#the freckles on my fingers are just as much me as my years long loyalty to specifically prawn cocktail pringles. okay

[hella1975]

i need to read more books and annotate in the margins i need to write more i need to buy jeans that fit me i need to eat more fruit i need to buy good quality headphones i need to get a skincare routine i need to talk to my friends more i need to wash my hair i need to stop treating this inhabitation as a curse. i am tired of punishing the body that has fought me for survival every day for years. i deserve little treats as regularly as possible !!

[atsumusfreckels]

Childhood Sweetheart

sakuatsu, childhood friends au

[I]

Kiyoomi and Atsumu as childhood friends who've known each other since elementary school, and just as the summer break ends announcing their return to class and a new year as high schoolers, Atsumu comes back from his trip to his grandparent's farm, new freckles found and sun-kissed.

And as he's helping his mother put the things from the car away, a deep voice calls his name as he's arguing with Samu over what to eat for dinner, bag of clothes in hand.

"Atsumu!" He turns his head towards the noise, confusion washing away as he locks eyes with a boy.

The familiarity of dark, curly hair, marching piercing eyes and twin moles above one eyebrow make his stomach flip, but the image of long limps, sharp jawline, broad shoulders and higher stature make his heartbeat race and his cheeks flush.

"Omi?" He's met with a too familiar smirk and a glint of something on black orbs.

"Who else would it be, idiot?" Even with the snarky comeback, Atsumu doesn't miss the fond look on his face. "Hey, Osamu."

His brother stops on his track, eyeing the boy carefully, then nodding.

"'Sup, Kiyo?" The question is left unanswered as the other returns to putting the rest of the bags back into the house, leaving Atsumu to freak out alone.

"So, how was your summer?" Kiyoomi holds one lock of bad dyed blonde hair between two fingers, his grip careful as he tucks it behind Atsumu's ear.

"Wha- Uh, good! Yeah, good." He feels the urge to facepalm and crawl away on embarrassment. "How was yers?"

"It was okay, didn't do much." He felt a weight being ripped away as Kiyoomi took the bag on his hands.

"Bold words comin' from a rich Tokyo boy." His intention of covering the nervousness on his voice seemed to work as the other faked laughter as he started walking away.

"You know it's not that fun if you're not there." Atsumu ignored the loud pounding of his heart as he walked.

"Aww, did ya miss me that much, Omi-kun?" A cheeky grin formed on his face as he fought the blush away.

"I'll admit that not having someone embarrassing himself at all times around me was found to be quite boring." This made him roll his eyes at the mockery.

"Geez, wanna put another word in there? Really, nobody of our age talks like that." A chuckle was heard from the other and Atsumu did his best to ignore the way it sounded so much deeper than before.

"Yeah well, you wouldn't know that because you're too busy-"

"Kiyoomi-kun!" Came a exited call from his mother, ripping both boy's attention away from one another.

"Hello, Miya-san." Kiyoomi seemed to mentally prepare himself as the women approached them, arms wide open.

"Oh, stop that. How many times have I told ya to call me Asumi?"

"My apologies, Asumi-san." Atsumu's mother grabbed him by the shoulders before bringing him into a hug, bag of clothes crushed between their bodies.

"So well mannered. Ya would think that after so many years together, Atsumu would've pick on some of it."

The women's comment earned a laugh from Kiyoomi and a whine from the blonde, voice high as he complained about loyalty and cruelness. His mother rolled his eyes as she stepped away from the boy, eyeing him with surprise.

"Oh my, ya've grown so much." A hint of pink was seen on the raven's face as he gave the women a shy smile.

"Now yer so big and handsome! Isn't he handsome, Atsumu?" Two pair of eyes settled on him showing expectation. He couldn't help but feel nervous once again.

"I mean, his head sure is bigger now."

His mother rolled her eyes as Kiyoomi let out a huff, gaze turning away from him.

"Just ignore him, Kiyoomi-kun. Might be the hormones."

"Ma!" Another laugh was heard as the women invited the boy into the house, leaving Atsumu to stand alone, thoughts going a mile an hour.

He tapped his chest in a weak attempt to calm his heart down, blush still high on his cheeks and hands trembling.

This was definitely gonna be one hell of a year.

[II]

The first day of high school came quickly after, and to say Atsumu was thrilled was an understatement.

But he couldn't be blamed, this year promised a whole lot of new things, new school, new classmates, new friends? And even better, new opportunities with volleyball.

He couldn't help but be specially excited about this last one, the idea of playing with Kiyoomi and Osamu once again made him jump on his place.

Especially Kiyoomi, because as much as Osamu and him worked so well on the court, there seemed to be an unmatched chemistry between Kiyoomi and him, one that could leave everybody on court fear their mere presence.

And Osamu seemed to think so as well, always claiming how the both of them loved the sport way more than he ever will.

And Maybe he was right.

Maybe Kiyoomi was the only other person Atsumu could trust in understanding the passion volleyball bringed him, and maybe, just maybe, that was one of the many reasons why they always worked good together.

Once again probing that they always understood one another.

So, with that in mind, he made his way into the kitchen, his brother and mother already there, and didn't hesitate to greet them with the an ungodly amount of enthusiasm.

"Mornin'!" He giggled as Osamu jumped on his seat, the latter looking at him with a scold on his face.

"Good mornin', dear." His mother greeted him with a knowing smile, settling a bowl of rice in front of him as he sat at the table. "Ya guys excited for school?"

"Yep."

"Ugh."

The twins reply earned a chuckle from her as Atsumu rolled his eyes at the other's direction.

"Of course yer all grumpy already." He brought a spoonful of rice to his lips before continuing. "Come on Samu, it's our first year of high school. Would it kill ya to show a little excitement? Or, any emotion at all, really."

"Oh shut up, yer just excited to see yer 'Omi-kun'." The high-pitched, mocking tone made him kick the other's leg under the table, only to be kicked back with more force.

"Ya little-" A knock on the front door cut him off as he was about to curse, his feet already moving out of habit. "Comin'."

He decided to ignore the knowing smirk on Osamu's face, making his way to the door and opening this one later to greet the person standing on the other side.

But his words caught on his throat as he took on the sight of the boy before him, messy, curly hair fell over a most more defined face, framing well marked cheekbones and a sharp jawline, those prominent on the milky skin littered by star-like moles.

A bag was thrown over a broad shoulder and Atsumu didn't miss the way

The other's shirt stuck tight against his upper half -image bringing a quick blush at the blonde's face-, but the most breathtaking part of it all were none other than those piercing emerald eyes, the ones that always looked at Atsumu with challenge, with smugness, with fondness.

Shit, he was staring, wasn't he?

"Atsumu?" Damn, he had forgotten about that deep tone of voice, and he wish he hadn't because that just made everything worse.

"Heya, Omi-kun!" He prayed to every God up there for his nervousness to not be shown.

"Hey, you okay?" No, he wasn’t.

"Yep, just peachy."

"Right, and that's why you got that idiotic expression on your face?" A little smirk made its way into Kiyoomi's face.

'Well, if ya care so much about my expression, then fuckin' kiss it away, ya asshole!'

"Oh shut yer trap!" He moved to the side, inviting the boy in, hoping the redness on his face wasn't too obvious. "Come on in before I shut the door on yer ugly face."

"Yeah right," A muttered 'pardon the intrusion' met Atsumu's ear as Kiyoomi took his shoes off beside him.

And he had to do his best to suppress a shiver.

"As if someone would walk you to school."

"I'm perfectly capable of walkin' on my own, thank ya very much." He rolled his eyes at the other, closing the door and turning around to move into the kitchen again, only to be met by a dark gaze and a towering figure in front of him, he was still getting used to the last part of that.

"I know." And there it was again, that look Kiyoomi would always give him, only him, since they were 12 and much more oblivious than now.

But even to this day, what was held behind that gaze, was a mystery to Atsumu.

"Oh, Kiyoomi-kun, you're already here." The voice of his mother interrupted them once again, making them step away from each other as Kiyoomi tuned around.

The boy stopped mid bow as the women embraced him in a hug, making Kiyoomi bend noticeably more than he did just a few months ago, and greeted him with a warm smile.

"Good mornin', my boy. Come on in, have ya eaten already? Do ya want somethin'? Have some miso soup, yeah?..."

"Good morning, Asumi-san."

And with that, Atsumu thanked his mother, again, for the distraction of his own embarrassment.

Following the pair to the table as he thought about school, and about a certain curly haired boy who happened to be sat in front of him.

This year would surely bring new things.

—

[vibraniumwing]

i’ve got you, always. [1]

an oliver wood x reader wherein oliver tries to bring the walls the reader built because of a past heartbreak down. will he manage to do that or break his own along the way?

WARNING: angst. 

A/N: so @harrysweasleys​ planted this idea into my head about how oliver wood and y/n met and how their love blossomed after her heartbreak with fred (if you do not know that then please read this first before proceeding) this part is more of a backstory as to how the two met.

i have split this into two parts and you can find the second part here.

---

Oliver Wood was an absolute charmer in his days at Hogwarts. He has the girls swooning over him with a simple smile of his— but who wouldn’t be? He’s the Quidditch Captain for Gryffindor.

Because he has only loved and still loves a certain girl, despite her breaking his heart unknowingly, despite him knowing that it was his own fault to begin with.

That was you, (Y/N) (L/N).

---

Oliver had first met you during his fourth year, his eyes landing on the small you amongst the crowd of first years who were just as excited to be sorted into their own respective houses. He watched you silently walk up to the chair and sat down, his fingers crossing immediately as he silently wished for you to be in Gryffindor.

And as if the Sorting Hat heard him, you were placed in Gryffindor. The Scottish found himself cheering along with the students as they welcomed you to the long table. You sat beside Fred Weasley and in front of him, too shy to even look at any of them.

“Hello there! I’m Fred!” “I’m George!” The twins immediately introduced themselves, offering their hands to you, which you hesitantly accepted and shook. “I-I’m (Y/N), though you probably heard earlier.”

The way you spoke tugged at his heart gently, making him smile to himself as he stared at you. “That’s Percy, our brother and that next to him is Oliver Wood, the captain for the Gryffindor Quidditch Team.” Fred continued, motioning to the two boys in front of you. 

The former merely spared you a glance while the latter gave you a rather warm welcome, “Hope ya like Quidditch! I’ll be looking out for you in the stands.” He teased, unable to hold back the smile as you nodded excitedly, looking forward to seeing how he played in the field. Despite not being the sporty type, you enjoyed the certain thrill of watching the game.

“Hey, (Y/N)! We’re on the team too!” Fred suddenly boasted, “We’re the beaters!” George continued, starting to chow down on the dinner that suddenly appeared from the table. 

As you easily fall into the conversation with the twins, a certain captain can’t keep his eyes trained away from you; unsure on how to deal with the feeling brewing within him.

---

“You do know she’s three years younger than you, right?” Percy questioned Oliver as he straightened up his school robes and hat.

He groaned softly into his hands, slightly annoyed that he was constantly reminded of that,  “I know, Percy. I don’t even know how to deal with this myself and you know me, I always plan and deal with things.” 

The ginger just shrugged, really unsure on how to deal with the dilemma of his friend. “That’s up to you to decide, Wood.” He said before heading for the door, off to do his rounds as a prefect.

And with that, he was left to deal with the problem alone.

---

If there was anything that Oliver Wood was good at aside from Quidditch, it was keeping his thoughts to himself. After Percy left him alone in their dorm three years ago, he swore himself to secrecy, to never let anyone else know about his little “crush” and decided to just bury it into the back of his mind.

But despite his best efforts to keep his infatuation at bay, you were making it harder to do so. As he witnessed you slowly mature and come out of your shell, the more he finds himself growing fond of your presence.

Oliver found himself by the covered bridge, staring over the vast amount of green as he pondered with his thoughts. The pressure was slowly growing on him with his final Quidditch season and urge to win the cup, his N.E.W.Ts, and of course his pent up emotions, he felt like his head was about to explode. 

“Oliver!” A sudden voice called out, he looked over to see your familiar (H/C) locks bounce as you walked over to him, a bright smile on your lips, “You seem worried out of your wits. Is there anything going on inside that head of yours aside from Quidditch?” you asked, earning an eye roll and scoff from him. 

He turned around and leaned against the railing, crossing his arms, “Quidditch ain’t the only thing that’s on my mind, lass.” he answered, not even fighting back the smile that was making its way to his lips. “Then enlighten me, Wood.” 

Maybe it was the longing feeling of having someone to turn to that made Oliver cave in, “Just pressure, ya know? With my N.E.W.Ts and the Quidditch Cup lingering, it’s quite hard to bear. Then there’s another thing I have to deal with but it’s nothing that concerns you, really.” He confessed, panic settling in him as he realized the latter part of what he just said. 

Curiosity got the best of you when he mentioned that he had another thing to deal with, making your eyebrows furrow as you tried to probe around the subject, “Well it is certainly my business now, isn’t it? Since you’ve told me already.” 

Panic settled into Oliver as he seemed to struggle with putting the correct words in, fearing that he might spill something to you. He stood there, silent as he contemplated whether or not to tell you about what he was really pondering on just a few moments before you made your presence known. 

“It’s just that-” He stopped himself mid sentence, looking at you with a hesitant glance before continuing, “I got this girl I like, been that way since fourth year. My feelings were never unchanging of hers yet I’ve never made it known to the public. No one ever really knows who, I’ve turned down multiple people because they’re not like her.” He explained, looking at you expectantly, nibbling down on his lower lip as he looked at you nervously.

Your face turned into one of excitement, smiling at the realization that he’s got a crush. “Oliver Wood has got a crush? And he doesn’t know how to deal with it? Blimey, that’s something very unusual indeed. What’s the catch though?” Teasing him lightly, you motioned him to continue his explanation.

Taking a deep breath in, he continued, “I’m unsure if she would like me back, (Y/N). Besides, she’s younger than me so I highly doubt that she would feel the same.” 

His words made you frown, disliking the fact that he looked at himself so lowly despite him being an actual heartthrob inside the school nor the fact that this was uncharacteristically like him, knowing he would always be sure of his actions, “Oh please, i’m sure whoever that person is would like you back! I mean who wouldn’t? You’ve got extreme loyalty to whatever you’re passionate about, you’re a stellar student and player in the field, I doubt that person would even turn you down!”

The way you hyped him up sparked the little circuit of hope he had, thinking that he might have a chance with you. His worried expression soon morphed into one of determination, the same one he would have during matches. “Alright then, I think I might just do it then. Thanks for the pep talk, lass.” Oliver said, patting you on the shoulder as he walked straight for Hogsmeade, wanting to give a gift upon his confession.

“I’ve got you, Oli! Always!”

---

Your words were burned into the back of Oliver’s mind as he made his way into the Gryffindor Common Room, clad in his hands was a bunch of beautiful parchments, a special quill and a beautiful bottle of color-changing ink, knowing how you loved to do writing in your free time.

As he entered, his eyes immediately scan around for the set of (H/C) hair he knew by heart. Spotting you by the couch, he approached you. However, the sight that followed next was not what he had initially expected. 

It was you, in the arms of another person, laughing your heart out as the both of you cuddled in front of the fireplace; in the arms Fred Weasley.

Your head whipped around at the sight of him in your peripheral view, “Oh Oli! How did it go?” You asked him excitedly, moving a bit to make some space for him to sit down, motioning your hand for him to come over.

He didn’t know what to do, he was stuck in his place as he felt his heart shatter into a million pieces. The girl he wished for, the one girl he turned everyone down, the one girl he looked for inspiration during his darkest times, was never going to be his. 

“Fred just confessed to me earlier today! He had this whole picnic set up by the Black Lake, it was wonderful! How about you though? How did things go with your mystery lady?” You exclaimed, leaning into Fred as you were now questioning how things went.

There were no words as to how pathetic Oliver had felt as you boasted on how sweet and extravagant his confession was. He held his gift at his back and mustered up a small smile, “I opted not to, (Y/N). She has a boyfriend now, didn’t want to be much of a wrecker, would I?” 

“Oli, I’m so sor-” “No, it’s alright. You didn’t know” He answered quite harshly, glancing at a rather smug looking Fred as his hands tightened around your waist.

He approached you both and placed the gift down on the table, using every inch of his power to give you another smile, albeit half-hearted, “You can have these instead, I find it no use to give it to her anyways.” 

You stared at him with wide eyes as you looked at the rather extravagant ink and quill, “Oli, these are so expensive, are you sure you want to give these to me instead?” 

“Positive, have fun with those.” He whispered, unable to hold his heartbreak anymore and made his way to his dorm; the feeling of disheartenment lingering through his skin as he remembered the incident he had with the ginger that held you securely in his arms.

---

“Oliver!” Fred called out, jogging up to him. He noticed that the expression on the freckle-littered boy was rather serious, making him stop in his tracks and raise his eyebrow at the younger. “What is it, Fred?”

He huffed lightly and shoved his hands inside his pockets, “So you like (Y/N) too?” his tone hint with aggressiveness. The younger looked tense as he competed with the intense stare Oliver gave him.

‘too? He likes (Y/N) too?’ he thought to himself, “So what about it, Weasley?” He questioned him, his tone as equally- if not even more aggressive- as the ginger. His arms were crossed, yet his fists were already clenched, knuckles white from holding back; disliking how the former approached him.

“Just back off, She’s mine.” And with that, the red-head left, leaving the older boy confused and angered. “I won’t lose her to a guy like you.” He answered back, obviously ticked off that someone wanted her as much as he did.

Who was he to say such words like that? 

---

Oliver stared at the mirror, cringing at how lifeless he looked. He’s been restless since the night he has seen you with Fred, ripples of pain shooting through his heart at the memory. The smile you had that night was permanently etched in his mind, almost haunting him in away.

You were is ray of sun, the motivation he needed when he felt hopeless; yet in these moments, he wanted nothing more to just wipe you away from his memory.

He has managed to stray away and hide from you for the past couple of days, internally thanking the fact that he had to study for his N.E.W.Ts and Quidditch Practice so he has concrete excuses as to why he was avoiding you like the plague.

“Wood, are you coming? We’re waiting for your speech before the match starts.” Harry asked him, staring at his captain with expectant eyes, unaware of the current grief he was holding so tightly to his chest.

With all of the energy he could produce, he masked up and grabbed his broom, ready to face the match ahead. 

or at least he thought.

There you were, hugging Fred tightly as you whispered wishes of good luck with their match against Slytherin. 

Stopping dead in his tracks, his angered boiled quite quickly and shouted, “Oi Weasley! Get your arse in the tent right now!” His voice dripping with agitation and jealousy. 

The red-head placed a quick kiss to your lips before walking over to the tent, noticing the smirk that was plastered on his lips, Oliver gripped on his broom even tighter as he spared you a glance.

“H-Hey, Oli!” you managed to say before he entered the tent. Oh Merlin did he miss hearing your voice. He turned around and looked at you expectantly, foot tapping in anticipation. 

“Good luck at the match today. I believe in you.” You cheered him on, waving the little flag you brought with you before skipping away to the stands to join your friends.

A big smile suddenly appeared on his lips, a sudden wave of determination washing over him at the cheer you gave him. As much as he hated himself to admit this, you were still his energizer. 

And your cheer was all that he needed to push forward.

---

“And Harry Potter has caught the snitch! The best house-” “Jordan!” “Sorry Professor, Gryffindor has won the match! They won the Quidditch Cup!” 

As Lee Jordan’s voice rung out through the whole pitch, Oliver’s eyes were wide in disbelief, cheering along with his teammates as they have finally won the cup. He was leaving Hogwarts with the Quidditch Cup in their hands.

He watched as his the twins carried Harry on their shoulders, raising the trophy high up in the air as they laughed to their hearts content. Personally receiving a few greetings of his own, he was more than ready to rest at the Hospital wing with Madame Pomfrey all in his ears.

“Oliver!” A familiar voice rung out through the crowd, looking around, he saw you running towards him with the biggest smile. He dropped his broom instantly and opened his arms, ready to accept you in his arms. 

You jumped to his arms, hugging him tightly, a proud feeling swelling in your chest as he wrapped his arms around your waist. Unknowing of the fact that the latter wanted nothing more than his moment to last, “Congratulation on winning! I knew you could do it!”

You broke away from the hug and placed your hands on his shoulders, “How are you though? You took some nasty bludgers to the stomach.” You asked, frowning lightly at the sight of him falling down. 

The older shook his head, a wide smile on his lips, “It’s nothing too bad, (Y/N). Nothing I can’t handle.” He explained, ruffling your hair lightly, which earned him a few punches to the arm. “Thank you for cheering me on though, it meant a lot.” He continued, giving her a smile, his real smile.

 “Like what I said before, Oli. I’ve got you, always! Now, I’ll be off, Congratulations again, Captain!”

And with that, he watched you jump into Fred’s arms, lips locked in a rather brief kiss as you shouted congratulatory words to him.

Oliver couldn’t even bear to look at the sight, smiling once more to his teammates, he headed off and decided not to look back.

To never look back at you and the memories you made.

---

general taglist: @theweasleyslut​ @violetravens​

[plant-flwrs]

sun // ginny weasley

masterlist!

a/n: is this a reenactment of a happier ending than the reality i endured with my first experience falling in love with a girl? maybe. was this incredibly painful to write? yes. am i now suffering way too much? most definitely. umm. let me know what yall think! <33

summary: Six years of being in love with Ginny Weasley. Watching her date boys and capture the attention of Harry Potter. Eventually, confessions are the only things left. 

(3.5k)

-------

The white sheets curled around her were shaded a heavenly yellow under the sunlight invading the room. Actually, it didn’t feel like an invasion, it felt like the sun followed Ginny, like it followed her on her command with the sort of loyalty Hedwig had to Harry. So, Ginny, unconscious, was somehow inviting the sun into the room, turning her white sheets a soft yellow. She lay on her back, perched on some pillows, and twisted slightly diagonally on her bed. She made her bed seem so huge, like it was begging you to crawl into it with her, like the bed was a devil on your shoulder. Her arms folded over her stomach, an abandoned Quidditch magazine sprawled across her chest. Her head had lulled back against the pillows, orange hair falling and spilling and cascading and somehow just sitting atop her head like a crown. 

