#stave off the brain worms

[cuffmeinblack]

Bound in Blood

Sebastian Sallow x f!reader

Tags: explicit | dark!Sebastian | angst | infidelity | sex | blood | violence

6.1k words

Summary: After several years, Sebastian is invited to visit by your betrothed, upending the cosy little life you've made for yourself with Ominis.

ao3 link

A/n: I started this ages ago after writing Old Habits as a what-if involving infidelity, which then evolved into a vague idea about a blood kink. It turned out as neither. I enjoy exaggerating Sebastian's darker traits, so I hope you know what you're getting by now. Reader is an arsehole, Ominis deserves better.

He had you pinned to the wall once again, though this time you didn't belong to him—your body was not his plaything anymore. You told yourself as such in an attempt to stave off the lustful hunger that rose like bile in your chest and the ache that settled between your legs. The words were superficial, the truth hidden just below the surface; you wanted him, still. After everything he'd put you through, your heart still ached for Sebastian Sallow.

It wasn't that Ominis was a poor partner, far from it. You loved Ominis deeply, and if the man in front of you simply didn't exist, you felt you could live a long and perfectly content life alongside him. But Sebastian did exist, and he knew exactly what to say; to worm his way into your brain, plant a seed and let it grow and flourish until everything else was deprived of thought and there was only him. Only his idea, his words that filled your consciousness every waking moment and invaded your dreams.

Be mine again. 

You'd been down this road once before and had your heart not only broken but shredded, left to Ominis to gently mend. His tenderness and unconditional love had seen you through your darkest days as Sebastian galavanted around the city without a care (or so you bitterly assumed). But there remained a missing part, a gaping hole nobody else could fill.

So here you were against the wall. Your living room wall. You could scarcely believe he was here, and at the invitation of your betrothed, no less. He truly hadn’t changed a bit, neither outwardly or inwardly it would seem—Ominis would be disappointed.

“You haven’t changed a bit, Sebastian,” you said bitterly.

“Don’t pretend to be disappointed. I saw your eyes light up when I arrived. They looked so dull before…what has our dear Ominis been doing with you?” he teased, stroking a finger down the side of your cheek.

You didn’t give him the satisfaction of flinching away, only staring into his dark eyes with a bored expression that belied your racing heart. If he felt your pulse or caught the deepness of your breaths he’d know you were lying.

“Does Ominis really give you what you need?”

“He does. He loves me, Sebastian. And I him.”

“What we had was deeper even than love. We bled together. He doesn’t know the true depths of your depravity, does he?”

He was far too close. The grip around your wrist was already starting to ache and numb your fingers with its ferocity, your wand hand utterly useless. You weren’t scared of Sebastian, not exactly; the niggling uncertainty of that thought thrilled you as your body reacted to the adrenaline.

“Get off me, Sebastian. I don’t need your sick and twisted version of love.”

“I’ll ask you again; does he give you what you need? Not what you think you want, but what you really crave? I’ll bet he doesn’t hurt you, not even when you ask him to. No, he’s too good for that; too fucking pure.”

“That’s…not all there is to life. There are more important things than…”

“What could be more important than baring your soul to one another? Your innermost desires, hm?”

Don’t listen. Sebastian was a Siren and you his unwitting victim. A Veela with no shred of remorse, with the power to lure with a look and a beautifully deceptive song. You loved Ominis, and your heart ached with guilt for simply being in this compromising position. 

“Ominis will be home soon,” you deflected, turning your head away from him.

Your eyes darted over his arm braced against the wall, his freckled forearm tanned from the sun except for a thin white scar that ran across the topside of his wrist—a memento of your time together. Sebastian sighed as you refused to meet his eyes, releasing his palm from the wall to turn your head. 

“I only answered him so I could see you. It’s been a long few years,” he said.

“You should have known I wouldn’t want to see you...”

“That’s not true,” Sebastian snarled.

"You left, Sebastian."

"I regret that every day."

"Did you think I'd just wait around, hoping you'd come back?"

"I didn't think you'd fuck my best friend, that's for sure," he spat.

He sighed, seeing the pain in your eyes as the memories of his departure flooded your mind once again. Those days had been dark, the nights even darker. The only light a dim flame in the form of Ominis which grew brighter with every passing week. He hadn't managed to extinguish the gloom, but had made the path ahead navigable, more bearable. 

"I'm sorry."

The apology shocked you, and the sincerity even more so. Sebastian was adept at manipulation but not even he could have feigned the shake in his voice and the glaze of his eyes. Your stomach churned, a turbulent sea that swelled when he touched your cheek. His calloused hands warmed your skin as you instinctively leaned into the touch. How quick your body betrayed you in his presence. Every fibre of your being felt compelled to fall into his arms on the sliver of hope that this time would be different. The thought faintly disgusted you, disappointed by your own weakness and Sebastian's own willingness to hurt his former best friend. You'd hesitated too long, and he'd grown impatient, taking your failure to pull away as consent. 

Sebastian honed in quickly, the way he did in battle with swift, precise movements that left little time for retaliation. Your defenses had dropped and he'd taken advantage, capturing your lips before any protest could leave them—not that there was one forthcoming. He felt and tasted familiar and comforting despite everything, even the lingering taste of liquor coating his tongue. His hands barely landed on your waist before they were roaming your body, his weight pressed against you. The hum of deep satisfaction he poured into your mouth spoke of a longing that you echoed as your fingers found that fluffy brunet mane. 

Tongues met in a breathy caress, fingers kneading and pulling as if trying to absorb one another, body and soul. The swirling guilt in your gut was almost crushed by the heavy swell of desire—almost. Ominis' words he'd spoken to you years ago came to the forefront of your mind whilst Sebastian was busy making short work of your blouse buttons.

"Let me be your comfort; my heart already belongs to you, all I ask for is time to earn yours."

Your lips froze, body ceasing its response to Sebastian's touch. The sudden frigidity halted his advance, eyes flickering open and lips departing. He pulled away merely an inch, eyes boring into yours in question.

"I can't. I can't do it to him."

Sebastian didn't have a chance to respond with an argument or plea, or whatever he had planned, before the click of a lock jolted you both into action. Your fingers fumbled with your blouse, hastily rebuttoning it whilst Sebastian tended to his hair. He was still far too close, apparently unwilling to part further than a hair's breadth. You slipped away, across the wall and towards the front door to greet who you presumed to be Ominis. Sebastian didn't follow, his scent fading as you made your way down the hallway.

"Ominis, you're back…," you said, hesitantly grasping his hand in welcome.

The remorse of what you'd done felt like a lump in your throat you were unable to swallow, making your voice sound strangled, pitched, guilty. If that were true, Ominis didn't pick up on the change in tone, placing a gentle kiss on your cheek as he pulled off his suit jacket. He stretched as if his body had been restricted by the fabric, finally free to relax. Or so he thought.

"You sound surprised, my love," he commented.

"I'm more surprised that Sebastian is here."

Ominis' eyebrows shot into his hairline; clearly he hadn't been expecting the visit either. 

"Since when?" he asked, walking down the hallway.

You fell in behind him, watching him fuss over his shirt collar. As if Sebastian would care about such a thing. Mumbling something about Sebastian's sudden arrival as you entered the living room, until silence fell once more as the tension thickened and then curdled. Ominis must have recognised something; perhaps his scent, which now clinged to you like cigarette smoke. They stood in one another's presence for far longer than was necessary, neither deigning to speak first until you couldn't stand it any longer.

"Sebastian only got here about half an hour ago."

"Indeed. It was nice of you to receive me," Sebastian said with a piercing glare in your direction.

"You came," Ominis said, disbelieving. "If I was honest, I hadn't thought you would."

"Then why write?" Sebastian said with a hint of amusement.

That seemed to pull a small smile from Ominis, and the pair greeted one another properly. They shook hands and exchanged pleasantries whilst you stayed in the background, but never ignored. Sebastian found it so easy to act as if nothing has happened. He'd come with the intention of stealing you away, shredding the last chance of rekindling his relationship with Ominis. Yet here he sat in your house, with your fiancé, sharing details of one another's lives. Had he given up so easily? Or was this merely a sickening ploy to gain access to your lives; to you?

The evening passed with no further misdeeds, only pleasant, if not slightly stilted conversation. One thing became apparent whilst the two men talked—they were very different people. Shaped by years of opposing decisions, their differences so obvious in school were now glaringly so. You wondered if Sebastian would visit again. This encounter had been close to disaster—too close. When Sebastian finally left, you vowed never to make the same mistake again.

-

3 days later

You wished Ominis would stop mentioning Sebastian. Every time his mouth uttered the name your chest would tighten and an overwhelming urge to run would wash over you. He'd asked you over and over how you felt about the meeting, and so far you'd only managed to mutter a ‘fine’ or deflect the question. By now, Ominis had realised that inviting him back into your life was a mistake, though perhaps not for the reason he thought.

Sebastian had managed to slither into your consciousness and lodge himself there like an unwelcome parasite, feeding off whatever uncontrollable longing you still held for him. The tumbling thoughts refused to be banished even as you made love to Ominis, unable to stop the constant comparisons. Even his dexterous fingers couldn't coax you back to reality, nor the skillful flick of his tongue. The swirling guilt returned with a vengeance as you came undone imagining a certain brunet nestled between your legs. It tore at your heart how much Ominis cherished you; his gentleness had been such a balm when you'd come to him with open wounds. After Sebastian. You let the tears fall after your orgasm ebbed away, silently, with Ominis none the wiser.

“Are you okay, my love?” he said softly into your neck.

His warmth enveloped your back, pale arms flecked with beauty marks wrapped tightly around your waist. You'd loved those marks, still did—but now you thought of myriad freckles on tanned forearms, scarred and roughened. Imperfect. Just like you. 

“I am. We should get ready for work,” you replied.

Ominis groaned in assent, reluctantly relinquishing his grip and slithering off the bed with a parting kiss to your cheek. You smiled despite yourself, missing the embrace as soon as it was gone. Settling into your morning routine was easy; showering together, dressing beside each other, eating breakfast by the window. Ominis enjoyed the sun warming his skin as he sipped his Darjeeling. The scene was idyllic, and it filled you with sadness. When had this become not enough? The answer was obvious. Three days ago. Amongst the lure of the unknown, heady passion and danger, the monotony of your safe little life full of love felt suddenly stifling. 

“I'll see you later. I may be a little late if the Minister is doing the rounds,” he said, giving you a kiss on the cheek.

Before his lips left your skin, you turned your head to kiss him properly, messing up his neatly knotted tie in the process. As your lips locked as they had a thousand times before, you felt as if it were for the last time. A desperate clinging to what had been that no longer satisfied. You could have wept then, and you did once he'd stepped out of the door.

Sitting and staring out of the window, it took you far too long to muster the energy to stand. You'd be late for work if you lingered any longer on your dark thoughts. You were slipping on your cloak when the roar of fire caught your attention, the crackling from the fireplace all too familiar with the green glow that filled the room. You crossed the room to the fireplace, now settled in a gentle flame and burning embers. There was a face waiting for you; strained, unwelcome, beautiful.

“Sebastian. What's wrong?” you asked, crouching at the hearth.

“You can tell?”

“Of course I can.”

Sebastian hummed, his eyes flicking away for just a second before returning to you with a plea, evident even in the flickering mirage.

“I need a favour.”

“Ominis just left for work…”

“From you.”

“What is it?”

“I need to retrieve something important and I could do with some backup.”

“Backup? Are you expecting trouble?”

“Perhaps,” he said vaguely. “It's at my old home. I haven't been back for a while, but there's something of Anne's I want to retrieve…”

His voice trailed off and the silence enveloped you. You should have said no, that this was none of your concern. You had a job to get to, a fiancé to return to at the end of the day. This was a request from Sebastian, though, and you'd never been good at denying him anything. A vague thought crossed your mind that made you shudder; that he was merely using you and your formidable power as a means to an end, but you buried that along with the rest of the reasons you should have denied his request.

“I'll help. Where shall I meet you?”

His smile tugged at your heart; that particular smile he used when he got his way. Soft and somewhat cheeky that widened his eyes and caused a swell of something you'd fought hard to deny.

“Colliers Street. I'll see you soon.”

With that, he was gone, leaving you with a cold chill despite the still lit fireplace. A flick of your wand extinguished the last of the embers and you stood, hastily fastening your cloak and pulling on sensible shoes for whatever Sebastian had in store. It wasn't likely to be anything mundane. The thrill was what led you to the front door, the curiosity pushing you past the threshold. Down a flight of stairs you fled, around a corner to the brick alleyway where you vanished with a crack, a pull into oblivion, reappearing in a not-all-together familiar part of the sprawling metropolis. You thought you recognised the terraced houses, the height of Muggle architecture with their bay windows and pillared porches; however, the city looked the same wherever you roamed. This street had a hint of impropriety, and more than a little dirt underfoot. Where the fallen women roamed and men of dubious morals stalked.

