#so I am not only going to torture myself with watching those two

[black-rose-writings]

I am terrible at life choices.

[myvoiddreams]

Fragments of Starlight

Pairing: Azriel x Reader

Summary: With the impending war, Y/N is captured by Hybern's general. As they struggle to protect those they care about, they reflect on their unrequited feelings for Azriel and their insecurities within the Night Court.

Word Count: 4,585

Warnings: ANGST, violence, torture, dark themes

A/N: This is my first time ever writing anything like this. I am a true sucker for angst. This is meant to go along with some of the events of ACOWAR, but of course, it’s different. Please don’t come at me for not following it’s exact story line. ALSO, I know that Azriel or Feyre would NEVER, but it’s just for the heartache okay!!

Part 2, Part 3

------

Now

All of it, it was all going to shit. I don’t know how my ears weren’t bleeding at the sheer amount of noise coming from the chaos around me. So much screaming, but was it Hybern’s forces, or our own? Everything was ringing, my head throbbing along with it. It was almost as if my breaths were not reaching my lungs. I was on the ground, all fours underneath me as I tried and tried to get myself to my feet. Everything was sore, it was like my muscles were not working. I stretched for the source of the aching on my temple and what I found was the warm, wet consistency of fresh blood.

My family, where is my family? Panic drenched me like a bucket of ice water.

With a groan, I grabbed my sword that lay beside me and turned to face the sky, now sitting at least. The sky, it was so blue. It almost felt like a disgusting joke to see something so beautiful, as dead bodies lay at my feet. Hybern’s forces were surrounding me, there was no escaping this.

I grit my teeth as I stand, my blade in hand. Dizziness rolls off me in waves, so much so that nausea is found coursing through my veins. I don’t get very far up before I’m slammed back down to the earth. My face hits the dirt as all the air leaves my lungs, leaving nothing but the taste of the earth and blood in my mouth. There is someone standing on my back, applying enough pressure I’m sure I’ll have a broken rib or two.

“Don’t go too far, sweetheart. We are just getting started with you.” A cry of pain leaves my lips as one of Hybern’s generals continues to crush my ribcage. The nausea and ringing in my head is too much. Then, with another blow to my head, everything is dark.

---

Before

“Oh, come on now sweet cheeks! You can do better than that. Az and I trained you myself!” Cassian’s voice was oh so annoying as he pinned me to my back. Sweat was gleaming across both of us as we spent the morning training. I was panting as my mind continued to reel.

Life had gotten tense with the Inner Circle recently. Not only was Prythian on the cusp of war with Hybern, but now we had to juggle the two newly made Fae that were the Archeron sisters.

I honestly felt bad for them. They did not ask for this life. I can only image what it would be like to go through life having your humanity ripped from you. Now knowing that you are going to be around for centuries instead of decades. And I felt bad for Feyre, who never wanted to see her sister’s dragged into this.

Usually, Azriel would be here with Cassian and me. Usually. It seemed as though Azriel had been getting far in over his head with the middle Archeron sister as of late. I would be lying if I said it didn’t bother me. But, I would never admit that fact out loud. Elain was half here and half not. Whenever she did speak, she’d just spew some crap that didn’t make any sense. But, that didn’t stop Azriel from spending any time he was not preparing for the war, with her.

Azriel. My heart seized at just the mention of his name. I had known the Shadowsinger for centuries. I stood by his side as he faced his own inner turmoil about Rhys being taken from us right under our feet. I stood by him even before that as I watched Windhaven and Devlon try to take was little he had away from him. Really, I had stood by everyone in this Inner Circle. But Azriel, Az was different. This too I would never admit out loud.

It took me holding him one night, after he had dreamt of his hands being lit aflame again, that it snapped. In all his vulnerability, it just, snapped. Az and I had shared a connection, a friendship, and I had loved him far long before the mating bond clicked in place. It only felt right that it was him. But, it hasn’t snapped for him.

It hurt, every single day, it hurt. And to watch him try so hard to make whatever it was happen with Elain, who was mated to someone else, made me feel worthless. This too, was not his fault. How was he supposed to know when I refused to breathe a word of it. Honestly, it might be a good thing, the distance. It hurts, but Azriel deserves happiness. I don’t know if I’m the one who can give him that.

“Damnit Cass!” I grunted as I fought back from his restraint.

“You are letting yourself get sloppy, Y/N. No room for that on the battlefield.” His face was smug. I felt some embarrassment creep up my neck and find its way on my cheeks.

“I know, I know.” I huffed. “Just let me up already.” I gave up on fighting back. Recently I found myself lacking the energy I used to have. I used to be full, driven, but I have found myself distant lately.

“Look, are you sure you’re okay, Y/N? You have not had your head in the game recently.” He stood and held a hand out to me. Cassian only wanted to check on me, it was nice really. I just wasn’t used to it. I had been the one the members of this court had always leaned their heads on. There just seemed to be no room for the others to do the same for me. So, I never asked them to. I wasn’t going to start now.

“I’m fine Cass, just tired.” I retorted.

“Aren’t we all sweet cheeks.” He said as he patted my back.

---

Now

Fire is crackling somewhere near me, but I can’t feel its warmth. I feel myself chained up. My arms were far above my head, hanging me from a support post. My feet had been stripped of their shoes, and now chains wrapped around my ankles. My body hurt, breathing hurt, and my head hurt. I was sure that this hellhole was only going to make it worse.

“Ah, there she is. Glad to see you actual awoke, we were starting to get worried.” Spoke the same general who broke my ribs.

I kept my mouth shut, only glaring at the direction of the voice. My vision was still blurry, and where I hope there was only one of him, I saw three.

The entrance flap of the tent open and closed to reveal another male. This one, I recognized. The King of Hybern himself.

“If it isn’t Y/N of the Night Court. I have to say, my men did a fine job bringing you in here for me. Wouldn’t you say so?” His voice was gruff. “Now that you’re here, we some questions we need answered, and I suggest you do answer them, dear. I’m sure you don’t want to find out what will happen if you don’t cooperate.”

I lazily lifted my head toward the King and sneered. “Try me.” I bit back, my voice laced with venom.

“Oh, I was afraid you’d say something of those sorts.” The king waved in another male, he was in head to toe in black. Something similar to what I’d see our very own Shadowsinger wear. Only this male was no where near the build of Az, but damn, did he look pissed.

The male pulled out a small dagger that was sheathed on their waist and made his way closer to me. I couldn’t help but let a little laugh escape my lips, “Size does matter you know,” I quipped. I know this man was here to interrogate me, but I could not let these people know how truly vulnerable I felt.

“Oh? I beg to differ.” The male stated as he plunged the dagger into the flesh of my calf.

---

Before 

Rhys wanted to have a family dinner tonight. It would be the first one in quite a long time. With everything going on, who was to blame anyone? I couldn’t say I was looking forward to it though. I used to love the time I could spend with my family, but now, it wasn’t the same. Not when my family was no longer the same. 

Rhys had Feyre, who don’t get me wrong, I love, and I love to see Rhys have the mate he has always deserved. But, with the additions of the Acheron sisters came with something strained. Cass hasn’t said anything, but I see the way he looks at Nesta. Nesta, who wants absolutely nothing to do with him, or any of us for that matter. Mor and Amren hadn’t been around as of late. Both were too busy preparing for this inevitable war. Mor with being an emissary and Amren with working out some logistics of the Cauldron. 

And Az. Azriel was no longer seeking me out. No longer spending time in the training ring or the library with me. Instead, he was with Elain. 

And then, there was me. Before this family all I was, was alone. Finding this family had saved me in more aspects than one, but I can feel it shifting under my feet, about to give way and take me with the edge of it. 

This though, is something I would never speak about. There is enough going on as it is. No one needs to be burdened about me, my unreciprocated feelings for the Shadowsinger, or my silly feelings of insecurity. I’m a friend to the court, a warrior, sometimes an advisor, but, I am nothing compared to the rest of them. I simply do not hold enough importance, and that is something I must live with. Something I am terrified they will realize as well. 

I was the last to make it to the table. Cauldron, even Elain is here. And next to Elain was Az. Hazel eyed, messy haired, Az. We caught each other’s eyes. I couldn’t help but let a smile creep up onto my face in greeting, and he smiled back.

I took my seat next to Cass and Amren and looked at the table around me. Even though war was around the corner, it felt good to gather as if nothing was wrong. Conservation started buzzing, everyone started eating, and I drifted off to a place that wouldn’t hurt me.

—- 

Now

Sweat is dripping off me in beads. My body is littered with cuts and bruises. But, I didn’t say a word. Not a single word about the size of our armies, not a word about what Rhys and the others had planned, not a word about our allies. Not a word. And I was paying for it.

Gods. They had left me here, giving me a break from the beatings and the torture. Whatever the used must have been laced with faebane because I have never felt this weak. This out of control of myself. I wasn’t healing, and I was still losing blood. At this rate, it wasn’t looking good. I was still hanging from my arms, I’m sure at this point I had a shoulder out of it’s socket. A rustling began again at the entrance of the tent.

“Back for more?” I croaked. My throat was completely dry from the screaming. But, when I got my eyes open enough to see what the cause of the noise was, my heart stopped dead in it’s tracks.

Elain.

---

Before

I retreated from dinner early. As pitiful as it sounds, I couldn’t be around it. I couldn’t stand to see Azriel with her any longer. Not when I knew he was the one who was slowly healing her and ruining me.

Knocking at my bedroom door pulled me from my thoughts and I was looking into a book, not really reading it. “Come in,” I shouted.

The site of Azriel caught me off guard. Once upon a time, it was normal for him to seek me out from my room. Now, it simply wasn’t. I couldn’t help but tense.

“Oh! Az!” I put my book down and stood. “How are you doing?” I smiled up at him.

“You would know if you hadn’t left dinner so early.” He looked down at me, frowning and crossing his arms. It was rare that Az was upset with me.

“Look, I’m sorry, I’m tired after training today.” I gave him a sad smile, not wanting him to push the issue further. “But please, tell me what I missed.”

This somehow made his shadows start to swirl around him and he huffed. “I was telling everyone how much progress Elain had made. She’s having actual conversations now.” He smiled at it, proud.

I tried not to show any hurt on my face. I have no right for this to hurt me. He was helping someone, and I had to be pitiful enough that I was jealous.

“That’s amazing Az, you’ve helped her a lot.” I let another smile grace my face. Before I knew what I was saying it was falling out of my lips, “But, you do realize that she is mated, right?”

Azriel’s demeanor shifted. His shadows became agitated, “Elain is a friend. She is going through a lot, and she needs support.” He sighed, “Plus, I think that cauldron could be wrong.” That sentence alone was enough to rip whatever was left in me to shreds. Why couldn’t he see me?

I had to take a deep breath to keep the silver lining in my eyes in place. “Az, when in your life have you ever seen the cauldron be wrong? Why would it start being wrong now?”

“Look, maybe you’ll understand one day, but it’s wrong about her and Lucien.” He crossed his arms now.

“It sounds like you want to it be wrong. Whether it is, or not.”

Azriel was growing frustrated. His eyebrow ticked and he huffed, “Can you blame me for wanting something more?”

“She is mated Azriel. Off limits.” I tried to stress him. “I don’t want to see you hurt if it doesn’t turn out the way you want.” I sighed. “I wouldn’t want my mate ripped away from me, I’m sure Lucien doesn’t either.” He doesn’t even realize that I’m talking about him. Not a single clue.

“Ripped away? Look Y/N, just because you’re alone, does not mean I have to be. Why are you making this about you?” He nearly snarled at me. Snarled. “I have finally found another purpose other than this war. I have found something, someone, to spend my time with and enjoy.”

His words hit me like an arrow to the chest. Alone. Maybe they all did see me, and they just didn’t care. Why couldn’t I be enough for him? Why hadn’t in all the time and cherished memories we have together be enough. We had held each other in hardship. We had trained together. We had grown together. We had spent countless Starfalls together. We had shared so many laughs and touches. Why wasn’t what we had enough for him?

The weight of Azriel’s words hung in the air, heavy silence settling between us. My heart ached with the sting of his remark, and I fought to keep any of my remaining composure.

I deflated, “Az,” I tried to sigh as he cut me off again.

“Well, maybe if you weren’t so insecure, you’d see that I’m just trying to help someone who’s been through a lot. You’re jealous and it’s clouding your judgment.” He stared at me, and I had to look away. I didn’t realize it but I began to shake. I couldn’t tell if it was from rage, or from the way my heart cracked as he spoke.

“I think you should go Az.” My voice began to break, and I could tell that my walls were going to come down. Not once had I ever asked him to leave.

His own eyes softened, and he reached for me, “Wait.”

He tried to continue but I cut him off, “Leave, Azriel.” I turned to face away from him. I gathered my arms together. I couldn’t let him see the tears that were rolling down my face, I wouldn’t.

He pulled his arm back to himself and hesitated, seeing the pain he was causing me. Without another word, he turned and left, the door closing behind with a heavy finality.

---

Now

Elain. What the fuck was she doing here?

Seeing her tore me from my stupor. She acted as if she was in a trance, half there. I was really panicking now. I could take this torture and pain, Elain, I don’t think she would last. I could hardly pull at my restraints at this point.

“Elain! Elain!” I screamed at her, trying to get her attention. One of the males that was hauling her in, left her side and strolled to mine. Next thing I knew I was tasting my own blood in my mouth as his fist met with my face. As the blood welled up in my mouth, I felt rage hit me. I spat at him. His face now coated with the bloody saliva that he caused me.

He wiped his hand over his face, ridding it of its bloody covering. I snarled at him as he drew a blade. Good. This way the focus would stay on me and not Elain. He brought the blade to my face, slicing a thin mark down my cheek. “If you wanted more, you could’ve just asked.” He trailed the blade down my neck, and now to my collar bone, all the while slicing lightly as he went. He brought his lips to my ear and his hand grabbed my face, “I have so much more than just blades and fists in store for you, girl.”

It was almost too hard to stomach. I didn’t want to know what he was alluding to. Elain, do this for Elain. I told myself. I kept silent and he pushed me away, returning to the other male who was already putting Elain into restraints.

Why is she here? Why is she not fighting back?

As they finished with her restraints, Hybern himself walked back into the tent.

“Cauldron be damned, if it’s not also Feyre’s cauldron made sister.” Hybern chuffed, “We are truly going to have such a fun time together.” He chuckled as he looked between Elain and I.

He nodded at his men and they both reach for their knives. One for me. One for Elain.

“Wait!” I blurted as I saw the man move toward Elaine, “Please, leave her unharmed.”

“Hmm,” hummed Hybern, “Now, tell me pretty thing, why would I do that?”

“She’s a Seer. Please, you must leave her unharmed or she will be no use to anyone. She will not come out of any trance if she is harmed.” I didn’t know if what I was blabbing was true. I only knew that I needed to protect Elain, for she could not protect herself.

Hybern nodded again at the male who was at Elain’s side. The male sheathed his blade and I let out a silent sigh.

“You on the other hand,” Hybern turned his attention back on me, “I have some questions about pretty Elain.” A wicked smile reached the lips of the male in front of me, as he lifted his blade threatening. “You, dear Y/N, best answer them.”

The male reached for my shirt and tore it in half. Now leaving my chest and abdomen exposed to the air, only a warrior’s wrap covering my breasts. I gasped at the bite of the air reaching my skin. My abdomen was littered with black and blue bruising from the beatings. The faebane in my system slowing any kind of healing.

I turned my face to a stone grimace. I could do this. I told myself. If nobody comes for you, then surely someone will come for Elain.

That truth hurt almost as much as the torture that I was being put through.

---

Before

It had been about a week since I’d seen Azriel. The bond that used to hum in my chest felt vacant. Rhysand had sent me and Cassian to one of the Illyrian war bands that were positioned in case of an attack.

It was a single flaming arrow that was sent into a tent that set everything into utter chaos. Cassian was in the middle of a meeting with some of the other commanders, and I was in the training ring.

Hybern’s forces hit us as if we were nothing but an anthill in their way.

I don’t know where Cassian was as I fought and fought, until I was brought down.

---

Now

I was hardly holding on. I had no energy to cry out anymore. No energy to even lift my own head up. My abdomen and back was near ribbons after that male drove his blade into me again and again.

Elain had seemed to snap in and out of it. When she was somewhat coherent, she would only cry. I felt bad for her, but I had done what I could do protect her. There wasn’t a single scratch on her.

At thinking of Elain my mind drifted to Azriel. I wonder if he’s looking for me, if not, her.

The inner circle had to know that something was wrong at this point. I only hope that Cassian was also okay after we were ambushed. I’m sure if he wasn’t, he’d be right next to me also receiving the beatings I was.

Blood dripped down my back, creating a small pool under me. I truly didn’t know how much longer I would last. I had never felt weaker in my life.

I should’ve told him that night. Anguish was suffocating me. I found myself retracing everything I did as of late. The way I stole myself away from my family because I was being nothing but pitiful. The way they started to treat me differently. The way one no one would come to me anymore, and I would not go to them. No wonder they have left you here. You are nothing to them. My mind bit at me.

What truly bothered me was the downfall of mine as Azriel’s friendship. He was the one person I could always truly count on. If I had fallen in training, if I had drank too much, if some stupid male had broke my heart, it was always Azriel that had caught me, and me him. It’s why I fell in love with him long before the bond snapped its place into my heart. And now I was going to die without him ever knowing. I was simply going to fade away as my blood pooled underneath me.

It's better this way. I told myself. Elain is unharmed, and I will fade before anyone knows of this bond. The war will be won and Az will be able to move on with someone he finds joy in.

I couldn’t help but let tears run down my face. I wanted to scream, to find some way out, but with the faebane running through me, I was simply too weak.

---

I woke to the sound of rustling at the entrance of the tent. The rustling led to Elain, and I could hear her restraints being messed with. I nearly couldn’t pry my eyes open at the sound. Maybe they would finally take me from my misery. I silently hoped. That’s when I heard a quiet gasp. I looked up to see.. Feyre? And behind her, the one messing with Elain’s chains, Azriel.

My heart lurched to a stop. They had come to help, we were going to get out.

“Azriel..” Feyre quietly said as he brought Elain into his arms.

“What.” He nearly hissed at her. That’s when he looked up and truly saw me.

“Az.. Feyre..” I choked on my words. Help was here. I was going to get out of here. To make it. Finally something positive bloomed in my chest in place of where that hole had found itself.

Azriel set Elain back down and rushed to my side. He put a hand to my cheek, “Y/N, we couldn’t find you anywhere. Cass, he said you were missing after the battle.” His touch sent shivers down my beaten spine.

My restraints still bore heavily into my wrists where I was strung up. Then, there was rustling and yelling coming from outside of the tent.

“Help me down, please.” My voice was raw and pleading.

The yelling was getting closer and closer.

“Az, we have to leave, now.” Feyre said, trying to scoop Elain into her arms.

Azriel’s hand left my cheek, and panic flared into his eyes as he took in my state.

Hybern’s soldiers were coming, realizing something was wrong. Azriel looked between Elain and I, backing up from where I was strung up. He was backing away from me. Why was he backing away from me?

My own panic started to settle deep inside of me, long squashing any hope that had found it’s place.

“Azriel… please,” I coughed quietly. Dread was setting deeply inside of me. They didn’t plan on saving two. They came here for Elain, not me.

A sob found it’s way onto my lips as he picked Elain from Feyre’s arms. Feyre herself looking torn, her eyes expressing so much anguish.

“We will come back Y/N. I promise.” Azriel’s words were yet another punch to the gut.

I couldn’t help but let the sobs I had been holding onto for so long bubble out of me.

“Please don’t leave me here.” I cried, no longer caring for the quietness. They both stiffened at the sound of my voice. “Please,” I was gasping for air as this point, “If you’re not going to take me, then at least put me down.”

Their eyes widened at my statement, but I couldn’t hold for much longer. I needed this pain to end. This suffering to be over with.

“We will be back. I will come straight back.” Azriel hushly stated. His eyes, those beautiful hazel eyes were boring into me. They were trying to convince me he was telling the truth, but I knew better. I knew that they were only getting into the camp once successfully.

They chose Elain. They were going to leave me behind.

“Just kill me, please kill me…” I sobbed, “Please if you are going to leave me behind, then just kill me.”

Feyre was crying now, and Azriel. I knew, that even though he was choosing Elain, Elain to save, and Elain to love, he still wouldn’t harm me.

“I’m so sorry Y/N.” Feyre bubbled out of her crying lips as she quickly left the tent under her cloak.

Azriel and I made eye contact again through my sobbing, through the tears that were leaving my eyes in force. “I will be right back. I will come back for you.” And then, he was gone. With Elain in his arms.

I broke, truly broke. No weapon could hurt me as much as the sight of who I loved most, my mate, leaving me here, strung up and bleeding out.

[watchmegetobsessed]

NOW AND FOREVER

A/N: i am a sucker for this trope and i feel like it has the right to be the last one of the year. thank you for sticking with me in 2023, i know it wasn't smooth sailing writing wise and i can't promise anything for next year, but lets all hope for the best. happy new year babes and have a blast tonight!✨

WORD COUNT: 2k

PAIRING: princess!reader x guard!harry

SUMMARY: New Year's Eve is spent with princess duties, but it's even more torturous than usually, because the person you want to be with is in the room as well. And he also happens to be your guard.

