#the bottom quote is what forced me to make this. i know they’re brothers but they are brothers !!!!!

[sincerelymarner]

“It’s always been me versus Quinn, making each other better. Over the years, it’s been unbelievable.”

"I was 4 and he was 6 and I was chasing him around and wanting to do whatever he did," Jack said "I always wanted to be able to compete with Quinn and play with him but didn't want to slow him down. He kind of pushed me, gave me that work ethic to work with him because he's such a hard worker himself. Catching up with Quinn was always the thing I wanted to do as the younger brother."

credits: sportnet / sportsnet / sportsnet / sportsnet / nhl / espn / the athletic / espn / sportsnet / the athletic / nhl

[i-cant-sing]

An Accident

Yeah... you may have seen this before, earlier this week when I accidentally posted it. Anyways, this is a part 2 of the Todoroki clan being obsessed with reader's hair. So, um enjoy.

Check out my MASTERLIST for more!

Yandere Todoroki Clan:

Rei is obsessed with reader’s hair.

She’s taken such good care of it, and after years of hard work, your hair now reaches just around your butt. Your hair is healthy, thick, luscious, and cut into a smooth, U shape; of course all trims are done by Rei herself because she doesn't even trust professionals. And even though you’ve asked Rei on multiple occasions to cut it short, at least up to the middle of your back, she just wouldn’t, always saying that you’re being unreasonable. But you’re not; you’ve given her multiple valid reasons.

For example, Rei and Fuyumi do your hair themselves. And initially, they would let you choose whatever hairstyle you wanted, but now they pick one for you, saying they know which one will suit your outfit of the day better. Rei likes to do double buns, or ponytails tied with ribbons or just one high pony with a pretty big bow on the top of your head. Fuyumi on the other hand makes super intricate hairstyles, and while they look pretty, only you know how much pain your scalp is in. Fuyumi does your hair as if you’re her doll, yanking and twisting hard, saying that she needs to be this rough to achieve the distinctive braid patterns. Thankfully, Rei usually does your hair most of the time.

One of the main reasons you've begged Rei to let you cut your hair short is how much time she (and you) would safe. Since your hair is so long, it takes a lot of time for Rei to put in hair masks, serums, oils, etc. It takes even longer to wash and dry them out, and then style them as well. But she smiled oh so kindly, and told you that she doesn't mind. She looks forward to taking care of your hair, forcing you to sit between her legs for hours as she applies some expensive magic growth oil, ignoring how you didn't like this.

And even if your hair is curly naturally, like even 4C curly hair, Rei will have it straight as a stick in no time (don't bother telling her that you like it natural). But don't worry, its still quite voluminous.

Of course, Rei washes your hair herself, telling you that you’re simply not capable enough to manage it. (At least she lets you wash your body yourself.) And due to your hair being so long, it takes time to not only wash it, but also dry it. Rei will detangle using a wide tooth comb, starting from the bottom and working her way up. Then she’ll dry it with her cold breath, and if required, call Enji to dry your hair with his heat. You like it when Enji dries your hair, because he does it quickly and your hair becomes far smoother.

And its not just Rei and Fuyumi that are obsessed with your hair, the boys are just as fond of it as well. Enji likes to card his fingers through your hair while he’s working on some papers or listening to news, his warm hands always putting you to sleep in his lap. Its an adorable sight, gives him a sense of peace.

Shotou also likes to run his hands through your long hair, especially after a stressful day. The feeling of his fingers through your smooth, long locks, it calms him. And if he’s feeling extra stressed, then he might braid your hair loosely as well. He always wears a scrunchie on his wrist for you.

You wouldn't ever admit it, but you enjoy it when Natsuo played with your hair. Its like he can sense when you're having a headache. He'll have you sit on the floor while he takes a seat on your bed, and then his fingers will do their magic. He knows exactly where to put pressure on your scalp, and exactly how much force to use. His massages always relieve your migraines, and he always massages with expertise to ensure their is proper blood flow in your scalp.

While you are more than happy to let Natsuo touch your hair, you hate it when Dabi's around. If you didn't know better, you'd think he wants to rip your scalp off. He knows how much it annoys you, always pulling at your ponytails, tugging at your braids, even yanking it a few times when you ignore him. And you've complained to your family, but all of them say that "oh he's just playing around." Or "no, he just misses you. He's only teasing." And when you ask Dabi to stop it, he'll just smile and say "big brother privileges."

He's insufferable.

Everyone gets to play with your hair, but God forbid if you do. Oh no, apparently you'd "destroy it", as if you're not capable of managing your own hair. You're not allowed to open your ponytails because, quoting Rei, "you're yanking your hair. You're going to rip your follicles- baby, stop. Just let me do it." But you know that she does that because she wants to brush your hair with the soft, bristle brush before you go to bed. And somedays, Rei doesn't tie your hair in a bun or something, letting your hair fall, and it gets in your way, and even then you're still not allowed to put it up because "oh honey, your hair needs to breathe too. If you keep it in a pony, the band will leave a mark in it." Honestly, everyone finds it adorable when you're dressed in your little, fluffy skirt paired with a cozy oversized sweater, all mad and pouting, trying to blow the hair strands blocking your field of vision. Like a little baby.

While Rei looks at your hair and sees years of her hards work and patience, all you see is losing control over your own life. And you are. They decide everything for you, from the clothes you wear, the food you eat, and even things you should like and dislike. They choose when you should go out, what you should watch, when its time for bed. They disregard your opinions and feelings, and if you show that you're frustrated, then its means that you're just throwing a "tantrum", and you need to be put to bed like some cranky child. You've told them that they're too overbearing, but they always say that they just love you.

What kind of love is controlling?

They're so lost in their delusions, that they don't even see the deteriorating effects it has on you mentally.

Actually, one person did see them. Dabi.

He saw how much everything was overwhelming you, how you were near tears when they talked over you, made choices for you.

He felt a bit bad for you, just a tad. Mostly, he felt there was another opportunity to mess with you.

When Dabi came to bother you one night, tugging at your hair again, this time a bit harder than usual, he saw you were ready to cry. You didn't even bother saying anything to him anymore, just kept quiet and did your best not to cry. Of course, now he ridiculed you. Called you a little crybaby and used that annoying patronising tone with you. And just as he was about to leave, he said "if your hair bothers you so much, why don't you just cut it, you big baby?"

As if something had finally snapped in you, you let his words echo. Why don't I cut it? What's stopping me?

Was it because you had learned to just give in?

You didn't even realise you had walked to your bathroom until you were holding a pair of scissors. Which surprised you, because you weren't allowed to use scissors unsupervised. It was almost as if a sign from the universe motivating you to do it, and definitely not Dabi who left them on the sink.

Holding the pair of scissors in one hand and a chunk of your hair in the other, you hesitate for a second and wonder what will Rei do. But before you could stop yourself, you cut.

I'll cross that bridge when it comes.

You start low, maybe 2 inches above your hips. It looks okay, but maybe you could cut a little more. And a little more. And a little more. Before you know it, your hair is around shoulder length, in an uneven, chunky bob. Its not perfect, but somehow you feel much better. Like you’ve finally gotten some control back. Wiping your tears away, you ruffle your hair a bit, the cool air on your neck adding to the feeling of freedom. You feel normal, happier, peaceful. Things you haven't felt in years. And all because you had 3 am meltdown.

After you cleaned up the bathroom, you went back to bed, anxious how everyone will react in the morning. Maybe they won't care. You thought. Its only hair. My hair.

Everyone was waiting for you at breakfast the next morning, and to everyone’s surprise, Dabi had joined them as well. Rei was cooking up some eggs, while the kids chatted. Enji was suspicious of the mischievous glint in Dabi’s eyes, and it was filling him with unease. Just as he was about to question him, you walked in.

Everyone went silent.

Then Fuyumi let out an audible gasp, while Dabi chuckled darkly. Natsuo, Shotou and Enji looked at you with their mouths agape.

“Good morning.”you greeted them.

Rei, who was facing away from you, finally turned towards you. “Good mo-”Rei’s breath hitched, eyes blown wide, as the plate of bacon fell from her hands.

Its funny how everyone in the kitchen, including you, had the same thought at that moment.

What the fuck?

Taking a deep breath, you moved to sit in your usual spot between Fuyumi and Rei, but Shotou suddenly pulled you back and pushed you into the seat beside him. He knows his mother is in a better state mentally, but something tells him not to risk it. Fuyumi snapped next, quickly getting up and cleaning the mess on the floor while Enji pulled Rei, who was still staring at you in disbelief, to sit beside him. You remained indifferent to everyone’s stares, quietly eating your food. As soon as you were done, Shotou got up and quickly pulled you out of the room, Dabi following close behind.

They sat in your room as Shotou looked at your hair with worry. “Looking nice, doll.”Dabi chuckled as he plopped down on your bed beside you. “Thanks.” you mumbled. “Y/n how did- why did you- why did you cut your hair?” Shotou asked, still looking at your choppy hair. “Do you not like it?” you asked. “N-no I do. But what will mom say-” “Shotou, its my hair.” you snapped. “Yeah, Shotou.” Dabi mocked. Fuyumi and Natsuo soon joined you guys, worrisome looks on their faces. “Why did you cut it? Oh my god, do you even know how much trouble you’re in?” Fuyumi was freaking out. “Its my hair.” you rolled your eyes. They ignored you. “Okay, okay. Shotou why don't you stick around with Y/n for a couple of days? Fuyumi and dad will try to keep mom away from her.” Before Fuyumi could nod, you stood up. “No.”

Natsuo looked at you confused. “what do you mean “no”?”

“I mean no. I don't need Shotou to babysit me. I can handle myself.” Fuyumi walked towards you, reaching her hands for you but you backed away, “Y/n, sweetie-” You cut her off ,“Stop treating me like a child.”

Shotou spoke this time, “Its for your protection-” “Protection from who? Our mother? Why?”your words dared them to say the truth. To agree that Rei was unstable. They didn't say anything.

A few days had passed by and things were returning to normal. Almost normal. Rei still had this thousand yard stare when she looked at you, but she never said anything. Cutting your hair was the best decision you had made, because not is it only easy to manage, but it also got the family off your back. Rei doesn't wash your hair anymore(although you think she's just not over the shock), Fuyumi doesn't need to do your hair, they dry faster, and all of your brothers (including Dabi) doesn't mess around with them anymore. Enji was the first to adjust to your new cut, he even complimented you one day.

Did you feel guilty because you know how attached Rei was to your hair? A bit, but then realised that you needed this. You need some control over your life, and if this is how they react to your new cut, then maybe you could start taking back reigns over other aspects of your life as well.

You thought that maybe Rei had finally gotten over it a week later, when you were laying in the bathtub, enjoying the hot bath. When you heard her walk in, you were a bit startled. Why was she here- is she finally over it? "Um- hey." She smiled at you. "Why are you here?" She took the bath stool and sat behind the tub. "You know why." She replied and started rolling her sleeves up. Is she here to wash my hair? "Oh, are you here to wash my hair? I don't need help with that anymore now that they're short." Rei smiled again, this one looking forced, before dipping her hand in the tub. "No, silly." And with that, Rei froze the entire the tub in 2 seconds. The ice trapped your limbs, and reached up to your clavicle. The sudden change from hot to cold had you jolt, but you couldn't move due to the frozen ice. "Mom-!" You heard the buzzing sound of a trimmer and then felt Rei entangle her fingers in your hair to yank your head back. "I'm here to complete your haircut." You tried moving your head but her grip on your scalp was unrelenting. She started trimming the right side of your head, moving it slowly as to get every single hair. "Honestly, you should've come to me. I do agree that it'd be a good idea to start again." Tears fell from your eyes, your teeth chattered and you could feel your heart beat slow down as the cold seeped into your bones. "M-mom, I'm col-d. P-please s-stop..." Rei was done with one half of your head. "You know, I read somewhere that your grows thicker if you cut it. I'm sure that after I've shaved your head, your hair will grow even fuller. I've already gotten some new oils and hair masks! Maybe we could do them together." You couldn't hear anything besides the slowing of your own heart beating. Your breath had started to become shallow, you couldn't think about anything except for how painful ice could be. Your lips were turning blue, eyes were getting clouded with black spots, all sensation from your body was losing. Just before you lost consciousness, you heard the bathroom door open and a panicked yell.

You felt warm.

When you came to, your entire body felt warm and weighted, probably due to the heavy blanket spread on you.

Opening your eyes, you found yourself in a dimly lit room. It was...your parents room. Why am I here? You turned your head to look around but your eyes stopped at the large figure sitting on a chair next to your bed.

"Dad?"

The figure's head snapped towards yours. "You're awake." He paused. "How- how are you feeling?" You moved the blanket off you, your body felt dense and ached. "Warm and...sore. What happened? Why am I in your bedroom?" Enji shifted in his seat. "I think its best if you stay here from now on, so that... your mother and I can look after you." Your eyes widened. "What? Why?" You moved to sit up but then a pain shot through your head. "Ah shit." You hissed in pain as you went to massage your temples but your hands halted at the feeling of your hair... or lack there of. You tried to run a finger through your choppy bob cut, but all you felt was your shaved head. Your eyes met Enji's, looking at him in disbelief as you recalled the events that had led up to this. "Darling-" You jumped off the bed and ran towards the vanity mirror, praying that this is just a nightmare. But as you looked at your reflection, you realised that this was the terrifying reality you were living in.

Tears dripped from your eyes as you took in your appearance. Trimmed- no, shaved pink hair. You couldn't see a single bit of hair above the roots, only a baby pink scalp. She had not only trimmed your hair first but then also proceeded to shave your scalp off. Your head looked like it had peach fuzz.

You couldn't bring yourself to look away, not even when Enji placed a hand on your shoulder. "Y/n-" He didn't even what to say. He was still in shock from what would've happened if Fuyumi hadn't yelled for him when Rei was-

Enji shook his head. Now's not the time. You're here and you're fine. You're fine. Enji pulled you towards him, burying your face in his chest as you cried. "You're fine." He repeated, more to himself than to you. "Why- why would she do this?" Your voice was muffled by his chest but he understood. He understood your pain and it tore him apart that he still wouldn't be able to help you.

Enji honestly didn't know what to tell you. He didn't know what words would bring you comfort. "It... it was an accident." His chest rumbled as he spoke. You pushed yourself away from him as you looked at him perplexed.

"What?" Your eyebrows raised, nostrils flared and blood rushed to your face. You were going to blow up.

"An accident? Is that what you said? Oh okay. Was it an accident when she froze the fucking tub? Did the trimmer accidentally fall from her hands to my head?! Oh and did she accidentally pull the razor over my head?!" Angry tears fell from your eyes but you were far too enraged to care.

Enji opened his mouth to say something but he was cut off by the sound of the bedroom door opening. Turning around you saw her.

Rei was standing there with a tray of food and water. Her face turned to shock before turning to happiness. She set the tray on a nearby table before she rushed towards you, her hands reaching for your face.

"Angel, you're awake-" you pushed her hands away roughly as you backed away from her.

"Dont you dare touch me."

The couple, they had never heard your voice such hostility. It wasn't like you. Rei shook her head as she tried to reach for you again, taking another step in your direction. But you smacked her hands away again. "I said don't touch me!" Your yelling had got your siblings to rush in the room, wanting to see what the commotion was about.

Rei's eyes shifted from you to Enji, looking at him for help, before they returned back to you. She took a deep breath before speaking. "Y/n, darling. What's wrong?" You scoffed at her soft tone that tried to quell the storm of negative emotions bubbling inside you. "What's wrong? What's wrong? I don't know, you tell me, Rei. Why the fuck am I bald?!" Your head was pounding with rage, raw unbridled anger.

When Rei didn't say anything, Fuyumi stepped forward to help her out. "Y/n its-"

"Shut up."

Fuyumi's- everyone's eyes widened. Of everyone, you never even rose your voice at your favourite sibling. But to hear your voice turn so cold towards her, it shocked everyone. "Y-Y/n-" she tried again but you cut her off. "I said shut up. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to Rei and she'll answer for herself."

Enji placed a hand on your shoulder, pulling you back slightly. "Have some respect. She's your mother-" You yanked your shoulder away from his grip. "No, she's not!" You inhaled deeply, trying to stabilise your voice. "No, she's not. You're not my dad. I'm not a part of this family. And I'm so sick of playing this game."

Dabi's eyes narrowed. "Stop being an ungrateful brat. You've been given all the luxuries one could only imagine, spoiled to no end-" You laughed. "Did I ask for anything?" "You never had t-" "And all these luxuries that you're talking about, I didn't get them for free. I had to give up a lot. No, wait-" you laughed again, tears blurring your vision. "I didn't give up anything. You all took it. Yeah, all of you snatched everything away from me. My family, my friends, my privacy, my sanity, everything. And you-" you moved towards Rei, pointing a finger at her. "You have been the most greedy one of them all."

Rei's jaw fell open, as she shook her head. "No-" You shook your head.

"Yes! I gave you everything. I let you dress me up in those god awful clothes, feed me whatever you wanted, stick to your side like glue because you don't like it when I was out of your sight for a more than a few minutes. For fucks sake, I didn't even go to college this year because you weren't ready to see me become an adult!" You ran a frustrated hand through your hair. "I played into your sick little fantasy. I let you treat me like a child, talk to me like I'm some helpless baby. I let you touch me even though it disgusted me to no end. I never even complained when you gave me ice burns because I was throwing a tantrum." You looked at the rest of your family, and they were shocked to hear that last bit. You smiled cruelly at them. "Yeah, you didn't know that did you?"

Rei was crying herself by now, as she reached out for you once again but you moved away. "I let you have everything. All I wanted was this little bit of freedom, for my own sanity. But you couldn't stomach that could you?" Your head hung low, your tears hitting the floor.

"Why do you have to be so selfish?"

Your voice held so much pain and defeat. Rei couldn't help but engulf you in her arms, wrapping herself around you tightly before you could even protest. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" She cried out. "I- I promise I'll fix this! Yes. I-I've already gotten you some new hair oils! They say that they'll help you grow 6 inches in a month! Oh and Natsuo also brought some stuff for hair growth! Some vitamins and- Natsuo whats that spray called? Minoxy? Mi-minoxidil! Yes! He said that'll help you grow your hair in no time! Doesn't that sound nice? You'll have long hair like before!" Rei pushed back to look at you. You couldn't believe it.

"Are you- are you really that delusional?" Your voice was so soft, almost like you would break any moment now. "Are you so blind to see what you're doing to me?" Your eyes held so much pain and confusion. "Sweetie, don't worry- mommy will take such good care-" You pushed Rei away from you, your anger rolling back in full speed. "YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER!" You shrieked. "Y/n-" Shotou tried to interject. "I'm not a part of your fucking family."

Enji stepped towards you. "Calm down."

You looked at him. "You said that what happened was an accident. What will you do if another one happens? And you're not around this time to save me? Hmm? What will you do? Continue playing house with my dead body?!"

Rei's sobs shook her body. "Shut up. Think before you say stupid shit like that." Dabi spoke this time, moving to stand between you and his mother. "Or what? You're going to hurt me? More the reason why all of you, but especially you-" you pointed at Rei "deserve to be in that nuthouse-!"

You were on the floor before you could even process what had happened. Had you- had you fallen? But when the searing pain of the burn on your cheek came alive and you looked at his hand that had erupted in blue flames, you realised what had happened.

Dabi slapped you.

"Y/n!"

Your cheek felt like someone had placed a hot iron on it, the sting spreading to your entire cheek, but you were far too shocked to care about the pain.

Dabi slapped me.

Shotou, Natsuo and Fuyumi quickly rushed to your side, picking you up and out of the room, while Dabi stood there in stunned as his own hand throbbed. The image of his handprint branded on your scared face wasn't going to leave his mind anytime soon.

Enji hesitated, looking at his wife and son in disbelief, before leaving the room to look for you.

Rei walked towards Dabi and smacked his arm. "What did you do?!" She yelled at him. He opened his mouth to explain but nothing came out.

"She's your little sister, Touya! W-why would you do that?!" Rei scolded him.

He hurt you. Like Enji hurt Rei.

He hurt you.

Rei sighed before closing her eyes and engulfing Dabi in her arms. "Its okay. Its not your fault." She rubbed his back soothingly. "It was an accident, wasn't it?"

Dabi wrapped his arms around his mother, burying his face in her neck, before nodding.

"Yes. It was an accident."

So... how was it?

[monkey-d-addy9000]

Hey~ some young EraserMic fanfics.

First of all, sorry for my english, it's not my native language

Since I don't find many young Erasermic fanfics, I decided to share with you some of the ones I liked the most and, who knows, with this encouragement, some writers feel inspired and decide to write some more? I don't know, I think it's just an appeal from a disaster girl.

Anyway~

Summary: As far as camping goes, it’s probably within Yamada’s Top Three Least Favorite Things To Do list.

But maybe this camping trip wouldn’t turn out so bad, so long as he has Aizawa by his side.

Second part:

Hizashi apologizing to Aizawa for making him insecure. Read Murphy's law first to understand.

Written by @tiniest-hands-in-all-the-land

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Summary: “I thought you might wanna hang around someone who didn’t hate your guts!” Yamada yells. “But I guess you just get off on everyone hating you!”

“I don’t care what people think about me,” Aizawa hisses back, just as coldly.

Or

Yamada's relationship with Aizawa is on thin ice, to say the least. Too bad class trips, technical mishaps, and simulated natural disasters don't consider personal vendettas when putting a damper on your day.

I highly recommend this story as it is a twist of feelings and emotions. I could feel on my skin every sensation I read. All the effort the author puts into their stories is almost magical.