You spotted him a little further along the pavement, black hood pulled forward despite the daylight. Clearly he didn't want to be recognised by anyone else, and you wondered if whatever business he had might have been better suited to nightfall. He turned to greet you before you reached him, a small smile playing on his lips. You caught the impression of smugness, something he so often carried. 

“Why have you dragged me here?” you asked, not speaking his name.

“You don't sound pleased.”

“I'm not.”

“Then why did you come if not for a little excitement in your humdrum life? Surely that office job is stifling enough to warrant skiving off once in a while?”

“You talk as if I do nothing but sit on my behind all day and lament your absence,” you said dryly.

Sebastian merely smirked and cocked his head to indicate you follow, which you did, hot on his heels as he wound his way down the street and slipped into a side alley. Decidedly worse for wear than the one beside your own house, he finally dropped his hood to reveal the mop of fluffy brunet hair and pointed to a door. 

“My old flat.”

“You're being watched?”

“Perhaps.”

Further you followed, through the shabby wooden door and up a staircase clad in broken tiles that crunched beneath your feet. 

“You lived here?”

“I did, for a while. It hasn't been as cushy as yours and Ominis' years of domestic bliss.”

You noted the bitterness in his voice and felt the twisting pull of pity. Sebastian was brilliant, capable of achieving so much, yet reduced to almost squalor. Despite being exonerated from a sentence in Azkaban, he'd carried a reputation with him ever since. No reputable employer wanted him, and so his bright mind had turned to disreputable sources of income. The pity turned to anger at the injustice of it all. 

“Dare I ask who we might expect? I need to be prepared…”

“Men who won't hesitate to kill on sight,” Sebastian cut you off.

“Merlin, what have you gotten yourself into?”

The door to his flat creaked open, not even locked. In fact, the lock looked blasted open. The inside was in a slightly better state than the entrance hall, but still bare and unwelcoming. Windows had been broken, what little furniture remained torn to shreds. 

“They've been looking for something,” you commented.

Whoever they were.

“They didn't find it. That's long since gone.”

Sebastian led you through the small rooms to an even smaller bedroom, only distinguishable by the old mattress propped against a wall. He held up a hand for you to wait, casting charms about the place before finally crouching down and waving his wand over a floorboard, no less striking than the rest. You were on high alert, ears pricked and hand twitching as he ripped up the board and delved underneath, retrieving whatever he'd been looking for in a closed palm. The small object fit neatly into his pocket. You didn't have a chance to look, or ask him what it was, before the ambush began.

The wards around the property stopped you from apparating, essentially trapping you both in the murky house as the barrage of red and green light flew from the staircase landing. They had found you, and Sebastian had been right; the jets of light crackled with the familiar energy of unforgiveable curses. You backed into the room and found him, his arm clutching you firmly in place behind him. He was shielding you. If your life hadn't been quite literally in danger, you could have kissed him. Instead, you aimed your wand at the bedroom door and braced yourself for the onslaught.

The thud of footfalls spoke of four or five pairs of shoes all thundering up the stairs. Upon the first wand peeking around the door frame, Sebastian relinquished a full force Bombarda at the unsuspecting attackers as you threw a shield charm around you both, deflecting the debris with ease. You worked so seamlessly together, as if a singular mind, so in tune with each other's duelling styles. A dance; a ballet of destruction. What remained afterwards was nothing less than a ruin, a pile of bodies in the hallway and blood; so much blood. Some your own, some Sebastian's, most from the men you now poked disrespectfully with your foot.

“You got what you wanted, we should leave,” you panted.

Sebastian looked at you in reverence with darkened eyes, a menacing glint now fading with the passing seconds of tension. The inappropriateness of it all was startling, yet you couldn't deny the overwhelming attraction you felt as he stood in his black garb, wet with the blood of his enemies. He reached out, sensing what you could barely acknowledge, and stroked a thumb over your brow. The sting as he pressed the calloused skin spoke of a wound you'd need to attend to, and sent a shiver of pleasure down your spine. 

“I'll take you to where I live now,” he said, leaving no room for debate.

As you left the flat and stepped through the wards, he laced his fingers through yours and turned on the spot, pulling you with him as he apparated. The intense adrenaline still rushed through your veins, coupled with the stress of apparating had you almost bent over as soon as you landed. That same pesky hormone had your feet taking you into another flat, straight into Sebastian's waiting arms, and inevitably his bed. You didn't have much time to take in the decoration, or utter the endless questions you wanted to ask, before he'd claimed your mouth in a kiss that felt like the end of all things. There could be no going back, not now. You'd had a taste of Sebastian and reacted like an addict; he was the purest opium, irresistible and deadly.

As his tongue flicked over your bloody lower lip, you parted your lips for him, your twinned moans meeting to harmonise in each other’s mouths. He maneuvered you backwards, losing patience with your stumbling steps—wrapping his arms under your behind, he picked you up and carried you straight to his bedroom. His mouth stayed firmly on yours until he deposited you gently on the firm mattress.

You watched him flick the clasp of his cloak open and throw the sodden fabric to the floor. Now you saw the product of your expedition. Where his clothes were bone dry and clean, the areas that had been exposed bore the truth. A nasty red gash tainted his freckled face, and you grimaced to see his beauty so marred. Holding out a hand, you beckoned him next to you, and he took the invitation. Your cloak followed shortly, and with more heated kisses exchanged the rest of your clothes were peeled away from aching muscles.

"Remember when we'd finish clearing an Ashwinder camp…,” he reminisced, dragging his lips across your collarbone, “...you’d be covered in blood. Some of it was yours, and I knew it by the taste.”

He nipped lightly at your skin as he travelled to your shoulder, his hands roaming to cup your breasts with a hunger that made your head spin.

“The other, thicker, darker blood was Goblin blood. Disgusting, but somehow delectable on your skin. You looked fucking magnificent...when I licked your wounds. Do you remember?”

You nodded and shuddered with unrestrained arousal as his tongue swiped across the tender flesh on your arm; a Diffindo not quite dodged. The gash stung and prickled with the wet pressure of his tongue, and you watched with rapt attention whilst Sebastian licked the wound clean, humming all the while. His cock grew hard, throbbing, and neglected.

“I remember,” you gasped.

Sebastian’s hand finally slid down your stomach, parting your legs with a gentle nudge. It had required so little effort that he smirked against your skin.

“Sebastian…”

Fingers parted your folds, your head dizzying with desire. He finally looked at you then, lips stained with blood; ragged and dishevelled but utterly alluring. His digits dipping into the well of slick arousal that betrayed your desperate need. 

“You were always so wet for me afterwards.”

A whine left your lips and he pushed inside you with little ceremony, drawing a loud moan from you that must have been heard several houses down. Your walls fluttered around his fingers already, legs spreading and back arching to accommodate more of him. Curling and stroking, he brought you to orgasm within seconds. You’d missed him so much, every part of you ached for more. He’d barely let the final wave of release roll over you before he knelt between your legs, his weeping cock proud and deliciously inviting. The thought was coupled with a squeeze of your hand around his girthy length, giving him the suggestive look through fluttering eyelashes that you knew would send him wild with lust. 

“It’s been so long since I’ve tasted you,” you sighed.

“There’ll be time for that later.”

Sebastian clearly had other ideas as he wrapped his hand around your wrist and squeezed hard, forcing you to let go of his cock with a high pitched yelp of surprise. He didn’t stop there, roughly pinning both wrists against the mattress as you squirmed against his iron grip.

“I’m going to fuck you senseless,” he growled against your neck.

The room filled with your keening, hands twitching uselessly against his hold. Your hips rose to press against his stiff length; an invitation, or a plea.

“Please…”

“Say it again,” he breathed, cock now prodding at your entrance. 

“Please, Sebastian. I need you.”

The voice didn't sound like yours; faraway, quiet and breathy. You were almost unaware of the words whilst caught up in a lustful haze. Sebastian's blood-stained face loomed over you, watching intently as he slid inside you. Every gasp and peak of your eyebrows, the flutter of eyelids as your eyes almost rolled back inside your head. All committed to his memory as he stretched you inch by inch. It was ecstasy, and the ultimate relief to feel him fill you again after so many years. You nuzzled against his neck and took a deep breath, moaning softly as the musk filled your nostrils.

“Fuck, I've missed you,” you sighed.

Sebastian responded with a growl, letting your hands free to grab a handful of flesh at your thigh and deliver a hard thrust inside you. Then your eyes did roll back inside your head, the dizzying force met with your ear splitting moan.

“Of course you missed me,” he breathed, rolling his hips again. “Nobody fills you like I do.”

Crude, but accurate. Perhaps he'd meant a deeper meaning, but he'd still be right on both accounts. Your hips rose to meet him at the top of his thrusts, moving together effortlessly as you'd done so many times before. Nothing had changed, yet everything had. Sebastian was hardened, grittier, and he showed it in the way he pleasured you. The intensity of his gaze would have frightened anyone else, but you simply absorbed the fiery stare, letting him consume your every thought. The chocolate brown irises remained unchanged, reminding you of the boy you'd fallen for and the innocence he'd lost.

Your fingernails dragged down his back, hard enough to draw blood to match the collection of crimson gashes on his body. His bedroom filled with salacious moans as he fucked you hard into the mattress, his rhythm faltering the closer he crept to his release. You weren't ready for him to finish, not by a long shot. He didn't relinquish his control lightly. With a well-placed thumb, you squeezed the still-bleeding gash on his shoulder until he hissed in pain, finally letting you push him back onto the bed. 

The glint in his eyes never dulled, only shined brighter as he watched you lick your thumb whilst clambering into his lap. He welcomed you with open arms, gripping your waist to guide you back onto his cock. Sinking onto him made you gasp with renewed pleasure as your fingers threaded through his brunet strands. Tugging his head backwards, you began to roll your hips, angling yourself just right to hit that sweet spot deep inside you. Sebastian responded with a gravelly moan, tugging you down to drive you harder onto his cock.

You settled into a rhythm, fucking him slow and steady as your mind slipped into blissful delirium. You're were moving by instinct alone, focused only on Sebastian—his touch; every delicious sound he made; the heady scent of sweat, blood and sex. Being with Sebastian felt better than it ever had, not only physically, but the connection between you was undeniable. Completely vulnerable, you'd given yourself to him, and he to you. Your souls entwined when your eyes met, an unspoken truth passing between you. This was no mere tryst or meaningless romp; you were making love, and certainly not for the last time. 

Sebastian's soft lips peppered kisses along your neck amongst flicks of his tongue and searing bites. He licked your skin of blood, origin unknown, whilst making wounds of his own for you to cherish. 

“Shit, don't leave a mark there…,” your weak protest came, not meaning a word.

“Why not? You're mine.”

You gripped him tighter then, taking a shuddering breath as his words slithered into your ear and trailed a path of heat straight to your core. There was no denying the fact, even amongst the sickening guilt of what you were doing to Ominis. Ominis. Sweet Ominis who had suffered more than most and deserved more than what you'd been able to give him. You almost cried, until Sebastian saw the fear and doubt on your face and kissed you hard, giving you a much needed distraction from your guilty thoughts. You reciprocated eagerly, gasping for breath between brushes of lips. 

“I'm so close…fuck, you feel so good,” he groaned, his eyes shut in a silent prayer.

“Seb…”

“Keep going, just like that. Come on, darling.”

He gave your arse a hard smack that made you whimper and summoning the last of your energy, you brought him to the edge and pushed him over with a hard bite on his bottom lip. The tang of blood lingered on your tongue as Sebastian met his release, his cock twitching inside you before he exploded. A final thrust from below sent you hurtling along with him, your orgasm hitting so hard your legs cramped and limp body fell forward onto his chest. He filled you with his cum, pulses releasing thick streams into your cunt until you could take no more. Every wave of pleasure that rippled through you seemed to draw yet more from Sebastian's cock until his lap and your thighs were covered.  

“So fucking good…” Sebastian was mumbling.

You had to agree. You slumped against him as your orgasm ebbed away, tired eyes taking in the scene you'd created. It was messy, grotesque, and perfect. Both covered in blood and sweat, it reminded you of those days you'd tried to forget; except the aftermath spent with him. Years spent pretending and hiding your true nature had unravelled in mere days.

“We should clean up. I need to take care of this,” you said, gently probing the sliced skin on his cheek. “At least I killed the bastard who did it.”

“There she is. The fire in your eyes is back,” he said, angling your chin with a firm hand to face him.

You sat entwined as you both worked on each other's injuries. Wand in your hand, you ran the length of his cut with your tongue, earning you a rumbling groan from his chest. A chaste kiss, and you withdrew, pointing the tip of your wand at the seam of flesh.

“Vulnera Sanentur.”

