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stealingpotatoes · 3 years

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The Thorns of the Crown

ao3 link

summary: After everything Corvo’s family has been through in the past six months, he’s not so sure the throne is worth it all. (Emily doesn’t take the throne back au)

The Loyalists had been fools to think they could kill him and take his daughter, and still get away with it.

Corvo had silently fought his way through the Lighthouse, putting guards to sleep as he forced his way to the very top, where he knew his would-be murderers were. Where he knew Emily’s now-captors were.

He entered the foyer of the highest part of the Lighthouse as quietly as a ghost, and was immediately met with the grotesque sight of a golden statue of Hiram Burrows, standing proudly in the middle of the golden-gilded room. It was ironic to lay eyes on the false sight of the traitor Corvo had defeated, while on his way to deal with the very traitors that had ordered him to do it. The Loyalists had not learnt from the mistakes of those before them, it seemed.

A grand staircase wound around the circular walls that surrounded the beastly statue, leading to a room above. That was where they had to be.

I’m coming Em.

Corvo lifted his mask off as he quietly ascended the winding stairs. There was no point of hiding behind the face of Death; the Loyalists knew who he was. Or, at least they thought they did.

Corvo finally drew up to the entrance to the war room, and put his back to the wall beside a bust of Burrows. With a deep breath in, he channeled the Void through his hand, and watched the world shift into muted reds.

He looked over his shoulder, through the wall.

There were only two yellow shapes -- two men -- in the room ahead. Not guarding, but sitting at a table. No, slumped against the table. Are they sleeping? Or something else?

Corvo checked his crossbow, making sure it was loaded with sleep darts, and rounded the corner fast.

A dead man’s silence lay over the room like a heavy shroud, interrupted only by the harsh patter of rain.

The top of the Lighthouse was a purpose-built war room. It was finely wood-panelled like the rest of the building, but the left wall was covered with a huge map, places circled and labelled with smaller papers. There was a lit fireplace at the far end, with chairs surrounding it.

At the room’s main centre was a large war table -- where Burrows had no doubt spearheaded his campaigns and his war on the common people of Dunwall.

But it was not being used to plan any wars now; at the end of the table, fine foods had been served with expensive-looking wine. The food had not been eaten -- but the drink had been poured.

Martin’s body was slumped in place, and Pendleton had fallen half-off his chair. Neither of them were moving in the slightest.

Corvo slowly began to lower his crossbow, keeping a firm grip on it, and skulked towards Pendleton.

He put two fingers to the pulse on Pendleton’s neck, and heard the crunch of boots on glass. Corvo stepped back.

Shards of glass were shattered about by Pendleton’s limp hand, with drops of blood-- no, wine spilt around them.

Corvo glanced back up across the table; Martin had a glass in his hand too, and Corvo was willing to bet he had no pulse either.

Corvo stood up straight. From the glasses and past experience, he did not have to guess what had happened to them. Poisoned -- but with no boatman to save them.

But where was the man that had done this?

Corvo activated his dark vision again, scanning for any more yellow shapes that might have been out of range before.

His dark vision melted back away, unsuccessful -- but as it did, Corvo’s eyes halted on a purple shape on the floor behind Martin.

He moved over to it, a new sense of dread filling him, and crouched to pick it up. He inspected it for barely a moment; he didn’t need any longer to recognise it. It was Mrs. Pilsen, Emily’s favourite doll, the one Corvo had given her back upon his return to the Tower.

Corvo ran a thumb over a new, small crack in the doll’s painted porcelain face -- Emily must’ve dropped her. But she had been here. She had to have been. So where is Emily now? And where is Havelock?

A little girl’s scream was Corvo’s first answer.

Corvo’s eyes widened. Emily.

The voice had come from above, and-- outside? Corvo looked around the room again, and he zeroed in on the second set of stairs, behind the wall. She had to be up there. She had to.

As he rushed up the stairs, he noticed the small splashes of blood on the wood of the stairs and floor. If so much as a speck the blood is Emily’s, Corvo thought, running, then I am going to make damn sure Havelock wishes he had never been born.

The trail of blood continued into the office at the top of the stairs, out onto the metal balcony that began out of a door in the glass-roof and wall. Corvo continued his pace, unfolding his sword as he burst into the pouring storm once again.

There was no sign of her there. Corvo raced to his left, up another set of stairs. He paused on a landing -- the trail stopped there, on a maid, dead, surrounded by her own blood. It was no relief.

“NO! Let me go!”

Corvo’s eyes darted up.

On the walkway far above, two people were moving-- struggling, silhouetted against the sky. One far larger, one far smaller.

“Quiet now! And move already, child!”

Havelock.

A hundred words of vengeance filled Corvo’s head, but he said none of them. He only darted to his left again, bounding up the rest of the staircase to the entrance of a sheltered stairwell. The voices were audible again as he entered.

“Hold still you stupid girl!” Havelock’s voice boomed through the rain.

“Let me go! I am the Empress!”

Corvo kept running up the twisting stairs.

“Didn't you learn anything in your short life?” Havelock yelled seethingly. “Empresses are pieces on the board. And Empresses can sometimes die--”

Corvo stepped out of the shelter and onto the walkway. He didn’t need to announce his presence -- Havelock looked up the second Corvo laid more than two steps on the metal.

Another bout of thunder and lightning struck somewhere in the storm.

“No! Stay where you are Corvo, or I jump,” the Admiral yelled over the rain.

“Corvo! Save me!” Emily screamed.

Corvo stopped walking.

“That’s right,” Havelock said, a maniacally grim satisfaction rising in his voice at Corvo following his orders. “If you take one step closer, we’re both off the edge.”

I don’t need to take a step to get to you, Corvo thought.

He made a show of folding his blade back up and sheathing it, before holding his hands up slowly in a surrender. The rain was beating down on him.

Corvo let himself lock eyes with Emily -- but only for a moment. Then he fixed his blazing-ice gaze on Havelock, who wore the grin of a man that thought himself entirely in control.

Havelock opened his mouth to begin some taunting speech. Lightning struck beyond the edge of the walkway.

Corvo curled his raised left hand into a fist, feeling that sharp pins-and-needles sensation on the Mark and called the Void forth. It heeded his demand with a sharp whisper. Time ground to a complete halt around him.

The lightning behind Havelock and Emily stopped its descent half way down, looking like a harsh rift of pure light in the sky. Water droplets stood in place, small gems floating against the dark storm clouds.

Everything was still.

Corvo didn’t waste a second; he ran forward and at once pulled Emily out of Havelock’s unknowing grip, shoving the Admiral hard as he did it

Corvo took a short, undeserved moment to take in the frozen sight of Emily, half in his arms, before releasing his taxing hold on time.

The grey scream of the dragged-out present disappeared. and the world resumed its pace. Emily almost tripped onto the metal floor with the force of time’s discharge, but Corvo held her safe.

Havelock hung for a moment, as if time wasn’t yet properly flowing, his footing just lost and surprise written all over him. He had expected one last piece of control -- control over his own death. But he had fallen into the same trap as all those before. He had become too comfortable in his position, and he had forgotten that Death belonged to no man, and followed no man’s orders. No matter their station.

Havelock fell.

Corvo, still holding tight to Emily, peered ever so slightly over the edge. He watched the Admiral’s screaming descent until he hit the jaws of the rocks below.

After what felt like a moment too many, Corvo turned to his daughter, still holding onto him for dear life. He held her back, and tucked a drenched strand of messy hair from her face. The rain still beat down on them, ceaseless, soaking their already-soaked clothes and hair.

“Are you okay?” Corvo asked hurriedly.

Emily gave him a shaky nod, eyes still wide with fear. “I-- I think so.”

Corvo nodded in return. “We need to get out of the storm.” Logic was slowly returning, replacing the blood haze seeing Emily in such danger put him in.

Corvo made himself let Emily go for the moment, and she ran ahead onto the covered metal stairwell he had just come from. Corvo followed just as swiftly. They both traversed down the small stairs, the sound of Emily’s little shoes on metal filling Corvo with more and more relief.

He had only paused by the bottom doorway for a second when Emily barrelled right into him for a hug. “I knew you’d save me! You’re my hero, Corvo,” she said, voice half-muffled by his wet coat but slowly coming back to herself.

When she pulled away briefly, Corvo knelt down to just below her eye level and pulled her into a proper hug. He knew was probably hugging her too tight, but he couldn’t bring himself to care about anything but the feeling of his daughter in his arms. She was shaking and freezing-wet, but still warm enough. But still alive.

The storm raged on on the walkways outside of their small shelter.

Eventually, they both pulled back, and Corvo took Emily’s tiny hands in his. “Are you alright?” he asked.

“You-- you already asked me that,” Emily said, still shivering from the cold and the fear. When Corvo’s worried expression didn’t change, she told him, “I think I’m alright. I’m alright now you’re here.”

Corvo nodded, feeling some small part of the weight on his shoulders go.

“Is it going to be okay now? Will I-- will I be Empress?” Emily asked, almost eagerly.

Corvo glanced down.

He thought of Jessamine. Of her cold dead eyes in the Gazebo. Of her blood on his hands.

Empresses are pieces on the board. And Empresses can sometimes die.

The Heart was beating, an unrelenting pulse in the back of his mind. An incessant reminder that what Havelock had said was true; Empresses die. And who was Corvo to be able to stop it? He had failed once; he could fail again. Death followed no one’s orders; not orders from Empresses, nor those from Lord Protectors.

I know what it felt like to drive a blade into your Empress.

Empresses die. And for what? So men could take control of the damned city of Dunwall? This city didn’t care about them. It didn’t care about anyone. It ate everything alive. It would not let an Empress be safe, no matter how good or pure of heart she was.

The crown and throne were nothing but a curse and objects of desire for ambitious men who thought themselves the better of people. The curse of power nearly took the last of his family from him -- the family that, because of the crown and its rules and its curses, he had never been able to openly call his own.

Empresses die. And so did Burrows, and Havelock, and Pendleton, and Martin. And so did everyone else that tried to hold that kind of power.

Now I want nothing but to leave this wretched city, and fade from the memories of those who reside here.

Emily was just a girl. She was Corvo’s girl, his baby girl. She wasn’t meant to be a piece on a board, a piece in Dunwall’s deadly game of power. She wasn’t meant to hold an Empire in her small hands.

She wasn’t meant to die.

If they went home, if Corvo let Emily take back the throne… what fate would he be damning her too? She would be forever caught in the crossfire of power-grabs and the schemes of conniving politicians. All it took was one wrong move, and Corvo would lose her to that crossfire. That was not the life he wanted her to live. That was not the death he could ever let her die.

This was the only way he could protect Emily. He wasn’t sure if Jess would ever truly approve of it, but she had not been through what they had been through. He hoped what was left of her would understand.

Empresses die. But Emily wouldn’t. Not if Corvo could help it.

The Heart continued to beat.

Corvo pulled Emily closer and planted a kiss on her forehead, “It’s going to be okay now. I promise.”

A relief seeped into Emily’s big brown eyes, and Corvo felt something squeeze in his chest at her expression. “Are we going home then?”

Corvo swallowed. He shook his head.

Confusion knit itself between Emily’s furrowed brows. “What?”

“We can’t go home, and you won’t be Empress,” Corvo said slowly, forcing the words out. This was how it had to be. I can’t protect you from this city. Nothing can, Corvo thought. “Dunwall and Dunwall Tower-- they aren’t safe,” he said instead. “They aren’t ever going to be safe.”

Corvo had expected Emily to show more resistance, or be more upset at the idea they couldn’t return to Dunwall Tower -- but maybe he still expected Emily to be the girl she had been six-and-a-half months ago, before this all happened. But she was not that girl; Emily merely nodded, with a look she was too young to have in her eyes.

“So where are we going to go?” she asked.

Corvo tightened his grip on her hands. “We’re going to take a ship out of here--”

“Like a pirate ship?”

Corvo huffed out a half-laugh, relief at really having his daughter back hitting him hard. I love you so much, he thought. “Yes, like a pirate ship,” he said with a small smile. “We’re going to take a ship out, and-- and we’re going to make a new home, somewhere else. Just the two of us.”

“Three of us,” Emily corrected. After seeing Corvo’s confused expression, she made an obvious face. “Mrs Pilsen! I grabbed her when they took me, but I left her downstairs.”

Corvo shook his head, half-laughing again. All that had just happened, and Emily’s first concern was her favourite dolly. It filled Corvo with faith. They could do this. They could live a normal life, where Corvo could just be a father and, Emily could just be a daughter. Where she would be allowed to be a child, and not a piece to be manipulated.

He squeezed Emily’s hands. “The two of us and Mrs. Pilsen. We’ll make a new home. How does that sound?”

Emily’s eyes drifted to the floor below, and she bit her still soaking-wet lip for a moment. “I…” her gaze returned to Corvo, and she slowly gave him a small smile, “I’d like that.”

Corvo pulled her into another hug.

---

Emily woke up to the slight sway of the sea beneath her.

They had been on this boat more than a week now. It wasn’t like any boat she had been on before -- far less fancy, and far more dirty.

Emily knew a smuggler was a lot like a pirate, but this boat didn’t look like the boats from Emily’s story books. This was a big metal steam-ship, not a pirate’s sailboat with a flag of skull-and-crossbones.

And the pirates in the stories never had to check themselves for signs of the plague, or make certain no rats had come aboard, but the smugglers had had to. So had Emily and Corvo.

Emily wasn’t sure “Slackjaw” was a real name, but apparently it was the name of Corvo’s friend who set this all up. He owed Corvo one, because he had saved “Slackjaw”'s life. Which made sense -- Corvo was good at saving lives. He’d saved Emily’s life more times than she could count. He’d been saving Emily’s life since before she could even count.

But Corvo had saved Slackjaw’s life, and so Slackjaw owed him a favour. Corvo used that favour to get him and Emily on a smuggler’s ship with new clothes and made-up papers.

The papers didn’t have Corvo or Emily’s real names on them, but Corvo had said that he and Emily would need to take new names, to stay safe.

Emily hoped they could come up with something better than Slackjaw.

She rubbed her eyes and sat up in her cot-bed, before glancing to the other side of the tiny cabin.

The cabin -- if it could even be called that; oversized cupboard seemed more apt -- was flakily-painted metal, like the rest of the ship. The tiny room was almost empty, besides Corvo and Emily’s few belongings, and the two foldaway cots pressed against the walls.

The size of the room allowed very little space between the two cots -- and so Emily had a very good view of Corvo, sitting on the far end of his.

He was fully dressed already. It still was funny to see him in something other than a long coat, but Emily supposed the roughspun jacket and shirt he was wearing now suited him well enough. His folding sword was somewhere underneath the jacket, and that gave Emily no small amount of comfort.

She squinted in the near-dark. Corvo was looking down at his hands, clasped as if they were tenderly holding something. He mumbled something at his hands, entirely fixated on the empty space.

“Father,” Emily started, barely able to stop herself from grinning as she did every time she called him that. Corvo said she was allowed to now. “Father?”

“Mm?” Corvo hummed in an almost-startled reply, quickly looking up from the nothing in his hands.

“What time is it?”

“Early enough that you can go back to bed,” Corvo said fondly.

“Is it early early?”

“What does that mean?”

Emily rolled her eyes. “Is the sun out yet?”

Corvo glanced back ahead, as if he could see through the walls of the cabin. “No,” he said, turning back, “but it will be soon. The crew’s beginning to wake up.”

Emily perked up. “Can we watch the sunrise? Please?”

She thought Corvo might say no for a second, but instead he smiled and nodded. “If you really want to.”

Emily nodded gingerly, then shuffled to the end of her cot and pushed herself onto the floor.

Corvo stood up too -- bent over slightly, unable to stand to his full height under the cabin’s short ceilings. He’d moved his hands apart now, as if he’d put the nothing he was holding back down somewhere. Emily paid no mind to it, only grabbing her coat from the back of the door and putting her shoes on, before giving her father a big smile to say she was ready.

Corvo returned the smile, and quietly opened the door, letting her pass into the cramped metal hallway.

He didn’t have to tell her to try to be quiet too. Emily knew that some of the crew would still be asleep, and they needed to be nice and courteous to the smugglers, as any guest would be towards their hosts.

Part of that meant Corvo had to help around the ship a bit, so he and Emily were more worth their while. The smugglers seemed to like him; they’d told him that if he ever wanted a solid job, he could join their crew. Corvo didn’t seem that interested.

After a short time of quiet footsteps in the hall, Corvo and Emily reached a heavy metal ship-door, which Corvo opened with ease.

The fresh not-yet-morning sea air hit Emily with a gentle breeze as they stepped onto the side deck of the boat. It had been getting warmer every day, as the ship got further from cold Gristol, and closer to sunny Serkonos.

The sea ahead was almost dark, but a peaking of the sun on the horizon drove a warm streak across the water.

Emily walked up to the ship’s metal side railing and peaked over it, but didn’t look off the edge. She had done that on the first day on the ship, and promptly regretted it, needing Corvo to calm her down and remind her that they weren’t at the top of the Lighthouse anymore. That she was safe.

“I can’t wait to be in Karnaca,” Emily said. “Will you show me everything you told me about?”

Corvo nodded with a small smile, a fond and loving look in his eyes. “I’ll show you whatever you want to see in Karnaca.”

“And can I go swimming in the bay, like you said you used to? Ooh, or climb the big trees? And-- and--”

Corvo chuckled, “You can do all of that, and more.”

Emily grinned giddily, and looked back to the sea ahead.

The sun was beginning to rise over the waters, painting the world around them hues of orange. Emily wondered if the sun was rising just the same in Dunwall. She supposed it didn’t really matter; what mattered was that it was rising, and that she had her father by her side to see it.

A new day was dawning for them both, and Emily found herself apprehensively excited. It would be a strange new future ahead, one that she did not know, but she had decided it would be a good future. She knew Corvo would make sure of that.

Emily leaned in closer to Corvo, who too was partly leant on the railing, and rested her small head on his arm. In response, he lifted his arm up and pulled her closer to his torso, before settling his arm on her shoulders in a warm half-hug.

Emily smiled, snuggling nearer and keeping her eyes on the rising sun ahead.

#dishonored #corvo attano #emily kaldwin #farley havelock #HAHA I FINISHED A FIC AFTER NOT BEING ABLE TO DO THAT SINCE MARCH #but i did not read this through so have fun #a normal life dh au #potes wrotes #dishonored fanfic

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dontcallmecarrie · 3 years

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Replying to @kine-iende [hope this works and you see it, still trying to get the hang of how tags work] who said:

Thank you, author-person, for this incredible detailed answer. (Also i don't mind being tagged - or not) With Tony being so aware of the dynamic between those rivals, Justin ending as a villian is less going a betrayal from almost-family and more of a 'natural phenomen' he should have seen coming. Because as always:rivals ^^

To be completely honest, if this AU were a tv show the ‘Justin Hammer accidentally founded Cabal’ reveal would’ve been the huge plot twist revealed at the end of either Season 2 or 3, and it’d be a major shocker for the Avengers...but not Tony.

also just realized I somehow made an AU where the protagonist basically becomes a villain out of Spite™ and I’m not sure if that’s the weakest origin story ever, or what

After all, if this were a tv show, it’d be centered around the Avengers, and the main season one conflict would be in seeing how Tony fits in the team— which would get resolved eventually, but not before the audience gets a good look at their dynamics. Like, the chemistry between Iron Man and Captain America, how easily and seamlessly they work together without needing more than a word or two because they’re on the same page, or Tony’s cordial yet distant academic respect for Bruce [which gets contrasted with Iron Man’s uncharacteristic instant bromance with the Hulk], or... well, the list goes on.

Not to mention that having a common enemy alters their dynamic as time goes on, because while if this’d been a one-off things would’ve still been rocky between Tony and the team, whereas having to constantly coordinate because new intel indicates that their last enemy was actually connected to something bigger and that means even more teamwork...

So by this point they’ve got a good idea of their characters, how they roll, how they react under pressure and during downtime and throughout all this, Justin Hammer would make cameos because he’s SHIELD’s main weapons supplier [...among other groups, which in and of itself foreshadows some of his shadier connections later on] and between him and Tony, they’ve basically cornered the market on experts in that field— which comes in handy when we’re talking about alien tech.

Justin wouldn’t get much screentime compared to the others, but enough for the Avengers [and the audience] to see he makes for a very good foil for Tony, with their differences being highlighted all the more due to the similarities. After all, both come across as good people: Tony’s very friendly to anyone who isn’t on his shit list, and Justin acts very polite and gentlemanly to strangers [and is 100% a mom friend to anyone he cares about]. Tony’s a hero, though, while Justin’s long since made it clear he was a businessman first and foremost.

Through all this, Justin and Tony’s dynamic is intentionally kept vague— one moment they’re perfectly friendly, the next they'll be at each others’ throats and, again, sometimes can get misinterpreted as something else.

Then the Reveal happens, and suddenly all those past encounters and hints come up and it’s so obvious in retrospect but—

Who would’ve expected it?

Tony.

Tony’s the only one who’s not surprised by what the latest intel’s hinting at, obtained from an intel broker who turned up dead not long after [...because said broker’d also been messing with HYDRA, but that’s the plot twist that comes up in the next season]: nothing specific, nothing concrete, but something that ties a good chunk of the previous Villains Of The Week together to reveal a far, far greater threat.

The Cabal, and while some of its members have long since become familiar names— e.g. the Fantastic Four normally are the ones who have to deal with Victor Von Doom, but not always— its founder had been a mystery for the longest time. A mystery that has just been ended, except nobody could have expected to see the name on the file.

Everyone else’s caught flat-footed and going through several permutations of ‘oh shit’, meanwhile Tony just leans back, scrubs a hand down his face, and looks out the window with a low whistle.

“Well played, Justin. Well played.”

Which is when the audience learns more about their very strange dynamic, which gets revealed to have started out a rivalry during their childhood [and has now basically escalated to the most high-stakes game of chicken there ever was, but shh].

Here’s the thing: if Tony were to call their rivalry off, Justin would stop.

But...

Tony can count on one hand how many positive constants he’s had in his life: Jarvis’ [and, after his heart attack, JARVIS’] presence, and his rivalry. Those are the two things that’ve been there for him through thick and thin, the only two safe places where he knows where they stand, knows they won’t try and tear him down and that means something.

JARVIS will never leave him [not this Jarvis, at least], but... this rivalry’s been a thing since before he met Rhodey, since before his parents died and Tony’s not entirely certain just how much it’s shaped him, but he can count on one hand how many people give a damn about him and want to see him succeed and—

Tony’s not sure he has it in him to call it off. Not at this point.

Not when part of him knows why he did it, because— well, every superhero needs an adversary, don’t they? For a moment, he’d been surprised Justin had the guts to do this, but it makes complete sense the more he thinks about it and Tony knows just how little respect Justin has for the others, of course he’d be the type of guy who’d go “ugh, fine, if you want something done right, gotta do it yourself”.

also, before this all seems very one-sided, I think I forgot to mention that Justin’s really benefiting from this rivalry too— not as obvious early on, but it gives him something to focus on and work towards.

Something that kept him from depression when he thought too much about his past life and discovered just how much he’d forgotten, was still forgetting, something to keep him from being bored when he looked up one day and realized— he didn’t actually have any goals in this life, did he?

Not when his life thus far had been dictated by his parents, and he’d been okay with following along to their script for him because if it wasn’t him, it’d be his sister or an innocent child who’d be forced to live up to their impossibly high expectations as the heir to Hammer Industries... but it was something he was resigned to at this point, not something he was particularly happy about.

This time, he... didn’t know what he wanted in life. Nor did he remember what he’d wanted last time— had they wanted to be a doctor? Teacher? Writer? They didn’t remember anymore— and it’s startling to realize that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d smiled if he wasn’t talking to his little sister.

Justin’s never been one to seek out the approval of the adults in his life— the fact that he was surrounded by Parents of the Year [note the sarcasm] probably had something to do with that— and remembering a past life means he sees everyone his physical age and lower as kids, so he doesn’t see many people as equals.

...and then Tony decided he’d like having a rival.

At first, yeah, it was confusing; even as an adult, Justin didn’t entirely get why, but it was. Something.

Something good, and gets even better because this is something they both decided, that had nothing to do with the meticulously-annotated plan his parents had for his life, and while at first it was weird, Justin found he was actually enjoying himself [for once].

To the point where he found himself actually getting honestly, genuinely invested in said rivalry, and if he sometimes found himself trying to drill self-care into Tony sometimes, well, those bags under his eyes made them look bad, okay? It was self-interest, nothing more, really!

Really.

So when Tony went and became a superhero, Justin found himself taking a step back for a moment as he paused to consider his actions.

Paused before taking the plunge, because this was it, was serious, was pushing the limit and going past the point of no return. Was he really willing to do this?

A moment to consider things, deliberate on the possible consequences and what could happen— then he gave a sharp, decisive nod.

“Yes, we’re doing this.”

#No Hero [Downward Descending]#replies #Naught replies #character study of sorts #My writing

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thepartyresponsible · 3 years

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For the wip ask (they all sound very interesting ngl it was hard to pick just one!) LostSteve

lost steve! yeah, so. what if shield defrosted captain america, and he broke out and just...kept running? what if they lost him? what if he ended up hiding out in tony’s tower, away from the fight for long enough to get his feet underneath him?

this fic is mostly about steve and tony finding each other first, so they can form the heart of the avengers, instead of the fault line that splits the team in half. here’s the first part of it.

—

There’s an alert from Nick Fury that Tony chooses to ignore, for the sake of his convenience and Fury’s ongoing character growth. JARVIS announces its arrival and then diligently reminds Tony about the message twice before Tony tells him to mute it until morning.

“If it’s really that important,” he says, “they’ll just send someone to break in anyway.”