You felt completely out of place in what you could only describe as heaven. You, standing in your Hogwarts robes, with your harsh face and your cold gaze, felt completely separated from the heavenly plane Ginny Weasley managed to curate in this dorm.

It had been like this since the third year when, somehow, Ginny Weasley returned to school cool. She became her own person-- Quidditch legend, funny, friends with everyone-- and you simply trailed along beside her. It didn’t help your cause, either, when boys began to notice the same things you were noticing about Ginny.

Ruben Hash had come first. He’d never made a move on Ginny, but you noticed him. Sometimes, it felt like you were a hawk over Ginny’s shoulder, one she tossed her scraps of food to and patted on the head. So of course, you noticed Ruben. 

And then, you noticed Neville. You couldn’t even be mad about Neville. He was sweet, and he’d even been good-humored about you cutting in to dance with Ginny for one of the few and far between slow-dances at the Yule Ball. You held Ginny, and Ginny held onto you, and you wondered if she saw it behind your eyes.

Then came Michael Corner. Michael was a sting. Michael was a kick to the stomach, a punch to the face, and a knife to the thigh. Ginny watched him beat you, step on you, until you were filled with harsh bile and spiteful words for him. Of course, Michael was nice to you. He didn’t understand your cold glances and your distaste for him, simply chalking it off to him being Ginny’s boyfriend and you not thinking he was good enough for her. 

That summer was weird. You tried to remain a semblance of normalcy, tried to write lighthearted letters back to Ginny, tried to accept her invitation to the Burrow before school started again. Any other summer you practically lived at Ginny’s house, but now it hurt. Everything hurt, all the time, because Ginny wasn’t like you. Ginny didn’t like you, and what hurt even worse was that she liked other people. She liked so many other people, her most favorite to talk about being the Harry fucking Potter (I mean seriously, how did she expect you to have any sort of self-worth when you were pining for her while she was whinging about The Boy Who Lived?).

So, that was the summer you didn’t go to the Burrow. 

Michael stuck around for a long time. However, fourth-year was different.

Fourth-year was a time you liked to think about often, at least until your sixth-year, because once you were in your sixth-year, there truly was nothing better. 

Fourth-year. Ginny seemed to be distancing herself from Michael. You stopped asking about him and she stopped talking about him. She asked you to sit in the stands of her Quidditch practices, and when you got there for the first time, you noticed Michael wasn’t there. It was like she had given you a rose and not Michael. Small things like this really made fourth-year worth fifth-year. You tried not to think about fifth-year.

Fourth-year. Ginny walked with you, all sweaty, back to the castle. Ginny sat with her thigh pressed against yours as you ate dinner and lunch and breakfast. Ginny woke you up in the mornings and told you goodnight every night-- every single night. While you walked to class, Ginny lopped her fingers with yours and said it was because she couldn’t believe how soft your hands were. You scoffed, and fueled the fire by insisting you didn’t even use lotion on them. Ginny indulged, or maybe she truly was baffled by it, and ran her thumb over any space of your hand she could as you walked. Fourth-year, there was a week where the elves were occupied with something Dumbledore had requested them for. There was a week where laundry wasn’t being done, and utter chaos was amongst the castle. You had been one of the lucky ones, finding a pile of clean clothes and sheets on your bed just before the elves’ vacation. Ginny insisted her sheets smelled too horribly from her post-Quidditch practice naps, that she couldn’t sleep on her own bed. Ginny slept in your bed, for an entire week. Ginny was a cuddler. Ginny had her hands wrapped around your middle with her head tucked into your shoulder every night for an entire week. You thought about revoking your membership in S.P.E.W. if it meant Dumbledore could whisk off the house-elves more often. 

Fifth-year, there was no hand-holding or thighs brushing beneath tables or goodnights or good mornings or cuddling. Fifth-year was the year of Dean Thomas. 

Dean Thomas had successfully managed to whisk Ginny off her feet. You hadn’t even realized that at some point during your heavenly fourth-year, Ginny had broken it off with Michael. You were afforded about two weeks of a nice fifth-year before Dean.

As with Neville, you couldn’t even be mad at Dean. Well, you were mad at Dean, all the time, for no reason recognized by him. You were cold, and harsh, and selfish. You put up a wall between you and Ginny, leaving her no place to go but Dean’s arms. And to Dean’s arms she went. She spent nights in his dorm. She ate with him at meals. She asked him to her Quidditch practices.

You are completely and utterly alone.

As her roommate, she believed she was still your friend. She assumed you had your own issues to work out-- and right she was-- and incidentally, she spent more time with Dean. She didn’t put together the two things.  

By the end of fifth-year, Dean Thomas was over. 

By the summer going into sixth-year, you were invited to the Burrow. You accepted it with grace.

Things fell back into place with Ginny in a way that made you want to cry. It was like she had either not noticed you were gone, or she found things so easy with you that it didn’t matter how much time had passed. In the warm comforts of her small bed, she insisted you not sleep on the floor. She invited you into her bed, and you nearly launched yourself on top of her with the anticipation of how you knew it felt to be held by her. Even if it wasn’t like that to her, you still knew. You knew she felt some sort of love for you, and you felt that was enough for now. You made it enough. 

Ginny slept with her window open and her curtains swept to the sides. At the Burrow, as you lay on your back with Ginny curled into your side, her nose brushing into your hair, you looked right out of the window. The stars were so much brighter out here than they were at home, almost as bright as they were at Hogwarts. Maybe it was Ginny that made the stars so bright. 

That summer made things alright again. Ginny seemed to be sitting atop a fence, looking down at you and Harry Potter on opposite sides, deciding on who she was going to let catch her. You stood with outstretched arms for an entire year.

Sixth-year. Ginny, laying in her bed basking in the sunlight that worshipped her, all you could do was stare. You stared until your other dormmates pushed past you into the room, talking loudly and taking no care to not wake Ginny. 

You watched her stir as she rolled onto her stomach, falling deeper into the bed. She saw you and her mouth perked up into a sort of lazy smile, raising her eyebrows. You flushed, feeling warm and tight and strained when she looked at you like that. It was on her face, come here, and so you went, crawling into her bed and curling next to her. It didn’t feel weird; the girls now rummaging through their wardrobe didn’t find it odd, and so you closed your eyes, feeling Ginny’s sun now coating you in the heavenly light. 

Waking up next to Ginny was always a struggle. You were warm and uncomfortable and often sweating, but nothing made you want to move. Ginny, with her body pressed against yours in these rare moments of intimacy, was something you didn’t want to disturb. In the first weeks of fifth-year, before Ginny went to Dean, you would pretend to be annoyed with Ginny’s touches. You would throw her an annoyed glance or a sarcastic comment with a little too much seriousness in it when she rested her head on your shoulder during lunch. You’d stiffen when she tried to reach for your hand in the hall, pretending you had not noticed and reach for something in your bag instead. You hated to think of those moments; moments wasted. 

When you woke, it was Saturday. Saturdays were days where Ginny had afternoons full of Quidditch practice and you sat in the stands doing your homework for the upcoming week. 

This Saturday was no different.

Sparing a glance at her, you regarded her pink nose brushing against her red and gold scarf pulled over her lips. Her long, red eyelashes ghosting over her tanned and freckled cheeks. The crinkle of her eyes, and oh, you just realized she was laughing at one of your jokes. This in itself made your heart twist inside itself. 

The wind worked in spite of you both, pushing against you as you walked to the pitch. Ginny was dressed in her uniform, and you had gone for your heavily padded and warm winter coat. Ginny huddled close to you as you walked, stuffing her hands in your pockets. Her fingers splayed over your hands, pressing into you like they were seeking your warmth. 

In the stands, you did your homework. When you finished your homework, you watched Ginny. You preferred to watch Ginny. She glided through the air with an ease that came with her personality. No part of her was practiced or rehearsed, but she was also so careful and cool at the same time. She was the best parts of all her brothers. She was Ron’s sense of humor, Charlie’s bravery, Bill’s coolness, Percy’s sensibility, and Fred and George’s wicked gift for mischief. This all made Ginny herself. Ginny was no one but Ginny. In a sense, she made it seem like her brothers learned all those qualities from her, just because she did them so well. You were in love with Ginny Weasley.

Back in the castle, hours after practice, you and Ginny sat side by side against the headboard of her bed. You had the blankets pulled to your chins, and laughter filled the air in front of you. Ginny had told the sun to go away, so it did, and instead, a muggy and cold day replaced it. Clouds stormed outside, and you knew you would be lulled to sleep by the sound of rain later. 

“Think the rain will last until tomorrow?” Ginny asked, leaning over you to look out the window.

“Maybe. Why?”

“Ron said he and Harry were going to Hogsmeade, wanted me to come with.”

Something clicked away inside of you, like one last light that had been tortured to stay on for years and years.

“Oh.”

Ginny was quiet, not realizing the separate storm raging inside of you. You could not believe you expected anything else from Ginny. Anything else but her tireless and never-ending efforts to get every boy at Hogwarts to notice her. Ginny and her perfect eyes and hair and skin and body and personality and laugh. 

“I don’t want you to go tomorrow,” you hadn’t realized you said it, the words twisting on your tongue like they knew you were trying out this honesty thing for the first time. 

“What?”

“Don’t go.”

Ginny laughed. You felt every bone in your face sharpen and freeze. It was like the tears you knew would well up in your eyes were first coursing through your face like a complicated sewer system.

“Ginny,” you managed to breathe it out, turning to her with glassy eyes and tight lips.

She stopped laughing, turning her entire body to you and pushing off the blankets.

“Oh my god, what’s wrong? Y/n?” her voice was full of breathless worry and concern at your rare showing of vulnerability. It made you want to cringe away and fall into her.

Her face was so close to yours, it was like a dream. It was like you were back under the stars at the Burrow, under Ginny’s stars and in her bed. You lifted your eyes to hers, hoping she saw the same look behind them from the Yule Ball. Her face softened and for a second you swore you saw it in her eyes too. You realized she was getting closer, her look of concern morphing into a look of unknown. 

Her lips were so close to yours, you wanted to reach out; you kept your hands tucked beneath the blanket and stopped her lips from meeting yours as you rested your forehead against hers.

“I-” you started, finding the rush of the plumbing beneath your face all clog at once, like the blood had stopped flowing through your veins. You were so close to her.

“Please,” her words fell onto your lips like they were physical things in the air, and all of a sudden your hands plunged from under the blanket and your face was on hers and your lips were touching hers. 

You held her hair in your hands and she ran her hands down your back. Her lips were so soft, and you were self-conscious because you wondered if all the lip biting and worrying you had done on your lips would make yours rough and harsh. You wondered if Ginny loved your hands like you loved her lips. 

You wondered about a lot of things, after that. You wondered about the looks Harry seemed to give Ginny. About the looks Ginny refused to give back to him. You wondered if she would mind how scared you were all the time. You wondered if she noticed how much you didn’t want to be scared. You wondered if she was ever scared. 

You slept in Ginny’s bed every night.

“Does Harry love you?” 

The question had felt almost as scary as when you’d asked her not to go to Hogsmeade. Her reaction to the first scary question, however, made you believe it was going to be okay. It would always be okay with Ginny.

“I think he might,” she said.

Your head was pressed into her neck, her long hair getting caught in your nose every time you breathed. It was hot and a little uncomfortable, but it was Ginny, and you just wanted to feel her. Her arms were wrapped around you, her head inclined slightly so her mouth was by your ear. Your legs were tangled and her feet were warm against your cold ones. Ginny had told the sun to go away a long time ago.

“Do you love him?” 

Waiting for Ginny to answer was like waiting for her to tell you whether or not she had lost her virginity to Dean Thomas. She had said she had, and you felt like your world was going to end.

“Not anymore,” she whispered, even though you had already cast a silencing charm around her bed.

You breathed a breath you hadn’t realized was reserved for this moment.

You turned to face her, your mouths inches apart. You couldn’t help but stare at hers, feeling now blissful and for the first time without any worry or insecurity. Then her face inched away and her brows knitted together. You brought a warm hand to them, running the pad of your thumb across them until they smoothed out. 

“I’m sorry.” Ginny was whispering it over and over again, like a prayer, and you felt panic surged inside of you. 

You pushed yourself off of her, thinking she was lying about Harry and apologizing for that. 

As soon as you were off of her, she was wrapping her arms around you again, pulling her back into her. She was cradling you, rocking you back and forth as she kept chanting it. You felt pathetic, like this was a goodbye she had been wanting to say since the day she met you. Like she was apologizing to some god for the things you had done together. Like she was apologizing to Harry for the lie she told you. 

You pulled away far enough to look at her face, seeing shiny streaks creating a river down each side of her face. She was crying. Your hands on her face again, pushing the tears away as they endlessly leaked from her eyes. 

“What?” you whispered, almost cooed, curling into her lap and holding her face in your hands.

“I didn’t see you sooner,” she whispered, choking out strangled sobs as she threw her face into your chest. 

“Yes you did,” you whispered back, finding the volume too loud for the weight of the conversation. You felt like saying anything aloud would be inappropriate. You wanted to write it all out and exchange it all in wax-sealed letters.

“You were always there, and I was never there, and I made you sit and watch,” Ginny was almost screaming, guilt throwing itself from her throat. “I was so selfish!”

You didn’t dignify this with a response, instead, waiting for her to calm down again. Her shaking ceased and her breathing settled into hiccups.

“I’d do it all over again. I’d sit through each boyfriend. I would go to every Quidditch practice and watch you at every breakfast and I would walk to every class with you. I would wait forever. I don’t want to, though, so stop feeling so awful about it. We are now,” you felt your own tears sliding down your face, a voice coming out that cracked and shivered unlike your own.

Your words racked a new wave of sobs through her, and you could practically feel the relief and the guilt washing off her in waves. You were no stranger to guilt.

You had felt guilt every time you looked at Ginny that way when she was with her boyfriends. You had felt guilt every time you wanted to brag to Michael when she didn’t invite him to her practices. You wanted to throw every piece of intimacy you and Ginny shared in Harry Potter’s face, just so he would stop thinking he had a chance. 

You also knew that relief. You knew that relief when Ginny didn’t stutter with her hands. When she breathed against your skin and smiled when you pulled apart. When it wasn’t anything different between you; when you could just as easily sit next to each other at the Great Hall. 

Ginny’s eyes were tired and puffy when they finally turned to you. She wiped your cheeks with the backs of her hands, because you had told her how gripping the broom made her fingertips rough. You kissed her hand, capturing her skinny wrist in your grasp and flipping it over to press your lips against her palm. She breathed, for what felt like the first time, in even and contained patterns. 

She had both hands on your shoulders, pushing you further into the mattress, until she climbed on top of you. Her strong legs were on either side of you, sitting just above your hip bones. She didn’t bend to kiss you, just sitting straight as she looked down at you: laid down at her mercy.

Her hands started at yours, interlocking them and then leaving them to trail up your arms. She ignored the shivers following her touch, continuing her warpath until she started again at your hips. Her hands slid up your sides, featherlight touches that made your back arch off the bed. She sighed with a smile, cocking her head in a disbelieving way.

“You’re all mine?” she whispered, voice hoarse and weak with melancholy and shock spilling into her words.

You couldn’t find the words to tell her just how much you were entirely hers, so you nodded helplessly. 

She began to giggle, finally bending down to bring her lips to you. They traced up and down your neck, like she was finding the right place to pot a plant, and then finally planted one searing kiss just below your jaw. 

“I’m yours,” you moaned, begging for her to do anything.

“Yours,” she answered, doing anything. 

[kaiisenn]

Reiner Braun x Fem! Reader: Angst

It all happened to quick...

One moment your all coming back from saving Ymir, Krista, Bertholdt and your boyfriend Reiner. You just wanted to check up on your boyfriend, you didn't know how things would end.

"I'm the armored titan and he's the colossal titan" Reiner spoke out like it was nothing look at you and Eren with a strong gaze "you're just tired, aren't you?" Eren placed a hand onto Reiners shoulder inspecting his face for any signs of tiredness "Right, Bertholdt. You've been through hmmm t so much, it's making you crazy!" Turning his direction towards the said brunette "Yeah, Reiner come on making a joke like that isn't funny!" You spoke out, a thin layer of fearful sweat starting to coat your body "Y-Yeah, Reiner's just really tired" Bertholdt stuttered out, taking a step back away from them Eren spoke "Besides, If you were really the Armored Titian that wants to destroy humanity....why would you be asking me this in the first place? What did you think would happen? That I'd nod and say 'sure let's go?'" Reiner just stood there looking at the two of you with wide eyes and a open jaw "Oh right. That's right. What the hell was I thinking?" Reiner finally mumbled out "Have I really gone crazy?"

Taking a step toward him the big blonde you speak out "Reiner, come on let's go home. You obviously need some rest, so why don't we go back together?" Looking at him expectantly, with hopeful eyes. Hoping this was all a bad joke, that your precious Reiner wasn't actually a man killing titan wanting to wipe what's left of humanity.

In the harsh wind the flag that was held up by a skinny stick finally breaks. Jumping at the expectancy you and Eren look towards where the flag use to stand tall and proud. Even if it was beaten and torn. Sunshine breaking through the clouds sets the scenery for change "I see... that's it. I've been here too long for my own good." A serious Reiner looks down at the ground "Its been three long years... We were just kids... we didnt know anything. If only I never knew that there were people like this...I... wouldn't have become....such a half assed piece of shit!" Tears began to form in his eye, wanting to do nothing more than help the one you love you tried making your way over to Reiner. Hand making it's way to caress his cheek, but before you could get the change Reiner slapped it away pushing you back with such force your butt landed on the ground. "It's too late now.... I don't know what's right anymore. But the only choice for me now.... is to face the consequences of my actions...and as a warrior...fulfill my duty to the bitter end!" Taking his arm out of the makeshift sleeve Krista made for him.

Showing his wounded arm starting to heal itself. Bertholdt coming to his side "Reiner! Are we doing it?! Now?! Right here?!" Screaming out just in case his friend was too absorbed in his own thoughts to hear him "yeah.. we settle this.. right here, right now!" Reiner replied back simply, running towards the edge of the wall. Before he could even jump Mikasa came to put an end to things, using her ODM gear to articulate her way to cut his hand off as well as cut his other arm badly. Making her way to Bertholdt she cut at his throat trying to kill him "EREN, Y/N. RUN!" she screamed out standing over Bertholdt with her blade ready "MIKASA WATCH OUT!!" You scream from your position on the ground, warning her about her other enemy. It was too late, he got elbowed off of Bertholdt by Reiner and off the wall, thankfully she had her ODM gear to grapple onto the side of the wall before the was too far away from them "Bertholdt!" Reiner screamed out indicating for his friend to transform "REINER!" reaching your hand out to try to stop your lover from making this mistake, hearing the others telling you two to run from them..

But it was too late, the impact and pressure from both of their transformations was blowing you all away from them, before you could get too far the armored titan took ahold of you..

Waking up in high in a tree was not the best or most expected way, sitting up way to fast a headache came over you. Holding your head for a few seconds you look up to see a legless and armless Ymir sitting right infront of you, and behind her a passed out Eren with no limbs at all "Oh my lord! Are you two alright!?" You asked reaching out to them "I mean, I've clearly been in better shape but I'm working on it. You on the other hand, you're not looking too hot, Y/n" A sarcastic Ymir comments sending you a smirk "Me-? I fell kin-" you cut yourself off turning your focus onto the men standing on the other tree, acting all high and mighty "Good Morning, Princess" Reiner spoke out, thick arms crossed over his chest "Reiner-!" You stand up too quickly almost losing your balence until Ymir grabs you by the ankle to keep you steady, you shoot you a thankful smile as she nods in return. Turning your rage to your boyfriend you scream out "Reiner, what the hell is going on?!" Fist clenching at your sides "What's going on our little Y/n, is that Reiner and Bertholdt are little traitors" eyes widening at the freckled brunettes statement "Ymir, come on stop joking this is Reiner and Bertholdt were talk-" suddenly the rush of memories fill your brain up as you think about what happened before you woke up here "Y/n, I'm sorry to tell you this but-" "YOU'RE SORRY?! HOW CAN YOU BE SORRY YOU KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE YOU KILLED AND FOR WHAT?? JUST CAUSE?! IT WAS YOU THAT DAY WALL MARIA WAS BREACHED!!"

"Hey, Y/n. What's got you so down?" Reiner comes walking up to you when you were alone at dinner "Ah nothing, I guess I was lost in my own head." You dryly chuckle and look to the side to keep your gaze away from his intruding eyes "Come on, I'm sure talking about it would help." Looking into his eyes you could see how sincere he was about wanting to listen and help you with whatever you were going through "I guess, if it's not too much of a burden on you." Grabbing your hands into his much bigger ones Reiner took your hands and led them to his lips giving them a sweet kiss "I'd do anything for you, Y/n"

At the time it was a sweet gesture, not only showing his love and loyalty to you but giving you a new reason to keep on pushing in this life. Now it's a bittersweet memory, thoughts of how he betrayed you swarming your mind, making you feel dizzy "my family... I told you how they were killed that day, I told you how when the titans breached the wall a huge chunk of rock trapped them in the house, and the only thing I could do was watch as my friends and family were eaten right infront of my eyes.... that day I lost everything, I had to steal to get food, I wore the same clothes every single day, my life was a living hell after that day and the only reason all that happened....Was because of you!" Erratic breathing and Ymir's tight hold on your ankle was your only thing connecting you to the real world "I know I didn't have it the worst, there is definitely people who have it worse than me. But to know all this time I've been living in a imagined paradise with the same person responsible for my family's death-" Clasping your hand over your mouth to stop any liquid from spilling out , squatting on the thick branch feeling Ymirs hand caress gentle circles on your back "Do you find some sick joke in all of this?! You bastard!! Do you not have any remorse for the people you've killed?! Men, Women, Children?!!" Tears spilling out of your eyes like a waterfall "You must be real happy with yourself knowing you have mankind hanging off of a thread!" Words just came spilling out of your mouth, the hatred for the titans that killed your life finally being released after years and years of keeping it in "I had no choice!!" Reiner shut you up before you could get another word in "how laughable-" you gave a raspy, dry chuckle to his defensiveness

"Y/n, don't trust to easily. You never know how people actually are." Your father spoke, a frown placed on his face "Awe come on pops, don't worry about me when you should worry about not getting anymore wrinkles on that face! Come on smilee" you gave a cheeky grin using your index fingers to lift your smile up more

"Was I just your pawn in all of this? Was I just someone you could use? Was everything a lie?" Before he could answer any of those questions a green smoke flare grabbed everyone attention "The Survey Corp is already here?!" Bertholdt shouted out looking at Reiner for guidance "We take them and go" Using his ODM gear he knocked you out and took both you and Eren, zipping away from the Survey Corp.