White threads of magic wove their way through the air, pulling the skin taught as the wound healed before your eyes. Healing spells were somewhat a specialty when you'd been through as much as you had. You repeated the process on every cut you saw and Sebastian did the same, until your bodies were whole again. The deep purple bruises inflicted by one another were another matter. They were to be treasured. Next came a shower, and discarding of bedsheets and clothes. Your skin shined, squeaky clean and glowing as you pulled on your clothes, minus the blood-splattered cloak. When you'd finished dressing, Sebastian was waiting, perched on the edge of the bed.

“Stay. Don't go…,” he said, pulling you by the hand to situate you between his legs.

You looked down into his deep brown eyes and your heart almost burst. Tracing his freckles with your thumb, you thought and searched for an easy answer, finding none.

"What about Ominis?" you asked, tears welling.

"What about us? I'll never leave again, I swear it. I'll make an unbreakable vow to prove it to you. Anything.”

“You broke me when you left last time. Ominis was there to pick up the pieces.”

“And I'll be forever grateful, but you belong with me. Do you love me?”

“Of course…yes, I love you.”

Sebastian nodded, guiding you backwards before standing up and striding to a small writing bureau in the corner of the room. You watched him curiously as he rummaged around in a draw and produced something silver, glinting in the light streaming through the window. A knife. A letter opener. The handle was ornately engraved, the blade thin and sharp. You watched him twirl the instrument in his fingers as he approached, your heart thumping wildly.

“What are you…?”

“I'll make a pact. A blood pact. Seems appropriate for us, doesn't it?”

Before you could acknowledge his suggestion, he'd sliced open his palm, the deep red blood welling and pooling at the thin slit. He squeezed his hand shut, droplets splattering to the floor.

“You would do that?” you whispered.

“It works both ways. We swear ourselves to each other. An oath to never leave. Consider this my proposal.”

You thought that perhaps this was insanity as you took the knife from him. You'd finally lost your mind. There were a million reasons not to proceed, but all paled in comparison to the one reason to agree standing in front of you. The blade sliced through your palm like butter, parting the skin to release the deep red blood you needed to make this a reality. Sebastian smiled softly and held out his hand, now completely stained and you took it without further hesitation. He spoke the words out loud to bind you together forever, and you echoed him. You watched in awe as droplets of blood rose in the air and mingled into a single drop; a silver phial materialising around it, signifying the end of the ritual. The precious container fell into your uncut hand, and Sebastian's forehead fell against your own. You stood in silence, breathing together, for as long as it took the cuts on your hands to stop bleeding.

-

1 week later.

Ominis deserved better. That much was clear as you'd packed your belongings and left a note for him to find upon returning home from work. There was nothing to be gained from heartfelt pleas. You didn't think you could bear to see his heart shatter before your eyes. And so you'd taken the coward's way out. You wondered how he'd taken it, whether he'd suspected anything at all. At least now he could find someone worthy of his love.

You shifted your weight as you waited impatiently for Sebastian to appear, squinting into the dimly lit pub from your perch outside. Your wand hand twitched as a towering figure passed your view, but it was a false alarm. Just another enebriated patron. Standing guard outside the seedy establishment whilst Sebastian made shady deals for artefacts from even shadier traders was quite a change in lifestyle from the Ministry office job you'd held but a week ago. It wasn't necessarily better or worse, only different; satiating another part of you that had always existed, snuffed out until Sebastian's return.

You saw the brunet appear from the back room and meet your eyes with a small nod, indicating a job well done. Even through the fog of the window, you noticed his dilated pupils and unmistakeable flash of crimson on his skin. Saliva pooled in your mouth as you followed him with your gaze. He appeared next to you a moment later, pressing you against the cold stone wall of the pub with a searing kiss, his cock already twitching against your leg. He'd make love to you that night and let you tend to his wounds, washing the blood from his skin with an intimacy nobody else could possibly understand. Of all the terrible things you had done and would do, you had each other through all of it. If there was one thing you knew to be true, it was that you deserved to burn and bleed together.

[experimentalmadness]

A Pretty Little Game

I've had writer's block for the last few years and here I am to now regale y'all with one shots of my Tav and Astarion because I'm a trainwreck. Anyway, please enjoy two rogues being dumb before they admit they're in a relationship.

***

Rasariel splashed water onto her face, savoring the cool droplets as the ran invisibly down her face and neck, staining her armor a darker gray. She blinked in the sun and heaved a sigh. 

Tired wasn’t the word. 

Bone-weary was closer. Even her skin ached, her eyes burned, the thin white hairs along her purple-blue skinned arms tingled. She kept replaying the dream over and over again. The golden paladin in his shining armor. His offer to help and his face…his face. 

“I was rather of the opinion one bathed with their clothes off, unless this is some drow custom I’m unaware of?” A lilting voice said at her back. 

Ras wiped the remaining water from her face with a gloved hand. 

“At least use a hand towel, you uncivilized rogue.” 

Ras’ traitorous lips twitched into something resembling a smile as Astarion threw a cloth at her head. “And where did you steal this from, you civilized rogue?” Her voice was rough, betraying her exhaustion. And she knew the red-eyed elf saw far more than he let on. 

“Bad dreams?” Astarion asked, leaning far too casually against the trunk of a tree. 

She regarded the vampire the same way she would a displacer beast. A lithe predator, beautiful and enticing. Dangerous should be a word she worked into that thought, but she never managed to string that together. His white hair caught the forest-dappled sun so brilliantly, as had the moon a few nights ago. It had been so long since someone had intrigued her. 

“Are there any other kind?” Ras spat, far more bitterly than she had intended. 

Of course the moment she let her guard down she’d see his face again in her mind. Two centuries of practical celibacy and the one night she decided to try her hand at happiness again…the gods were nothing if not cruel. 

“I see someone woke up on the wrong side of the bedroll this morning,” Astarion sniffed. “Perhaps you should try waking up next to mine tomorrow instead.”

She wasn’t a fool. And she laughed at his audacious attempt at flirting. He was quite good at that, making her laugh. No one had managed it in a very long time. She knelt by the river bank to refill her waterskin. She could hear Astarion take a few tentative steps closer before clearing his throat. “This is the part where you tell me to try harder, darling.”

Ras sighed. “Astarion, I…”

Images flashed before her eyes like the fluttering of a stack of playing cards. The parasite in her head writhing as it feasted upon the memories. A handsome human man with dark hair and tiefling gold and black eyes looked at her with an expression she had missed for so long. She watched him smile, laugh, then toss her a pair of daggers. A training exercise. She wanted to lean into the images and never leave. She wanted to take the man in her arms and tell him how sorry she was. How sorry…

Rasariel was back in her own body, coughing up the last of the memories torn from her brain by the damned worm. 

“Was that the source of your dream last night?” Astarion asked. She could tell he was just as surprised by the sudden connection as she had been, but he, as ever, knew how to play it off. “Charming fellow, should I be jealous?”

“Enough!” Ras growled, rising to her feet. “That was…he is…that was not for you to see!”

“Well I didn’t decide to go rooting around in your head. I can’t exactly control this connection, you know.”

She suddenly felt entirely boxed in. The expanse of the forest camp shrinking down to the size of a small wooden crate. She tried to think. What would the old Rasariel have done back in the days of Menzoberranzan? A laugh, a misdirection. Anything to stave off questions. But she was not the rogue of the Underdark any longer and she hadn’t been for centuries. Either way she did not want to talk about this now. And she certainly didn’t want to talk about this with Astarion. 

“It’s nothing. Ignore it.” 

“I’d say we’re a bit past that, wouldn't you agree?”

Like a damned dog with a bone. She glared. He simply crossed his arms and stared back. 

“He is…was…my betrothed,” she ground the words out. “Happy?”

“Was?” For just the slightest moment that haughty expression slipped on the elf’s face. What a sight to behold. If she wasn’t so furious she might have even enjoyed it. 

“He died. Centuries ago so it’s not as if you have to worry about some angry jilted lover coming to stake you in the heart.”

Astarion fell silent. A feat in itself. For a moment there was nothing but the wind and the distant sounds of the rest of the camp stirring to life. 

Ras blew a strand of white-blue hair out of her eyes, feeling awkward and hating every second of it. She shifted on her feet, trying her best to adapt that carefree stance she’d been very careful to let everyone see. “Can we go back to your best attempt at propositioning me now?”

She did not like the way Astarion was looking at her now, sizing her up the same she had trained herself to do her whole life. Even now she could guess he was trying to figure out the right thing to say to gain her confidence. She could read him like an open book. The self-confident rogue hiding just a seed of vulnerability, the way she saw her earliest self reflected badly in his eyes. 

“Alright if you won’t I will,” Ras spoke into the silence. “It’s not even breakfast yet but that doesn’t mean you can’t devour me now.”

Astarion blinked before bursting out into, what Ras was shocked to hear, genuine peals of laughter. He doubled over. It was ungainly, uncoordinated, and hardly alluring. There were no subtle spikes of malice around the edges and it was…delightful. 

“That was dreadful!” Astarion declared, still huddled over himself. 

“I can try again!” Ras said, the laughter starting to become contagious. 

“Please spare me,” Astarion straightened. 

“Very well, since you said please. I’ll let you handle the charming words from now on.”

They were lying to each other. She wanted an escape, something new to lose herself to after centuries of denial. And he? Well, she was still working that out. But this, whatever this was, was not real. The cooling of her grief as she watched him smirk at her was a facade. This was what she wanted after all. And he clearly needed to believe she was firmly under his spell as well. 

“Astarion, I am sorry…for before.” Just because they were playing this little game with one another didn’t give her the right to tear his head off. They were still traveling companions after all. Part of her past was bound to come up. If not via their shared connection then through other means. 

He simply waved her concerns away with a pale hand. “You don’t ever have to explain yourself to me.”

“Ever?”

“Well…within reason. If I sense you about to go shooting down dragons from the skies I might want to be informed.”

“Now that’s a decent proposition,” Ras gave a conspiratorial wink.

“I somehow thought you might approve.”

[crowsagent]

i very messy doodle before i go to bed so i can stave off those sskk brain worms for a bit

[nerves-nebula]

I should probably stop sending you these i I‘m being honest - i am probably hopelessly clogging up your asks rn. But this is my pet brainworm and I can‘t get rid of it. Someone. Someone help me. This is the project i turn to whenever staving off The Dread™️ Is getting hard again and it works because i just take it and put it onto these guys. There‘s also gonna be a section with Leo‘s POV and it‘s actually weirdly cathartic writing him. Donnie is too, but in a very different way. This thing is also so much fun to write because i never fucking get to write in german normally and it‘s fun.

Für eine wilde Sekunde glaubt Donnie er halluziniert. Irgendwie macht es Sinn – mit ihm stimmt doch sowieso irgendwas nicht. Was sind ein paar Halluzinationen dazu? – aber die Hoffnung stirbt schnell. 

Leo (denn es ist Leo, ohne Zweifel) steht vor seinem Spiegel mit dem Rücken zu Donnie, Kopf schief gelegt. Seine Hände streichen immer wieder über den Stoff des Kleids das er trägt. 

Es passt nicht richtig, geschnitten für den Körper eines Menschen und hastig über den Körper einer halbmenschlichen Schildkröte gezerrt. Aber irgendwie steht es ihm auch. Der weinrote Stoff ist verschmutzt und zerknüllt, aber es war mal hübsch.

Translation:

For a single wild second Donnie is convinced he‘s hallucinating. It makes sense, somehow - there‘s already something wrong with him. Why not add hallucinations in the mix? - but that hope dies quickly.

Leo (because it is Leo, without a doubt) stands before his mirror, back turned towards Donnie, head tilted. His hands keep brushing over the fabric of the dress he‘s wearing.

It doesn‘t fit quite right, tailored for the body of a human and awkwardly stretched over that of a humanoid turtle. But it doesn‘t look that bad on him, somehow. The wine-red fabric is dirty and damaged in places, but it used to be pretty at the very least.

This is like. Literally two seconds before shit goes down. Also my document for this is literally named „leo why are you like this =(“ . I know exactly why he’s like this, and i am bashing my own head into concrete. It’s also fun to write Donnie just going ?????? Leo??????. I like angst. Overall i am just grabbing them both and squishing them as hard as i can.

(Also to get back - probably myself. In the foot. By accident. I do not know how to handle firearms. I’d just drop the thing in terror and beat Splinter to death with my bare hands or die trying)

Oooughjhh it’s so good thank you for sharing. Leo is Like This™️ because he is an insecure and abused child <3 he gets put in the blender and when he comes out he grabs Donnie and forces him into the blender too <3

Anyway, I like ur brain worm 👍

[millionsnife]

He shouldn't be here; normally wouldn't be here.

But there's no where else he can go for this particular need. Ship Three is the only place in the world where any of the seeds may have survived–he'd only glimpsed it last time, but Luida's garden had been well known even by the Doctor, and it's the only one of its kind on the entire planet. Rare, extinct species of flowers, the only surviving source of the flora that had been lost in the Great Fall.

