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heisenho · 3 years

Note

Karl x Fem!Reader that also has the ability to bend metal and being his little apprentice. Like they go from mentoring to lovers?

Power

[Karl Heisenberg x Fem!Reader]

Warnings: 18+, MINORS DNI! Good ol' pussy eatin', Karl being a bit of a dick, just normal re8 stuff.

A/N: This was so fun to write, i do hope you like it! Thanks so much for this request! This is more... uh reader loathing karl and then letting him mentor her, and then they become lovers. i hope that is okay dfijffnwfjw

“Fuck!” You screamed out, stomping your foot. “Why can’t I just live with Lady Dimitrescu?”

You were growing angry. Rage boiled inside of you. You let out a loud, shrill scream and slammed your foot against the metal you were supposed to be moving around with your fucking mind.

“Shit!”

Another yell. You grabbed your foot and fell to the ground, rolling in the dirt for a minute.

“Get the fuck up.”

You stopped your rolling and your eyes shot towards Heisenberg. You stood up and glared at him. You crossed your arms and stepped closer to him.

“Girl,” Heisenberg growled, “You do not wanna do that.”

When you were first sent to live with Heisenberg, you were sure it was going to be hell, he was terrifying. But now, it was hell because he was being bossy.

“You’re lucky I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Otherwise... You’d be-”

“What? What would I be?

Your arms fell to your sides, your fingers digging into your palms. You screamed again and turned to stomp away from Heisenberg. His jacket rustled and you ignored it, thinking he was probably going to fuck around with his powers just to show off.

Show off, he did.

A piece of metal came flying towards your legs and wrapped around your shins, knocking you to the ground. A scared noise fell from your lips and you scratched at the ground, trying your best to stop whatever was happening. Once it registered that you were not about to get away, you let yourself slide towards Heisenberg.

The metal around your legs began to pull you upwards and you tensed. You truly had not expected to start fucking floating. The metal tightened as your moved higher into the air, thankfully Heisenberg seemed to not want to drop you.

“Oh, if only there were a way you could escape this.”

You swung your arm out and let out a strangled, stressed scream as he caught it. “Karl, let me down right now!”

Blood was starting to rush to your head. Heisenberg was deadpan, watching you struggle. He didn’t look comfortable, but he also was letting it happen. As you were leaning up, pulling at the metal, Heisenberg reached up to you, the metal falling and you dropping into his arms.

He quickly set you down and began to walk back to his factory. “C’mon, we’ll try again tomorrow.”

You looked down at the metal and tried your best, really giving it your all, and moved your hand outward, towards it, but nothing happened.

“Karl,” you let out a soft whine, “I can’t do this.”

Karl came up from behind and sighed. You knew for sure he was about to pull some more bullshit, so you tensed. Karl’s face dropped, his eyes softening, but you couldn’t quite see that. You could, however, hear Karl sigh.

“We’re gonna try something different.” Karl stepped behind you and your body only tensed even more.

Karl placed his gloved hand on your bicep and slid it down your arm, causing your breath to catch in your throat. “Focus on the metal,” he brought your hand upwards and uncurled your fingers, which were digging into your palm. “Just think about moving it, it’ll come naturally.”

You nodded and relaxed into him, “Okay.”

Suddenly the metal moved. You gasped and practically ripped away from Karl, your excitement bubbling over. You turned and looked at him with wide eyes.

“I did it!”

“Told ya it wasn’t hard.”

You huffed at him, “You literally dragged me around the dirt yesterday, sir! Do not go talking about this bein’ easy!”

Karl snorted, “Whatever, girl,” his eyes rolled behind his sunglasses. “Now, we can get to the actual training.”

You stood across from Karl, in the scrapyard, your fingers twitching at your sides. You were finally getting good at whatever the hell Miranda had “blessed” you with, and Karl was taking training up a notch.

The metal began to float around you causing you to feel a little anxiety. You brought your arms up, palms facing Karl, and you pushed some of the metal back towards him. As you did that, he snapped his fingers, effortlessly causing a piece of metal to fly at you. A short whine escaped you as it scraped your cheek.

Warmth ran down your cheek. Blood.

“Not fair!”

“Life isn’t fair, Kitten,” Karl smirked.

You blinked, and your hands fell down to your sides. Your entire body tensed and without even thinking, you caused the metal to shift around you. Every single piece, even the ones near Karl, hit the ground. Hard.

“That’a girl!”

Karl walked towards you and smiled proudly. Your stomach twisted and you swallowed hard. Something about that pet name, and the way he said it... He had your stomach in knots. You gave him a nervous smile and nodded.

“Thanks. I totally meant to do that.”

Karl laughed, “Let’s go inside, I think that’s enough for today. Anyway,” Karl brought his gloved hand to your cheek, “You’re bleeding. You need to clean that up.”

Without thinking, you swatted him away and leaned back from him. Karl, unbeknownst to you, was not a fan of that reaction. His face dropped, slightly, before he gave you a cocky grin once more.

The both of you walked in, and you knew you were going to have to deal with your new feelings, one way or another.

It had been about a week since ‘the incident’ and you could not get the way he called you ‘kitten’ out of your head. He hadn’t said it since, he had barely gotten close to you unless he was training with you, and even then he kept his distance.

You had to find a way to relieve stress and you had to find one soon. Being a desperate woman, you decided, when there was a family meeting, you were going to find one of Alcina’s daughters and ask her for help.

And you did just that.

“Daniela,” You pulled her to the side and prayed that Karl wouldn’t find you, “I need help.”

“Ooooh~” She let out a laugh, or what you could only assume was a laugh, “what does the newest member of the family need?”

“Please keep quiet, this is important to keep between us, and only us.”

“Of course,” she grabbed your shoulder and smiled at you.

‘Maybe she’s trying to make me feel less scared?’ You thought. “Anyway...” You tried to shrug her hand away, “Look, do you ladies have any... toys. Just, like, around the castle?”

“Toys?” Daniela cocked her head, “I didn’t think you wanted to play with men?”

Your eyes widened, “No! Sex toys!” You hissed at her.

Her eyes lit up, “Oh! Of course. Follow me, my cute little pet.”

And just like that, you were completely set up to relieve your stress.

Finding a secluded area was not the easiest. So many of Karl’s little experiments wandered around. But once you found it, you were ecstatic.

You were sprawled out on a small pallet you had made. You had surrounded yourself with some metal, a barrier between you and the creatures that could find you. Keeping it up was becoming a hassle, especially once you started feeling immense pleasure.

You had been messing around with yourself for a good half of the day. You had somehow convinced Karl to let you wander off and not work that day. He said he had things he needed to tend to, and let you go off on your own.

You were taking breaks in between sessions, but nothing was like the real thing. The vibrations of the toy were sending shockwaves through your body. You were getting close to the edge, toes curling, eyes rolling back, and body tensing. And, unlike all your other orgasms, you let out a loud whimper.

“Hey, girl-” Karl called out, obviously looking for you.

“Karl-” You moaned out, not registering Karl’s voice.

Something had come over you, you were completely wrecked by the thought of Karl having his way with you. To the point where you called out for him. And he most definitely heard you.

The metal dropped around you and you, suddenly, you were forced to face Karl. Once and for all. A scream ripped from your throat and you closed your legs, pulling your large, button up shirt, over your knees.

“Fuck!” You yelled, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t-”

“Damn,” Karl, being the extreme gentleman he was, noticed you weren’t entirely comfortable and covered his eyes. “If you needed some help you could have asked.”

“Karl!” You shouted throwing the sex toy to the side. Face burning, body trembling, mind filled with pure embarrassment, you just sat on the floor, “Shut up!”

Suddenly, you realized what he said. Your jaw dropped and your arms, that were wrapped around your legs, tensed.

“Last chance,” Karl smirked, eyes still hidden, “you obviously need-”

“Okay.”

That was all he needed to hear. His hand dropped from his face and he stalked towards you. Without a word, Karl leaned down, picked you, and tossed you over his shoulder. Letting out a small gasp, you hung down his back. One of his hands held you steady while the other rested on your ass.

The both of you reached his ‘room’, just an area with a mattress on the ground not as many experiments around. Karl placed you down on the mattress and leaned over you, he peeked over his sunglasses at you.

“You have no clue how long I’ve wanted this.”

Heisenberg’s mouth was the shell of your ear, his breath causing your body to react in the best way possible. He pulled back and stared you down, like a predator ready to devour their prey. Your knees knocked together and you were looking up at Heisenberg with big doe eyes. His large calloused hand grabbed one of your knees and he pulled your legs apart, gently.

“I was wondering where that shirt went...”

“Well, maybe if you had more shirts you wouldn’t have noticed.”

Karl chuckled, a rumble coming from his chest, and you felt like you had made some type of mistake, “Are you sure you wanna get that tone with me, kitten?”

“Yes...” It sounded more like a question than an answer, but the confidence was almost there.

“How are you so bratty, yet so cute?” Karl positioned himself between your legs.

You shrugged, unable to find words to say. Your brain was malfunctioning at the worst time. You had thought about this moment, even dreamed of it, and now there you sat, looking like some deer in headlights. You were vulnerable and so small compared to him.

“You sure you’re up for this, kitten? You’re looking a little-”

“I’m good!” Your voice cracked, “You have no clue how much I’ve wanted this- you. I just kinda thought you... hated me.”

Karl cocked his head at you, “How? You’re fucking amazing. I thought you hated me, the way you tensed when we were training... I just assumed you were afraid.”

“Karl,” you spoke so calmly, as if you weren’t almost naked and completely vulnerable under him, “as I said before, you dragged me through the dirt with metal...”

“That was just tough love,” Karl smirked down at you, before his facial features softened, “I can make it up to you?”

You nodded, wondering what he had in mind.

“Lean back,” he moved down, positioning himself between your legs, his body keeping your legs from closing.

You complied of course, and leaned back for him. Your back hit the mattress and you let out a shaky sigh. Karl began to softly kiss up your thigh, his large hands pulling your legs further apart. Your hands gripped at the bare mattress below you and you arched into Karl’s mouth.

Once he reached your cunt, you let out a soft moan, waiting for more. One of Karl’s hands gripped at your hip, while the other pulled your shirt up further. His hand quickly moved from your shirt and to your bare ass.

“I promise, I’ll be gentle,” Karl murmured right before his tongue licked a stripe up your pussy.

You gasped. God, it was everything you had imagined, and better. His tongue quickly found your clit and he sucked at it, briefly, before getting back to your pussy.

You let out a soft hum of pleasure, your hands knocking his hat off and grabbing at his hair. You pulled at it and Karl immediately stopped.

“Girl,” his chest rumbled, and his eyes snapped up at you, “I don’t think you’re prepared for what that brings.”

You couldn’t answer, you were genuinely too in the moment to register anything but your own pleasure. And you were getting close to cumming. Your back arched, and your toes curled, once his lips met your throbbing pussy again.

“Karl,” your voice was loud, but not loud enough.

“Kitten, who’s making you feel this good?”

“You- You are!”

Your feet jerked, pulling you up on your tiptoes, and your back curved, causing your hips to push into Karl, letting his tongue go deeper.

“Karl! I’m- I’m gonna-” You were cut off, everything becoming too much.

You gasped loudly and the entire factory shifted and groaned. Your eyes screwed shut and your entire body tensed under him. Karl did not slow. You felt the metal around you beginning to move.

Your eyes snapped open, just in time for you to witness the metal starting to come to life around the two of you. You fell, your back colliding with the mattress once more, and the metal fell back down. The factory stopped creaking, the only noise now being your loud panting.

“Damn, girlie,” Karl brought his face up to yours, “you’re more powerful than I thought...”

Karl gave you a kiss, and you quickly deepened it. Your arms wrapped around his neck and held himself above you. Your legs wrapped around his waist and you softly mewled beneath him. Reluctantly, Karl pulled away and pressed his forehead to yours.

“How about-” he paused, thinking about his wording, “how about we take this shit over? Fuck everyone else. Me and you, kitten, that’s all that matters.”

You quickly answered, unsure if it was the fact he just ate your pussy, the love you felt for him, or your genuine hate for Mother Miranda. Or all of the above, “How about we fuck first? The vibrator just wasn’t doing it. We can think about world domination after sex.”

“I like the sound of that.”

#karl heisenberg #karl heisenberg x reader #karl heisenberg x you #karl heisenberg imagine #beff writes #anzu-sl #i love karl so much #like.#karl top me challenge #i hope this was good!!!#aaaaa #im always nervous to post a fic lol

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jiminrings · 3 years

Note

umm maybe this is me projecting bc i am messaging you during my break but for a drabble request, yoongi in a retail setting???? 😐😐😐😐 oc could either be a co-worker or a regular customer who asks too many questions 😔😌

retail-type beat

drabble week: day three

drabble week masterlist

pairing: customer!yoongi x retail worker!reader

wordcount: 3k

glimpse: "hi! almost thought you were hiding from me for a second. anyways, is this sweater wool or cotton?"

feedback + support mean the world to me!!

the last time you checked, work doesn’t start until nine

you kNEW it doesn’t start until 9 in the morning, so clearly that’s why you’re just wearing slides instead of your sneakers

the company uniform is either black or purple (it has to be from what the store is selling though so you can get to choose) with of course!!!! a lanyard!!!!

and you know this, because you’re still wearing your slides from home because it isn’t opening time yet

“goddamn it, i forgot to bring my slippers,” jin moans the moment he walks to see you, looking down on your feet that only reminds him he’d be stuck in his cool yet painfully uncomfy sneakers

he’s probably the only co-worker that you’re truly close with, not feeling the urge to sell him just to get a free day

“i told you to get the sneakers that nurses use!!”

hands-down one of the best purchases you’ve ever made

retail’s hard and it’s not exactly the best-paying job!!! thankfully the franchise owner is a bit more generous so that’s why you get slightly-higher hourly pay

“i would if they looked a little more seasoned,” jin snorts and stubbornly crosses his arms, “i might sacrifice my pride and buy some compression socks.”

OOOOOH THOSE ARE GOOD TOO

makes you feel like ur walking on air

but lol no seokjin isn’t ready to buy those just yet

he’ll settle on some blisters and putting salonpas patches because they look cooler that way, thank u very much <3

jin yawns, talking about finding a steam iron somewhere to replace a blowdryer so he could break in his shoes

“you wipe the glass this time.”

oh right he absolutely hates wiping down the glass — even before opening!!! even when there aren’t any grubby kids that would soil it instantly with their equally as grubby hands

you don’t mind it honestly

you might honestly like it

you prefer wiping the glass a hundred times over than steaming clothes

there is nOT a single thought in your head when you spray on the solution to the glass, rag and squeegee tucked between your fingers when-

maybe you should’ve hOLY FUCKING SHIT

it’s not opening!!!! it is nOT nine o’clock in the morning!!!!

you know that the shop you’re working in is pretty fucking famous and it’s located on one of the most populated streets ever BUT THERE’S ALREADY SOMEONE

although the bucket hat seems familiar from a distance and-

oh it’s just yoongi

yoongi?

yoongi’s already here????

yoongi, the guy in question, is an always customer!!

no, not a regular customer — an always customer

he comes every week and maybe even twice within that period

he’s a nice talkative customer who likes asking questions and even occasionally guides the other customers on what to buy and where to find it

he’s yoongi!!! of course that’s expected of him

he’s been going here long since you ever started working here, and jin keeps iNSISTING that he’s been here more frequently since you started like a year ago

but doesn’t he come at eleven in the morning?

“woah, yoongi’s already here? — doesn’t he come at eleven in the morning?”

?!!?!!

“i was just thinking the exact same thing.”

jin bangs the glass with his fist and you automatically wince and frown

you dO like cleaning the glass panes!! you didn’t say you liked cleaning them a second time :(

“YOONGI!”

“YES??”

you push jin’s fist away to wipe at the smudge his hand left

“IT’S NOT OPENING YET!”

“I KNOW!!”

wow they’re uh

they’re really loud

sometimes you forget how seokjin could be since it’s been awhile since you heard him yell

lol no one’s been shoplifting recently so you haven’t been hearing him

a mind-blowing idea is for jin to come outside and talk to him in a normal talking voice, so your ears would stop ringing

“HEY! WHAT IF YOU JUST ENTER EARLY IN?”

“REALLY? IS THAT EVEN ALLOWED??”

"YOONGI, EVERYONE ON THE FLOOR KNOWS YOUR NAME. NAMJOON EVEN GAVE YOU A CUSTOMARY BIRTHDAY GIFT, AND WE DON'T GIVE CUSTOMARY BIRTHDAY GIFTS TO ANY OTHER CUSTOMER!!"

namjoon, who technically should be called mr. kim because no one really thinks to call the franchise owner with their government first name, is actually pretty cool

but he's too busy these days and haven't been visiting because he's too busy tending to his newly-opened coffee shop

as if the money he earns from opening his franchise in a day alone isn’t enough :0

"IF YOU SAY SO?"

you’re the one who hikes up the roll-up door in the slightest, enough for only yoongi to enter and not encourage anyone else to nOT enter when it’s still not opening time!!!!

he only has to crouch a little but he still has to dust his thousand-dollar pants as if he crawled through mud

his cream-colored slacks with a large black hoodie that has a giant bear embroidered on the middle of it and mules

... you don't hate his outfits

pretty cute, actually

it's yoongi!!

you'd never catch him lacking!!!

you don't even have to envision him rocking the shit out a paper bag

one time, he came in the store wearing the WRINKLIEST brown linen jumpsuit that no iron could possibly fix and he still pulled it off

toon-teen-ten!

oh god that’s the sound of the intercom

and the sound of the intercom equates to jungkook

... as in jeon jungkook who’s the floor manager and his constant top one goal for every month is to endearingly annoy seokjin

he’s young and mischievous!! but if you were to ask him, only you and jungkook are the people in this floor he’d actually get drinks with outside the shop

“seokjin come to the lingerie department right now, please.”

you see the thing is :D

“now this is just funny

there’s walkie-talkies for everyone here!! jungkook likes intercoms, and seokjin like yelling!!

“WHY ME AGAIN?? I’VE ALREADY FOLDED-“

“there’s a literal rat and i need yOU to catch it!! you know that i hate rodents!!”

him and jungkook are forever gonna be on this eldest-youngest brother dynamic and while jungkook pouts and shared the extras that he gets, jin is the one who kills the bugs :D

10/10 totally fair

fine then!! he’ll catch that goddamn rat

that leaves you and yoongi. alone.

“why did you come so early this time?”

you ask out of courtesy, genuinely baffled too because you know that yoongi’s a creature of habit

yoongi’s eyes pop out, head fervently shaking no

“i’m typically not the type to do that, no.”

