#so two of the walls are a lot cleaner than they were before

[chartreuxcatz]

At work I spent... maybe a little less than an hour scraping gunk off a floor that hasn't been cleaned in god knows how long and now my body hurts.

And its not even done yetttt

[munsonhoneybaby]

Sweet Leaf | Eddie Munson X F!Henderson!Reader

Summary: Finally starting to spend time with Eddie outside of your bedroom, everybody seems to know about the two of you but Dustin. 

Word Count: 10.3k

Warnings: 18+ mdni, eddie’s never-ending pet names, frequent drug use (marijuana), smut, lots of high sex in the whole series idk what to tell you lol, tiny bit of dry humping, eddie’s fishnet fetish?, skinny dipping, fingering, p in v (unprotected but he pulls out), sex in an empty parking lot, squirting, pretty heavy subspace, not angst but crying after sex, eddie’s a little fucknasty sometimes but he worships his lady, cheesy ahh ending

A/N: just two emotionally damaged stoners trying to figure out how to love each other, what more can i say? the length of this one just kept getting away from me lol i’ve loved writing this series and even though the main storyline is over i’d love to keep writing about these two if anybody sends in blurb/headcanon requests or anything like that !! i had plenty of little ideas i had to leave out !!

part one | part two | tmic masterlist

Eddie paused in the mirror, fixing the hair laying on his forehead. He fidgeted with his shirt, trying to get it to sit right on his shoulders– it was an old Kill ‘Em All t-shirt he’d cut the sleeves off of ages ago. He huffed and did one more frantic scan of his bedroom, hands fluttering uselessly at his sides as he was sure there had to be something he’d missed. Bed made, laundry done, and messes cleared away, his room looked cleaner than he’d seen it in probably two years. Deciding it wasn’t gonna get any cleaner in the next fifteen minutes, he dashed down the short hallway to double-check that the living room was spotless.

He’d draped the nicest blanket they had over the back of the couch and even specifically bought a few candles to light around the room just for the occasion. A few pre-rolled joints sat out on the coffee table alongside the selection of horror movies that Steve definitely didn’t let him sneak out of Family Video for free; he wanted to give you options, so he settled on The Thing, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Shining, and The Evil Dead. He would have happily taken you to see a movie, maybe even a drive-in, but you’d said you’d rather it be just the two of you.

Three knocks sounded at the door, making him jump. You were four minutes earlier than he expected. Stepping to the door, he glanced around the room again and blew out a heavy breath before he opened it.

And there you were. Black shorts peeking out under your baggy Dio tee and a bag of snacks in hand from the gas station a couple miles off, you smiled at him. “Hi.”

Eddie couldn’t help his cheesy grin as he replied, “Hey.” Something about you was so enrapturing to him. He could have just stared at you, standing in the afternoon sunlight shining on his doorstep, forever.

“You gonna let me in?”

“Oh! Uh– right.” He moved aside, opening the door wider. “It’s not exactly the Ritz, but uh–”

“Oh, knock it off. I don’t care about that shit.” You looked around, taking in the collection of hats and mugs lining the walls. The warm light outside made the closed mismatched curtains glow. “I think it’s perfect.”

He cleared his throat to overcome the warmth in his chest before he spoke. “I got a few different movies if you wanna pick.”

“Ooh, can we watch The Shining? It’s been a little while since I’ve seen it, it’s one of my favorites.”

“Sure thing,” He nodded. As he turned on the TV and put the tape in the VHS player, you found a seat on the couch and grabbed a joint off the table to light up. While you seemed totally at ease in his trailer, he was as nervous as the first time he met you. First date jitters, he supposed. You looked so comfortable curled up and smoking in the corner of his couch that, as he settled at the opposite end, he couldn’t help but feel like you belonged there.

Your legs stretched into his lap as you scooted down a bit to pass him the joint. He rubbed his free hand back and forth along your calf absentmindedly. “I don’t know how long you were planning on staying– if you wanna stick around after this movie, I could make a frozen pizza and we could watch another or something.”

“Sounds good to me,” You hummed in return.

Forty-five minutes into the movie, the first joint was gone and Eddie was focused intently on the television screen. You started to get fidgety though, foot nudging against his thigh. “What’d you sit so far away for?”

“I dunno, just thought I’d give you your space I guess? I didn’t wanna make you uncomfortable or anything.”

“C’mere.” Pinching at his shirt, you tugged until he scooted himself to you. Your legs lay completely over his lap as you rested your head against his shoulder. “I don’t need space, I came here to be with you. It’s cute you’re taking this whole ‘first date’ thing so seriously, though.”

His cheeks flushed a little pink and he fiddled with his rings over your lap. “Sorry, I just– I want this to go well.” He laughed nervously as he continued, “I want to keep seeing you outside your bedroom, y’know? I want you to come to my shows, and I wanna take you to the diner, and I wanna kiss you goodbye after Hellfire sessions.”

You gave him a little smile, turning his face toward you to plant a soft kiss on his lips. “I wanna do that stuff too, Eds. You know that you mean something to me, right? I just wanna go slow in the Dustin department. He has to be okay with this.”

“Okay,” Eddie nodded instantly, “However you wanna go about it. I swear, I’ll even ask the little loudmouth for his blessing when you want me to. I mean, I love that kid too.”

For a split second you just took in his features, and those big, earnest eyes were impossible not to believe. The material of his shirt scrunched between your fingers as you drew his lips to yours again. “Thank you for being there for him. And for me. You don’t know how much it means.”

He brushed a strand of hair back from your face with a little smile. “I think I do, sweetheart.”

“Hey, so where’s your sister?” Mike asked, shoveling a handful of popcorn into his mouth. “She’s like…always home.”

“I don’t know,” Dustin frowned, “I guess she just told Mom she was going out. Maybe I should call Robin and ask if she’s with her.”

“Dude, she’s an adult,” Lucas shook his head slightly. “She probably doesn’t need you to check in on her, I’m sure she’s fine.”

“But what if she isn’t?” As he continued, he paced the length of the basement, hands gesturing wildly with his words. “And what is she doing? ‘Going out’? What does that mean? Why is she trying to hide where she’s going? What if it’s somewhere sketchy?”

“You need to calm down,” Mike insisted. “It really isn’t that serious, she’s probably with Robin and Steve or something.”

“Right, so I should just call Robin and make sure!”

Lucas still rolled his eyes, but Dustin was already dashing up the stairs to the phone. “Great, now he’s gonna lose it if she’s not with Robin.”

“Where else would she be?”

“Literally anywhere, man. She could be at the record store, or with Nancy, or maybe with...”

“You don’t think she could be with Eddie–” But Mike was cut off by footsteps thundering down the stairs.

“She’s not with Robin, Steve, or Nancy which means I’m out of people to call which means I’m officially concerned. Do you think we should go out and start checking places? I mean, what if she smoked like– like– bad weed or something? I don’t know how that stuff works! Why wouldn’t she tell me where she’s going? She should know I’m worried sick!”

“Oh my god, would you relax? Did you talk to your mom?”

“Well, of course she thinks everything’s fine! She trusts us both implicitly when she obviously shouldn’t!”

Mike pinched the bridge of his nose and blew out a breath before he looked at him. “I seriously think you’re overreacting. Like Lucas said, she’s an adult; she doesn’t have to tell you everything. She’s allowed to have a life.”

Having returned to his pacing, Dustin halted and looked at him with an offended expression. “Are you trying to say I’m clingy? I’m not clingy!”

“I’m not saying you’re clingy! I’m just saying that you do your own shit, she probably does her own shit too. Maybe she’s taking time to herself or maybe she’s out with a guy or something.”

“There’s no way she’s out with a guy. She would tell me if there was a guy! And where would she even meet a guy? Work? She barely talks to anyone, you guys know that!” Mike and Lucas shared a glance before looking in different directions.

“Look, if she’s not home in an hour we’ll go check a couple places, alright?” Lucas finally sighed.

“An hour? It’s already a quarter after nine!” Then they heard the front door close and Dustin was racing back up the stairs. There you stood, kicking off your shoes beside everyone else’s, a smile on your face that you were trying to bite back. Until your brother and his friends burst out of the basement. “And where on Earth have you been?”

You looked at him questioningly. “Enjoying my day off?”

“By yourself? Until nine-thirty at night?” He placed his hands on his hips, scanning you with a scrutinizing gaze. “What were you doing?”

“What’s with the third degree? I stopped at the bookstore, then I went out in the woods and read for a while. Is that okay, Mom?”

“Don’t condescend to me, you had me worried half to death!”

As you replied, you ruffled his hair. “Aw, well that’s very sweet, Dusty. I’m fine though, you don’t need to wait up for me.”

“See? We told you there was nothing to worry about,” Mike chimed. When he and Lucas gave each other another pointed look, however, he knew they’d both seen the faint hickey peeking out from your shirt collar that Dustin had apparently missed.

“Goodnight, boys. I’ll make you guys some breakfast in the morning, alright?” They all called back their own goodnights as you headed down the hallway to your bedroom and they made their way back into the basement.

Later that night you were dozing off, still dressed and on top of the blankets, when you jolted back to full consciousness at the sound of the phone ringing in the living room. Grumbling a little under your breath, you rubbed your eyes.

You were halfway down the hall when you heard the basement door creak open, and suddenly you were wide awake. At half past midnight, there was no way anyone other than Eddie was calling and there was definitely no way Dustin could answer that call. Increasing your pace to a slightly-panicked speedwalk until you were in the room with him, you just barely made it to the phone before him. You pressed the receiver into your chest to muffle your voice as you practically whispered, “Don’t worry about it, Dusty, it’s for me.”

“Who is it?”

“Nancy, she wanted to talk about what I got from the bookstore but she was busy with Robin and Steve,” You answered easily. He nodded and yawned out another goodnight before booking it back downstairs. Letting out a relieved exhale, you finally raised the phone to your ear. “Sorry, Dustin almost picked up. Everything okay?”

“Shit, I’m sorry, baby. Everything’s fine. I tried not to call, I swear I did, but–” He laughed a little embarrassedly, “Fuck, when can I see you again?”

“Eddie,” You whispered through a little giggle. “You had to call about that now?”

“I mean, I could always come over so we could talk about it in person instead,” He teased.

“I just left your place three hours ago.”

“Should’a just stayed the night, babe,” He sighed regretfully.

Clutching at non-existent pearls, you replied, “Stay the night? On the first date? Eddie Munson, what kind of girl do you take me for?”

“Of course, sweet thing, you’re right. You could never do anything so scandalous as sharing a bed with me before we’re really goin’ steady.” You could picture that smirk on his face as he spoke. “Guess that means we’ve gotta plan a second date, huh?”

“Guess so,” You hummed. “Have anything in mind?”

“Well, I was thinking,” He began slowly. “Maybe you could come to one of our shows? I know that’s not a super great date idea since I’m gonna be on stage pretty much the whole time and everything, but–”

“No, that sounds great,” You interrupted. “When’re you guys playing next?”

“Friday night at eight.”

“Alright, I’ll see you at The Hideout on Friday then.”

“Alright,” He cooed back playfully. “G’night, baby.”

Standing in front of your open closet, you rustled through all your clothes in indecision. “I don’t know what I should wear.” Nancy, Robin, and Steve sat side by side by side on the edge of your bed, peering into the closet from behind you. The latter opened his mouth to share an opinion but held his tongue as your younger brother leaned in your door.

“What’re you doing?”

“Uh– just trying to find something to wear, I’m going out later.” You shrugged off his question and continued shuffling through your hanging shirts.

“Again with this ‘going out’ stuff! With who?”

“Us,” Nancy interjected casually.

“Thought we’d go check out Eddie’s show at The Hideout tonight,” Steve added. “Show him some support since it’s usually just the drunks there.”

Dustin eyed you for a split second but seemed to move on from whatever suspicion he had toward you quickly. “Cool, I’ll let Mike and Lucas know. We were gonna hang at Mike’s, but we can all go to the show together instead.”

“You can’t come, Dusty. That’s not a kid-friendly environment,” You told him apologetically.

“What? Come on! We’re not kids, we’re in high school! We wanna see Eddie perform too, he’s our friend!”

“Oh, so now he’s just your guys’ friend,” Steve chimed. “Before, you were practically begging us to get along.” He stood and crossed the room to ruffle Dustin’s curls. “Seriously, dude, your sister’s right. This place is nothing but adults drinking, I doubt they’d even let you stay if you came in with us.”

“See? Your mother says no,” You confirm. “Sorry, Dustin, really. Maybe we could all do something together as a big group though soon, yeah? All of us and the Hellfire club. We could sit in on a session or take you all to the movies or something, okay?”

He paused, fidgeting with one of the buttons on his undone, patterned overshirt. “That’d actually be pretty cool. You’d do that?”

“Yeah, kid, it’s no problem.” You walked over to give him a side hug before nudging him out the door. “Now beat it, I’ve gotta get ready.” It took another minute or two of brainstorming before you decided to snag Dustin’s Hellfire t-shirt from his laundry basket– thank God you had just done his laundry for him. You thought it’d be the best fan attire since Corroded Coffin wasn’t exactly selling merchandise.

Once you were ready to go, Robin called shotgun as the four of you piled into Steve’s car. “Sorry that you guys have to tag along now, but you know how Dustin gets.”

Glancing at you briefly in the rearview mirror, Steve replied, “It’s no big deal. Sorry I told him you were going to see Eddie.”

“It’s fine,” You shook your head. “I wanna lie to him as little as possible anyway, I just haven’t figured out how to bring it up yet.”

“I know he wants you to, but you don’t always have to tell him everything right away,” Robin reminded you. “I mean, what were you gonna tell him– that you were fucking one of his best friends? He doesn’t need to know that. It’s not like you guys are actually together yet–” She was interrupted by a punch in the shoulder from Steve.

He gave her an incredulous look before Nancy took over, reaching over and squeezing your hand. “What she means is, you guys should take your relationship at your own pace and tell Dustin when you think the time is right.”

“Right, that’s exactly what I was gonna say,” Steve added.

Robin rolled her eyes. “Oh, shut the fuck up, Harrington.”

“What? I was!”

When you were finally standing in the parking lot of The Hideout, you let out a deep breath you hadn’t realized you’d been holding. Robin hooked an arm around your shoulders and started for the door. “Come on,” She drawled. “Let’s catch ‘em before the show starts, you’ll be okay.”

They weren’t hard to find, setting up on stage front and center. You could see Eddie kneeling down to plug in the amp until Gareth lightly hit his arm and pointed in your direction. A grin stretched across his face as his stare dragged over your frame, taking in your fishnets, short skirt, and Hellfire tee. He excused himself to the rest of the guys before jogging over to you. “Hey, I didn’t realize you guys were coming along.”

“Yeah, I’m really sorry I didn’t give you a heads-up. Dustin found out where I was going and I didn’t want him to get nosy–”

“Are you kidding? This is the most sober people we’ve ever had in an audience, don’t sweat it.” He briefly squeezed your waist then let his hand settle on your back, fingers drumming impatiently. You looked at him questioningly, but he didn’t meet your eyes just yet. “I appreciate you guys coming, I know it’s not really your kinda music.”

Steve waved him off. “Nah, man, I’m sure it’ll be great.”

“Thanks, Harrington.” His arm moved from your waist to your shoulders, “I’m gonna steal her from you guys for a couple minutes if you don’t mind. I wanted to show her some of the equipment.” Robin opened her mouth to make a smart remark but was stopped by another punch from Steve.

He guided you to a nook behind one of the walls in the far corner of the bar. Humming lowly, he cupped your face so you’d look at him. “You really dressed for the occasion, pretty girl. You look fucking incredible.”

“Well, I haven’t gotten my exclusive Corroded Coffin t-shirt yet, so I figured this was the next best thing.”

“My apologies, babe, I’ll get right on that.” He dipped his head to press a long, slow kiss to your lips.

“Somebody smoked a joint without me,” You teased.

With a good-natured smile, he rolled his eyes in false exasperation. “Sorry, should’a gotten here earlier. We can smoke all you want after, alright? Pothead.”

“What’s that thing people say?” You asked sarcastically. “I think it was something about a pot, maybe a kettle?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” He laughed. A whistle from Gareth called his attention to the stage and he exhaled heavily. “Okay, that’s my cue. Wish me luck?”

“Like you need it,” You pecked his lips. “I’m really excited to hear you play. You guys are gonna do great.” Eddie smiled and stole one last quick kiss before darting back to the stage, leaving you to make your way back to the others.

“We may have taken the liberty of getting you a drink,” Steve said as Robin pushed a glass across the table toward you.

“I would be offended if you hadn’t.” Taking a few swigs, you looked over to where Eddie was finally settling the mic into its stand, his guitar hanging from his shoulder. They didn’t bother with grand introductions given the small crowds that gathered weren’t exactly there to see Corroded Coffin; they simply started into their set.

The boys mostly stuck to covers of semi-popular songs– sticking to their roots with Metallica and Black Sabbath, but appeasing the bar patrons with some Led Zepplin and a grudging Bon Jovi song. A few pieces they’d weaved in were their own and you could tell, but they certainly weren’t out of place. You could see where their inspiration came from.

You caught up with Nancy, Robin, and Steve between songs, but they mostly carried the conversation as you watched Eddie. Anyone really paying attention would be able to see that he was in his element. Sweat matted his bangs to his forehead, fingers moving masterfully over the strings as he powered through Trapped Under Ice with incredible accuracy. While you had heard the dramatic voices he put on during Hellfire, you hadn’t known that he could also mimic James Hetfield and Ozzy very impressively. He wasn’t perfect, but what little he lacked in refinement and precision, he more than made up for with passion. 

The middle-aged drunks occasionally gave some muted applause for the songs they recognized, but otherwise ignored the free entertainment. He really was underappreciated here. In front of a real audience, you couldn’t imagine the kind of stage presence he’d have.

Over the next two hours, you worked your way through a couple drinks. You hoped the frequent crossing of your legs could be attributed to the short skirt you were wearing rather than your dwindling patience and self-control as you waited for Eddie to finish his set. When they finally wrapped up their last song, you made your way up to the stage. He was lowering the mic stand when you got to him, holding his gaze as you dropped a twenty in the guitar case in front of him. There were only a few other bills and some loose change inside.

“God, please don’t. Seriously, that’s insulting.”

“Are you kidding? That’s an investment. I expect it back with interest when you guys make it big.” He held a hand out to you as you joined him on the stage. “Really, I thought you were amazing. You’ll see when you get outta this place.”

He just gave you a small smile and brushed his thumb over your cheek, eyes sweeping over your face briefly before he took both your hands. “So I really do wanna hang with you, babe, but I absolutely have to move all our gear first. Is there any way I can convince you to stick around?” His lips dragged over your knuckles, leaving a few kisses as he spoke. “Have a li’l smoke sesh in the back of the van once it’s empty. Promise I’ll make it worth your while.”

Your chest warmed at the attention he was lavishing you with in front of all of his friends– Dustin’s friends– and you tucked your chin a little bashfully. “That’s fine, Eds.”

“Awesome. We’re gonna finish loading the van, then you can ride with me to Gare’s to unload everything there, then I’m all yours. Cool?”

“Sounds good to me, rockstar.”

Holding your face in one hand, he squished your cheeks and shook your head back and forth lightly. “Always makin’ fun ‘a me, aren’t you?” He landed a kiss on your puckered lips and subtly patted your butt. “Go sit with your friends and I’ll let you know when I’m finished, okay? So glad I had my best girl cheerin’ me on tonight.”

As he went back to helping the guys pack up, you went back to Robin, Nancy, and Steve who paused their conversation when you sat down.

“Swooning already?”

“Somebody’s definitely looking a little starstruck,” Robin added. “Ready to ask him to sign your boobs?”

“The way it’s sounding, he might later,” You replied before taking a sip of your drink.

“I’m proud of you,” She nodded and took your hands dramatically over the table. “At least one of us is leading a successful love life. We will live vicariously through you.”

“Well then, let me know when we figure out how to tell our little brother that we’re dating his male mentor.”

“Wait, did Dustin say Eddie was his male mentor?” Steve interjected. “That’s so not true–”

Robin shook her head. “Steve, shut up.” She smacked your hand and nodded behind you just before you felt hands settle on your chair.

“Hey, you guys enjoy the show?” Eddie’s rings clinked against the metal of the chair, his voice not far from your ear making your heart rate pick up.

“Yeah, you guys were great. We’ll have to come again sometime,” Steve replied.

Nancy politely asked, “How long have you been playing, Eddie? Some of those songs seemed pretty complex.”

“I started playing with the guys when I was in eighth grade, but I started teaching myself around sixth. So, I guess about…nine or ten years?” He shrugged, thumbs drumming against the chair.

“You’re really talented,” She commended.

“Thank you, that means a lot to me.” His hand shifted to your shoulder before he continued on playfully, “Your guys’ friend here gets a backstage pass though, which means she gets to come watch us unload equipment at Gareth’s mom’s house and smoke my weed.” He took your hand as you stepped down from your high-top chair, pushing it in for you and grabbing your purse as you said goodbye. “Thank you guys again for coming. I’ll see you around soon, yeah?”

Steve gave him a one-armed hug as he nodded, “Definitely, man.”

The two of you walked back to the van, hand in hand, your steps echoing in the mostly-empty parking lot. The others were already waiting in Gareth’s garage passing around a joint when you pulled into the driveway. You followed Eddie around to the back of the van as he opened one of the back doors. Gareth got up to open the other one, handing you the joint as he passed you. 

“Alright, boys, think we can manage our fastest unload yet?” Eddie asked, cracking his knuckles.

“Yeah. As long as you don’t tweak your fuckin’ back again, old ass,” Jeff scoffed in return.

“Seriously, dude. Lift with your legs,” Gareth chimed.

Eddie made a talking motion with his hand and mumbled mockingly back before grabbing one of Gareth’s drums. “Start moving your shit or I’ll stop discounting your weed.”

“Oh, yes! Forgive me, master!” Gareth snarked, voice quavering with feigned fear.

They all got to work on moving the drum kit out first before moving on to the other equipment. Not knowing what to do with your hands, you took a hit and sat on the edge of one of the chairs they had out. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“I mean, there’s a fridge in the corner, you wanna grab a few beers?” Jeff asked, getting a grasp on one side of an amp.

Gripping the other side of the amp, Eddie gave him an unimpressed look. “Dude, did you seriously just send her on a beer run?”

“It’s literally the other side of the garage. Shut the fuck up and bend your knees.”

You grabbed a beer for everyone– except Eddie, who was stuck with cherry Coke until he was done driving– and passed them out when they were done moving the amps. Then, to kill some of the time, you sat in the van and packed a bowl to smoke with Eddie later. When the equipment left in the back started to dwindle, you, Jeff, and Barry made conversation while Eddie unloaded some of the lighter equipment with Gareth. Keeping his voice low, the drummer suddenly spoke. “You know you have to like– marry her, right?”

“What’re you talking about?” Eddie chuckled, though his face and neck warmed at the mental image.

Gareth jabbed a thumb over his shoulder in your direction. “Dude, she’s over there talking to your nerdy loser bandmates about Judas Priest’s influences on Iron Maiden’s first album. And she’s actually invested. You’re not gonna find another girl like that in Hawkins. Not to mention how you talk about her–”

“Alright, shut it,” He huffed. “Just help me get this shit out, it’s getting late.”

When the last of it was finally tucked away in Gareth’s garage, Eddie checked his watch and sighed. Eleven-thirty. “Damn.” Your conversation with the boys had drifted to your opinions on heavy metal power ballads when his hands settled on your waist. “Sorry that took so long, you ready to get going?”

“Don’t worry about it, Eds. I’ll see you guys later though, alright? We should really head out.” The three of them thanked you for coming and said their goodbyes before settling back into their fold-out chairs, presumably to keep getting fried.

You and Eddie climbed into the van and he started it up before looking over at you. “It’s not the first date anymore. Any chance I can convince you to stay the night?”

“No convincing needed. I didn’t know how late I’d be home so I already asked Nancy to cover for me if Dustin calls.”

“Wait, you really want to?”

“Of course I do. Will Wayne mind me staying there?”

“Oh, he wouldn’t care. He works the night shift and sometimes he works overtime, so he usually isn’t back until six or eight in the morning. And occasionally he’ll even stop for a drink with a couple guys from work and that could take ‘til ten,” He explained with a little crooked smile. “He’d love you, though.”

You noticed him freeze up a little as he registered his own words, so you took one of his hands and laced your fingers through his in your lap. “I’m sure I’d love him, too. He must be a great man if he raised you.”

He squeezed your hand lightly as he relaxed. “Yeah, he’s pretty cool.” There was a moment of quiet, just the low hum of the radio and the roar of the van until Eddie spoke again. “You wouldn’t wanna go to Lover’s Lake, would you?”

“Sure.” His hand settled on your thigh and your lips curled down as you repressed a little smirk. “I didn’t take you for the type.”

“Hey, I can be romantic,” He defended lightheartedly. “I just prefer places like these when they’re less populated.”

“Why? So you can smoke and have sex in them?” You asked with a joking scoff.

“No, I just like my privacy. It’s more intimate without a bunch of obnoxious people around.” He paused, then conceded. “But yes, I like to have a range of recreational activities to choose from. Is that so bad?”

You shifted your leg so his hand drifted further up your thigh. “You wouldn’t happen to be taking me there to do both, would you, Eds?”

“I’m taking you there to do whatever you wanna do, sweet thing.” His tone remained casual, but his hand slowly crept higher and higher. “We could lay down and look at the stars…Maybe go for a swim…” Goosebumps rose on your skin as his short nails dragged across it, fingers catching on the loops of your fishnets. “What d’you think?”

“We didn’t bring swimsuits,” You remind him.

“So?” He asked as he pulled into the small gravel lot hidden by the trees. Looking over at you with a smirk, he continued, “There’s no one else here.” He got out of the van and came around to open your door as you unbuckled your seatbelt. “We don’t have to if you don’t want to, though.”

After grabbing a couple of blankets from the back of the van, he took your hand and lead you out away from the trees. You helped him lay out the blankets, crawling onto them and kicking off your shoes. Eddie lay down beside you and you looked over at him, “I don’t think I’ve ever actually been out here at night. It’s really pretty.”

“Can’t believe you think so when you get to look in the mirror every day,” He shot back without effort, giving you that goofy grin of his.

Lightly smacking his arm, you fought back a big smile of your own. “That was terrible, you know that, right? That was actually so bad.” Your combined laughter sounded loud in the near-silent clearing of the lake; your voices were only accompanied by the constant chirping of crickets and the occasional owl’s hoot. 

He rolled onto his side, resting his head in his hand as he looked down at you. “You’ve gotta get used to taking my compliments, babe, even the corny ones. ‘Cause soon they’ll be comin’ non-stop.” You simply hummed in response, your hand finding the back of his neck to pull him into a kiss. He didn’t hesitate to shift over you, arms on either side of you to support himself as his knee braced between your legs. Lips sticky with your lip gloss, his mouth made a path to your neck. “Y’really do look so pretty tonight, baby. Never seen you in a skirt before, I could barely pay attention to our set.”

“I thought you did amazing.” His hot breath on your neck made you squirm, grasping at his shirt as your hips wound against the firmness of his thigh. “Had me wet the whole time.”

“Fuck, wanted to get my hands on you so bad. Just performing had you all soaked for me, huh?” Your skirt rode up toward your waist until Eddie decided it was unnecessary, leaning back to yank it off. “Jesus H. Christ, fucking look at you.” Lying beneath him, fishnets stretched taut over your spread thighs leading up to your Hellfire tee, you were his fucking dream. It wasn’t hard to tell he wasn’t a religious man but, at that moment, he wished he was because he felt like he needed to thank somebody for your existence. It was like every fantasy he’d ever had simply walked out of his head and into his life. “Seriously, I might need to take a minute.”

“Can you help me out of these while you do?” You ask, curling your legs up to your chest.

He guided one of them up to his shoulder, running his hand down your outstretched leg and eyeing the tights before he looked at you. “Am I in trouble if I say no?”

“If you take them off now without ripping them I’ll wear them for you again sometime,” You bargained teasingly.

“I’ll do it if you let me eat you out through them next time.”

You shoved lightly at his chest with your foot, trying not to laugh. “You’re such a freak.”

Eddie narrowed his eyes at you playfully, but you could see he didn’t take the name to heart coming from you as his hips pressed into your ass. “Careful callin’ me names, babe. I’m starting to like it when you’re mean to me.”

“Pervert.”

He hummed, trailing kisses down the inside of your leg and finally hooking his fingers into the waistband of your fishnets. “Only for you, sweetheart.” His short nails scraped gently along your skin again as he carefully drew the tights down your legs. The second they were off, you sat up to pull him into another hungry kiss.

Deepening it, he started to ease you onto your back again but was shocked when you pulled away. With a coy smile, you asked, “How ‘bout that swim?”

Baffled, he was unable to come up with a response before you were standing and whipping your shirt off. His brain kicked back into gear when you dashed away from him toward the lake. Then he was running after you, fumbling to kick off his shoes and strip in the process. He froze as he watched you take off your bra and jump in wearing nothing but a skimpy pair of panties. You’ve gotta be fucking kidding. Finally kicking off his jeans, Eddie dove in after you.

Attempting to wipe the water from your eyes, you looked around for him in the water. Just as he breached the surface behind you, though, he grabbed your waist and shouted. Your squeal broke into a fit of giggles as he squeezed your sides and pulled you into his chest. “You’re such a dick!”

“That’s what you get for bein’ a tease.” Staying close to shore, the water came nearly to his shoulders. He urged you to wrap your legs around his waist, his hands settling under your butt to hold you comfortably.

Arms settling loosely around his neck, you looked away pointedly, that mischievous little expression finding its way to your face again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course, you don’t. ‘Cause the sweet girl I know would never do a thing like that, right?” He asked sarcastically.

You shook your head and answered in a falsely solemn tone. “Never.”

He chuckled softly until you leaned into him, nipples hardened from the chill of the water and pressing into his chest. Faint smiles never left your faces as you shared a few messy kisses. His hand rubbed soothingly up and down your spine while you pushed a strand of wet hair from his face. Swept off his shoulders, his soaked hair allowed you to see his whole face more clearly than ever. He started to feel self-conscious as your eyes drifted slowly over his features, taking him in, your thumb stroking over a spot beneath his ear that gave him chills. “You’re so handsome, Eddie.” He opened his mouth slightly like he was going to respond, but he couldn’t seem to think of anything so you changed the topic for him. “It’s nice here at night, we should come back again sometime when we don’t have any other plans.”

Eyebrows furrowing, he frowned in confusion. “What do you mean ‘other plans’?”

Untangling yourself from him, you faced him and swam backward toward the dock. “Hotboxing the van and having amazing sex, obviously. C’mon.” Climbing out, you held your arm tight over your chest as you snagged your bra off the dock and ran to the blankets still on the ground.

