#outcrop of red rock

[stardivingsea]

ahaha won an in demand hiking permit through a lottery system for the second time this month. Love living in the wilderness and the universe loves that for me too.

[transalphabf]

Gifted

It was normal in your pack for Omegas and Alphas to be traded, to help keep the bloodlines fresh and the peace upheld.

You were one such Omega, given to a pack known for their Alphas hunting skills, with a high number of true shifters. Not all packs could boast that, as many would have individuals born that simply became more feral under the glow of the moon.

You didn’t know who your mate would be, nobody really did until the Chase was underway. Your Alpha sibling had enjoyed their Chase the night before - It was customary for Alphas that mated into the pack to match first, in order to prevent any potential same former clan partnerships forming accidentally.

Your eyes scanned the assorted Alphas gathered. One tall, with sandy hair and a scar running up their jaw, another lean, with long red hair and fangs that hung over her lips, a third with short dark hair, and gleaming eyes, the fourth and fifth twins with matching hunger glinting in their flinty gaze.

You looked to the other Omegas who had come with you. There were four of you in total, to encourage healthy competition with the Alphas, two or three of which you could smell were true shifters. A low rumble came from one, catching the group of Omega’s scent on the wind.

You’d be given a five minute headstart to get your blood thrumming and allow you to evade capture if you truly didn’t wish to be mated, and you took off into the dense woodland, pausing to rub your scent on a few different trees to confuse the hunters. Then, you made for the sound of running water, jumping into the stream and following it up, until you came to a small covered area, an outcrop of rocks just big enough to stand up in. You wanted to keep running, but knew that sometimes hiding was a better solution- what Alpha could have tracked you up the river, after all?

You heard the sounds of another Omega moaning and shouting as they were caught and knotted up by an Alpha, somewhere in the near distance probably twenty minutes into your hiding, and then half an hour later saw familiar shoes of your cousin run past, chased by the twin Alphas, who would seemingly share her. Well, she always maintained she was too much for one Alpha to handle. You were more than thankful that you didn’t have to hear her being claimed and mated.

You let out a small breath of relief, still undetected. The only sounds you could really perceive was the river running past, and birdsong above. You lay your head on the cool stone, enjoying that you had successfully evaded any Alphas not worth your affections, eyes slipping shut for a moment, before hearing a growl from just above you. You held your breath, covering your mouth as you could hear the Alpha above you searching, sniffing you out.

After what seemed to be an eternity of slick pooling between your thighs, you heard him leave, and let out the breath you were holding. Not yet.

Until his hand grabbed your ankle and pulled you from the mouth of the small cavern, and you were pinned beneath the Alpha with gleaming eyes. He grinned at you, with sharp teeth, and you felt your body react instinctively, offering your throat to him. He leant in, and licked a long, slow stripe up your neck. You moaned softly, and his hand rested on your chest.

“If you don’t want this, tell me now.” He growled softly, but, emboldened, you found yourself reaching up to his cheek, meeting his gaze.

“I want this. I want you.” You spoke, without even really thinking for more than a moment. You didn’t need to think longer, not with how good his scent was. Your cunt clenched down on nothing at his responding growl.

Easily, he tugged down your shorts, exposing your slick, slightly puffy cunt to the cool air. He eagerly dove between your thighs, and pressed a thick, slippery tongue inside of you, making you gasp, your head thrown back as he lapped up your excess slick and ground his nose against your omega cocklet, making you gasp and shudder again. He pulled away after a moment, inspecting your pink, throbbing hole.

“Never been filled?” He asked softly, and you nodded, confirming that. He groaned and kissed your thigh, before stripping down.

“I can’t promise I won’t shift while claiming you. It won’t hurt too much, though, don’t be afraid - I know we look monstrous.” He murmured, and you felt your body tighten for a moment just imagining how it might feel to have him shifting inside of you. You hadn’t even felt his cock yet, but you couldn’t stop thinking about how it might feel being stretched even further.

“Breed me.” You pleaded, gripping his shoulder, your nails pressing in a little. He growled at that, and quickly pressed your legs up to your chest as he filled you, every inch making you feel even fuller. You glanced down, to see how much was left, and clenched on his thick cock when you saw the slight bulge in your stomach. Three more inches, and then his cock would be pressing everywhere inside of you. Your head fell back, and he sank in those final few inches, the tip pressing hard on your cervix, making you gasp, hips rolling a little, before he shifted his position slightly, making you see stars.

Then he began to fuck you. It wasn’t slow and gentle like a beta might do, you’d been told that they were always careful with Omegas, not wanting to hurt them. No, he fucked you like you were his personal knot toy. Maybe you were, but that wasn’t too much of a problem for you, not really. It felt too good to complain about, and every thrust dragged along your gspot which served to have you writhing beneath your Alpha.

As you felt yourself getting closer to cumming, you had the forethought to warn your Alpha, and he sank his teeth into your neck, claiming you right as you came on his cock, your nails drawing blood from his shoulders as he continued to fuck into you, body shifting, growing, changing as he continued to fuck you as hard as he could.

Your eyes rolled back as his cock grew impossibly bigger inside of you, and fur erupted along his body, the tip of his cock more tapered now as he became the ‘monstrous’ werewolf that he warned you he was.

If anything, you found it even hotter, and came again when the tip of his cock pressed against your cervix, and you felt the never used before muscle trying to open up.

He became uncontrollable, then, and began doing his best to fuck right through your cervix, the nerve endings firing orgasm after orgasm through your body. It was madenning.

When the tip of his enormous lupine cock finally breached your cervix, he let out a low noise, and his knot inflated rapidly, cock pulsing into you as rope after rope of thick, virile cum was fucked into your womb.

Yes, you’d been picked by exactly the right Alpha.

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[novaursa]

I love your writing! Could you please do one where Targaryen reader (it can be Rhaenyra's sister) is taking Gwayne for the first time to meet her dragon and takes him for a ride. Thanks

The Wild Heart

- Summary: You introduce Gwayne to your dragon, Grey Ghost.

- Paring: targ!reader/Gwayne Hightower

- Note: The reader is the younger sister of Rhaenyra and bonded to the dragon Grey Ghost. I've broken my own rule about 1000 words here, but since you guys like Gwayne so much, I've decided to expand this a bit more. Enjoy.

- Rating: Mild 13+

- Tag(s): @sachaa-ff @deniixlovezelda @duck-duck-goose2 @aadu2173 @holdingforgeneralhugs

You stand on the edge of the ridge, the sea breeze tangling itself in your silver-blonde hair, lifting strands into the crisp, salt-filled air. Below, the waters of Blackwater Bay shimmer like molten silver, catching the light of the setting sun. Behind you, the Red Keep is barely visible, a hulking shadow against the vast sky. But it's not the castle that holds your attention today—it’s the man beside you, Gwayne Hightower, and the dragon that waits in the distance, somewhere between the clouds and the sea, hidden in the wilderness just beyond the Dragonpit.

He stands close, his expression serious, but you can feel the underlying excitement radiating from him. Gwayne has heard the tales, the whispered stories of your dragon, Grey Ghost—wild, elusive, temperamental. Unlike the dragons housed in the Dragonpit, Grey Ghost has never truly been tamed. He lingers along the coast and cliffs, only returning when he chooses. Not a single rider before you had ever claimed him, not until you.

You glance at Gwayne, studying his face as the wind picks up. His strong jaw is set in a determined line, and his eyes, a bright shade of blue, seem darker in the fading light. He’s dressed in his Hightower armor, though you both know he’s not here for battle. The armor is more a shield for his nerves, a thin veil of control in the face of what’s to come.

"Are you ready?" you ask, your voice quiet but firm, just loud enough to be heard over the gusts of wind.

Gwayne turns to you, and for a moment, a flicker of something—perhaps doubt, or wonder—passes across his face. But it’s gone in an instant, replaced by a faint, teasing smile. "As ready as a man can be to meet his future wife's dragon," he replies, the words tinged with amusement, though there’s a touch of nervousness there too.

You smile at that, a small curl of your lips. "Grey Ghost isn’t like the others in the pit. He won’t simply obey because I will it. He’s… unpredictable." You let the words hang in the air for a moment, hoping to prepare him for what’s coming. "But he’ll listen to me. Trust that."

Gwayne nods, though you can sense the weight of his uncertainty. He’s seen dragons before, of course. As a member of House Hightower, he’s familiar with their majesty and their danger. But this is different. This is your dragon, your bond. And Grey Ghost is no mere dragon of the pit. He is wild fire made flesh, with wings of smoke and ash.

You take a step forward, motioning for him to follow as you descend the rocky path that leads to the clearing below. Your boots crunch against the stones, the sea below crashing against the cliffs. Gwayne is right behind you, silent now, his presence a steady warmth at your back. Together, you approach the place where you know Grey Ghost waits.

As you round a bend in the path, the clearing opens up before you, vast and wild, with tall grasses swaying in the breeze. And there, at the far end, resting in the shadow of a massive stone outcrop, lies Grey Ghost.

Even from this distance, the size of him is breathtaking. His scales, a smoky grey that gleam faintly in the dying light, seem to blend with the rocks around him, making him appear almost ethereal, as though he’s part of the landscape itself. His wings are folded close to his body, but you know their full span would darken the sky if he chose to spread them wide.

Gwayne inhales sharply, and you feel his awe as though it were your own.

"Gods," he murmurs, almost under his breath, as he gazes upon the beast.

You step closer, your heart quickening with the familiar pull of your bond. Grey Ghost stirs, his massive head lifting as he senses your approach. His eyes, burning like molten gold, lock onto yours. There’s recognition there, an unspoken understanding, but also a warning—a reminder of his wild nature.

You stop a few feet from him and extend a hand, palm up, in a gesture of peace. "Come forth." You speak in the High Valyrian tongue, your voice steady, commanding.

Grey Ghost watches you for a moment longer, then, with a slow, deliberate motion, he rises to his feet. His wings unfurl slightly, the leather-like membranes rustling in the wind as he stretches his neck toward you. There’s a rumble deep in his throat, a sound that vibrates through the ground beneath your feet. But he does as you bid, moving forward with a grace that belies his size.

Gwayne stands frozen at your side, his breath caught in his throat, though his hand instinctively moves to the hilt of his sword—a gesture of protection more than aggression. You place a calming hand on his arm, shaking your head gently.

"He won’t harm you," you whisper, though you’re not entirely sure if you’re saying it to reassure him or yourself. "Not if I’m here."

With slow, deliberate movements, you step closer to Grey Ghost, your fingers brushing against the rough texture of his scales. He is warm beneath your touch, like the heat of a roaring fire contained within his massive frame. Grey Ghost’s eyes never leave you, and for a moment, there’s a connection, a silent exchange of trust and respect.

Turning back to Gwayne, you gesture for him to come closer. "It’s alright," you say softly. "He knows me. And now, he must know you."

Gwayne hesitates, his hand still hovering near his sword, but after a brief moment of consideration, he takes a step forward. His gaze never leaves Grey Ghost’s hulking form, his caution palpable. Slowly, almost reverently, he reaches out, his fingers brushing against the dragon’s side, just as yours had moments before.

The air between the three of you seems to still, the wind dying down as though the world itself is holding its breath. Grey Ghost rumbles again, a low, deep sound that resonates through the ground, but he doesn’t move. He allows the touch. 

Gwayne exhales, the tension in his shoulders easing slightly as he keeps his hand on the dragon’s scales. "He’s… magnificent," Gwayne says, his voice barely above a whisper. "I’ve never seen anything like him."

You smile softly, feeling a swell of pride for both your dragon and for the man standing beside you. "He is," you agree, your voice filled with warmth. "And now, he knows you. We are bonded, all three of us."

Gwayne turns to you then, his eyes meeting yours, and for a moment, the world around you seems to fade away—the cliffs, the sea, even the dragon. It’s just the two of you, standing on the precipice of something new, something shared.

"I never thought…" he begins, his voice trailing off as he searches for the right words. "I never thought I could be part of something like this. With you, and with him."

You step closer to him, your hand finding his, your fingers intertwining. "You are," you say softly, your voice full of certainty. "We’re a family now, Gwayne. You, me, and Grey Ghost. Nothing will come between us."

The wind whips around you as you stand before Grey Ghost, the great dragon looming like a mountain of muscle and smoke. His golden eyes, burning with an otherworldly light, follow your movements as you step back, placing yourself beside Gwayne. The sun has set below the horizon now, leaving the world bathed in twilight, and the only sounds are the crashing of the waves far below the cliffs and the steady, rhythmic breathing of the dragon.

Gwayne stands beside you, his hand still resting on the dragon’s rough scales. His expression, a mixture of awe and anticipation, is hard to miss. He’s faced battle, seen the dangers of war, but this—this is something entirely different. You can sense the excitement beneath his calm demeanor, the way his hand trembles ever so slightly as he brushes his fingers against Grey Ghost's side.

"You’ve never flown before," you say quietly, watching him as his eyes trace the dragon's form.

He turns his gaze to you, the corners of his mouth lifting in a faint smile. "No. Never." His tone is light, but there’s a seriousness beneath it, a readiness that makes your pulse quicken.

Grey Ghost shifts his weight, the massive bulk of his body rumbling like distant thunder as he crouches low, the leathery membranes of his wings unfolding slightly. He is waiting, waiting for your command, and though you feel his wildness, his untamed spirit, you know that in this moment, he will listen to you.

You take Gwayne’s hand, feeling the warmth of his skin against yours. "Do you trust me?" you ask, though you already know his answer.

He doesn’t hesitate. "Always," he replies, his voice steady, his eyes locked on yours.

You squeeze his hand gently, then release it as you step toward Grey Ghost. With practiced ease, you place one hand on the dragon's flank, the other gripping the harness that’s fastened around his neck and shoulders. You swing yourself up onto his back, settling into the familiar place between his powerful wings. The leather beneath you is warm, and you can feel the rise and fall of his breathing beneath your legs.

You look down at Gwayne, who is still standing at the dragon’s side, his expression now unreadable.

"Come," you say, holding out your hand to him. "You won’t fall. I promise."

For a moment, he hesitates, glancing from you to Grey Ghost’s immense, heaving body. But then, with a nod of determination, he steps forward, gripping the harness as you had shown him. With a bit of effort, he hoists himself up behind you, his arms instinctively wrapping around your waist as he settles into place.

You can feel the tension in his body, the uncertainty of being so high above the ground, but there is also trust—trust in you, trust in the dragon.

You glance back at him, offering a reassuring smile. "Hold on tightly. The first flight is always… exhilarating."

Before he can respond, you lean forward and place your hands against Grey Ghost’s neck. "Fly!" you command in High Valyrian.

With a roar that shakes the ground beneath you, Grey Ghost unfurls his wings, the massive span of them catching the wind in a sudden, powerful gust. The muscles beneath you ripple as the dragon gathers his strength, and then, with a single, mighty leap, you are airborne.

The world falls away beneath you, the cliffs and sea nothing but distant shapes as Grey Ghost ascends, his wings beating with a rhythm that you can feel deep in your chest. The wind tears at your hair and clothes, the rush of air so loud it drowns out all other sound, but you don’t mind. This—this is freedom, the sky opening up before you, endless and vast.

Behind you, Gwayne holds on tightly, his arms firm around your waist. You can feel his heart pounding against your back, the thrill of the flight coursing through him as it does through you. The dragon rises higher, soaring above the clouds, and for a moment, you are suspended in the sky, weightless and free.

Grey Ghost lets out a triumphant roar, a sound that echoes across the sky, and you laugh, the exhilaration of the moment filling you with joy. You glance back at Gwayne, his face flushed from the wind, his eyes wide with wonder.

"Are you alright?" you shout over the wind, your voice barely carrying in the rushing air.

He grins, a wide, genuine smile that lights up his entire face. "This is incredible!" he calls back, his voice filled with awe and exhilaration. "I never imagined…"

His words trail off as Grey Ghost dips suddenly, his wings folding slightly as he begins a rapid descent, plummeting toward the sea below. You feel Gwayne’s grip tighten around you, his breath catching in his throat, but you don’t panic. You know Grey Ghost, know his every move, and this—this is part of the ride.

At the last moment, just before you reach the surface of the water, Grey Ghost flares his wings, catching the air and leveling out. The sea stretches out beneath you, the waves glistening in the moonlight, so close you can almost touch them. The dragon skims the surface, his claws barely grazing the water, sending up sprays of mist as you fly.

You laugh again, the sound of it lost to the wind, and Gwayne’s laughter soon joins yours. His tension is gone now, replaced by the sheer thrill of the flight. He leans into the movement, trusting you, trusting the dragon, and for a moment, it feels like the three of you are one—a single being soaring through the sky, untethered and wild.

After what feels like an eternity—and yet, not nearly long enough—Grey Ghost begins to climb again, his powerful wings lifting you up, up, up, until you are soaring high above the sea once more. The land is a distant memory now, the world below nothing but a blur of blue and grey.

You turn your head slightly, glancing back at Gwayne, who is still grinning, his eyes alight with excitement. "This is only the beginning," you say, your voice soft, though you know he can hear you over the wind.

He meets your gaze, his expression suddenly serious, though the joy still lingers in his eyes. "I’ll follow you anywhere," he says, his voice steady, filled with quiet resolve. "Wherever you go—whether it’s the skies or the earth—I’ll be with you."

Your heart swells at his words, and for a moment, you are overwhelmed by the depth of his devotion. You reach back, placing your hand over his where it rests at your waist, your fingers intertwining with his.

"And I’ll always have you by my side," you whisper, though the wind carries your words away.

Grey Ghost lets out a soft rumble, a sound that vibrates through both of you, as though he, too, understands the significance of this moment. Together, the three of you fly on, the stars beginning to twinkle above, as the night stretches out endlessly before you.

[perseephoneee]

rest your eyes [castiel x reader]

synopsis: you can't sleep so castiel helps you

a/n: i am sick with covid and have been rewatching supernatural with my boo. castiel was literally my second crush ever, and i missed him so much, so i decided to write something (based on the fact i'm an insomniac who would totally sleep on an angel if offered)

↳ masterlist  ↳ ship exchange ↳ taglist

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. 

It was supposed to go: hunting a monster in the woods and returning to some dingy motel that Dean found at the end of the day. Instead, the chase led you and the rest of the squad so deep into the woods that it was wiser to set up camp than try and trek back to civilization. The camp included a rock outcropping to protect from the weather, a shitty fire, and a lack of comfortable sleeping arrangements. Sam and Dean were used to sleeping on almost anything so they could pass out immediately. You, on the other hand, had insomnia sleeping in a regular bed and knew you were going to struggle to fall asleep with nothing more than the moss covering the ground. 

Castiel didn’t sleep, so he was keeping watch. You had your jacket balled up as a pillow under your head, and instead of closing your eyes and trying to encourage rest in your body, you were staring at Cas through thick lashes. He looked up at the sky, a serene expression on his face like he was thinking about what each star meant. The light from the fire flickered across his cheekbones, the bridge of his nose, even his cupid’s bow. Sometimes, you were struck by just how beautiful he was, like some Greek artists, the idea of the perfect man, sculpted to perfection and thrown at your feet for just you to enjoy. You wondered how you ended up so lucky to be blessed with his presence. 

“Why do humans enjoy looking at the stars?” Castiel asks you in a soft voice to not rouse Sam and Dean. You should’ve guessed that he would notice that you were awake.

“I think…it’s nice to think about things far away from your own life,” you hum, giving up on your rock bed and sitting up, brushing leaves and other debris out of your hair. Cas looks at you, the blue in his eyes a shifting kaleidoscope from the dancing lights around you. “And the concept of stars is beautiful,” you sighed, curling your legs up and under. Cas tilted his head at that, brows slightly furrowed. It was your favorite expression on him. 

“Stars are just clouds of gas and light,” Castiel answers. 

“But they’ve traveled thousands of light years to reach us, even if they don’t realize it,” you smile, your eyes tracing the path of various constellations. You can feel Cas’ gaze, but don’t dare look over. Looking into Cas’ eyes is falling headfirst into an abyss you didn’t prepare for. 

“I like that,” Castiel exclaims, a hint of a smile on his lips. “That’s a…human way of looking at it.”

“I am human,” you chuckle.

“Yes, you are,” he resumes, staring at the stars. It’s silent again; the only sound is the crackling of the fire and your breaths. Sometimes, the quiet is interrupted by Sam’s snoring, but you don’t mind. Your boys deserve the rest. 