MASTERLIST | SUPPORT ME!

The man in front of you is talking… and talking… and still talking, but you have absolutely no idea what he is saying. Maybe he is talking about his latest ski trip. Or his father’s business? No, it might be his ridiculously ugly watch that cost a fortune.

Whatever it is, you couldn’t care less, yet you mastered your polite but blank smile so well that he doesn’t realize you give zero fucks about him.

Fuck, you’re too good. But it’s no surprise, you had all your life to learn your ways to be the best version of yourself even at times your mind is miles away. Tonight however, it’s not that far away, only on the other side of the room where one particular man resides in his black, perfectly tailored suit and irresistible curls, his piercing green eyes relentlessly examining the room. 

Harry has been your personal guard for three years and it’s safe to say that you’d gladly put your life in his hands, he’s been through so much with you, breaking through protesting crowds, hiding from paparazzi after your cousin’s scandal, attempted break-ins and threatening mails, promising to have you dead in no time. Harry has been the person who protected you physically all while being your rock mentally and emotionally as well. 

You knew from the beginning that falling for him was inevitable, but you never knew he would ever give in and openly reciprocate your feelings. Well, openly as in between you and him, behind closed doors where it’s just the two of you. You both know no one can know about what’s going on between the two of you, because he would not only be removed from your security team immediately, but your relationship could be an opportunity to those who want to harm you. 

You never wished to not be born as the heir to the throne more than the night you heard him confess his love for you after a man tried to attack you at a public appearance. You were convinced Harry would blame himself for it, because the man somehow got through a security check with an airgun in his backpack and even though he couldn’t have killed you with that, he could have easily caused some serious injuries. You were expecting Harry to be beating himself up for all of it even though he wasn’t in charge of checking the audience, but to your biggest surprise, he confessed his love for you in your bedroom that evening and you knew there was no going back from there. 

Now it has been five months since then and you’ve kept it hidden so well, no one is suspecting a thing. But there are times when you wish you could just openly walk up to him and kiss him, have him lock you in his strong arms and never let you go. 

Like tonight, at the palace’s New Year’s Eve party that’s definitely not a party to you, rather than another night of princess duties. 

“Princess? What do you think?” The man in front of you snaps you out of your thoughts and you tear your eyes off of Harry and back to him.

“Sorry?”

“Would you like to have another drink and then maybe dance?”

The smile on his face tells you he is trying to chat you up and possibly marry into the royal family, but even if your heart wasn’t in Harry’s hands, he would stand no chance. 

“Thank you, but I think I’ll go and refresh myself. Enjoy the evening!”

You nod your head at him respectfully before walking away, straight to Harry. His eyes spot you in the crowd fast, as if there was a magnet pulling him towards you. His face remains still, at least to everyone in the room, but not to you, you immediately notice how the right corner of his mouth turns the slightest bit upwards. 

“Princess?” he nods as you finally reach him.

“I want to refresh myself. Can we go back to my suite?”

“Of course.” Reaching up he gives a quick order through his earpiece to the rest of the security team before escorting you out of the room.

You walk side by side silently, the clicking of your heels echoing in the never ending hallways until you finally reach your suite. You walk in and Harry follows, closing the door behind him and planting himself in front of it as always. With a grunt you kick your heels off and let your feet rest a bit and turning around your gaze finds his. 

“How is the party?” he asks.

“Boring,” you shrug, slowly sulking closer to him. “Lots of people I don’t want to talk to but I have to.”

“I’m sorry,” he replies, his eyes glued to your face as you finally stop only an inch away from him. You don’t kiss him just yet, just tease him by running your hands up his chest to the base of his neck. Without your heels you need to push up to your tiptoes to lessen the distance between the two of you, your nose already brushing against his, but before your lips could meet, you stop and look into his eyes. You want him to make the final move. 

It doesn’t take him long. His hands grab onto your waist and he pulls you against him right before taking your lips in a hungry frenzy. 

If there’s one good thing about hiding your relationship it’s the build up between each stolen little moment. Sometimes you have to go days without even touching each other so when you finally have a moment of privacy you practically devour each other. 

You’ve always known Harry to keep his cool in every situation and not let his feelings and thoughts show, but when it’s just the two of you, he bares his soul to you and you can’t get enough of this side of him that’s only known to you.

The way his fingers dig into your flesh, how his body wraps around you and his lips become one with yours, the little grunts he lets out and the burning warmth you feel radiating from him, it’s so addicting, you have no idea how you could go for so long without experiencing this. 

He turns the two of you around and he pushes you against the wall, the impact makes you moan into his mouth and you pull a leg up, the slit of your dress baring your naked thigh as you hook your leg behind him, his hand immediately sliding beneath the fabric. Your hands are tangled in his hair, pulling and tugging as he kisses down your neck, gently biting the soft skin on your exposed collarbone, making sure he leaves no mark. 

You get lost in the moment, ready to take it further and to your bed, but then Harry slows down and comes to a halt, regulating his breathing before reaching to his ear and you know someone called for him through the earpiece. 

“Will be back in five,” he answers to whoever is on the other end and you swallow back a whine that you were interrupted so quickly. “Your father is looking for you,” he whispers, pressing a soft kiss to your lips. 

“Couldn’t you have said at least ten minutes?”

“It takes three to walk back and we need to get you look like nothing happened,” he smiles as he slowly lets go of your leg, taking a small step away from you.

“Yeah. If you said ten we would have had seven minutes for ourselves, two minutes to freshen up, three minutes to walk back.”

“That’s twelve minutes,” he smirks at you in a way that makes you clench your legs.

“I know, but they would have only sent someone after us if we didn’t arrive in thirteen,” you answer cockily, knowing the security rules as thoroughly as a guard on the team. 

“You have one minute now,” he chuckles, nodding towards the bathroom and you flash him a pout but obey. 

In exactly five minutes you’re back to the ballroom and no one suspects a thing. Harry returns to his spot and you find your father. 

You count down the last ten seconds on the balcony watching over the hills behind the palace, there’s fireworks and you’re drinking champagne, kissing your father’s cheek to greet the new year, but in the midst of all the celebration your eyes find the only person you’d want to be with right now. 

Harry’s eyes are already glued to you and even without words you know you’re thinking about the same thing. You give him a bitter smile and he nods his head before someone taps your shoulder to wish you a happy new year, breaking your silent moment with your lover. 

It’s past three am when you’re in your suite, getting ready to go to bed. The dress you wore is now discarded on the floor of your bathroom, your makeup is gone and your heels are put away. You’re just about to get into bed when there’s a knock on the door.

“Come in!” you call out and somehow you already know who it is. 

Harry walks in and closes the door behind him, stopping there for a second before slowly walking further inside. 

“Everything alright?” he asks and you know it has two sides. As your guard he wants to know there’s nothing out of ordinary and on the other hand, he is checking in on you as the man who loves you.

“I’m good,” you smile as you watch him walk up to you, his hands moving to your hips in a familiar movement. You curl your arms around his neck and close your eyes as he rests his forehead against yours. “I wish we could be alone at midnight,” you whisper. “I never had a kiss at midnight before.”

“Never?” he asks, pulling his head back, making you open your eyes as you shake your head. 

He runs his tongue over his lips, looking around as if he is looking for something and then his gaze stills on something. His arms fall from around you and he steps to your night stand, grabbing the old school alarm clock. You don’t see what he is doing with it so you walk closer and when he sets it down you realize he just set it back so it reads one minute to midnight. 

“Come here then,” he softly says as he pulls you back into his arms and you melt into his embrace as you look at him. 

A tear rolls down your cheek and reaching up he catches it with his thumb. He doesn’t question why you’re crying, because  he knows. Because he can feel the bittersweetness of the moment as well. Finding the person you want to spend your life with, but having to sneak around and hide from the rest of the world, it’s such a torturous feeling. 

And just as the clock hits midnight, again, your lips meet his and that kiss means everything and beyond to you both. His arms tighten around you and for a moment it feels like time has stopped and you can finally be who you want to be, with Harry.

But time never stops and you both know he can’t be in here for too long. So slowly, he pulls back, but not before saying the words you love to hear the most from him.

“I love you, now and forever.” 

This is what he said that night he confessed his love for you and it’s just as magical as the first time. 

“I love you too,” you smile at him tiredly and he presses one last short kiss to your lips before walking over to the door. He looks back once more and you notice his eyes are teary as well before he steps out and the door closes behind him. 

Thank you for reading, please like and reblog if you enjoyed and buy me a coffee if you want to support me!

[glorystark]

Empty eyes | Dean Winchester x Reader

Summary: Dean doesn't take Charlie's death too well and because of the Mark of Cain affecting him, he tells you things that will regret.

Warnings: moc!Dean Winchester, Dean being a dick, minor mentions of injury, swearing, ANGST, major character's death

Pairing: Dean Winchester × reader

Featuring: Sam Winchester

Word count: 2,3k

We watched in agony as Charlie's body, wrapped around a white sheet, burned in the flames. This should never have happened to her kind soul. She died so we could save Dean. I couldn't help but feel guilty; my heart ached because I lost a friend, again. I knew Sam felt the same. We both asked Charlie for help with the Book of the Damned, and we both lied to Dean about the book being destroyed. Now it was too late to make things right. Memories flashed through my eyes, making me tear up. I remembered when she helped us with the Dick situation, or when I taught her some hunter-kind-of-tricks. How happy she was and wouldn't stop thanking me. She didn't deserve this, anyone but her.

“Charlie,” Sam started, grabbing my and probably Dean's attention. “We are gonna miss you. You're the best.” He stopped when his voice cracked, and now I was sure he felt far worse than me because looking back, he suggested not telling Dean about the Book of the Damned not being destroyed, which I didn't agree with at first. But seeing Dean, my Dean, slowly fade away right in front of my eyes changed my opinion. Maybe it was selfish, me and Sam both were. But we couldn't let Dean become something he fears, a Monster. We couldn't lose another person, another family member, but we didn't realize who we were putting in danger on this path.

“We love you, Charlie, and I'm so sorry,” I said, blinking through tears.

“Shut up,” Dean said coldly, making Sam and me look at him. “You got her killed. You don't get to apologize.” He continued.

“Dean-“ Sam started, but Dean cut him off.

“You too, you two are the reason she is dead,” he said, not taking his eyes off the flames.

“We were trying to help you,” I said, still looking at him.

“I didn't need help,” he said bitterly. "I told you to leave it alone.”

“What were we supposed to do, just watch you die?” Sam asked, not letting me be the only one receiving the cold tone from his older brother.

“The mark isn't gonna kill me.”

“Maybe not, but when it's done with you, you won't be you anymore,” I stated. “Dean, you're all we got. So of course we were gonna fight for you because that's what we do,” I said softly.

“Yeah, she's right, we had a shot-“ Sam was cut off again by Dean.

“Yeah, you had a shot. Charlie is dead.” He finally turned his head to look at me and his brother, who was standing next to me. His dark emerald eyes bore into mine, and I couldn't recognize them. Never have I ever seen him look at me with those eyes. Because no matter how much crap we went through, he always made sure I was fine, and his eyes held nothing but sweetness and, on most occasions, worry. “Nice shot.”

“Are you even listening to me? You think I'm ever gonna forgive myself for that?!” I snapped, not being able to keep my voice down anymore. He is grieving, but so am I. If I could, I would trade places with her.

“You know what I think,” he started, still with the same voice tone. “I think it should be you up there and not her.”

I felt my heart break for the hundredth time today. I parted my lips, not taking my teary eyes off him, which clearly showed how hurt I was. Sam let out a small gasp and widened his eyes after he heard Dean's words, clearly not expecting his brother to go that far.

I knew he blamed me, probably even more than Sam. But knowing that he wanted me dead hurt more than any physical torture I've experienced.

Sam called his name, still shocked after what he heard, but his brother just walked away, breaking my heart more and more.

—————

It has been a week since I lost Charlie, since I lost my Dean. He has been searching for the Stynes ever since but has been having a bit of trouble finding their location. So meanwhile, he went on a few solo hunts. He hasn't said a word to me and to Sam, just a few like ‘buy some beers’ ‘did you find anything about the Stynes’.

He found another hunt for today and was packing his bag in his own room. We both haven't stepped in our shared room ever since the accident, which meant we weren't even sleeping on the same bed. I'm done with being ignored, so I knocked on his door and opened it without waiting for any response. He didn't even turn around, probably knowing it was me.

“Dean,” I called his name, not even knowing what I wanna talk about, but getting him to look at me was the first step. “Dean,” I called, this time louder, and when he still didn't turn around, I walked towards him and grabbed his arm. “Alright, I'm done. When will you finally stop ignoring me?!”

He looked at my hand, which was grabbing his arm, and slowly turned around, finally looking at my face. “I'm not ignoring you, I just don't want to talk to you or be near you,” he said bitterly, pulling his arm away and reaching for his door.

“Dean, you know you're not the only one who lost someone, okay? And believe me, I know it's my fault she's gone, and I'll never forgive myself for that. But, god, you're practically killing me. I miss you,” I said desperately, waiting for something in his eyes to change, waiting for him to embrace me in his strong arms, but... Nothing. His eyes didn't even hold hatred anymore, just emptiness.

“I don't know what you expect me to say, ‘I'm sorry you were so stupid’ ‘I'm sorry you got another person killed off’ ‘I'm sorry you're so fucking useless’ Huh?! Is that what you want me to say? You want me to feel sorry for you?!” he yelled, showing the anger and darkness in his eyes while he harshly slammed me to the wall, making me whimper slightly. His words cut deep into my skin, but I tried my best to ignore them, knowing this Dean wasn't really my Dean.

“I want you to understand, I want you to know that I'm sorry. I want you to tell me that we're gonna go through this like we always do,” I said softly, looking deeply into his eyes, trying to crack him.

He let out a dark chuckle and grasped my shoulders, lowering his head to be on the same height level with me. “You want me to tell you that we're gonna go through this? Well, baby, in that way, I'd be a big liar.”

“Dean, me and Sam, we are so close to saving you. Please, just don't let the mark control you,” I begged, feeling small under his touch.

“I don't want nor need you two saving me, and believe me, at this very moment, I'm trying to not let the mark control me, so don't provoke me,” he whispered against my ear, sending shivers down my spine.

"I thought you trusted me.”

“Well, that trust was destroyed when you got someone who was like a sister to me killed. Have you ever noticed how many innocent people died because you were being too stupid?” he said harshly.

"We all have made mistakes, Dean," I said, as I thought about the hunts where innocent people died, and I couldn't save them. I didn't want Dean to know how much his words were affecting me, but, god, I felt like a crumpled paper.

“Seems like that's the only thing you ever do,” he smirked, letting his eyes fall on the floor again before looking up at my eyes again. “Tell me, how does it feel knowing you don't mean anything to anybody and you're just a burden in our lives? How does it feel knowing nobody loves you?”

That's it. That was the punch line to make me break into tears.

“Y-you love me, you said that before.”

“You know I lie to get laid,” he said, smirking, proud of his response.

My heart was racing more and more, and I felt nauseous.

“Dean, please-“

“You're nothing, do you hear me? Nothing!” he grabbed my cheeks harshly. “Your existence doesn't matter. You.don't.matter.” he said, spitting the words out before letting me go. He took his bag and walked out of the room, not even glancing at me. I slid down the wall as I started sobbing silently.

Then I heard a buzz from my phone.

New message from Sammy:

“Y/N, Dean just said he found a hunt, probably three to four werewolves, and he told me to go with him. I was really surprised but didn't question him. I think he's getting better. I'll also talk to him on the road. Next time, he'll definitely ask you too, just like old times. Don't stay up and don't worry; we got this :) love you.”

He asked Sam to go, but not me. If he hadn't told me that he hated me a few minutes ago, I'd think he was worried. But if it was really 3 or 4 werewolves, there's nothing to be worried about. He just wants to stay away from me. He told me I was a burden to them; he'll probably throw me out of the bunker soon.

Dark thoughts ran through my mind, and suddenly a rush of anxiety ran through me. What if there were more than a few werewolves? What if they get hurt? What if Dean hates me even more?

I checked Sam's message again and saw that he sent me the address of where the werewolves' location is and where the hunt would probably take place. I quickly rushed to my room, grabbed my car keys, and went to drive to the location.

—————

I was hiding behind some of the trees in the forest, watching as each of the boys fought one werewolf, two already dead ones on the floor.

Everything seemed good so far; I mean, their guns were on the floor, but they were fighting each werewolf single handed and there was no need for me to make my presence known. The boys were winning as always. And that's when I realized they don't really need me in their life. I knew the words that came out of Dean's mouth tonight weren't really Dean's, my Dean. But he was somehow right; before I became the hunter I am today, I made many mistakes. Some were small, and some led to people getting hurt or even killed. I also put their lives in danger multiple times because I was being reckless. Finding the demons that killed my parents blinded my vision. I was ready to get back to the bunker when I saw both of the werewolves giving up until I noticed something.

A werewolf close to Sam's back, and it seemed like none of the brothers noticed him. I searched for my gun but remembered I forgot it in the backseat of my car. I cursed under my breath and did the only thing possible right now to save Sam. I couldn't let Dean lose another person, especially his brother, who I knew meant the world to him. I couldn't put him through something like that again when there's a chance to save the younger Winchester.

So I ran towards Sam, trying my best to not slip because of the woods on the floor. The Werewolf was close, and nobody noticed him. I'm not the only stupid one after all. The boys turned their heads to me for a slight second, surprised at my presence, but didn't stop fighting the other werewolves.

Until I pushed Sam away from the werewolf he was fighting onto the floor. He seemed confused at first, until he saw it. I assumed Dean did too but couldn't be too sure since he was behind me. I let out an agonizing scream when the werewolf grazed his claws into my stomach and the other one, which Sam was fighting before, grazed his claws into my back before my lifeless body fell on the floor. Dean didn't hesitate more seconds before getting his gun from the floor and shooting all the werewolves.

I was bleeding like a waterfall from my body and my mouth. But the good thing is-

I didn't feel any pain, or anything in that matter…

Dean Winchester’s Pov:

No no no.

This can't be happening.

It's all a nightmare, just another stupid nightmare.

I heard Sam's crying voice telling the love of my life, his best friend, to wake up, holding her torn apart body in his arms, asking her why she pushed him away. But there was no answer.

It's a nightmare happening in real life.

Her beautiful y/e/c are open but so empty, unrecognizable.

I stood over her body, not being able to move from my spot.

There is so much blood everywhere.

Her blood.

This is hell.

No, I’ve been to hell and it's worse than hell.

I started tearing up more and more, reality hitting me more every second.

I let out an angry scream and fell on my knees when I remembered my last words to her.

“You're nothing, do you hear me? Nothing! Your existence doesn't matter. You.don't.matter.”

She wasn't nothing, she was my everything.

She mattered, she was the reason I kept going, now she's gone and it's all my fault.

All my fault.

All of the words I said came back to me, making my chest hurt.

As I knelt beside her lifeless body, surrounded by the aftermath of our shattered world, I whisper into the silent abyss, "I'm sorry, Y/N. I'm so sorry."

And deep down I felt the Mark laughing…

[icbgwy]

not strong enough ꕥ kwon jae-sung x fem!reader

synopsis : with the seikai teikai only allowing six participants from each dojo to join, you start to reconsider the role karate might play in your life, much to your boyfriend’s dismay.

genre : angst

warning(s) : shouting, micommunication, ambiguous ending.

It was midnight, and the two of you should’ve been in bed resting to get up early for training at dawn, but Kwon had decided to take it upon himself to sneak out with you and celebrate his upcoming departure to Barcelona for the Seikai Teikai. 

The moon cast a glow on the mountain tops, a place you both had discovered together, somewhere to escape the watchful eyes of others. 

You sat next to Kwon, admiring his features while simultaneously debating on whether to tell him of your future plans. His face was loaded with excitement as he talked lively about the upcoming tournament. 

You felt guilty for what you were about to do knowing how it would ruin the sweet moment between the two of you, but keeping it in any longer felt like torture. You couldn’t keep lying to him.

“Kwon, I need to tell you something… I’m quitting the dojang and moving back to Seoul,” you said, your voice trembling. You cringed at the words leaving your mouth, making the decision in your head all too real. There’s no turning back now. 

It took him a while to register what you’d said. He looked at you with confusion written all over his face. “Wait, why!? You want to leave the dojang?” he asked in bewilderment.

You reached for his hand, your thumb tracing over his knuckles riddled with scars from the intensive training that Sensei Kim had no problem giving out. She was one of the many reasons on your mental list for wanting to leave. 

“I know we said we’d do this together, but I—” you tried to explain to him, but he cut you off, pushing your hands away as he stood up abruptly. 

His anger was getting the best of him. He couldn’t understand where this was coming from. Everything was going so well. Why would you want to leave him the dojang?

“But you what? Huh? Tell me why!” he demanded, his voice rising with each word, echoing in the quiet night. 

“I don’t have a future in karate, not in the same way you do at least. I’m not strong or passionate enough for it,” you embarrassingly admitted, your voice barely above a whisper.

“But you are strong! I‘ve seen it myself.” He tried to reassure you hoping it would make you stay.