In the end, you arrived back home with Mikasa, Eren, Armin and the others after a long and devastating fight. Your questions were never answered and your heart would forever be broken.

THAT WAS A SUPER ASS ENDING BUT I HOPED YOU ENJOY REINER IS SO SEXY I HAVE TO DO SCHOOL WORK CAUSE I PUT IT OFF FOR THE PAST FEW HOURS TO WRITE THIS ANYWAYS REINER IS SEXY 🤰🏽🤰🏽🛐

-Kaii

[jamilelucato]

Best Teacher, Part 1 || Fred Weasley

Pairing: Fred Weasley x Slytherin!reader

Summary: y/N is a pureblood Slytherin best friends with Harry Potter, but not yet that close to the Weasleys until she’s invited to spend Christmas with them.

PART 2 HERE

PART 3 HERE

A/N: So yeah, we’re not even close to Christmas, but this idea popped in my mind and I had to write. Yes, out of nowhere I got into this Harry Potter vibe, who can explain?

*gif below not mine

Being friends with Harry Potter had always been something you were proud to have achieved. Harry was not only a nice guy and great friend, but he was also very famous, so having his friendship gave you some kind of popularity that being a Slytherin you would not have achieved on your own.

You couldn’t exactly point a finger to when your friendship began, but it was around your second year. Now, that you are a fourth-year student, your friendship is really solid. You care deeply for Harry, proving your loyalty to him many times by now. 

He had other friends, but you hadn't talked to most of them yet. Hermione was kind of cool, she didn't bother with the fact that you were a pureblood and a Slytherin since you never showed any kind of prejudice against who she was — a muggle-born. 

Ron Weasley, on the other hand, was somewhat of a problem. He ignored you most of the time you were with them, avoiding talking to you. He never actually said a bad thing about you — that you had proved of — but you believed he did behind your back since any of the Weasley talked to either. They never even tried. 

Percy was too old for you to even have anything in common to say, besides, by now, he's no longer a Hogwarts student. The only Weasleys left were the Twins and Ginny. Ginny was too busy to have time for you, although you had the impression that she didn't like you simply because of your friendship with Harry.

The Twins, George and Fred, were kind of mystery in this matter of "do they like me or not". They were always playing jokes against the Slytherin house, so more times than often, you were a victim of their pranks. Although you didn't think it was their purpose to hit you, they never apologised. George had spoken to you, one or two words, generally, to make fun of the situation you and Harry were involved, but Fred never said a thing.

Even when he had to study a year next to you during Snape's classes (the Professor got angry because Fred and George never shut up, and made them split), he never talked to you. Staring, though, he did a lot. You couldn't help but do the same. He was beautiful — in your opinion, the most beautiful of the Weasley, maybe being a tie when it came to George — and, since he always started the stares, you didn't felt the guilt of looking back. 

It wasn't like he was disgusted by you, it felt like he was just curious. Sometimes, when you got wrong with the potions, he looked scared. You couldn't blame him, because you were a real nightmare when you got some lesson wrong.

"So, what are you doing for Christmas, Harry?" you asked your friend once you met him on the corridor, after a long period of staring Fred during one of Snape's class.

Being an orphan and living with a terrible family, Harry hated going back home for the holidays, so, most of the time, he stayed in Hogwarts. You felt so bad, that you used to insist on him to come to spend the holiday with you and your family. Maybe they weren't the happiest family during the season, but you were sure your parents would try to impress Potter since they had him in a very high status.

"I'm going the Burrow" he answered, holding his books closer to his chest. By now, you already knew the Burrow was the residence of the Weasleys, and listening to that info made you involuntarily sigh. "What's wrong?" your friend looked at you, confused.

"Nothing. I was just expecting you to finally come to spend the holiday with me and maybe I wouldn't feel so sad" you explained, making sure your puppy face was out, trying to change his mind by being too cute.

He only smiled, kinda relieved. "Well, you could always come with me. I'm sure Mrs Weasley wouldn't mind, she even said I could bring someone with me"

You showed your teeth, frowning. You were sure Mrs Weasley was a nice person, you knew how well she treated Harry, but you were no Gryffindor orphan friends with her kids.

Would be nice to be around such a happy family for Christmas though.

"Thanks, Harry, but I guess I'll have to say no to that. The Weasley didn't really invite me so..." you were saying but got interrupted.

"You surely should come. I'm a Weasley, consider yourself invited" Ginny showed up out of nowhere, accompanying you two in your walk to the Great Hall.

You looked surprised. "Still, I..."

"Come, 'cause I will warn my mom and if you aren't there, she'll find you herself," she remarked, making Harry shake his head in agreement.

"Okay, maybe I'll turn up" you finally agreed, slowly bowing your head, scared of what you just said yes to.

"Now, can I steal Harry from you for a second?" she asked, already escorting him away from you.

"Sure" you answered, but they both couldn't be seen anymore.

***

When the day to leave Hogwarts came, Harry waited for you in front of the Slytherin common room. He got some stares, but he didn't seem to care, smiling when he finally saw me.

"Harry, what are you doing here?"

"Ginny asked me to make sure you'd come. She said her mom was anxious to meet you" he answered, getting his bags from the floor.

"Still don't get it. Why would Ginny want me there? We're not really friends" you pointed out, walking down the corridor.

"I suppose she knows how much would it mean to me to have my friends around during this dark time" he answered, giving real thought to it "Shes a nice lad, Ginny"

"Yeah, I know" you commented, elbowing him, just to mess around, He blushed. "But I'm glad to be going. My parents don't believe in celebrations, so we generally just stay home, and eat dinner earlier during Christmas"

"So this will be different for you. The Weasleys stay up until late" Potter explained.

We had finally arrived inside the train.

"I think I'll like the change," you said, before settling down with Harry, Ron and Hermione in one cabin.

Ron was mostly quiet during the whole trip, but Hermione filled the silence with a bunch of random information. She was said she could not spend the holiday with the Weasleys but she didn't want you to forget to write to her everything that happened during your time there.

"Including me?" you asked, confused if she wanted you to write her as well.

"Well, of course! I need a female opinion about what happened as well" she replied, with a smile, hugging you not too tight.

You smiled back, happy with the request.

"Hermione, it's ‘what might happen’ ". It'll probably be another boring week" Ron finally spoke, shocking me to hear his voice. Remarkably because he was correcting Hermione, which is, again, a shock.

"Ha! As if Fred and George wouldn't prank anyone!" she claimed, and we all just laugh, because it was certain that they had something planned for the holiday. You just had to wait to see.

Bags in hand, you all didn't have to wait long to see Mr and Mrs Weasley in the crowd. They waved, making Ginny run in their direction. Ron walked behind her, not as happy to see his parents. Harry was next in line, leaving you with Fred and George because you were having some trouble with how heavy your bags were. It didn't occur to you that you wouldn't need as many clothes as you planned for just one week away.

One of the twins nudged the other, who then showed up right next to you. "Need any help?" the nudged one offered, throwing his only bag on his shoulder and offering you a helping hand.

It was only when you faced the twin that you realized it was Fred. He had a small freckle next to his chin that George hadn't. 

The help made you confuse if you should accept or not, but George added over his shoulder. "If you don't accept, mom will be angry at us and then I'll be angry at you"

You sighted. "Okay, I'll take your help" you agreed, giving Fred one of your bags "Thanks, Fred" you added, making he amazed with the fact that you differed him from his brother.

"Always here for you" he answered, attempting to be funny, but sounding more serious than he should.

You both walked a bit faster, trying to catch up to the rest of the group. Mrs Weasley, a short warm lady was still hugging Harry in a very, very tight hug when you and Fred finally got there.

She let Harry Potter go when she caught your face. "Oh! You must be the one Ginny told me about! y/N, isn't it?" she asked, walking closer to you.

"Prepare yourself" Fred tilted his head in your direction, whispering advice. You only had time to look at his direction before being sucked into a tight hug from Mrs Weasley.

"Nice meeting you, Mrs Weasley," you said once she loosened the embrace, allowing you not just to talk but also to breath. Fred hid a smile at your side.

"Please, call me Molly" she entreated. You smiled at her, in a way of showing that you'd do as asked. She held your hand to show you where to go.

Mr Weasley only had the chance to wave at you, since Mrs Weasley was leading you surprisingly fast for such a small person, still, you managed to wave back, without dropping your bag. While walking, you could hear the laughs around you, swearing you were recognizing Fred's, because it was probably the loudest.

Harry caught up to you two, walking next to you when he commented: "I said you'd be welcomed".

***

Lastly inside the Burrow, Ginny guided you to her room, where you'd be sleeping. Fred followed you, dropping carefully your bag on the floor, just before leaving to his room.

The house was way smaller than yours, however, that wasn't a problem for you. It did feel very welcoming, with a warmth that was very welcomed in such cold weather. Ginny had a mattress on the floor for you, which was more than you could have asked, showing up like that, practically uninvited.

"I feel like I haven't thanked you properly for allowing me here, Ginny. Feels good to be around a big happy family for the holiday" you said to her when you both were going back to downstairs.

"Hey, y/N, no worries. I don't bother with a full house, and I need another girl around to handle these many boys" she retorted, making me laugh.

"Just out of curiosity, did you tell your mom everything about me?"

"Everything?" she repeated, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah, like, I'm Slytherin and all" you explained. 

She pulled her bright red hair back before answering. "Well, no. Not that it would matter. She would need only to look at you" 

"What do you mean?" you were confused by what she had said, scared that you could have an evil face or something like that.

"You shine with power, y/N. That Sorting hat would be a scam if it hadn't put you in Slytherin" she explained, avoiding looking at you.

You were about to ask what she had meant with that when Mrs Weasley appeared in front of you. "Ginny, come, I need your help" 

The girl followed her mom with a frowny face, not very happy with losing free time with Molly.

Without anyone to talk, you went outside the Burrow, just to stare at the sky, not knowing exactly what to do. You planned on finding Potter, but he wasn't outside once you got there.

"And Hermione thought I'd have something to tell" you mumbled, not to anyone, in particular, getting surprised when you noticed you had been heard.

"What did you just say?" a masculine voice asked, making you turn your face to look back.

Fred and George were walking in your direction, both with a smirk on their faces. With their faces a little away you couldn't differ each from the other, especially because they changed their shirts to red sweaters.

"Me? Nothing" you said, looking away from them.

"I heard something, didn't you too, brother?" one of them asked, in a mocking tone.

"I did, Freddie," George asked, sitting next to me on the grass "So what was it?"

"It what?" you replied, trying to mock as well.

Fred sat on your other side and look at you. "What did you complain, darling?"

The "darling" was like a weak spot for you, almost forcing you to confess. "Hermione asked me to write to her everything that happens during my time in here" you explained, a little angry at yourself for spilling the tea.

"Your complaint is because you hate writing?" George asked, looking at you confused.

"Definitely not, brother, she writes a lot more than necessary" Fred was the one that answered, smirking lightly.

You stared back at Fred, with a mix of feeling because of what he had said. Happy because he noticed, but interested in why he noticed.

"I do?" you asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

He swallowed hard before answering. "I, for instance, don't write a thing during Snape's class, but you can't keep your hand down".

You smiled. "Well, of course! I need to write down the things he says, otherwise, I get everything wrong. You just don't care about getting everything wrong."

"Potion's classes are only cool when there are explosions" Fred affirmed, closing his eyes for a second. You took the moment to contemplate his lovely face in the sunlight.

"Agreed, brother" George said on your side, stopping you from keeping with the stare. "So, y/N, what's your problem with writing to Hermione then?"

You pressed your lips together, embarrassed to answer. "It's just... I don't know any of you enough to have stories to tell her."

Fred and George exchanged a suspicious look before facing me again. George even replaced himself in the grass, so he could face me better.

"That's something we can resolve," Fred said, smiling while shaking his head up and down, nonstop.

"We can make you have tons of things to tell Hermione" George added.

"I bet she'll be happy to hear about everything the Weasley's Twins have been doing" Fred commented, making his brother laugh and making you worried.

"Why do I feel like I'm gonna regret this?"

"Oh, y/N, because you will" answered Fred, smiling so bright that all his teeth were showing.

***

Since you had arrived on a Saturday and Christmas was only on Friday, you, Fred and George had not many events to attend as such exchanging presents or singing carols.

The Twins planned to steal you to a bunch of activities, that, according to Fred, had all been schedule so every day you'd have a new prank to assist. Yeah, assist. They were not only making you their accomplice but also their partner. 

It was late in the night, yet on Saturday, that your first task happened. You were sleeping on the floor of Ginny's room when you heard the slight knock on the door. Not used with sleeping in a crowded house, you were able to wake fast, visibly scared.

You ran your finger through your hair, attempting to look better even though you were with a sleep face in your nightclothes. You tried to open the door without waking Ginny up, but, by the looks of her, she would need a loud hard-core rock playing to wake.

"Fred? George? What are you guys doing here at... what time is it?" you asked, walking out of the room and closing the door behind you. 

"It's almost five A.M. but that's not the point" one of them answered, but the darkness didn't allow you to distinguish which.

"Five A.M?" you repeated, a little louder than you planned, just to get a "shhh!" from the twins.

"Follow us, come on" one of them instructed, getting down by the stairs.

You followed, although scared of what were they planning. One of them said "Lumos" to get a little light on your way, which you were thankful, because you practically couldn't see a thing since the sun wasn't out yet.

When you arrived in the kitchen, they finally stopped walking.

"We decided that our first prank should be a breakfast one," one of them said, and you recognized it was Fred because of his pyjamas, it had an "F" in front of his jumper.

"What is breakfast prank?"

"y/N, you do know nothing about pranks, do you?" George asked, laughing a bit. 

You nodded, ashamed. You were only close to Harry, and he wasn't much of a prankster. You had other Slytherin friends, but you used to only talk to them about your house points and to ask for help to study; therefore, besides not having someone to teach you how to fool everybody, you also didn't have someone to fool.

"George and I thought of a food colouring spell" Fred explained the plan to you, ignoring the fact that you had never pranked anybody before.

"Is there such a thing?" you questioned. You were not the smartest witch, but you had never heard of such spell before.

"I came up with it" Fred revealed, pressing his lips together, a mix of ashamed and proud.

You looked at him, amazed. The Twins didn't have the best grades in Hogwarts, but that was just because they didn't want to be good at academics. They were good at what they wanted to be good.

"It will turn everything mom cooks black like she burned it" George continued, going toward the stove.

He and Fred got their wands and cast the words, but you were still analysing the impact of such a prank.

"Doesn't seem like such a nightmare" you pointed out, once they had finished and were laughing a bit louder than they should.

They both froze at your words, turning their faces in your direction like you had just said you-know-who's name.

"What?" you didn't understand their shock.

"Did you just say we made a bad prank?" Fred asked, without relaxing his face.

"It's not bad, it's just simple" you corrected, much for their surprise, making they gasp with your words.

"A too simple prank? Did you hear that, Fred?" George faced his brother, not moving his body.

Oh, Merlin, what had you done.

"I heard that. I feel like she's challenging us" he answered, arching an eyebrow.

"We should not run from a challenge, though" George pointed out, squinting.

"And she should participate as well since she doubted us" Fred added, looking back at you.

"I thought I was already your partner in crime," you said, holding your laugh.

"Go back to bed, dear y/N. And be prepared" Fred advised, trying to make a mysterious face but failing.

"We'll find you when we're ready" George added, copying his brother's face.

You no longer could hold your laugh, letting it out but trying to make it not as loud as it usually was. Shaking your head, unable to conform with what you were hearing, you headed back to the stairs, to go to Ginny's room.

"She's mocking us, brother" you heard when you were going up the stairs.

"Indeed she is" the other twin agreed.

***

On Sunday morning, a black breakfast awaited you, one you could only smile at, trying to pretend you knew nothing about.

Ginny didn't seem confused though.

Sitting on the table, Fred and George laughed hard, listening to their mother's complaint.

"Do you boys know how many eggs I threw away before I realised you've cast a spell on my stove? Do you think the Ministery will be happy to hear you've been performing magic outside of school?" their mother snapped.

"Who said it was us, mom?" George questioned.

You were again able to differ him from his brother because of his jumper. This time, a green one, where Twin #2 could be read. You knew it had to be George since he was the second born, as pointed out by Hermione once.

" 'Who said it was us' " his mom repeated, in a mocking tone, using a newspaper to hit them in the back of their heads.

You laughed hard of the scene, almost ashamed of the doing until Harry and Ginny started laughing with you, which only made you wanna laugh more.

You sat down on the only left chair available, in the middle of Fred and Ginny. The 'Twin #1' fastly moved his head in your direction.

"We have planned the biggest prank ever" he whispered so only you could hear.

You smirked. "Do you guys ever chill?"

"Never" he answered, smiling back at you.

"Percy is coming by Wednesday but Bill and Charlie won't be able to come" Mrs Weasley informed while putting a fried egg at the plate in front of you.

"Thanks, Mrs Weasley, you didn't have to," you said but was glad by her act since you were hungry. Even though the egg was pitch black, it still smelled genuinely good.

"Molly, dear" she corrected you.

The boys next to you sighted.

"Are you kidding me? The worst of us is coming but the cool ones no?" Fred asked, frowning his forehead.

Molly hit him in the head again. "More respect with your older brother," she demanded, but he rapidly ignored, rolling his eyes followed by his twin and Ron.

You had no idea what to expect from Percy since he didn't have much fame in his household. You remembered his appearance, redhaired just like the others, but you never talked to him, so you had no idea if he was all that bad.

After breakfast, the family got outside to play quidditch, and you, not knowing how to play, stayed sitting on the grass, just observing the game. Mr Weasley stood next to you, not sitting, but facing you still.

"Not gonna play, y/N?" he asked. "They surely are missing one"

"Oh, no, Mr Weasley. I have no idea how to" you answered, embarrassed when he acknowledge your words.

"Are you serious?" he questioned. "I can't believe the boys haven't taught you yet"

"I don't think they know" you replied, looking back at them, while they were sorting their teams.

"Hey, boys!" Mr Weasley called, making your friends face in your direction. You could feel your cheeks going red. "Can you guys teach y/N how to play quidditch? She doesn't know"

"What?!" you heard and assumed it came from Fred because he was trotting in your direction. "You actually don't know how to play?"

You shook your head a 'no'.

"Well, then, you have to learn!" George urged, following his brother.

"Come on, we'll teach you". Fred, now closer to you, reached for your hand, and strongly pulled you up.

"No, guys, it doesn’t bother me not knowing..." you started but Fred interrupted.

"You have the chance to learn with the best, y/N, let's go" he bagged, distorting his face so his eyes looked bigger. "Please"

You sniffed. "Ok, fine" you surrendered, making Fred smile. He pulled you closer to him, passing one of his arms around your shoulders. When you two passed through George, he followed you, embracing you from the other side, copying his brother.

"She's on my team!" Fred shouted to the rest of the players, causing Ron to roll his eyes, Harry to laugh, and Ginny to clap fervently, jumping with happiness.

You could now, more them before, feel the red on your cheeks, and you could only imagine it was redder than the Weasleys' hair.

"Get ready to become the best at quidditch, y/N" Fred whispered on your ear when his brother let you go.

"Oh, yeah?" you faked confusion.

"After all, you have the best teacher for yourself" he explained, which caused you to burst out laughing.

___

Part 2

[karasu-hieis-dragon]

PEACE AND CHAOS

Sith Kenobi and my Jedi OC Kyrhyraeth Scath. Kyra has been fighting her feelings for Obi Wan Kenobi for years. She would never allow herself to give in because her loyalty to the Order is too strong.

Or so she thought.

I am marking this Explicit NSFW 18+ because of smut in later chapters and cussing.

Sith Kenobi is a gentleman, he will never take what he wants from Kyra. Permission is hot. I will beat a mother fucker with another mother fucker who says otherwise. There is a small amount of man handling though so if that is a trigger please keep scrolling.

Peace and Chaos Chapt. 1

The heavy rain was falling onto the city streets from the dark Coruscant sky, the drops slamming onto the ground, hitting your ears like echoes of ancient chants from a time long gone. She stood out in the storm letting the rhythm of the water pour onto her cloak, she imagined this is what it felt like having fingers strumming across an instrument. She was used to the cold rain, it always made her feel renewed, it was never a bother, in fact it made her feel powerful. As a child she would crave the storms that would rage outside, it calmed her mind when the water would hit her bedroom window, it was like music to her ears. No, the rain never did bother her, what did though was the dark red tendrils that were weaving their way into her Force signature. The swirling red vortex mixing with hers, it was never unsettling and if she was being honest it felt like home.

Bastard.

She knew who it was, she knew what he wanted and no amount of closing herself off helped. He knew her too well he always knew how to get in, he always could but she would always let him in no matter what. They were just children when they met at the Jedi Temple, both ripped from their homes - or at least that is how they felt at the time – brought in at the age of ten to train to become Jedi. Trained to be peacekeepers only to be thrown into a war neither wanted to fight in. She will never forget the day they met, they were just children, but their bond was instant.