Which is why, on some level, he’s not at all surprised to find a man sitting on a couch in his penthouse twenty-seven hours later. He will admit to being caught somewhat off-guard by the specifics of the situation, though, because Steve Rogers has been dead for longer than Tony’s been alive.

“Zombie?” Tony asks. “Hallucination? Oh, clone? Are you a clone?”

Steve Rogers looks at him the way people look at wax sculptures. Like he’s interested in the details of the creation in front of him, but doesn’t believe for a second that what he’s looking at is real. “Mr. Stark,” he says, politely. His voice is deeper than Tony would’ve guessed.

“Robot,” Tony theorizes. “Sexbot? Updated Trojan Horse? If I let you inside me, are you gonna--”

The man’s brow furrows, and his mouth twists down, and his eyes are too sad for circuitry. No one would code that kind of grief.

Tony pauses for a moment, rocks forward onto the balls of his feet and then back onto his heels. He studies this intruder carefully. Someone sent him a Steve Rogers lookalike in a white t-shirt and stained khakis. He’s hale and healthy, built like a god, but his feet are bare and dirty.

Bloody, too. There are bloody footprints on the carpet.

“Wait,” Tony says. “Wait. Who the hell are you?”

There’s a long beat of silence. The man on his couch just stares at him, eyes tracing over Tony’s face, his shoulders, looking at him like he’s starving for something. He’s quiet and small, somehow, in a way that doesn’t relate at all to the amount of space his body takes up.

And then he stands, light and graceful on his bloody feet. His jaw tightens, and his shoulders pull up, and he’s an American Hero, suddenly and decisively, like he’s made some kind of choice about it.

“Mr. Stark,” he says, again, “I’m Captain America.”

And he is, Tony thinks. The same way that he’s Iron Man. Because once you put on that kind of armor, whatever else you used to be is irrelevant.

—

He’s Captain America, and he’s back from the dead. SHIELD had him and lost him, and Nick Fury wants Tony to go looking for him. That’s the message he left with JARVIS over a day ago. And Tony can’t imagine he was the first name on their list, which means Steve Rogers has been alone in the wrong century for an unknown but considerable amount of time.

“Hey,” he says, calling out from where he’s slouched against the kitchen island, watching Captain America dutifully eat through every scrap of leftovers Tony had in the fridge. “How long have you been here?”

“I was born here,” he says, through a mouthful of fried rice that he hides behind a napkin. He chews, swallows, and jabs his fork over Tony’s shoulder. “In Brooklyn.”

Tony knew that. Of course he knew that. He memorized everything about Steve Rogers back when he thought he could become enough like him to make Howard consider him worthwhile. “No, I mean,” he says, waving his hands, “in this century. How long have you been--- Jesus. I dunno. Awake? Aware? Unfrosted flakes?”

Steve blinks at him. He stares for a second and then ducks his head, stirs his fork through the open takeout box in front of him. “Spent a couple days,” he says. “Looking around.”

Looking around. Steve Rogers, unwitting time-traveler, barefoot in New York. What had he been looking for? Why did he come here?

“Why didn’t you get any shoes?” Tony asks, instead of any of the more complicated questions.

Steve tucks his feet under his chair. He washed them half an hour or so back, walking uneasily into the bathroom Tony showed him and then locking the door behind him, like he thought Tony was some kind of pervert who would bodyslam through the door to catch a glimpse of him sudsing up his bare ankles.

“Didn’t have any money,” he says, surprisingly mulish about it.

“You couldn’t smash and grab a pair of Sketchers?” Tony shakes his head. “If you get lockjaw, you’re gonna have to tell Fury you caught it from somewhere else. Fuck’s sake, when was your last tetanus booster? 1943?”

He shrugs. He doesn’t seem concerned. He’s busy eating his way through enough calories to keep your average winter-starved grizzly happy.

It’s hungry work, coming back from the dead. Tony remembers the unholy things he would’ve done for a cheeseburger.

“Didn’t have any money,” he repeats, scraping his fork around the sides of the takeout box, diligent and serious, like it’s the very last scrap of food he’ll ever get.

Tony clears his throat, hip-checks the counter to heave himself to standing. “I’ll get you some cash.”

—

There’s a weird moment, when Tony gives him the money. It’s just a few hundred dollars. He’s not Tony’s problem, not his project raised from the dead, but he still doesn’t want to give Steve Rogers the means to get himself truly lost in a world he doesn’t know.

Five hundred dollars will get him some food and somewhere to sleep for a few days, but it won’t get him far enough out of SHIELD’s orbit to get himself in trouble.

He looks up when Tony gets close. There’s a well-worn wariness in his eyes. He watches him the way a dog from a bad home might watch him through the bars of the shelter’s kennel. Resigned instead of hopeful, like he knows how this goes, like he knows he can survive it.

“Here,” Tony says. He leaves the money two chairs away from him, within easy grabbing distance. “And I have shoes your size, if you want to borrow them.”

“I don’t need that,” Rogers says, pointing at the money.

Tony lets his mouth tip up sideways, smirks like this is the part of the whole situation he finds truly unbelievable. “You’re going to come into my house,” he says, “uninvited, unannounced, and then you’re going to refuse to accept my hospitality? Rogers, what would your mother think?”

There’s a stall point in Roger’s stare, like watching a bird fly into a window. There’s a moment, right around the word mother, when those blue eyes blank out, and Tony’s just staring into empty space.

“She didn’t,” he says, and it’s fascinating. He’s stitching himself up right here at Tony’s dining table. Tony can practically see it happening, vertebrae stacking up, pulling him taunt like a needle tugging on a thread. “She never liked charity.”

Tony is familiar with pride. He has something of an overabundance himself, although he comes by it honestly. He knows hurt pride hates an audience, so he looks away.

“I imagine she hated the idea of you starving, too,” Tony says. “Probably worked very hard to make sure that didn’t happen. Going to waste all her work now, Rogers? Seems ungrateful.”

He’s half-taunting by the end of it. He’s not sure why. He finds weak points like a magnet finds iron. Sometimes he doesn’t even know what he’s pulling on until after he’s accidentally ripped out someone’s heart. It’s not one of the traits he’s proud of, but, like his pride, he knows where it came from.

Rogers glares at him, but he hooks the next takeout container over anyway.

“I’ll get those shoes,” Tony says. JARVIS has already measured; Rhodey left some boots that should fit.

Steve doesn’t say anything, but, when Tony comes back, the money is gone, and so is he.

—

Tony doesn’t tell Fury a damn thing. If Fury lost a national icon, that’s his problem. And anyway, Tony’s still not completely convinced that the blonde who materialized in his penthouse was actually Steve Rogers and not some kind of really confused, really well-built homeless man. Or a stripper.

Tony’s never actually met a stripper who showed up in khakis, refused to disrobe, and then ate ten pounds of takeout before silently disappearing, but he’d be willing to pay another five hundred dollars for a repeat performance.

He figures out how the maybe-Steve got into his penthouse. He upgrades the security, but he tells JARVIS to let him in if he ever comes back. He’s not sure what he’s hoping for, but he’s too curious to lock him out.

—

There’s a bit of nothing that kicks off in New York, some Hammer tech that goes haywire. Tony puts it down like the cheap knockoff that it is, but he gets stuck in debrief with Phil Coulson afterwards, because he’s not quite quick enough to abandon the scene after the fight’s over. In his defense, he was holding a car above a partially-trapped bicyclist, and Coulson caught him before the EMTs could finish disentangling her.

He makes it back to the Tower after an hour of mostly-wasted time. Steve Rogers is sitting at his dining table. Tony bites back the ludicrous urge to “honey, I’m home!” him.

“Hey,” he says instead, as he steps in from the balcony, stripped down to the skintight suit he wears under the armor. He didn’t expect company. “You get something to eat?”

Steve seems somehow offended by the question. “I didn’t break in here and steal anything,” he says.

“Okay,” Tony says, moving past him. “Well, that’s a gold star and an empty stomach for you, Rogers. We’re all very proud.”

“It’s not my food,” Steve tells him. If he had hackles, they’d be raised. Tony wants to pat him on the head, but only because he’s always had a sort of neurotic tendency to see how hard people bite before he decides whether to trust them.

“Yeah, and a twenty-dollar grocery bill is really gonna break me,” Tony says. He takes a smoothie out of the freezer. “You want pizza? I’m gonna order pizza.”

Steve stares at him for a long moment before he shrugs. “I could eat,” he says.

“Great,” Tony says. He has JARVIS order three pizzas, because he wants at least half of one for himself, and Steve Rogers is a human garbage disposal.

Steve takes a shower while they’re waiting. He asks first, which Tony supposes is the polite thing to do, and he takes his backpack with him, like he’s worried Tony’s going to steal his wallet.

“You know,” Tony says, when Steve remerges, wearing another knockout set of some grandpa’s Goodwill khakis and button-down shirt, “you keep showing up like this, and it’s gonna get harder for me to lie to Fury about having no idea where you are.”

Steve flips open a pizza box and carefully selects a slice. His hair is wet and neatly combed back from his face. He’s handsome from a distance but damn near devastating at close range. Tony takes another bite of pizza, hopes it’ll help swallow back the urge to sink a few grand into war bonds.

“Fury’s the guy with the eyepatch?” Steve doesn’t settle into a seat. He takes his pizza and wanders over to the window, stares out at the skyline.

“Yeah, that’s him,” Tony says.

Steve makes a face. Tony can see it, dulled and faded, in the reflection on the glass. “He’s persistent,” he says, slowly. Not like it’s a compliment.

“Yeah,” Tony says, again, “that’s him.”

Steve doesn’t say anything else. Tony finishes his slice of pizza, eats another one. There’s an ache in his right shoulder from being wrenched around by Hammer’s ridiculous creation, and he should be icing it, but he doesn’t want to. Not with Steve Rogers here.

He’s never liked looking human in front of an audience. His problem has always been that he couldn’t figure out how to stop. At least, not until he built his armor.

Steve comes back when he’s out of pizza. He’s catlike in his wariness, in the way he seems pissed at Tony for daring to exist in his proximity.

“That fight,” he says, apropos of approximately nothing at all. “Earlier.”

“Oh,” Tony says, rising out of his chair and moving toward the bar, giving Steve the room to loom over the pizza like he’s defending his kill. “You see that on the news?”

“Saw it on the street,” Steve says. “Heard the screams.”

Heard the screams and came running. So he’s still in the hero business. Fury will be happy to hear it.

“You’re gonna get yourself killed,” Steve tells him. He sounds angry about it. At Tony, not the situation. “Where’s your backup?”

“Backup,” Tony repeats. “Cap, c’mon. Read a newspaper. I work alone.”

Steve Rogers looks up from his pizza perusal just long enough to roll his eyes. It should feel like a slap across the face, and maybe it does. However it feels, Tony likes it. Wants more of it. There’s always been something grounding in being dismissed, like Tony’s never known where he stands until someone shows him how he doesn’t measure up.

“Is that supposed to be impressive?” Steve asks. “Men who work alone die alone, Stark. And they’re not very effective when they do.”

Tony knows he’s meant to be offended. He is, probably. But he couldn’t bite back his smile for anything. “I think I liked you better when you called me ‘Mr. Stark.’”

“Seems to me,” Steve says, “you want everyone to call you Iron Man these days.”

“Oh Captain, my Captain,” Tony says, “surely they had that line about glass houses in the ‘40’s?”

Steve frowns at him. “I never asked anyone to call me Captain America.”

“And yet,” Tony says, tipping a bottle of whiskey his direction, “that’s how to introduced yourself to me.”

Steve gives him a look like he thinks Tony’s being deliberately obtuse. “That’s who I am,” he says.

Tony rolls his eyes and flips a tumbler right side up. “But when I start using a stage name,” he says, “suddenly I’m a narcissistic asshole who doesn’t--”

“Do you think,” Steve says, looming up suddenly, shifting gears like something mechanical, going battle-ready with more decisiveness than a faceplate clicking down, “that anybody spent years, spent—I don’t know. Millions of dollars? Do you think anybody did that for Steve Rogers?”

Tony’s caught wrong-footed. He did it again. Drilled until he found the nerve, cut until he broke the skin.

“I think you don’t get one without the other,” Tony says, trying now to soothe. But he’s not very good at it. His instincts don’t run this direction. His whole life, the only things he could ever repair were machines.

Steve shakes his head. He steps away from the pizza. He looks around, eyes zeroing in on his backpack.

“Stay here,” Tony says, sidling out from behind the bar, whiskey now in hand.

Steve straightens up like a cobra, like he’s going to spit venom in Tony’s face. Tony wants to put his mouth on him, which is probably only half because he’s always been hellbent on his own destruction. The other half is that Steve Rogers is beautiful like something made in a lab for aesthetics alone, carefully designed for universal appeal. Tony likes to tell himself he has a taste for the exclusive, but the reality has always been he wants exactly what everyone else does.

“You don’t want SHIELD to find you,” Tony says, “then stay here. Trust me, this is the last place they’d think to look.”

He’s not standing between Steve and the exit. He was careful about that. Whatever SHIELD might think about him, he doesn’t have a death wish. And also, when he’s thinking about it, he’s not usually deliberately an asshole. It’s just that, most of the time, he’s not thinking about it.

“Why should I trust you?” Steve asks.

Tony shrugs. Hell, he has no idea. “Why’d you come here? The first time. When SHIELD lost you, you came here. Why?”

“I went home,” Steve says, argumentative, all squared shoulders and tight jaw. “I went to Brooklyn. But it wasn’t there anymore. None of it was—I couldn’t find…”

He trails off, shakes his head, sharp and agitated, a horse bothered by a fly. It’s hard to look in his eyes. There’s something in them that Tony doesn’t want to see. It’s like watching a statue bleed.

“I heard there was still a Stark in New York,” Steve says. “I read about you. I thought maybe you’d--”

“You thought I’d be like Howard,” Tony finishes for him. “Sorry to disappoint.”

“I thought you’d be like me,” Steve says, which doesn’t make any sense at all.

“You,” Tony says. And then, a little helplessly, “What?”

Steve looks away. He shrugs, looks back. “I saw the suit,” he says. “On the news. I saw what it can do. I didn’t think--- things have advanced a lot. I didn’t understand. I thought Howard had…”

Tony squints at him. “You thought Howard did a Rebirth redux and tested it on his kid?”

“I thought a lot of things,” Steve says, snappy. “It was a very confusing couple of days.”

Tony can imagine that it was. “So you thought I was Rebirthed, and you wanted--”

“I didn’t want anything,” Steve says, and there’s that flash of exposed nerve again, that look like a sinkhole in the backs of his eyes. “That’s not the point.”

Tony takes a sip of his whiskey. It settles, warm and sweet, into his stomach.

I didn’t want anything.

I shouldn’t be alive, unless it’s for a reason.

Tony holds the tumbler out. Steve needs the warmth more than he does. “Here,” he says.

Steve takes it, seemingly on reflex. “I can’t get drunk,” he says.

“Well,” Tony says, circling back toward the bar, “not with that attitude.”

#writing #fic

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cheri-translates · 4 years

Text

[CN] Gavin’s S2 R&S - Inevitable

🍒 Warning: This post contains detailed spoilers from an R&S (不可抗力) which has not been released in English servers!🍒

This R&S features S2 Gavin!

It is incredibly important to read Ch 9 Part One before embarking on this!

[ Chapter One ]

At midnight, a young man makes a turn at a secluded alley, walking into a small hotel that’s still open for business.

He walks around the main hall, and straight into the innermost booth. The sound of shuffling in the night is continuous, and the dealer holds a cigarette in his mouth, drawing a card.

A hand suddenly approaches, and the muzzle of a gun covers his temple.

"How long will it take for you to finish this round?" Gavin’s voice is calm, fingers exerting more pressure on the trigger.

The others are so frightened that they rush out. With no way out, the man suddenly whips out a knife and swings it at Gavin. Gavin grabs his wrist, the other hand reaching for the handcuffs.

All of a sudden, a voice rings in his head: Don’t get hurt, and don't ignore the consequences. If he were to do this, it seems someone would be very sad. He doesn’t seem to want to make that person sad either.

In that second of distraction, the knife glinting with a cold light in the man’s hand slices the area between Gavin’s thumb and index finger. The thoughts in his mind accumulate amidst the pain. Gavin gathers some strength in his palm, a raging gale rolling up the battered tables and chairs. The man’s gaze turns frightened...

Three minutes later, the man, who was puffed up with pride earlier, is firmly handcuffed and kneeling on the ground, begging for mercy.

Gavin pushes the person out of the booth, and the colleague responsible for providing assistance steps forward, escorting the person into the police car.

In the main hall, the little girl who was clapping her hands and singing the birthday song earlier has burst into tears, shocked by the sight before her. Her mother comforts her. "Don't be afraid, darling. This is the Special Police Uncle who catches bad men and is here to protect us.

After glancing at him, the little girl cries even more fiercely.

Gavin nods to the girl’s mother apologetically, then walks towards the claw machine at the entrance of the hotel. After a short while, he returns, hugging the largest doll in his arms.

"Happy birthday.”

He hands a huge cartoon doll to the little girl, then turns and walks out the door.

An hour of interrogations is enough to leave one exhausted. Tang Chao stretches, holding a tidied statement while heading towards Gavin’s office.

It’s late at night, and the lights are still on. Tang Chao knocks thrice but receives no response. He tries pushing the door open, and is shocked to find that Gavin, who is seated behind the desk, is neither dealing with a case nor official business. Instead, he’s in a daze.

Gavin leans against the chair, his gaze fixed on the computer screen for a long time, brows furrowed deeply. Tang Chao walks over and glances at the screen - it’s a report regarding the arrest of the producer from [MC’s Company Name] not too long ago. He reaches out, waving his hand in front of Gavin. He asks, "How many fingers?”

When Gavin glares back coldly, Tang Chao feels relieved. However, seeing the scab wound on his hand, he’s confused again - what could be so important that he’d forget to tend to his wound?

He places the tidied statement on the table, then drags Gavin to the infirmary. "Even a body forged in iron can’t be compared to you.”

Fortunately, the wound isn’t deep, and can be healed in a few days. But Tang Chao’s intuition tells him that Gavin is a little different from usual. This time, the offender wasn’t considered dangerous, and could be easily subdued by Gavin’s skills. How did he get hurt this easily?

Before Tang Chao can ask a few more questions, Gavin has already vanished without a trace.

[ Chapter Two ]

At four o'clock in the morning, the clerk at the 24-hour convenience store yawns, overcome with boredom as he stares at the TV commercial on the wall to pass the time. A cheerful electronic sound rings. The automatic doors slide open, and a young man walks in.

The clerk perks himself up, and is about to say "Welcome" when he realises that the customer in front of him looks very familiar.

This man lives in an apartment in the vicinity, and visits this convenience store frequently. Sometimes, he drives past in a smart-looking motorcycle. When someone tries to hit on him occasionally, he always rejects them coldly. It’s a pity that whenever he visits, he either buys instant noodles or instant bento... looks like it’s the same this time.

When the clerk sees him heading towards the convenience food shelf, he sighs in his heart: Young people these days don’t take care of their health at all.

Gavin leans down, his gaze flitting across the neatly arranged food on the shelf, absentmindedly differentiating the expiration dates marked on the packets.

Shiitake mushroom flavoured instant noodles aren’t tasty. The stray cats at the entrance of STF prefer meat, not anchovies. Don’t get hurt, don’t get mired in danger alone, don’t leave without saying a word.

Such thoughts once again surge forth. From a certain point in time, many unfamiliar experiences have been intruding into his life. It’s as though he’s sharing another memory, these disordered fragments of memories twisting into a long, thin thread, holding onto his wrist, tugging at him secretly from time to time.

Gavin returns to his senses, subconsciously drawing back the hand that was reaching for the convenience food, and picks the brand at the side which contains more vegetables.

When checking out, Gavin notices that there are rows of potted succulents next to the cash register.

"This is a public welfare activity jointly launched by our store and the Loveland City Environmental Protection Association. For every plant sold, we will donate the same amount of funds to the environmental protection charity.”

Seeing how unresponsive the young customer in front of him is, the clerk is tactful as he continues scanning the remaining products, "Nine dollars in total.”

The receipt is printed, and the clerk hands it to him along with the bento. The young man suddenly points at the small potted plant that had just emerged from the soil.

"Add this too.”

Back home, Gavin throws his jacket into the washing machine, sets the time for washing and drying, then heads into the bathroom to take a shower.

A strong gush of water flows from the shower, and white mist quickly fills the entire space. The stinging pain from the wound sobers him up quite a lot, and he subconsciously thinks: The wound should be tended to quickly, and “she” can’t know about it.

Realising what he’s thinking, Gavin is once again stunned-

Who’s “she”?

And why is he so concerned about how that person feels?

Stepping out of the bathroom, the washing machine makes a "ding" sound. Gavin wipes his head and walks over to take a look, only to realise that he had put bleach instead of laundry detergent. He stares at the washing machine in silence for a while, then reaches out to unplug the power, retrieving the ruined jacket.

After all of this, Gavin suddenly remembers the small potted plant he just bought. The clerk said that if it is placed in a location with sufficient sunlight, there would be new shoots in a week, and that it’s very easy to grow.

Gavin places it on the balcony, then picks up the phone and begins to search "How many times must succulents be watered in a day". Whether it’s a mere illusion, that sense of deja vu once again surfaces.

"What in the world am I doing...?" He mutters to himself, tossing his phone aside a little irritatedly. He returns to the bedroom, lying on the bed and closing his eyes, waiting for sleep.

In the depths of this autumn night that no one knows about, the rain outside the window patters against the leaves gently, and there is a very, very light stirring in his heart.

Gavin opens his eyes, looking at the ceiling which is illuminated by car lights. Suddenly, an unnamed emotion surges in his heart - he feels that the memories he has never been able to grasp weren’t “forgotten”. Rather, they are “losses” which render him powerless.

[ Chapter Three ]

On a rare, idle weekend, Tang Chao calls a group of friends from the STF together for hotpot. Right after ordering the hotpot base, Lu Yi’s conscience suddenly bugs him, and he asks if he should call Captain Gavin over.

Thinking about how rarely Gavin gets to rest and how he definitely wouldn’t be willing to see this group of people, Tang Chao knowingly shakes his head. However, his mouth has a different idea. “I’ll call him then.”

On the other side, a few special police officers are comforting Xiao Zheng from the Publicity Department who was hurt emotionally. Xiao Zheng fell out of love last week, and has been feeling extremely fragile and sensitive these few days. Hearing the bitter love songs in the shop, his eyes immediately redden.

Tang Chao taps open his contacts list, silently recalling the odd behaviour of Gavin recently. He isn’t interested in being a busybody, but his instincts tell him that Gavin has something on his mind, and it’s a change obviously brought about by that girl’s appearance. But whenever Tang Chao wants to inquire about it, the words get halted by Gavin’s killer glare.

Thinking about this, Tang Chao glances at Xiao Zheng sympathetically, and comes to a definite conclusion - if Captain Gavin were to continually suppress his emotions without releasing them, it’d result in an illness.

Tang Chao asks the waiter to serve two dozen beers, then dials Gavin’s phone.

"Good evening Captain Gavin. Have you eaten?"

"I don’t mean to annoy you, but Captain Eli invited us to have butter hotpot. You coming?

"Don't be in such a hurry to refuse. I’ve got something to talk to you about. Yes, it’s happening right now... it’s of utmost urgency.” Tang Chao shoots a grin towards an astonished Eli. Then, he continues fabricating a tale. "I don’t want to run laps. There’s a genuine matter.

Half an hour later, Gavin frowns as he walks into the hotpot restaurant. Seeing this, a few young special police officers immediately set down their chopsticks and stand up straight in a row. The only thing they haven’t done is to salute at Gavin.

Tang Chao grins, asking the waiter to bring an additional pair of tableware over. “Captain Gavin, you’re here.”

Gavin glances at Tang Chao and says in a cool voice, "What’s the urgent matter?"

“Xiao Zheng fell out love, so he asked you over to console him with us.”

“...”

Xiao Zheng frantically waves his hands in surprise, stammering a retort. Tang Chao pushes him back onto his seat and signals for him not to speak.

"Don't be sad, the chances of people ending up together is always unpredictable." Tang Chao pats Xiao Zheng on the shoulder. "Besides, who doesn’t have someone in their heart? Don’t you agree, Captain Gavin?"

These words are akin to a sudden clap of thunder on a calm sea. Xiao Zheng immediately forgets to cry. Eli immediately straights up, and the others hurriedly set down their chopsticks, whipping their heads over to look at Gavin like meerkats.

Gavin remains expressionless, though the hissing sound emanating from his body is even cooler than the ice cubes in the beer.

Since they’re in public, Tang Chao knows that it wouldn’t be convenient for Gavin to give him a beating. As such, he’s incredibly composed, and continues with his questions without a fear of death. “Captain Gavin, why aren’t you saying anything?”

“Why do you think this has anything to do with her?”

“I already saw the photograph back in the training days. Is she the lady from before when you roared “Tang Chao, put your hands away”?

[Note] These are references to R&S [Tempering] and Ch 2 Part One!

"...Tang Chao!”

“I'm here, I'm here." Tang Chao fills Gavin’s glass with beer. "Captain Gavin, I actually realised that you haven't been in the best state recently, but you don't like speaking your mind. I’m showing my concern."

“It’s said that you speak the truth after drinking, and today’s beer should be enough. Whatever you want to say, whatever’s suppressed in your heart, just release them all happily. Right, Captain Eli?”

After three rounds of drinking, Tang Chao fails to get Gavin drunk, but ends up drinking too much himself. Once again, he complains about Gavin's "Death Training" back in the days of special training. In the end, Gavin foots the bill.

Eli steps forward and pats him on the shoulder, saying, "Did something happen recently?" Gavin shakes his head in resignation. "You really believed him? His mouth is like a runaway train.”

Eli looks at Gavin and sighs. "I know you don’t need anyone to worry about you.”