“You’re only saying that because you’re my boyfriend. I’m weak. Sensei Kim and Sensei Kreese know it too, even if they don’t say it. If I was as strong as you say I am, I would be going to Barcelona with you, but I’m not.” You looked down as you fidgeted with your hands, scared that if you didn’t, you’d start crying.

Kwon’s jaw clenched in frustration, pacing back and forth trying to regulate his anger with some breathing technique you had taught him when you first started dating. The memories of those early days together flooded back in his mind making him all too vulnerable to his own tears.

After some time, he sat down next to you, and in a low, exasperated tone asked, “Why couldn’t you wait until after the tournament to quit or at least tell me? Why does it have to be now?” He looked into your eyes, his filled with desperation and yours filled with guilt. The reality of the moment pressed down on you, making it hard to think.

“I can’t keep lying to you Kwon, it’s not fair the both of us. I can’t waste any more time chasing a future that isn’t plausible. I’m fine with not being the strongest, but I need to move back to Seoul and start getting ready for the suneung.” A sense of ease washed over you as you finally spoke the truth, but it was quickly replaced by the ache of seeing Kwon’s reaction. His eyes were glossy, and his eyebrows wrinkled in concentration making sure his tears didn’t spill.

Kwon let out a heavy sigh. “We’ve come so far together. Why can’t we keep going?”

“I need to find my own path, even if it means leaving you and the dojang behind,” you replied.

He sat in silence for a while, his mind racing as he tried to process your words. Finally, he spoke, his voice barely audible. “I’ll miss you.”

“I know you will, but just know I’ll be cheering you on. No matter where you are. I’ll miss you too,” you replied, your heart breaking at the thought of leaving him. He looked at you, his eyes searching for something, anything, that could change your mind. But deep down, he knew this was something you had thought long and hard about. The silence between you was heavy, filled with all the things left unsaid.

© icbgwy all rights reserved. do not repost, modify, steal, plagiarize, or translate my works on any platforms

[absolutebl]

This Week in BL - We Are Surprised

Organized, in each category, with ones I'm enjoying most at the top.

May 2024 Wk 2

Ongoing Series - Thai

Wandee Godday (Sat YT) ep 2 of 12 - Oh it’s fucking great. It could all go horribly south, of course. But it’s awesome at the moment. Messy gay and one of them is already pining? Got to love it. Including the negotiation.

I’d love a good sex negotiation, it’s almost as good as linguistic negotiation. This show makes me happy. All that said, it’s moving awfully quickly for a 12 episode run. Not sure what’s gonna happen on the backend. 

My Stand-In (Thai Fri iQIYI) ep 3 of 12 eps - I’m still enjoying it but I’m ready for him to die again now. 

We Are (Weds iQIYI) ep 5-6 of 16 - Toey is going after the Namgoong Award for Best Wingman this year, I see. And in exchange, literally all the rest of the friends are going to be his wingmen. It’s adorable. I also like that Phuwin got to be the aggressor for the first kiss. I like that this is mostly just boys flirting, and not really any prescribed seme/uke stuff. In general, I think these last two episodes I improved the show in my regard a lot. But then middles are always GMMTV's strong point, it’s whether they can stick the landing that’s an issue.

Two Worlds (Thurs iQIYI) ep 9 of 10 - Apparently we have the Frodo walking into Mordor episode. Also the sides were cute. In Thailand (like Taiwan) all gangsters are gay, apparently. 

Only Boo! (Sun YouTube) ep 5 of 12 - It’s cute but very cringe and dorky. Silly singing. Terrible pickup lines. Still, that was a ridiculously charming confession.

Ongoing Series - Not Thai

Unknown (Taiwan Tues YouTube & Viki) ep 12fin - Oh so good. Very few shows that feature one-sided long-term pining of this kind can resolve the unevenness of that power dynamic into a more stable and equal footing with such class. We really got to see the object of the desire turn completely around and become equally besotted. An age gap, stepbrothers trope like this one is hard enough but at this length? Very well acted boys! Unknown managed to show the older brother softening in a believable way that’s pretty unusual in narratives of this type.

All in all?

Unknown is a wonderful BL with a pitch perfect portrayal of long term pining, age gap, and the stepbrothers trope. The acting and chemistry are ON POINT (especially from the leads) which made the resulting characters very believable. When it dwells in intimate family drama, it's stunning. It's slightly less successful when it leaves the home and goes gritty. It's few flaws are the result of curtailed length. It could have used more breathing room to deal with side plots, characters, and companion character development. The editing was occasionally choppy and packed with flashbacks that broke the emotional tension. Still, those are mere quibbles. This is an excellent show that I know I'm going to be recommending a lot. 9/10

Finally Taiwan hits another one out of the park.

About.

Damn.

Time.

Blue Boys (Korea Sat YouTube) 4 of ? - Oh it’s so good, and they are so tortured and it’s just charming and I can’t EVEN. I just love it. I love that Korea is giving us this right now. You’re an idiot if you’re not watching this show, it’s truly spectacular.

At 25:00 in Akasaka AKA 25 Ji Akasaka de (Japan Thurs Gaga) ep 4 of 10 - Well well well Japan. I see how you kneed. I enjoyed this episode better than the first two, and I am way into our Bad Boy second lead. I can already feel myself succumbing  to the syndrome. Next week = the obligatory onsen ep! 

Living With Him AKA Kare no Iru Seikatsu (Japan Thurs Gaga) ep 5 of 10 - Omg most adorbs failed linguistic negotiation. 

Boys Be Brave AKA Roommates (Korea Thurs Viki) ep 5-6 of 8 - I love the side couple. It’s a shame we’re finally getting some truly great class conflict and it’s relegated to crumbs.

Love is like a Cat (Korea Mon Viki) eps 11-12fin - Well that was a waste of time. There was no connection (of any kind) between the leads. The language thing was hella weird and likely added to that. The past history of the Korean character was necessary to know from the start, its lack throughout, meant there was no depth to his character. They tried to tackle all the interesting stuff in the final 2 eps. AND they even killed the dog. I never thought I'd type this sentance, but Peach of Time is better.

I don’t know. 5/10 I guess

All in all:

A disappointing lackluster and barely cohesive BL about a jerk Thai actor (speaking Thai) who has to work for a Korean animal rescue cafe as a publicity stunt. It's difficult to believe the leads like each other, let alone fall in love. The acting is stiff, the characters lack motivation and cohesion, and there's not much to recommend this show beyond some pretty visuals. Also, they kill the dog. All in all, a disappointing and unsuccessful joint venture that mostly highlighted that between Thailand and Korea the style of BL, narrative approach, language cadence, and acting techniques all clash.

It's airing but...

Lady Boy Friends (Thai WeTV grey) 16 eps - reminds me a bit too much of Diary of Tootsies only high school. Not my thing. DNF unless it turns a corner and is truly amazing.

You Made My Day (Thai YT) ep 1 of 5 - mini series staring the I Will Knock You couple Tar & Bom, started but I couldn't find it. I also didn't try very hard.

A Balloon's Landing (Taiwan movie) trailer - A frustrated Hong Kong writer, Tian Yu, meets a Taipei street gangster, Xiang (Fandy Fan from HIStory2: Crossing the Line), and the two of them embark on a journey to find the Bay of Vanishing Whales. Along the way, they discover unexpected twists and turns and close bonds, which brings out the message that "there is always someone like you in this world who is waiting for you. This released to cinemas in Taiwan, no word on international release.

Memory in the Letter (Thai WeTV) - it's done, tell me if I should bother?

Fan's Only Corner

Someone asked in a comment (which tumblr promptly ate) about group sleepovers in BLs. It's happened a few times but the only one I can recall being noted and particularly lovely (and VERY college) was in Nitiman. There's also one in Lovesick.

Next Week Looks Like This:

5/16 Blossom Campus (Korea Thurs Gaga & iQIYI) ep 1 of 6 - Strongberry doing classic uni BL! Weeee!

5/19 OMG Vampire (Thai Sun ????) ep 1 of 10 - LeeFrank are back - not unlike the undead (as it were). But how do we feel about it? Unsure given their track record.

Upcoming BLs for 2024 are listed here. This list is not kept updated, so please leave a comment if you know something new or RP with additions.

May Releases

VBL (Taiwan) is releasing 4 'Special Episode' epilogues to their 4 2023 shows every Friday this month on Gagaoolala, Viki & Viu. Not sure on search terms or how to find these. (Or, frankly, if we need them.)

5/10 – You Are Mine

5/17 – VIP Only

5/24 – Stay By My Side

5/31 – Anti Reset

5/25 The Time of Fever AKA Unintentional Love Story 2 (Korea movie) trailer - HoTae & DongHee are back but unfortunately not in a cinema near me. Side couple from Unintentional Love Story, same actors, same character names. I love them. I NEED TO SEE THIS.

5/28 My Biker 2 (Thai movie YT?) - trailer

5/31 The Time of Huannan (Taiwan movie) - May not be BL

THIS WEEK’S BEST MOMENTS

LOVE a smile kiss. Love it. Two killer kisses from PondPhuwin. Elegantly done, boys. Thank you very much.

I love them a lot all of a sudden. (All We Are)

It's hard to give MaxTul a run on their crown as best bodies in BL, but boy these two are giving it their, erm, best. (Wandee Goodday)

(Last week)

Streaming services are listed by how I (usually) watch, which is with a USA based IP, and often offset by a day because time zones are a pain.

The tag BLigade: @doorajar @solitaryandwandering @my-rose-tinted-glasses @babymbbatinygirl @babymbbatinygirl @isisanna-blog @mmastertheone @pickletrip @aliceisathome @urikawa-miyuki @tokillamonger @rocketturtle4 @blglplus @anythinggoesintheshire @everlightly @renafire

If ya wanna be tagged each week leave a comment and I will add you to the template. Easy peesy.

[gay-dorito-dust]

I just imagine the ANGER that reader has when dipper & mabel becomes distraction

The twins are arguing with each other and reader just calmly said "what if just volunteer myself with the memory gun i mean i also know the equation" then they said something hurtful calmly that make the twins realize how their action put a nail into the coffin of their niece & nephew

When they got back and want to make a deal with bill but he didn't believe them but then reader said "you can't possibly got in his head with that metal plate of his" (they say something like that) bill wasn't angry but more like entertaint and make a deal with them, reader just wants no harm comes to the kids and town people's after they give him the equation and when asked abt the stan twins they just don't care

You didn’t care what happened to yourself, you really didn’t but what you weren’t about to do was let Mabel answer dipper become distractions.

You refused. So while Stan and Ford were bickering, again, you whistled sharply, which got the two older men to stop their argument to look over at you.

‘How about instead of using your own flesh and blood and possibly getting them killed due to your negligence and let me to make the deal with bill instead, you’re not the only one who knows the equation Ford so you can drop the hero complex.’ You snapped and it silenced the entire Pines Family when they realised you were right.

‘Are you sure about-‘

‘I am very certain Stanford.’ You cut Ford off and his face was full of hurt but begrudging acceptance, he knew that once your mind was made up nothing else mattered.

‘Hey let’s at least-‘

‘I don’t care about what the next words to leave your mouth are Stanley!’ You hissed, making him take a step back. ‘What I’m not about to do is put those two kids in danger like you two, it’s almost like you forget they are kids at the end of the day with parents waiting for them back home.’ You reminded the pair as they looked at Dipper and Mabel who were gripping onto you tightly, pleading with you to not make the deal with Bill.

Ford sighed. ‘Fine, if this is what you want to do.’ He trails off.

‘It is.’ You said with a newfound strength. ‘Since It seems like I’m the only one who gives a fuck about Gravity Falls and the people in it.’ You added but left Ford and Stan with the twins before they had the urge to further push you on that statement.

When you finally confront Bill, who was obviously waiting for Stanford, you could see him visibly deflate and couldn’t help but scoff. ‘Oh come on Bill I’m not that bad.’

Bill chuckles. ‘Sure you might not be but no offence, I was expecting fordsy, not his assistant- or should I say former assistant.’ Your jaw clenched, bill sure knew how to put salt in the wound but still you pressed on, for dipper and Mabel and the weird but lovable townsfolk of Gravity Falls; your true family.

‘Sorry to disappoint but with that metal plate in his head, there’s no chance you would’ve made it even close to the equation.’ You fake winced as you saw the annoyance flicker in Bill’s one eye. ‘Sorry but I’m the closest to the next best thing for you.’ You add with a shrug, fully accepting what was going to happen to you as you didn’t have any one of worth to mourn you nor your memories.

‘Ugh if I have to since option one was unavailable,’ Bill drawled as he held out his hand, not bothering to look at you, ‘is there any boring thing you want to say now in your final act of heroism fleshbag?’ He asks.

‘For you to leave dipper, Mabel and the citizens of Gravity Falls alone, they’ve been through enough as it is.’ You tell him, watching as the blue flames flicker and lick at his hand. Bill blinked at you, having where this stereotypical speech one too many times in his long, long, long life, ‘anything else, or rather anyone else?’

You knew who he was suggesting but all you said in regards to Stan and Ford was; ‘kill them, torture them, make them into your personally puppets whatever, I honestly don’t care.’

Bill’s eye widened. ‘Oh now this is interesting! You’re becoming interesting to me now fleshbag! I haven’t heard such venom towards another fellow fleshbag in so long! Deal!’ He exclaims as he grabs your hand, cementing the finality of your deal, how naive the dream demon was to not see the trap he had walked into by doing so.

[ramp-it-up]

Red Wings

Summary: Bucky wants to earn his red wings with you.

Pairing: Beefy Bucky Barnes x Reader

Word count: Around 1300

A/N: This is based on this ask:  What if reader and Bucky are shopping and he sees her put feminine cleanliness products in the basket? How would he react?

Again, sorry this is so late! I’ve been neglecting my inbox. This is a one shot

Warnings: 18+ Only, Minors DNI. SMUT! Read at your own risk; curate your own experience. Wee bit of angst on the part of the reader. Period talk, personal hygeine products, suggestive language (whew!) Talk of: Period sex, protected sex, unprotected sex (you still need to wrap it up), nipple play, anal play,  shower sex, anal sex. 

 Not Beta’d. All errors my own. 

I no longer have a taglist. Please follow @rampitupandread and turn on notifications to learn when I post! 😘

I Do NOT Consent to my work being reposted, translated or presented on any other blog or site other than by myself.

Despite your best efforts, James Buchanan Barnes found you.

He was, after all, a world class agent of stealth. And the former Winter Soldier.

You should have known better than to think you would outsmart him.

You watched in horror as he approached you with what he had in his metal hand.

You gasped.

Bucky raised his eyebrow at you and smirked. Then he shook his head as he deposited his item in the grocery cart.

It was a huge box of Cheerios. Plain.

“I know you don’t like them, Doll. We can go and you can pick out your sugar infested chocolate doo dahs if you want.”

You just nodded and hid your hand behind your back, a huge lump in your throat.

“Hold up. We need a couple boxes of these.” 

Bucky grinned as he grabbed two cartons of Magnum XLs and tossed them in the cart. 

“Those should last the week.”

You just stared at him, trying to slowly move your hand as you backed toward the shelf.

Bucky chuckled again and grabbed two more boxes.

“You’re right, we need more than that.” 

He waggled his eyebrows at you, and then noticed what you were doing.

“What ya got there doll?” 

He nodded toward you, suspicion evident on his face.

You were caught. There was no use lying. You sighed and brought your hand from around your back to reveal a feminine hygiene product.

“Might not need those condoms this week, Bucky.”

You avoided his eyes as you deposited it in the cart.

Well, this was it. You’d just started being domestic with Bucky and you really liked him, but this might be a deal breaker. You clutched the handle of the shopping cart and stared at the wheels.

“Hey,” Bucky moved close to you and tilted your face up by your chin, forcing you to look up at him. 

“You good, Doll?”

You cleared your throat and tried to avoid those bluer than blues.

“I- I’m fine. That time of the month, y-know. So…”

You huffed.

“I know it’s gross, and I understand if you want to…”

“Doll. Look at me.”

You focused on Bucky, your cheeks hot.

“I know it’s your time of the month. I asked if you were good. Are your symptoms worse than usual?”

“H-how…?”

Bucky smiled down at you and leaned in.

“I can smell you.”

You closed your eyes, mortified.

“I am so… so sorry Bucky.”

“I said, look at me.”

Your eyes snapped open at his tone. You watched him lick his lips and observed the look in his eyes.

He looked..it couldn’t be.

“No need to apologize, unless it’s for not giving me any sooner.” 

Bucky watched your mouth as it dropped open.

“You’re killing me here, Doll.”

He cocked his head.

“We’ve been intimate for what? About three weeks? And we’ve been dating for three months?”

You were able to nod as his hand moved down to gently rest on your shoulder, his thumb brushing your neck. Goosebumps were raised all over your body.

“It was torture during each of your goddess times for me to hold myself back. You smell so… Goddamn Doll. You don’t know, do you?”

You shook your head now, speechless.

“You were on when we met, remember? I wanted to ravage you, but that would have been rude.”

You giggled, remembering your instant attraction.

“Oh my god, Bucky…”

“It was somewhat easier that night, since we barely knew each other, and plus I was havin the time of my life talking to you. You’re so damn smart, Doll”

Your boyfriend looked at you appreciatively, then went on.

“But when we became a couple, each month I just wanted to revel in you, but I sensed you were uncomfortable with it. But it was hard. God, I was so hard. Every single time.”

This time when you shook your head, it was in disbelief. 

Bucky pulled you closer to him.

“I am not a little boy. I’m a grown man. In fact, I’m an old man.” 

You stared up into his face, captivated. 

“I am not afraid of your womanhood. It’s not ‘gross.’ In fact, I happen to know that it can be very pleasurable for me… and for you during this time…”

You put your hands on his chest, feeling as if you couldn’t breathe.

How could he be this perfect?

“You’re more sensitive, especially your tits, Doll. Right?”

You didn’t, you couldn’t answer, but the answer was pressed up against him. He could feel it. He leaned down to whisper in your ear.

“They are bigger and softer right now. Nipples so fucking delicious. I bet I could make you cum just from licking them. Maybe sucking softly?”

The moan you let out was not appropriate for the grocery store, thank goodness it wasn’t loud. Bucky had you wrapped around his little finger, and you wanted to be wrapped around his big dick, cycle be damned.

“If you let me in, you’d be extra tight, you’d hug me so good and snug and I’d have to go slow, until you beg me to go fast, and it will feel like extra creamy goodness, especially because we won’t need those…”

He nodded toward the condoms and your eyes watered at the thought of fucking Bucky raw. He took a ragged breath before he continued.

“We can do it in the shower, or just lay down a towel. We’re both grown, Doll.”

He paused.

“Or…” 

Bucky was huffing in your ear now and you could feel his erection against your hip . 

“Or… I know you like it when I play, my fingers, or my tongue… in your other hole…”

“Bucky!” 

You hit his chest, and looked around. Bucky didn’t care who might have been around.

“Am I lying?” 

Bucky laughed and turned you around, grasping the cart around you, so you could feel his cock in your backside. You flushed when an older couple walked by and smiled at you two. It looked innocent, but it was anything but.

When they were out of earshot, you replied. 

“No… it’s just… you’re just so… I don’t know if it will fit...”

Bucky leaned down and kissed your neck, one hand splayed gently against your stomach, as the other reached for some personal lubricant and put it in the cart.

“Oh, Baby Doll,” Bucky groaned in your ear. “We’ll make it fit. And we’ll feel so good doing it.” 

You used to think you didn’t want it. But now you did. Your body was ready and clenching around nothing. That had to change.

“Fuck. Bucky.”

The neediness in your voice was readily apparent.

“Yes.”

He took a ragged breath, trying to calm down.  

“Bottom line is if you want to fuck Bucky on your cycle, off your cycle, 365, 24/7, this dick is yours. No qualifications, no black out dates. I want to have you in every single way.”

He cleared his throat and stepped back from you.

“So get whatever products you need. No need to hide them from me, Doll.”

He grabbed your neck and brought you in to kiss your forehead.

“I’ve got to take a walk because I have the biggest hard-on. I’m going to go get you some cocoa sugar dyno puffs on aisle 10 before I bend you over the salad bar and fuck you until we get arrested.”

You both laughed but the look in his eye said that he wasn’t totally joking. You swallowed and nodded, reaching for your products.

You turned around and Bucky was gone, as if that had been a dream. You began to wonder if it was.

Your phone vibrated and you pulled it out to look at the message.

Hurry up Doll. You got me so worked up that  at the very least I gotta suck your nipples until you cum. 

You practically ran to the checkout lane. 

When you saw James Buchanan Barnes’ fine ass waiting for you was when you decided to do the absolute most.

[loving-barnes]

Bucky Barnes - My past, my mission

A/N: I was watching Marvel movies and this just popped into my head. It's not good, there are mistakes but I tried. Please, beware that there are heavy topics discussed in this one shot. Now, I can take another break for a decade.

Pairing: Avenger!Bucky Barnes x Avenger!enhanced!female reader

Warning: angst, dark themes (mention of abuse and sexual abuse, torture, children), death, fluff

Please, do not read if you are under 18. This story contains darker themes/topics.

Words: 10 000+

FULL MASTERLIST

The team was worried. They had been watching Y/N distance from them and they didn’t know why. Everything seemed fine. That changed almost two weeks ago. She started to hide in her room, attend the gym when no one was there and kept silent when they had a meeting. No one knew what happened. The only person she talked to was Nick Fury. More than once they saw her in a small conference room with him, where they were talking. 