Written by @tiniest-hands-in-all-the-land

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5 times Hizashi drops everything to take Shōta somewhere where he can rest comfortably, and 1 time Shōta picks everything up to allow Hizashi some repose

Hizashi being cute and careful with his "friend".

Written by @tiniest-hands-in-all-the-land

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I smiled on every line of this story. Just two cute boys being cute.

Written by @ill-go-with-that-then

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Just a warning: it's hot.

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Summary: 8-year-old Hitoshi Shinsou is Quirkless—at least, that’s what his foster dads have been told by the orphanage. Hitoshi never speaks, he signs, although there were no mentioned disabilities or medical conditions on his file to explain this. He’s seemingly capable of speaking, but it’s a mystery as to why he doesn’t. One day, however, a ruthless gang member breaks into the Aizawa-Yamada residence, intent on revenge for Shouta's capture of their brother, and upon seeing his foster dads in trouble, Hitoshi is left with no choice but to reveal his ‘villainous’ Quirk to save them.

I was so moved by this story that I had to reread it 4 times in less than a month to relive every good feeling that was transmitted to me.

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“What are you, scared, Aizawa?” Kayama leered, leaning in too close and poking at his side.

Shouta swatted her hand away. “Why would I be scared?” he scoffed. “They’re just mirrors.”

Hizashi fidgeted, leaning closer in a way that would be imperceptible if Shouta weren’t ridiculously over-aware of him. “The place looked deserted when we came in… maybe we should leave? We could still make it to the party!”

“We can’t leave without solving the maze,” Shouta said, irritably.

--

Don't trust your eyes...

Ma babys are scared and in love

Written by @ill-go-with-that-then

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He tries to put all the enthusiasm he feels into it, to reassure Shouta that this step in their friendship is wanted and welcome.

It seems to work. Shouta’s shoulders relax, and he grins up at Hizashi, wiping his hair out of his eyes. He misses a piece, and Hizashi has to shove his hands into his pockets to keep from giving in to the strange impulse to tuck it behind Shouta’s ear.

It’s different, after that.

Another point of view.

Ah, young love. These boys are so soft. I can't handle that anymore. If you want to scream because you can't handle the amount of cuteness, you must read this.

Written by @ill-go-with-that-then

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1.

One In A Billion summary: Mic as a weapon is too much to handle. Aizawa as a meister is difficult to get along with. What will happen when these two odd souls are forced into taking on one of the names at the top of

Death's hit list?

It's Soul Eater AU time!!

2.

Clarity summary: Mic had his secrets, this Shouta knew. Even after all this time, when their souls resonated, there were places Shouta felt he couldn’t go, places Mic blocked from him. Shouta had these places within his own soul, too, but whenever something was truly important, Mic always seemed to know how to gently tug the truth out of him. Shouta, unfortunately, had no such similar tact, and usually he didn’t need to; Mic was open about so much.

How bad could Mic's secrets really be?

I was fine, until Yami quotes the song Clarity, and Yamada enjoying the song claiming to remember Shota when he hears it? I almost screamed. I love this fanfic from the bottom of my soul.

Written by @yamiheart and @nartothelar

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Those were the cutest young Erasermic stories I've read. I just wanted to share with you a little bit of my daily dose of love.

And yes, I reread them every day because they are the ones I liked the most. It's so well written that it really makes me feel every emotion as I read this.

Oh! And I will be updating as I find new good fanfics

[bestiesenpai]

Study buddy - Choso

Where oh where can I find a Choso-nii to help me with my studies? Where oh wherefore art thou? Femme reader, 2.1k words

Content warnings: incest, that’s it

“I don’t get it!” You whined loudly to yourself, almost to the point of tears as you sit at the dining table, frustration mounting the longer you stare at the screen of your laptop. There’s too many assignments that you need to finish, too many tests you need to study for - it’s all too much.

“What’s wrong?” As you throw your head into your hands, Choso comes around the corner, having heard your small shout. Looking over the table, swamped with textbooks and stacks of papers, his heart breaks a little for you.

“Go away, Choso-nii.” With your forehead pressed against the table, you don’t have the heart to sit up and look at your older brother.

“Not until you look at me, tell me what’s going on.” Smoothing a large hand across your back, he tried to nudge you to turn to him.

“You wouldn’t get it.” He’d never attended university, having gotten a job as soon as he could to help support the family. It wasn’t like you doubted his intellect, but this issue was out of his range.

He pushed and he pulled, but try as he might Choso couldn’t get you to look at him. He could see the angry scribbles on your notebook pages and the way your breathing was slightly laboured as if you were holding back tears. He didn’t want to push you too hard but he didn’t want you to wallow.

“Get up.” He was wrapping his arms around your middle before you could fully comprehend what it is he wanted, and soon you were forced out of your chair and sat back down onto his lap.

“Lemme go.” Your head still hung low, hands covering your face so you wouldn’t have to look at him and his pitying expression. Choso shook his head, resting his own forehead against your shoulder and squeezing you.

“Is it school? Do you want to take a break?”

“No.” You replied immediately, shrugging his head off and grabbing your pencil again. “I can’t, I have a lot to do.” Forcing yourself to scribble down some more words, you ignored the silence and the sigh that followed from Choso.

“But you’re upset, why don’t you-”

“Just stay out of it!” You snapped, clearly not in the mood to be coddled. Choso wasn’t used to you snapping at him like this and it showed in the shocked raise of his brows.

“Baby girl calm down.” Although he said it softly, there was an underlying edge to his tone. Choso shifted you on his lap, drawing you further up his legs and securing you more tightly in his arms.

“M’not a baby.” You mumbled back, instantly regretting how you spoke to him. All Choso ever did was try and help you, try and make your life just a bit easier; it wasn’t fair to him for you to act this way.

“You’re my baby.” Giving you a kiss on the back of your neck, Choso settled his chin on your shoulder. “Now, are you going to take a break?” He expected it when you shook your head no. “Will you let me help you then?”

“I don’t know, nii-chan...this kind of stuff might be too hard for you.” Handing him one of the pages of homework you had, you bit your lip as he read over it. Choso didn’t exactly have the best track record with schooling, often skipping classes to pick up odd jobs or just to sleep the day away.

“We can work on it together.” Putting it back on the table, Choso plucked the pencil out of your hands and started scribbling down what he thought was the right answer.

“Choso-nii, wait! Not like that!”

“Hm, no?” Cracking a smile, he began to tickle your sides as you snatched the pencil back. “Then how should I do it? Like this?”

“S-stop!” You shouted, giggles forcibly rising from your chest. Desperately trying to grab his fingers and hold them away from your sides, you had no choice but to laugh and squirm helplessly.

After a few minutes he relented, handing you back the pencil and letting you catch your breath. A soft smile stayed on his face as he noticed your mood had improved just from him tickling you, the hard crease in your brow and the frown tugging at your lips were gone now.

“Tell me what you’re working on here.” Gesturing toward your laptop, he saw an abundance of open tabs and a slideshow that was barely started.

“That’s one of my finals, I have to make a presentation.” Slumping against Choso’s chest, you huffed indignantly. Humming to himself, Choso clicked through a few of the tabs. He wasn’t familiar with the subject you were presenting on at all, but surely he could help a little bit?

“Let's work on this one first then, it seems to be giving you the most trouble.”

“They’re all giving me trouble.” Pushing your face into the side of his neck, you didn’t try to stop Choso from tidying up your workspace, tucking papers away into folders and pushing unneeded textbooks away.

Just having the table clear of all the daunting assignments was enough to make a slight weight lift off your shoulders. With no visual clutter, things in your mind slowly started to calm down. From your position leant against Choso, you explained the presentation as simply as possible. He flipped through more tabs as you spoke, reading and falling silent except for a few hums.

“I bet we could get a rough draft done by tonight.” He murmured.

“You think so?” His words gave you a little hope, and the reassuring hug he gave your middle even more.

“With a little sister as smart as you? I know so.” Pressing a kiss to the top of your head, he nodded confidently. He smiled when you smiled at the compliment, taking a hand and rubbing up and down your arm. “Let’s get started.”

As the two of you began to work, both diligently reading over the material, Choso’s hands started to wander. Both arms slid from around your waist, one going to rest around your hips as the other settled just under the hem of your shirt.

“What do you think about putting that quote here?” He whispered, pointing to the screen briefly before putting his hand back, letting his fingers creep up a little under your shirt.

“I could try it.” Unaffected by his hand, you typed away on the keyboard. As you breathed, Choso’s hand pushed up under your shirt entirely, hot palm resting on your stomach. Your hands faltered for a moment, but you didn’t say anything.

Silently typing, you tried to ignore Choso’s hand now fully resting just below your breasts. His hand was stopped by the bra you had on, but not for long. Pressing a kiss onto your cheek, he fully tugged down your bra.

“Nii-chan…” A whining protest was on the tip of your tongue, fingers beginning to curl around his wrist and pull his hand away.

“Sshh, don’t worry about what I’m doing. Focus on your work.” Gently twisting your nipple between his fingers, Choso flicked his chin toward the screen. Biting your lip and nodding your head, you did as he said. He was being nice enough to help you with your homework, it was only fair to let him have this.

Lightly massaging your breast, Choso still managed to be helpful and give critiques, aptly splitting his focus between fondling your chest and helping build the presentation. With soft fingers, he worked both nipples to full hardness and watched as they pebbled and peaked under the fabric of your shirt.

“Choso-nii, here too.” Spreading your legs for him, Choso lets you pull his hand from your shirt and down to your bottoms, past the waistband and over your panties. There’s a good amount of slick built up between your legs, seeping into the fabric of your panties and marking them with a large wet patch.

With his other hand taking the spot on your breast, Choso pushes his hand into your panties. Your legs are thrown open wide for him, body completely relaxed against his as you let him do whatever he wants.

Tapping your clit with his middle finger, Choso chuckles under his breath at the reflexive twitches in your legs. He can’t help but do it a few more times until you let out a whine and wiggle your hips for him.

Circling the swollen bud with the tip of his finger, the high moan that leaves your throat is music to his ears and when he presses down on it more firmly, your thighs immediately snap shut on his hand.

“Excited?” Choso teases in your ear, watching as you shamefully reopen your legs. Rubbing your clit with two fingers now, he can feel your hole clenching around nothing. With how much of your juices are on his fingers, it’s easy for them to slip down and press against it.

Steadily pumping his fingers in and out, Choso worked his fingers down to the knuckle, resting his palm snugly against your pelvis and grazing your clit. You’d fully given up on even pretending to still be working, fully laying on Choso as your hands gripped his sleeves.

Drawing his fingers out, Choso began to slowly thrust his fingers in and out, a soft clapping sound of his palm hitting you beginning to sound throughout the room.

“Shit, Choso!” You gasp loudly when his thumb finds your clit, rubbing it in tandem with the motion of his fingers. Your thighs threaten to close in on his hand again, quivering on his lap and fighting to stay open.

Soon your hips are bucking up to meet his fingers, quiet pants falling from your mouth and landing on the side of his face. Clutching your breast tightly in his hand, Choso grinds his thumb on your clit, getting a wave of endorphins himself just from hearing you moan.

You quickly lose the battle of trying to keep your legs spread, nearly fully clamping down on his hand and rendering it immobile. Choso doesn’t mind though, he welcomes whatever reactions you have to him and his touch. All he wants to do is make his little sister happy.

“Are you going to cum?” Swallowing thickly around the words, he breaks out into a silly grin when you nod drunkenly. His wrist and hand are starting to cramp up and the muscles in his arm are beginning to burn, but Choso refuses to slow down even a fraction.

“N-nii-chan, please!” Screwing your eyes closed, you arch your back hard, breath coming out shorter and shorter as your orgasm approaches. It’s unclear to both of you what you’re asking for, but you both know it’s not to stop.

“That’s it baby girl, cum nice and hard for me.” Kissing any part of your face he can reach, Choso’s hand doesn’t stop when you let out a loud moan and your cunt spasms around him. He certainly doesn’t stop as your feet stamp against the floor, the pleasure overwashing your senses almost too much for you to handle. He almost can’t bring himself to stop when your body goes slack and you whine at him to stop, the pleasure turning into pain.

Slipping his hand from your bottoms, Choso stares at his fingers covered in your sticky release. There’s thin strands that spread and break when he pulls apart his fingers and the heady musk that comes from them tastes just as good as it smells.

Slowly fixing your clothes and straightening your back, you fully turn over your shoulder to Choso and kiss him as he pulls his fingers out of his mouth. You can smell and taste a hint of yourself on his lips, his tongue just barely darting out to swipe at yours.

“I think that was a good break, don’t you?” Choso whispers as he breaks the kiss, giving you a quick kiss on the nose before fully pulling away. He takes a mental picture of the blissed out look on your face and the way an easy, dopey smile spreads on your face.

“Yeah.” Nodding, you lean forward and kiss him on the cheek. “Thanks, nii-chan.”

“You’re welcome, baby.” Helping you readjust your position on his lap, Choso feels his heart swell at knowing he helped you relax, made you feel nice and happy as any good caring older brother should. Pulling your laptop closer, Choso reopened the presentation and skimmed the last few words you’d written. “Now, let’s get back to work, alright?”

[allywritesforfun]

{Trusting You; Chapter 1} Loki x Reader

summery: You are a superhero from out of town. After getting injured by a frost giant, you are taken in by the Avengers. To keep yourself safe, you have to decide who can trust

pronouns: she/her

trigger warnings: swearing, (nonsexual) ropes, weapons

word count: 1157

masterlist

“Okay everyone clear the living room!” You heard Tony yell as Steve was carrying you bridal style into Stark Towers.

Everyone was murmuring around you, trying to figure out who you were. Everyone was in some sort of panic, going around to each other trying to match their information.

“Stark!” A man yelled. “Who is this?”

“I'll tell you later!” He replied and Steve laid you down on the clothed sofa.

“What's wrong?” A girl rushed over to you.

Steve stood up and hovered over you. “She just took a blast to the heart from those-” He paused and looked out the window. “Whatever those things are, Natasha.”

“Why didn't you take her to the hospital?” The girl asked.

“Because she's one of us,” A tall man walked in, his nose in a book. “She is a ‘superhero’.” He quoted and scoffed. “Barley, she's just a mortal who Fury has yet to discover.”

“Loki!” Thor stared at him. “This is not the time.”

Loki rolled his eyes and walked towards the window. He gazed out and pointed to the blue thing that hit you, “Those things are Frost Giants for your information.”

You sat up. “How do you know me?”

He looked up for the first time, “You don't know who I am? Stupid mortal,” He chuckled. “I am Loki. God of Mischief, King of-”

Thor interrupted, “Prince of Asgard. Don't make yourself sound higher than you are, Brother.”

“How do you know me!” You demanded again. You only knew them for the destruction that they caused this city and many more. In your opinion, you didn’t think you could trust them.

“The news,” Loki answered. “(Y/N) here is a girl of the spotlight in Britain. Not even a Brit herself but calls herself a hero. She makes balls of things and throws them at people. (Y/N) is our Black Widow but more advanced. We should imprison her and force her to work for us, we do need a weapons master. Someone needs to take Banners place.”

You could tell Loki was a troubled person. Typical projection. A defense mechanism used by people when they have some sort of anxiety. You theorized that he most likely went to a prison himself and wants you to feel his pain. Maybe he wants to inject the pain onto others to make himself feel superior, or maybe he didn’t want to feel alone. One thing is for sure: he’s trouble.

“I am not a weapons master,” You threatened. “Don't any of you dare try to hold me hostage! I will have your heads off before you get the chance!”

“Calm down,” Steve whispered to you, he looked over at Loki. “And you wonder why we don't allow you to leave the Tower.”

“Why am I here?” You looked around. “I must get back to Britain!”

“We will get you back as soon as you're healed,” Tony answered. “Hey, Frost Giant. How do we heal her?”

Loki scowled and snapped his fingers, disappearing from thin air. Magician. Or some sort of power. He definitely is advanced and uses his powers whenever he can. He has to feel some sort of power or comfort using them.

“Brother,” Thor sighed. “We need your help, enough with the tricks.”

“I don't have time for this!” You yelled. “There are more Frost Giants in Britain!”

Another man walked in from the elevator, setting his bow down on the table, “They're dead now.” He pushed a bottom button into his ear, “Clint to Director Fury: New York and Britain are safe now. Most of them are pissed because their city isn't looking the best, nothing some fangirls can't fix.”

The city isn’t looking the best? What the hell. They think you’re so dangerous to them but yet THEY destroyed YOUR city. They need to back off, “Can you just throw me off the ledge, I need to go.” You demanded. “I got some cleaning up to do.”

Thor shook his head. “Not until we know that you are healed, Lady (Y/N).”

You shook your head, “I am no lady. I'll have your balls chopped off and framed if you don't let me go.” You stood up but an arrow with a rope tied your wrist down to the couch.

“Who is this cutie?” Clint asked, walking over to you.

“Don't you have a wife?” Steve questioned him. “And a kid?”

You pulled on the ropes trying to break them. You knew you were pretty strong and had the will to get out.

Clint nodded. “That doesn't mean I can't admire someone else. I'm not gonna try to get with her.”

Loki walked back in, without his book this time. Thor picked up a lamp and threw it at him, shattering as Loki caught it, “I'm here.”

“Just making sure, Brother, now. You have healing powers, heal Lady (Y/N) so that she can get on her way,” Thor gestured towards you.

You started to grow a strong liking towards Thor. He seemed to understand. If you remember correctly, he has a different home he wants to protect. You felt an unsaid bond with him.

Loki laughed, “Eh... you people don't understand me one bit. I can only heal myself, it's not even healing, it's quick recovery.”

“Just fix me so that I can leave!” You sighed.

The man pulled out two daggers and walked towards you. Everyone quickly lunged at him. He flicked his hand causing everyone to stop in their tracks, falling to the ground, “I'm just cutting the ropes, calm down.” Loki proceeded to you.

When he got close enough, you lifted your legs and kicked him away, “Don't you dare come near me!” Loki is the God of Mischief- if anyone here was going to hurt you, it would be him.

“I'm not gonna hurt you Lady (Y/N), I wouldn't want to do that to a girl as ravishing as you,” He flattered.

You shook your head. “Don't you dare try to flirt with me, you're just an Odin wanna be.” 

He's trying to get into your head, he needs you for something. Or maybe he gets some sort of excitement when he gets into people’s heads. Not yours, you won’t let him. You kept trying to analyze him, get a sense for who he is. Nothing came to mind. The more you noticed about him, the more confused you got.

“So you do know who I am!” Loki chuckled and sliced the ropes from your wrists. “But I am so much more than him.”

You stayed sitting, “Well then, heal me.”

Loki shook his head, “I told you already, I can't heal you.” He looked back at his brother. “How long has she been injured?”

You gritted your teeth, “I can answer for myself, I've been hurt for half an hour now.”

He chuckled, “You should've been dead 10 minutes ago. You're something special.”

“So I'm gonna die?”

[eyayah-oya]

Return to Me

Clone Ship Week | Day 6 | Post-Battle - @cloneshipweek

Cody/Rex

Rating: G

Warnings: mentions of Point Rain, canon typical violence, disgustingly cute happy ending

Ao3 link

           Geonosis was just as awful as every vod had ever described. It was hot and dusty, of course, but Cody didn’t really care about any of that.  It was the number of brothers he’d lost on the way to Point Rain, the hundreds more killed by the bugs and their weaponry, on top of all the droids that seemed to come in never-ending waves.

           Cody and the rest of the 212th were going to join General Mundi and the 21st Nova Marine Corps on the other side of the planet while Rex and his men worked with Gree and the 41st under General Unduli.  They would be taking on the enormous droid factory the next day, and Cody would not be able to help any of them.  He would have his own mission to run.

           There were hundreds of vod’e all over the fortified base they’d managed to find and set up camp in.  Brothers from all four battalions mingled and shared increasingly exaggerated stories.  Cody had spotted Corporals Fives and Echo talking to some boys from the 21st, and he’d seen the medics fussing over the injured vod’e and generals.  But there was no sign of Cody’s cyare.

           “Lieutenant!” Cody called to 2nd Lieutenant Jesse of the 501st.

           Jesse snapped off a sharp salute.  “Sir!”

           “At ease, Lt.  Have you seen Rex around recently?” Cody asked.

           Thinking for a moment, Jesse slowly nodded.  “I think I saw him over by the remaining gunships, sir. He was talking to General Skywalker about half an hour ago.”

           Cody nodded and clapped the trooper on his shoulder. “Thanks.  Make sure you take some time to rest, Lt.  We’re in for a rough campaign.”

           “Of course, sir.  You do the same and see if you can get Rex to sleep, too.”

           As Cody walked away, he chuckled to himself.  Little brothers were getting uppity.  At the start of the war, there was no way any trooper, let alone one from a different battalion, would have talked to him so casually.  It was a testament to how well the men of the 501st were relaxing around their Jedi and learning how to be something besides soldiers.  It was nice.

           Cody prayed to whatever gods watched over clones bred for war that Rex hadn’t gone back up to the Resolute already.  He needed to see Rex and make sure his cyare was alright. Too many vod’e were walking wounded, and even more were severely injured or dead.  As much as he knew it was a real possibility, Cody did not want to ever consider a reality where Rex marched on ahead of him.

           “Hey, Commander!” Commander Tano chirped from out of nowhere.  She smiled up at him with bright eyes that hadn’t been weighed down by war yet.  She still had hope and Cody prayed that she would never lose that.  Yet another thing he prayed for to unknown gods.

           “Hello, Commander.”  Cody dodged a pair of vod’e carrying a crate full of supplies and glanced down at Commander Tano.  “Can I help you with something?”

           “Jesse said you’re looking for Rex?  I know where he is!  But we have to hurry before my Master pulls him away again.”