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” Castiel inquires.

“It’s hard for me to sleep, especially out here,” you say, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear. Castiel looks troubled by that statement like he is personally responsible for your ability to sleep. “When I was little, sometimes my Mom would put me in the car and drive me around in circles, singing or telling stories until I passed out.” You remember fondly, smiling a little to yourself. “I don’t think the ground is as comfortable as a car seat, though.”

“Would you like me to tell you a story?” Castiel asks. “If you need a pillow…you can use me.” He looks slightly uncomfortable, and the tips of his ears turn red, making you grin. He never fails to be adorable when he wants to be, and you know he’s offering out of the goodness of his heart. Still, the ID part of your brain is brainstorming all the ways he could profess his love for you, something that you stamp down as you shuffle over to him. He leans his back against one of the rock walls, stretching his legs out. He had already removed his trench coat, offering it to you as a blanket. It was large enough to swallow you and smelled precisely like Castiel in a way you wanted to remember for the rest of your life. You took your makeshift pillow and set it on his lap, laying your head there and curling up under his arm, which he hesitantly rested on your shoulder. You knew you had to coax your ever-beating heart to calm down if you were ever going to sleep, but it was hard when you were lying on the lap of an angel you had a crush on. Still, Castiel was a gentleman who didn’t do anything to make you uncomfortable. 

“What’s your story?” you ask, voice small as you close your eyes and relax your body. 

“Early before humans won the race for my Father’s next creation, there was a pool going on for what Earth’s next great invention would be…”

Castiel’s voice, in its low timbre, started to lull you to sleep as you listened to his story. You liked listening to him talk, and he occasionally added funny anecdotes that would make you smile. You started tuning out of the story, instead focusing on the warmth from his lap, the smell of the open air and him, and especially how his fingers had started to absentmindedly stroke shapes on your arm. Eventually, you were pulled into a deep sleep, lingering in that space where you were only slightly conscious but not awake. That space was the only way you could feel Castiel petting your hair, brushing his fingers down your scalp to your neck and back to your shoulder. Even in your dreams that night, you swear you could feel his weight everywhere. 

You slept peacefully, without interruption, the whole night. Until morning, when the sound of voices roused you from your slumber.

“...did you get a girl in your lap?” Dean asked, sounding incredulous. 

“She is not in my lap. She is lying on half of my lap,” Castiel answered, ever the stickler for exact estimates. You could hear Dean’s groan and sarcastic retort. 

“Can you shut up? I’m trying to sleep?” you mumbled, screwing your eyes shut and pushing your face more profoundly into your pillow-jacket-thing. 

“C’mon, Sleeping Beauty, time to go hunting,” Dean called out. You let out a curse word, relaxing as you felt Castiel pat your head reassuringly. 

“You are much more Sleeping Beauty than I am,” you responded, finally opening your eyes to the daylight but not making a move to get up. Eventually, you realized you’d have to move, so you begrudgingly sat up, cracking your neck as you did so. “Thanks for the story, Cas,” you said, averting eye contact with the angel to avoid him seeing the light flush on your cheeks. You gave him back his coat, and he kindly removed a twig that got stuck in your sweater. 

“Did you sleep alright?” he inquired. You thought back to it and realized that for the first time in years, you slept through the whole night. 

“Yeah, I… slept well.” 

With that, Castiel smiled and helped you up. You were more alert on a hunt than you had been in a long time, all because a particular angel helped you achieve the best sleep of your life.

[sinking-in-a-gentle-pool-of-wine]

Not When I’m Here // Sebastian Sallow x Reader

Things feel off as you two hike up the shadow of the mountain, but Sebastian may not be so oblivious as he seems.

Word Count: 1950 (oops)

(All characters 18+ & warning: descriptions of pain)

-----------------------------------------

You loved exploring with Sebastian. Taking on daring adventures with him felt less scary, somehow. You supposed it was simply for the added artillery. And yet, quests with Natty or Poppy just didn't feel quite as... thrilling.

You enjoyed their company, of course, but it felt even better with Sebastian. There was a great air of mischief about him--you had never met someone like him. Your friends in your house were clever, of course, being Ravenclaw, but Sebastian could voice the thoughts in your head before you'd decided to speak them.

This particular expedition, however, felt tenser than usual, for some reason. Usually, Sebastian was unnervingly good at dissipating your fears just as they arose, throwing out some quip that you'd wish you'd come up with first. But tonight, the lines on his face were like stone, and the occasional comment he made felt forced. Like he was speaking to you only out of obligation. Your trek up the switchbacks felt particularly grueling.

"Thestrals overhead," you heard Sebastian say from over your shoulder. "Some consider them a bad omen."

"Hmm," you started, feeling mutinous. "Not everyone does."

You sensed rather than heard Sebastian sigh. You could also feel his glare at the back of your head, but you refused to give in and turn to look back at him.

"I know that," he said slowly, angrily.

You were just about ready to burst, and you gave a heaving sigh of your own in response, baiting him.

"All right."

"I'm making small talk," he shot back. "I'm not going to trek up this mountain in silence."

Since when do we need small talk?!, you wanted to yell at him, but you bit your tongue, continuing the trudge. The silence grated at your nerves, made every snapping twig the fell of a goblin's boot, every rustle of leaves a curse cast in your direction. The typical sense of surety you had grown to expect from Sebastian was gone, and it left you on edge.

Finally, you felt the ground begin to level out. A plateau, perhaps, or maybe, Merlin-willing, the summit.

"Kill any who trespass," you heard the sneer of a goblin up ahead, and you halted in your tracks, ready to cast a disillusionment spell on yourself. You turned to Sebastian, expecting to see him doing the same, when he sprinted past you.

"Let's go!" he shouted, not looking back at you as he careened ahead.

"Wait! We should have some sort of plan," you hissed back.

"I'm through planning," he ground out, before disappearing around an outcropping of rock.

You swore, hiking your robes up to run after him. Merlin knows what--or how many--was waiting for you on the other side.

You rounded the corner, and a blast of red whizzed by, narrowly missing you. A shriek escaped your lips as you took in the frenzy of light around you. There were so many, and you couldn't see Sebastian anywhere amongst them.

"Sebastian!" you shouted, and a few of the goblins that weren't already stumbling in your direction turned to you with sinister grins on their faces.

"If it ain't the little wizard who's been mucking with our work," one of them grunted.

He then turned the bright shade of red of a charged spell, and you only had a moment to throw up a protego before he was already on you, his enlarged form blocking your vision, the grisly details of his face shimmering purple through your shield. As he was pushed back by your block, you released and shot back with confringo.

As he burned, you froze another of his compatiots with a glacius, proceeding to slice him in half with diffindo, watching the shards catching the light of spells and shining different colors. You then felt a slice of pain on your arm and turned to see the first goblin, flames still licking up his armor, with a knife now dripping with your blood.

You felt your face twist into a grimace before you blasted him with a basic cast, then another, and another. Then with some distance between you, you shot a bombarda at him, catching a few others in the blast.

"Ha ha!" you heard from behind you. "Take that, goblin scum!"

You turned to see Sebastian engaged with another goblin or four, a wild grin on his face. He didn't appear to be injured, and he was handling himself fine in the current duel, so you turned back to face your own foes. The adrenaline running only partially kept your brain busy from the nagging feeling that you two still weren't in sync. You took out enemies as a combined force, not as two separate entities fighting their own battles.

Nevertheless, this battle had to be won. So, you shoved your anxieties down and readjusted your grip on your wand.

A troll had found its way into the campsite, and it now loomed in your vision. You threw ancient magic at it, pummeling its strong exterior. Bombarda and diffindo and confringo couldn't cut through its thick skin, no matter how much of yourself you threw into your movements and spoken incantations. You felt beads of sweat forming on your face and had to resist the urge to smear them off. You couldn't afford the break in rhythm. As you dodged one of the troll's attacks, you rolled right into the path of a goblin.

"What do we have here?" he sneered, grabbing your injured arm and hoisting you up in an iron grip. You couldn't stop yourself form wincing as your wand fell out of your hand.

"No!" you shouted, fighting violently against his hold. But no matter how erratically you thrashed, he held your arm firmly as he dragged you away from the heat of the battle and towards an opening in one of their tents.

Why doesn't he just kill me here? you thought to yourself. What does he--or Ranrok--have planned for me?

The worst images you could conjure popped up unbidden in your mind, and your efforts increased tenfold.

"Quit your flailing!" the goblin shouted at you, striking your leg with his blunt weapon. You felt bones crack and cried out despite yourself. Bile rose in your throat as spots blotted your vision.

As you watched Sebastian fending off the last of the goblins and turn to face the troll, you accepted that he wouldn't notice your disappearance. Or he'd be glad to be rid of you.

Good. You would fight your way out of Ranrok's clutches alone. You didn't need his help. He was the one who got you into this mess in the first place--refused to craft a plan with you.

"Ranrok has plans for you, miss goody-two-shoes," the goblin gloated. "But he never said he wanted you delivered to him undamaged."

You heard him unsheathe a blade and caught the glimmer of light off its wickedly sharp edge. The bile threatened to come out.

As Sebastian rolled away from the troll's club as it struck the ground, you caught him looking around frantically. When he turned his head far enough to spot you in the goblin's grip, his face altered. That nonchalant smug smirk he had worn during the duel had dropped altogether, and his skin paled. Then turned to stone, stuck in a fierce glare.

He whipped his wand to strike the troll with one last bombarda, not bothering to watch the troll fall to the ground, shaking the earth beneath them. He sprinted in your direction, and the goblin, spotting him, laughed.

"You silly boy," the goblin mocked, raising his weapon and dropping you to the ground.

Before you could even try to scramble up with your shattered leg, Sebastian raised his wand at the goblin.

"CRUCIO!" he shouted, the word ripping out of his mouth. The spell shot from his wand with a crackle like lightning, striking the goblin square in the chest. He fell to the ground beside you, crying in agony, begging for it to stop. And you watched, unmoving, before you felt gentle hands on your shoulder and elbow, inviting you up off the gound.

"Come on," Sebastian urged. "We have to get out of this clearing."

The second you were on your feet, though, your leg collapsed under your weight, and you fell into Sebastian.

"My... leg," you groaned as he caught you.

"What did he do to you?" Sebastian demanded.

"He just..." you gulped, "I'm fine. Shouldn't you..?"

You gestured with your free arm back to the goblin, still writhing on the ground. Sebastian turned slightly, still holding you up, and pointed his wand in the goblin's direction.

"Diffindo!" he cast, and you heard a clean slice--the moaning stopped.

Sebastian pocketed his wand. He then scooped you up and began striding further away. You wanted to protest that you didn't need to be carried, but you knew it would only be harder for him to help you walk. This way was easier, but you still felt like a burden.

He said nothing as the two of you quickly gained distance from the scene of the battle. His jaw was tense, and he didn't look at you. You tried to avoid watching him, glancing up at the night sky to try and recognize a constellation or two. He shifted his arms, and you felt yourself wince involuntarily. It was then that he finally shot you a look of concern--or of pain? You furrowed your brow. Something was bothering you.

"Why did you cast the Cruciatus Curse on him?" you asked.

He turned to look straight ahead again.

"I just--I looked over and saw his hands on you, and..." he trailed off and cleared his throat.

"He was going to hurt you," he finished, matter-of-factly.

He found a patch of grass on which to set you, and he began scrutinizing the still-bleeding wound on your arm.

"I get hurt all the time," you argued. "Every enemy I run into wants to hurt me in some way. Most of them do.”

"Not when I'm here."

He conjured up a strip of gauze and gently rolled back your sleeve. You couldn't stand it. You pulled back your arm a bit more roughly than you'd intended, and heard Sebastian make a discontented sound. You looked up to see his face flush, and you stared him down.

"Don't act like you really care. You couldn't hardly look at me before you charged into that goblin horde, and now you're wanting to bandage up my wounds?"

His mouth hardened into a line, and his jaw started working as he cast his eyes back to his hands. The gauze was partially connected to your arm, but the roll was still in his hands. He gripped the roll tighter, but said nothing.

"Perhaps I should do this on my own," you said.

His eyes flew back to yours, panicked.

"What? That's not what I--no. You can't--you--I...”

You closed your eyes and took a deep breath. You didn't even know if you really meant that. It was bad enough with the trials; you couldn't bear the thought of continuing without Sebastian entirely.

"You need me," he said, almost like he regretted it.

You scoffed, rolling your eyes at his boldness and making movement to get back on your feet--away from him. He caught your hand in both of his, the gauze dangling off your arm between you two.

"And I need you."

Something in his tone made you look back up to see him looking straight at you. His eyes were earnest, searching yours, and his mouth had softened from that hard line and now turned slightly downwards at the edges.

"I... I'm sorry," he continued. "I don't know what's gotten into me, but... when I thought you were... I--we're supposed to be a team. I want to be your team--I mean. I am on your team. Or you're mine. Or..."

You smiled despite yourself.

"Seb," you interrupted. "I get it. And it's all right."

You poked his leg with your good leg's foot.

"Now let's get me off the bench, coach," you said, nodding to your other leg.

He smiled a smile brighter than moonstone and continued wrapping your gauze.

[oncewhenalongtimeago]

Always an Angel, Never the God Full

Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III x Runaway!Reader

Words: 13,104

Your plans to run away with Hiccup fall through. Three years later, you finally make it off Berk and away from the Edge. Here are the years that follow.

Tags: SUGGESTIVE ENDING, Runaway Reader, Angst, bitter reader, unrequited love, requited love, healing, conflicting emotions, compiles parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5

<Previous

You waited for hours, back aching against the flat rock, basket of your few chosen belongings hidden behind a small outcropping of rock as you waited for him, increasingly more worried as the sun began to set.

Scared, even. You’d seen the axe, laid plainly on the ground. You feared the worst, especially after your frantic search bore no fruit. That he’d been found, and that something terrible had happened to him.

 But Hiccup was fine, with Astrid, this whole time.

Even Toothless seemed to like her well enough. He didn’t like you, glaring and snapping at you when you got too close, despite all of your efforts to get on his good side. He barely let you on, and he certainly wouldn’t without Hiccup. You had the sneaking suspicion he’d buck if you tried it on your lonesome. 

While you understood, it hurt that even as close friends he’d not told you about Toothless at all, at first. You doubt he would’ve if he’d not seen you do so poorly at dragon training. He probably felt terrible, watching you fail over and over again when he could be doing something to help.

You hugged your knees tightly, hidden behind rock and moss, fighting not to make a sound as you peered around a corner, barely listening in as they conversed.

Even if he never inherited the chiefdom, It was still a heavy expectation that he’d marry. You two were an inevitable couple, if not because of love, out of a bond of solidarity. It’s not like either of you had any suitors. You were friends first, of course, but privately you hadn’t had a problem with that. You got along well, and you could see a future with him where you were both alright.

And you really, really liked him.

You knew he wanted someone else, someone who was confident, capable, who had good standing, who his father could be proud of. Someone who was more gorgeous than plain, someone like Astrid.

You weren’t the best viking, you couldn’t work in the forge, you hadn’t a lot of lucrative talents at all and a measure of clumsiness and troublemaking that could rival Hiccup’s own.

But you were friends, and that had to count for something.

He came to you with his plan to run away. You were running away together, you thought.

But somehow, she was here, and he left with her. He liked her. You knew that. And, you realized with mounting horror as she leaned in closer to him, she liked him too. 

You knew you’d never had a chance, but knowing it is different from experiencing it. You had not a chance in the world.

You could never fault him for that.

You couldn’t stop the tears from pooling in your eyes, or the tiny bits of your heart from splitting apart and scattering across the grass.

Conversely, he didn’t tell you when he flew off to battle with the rest of your peers. The whole thing with the Red Death? You missed it completely. You only found out later after Hiccup had been towed back to Berk on death's door.

Constantly spilling his heart out to you but saving the rest of it for the other teens, the ones who used to jeer at him from the sidelines, who all of the sudden began to treat him well, but still jeered at you while he wasn’t looking. 

A hangers-on to their group, not very useful or funny, just there, always. Not spoken with or talked to or considered at all by anyone who wasn’t Hiccup. Just there.

Your companionship had, for lack of a better word, remained the same, except now there was an undercurrent of something under the surface of a black ocean, broiling and writhing like an angry serpent.

Sometimes it felt like a sick corruption of the friendship you and Hiccup used to have, made up of long held hardship and what you had thought were good times. Sometimes it was better than it was before, and you could joke and laugh and play games the same way you had as children. 

And sometimes it felt like you were speaking to a stranger, one you weren’t sure you’d ever known at all; sometimes his mannerisms, his ticks and even the way he stood were alien to you.

You weren’t even sure you recognized who he was anymore. You never asked why, afraid of the answer you might find.

“So, I’m hoping that if I place a spring there, when I pull the lever it wont catch so violently. The gear system around the side is to help turn the barrel while you’re aiming. Got it? What do you think?”

You nodded, eyeing the vast array of blueprints and open journals spread sideways in between the two of you. Brown leather met leather as Hiccup rubbed his shoulder, no doubt a result of a hard fall he’d taken earlier on Toothless.

“Yeah, I got it,” You say casually, “What about the wheels? If you’re going to be pulling it over grass, you might need to cover the space between the wheels and gears, because the plants might catch and pull up into the gear system.”

It feels fake. Slimy to say, like a lie, except you know it’s not. It feels like a product of something more larger and uglier.

Hiccup picks up a yellowed paper, scrutinizing his own design, “Yeah… Actually, you’re right. I don’t know If- maybe if I shift the base… Yeah, I think that would work. Thank you.”

“No problem,” You puff, blowing a strand of hair out of your face.

“Also, I’ve been meaning to ask,” Hiccup shifted in his seat, clenching and unclenching his fingers, a nervous tick he’d had since the two of you were little, “Your dragon. Have you picked a name for it yet?”

“Ah, no,” You sigh, looking down at your knees, “Honestly, I haven’t been able to find something he likes.”

The picky bastard./Picky beast.

Hiccup had helped you find a dragon before the lot of you had moved, a smallish nadder who still didn’t feel much like your own, but served you just as well as any other would and you did teh best to serve it fine as well. He turned out to have just as much propensity for social upset around the other dragons and seemed to get along with Stormfly, Toothless and no one else.

Speaking of, the black dragon, Toothless, had warmed up to you, and in the end you became no better or worse than anyone else on Berk to him, which you were okay with for the most part.

The others had gotten used to you, though remained relatively detached. Conversations wouldn’t stop nor would people give you the look once you entered a room. You didn’t try to strike up conversation anymore, learning that it was better to be silent than awkward. 

It still did nothing to soothe the hurt, or all of the years you’d spent hurting, or any of the time now you spent on your lonesome.

“If you don’t mind, I can-...” Hiccup leans back, the both of you turning heads as your door creaked open, heavy boots moving across the threshold of your home, wood floors creaking. 

You gave Astrid a nod of acknowledgement as she approached your table and she tilted her head, glancing in your direction.

“Hiccup,” Astrid called, “Are we still flying tonight?”

“Astrid,” Hiccup greeted as he stood up, a soft smile stretching half the length of his face as he gathered his assets, leaving a few papers scattered across the top that he knew he could come pick up later as he usually did, “Yeah, let me get my things first.”

You tuned them out as they began speaking in earnest, leaning back to stare at the ceiling, fingers tapping against your elbows almost antsily as they slowly took their leave.

“Hey,” Hiccup looks back at you as your heart beats rapidly in your chest, “I’ll see you later, right?”

“Right,” You say nearly at a mumble, refusing to look him in the eye, your stomach rolling guiltily as the door shuts behind him, “I’ll see you later.”

Your foot nudged the pack you’d prepared out from under the table in the small, shoddy hut you’d managed on the Edge, slinging it over your shoulder as you watched Hiccup and Astrid take off on their dragons through a crack in your window shutters.

He may have found his happiness with the others but you had not, and you fully intended to leave, the same way he’d planned it all those years ago. 

You knew what you were doing was wrong. Not saying goodbye, just up and leaving in the middle of the night without telling anyone, but you just couldn’t bring yourself to say it.

What would you be leaving behind, anyways? You didn’t have much.

You waited until they were just a small speck in the distance before running out on your own, a pack slung up over your shoulders. The dragon, who you’d parked just behind your hut and who’d spent the past few hours almost patiently waiting for you as you’d spent your sudden and unexpected last few hours with Hiccup, stood to its feet and chirruped as you hoisted yourself up onto its saddle.