“You need to tell them what is happening,” said Nick when they were once again sitting together, talking. “The team is here for you.” 

“No,” she said stubbornly. “I’m going to deal with it myself.” 

He sighed. “You need backup. It’s dangerous. You won’t be able to handle it on your own.” 

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t want them to know this part of my life,” she whispered. A tear was trying to escape her eye but she managed to control her emotions. 

“Listen, they already noticed that you are not being yourself,” he said. “Since you’ve found out the location of the Youth Center, you are acting differently. It took a toll on you. I know how hard your childhood and teenage years were. But I am telling you, if you want to end this, you need a backup for this mission.” 

“I can handle it on my own,” she raised her voice. “They made me who I am today. I know how they operate. I’m going to do it alone. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. And if I die, so be it.” 

“Come on,” he was getting irritated. “Take at least Barnes. You two have a similar history and work well together.”

“I said no,” she smashed her hand against the table. “You won’t change my mind. I’m doing it alone and I am leaving tonight.” She stood up with a loud noise. The chair creaked. “If I don’t make it back, tell them I just left. Tell them I was relocated. My only wish is you won’t tell them the truth.” 

Nick shook his head. “You are making a mistake.” 

“I told you the same when you took me in and made me part of the team.” She reached her hand to his. He hesitated but took it and they shook hands. “I am thankful.” 

“I am not saying goodbye to you, Y/L/N,” he said. “At least think about it.”

She left the conference room and headed back to her bedroom. It was time to pack and leave. This was her moment, the perfect opportunity to destroy the place that used children to experiment on them. It was a dark place. They were kidnapping them, abusing them and testing on them as if they were lab rats. Successful tests resulted in children with different abilities. Those that obliged were spared and kept as weapons. Others were killed. 

When she escaped, they moved places and she couldn’t find them since - until now. Oh, how she’s been waiting for this opportunity. 

The Centre got bigger, hidden in the woods in Northern Canada. There was nothing but wild nature. The weather would be cold and unpleasant. Fury was right when he told her to bring backup, but she didn’t want to risk the lives of people whom she considered family. What if it didn’t seem as bad as it was presented? The truth was, they didn’t have a lot of information. 

“Hey, Y/N,” she heard Natasha say her name. 

“Hi,” she replied, not looking at her, not stopping to chat. 

“Come on, talk to me. We are friends,” she ran to her, trying to walk her pace. “Everyone is worried about you.” 

Y/n rolled her eyes. “Everything’s fine,” she said. “I have a lot on my plate these days.”

“You are a bad liar, Y/N. We all can see that it’s not fine and something is bothering you. You’ve been keeping your distance, you barely talk to us. What happened?” 

“Nothing,” she was annoyed. “I’ll deal with it myself.” 

That answer made Natasha stop and let her leave alone. She was immediately thinking about what she said. What did she mean by “deal with it myself”? She could already put two and two together. 

She turned around and briskly walked to the other side of the building where the rest of the team was hanging out. It was a Saturday evening. That meant beer time and chat. When she arrived in the lounge room, all eyes were on her. “Did you find out anything?” Steve was the first to ask. 

She sat down on an armchair, frowning. “No and yes,” she said. “She didn’t want to talk at all. She barely looked at me.” 

“And what is the “yes” for?” Sam asked, confused. 

“She said, she will deal with it herself,” Natasha said. “Which indicates she was not talking about mental or emotional things. This means she was talking about something bigger.” 

Bucky was silently sitting next to Sam, watching his friend think out loud. He was holding a beer in his metal hand. No one knew how hard this time had been on him. No one knew how much his heart ached when Y/N stopped talking to him - to everyone. 

“Do you think she could be going on a solo mission?” Tony asked. 

“Maybe that’s it,” she nodded. 

“What the fuck? I thought Fury would discuss it with us,” said Stark angrily. “I’m not saying she can’t handle it alone, but we should know about the mission and discuss it.” 

“I have to agree,” Steve nodded. “She works well with us, but I’m not sure she was ready for a solo mission.” 

“This whole thing stinks,” Sam said. “Think about it - she’s been talking to Fury for the last few days. Her whole demeanour changed with a snap of fingers.” 

“FRIDAY, do we know anything on Y/N?” Tony asked his AI. “What’s her status?” 

“She’s currently in her room, not accepting visitors,” said FRIDAY. 

“What if she asked for transition?” Clint asked. 

“What?” Bucky’s eyes widened. That thought made his heart sink. Why would she want to do that? Was she not happy here? He thought they were friends. He thought that maybe… 

Tony made a face. “I don’t think so. We would already know if she was that unhappy.” 

“I think we saw a lot of that for the last few days,” said Sam. 

“Let’s give her a day and we will try to talk to her tomorrow,” Steve suggested. “We don’t know what is going on and we don’t want to jump to conclusions.” 

The team relaxed - except for Bucky and Natasha. They both were thinking about her. They were trying to figure out what was going on. 

“We should ask Fury,” said Bucky out of nowhere. 

“No,” Natasha shook her head. “If they made a deal, he would keep his lips sealed.” 

Y/N didn’t waste her time. She put on her custom tactical suit that would keep her warm even in the cold weather. She packed the most important stuff, but mostly geared up. She would be using her special abilities that she got unwillingly. 

She checked her watch. It was time. The sooner she’d leave the better. She wouldn’t be able to say goodbyes to anyone. It was better this way. She put on a long black leather jacket, and a backpack and left her room. She was about to pilot a jet for about six hours. It would be a long night. 

Tony was awoken by a beeping sound. He slowly opened his eyes and groaned. He finally got some sleep after a week and he was rudely awakened by his AI.

“Boss,” FRIDAY sounded urgent. “The Jet 05 was taken five hours ago,” she informed him. 

He quickly sat up, rubbing his eyes. “What? Who authorised it? Why didn’t you wake me sooner?” 

“Nick Fury,” FRIDAY answered. “The jet was taken by Agent Y/L/N. I tried to wake you, but you were deep asleep.” 

“What the fuck?” he said to himself. “Call the team immediately and I want Nick Fury here as soon as possible.” 

The team gathered in the biggest conference room they had. Tony was waiting for them, with a hologram of Y/N’s information presented in the middle of the table. He seemed nervous, even pissed and the team saw it. 

“Where did she go?” Natasha was the first one to ask. That’s when a map of the jet's route was shown to them. 

“North Canada. She’s still in the air,” said Tony. “The autopilot was turned off and she’s not using FRIDAY. But there is one tracking device she didn’t turn off. That’s why we know her location.” 

Bucky was silently sitting in a chair, looking directly at her photo. He should have gone to her, talked to her and convinced her to take him with her.  

“You okay?” Steve asked him silently when he noticed his friend struggling. 

“No,” he admitted. 

Steve sighed and leaned closer to him. “I know how much she means to you, but we need more information before we proceed.” 

When Nick stepped into the room, he was met with stern glares and upset people. He expected that. He knew what the reaction would be and he was prepared for everything. “You only figured it out because I arranged it,” he said. “And, also, because Natasha listens.” 

“Why don’t we know more about this?” Natasha asked him. “She’s part of the team, part of this family and you two have decided to leave us out of it.” 

Fury took a chair next to Stark. He was calm. “There’s a lot of things you still don’t know about her. When we decided to bring her here, we had long discussions about her, the abilities she has and her past. We made a deal: she would tell you her story once she’s ready.” 

“Why?” Clint asked. 

“It’s not my story to tell,” said Fury. “You cannot expect someone to tell you about other people’s lives. Same here - she wanted trust, she wanted to feel safe before she’d let you in.”

“So, she doesn’t trust us?” Natasha asked. 

“She does. It was only a matter of time before she’d tell you everything. This, however, is something bigger than you can imagine. I know all of you had a rough past. Y/N’s the newest member of the Avengers initiative and I gave her my promise not to tell you a word.” 

“You are not going to tell us what her mission is?” Steve glared at the director. “We should just wait and see if she comes back?” 

Fury nodded. “That’s what she wants.” 

Bucky thought back to the moments when they talked together. He recalled one night when they were both sitting on the rooftop of the building when neither of them could sleep. They talked about their nightmares, but she wasn’t specific. There was one thing he could remember her saying. 

“I wasn’t born with these powers. They were given to me,” she said sadly, looking at the little purple lights swirling between her fingers. 

They were given to her, which meant she was on her way to a place that gave her the powers. His eyes widened. “Holy shit,” he gasped and that brought everyone’s attention. 

“What?” 

“Two months back, we were sitting on the roof talking and she said to me that she wasn’t born with the power. It was given to her,” Bucky explained. 

Natasha caught up. “She’s going to the place where she was given her power.” 

Fury nodded. “She didn’t want any backup. She wants to do it alone. I believe she’s ready but I suggested she took someone from the team.” 

Barnes abruptly stood up from the chair, letting it fall on the floor and ran out of the conference room. He was ready to find her and be her backup. All he needed was to change, armour up and take a jet. 

“Bucky, wait,” Natasha shouted his name. 

“I have to find her,” he shouted back, not stopping. 

“I’m coming with you. We’ll meet at the hangar.” 

Y/N had no idea that the team had figured it all up - sort of. She arrived in the province of Nunavut, Canada. She landed with the jet in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by deep forest. Once the jet was secured, she left her coat in the jet and grabbed some weapons for the mission. All the details she memorised while on her way to this place. 

The building was three times bigger than the last complex she was raised in. Many children of various ages were held captive in this Youth Centre. The number was still unknown. That’s what it was called. To the public, it was known as a young offender’s institution - a place where they taught children to be better and do better. Y/N knew the truth. She saw the truth. it was a place where they tortured, killed and experimented on kids. All of the memories came rushing back. 

They were as painful as the torture she experienced. For a moment she felt as if she travelled back in time and saw her arms covered in IVs. They were bruised from the needles and burst veins. No wonder she had a problem withdrawing blood or vaccinations.

Her breath became shaky. Maybe it was the cold, maybe it was the painful feeling crawling through her body. 

Using her power, she lifted from the ground and flew through the forest to her final destination. This was her opportunity for revenge - destroy this evil facility and the people who worked there. 

What about the children? What about those who were not corrupted and wanted to live freely? She didn’t know. All she wanted was to destroy this place, even if it meant losing her own life. Was it wrong of her to kill everyone? Maybe.

There it was, a castle-like building in the middle of nowhere. When she was young, the Youth Centre was located in the States. Once she freed herself, they relocated here. 

She landed in a tree where she had a great vangate point. First, she needed a plan. By looking at the perimeter, she could see at least a dozen soldiers walking around the place, keeping an eye on intruders. From the files Fury gave her, there were potentially at least over a hundred men walking around the building. That was the last thing she feared. 

If there were any enhanced children, that would be a problem. It was hard to predict whether they were compelled to obey their orders or if they were still able to think for themselves. The first thing she should do was to infiltrate the building and try to find any children who were still human and try to get them out. Afterwards, it was time to destroy this place.

“If only Wanda and Vision were with us,” Natasha said while piloting the jet. 

Bucky was checking his guns and ammo in the back, wanting to be as prepared as possible. They had four hours to go. Y/N’s jet was located in the middle of a forest, in Canada. From the satellite that belonged to Stark, they found a building there too. It made sense that’s where she was going. 

“They wanted some time off,” Steve commented. “We will have to do it without them.” 

The Captain wanted to join Natasha and Bucky. So did Sam and Tony. Bruce and Clint stayed at the HQ where they monitored the situation from there. 

“I will have a serious talk with Y/N once we are on our way home,” said Tony. 

“Everyone calm down,” said Natasha. “She’s doing what she thought was the best.” 

“I don’t get it,” Sam thought out loud. “How bad could it be?” 

Bucky kept his eyes lowered on the gun he had in his hand. He kept replaying all the conversations he had with her. He thought of one moment when they were at Stark’s party.

She was sitting at the bar, drinking wine when he approached her. She looked stunning that night. They joked, commented on the snobby people around them and laughed at the event. “In the end, I’m enjoying this,” she said with a smile. 

“Really?” Bucky was surprised. “I thought parties weren’t your thing.” 

“That’s true. But I like to enjoy life as it is now. You never know how bad a person had it in the past,” she shrugged and drank the rest of the wine in one go. He could relate to that. If only he knew what her past was. 

“How are you doing?” a hand appeared on his shoulder. It was Steve checking up on him. 

Bucky shook his head. “I don’t know. I keep thinking back at our conversations, trying to find a clue, but I have nothing,” he admitted. “I want her to be safe, Steve. I care about her. I should have told her that a long time ago.” 

“We’ll find her and bring her back home,” said Steve reassuringly. “Then you can tell her.” 

“I fucking love her, Steve,” he finally admitted to his friend. “I never thought I would after everything that happened. I fear that we’ll be late.”

Y/N’s heart skipped a beat out of nowhere. She frowned. That was odd. She thought it was the adrenaline, but she wasn’t sure. 

She was running out of time. The sun would set in less than four hours and she wanted to finish this mission before dark. The plan was simple - attack, use her abilities to kill every man that was there, get inside, look around and find those assholes that started this twisted institute. If they were able to destroy Hydra and the Red Room, she would be able to end this. 

She could manipulate objects and create force fields. She had both offensive and defensive abilities. She and Wanda were almost alike. However, Wanda was a witch and was able to do more than Y/N. Wanda said to her, that she’s powerful too. 

With a deep breath, she jumped off the tree. Y/N was ready to end it all once and forever. 

With her powers, she captured each man who was outside, throwing their bodies to the wall and breaking their bones. Some of them died, some of them were unconscious from the pain. She cleared her path into the building. Once she approached the courtyard, she was met with more men, heavily armed. It seemed as if they were expecting her. 

All those emotions, rage, anger, and sadness caused her power to intensify. She was able to cover herself with a forcefield while she disarmed them and destroyed their weapons. That’s when an alarm was turned on.

Focus on the power running through your veins, she heard Wanda say. That’s what she told her all the time when they trained together. 

She was powerful, she could do it. She could end it all. 

Once all the men were down, she walked to the entrance door. Her adrenaline was high. Somewhere deep, she was thrilled. A smile appeared on her face as she walked further inside. For a brief second, she lost focus and a bullet scratched her shoulder, making her bleed. She groaned from the pain. 

Her eyes turned purple as she gathered her strength, surrounded the soldier in her powerful magical grip and threw him out of the nearest window. Fucker. 

First, she wandered the hallways of one sector, checking each room. They were empty. She turned to another hallway and checked there - nothing. There were classrooms and offices. It was all empty. 

When she met more soldiers, she swiftly defeated them. She took out her gun, ready to use it. She spent a lot of time at the shooting range. When an opportunity came, she shot a man straight into his head. Headshot, she heard a low male voice inside her head. 

Weird, there were no children to be found. Was it a trap? It was all too easy. That was until she stepped into a hall where she was met with those who made her the way she was. 

Adam Lewinski, the head of the Youth Centre, was staring at her like a hawk. By his side was his wife Greta. He had a right hand, Vladimir Vanko. They were standing at the very end of the hall. 

“What a pleasant surprise,” said Adam with a broad smile on his lips. “Did you miss your home?” 

They hadn’t aged a lot since she escaped. The woman had grey hair and Vladimir gained weight. Their presence made Y/N nauseous. She wanted to scream from all the pain but nothing came out. Her brain was fogged. She heard a loud ringing sound in her ears. 

She registered laughter. “Not so powerful, are you? And you call yourself an Avenger?” 

Y/N tried to open her eyes and looked at the cause of her pain. There was a boy, maybe eight years old, using his power on her. How come they were able to modify them to possess such ability? 

You know what to do, she heard herself say. There was no other way. She had to do it. Kill him before he kills you. He’s lost. 

Gathering her strength, she twisted her hand and sent a purple mist at the child, wrapping it around its neck. With a pull, she heard a loud crack and simultaneously the pain was gone. Taking a deep breath, she fell to her knees. Finally, she could breathe. However, it took its toll on her. 

Y/N just killed a child. 

Tears flooded her eyes as she tried to breathe through her nose. “Fuck you,” she said with a shaky voice. “How can you use children like this?” She stood up on her feet, glaring at the trio in front of her. 

“Haven’t we made you special?” asked Greta and took a step toward Y/N. “Our program gave you the abilities. We made you who you are now. You are an Avenger thanks to us. And yet you are an ungrateful brat,” she laughed. 

“You destroyed families. You took children from their parents and killed them. You used us against each other, making us kill one another. Do you think that is normal?” Y/N asked. “Do you think this is a good thing?”

“You don’t understand it, do you?” Vladimir approached her without any fear. His voice was deep and cold. “Without us, you would be nothing. All of those children were meant to be doomed - raised by abusive parents, in the streets. We gave you a new home, we gave you a purpose.” 

“No, you didn’t,” Y/N opposed. 

Adam whistled. It was a high-pitched sound that echoed around the hall. That’s when more than twenty children entered the hall. Y/N’s eyes widened. Some of them were teenagers, and some of them were literal children. The youngest must have been five years old. 

“There are our greatest creations,” Greta said. “They are more powerful than you think - some have superstrength, one is fast, other can cause you pain with a simple touch. You killed our beloved Lucas. He was such an extraordinary boy. Can you imagine harming someone with a simple look?” 

“You are nothing compared to them,” Vladimir said. “Just because you can manipulate some objects… as if that was something special,” he laughed. 

“We control them,” Vladimir continued. “They would do anything we say - protect us, die for us. They are programmed differently. We didn’t want to allow them to think as a free person.” 

“Weapons of mass destruction,” Adam added. “That’s what they are. That’s what they were meant to be.”

Y/N took a good look at those children. They seemed normal, human. Inside, they were modified, and powerful. How powerful? She was about to find out. 

“Children, it’s playtime,” Adam clapped his hands. 

That was their cue. Slowly, one after another they started to walk towards her. This was the moment she realised how stupid she was to not bring a backup. If she had to die, she’d die trying to stop the potential threat. 

“By the way,” she heard Adam say, “some of the children are waiting for their death, others were moved to our buyers. There is a group that will be given the serum once we are done with you.” 

You have to kill them, she said to herself. End it all. These are not children anymore, she reminded herself. 

That’s when a first child threw a fireball directly at her. She protected herself with a force field. Another hit came right afterwards. Shit. There was a girl that had superstrength. She was able to get close to Y/N and hit her on the right shoulder. Y/N immediately fought back, throwing her against the farther wall. Once she fell to the ground, the wall was covered in her blood. 

Luckily, these children were not immortal. 

The team landed the jet right next to the one that Y/N took. Bucky was the first one to run out of the jet, running to the other one to check it. He didn’t find her. “Fuck,” he mumbled, holding her leather jacket tightly in his fists. 

“We’ve got to move,” Steve ordered the team. “We don’t know how much time we got.” 

The newest nano-tech suit covered Tony’s body. He was ready for some action. “FRIDAY, talk to me. What do we have?” 

“I have analysed the building. There are many dead people. I have captured activity inside the building. It looks like Miss Y/L/N is there,” she informed them. “Boss, if the scanning is correct, she’s fighting children.”

Natasha’s eyes widened, not believing what she heard. “What?” she gasped. “What do you mean children?” 

“The place is holding captive more than 80 children. A group of them are now in an active battle with Miss Y/L/N,” said the AI. 

“Children?” Sam said to himself. 

“I can capture levels of power coming from the place.” 

“Enhanced,” said Steve. Slowly, they were putting the pieces together. “This must be the place where she gained her abilities.” 

“This must be the place where she grew up,” Natasha whispered.

Bucky’s heart ached. She went to fight her demons alone. He was the first one to move, leaving the team standing there. “Wait,” Natasha called after him. “We need a plan.” 

“No, we need to move, now, before it’s too late.” 

“He’s right,” Steve nodded. “Tony, Sam, get in the sky and secure the perimeter. Keep us updated.” 

The time was ticking. 

Y/N was bleeding from her nose. Her body ached as the children took turns, trying to kill her. So far, she was able to eliminate five of them. It was becoming more difficult. They were stronger than her. They didn’t have any emotions. All they wanted to do was finish her off. Y/N’s energy was low. It was hard to keep up with them. 

Before she knew it, they captured her and brought her down on her knees. The girl with superstrength punched her in the face, making her bleed from her mouth. She tore her skin under the right eye. Another hit was on her stomach. Y/N groaned from all the pain and spit out some blood. 

Her vision was blurred. Her ears were ringing and it was hard to breathe. This was it. She was too weak to defeat a bunch of enhanced children. Their experiments were different than back in the day. They had no mercy. 

You need to kill them all, she heard a voice in her head. They are not children anymore. 

Out of nowhere, she could see the faces of people she loved the most. Natasha was smiling at her. Steve had a proud look on his face, and Sam laughed as if she said the funniest joke ever. And then there was Bucky who kept lovingly staring at her, holding his hand stretched out to her. You are stronger than you think. 

Oh, how she loved him. She would never be able to tell him. She was too scared to do so and now, she wouldn’t have the chance. The love she had for her family and for that man brought a warm feeling to her chest. It was beautiful and pleasant. It made her want to fight more. 

“Any last words?” she heard Adam’s voice echo around her. 

“Burn in hell,” she mumbled. 