           If Commander Tano was willing to help him find Rex, Cody was definitely not going to say no.  Especially after the massacre they’d just faced.  “Thank you, Commander,” he said, warm affection warming his chest briefly. “I appreciate it.”

           Commander Tano waved away his thanks.  “It’s no problem.  I get it.  Master Skywalker practically ran to Master Kenobi’s side as soon as we got here, and I know Jesse went to go find a batchmate of his from the 41st. Sometimes, you just need to make sure everyone’s alive.”

           “That is very wise, Commander,” Cody said.  He really shouldn’t be surprised, but in his mind, the Commander was just so young.  She shouldn’t have insights into how war worked, and why they needed time to recuperate after a bad battle, if only to reassure themselves that their loved ones made it out alive or to mourn the ones that hadn’t.

           There were far too many mourning vod’e.

           “I have a great teacher,” Commander Tano said with a warm smile.  “Rex said you taught him a lot of what he knows and he’s been passing some of that down to me.  It’s helped me in some tough situations, so I should be thanking you, Commander.”

           “No thanks necessary, Commander,” Cody managed to say without choking or giving away his emotions.  Not that it probably mattered since Jedi were attuned to the people around them.  Only General Kenobi had ever thanked him for anything, and Cody was convinced that his General would thank Ventress after she stabbed him with her saber.  Karking di’kutla jetti.

           “Anyway, Rex is over in that tent, hopefully taking a nap. Coric was threatening him earlier with sedation, so he might have followed through on that threat.”

           And with that, Commander Tano skipped away, most likely to terrorize some poor shiny who wouldn’t know how to deal with an overly friendly shiny Jedi Commander. Cody privately wished he had a holo of their flailing.  It would provide some good laughs in the future.

           Cody strode over to the tent Commander Tano had pointed out, and knocked on the frame.

           “Come in,” Rex called and something inside of Cody’s chest loosened.

           He undid the fastenings and stepped inside, taking his bucket off immediately.  Rex was sitting on the cot, a datapad in his hands, likely going over the initial casualty reports for the battle.  Most importantly, he was very much alive.

           “Rex,” Cody gasped out with a strangled breath.

           Rex jerked at his voice and then a second later, Cody had his arms wrapped around his cyare, breathing him in as he held on as tight as he could.

           “Cody!  You’re okay!” Rex said.  He pulled back to give Cody a sharp look.  “You are okay, right?”

           “Yes, I am.  I didn’t end up getting injured.  That was purely my General,” Cody said, trying for some dry humor but it fell flat in the face of their combined relief.  “What about you?  I heard you got thrown off a wall?”

           “Karking Fives and Echo,” Rex growled.  “General Skywalker and Ahsoka caught me, so I wasn’t hurt.  Nothing beyond a few bumps and bruises.”

           Cody ran his eyes over Rex’s body, as though that would tell him if Rex was hiding any injuries with the armor in the way.  Once he verified that there wasn’t any gaping hole or crack in Rex’s armor, Cody dropped his helmet to the ground and pulled Rex into a bruising kiss.  His cyare responded eagerly, clinging desperately to the hard, sharp planes of Cody’s armor.  There was no finesse, no sweetness in the kiss.  Just pure, heady relief and a desperation to prove that they really survived.

           Rex gripped Cody’s hair tightly with one hand, the other wrapping around his waist to pull him as close as their armor would allow. He sucked on Cody’s bottom lip and gently nibbled before letting go and pressing his head against Cody’s in a soft keldabe.

           “I was so worried when we heard that most of your gunships went down, including General Kenobi’s.  You’re usually flying with him.”

           “We decided to split our forces.  It was a really close call a few times, but we made it.  We both made it,” Cody answered.  He was shaking from relief at having Rex in his arms, alive and unharmed.  Nothing would ever be able to beat that heady feeling of overwhelming gratitude to whatever gods were listening.  They’d listened to at least one of his prayers today.

           “Stay alive tomorrow,” Cody demanded after a moment of just breathing each other in.  “That factory is going to be really dangerous.”

           “I know.  Gree is a solid vod, though.  He’ll have my back and I’ll have his.  Plus, we have the Jedi to help keep us safe.”

           Cody very carefully didn’t think about the many times General Skywalker had gotten men killed by doing something reckless or stupid. The R2 droid was not important enough to sacrifice his padawan, Rex, and three other men to General Grievous.  Out of four, only Rex and Denal had made it back, and Commander Tano had nearly been killed by Grievous when she kept Grievous from killing Rex, all for a droid.  Cody was skeptical, but he also had faith in Commander Tano and General Unduli and her padawan.  They’d protect the men while Skywalker handled whatever crazy idea he had.

           “We will be safe,” Rex said, giving Cody a shake. “While you’re off with the Marines, you should talk to Bacara.  They’re out of contact with most of the GAR.  Only Neyo and Jet can get through the blockades to deliver supplies and intelligence to Nova.”

           A frown carved the worry lines on his face deeper as Cody absorbed that information.  “I’ll talk to him.  See what we can do,” Cody swore.

           Rex nodded.  “Good.  He’ll keep you alive.  Bacara already told me he’s planning on sharing all of my embarrassing ARC training stories to you while you’re on campaign together.”

           Cody grinned.  “I’ve been trying to pull those out of Neyo, Keeli, Thorn, and Thire for ages now.  And Bacara’s the one to spill the beans?”

           Rex grumbled and buried his face against the crook of Cody’s neck.  “He said I don’t have enough blackmail material on him to keep him from blabbing. He also said I don’t scare him because, and I quote, “I’m as terrifying as a sleepy baby nexu cub buried in a pile of nip”.”

           “That—is strangely accurate,” Cody choked out, laughing at Rex’s offended growl.  “You’re a little prickly, but everyone knows you’re just a softy.  I mean, you’ve been teaching Commander Tano what I taught you?”

           His cyare shrugged.  “She’s in the middle of a war, and she doesn’t have the training we do. I don’t want to see her die when I could have prevented it.  Nor do I want to see my vod’e die because she makes a bad decision.  I’m giving her all the tools she’ll need to be successful and survive this war.”

           “You’ve adopted her.”  Cody couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it before.  Rex had always loved with all his heart, as evidenced by the numerous vod’e who loved him unconditionally.  Of course, Commander Tano would have made the list.  “If she’s yours, then she’s mine, too,” Cody said. “We’re in this together.”

           Rex finally peeked his head back out from where he’d hidden it against the small sliver of skin on Cody’s neck.  “Really?”

           Cody didn’t hesitate.  He nodded and bumped their foreheads together.  “I promise.”

           For the first time since their first kiss, Cody had the amazing opportunity to see Rex completely and totally flustered.  He blushed bright red, sputtering and coughing as he tried to find something to say.

           It took a few minutes for Rex to completely compose himself and then it was Cody’s turn to be flustered.  “Are you asking me to be your riduur?”

           “What?” Cody spluttered.

           For a second, Rex faltered.  But then he squared his jaw and firmed his spine as if he was facing the worst of odds in a battle.  “We are one when together.  We already do that, and have done that since we were cadets.  We are one when apart.  At this point, I don’t think there’s anything that could separate us, even when we’re fighting on opposite ends of the galaxy.  We share all.  We tell each other everything.  You said it yourself.  What’s mine is yours, too.  We will raise warriors.  We are raising Ahsoka together, since we share all.  Not to mention all of our men that we’ve both trained since this war started. If that doesn’t count, I don’t know what would.

           “So, are you asking me to be your riduur?”

           As Rex laid out each point, Cody found himself agreeing. He and Rex were already married, they just hadn’t said the vows to each other yet.  And honestly, there wasn’t a better time than now.  Cody would rather be married to the love of his life for a few hours, then never have married him and watched him die in battle.

           “Yes, Rex of Torrent.  I am asking you to be my riduur,” Cody said, determination in every cell of his body.

           Rex lunged forward and wrapped his arms around Cody, bringing their foreheads together.  “Mhi solus tome, mhi solus dar’tome, mhi me’dinui an, mhi ba’juri verde,” Rex swore fervently, his whole heart bared for Cody to see.

           “Mhi solus tome, mhi solus dar’tome, mhi me’dinui an, mhi ba’juri verde,” Cody echoed the vow, offering Rex his heart with every breath.

           They shared the same space for a moment, pressing into the keldabe more firmly before their lips brushed together.  Like a firework had been set off in his bones, Cody tugged Rex into a passionate, over-whelming kiss that stole their breath away.  He could feel his heart swelling with the amount of love he felt for Rex, bursting out from behind the dam he kept on his emotions most days.  It rolled over him until the only thing he could think of was that Rex was alive, in his arms, and that they were now married.  What more could Cody care for in that moment?

           Eventually, air became a necessity, and they broke away from each other to breathe.  Rex gave a soft chuckle.  “You do realize that means you’re going to have to adopt Ahsoka, too, right?”

           “YES!  I get two dads AND Cody has to call me by my name now!”

           “Shh, they can hear you, Soka.”

           “Oops!  Everyone scatter!”

           Cody laughed.  His heart couldn’t contain the joy he felt, and he would carry that joy throughout the war as a hopeful flame for when they could all have peace again. But in that moment, he had all night with his riduur, and Cody planned on making the most of it.

[iliveiloveiwrite]

Soon // S.B.

Request: Ahhhh!!!!! Congratulations on such an AMAZING milestone🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉!!!!!! You deserve all this and sososo much more girly. I’m glad ur being recognized for ur amazing talents 😩💓 Now for the celebration. Could I suggest: Sirius, Hogwarts, Soulmate au, fluff #13, and Misc #5 - @leahstypewriter

Fluff 13: “Compared to you: stars pale, and the moon dulls.”

Misc 5: “Are you quoting a film at me?”

A/N: Thank you so much, lovely! Here’s your request! I hope you like! I love writing soulmate AUs and I had to go searching for one that I hadn’t done before so here we are! As always, I hope you like!

Pairing: Sirius Black x Fem!Reader

Warnings: I continue to wax lyrical about the history of soulmates, hopeless romantic (reader and writer lol).

Word count: 2.3k

The magic of soulmates was first discovered centuries ago; too long ago for the story to be remembered correctly, but through the years, the general gist remains the same amongst families of witches and wizards.

From birth, a witch and wizard are paired with another witch or wizard. It would take time to find their match; it would take patience of the strongest sort, but they will meet their soulmate should good fortune befall them.

How do they know they have a soulmate?

Anything written on skin; be it a word, a quote, a doodle – it all appears on their soulmates skin. Anything other than their name. Centuries of debate and arguments over the exact reason for this decree fell over the world. In the end, the ministries and the scholars across the world threw their hands up in exasperation, declaring that the decree relating to the naming of soulmates would have to stay and the reasoning being that those making the decree were too awkward and stubborn to think of making life easier for an entire society that had to go into hiding.

For years, witches and wizards, once old enough, are able to communicate with their destined other half. The itch of a sentence being written becomes familiar; almost tolerable. Over time, they get to know their penmanship and their inner most secrets only dared scrawled onto their skin that could be hurriedly washed away if needed.

By the time the young witches and wizards in the United Kingdom have reached the age to start Hogwarts, their soulmate is already a part of them.

Now it was just trying to whittle down the student population of the school to discover who exactly was your appointed other half from birth.

---------

Most soulmate matches at Hogwarts are made in the months April to July – it’s when the weather starts to warm up; becoming bearable enough for the short sleeved blouses and shirts to be dug out from the very bottom of trunks.

Arms are on display for most of the day. It means that matches are made in the corridor, in the classrooms, in the Great Hall. Everywhere across the castle matches are made.

It’s wonderful, it is. But it also makes you more impatient.

You’re in the library when another match is made. Madame Pince tries her hardest to hush the new match into some level of quiet, but it does no good and thankfully, she evicts them from the library and the hush soon falls back over the great room with the same sense of a comforting blanket.

Rolling the sleeve of your cardigan up, you delicately write, “I’ve just seen the third match made of the day and it’s not even noon.”

It doesn’t take long for your soulmate to reply, “I’ve seen two so far. Where was your third?”

“The library.”

“I bet Pince was thrilled.”

You snort at their reply; amused at how well they know the school’s librarian.

“When is it going to be our turn?” You ask somewhat hesitantly.

The reply takes a few minutes, but it comes all the same in the elegant script you’ve come to know, “Soon.”

You rag your sleeve back down in frustration, repressing the building groan. You didn’t know your soulmate’s name, but you had given him the nickname of ‘aloof’. He had gone to great personal care to not reveal too much about himself other than the fact that he was male, he went to Hogwarts and he was your age.

That was something at least, but your countless attempts to find out more had been rebuffed. When you asked why, he simply answered that he wanted to leave as much as he could a surprise. You understood that, but the curiosity got to you.

You sigh heavily returning to the homework laid in front of you, but your mind continues to play the realisation that had happened only moments ago. The happiness on their faces; their utter elation tied in with the adoration they already felt for the other.

It was hard, you realise, to be in love with someone you’ve only spoken to through words and doodles on your arm.

-----

The week doesn’t get any easier; the weather only turns warmer, so the outer robes are ditched completely. You leave the Great Hall the morning Lily Evans realised she had been talking to James Potter since she was a child. You couldn’t watch it and still feel the same empty feeling that had settled within you so long ago.

Your friend June and her boyfriend follow you from the Great Hall. They find you facing one of the many tapestries that depict the meeting of soulmates; they’re found all over the castle and each one feels like a dagger to the stomach.

“It’ll happen soon,” June comforts, placing a soft hand on your shoulder.

“Soon! Soon! That’s all he says,” You explode. Then you repeat in a quieter voice, “That’s all he says. He’s here and he’s close and all he says is soon. What if he doesn’t want to meet me, June?”

June tuts, “Then he’s a damn fool. However, he does want to meet you. He replies doesn’t he?”

You nod your head, but her words do nothing to comfort the growing sense of dread within you.

It was rare, but the soulmate bond could be rejected. There were those in the wizarding world who were born without a soulmate, but there were also those who simply didn’t want one, so they never replied to their partner’s pleading. Instead, they chose to ignore every word, every plea, every beg. For the bond to be accepted, the first reply is important. If words are never painted on your skin, the bond is rejected.

For not the first time that day, you sigh, “I know we have forever to know each other, but is it so wrong of me to want that to start now?”

June squeezes your shoulder, “It’s not wrong at all.”

You continue to stare at the tapestry a little while longer after June and her boyfriend depart; the depiction of soulmates shown in the quill being held by both parties.

Running a hand through your hair, you turn your back on the portrayal of true love, your mind focused on how long it would be until you experience something of the same magnitude.

-----

The day after James and Lily have their realisations, you find Sirius Black’s eyes on you at breakfast. When you meet eyes, he smiles at you, raising his hand in wave. You smile back politely, waving back awkwardly before shaking your head and returning to your breakfast and the latest letter from your brother and his new wife.

They had settled well into their new house; they loved their wedding present, thank you; and yes, you were to have a niece or nephew by the end of the year.

Wonderful.

Shoving the letter from your brother into your bag with more force than what is needed, you feel someone standing next to you. Looking up you meet the grey eyes of Sirius Black; he smiles down at you, “Are you okay?”

You fix him with a puzzled look, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

He shrugs, “You were frowning so big I noticed it from down the table. I thought I would come see if you’re okay.”

“Well, I’m fine. Thanks for checking on me though.”

He nods, shoving his hands into his trouser pockets. He doesn’t say anything else and you don’t offer to fill the void, so the silence sits between you as heavy as a rock.

You stand from the bench; throwing your bag onto your shoulder, “Thanks again, Sirius. I’ll see you later.”

Sirius shifts out of your way, clearing the path for you, “My pleasure. I’ll see you later.”

You shake your head as you walk away; the encounter being an odd one given that your social circle didn’t tend to include any of the Marauders. But there was something about his final words; something about the way he uttered them that made them sound as if they were a promise to you.

You rush the thought from your mind; refusing to let yourself being occupied by someone who wasn’t your soulmate.

---

Sirius begins to take more notice in you; he starts to strike up small conversations whenever he can as well as numerous attempts to catch your eye at any meal time.

He starts to take up a lot of your time; sitting with you in the library on the rare occasion, but also joining you in class when the other Marauders are occupied with other pursuits.

It’s odd.

Muggle Studies remains one of the few lessons that hasn’t been interrupted with the growing number of soulmate matches in your year. Arguably, this school year could be the one with the most matches – the final year of Hogwarts; that final rush to find the love of your life before being sent out into the whole wizarding world without that safety net of the school to fall back onto.

The longer the professor drones on, the harder you find it to focus your concentration. The professor paces the front of the classroom, explaining their brief overview of what they hope the next few lessons will shape up to be like, but your attention is shot. It flickers between the marauder who has, for some reason, taken an interest in you and your soulmate, who still won’t reveal any more information about themselves or when you’ll be meeting.

A headache is close to blooming behind your eyes at the stress of it all.

Shrugging off your cardigan, you dip your quill into the pot of black ink sat in its holder. With the practiced precision of someone used to drawing on themselves, you begin to doodle.

Stars, planets, and moons appear on your left arm – decorating the inner forearm with an entire galaxy. They’re pretty rudimentary drawings, but it’s enough to keep you occupied from the droll being spewed by the professor who definitely hasn’t noticed they’ve lost the attention of most of the class.

The bell rings; finally signally the start of your only free period of the day. With a grateful sigh, you drop your books into your bag and make your way to the library.

You never make it to the library. On your way there, a hand grabs the back of your robes, pulling you into an empty corridor. With an angry shout, you face your kidnapper, “Sirius!”

He lets out an amused laugh at your affronted expression, “I’m sorry, I just needed to talk to you in private.”

You exhale, adjusting the heavy bag on your shoulder, “Sirius, I have to know. Why are you paying me so much attention? Surely you have a soulmate to think of.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk about.”

“Really?”

Sirius nods. He takes a deep breath before saying, “Compared to you: stars pale, and the moon dulls.”

“Are you quoting a film at me?” You ask; an eyebrow raised.

Sirius shakes his head, repressing a laugh. He rolls up the sleeve of his jumper, revealing his left arm to you where decorating his inner forearm are the very same stars, planets and moons that you had doodled instead of focusing on the classwork.

Instead of saying anything, you roll your own sleeve up, lining your arm up beside Sirius’ where the patterns match perfectly.

It seemed that his attempts at conversation and his watching you from a distance was for a purpose.

Sirius Black is your soulmate.

“Oh…” You whisper.

“I told you we would meet soon,” Sirius whispers; a sight teasing lilt to his voice.

You shake your head, “I kept thinking you didn’t want to meet me; that you didn’t want a soulmate.”

Sirius grips both of your hands, “The complete opposite. I just needed to work up the nerve to find you.”

“When did you know?”

“Not that long ago. When James and Lily got together.”

You nod your head; remembering the day well.

“I overheard you talking to your friend when I was on my way to a lesson and you kept talking about how your soulmate kept promising you soon. And I realised that that was all I was saying to mine. Soon.”

You look down at your joined hands, “I never even had an inkling it was you.”

Sirius chuckles, “I suppose that should be flattering. I must be that good at concealing information, I should be a spy.”

You roll your eyes, “It almost drove me mad is what you mean.”

“Well we have a long time to get to know each other now,” He murmurs; voice soft and filled with promise for the future.

You smile shyly at the long-haired teenager, “We do?”

He nods, “Yeah, we do.”

Tentatively, you take a step closer to the long-haired Marauder. A small smile graces Sirius’ face as he takes in your movement. With a tug of his hands, you fall into him – an arm clasping itself around your waist, pressing you to him.

Sirius’ hand caresses your cheek; you lean into the touch, wondering if this is how every match felt when they found their soulmate or whether this was entirely Sirius’ effect on you. Either way, it was addicting… and he hadn’t even kissed you yet.

Finally though, after what feels like a lifetime of staring into each other’s eyes, Sirius dips his head to kiss you. You meet him halfway; the desire you feel for him controlling your every move. His grip on your waist tightens and your arms wind their way around his neck, holding him to you. This kiss is what breaks the dam; from the lightest pressure of his lips, long buried emotions bubble up to the surface and it’s all you can do to keep yourself in control.

Sirius breaks the kiss, but he doesn’t retreat far. He beams down at you; eyes bright with elation. It’s a smile that you return and more; happy to have found your soulmate, happy to know who he is and that he loves you just as much as you love him.

Happy to know that soon is now.

*******

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Sirius Black taglist: @approved-by-dentists @fific7 @susceptible-but-siriusexual​

[aswithasunbeam]

December 1814

“Hush, darling,” Eliza whispered. “It’s all right.”

Angelica curled up further on the bed beside Eliza with a soft whimper. At least she was resting, finally, after hours of panic about invisible demons reaching out from the walls to take her away. Eliza had had to push the bed away from the walls before she’d been able to convince her daughter to lie down.

Eliza closed her eyes, the press of the day weighing on her already. Servants were bustling through the halls just outside the door, heaving trunks from little Eliza and Phil’s rooms. They were all bound for New York at first light tomorrow to celebrate Johnny’s wedding to his dear Maria. A joyous occasion to be sure, especially as she anticipated having their children together for the first time in years: William was meant to be coming down from West Point, and Alex and Jamie had secured time away from their posts, as well. Joyous, yes, even as it hurt that so much of her family wouldn’t be there, with Angelica and Peggy both gone, her parents, and Philip…. She swallowed around a lump in her throat at the thought of her eldest.

Her younger daughter shrieked suddenly from down the hall. “Give it back! Now!”

“I’m using it!” Phil yelled back.

“It’s mine!”