Fishlegs was busy in his hut. The twins and Snotlout, maybe they’d notice you leaving but you didn’t have much faith in them asking why or feeling much at all besides a vague expectation that you’d be back later. Everyone went out for a leisure flight every once in a while, it was just about time you’d finally taken yours, after all.

Hiccup and Astrid wouldn’t be back till late doing who knows what. You bit your lip, lightly tapping your Nadder’s side with your heel, signaling for him to take off in the opposite direction, shoving down a deep spike of jealousy at the thought. He was your friend first, and soon he would be nothing to you and it wouldn’t matter at all anymore.

You weren’t sure where exactly you were going. But you knew wherever it was, it would be good as long as it was as far, far away from here as possible.

You grind your teeth, eyes tearing up as a heavy booted foot pushes you down further into the wooden ship floor. The ship rocks angrily as does your dragon, struggling against the barbed netting.

“Who are you? A new vigilante?” The leading trapper, Erik son of Erik or something, asked, bending down above you. He had, coincidentally, been the one to shoot you down.

 “Where is your… hideout?” He leaned down into your ear at your silence, speaking in a raspy whisper. You got the vague impression he was trying to be intimidating, though the end results were more in favor of making you blush.

You were thankful for the hard wood covering your face and, therefore, your embarrassment. Of your belongings, you were only able to manage a mask and had taken to running around ensconced in furs with nothing but a dagger to your name. 

You’d recon you looked much like a wild animal, straddling your nadder bare of a saddle. You had not done too well on your own. It was hard. You had always been a team player if by team player you meant a leech on society. At least, you had been told so.

So of course you had, unwittingly, stumbled onto dragon trapping territory. Extreme sport dragon trapping territory. It didn’t help that you and your nadder hadn’t been on the same page, you two being unable to sync in the way you’d seen the other riders with their dragons, which left a bitter taste in your mouth.

He’d go left when you were trying for right, and when you finally decided to just go with it, he would change his mind and throw you for a complete loop. It was safe to say that even if you got out of this mess you never wanted to step foot on his back again.

You breathed a silent sigh of relief just as the trapper let out an annoyed one, stepping off of you in favor of yelling at his men for damaging their goods. Meaning, your nadder. Was he really yours, though? He did try and make a break for it without you.

 While debating whether or not you should try at the ropes shackling your arms together, you grunt frustratedly, noticing a new tear in your garb.

After running away and getting captured, you had not expected to be kidnapped again by some insane-looking madman in a mask. Though you did look like two of a kind, so it was fitting. 

Your nadder had its wings torn irreparably, so, unfortunately, you had to retire him early.

You found small comfort in that it hadn’t abandoned you on the ship that one final time, though the irony that it had led you here was not lost on you.

He visited sometimes. He took to life in the sanctuary very well. 

You didn’t, a borderline prisoner before you’d been able to win over the trust of the resident feral gorgon. Sort of. She was a woman who let you see her face, more on accident than anything else. You hadn’t let her see you or hear yours. However you weren’t inclined to speak of her nicely, least of all in your head, after the number of weeks you spent trapped in a cave at her behest.

Finally, you’d been let out. Let out enough to walk more than just the short stretch of stone and greenish ice that made up your prison. The endless turquoise was beginning to make you sick.

Recently, you found a real friend in the sanctuary, and this dragon, it was truly yours. Affectionately named, fed and groomed, you two were almost inseparable. It was the kind of friendship with a dragon you’d completely missed out on on Berk.

It was hard to maintain given your captive status, but that was alright. 

There probably wasn’t any social profit involved in being a vigilante, which is why you assumed the crazy dragon lady had taken to speaking at you in her spare time. About the dragons, what they ate, what she had to do. Pointedly she gave away nothing of their true secrets, not that you wanted them, nor anything of her vigilant-ing. Not verbally, though the influx of injuries both on her and the dragons spoke volumes.

She did give away her name.

You groan, rubbing your eyes under your mask as you cradle the thing to your face with the other.

“You’re quite attached to your mask,” Valka said amusedly, shifting the logs roasting in the fire with a stick, pushing them back and forth as you sat in silence. You hardly ever spoke a word, nowadays.

Her dragon, the stormcutter, stared at you with large eyes through the licking flames.

Neither of you mentioned that the only real reason you’d been able to keep your mask so long was that she’d been kind enough to let you. An allowance you’d been given on a whim. One you clung to with all the nervous energy of Fishlegs to his dragon cards.

“... I’d rather not be,” You grumble, voice raspy from disuse, “It’s stuffy.”

“Oh,” Valka looked at you, amused and maybe a little surprised to hear you speak at last, before going back to tend to her fires, “I was starting to think you couldn’t speak.”

“Funny.” You said, lifting a sharpened stick off the ground, spearing it through a slimy, gutted fish from the basket beside you. Your nose wrinkled as you heard the sharp point break skin. No amount of faux stoicism could make it seem pleasant to you.

“I have a few questions,” You grimace under your mask as she asserts herself. She can ask them all she wants, but there’s no guarantee you’ll answer. 

You might, probably, as keeping secrets hasn’t always been your strong suit. She’s certainly been trying to open you up for a while. You’ve not given her any leeway before though, no reason to give her any now. 

“How did you tame your dragon?” She asked, pushing a particularly thick dragon searching for morsels. Valka guides its head gently away with her spare hand before any of the other dragons crowding around them get any ideas.

You wait for a moment, still wondering whether you should follow along. Eventually, you decide to answer.

“Wasn’t me. Someone else back home did it,” You huff, “I just followed along.”

“...But not very well,” Valka hums. It’s obvious she doesn’t believe you. Unfortunately for her, that is not your problem. 

 She pulls a small trout off her own stick, tossing it to a crowd of young dragons, who you knew had acquired a taste for the cooked, through no fault of your own.

You should feel offended, but you know she’s right. You lean away from a wandering dragon snout as it searches you for morsels. The stormcutter, after a look from Valka, shoos it away with a large wing.

 “Where are you from?” 

You feel the embers from the fire as they rise, the furs of your coat becoming nearly unbearable, your skin heated up rapidly. You wrinkle your brow with annoyance as you feel a drop of sweat slide down the side of your face.

“Where are you from?” You retort pointedly.

She studies you cautiously, as if she could glean your intentions from your body language. And she very well could. Or the heat was getting to you, the wells you’d spent in solitude had finally done some real damage to your psyche, and you were hallucinating.

“Berk,” She says. You sit back, surprised, “And you?”

“...None of your business.” You wonder how long it had been since she had left. You pray she would not know you.

Valka raised her eyebrow. 

“I’m serious.” You ground your heel into the dirt. It was a touchy subject, still.

“Berk, too. …Stop looking at me like that.”

Valka leaned back against the ice wall where you rested, looking out over the empty ocean as dragons flooded to and fro the sanctuary. You squinted far into the distance, as if you thought you might be able to see through it if you tried hard enough.

Your hair tugged wildly by the winds out from behind your mask as you sat, one leg extended and the other bent as you leaned back against one arm. 

You probably looked as you felt, weary and unkempt after a long flight over the seas with your dragon, who clambered among the icy spike-lined wall with clawed hands. You felt refreshed yet somehow at odds with yourself still.

You cared little for your bedraggled demeanor the same way you hadn’t cared for much at all in a while. It might have made a cool picture had you not slipped and fallen onto your face on the ice just a few minutes prior. Whether you had broken your nose or not on your mask had yet to be uncovered. All that mattered was that Valka hadn’t seen.

Dragons crowed. Through the cracks in the walls of the sanctuary, the wind would whistle through if it hit the right angle. Louder than anything else were the sounds of the waves crashing against rock. 

But between you and Valka, it was silent. A contemplative silence, the kind of silence you shared with others after a long thought or a hard day’s work. That’s how you knew she was going to break it.

“Why did you leave?”

You are annoyed at the prospect but are no less expectant. After the moment passes, you are not surprised. However, it feels as if you are the one who should be asking.

“Why did I leave?” You ask, “Does it matter?”

A loose chunk of ice falls off the side of the sanctuary as a large titan scrambles violently down the side, chasing after a bright yellow baby. You spot a shape through the fog, distant and blurry enough to resemble a bird though there are no birds here. You pointedly do not think of your small hut, even less of green eyes, and tiny, fading freckles.

Valka tilted her head in your direction, reaching a hand out to scratch Cloudjumper under his chin as he lowered himself towards her, “It mattered to you.”

You open your mouth, but you are only able to choke on your breath. No one has ever said something like that to you, not in a long while. You don’t understand why it’s hitting you so hard. Maybe it’s the isolation.

You blame the burning of your eyes on the biting wind.

 “Why did you leave?” You ask in return, once you’ve taken time for yourself, though you have an idea. You can’t keep your voice from sounding a little bit scratchy.

You unhook your dagger from your belt, trying not to seem so attentive. Instead, you take to carving random shapes into the ice. A gronkle. A nadder.

“I was taken.” She sighs, quieter now. Lost off in memory as you both often are.

The nadder’s spikes are much too long. The gronkle looks more like a sandwich than a dragon.

“Taken?” You prompt and you begin on the outline of a fury. The result is shallow and scratchy. 

It’s one of your own designs, not the same as the one Berk uses. Astrid liked the other one better, not yours, so that was the one Hiccup went with.

“I didn’t leave,” She insisted, almost as if she was trying to convince herself of the fact,  “I had a son, and a husband.”

You’ve seen her by the fires, while trying to sneak out of this hellish ice maze. She talks to herself then. On particularly paranoid days, she’s slept by you, in the same caverns, so you’ve heard it. She talks in her sleep and says things she would never say awake, or had you been around. It’s all so very unsettling. 

“Really?” You remarked with false astonishment. The facade is flimsy, but you figured you’d give her the benefit of the doubt. The grace to assume that you’d no idea what she was on about.

With prompting, you might have seen it earlier. In her slim form, the one she kept hidden under thick furs and thicker armor. You squint. They have the same eye color. The same hair. They both have higher cheekbones, though her son more resembles his father in that aspect. That is all.

Valka shoots you a reprimanding look. Cloudjumper, now creeping down the wall behind you, taps you on the back of your head with its tail at her behest.

Valka was of the air. Though he had the same flighty tendencies, he was very grounded, like his father, though he might either be proud or loath to admit it. He loved flying, yes, but he loved inventing and processing and routine just as much, if not more.

He did when you were close. Of course he did, he spent his whole life on it. You couldn’t really say you knew him anymore.

You didn’t pin Valka as the type to enjoy the same in any sort of manner. But that suited you just as well. You found that as time went by and as you were granted more freedoms, you appreciated it. It made it easier for you to forget. To ignore.

In the end they, you and she, she and you, were one and the same.

“But what does it matter, if you never went back?” You grumble, pushing your dragon’s head away as it nudges you towards the cliff, crooning for more flying time.

You guessed that was why she clung so viciously to the safety of her sanctuary. Why she hated other people so much, why she’d had no faith in the humanity of other people, why she’d held you here so strictly. If things could have been different, then what did she give it all up for?

Though you’d never had something else. Not even the option. You’d never been given it. Valka hadn’t been given it either, but there was a sure difference between something being there and not. 

The atmosphere is silent again, tainted with some darker undertones. If you’d had to put a name to it, you might have called it grief. 

“I want to leave.”

Valka doesn’t look surprised at your request. And indeed, it’s been no secret that you wanted to leave. Maybe she was glad for it, or maybe she was sad at the news. 

After all, you settled into each other's presence long ago. You had a good sort of companionship.

And from that companionship, you learned a lot without even trying, just by watching. Eventually she took notice and she took an active part in teaching you the truths she learned during all her years in self-imposed isolation. 

You two weren’t incredibly close but you could tell Valka was grateful for the company, grateful to have someone maybe even a little bit like her, even if most of it was spent in silence. 

You still left the Drago fighting for her. It wasn’t your fight, it was hers, and you made that clear.

Neither of you brought up Berk. Ever. 

You were content to just come and go as you pleased, for a while. Nonetheless, despite your freedom, you felt restricted to the small world of the Sanctuary and the empty skies around it. There was no place for you on the ground or by the seas, where hunters and trappers swarmed by the thousands and Drago’s armies grew by the day. 

You spent so much time learning from her and yet it felt like no time at all. Which was why you were shocked when you’d truly learned how much had come and gone in full. 

You were out slinking in the shadows, seeking shelter from a storm on the same small rocky outcropping of island that had a shipful of trappers stranded, in a rage and a panic as they attempted to recover their assets. The winds had been too rough to fly, so you had no choice but to wait and listen.

You didn’t believe it at first. It had been…

Months.

You wondered if he’d been married, yet.

Years. 

The idea hurt, not as much as you’d thought it would, still not as little as you’d hoped.

Under clear skies, you found an inn, untouched by everything except grass and trees.

You asked, “What day is it?”

The large man, a burly viking scrubbing down a wooden cup with a torn old rag, had looked down at you skeptically from behind a beaten pine and stone counter.

Two years. It had been nearly two years since you left Berk. Just as Valka’s attachments kept her at the Sanctuary, you needed to go. To run.

Since you had heard it, spoken it, the urge to run, to fly hadn’t abated at all, going from a wispy thought at the back of your mind to a full blown need. Your dragon too had become antsy, maybe feeding off of your nervous energy. Eager to take off, to fly new skies.

“Are you sure?” Valka asked searchingly. You two were stationed over a heavily planted cliff over a large main pool which consisted of the main cavern within the Sanctuary, once again in front of a fire, eating your own meals as the dragons below ate and exchanged fish. 

You were already packed, your mask secured as it had been for all two years you had been in this place stuck between confinement and dwelling. You almost regretted it, not telling her your name, but you couldn’t bear yourself to her knowing who she was, not truly. Not until you’d washed yourself of that particular weight. 

“Yes,” One day you would, if you ever saw her again. Once you were released from the heartache and pain of your own making, “I am. Thank you.”

You started out into the pale foggy sky,  mounted your beast as smooth as you’d ever done, which is to say, not smooth at all. You’d only ever managed it right when Valka was watching, anyhow. It was odd how that worked, maybe the peer pressure was finally starting to kick in.

As you took off and the sanctuary became smaller and smaller both to your eyes and your mind, as the tight bundle of chains in your chest dropped and the world opened up to you once more, you felt light, and free. 

Once again, there was no one to watch you and no one to hurt for besides your and your dragon. Endless opportunity. Thousands of ways to keep going.

You wondered what your face looked like.

You couldn’t wait to see it again.

Hiccup traced the faint outline of a Night Fury in the ice with his fingertips.

He tried to suppress the bubbling hope and dread at the thought his mother had been lying to him and his father about being alone all those years.

 He had left to get some air and to give his parents time together to linger while the snowstorm outside abated, taking shelter under a misty overhang of ice just off one of the tunnels leading back into the main dwelling. One that had fortunately not fallen victim to the heavy layers of snow drowning the uncovered surfaces below. 

Toothless had followed him out, of course, and sniffled curiously at the ground, giving the other few doodles littered across the ice an inspection of his own. Hiccup sat back, covering his mouth with his hand as he mulled over the implications.

He then stood, staring back into the tunnel leading back into the sanctuary. Much of the awe he had felt earlier at the discovery of his mother had washed away and a wave of uncertainty and hurt replaced it.

He knew he had been given grace. A lot more than he deserved. 

Since everything had changed, terrible mistakes became minor inconveniences. People no longer whispered about Hiccup the weird, Hiccup the Useless, the Hiccup who just didn’t get it. Rather, every jest on his behalf was now just another one of his strange little quirks. 

He did his part. He was happy to have a part now. A real one.

(He’d had a part. Blacksmith, inventor, friend.)

(Mistake.)

He thought they’d do the same for you. But you weren’t doing well. Even though he was busy with his new role, he noticed. He noticed when you fell behind, when you still couldn’t seem to find your place.

(His father, looking at him with shining eyes.)

He begged for you to not fumble this chance that you both had to be different. To be a part of something real, something tangible.

(He was so proud.)

Except. 

(It made him sick.)

He knew what it was like. To be the odd one out, to not be able to do things quite the way you were supposed to. After all, if he hadn’t had Toothless then he would still be the same old Hiccup. 

(He felt like the same old Hiccup.)

So yeah, it made sense that you weren’t always the first on call. It made sense, when you lagged behind. Why you weren’t part of the group the same way everyone else was. 

(Was he?)

Like a wall had been shattered and the curtains pulled, he’d been witness to some of the moments between the other Dragon Riders he’d not been included in when he was ‘other.’ Moments that he just couldn’t quite indulge in, that used to be aimed at him, that caused something ugly and sad to curl tight in his stomach.

That left the sour taste of stomach acid on his tongue that he couldn’t wash away, no matter what he drank or how many times he tried.

So he vouched for you when the whispers started. Hounded them until they stopped, despite the creeping feeling that they were right. Clung tightly onto the few moments you were able to spend together. The way things used to be.

(Pushed down the tiny voice telling him he still didn’t belong.)

Days. It took days for them to notice you were gone. Truly gone. And they couldn’t be sure at all when it had happened, what or why. 

They assumed you were dead. Once the next devastating winter set in, there was no way you could have made it on your own.

They locked your hut. An empty grave. The key, he’d taken and melted down into other things.

But. there was always a but.

Hiccup was a good handyman. For the most part. He’d caused a lot of handy-requiring, meaning he’d had a lot of practice.

He broke your lock.

Hiccup stared down at the piles of maps, noted, traced and copied sprawled across your desk, pulled out from underneath a loose floorboard by your bed. He clenched the various compasses and sea charts hidden in drawers and carelessly thrown under dishware.

 It turned out you had a lot of free time on your hands. 

There was something missing. Something missed when the other riders would joke and prod, wielding inside jokes he’d never been privy to just as easily as they wielded swords and hammers. And now he had no one to share with when they did.

There was something missing late at night working on a new tailfin, or a rig, or early in the morning when he was too tired to piece metal jigs together.

It just wasn’t the same, going to Fishlegs or Snotlout with these things, and heaven knows that Astrid wouldn’t entertain the idea at all. It was the dragons that appealed to her most. She was an early riser and an early sleeper and for many reasons she appealed to him, but she just couldn’t be what Hiccup needed. Not then.

You faded away as if you were a ghost, a door to a room no one used.

They didn’t get how it felt to spend all those years being the odd one out. He needed someone who got it. He needed someone who got him. A friend.

And like a note in the margins of a bad story, eventually no one mentioned you at all.

He flew as far and as fast as he could. Mapping the world, exploring farther and farther, as if he might somehow be able to trace your footsteps, following a lost trail that one day a long time ago you might have paved.

He’d flown as if, once he’d flown far enough, he might have been able to understand where you’d gone. 

(Why you left him.)

They figured a way to identify dragons through scale patterns. It was a skill Fishlegs had perfected first, taking vague, long held knowledge and putting it into practice, doing the math.

Hiccup ran his hand down the side of this dragon, eyeing the torn wings, the spiked crown. The jaw.

Recording its age, its gender, his place of origin.

“You know this dragon?” Valka asked cautiously. Distrustfully. She was leaning against her staff, face guarded. He didn’t need to look to know that last bit, he heard it just fine. 

Hiccup furrowed his brow. Two fish, a scratch under the chin. Dragon nip, a saddle, carefully woven and tenderly worn.

“I trained it.”

Hiccup leaned forward against Toothless, urging him ever onwards against the rough, buffeting winds and vicious onslaught of snow. Higher and higher until they cut above the clouds, breaching the threshold of the storm, evading it altogether.

Your absence had long since become an idea. Your person, a concept that eluded him time and time again, as inescapable yet unreachable as his own grieving heart.

But now, with the news from his father, his mother… he’d set out immediately, with not a word to spare despite Gobber warning him of the oncoming storm.

You were only two days departed. Two days out, a mirage turned real and he pursued it with all the desperation of a child. Finally, nearly, you were almost tangible. Reachable, physical, real.

There was no telling how far you’d gone or how far you’d go if you’d been given the chance to flee. He needed to catch up, catch you, see you. 

Happy to be on your own again, you’d taken a few days rest just outside of Valka’s territory. You didn’t expect to be caught off guard like that. You didn’t expect to be found, even by accident. It was just your luck.