Eddie was close behind, picking up his trail of abandoned clothing. He started to apologize for the lack of towels, but you quickly waved him off and you both dried off as well as you could with one of the blankets. While you wrapped yourself in the dry blanket, he gathered your things with his to carry it all back to the car. “Go ahead and get in the back, I’ll start it up and get the music going.”

Opening one of the back doors, you found that the floor was already covered with other blankets. Climbing inside, you felt the van rumble to life. You could hear Eddie rustling through cassettes in his console as you peeled off your sopping-wet underwear and curled up with the pillows and blankets he’d put back there. The bowl you’d packed in hand, he finally joined you in the back. When he climbed in he paused to fidget with something you couldn’t see and suddenly the back doors were illuminated by little twinkling lights. He swung the door closed and tugged off his boxers before you asked, “When did you have time to do all this?”

“Hm? Oh, it’s all been back here for a little while. I just laid the blankets out in here when I grabbed the other ones to lay down by the lake.” He settled beside you, the top half of his blanket bunched in his lap leaving you free to ogle his tattoos– a favorite pastime of yours. “You want the first hit?”

You shook your head with a small smile, eyes tracing his features like they had in the lake. His hair was still heavy with water, but his forehead was hidden again and his curls were starting to come back. With nothing but moonlight, his eyes had looked black; in the glow of the fairy lights, you could see their warm cocoa-brown color again. His pretty lips formed an O as smoke billowed out of them. Their blushy-pink color nearly matched the flush on his cheeks, which you knew would spread to his neck and chest soon enough. He was beautiful, really.

He offered you the bowl and it stayed quiet, excepting the Master of Reality album playing softly, while you took a few long rips. You passed it back to him and let the silence continue for a moment before you finally said, “I’m gonna tell Dustin.” Unintentionally hitching in a breath, he choked on a throatful of smoke. The resulting coughing fit was so intense it brought tears to his eyes and you couldn’t help but laugh as you rubbed his back. “Are you okay?” He nodded, but you still leaned over the console to grab the bottle of water from the cup holder. 

Taking a few swigs, he cleared his throat. “Okay, sorry,” He let out a big breath before he looked at you again. “You’re ready to tell him?”

“Yeah.” Too nervous to hold his gaze, you curled into his side. He welcomed you, of course, tucking his blanket around the both of you and kissing the top of your head. “I just feel like things have gotten…real. You try to take care of me in ways no one else has before and everything feels so easy with you– and honestly, both of those things scare the shit out of me ‘cause that usually means everything is absolutely going to go to shit…But you look out for my brother, and I feel like I can trust you, and everything we do together just feels so intimate…” You huffed embarrassedly and buried your face in the crook of his neck. “I think Dustin deserves to know that I care about you so much.”

“That we care about each other,” He corrected you. Hand framing your jaw, Eddie made you meet his eyes. “I’m gonna be there with you when you tell him. I don’t want you to do it alone, we should do it together. I still have to get his blessing, right?” He added jokingly. Before you could say anything, he started to ramble a little nervously. “I feel like this is real. I’ve never felt this way about anybody. I’ve never had the chance to have anything serious before, but you…You’re all I think about now. That first day I met you, it was like I had this ‘Where have you been all my life?’ moment and you’re all I’ve wanted since, and I know that sounds really cheesy and dramatic but–”

Your mouth on his cut him off, which seemed to be a habit you were forming. He didn’t mind though, he’d been told to shut up in much less pleasant ways. When you pulled away, it was only enough to murmur, “I know the feeling.” Your nose nudging his was enough for him to keep it going, hand hooking under your knee and drawing you to straddle his lap.

The blanket slumped to your waist leaving your torso bare for his eyes and hands to wander. “You’re just so fuckin’ beautiful. My pretty girl, right, baby?”

Toying with one of his damp curls, you held his gaze as you agreed, “No one else’s.” At your answer, he pulled you in for a much more desperate kiss. His fingers pressed into your back while the others slipped beneath you to find you soaked, your chest flush with his as his tongue passed your lips. 

He pressed two fingers into you easily, slowly massaging your g-spot until you were whining into his mouth. “Feels like you might not even need me to stretch you out, sweetheart.” Hips canting forward involuntarily, your clit ground into the thick base of his cock. Finally letting you catch your breath, he withdrew his hand from between you and looked down to watch how your slick spread on his skin as he rutted against you. “Mmm, gonna let me show you how bad I need you?”

You brushed his hair back from his shoulders as you breathily replied, “Condom?”

“Wallet,” He answered. Leaning over his shoulder to grab it off the console put you in the perfect position for Eddie to mouth at your tits, lips wrapping around one nipple while the roughened pads of his fingers found the other. You moaned quietly and tugged at his hair, but grabbed the wallet and rifled through it. 

“Eds, there isn’t one in here.”

“Fuck. Glovebox, maybe,” He suggested.

Huffing impatiently, you began to wind your hips against his again. “D’you promise to pull out if I let you fuck me raw?”

He looked up at you with wide eyes. “Really– I mean, are you sure? You don’t have to.”

“Need to feel you now, Eddie,” You insisted.

“Alright, sweetheart, I promise.” He lovingly pecked your lips before grasping your waist, helping keep you steady as you slowly sank down on him. Fully seated in his lap, a gasp rose in your throat. “There you go,” He murmured comfortingly. “I know, baby, but you’re so good. Can finally feel how wet you really are. Takin’ me so deep.”

Your voice was nothing but a high-pitched, airy sigh. “Feel you everywhere.”

“S’Cause I’m made for you.” Your forehead rested against his as he continued. “I was made to fill you up, pretty girl.” His words provoked a pathetic moan from you, spurring you to lift your hips fractionally just to ease back down again. Supporting yourself with your hands on his shoulders, you tried to start up a steady pace, but your thighs trembled with every motion. The moans and whimpers you let out started to sound quiet and watery and it worried him, but the determined rocking of your hips never ceased. “You doing okay, baby?”

Not lifting your head, you sniffed frustratedly. “Need help, Eddie.”

“Oh, baby, why didn’t you say so?” He cooed sympathetically. “S’okay to need my help, c’mere.”

Arms around your waist, he guided you up and down on his cock at a careful speed until you were grinding down on him again. “Eds please, I need more,” You whimpered. Rolling his hips to meet yours, he didn’t hesitate to tighten his arms around you and quicken his pace. The way he was hitting every possible spot inside you had your eyes squeezing shut to keep them from crossing. Thighs trembling, you shivered as he rubbed and squeezed at them.

Eddie’s shoulders rolled back as he leaned against the console, hands running slowly over your hips and across your stomach to palm at your tits. “Look so pretty on top’a me, sweet girl. Might have to make you ride me more often.” His thrusts into you sped up, the console against his back giving him more leverage. One of your hands rested lightly on his lower abdomen to steady yourself but once his thumb found your clit, you were practically writhing in his lap. He rubbed it in firm, precise circles and felt you squeeze around his cock uncontrollably. “That’s it, baby, come for me. Can’t wait to feel you soak me for the first time.”

Something felt different than usual as that coil wound tighter in your stomach. It was hotter, like flames were crawling across your skin. It felt like your bones shook and your eyes swam with stars as you cried out his name. Your nails dragged down his stomach, those of the other hand doing the same to his thigh, trying to anchor yourself with your head in the clouds.

It wasn’t until the ringing in your ears cleared that you heard Eddie’s feral groans, making you look down. Everything was drenched; your thighs, his cock, his stomach, and his chest glistened wet in the warm lights. The sight made you register the sloshing sounds of your dripping wet pussy as he started to slow his thrusts enough to pull out. Arms enclosing around your waist again, he all but pinned you to his chest as he rutted between your stomachs. Lips molding to yours, he kissed you sloppily before his gaze wandered your body in awe. “Can’t believe you fuckin’ squirted f’me. Fuck–” Cut off by his own moan, his forehead fell to your shoulder as his eyes squeezed shut, his hot spend painting both your skin and his. 

After he pressed a sweet kiss to your temple, he eased you onto your back, watching the filthy mixture of your come drip down your used cunt. “Eds, what’re you doin’?” You asked timidly as he lowered himself between your thighs, voice coming out in a barely-there squeak.

“Wishin’ I could take a fucking picture, sweetheart. I was gonna clean you up. Want me to use the blanket instead? S’okay if you’re too sensitive, especially after all that.” You nodded and he kissed the side of your knee with a smile as he grabbed the soiled blanket and quickly wiped himself off. Your legs flinched as he patted you dry and his eyes filled with concern as he murmured your name. “Did I hurt you? Did I do too much?”

“No,” You struggled to raise your voice above a mumble. “I’m okay, Eds, I’m jus’ all sensitive.”

“Promise me that’s it?” He asked, running his hands comfortingly over your legs. Pointedly avoiding his gaze, you huffed through your nose and your eyes brimmed with tears. “Baby, c’mon, what is it? What’s the matter?”

You answered him in a whimper, sniffing back tears every few words. “I jus’ made a mess ‘n I’ve never done that before ‘n now everything’s all yucky–”

“Aw, baby,” He chuckled through a sympathetic pout. Lying down and drawing you to his chest, he wiped your tears and kissed your forehead. The two of you curled up under one of the clean blankets. “Nothing’s yucky, sweet girl. Just gotta wash the blankie, no big deal.”

“But ‘m still all sticky,” You pout up at him. “C’n we take a bath when we get home?”

“Home?”

“Your trailer, Eddie,” You whine. “Wanna take a bath.” Lids heavy with exhaustion, your eyes slowly fluttered closed repeatedly before they’d snap open again.

“You’re so sleepy, sweet girl.” He brushed your hair back from your face. “Think you can take a little nap back here while I drive us home?” You nodded dreamily but still clutched at him whenever he tried to get up. “I know, baby, just twenty minutes and we can take a bath. Okay?” When you finally conceded, he tugged on his jeans and made the short drive home. 

Once you were bathed and dressed in nothing but a borrowed Metallica t-shirt, he tucked you into his bed before crawling in beside you. You dozed off easily with your head on his chest, but he stayed up just a little while longer. Palm rubbing circles on your back, his lips ghosted over your forehead. “I love you, baby,” He whispered almost silently. Closing his eyes, he focused on the feeling of your heart beating against his side, counting them like a child would sheep until he fell asleep.

The next morning, you woke up first, Eddie’s arms around you and his chest molded to your back. You scoffed and rolled your eyes but you couldn’t help your tiny smirk as you registered the feeling of him squeezing at your tit, his even, heavy breaths against your shoulder telling you he was fast asleep. Slowly rocking your hips back, you bit back a laugh when it made his grasp tighten while he nuzzled into your neck. He rutted against you, half-hearted and arrhythmic in his unconscious state. It wasn’t until you reached back to hold his hip and grind directly against his cock, separated only by his boxers, that he finally grunted himself awake. “Mmm, g’morning t’you too, gorgeous.”

“You’re a perv even in your sleep, you know that, Munson?”

He mouthed at your neck with a sleepy grin, “I could’a told you that. How’d you know I was dreamin’ about you?”

“Well, your right hand was my first clue.” You pointedly ground your hips into his again and looked back over your shoulder at him, “Wanna guess my second?”

“Can’t help but get ideas, babe. You’re sleepin’ in my bed, in my shirt, no panties…” His fingers walked a path down your stomach, stopping just after your belly button. “Promise I kept my hands to myself, though– while I was awake, anyway.”

His hand drifted leisurely between your legs but you groaned. “Eds, what time is it?”

“I don’t know, almost nine? Why?” His lips never left your skin, still working over your neck and shoulder without leaving obvious marks.

“We can’t, we have to go. Dustin’s at Mike’s and I wanna make sure we get back before him. I’ve still gotta make myself decent and figure out what I’m gonna say to him.”

“What we’re gonna say to him,” He corrected. “And can’t you stay indecent a little longer?”

“Wayne’ll be home anytime,” You remind him, “If he’s not already.”

He pouted, “But how often do we get to have great morning sex after a night together like this, baby?”

“Any morning now that I’ll be staying over whenever you want,” You point out.

“Hmm, I s’pose that’s true,” He agreed contently. Stretching out beside you with a loud groan, he pecked your cheek before he got out of bed. Yawning, “I’ll be right back,” he headed for the bathroom. 

Rolling over, you buried your face in his pillow and breathed in. Old spice shampoo, weed, and Marlboros filled your nose and it made every muscle in your body relax. Him. You wanted to bottle the scent, soak every pillow and blanket and sweatshirt you owned with it. You’d never have another restless night again. Lifting your head slightly, you left your nose against the fabric but allowed your eyes to flicker around his room. 

A bottle of lotion sat on his nightstand, he didn’t seem to bother with tissues though. You weren’t surprised. Handcuffs hung on the wall, also not surprising, but they still made your thighs twitch. There were more band posters than in your room, including a hand-spray-painted one for Corroded Coffin. He had three guitars, his prized possession– his other sweetheart, as well as another black and white electric, and an acoustic painted to say ‘this machine slays dragons’. An amp sat across from the bed and his dressers were strewn with clothes and beer cans. It was easy to imagine him existing in here. Playing guitar in bed in his boxers or planning the party’s next campaign at his desk.

Your eyes snapped to the door when it finally opened again. “Still in bed, huh?” Nodding with a small smile, you watched him rummage through his dresser for today’s band tee. His hand settled on Slayer before he thought of running into your mom, and opted for the much tamer Deep Purple one beneath it. “Well, you should probably put somethin’ else on before I take you home. What you’ve got on might get a little breezy.”

“Bite me,” You yawned, flipping him off as you got up.

“I didn’t think we had time for that,” He replied snarkily. He finished getting dressed as you slipped on your skirt and balled up your fishnets to put in your purse.

When you were both ready– or as ready as you could get for now– you headed for the van. “I’ll make coffee when we get to mine,” You offer. “My mom should be at work, so I’ll make breakfast. Food might help soften the blow.”

“God, you’re acting like we killed his cat or something,” He laughed. “We’re not breaking bad news, babe.”

“It’s still a shock, alright? And Dustin has big feelings, you know that. I just don’t wanna make him feel uncomfortable or lied to. Me and him don’t usually keep secrets, so this is a big deal.”

“I can be tactful, alright? But I’ll let you do most of the talking if that makes you feel better, I know you’re worried about him.” His fingers laced through yours and brought the back of your hand to his lips. “It’s gonna be okay though, sweet girl.”

Pulling into your driveway, you let out a heavy breath before you got out and lead him inside. As you got dressed, you tried to practice what you’d say, rambling your thoughts aloud. He left you to your process, only stepping in for you to bounce thoughts off of or to keep you from getting lost in your concerns. You only paused once you made your way into the kitchen. Putting a pot of coffee on, you asked, “Chocolate chip pancakes okay for breakfast? They’re his favorite. I’ll probably make a little of everything else too; eggs, bacon, sausage, there’s fruit in the fridge.”

Eddie had to bite his tongue to keep the words ‘marry me’ from rolling off his lips. “Sounds incredible, baby. Anything I can do to help?”

“No, it’s okay.” Watching you methodically gather everything you needed from the fridge and cabinets, he figured he’d just get in your way if he tried to lend a hand. While you cooked, you mumbled through your prepared speech again, knowing it would never go so smoothly in actual conversation. Thinking about it more, you just hoped Lucas and Mike didn’t come back with him.

By the time he made it home, leaving his bike in the yard, you had made more than enough food and Eddie had already eaten his. Dustin was talking the second the door was open. “What’re you doing here, Eddie? Something going on with Hellfire?”

“Nice to see you too, Henderson.” He retorted, standing and flicking the bill of your brother’s hat into his eyes. “Your sister made you breakfast. I hear chocolate chip pancakes are your favorite.”

He eyed both of you suspiciously as he started toward the kitchen. "Yeah, what's it to you?" Eddie shared a confused look with you, but decided not to say anything. After he’d made his plate and sat down at the table to dig in, Dustin spoke again with a mouthful of food. “So, what’s with the special breakfast? Why’re you guys being weird?”

“We’re not being weird–”

“You’re alone at the house together,” He pointed out, still shoveling food into his face. “That’s weird.”

“It’s not weird– would you just listen? It’s not a big deal, I just wanted to run something by you, alright?” Eddie could tell you were fumbling, forgetting everything you’d planned to say. His hand itched to reach out for yours on the table, but he knew you wanted to get the words out first. “I’ve been–”

“Seeing Eddie?” Dustin interrupted. When the two of you shared a glance and you opened your mouth to question him, he continued. “Mike and Lucas told me last night.”

“How did they–” Eddie began, but Dustin cut him off.

“Apparently, everybody knew but me! All the guys in the band knew! Steve, Nancy, and Robin knew! How could you leave me out of the loop like this? You know I hate not knowing things! I have to know everything!”

“Dusty, calm down,” You said softly. “I wanted to wait until I actually had something to tell you. He’s your friend, I didn’t want to change the way you look at him just to go on a couple dates and decide it wasn’t gonna work.”

Nose wrinkling, he asked, “So, what? You guys are like– boyfriend and girlfriend now or something?”

You snorted and Eddie couldn’t help the small, smug smile creeping across his face. “Yeah, are we boyfriend and girlfriend?”

Back of your hand hitting his stomach, you tried not to laugh as you answered. “Yeah, I guess we are.” Turning back to your brother, you added, “Only if you’re okay with it, though. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable or feel like you can’t trust Eddie anymore.”

“It’s kinda weird, but I guess I don’t care as long as you don’t make out and all that gross shit in front of me. And you’d better treat her right or me, Mike, and Lucas are all leaving Hellfire,” He tagged on pointedly.

“You don’t have to worry about that, you have my word.” He looked like he was about to say more, but opted to stay quiet.

“Okay, well, I think I’ve lost my appetite for now.” Dustin stood from the table, “I’m gonna go back to Mike’s and tell them they were right.”

Rolling your eyes, you started to clean up. “Be safe, I love you.” 

“Love you, too!” He shouted back just before he yanked the door shut.

As you started rinsing dishes in the sink, Eddie’s hands found your waist. “I think that went well.”

“Hopefully it doesn’t stay awkward for long,” You sighed lightly. “I guess Lucas and Mike did the hard part for us.”

“Guess so,” He drawled in agreement. “So, what now?”

“Now? Hmm…” Drying off your hands, you turned to loosely wrap your arms around his neck. “I guess now we do whatever we want, no more sneaking around.”

“I hope that’s not gonna suck the fun out of it for you.”

“‘Cause watching you Tetris yourself through my window is such a turn-on,” You scoffed.

He gave you a look of mock offendedness. “Good thing I won’t have to do it anymore, since you clearly don’t appreciate the athletic prowess it takes to climb through that window without waking your mom up.” 

Halfheartedly rolling your eyes yet again, you let your fingers dip past the neck of his shirt, fingers grazing along the top of his spine. “How about you roll us a joint and then I’ll show you how much I appreciate your ‘athletic prowess’?”

“You drive a hard bargain, babe,” He sighed theatrically. “But you know it’s an offer I can’t refuse.”

“Obviously,” Lacing your fingers through his, you dragged him toward your room. “That’s why I offered.”

As the three boys gathered at Mike’s house again, he asked, “Wait, we were right?”

Lucas stood, pointing at him. “I TOLD YOU, MAN!” 

Mike tried to argue, “I NEVER SAID–”

“I TOLD YOU!”

“GUYS, SHUT THE HELL UP!” Dustin interjected.

Lucas cleared his throat as the two of them settled back into their seats. “You’re right, I’m sorry.”

“So, you’re really okay with Eddie dating your sister? I mean, it’s not gonna make Hellfire awkward or anything, is it?” Mike questioned.

“I don’t know, it’s weird. It’ll definitely be nasty seeing them all lovey-dovey or whatever, but they’re still just Eddie and my sister. As long as they don’t act different, I won’t act different.” Turning on the TV, Dustin flopped onto the couch next to Mike. “Besides, I think part of me knew they’d hit it off– I’m like a natural matchmaker. They just have too much in common, ya know?”

part one | part two | tmic masterlist

tags: @adequate-superstar @akiratoro420 @bbciwp @trixyvixx @yujyujj @nope-thanks @broccolisoupy @spookybabey @comboboo @thecraziestcrayon @mommybaby-witch @imvirginia17 @therensistance @peacheskiwi @skyfullofsong123 @hcneyedsstuff @aysheashea @prestinalove @ungracefularchimedes @psychospore @bellaisasleep @untoldshortsofthefandoms @ficsaremylife @ohmeg @twirls827 @bellasfavoritesweatpants @sebastiansstanswhore @444aslut444 @ourautumn86 @dream-a-little-nightmare @extrainsanity @poniesandcupcakes @trln @cantreadbutcute @kennedy-brooke @navs-bhat @sluggzillaa @whatwedontdointheshadows @saayanaaa @depressedacidtest @unholyyylita @m-chmcl-rmnc @pullhisteeth @vivalasv3gan @a3trogirl @thesagewitchh @djoseph-quinn @darlingdixon

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[faefictions]

Hospital Meet Cute

Eddie Munson x Reader

3.3k words

“What are you in for?”

They were the first words that had been spoken directly to you for what felt like hours. The bright white of the room and the smell of cleaner was overwhelming enough, but you were nursing a headache that was beginning to really worry you. In all honesty, you probably should have been rushed back to be examined the second you arrived to the hospital, but it had been well over an hour wait now with no end in sight. 

You looked to your right, where the boy who had spoken was sitting and looking at you. He looked almost as bad as you, a bloody nose that you assumed was broken, a split lip, and a black eye just beginning to darken. You were almost too exhausted to answer him at all, but what you could muster came out much more rude than you had intended. 

“Can’t be sure until they actually get me checked out,” you sighed, checking the time on the wall yet again. Only 15 seconds had passed since the last time you glanced, it was still nearing midnight, your bad day hadn’t yet ended. 

“How long have you been here?” 

You really looked at him this time. He was young, maybe around your age, give or take a couple years. His eyes were brown and his hair was long and curly, much longer than the men in your hometown. He was calm, calmer than you would have been if you looked like him. Hell, for all you knew, you did look like him, and you had been fighting off tears the entire drive here. But this guy was sitting there like he was a regular in the waiting room, and you sat there clueless to what town you were even in. 

“I’m not sure when I got here, but its been more than an hour at least. Maybe two now.” 

“They’re really off their game tonight,” he said, almost under his breath as he sat up to look behind the desk. You were staring to think maybe you were right about him being a regular here. 

“I think you misunderstood my question though,” he smiled at you as he sat back down, “I’m looking for the dirt, the juicy stuff. The how more than the why.”

His smile was charming, but his happy go lucky demeanor was going to get old fast. You had a feeling that ignoring him wouldn’t do much though, and you could use a break from staring at the clock. 

“Well it’s nothing you need to worry your pretty little head about. Hurts like a bitch though. Your nose doing ok?”

“Yeah, probably not broken. It doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as last time I broke it, so we’re probably in the clear.” 

“Glad to hear it,” you chuckled. You had never seen someone in such a good mood with blood actively dripping down their face. 

“Aren’t you going to ask me what happened?”

“No, I usually respect the privacy of strangers that I met less than a minute ago.”

“I’m Eddie, now I’m not a stranger.”

“That’s not how that works,” you smiled incredulously. 

“Sure it is! And if you tell me your name, you won’t be a stranger to me. And it’s been more than a minute now, so I think that means we’re in the clear.” 

“You are ridiculous.” 

“I get that a lot, but I didn’t hear an introduction anywhere in that insult.” 

“I’m y/n.” 

He extended a hand, and you hesitated for a second before offering your opposite hand as a compromise. It took him a second to decipher why you raised the wrong hand, but when he look down to your left wrist, he could see the bruising. 

“So, you gonna ask now?”

“No,” you chuckled at his persistence. 

“Damn. Well I was just going to tell you not to worry your pretty little head about it anyway so I guess it all worked out.” 

“Wow. Are you always this charming?”

“You think I’m charming?” he smiled at you, and you half expected to find a missing tooth among his pearly whites, but his teeth seemed to remain one of the only parts of his body unscathed. 

“You’re a bit of an ass. That’s about it.”

“And you’re just a ray of sunshine.” 

“Well sorry for not being so chipper after…” you paused as you were about to reveal what your night had entailed, but shot a look at him before you could, “Damn, you almost got me.” 

“That was a close one,” he smiled mischievously. You couldn’t help but admit that you really liked this guy. He was nicer than the people in your hometown, and the way he dressed was a beacon for someone like you. 

You figured if you told him what had happened, it wouldn’t be as surprising to him as it would be to someone else. The kids in your town had been terrorizing you since kindergarten. The town freak since the ripe age of 5. Things had been getting progressively worse since your father died back in ’79. Now with no mother or father, you no longer had anything in common with the kids in your school. You thought the bullying would stop after high school, but you were wrong. You learned that leaving town altogether was your only hope. 

That is what you had been doing. Your car was packed to the brim with your belongings, and you were set on your way for a small town about an hour away. Far enough for a new beginning, but close enough to not terrify you. Halfway through the drive, you noticed the car behind you getting a little too close for comfort. The sun had just set, but you still recognized the car. It belonged to the boyfriend of a girl that had led the crusade against you in high school, the one person you were most thankful to get away from. You knew if he was driving behind you, she was in the passenger seat, and their friends were probably packed into the back. Whatever they had planned wasn’t going to be good and you were starting to get nervous. 

They started to tailgate you, and you did your best to keep your speed steady. If they rear ended you, that was their problem not yours. But your sentiment quickly changed when you realized that there was no one else on the road. If they forced you to stop, it would just be them against you, and you were worried that that was the plan all along. So you sped up. 

You rode for a couple miles with them on your ass, speeding almost 20 over the limit, hoping to come across some traffic and a well lit stop to get them to pass. But before you could reach your safe haven, they had pulled up beside you. The last thing you remembered was her smiling at you before running into the side of your car. 

They must have sped off, not even stopping to see if you were alive, because when you woke up you were alone on the road again. You could see the lights of a town maybe a mile up the road, and with your car now totaled, your only hope was to walk the rest of the way. 

You hadn’t told the ladies behind the desk about the severity of your situation. You just told them you got into a little accident. You were regretting that now, knowing that if you told them you were ran off the road and had to walk to the hospital after coming to in a totaled car, you probably would have been seen by now. 

“Do you want me to get you something cold for your arm? It looks like it’s staring to swell.”

You glanced down to your left arm again, and he was right. You still weren’t sure what was broken and what just ached. Your adrenaline was pumping during the walk here, but you didn’t feel an ounce of it anymore. 

“That would be lovely, but where are you going to get something cold in the waiting room.” 

“I know my way around,” he winked before getting up and leaving you for a moment. He returned a minute later with an ice cold can of soda.

“Come here often?” you chuckled as you took the can and rested against the tight skin on your wrist. 

“Yeah, actually. I’m on a first name basis with a majority of the staff at this point. Especially the ones who work the weekends.”

“What, are you more accident prone on a Saturday?”

“Oh, darlin, you really think I bruised myself up this good? Nah, not even I’m that talented.”

“You really want to tell me what happened, don’t you?” 

“Only so you’re trapped into telling me what happened to you. No offense, but you look like you’ve gone to Hell and back, and I would love for you to feed into my morbid curiosity.” 

“Then you can keep your secrets,” you smirked at him, and glanced back to the clock. Somehow, 10 minutes had passed. You had begun to convince yourself that you had entered purgatory before you starting speaking to Eddie. It felt like time was never going to progress, and you were going to be stuck waiting for medical attention for the rest of eternity. 

Eddie was about to speak up, but before he could open his smart ass mouth, the doors of the entrance slid open and he glanced behind him to see whose shoes were squeaking as they made their way to you. 

“Fuck,” he muttered under his breath. The smirk was wiped off your face when you turned to see a tall man in a police uniform approaching the two of you. 

“Hopper, to what do I owe the pleasure,” Eddie tried to joke. To you, he was clearly nervous, but you thought he hid it well. 

“I’m not here for you this time Munson. But better safe than sorry, you should stick around for a quick word after this,” The officer spoke gruffly, coming off like a disappointed father, “Are you y/n l/n?” 

Your heart dropped. You had never been good with authority figures. Whether it be teacher, principles, security guards, or cops. You were always on the butt end of a bad situation, and you learned from a young age that not even finding an adult could save you. No one was ever on your side. 

“Uhm, yeah,” you replied, barely above a whisper and unable to look back up at him. 

“Thank god,” you heard him grumble under his breath, “Are you aware that your car is on fire a mile up the road?”

“Oh, it just wouldn’t start when I left it.” 

Eddie was soaking up the conversation, looking between you and Hopper like it was a tennis match. It was the entertainment he had been hoping for to distract him from the third time he had been in a fight this month. This time he truly did have himself to blame, after saying something he really shouldn’t have to a man much bigger than him after a show at the Hideout. But as he began to piece the puzzle together, he was growing more concerned for you. 

“You mind telling me what happened to your car? Or how you got here?,” Hopper’s head quickly swiveled to Eddie, “Did you drive her?” 

Eddie just shook his head and glanced at you. He could see your eyes staring to water now, and something in him hated the sight. He reached out and grabbed your good hand, hoping to offer some kind of support or comfort, whichever you needed more. 

“I walked.” 

“And you were in the car when it flipped?”

Your head shot up, unable to believe what you were hearing.

“It flipped?” 

To the best of your recollection, you just swerved off the side of the road. Honestly, you weren’t thinking straight, because there was no reason for you passing out and totaling your car if you had simply swerved. 

“It did. There wasn’t anyone else in the car right?”

“No… Just everything I own.” you scoffed as the weight of the situation really sunk in. This brought a whole new meaning to your “new beginning” idea. There was no fresher start than one with nothing from your past. 

“How long have you been here?” 

You were too stuck in your own thoughts to process that another question had been asked, so Hopper looked to Eddie in hopes of an answer. 

“She was here when I got here an hour and a half ago, but she said she doesn’t know how long she’s been here.” 

“I’m going to go see if I can get someone to give her a once over. Keep her company.” 

Eddie nodded and turned his attention back to you. You were obviously zoned out, and Eddie didn’t blame you, but he needed to reel you back in. 

“So much for keeping your secrets,” he whispered, feigning maliciousness, as if he had personally asked Hopper to come down and tell him. 

You couldn’t help but laugh at him, even as your tears began to tip over your lower lids. 

“I think you have to tell me what happened to you now, if I recall the rules correctly.” 

“Oh, I just got beat up at a bar. Nothing near as exciting as what’s going on over here,” he chuckled as he gestured vaguely towards you. 

It wasn’t until now that you realized that his hand was holding yours, but you were glad to receive the kind attention. It wasn’t something you were used to. 

“So what were you running from?” he asked, the warmth and humor suddenly absent from his voice. 

“What do you mean?”

“You had all your belongings packed into the back of your car, and I am 90% sure you aren’t from around here. So I can naturally assume you were running from something. Honestly I have a feeling I know the answer, but you know, never judge a book by its cover.” 

“Maybe I want to hear your guess.”

“Town freak?”

“Excuse me?”