Eliza sighed, easing herself from Angelica’s bed to go see what all the fuss was about. Phil and little Eliza were engaged in an all out tug of war over a bit of ribbon in the hallway between their rooms. She watched silently for a moment, frowning, her arms crossed, waiting for them to notice her displeasure.

Phil noticed her first and abruptly let go of the ribbon. Little Eliza stumbled backwards, landing hard on her bottom. She yelped, glared up at her brother, and aimed a swift kick at his ankles.  

“What are you two doing?” she demanded.

“She started it,” Phil said, jumping hastily out of the line of fire.

“He stole my best ribbon and he was using it to hang toy soldiers out the window.”

“I was going to give it back.”

“It’s got dirt all over it and you got it all wrinkled.” She held the ribbon up to show her mother. “See? I wanted to wear it to Johnny’s wedding.”

Phil stuck his tongue out at his sister. When she noticed, she aimed another kick at his ankles. He jumped back again, shouting, “Stop it!”

“What is all the yelling about?” Alexander asked as he slowly wheeled himself around the corner, to their collective surprise.

Despite the gathering dark outside the hall window, she was shocked to see him home; she’d hardly seen hide nor hair of him in the past days as they prepared to leave for their extended trip home. Both the children went quiet at his unexpected arrival, and little Eliza bounced up to her feet.

“Sorry Papa,” they both mumbled quickly.

“We seem to be having quite the disagreement over a bit of ribbon,” Eliza supplied when they failed to offer further explanation.

Alexander looked at her with a hint of a smile. “Want me to send them to help dig out the new latrine by the camp? That’s what I do with the men who mouth off. Very effective punishment.”

They both paled considerably, sending her matching pleading looks.

She made a show of considering for a long beat before smiling as well. “I think we can give them one more chance before we put them to hard labor.”

“We’ll be good,” Phil promised solemnly.

“I expect so.” Alexander tilted his head to the side to dismiss them. “Off you go. Stop making your mother’s life difficult.”

If only he’d take his own advice, she thought fondly.

They scampered off down the hall, both giving their father an affectionate peck on the cheek as they passed. He shook his head as he watched them go, then looked back at her, the laugh lines in his cheeks creasing. “Imps.”

“Well, we did complain the house was too quiet without them,” Eliza said. Indeed, when Alexander had sent them off to stay with family over the summer for their safety, the house had felt empty without their constant bickering and antics. She paced over to him and leaned down to kiss him, as well. “It’s good to have you home finally. You missed dinner again.”

“I know, I know. I’m sorry I haven’t been much help getting ready for our trip. I’ve been in endless meetings. When I at one point raised the concern about the endless meetings, one of Jemmy’s secretaries quite unironically asked if I would like him to schedule a meeting to discuss it.”

She laughed.  

He grinned at her, but his eyes turned serious when he glanced towards the door to Angelica’s room. “How’s Geli today?”

Eliza sobered as she, too, glanced back at her daughter’s door. “She’s been having a bad day.”

He sighed. “She’s been having a lot of bad days, lately. I heard her whimpering and muttering when I got home late last night. She was wide awake when I peeked in at her. I doubt she got much rest.”

Eliza hardly needed reminding, having been up much of the night with her. “She’s resting now, finally.”

“That’s something, I suppose.”

His hands fidgeted on the wheels of his chair. She watched him a moment, sensing he had something else to tell her. The expression twisting his face usually signaled some sort of indigestion. When he failed to say anything more, she asked, “What is it?”

“Well,” he started, his hand going up to scratch at his neck uncomfortably.

Anxiety started to build up at his continued reluctance to speak. “If you say you can’t come to New York for your own son’s wedding—”

“No, no, it’s not that.” He sighed, resting his hands on the wheels of his chair once more, as though contemplating an escape even as he spoke. “It’s just, I need to meet with some people before I leave. And the only time they would both be available was tonight. So, I may have suggested they stop by the house before we leave. They’re on their way over now, actually. For tea.”

She felt her own expression twisting to match his, heartburn flaring in her chest as a suspicion about his guest list occurred to her. “Who?”

“Burr,” he said.

“Burr,” she repeated, disbelief in her tone even though that’s exactly the name she’d expected to hear. “You expect me to serve tea to Aaron Burr?”

“Well,” he started again.

“You promised me. You promised, when you suggested him for his position, that I wouldn’t need to be alone with him.”

“I said not just the three of us.” He fidgeted in his chair again, clearly not relishing delivering his next bit of news. “Someone else is coming, too.”

He seemed somehow more reluctant to tell her the next guest. How could it possibly get worse? “Who else?”  

He gritted his teeth, hesitating again before saying, “Monroe.”

A wave of cold fury washed over her. “Monroe!”

“Shh,” he hushed, pointing towards Angelica’s room behind them.

Her nostrils flared as she forced a deep breath, jerking her head to indicate he should follow her down the hall before moving around him towards his office. He liked to praise her as an endless fountain of love and patience, she thought, but much as she might try, she simply wasn’t. Her nerves were already frayed from sleepless nights and managing ornery children and overseeing the packing and planning for their journey. Now he wanted her to cap off her night by serving tea to two of the most loathsome men on earth.  

He rolled in to the office behind her, and she snapped the door closed.

“No,” she said firmly.

“Eliza—”

“No, Alexander. No. You ask too much, sometimes.”

He smiled softly, highlighting the dimples in his cheeks, and reached out for her hand. “You’d send me into the viper’s nest without my trusty mongoose for protection?”

“You can’t charm your way out of this,” she hissed.

“Betsey,” he sighed, expression turning serious. “It can’t be helped.”

“They’re not welcome here. Not in my home. Neither of them.”

“You know I try to keep them away as much as possible. I know how you feel.”

“Do you? Because sometimes, the way you act, especially around Burr—”

“I understand. I do. But I need to see them before I go. It’s important.”

“What’s so important?”

“Campbell submitted his budget, just before he conveniently resigned to see to his health. He estimated an appropriation of $25 million would be needed, which is far, far beyond the expected tax revenue of $11 million, and all that’s before factoring in the cost of rebuilding the capital.”

She sank into the chair near his desk, sensing a lengthy conversation. “Go on.”

“Then there’s this…this treasonous…convention.” She could hear the quotes around the last word as he spit it out. “Otis has called a meeting of Federalists all across New England to propose a radical change in our national compact. Because what we need in the middle of a war, apparently, is a new constitutional convention intent on gutting the Federal government.”

“Were you invited?”  

He snorted. “As if I’d stoop to attending such a farcical proceeding.”

She smiled a little. She knew he’d have gloried in attending, monopolizing the conversation until his voice went hoarse telling them exactly why they were all idiots and cowards, had he been given the opportunity. “So no?”

He shot her a glare, but then smirked, caught red-handed by her knowing look. “I think they knew what my answer would be.”

She threaded her fingers between his. “I know how stressed you are about the war and fate of the country, sweetheart. But I don’t see what a meeting with those two—” she paused, hunting for a word, and, finding none, continued with only the empty space to define them, “—helps accomplish.”

“Monroe is acting Secretary of War, and, with Campbell gone, probably acting Secretary of the Treasury as well at this point. I need him to call on Congress to establish a new national bank, which in turn will help fund additional men. At least 100,000 to start.”

“And I’m sure he’ll take your direction with great enthusiasm.”

“Not with enthusiasm, perhaps, but he’ll take my direction, once I explain the need.”

“And Burr?”

“The Hartford Convention needs to be minimized. We need a shot of patriotism in that part of the country, a call to arms to rally flagging spirits. Since the Northern theater quieted, they’ve been shouldering the financial burden with none of the chance for glory. Meanwhile, the enemy is starting to gather with an eye towards New Orleans. If we can start mustering troops in New England, threaten an invasion of Canada, we might be able to press England into peace and herd New England back into the fold at the same time.”

“And you want Burr to head the effort,” she said, intuiting his plan now. Once Monroe agreed to call upon Congress to fund new troops, Burr would ride north to start mustering a force to take on Canada again.

“Exactly.” His eyes bore into hers. “And it needs to happen now. Immediately. Congress can’t be frightened into cutting back on the army, or we’ll be a British colony again by New Year’s.”

She squeezed his hand.

“So?” he pressed.

She held his gaze. “I suppose I’ll let them in when they knock. I won’t agree to more than that.”

He leaned over in his chair to catch her lips. “That’s all I need from you.”

**

That she managed to bring in the tea service without pouring the scalding water over either of their two unwanted guests ought to have qualified her sainthood, in her opinion. She didn’t stay in the room with them, didn’t even mutter a greeting. She did stay near the door, however, listening, while Alexander laid out his plan. She couldn’t quite bring herself to abandon him, even when he’d invited the viper’s nest upon himself.

“I wasn’t a particular supporter of your bank the first time around, Mr. Hamilton,” Monroe said. “Why should I call on Congress to re-charter it now?”

“How else are you going to pay for more troops, Mr. Secretary?”

Monroe answered in a measured tone. “We’re mere weeks away from a peace treaty, according to my intelligence in Ghent. Once that’s signed, there won’t be a need for more troops. We can cut back, limit spending to match our more limited revenue stream temporarily, until imports duties return to their pre-war levels.”

“You don’t think the British are also gathering intelligence?” Burr asked. “They’ll be watchfully waiting for our new budget proposals. If we’re seen dismantling the army before the war is over, why would they ever agree to a peace deal? Might as well take us for their own again.”

Monroe scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous. They’ve practically already signed. And I think we’ve proven far too troublesome to bother with as a colony again.”

“Too troublesome thirty years ago,” Burr pointed out. “And we were lucrative. If we can’t mount a solid defense, no reason not to give it another try.”

Alexander added, “You need to get the dissent in New England under control. And you need funding. Even without the additional expense of more troops, rebuilding the capital will be an expensive endeavor. You need to do this.”

“I don’t like the bank,” Monroe said sourly.

Alexander laughter bitterly. “It’s me you don’t like, Mr. Secretary. And that’s quite all right. I assure you the feeling is mutual. But you have to do this. Don’t make me go over your head to Jemmy to force you into action. It will only waste time.”

There was a long silence, tension palpable. “Fine. I’ll propose re-chartering the bank and adding funding for more troops. But I can’t promise it will pass.”

“Oh, I think you’ll find the votes, Mr. Secretary,” Alexander insisted. “Necessity is a great motivator.”

Sensing the meeting was coming to a close, Eliza moved to summon the servants to bring the hats and coats. She didn’t want them lingering in the front room any longer than necessary. In the moments she’d stepped away, however, something must have happened, because she suddenly heard raised voices coming from the office. She hurried back, opening the door to the office to find Burr standing in between Monroe and Alexander.

Monroe was all but shouting, “You think just because you’ve blinded Jemmy with nostalgic appeals to a long-dead friendship that you can always have your way, just as you did with Washington. I’ll not be so easily taken in, Mr. Hamilton, I promise you that.”

Burr placed a hand on Monroe’s shoulder, trying to ease him away from Alexander.

Alexander looked blithely unconcerned, all but smirking at Monroe as he said, “I’ll remind you there is no guaranteed succession in this country, Mr. Monroe, however many hats you acquire during this administration. I wouldn’t be so assured of victory in the next election, if I were you.”

Color rose in Monroe’s face as he pushed around Burr, holding a finger out in Alexander’s direction. “Enjoy your influence while you have it. Your days are numbered.”

“That’s quite enough,” Eliza said, voice deadly quiet, fury taking wing in her chest at the implied threat.

Monroe spun around to face her. “Mrs. Hamilton—”

“You have nothing to say to me, Mr. Monroe.”

“I apologize for raising my voice,” he continued, bowing his head slightly.

“No. No. If you mean to offer anything other than a full and sincere apology, not only for the unforgivable words you just uttered, but also for all the slanders and stories you circulated against my husband in the past, I have no interest in hearing it.”

Monroe frowned. “If you mean…the business with the Reynolds papers was hardly my doing. Your husband—”

“What my husband did was a matter we have long since settled between us. But that the rest of the world was involved was very much your doing. He has earned my forgiveness. You’ve never even bothered to ask it.”

“Mrs. Hamilton—”

“And you now have the…the gall to come into my home, drink my refreshments, and then threaten the person I hold dearest in the world. Please leave, Mr. Monroe. Now.”

He stared at her for a long moment. Burr patted at his shoulder, encouraging him forward. Just before Burr himself stepped out, though, he glanced back at her husband. “You’re a real pain in the ass, Ham. You know that?”

“So I’ve been told.” Alexander had the nerve to look fond as he addressed Burr.

“Out,” she insisted.

Burr at least had the decency to avert his eyes as he passed her, collecting their coats and urging Monroe out the front door without another word.

When the door had closed, she looked back at Alexander, still sitting in the middle of the room. He gave her plaintive look. “I’m so sorry, Betsey. I didn’t mean for things to get so out of hand. Or for you to be pulled into the middle of it.”

She pointed in the direction the two men had just disappeared, her hand shaking slightly from rush of rage and fear that coursed through her. “That man is never, ever setting foot in my home again.”

“Of course. Never again.”

Promises, promises—how he could make them. Her heart was still beating in her throat.  He rolled forward and took her hand, placing a kiss to the back of her fingers.

She softened as she looked back at him, calming somewhat with his easy agreement and solid feeling of his hand in hers. The reason for his insistence on the meeting in the first place re-occurred to her, and she felt a niggle of concern despite herself. “Do you think he’ll still put forward the proposal to Congress?”

“Yes.” He sounded completely confident. “He doesn’t have a choice. Jemmy will back me if it comes to a contest, and he knows it. I just don’t want to lose time on the argument when every minute counts. We’re too close, balanced on the edge of a precipice. I’ll not let our experiment fail over pigheadedness and pride.”  

She considered the exchanged she’d walked in on again, eyes locked on her husband. “You said that to him, didn’t you? You goaded him into shouting at you.”

He gave her a sheepish smile. “I do so enjoy winding him up with impotent rage.”

She wanted to be angry with him, but amusement was quickly outpacing the sensation. Damn him, his charm, and his sweet smile, she thought. She let out a breathy laugh, shaking her head at him. Relief washed over his face.

“I really didn’t mean to drag you into it, though, my dearest.” He kissed her hand again, looking more relaxed. “Though I confess I enjoyed watching you kick him to the curb. My darling mongoose.”

His darling mongoose, indeed, she huffed internally.

[everything-laito]

I know you've somewhat answered this about who Laito would suit with best and Yui is good for her expressions which doesn't bore Laito. I agree though cuz Laito does enjoy showing dominance that way. But I feel like Yui as a whole is not quite right for Laito. Because Laito might need someone emotionally mature and while Yui is definetely better than the boys, in my eyes she is young and impressionable and not able to answer every question given to her because she has no answer. Laito definetely likes that but having someone who can guide him emotionally and psychologically would aide him better (while also letting Laito show his dominance). I just feel bad for her to be paired with someone like Laito cuz she deserves better and Laito is clearly using it against her. What do you think?

Well, the thing is, I'd say the bottom requirement is to entertain Laito or at least not get him bored with you. And with that in mind, that base requirement is still not good for a healthy relationship. To not bore Laito basically ensures that you'll survive in an HDB situation. Going off of HDB stuff here because there's so much nuance to the other games, but I'll get to that later.

In HDB, it would be near impossible (or honestly straight up impossible) to have a healthy relationship with him. Although Yui's character is pretty perfect to not get her killed, there's also the whole Cordelia situation too, which is implied that Laito knew all along given his Brute/Ending 03. That might also be a reason why Laito kept Yui around to see what would happen, and that curiosity probably intrigued him too.

Here's a quote from Dark 07, where he drinks Yui's blood for the first time:

Laito: ーー No, that can’t be. It has to be a coincidence, right? Yui: What…? Laito: Nfu~ I’m just talking to myself. Haa…This nostalgic taste…My tongue’s tingling.

Then we move onto his Ending 03/Brute ending in HDB:

Laito: Furthermore…stirring awake that person who slumbers inside of you. ー Cordelia appears in Yui’s subconsciousness Cordelia: ーー Laito…! Did you realize I was here? Yui: That…W-When did you notice? Laito: Nfu~ Gosh, you are so insolent. I realized right away.

Either he's lying or he really did notice right away. Maybe drinking Yui's blood was his confirmation, but it's pretty unclear. However, considering Laito has spent a lot of time with Cordelia and keeps her memory pretty dear, I don't doubt that drinking Yui's blood would force him to connect the dots. He is pretty smart.

In an HDB scenario, Yui's special because Laito finds her entertaining, he supposedly knows about Cordelia lurking in her (and I've written about how he does all his manipulation to his victims in order to get some type of revenge on Cordelia and/or him to come out on top--and this is literal revenge on Cordelia this time as well), on top of Yui being "pure" to him. The purity part also links to his corruption kink and getting "back" at Cordelia. I say revenge but it's more personal retribution for Laito, which I guess that's still the same thing. He knows he didn't deserve to be abused but he's going to take that out on pure girls because he's jealous of their purity. But now, since Yui's a whole package: pure and literally contains Cordelia, he's extremely sinister.

If there was a more emotional mature person (which I do think Yui's emotionally intelligent in her own way, but she still is 17), it would still be the same outcome: manipulating that person, using her as his toy, and possibly killing her if he gets bored of her. As for your comment on not being able to answer anything, Laito asks pretty vague questions a lot of the times, ones that Yui just isn't supposed to know the answer to, or he just does it to toy with her.

Yes she is impressionable as well, but she's more impressionable given the conditions and physical and mental stress she is under, (again, back to my Vitamin D/calcium deficiency rant) and all the manipulation and isolation she experiences via Laito. I cannot stress enough that the events that happen in Laito's HDB route could be effected by anyone. Nobody would be able to come out of that situation the same, and that is a guarantee. No matter how well versed you are in rhetoric persuasion or psychology, or even know that he's manipulating you, the conditions and lack of resources makes it a very repeatable scenario.

However, when we get to the events in MB+, Yui's not able to comprehend what's going on with Laito. She does her best to console and comfort him, which does help him for the most part. Yui's still 17! That's so freakin young! For Yui to be Laito's only emotional resource is better than having no network or emotional resources at all. Mans still needs a therapist. So I do agree with you when it comes to a situation such as MB+ where Laito is on the more emotionally vulnerable side due to outside events. HDB is a closed system, while MB+ is an open system. He would need someone to emotionally and psychologically guide him through these troubles, and with Yui being 17, she tries her best, and is good for Laito, but not the best in that department. However, I think that Yui not being as overbearing gives some type of comfort to Laito. Thinking that he's able to dominate Yui, kill her, and just even isolate her at his will is comforting to him. Even in MB+ he doesn't actually want to do it.

Yui will emotionally mature, and will be a really good resource for Laito in the future. However yes, right now he does need someone like you describe, but I think he needs a network more than just a singular person. Give this man some friends. I think he needs platonic affection more than sexual or romantic. Sure he has family, but they're not the best towards him (even though Laito tries his best to be a good brother :'))

Ok that was a lot longer than I thought, but hopefully that makes sense! As always if you have any questions, comments, clarifications, etc, please let me know!

-Corn

[cauldronofmorning]

Okay so.... I've encountered your tags about "the talking scene between trapper and hawk in dr pierce and dr hyde the stuttering the grabbing the not blinking how another of hawk's coping methods has bitten the dust#trapper being soft parental but annoyed and how he needs to check out while hawkeye needs to save the entire world"... if you have time, Go off! I would love that 2000 word essay and your opinions.

It’s a bit of a mess and would probably get a C- if I handed it in, but! Dr Pierce and Dr Hyde and how it shows the difference between Hawkeye’s and Trapper’s coping methods.

Context! Alan Alda wrote the episode, mental health is important to him (not to psychoanalyze an actor, but he had depression before the show and his mom was schizophrenic) and there’s a quote on how Hawkeye didn’t actually change much in the eleven years, just had his coping methods beaten down.

So throughout season one, Hawkeye and Trapper have mostly been ignoring the trauma of a war. Hawkeye naturally ended a movie with a speech about propaganda (Yankee Doodle Doctor) and Tommy tells them (Sometimes You Hear The Bullet) about a kid who should have been the blonde hero in a war movie actually dying and not hearing a bullet, forcing them to actually quietly think about it. But for the most part, they can distract themselves with booze, pranks and women, and Hawkeye can still draw a straight line between his tenuous sanity pre-war and the place he’s in.

There’s also two important episodes in season two before Dr Pierce and Dr Hyde, that make the war more personal for both of them. The first is Radar’s Report, where a scared prisoner contaminates Trapper’s patient by knocking the blood over. Trapper’s sulkier throughout the episode, obsessed with how it could have been okay if it weren’t for that incident, and less indulging of Hawkeye’s girl of the week problem. His patient doesn’t make it, and he makes a beeline to the POW’s tent, maybe would have killed him if Hawkeye hadn’t bought him back to reality. “That’s not what we’re about.”

The second is For The Good Of The Outfit. This one has a village bombed by American military and Hawkeye/Trapper run afoul of previously decent sounding generals trying to shut them up from talking about it, including passive aggressive threats to send them to the front, and specifically to Hawkeye, intercepting letters to his dad. It’s okay by the end of the episode, but he’s still livid when he finds this out.

In comes Dr Pierce and Dr Hyde. The episode starts with Hawkeye already slightly dissociated from a long shift, thinking it hasn’t ended, and Trapper having to gently take him by the arm and guiding him out of the OR, telling him he was taking the chest cases “like he was their only hope”. Hawkeye wanting to save everyone keeps popping up throughout the episode; here, when he’s stumbling into Henry and his ego filtered through deprivation making him think he’s the only one who can do chest cases, the scene I’m getting to, and the end where Trapper and Henry sum him up.