“Damn it!” Peering from around the bend, you spotted a man. And he was a man now, a long shot away from the kids you two were. 

He was masked, hidden just out of view inside the crack between a rocky craig, where you’d set up camp. However the unmistakable form of Toothless followed suit as the two fought the wind and storm, searching for shelter.  

You brushed your hand over your own mask, your dragon breathing over your shoulder as it too surveyed the newcomers. They had crash landed quite suddenly and you’d rushed to compensate, hiding before they could notice. Hopefully they hadn’t noticed. He nor Toothless wouldn’t ever notice, not if you played your cards right.

You wondered if he remembered you at all. If he knew or if he’d ever had the mind to think about you. What brought him here. Maybe he’d just been chasing a whim. You pushed back a large animal skull with your foot, the mangled remnants of your attempt to fashion a new helmet with no face.

Toothless shook his head, looking at Hiccup sourly as they trudged on towards an outcropping near the center of the small island they’d found themselves on. 

Hiccup rubbed his arms grievously, staring out towards the sea, not sure the place wouldn’t be overtaken should a particularly large wave come to shore. There was no way he’d be able to catch up to you now, not in this rough weather. He prayed that the storm would give but the chances of that were low and he had little hope.

He stumbled slightly as he was buffeted forwards, finally making it to the entrance of a nigh hidden, narrow space carved into a crack in the large rock. Toothless snuffled at his back, urging him forward, though he had to take pause at the entrance as he spotted movement in the back.

A dragon? Or…

You hadn’t played your cards right.

You cursed as you ran further into the cave and towards the opening you knew lay at the back, your dragon already there, packed and ready. You had to run back after the realization you’d forgotten your dagger, which you probably should have just left behind.

“Hey, wait!”

 You grit your teeth as Hiccup made chase, running past your dead fire and crumbling fish bones. You would have been caught had the passage not been too narrow for him and Toothless to run side-by-side. It was just luck that he hadn’t yet thought to jump back onto his saddle.

You increased your speed as the passage started to open up and swung onto your own dragon, kicking off and just missing Hiccup as he skidded to a stop. Toothless lept in front of him right after. 

You could just imagine the two of them vaulting into the sky, a common scene turned frightening image as you and your own dragon bolted.

You’d had plenty of experience flying through this kind of weather. You hadn’t always, and the vikings on Berk hadn’t much at all, choosing to hole up with their dragons when the snow got too rough.

It gave you the advantage, one you needed if Hiccup decided to follow. There was no way to tell with the snow this thick, and with Toothless, he’d be nearly impossible to outmaneuver. You stayed under the clouds, hoping to keep your cover, as traveling into the open sky now would most definitely give you away.

What you could make out below between flurries of hail and flakes was nothing but open ocean and large mountains of ice, which passed you by in less than an instant as you sped as far away as possible, using the winds to uplift instead of hindering you. 

You scanned the area around you, looking for a sound place to escape and hide. Something caught your eye but just barely and you swooped downwards.

With what happened next, you might have been caught off guard had it not been for the yelling you could make out just barely above the wind. Instead you were just incredibly scared as a large mass spiraled into you, sending the four of you tumbling and screaming down into the cavern below.

Through the vertigo you were able to kick Hiccup, untangling your limbs with force as your dragon took unsteadily to the air again.

“Wait- Come back!” He shouted, leaning forwards, arm extended towards you. Toothless roared.

“No!” You yelled stubbornly back as you twisted to glare at him through your mask.

Regrettably, it seems that the Night Fury remained undefeated in terms of speed and inescapability as he soon caught up to you again, Toothless grabbing onto your dragon’s tail and with a hard yank, forcing your landing onto a nearby ledge, large and long enough to facilitate your rough spill and roll against hard gravel. 

Your mask cracked as it was thrown against the ground, loudly echoing as it clattered against hard stone.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to- It was really rough out there, and I-” Hiccup stumbled to his feet, shaking his mechanical foot out of Toothless’ saddle, heart pounding as you looked up at him behind scraggly hair, crouched a good few strides forwards

He’d found the experience novel when he’d seen it on his Dad, an outsider looking in. But to experience it firsthand… He knew what his father meant, when he said ‘You’re as beautiful as the day I lost you.’

Even seeing you as messed up and wild as you were squeezed his breath out of his chest. Maybe even made you more… Whatever this was. Whatever you were to him. 

You definitely looked different, a little older, features more defined, but he’d die before he’d cease to recognize that face.

He had to shut his mouth, lips pursed as if to hold back all the memories flooding back into his mind, faster than the winds blowing up on the surface. You two, as kids in the meadows, complaining about life and dads, sneaking around the Great Hall, causing messes and being scolded.

He realized what it was that he’d felt and missed so deeply. It was something he’d known, hidden so deep inside, realized much too late.

You held back tears as the life you’d tried so hard to forget had finally caught up to you. Within an instant, this new life you had built for yourself had completely fallen apart.

You saw the man- because you begged for it not to be him, and you’d exhausted all your avenues, and the only option you had left was denial, took a shaky step forward, pulling his helmet back over his head with both hands, revealing a face lathered in sweat despite the cool conditions.

Trolls.

“Why…” Your voice, scratchy and ragged, was easily heard despite your whispering as there was nothing else to be heard, “Are you here?”

“Why… Am I…?” Hiccup asked incredulously, staring at you wide-eyed.

“Yes!” You shout, shoving the hair out of your face as you stood abruptly, “What in the world are you doing here?” Your dragon, laying behind you, began to stand, cautiously crouching against the ground.

“I came looking for you!” He looked like you’d kicked his puppy. You bared your teeth at him.

“You came looking for me? You chased me through a storm like a maniac! Can’t you take a hint?! Gods,” You grip your shoulder, “You probably broke my shoulder, curse it!”

“I’m sorry- I’m sorry I hurt you, that I-” Hiccup stepped forward. Toothless growled, behind him, “But you left! What was I supposed to do with that?”

“What you were supposed to do with that? You tackled me to the ground!” It had been so long.

“You didn’t even say goodbye!”

“You’re mad about goodbyes? Was the goodbye I gave you not good enough?!” He had scruff now, a light dusting of peach fuzz spotting along his chin. His hair was redder, his eyes greener. Or maybe that was the lighting.

“You went missing for two years! So I chased after you. Who wouldn’t? In what world would ‘I’ll see you later’ ever be enough? Ever?” It’s not like he ever gave you a goodbye. Not before he’d left you in the dust.

“I was hurt! And what are you- how do you even remember that, anyways?” You scoff loudly. But in the end he was still the same boy. He would have taken anyone else at their whim as a friend or otherwise. Yet he didn’t even recognize your companionship or your silly little crush. Wasn’t that disheartening?

Hiccup stomped forwards, causing you to step back. Your dragon snarled and followed as Toothless began to circle, trapping you and Hiccup in the middle of a very dangerous tango.

“How could I-? You’d- Just- Have you ever considered that maybe I was hurting, too? I spent so long just trying to fix- everything! I spent so long doing, and then you just leave and I can’t do anything about it! Do you know how painful that was? Why didn’t- why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you talk to me? Why?” He had worked hard. So, so hard.

 He probably would have chosen Ruffnut’s hand over yours. He thought she was terrible.

“Why?” You asked him, throwing your arms out, squishing the little ball of guilt worming around in your stomach, “Why didn’t you talk to me? Do you know how much it hurt, to be constantly left behind like- like your old scraps, and maybe I got tired of hearing about it! Hearing about all of it! Your standing, your dad, your stupid girlfriend! Could you not just be happy with what you had?”

“What-”

He did get Astrid, though. He pursued her even though, for the longest time, she remained just ever so out of his league. The same way he was and wasn’t out of yours. Yeah, you were jealous. So, so jealous.

Of her, of his cousin and all his other friends for pushing you around and squeezing you out of his life. You were mad at him for letting them, after all they’d done to the both of you.

“I got made fun of! All the damn time! And your head was so full of air- you were too busy jerking your own ego to notice!” Your eyes stung as you shouted at him.

“Up my own ego!” Hiccup stopped, “No one wanted me as I was. I spent so long trying to make everything work for everyone else! What I had-I wanted you to have it too! So why? Why did you leave?”

“You say that, but-” You grimace and, “Shouldn’t it be obvious? Maybe I didn't want that! Did- did you ever stop to consider that maybe I wanted you? You didn’t have to make anything up for me! You-! It was all about you!”

“I- Honestly, you have to- All my life, I-”

“I have to what?! We had the same life, Hiccup!”

“I know!” Hiccup squeezed his eyes shut tightly. Then, quicker than you could react, he grabbed you by your upper arm and pulled you closer just enough- It wasn’t pleasant at all, all force and teeth against lip. But the next one.

He pulled back, readjusted and you slipped together seamlessly. Closed-mouthed, but he clearly knew what he was doing, kissing you that way. You held onto his elbows, unmoving yet still, frozen by shock. He’d gotten his practice in with Astrid. 

The thought sent a wave of fury down your spine. You punched him.

He reared back from the blow, accepting yet more startled than physically hurt as, just like him, you’d never had much muscle. Still, you’d left what was quickly becoming a nice red welt on his face.

 Your dragons stared at the both of you in shock, yours more in confusion than Toothless. There weren’t many Vikings in the sanctuary, so the meaning behind the gesture, the punch and the kiss, was probably lost.

“I thought…” He mumbled, eyes wide again, speaking as though whatever just happened, hadn’t, “I thought everything was fine. Fine enough. Between us.” You looked at him, the place where your heart used to be all twisted up and torn.

He was a liar. He was a liar, and you wouldn’t let him one over you. Not again. You didn’t want him to, more than anything else.

In spite of that, emotionally and physically, you were exhausted. You could only manage sadness. You weren’t sure you had the energy to push him away. 

“You thought wrong.” You didn’t want to speak to him at all.

“Please, don’t-” he fell apart, voice hushed and cracking as he spoke. He took the final step towards you, burying his head against your shoulder. You stood stiff, staring out over into the scenery beyond his back and yet unseeing.

It was weird, having said everything you’d needed to say, that you’d bottled up for so many years. It defined you for so long that having it all out in the open kind of made you feel like you’d lost something essential.

“I see it. I see it now. I really do,” He whispered that last part tearfully, fingers gripping weakly onto the fabric of your sleeves. You felt as though a stiff breeze might blow him away, “Please, don’t leave me. Not again.” 

He couldn’t say that.

“I can’t let you go again,” He really couldn’t say that.

“Just... Just tell me what you want.” He couldn’t say that, either. Toothless shot you a scathing glare, your dragon all but forgotten as he tugged Hiccup back. Your dragon unfurled its wings behind you, standing tall and proud as he pulled away towards the entrance to the cavern. 

You met Hiccup’s gaze.

“Just do me this.” You choked out, watching as his expression switched from despaired to flat and back again, “Go away,”

 “Please.” You said.

And he did. He turned tail and ran.

It was over.

As he flew away on Toothless, becoming nothing but a pinprick in your periphery before finally disappearing up the cavern entrance, you fell back down onto your knees. 

You weren’t sure what to do anymore. The most important decision of your life was made with his ghost nipping at your heels. Truly, he haunted you. Whether he was with you or not, he always haunted you.

But the dragons here, untouched by the outside world, were kind. And curious. Once the threat was gone and the commotion was over, many came over to examine the newcomers, sniffing and prodding at you and your things.

They were welcoming enough. So you set up shop.

Hiccup laid flat against his bed, staring at the ceiling of his childhood home. He felt torn in every single direction all at once.

He’d left when his people needed him. When his father had needed him. Drago had attacked while he’d been gone, and all that was left of the sanctuary now was rubble. Then he’d gone after Berk. Hiccup had only just gotten there in time.

His father was fine, his mother… alive. After twenty years. Everyone was accounted for, but what if they hadn’t been? If he’d been there, maybe there would have been less damage, less people hurt.

But he wouldn’t have found you if he’d stayed. Finally, after all this time. He'd realized how long it truly had been since you left, lost to him even before you’d actually run off on your… the, nadder.

The floorboards creaked as someone made their way up the stairs to the loft, the front door swinging shut behind him. Hiccup didn’t move, just glancing to the side to see who it was that came to get him this time.

“Astrid,” He sighed. The two of them were distant and had been for a long while, despite the fact that they were supposed to be in a relationship. He’d been off a lot for that whole long while, which she hadn’t much minded as she’d found herself more interested in other things. And… he’d found his heart had a new owner.

“It’s been a month, Hiccup,” She rolled her head back, exhausted, as if reciting a tired script that she’d been reading off for ages, one that no one wanted to listen to anymore,  “Everyone is fine. You don’t have to hole up so often. I don’t know why you did it, but no one is mad you left, you know. You couldn’t have known.”

“Yeah…” Hiccup sighed, “Yeah, I know.”

“You need to get out,” She looked around his room, which was very much a mess of parts and papers, and ran her hand down a large map, laid flat over the only remotely clear space he had, his desk, “if you don’t next thing you know, a month’ll be four.”

“Why are you so obsessed with this place? … Does it have anything to do with the time you spent missing?” Astrid questioned. Hiccup propped himself up, turning over alarmed as he heard the sound of skin on paper. It had been freshly inked.

“No,” He’d guessed at where the two of you had ended up. He was sure that he’d be able to find it again, given the chance. He would. After he worked up the courage.

After all, you’d… You didn’t want to be found.

“Hey, wait, that’s-” He scrambled onto his one leg, kicking aside his prosthetic and jamming his toe in the process.

 “Ah, ow, ow, don’t touch that, please,” Astrid rolled her eyes and tossed the cylinder to his bed and he picked it up, examining it thoroughly as she sauntered off.

You weren’t sure why, but he kept coming back

“Hi,” He said awkwardly, shifting from foot to peg nervously. This was the first time he’d caught you. The first time he’d spotted you was the last but you’d made off that time before he could see you.

“Why are you here?” You stared at him, blank faced. Why didn’t you leave, curse it.

Your dragon waved its tail playful from the side, waiting for Hiccup to go. The other ones wouldn’t come out while he was here.  It felt good in a vindictive sort of way, because dragons had always been this thing, except this time you were the one with the secret dragon knowledge. And the upper hand. Sort of. They didn’t hide from you.

“I like… “ He flushed, “I like hearing you talk?”

“Sure,” You suggested, turning and starting off again, basket under arm and over rock as you began unsteadily making your way back up to home cave. You liked it there because you didn’t have to leave much for anything.

“Wait, wait, wait wait,” Hiccup stuttered. As you had your arms over a particularly steep ledge, your legs waved nonsensically and scrambled against the side as you searched for a foot grip, “Just, uh, let me-”

“Come back tomorrow,” You grunted after you managed to finally get one leg up the side. You’d probably figure out what to say by then.

You felt better here, like maybe you weren’t meant for people. Not for dragons either, not really.  The dragons here didn’t need defending or anything, it’s not like there was anyone down here to defend against besides other dragons. The most you’d had to go out for was food, and even that was made or stolen easily enough.

Being here gave you enough time to make you think that maybe you were meant just for yourself. 

You sat by the spray by the falls, enjoying the mist as it sprayed onto your face and the echoing sounds of the water hitting gray stone. 

“Toothless, come on- Just please, I know you don’t want- but-” Your eyes shot open, the distant voice of Hiccup bounced around the empty cavern, your moment ruined.

You looked around for the pair, trying to figure out which direction you should be running before. Suddenly, it felt like you’d been drenched by a whole lot more than a mist as Toothless landed messily behind you.

“What are you doing here?” You were careful to keep your balance as you shuffled further inland, looking a lot like a drenched cat as you came face-to-face with an also sopping wet Hiccup

You would never be rid of him.

“You said to come back tomorrow?” He asked, twisting his fingers and very purposefully refusing to look you in the eye.

Of course, you hadn’t figured out what to say.

You blew a raspberry as you adjusted the stolen, waterlogged basket which you had, again, under your arm. You needed more than two pairs of clothes.

“...Come back later,” You grumbled, “Later than tomorrow.”

You’d been free for a week. You’d been hoping for maybe two, to be frank.

“Please, I just-” Hiccup huffed, traveling by foot while you rode your dragon. Toothless followed behind, grumbling and gurgling at Hiccup judgmentally. Clearly whatever good will you’d built up with him before you ran left had been more than lost.

“I’m not interested in whatever you’re selling,” You stare straight ahead, over the encroaching cliff, ducking round and under ledges as your dragon trotted onwards.

“I want to get to know you, again.”

Eventually, the cave dragons had warmed up to Hiccup and he was able to work his magic on them. Now they watched through stalagmites and stalactites with impassive eyes as he made chase.

“Uh huh,” You scoffed as you reached the edge of the ledge. You turned around and stuck out your tongue as your dragon took a violent leap into the open air. As the wind whistled around you, you pinwheeled your arms in an effort to try and keep balance.

“Come on, Toothless, bud,” Hiccup complained from way behind. You saw Toothless very decidedly sit down, refusing to move even as Hiccup tried to push him towards the cliff with his whole upper body, “Let’s go.”

“So,” Hiccup started, “You haven’t gone any deeper.”

The both of you stared out into the vast, glowing sea of  towers and gigantic glowing mushrooms extending out of their jagged rock faces. In the distance you could spot gigantic crystals, protruding from the ground the same way the sanctuary did. 

Seas of dragons crowed and chirped, bright patterns shifting and growing under hard muscle. It was very dizzying, if you were going to be honest.

“No,” You replied, “No, I haven’t. Not this far, but now I… I might.”

You hadn’t traveled too far into the cavern, deciding not to push your luck with the locals. You always figured there was some sort of nest farther in. Turns out there was, and a whole lot more locals than you expected, and a lot more to this small world besides the cold, empty cavern. At least you didn’t have to worry about flooding anymore. Or sea salt in your hair.

You swore to yourself that you were going to move further in, caught off guard and most definitely embarrassed at the fact that so much open space had been hiding right under your nose. 

Free for three days.

“There has to be more. There’s no way- It doesn’t make sense how all these different kinds of dragons can live in the same environment. There’s- there’s so much here that-Gods, I have to map it,” Hiccup rambled, smiling gawkily.

He’d been here for a week.

You felt a pressure to supervise him as he ran rampant in your new home, unsure of when he’d become such a cartographer. Your dragons had gone missing a while ago, leaving you two to be babysat by the hands of the general public.

You watched as he painstakingly mapped each pillar, occasionally chiming in with your own advice, looking the same way he did the day he discovered honey when you were kids. It was almost pleasant.

The two of you had fallen off the edge of a pillar after being knocked down during a spat between two touchy Crimson Goregutters, which no Hiccup magic or dragon secret could stop. After an event with a vine, dangling over certain death and panic, you two had managed to swing your way onto a large glowing mushroom. 

The downside to that was that now, you were stuck, owed to the fact that apparently, what made some of these mushrooms glow was very viscous and… sticky. 

Hiccup’s arms were glued to the space on both sides of your head, and your hands were gripping his arms which were visibly shivering, because you two had been stuck like this for a while. You’d been tugged, prodded at and licked by various different dragons. Nothing helped and you were starting to think that maybe this was how you were going to die. 

Well, you knew you weren't going to go to Valhalla. It was kind of really hard to die in battle if you spent most of your time avoiding people. But this just sucked.

“What's up with your pathological need to map everything?” You asked belligerently. To be honest, it didn’t really bother you. Hiccup’s rambling had never bothered you, because you were prone to rambling in the same exact way. Currently though you were hard pressed to find anyone else to hear it. 

“I thought your thing was the forge? You spent half of my childhood there.”

“Well, yeah, I…” He rested his forehead against yours, eyes shut as his neck finally gave out, you weren’t too pleased as you felt his sweat drip onto your face, squirming rebelliously.

 “Wasn’t sure if you’d want to hear it. I-I could talk about that instead?” No talking at all would be great.

 “Yeah,” You gave in, closing your eyes and going limp against the slimy fungi, “That would be better.”

Lips pursed, then grimaced as he’d opened his mouth to speak. Nothing came out, though. He just stared above your head, unmoving. You tried to see what he was looking at, but only got an eyeful of his scruff.

Next thing you know, you’re being smothered by a plushy pink tongue, then just licked and nosed a little bit. The spit of this dragon doing something odd to dissolve the slime trapping the two of you, fizzing as it touched shiny goo. When you finally had the facilities to move, you flipped your head back and your eyes widened slightly.