“Outcast? Pariah, reject, untouchable? I can go on for hours. I’m afraid I have an unfair advantage with all the synonyms.” 

“And why’s that?”

“I’ve been called them all, sweetheart. You are speaking with the resident Freak of Hawkins, Indiana,” he pretended to bow from his seat. 

“Guess it really does take one to know one, huh,” you offered a half hearted smile. 

“So what was it? Weird music? Everyone hate your dad? One person just decide to make it their lives mission to make everyone hate you?”

“If I knew what it was, I would have changed it years ago. I think it’s just genetic though. But your guesses aren’t bad.” 

You adored that Eddie could make you laugh even after something as terrible as this night. You almost didn’t want to get called back anymore, knowing that your time with him would likely come to an end, and you may never see him again. 

When Hopper returned to let you know that your wait was almost over, you were almost disappointed. 

“Y/n, I need to talk to you really quick though. Is that alright?” he asked, and he seemed much more gentle than he had when he arrived. You hated the pity, but it was much better than how you were used to being treated by the police. So you gave him a nod. 

“Eddie, can you give us a minute?”

“It’s ok if he stays,” you cut in quickly, subconsciously squeezing Eddie’s hand harder. 

“Ok, that’s fine with me,” Hopper gave you a smile before he pulled a chair closer to sit directly across from you. He pulled out a small notepad and a pen and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. 

“Y/n, I need to know what you remember from before your car flipped. If you remember anything at all.” 

“Why?” 

“There are… There are some marks on the drivers side of the car that suggest you were hit. I just want to put the pieces together before we start a man hunt, just in case I’m wrong in thinking someone ran you off the road.” 

“It’s ok, there’s no need to look for them. I don’t want to press charges or anything.” 

Your heart began to pick up thinking about the retaliation you might receive from bringing legal charges agains them. You were trying to get away, the last thing you needed was a case to tie you to them. 

Hopper’s head quirked in curiosity, and he squinted his eyes at you before asking, “Y/n, do you know who did this?” 

“Well, yeah, but like I said, it’s…It’s fine.” 

“Can we have a second Hop?” Eddie asked gently, and Hopper nodded before crossing the room to allow you two to speak. 

“The people you were running from, are they the ones that did this?” 

“Eddie, you don’t get it.” 

“No, I do, remember? I need you to take a deep breath, ok?” 

It took you a second to realize how hard you were squeezing his hand and how quickly your heart was beating. So you took his advice and took a few deep breaths before you looked for him to continue.

“I can tell you’re scared. But, y/n, this isn’t school yard bullying. They could have killed you. And it doesn’t sound like they stopped to see if you were alive. They deserve to be locked up for that, you know that right?” 

“But they won’t.”

“Cops don’t like you back home?”

You just shook your head.

“Well look, you met Hopper over there,” he gestured over his shoulder and waiting for you to nod before continuing, “Well he’s different. I promise. He will make sure those bastards burn for what they did. He doesn’t care if their daddy is mayor, he will make sure they do the time the deserve ok?” 

“How do you know it was more than one person?” 

“Those kind of people always travel in packs.” 

“If I tell him who it was…” you paused to organize your thoughts into a coherent sentence as your mind raced, “How do you know they won’t just find me and try again?” 

Eddie gently reached up grab your cheeks and got closer to your face, “I swear they won’t lay another finger on you. And if you decide to stick around Hawkins, I can assure you no one else will either.” 

“You offering to be my body guard?” 

“Maybe,” he chuckled. He could tell you were calming down already. 

“By the looks of you, I don’t think you’re cut out for that line of work.”

“Shush,” he laughed, “So what do you say, can I call Hop back over?” 

You nodded, and a minute later, Hopper was out the door and ready to bring justice to the people who had been making your existence unbearable for your whole life. It wasn’t much longer before a nurse rushed out and apologized for the long wait to both of you and called you both back. Your heart dropped when you realized you may not see Eddie again, and he could sense your reluctance to let his hand go. 

“Don’t worry, I already memorized your full name like the good freak I am, and I will be back to visit you later.” 

“Promise?” 

“Of course. The best thing about the hospital here in the lovely town of Hawkins, Indiana, is that our visiting hours are 24/7. I can come annoy you for as long as I want,” he smirked at you, “I just need to run home and grab my copy of Lord of the Rings after they check out my nose. I think you’ll really like it.” 

“With this headache, I don’t think I’m going to like reading anything.” 

“Oh don’t worry, I wasn’t going to let you lay a finger on it. I like doing the voices.” 

You both laughed, and continued to hold hands until it was absolutely necessary for you to part ways. 

“See you soon,” Eddie smiled down at you before following a different nurse to a room down the hall. 

“See you soon.”

@embrace-themagic​ @fanficparker​  @heartbeats-wildly​ @saturn-aka-six​ @calum-hoodwinked-me​ @peterplanet​ @mischiefmanaged49​ @nicotine-sunshine820​ @itsjusttor​ @emistrash​ @thenoddingbunny-blog​ @sovereignparker​ @raajali3​@eddielives1986​ @eddieswifu​ @chickpeadumpsterfire​ @fluffybunnyu​

[luveline]

steve zombie!au…. maybe in this new camp the reader is placed to do the scouting for supplies/ protecting the camp while steve is the one that has to stay in the camp and starts worrying over her a lot? love your writing jade 🫶🏼

thanks gorgeous! —you and steve settle into your new jobs. he worries, you dote. fem!reader, 1.3k

You watch in mild frustration as another firework shoots up into the air and pops. It doesn't break the treeline, but it's loud. 

"Should we really be doing this?" Joyce asks. 

Hopper grunts in annoyance and begins a spiel you've had the misfortune of hearing twice already this morning. The fireworks are going to be an alarm, a code in case another undefeatable foe crosses the proximity line. Newly appointed guard and on duty, if someone were to approach now, it would be you that lights the firework. 

You kind of hate your new job. You haven't met the new and elusive leader of the camp you've merged with, but you've met his underling Wendy, and she assigned you a job. You're on guard duty and potential runs, Steve's on childcare, and when he asked if you could switch, she said point blank No.

Steve's less than pleased, though he likes being with the kids. 

"What use is a warning if we draw other people?" Joyce asks. Frustration must be in the air. 

"Kid," Hopper says. It takes you a good handful of seconds to realise he's talking to you. "You can go. Take the evening off." 

"Are you sure? Wendy's kinda stern." 

"I can deal with Wendy." 

You pat the pommel of your sword and nod, starting back through the trees toward camp. Hopper's more than capable of looking after himself despite the argument that awakens as soon as you're far enough away. 

Walking back into camp makes you feel weird. More than half the people you see are strangers, cleaner, happier than anybody from The College, though they're starting to merge. You weave between a procession of runners back with a literal wheelbarrow of cans from the grocery store a half a mile east from here. They spray painted on the windows that the place was full of geeks months ago and it remains untouched. Sneaky trick, but one you can appreciate if it keeps all the kids alive. 

You can hear them as you approach one of the portables. They aren't truly portable buildings; if you ever wanted to move further into Michigan, they'd stay behind. But they have walls and ceilings and it makes the world feel a little less alien for the kids, who mostly grew up for the last year, nearly two, in The College. 

You put your sword against the side of the wall and run up the silver metal steps to ease the door open. 

Steve's sitting at the back of the room with four other adults, a little girl in his lap, her head on his chest. She can't be older than five. 

At the front of the room sits Sarah, reading from a big storybook. There are no lights on, but she has a torch with different coloured crepe papers taped to the front, and she shines them when different emotions come into the story. Right now, the story is sad, and a light blue light kisses the cheeks of the children in the front row. 

They barely notice your arrival. Steve, however, heaves a visible sigh of relief, the arm he's wrapped genially over the little girl's back moving up incrementally at the sight of you. 

"Hello," you whisper, sitting down next to him quietly. 

"Hi," the little girl whispers. 

"Hi," you say back. She isn't one of The College kids, you'd know her face. "Who are you, honey?" 

"I'm Mabel." 

"Hi Mabel, I'm Y/N." 

"Y/N's my girlfriend," Steve whispers, grabbing your hand for a squeeze. You squeeze back. 

Mabel looks up at Steve with a smile. "Do you kiss?" Mabel asks. 

You laugh, startled, and half the kids turn their heads to see what's so funny. Steve shushes you like a proper teacher, finger over his lips until they all turn back to their story. 

"We do sometimes to say hello," Steve whispers, quieter than before. "Why?"

"My boyfriend is a bad kisser," she says. 

You tamp down a smile badly, amusement colouring your words, "Honey, I think you should stick to holding hands." 

"I think so," she agrees. 

Steve pats her shoulder to show his agreement. She cuddles in and turns her attention back to the story. Steve meets your eyes over her head and you both laugh with closed mouths, hot breaths pushed out of your noses. 

When the story's finished and the room is too dark to stay any longer, Jonathan arrives to cart off his boat load of fostered brethren, as do the other adults. It's nice to see how many of them accept children who aren't theirs with open arms. Steve carries Mabel until the very last second when Julie, Mabel's older sister, comes to collect her. 

"Did you know she has a boyfriend?" Steve asks Julie. 

"Is that what she said?" Julie asks fondly, tapping Mabel on the tip of her nose. "You're silly. No boyfriends until you're ten, at least." 

Mabel blushes and hides her face. 

"Will she forgive you?" you ask Steve as they leave. 

He hugs you close, suddenly. At the doorway of the portable with the other 'teachers' still inside cleaning up the kids' mess, you aren't expecting him to be outwardly affectionate. 

"I'm her favourite, she'll forget by tomorrow." Steve hugs you tighter still, prompting you to hug back. He groans as soon as you do, as though your touch is a great relief. 

"Is everything okay?" you ask. 

"I worry about you when you're gone." 

"I know, but it's no different than yesterday. They didn't even need me, that's why Hopper sent me back. It's not dangerous." 

"It's obviously dangerous." Steve's cheek pushes against the side of your head, almost nuzzling you. "It's the best part of my day when you come back to me." 

You feel heat rise to your face, a hot flush of embarrassment that licking over every inch of skin. "Steve," you mumble. 

He squeezes your waist and has you take his weight on your chest, bending you backward. "I love you." 

"I love you too," you utter.

Steve pulls away from you, something sweet and soft in the set of his mocha brown eyes. "I know. I think that's why I freak out so much." 

"You'd miss being adored," you tease. 

"By you, yeah." He gives you a long look. You know before he's moved even a millimetre that he's going to give you another thankful hug, lips at your ear as he confesses, "I'd miss you more than anything." 

You hug him back with your own relief —you've loved Steve for a very, very long time. It's an unexplainable feeling to know he loves you back, and fiercely. Somewhere in the past is a girl laying in his lap in the woodland bordering an endless intersection highway, wishing he'd want you back. You can't tell her that everything will be okay, that you'll get through it safe and sound, but you could at least tell her that there's something worth living for at the end of the seemingly insurmountable. Someone who worries about you when you're less than 100 yards away. 

"You worry too much," you say, pushing his chest gently to separate your hug. You look him straight in the eye. "We're good at finding each other again. And I'm not going anywhere in the first place." 

Steve exhales slowly. "Good. I hate when you go places." 

"Me too. Let's stay here forever." 

You both know it's an impossible thing, but the hypothetical is nice. You can see the weight of the worry Steve carries on his shoulders, worry in his eyes, but he's carrying a lot of love too. You wish it wasn't all so heavy. 

[fortheloveofwonderland]

Midnight | Chapter 19 | SR

Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

A/N - a slight jump forward in time here. For the sake of this, Spencer’s mom lives back in Vegas.

Chapter Summary - after finding a new place to settle down, things finally seem like they might be looking up for you and Spencer. Meanwhile Luke refuses to rest while he continues searching for you.

Pairing - unsub! Spencer Reid / Fem! Reader

Category - dark angst | smut | very eventual happy ending

Warnings - cleaning up a crime scene, burying bodies, fingering, handjob, swearing, vomit, brief mention of depression, penetrative, unprotected sex, lying.

WC - 5.7k

Chapter 19 - Stitch Me Up

Two Months Later

The desert city of Twentynine Palms, California was located in the Mojave Desert and sat on the northern side of the Joshua Tree National Park and promoted the motto “a beautiful desert oasis”. 

It wasn’t small but it was huge either, with a population of around twenty five thousand, making it a great place for two people to hide in plain sight. And given its desert location, the temperature this time of year was over one hundred and five, a stark contrast from tiny little Colorado mountain towns. 

Samuel and Violet Truman of Arizona had moved out west and rented themselves a little fully furnished three bed, single storey home on Chia Avenue in a quiet suburb of Twentynine Palms. They arrived two weeks ago after spending some six weeks travelling the states with their travel companions Jack and Lily Waters. 

From the outside their home left a lot to be desired, with its rickety metal fence and lone palm tree in the sandy front yard. But the inside was so modern and sheek that the couple had signed a lease on the spot. 

From the outside looking in, you and Spencer were the idyllic all American couple. And admittedly, from the inside you were also pretty damn happy. 

Since fleeing Crested Butte in the middle of the night two months ago, things had changed dramatically. That night you’d waited until Luke had stopped patrolling your cabin before getting Mary’s body into the trunk of the Nissan. You’d scrubbed every single inch of the house until it was cleaner than when you’d arrived, tweezed the bullet out of the wall and filled in the hole left behind, before gathering all of your belongings and getting the hell out of dodge. 

On the way out of town you had begged Spencer to make one last stop. He wanted to refuse, you could tell, but he was trying so hard to make you happy, to make up for the way he’d been treating you that he agreed and pulled the Nissan to a stop on the street outside of McGills. 

It had been late and all the lights were off so you’d ducked down the side alley towards the door that led up to his apartment. You’d had no idea if he’d be there but you’d prayed with every fibre of your being that he would. And by some stroke of luck, he answered the door after you’d knocked twice. 

“Rose,” he folded his arms across his chest and leant against the door jamb. “Or should I say, Y/N.” 

“I heard Luke spoke to you.” You gnawed on your lip as Jesse regarded you like the stranger you were. 

“He did. I have to say, I did not expect you to be FBI.” 

“Yeah.” You nodded. “It’s a long story. I just wanted to come by and apologise for everything. I probably really shouldn’t have let myself follow you out of the Nickel that night.” 

“I’m glad you did.” He nodded, dropping his arms to his sides. “Even though it didn’t work out between us, it at the very least got me out of my slump. Maybe now I can actually put myself out there again, you know? Now I’ve gotten over that first hurdle.” 

“You’re going to make some woman very happy someday.” You smiled, subconsciously taking a step closer. 

“It’s a shame it couldn’t have been you.” He shrugged wistfully. 

You swallowed thickly, glancing down the alley and noting that you couldn’t see the Nissan from this position, or more importantly, its occupant couldn’t see you. You stepped even closer to Jesse and cupped his cheek. 

“In another life maybe.” You whispered. “I’m leaving town.” 

“I figured as much.” He nodded as your hand wandered down from his face to bicep. “You could stay, you know? With me. You don’t have to go just because he wants you to.” 

“You have no idea how tempting that is. But I can’t.” 

“I know.” He sighed, suddenly gripping the back of your neck. “I’m going to miss you.” 

Suddenly he’d slammed his lips against yours in a kiss so passionate your legs had buckled. If Spencer knew how you’d said goodbye to Jesse, he most likely would have gone back and killed him. If he’d known you’d let Jesse finger you in his doorway while you jerked him off in return, Spencer would have certainly murdered him and probably enjoyed it. 

But clearly you had a better poker face than you realised as Spencer simply drove off as soon as you were back in the car. And on the drive the only thing you’d thought of were Jess’s last words to you. 

“I wish I’d gotten a chance to love you, Y/N.” 

But at some point you had to let that go. 

Mary’s final resting place had been a hole in the ground in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in Montana, almost eight hundred miles north of her hometown of Crested Butte. The Nissan met the same fate as Spencer’s Volvo a further five hundred and fifty miles east just outside of Medora, North Dakota. 

Spencer purchased three pairs of bus tickets: one down to Texas, one out to Minnesota and one to Iowa, the latter being the ones you actually used. It took the better part of an entire day on a sweaty, smelly bus before you arrived in Cedar Rapids.

You checked into a cheap and dirty motel under the names of Jack and Lily Waters and spent almost the entire night having sex. Thoroughly exhausted in the morning, Spencer found a used car lot and using his Arizona licence in the name Samuel Truman, paid cash for a black Chevy Impala. 

For the six weeks that followed you travelled up and down the country in much of a zigzag, alternating between your two pseudonyms, back and forth so the BAU would never find you. You spent six weeks in multiple different cheap motels, fucking like rabbits every step of the way. 

You’d never felt so intrinsically linked to someone the way you did to Spencer in those six weeks. And it seemed he’d finally found his bliss as he didn’t kill once. 

Eventually when enough time passed you’d choose to settle down in California. But unfortunately the mundane realities of life would ultimately be your downfall. 

You stood up from the bathroom floor with a groan, wiping the back of your hand over your mouth and padding over to the sink. You stuck your mouth directly under the faucet and drank from it to wash away the taste of bile on your tongue. 

You’d been throwing up on and off for some weeks now but you simply put it down to the residual stress of being on the run. You exhaled heavily before shuffling back out into the bedroom where Spencer still lay naked on top of the sheets. 

“I’m mildly offended.” He offered you a wistful smile. 

“I’m sorry.” You grumbled, flopping back to the bed next to him. 

“It’s ok. Just never had anyone need to throw up whilst sucking my dick before.” He chuckled, wrapping his arm around your shoulders. 

“It’ll teach me not to eat hotdogs from a gas-and-go.” You sighed. “I can try again if you’re still in the mood?”

“After I just listened to you puke your guts up? I’m suddenly not very horny.” He pulled you closer so your head was resting on his chest. “But seriously, are you ok? You’ve been getting sick a lot lately.” 

“Yeah I guess it’s stress or something. I’ll be fine.” You nuzzled against him, placing your hand flush against his chest over his heart. 

You smiled as the ring caught the light and found yourself moving impossibly closer to Spencer. His grandmother's old ring had been upgraded, as had the one he wore, for newer silver matching bands inscribed on the inside with partners in crime. 

One of your stops on your travels before you’d made your way to Twentynine Palms had been in Atlantic City at a seedy motel just off the main strip. After a few drinks one night as you walked by a little drive-in chapel, Spencer had a proposition for. 

“What would you say I said we should get married?” He pulled you to a stop on the sidewalk. 

“Married?” You glared at him. 

“Right now. Partners in crime forever.” He grinned at you. 

“You’re joking, right?” Your brows furrowed. 

“I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life. Before we get swallowed up entirely in the lives of Samuel and Violet, I think Spencer and Y/N need to do this one last thing.” 

And really there had only been one answer to that. You and Spencer had been bound for life the moment you’d left DC with him, you were as good as married, so why not make it official? 

If your old team were to ever find one last trace of Spencer Reid and Y/N Y/L/N it would be the signing of marriage licences in a little Atlantic City chapel. 

Spencer purchased you the new rings as a surprise and that along with your rose gold heart necklace, were your most treasured possessions. 

“You don’t need to be stressed, sweetheart. It’s over, we’re safe now. I’ll never let anything bad happen to you.” He cooed, kissing your head. 

It really was amazing the difference a few months could make. Of course things weren’t ideal, you’d always be on the run, never able to return home but things with Spencer were as close to perfect as they could possibly be. 

Since fleeing Butte he’d been wonderful, the Spencer you’d known was still in there somewhere. You may be on the run but as long as this was the Spencer you woke up to every morning, you didn’t mind at all. 

But Spencer was wrong, things were far from over. At least you’d always have these moments to look back when everything came crumbling down. But for now, despite the stress within you, you knew Spencer was all you needed to feel whole. You and Spencer were two broken halves but maybe together you could patch each other up and finally feel complete. 

***

Two days after Luke Alvez arrived back from Crested Butte he received a phone call from the diner owner's son. 

Jesse McGill had informed him of the mysterious disappearance of the girl Mary, whom Luke had met at the diner, which was followed in quick succession by you and Spencer’s sudden departure from the town. 

It really didn’t take a genius to put two and two together. But unfortunately for Luke it did take a genius to pull it off and Spencer was sure to leave behind no trail, no scrap of evidence. And two months later and Mary still hadn’t been found and the BAU had no leads on you and Spencer’s whereabouts. You’d well and truly outsmarted them. 

In his spare time, which was very few and far between these days, he poured over the Duncan Green case file as well as images of the sparkling clean cabin you’d left behind in Butte in the hopes that maybe he’d missed something. He stayed late in the office every single night and looked for any reports of sightings of you and Spencer as Emily had officially registered you as missing persons. He scrolled through police databases for any other occurrences that might point to where the hell you were. 

He’d discovered two bodies buried in woodlands across the country which were similar in MO to Green but with no pertinent links between them, the BAU couldn’t investigate. 

Lyle Smith was found in a shallow grave with his throat cut in the Hoosier National Forest just north of Jasper, Indiana. The body of Brett Carlisle from Wichita, Kansas was found in the Rita Blanca National Grasslands in Texas. Both bodies had been subject to the elements but deemed to have been dead since before that little Nissan was picked up on Elk Avenue for the first time. So maybe Spencer had been on some kind spree since he’d left DC.

And that brought him onto the discovery of the burnt out Nissan, near identical to how they’d found Spencer’s Volvo. They’d spent three days searching the area surrounding where the vehicle was found for Mary’s body only to come up short. Of course, Spencer wasn’t stupid, he wouldn’t dispose of a body anywhere near the car. 

The only lead Luke had really had in the last two months was the filing of a marriage licence in the state of New Jersey. It was like a big middle finger in his face, clearly you’d both wanted him to find it. He’d driven to Atlantic City on one of his rare days off and canvassed the area near the wedding chapels, showing your photographs to anyone who would look. But he knew you’d be long gone. 

If he could just find a way to connect any of these crimes to Spencer, or to find Mary’s body then maybe he could convince you to come home. He was sure you had nothing to do with any of this and if had solid proof that Spencer had murdered one of these people maybe it could be his way to form a wedge between the two of you. No matter what happened, Luke would never stop trying to protect you. 

But god if it wasn’t taking its toll on him.

Luke Alvez was, in no uncertain terms, coming apart at the seams. The stitching holding him together had been removed thread by thread and at this point there was barely anything holding him together. Emily had expressed her concerns for his mental health, suggesting he seek medical help for what she had dubbed a depressive spiral. 

His response had been simply, “you’d be depressed too if your best friend had married a murderer” which had pretty much shut down the conversation. 

He knew he was devolving, he’d seen it hundred of times before. His apartment was a mess of case files, innocuous accounts of possible sightings and potential victims of Spencer. He barely slept, running mostly on coffee and energy bars. He was almost certain he was getting an ulcer. 

But he wouldn’t let this go. He couldn’t shake the feeling that you weren’t safe and he couldn’t rest until he knew you were. Maybe this obsession would eventually kill him, but it would be worth it to be able to free you from the clutches of Spencer Reid. 

***

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” You scurried back to the car with your best apologetic smile as you slid into the passenger’s seat and Spencer pulled a face. 

“Did you puke again?” He frowned at you. 

“No.” You shook your head. 

“You were peeing again? You went when we got here.” He started the engine. 

You weren’t exactly sure where you were headed, Spencer had simply told you that you were going out for the day and with nothing better to do you’d followed along. You were somewhere along the I-15 heading north about two hours away from Twentynine Palms, at a gas station. You’d only stopped long enough for Spencer to fill up the Chevy and have a coffee and you’d used the bathroom twice, which was very unlike you. 

“I know, I think I drank too much coffee this morning.” You mused, putting on your seatbelt.

“You always drink too much coffee, but that’s an entirely different conversation.” He chuckled, putting the car in reverse and pulling out of the space. 

As he merged back onto the interstate you twirled your wedding band around your finger, watching the way his caught the sunlight through the windscreen and you smiled to yourself. 

“Where are we going, Spence? Not that I don’t like a spontaneous road trip but I thought we’d settled now? Driving long distances usually only equals bad things where we’re concerned.” You rolled your bottom lip between your teeth. 

Spencer removed one hand from the wheel and brought it to rest on your knee while he smiled at you softly. 

“We’re going to see my mom.” He spoke happily.

“Oh.” You nodded with a soft laugh. “Ok, good. You had me worried for a second.” 

“I told you sweetheart, you don’t need to worry about anything. Not anymore.” He gave your leg a squeeze, the adrenaline pulsing through his veins. 

His bloodlust had been sated for the past two months but now it had come back with avengence. He needed to kill and he had a particular target in mind who he was sure would satisfy his urges more so than any that had come before. 

But it was better to keep you in the dark. You were so happy lately and Spencer loved it when you were happy. He’d use visiting his mom as a distraction and he’d sneak off and extract his plan solo. You’d never need to know and your blissful little bubble didn’t need to be popped. 

It was a win-win. 

He ran over his plan in his head as he drove, making sure he had all the little details secure in his mind. There was no margin for error here, this had to be the perfect kill. 

The two of you mostly stayed silent until he’d made it about another half hour up the interstate and you huffed out a loud breath. 

“Goddamnit,” you grumbled. “I need to pee again.” 

***

Visiting Spencer’s mom had been pretty safe for the two of you given that if anyone ever asked her if you’d been here, she most likely wouldn’t remember. You spent a few hours with her upon your arrival in Vegas before Spencer took you for a three course meal at the very expensive Capital Grille on Las Vegas strip. 

After he walked you down to Caesars Palace in which you expected to be having drinks and were extremely surprised when Spencer strolled up to the reception desk stating he had a room reserved under his other alias Jack Waters. 

A bellboy led you up to one of the top floors and showed you to the Palace Premium Suite. You stood in the middle of the grand living room while Spencer tipped the young man and once the door was closed and the two of you were alone, he sidled up behind you and wrapped his arms around your waist. 

“You like it?” He spoke as he kissed the side of your face. 

“Wh-what is happening?” You laughed, still in awe. “What did I do to deserve this?” 

“Consider it a belated, one night honeymoon.” His lips trailed down your neck. “And I guess just a small token of my gratitude for everything you’ve done for me. I know I have a hard time saying how I feel but I love you so fucking much and I am the luckiest man in the world to call you my wife.” 

“Spencer,” you sighed happily in your arms. “I love you too. And I’m the lucky one.” 

“Ok, now we’ve got that out of the way, tell me Mrs Reid, where would you like me to fuck you first?”

You moaned at his words, turning yourself around in his arms and attaching your lips together. 

“What are my options?” You spoke against his lips, feeling his dick growing hard as he pressed into you. 

“Well there are multiple couches, a four poster king sized bed, a pretty decadent bathtub, or there’s my personal favourite option…” his hands wandered under the hem of your shirt and over your back. 

“Which is?” You took hold of his lapels, tearing your lips away from his so you could look at him.

His pupils were already blown out with his lust, his lip quirked up into a sinful smirk. 

“We’re way up high, with some of the best views of Vegas.” He tugged your shirt up, quickly getting it over your head and tossing it aside. He took hold of your biceps and turned you back around to face the huge floor to ceiling windows overlooking the strip, his lips moving back to your ear. “My choice would be to fuck you up against the window. But that’s just me.” 

He was already leading you towards the windows, lips sucking the flesh of your neck, his free reaching between your bodies and unhooking your bra. He quickly got it off your arms and dropped it on the floor, and you made no protest when he pushed your front up against the window. You hissed slightly at the cool glass as it touched your nipples and Spencer smiled to himself. 

It was all a part of his plan. He would render you dumb with sex then run you an indulgent bubble bath with a large glass of wine to soothe your post-coital muscles. Then he’d tell you he’d left something at his mother's facility which was purposefully on the other side of town to buy him some time. 

He’d tell you he hopefully wouldn’t be gone long, but traffic on the strip at night could be a nightmare and he’d be back as soon as possible. He’d inform you of the bar and the spa downstairs if you wanted to use either while he was gone. 

And while you were preoccupied having a drink or getting a massage or whatever, he would seek out his target, slice his throat and be back before you knew it, with any luck rejuvenated enough for round two. 

He continued kissing your neck while he started unbuttoning your pants and you helped him wiggle them down your legs and kick them off. You could see Spencer in the reflection in the window start to work on the buttons of his shirt. You caught his eye and he smiled at you. 

He shucked his shirt off and pressed his bare chest against your back, caging you against the window with his hips, his hard cock pressing into your back. His lips moved back to your neck and worked on sucking deep bruises into your flesh whilst one hand wandered over your stomach and quickly dipped inside your panties. 

You closed your eyes as two fingers were soon pressing inside of you, his thumb massaging your clit. You rolled your ass backwards, grinding against his erection but you wobbled a little on your legs at the feeling of his fingers inside you. 

With your eyes closed your mind wandered of its own accord. There were times when you and Spencer were together that you found yourself thinking of Jesse, most specifically the last time you’d seen him when he’d fingered you in his doorway. 

It was entirely involuntary, you certainly didn’t mean to think about him and his strong tattooed arms and the large vein in his forearm that pulsed when his fingers were inside of you. You didn’t mean to imagine his wiry beard scratching your face as he kissed you. And you most definitely didn’t mean to picture him fucking you whilst Spencer was. Sometimes it just happened. 

Spencer was by no means an idiot and he knew you still thought about GI Mountain Man. He knew exactly what you looked like post orgasm and he’d known what the two of you had been doing when you’d said goodbye to him, even if you’d tried hard to hide it. There had been three, maybe four times when you’d said his name under your breath when he was fucking you but you’d never seemed to notice. 

Of course it bothered him, a part of him wanted to drive back to Butte and kill Jesse just to make himself feel better. But he was trying to be better for you and so he ignored the occasional slip of the tongue. 

Your hand snaked around his wrist, holding him firmly in place in your panties. He knew you were thinking about Jesse now, call it intuition, or gut instinct, but whatever it was Spencer knew. 

He used his free hand to relieve himself from his pants and move them down his thighs enough so they were out of his way. He was almost positive that Jesse wasn’t as big as him, couldn’t fill you up the way he could.

In one swift move, he removed his fingers from inside of you and hurriedly plunged his cock between your legs, causing you to gasp and fall flat against the window. Your eyes sprung open at the sudden intrusion and you made eye contact with him in the reflection.

“Jesus Christ, Spence.” You panted as he bottomed out. “A little warning next to him.” 

He chose to ignore you, placing his hands flush on the glass either side of your head as he started thrusting into you. He kept eye contact through the glass, not letting you close your eyes for fear you would start thinking of Jesse again. 

It’s not fair. I’ve done everything for her, I fucking married her and it’s still not enough. What makes him better than me? Why is he still on her mind? 

He tried not to let his anger cloud his judgement and had to rein himself back from fucking you too hard. He forced himself to slow down, thrusting you languidly against the window. You moaned in sync with one another while the Strip below illuminated you both in its chaotic glow. 

You kept your eyes on his in the reflection while he fucked you and all thoughts of Jesse left your head. When you were clenching around him, legs shaking from your impending orgasm, he took hold of your left hand and ran his fingers over your wedding band. 