"But that kid Tang Chao said one thing right. If one keeps suppressing their feelings, they’ll be suppressing problems.”

[ Chapter Four ]

On the way back, Gavin sees withered leaves on the branches along the street, and only then remembers the small succulent he had bought not long ago.

Back home, the potted plant on the balcony shrinks alone in the corner. Originally thinking that the plant he had left “free range” for so many days would meet a premature end, it turned out to be alive despite having a few withered leaves. Gavin finds this a little unbelievable, and he becomes more meticulous in watering it.

The next morning, Tang Chao opens the door to Gavin’s office and apologises solemnly. "Captain Gavin, I'm sorry. I promise that I’ll never inquire about your personal life in the future, let alone make arbitrary conjectures about your feelings.”

Without looking up at Tang Chao, Gavin only tosses out a sentence. "Before next Monday, re-check all the case data in the Archive Room.”

The Archive Room is on the third basement floor. The dust is very dense and the materials are very thick. Tang Chao wails immediately, leaving dejectedly.

Gavin picks up the document Tang Chao had just placed on his desk. It is a sealed report for the seizure of "small syringe" production plants, which records in detail the batches and output of pharmaceutical companies which participated in the production.

Reaching the final part of the report, Gavin is silent for a moment. At the end of the report, there is a line of small characters - "Ten boxes of drug samples are suspected to have gone missing."

Without putting much thought into it, a face with a beaming smile locks onto his mind.

“...I won't investigate you this time." He sighs, putting the report back into the drawer.

After ferreting the mole out of STF, Gray Rhino seems to have erased all traces of the "small syringes". But Gavin knows they wouldn’t withdraw easily from competing for "CORE" - naturally, neither will Black Swan.

Gavin is clear that the current peace will not last for long. Before the girl stands against him on the opposite side, what he has to do is be one step ahead, obtaining more crucial information as soon as possible.

The phone beeps, notifying him of a new e-mail. Gavin is pulled back from his thoughts, and his eyes fall on the unknown email that popped up.

"Congratulations on your successful registration in the Hunter Game" - the sender’s address is encrypted, and there is no doubt that no information can found.

Gavin's thoughts gradually settle. His hands are clasped lightly on the table, his gaze falling on the words "Hunter Game", his gaze turning sharp and determined.

That place definitely has something they’re looking for.

[ Chapter Five ]

In the STF Intensive Care Unit, a dripping sound accompanies the plastic tube. Gavin sleeps very peacefully, and he feels like he had a lot of dreams in his dazed state. They aren’t nightmares which wake him up with a start, but dreams which make him willing to remain asleep.

However, it seems he can only remember the final dream from the long series of dreams. When he’s roused awake by the sound of footsteps in the corridor, what lingers before his eyes is a blurry yet familiar face. Gavin sits up on the hospital bed, the pain from the no-longer-effective anaesthesia making him more awake.

Despite not telling Tang Chao and Eli about his participation in the Hunter Game, they aren’t suspicious. They’ve grown accustomed to Gavin’s aloof nature, and as such, assumed that he went on a secret mission.

During his absence over the past few days, there was a new development in the Evolver assassination incident - a new victim has appeared.

Gavin is very clear that if the cases were to be allowed to ferment, the higher-ups from “that side” would intervene in the matter. They have to take immediate action.

“There’s one more tricky thing." Tang Chao sits at the edge of his desk. "For the latest assassination case, we encountered a witness with a special situation. We might have to ask an Evolver who can read memories for help."

Tang Chao blinks and asks, "But I don't know any Evolvers with this ability. Do you know any, Captain Gavin?”

According to theory, aside from work purposes, they should be keeping a distance from each other. But according to the girl, the reason why they’ve come out for an idle stroll is, for one, to relax. Two, to search for inspiration to solve the case.

The lead from the only witness to the Evolver assassination was cut short. Gavin isn’t affected much, since he knows that this matter isn’t simple. In contrast, the girl is especially bothered by it, and feels apologetic for not being able to help.

On the bustling street in the afternoon, Gavin returns to his senses, taking the oden which the girl hands over with a smile.

When walking by her side, Gavin realises that he’s barely thinking about the things that are bothering him. He naturally picks up her conversation topics, as if they had wandered aimlessly on the street side by side before.

Does she feel the same way? In his heart, Gavin shakes his head in self-mockery, wanting to forget these thoughts which confuse him.

Walking out of the food street, rain patters down. The pedestrians on the street crowd together suddenly, rushing towards the station. Gavin holds up an umbrella, planning to send her back.

The yellow wintersweet flowers exude a subtle fragrance in the rain. The smell, colour, and the scent of the person next to him seem to be magnified, forming a memory of the present moment.

Perhaps, even before he noticed it himself, while he has been deliberately neglecting the complex emotions in his heart, they have been also been growing in a place where he cannot see. When she calls his name, when she accidentally touches his hand, it’s as though some things from a very long time ago are coming back to life in his mind--

Someone had once called his name using such a tone.

Someone had once held his hand in this way.

Someone... was once his strength.

The emotions which he conceals deeply, whether they are good or bad, were once held gently.

A scorching wave of heat suddenly rushes into his chest.

The traffic lights change, and the crowd waiting at the side of the street slowly surge towards the middle of the road. The surrounding pedestrians squeeze past each other, bumping into his shoulder from time to time.

Gavin lifts his head abruptly, watching the side profile of the girl as she’s in the rain. It’s as though there’s an intriguing overlap. It’s as though a very long time ago, his heart had leapt this fiercely for her.

The girl suddenly turns around, looking in his direction and waving at him. Putting away her umbrella, she points to a mother-daughter duo hiding from the rain underneath the bus stop. She asks for his opinion through her gaze. Without much thought, Gavin removes his jacket, brisk walking towards her in the rain.

Raindrops patter down, and the water beneath his feet leave splashes in their wake. Akin to rain, they land on his body. It’s as though he gets slightly more drenched with each step. At this moment, Gavin realises that on days when memories are muddied, he has grasped a thin thread since a long time ago.

The jacket supports a narrow world, and wind and rain occasionally blow in.

If their reunion was meant to verify their directions, no matter what the future holds, what he has to do now is to run forward with her, together.

[Note] Please don’t ask me about the Hunter Game! I haven’t had the chance to read the earlier chapters in detail so I don’t know the specifics 😅

💙 More S2 content: here

💙 Support the cafe by dropping by the tip jar!

#mlqc #mlqc cn #mlqc spoilers #mlqc gavin #...T^T #please don't send me asks about the new chapter even if it's about verifying spoilers floating around!#I haven't read them and I don't wish to be spoiled HAHAHA

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getthembees · 3 years

Note

Royai prompt: They get caught gettingiton by all of Team Mustang, pre frat rules being lifted. (Or making out, if you wanna keep it PG~ honestly I just wanna see the members of Team ‘We-All-Share-The-Same-Braincell’ finding their very professional bosses not being very professional.)

Hello sorry this took so long!! It's here now! This is also a lot more tender than what I think you were expecting haha

Title: flash flood under my bed

Rating: T

Read it here or on AO3

Riza feels herself stretched between the realm of consciousness as if her body is being hauled through a swamp. Sticky and lethargic, her eyelids flutter and fall as her mind claws at the mud. Each time she resurfaces from its depths she can take the world in for only a second—a burning light above her, a white ceiling tile, thin sheets beneath her arms—before she is submerged once again, dragged into the grime.

Her mind wakes before her body does, kicking at the shallows to keep her eyes open. Fear creeps up the back of her neck at the foreign bed under her, the unfamiliar room. She wills her body to move, to secure her surroundings. Her eyes drag to her right, blinking sluggishly at the figure there.

Black hair. It’s messy. Who is that again? A small part of her asks.

Silly girl, a larger part supplies, rattling through her entire body, that’s your Colonel.

My Colonel…

She finally blinks awake, eyes wide. Her body feels like it’s been dumped in ice water after being in a hot spring. She turns her head.

Roy does not acknowledge her movement, he sits on a borrowed hospital chair at the side of her bed, head bowed, fingers twisted in the bedsheets. His eyes are closed.

Her memories catch up with the rest of her—the tunnels, Bradley, Pride, the transmutation circle—she swallows back a choked noise. Her throat is rubbed raw from both the exertion and the yelling, her tongue feels like it’s been turned to cotton, and when she swallows again she tastes iron.

“Colonel…,” she rasps, but it comes out more of a cough than a word.

He hears it, though, and his head shoots up, eyes opening to reveal foggy pupils as he looks in the direction he thinks her head is. “Lieutenant—” he gasps, a quiet noise. Maybe he’s been swimming in a swamp, too. “Lieutenant, are you awake?”

Riza nods. Realizes he cannot see her. She hums an answer instead.

A grin splits his face, and it is a look so utterly relieved that she feels her eyes misting, “I’m so glad,” he whispers, breathless, “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

She wants to answer, wants it more than anything at this moment. To reach out and reassure him with words he’ll need now that he cannot see, to talk, finally, now that the battle is over. But her throat still tastes like metal, and she desperately needs a drink.

“Water,” she croaks, reaching feebly for the table at her bedside.

“Oh, right.” Roy traces the edge of her bed until his hand hits the table leg, brushing upwards until he closes his hand gingerly around the full glass. She meets his hand halfway, closing her fingers around his bandaged skin as he moves the cup to where he thinks her head is.

Riza sits up, the wound in her shoulder smarts as she does so, but she ignores it in favor of guzzling the water, only stopping to gulp down air.

When the cup is empty, and her throat feels less like it’s full of copper cenz, she opens her mouth. “Thank you, Colonel,” she starts, she almost says I’m glad you’re okay, too. But he isn’t okay, his hands are wrapped in gauze, and he’s still blind. What a poor excuse for a bodyguard you are, her mind spits.

“How long have you been waiting here?” She asks instead, an innocent question, a safe question.

“A couple of hours, I think. Though I really can’t tell,” he laughs, but it sounds strained. A string pulled taut. “You’ve been asleep for longer, It took the medics a while to bring me here. How is your neck? Your shoulder?”

“Sore, they itch a little, too. Mei Chang did a fine job, it’s not as bad as it could be.”

His mouth creases in a thin line at the memory of her, the blood, the gold-toothed doctor. “I suppose you’re right. It seems I am indebted to her for saving my precious subordinate’s life.”

Precious. Riza ignores the warmth in her chest and eases back onto her pillow with a heavy sigh. “How are your hands, sir?” She doesn’t ask about his eyes, she knows Amestrian medics don’t have the means to restore his sight from the other side of the gate.

Roy’s head tilts down as if to look at the bandaged limb before he catches himself, snapping his head upwards like it was pulled by a hook. “The surgery was quick, and the doctor said they’ll heal fine. The cuts were clean. Neat, even.” He shoots her a lopsided smile, “still hurts like a bitch to move, though.”

Riza doesn’t have the energy to laugh, her lips quirk instead. “That’s good, Colonel.”

There’s a lull, a tension settles in the air like lightning is about to strike the very room they sit. She hasn’t felt this uneasy in his presence since Ishval. Riza takes a breath, “sir—”

“I am very sorry, Hawkeye.”

Riza freezes, staring at him. She doesn’t speak, she senses he’s not quite finished.

“I apologize for… for everything that happened in those tunnels. For losing my head fighting the homunculus, for yelling at you, for my… attachment to you getting you hurt,” he looks up, and despite the blind gaze, she feels his eyes bore into hers. “I was reckless. Arrogant to think they’d never hold you against me and a fool for thinking I was a good enough man that you would never have to pull your gun on me.”

“Please,” he begs, bowing his head. “Please forgive me, Hawkeye.”

She inhales slowly, turning his words over in her head. She remembers the terror in his voice as he watched her get dragged to the transmutation circle. “You don’t have to apologize for what happened with the doctor. That wasn’t your fault, sir. It was never your fault that they decided to use me against you. You could never have prevented that.” Roy looks like he wants to argue, she forges on, “do not apologize for being a human, Colonel. You are bound to have people close to you. Any one of those could have been used against you, to drop them for any potential threat is a foolish paranoia. Our…” relationship? Partnership? Friendship? “...proximity is nothing to apologize for. I will not have it.”

She pauses, clenching her hands against the pristine sheets of her bed. The battle with Envy flits through her head like an old film, her Colonel’s savagery seems branded in her mind. Riza takes a deep breath. “You lost yourself against Envy. You lost yourself in your anger, and you said horrible things. You almost did horrible things. You pushed me away, Colonel. But…,” she looks at him, his fingernails are digging into the fabric of his pants, knuckles white.

She remembers what he had said to her months prior, before she had been reassigned. I’ve been called a human weapon, a monster, but it’s only when I’m fighting a real monster that I realize I’m just a human. She rests her hand on his, his fingers relax under her touch.

“You didn’t go past the point of no return. You didn’t lose your humanity, Roy.”

Roy sucks in a breath, the sound rattled and hollowed. It makes him look fragile. She curls her fingers around his palm.

“So…,” she begins, her voice no more than a whisper, he leans his head towards her. “I forgive you, Roy Mustang. I’ve already forgiven you.”

Roy turns his hand upwards, slipping his fingers between hers. His eyes are closed again, and there is a small, shaky smile on his face. “I don’t know why you’re forgiving me so easily. You shouldn’t.”

“Well, I’ve never listened to everything you have to say, sir.”

Laughter bubbles from his lips, the sound warm. The knot of stress in his voice seems to have unwound. He bows his head, his forehead nearly touching hers. “Thank you, Ha— Riza.” She can make out the small, newly healed scratches on his face from this distance. “Truly, for everything, thank you.”

The hand he has clasped in hers untangles their fingers and reaches up to trace along the inside of her wrist, up against the length of her arm, her uninjured shoulder, the side of her face, until he sweeps the loose hair that falls over her eyes behind her ear. The movement is slow, tentative, cautious of her injuries and his own blindness. Riza leans into his palm and hums, a soft encouragement. She pushes up on her elbows as his finger traces her cheek, her jaw.

Riza reaches up to hold his hand in hers once more, grasping at his knuckles, brushing against the bandages on his palm. The tension that had crackled before isn’t vicious now. It is still there, palpable in the air, but it doesn’t threaten a flashover, lingering instead with the promise of summer rain.

Roy leans in and pauses a breath away from her, unsure if he’s welcome or unsure where she is, Riza can’t tell, but she huffs a laugh nonetheless. Still useless in the rain, I suppose, she thinks with a smile, and closes the gap for him.

Warmth blooms in her chest and she feels a rush of lightheadedness. This. This is what had been building in them since before the Promised Day, before the homunculi, in the budding years of their partnership. The kiss says a million things, it is the culmination of a thousand stares, a thousand late-night dinners, a thousand confessions buried under propriety and mumbled words. Roy’s palm flexes against her cheek, his other hand moves to grasp at her waist, the heat of his grip searing over her thin hospital gown. Her own hands reach up to tangle in his hair, pulling him closer. Now that she has allowed herself to touch him, she never wants to stop.

Roy has the same mindset, the hand on her waist traveling up and down her side, never quite stilling even as it moves to her lower back, pressing gently into her spine as he tilts into her. His lips are soft, unfairly so when hers are still chapped, and when he opens his mouth to scrape his teeth against her bottom lip she lets out a noise that makes her flush spread to her chest.

They break away only for a heartbeat before meeting again. Roy leans over her now, and a reasonable voice in the back of her head whispers that, maybe, she shouldn’t let her commanding officer press her into a creaky hospital mattress in a crowded building with a door that is, presumably, unlocked.

Riza ignores this thought in favor of pulling down his collar so she can kiss the length of his neck. He grumbles low in his throat, and she feels the noise against her tongue.

She’ll be damned if they stop this now, after years of nothing, she wants nothing more than to lie with him here forever. The bed dips where Roy props up his knee, and she leaves his collarbones to seal their lips again.

And— yes, yes. She refuses to let this go— not when Roy squeezes the skin of her outer thigh, not when she allows herself to rub the wide expanse of his back through the thin hospital shirt, not when he presses his tongue between the seam her lips and makes that noise—

Someone in the room coughs.

Roy freezes just as Riza wrenches herself away from him, face flaming as she whips her head to look for the source of the noise.

Breda stands at the door, looking thoroughly unimpressed. Fuery and Falman flank him, the former of whom has turned a dangerous shade of red and has cast his gaze downwards to lock eyes with the suspiciously Hayate-shaped lump under his jacket. Falman is thin-lipped and tense, his shoulders pressed up against his neck, he averts his eyes to a space in the far corner.

Rebecca stands behind them, body halfway through the door, with the smuggest grin stretched across her face. Riza feels a headache coming on.

“Apologies for the interruption, sirs,” Breda deadpans, raising an eyebrow and shooting her a look that says, really? Riza clears her throat self-consciously. “We just came in to visit the Lieutenant.”

“We can leave if you’re… preoccupied,” Rebecca says, trying, and failing, to stifle her laughter with a cough.

Roy had settled back into his chair as soon as they spoke, his back straight. “That’s quite alright, Second Lieutenant. I’m sure Hawkeye would enjoy the company.” The professionalism in his voice belies the red of his ears. She’s sure the team doesn’t notice, far away as they are, but the attempt amuses her nonetheless.

Breda strolls in, determined to pretend that nothing abnormal has happened, Falman follows in his example, although he has yet to meet her eyes, and Fuery avoids the dilemma entirely by pulling Black Hayate from his jacket and placing him on the floor. Her puppy bounds across the floor, his entire body moving with the wag of his tail.

“Hayate!” Riza cheers as he leaps onto the bed with her, tilting his head as she scratches behind his ears. She pulls him to her chest, pressing her face into his fur, “I’m so glad you’re okay, Braha. You’re such a good boy.”

Hayate chuffs in response, leaning into her hold as his tail whacks her arms. She lays a kiss on his head.

Rebecca sidles up to the bed, brushing the fur between Hayate’s shoulder blades. “It was the Sergeant Master’s idea to sneak him past the staff,” she supplies, nodding back at the man in question.

Fuery rubs the back of his head, meeting her eyes for the first time since he’s entered. “Well, they probably saw him and just ignored it, really. He couldn’t keep his tail still.”

“Maybe a nurse should’ve stopped us. Then you two could have continued with your catch-up time,” she cackles, failing to smother the noise into her fist, and shoots Riza an exaggerated wink.

Roy huffs, his arms crossed over his chest, “I think we get the picture, Catalina.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’re thinking up quite the picture, Colonel—”

“Thank you, Fuery,” Riza cuts in before the bickering could devolve further, “I appreciate it.”

Fuery gives her a nervous smile, “It was no problem at all, Lieutenant, really.”

“Still,” she looks over the rest of the group, “I’m glad you all visited, and that you’re all uninjured.”

Breda waves his hand dismissively. “Yeesh, I didn’t know you were such a sap, Lieutenant. Of course we’d visit,” he cups a hand to his face like he’s about to tell a secret, “It would be cruel for us to leave you here alone with the Colonel for God knows how long.”

“Har har,” Roy mocks as the rest of the room snickers, “if you’re going to be a pest, Breda, you should have at least brought some food with you.”

Breda rolls his eyes, just as Falman pulls a paper baggy from his coat pocket. “One monte cristo and one turkey, lettuce, and tomato sandwich from Zullo’s Deli,” he states in the same tone of voice he delivers his mission reports.

Riza thanks him as he hands her the baggy, she slides Roy his monte cristo as she unwraps her own sandwich. Hayate watches the food curiously while giving her a particularly pathetic look. “No begging,” she tells him, and he lowers his head to her lap once more.

Roy nearly groans as he manhandles his food, “Falman, you are a saint.”

Riza takes a bite of her food, savoring the taste. It tastes like liquid gold on her tongue, but, she supposes, even food from the trash would taste impeccable right now. She nudges Rebecca with her elbow, “did you bring anything for yourselves?”

Rebecca shrugs. “Nah, we already ate about an hour ago. We plan on staying here to chat while you two eat, assuming that’s fine with you.”

“Of course it’s fine, as long as you find your own chairs,” she responds, scanning the room for seating. It’s relatively barren, with there only being two guest chairs in the room, one of which Roy currently claimed. Rebecca took the other chair, pulling it closer to Riza’s bedpost while the other men in the room piled onto Roy’s empty bed.

The team recounts their friend’s whereabouts as they finish their sandwiches. The Elric’s had been admitted soon after she had, and Alphonse currently resides in quarantine, with his only visitor being his brother. Reconstruction of the Central Command building had begun as well, led by Grumman and his men.

They keep the conversation light, they don’t talk about the death toll, or the injured. No one mentions the clouded sheen over Roy’s eyes.

Riza brushes her finger against Roy’s knuckle while the rest of the room laughs at something Breda said. She taps twice, lingering a second before pulling away. His hand chases hers as it retreats, catching it and curling his pinky finger around hers. He taps back, once, twice, thrice. Repeating the motion in sync with the steady beating of her pulse.

#royai #fma #roy mustang #riza hawkeye #fullmetal alchemist #my writing #this has been sitting in my drafts for like four months I'm so sorry LMAO

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casuallyimagining · 4 years

Text

A Normal Wednesday

Jeon Jungkook x Reader

Summary: Drunk Jungkook confesses something that Sober Jungkook has to reckon with.

Part of the Long Term Couples series. Read more here.

Jungkook was drunk.

Not too drunk. He wasn’t swaying or slurring his words or anything like that. But when he spoke, he was just a little too loud, a little too honest, and a lot too talkative. Somehow, he had convinced you to take him back to your apartment rather than the shared dorm where the rest of the guys could take care of him. Normally, this wouldn’t have been a problem. Jungkook stayed over often enough that he had a change of clothes in a backpack stuffed away in your closet, and you never minded having him around.

The problem was more that it was three in the morning, and you had a meeting with upper management--his upper management--at ten. And as much as Bang PD and Manager Sejin loved Jungkook and the boys, you weren’t sure you wanted to test how deeply that love ran.

“Please, Jungkook,” you begged, a soft fourth attempt to get him to quiet down. “I know you have off tomorrow, but I don’t.”

Reasoning with a drunk. The first sign of your apparent insanity.

Jungkook giggled at you, his bunny teeth peeking out from between his slightly parted lips. His head was resting heavily against your shoulder as the two of you lounged on your couch. You had given up on trying to coax him to bed an hour ago, choosing instead to attempt to placate him with a movie. If I can sleep through his snoring, I can sleep through a movie, you had told yourself.

Had it just been the movie drawing your attention, you may have succeeded.

Shortly after Jungkook legally was able to drink, you learned that he was a needy drunk. He didn’t just want your attention, he craved it, and he was willing to go to increasingly annoying lengths to get what he needed. Which is partially how you found yourself with an arm slung around his shoulders as he absent-mindedly played with your hand and told you about his day. It was all horribly domestic, and if it wasn’t 3:05 on a Wednesday morning, you would probably even think it was cute.

“Jin-hyung is surprisingly good at table hockey,” Jungkook said earnestly, tracing the heart line on your palm. “Even after I accidentally hit him with the puck.”

“I’m glad you had fun.” You stifled a yawn and rested your head against his own. “Jin takes those games far too seriously.”

You felt him nod against you. “It was fun. I wish you could have seen how bad Yoongi-hyung is at the games. He’s like… really bad.”

You hummed, attempting to close your eyes. It seemed that, now that he was done telling you about filming that afternoon, Jungkook was starting to calm down. You could feel your eyes start to droop closed, and you prayed that whatever higher power would take pity on you that sleep would come quickly.

A few moments of silence passed between you, the tv still playing the movie Jungkook had started and promptly forgot about. For a moment, you thought maybe he had turned his attention back to it--it was his favorite, after all--but when you ventured a peek at him, his gaze was in his lap. He had stopped playing with your fingers, his own tattooed hand now solidly engulfing yours. You closed your eyes again, snuggling in. If he was going to trap you on the couch, the least you could do was get comfortable.

Hopefully, he would sleep.

Unfortunately, that was wishful thinking, as not even a second later, Jungkook was whispering your name. You hummed in response, not even bothering to open your eyes.

“I’m really drunk,” he confessed.

“I know. Go to sleep.”

He started to play with your fingers again, but now, you could feel the nervous energy practically rolling off him. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but you’re my best friend-”

If you could bring yourself to open your eyes, you would have rolled them. “I know, Koo-”

“But you’re more than that, too.”

“What?”

“I just mean that...” You felt him shift, and he mumbled a soft ‘I’m way too drunk for this,’ before continuing. “I just mean that… I dunno. I feel like there’s something more here. Best friends don’t do this.”

You opened your eyes just enough to see that he was gesturing to the space--or rather, the lack of space--between you. “Sure they do.”

“Then why do I get butterflies every time you walk into a room?”

Oh.

Shit.

“You’re drunk.”

He giggled at that, and he adjusted himself so that he could look at you while still laying against your side. You could feel your heart racing, and you hoped that Jungkook couldn’t feel it, too. Drunk or not, he would almost certainly tease you mercilessly about it.

“It’s okay if you don’t feel the same way. I don’t mind. We can still be friends.” Jungkook nodded, and you couldn’t tell if he was trying harder to convince you or himself that his words were true. He pulled himself closer to you, then, nuzzling his nose into your neck. “Promise me we can still be friends?”

You were speechless, but you held out your pinky to him. His longer one wrapped around it, and you could feel him smile against your skin as he shook your hands up and down. When he was satisfied with your pinky promise, he let you go, choosing instead to wrap his arm around your middle.

“You should get some sleep.” Finally, you could hear a hint of exhaustion in his voice. “You have a meeting in the morning.”

You had to admit: sleeping on the couch wasn’t your brightest idea. Your neck was sore, and you were pretty sure that the pain in your lower back would be there until you died. It didn’t help that extricating yourself from Jungkook’s grasp was almost more difficult than getting him to fall asleep.