As much as Trapper is “let’s get drunk to deal, okay?” kind of comfort in comparison to BJ who can actually talk about emotions, if not necessarily knowing the best way to deal with them (Hawkeye has a type and it’s repressed blondes), he’s soft with Hawkeye – gentle touches, firmly telling him to go to sleep, indulging that chopper noise is just thunder – until he figures the best way to get his friend to rest is to sedate him behind his back.

The thing with Trapper is that while he might be a bad husband, cheating on his wife with no shame (but he keeps bringing up that Hawkeye is more perverted so that might make it easier for him to deal with, see the couple of times he glares at Hawk for flirting with Henry/a male patient, Divided We Stand, The Trial Of Henry Blake, Check Up, Life With Father, Adam’s Ribs), he’s a good father who ran into a minefield for Kim and tried to go AWOL for Cathy and Becky. That’s not to say he always treats Hawkeye like a child, that would be weird considering how much flirting they do, but when the other man is manic or badly affected, Trapper’s first instinct is to be parental.

After Hawkeye in his doubletalky way admits to Radar he’s compulsive and psychotic (sidenote:  his symptoms of strong emotions, not being able to think clearly and too many spirals to name actually bear that diagnosis out, instead of just using the word when one thinks another is behaving badly), he wanders around the camp like a ghost, making notes about corpsmen with guns and nurses checking patients in post-op.

As Hawkeye often does, whenever he finds something out, or thinks he has in this instance, he has to tell his live-in boyfriend of the season immediately, and if he can’t sleep then neither can anyone else. He sits on Trapper’s bed, extremely close and not blinking, and jostles him awake. Already Trapper’s slightly panicky, as no matter what he says about being the mellow one, any time there’s shouting or loud noise in the swamp, he always wakes up with a start. Even when he sees it’s Hawkeye it takes him a few seconds to process and get back into his role.

Hawkeye’s very sad and very quiet. For the past seven minutes, even though he’s dissociated, exhausted and not doing well, he’s still trying to do his normal thing of turning his anger sideways and being snarky or being a clown bottom for the gaggle of nurses. Going back to one of Trapper’s good qualities is that he’s a decent parent, Hawkeye can regress emotionally into being like a ten year old (incidentally, the age when he had the most trauma pre-Korea, with Billy, his mom dying, guilt over not wanting dad to remarry and at some point losing his virginity), both for funny like in Picture This and for sadness.

So he’s finally noticed that he’s in a war zone and he’s too tired to make jokes about it or distract himself from it. Trapper already sounds frustrated but still listens, telling him to go bed before he drives himself crazy. There’s been a few takes that Trapper would get sick of later Hawkeye, and given how much they really can’t talk to each other that often, even just a mention of Hawkeye’s will when he has to go to the front makes Trapper shut down and Hawkeye cover with a joke, that’s probably true. They’re both messes, but for now Trapper can give Hawkeye someone to lean on.

“If I thought I could stop it just by going to sleep, don’t you think I would try?” Hawkeye does a twitch of the head, still unblinking, and that’s just really asking Trapper to understand and take him seriously. Also the wording, he’s not saying he can stop thinking about it just by going to sleep, or stop feeling anything just by closing his eyes, although both of those are implied. He makes it very clear later on (Letters, Preventive Medicine, Blood Brothers) that he feels like he’s as bad as the war – god and martyr complex combined – and if he can’t fight against/blame everything on that then it’s time for some self loathing.

Trapper does actually pay attention and gives him some advice. Definitely not great advice, but advice nonetheless, to close his eyes when things get unbearable, and to keep checking out when it keeps happening. This can’t work for Hawkeye, who’s had a guilt complex ever since he was a child, but it’s how Trapper copes. The next episode when Kim’s mother turns up for the boy, after a time of being actually open, he goes right to dismissive snark. Plus in season three’s Mad Dogs and Servicemen, another one on how differently Trapper and Hawkeye deal with things, he shrugs that he pretends he’s not there all day along.

Hawkeye’s stuttering a bit at this point. Words are important to him, it’s why you should probably leave him a note even if you’re a man who 1) wants to forget about Korea as soon as he arrives in Boston but won’t 2) wants desperately to believe he’s straight but isn’t 3) cares through physical touch and can’t think of what to say for seventy two hours. Wordplay is important to him too, and he admits to Sidney in the finale that his brain thinks too fast. Obviously exhaustion is going to put his brain and mouth out of sync, and considering how he sounds like he’s going to cry in the mess tent when he can’t even get words out to Frank Burns, it makes him all that more helpless.

“Somebody, and it wasn’t you or me, started this war.” It’s the “whoever the them, we were always us” of it all. It’ll be more important in the third season, and what happens in Welcome To Korea, but Hawkeye has taken it for granted that he and Trapper will stay co-dependent no matter what happens or who they come up against or how their time is running out. Much how he probably didn’t tell Trapper about the abandonment trauma he’s suffered before, Trapper always reassures him to come back soon, or no charge for leaning on him, or it isn’t a Christmas goodbye, and doesn’t want to share real feelings.

Beyond that scene, with Hawkeye dragging himself off to be a hero, assume that everyone who tries to take care of him really just wants to sleep with him, and cry while singing, Trapper tries to sedate him while he’s not looking. He’s tried being parental, he’s tried the repression advice, it’s time to be passive aggressive for Hawkeye’s own good. Or what he thinks is Hawkeye’s own good. It’s not especially great on Trapper’s part, but a similar thing happens reversed in Mail Call, where a drunk Trapper tries to go AWOL and as soon as he’s distracted laughing at Frank, Hawkeye locks his bag away so Trapper won’t be tempted again. Both of them are repressed messes who can’t really talk to each other.

When that sedation attempt ends up in Frank falling over, Trapper goes to Henry to be the worried macho boyfriend. Like with the only comedic dancing allowed and not the time in Officers Only when a genuine offer gets turned down, being protective over Hawkeye where he can hear can only happen when it’s for fun/likely no real danger.

At the end, Trapper and Henry sit by Hawkeye’s bed when he’s finally asleep and talk about him. Kindly, but they know he’s unstable with a hero complex. Like Mulcahy said in season eleven, the camp has a lot of experience with not dealing with reality, and even Trapper says in Iron Guts Kelly that one man’s reality is another man’s fantasy. Nobody has the capability to talk about this yet, and Sidney and Hawkeye only really become friends in O.R. Hawkeye will wake up and he and Trapper will pretend this never happened.

When Adam’s Ribs comes around, and Hawkeye has a manic episode over needing to eat something that isn’t liver or fish, Trapper and Henry are again the ones looking after him, comparing him to their kids and Trapper in the background both snarking over Hawkeye’s slippage in sanity and looking out for him. It’s not as quite high stakes as Dr Pierce and Dr Hyde, but they’re still worried about him.

To end this out, Trapper and Hawkeye and mental health is a fun thing to look at. Neither of them are particularly emotionally intelligent yet, Hawkeye just kind of a self absorbed mess and Trapper finding it easier to be a reassuring rock and keep his own struggling to himself, and they keep things from each other while also taking past each other, but they comfort each other with jokes and distractions that only they can understand. The repressed clowns are trying, even if it does all end with a borrowed kiss and only just barely missing each other.

[be11atrixthestrange]

The Loft (Chapter 1)

After a bad break-up, Hermione Granger moves into a messy and dysfunctional loft with four single men. What starts as a temporary home until she gets back on her feet becomes so much more, as she learns there's a lot of life - and love - that happens at rock-bottom. 

Inspired by the TV Series ‘New Girl’

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Also on A03 | FFN

More Chapters

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Chapter 1

[Hermione]

"I don't know, Harry," groans Seamus. "She'll change the dynamic too much, don't you think?"

"Who's to say that's a bad thing?" Harry glares at Seamus's dirty feet on the coffee table, propped up on an empty take-out container. "Honestly, we could probably use some more feminine energy in here."

"You're just doing this because Ginny asked." Seamus lets out a laugh, and a smug smirk spreads across his face. "You know, this little favor isn't going to make her sleep with you."

Harry scowls right back. "I'm not trying to get her to sleep with me," he argues, although his reddening cheeks suggest otherwise. "I'm just trying to do the right thing here. Hermione needs a place to live, and we need another roommate anyway."

"So the fact that she's friends with Ginny has nothing to do with it? You're not using Hermione to lure Ginny over here more often?"

Harry's silence is a sufficient answer for Seamus, who scoffs and leans back on the sofa with his hands behind his head.

Hermione resists the urge to clarify that she's not exactly Ginny's friend per se. To Ginny, Hermione's just the broken-hearted mess of a girl she found crying in the office bathroom yesterday, and to Hermione, Ginny's nothing but a well-timed acquaintance who happened to know of a loft with an empty room.

Instead, she clears her throat to remind them of her presence, as they seem to have forgotten. "Boys, I'm sitting right here. If you don't want me to move in, that's fine. Just tell me, and I'll look elsewhere."

"For what it's worth, I like her," chirps Neville quietly from the other end of the sofa. "She seems nice."

Hermione silently thanks Neville with a smile, but apparently for the other two, 'nice' isn't what they're looking for.

"That's the problem, Neville. She's 'nice'," says Seamus, emphasizing the phrase with air quotes. "I want to feel comfortable in my own space, and sometimes, seeing something 'nice' in the morning makes things uncomfortable." He motions to his pants to emphasize his point.

Gross. Is this guy serious? Hermione looks at Seamus in disgust and crosses her arms in front of her chest, hoping to hide anything 'nice' from view. She can already tell that this is not a good fit.

"Dude, really?" chastises Harry. "She's right here, man."

"Seriously," tuts Neville. "Jar."

"Yeah, that's fair," shrugs Seamus.

Hermione watches in shock and horror as Seamus digs into his pocket for a dollar bill before shoving it into a glass container labeled 'douchebag jar'.

No, this definitely isn't going to work out.

"I'll just go," she says, rising to her feet. "Clearly, this isn't a good idea."

The boys erupt in whispers as soon as she turns her back, and a tidal wave of self-consciousness crashes down on her. She scurries toward the door, wishing she had worn something other than her Lululemons. Something less 'nice'.

She'll find another place to live. She has to.

But as she approaches the door, her eyes sting with tears. She's banking on this working out — if she doesn't find a place today her only option is a hotel she can't afford, or another night in her old apartment with Cormac, and she's not sure she can stand to sleep in the same bed as him, or on the same couch she caught him naked with — what was her name? Romilda Something? It doesn't matter. Cormac probably never asked for her last name, and Hermione doesn't need to know either.

It might have to be a hotel, and she can almost hear her wallet whimper at the thought. Her first priority is getting out of this loft before she starts crying.

"Hermione, wait!"

Her hand freezes on the doorknob at Harry's abrupt call.

"What?" she snaps back without turning around. It's too late to hold back her tears — the floodgates have officially opened, and it's not a good time for pleasantries.

"We've just discussed, and we want you to live here," says Seamus, his friendly tone forced.

"Yeah," adds Neville. "We're really looking forward to it."

"So what do you say?" asks Harry.

Her stomach clenches, and for the first time she notices the smell of the apartment — it reeks of forgotten fast food and gym laundry. There's a lumpy, brownish stain in the corner by the door, and Hermione doesn't even want to know what it's from, and right above the stain, a shelf proudly displays a water bong in the shape of a naked woman. An empty picture frame hangs crookedly on the wall, a mediocre effort to hide the sloppy drawing of male genitalia etched in permanent marker. There's a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, and the light fixture above her head is held together with duct tape...

Does she want to live here? No.

But is she absolutely, one-hundred-percent desperate? Yes.

On the bright side, Cormac was a total slob before they lived together, and she taught him well. She can teach these boys too, she's sure of it.

She turns around and wipes her eyes, now leaking with tears. "Thank you," she says, her voice breaking into a muffled sob. "I'll go get my stuff in my car."

"Are you crying?" asks Seamus, his eyes wide. "You… you can't do that here. Harry, we made a mistake."

"Seamus, she's welcome to express her feelings if she needs to," says Neville.

"Dude! What are you talking about? You cry all the time!" says Harry, addressing Seamus. "Remember when you fell asleep and missed the Taylor Swift conc—"

"I was crying about something else entirely!" Seamus shouts. "My… my Nana died, okay?"

"Again?" Neville and Harry burst into laughter.

Hermione uses their moment of distraction to escape out the door. Once in the hallway, her tears fall freely, and she wipes them away with her sleeve. She approaches the elevator to begin the two to three trips — tops — to gather the minimal belongings she could stuff into her tiny Prius. She'll have to face Cormac if she wants the rest of her stuff back, but that's a worry for another day.

x

Hermione wakes up with a neckache, likely a result of the lumpy pile of blankets serving as her temporary bed. There are no blinds or curtains on her window yet, and the morning sun sends a direct beam of light into her eyes. She groggily props herself up on her elbows and glances around at the room — her room. It's quite small and the walls are a bit bland, so there's nothing special about it, really. But it does have one thing going for it — she doesn't have to share it with a lying, cheating ex-boyfriend. Thank goodness for that.

Rubbing her throbbing neck, she climbs to her feet. Her dresser is still at Cormac's, so last night she left all of her clothes in a pile on the floor of the closet. She rummages through it and fishes out her robe — something to provide enough coverage to feel comfortable traipsing through the loft to the bathroom that she now shares with three boys. At the thought of running into them, she checks her reflection in the rectangular mirror stuck to the inside of the closet door and runs her fingers through her bushy brown hair — a feeble attempt to defrizz it. She tugs at her robe, which is shorter than she remembers. Not that it matters, she reminds herself. It's not like she's attracted to any of her roommates. There's no reason to look good.

Out of nowhere, the door to her bedroom swings open and slams into the wall with a bang. Hermione jumps and whips around to face her intruder, and her mouth drops open when she meets the equally surprised gaze of a tall, lanky, shirtless, redhead.

"WHAT THE FUCK?" he yells, taking a step back. He glances around the room in confusion, looking like he walked into the wrong apartment.

Hermione's ears tingle with embarrassment and she tightens her robe. "Who are you?" she asks, her voice shaky.

The redhead stares back dumbfounded. "Who am I? Who are you, and why are you in my gym?"

"Your gym? What are you talking about? This is my room!" Only now does Hermione realize he's carrying a set of dumbbells at his side. Her eyes scan for the number on the weights, a strange habit leftover from Cormac's constant bragging about how much he can lift.

Before she can catch the number, her eyes are drawn to something else — his gym shorts are quite tight and revealing, and his torso is sleek and muscular; his abs remind her of the crisp, defined cubes of an ice tray on a blistering summer day.

The heat spreads from her ears to her cheeks.

"Ron! You're back from your trip early," pants Harry as he rushes into her room to join the pair.

The redhead — Ron — turns to Harry and scowls. "Harry James Potter. Who the hell is she?" he asks, nodding in Hermione's direction.

"Ron, this is Hermione Granger," says Harry. "Our new roommate."

Hermione watches the two boys stare at each other and communicate in a language she's not privy to; their expressions flash with silent conversation. She takes a step back to observe and realizes from Ron's unwavering scowl that he was blindsided by Hermione.

"What happened to my home gym?" he whines, avoiding Hermione's gaze. His arms hang by his sides, the dumbbells dragging his shoulders into a slump, which gives him the appearance of a disgruntled toddler on the verge of a tantrum.

Harry clears his throat and stands up straighter. "We've decided that you can work out in your own bedroom from now on," he states diplomatically.

"That's not fair," says Ron, puffing his chest in an apparent challenge to Harry.

Harry shrugs. "Well, as you know, the rent is going up, so we all decided not to let you have two rooms to yourself. And Hermione's cool, your sister vouched for her."

Ahhh, Ginny's brother. Hermione finally connects the familiarity of Ron's flaming red hair.

"But you didn't even ask me!" complains Ron.

"Sorry bro. It was a practical choice."

Hermione shifts in discomfort at Harry's word choice — practical is a descriptor she's heard too many times before, and the sting of her breakup conversation with Cormac comes flooding right back. Romilda whatever-her-last-name is exciting and spontaneous, while Hermione's sensible and safe. As if transported back to her old apartment, she can hear Cormac crooning, 'Don't get me wrong baby, you're a great girl, but I just want to have fun right now...'

Harry must catch the flash of anger on her face and mistake himself as the culprit. "Hermione, I'm so sorry that this pale, speckly moron was your wake-up alarm."

"It's fine," she says, her voice shriller than intended. "It's nice to meet you, Ron. Now would you mind letting me get dressed?"

Ron turns toward her, and, for a moment, Hermione swears his eyes sweep over her body, a rosy tint swarming his cheeks before his expression hardens. She's becoming more appreciative of her too-short robe.

"Well, welcome to the loft, Hermione," says Ron stiffly before turning back to Harry, "If you need me, I'll be working out in my bedroom." Ron brushes past, bumping Harry's shoulder on his way out the door.

Without permission, Hermione's wild imagination conjures up the image of Ron doing just that. His too-tight gym shorts stretch with each squat, revealing his freckled, toned thighs. The same ray of sunlight that woke Hermione illuminates his porcelain skin which glistens with sweat, causing Hermione to crave the cool, refreshing taste of a vanilla ice cream cone…

"Why would I need you?" shouts Harry, interrupting Hermione's headspin.

"I don't know, Harry," comes Ron's muffled voice from the hall. "But if you do, you know where to find me."

She narrows her eyes and clears her throat, catching Harry's attention. "You didn't tell me there were four of you here."

Harry stares intently at the floor. "Right. Technically four is the maximum, so if anyone asks, you're just visiting."

Hermione's jaw drops and her heart starts pounding. She's a rule-follower, she always has been, and the thought of living where she's not supposed to makes her uneasy. "Harry — are you telling me that I'm living here illegally?!"

"It's not illegal," he says, his emphasis on the word concerning, "It's just frowned upon."

"Frowned upon by whom?"

"Our landlord." He waves his hand dismissively, "but he'll never find out."

"Harry—"

"I'll let you get dressed," he interrupts, slipping out of her room and closing the door behind him with a thud.

Hermione groans and turns back to the mirror, suddenly interested in her appearance again. She can see her anxiety etched into her face, the line between her eyebrows a prominent reminder of all that's gone wrong in the last few days.

If anyone asks what she's doing here, she's supposed to lie and say she's visiting. That shouldn't be an issue. She can lie, right?

"You're just visiting," she tells her reflection, and she likes the sound of it. The insinuation that this chaos is only temporary eases her anxiety.

"You're going to love it here," she practices again, pushing away the contradicting image of the trash-filled kitchen, pornographic water bong, and questionable stains on the floor.

"You're definitely not attracted to your roommate," she adds, knowing that somewhere in the loft, the shirtless redhead is working up a sweat, his breath growing heavy, as he throws around dumbbells by his probably-still-unmade bed.

It'll be fine — she can be pretty convincing, after all.

[justlightlysedated]

I’m not sure if this is what you were after with your message earlier, but anything more with the Malex Charmed AU where Alex is a witch and Michael is a white lighter would be wonderful 💖💖💖

set in this au:

Michael’s never been so nervous about an assignment before. But that’s probably because he’s never been given such an important assignment before. Usually he takes care of future White Lighters or low level witches just learning to use their powers.

But these were not only the children of a Charmed One, but also the children of Jesse Manes, one of the most notoriously evil warlocks, who even the Source was rumoured to fear.

So yeah, he was nervous, but he knew what his strengths were, and he knew that he was chosen because he was the best at blending in and staying in character and the Elders really wanted to keep an eye on the Manes Brothers, without them actually knowing that they were being watched.

Michael takes a look at his reflection in the rearview mirror, and he looks just as terrified as he feels.

He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath trying to find his center, and calming himself down just like Max had taught him back when Michael had first become a White Lighter.

Once he feels more calm and less nervous, he gets out of his truck, making sure to grab his tool box.

Michael closes the door behind himself and looks up at the Manes Manor.

The architecture put it firmly somewhere in the early eighteen hundreds, and the mauve color of the wooden boards made it stand out even more in the neighborhood full of monotone colors.

Michael’s story was pretty easy to remember and to input. The Manes had several nosy neighbors, and Mrs. Karen Johnson, their next door neighbor had been heard complaining loudly about the fact that the boarded up windows at the Manes Manor hadn’t been fixed since they’d been broken almost a full week ago.

So Michael had decided that the best way to infiltrate was to pose as a handyman, after all, old Victorian Manors sometimes did need a lot of work done, if no one kept up with the upkeep, and something told Michael that the Manes were more concerned with other matters than their home falling around them.

Something which is proven when Michael gets closer and realizes that the door wasn’t left open, but was actually leaning against the door jamb, on it’s side.

Michael is trying really hard not to be judgemental here, but he’s surprised that they’re still alive at this point.

As he stops right by the edge of the welcome mat, covered in wood chips and what he’s pretty sure is green demon goo, and sets his tool box down, he can almost perfectly hear the argument going on inside.

“-should just admit that you have no idea what you’re actually doing,” one voice says, sounding very much on the edge of condescending.

“Just because you can’t do it, doesn’t mean that my patch job is bad,” another voice says sounding on edge.

There is silence for two seconds and then the sounds of wooden boards hitting the ground, along with the small metal sounds of nails falling.

“You were saying?” the first voice says.

Someone else scoffs, and then Michael hears footsteps.

Michael doesn’t bother hiding as the first brother appears, Flint, the middle one, walking out from where he thinks the living room is located and into the short hall that leads towards the front door, heading towards the stairs that lead up to the bedrooms.

But no one seems to notice him as his two brothers follow after him.

Gregory, the eldest and the tallest one of the three of them, is the one to speak next, “I agree with Alex. We should consider hiring someone.”

Michael clears his throat and takes a step closer to the entrance, but no one pays attention to him.