“You’re mine.” He mumbled, his face contorting as his own orgasm snuck up on him. “Mine. My partner in crime, my wife, my…fuck.” 

He groaned the last word, head falling to your shoulder as he suddenly came inside of you. You whimpered as he filled you up, pushing you over the edge and your legs almost gave up with the force of your orgasm. 

You fell back against Spencer’s chest, his arms holding you up right even though his own legs were shaking. As you fought to catch your breath he peeled you away from the window as he slid out of you and helped you over to the couch. 

You collapsed onto it, panting heavily and pulling Spencer down with you. He laid his head on your chest and listened to the sound of your erratic heartbeat. 

You laid like this for a while until you were both breathing at a normal rhythm and Spencer untangled himself from your arms and got to his feet. He tucked himself away and tugged his pants back up before buttoning them. 

“I’m gonna run you a bubble bath.” He smiled softly down at you. 

“You gonna join me in it?” You smiled back sleepily. 

“Sadly not, I realised I left my wallet at Bennington.” He went to head towards the bathroom but he didn’t get far. 

“You had your wallet at dinner.” You sat up, frowning at the back of his head. 

Spencer froze in his tracks. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. 

“Uh,” he turned back to face you, quickly trying to think on his feet, which would be a lot easier if his head wasn’t still hazy from his orgasm. “Not my wallet, I meant the burner phone. I should go and get it.” 

You scrutinised him for a moment but thankfully for him your own head was also bleary and wouldn’t allow you to think too much into it. 

“Ok.” You shrugged, flopping back to the couch. 

Spencer exhaled heavily, continuing on his way to the bathroom. He started the water, pouring in an ample amount of bubble bath and leaving the tub to fill. 

“There’s a bar downstairs and a spa, even a casino. If you get bored with the bath and I’m not back, go nuts.” He spoke as headed back into the room, locating the bottle of red wine he’d had sent to the room before you arrived. 

He made quick work of the cork and poured you a large glass before coming back over to the couch and dropping down next to you. He handed you the glass and you sat yourself up against the cushions again. 

“Hmm I like honeymoons.” You smiled, bringing your glass to your lips and taking a small sip. 

Moments later your face fell and you gagged, thrusting the glass back at Spencer before leaping from the couch and running as fast as your legs could carry you to the bathroom. 

Spencer heard the toilet seat slam back against the cistern and then the distinctive sound of vomiting echoed around the room.

Realistically he was smart enough to figure out what was going on, as were you, but both of your heads were clouded by other thoughts and so you both missed the obvious. 

Spencer padded back to the bathroom and found you on your knees, wiping your hand over your mouth. You looked up at him with large, sad eyes. 

“The wine turned against me.” You whined. “Goddamn gas-and-go hotdogs.” 

Spencer smiled sadly at you and slid to the floor next to you, wrapping an arm around your shoulders as the bath continued to fill behind him. 

“Are you going to be ok if I pop out?” Please god say yes, I need this, it has to be tonight. 

“Yeah, I’ll be fine. It’s passed again now, I guess I just won’t be drinking any wine tonight.” You sighed. “You go, do your thing.” 

“As long as you’re sure.” Spencer pushed himself back to his feet and then held his hands out to help you up. 

“Of course. Do you think you’ll be gone for long?” 

“No idea, traffic at this time of night will probably be a pain, but I promise I’ll hurry.” He stroked your hair back from your face. 

“Ok.” You nodded, lowering yourself to sit on the edge of the tub. “Go, I’m fine. I can run a bath.” 

“I won’t be long.” He went to kiss you but then thought better of it as your breath smelt like vomit. Instead he kissed his first and middle finger and then placed them on your lips making you chuckle. 

Soon he was heading out of the room in search of his bag so he could change into jeans and t-shirt. The weapons were in the Chevvy’s glovebox, ready for their next assignment. 

He dressed quickly and got his shoes on, throwing on a hoodie before grabbing the car keys and heading to the door. 

“Be safe, sweetheart.” He called as he reached for the handle. 

“Love you.” You replied and it made his heart swell every time he heard you say that. 

As he opened the door, his wedding ring caught his eye and he rolled his lip between his teeth. He forced open the door, ignoring the way his heart practically exploded when he looked at his ring. He had a job to focus on. 

But the truth was, you were the only thing keeping him together. He was lost and you’d found him, taken him in and patched him up. His scars both mental and physical didn’t phase you, if anything you’d loved him harder because of them. You’d fixed him up in ways you’d never understand and he hoped he wasn’t making a huge mistake in what he was about to do. 

He was fairly certain you’d never walk away from him, that nothing he could do could be worse than the things he’d already put you through. Because he was sure one day all that thread keeping him together would come unravelled and if he had no one there to stitch him back up again he would be torn so deeply there would be no repairing him. And god only knows how quickly a broken man would devolve.

No, it's no wonder I feel broken,

Are you the one to fix me up, patching up the work they done?

Try and sew me,

So thread the needle, tie it off, teach me how to trust someone.

Really hoping that you stay,

That you never walk away,

Every word I shouldn't say, I shouldn't say, I shouldn't say it.

Do you feel the stress in me,

Steady bursting at the seams?

You're the only one I need to make me complete, yeah.

Stitch me up, stitch me up, don't tear me apart,

I've been stuck in the rut, patched up in the dark.

Stitch me up, stitch me up, there's pins in my heart, oh,

Pardon all my precious scars.

No, it's no wonder you've been feeling,

Like a doll in lost and found, so mistreated, thrown around.

Who you kidding? (You kidding),

Every flaw and every fray, that's what makes you sexy to me.

Really hoping that I stay,

I could never walk away,

Every word we shouldn't say, we shouldn't say, we shouldn't say it.

Do you feel the stress in me,

Steady bursting at the seams?

You're the only one I need to make me complete, yeah.

Stitch me up, stitch me up, don't tear me apart,

I've been stuck in the rut, patched up in the dark.

Stitch me up, stitch me up, there's pins in my heart, oh,

Pardon all my precious scars.

Elegant and broken, tasteful, tattered clothing,

I guess we've been caught in the middle of love.

Motive through emotion, damaged but we're golden,

I guess we've been caught in the middle of love.

Elegant and broken, tasteful, tattered clothing,

I guess we've been caught in the middle of love.

Motive through emotion, damaged but we're golden,

I guess we've been caught in the middle of love.

Stitch me up, stitch me up, don't tear me apart,

I've been stuck in the rut, patched up in the dark.

Stitch me up, stitch me up, there's pins in my heart, oh,

Pardon all my precious scars.

Really hoping that you stay,

Pray you never walk away,

Pardon all my precious scars.

Stitch me up, stitch me up, there's pins in my heart,

Oh, pardon all my precious scars.

@bubblebuttwade @jay-2s-world @daddy-dotcom @nomajdetective

[footprintsinthesxnd]

Anything For You

So here is the much awaited part 2 of ‘Good Girl’ for @ronsparky I’m sorry it took so long. Warnings: smut, sexual themes, bondage, swearing, Nixon being his usual self, 18+ fic only. Word count: 2.9k

It had been a few months since Y/n's last interaction with Speirs. It’s not like she was avoiding him, the company had been moved back to Mourmelon for a breather and between trying to relax and drills and training they just hadn’t managed to talk about what happened in Hagenau. They still shared longing looks across rooms and when they were occasionally close enough to touch Ron would reach out and brush his hand against hers.

After two months in Mourmelon, the company moved on to Struzelburg, Germany. The air seemed cleaner, the weather warmer and the general living conditions nicer. Y/n often thought that these comforts were almost like being back at Toccoa or Aldbourne.

She had just come back from collecting some eggs with Frank and George when she bumped into Speirs carrying a large tray of silver utensils through the street.

“You want some help with that Lieutenant?” She laughed, watching his shocked face meet hers and he gulped.

“No, that’s quite alright. I can manage,” he replied gruffly, already turning away from her and in the direction of the battalion post office.

Y/n trailed after him, despite Ron’s continued protests. Inside the post office, Ron placed the silverware on the counter, pulling out two packs of smokes for Private Vest.

“Same address as last time, Sir?” Vest asked, pocketing the packets of cigarettes with a smile.

“Yes,” Speirs replied abruptly, his eyes flicking back to Y/n for a second before turning away.

“Sure thing. I’ll say, Sir, the Y/l/n family will sure have a lot of nice silverware.” Speirs harsh glare cut the private off from saying anything else. Y/n stood in silence watching as Speirs tried to break his icey resolve and turn to her. He mumbled something about being needed at battalion before heading out the door, his head down as he passed Y/n but she couldn’t bring herself to follow him.

“Hey, Sergeant, ain’t Y/l/n your last name?”

“Shut it, Private,” Y/n snapped, spinning around on the spot and hurrying after Ron who had disappeared into the crowd of paratroopers.

Y/n had tried to find him that night but Lipton told her that he was in his room and didn’t want to be disturbed. This act went on for the rest of the month with Ron hiding away and avoiding her. That was until the company was moved on to Berchtesgaden.

Y/n finally found herself with her own room, a hot shower and a warm bed. It was these simple luxuries that Y/n had learned not to take advantage of. The alcohol flowed freely and the boys celebrated. The war in Europe had finally come to an end and despite the continuing war in Japan looming over them, for a moment, just for one night they could celebrate in peace.

Y/n had left the party an hour ago, wandering the halls in a dress she had found in one of the rooms. It was long, flowing out behind her and despite the neckline being a little lower than she would have liked, she wore it in a desperate attempt to reclaim something she had lost. She’d danced with nearly all the men that night, arm in arm with Malarkey, spinning frantically around the floor with George, Bull had taken her for a very sweet slow dance. She felt like a woman again, and the men treated her as though she was something to be admired.

Y/n found her way to the balcony that the officers often frequented, the sun loungers lay along one of the walls with discarded whiskey bottles that almost certainly belonged to Captain Nixon. At this time of night; despite the ruckus downstairs, the air was still and quiet. No wind blew, no birds sang. A dark silence hung over the mountains. Y/n didn’t know whether to find it ominous or peaceful but the silence was soon broken by the heavy footfalls of Ronald Speirs who rounded the corner so quickly that they both jumped in surprise.

“Sorry, I didn’t realise anyone was out here,” Ron confessed, avoiding her gaze and turning to head back the way he’d come.

“Ron, wait! Please. You’ve been avoiding me and we need to talk,” Y/n protested, watching as Ron fought with himself until he finally turned around to face her.

“There’s nothing to talk about. What happened between us never should have happened. We both know that. You’re going to go back home soon enough and I’m planning on staying in the army, and that’s it, either of us make it out of the Pacific anyway.” Ron huffed, slouching against the hard brick wall, glaring at the ground, “we were never gonna make it you and I.”

Y/n felt her heart clench and her lungs felt tight as she tried to find the words to convey how she felt. “You don’t know that Ron. You can’t know that unless you give us a chance.”

“We have no chance Y/n. One day you’ll wake up and realise that I was no good for you so I’m letting you go now before it’s too late. I’ve sent all the silver home to your family. I want to support you even if I can’t be with you.”

“Who says you can’t be with me?” Y/n cried, “Do I not get a say in this.” She moved closer to Ron, her dress trailing along behind her. They were inches apart when she spoke again. “I want this to be my choice Ron, and I choose you.”

Ron surged forward, pressing his lips roughly to hers. His hand gripped desperately at her hips, pulling her flush to him. In that kiss was the sweetest passion she had ever felt. Ron’s lips were soft, the stubble of his chin grazing her face but she didn’t mind the burn. Y/n found herself weaving her fingers into his hair, wrapping one of her legs around his to pull him closer. The kiss spoke volumes, travelling all the unsaid words, the unspoken feelings and desires. Y/n pulled back, brushing her thumb over Ron’s cheek and feeling the damp tears that had fallen. “I want you too,” Ron whispered, his voice cracking and Y/n realised she had never seen him cry before, his stony resolve breaking down and revealing the man beneath who just wanted to be loved.

“Oh Ron,” she whispered, their lips brushing again as she spoke. Ron looked up at her, his eyes misty and his lip quivering as he spoke.

“I’m sorry I’m so weak. I should have told you before,” he mumbled into her neck, burying his face from her view.

“You’re not weak Ron. You are the bravest man in this company. Only the brave become vulnerable emotionally and for you to show me that is braver than any act of the battlefield,” Y/n soothed him, rubbing his back in comforting circles.

Ron pulled away, his eyes becoming dark and stormy once more and a sly smirk spread across his handsome face. “If I remember correctly, you and I have some unfinished business.”

Y/n chuckled, reaching out and placing her hand in his, “I believe we do.”

Ron chuckled and it felt like the most genuine laugh they had ever shared. He scooped her up into his arms, carrying her bridal style along the corridor. She grinned up at him and Ron smiled happily down at her. Y/n now knew what she was missing in life. All those years of thinking she had a missing part and Ron’s smile filled that hole.

The walk to Ron’s room was short, too short really because all too soon Ron was carrying her over the threshold of his room and slamming the door closed with his foot, never once putting her down until he gently laid her on the bed. Ron moved to close the curtains but Y/n called out to him, “No, leave them open. You look beautiful in the moonlight.”

Ron huffed, the smile growing on his lips once more. Y/n felt herself growing warmer, just led on Ron’s bed watching him unbutton his shirt in the moonlight had her heart racing. The curves of the muscles rippling under his toned flesh caused her to whimper and Ron’s head snapped up, dark eyes watching him intensely as he whispered, “Are you going to be a good girl?”

Ron’s lips brushed against her ear lobe, sending shivers down her spine, as he whispered sweet nothings to her. Y/n had lost all coherent language as soon as Ron’s lips met hers. His hands roamed down her sides, ruffling the fabric of the dress and bunching it around her middle.

“Ron,” she pleaded with him but he ignored her, continuing to kiss down her neck while his hand grazed its way up her bare thighs. Her hands fisted in his hair and Ron groaned at the comforting sting of pain and pleasure it gave him. Ron would be lying if he said he hadn’t been dreaming of this moment since Hagenuea, well maybe even before then. The pathetic whimpers falling from Y/n’s mouth had him driven to the brink of insanity.

“Ronny, please,” Y/n begged again and Ron chuckled at this new nickname he’d been given.

“Oh Darling, you’re so needy. Tell me what you want. I’ve barely touched you and you're so desperate already.”

Y/n gasped as Ron’s fingers ran over the edge of her pant line, “Ron, God, please. Please.”

“So impatient, Darling.” Ron tutted, sitting back on his heels and smiling down at her. The distinct bulge in his trousers caused Y/n to groan further. She reached out, massaging the bulge through his trousers and watching as Ron fought back the urge to moan.

“Please Ronny,” Y/n mumbled, pressing a chaste kiss to his lips. “Please, Ron.”

Ron couldn’t take it anymore, he sprung forward, pinning her beneath his large frame, his hands gripping her wrists and pulling them above her head. Y/n tried to wriggle out from his grip but his grip only tightened.

“Now now Darling, don’t get upset,” Ron reassured her, pressing his lips to hers to silence the whimpers.

Ron worked quickly, stripping her of her dress and underwear, tossing them across the room to be collected later. Next came his trousers, he pulled off his belt and began wrapping it around her wrists, pulling them flush against the headboard and restraining her there.

“Please Ron, let me help you. Let me touch you,” she cried but Ron silenced her again with another kiss.

“Oh pretty lady, you don’t need to touch me. Tonight is all about you.”

Y/n could feel his fingers slipping down beneath her dress once more, rubbing against the soft flesh before trailing to where she wanted him. Where she needed him.

“Ron!” She gasped, as his thumb began to slowly circle her clit, while his other hand moved up her body, stroking the smooth skin of her lower abdomen before trailing up to her breasts. Y/n had never felt so safe and secure while simultaneously being so exposed as he pressed another kiss to her lips.

“You’re so beautiful,” Ron cooed, brushing the stray strands of hair that had fallen into her face while continuing his movements on her clit. She couldn’t speak, she could barely breathe as her stomach began to knot and the pressure between her legs grew. She wanted to snap her legs shut as she wriggled beneath him, and as if Ron sensed this he situated himself further between her legs. “Now you promised you’d be a good girl and good girls don’t close their legs now, do they?”

Y/n shook her head frantically, she’d never felt so pathetic. Ever since she joined the paratroopers she had spent every day proving she was tough, she could handle herself and yet by just his touch alone Ronald Speirs had rendered her incapacitated.

A small moan escaped her as Ron’s tongue swirled around her nipple.

“Do you like that, Darling? Tell me you like it.”

“I like it,” Y/n nearly screamed. “Please, I like it. Don’t stop.”

Ron hummed in amusement, repeating the action and earning the same response.

“Please Ron, please I need more,” she whined, fighting against the restraints that held her there. The desperate look in her eyes was all Ron needed. He reached forward, removing the belt and freeing her hands. They immediately landed on the hem of his underwear, pulling at the elastic impatiently but Ron pushed her hands away.

“Not yet my Darling. Remember I told you, tonight is all about you,” Ron pressed a final kiss to her lips, squeezing her hips before he sank beneath the covers out of view.

Y/n had been with men before but none had done anything like this. She gasped, grabbing a fistful of the bedsheets and throwing her head back in an exaggerated groan. Ron linked his arms under her legs, placing them over his shoulders and he continued to trail kisses over her clit. The small licks and nibbles drove her wild. Y/n cried and whimpered, tugging frantically at Ron’s brown locks as the pressure in her stomach continued to build.

“God, Ron I’m so close. I’m so close. Please…” she cried out as the knot came undone and her whole body spasmed. Her legs clamped tightly around Ron’s head but he didn’t seem to notice, choosing to continue to kiss and lick her until the tremors finally subsided and Y/n could breathe again.

He reappeared from beneath the covers, his lips and chin dripping with saliva and a wicked grin on his face. His brown locks fell onto his sweaty forehead as he spoke, “Did you enjoy that my Darling.”

“Yes,” Y/n mumbled, her chest still heaving from the effort of her orgasm.

“Good because I’m only just getting started.”

Y/n let out a guttural moan, pushing herself off the pillows, “Ron, I want you to fuck me.”

She wasn’t sure where the foul language had come from, despite being surrounded by soldiers all the time she rarely swore but now seemed like an appropriate time.

Ron took this as a sign, pushing his boxers down and allowing his desperately hard cock to spring free from its restraint. He reached over to the bedside cabinet, retrieving a condom and rolling it down his cock. Y/n watched in awe of him. Not only was he an attractive man but his body was sculpted like a Greek God and Y/n thanked all those runs up Currehea for that.

Ron pushed her back against the bed, pressing his hips into hers and teasing her once more but the teasing didn’t continue for long and soon he was lining himself up to her entrance.

“Are you ready? If at any point you want me to stop…”

“Ron, please just shut up and fuck me,” Y/n snapped, already too wound up and desperate to keep talking. Ron nodded, pressing his lips securely to hers as he entered. With every inch that pushed inside of her Y/n felt fuller than she ever had before and the ecstasy building within her was stronger than ever.

Once he was inside all the way, Ron allowed her a moment to adjust before pulling out and slamming back into her. His thrusts were relentless and precise. Hitting the exact spot with every thrust and sending Y/n into a frenzy of incoherent phrases as she clawed at his back like a mad woman. Despite the pace he was going, Ron made her feel loved with every thrust, pressing delicate kisses to her ear lobe, whispering to her, a number of ‘I love you’s’ were exchanged too.

“Ron, please… I’m so close,” she cried out, causing Ron to draw in a deep breath. He reached his hand down between their bodies, circling her clit with his thumb once more until she came undone with a loud cry of his name. He grabbed her face, kissing her passionately and silencing the moans as he came undone inside of her.

The pair lay like this for a few moments, sweat trickling down Ron’s spine and his damp hair smeared against his forehead.

“Y/n, Sweetheart, are you alright?” He looked down at her, his eyes full of love and concern.

“I’m perfect,” she replied, reaching up to brush away the stray hairs from his eyes, “Everything is perfect.”

The moment was disturbed by a harsh crashing noise followed by the bedroom door flying open and a very drunk Nixon stumbling into the room.

“SPEIRS?” He shouted, seemingly shocked that Ron was in the room he thought belonged to him.

“SERGEANT Y/L/N?” Nixon started blankly for a few moments before sticking his head out the door.

“HARRY YOU OWE ME 20 BUCKS. I TOLD YOU THEY WERE FUCKING!”

“NIXON!” Ron snapped, glaring harshly at him as he rolled out of Y/n who let out a small moan. “GET THE FUCK OUT!”

Nixon looked at them again before waving his hand and mumbling as he retreated out of the room. The couple fell back onto the bed laughing. Ron pulled off the condom, disposing of it into the bedside bin and moving to get out of bed when Y/n stopped him.

“Wait. Let’s cuddle for a while.” Ron nodded, sighing as he pulled Y/n flush to his chest. Y/n glanced up at him, her face shining pale in the moonlight.

“Ron, next time we have sex, can you please make sure you lock the door.” Ron nodded, sighing as he pulled Y/n flush to his chest.

“Of course my Darling. Anything for you.”

Tags @iceman-kazansky @yeahcurrahhe-e @msmercury84 @blvestxr @dustyjumpwjngs @theflyingfin @jump-wings @kafka-ohdear @kmc1989 @mads-weasley @docroesmorphine @liptonsbabe @ronald-speirs @sweetxvanixlla @hesbuckcompton-baby @ronsparky @allthingsimagines @whollyjoly @bucky32557038ww2 @panzershrike-pretz @malarkgirlypop @hanniewinnix @inglourious-imagines @l13bg0tt

[straykids-97]

Scarlet

“When I am dead, I hope it may be said; his sins were scarlet but his books were read.” 

Yunho is a patient man, but sometimes you wear his patience thin…

Warnings: Dom!Yunho(like actually heh), use of toy(riding crop), unprotected sex, pet names/nicknames, dom/sub dynamics, smut, also soft Yunho at the end Word Count: 3.1k

You met Yunho through mutual friends. At first, you were shy, Yunho was way out of your league. All the girls wanted him, but for some reason, he never brought anyone home. He hardly afforded them much attention either. He was the perfect gentleman, always so nice. 

Until he met you.

He hardly spoke around you, at first you thought he didn't like you. Then gradually, he began to open up. He was adorable, and he was so blushy when the two of you talked for longer than 10 minutes. It made you melt, it was clear that the two of you were attracted to one another. But you were too shy to say something to him, not that you needed to. Yunho knew. He always knew.

When Yunho finally asked you out, no one was shocked. You two were perfect for each other. But there was something different about Yunho, you noticed. He didn't seem to eat or sleep, and after a few months, you finally confronted him. The answer you got wasn't what you expected. In fact, you thought he was joking. But, he wasn't. 

But it made sense. Why was he so alluring. Why everyone was so drawn to him? Why he was so charismatic? It was because Yunho was a vampire. 

That was his deepest, darkest secret, well one of them. Perhaps his second one was that he desired control over you. He wanted complete and total submission from you, in every way possible. You knew he was ‘kinky’ but the night he dangled those keys in front of your face changed your future. You were apprehensive at first, it was a lot to take in. After all, he had quite the collection of things. 

He quietly watched you from afar, observing, waiting for the moment you had a question. Yunho immediately gave you a synopsis of what you picked up, no matter what it was. Ranging from its uses of it, to where it originated from. Even before you opened your mouth, Yunho was immediately answering the question you had. He wanted to share this part of his world with you. Even if that meant waiting for you to catch up to speed. And he had all the time to wait for you. You both had a discussion about what you wanted and didn’t want, and Yunho was wholly understanding that this was all new to you. After all, he didn’t want to push you away. Yunho very rarely chose a sub, let alone a sub who knew his secret. 

After a while, he learned that maybe if you had the opportunity to explore the room alone, you’d be more open and honest. Figuring that you may be more comfortable if you had the chance to explore without him around. So Yunho allowed you the keys and told you to feel free to go through everything and anything while he was gone. “Call or text me if you have any more questions.” He gave you a soft smile and left you to your own devices. 

You stood in front of the dark door, fidgeting with the keys for a few moments. You bite your lip apprehensively, take a deep breath and finally unlock the door. You were greeted with the smell of wood cleaner and Yunho. His scent was all over this room; he did admit he spent a lot of time in there. You walk toward the ‘whipping wall’, as you called it. Yunho found it adorable that you were naming the things in his playroom. But he couldn’t deny the fitting name. The wall was covered by things that all hung on hooks; from canes to tickling devices, Yunho really had one of everything. You were intimidated by the more brutal-looking devices and opted to look more closely at the less lethal-looking ones. 

You were most fascinated with the whips and flogs, heat filling your cheeks and neck as you run your fingers over the riding crop. Maybe Yunho would use it on you one day. The thought made your legs clench. You clear your throat, trying to rid yourself of the heat you felt suddenly. You keep moving through the room for a while and decide that you were done exploring. You leave the room and make sure to lock it. Carefully put the keys back where they belong and go to the door, texting Yunho that you were going home for the evening. He texted back immediately and told you to travel safely. He followed it with a, ‘I’ll call you as soon as I’m through with this business.’ 

You catch a taxicab and ask to stop by the store before heading home. You remembered that there were something’s you needed to grab before getting home, and maybe grab something for dinner while you shop. You were dropped off at a store a few blocks away from where you lived; a good thing if you couldn’t find a taxi later. But you dreaded if you didn’t. 

After leisurely browsing the aisles for the list of items you needed, your phone buzzes. Yunho texted you; any kinks I should know about Princess? 

You gasp to yourself, sensing your legs clench. It surprised you that even now his dominant side was prevalent. Yunho explained that it was all involuntary because of what he was and that he was just used to making women feel this way. Even if it was on accident. Nonetheless, his question caught you off guard and you think that replying to his text while in public wasn’t appropriate so you leave it alone for now. You carry on throughout the store, calming yourself and preparing for that call Yunho promised you later. Lord knows you needed it. Yunho was very convincing sometimes, and who knows what he had planned for later… You gather yourself and finally check out. Surely enough after some trying, you managed to find another taxi to make it home before it got too late. 

Sighing as you walk down the hall to your apartment door, you pull your keys out and let yourself in, kicking the door closed with your heel. You release yet another sigh as you kick your shoes off, struggling with your bags as you managed to semi-safely get out of your shoes. You tread into your kitchen to put your food away, not noticing the figure sitting in your lounge chair until you hear the lamp click on. 

You freeze; heart skittering to a stop. You knew that sound very well, the lamp that was beside your chair… The one you spent hours sitting by the window with a book, cuddled up as Yunho watched from the safety of the darker side of the apartment. That lamp.

Slowly turning to see who let themselves into your apartment, you only see a figure. Their face darkened, the light of the lamp positioned just right to reveal only a silhouette. They’re wearing a black dress shirt, unbuttoned enough to reveal a broad chest. Those familiar collarbones were on display for you and only you. Their lithe legs were covered by tailored slacks that squeezed their thighs deliciously. And spread just enough to make your pulse race. His feet were bare, something that he had revealed many weeks ago that he only does when he’s in his ‘space’. Yunho explained that it gave him a better grip on the floor when he was in his playroom because the floor was wooden. But the thing that held your interest was a thin, hard riding crop that slowly and rhythmically tapped his thigh. His opposing hand held his head, his scarlet eyes watching you intensely. 

For a moment, neither of you says a word as you scrutinize each other. Yunho’s beautiful eyes scanned your flushed features for a while until they landed back on your face. He splits the silence with a deep drag, “Didn’t reply.” His hoarse voice rumbled, making you jump slightly. It wasn’t loud, or even stern. His words almost sounded like a cat purring, and it sent shivers down your spine. “I-I was at the store.” Your voice broke at the end, making Yunho chuckle. “Why don’t you say it now, hmm?” He smacked his thigh once; the loud sound made you jump again. He held the riding crop up to his nose, moving it down the whip part of the crop until it landed on the clap, “Or maybe this speaks enough for you…” He runs his nose back along the riding crop, inhaling where your fingers danced earlier. “You dawdled on this one longest…” He drew away, his eyes regarding you carefully. “Come here.” 

You waver for a moment too long and he slowly rises to his feet. “We’re in the space…” he trails off, referring to you two, “where you don’t get to disobey me.” His voice grows deeper as he hisses the end, his teeth baring at you. Your legs become goo instantly as you sink to your knees. Your eyes fall to the ground, remembering everything Yunho expected from you when you two played. You watch his feet appear in your vision and he stops in front of you. “Hairtie?” He requests. You hold your wrist out for him to pull the elastic off of your appendage. He moves behind you and pulls your hair backward, running his hands through it before quickly and expertly braiding it. Yunho hums a song to himself that vaguely sounds like Often, by the Weekend. 

He takes a deep breath and wraps the long braid around his hand and yanks your head backward to look into his scarlet eyes. You mewl, heat spreading through your belly. “Crawl to the chair.” His voice was sharp, piercing your core and making your legs shake. Somehow he always makes it sound so alluring as if he was a walking sex God. The second he drops your braid you instantly do as you were told, pausing only when you were a few feet away from the edge of your sitting chair. You sink back onto your calves and wait for your next demand. 

Your heart was sprinting; Yunho could hear it. It made him want to pounce on you, devour you right then and there but he had to take his time. You were new to all of this. Quite frankly, he didn’t care for playing. He just wanted to toss you onto your couch and rip all your clothes off and- 

“Take your clothes off.” Yunho ordered. You sit there, unsure if you could stand yet. “May I stand, sir?” Your voice was soft and fragile, making Yunho groan softly. “Yes. Once you are done, back to your knees babydoll.” He approved of your memory; only calling him by his preferred play names, ‘Sir’ and ‘Daddy’. Yunho moved around you to sit in the chair, spreading his legs so that you were now in between them. His scarlet eyes watch your every movement, even the rise and fall of your chest. He most enjoyed the quickening of your pulse as you shifted, realizing what you were about to do for him. He was struggling to maintain his composure... 

You shudder knowing that he was observing you strip, making you feel a little self-conscious. You had never done this before, stripping for someone that is. Or really anything that Yunho had planned for you, whatever it was. But you hoped he used that crop on you. Your thoughts cause you to bite your lip, and Yunho grins like a cat, “Penny for your thoughts, baby?” You shake your head, too embarrassed to say what you were thinking. Yunho chuckles, “A loss, for certain.” He drops it and continues to eye you as your fingers make quick work of your clothes. After a few moments, just as you were about to take your panties and bra off, Yunho holds his hand up, causing you to glance at him. “Leave those…” He trails off, his eyes shamelessly racking up your body until they landed on your face. Your cheeks heat up as he sucks his bottom lip between his teeth, surely puncturing them with his sharp incisors. “Come here.” He taps between his legs with the crop, and your feet carry you to stand closer to him. “Bend over my lap.” You gasp at his demand but still obey. It was like your body was not your own, but an appendage of Yunho’s. Yunho really was struggling now. You were being so good to him. He wanted to give you the whole fucking world, even if he had to make it burn just for you. 