He hates her (and it's mutual; Knives won't kid himself that it's not, that she doesn't hate him right back) but Luida's the only person he can ask now. Knives stares at the sandstorm, knowing the ship hidden beyond won't wait forever for him to come aboard. The worm tickling his neck, grabbed in passing more for vague moral support than any actual need of Zazie's assistance, is what finally jars the plant into moving. Braced against the storm, he forges onward until the storm abruptly ends and the looming opening of the ship awaits him.

(It probably shouldn't feel so much like entering the Doctor's lab as a child. Cold and unwelcoming, threatening–knows it isn't so to those who call it Home. To Vash.)

Knives avoids the gaze (glares) of those awake and aware, wandering the ship and doing their jobs as he makes his way to the garden. It's exactly where their rec room had been on Ship Five–all the ships had had the same layout–so he can find his way blindfolded if he's honest. Nearly does, just to avoid meeting anyone's eyes.

He hesitates at the threshold.

"Stop haunting my doorway and either come inside and ask for what you need, or leave." Luida's the same as he remembers–brisk, professionally cool. Calm. Knives hates it immediately, bristles entirely on instinct before forcing himself to relax.

He's here to beg, and getting defensive won't help. (He still has to rip the words out of his own throat, force them out when he keeps trying to swallow them back down. Nearly turns and leaves twice before he sets a hand on the doorway and digs his fingers in to ground himself from fleeing.)

"I wanted to know if any geranium seeds survived in your garden."

Luida looks up at that, and Knives forces himself to stay still instead of bolt at the way she seems to look right through him. (Rem had looked at him like that sometimes–)

"A few. Why?"

"I–" Red flower, blue flower, Luida, grass, trees his brain recites immediately, an attempt to stave off whatever panic's trying to worm its way in. Exhales slowly, straightens a little and stares at a point just slightly above and to the left of Luida's gaze.

"I want them. Please."

(He leaves an hour later with a packet of three seeds and a warning that if they die he'll have killed the last of h– only remaining seeds Luida had managed to salvage.)

[a-hundred-rats]

Crazy?

No, no no no nonono not anymore.

I once was, yes.

I hissed and spat. I screamed and guffawed. The townsfolk called me insane, dangerous, violent, yet I was more whole and free than each and every one of them. I twirled and danced through the streets, shouting my soul to passersby who did not want to listen. I feasted on movement. I drank in my own thoughts, reveled in them, only to vomit them out and then drink them in again. I waltzed with my brain to the tune of my blood pumping through my veins. Nobody liked me, but I loved everything.

They locked me up. Their intent being not to mellow me but to gut me like a fish, press me into the mental mold that they considered „healthy“. They wanted to tear me away from my thoughts and halt the music that they said only I could hear. They threw me into a padded room, claimed I was a threat to myself. They did not feed me, or bring me water. I had no sunlight with which to photosynthesize. I wilted, became frail. My ponderings were not substantial enough to save me from dehydration, my movements not enough to stave off hunger.I was weak. Not only of mind, but of body.

I was broken.

My thoughts, for once, were silent. I was silent, so I could hear. The room was not silent, it merely lacked speech, for the one noise that I could make out with my newfound ears was a horrible squealing. It came from the walls. Squeaking and skittering. Soon, scraggly grey animals with knife-sharp teeth, matted fur, and worm-tails began to emerge from the cracks in the corners.

I knew what they were. The answer came to me like a snap of a twig in a silent forest.

The rats.

I could see the hunger in their eyes as they peered at me, noting my lack of movement. I knew that they, like me, needed to feed. I despised them for it, the way a chicken despises a farmer when it sees the axe, but with a grim acceptance. That is why I did not move as those foul rodents skittered towards me, gnashing their teeth, eyeing me with malice. Why I did not move as they tore into my flesh, their teeth minuscule but sharp. Why I did not move as they dug their claws into my skin, drawing blood. The pain filled me again, filled my mind with thoughts. It made me want to hiss and spit and dance and yell, but it was temporary. My mind was less full than before. „Healed“, in a sense, like a cracked wine glass.

I promised the townspeople that I was cured. They ran tests to confirm it. I passed with muted tones, the way they preferred it. They hated my flying colors of before. In their minds, I was finally normal. I was not crazy.

I am not crazy.

But sometimes, I see rats on the street. They remind me of the pain, but memory is long, almost permanent. When I see them, it’s as if my brain overflows with thoughts again , so many that I can finally drink them. I am no longer cotton-mouthed and dizzy. I cartwheel and twirl and scream and bite, and again they say that I‘m crazy. They put me back in the rat room. The room breaks me. The rats remind me. They trim down my thoughts so that they no longer strain at the confines of my skull. Then I am let go.

Again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

I have not seen any rats today. I am not crazy.

Crazy?

[fanfic-enthusiast]

Holiday Party Fervor

His friends were due to arrive any moment. Ratau stretched his back and went over his mental checklist of everything he had for the party one more time.

Decorations, check. Cookies, check. Candy canes, check. Eggnog, check. Knucklebones, of course.

He breathed a sigh of relief, tugging at the knit scarf around his neck. Everything should go fine. This would be great! This was the first holiday party the four of them have had in years. The tradition fell out of fashion for the four of them to get together when the weather got chilly. Stopping right around the time when Ratau had lost his crown all those years ago.

It felt nice setting up decorations around the shack to make it feel festive. It gave the small space a kind of warm and cozy feeling. All that the now cheerful shack needed were some guests to really make the space come to life.

As this thought entered the rat’s mind he heard a knock on the door.

“Hurry up Ratau, we are freezing out here!!”

“Oh! Coming!!” He's quick to reach the door and open it wide, all three of his friends stand there wrapped in winter coats and scarves to stave off the winter chill. “My friends welcome!”

“Oh cut the formalitiesss Ratau, we are just glad to sssee you again.”

“Yes! We couldn’t wait to party again like we used to, Bop was going on about it the whole trip here.” The worm on top of Klunko’s head nodded slightly as Klunko crossed the threshold and started removing his coat. Moving to help Flinky out of his winter ware as well.

“Hmf. It actually looks nice here for a change.” One of the best compliments to come from Shrumy in all honesty, warmed the old rat’s heart.

“Glad to have you all here my friends. What do you say we start off the night with a few rounds of Knucklebones?” Varied expressions of approval filled the space as the friends settled around their favorite pastime. Interrupted only briefly when Klunko got up from the table to fetch everyone in the group a tall glass of eggnog, dusted with cinnamon.

The space was soon filled with festive laughter and cheer as the group of friends rolled dice and drank together. The fire in the stove may have kept the shack warm from the elements outside but the comradery between these four brought a kind of warmth to the space that had been missing for far too long. That Ratau missed for far too long.

Having his friends over so often for game nights was different than this, this festive cheer that only came about when all of them were together for the holidays. Each of them brought something to the group that made gatherings feel incomplete if they weren’t present. Even Shrumy with his sourpuss attitude.

Speaking of Shrumy, he even surprised everyone with holiday sweaters for this get together! One for each of them! Along with some excuse of them being ‘no good for betting against if they were half frozen.’

They were very nicely made as well, the turtle put a good deal of time into making each custom sweater special. The pattern on Klunko’s even had an image of his severed hand sewn on the front which brought quite the hearty laugh from the crow when he spotted it.

“I still intend to win that back!”

“Ha! In your dreams, bird brain.” Shrumy shifted his shell to show off the hand strapped to the side of it before turning away yet again.

Donning their new festive sweaters they set about eating and drinking more eggnog together around the knucklebones table.

“Hey Ratau?” Klunko swirled his drink a little. “Did you make the eggnog differently this year? Tastes stronger than usual?”

“Hm? Oh yes! Just a little bit… I think? I wanted to make sure this would be a fun night for everybody so I got out the good stuff. Might have gone a little overboard.” “Oh! That's nice! You didn’t have to do that! It's great just spending time with you all for the holidays.” “Yesss it’sss been agesss after all.” Flinky smiled and took another long sip of the egg nog. “That being sssaid I’m not complaining about the ssspecial treatment. Hehehee.” Shrumy nodded in agreement and tossed his dice onto the table. And Ratau smiled, he was feeling quite touched by all his friends wanting to be around him like this. Meant they would be doing this again next year, and longer still after that if their luck held. Only time will tell. All that was left for him for tonight was to enjoy the company and celebration of friendship around him.

~

While the moon hangs high in the sky and the forest outside is blanketed in white snow and silence, the inside of the shack was full of more than just warmth and light. It was full of the best kind of warm lively chaos that happened when good friends got together.

Candycanes were shared along with the eggnog and other treats Ratau had prepared for the evening. He even got out some mistletoe for a few pranks, something he hadn’t done since their last holiday party. Dangling it above his friends heads without one’s knowledge sent him into laughter fairly easily. Though it usually came with ‘revenge’ of some kind later in the evening.

He would have to worry about that later however. Because as of right now, the only thing on his mind was song.

“I WON'T ASK FOR MUCH THIS CHRISTMAS!!! THIS IS ALL IM ASKIN FOOORRRRR!!!”

Ratau was on top of the knucklebones table, face flushed with his scarf wrapped around his forehead, holding his staff to his mouth like a microphone. While the rest of the friends swayed with the music and laughed nearly as loud as his singing. “I JUST WANNA SEE MY BABY STANDIN RIGHT OUTSIDE MY DOOORRR!!!”

“I jusst want you for my own!!” Flinky climbed up on the table and coiled around Ratau, squeezing a bit. “More than you could ever know!!” Klunko joined them on top, wrappin his arm around the two of them while Bop struggled to stay on his feathery head as they swayed. “Make my wish come truuuuuueeee!!!” Shrumy clambered up to them, on the table for his piece. The furniture squeaked under his feet. “ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAAAAAAAS IS YOOOOOOUUUUUU!!!” All four of them shrieked to the ceiling before falling to the floor from the table top in fits of giggles and ramblings of the lyrics. Flinky still coiled up around Ratau who laughed between hiccups. Shrumy slammed his fist on the floor as he was overcome with giggles. And Klunko struggled to get his feet under him, holding onto the table as he too was made weak in the knees with laughter.

Yeah… perhaps Ratau did go a bit too overboard with the eggnog.

~

Lamb tucked the gifts into their fleece as he stepped up to the door of the lonely shack. “Ratau? Happy Holidays! I have some things for you and the others.” No reply came from the door, which was odd. “Hello?” Lamb took it upon themselves to open up the door to the shack and was stopped in their tracks by the sight before them. Ratau was laying on top of the knucklebones table, fast asleep with some mistletoe tied to his tail, covered in red lipstick. Klunko was just coming to, in the corner of the room, where he had a candy cane tied to the stump where his hand used to be. Which he waved at Lamb lazily with a slurred “Hi there wee Laaaammmmbb.”

Shrumy was on the floor still out cold, wearing red lipstick and surrounded by a couple mostly empty punch bowls. Which… explained why Ratau was covered in makeup. And… Lamb looked around a bit more, then up and yep. There was Flinky, coiled around the rafters with a santa hat and snow white beard. “...Ill come back later tonight then.” And Lamb closed the door behind him with a chuckle. Leaving the old men to sort themselves out.