???

is he-

are you-

are you both talking about the same thing

yoongi’s face flushes in embarrassment, his mind just then registering what you were actually saying

“o-oh! it’s because last night, i dreamt of the sweater i saw here last week!!"

oh right

typical :D

"need me to find it for you or do you already know the aisle?"

you align the folded shirts by the corners as you pass, looking at yoongi briefly while he trails behind yoh

“not unless you pulled it out already."

he's hoping that dear god you haven't

the black sweater with the moon aND buildings on it and when you turn on the flash, the windows of said building reflect it right back???

he SHUDDERS just by thinking about it

it’s gonna go with everything!!! an instant boost of serotonin every time he sees it

"for you, yoongi?" you shake your head, a small smile on your face that he only sees every once in a while, "i'd comb through the entire stock room."

wait

that’s sweet :((

“i’ll hold you to that.”

you know what??? you're less cranky when it's only him, and a couple of hundred people less

your smiles aren't for customer-service and you don't have misplaced clothes hanging from your shoulders and your walkie-talkie isn't talking in latin

or when no one’s asking you to reach something from the top shelf

or when you’re on the way to the intercom because a kid got separated from their mother

or when someone’s approaching for a refund for a shirt who has a stain that’s 100% no doubt customer error

his feet immediately move on its own because he’s memorized the outline of this too many times

there it is!!!

the sweater he’s dreamt about is already on his hands, only a handful few left

the piece is considerably more expensive than majority of the items here, so that’s why they’re all spaced-out instead of being clustered altogether

yoongi rarely goes to the dressing room, regardless if it's a full-house or not!!

he could just look at an item and immediately tell that it’s made for him ta know

he's beyond sure that this sweater fits him perfectly, but he may want to be here a little longer

yoongi may have say inside one of the fitting rooms and spent a little time in it just to sit on the chair inside, not fitting the sweater at all

he's gotten his item SO quick and he wished he could've just walked slower or pretended to not know where it was!!!

he wants to spend a little more time here

you don't hate yoongi!!! but sometimes he could just be... yoongi

he's quite talkative and strikes it whenever, making you unguarded

he could be overbearing but like an overbearing kind of nice

yoongi’s nice!! he’s the type to ask a lot of questions sure, but he’s also the type that would point the other customers what to buy and where to find it

he’s the type to find an obvious faulty stitch on a shirt, but he’d just quietly exchange it instead of asking for the manager

he’s the type you wouldn’t want to stand behind in line because it would take a long time for him to finish, but he’s also the same one who buys giftcards with generous amounts for family and friends

yoongi’s kind of cool and that’s cemented on your mind

"what do you got for me?"

he materializes out of nowhere, spooked because you thought he already ringed up and was out of the store already

it just happens to be ten minutes before opening and you’re doing last-minute arrangements on a new spread

well, yoongi most certainly is still here and his attention’s piqued

“we have... a new collection."

you clear your theory, awkwardly gesturing because you’re more than aware that yoongi hasn’t seen this either

“yeah, i know that. but like, what's going on??" he gestures to the displays and racks, squinting his eyes, "what's the theme? what's the material?"

uhm you haven't read the brief about this

you aren't even sURE if there is one!!

doesn't everyone make up something on the spot in retail

or atleast that’s what seokjin tells you

“the theme," you clear your throat, scratching your temple before gesturing towards the full rack, "is everything."

“everything?

yoongi’s eyebrow is raised, not expecting that answer at all

you look back to the new feature, and nOW that you think about it,, there's no cohesion at all

“y-yes. the shop was going for the theme of uhm, everything... all at once — yeah, that's it. everything all at once."

it’s a nice way to put it when not one bit of the new collection goes together

“hmmmm. i like it,” yoongi nods solemnly and tilts his head, “and the material?"

"the material?"

you repeat, eyesight not the best so you can’t really tell anything off the bat or uh aNYTHING really

"t-the material is shirt."

they're all shirts!!! that’s it

yoongi grimaces in disgust, the first time you’ve seen of it

“what?? you can't say that.”

he outsretches his hand to the nearest article, holding it up by the hanger

"this, right here, is satin. see how it shines like silk, but doesn't feel like silk?"

uhm yes

you have a gist of what he’s saying but yes

yoongi picks up a pink button shirt this time, flipping it inside out

"this, is silk charmeuse. look at the inside, is it smooth?"

okay where is he going with this

he urges you to put your hand on the fabric and uhhh you didn't sign up for this???

it looks smooth, sure!! end of discussion

"yea-..."

“it's not. it's rough. it is smooth, but it's dull. silk charmeuse is still silk, but the backing it has is different from the lustrous part."

okay yoongi

you’re starting to feel uncomfortable and it has to do something with the tone he’s using on you

“can't believe you didn't know that!! how about this," he plucks out a shirt with a tiny print at the middle of it, "cotton or polyester and rayon?"

"i don't-"

there’s an itch in your neck that you want to scratch, a tell-tale sign that you just wANT to remove yourself from this situation

“come on!! it's a dead giveaway!!"

:((

why is he being like this?

toon-teen-ten!

“y/n, panty section please. jin almost got bit by a mouse and he needs comforting. two minutes until opening, people!!"

jungkook speaks at the right moment, and jin’s little incident is enough of a reason for you to bolt

yoongi's still looking at you but you can't afford to embarrass yourself further

“bye. happy shopping."

huh?

yoongi’s face falls when you leave as cold as that!! typically when you were going to show him out (when it’s regular shop hours), there’d be a smile :((

there's not even a customer service smile :(((

yoongi goes to the only cashier that's open so far and it happens to be far away from you and a teary seokjin

seokjin's fine he didn't even get bit!! that much he could say

but are you okay? uhhh you kinda went cold on him by the end and he thought he started on a good note

yoongi doesn't visit for another week and you don't find yourself counting the days until you meet him again

you did not have a devil wears prada moment where anne hathaway has an epiphany for fashion knowledge

you just felt belittled at a job that isn’t exactly what you wanted anyways

needed, yes. but wanted? not exactly

you know that basic knowledge about clothes is required in a retail job like this and you have it!! you do!!!!

you’d know more if only there were actual available resources for employees to know!!! nobody besides yoongi asks anyways

you’d know if you have time to yourself and aren’t working two jobs trying to make ends meet and tHEN you could pull up a book or something!!!

you’d know if your life is as lax as yoongi’s and could have the budget to buy new things for yourself every single week

“jin, i need to ask you something.”

he hums as called, looking at you briefly until you get on with it

“do you know the difference between silk and silk charmeuse?"

he shrugs casually while you're sitting inside one of the closed-off fitting rooms to catch a break, sharing a burger because the store’s packed-packed

why did you ask him? it’s too easy

“one's made by worms, and the other's a pokémon."

that,.,., could not possibly be righti* it brings you a laugh and you honestly don’t even try to correct him

it’s 11:15 and you kNOW it’s time to resume your shift, straightening your shirt because atleast one (1) person would hound you when they see a familiar red lanyard

oh you’re hounded alright

“hi! almost thought you were hiding from me for a second.”

yoongi????

you haven’t seen him for a week and you don’t know what to feel in all honesty

"anyways, is this sweater wool or cotton?"

wow

you're quite speechless as he holds up the item

really?

this thing all over again???

why are you even surprised

the only thing that yoongi gets your customer service smile, fishing your hand from inside the sweater to show him

“70% wool."

that's it???

NO GOOD MORNING????

you're mad at him, aren't you?

he knew it :((

he knew something was wrong but he just didn’t know what

he’s gonna fix this!! he will

which is why the very next day, he takes the day off from his work and comes to the store at a time he knows you’d surely be there

you're on cashier duty and you like it actually :D

you have an option to sit and the way you’re just gonna scan pricetags (and occasionally enter the code if it doesn’t work) is really appealing

“good morning!"

you’re about to grab the items from the basket laid on the counter and your eyes could only see the very familiar hand

the same one you’ve seen go through racks and racks

yoongi??

he sets his items one by one, buying himself more time

the first one is the same exact sweater he came to wait for before opening

“you already bought this."

you tell him even before you could hold it back, looking back at him briefly before you scan the tag

“i know. i just wanted to see you."

yoongi threw a bunch of other items (individually) so it would be a longer talk, but you scan each item quickly that he’s grabbing things from the counter

hand sanitizer!!! hair ties!!! keychains!!!! yeah he needs them

“i'm sorry that i tend to spring shit on you most of the time. you don't need to know the difference between silk and silk charmeuse."

you only chuckle then, a meek smile on your face

"it's okay, yoongi.”

“it's not."

... it’s not?

yoongi fidgets, opening and closing his mouth like he’s nervous!!! he’s never had his credit card cancelled but he could only feel that this type of jitterness is more than the former

“can i make it up to you? no lanyards, no baskets, no customer service?? i don't wanna fuck things up with you."

“don't feel obligated-"

“i know i could be a condescending ass who expects people to automatically know fabric and whatnot, but i wanna make it up to you."

alright yoongi’s a really good apology-maker

you mIGHT be even flustered a little

“you're holding the line, yoongi.”

“i cleared my schedule."

“i haven’t!!!!!” - guy in the back

“dinner at my place at 8. i-i promise to make your hard-earned break after your shift worthwhile!!!"

hmmm

maybe that wouldn’t hurt

“okay. just because you're holding the line."

“fine by me."

:))

yoongi transfers all the items he bought, all but one, to his tote bag

he hands back the paper bag to you, scribbling his address on the back of the receipt before he does

he lingers a little while at the counter, the people behind him ALREADY switching lanes to the one seokjin’s just opened beside you

it's the sweater that he has too

yoongi scratches the back of his head, this time being the meek one

“what? m-matching sweaters for our first date. s'cute."

#drabble week #yoongi imagine #yoongi imagines #min yoongi imagines #yoongi oneshots #yoongi oneshot #yoongi drabble #yoongi drabbles #yoongi au #yoongi x reader #yoongi x y/n #yoongi fanfiction #min yoongi fanfiction #yoongi fanfic #min yoongi oneshot #min yoongi scenarios #yoongi headcanon #yoongi fluff #yoongi angst

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imagine-a-life-like-this · 3 years

Text

Play The Part (K.SJ)

Warnings : swearing, miscarriage, a publicity stunt relationship, fainting

Word Count : 4468

Synopsis : she thought acting alongside her favourite actor would be wonderful, until she realizes he hates her. but as things fall apart around her, kim seokjin is the one to pick up all the pieces, falling in love in the process.

His hand wrapped around my wrist, stopping me from walking any further away. I turned and looked up at him with my tear-filled eyes, pleading for him to just let me go. “I can’t let you go.” His own eyes filled with tears at his words.

“You have to.” Silence settled around us. We stood there, staring at each other. I didn’t want to leave, but I had to.

“Why?” There it was. The dreaded question that was on his mind.

“Because I’m protecting my heart. I’m breaking your heart before you can break mine.” I admitted, fruitlessly wiping at the tears streaming down my face.

“Who says I’m going to break your heart?” He yelled.

“Everyone I love leaves me.” I glanced down at his hand that was still wrapped around my wrist, his grip tightening only slightly. I met his eyes again, my tears calming. “Can you promise me right now that if I don’t walk away, that you’ll stay?” His grip loosened and my arm dropped back down to my side.

“And cut!” The director yelled and Seokjin immediately left the set we were standing on. My eyes followed him, wondering what I had done to make him hate me so much. “Y/N, your acting was so beautiful!” The director praised, placing his hands on my shoulders. I smiled up at him, thanking him for his kind words.

Taehyung, another co-star and Seokjin’s brother, sat in my dressing room as per usual, jumping up to greet me. I chuckled as he threw his arms around me, going on about how amazing I did during that last scene. “Don’t lie to her, Tae.” When I turned towards where the voice was coming from, Seokjin was leaning against the doorframe, his infamous smirk dancing across his lips. The same lips I’ve kissed multiple times now. The same lips I tend to dream about.

“Yah, hyung, don’t be so rude.” Taehyung whined, furrowing his brows at his older brother. I smiled up at him, telling him not to worry.

“I can handle criticism. What do you think I could do better, Seokjin?” I crossed my arms over my chest, waiting for his response. He stood straighter, dropping his arms that were once crossed across his chest back to his side.

“Quit.” He said simply as if that was an option this late into the drama. “Jungkook and Namjoon are meeting us at the restaurant.” His words are now directed at Taehyung, and with that, he takes his leave, leaving me absolutely dumbfounded.

“Don’t listen to him, Y/N. I think you’re amazing.” I nodded, telling him he should hurry to meet his friends. “Did you want to come?” He asked, his hard to resist pout on his face.

“I don’t think I’m invited.” I joked, reading through the texts I missed while filming. “Besides, it looks like Bang Chan is picking me up for date night.” I smiled. Chan will definitely be a breath of fresh air from this shitty day. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I grabbed my purse and quickly headed outside to meet Chan.

“Hey, there’s my beautiful girlfriend.” He smiled when I emerged from the doors, and immediately brought me in for a kiss. “Are you hungry? Should we go eat?” I nodded excitedly as he led me to his car.

When we got to the restaurant, the last thing I was expecting was to hear someone call my name. I smiled widely when I saw Jungkook waving at me, and then laughed to myself when I realized that Seokjin and Taehyung were on there way here. “Why don’t you join us?” Jungkook also looked up at me with his hard to resist pout, but Bang Chan and I didn’t get a lot of time for date night.

“We’d love to.” Chan chimed in, placing his hand on my back. “It’s still date night because we’re with each other.” He whispered into my ear before we took two empty seats at the table. “I’m Bang Chan.” He held out his hand for Jungkook and Namjoon to shake, a cute smile on his face as the other two introduced themselves as well.

“Y/N talks about you a lot!” Jungkook spoke up with a smile, and I couldn’t help the blush that rose to my cheeks.

“I guess it’s only fair, since I talk my friend’s ears off about her all the time.” I lightly hit his arm and he chuckled, taking my hand in his, bringing it to his lips for a quick kiss.

“What are you doing here?” Seokjin quipped as soon as he was sitting down.

“I was invited. Twice actually.” He rolled his eyes and proceeded to ignore my entire existence, as he usually does. I tried to enjoy myself, to pretend that Jin’s words didn’t bother me. I tried to pretend he wasn’t even there and enjoy the evening with my boyfriend and friends.

The next day, I stood across from Taehyung for his confession scene. I could see Seokjin in my peripherals, most likely judging every move I make. “Why can’t you look at me the way you look at him?” Taehyung yelled, tears welling up in his eyes. “I’ve been right in front of you this entire time. I’m always there for you, every single time he hurts you.” His voice was softening with each word. He’s such an amazing actor, my heart was breaking the more he spoke. “I would never hurt you like that. I love you.”

“I’m sorry.” I whispered, tears welling up in my own eyes. “I just can’t stop loving him.”

“Cut!” The director called with a wide smile on his face. “Beautiful as always, Y/N!” He exclaimed, draping his arm across my shoulders, and walked off the set with me, going on and on about how excited he was for this drama. “Go take a break. I’ll have someone come get you for your next scene.” I smiled and started off towards my dressing room when Jin stopped me by grabbing my upper arm.

“I thought you should see this.” He held his phone up to my face, and I could feel my heart break at the image on the screen. There was pictures of Chan with another girl. He was wearing a hat and a mask, but I’d recognize him anywhere. I’ve been in love with him for 2 years now. “You okay?” He removed his hand from my arm and slid his phone into his pocket.

“What do you think?” I scoffed. “I just found out that my boyfriend of 2 years is cheating on me. Do you think I’d be okay?”

“I’m sorry.” His voice was soft. “No one deserves that, not even you.” He gave me a sad smile. I just thanked him and walked to my dressing room, seeing Chan sitting on the couch scrolling through his phone.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, standing in the doorway, my hand still on the doorknob. Chan looked up with a smile on his face, and I could feel myself crumbling. I wanted to be strong, but his smile has always been my weakness.

“I figured I’d bring you some food.” He said, pointing to the array of takeout bags on the table in front of him. “Thought we could have a mini date while you’re waiting to film.” He spoke like nothing was wrong. Like he didn’t just break my heart and tore my world apart.

“Chan don’t play with me right now. I know about her.” He smile seemed to fall at my words. I watched as he visibly swallowed and stood up from the couch.

“I guess it’s time you know the truth.” He told me softly as he walked towards me. “I don’t love you, Y/N.” The tears I was trying to hold in started to fall in that moment. “Our relationship was a publicity stunt set up by our companies.” He continued. “My group wasn’t doing as well as we hoped when we first debuted, and you were having a hard time moving on from your previous relationship.” He explained, and I tried so hard not to sob in front of him. “They thought it would be best if you didn’t know about it, let you move on naturally.”

“So you thought it would be best for me to fall in love with you and end up heartbroken again?” He reached out for me, but before I could move away from his touch, a hand grabbed his wrist.

“Don’t touch her.” Beside me stood Kim Seokjin with a look of pure anger on his face. “Leave and don’t think of contacting Y/N ever again.” He dropped his hand and moved out of the way to allow him to leave. “What a disgusting guy.” Jin scoffed as he watched Chan leave. “Enjoy the food he brought you and relax a bit.” I nodded and watched as he walked away as if he didn’t just do what he did. And I pretended like my heart wasn’t pounding in my chest.

For the next couple of weeks, I threw myself into my work. I put on my brave face and pretended I wasn’t hurting. I put my entire heart into my work. And I knew everyone around me could tell I was trying to distract myself from my breakup that recently went public. I could see the looks of pity from staff members and other cast members. Taehyung tried his best to help distract me, and for that I’m thankful. Even Seokjin was nicer to me, bringing me a coffee every morning. He even began to bring me home cooked meals, saying he noticed I wasn’t eating as much.

“If you want to love me, then just love me!” Jin yelled as we acted out the dramatic reconciliation scene.

“I don’t want to love someone who doesn’t love me!” I yelled back, feeling myself get dizzy. I could see the edges of my vision getting dark, but I pushed through.

“I fucking love you, okay?! I always have.” It was my line; I knew it was. But when I opened my mouth, no sound came out. The next thing I remember was falling to the ground as everyone called out my name.

When I woke up some time later, Taehyung was sitting in the chair beside me while Jin sat in a chair across the room. “Hey.” Taehyung spoke softly. “Let me grab the doctor.” He brought the hand he was holding up to his lips and placed a soft kiss to it before leaving the room to grab the doctor.

“I know you’re hurting, but you need to take care of yourself.” Jin spoke up, barely looking up from his phone. “The director said we’re going to take a break. We start filming again in about a week, so take this time to get better.”

“I never thanked you for standing up for me when Chan told me our relationship was fake.” Jin just nodded.

“Anyone would have done what I did put in that situation. Just because I don’t like you doesn’t mean I think you deserve that kind of shit.”

“Why do you dislike me so much anyway?” At this question, he lowered his phone and looked at me.

“You’re a rookie actress. I’ve worked hard to get to where I am, and then some model comes along and gets a lead role in her first audition. The director always goes on about how great you are, but you’re average at best. Any other actress could do what you do.” I nodded, understanding where he came from. He was right.