Y/N gathered all the energy she had left. She never did this before. As if her body was telling her what to do, guiding her through the unknown and making her release it all for the whole world to see - her full potential. 

With a painful scream erupting from her throat, she released the power from her entire body. Each child was thrown away into the cracking walls of the building that started to shake from its core. The ceiling started to fall and the stability of the building weakened. 

“You are going to kill us all,” she heard Greta scream. 

Y/N’s purple mist changed into purple-blue electricity, surrounding her body. The ground under her started to shake. It reminded her of an earthquake. She closed her eyes and let it all consume her. Everyone dead meant no more potential threat to the world. And then, she threw her hands up in the air. 

“What the hell is happening?” Sam asked once he flew over the building. “Something’s not right.” 

“The building is about to collapse,” FRIDAY informed them. “There is a high amount of energy surrounding the place. It belongs to Miss Y/L/N.” 

“No!” Bucky screamed.

When the Captain, the Widow and the Soldier arrived at the border of the estate, they watched as the whole building started to fall before their eyes. Blue and purple cracks appeared on the walls. They were watching it without breath until the rays of Y/N’s power got out of the building. There was a sound that reminded them of an explosion. And then the building collapsed. 

Everyone got covered in dust and the place got silent. The team kept staring at the ruins of the building. It was unrecognizable. No one could have survived it. 

“Holy shit,” someone said.

Bucky fell on his knees, not believing that he had lost her. He couldn’t breathe. All he could feel was pain. His heart shattered. There was no way she could have survived it.

“FRIDAY,” Tony mumbled the AI’s name. “Any signs of life?” 

“Scanning.” 

“Holy shit,” Sam said once he landed next to Steve. “What the fuck happened?” 

“I don’t know,” Steve replied. Once he could see better, he moved forward. 

“No signs of life, boss,” said FRIDAY after a minute. 

“Shit,” he sighed. 

They all started to walk on the remains, trying to find Y/N’s body. Natasha could see tiny hands sticking out of the bricks and wood. It was a horrifying look. So far, she counted six dead children. When she noticed an adult hand, she quickly ran to it, trying to lift any boulder covering the body. Unfortunately, it wasn’t her. It belonged to an unknown woman. “More people were present,” she said into her comm so the rest of the team could hear her. “I have a woman, mid-fifties, without signs of life.” 

They kept walking around, counting the people who died. No one could find Y/N’s body. 

“I’ve called Fury,” Tony informed them. “He’ll be sending a team of people here to get out the bodies and identify the children. Agent Hill and her team that is in Canada will be here in two hours.” 

Steve had his eyes locked on the ground. He kept searching the ruins until he found another hand. This one was familiar. The nails were covered in dust and dark red nail polish. His heart skipped a beat. He prepared himself and uncovered the body. 

It was her. Y/N’s body was covered in dirt. Her forehead was torn and bleeding. Her face had bruises. The suit was torn in many places. “I found her,” he informed the team, swallowing the grief. 

He squatted down, his fingers gently brushed her cheek. A tear escaped his eye. Why didn’t she call them? They would have helped. This should have ended differently.

Natasha was the first to arrive, gasping when she saw her friend lying there, dead. A sob escaped her lips. Then Sam arrived, not believing his eyes. It was difficult for them to see her like this - lifeless, beaten and dead. 

Steve was about to lift her body into his arms when he heard a heavy intake of breath. Quickly, he put two fingers on her neck, trying to find a pulse. “Shit,” he gasped when he felt it under his two fingers. “She’s still alive!” 

Tony flew to them, letting FRIDAY take a complete scan. “Vital signs critical.”

Natasha and Sam helped him take her out of the ruins. Steve held her tightly in his arms as he quickly, yet carefully, walked over the bricks, food and stones. One of her arms was lifelessly hanging down.  

“Let me take her,” Sam suggested. “I can fly her to the jet and get her to the nearest hospital. I know some people from the military.” 

“I’m coming with you,” said Tony. 

Steve nodded and handed her body to Sam. Before Bucky could approach them and see with both eyes she was indeed alive,  both Tony and Sam flew away from them to the jets. 

“No, wait,” Bucky shouted at them. “I wanted to…”

“She’s on the verge of life and death,” Steve stopped Bucky by putting a hand on his shoulder, squeezing it. “She needs immediate medical attention. We will get to her, all right?”

“But Steve-”

“I know, Buck. I know you are worried. We all are. We can only hope that they will make it on time.”  Steve could see the fear in Bucky’s eyes. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much they could do for her. 

She was in and out of consciousness. Her ears registered the rumbling sound of a jet engine. Was she in the jet? She wasn’t sure. Was that the sound of the falling building? All she felt was pain and her brain brought her back to the moments she’d like to erase from her memory forever. 

All of a sudden, she was sitting on a rustic chair with her hands tied behind her back. She was so small, still a child, maybe ten years old. The cold brought goosebumps to her skin. The window in the room was open. It was early winter. They left her sitting there in her underwear as a punishment. Suddenly, someone was holding her cheeks, screaming into her face. It was one of the guards. He pulled her hair, smacked her face and kept yelling. She felt as if she was suffocating. 

Y/N, she heard her name somewhere in the distance. Hold on. We are almost there. 

“Hi,” she heard Bucky greet her. When she turned around, he was sitting on the couch in the lounge room. It was that time when she couldn’t sleep because her past was still haunting her. “Are you okay?” 

“Can’t sleep,” she walked to the couch and sat down next to him. “Bad dreams.” 

“I get that. Sometimes it is hard to rest after a difficult mission. Nightmares invade your mind and won’t let you sleep,” he said. 

She looked at him, memorizing every detail on his handsome face. “Do you… Do you ever wish that you were killed?” 

He looked into her eyes and took a deep breath. “I used to,” he replied. “Now, I don’t.” 

They kept staring into each other’s eyes. “Yeah, same,” she smiled at him. 

That’s when she was pulled into the darkness. She felt more vibrations. What was it? Where was the jet taking her? Was it the jet? Please, stay with us, she heard someone’s voice. 

I’m right here. 

There was a big white room where she was lying on a cold metal table. Her body was tied to it. All she could see were the IVs coming out of her body. So far she counted six. Four on her arms, one on her neck and another one on her right leg. Her mouth was closed shut with a mask. She wanted to cry but deep down she knew it was to no avail. They would punish her and make her suffer more. Just be a good girl and do as we say. 

They made everyone suffer. It didn’t matter that some of the children were maybe three years old. Nothing mattered, only the next mission, the next experiment. 

Will life get better? 

Again, darkness. This time, she was swimming in it for a long time. It seemed that there was nothing more to show. Or maybe this was the end - darkness, nothingness. There was no heaven or hell, only darkness. 

Y/N, I’m right here with you. Please wake up. That voice was familiar. It brought a warm feeling to her chest. She tried to swim to it, as fast as it let her. Wake up for me. Was it Bucky? 

Y/N opened her eyes and the first thing she saw was a white light. It hurt her eyes and she blinked a few times. Her ears registered the sound of beeping machines. It was a steady beep, the one that monitored someone's heart. Slowly, turning her head from side to side, she noticed an unknown woman standing by her bed, checking up on her. 

“What happened?” Y/N whispered. Her throat was dry and her voice was raspy. 

The nurse gasped and quickly found a device that called any doctor. “You are awake,” she seemed surprised. “Oh my god,” she seemed surprised. 

“What?” 

The door to the hospital room opened and a doctor with another nurse came in. He was immediately standing next to Y/N, checking her eyes with a tiny light. “Everything seems fine so far,” said the doctor. His voice was echo-y. He showed his index fingers to her. “Squeeze them as tightly as possible.” 

Very slowly, Y/N wrapped her hands around his fingers, trying to squeeze them with all her strength. It wasn’t much but it was enough. The doctor seemed satisfied.

“That’s great,” he said. “We were waiting for you to wake up, Miss Y/L/N.”

“How long was I out?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper. 

“Over three weeks,” he replied. “You had a ruptured spleen that we had to take out. There’s been some internal bleeding that we stopped. You also had a concussion which led you into a coma for a few weeks,” he explained. “We stitched some of your wounds, you also have bruised ribs. Surprisingly, nothing was broken.” 

She remained silent, thinking about what happened. “Where am I?” 

The doctor frowned. “Do you remember anything?” 

“Yes,” she sighed, tired from all those questions. “I was supposed to die. Am I back in the US or am I still in Canada?” 

“You are back in the States,” he said, relieved that she knew what was going on around her. “Currently, you are still in New York, Langone Hospital.” 

“Has,” she dryly gulped. She wanted water. “Has anyone been here?” 

“You had several visitors. The last one we sent home because the visiting hours had ended. But, now, we need to inform Director Fury about your current state. I’ll let the nurses bring you water and we will give you another IV with antibiotics.” 

“IV?” she panicked. Her eyes widened when he said that. Immediately, she looked at her arm, scanning the needle. Her heart started to beat fast. She needed to overcome her fear. Quickly, she shut her eyes, trying to rest before any potential visitors. 

The doctor saw it. “Do not worry. We are giving you antibiotics, nothing else,” he reassured her. “We won’t hurt you, Miss Y/L/N. I need you to stay calm and we will call Director Fury as soon as possible.” 

With a simple nod, she released a loud exhale. No one knew about her fear of needles. They never witnessed her getting one and she avoided any at all costs. The less they knew, the better, right? 

She fell asleep for another hour when she heard the door open. She stirred and gently opened her eyes, looking directly at Nick Fury. “I’m glad you are alive,” he said. 

Y/N huffed. “I should have listened, I guess,” she whispered. 

“Yes, you should,” he nodded and pulled a chair closer to her bed. “Do you remember it?” 

“I remember it all,” she said. “I had to do it, sir. It needed to stop them. Some of the children were already sold,” he cleared her throat. Fury brought a cup of water with a straw to her lips and helped her drink from it. He didn’t let her take much. “Thank you.” 

“Not bringing any backup was stupid, Y/N.” 

“I know. I know. Will I,” she stopped, not daring to finish the sentence. 

He sighed. “There won’t be any repercussions,” he answered. “We were dealing with a global threat,” he explained. “The Youth Centre was as bad as Hydra. Unfortunately, they used children, experimented on them and killed them. We gathered a lot of information during these past few weeks and have enough evidence that even though the children died, it was for the better.”

“I am so sorry,” Y/N started to cry softly. “I looked. I couldn’t find anyone once I killed a lot of guards. They were hidden somewhere.” 

“Here is the good thing,” he stopped her. “Once we cleared the debris, we managed to uncover an underground place where there were around fifty children hidden in a cellar.” When he said that her eyes widened. “You didn’t kill all those children. You saved them. These children were not enhanced yet. They were abused a lot. Fortunately, no serum was given to them.”

“They are fine?” 

“With a lot of therapy, they will be fine,” he nodded. 

Y/N wanted to say something. When she noticed how he was staring at her, she forgot what she had on her mind. “What?” 

“How did you do it?” he had to ask. “How did you destroy the building?” 

She opened her mouth. How did she do it? It never happened before. She knew what her abilities were. This thing came out of nowhere. She thought back to the moment it happened. There was this feeling inside her that intensified and she released it out. “I have no idea,” she said honestly. “I wish I knew.” 

Fury simply patted her shoulder and stood up. “We will discuss it once you are out of here. The doctor said that if your condition remains the same until tomorrow, they will transport you into the HQ to the hospital wing.” 

That’s when she remembered the rest of the team. “Are- Are they angry at me?” she lowered her gaze. 

“Confused,” he said. “They don’t understand why you did it. Thanks to Romanoff and Barnes, they slowly figured things out.”

Bucky. Her heart dropped. She knew he would hate her the most. “How did I get here?” 

“Because they figured out where you went, and I left one of the tracking devices online, they came to help. However, before they were able to do anything, the building was destroyed and they thought you died,” Fury explained. “Relax. Nothing is as bad as it seems.” 

“So you broke the promise,” she said. 

“No,” he shrugged, keeping his voice on a funnier tone. “I didn’t say a word. I simply left some clues.” 

He was about to leave the room when she stopped him. “What am I supposed to do now?” she asked. 

“Rest,” he turned to her one more time. “And talk to the team. I believe they would like to see you. The last person that was here was Barnes. He looked terrible. No wonder. That man spent most of his days here. ”

She couldn’t believe it. Did Bucky keep visiting her while she was in a coma? Why would he do that? 

Y/N was left alone. Another round of sleep came to her. She didn’t have much energy and another cat nap would only do her good. This time, her mind was not invaded by any bad dreams. Maybe it was the drugs? 

She was awakened by something soft and warm pressed against the back of her hand. When she opened her eyes, she found Bucky pressing his lips to her hand, whispering something. He was sad and tired. Y/N squeezed his hand and he quickly looked up at her. 

“Y/N,” he whispered her name. “You are awake.”

“Hi,” she greeted him. “I woke up today,” she whispered. “It was time.” 

“We thought we lost you,” his voice broke. “I thought I lost you,” and he pressed another kiss to her hand. “How are you feeling?” 

“Tired. Weak. A bit confused,” she admitted. “If all goes well, I’ll be relocated to the HQ tomorrow.  Uh, can you bring me water, please?” Bucky was quick to take the glass with a straw and brought it closer to her lips. When she started to drink it, their eyes locked.  “Thank you,” she said when she finished. 

He opened his mouth, ready to tell her something. However, Natasha, Steve and Sam entered the room before he could make a sound. The redhead was first by her side, carefully hugging her. Steve and Sam stood behind Bucky, smiling. 

“You scared the shit out of us,” said Natasha when she pulled out of the hug. 

“I’m sorry,” said Y/N. 

“Why didn’t you ask us to come with you?” Nat asked. “You know we would have helped you.” 

Y/N’s eyes slowly moved to Bucky who kept looking at her. She wished they could be alone. It was hard to come up with a relevant answer and, in all honestly, she’d rather sit in silence with him. She thought he’d hate her. So far, it has nothing to do with hate. 

Sam started to talk about… something. Y/N wasn’t listening. It was something about a game of darts. Steve told her how the rest of the team thought highly of her and that Wanda and Vision would be back in two days. 

Her eyes were slowly closing while she kept listening to their stories. No one wanted to mention the mission. They kept her mind occupied with something else.

A nurse came to the room with a new IV and a bag. “It’s time to let her rest,” she informed them. “I suggest you come tomorrow.”

Natasha gently hugged her and the rest of them said their goodbyes. Bucky was the last one to leave. He noticed how Y/N was panicking when the nurse was about to take out her IV. Y/N turned her head, trying to breathe deeply. That’s when she found out he was still there. Tears welled up in her eyes. 

He took a few big steps and was immediately by her side. “Hey, it’s okay,” he tried to calm her. “I’m right here, Y/N. Keep looking at me.” 

She only nodded and pursed her lips only to keep her sobs hidden. Bucky found her free hand and took it into his, holding it tightly. He didn’t question it.

“I’m sorry, but you should-”

“I’m staying,” said Bucky to the nurse harshly, not giving her a single look. The woman kept her mouth shut and took out the needle of Y/N’s arm. 

“It’s going to be a minute, alright? Focus on me,” he kept talking to Y/N. “You are doing so well.” 

Bucky knew not to ask, not now. He stayed there until the nurse was done and Y/N had a new IV ready. “All done,” said the nurse. 

“It’s all done,” Bucky repeated for her. She snuggled her head into his chest and silently cried. She hated every moment of it. Nothing scared her more than IVs. She hated them with her whole being. 

He kept stroking her slightly greasy hair, trying to calm her down. Five minutes later, he realised that she had fallen asleep while being snuggled to him. Bucky kissed the top of her head and gently pushed her away. He fixed her body on the bed and stroked her cheek. Once again, he remained sitting next to the bed. This time, his body was relaxed because he knew she was conscious and well. 

Y/N was confused when she woke up the next day and she was alone in the room. She knew Bucky was the last one with her, helping her get through her fear of IVs. Now, no one was present. She sighed sadly. 

For the next few hours, she kept taking naps and watching TV that was installed in the room. That was until it was time to transfer her to the HQ as promised. She couldn’t be more thrilled. 

Everything went smoothly. They helped her take a shower after weeks and prepared her for transfer. Before she knew it, they wheeled her into the medical wing of the compound. The first thing she noticed was the bouquet of red roses standing next to her bed. There was her phone and a book she didn’t finish. The bed was way more comfortable than the one in the regular hospital. And, as if it wasn’t enough, there were snacks in the drawer next to the bed. 

“Do you like it?” said a voice from the door to her room. 

When she turned her head and saw Bucky standing at the door, smiling. Instantly, there was a smile on her face. “You did this?” 

He walked to her. “Yes. I wanted you to feel good, homely.” 

“That is so sweet,” she said and yawned. It was time to lie down and gain more energy. She stretched her arm to him and signed him to take it. “I love roses.”

Bucky couldn’t do it faster. They held hands for a good minute, staring at each other silently. 

This was his moment. He couldn’t wait any longer. He leaned to her and pressed his lips to her. The first good sign was, she didn’t pull away. The kiss was sweet, just as he imagined it would be, if not better. He could stay like this forever.

Bucky smelled like a menthol shower gel. She could breathe his scent until her very last day. How glad she was they made her take a shower before transfer. 

When he pulled away, he kept his forehead pressed against her. “I love you,” he whispered, finally admitting his feelings. “I’ve loved you for some time now.” 

Y/N smiled. “I love you too, Buck.” She couldn’t be any happier. “I was worried you’d hate me.”

He looked into her eyes. “I could never do that. I was upset that you didn’t want me there. I thought my life ended when they found you without any sign of life.” His gorgeous blue eyes filled with tears. “I really thought I lost you.”

She put both hands on his cheeks. “I’m so sorry.”

He brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “Don’t be. You are alive, here with us, with me. That’s all that matters.” 

She kissed him again, this time deepening the kiss. Bucky’s metal hand travelled to her neck and pulled her to him as much as it was possible. The cold made her gasp and that was the moment he used and explored her mouth with his tongue. 

Someone cleared their throat. Slowly, they both turned their head to the sound and disconnected their lips. Steve and Sam were standing at the door, smiling like school girls. 

“Sorry to interrupt, love birds,” said Sam, giggling. 

“You are ruining the moment,” Bucky snarled at him. “Can you come later?” 

“You know what?” Y/N interrupted, patting Bucky’s hand. “Stay. Please. I need to talk to you. Could you also call the rest of the team? I- I need to tell you everything. Please.” 

“Okay,” Bucky nodded and before he left, he kissed the top of her hair. 

Steve and Sam were still grinning at her. They sat down on a small sofa that was next to the bed. “So, you two, huh?” said Sam, winking at her. 

“Sam,” Steve nudged his shoulder. “How are you feeling?” he turned his head to Y/N, genuinely concerned. 

“I’m getting better by the minute,” she admitted with a smile. “Still tired though. The doctor said I need to rest here for another few days. Afterwards, I can leave this place and rest back home - or in my room.” 

“Or in Bucky’s arms,” Sam teased. Steve smacked his shoulder.

“And no active missions until we are sure you are healthy and strong. We can use you from here,” said Steve. 

“Yes, Captain,” she winked at him. “And I am really sorry for what happened.”

Natasha was the first to run into the room. Before Y/N knew it, the woman was hugging her again and taking a seat next to her. “I’m glad you are here with us,” she said with a smile. “The rest of the team will be here any minute. You okay?” 

“Yeah,” Y/N nodded with a smile. She fidgeted a little. “Just nervous.” 

“Why are you nervous?” she asked. “You don’t have to be. We’ve been through a lot together. It’s going to be fine.” 

Clint, Tony and Bruce entered the room. They greeted Y/N with gentle hugs. While they were chatting, Wanda and Vision unexpectedly walked into the room. Y/N’s eyes almost popped out. “Holy shit,” she gasped. 

Wanda was quick enough to come to her and pulled her into a tight loving embrace. “Don’t ever scare me like that,” was the first thing the woman whispered into her ear. 

“I’m sorry.” Wanda and Y/N had a special bond. There was something a little more special than she had with Natasha. But all three women were very close. 

With a kiss on her forehead, she sat by her other side which was not occupied by anyone. Both friends were by her side. And yet she wished Bucky was the one sitting with her. He was the last one to return. His eyes noticed that he wouldn’t be able to sit next to the woman he loved. 

Without stalling, Y/N started to talk about her past - how her childhood was taken away from her. 

“I remember playing outside. My mother was there with me. It was a beautiful warm day. I don’t remember the city I was born in or her name. What I do remember is the sound of her painful cry. It happened so quickly. The next thing I knew, I was in a place that became my new home.” 

Everyone listened and didn’t ask questions or intervene. 

“There’s been always at least 20 to 40 children - all ages. We were raised there. They taught us everything that they considered important as well as basic skills such as reading, writing and math. I guess it was similar to Red Room,” she looked at Natasha. “They started to experiment on us very early, as well as they started to kill us. There was this older girl, about seventeen and she was on her way to becoming enhanced. Unfortunately, the last experiment changed her personality and she turned into a psychopath. Because of that, they killed her and everyone who was undergoing the same treatments as her. Of course, they did it in front of us.

“The first time it happened, I vomited as well as other kids. They punished us and we stayed without food for a week. The only thing we had was water. They kept us between four cold walls. One time,” she put a grimace on her face, “one of the soldiers tried to drown me because I refused to pleasure him. I was eleven.” 