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The first day of Jedi training for the young Force Sensitives was with Master Yoda, the Younglings were brought into a big room and told to have a seat on the floor. She held off sitting so she could look around the room at all the Younglings to see who she may want to sit next to and the moment she saw him she knew she wanted to sit next to him. All the other kids were already sitting up front and center talking to each other eager to learn how to become a Jedi. But not him, no, he was alone in the corner as if he was trying to hide, focused looking at his hands folded on his lap. He looked scared and it made her sad, there was something pushing her to meet him, a tugging inside of her soul that told her this was the right thing to do. So, without any more hesitation she walked over and sat down by his side. She felt as if she was home. When she took her place next to him, he looked over at her and just smiled, even back then his smile was warm, and it called to her. Looking at her with those eyes so blue they looked like the storms she loved to watch through her bedroom window back home.

She reached her hand out to him and asked his name, he surprisingly didn’t hesitate he just moved his hand out slowly and shook her hand. It must have taken every ounce of confidence he could gather to respond “I’m Obi-Wan Kenobi” whispered in a shy voice. His face lit up though when she repeated his name back to him “Obi-Wan Kenobi. That’s a neat name.” He didn’t let her hand go he just kept slowly shaking her hand up and down and after what felt like a lifetime he finally sputtered out “W - what’s um, what’s you – your name?” Without missing a beat, she said “I am Kyrhyraeth Scath but you can call me Kyra” followed by a little giggle. From that moment on the two were inseparable.

She liked to tell herself the reason they had bonded so quickly was because she had punched another Youngling across the face for him, but she knew better than that. At lunch that first day a Bantha of a kid came up and stole his dessert right from his tray, Kyra didn’t even think twice, she just walked up to the kid, hauled off and punched him. She came bouncing back with his dessert in hand leaving the Youngling behind her bleeding and crying.

It left Obi-Wan totally speechless.

Looking back though she realized it was the balance between her and Obi-Wan. Where Kyra saw a chaotic storm in his eyes, Obi-Wan saw a calming peace in hers. It was almost tragic but they both found solace in each other.

They were drawn to each other’s energy.

Balance.

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Kyra was trying to remain strong; she knew it was wrong to go see him but like a moth to the flame...

If the Jedi Council knew she was in contact with him there would be repercussions and she could not allow that to happen. She thought the rain would help drowned him out, but it seemed to only make it worse. The red tendrils wove their way into her head, swirling and mixing with her purple Force signature. Purple. Of all the kyber colors that could have chosen her, she gets purple. Both light and dark power. Rare. Obi-Wan had tried to comfort her the day they built their lightsabers but it was futile, it was supposed to be a day to celebrate but all she could think about was that she would be susceptible to the Dark Side.

In a way, her younger self was right.

You know you are going to come see me you always do.

Maker, Kenobi, why are you doing this?

Last name basis now? I am crushed.

Fuck off.

Only if you’re the one I’m fucking.

Where are you?

You know.

And just as quickly as he had invaded Kyra’s head, he left it just as fast, knowing it would drive her crazy.

And it did.

He knew every kriffing button to push and she fell for it every fucking time. She allowed it, she craved it. She needed his chaos.

Soaking wet, standing outside his door like a lost loth cat, dripping wet and cold. Cursing at herself for always falling for his shit.

If the Council knew…

But she didn’t have a chance to finish her thought, the door abruptly opened cutting it off. Of course, he knew she was out there, kriffing Force bond. He leaned against the door frame in the cockiest fashion looking very much like a Sith Lord. Dressed in all black, black fitted tunic, loose pants and red belt draped around his waist perfectly.

Maker, Why does he have to look so handsome? Those tortured amber eyes that replaced the beautiful cerulean hue, they still sparkled every time they saw her and she wasn’t sure how that was possible.

“It’s because you make me happy.”

“Shut up.”

“Your feelings betray your tone, little one.”

“Don’t fucking call me that, you Sith bastard.”

“Again, your feelings betray you.”

She tried storming past him to get inside and out of the rain, knocking into his arm hard as she tried to push by. Before she could get even a step past him, he had reached out grabbing her arm, slamming her back against the wall. He pinned her hands back with the Force then using his right hand he grabbed her chin making her look up to have direct eye contact with him. Kyra looked at him with defiance, she knew he would never hurt her, so she stood her ground. This only made it worse, he loved when she didn’t take his shit.

“Let me fucking go, Kenobi”

“Say my real name.”

Bending down slightly he brought his lips to her ear and with a low growl he whispered.

“My Sith name.”

Kyra tensed up, he could feel it in his bones, and he relished in it.

“That is NOT your real name Obi-Wan and I would rather you kill me than even whisper that filthy name.”

“You wound me.” Tsking low into her ear. “Do you find me so barbaric that you think I would ever kill you? Besides, Kyrhyraeth if I kill you how would I ever make you…” He took in a deep breath then exhaled right next to her ear. “…scream my name.”

It took all of Kyra’s strength not to collapse, feeling the burn swirling in her stomach and the pooling between her legs that wasn’t rainwater.

“Oooh, you like that thought.”

Obi-Wan pulled back, snaking his calloused hand across Kyra's cheek then gently grabbed a handful of her wet hair. He was mere inches from her face – Stars, why does he have to smell so good? His warm body pressed against hers, amber eyes lit with the flames from the candles he had burning in the room, lips twisted in a sensual smirk. He knew she wasn’t going to budge; she never gave into him when it came to intimacy but that didn’t stop him from trying. He knew she craved him so he was relentless but Kyra never wavered, the Order was too important to her.

He has never met another person like her, she was a perfect storm. Defiant but loyal. Strong but caring. Dedicated but so fucking reckless. She was perfection.

He looked down at her wet, dripping form and he couldn’t help but think how beautiful she was pinned to the wall by him. Her drenched flaming red hair was sticking to her pale, freckled face, those fierce blue eyes staring up at him with all the strength she could conjure yet - there was something else there, there always was.

They were filled with love.

Love for him, a Sith Lord and no matter how hard she tried to hide it; he knew she loved him. Just like he loved her except he would never try and hide that from her. Ever.

Fuck her Jedi Code.

Her lips were closed into a tight perse, eyes narrowed now shooting daggers at him. He loved it, he loved that he caused her to react this way, he thrived off it just as much as she did, but he would never cross a line she didn’t invite him to cross. He was a Sith, yes but he will always respect her, she was his universe, he would never take his anger and hate out on her. She deserved better than that, she deserved better than what the Jedi Council offered her as well.

She saw his eyes soften, and his face relax. As hard as she tried to put on a good act she knew he saw right through her, so many times almost caving, before he became a Sith and after, neither were easy to say no to and right now was proving to be no different. He was so close, his eyes pleading with hers, all she had to do was give him the hint of an approval and his lips would come crashing down on hers. She needed to push those type of thoughts aside though, she was already giving a big fuck you to the Order by forming this kriffing attachment to a Sith she will be damn if she makes it worse.

“Please let me go, Obi-Wan”

Kyra felt his Force grip and hand grip loosen, hands dropping to his sides in mock defeat, but his eyes never left hers. He finally allowed her to walk past him, he had a fire lit so it warm in his apartment and it felt really good. She was freezing in her wet clothes.

Without a word he turned on his heel and walked into his bedroom, returning a few minutes later with one of his long sleeve shirts, a pair of pajama pants and a towel, all of them black.

“Here, as much as I love seeing you disheveled, you’re going to get sick if you stay in those wet rags” He smirked at his jab towards the Order for their choice of robes they made the Jedi wear.

She knew he wasn’t going to let up so she grabbed the dry clothes out of his hands and headed to the refresher. She looked at herself in the mirror, hair tangled, face flush and her robes a wrinkled wet mess. She didn’t understand his attraction to her, he could have any woman he wanted in the galaxy but he always came to her. Then the memories started to flood her brain, it had been the worst fucking year of her life. They had fought the night before he left on his mission to protect the Duchess of Mandalore. He begged her to let her dedication to the Jedi Order go, he was so worried he wouldn’t make it back alive and he wanted to have what could have been their last night together to be special.

But she denied him, he poured his heart out to her, and she fucking denied him. Not only that, she had lied to herself. He was everything to her and she let him leave not knowing if she would ever see him again. She let him leave thinking she didn’t want him. It was the biggest regret of her life because she did love him but she refused to tell him. He loved her but she broke him. Then much to her distain he allowed the Duchess to put him back together. Kyra was all he ever fucking wanted.

Until Satine.

Tears started to roll down her cheeks.

Kyra took a deep breath cursing herself as she removed her lightsaber, focusing on the cold, black metal in her hand. Putting it down on the sink she got undressed and stepped into the shower turning the water on to the hottest setting letting the water pour over her. Get yourself together for fucks sake. She grabbed his soap and it smelled distinctively like Obi-Wan. Gods, why does he have to smell so good? Spicy, woodsy and….Maker, why does he do this to me? Kriff, how the hells am I still a Jedi?

She finished washing her body and hair then she just stayed there letting the hot water run out before she allowed herself to get out. After drying off she slipped into his shirt and pajama pants, throwing her hair up in the towel. When she walked back out to the living room she noticed he had put out some cheeses, meats, crackers and a fresh pot of tea. He was standing facing the fire, fists balled up she could feel his unease. Kyra sat down on his overly plush sofa and poured them both some tea trying to ignore the tension, then he finally spoke.

“She didn’t mean anything to me.”

“Are we really going to do this right now?”

He still wouldn’t face her, she knew it was because he was ashamed.

“It doesn’t matter Obi-Wan, you owe me nothing. You were protecting her and were on the run for a year. Shared trauma. I don’t blame you.”

“I know it still hurts you.”

“A lot still hurts me.”

He finally turned around, eyes solemn.

“You’re a terrible Sith, you know that?” She teased.

“Only when I’m around you.”

Smiling weakly he walked over to taking a seat next to her on the sofa.

“You know, while we are on the subject the same could be said about you, Jedi.”

“I like you better when you’re a dick.” Kyra smiled weakly.

You both sat there in silence, sipping tea, enjoying the delicious treats he had put out for the two of you. Though comfortable there was still the underlining tension of so many things not said. As many times as Kyra had agreed to see him this is the first-time things had escalated this way. It was usually quick meetings to have kaf and catch up and torture each other but this time it was different, and she couldn’t figure out why. Suddenly the silence was deafening. Before she realized what she was doing and before she could stop herself, she blurted out a question that she instantly wished she could take back.

“Did you love her?”

Silence.

Fuck it, I have taken it this far and the damage is done.

“I asked you a question.”

Silence again, he just sat there looking at his hands on his lap, like he did the first day she met him.

“Answer. Me.”

He let out a shaky breath, closing his eyes.

“Yes, but not the way you are thinking. Yes, I cared for her as a friend but that was as far as the love went. I would never allow myself. She was just a pawn to get back at you for hurting me.”

He opened his eyes to look at Kyra who was sitting there with tears streaming down her face. Suddenly there was rage behind her eyes, as many times as he has pushed her, he has never seen her allow that emotion to take over her. Even in the worst of battles she was composed. No, his little Jedi was at her breaking point and it made him tense.

Shit.

The next words she spoke were strangled as she fought to control her emotions.

“Did. You. Fuck. Her?” She stated through gritted teeth.

There it is, she finally allowed herself to let go enough to ask the question that has been plaguing her since you came back alive and stupidly told her about Satine. Obi-Wan had instantly regretted it not realizing she would harbor the pain for so long.

At the time he just wanted her to hurt like he did. Not realizing she had been hurting just as bad choosing the Jedi Code over him.

Maker, Kenobi, you’re a fucking idiot.

He was finally snapped out of his stupor by her yelling, seeing her hands curled into fists, shaking.

“YOU SITH ASSHOLE, ANSWER MY QUESTION!”

Obi-Wan turned to look her in the eyes, relieved he was finally able to tell her the truth. He gripped her shoulders; he could feel how hard she was shaking trying to control her anger and it pained him. So much of her time requires her to remain calm and not show emotions such as fear and anger. She was allowing herself to let go and it was intense. He raised his hands to cup her face using his thumbs to wipe the tears away. Her eyes were pleading with his to just answer the question.

“No, I didn’t.” He exhaled the breath he was holding, raggedly.

Then he saw a change in her eyes, the rage and pain turned to relief and something else he couldn’t identify.

Then she was crashing her lips into his.

All the pain melted away as soon as her lips touched his, she finally felt so free.

Fuck the Jedi Code.

Than you for reading please let me know if you want to be tagged for future chapters.

[valhallasubstitute]

The Things You Deserve

--Sihtric x reader

After the re-taking of Dunholm you go to find Sihtric. When you do he’s a little bruised and more than a little upset - that doesn’t stop you from loving him though. While you help him bathe Sihtric reveals some of his past and you begin to understand how a man like him deserves to be treated.

A/N: So this is set just after season 2 ep 4, I thought this version of Sihtric would work real well but it ended up really sad so I’m sorry anon, I hope I did your vision justice.

WARNINGS: Mentions of past abuse, mentions of injury, angst? fluff – some real lovin’ being given to our Dane boy who may or may not resemble a rat but he is sad. Really fuckin’ sad

Wc: 1599

It was dawn and Dunholm was quiet. You stepped over many drunken, sleeping forms as you moved through the main yard. The feasting had been magnificent as it always was in Uhtred’s victory, ale had not stopped flowing for many hours and you had no doubt that the celebrations would continue today and into the night once more.

You had partaken in drinking and games with your fellow warriors, enjoyed the buzz of victory and the end of a blood feud but you weren’t oblivious to the look in your lovers eye. Nor how he had left your side as you slept not ten minutes ago.

You hadn’t been with the quiet Dane for long, a few months at most, but in that time you had become inseparable. If he was sitting you would be found in his lap, if he was playing games you would be found beating him, and if he was in battle you would be found at his side.

You had kept a close eye on Sihtric as the square was made for Ragnar and Kjartan. You watched him bask in Ragnar’s revenge, Ragnar’s justice and Ragnar’s broken rage.

You also watched it break him in ways neither of you were expecting.

You saw the way his eyes watered, how he flinched as Ragnar just. Kept. Stabbing.

He had been quiet for the rest of the night. He never refused a cup of ale handed to him and he never denied your touch but barely a word passed his lips, physically your lover was there but the look in his eye was far away and it pained you.

The guards at the gate let you pass without argument, with Kjartan dead there was no threat.

Not right now.

You found him at the lakes edge. The sun was rising and you admired his silhouette, the light seemed to glide over the sharp angles of his cheekbones and jaw, even his arms. It softened them and bathed him in pale gold.

He did not hear you approach, and the way he flinched as you slipped your hand into his made your stomach lurch.

‘I did not mean to startle you, my love.’ You spoke the words quietly, his eyes were wide like a startled deer’s. You made small circles with your thumb over his knuckle and the movement seemed to pull him back to the present. He swallowed deeply, blinking rapidly before he spoke.

‘I came bathe…’

‘I shall leave you to it then, I only came to see what pulled you from our bed.’ You turned to leave with a smile but his grip on your hand tightened.

‘Stay Y/N. I would like you to stay...’ You could see his tears then, too stubborn to spill but they danced in his eyes regardless.

‘I will not leave you Sihtric.’

He nodded and started to remove his armour. As you were unlacing your own you heard him hiss through clenched teeth. He dropped his arms in defeat, half snarling at the garment as you stood in front of him. You started to remove it yourself and Sihtric didn’t stop you, his eye would not meet yours, instead he watched your fingers work. You loosened the ties with care, unbuckled the belts with trained efficiency and on your tip toes you pulled the main bulk of armour over his head with only the smallest indication of pain.

When he stood naked before you couldn’t help but take a sharp inhale, even with the purple bruise that was covering his ribs, he was a sight to be seen. There was little blood but the wound would still need to be cleaned. You bent slightly, taking your dress in hand and ripped a piece from the bottom, Sihtric looked down at you, confusion clear as day on his face.

‘You can buy me a knew one with all that sliver Uhtred keeps promising you. Now get in the water, I need to undress.’ He did as he was told with a small nod and the ghost of a smile. He still wasn’t himself but it was something.

Sihtric stood waist deep in the water, his face towards the sun once more. You announced yourself as you approached, a small cough and light splashes of water against your thighs. Only his head turned in acknowledgement, his eyes roaming over your form freely as you came to his side.

Neither of you spoke as you started to wash him, the rag of your dress was soft even soaked in water, the fabric glided over his skin smoothly, washing away the grim and dirt of battle. He smiled properly when you washed his face. He had closed his eyes in anticipation for the cold water not your warm lips on his cheek. You watched his eyes flutter open as you washed down his neck, following his tattoo down to his shoulders and chest.

He seemed to relax at your touch but not completely. Once the front of him was clean you moved to his back. It was broad and muscular and you admired it as much as you did the front of him. You took your time cleaning his wound, it had undoubtedly been cause by a fierce whack of a shield, only the tense of his muscles showed you how much it hurt. You brushed your lips over it once, twice, three times before you heard a tiny breathless laugh from above you.

‘I am no child Y/N.’

‘I know but even the most accomplished warriors deserve kisses.’

You went back to aimlessly running the cloth over the expanse of his back, eventually replacing the rag with your finger. Despite the chill of the water his skin was still warm and you found yourself humming, lost in the intricacies of his skin.

You joined every freckle with an invisible line and traced every scar with interest. You knew the story behind most of them, it was inevitable when you participated in pillow talk with one of Uhtred’s men. There was one scar that you hadn’t noticed before now. It sat just beneath his right shoulder blade and it was long and faded. Even so you could tell that at the time it had been nasty. Painful.

Had anyone else been watching they would have thought that running your finger over it caused Sihtric pain even now.

His whole body tensed. It was like his entire being collapsed in on itself and the scar was an vacuum, sucking him in.

‘Sihtric, what’s wrong-‘

‘Kjartan.’ His voice trembled slightly and your heart shattered. Grief and guilt and relief was the cause of Sihtric’s distance and tears. You chose not to speak, instead you pressed your cheek into his back and wrap your arms around his frame gently. ‘Kjartan was not fond of me – his bastard. He…he would beat me as punishment or as entertainment. For grieving my mother he had me lashed. It left that one.’ There was forced indifference in his voice.

‘That one … has he left many marks on you?’ Sihtric did not answer, you could feel as well as hear the shaky inhale he took. He took one of your fingers in his large hand and placed it up to his chest. He dragged the pad over the skin, enough pressure that you could feel the slight dip of another scar. When he lifted your hand you had expect him to place it back but instead he placed it onto another on his chest, and another on his thigh and another and another. Some where worse than others, all of them old enough that you hadn’t seen them.

Once he had traced the last of them he took your entire hand in his and brought it to his center of his chest. You forced your tears to stop and the lump in your throat to disappear.

‘You did not deserve such mistreatment. You do not… you do not.’

‘I was his-‘

‘There are no excuses for what he did to you. Bastard or not you were his son and you are a man that deserves many things and that- that was not one of them.’

‘I do not know what I deserve.’

‘Then I shall tell you Sihtric, if you trust me to be honest.’

You removed your head from his back and gently tugged him to face you. He did with little resistance and together you walked back to land.

The two of you sat in your under-garments on the shore line, Sihtric lay between your legs as you re-braided his hair. You told him again that his father was wrong in his mistreatment of him. You told him that he deserved respect and renowned as a warrior. You told him that he deserved the love and loyalty of Uhtred. You told him that he deserved the love of a good woman and many beautiful children , children that he was capable in loving in a way his father never was. And that was because he was a better man.

‘The things you deserve Sihtric are all good and they are endless, my love.’

-*-*-*-*-*-

And in the years to come, despite the battles and the politics and the questionable haircuts Sihtric came to believe your words. The scars of Kjartan faded to sliver and memory, new ones covering them but he didn’t mind. While he never came to believe that he deserved you he would never deny you kissing his wounds better, once, twice, three times just as you had done in the lake by Dunholm.

[monikafilefan]

seven years

This is an answer to a couple different anon prompts from a long time ago mixed together. One with Maggie finding Scully’s journal and seeing what she’d written to Mulder. The other prompt was for Mulder to spend a lot of time at Scully’s place after “all things.”  

tagging @today-in-fic 

*

Margaret Scully considers herself to be a great many things in life. She’s a conservative woman of God who has quietly voted democrat since the day she said “I do.” A loyal navy wife who has worked her slender fingers to the bone as a stay-at-home mother of four; a stickler for rules who occupies her time spent alone with a well-kept home; a grandmother who loves to spoil her grandbabies with cookies before dinner and always reads “just one last story, Grandma” at bedtime.

She also considers herself an excellent judge of character and has learned over the years when not to pry in the private lives of others without invitation. Though she cannot say she has never let curiosity take over and wishes her children would invite her in to visit those hidden recesses of their minds once in a while.

But blind is one thing she is not.

Arriving at Dana’s for a quiet Mother’s Day brunch after church today has only confirmed her long-lasting suspicions of the current relationship status between her daughter and Fox Mulder. One look at Dana’s flushed cheeks and swooning smile as she utters her partner’s name across the kitchen table would have been enough to satisfy Maggie’s curiosity about whether or not her daughter has finally embraced what lay within her heart.

Yet, there is much more to be seen here than a meaningful smile and pink cheeks.

And Maggie sees plenty.

A pair of men’s running shoes - size twelve - sit snugly by her daughter’s size sevens. A large leather jacket that smells of familiar cologne is slung over the coat rack by the door, only partially hidden by the sweater she’d gifted Dana four months ago on her first birthday of the new Millenium. There are two mismatched mugs resting next to the coffee maker, two toothbrushes inside a cup in the bathroom - bristles touching in comfortable ease - and two towels hanging dry over the shower door. The entire bathroom smells of men’s body wash.

A new development seven years in the making.  