You lean over his lap, breasts pushing up as you lean over the arm. Your ass was stuck up in the air and Yunho took full advantage of the opportunity, grabbing a handful. “If you ever feel ashamed of your body, I’ll spank it out of you. Your a damn Goddess, y/n.” He purrs. After a few seconds, a harsh slap rang out into your tranquil apartment. “Yunho!” You choke, head whipping to peer at him. A cunning, seductive grin spreads across his features as he raises his hand to deliver yet another strike, his eyes holding yours as his palm connects with the other cheek. You yelp, your mouth dropping open as your skin warms up, the interaction between the two of you making you feel fuzzy as if your body was responding to his. Yunho quirks an eyebrow as he rests the crop on your backside, “Ordinarily,” he cocks his head as his free hand holds your chin, “I would make you look away. But,” he runs the crop between your asscheeks to your soaked core, making you whine, “I want you to look at me.” He delivers a soft quick pat to your clothed clit, making you pant. 

You try to close your legs but Yunho’s foot prevented you from doing that. You didn’t even notice that his leg was wrapped around yours until then. He had you pinned to his lap, and the thought of him not letting you go made your pulse race. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, “The fragrance that you emit when you get horny makes me want to fucking eat you alive, y/n.” he reopened his eyes to reveal his eyes burning a brighter scarlet. “Yunho-” you begin to say but he stops you. “Sir.” He corrects, using the crop to spank you. The sting was sharper but didn’t last as long as when he used his hand. Your legs begin to shake as he spanks you three more times. “Do you like this, Princess?” You nod frantically, panting as your core clenches around nothing. No one had ever made you feel this way. You whimper when you realize that he had stopped. You begin to think you’ve done something wrong, but what you didn’t know was that you had made him snap. 

He had you on your back, pinned to your carpeted floor in seconds. He didn’t speak as he burst the buttons of his dress shirt, ripping at the seams to get it off of him. Yunho’s mouth latched to yours, his right hand holding your jaw as his other peeled his pants off. Your mind was churning, jumbled with thoughts of what he was about to do to you. Yunho and you had only had sex twice but he seemed to be holding back, but not this time. He was going to give you what you deserved and deal with the consequences later. Yunho wanted to use you. Wanted to eradicate any hope of anyone that may come after him, but the thought of anyone else with you made him growl, there would be no one else. He would ruin you so completely that there could be no one after him, ever. And now that he knew you were just like him, he knew he was fucked in more ways than one. 

There was another shredding sound and your panties joined his ruined shirt a few feet away. He pulled your bra down enough to expose your breasts, making him hiss. His mouth latched around your nipple making you cry out, his teeth sinking into your flesh. But his tongue was quick to lap up the blood that spilled out, filling you with even more passion. You groaned, running your hand through his hair as he thrust into you, both of you groaning with bliss; he filled you so completely that it was as if he was made just for you, and you for him. He groaned as he began to fuck you into the floor, the sound of flesh meeting flesh was pornographic. You prayed that your neighbors couldn’t hear, not that you cared at the moment. 

Yunho’s scarlet eyes met yours, agitating with hunger and desire, and he buried his face in your neck. “I could fucking mark you right now.” he moaned, “no one will want you then. You’ll be all mine. No one elses.” You wail at his words, nails digging into his back as he fucked you harder. “Mine. Mine.” he growls, baring his teeth at you, gripping your jaw. “Yours.” You blubber. Yunho’s mouth falls open and a moan emits from the back of his throat. “Say it again.” he demands, thrusts getting shallow. Your mouth falls open, feeling your orgasm getting close. “Yu.” you plead, holding his shoulders as he goes faster. “Fuck, please say it again.” Dom Yunho was gone. He didn’t care anymore. He just wanted you to say that you were his again. 

“Yu, I’m- I’m all yours!” Your eyes roll into the back of your head as he grinds against you, the tip of his dick rubbing the gooey spot inside of you. “Yu!” You cry out as your shatter. You tuck your head into his neck, holding him closer as you cry into his throat. He holds you as his hips stutter and he stops, letting out a throaty groan. For a moment you stay like that, unmoving. Well, apart from the shaking of your body as you came down from your high that was, you didn’t move.

Yunho pulls away and looks at your tear-stained cheeks. His thumb catches a stray one as it rolls down your face, “Are you ok?” He questions. You nod feebly as he gazes down at you with something akin to adoration maybe even love. Yunho offers you a soft smile as he pulls away, helping you to your feet. You were feeling tired as he holds you steady, “Do you want to lie down or take a bath?” He sweeps you off your feet and awaits for you to reply. “Bath.” You reply, curling into his chest finding solace in his warm body. Yunho carries you down your hallway to your bathroom, humming something that you didn’t recognize as he enters the bathroom. 

Yunho finally found what he had been looking for for nearly 300 years; someone to spend his forever with.

Taglist: @anyamaris @vibessonvibes @s3onghwaswifey @whatudowhennooneseesyou

Working on cherry as we speak! As I work most weekends, it probably won't be up until Monday :( anyway, enjoy this utter filth for now you animals &lt;3 plz lmk if you want to be tagged!

©️straykids-97

[rokhal]

ANGR Magical Girl AU: Wrong Universe

The Robbie I usually write wakes up in the Ghost Rider Magical Girl AU.

I figured that in Magical Girl AU, Robbie is likely to go to Lisa to ask for help walking in heels (assuming Johnny's tips are less than useful) and Lisa gets so excited at the prospect of Robbie participating in drag and he denies that's what he's doing but refuses to explain so in her desire to be supportive she ends up stalking him so she can cheer for him at his show and ends up finding out that he's a magical girl which somehow makes a lot more sense. She becomes a valuable member of the team because she has social skills. Of a sort.

If anything here contradicts any other ideas anyone else has in the works, MULTIVERSE BAYBEE it's noncanon :) The Sharpie thing is purely a case of Great Minds Think Alike though. I saw that in Moose's fic and was like, twins!

This is way too long 😭

As Robbie scrubbed the brake cleaner off his hands, the axle grease wiped away and so did the black Sharpie he’d hastily scribbled onto his fingernails that morning. His bright pink fingernails. If it was nail polish, the brake cleaner should be taking that off, too; he scrubbed hopefully at his thumbnail but this was as useless as the acetone he’d tried before resorting to Sharpie.

He’d woken up feeling more normal than he had in a long time. The pleasant sensation of a full night’s rest had faded as he’d gotten dressed and made Gabe breakfast. His bad eye was mysteriously back to normal and the scar on his forehead was completely gone, but his goatee was shaved off, he had some kind of jewel embedded in his chest, his fingernails were pink, and. And Gabe wasn’t his Gabe. It was Gabe’s face, and Gabe’s smile, but instead of cartoon and comic book heroes filling his shelves and plastered all over his door, it was sparkly anime girls and Japanese motorcycle riders; he was happier, stronger legs and steadier hands, and he didn’t second-guess Robbie’s every expression and movement or double-check his identity after every time Robbie left his sight. Robbie spent half an hour tossing the bathroom looking for his epilepsy meds before he checked the app on his phone where he tracked expenses and found that this Gabe had been off them for an entire year.

The apartment was mostly the same; same view across Hillrock Lane out the apartment window, same pile of automotive magazines on the coffee table—now with manga mixed in—same thrifted art on the walls. Robbie had wondered if he was still asleep, and dreaming, or better, if the last two years had been a long and vivid nightmare, until he noticed the time and realized that he’d missed Gabe’s bus and was about to be late to work. He’d stuffed a stale tortilla in his mouth and gnawed on it while grabbing a pair of coveralls and helping Gabe into the Charger to get to school. He’d dropped Gabe off and made it all the way to Canelo’s before he realized that he hadn’t heard from Eli all morning.

He stood now under a half-disassembled Chevy Tahoe, scrubbing desperately at his glossy pink fingernails as though with enough solvent and friction he could wipe himself from this world and return to his own body, his own curse, his own Hillrock Heights, his own brother. He simply had no better ideas.

“Reyes!” Canelo barked from across the shop, and he jumped, dropped the can of brake cleaner. “Quit daydreaming!”

Eli would have had a snide comment about how Canelo ought to mind his own fucking business or risk getting disemboweled. Robbie checked the time and added up the hours he was due by the end of the day, for future reference in case Canelo rounded his pay down when it was due next week. If he was still here next week. He couldn’t be stuck here until next week but he didn’t know to do anything but work. Did his other self know anybody here who dealt with interdimensional travel and too-pleasant dreams? He wasn’t a Ghost Rider here, Johnny Blaze wouldn’t have any reason to have met him…

...But he was a something.

What the hell was he now?

He was on the clock, that’s what. He had a job he knew how to do, to provide for a brother he loved, even though neither of them were his, and he would reinstall this truck’s axles and wheel bearings and not get his alternate self fired and then he would, somehow, figure out how to get home. (Dread filled him.) (He hadn’t fantasized about murdering anyone all morning.) (The world felt brighter, his senses more vivid, his flesh and skin snug over his bones, and he could believe for the first time in a long time that he might be safe for others to be around.)

“You alright, son?” Canelo asked from two feet behind him, and Robbie hit his head on the Tahoe’s subframe. It didn’t hurt as much as it probably should have. Canelo was just standing there, frowning a little. “Take five, I’ll get you some ice.”

What the hell, Robbie thought, and no one answered.

Canelo did, indeed, return from the break room with an ice pack. No one else at the shop seemed to think this was unusual. Marty winced at Robbie and patted his own head, mouthing, You okay? and even Ramon grunted sympathetically at him. Robbie retreated to the bathroom where he pressed the ice pack to the starting bruise and stared himself down in the mirror. Without his beard, he looked young and delicate—that’s why he’d grown it. But it wasn’t just the beard; his eyes were brighter, his skin was smoother, the scar through his eyebrow had faded—all the scars on his hands were gone, too, the bashed knuckles and burns and scrapes that were inevitable if you worked with cars all day. He looked tender and undamaged. He looked like someone worth protecting.

He had a terrible thought and whispered, “Talk to me. I’m not doing this on purpose but if I know you’re in here I think I can give you your body back.” He stared uncomfortably into his own eyes, but the back of his mind was silent.

He got out his phone—same PIN as usual—and checked his contacts list. Johnny Blaze was on there, but Johnny Blaze had almost killed him and Eli the first time they’d met; how would Johnny react to some strange, murderous version of Robbie wearing the skin of the Robbie he knew? He couldn’t beat Johnny in a fight in the real world. He didn’t know how to explain himself. There was nothing to do but finish the Tahoe.

The day rolled on, he returned the Tahoe to drivable condition and did a couple tune-ups and oil changes, and he snagged a moment to Sharpie his nails black again. He wasn’t afraid of nail polish—he had black nail polish at home somewhere, eyeliner too—but pink was not his style and was liable to attract the wrong kind of attention, especially with how...how he looked, in this world. (What was he? Was he something that could fight, defend itself? There was no fire waiting under his skin to consume his human weakness.)

He was puzzling over a set of trouble codes from a fifteen-year-old Nissan Maxima when his phone buzzed. If this version of himself worked on the same logic, he’d set it up to mute unknown numbers but programmed in all Gabe’s teachers and therapists. He dug into his pocket under his coveralls and checked it. It was Lisa, saved in his contacts list with a photo he didn’t remember taking: familiar bright hair and smile, raising two fingers in a V in front of one eye while her other hand displayed a river rock with a large hole worn through the center, dangling from a pink ribbon.

This was not a conversation he was ready to have. He ended the call. A minute later, she called again. Robbie walked to the time clock and punched out as he answered. “Uh, what’s up.”

Screeching and howling and buzzing in the background. “Omigod where are you?” Lisa demanded. She sounded out of breath.

“Work,” Robbie said, baffled. “What’s going on, are you okay?”

“What do you mean what’s—” Banging, panting. “Where’s Eli?”

A chill unfurled under his skin, his hand grew numb as he gripped his phone case. “What are you talking about.”

“Did you lock him in the freezer again?” Lisa demanded. What. “I know he’s annoying—”

“That’s one word for it,” Robbie muttered, swallowing bile.

“—but he’s an essential member of the team!”

“What team?”

Lisa paused. “The, the team,” she said hesitantly. “The Guardians of Hillrock Heights. Robbie, you. You know what you do helps people, right?”

He was disappointing her somehow—no, worse, letting her down. “Yeah, of course, I, uh.” Eli existed here, but this Lisa knew about him; obviously this version of Robbie had trusted her more. Or she’d just stalked him and figured it out. “What do you need me to do?”

“Get to the Cecil Hotel,” Lisa panted. “Bring Eli. And stay and talk to me after you transform back.”

Transform. Robbie rubbed the hard pink jewel embedded in his sternum. “Right. Okay.”

He left the time clock and approached Canelo’s office, racking his brain for some excuse—a lie about Gabe? A medical appointment? When he opened the door, Canelo met his eyes and sighed. “Again? Well, go on.” Robbie stared at him. He wasn’t even scowling. “What do you want, a hug? Go do your thing.”

He ran out of the shop and threw himself into the Charger. As he sped out of the parking lot, he almost clipped off one of its mirrors against the security gate. He grabbed his phone and started to search for the Cecil Hotel while making a left turn onto Atlantic Boulevard and almost crashed head-on into an F-250; he couldn’t drive and use his phone at the same time anymore. The phone dropped to the floorboards and he pulled hastily to the side of the road, cursing.

His connection to the Charger was different here, too. Still there, but weaker. Possibly just in his head. He tried to stretch out into it anyway, feeling its vibrations, listening to the loping chug of its idle and the continuous hiss of its supercharger, but his consciousness stayed firmly in his human body.

He heard something clank in the trunk.

Atlantic Boulevard was not a good place for a street fight. Robbie found his phone, pulled up a route to the Cecil, took a detour in an alley behind a warehouse. He hit the gas and slammed the brakes a couple times before shutting down the car and sprinting around the back to pop the trunk, confront this alternate version of his uncle, slam the trunk on his neck while he was still dazed, kill him like this alternate Robbie wasn’t yet sullied enough to do.

There was no washed-up mob henchman wriggling in the Charger’s trunk. Robbie found a couple bags of school supplies, a tool box, and a big first-aid kit, nothing sinister, and then in the shadows, oddly, something pink and shiny—one of this Gabe’s collectibles? A Beanie Baby?

“FUCK,” the pink thing bellowed, and then it unspooled and slipped up over the edge of the trunk, hit the ground with a slap, and slithered away, S-curves glittering in the sun as it struggled against the smooth pavement. Robbie gaped, then chased after it. Him. Eli was making slow progress and Robbie caught up quickly, but he turned on a dime; Robbie headed him off away from a nearby dumpster and danced around him for almost a minute before he had the idea to shrug off his jacket and throw it on Eli’s head. Eli backed out from under it but by this time Robbie had him by the neck. “Look. Revenge is, you don’t got the mindset for it? There’s healing in forgiveness. It makes you more stable. Less prone to violent, emotional outbursts. Kid. Kid! We had our differences, but it was the situation, the close quarters, you know? You’d do the same in my position, I just wanted to live, I had unfinished business! And now, heh, you got a body, I got a body, we can go our separate ways. Kid? Hey?”

Eli was a shimmery pink snake about half-again as long as Robbie’s arm. He had round shining eyes in a hundred shades of rose, and the large scale between them was shaped like a heart. His forked tongue sparkled as it scented the air. His voice was exactly the same.

“You, uh. Look different.”

Robbie had a sinking feeling that stomping the snake’s head under his boot wouldn’t be doing this world’s Robbie any favors. He dangled Eli in one fist at arm’s length—an essential member of the team. “You don’t know what’s going on, either.”

“Believe it or not, I’m not the cause of everything that goes wrong in your life.”

“Lisa wants us at the Cecil Hotel,” Robbie said, returning to the Charger and dumping Eli on the passenger seat. “She requested you by name. We’re gonna take care of whatever’s going on and figure it out from there.”

“The Cecil, huh? Good times.”

“Don’t tell me you killed people there.”

“I won’t.” Eli awkwardly pressed his long narrow body against the door, slowly lifting his head toward the window. Robbie took a hard left and Eli slipped sideways between the seat and the side pillar. “Fuck.”

“Apparently you’re important for some reason.”

“Can you not act like my existence is an imposition for two seconds.”

Robbie slammed his fist into the steering wheel. “You exist because you committed human sacrifice.” Eli slithered out of view behind the passenger seat. Robbie took a breath. “You’re a talking pink snake here. You probably have magic powers.”

“Pink?”

“You color-blind, too?”

Eli was silent for the rest of the drive. Robbie hoped he was figuring out what magic powers he had, otherwise they’d just have to wing it.

Hotel Cecil was a trio of brick buildings spanning half a city block and joined by skywalks. The complex had probably been impressive before the invention of reinforced concrete. No longer a failing hotel for people falling down the ladder of society, it was being converted to affordable housing for people crawling back up. Robbie parked across the street and squinted up at it. He was pretty sure the walls weren’t supposed to be covered in gray goo, but there was a ghost tour or something right there on the sidewalk and none of the tourists were taking pictures. Maybe it was a maintenance thing? An art installation?

“Huh,” Eli said, finally squirming his way up onto the dashboard to take a look.

Robbie texted Lisa: Here.

Her reply was immediate. Fourth floor front building room 73

No emojis. That couldn’t be good. “Any ideas on how to get inside?” Robbie asked.

“Put on your spare coveralls and act pissy.”

Robbie could have thought of that himself, but he had no better ideas. He stomped through the graffitoed doors of the unassuming entryway and through the unexpectedly grand marble halls of the lobby floor, scowling like he’d been called in on his day off to fix a plumbing catastrophe that could have been prevented by routine maintenance the previous week, and glancing up now and again at the pulsing tangle of veins the color of neglected differential fluid that wormed between the ceiling lights and which no one else seemed to notice. Eli wrapped himself around Robbie’s neck like a scarf; uncomfortably close, but better, at least logically, than having him ride along in his thoughts like usual.

“Art nouveau,” Eli commented, peering up an angular gold-and-green wall sconce beside a statue in an alcove whose opening was carved to look like palm leaves and Egyptian columns. “Classy place full of staff who don’t ask stupid questions.”

“Shut up,” Robbie hissed. They reached the pair of elevators that served this part of the complex: just two, and one was out of order. A big brass dial on the top indicated that the elevator was on the eighth floor, and going up. Robbie stabbed the button irritably, then gave up and ran for the stairs.

On the fourth floor, the gray veins were so thick that the ceiling looked a foot lower than it should have been, and the light sconces were mostly covered. Somehow, the light escaped anyway, leaving the carpet brightly lit and the air at shoulder-height and above dim like twilight. Robbie watched a tall man in a business suit strolling down the hall, his entire head vanishing into the pulsing fleshy mass. “Keep your head down, there’s gray magical crap on the ceiling,” Eli informed him.

Robbie felt a moment of glee that Eli couldn’t just look out through his eyes anymore. “I noticed.”

“Try touching it. Left hand.”

Robbie poked one of the ceiling tentacles with his left pinkie finger as he advanced down the hall toward room 73, and cringed as the rock in his chest seemed to shudder in protest. The gray flesh was clammy and yielding, leaving his finger numb as he pulled away. Even if it was invisible, how did anyone walk around with their whole head swimming in this stuff without noticing? What was it doing to the people it enveloped?

He passed room fifty, and noticed that the higher the numbers progressed, the thicker the veins overhead pulsed and the lower they sagged, growing to fill more of the narrow space even as he watched. He crouched low and broke into a run. Room 73 was nearly overtaken; limbs as thick as ventilation ducts sprouted through the walls, heaving and pulsing and moaning, ozone and rot thick in the air. He had to kneel beside the door as he knocked. “Lisa! It’s Robbie. I’m outside.”

“Get in here!” Lisa yelled from within.

“They ain’t changed this lock since ‘98. You can shim it with a credit card.”

Robbie bypassed the latch and shoved the door inward against the mass of shifting tendrils packed against the ceiling. There was barely room to crouch inside; the rust-red carpet shone in the light of fixtures completely swallowed by the strange rot overtaking the hotel. He ducked as a gray coil twisted past his face.“Can you get to the door?”

“Kinda busy!” Lisa grunted. Someone else screamed, inhumanly long and somehow muted, the volume too soft for the cracks of agony in the voice. Robbie leaned down and spotted what looked like a clear space around the hotel bed. He army-crawled toward it. There was something wet and sticky on the floor—not blood, it smelled like solvent. White spray-paint, circling the bed. He dragged himself over the painted lines and got his first look at what Lisa was busy with.

There was a body on top of the blankets, a middle-aged white woman with hollow cheeks and loose skin rising in narrow folds where gray tendrils sank into her from above. Lisa had a broken bottle in one hand and was sawing at the thickest of the tendrils just above where it sank between the motionless woman’s eyes. With another, she held a flat rock with a hole in the center, scowling through it like a lens. From the nest of gray veins on the ceiling, a human figure sagged down, joined to the woman joint by joint with those tendrils. Its mouth was a formless hole, its eyes cold wet pits, its flesh the same sludgy substance as the rest of the hotel’s infestation. Robbie swallowed. “Is she alive?”

“For now,” Lisa said, scraping furiously at the tendril. Robbie noticed with horror that two other tendrils had descended from the ceiling to sink into Lisa’s shoulders; he lunged forward and ripped them away. The rock in his chest shuddered as his hand went numb. “Was it on me?” She turned around and looked at him for the first time. “Omigod, why aren’t you changed?”

Robbie took a deep breath and stared up at the vacant eyes of the abomination on the ceiling. He pulled out the blade on his multitool and joined in cutting the woman free; the gray stuff yielded like flesh to expose a tough stringy black core. “We can wrap her in the blanket and drag her out.” The human shape began to drag one of its hands down toward them, struggling against an unseen force.

Lisa grabbed his wrist. “Robbie, she needs an exorcism. You have to change.” He stared at the river rock that dangled from a long pink ribbon on her neck as she tried to meet his eyes. “She’s got kids who miss her, she’s turning her life around, you gotta help! Come on!”

“I don’t remember what you’re talking about,” Robbie blurted.

“Omigod are you cursed or something?”

The horror on the ceiling reached closer, closer, as black claws unsheathed from half-molded fingers. Then it drew back and tension shuddered through its body; the woman on the bed shuddered in synchrony. Its eyes fixed on the back of Lisa’s neck. It lunged, but Robbie was faster, slicing its wet palm with his knife as he pushed Lisa aside. As it swiped back to retaliate, he instinctively leaned into its path—baiting it with the Rider’s leather skin filled with the Charger’s fire ready to erupt the moment those claws released it to burn his enemy—and screamed as the talons sank into his human shoulder. He could barely feel the wounds through the hollow ache the creature’s touch carried, but the worst pain was the furious hum from the stone in his sternum, rocking and jerking like an engine that had snapped its mounts; he thought his chest would crack open from the force. His hand went limp and the knife dropped and stabbed blade-first into the bed. He punched ineffectually with his good hand as the creature lifted him. New tendrils sprouted from its body, seeking to plug into his own. He was as frightened and angry and frustrated as he’d ever been in his life, and though he was suppressing none of it since this Lisa was already enmeshed in his supernatural bullshit, the transformation wasn’t happening.

Eli slithered down his coveralls and escaped out his pant leg as he struggled. Lisa stared in horror through her river rock. “Eli! Help him!”

“Eh, sure,” Eli said, watching Robbie from the bedcovers while Robbie’s leg went cold and dead. “Rake its eyes! Behind your left shoulder!” Robbie flailed blindly with his working arm, hoping Eli hadn’t gotten his left and right confused.

Lisa stood up and grabbed Robbie by the waist, trying to pull him down. Blood from his shoulder soaked her hair. “What’s wrong with you two? Say the words!”

“What words?”

Lisa groped his chest until her palm pressed against his pink troll-doll gem. “Oh, thank God. Say it: Tie cloth nee, ya toys or chalk!”

“What?!”

“Say it! Tie cloth—”

“Ty glavny, ya tvoy suchok,” Eli interrupted. “Five words, you can do it.”

“Die glovny, a twoy sujock,” Robbie gritted out just before the ceiling monster’s limbs closed around his throat. For an instant, all he knew was aching cold and darkness. Then the stone in his chest sparked and a shockwave erupted through his body, driving away the clammy gray tentacles in a blast of warm pink light. It doesn’t hurt, he thought, shocked. Changing into the Rider in his own world was a cathartic blast of agony as his body cremated itself from within, but this, this was nice. He was weightless in a void of dancing blue-green lights. The pain of talons crushing his shoulder was gone, and so were the low-grade headache he always got about halfway through the work day and the tension in his spine and the knot on his head from banging it into the Tahoe that morning; he tingled all over with the contentment of an hour-long hot shower where he wouldn’t have to pay the heating bill. He stretched out, luxuriating in the feeling, and realized with horror that his body wasn’t there.

I’m hallucinating, he told himself. It was hard to think through the nice bubbly feeling, but he remembered that Lisa was right there trying to stop him from getting eaten, and there was a woman on the bed below who was dying, and he couldn’t see or feel anything but the bright pink gem illuminating the hollow space where his body was supposed to be. He thrashed, but it was like trying to fight the wind with a puff of smoke. He was nothing but thought, and he couldn’t even panic properly.

Solidity returned in jolts and starts: cool fabric twisting around his body and snugging him into shape. Protective gloves, leather boots long enough to save his knees from road rash, body armor, something to guard his forehead. The familiar handles of a pair of body hammers filled his palms, and the world snapped back into place. No time at all seemed to have passed; he was still suspended above the bed by the ceiling monster.

He was not the Rider, but he knew what the Rider would do. He jammed one hand into the mouth of the humanoid sludge stalactite and stabbed the spike of a body hammer through its skull. It moaned, and he stabbed again, flipped himself around, gripped its leg between his knees to anchor himself, and struck for the heart, the throat, all the vital targets that he’d trained himself to avoid whenever he gave in to the urge to beat down local thugs in Hillrock Heights. Black blood spattered into his eyes and trickled up his nose, reeking of mold. Its touch no longer chilled him; his touch seemed to burn it. He beat the creature until it melted away and retreated back into the ceiling, all the veins and coils and tree-root limbs draining away after it. Robbie landed hard on the edge of the bed, bounced, and rolled to his feet. His feet—

“Point your toes!” Lisa yelled, too late. He tripped over his own ankles and crashed face-first into the bedside table.

Whenever the Rider ate shit like this, he’d sink through his own shadow and reappear in the car like he’d meant to do it—not that he was embarrassed, just that he preferred not to take the time to pick himself up. Robbie pried himself up off the floor when he realized that his powers in this world did not include the ability to dissolve into the room’s nicotine-stained carpet. He was wet, disappointingly fleshy, and entirely alone in his head. His protective gloves were doing a poor job, already soaked through with disgustingly organic black slime, and his feet—

He looked down at himself for the first time. He wasn’t wearing protective gloves or work boots or body armor. He had the kind of delicate white cotton gloves that women wore with ballgowns in old movies, and thigh-high go-go boots over tights, and what looked like a women’s ice-dancing costume. The ankles of the high-heeled boots were decorated with pink rhinestones, and so were his white-painted hammers. The worst part was that under the pink satin bow where the gem from his chest had migrated, the black leotard bore the same staple-shaped white stripe as his favorite jacket. This was his ice-dancing costume.

He tried to get his feet under him to stand, but the heels were in the way. Whatever force had undressed him seemed to have a grudge against the stock geometry of the human foot; the boots were so stiff he could barely bend his ankles. When he yanked at them, they didn’t budge. He couldn’t find any fasteners. He was about to grab one of his spiked hammers and try ripping through the leather when he noticed Lisa looking down at him from the bed, holding Eli twined around her forearms like a pet corn snake.

“Get the fuck away from her,” Robbie snarled, lunging on his knees.

Lisa jerked back, carrying Eli with her. “Okay, what is your deal today? I thought you had amnesia, but the way you bashed up that genius loci—are you, like, possessed by your alternate universe evil twin with a goatee?”

“Basically,” Robbie said, retrieving one hammer from under the bed. “Put him down.”

“Hey, looks like we’re friends in this universe, too.” Eli rested his head in the crook of Lisa’s elbow and flicked his tongue at Robbie.

“Rrrrrrrr,” Robbie growled. It sounded ridiculous without the rumble of the Charger’s engine filtering through his throat. He could tackle Lisa and rip Eli away from her, bash his head into the wall—but she’d never trust him after that. “He’s not safe, he used to be a—”

“I know you are, but what am I?” Eli interrupted, and Robbie wavered.

Lisa passed him the box of tissues from the bedside table. “Wipe your face and exorcise Mrs. Sanchez so we can get her out of here.”

Robbie hated that this “change” had left him with a human face to wipe. He struggled to his feet, gripping the mattress for balance. The woman on the bed hadn’t moved; she stared vacantly at the ceiling, black veins spreading from the points on her body where the ceiling-monster’s roots had anchored. She was breathing, at least. Her lips were an unhealthy gray-purple. “Any idea how I do that?” he asked, glaring at Eli.

“Search me, I dunno what trigger words alternate-me picked.”

“You make a cross with your hammers,” Lisa said, demonstrating with her empty fists, “and say something like, eej an owie, sucker?”

“Idi na hui, suka,” Eli corrected her.

Robbie had a bad feeling that all his powers were activated by Russian vulgarities. He took careful crouching steps as he retrieved his other hammer, keeping one hand on the bed or on the wall as much as possible, then crossed his hammers like a priest in a vampire movie and did his best to parrot Eli’s words. There was a rush of wind that set his hair fluttering along with the skirt and pink bows of his leotard, and a fountain of pink sparks erupted from the hammers, right at the comatose woman’s bare face and the flammable-looking bedclothes. He had to separate the hammers, to turn off the power or at least point it in a safer direction, but his body wouldn’t obey him: his spine straightened and his shoulders drew back and his legs stepped wide into a power-stance despite the boots pinning his feet at an unnatural angle; he was spraying hot sparks at a defenseless innocent person and he was posing like he was proud of himself.

The seizure ended and he dropped the hammers and stumbled to the edge of the bed, ready to smother fires with his thin cotton gloves, brush off any burning embers from the woman’s hair. Lisa caught him by the shoulder. “Hey! Hey, look, you did it,” she said, examining the woman through her river rock.

There were no fires or burns. The infected gray-black marks were retreating up from her skin and trickling away into inert slime. “What did I do,” Robbie panted.

“You saved the day!” Lisa said brightly. She lifted her rock to check the ceiling; fresh veins had begun to ripple over the paint in a human outline that mirrored Mrs. Sanchez. “You saved...two thirds of the day. Eli, so your thing.”

Robbie hated that he knew Eli well enough to read from the tension in his sigmoid posture that he was taken aback. “My thing.”

“Bite her!” Lisa said impatiently, watching the ceiling.

“What?”

“His bites heal people.”

“Puta madre.” Eli stared at the woman in...probably disgust. “This is…” He cut himself off, looking up at Lisa. “Just what I’ve always wanted.”