Y/N noticed how Wanda’s eyes closed. She tried to remain stoic. When her eyes scanned each person, no one could look at her, even Bucky’s eyes were on the floor. 

“It happened at least once a week,” she continued. “Unfortunately, when they break you, they’ll get what they want. And they’ll find a way to do it again and again.” Her voice started to shake. “Then comes a turn and once the time is right, you make them suffer.”

She thought about that particular moment and told them about it. She was sixteen when the experiment was successful and she gained abilities. The guards, who loved to play with her, were met with her rage. She killed them all. 

“Thus, my plan to escape started a few days after that. I managed to leave the place that tortured me for years. A place where even though I gained something powerful, broke me in many ways. They took me away from my mother and destroyed my childhood and teenage years.”

This time, a tear escaped her eye and gently caressed her cheek. “I never thought things would get better. I was hiding around the States and in Europe. I became a mercenary only to have some money. Now, here we are… After all that death and torture, I am still alive. That’s why I wanted to, no, needed to do this alone. I needed to finish this and kill them because they were a threat to everyone. I didn’t want to risk your lives for my pain, my past.” 

The team was silent. No one knew what to say. What could a person say after everything they’ve heard?

“Don’t look at me like that,” Y/N shook her head. “You’ve all had traumatic pasts.” 

Natasha was the one who said it out loud. “No one was raped when they were a child.” 

“Well, there are other things that did not happen to me, but did happen to you,” said Y/N. “We live in a fucked up world. Now we have the ability to make it better.” 

. . .

Bucky had his normal hand on the steering wheel while his metal hand held Y/N’s. He proposed a trip - a few days off, without the team somewhere outside of New York. Just the two of them, enjoying their time together. It was nice of him to take her out. 

He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Where are you taking me?” she asked, giggling. “Come on, Buck, just give me a hint.” 

“We’ll be there in a minute. Please, wait and you’ll see,” he said with a smile. 

At first, they flew to Colorado and spent a nice day walking around Denver and enjoying the food and entertainment. Today, he took her for a ride. They were slowly driving through a peaceful neighbourhood. There was nothing special about it - houses, families walking around and enjoying the day.

Y/N took a deep breath through her nose. She became nervous. “Did you buy us a house?” she had to ask. 

That’s when he parked the car and looked at her. “No,” he shook his head. “I know I should have asked you about this, but after everything, I figured this would be something you’d want to do,” he started. “I’ve been searching for several days until I found what I wanted and that’s why I brought you here.” 

She frowned at him, not liking how cryptic he was. Bucky quickly kissed her lips and then got out of the car. Because he was a gentleman, he went to Y/N’s door and opened it for her. “I’m nervous,” she said when she stepped out. 

He grabbed her hand, squeezing it reassuringly. He slowly took her to one of the houses. It was of smaller size, but it was a nice place to live. Once they were at the front door, he loudly knocked on them. “I figured that maybe you’d want to…”

The door opened. A woman in her mid-fifties was standing there, dressed in casual comfortable clothes. From her face, she seemed shocked. “Oh my god,” she whispered. 

Bucky didn’t need to say a word. Y/N figured it all out.  She could feel it inside her soul that she knew this person. “Mum?”

“It’s you,” the woman started to sob. “You are alive.” She pulled Y/N into a tight embrace, crying into her shoulder. “Oh my god, my sweet angel, you are alive.” When she pulled away, she grabbed Y/N’s face into her hands, scanning every detail to memorize it. “Your wonderful friend came to me a week ago, saying that he knows you. He told me, that my beautiful baby is alive.” 

Y/N looked at Bucky, her eyes filled with tears. “Yeah, he’s the best thing that ever happened to me.” 

[narcissarina]

Darkened Desires

Prologue and Chapter 1: The sun || Chapter 2: The moon || Chapter 3: The moon || Chapter 4: The sun || Chapter 5: The sun

Pairings: Mafia!Scaramouche × Barista!Reader

Word count: 1,373

Tw: praise kink, degradation, kidnapping, tourture, dub/non-con, forced breeding, dismembering, gore, deaths, age-gap, corruption, use of force, trauma, use of drugs, stalking, mentions of human trafficking on the near chapters, slowburn.

Warning: This fanfiction may contain kidnapping, torture, dub/non-con, forced breeding, dismembering, age-gap, corruption, vigilante Scaramouche, use of force, trauma, use of drugs, stalking, and more. This fiction will continue grow darker as chapters goes by.

Your mental health matters.

CHAPTER 6:

THE MOON

I took her to a familiar flower shop, base on her files—I coincidentally made her meet up a friend, I watch her laugh, smile, and tease around with her friend. I get constant glance from her friend, who seems to be suspecting something but didn’t say anything.

I could only smile, not just an ordinary friendly smile. I smiled with intent of possible murder, dark and twisted smile that gave her friend a shudder.

Funny enough, I could stand for a minute or so until a figure I caught in my eye stood out, they were rushing and sweating, a boner in his pants as he disappeared in the alley across the road.

I lean down to my sunshine to excuse myself, she could only nod and hum timidly, fuck. How I could just fucked her in the car right here and there, but patience is virtue right?

Left and right, I look at passing motorcycles and cars as I made my way down the road. I rush a little, not wanting him to get out of my sight, I turn left and saw him went through that door. I took my gun out, held it firmly in between my fingers, my other hand on the knob—turning it and using my body to rush in.

It was dim, but not too dark.

“Hands up and on your fucking knees!” I said, wow. I sounded like a shitting police officer—I am not doing that again. And it fucking smells here, as if someone just got done emptying their balls.

Of course, fucking sickos.

I shot the ground, the sound ringing in every corner of this room. I see a girl whimpering from pain as a grown ass man was gripping the poor girls hair tightly, “let go of her,” I said, pointing and threatening to shoot.

He listens and the girl came running at me, “good boy,” I shot him. Right in the leg while covering the girls ear and hugging her tightly close to me, “fucker.” I curse and turn to the girl, I heard the man scream—calling a backup huh? I hear footsteps come running down, I put the girl outside and held her shoulder, “hey, little girl. Run and take a right, go to the lady that’s sitting on the flower shop. She’ll help you, and tell the guards that’s stand behind her that I need help. Can you do that?” I spoke in a soft warm tone.

She nodded and gave a quick hug, “thank you, mister.” She said, poor girl. “The big bad man hasn’t touch you nor harm you right?” I quickly asked, just to be sure because I’ll hurt him back. She nodded, “just pulled my hair..” she said and told her to go now, that was all I need to fucking know. I’m going to have fun fucking this bastards up.

“H-Hey!” someone shouted, holding a baseball bat, I turn when I’m assured that the girl finally ran and disappeared out of my sight—knowing that she’ll be safe in my sunshine’s arms and guidance.

Gun in hand, I smiled, “what’s up gentlemen?”

“Don’t get involve here, don’t think you know us!”

“But I do… Know you.” I point my gun to him, as I whisper those two words, that I know them. Although I plan on fucking them up later, I never thought I would have a last minute change of plan. How laughable.

I should make this quick, and I hope those guards hurry up or else I’m not giving their payment. Don’t want to worry my sunshine.

He started running after me as I quickly shot him in his knee perfectly, he yelled in pain, “what you all standing there?! Get him!” he yelled, I could only scoff at how weak they are. Not to mention they’re a little taller and intimidating than me, while I’m only a few inches shorter and a baby faced… I want to burst out and laugh at how pathetic their attempts are.

This is getting annoying, earlier I was having fun fucking them up but they keep on coming, not accepting defeat—how much I fucking wanted to put a bullet on their fucking shitty head. All of them on the ground, his team unconscious and knocked out cold, no I didn’t used force. Why is that? Because I knew she’ll call the cops, I’ll make sure to put a bullet in each of their head when they’re in prison.

I sigh and groan, mother fucker manage to stab me right on the abdomen. Taking deep breaths as I make my way to that pedophile that’s been with the poor girl, I crouch down and position my gun in his head, he whimper and cries—pleading for his life.

“Aren’t you the one who abuse your wife? Instead of pleasure, you bruise her and cause her great pain in intercourse, where you only think of your fucking dick.” I said, pushing my gun harder into his face till it bruises, “y-yes, yes! That’s me, if saying this would make you have mercy at me then I confess!” he said, I click my tongue, my finger threatening to pull the fucking trigger.

“Who said that I’m going to let you go?”

Bang—

“Sir! Sir!” one of my guards called, they entered the room—rushing and sweating, “you’re all late.” I said, they bow and apologize repeatedly, I stood up and held my stabbed abdomen. One of them went pale and starts to panic.

“I can still walk, no need to carry me.” I assure in advance, clothes bloody and filled with sweat. Each walk I softly groan until I finally see the light—my light. She was talking to the police and the girl was clinging to him. She’ll be a great mother, I knew that—why? She’ll b filled with my children and she’ll be the one carrying them for nine fucking months.

She noticed and went pale when she saw that I got hurt fighting off those pedophiles and abusers, the guards help me cross the road and sat me down to the chair.

The police were horrified on what they saw and immediately took action and went to the alley where I beat and knock them all up—well, except for that one man who I put a bullet in his head.

“Let’s take you to the nearest hospital, sir.” One of the officer said, inspecting my wound.

“It’s just a stab, it’ll be fine.” I sarcastically remarked and rolled my eyes, my gaze went to the girl and smiled at her. She started crying and flew into my arms, “hey there.”

She kept apologizing again and again, “It’s not your fault”

“but you got hurt.” She sniffs.

“if getting hurt means saving you, then I’ll do it over and over again.” I pat her head and turn to the police officer, “you know where her parents are?”

They nodded and said that they’ll be right here, rushing.

I look at her, her eyes filled with pity and anger. She’s so cute, I could burst and have her kneel to suck my dick. But I can’t, I’m injured too, maybe I could make her nurse me.

The thought made me smile a little wickedly.

Yeah, it’ll be fun.

So fun that I didn’t noticed the girls parents, they thanked me for saving their daughter and they waved goodbye—before leaving, the girl looked back at me once again before driving off to her home. Where she is finally safe and with her family.

“you look kinda familiar.” One of the medic said, I raise a brow and smiled at him. “Oh?” I snicker, “aren’t you a mafia?” my heart sank but I kept a straight smiling safe, “now that remark wound me, sir. How could I possibly a mafia?” I asked, sunshine is just beside me—piercing me with her stare.

“quit it, John. Can’t you see the poor man injured? Not to mention he saved a little girl and five abused women in that house.” One officer smack him at the back of his head, “sorry. I hope I didn’t offend.”

“none taken.” I smiled and look at sunshine.

“Are you mad?”

“fuck you.”

“love you too, sweetheart.”

Link:

Chapter 7: THE MOON

[bchan95]

Tension Pt. 1

I swirled my glass of wine, tongue fixated on the inside of my left cheek as I watched him lean over to her again and whisper something into her ear. That stupid dimple popping as he moves his hand to rest on her lower back.

Nothing about this should bother me. Nothing about the way his head tips back in laughter at her jokes should make me want to pour this glass of rose down the back of her silky silver dress. The only thing that could potentially stop their bodies from being fully intertwined like they had been all night.

I had no right to be angry at someone I didn’t know. A beautiful brunette with perfectly placed freckles with her hands on his chest. Face near his face. But here I am, two seconds away from breaking this glass against the brick wall I’m leaning against. I begged for any noise to drown out my thoughts of her face on his face, his neck, his body.

This rush of pulsating continuous thoughts was put to a pause by a hand on my shoulder. My eyes painstakingly left the bitter romance that I watched in front of me to meet bright blue curious eyes. I let my scowl fall as I read the concern immediately as pressure was added with a squeeze.

“Girl you cannot sit here and torture yourself all night,” Yuna looked at me wide-eyed as she grabbed the glass from my hand and took a sip before handing it back to me.

I knew she was right. I couldn’t just sit there and let my thoughts continue to dig their heels into the crevices of my thought process. But I couldn’t look away. I knew that the second my eyes left their intertwined arms, I would just continue to paint my own picture as I tried to keep up with the buzzing conversation at the table.

“I’m fine,” I say flatly. She ignores me. Interlacing our hands, she guides me back to our shared table.

They all look at me with the same doe eyes. I hated how I immediately knew that they were pitying me. Something in those soft glances made me want to spill my guts. And there was only way I planned on throwing up emotion tonight.

“Guys… why are you looking at me like that?”

Felix shook his head at me, the little cross earring in his left lobe shaking as he sighed. He grabbed my hands from across the table and lovingly drew circles on the tops of my palms. He didn’t say anything else but I knew what it meant.

I let his hands rest there as I scoffed, forcing a smile across my lips as my left eye glanced in their direction once more. Enough to hold me over until they were all distracted again. They were dancing. Closely. That’s all I allowed myself to see.

I let go of one of Felix’s hands and downed the rest of my glass, squinting my eyes at the impact. I looked back up at the table and their eyes were still on me. I finally gave in and asked the question.

“What’s up with you all? So quiet?”

I laughed. No one else did. Finally, the quiet was cut by the waiter setting glasses on our table with a bright smile. He dropped a dark liquid in front of me. I scrunched my eyebrows, turning left to catch his attention.

“Oh I didn’t order-“

The waiter smiled back at me, a small diamond gracing his leftmost tooth as it widened. He shook his head before speaking.

“You didn’t… but he did.”

The man pointed to a section across the room from the table. MY eyes followed and finally landed on him. He grinned ear to ear as he held her waist close to his. He shot a wink and shook his phone. I quickly looked down at my own bright screen and saw it aglow with a message.

“You deserve to have fun, yeah? Happy birthday xx”

I sent a quick heart react to the message as a faint smile fell across your lips. I looked back up at him and raised the glass with a nod. I looked back over at the table to three disappointed halfhearted smiles across from you as you slowly savored the free cinnamon and brown sugar coating the glass.

Felix finally breaks the ice with an eye roll.

“I know Chan is your best friend and it’s complicated but… Y/N I just hate seeing you like this… and on your fucking birthday.”

My own laugh sends a sharp pain to my stomach, and I take another long sip. I knew he was right. I knew constantly watching Chan dance with other girls really hurt. I knew that although he was entirely unavailable, I found it hard to date anyone because of him. It was unhealthy. It made me nauseous. I didn’t want him to leave.

“Felix. I promise I’m okay. Chan is going to Chan. I shouldn’t just not invite my best friend to my birthday celebration because I’m incapable of moving on.”

The liquor burns this time as I force it down my throat, but I am persistent. I let the full glass melt away in my body before facing them again. I smirked, leaning my hand against my head, feeling the burning of my cheeks against the chill of my palm.

“I’ll be okay. I just hope he gets whatever he planned to get out of this night so I can just focus on something else.”

Lia chewed on her bottom lip “I just think he’s kind of disrespectful. Like… even as your friend he couldn’t stop playing the field to celebrate with you?”

I nod softly. She had a point here. I had made these plans weeks ago. I just wanted one day with my friends to let loose and forget everything. But it’s hard to do that when your best friend is a rockstar with enough ego to be supercharged for life.

It wasn’t his fault though. I told him to have fun… and he is having fun. I know he is. That girl is beautiful. The way her arms seem to fit so perfectly around his neck as he pulls her torso into his. The way she throws back her head with easy laughter at anything he says, catching the brightest smile she’s ever seen on his face.

I envy the ease that comes with the beauty of her caliber. Even if it’s just surface level. Because selfishly and desperately, I wished that I was pretty enough that he forgot about all of my quirks. That he saw me as only an object of desire for once. That I could capture all of his attention with one bat of my eyelashes.

But he had to know my Ben & Jerry's, sobbing in the shower, corner store red wine, five seconds from a meltdown personality.

I lift myself off my chair, a slight haze covering my pupils for a moment before they clear.

“I’m going to get another drink. Does anyone want anything?”

They all shake their heads and I shrug as I push through pulsating rhythms and bodies to get the bar. I, unfortunately, lay my hands down on the sticky wood and immediately picked them up with a scrunch of my nose. I hastily grab my hand sanitizer out of my purse and glaze my fingers in the putrid liquid before looking back up.

A dark-haired bartender with glasses smiled at me as he cleaned off the glass in his hand. My eyes glanced at the way his arm muscles followed the motion of his hands for a moment before looking back at him.

“Hi!” I scream against the deep base of the EDM track behind me. The bartender’s smile deepens.

“HI!” he mocked me, giggling a bit after he did.

I bite down a smirk on my lips before continuing “Can I get a vodka cranberry…”

“Changbin.” He said confidently, nodding at me as he took my credit card from my waiting hand.

“Thank you!!” I yelled again, letting myself lean on the counter once again.

My eyes zeroed in on their dancing. However, this time Chan’s eyes directly met mine. I forced a smile onto my lips, about to mouth some stupid quip to embarrass him when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I spun around to meet those glistening dark eyes again.

“Here you go miss…”

I allowed myself to smile again “Y/N.”

He nodded, holding out a frosted glass and my card in my direction again. Our fingers grazed as I grabbed the items from him. “Man,” I thought to myself, “I really need to get laid. A Darcy-esque hand touch shouldn’t send shocks up and down my arm like this.” I giggle to myself and start to step away from the bar.

“Thank you, Changbin!” I yell at the same volume as I did my introduction.

He tapped his chest with his fist before screaming “You’re welcome, Y/N!!!”

I couldn’t fight back the giggles this time as I saw his obscene reaction. I let them fall one after the other as I kept eye contact with him. He breaks out into a bright smile before shooting a wink my way and turning back to the bar. I try to settle the reaction on my face as I turn around to move back over to the table. As I sit down, I already hear laughs around me.

“Oh he’s cute, Y/N…” Yuna starts. I lift my head to see her raising her eyebrows up and down in my direction. She points subtly behind me with a smirk. “And he’s still fixated on you even though he can only see your back right now.”

I slowly turn and meet Changbin’s eyes quickly before spinning back around. My cheeks were heating up as I tried to sip my glass casually and respond back to Yuna.

“He is kind of cute…”

I watched as Yuna scanned the room, her eyes meeting something before she almost doubled over in laughter. I feel my eyes widen in confusion as I watch her expression change. I am terrified to look around, not sure what my eyes will come in contact with. Luckily for me, Yuna paints the scene.

“Looks like your cute little interaction was noticed by someone else too…” She lifts her glass with a smirk

Now I was curious.

I turned around quickly, and I saw Chan leaning against the bar. Eyes blazed and glared right in my direction. The girl he was with dangling on his arm, trying to whisper in his ear but he continued to stare at me. I raised an eyebrow at him before turning back to the table with a shrug.

“He’s being weird, but what’s new.”

The three people across from me exchange some wide-eyed glances before looking back at me. I want to say something, but my thought is quickly stopped by a warm hand on my exposed shoulder. I don’t move out of shock, waiting for any other movement from whoever stands behind me. I felt whisky-laced breath hit my nose as they leaned their face toward my ear.

“Who’s your bartender friend, Y/N?”

[chaotic-orphan]

INTOXICATING FEAR (IX)

Much Needed Alone Time

Read part one here

Continued from here

TW: overall content warning, very uncomfortable, forced self-harm, self-harm, mentions of self-harm, explicit self harm, gory self harm, blood, cuts, knives, cutting, explicit detail of blood/wounds, gross depictions of blood, torture, threats of violence, hopelessness, sadistic whumper

This one is even a bit squidgy for me at parts so take care of the warnings and of yourselves! Enjoy!

*~*~*~*~*

“Wakey wakey, Kit,” Ambrose sang. That was his only warning before a slap echoed around the room and Kit’s eyes shot open in shock. Ambrose was crouching in front of Kit, pale red lips tilted up into a half smile as Kit jerked forward. He didn’t get very far though.

Kit’s arms were kept restrained awkwardly behind him, bound tightly wrist to wrist. Kit frowned at Ambrose in question.

“Where’s Superhero?” Kit asked, voice erring on cautious. If Ambrose had managed to subdue or God forbid kidnap Superhero… or use him as his own little puppet toy plaything, then there really was no hope for either of them.

“Oh, don’t worry your pretty little head about Superhero, Kit. He had to nip out on an errand which gives us some much-needed alone time,” Ambrose said, his voice too high and pleased with himself as he spoke, but his eyes… Kit swallowed the lump in his throat at the pain they promised. “Ah, there you are. There’s my scared, timid little Kit. You forgot yourself before, it’s okay. You can admit it, it’s only the two of us here after all.”

“I didn’t forget myself,” Kit snarled, bearing his teeth at Ambrose and jerking forward in the chair as far as he were able to. “I am done playing by the rules of your sick twisted games.”

Ambrose tilted his head to the side, dark eyes drinking in Kit’s threat. “Did seeing Superhero make you brave, Kit?”

“He’s going to see right through you,” Kit sneered, “and when he does, I’ll be there. Watching as he beats the—”

Ambrose jumped at Kit, one hand going to his throat while the other pressed a knife against Kit’s cheek. Ambrose wrenched Kit’s head up, so he was staring directly into Ambrose’s eyes with that cute little defiant look. Ambrose revelled at how still Kit went once Ambrose introduced the knife to his face.

“You won’t be able to watch if I pluck out those pretty little eyes, Kit, would you?” Ambrose mused. Kit shook his, trying to shake free Ambrose’s grip, but Ambrose tightened his hold and pressed the knife in deeper until Kit stopped moving. “Ah, ah, ah, Kit. Play nice or my hand might just slip.”