“You know I got into acting because of you. My dream was to act alongside you, Kim Seokjin. And lucky me, my first role is opposite you.” I chuckled. Before he could say anything, Taehyung returned with the doctor.

“Miss L/N, I’m sorry to tell you that you suffered a miscarriage.” My heart stopped. “The shock of it caused you to collapse today. "I’ve prescribed these pills for you to take so you can pass the fetus.” Tears sprung to my eyes. Something I had wanted for so long was so close in my reach and I had no idea.

“Thank you.” I whispered, taking the bottle from his hands, and staring at it.

“Everything else seems normal. So you’re welcome to go home.” I could barely hear his words, ringing in my ears taking over all the sounds as I stared at the pill bottle in my hands.

“We’ll take you home.” Taehyung whispered, taking one of my hands in his, pulling my attention from the pills to him. “Change into this, we’ll wait outside the door for you.” I nodded. Him and Jin stepped outside the door, and I slowly got up and changed out of the hospital gown.

The drive to my house felt like a sick, twisted dream. My hand rested on my stomach as I stared out the window, the quiet conversation happening in the front between the two brothers not even registering in my ears. All I could think about was the unborn baby I’d never get to meet. “Did you want me to stay with you?” Taehyung asked when we pulled up to my house. I shook my head, quietly telling him I wanted to be alone.

I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, running my hands over my stomach, imagining what I’d look like with a baby bump. Imagining what I’d be like as a mom. The pill bottle sat on the sink counter while I smiled through the tears, saying a quiet goodbye to the unborn baby I named Haneul, meaning heaven.

I spent the next few hours laying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, my tears officially stopped. I fell asleep at some point, waking up only because someone was ringing my doorbell. It was close to noon the next day, so I pulled myself out of bed, wondering who would be bothering me right now. “I figured you wouldn’t be taking care of yourself properly.” Jin said when I opened the door. He slid his shoes off and slipped on a pair of house slippers as if he’s been here a million times before. It was then that I noticed the grocery bags in his hands. I watched in awe as he walked to my kitchen, setting everything down and beginning to cook as if he lives here.

Eventually, I found my way to the couch in my living room, turning on the tv for some background noise. I stared straight at it, but I wasn’t paying attention, instead living in my own mind, wondering what Haneul would have been like. “Drink this.” Jin said softly, handing me a cup of tea as he sat on the chair beside the couch I sat on. “Food is almost ready.” I nodded, softly blowing on the freshly made tea. “Did you want to talk about it?” I sat there, thinking about what I could say. Jin sat there, staring at me, waiting for me to say something.

“I always wanted to be a mom.” I finally said, my voice barely above a whisper. “I didn’t even know I was pregnant.” I felt numb. I cried myself to sleep and I was completely cried out. Jin silently reached out, taking my free hand in his, running his thumb across my knuckles which was surprisingly soothing.

“You’re going to make a great mom someday, Y/N.” His voice was just as soft as mine as he spoke. All I could do was nod. The two of us sat there for a couple minutes in silence as he continued to hold my hand and I sipped on my tea. Eventually he got up to finish the food he was making and returned. We continued to sit in silence, pretending to watch whatever was on tv as we ate.

Jin ended up staying the entire day, only leaving once the sun had set and stars littered the sky. “I’m sorry for being so rude to you.” He said before turning and walking out the door. I watched as he got into his car and drove away with a soft smile on my face.

He ended up coming over every day during our week-long break. He would cook for us and we’d sit and eat while watching something on tv. We’d talk and get to know each other, and I found myself not wanting him to leave when nighttime rolled around.

I thought I’d spend this week in bed, mourning the loss of the child I never got to meet. Laying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, letting the days pass by slowly until I could throw myself into work again and pretend this never happened.

Instead, I spent the week laughing so hard I could feel abs forming. I spent it getting to know the actor I’ve looked up to since his very first role, who ended up being the same man who hated me for months. The pain I felt just days ago seemed to fade into the background as I enjoyed my time with Kim Seokjin.

The day we returned to work, Taehyung immediately threw his arms around me, asking if I was doing okay. “I’m fine, Tae.” I giggled. He pushed back from the hug, looking at me with wide eyes while I looked up at him with a smile. “Have I ever told you how pretty you are when you smile?” He beamed, pinching my cheek, and I couldn’t help but let out another giggle.

“Only every day since the day we met.”

“And I will continue to do so until the day we die.” He huffed, booping my nose as Jin approached the two of us, handing me a coffee.

“Glad to see you looking like yourself.” Jin smiled as I took the coffee from his hand and taking a sip. Since day one of him bringing me coffee, I always wondered how he knew my coffee order, but I decided not to overthink it and just be grateful.

Our chemistry on screen definitely improved thanks to our week spent together. We started with the scene I fainted during, blowing everyone away with the emotions we portrayed so easily. “I don’t want to give my all if you’re going to walk away.” My voice was soft as my eyes welled up with tears. Jin reached out, cupping my face, and slowly wiping away the few tears that fell.

“I’ll never walk away from you. Not this time.” He started leaning in, and I could feel the butterflies erupt in my stomach. As his face got closer to mine, my eyes fluttered closed, as did his. And before I knew it, his lips were pressed to mine. It was like my body was shocked with electricity the moment our lips touched and moved in sync. My hands made their way to his chest, balling his shirt up in my fists.

Everyone seemed to disappear while I focused on the feeling of his lips on mine. It was like we were no longer filming a drama, like he was kissing me because he wanted to. And I didn’t want it to end. But it did. He pulled away, resting his forehead on mine. “I’m going to love you for the rest of my life.”

“Cut!” Slowly, Jin backed away from me, unlike all the other times we’ve filmed in which he would rushed off set as if I was a disease he didn’t want to catch. “That was the best take in the entire drama!” The director exclaimed as he walked over to us. My face felt hot when I realized just how many people were watching that scene being filmed. “Let’s keep this chemistry up for the rest of the drama!” Jin and I both nodded before walking off set to get ready for the next scene.

“Holy shit that was steamy!” Taehyung exclaimed, throwing his arms around both of us.

The rest of filming that day went just as well, everyone fawning over our new found chemistry. Every time, my face would go hot and I would avoid eye contact with everyone, hoping these new feelings would stay hidden. “We’re grabbing dinner with some friends; did you want to join?” Jin asked as I walked out of my dressing room, ready to go home and order in.

“Did my hyung really just ask Y/N to join us to dinner?!” Taehyung gasped, looking between the two of us.

“Don’t be so dramatic, Tae. We’re friends now.” Friends. The word rolled off his tongue so easily, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. I realized I didn’t want to be friends with Kim Seokjin. I wanted more; so much more.

I wanted to wake up to his face, his arms wrapped around my body as the sun illuminated his handsome face. I wanted to watch him cook all the time, practically dancing around the kitchen. I wanted to come home after a stressful day and see him on the couch, sipping on a drink while watching something on tv. I’d cuddle up to him and feel immediately better, forgetting whatever it was that made me annoyed. He’d tell me about his day, playing with my hair, his voice soft as he spoke. I wanted to kiss him whenever I wanted, claiming him as mine as strangers passed by. I wanted everything with Kim Seokjin; his good and his bad.

In just a short amount of time, he had helped me move on from Chan, the broken heart I once felt, completely forgotten. It was the fastest I’d ever fallen for someone, and I was terrified. But I put on a smile and agreed to dinner, following Jin and Tae to the parking lot.

Namjoon and Jungkook were already at the restaurant, joined by a couple guys I’ve yet to meet. Jungkook’s eyes widened when he saw me walking in with Jin and Taehyung, and they almost popped out when Jin pulled out my chair for me and taking the spot beside me. “That’s Yoongi, Hoseok and Jimin. Guys, this is Y/N.” He introduced before picking up the menu and scanning through every item. Jungkook and Taehyung exchanged looks as they watched the interactions between Jin and I, both wondering what changed. “This is one of my favourites.” Jin whispered, pointing to something on the menu. “But I think you’d like this better.” He turned the page and pointed to something else.

“How do you know me so well?” I chuckled after reading what was in the dish, my mouth watering at the very thought. Jin’s ears turned a light red as a blush dusted his cheeks. He shrugged and continued looking through his menu.

After receiving our food, the 8 of us slowly ate while making conversation. The guys shared stories of their adventures together, causing the others to cringe in embarrassment, but I couldn’t help but laugh. They’ve known each other for years now, and it was evident by the teasing and playful banter.

I sat mostly silent, watching their interactions, and smiling to myself. My eyes continuously drifted to the handsome man beside me, watching how he interacted with the younger boys. I was so entranced by him that I didn’t notice the eyes on me from across the table, questioning my every move. Jungkook would ask me later how I felt about Jin, but I just brushed it off.

When Jin and Tae drove me home, Jin actually got out of his car and walked me to the door, using the excuse that he wanted to make sure I got inside okay. “I hope they weren’t overwhelming.” He said as we stood outside my door.

“I had fun.” I smiled and silence surrounded us, neither of us knowing what to say but not ready to say goodbye quite yet. It felt too much like the end of a date for my liking, my hopes raising the longer he stood in front of me, kicking his feet while glancing at me every once in a while.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.” He eventually broke the silence and turned and walked away. I once again watched as he got into his car and drove off, a small smile on my face. I fell in love with Kim Seokjin.

The filming for the drama soon wrapped up, and everyone talked about how big a hit it’s going to be. “It was nice working with you.” Jin said, leaning against the doorway of my dressing room. I was packing up my things to make room for whoever was going to use this room next. “Maybe we’ll act again together in the future.” A wide smile danced across his lips, and it took everything in me not to kiss him.

Now that I know what it’s like to kiss Kim Seokjin, I never wanted to stop. I was addicted to the feeling of his lips on mine. “Don’t be a stranger. Let’s grab dinner sometime.” I smiled, throwing my bag over my shoulder, and walking towards the door.

“With everyone else, or just us?” His wide smile turned teasing in a matter of seconds, and the butterflies in my stomach couldn’t seem to calm down.

“I wouldn’t mind it being just us.” I laced my words with a teasing tone, hoping he wouldn’t catch on to the feelings I’ve developed that seemed to only grow stronger in his presence.

“Are you asking me on a date, Miss Y/N?” He stood up straight, crossing his arms across his chest. In that moment, I decided to be bold, taking a step closer to him.

“And if I am?” I too crossed my arms across my chest as I watched a smile break out on his face.

“Then I’ll pick you up tomorrow at 6. Now, let me drive you home.” He grabbed my hand, causing my arms to drop to my sides, and laced our fingers together. Taehyung was watching everything play out, calling after that Jungkook will pick him up, and to use protection.

“I can’t believe I get to go on a date with my favourite actor.” I joked when we were in the car. Jin let out a laugh, glancing over at me for only a second before looking back to the road. “Who would have thought my favourite actor would return my feelings?!” I exclaimed as I turned my body slightly to watch Jin drive.

“Are you going to be saying this the entire time we date?” He chuckled. “Because I might just fuck around and marry you if that’s the case.”

“Take my whole heart, Kim Seokjin. I don’t even want it back!”

#bts imagine #bts au #kim seokjin imagine #kim seokjin au #kim seokjin x reader #kim seokjin #min yoongi #jung hoseok #kim namjoon #park jimin #kim taehyung #jeon jungkook

66 notes · View notes

9tzuyu · 3 years

Text

children of tragedy (rewrite)

note: heyo, rewriting an old fic of mine. i hope to be able to rewrite all 5 chapters quickly. if you guys don’t like it, i won’t continue because its kinda dark and idk i feel like no ones gonna like it anyways. please leave feedback though, im on my knees begging for validation. also sorry if its ooc, please forgive me.

++ sorry the beginning reveals how rusty my writing is </3

(*** i wrote this as as a fem reader fic because it worked easier with how i wrote things.)

+ please remember that this is purely a way to get out my own feelings/struggles in a healthy way. also i’m sure this works better as a ship fic, but someone asked for this version so yeah :).

** mistakes are mine im too tired and lazy to proofread right now.

warnings: talk of alcohol abuse, slight mention of domestic abuse.

🏷 @peggycarter-steverogers

ch.2 | ch.3

[love, fragility, and the memories that eat us alive.]

meeting wanda changed everything for you. she wasn't like anyone you’d ever known. she was always kind, never quick to lose her temper or scream and yell at you for things you couldn't possibly control. she was warm, tender with everything she did.

your relationship with her was very new to you. it was much different in comparison to your past experiences — and you weren't quite sure what to think of it. there was no doubt that you appreciated her and everything she did for you, but you were still waiting for her to snap. it was almost like a need burning throughout your body. being able to grasp the idea that someone could ever really, truly be gentle with you was out of the question. in turn, you’d push all of her buttons, hoping that she would get mad enough and get it over with.

no one could really fault you for it. the steady stream of abuse was the nearly the entirety of your life, both physical and mental.

lately wanda was having to pick you up from wherever she could find you, most of the time in the alleyways of of bars you’d been kicked from.

once you were drunk enough (anyone really) you weren’t afraid to say the first thing that came to your mind, offensive or not – which meant it was no surprise when you’d been involved in fights. the alcohol numbed a majority of the pain anyway, so didn’t really make much of a difference to you.

with this happening so many times, you figured wanda would be angry with you – perhaps so angry she would find it within her to hit you. but each and every time wanda brought you home, she made sure you were comfortable before tending to your inuries.

what you didn't know was that being so worried for you all the time, every second of everyday, was beginning to take a toll on her. wanda only wanted to fix you, but you were making it more than difficult for her to do that.

she knew very little about your past, simply because you didn't like talking about it and she didn't want to push. but there was no denying the fact that wanda was curious.

sometimes she would ask questions, only between the soft moments the both of you shared. much to her dismay, most of her curiosities were turned down. on the rare occasions you shared brighter memories of your childhood, wanda would bookmark them in the back of her head.

no harm would ever come from her, but you didn’t know that. at least not right now.

too many times had your exes used the trust you’d so politely given against you. to be fair with wanda though, you shared only the brightest parts of your childhood. they were very seldom, but the ones you could remember were the ones you enjoyed talking about the most.

despite her limited knowledge, it wasn’t hard for her to tell that you’d already been hurt plenty of times before. apart from the fact that wanda was overall truly a good person, it made her even more gentle with you than she’d ever been with anyone before.

on top of that, wanda wasn’t stupid. she picked up on every little flinch you tried to hide, or the times you had to ask her if it was okay if you could do something on your own free will, and she definitely didn’t forget about the countless times you berated yourself over small, humanly mistakes. a frown never failed to decorate her face when these things happened.

wanda tried her hardest to make it known how much she loved you, and how she would never intentionally hurt you. she never once lifted a hand on you or raised her voice in the slightest, even when she felt like she’d met a breaking point.

the last few weeks seemed to be putting more stress on her than usual. the gashes on your body seemed to be cutting deeper and the bruises on your jaw and rib cage were beginning to turn a darker shade of indigo as each fight became more aggressive. your knuckles had been swollen, irritated to the point your hands trembled when your palms were held open.

you completely missed how drastically wanda’s mood had changed. she became quiet, seemingly lost in thought most of the time until she needed to take care of you. she grew tired, a purple tint claiming a spot below the lip of her eyes. fifteen pounds of weight had shredded from her body and her head grew dizzy every time she stood up. none of that mattered to wanda though, you were her number one priority.

alcohol was the biggest issue in the way. if wanda could get you to stop drinking for just one night she might be able to reason with you.

the brunette knew that was out of the question though, because she knew no matter how many times she told or expressed her love for you, you wouldn’t stop until you wanted to, not when she wanted you to.

you never allowed yourself to be vulnerable around her, so she never knew how you truly felt about the things going wrong in your life. there was an unbearable amount of pain when it came to confronting what you tried so hard to push away. the idea of allowing yourself to heal, to mourn the things taken away from you caused a lump in the back of your throat. living in denial was the easiest way to cope - that was as long as you could bear the damage it created.

(and whether wanda knew it or not, knowing that you were causing her so much misery was the worst feeling you’d ever faced. all she had ever given you was love and in return she was met with destruction.)

so once again you found yourself walking alone, a slight stagger between steps. it was cold, each breath exhaled from your lips could be seen vaporizing into the air. every movement ripped what balance you thought you’d gained right out from underneath you. the feeling of numbness in your fingertips brought your attention away from the fact that you didn’t know where you were.

the buildings all looked familiar, but everything was hazy. being drunk wasn’t always the fun everyone bragged about. too tired to carry on, you found yourself slumped in the back of an alleyway next to a dirty garbage bin. it reeked of sour, expired food, but you’d given up on caring about anything else other than trying to drink yourself numb.

your mind began to wander. flashes of early mornings with wanda’s hands wrapped around your waist, breath tickling the back of your neck while the sun began to rise started filling your thoughts. the warm feeling wanda gave you outweighed every bad emotion you could possibly think of.

but as you stared at the ground beneath your feet things began to spiral. your throat contracted, the guilt you tried so hard to swallow began clawing its way out of your body.

(and holy fuck you could not deal with this right now.)

you curled your head between your legs in an attempt to shield yourself away from something that was born from the inside.

it was too much.

without a chance to stop what was happening, your stomach began heaving. a mix of bile and alcohol drooled from your mouth as you continued to vomit.

you missed the sound of footsteps coming from behind you. the feeling of a hand on your shoulder caused you to jerk back, slamming your back into the brick wall.

“hey, hey, it’s me. you’re okay. it’s just me, wanda.” she cooed.

through teary eyes, you looked up at the woman in front of you.

she’s your girlfriend.

(but you weren’t sure that you deserved to call her that after everything you’ve put her through.)

“what are you doing here?” your voice wavered as you wiped your mouth free of excess vomit. you sniffled backing away from her.

she tilted her head, desperate to read what your eyes would give away. “i’m here to bring you back home. can you stand up for me?” you shook your head. you were too exhausted and dizzy from the alcohol to even think about standing.

“that’s okay,” she whispered. “here, i’m going to pick you up, okay? wrap your arms around my neck and your legs around my hips.”

“mkay.” your speech was still slurred, but at that point all wanda cared about was getting you home safe.

you didn’t remember the ride home or wanda carrying you out of the car to lay you on the couch. by the time she got the supplies she needed to wrap and tend to your wounds, you were completely passed out.

when you woke up you were greeted with a glass of water and an over the counter pain medication. you swallowed the pills and moved to set the glass on the coffee table, but wanda beat you to it and took it out of your hands. she smiled down at you, taking a seat next to you. she tucked your hair behind your ears, giving your face one last gentle stroke.

thats when you noticed her eyes were red.

you immediately sat up, crossing your legs and moved closer to her. you’d hoped to comfort her somehow, but the shake of her head broke sonething inside you.

you bit your lip, anxiety shooting throughout your body. she sensed your nervousness and took your hands in hers, rubbing circles on the outside of your wrist with her thumbs.