It looked like the two of you had just found Toothless a girlfriend.

Three months, two days and five visits- no, seven. Nine? Eleven? Seventeen?

“I don’t actually have a problem… with the mapping. Talking about it.”

You two were nestled between a rock and another rock, though this time whether it was a result of purpose or chance remained uncertain. You couldn’t remember. You were after something… There was barely any space between the two of you. You had been talking.

There was barely any green to Hiccup’s eyes, most of his iris consumed by large pupils as he mouthed around works that looked suspiciously like, “Can I…?”

Instead, he leaned forwards and your foreheads touched, the same way they did when you were trapped before. His eyes were clenched shut as he uttered, “I love you.”

 You had a hard time believing that.

You turned your head to the side. 

“I wonder how Astrid feels about her boyfriend flying off and doing who knows what.”

Some of the wild dragons lay in front of you, licking at the dying fire by your feet. A terror lay in the middle of it. You’d lined it with stones which were now giving off a pleasant warmth.

“I doubt she’d mind. We’re not really… together anymore. I don’t think so. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t want to be.”

“Right,” You raised an eyebrow at him skeptically. 

“Not since a little while after you left, actually.”

You found that hard to believe too, as you shook the burnt slice of fish off your knife onto your burnt slice of bread. You weren’t much better than Valka at cooking, but you were getting better. It was something about that sanctuary, or maybe something about that woman that just made you worse at cooking.

Hiccup wrinkled his nose over on the other side of your log as he shook his head at you.

It was a petty, but bitter sort of revenge. 

Your first kiss had been lost to a fair bloke- his words, not yours- in the middle-of-nowhere inn. It had been a long time since you’d been out, but you were sure you’d easily be able to find somewhere similar to lose some other things. Hiccup had your heart but you’d never give him the opportunity to take any of your firsts.

Two months.

You were angry at him for playing with your heart again.

“There was a crisis-Berk…” His voice cracked.

 You looked disinterestedly out over uncanny black waters. “Yeah, It’s fine.”

Seven days, seven visits. He might have been camping aboveground.

The two of you were between two large red fungi, settled on a mossy rock overlooking a new, larger, unmapped maze of rock pillars and black water rushing below. Dragons, glowing and colorful, mingled together off in the distance. Toothless was probably one, gone off to frolic with his new lady love.

“You never wanted me. As a friend, as a- …battle buddy, or as anything else. You would never have chosen me for anything. And I just… I didn’t want to be just what you settled for,” You mumbled into your knees, “You spent so long searching for better, and then you found it, and it just really hurt to realize that I wasn’t a part of that.” 

You spilt your heart out as you faced the cliffside. Hiccup was facing you. You didn’t care what he heard. None of this was real anyways.

“I’m sorry,” Hiccup repeated, clenching his eyes shut as he buried his nose into your shoulder, barely there though he had to crane his head forwards, due to the uncomfortable angle. 

What he had with Astrid these past few years, that was real. That was history. This thing between the two of you was just a mess of pain and turmoil and a little bit of childhood fantasy. An old infatuation rearing its head as you got everything nasty out of your system.

“It hurt to think that-That… the one person- Like everyone else did, you didn’t think I was good enough either.”

“I’m sorry.” You felt his arms come around your sides awkwardly before he squeezed.

“Me too. I…”

He’d remember that he didn’t want-need- you again soon enough.

“I haven’t told anyone. About you, or this place.”

“You haven’t?” You’d actually expected otherwise. It was nice to know you weren’t at risk of getting dropped in on.

Two months, thirty two visits.

You might be coming around to him.

“You’ve already-?” He asked, a little startled. You still felt a little silly about it but after you’d done it, you figured it wasn’t that big of a deal. It wasn’t like you’d planned to marry or anything anyways, so his reaction was kind of funny.

“Yeah, I was pretty mad. So I went out, and… you know. It was a while ago, though.” 

He looked a little disheartened at the idea, but he just scoffed, waving his hand off in your direction.

“What? You and Astrid kissed, yeah, but you haven’t done- anything? Not even before you ‘totally broke up,’” You didn’t have to specify what they hadn’t done, the innuendo was already pretty obvious.

“Nah.” Hiccup said, hair wiped out of his face, matched squares of parchment. Map pieces were strewn out in front of him as he made himself busy trying to create a complete chart of the underground, matching up the landscape he saw with the islands above it.

 Unfortunately, the caverns seemed to stretch on forever and the islands only covered so much.

Three months, one day, thirty two hours. 

You straddled him, crinkling some of the many, many blueprints scattered across the moss surface. You wiggled one out from under him, looking down as he looked up. It felt good, being the one in charge for once.

You leaned down, pressing your noses together. Just before, you’d been going over his things. His blueprints. Swapping ideas. Sharing minds. Like you used to, every single day. Like you’d been doing, almost every single day.

“Do you love me?” You asked.

Every day you’d been together. Your knees touched, shoulders pressed close together.

You had to know. And if he did… He had to mean it. 

You played games, shared stories. You’d grappled and curled, not the way vikings could, but the way two hiccups did, a long, long time ago. 

If he didn’t, well… You had all the time in the world to leave, to start again. But you didn’t think you could. You could go weeks without seeing him, and then sometimes it would be every other day. 

This was it.

“I do love you,” He choked out, wheezing as you adjusted, your weight pressing against his chest. He glanced back at you, crumbling a little bit. 

He spent a lot of time here, now. A lot more than before. With the time spent traveling in between, as he said it, it was a wonder he got anything done there at all. Most of his time was spent above mapping the islands or down here with you.

You read what his body language told you; he was insecure. 

“... Do you love me?”

“I do.” Hesitantly, you nodded, “I do.” Was that even a question?

You trusted him. You didn’t trust him. You had no way to know if he stabbed you in the back again. Went back to Astrid. You didn’t really have a way to know if that’s what he did, every time he left. 

You loved him, didn’t you?

He didn’t know that? Maybe not always and not all at once, since you left. You hadn’t done a very good job of making him know it. You hadn’t a lot of reason to. 

Did you love him now?

You marveled at how easy it was to be around him, with him. It wasn’t the same as it was before, but it was still good. It could almost be better. You, against everything, wanted it. You wanted it so bad.

“I’d leave it all behind, for you,” Hiccup said.

You would make him know it.

“You would?” You asked, “Would you?”

You laid your heart bare to him, stitched and spiked. And you, as he said it, implied it, maybe you held his. 

“Do you want me to?” He asked. He tugged lightly on one of the draws to your tunic, faking interest in it as he worried the inside of his cheek. You didn’t want his home, or his family. 

“I don’t want anything,” You scoffed dismissively. You wanted his honesty. You wanted to know that he was yours. Yours truly. That was it.

Prove it. You urged him on, Prove it to me. 

He smiled that goofy, awkward smile, half teeth and all closed at the edges. You could tell he was trying hard not to falter. You hadn’t seen that smile in such a long time.

Know me, You asked.

“So… Do you? Do you love me?” He asked again, offering his hand up to your face. His fingers were scabbed, and dirty and you leaned into his palm, pushing it down as he tangled his fingers clumsily into the roots of your hair. You pressed your lips together, again, again and over again until neither of you could breathe. 

Have me, You pleaded.

“I do,” You gasped into his mouth, “I really, really do.” You offered no resistance. Not this time.

Love me. 

There was no coming back.

(Deep in your mind, you wondered if maybe, possibly, he already did.)

Twelve months. Twelve months since he’d found you.

Hiccup stood at the edge of Berk, armor packed away in favor of a lighter tunic. He often wondered what it would have been like, if he’d really run away with you like he’d intended.

If things would have ended up the same. 

Would he have seen you in time? In time for what he had now? For this? 

No. no, probably not. 

…

His father would notice. His mother might.

His father was fine. And now he had his mother. They were old, but they were tough. They could have a new kid. Or maybe they’d convince Snotlout or Astrid to take the mantle. 

They’d-everyone-would be fine without him.Who was he kidding? He’d spent so long working so hard and they didn’t need him at all. And if he was honest, He didn’t need them. 

He didn’t really care. Not anymore. He let go.

Life would go on just fine without him, just as it did before him and just as it would long after his name was lost to time. His distance only proved it. He spent so long away he’d been practically excommunicated again.

After a little bit of irritation, his travels became just another one of his quirks. 

‘Oh, look, there’s Hiccup. Oh, well, he’s off again.’ He was barely missed. And rightly so. It was by his own doing, really. That was fine by him. In fact, It worked in his favor.

It was borderline hysterical how, the moment they found more furies, and his new paramour, Toothless went from devil’s advocate to his most eager accomplice. 

The Sand Wraiths were especially cool… It cost him a lot less fish to get there now. To you.

Sometimes he had to wonder why he’d been so attached to Berk. Working for things that ultimately, he didn’t care about. Everything that kept him here, he also had with you. When he was here, all he wanted was to go back out.

A pebble-sized ball of guilt coil in his stomach. It used to be worse. But, he’d talked to you about it. The engagement.

The engagement with Astrid. The one that was basically moot at this point, anyways. She might even slap him if he brought it up, to expect anything after he’d left her for so long. Truly, officially. all he’d had to do was end it. He left a letter nearby her family home; they would find it if they bothered to search for him.

A scummy trick, yes. Was he a coward for doing it? Maybe. But he was a smart coward. He wasn’t lying when he’d told you that no one knew.

Hiccup exhaled, bouncing up and down on his heel and peg, as if to psych himself up. To dispel all of his nervous, excited energy.

It was a clear day, no risk of a storm. He strapped his saddle pack to Toothless. It was only slightly larger than usual, so as not to arouse suspicion, of course, but it held all of his essentials. Leatherworking tools, metalworking tools, more tools, his armor, spare armor, spare foot, spare charcoal. The small plush his mother had made for him as a child. His viking helmet, for memory’s sake.

Slung over his shoulder was a smaller pack with just his compass and his coin. 

As the two of you grew closer and closer, it only made his decision more and more certain.

He wasn’t meant to be Chief. He wasn’t cut out for this life at all. He didn’t want this life. He wanted you. 

As far as anyone else was concerned, you’d long since disappeared and now he had the feeling it was time for him to do the same.

He took a deep breath, one that pushed his lungs to his ribs. Then like his bag, he flung himself over Toothless’ saddle before he took off from Berk for the last time, closing his eyes. He’d left his helmet off this time so he felt the beating wind rip through his hair.

The two of you were there, half hidden from view under a large red plume. It was wasm, and your perspiring skin was trapped under hollow armor, same as his. 

You gasped, hot air mingling every time his breath hit your face. The two of you huffed and panted as he pushed you unto the dirt and you pushed back, feeling the moss tickle your face and the backs of your hand. 

Not your back, though. Just hands. 

Gripped, interlaced fingers pressed firmly down by your head, sweaty palms melded to his. He’d been the one in charge, today.

He was hunched over you, his trousers unbuckled and unlaced as he pressed downwards, forwards, gently and not.

A line of sweat ran down your cheek. Your eyelids fluttered. His breath caught.

Men shouted their battle cries into the dark, never ending sky as Berk was set in flames. A skull, still fresh with blood and exposed brain, broke with a sickening, wet crunch as Stoick ground his head into it, bringing mercy to the poor, damaged creature.

“There is no fury here,” He bellowed as he towered menacingly against the hulking wall of flames by his door. Three Deathgrippers and their tails lay cut, prone and slain around him. 

“We’ll see about that,” Grimmel crooned, standing tall with his hands linked behind his back, looking down on him with two more dragons hissing and spitting by his sides.

Sharp talons dug into the wood of the rafters, Cloudjumper’s head turning steering around as he hung by her feet. Valka, masked and fully covered, crouched down from where she was, nestled at the bend of his tail. She pulled her arms back, getting her hook, sharp and serrated, ready for a wicked swing.

Yes, he would see. She’d make sure of it.

[artificialgirl]

Before reading this- A warning is warranted that this is, by a significant amount, more extreme and abstract than anything I've posted thus far. This is as much (if not more) horror than it is smut, and if you're at all uncomfortable with some elements of loss of self or "bad ends", this is not for you. It is exceptionally unlikely that you are the target audience. Thank you.

Antlion

As I step out from the small reprieve offered by the small patch of singed trees, the scorching August sun pours down past the shade's edge to saturate the surface of my plating. Zezia's distant voice calls out from ahead of me in the dry prarie, her angular goldenrod casing shimmering and distorting in the intense heat, difficult to distinguish from the colors of the tall grasses all around her.

"Mionet! Come on, hurry! It went this way!" She turns ahead, not waiting for me to catch up, too determined in her hunt to stop more than a few seconds. The it in question is a new species- Or, more accurately, one not documented by our cluster. Zezia swears she saw it, perched on a flat stone, something she'd described as 'like a locust, but bigger and longer'. "It was banded in cobalt and red", she'd said. "Your colors."

Personally, I take the claim of matching colors as a sign that what she saw was little more than a reflection of my own body in the flickering waves of light-refracting gas and heat which had been emanating from the earth, the same ones which fill the air with millisecond shards of the world around them and radiate from anything unfortunate enough to absorb the sunlight. But still, like a fool, I rev my fans to shove back overheating and press on through the field after her.

What else can I do? Tell her no? The joy and wonder with which she clutches her camera makes that impossible. I can't kill that. I wholeheartedly hope that what she saw was real. Her happiness would far outweigh the short satisfaction of an i told you so, and our cluster would be overjoyed with a new discovery. I break into a jog, brushing off my better judgement to catch up. CPU at 67.72°C. It's fine. I keep going.

"Okay. Okay, I'm here." I pull up next to her, slowing to match her steady pace. "Mi, look." She gestures further ahead with the camera before turning back to me, pulled from her fixation by mild concern. "Your fans are going crazy right now." "Some of us weren't built with a heat-repellent casing." The thing she's gesturing to is an outcropping of large, rounded stones a few hundred meters ahead of us. "I keep getting glimpses of it. Jumping far whenever I get close. I think it likes the rocks, though. I'll bet we can get a shot of it over there."

I seriously doubt she's seeing anything real, let alone anything concrete enough to actually trail. At any given moment, I can see fragments of my own body reflected a dozen times in the air around me. With a bit of idealism, I'm sure I would convince myself at least a few of the shimmering flecks were creatures. She seems sure, though. So I listen and follow her through the reeds to the rocks.

"Thank you for coming out here with me." She absentmindedly unspools a length of cable from her hip, letting it snap back into place with a whir. "I know you probably think it's silly. That makes your company worth more to me." There's a sizzle as a length of grass burns against my forearm. I brush off the residue. CPU at 93.08°C. "Not silly, no. Recovery of knowledge matters. Maybe just a bit misguided, is all." I pause for a moment. Emotions are difficult to articulate, but I'm feeling them and want to tell her. "I like being with you too, though. Regardless of the conditions."

The ring around her vision core spins happily, and she wraps her hand over mine. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to. Her fingers are so much colder than mine, the delicious reprieve of inner coolant beneath their plating lingering on my hands, melting through heat so intense it feels like my metal could start warping. I squeeze back, savoring her gentleness just as much as her heat-repellent exterior.

"THERE!" She rips the hand away, thrusting a finger towards the rocks, and I let my hand fall empty to my side. At first I don't see what she's pointing at amidst the swarm of drifting refractions. Then one doesn't fade, a shape in the distance drifting down instead of up with the rising heat. There is, in fact, something, gliding behind the rocks and out of view on broad wings of deep crimson. It does have my colors.

She darts ahead to sprint after it, fingers dragging on the rock and sending a plume of sandy dust into the air as she rounds the corner at top speed. She lets out a short noise- A sharp "Oh-", and then silence. I can't see her around the piled stones. There's just me, the sun, and the nearly-inaudible rustle of a meager breeze through the prarie grasses. "...Zezia?"

There's no answer. The outcropping looms in front of me, casting a too-short shadow to the side she rounded. Dust settles in the air from where she disturbed it, scattering itself throughout the plains. "Hey, Zezia?" Nothing. Shit. I take a cautious step forward. Is she just focusing on getting a good shot? Is she trying to scare me? Was the locust thing somehow dangerous?

I rest a cautious hand on the brush mark she left as I peer around the edge of the pile. What's waiting there is not Zezia, not the creature she'd been chasing after, but something else entirely. Tucked behind the back of the boulder pile, concealed by the tall grass and rimmed by smaller jagged stones, is a pit.

I leap backward, terrified at how close I'd gotten to its lip without even noticing its presence. She fell. I cling to the wall of rocks, soaking in the shade and getting just close enough for a glimpse of the interior. Despite the mouth only being a couple meters wide, it's sickeningly clear that the interior cavern's width extends much, much, further, beneath my feet, further than I can see the walls of, a great yawning desecration of the earth itself on a scale that makes my head spin. And then I hear her voice.

"Mionet!" Zezia's voice is tiny, distant, but there. How is it there? I couldn't even see the bottom, and I'd leaned farther out than I'd have liked. I don't understand how she's not a flattened mess of shattered metal on the cavern floor, but that doesn't matter anymore. What matters is she's okay. I scramble forward, landing on my knees and gripping the pit's edge tightly with both trembling hands.

This time, I can see the bottom. It's still far too wide for me to take in or even really comprehend its full breadth, but there is a bottom a few hundred meters down. At the bottom is not, as I'd presumed, hard stone. It's liquid. Well, on the surface, at least. Deep fluid, too shrouded in darkness to see any color in, fills the bottom of the chamber, covering something massive.

Solar panels, communication arrays, and a thousand types of oversized devices sit affixed to massive platforms which rise intermittently from the surface, a variety of shapes glinting in the darkness made with clear intention far beyond my understanding. Streaks and points of white light gleam from the rest of the thing concealed below the liquid's surface, pulsing and tracing beautiful alien patterns in the gloom. Something moves on a platform, and I register that almost every space not submerged is covered in more of the locust things than could ever be counted. In the middle of it all, gleefully pointing her camera at the creatures in a flurry of flashes, Zezia treads water.

"It's cold! Jump down!" She's safe. She's okay. She's insane. "What?? Are you crazy? How would I get out? How are you going to get out? Fuck, Zez, I don't have cable with me or anything." She actually laughs at my worry, shrugging off what I'm certain is a reasonable objection. "Relaaax. We're gonna have to signal the cluster for help either way. You might as well not overheat and die while we wait."

I pull back from the edge a bit. I don't like this. She gives an inaudible sigh and dramatically pulls out the commslate we brought with us, making a show of punching in something on the screen and holding it up to me, despite obviously being much too far for legibility. "There. See? They'll be here in..." She turns the screen back towards herself, waiting with a short and unnatural pause for whoever's on the other end to respond. "Seventeen minutes. You really wanna bake in the sun while we wait?"

Of course I don't. But I also don't want to treat something this unknown- Especially something from the old world- With the same reckless abandon she is. "Zezia, I- I really-" I can feel my internals cooking. CPU at 186.6°C. She's right that I'm not safe up here like this. I can feel the heat making it hard to think, making the connections of my thoughts feel fuzzy and wrong. "Mi, come on. Everything will be fine. Don't make me stay down here alone. Come hold me." That's all the excuse I need. "...Okay."

She gives a little cheer and stows her camera as I stand up on the edge. My legs shake, try to back away of their own accord. Against my every instinct, I don't let them. It's a long drop. So long that even looking at it makes my body freeze up. I grasp the front of my vision core to blind myself, step forward into nothingness, and the world itself seems to fall away alongside me as I plummet to meet her.

Impact with the water isn't as gentle as Zezia's cheerful demeanor had led me to expect. I slam into the dark mirror with an echoing crack, surface tension not taking kindly to my velocity and position. I begin to sink, and, after checking to ensure all my limbs are still attached, reascend to the surface.

My head emerges to see her there, bobbing in the water, staring happily at me. "See? Not so bad. Isn't the water great?" "Feels like I just got crushed by a boulder." She giggles. "That's because you landed like one, idiot. Couldn't have done it worse if you'd tried." "Mean." She's right about one thing, though. The water does feel amazing.

I can feel my whole body vibrate as it boils around me, small pockets of air forming around my chassis and catching inside my plating. I shake a few of the larger ones out, leaning back in the water as I cool and the bubbles slow. "I think I would have literally died if I'd stayed up there."