“Take my eyes!” Kit spat, his voice taking on a feral growl to it, as he struggled furiously in his restraints. “Take whatever the fuck you want because you will fuck up sooner or later and it’s only a matter of time until Superhero finds out who you really are! So go ahead!”

Kit craned his neck up further, pressing into the knife that Ambrose held. Daring him.

Bold.

Ambrose pulled away, dropping all contact from Kit. Kit let out a scoff as he dropped his head and rolled his shoulders.

“Yeah, thought so.”

“You know, Kit,” Ambrose said with a sigh, pressing the tip of the knife against his index finger and twirling it thoughtfully. He turned his back to Kit, walking towards the front door.

“You’re right. I didn’t really think the whole sickness thing through, if Superhero comes back and you’re still as feverish as you were, well,” Ambrose said inclining his head, with a wan smile: “he’d probably recommend a hospital or a healer… both of which I have no need of.”

Kit remained silent. He glared at Ambrose as he continued.

“So, while you were out of it, I was trying to think of a way to get Superhero off our backs and I had a little lightbulb moment, Kit,” Ambrose said, and looked over his shoulder at Kit with a grin, “you wanna know what it was?”

“I’m sure you’ll tell me anyway.”

“You’re so un-fun, but I will,” said Ambrose, turning to face Kit now. “Sometimes stress manifests itself as illness, Kit.”

“Well, I am sick of you, so that makes sense,” Kit grumbled. Ambrose laughed.

“And sometimes, it manifests as mental illness.” Kit’s brows furrowed in question. Ambrose smiled. “Don’t you want to have a guess at what I mean by that?”

“Not particularly.”

Ambrose shrugged. “Good. So, we can begin then.”

Kit tensed in the chair as Ambrose walked purposefully towards him, around the chair and out of sight. Kit turned his head, but Ambrose pushed it back, so Kit was forced to stare forward.

“Hey! Hey! What’re you—”

“Oh, not so brave now, are we?” Ambrose asked, sarcasm dripping from every word.

When the cool metal pressed against Kit’s wrist he jerked forward, trying to get away but Ambrose said: “stay still,” and the sludge like command melted Kit’s brain until he was forced into immobile submission.

The metal pressed against Kit’s wrist again and to Kit’s surprise, Ambrose cut him free of the ropes or whatever was tying him to the chair. He still couldn’t move but for some reason being free didn’t exactly make Kit’s heart sing with joy. Something like dread settled at the bottom of his gut instead as Ambrose walked around the chair again.

“Now, Kit, illness… sickness, physical sickness can be treated by a healer or a doctor but mental illness? Especially from stress, perhaps… oh I don’t know, work related stress from being a hero, for example. That is treated by time away from the stressors.”

Ambrose paused to let his words properly sink into Kit’s brain. Ambrose didn’t speak again until Kit’s wide eyes met Ambrose’s with a panicked kind of hatred.

“No,” Kit said. “No! You can’t—”

“Oh, yes, Kit. Yes, I can.”

“Superhero would never… he wouldn’t—” Kit blubbered before furious eyes met Ambrose’s dark ones. “He would check on me every day—”

“Would he? A good soul like Superhero? Or would the guilt of having maybe pushed you too hard, or not having seen the signs earlier prevent him from coming regularly?”

“Wait, Ambrose. You can’t do this!”

“Oh, I can,” Ambrose chuckled.

Kit’s mouth screwed up desperately, his breathing coming out a bit faster than necessary. “But— but I won’t be as fun if you can’t fuck with me when I’m at the hero tower, and you won’t learn about anything or be able to take down the heroes from within, or— or—”

“Oh relax,” Ambrose said with a wave of his hand. “This isn’t going to be permanent, Kit. Just a long enough break away from the stressful environment of being a hero. Some good old-fashioned R&R with yours truly will set you right.”

Ambrose bit back a grin when he saw tears gather behind Kit’s eyes as he struggled to try and fight Ambrose’s compulsion.

“Please, Ambrose. Please! Anything but that, please. I’ll be good, I’ll do whatever you want. Please, I’ll stop fighting you. Please just don’t— don’t—” Kit cried, cutting himself off with a heartfelt sob, sniffing as the tears started falling down his cheeks.

Ambrose moved closer, cooing at Kit’s pathetic display of desperation. He pressed a cold hand against Kit’s cheek and brushed the tear streaks away with the coarse pad of his thumb. A sympathetic smile on his stupidly too-red lips.

“It’s okay, Kit. Everything will be fine. Come on, walk with me to the bathroom. The blood will be easier to clean off there.”

To Kit’s horror his body obeyed Ambrose’s command. Every neuron in Kit’s brain was firing at him to stop, to not go with Ambrose, to fight, to regain control over his own body – but it was all in vain.

Kit stood from the chair and followed Ambrose across his living room into his bathroom. Ambrose turned on the light, and turned to grin at Kit, holding out a hand.

“What?!” Kit barked, wiping the angry tears from his eyes.

“Well, you have two choices Kit, you either; step into the bath or hold your arms over it,” Ambrose said, leaning his lower back against the sink and crossing his long legs. “The choice is yours; it doesn’t really affect me.”

“Is it?” Kit asked, coming to stand in front of Ambrose, his heart thundering against his ears. If he could stall for time and wait for Superhero to come back, he could catch Ambrose in the act. He’d know that Kit was suffering at the hands of a fucking tyrant.

The corner of Ambrose’s lips quipped up. “Knock yourself out, Kit. Enjoy the freedom.”

“Except it’s not freedom cause either way you’re going to make me do one of them, aren’t you?”

“Well obviously,” he deadpanned. “But I can wait if you want. We can wait until your precious Superhero comes back and instead of hurting yourself you can hurt him too. Would you like that, Kit?”

“You said you wouldn’t read my mind anymore. Takes the fun out of it, have you changed your tune?”

Ambrose rolled his eyes and stood to his full height, stepping forward and knocking Kit back a step with his shoulder. Kit’s eyebrows rose in surprise as he stumbled back, forgetting that Ambrose was taller than him.

“Honestly Kit, I try,” Ambrose said with another step. Kit matched it with one backwards, still glaring up at him. “But sometimes it’s so rare that you think anything in that little noodle of yours, that the thoughts are too loud for me to ignore.”

Ambrose pressed a finger into Kit’s forehead and tipped him back another step before Kit batted his hand away.

“Real funny, Ambrose. Hah-hah!”

“I try,” Ambrose said, flashing a charming smile. “But you’re right. I have decided. In the bath is better than out.”

Without pausing Ambrose pressed his palm flat on Kit’s chest, fingers spread and shoved Kit backwards. Kit hadn’t realised how close he was to the bath, so it came as a surprise when his thigh hit the edge. He shot his hands out to steady himself too late, failing to grab hold of Ambrose and gravity had him in its claws. Ambrose getting further away as Kit fell, his head smacking off the tiles as he landed awkwardly in the tub.

“Motherfucker!” Kit cried, rubbing his head with a scowl as it pounded from the whack.

Ambrose shrugged leaning back against the sink again, arms folded across his chest. “I did give you the choice to get in the bath of your own accord. This one’s on you.”

“Maybe I want to lean over it,” Kit grumbled, fumbling to right himself. When he settled Kit glared up at Ambrose from the tub. “Well, we don’t have all day. Force me to do whatever you want; I don’t care anymore.”

“Kit,” Ambrose chided. “Don’t have that attitude, come on. Make it fun for me. Struggle a bit.”

“What’s the point? You’ll just use your powers on me and get what you want eventually. Let’s just cut through the bullshit.”

Ambrose shrugged. “Fair enough.”

Ambrose leaned off the sink and handed Kit the knife. “Kit, I want you to take the knife and roll up your sleeves and cut your wrists.”

Kit felt the blood drain from his face.

“What?” Kit whispered as his hand reached for the knife against his will. “Wait! Ambrose, you can’t want to kill me I thought—”

“Oh hush, Kit. Don’t be dramatic. Make the cuts horizontal. Not deep enough to bleed out, or need stitches, but enough to leave scars.”

Kit was rolling up his sleeves as Ambrose spoke. “Ambrose, wait please. Please! Wait! Stop! Why can’t you do this to me? You cut me! Make them believable? Please?! Ambrose please, I – I don’t want to do this.”

Ambrose crouched so he was eye level with Kit, looking into Kit’s too bright eyes that were already tearing up at the mere thought of Ambrose’s command.

“What makes you think I care about what you want, Kit?”

Kit let out a sharp hiss as the blade sliced through his skin. Kit didn’t look down. He didn’t want to see what his body was doing to itself. Instead, he stared at Ambrose as he cut and Ambrose stared at Kit, never dropping eye contact for a second. Black eyes drinking in every twinge of pain flashing across Kit’s face, savouring every morsel of emotion that bled through his features.

Kit was doing a good job of keeping his face impassive. Until the third cut. Kit sucked in a sharp breath as he banged his leg against the wall of the bath, wrenching his head up to stare at the ceiling and breathing slowly out through his mouth with a pained hum.

“Alright there, Kit?”

“Never bett— AGH! Fuck!”

This time Kit looked, and he wished he didn’t. Sticky blood surrounded his wrist, thick and dark and gloopy. Kit couldn’t even tell where the cuts were because the blood from the last cut had washed over them all, leaving streams of blood racing down Kit’s palm. Splashing down onto the snow-white acrylic bottom of the tub.

Kit was going to be sick, but there was no time as his arm mechanically moved back to slice again. Kit looked up pleadingly into Ambrose’s black eyes, looking for any sign of sympathy or empathy, finding nothing except his own pathetic reflection staring back at him. Kit bit his lip to stop crying out on the last cut before Ambrose moved.

“Okay, Kit. That arm has enough. Mo—”

“Wait,” Kit croaked, licking his lips. “Waitwaitwaitwait, wait…”

Ambrose paused, tilting his head, eyebrows arching at interruption. He didn’t punish Kit though or chastise him, so Kit took that as an opportunity to continue.

“The… the blood— my knife will slip. I need to—”

“Okay Kit,” Ambrose said softly. “We can wait while you fix yourself.”

“Thank you,” Kit breathed, dropping the knife onto the tub floor with a clatter. Kit’s hands were shaking violently as he wiped the blood on his tracksuit bottoms, biting his lip to quiet the pained whimpers.

Ambrose clicked his tongue and said, “Kit stop. You’ll ruin them. Use the water.”

Kit blinked up owlishly at Ambrose, eyes glazed over as if the thought of using the bath hadn’t occurred to him. Kit nodded dumbly and reached over to the end of the bath, turning on the cold tap. The water was freezing. Before Kit could talk himself out of it, he gritted his teeth and plunged his arm under the spray.

Kit let out a startled gasp of pain, making his other hand a fist and beating it off the side of the bath because the cuts stung under the icy water. Kit bit his lip and rubbed the sticky coagulated strings of blood from his arm and hand. He did his best to not watch them slither like snakes down the drain and instead focused on turning the tap off.

Kit looked down at his arm to see fresh bright red blood surface in his cuts. None of them too deep. Exactly what Ambrose wanted. Exactly what Ambrose commanded of him, and he obeyed like a good little puppet.

Kit pushed himself back to the middle of the bath trying to push that though from his mind. His damp tracksuit clinging awkwardly to some places as he scooted across. Kit found Ambrose’s eyes with his own as he wiped the fresh streams of blood on his tracksuit, half to dry his hands, half to fuck with Ambrose just because.

Kit grabbed the knife and got comfortable, balancing his knees against the inside of the bath, feet planted on the bottom of the tub. He cocked a brow at Ambrose, as if to say I’m waiting, and Ambrose had to laugh inwardly at the gall.

Ambrose’s lips quipped up at the simple defiance. “Okay, Kit. Now cut your other arm.”

Ambrose relished Kit’s shaking hand as he drew the knife over his skin. He wanted to record all of Kit’s micro reactions in his brain just so he can think back on this moment whenever he was feeling down. It was intoxicating.

To watch Kit’s hand tremor, his body fight against Ambrose’s power and not be able to do a single thing to stop him. He could feel Kit’s mental resistance trying to fight Ambrose’s compulsion off him as he made the second cut. Ambrose drank in his expressions, every muted wince that he tried so hard not to show Ambrose.

It was pure turmoil he put Kit in, and it was addicting. He could watch it all day, and never get bored but that was just with Kit. Most of his other victims had a weak constitution and gave in a few days into Ambrose’s mental assault, in hopes that Ambrose would get bored and let them go. Some of them stopped fighting him out of sheer weakness, but not Kit. Never Kit. How long had it been now? Weeks? Months? And Kit was still fighting him.

Even if it wasn’t fighting Ambrose’s powers mentally, it was his little looks of defiance, his unwillingness to concede even if it would make life easier on him. No… Kit was a fighter and Ambrose couldn’t get enough of it. Finally, someone to match him, to challenge him. To say no and make everything difficult just because. It was obviously an illusion, but to Kit it seemed to be some semblance of control that he could pretend to have.

His favourite part was coming up now… ah yes. After the third cut, Kit bit his lip to stop the sudden cry. A deeper cut. He brought his head up and stared Ambrose directly in the eyes, that defiance still evident through his pain filled, glassy eyes on the verge of tears. Even when he wanted Ambrose to show mercy, he refused to ask.

It felt like Christmas and Kit was a gift for Ambrose to toy with, to batter and break and fix and break again, but a toy doesn’t give you that same satisfaction. The euphoria of seeing Kit’s white knuckled grip tight around the handle of the knife as he sliced through his flesh against his will and tried to hide the pain in his expression. Or more aptly, trying and failing to hide it, made it all the sweeter.

Ambrose leaned forward. “Two more, Kit. One deep, one shallow.”

“Nn— no,” Kit whispered, his hand shaking harder now. “No…”

“Remember little Kit, what you are. You’re my little puppet. My plaything, you don’t get to say no to me. Now, deep enough to hurt but not deep enough for hospital.”

“Fuck you,” Kit whispered venomously as he sliced through his arm, deeper this time. Kit cried out loud this time, craning his neck back to glare at the ceiling and Ambrose leaned closer. Observing the strain in Kit’s neck, the veins popping out of his throat. His jaw that was clenched tight enough to grind his teeth. His voice that came out like a pathetic animal’s cry.

“FUCK! Ughh!” Kit groaned, stamping his foot against the wall of the bath again, trying to exert the pain in his arm and transfer it to the bath.

“Look at it, Kit,” Ambrose said, and Kit shook his head.

“Go fuck yourself, Ambrose.”

“Kit. I said, look at the mess you’ve made.”

Kit fought the command like he always did but eventually his head turned down against his will and his eyes fixed on the massacre of blood on his arm again. Ambrose watched as Kit visibly paled at the sight with a soft smile. Kit made another cut while he looked at his arm and then Ambrose plucked the knife from his hand. Kit glared up at him. Ambrose just grinned.

“Clean your arms with the water, then change out of those clothes and put them for the wash. I’ll get the blood out of them, Kit. Don’t worry.”

“You’re so gracious,” Kit spat. Ambrose looked over his shoulder at Kit.

“Kit, slap your cuts for me.”

Kit barely registered the command, but the sharp sting had him letting out a diminished howl through gritted teeth.

“You fucker!” Kit screamed after Ambrose, but Ambrose had already walked out of the bathroom laughing at the good of it. “I hate you!”

“I know, Kit.”

*~*~*~*~*

Continued here

The Orphanage (plz lemme know if you want to be added or removed <;3) - @nameless-beanie @andithewhumper @annablogsposts @whumpasaurus101 @0eggdealer @rejectedbytheempty @sleepy-pearl @n3rv0usn0v4 @whumpatize-me-captain @steh-lar-uh-nuhs @sunshiline-writes @burningkittypoet @honeyed-euphrates @sacredwrath @theonewithallthefixations @acer-gaysimpstuff @m3rakii @xxgalgurlxx @princess-bubble-blossom

[seramilla]

(How DARE you post it when I promised I’d be good, now look at what you’ve made me do!!)

Lute may want to see Emily but…why?

Does Emily even want to see her right now??

It’s all just complicated.

Emily is with Odette and Clara when Sera comes to let her know Lute is awake and they spoke.

…And that she wants to see her.

Emily is very hesitant to get up and go. Her mind is racing with an endless stream of thoughts and questions.

Clara and Odette watch her carefully for any reaction at all when Clara speaks up.

“Do you want us to go with you? I can punch her in the face if she tries anything.”

Emily shakes her head breaking the trance she was in.

“No, thank you for the offer though. I think I can handle this.”

Emily gets up and follows her sister to the room and takes a deep breath as she grabs the handle.

Lute is sitting in the bedroom alone with her thoughts.

‘You idiot, why would she want to see YOU? You’re nothing but a vile DEMON that got her and her sister cast out of heaven. It’s all YOUR fault they needlessly suffered! You don’t deserve their kindness. Just look at what you’ve become. Now your outsides match your insides. No better than the very sinners you slew…’

“…shut up…”

It’s hard to breathe suddenly.

“Shut up. Shut up! SHUT UP!!!”

Lute clutched and clawed at her head and pulls at her hair because pain would usually makes those thoughts get quiet again. She stared at her left arm and grabbed a patch of feathers and pulled….ripping them out right as Emily walks in.

Emily can only stare in shock and horror as she sees Lute tearing out a clump feathers.

“LUTE!!”

"Lute, stop!"

Lute doesn't listen. She keeps pulling, and pulling, until there is a patchwork of tiny pinpricks and golden blood marring her skin, like someone had taken a hole punch straight to her arm, leaving tiny, miniscule openings for blood to come through.

"Lute, please, you're hurting yourself!"

Emily pulls on Lute's opposite arm -- the angelic one, that can still fit so perfectly into the other angel's palm. She tugs when Lute tries to wrench it away from her again, to continue her relentless picking of feathers on her demon arm, but Emily is stronger than she looks. She holds Lute's hand to the bed, preventing her from causing more damage.

"Why do you care if I'm hurting myself?" Lute asks. She's trying to project anger, and that same stone-cold demeanor that Emily is used to. But Emily can see that the wall placed around herself is crumbling. This behavior, this blasé and no-care attitude, has always been a front. She can see that, more than ever now. Lute has always used it to hide the pain.

It's not an excuse, Emily reminds herself. It's never going to be a valid excuse to justify everything Lute has done. But it's an explanation. One she can understand...even if she doesn't support what it used to hide.

"Because I don't like to see anyone in pain," Emily says, holding her hand down tighter. "Even you. Even though I'm still...mad at you. I am still so livid, that I almost didn't come in here. What you did...it makes me so angry to even think about. I still haven't forgiven you, for everything you did! But..."

Emily observes Lute for what she is now. A decrepit, mangled creature, constantly fighting against her own will to survive, and wanting to inflict pain on herself. For what? To punish herself for past mistakes? That wasn't her call to make. To the people she'd wronged...this isn't justice. It's insanity! Two wrongs don't make a right...Lute torturing herself won't change what happened!

"...But?" Lute asks. She tries to make it sound disinterested; like she doesn't care. She fails spectacularly.

"But I never wanted this!" Emily clarifies, motioning to the whole of Lute's body to illustrate her point. "I would never want you to suffer like this!"

"Then what do you want?" Lute asks, turning her head away, and grunting as she tries to lie down. Emily can see it's hard for her to get comfortable. Lute won't look at her now.

"I wanted you to change. See that there could be another way," Emily explains. "Heaven made you do such awful, terrible things. Then told you it was okay, because it was for the Heavenly mandate. Heaven doesn't know everything! They get things wrong, sometimes! They were wrong about me! You could have stood up for me and Sera, but you didn't!"

Lute flinches away. She turns over on her good side, facing away from Emily. Emily can see how much it pains her to do so. But she doesn't let Lute's feigned indifference make her stop talking.

"I know you can hear me. You know I'm right. What I want, Lute...is to be able to forgive you someday. I didn't want to trade my suffering for yours. That doesn't solve anything and just perpetuates the cycle of pain. I just wanted you to see...see where I was coming from. I think now you have. I hope I can try to forgive you, but...you'll need to start learning to forgive yourself first."

Lute doesn't answer. She doesn't even acknowledge Emily's words, even though Emily knows she heard them. Emily apologizes, tells her to "Think about what I said, okay?," and turns away. As she leaves the room, she doesn't see Lute's shoulders quake with grief. She doesn't see Lute cry, as her tears mingle with the golden blood that's already stained her pillow, and wallow in her self pity even more.

[paigenoelchas-blog]

Just a quick little write to get my juices flowing again and to distract myself while I am waiting for #moonvale. I still love them so much.

Waiting

Sitting and staring at the phone was driving him mad. He thought he was long past waiting for her response to his texts. He thought he was well beyond waiting in nervous torture for her to send him any notice that she was safe and happy and that she still loved him.

But it had been three days and two long nights since she had called to tell him about her day and whisper words of love to help him sleep.

It had become their habit to speak every night to share their world with each other. He hadn't realized how much he had come to depend on those moments, hadn't realized how empty his life was without her. Though they still couldn't quite be together, they were connected in a way that he suspected, most other couples were not.

She was what made him more than human. She gave him humanity and filled his heart with something that he was sure he didn't deserve.