Klunko looked over his shoulder to Bop, who was curled up in the corner next to him munching on a cookie. “We… are absolutely doing this again next year Bop. Yeeaaaahhh.”

~~~

This was a secret Santa request for @teeteekaa

[ben-drabbles]

Tertians

Colloquially known as "brain slugs," "third-eye bugs," or "psycho-worms," these simple-minded tartigrade-like parasitic creatures attach to a sentient being's nervous system, from which they feed on electrical impulses and specific excess nutrients. In exchange, the Tertian stimulates the sentient's psychic capabilities, to better aid in the survival of the now-bonded pair.

People who use these parasites are able to manifest psychic abilities without training or strong talent of their own, making them a popular shortcut for the likes of opportunistic diplomats or mercenaries wishing to up their game. However, due to this lack of training and indirect stimulation, their powers are less directed and cannot be further trained to any high degree. For example, one might be able to read general emotional intent without understanding specific thoughts, or perform a simple psychic push rather than fine manipulations.

The use of these parasites is not without cost, however. Like with trained psychic abilities and any other physical exercise, their extended use can tire out the wearer. Furthermore, the parasites require specific nutrients to stay alive, and feed on them in their hosts. Most are replenished naturally enough with some extra food, but the parasites are always ravenous for calciferol, known to humans as 'Vitamin D.' With prolonged use, a 'slugger' might find their bones deteriorating, along with adverse mental effects similar to extended deep-space travel. Many 'sluggers' will carry calciferol supplements, or prioritize time on sunny worlds, to stave off these effects.

Many modern psychics - at least, those who work in civilized space - will be registered with one or more agencies or governments. The use of a Tertian is a shortcut, and so is often used by people looking to avoid being noticed and registered; in many governments, they are even considered contraband due to their subversion of psychic regulations - and, perhaps, some lobbying by local psychic institutions. That is not to say they are unwelcome everywhere. HIPLAD, for example, has a 'Tertian Rehabilitation Assistance Program,' where they help extract Tertians from their hosts and train them in 'proper' psychic abilities. Less scrupulous jobs might offer their employees bonuses if they take on a Tertian, and in certain high societies, it is expected that almost everyone can read your mind, however they accomplish it.

It's easy to forget the sun. These fellows help you remember it - maybe there is a bit of light behind those beady eyes?

[cuffmeinblack]

When the fuck did I write this?? 😂😂

Looking through my WIPs and abandoned documents trying to find some inspiration. I think this was going to be my Sebastian blood kink fic......then I stopped because it felt too similar to something else. Maybe I'll finish it anyway one day idk.

He had you pinned to the wall once again, though this time you didn't belong to him—your body was not his plaything anymore. You told yourself as such in an attempt to stave off the lustful hunger that rose like bile in your chest and the ache that settled between your legs. The words were superficial, the truth hidden just below the surface; you wanted him, still. After everything he'd put you through, your heart still ached for Sebastian Sallow. It wasn't that Ominis was a poor partner, far from it. You loved Ominis deeply, and if the man in front of you simply didn't exist, you felt you could live a long and perfectly content life alongside him. But Sebastian did exist, and he knew exactly what to say; to worm his way into your brain, plant a seed and let it grow and flourish until everything else was deprived of thought and there was only him. Only his idea, his words that filled your consciousness every waking moment and invaded your dreams. Be mine again. You'd been down this road once before and had your heart not only broken but shredded, left to Ominis to gently mend. His tenderness and unconditional love had seen you through your darkest days as Sebastian galavanted around the city without a care (or so you bitterly assumed). But there remained a missing part, a gaping hole nobody else could fill. So here you were against the wall. Your living room wall. You could scarcely believe he was here, and at the invitation of your betrothed, no less. He truly hadn’t changed a bit, neither outwardly or inwardly it would seem—Ominis would be disappointed. “You haven’t changed a bit, Sebastian,” you said bitterly. “Don’t pretend to be disappointed. I saw your eyes light up when I arrived. They looked so dull before…what has our dear Ominis been doing with you?” he teased, stroking a finger down the side of your cheek. You didn’t give him the satisfaction of flinching away, only staring into his dark eyes with a bored expression that belied your racing heart. If he felt your pulse or caught the deepness of your breaths he’d know you were lying.

[boxofteethrpg-blog]

To Have and to Hold Chapter 1

Estelle's paper-thin skin teased the pad of Barney's thumb as he stroked her skeletal forefinger. His mind dwelled not on the sandpapery feel to his wife's flesh, nor how supple it had been when life held nothing but wine and roses. He brooded on failure. It began with the failure of her cancer to stay in her liver. Surgeons failed at slicing tumors from her body. It continued when radiation burning away rouge growths failed. Eating right failed. Experimental drugs failed. Esoteric oriental techniques and bullshit holistic cures he didn't comprehend failed.

His pleading with God last night to take him instead failed.

His throat still burned with curses hurled at the Almighty which came as the evening rolled into late night. His knees ached from kneeling on the hard hospital chapel floor until dawn came. In that darkest hour, he declared he would give anything to not have to kill his wife. As with everything else in this cold universe, the Devil failed to appear with bloodied quill and contract for Barney's soul. The grief-stricken husband would have offered the pitiful shriveled thing up without hesitation.

What Barney succeeded in doing was singing Estelle's death warrant this morning. The doctors, his lawyer, the family, they'd all assured him it was the right thing to do. Her fragile hand squeezed his briefly and then relaxed. After forty-three years of marriage, he failed her. The minuscule, mechanical press came and went once more.

Barney filled his lungs with air both antiseptic and miserable. He stared at her hand for some time longer before daring to look the love of his life in the eye. Her once-bright gaze stared hollowly at the ceiling, almost lifeless save for the occasional blink. Logically he understood the only thing keeping her alive were the plastic tubes stuffed down her throat like a squirm of eager worms hoping to get a jump start on those waiting for his beloved below ground. Together they had done everything they could to stave off this day, but complications swiftly arose and brain death followed. The woman he cherished no longer haunted the vessel he held, no matter how alive she still felt. Estelle made her wishes explicit when she got to this state to pull the plug.

The chirping of birds swelled outside the window while a late afternoon drizzle pattered glass. Distant thunderheads of spring lingered at the horizon, with streams of light poking through. Estelle loved these sorts of days.

"Perfect for gardening, or sex on the grass." She'd say.

He pressed her decrepit hand to his age-sharpened cheek, trembling lips to her palm. No miracle was to come, no devil's deal either. Salty sorrow eased from his eye, and ran its course down to her wrist. The tear caught on her ID bracelet, eddied across the information of who she'd been. The doctors gave him one more day but come tonight away went the machines. In the morning, Estelle would die because he and everyone else had failed her.

The feeling of eyes on him drew Barney from self-loathing reverie into the gaze of a frightened child in the hallway. The tike couldn't be more than five. She grasped her mother's hand as the woman conversed with a pasty nurse. It wasn't fair, he felt, to bring the little girl here. The cancer ward wasn't a place of healing, but a place of dying. The relentless malignancy of the disease saturated everything and the child felt it, but couldn't understand it. She looked away from Barney's guilty visage as her mother sobbed. Like every visitor, the dirty-blonde mom and likewise moppet were here to harvest one last memory. At the girl's age, she'd probably not even do that.

"I'm sorry," Barney murmured to his victim as he turned away.

"Mr. Schell?" The sallow nurse said as she lingered in the doorway, adding, "you really should get something to eat. The cafeteria will be closing soon."

He focused on her mangle of a smile. A fresh jet of cooled air flowed from the vent above Estelle's bed. Pebbles rose across his neck, and for a brief moment, he hoped it was Death coming to collect the Schells at the same time. Instead of cursing at the pallid nurse, the old man grunted. With some effort, Barney stood, thanks to his grimy walker. Age hadn't been kind to him either.

Barney left his wife laid out on a padded altar. Come tomorrow she'd be sacrificed for nothing. The split tennis balls on the feet of his walker squeaked as he shuffled down the hall. With a shadowed grin, the nurse watched him and then slipped into the room to do whatever useless fucking things they did when people weren't watching. Barney averted his gaze from the suffering on display at each open door. The collection of living skeletons didn't bother him. They'd still be alive tomorrow, some of them anyway, and that ate at him.

[quietlyimplode]

Clint/Nat. (970 words)

There’s some telltale signs that Natasha isn’t coping.

Warnings for anxiety - based loosely on this prompt.

.

The house is quiet.

Clint puts his bag down on the table, and looks around for any telltale sign that Natasha is here. She said she would be.

The house is clean.

They’d both left on the same day. Her mission was shorter, a retrieval of information that should have only taken a day or so. His, however was protection detail. A full week he’d had to stay alongside a Marine, set for a deposition against the government.

She’s obviously been here. This is not how they left their house. There were clothes everywhere, dust in the corners and things not in their place. They’d laughed about it as they’d both left and he’d locked the door behind her.

Now.

Now it looks like someone had been through and cleaned everything within an inch of it’s life.

The house is cold.

If she was here, he’s sure it would be warm.

He calls her phone and it rings on the kitchen table, he hangs up and picks it up, concern curling in his stomach.

There’s no movement.

He climbs up the stairs towards the bedroom, hoping she’s in there. He doesn’t say anything in case she’s asleep.

Surely.

That’s it.

If she’s asleep, it accounts for the cold, quiet house.

He opens the door slowly, the is bed made.

He scans the room and sees her.

She’s watching him; blanket over her lap, sitting on the floor against the wall.

“Hey.” He approaches her slowly.

“Hey,” she gives him a smile. It’s genuine and he smiles with her.

“Why are on the floor?” he asks quietly.

“I..” she starts to say one thing, but changes her mind, “headache,” she decides on.

He knows that’s not the extent of it. She would probably have just taken painkillers and gone to bed if that was the case. This looks more like she hasn’t slept in a couple of days and the brain worms have got her in a holding pattern.

He holds his hand for her to stand up, but she shakes her head.

“Feels better down here.” She tells him.

He sinks down next to her and she rests her head on his shoulder.

“Do you want something for it?” He asks, grasping her hand and bringing it to his lips.

There’s a beat.

“It’s not my head.” She admits.

He stays quiet, hoping she’ll elaborate. He traces patterns on her palm. He holds two fingers on her pulse and feels it beating fast. Looking at her, she looks calm, rested. Inside though, tells a different story.

“What is it?” He prompts. She takes a breath and blows it out, perhaps unsure what to say or even how to describe it.

“I…” she stops again. He keeps his fingers on her pulse point.

“It’s becoming hard.” She begins. She sits upright, ramrod straight bad, ”being around people.”

He nods. He gets it.

A lifetime of being around people, of others controlling her every movement, of the anxiety of having to observe and know the intentions of every single person around her.

It’s a wonder that she’s as social as she is. He gets her introversion, craves it for her at times as he’s often watched her push through at the expense of herself.

Her pulse jumps at the confession and he starts drawing circles on the back of her hand again.

“You didn’t tell me it was getting bad again.” He says softly.

“It’s… it’s just, I need time to decompress afterwards and it seems to be getting longer to come back down.” Her breath hitches as she admits it quietly, to herself more than he.

Clint knows what that’s like.

“I don’t know how to make it better.” She tells him, eyes wide staring up at him.

Her breath seems to catch and she coughs. She’s missed a breath and panics on the loss.

“Lay down,” he tells her, seeing the beginnings of a panic attack. If he can get her head below her heart, maybe he can stop it.

Natasha follows the instruction, dropping her body and curling into a ball. There’s enough space behind her that Clint is able to hold her and fit his body around her, holding her loosely.

“It’s going to be ok.” He whispers in her ear. And repeats it so she hears.

It makes sense to him, the clean house, the neglect of warmth and probably food, not wanting the comfort of bed. She’s put herself at odds.

“It’s going to be ok.” She says back to him, reassuring herself.

“Clint?” She asks.

He hums, changing his position to make her hands grab his wrists, making sure she can feel his slow pulse.

“Please don’t go.” She asks holding on hard.

He kisses her neck and whispers assurances.

“It’s going to be ok.”

.

Morning comes and Clint wakes up on the floor alone.

His back creaks as he stands and stretches; it’s been a tricky night, staving off panic attacks.

He hears Natasha in the kitchen. The coffee maker hisses and the sound of the morning TV is playing quietly. He smiles, the house is loud.

He walks into the kitchen and hugs her hard.

The heater is on and as she hugs him back; he realises the house is warm.

They proceed to make breakfast together. It’s not better, the anxieties are still there but she’s talking and he’s taking it as a win. They talked about booking an appointment with the therapist and she’d agreed. She hasn’t shut him out, and on the contrary almost seems lighter for having made the decision.

He cracks eggs and fries them as she butters toast. They dump the dishes in the sink and eat together in front of the TV.

The house is messy.

.

One shots.

[bbugyu]

of all the views you had seen, there was little that could compare to him.

6.2k | cavalry captain!jeonghan x gn pyro!reader, genshin impact au, fluff, adventure, drinking, so much flirting, mentions of trauma, honestly this is the sweetest i'm ever gonna write jeonghan

happy inazuma release day!!! it's your local kaeya trash, because i predictably fall for gay bastards that lie straight to my face (example: jeonghan), and i'm here to give you a fic i wrote AGES ago and just polished up a bit to celebrate the release of what is likely going to be my FAVORITE region in genshin impact. i'm japanese so 😅 i have a soft spot. if there's any other gaymer carats out there, enjoy this one. if not, sorry! you can actually probably still read this and understand it for the most part, though you might miss a bit of context of the landscape and the lore.

ps. go tell @babiemingoo that wonwoo xinqiu 🤭

~