He had woken up briefly when you tried to slide out of his iron-tight grasp, but thankfully, you were able to lull him back to sleep by playing with his hair. After that, it had been smooth sailing, and you were actually able to stop for coffee before your meeting.

Truthfully, you weren’t sure what you would be returning to. You had left a Post-It on his phone offering to let him ride out his hangover in your apartment since it would be quiet. But when you hadn’t heard from him into the afternoon, you wondered if he had just gone back to the dorm.

You hoped he wasn’t too embarrassed. Publicly, he oozed confidence. But privately, when Jungkook got overwhelmed, he tended to shut down, especially if he was feeling particularly unsure of himself.

As you drove home, you thought about what he had said the previous night. He was right, of course. The two of you never acted in a way that said anything more than ‘best friends,’ but it was the feelings behind the actions that mattered. And at some point, though you weren’t exactly sure when, the Jungkook-sized place in your heart had shifted ever so slightly.

You weren’t stupid. The man would make a great partner. He was handsome, sure, but more than that, he was kind, and he was loving, and he put the people he loved ahead of anything else. He cared purely,and unceasingly with every fibre of his being. When he hung around other people, you tried to pass off the pit in your stomach as jealousy that he was making new friends, but maybe there was something more to it.

When you opened your door, his boots were still where you had placed them neatly the night before. You weren’t sure if that made you more relieved or stressed. You kicked your shoes off and hung your keys and your bag on the hook in the hallway, trying to be as quiet as possible just in case Jungkook was trying to sleep.

He wasn’t--or, if he was, he was failing. You found him in your living room curled up into the corner of your couch, a blanket draped over him. He was watching the movie from last night--Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--and he was clutching one of the pillows from your bed. He must’ve grabbed it sometime after you left. Your heart fluttered at the sight.

You decided you were glad he was still there.

“How’s Clementine?” you questioned, leaning against the back of the couch directly behind Jungkook.

He hummed. “She’s in love. For now.”

On a normal day, he would have tugged you down beside him to finish watching the movie, or he would have paused it and followed you into the kitchen to grab a snack. But today, he sat still, his fingers twisting and untwisting the blanket, his eyes trained on the television. You sighed softly and ruffled his hair before making your way into the kitchen.

It wasn’t that you were disappointed. Really, you weren’t sure what you were expecting. But seeing him treat you differently stung a bit. You liked to think that your friendship with Jungkook was unshakeable--god knows you’d been through so much in six years. You were there to cheer him on at his high school graduation, for the highest of highs and the lowest of lows in his career, to help him make sense of the group almost disbanding. He hadn’t changed then, so it was hard to see him change now.

But he was still there, in your apartment. That wasn’t nothing.

So you grabbed a bottle of water and trudged back into the living room, just in time to see Joel and Clementine sitting on the steps on the beach in Montauk.

“Never liked this part,” you admitted, sitting down on the opposite end of the couch from him.

Jungkook hummed, and you could see him looking at you out of the corner of his eye. “It’s sad. If only he could have shared his true feelings with her.”

“I think he does, though.” This topic of conversation was not new. You and Jungkook had discussed Joel and Clementine’s relationship before. “Maybe his life really isn’t that interesting.”

“But if he weren’t that interesting, don’t you think she’d notice?”

“Maybe not. He’s interesting because of her.” He turned his head to stare at you, but you just shrugged. “He’s a book nerd. He goes to work and goes home. His life only has meaning because she’s in it. That’s all.”

His brows furrowed. “Have you been watching this without me?”

“You wish.” You snorted out a laugh and rolled your eyes. “I don’t even like it that much.”

“Then why don’t you complain when we watch it?”

You could feel the tension in the room dissipate slightly. Whatever funk he had been in earlier seemed to have left the moment you started talking about Clem and Joel. You sighed, still trying to determine if you wanted to broach this subject.

You liked your friendship with Jungkook. He knew almost everything about you. It was nice. It was home. Maybe it would be better to just leave well enough alone. Then again...

“Because it’s what best friends do,” you said softly, crossing your legs on the sofa so that you were facing him. “Just like they stay up ‘till three-thirty in the morning listening to their drunk friend ramble about arcade games.”

He ducked his head and laughed sheepishly. “I’m glad you made it to your meeting on time.”

“Let’s not sleep on the couch again for a while. I woke up and I felt like I aged 50 years.”

“Sober Jungkook does not make promises for Drunk Jungkook.” He laughed, pulling his legs up so he was hugging his knees facing you. He fell silent, and you watched as, after a moment, his smile fell and the gears started turning in his head.

You gave him time to process his thoughts, your focus shifting to the final scene of the movie--Joel and Clementine in Joel’s car, listening to the tape of Clem’s memories.

“You know,” you began tentatively. “I’m a book nerd. I go to work and come home. My life really isn’t that interesting.”

Jungkook’s eyes met yours briefly, and after a moment, you could see the lightbulb turn on. “Are you saying that I’m your Clementine?”

“Not in as many words. And not exactly. But…” You shrugged.

“No.” His face scrunched up in disagreement. “No way. I’m not your Clementine. We’re nowhere near as-”

“Jungkook,” you cut him off with a sigh. “In the six years I’ve known you, I have been in your orbit. I’ve traveled the world because I have the happy misfortune of assisting Sejin-oppa and managing your social media presence. I go out because you ask me to. I stay in because you want to. I hang out with your friends, eat your favorite foods, watch your favorite movies.” You couldn’t help the small smile threatening to show itself. “My life would not be this interesting without you in it.”

You watched him chew on his bottom lip in thought. “So what are you saying? Because if I’m Clementine and you’re Joel… I’ve seen this movie, and I’m not sure I like how it ends.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it won’t end the same way.” You moved closer so that your knees were barely a foot from Jungkook’s shins. “We could try, and we could fail spectacularly. We could do nothing and fall apart anyway. It happens. Friends drift.” Gingerly, you took his hand from where it clutched his knee. You were quiet as you traced over the micro-tattoos that covered his skin. Finally, you took a breath and continued. “Or, we could try, and we could succeed.”

“I don’t want us to fall apart like Clem and Joel do.” His voice was soft, timid. You hadn’t heard him this scared since the band meetings in 2018 that almost separated the group.

“I have more faith in us than I do in Clem and Joel.”

“But what if we end up hating each other?”

“I can’t think of anything I don’t like about you right now.”

Jungkook smiled at that, and honestly, you were a little impressed with yourself. You didn’t think you had seen the movie enough to pull quotes like that out of your ass.

“But you could, though.” He ran a hand through his hair. “You could end up hating me because I’m-”

“You’re obnoxious. You don’t take no for an answer. You’re the loudest eater on this side of the universe. You get drunk and keep me up to three-thirty in the morning.” You laughed, surprised at how happy you sounded. “Koo, I’m already over the moon with you. You’re my best friend. If I couldn’t handle that, do you really think we would be here right now?”

“But what if it makes things weird?”

“Things are already going to be weird. We passed weird a long fucking time ago, bub. This shit here,” you poked his knee for emphasis. “Is uncharted territory. And there’s no going back.”

His brow furrowed, and you watched him chew on his lip again. “Doesn’t that scare you?”

“I’m fucking terrified,” you admitted. His eyes went wide as he looked at you. “But… god, I knew from the moment I met you that I would always be in your corner. I trust you, Koo. You haven’t let me down yet.”

Jungkook sighed, his bottom lip back between his teeth. He shifted, then, so that his legs were crossed, your knees pressed together. You wished you knew what he was thinking.

You weren’t lying when you said there was no going back. And if you were honest with yourself, you knew that if he declined, you would be crushed.

His dark eyes met yours, the little crease between his eyebrows appearing and disappearing as his focus shifted around your face. It was as if he was studying you, trying to commit things to memory.

“Okay,” he said softly, his eyes darting away from you.

“Okay?”

Jungkook nodded, leaning forward to grab your hand. It was quiet, the only sound being Beck singing “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” as the credits to the movie rolled. He shifted then, tugging you closer so you ended up leaning into his side. At first, you were a little surprised at how absolutely normal it felt to be cuddled up in his side. He slung his arm around your shoulders while casually searching for another movie to watch, and you tangled your legs together.

Perhaps things had technically changed, but it felt like just a normal Wednesday.

Read more of the series here

#jungkook x reader #jungkook #jungguk x reader #jeon jungkook #bts x reader #jungguk #bts

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readerinsertfanfiction · 3 years

Text

It has been a while since I wrote anything this long for fanfiction. o7

Fandom: Ikemen Sengoku

Character: Motonari Mouri

Prompt: Enemies to lovers (implied) + Soulmate AU (the first word/sentence your soulmate says to you is etched into your skin.)

The tides of the waves and the soft shaking of the boat was a lullaby to the body and mind, comforting you into a sweet lull that you found hard to fight off. But you were on a mission and you couldn't afford to be distracted. Not when the sea's greatest treasure was so well contented for and the map so near but not in your hands. Yet.

"Raise the sails! Rival ship signalled!" someone called from the crow’s nest, and you knew that to be your cue. For days the ship had been tiding the open sea, its captain too afraid to board now that he finally had the map. A coward’s decision with insight, you knew, for it had cut you off from any escape route, or room to act. It forced you to be patient, to wait for the wave to come. But with a rival ship in sight this changed, this could be your wave. And as the rest of the ship jumped into action you quietly slipped out of sight, carefully making your way down towards the captain's room; the place where the treasure map would be.

Whoever manned the other ship had a bold captain. The crash you heard, followed with the shock that threw you off balance on the stairs, signalled as much. A mixture of screams, war cries and fear alike, told the rest of what you needed to know above as you hurried yourself along the wall, knowing there was little time.

"Fire!" a voice cut above the rest of the chaos. It was the only warning you got as you were launched into the wall again. A sharp burst of fire and gunpowder followed. The attacking ship was out for blood and the cannon that had blasted a hole in the captain’s room did the rest. The smoke, thick at first, slowly faded revealing a tall figure stepping through without fear or care and in full confidence.

A showdown, you determined. For now there were two of you in the room. Though the winner between both ships was already decided the contest for the map had just started. You were determined to make yourself the winner, but knew that you weren't alone in that idea. A smile curved along your lips as you wondered if you would have to jump ship. It mattered little with whom you were, as long as you stayed afloat. Security first, you could always swipe away the treasure later.

The ship shook once more. Violently like a summer storm brooding, and a noise accompanied it along with more screams and yells incomprehensible from above. The fight had officially started as the sound of iron and steel clashed. The time to move and get your map was running out. And with the stranger already at the captain’s desk you knew you had to act fast.

"Best give that to me," you smiled, a gun clicking in your hand as you aimed it at the figure from the smoke. A man, you recognised him, tall and dark with a mop of white hair. Handsome, you determined next, but nothing that could help him convince you to give up. Bold, just like those red coloured eyes that snarled at you with a wicked smile before pulling a weapon of his own. "Motonari Mouri," you named the man, a smirk on your face as you circled around the infamous pirate, "finally we meet." You had hoped for a showdown with the pirate before. There was a bounty on his head and you valued your bounties just as much as you loved your treasures. It had been inevitable for the two of you to meet, for the seas weren’t endless and the treasures few.

"Just give me that map," Motonari spoke, and somewhere you could tell that under all that rough exterior and slang there was a well-educated man. Someone that grew up within the upper class. It wasn’t his accent that got your attention, however. It was the sentence itself as you felt the back of your shoulder burn, the words imprinted there calling, snarling. You grimaced at that irony as you rolled your shoulders, slowly stepping around to face the man, a smile etched on your face when burnishing red eyes met yours, a scowl on his face.

"Nice to meet you, soulmate," you calmly responded, placing an emphasis on the last word as you watched Motonari click his tongue. "You will need me to be able to read the map," you stated confidently, and your newly found soulmate narrowed his eyes.

"Don't think that being my soulmate will save ya.” His tone is sharp before a confident smile finds his way, "or that I need ya.” And you could tell from that crazed smile that your soulmate meant every word. He would feed you to the sharks before taking you in.

A voice calling “halt!” followed by a warning shot had the two of you duck on the floor as you switched your target, your weapons aiming at the captain in distress who had originally hidden the map. “Don’t think you can get away alive,” the man blusters and you snort, pitying the fellow as you eye Motonari in mutual understanding.

"A shame, I could be useful," you shrug, trying not to seem daunted or worried. It was ill business to show any form of intimidation, not in a world where only the boldest could survive. Diving you roll underneath his arm, swiping the map out of Motonari’s hand as a pair of shots are released, only one finding its aim.

Throwing the scroll up in the air you give the pirate a whimsical look, ignoring the shot captain on the floor. "We only get one soulmate, after all." And with that dramatic claim you jumped through the hole, leaping over to the attacking ship. Another shot could be heard, followed by an order barked towards the remaining crew on the ship. Motonari’s ship.

The sails of the ship billowed and the low thud behind you amongst the rest of the leaping figures signalled the departure of the ship. It had gotten what it aimed for and so did you. Turning around you eye your soulmate, his eyes set in a deep frown before turning into a broad smile, a flash of his canine teeth flashing handsomely, "we only get one, right?" and you return the cheek, deciding that the pirate was worth the interest for more reason than simply fate.

But nothing was ever easy with Motonari and within your wandering life there was little room for ties and commitment. The map had been acquired, but there was only one treasure and it was one that you weren’t willing to share.

"Are you leaving?" his voice sounded harsh in the dark and you could tell that he was pouting underneath that harsh exterior. In the while the two of you had been partners you had come to know the man. The one that had been betrayed too often, the one that couldn't trust, the hurt child and the feral cat within. He who would hurt you before you ever had the chance of hurting him. The one who was as unwilling to share as you were.

The breeze that night smelled of salt, harshly whipping against both your faces, promising a storm. It felt like an apt moment to leave, you thought, but you weren't sure. You just had to leave, you felt.

"There is only one treasure," you answered, and the fiery red in Motonari's eyes took the same bluster as it had the first time you met, his lips pulling taut as he stared you down. For months you had followed while he had warmed up gradually. There was little to no change in his hostility, but you knew why, and you knew you couldn't ask for it. Not from him. Just as that your soulmate had known that you would leave his side one day. You were a wanderer, a treasure hunter, never to be tied to one place, or to a ship even. Your loyalty couldn't be tied. Not even to him whose fate was intertwined with yours.

"Ya can do whatever ya want, but the map stays," you heard him growl and a wry smile escapes you, having always known that sharing was not an option with him. It was something you had learnt not to ask for either. It wasn't selfishness, you knew. Not from Motonari. It was why you couldn't ask him to change, just as he couldn't ask the same from you.

With a shrug of your shoulders and a flick of your wrist you throw the map over. "I copied it, just so you know," you tell him honestly and the flicker in his eyes tells you that he had expected it, but appreciated your openness nonetheless. It made you feel braver and bolder for what was to come next, that which you knew to be the hardest part.

"If only you could ask the same of me." The words were out before you had a chance to review them yourself, your expression twisting as Motonari's brows raised, surprise painted on his face. Neither of you had expected an expression of your sentiments, not now when you were so determined to leave.

"Would ya?" he throws back at you and you laugh, at the informal tone he has taken with you, at the whole ordeal between you two. Soulmates, yet miles apart and it was so evident that both your hearts, or at least yours, wanted something that wasn't the reality now. Men paint their own tragedy, no matter how free their souls are believed to be.

"Can I?" you ask and you see a flash of irritation on the pirate's face, his nose scrunched up in that disapproving manner when things didn't go his way. The answer was already obvious, it had already been known for so long, but you wanted it out of him, you wanted Motonari to say it.

But he was as stubborn as you were and neither of you were willing to change. Not in nature, nor in life, or in style. "Whatever," his answer sounded and you knew this was the best you would get. The topic of soulmates still far away and undiscussed, the phrase 'I love you' even further away.

You knew that you both cared for the journey more than the result, for at least the both of you were adventurers at heart if there was nothing else you shared but fate.

#ikesen motonari #ikemen sengoku motonari #ikesen #ikemen sengoku #ikesen x reader #ikemen sengoku x reader

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needtherapy · 4 years

Text

The Necromancer’s Apprentice

Xue Yang has seen The Dark House and he’s heard the rumors that a zombie, a witch, and a necromancer live there. It’s stupid, obviously, but...well...maybe he’ll just sneak in one night and find out.

It’s better than doing nothing. It’s better than going back to the group home. It’s better than sleeping on the street.

Aka, three mildly feral twentysomethings are forcibly adopted by one (1) very feral thirteen-year-old Xue Yang.

Read on AO3

Many thanks to @coslyons for co-writing this with me (all the funniest parts belong to them) and @kevinkevinson for beta.

There is a Dark House in Ballard, and people say to avoid it.

It is probably not called the Dark House because evil lurks inside, although there is some debate about that. It is called the Dark House because it is black from threshold to cupola, from shutters to frames, and it looms on a block where whimsical shops of brick and steel are far more common. Unlike the thrift store and the record shop, the hiking outfitter and the vegan patissiere, no ivy reaches toward the roof of the Dark House. Unlike the local yarn store, no dogs sniff the Dark House’s gate, although at least two cats—also black, naturally—are always sitting on the porch.

It may not be fair to judge a house by its color, but the local legends are clear. If you step on the cracks in the sidewalk, the Dark House will steal your soul. The wrought iron gate of twining snakes comes alive under the light of the full moon to snap at unwary joggers. Children who walk alone after dark get eaten, and the yard is full of bones that wail songs of their murders.

Xue Yang sits on a bench, across the street, eating ice cream and admiring the house. He wonders about the sanity of people who mow the lawn and trim the roses, yet painted their pretty little house black, until it occurs to him that he could just go inside and find out.

He waits until dark, not to stay hidden, but because it’s a more terrible idea, and Xue Yang always gives himself permission to do more terrible things whenever he gets the chance. The high iron fence buzzes with a strange kind of energy that crackles in his palms, so Xue Yang wraps his hands tightly in his flannel shirt as he climbs over. His mother always said he was a practical boy, back when she was still around to say things.

Xue Yang lands in the backyard with a quiet thump onto thin and scraggly grass. The center of the yard is dark under the watery moonlight, with the dirt churned up and loose, and for the first time, a tiny twinge of warning pings in the back of his mind.

He ignores it.

With a flick of his wrist, he summons his knife, a long black switchblade that is seven kinds of illegal and which he loves more than anything else he has ever had, not that there is much competition. With nimble and practiced hands, he slides the knife between the door and the frame, twisting just right when he reaches the lock. With a grin of triumph, he turns the handle, shaped like a gaping mouth, and opens the door.

In the center of the room, there is a long sort of table that seems somehow to pull all the darkness of the room toward it. The shadows gather most thickly around a large, human-shaped lump laid out stiffly on top of it. Xue Yang reaches out to poke it and feels something unexpectedly warm give slightly under his finger.

The shadowy lump on the table sits upright with a sudden jerk.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHH!” Xue Yang shrieks.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHH!” the shadowy lump shrieks back.

“Why the fuck is everyone yelling?” a voice says, and the room is suddenly filled with light.

The shadowy lump rips off the sheet and turns into a guy in his early twenties with a scraggly little beard and wicked bedhead. The voice belongs to a grumpy-looking woman wearing a fluffy pink bathrobe. She squints at him in the oppressive brightness, glaring for a long moment before apparently deciding to deal with the man on the table first.

“Wei Wuxian, I’ve told you a thousand times that the workshop is not a place for sleeping.”

“Technically—” the man begins, before being abruptly cut off by the woman.

“If the next words out of your mouth aren’t ‘yes, Wen Qing,’ then I don’t care. Go to bed.” She rounds on Xue Yang and he takes a tiny, involuntary step back. “You. What are you doing here?”

Before Xue Yang can answer, another guy—this one with long hair, killer tats, and a dedication to the goth look Xue Yang has to admire—runs in with a baseball bat held in his hands like a club.

“Jiejie! Is there something wrong?”

The woman—Wen Qing, she’d said—pinches the bridge of her nose and says, “It’s fine, A-Ning. I’m just trying to figure out what this little hooliganthinks he’s doing breaking into my house and tripping all of my wards while I’m trying to fucking sleep .”

Xue Yang is now convinced that what he’s broken into is some kind of madhouse, and he pastes a charming smile on his face, the one he uses when fists are clenched and the smell of alcohol burns in his nose. The smile whispers words like “anger issues” and “prone to destruction,” and it’s usually weapon enough, but he holds his knife a little tighter too, just in case.

The woman snaps around like she’s felt his fingers grip the handle of the blade and holds out her hand. “Give it to me.”

No. He will not. His chin tips dangerously, his smile grows icy spikes.

Her eyes narrow. “I could just take it.”

They face off for a minute, the tension almost palpable. Actually, Xue Yang thinks, it’s not tension after all. There’s something else in the air. It reminds him of the buzzing fence, and he doesn’t like the way it confuses him.

“Ah, Wen-jie, let him keep her. Can’t you tell? The kid is scared, they’re both scared, and it’s not like he can hurt us.”

Xue Yang is offended. He is not scared, but he’s relieved that Wei Wuxian spoke up all the same, because even though Wen Qing purses her lips and looks annoyed, she drops her hand.

“Fine.” She crosses her arms again. “Wei Wuxian, make sure our little guest leaves. I’m resetting the wards in five minutes and going back to sleep.”

“Yeah, sure.” Wei Wuxian grins and shoots finger guns at Wen Qing. “Sleep well and dream of me.”

Wen Qing rolls her eyes. “Yes, because I love having nightmares.”

“Oh shoo.” Wei Wuxian flicks his hand at the goth man and Wen Qing. “To bed with you both. I can handle it.”

Their footsteps creak on the wooden floors as they walk further into the house. Xue Yang and Wei Wuxian wait in silence until the footsteps quiet, and then Wei Wuxian turns to Xue Yang. The grin he’d been wearing drops off his face and he looks serious, his eyes shaded and dark.

“Look kid, you should know better than to piss off powerful witches. It tends to be bad for the health.” The side of his mouth just barely tilts upwards, more wry than mirthful, and he looks old now. Old and grey and tired. “So, we’ll just call this a learning experience, and you’ll never come here again, right?”

Xue Yang snorts. “Are you kidding? If you’ve got real magic why the fuck would I leave now?”

“Toddlers shouldn’t swear.”

“I’m almost fourteen, fuck you very much.”

“Ah yes, I am now so convinced you are an adult.” Wei Wuxian rolls his eyes. “It’s two in the morning. You want to go home and go to bed. There’s nothing here for you to be curious about at all.”

Something sibilant and musical weaves its way through the words, and Xue Yang has his hand on the door knob before he fights off the slithering compulsion.

Holy fuck that was cool.

“Nah, I think I’ll stay,” he says, sauntering back casually, pausing to look at a weird painting of a monster facing off with an axe-wielding guy in front of a lighthouse. He feels a very strong sense of camaraderie with it right now.

Wei Wuxian sighs. “Sure, maybe you’ve got a little gift. But you’re a kid. Don’t you have parents who are going to, you know, notice you’re missing?”

Xue Yang stares him in the eyes, willing himself not to flinch. Something tells him this is a chance he’s never going to have again, a chance that requires honesty.

“No.” Xue Yang lifts his chin stubbornly. “I don’t.”

Wei Wuxian stares back, and Xue Yang gets the feeling that he sees all the years and all the disappointments that fit into that no. He doesn’t care. No one gives you what you want unless you take it.

This standoff lasts forever, or maybe it’s only a few seconds.

“She’s going to kill me,” Wei Wuxian mutters, and a little louder, “You can sleep on the couch tonight, but I’m locking you in the room and if you touch anything, I will turn you into a mannequin.”

He turns to leave, but looks back with a frown. “Wen Qing builds beautiful, elegant wards that you’ll never feel, never even notice if she doesn’t want you to. Mine will hurt. Don’t. Touch. Anything.”

Xue Yang decides, in the principle of magnanimity, to agree. “Whatever.”

Wei Wuxian shakes his head and points a finger at Xue Yang. “Go to sleep, kiddo.”

The words hold Xue Yang’s hand and lead him to the couch, make him lay down, and within minutes, he is asleep.

He opens his eyes to piercing sunlight and a pale face inches from his.

“What the fuck!” he yelps, instinctively grabbing for his knife and snapping it open.

“Mr. Wei, he’s awake and noisy,” the face says, and Xue Yang focuses on its features.

It’s the goth guy. His arms have full-sleeve tattoos, matching patterns of stark black geometric lines and circles, but his neck has weird black veins tattooed on it. His eyes, which are still way too close to Xue Yang’s, are so dark they’re practically black.

“Where’s the witch?” Xue Yang asks, sufficiently recovered to be an asshole.

“Boiling children,” Wei Wuxian retorts. He’s leaning over the table and taking notes in a tattered book, poking something with a tiny screwdriver. “It’s the only reason we let you stay.”

“Really?” Xue Yang can’t decide if that’s cool or terrifying.

“He’s always like that in the morning,” Goth Guy says conspiratorially. “By ten, he’s pretty nice again.”

“I’m never nice,” Wei Wuxian grumbles. “A-Ning, can you take our miscreant home, please? The last thing I need is cops knocking on The House door asking if we’re kidnapping children. Again.” “Okay, Mr. Wei.”

Xue Yang panics. He can’t go back there. Not since they found him alone with the fire. He knows what they’ll do, and he can’t go back. He won’t . He ducks under Goth Guy’s arm and has his knife angled under Wei Wuxian’s chin before he’s even processed the motor function commands “get up” and “don’t let him send you away.”

“No! You have to…” He scrambles though thoughts, desperate ideas, each one crazier than the last before he hits on words that work themselves loose from his mouth. “You said I had a gift, you have to teach me to use it.”

Wei Wuxian frowns, but instead of being afraid or angry, he tips his head and whistles, two notes that almost sound like a name. To his great shock and horror, Xue Yang’s knife vibrates in his hand, and his fingers snap open like a broken trap, dropping the knife onto Wei Wuxian’s waiting palm. He carefully folds the blade back into the handle.