“You are so full of shit,” Robbie hissed. Lisa glared at him, and Robbie glared back. “He is!”

“We don’t have time for this,” Lisa said to Eli, making a strange gripping gesture beside his head. “Hurry up or I’ll do it for you. Manually.”

Eli grudgingly fit his mouth around Mrs. Sanchez’ wrist and wriggled his lips and teeth around with disturbingly more mobility than Robbie had expected a snake to be capable of. Robbie clenched his fists as translucent pink fangs flicked into view before sinking into her wasted skin. Eli’s body glowed, and pink sparks shimmered along her veins, circled over her heart, and flashed twice before vanishing. Mrs. Sanchez opened her eyes and sat bolt upright, staring at Robbie.

“Uh,” Robbie said.

“Oh thank God you’re okay!” Lisa squealed, throwing herself between them and gripping Mrs. Sanchez by the torso. “Ma’am, you just survived a carbon monoxide leak, it’s absolutely imperative that we get you to fresh air, you may still be experiencing visual disturbances, first responders have been called, come on, let’s get you out, don’t worry about your belongings, let’s go. Go. Go.” She half-led, half-wrestled the confused woman out the door. Robbie took two steps after them before his ankles did a death-wobble and dumped him to his knees. “We’ll figure out your amnesia-whatever when I get back,” Lisa assured him. “If the hotel wakes up again…” She mimed bashing something with a hammer. “You got this!”

“I got this,” Robbie whispered to himself, stumbling to the nearest wall for balance.

“He can’t even walk!”

[unholyhelbig]

PART TWO OF SPIDER!PERSON SOULMATES

[a/n: Thank you all for the response to the first part of this! Here is part two, and depending on demand I may do a third part. Let me know!]

Title: Magnetic

Ship: Kate Bishop x gn!reader

Disclaimer: I did not proofread, if there are mistakes, I'm sorry!

Trigger warnings: mild injuries, horrible parenting, labs [?]

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Read Part One | Join my Taglist!

Summary: Reader is a spider!person from earth-2099 and Kate Bishop is curious about why she's so drawn to them.

There was a trivial feeling to packing a duffel bag that you pilfered from the nearest thrift store. It was resting between a tapestry of crudely drawn frogs and an old vacuum cleaner that was still caked with dirt. It was small and the upholstery was falling apart, but it was enough for the little clothes that you allowed yourself.

If you had a few more weeks here, maybe you would have bought the frog tapestry and hung it up. The walls of your apartment were just as empty as they were two months ago when you painfully slid across the gravel rooftop of the very building you rented in.

You’d dislocated your shoulder and leaned up against the door to push it back into place, trying to swallow back the metallic taste in your mouth. The landlady opened the door and eyed you, her cigarette lit and angry in the dark. Old pink curlers were in her hair, and she blew a puff of smoke into your face.

They’d just had a room open up, and you used what little cash you had to pay the first half of rent for the month. That night you slept curled up on the wooden floor with your sweatshirt under your head. It was the most peaceful sleep that you’d had in months.

Kate and Peter lived across the hall in an equally shitty apartment that was somehow done up nicely and with a certain type of style that every Peter Parker you had met in the past couldn’t pull off. It was just your luck- to find Kate Bishop so soon after you had crash landed.

It infuriated you that there were so many rules along with the lack of rules that dimension hopping possessed.

Don’t interact with other versions of you- which, wasn’t a problem. There was only one you and it was difficult to keep track of that much.

It’s better not to mess with fate. Really- keep to yourself and don’t’ do anything superherolike because you carried a signature, and that was easily trackable. The last thing you wanted to be was trackable.

Don’t fall in love with a different version of your person. This is the one that you broke all the time, without fail.

It’s why you were shoving everything you owned into a bag and lifting up the floorboard in the back corner of your closet to retrieve the pocket watch. It used to be a pocket watch, anyway. Your father had enhanced it and tinkered until a portal tore into the universe and he stepped into it, hoping that it would work.

It did. From there he changed that pocket watch to something wearable, something that you could alter on your wrist. When you stole the original watch, you used to it jump to Earth 267, only for a moment, to disable the tracker before you hopped three more earths and found someplace to sleep, and cry, and think.

You squeezed the cold metal, breathing in. There wasn’t time to linger. You shoved the golden watch into your pocket, slung the duffel bag over your shoulder, and opened the door to the hallway. The green overhead lights tinted everything in a dingy blue, the carpet in the corridor smelled of mildew. You’d left the brass key and an apology note on the empty kitchen counter, which wasn’t your style, but also a hell of a lot nicer than the other tenants that occupied the space.

A small breath escaped you as you stared at Kate and Peter’s door. Part of you expected one of them to burst through it, but everything was silent, save for the methodic drip from the water pipe in the stairwell.

Two weeks ago, Kate had stolen you from the elevator the second the rickety doors screeched open. You were carrying a well-done steak that was left to congeal with mashed potatoes and gravy after a patron took a single bite. You’d wrapped it in tin foil, your body aching.

You were ready to crash on the single bed pushed against the back wall of your apartment, entirely content on scarfing down cold food and reading another chapter of a pulp horror book you’d thrifted along with a lamp without a shade.

“Y/n, you have to help me.” Fear and questioning must have flashed across your face, because Kate squeezed your arm and a warmth flooded your stomach. “There’s this massive spider in the shower, and Old Woman Harbor told me to shove it.”

“It can’t be that big.”

She deadpanned “It has its own zip code. Please, I’m begging you.”

“Where’s Peter?”

You asked the question even as you resigned to your fate and let her grasp your hand, tugging you towards her apartment. It was decorated much nicer than yours, seeing as it had furniture, and smelled thickly of cinnamon. There was a comfort that radiated from the space- it was lived in, it was personalized.

“Pete? Please, he’s more afraid of spiders than I am.” Kate turned to you, watched as your eyes flitted around the room, taking in the art, and the books, and the records. “Rescue me, fair warrior, for I am at the mercy of an eight-legged creature from darkness.”

You had scooped the spider onto a piece of paper, using a mug that was holding discarded pens and keys that led to nowhere. It was a big spider and you tried to ignore the way it blinked at you as you slid open the window and gently set it on the damp fire-escape.

The door that you stared at now didn’t open to that familiar comfort, or that deep cinnamon scent. You pulled your hood over your head and pushed into the stairwell. Instead of going down, towards the street, you went up to the place where it all started.

The pocket watch that weighed down your clothes packed a punch. There was an electromagnetic pull, everything would raise into the air and then come crashing down. Better some gravel than the shitty furniture you had acquired.

A light drizzle cool your cheeks, the lights from buildings around you were blinking on and off with activity. There wasn’t a moment in this city where it wasn’t raining. You couldn’t tell if it was the earth, or the season. Either way, you looked up for a few, long moments, letting the drops soak your collar.

Lightening flashed, shading the limestone of the building, your breath as it pushed through the air. There had been dozens of universes, each one different than the last. But the tugging, the importance of this one, lingered against your skin. No rain could wash it away. No amount of swallowing your pride could make any of this feel right.

You clenched your eyes shut and fought back emotions that clung to you. This was better for everyone. It was better to leave- because the one moment that you had let yourself be you was enough for your father to pick up on a signal. He’d rip through the city if you stayed. Rip through Gary, and Peter, and Benny, and Kate.

“You were just going to leave, then?”

Kate.

She was silhouetted by the dim light of the stairway, but only for a moment. The door fell closed behind her and suddenly, the two of you were alone on the rooftop. Even in the darkness of the night, you could see the anger written across her face. It wasn’t quite disgust. Not yet.

Her words rumbled over the rain. “You’re a coward.”

“I’m not going to fight with you. Not again.”

You set the duffel bag down and turned to her, took a few steps away from the edge of the building. There was a good distance between you. Water had matted her hair down and dripped from the point of her nose and slope of her chin. There was hurt in her eyes.

“You’ve never fought with me.”

“I’ve seen how this plays out.”

“With all the other Kate’s!” she raised her voice, gesturing angrily. “Dozens of them, from what I figure. You appear in their lives, and then leave and how do you think that makes them feel? How do you think that makes me feel?”

“I’d rather you be in pain than dead. Do you not understand? I’m fated to be with you, but you’re also fated to perish in every single universe where we cross paths. I’ve mapped them, I’ve… I’ve lived them and I may be a coward but better a coward than the cause of your demise.”

You had closed the gap between you. She was taller by a few inches; the furrow of her brow was prominent. Your bones itched to pull her close, to ignore the rain, and the cold, and feeling of defeat in favor of her body against yours, if only for a moment.

She whispered. “Eventually, you’re going to run out of worlds. Don’t you think it’s worth it to fight for the one you’re in right now? To fight for me?”

Pain ripped through you and you gave in to the cold of the rain that soaked into your clothes. You had resigned yourself not to cry in front of Kate Bishop. But water was dripping down your face and you could hardly muffle the sob that pushed through your throat.

“All I’ve ever wanted to do,” Your voice cracked, “was fight for you, Katie.”

The archer had softened, her head lilting to the side for only a moment before her angry exterior dissolved and her hands were on both of your cheeks, applying gentle pressure. Her eyes were red, strands of black hair adhered to her forehead.

She finally said, “Tell me. Tell me what happened.”

You ended up in her living room in front of one of the original fireplaces. The brick supported the building, and that was the only reason they hadn’t been repurposed into something cheaper. Old Woman Harbor didn’t’ pay for central heating, or air, but the brick hearths made up for it. You had lit your own once, reading by the warm glow.

Kate had supplied you with sweatpants and a T-shirt that smelled like lemon, like rosemary with a hint of detergent. She’d draped a blanket over your shoulders and handed you a cup of mint tea despite your protests. You both sat cross-legged, parallel to one another, knees barely touching.

Your duffel bag was by the door, dripping water onto the floor. You’d slid the watch from your sweatshirt and into the pocket of the pants you were provided with. Your nose was still red, cheeks pink from the steam of mug you held under your chin.

“I thought I answered all of your questions.”

“Don’t get defensive.” Kate pulled her knees to her chest, rested her chin against them. “I need you to tell me why your father is after you, why he’s so hellbent on making sure you don’t exist anymore.”

You took a scalding gulp of tea, mint filling your lungs. It burned, made your eyes pinch with water, but it was a better pain than remembering something you had tried so hard to forget. Your instinct was to run away from this Kate. But she was so, so much like yours- the one you had lost and yearned for.

She watched you quietly, taking in your movements and your procrastination. There was no pushing, not anything past the initial question. The warmth from the fire was beginning to settle into your bones.

“My father is a geneticist. He spent his entire life trying to splice the DNA of different things with humans, and his partner, Lyla- she specialized in interdimensional travel. They were funded by Alchemex, given free reign of the labs and unlimited funding.” You swallowed the artificial sweetener taste on your tongue. “Everyone thought they were capable of wonderful things.”

Kate’s voice was barely a whisper. “What changed?”

“My father became obsessed with creating the perfect creation. He started taking DNA from bats and splicing it with monkeys. Wolves and hamsters, fish and lizards- you name it and he tried to achieve it. He was getting to the point where he wanted to splice human DNA with something more. Lyla was the only one who could reign him in, not even my own mother could get through to him.

“Christmas Eve, Lyla was staying late at the lab, and her technology faltered. It was an interdimensional travel device that was stronger than a pocket watch they toyed around with in college. Either way, something went wrong, wires got crossed and suddenly, Lyla was gone.”

“Into a different dimension?”

Your eyes were damp, clouded with emotion. You shook your head and when you curled into the cup in front of you, a tear escaped, landing on the soft fabric of the blanket. You were quick to wipe it away, to steel yourself.

“My father can still talk to her. I don’t know how, I was never the science kid, you know? Music was my thing. I was a prodigy, even. Miguel, my brother, he was the one that followed in my father’s footsteps. The one who gained his respect.”

You hugged the blanket closer to you, shuddered into it. Kate flinched as if she wanted to move and comfort you, say something to ease your worries. But you both stayed where you were.

“A year after Lyla, I came home from college for the holidays. It was Christmas Eve, and though my mom begged my father to stay home for the day, he went into the office. I was sent to Alchemex to get him.” You laughed wetly, using the back of your hand to wipe away moisture “Which was stupid. He didn’t like me. He barely tolerated me.”

This time Kate did reach out, her fingers were like an electric current as they touched your knee. You flinched, then settled into the familiarity of her grip. You placed your hand on top of hers, constricted your fingers around hers. It was holding you in place.

“The man that I saw that night was not my father. I knew that we had our issues, our lack of connection, but there was this cold, detached look in his eyes. He didn’t say a word, didn’t even blink.” You whispered the next part, not finding the words. “One minute he was there, the lab was there, I was there and the next everything was black, there was this horrible pain in my temple.”

“He knocked you out?” Kate asked.

“Yeah, he did. A hell of a lot of force too. When I woke up, I couldn’t collect my thoughts, not all the way. The only thing that I could think about was my mother and how she had worked so hard on dinner and how it was getting cold. Which is so, so stupid, right? Worrying about the quality of mashed potatoes when my own father had me strapped to a lab table.”

You frowned, trying to remember. This part of your story was ebbed in pain. You were in and out of lucidity. There were lights that fuzzed at the edges and a surgical mask over your fathers face. He didn’t talk, but you pleaded. As much as you could, but knew it was worthless.

“He was ready to take his experiments to the next step. He wanted to try to morph DNA with a human and I was… I was there. I was convenient for him.”

Kate’s voice was soft, weak. “Jesus Christ,”

“When he wasn’t in his lab, he was traveling, searching the world for animals and insects that would aide him when he did finally perfect his craft. One of the spiders he brought back from his travels was the Evarcha Culcivora. The vampire spider.”

She blinked at you, clenching her jaw “The what?”

You laughed, some joy returning to your words. “Yeah, cute little thing, actually. It’s a jumping spider, and got it’s name because of it’s taste for blood. It doesn’t bite humans, though. Just mosquitos.”

“And that’s what he chose to…?”

“Mm, and it worked too. The pain was blinding, nearly unbearable. It felt like a million hornets had been shaken up in a glass and then pumped into my veins. Through all of it, I had broken free of the table, had enough strength to get away from him. I did the cowardly thing and I ran.”

“Coward? Y/n, he altered the DNA of his own child. There is a difference between being a coward and being alive.”

“I felt like a coward, and I suppose the habit stuck.” You shook your head, trying to clear the jumbled memory of pain and fear. “I… I couldn’t get my thoughts together. I blindly grabbed at his inventions.  The only thing I could remember was you. The you in Nueva York. There was a ring on my finger, and when I looked at it, I knew where to go.”

Kate swallowed hard, closed her eyes for a long moment. When they opened, they were stormy, saturated in despair, and longing. You couldn’t read the other emotion, her thumb moving over your knuckles.

“It’s the biggest mistake of my life. Leading him there.”

“He killed her.”

“Shot her twice in the stomach.” Your throat tightened. The collar of the sweatshirt Kate leant you was damp with tears. “Whatever sanity he had left was gone the moment he pulled that trigger. So, I pulled the one on the pocket watch. I let it take me wherever it wanted to.”

The silence lingered between you both, wood cracking as fire ate its way to the core. You took another gulp of your tea, it was cold now, coating the back of your throat with a fresh flavor. Kate had pulled her hand back into her own lab, stared at them for a long moment.

“Running is the only thing I’m good at.” You broke the silence. “I carry this… signature. Each time I use the watch, or do anything that’s remotely spider-like it pings on my father’s radar. He’s torn whole universes apart looking for me. Looking for one of his only successful fusions.”

“So, the other night, when you swooped in and helped Peter and I?”

“He knows. So, logically, it would make sense for me to go back up to the rooftop and get to the next universe.”

“And illogically?” Kate asked, raising both of her eyebrows. “What’s that option?”

“Kate,” You warned “There is no other option. I’m not strong enough to fight him. What he did to me, it gave me increased speed, and agility, and strength. Fuck, it even gave me fangs. But he’s too powerful.”

She groaned dramatically “Do you always have to do everything by yourself? Y/n, you’re not alone here. You have me, and Peter.”

“While I appreciate that, Katie, I don’t think it’ll be enough.”

“Okay!” She sighed, lowering her voice “Okay. Then I’ll call Clint and he’ll call the rest of the Avengers.”

You frowned and took a long gulp of your lukewarm tea. The mint made your throat tingle, your fingers twitching around the mug. The Avengers. You’d met all of them individually, in between universes where they fought their own battles- aliens from different worlds, and creatures that rise from ash.

“Clint,” You whispered, eyes finding Kate’s soft grey ones “What is he to you here?”

“My… my mentor. I wouldn’t say we’re best friends, but I mean, I think I’m wearing him down.”

You laughed; the sound filled the room like a crackling fire.  Kate gave you a proud smile that reminded you of a parent watching their kid walk for the first time or accept an award on stage. It was endearing and made your heart hum with longing.

“Good, good. I’m glad.” Again, you looked down at the muted brown liquid in your cup. “Katie, while that is incredibly noble of you, I have a feeling that the Avengers have bigger threats then my world hopping.”

“You won’t know unless you ask. And don’t give me that bullshit about getting turned down in different universes because this is my universe and if you haven’t noticed, I’m extremely charming and persistent.”

“I’ve noticed,”

Kate swallowed hard and took her hand from your knee. You fought a complaint about the lack of warmth, of comfort, but her palm was quickly against your cheek. She smelled like rain, damp and silent. Kate’s thumb moved soothingly, tracing the contours of your face.

“I know what it’s like to want to run, y/n.” her voice was a choked whisper “But just this once, please, stay. We can figure this out.”

“Kate,”

“Seeing you up on the roof, with that pocket watch, knowing that you could vanish into another universe in the matter of seconds and I’d never… I’d never see you again, it scared me. I don’t scare easily.”

You sighed, closing your eyes, clenching them so hard that you could see stars. When you opened them, she stared right back, so resolute and solid and touching your face. You had tried so hard to keep away from every single Kate Bishop you came across, for her safety. You hadn’t felt her hand since a ring weighed it down.

Every part of you wanted to give in and let her hold you, let her comfort you and make everything okay. Her words made you believe they might be.

“Forty-eight hours.” Kate begged “Give me 48 hours to fix this, and take you out on a proper date.”

There was apprehension in your voice, and in your stare. Kate would move earths for you, that was clear by her expression, her contemplation. “Okay, Katie. 48 hours.”

Taglist 💜: @lovelyy-moonlight

[bobgasm]

kingpin ⦾ one

pairing: robert “bob” floyd x ofc!emery young word count: 3032 warnings: vague backstory, unintentional eavesdropping,

summary: in which emery is privy to a conversation she wishes she’d never heard

author’s note: tysm again to @just-in-case-iloveyou for beta’ing this part!

prologue | kingpin | two

15 YEARS LATER

Emery rolled her shoulders as she knelt a little straighter, trying to relieve the tension that had built in her upper back from scrubbing the walls of the shower. It was the worst part about working as a cleaner, in her opinion. Showers were fucking disgusting, but also the most satisfying to clean, after a filthy oven of course. 

She pulled her gloves off and reached for the shower hose, rinsing the tiled walls and glass divider. Watching the soap and grime wash down the drain before making sure the floor was no longer covered in any mess or product. Turning the water off, she reached for the squeegee to blade the water droplets from the walls and divider before drying the floor. 

It was the last thing she needed to do in the bathroom before being able to vacuum and mop. Once that was done, she’d be able to break for lunch.

Emery hated working on a Sunday, but she’d been forced to take on the extra day in order to pay her bills on time. Even if the cleaning job was the last thing she ever saw herself doing, her degree was sitting there gathering dust and refusing to pay rent or utilities.

She’d been struggling to land a full time accounting job for months now. In fact, she was closing in on a year since graduating and the only thing she had to show for it was a lousy certificate she had framed and hidden in her closet.

It was one hell of an expense, that was for sure. 

As she packed away her things, she made sure the house was locked before climbing into her car. It was an older Toyota Corolla that had seen better days, but it was all she’d been able to afford at the time. Even though the mileage was climbing up, and the passenger side window no longer rolled down, the car never died on her. She counted her blessings for it every day, relying heavily on it for her work.

Sunday’s were a slow day with only three homes on her rotation, but they were much larger than what she cleaned during the week. All located in the same gated community, they took almost three hours each to clean. Some days the owners had thrown a party the night before, which meant there was extra work to do to bring the house back to its former pristine glory. 

Obviously, it meant the three hour timeframe she’d allotted herself crept towards the four and a half hour mark. That was all reflected in the bill, however. The owners understood that doing dishes or taking out rubbish wasn’t a part of the service she offered, but if they were willing to pay the additional cost? Emery was more than happy to work a longer day.

Thankfully, this week no one had thrown a last minute party. It meant her day was a lot shorter, so she could catch the last spin class of the day that the local gym offered. 

Emery kept her gym bag in the car. She hated leaving her cleaning supplies in plain sight, so she always parked beneath the only security camera in the parking lot. She didn’t have the money to replace her vacuum, or the time to deal with claiming insurance for it or any necessary repairs her car might need. She was cautious. 

She quickly changed into her gym gear in the changing rooms before stowing her bag in a locker and taking the time to fill her water bottle. 

The gym was relatively quiet for 6pm on a Sunday evening. There were a few people stationed at different machines in different stages of their workouts, but Emery knew the class would be full. She always tried to take at least two classes a week so that the membership she paid for didn’t go to complete waste, but sometimes life got in the way. Sometimes other bills had to take precedence. 

Luckily for her, Emery’s sister, Natasha, worked at the gym. She always made sure Emery’s late fee was waived if the payment bounced because she knew how hard she worked to keep herself afloat. Sometimes, she even paid the fee herself. Emery was too proud to ask, so Natasha never mentioned it. Never made her feel like Emery owed her anything – she was kind and helping out a friend. That’s all there was to it.

When Emery walked into the class, she picked a bike and started doing some stretches. Warming up her muscles before the intense 45 minute class that would likely leave her sore the next day – they always did.

“Hey, Em,” Natasha greeted her with a friendly smile. “You ready for another brutal class?”

“I’m barely recovered from the last one,” Emery joked. “I was barely able to walk up the stairs on Thursday.”

Natasha laughed softly. “Good thing you have the morning off tomorrow, huh?”

Emery had taken the mid-afternoon class on Wednesday. She only worked until midday, so it made it possible to grab an earlier class. The only issue with that was she hadn’t busted her ass cleaning all day – her muscles hadn’t been as warmed up as she’d typically liked. It made Thursday an absolute mission to get through. 

Despite that, she still felt good for attending the class, even if she’d cursed Nat out most of the following day.

After Emery had finished her stretches, the rest of the class had shown up. She climbed up onto the bike and followed along to Nat’s instructions.

Natasha Trace had been one of Emery’s foster siblings. Emery had hated almost every kid she’d met while in foster care, but somehow, Natasha had gotten through to her. Perhaps it was their similar stories. Perhaps it was that they were the only two girls at the home. She couldn’t tell you exactly what it was, just that she was glad to have Nat in her life. She’d always wanted a sister and now she had one.

Despite their connection, Natasha never took it easy on Emery. She always made sure she was pushing herself to be better, to do better. Whether it was applying to college, or kicking her ass in a spin class, Natasha wanted to see Emery succeed. She was her biggest supporter, and Emery was hers. They had each other’s backs; they were family, though not by blood, but by choice. 

Emery always felt like she was dying by the time Nat instructed everyone to start their warm down circuit. She gulped down mouthfuls of water and glared daggers at Nat, wondering how they’d just done the same class, but she was still breathing and talking normally. Emery knew that if she tried to speak, she’d be panting the words out. 

With the class finished, Emery slid carefully off the bike and started helping Natasha wipe down all the equipment. Nat could do it herself, but Emery enjoyed the company. Ever since she got her own place it was like they barely saw each other anymore, so she cherished whatever time she got with Nat.

“Great job today,” Natasha praised. “I know it’s hard work, but it’s paying off. Your ass and thighs look so toned.”

Emery laughed as she sprayed another bike seat before grabbing a paper towel to wipe it down. “Yeah, I’m sure my two classes a week are really showing.”

“They are,” Nat assured her. “Especially in those tights.”

Emery snorted. “Thanks.”

Natasha didn’t push any further. “How was work today?”

“Work was work,” she replied. “I applied to four more jobs this week, but haven’t heard anything back yet. I’m not sure that I will, since no one else has gotten back to me in months.”

“Do you want to rant or hear my big sister speech again?” Natasha asked.

Emery threw a few dirty paper towels in the bin by the door. “Neither. It’s a pity party for one kind of deal right now.”

“Okay, well, since I’m not invited to the pity party, why don’t you come over one night this week and we’ll make dinner? Have some wine and a sleepover, like we used to?” Natasha offered. It was a sweet offer, really. One Emery desperately wanted to agree to, but Natasha sensed her hesitation. “I know you’re not too cool for a sleepover, so what is it?”

“Just a lot on my mind,” Emery replied. “Thursday night? I want tacos.”

“Tacos it is,” Natasha agreed.

Emery said her goodbyes and grabbed her things, ready to head home for a shower. Her stomach growled the second she reached for her bag in the locker, so she settled it with some more water for the time being. She needed a shower before she thought about dinner, which was likely going to be food from the diner down the street. Cooking wasn’t a skill she necessarily possessed, though she could handle very basic recipes. Her college years proved that she was innovative, but not exactly the next Roy Choi. 

The drive home went quickly and she pulled into her designated parking spot. Making sure to grab her vacuum from the car before locking up and heading inside. 

While the parking was semi-covered, anyone could walk in off the street. The vacuum had been a necessary expense and the last thing she wanted was for it to be stolen. The chances of it happening were slim, but the area she lived in wasn’t the best, however, it was all she could afford. 

Emery’s apartment was a small studio on the third floor, and luck just wasn’t on her side. She groaned at the ‘out of order’ sign taped to the elevator, legs already feeling like jelly from the spin class, and now she had to climb three flights of stairs. Brilliant. 

Her apartment didn’t house much in the way of personal belongings. Her bed was a fold out sofa she’d bought second hand, and it beat the air mattress she’d been using for the first three months of living in her apartment. Natasha had helped her bring the sofa back to her place and had insisted that Emery let her buy a replacement mattress for it. The one it came with was yellow and gross, so they’d pumped the air mattress up so it could sit on top of the actual mattress just for the time being. 

Nat had kept her word and bought a new mattress for the couch, and had hired a rug doctor to properly clean the rest of the couch. Emery had thanked her with wine and a roast dinner – one of the only proper meals she knew how to cook, but she still felt like she owed Nat. 

The mattress was lovely, though extravagant. Nat never told Emery how much it cost, and she never would, because it was a gift. Sure, it was a bit much for a housewarming/birthday gift, but Emery needed it. Nat told her she wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing she was sleeping on a filthy old sofa bed without at least trying to make it less disgusting. 

There was a small tv perched on a chest of drawers and a washing hamper full of dirty clothes that needed a trip to the laundromat. Her fridge usually only housed bottles of water, some yoghurt and enough to make a few sandwiches for lunch during the week. She needed to go grocery shopping tomorrow, so she wasn’t worried about her poorly-stocked fridge. 

Grabbing a fresh bottle of water after locking the door behind her, she placed the vacuum in the kitchenette and moved to the bathroom. Already thinking about the food she was going to order at the diner, she wasted no time showering. Washing her hair with the last few dregs of product from the bottle of shampoo. Lathering her body in a coconut body wash she’d been gifted by a client for her birthday, that she’d refused to touch until she was completely out of her lavender one. Making sure to massage her calves and feet before stepping out of the shower and wrapping a towel around her body and her twisting hair up in another. 

Emery changed into a pair of sweatpants and an old tee that had seen better days. It had a couple of small holes around the neckline and the hem had been ripped, but it was easily one of her favourite tees. She towel dried her hair as best as she could before tying it in a loose braid and slipping her feet into a pair of old sneakers. Grabbing her keys, phone and some cash, she locked up and made her way downstairs to the diner a couple blocks away. 

The night had cooled some but not a lot. Emery was still warm from her shower and prior exercise, so she enjoyed the cooler temperature as she walked. Passing the few stores that were still open at this time of night and enjoying the aromas of Mexican or Chinese food. Her stomach growled vehemently, mouth watering. Proper takeout was a once in a blue moon kind of expense, and when she felt like she deserved to splurge a little bit, she always got extra so she could eat it the following day. 

Lila, one of the waitresses, smiled at Emery as she opened the door of the diner. Emery gave her a small wave before showing herself to a table, knowing Lila would be over to check on her once she’d finished up with her other customers. 

“Hey, Em,” Lila greeted. “Your usual again?”

Emery smiled in acknowledgement. “Yes please, and a side of onion rings tonight,” she replied. 

“Coming right up,” Lila assured her, walking off to hand the ticket to the kitchen to start making.

Emery sighed and slumped in her chair, resting her forearms on the slightly sticky table as she scrolled through her phone, searching for any new job listings. A lot of the higher paying accounting jobs were located closer to Los Angeles, but it also meant if she moved, her rent would practically double. Still, the offer of full time work doing what she loved for a starting salary in the high double digits was very tempting. It definitely beat housekeeping, that’s for sure.

Deciding to just bite the bullet, she applied for a couple of roles. Attaching her CV, typing a cover letter that she copied and pasted for each other application, and finally submitting them one by one. Hoping for at least a call back so she could decide one way or another if moving was actually going to be worthwhile.

Emery looked up from her phone as Lila brought her a glass of water, thanking her briefly. Continuing her search, if only to pass the time while waiting for her food to come out. 

She tried not to listen to the man a couple tables over talking into his phone. He was clearly trying to be quiet but failing as his voice continued to rise with his blood pressure. He spewed out accounting terminology in rapid succession, and even as Emery tried to paint a mental picture in her head, she knew shit wasn’t adding up.

“They’re clueless about what I’ve done,” he spoke into the phone. 

Emery was careful enough to pretend she wasn’t listening, bopping her head along to the low music playing from the tinny radio. If he looked at her, he’d assume she wasn’t able to hear him. Whatever he’d done wasn’t something she wanted to involve herself with.

She thanked Lila as her burger was placed in front of her, straining to keep listening to the conversation. Still, she kept the smile on her face even as her blood chilled at the mention of siphoning funds from Floyd followed by something she only understood as a building term. She picked up an onion ring and bit into it, hoping like hell the guy didn’t realise he was speaking louder than he probably anticipated. 

“It’s all set. The payment is untraceable and the account is offshore. Even if they wanted to, they’d never be able to get it back,” he bragged. 

Emery swallowed her mouthful and chased it with some water, his words leaving a bitter taste in her mouth. 

“Yeah, well over 5 mil,” he continued. Emery saw him shift in the corner of her eye as she picked up her burger and took a large bite. His voice dropped down an octave as he spoke again, “I’m on the next bus out of here in two hours. You remember the rendezvous point, right?”