your work with the adventurer's guild was always efficient. you received your commissions, you carried them out, then returned for your reward, usually before the sun had even peaked. the rest of your day was generally spent either basking in the eternal sun of mondstadt, feeding cats in inazuma, or enjoying a hard earned meal in liyue, depending on where you decided to stay that week, finding board and paying for it with the commission you had earned that day. your tendency to wander came less from choice and more from nature - you could call yourself a nomad, but generally, you just got bored, and preferred seeing everything teyvat had to offer rather than settling in one place. adventuring was simply what you were meant to do, your mother had told you at a young age.

she, too, had wandered for most of her youth, and didn't stop just because you had come into her life. you remembered getting scooped up because you had wandered off a bit too close to the railing at wangshu inn as a toddler, playing with dogs at the docks of liyue harbor. you remembered the ludi harpastum and the first time you had ever had a sweet honey roast, and the way it made your eyes grow ten times in size before you dug in for more.

when your vision was bestowed upon you, you already knew how to use a sword. it was important, your mother told you, that you knew how to protect yourself. she had a vision as well, younger even than you had, and you had come to recognize the static in the air as a sign that she was angry - whether it was because of an altercation with someone on your journey or because you had secretly eaten the last hashbrown without consulting her first.

she used her vision and a sturdy blade she had owned since before you were born to protect the two of you on the road, but when she felt you were old enough, she taught you how to weild. a two handed weapon that was far too big for you when you were only fourteen, but when your reckless abandon got paired with a spark, you suddenly became far more dangerous than even your own mother. she scolded you for nearly starting a forest fire when you tried to pair the two skills for the first time after receiving your vision, and you both agreed that training was a beach activity from then on.

your mother settled eventually, after you were old and skilled enough to take on the road alone, pulling the many favors she had gathered in her travels to build a home in a small neighborhood south of liyue harbor, nestled in the foothills of mount tianheng, where you visited as often as your wandering allowed.

you had become much better with your vision. more careful but just as hot. quick to scan situations and strategize in the moment, hardly taking a second before jumping into action, slaying hilichurls like you were getting paid. well, you were, you supposed, but you had been doing this long before you had discovered the benefit of joining the guild. you were good at it. you were built for adventure, but revelled in leisure. there was good reason you were able to take afternoons off, and you milked every last second of it.

"you're back in town?"

you grinned, leaning your sword against the wall and dropping your bag off your shoulders before settling at the bar. "for now."

rubin often served you alcohol - when you were in mondstadt, at least, however often that may be - but never questioned you deeply. he would ask how your travels were, and listen to your stories from regions beyond his knowledge, of the cultures that he had only heard of from people like you. he enjoyed them just about as much as any, if not a little more, purely because your tenacious personality brought something more to the table. he wondered, though, how long you intended to keep living day by day, sleeping in different beds every week.

"what's wrong with sleeping in different beds?" you teased, laughing into your wine glass. "if i didn't know any better, i'd think you were shaming me, rube."

rubin simply laughed, knowing your tone by now. "i just wonder if you ever intend on digging in your roots, or if you'll continue travelling forever."

"if i dig roots, you may never see me again. is that what you want?"

"what," he said. "you don't like mondstadt?"

"i love monstadt," you assured him. "but i also love inazuma. and my mother is in liyue, though she might be upset with me if i try to settle too close to her. perhaps natlan would suit me more?" you shrugged finally, the door behind you opening as you finished with "i suppose i'll settle when i've found a reason to love one place more than the rest."

rubin shook his head, a chuckle falling from his lips. "a wanderer through and through." his attention was quickly drawn to the man entering the bar. "ah, captain! the usual?"

"please," the decorated man said, quickly taking a seat beside you despite the rest of the bar being available. "would you like another, wanderer?"

you eyed him cautiously, studying what you could see if his face around the black eyepatch, gaze skimming down his elaborate clothing before looking down at your emptied drink. "sure."

"another for your wandering friend, rubin, on my tab, please." your brain swirled, considering the brief information you had been given and wondered how you had never managed to meet this regular during your past visits. "are you just drinking dandelion wine, or something more fun?"

"more fun?" you asked. "what are you drinking, then?"

"well, a death after noon, of course," he stated. "don't tell me you haven't had one."

you blinked at him. "i haven't."

you turned towards rubin when he laughed at the back and forth. "shall i make two, then?"

"definitely," your new drinking buddy said, then gestured to you. "you trust my taste, right?"

you said nothing, but he accepted your silent smile as an agreeance. "captain," you said finally, thinking of how rubin had addressed him. "of?"

the man turned towards you, his elbow planted on the bar and his cheek on a fist. despite his get up, he had a playful smirk across his lips. "you mean, my reputation doesn't precede me? you really are a wanderer. everyone in mondstadt knows my name."

"everyone but me," you corrected. "as i'm currently in mondstadt."

his teeth shone behind his smirking lips before he sat up straight. "well, allow me to introduce myself." he saluted, his arm extending from his side at an angle - a salute you recognized from the guards around the city. "i am jeonghan, the cavalry captain of the knights of favonius."

"ah, the knights," you smiled briefly, before letting your eyes wander as you thought, crossing your arms over the bar. "i don't see much of a cavalry in the city, though."

he let out an amused exhale. "so i have a bit more free time these days."

"i'm sure the acting grand master is jealous of all your free time," you teased. "poor guy, looks like he's staving off a panic attack every time i see him. you should probably help him more."

"so," he sighed, leaning against the bar again. "you know of the acting grand master but not me?"

"jihoon?" you asked. "of course i know of him. he's all anyone ever talks about around here."

jeonghan nodded once, thanking rubin when he placed two drinks before you. "people talk about me, also, you know."

your lips stuck out in a pout. "jeonghan, you said? doesn't ring a bell."

he rolled his eyes and picked up his drink, holding it out for you to cheers against. you giggled, clinking your glass against his before taking a sip. the golden liquid was sweet, but not like the dandelion wine you had grown to love in this region. it had more depth, a subtle bitterness to it, and a refreshing bubble. you stared after the glass when it left your lips, then looked over to find jeonghan grinning at you.

"i see why it's your usual," you said, taking another sip before placing the glass on the bar. "i could drink too many."

"will you?" he asked.

"not tonight," you replied coolly. "i haven't asked sana to put me up at the guild yet, and if i get there too late, i'll get a cot instead of a bed. unless rubin finally wants to come clean about something?"

the bartender laughed. "how many times do i have to tell you? we don't even have rooms to board."

you squinted at him. "i know there's something upstairs. i'll learn your secrets one day, rube."

"i wouldn't be a very good bartender if i didn't know how to keep them."

"so you're in the guild?" jeonghan asked as rubin attended to another patron. "an adventuring wanderer."

you smiled vaguely at him. "i am. i have to pay for my travels somehow."

he shrugged. "there's other ways to make money. probably more profitable, too."

you eyed his teasing smirk. "i'm not sure i know what you're implying."

"as a captain of the knights of favonius, i assure you, i'm implying nothing at all," he said, exhaling sharply and adjusting on his stool. he leaned over towards you before speaking in a quieter tone. "but as jeonghan, i think you know exactly what i'm implying."

you only laughed, recognizing the thinly veiled attempt to worm a secret out of you. "i outgrew those means a long time ago. besides, when mora gets tight, i can always board up with my mother. i like liyue enough."

jeonghan studied you as you drank again. "liyue's home, is it?'

"for her, yes," you said, looking over to him, but you found yourself looking away again when his steely blue gaze met yours. you thought carefully about how much of yourself you were willing to reveal to this stranger, especially considering how important he was in the rule of the city. "she was a wanderer, too, and ended up falling in love with liyue harbor."

jeonghan made note of the way your face softened as you spoke about your mother. "and what about you?"

you met his intent look again, thinking about how his covered eye somehow made him even more intimidating. perhaps that was its purpose. "what about me?"

"what have you fallen in love with?"

a smile crept onto your lips as you processed his question. "oh, archons, what have i not fallen in love with? the smell of the open ocean in inazuma, the breathtaking temples in sumeru - have you ever been to waterfall city?"

jeonghan merely shook his head at you, the corners of his mouth turning upwards as he put his cheek on a fist again, leaning against the bar. "beautiful?"

you exhaled, eyes wide as you thought of the towering falls and the light mist that covered the city, trying to come up with an apt description. "humbling. there's nothing like it."

he watched your expression, head tilting further. "what a wonderful way to describe a place. tell me more."

your gaze went to him, then away briefly, feeling suddenly shy as you noticed his look. "about waterfall city?"

he shrugged a fur covered shoulder, shaking his head lightly. "about anywhere. describe your world, wanderer. i'd like to hear whatever you have to say."

you wondered if the heat that ran through you was because of the alcohol or the man, but you just took another drink and cleared your throat lightly, thinking of more places you had discovered in your travels. you thought of qingce village, one of your favorite places to visit, because the people are kind and welcoming and the fields are so beautiful. you told him about a tea shop owned by an old man - he insisted you call him pops so fiercely that you weren't even sure you had caught his given name - and it was probably the most relaxing cup of tea you ever had.

"it's been a while since i've gone," you sighed. "i think i'm overdue for a chat with pops and his tea."

jeonghan was smiling when you looked at him again. "the tea in liyue is unmatched," he said, reaching for his drink. before taking another sip, he gestured for you to continue.

so you did. you told him about sakura pond, about celestia city, about the volcanic black beaches. you told him liyue had your favorite people, but inazuma had your favorite food. he clicked his tongue at you.

"what about mondstadt? do we have one of your favorites?"

you smiled, genuinely. "sunsets. the night sky is different here than it is anywhere else. i think mondstadt is the closest we can get to the stars without joining the archons."

jeonghan studied you briefly, his blue eye flicking over your face as you finished your drink. "i think that's an apt observation. it seems your eyes are always wide."

"i travel for the views," you exhaled. "i don't plan on missing any."

he thought a second. "have you been to starsnatch cliff?"

your eyes lit up. "not in years," you said, in complete shock that you could have forgotten such a place. you pushed from the bar slightly, turning towards him, and he noticed the flash of a red gem strapped to your right thigh for the first time. "my mother took me there when i was a kid, but i haven't gone since."

"it never gets old," he said, sipping at the end of his drink. "i've yet to see that view and not be in awe."

"i'll go before i leave mondstadt again," you decided.

he looked to you. "when will that be?"

you sighed. "not sure, yet."

he just chuckled. "would you like another drink?"

"oh, no," you said, standing and stretching your spine. "i should make my leave. i don't like sleeping on cots. i just came by to let my ol' pal rube know i was in town again."

jeonghan watched you pull your pack onto your back, grabbing the handle of your sheathed claymore from where it was leaning against the wall next to the bar. "perhaps i'll see you again tomorrow?"

you looked at him, a vague smile on your lips as you strapped your sword back on. "perhaps you will, captain."

"jeonghan," he corrected. "but i don't believe you ever shared your name?"

"that was by design, captain," you said, and he swore he caught a glint in your eye as you bid rubin a farewell and stepped out of the angel's share.

jeonghan spun back around on his stool, immediately looking to rubin. "do you know their name?"

"no, sir," he said, looking at the closed door. "they've never said."

jeonghan's gaze went to the empty glass you had left behind, thinking about your stories, your sword, and the signifier of your vision on your thigh. "fascinating."

you got lucky - sana had a private room for you, and said you were welcome to rent it for your stay. she said not many people were travelling to mondstadt these days, and that more often than not, the adventurer's barracks in headquarters went unused. ever since the fatui had holed up in the grand goth hotel, it had been harder for you to make extended stays in mondstadt, but it seemed that something was telling you to stick around longer than usual. you laid on the hard mattress - a feeling that was more comforting than most, thanks to your continuous travels - and thought of the charming captain that had made a night of questioning you. you wondered if he really had any interest in anything you had to say, or if he had been hoping for details about something pertinent to an investigation.

you packed a lighter bag in the morning, only bringing along the essentials as you set out for your commissions for the day. that afternoon, you wandered around mondstadt and asked questions. questions about the simultaneously well-discussed and mysterious cavalry captain that had listened to your tales of travel, and answers came easier than expected, though they didn't contain all the details you were looking for. that night, you waited up at the angel's share to brag about your newfound knowledge to the captain that never showed, and you did your best to not let that hurt your ego.

the next day, you made a detour on your way back to the city after completing your commissions, stopping by springvale to enjoy a well deserved lunch and catch up with some locals. you sat in the grass with a skewer of grilled meat, watching the windmills of mondstadt steadily spin in the distance as time passed, thinking about how rubin had asked you if you didn't like it here.

you did, you decided. mondstadt felt different than anywhere else you had been. untouched, almost. wilder. freer. despite being born in inazuma, your first memories being in celestia, or your mother being in liyue, mondstadt felt comfortable. felt like a home. you wondered to yourself what that might mean.