“Jiangzai,” he says, almost affectionately.

It doesn’t mean anything, but then it does , and it hits Xue Yang so hard he collapses to the ground. The knife has a name, and he knows it’s right as soon as Wei Wuxian says it. Xue Yang’s heart pounds, and he hates it. He hates this motherfucker who just took his knife away and he hates the Goth Guy who is helping him back to his feet. He doesn’t want to stay anymore, and he shakes off Goth Guy, wishing he could throw his kindness on the floor and stomp on it.

Wei Wuxian rolls his eyes. “Okay, maybe you have a little bit more than a little bit of a gift. But you still can’t stay, and I’m not teaching you anything.”

Xue Yang snatches his knife— his Jiangzai—out of Wei Wuxian’s hand and stomps to the door. “Fine. Fuck you.”

He gets as far as yanking the door open and slamming it against the wall before he realizes that there is a person in the way, and she doesn’t look inclined to move.

“Here you go, kiddo,” she says, handing him a bag. “I bought you some clean clothes and a toothbrush. A-Ning will show you where the bathroom is. Come back down for breakfast when you’ve changed.”

This is somehow more terrifying than when she was yelling at him. Yelling he understands. Now she’s just being...creepy. He stares at her belligerently, and she sighs.

“Listen, you little shit,” she says, bending over to look him dead in the eye. She doesn’t have to bend very far, he realizes. She’s actually tiny, even though she seems as big as the Fremont troll. “You will either go willingly with A-Ning, who is very nice, or you can test my patience and get buried in the yard with all the rest of the naughty children who break into my house. Your choice.”

Yeah, that’s more solid ground.

“Fine.” He grabs the bag from her and waves at the Goth Guy. “Lead the way, A-Ning .” He means it to be an insult, but Goth Guy just grins.

Xue Yang hears Wei Wuxian ask, “Wen Qing, what the fuck,” before Goth Guy herds him up the wide staircase, and he doesn’t hear any more of her answer than, “A-Xian, I can’t let him leave. You don’t understand, I did a location…”

This close to the Goth Guy, Xue Yang decides to acknowledge that the pale translucence of his skin is probably not makeup.

“I’m Wen Ning, by the way. I doubt Mr. Wei or jiejie introduced me,” Goth Guy—Wen Ning—says in a casual tone.

“So are you actually dead or what?” he asks Wen Ning, and Wen Ning grins.

“Or what,” he answers enigmatically, and gently shoves Xue Yang in a bathroom with pink tiles and a claw-foot tub.

Once he’s bathed and changed, Xue Yang heads back downstairs. Breakfast is bacon, eggs, and toast, and he doesn’t even pretend it isn’t the best food he’s eaten in a week. It is, in fact, the first food he hasn’t stolen in a week, and that alone is a novelty.

He’s halfway done with his food when Wei Wuxian, who hasn’t touched a bit of his and looks as sullen as an orange, says, “I have been informed that there is some arcane rule about teaching a gift you discover, and my...how did you put it, dear Wen Qing? My immortal soul and earthly being will be in danger if I don’t capitulate to the inevitable?”

He glares at Wen Qing, and she smiles sweetly at him.

“Whatever,” Xue Yang says around a mouthful of eggs. “Are you going to eat that?”

Wei Wuxian passes him the plate of food, and Xue Yang closes his eyes in bliss. Food is amazing.

“There are conditions—don’t look at me like that, Wen-jie. I agreed, okay? I get to set conditions. First of all, you do whatever I tell you. If I tell you to sell turnips on the street corner, you better sell some goddamn turnips. Second, you don’t touch anything unless I say it’s okay. A lot of this stuff,” he waves his hand around the white and yellow room, which looks surprisingly cheerful for a kitchen in a black house, “is priceless and dangerous, so…”

Wen Qing clears her throat and glares at Wei Wuxian.

“Uh...don’t touch anything.” Wei Wuxian finishes, snaking a piece of bacon from Xue Yang’s plate and shoving it into his mouth before disappearing back into his workroom.

Wen Qing rolls her eyes. “I promise he’ll actually teach you stuff once he pulls his head—” She visibly checks herself. “Once he stops being an idiot. More bacon?”

The rest is on AO3

#the untamed #cql #mdzs #mo dao zu shi #xue yang #wei wuxian #wen ning #wen qing #Seattle #modern au #modern with magic #found family #the untamed fic #13k words #I just think teenage Xue Yang would have been very different with a family

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corpsentry · 4 years

Photo

ao3 mirror

fandom: botw rating: t  pairing: zelda/link  notes: post-canon, getting together, mild descriptions of injury. cooking. dancing. crying. and so on. “Let’s say you’ve been asleep for a hundred years and when you wake up you’ve lost all your memories, but you defeat the big bad monster like you’ve been told to, because a girl told you to, and because you were in love with her. And after defeating the big bad monster she comes back, only she’s not the person she was a hundred years ago. And you’re not the person you were a hundred years ago. And yet every time you look at her, your chest hurts so bad you think you might be dying.” He looks up from his breadstick. “Am I dying?” “No,” Beedle says. “I think you’re stupid.”

All roads lead to hateno.

“I ate the frog.” Is the first thing he says to her in a hundred years, because he can’t stop staring at her hands, and his head isn’t working properly because he can’t stop staring at her hands, and he doesn’t remember what he had been planning on saying before he walked into the castle and killed two versions of evil incarnate in a room with a domed ceiling and a field with a domed sky, but he’s pretty sure. He’s pretty sure it wasn’t this. “I’m sorry,” Zelda says. “You what?” “I, uh.” He takes a step back, and then a step forward. Hyrule castle looms like a corpse behind her, hulking and majestic and dead. It distracts him, though not as much as Zelda herself, pale as winter and glowing behind a halo of sun. “There was a frog you wanted me to eat.” A hundred years ago. “You said it would be for an experiment.” A hundred years ago you told me to eat a frog and that’s all that I remember. That’s what’s kept me going all this time. When things got hard, when the weight of the curse you had given me grew too great, I cooked a frog in a pot over a fire. She stares at him for a moment, her expression unreadable. “You’re more talkative than I remember.” He panics. “Should I stop talking?” “Oh no! No, just— how do I put it—” This probably isn’t what she had in mind for their reunion. He feels the sudden need to apologize. He should have tried harder to hold onto himself while he was sleeping off the blood on his back and the world retreated into a corner to lick at its wounds, but it was hard. He didn’t know what he was doing. He doesn’t remember, actually. He doesn’t remember going to sleep, and he doesn’t remember what he dreamed of. That’s two question marks in one head, and only one answer to go around. There were two shadows on the wall, though they belonged to the same boy. Zelda twists her hands together, almost as if in prayer. Her white dress billows heavily in the wind, covered in wounds from another century. “I’m sorry,” she says to his feet. “Please keep talking.” He nods, though she isn’t looking. After a moment, they make their way across the trampled, dead-looking field to his horse, who’s had half of her mane seared off and looks like she desperately wants a carrot. He hauls himself onto the saddle, then holds out a hand to Zelda, who stares at it like he’s just offered her the rest of his lifespan. Then she takes it, letting him pull her up behind him, and her hand is so warm, and the sky is so blue, and everything is so strange, he almost lets go. Of the girl. Of the reins. Of his grip on reality, this new, unexplored reality, the carcass of the castle slowly growing smaller in the distance. When he walked into the sanctum with a plan to kill Ganon he had been thinking about how the stalhorses on Tabantha Snowfield run faster than the horses near Kakariko, how a bokoblin will choose a freshly roasted chicken over the skin of your teeth, how stables are a metaphor for family. Now all he can think of is angels. She asks him where they’re going a little while later, and it’s only then that he realizes he doesn’t know. It’s a cool, starless night. No moon, no blood. His horse snickers at a boar by the side of the road, and Zelda tightens her grip on his waist. God, what have they been doing for the last hundred years? “Home,” he answers. “We’re going home.”

 The house in Hateno is a small and modest affair. This is probably the only reason Bolson and his construction company were willing to sell it to him at an equally modest price, with modest display stands for his modest weapons, and a modest bed beside which he hung a framed photograph of him and his dead friends. He’s fine with it, though. The only thing that really matters to him is the photograph, though there are now two living people in it instead of one and a half, and if Bolson had not graciously included a bedframe and mattress in his modest homemaker’s package, then Link would have slept on the floor. He says as much to Zelda, who blinks at him sleepily and throws a pillow at his face. “Please don’t do that,” he says. “Sleep in your own bed,” she replies. He peels the pillow off the floor and pats the dust away before replacing it carefully on the bed. “I promised your father I would take care of you.” And Daruk. And Mipha. And Urbosa, who would kill me if she found out I let the princess sleep on the carpet. Like a dog, she would probably say, her voice low, her eyes slanted. How could you treat her like a stray dog? This is the princess we’re talking about. She deserves better. He opens his mouth to say as much, but Zelda gets there first. “My father is dead,” she says, her voice unexpectedly raw. She seems surprised at herself despite her best efforts, and clears her throat in an attempt to hide it. He finds himself overwhelmed with the sudden urge to hug her or blast a hole through the roof with his sword, but can’t decide on one, and ends up wringing his hands together behind his back while Zelda sits on the side of the modest bed in the modest house in Hateno, and presses the folds of her dress into a clump. There should be more he can do for her. What is it? If only Urbosa were here to tell him what it means when Zelda takes your hand like a promise, when Zelda pinches the side of your waist, when Zelda announces that her father is dead, has been dead for a hundred years, died a long time ago. But Urbosa is dead too. The old world is gone, though its survivors have finally emerged from the twilit field. What now? Zelda rubs her eyes. He picks at a cuticle and holds his breath. Despite her best protests, she agrees to the bed-floor arrangement. Zelda will sleep on the bed, because he didn’t think that far when he walked into the castle and defeated evil incarnate, and she doesn’t seem to care. Meanwhile, he will sleep on the floor. Which floor? The first floor, he decides, but when he tries to go downstairs he almost throws up. His heart’s uneasy, of course, but he had underestimated the side-effects of meeting an angel. Over the past few months, he had gotten used to getting mauled by things to the point where it had become part of his daily routine: get up, have a minor crisis about the fact that everyone you know is dead, have a minor crisis about the beautiful voice in your head, get mauled by a bear. Get mauled by a bokoblin who stole your spear. Get mauled by Mount Lanayru, which has a thing for spitting giant snowballs at him when he’s trying to talk to the Koroks in the region, pleading with them through chattering teeth to stop giving him more tiny golden shits and start letting him talk about his feelings. Zelda is not daily routine. Zelda was the girl in the dream, then a face in a photograph, and now Zelda is sleeping in the house in Hateno with her hands pressed up to her cheek, breathing softly. He’s overcome with emotion, though if you asked him to tell it to you, he wouldn’t know how. And as for the matter of her hands, were they always this lovely? Impa didn’t tell him what to do after he saved the girl, though he knows she’ll want to hear about it from him and not the Sheikah warriors she has spread out throughout the kingdom, keeping an eye on their dying gods. Impa wanted him to look forward, which meant knives and teeth and forests full of bodies. She didn’t tell him what he could or couldn’t do in the presence of the sun, and he, having spent his whole life sitting in a dark room, didn’t think to ask. In retrospect, he should have. In retrospect, he should have asked Bolson to build two beds. But the thought didn’t occur to him, just as it didn’t occur to him that his heart might not be the dead thing the world told him it was, and so he never did.

 “I had a dream.” He flips the eggs. “About what?” “About a world where I made it in time.” Zelda peers over his shoulder. “Are they done yet?” “Almost, if you could please—” “—Ah, excuse me—” She dances out of the way of the big cast-iron pan, which he holds in one hand while he reaches for the plates with the other. In her haste to create space she walks into the counter and winces, bending over to touch the side of her foot. “Oh. I stubbed my toe.” She sighs. After breakfast he goes to look for Uma. He finds her sitting under the same old tree beside the bridge, cradling a cup of tea and humming along with the cicadas. Uma is the only person in Hateno who remembers the Calamity as a name with a face, and not a dream. She also had a daughter once, whom she lost in the years after the Calamity, when the rice fields had not yet begun to flourish, and the winters were long and cruel. He asks her quietly about the weather, which she tells him is her favorite kind. Spring’s never felt quite so lovely, she informs him, as she pries open an old dresser and leans forward to peer inside. He holds her cup of tea with both hands, the mellow sweetness of chrysanthemum tickling his nose and making him sneeze. After a moment, she returns with a set of clothes in the signature Hateno blend of oranges, blues, and warm, earthy browns. She places them carefully on his head and then retrieves her tea before he has the chance to drop the cup. “I hope your friend is taking well to Hateno,” she says warmly. I hope I have a friend, he thinks with his heart stuck halfway up his throat. He’s barely keeping himself together, in pretty much every sense of the word, but he thanks her all the same, and means it.

 He did, in fact, eat a frog. Several times. Once on the Great Plateau, after the spirit of the old king had left him to fend for himself with a pickaxe and half an apple, and again while he was in the Hebra mountain range, because it was too cold out to hunt and one had hopped into his pack while he wasn’t looking and died there. Then there was another time, at one of the stables up north, where he met a traveling salesman who offered him a stamina-boosting trick for ten rupees. The first time he obediently closed his eyes, and could only describe the texture in his mouth as ‘soft, with hints of viscosity’. He returned several weeks later, ran away on his horse immediately after making payment, and was mildly alarmed to discover that he had not in fact been presented with a breadstick, but rather a leg. A very long leg. With joints. And skin. And a big, webbed foot. Once, while sitting on a raft headed out to sea, he considered hurling himself into the water. It had been raining for several days by this point, which itself wasn’t a problem as he had come to quite like the sound of rain bashing on the outside of his tent with bloody fists, but this rain was relentless. Like a ghost which tries to kill you and fails, and, in a fit of bitter resentment, resolves to throw rocks at your window each night for the rest of your life, the water got into his boots and it got into his eyes and then it got into his pack, which spoiled all of his carefully-preserved meat and caused the stopper in his bottle of milk to rot. Under the present circumstances, all the game had either gone off to find shelter or been washed away by the floodwaters. There was nothing for him to hunt, and nothing for him to eat. His stomach growled faithlessly. While stumbling along some beach or another, he bumped into Kass, who told him about some treasure further out at sea. He looked blandly in the direction that the parrot pointed out for him, and found his eyes drawn to the island that lay beyond it. “I’m going to go there,” he said. “I hope you find good treasure,” said Kass. “Yeah,” he said. So he hauled himself onto a raft (he was too shy to ask the people in Lurelin for help, and too proud to talk about his circumstances) at the crack of dawn and began to blast a Korok leaf at the sail. And then he got tired. He sat down. He leaned over the edge of the raft. His reflection in the water was gray, because the sky was gray, and the sky was gray because it was raining. He had begun to shiver again, but he had spent most of the week shivering anyway and so didn’t pay it any attention. His hair was matted to his forehead, and there were bags under his eyes. One of his piercings was smarting; it must have gotten infected. “What if I just stopped trying,” he suggested to the sea, which ignored him. What was the point of it all, anyway? All of his friends were dead and the girl in the photograph was stuck in a castle in the sky. He didn’t remember a single thing about the first seventeen years of his life. Only the things that happened in the last three months, only the things that were deemed important, and even those he remembered in fragments. Like what if he had a sister. What if his father had been kind to him, or doting, or an alcoholic. What if he had been in love with someone, and what if he had had a heart, and what if he had cared. It was hard to discern the world’s sympathies for him when he spent most of his time alone. Sometimes, at night, he drew a face on the rock-wall and gave it a name. “I’m tired,” he said. “I’m tired, and I’m hungry, and I feel more dead than alive, even though I’m the only one still breathing.” But the sea continued to ignore him. The wind continued to ignore him. The rain continued to ignore him, pelting at his wet shoulders with wet hands and wet teeth, clawing at the skin on the back of his neck, telling him to go to sleep and stay there. Eventually the raft drifted of its own accord to the shore of the island he had spied in the distance, and then some thousand-year-old mummy stripped him of all his belongings anyway, so it no longer mattered that he had nothing in his pack or his head or his heart, as long as he was able to replace it with something new.

 A few weeks later she’s standing in the kitchen and staring at the vegetables in the pot, humming to herself, while Link rearranges the condiments on the table. She’s swaying from side to side, holding up the ladle like a sword. She seems happy. He leans back in his chair until he can just about see the top of her head. “What song is that?” he asks, casual as a house on fire. A pause. Something clatters to the floor. Picture two figures in a forest full of thorns and teeth. Picture the knight carving a path through the trees, the princess stumbling behind him, his clammy hand tight around her wrist, their feet bruised and dirty. It’s raining, of course, because it’s always raining in the dream. They’re being chased by mechanical monsters with knives for eyes. And they’re tired, both of them, so tired they could hurl themselves into a pond and drown there, but instead she walks into a tree. The bark scrapes the length of her forearm like a kiss, tearing at her skin and pouring blood down the back of her hand. Something clatters to the floor. Something breaks. Picture the old dream, the one he knows like a memory, the reason he’s less afraid of bears than people. He whirls the chair around to the sight of Zelda’s hand in the fire, her posture rigid, her face hidden by a curtain of hair. “I’m sorry,” she says, crestfallen. “It’s just—” He’s on his feet and halfway across the room before she can finish her sentence, pulling her away from the counter, reaching for the faucet with his other hand. “—It’s the first time you’ve asked me a question since you found me,” she says quietly. The skin on the back of her hand is bright red. If Urbosa were here, she would tie his arms and legs to four horses and then ask them to run in four different directions, and he would die in such a memorable way, it would eclipse even the deaths of all his old dead friends, who were trapped in machines with voices for a hundred years while their bodies turned into dust. If Urbosa were here then he likely wouldn’t be, would be in the next room, his ear pressed to the door, his heart pressed to the roof of his mouth. It’s a good thing, then, that she isn’t.

 It’s spring, so the water from the faucet is cold enough to cut yourself on. The water from the faucet is cold, so it should sting on skin as red as this, but Zelda doesn’t say anything as he holds her hand under the stream of water, his thumbs resting on the curve of her wrist, his eyes searching her blank expression for. A sign? A reason? Why the ladle on the floor; why the hand in the fire? “It’s fine,” she finally says, brushing her hair behind her ear with her unhurt hand. “No,” he says before he can stop himself, bristling a little, feeling slightly outrageous. “It’s not.” Zelda looks somber for a moment. Then she hiccups a laugh. “We’ve had this conversation before, haven’t we?” Yeah, I remember when you [the path that leads to Hateno is wet and winding] and I [your hand on the back of my head was cold and dying], he wants to say. But he would be lying if he did, because he doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember anything except the sixteen stories she left him, sixteen shards of a seventeen-year-old life. If she’s referring to something funny, then he’s missed an opportunity to make her laugh. If she’s referring to something important, then it’s no wonder he can’t seem to bridge the gap between the frog and the girl, no wonder his head hurts like someone stabbed it with a pitchfork and forgot to take it out, no wonder Hyrule still feels so far away, even as he milks the chickens and he chases the cows and he collects the eggs from the bears. He turns this thought over in his head as he goes for the medicine cabinet, which he had not asked for and Bolson had installed as a courtesy. Despite his best efforts, the blood on his back never quite washed away. She’s gone by the time he closes the cabinet, and he begins to feel that telltale sickness in his stomach, the sudden urge to throw up. He walks briskly out of the house in Hateno, salve and bandages tied to his wrist, his heartbeat ringing in his ears. The moon is a crescent tonight. Hateno rises and falls with each breath, pressing flowers into the palm of his hand. He folds each one unevenly in half. Zelda’s halfway up the ladder when he finds her. He waits for her to get onto the roof before he starts heading up, and is surprised all the same when he reaches the top of the ladder, and finds her face inches away from his. “I didn’t know you had a ladder,” she says pleasantly. “Why did you follow me up here?” She smells like Goron spice and sun. He is three seconds away from plummeting to his death. This is nothing he is used to, and a part of him thinks that if he knows what’s good for him then he will never get used to any of it. Not the silent, dead castle, not the long black shadow of the future, not the girl. She leans back after a moment. He breathes out. Half an inch of space will not keep either of them safe. Zelda watches him retie his ponytail expectantly. “So?” The ladder is from the Great Plateau. He found it at the back of the Temple of Time days after the old king asked him to climb to the top of the ruined structure and revealed to him that he was, yeah, the old king, and that all of his friends were dead, and that he would have to get the girl out of the castle before she could even think to save him, and by association, the rest of the world. At that point he was still naive enough to think defeating Ganon would take a stick and an apple and a really fast horse. He had also not yet learned of the myriad ways in which he had failed everyone he had ever cared for, and so spent his days wandering from place to place, pointing at bugs in the leaves and laughing. The ladder pissed him off. Who put it there? Why didn’t the old king tell him about its existence? What was the point of leaving a ladder behind the statue of Hylia when you could’ve put it in front, so stupid soulless people like him could use it to reach the end of the story faster? He returned to it much later, after he had purchased the house in Hateno, and yanked the whole thing down. Hacking it into four sections with a pickaxe he stole from a bokoblin (it had probably belonged to him first anyway), he piled all of them on his horse and then walked through Hyrule field, past Fort Hateno, all the way back to Bolson, who stared at him like he’d just asked him to kill a man. What do you mean you want me to fix this ladder, he asked. I mean I want you to fix this ladder, he replied. So Bolson did. Zelda laughs so hard she almost falls off the roof. She gets right up to the edge of it, leaning over the side with her face in her hands while he scrambles to keep her from toppling over. She only let him wrap up her arm because he was talking, because according to Zelda he never did much talking, but maybe he’s said too much. He’s embarrassed. Defeated, he lies down. There’s a star, just above the crown of trees at the other end of the village. He reaches out idly, trying to pinch it between his thumb and forefinger, but his fingers brush against skin instead of sky. Zelda, half-goddess, half-miracle, turns her face into the palm of his hand for the briefest of moments, like a butterfly alighting on the surface of a pond. The cicadas sing ballads. His breath stops in his lungs and dies there. “I like the ladder.” “Oh.” “Please keep it.” “Oh.” “You know,” she says, still leaning over him, close enough that if he gave her hand a tug, she might fall right out of heaven. Her head is tilted, her hair falling into her eyes, splaying across the tiles on the roof like a satiny strip of sun. “What?” he asks hoarsely. She smiles at him like a secret. “I—”

 He used to be in love with her. As each piece of his sixteen-part past was returned to him and the last day of his life emerged slowly into the light, it dawned on him like a horse falling out of the sky that he had been very lucky to be her knight, that he would have willingly given his life for her, and that he did. Only his final, heroic act of sacrifice failed to accomplish anything meaningful in spite of his best efforts. He had died with her hand cradling the back of his head, his tunic wet with blood and tears, believing that the ending could be salvaged still. Maybe this is what it takes to reach happiness, he thought dizzily. Maybe you have to be pushed to the end of the line, before you can start walking back towards the center. But when he opened his eyes, it was to a world which had not moved an inch from the precipice. His back was covered in scars, water streaming down his skin like blood, and his head was so light, he worried for a moment that if he stood up too fast it would float right off of his shoulders. The only thing that remained was old skin, the thin aftertaste of fear, and a bone-deep anxiety that wouldn’t come off no matter how many times he threw himself into the river. The only thing that remained was a voice in his head, calling his name through the dream, reminding him that there was still something that could be salvaged from the fire. He used to be in love with her, though it took him a while to admit it, because being in love with her meant admitting that he had failed not only on a prophetic level, but on a personal level that cut to the wound at the center of his chest. It was a matter of survival in those first few months. Him, or a kingdom. His selfish and worthless pride, or the world. Naturally, he chose the world.

 “Let’s say you’ve been asleep for a hundred years and when you wake up you’ve lost all your memories, but you chase after fairies and you dig up shrines and you defeat the big bad monster like you’ve been told to, because a girl told you to, and because you were in love with her. And after defeating the big bad monster she comes back, and you take her back to your house, and you fry eggs for her. But she’s not the person she was a hundred years ago, because she spent a hundred years in a dream. And you’re not the person you were a hundred years ago, because you forgot everything you could possibly forget, and then you got mauled by a bear. And yet when you look at her, every time you look at her, your chest hurts so bad you think you might be dying.” He looks up from his breadstick. “Am I dying?” “No,” Beedle says very seriously. “I think you’re stupid.” Beedle retrieves a string of petrified armored beetles from one of the pockets on his back, and holds it abruptly in his face. “You can fall in love with someone twice, you know.” Link wrinkles his nose. “How do you know?” Beedle sticks the lower half of a beetle in his mouth. “I’m five hundred years old.” He bites down. “I know things.” Chews thoughtfully. “I’ve eaten things, too. Things you’ve never even dreamed of. “Point is, Link, you’re being stupid. Get it together. The world’s not ending anymore.” “Oh,” says Link. He watches Beedle eat the rest of the beetles. There are five in total. He doesn’t have to chew very hard, which is weird. He turns Beedle’s words over in his head. Beedle has a point. The world isn’t ending anymore. The world isn’t hanging on by a thread, waiting for the boy in the story to haul it back up the side of the cliff. They hauled it back up, him and Zelda and their old dead friends. They hauled it out of the well. And now look at the flowers.