Maggie dries her hands at the sink and shuts the bathroom door, smiling warmly as she goes.

“You need help cleaning up, Dana?”

“No.” She shakes her head and turns the water off in the kitchen sink, soap bubbles rising above the dirty plates as she wiggles her rubber-gloved fingers. “I’ve got it, Mom, today’s your day. Why don’t you take a seat in the living room? I’ll make us some tea and we can talk.”

It’s her day, too, Maggie thinks, but will never say. There will always be an ache in her heart at the thought of her child unable to raise one of her own, yet her pain is one she soothes regiously on her knees come Sunday morning.

“If you’re sure…”

“I’m fine.”

Maggie eyes the paired coffee mugs once again and taps each one with her manicured nail, giving her daughter a chance to open up if she so chooses.

“Do these need to be washed, too?” she asks, knowing good and well that they do not.

Dana’s blue eyes widen as they flick to Maggie’s but replies with a casually dismissive, “No. I cleaned them this morning,” before resuming her scrubbing. This time, Dana does so with a renewed flush and a bitten lip.

“That’s good, honey,” Maggie says with a reassuring squeeze to her daughter’s shoulder, but cannot resist adding, “It’s good to spend mornings with those you care about,” as she turns to leave her with her thoughts.

As Dana finishes with the dishes, Maggie allows herself to admire the intimate details of her daughter’s home - now that she knows for certain with whom she’s been sharing so much of it lately. Her slender fingers trail along the bookshelf, scanning the titles of anatomy books, several science journals in which Special Agent Dana K. Scully, MD has been published, and some classic novels she recalls her freckled nose being buried in over the years. All are in alphabetical order. So very Dana.

She chuckles and her eyes catch on a leather book that is not neatly tucked in line with the rest. It’s black with golden letters etched on the cover that simply says “Journal.”

Curious, Maggie holds the journal close and contemplates on whether she should peek, selfishly hoping that more than just the surface-level emotion her daughter allows her to see might reveal itself.

Yet, the thought of betraying Dana’s trust unnerves her. Her daughter trusts so few these days.

As she firmly decides to return such private thoughts to where she found them, she notices a piece of yellow paper slipping out of its back pages. Maggie quickly tries to nab the square bookmark so Dana wouldn’t lose her page due to her mother’s intrusion when the spine flips wide open, fanning out words of heartache her eyes simply cannot unsee.

And every word is intended for someone else.

To whom it may concern,

To my family,

Dear Mulder,

I feel time like a heartbeat, the seconds pumping in my breast like a reckoning. The luminous mysteries that once seemed so distant and unreal, threatening clarity in the presence of a truth entertained not in youth, but only in its passage. I feel these words as their meaning were weight being lifted from me, knowing that you’ll read it and share my burden, as I have come to trust no other…

“Oh, Dana,” Maggie exhales through her fingertips, hesitantly scanning the pages scrawled in intimacy with watery eyes.

...Mulder, if the darkness should have swallowed me as you read this, you must never think there was the possibility of some secret intervention, something you might have done. And though we’ve traveled far together this last distance must necessarily be traveled alone...

Months spent watching helplessly as the bright light of life burning within her daughter slowly faded more and more each day was the hardest thing she as a mother had borne. Watching and waiting for what many thought was the inevitable is something she would never wish upon anyone. And here she is, sneakingly seeking some sort of deeper understanding of what her baby girl has endured.

...Mulder, I feel you close though I know you are pursuing your own path. For that I am grateful, more than I could ever express. I need to know you’re out there if I am ever to see through this...

Maggie sighs and swipes at a tear hovering along her lashes, hands shaking as she adjusts the book to replace it, when the piece of paper floats to the floor.

Bending down to retrieve it, the journal pages flutter open across her lap to another time in Dana’s life. Maggie’s chin quivers at the words displayed before her.

Dear Mulder,

There was a time in the not so distant past when I told you I was throwing this journal out. That I chose to leave my moments of weakness in the past. But the time has come to admit to myself that losing my only child, my daughter that was never meant to be with you by my side, only confirms that the ache of what lies within my heart is meant for you to bear along with me. That this time, the distance must necessarily be traveled together…

Maggie gasps at the strength and conviction laced within her daughter’s words. The raw heartache Dana must still feel after burying a piece of herself is a familiar one Maggie does not have the strength to re-expose.

But her baby has not experienced it alone; she’s had her partner, and that has been enough.

Her eyes burn and a hot tear rolls down the swell of her cheek, splashing onto the next page before she can stop it. Pinching the tear-stained paper between her thumb and index finger, she waves it through air in hopes of drying the smeared ink before she shuts the book. As she does, Maggie turns the page fully and sees a single sentence hastily written over and over with what she recognizes as fierce emotion pouring from her child’s fingertips.

Dear Mulder,

Personal interest is all that I have. Personal interest is all that I have... Personal interest: it’s something I’ll always have, even if I should not.

“Oh, goodness.” She should not be reading any of this. If Dana wants her to know what secrets lie in her heart, she will tell her.

Maggie picks up the yellow paper next to her feet and immediately realizes it’s more than merely just a bookmark. It’s a note addressed to “Scully” that’s written in fresh ink and time stamped for today’s date.

I never imagined you’d invite me to see your private thoughts you’ve kept so well guarded over the years. I’m truly grateful; for your loyalty, your trust… for you, Scully. More than words can ever express.

Sniffling and riddled with guilt, Maggie slips the note meant for her daughter to read in private back behind the journal’s last written entry. This time, Dana’s greeting to the man she’s clearly been loving from afar for years is a very different one.

To my constant, my touchstone...

Maggie quickly shuts the book and stands, heart racing at her lack of self-control as she places the leather bound memento back on the shelf.

She has known for years that her daughter loves her partner a great deal, and that he loves her just as fiercely in return. She’s not an oblivious woman and never has been.

No, she thinks, as her eyes scan the room once again to land on a lone photo of Dana and Fox standing close together at a crime scene, staring into one another’s eyes, blind she is certainly not.

“Mom, I have tea brewing if…” Dana enters the room and stops a foot away as she takes in the likely overwhelming expression on her mother’s face. “What’s wrong?”

Maggie swallows a lump in her throat and smiles softly at her daughter across the room. Suddenly she sees the tomboy with wild red hair and dirty knees; then the teenage girl with freckles and braces kissing a boy on their front porch. She sees a proud Dana graduating with honors and jumping head first into med school, only to be eagerly recruited by the FBI. She then sees that pride and determination focus on a quest that Maggie will never truly understand, but she doesn’t need to.

No, Fox Mulder is the reason Maggie now sees a real and fulfilled happiness on her daughter’s face for the very first time.

“Nothing, honey. Nothing at all,” Maggie assures, and she means it.

Dana cocks a brow - just like her father used to - and points to the kitchen. “Okay, well I’ve a kettle on the stove if you want some tea.”

The house phone rings before Maggie can respond and Dana stares at it carefully, as if considering whether or not she should pick up. At the fourth ring, she gives in and answers with a breathy, “Yes, Mulder?”

Maggie smirks, silently moving about the living room to gather her things.

“The audit has been moved up? To tomorrow?” Dana huffs with her back turned, tapping her nails along her desk. “Isn’t this a little short notice coming from Skinner?”

Walking into the kitchen with her purse and sweater slung over her arm, Maggie removes the teapot from the burner before it screams for attention. She pours her daughter a cup the way Dana likes it and sets it on the dining room table as she finishes her call.

“Yeah... yes, I can do that,” Dana murmurs, failing to fight off a smile before swiftly hanging up. “I’m sorry, Mom I-”

“Have to go?”

“Mm,” she confirms and darts her gaze out the window. Maggie knows the summer sun is only partially to blame for the glow on her Irish child’s porcelain cheeks. “Something like that.”

“Fox needs you.” A question isn’t needed this time and both Scully women know why.

“Yes,” Dana draws a deep breath and nods. “It looks that way.”

Maggie has seen more than enough today to know that it’s always been that way. And when her daughter finally looks at her again, Maggie is staring at her gleefully.

“What, Mom?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

Dana runs her tongue across her upper lip, expectant. “You may as well.”

Maggie shrugs nonchalantly, openly grinning now with a motherly confession perched at the tip of her tongue. 

“I may be near-sighted, Dana, but I’m not blind yet,” she teases, reaching up to cup her daughter’s reddening cheek. “Not blind at all.”

*

side note: Mulder leaving evidence of his weekend sleepovers at Scully’s is a little slice of head canon happiness I like to cling to pre Requiem. I do however believe the evidence shows he moved in with her after he came back in “deadalive,” just not beforehand. 

[there-must-be-a-lock]

Lost At Sea (But I Am Home) [Part 1]

Dean x Reader 

Word Count: ~4600

Warnings: Smut (vanilla, but explicit) and Dean emotions. 

A/N: This came from a request by MJ on the occasion of her birthday. It was supposed to be done, like, months ago, but there was much loss of sleep, tearing out of hair, rending of garments, wailing, etc. before it came together. I hope it’s worth the wait. I missed these two.

This is not a coda, exactly, and not a sequel, exactly, to Marked. It’s a fic of its own, but you might want to read that first. There will be two more parts to this. 

Big thanks to @thoughtslikeaminefield​ @fangirlxwritesx67​ @justcallmeasmodeus​ @mskathywriteswords​ @itmighthavebeenintentional​ @fookinghelljensensthighs​ and all the rest of the gay screaming crew for your brainstorming, reading, and inspiration help. Y’all are the best. 

We show great loyalty to the hard times we've been through. We are filled with riches and wonders.  Our love keeps the things it finds, and we dance like drunken sailors,  lost at sea, out of our minds. You find shelter somewhere in me, I find great comfort in you. And I keep you safe from harm.  You hold me in your arms. And I want to go home, but I am home.

“Riches and Wonders,” The Mountain Goats

*

Dean used to think that love might feel like safety. 

When he pictured a relationship, a family, a partner, he used to picture apple pies and picket fences. Love, in his mind, was always tied to comfort, PB&J with the crusts cut off, security, and all the other things he knew he’d never have again. The person he is, the things he does… he wasn’t meant for that soft kind of love. 

Dean’s gotten so used to hiding his softness behind sharp edges and impenetrable walls that sometimes he forgets it’s still there. The sort of woman he once thought he could love would be shredded to pieces before she could get close to it. 

Then he met her. 

When he tries to talk about it, tries to describe the way she makes him feel, he ends up stuttering and stumbling over the words, because it’s nothing like a quiet house on a suburban street. It’s not safety that he feels when he looks at her; it’s nothing so simple as that. She makes him feel about as safe as a fucking hurricane, except that when the wind is howling around them, when rain is falling and the churned-up waves are rising, Dean looks at her and knows, with absolute certainty, that in spite of the storm raging around them and within them and between them, they’re going to be okay. 

So, yeah, Dean was wrong about love. He’s starting to realize that he was wrong about a lot of things.  

*

Dean storms into the kitchen and almost rips off the cabinet door in his haste to get a glass, and he doesn’t notice Cas sitting at the table until he’s slamming the whiskey bottle down on the counter and going for the first gulp. 

Cas just raises an eyebrow. 

“Don’t give me that,” Dean grumbles. He knocks back the rest of the glass and pours another before sitting down across from Cas, slumping in his chair and glaring down at the pitted surface of the table like it’s done him some personal wrong. 

“You had an argument,” Cas says, gravelly and implacable. 

“You listening in?” 

“It wasn’t a conscious effort. More like an unfortunate inevitability.” 

Dean winces. “Guess we were a little loud at the end there.” 

“Yes.” 

Cas doesn’t ask. He just sits there, drinking his tea. Dean really didn’t intend to spill his guts, but fuck, his thoughts are rattling around in his skull, too loud to hold in. 

“When something’s wrong, you’re supposed to fix it,” Dean blurts out. “Right?” 

“What sort of thing are we talking about here?” 

“Just… she was pissy all day. Fuckin’ quiet, and trying to avoid me, and… fuck, I don’t know, I just kinda snapped eventually. Mighta lost it on her a bit. And she was having one of those days, I guess. Had a nightmare last night.” 

“And… you apologized?” 

“Well, yeah. She just wasn’t having it, said she needed space to sort through it on her own. ” 

“And that bothers you.” 

“Fuckin’... yeah. Because if she’s mad at me, I’m the one who’s gotta fix it, right? I’ve gotta take care of it, I’ve gotta make things right, and she just won’t fuckin’ let me. How the fuck am I supposed to make her feel better if she won’t let me?” 

“Did you ask her that?” 

“Well, yeah. She said it wasn’t anything I could fix, it was just… something she had to deal with. Went to work, wouldn’t let me drive her. The fuck am I supposed to do with that?” 

Cas gives him a look like he’s being the densest motherfucker on the planet. 

Dean scowls down at his glass and takes another sip, trying to sort through the tangle of his emotions. His insides are a mess, disorderly and beyond his control, and it’s infuriating. 

“I wish I could fuckin’ do something,” he says softly, swallowing around the knot in his throat. “I want to just… take care of it for her. Make it better.” 

“Even though she said you couldn’t,” Cas prods. 

Dean shrugs helplessly. “If she’d just let me,” he says feebly, all too aware that he sounds petulant and whiny. 

Cas rolls his eyes. 

“Fuck off, Cas. She’s just… out there. Walkin’ around without me, and I don’t know what she’s thinking, and there’s nothing I can do.” 

“What exactly are you afraid of?” 

Dean bristles. He opens his mouth, closes it again, and then takes a sip of whiskey to cover his confusion. 

“I just don’t like it,” he admits gruffly. “Not being able to do anything.” 

“Did she say she’d be home later?” 

“Yeah. After work.” 

“You know that she loves you.” 

“Fuckin’... yeah, Cas, Jesus.” 

“You believe this is something you’ll work through?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, without hesitation, almost surprised by how much he believes it. 

“You trust her. You know she can take care of herself.” 

“Yes. What… what’s your point?” 

“My point is that she is a grown woman, a remarkably capable and strong one at that, and there are going to be moments when she does not want you to fix her, or take care of her, or make things right for her. Clinging to the illusion of control is only going to make things worse.” 

Dean feels like a fish, opening and closing his mouth stupidly. Part of him wants to get angry; it would be easier than dealing with the uncomfortable ache in his chest. He knuckles at his eyes and takes another drink. 

“Fuck, Cas, don’t sugarcoat it or anything,” he mumbles. “Should never’ve introduced you guys.” 

“I’d say I’m sorry, but…” Cas shrugs. 

Dean makes a face at him. There are a few minutes of comfortable silence as he listens to the ever-present background whisper of the air circulating through the bunker, like the lungs of some gigantic underground beast, and to the steady rhythm of his own heartbeat. 

“I miss her,” he says hollowly. 

Cas gives him a wry little half-smile. “I believe they call this personal growth.” 

Dean scowls. “Don’t patronize.” 

“You weren’t the one slamming the door behind you. You admitted you wanted her to stay. That’s new, for you. Growth.” 

If Cas wasn’t so fucking right, Dean would probably hate him right now. As it is, he has all too many memories of walking out on Cas, or shoving him toward the door…  it’s either cry or laugh, at this point, so Dean digs the heels of his hands into his eyes and huffs out a laugh. 

“Shove it up your feathered ass. You gonna have a drink with me, or what?” 

*

Years ago (probably before he was technically old enough to be meeting girls in bars) Dean met a girl — Sasha? Sandra? — in a bar. He doesn’t remember her name, but he remembers the freckles on her pale shoulders and the long corkscrew curls that framed her face when she lay down, like a tangled halo on the pillow. 

After, as they caught their breath, Dean played with her hair, twisting one curl around his finger and releasing it again, fascinated by the way it bounced back into its spiral. He remembers putting his arms around her and telling her she was beautiful, and he remembers that she looked away, eyes suddenly shuttered. 

“It’s okay,” she said softly, and started looking for her shirt. “You don’t have to pretend it means anything. That was fun.” 

He learned quickly, from her and from others, what was expected of him. They wanted him to be confident, if not cocky; strong, but not too rough; kind, but not exactly sweet… they wanted him to be charming, and fun, and not much more than that. Above all, they wanted him to leave. 

He learned. Leaving became second nature. Leaving was better than waiting around for the inevitable day that they would leave. 

Women didn’t want tenderness or romance, at least not from him. Maybe they wanted those things from someone who might stick around, but Dean would never be that guy. Dean might be the thrilling story they told their friends the next day, a fondly scandalous memory, just dangerous enough to feel like an adventure: I can’t believe I did that. 

He learned to take what he could get. He learned to separate the emotional from the physical. He learned to hold back, to tell stories without showing the scars they’d left, to share tiny slices of the truth without ever really revealing the messy whole. He learned to wall off his soft, vulnerable places. Nobody wanted to see those. 

It was easy to put those walls up, even easier to hide behind them. Dean started to think he was safe there. He thought his carefully constructed fortress was stronger than any storm. Then she happened. 

She keeps proving him wrong. Dean’s getting used to it. 

*

She still hasn’t gotten home yet, by the time Dean bids a bleary-eyed goodnight to Cas. She had the late shift, and he knows that, but his stomach is jittering cold under the blanket of whiskey heat, and he doesn’t expect sleep to come easy. 

He hears the echo of Cas’s voice as he tumbles into bed: you know that she loves you. 

He falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow. 

When he wakes up in the middle of the night, there’s wet heat and suction enveloping his cock, and he’s thrusting up into her mouth helplessly, rock-hard, gasping her name into the darkness before he’s fully conscious. Dean’s caught in the limbo between waking and sleeping, trying to separate reality from his dreams, but this feels too good to be a dream. Dean’s never dreamed anything this good. 

She’s rubbing her thumb along the cut of his hipbone, stroking sweetly even as her tongue does something that should probably be illegal. He reaches down and grabs her hand, lacing their fingers together, and she lets out a low, pornographic moan, her throat vibrating around the head of his cock. 

“C’mere,” Dean pleads, hoarse and sleep-slurred. She pulls off with an obscene slurping sound and crawls up his body. She must’ve taken off her jeans before she got in bed, but she’s still wearing her shirt and underwear, and Dean’s pretty sure he hears something rip as he wrestles with the fabric. If the harsh way she’s panting is any indication, she doesn’t care either. 

“I’m sorry,” she says fiercely. 

“Missed you,” he whispers. His voice sounds broken, pathetic, but it doesn’t matter; she’s here, warm and soft in his arms as they fumble in the darkness. 

She’s finally naked, straddling him, and Dean reaches for her blindly, pulling her down for a kiss that’s more of a clash of teeth when they both misjudge the angle. Dean wraps an arm around her lower back and crushes her to his body, fisting the other hand in her hair, holding on for dear life as they exchange deep, bruising, biting kisses. She clings right back, fingers stroking his jaw and his neck like she’s trying to read the Braille of his skin and bones. 

Dean’s breathless by the time she breaks the kiss to wriggle back and line up. His eyes have adjusted enough that he can see the faint silhouette of her body, charcoal against jet-black, but the important thing is the way she feels, like solid ground or safe harbor in a storm. 

He thrusts up helplessly, stuttering out a nonsense string of vowel sounds as she takes him in all at once, slick and welcoming. Dean’s spine bows with the way it drags pleasure from every part of his body, wrenching and twisting through him, winding him tight. She leans in and rests her forehead against his, so close they’re breathing the same air. Dean digs his fingers into her hips and feels the way she flutters around him, smooth silky wet skin, living heat, pulsing like a heartbeat as his body answers with its own heavy thud of arousal.  

“You came home,” he chokes out. 

“Of course I did,” she says. 

She rocks her hips and Dean surges up to meet her, grinding in deep, pulling her down against him. He’s closer to her than he’s ever been to another person, and it’s never close enough. 

Home. 

*

Dean considers himself a giver, when it comes to sex. 

It’s always been a point of pride: no matter how casual it was, no matter how easy it was to walk out the door afterward, he put his partner first. Not like it was a fucking chore, anyway. He’s heard stories, heard the way women talked about other men, and it genuinely confuses him sometimes; those men have no idea what they’re missing. 

It’s not often, in his line of work, that he gets to make people just feel good. He hasn’t brought anything positive into the lives of most people he’s met; he’s brought danger, and bloodshed, and nightmarish fucking violence. Those rare moments when Dean can bring someone pleasure, instead, have always felt like a gift. 

He remembers the first time he figured it out, the way the girl (Jenny? Jessie?) sounded when he found the right spot, the face she made, the way she twitched around his fingers, and he remembers the awed, wonder-struck glow in his chest. He remembers thinking, I did that. It was satisfying in a way that had nothing to do with his own orgasm. 

Getting off is great and all, but Dean’s never cared too much about comfort or pleasure. He takes a utilitarian approach to the basic needs of his own body, whether it’s sex, food, sleep, or whatever else. He’s always been fine with his hand, a burger, and four hours of shuteye on a crappy motel bed. He’s never asked for much more than that. 

Watching someone else enjoy themselves, though? That’s worth taking his time, doing it right, appreciating every moan and every spasm of pleasure that flickers over her features. It’s not so much about what he wants. It’s about what he has to give.  

*

Dean’s never been a morning person, but he’s starting to understand the appeal. It’s just them, in the morning, before they’ve had time to pull on the invisible armor they wear when they have to face the rest of the world. It’s a nakedness he never thought he was capable of. 

He wakes half-sprawled across her, one arm over her chest and a leg hooked over her thigh, like he was worried about her escaping from him in dreams. His face is tucked into the side of her neck. He inhales deep, immersed in the smell of her shampoo and her sweat and her skin. 

He traces the soft lines of her body, running a feather-light touch from the round of her shoulder, across her collarbone, down the center of her chest and then back up to map the curve of the underside of her breast. He rubs his thumb back and forth over her nipple, feeling the skin start to respond to his touch just as she sighs and stirs, and then he trails his fingers down to brush the inside of her thighs, down and up, one and then the other. 