sana greeted you happily when you returned much later than you normally did. she told you to go ahead to the guild and come back, filing away your reports and retrieving your rewards. you dropped off your things in your rented room, quickly, practically galloping back down the steps towards the entrance of the city to continue your conversation with the adventurer guilds' mighty receptionist without your sword weighing you down. you crossed your arms on the counter, comfortably lounging as you chatted with her, having always enjoyed her conversations more than most. like rubin, she was a reason mondstadt always felt comfortable.

"fancy meeting you here," an all too familiar voice said, and you pulled your eyes from sana to find jeonghan leaning his side against the counter next to you.

"good evening, cavalry captain!" sana chirped, placing your reward - your room free already removed - on the counter and bowing politely. "can i help you with anything today?"

his icy gaze flickered from your lightly curved lips towards sana. "oh, no, my dear. i'm just coming back from an investigation near springvale"

"interesting," you said, eyeing him. "i was just there and didn't see you."

"i wouldn't be very good at my job if you did, wanderer," he grinned. "knight business, you wouldn't understand. got the assignment yesterday."

"ah," you shifted to your side to face him, making him eye the vision on your thigh. "is that why you never showed? rubin was worried."

he looked you up and down. "rubin was, huh?"

you rolled your eyes and adjusted your posture to face away from his smirk. sana looked between the two of you twice before clearing her throat as quietly as possible, making jeonghan let out a chuckle before he directed his attention to the guild's receptionist.

"how goes holding the post, sana?"

she looked almost frightened when the attention was directed back to her. "good, captain! in fact, one of our most capable adventurers-" she gestured to you, "-just returned from taking care of some of our more difficult commissions - no one else would take them."

jeonghan looked at you. "why did sana have to tell your secret?"

your eyebrows quirked upwards. "what secret?"

"that you're good at this. shouldn't you be bragging?"

a chuckle spilled from your lips, and jeonghan watched you as you looked away. "i'm not the bragging type."

he studied you a moment. "what type are you, then?"

you considered the question, wondering exactly how to answer. what type were you? if not a teller, than surely you must be a shower, but that didn't seem right either. you exhaled. "the quiet type. see you later, sana."

he laughed, pushing off the counter as you tucked your mora into your waist bag, wishing sana a good evening and following you towards the fountain. "you sure talk a lot for being the quiet type."

a smirk landed itself on your lips as he fell into step beside you. "maybe private is a better description."

"that one i can see," jeonghan said, looking over to you. he thought of how you had spent nearly an hour telling him about the best views in teyvat, yet he still didn't know the most basic information about you. "do you share your name with anyone?"

you thought. "my mother."

he scoffed. "anyone else?"

you looked to the sky. "rubin."

"wrong," he retorted. "he doesn't know your name, either."

you laughed, looking over to him as you came up to the fountain, spinning and sitting back on the ledge. "you asked?"

"of course i asked," he said, planting one foot on the ledge beside you and placing his arms on his knee. "i asked other people, too. almost everyone knows you, but they don't know anything about you. bits and pieces, but never the full picture."

you just smiled up at him from your relaxed posture on the concrete. "what's wrong with a little intrigue?"

he just smiled back at you. "nothing. i tend to keep a bit myself. did you know there's a large number of people in this city that were shocked when i said you wield a claymore?"

you hummed, dipping the tips of your fingers into the fountain. "did you know there's a large number of people in this city that consider you the most eligible bachelor in not only mondstadt, but in all of teyvat?"

his lips parted slightly as you spoke. "so you snooped, too."

"i was bored yesterday. it wasn't hard," you exhaled. you flicked a drop of water towards his foot. "jeonghan yoon, the cavalry captain of the knights of favonius since he was only nineteen. who loves wine and whose adopted brother runs the biggest winery in teyvat, yet they're hardly ever seen speaking. who comes from a far off land on a different continent, but has come to love mondstadt like it was his home. who wears an eyepatch but has never told anyone why."

he chuckled at the assessment and pulled his foot off the ledge to sit beside you. "so when do i get to learn about you?"

"i told you about me yesterday," you said.

"you told me about teyvat," he corrected. "and while i was able to infer some things about your character, i still know close to nothing about you."

you thought for a moment, realizing no one had ever noticed how little you truly shared despite always being willing to tell stories. "sometimes it feels like i am teyvat. it's hard to think of things that are just about me."

"you could start with that vision," he said, nodding at the strap across your thigh. you looked down at it, exhaling.

"what's there to tell? you know what it means, and that's more teyvat than me, too."

he leaned back on a hand, looking you up and down in curiosity. "how old were you."

you chewed your cheek. "fourteen. you?"

his lip quirked upwards. "sixteen."

you bumped his shoulder with yours playfully. "beat you."

he laughed. "how'd it happen?"

you paused. "you go first."

he just chuckled and looked away, watching a dog wander past the general store. "another day, then."

"no fun," you sighed, brushing your hands together as you leaned forward. "what about the eyepatch?"

he met your eyes, mouth slanted in a smirk. "another day."

you clicked your tongue. "if you wanna learn about me, you have to be willing to give up some details, too. i value a fair trade."

"then stop asking questions that you know i won't share the answer to." jeonghan noticed the color of the sky, then suddenly pulled a pocket watch out, checking it quickly to confirm that there was enough time and stood. "come with me?"

you stared up at him. "where?"

he grinned, extending a hand to help you to your feet. "you said mondstadt's sunsets were your favorite, correct?"

you generally weren't prone to following mysterious men into back corridors, but jeonghan easily convinced you with no words at all that sneaking around the sight line of the acting grand master was completely normal behavior, sushing you with a grin as you giggled, taking refuge around a corner after the two of you made it up to the second floor of the favonius headquarters. he tugged your hand with his, pulling you into a steep maintenance staircase behind a door.

"this feels like it's against some rules," you said, climbing the stairs behind him.

"nonsense," he said, looking back at you and grinning. "are you suggesting that a knight of favonius would break rules just to impress a mysterious traveler?"

you laughed quietly, wondering if he really meant that he wanted to impress you. "not most, but maybe this one."

he only thought for a split second. "if anyone asks, we're on official knight business."

he opened the door and you found the sky again, beginning to glow orange as the edge of the sun began to hide behind the cliffs. you stared in awe at the way the few fluffy clouds reflected pink and gold, then readjusted your focus when jeonghan spoke again.

"i hope you aren't afraid of heights," he said, walking over to the parapets that surrounded you. "the best view requires a bit of a climb."

you looked up at the tower, and while it wasn't much higher than where you stood, you also recognized that you were well above most of mondstadt already. "you climb up there?"

he paused, studying you. "we don't have to, we can just sit on a merlon-"

"no, we can climb," you said, walking over to where he was and eyeing the small gap between the parapet and the adjacent roof. "hop over?"

he laughed, stepping over the gap and holding a hand out for you. "watch your step."

and though you didn't need it, you accepted the hand anyways, and it stayed on yours as you walked over the roof to the tower, as if making sure you didn't misstep several stories in the air.

"would you like to go first?" he asked. "i'll catch you if you fall."

you rolled your eyes at him, dropping your hand from his grip. "you go first. i want to see where the handholds are."

he just grinned at you. "very well," he said, tugging on the wrists of his fingerless gloves to make sure they were taught against his skin before taking hold of a brick. you watched him as he took foothold after foothold, and he resisted the urge to show off by speedily scaling the wall in favor of making sure you had the chance to see where he gripped. when he reached the opening in the tower, he pulled himself up and spun around, exhaling with a grin as he seated himself at the ledge with his legs dangling above you.

"your turn."

you adjusted your waist bag as you sighed in amused annoyance, spinning it to be behind you and out of your hips' way to climb the wall. it wasn't much - a couple meters, maybe - and you had definitely climbed further, but jeonghan's presence made you slightly nervous. that nervousness, however, just fueled you to prove yourself.

you scaled the wall easily, making jeonghan whistle and jokingly call you some kind of adventurer, and your only hesitation came when his hand was in your face. despite your initial inclination to ignore it, you put your left hand in his, allowing him to help you pull yourself up on the ledge and sit beside him.

"impressive," he commented.

you laughed, brushing off your hands. "you, too."

"c'mon," he said, gesturing his head over his shoulder before making moves to stand. "the view's on the other side."

you sighed, looking over the view of mondstadt shrouded in golden light as he stood and walked to the other ledge. "never a moment of rest with you."

"if you want to miss the sunset, be my guest."

you leaned back on your hands and laughed, pulling your gaze away from the city to look at where jeonghan had seated himself on the other end of the tower, and subsequently the view of the rolling hills beyond him that were glowing golden in the evening sun. you blinked for a second, realizing you hadn't seen the sunset the night before, and quickly got to your feet to join him before you missed this one, too.

he gave you a soft smile when you sat beside him, and you briefly wondered how many he had in his repertoire. the wind was stronger higher, whipping gently through his hair and alleviating any uncomfortable warmth you may have had from exerting yourself on the way up. you watched the dregs of sunlight skip across the grassy hills and the sky turn deep orange and bright pink, feet swinging lightly over the edge of the tower.

"i was fighting with my brother," he said suddenly, causing you to look at him with a start before you realized he was telling you about his vision. there was a slight smile on his face as he looked out on the fields. "hyungwon. it was bad. he already had his - he's a pyro, like you - and we were both young and stupid and just lost our dad. we were sword fighting and it came to me when i needed it. it probably saved my life, honestly."

you blinked at him. "you think he would have killed you?'

he exhaled, leaning back on his hands. "i think if the roles had been reversed, i would have tried to kill him, too. i'm grateful it didn't go that way, though." he coughed abruptly, clearing his throat. "we're on speaking terms, and i do love him as a brother, but i generally avoid him."

you let that thought ruminate as you watched the sun sink, halfway beyond the horizon. "my father was in a gang in inazuma, but my mom ran away when she found out she was pregnant. didn't want to raise a kid in that world, i guess? we ran into him when i got older and he wasn't very understanding." you paused, remembering the detail too well. "they were going to take her vision. that's what they did to traitors. probably take me, too. they weren't expecting me to start setting fires."

jeonghan's gaze was on you as yours was on the horizon. "just a couple of survivors."

you looked over at him, a smirk on your lips. "a couple?"

he laughed waving at your implication, thinking he would have said the same thing in an attempt to fluster you just as you were to him. "like, more than one and less than four."

you only laughed back. "fortune favors the weak, i suppose. the archons saw we needed help and extended a fig branch."

"is that what it was?" he asked, a laugh on his lips. "we were both fighting people. that's hardly an offer of peace."

"look for the deeper meaning, jeonghan. we were fighting for our lives," you pointed out, and he realized it was the first time you had addressed him by his name rather than his title. "i was fighting for family. for freedom. is that not the greatest pursuit of peace?"

he watched you as you pulled your knees to your chest, putting your feet on the edge of the stonework surface you sat on. he studied the way the golden rays lit your skin and made your eyes sparkle. "i suppose so."

you paused in that moment for a long while, and jeonghan allowed the comfortable silence as the two of you watched the sun disappear beyond the cliffs of mondstadt. the sky was turning a deep shade of purple when you told him your name, and jeonghan thought that it was quite possibly the best news he had ever received, but he kept that joy to himself as he confirmed your name, and you rolled your eyes.

"are you gonna answer my other question now?"

he scoffed. "about the eyepatch? is it really that interesting?"

"not any more interesting than my name," you retorted.

"completely untrue," jeonghan insisted. "i've never been so excited to be told a secret, and i get told a lot of secrets."

you eyed his smile warily. "my name may be unknown, but it's no secret."

he sighed and shook his head lightly. "you really wanna know the reason i wear it? it's probably not as dramatic as you're hoping."

"yet you hide it?"

he laughed. "what's wrong with a little intrigue?"

you looked away, recognizing the parrot of your own words. "whatever you say, captain."

"no!" he whined and grabbed your arm, making you start and look at him with big eyes. "you just started calling me jeonghan, don't go back to captain."

you stared at him, only breaking to laugh, dropping your legs over the edge again. "you won't show me what's under the eyepatch, so i thought we weren't on first name basis."

his hand on your bicep was warm and gentle, but his gaze was piercing as he thought it over for a bit longer. you did your best to hold it, but you felt yourself shrinking when he quietly muttered, "go on, then."

it took you a second to register what he meant, and you reached out slowly, fingers hesitating before they brushed upon his cheekbone. jeonghan closed his eyes, resigning to your touch as you gently lifted the eyepatch. his eyes opened again, slowly, and you thought your heart might have skipped a beat.

"like chocolate," you commented, and a smile spread across his lips.

"that's the kindest reaction i've gotten."

your fingers fell upon his temple, brushing down gently as you inspected his singular brown eye. "since birth?"

he nodded, his eyes flicking down to your lips briefly before he spoke. "heterochromia. it's a characteristic of my family."

you studied his face. "not the one here?"

he sighed. "not the one here."

the icy blue of jeonghan's eye had always struck something in you. it made him mysterious. commanding. it felt like he saw more than you despite having one eye covered. but now, you felt warm. you felt his gentleness. there was comfort hidden away behind that black patch, and you told him that you understood why the cavalry captain had chosen to hide the eye he did.

but to you, he was willing to show anything that would keep you around longer, he said.

"why me?" you asked, studying his expression when he looked away. the sun had retreated behind the hills, leaving the sky a deep blue.

jeonghan didn't respond right away, and you wondered if he himself even knew the answer. "we're birds of a feather, you and i."

you looked out to the view again, watching the subtle movements of the wild hills. "did you travel much before you came here?"