“i love you, you know that. at least i hope you do,” she let out a soft laugh. “but i can’t keep doing this.”

your heart dropped, and you could feel the all too familiar feeling of guilt building its way back up. you tried to speak, but wanda cut you off.

“i need you to hear this.”

when you didn’t respond she took the opportunity to continue saying what she needed to get out.

“i have exhausted myself to a breaking point. i can’t keep worrying about you every single night you’re gone. i can’t be there every time you need saving. i’m losing myself.”

she paused to check and see how you were handling her words. for once you weren’t shutting down. you were genuinely trying to process what she was trying to say.

(and she was so proud of you for that. she almost considered giving you another chance. but she knew for the better, she couldn’t do that. not to you, not to her.)

“i’ve packed your things. you can leave tomorrow morning if you wish, i don’t mind having you for another meal or two.”

she squeezed your hands and got up from the couch, allowing you to take in what she said. it was in that moment when you realized that even when she’d finally drawn the line, had enough, she didn’t yell at you. she wasn’t angry, she was just sad.

you were chasing after something that wasn’t there, and it never would be there.

and now you were able to register just how much you’d fucked up the one good thing in your life.

#wanda maximoff x reader #scarlet witch x reader #wanda maximoff fic #wanda maximoff x you #wanda maximoff imagine #avengers imagine #avengers fanfiction

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haworthiaace · 3 years

Text

Magic misfits! Did I update the masterpost specifically because of this fic? yes absolutely. A busy day for Scar, featuring TFC and some good ol’ Scar appreciation :]

The start of a new season was always interesting.

While TFC didn’t enjoy having to start from scratch every year or so; having gotten used to the comforts of late season riches, he did love the sheer amount of interaction that came with a new season. TFC was content to hear gossip about the others’ shenanigans while he stuck to what he was best at: mining. Some of the others called it cheating to use his earthbending down in the tunnels, but he called it cheating to be able to shapeshift, or use magic crystals, or any of the other crazy things the other hermits could do, so it evened out.

When he wasn’t down in his mine, TFC watched as all the other hermits scrambled to make the most impressive buildings and contraptions in as little time as possible. Many of his servermates placed more importance on finishing their creations than actually gathering necessities such as tools and armour.

As if to prove this observation, the Boatem village appeared on the other side of the nether portal, populated with structures that were much too large considering it had only been three weeks since they arrived in this world. There was also a… tree? At least that’s what it looked like; a thin oak tree stretching up past the clouds and out of view. Looks like Mumbo and Grian were up to no good already.

“TFC! Up here!” Scar’s voice came from somewhere above TFC’s head, and he looked up to see the wizard (although he no longer wore his robe and hat) standing on a balcony extending from a truly massive wagon, one hand on the railing and the other extended above his head, waving enthusiastically at TFC.

He climbed the ladder up the side of the wagon, entering a sparse storage room. Knowing Scar, he either hadn’t bothered to move in yet or lost all of his things in a cave somewhere. Despite his powerful crystal magic, Scar still managed to die more than any other hermit, so the second option was more likely.

“Well hello there! Welcome to my humble abode, please take a seat.” Scar led TFC to a balcony, where he gestured towards a table and two folding chairs. Scar sat down, crossing his legs and folding his arms in his lap. “So, what brings you to our little village today?”

TFC raised an eyebrow at the question, confusion evident in his voice. “Because you invited me? We were supposed to have tea today.”

Scar jolted in his seat, then proceeded to scramble out of said seat. “I’ll be right back! I have to go… feed Jellie!” This was quite obviously a lie seeing as Jellie hadn’t returned from her between seasons interdimensional travels yet. TFC’s laughter chased Scar into the wagon, where he frantically prepared the tea that he was totally planning on making because he definitely remembered his plans for the day.

After about five minutes of mildly concerning crashing sounds, Scar returned with two steaming mugs of tea (decorated with cat faces, of course) and a plate of chocolate chip cookies - Stress’ recipe if TFC wasn’t mistaken. They sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes, appreciating the tea and cookies.

“So, how are you holding up this season, Scar?” TFC took a sip of green tea, looking out at the horizon.

“Oh you know, the usual. I don’t have my village anymore, but the magical misfits still come seeking my help.” He brought a cookie to his mouth and bit off half of it. “Not that I mind helping people!” He swallowed his mouthful before continuing. “XB was here last week convinced that he left his coat in season seven, but turns out it just ended up in one of Joe’s boxes.” He chuckled to himself, wiping crumbs off of his jacket as TFC stared at the distant ocean, lost in thought.

TFC broke the silence that had fallen. “You’re a good man, y’know that?” The wizard in question looked at TFC in surprise. He was used to ‘thank you’s, but the personal compliment caught him off guard. “You’ve created a safe space for folks from all sorts of places, and you’ve saved quite a few of them from bad people.”

Scar looked down, smiling at his cup of tea. He spoke quietly, a departure from his usual boisterousness. “Thanks TFC, that means a lot.”

Scar was in the middle of catching TFC up on what he missed from day one when something red and very fast crashed into the balcony. The something in question turned out to be Grian, shimmering wings protruding from his back. Something must have been wrong, since winged hermits tended to refrain from flying early in the season, in the name of fairness.

“Scar we need your- Oh heeey, I didn’t know you had company over!” He leaned on the railing, his urgency replaced with a forced cheerfulness as he (quite obviously) pretended nothing was wrong. What was probably supposed to be an easygoing smile stretched too wide, and his voice was more high pitched than usual. “How’s it goin’?”

Scar, completely oblivious, responded excitedly. “Oh, I was just telling TFC here about our adventure in the geode with Cleo!”

Grian’s uncomfortable smile grew wider, and his eyebrows furrowed. “That sounds great, do you think you’ll be done anytime soon?”

“Oh well, I’m not too sure. It depends on when we finish all of these cookies.”

“Oh that’s just wonderful,” Grian’s wings started to twitch behind him, “did you make those yourself?”

Scar took a breath, preparing for a tangent when TFC cut in, showing the poor fairy some mercy. “Alright Grian, out with it. What’s wrong?” Scar stared at Grian, somehow surprised that this wasn’t a completely ordinary visit.

Grian let out a long sigh. “Thank you so much TFC.” He turned his gaze to Scar. “We need a little help with curse breaking.”

Scar set down his mug and gave Grian his full attention, preparing himself for whatever strange curse one of the fairies had set on some poor hermit. “Really? How are you two cursing people already? It hasn’t even been a month!”

Grian’s tangent was accompanied by wild hand gestures that made it difficult to follow what he was saying. “Well, Pearl came up behind Mumbo and spooked him, he shouted something about not sneaking up on him, and now whenever he turns his back on her she teleports directly in front of him.” Grian looked nervously over his shoulder in the direction of Mumbo’s van. TFC followed his gaze, and burst into laughter again.

Mumbo was standing a few feet away from his campfire, spinning in circles and doubling over in laughter as Pearl kept popping up in front of him.

Scar pushed himself up from his chair, TFC followed suit. The pair headed to the door while Grian flew back down, Scar giving TFC a sort of briefing. “Alright, let’s go figure out what exactly Mumbo did before Pearl starts feeling particularly vengeful.”

It took two hours and a lot of trial and error (with TFC giving supremely unhelpful tips), but eventually Pearl could stand behind Mumbo again. At some point Scar accidentally applied the effect to both Grian and Mumbo, and he had to beg the two not to create a space time anomaly. But it was all fixed now, and TFC was sure Pearl’s revenge would be swift and cruel.

Scar made his way back up to the balcony, and the two continued their conversation. It was a good thing Scar had enchanted his mugs, something he had done back in season seven after his drinks kept getting abandoned and going cold.

After a few hours of peace (other than both Mumbo and Grian’s bases abruptly flipping upside down while the boys were inside), the pair was interrupted again by a voice behind them.

“Howdy, Scar. Oh, and howdy to you as well, TFC!”

Neither of them had heard Joe coming, so Scar jumped about a foot in the air while TFC nearly spat out his tea. It turned out that Cleo was there as well, looking quite a bit angrier than Joe, although that wasn’t too uncommon.

“Oh my goodness, Joe you scared the life out of me!” Scar held a hand to his chest and caught his breath as Cleo got right to business.

“Sorry about that Scar,” her voice was flat, and it was safe to assume that she was not, in fact, sorry about that. “But we have an emergency. It’s completely Joe’s fault, he-”

Joe smoothly stepped in front of his companion as he cut her off, “I wouldn’t say it’s entirely my fault, old magic is a fickle thing-”

Cleo shoved Joe aside, stepping in front once again. “He revived my leg!” She raised a foot off the ground and gestured at it with both hands.

Sure enough, both TFC and Scar looked down to see that Cleo’s right leg was significantly more flesh-coloured than the left, restored to what it presumably once was.

Scar’s lingering panic was instantly replaced by an amused grin as he gestured to the leg in question. “Cleo, why don’t you just get your leg reinfected? It’s not like zombies are hard to come by.”

The pair stood still, just blinking. (Completely in sync, it was eerie)

Cleo rounded on Joe and punched at his shoulder just as he raised a hand to deflect her fist. “How did you not think of that Joe?! I thought you knew everything there was to know about-” She gestured wildly about for a moment. “Everything?!”

“Shouldn’t you be some sort of zombie expert by now? How is that my responsibility?” The argument continued as the pair went back into the wagon and down the ladder. As they walked off, presumably to go find a cave, something occurred to TFC. He cupped his hands around his mouth to yell down at them.

“Cleo!” She turned around. “Don’t use Joe as bait!”

She snapped her finger like a defeated cartoon villain, as Joe turned to face her and presumably gave her grief for this evil plot.

It was only about five minutes after Cleo and Joe left (preceded by twenty minutes of arguing) that the next problem arrived, as it often did, in the form of Zedaph, Impulse, and Tango arriving on the shore of the village. TFC found this odd, seeing as how everyone was now connected by nether portals, but he assumed there would be an explanation shortly, even if it didn’t make a lick of sense.

Impulse shouted up from the ground, the three of them clustered near the front of the wagon. “TFC, we need your help!” Well that was a surprise, not many people asked for his assistance other than Scar. “We made an oopsie and Cleo said we could find you here!”

As every hermit knew, ‘oopsie’ was a versatile word with these three. It could mean anything between making a minor mistake in a build to banishing Impulse for the fifth time. “What happened this time?” TFC stood up and made his way down the ladder, since shouting down at them wasn’t very efficient and they didn’t seem inclined to come up.

Impulse started twisting his hands together while Zedaph and Tango tried their best to look innocent behind him. It didn’t work. “Weeell, Tango wanted a terraforming job done around his base, so we made a little deal for it.”

Oh boy. Not much good came out of magical deals, yet the other hermits continued to make them with each other. Demonic deals were especially tricky since the demon didn’t have precise control over their end of the deal, not that it stopped these three. “Tango offered me his first beacon in exchange for the job, and it turns out that a beacon is worth a lot more than I thought- it’s probably easier if we show you.”

“Quick FYI guys: firsts are very valuable in deals! It applies to you as well Impulse, not just the fae!” Scar called helpfully from his still seated position on the balcony.

They all ended up going over to Tango’s house/ shop, which was literally buried in a mound of dirt and stone, along with about three quarters of Bdubs’ giant moon house. That explains why they didn’t use the nether.

The earth was offended after being touched by demonic magic, but after a long negotiation TFC managed to convince it that Impulse meant no harm, and it was happy to return to its prior state. Tango was mildly annoyed that he would have to do the terraforming himself and give Impulse a beacon, but it was better than the wrath he would have faced from Bdubs.

By the time TFC and Scar returned to the Boatem village, the sun was starting to dip below the horizon. While TFC admired the beauty of it, Scar just looked disappointed.

“I’m sorry.”

TFC raised an eyebrow at the wizard, a frown making its way onto his face. “What do you mean you’re sorry? Did you do something to the tea?”

Despite TFC’s attempted joke, Scar still stared at his perfectly polished shoes. “This was supposed to be a nice relaxing day to catch up, and people were just showing up left and right. I mean, we hardly got to spend any time together! Maybe I shouldn’t invite people over with all this wizard stuff going on.”

“But we did spend time together.” TFC’s rough hand landed on Scar’s shoulder, the latter looking up at the former, startled by the contact.

“Well yeah we had tea for a while but-”

TFC had to cut off Scar’s rambling or he would never get to his point. “Yes we had tea, but I’m talking about the rest of the day.” Scar seemed genuinely confused at this. “I helped you un-curse Pearl,” he did air quotes on the word ‘helped,’ “We watched Joe and Cleo argue together, and you came with us to fix Tango’s house.” Of course he didn’t do much other than laugh at Tango’s misfortune, but it was the thought that counted. “Just ‘cause it didn’t go to plan doesn’t mean I didn’t have a good time.” After all, not much went according to plan on the hermitcraft server.

Now Scar was smiling. “So I didn’t ruin the day with magical misfits?”

“Not at all.” TFC reached for his mug and emptied it one last time, then stretched before heading out. “But now I gotta get going. I don’t like my chances against the mobs with my crappy iron gear.”

Scar waved once more as TFC disappeared into the nether portal. “Goodnight TFC! And thanks again, for everything!”

TFC smiled as he made his way through the nether tunnels back home. Scar did a lot more for the hermits than he realized, allowing them to be free with their magic in a way they couldn’t back home, TFC included. He’d created a home for all sorts of ‘magic misfits’ as Scar put it, and he performed an invaluable service, whether he realized it or not.

He’s a good kid. Just needs some reminding every once in a while.

#hermitcraft #hermitcraft 8 #magic misfits au #tinfoilchef #goodtimeswithscar #grian #mumbo jumbo #pearlescentmoon #joe hills #zombiecleo #tangotek #impulsesv #zedaph #im not too confident on the Emotional bits but #practice makes perfect i suppose #theres a few things i implied here so feel free to ask and clear things up

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feelin-woozy · 3 years

Text

Title: With Teeth

Word Count: 1,808

Pairing: Bo Sinclair / Reader

Warnings: Gender-neutral reader

[ Ao3 Link | Next ]

1977

You were a stubborn child. If there was trouble to be found, it was probable that you had a hand in either creating it or seeking it out. Bo Sinclair wasn’t an exception to this. Bo was the kind of child that parents ushered their young away from, voices dropping to a quiet hush as they told them, ‘no, you can’t play with him.’ The warnings never stopped you.

You never really knew why, only ever hearing fragments of conversations of adults around you. They spoke with contempt dripping from each word as they detailed how he was trouble, how he would be a bad influence, and why couldn’t he be more like his brother? But you didn’t mind. You liked trouble, and besides, you weren’t afraid of Bo like all the other kids were. Even with all his jagged edges and mean looks, you didn’t know any better because to you, he was just Bo.

Even when he pushed you to the ground, blue eyes shining with that mean look and something you think was amusement as your own eyes welled with tears and your freshly scraped knees stung. You weren’t afraid. You didn’t stop playing with him even when he stuck gum in your hair, and your mother had to cut it out. But you remember her scolding you, speaking in that same voice you heard other adults speak in, telling you that ‘There’s something wicked about that boy.’

For every time he pushed you down, there would be a time that you stuck your foot out as he ran by. While those mean blue eyes never glistened with tears, the shock was apparent as he dusted the dirt off himself and pulled himself together. And then there was the time you put glue on his seat during class. No one knew it was you, but Bo never put gum in your hair again after that.

1986

Things didn’t change all that much as you got older. Bo was still a boy with jagged edges that, if you weren’t careful with, they’d cut you to the bone. But he didn’t push you to the ground anymore or try to stick gum in your hair like when you were kids. It didn’t mean that he was any less aggressive than when you were kids; if anything, it has crossed the threshold from aggressive to violent. It wasn’t directed at you anymore though, it had shifted to those around you. After all, you were the only one not afraid to clean the drying blood that caked his freshly split lip or to tend to purples and greens that would bloom over knuckles. Save for his brothers, but even then, sometimes they didn’t fare so well either.

A warm breeze rustles the trees as rays of sunshine peek through the thick canopy of leaves overhead. The July heat was unrelenting. It didn’t matter where you were in Ambrose; you always felt like you were melting. Still, Bo didn’t forgo his long sleeve button down. You didn’t blame him, nor did you comment on it. Some things were just better left unsaid. At least away from the town and deep in the forest, the two of you could forget about what happened within the sleepy town, even for half a day.

Bo winces as you dab gently at the wound on his lip, but he doesn’t draw back or pitch a fit. He sits there in silence, watching you carefully as if expecting you to salt the wound. You don’t. You know better than to make a scene of this. This, whatever this was, was a part of Bo, and you had come to accept that. Though you’d be lying if you hadn’t thought about leaning in and pressing your lips to his, trying to chase the thoughts of what he might taste like. You quickly shake the thought away, it was unwise to linger on such a thought.

You drawback and toss the rust-stained napkin to the ground before getting to your feet. Bo watches as you move away, moving towards your beat up school bag where you grab two beers. Beads of icy sweat drip down from the bottle and onto your hands; it’s the only reprieve you have in the hot Louisiana heat.

When you turn to face Bo again, he’s leaning back against the thick tree trunk, shadows dancing over his face. You move towards him, twigs snapping below your step as you hand him the bottles without a word, and he works quickly, using his lighter to open each bottle. The cap flies off with a hiss, joining the other caps that decorate the forest floor. Some from you two and some from other teens who took sanctuary within the forest as well.

“Your pa’s gunna notice one day.” He points out, handing you the bottle before opening his own.

“If he hasn’t noticed already, he deserves to have his beer stolen.” You flash him a lopsided smile as you take a seat next to him before you raise the bottle to your lips and take a sip.

For a moment, things feel okay. As if you hadn’t just been patching him back together, as if the cruel words people threw his way didn’t hang over his head like a dark storm cloud. He pretended they didn’t sting, but you knew that they did. Because even if he wasn’t violent towards you, that didn’t mean you didn’t still fall victim to the darkness that festered within him. Sometimes it was as small as throwing the keys to dad's beat-up truck into the tall grass, leaving you to comb the fields for hours before you’d find them. He spat cruel words at you other times, leaving tears to prickle at your waterline, but you never dared cry like when you were kids.

You still didn’t mind. Your penchant for trouble hadn’t changed, and God, if Bo wasn’t the exact brand of trouble that you craved. He made you feel alive within this sleepy little town; he brought excitement to your days even when it made your mother cry. Perhaps it was naive. You knew now why parents warned their kids of Bo growing up. You could see what they saw; you were stupid, not blind. Still, Bo was just Bo, and sure he had those mean blue eyes and sharp edges, but in the time you had grown, you too had accumulated your own edges. You don’t think it was possible to be friends with Bo without being damaged yourself in some form or another.