 Once, while sitting on a raft headed out to sea, he considered hurling himself into the water, but here’s the other half of the story. He had recently been into the castle again, up to the princess’ room, where he found, among other things, a moblin, a bow, and a single Silent Princess, growing at the end of the hallway. He also found a diary, which he really shouldn’t have read. He shouldn’t have read the diary. It’s common courtesy. It’s the mark of human decency, respect of personal privacy, respect for the dead, et cetera. But he did. So he hauled himself up to that tower in the sky, and he mistimed several guardian laser parries before finally getting one right and yelling in triumph and getting a beam to his ass for his efforts, and then he cried, standing over that tattered old book while a cold wind blew in through the man-sized hole in the wall. He had spent so long working towards the abstract idea of salvation, he had forgotten that salvation was also, inextricably, a person. A girl with the hands of Hylia, praying in a castle in the sky, stuck in a hundred year cycle from hell. She had thrown away everything so he would float back out of the water with his face to the sky, and he couldn’t even remember how to shoot a bear without getting his face clawed off. What had he ever done to deserve this? What had he done for her? The answer was he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember anything. The conversation they had about skin-deep secrets, the day it was raining and she told him about the hypothetical nature of failure, the morning of her seventeenth birthday, as she slid the gold cuffs onto her wrists and strode grimly out of the castle, her shadow clinging to the wall like it could keep her from leaving if it did. Did he even say happy birthday? Did anyone bring her candles? Did she make a wish, and if so, for what? He felt suddenly angry, and disappointed, and lonely. The fireplace was full of rubble and the table was covered in dust. The bed frame had collapsed, probably at the very beginning of this whole mess, and the mattress was sunken in like a face with no flesh, the sheets torn, the gold trim reduced to tatters. This place used to be a sanctuary. Now it wanted him dead. He wiped his eyes furiously, though there was no one there to point at him and laugh. He wiped his eyes with the back of his clumsy, scarred hand, pulled the diary shut, and walked back out, into heaven’s line of fire.

 He takes her to the Kochi dye shop on her request, but Sayge gives them a name and an address and herds them out of his store, and so they find themselves in Tarrey Town again, exchanging nods with the people he tricked into leaving their old lives behind while Zelda describes her old outfit to Rhondson, who takes notes on her husband’s arm in erasable ink. Several days later, a new set of clothes arrives in Hateno by donkey. He helps her do her hair, by which he means he holds a mirror behind her back and she does her hair, occasionally instructing him to tilt it several degrees in one direction or another, but it’s the most useful he’s felt in weeks, and when she’s pulled on her gloves and done up the buckles on her boots, she stands up and does a little twirl. It’s a perfect replica. She’s glowing. Rhondson is god. “I feel like I could defeat Ganon,” Zelda tells him. I already did that, he thinks. He nods. “You probably could.”

 “So, are you going to do something?” Beedle retrieves a string of soft-shell crabs from his pack. “Do I have to?” Beedle waggles his finger at him disapprovingly. “The question is, do you want to?”

 He has a dream where she falls from Shatterback Point. He runs as fast as he can down the side of the mountain, cutting his palms on coral and bruising his knees on the wet rocky path, but when he gets to the bottom, no one’s there. You were too late, Muzu tells him, stroking his beard somberly. You tried to reach her, but you let go, and then you were too late. The water in the lake is bright as blood. The sky crackles silently above Muzu’s vacant eyes. A voice emerges from the lake. You let me die, the voice says. I saved the world for you, and you let me die. He wakes up sweating. He curls up on his side, bracing for the cold, hard floor against his cheek, but Zelda’s slipped one of her pillows under his head while he was sleeping. She’s murmuring in her sleep, something about fruit halves and grams of sugar, her hand dangling over the side of the bed clenching and unclenching itself earnestly, kneading imaginary dough, cutting imaginary apples. “Zelda?” Too soft. He won’t call again. He refuses to. In a moment of weakness, he reaches for the side of the bed, but stops just shy of her hand. Beedle’s bright, angular nose appears before him, carrying with it the wisdom of his ancestors. What do you want to do, Link, Beedle’s Nose asks him. What do you want? I want to pull her out of the burning house, he thinks. Is that too much to ask for? Moonlight trickles down her throat and vanishes under the collar of her tunic. His chest implodes and his heart bursts into a thousand tiny pieces, as he wonders how it is that planets were made before people. Beedle’s Nose is indifferent. What burning house, it asks. Where’s the smoke coming from? Look around you, Link. There’s smoke, and fire, and windows with broken glass. But who’s still inside?

 Uma’s hundred-and-ninth birthday arrives on the coattails of fall. On her insistence, they keep the decorations sparse and the cake disarmingly large. Streamers are put up and butterflies corralled into glass menageries. A traveling band with a bit of a reputation further west is invited. There are three musicians with ocarinas and one with a cowbell, and all of them are wearing pink overalls and big yellow sun hats which hurt to look at for too long, unless you work for a construction company, in which case you want to look at them forever. After Bolson has finished taking down all of their contact information on his forearm (they prefer to be called for via messenger pigeon, but if you don’t have one then a snail is fine as well), Zelda drifts across the grass to stand in his place. She’s wearing a white dress, borrowed from Uma, who said it would complement her eyes. Uma was right. The dress is made from a thin, glittery fabric that billows around her ankles and makes her look like she’s floating. Like a fairy in a forest clearing. Like a cat perched at the top of a clocktower. Their conversation lasts for several minutes. She says something, and the others laugh. The guy with the cowbell pretends to look embarrassed. Everyone else at the party is dancing, including Uma, who is holding hands with a small child in a green frog-suit and swaying like a palm tree in the wind. While Zelda keeps the ocarina ensemble preoccupied, one of the adults in the village has gone and retrieved a guitar. He begins to play a warm, meandering tune that reminds Link, distantly, of grassy fields and white skies. “Are you not going to dance?” He looks down. Nebb tugs at the edge of his tunic with one hand, pulling him in the direction of the crowd. He squats down. “I don’t have anyone to dance with.” “You can dance with me. Duh.” “I don’t know how to dance.” Nebb looks at him like he’s stupid. “Then learn.” “What if I don’t want to?” “What if you meet someone who does, and you like them too much to say no?” He squints suspiciously at Nebb. Nebb’s atrocious bowl cut hasn’t grown any less atrocious with time, though it does have the effect of making him look far less menacing than he would be if he were bald or sporting a mohawk. The boy knows too much for someone so small. This cannot do. If this goes on, he will reveal a secret to the gods, and then they will kill him for his hubris. “Shhh,” Link says to him, holding a finger up to his lips. He digs around in his pockets until he finds a piece of honey candy, wrapped in a palm leaf and tied together with twine. “Take this, and go dance with someone else.” Nebb gives him the Stare of Judgment, but takes the candy. “You’re terrible, Link.” He sticks out his tongue. “Bye.” Then it’s back to demolishing the cake, which he’s still not convinced Uma didn’t order expressly so that he would have something to do with himself during the course of the evening, as the dancing progresses from cheerful to insane and a small group of guests begins to construct a spaceship out of empty wine glasses. No one else has gone for thirds, though a handful have gone for seconds. There’s a big fondant chicken perched on the highest layer. He sucks on his fork thoughtfully. He wants it. Last week they went up north, in search of forgiveness. Despite their best efforts and the gift of crabs and crocuses they brought along, their reception in Zora’s domain was cold and gray. It reminded him of the way they had received him when he first stepped out of the rain and into the blue glow of the domain’s hallways, armed with only the knowledge that he had been sent to prevent a tragedy that had already happened. He didn’t yet know that Mipha was dead. He thought he could still save her. They called him failure and fool and living reminder of Hyrule’s downfall, laughing at him in a language called mourning. He had thought they had forgiven the Hylians and their king for letting their Champion die, especially after he walked out of Vah Ruta with a black eye and a bloody nose to show for it, especially now that the evil had been defeated. Apparently the knight by himself was tolerable. The knight and the princess, together, made things too raw. Too immediate. “Mipha’s dead,” they said. It was a Tuesday. “I’m sorry,” Zelda replied. Tomorrow they’re headed for Goron City. He closes his eyes and wills away the taste of sweet cream and berries, tries to picture the winding path up Death Mountain, the grooves hammered into the ground, the rubies in their metal caskets. Flame-resistant armor is a given, so it’s a good thing he bought two sets on accident last winter. He wants to trap a few fire lizards in a bottle and bring them back for a friend. As for what he will say to Zelda before he hands her off to the city’s protectors, their hands half an inch apart but not touching, never touching, there isn’t much. Goron City will be better, he thinks. He licks the cream off his fork. It’s sweet. “What are you thinking?” He opens his eyes. Zelda looks at his plate, then the cake, then his plate again. She points at the chicken. He shrugs. “I was thinking that I hope Uma lives forever.” Someone has invited the dog onto the dance floor. He isn’t trying very hard to keep to the beat of the guitarist, who has been joined by two of the ocarina players with brown hair and blue eyes, but he doesn’t have to. Spinning very fast in a circle is actually the smartest dance move of them all. There’s no beginning, so there’s no end. Zelda plucks a berry from his plate. “It’s not very fun, to be honest,” she says, chewing thoughtfully. “Living for that long.” He watches the dog chase its own tail and she watches him watch the dog, though neither is aware this is happening. “Sorry, I didn’t know. I was asleep.” The dog is easily the best dancer in the crowd. He experiences neither shame nor hubris, and is thus freed from the stresses and seasonal anxieties of being known by others who might fear him or like him. He also runs very fast. Zelda punches his shoulder weakly, her hand lingering, her eyes soft. “That’s a terrible joke, Link.” He pinches the inside of his wrist. “I’m trying my best.” “So am I.” After a beat, the dog who has been invited to the party to spin in tight circles on the dance floor and be a nuisance to the other guests goes careening into the rotisserie chicken. In a wondrous, gravity-defying moment, the chicken sails not away from the dog, but towards him, flying in a swooping arc over his head at a height of several hundred feet above the ground. The plate clatters to the floor before the chicken can find its bearings and, awoken by its war cry, people scramble into action, evacuating themselves to the other side of the buffet table or under the veranda with their legs between their tails, until Uma is standing alone on the grass, still swaying to a song only she can hear, still smiling. The chicken reaches the highest point in the sky, pauses for a heartbeat, then pitches downwards. She catches it. The crowd goes wild. And then Zelda is tugging on his sleeve, like Negg, but not like Negg, because Zelda walked out of the mouth of the monster, because Zelda left her hand in the fire, because Zelda looked at the miserable, vulnerable world that he had yelled at until his voice was hoarse and dying and even the pigeons were something fiercer than him, that he had tended to with clumsy, scarred hands in spite of all the dead things on the ground, and decided to stay. “God,” she says, her eyes bright. “Link, look. In the sky.”

 Picture two figures in a forest full of night. Picture the princess carving a path through the trees, the knight stumbling after her, her hand tight around his wrist, their feet fast and flying. The sky is clear, of course, because someone pulled the mourning veil off its head and threw it in the river. They’re chasing after a column of light, poured by the hand of Hylia from the heavens. And they’re tired, both of them, so tired they could hurl themselves into bed and lie there, half an inch apart, watching each other in the dark with waiting on their tongues, but instead he trips on a branch and goes down, face-first, into the dirt. She doesn’t realize he’s let go until he lets go, but when she turns around he’s already pushed himself off the ground. Hands and knees and boots digging into the grass. The woods outside of Hateno are still teething. The princess gives him her hand, and he stares at it for a moment like she’s just offered him the rest of her lifespan, and then takes it. He’s fine; of course he is. It would take much more than this to kill him. It would take another hundred year cycle of pain. She points at the column of light. It’s still there. Still glowing. So they keep going, picking their way through the undergrowth, climbing over branches and pushing boulders out of harm’s way, doing what ghost children like them do best, which is pointing at something in the distance, and then chasing it. Chasing hope. Following it back to the center. And when they reach the place where the sky has spat out the blood in its mouth, the knight gets punched in the face with nostalgia. He caught a falling star once, when he was all alone and the world was grim and unknowable. Then he gave it to a fairy, in exchange for less blood on his tunic, in exchange for stronger teeth. He approached heaven from afar once, a solitary figure burning darkly against the pale yellow water, but there was no way for him to go home when all was said and done, so he pinched the inside of his wrist and kept walking.

 The thing is you can’t go from swinging a sword around and dreaming about dead people to waking up and frying eggs and searching for ways to heal the cracked earth beneath your feet. Not that fast. Not that goddamn fast. You can’t just flip a switch and not be scared anymore, not wake up sweating anymore, not wake up wanting to hold her hand. Fear is a country and you’ve lived in it all your life. There’s a reason kingdoms keep such a close eye on their borders. You’re either in, or you’re out. Make up your mind. Pick up your sword. Save yourself.

 The star fragment is stuck in a tree. Zelda wants to climb it and he wants her to stop; naturally, she wins. She hauls herself up the trunk while he circles the bottom like a hawk with an anxiety problem, waiting to catch the star, or the girl, or both. But neither comes pitching out of the sky. The dream stays just out of sight. “So that’s what star fragments look like,” she says later, her voice muffled by the sound of crickets. She turns it over in her hands, running her fingers along each point and indent. “They’re warm.” Smells it curiously, then wrinkles her nose. “No smell.” Tries to break off one especially thin-looking point with little success. “Sturdy.” She spends ten minutes staring at the star. He spends ten minutes staring at her. She gets bored, puts the fragment on the ground, and looks up. He looks away. “The party’s probably over now, huh.” He nods to his left. A sigh, very small, very lovely. Like a firefly under a bridge. “I didn’t get the chance to dance with anyone.” Beedle’s Nose is staring at him from a gap in the trees like the red eye of the devil. It’s singing a nursery rhyme he doesn’t remember learning. What do you want/what do you want/what do you want. Link! Link! Open your eyes! He has to break every bone in his body just to turn his head three inches to the right, but for the first time in this life, this new life, this second chance at everything, he gets it right. Zelda’s knees are drawn to her chest, her head pillowed on her arms, her gaze heavy on his face. He sucks in a breath. “Do you still want to?”

 Dancing without music sounds reasonable in theory, but generally requires one party to be exceptionally good at keeping count while the other has to be in possession of at least a rudimentary grasp of the steps. This is, of course, assuming that there are redeemable qualities to both parties. For example, if one is the knight from the fairy tale who has spent his whole life swinging sharp objects at people, and the other is the princess from the fairytale who has spent her whole life praying sharp objects find their way to the right people, then there may not in fact be anything redeemable between them. Her counting is off, his hands are clammy. Her voice is wavering, his feet are too slow. It’s disaster after disaster after disaster, first the champions in their divine beasts, then the castle, then the king on the Great Plateau, a knife through the heart, et cetera. Dancing without music sounds reasonable in theory unless you’ve spent the last three months of your life chasing angry moose down mountains, so it’s a good thing no one’s here to laugh at them. It’s a good thing they’re alone, surrounded by starlight, half an hour by foot from Hateno, village of lights and wonder. Spring has come and gone without them. The night is young and the air is cool and the forest is sweetly indifferent to his tendency to crash into inanimate objects. This would be embarrassing if he left himself think about it, but more importantly it’s unfair, how neither of them knows what they’re doing but Zelda can smile her way out of a clumsy turn, how he has to keep his hand on her waist but hers is doing an elaborate dance on his shoulder, how every time she leans in and her hair parts down her back, a sliver of neck peeks out and steals the lungs right out of his chest. He is going to die trying to keep his hands to himself or they are going to fall off the edge of the forest and into a ravine with no bottom. There is no option to walk away. “You’re a terrible dancer,” she says, smiling up at him from under her lashes. He chews on his lip. “I’m sorry.” “That’s fine.” He twirls her and her dress floats up past her ankles like a cloud of tiny stars. “I like you anyway.” He walks into a tree. Decides that’s not enough. Slaps himself generously across the face, hard enough to leave a mark. Decides that’s not enough. Kneels on the grass, letting go of her hand, to look for a stick that might help him end things faster. “Link?” It is too much and too little all at once, and therefore unbearable. He is going to fall off the edge of the forest right now. He tries to stand up just as she begins to bend down, reaching for his shoulder. They fall off the edge of the forest together. Oh god. Oh fuck. Oh no. They’ve fallen off the edge of the universe together. Her face is in the crook of his neck and her hair is stuck to his clothes. His skin is on fire and his butt is sore and he’s dying. Hylia, can you hear him? There’s a name for the place children go after they leave this world. He’d like to know what it’s called now. “Hey,” comes the small, muffled voice. Her arms are on either side of his waist, and they’re trembling. “Can you say something?” He looks up. Always up, always forward, towards knives and teeth and forests full of bodies. Always past the blurry face in the dream, to the nightmare that follows after. Someone will tell you when to breathe. Someone will tell you when to swing your sword. Someone will tell you when it’s all right to stop being scared of everything, and start looking for angels. Like right now. Like right-right-now. Your heartbeat fluttering in your throat. Your throat an ocean of knives. Eight weeks and three days after he walks into the castle and defeats two incarnations of evil, first in a room with a domed ceiling, then in a field with a domed sky, he steps out of the burning house, and finds himself face to face with the sun. He presses his cheek against her hair. “Do you want me to?” “Yes,” she sighs. “Yes, I do.”

 He tells her about the way the world looks from atop the back of a bear and the gray of the ocean from a raft and the conversation he had with her dead father about how cooked apples taste sweeter. He tells her about the first time he shot an arrow at a bomb barrel and the second time he shield-surfed down a hill and how Urbosa made him promise to take care of her, even in death, even after it. He tells her about being so lonely it hurt to breathe and being so bad at breathing he passed out in a river, and being so hurt he had to be saved by a stranger on the road, tied to the back of their donkey like a piece of merchandise and carried to the nearest stable to be burnt back to life. He tells her how no one believed he was the boy in the story, even when he pulled out the sword, even when he showed them the blood on his back. He tells her about how the stalhorses on Tabantha Snowfield run faster than the horses near Kakariko, how a bokoblin will choose a freshly roasted chicken over the skin of your teeth, how a sword is a metaphor for forgiveness. He tells her how a hundred years ago she told him to eat a frog, and he never forgot about it. Not once, not ever. Walking through the Breach of Demise, looking for Koroks in Fort Hateno, praying for her heart at the Spring of Wisdom, he never stopped thinking about the damn frog, and by extension, the girl. The first thing she says is why didn’t you tell me all of this earlier? The second thing she says is why the hell didn’t I ask? She presses a hand to his forehead, pushing his bangs out of his eyes and glaring at him. The third thing she says is that she really wants to see a stalhorse, and the fourth thing he says is he’ll take her there one day, and the fifth thing she does is cry. Big, heaving sobs. Arms tight around his shoulders, tears smearing the front of his shirt, while he pretends he isn’t half as insane, gives up, and resolves to hide his face in her hair forever. And it’s dramatic as hell, it’s an ancient tapestry on a wall in Kakariko, but hasn’t it always been that way? Haven’t they been through enough shit to justify the heartfelt reunion, the face full of tears? If the conversation they had in the field outside the castle was a blueprint for what it looks like to meet someone you wanted a hundred years ago, then this is the aftermath of that war. Do you remember me? Of course I do. Do you love me? Of course I do. Ask me a question, any question. Crack my chest open. “To make things very, very clear,” Zelda says, wiping her eyes furiously. She’s pushed him flat onto his back and the light’s not hitting her face so he can’t make out her expression, but he can imagine the pinched brow, the bitten lip. “I didn’t fall in love with you because you were conveniently there, like, I don’t know, an armchair when you’re tired, or a glass of water when you’re thirsty.” Her hands on his chest are very beautiful, even in the moon-lit dark. “I didn’t take one look at the prophecy and think to myself, well, if I’m going to tie my happiness to someone then it might as well be him.” Now he’s the one who’s embarrassed. He brings a hand up to cover his face but she tugs it away. Takes a deep breath. Counts to ten, probably, maybe fifteen, maybe a hundred. “I fell in love with you,” she says, softly, each word falling from her lips like a star, each star plucked from the highest point in the heavens. “I don’t even know why I fell in love with you.” She fists her hands loosely in his shirt. “It just happens, you know? One day you look at the boy with the stupid pretty hair, and you think to yourself, oh no.” His head is spinning so fast he feels like the dog at the party. Maybe he is the dog. Maybe he finished eating the cake and shoved the fondant chicken in his mouth and then he passed out, and had to be carried back to his house, and had to be laid gently on the unmade covers. He gathers his thoughts. “I’m not a very good person,” he says quietly. “But if you would have me, I would gladly give you my life.” “You’ve already done that once, Link,” Zelda says, laughing with the sun in her mouth. “Do something else.” What do you want, Link? Open your eyes. Save yourself. “Okay, then. Can I kiss you?”

 His name is Link, and he died once when he was seventeen. It was pretty traumatizing. He got slashed several times across the back with some very sharp weapons, and then he got mauled by a forest full of screaming metal, and then he collapsed, right in front of the person he was supposed to protect, who ended up protecting his dead body by the skin of her teeth. Because he died. Somewhere between the laser on his chest and her hand pressed against the seal of the sky, his body made one last stand against the stark inequalities of the world, and he died. The only reason he knew his name was Link when he woke up was because it was the first word she said to him. “Link,” she said. “Wake up.” He concluded through logical reasoning that “he” must be “Link” and that “Link” had to “wake up”. So he did. He went traipsing around Hyrule with a ladle and a pot lid, seeking out places from a photograph and trying to find ways to bring every four-legged animal in the land to a stable, but he never really felt like “Link”. He felt like a corpse that had received a very shiny, very thick coat of paint. Half-here, half-there. Half-me, half-something-else. What else? A bird, maybe. A horse. One day Link got bored and decided that he was going to defeat all the forces of evil. He fought his way into the castle, where the guardians shot lasers at his earrings, and he fought his way past the lynels, who hissed fire and called him rude words, and he fought his way into the sanctum, where he met the asshole who had put him through all this shit in the first place. And he kicked his ass. And he kicked his other ass. And the asshole died. His name was Ganon. Ganon dying brought Zelda back to life, because the law of equivalent exchange governs half of the children in this world, while the devil gets the rest. The devil got to him: his life will always carry the weight of hundreds of thousands, he will always feel like lead for the first three seconds after he wakes up. But it didn’t get to Zelda. Zelda got the other bargain, the one where your dead father dies but you get your knight back. One or the other, left or right. In the end, you always have to choose. And he’s still pretty traumatized. And dying at the age of seventeen with a sword still stuck in your hand is pretty traumatizing. And the Zora are still mourning and the Gorons are still eating rocks and the Gerudo still think he’s just a really short girl, which he can live with, which he doesn’t particularly mind, but the trauma has a place on the shelf now. And the shelf is in his house. And the house is a modest one, with modest display stands for his modest weapons, and a modest bed beside which he’s hung a framed photograph of his friends. But some things are different, even if the foundations stay the same. No more rafts on gray seas. No more sleeping on the floor. No more standing in the burning building, and wondering why the shadows aren’t moving. No more shrines full of dead monks. No more monsters full of dead bodies. No more waiting for someone to tell you when to breathe, when to stop, when to get mauled by a bear. Pick up your sword, boy. Now put it down. Now pick it up. Now put it down. You’re going to be doing this until the day that you die. Are you all right with that? Are you all right with your god? [Thank you for helping my sister.][They say the leviathans died thousands of years ago.][Get me a horse. A big, strong horse. Any horse.][BROTHER. THE ROCKS ARE READY.][Find me someone whose name ends with ‘-son’.][I’ll sell you rushrooms for diamonds. Fifty-five for one.][Have you heard of the story of the bird on the mountain?][Do you already have someone special in your heart?][They say if two people visit this pond, they’ll be together forever.][Do you believe in miracles?][Do you believe in magic?][Do you believe in me?] [I believed I would see you again.]

It’s a cruel, unforgiving world. People die and don’t come back. But you did. Now get up. Someone’s waiting for you.

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caffeinated-cryptid · 4 years

Text

bishop to castle; check.

3.8k words | AO3 link | tags/warnings: suicidal behaviour, risk of falling from a height, talking someone down from a ledge, hurt/comfort, platonic roceit, positive ending.

“After weeks of moping post-POF, Janus goes into the imagination to find Roman. They end up having a much more intense conversation than he could have ever planned for.”

-------------------

Janus hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Roman since their last argument. It was fine, probably, he justified to himself, despite how Patton had returned from their talk with pursed lips and worriedly furrowed eyebrows. He likely just needed time to process everything that had happened, and Janus wasn’t going to push that.

(His reluctance to address the issue had nothing to do with the fact that he dreaded another confrontation. Totally not.)

After all, forcing his presence on Roman now could potentially only make things worse. So instead he would just have to wait for him to come around first-- to calm down enough to be willing to hear him out without resorting to name-calling.

Janus was plenty busy anyway, what with his new position in Thomas’ life. More than smoothing over one less-than-steller relationship with a side (which Janus was collecting like pokemon cards recently, it seemed), he elected to focus on ensuring Thomas held true to his promises of self-care, which meant working with Patton more often.

That wasn’t so terrible, at least it wasn’t as bad as the him from a year ago would have expected; the side was trying harder to welcome his contributions which he appreciated. Though inadvertantly through this new partnership, he found himself being dragged into more casual hang-outs, where they would do nothing but...chat. Sharing daily anecdotes and worries and secrets about themselves. It was strangely open and the sort of thing Janus had to adjust to, but with this new friendship he had found himself in, he did his best not to ruin it.

“I’m getting worried.” Patton admitted one day, setting down the tv remote after a finished screening of some Air Bud spinoff. How Janus had been wrangled into watching that ceaseless dog series was beyond him. “I think the others might be starting to come around to you, but Roman...”

Patton didn’t need to finish his sentence, because Janus already knew what he meant. With Virgil and Logan, he’d been making an effort to try to prove his worth as a member of the team (whether or not that was working was yet to be seen, despite Patton's generous assertions that it would all work out eventually), but he hadn’t even gotten the chance do to that with the creative side. As much as he had first assumed that time and space would do the trick, it seemed like that wasn’t the case after all.

“I suppose a confrontation is inevitable.” He grimaced, knowing that this had been put off for long enough.

“Would you do that?” Patton asked suddenly, looking to him with relief. It made Janus realize that it sounded like he had signed up to go talk to Roman himself.