He hummed at whatever the person on the other end of the call said. “If you don’t hear from me in 12 hours, there’s a go-bag under the creaky floorboard in the bedroom. It has everything you’ll need to travel to Ecuador without being followed.”

It was hard to hear him over her own chewing, but she tried desperately not to look. If he so much as thought she’d heard a peep, she knew nothing good would come of it. He was deep in something she wanted no part of. 

Emery signaled to Lila, asking her for a diet coke when she walked over.

“Of course, hon. How’s everything?” Lila asked politely. 

Emery was grateful she’d had the mind to bring her over. “Great, thank you,” she replied with a smile. “Can you save me a slice of pie to take home? I probably shouldn’t, but you know I can’t resist.”

Lila laughed and placed a friendly hand on her shoulder. “I’ll pop a slice in a takeaway container for you, just let me know when you’re ready to close out. I’ll be back with your soda in a sec.”

The man had breezed past the two women during the small interaction, and Emery had watched him leave before quickly diverting her attention to her meal. She didn’t know why she’d even looked – she didn’t want to get involved. She didn’t have any desire to seek out this Floyd person and tell them what she’d overheard. She just wanted to eat her damned meal in peace.

[bombsonboard]

the day after yesterday: chapter three

Summary: Time travel is volatile, dangerous, playing god. And then sometimes  it drops you in just the right place at the perfect time. It’s a matter of perspective. You decide.

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Reader (no Y/N)

Word Count: 4.4k

Series Masterlist | Masterlist | Read it on AO3

A/N: So my scheduled post didnt work! But i’m still uploading this on Wednesday, just a little later than planned lol. Hope you’ve all had a good week and sorry for the lil bit late chaper!

You stood outside ‘Stillman’s Gymnasium’ feeling grateful it was a warm summer’s day and you didn’t have to brave the New York cold without a jacket. Bucky said he’d meet you here, he cleaned the gym after hours in exchange for weekly boxing lessons, promising it would be all theirs so you could work on your escape in peace. 

Turns out, jumping the turnstile to get on the subway was a hell of a lot easier in the 1940s, it just took avoiding every man with a conductor hat, which the crowds made easy, and you made it to midtown. 

All alone, you let yourself take a breath. Yes, you were stuck in the wrong time, but with the hope of getting home, it was quite an astonishing thing. This place wouldn’t even be here in twenty years, bulldozed for apartments. Having the privilege to be here was something you could hardly fathom but you tried to let yourself enjoy it, at least for the time being.

It was too easy to imagine yourself having a life here, who could be waiting for? Maybe a good girl friend, or maybe some guy was picking you up to go and see a movie, one of those old ones that are only on at Christmas or Sunday afternoons. Your dress would be a bit cleaner, your hair pinned out of your face and you would see him approaching in the distance.

In your mind he had a kind smile on his face, a few roses, not too many and he would walk up to you and say:

“Steve is gonna kill me when he finds out I took his nice sketch paper, this better be worth it.” 

You blinked out of your fantasy to see the roses had flattened into a stack of paper and the kind smile you dreamed of was replaced by Bucky’s blank frown. He looked at you curiously.

“What?” He brushed his hair back with his free hand.

“Nothing” You felt caught out.

He shrugged, slowly growing used to your strange looks, and pulled a bunch of keys from out of his trouser pocket and slid them into the door. Unlocking it and pushing the door open with a clunk.

“After you.”

The smell of sweat and floor polish hit you like a wave as you stepped inside and Bucky locked the door behind the two of you. On the bare brick walls hung dozens of pictures of men in boxing gloves, raising their arms in victory. Along the surprisingly clean wooden floor punching bags were lined up, the rich brown leather cracked and beaten from excessive use and just waiting patiently to be used again. 

The great big boxing ring was the main event, a square stage of battered cream, held together by rows of red rope. You wondered if it was red on purpose. 

You pictured one of the boxing matches happening right there in front of you, the crowd of screaming men, praying for their bet to come clean and bracing for the final take down. The champion raising his godly fists, shirtless, shining and soaking in the sounds of his glory.

So, this is what Bucky wanted to be before the army? You tried to see him there, posing for one of the pictures on the wall with his grin plastered to his face. Though, maybe thinking of him shirtless and sweaty really wasn’t the most efficient thing you could be doing at the time.

“So…” Bucky comes to stand next to you, and offers you the paper

You take it with a quiet thank you.

“Do you have a-”

He hands you a pencil.

You swallow, turn around and begin to lay out the pieces of ‘borrowed’ sketch paper out on the glossy brown wood.. 

“There’s a desk in the office, y’know” Bucky points out, watching you crouch to the floor.

“That’s okay, I’m fine here.” 

He looks at you, confused and waiting for any kind of explanation you would offer.

“I’m gonna need…quite a bit of space.”

Bucky raises his eyebrows, accepting that’s all he was getting, and goes to lean against the wall.

You start your chicken scratches, numbers in the tiniest handwriting you could manage, but the nagging sensation of his presence there itches at you incessantly. You lift your head and notice he’s just standing there, watching you. 

“Don’t you have cleaning to do?” It came out a little more spiteful than you intended.

“Looks pretty spotless to me” He kept his eyes trained on you, not bothering to look around at all.

“Okay, so you don’t need to be here then?” You didn’t mind the company really, but why did it have to be him? It was better for you both if he just left you alone.

“I’m responsible for this place, how do I know you won’t mess it up?” Bucky narrowed his eyes at you.

“Christ, I don’t need a chaperone.” 

“I’m sure you don’t, spitfire” He scoffs “but I'm not leaving, so…” He gestures for you to get back to your work “Go on.”

Rolling your eyes with maximum effort you go back to work and start to lose yourself in the math. Spread out on the floor with your ass in the air probably wasn’t the most ladylike position but who cared, Bucky didn’t seem to make a comment.

You willed yourself to stop wondering about him for just a moment so you could focus on the task at hand. If you were going to figure out the coordinates to put into the GPS, you needed a start point. It was 1943, that you knew but, the specific date was what you really wanted. There wasn’t anything that showed you today’s date in your immediate vicinity, so your eyes wandered and landed, unfortunately, on Bucky, who had his feet propped up on the front desk, head stuck in a newspaper. 

"Is that today’s?” You ask from the floor.

“Yu-huh” He mumbles from his wall of news.

Of course he had the thing you were looking for. 

“...What’s the date on it?”

He folds over one corner so you could be victim to his blank stare. “You don’t know what day it is?”

You stare back. 

“11th June.” He supersedes.

“Thank you.” 

He flips his corner back up and you go back to your work silently.

“11th June 1943.” You mumble quietly as the numbers take over your head again.

Hour One

The silence didn’t last half as long as you hoped it would.

“So, how long does something like this normally take?” Bucky wonders after a while, as if you launched yourself into the wrong time all the time, you felt yourself getting offended until you remembered he had absolutely no idea. 

Scribbling down the total days you needed to travel you hid your face from Bucky.

“A while.” You hoped he didn’t hear the small crack in your voice. 

“Great. Maybe it’s enough time for me to figure out why you’re so weird.” He chuckled lightly.

Bucky Barnes, ladies man.

“Oh you’ll figure it out…in 29,209 days” You mumble under your breath, you didn’t mean for him to hear, but when you’re the only two people in a room, it’s hard to keep secrets.

Bucky shakes his head in amusement, ignorant of just how truthful you had just been, but he was quiet for a little while longer after that.

Hour Three

Eventually grew restless of the front desk and sauntered over to the back office. You wondered who might usually be found in there, some short and stubby gym manager, dark hair slicked back with wiry eyebrows that look so much like caterpillars they might crawl off his face. A cigar permanently between his lips. 

You cracked a smile at the image until you heard exactly what Bucky was doing in there. The crackle of a gramophone interrupts your thoughts and the smile falls from your face. You had no complaints about forties music, really, but you were convinced he was doing this on purpose, taunting you with warbling jazz.

With a frustrated grumble you threw down your pencil, abandoned your work and stalked over to the back office. He was there, leaning back on a chair with his arms crossed, eyes closed and absorbing the music echoing around the room. 

Sure, he looked peaceful, but there were bigger stakes here than Bucky Barnes enjoying a record. 

You rapped on the door forcefully but he didn’t jump to attention like you wanted.

Bucky slowly opens his eyes and looks up expectedly.

“Could you…turn it down?” You mimicked turning down a volume knob, and he looked at you blankly.

“Please.” It pained you to add.

“Turn it down?” He mimics your action, eyebrows furrowing. “And what’s that?”

“The music” You impatiently pointed it out and walked over to the small gramophone, singing pleasantly in the corner. It would be a relic any other day but right now it was just annoying you.

Shoot, no volume control you realized, it seemed people were just happy to hear music here, nevermind the volume. A little joy in a somewhat bleak time in history. 

You needed your peace though, one way or another.

“Could you just turn it off?” You turned to leave.

“If this is gonna take long, I’d like to have something to entertain myself.”

You stopped, breathing in and out to stop yourself from killing him before his inevitable death date.

“You don’t even have to be here” You crossed your arms across your chest.

He smiled at your irritation “Tell you what, I’ll give you a chance.”

While you were occupied with how he just had the audacity to patronize you, Bucky stood from the chair and took the trash can from the corner and placed it at the other end of the office from you.

“What are you doing?” You watched him closely.

He walked back over to you with a self- satisfied smile, taking his time as he stopped just inches from you, the tips of his shoes touching yours just about.

“Bucky?” You felt your heartbeat palpate, your chest go tight.

He wordlessly leaned past you to grab an old coffee mug full of pencils that sat on the desk behind you. Bucky pulled away to stand next to you and embarrassment fizzed in your stomach. Bucky smelt like leather and his mothers cooking.

“First one to get three pencils in a row in the trash can wins. If you win, I’ll turn it off and I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

You found that hard to believe and it must’ve shown on your face.

“...mostly,” He added. “But if I win, the music stays and you can’t say a thing about it.”

“Seriously?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die, swee- spitfire.”

He looked at you with his blue as a cloudy sky eyes as you sized him up. It seemed fair and you were always one for a good bet, but the way he looked at you made you feel like he knew something you don’t. Figuring that look out would have you spinning for days.

“Do you need me to move it a bit closer?” He suggested condescendingly.

“Fine.” You grumbled.

“Ladies first.” He held the mug out to you and you grabbed three pencils with a roll of your eyes.

It had to be easy right? You didn’t have the worst hand eye coordination in the world but it wasn’t one of your most notable qualities. The only thing you had going for you was a desire for Bucky Barnes to keep quiet, and you were about to find out how good of a motivator that was.

You toss the first pencil and it lands in the trash can with a happy little clang. The second pencil was subject to pressure and bounced on the edge before landing safely inside, you celebrated inwardly, trying to hide how invested you were in a game of throwing pencils, but you were so close to victory, sweet victory.

One final pencil in your hand, you looked to Bucky “Any final words?” you ask smugly.

“I’m good.”  He stared straight ahead.

The last pencil is in the air and you swear you’ve never felt this tense in your life. Maybe apart from the time you landed in the 20th century by accident. Taunting you, it bounced off the edge like the second but this time it was the wrong way. You watched in disbelief as it clattered to the floor.

“Shit.” You muttered and tried to hide how actually sad you were to miss your final throw.

“I’d offer condolences but you were a little cocky at the end.” Bucky plucked three pencils from the pot.

He effortlessly tossed his pencils in without a second thought, one, two, three, in quick succession, giving you no time to think of a plan to sabotage him at all.

Bucky looked at you with a smile “I believe congratulations are in order.”

“Best of three?” You grasped at any chance he might give you.

Bucky just laughed. In your face. You let out a combination of a grumble and a sigh and stomped out of the office.

He had won, the music stayed.

Hour Five 

“C’mon you should take a break.”

Bucky had stayed mostly in the office, humming to his music. You had migrated to the boxing ring to lay out your findings. He had been leaning against the door, keeping his eye on you for the last five minutes.

“Can’t take a break.” You didn’t look up.

“You’ve been scribbling for like ten hours” He groans.

“I’m not scribbling” You retort, but looking down at the paper ‘scribbles’ was definitely an accurate word, not that he needed to know that.

“What are you doing then?”  

“I’m working out- ugh, stop it!” You needed to be more on the ball with his incessant questions.

“It’s for your own good”  You told him as sternly as you could manage.

“Yes Ma'am” He grins cheekily.

He moved from the doorway, you cursed yourself for having half your attention on him again.

“I don’t think you’ve ever taken a break in your life, you’re so…tightly wound.”

You had half a mind to tell him why you were really ‘tightly wound’ right there and then. But then the fatal implications and so on…blah blah blah. 

“I take breaks.”

“Hard to believe, you ever been to the movies? Or a dance, maybe?” His analyzing eyes felt like they could see right through you.

“Sure, I’ve been to dances.” You brushed him off and continued writing. Maybe they weren’t the dances he would be familiar with but you had been to some. They just played the Black Eyed Peas, not Vera Lynn.

“Really? Because you haven’t recognised a single song I've put on.”

Oh. He had you there. 

“Maybe I just like different music.”

“Who doesn’t like Dick Haymes?” 

You put your head back down, ignoring his teasing and diving back into work, and hopefully convincing him that you just weren’t interested in extracurriculars. 

“Don’t worry, Spitfire, I’ll get you dancing.”

Hour Eleven 

He had run out of records a couple hours ago and was now entertaining himself by standing by the entrance and using some spare paper to fashion a paper airplane and seeing how far he could throw it.

The boxing ring was covered in a blanket of math now, you sat cross legged in the center, surrounded by stretches of equations, statistics, and graphs, traveling along y axis and x axis, finding each coordinate you would need. You had worked this long before but after a day of exerting yourself physically, the strain was weighing heavily on your brain. 

You close your eyes for just a second but a rude and painful awakening comes from a sharp poke in the side of your head. 

“Sorry!” Bucky calls from across the room.

You sigh and stand, rubbing the side of your head “It’s fine, I needed to wake up anyways”

You were in the land before energy drinks, your go to when the numbers become squiggles in your eyes. 

“There somewhere that sells coffee around here?” You grumble.

“Um” Bucky points to the window and you see nothing but black.

How had you missed the sun going down? 

“Nevermind.” You ran a hand over your face, eyelids growing heavier by the second, but you knew you couldn't afford to sleep, not now.

But your brain was too exhausted to make sense of the final coordinates you needed and there was no point in half-assing this and ending up in the wrong time again. You had read in some study that regular breaks actually proved to help total productivity, as hard as it was for you to believe, you weren’t opposed to a little experimenting.

Tip toeing carefully over your working, you sat on the side of the boxing ring, waiting for productivity to strike.

Bucky abandoned his paper airplane to sit next to you. The air felt heavy around you and all you could feel was the incomprehensible weight on your shoulders. You had no idea what Bucky thought, you had hardly been nice to him. But the way he was looking at you made you think he just wanted to lighten your load, just a little bit.

“So, how's it going?” He asked after a minute.

“It’s…getting there.” You fiddled with your hands “Maybe.”

“You really are weird, y‘know?”

He was smiling at you, like he had just paid you a sweet as sugar compliment.

“Thanks, Bucky.” You gave your sarcastic gratitude.

With a sudden burst of energy, he practically waltzes to the back office, you watch with amused curiosity, and when he appears again, he’s carrying the gramophone with both hands, a record under his arm.

He places it happily on the corner of the ring, lifting the red rope, he slides under and stands in the boxing ring. What was he doing now?

“C’mon.” He tilted his head at you with a smile.

Waiting for you, you supposed.

“What?”

Bucky began to pile up you papers covering the space and you flew into a panic, if he messed them all up you’d have to spend another hour putting them back in the correct order so they made sense, you hadn’t thought to number your pages because you thought he wouldn’t be stupid enough to touch them. You thought wrong.

“Bucky!” You shrieked with wide eyes.

He looked at you, calmly “I’m keeping them in order.” 

His habit of reading your mind was getting pretty annoying. You follow his lead and shuffle under the ropes out of curiosity. With your math tower tucked safely to the side out of harm's way, you faced him with a confused look. 

“You needed to wake up, right?” 

“Are we going to box? Because I don’t think I'm up for that right now.” 

“No, no” He takes the record out of its sleeve with a flourish and places it on the gramophone, setting the needle down, humming with excitement.

An upbeat song begins to play, filling the hall with hearty trumpets and jiving double bass. It almost felt like they were in the room somewhere, hiding under the boxing ring with their instruments. 

You stood a meter away from Bucky, no closer and no farther. He held out his hand, you looked around you as if there was any one else he could offer it to. 

“What are you doing?” You ask, you could barely hear yourself above the music reverberating around the walls.

“Dancing.” He said it like it was obvious.

You didn’t think you get stage fright in the absence of an audience but Bucky had a funny way of making you nervous. For the third time, you were stuck gawking at his open palm. The vibrations of the music sent waves through the boxing ring, an invisible hand urging you closer to him.

“I don’t think that’s, maybe not-” You splutter.

You tried to think of the ripples in time this could cause but all you could really focus on was how much you wanted to feel his hand in yours again.

“Spitfire.”

When would you ever get the chance again? Never, that’s the answer. Sure, time might crumble before you but he looked so happy standing there, and he didn’t have many of those moments left.

“I swear every time you look at my hand it’s like you’ve seen a ghost.”

That’s what he had in store. Becoming the most infamous ghost story history had ever heard. You made peace with the universe in a surprisingly short amount of time and decided Bucky Barnes needed this more than anything else in this world.

“You gonna keep on staring at my hand or are you gonna take it?”

You take a few tentative steps towards him and slide your right hand into his left. He directs your other hand to rest on his shoulder and he slips his hand behind you. He tucked you closer to his chest with a shy smile and a gentle pull, you gazed up at him with bright eyes, a smile hiding in the corners of your mouth just waiting to blossom.

The next ten minutes, Bucky spends teaching you how to swing dance after coming to the conclusion you had never danced with anyone in your life.

“I have!” You insist after you step on his toe for the seventeenth time.

“Do they still have feet?” He asks in fake concern. 

“Ha Ha.” You poorly cover your genuine laughter, but you couldn’t hide the smile that had crept up on you anymore.  

Dancing with Bucky was a whirlwind in the most literal sense, you spun like a pinwheel in and out of his arms. You spent half the time spiraling into danger and he would be there to catch you as if there was no risk at all. 

When he kept you close, you could just about hear him counting to the music under his breath. It was an endless night of numbers for you, but you were convinced you had never been as dizzy as this before, dipping in and out and twisting up and down but you knew he wouldn’t let you fall. There was something transporting about it, bringing truth to your daydreams.

Dancing with him felt more like time travel, than well, actual time travel. 

You were glad he wasn’t enhanced yet, or he would hear your heartbeat picking up speed. For a moment he was all you could think about, and you finally had no complaints. 

Until you saw your papers topple and scatter on the floor, the jolting of the enthusiastic swing dance lesson had your precious work falling all over the floor. 

Quickly, it all got too much, heat rushed through you and the music was thumping in your head. He was too close to you, chests stuck together that should never have touched in the first place, Hands glued to his, you were trapped in his time and you were losing yourself by the second. If you didn’t let go now, who knows what you could cause. 

“Stop, stop!” You pulled away, ripped your hand from his, stumbling back and catching yourself on the ropes. 

“You alright?” Bucky spoke cautiously behind you.

“Yeah, yes I’m okay, I just-”

You swallowed down the bile rising from your stomach, and turned to see him standing there with concern in his eyes. Damn him. Damn him for helping you.

“I need to get this done.” You hurried to pick up your work and put it back into the correct order, scared to even look at him again.

“Okay.” He sighed quietly.

Hour Fifteen

Bucky had fallen asleep sometime ago.

The sun had come up again, the cloudless sky left the blinding beams of sunlight to burst through the windows.

His gentle snoring was the only sound as you held your breath,staring at the coordinates. Double checked, triple checked. All you had to do now was put them into the GPS and go.

But something was keeping you here, just for a few moments more. If it had anything to do with the man sleeping a couple meters away, you weren’t sure. All you could do was keep your eyes on the key to your exit.

“You worked through the night?” 

Okay, so he wasn’t asleep anymore.

You could disappear right there in front of his eyes and leave him questioning everything for the rest of his life, even though you thought it would be a little funny and maybe he deserved it, it was just too risky. 

“Done it before” You shrugged.

“Well my sleep was great, surprisingly sound” He began to walk over “Oh, and if my Ma asks where I was all night, do me a solid and say the recruitment center, something about long queues i don’t know.”

Hang on.

“You haven’t enlisted yet?” 

“No?” 

“Haven’t been to the recruitment center at all?”

“Been a bit busy” He chuckles

“Well you should go, go do it now”

“What?”

You thought he had gone by now.

“I’ll do it later, suppose” He shrugs

You looked at the coordinates. You could go home. But you couldn’t. Bucky hadn’t enlisted. And if he doesn’t join the army then, then Steve probably wouldn’t either and Captain America wouldn’t exist and maybe we didn’t win the war, maybe we lost all of the wars, the battle of new york, the battle of the earth.

Him not becoming a sergeant . you couldn’t begin to think of the implications.

Was it all your fault? 

“Been thinking about it a lot and I know my dad did and all that, but…I don't know”

You had currently beaten your record for amount of shits in a twenty four hour span ten times over.

Getting home, All of this means absolutely nothing if Bucky doesn’t go to war. 

He needed to enlist, he had too, you were to blame for this, and you were damn right gonna fix it.

You had to make him join the army, no matter the cost.

Maybe you could afford a couple more days here, you supposed.

“You figure out all your math?” Bucky asks. 

You turned to him and stood.

“Not quite.”

Tag-list: @emily-roberts @enchantedbarnes @marygoddessofmischief @nickangel13 @elxvrr @pixiesbored @skittle479 @sweetwritingfanficfriend @curlycarley​ @acceptedbyace​ (bold means I couldn’t tag you)

[little-spoiled-brat]

pairing: levi x reader

cw: angst and fluff, mostly comfort, slight spoilers for the 57th exterior scouting mission arc of the manga

author's note: just in case anyone was wondering, the meaning of the title is mentioned in the story <3

- 全てが大丈夫になります -

it had been a heavy expedition, there were much more casualties than usual. more lives had been lost more than saved. it was a heavy blow, especially for your squad - you pretty much lost everyone in the squad, the only surviving ones were you, levi, and eren. a lot of the other squads were also wiped out and everyone in the survey corps had been feeling the heavy atmosphere ever since.

like usual, the survey corps was once again belittled by the citizens of the walls. it was instinct at that point to simply ignore the negative comments that were thrown to everyone.

you continued to lead your horse back to headquarters, keeping your head down as you tried to not listen to the comments that were being shouted at you left right and center.

"captain levi! are you really humanity's strongest soldier or humanity's weakest soldier?" a man said upon seeing that almost the entirety of squad levi was gone. your eyes looked up from the floor, looking at levi who was walking a few feet in front of you.

your husband was stoic, not a single hint of emotion was shown, that mask of his never once cracking even when it felt like the world was ganging up on him. you subtly walked a bit faster so you were right behind him, close enough to let him know that you were there but far enough to maintain the professionalism between the two of you. for now, at least.

erwin lead the entire survey corps back to the headquarters, returning the horses to their stables before entering the headquarters building. it seemed bigger now, with all of the comrades that you lost.

"get some rest, no training for tomorrow" erwin simply commanded, you gave him a salute before going into separate directions. you went to find levi, walking beside him as the both of you made your way to the connected bedroom that you share in his office.

neither of you said anything, just quietly getting changed out of your uniforms. you took a shower together, washing away the grime and blood that the expedition left before getting dressed in cleaner clothes afterwards.

"are you okay?" you asked, coming up behind levi and wrapping your arms around his waist. he turned around in your embrace and wrapped his arms around you, burying his face in the crook of your neck.

"levi?" you asked again, needing to get some sort of response from him about his wellbeing. he pulled away from you for a second, looking at you and pressing a kiss on your forehead.

"i'm okay" levi simply said as you nodded. although you knew that he may not be completely okay, you just decided to comfort him for the time being. you tightened your grip around him, holding him closely to you.

the two of you stood there for a few minutes just holding each other close, no words were said - just the presence of each other was enough.

"let's go to sleep, i'm tired" levi said softly after a few minutes of silence. you let him lead you to the bed, getting under the blankets as you rested your head on his chest. he wrapped his arms around you tightly, gently running his hand up and down your back.

"i love you" levi whispered, placing a kiss on the top of your head. you pushed yourself off of him for a second, kissing him on the lips in reply.

"i love you" you said before returning back to your spot on his chest. it didn't take long until exhaustion started settling in and before you knew it, you were fast asleep on top of levi.

however, levi laid awake the entire night. he was just as exhausted as you were but his mind and the thoughts that he was having was stopping him from getting any kind of rest.

he ran his hand through your hair, looking down at your sleeping form on top of him as he got lost in thought. he was reminded of what the man had said on the way back.

levi had always hated the title that was put on him - humanity's strongest soldier. the title was more of a burden than an honor, having that kind of title meant that he wasn't allowed to make any mistakes, he wasn't allowed to show emotions or vulnerability.

having the title meant that he was nothing but a titan killing machine, not a human with feelings and emotions.

without noticing it, a tear had fallen down levi's cheek as he quickly wiped it away with the sleeve of his shirt. he sighed deeply, snuggling closer to you. it only had been less than an hour since you fell asleep and he was already starting to have a rough night.

nevertheless, he tried to go get some rest. although it didn't last long because of his nightmares kicking in, he did manage to get a few hours of sleep.

by the time the sun was about to peek at the horizon, levi could no longer go back to sleep. instead, he watched you sleep peacefully in his arms and waited for you to wake up.

despite everything that happened in the past twenty four hours, having you in his arms, bodies pressed up against each other, your breathing slow and steady as you lied asleep on his chest. it gave him a sense of hope that everything will be okay.

humanity's strongest soldier couldn't save everyone but levi can continue living for everyone. especially you. that was all he could do, to continue living for the comrades that he had lost and for the comrades and lover that was next to him.

levi tucked a piece of your hair behind your ear, gently caressing your cheeks with his knuckles as he savored the feeling of having you next to him.

"i love you, y/n. so much" levi whispered, kissing you on the forehead as you stirred a bit in your sleep and unconsciously snuggled further into him. he smiled, grateful that you were still with him - safe and protected.

he may have lost a lot of people that he cared about in the past few years but as long as you were with him, he knew that everything will be okay.

taglist: @levi-supreme @galactict3a @notgoodforlife @jooonpapi @imkumichan @lamees004 @ackermendick

[hexagonalhavoc]

Can I get a Mycologists x reader who actually really likes watching them do surgery? Like the first time they met and was told to look away they were like ‘…Can’t be that bad-‘ and took a peek

Next thing the Mycologists hear is a reader whining that the show was over :>

Morbid Curiosity 

Mycologists x Reader 

[Author’s Note: ⚠️ Mentions of surgery, experiments done on animals, blood, bones, and stitches]

     “My dear, the wind in my sails, the sun on my skin, my light in the darkness, you do not want to see this procedure.” 

“It’s too grisly.” 

“Very grisly.” 

The Mycologists always had something to bicker about. It could last hours before they started to ignore each other or finally found a way to settle the conflict. There was very little that they actually agreed upon and one of those things was you not witnessing the more…ugly side of their work. 

Maybe it’s because they can’t help but see you as this pure being that can do no wrong, the virtue to their sin, but that can’t  be farther from the truth. You’ve just always been better at hiding your love for the macabre. 

So when the loves of your life start treating you like sentient glass you are rightfully annoyed. You know they mean well but it feels downright patronizing to be treated like this, as if you don’t live in the woods and see fucked up things on a daily basis. 

“Oh come on this isn’t fair! Can I at least be in the operating room?” You plead, going from frustrated to speaking sweetly hoping that you can sway them. You respect how important their work is to them, you love how passionate they are but you’re tired of them locking themselves in the operating room for hours on end. Leaving nothing for you to do other than wait. 

Scarred, trembling hands encase your own. You can’t see their eyes through the goggles but you can imagine the way their brows might furrow. 

“I admire your eagerness darling, y-you want to learn and that’s amazing I appreciate how we share a common interest. But-“ 

But they don’t want you to think differently of them. Despite your constant reassurance it’s always been a fear that one day you’d become horrified of them if you saw the extent of their work, that you would never want to be close to them ever again. 

“You may be in the room but no peeking.” The smaller head stops the other’s anxious rambling. It was always better to try and reason with him as he knew very well how stubborn you could be. If a compromise wasn’t made now they’d be here all day and they needed to get work done. 

You try to fight the satisfied smile that threatens to tug at your lips. You nod curtly at an attempt to hide your excitement. “Deal.” 

———-

The room was a lot cleaner than you thought it would be. There was some dried blood on the floor and walls, some tools displayed on shelves were recognizable but others were a lot more questionable. You couldn’t tell if the brown spots on them was blood or rust, maybe both. Tanks of anesthesia are next to a large operating table where two raccoons lay. One of them was critically injured, limbs twisted with bone peaking through the fur. 

“You’re trying to save it?” You ask as you approach the animals with interest. 

You wouldn’t call the mycologists cruel, they keep their specimens in a pen outside their shabby house made from a giant mushroom, they release them after the experiments are done and never euthanize them unless the animal has no chance at living. You knew very well that what they did was unethical but it was interesting that joining two creatures together could ultimately save them. 

“Just to see if we can.” The smaller head says nonchalantly. Shrugging off the potential good deed.

They motion to a chair that’s up against the wall and you sit down in it. As per the agreement you put your hands over your eyes. 

“No peeking.” They warn and you nod but the smile on your face looks more mischievous than it does innocent. 

“I mean it.” The small head says sternly. 

You keep your hands over your eyes, you can hear the clatter of tools and the anxious muttering of the larger head that are too quiet to understand. You aren’t sure but you bet that the Mycologists are checking to see if you’re peeking or not so for now you don’t peek, you’ll catch a glimpse when they’re too distracted to be checking up on you. 

You aren’t too sure but you think you can hear the first couple of incisions into the animal as well as the subtle snaps of bone. Tools crash on the ground constantly as they tried to reach for something that was slightly out of reach. That’s why they should let you work with them, it must be so hard to do everything on their own. Especially if they’re handling larger animals. 

It’s a little silly but you get relaxed in your current position. With your hands over your eyes all you can do is listen, taking in every little sound. It was like meditating in a way and you start to forget what you originally came here for. 

Your fingers slowly spread so you can see in between them. It’s complicated to make out what’s going on from the angle you’re at but you can see their hand move closer and then farther away as they sew the animals into one. 

It looks like you missed the show. 

“Wow you guys really are quick.” You get off your chair and walk up to the raccoon. Its eyes are closed but you can see the rise and fall of its chest. You can see the large, bloodied stitches running down the middle of the creature. 

The mycologists flinch at your sudden intrusion. They reach for the scissors behind you to cut the thread once they’ve finished stitching. 

“I thought I told you not to peek!” The smaller head scolds you, slamming the scissors onto the operating table.