“Bo?” The name feels heavy in your mouth, as though it was a knife sliding through a priceless piece of art. The dread you felt building in your stomach felt similar.

“Hm?” He doesn’t look at you, just lights a cigarette and passes it over before he lights his own. The action makes guilt bloom alongside the dread, the emotions weaving together to create something ugly that makes bile rise in your throat.

“I have to leave Ambrose.” You take a drag off your cigarette, letting the smoke burn your lungs as the taste of nicotine mixed with bile. You don’t look at him to see his reaction. You can’t bring yourself to. But you feel the way his body stiffens, and you hear the soft sound of the cigarette burning as he takes a drag that burns the cigarette half way.

“Oh.” Is all he says, exhaling the word along with a thick cloud of smoke that billows up and disperses amongst the branches and leaves.

“Dads got a new job in the city.” You explain though you’re not sure why. You don’t know if Bo wants to hear what you have to say or if he’d rather blow his lid over something that was beyond your control. You wouldn’t blame him if he did. If it was him leaving, you’re sure a part of you would wither away. You dare a glance over at him, watching the way his jaw clenches and how he stares off through a break in the trees. “I don’t want to go.”

“Yeah? Then don’t.” A part of him sounds serious, almost hopeful, but it sounds too distant and bitter for you to put any stock into it.

“You know it’s not that easy.” Your hands feel clammy against the chilled bottle in your hand. You take a drink, emptying half the bottle in a few swallows just to distract yourself. To try and fight whatever ugly feelings were clawing at your insides.

“Sure it is, stay with me.” Bo flicks ash off the end of his cigarette before he turns his head just enough to look at you from the corner of his eye. “Ma fuckin’ loves you.”

You can’t help but snort at that, rolling your eyes. “Bo, your mom hates me.”

“Yeah, she does.” Bo chuckles softly, but the mirth is gone as quick as it came, and that distant look rolls over his face again. He gets to his feet, turning to look down at you with an unreadable expression. “But when has that ever stopped you from sneakin’ into my room?”

“I’ll come back, I promise.”

“I wouldn’t bother.” The way he looks at you as those words leave his lips, it makes you feel like a kid again. You stare up at him, and something inside you aches. It hurts worse than the times he caused you to scrape your knees against the dirt roads or the times he kicked you out of his truck and made you walk ten miles back into Ambrose in the pouring rain.

He doesn’t sneer at you, and he doesn’t even yell, just stares at you with that mean look before turning on his heels. You watch him go, watch the way he drains the rest of his beer, and you listen to the sound of twigs breaking beneath his heavy step. When he’s a fair distance away, you watch the way he tosses the bottle hard against a tree. The sound of glass shattering fills the air alongside the sound of birds taking startled flight.

_____

Bo doesn’t see you off when you’re leaving Ambrose. You hadn’t expected him to though, he had been avoiding you since you broke the news to him. It wasn’t as if you could really blame him. It was probably better this way. It was less volatile to cut out the catalyst than to continue to expose yourself to it. Still, you knew that he was around. The boy down the block with shaggy blonde hair was sporting a fresh black eye, and you had heard your mother's hushed whispers as she gabbed with the neighbors about him. But even if you hadn’t been expecting him, it still hurts you never got to say goodbye.

[ Next ]

#House of wax #bo sinclair #bo sinclair x you #bo sinclair x reader #house of wax 2005 #Slasher x you #slasher x reader #my writing #the friend who beta'd this said this was some of my bestwork and im emo over that

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echo-three-one · 3 years

Note

How ‘bout Jealous Soap x reader?

Hello Earthisdonut 🌍 🍩

I saw your ask while I was at work and I can't stop thinking about how the story goes... I had a lot of ideas but as I wrote, it kept on swinging on the other direction. Maybe it's my feelings being resonated into the words or an entire force telling me to go this way. Anyways here you go...

A jealous soap x reader fic.

Take me home

You take a deep breath and closed your eyes, clearing away the mixed sounds of random chatter, loud tv commentary and the all the yelling. 'Friday evening shifts are the worst' you thought to yourself as you make your way back to your station, wearing a smile on your face.

"Hey miss!" a customer whistled from the far end of the counter. You hastily walked to him and smiled.

"What can I get you?" you asked with sincerity in your voice. You've worked long enough to master the art of faking a smile when in fact you are tired, but this job is all you have and the tips kept the bills afloat.

"Two beers and roasted nuts, please." He ordered, you were impressed at how kind he was, unlike the other new customers who reeked of rudeness and bad manners.

"Coming right up, Sir!" you winked as you tend to his order, mentally noting his tab for later. You hand him over the beer, placed on a circular chip that served as a coaster, followed by a heaping bowl of roasted nuts.

This kind of scene continued throughout the night, just with different kinds of people with different combinations of orders. You feel tired but you tend to forget it when you look at the tip jar, the thing that kept you moving forward. It's also the thing that's holding you back from life, you remembered when your best friend told you that you should unwind sometimes instead of rendering overtime during your day offs, to which you replied : "Soon enough", and that was well over a year ago.

As you wiped off the recently left spot by the counter, a well built man immediately took the spot and sat down, you tilted you head upward as the action surprised you. There he was, you couldn't miss his look, he stood out on the crowd because of his haircut, a perfectly cut mohawk and a scar on his left eye. He grinned at you, his blue eyes looked excited as soon as it met yours.

"John? I didn't know you'd be home!" You gasped as soon as you realized he's actually there, quickly putting a shot glass and pouring his favorite drink.

"Hey Y/N! I knew I'd find you here!" his hand gestured for a shake but he quickly dismissed it as soon as he realized he couldn't do it while you're at work.

"Yeah, working as always." you replied, trying to sound contented. He smiled at you as he raised his glass and downed the drink. You couldn't help but look at the way his Adam's apple moved as he consumed the drink.

His face turned into something incomprehensible as he let the taste of the strong alcohol set in, making you chuckle a little. His eyes turned to you as he heard you laugh.

"What's funny?" he asked. You simple shook you head and poured another pint on his shot glass.

"I'll be back in a few. I have to serve drinks for these wild crowd." You informed him, but as soon as you were about to step out, you hear him stand up.

"What time will you be off?" He asked.

"Two more hours." You replied without looking back. You could feel your cheeks warm up and an uncontrollable smile plastered on your face.

"Okay. I'll be here till then." he yelled as you entered the door to the employee's area.

'Shit Shit shit shit.' you whispered to yourself as you regain composure. He felt way off. He didn't act like this toward you before. You could feel something odd between you two, and you're very distracted about it.

You made your way to your manager's office to request a five minute break. You knew he'd approve a breather from you because he was a accommodating to you since day one. You believed it's because you always give it your all in every shift.

You softly knock on his office door and pushed it slightly ajar, peeking your head through it as you saw him on his desk, doing some paperwork.

"Ah, Y/N. You need anything, love?" he greeted in his usual tone. His endearment didn't matter you as he calls every female "love".

"Can I take a five? Just needed to breathe." you huffed. He nodded in approval and stood up.

"Let's puff it out, yeah?" he smiled as he offered a stick of cigarette.

The cold breeze of the Saturday evening wrapped around your work uniform. The noise from the bar was muffled but occasional screams would echo across the street. You exhaled a long stream of cigarette smoke through your mouth as the relaxing feel of nicotine coursed through your system. Smoking was your go-to activity whenever you feel extreme unexplained emotions, such as seeing John MacTavish after a long time.

"Tough crowd?" Your manager turned his head to you as you casually leaned on the cold metal railing.

"Not really. I just saw someone I least expected to see." You retorted, pressing your lips against the cigarette butt as you closed your eyes and inhaled the vice.

"Someone you hate?" He queried.

"Not necessarily. But at one point of my life, maybe... It's just... it's complicated." You complained, sighing at the thought of him once again. You mentally fought against yourself whether to reminisce or not, reminding yourself that the reason you went out here was to clear your head, not to fill it with memories of summer 4 years ago.

You fixed your posture and flicked off the cigarette butt to the ashtray. Your boss followed, escorting you back to the office.

"Thanks for the company. I needed it." You thanked him as you crossed the street. He hummed in acknowledgement as he opened the door for you. You couldn't help but scan the room quickly for a mohawk, but he wasn't around. Maybe he went to the bathroom, you thought to yourself as you get back to your station.

9:59 pm. Your eyes trailed to the huge digital clock by the door, rapidly moving across the crowd still no mohawk in sight. This actually made you sad, he wasn't the kind of guy who dissappoints, you always saw him as a man of his word. You did confirm that he already paid for his tab about an hour and a half ago, just after your short break.

Guess you're going home alone. So much for ' I'll be here till then' you mentally argued, frowning as you wiped off the last glass in the tray.

10:00 pm. You sighed and lazily grabbed your time card and let the huge metal clock record your departure. You felt your energy quickly deplete due to the dissappointment that is John MacTavish.

"See you on Monday!" you waved goodbye to your coworkers who seemed to notice your sudden loss of energy. You push the back door slowly and stepped outside. It was getting cold and you weren't prepared for it.

"Hey." A low scottish accent muttered just beside you, making you yelp in surprise.

"Holy crap, you scared the shit out of me!" you angrily punched his strong arm, hurting yourself in the process.

"I'm sorry." he spoke lazily, almost tired or drunk. You couldn't exactly tell, but it was far from his tone earlier.

"Pretty chilly, eh?" you asked him, imitating his accent. Something that you always considered a major turn on when it comes to him.

"A little bit. And your impression is way off, I don't say it like that." he retorted nonchalantly making you worry if something happened while he was waiting.

"You seem a little off, what's the problem?" you asked, playfully bumping him while you walked the empty streets on your way home.

"It's just... uh.. Nevermind." he trailed off, his secrecy was making you impatient and you stopped on your tracks. He continued walking, looking down at the ground until he noticed you're no longer beside him.

He turned back. "You forgot something?"

"I don't get you." you raised your voice. He slowly walked back to you until he's just inches away from your face.

"Yeah. I'm sorry. I should've just asked..."

"Asked what? You told me you'd stay here till my shift is over and then you're gone like that?" you complained, the tone of your voice was demanding and you could see him flinch when words hurt.

"I didn't want to raise suspicion."

"Who would be suspicious of you?!"

"Shortly after you left, I took a smoke. But I didn't do it by the smoking area. I was way up here, enjoying the breeze." he said, turning to the smoking area which was very visible from up here. Was he sad because he saw you and your manager by the smoking area? What kind of eyes did he have? You didn't want to assume things so you started to supply him with questions to fill in the blanks.

"And? Was the area too sad for you to be all emo like that all of a sudden?" you complained, soing your best impression of an angry person, but you know deep inside that you couldn't get angry at this man.

"Yeah. You could say that." he chuckled. He couldn't even look at you anymore.

"Bullshit." you retorted. He slowly tilted his head and smiled as soon as your eyes met. The view was so gorgeous you almost felt like the world was in slow motion.

"You don't have to believe me if you want. Why are you walking with me home anyway. You could've said no. I bet he has some nice fancy car to drive you home." he blurted, fog started to huff out of his mouth as the snow started to fall from the sky.

"Where are you going with this, John?" you spat, letting the emotions get the best of you. If only he was clear enough then this wouldn't have happened.

"I saw the two of you smiling while talking, I thought to myself. Yeah, she's happy with that bloke huh, I wish I knew that before I invited her earlier." he breathed out. You almost felt guilty, but it wasn't your fault. He easily assumed things that weren't even true.

"What made you think we're together? Just because we're smoking together doesn't mean we're in a relationship. Is that what you thought?" you replied, fighting back helping him on his way to the truth.

He paused, it's as if his whole thought process was shattered when your words stung him.

"I got jealous. To be fair, I was gone for 4 years... I always thought you already found someone else within that time." he frowned. It was not usual of him to feel this vulnerable.

"Look-" you tried to explain but you suddenly felt his warm embrace wrapped around you.

"I'm sorry..." he whispered. The same words he said before leaving 4 years ago. The same words that hurt you back then and the same words that's going to hurt you at this moment. He was the one that got away, he was the one whom you shared your most magical moments with, but not the one who's going to be there until the end. He'll have to leave anytime soon, as his job requires him to save the world. You told him he could settle for less risky world saving endeavors but he insisted that this was his purpose. And you were not willing to let him choose again.

"You know... you're not supposed to feel jealousy." you consoled, rubbing his well sculpted back.

"I know... I couldn't help it." he whispered.

"Let's get you home, John." you whisper to him as he pulls away from you, his face pouted like a baby whose candy got stolen.

"Why are you here anyway?" you added.

"I'm getting reassigned to a new task force. I figured I could say goodbye to someone I hold dear." he smirked, he felt normal, but then again you couldn't help but feel that this would be the last time you'll be seeing him. You we're thinking he won't be able to travel freely back here anymore or worse, he'll be the hero the world wanted him to be.

#earthisadonut asks for a fic #horRAYfic #no spoilers in the tags #but aaaaaaaaaaaaaa

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starr-fall-knight-rise · 3 years

Text

HASO, “The Spirit of Polaris.”

Didn’t know what I wanted to write this week , but I told you you would get three stories every week, so that is what I have done. I hope you guys like it.

Adam couldn’t sleep. He lay flat on his back with the warm Texas heat blowing through him. The windows in the barracks were open and a breeze blew through tugging at his shirt muggy with warm summer night air. All around him the other cadets lay sleeping in the night filled with the distant sounds of marching feet and the even more distant wine of aircraft engines. Light filtered in from the distant runway giving a gently white glow to everything around him. He sighed and rolled onto his side, trying to get comfortable, but it was no use.

Sweat pulsed from his pores with every beat of his heart, and slowly he sat up rubbing his head and blearily looking over at the other sleeping recruits. He had no idea how they were doing it. Most of them were probably from more humid climates, used to sleeping in this sort of oppressive heat.

He was more used to dealing with the cold.

He sat there for a long moment, debating on what to do before finally making a decision. Slowly rising to his feet, he quietly grabbed his boots, and slipped towards the barracks door feet almost silent on the wood flooring below him. He did his best to avoid allowing the light from outside to filter too far into the room, leaving only an instant sliver of illumination on the wood before stepping out into the cool night air. It was nicer outside, and he took in a sigh of relief as the wind brushed over his skin and cooled the heat.

He turned his head up to the sky, tilting his head back and frowned wilting.

The light pollution was so bad here, there were no stars to see. He slumped back against the wall and sighed. This was going to be a long night.

Bending over, he put his boots on the ground and laced them up turning and making his way towards the distan runway. Up in the sky he could see distant circling lights of the planes both leaving and coming. He was drawn towards them, and the rolling sound of engines.

He made his way through other small concrete buildings, quietly passing by, doing his best to avoid the dim flare of red, and a line of smoke that trailed up from the watch building, and up onto a hill in the training field where he was able to sit and stare at the planes both coming and going. He found the roar of their engines to be peaceful, and wrapped his arm around his legs gently rocking back and forth in the night as the wind blew past him.

Adam was going to be exhausted tomorrow he knew, but there was nothing to help it. He wouldn’t be able to sleep, and there was no reason to lay there and hope it would happen. If Master Sergeant Kimball caught him at this hour, he would get his ass beat, and everyone in his group was going to get punished for him being a dumbass, but he was pretty sure their MTI was supposed to be asleep at this hour, and he couldn't Imagine the Master Sergeant missing out on his beauty sleep.

He had to keep his beautifully bushy eyebrows in top shape to yell at the cadets.

Adam rested back against the grass, hands behind his head to stare up at the sky watching as a slow moving red light passed through the distorted atmosphere. The breeze continued to tug at his shirt; he lay in the grass and stared up at the sky.

He was sort of half dozen when.

“Are you enjoying your evening layabout, recruit.”

He nearly soiled his pants jolting upright and nearly tipping over as he turned around to see Master Sergeant Kimball crouching behind him in the grass, the whites of his eyes wide and wild.

“Master Sergeant,I…. I…”

Sergeant Kimball stood staring down at him with his large eyebrows furrowed. Adam had grown a lot over the past year and was almost as tall as the man, but that did nothing to ease his abject terror.

“Sneaking past the posted guard to come watch the airplanes”

Adam stammered, “I’m s-orry, sir. I- I couldn’t sleep and there are no stars out.”

Sergeant Kimball stepped forward, and Adam flinched back preparing himself for the string of abuse that was sure to leave the man's lips, but when nothing happened he slowly opened on eye too see the man staring up at the sky overhead backlit as a silhouette against the training field below.

“Sit your ass down, recruit.” He said, voice softer than it normally was.

Adam did as ordered dumbstruck as the man slowly lowered himself to sit next to Adam. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lighting on and placing it between his lips as he stared up at the sky, “This damned humidity makes it impossible to sleep.”

Adam could only nod in agreement.

He looked up at the sky taking a drag on the end of his cigarette causing the tip to flare once before dying away.

You’re right, not much a man can see of the stars here.”

Adam nodded tentatively, opening his mouth, “That was you, at the guard post? You saw me?”

“You aren't exactly one built for sneaking, son, white as a bare ass.”

Adam blushed and shuffled his feet, “Sorry sir, couldn’t sleep.”

Sergeant Kimball looked back up at the sky, “Tell you what, why don’t you and me go for a little drive.”

Adam wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about that. Getting in the car alone with their MTI seemed like a great way to get himself singled out, but he couldn’t imagine how he could say no to this man either, so instead he just nodded and stood. Sgt. Kimball led him down through the base and towards the parking lot before the main building pulling the keys to a hover jeep out from one of his pockets. Adam got into the passenger seat using the frame to halt himself into the seat and sit down as the man began to drive. The vehicle was open, and so there wasn’t much conversation as they spend through the night, wind rushing past them in great usts as they sped up the highway, other vehicles roaring past them.

Adam closed his eyes feeling the rush of air over his skin as he leaned his head out the open side and into the night.

They left the city behind crawling out into the desert of scrub brush dark under the night sky above. The city lights faded into the distance, slowly replaced by blackness overhead. Stars began to wink into place, the brightest first followed by their dimer counterparts.

He closed his eyes, lifting his face to the sky in awe feeling a thrill in his chest as the desert passed by them on both sides and the sky grew darker, until it was possible to see the distant milky lines of their galaxy’s arm extending into the darkness.

It didn’t fail to cross his mind that he was alone with Sgt Kimball in the middle of the desert, a prime place to kill someone and bury their body, but generally tended to hope that he wasn’t going to die.

He didn’t think Sgt. Kimball hated him that much.

They pulled off down a dirt track and pulled to a stop with the sky arrayed above them.

He clambered out of the car at the instruction of Sgt Kimball who sat himself on the hood of the vehicle and stared up at the sky.

“Beautiful isn’t it.” The man commented

Adam nodded eyes filled to the brim with glowing white stars.