It’s not like he’s trying to tease, he just can’t stop touching her. He could spend eternity running his fingers over her smooth skin, dips and curves and hollows and swells like an entire landscape under his hands. He maps it all, awed, until she’s breathless and squirming. 

In the end she just grabs his wrist and shoves it down, showing him exactly what she wants. She holds him there, cupping her hand over his, rocking up, hot and slick under their entangled fingers. 

Dean waits until she’s trembling, straining, close. 

“On your side?” he whispers, and kisses her cheek. He doesn’t pull his fingers away, just rolls with her and fits himself against her back. She arches, raises one knee, and she lets out this desperate throaty moan when he has to move his hand for a second to adjust, but then he sinks in and he can feel her shudder down to her toes. 

He’s been so focused on her that he didn’t realize how hard he is, but he’s dizzy with it, suddenly, like every drop of blood is rushing to his dick and throbbing, his nerve endings on fire with the searing slippery friction of her body opening up for his. Jesus, he’s so close it should be fucking embarrassing. 

She’s whimpering on every breath, clenching and dripping around him as she grinds into her hand. Dean reaches forward and slides his fingers under hers again, and he can feel the way she squeezes, muscles pulsing in waves of silky heat. He rolls his hips and she arches her back, biting out an anguished sound. 

They’re barely moving, rocking against each other gracelessly without the leverage for more, just a push-pull-shove-tug that builds into something powerful and unavoidable. Dean can feel it pounding through him with every shallow thrust and every little groan. He’s losing control, swamped by the sensations, barely holding on. 

Dean focuses on the way she feels under his fingers, the rhythm, pressing and circling, working her just the way she likes. 

“Not yet,” she gasps, practically writhing in his arms. “Want to feel you.” 

“So fuckin’ close, just -” 

She hisses, grabbing his wrist in a steely-strong grip like a handcuff and forcing his hand away as she snaps, “Dean, come for me.” 

He can’t help himself. It hits him immediately, sucks him under, sweeps him up and whirls him around, until all that’s left is how fucking good it feels: her sweaty skin against his, her soaked cunt squeezing him over and over again as she comes, wringing it out of him, and her fingers bruisingly tight, a bright spark of not-quite-pain around his wrist, as pleasure twists in his gut and spirals out and carries him away. 

He’s dimly aware of the way she’s shaking, the sound of her voice, but it takes a conscious effort to understand the ragged words: “So good, Dean. So fucking incredible, feeling you fall apart for me.” 

They’re both trembling. She loosens her grip on his wrist and brings his hand to her mouth, kissing the center of his palm and then every fingertip in turn. The sweat between them starts to tickle as it cools. 

She turns in his arms, pulling back to look at Dean with a sparkling smile and a curious, level gaze. He can see the gears working behind her eyes, cogs clicking into place, but he can’t for the life of him figure out what she’s seeing as she stares. Then it clears, and she’s just beaming at him, giving him the same open, tender expression he sees every morning when they wake up together. He can see it all over her face, how much she loves him. 

Dean’s not sure what he did to deserve that smile, but he’ll spend the rest of his life trying to earn it. 

*

He’s heard it so many times: take care of your brother.

It wasn’t just Sam, though. It was always very clear to Dean that being a man, being strong, meant protecting others. It meant making the hard choices, putting on a brave face, shouldering the weight so that others didn’t have to… no matter how he felt, no matter how hard it was sometimes, his job was to take care of the people he loved. 

He remembers smiling, hugging his mom, trying to make her smile again: It’s okay, Mom. Dad still loves you. I love you, too. 

He remembers putting a hand on his dad’s shoulder, looking into bloodshot eyes: It’s okay, Dad. I’m really glad you’re home. 

He remembers setting his jaw, holding his head high: Shoot first, ask questions later. Watch out for Sammy.  He remembers that curt, military nod he got in return: That’s my man. 

So that’s what Dean did. He protected people. When he loved someone, he did whatever it took to keep them safe. It was the foundation on which he built his entire life; it was the cornerstone of every structure, every wall, everything that held him up and held him together and kept him from falling apart. 

You’re going to be okay, Sammy. I’ve got this. I’m okay. Don’t worry about me. I’ve got it all under control. 

Then she happened. He couldn’t keep her safe from himself. He failed. 

He tried to push her away, after. He tried to rebuild all those walls, for her sake, but she just knocked them down again. She demolished everything, right down to his crumbling foundations, and she loved him not in spite of what she saw in the wreckage, but because of it. 

Dean has always believed that he isn’t a man, isn’t strong, isn’t worth loving, if he can’t protect the people around him. She claims he’s wrong. He was skeptical, at first, but she keeps coming home to him; it’s hard to argue with that. They’re building something new together, and it feels solid. 

*

“Get your fucking moose hands off me, Sam, I’m fine,” Dean snarls. “Motherfucker, you’d think I never needed stitches before. Stop fussing.” 

Sam lets go of his arm with a huff, and Dean sits down on the bed a little harder than he meant to. 

“Welcome home,” she says flatly from the doorway. 

“Maybe you’ll have better luck with him, I give up,” Sam growls. He shoulders past her, closing the door behind himself. 

“It’s really not a big -” 

“Lie the fuck down, you moron,” she snaps, eyes blazing. “Bad enough you have to go and get yourself half-torn to pieces. If you make things even worse because you’re too fucking stubborn to deal with basic first aid, I swear to god -” 

She’s got that face on, the one that means it’s pointless to argue.  

“Okay. Okay, see? Lying down. Jesus.” 

Dean settles back against his pillows, trying to hide his wince as the movement sets off shooting pains down his side. She stands next to the bed, looking down at him, and her jaw is set as she takes in the big gash across his ribs and the swollen punctures in his shoulder, visible through the shredded, blood-stained remains of his shirts. 

“We’re gonna have to take care of that,” she says briskly, but her voice is shaking. Dean can see the fear in her eyes, and guilt twists in his ribcage. 

“I can deal with it,” he protests automatically. “It’s not a big deal, I’m fine, you don’t have to -” 

“Dean,” she interrupts. “Don’t. It’s me.” 

I’m fine, it’s not a big deal, I don’t need you. It’s the first line of defense, has been for as long as Dean can remember. In all those years, she’s the first person who really bothered to break through. She makes it look easy, too, like a tornado going through a crooked old fence. 

Dean feels off-kilter and flayed bare, suddenly. Now that he’s not bothering to keep up appearances, he just feels raw inside, like the monster clawed something deeper than his skin. 

She bustles around for a moment, gathering up bandages and antiseptic, and Dean’s throat feels too tight. He missed her. He always misses her, and now instead of letting him hold her, kiss her, touch her, she has to patch him up… and part of him is so pathetically grateful that he doesn’t have to do it himself, even though he knows that he could. He can take care of himself. He should be the one taking care of her. 

He just wants to hold her. He wants to reassure them both that he’s still breathing, that he’s home, that he’s safe. 

She comes back with scissors. She gently moves the ruined flannel aside and then snips up the front of the t-shirt, biting her lip intently and then scowling as she pulls the fabric away from his skin to reveal the livid bruises that are already blossoming across his chest. 

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he tries. His voice cracks on the last word, and her eyes snap up to meet his gaze. She opens her mouth to argue, pauses, frowns, then closes it again. 

She’s studying him. Dean feels a prickle of embarrassment, cheeks flushing under the weight of her stare. 

“What is it?” she asks softly. 

He wants to say, just come here, hold me. He can’t seem to force the words past his lips. 

Dean raises his less-injured shoulder in the barest suggestion of a shrug. It hurts. He rolls his eyes at himself and clenches his jaw. He can’t quite look at her. 

She watches for another second, and then she sighs, putting the scissors down on the nightstand. 

“Okay,” she whispers. “Can you sit up? At least help me get that off you.”

She slides into bed carefully, doing her best not to jostle him, and Dean sits up, gritting his teeth against the pain. She helps him ease the remains of both shirts off his shoulders and then tosses them aside. Dean settles back, fitting himself under her outstretched arm, shifting slightly onto his good side so that he can rest his cheek on her chest. He has to squeeze his eyes shut tight to ignore the way they’re burning. 

“I’m really glad you’re home,” she says, hoarse and fervent. She brings her free arm up to cup her hand to his cheek, and her thumb brushes back and forth in a soothing, mindless rhythm. 

Dean wants to apologize, wants to reassure her, wants to thank her… he fucking hates scaring her. 

He wants to promise that he’ll never scare her again, but that would be a lie. He wants to ask why she bothers, but they’ve had that conversation one too many times before; Dean’s starting to accept that there’s nothing he can do or say to convince her that she’d be better off without him. She’s stubborn that way. 

“I love you,” she says softly. “I got caught up. I’m sorry.”

Jesus, Dean can barely breathe. 

He wants to ask, What did I do to deserve you? He wants to ask, How do you always know? 

“Just for a minute,” he whispers. 

“As long as you want. I’m not going anywhere.” 

He’s choking on all the things he wants to say, variations on thank you and I’m sorry and I love you. 

He listens to her heartbeat, feels the rise and fall of her chest under his cheek, takes in the smell of her shampoo, and he reminds himself that he’s home. 

It’s nothing like the home he used to dream of; he lives in a bunker, no fucking picket fence in sight. He’s bleeding from a half-dozen places, and no matter what he might think in the brief stretches of peace between apocalypses, he’s never really safe. 

In this quiet moment, she could be mistaken for the soft sort of woman he used to imagine falling in love with, but she’s so much more than that. This tornado of a woman is sharp and tough and smart enough to break through every wall of bullshit he hides behind, and it’s terrifying, being exposed like that, but Dean wouldn’t have it any other way. 

It’s not what he pictured, but this is home. This is love. 

He doesn’t say anything. He has a feeling she’ll understand anyway; she always does. 

.

.

Next part is here. 

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[starkerforlife6969]

Starker, Need ,Part 2

tw: mentions of death, dark peter

Tony knows he's made a mistake.

It is his own fault. His own runaway mouth is not under his command. He will punish himself for an eternity, as that is how long he will live.

Things have been peaceful for a few centuries now. Living here with Peter, presiding over Attica. Tony is a god. His mortal flesh long shed, power where there was weakness, endless talent where there was once fanciful skill.

He is a god, but all the shrines are to Peter.

Tony is not surprised. While he keeps to the palace on the hill, looking down over their polis and the people, Peter likes to go down and grace the mortals with his presence. Keep them on their toes. They teach stories about him, mother's take their blubbering babies into the streets hoping Peter will spare them a glance.

Their palace is laden with offerings sent from all the other countries and lands. Most of the gold and the art and the lion-skins are pleas. Leave us. Do not try to conquer us. Please. We beg you, Deus Peter.

That is what they call Peter now. Deus Peter. He is no god, but he has the favour and tricks of them. He wins every battle he fights, as Ares blesses his soldiers and his weapons. He is kept young and beautiful, strong and infinite. He is Tony's, and Tony is his.

The mortals call them husbands, lovers, partners. Tony once knew what those words meant. When he was contained in a body of flesh, when he understood the passage of time.

He sees his ignorance now. Peter and he are bound. Eternity is fathomable. Time passes as the tide, again and again, bringing changes, never stopping, but irrelevant.

The people do not fear Tony. When, on occasion, he comes down to the busy, chattering villages and cities, searching for inspiration for some new invention, they bow to him; fleeting, they press dedications into his hands for free, but here is no fear there. Why should there be? Tony has never harmed them. Would never harm them.

He is not the Captain. Peter is.

Perhaps it's his complacency that leads to such a mistake. Perhaps due to his mortal history, he forgets, lapses in his judgement. They are partners, they are bound. But Peter's love is unlike any other. His love is fierce and endless and even Eros cowers in it's wake.

They are eating: table straining under such a feast, when Tony errs.

"Archimedes turns into quite the young man." He says, and Peter looks up from his wine.

"Archimedes?"

"A young man from the city. His mind is unrivalled. You should give him your blessing."

Peter smiles. Cold beauty. His amber eyes hold the secrets of a hundred years. "I should."

Tony wisely, does not speak again.

"Tell me, does his mind rival yours? This Archimedes. Your new favourite."

"I do not take favourites-"

"His mind."

Tony slinks into his chair. He is wrapped with power. Powers that came with being a god. Strength, endurance. But there are his own powers too, that came from his mortal form. His mind, his sharp tongue, his hands. One touch and if he wanted, he can turn those into dust. He has not used it. "His mind shows great promise. His will be a treasure to us. To our country."

Furious, beautiful, deadly, Peter rises. He gestures to the table. "This is not treasure." He says, and the table cracks and splinters. He summons hoards of gold and gifts. "Even these are not treasure." They melt into tar. The attendants carrying them scream. Sharp teeth, cutting blood into the air. "That boy is not your treasure. I am."

"Of course you are," Tony breathes, the air getting sucked out of the room. He is a fool. He sees his error here. You do not command Deus Peter, and you do not forget your love for him. "I love you and only you. I could love no other. You are my treasure, the greatest, only treasure." He rises, tries to go to him, to hold Peter in his arms and feel that soft, smooth skin, but the air does not let him.

"You forget yourself." Peter hisses, eyes slits, "But I will make sure you do not forget again."

*

Peter has a kindness in him. A sweetness. He blesses children and widows. He labours with the common man when he passes them by.

Women swoon and bat their lashes. Peter looks just like a boy, beautiful, ethereal. He stands for paintings and pays handsomely to the ones he likes. Pays handsomely too, for the ones he doesn't. These, he destroys in the palace pyre.

When Tony was freshly turned, mortal blood still pulsing in his veins, still weak, Aides, son of the underworld, had broken into the palace. He had stolen a cursed trident. One touch, and Tony would have died.

Peter was there. He had pleaded, his beautiful tears, and Aides had smiled: hungry. His large hand around Peter's throat, the other feeling his lush body.

"I will take you," Aides had purred, "pretty nymph, after I kill this ambitious mortal."

"I should see you try." Peter had snarled, unsheathed, pretty to poison, uncoiling like a snake, biting Aides' throat out, lapping at his blood. "Queens of the underworld, your son I return to you." He'd spat, before blue flames had wrapped around Aides.

Then Tony was cut free. Peter healed him with his herbs and potions, loved him, caressed him.

"How long will I be like this? Half turned? Half mortal, half god?" Tony had croaked.

"A few more years yet, my love,"

"How long has it been?"

"Some decades."

Some decades. Everyone Tony knew is dead. As he was lost, in this haze of transformation.

"What of King Rumlow? What happened to him?" At Peter's look, Tony feels inclined to remind: "your father."

"Dear heart, why do you not sleep? I will have them fetch you tea."

Later, once he's changed, he finds a throne in the thick, green, palace gardens. Teeming with fecundity, overgrown with roses, the throne sits. It's Rumlows. Tony traces it's velvet softness. It is his old life. How many times had he bowed before this throne and he who sat in it? The fall of his home. Peter took it to war in the blink an eye. An army of the dead.

"Did my people fight yours well?" Tony asks, when Peter finds him, and hooks their arms together.

"What a silly question. We have the same people."

"What of my home?"

"You are there."

Tony had stooped low, and kissed Peter in the garden to see if it would still feel like safety. Like saviour. Like hearth and home.

It had.

*

News of Archimedes' death spreads slowly. A shadow, a slow, creeping monster over the city.

Tony hears of it from tradesman on the docks. He visits the grieving family. He knows he caused this.

When he returns to the palace, Peter is waiting for him.

"My darling," Tony whispers, getting to his knees. "I have no love for any other. Only you. I valued him only for his mind and the asset he would be for us."

"What of my mind? Is it not asset enough?"

"Even mortals have their skill, Peter. Even mortals have their uses. You saw that within me."

"You would have had me make him a god?"

"No, only your blessing. Only his safety, that was all I asked of you." He is not treading light enough. Peter's eyes are like fire. The attendants cower. Tony tries to pay them no mind. "I should not have asked that of you. You have done so much for me."

"You are grateful for none of it. I should have picked another."

Tony is wounded. His love is hurt, cut deep, and the scar is within Tony too. He is a tragic figure, yes, but he was tragic before. Now, in this endless bliss with his bound one, he has all he desires. Glory and triumph. He has Peter when no one ever has before. He hosts Olympians. He converses with mortals. Few kept gods are allowed such luxury. "My love." He pleads. He is bold, and touches Peter's legs.

Slim, shapely. He slides his hands up, up, up, to those soft, warm thighs.

Peter spreads them, his head still turned away.

"I want only to worship you." Tony vows, holding his bird tight, gratitude rolling off in waves.

"Then worship."

*

Sating Peter is hard-worn, but no hardship. Tony goes unsatisfied, aching, but thinks not of it. Only watches Peter, watches for his forgiveness or his wrath.

"Would you have me retrieve him?" Peter asks, fingers under Tony's chin. "Boil roots and leaves and retrieve your precious treasure from the underworld? You ask and I will do it."

Such divine forgiveness, Tony does not deserve it. "How can you retrieve my treasure," he asks, "when it is before me?"

Finally, Peter smiles. The kingdom seems to breathe in relief. The storm breaks. He lets Tony stroke his arms, brush his hair. "You can choose another favourite. With a sharp mind. I will let you be a mentor to them."

Tony kisses his temple. "And what can I do in return?"

"Be faithful." Peter beams. "Or suffer the consequences." He looks hungry to inflict punishment.

Tony laughs. Full and rich and godly. "If there is one thing I am certain of, it is my loyalty to you. Deus Peter."

Peter scrunches his nose; dappled with freckles and sunlight. Good hearted for now. Claws sheathed, for now. Teeth hidden, for now. It is like laying with a snoozing lion. "You have such mortal humour." Peter muses, distasteful, twining their fingers together.

Tony kisses him again, and avoids disaster.

[bipercabeth]

👀 anything + "does it still hurt to think about?"

(happy birthday alyssa i love u!!!) 

this is a bellarke fic so let’s pretend it’s on my sideblog and call it a day. s7 compliant until 7x10. then i do what i want. 

It all happens so fast. 

Bellamy comes back, ragged and worse for wear but alive. He and Echo meet an abrupt, messy end Clarke doesn’t catch the details of. And somehow, inexplicably, Clarke ends up alone with Bellamy in Octavia’s quarters while the others recuperate. 

Part of her longs to be with them—making plans, gathering information, maybe trying MCAP to crack Bellamy’s stubborn memories—but loyalty and guilt keep her rooted in place. It’s stupid to think she could’ve prevented Bellamy from being taken in the first place, but still. She should’ve been there. She should’ve known sooner. 

“Stop thinking so loud,” Bellamy calls from the bathroom. 

It earns a laugh in the way only Bellamy can. Laughter has been scarce lately. It always seems to be when they’re apart. 

She pushes the door open and leans against the frame, making eye contact with Bellamy in the mirror. He’s frowning, running his fingers through the long beard he grew on Etherea. Clarke wonders how much time he’s lost. At least she knew the number of days she spent in Eden. It’s a cruel trick of the universe to steal more time after everything it’s put them through. 

“How’d you know?” she asks. 

He shrugs. “I still know you.” 

He says it like it’s inevitable. This man has no memory of the past several months to years of his life, but he knows when Clarke Griffin is overthinking based on her silence alone.  

“Can I ask you something?” 

Clarke smiles. “Anything.” 

He turns to her, scissors in hand. “Will you cut my hair?” 

She takes in his unruly waves, which are nearly as long as her own. “I don’t know, I kind of like matching.”

“Just take the damn scissors, Princess.”

Clarke’s hand freezes, her fingers ghosting over Bellamy’s. It takes all she has to curb the shock from her face, but she doesn’t manage to suppress her smile. “Been a while since you called me that,” she says lightly. She drags a chair from the corner and motions for him to sit. 

She busies herself ruffling his hair. “How short?” 

“Like it was before?” 

It makes sense, wanting to return to who he was and how he looked before this. It’s not Clarke’s favorite cut, but she can do it. She measures the length out with her fingers. “Here?” 

“No, before. On Earth.” His voice is heavy with significance. Clarke learned long ago not to put words in Bellamy’s mouth, but she can almost hear him say with you at the end of that sentence. 

She swallows. “I can do that.” 

She works in comfortable silence, chopping off the longest parts before shaping up the rest. Bellamy’s gaze burns into her through the mirror, but she can’t bring herself to meet it. Regardless of how fun it would be to make fun of him with half his head shaggy, all Clarke can think about is how he’ll look when she’s done. The Bellamy she imagined for six years in Eden is about to be in front of her. That takes some priority. 

Six years of cutting her own and Madi’s hair has made Clarke something of an expert. Before she knows it, Bellamy is halfway back to himself, save the beard. 

It’s a bit shorter than before, she thinks as he looks in the mirror. Despite her experience, she hasn’t done a cut like this. A slight miscalculation meant she had to take in the sides a bit more than she’d have liked, but it works for him. She thinks most looks would, even the caveman thing he has going on on the lower half of his face. After all, it’s Bellamy. 

Bellamy’s responding grin is somewhat hidden under the beard, but Clarke sees it in his eyes. He tips his head back against her chest as she fusses and fluffs the front with anxious hands. “Looks good, Princess.” 

There he goes with that nickname again. This time Clarke can’t hide the way her hands still. 

“You haven’t called me that in 131 years.” 

Bellamy frowns, as if to protest, but quickly devolves into distress and confusion. “I don’t think that’s right. I think I called you that when I was... wherever I was.” 

The amount of baggage to unpack in that statement alone almost shuts Clarke down. She can’t look at him. 

Instead she moves to the medicine cabinet, distracting herself with the need to get rid of that horrific beard. “Does it still hurt to think about?” 

“When I push too hard, yeah. Sometimes the memories are buried so deep it feels like someone is bashing against my skull. Sometimes I can feel them, even if I don’t know what they mean. I’m just drawn to certain things. I think that means they were important to me there.” 

“Like what?” 

“You.” 

When Clarke’s breath stutters and she looks at Bellamy, she only finds quiet resolve. 

“I may not remember it, but there’s no way I was stranded like that and didn’t think about you. And when I came through the Anomaly, that was the one thing that stayed with me. Just you.” 