“I wish I had peeked earlier.” You tease him. There’s truth to your words as you didn’t get to see much as you intended. “It’s really cool stuff! I’d love if you can teach me.” 

It’s quite surprising how eager you are but also endearing. You’ve always shown interest in their work but you’ve never insisted like this. 

You can tell by the look on their face that they are silently debating whether it’s a good idea. You’ve always wondered if they can talk to each other inside of their head whenever they go silent like this. 

The larger head lets out a hefty sigh as they peel off their thick, bloody gloves. “Give us time to talk it over, love. But if we do teach you we won’t start with operations. There’s a lot you need to learn about anatomy and things first.” He smiles at you nervously and reach over to hug them, disregarding the bloody apron they’re wearing. 

Usually they wouldn’t allow this but they love that look in your eyes.

[etsuven]

summary: next up on the list, your loyal knight, xiao! although he spends most of his time around you (being your personal guard and all), you can't help but wonder what he does during those few moments where he's not looking after you. character included: xiao nova affectus series: day in his life <[previous] - [next]>

xiao normally woke up quite early.

six am, to be exact. why? well, you usually got up at eight, and getting up early gave him a lot of time to get ready and stretch for the day. his room was right next to yours, and he was a very light sleeper. it was perfect because if any commotion happened in your room in the middle of the night, he'd be the first to know.

his morning stretches usually consisted of simple stuff. leaning down to touch his feet, stretching his arms, lifting his leg up and seeing how long he could hold it for, splits where he rested his head on his knees.

yeah, 'simple stuff.'

once he was done, he took his knights uniform out of his closet, slipping it on and checking every inch of fabric to make sure it was up to standards. collar? check. intricate armor? check. the only thing that was missing was...

his trusty spear.

the primordial jade winged spear... the weapon had been gifted to xiao when he was hired by your family. apparently it was sent over along with him from the prince of the nearby liyue kingdom where he originally lived. it was sitting next to his bed, easy to spot in case of emergencies.

he grabbed the spear, taking a good look at it before finally walking out of the room to stand in front of your door. this wasn't his favorite part of the day, as it was just him sitting in front of your door until you eventually woke up and came to bother him, but he didn't really mind the silence. the next hour and a half went by quicker than he expected.

xiao usually spent the time thinking, occasionally greeting the various maids, butlers, and cleaners that went past him. he also greeted a worker who personally tended to you, which was a sign that he needed to start preparing himself.

and like he expected- around 30 minutes later, you came walking out, rubbing the sleep out of your eyes. you were dressed in a more thin and form fitting outfit, as you were preparing for your daily training with him. "good morning, xiao!"

xiao bowed at you, right hand over his heart and left arm behind his back, just like he was taught. "good morning, your highness. i assume you're ready for training?" he followed you as you started to walk down the hallway, jade weapon in hand.

"of course!" you laughed, turning around and giving him a wide smile. your smile had been the same ever since the two met as almost teenagers, and it was honestly his favorite thing about you. "i'll definitely beat you today, just you wait!" the two of you walked by many rooms on your way to the courtyard, and you passed the time by chatting to him and waving to every person you saw.

eventually, you made it to the training grounds, and xiao waited for you as you chose your weapon. he had put down his spear when the two of you had gotten there, trading the weapon for a dull spear that had no chance of hurting you. you had decided to go with a sword, but xiao was sure that you'd choose something else the next day.

after choosing your weapon, you took up an offensive stance, feet a little close for xiao’s liking, but he wouldn’t tell you that now. you would figure out your mistake later. your voice rang through the training yard, echoing thanks to the walls that surrounded you.

“get ready to get beaten!” you said, a confident smile on your face. xiao rolled his eyes, greatly amused by your little talk. he pulled off the shirt of his knights uniform, setting it to the side and leaving him in a form fitting, sleeveless top that showed off his arms and back.

picking up the dull spear, he got into a more defensive stance, moving his spear in front of his body so it would act as sort of a shield. “i doubt that you’ll beat me. now, enough talk- let’s get started.”

you immediately raced forward, swinging your sword in a direction that wasn’t protected by xiao’s spear. with his inhumanly fast reflexes, xiao blocked your swing, and you quickly found yourself on the defensive instead.

you tried to get back on the offensive, but the swings from xiao’s spear kept you from really doing anything. suddenly, xiao swept a foot under your legs, tripping you and causing you to fall backwards. you tried to get back up. but you were met with the dull tip of his spear being pushed against your neck.

“i win.” he spoke, and you could sense a bit of amusement in his voice. letting out a cry of exhaustion, you rested your head against the ground, pouting. “that wasn’t fair!”

the skilled knight let out a soft sigh, removing his weapon from your neck. he held back a small smile at the sight of your pout, instead holding a hand out for you to take. you gave him a glare (it wasn’t very scary) before taking hold of his and pulling yourself up.

“first off, your biggest mistake,” xiao walked over to his previous spot, turning his head to make sure you were listening to him. “when it came to both your defense and offense, you were too stiff.”

he got in a random pose, and it quickly occurred to you that it was probably the stance you were in as you were training. it looked weird on him, especially when you compared it to his usual elegant yet sophisticated moves.

“your legs were too far apart, which was why i was able to trip you like that.” crossing his arms, xiao continued to speak. “and while you did try to get past my defense, you were just a tad bit too slow.”

you let out a long groan, patting the dirt off your clothes. training wasn’t really your favorite thing to do, and while it was fun at times, it was tiring when you constantly had to perfect every last bit of your stance for multiple weapons.

“‘just a bit slow…’ alright, i’ve got it.” you picked up your sword, brushing the dirt off the hilt of the sword. “now that i’ve heard all of this, i’m sure i’ll be able to beat you this time.”

you got into position, and followed xiao’s advice. legs not too far apart, making sure you weren’t too stiff. there’s no way you would be beaten now, you looked perfect.

“alright, your highness,” xiao got in position as well, his eyes scanning your body. after a second or two, he looked back at your face, seemingly pleased by how you had taken note of his advice. “give it your best shot.”

you lost again.

please note that i have no idea how to fight-

taglist

@frieschan @pixyys @lunaflvms

[stonersnowyyy]

I wanna be yours

quick little story about Tallahassee from zombie land, its not necessarily a x reader but it can be goes by town names main characters name is jersey, I dot really have a summer but its about the song I wanna be yours, enjoy <3

Falling in love in the apocalypse wasn't easy, you weren't supposed to love somebody when you never knew if you never knew if you'd ie another day, he fell for her fast, the first day they found her actually, names were to formal to them but calling her by her home town really suited her, Jersey worked well for her, almost to well. he had this need to be by her side and protect her.

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust.

they grew closer during the time they had with her, fighting side by side. staying up late nights while driving, she would fall asleep in the back of the truck with him when they would switch drivers, as time went on Tallahassee really felt something for this girl, he never thought it was possible.

I wanna be your ford cortina, I will never rust.

he saved her one to many times, it was something he felt like he had to do, he couldn't lose her before he got her, being in love was scary but not knowing if the person loved you back or not was scarier, he wasn't the kind of man to let his emotions show, but he was up some nights thinking about it, did she really want him or were they just friends.

if you like your coffee hot, let me be your coffee pot

she loved him more than he would know, she fell for him the minute he got out of the truck when they found her walking the interstate, she felt like she could trust trust him, something about Tallahassee drew her more into him, like a moth to the flame, he was beauty in mortal form, she wanted him to be her's forever.

you call the shots, babe, I just wanna be yours

over the months she tried to amen her feelings more apparent, going out of her way to help him or get him something he needed, Jersey would be first to tend to his wounds, always making sure he's well and taken care of, he would do the same for her, Tallahassee helped her with her aim and taught her more self defence moves.

Secrets I have held in my heart, are harder to hide than I thought, maybe I just wanna be your's, I wanna be your's

the group started to notice the change in their relationship, the way jersey would take to him and the way Tallahassee would look at her, something about how they acted with each other verses others spoke volumes, they both wanted each other but they were both to scared to scared to make the first move, maybe time would tell.

I wanna be your's, I wanna be your's, I wanna be your's, I wanna be your's,

she almost got bit and that made Tallahassee realize they might not have forever together, he almost turned a cold shoulder to her, he still cared but stopped acting like he was in love, Columbus and Wichita helped Jersey through a lot of stuff since Tallahassee wasn't in her corner like he used to be, Jersey felt foolish, how could someone like Tallahassee love someone so basic like her.

let me be your 'leccy meter, and I'll never run out.

turning a cold shoulder to her felt wrong Tallahassee wanted nothing more then to hold her and tell her it will all be fine, he just wanted to be there for Jersey and live in domestic bliss with her, having a life in the zombie apocalypse was hard but he still wanted to try and have one with her, he just didn't want either of them to be hurt.

let me be the portable heater, that you'll get cold without.

Tallahassee tried to get back to what it used to be but it was hard, her walls were back up, he knew it was his fault he pushed her away, Tallahassee hurt Jersey trying to protect her, he learned two things that day, you can't protect somebody who doesn't want it, and that everything comes with a cost so why not risk it to feel something for once.

I wanna be your setting lotion, hold your hair in deep devotion (how deep).

it all went back to normal one night, they all had drinks at their temporary home, Jersey's true feelings slowly came out, she would lay on Tallahassee a bit more, nuzzled her face into his neck at points and hold eye contact with him with a look she never had before, she had followed him to his room that night.

at least as deep as the Pacific Ocean, now I wanna be your's.

Jersey laid on Tallahassee clearly wanting more than just cuddling but Tallahassee couldn't bring himself to do anything but hold her, he didn't want the women he loved to hook up with him while hammered, Tallahassee wanted a first with her that meant more than sex, he held her that night as they stared at each other, Tallahassee played with her hair till she fell asleep, he fell asleep with Jersey and never felt more in love.

Secrets I have held in my heart, are harder to hide than I thought, maybe I just wanna be your's.

waking up bids Tallahassee made jersey feel safe, the feeling of him gripping her hips and holding her securely against his chest made her really feel like she was in love, she didn't want it to end, the sweet feeling of bliss, but she didn't know if he felt the same, what if Tallahassee just pushed her away again when he got up.

I wanna be your's, I wanna be your's, wanna be your's, wanna be your's.

when Tallahassee did wake up he just held her and kissed the back of her head, Tallahassee didn't want to leave the bed, he wanted to stay in that moment as long as he could, jersey was the one for him, they never knew if tomorrow was promised and he didn't want to wait anymore, he wanted to call jersey his.

wanna be your's, wanna be your's, wanna be your's.

Tallahassee finally asked Jersey if she would be his and if he could her's, she said yes and they spent that morning laying together both wanting to soak in the bliss, but of course they must stay on the move you can never truly get comfortable, everything felt better now, Columbus had Wichita, Little Rock found comfort in seeing her sister happy, they all had peace, as much peace as they could get.

Wanna be your's, wanna be your's, wanna be your's.

being on the road was always a highlight, Jersey, Tallahassee, Columbus and Wichita spent time singing songs together while driving, making some up or just trying to remember songs the group used to like, it felt like they were truly a family. Jersey never thought she would find what she was looking for in a black truck on the interstate that day but it was.

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner (I wanna be your's) breathing in your dust (I wanna be your's)

they all wanted somewhere to call home, somewhere to feel safe and have relaxing days, not having to stress about the outside world unless they needed food or medical supplies, the started searching threw LA for a place to live they planned to stay together they didn't want to split up, they grew close over the months they spent together.

I wanna be your ford cortina (wanna be your's) I will never rust (wanna be your's).

after finding a home in the hills they all started to settle into a routine and normal life, Jersey and Tallahassee would be the ones to go out and collect supplies, it gave them both a rush they craved, they both wanted the feeling of freedom it brought to walk in a store grab what they want and walk out.

I just wanna be your's (wanna be your's) I just wanna be your's (wanna be your's) I just wanna be your's (wanna be your's)

Tallahassee and jersey had the peace they needed and the love they both craved, finally Tallahassee had someone who matched his energy, jersey finally had a man that let her be herself and not feel a pressure to be a perfect girl, they really were made for each other, Tallahassee had never been happier that he fell in love and stuck with the feeling, he wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

I hope you guys like it this is my first fic I've posted if you have any feed back or want any more let me know <3

[shmorp-mcdurgen]

Alternate AU: New Beginnings

Cesar Torres meets up with a familiar face, and when he visits the BPS headquarters, he’s greeted by one that’s...not as friendly.

Notes: This is around 3’500 words, and isn’t as well thought out as my last two alt au fics, but I wanted to write how I think Cesar’s first day in the BPS went. So once again, I hope you enjoy :)

The sun was beginning to set over Bythorne, casting darkness over the town as people began to head home for the night. Two bright beams emitting from the headlights of a black car hit the side of a small house, which rested near the edge of town. The vehicle’s engine rumbled as it parked in the small driveway before its lights shut off and the doors opened.

Emerging from the driver’s side was a man in his mid-twenties, staring at the home with curiosity. Cesar was wearing a red hoodie over a white button up shirt. His raven-black hair was long and wavy, with one grey streak running down his bangs. He had faint stubble over his chin and upper lip, mainly because he didn’t feel like shaving. His brown eyes stared at the home as he began to approach it.

“So…this is the place?” Cesar asked the figure leaving the car behind him.

“Yep. It’s…not a lot,” The figure sighed, her gaze fixed on the house as well as she followed Cesar. “It was the cheapest rent we could find around here.”

Sarah was a younger woman, wearing a black hoodie with the letters BPS written on her chest in bright yellow lettering. Her long, brown hair draped over her shoulders, running down her back. She approached Cesar, who was standing next to the front door, waiting for her to let them both in.

“It’s not all bad,” Sarah said as she took out a key from her pocket. “It does the job fine enough. Just…don’t expect anything fancy.” She opened the door, gesturing inside as Cesar walked into the building. Sarah followed close behind, shutting the door behind her.

Cesar took a look around the living room, seeing that it wasn’t…the cleanest place he had ever seen. Cardboard boxes were littered in the corner of the room, along with some miscellaneous junk that hadn’t been thrown away. Sarah seemed to notice the disarray as well, as she immediately let out an annoyed groan. “God damn it…I told him to clean his shit.” Sarah muttered under her breath. “I’m sorry, Cesar, I promise it’s normally cleaner than this.”

“Uh…are those…guns?” Cesar pointed towards a pair of firearms resting against the wall, one being a shotgun and the other being a huntsman’s rifle. Small boxes of bullets were resting on the coffee table sitting in front of the couch, as if someone was planning a hunting trip.

“Oh…yeah, you don’t need to worry about those.” Sarah said. “I mean, you’ve been around guns before, right?”

“I…guess.” Cesar stated. “I shot a pistol at a gun range once, though it was a long time ago.”

“Well, with…the alternate…thing, it’s just safer to have a gun handy, you know?” Sarah said. “Now…why don’t I show you around? There’s not a whole lot to see, but if you’re gonna stay here, you might as well know where the bathroom is.”

“Heh…yeah,” Cesar said with a slight smile. “Sure.”

“Who is this?”

Cesar was nearly startled out of his shoes when he heard the deep, extremely gravelly voice coming from the hallway. He glanced over to where the voice originated, seeing that he and Sarah weren’t the only ones there. A very tall, long-legged man was standing in the hall, glaring at Cesar through dark eyes. He was wearing a dark grey tank top, which itself was partially covered by a black back-brace around his mid-section. In fact, both his elbows and knees were covered in similar braces. His black hair was tied back in a messy bun, and his facial hair was scraggly. Just looking at him made Cesar nervous, and the man’s intense glare only made that feeling worse.

“Oh…hey, Seth.” Sarah sighed, sounding like she was preparing for a lecture.

“Who the hell is this?” Seth repeated, his cold glare still fixed on Cesar as he approached the two. Cesar couldn’t help but notice that Seth walked with a slight limp, using his right leg more than the left.

“This is Cesar, I knew him a few years ago.” Sarah explained.

Seth looked down at Cesar, who was attempting to conceal his discomfort. Seth looked as if he didn’t sleep in days, if the dark circles around his eyes were any indication. His gloved hands were curled into loose fists, hanging by his sides. Cesar noticed that he was wearing a belt around his hips, which had a pistol in a holster clipped onto it. Seth stared deep into Cesar’s eyes, as if he was looking for something.

“…Uh…hey…?” Cesar smiled nervously.

“…If you’re one of them, you’re pretty convincing.” Seth muttered. “Or you’re just a special case.”

“Seth, please…” Sarah said.

“Sarah, can I talk to you for a second?” Seth asked before walking towards one of the other rooms, finally letting Cesar let out his breath. Sarah shook her head slightly before glancing back at Cesar, shrugging slightly. When she joined Seth, and they were out of view of Cesar, Seth let out a sigh.

“I told you to let me know these things in advance.” Seth stated.

“Damn it, do we have to go through this every time?” Sarah asked. “I know him personally; can I not just let him join?”

“How well do you know him?” Seth asked.

“Well enough; my brother was good friends with him.” Sarah responded with a twinge of annoyance. “He’s a good man, I know it—”

“Was he acting…strange before he got here?”

“No, he wasn’t.”

“How long has it been since you last saw him?”

“I don’t know…around…eight years?”

“Eight?” Seth repeated. “And you don’t think that anything could have happened in between then and now?”

“No, it…it doesn’t seem like it.”

“Are you sure that he’s—”

“Seth, can you please just…chill for a moment?” Sarah interrupted. “You go through this…thing every single time we get a new member.”

“I just wish you actually told me before you bring in someone you only know through association.” Seth sighed.

“Don’t you ever think this is the reason no one joins the BPS anymore?” Sarah asked. “You scare them away before you even know them.”

“I do not—”

“Yes you do.” Sarah responded. “Just…please. Give him a chance, at least. Can you do that?”

“I’m just being careful, Sarah,” Seth defended, his bushy eyebrows furrowing on his face. “You should be too.”

“Don’t you think you’re being too ‘careful’?”

“…Sarah…don’t you remember what happened the last time I wasn’t careful?” Seth’s voice lowered. “Bad things happen.”

“…I guess…but…come on, you know that wasn’t because of you.” Sarah said, equally lowering her voice. “I believe this time will be different. Can you please just give Cesar a chance? Just this once?”

Seth remained silent, looking at his feet before he let out a deep sigh. “…So you are certain…that you trust him?” Seth asked quietly.

“Yes.”

“…Alright.”

Cesar sat cross-legged on the couch, waiting for Sarah and Seth to be done with their conversation. He heard their muffled voices behind the wall, feeling a sense of unease as he attempted to figure out what they were saying. He felt like he was about to be interrogated by the police, if the cop was instead a gruff, stupidly tall man that looked like he’d shoot Cesar dead if he just looked at him funny. He was almost relieved when Sarah and Seth finally walked back into the living room, breaking the increasingly unbearable tension. Cesar stood up quickly, keeping an eye on Seth specifically as he approached.

“Your name is Cesar, correct?” Seth asked, lightly brushing against Sarah as he walked in front of her.

“Yeah.” Cesar responded. “…Cesar Torres.”

“Well, Cesar, while you’re here, you’re going to adhere to the rules we have in place, you understand?” Seth stated.

“Yeah, I…I guess so.” Cesar agreed.

“Sarah will show you around,” Seth glanced at Sarah. “But if you have any questions, you come to me. You understand?”

“Uh…yeah; yeah of course.” Cesar coughed, having to force his gaze away from the pistol on the older man’s hip.

“If anything happens,” Seth turned to Sarah as he lowered his voice, “You come to me, and I’ll take care of it.”

“Okay, I’ll take it from here.” Sarah said.

Seth took one last glance at Cesar before leaving the room, closing the door behind him. There was silence for a moment before Cesar looked towards Sarah, “What was…all that about?” He asked.

“I…I’m sorry, I forgot to mention him.” Sarah crossed her arms. “That’s Seth. He’s the head of the BPS. I wouldn’t worry about him; he’s harmless.”

“…I fucking doubt that, honestly.” Cesar muttered. “He looked like he’d kill me without second thought.”

           “He’ll get over it…it might just…take a while.” Sarah said, not quite confident in her statement. “Well…do you still want to take a look around?”

           “Uh…sure.” Cesar responded. “I guess…”

           As Sarah led Cesar down the main hallway to the other rooms, Cesar remembered something Seth had said. “Uh…what was the whole…’come get me if something happens’ thing Seth said?”

           “He…he’s still not convinced you aren’t an alternate.” Sarah sighed. “He basically told me he’d shoot you if you try anything.”

           “…Oh.” Cesar stopped in place, staring at the ground before shaking his head slightly and following Sarah into one of the rooms. “Swell guy…and you said he’s harmless?”

           “To people who don’t deserve it.” Sarah responded, stopping in the middle of the small bedroom. “…Well. Here’s the bedroom. This is where you can sleep and keep your stuff.”

           Cesar looked into the bedroom, seeing that there were two twin-sized beds next to opposite sides of the room, both empty. There were a few boxes in the corner, resting in front of the closet to the right of the bedroom door. They were all unmarked, cardboard boxes, full of random possessions and clothes. It wasn’t a bad size for a bedroom; better than the apartment he had been living in anyway. At the very least, it was big enough for both him and his cat to stay in.

           “Sorry about the mess…we haven’t cleaned out this room yet.” Sarah said, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed.

           “Is this where you sleep too?” Cesar asked.

           “No, I sleep in the other room.” Sarah stated. “No one stays in here right now…Seth sleeps on the couch.”

           “Oh…so you just…use this as a storage room or something?” Cesar asked, hesitantly approaching the pile of boxes.

           “Don’t touch those.”

           Cesar froze, looking back at Sarah, noticing the strange…almost sad stare she was giving him.

“…Oh…sorry.” Cesar backed away, sliding his hands in his pockets. As much as he wanted to know whose possessions were in the boxes, he figured it would’ve been best to stay silent. It didn’t seem like Sarah wanted to answer anyway.

“…So…uh…” Cesar coughed forcefully, hoping to break the tension. “What...do you guys do, exactly? Is it just paranormal investigations and all that?”

“…Basically, yeah.” Sarah responded. “We take reports, we go to the locations and investigate, rinse and repeat.”

“So…like the Ghostbusters?”

“No.” Sarah stated. “You wouldn’t believe the amount of times people called us the fucking Mystery Gang, or the Ghostbusters, or some other shit.”

“…Oh.” Cesar muttered. “But you guys are like ghost hunters, right?”

“In a way,” Sarah shrugged. “Though we take other reports too. Like…well…Alternate reports.” Sarah’s voice seemed to lower slightly at the mention of alternates.

“…Alternates?” Cesar repeated, approaching Sarah with disbelief in his eyes. “You guys…go after fucking alternates?”

“Occasionally.”

“Holy shit…” Cesar exhaled.

“…Cesar…this may seem kinda…out of nowhere, but can I ask you something?” Sarah asked, sounding as if she was itching to ask whatever question she was thinking of for a long time.

“Shoot.”

“…Have you seen Mark?” Sarah’s voice had a hint of desperation, her eyes with a glint of sadness. Cesar was taken aback, looking at the ground before scratching the back of his head. “It’s…just been years since I’ve heard anything about him, and I just want to know if you…if you’ve seen him, or heard anything new. No one’s been telling me anything, and you were really close to him, so I was just hoping…you knew anything?” Sarah continued as Cesar thought intently.

“…No.” Cesar stated, unsure if he was actually telling the truth. “No, I haven’t.”

Sarah sighed in disappointment, her eyes not making contact with Cesar’s. “I just thought…you would’ve known more.” Sarah muttered. “I mean…you stayed in Mandela longer than I did…as soon as I could, I got the fuck out of that hellhole.”

Cesar knew that the statement was false. He knew very well that he left Mandela before Sarah was legally allowed to live on her own. He left Mandela when he was 18 and still in high school, long before he was prepared to start his own life. The night he left his loving home and drove away from everything he grew up with. The night he met—

“Are you alright?” Sarah asked softly.

Cesar wasn’t sure why she asked that until he noticed that a tear was running down his face. He wiped it off with his sleeve, coughing before finally answering her question. “I’m alright, just…tired, I guess.”

“Do you want to go back to your place?” Sarah asked. “I can get everything cleaned up before you start living here.”

“Ah…it’s…it’s fine.” Cesar said. “I want to kinda…get used to this place anyway…get used to…Seth being there.”

“I’m sure you’ll get used to everything soon enough.” Sarah assured. As she examined Cesar’s distracted expression, she felt a sense of sadness radiating off of her friend. “…Are you sure you’re alright?”

“Yeah…” Cesar lied. “…I guess.”

Cesar was led by Sarah around the apartment, getting used to the layout of the place and the fact that there were guns in every single room. Sarah told him that most of them belonged to Seth, which wasn’t very surprising; he looked like the kind of guy to own a military’s worth of firearms. Overall, it wasn’t a bad apartment; for the shoestring budget that the BPS had, it wasn’t too crowded, even with three people living in it.

After the tour was over, Sarah and Cesar sat in the living room, both of them looking at the coffee table, which had multiple pieces of tech laid across it. Sarah explained the purposes of all of them, all while Cesar listened with interest.

“…And this is a spirit box,” Sarah stated as she picked up one of the gadgets. “Ghosts can use the radio frequencies to communicate to the living.”

“Huh…spooky.” Cesar said, lightly taking the spirit box out of her hand and examining it. “I’ve seen shows about ghost hunting…they almost always have one of these.”

“It’s one of the most common things to use in paranormal investigations.” Sarah said. “So…yeah, of course you’ve seen it on TV…well…before they were banned a year ago.”

“I never understood that.” Cesar said. “Like why get rid of the fuckin TVs? Last time I checked, alternates can’t come through TVs.”

“Well…you never know, those things are…unpredictable.” Sarah stated.

“Yeah…definitely.” Cesar muttered.

Sarah looked at the gadgets on the table, furrowing her brows before she sighed. “Fuck, I forgot the thermal camera…” Sarah stood up from the couch. “You should probably know how to use it…I’ll be back in a second, sit tight.” Sarah left the room, walking down the hallway until she was out of view. Cesar sighed, leaning back on the couch as he began waiting for Sarah to get back.

“Looks like you’ve had a rough time.”

Cesar jerked his body around, seeing that Seth was walking towards the couch, staring at him. “…How long…have you been there?” Cesar asked sheepishly.

“I only just came in here.” Seth stated. “Heard you and Sarah talking.”

“…Wait, what do you mean?” Cesar asked. “…The whole…me having a rough time thing. How would you even tell?”

“That streak in your hair.” Seth responded, his hand reaching into his pocket and taking out a box of cigarettes; it was nearly empty. No wonder he had such a gruff voice.

“…What about it?” Cesar asked, lightly touching his grey bang with his hand.

“You know…I read somewhere that people’s hair can turn grey after a traumatic experience.” Seth explained as he lit the cigarette in his mouth. “…some people’s hair turned completely white.”

“…I…I just thought it was just some…coincidence.” Cesar said.

“Not trying to pry, kid…” Seth said. “But what exactly happened to make you want to join the BPS?”

“…I…I don’t know, I just kinda…felt…a calling?” Cesar struggled to find the words, not wanting to tell the guy the exact reason. “I felt like I could…get some answers.”

Seth paused, sighing a bit before walking in front of Cesar and sitting on the other end of the couch, avoiding sitting right next to the young man. “…Yeah, that’s what a lot of people want. It’s not like anyone else is gonna answer anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mandela County especially has been trying to keep everything down low.” Seth explained. “Bythorne is the same; though you can be a bit more…open with talking about those things here than you can in Mandela.”

“I-I see.” Cesar said.

“You’re from there, right?” Seth questioned. “That’s what Sarah told me anyway.”

“…I used to live there, yeah.” Cesar answered.

“Ah.” Seth said, squinting his eyes slightly. “I’ve always hated that cesspool. Nothing but…death. Death, pain, and police who don’t care about the people they’re supposed to protect.”

“Heh…you…you got something against Mandela, huh?” Cesar smiled slightly.

“I…grew up there.” Seth said. “…Wouldn’t say it was much of a childhood, but I stayed there until I was old enough to leave.”

“I always felt…weird about Mandela.” Cesar said. “I…I don’t want to go back there in a million years.”

“…Well, sorry to say, kid, but you just might.”

“…What?” Cesar looked at Seth, who was staring at his feet.

“Mandela is where we get quite a few reports from.” Seth explained. “…So you might have to tag along.”

Cesar sighed, the clear worry in his face getting the attention of Seth. He sat up straight, staring at Cesar as he thought to himself.

“Cesar, I’m going to warn you,” Seth stated. “If you want to be in the BPS, you’re gonna need to be ready for anything. You may find yourself in…dangerous situations…situations that can be life or death. You need to know how to defend yourself from those…things out there, and most importantly, you need to be mentally strong. If you don’t think you can do any of those things, I’d recommend leaving now.”

Cesar remained silent, staring at Seth’s face, seeing that his eyes were cold, as if he was fully expecting Cesar to give up right there. Cesar sat still, contemplating as Seth stared at him, awaiting an answer. “I’m giving you an out, Torres.” Seth stated. “You can leave. No one will be mad at you.”

“…No.” Cesar muttered under his breath.

“…No?”

“No, I’m…I’m not just gonna leave before I even start.” Cesar continued. “I want—no—I need answers to some things that…I just can’t get out of my mind. I need to figure out…why.”

“…Why, what?”

“Why…I…saw…” Cesar trailed off, realizing he wasn’t ready to talk about his own…encounter, especially with a man that seemed to not give two shits about him. “I just need to figure things out.”

Seth remained silent for a moment, taking another hit from his cigarette, seeming surprised by Cesar’s response. “Fair enough…I suppose.” He coughed. “Just know that you can’t fool around, you hear?”

“I won’t.”

“Good. Fucking around might very well get you killed.” Seth said, standing up from the couch. Cesar heard a crack come from Seth’s knees, along with a slight grunt as he stood there for a moment, grimacing slightly.

“…You alright?” Cesar asked.

“Yeah…just…” Seth sighed deeply, walking away. “…Fucking bullshit…”

Cesar watched as Seth left the room, brushing past Sarah as she came back with the camera. She watched him leave before looking back At Cesar, quickly walking back to the couch. “Sorry about that, I had to look through one of the boxes for this.” Sarah said, placing the camera on the table.

“Oh…no problem.” Cesar said.

“Did…Seth say anything rude to you?” Sarah asked.

“Huh? Oh…no, not really.” Cesar responded. “…I don’t think.”

“Good…” Sarah said. “I’m just…tired of him threatening new members.”

Cesar looked towards the hallway Seth left through, sighing deeply as he thought to himself. He started wondering if he was really going to get answers for his plight in the BPS, or if he really was putting himself in danger like Seth mentioned. He had been haunted by questions for as long as he had lived in Bythorne, none of which getting any answers. Who knew; maybe Seth would end up warming up to him, as unlikely as it appeared. Until that day however, Cesar was going to be careful. The last thing he needed was to get shot.