Sgt. Kimball looked over at him, “You’re serious about this.” it wasn’t a question

Adam nodded.

Kimll leaned back against the windshield kicking one of his feet up onto the hood while dangling his other foot off the side, “A lot of those kids back there couldn't give two shits about what we do.” he glanced over at Adam, “You on the other hand, you try, pay attention in the classes, spend your free time studying while those little assholes fuck around.” He lit another cigarette, “I always know when someone is going to make it, and you, you will.”

Adam frowned a bit skeptically, “Er….. thank you sir but, I Thought you…. I thought you thought I was a dumbass.”

Sgt Kimball laughed, “Because you are, son. But the world is run by two types of people, assholes or dumbasses, and quite frankly, I tend t find myself liking dumbasses more than I like assholes.”

A cloud of smoke billowed up from his lips as he pointed up at the sky, “I’m assuming you know where Polaris is?”

Adam nodded and pointed with a finger.

“People been guiding themselves by her light for thousands of years, soon enough we'll be sailing the stars and she won’t be so useful anymore.” he paused, “I think we should visit her when we can, seems like it would only be fair to pay homage to the most important star in human history…. Second to the sun I suppose.”

Adam stared at Sgt. Kimball mouth half open. He didn’t think there was particularly anything poetic about the man.

“Shut your mouth boy, leave it open too long and something might nest in it.”

He closed his mouth and turned away, lifting his head to the sky above staring towards Polaris, which winked at him from the distant expanse of space.”

***

“Get out.”

“But.”

“BET OUT! If you want to sleep inside than you have to prove you deserve it.” Chalan flinched back as the door was slammed in her face taking a step back into the moss as the sound of her mother’s voice echoed through the night. Inside she could hear raised voices, an argument rising up in the night.

“You dishonor yourself .”

“Dishonor myself Kazna, or dishonor you dishonor yourself.”

“You are too soft on her.”

“And you are a traitor to your own family. As her mother it is your job to protect and love her. It is NOT conditional.”

“You are weak Lanus, and your ideals will make her weak.”

Chalan turned her head away and trudged her way through the village trying to ignore the eyes on her as she could see peeping out the little windows in the side of the huts. As she walked her feet kicked up bioluminescent moss spores, which glowed as they moved and wet dormant as they lay still calling attention to her movements as she made her way through the open streets and out towards the edge.

The city watch ignored her as she passed by them. Spores clung to her feet and heels making her feet glow with every step as she walked into a small patch of coil tree, their berries glowing white in the darkness. She picked one idly and rolled it between her fingers. Behind her, she heard the sudden soft padding of feet, crouched low she spun spear held out before her in a defensive stance, sure she was about to be set upon by an enemy tribe, but instead was surprised to find Nehchal and Kanan standing behind her. Nechal glowing like one of the moons with her bright white carapace, Kanan blending into the darkness behind in comparison.

She blinked “What are you two doing here.”

Nechal raised her spear, “Watching your back for the night is dangerous.”

Chalan sighed, ‘You could just be honest with me.”

“You know I don’t lie.” Nechal said falling into step beside Sunny as Kanan did the same on her other side.

“You guys don’t have to.” As they walked, their feet lit up with the bioluminescent spores.’

It was a safe enough time of year. The spores could be easily seen across long distances in the dark, and so an arriving raiding part would have to be stupid to come at night. Even now, in the distance, she could see a slow line of spores ascending into the sky as a herd of unknown creatures passed over the fertile valley before ethem.

Kanan placed a hand on her shoulder, “Why don’t we sit, this seems as good a palace asanhy.”

Chalan shrugged and sat in the moss as she tilted her head back towards the sky. She tried not to think too much about Nechal and Kanan being here. They had probably been spending time together before the argument between her parents broke out. If it wasn’t for her they might be having a nice night together.

“Do you think we are the only ones?” Nechal asked into the darkness

Kanan looked over ather, “The only ones what/”

Nechal waved one of her hands upward, “The acolytes say we live on a floating rock in the middle of the void. That void is lit by burning gasses of unknown providence, so my question is, are we the only floating rock or are there other things living out there?”

Kanan laughed while Chalan stayed silent, “Definitely the only ones.”

“You think so?

“Doctrine of the citadel doesn't mention anyone else?”

“The doctrine also doesn’t talk about coil trees, but those still exist.”

Chalan lay there listening to their banter as she looked up at the sky. It was a good question, and if there was life out there, what would it be like? She tried imagining fanciful creatures to populate these unknown worlds, but found that it was hard to imagine anything that didn’t resemble something already their own. Not like i mattered anyway, it was unlikely any of them would ever find out.

She did her best to block the arguments from her parents of earlier and listened to the distant roaring of the mountain volcanoes glowing red on the distant horizon.

Nehchal pointed her hand up into the sky, “Look, Chalan, Eedacheel. It’s bright tonight.”

Sunny turned her head to the southern star.

“Beautiful.” Kanan whispered

“That’s my favorite story.”

“What?”

“Eedacheel, the spirit that guides, the spirit that brings Drev together. Remember, they say she guides us to those we love.”

The two of them shared a long look and Sunny had to stop from rolling her eyes at them. She stared up at the star Eedacheel had never done anything for her. She stared at the softly winking star. All she saw was distant and unattainable. If there was a spirit, it certainly didn’t care about her.,

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hournites · 3 years

Text

A lot of ways to love you (teach me through your eyes)

Hournite Week Day 7: Love Languages

Summary: Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Gifts, Quality Time, Touch. Or, Rick, Beth, and their many languages of love.

Thank you for coming along on this first HN week journey with me! ❤️

~.~

Words of Affirmation

Beth found Rick by himself at the corner of their shared history class, carving his initials into the desk. She didn’t understand why he’d put himself there. It was like a brooding corner to be miserable.

“Hey,” she said, taking the seat in front of his desk. “What’s wrong?”

Rick dug deeper to splinter the wood. “They think I cheated on my chem test.”

Without asking, Beth unzipped Rick’s bag to pull out the test. Rick let her.

She gaped at him as she scanned over the F and comments from the teacher. He always treated Beth kindly when they passed in the halls, but she never actually had Mr. Geralds. Chemistry wasn’t her strong suit like Rick, but there wasn’t a doubt that she’d given some of the same answers with a great grade from the other science teacher. “Are you serious? That’s crazy. You’re going to contest that, right?”

“You’re not going to even ask if I did?”

“I know you didn’t, you’re too smart.”

“I used to steal shit,” he muttered under his breath and dropped his pencil. “Haven’t heard you say I’m too smart for that.”

Beth slipped his test into her folder to return to at a later time, right now focusing on Rick.

“Hey, that’s not fair.” When Rick wouldn’t meet her eyes, she leaned in closer. “Look at me.”

Rick did.

“You know you deserved a good grade. And you’ve done what you did to get by.” She glanced at the vandalism briefly. “There are people here who know you’re better than what the majority of the town thinks.” She lowered her voice to keep her next words between them. “You’re a hero. You’ve helped save everyone in this town. So show them who you really are.”

She smiled when he let out a small huff, she knew he was listening. “I’ll go to the principal’s office with you, and we can get Pat to vouch for us. We both know that for Chem you should be in AP.”

“It’s really not that big of a deal,” he lied, shifting uncomfortably from all her nice words.

“If it weren’t a big deal, you wouldn’t have done that.” She pointed at the roughened mess he’d made of the school desk. “I know you better than you think.”

Act of Service

“Has anyone seen Beth?”

Rick walked around the main area of Pat’s cabin. It was after 2 AM. Barbara and Jennie were making late-night comfort food in the kitchen. Pat was manning the first aid station, tending to Mike, Jakeem and Yolanda’s injuries from Sportsmaster. Courtney was bonding or something with the staff in some strange ritual she had after a life-threatening mission. Rick just stepped out of the shower, washing the grime from his arms and face.

“She’s upstairs, I think!” Yolanda called, holding her ribs from her seat on top of the table. Rick shook his head when Pat admonished her not to yell. Rick made it up the stairs two at a time, stopping when he found Beth with her packed school bag on the floor in front of the couch. She was searching through papers, openly crying. She hadn’t even taken her cape off yet.

Rick crouched down beside her. “Hey,” he said softly. She looked utterly exhausted. “Are you okay? You said you didn’t get hurt.”

“I’m not hurt.” She hiccuped, flipping through more papers, a little hysterical. It looked like it was for school. “I can’t find my math assignment. It’s due tomorrow morning.”

“Did you finish it?” he asked.

“I don’t remember.” She wiped at her tears as she cried harder. “I might’ve left it at home, I can’t find it. I’m too tired, I can’t think.”

“Yeah,” Rick agreed. His bones were weary but he had always felt the least affected after battling it out with the ISA. He suffered plenty of superficial cuts and bruises, but he hardly felt them because his hourglass really protected him. He couldn’t imagine the hit the night must’ve taken on Beth’s body. Pat was going to be driving them back to main Blue Valley at 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning to get them back to school. It wasn’t ideal, but it was a random Wednesday. It’s not like they had a choice.

“Did you ask Chuck?”

“No.” Her lip wobbled, face contorting into another sob. Rick regretted asking. It was clear she was far too drained. It would’ve been simple to have asked Chuck to scan her bag to find out, but she hadn’t thought of it.

“Okay, okay,” Rick said. “Go to bed. You’re not going to be able to do the homework now even if you found it.” Rick got up to get to the top of the stairs, calling down for Barbara.

When he returned, he helped her up and managed to get her to let go of her school bag. “We’ll look for it before we leave, okay?” Rick ran a hand through his damp hair, his own eyelids started to droop. “I promise you’ll get it done before school.”

Barb joined them upstairs and coaxed Beth to change out of her suit, leading her downstairs with her regular clothes and a promise of a warm bed and tea.

Rick followed to grab Chuck when Beth wasn’t looking, turning him on once alone to help identify if this alleged math homework was even in her bag. Together they found what she was talking about. Ten problems of pre-calc. She was right. It was rushed and not done.

Rick sighed, tucking it under his arm. He said goodnight to the rest and retired to his assigned room. He turned on the lamp on the desk where he first solved the code of his father’s journal, spreading out the assignment and using Chuck as a calculator. It dawned on him an hour later as he rubbed at his tired eyes how he would be staying up all night to finish homework that wasn’t even his.

Gifts

Beth was immersed in her book when two hands landed on her collarbone. She looked down, touching the skin at the opening of her shirt when she felt the weight of something new at the base of her throat.

“What’s this?”

Rick murmured in her ear from behind. “An early birthday present.”

She let out a soft gasp when he finished with the clasp. A tiny brass hourglass pendant with sand just like Hourman’s trickled steadily beside her rainbow pendant.

“Woah.” She glanced up at him. “You got me an hourglass?” She bit down on her lip, dread creeping into her mind when she realized this had to be expensive. She struggled to voice what she was feeling out loud, but Rick must’ve caught the complicated expression on her face. He smoothed his hand along the sleeve of her cardigan and reassured her the cost didn’t push him into any kind of financial ruin.

“Did you not realize I’ve been working for Pat before school? I had some spare cash. Trust me, there’s nothing better I’d spend my money on.”

The puzzle clicked into place. Beth had been meeting Rick at the Pit Stop every morning before school for what felt like months now. It made sense he was there to work on the cars. Beth felt her face heat up at his implicit soft-spoken confession. “Thank you,” she said in a whisper, still in awe. The necklace was beautiful and she felt fuzzy ever since his hands were on her neck. “I love it.”

His eyes, usually hardened and defensive, skilled at warding off unwanted attention, now creased at the corners. Gentle, quiet, yearning, he watched her accept his gift. “I’m glad.”

Impulsively she asked, “Could you unclasp the rainbow one?”

Rick did. The chain pooled in her palm. She shook her head, pushing it to his chest. “You should have it.”

His brows furrowed in response. “You want to give me your... rainbow necklace?”

She flushed when he said it like that. She toyed with her new one, looking at him from beneath her lashes. “Well…” she said. “I have something of you, now you can have a symbol of me.”

Rick let out a small laugh. Beth was pretty sure if this were anyone else he’d say it was stupid, so she couldn’t help the surge of pride when he nestled her necklace around his own neck.

“How does it look?”

It was actually twisted. She flattened it so it would look the way it was supposed to over the collar of his shirt. Rick didn’t complain, but it was bright and cheery and clashed with his entire self. Beth bit her lip, withholding another laugh, and took pity on him, changing her mind to tuck the necklace underneath. “Perfect now.”

“Beth, I hate to interrupt this moment but you will be late for school if you don’t leave the Pit Stop in the next five minutes.”

Chuck broke them out of their weird double transfixion. They both found themselves smiling shyly at each other, neither truly wanting to move.

“Come on,” he said after another few moments of them smiling at each other without moving. “Put your bike in my trunk. I’ll drive you.”

Quality Time

When Rick stopped by at Beth’s locker, she was talking to Charity, a new close friend she made over the summer volunteering at the Blue Valley Community Centre.

“Hey,” Rick greeted, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, waiting for Beth to visit.

“Hey,” Charity said back. She swept her blonde bangs out of her face to continue their conversation.

“Charity had a great idea that we should enter for the sustainability case competition,” Beth filled in.

“We’re going to need at least a month to prepare. I was thinking we could meet Tuesdays and Thursdays after school?”

Rick stuck a hand in his pocket, sullen. Thursdays were their days, unofficially. Not that they’ve ever said so out loud, but with JSA training afternoons the rest of the week, Beth working on a case competition their days off basically meant not getting to see her. Which was fine. It happened. Rick just wishes it didn’t have to.

“I can’t on Thursdays,” Beth told her. She glanced up at Rick to give him a smile. He straightened up, meeting her gaze with obvious surprise. “Those are our nights.”

Charity paused, watching the two with curious eyes.

“We can cancel,” Rick found himself saying and actually meaning it. “You don’t have to stay on my account.”

Beth’s nose scrunched up as she shook her head, mind already made. “Nah. Sorry Charity, Thursday doesn’t work for me. Take out your schedule, maybe we have a shared free period somewhere.”

“Oh, yeah, sure! Okay!”

Rick ducked his head to hide his smile as Charity fished through her bag for her agenda.

Touch

When Beth stumbled out of the cell she’d been bound in, she hadn’t realized just how long she’d been gone. She was hungry and exhausted and felt horrifically dirty in her soiled Dr. Mid-Nite suit, but then she got a glimpse of Hourman nearly pushing the others in his rush to get to her all she could feel was relief.

Rick cupped her face, eyes squeezed shut as he held her close, his thumbs brushed along her cheeks, under her dry eyes. She felt the buzz of adrenaline rushing through him just by being so near, but the way he touched her was gentle, so gentle.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he whispered, a startling unfamiliar word to fall in succession like that, coming from Rick. His hands flew to the crown of her cowl, tugging it down to kiss her forehead again and again. “Thank you.”

I’m okay now, she tried to comfort him, though her words were choked, smothered out by the crushing weight of it all. He was crying as his lips brushed over her face. It wasn’t his stamina. The buzz, she felt. Rick was shaking. It hit her then, that maybe he wasn’t sure Beth was ever going to come back. Beth had scared him. He was scared.

Beth vaulted with her tired, numb legs, reaching to wrap her arms around his neck. Her mind went calm for the first time since before they left home, muscles relaxing as she let Rick scoop her up.

She was safe. She was home.

Beth was loved.

#hournite week #hournite #hournite week 21 #hournites fic #love languages #fluff #hurt/comfort #i'm proud of this one

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babi-correia · 4 years

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What Could Have Been (Part 2)

Words: 1605 Warnings: Flashbacks, nothing too violent A/N: ...I’ve been going at this fic and it’s going to be over 20 parts long... It’s going to be good, I promise! Also, two updates in one day, who am I?!

Part 1

Back in the firehouse, you rush into the showers, eager to scrub away all the remnants and memory of what you saw on the bottom of the river. You allow your mind to wander while you’re under the water, your fingers absentmindedly running through the multiple laceration scars on your right hip. You can remember the incident like it was yesterday.

You’re making small talk with the other marines on your truck when it comes to an abrupt stop, and you hear ruckus coming from the outside.

“C’mon Peacemaker, go out there and settle whatever is going on.” Your CO orders, making you hop off the truck and jog towards the front of the convoy, where several Rangers are yelling in English, Spanish, and Pashto at a small girl standing in the middle of the road.

“Cut it out.” You snarl at the Rangers, moving forward. You see Jay and Mouse up front as you approach on your left. “We’re in the fucking Valley of Death, and I’d appreciate it if we didn’t have to be here any longer than strictly necessary.”

“That girl is blocking the way.” An older Ranger barks, his gun trained on her. You roll your eyes at him, noticing the frightened look on the girl’s face.

“Put that fucking gun down.” You bellow, coming closer to the girl until you feel a hand on your arm. You see Jay on the other side, shaking his head.

“Don’t go any closer. We don’t know what could come of that.” He says, and you nod. You turn to the girl, playing your role as an interpreter.

“What’s your name?” You ask her in Pashto, lowering the bandana around your mouth and raising your hands, showing her you meant no harm. “I’m (Y/N), what about you?”

“They… they said the infidels were going to suffer.” She whimpers, making your eyes go wide.

“Everyone, get back!” You call out, but it’s already too late.

You watch as a missile lands where the girl is standing, throwing you back and making your ears ring. You scramble, screaming when you feel the debris and shrapnel embedded on your right hip and leg. You drag yourself a few inches, looking around at your teammates and seeing complete carnage, crawling towards Jay and Mouse, seeing the latter scramble up-

“Hey, (Y/N), you ok in there?” You hear Kidd’s voice outside the door, snapping you from the trip down memory lane. You thank her mentally, remembering that what came next was not something you liked to relive.

You and Kidd had had some problems in getting along when you first met, but with time and some hangouts, the two of you quickly became good friends. She knew about most of the events from your deployments due to your own drunk blabbermouth, but even when drunk you saved her the most gruesome details, and the part that you knew Jay and Mouse.

“I’m fine, just got a bit distracted!” You call out, shutting off the water and wrapping a towel around yourself as you exit the stall. Your right leg seizes, causing you to curse as a sudden surge of pain floods your hip and shoots in every direction.

“I’m coming in.” She warns, opening the door you thought you had locked and closing it behind her, turning the bolt. “You did lock it; I picked the lock.”

She comes to your side and helps you sit down on the little ledge in the shower, crouching down in front of you.

“I heard about your find today, how are you holding up?” She asks, resting her arms on your knees as you secure the towel around your chest.

“I’m fine. I’ve seen worse.” It wasn’t a complete lie: even though the bodies in the river were a gruesome sight, your deployment had given you plenty worse. “But my leg is acting up again with the damn ghost pain.”

“Let’s get you dressed and then you can rest a bit on the bunks.” She suggests, gathering your clothes and helping you up. “It seems like the rest of the day is going to be slow.”