She should have been home from her business trip a couple of hours ago. He had distracted himself for a while, watching dishes and cleaning his living area, but there was nothing else to distract him. He could not separate himself from the worry.

If she didn't text him soon, he knew he would do something reckless, like track her phone, fly to where she was, or beg her to come to him and never leave.

He stared at the phone, begging it to ring, begging for a text, for any sign from her.

He imagined her gorgeous laugh and soft voice in his head. He imagined what it would be like when, one day, they would meet and the world would vanish. He dreamed of the day their lips would meet and he could take her all in, from her aroma to her warmth. He imagined what it would be like to sweep her up in his arms and do all of the things that he had only imagined in the middle of the night.

More than that, he wished for the days when they could share a couch and talk of their days together. When they could wake up early to eat waffles and speak of their plans for the day. When their world was one and their home was in the presence of each other.

And he was still imagining her and their life when the phone notified him of a message. Finally.

"Home safe, missing you." He couldn't keep the smile from growing on his face.

But just as quickly as he read the message, he heard a knock on the door.

Cautious, he grabbed the bat that sat beside the door. He wasn't expecting deliveries or a visitor. He couldn't trust the outside world yet, so he walked cautiously to the door and squinted into the peephole.

He saw a woman, blonde and stunning, better than she had ever appeared over a screen. She looked nervous and though he knew that he should send her away, he simply could not. Dropping the bat, he flung the door open with such intensity that it caused her to jump. Her cheeks flushed a little. He couldn't help but think that it added to her beauty. She had a bag of what appeared to be food and a suitcase following behind her.

Their eyes met. He froze. She began to look nervous, tucking her hair behind her ears. Without apologizing or saying anything, he ushered her inside while reaching around to grab her suitcase. She smelled like cinnamon. Once inside, he took the bag and placed it on the table.

As soon as the back hit the counter, she ran into him, quickly wrapping her arms around his waist and almost setting him off-balance.

He returned the hold that she had on him and refused to let go for what he was sure was an inappropriate length of time. He didn't care. He couldn't believe that she was here in the flesh, that she had risked uncertain dangers to get here.

Eventually, he pulled back and stared into her eyes again, trying to convey every feeling he couldn't put words to. "You crazy, wonderful, gorgeous woman... What are you doing here?" the words fell out of his mouth in a blubber. His thoughts, normally formal and thoughtful, had betrayed his messy heart.

She looked up at him and smiled softly, "I had a craving for Chinese food and remembered a promise made to me long ago." She removed a hand from his waist and brought it to his face, gently caressing his cheek, then added, "My heart was more than a little homesick."

He chuckled. It was deep and guttural, a mix of delight and attraction and only for her. Reluctantly, he began to release her. "I guess I should make an effort to fulfill my promise and get some plates for us before the food gets cold, I mean that is the least I can...."

"We can warm it up, later, you know." She interrupted. She reached for his hand and locked their fingers together.

It was at that instant that he placed his lips on hers, gently claiming her. Then, knowing that she wanted him as much as he wanted her, he picked her up and carried her to the bedroom finally showing her all of the things he had been dreaming of.

[a-998h]

Hi I hope your having a good day.

Anyways I've got a sagau idea

So I've made like ten-ish or over OCs who look exactly like/similar to me because of Lore Reasons.

So pretend Reader has their own universe with a look-alike self-insert and over ten OCs who look just like their IRL self because of Lore Reasons.

It only applies to physical appearance and it ranges from "you're identical to the Reader" to "you could be a relative to them."

Let's say that instead of Reader getting Isekai-ed to Teyvat, one of their OCs who looks just like them lands in there instead and is executed in Imposter AU fashion, no matter how much they say they aren't Reader and never even claimed to be them.

They wake up in their universe like it was just a nightmare, but now have scars permanently acquired from the Imposter Hunt.

As for Reader, they had a nightmare where they saw their OC brutally hunted and killed in all the worst angles and don't take it well.

Next time its time to boot up Genshin Impact, they just hand it to a friend who loves the game but don't have the storage to play it, and just watches them play.

Their acolytes are wondering why their creator isn't controlling them anymore.

"As glad as I am that your letting me play, what's the fuck happened to make you let go of your borderline obsession with it?"

"Nightmare."

"one hell of a nightmare to put this off, the fuck happened?"

"You know [OC's Name]? I had a nightmare they woke up in Teyvat and was murdered and tortured by almost everyone in Teyvat. Because they looked like a Creator Deity."

"There's never even been a mention of a Creator God, and looking like them got one of your favorites killed, good god."

"yeah I can't stomach this anymore. I think I'll focus on my own original creations instead, you can have my account for now on."

"Woof. Not too keen on spoiling my Teyvatian faves myself knowing they might be culpable in making you sad."

"yeah I'm scared of having nightmares of my other look-alikes being murdered."

"Whatever makes you happy."

From then on Teyvat has to grapple with only having attention from a friend of their Creator occasionally giving them the time of day instead of their Creator's doting.

Teyvat will have to grapple with the 'imposter' being one of their many direct creation always meant to look just like them.

Teyvat will have to grapple with having executed a direct creation of the creator and loosing their love because of it. All that love now directed to those very mistreated creations.

Teyvat will have to grapple with their Creator Deity not even knowing/remembering that they created Teyvat, and only thinks they made their current focus.

Okay now I'm imagining an AU where another look-alikes OC whose heard of what happens the first time around wakes up in Teyvat and it very intent on staying away from civilization and finding their own way back to their universe.

Like what if this happened because Teyvat or other parties couldn't get the Creator back yet, so they settled for the next best thing. Their own creation who looked oh so similar.

This fits with my own lore for my series on my blog.

They want you. You're their beloved god but they can't have you, at least not yet. Thanks to Travel and the existence of you controlling them they knew other world exist.

The first they thought was a copy of you. They hunted the imposter, how dare this weakling impersonate their god. The death was brutal. That one woke up with scars.

This repeated for who know how long. As they come to terms with the fact that they won't have you just yet, the settle for someone they think is related to you. There are traits shared between the two of you, but that one isn't their god. But the have to settle until they can have you.

The nightmares that follow you push you away, they're sorry. They want you back, they'll be nice to the next one if you just look their way again. Please, they need you.

There is guilt, they killed a creation of yours with no remorse. They killed someone because they happened to look like you, and Teyvat thought this person was lying about being their god. They'll all make it up to you, just please look their way again.

[denimbex1986]

'If Peaky Blinders made the Irish actor a household name, will Christopher Nolan’s nuclear blockbuster send him into the stratosphere? He talks about extreme weight loss, hating school and why his next character won’t be a smoker.

Cillian Murphy is struggling with what he can and can’t say about his title role in Oppenheimer, the latest Christopher Nolan epic, such is the secrecy surrounding this film. Murphy is under “strict instructions” not to talk about the content. Which is awkward when you’ve flown to his home in Ireland to interview him specifically about playing the physicist who oversaw the creation of the atomic bomb, later detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s not clear who issued these instructions. Nolan? The studio? The US government? All I know is that as well as Murphy being gagged by hefty NDAs, I am not allowed to see it (“bit unfortunate”, he concedes).

So, yes, here we sit in an empty upstairs room of a restaurant near his house in Monkstown, Dublin, working out how to do this. The room is dark, the sun shining through a solitary Velux lighting his features like a Géricault. The only background noise is the low hum of a wine refrigerator. Murphy loathes interviews, looks visibly tortured at points. But he relaxes when I ask if he’s pleased with Oppenheimer. “I am, yeah,” he says. “I don’t like watching myself – it’s like, ‘Oh, fucking hell’ – but it’s an extraordinary piece of work. Very provocative and powerful. It feels sometimes like a biopic, sometimes like a thriller, sometimes like a horror. It’s going to knock people out,” he adds. “What [Nolan] does with film, it fucks you up a little bit.”

Nolan wouldn’t disagree. The director recently told Wired magazine that some of those who’d seen it were left “absolutely devastated … they can’t speak”. Which sounds like a bad thing, but is related perhaps to the thought of the 214,000 Japanese people, overwhelmingly civilians, who lost their lives when the bombs were dropped. Kai Bird, the historian who co-authored American Prometheus, the 2008 biography of J Robert Oppenheimer upon which the film is based, said he was still “emotionally recovering” from seeing the film, clarifying that it was “a stunning artistic achievement”.

Murphy’s portrayal is said to be astonishing (“Oscar-worthy” is the buzz). This is not unbelievable. While Hollywood might not know him as a leading man, this quietly intense actor has long been celebrated in the UK and Ireland, most notably for his nine-year stint as Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders. When he first appeared on our screens, looking like a renaissance painting of Saint Sebastian – chiselled head contrasting with translucent blue eyes – it was impossible not to be distracted. He appeared first on stage in Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs, then the screen adaptation. Then 28 Days Later; Intermission; Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Previous collaborations with Nolan include the Dark Knight trilogy, Inception and Dunkirk, “significant milestones in my career,” he says, adding that Nolan “might be the perfect director”.

It was Nolan’s wife, the producer Emma Thomas, who called Murphy one afternoon at the home he shares with his wife, artist Yvonne McGuinness, and two teenage sons. Nolan doesn’t actually have a telephone, or an email, or computer for that matter: “He’s the most analogue individual you could possibly encounter.” So, Emma said Chris would like a word and passed the receiver, then the director came on the line. “Cillian, I’d love you to play the lead in this new thing,” he said. Murphy tries to recreate his response to this news. “I was lost for words. But thrilled. Like beyond thrilled.” It is characteristic of Murphy that the modulation of his voice barely changes as he expresses this. He was so stunned, he had to sit down. “Your mind explodes.”

In the absence of the three-hour feature, I scrutinise Oppenheimer’s three-minute trailer. It’s a rush of snapshots against the crackling of a Geiger counter. There’s Murphy, short back and sides, lifting 1940s eye goggles; blue and red atoms coming at him fast; orange light; white light; blackout; silence. Massive explosion against the backdrop of space. Overlaid is Murphy’s narration, “We’re in a race against the Nazis / and I know what it means / if the Nazis have a bomb.” There’s Matt Damon looking porky as army general Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project: “They have a 12-month head start.” Murphy, pointing with cigarette: “18.”

He has put back on some of the weight he lost for the part, I’m relieved to see; his skin isn’t quite so taut over his skull and there are freckles over those eagle-wing cheekbones. He was determined to nail the scientist’s silhouette “with the porkpie hat and the pipe”, testing himself to see how little he could eat. “You become competitive with yourself a little bit which is not healthy. I don’t advise it.” He won’t say how many kilograms he lost, or what food the nutritionist told him to cut out. NDA? “Ach, no. I don’t want it to be, ‘Cillian lost x weight for the part’.”

Then again, the hurtling speed at which Nolan worked, crisscrossing the US, made it easy to skip meals. Murphy began to forget about food in the same way he began to forget about sleep. “It’s like you’re on this fucking train that’s just bombing. It’s bang, bang, bang, bang. You sleep for a few hours, get up, bang it again. I was running on crazy energy; I went over a threshold to where I was not worrying about food or anything. I was so in it, a state of hyper …” he gropes for the word, “hyper something. But it was good because the character was like that. He never ate.” Oppenheimer subsisted on little more than Chesterfield cigarettes and double-strength martinis, rims dipped in lime. “Cigarettes and pipes. He would alternate between the two. That’s what did for him in the end,” Murphy adds, a nod to the scientist’s death from cancer in 1967. “I’ve smoked so many fake cigarettes for Peaky and this. My next character will not be a smoker. They can’t be good for you. Even herbal cigarettes have health warnings now.”

I raise method acting and Murphy tilts his head and frowns. “Method acting is a sort of … No,” he says, firm but with a half smile. Oppenheimer had many defining characteristics, not least walking on the balls of his feet and a vocal tic that sounded like nim-nim-nim, but Murphy didn’t want to do an impression. Nolan was obsessed with the Brillo-texture hair, so they spent “a long time working on hair”. And the voice. The real question for Murphy was what combination – ambition, madness, delusion, deep hatred of the Nazi regime? – allowed this theoretical physicist to agree to an experiment he knew could obliterate humankind. “He was dancing between the raindrops morally. He was complex, contradictory, polymathic; incredibly attractive intellectually and charismatic, but,” he decides, “ultimately unknowable.

“Listen, it’s not like a spoiler,” he says, checking himself before he leans in, “but there are incidents in his early life that were quite worrying; very erratic.” They are in the film and the book, he steers. I suspect he is referring to Oppenheimer’s postgrad at Cambridge in 1926, when he placed a poisoned apple on the desk of a tutor towards whom he harboured complicated feelings of inadequacy and jealousy. Arguably, this was attempted murder. But Oppenheimer’s rich New York parents rushed in to bundle him into psychoanalysis. He was diagnosed with “dementia praecox”, a term describing symptoms associated with schizophrenia.

Murphy likes these complex characters; they’re his meat. People that don’t necessarily follow the – yawn – traditional transformative arc of storytelling. Not villains, exactly (although he’s played a few, including Scarecrow in Dark Knight and Jackson Rippner in Red Eye): “Villains are good if they’re well written, but if it’s one note or a trope, then they are dull.” He likes a script to stretch leisurely into all corners of the human condition, “all the shades”. At the same time, you have to understand his exceptional ability to portray interiority, physically manifesting intense human emotion without a word, radiating fierce, consuming energy. Which he does today, actually, when I stray off track.

Although Nolan is usually, shall we say, antiseptic in his approach to romance, Oppenheimer represents a significant shift. He told Wired the love story aspect “is as strong as I’ve ever done”. It features prolonged full nudity for Murphy and Florence Pugh, who plays Oppenheimer’s ex-fiancee, as well as sex, and there are complicated scenes with Emily Blunt, who plays his wife, “that were pretty heavy”. Murphy turns coy: “I’m under strict instructions not to give away anything.”

He asks if I’ve heard of chemistry tests. “They put two actors in a room to see if there’s any spark, and have all the producers and director at a table watching. I don’t know what metric they use, and it seems so outrageously silly, but sometimes you get a chemistry and nobody knows why.” This is a roundabout way of saying his scenes with Blunt and Pugh conjure this magic. His established bond with Blunt (they co-starred in A Quiet Place II) meant “the audience gets something for free”, he says. “You can be immediately vulnerable and open, and try stuff. There were moments where I remember saying, ‘I couldn’t have done that if it wasn’t with you.’”

Murphy, 47, grew up the eldest of four in Cork. His father was a civil servant, his mother a French teacher. They were a middle-class family, musical; his father “can pick up any instrument”, his brother played piano, and they regularly got stuck into “traditional Irish sessions”. Bookshelves were stuffed with literature, the radio often on, the “shitty” TV set not so much. Home life was busy but his parents taught him French and Irish, and sent him to an all-boys academic, rugby-playing private school. “I got all the education” he says, drily.

The story of how much he disliked the Presentation Brothers College, the hard-drinking masculine emphasis, how he found solace playing guitar in a band, is much rehearsed and he says today he doesn’t want “to slag the school off. I hear it’s great now.” Something about this experience seems nonetheless unsettling. He had one friend, who is still his best friend, “so I wasn’t, like, an outcast”. He played rugby for the first couple of years, but abandoned it “because everyone was all of a sudden towering over me.” Was it an unhappy time? He shifts. “It was OK. I was a bit of a messer, like I’d get in trouble and say nothing. It wasn’t the ideal school for me.”

He enrolled in and dropped out of a law degree at University College Cork, which created some friction with his parents (when I ask if his own sons will go to university in Dublin, he says, “Whatever they want”). He continued with the band, his first creative love but the one that got away. When they were offered a contract with Acid Jazz records, he turned it down for a number of reasons, he says, crucially that he didn’t feel good enough. He still writes and plays at home but, no, you won’t be hearing any of his recordings, ever, he says.

It’s a funny thing talking to Murphy. He’s at once garrulous (on the craft, or literature, or ideas) and reticent (pretty much anything else). I sense in previous interviews that he skates over issues close to his heart – such as the expression of emotion in Ireland and the need to teach empathy in schools. But when I try to drill in to these topics, get to the root, he clams shut, emitting energy like a nuclear reactor.

Later, in a different context, he will tell me a truth: “I’m stubborn and lacking in confidence, which is a terrible combination. I don’t want to put anything out that I don’t think is excellent.” But he clearly hates the pantomime of publicity, asking why I am returning to certain topics and repeating lines I’ve read elsewhere. I can almost see him at home with its views towards the Irish Sea, complaining to his wife as they tuck into supper: “Another one, asking the same fucking questions.”

If he could get out of going to Cannes, of standing on red carpets, dressed as is his habit for a funeral, hair shellacked, hands in pockets; if he could turn his back on the coloured-foam mics thrust in his face, he would. He really would. No, it dawns on him now, there’s something even worse than the red carpet; there’s the talkshow rounds. The very word “talkshow” comes out of him like a pain from his ribcage, as if the parcelling out of amuse-bouche anecdotes, offering them up to the forced laughter of that false god of show business, the studio audience, is in itself the most cheapening experience known to mankind.

“I do them because you’re contractually obliged to. I just endure them. I’ve always found it difficult. I’ve said this so many, many times.” Then there’s the double wince of realising that, yes, he’s done it again. He’s laid into the industry that feeds him. His hands raise slowly in surrender. “I want to just caveat this by saying, I’m so privileged. I’m so happy to be doing what I love. I’m really lucky. But I don’t enjoy the personality side of being an actor. I don’t understand why I should be entertaining and scintillating on a talkshow. I don’t know why all of a sudden that’s expected of me. Why?”

There’s an awkward silence. I say that he reminds me of Naomi Osaka, the tennis player who refused to talk to journalists after the French Open in 2021. He says he feels “100%” sympathy with her, “because why should she have to perform?” Then he relents. “But I get it. I get it’s a kind of ecosystem where the film feeds the publicity which feeds the talkshows which goes back and feeds the film, so, like, that’s how it works. I suppose I’m just not good at it. At interviews, at this stuff,” he gestures at me. He says after he leaves me today he’ll be going down the stairs thinking of all the things he’s said and worrying it’s come across all wrong. “Do you know what Sam Beckett said? ‘I have no views to inter.’ I love that. That should be the interview.”

We return to his art, the tension falls away and he’s back to his charming self, charged air evaporating. Since Oppenheimer, he’s also wrapped Small Things Like These, an adaptation of Claire Keegan’s brilliant novella set in 1985 in a small Irish town on the edge of which is a convent and “laundry”. Murphy is a huge fan of Keegan. He remembers reading her 2010 novel Foster on a train and having to pull his hoodie over his face because he was crying so hard. Anyway, he’d wanted to work with the Peaky Blinders director Tim Mielants and they were throwing ideas around in his sitting room when Murphy’s wife suggested Small Things. “No, there’s no way,” Murphy said. “That’s going to be gone already.” But when he called the agent, he found it was available. “I went, ‘No, you’ve got to be fucking kidding.’” Murphy pitched the idea to Matt Damon, who has set up a studio with Ben Affleck. “From there it all just happened really quickly.”

Murphy plays Bill Furlong who, funnily enough, is a man of few words. Keegan’s light-touch writing is everything he loves in art – the sense that you are not being bashed over the head by an idea. That’s how he tries to act, he adds. “I’m always trying to cut lines in scenes, because I feel like you can transmit it. Like when you see a person on a train thinking, or driving a car, and you are purely observing someone and feeling the energy that is vibrating from them. That’s the sort of acting I love. In a lot of film and television, they want to cut those bits to go to the action. I like films that pose the big questions and then leave it to the audience.” Perhaps this is at the heart of his reticence in interviews? That he doesn’t feel the need to explain.

He still finds it “nuts” that the last of the Magdalene laundries closed in 1996, that it was illegal to buy condoms in Ireland until 1985, that divorce was made legal only in 1996. He remembers vividly thousands of people still going to see moving statues in Cork when he was growing up. “Crazy. But, like, how far the country has come since then, we’re so socially advanced now compared with where we were. But you must look back. And art is a better way of doing that than reading all these reports [into the laundries].” (Afterwards, he emails me: “The nation is actually dealing with an unresolved collective trauma. Who knows how long this will take to heal, but I feel strongly that art, film and literature can help with that process. It’s a kinder and gentler sort of therapy. I hope that our movie can help with that in its own little way.”)

Because he’s a nice man, because he doesn’t want me to feel bad about our encounter, and because he’s generous and hospitable, Murphy finishes by telling me some of the best places to visit in Ireland. He and his family are staying here for the summer. They’ve had it with air travel and his home town of Cork is only a couple of hours away. He supplies me with other recommendations: a great book he’s just read, Brian, by Jeremy Cooper, oh, and there’s the Francis Bacon studio exhibition I should catch on my way out.

But before I go, what has he learned from playing Oppenheimer? Foremost, he says, that scientists think differently. He knew this already from playing physicist Robert Capa in Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) and hanging out in Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, for research. “I had dinner with all these geniuses. I’ll never understand quantum mechanics, but I was interested in what science does to their perspective.” He sought their opinions on subjects that matter – love, politics, our place in the universe, “infinity, or whatever the fuck. Because they have a completely different way of taking in information than we do. I remember one scientist saying, ‘I don’t believe in love. It’s a biological phenomenon, the exchange of hormones between the female and the male. That’s all. Love is a nonsense.’” Murphy taps the table with his hand. “I couldn’t go along with that, obviously.”