Flint stops right at the bottom of the stairs and gives Gregory a truly vicious look, “Of course you agree with Alex.”

Alex, who is the youngest brother, shares a look with Gregory and then obviously rolls his eyes, almost with his whole entire body, leaning back against the small table where an empty vase is located.

He’s the only one with his back to Michael, and yet, no one else notices that he’s standing right there.

“I’m just saying that your way didn’t work, maybe we should consider-”

“Dad always said that real men fix their own messes,” Flint interrupts.

Alex makes a truly impressive disgusted noise with his mouth, “Dad is also an evil bastard warlock who keeps sending demons to steal our powers, do you really want to keep listening to his advice?”

"Excuse-" Michael tries trying to interrupt them, but they keep talking over him.

Flint rolls his eyes with his whole body just like Alex did, “Just because you think he’s evil-”

“He’s sending demons after us to steal our powers,” Alex repeats.

Flint gives him an annoyed look, “Powers that we only have because of you.”

Alex pushes off the table then, making the vase rock alarmingly. "You're really still blaming me after the last demon confirmed that dad would've sent them after us anyway?"

Flint opens his mouth, but Alex cuts him off, before he can say a word.

"Do you want to be dead? Because that's what you'd be right now. Dead."

"I can't believe that you're willing to take a demon's word for it, when it's our dad-"

Alex scoffs, "Dad has wanted me dead our whole lives-"

Michael moves forward and knocks on the door, and he sees Alex twitch towards the sound, but at the same time Gregory speaks up, loudly.

"I think that maybe we should table this conversation for some other time," Gregory says speaking over his two brothers, who turn to face him. "And I also think that we should put it to a vote."

Flint and Alex just look at him expectantly.

"Should we call someone to look at the damage and give us an estimate so that we at least know how much money before deciding it costs too much and do it ourselves?" Gregory asks.

Flint scoffs, but doesn't move.

Alex raises his hand immediately, "I say we should."

"So do I," Gregory says, raising his own hand.

"Fine," Flint says, and turns around and stomps up the stairs.

Michael winces as the slamming of his bedroom door echoes loudly downstairs.

Alex and Gregory just look at each other.

"You make the call, I'll make the coffee," Gregory says, and turns around, heading towards the dining room and to the kitchen.

Alex just sighs and turns around and makes direct eye contact with Michael.

Michael feels very much like someone just punched him in the stomach and forced all of the air out of his lungs.

Michael had seen pictures of the three brothers to be able to tell who each one was and who had what power, but pictures really didn't do Alex Manes justice.

There was something magnetizing in his kohl lined gaze, and even though he was looking at Michael with suspicion, his gaze was so intense that Michael didn’t think he could look away, even if he wanted to.

Alex takes several steps forward which snaps Michael’s attention away from his face and down the rest of his body. The way his shoulders stretch out the thin fabric of his black t-shirt, and how thick his biceps look and down to how his black skinny jeans stretch across his thighs, and the flash of pale skin in the strategically placed rips.

Michael feels a stab of attraction low and hot in his belly and he thinks, oh, oh no.

“Can I help you?” Alex asks, sounding hostile, and Michael stares at him for a second longer, at the way he’s moved so that he’s right in the middle of the hall, but close enough to duck into the living room if Michael were inclined to attack.

Michael pulls himself out of the daze he’d fallen in, and lifts a hand and waves, "Hi. I've been trying to get your attention."

Alex gives him an expectant look like he expects Michael to explain why, so Michael does.

“I was fixing the back door for your neighbor, and she mentioned something about your windows, and I figured I might as well take a look since I don’t have any other jobs lined up for the next couple of hours.”

Alex looks him up and down for a second, taking in the toolbelt and the tool box that Michael had set down earlier.

“Which neighbor?” He acts like he’s testing Michael.

“Mrs. Johnson?” Michael responds, more like a question

Alex deflates at the answer, face losing all of it’s tension as he steps even closer, sending Michael a small, sheepish smile that almost sends Michael into a daze.

“Karen needs to mind her own business,” he says, sounding amused. “But since she has been dropping by with food and hints about knowing someone that would help, I’m not surprised she got tired of being ‘subtle’ and actually sent someone over.”

He does finger quotes around the word subtle, and Michael thinks that he maybe falls in love with him a little.

Michael shakes his head, and looks away from Alex. He hopes that this attraction thing is short lived, since he has a job to do, but a small part of him already knows that it’s not going to be as easy as that.

The only thing that he’s pinning his hopes on right now is that Alex is not interested and straight.

“Yeah,” Michael says weakly. “I heard the last bit of your conversation there, and I can give you an estimate right now if you want?”

He looks back to Alex, who looks up and then turns to look behind himself, the move making his shirt lift up, and showing off the rainbow studded belt he’s wearing.

Michael’s heart jumps in his chest, and he tells himself that that belt could mean anything, but that combined with the eyeliner and the cuffs around his ears are a blatant sign in a language that Michael is fully fluent in.

“That would be great,” he says turning back to face Michael, and the small smile on his face gets a little wider as he realizes that Michael had been staring at his belt.

Michael looks away from him then, and he leans down and reaches for his tool box, telling himself firmly that he has a job to do, that that’s all this is, a job, and that there are rules against this sort of thing. Rules that clearly state that relationships between witches and White Lighters are strictly prohibited.

He walks into the house, and signals to the door, “Should I add the door into my estimate as well?”

Alex looks over to the door, and makes a face, probably at the mess that’s on the welcome mat.

“Yes,” he says looking back at Michael, and then he takes a step closer, so that he’s within reaching distance.

“I’m Alex, by the way,” he says as he puts out one hand.

Michael swallows hard, but he reaches out with his free hand.

“Michael,” he says just as their hands make contact.

Alex inhales sharply, eyes falling shut as his hand squeezes Michael’s hand lightly.

Michael can feel the wave of magic that pours out of him momentarily, and he already knows that Alex is the one who can see the future, which means that he probably just got a premonition.

Michael needs to act like this isn’t something that he would know about, but before he can make an appropriately worried face, Alex is opening his eyes.

He licks his lips and looks at Michael with too wide eyes, pupils blown wide, and his eyes drop down to Michael’s mouth, and then even lower, before he looks back up to Michael’s eyes.

“It’s going to be so nice knowing you,” Alex says, in a low and breathy voice.

Michael’s eyes go wide and he feels heat flooding his cheeks as Alex’s voice hits him right in the middle of his stomach.

Fuck, he thinks. He is utterly fucked.

He wonders what the hell that could mean, what kind of premonition Alex had that would make him say that, but then Alex’s face goes a little panicked as he realizes what he just said, and he lets go of Michael’s hand, taking a step back and clearing his throat.

“I mean, nice to meet you,” he tells him in a completely unconvincing tone. “Let me show you the windows.”

He turns then and walks into the living room, and Michael watches him go, still feeling a little warm.

Oh no, he thinks again, and follows after Alex.

[gimme-my-mammoney]

aaah im so happy to have found you! i don’t know why, but im having trouble finding people who write much obey me content... anyway, i was wondering if i could request the brothers’ reactions to mc adopting a kitten! and like, she’s keeping it a secret because she doesn’t want lucifer to find out but it’s super obvious she’s hiding something because she’s always in her room and won’t let anyone in, or asking where to buy pet food, and cat toys keep falling out of her bags thank you!

Hey! I’m so glad you like what I’m putting out! As for the Obey Me! content, my best advice is to look at the tags at the bottom of the post and search through them. A few accounts I follow who produce or reblog stuff consistently are; @leviathanru, @gamelovers-posts , @obeymeimaginesandasks (their incorrect quotes are GOLDEN), and @thehouseoflamentation . They’re all worth checking out or giving a follow to! xo 

- I also apologise for the slower upload schedule. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a freelancer who is trying to claim any work I possibly can during this pandemic and it’s proving a struggle. I’ll try my best to keep up with people’s requests (which will take priority over my own ideas for the minute) but I can’t give a timeframe. I also have a pretty big backlog of requests to get through, so please bear with me. I’m keeping my asks and requests open, though, so feel free to keep sending them in if you don’t mind the wait! -

You’d found a stray kitten eating out of a dumpster behind Hell’s Kitchen and took it some leftovers. All it took was his happy little purr for you to stuff him under your coat, risk Lucifer’s wrath, and take him back to the House of Lamentation. It had been a week since you’ d rescued the kitty and he’d adapted to living in your room quite well. You’d managed to sneak in bits of food and a few toys you’d ordered from Akuzon but you were worried the boys were getting suspicious. 

Lucifer ~

Knew the first night you brought it home but didn’t want to have to make you get rid of it in case you cried (feelings scare him). 

Found out he could have fun with it when you dropped a cat tease in front of him and pretended it was yours. He got a good laugh out of making you roll on the floor pretending you enjoyed it. 

Secretly laughed in his room after he’d inspected yours, heard a meow, and watched you pretend it was your singing. 

Secretly drops food off into your room when you’re not there so that the cat isn’t hungry. 

Extra vigilant with his brothers though; he doesn’t want a repeat of Leviathan’s sea monster incident. 

Mammon ~

Helped you smuggle it into the house.

Tried to convince you to name it Mammon. 

Used some of his modelling money to get the kitty a blinged-out collar. 

Enjoys the fact that this makes you sort of a rebel. 

Got clawed for trying to touch the kitties tail and has to pretend he isn’t scared of it ever since.

If you’re ever caught by Lucifer, he’s blaming the whole thing on you. 

Leviathan ~

You had to tell him about the kitty after he saw you drop a cat toy in front of Lucifer. You covered it up by claiming it was a weapon from a new anime and he knew you were lying. Even a normie like you isn’t that stupid. 

Promises to keep your secret because he has a thing for adopting stray animals too. 

Wants to call it Henry 3.0 and wails when you refuse. 

You often find that he’s taken the kitty up to his room. He enjoys having it curled up on his lap while he plays video games.

Worried it’ll eat Henry 2.0.

Satan ~

Went in your room to borrow a book and heard the meowing.

OH. MY. GOD. KITTY.

Loves the kitty more than his own brothers. 

Would die for the kitty. 

Has 3,000,000 books on cat care.

Your ultimate ally in keeping the kitty a secret. Smuggles in anything you need and would destroy any of his brothers if they snitched to Lucifer. 

The kitty adores him because he’s quiet and attentive. They regularly snuggle together. You once caught him reading to it.

Asmodeus ~

Saw you buy a collar and assumed it was for something kinky else.

You only told him so he’d stop being a creep too interested.

Thinks the kitty is the second cutest thing he’s ever seen. His reflection is the first. 

Gets little outfits to dress it in and then cries when the kitty dares cut his perfect skin. 

Made the kitty a devilgram and you had to force him to take it down. 

Beelzebub ~

Smelled the leftover food you were sneaking into your room and assumed you were having a secret picnic. 

More of a dog person but thinks the kitty is adorable too. 

Surprisingly gentle with the kitty. You were worried at first because he’s so big and the kitty is so small, but he’s very delicate. 

Sneaks food for the kitty and actually shares it. 

You made him promise he won’t eat it. 

Belphegor ~

Found cat hairs on your bed when he was stealing your blanket to make the ultimate nap fort.

You found both him and kitty asleep on your bed when you came back. 

Lets the kitty sleep on his pillow even though he ordered it a luxury cat bed from Akuzon. 

Finds it super relaxing to stroke kitty’s fur. 

They become the ultimate nap buddies and constantly sleep on your bed. 

[emersonfreepress]

New Year's Eve 2000 @ the Emersons'

"Is he here? Have you seen him?!"

The laughter in Heidi's clique fades abruptly and the queen herself scowls at her brother for his interruption.

"Seen who?" Jessie asks in such a sweet tone Heidi's forced to wipe that sneer off her face. Good ol' Jess. Curt can always count on her to diffuse the H-bomb before it even gets going.

"Gabe." Curt does another cursory glance around the room and still doesn't see him. Then he checks his watch and groans. "It's like five minutes to midnight, where the hell is he??"

"I'm pretty sure he isn't coming," Madison says. She crosses her legs and looks up for a second in contemplation. "Is he even in town still?"

"What do you need him for?" Brooke whines with a pout and a subtle toss of blonde hair. "Come sit with us, the countdown's starting soon."

"Brooke," Curt starts. "You're beautiful."

Brooke quits pouting and preens under the unexpected compliment, batting her lashes with a small smile. "Curtis..."

"But I see you all the time."

She deflates just as quickly.

"Cortés said he would be here, he wouldn't just..."

The girls all stare at him. Madison fails to hold back a laugh.

"Oh." Madison covers her mouth slightly. "Sorry."

"He wouldn't just lie to you?" Heidi asks, voice dripping with sarcasm. Her eyes add, 'Are you stupid?'

Curt just groans again and walks away. He can't explain himself to them. Jessie might know what he's talking about but he's only got four minutes left to find Gabe and he's already got his answer: they haven't seen him.

Is it possible he really didn't show? Curt doesn't know how to feel about that. He's not an idiot, that was sort of what he expected. Gabe has skipped the holidays in Emerson for two years straight and it was pure dumb luck that Curt even spotted him at all downtown last weekend. He didn’t seem all that different, busy as ever somehow, but he'd at least had enough time for Curt to invite him to his parents' New Year's Eve bash and to give a polite yes.

Curt sighs. Maybe that was the sign. The politeness. Since when has Gabe ever been polite to him?

It's only ever hostile neutrality or whining with that guy...

Three minutes.

Curt is being stopped by a former classmate/future nobody or some family acquaintance every few seconds now. Even if Gabe is here, there's no way he's going to find him before the clock strikes twelve. Sighing forlornly, he decides to make his way back to Heidi and her friends. At least Brooke is reliable for a kiss.

- - -

"Oh!" Jessie beams and jumps up from her seat. "There you are!"

Gabe gives her half a genuine smile before settling into a more careful one for Heidi and the Madisons—um, Brooke and Madison. He should probably stop thinking of them like that.

"Hey, Jess." The two hug and Gabe shuts his eyes for a quick second as he gives her an affectionate squeeze. They part and he greets the other girls. Heidi shoots him a nod of acknowledgment and a raised glass while Madison gives him a short wave. And Brooke... crosses her arms and ignores him.

Okay...

"Curt's been looking for you," Heidi says, holding an empty champagne flute out to him before standing to grab their table's bottle of Dom. "Apparently you promised him you'd come."

"Ah, yeah. I wouldn't call it a promise, though. " Gabe almost passes on the champagne but Jessie's bright smile leads him to accept the glass and the alcohol that follows. "More like..."

"Placating a child?" Heidi asks, amused.

Both Gabe and Madison laugh at that.

"Sure, that."

"One minute, everyone!" someone shouts.

"Here we go..." Madison gets to her feet, nearly reaching Gabe's height in her heels.

Brooke jumps up, perplexed. "What, already? Who the heck am I supposed to kiss??"

"Aw, I'll give you a kiss, Bee."

Brooke's arms uncross just to rest on her hips alongside another pout. "That won't count, Mads."

Madison just laughs in response and teases Brooke some more. Meanwhile, the remaining empty hands around the room quickly fill with glasses while more and more people begin joining the countdown. Heidi makes sure their group's glasses are filled before swapping the bottle in her hand for a tumbler of whiskey and downing it. Gabe also notices her shoes are off and to the side—someone's had a long night.

Jessie lightly nudges him in the side with her elbow, breaking him from his observations.

"So are you leaving tomorrow, after all?" The soft smile on her face is hopeful so Gabe sighs, regretful to disappoint her.

"Yeah." He rubs the back of his neck. "I just... This town is..."

"'Stifling?'" They both wince a little, Jess in her attempt to keep a smile on despite her disappointment and Gabe at hearing his exact word quoted back at him.

"Right. It's not the people—"

Jess giggles and pats him on the arm. "Oh come on, Gabe. It's the people."

He rolls his eyes with a light laugh. "Okay, yeah. Even just being here right now..."

Jessie sighs. "Yeah, I know. It's always weird coming back just after a few months out of state. I can't imagine after two years."

Gabe nods, the thin glass stem in his hand suddenly feeling a little too brittle for how tense he is. How tense this environment makes him. He shrugs, though.

"Well, I'm glad I got to see you, at least."

"Ten seconds! Ten! Nine!"

Jessie hits him with the full brightness of her smile and one of her tiny bounces of joy.

"Yeah! Me, too."

- - -

Just as the entire party begins counting down from ten, Curt finally gains sight of his sister and her friends again. Brooke catches sight of him too and smiles, knowing exactly why he's returned. He smiles back at her for a second before he falters when he sees...

Ha! I knew he meant it!

He's never wrong about these things. Curt smirks hard and licks his lips, unable to keep from internally gloating. Gabe showing up at all is a victory in and of itself.

"Eight! Seven!"

Oh, wait. No, it's not. Curt speeds up his approach.

"Six! FIVE!"

It's only really a victory if he reaches him at midnight!

- - -

"I have a good feeling about 2001!" Gabe rolls his eyes, cynical as always, but Jessie cheerfully insists. "Just watch, this year is going to be perfect and—oh! Three! Two!"

Gabe refrains from counting but turns with everyone else to face the giant screen displaying the Times Square Ball Drop.

“ONE! Happy New Year!”

The room they’re in, and the rest of the house, erupts in raucous cheers, shouts, and champagne glasses chiming. Jessie nearly crushes Gabe with a giant hug as she shouts “Happy New Year!” and that manages to pull a real smile from him, even as they almost spill both of their drinks. They both laugh and clink glasses instead.

“Happy New Year, Jess.” He turns to the other girls, who are just toasting each other. “Happy New Year, Heidi. Madison.”

Heidi wears a polite smile and nods as she raises her glass to him and Madison enthusiastically clinks her glass against his with a breathless “Happy New Year!”

Gabe turns to Brooke, who’s turned away from him and is fluffing her hair. Should he bother? Eh... might as well. “Happy New Year, Br—”

- - -

Curt is vaguely aware of Brooke leaning into him as he walks up to Gabe, but his tunnel vision forces him to sidestep her with a smile. Everything’s fallen into place: it’s a bangin’ party, it’s midnight, Auld Lang Syne’s just started, and the belle of the ball has finally arrived. He doesn’t wait for the boy to finish whatever he was saying and just goes for it.

Gabe’s eyes widen just a bit before Curt plants a kiss fully on his mouth, placing one hand lightly at his lower back for support as he leans into him. Gabe lets out a stuttered breath and clasps at the lapels of Curt’s suit jacket to keep upright. That brings a cocky grin to Curt’s lips and he raises his other hand to brush his thumb along the bottom of Gabe’s jaw, just as lightly.

"Mm." Curt darts his tongue out to savor his old classmate for just a moment longer before finally drawing back. With a boyish smile and a slight bite to his own lip he says, "Happy New Year, Cortés."

Madison makes a strangled noise somewhere between a gasp and a shriek.

“God—DAMN it! I told you I needed my camera, Jessie!” The girl darts away in a flash of jet black hair and spilled champagne, presumably to go find it. Brooke has gone pale. Heidi rolls her eyes and takes a sip of her champagne.

Gabe is frozen, gobsmacked. After he starts to feel others’ eyes on them, though, his expression finally breaks into one of angered incredulity and he shoves Curt away from him.

"What is your fucking problem, Emerson?!" He wipes his mouth on his sleeve as his face breaks into a subtle yet violent blush. "Is—" Gabe’s expression clouds, the brief panic that was there gone in an instant. "Is that why you invited me?!"

Curt frowns, confused.

"Of course! I said I couldn’t wait to kiss you at midnight!”

Brooke, completely forgotten, makes an indignant sort of squawking sound.

Gabe's hands curl into fists and the look he throws him is venomous. "Curt."

“And I’ve said kissing you's on my bucket list?” Curt blinks, lost. “Like, a thousand times at this point, Gabe."

Gabe’s fists curl tighter and Jessie steps between them, her glass waved between the boys like a penalty flag and a deceptively natural smile plastered on.

“Oookay! Curt, I think you just startled Gabe. I’m positive he didn’t think you were being serious, right?”

“No, I fucking didn’t,” Gabe growls.

Curt has the gall to look even more confused.

“For six years?”

Gabe shuts his eyes, his anger in danger of rising faster than he’s able to suppress it.

“Jesus, Curt. Just apologize.” Heidi looks more annoyed than anything else. But at least Curt finally catches on to the huge party foul he’s committed.

“Sorry! Sorry, man. I thought you knew what I meant.” Curt is, for whatever it’s worth, blushing now, seeming actually embarrassed for once. When Gabe doesn’t reply, he raises his hands in a placating manner, then brings them together at his chin with a truly pleading look in his eyes. “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. I’d take it back if I could, don’t be mad!”

Gabe rubs a hand over his face and lets out a long, hard sigh. Then his other hand rakes through his hair briefly as he looks away from the blond idiot.

“Fine. Fine.”

Curt sighs in relief.

Then, because it’s very important to him, he asks, “It was good, though, right?“

Heidi barks a laugh, flopping back down into her seat. Jessie winces and pleads, “Curt, no...” Brooke, of course, seethes and plops into her own chair, quietly downing the contents of her flute.

And even though the anger has dissipated, Gabe’s annoyance surges to new heights. But before he can even voice his disdain, Curt’s looking around the immediate area as if something’s just dawned on him.

“Oh, wait a minute.” Curt huffs, dissatisfied. “I’m the only one without champagne!”