“Don’t jinx it, I need that desperately right now.” You mutter, putting on your underwear before taking a little pause. You can see your reflection on the mirrors from the corner of your eye, your skin littered with scars, both small and big, faded and evident, shallow and deep, all reminders of a time in your life that you wish you could erase from existence.

“What’s going on, (Y/N)?” Stella asks, her hand resting comfortingly on your shoulder. You give her a sad smile, putting on your shirt.

“Saw some people I wasn’t expecting to see today, and it brought back memories.” You mutter, grabbing the pants from Stella’s hands and putting them on with her help.

“Someone I know?” She asks, raising a brow. You sigh, sitting back on the ledge as you put on your socks and boots.

“Yes.” You say defeatedly, making her look at you curiously.

“Who??”

“…Jay Halstead.”

“What do you mean, ‘Jay Halstead’? How do you know him?”

“You remember the convoy ordeal?” You ask, seeing her nod before continuing. “Well, his team was there with mine. We both got blown up.”

“Holy shit, I had no idea.” She mutters, her eyes wide in shock. “How long ago as that?”

“Very long ago. He looked right at Squad table and greeted Severide, didn’t even recognize me.”

“Why didn’t you talk to him?”

“Well, it’s more complicated than that.” You say, finishing the bow on your boot’s laces before getting up, moving to the mirrors to comb your hair. “We were very good friends during a very tough time for the two of us, and as you can see, recognition brings back not so pleasant memories.”

You put your hair in a sleek bun at the nape of your neck before grabbing your dirty clothes and limping towards the laundry room.

“But still… Maybe he could help you see some good in reminiscing the times with him.” She suggests, watching as you load your used clothes into the washer. You shake your head.

“Stella… Trust me, it’s better like this. It’s better only one of us suffers.” You say softly, pressing the buttons and prompting the machine to start its cycle.

“Ladies, excuse me.” Severide interrupts, stopping at the entrance. “(Y/L/N), Boden is asking for you at his office.”

You frown as you follow Severide, trying your best to mask the limp on your leg but failing miserably.

“What’s wrong with your leg?” Severide asks, slowing down. You shake your head, slapping your right hand down on your hip.

“Old pains tend to flare up some times.” You say, shrugging your shoulders. He seems to accept the answer, nodding before he stops you in the hallway, mere steps away from Boden’s office.

“Fair warning, Voight and Halstead are inside.” Severide says, watching as you clench your jaw and take a deep breath. “It’s probably something about the bodies in the river.”

You nod, trying to relax and stop your heart from beating franticly against your ribs, the anxiety of it all leaving you a little light-headed. You enter the office after Severide, closing the door behind you before joining the small group on the opposite side from Jay.

“(Y/N), Sergeant Voight asked me if he could speak to you in person about the last call.” Chief Boden says, crossing his arms in front of him. Voight reaches his hand out to shake yours, and you give in.

“Sergeant Hank Voight.” He introduces. You give him a firm handshake, noticing Jay extending his hand as you let go of Voight’s. You quickly grasp his hand, trying to hide the shaking.

“Detective Jay Halstead.” He says, shaking your hand, and your mind gives you flashes from your deployment: from the actual first time the two of you met, from the times where hand holding between the two of you meant comfort and understanding instead of just formal pleasantries-

You force yourself to snap out of it, forcing a smile as your chest tightens.

“(Y/N) (Y/L/N).” You introduce yourself to the two men, watching the slight puzzlement taking over Jay’s face for a few moments before he shakes his head. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

“We just wanted to let you know that you singlehandedly gave closure to the families of the 5 victims we recovered from the river today. You have our appreciation.” Voight says, nodding his head in a small sign of respect.

“If it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else, you have nothing to thank me for.” You say, tucking a stray strand of hair behind your ear. You feel Severide’s gaze on you as you try to level your breathing, the uneasy feeling in your chest only growing.

Voight’s phone rings and he answers, listening for a bit before disconnecting the call and nodding at Jay. The two men quickly shake hands with the three firefighters in the room before excusing themselves.

“We caught a break on the current case, we have to go.” Voight declares as he and Jay leave the office. Boden nods at you when you look at him, a silent permission to leave, and you just about run out of the office and through the kitchen’s access to the outside, slumping against the wall as the snow comes down around you.

Seconds later, Stella comes out of the same door you did and wraps you in a hug, sliding down the wall with you as you burst into tears.

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poptod · 4 years

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Dusk and Dawn (Ahkmenrah x Reader)

Description: A gardener and a prince look for the beauty in the world and end up finding it in each other.

Notes: This is mostly a drabble that came about after I played with the hose while watering my flowers, and also after I read some ancient Egyptian poetry. gender neutral. Word Count: 10.5k

AO3 Link: Dusk and Dawn

God, you loved to watch him. He didn't know about that, of course, but you still liked to look up every now and then. Your garden was right below his room, and he often sat in the open arches overlooking the city. A soft sigh fluttered through you – the sun set on your end of the palace, and the warm rays always glittered in the prince's golden robes. Surprisingly you actually had met him, though that was a long while ago and you doubted he remembered you. Still, you held the hopeful fantasy that maybe he was looking down, watching you tend the blue lotus pond.

For a long while you'd been tending to the western garden, bringing water for the plants, keeping the pond clean and making sure the turtles and geese were fed. There were a few birds who lived there, and those that did each had a name assigned by you. One had electrically orange tail feathers; that one's name was Abayomi. Another had black feathers surrounding her eyes – her name was Nuru. An ibis also stopped by every now and then, though you didn't have a name for it, as it usually roosted up in the treetops.

None of that really mattered, but tending the garden all day and living without many friends had set a special loneliness upon you, and with no visitors you could generally do as you wished. That's why you kept one of your prized possessions there amongst the flower bushes; a flower from China that grew in the shade. The Pharaoh was not aware of the flower, but you doubted he'd actually care anyway. After all, he barely glanced at the list of gardeners before hiring you, and he seemed to be doing it more to satisfy his wife's wishes than to fulfill a passion for the earth.

Either way, you were lucky to have the job you did – it paid well, was an easy enough, enjoyable job, and every now and then you could see the prince in his palace windows. The best times were when you could hear the jangled notes of him trying to play harp, though most times it was rather out of tune.

You circled the sandstone path of the garden once more, watching every flower and testing their sweet scent in the warm air. Once you checked the health of each vine, bush, and tree, you turned to the pool of water, the alabaster edge marking the lillies encircling a tiny, grass island in the center, where turtles liked to relax.

As the last vestiges of sunlight disappeared over the desert and oasis horizon, you stood from your knelt position against the white lip lining the water, looking up to a purple dusk above you. One glance at the open arches and he was not there. Slightly disappointed, you enjoyed the last few minutes of your job before you left. You didn't ever really like going home – your roommates didn't like you all that much (and to be fair, you didn't like them), and the gardens were much quieter. Unfortunately, you had to pack up your remaining tools, as your garden was the home of nesting animals and the few nobles who meandered the paths at night.

Tomorrow you would have to tend to the bushes. Their branches, while fruitful, had to be trimmed properly so as to keep a 'clean' look about the place. Another issue was the overcrowding of the date trees; you'd have to look into that, but you left that for tomorrow. As for tonight, you wandered on home, watching the stars appear in the sky like distant candles marking an oasis.

You awoke to the screech of birds outside your window, roosting in the tall trees even with your third-floor bedroom. Grumbling, you hid away from them, slowly acclimatizing yourself to the idea of standing up. When at last you did so, you turned to the small mirror in your name. Kneeling before it you tidied up your hair, making sure you looked even before reaching for your clothes. Normal clothes today, you thought – nothing special happening, just another day of tending.

Beneath the pile of cloth, something rattled, and as you pulled the folded clothes away you found a golden armband beneath them, clinking against the stone floor. You paused, curiosity consuming you until you set the clothes aside and picked up the band. Examining it, you admired the sun's reflection and the lapis beads dug into the shape of a scarab. Your brows knitted together; you had no recollection of seeing this, much less buying it. Maybe one of your roommates had gotten it for you, but it seemed improbable, as they often failed to pay rent. For a moment you contemplated wearing it, ultimately deciding it couldn't do any harm.

With a soft smile on your face you pulled on your sandals, tying up the leather laces before slinging your linen satchel over your shoulders. Running down the stairs, you made a quick stop to the pantry, taking one of the parts before you left out the front door. It would be a beautiful day, you thought, as the sun shone warm overhead, and in the distance you saw naught but a pale blue sky and faraway mountains. You passed by a couple birdsongs as you made your way to the palace, and though you made sure to appreciate them you also made sure not to be late. Not that you actually had to check in or anything – just a personal preference.

It didn't take too long before the palace stood in front of you, the tall, stone walls leering over the city. The sight unsettled people sometimes (mostly foreigners), but you found it familiar over all else. Another soft smile crossed you – if you could find time to stop by the kitchens, you could get leftover bread and scraps for the birds, which always helped in their amiability with you.

You passed by several people in the halls, none of which you knew, though silent nods were usually exchanged. Politeness was key when dealing with royalty and nobles, and your fear of them helped to keep you in check. You would never be able to find it within yourself to disobey nor befriend royalty.

Fortunately, you did stop by the kitchens, and the servants working there bid you a cheery hello and pleasant good bye as you came and went, stuffing day-old bread in your bag.

Continuing on your way, you came to the large archway leading into your garden. Sunlight shone through it and onto the stone you stood upon, lighting up the intricate detailing of the carved arch, and the bits of metal in your sandals. Warmth rolled up your body, comforting your skin as you continued forward. The sun had always been your friend, and you hoped it would remain that way, as you always smiled when the sun touched your face.

Setting your bag down on the stone floor you snuck behind the bushes, pulling out the box of various tools you needed. Shovels both big and small, shears, bags of earth direct from the Nile's shores, such and such – you dug through for a moment before reaching the large, metal clippers. Holding it with both hands you smiled, satisfied with the size before you stood. The bushes needed trimming; you'd do that first, and once you finished with that, you could climb up into the trees and harvest the dates, and later the figs nabk berries.

In the meantime, you listened to the faraway music of the temples, carefully snipping away at the loose leaves and branches. Out of habit you looked up to the sky, watching for both birds and the prince. When you found neither of them you let out a dissatisfied mumble, returning to the task at hand with a tinge of disappointment.

By around noon you finished off the bushes, and you excitedly prepared for your next task of the day. It was a tad harder than your previous work, but more worth it, and certainly more enjoyable.

Grabbing a wicker basket you set it beneath the date tree, looking up so as to carefully measure where the dates would fall. Date trees were tall, tall enough to need either a ladder or a rope, neither of which you had. You contemplated your various options before deciding you could probably climb up the trunk. Whether or not that was safe you didn't know, but it wasn't particularly important anyway. Climbing trees was fun.

Your first attempt ended up with you flopping onto your back as you fell. It wasn't a very long fall considering you only made it two feet into the air, but it still knocked the air out of you, which was an unpleasant feeling all around. Trying again, you kept your hands tight around the wood, using your shoeless feet to get a better grip. With a little more flailing you made it to the top, wrapping your legs around the trunk and releasing your hands. You floated midair, and with a wide, triumphant grin you began to pick at the branches heavy with dates, letting them fall into the basket far below.

Through the tree branches movement caught your eye, pausing your hands as curiosity once more overcame you. High above you, the prince stood at his golden arches, and for a second the two of you made eye contact. Reaching your hand out wide, you waved at him. He laughed – at least that's what you thought he was doing, and he waved back. Your own bright grin crossed you, but before you could think of something to yell, he returned to the safety of his room. You tried not to let it disappoint you and returned to the dates.

A few minutes later and the heavier branches were lifted of the bulk of their fruits, making the brush of the leaves much lighter in the breeze that passed by. You climbed carefully to the floor, jumping off when you could, and looking over the collected dates. It was a good batch – clean, well shaped, with little to no bruises. You had a special talent when it came to that, which you liked to believe made you a better gardener.

Lifting up the heavy basket you took it to the waterside, kneeling on the ledge and dipping the basket in. The design of the flax allowed water to pass through, and as you soaked the fruit the bugs and dirt washed away, fluttering to the bottom of the clear pond. With a grunt you lifted it out, the remaining water draining till all that was left was clean dates. You took one – just to taste, and within the first bite you knew the trees were having a wonderful spring.

As you made your way to the arch, ready to take the basket to the kitchen, you were stopped by nearly walking head-on into a man entering the garden. You fumbled only a moment, your grip on the basket tightening so as to not accidentally drop it on both your and the stranger's feet.

"Oh goodness," you breathed out as you stepped backwards, narrowly avoiding collision.

"I'm sorry, I – I didn't see you, sorry," he stammered, holding his hands out in front of him defensively.

Looking up to his face, your breath stopped, eyes widening imperceptibly. Immediately you dropped the basket, kneeling before him in a bow that pressed your forehead against the stone floor.

"My prince," you said, your voice weak from nerves.

"Oh, there's no need for that," he said quickly, helping you back up to your feet while you stared in awe and confusion. "I'm the one that almost ran into you, after all. You're the gardener, right?"

You nodded, heart pounding against your ribs.

"I see you from my room, sometimes," he said, and right away you recalled crystal clear memories of seeing him far above you that dated back years.

"I think I waved to you," you said softly.

"Yes," he said with a smile, "you did. I just... I thought I should introduce myself. I think we've seen quite a lot of each other, but I still don't know your name."

"I am Nedjem," you introduced yourself with a shallow bow.

"Ahkmen," he said, offering you his hand. Gingerly you took it, shaking his hand.

"I'm sorry to leave so shortly, but I need to take these to the kitchens," you said as you knelt, ignoring how close you were previously standing before him in favor of lifting up the heavy basket. He scooted to the side to allow passage.

"Will you be back?"

"Of course, my prince," you said with another short bow, this time bidding him a short good-bye.

A shiver ran through you – both from your encounter and the sudden shade in the chilled walls of the palace. Passing by the paintings adorning the hallways, you noticed your hastened step with bashfulness, and the ceaselessly happy smile creeping upon you. You couldn't control it, so instead you kept your head up and waved to the couple people you passed by.

It wasn't a long trip to the kitchens, and though the chefs wanted to discuss something with you, you quickly excused yourself with the excuse that the prince was waiting for you. They shut up pretty well after that.

The prince was just as nice as you thought he would be, something even you could tell from your brief meeting. A giddiness ran through you – he was so polite, especially considering his other family members. You'd only met his brother once, but you preferred it that way, considering in that one meeting that lasted exactly four minutes, he managed to find seven different ways to insult you. A creative lad for sure, but not kind.

You reentered the garden with the large, empty basket at your hip. Humming quietly to yourself, you stowed it away with the other tools, not bothering to look back at the pond.

"Is this where you keep your tools?" The voice of the prince said behind you, and before you could help it you jumped, whirling around to face him with quickened breath. At your reaction his eyes widened, and he said, "I'm so sorry, that's twice now I've made you jump. Oh dear."

"No, it's my fault, I should've noticed you standing there," you said quickly, trying to get your breathing under control. The prince didn't make it any easier – he was practically standing chest to chest with you, and with you backed up against the thick brush, you couldn't move anywhere. You could feel your cheeks boiling with a vibrant blush.

"I'm still sorry," he said with a weak chuckle, taking a few steps back so you could leave your little hole behind the bushes. You nodded your head gratefully, but you couldn't hold that long of a conversation with him, even if you wanted to. After all, you were still at work, and the fig trees needed to be plucked and trimmed.

As you took one of the smaller baskets to the northern row of fig trees, the prince followed behind you, looking over your shoulder as you worked away. With your bare knees dug into the soft earth, you ducked beneath the tree branches and reached for the more invisible of the fruits. There had to be a few visible for the King to pick, should he come through, so you took up the tendency of taking the bare minimum. The King hadn't said anything, so you assumed it was fine.

"Can I make it up to you?" The prince said in that mellowed, honey voice that you doubted you'd ever grow used to.

"What do you mean?" You asked, reluctant to turn away from your task, as any eye contact you held with the prince had your heartbeat picking up and your palms sweating.

"I frightened you terribly. You could've dropped your basket. Both times, too," he added, drawing a soft laugh out of you. Shaking your head, you tried to think up a response as you debated whether or not you actually wanted to spend time with him. He was kind, but you couldn't trust yourself to keep calm.

"That's really not necessary," you said.

"I know," he said as he knelt down beside you, dirtying his golden robes. Before you could say anything, he added, "I just want to."

"I would love to, but I'm busy with the garden most days," you said with a sigh, your heart sinking ever so gently into a pit of regret for something you hadn't even decided not to do.

"What about tonight? I can take you down to the river, we can sail for a little while," he offered, and though your immediate reaction was to turn him down, you paused before speaking. You could certainly use more flora and such for the garden (it was a little sparse around the walls), and one of the best, cheapest places to get it was in the wild.

"Can I collect plants?" You asked quietly, almost embarrassed to bring it up. But he just smiled, warm and comforting, as though what you said was not only special but worth hearing.

"Of course. When do you finish off here? I can meet you then," he said, and you answered with your usual time, which was around sunset.

He bowed curtly before he left, a hint of a smile tugging at the ends of his lips. You let out a heavy breath – he could be quite intense, but you looked forward to the day you could relax around him, should that day ever come. In the meantime you fantasized while you gardened, dreaming of picking figs beside him and wading in the shallow pools.

The sun set slow that afternoon, verging carefully into evening. You didn't notice, still caught up in your plants, and having yet to feed the geese circling the pond. The ibis hadn't come today, but you weren't worried – it could handle itself just fine. As for the domesticated ducks and turtles, not quite so much, and as one of the servants brought you a small basket of wide, crisps leaves, you thanked them with a short bow. They left quickly, and with that you turned to the animals gathered in the pond and on its' island.

Slipping off your sandals you kept the basket of leaves close to you, carefully readying yourself for dipping your feet into the water. It chilled against you, crawling slowly up your leg till you stood calf deep in the water, wading across the soft dirt floor towards the island. Several of the turtles looked up to you, but the rest didn't pay your presence any mind. Smiling softly, you pulled a few leaves out, holding them in your hand for the more hungry ones to bite into. The crisp of the leaf in a sharp beak snapped in the quiet air, bothered only by the soft giggles leaving you at the sight.

Ahkmen watched as the edge of your skirt dipped ever so slightly into the water, smiling to himself at your absolute concentration. He stood, leant against the arch while you hummed quietly, taking short pauses to speak to the many turtles now staring at you. It was a rather unfamiliar sight to him, but he still couldn't help the smile on his face.

"I've got to feed the others now," you told the turtles quietly, leaving the rest of the leaves on the center of the island before wading back to shore.

Setting down the now-empty basket, you reached for the bag of bread crumbs, only then catching Ahkmen out of the corner of your eye. You nearly jumped – again – but fortunately, you kept your composure this time.