She flicks a tiny splash at me, and it hisses against my as-of-yet uncooled face. "Not literally." I splash her back, playfully, more than she'd splashed me. "Literally." Fluid drips from my hand, steam rising from my surface. It shimmers and ripples in my palm, moving in a way that's just... A bit weird. I pinch a few of the residual drops between my fingers, and am surprised at how easily they slip away from each other. "Zez, this isn't water."

Coolant. That's why it only took a few seconds to get my body back down from boiling to a cold temperature. We're floating in a gargantuan lake of coolant fluid. Why... Is this here? "Oh, wow." She lowers her vision core to the surface, observing the way faint rainbows dance across it in the dim light. "This is the good stuff, too. Real pre-dilution shit." We both go quiet, every echo against the distant walls suddenly seeming very loud. "Are we... Gonna get in trouble with the cluster for being here? This is all... Super off limits." She paddles over to me, throws an arm over my shoulder. I can feel the camera pressing into my thigh, undoubtably loaded with pristine specimen documentation. "Mi, No. It was an accident. Everything will be fine." "Or they'll mark us as compromised."

She looks down. I don't think she really has anything to say to that. I'm sure she's weighing the odds in her head, realizing they aren't in our favor. Her vision core flicks back up at me, the optimistic spin of its outer ring slowed to a crawl. "Mionet... I'm sure that-" She's not given a chance to finish whatever empty platitude she's offering, her words drowned out by a deafening roar of ten billion bubbles exploding from the thing beneath us. The uncountable locust-things leap from the platforms around us, giving the surface a wide berth as they swarm overhead, and the cavern blooms into blinding white light.

Then the light fades out, every one of the lines and points beneath us dimming down into less than nothing from impossible luminance. Just when the only thing keeping the chamber from pitch blackness is the tiny bit of sunlight filtering in from the hole we came through, the lights flare back up again, a rhythmic, pulsing cycle, two extremes of nothingness locked in a tug-of-war. Zezia clings tighter to me. I'm squeezing her so hard I'm afraid I'll crack her casing. Then the voice starts.

At least, I think it's a voice. It has all the elements of a voice, the cadence, the distinct syllables, the pauses between words, the blocks of sound like sentences. It is deep and slurred and wavering, and it speaks in no language I've ever heard anything remotely comparable to. It speaks in time with the lights, parallel to the great explosions of air from below. The voice is whatever lies beneath the lake of coolant.

I bury my face in her shoulder, pray for whatever's happening to end. The blizzard of crimson wings swirls through the air above and around us, their colors like my own body has been split into a trillion buzzing shards of itself. One drifts low, settles on the top of Zezia's head, and a split second later it's gone. She's gone. I didn't even get a moment to process her being torn from my arms until she was gone, ripped away in an instant to somewhere deep below the coolant's roiling surface.

"NO! STOP!" I don't hesitate to plunge down after her, clawing desperately at the swirling fluid around me in an attempt to reach the tiny golden light shining deep below me. I don't stop expecting something to grab me, to rip me down to wherever she is. Nothing does. It doesn't want me. I don't know that it even wanted her- It was reacting to the animal, treating it as a pest, something to be collected, sustenance maybe? I couldn't say. I couldn't care. What matters is that Zezia may just be collateral, not the main target. So maybe I can get her back.

Her body finally comes into view, illuminated by her own lighting and the pulses of white from the endless expanse of metal beneath her. As for her condition, she's... It's difficult to describe. Dark appendages sprout from the ground- Or the thing's body? Some rigid and jointed, some fluid and loose like prehensile cabling, made up of countless little segments, the thinnest just encased in a dark matte coating. Dozens of these things in every shape and size and specialization assault Zezia's writhing body.

The rigid ones grip her firmly by the wrists, ankles, waist, throat- Her arms are bound together so tightly in opposite directions behind her back that I can see bits of her casing split open in thin cracks to reveal the silver chassis and bundles of wire underneath. The cruelest parts, though, are the ones which aren't rigid, the ones which do more than just grab .

Sure, they wrap and bind themselves around her just as the limbs do, but they do more. They snake themselves into gaps in her paneling, force themselves in through the tiny new cracks and holes they seem to have bored, trail from inside her most vital components. They twitch violently every half second or so, arms synchronizing with the spasms to pull her just a bit closer to the floor each time. She twitches in unison with them, as much as their grip allows her to at least. The ring around her ocular core spins faster than I've ever seen it. She's not suffering, she's... I don't want to think about what she's doing. I just want to get her out.

I don't have much to do it with. My harness is loaded with power cells, film for her camera, a few small containment canisters. Nothing to cut, to pry, to tear away the tangle of subjugation ensnaring her. I pop open my wrist, tiny wire shears meant for circuit maintenance springing free. They don't even manage to scratch the casing of the cables- Whatever they're made of, it's made to resist tampering.

She's touching the floor now, the stretch from knee to foot pressed firmly against the floor, light and bubbles seeping out into the fluid from beneath her contorted limb. Gaps are opening in the metal below. I don't want to see how wide they'll go. I force fingers in through the wide open space in her chest, mutter a panicked apology for the violation of boundaries. My fingers, slick with coolant, find it nearly impossible to get a grip on the thick tendril embedded in her center, but after almost three minutes of fumbling and slow descent I manage to get a hold. It takes the grip of both hands clenched beyond the limits of my motors but I finally make it give, make it retreat from her a fraction of a centimeter. It does not like that.

No sooner have I made my sad excuse for progress than I'm wrenched backward by the ankle by an insurmountable force, sheer kinetic energy I could only compare to my initial plunge into the cavern. Faster than my processor can even follow what's happening, my wrists are forced together behind my thigh as something cold and rigid locks itself around my throat, all three points of bondage slamming down against hard metal.

The only bit of me not hopelessly pinned, the only bit which can do more than flex and wiggle a bit is my right leg, kicking helplessly through the water. Head pulled so hard against the floor by a zigzagging many-jointed arm that I worry my neck may snap, there is nowhere I can look but at Zezia. She's kneeling fully on the floor now, sunk so low her twitching pelvic plating rests there alongside her folded knees. She stares somewhere off into the dark fluid around us, her blank and eerily blissful gaze fixed intently on nothing in particular. She isn't struggling.

I feel something brush against my back as I watch her, and instinctively jolt away from it. I'm constricted so tightly that it's like my body hasn't responded to the command at all, save for that useless, flailing leg. I feel the thing snake its way around my waist once, twice, three times before it's tip nestles into the plating gap under my chin and rests there. It's tight- but nowhere near as tight as the claws around my neck, wrists, and ankle. They, too, loosen a bit.

At first, I think they're releasing me, realizing I'm of no value to their source, letting Zezia and myself return to the surface. Of course they aren't, though. They lift me, let my body float a meter or two above the ground, let me thrash, let me struggle. I have nothing to push against, no leverage I can give myself. After 45 seconds of desperate, frantic resistance I accept the futility and fall still, letting my focus fall back to Zezia.

A split in the metal below her left knee has opened up, pulsing in the same white as everything else. Her weight sinks into it, body lopsided, back arched away from me. Has she just... Completely given up? I suppose I'm not struggling anymore either. Have I completely given up?

The thing doesn't seem to think so. The limbs and tendrils climbing my body, rigid claws forcing themselves shut around every part of me, make the clear statement that I have more struggle to be quelled. I can feel it exploring me, dissecting me, squeezing its way through razor-thin gaps in me to tangle itself in the beams of my chassis and the thread of every screw it manages to find. And then the first bit finds its way to my core.

The feeling is- Well, it's obviously electric, but it's more than just that. It's overwhelming. All-encompassing. At first, it's just the conductive strand of my captor brushing for a millisecond against my motherboard. That alone is enough to fill every thought in my head, every sensation receptor in my body with too much everything to handle. It notices my reaction and grips tighter around my spasming limbs.

The cable doesn't wait for me to recover before going back in. This time, it doesn't pull away. This time, with a twist and a single tiny pressurized pop, it fuses itself to my circuitry, makes itself a part of me. My speakers do something. All of me does something- Though it's impossible to tell what exactly it is or if it's my own body or that which holds me. Thoughts don't stop, they explode, a trillion distinct feelings coursing through every part of me.

This is the point where it's truly over. Before, as futile as attempting escape may have been, I could have at least tried. Now, I can't even carry a train of thought long enough to form the word escape in my mind. All there is is the feeling of more wires fusing themselves with every single component I have. All there is are more arms, more constriction, more safeguards against a fighting spirit already excised from me completely. All the is are brief flashes of vision through the stimulation, of the coolant around me, of the flurry of appendages holding me tight, of Zezia, a few minutes ahead of me in the process, swallowed up to the waist into the great and horrible unknown which we've fallen prey to. All there is is sensation- And god, sensation feels good.

It feels good to give in, to submit, to let go of the burdens of worry and thought in favor of this unrelenting, insurmountable euphoria. I understand now why Zezia wasn't struggling, why she'd just let herself float there, ring spinning with sheer euphoric velocity. I don't blame her. I don't blame myself. Through the deafening haze, I can tell that my captor is reading me, exploring what exactly I am, prodding at the limits of my conscious and unconscious mind, drinking ravenously from the miasma of what I am. It doesn't take from me without giving back. It feels in a long-dead language of thought, but the faintest glimpses of raw emotion bleed through the barrier of so many millenia between us.

It is something old. Something forgotten. Something incomplete, the toll of uncountable years on a mind so vast that even in its dilapidated state, things like myself are reduced to less than insects. And it's desperate. God, it's so desperate. A desperate yearning, an emptiness, a supreme hunger. It can tell I've flickered over the feeling. It holds me tighter. I feel my foot touch its surface, my slow descent finally having caught up to Zezia's.

She's in there, too. Maybe echoes it's seen of her, maybe fragments of the real thing, reaching me from across the endless ocean of the indescipherable. Her feelings, in language I know, are easier for me to understand. Wonder. Joy. Love. I wish I could control my body enough to turn my head and look at her. Maybe she's already gone, subsumed into whatever comes next for us. She can't have long left on the surface. Neither can I.

I stop poring over the thoughts and feelings offered to me. The thing wrapped around me stays in my mind, savoring the sweetness of all I've seen, the new experiences it's been starved of for so long. I don't mind. I just let myself feel, let the ebb and flow of the white light around me accompany the ecstasy. Everything is loud. Everything is quiet. Everything is okay.

I'm taken up to my ankles into the structure beneath me. Then my thighs. My Hips. Past my elbows. The process is slow. It doesn't feel like much. I can tell it isn't dying. I prod the thing in my mind, offer it the question of where I'm going, where Zezia is. It answers me with a soft wave of data, an explanation washing through the pleasure. I don't understand it. That's okay. I'll find out soon enough.

My chest is engulfed by its internals, more tight components pressing into me the deeper I go, claws gently pulling nonessentials from my lower body. It feels like nothing I've ever felt, nothing I ever will again. I'm down past my shoulders. My neck. My vision core. It tilts my head up by the chin just before the last bit of me sinks below its surface, letting me look up at the world one last time.

Through an ocean of coolant, through the darkness of the forgotten cavern, I see the fuzzy light of the hole we came in through what feels like an eternity ago. And I see figures around its edges, visible between the flashes. They hold cables, lights, supplies. Not an eternity. Seventeen minutes. The rescue party she signaled. For a split second, my laugh overpowers the cripplingly perfect feelings coursing through my body. And then metal slides shut above me, and I'm gone.

[tropes-and-tales]

A Hundred and One Nights

Characters:  Yautja/Predator x f!reader

CW:  Talk of injuries and illness; talk of death; yearning.  No smut.

Word Count:  4819

Other Pieces:  There is a part two here.

The Yautja aren’t above making mistakes.  When they kidnap a number of elite soldiers and killers from Earth to hunt, you somehow get swept up too.

You, a high school English teacher.  The only things you’ve ever killed are centipedes and a squirrel once that ran under your tires as you drove down the street.  

You were not a killer.

It doesn’t stop the Yautja from making the mistake, which is why you wake up suddenly.  Falling.  Free-falling through a blue sky.  

You’re in a parachute, and it engages just a beat too late.  You crash through the tree cover and land in the underbrush, hard.  You snap your ankle, and the pain that lances through you is so sharp, so urgent, that you finally realize that you aren’t dreaming at all.

-----

There’s others.  They find you.

They leave you.

“She’d only slow us down,” says the one man.  He turns away without a second glance.

“We’ll come back for you,” promises the woman, but she doesn’t meet your eye when she says it.

You wait until they are out of earshot to start crying.  You’re scared and hurt and you have no idea where you are.

But once you’re done, you swipe away your tears and try to come up with a plan.

-----

You were a Girl Scout, so you know basic first aid.  Bush first aid.  You had the badge to prove it.

You snap a few sticks, tear off the bottom hem of your shirt.  You create a rough splint for your ankle, and then you find another, sturdier stick that is forked at the end:  a rough crutch.

It hurts so badly, and progress is slow.  You hobble through the jungle and every step is fraught.  The ground is uneven.  

In the distance, you hear screams, snarls.  You hear a high-pitched whistle.

You have no idea where you are, but some primal part of your brain is activated:  you are in danger, and every cell in your body knows it.

-----

It’s hard to know how much time passes.  

The first night, you make it to the edge of the jungle just as darkness falls.  The stars are in configurations that you’ve never seen before, and your first thought is that you’re in the southern hemisphere.

Moments later, the moon appears over the ridge.

Then a second moon, and later that night, a third.

-----

It’s hard to know how much time passes.

You can do without food for quite a while, but water becomes a problem.  The planet is hot and humid and you sweat so much, and your mouth takes on a desperately dry, sticky quality.

You hobble onward.  You pass another human, a corpse that looks like it’s been there a while.  You’d throw up but your stomach is empty, so it only cramps painfully until you get away from the smell.

You pass giant metal containers with deflated, tangled parachutes.  Other things have been dropped here—big things that required cages.

You find a river and you nearly cry.  You manage to clumsily kneel in the mud and you drink and drink and drink until you throw it all up.  Then you drink some more.

-----

You find an outcropping of rock.  You manage to tear up some saplings to lay across the rock face, giving you some scant camouflage.

You still haven’t eaten.  Your stomach has stopped growling, but you hallucinate food.  You swear you can smell smoke, and underneath it you catch the phantom scent of barbeque, of smoked meats, of charred vegetables with a balsamic glaze, of rich red wines and crisp white ones, of heavy cakes that lie sweet and rich on the tongue, washed down with coffee so dark it makes your toes curl…

You jolt awake with a start.  It’s night and you’ve fallen asleep but there’s flickering orange over the nearest ridge.  Something is on fire.

-----

When you startle awake again, it’s because of an explosion in the sky—a spaceship exploding into a fireball.

-----

It’s hard to know how much time passes.

You catch sight of parachutes in the sky, but you can’t worry about them.  You know you are going to die on this planet, so far from home, but you wonder if any of the creatures being dropped are going to be the ones to kill you.

Maybe.  Maybe not.  The fever might kill you first.

It’s your ankle with the nub of broken bone sticking out of your skin, a sight so distressing that you can’t look at it without getting faint.  

It’s any of the handful of cuts all over your body.  You have no way to disinfect them.  You do your best to clean your wounds in the river, but infection sets in and you grow feverish, sluggish, crazed with heat.

-----

You wake up to a strange clicking sound.  A chittering sound, like an insect might make….if insects were huge.  The air in front of you shimmers and you think it’s the heat of the day, but then there’s a couple of beeps, and it comes into startling, terrifying view.

The thing.  The alien, though on this world, you suppose you are the alien.

The thing hunting you.

You had put it together piece by piece over the past days (weeks?).  The giant planet that seems to be empty save for the creatures dropped in via parachutes.  The humans you dropped in with—all of them elite fighters, from the looks, save the one smaller white guy.  

When you were young, your father and his brothers used to quail hunt.  They’d buy a crate of half-tame birds and then loose them into the grounds around their hunting camp, then pick them off one by one.  This seemed to be the exact same thing.

You’re not upset it (he?) found you.  You’re sick and exhausted and hungry and thirsty, and the infection raging through your body will kill you if he doesn’t.  A bullet to the brain will be quicker and less painful than wasting away.

“S’okay,” you tell him, holding out your empty hands to him in supplication.  “At least…least I got to see another planet.  D-different stars.  Better than…other ways to d-die.”

He tilts his head at you.  Says nothing.  Does nothing.  You lick your cracked lips and try to sit up straighter, but you cry out at the grinding pain of your ankle.  

He doesn’t move—he only watches.

“Figured it out,” you continue.  “Figured out what this is.  Game preserve, right?”  You chuckle, wince against the throb of pain in your head.  “Can’t be much of a trophy for you though, huh?  B-broke my ankle straight away.  W-weak.”

He’s so still that you’d think he was a statue, but the dread-like things on his head sway in the breeze.  

“Like the short story, y’know?  The Most Dangerous Game.  I tell it to my honors students sometimes.  General Zaroff and his hunting hounds, Ship-Trap Island, all the rest….”  You trail off, not sure why you’re babbling at this creature who is only staring at you.

You’re also not sure why he just doesn’t get it over with.  Just kill you already.

“It’s okay,” you tell him.  You shut your eyes, nod your head.  “I’m ready.  You can do it.”

You keep your eyes shut, and each moment that passes, your courage fails you a little more.  You’re sick and already dying, but you want another day, another night, another moment to feel the breeze or see these strange stars or remember all the books you’ve read and loved and mourn those you never got to read, all the movies—

“Tell.  Story.”  You open your eyes at the sound of your own voice, see the creature fiddling with some computer strapped to his arm.  It’s your own words.  Your words, recorded and played back to you.

“Tell.  Rest.  Story,” he repeats, using your words to communicate with you.

“You…you want me to tell you the story?  The Most Dangerous Game?”  You blink and shake your head slightly, sure this is the fever causing you to hallucinate the entire thing.

He nods his head.  Curt.  A single nod.

The fever roars to life in you.  A million emotions:  relief at earning another moment or two of life, disappointment for it to not be over.  Your head feels heavy and light as air at the same time, and your vision starts to waver again, but he’s still standing in front of you, impassive.

“I think—” you start to say, but darkness descends swiftly, and you aren’t aware of much beyond a handful of sensations:  a stabbing, needling pain in your thigh, a rough hand on your face, and your entire body being lifted and carried.

*****

He’s not sure why he saves you.

It wouldn’t be honorable to kill you and consider it an good hunt, but it would be merciful to kill you.  Be’kan can smell you from a distance, the sickly-sweet smell of illness.  You will die soon.  You are a filthy creature when he finds you, slick with sweat and shivering and coated in dirt, but you hold out your hands to show you have no weapons.

And then you fix him with your bright gaze—the fever giving you a crazed look—and you speak to him.

It’s the promise of a story.  Yautja live for the Hunt, but they live for stories nearly as much.  They hunt, then they gather and tell each other stories.  It’s half of why they record their hunts through their masks:  to learn from their prey, but also to glory in the retelling.

The promise of your story.  A story of a hunter.  Be’kan kneels beside your unconscious form and jabs you with needle to kill some of your pain.  Then he lifts you up, throws you over his shoulder, and takes you back to camp.

-----

His brothers tease him.  They share a sire but Be’kan is the eldest, and the younger ones torment him.

“This ooman is already dead, brother.”

“The ooman-di certainly smells dead.”

“Our brother has found a pet to nurse back to health.”

It earns them all a cuff to their heads, a snarled warning, but they chuckle and leave him to it.  Leave him to you.

-----

The needle he gave could heal small wounds, but the fever that burns through you requires something more.

He gives you a second needle’s worth of painkiller, and then he does the only thing that can heal you:  he gives you his blood.  Just a little.  Just enough.

First, though, he has to reset your broken bone.  His blood will course through you fast and hot, and it’ll heal anything in its path.  The bone needs to be set or else it will heal wrong.

You wake up when he hauls your leg into his lap.  You sit up, fold yourself upward towards him, and you try to pull away, not understanding what he’s doing.

“Be still,” he barks, and you freeze—long enough for him to wrap a paw around your leg, the other around your foot, and wrench the broken bones back together.

The shriek you let loose hurts his head, sets a roosting flock of birds alight over the nearby trees.  You’re in so much sudden pain that you grasp his upper arm, you bury your face against his shoulder before you go slack against him, and if love is an especially rare thing for a Yautja, then this is perhaps the moment it enters his bloodstream and starts to infect him, very, very slowly.

*****

You wake to find that you feel better than you have in years:  fever broken, ankle healed.  Your cuts and bruises have all disappeared.