[albatris]

ok ok alriiiight ok so the plot of ATDAO

this post is not, like........... well, it’s not gonna be a blurb or a summary or a nice neat synopsis, this is not Professional Writeblr Business, this is, this is, uhhhh

this is like drunk house party logan rambles

works best if you imagine ur just like “hey man how’s it going” super casual and I grasp you firmly by the shoulders and look you dead in the eye and just ramble all of this without taking a single breath

could I have explained in a nice neat concise "elevator pitch" sort of way? probably. mind ur business. that’s not how we do things here at albatris.org

anyway the purpose of this post is “hey people seem to know a lot about the characters and the worldbuilding and the premise but have no clue what happens in the actual story” so I’m not going to be talking about said characters and worldbuilding and premise in depth

in terms of rambles, that stuff’s been covered! this post assumes you know what Ports are, n what the nature of the ATDAO apocalypse is, vaguely what the MCs are like as people......... though I can fetch this info for you if you like

but yeah if you are coming into this post with zero prior ATDAO knowledge........... deeply deeply from the bottom of my heart: sorry

also if this is your first time experiencing One Of These Rambles

also @safe-in-the-steep-cliffs​ and @siarven​ I am tagging you because you said you would like to be tagged and also hi and also I hope y’all knew what you were in for

anyway without further ado

(visual representation of my approach to this rant, not of how complicated my plot actually is)

(my plot is not that complicated)

ALRIGHT

there are two viewpoint characters! and two plotlines which converge near the end of the story, but honestly there’s a very real possibility I will decide these are two separate books meant as companion stories to each other because I love making things difficult for myself yeehaw

ATDAO’s co-protags are Tris and Noa, best buds four years and counting. their friendship is one of the single most important aspects of the story, n the ongoing love and trust they have for each other despite the way unfolding events force their relationship to change is integral to the themes and making the heart of the story what it is. I will now proceed to not mention this friendship for the entire remainder of this post. they’re bros. that’s all u need to know. listen. listen. I have a lot to cover

so yeah, ur first key player is Tris Greer, whose parents are dicks but whose siblings are chill. most notably of said siblings there is Jacob, older brother by thirteen years, whom Tris believes is just about the coolest person on the entire planet. this plotline kicks off when Jacob gets caught in the midst of a freak car accident that kills a dude and wrecks a street corner and also somehow causes Jacob to just kind of................. blip out of existence entirely and without a trace?

n Tris is understandably horrified and distressed by Very Much All Of This, but hey, at least there are responsible adults who can look into this obviously Port-related weird disappearance and figure this mess out, right?

INCORRECT

the relevant interdimensional authorities are brought in to suss out the situation and these authorities are kind of like “hmmmm idk about this” but are all set to take Tris at least somewhat seriously until they learn the following:

that Jacob had already been reported missing to police in his home state three days earlier

that Jacob was in the midst of several ongoing personal crises and at least one nervous breakdown

that Jacob was allegedly tangled up in some real weird shit that would more than account for a disappearance under suspicious circumstances

that Tris is schizophrenic, prone to hallucinations, confusion, memory issues and quote unquote “letting his imagination and anxiety get the better of him”, and precisely zero people can actually corroborate his story that Jacob was even there are the time of the accident to begin with

and after some back-and-forth and Looking Into The Evidence pretty much everyone in any position of authority comes to the conclusion that this is just Ordinary Regular People Crimes and whatever happened to Jacob had nothing to do with weird apocalyptic energies, and that Tris is (at best) stressed out and delusional or (at worst) lying through his teeth because he knows more than he’s letting on

so Tris is forced to hop pretty quick from “I’m sure someone will handle this” to “no one believes me but I’m sure if I can find some concrete proof they’ll listen and someone will handle it” to Well Fuck I Guess That Someone Is Me

cue bizarre reality-hopping fantasy quest, which is ten times easier said than done when most of the time Tris is terrified enough just, like, going to the supermarket

he enlists the help of his new classmate Shara, amateur paranormal investigator and professional weird-bullshit enthusiast, who agrees to help him puzzle out what the fuck happened to Jacob in exchange for his assistance in mapping out Adelaide’s interdimensional “fault lines” as part of her ongoing quest to track down the source of the apocalypse

she’s got big fuckin dreams, ok, go hard or go home

slso worth noting at this point that there HAS been an uptick in Ports and their related reality-bending strangeness in Adelaide recently which is why this is of particular interest to her currently. gotta find out What Makes The Weirdness Tick, gotta find out Why The Sudden Extra Weirdness

..........and also Kai is there

Kai has no nice neat reason to get involved with the plot, Kai just likes drama and being all up in people’s personal business. Tris brings them on board for one single afternoon like “hey I will pay you some money to come to my house and fix my fucked up phone so I can listen to an interdimensional voicemail” but forgot the apparently key addendum “and then leave”

their first three chapters of knowing each other is basically Tris being like “stop inviting yourself into my house we are not friends” and Kai being like “that’s a rude thing to say to your friend. also your sister gave me the netflix password and I used your kitchen to bake pastries feel free to help yourself”

but yeah so Tris’s story mostly focuses on his quest to figure out where Jacob got yeeted to and how to get him safely home (y’all probably know a bit about The Unreality already maybe?), whilst also dealing with rising family tensions, whatever shifty stuff Jacob was involved with prior to his disappearance, and his own creeping doubts about his perceptions of reality

n I’m also saying flat out it’s not a plot that’s going the “oh the whole thing was just a delusion all along” route because ew

his psychosis is a fairly involved part of his character but the explorations around it are more to do with, like......... the difficulties he has in trusting himself and whether he has the luxury of letting himself get swept into some Big Weird Implausible Adventure when this has extremely different implications for him than it would someone else. n eventually to how his success and survival is not ~in spite of~ but specifically because of the different way he understands and interprets the world and the skills he’s developed

THAT TANGENT WAS A PERSONAL RANT IT WAS NOT RELEVANT I just have words to say on the subject of how psychosis is treated in fiction and didn’t want people jumping to the “none of it is real” conclusion anyway ok moving on

ur SECOND key player is Noa Yun, who has rather a lot on her plate right now. she’s broke as fuck and her mum is sick and her car is making Noises and she’s not getting enough hours at her job at Not-IKEA and everyone is on her back about her failing studies as if that’s a thing she has the energy to care about. feeling rather backed into a corner by life’s bullshit and her financial situation, she blatantly lies her way into a field job at the Department of Interdimensional Instabilities, because A) surely it can’t be THAT bad, and B) what does she have to lose?

so more or less what she’s doing is the equivalent of emergency services for Port-related weirdness, it’s going out and dealing with highly unstable otherworldly energies head on, navigating Weird Phenomena and bendy patches in reality......... it is, among other things, a job that’s relatively easy to get into because no one wants to touch it with a ten foot pole unless they absolutely have to

n the DII is a whole other post, this shit has lots of different functions and levels and branches and corruption and secrets and a tendency to view workers who have to go out and deal with the brunt of the apocalypse head-on as vaguely expendable and I’ve talked about it a bit before and in more Serious Words

things kinda kick off for her when in true Noa fashion she hurls herself into a dangerous situation to help out a coworker, n enters a pretty standard issue “overlap” where the barriers between universes are a little fucky, but hey, she seems to come out of it with nary a scratch, so it’s reasonable to assume everything is fine, right?

INCORRECT AGAIN

she basically gets some whacked-out otherworldly energies latched onto her that are now following her through her everyday life, and it turns out she’s starting to bend the reality around her the way certain types of Ports do, which is! obviously not ideal! she’s not exactly a Port herself, because she’s pretty sure that’s impossible, but it’s clear capital s Something happened to her in that overlap, and she doubts it’s good news. and to make matters even more disconcerting, she’s now being dogged at every step by strange visions of a child who speaks in an unfamiliar language and who seems Real Fuckin Pissed at her

so her thing is basically “I acquired fucked up reality-bending powers against my will and they might be lowkey killing me ‘cause Ports are notoriously unstable like that and also I’m haunted for some godforsaken reason” which all somehow ended up being, like, the least interesting part of her plotline for me lmao

oh and Noa also enlists the help of Shara, Because Ghosts

anyway yeah so her search to find out what’s happening to her re: Weird Children, being a Port-adjacent something-or-other, and whether there’s a way to stop her own unravelling leads her to (rogue computer programmer? mad scientist? general shifty bastard?) Laurence Marrick Thiele, who claims to have suffered a similar affliction in the past and now does some real interesting research on the subject. n this guy. well. he’s got some fuckin stuff going on

he definitely knows more about the nature of Ports than he should. also is he actually researching what he says he’s researching? also what’s with all the weird tech? also did he just straight up murder that guy Avery? all will be revealed later, maybe, if I feel like it

but yeah at about the same time as Noa goes “actually fuck this you’re shady as hell I’m out” she stumbles into, like, The Actual Reality of what Marrick is up to re: manipulating Ports and interdimensional doorways for his own gain, and the various ways this spells bad news not only for her but potentially for the entire city and anyone unfortunate enough to get caught in the crossfire, and she shifts gear to “actually you know what I’m gonna kick your ass”

there are various reasons for this, but first and foremosterly you have to understand that Noa’s got a fuckload of pent-up rage and she will bring it in full force the moment you say some stupid shit like “some people are expendable” or “it’s inevitable for the greater good”

(there’s also a fun ongoing subplot with her work at the DII where she and her team are investigating a string of strange illnesses with bizarre symptoms that appear to be spreading via obscure radio stations so that’s. happening. I guess?)

but yeah the main story here mostly follows Noa’s attempts to undermine Marrick, bastard supreme, and find a way to fuck him up before he goes, like, Full Cartoon Supervillain, n also like........... her attempts to keep up her work at the DII despite her rising paranoia that the teammates she’s growing to care about will notice her increasingly unstable state and the fact that she’s all tangled up with the very forces they’re meant to be thwarting. n along the way discovering the reality of what happened to her in The Aforementioned Overlap Incident and about her visions and such

so that’s all that. did that make sense

n she’s got a whole arc going on about trust and learning to lean on others, like, she comes into this story as a very standoffish person with lots of paranoia, she’s spent much of her life feeling like she can only rely on herself, n she’s. well. yeah, like I said, she’s got a lot of anger at the world and at the various systems that have failed her and her loved ones, n the story puts her in a position to become even more isolated

and her plotline isn’t so much “you have no reason to be angry or afraid” or her learning to Not Be, It’s more, like........... yeah you have every fucking right to be furious and of course you’re afraid! but there are people around you who love you and who will jump at the chance to defend you and who will help you carry the weight of your anger and grief and none of this needs to be yours to bear alone which is extremely cheesy

which applies to both her Weird Supernatural Goings-On as well as her regular ordinary life goings-on

I feel like Alice and Jet deserve a mention for Noa’s plotline but also this went on and on too long already so. well. Alice and Jet exist! yep. they work with Noa at the DII. I have things to say about them. I will not be saying them today

and uhhhhhh

in general, for Tris, his plotline, you wanna think, like, fantasy/adventure vibes which veer pretty sharply into horror, and for Noa you wanna think...... kinda, sci-fi mystery conspiracy vibes with a dash of some superhero bullshit maybe except not really

and that

pretty much is it I think

also the fact that Kai just invites themself into the plot for funsies and then is dragged kicking and screaming into caring about themself and making positive changes in their life means there was no convenient place in this post to be like

"oh there's also a whole major subplot about a time loop"

but there's also a whole major subplot about a time loop

goodnight! thanks for coming to....................... whatever this was! have a nice saturday everyone

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Touch

CW: Consensual spice (PG-13 at most, totally safe for work), trauma response, PTSD panic attack, meltdown, internalized victim-blaming, internalized ableism, head banging, negative stimming leading to self-injury (there is also positive stim in this piece), references to past conditioning, references to past noncon. This is a heavy one. Stay safe.

TIMELINE: Post-Chris moving into college, after Oliver Branch’s trial. Happens during Chris’s freshman year at college. He is 22.

Tagging Chris’s crew:  @burtlederp , @finder-of-rings , @endless-whump , @whumpfigure , @stxckfxck , @slaintetowhump, @astrobly, @newandfiguringitout, @doveotions

It begins, and ends, with touch.

It’s not that Chris is afraid of any of it - he likes the way Marissa hugs him when they meet up or they split to go their separate ways or just whenever the urge to hug strikes her. He likes the sensation of warm arms around him that never come with an ulterior motive. He likes the way it feels when he and Dylan curl up on Dylan’s bed to watch TV, the two of them shoulder-to-shoulder with touch all the way down their legs, perfectly normal, like he’s always been a part of the world where these things happen without the prickle of fear or shame underneath them.

But the way Laken hugs him… feels different, and Laken is always hugging him or putting an arm around his waist or nuzzling playfully against his face. There’s always touch and he loves it, the simple reassuring weight of a hand on his back by his shoulder blades comes now with an electricity that sparks like static between them, but it doesn’t fade when they leave. He feels their touch for hours after, thinks of them in his sleep, stares at the bottle of cheap shampoo in the shower he shares with Dylan and the boys who live on the other side of the bathroom and wonders if Laken likes the way his shampoo smells or not.

Laken is like a lightning bolt wrapped in black in Chris’s life, there and gone in half-seconds of time, a flash of a smile in a warm brown face. The brush of roughly textured black hair that falls in curls long along the top and back when they lean over to point out something in the textbook they’re studying from, and Chris feels the place their hair touched him for hours afterward, like a lingering kiss, like a burn. 

Laken laughs and tells him to find out for himself when he asks what hair that short feels like. Chis’s nerves spark when he runs his palms over the short buzz cut sides and he can’t explain why his mouth feels dry and his heart beats rabbit-fast inside his chest.

He feels like an idiot whenever he speaks, his words stumble and trip over each other out of his mouth, but Laken doesn’t seem to mind. Like Jake, they don’t interrupt him, they let him find his way to the end of the sentence no matter how long it takes. Like, Jake, their smile doesn’t falter when they watch him fiddle with the feather he is always wearing, with the bracelet, or if he taps on himself or the wall or the bed.

But they’re not like Jake at all, are they?

They ask, once, what he’s doing when he taps. He uses the words that Nat gave him when he was scared, the name for what he does. Words are a kind of power, in many ways, Nat had explained gently. That’s why the company gives you so many things they force you to remember while they make you forget the rest. Language creates thought. 

Chris had been caught tapping the wall. He’d been terrified and held his hands out for discipline and Nat had folded his fingers back up over his palm, one by one, held them briefly in her warm, firm grip before giving his hands back to him. The glimmer in her eyes caught his, and held it. You were forced to forget the words, and give up the power, but you can have it back, sweetheart. There’s a word for what you do, and a reason you do it, and you deserve your hands, you deserve the mind that moves them. You deserve to move, Chris.

He tells Laken the name for it, the words that Nat gave him - I’m, it’s called, um, stimming, it means self-soothing stimulatory be, be, behavior and it helps, helps me calm down and and and and focus, Ben, um, Ben knows, Ben’s little brother does it, you should, should should should ask Ben, should ask him- and understands what Nat meant about power, then. Because Laken just nods, says cool in their deep husky voice, and Chris feels a kind of rush inside himself greater than any he’s ever felt. 

Laken Mamani is beautiful, and handsome, and everything in between, and Chris doesn’t know why he feels like a fucking idiot whenever he’s around them but he thinks Dylan does. His roommate gives him a weird, knowing smile whenever he sees them together. Makes jokes about things that make Chris turn bright red and hide under his pillow. 

Everyone knows that Chris didn’t grow up the way they did - he doesn’t tell them that maybe he did, he just doesn’t remember it. Everyone thinks he grew up in a sheltered religious family. Laken suggests maybe he grew up in a cult.

Chris doesn’t argue. The lie is easier to believe than telling them the truth ever could be, and much, much safer. 

He and Laken don’t do anything special. Just hang out in Laken’s room mostly since their roommate goes out every single night and sees her boyfriend on the weekends. They just watch movies Chris hasn’t seen that everyone else is always quoting, they just sit on Laken’s bed and sometimes Laken has to reach over Chris to grab at their drink or their bag of chips and Chris feels his breath catch and thinks, maybe they’ll stay there and it feels like something he wants and something he doesn’t, both at once.

Tonight, there’s something even more electric between them than there ever has been before. Laken keeps glancing over, and every look seems weighted with meaning Chris doesn’t understand and couldn’t begin to explain to himself. 

The movie isn’t any different than the movies always are. They have their Chemistry book open between them - they share two different classes together - but neither of them is looking at it, not even a little. 

Everything is normal, but something is different.

Chris is sitting back against the wall, with one of Laken’s pillows - the thick one with those little arms - against his back, his eyes on the tiny TV but he has no idea what they’re watching, some Netflix show that Laken put on. He doesn’t think Laken is paying attention, either. 

Laken has their phone out, fiddling with it idly, and they look at Chris sidelong and then back down before they put it down, leaning forward to catch his eyes. “Hey, Chris. Can I ask you something?”

Chris looks over, and Laken is closer than he thought. He licks at his lips - they feel suddenly chapped and dry - and slowly nods. “Um, yeah, sure, sure you, you, you-you can,” He said, softly. He already had one hand grasping onto his feather idly, and hopes it looks perfectly natural when his thumb moves to rub over the textured silicone. Not nervous at all, just absolutely one-hundred-percent normal. 

“So… look, I figure it’s better to be super direct about this.” Laken swallows, and Chris realizes they’re nervous, too - and he didn’t know Laken got nervous, really, they’ve never acted the slightest bit nervous around Chris before. 

“Um… okay.” Chris winces as soon as it’s out of his mouth - there has to have been a better, smoother way to respond, but he genuinely can’t think of anything else to say. His mind has gone totally, utterly blank. 

“You’ve-... um, we’ve hung out a lot, the last few weeks,” Laken says, looking away from him and down at their bedspread, running a fingertip over the deep saturated orange-red paisley print there. It had surprised Chris to see their room the first time and realize that Laken - who alway wore black, who only wore black, had everything in their room a million bright colors. 

A lot about Laken surprises Chris. Like unwrapping a gift, only the gift just keeps unwrapping and there’s always a new present to be found.

“Yeah, we, we have.” 

Laken nods a little, as though Chris has asked a question, and then they take a deep breath and straighten their back, leaning over to look a little closer into Chris’s face. They have brown eyes, and this close Chris can see little flecks of green just around their pupil on the inside, a hint around the edges. “Chris, do you like me?”

Chris goes still, for just a second, before he rubs harder at the feather on his necklace and finds a kind of nervous smile, letting his hair fall alongside his face, taking comfort in the brush of sensation along his cheekbone. His heartbeat skips, stutters, stammers along with his voice. He’s on fire with fear and nerves and excitement. “Uh… um, I, I, I-I-I, I… yes. Yes, I, um, I-I like you.”

“Yeah, but… like for real, right? I’ve-... you know, I’ve fucked up noticing this kind of thing before, so I just want to check-”

Chris swallows around a lump in his throat - made of air? of words? of fear? - and nods, quickly, three or four times in succession. He’s going to throw up. He wants to throw up and sink into the floor and maybe drown somewhere else where this won’t have happened. But he wants it to happen.

And he doesn’t.

“Yeah, no, I, I, I do. I like you. Um, a lot, Laken.” 

Laken gives another slow nod while they lick their lips in thought, and Chris’s eyes are caught there, on the full swell of the bottom lip, the flash of pink tongue against it, the slight dip in the middle of the top lip. The trace of a smile always present in one form or another. The way Laken glances up to catch Chris’s eyes on their face and grins at him, warm. He feels it like a spark catching dry grass at the end of summer.

How would he know what that looks like?

“Laken the lightning bolt,” Chris whispers, and doesn’t know he’s spoken out loud until Laken moves and their mouth is on his.

Chris makes a noise like a whine in his throat before he can catch it, pushes back the training that still lingers in his mind even four years later and focuses instead on how Laken’s mouth has the slightest pressure against his, their bottom lip caught just between his two, and the kiss ends too soon and takes so long, both at once.

Laken pulls back, takes a breath, and says, “Holy fuck, you’re a good kisser.”

I got good marks in that-

Chris drowns the voice by reaching out and pulling Laken back to him, hands to either side of their face, his thumbs resting on cheekbones that look like they could cut glass as he kisses Laken again. 

Somehow he’s on his back on Laken’s bed with the soft puffy paisley comforter dipped slightly under his weight and Laken straddling him with their knees on either side. Mouths open, Chris can taste the cherry Coke that Laken is always drinking, thick and syrupy-sweet taste and he chases it with his tongue and Laken meets him with theirs, making a soft sound at the contact that sends a thrill right through Chris’s body, from the hairs on top of his head down to his toes. 

His heart is beating so hard it might break out of him and be visible to Laken and show them everything he’s thinking. His heart is pounding and there’s a thin line between thrill and fear and Chris is standing between the two as he feels Laken’s weight settle over his hips, rolling just a little as they sit back up.

He breathes hard - there’s an ache in his chest, something odd but he doesn’t want to question it or think about why his hands are starting to tremble as he watches Laken sit back. Those deep brown eyes lock on his and Laken gives a half-cocked smile as they pull their T-shirt off over their head, the black fabric bunched around their neck and then gone, tossed to the side onto the floor on the little red shag rug that they brought with them from their home.

Chris has a moment, just a hint of thought, about how much he likes running his fingers over that rug, the shag like fur.

“I hope binders don’t bother you,” Laken says, with a carefree air to their voice but there’s a catch in it, and Chris thinks that Laken is serious, they’re actually worried that whatever a binder is will bother Chris.

“A, a, a-a wh-” 

His eyes seem to come back into focus and he realizes Laken means the thing he’d thought was just a long sports bra or something, what looks like a form-fitting black tank top with thick shoulder straps they were wearing under their t-shirt and he blinks once, twice, three times. 

“Uh… no, it, it, it doesn’t.”

“Good. ‘Cause… it stays on.” Laken gives them a small smile, a hint of vulnerability, and Chris has never seen Laken look like that before. “I’m just more comfortable that way. Is that cool?” Every other moment with them has been Laken’s effortless confidence compared to Chris’s nervous, excited attempts to be half as cool as they are. 