“Uh...” Janus tensed, his previous concerns surfacing again. “I don’t think I would be the best suited to have this conversation-”

“Oh- Pleeease? You two need to talk most of all! Besides, when I went, he wouldn’t even...” Patton trailed off, biting his lip with a pout. “...Could you try, at least? Maybe you could get through to him.”

“...Alright. I’ll go before lunch.” Janus agreed begrudgingly, rewarded by Patton’s grateful smile. Stupid puppy face. That would have to stop working eventually.

-------------------

That was how Janus found himself in the lawless lands of The Imagination.

It had filled him with dread, knocking on the red and gold door and recieving no response. Even more so when he risked intruding anyway and seeing the wrecked state of the room, and then noticing the entrance to The Imagination wide open.

Unsurprisingly, that was where he found the side in question. More surprising was when he did, finding him sitting on the edge of the tallest turret of his castle, like he had decided to overlook his kingdom in the most dangerous way possible. Janus wasn’t so naive to assume that was all it was though.

Roman probably saw him approach as he ran the rest of the way to the castle, and that pushed him to go faster, dashing through the lonely walls of the old building until he was climbing up those spiralling stairs all the way to the top. When he finally made it, he stood there doubled over and completely out of breath as he adjusted to the high altitude winds that bit at his cheeks. He used the seconds he took to catch his bearings to figure out what to do-- his eyes never once leaving Roman’s back, who luckily hadn’t moved at all during his frantic dash. Perhaps his insticts had been wrong and there was nothing dangerous going on here. Every part of him screamed to stay and stop whatever this was though-- so he did.

“Roman.” He ended up saying once his breath had evened out, and nothing more. There was too much going on in his head to break whatever balance they currently had; too much to ask, too much to say, to explain, to defend, to try to understand.

Said side turned his head slightly to make eye-contact; not facing him, yet it was acknowledgement at least. “Deceit.” He said after a beat. His voice was cold, but not angry, and for some reason Janus would have prefered it if Roman were upset with him. Anything but this odd indifference that made him feel guilty for not summoning up the courage to check in sooner.

“Janus.” Janus corrected in an invitation to use his name. He intended it as a sign of goodwill, but Roman’s face twitched and he looked away again, this time his focus on the ground directly below.

“I came to talk.” Janus said in an attempt at a distraction. He was disheartened when Roman made no move to acknowledge him again, so he continued despite his uneasiness. "Would you please come down?”

“What? Scared, Deceit? I'm not doing anything. I'm not going to either, so you can go back to whoever sent you and tell them I’m fine.” Roman scoffed and the string of lies felt bitter in the fridgid air, enveloping him like an unwanted hug. If possible, Janus’ heart begun racing even quicker.

He wanted to protest and say that he had come of his own volition, but Janus knew that lying right now wouldn’t do either of them any good. “In that case, would you do it for my peace of mind?” He tried instead, and it earned him a wry smile, sent from over Roman’s shoulder.

“What ever gave you the impression I care about that?” Roman shot back, standing up only to turn on his heel to step down into the crenel next to him, then back up onto the the next merlon. He continued, going up and down and slowly circling around Janus like a predator would it's prey, but somehow he didn't feel like the one being hunted here. Actually, it was more like he was trying to convince a mouse that the cheese on a trap wasn't worth it. And being a snake himself, that simile was especially ironic.

“...That’s fair. We can talk like this, then. I wanted to apologize and hopefully make amends.”

Roman’s footing twisted haphazardly and Janus all but shot forward to steady him until he was given a deadly glare that froze him in his tracks.

“Stay back! You're not fooling me again. As far as I know, you'll just try to convince me to take a swan dive right of the side of this tower. No greater depth to plummet to than that, huh?"

“I- that's the complete opposite of what I want.” Janus stressfully replied, fighting against the urge to pull Roman off of the edge and end this whole thing himself, instead holding up his hands as a sign that he wouldn’t come closer. God, where had he gone so wrong go end up in this situation? He should have convinced Patton to come with him when he had the chance-- at least he probably would have had a better idea on how to get through to Roman when he was like this. Comparitively, Janus had no clue. He didn’t have the trustworthiness or the years of friendship.

“I believe you. You've already made it so clear just how much you care.” Roman replied sarcastically. Janus felt his hackles rising.

“I’m not lying! I didn't want any of this.” Janus gestured around. “There's so much I wish I could take back, but especially whatever I did to cause this.”

“Oh, Janus.” He felt a small dose of hope when Roman finally used his name, which was quickly dashed as he huffed out a laugh. “Always thinking you have a finger in every pie. Isn't it enough for me to come to this conclusion by myself?”

He continued bitterly, practically stomping his way around the edge of the tower now. “It's not like it was hard. Even an idiotic egomaniac prince like myself can tell when he's not wanted anymore. When the dream has died.”

Janus, despite the silver tongue he may possess, struggled for words in the face of Roman’s insecurity. He had wanted the anger because he had assumed it would be easier to prove that he wasn’t as evil as Roman was so keen to accuse him of being. He just hadn’t expected this issue to be so deeply sensitive. (Though perhaps he should have picked up on that hint when he saw the other side looking ready to jump to a temporary death). “Thats not true at all, you’re incredibly important and all of us need you. Perhaps we’re operating under new rules now, but that doesn’t mean you’re not wanted.”

But it seemed that wasn’t the best thing to say. Roman stopped in his tracks, his expression unreadable as he began shaking with fury or perhaps something else. “...If I’m ‘so important’, why does it never feel that way? Why am I the only one who has to change constantly for rules that can never stay the same? Why do I have to make sacrifices and tone down my voice?”

His controlled tone got louder and more stressed. “Why are my best efforts never good enough? Why are my doubts ignored? Why is it considered fair to disparage my work? To ignore the blood, sweat, and tears I put into everything?”

Janus stared in horror as Roman kept going, yelling over anything he could have possibly wanted to say.

“Why does it take this to be be fucking noticed?!”

Both of them paused when his rant reached a screaming crescendo and fat angry tears rolled down Roman's cheeks.

"...Forgive me if I'm having a little difficulty trusting what you say right now.” He sniffed, ducking his head away to wipe his eyes. The words were distant despite the soft way they were uttered.

Once again Janus was lost for what to say as he watched Roman compose himself. There was simply too much there to unpack, too many years of built-up stress and resentment. What in the absolute hell had these sides been doing all this time? “...I do wish to take some responsibility for that, though. Your hesitancy to trust again.” That seemed like a good place to start, if any.

Roman only snorted humourlessly at his efforts though, voice tired and unenthused. “I'm sure you would. It's a lot easier to sweep aside a broken vase rather than acknowledge its cracks when they’re forming, after all. That was the lesson you taught us, right?”

Janus winced at the callback to his first appearence to Thomas. He didn’t necessarily regret that day, but having it thrown back now made it feel like something to be ashamed of; seeing his lessons interpreted in such a way. “...Is that how you see yourself? Broken?” He asked instead, squashing down his indignation.

He only got silence in return. Janus swallowed, definitely regretting his hesitance to resolve this issue now.

“Roman, even though I doubt you’d trust my words, I promise that we're not trying to simply ‘sweep this aside’. If we're going with the vase metaphor, all of us want a chance to try to glue the pieces back together. Make right on all of the ways you’ve been wronged.” When that got no response, he tentatively asked, “Have you ever heard of Kintsugi?"

“...Broken pottery fixed with gold, I'm aware. But trying to apply that right now is sloppy, even for you. People are never so beautiful after being so thoroughly broken, nor is it that easy." Slowly, Roman sat down on the edge, and even though his legs were dangling over the wrong side, Janus' heart finally felt some semblance of rest. He took a step forward.

"I disagree. Kinstugi is rarely an straight-forward process either, and yet it achieves such splendid results with just a little patience and care. Which is to say... while it may not be the easiest thing to do, there’s undeniably beauty and strenght in survival. Trying again even when it feels impossible.”

“Of course you'd think that, Mr. Kill or be killed. You have no choice in whether you get to continue forward. But I do.”

Janus paused at that, only four paces away from Roman now. The creative side startled when he peered backwards and saw him so close, and then he glared at Janus as he stood up again, this time facing him fully. His foot slid backwards until the worn-down structure crumbled under his heel, sending rocks tumbling down below. It was a warning, Janus realized as his blood frooze in his veins.

“Don’t look so shocked. I control everything here, or did you forget?” Roman smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile or even a smug one; it only looked like he was stretching his mouth unnaturally, all pretenses of putting on a convincing performance stripped away. “If I want, I could have a Pegasus fly by and save me at the right moment. Or I could expand the moat to catch me. Or..."

Roman looked frustrated for a second when he couldn't think of anything else, even more so when Janus patiently waited for him to think of another example. In the end, he gave up.

"The point is, I call the shots about what happens to me."

"But would you? Save yourself?" Janus questioned hesitantly. He knew he was treading on thin ice, so he left it there. Roman raised an eyebrow at him and he returned it, making it clear that he wanted an answer. He recieved it with a scoff.

“Of course I would. What kind of question is that?”

Lie.

Janus winced. “Roman... You are aware of my ability to detect lies, yes?”

The creative side blinked in surprise and then looked at him with wide eyes, as if he hadn’t expected to be called out. Like it had been so natural to brush aside the question that he didn’t even realize his own feelings. Fortunately, Janus’ ability was too keen to be fooled by one’s own self-deception. He could see below the surface like that; pull people’s hidden truths from them and keep them for himself, like a keeper of forbidden knowledge (Though in moments like these, sometimes he wished he couldn’t. Ignorance truly is bliss).

“Should I ask again?” He pressed. “Are you really planning on saving yourself?”

This time Roman’s face screwed up in confliction and he directed his gaze to the floor of the tower. It was an awfully clinical way to ask, but it felt necessary to stop dancing around what was important-- this casual show of self-destruction.

Eventually, the other cracked with a tired huff of laughter. Sadly genuine this time.

“...It's certainly nice to think that I could.” Roman admitted as he rubbed his face, apparently not mad at being called out this time. “Finally being a hero again, even if it's only to myself.”

Janus paused in shock. Was he still misinterpreting that moment?

“That wasn't a lie.” Janus blurted out, taking even himself by surprise by the thoughtless exclamation. “Thomas still thinks of you as his hero. There’s no need to do things like this to prove it.”

Romans eyes went watery and he avoided his gaze.

“At this point I don't think it matters, when I haven’t been acting like it at all lately.” He whispered coarsely, uncharacteristically quiet compared to the wind. “Frankly, I'm surprised you're even trying to stop me."

Janus eyes softened and he took another tentative step forward, then another when Roman didn't react badly. “Why wouldn’t I? I’m not just Deceit, you know. Part of my job is to help you.”

“...Because you hate me? At this point you have more reasons to than not.” Roman explained warily, looking at him like Janus were seconds away from snapping and shoving him over the edge. It hurt to have that sort of mistrust placed on him, but at the same time Janus understood it. He had often been in that sort of situation before; doubting the safety of opening up to other people. That was just part of his job, to be doubtful and wary in order to protect the self. Yet to see it so openly on somebody else felt like a punch to the gut, even though he should have been used to that feeling of being distrusted by now.

“Do you think me so sensitive that a schoolyard insult would make you my archenemy? Or being called evil? That is...sort of what I’ve been going for.” He cracked a joke, gesturing to his outfit. When Roman kept staring at him he sighed. “Of course I don’t hate you, Roman.”

Roman shifted doubtfully. “That doesn’t mean you like me, either. Maybe it doesn’t mean much to you, but you should know how- how being called that hurt me.”

"...Yes.” It was Janus’ turn to be uncomfortable. “Perhaps at first I felt attacked and wanted to make you feel the same hurt, but I would never have said that had I known just how deeply it would have impacted you. I’m sorry for that.”

Roman’s expression turned incredulous, like he couldn’t believe Janus had apologized. “...You know, I wanted to make you upset. I wanted you gone.”

“I figured.” Janus nodded.

“And that doesn’t change anything? Even though I acted so...” Roman bit his lip. “So unheroic?”

Janus stifled a sigh. By now, he really hated that word with a passion. It had caused so many high standards, so many instances of self-sacrifice, so many misguided attempts at selflessness and perfection. Perhaps later they could talk about it all and lay out why it had done so much harm, but for now he decided not to push it, not when he felt so close to getting a breakthrough.

“Believe it or not, but I think that you've been plenty heroic already. This whole time you've been fighting for something you thought was valient and noble, and that means something, even if it was for a misguided cause.”

That took Roman off-guard. He moved his foot away from the edge subtley, and had Janus not been focused on his face, he would have considered it a small victory.

“...What’s the point of all of this, really? Is this some... some dastardly plot?” Roman questioned skeptically. He was looking even more cornered now that he was letting Janus’ words sink in.

“All I'm here for is to offer the helping hand you need, if you’ll accept it.” Janus said softly as he extended his hand up to him. “Really, my only plot right now is to get you off that ledge before you give me a heart attack. Please?”

Roman stared at him, desperately trying to find some sort of mistruth in his eyes before his gaze lowered to the outsretched hand. It felt like time slowed in the seconds he was making his decision and Janus held his breath, waiting...wating... until finally the other side nodded and took his hand.

With Janus’ help, Roman stepped down, looking confused and lost now that he was away from the edge. The expression pained Janus’ heart, so he opened his arms half expecting rejection, only to be taken back by how quickly Roman latched onto him. Janus wasted no time clinging back, so relieved that he actually suceeded that he didn't want to risk ever letting go, like this moment could be torn away at any second. It was no surprise when he felt the other’s chest jerk with held-back sobs until there was a wetness on his shoulder, and he didn't say anything about it. He didn't need to either, because Roman spoke up first.

“It didn’t mean anything. Really!” He exclaimed through messy tears. “I was only thinking about it!”

Lie.

“...It's okay if it was more than that.” Janus soothed, patting his back. “It's okay to feel low and in need of help.”

That made him cry harder and Janus was relieved to see the excess of emotions finally pour out. While waiting for Roman to calm down, he had to fight for his own tears to not spill over. Inevitably, the stress of the situation finally caught up when the adrenaline wore off, and he sagged into the hug, sniffling quietly and trying not to fall over on his aching legs. He really just sprinted up multiple flights of stairs, didn’t he? Belatedly, he realized that he must have lost his hat at some point during the journey because he could feel the wind tousle his hair.

It would have been funny if it weren’t for the absolute rush of emotions he had just gone through.

The two of them stood there for what would normally be considered an awkward amount of time, except the act of simply hugging on solid ground was the biggest comfort in the world, too much to ruin the moment. They waited until they got through the worst of their tears before they dared speak again. Once again, Roman went first.

“Sorry for laughing at you back then.” He said, voice reflecting the yelling and crying he'd been doing. It felt genuine. “I actually really like your name...the mythology suits you. Very dramatic.”

Janus laughed wetly, finally a true statement. “Why, thank you. And I apologize for where I’ve wronged you.”

Finally, they straightened up. Roman took one look at him and summoned hankerchiefs for them both. Janus accepted it and wiped away his tears as gracefully as he could.

“Hopefully we can have a more in-depth discussion on this later, but for now Patton and I prepared lunch, if you’d be willing to have us.” Janus asked, hopes raised.

“...That sounds good.” Roman smiled.

Janus smiled back.

Together, the two of them descended down the steps of the tower, and the imagination was the slightest bit sunnier when they reached the outside.

#my writing #sanders sides #platonic roceit #janus sanders #roman sanders #patton sanders #roman angst #roman stans come get y'alls juice #(i wrote this in a Mood so if this is janky i'm sorry)

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robininthelabyrinth · 4 years

Text

Fire and Light (ao3) - on tumblr: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5

- Chapter 6 -

For his trip to the Cloud Recesses, Wen Chao was assigned a bodyguard of his own, a man introduced to them as Wen Zhuliu – not his actual name, of course. Wen Ruohan handed out his surname like a gift, spreading his poison to as many people as possible, and this Wen Zhuliu was apparently one of his most highly prized finds.

“They call him the Core-Melting Hand,” Wen Xu told the children. “And it’s not an exaggeration – he has a technique that can actually melt a person’s golden core.”

Personally, Nie Mingjue thought that techniques like that, however frightening, were all a bunch of trash in the end – a technique of that sort was flashy, impressive, but it had only two uses: to scare people or to turn the tide of a single battle against fellow cultivators, and for the run-of-the-mill work of night-hunts was totally pointless. It required such immense focus and dedication to puzzle out that it left no room for anything else, meaning this Wen Zhuliu probably didn’t know how to do anything practical, even as he thought himself better than others.

The man looked it, too. His face seemed older than he probably actually was in years, with an expression of detachment and ennui that made him come off as arrogant, or at minimum as snobbish, despite being nothing more than a tool for Wen Ruohan to use up and cast aside.

He’d probably be a bad influence on Wen Chao, Nie Mingjue thought, frowning to himself. He would need to have a word with Wen Chao before he left – tell him to trust his own instincts, to avoid things that made him uncomfortable, to reach out to trustworthy adults in the Lan sect if he thought he needed help. Even if this Wen Zhuliu wanted to make trouble on Wen Ruohan’s behalf, it would be difficult for him to act if Wen Chao used his youth and desire to please his father as an excuse to obey the rules…

A hand touched his shoulder and Nie Mingjue flinched, his hand flying to Baxia’s hilt – he was never without her comforting weight anymore – but it was only Wen Xu, looking as anxious as ever.

“It’s lunch,” he said, and Nie Mingjue blinked, noticing that they were now alone in the hall. He must have lost time again, sinking into his thoughts without tracking the world outside. A dangerous habit anywhere, even more so in Qishan, but on the other hand it wasn’t like he was being allowed out for night-hunts right now – the danger here was only internal, and Wen Ruohan found his suffering funny. “I asked them to make lamb skewers with cumin.”

A Qinghe specialty. Nie Mingjue appreciated the gesture.

“Wen Zhuliu,” he croaked, his voice rasping as if he had just been screaming. Maybe he had been. It hadn’t been that long since the last ‘walk’ through the Fire Palace that Wen Ruohan had invited him on – they were a regular part of the routine, now. Wen Ruohan’s own personal indoctrination since the usual sorts of things didn’t seem to be working well enough on Nie Mingjue.

Maybe if he could keep thinking of it that way, as some twisted form of education, then perhaps the horror of the things he saw and, worse, was made to do – the choices he was forced to make, the things he had to do to innocent people with his own hands, the things that were sometimes done to him as an example, the screams, whether his own or others, that incessantly rang in his ears, the feeling afterwards that he would never be clean again – perhaps it would eventually become merely mundane. Maybe. Probably not.

It might be worse if it did, actually.

“What about Wen Zhuliu?” Wen Xu asked, interrupting Nie Mingjue’s increasingly dark thoughts, and Nie Mingjue shook his head to clear it.

“He’ll be trouble,” he said.

Wen Xu frowned. “You think so? He’s just a bodyguard.”

Nie Mingjue shook his head a second time. It was evident to him that Wen Zhuliu was being sent to ensure that the Lan sect taught Wen Chao only as much – or as little – as Wen Ruohan preferred; otherwise, there was no need for such a powerful servant, with a frightening aura and an older man’s authority, to chaperone Wen Chao. Especially not to such a peaceful place, backed by the Lan sect’s guarantee of safety.

Wen Chao had only so very recently started acting like a person, thinking of others and considering questions of right and wrong beyond his own selfish desires – leaving him alone with Wen Zhuliu threatened that.

Nie Mingjue was sure of it.

“I’ll talk to A-Chao about it, then, warn him of the sorts of tricks he might play,” Wen Xu said. He would know them best, of course. “And I’ll make room for you to talk to him as well, if you feel able. Maybe I can get us permission to escort them some part of their journey, you and I…it’d be good for you to stretch your legs a little.”

Get you out of here for a while, he meant, and Nie Mingjue shrugged. Even if Wen Xu won permission for him to leave, which he doubted he’d be able to, in the end Nie Mingjue would have to come back, back to Wen Ruohan and his Fire Palace, back to all the people who depended on him.

Nie Huaisang, Wen Chao, Wen Qing, Wen Ning, even Wen Xu…

He was their big brother. He had a responsibility to them, just the same as he’d had ever since his father put Nie Huaisang into his arms for the first time, love chaining him more effectively than any iron.

He had to come back.

After all, if he didn’t go walking with Wen Ruohan, someone else might have to, and that was just – intolerable.

“I need help planning a murder,” Wen Xu announced as he swept in through the door in a swirl of intricately designed red robes, and Nie Mingjue wondered grumpily what type of dramatic actor he had been in a past or future life that made him quite so inclined to extravagant gestures. “Well, don’t all of you jump up and volunteer to help at once!”

Everyone reluctantly turned to look at him. Wen Ning was playing weiqi with Nie Mingjue while Nie Huaisang pretended to meditate as Wen Qing examined his meridians for any courses of treatment that might make cultivating easier on him; no one was especially moved by Wen Xu’s grandiose proclamation.

Maybe if he didn’t say something similar just about every other week…

“Who are we murdering today, Wen-ge?” Nie Huaisang asked, cracking an eye open and very obviously asking more to have a reason to stop even the pretense of meditation rather than any actual interest in the answer. “One of the teachers, or the soldiers, or a guard, or someone that stepped on your foot in the marketplace –”

“Wen Zhuliu,” Wen Xu said, and Nie Mingjue put down the weiqi piece he’d been toying with abruptly, with a smack that shook the table.

“What did he do?” he asked, concerned. “Is A-Chao all right?”

“He’s fine, if a bit shaken,” Wen Xu said. “Wen Zhuliu took him to a brothel.”

“He did what,” Nie Mingjue said.

“Unfair,” Nie Huaisang said. “I want to visit a brothel.”

“I’m fairly sure he wasn’t there on an educational visit, Huaisang-xiong,” Wen Qing said. “Or, at least, not in terms of a literary education.”

“Oh. Ick. No thanks, then.”

Wen Xu was gnashing his teeth together. “He wants to make a waste out of him. Fancy restaurants, a gambling house – I insisted we leave as soon as I realized – and now a brothel…if I hadn’t put a stop to it, A-Chao would be addicted to every vice available by the time he got to the Lan sect. They’d kick him out within a week!”

“He wouldn’t be able to challenge your position if he were a waste,” Wen Ning observed quietly. “If you were more like your father, you might even thank him for getting rid of a rival.”

“But why now?” Nie Mingjue asked, shaking his head. “A-Chao’s still so young. Playing around at that age can injure the body.”

It probably fucked up your head, too. Wen Ruohan’s specialty.

“If A-Ning is right about the motive, that’s the sort of injury one might want to inflict,” Wen Qing said. “Boys that young can’t get women pregnant, and overdoing it too young can damage them, keep them from having children in the future. Not to mention the impact on their adult personalities; it might turn him into a lascivious beast, unable to take no for an answer, or else retard him in childhood, injure him with trauma – or all of the above. Or none, of course, some people are fine, but it’s not something you want to take a chance on.”

“You put a stop to it, right?” Nie Mingjue asked Wen Xu, who nodded.

“I explained at some length to A-Chao how exactly one gets infected with lin bing,” he said. “Bleeding sores on your prick and all…in fact, I may have overdone it a bit. I’m not sure he’s even willing to look at a woman right now.”

“Good thing he’s off to the Cloud Recesses, then,” Nie Huaisang said, pitiless in the ways of the young. At least, Nie Mingjue hoped that was the reason, and not Qishan Wen cruelty seeping into his bones. “Don’t they split up men and women?”

“I knew Wen Zhuliu was trouble,” Nie Mingjue said, deciding to sidestep the current conversational subject. “We should write to the Lan sect – Xichen will be able to recruit his uncle to help stop anything like that going forward. Though I still want to know why Sect Leader Wen would do such a thing to A-Chao now. Haven’t I reduced my level of influence on you enough?”

He got a whole array of pitying looks that suggested his supposed ‘influence’ on them – mentioned several times by Wen Ruohan, and just as inexplicable to Nie Mingjue as it had been the first time it had come up, even though everyone else seemed to automatically know what was meant by it – was not only still existent but running stronger than ever.

“Well, fine,” he said, scowling at the traitors who refused, to a man (and woman), to explain anything. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t understand what they were always not-saying to each other about it. “But the point still stands. Why now? Why this way?”

“It’s his first time leaving the Nightless City without the usual retinue,” Wen Qing said. “And he’ll be staying at the Cloud Recesses for a few months. If he gets used to the outside world without going off-course, it may be harder to lure him into vice later. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence?”

“Perhaps,” Nie Mingjue said.

“If we’re very lucky, it’s not a coincidence, but has nothing to do with us at all,” Nie Huaisang put in. “There may be more that we don’t yet know.”

The ‘more’ turned out to be a very well-off young lady, closely connected to several of the cultivation families in Henan – in the area right between Qishan Wen, the remnants of Qinghe Nie, and Lanling Jin – moving into the Nightless City as Wen Chao’s future bride.

Nominally, anyway.

In reality, her ‘bridal’ suite became a regular stop on Wen Ruohan’s daily schedule, and the extremely audible sounds of their romping had everyone chewing ginger in an attempt to avoid vomiting.

“There goes any hope of another girl for me to spend time with,” Wen Qing said with a sigh.

“What? I’m not good enough for you?” Nie Huaisang huffed, mock-offended. “How many girlish arts to I have to excel in, huh? I dress neat, I embroider, I…uh…”

She poked him in the forehead. “I was just saying that it might be nice to have someone else, that’s all. Ideally someone who is actually my gender. But I’m not anywhere desperate enough to spend time with someone like that.”

The young lady in question, Ma Liyuan, was arrogant and self-absorbed, closer to Nie Mingjue’s age – or maybe even Wen Xu’s, he hadn’t asked – than to Wen Chao’s, and seemed quite content with the circumstances that had brought her to and kept her in the Nightless City, provided that she was kept well supplied in new clothing and make-up. The morality, or lack thereof, of fucking her engaged-in-absentia fiancé’s father on the regular appeared not to matter in the slightest.