“I know how you feel. After Praimfaya...” Clarke feels her cheeks heat. “Well, you know how I got through it.” 

The misery of all the times fate has ripped Bellamy away climbs in Clarke’s chest, propelling her back to the medicine cabinet where she finds shaving cream and a straight razor. 

Bellamy’s face changes in an instant, morphing from something wistful and longing to his signature Big Brother face. 

“Why is there a razor in my little sister’s room?” 

Clarke simply smiles. “Little?” 

“I don’t care how long she spent on Penance. She’s my baby sister,” he groans. “Besides. I could still be older.” 

He moves to take the razor from Clarke, but she holds it close. “Can I?” 

“I can shave myself, Clarke.” 

“I know, but—” The misery climbs up her throat, now— “I thought I lost you.” 

That softens him. He leans back and offers himself to her. “All yours.” 

There isn’t much room for talking after that. Clarke wets his beard and rubs in some shaving cream, thankful for the towel she wrapped around him before she started this whole process. She doesn’t want to see him in the stiff Bardo robes or the parka he made himself on Etherea. Here, in the Henley she recognizes from before he left, he is almost her Bellamy again. 

“Have you ever done this before?” he asks as she lines up the blade with his sideburn. 

“No,” she admits. “But I have steady hands.” 

They’re less steady with body heat radiating in the space between Clarke’s body and Bellamy’s, but she won’t tell him that. 

The first swipe is a series of careful tugs with her left hand, assisted by her right holding his skin. Each inch reveals constellations of the freckles she so dearly missed. 

Clarke watches his face as she tosses the hair and wipes the blade. He meets her with unwavering trust as she brings the blade back to his skin, this time with more confidence. With each pass, the man she loves comes back to her. 

Bellamy’s cheekbones are easy, all sharp lines and simple angles. It’s one thing to watch the freckles bloom on his cheeks and another entirely to feel his breath ghost her fingertips as she takes off his mustache. Her fingertip traces the scar on his lip without thought or caution. Her eyes follow. 

Next comes the divot in his chin, freed at last. Clarke rests her thumb there to tilt his head back for the final strokes along his neck. He’s all trust in her gentle hands. He always has been. It becomes them, same as love. 

Love lives in Clarke’s hands as she holds his neck, feeling his muscles jump with anticipation. They have never let themselves get this close, and now she understands why. Clarke has been so strong for so long, but Bellamy is her undoing. 

“All done,” she breathes. 

He sits up, but Clarke is frozen in place. Her blade hovers near Bellamy’s throat while her hand cups the other side. A single drop of blood gathers where she nicked his upper lip earlier. She has the ridiculous urge to kiss it away. 

“Been a while since I saw you bleed,” is all she can say. 

His breath is warm on her lips. “I don’t think it’s been a while since I bled.” 

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there to patch you up.” 

“You were,” he assures her.

“Bellamy, I...” 

“Yeah,” he eases the razor away and lets it clatter to the ground. “Me too.” 

The dam breaks, unleashing a flood of emotions Clarke never dreamed she would allow to surface. Bellamy’s hand tangles in her hair, and it’s unclear who pulls the other in first, but that doesn’t matter because his lips are on hers after centuries of waiting. She throws a leg over his lap and straddles him, her caution drowned in the wake of passion.

They part too soon for Clarke’s liking, but Bellamy’s hands stroke her back idly, like he has all the time in the world to touch her, and all that matters is that they get that time. They have seen the world end countless times, but it is reborn with each second Bellamy looks at Clarke like he looked at the sky that first day on Earth: joyful, disbelieving, reverent. 

“I never thought I’d get this,” he pants. 

“Me?” 

“Happiness.” He says it like it’s the same thing. 

Clarke kisses him for it, half because he’s sweet and half because she can. 

Their love has eclipsed entire planets, even outlasting the one where it was born, but he has always been Earth to her. The final journey home. Joy. 

And joy tasted better on Earth. 

[carewyncromwell]

I guess this is my “happy end” for Carewyn and Orion for that LOTR AU (once again started by @drinkyoursoupbitch​​ and @no-moon-nor-stars​)! Pictured are the newly crowned king of Gondor, Orion II Elessar, and his love, the current Steward and future Queen of Gondor, Carewyn Cromwell-Took! (Previous part here!)

When Orion, Ben, Wendy, Charlie, and their allies from Gondor and Rohan charged to the gates of Mordor, there was almost no hope of success. As the final battle raged on, however, wave after wave of reinforcements arrived -- Treebeard and the Ents Carewyn had befriended in the Forest of Fangorn; an army of men led by Barnaby Lee and an army of elves from Mirkwood, who came to support Fellowship members Selene and Artemis Clair de Lune; a battalion of dwarves led by the new King Duncan Stonehelm of Erebor; a militia of men from Dale led by Carewyn’s friend, Lord Andre; the eagles, ridden by both Gandalf and Carewyn’s long-lost brother, Jacob Cromwell-Took, who brought along some white magic of his own to blind and beat back the Orc advance; and Selene and Artemis themselves, who -- after smuggling Smeagol, Bill, and Cedric inside Mordor -- infiltrated the wall over the dark city and attacked Sauron’s dark army from above. Then the final blow was dealt against Sauron -- the Ring was destroyed, and with the destruction of Sauron also came the annihilation of Mordor. The day was won.

The triumphant army returned to the stronghold of Minas Tirith as heroes. As happy as Carewyn was to see Ben, Wendy, Charlie, and Orion safe, however, she was overwhelmed beyond words by who else greeted her at the gates of the capital.

Carewyn flung her arms out wide, rushing to Charlie and throwing her arms around him, hugging him tightly.

“You did it!” she said, her wide ruby red smile echoing in every word. “You all did it!”

Charlie squeezed his old friend tightly. “We did it. We couldn’t have done it without you, Carey -- if you hadn’t sent for reinforcements -- ”

“Carewyn Cromwell-Took.”

Carewyn looked up. Standing before her was Duncan, his lips spread into a mischievous grin through his now much-thicker brown beard. He’d had his thick arms crossed, but when Carewyn swept over to him and wrapped her arms around his neck in a huge hug, they fell lax at his sides.

“It’s good to see you, Duncan,” murmured Carewyn.

The young King of Erebor’s expression faltered somewhat, betraying genuine affection despite himself, as he brought his arms around her in return and held her like a dear younger sister he hadn’t seen in years.

Andre came up as well, opening his arms wide to ensnare Carewyn in a hug of his own.

“Look at you, Carewyn!” he said, looking over her new Steward attire and grinning. “One would hardly recognize you as the hobbit who escaped a band of orcs and wargs by floating yourself and your friends down the river in barrels...”

Carewyn bit back a laugh. “Not my most glamorous moment.”

“Artemis! Selene!”

Ben’s voice caught Carewyn’s attention. Riding in on fresh horses were their elfin friends, both looking very tired and beaten down, but with smiling, alight faces at the sight of them. Artemis made a beeline for Ben, leaping off his horse so as to throw both of his arms around him. Once Selene had embraced Wendy, she bend down to hug Carewyn as well.

“It’s felt so long, since we saw you last,” said Selene, “longer than I even know how to express. I think I now know why people with mortal lives act like they have no time at all...”

“I know -- it’s felt like years, somehow,” agreed Wendy.

A loud cry overhead signaled the arrival of the eagles. Carewyn beamed when she caught sight of Gandalf’s white robes -- but she was taken aback by the sound of a familiar, hoarse voice.

“CAREY! CHARLIE!”

It was Bill. He rode the eagle behind Gandalf and looked even more exhausted and worn than the Clair de Lune twins, but his freckled face was just as bright and his eyes were flooding with tears.

“BILL!”

“BILL!”

Both Carewyn and Charlie barreled over. Bill didn’t even wait for his eagle to fully land, instead launching him off of its back and hobbling with difficulty over to them, throwing his slightly longer legs backward and forward in precarious, reckless strides until he’d reached them. The three red-haired hobbits all threw themselves forward, seizing onto each other’s shirts and arms and squeezing each other’s shoulders in a vice grip.

“Charlie -- ” Bill choked through his flood of tears, “Carey -- ”

“Oh, Bill,” whispered Carewyn. “You did it -- you and Cedric -- ”

“I knew you could do it,” Charlie murmured proudly, clutching at his older brother’s back. “I always knew -- ”

Carewyn blinked back the traces of tears in her eyes, turning her gaze to the rest of the eagles landing. Her eyes softened in relief seeing Gandalf carrying a sleeping Cedric under his arm. Then she caught sight of the rider disembarking the eagle just behind Gandalf, and all trace of a smile vanished.

The final rider was a hobbit about a head shorter than Bill, dressed in worn gray robes one would be more likely to associate with a wizard. His black-brown curls had grown as long as a dwarf’s, sweeping down his back, and his eyes had been hollowed out like a skull’s, but they still sparkled the same shade of blue as Carewyn’s. His face was very white and weakly smiling, almost anxious, as he faced her.

“Wyn,” breathed Jacob.

All dignity forgotten, Carewyn flung herself out of both Weasley brothers’ arms. She tripped over the long skirt of her dress several times, but she didn’t care -- she would’ve tripped a thousand times more over, just to --

“JACOB -- JACOB!”

The two Cromwell-Tooks clung onto each other so tightly that it was like they never wanted to let each other go again. Jacob anchored a trembling hand on the back of his little sister’s head as he struggled not to completely break down.

“Oh Wyn -- my little Wyn -- ”

He pulled away at last, running his thumbs over her cheeks as his tear-filled blue eyes scanned her face.

“Look at you -- you’re a real lady! Shining like the Lady of Lothlorian herself...”

“You’re alive,” choked Carewyn. “I can’t believe you’re alive -- ”

“Jacob?!”

The two Cromwell-Tooks looked up as Duncan rushed forward, his eyes very wide and his face very pale under his dark beard.

Jacob’s blue eyes sparkled. “...Hello, Ashy.”

Carewyn had expected Duncan to perhaps run forward and hug Jacob too -- instead, when he reached Jacob, he immediately grabbed hold of his pointed ear and yanked hard.

“Owowowow -- !”

“You blasted IDIOT!” swore Duncan. “Disappearing like that -- let me guess, you got in over your head again, as per usual? How can you be so smart and yet so bloody daft!?”

“Owwww! Let go, will you?!”

Carewyn brought a hand up to wipe away the tear forming in her right eye as she looked up at Gandalf, who was smiling warmly.

“It seems your brother, like me, had battles to fight in fire and shadows,” he said. “Fortunately, like me...he also found his way back. He’s become quite a talented magician, for a hobbit -- I suspect he’ll be able to conjure up quite enough fireworks, for the next party in the Shire...”

“Thank you for bringing him back to me, Gandalf,” said Carewyn softly.

She then turned to the soldiers and courtiers who had escorted her to the city wall.

“Come -- let’s get Cedric a bed and proper medical attention. And prepare a hearty meal, in the main hall -- our King and his friends need it.”

Soon after was Orion’s coronation at the white Citadel of Minas Tirith. Representatives from many kingdoms -- Man, Dwarf, and Elf alike -- all came for the celebration. Once he was crowned, Orion bestowed honors onto all of his companions in the Fellowship of the Ring and all of the allies who had fought with them when things were at their most desperate. He vowed to the citizens of Gondor that he would do everything in his power to rule with patience, tenacity, loyalty, and fire and bring peace and balance to their world.

The coronation party afterwards was full of singing, dancing, and a great feast, where the Fellowship reconvened merely as friends, rather than soldiers. At one point, when Carewyn got up to speak with Merula, the new Captain of Gondor’s Guard, Cedric noticed something he hadn’t before.

“...Say, you all,” the youngest hobbit said with a frown, “who did Carewyn promise her heart to?”

Everyone in the Fellowship went stock still. Ben and Charlie immediately moved as if to hush Cedric, but it was too late.

“What?!” yelped Bill.

Carewyn’s best friend whirled on both Ben and Charlie, looking both beside himself and absolutely incredulous.

“You knew about this?”

Orion had gone very pale, his eyes darting around at each of the hobbits and Ben as he tried to make sense of what he was hearing. Artemis and Selene both looked at each other with a frown.

“‘Promise her heart?’“ said Artemis, bewildered.

Selene glanced at Carewyn and then gave an “oh!”

“Her left ring finger,” said the female elf. “If Hobbit tradition is anything like ours...Carewyn is engaged!”

“When did THIS happen?” Bill was still interrogating Ben and Charlie -- despite him only being about two heads taller than Charlie and much shorter than Ben, both men looked equally taken aback by his volume and level of passion. “What happened?”

“It’s not what it looks like!” said Charlie hastily. “That is -- well, yeah, she put it there, but -- I mean -- ”

Orion was barely taking in much of what anyone was saying -- his mind was moving too quickly.

Carewyn...was engaged? If she’d promised her heart, was that...like a betrothal? When had this happened? Had she been proposed to while she was in Gondor alone, while he was away? Had she always been betrothed, since before they’d met? To who?

Orion found himself clutching his own hands as he closed his eyes and tried in vain to stabilize his breathing. His thoughts were always way too loud and way too fast, when he was anxious...

He was startled out of his thoughts by a hand on his shoulder. It was Wendy.

“Come on,” said the dark-haired shieldmaiden under her breath with a smile, “let’s go for a walk -- it’s getting too loud in here.”

And so Wendy steered the new King out of the hall and out onto one of the balconies of the White Tower. It didn’t take long for Carewyn to notice Wendy leaving with Orion and, noticing how very ill and upset he suddenly looked, she quickly ended her conversation with Merula and left the hall after them. She found the two talking at the balcony -- Wendy noticed as soon as Carewyn arrived and rather quickly excused herself with a pat to Orion’s shoulder and a smile at Carewyn.

“Carey, would you please tend to His Majesty?” said Wendy, a wry twinkle in her eye. “You seem to have a special touch with him."

Carewyn watched her go with a swish of her long dark hair, frowning in confusion. Rather than dwell on it, however, she immediately turned her focus back to Orion. He looked so pale...

She reached out a hand to him.

“Is everything all right?” she asked, her blue eyes very concerned.

When she’d reached out to him, Orion’s gaze had flown immediately down to her hand and to the ring on her finger.

His eyes widened.

It was his ring. The Ring of Barahir he had given her, before she’d first left for Gondor with Gandalf. Naturally, it being made by Elves, it had enough magic to shrink or grow to the proper size, so it fit her finger just as well as it had his.

The ring that Cedric had thought represented some sort of romantic promise...was his ring.

It took a moment for Orion to catch his breath again. Once he’d managed to compose himself enough, he bent down so as to properly look Carewyn in the eye. He took her hand, trailing his thumb over the ring on her finger, as he led her closer to him. Although he managed to keep his voice level somehow, his lightly tanned face was still very white and his hand holding hers was trembling.

"...Carewyn...” he murmured, “the way you wear my ring...is there...a meaning to it?"

Carewyn blinked in surprise. Then her face relaxed, and she offered a small smile even as her cheeks darkened with a flush and her eyes rested on his shoulder and not his face.

 "...Yes. For hobbits, it represents a promise of one's heart -- one stronger than time, life, or death.”

Her eyes drifted down to their joined hands.

“...It was that promise...that was in my heart when I pledged my fealty to Gondor. When Denethor heard me pledge myself to 'my lord', ‘til he release me or death take me..."

She smiled wryly.

"...he was unaware that, in my own mind at least, I already had a lord to be loyal to."

Orion’s eyes widened. Carewyn raised her head at last, her face much more solemn despite the softness in her eyes.

"Even if just as your friend,” she said very seriously, “my heart is yours, my king."

She lifted their hands, adjusted them so that Orion’s was on top, and placed a feather-light kiss to the back of his hand.

For a moment, all Orion could do was stare. His dark eyes trailed over Carewyn’s face, lingering on her eyes and her ruby red lips -- then, his pale face flushing with a kind of emotion Carewyn had never seen before, he swept forward. His hands found her cheeks, cupping them gently as he leaned in and placed a tender, lingering kiss to her forehead.

“My lady,” he breathed, his eyes half-lidded and shining upon hers, “you are far...far more than a friend to me. And I hope that you’ll consent to be far more, as well...for among both Men and Elves...”

His eyes flickered down to her lips and then back to her eyes, in a move that almost suggested shyness.

“...the place you wear my ring...could also be seen as the mark of an engagement...were it to host a different band."

Carewyn stared at Orion.

“You...you’d want to marry a hobbit?” she asked, her voice very soft and stunned.

Orion’s eyes softened with some amusement despite himself. “I would like to marry you. If you’ll have me.”

“If I’ll -- ?”

Carewyn looked flabbergasted.

“Orion...I’m just a halfling -- you’re a king. More importantly, you’re...you. You’re gentle, and noble, and wise...”

“And you are warm and resourceful...and braver than anyone I’ve ever known in my life,” Orion cut her off gently.

His gaze flickered down to her lips again self-consciously. For all of his confidence as a Ranger, a warrior, a general, and even a king, Orion found himself oddly fretful and uncertain, in that moment -- as if he was standing on the edge of a cliff and would either fall to his death or soar up into the clouds, were he to jump.

“I realize that hobbits...rarely marry outside their own kind...especially to Men -- but just as I could see no one else as my Steward...I can’t think of anyone else I would ever ask to be my Queen.”

Her face flushed and her eyes sparkling like stars, Carewyn brought a hand up to rest on his cheek. She cradled his face with her hand as she bent her head just enough to rest her forehead against the king’s.

“Orion...I could not think of a single greater gift or treasure in this world than to be yours.”

Orion felt as though a weight he’d been carrying for ages had suddenly been lifted off of his chest. He exhaled, his eyes fluttering closed absently as he leaned lightly back against her hand on his face.

“Carewyn...”

One hand sank into the shoulder of her red and white velvet dress, while the other trailed affectionately along her cheek. Carewyn closed her own eyes, smiling fondly.

“I love you,” she whispered, a mere breath away from his lips.

She kissed the side of his temple, and then his nose and his lips. Without opening his eyes, Orion found himself mirroring her, littering her face with kisses as he trailed his hand along her cheek and through her hair. Several times their lips met, sometimes chastely, sometimes deeply, but always through the gentlest, warmest, happiest smile -- as though their hearts were both fit to burst from happiness.

A week later, Carewyn was crowned queen of Gondor, to the delight of her new people. Regardless of her heritage, the people of Gondor had not forgotten her courage and leadership in the midst of the War Against Sauron, and over the years, their affection for their “little queen” only grew. (This didn’t mean that she ever became very well-regarded in the Shire -- truthfully, someone that worldly and strong-willed would never really have belonged there. Most Shire folk didn’t dislike her, of course, but it was still a little uncomfortable to be associated with someone so thoroughly unlike the traditional image of a hobbit. The clear exception to this rule, however, was any hobbit with the last name “Weasley,” who were all always welcome in the kingdom of Gondor.)

One looking back on the reign of King Orion II Elessar and Queen Carewyn Dilthenrís could almost wonder if their romance -- however peculiar it was -- was written in the stars. After all...one translation for the name “Carewyn” is “white tower” -- like the fabled tower of the Citadel at Minas Tirith where she first inspired her future King’s people.

[hatsoffiguess]

Baby no

My Hero Academia Fanfic

Word count: 735

Oneshot

First draft

Hisashi "All For One" Midoriya, looked down as his bundle of joy, unable to believe this was real. His son.

The best of both he and his wife- Inko's deep greens, his curls and freckles. 3 months old, and this child had the world's most feared villain wrapped around his small, chubby fingers. Imagine if his brother could see him now...

"Hey, Izu. You have to get your mother's quirk, okay? You don't want mine, there's too much history behind it. The world would never leave you alone."

He danced his fingers above Izuku's sleepy face, unable to help his smile as the boy giggled and tried reaching out to catch them.

Sighing, he gently poked Izuku's nose, strangely delighted by the way his face scrunched up. The baby managed to wrap his tiny hands over around the finger, watching it crossed eyes and little tongue poking out.

"Aw, you got me!"

"Bah!"

Yes, Izuku was too good for this world. Hisashi could spend hours like this, taking care of his precious son, just basking in the quiet peace and baby giggles.

Then he felt a tug in his chest, and paled.

"No, no, Izu," he gently pulled his finger away from the baby, but the tugging feeling persisted, getting stronger. "C'mon kiddo, you've got to let go. You can't have that, okay? Just, let go-"

The tugging pulled something loose, and it felt like his heart was trying to jump out of his chest to join it. His throat tightened and the room spun for a moment.

He swallowed the lump in his throat and focused back on Izuku, who was transfixed on his hands, like they were new to him. Hisashi nervously reached for his quirk in confirmation- and yes, All For One was gone. Right.

He rested his hand on Izuku's cheek, patting his face softly.

"Okay, fun time's up, you've gotta give it back now."

The baby just cooed at him.

He started bouncing the child in his arms, urgency creeping into his voice.

"Please Izuku. Just give the quirk back to Papa." He couldn't risk making too much noise, with Inko asleep just the room over, but it was hard to keep his voice down.

What would he do if Izuku didn't give the quirk back?! Sure, he had all the quirks he'd collected over the years, he still had his connections. But there's only so long he could lie about still having his quirk before someone caught on. Any experiments on multiple quirk users would be stopped. No more taking enemies quirks to remove the threat. No more bartering quirks to gain loyalty or inflict fear. He wasn't powerless without All for One, but he was severely weakened. Wait, could he even go by All For One anymore-?!

"Pah!"

His son slapped his hand over Hisashi's nose, echoing his earlier poke. Everything froze for a moment, and he felt All For One slip back into place, clicking like it hadn't left. He wheezed out a breath in relief, clutching Izuku to his chest and letting himself calm down.

After a few moments, he held the boy away from him, looking at Izuku with a near wariness. He got a gummy grin in return.

"Alright, Izu. Let's get you to bed."