But here it is. Just a little, just a bit - a moment where Laken wonders will he still like me if-

“Yeah… yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s-that’s-that’s cool.” Chris’s voice sounds ridiculous, airy and higher than he means it to sound, but Laken doesn’t seem to notice. They just breathe out a sigh of clear relief and lean back over him again.

Their hands on his face feel dry and warm, soft palms cupping his jaw on either side. His hands settling briefly at their lower back to feel the slight dip there. Then his fingers move up over the fabric of the binder, the curve of waist and ribs, and back down again. 

Chris is strung between Laken’s mouth and their hands, moving down his neck and over him, sliding up under his shirt. He’s on fire and his body is singing at the kind of touch it has been so thoroughly denied after having been so thoroughly taught to need a long time ago.

There’s a point, somewhere between one touch and another, where something inside Chris cracks open. Maybe it’s the motion of a hand over his hip, or the way Laken starts to undo the button on his jeans. Maybe it’s something else entirely. 

One moment, he’s on perfect fire. The next, he’s burning down.

His mind opens like Pandora’s Box, like he read about in class, only Chris isn’t full of things like sickness or death. Instead, with Laken’s hands sliding up his ribcage, Chris feels a terrifying helplessness pouring out of him from behind the dark wall he has built to separate the three lives he has lived in twenty-two years.

He cracks open, and Sir pours out.

Chris is fear and hurt and oil-slick smile and the voice and his pain and his pain and his pain-

The walls inside his mind can’t hold. The weight of it all is too great.

The cracks grow.

The dam breaks. The box opens. A voice whispers like fingertips that graze up the back of his neck, shouts like a hand gripped tight to his hair. A voice he has never forgotten, that he is never allowed to forget, no matter how hard he tries.

Be still, darlin’. This is what you were made for.

He doesn’t want this. He doesn’t have to anymore. He’s not made to do this, he’s not, and he doesn’t want to, and he never wanted to and they made him he never wanted this he never did they made him they made him they made him, rebuilt a boy that didn’t want to, he doesn’t want to do this-

He has spent four years learning to say no. He’s so good at it now. It’s just one word.

You don’t have the option of saying no. Not any longer.

“Chris?” Laken’s voice is low against his ear. Lips brush there and he shudders in disgust, he doesn’t want it to go this far, he doesn’t want it. There’s a vibration in his throat, he might have made a sound. He doesn’t know, he can’t hear it over the static noise beginning to blare inside his head.

I don’t want this.

What you want is irrelevant.

I have never once wanted to do this.

It has never mattered if I did.

What you want is irrelevant, it’s not an option, it doesn’t matter, you were made for this you’re made for this you’re not a person you’re lying they all know you’re lying they know they know they know they know

They know what you are they all know they all know they all know they all-

“Chris!” He jumps at Laken’s voice, his eyes rolling, white around the edges. He thinks they pull back from him but he can barely see, Laken is a blur of black binder and pants and brown skin and black hair.

Some part of him realizes they sound worried, not pleased, at his fear. They sound scared. No one ever sounded scared for him before. Chris’s eyebrows furrow in a vague confusion.

“Hey, are you okay? Oh, shit, are you okay? Hey, Chris, talk to me, you have to talk to me-… look, look at me, please look at me.” Laken pats the side of his face and Chris flinches, hands flying up to guard himself. He whimpers - he can’t remember how to beg not to be hit. 

“Oh my God,” Laken whispers out loud. “Oh, shit. Chris… Chris, what’s wrong?”

When his mouth opens, nothing comes out at first. No sound. No air. How do you breathe? He used to know. It used to just happen - lungs expanding and contracting without his consent, he didn’t have to tell them, they just soaked up oxygen and fed it to his blood. Suddenly he understands that he can’t breathe unless he thinks about breathing and he gasps in air, a whine on the exhale, fear is burning him he is burning he is on fire. 

It’s only after Laken has moved back that Chris looks up to see the open concern for him on their face. It’s only then that he remembers how to speak.

“I… I, I have to, to-… to, to to to go.”

“What? Hold on, no-”

Chris has already pushed them back and away, is already up and out of the bed, pulling his shirt back down. He forgets shoes exist in the moment, he’s running barefoot out into the dorm’s hallway with Laken’s voice at his back, reminding himself consciously inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale exhale inhale exhale inhaleexaleinhaleexhaleinhale-

There are people in the lobby who look up when Chris flies past, a blur of blue hair and bare feet slapping briefly against the tile floor before he hits carpet again. He doesn’t stop to see if he knows them. He doesn’t stop.

His brain breaks apart under the strain and everything crashes together. He can’t ever look at Laken again he can’t do this he doesn’t want to do this with anyone he never wanted to they just made him think he did even when he didn’t he just wanted to be with them but not like that and now everyone knows they know they know

The world is a cacophony of sound around him - music muffled behind dorm room doors and people talking and the crinkle of a bag of chips and someone shrieks, playful and harsh, and the sound grates in Chris’s ears. Back behind him he hears Laken call his name, but he barrels into the door to the stairwell - Chris lives on the fourteenth floor and he’s never seen anyone in the stairwell before and figures he won’t see anyone now

His brain is twisted in two directions - go up or go down, one or the other, he can’t decide, his thoughts go both ways and finally he runs down. His feet drag against rough strips laid to keep shoes from slipping on rainy wet days, the concrete stairs are freezing cold against his toes.

He can’t breathe he can’t breathe he can’t breathe

There’s nowhere to run, trainee. Where would you go? How would you ever find your way out?

There’s no way out.

He collapses somewhere near the tenth floor, maybe. His foot skips a step and the world spins in a sick whirl around him. Chris slams down onto the landing, pain flaring up his arm and shoulder as he lands hard on his right side, crying out. His voice echoes in the stairwell but no one hears him.

The fluorescent lights are flat and eternal in the stairway, and Chris sobs, fingernails scrabbling at the ground just to remember that he’s lying on concrete and not white tiles. His arm hurts, a dull throbbing ache, and he winces as he moves it just to be sure it’s not broken.

The button on his jeans is still undone and he feels his pants shifting oddly on his hips without it fastened as he scrambles into the corner of the landing, curling himself into a tiny ball. 

He’s going to have to drop out. They’ll know and they’ll tell the admissions people and they’ll make him drop out and it doesn’t matter, he can’t look anyone in the eye ever fucking again. He can’t look Laken in the eye. He can’t look at anyone. Ever.

Chris lets out a wail he can’t hear around the noise in his mind and slams his head back against the brick wall, trying to drown out the sound with sensation. It’s not enough so he hits his head again. And again. Again and again and again and again and again-

Oh, like that’s going to help. You’re a fucking piece of work, 223499. 

His fingers are in his hair, gripped tight, pulling on it as hard as he can as he rocks back and forth, trying to stop the thoughts in his head the voice the hands the feeling that he doesn’t want, he’s never wanted, he never wanted this he never ever wanted this-

Oh, darlin’, my beautiful boy, you’ve made such a mess of yourself, haven’t you?

There’s an echoing voice in the stairwell, the sound of steps growing louder, but they seem like maybe they’re just in his head like Sir’s voice like the handler like his whole life is just something he’s lived inside his head and he’s not allowed to have these feelings anymore. 

He’s not a person. Why did he think he could fake being a person? It was a stupid fucking mistake and he needs Jake to hold him and make him remember but Jake isn’t here and he was stupid to think he could go to college, he’s so stupid, he’s so fucking stupid to think he can be anything but what they made him, he’s so fucking stupid to think he gets to want things or not want things, it doesn’t matter what he wants it never mattered it’s never going to matter.

He can feel hair tearing free of his scalp and the pain is clean and the pain is pure and the pain is not the noise inside his mind and the world around him is too much. The brick wall is too red and the light is too white and the sound of footsteps bounces in his skull.

His heart beats too hard inside his chest, he’s a prison inside and out for himself. 

Chris makes a strangled noise in his throat but he can’t make sounds and breathe at the same time.

He’s a wildfire burning down the forest, he’s the skeletons of trees and dead animals scorched and charred. He’s a ruined place where the ruins think they’re still buildings and don’t know any better than to wonder where all the people went.

He’s a dead tree that remembers the birds.

There are sounds nearby but he can’t hear them, there are people but he can’t see them. He can only rock - back and forth and back and forth, letting his head hit the wall behind him, tearing hair out with his hands. 

It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts

“-he is!”

Something trickles into his mind, some hint of sound, and a moment later there’s a face in front of his and Chris flinches back and away from it, letting out a shocked, terrified cry. “N-no, Sir, please!”

It takes whole seconds ticking by for him to realize it’s Dylan.

“Chris?” Dylan’s hair is in his eyes, still wet from a shower, and he’s wearing his pajama pants and no shirt, blinking. “Hey, man, what’s happening? Laken came and got us, they’re freaking out, man, what’s going on with you right now?”

Chris opens his mouth but nothing happens. The words are gone. Were there words? They know, they’ll all know. He can’t tell them. It doesn’t matter, they’ll know, anyway. They’ll know and someone will call the cops but he doesn’t have a barcode to be scanned, anymore, so-

It doesn’t matter. Sir is in jail. They won’t send you back to him, they’ll refurbish you, back to white walls back to white lights back to the pain and the fear and what you were made for-

Chris whines and covers his face with his arms, hands up in his hair, rocking and rocking and rocking to try and rock the thoughts out of his mind.

“He can’t talk right now,” Ben says from behind Dylan. Chris’s eyes dance up to his, peeking between his arms, and Ben looks back at him with a kind of calm on his face that Chris wants to grab and hold onto. “Back up a little, Dill, give him space.”

Dylan shuffles back a few steps but doesn’t stand up, resting his back against the central pillar where the stair railing attaches. “Got it. What the fuck’s happening right now, Ben? He looks like-”

“Yeah, describing what it looks like isn’t going to help it go away, dumbass.” Ben just gives a shrug and then turns, speaking over his shoulder at someone further up the stairs. “Run up and get a blanket, okay?”

A flash of something, black clothes and brown skin. Laken running back up the stairs. Heat flares in Chris’s face as he realizes they saw him rocking, saw him - how much did they see?

I wasn’t still. I should have been still. Just stayed still and let it happen, stayed still and been hurt because it’s what I’m made for, what I’m made for, all I am-

He starts rocking hard back into the wall again, but he sees Dylan flinch, and something in the movement stops him.

“We’re here, Chris,” Dylan says. His voice is gentler than Chris has ever heard it, calm and soft. He sounds like Nat. He sounds like Jake in the middle of the night when Chris calls because it’s storming and he needs someone to tell him a storm is just weather and it doesn’t mean fear anymore. “We’re right here. Take your time, we’re here.”

Ben shifts slightly into Chris’s field of vision more fully. “Chris, I’m going to talk to you right now, and you don’t need to talk back,” He says quietly. “I just want you to hear me, if you can. That is all we need from you right now, just to know if you are hearing me. Can you hear my words?”

Chris shudders and nods, trying to show he’s trying.

“Good. If you can, I need you to stop pulling on your hair. Can you hold your necklace instead, will that help you?”

“What are you doing, Ben?” Dylan asks, glancing up at Ben, whose expression hasn’t changed. “Why are you-”

“Redirection,” Ben interrupts, voice slightly flat.  

Chris closes his eyes, puts all the strength in his body into pulling his fingers out of his hair. Strands of blue with strawberry blond roots drift towards the concrete, settle there. His arms move only with supreme effort but he finds the necklace still right there over his sternum, and he grips onto it with one hand as tightly as he can, rubs his thumb over the texture silicone plastic, a desperate push for texture. He takes a breath and taps his fingers against his leg, tap-tap-tap-tap against his thigh, rapid-fire, as quickly as he can. Lets the soothing rush of each sensation rock through him. 

He stops rocking back into the wall.

“Okay.” Ben swallows, his eyes moving like he’s reading a book inside his mind. “Okay, Chris. I want you to breathe, okay? Just focus on breathing. You don’t need to do anything right now but breathe. Don’t think about trying to speak to us, just take your time. We just want to be here if you need us, okay?”

Chris manages a nod. He can do that. He can breathe.

He can remember how to breathe, and if he can remember how to make his lungs work without having to think about it, he can remember how to speak, too. He drops his eyes back to the ground, rocking a little but he can keep his hands busy with the feather and the tapping and push away everything else, the touches of Laken’s that had lit him up in good ways that were too close to the bad.

There’s silence from the two other boys, for a while. And in their presence - the visible, tangible reminder that his life is not what it used to be and it will never be that life again - Chris can feel his lungs start to work. The automatic reflex of breathing starts back up without his conscious input. His heartbeat starts to slow. He stops rocking.

More steps on the stairs and Chris looks up to see Laken holding their paisley comforter in their hands. Their shirt is back on but it’s backwards and inside out and they don’t seem to notice as they move over, glancing at Ben nervously. “I have a blanket. What now?”

“He’s overstimulated and the lights bother him. I noticed that before. Let’s cover him with the blanket.” Ben takes a corner of the blanket and Dylan takes a third and between them they pull the blanket open and taut and move to hold it over Chris’s head. The darkness descends on him like a comforting physical weight and Chris feels the prickles of the fluorescent lights on his skin suddenly stop.

They just… hold the blanket, there, for a while. 

Chris feels his knees unbend, his legs slowly straightening. His shoulders lower and he looks at the three of them, seeing their legs showing before the darkness of the blanket covers up their top halves from his vision. Laken in their slightly faded black pants, Dylan in his pajamas, Ben still wearing paint-splattered jeans. 

Circling him, but not as predators. 

Close enough to touch, but nobody’s hand is out to grab.

“I…” His voice croaks at first, and he has to stop and clear his throat. How do you speak again? He shakes his head just to feel the brush of blue hair against his cheeks, to see the flash of it in the corner of his eyes. “I’m… better.”

“Are you sure?” It’s Ben, still. “Don’t try to be better if you’re not, you don’t have to do that for us.” Chris doesn’t know Ben that well but right now he wants to hold onto him and not let go. He’s a Jake, Chris realizes. Someone who wants to help people and knows how. 

“Yes,” Chris says, softly. “Laken, I’m, I’m, I’m-I’m sorry, I’m so-so-so, so, so so so-... so sorry.”

“Hey, it’s okay. Shit happens.” The blanket-sky over his head is collapsed as they move to wrap it around his shoulders instead. He sees concern written over their faces, not derision. He expected disgust. He expected loathing. 

Instead, Dylan drops next to him, holds out a hand, pulls back it. “Chris, can I-”

“Please, yes,” Chris whispers, and Dylan leans in to wrap an arm around his shoulders, pulling him into an awkward side-hug, pressing his face into Chris’s hair. Chris leans hard into it, but he keeps himself moving, tapping his leg, rubbing at his feather, lets his legs shift a little. The energy is twisting around inside him, it has to find somewhere to go.

“How did you know all of that would work?” Dylan asks Ben, still holding onto Chris. Laken moves to his other side, watching him with deep brown eyes that don’t see him any different than they did before. 

“My brother.” Ben gives a shrug, casual as can be, but he’s watching Chris with careful consideration, eyes moving over his face, the way his hands are moving. “He was having a m-”

Chris meets Ben’s eyes. Something passes between them in a fraction of a second, and he knows Ben sees the way he is pleading without the words to know what he’s asking for.

“-a panic attack,” Ben finishes. “I’ve seen them before. It’s okay. He’ll be okay. We need to get him back up somewhere, though. Can we get you back to your room, Chris? Are you tired? Do you need sleep?”

Chris swallows and shakes his head. He can’t sit still in his room, not now. He can’t sleep. He’ll see Sir behind his eyes. 

Will he see Sir forever?

Ben nods, lets out a breath, and his eyes move to the side, in thought. Staring at the stair railing. 

“Outside,” Laken says suddenly. “I’ll… we can go for a walk. Down by the lake, it stays quiet over there. Yeah?” They look at Chris, and he wants to say no but he doesn’t want to say no. He wants to tell them why and he doesn’t want to. He can’t reconcile the two tracks, the trains of thought that run parallel in two entirely different directions.

“I’m sorry,” He whispers. “Laken, I, I, I-I’m so sorry-”

“Fuck off, don’t be,” Laken says, and they smile at him. They smile, after everything he just did. “Shit happens, like I said. But would it help to get outside for a while? No pressure, I promise. Absolutely none. We’ll hit up the Student Center, get some coffee, walk over to the lake and around it. Yeah? No talking if you don’t want to.”

“No, I… I, I do want to. I, I do, I want-... I want to.” And… and he does. He does want to. He wants to walk around the lake with Laken, maybe even hold their hand, maybe hug them some more. He likes the hugging. He even liked the kissing. It was, was just-... it was just what came after the kissing that scared him.

“What if he has.. Um… Ben?” Dylan is gnawing on his fingernail, index finger. He does that when he’s nervous, and Chris wonders sometimes what the difference is between nervous habits and what he does, why there are different names for things that are sometimes the same. “What if he freaks out again?”

“He didn’t freak out, Dill. I’ll explain it later and show you what to do next time. Come on, Chris, let’s get you back upstairs so you can get some shoes on.” Ben gives him a smile and an offered hand, and it’s Ben’s hand that Chris takes, curves his fingers around, uses it to pull himself up. 

Laken on one side, Dylan on the other, Ben in front of him. 

“You’re okay, Chris,” Ben says, gently. “You’re okay.”

“We got you, man,” Dylan says, and squeezes him around the shoulders again. “If you need help, we got you.”

“I, I need… I, I need to, to to to call my, my brother,” Chris says, his voice low.

What you want is irrelevant-

“Your phone’s still in my room,” Laken says, and gives him a warm smile, a curve of those lips that were so soft and then so hard and always so perfect against his. “Okay? You can call him right away.”

“I want to talk to Jake,” Chris says, softly.

What would ever make you think anyone cares what you want, beautiful boy?

“Sure. Sure, Chris. Anything you want.”

Every step back up the four flights of stairs that will take him back to his floor is a calming, grounding motion. Foot on concrete, place and balance, step up to the next. One by one by one. And with each step, his friends are on either side of him. They fall into an easy conversation about something someone did last week during a co-op game they played and they don’t ask to explain himself or to justify his actions. They’re just… there.

Dylan keeps an arm around him, and Chris feels himself lean against it, chasing the kind of contact that feels safe and not dangerous. Laken brushes fingers against his hand, just a little, and gives him the softest smile that maybe says they’re still interested.

Ben stays just ahead, but looks back on occasion.

He’s the one Chris worries about. He’s the one with something brewing behind his eyes. He’s the one with the questions that Chris can’t answer, doesn’t want to, would rather choke on the words and die.

Or maybe not. Maybe he’s reading too much into the curiosity that Ben never quite hides behind his glasses.

Maybe.

“Hey, you don’t have to walk, by the way,” Laken says when they’ve made it back to his room. “If you want to go inside and just, like, chill and have a reset, you can do that. I can get your shoes and stuff back to you and you can just hang with Dill. It’s not a big deal. Okay?”

Chris shakes his head, a little too quickly, and he’s rewarded with the slight smile on Laken’s face in response, the barest flash of their teeth. It makes him think of their stomach, the way it had curved just a little, the softness he had, for just a second, wanted more than anything to touch. 

“No, it’s-... I want to, to, to-to-to walk with you,” He says, shyly, his voice catching and coming out a little softer than he meant it to. “Just… not.. Um. Can we, um, can we not, not, not-not-not, um, can we not-”

“No more touching?” Laken asks, carefully neutral.

“No, not that, just-... just. Um. Can we not-... can we not talk about-”

“Yeah, Scout’s honor.” Laken crosses index finger over middle finger and gives him a grin. “I absolutely one hundred percent swear we will only talk about, like, nature and stuff. Sound good?”

Chris lets out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding, and he meets their smile with one of his own. “... yeah, that, that sounds great.”

“Good. Then I’ll get your phone so you can call your brother while you put your shoes on. I… I like you, Chris. I’m sorry if I pushed too fast.”

“I’m, I’m sorry if-”

Laken presses a finger to his lips and Chris feels the spark of it, the same way he felt before. A dull burn that he doesn’t want to feel any brighter or hotter than this. “Don’t be sorry,” Laken says. “Just go on a walk with me. We’ll figure shit out as we go, right?”

“Right.”

“Perfect. I’ll be right back with your phone.” Laken pulls their hand back and moves away down the hall, back towards their room. Chris watches them go, gorgeous in their inside-out shirt. 

Can you want to kiss someone if you don’t want to do anything else? Can you like someone if you can’t-... if you can’t be what I was? What if I don’t want to, ever? Is it Sir taking me over if I don’t want to?

But I didn’t want to, before, did I?

They made me.

Didn’t they?

“Hey,” Dylan says from inside. “You wanna change clothes first? You were pretty sweaty.”

Was he? Chris blinks and looks down at himself, realizing only now that he’s covered in a thin film of sweat drying sticky on his skin. And he’s going to go on a walk. Because he wants to go on a walk with Laken, in the dark, where nothing happens.

Where he isn’t afraid.

Where what he doesn’t want to do matters just as much as what he does.

Chris nods, slowly, steps back into his room, and shuts the door. 

“Can I… hug you, man?” Dylan asks. “I mean, if you don’t-”

“I do,” Chris says, and Dylan’s arms are around him, strong and sure. He melts into the embrace and hugs back, dropping his forehead against Dylan’s shoulder, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. “Dill, I, I just, I-”

“I know. You been through some shit, right? And it got to be too much?” Dylan snorts, but it’s a soft sound, a kind one. “I get that. It’s okay, Chris. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

It begins and ends with touch.