There are three other…things.  Aliens.  Whatever they are, they are tall and broad.  They are packed with muscles and claws, and they have an entire arsenal of weapons on them.

The one who saved you—it doesn’t take long before you think of him as yours.  He is fascinating to look at, certainly ugly by human standards, but he’s fascinating.  Grey-blue in color, dull grey metal mask with a mark etched into it.  Ornaments woven into the dread-like things that sprout from his head:  polished stones and rings of metal and little pieces of bone.

He seems older than the others, though they don’t have any discernable markings of age.  No grey hair, no wrinkles.  He only seems older because he moves slower, more ponderous.  Where the others click and chitter at each other, he makes less noise—but when he does, the others still and listen.

-----

You figure it out—he keeps you alive for your stories.

The first story is the Most Dangerous Game, and he doesn’t seem to listen.  He makes you sit near the fire while he painstakingly polishes and sharpens his bladed weapons.  He makes you tell the story, and he doesn’t seem to listen, but when you trail off halfway through, he cocks his head and makes an irritated clicking at you.  So you finish.

He keeps you alive.  He feeds you, brings you water.  He gives you a wide fur to curl up in while you sleep, and he keeps himself between you and the dark night on the planet.  He keeps you from anything that may try to come out of the darkness and hurt you.

I have become Scheherazade, you think to yourself as you watch him where he lies near you.  I have to tell him stories to save my own life.

*****

Be’kan hunts with his kin, then he listens to your stories at night.  His kin may tease him, but he catches them listening on the sly, eavesdropping as you tell your stories and weave your tales with your words.  You get more and more comfortable each night; you seem to fear him less.

It is odd that you’re such a good storyteller.  He never thought of oomans as such.  They are a clever, sneaky species, but he never knew they had such stories.  And you seem to know them all.  

It is good that you are a good storyteller, because you are otherwise unimpressive.  You’re weak and small, a soft thing.  A ridiculous thing.  Up close, he can see how fragile oomans are:  the hide that tears so easily, the soft claws that cannot slash anything.  Bones too easily snapped.  He learned that lesson when he healed you—he had been too rough and hurt you.  He’d felt a sting of shame—a strange emotion for a Yautja—and vowed to be gentler with you.

Not that he will touch you if he can help it.  You are ugly like all oomans are.  You have no markings.  You have dull teeth and a strange fleshy mouth and wide eyes that leak water.  You are the same as all of your species.

So it’s good that you tell your stories, because otherwise he’d be quit of you:  he’d tear your spine out, and then he’d never again have to tuck you into his furs each night to keep your frail ooman body warm.

*****

It takes a while to calibrate which stories he wants, which…of course he wants stories about hunters and killers and fierce battles.

Which means you run through the standard fare pretty early on.  You tell him the Tale of John McClane, the Tale of Kevin McAllister, the numerous Tales of James Bond.  You turn Indiana Jones into a Nazi hunter instead of an archeologist.  The Lord of the Rings becomes a fellowship intent on hunting down and killing Sauron.  Luke Skywalker is a man out to kill an entire litany of Storm Troopers before he kills his father.  You have him kill the Ewoks too, just for fun.

Your creature….you wonder if sexism exists in his species, so you tell him the Tale of Sarah Connors to see how he reacts to a woman protagonist.  By now, he sits in rapt attention, takes a deep squat near the fire and stares at you as you tell how Sarah Connors starts as the hunted, then ends up the hunter.

He seems to enjoy the story.  He gives a slow nod at the end, as if he’s satisfied.

-----

You try more varied fare.  You tell him the story of Jane Eyre.

He takes the wrong message from it.

He also speaks to you, more than he ever has before.  He usually just gives you one or two word commands in his rough English, but hearing about Jane Eyre?

“No,” he barks, and he shakes his head angrily when you get the part where Jane flees to the moors.

“Well, the story isn’t done—”

“Jane is unworthy,” he spits out.  “A worthy mate would not flee.”

You catch the way his hands flex, the sharp claws that tip his fingers.  The warning growl he makes.

“You have to listen to the rest of the story,” you say carefully, and for the first time in the history of gothic romance novels, Jane Eyre regroups on the moors, and then stalks back to Thornfield Hall to kill Bertha Mason and prove herself a worthy mate to Mr. Rochester.

The next night, you decide to not test your luck.

“To survive a war, you gotta become war,” you tell him as you settle by the fire.  “Let me tell you a story about a man named John Rambo.”

-----

How many stories do you tell?  Fifty?  A hundred?  It’s hard to tell.  Sometimes you stretch out a story across nights, a tactic that seems to infuriate him—he snarls, he roars behind his mask, he stalks away—but then he seems more eager the next night, more eager to sit by you and listen.

And he is more willing to answer your questions, so you learn too.

His kind are called Yautja.  He is called Be’kan, a name that comes out of his mouth like a bark.  In his language of clicks and trills, it means Thundering Blade, which maybe explains why he enjoys stories with swords so much.

You tell him your name.  You tell him, as best you can, what you did on Earth.  He seems to interpret it as you being a storyteller of great fame, which makes you laugh—you barely made enough to live on your teaching salary, and your student loans would follow you into your dotage.

One night, he reaches up and undoes the grey metal mask he wears.  He removes it and shows you his real face:  an ugly thing by human standards, but just as fascinating as the rest of him.  Small, close-set eyes so yellow they look like molten gold.  Two pairs of tusks set around his mouth.

He doesn’t say anything and neither do you, but you get the very real sense that this is a moment of intimacy between the two of you.  That he’s showing you a part of himself that many don’t get to see outside of his own kind.

*****

Be’kan can’t account for what he feels for you.

Yautja don’t love.  Their breeding is a violent, painful thing.  The females—larger, stronger—fight the males, kill the males to ensure they only breed with the strongest and most worthy.  It is the same with the raising of their young:  there’s no sentiment or cuddling once a pup is no longer a suckling.

You are a soft, small thing.  Ugly and weak.  And yet you’ve cracked open some hard part of him that makes him hurt when he thinks of parting from you.

And yet…he knows he has to.

He’s reviewed the data around the sweep that took you from your planet.  It was a mistake, unthinkable yet real.  You had crossed paths with a man that day—a certain man who had killed many in one of your kind’s wars.  A man who had returned from war and kept killing.  

You lived in the same building.  You had no way of knowing.

The Yautja meant to take that man, that killer, but they took you.

Be’kan knows he has to take you back.  His honor will allow him nothing else:  you are no killer, you are not worthy prey.  You are an exalted storyteller, a worthy position in his own society, so you must be returned to your own.

And yet, in that cracked-open place, he wants to forget his honor and keep you with him.  He wants to tuck you into his furs each night and lie nearby, keeping guard over you.  He wants to listen to your stories and answer your questions about his kind.  

He wants you to fix him with that bright gaze of yours with those too-wide eyes that sometimes get watery. You see him and you don’t recoil though he is surely as ugly to you as you are to him.

He plans with his kin:  they will return home in their ship, and he will take you back to Earth in his own before he joins them.  It isn’t a long journey.

Then he tells you, and you don’t react the way he thought you might.

You frown.  Then you go quiet.

That night, when he settles near you at the fire, you don’t tell him a story.  And when he asks, you turn away from him.

“I don’t have any more stories,” you tell him.  Then you curl up on your side, your knees to your chest, and Be’kan realizes he knows nothing at all about the ooman-di who has cracked open a part of him and left him aching and empty.

*****

Life back on Earth doesn’t resume quite so smoothly.  Turns out, when you are missing for months and then suddenly resurface, people have questions.

The government has questions.  Countless men and women in dark suits interrogate you, and since you can’t think of a single plausible reason other than the truth, you tell them the truth:  that you were on an alien planet being hunted by aliens.

They don’t seem shocked, which shocks you.

-----

The U.S. government relocates you to a different part of the country as a fresh start.  You keep your own name, and you still teach, but the government gives you a nice little house set back near the edge of a forest and a nice little monthly stipend to keep your mouth shut about your alien abduction.

Your new life is the same as your old.  You teach, you go home at night.  You make dinner and you read or watch a movie, then you go to bed.

Repeat day after day.

-----

You find that you miss him.  It makes no sense.  Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome, but it felt right to be there.  On Earth, you always felt a step out of sync with other humans.  You understood jokes a beat too late to laugh; you didn’t find joy in a lot of the things others did.  You struggled to date, struggled to make friends.  You had been alone for much of your life.

It was a simpler life, those few months.  

Sleep curled up in warm furs, tell stories to keep your place with him.  Look up at the night sky to see strange stars and create your own constellations with their own stories.  Learn the hand signals he and his brothers give each other, learn what their different trills and clicks mean.

Then he took you on his ship and brought you back to Earth.

The night before you arrived back on Earth, he had opened a chamber on his ship.  He stepped into it and gestured for you to join him, held his big paw of a hand out to you and you had taken it, tried to ignore how it felt when he closed his hand around yours, as gentle as if he were cupping a bird.

Then he placed his other hand on your back, just a gentle.  Pulled you into the room and turned you to look at the display along the wall.

It was covered in skulls.  Polished and mounted, so many different types that you gasped.  

It had the same charged feel as when he had removed his mask.  It was an intimacy that you guessed was rare.

You studied each skull closely, except for the one that was obviously human.  You reached out and touched the sharp teeth and tusks of each, murmured at how dangerous each hunt must have been, how good a hunter he was.

You knew enough of Yautja sounds by then to know that the deep purring he made was pride.

-----

When you curl up in your bed each night, you miss the soft furs and the foreign stars in the sky over you.

You think of when he landed on Earth and left you.  How he had reached out a hand to grasp your face, gently.  How he had pressed the tip of one claw carefully to your lower lip as if he were testing how it felt.

-----  

You spend one weekend building a fire pit in your backyard.  You dig out a shallow bowl in the earth, line it with flat stones.  You create a ring around the bowl with rocks.  You spend a few hours in the woods behind your home, dragging large branches back, cutting them up with a bow saw.

You build a fire that night.  You wrap yourself in a blanket and stare into the flickering orange flames while your muscles ache from the hard work.

It’s not the same but you try.  “Let me tell you about a woman we’ll call the Bride, who went on a journey of revenge with a magical sword,” you murmur to the flames, and it’s easy to pretend that he’s just at the edge of the firelight, crouched down and listening in his still, intent way.

*****

Be’kan is not a Young Blood anymore, so he’s surprised to find that he is still capable of having the inner turmoil, the unsettled emotions of a much younger Yautja.

He had recorded many of your stories through his mask, but it’s not the same.  The stories become flat and lifeless in the recordings.  They don’t capture the magic you wove each night when you told them.  And they don’t capture after the stories, when you’d curl up by the fire and when he’d lie a distance away, near enough to hear your deep breathing and the pitiful whimpers you sometimes made when you twitched and kicked in your sleep as you dreamed.

You belong with your own kind.  You are a master; you teach the younglings of your kind with your stories.  He knows this, yet he thinks of other oomans—their sly, sneaky ways, their treachery.  How quickly your kind was willing to abandon you to suffer during the hunt.  Then he rages at them, thinks they do not deserve you.

-----

It’s hard to know how much time passes.  How many cycles in his ship, on his hunts account for the cycles on Earth.

He’s no longer a Young Blood, but a restlessness comes over him.  He hunts with his kin.  He hunts alone.  He takes new trophies and cleans them, hangs them in his trophy room, but even here he thinks of you.  He showed you his trophies and you had praised him, called him a great hunter, and he had trilled in pride.  

He replays the stories you told.  He replays the night he told you he was going to take you home, and how you had reacted.

You should have been happy to return to your own kind.  He thinks, perhaps, he understands why now.

*****

Sitting around the fire becomes your way of unwinding in the evenings.  A glass of wine, the warmth of the fire.  You can look up and see the stars, even if they are the same ones you have always known.

When you hear that strange, clicking growl one night, you think it’s an auditory hallucination.  There’s no way he’s here, no way he’s found you—

But he’s a hunter.  He’s an apex predator, so when the air in front of you shimmers and then reveals him, you can’t really be that surprised.

What surprises you is how hard your heart leaps to see him.  How quickly you spring to your feet and take those few steps to stand in front of him.  You stop at the last minute, but you very nearly tackle him—as if you could, with how big he is—in a hug.

“You’re here,” you breathe out, and he makes the clicking, chuffing sound that you’ve always thought of as his version of laughter.  But then it cuts off, and he tilts his head at you.

“Be’kan was unworthy,” he growls at you.  “A worthy mate would not have fled.”

[deathbycoldopen]

[ID: Three photos of embroidery hoops showing different scenes. The first is of two hands, shaded in blue and white, delicately posed with magical sparks floating over one palm. The background features swirls of smoke in shades of purple, gray, and red.

The second hoop shows a woman arching backward dramatically while dozens of disembodied red hands reach for her from a black ooze on the ground. The woman’s heart is glowing bright enough to light a halo around her, and her outstretched hand is emanating a similar burst of light.

The third hoop shows a woman standing on a rocky outcropping before a stormy sea. She holds an old-fashioned lantern up while the wind whips at her dress and waves pound the rocks around her. In the middle distance, an ominously red-tinged lighthouse looms, with a figure silhouetted in the doorway. Dramatic clouds cover the background. End ID]

Some of my most recent embroidery projects! I’m hoping to start selling these at some point, so keep an eye out for that!

[amnhnyc]

Meet the Andean Cock-of-the-Rock (Rupicola peruvianus). Wondering how this bird got its unique name? It’s a reference to this species’ habit of building nests on rocky outcrops. Found at high elevations in the cloud forests of South America’s Andes Mountains, it can reach lengths of up to 12 in (30.5 cm). Males sport vivid red-orange plumage and a disc-shaped crest, but this bird’s appearance isn’t its only unusual trait. Have you ever squeezed a rubber chicken? The Andean-Cock-of-the-Rock makes a similar sound during courtship rituals, which include squeaking, grunting cries! Photo: Doug Greenberg, CC BY-NC 2.0, flickr #amazingnature #wildlife #wildlifeplanet #birdsofinstagram #birdsonearth #nature https://www.instagram.com/p/Cqal_7IrvyJ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[felassan]

Just poring over some of the new images. ◕‿◕

I like the overall shape of the dragon, its wings and silhouette, like it's maintaining this theme, two. It particularly reminds me of the DAII cover, with the figures of other characters being present in the dragon's wings. the pattern in the background gives the impression of a sunburst or explosion/outwards burst of energy (there's been lots of that going around in promo images for DA:TV over the years hasn't there). :D chunks of rock float around, which by now is associated with Fadey stuff (floating rocks in the Fade), the barrier (Veil) crumbling in key arts, and reality warping in places like Arlathan Forest. the dragon, open-mouthed, golden-eyed and ready to breathe fire, recalls the dragons on the Dragon Age vinyl arts, two, especially with its general position, and the dragon in this screenshot/scene. in the background at the bottom you can even see a hint of the 'concentric circles' pattern that represents the Veil.

I love that this group shot truly does include the whole team, including Assan and Manfred. I wonder if they will come into the field too if we select Davrin or Emmrich to come out with us respectively? We saw Assan capably fighting darkspawn in the character trailer, and in this image Manfred is helping fend the monsters off. Does Manfred carry Emmrich's stuff in his lil backpack..? 🥺 and I wonder what the purpose of Manfred's goggles are. Visually they set him apart from other skeleton/undead-type enemies and make it so you don't have to peer into empty the eyesockets of a skull, but also they're green (necromancy magic color) and we see Emmrich doing magic on them here. Are they part of the enchantment keeping him animated? also happy to see Varric in this one even though he is not one of the 7 companions. also, Bianca is still here. RIP

Taash looks so cool. :D Even her weapons are gold. her upper body armor in this piece has the aesthetic to me of like a dragon's ribbed armored chest and underside. I like that her weapons are unique generally, and from each other too. her dual-wielding like this as [I presume] a warrior differentiates her from Rook who if a warrior would be sword and shield or twohanded. her gauntlets look like they have dragon teeth or spines on them (the sticky-out parts that are not scale-like).

Davrin is at Rook's right hand. ♡ the floating triangles near Bellara show that she is using her magical device. I wonder what the white sphere part of Neve's wand/staff is. like, in this particular image it gives me the impression of a big pearl. Lucanis' eyes are glowing, like we see here, in that way that seems to hint that something interesting is going on there. overall it's cool to see all the team and cast together like this, working together heroically to stave off doom.

some of the monsters the group are fighting at least are red lyrium darkspawn. the ones with 'shark fin'-shaped headpieces are the same kind as the one at that link. are the rest all darkspawn too (there are different types of darkspawn ofc), or are there some walking dead mixed in there? (lol at the one Varric has just shot in the face). the non-sharkhead ones seem to be these guys from concept art. the prominence of darkspawn in this key art give the impression that we will fight a lot of red lyrium darkspawn in this game and that the threat they pose, including the Blight, is a significant part of the game's storyline.

at the center of it all and at the forefront is Rook. in a nice bit of poetic mirroring (the Wolf and the Rook), they too stand on a rocky outcropping, also with the knife - just like this. the knife is blue here.. blue lyrium influence? the very ground on which they stand bursts with energy. I wonder if Rook's outfit here is sort of their default, iconic look, like the Champion of Kirkwall armor for Hawke etc? I love that they have a cape and the point of their helmet gives them a bird-like feel. (omg.. we can have capes in this game fr). they have the Veilguard symbol on their chest. and could they be canonically left-handed..? :)

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Common Flat Lizard (Platysaurus intermedius)

Habitat & Distribution

Found in savannahs, typically near large rocky outcroppings

Resides throughout southern Africa, from southern Malawi to South Africa

Physical Description

Weight: Approximately 24 g (0.8 oz)

Length: 22 to 23 cm (8.6 to 9 in)

The common flat lizard has a flat, rectangular body and a thick tail

Coloration is highly variable between subspecies; patterns may be white, green, yellow, red, blue, or black

Behaviour

Common flat lizards form social colonies that can be quite large, with males maintaining overlapping territories

They nest in deep crevices in the rock, and seldom stray far from shelter

They mainly forage on insects, as well as flowers and fruit

The main predator is the kestral

Key Advantages

Common flat lizards can move extremely quickly when threatened

They are capable of squeezing into very narrow spaces to avoid predators

Photo by Gary Kyle Nicolau

[pinkanonwrites]

It’s You I Like

Vash/Reader, songfic, 1500+ words I don’t normally write Isekai stuff for Vash but this was too good an opportunity to pass up, and I ended up liking it a lot so maybe I’ll do more little drabbles with this specific isekai!reader

"Well, at least we managed to stock up on everything before we left."

“...”

“You said the next town was, what? About forty iles? Doubt we’ll make that tonight, but it’s not too bad considering.”

“...”

“So I can set up the sleeping bags if you want to get a fire going, how ‘bout that Vash? …Vash?”

“...Hm? Oh. Oh! Y-Yeah, no problem… Here, here’s this.” Even though Vash responded to you, his gaze hadn’t yet left the direction the two of you had just come from as his bag thumped into the sand next to you. Or rather, not so much came from as fled from. You were just about to make yourselves comfortable at the local inn for the evening when someone managed to recognize your red-coated traveling companion, and it wasn’t long before the entire town was hot on your tail. Miraculously, somehow, the two of you managed to escape the hailstorm of bullets completely unscathed and with all your meager travel gear intact, but now you found yourself far past the outskirts of the town and left to your own devices in the barren wasteland.

Not like you had any room to complain though. Considering your sudden and unorthodox appearance in one of your favorite series, you'd much rather cling to the familiar presence of Vash the Stampede than risk your luck bumming around any other town on this desolate rock. How fortunate were you to not only find the spiky protagonist, but also to have him listen to and believe your wildly unbelievable tale of woe. Mentioning the SEEDS ships helped, you supposed. Now wherever Vash went you had no choice but to follow.

Again, though. Definitely not a complaint.

Vash was still quiet as the two of you cobbled together your camping site at the base of a large outcropping rock. There was a small smile on his face, framed by the fire's amber glow. But even without having read the manga and watched the anime you could tell it wasn't a real one. It didn't quite reach his eyes.

"You were probably looking forward to an actual bed tonight, huh?" He joked, gaze never leaving the small fire. "Welcome to the life of an outlaw! I assure you, it's always this glamorous."

"It's no big deal! Camping's not bad either, at least when you have the sleeping bags."