He walked over to the cot at the side of the living room, carefully resting Izuku down and tucking him in. Hisashi rested against the railing, spending minutes just watching his son easily fall to sleep, pacifier in his mouth, snuggled up in the green bunny onesie he and Inko had laughed over and bought two of. That blanket was one Inko had gotten from a friend at work. And the cot was built over an evening of take out food and being given directions by his very pregnant wife. It had all been so much fun.

"No one in this world is born equal, Izuku. I hope, when you have to learn that, you know how much you're loved."

At Izuku's age, he wouldn't be able to control his quirk to keep it hidden. Word could get out, and it only took the wrong person hearing of it once to draw conclusions. They would be after Izuku for his quirk, or for Hisashi himself. He knew what he had to do.

"For what it's worth... I'm sorry."

And he reached into the cot, and took his son's quirk.

[artoodeeblue]

A Lady on Paper

Find the French version along with my other original writing on this blog!

I can barely remember my birth. My first one, anyway. The cornerstone. It is shrouded in mist, cloggy like the swamp of my cradle-town. Someone must have fathered me – towers and spires rarely sprout up unannounced, I have gathered. In the echoes of my nave, I still hear the scratching of quill over parchment, the heavy bangs of the hammer, the heaving of my creators’ breaths.

The little details give me real life. I take my first breath when Gaultier chisels his initials on one of my rib vaults. His upturned tongue sticks out, almost touching the freckles on his nose. The light bounces through his walnut hair and lands on my freshly-carved stones.

“Hello,” I whisper, gently caressing his mind.

“Hi.” He smiles. Wipes the sweat from his forehead. His voice is tentative. He doesn’t quite know what he’s doing, but his tender name glows, etched into the millennia.

“Pleased to meet you, Gaultier.”

With a professional hand, he scratches another layer of mortar on his stone. In the growing mass that will become my visitors, the sound is both grounding and appeasing. Painfully, heavily, I rise.

“Me too, my Lady.”

Someone must have sired me, but my loyalty has always been to my children.

 They give me jewellery and thorn crowns, which I accept like a mother concedes to her child’s present. I don’t need them, but if they reassure them – if they can feel less alone in this world – I can carpet my walls with a thousand tapestries.

Gaultier is long gone, but his laugh still echoes in the choir. It spins around, playfully blowing out candles and raising my children’s hair. His parting gift to the generations.

 They give me eyes. I count three, round and gleaming. They flash with pastel, sketched with a delicate mix of stone and glass. With them I see my cradle-town. I see the steaming chimneys, the palace, the paved dampness of the city. I finally see my children, immersed in pink and blue light. Kneeling, muttering, singing. Confessing. They come in processions, light candles most cannot afford, speak a language I do not understand. I pray as well – that they find the answers they ask of me.

They add more intricate buttresses, for fear that I fall. I chuckle. Of course I will fall. I will burn down and crumble and fade until I am nothing more than a lady on paper. But Raymond will have none of this. He gives out orders, holding his parchment, counting steps and scratching on his board.

His touch is firm and steady. He pats me like his pet, running his fingers in the tiny creases between the stones.

(He misses Gaultier’s carvings, which I hide covetously.)

“You will become the most beautiful temple ever to stand upon this earth,” he tells me. His pompous language never fails to pry a laugh. “You will be thin as a sheet of parchment, yet your towers will stand strong until Judgment Day.”

“My sisters have not,” I try again. “Can you not hear their screams, as they fall to pieces and flames in the East? Only their ruins will see the sun rise on Judgment Day.”

“Not you,” Raymond insists. “You are better. You are good. You are holy.”

“Holier than the entire civilisation your people slaughtered in the name of God?”

His blue eyes glint with stars and hubris. He jerks his chin upwards. “Yes.”

My children are strong, and proud, and will burn themselves for a touch of the sun.

  I wonder if this was how my sisters felt in the East.

They plunder my crypt, behead my kings and saints, but I never knew them anyway – they are all mere faces tattooed without my consent. Fake jewels. Kings never come to say hello; they just waltz in, kneel, smirk, and declare war over heretics.

Julien’s little kick is nonchalant, patronising.

The pavement is coated with a thick layer of blood. It swirls around me, inside me, churns my stomach and stares at me. They don’t do much to me – maybe, underneath the harsh gaze of the Raymond they so despised, they can hear Gaultier’s murmurs of hope. I never really understood hate, but I know it quickly dissolves under permanence.

“Not so powerful now, huh, girl?”

He wears a blue and red tricorn which awkwardly frames his childish face. He cannot be over twenty, yet his tongue sticks out as if he had finally brought a lion to its knees. Still, it has been decades since I have spoken. I nudge him back.

“Never,” I answer.

Julien smirks, and waves his little flag. “We control you now,” he gloats. “You’ll never hurt anyone else again. You’ll be forgotten, just like every other part of the Old Regime.”

“So will you.”

With a giant, heaving swing, the rod comes smashing towards St Thomas. His head explodes, and the fragments scatter through my bowels.

“I despise you,” he snarls. His breath is ragged, and his chiselled jaw twitches in its socket. ��You’re everything that’s evil in this world.”

I am only rocks, I want to tell him. How can stone, oak, mortar and carved initials rival with the bloody smoke-trail of a musket?

But he is already gone, running on the pavement, carried by youth and homicidal optimism.

They change my name – it belongs sometimes to Reason, sometimes to the Supreme Being, sometimes to Liberty. My children are creative, and fickle. Anything to prove that they have changed.

But a few chopped off heads do not change the tell-tale glimmer in your eyes.

  A man with almond eyes and a high forehead like mine pushes through my heavy door. His steps break my trance-like slumber, and I stir. Shy sunlight cracks through my unused eye. I blink. Slowly.

Gaultier’s laugh is no more than a whisper now. It has lost its music – has grown as lethargic as mine. Raymond’s promise flies over me like the angel of Death.

The man blows, sending a streak of fresh air over the piers. Dust materialises in the diffused rays. He stumbles around the half-ruins littered on the floor.

Electricity courses through his fingertips as he brushes my stone. I shudder. I haven’t been touched like this in centuries.

There’s an aura around him. Not divine – not like the few priests who still roam my sleepy aisles. Something rich and brown, scented with paper, ink and starlight. His eyes seek, blink, and dart in rhythm with the turn of the earth. His feet are posed firmly on the checkered tiles, yet his posture is light and dream-like. Grounded, physical, yet full of wonder. Not broken – not yet.

He smells so intensely, decidedly human.

I take a breath, and guide his hand towards the tiny alcove I made. It hides in the joint between walls, covered by dust and inconsequence. His breath gets caught in his throat, Adam’s apple bopping up and down. He religiously traces around the tired G, the sloppy H. It stings up to my spire, but tickling nerves feel much less lonely than numb inattention.

“Six hundred and fifty years,” he murmurs. “We must look like insects to you.”

I brush his skin, watching his eyes light up with Muses. Deep in the bowels of my bells, a slow rumbling comes to greet him.

“I think you look like giants, Victor.”

 Out of everyone who said hello, he’s the only one who comes back broken.

“Look at you, all pampered,” he says. “You’re a proper lady on paper now. On your way to your old beauty.”

“It is your doing, my love. Your beautiful story set the spark.”

Victor smiles, a weary, tentative thing that contrasts with the navy bags under his eyes. His back is hunched, shoulders drawn tight under his jacket.

Sometimes, Victor reminds me so much of myself it sends sparks of pain down to my crypt.

“I am so very sorry, my dear.” I send him a tender sunray, but he recoils – flinches – away. He takes a shuddering inspiration.

The clangs and thrusts of the renovation scaffolding reverberate inside the nave. Victor’s knee fidgets back and forth, up and down, synchronised with my heartbeat. His breath comes in long, trembling sighs. He dips his head a little more, letting his brows cloud his gaunt expression with shadows too old for his age.

“She was…” Victor falters. “My Leopoldine, she was only nineteen.”

He whimpers, shoulders trembling. Never in his life could he withhold emotions from his features. My Victor has always felt everything so viscerally, so fiercely, that the force of a hundred hell fires could not possibly restrain him.

His hands are linked together and his eyelids close – a small, awkward attempt to connect to something far above my spire. I stay silent.

“You’re supposed to know everything.” His mouth moves, yet his voice comes from another realm. His brow twitches. “If you’re so omniscient, can’t you at least tell me… Tell me why?”

That is the one question I cannot answer, that I can never answer.

“Why can’t you bring her back?”

His broken sobs do not echo. Neither do Gaultier’s laugh, Raymond’s hopes, Julien’s fire. They are absorbed in the scaffolding above, in the heavy oak framework, in the centuries-old mortar.

 Sometimes I wish I could speak to God. After all, am I not named after his mother?

Perhaps I am condemned to share her fate, forced to watch my children break and die, suspended to the cruel post of Time.

Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la cathédrale… Je partirai.

  It feels…strange, to say the least. I am smaller, lower. Reduced.

Smoke and ashes fly from my spire over my cradle-town, my beloved light-city. My children are cut from me, staring powerless behind murmuring firemen. They pray, they sing, mutter words of comfort that I barely catch over the screaming in my mind.

It aches. The intricate carpentry consumed, the flames licking up my roof, the crashing water relentlessly boring into my shoulders. The tireless wind ramming against my walls, whistling between my towers. It carries the bystanders’ collective gasp as they watch my spire crumble and impale my flank.

A young fire woman fixes her gaze on the brazier, a stoic jawline firmly maintaining her illusion of control. I can barely discern the tell-tale glimmer of her eyes through the smoke.

“You must be in so much pain.”

Maybe, but my pain is not unbearable. My children’s is.

“Don’t worry. We will protect you.” Her voice is wobbly, with a higher pitch than usual, yet her hand on the hose could not get any steadier.

 When the sun rises over my still smouldering body, I hear relief, and I hear grief. The city, my radiant, proud, boastful people, hang in exhausted silence. It drapes over me.

My close call to destruction caused thousands of individuals to turn their heads towards an old remnant of the Regime.

“We will rebuild,” they say. From my undamaged eye, I spot their leader, surrounded by a shifting mass of microphones and cameras. “We will restore Our Lady to her former glory, and make her even more beautiful. We will make these stones alive again.”

Raymond’s voice resonates through millions of television sets. His eyes bore straight through the country.

I think of Gaultier’s sweat-filled affection, of his cheery compassion.

Of Julien’s anger at the vices of the world, of the passionate curve of his eyebrows.

I think of Victor the writer, of his beautiful smile and his magnificent tears, of his unconditional love for humanity.

I think of the three or four billionaires I have never met, who will claim to adore me by bedecking me with fake jewels, by cajoling me with impersonal wood and long-dead cold stone.

I think of my other sisters in the ocean, in the forests, in the air. Cathedrals that will never be rebuilt nor remembered, in the small scheme of political power. Monuments older than my cradle-town disappearing with the snap of two fingers, never to be seen again. Killed by hubris, disdain and general disinterest.

 My stones do not make me alive. Just like you, they decay, wither, and burn.

No. I do not remember the placing of my cornerstone.

I took my first breath when a young, gap-toothed bricklayer chiselled his initials on the slabs of my rib vault.

[minniemixe]

Beauty And The Beast

Gangster AU

Stray Kids Fanfic

Chan x Reader

Other Appearances: GOT7 BTS

Genre: Smut, Fluff, Angst

Warnings: Violence, Mentions of stabbing

A/N: So these have been sitting in my drafts for over 7-8 months now, I wasn't really satisfied with what I wrote, around 5 chapters are already written, and since I wrote them a long time ago, Woojin is part of these series, I'm sorry I know he left but I wrote this before he left and I'd have to rewrite the entire story again if I were to remove him. I'm sorry, but please bear with me, he will not be added to my upcoming stray kids series. Thank you 😅😅. I proofread this a few times but if there are any typos please let me know 😊.

Beauty And The Beast Masterlist

Chapter 2

The entire gang was gathered in a hallroom that seemed to be a kind of place where important meetings would be held.

“Let’s get a few things straight. You will answer every question asked honestly, otherwise there will be consequences. You will be trained individually by each member, after general training which is phase one, there will be a test which will determine whether you're the one for field missions or not. Once phase one is complete, you’ll be moved to phase two, in which you will be trained for using weapons, in the end you get to choose the weapon of your choice. Phase three will determine your rank and position among the gang. You can go up in ranking but your position stays the same throughout. And lastly phase four will be a loyalty test. When you pass all four phases will be when we start to trust you. Until then you will be under supervision at all times. You will not be told our real names until you pass all the tests. With that being said lets begin with the introductions” the leader looked at the girl after the speech.

“Let's start from you, tell us your name” he pointed at her

“My name is-” she stopped mid sentence. Taking a look around the room, she realized this was her new life, everything she knows and loves is now her past.

“My name is Moon” the leader looked at her questioningly when she said that

“This is my new life, everything I know and love is now in the past. I can’t go back there, this is a new beginning. So Moon, that’s my name. I’m starting over.” Moon explained

“Fair enough. I’m CB97. I’m the leader. That’s all you need to know for now”

“I’m Woo, second in command, sniper and medic.”

“Lee Know, I do the spying and undercover work”

“SpearB, task force leader and Tech”

“HH, Spy and undercover”

“Freckles, SpearB’s right hand man and undercover”

“J.One, sniper and spy”

“Dandy, Tech leader”

“I’m I.N, I’m with Dandy and Anna”

“El, sniper and spy”

“Bree, Tattoo artist, sniper and task force”

“Anna, Medic and undercover”

“Liv, medic and task force”

“Your training starts tomorrow morning, Bree will be your first trainer. Dismissed.” With that everyone left one by one, leaving Moon by herself, she looked out from the large window to see the foreign land outside. The sky was pitch black, no stars in sight, she thought about how in a way it represented her life, dark and empty. But she was determined to change that, nights aren't always like this, the moon is bound to come out from behind the clouds and light up the dark. With that thought she too left the hall to return to her designated room. As she was opening the door to her room someone called her, she turned around to see HH standing at the door of the room across from hers “yes?” she asked

“You look calm, for someone who just joined a gang” he said

“There’s not much I can do, this is my new life after all” Moon replied

“New life? You’re saying that as if it’s a good thing.” he scoffed before continuing “This new life, is not what you think, this is your worst nightmare, by the time you get a grasp of this so called new life, you’ll be crying for your old life, you shouldn’t have taken your father’s place, he was old he was gonna die anyway, but you, you just bought yourself a one way ticket to hell” he towered over her petite figure, glaring down at her

“I’ll get through it, it can’t be that bad, you’re here, so I don’t see why I can’t be” she looked back at him with fierce eyes, she was determined to prove herself.

“Not that bad? Oh sweetheart we’re going to completely break you and then build you back up. You really think you can take that” he questioned her

“Of Course I can, and it’s not like I have any choice” she gave him a fake smile

“Who said you don’t have a choice?” he asked her, at which she gave him a confused look. He leaned close to her ear and whispered “You can always die” he smirked at her reaction and walked back to his room slamming the door loudly.

“By all means do shoot me in the head then” she sarcastically spoke before going into her own room.

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Morning came too soon for Moon’s liking, it was like she closed her eyes for one second and morning was here. Getting up from bed, freshening up, she put on a pair of black skinnies and a white t-shirt and made her way downstairs. She was met with 3 pairs of eyes looking at her from across the lounge. “Oh Good you’re awake, Bree is making breakfast, tell her you’re awake so she can make some for you too” Dandy spoke.

“Thank you for the offer but I’ll just have some water, I’m not a breakfast person” Moon replied

“Well starting from today you are, you need the energy for training” El spoke from behind her, making Moon flinch a little from the sudden voice. She nodded her head and made her way to the couch next to Dandy.

“I’m going to help Bree with the breakfast, you all behave” El said, emphasizing on the word ``behave while pointing towards Freckles and Liv, both of them shrugging their shoulders.

Moon sat awkwardly at the side while the other 3 engaged in a conversation.

“In what year were you born?” Liv asked

“Me?” Moon pointed to herself

“Yes you dumbo” she giggled, all eyes now on her.

“2000” Moon answered

“Wait what??? You look so much younger, I thought you were younger than Liv” Dandy said

“Hahaha Thanks, I guess” she awkwardly replied

“Month?” Freckles asked, surprising Moon with his deep voice, how come I didn’t notice last night, she thought to herself

“October, uuh 5th October” she replied

“So you’re older than me and younger then these two by a month” Liv spoke

“Which year were you born in?” Moon questioned

“2002, which means I’m 18” she replied

“Did you have a job before coming here?” Freckles asked

“I own an online business, basically I anonymously do what my clients ask me to do, it could be hacking, it could be designing an entire software, or developing a program, anything related to computers honestly. It’s one of the biggest illegal online platforms. It’s called GhostLand (a/n: I hope this doesn’t already exist and sorry I suck at coming up with nice names)”

“Wait YOU’RE the one who runs GhostLand!?” Dandy exclaimed

“Yes? Why do you sound so surprised?” Moon asked

“Because you may or may not be the one who basically taught me everything I know” Dandy answered

“Wait what? You’re one of my students?” Moon was so surprised at this point

“He’s your student, aren’t you like 16” CB spoke from behind her

“Do I really look that young, I mean I’m not complaining, but 16? I’m 20” Moon turned around to speak

“You’re tiny, that’s why” he said getting closer to her face, smirking at her

Moon’s heartbeat increased due to the close proximity of his face, Damn you’re hot, she thought.

“Looks like I’ll now be giving you lessons in person” Moon spoke, trying to distract herself from the attractive man sitting beside her on the sofa’s arm.

“Wait does that mean she knows more than you” Liv questioned

“Not necessarily, I mean he subscribed with me to learn hacking and creating viruses. In that area I may be the one to know more, because I’m not going to teach him everything that I know, he could potentially use it against me” Moon explained

“Did you know about Dandy’s identity when he became your student, like his real name, age and other things” The leader interrogated

“No, I only knew his username which also happened to be Dandy_Boi”

“And you never did a background check” he questioned

“Anonymity is essential between me and my clients, they don’t know who I am and I don’t ask for their identity either, my only concern is the money I make. The only time I do background check is when they try to hack my server. Which has only been twice, both times with the police.”

“Impressive, you’re not all useless” the leader commented.

“Useless?!?!?!?!? Excuse you but I’m not useless, and you should know that, if I was useless as you claim I am, I wouldn’t be here, I cracked all your security protocols and walked right into your house, if anything your security is useless” Moon was furious, she hated being talked down to.

“Feisty, you’ll fit right in” he patted her head and left, surprising everyone.

“Wow, someone’s the leader’s favorite already” Dandy smiled at Moon.

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Dodging Bree’s third attack, Moon lost her footing and fell down.

“You’re familiar with a lot of moves” Bree stated

“Well, a girl’s gotta know how to defend herself in this cruel world” Moon answered.

“Are you sure that’s all there is”

“What do you mean?” Moon questioned

“I don’t know, something is fishy about you, I can’t seem to put a finger on it” Bree said

“Yeah? Like what?” Moon threw a punch, “Like your father not being able to pay the debt.” Bree successfully dodged her “You showing up within days of him being taken in” she continued, punching Moon in the stomach “You owning one of the largest online illegal platforms” Bree kicked her leg causing her to fall flat on her back. Moon recovered quickly, getting up she attacked Bree again “Trust me, it’s all just a coincidence”. Bree twisted Moon’s arm and locked it around her neck “See that’s the thing we ca- ooff” Moon elbowed Bree in the side of her stomach catching her off guard. “Trust me? I know, that’s why I’m willing to do anything to earn it” quickly spinning around she kicked Bree in her stomach causing her to stumble back and collide with the wall. “That won’t be easy” Bree said walking towards her “I know” Moon sighed.

“You’re good and fast at learning, You’ll pass phase one quickly” Bree assured the girl

“Thank you, what’s next?” she asked

“Nothing, you’re dismissed for today, we’ve been doing this for more than 5 hours, it’s almost dinner time” Bree told and left the girl alone in the gym.

For the next few days Moon trained with Bree, learning new tricks quickly, the older woman was impressed with how quickly she was adapting. Her next instructor was SpearB. He had a triangular face and he gave off a dark aura, he wasn’t much taller than Moon but he was muscular which made him look much larger than the girl he was training. With him, training wasn’t easy due to the difference in size. With Bree, even though Moon had less experience, both the girls were skinny and there wasn’t much difference in size other than Bree being taller than Moon. However with SpearB, Moon proved to be much weaker than him. Training with him always ended with her in multiple bruises on her body and a split lip every time. After two weeks and an extremely aching body, Moon was finally able to win against SpearB, but not with strength rather by using tricks.

Her next training session was with HH, this wasn’t going to be easy considering neither of them got along with the other. “Today we’re going to be using knives” HH smirked at Moon “Knives??? Isn’t weapon training in phase two?” She asked

“Sweetheart your opponent isn’t going to play fair, if they run out of bullets they’ll fight you with fist and knives. It won’t be a martial arts ring, there will be no rules, you’ll be in a do or die situation, you need to be ready for anything.” he explained

Moon was dreading training with HH, he would cut her with his knife every chance he got, by the end of fifth day Moon had a large scar on her thigh and across her back along with other small cuts around her body. However Moon was learning quickly so she didn’t spare HH either, he too had a small scar across his chest. Today was no different, the two had been training for hours on end, Moon was able to successfully dodge his attacks until he swiped his knife under Moon’s right breast, cutting her and ruining her training bra. “Son of a bitch” Moon cursed. She kicked him in his side, making him stumble. She went to punch him but he grabbed her arm and twisted her around locking her in a chokehold, Moon grabbed her knife that was tucked in the waist of her shorts and cut his forearm, once she was out of his grasp she went to kick him again until he fell, straddling his lap she pinned him to the ground putting her knife against his throat “You’re dead” she spoke. Suddenly she felt pain in her side, she looked down to see the cause, to find his knife stabbed in her waist.

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A/N: I added a few extra characters (girls) cuz I just thought 9 boys with one girl was kinda overrated.