"it was all i knew," he told you. "i was thirteen when my father left me here."

your neck snapped, your eyes on his profile when he leaned back on his hands. "left you?"

he almost laughed, a smile on his lips when his eyes met yours. "i was slowing him down, i suppose. hyungwon's father found me and took me in."

"so you stayed?"

"i didn't always want to," he assured you. "i had the itch to leave for years. as soon as i was able, i always told myself." he paused, eyes dropping. "then father died. then hyungwon turned down his position with the knights. and i was their second choice."

you pursed your lips. "you stayed for a job."

he laughed. "it's not that simple."

you smiled at him, enjoying the warmth of his eyes on yours as the sky cooled. "are you sure we're birds of a feather?"

"listen," he said, getting off his hands and brushing them off on his thighs. "i accepted the job so that i could set the story straight. i didn't want to run from the people that believed that hyungwon tried to kill me to avenge our father."

you studied him. "i'm sorry."

"don't be," he said, nudging your shoulder. "i was still planning on leaving, but then i fell in love."

you looked away, trying to sort out the way your stomach flipped. "are they still around?"

"not with a person," he laughed, then nodded towards the now dark hills. "with the views. besides, i get free reign whenever i leave for missions. i have fun adventuring, and come home to the best sunsets in teyvat. there are worse places to call home."

your eyes scanned the horizon, remembering the brilliant rays of sun you had just seen skip across it. "that is tempting."

"how tempting?" he asked.

you thought on that for a moment. "almost as much as a death after noon right now."

jeonghan laughed, slightly proud that he had hooked you on his favorite drink. "shall we go see rubin, then?"

you hummed, smiling at the captain. "as long as i don't have to sit alone again."

"that's a promise," he told you as he stood, holding out a hand that you took without hesitation, though he withheld his intention to make sure you were never alone again.

[secretgamergirl]

Dear Game Developers, I don’t want to be a rapacious colonizing blight on the world.

I like a pretty wide variety of games, but one general thing I’ve always been particularly keen on is the sort of game where I start off just kinda naked in the wilderness with nothing and have to build up a bunch of infrastructure to accomplish something. So you know, RTSes, Civ clones, survival games, sandbox-y Minecraft stuff, Dwarf Fortress and similar things, but these all have this really annoying habit of making my character the biggest existential threat to the entire world, and I would really like them to stop doing that all the time.

So, just to open up with an example of how to do this sort of thing in a way I like, Subnautica is one of my favorite games. I recently streamed the whole thing, so, links to that if you’d like: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

Subnautica actively confronts my issue head on, and handles it right. I’m not slaughtering everything I see, I’m not strip mining the whole planet, I’m not leveling forests. I’m here by way of horrible tragic accident, and by the end of the game I’ve done my best to clean up the mess from that and address some other global issues to the point where I can confidently say my presence over the course of the game has made for a net positive impact on the environment in which it’s set. Plus it’s a great game in a bunch of other ways.

I’m also pretty happy with Factorio, oddly enough. In Factorio I AM strip mining the whole world, slaughtering absolutely all of the local wildlife, and any forests I’m not clear-cutting I’m choking out with industrial emissions that leave nothing but dry withered skeletons where there were once beautiful stretches of foliage. The thing of it is, between actually tracking my environmental impact as a mechanic and having such downer visuals, it at least feels like the developers and I are sharing a really dark joke about how awful you are in games like this.

Then on the other side of the coin here, we have, say, Satisfactory. A game in the same weird subgenre as Factorio (do we have a name for these yet? Convey’em Ups?) but... really gross. The player is explicitly just heading down to this really beautiful planet to extract and process all the resources they can. You’re rewarded for killing... basically all life you see despite it not generally posing any sort of real threat to you, clear cutting all the vegetation, and to keep the factory building vibes nice and chill, when you tap into a coal vein or set up an oil well, you get an endless supply of those burnable fuels to use forever, with absolutely no consequence, as you just consume all the things to make all the other things and ship them out to meet quotas. And that’s... kinda gross? Again, the fact that nothing you do has any sort of consequence despite half of it being stuff that is literally killing the world in reality makes it way worse.

Meanwhile, lately I’ve been keeping a lot of modded Minecraft videos going in the background to stave off the social isolation with the whole plague and all with some human voices, and see what cool new ideas people are testing there. One of the real popular new mods is this one called MineColonies, and you know what? It’s really neat. The idea is you find a big open plot of land somewhere, throw down blueprints for really huge multiblock structures of houses and workshops and such, get those built up a little, and NPCs start wandering in you can start giving jobs to. Here’s someone to harvest and replant trees, someone to go mining for underground resources, someone to build and upgrade the rest of these buildings, people to provide renewable food and medicine to all these other NPCs. Schools for their kids to get their stats up to good places by adulthood, a whole higher learning system to advance a tech tree, it’s cool.

But the thing is, as you probably gathered from the name, it’s DISGUSTINGLY colonialist. All these people coming in are explicitly white, with British accents, explicitly gendered and explicitly heterosexual too incidentally, and a huge part of the general infrastructure building is having to set up guard posts and barracks all over, training knights and archers to defend against the local barbarians native to the land you’re building on who wander out of the wilderness to attack everyone with some regularity. And I mean, how messed up is that? This mod is explicitly adding in native people’s just so there’s someone for you to displace and murder as you colonize some big chunk of unspoiled wilderness in the name of prosperity for your... British colony. Which of course works on an explicitly feudalist system (and then also for some reason has everyone grumbling about how you’re spending your gold, which you aren’t even doing). It totally thematically ruins what I’d otherwise be super super into. And not long after this was released, baseline Minecraft did basically the same thing. There are now roving barbarian tribes who go around trying to kill you and any villagers near you and you have to concern yourself with wiping out whole groups of them with some regularity, whereas previously the only enemies you really had to deal with were zombies and skeletons and a few other weird explicitly monstrous things. It’s gross.

My distaste for slaughtering barbarians extends to the civilization games too. Which... I mean I have put a LOT of hours into a lot of Civ games so it’s obviously not a total dealbreaker for me, but... you’re always this weird immortal dictator and even if you set your civilization up as a democracy, you sure do win every single election regardless of how unhappy people are with you, and you spend a good chunk of time slaughtering local barbarians. And increasingly, with each new game, smaller independent nations because they really keep putting more and more emphasis on military conquest being, if not the best path to victory, one you have to push pretty far no matter what you’re going for.

And it doesn’t have to work like that. My favorite game, mostly in the franchise, is still Alpha Centauri. Where the “barbarians” are brain eating space worms, not other humans, and even then, you can (and I consistently do) be a big tree-hugging hippy, enact worm-friendly social policies, make friends with them instead of killing them, and have them go devour a bunch of violent anti-science anti-environment right wing creeps, strongarm everyone else into adopting similar policies, and, like Subnautica, leave the world better than you found it by foregoing all the easier wins and doing the thing where you find a permanent solution to the local planetary superconsciousness accidentally going berserk and eating itself at periodic intervals. Happy ending for everyone! Except for Miriam. Screw Miriam.

Meanwhile, someone I know not to long ago just randomly pitched a game where there’s a big nature ravaging industrial sprawl, but you play as some sort of reclaiming embodiment of nature, strategically... I guess spreading trees to grow up through everything and have rats chew through the wiring and stuff, and yeah, I would play the hell out of that game. If nobody else gets to it before I clear my plate of all these other projects, I might even make that game.

I should stress again too that it’s not even that I don’t want games to ever put me in such a role as the player, just if you’re going to do it, acknowledge that that sort of thing isn’t cool, and either make it clear that the player character has been forced into a really unfortunate position, or that said character is just awful. Or both, both works.

What I don’t want to ever see people do is rationalize a way out of the issues. “Oh this is an infinite supply of clean-burning coal” does not fly with me. “Oh we’re establishing a colony but it’s on an alien planet” is still colonialism. The weird fetish the whole game industry seems to have with leveling forests is not made better by having those trees give you saplings that fully replace every tree cut down in like 2 minutes. If you don’t want to unpack the moral implications of something, you can just not include it to begin with. None of the stuff I’ve been laying out here is actually necessary for any of these games to work. Just... quit being weird and making me play coal-mining conquistadors already.

[yandere-daydreams]

My favourite thing about yanderes is that despite escaping the law after kidnapping someone and most likely killing a few people they're still fucking stupid

tw - kidnapping, dehumanization, mentions of stalking, obsessive mindsets, yanderes aren’t stupid but they sure are trying to be.

To be fair, they’re really only stupid around you, and they have a good reason for being... like that, despite their few, hypothetical good points. They’re capable human beings. They’ve got a job, one they needed to go through a few years to qualify for, a social circle, and before they met you, they probably had normal relationships, normal partners, a totally normal life. You just happen to be an unfortunate weak point. A slight vulnerability that worms its way into their brain and rots whatever it touches, regardless of how vital those parts may be. It just makes things a little harder to ignore, where you’re concerned. 

I think it has something to do with how long stalking takes, honestly, how long they staved off all those nasty, half-baked impulses before they finally broke and brought you home. By the time they finally get find their arms wrap around you, by the time they finally have a chance to do every sickeningly loving thing they’ve wanted to, since they first realized how they felt, they’re over-eager, they’re excited, they’re so, so ready to do something stupid. It’s only natural they’d get a little frustrated when you fail to respond with the same enthusiasm, that they’d say something dumb and disregard your feelings and act like a child - a toddler with a knife and a bottle of sedatives and no adult to tell them to calm down. They’re not going to make rational choices, not when they’ve been waiting so long, not when they don’t have a reason to think they can’t break you into returning their affection. They’re not going to use logic, they’re not even going to try, because they don’t think they have to. They think they love you, and when you’re around, that’s all they care about, and their only goal is to keep you alive enough and beaten down enough to learn to love them back, one day. They’re not stupid, but they’re short-sighted. They’re not an idiot, but they’re willing to act like a childish, temperamental, spoiled brat, if it means getting what they want.

They just love you too much to think about anything else, and they’re not going to make an effort to try.

[soft-emilyon]

i have many brain worms chewing away at my happiness but as long as i stay on tumblr and wear a skirt every now and then i can stave them off another day 🙃

[paynomindtotheinsanity]

Vampire Dib AU: Your Eyes are Red

I’ve been working on this on and off. ADHD is a bitch - can’t get anything done around here, lol. Anyway, here’s a little snippet of the first chapter if anyone would like to read it! Dib shows up to school one day and isn’t feeling all that great. Zim, being his usual, obnoxious self, has noticed a strange smell on the human and is determined to figure out what’s going on...

I walk out of the nurse’s office and lean against the door frame in exhaustion. Yeah...fuck this. I’m not going back to class.

“Dib-thing?”

Zim’s voice startles me. I look up to see him sitting on the bench across the hallway.

“Were you...waiting for me?” I ask. His eyes narrow and he crosses his arms.

“No! I’m here for my own purposes.”

I stare blankly. “Which are?”

He throws his hands up and snarls. “Which are of no concern to you, human! Now, tell Zim what the stink-nurse wanted with you.”

I glare at him for a moment as my fever continues to rise. I didn’t expect the Tylenol to do much, but I hoped it would do something to stave off this awful heat.

“I’m going home, Zim. I’m sick.”

 I start hobbling down the hall toward the exit. Zim hops off of the bench.

“Zim will accompany you.”

Oh, god. “That’s…” too much, annoying, suffocating, obnoxious, please leave me alone “not necessary-”

“SILENCE!”

I cover my ears and snap. “Why the fuck are you being so loud today?”

He ignores me. “Zim will decide what is necessary since you have fallen ILL with some disgusting human disease. Your sad worm brain has been compromised and therefore cannot be trusted with the decision-making.”

I groan in unison with a new rush of heat. “Fine, whatever Zim. I don’t have the energy to argue with you anyway.”

“Good!” he shouts, flashing a grin of pointy teeth as he passes me. “You still have some brain cells left. Now come along, Zim will escort you to your filthy human hovel.”

The room doubles. Triples. My feet feel strangely cold as I trail miserably behind the Irken.

“Hey…” I spy my bag clutched tight in Zim’s weird finger-claws. “Did you go through my stuff?!”

He glances over his shoulder and sneers. “Zim is helping. Yes, you’re welcome. I was trying to find the culprit of your...unusual stench today, but it doesn’t seem to be from your bag. Must be something rotting in your home. You should take extra baths today, Dib-stink.”

I swallow down the urge to vomit again and push past the little imp, putting both hands on the door leading to the front of the school and shoving it open--

The screech of metal rips through my ears. I stumble forward, down the steps, missing one, two, three in a row before I fall on my side on the stained concrete. The sun is blinding. Every fiber of my body is screaming, aching, bleeding - the breath has been ripped from my lungs.

I grimace, clutching my head with one hand, fixing my glasses with the other, and I see that the door I just pushed open hangs on one hinge, crushed into the side wall. Zim stands at the top of the steps, staring intensely at the busted door for a moment before his wide gaze narrows and moves to me, a crumpled mess on the ground below.

My thoughts scramble. What the fuck just happened?