“I’m happy that she’s here,” Nie Mingjue said, and when they all looked at him strangely, he elaborated, “She’s been very distracting.”

He hadn’t had to go on anymore ‘walks’ with Wen Ruohan since she arrived, since there was really only so much time to spare for extracurricular activities in the busy schedule of a Sect Leader, and his mental state had improved dramatically as a result. He didn’t like the fact that his reprieve came at Wen Chao’s expense – at least Wen Chao was safely away in Gusu for the moment, and didn’t have to endure the wretched humiliation of it in person – but he couldn’t deny that it was, in fact, a reprieve.

“It won’t last,” Wen Xu predicted gloomily. “It never does, with his lovers. Father only ever cares about power; he’s fucking the promise of Henan land, not her, though I assume he also enjoys demeaning her in every way he can think of in the process. Honestly, I don’t know why Father didn’t just take her on as one of his own concubines if he was planning on doing this – why the charade?”

“Another plan to get A-Chao out of the line of succession?” Wen Ning suggested.

“Seems like too much effort for just that,” Wen Qing said, and Nie Mingjue nodded, agreeing. Wen Ruohan didn’t need a reason to disinherit somebody, but even if he wanted one, he only needed one, not a half-dozen.

“Perhaps he just wants A-Chao to become disappointing,” Nie Huaisang said, his chin on his hands. “To us, I mean, not to him. A-Chao’s prickly, you know – if you mixed together those vices he’s being tempted with and the humiliation he must feel when he hears about what’s going on here, he might get himself into something stupid. And then, well, you know A-Chao would be heartbroken if we turned away from him, and you know he’s not the most independent person. All he’d have left is him.”

“But we wouldn’t turn away from A-Chao even if he did disappoint us,” Nie Mingjue objected. “I’d break his legs if he tried to turn into some drunken wastrel, of course; scold him, refuse to let him out of his room, make him reflect and write reasons why he needed to stop, train him into the ground if necessary, but that’s hardly turning away from him. Who’d do something like that?”

Everyone looked at him fondly, as if he was a puppy that just performed a unique trick.

Nie Mingjue scowled at them. Hadn’t they respected him, once? Or was that his imagination?

“It’s a reasonable thought,” Wen Xu said, apparently opting to ignore Nie Mingjue’s view on the subject. “Divide and conquer is my father’s preferred method of attack, along with forcing people to suppress their own morals in order to reach a temporary compromise that he’ll only break further the next time. With Mingjue-xiong injured –”

He was fine. Physically, anyway. The mental scars didn’t count.

“– and A-Chao temporarily gone, his next goal will be one of us, no doubt. Perhaps we should preempt him.”

“Oooh, are we staging a fight?” Nie Huaisang asked, perking up. “I call spectator. Fight! Fight!”

Nie Mingjue reached over and tugged on his hair. “If there’s going to be a fight between the four of you, you are definitely getting involved, and not as a spectator. And speaking of fighting, Huaisang, where is your saber? Have you been practicing?”

Everybody laughed.

#mdzs #nie mingjue #nie huaisang #wen xu #wen chao #wen ning #wen qing #my fic #my fics #fire and light

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akatsuki-shin · 4 years

Text

Review: Scum Villain’s Self-saving System (SVSSS)

Notes:

(Very) long post ahead

Contains spoiler

This is my personal review and does not represent the entire audience, you are free to agree or not agree with what I’ve written here

Feel free to reply/send me a message if there are things you want to discuss

Summary:

SVSSS tells the story of Shen Yuan, an avid web novel reader - particularly the stallion genre - who died suddenly from food-related incident after having just finished reading a famous (yet controversial) web-novel "Proud Immortal Demon Way".

Upon his wake, he discovered that he had been transmigrated into the world of that very novel, moreover into the body of the story's most-hated scum villain, Shen Qingqiu.

In his previous life, Shen Yuan had frequently criticized the "Proud Immortal Demon Way" and its author, "Airplane Shooting towards the Sky", for he found the web novel full of wasted potentials. Now having been sent to live in that novel's story, a mysterious system assigned him with a mission to fix the very plot he had been denouncing - and of course, to save himself from the tragic end of the original Shen Qingqiu, who was fated to be mutilated into a human stick by the story's protagonist, Luo Binghe, his own disciple.

STORY: 7/10

I personally have not read a lot of "isekai" stories. However, what makes SVSSS interesting to me, compared to most transmigration stories I've seen in the past, is because the main character was not thrown into a completely strange, unknown world, but rather into the universe of a novel he had been closely following up until the very last second of his life.

And what's more? He does not have complete freedom in modifying the story however he wants, but supervised by a mysterious system that will reward him for correct decisions, and punish him for wrong choices - with being deported to his original world as the ultimate punishment should his points fall below the set limit (a.k.a. he would really lose his life because he is already dead in his original world).

The fact that Shen Yuan, now living as Shen Qingqiu, possessing complete knowledge of the original story, yet still unable to foresee what butterfly effect his actions will cause to the plot and characters is perhaps the most appealing aspect of this novel.

Shen Qingqiu in his previous life was no different than us - a normal, modern young man from the 21st century. His thoughts and opinions on the situation, the way he reacts on certain matters, his internal monologues are all realistic and easily relatable. It feels as if I myself have partly become Shen Qingqiu, as well, looking at how the story progresses from a first person point of view, because if I were to be in his shoes, I would probably react in the exact same way as a modern person thrown into an ancient fantasy world.

Nevertheless, this "omniscient reader" point of view is not without a flaw. Although Shen Qingqiu himself is gradually blending in, accepting his new life in the ancient cultivation world and no longer seeing the other characters as mere "fictional characters", because his mindset is that of a modern man, I find it difficult for myself as the reader to perceive the world of SVSSS as an actual, stand-alone world. Until the very last page of the story, I still feel like I'm looking at a fictional world, feeling detached to the universe and characters because I'm not "living" in it.

Another aspect that I think could've been improved is the romance development between Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe. I have full confidence that post-story Shen Qingqiu loves Luo Binghe with all his heart, but I seriously have no idea when and how he reached that point.

In the first half of the story, upon having accepted his new life as Shen Qingqiu, his feeling towards Luo Binghe is more like fondness and endearment. Perhaps he does like the character Luo Binghe, and considering that he, along with the rest of the web novel's readers, hated the original Shen Qingqiu to the core, of course he wants to treat Luo Binghe and the other characters better (otherwise, how could he save himself from that nightmarish fate as a human stick).

Later on, he learns of his mistake, how he could've made better decisions, and tried to understand Luo Binghe better, redeeming himself. Perhaps his love towards Luo Binghe began to grow along this path, but I honestly don't see it being told to me, as the reader. All of a sudden he is willing enough to "offer" himself to calm the maddened Luo Binghe. He's been proclaiming himself as a straight man all this time and never once did I see him agreeing with himself that he is going to accept his feelings for Luo Binghe. When I read this later part, I feel like I've just jumped over a huge chunk of development. Because up until that point, Shen Qingqiu still only gives me the feeling of a teacher who adores and cares for a special disciple of his.

All in all, if I were to summarized the plot, I think SVSSS is an interesting, curious story. The fact that Shen Qingqiu was tasked to fix the original novel's flaws makes me want to continue reading for as long as I can. What change is he going to make? What effect will be caused and what chain of events will follow? Furthermore, if you're looking for comedy, then you've come to the right place. With an internet-literate modern man experiencing living in an ancient, fantasy novel, Shen Qingqiu's reactions will never be boring to see. Even the banters and exchanges between characters are so realistic to the point that it is almost possible to imagine them visually.

Also, BingQiu is cute, I take no criticism.

CHARACTERS: 6/10

The distribution of that overall score of "6" is actually as follows:

3 --> Shen Qingqiu

1 --> Shen Jiu

1 --> Luo Binghe + Yue Qingyuan

0.5 --> Liu Qingge

0.5 --> Everybody else

Notice that in the previous section, I barely talk about any other character than Shen Qingqiu? It's not just because he is the main character, but because the other characters are seriously that un-interesting. In fact, I regret to say that personally, I think the characters are this novel's weakest point.

Or to be more precise, the characters' depth.

Shen Qingqiu by himself is a great character. He is calm, logical, knows when and where to put his "omniscient reader" knowledge to good use. He is effortlessly hilarious even if he himself doesn't realize it, but at the same time, despite the mountain of curses he often uses, he is still a good person at heart. I think he is the sole reason that the story could remain interesting until the very end.

But sometimes he is a bit too ideal, almost always having the correct solution and/or countermeasure to every situation even if the plot has changed massively from the original web novel that he knows. Especially when it turns out that he has discovered a way to revive himself after self-destructing at Huayue City, it makes his initially heartbreaking sacrifice less......touching. Because it feels as if he's been scheming this to be freed from the current ordeal, maybe to escape the system, as well.

Furthermore, no matter how much of an expert he was of the "Proud Immortal Demon Way" universe, he still just passed away and was transmigrated into a foreign world. Although the system initially banned him from being OOC, other than some panicky internal monologue, there was almost no trace of him looking distraught when being faced with the unthinkable situation.

Plus, Shen Yuan was different from Airplane Shooting towards the Sky who, even if he were to return to his original world, would have nobody waiting for him. The description of his family was pretty clear. Not only he comes from a well-off household, his family seems to be quite a happy and harmonious one (especially how he used to dote on his younger sister). How come there is not one single moment when he thinks about the family he has left behind and simply carries on with his new life as if nothing happened?

Now Luo Binghe, the second main lead and the one paired with Shen Qingqiu.

Before he fell into the Eternal Abyss, his character actually seems pretty solid. But post-darkening, I don't know why I can't get a good grasp of his character.

The "clingy, crybaby boyfriend" aspect is pretty clear, no complaint there (although the moments of his crying feels too comical for me). Other than that, I don't really feel the "powerful Demon Lord" vibe from him.

Yes, there are descriptions of how powerful he is, how frightening he can be. But it's just not solid enough for me. I understand that he is supposed to be a character with unstable mental, but there are simply not enough part where he is shown to be a proper, powerful Demon Lord because he keeps breaking down each and every single time. The "glass heart maiden" aspect isn't bad, but when it's used in an overly comical way, the character simply loses the charm he's supposed to have.

Even Yue Qingyuan, who's only a minor character, had such a strong charm that slaps you with the biggest plot twist in the whole story when it was revealed (to us, the readers) who he actually is.

Ironically, the original Luo Binghe (Bing-ge) was able to present the character's true image and complexity even if he only appear in less than 10% of the entire story.

And even more ironically, the original Shen Qingqiu a.k.a. Shen Jiu, is probably the most complex character to have ever existed in there (and he only appears in, what, a couple of extra chapters).

(You know what? If MXTX just goes with the original Luo Binghe x Shen Qingqiu, including all of their complexity, I think the development, conflict, and resolution could've been more deep and complex - but yeah, it ain't gonna be "Scum Villain's Self Saving System)

Liu Qingge is okay and actually quite lovable. It's just that I feel it's too easy for him to appear anytime, anywhere there is a problem, as if he's some easy way out.

Other than those I've mentioned above, I literally don't have anything to comment on the other characters because... I don't even know if there's anything to comment. They really come and go just like that and leave no big impression on me.

TECHNICAL ASPECTS: 6/10

This here is basically just some technical things that were a bit unfortunate, because if only they were improved, the story could've been better.

1. The story is clearly written from Shen Qingqiu's point of view, but it will suddenly switch to Luo Binghe's inner thoughts every now and then, making it inconsistent.

2. Description of time and environment. Sometimes it's really difficult to tell in what kind of place the scene is happening, whether it was day or night, whether the characters still remain in the same place or have move elsewhere. Transition when switching locations is also not described enough.

3. As much as I love the story, I feel like it's progressing too fast without any significant crisis. It just ends like that with no massive ordeal or mystery to be solved. I think this is related to Shen Qingqiu's "omniscient reader" point of view because it makes me feel like "hmm yeah, it's just another part of the story, they're going to go through this just fine"

Still, I understand that this is MXTX's first novel. In fact, most of the aforementioned issues (including the characters) have undergone immense improvement in her second novel (MDZS), so I don't think I have anything to worry about.

OVERALL SCORE: 6.3/10

It's worth to read, really. If you just want to enjoy a cool, funny, and cute "isekai" story, I can definitely recommend this. But don't expect some deep philosophical shit, because half of this novel is made of shitpost (I shit you not).

Moral of the story though?

See how market demand kills content creators' freedom and creativity.

Airplane Shooting towards the Sky, the author of the controversial stallion "Proud Immortal Demon Way" literally told Shen Qingqiu at the final chapter of the main story:

He's actually written deep, aesthetic stories before, but they were all unpopular. Only when he wrote this harem novel full of fan-service - disregarding plot depth, plot holes, cheap characterizations - did he finally gain popularity and was able to obtain sufficient income to feed himself.

He was grateful to Shen Qingqiu for "messing" up the plot of his novel, changing it into how it is now, because it allows everything he originally wanted to write - but couldn't - to come true.

In previous chapters, he also said that he actually wanted to make the original Shen Qingqiu into a three-dimensional, more complex characters, but the netizens didn't appreciate it and were complaining instead. Hence he was forced to make the original Shen Qingqiu into a plain old scum villain with no redeeming quality at all - even though in his original script, this character has a complex background that causes his current known personality.

Shen Qingqiu and Shang Qinghua might be talking about it in their usual, funny bantering, but who dares to say that this isn't an issue being faced by almost all content creators in the whole world?

How many content creators have been forced to sacrifice the creativity value and quality of their work in order to satisfy the taste of majority?

How many content creators have been made to revise their works by editors in order to fit into a certain agenda or market trend?

Unless you're a massively popular creator or a powerful individual, chances are you will never have the chance to create a content you truly want to make for a living.

In any case, there may be other authors who are better than MXTX in this world, but I love her works because despite the fictional content, the comedy, the silliness, etc, there are still at least one aspect that reflects the situation of the real, current world, and when you realize it, the realization can be quite a slap to the face like "hey, wait a minute, she's right you know?" See less

#Scum Villains Self Saving System #SVSSS #BingQiu #Shen Qingqiu #Luo Binghe #Review #Danmei #Mo Xiang Tong Xiu #MXTX

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wri0thesley · 4 years

Text

Lucky - Kars x Fem! Reader (Kinktober Day #4: Somnophilia)

NSFW. 18+ ONLY. AFAB reader, neutral pronouns. SOMNOPHILIA. Dub-con if you squint; Reader is Kars’ pet, although it’s made VERY clear that they’re more than happy to be so. Size difference, slight belly bulge, lots of come - one (1) vague allusion to procreation. 2.5k.

Your Master takes whatever he wants, when he wants it - and you are more than happy to give him it.

You had never pictured your life like this, when you’d imagined a future. You’re not sure what exactly you did picture - you’ve had vague occasional thoughts of a husband or a wife, sun-dappled mornings, a family, a breakfast neatly laid on a kitchen table. You’ve thought of the libraries you’ve spent so much of your time in and the dust motes floating in golden sunbeams. You’ve thought of being on your knees among your garden, digging in fresh soil, throwing a stick for a pet dog . . .

No, you certainly never imagined this.

You never imagined finding yourself beneath a man like Lord Kars, a pleased smirk curling his face. You never imagined swearing fealty and loyalty to a man who’d soon see your entire species eradicated - you certainly never imagined that a man would stroke your face with massive fingers and murmur, lowly;

“My pet.”

And that you’d shiver in anticipation instead of disgust. Perhaps the idea of being a pet to someone much stronger and faster and cleverer than you would be abhorrent to most people - a few months ago, you’d have agreed with them. But these people have never seen Lord Kars. Have never been privy to his amused smirk and his voice shivering with suggestion and his body, cool and toned and hard like marble pressed against theirs. They’ve never caught the attention of a God - they do not know how intoxicating it is to be the object of affection of one.

Lord Kars himself sometimes expresses wonderment that you’ve so captured those affections. He doesn’t find mortals all that fascinating, as a whole - but something about you . . . He traces the lines of your body with big fingers and makes you open up before him like a blooming flower, your petals trembling under his hungry gaze. He has you sit at his feet, running fingers through your hair - he listens to you talk about things you care about, the plants in your garden, making a soft hum low in the back of his throat that makes you feel safe and comforted.

“I don’t know what it is that so enchants me about you, little pet,” he murmurs against your collarbone, big fingers spreading you open, coaxing forth enough wetness that you might come close to fitting him easily, “But oh, how it does.”

He had given you a choice: one final chance to flee, and he would not follow - or stay and kneel at his feet and kiss his hand and be his in every sense of the word. Belong to him.

Six months ago, it would have seemed a simple choice, and you’d have laughed in his face. Three months ago, though, you had barely thought as you’d inclined your head and brushed your lips over his palm.

“So you’re to be mine, little morsel,” he’d said, voice very low - so deep it feels like it reverberates down your spine and settles there familiar and comforting. “I must say . . . I’m pleased that you’ve made the correct decision.”

And so you had become his. You’d bowed under his big hands, let fingers wring pleasures from you that you didn’t know your body was capable of - had felt his mouth against you, drawing you closer and closer to peaks of fire, and had used your own on him in return. Your own hands - inexperienced though they were - had learnt every dip and contour and hard muscled plane of his body until you could see him in your sleep, all the while his amused voice had reminded you how lucky you were.

Lucky. Yes, you feel that.

Lord Kars can do what he wants with you; you had given yourself over to him utterly when he asked. Now is no different - as he pulls silken sheets from your body and you stir in your sleep, your nose crinkling, a soft sigh escaping your parted lips. You’re already mostly naked - the diaphanous slip that he gives you to wear (if he takes you outside with him at night you have luxurious clothes no matter the weather - he might not feel cold, but he has watched the goosepimpling of your skin in the cool air with interest) rucked up around your thighs.

For some people, seeing you in front of them laid bare like this might fill them with excitement - it is not so for Kars. You are his body and soul and he is merely taking his rights from you - looking at you laid out like a beautiful painting, just ready to be touched even in your slumber, fills him with the warmth that one gets when they own something beautiful.

He grazes the heel of his hand over one side of your body - the soft swell of your breasts, your waist, curve of your hips. You sigh again, tossing your hair slightly. Your mouth moves into a soft moue of disappointment as he pulls his touch away, but it is not for long. This time, when he touches you, he brings up both of his big hands and they land over your breasts. You’re soft beneath his grip - he squeezes gently, experimentally, and you whine in the back of your throat, baring your neck. Sweet. Even in sleep, you’re desperate for him - some part of you recognises the coolness and size of his hands and knows subconsciously that it is your Master who is laying claim to you. His thumb and forefinger pinch one nipple through the thin fabric, and your eyebrows furrow - Kars finds himself smiling down at you, his look far more tender than he’d ever allow had you been awake.

You always react to him so well - even now, you’re parting your thighs, sighing softly. You know what he wants from you even when you’re still half-buried in your own subconscious, and he feels his own cock stir at your display of helpless devotion.

“Patience, little one,” he murmurs, a few more moments spent squeezing and stroking your breasts until your nipples are hard and obvious, making little points in the fabric. “All in good time.”

He pushes what little you’re wearing up higher, so your stomach and thighs and hips are all bare for his hungry gaze.

You’ve already spread your thighs, and Kars smirks again as he runs a thumb over your slit - you’re slick with need just from the few small touches he’s given you so far. He’s never dipped his hand between your legs whilst you’re awake and found you anything but damp - but the knowledge you’re like this even without possession of your senses is intoxicating. You’re his perfect little pet, in every sense of the word.

The touch of his fingers on your thighs as he pulls away from the slick valley of your sex is feather light - he could bruise you so easily, but he doesn’t want to wake you with pain. No, if you awake he wants it to be that the feel of him inside you driving you to need to be involved, or the force of an orgasm rocking your body too good to be ignored. You’re almost trembling under his strokes, already.

Still. He’s not a monster. You take his cock well - but you almost never take it unprepared, With two thumbs, he gently parts the plump lips of your core, pleased to see that you’re pulsing invitingly and glinting in the low light, your clit swollen to attention. He’s barely touched you - but part of the reason you’d so enthralled him was how prettily you respond to his ministrations.

He could crush you in moments - snuff out your life like it was nothing. He dwarfs you in bed, in size and in speed and in power - and yet, you continue to intrigue him.

A finger toys with the clit, and you mewl in your sleep, bucking your hips up lazily in search of pressure. The noise goes straight to his cock, already stiff and more than ready to be inside you. But Kars did not get where he is without patience. He is iron-willed. His cock wants to be buried inside you, tight and hot and wet and deep - but he will deny himself for now.

For now, he enjoys the way you move in your sleep. The soft pliancy of your body as he spreads your thighs even wider, as he places the tip of his finger at your entrance - as you welcome that same finger into your silky confines with a sigh, breaching the final knuckle yourself. You’re tight like this, your walls pulsing around even just one of his fingers (never mind that his finger is almost the size of the cock of a regular man) - but still, he pulls it out. He wins another whine from you for that, until his second finger joins the first, twisting inside of you and gently scissoring you open.

He’s not always the kind of creature to prepare you slowly - he sometimes likes pressing three fingers as deep inside of you as they can go and curling them to rub against your sweet spot, watching how your eyes roll back in your head and you wail into the ceiling. But now . . . now, he is enjoying the quieter noises of your arousal. The soft pants, the eyes squeezed shut, the slight flush that has crept to your face. Your breathing remains even, but he knows it won’t be for long.

He enjoys your slick tightness around him for a few moments before he pumps them in and out, agonisingly slow. He wants to be pumping his cock in and out of you, really . . . but the way you’re clenching around him and your thighs are trembling make a pleasant distraction to the heat low in his own core. His thumb strokes once across your clit - and he watches as your teeth bite into your lip at that, eyelashes fluttering. The second stroke across your clit you toss your head in your dreams, a gasp falling from your mouth that sounds like a plea.

He almost wants to keep going. Your hips are moving subconsciously now in time with his fingers thrusting. Your walls are fluttering around him, trying to hold him inside of you with an iron grip. Your slick is soaking his fingers and thumb, pooling beneath you on the sheets - but he doesn’t want you to wake up because he made you come with his fingers.

(Another time, he tells himself - another time he’ll let you come in your sleep with his fingers buried inside you. He wants to feel how much like a vice your insides would feel, how you’d gush over him. But not tonight.)

The pulling out of those fingers wins another groan, this one disappointment and frustration. Sweet, how needy you are.

You will not be needy for long, he thinks, as he positions himself between your thighs, reaching to free his cock. He spends a moment, before he fucks you, enjoying the scene you make for him - all tousled and unaware, your body looking impossibly small next to his muscled thighs and the cock he has pressing against your entrance.

The first time you had seen it, your eyes had widened and your tongue had darted out to wet your lips, as you’d haltingly professed that you weren’t sure you could take it.

You had.

And he knows you’ll take it now, as he begins the slow inexorable press of his hips against yours, your tight, wet heat enveloping the head of his cock. Your head falls back and you groan aloud, and Kars takes a hold of your hips to ensure you stay against him.

Inch by inch, he sinks inside of you, and you welcome him as you always do - silky and hot and perfect, clinging to him like your body was made for taking him. He finds himself groaning at just how tight you are in your sleep, before he catches it in his mouth - he will not let go of his composure. He hilts in you. You are still his. He is still your Master--

A hand on his bicep.

“L-Lord Kars?” You murmur, and your eyes open, dark with sleep. “Mm, Lord Kars--”

Your legs lock lazily about his hips. They barely stretch that wide - your feet are nowhere near meeting. He is not the size of a creature who you could really wrap yourself around. But the intention is clear - that you want him as deep inside of you as he can go.

You are still half-asleep as he begins to rock against you. Your pants and sighs are still heavy, and your grip as you go to his shoulders is lazy. Kars does not care. He would not admit how helplessly hard your utter submission in your sleep has rendered him - he has to rein himself in to keep his composure, to keep speaking to you as he fucks you.

He has never been so close to losing himself into animal nature, grunting and groaning and fucking into your body beneath him until you and he are like two animals desperate to mate. So he breathes and speaks to keep himself grounded, congratulating you on how well you’re taking him, what a good little pet you are, how you were made to take his cock--

You come first, as you always do. The feel of his cock stretching you out so deeply, the way that it hits your most sensitive spots with every stroke, the constant pressure of his hard pelvis against your clit - it’s no wonder that whimpers come spilling out of your mouth as you come under him, sparks of pleasure converging on one point so your sex pulses around him.

He fucks you through the orgasm and the aftershocks, your body becoming once more limp and helpless as your eyelids close again. Did you wake, just to come? Will you even remember this in the morning, or will it be half-remembered like a dream? Your pliability beneath him pushes over the edge, and Kars’ cock pulsates inside of you, twitching, spilling his come deep inside you. He chases the high himself with deeper, longer thrusts, the sound of him driving his come inside of you indecently loud in his bedchambers even mixed with your chest-deep pants--

When he pulls out, your sex is leaking him, and your stomach is almost slightly distended. He knows, from how you’ve choked around it, that he comes a little more than the average man - of course he does. He’s no man. He’s a God. He’s chastised you for not swallowing it all until you’ve promised to do better, fervently rubbing your face against his cock again to goad him into hardness so you can show him that next time you will take all of him.

Ordinarily, he would be frustrated that a drop of his precious seed is wasted. No matter what the ends of his fucking - and with you, prized little pet, it is not procreation - you should feel honoured to have taken him.

But now, he feels dimly satisfied that you will have the reminder of him between sticky thighs when you wake back up. Just as an assurance that the events of tonight were not a dream - and perhaps to tempt you into asking him to do it again.

He will no matter what. But he feels so much more powerful when it’s you asking.

#writing #kinktober collection #kars #not sfw #afab reader #neutral pronouns #somnophilia #dub con for ts #JUST IN CASE. both parties are VERY into it but. power imbalance #jjba

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