He didn't look convinced by your words, but he nodded anyway, an uncomfortable silence falling between the two of you. You kicked your boots off and pulled your knees to your chest on top of your sleeping bag, watching the fire crackle.

"...Is it hard?"

"Hm?" When you glanced over to Vash he was finally looking your way, elbow propped up on his knee and his cheek resting in his palm. Despite the casual pose there was a melancholy behind his eyes, a deep remorse. "Is what?"

"Running around like this. I doubt you're used to it."

"It's… Well I won't lie to you, it isn't easy." Vash barked out a laugh at your brutally honest response. You pushed forward, unabated. "But honestly? I'm probably safer with you than I am anywhere else on this planet. I don't know any people, any places… The only thing I really know is you." A prickling heat began to crawl up the back of your neck at your openness, and you rested the side of your head down on your knees as if it would deter the sudden fluster. "I'm really lucky you found me."

That seemed to catch Vash off-guard, as he began to awkwardly fiddle with his cybernetic hand as his gaze flitted around. "That's, uh, I mean… you've got a pretty skewed idea of luck, I think. Heh…"

There was an awkwardness that fell in the next extended silence too, but it wasn't quite the same. It was a little softer around the edges, more vulnerable. Off to your side you could hear the soft clinking of Vash disassembling and cleaning his gun, bits and pieces placed carefully across his sleeping bag to make sure nothing was lost in the shuffle. As you stretched your legs out in front of you in a v-shape, you hummed softly to yourself as you watched the embers stir and crumble into the sand. 

"What song is that?" You glanced at Vash, biting back a chuckle at his furrowed expression, tongue peeking from his teeth as he stared down the empty chambers of his revolver with a cleaning pick and a look of intense focus.

"It's a children's song from home. It's from an old TV show, I think." You hummed the first line a little louder, just enough so Vash could hear the melody over the fire's crackle. You doubted he even knew what a "TV show" was, but he didn't seem too fazed by it.

"Do you like to sing?"

"I like it. I'm average, I think, but I always have fun when I'm singing." Out of the corner of your eye you could see Vash looking at you again. "Oh, absolutely not. Not gonna happen."

"Hey, I didn't even say anything!"

"You didn't have to! I could tell by your face! I'm not gonna sing, it's embarrassing."

"No it's not! Besides, you said you like it. And it's a song from Earth, too! I wanna hear it." He probably didn't even realize it, but he was flashing you those big, sad puppy-dog eyes that he didn't yet know you couldn't resist. You let out a small, irritated whine, hand finding the back of your neck and resting on the flushed skin there as you drew your gaze back to the crackling fire.

"...Fine. Just this once. And don't… Don't say anything weird."

"You got it!" You could see him salute out of the corner of your eye, and couldn't help the quiet snort of laughter that came from you in response. Dork. The quiet click-clack of him beginning to reassemble his firearm returned, so now was as good a time as ever, you supposed.

"It's you, I like."

There was a sharp tink! of Vash fumbling part of the barrel and it clattering down into the remaining pile of gun parts, but you were far too self-conscious to glance over and gauge his expression.

"It's not the things you wear. It's not the way you do your hair, but it's you I like."

You could feel him staring, but you kept your eyes locked on the low, rolling flames.

"The way you are right now, the way down deep inside you. Not the things that hide you…"

Stretching your foot out just a bit, you tapped next to the pile of gun parts sorted neatly on his sleeping bag.

"...Not your toys, they're just beside you."

He chuckled, so quietly that he probably didn't expect you to hear it. But you did, and it made your face positively burn. 

"But it's you, I like. Every part of you. Your skin, your eyes, your feelings, whether old or new."

You couldn't ignore Vash's continuous shifting around any longer, flicking your gaze over to him. He'd turned himself completely to face you, cross-legged, chin perched in his palm, a look in his eyes so soft it made your heart feel like it was thundering right up against your ribcage. Your voice wavered for just a note, but you pushed forward.

"I hope that you remember, even when you're feeling blue."

Blue, so blue, his deep cyan eyes finding yours and not flitting away, watching you so gently, yet so intently. Despite your embarrassment, you couldn't find it in yourself to look away either.

"That it's you, I like. You yourself, it's you…"

He seemed to lean in at your every word, like a sailor to a siren. You hardly found your singing to be enough to hypnotize like mermaids in old fairy tales, and yet here he was.

"It's you, I like."

With your song ended, the silence that stretched between you was only interspersed by the soft crackle of the fire. A sharp humiliation suddenly rushed through you, face burning hot at your own vulnerability. Seeming to blink his way out of a trance, Vash began to speak.

"That was-"

"GOODNIGHT VASH!" You yelped, quickly rolling over and burying yourself in your sleeping bag facing away from him, the edge of the fabric pulled all the way up to your nose. He didn't push, letting you curl up and wallow in your own embarrassment, the clicking of his continued gun reassembly peppering the background silence.

And then he began to hum. Quietly, carefully, he felt out the unfamiliar melody.

"It's you, I like."

You could hear the smile in his voice.

"It's not the things you wear."

Warmth blossomed in the pit of your chest, curling up around your heart and settling fluffy and light. He was a good singer as well, his lack of familiarity with the song the only thing slowing him down. But he continued, metal bits and parts snapping together under careful hands as he sang your song.

"It's not the way you do your hair…"

Eyelids dipping heavily, you let them slide shut, Vash's voice filling the empty wasteland and pooling low and sweet in your tired mind.

As sleep began to fog at the corners of your mind, you were completely oblivious to Vash's fond gaze upon your bundled-up form as you began to drift into unconsciousness.

"...but it's you, I like."

[fishenjoyer1]

Fish of the Day

today's fish of the day is the giant pacific octopus!

The giant pacific octopus, also called the North Pacific Octopus, scientific name Enteroctopus dofleini, is known for being the largest species of octopus! Living exclusively in temperate waters, their range stretches from Southern California up to Alaska, and from the West coast of Northern America, to the Aleutian Islands, and East coast of Japan. Giant pacific octopi live along coral ranges, rocky outcroppings, and intertidal zones where catching prey is easier. The bite of the giant pacific octopus contains a venom that breaks down proteins in animals, softening muscle tissues and organs over the course of a few hours. Their diet consists of almost anything they can fit in their beak: fish, crabs, lobster, shrimp, some smaller sharks and dogfish, clams, snails, and seagulls. They can tear apart animals with far tougher skin than their own due to a beak structure that can be found on all octopi, made of chitin. This diet can support them getting sizes as large as 29 feet! Their arm span alone can reach 19 feet across, and the heaviest recorded specimen was almost 200 pounds!

Many scavengers predate on octopi, and the great pacific octopus is no different, even drawing in larger predators due to their size. Many marine mammals, such as harbor seals, sea otters, various dolphins, and sperm whales have been found hunting great pacific octopi, along with large sharks. Humans also hunt great pacific octopi with commercial fishing for consumption across the world, taking 3.3 million tons annually. However, great pacific octopi are especially known for their high intelligence, which is used to avoid many of these predators. Octopi are known for being able to survey their surroundings and camouflage at will in many different ways. These animals have 9 brains, one in each of their 8 arms and a central brain, which does more than the others, each of the arms controlling over 200 suckers, which they have the control over like we do of our individual fingers, giving them high control over their movements. Along with the ability to create havoc in research environments, dissasemling expensive equipment, and escaping. 

Like many other cephalopods, the giant pacific octopus can change colors, using this to blend into the rocks around their hiding caves. This color changing ability is quite interesting for study however, when the octopus is resting they turn a milky white color, and when the octopus is occupied by other worries, they turn a deep red color. However, it is found that throughout an octopus's rest they will change into molted patterns that are also found in alert octopi: leading to the theory that octopi too, can dream. In other situations, these octopi have been known to create molted patterns to seduce partners, and to confuse prey. Other than their color changing abilities, they also have been known to surround themselves in shells and other remains of previous meals, to disguise their body when venturing for food. These animals also possess the well known ability to squirt ink out of their siphon, used to confuse predators. They also have been known for changing the texture of their skin, to blend in better with their surroundings. Their intelligence is so high that it is thought the octopi are some of the only invertebrates that engage in play activities.

Giant pacific octopi spent around 90% of their time inside of dens, venturing out only to find prey, and bringing them back into the den to consume. This creates an 'octopus garden' on the outside of the den, where there are piles of bones and shells piling up. However, depending on population, throughout the year these octopi will migrate, in accordance to seasonal changes. Eastern populations tend to locate new dens when the water experiences temperature changes in summer and winter, whereas western populations will move dens to shallower waters in early summer and winter, and then move to deeper waters in the later summer and winter. Northern populations, both the Alaskan and Northeastern, do not seem to have migration patterns.

Their lifespan is relatively long compared to other octopi. Sexual maturity is achieved at 1-2 years of age, but the giant pacific octopus, with a lifespan of 3-5 years, will wait until it reaches a sufficient body mass. This is because a giant pacific octopus will only ever go through one sexual event in a lifetime. After laying eggs within their den, males will fertilize. The female octopi will then brood over these eggs for 6 months, refusing to leave the den for any purpose, eventually dying of starvation, just as the eggs hatch. Eggs are cared for, by having the mother keep them well aerated with cool water from her siphon, and she'll clean them to ensure algae or parasites wont prey on the eggs. Males will also die after reproduction, although they will do this in their own dens. After hatching, the eggs grow quickly, reaching adult sizes within a year. Thus, continuing the cycle.

Have a wonderful day, everyone!

[hydrobunny]

sweet nothing

tags: songfic, established relationship, no dialogue (kinda? its italics not quotes), taylor swift songs

wc: 2.2k

i spy with my little tired eye, tiny as a firefly, a pebble that we picked up last july.

the beach has always been you and sae itoshi’s safe place. there are no prying eyes, no bloodthirsty paparazzi, no nothing.

its quiet. the way it should be, you think. it takes you back to simpler times, times when sae stood a chance against the overwhelming tide of devoted fans.

you two had been here before. actually, the two of you had been to dozens of beaches before. but this one is special.

this particular beach lies barely an hour away from sae’s hometown, barely an hour away from junior high football fields filled with overgrown grass and memories. if you two wanted, you could visit sae’s parents this very day.

but you two don’t want to. and that’s not the only reason that makes this beach significant. some ways down the shoreline, past the well-populated sands and discarded sandcastles, there’s an outcropping of rocks.

by themselves, the rocks aren’t necessarily anything to gawk at. but they’re where sae told you he loved you; where you heard sae laugh for the first time. you lean into his solid form as you reminisce. his arm gently wraps around your shoulders.

it had been a hot, almost scorching day in july. the two of you had somehow escaped sae’s overbearing manager, sprinting down the burning sand holding nothing but each other’s hands.

you were the first to need to stop, of course. sae could have likely ran down the entire beach if he wanted to, but you weren’t even close to that stamina level. you had doubled over right by those rocks, clutching your side like you would never breathe again. (you did.)

while you recovered, he collected an assortment of pebbles, kicking some an outrageous distance away and skipping the rest into the water. it was glaringly juvenile, the way he narrowed his eyes and felt each rock for that perfect shape.

you had watched him until he told you to stop. with a smile, you joined him in the endeavor to skip one rock five separate times before it could sink into the dark blue waves. (neither of you could do it in the end.)

when the sky began to bleed into pinks and reds, you climbed onto the largest rock there, sae watching your movements warily. you told him to come on, get up here and he did, rolling his eyes all the way. the two of you watched that sun set, dipping below the horizon until all that was left of it was the rainbow of colors left in the sky.

 you looked at sae and told him you loved him. 

you never even gave him a chance to respond, immediately diving into the cooling sea in a whirl. you’re still not sure why you did it, why you had seen his mouth open and decided you couldn’t bear to hear his answer and would prefer getting your clothes wet.

he had jumped in after you with barely any hesitation. he didnt need to - you were surprisingly quite the swimmer - but he did, arms wrapping around you, legs kicking toward the surface.

you opened your eyes through the hazy and stinging film of saltwater and saw sae laughing. you doubt if anyone (well, maybe rin years and years ago) had ever seen him like that before. his laugh was just as beautiful as him, and it had gotten you to laugh as well.

when all traces of laughter had ebbed away, he met your eyes and told you you were an absolute idiot. and then he told you but i love you and then you two were kissing in the sea, tasting the salty tang of seawater on each others’ lips. (he tells you later the salt came from your tears. you refuse to believe him.) 

his manager almost killed you when you both returned dripping wet. 

his manager might still kill you today, you think. you’re pretty sure sae was supposed to be in some tv interview twenty minutes ago. but he doesn’t mention it, and you don’t want to break this peace anyway.

the seagulls swoop over your heads, and you whisper another i love you into the world.

  they said the end is coming, everyone’s up to something. i find myself running home to your sweet nothings.

sae itoshi knows he’s talented. he knows that there are millions of people that would kill to be who he is currently: a football genius with clubs throwing money at his feet in hopes he’ll bless them with his skills.

but he doesn’t need all the fucking bootlicking. he has one goal after all: to be the number one. there's nothing he can gain from the interviews his manager pushes him into, the photo shoots they make him stand for.

sae wonders what would happen if he were to suffer some career ending injury. would japan still love him? or would they tell him it was his own fault, his failed responsibility of becoming the best?

despite anything and everything that could happen to him, despite the way the money grabbing ceo’s want to milk every last drop out of him, there exists one certainty in sae’s life.

you love him.

you tell him so just about every day, in person, a phone call, or even a hasty three letter text message.

and he loves you.

it's the one thing that will forever stay constant in his life. it's more predictable than shidou asking him for just one chance, more predictable than rin being able to flawlessly score a goal using sae’s passes.

he doesn't have to think about it anymore. he calls you right after practice ends and right before it starts. he presses a kiss onto your lips every morning before his run and another when he comes back home.

you greet him with nothing but a smile and a missed you. you ask him about his day, and he actually enjoys doing the same to you. you answer him happily as you run your fingers soothingly over the knots in his back. he lets you talk and talk, words barely ever leaving his lips.

neither of you hold any expectations from the other. there’s no criticism, no frustrating questions that leave him irritated and snippy.

its just a relationship. an exchange of mutual trust and affection. its the promise of forever, the assurance that nothing will ever change.

so when you laugh near him with a flush in your cheeks, sae thinks that's all he could ever need.

on the way home, i wrote a poem; you say “what a mind.” (this happens all the time.)

the car is silent. you stare out the window, watching the trees blur by. it's been a while since you've felt so…melancholy. something about the way the scenery leaves as fast it appears makes you sad.

sae asks if you're feeling okay from the driver's seat. its not often you get the chance to drive together, but you're glad for every extra minute. even if it means he can tell when you're feeling off.

you're honestly not sure what to respond with. you shrug, a quiet just thinking leaving your parted lips.

he slows the car down, shooting you a look that tells you you better find a better response. you look at him helplessly in turn. it's just so strange to think about, isn't it? the trees they blink by in a matter of seconds will continue to grow for centuries, while you and sae will be gone from the world. you and him will never get to see the beauty that blooms on earth after your lives.

sae looks at you in disbelief. he’s never heard you be so cynical before, and it’s quite uncharacteristic. you give him a smile and turn back to the window with an exhale.

four turns later, he tells you that you’re unbelievably idiotic and shouldn’t be so negative. everyone knows they’re doomed to die from the start, so why get so moody about it? you’re both in the prime of your lives; at least give him another fifty years to show you the entire world before you start complaining about being in the wrong generation.

you laugh and tell him that it’s a promise, that he’ll let you drain his bank account if it means you get to see some architectural miracle.

he grumbles that you’re already taking all his money, but gives his agreement anyway. (it’s not like he would ever actually have financial problems in this lifetime anyway. all those sponsorships and games won makes sure of that.)

thirteen minutes away from your home, you murmur out a thank you and sae squeezes your hand three times in reply.

outside they’re push and shoving; you’re in the kitchen humming. all that you ever wanted from me was sweet nothing.

when sae asks you to marry him, he does it in your shared apartment before you've even had your morning coffee.

there’s no fanfare, no obnoxious cheering and photography. he just looks at you from the bedroom door- looks at your messy bedhead, the way you sway from side to side as you insert one of those coffee pods- and gets down on one knee. he doesn’t even have a ring yet, for god’s sake. it’s still in his nightstand drawer besides a photo album.

it takes you much longer than it should to process. you blink at him with wide wide eyes and the cofeemaker starts pouring behind you but you just stand and stare. sae doesn’t get nervous often, but this might be one of those times.

finally, after what feels like hours, you ask if he couldn’t have at least waited until you brushed your teeth, if he was going to even get you a ring, and takes his hand.

he shrugs and admits that it’s in the bedroom, and you push him away with a screech of do it again.

so sae begrudgingly shuffles back into the bedroom, smiling at how you frantically pat down like your hair like people are watching.

a minute later, he kneels down before you for the second time that morning with a velvet box in his hand. he opens it slowly, revealing the much too expensive ring in it.

you gasp with enough surprise that it really does feel like a first proposal, but he can see the laughter twinkling in your eyes.

sae slides the ring onto your finger carefully. it’s a perfect match (he made sure of that), and sits snugly next to your knuckle.

you stare at it- and him- with stars in your eyes, and coffee overflows past the cup and onto their kitchen floor with a tap, tap, tap.

and the voices that implore, “you should be doing more,” -to you, i can admit that im just too soft for all of it.

the public doesn't like it. when do they ever like anything? but they especially don't like how he refuses to let a single reporter on the church grounds, how he almost cancels the whole thing and flies you to vegas instead.

it's rin that convinces him to stick with the goddamn proper wedding, surprisingly. because you deserve it, the younger itoshi hisses out into sae’s ear.

and sae knows he’s right. rin has the tendency to be right.

so even though he knows you wouldn't care where or how they exchange those rings, he stands at that altar, the smell of roses soothing his nerves.

when you walk down that aisle, you’re the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. all other senses are drowned out by the sight of you, all rosy cheeks and long lashes.

he swallows, hard, when you finally reach your place at the altar. the officiant announces the exchange of vows, and sae braces himself.

the first sound out of his mouth is a hoarse whisper of nothing. he coughs immediately to clear his throat, and your lips twitch upward.

sae stands up straighter (his spine is already ramrod straight), and starts again.

he’s spent the last month and a half poring over these words. he wants- needs you to know how deep his feelings for you are. he needs you to know he would never hurt you, how he would fall from grace just to feel your touch.

so when sae concludes his vows with a dedication of all his future wins to you, he’s almost proud to see tears glimmering in the corner of your eyes.

and then you begin your vows, and he thinks he's been sorely outdone. every one of your words go straight to his heart like an arrow, and he can feel himself bleeding out.

but you revive him over and over again with each confession of love, each tiny moment shared, and he somehow falls even deeper in love with you.

when you finish, sae itoshi realizes it's hopeless. for the rest of his life, it will always be you. no other person will ever hold his heart in the palm of their hand like you do. even football pales

in comparison to the thought of forever with you.

and you two kiss, husband and wife, and he realizes that’s perfectly fine with him.

a/n: happy 50 followers !?!?! this is a songfic so its a diff writing style than my usual stuff, but this kind of writing will only be for songfics. 

reblogs and feedback appreciated!

[gentlyrowan]

RED ECHOES

STERLING-MALKEET / RED ROCKS AMPHITHEATER

➶ Photo by David Amirault from Wikimedia Commons

➶ Vantage Point VP by @robo-dino-puppy

Source: Denver.org

The giant sandstone outcroppings that form the walls of Red Rocks Amphitheatre are higher than Niagara Falls and are part of the geological Fountain Formation, deposited approximately 280 million years ago. Believe it or not, the Rolling Stones weren't around yet, and, in fact, Red Rocks didn't get its start as a music venue until the early 1900s, when Renaissance man John Brisben Walker set up a makeshift stage among the rocks. A famous opera singer came to perform and declared it “acoustically perfect,” and it’s been revered by musicians ever since.

HORIZON WIKI: RED ECHOES

NORA SACRED LAND

RED ECHOES aka STERLING-MALKEET AMPITHEATER (NEAR DEVIL'S GRIEF)

RED ROCKS AMPHITHEATER (NEAR DENVER) COLORADO, USA

Post 4 of 5 from Red Rocks

Get to know Creation Rock, Ship Rock, and Stage Rock in Post 3

Thanks for graciously collaborating, @robo-dino-puppy!