"Do you often feed them?" He asked, his arms crossed over his chest, watching you with a lopsided smile.

"Feed them every day," you said with a nod. "They live here."

"Really? I thought they were wild," he said, stepping away from his place beneath the arch to join you at the side of the pond. Still dressed in his golden robes, though this time wearing neither his cape nor his crown, he sat down on the pond's ledge.

"Some of them are," you said, sprinkling crumbs over the water around the ducks, "but some understand the ease of life here a little better than others."

They began ducking their beaks underwater, fast movements allowing them to eat before it soaked too terribly. You watched with a distant smile, sprinkling more over as they ate quickly, the sound apparently amusing Ahkmen.

"Could I feed them?" He asked, his eye switching between the geese and you.

"Of course," you said, handing him the bag.

With a grin he grabbed a rather large handful, mimicking your sprinkling, but ultimately failing when a sizable chunk fell from his palm, sinking into the water. He frowned.

"Don't worry," you said, "they'll get it eventually. They always do."

The two of you stayed there a little while longer, you calf-deep in water, and Ahkmen sitting on the ledge, his skirt crumpled in his hands to avoid soaking it. As you fed the last bits of bread to the ducks, the sun fell behind the horizon. That familiar purple tinted the sky, making way for the first stars, and in the southern sky, the moon. Dusk settled itself upon the land, and with that you looked to Ahkmen who was already staring at you.

"Nice evening, isn't it?" He murmured, tracing his finger over the lily pads. You agreed with a hum. "Shall we go then?"

He stood before you answered, and wordlessly you followed him, wading carefully in the water before making it to the edge. Hauling yourself off, you wrung out the end of your skirt. You offered a small smile before taking your bag, slinging it over your shoulder before you left the garden, walking beside him like good friends. For a little while he led you through the palace corridors, into places you'd never been before and didn't really care to be. It didn't take too long, though – soon he was leading you down an outdoor path to a distant boathouse, sitting on the edge of the Nile with its' canoes brushing up against the dock in time with the gentle movement of the water.

The scent of the shore hit you all at once, enlivening your heart till you were practically giddy, your pace quickening to reach the river sooner. Beside you Ahkmen smiled at your excitement, fixing his steps to match yours.

"I don't get a lot of free time," you told him quietly, your eye never straying from the fertile shore. "My work takes a lot of... well, work."

"I feel the same way," he said with a chuckle, "with all the studies I've got to do."

"At least we have free time in the night," you said.

"Indeed. And I'm happy to spend it with you," he said, leaning forward to catch your reaction. He was quite a lot taller than you.

"You hardly know me," you mumbled as a blush began creeping up your cheeks.

"I know you care deeply about the earth. That tells me a lot about you already," he said.

"Like what?"

"You're kind and thoughtful," he said, pondering quietly for a moment before he continued. "You're also quite beautiful, though I didn't need to see your garden to know that."

You said nothing, instead staring at the ground while Ahkmen watched your growing blush with much interest. He had a soft blush of his own, invisible in the dark of night, and he preferred to keep it that way.

At last you stood beside the shore, following him into the boathouse where the skiffs were tied up. As he set about positioning oars and untying ropes, you sat on the end of one of the many wooden docks, your legs dangling off the edge, just barely skimming the surface of the water. Staring upwards, you watched the sky's movements in the approaching midnight. Soon it would become much harder to see, but you didn't mind all that much – night was a beautiful time to be alive, and the moon above would be able to mark the definitions of the plants along the Nile. You fidgeted thoughtlessly with the strings of your bag, only pulled away when Ahkmen tapped your shoulder.

"Ready?" He asked as you pulled yourself to your feet.

"Yes, my prince," you said with a smile.

"You don't need to call me that. Not when we're alone at least," he said, taking your hand and leading you to another dock, where a boat sat tethered by only one rope in a weak knot.

Helping you inside, he had you sit on the end before entering himself, untying the rope and taking an oar in hand.

"Do you want me to do that?" You asked, too aware of his royalty.

"Aren't I the one who invited you here?" He asked in reply, a questioning smirk on his face.

You huffed, but unfortunately couldn't stop your own smile from appearing. He clearly liked your compliance, though you felt nothing but restlessness as he rowed, taking the two of you far from the boathouse and the palace. Sighing, you tried to comfort yourself – the prince was perfectly safe, and you had nothing to worry about. The thought alone didn't rid you of your anxiousness, though blamed that chiefly on the way Ahkmen kept an expectant eye on you, smiling when you smiled and generally watching you with an innocent curiosity.

"By the way, if my father catches us, this trip is for your garden," he said, breaking the silence, followed by your laughter muffled by your hand.

"I'll keep that in mind," you said when you calmed down enough to form words.

He was beaming at your delight, his eyes shining even in the dim light of the moon. You hadn't taken the time to notice it before, but he had a childish curiosity for the world, something you often found in yourself as well. After all, you tended to the geese and turtles as though you could speak with them, a trait more commonly seen in children than adults.

The shore rolled slowly by, marked only by the soft sound of water rushing against Ahkmen's oar. Ripples ran from the droplets falling in by the oar, brushing against the fingers you dipped ever so slightly into the water, finding comfort in its' familiarity. There were no fish in the river, at least none you could see – it was a bit hard to look for fish at night.

When at last you found your search fruitless you turned back to the shore, feeling nothing but your heart beating harsher every second you spent with the Prince. Not out of any logical anxiety, of course; just the need to be seen as good, as worth his time.

Out of the corner of your eye you caught a flower resting in the water, the petals white and the center pink. Your eyes widened.

"Could we stop here for a moment?" You asked, your eye never leaving the flower.

Wordlessly he followed your request, guiding the boat to shore, where you immediately jumped out. Water splashed up your leg, a few drops reaching him. You didn't watch, caught up in the search, though you still heard Ahkmen's quiet chuckle.

In the garden you tended, the lillies were blue – blue lotus to be exact, and though they were beautiful, blue was the only color they showed. Maybe it was just that specific strand of flower, but excitement still filled you as you reached the white lilly resting on a wide, dark green pad. Pulling the small knife out of your bag, you dipped your hands into the water, running your knife across both the pad and the flower's stem till it broke, allowing you to pick the two up as one.

"You know, people come to our gardens, and they always marvel over our blue lilies," you said, wading the short way back to the boat, "but I always find white lilies to be more worth the time. They grow everywhere in the rest of the world, but so rarely do you find one here. I think it'll make a good addition to your garden."

"I've always thought of it as a bland color," he admitted, taking your hand and helping you back into the skiff.

"It's purity, and it is silence," you said softly, still admiring the flower, even as you took your seat back in the boat, dripping river water on the floor. "Think of alabaster, and clouds, and the reflection of the sun – white isn't bland. Not when you look closer."

"Maybe you're right," he sighed, taking the oars back in hand and rowing you away from shore.

"It's also good to have more than one type of lily. Makes sure the colors don't clash," you said, bringing a soft chuckle out of him.

"That too," he said.

You turned to the stars, looking up with a distant smile as you admired their light. They had patterns – looking close enough, you could find anything, just like in summer clouds. Lions, trees, chariots, and all of it hidden in the heavens. You sighed softly, filling yourself up with a calm you rarely found while in the presence of someone else.

"I feel as though I already know you," he said, drawing your attention away from the light of the stars and to his light.

"How so?"

"Well, I... um, I've actually watched you for a while, from my room," he said, clearing his throat awkwardly. "I hope that doesn't make you think any less of me. I just... you're very nice to watch."

Despite him initiating the conversation, he wouldn't make eye contact with you, intent to concentrate on the oar that really didn't require all that much concentration. Reaching forward you stilled his hand, allowing the boat to come to a stop in the river as he looked to you.

"I already kind of knew that," you admitted. The two of you had made eye contact enough throughout the years for you to realize a pattern.

"Really?" He asked, a blush burning onto his cheeks as he gripped the oar tight, letting his knuckles turn white.

"I don't mind," you said softly, smiling gently as he met your eye. It brought a small comfort to him.

"It wouldn't've happened if I were allowed to leave the palace, mind you. I just... it gets terribly lonely, sometimes. I know I have to complete my studies since one day I might rule this land in my father's stead, but I am still young," he said, spilling out information you hadn't expected to hear anytime in the next month. You took a moment to contemplate your response.

"At least you're aware of it. Better than ignorance or anything of that like," you said.

"You're a very kind person, aren't you?" He asked, tilting his head slightly to the left.

"I don't think that's for me to decide, but thank you anyway," you said with a soft giggle, making him grin as well, dimples creasing into his blushing cheeks.

"I enjoy your company a lot more than I thought I would, and to be fair, I already thought I'd enjoy your company quite a lot," he admitted, making you laugh. Immediately you covered your mouth with your hand, unable to stop the giggling falling from you. His smile only grew.

"I enjoy your company quite a lot, too," you said in a posh voice.

He let his head hang from his shoulders as silent laughs shook his body. Delight filled you – from his smile, from your own comfort, from the gentle current of the river, from your flower, and ultimately just from him. You were expecting a polite man. Not a warm one, but the surprise was one you welcomed with open arms.

As you headed back up the Nile in search of the city, you watched the shore carefully for any other flowers. You didn't end up finding any more, but you did pause for a few fern leaves, and the root of a vine whose leaves splayed wide. Watching the water pass by, you leaned against the edge of the boat, your chin supported by your palm, watching the shadow of your reflection beneath you. She smiled, and your lips quirked up just slightly.

Soon the bottom of the river could be seen, making you raise your head away from the water and towards the prince. The boathouse sat ahead of you, and as Ahkmen rowed you back, you took the little time left to watch the muscles on his back move with every stroke of the oar. You hadn't noticed before, but he was actually rather muscular. Just another thing you realized about him that night along with a dozen other things.

He gently maneuvered the skiff back into its' place at the dock, tying up the rope on his end before tossing his oar onto the dock. Placing his hands on the wood he lifted himself out, tying the other end before lending you his hand, helping you out. You murmured a soft thank you, following behind him as he put away the oar.

"We can do this again, if you like," he offered quietly as the two of you headed back towards the palace. "Or we don't have to. Up to you."

"I'd like to," you said, "if only to get more seeds."

He grinned, shaking his head.

"Shall I find you at dusk again?"

"That sounds nice."

When I hear your voice, it's pomegranate wine

I live to hear it

And if I look at you, at each look,

it is purer than any honey or beer.

True to his word, he did take you on more short excursions, though he called them expeditions, something that always made you chuckle. Maybe it was just because you were bashful around him, but no matter the reason you both enjoyed calling them that. Expeditions or adventures – you still found yourself enjoying them, even if you took the same path through the Nile every time.

At sunset he appeared in the threshold of your garden, watching you silently as he always did. Sometimes you spied him out of the corner of your eye, but most times you didn't, leading to you jumping when he made a sound. The other times that you did see him you let him stand there, feeling the heat of his gaze on your back.

What exactly he was doing you didn't know, but you didn't mind all that much, as he'd never shown any cruelty to you. It was a polar opposite to his brother – at least, in your interactions with the two princes. Kahmuh didn't talk to you nearly as much as Ahkmen did, and you preferred to keep it that way.

"How's the garden today?" He asked, making you twist around to him. The moment you saw him a bright smile lit up your face, now an instinct whenever you met his eye.

"Doing quite well. I need to feed the geese less, though," you noted as you stood from your seat beside the pool, your feet dipped in the water.

"Why? Growing too domesticated?"

"No, just too fat," you said, pulling a laugh from the prince.

As you stepped out of the pond, the geese tried to follow you, honking at you demandingly. You turned around, scolding them quietly before you hurried over to Ahkmen.

"My prince," you greeted him with a bow of your head, a habit you made sure to keep. Just in case. He didn't like it, which was obvious from his knitted brow, but he would have to learn to like it.

"Want to go out on the river again?" He asked, mostly ignoring your greeting.

"Of course."

And you found yourself out on the water for the umpteenth time, staring at the same stars, watching the same shore pass you by, and yet every time you joined him it felt new. Just like the first time you watched the shore carefully, scanning for any flora you could add to the garden. You paused only to look to the sky, charting the stars with your imagination, drawing lines across the heavens to form the earth in the sky.

"I've finally started taking astronomy lessons," he said, his voice airy as he, too, looked up to the stars. "I've always loved the stars, but... never got around to learning much about them till now."

"Is it a difficult subject?" You asked, leaning forward.

"Not yet," he said with a chuckle, making you smile.

With the skiff resting the middle of the river, he set down the oar, moving to sit beside you. He took your hand and pressed your cheek against his, matching your eyes together as he pointed upwards.

"Up there," he said, "you can see Hathor's constellation, right by the brightest star."

"Oh, yeah," you mumbled, watching where he pointed and drew out the sacred cow.

"Over here is an eagle. The tail runs pretty far, but it connects through the southern star," he said, and in your concentration you almost forgot about his touch against yours, curling around your fingertips and pressed against your blushing cheek.

"It's beautiful," you murmured thoughtlessly, not even noticing when his finger dropped down, landing on your intertwined hands. He hummed in agreement, keeping at your side.

Only when silence encompassed you did you pay attention to his closeness, an anxious warmth crowding out your thoughts as he breathed against you. You could so easily rest your head on his shoulder, or stroke your fingers across his forearm, or kiss his cheek – you didn't do any of those things. Instead you enjoyed the softness of his hand while you could, letting your imagination run free as you stared up at the patterns of the stars.

You almost drifted off, almost – one moment you were almost leaning into him, your eyes just barely closing, and the next he once more stood on the other end of the boat, the long oar in his hand. He was humming, quietly enough that you had to strain to hear. As the seconds rolled by you stared back up at the stars, memorizing his thoughtless hum and teaching each note to the distant lights above you.

Upon your return to land your feet grew shaky, too used to being in the gentle rock of the tide. Like all the other times he offered you his hand, and you took it, lifting yourself out of the boat and pressing your side against his for support. He didn't seem to mind, so you stayed right where you were. With your heart thumping so harsh you were worried he could feel it, the two of you left the boathouse, heading up the path back to the palace.

"Have you got anywhere to be in the morning?" He asked.

"No," you answered.

"I'll walk you home, then," he said with a soft smile, and you looked at your feet, ashamed of the blush that so easily overtook you. "I haven't anywhere to be tonight or tomorrow."

"Is that rare for you?" You asked quietly, your shoulder bumping against his arm as you walked.

"Let's just say it doesn't happen often," he said, making you chuckle.

Soon you found yourself at the fork of the path, the well-trodden one leading to the palace, and the overgrown path leading into the city. He took you that way, adopting a slow stroll that you didn't mind in the least. Even if you did get subpar sleep, it would be worth it to spend more time with him, listening to crickets and the distant sound of music. Like most summer evenings, the city was alight with the life of several different parties. The scent of alcohol grew thick in the air, and the shouts of patrons louder, marking where solitude ended and unease began. The prince didn't seem to mind it, but he noticed your discomfort, and in a motion both exciting and familiar, he held your hand in his.

Behold, if I pass before him,

I shall tell him of my turnings;

Behold, I am yours, I shall say to him

And he will boast of my name.

On a late summer morning, you awoke before the sun, bringing yourself to life with a heavy sigh. The blankets across your body draped as you sat up, already awake from the rather disturbing dream you'd had. With the thought of sleep eradicated from your head, you stood, dressed yourself, and left your home without word or breakfast. You regretted the decision about five minutes into the walk to the palace, as you stomach began to grumble uncomfortably. Instead of stopping by anywhere, you thought of your Chinese flower, and how beautiful it would be to see it in the total dark of the hours before dawn. Surely it would be a marvel – and that was what led you away from your comfy bed and fresh food.

Slowly you climbed the steps of the palace, keeping quiet footsteps to keep the peace. Two soldiers were always stationed at each end of the staircase, and though you'd never said hello to any of them, you did wave, which earned you an odd look and confused wave in return. You almost stopped to laugh and initiate and genuine conversation, but the pull of your flower was strong enough to hurry your footsteps towards the garden.

As you reached the open hallway leading into the garden, you paused, already hearing a voice from inside. Silently you approached the arch, hiding behind the wall as you peeked inside.

Ahkmen sat on the pond's ledge, wearing naught but a loosely tied skirt that tugged down with every movement he made. For a moment you lingered on the soft skin of his waist, but your thoughts were torn from there when he spoke, and with one glance you found him talking to Nuru. She didn't look like she minded, but it was hard to pinpoint the emotions of a goose.

"You see Nedjem a lot," he said, his right hand curled around the fabric of his skirt, and the left petting Nuru's wing feathers. "Do you think they like poetry?"

You perked up slightly, though kept in mind it'd be best not to be seen.

"I hope they do," he hummed, a gentle smile on his face as the goose burrowed her neck into her fat body. You really needed to stop feeding them so much. "Lately I've written so much. Mostly on pottery shards, but still... maybe you'll have an opinion on them?"

He proceeded to dig into the small pocket sewn to the side of his skirt, shuffling around before pulling his hand back out, opening it to reveal shard upon shard of limestone. Your heart began to race, your grip on the marble arch tightening.

"I'm not a poet, mind you," he added, talking to the goose as though she were a person. "I can barely write. But..." he trailed off, sorting mindlessly through the collection before pulling one out, holding it up to read.

"Oh to be the artist – able to stare at you for as long as I please. To be the writer, capturing your essence, the sweet melody in your laugh. Oh, to be the musician, mimicking that melody, serenading you with the kindest words and softest tone, to be an artist – what an endearing form of love. How wonderful it must be to be an artist in love. Um..." he stuffed it back in his pocket, picking a new one. "When I touch you, I am love incarnate. I have found a home in the touch of your hand against mine. That one's... quite a bit shorter. Probably won't use that one. Oh, I shouldn't be too straightforward with it, either."

You almost giggled – you didn't, fortunately, managing to cover your mouth with your hand before any sound escaped. But the sight was so sweet, so endearing you could almost imagine him saying those things to you, looking you in the eye, and running his thumb across the curve of your lips. A lump grew in your throat, hurrying your breath as you watched him continue.

"There's only one more that's worth mentioning," he said, although there were a great deal many more shards than the last one he pulled. "I want to love you in so many ways. I want to love you as a servant, as a master, I would love you as a king and I would love you as a farmer. As long as it's you, I could be anything if I still loved you."

"That's a pretty poem," you finally said, leant against the arch and surprising him just like he'd done to you months ago. He immediately looked up, his expression softening when he recognized you.

"Nedjem," he said with a smile, a tinge of relief evident in his eye. "Gods, I thought you were my brother."

"Fortunately no," you said, walking to join him at the side of the pond.

"What are you doing here?"

"Well for one, this is where I work," you said, making both of you laugh. "Who are you writing these poems for?"

He stared at you a moment before answering, "someone very special."

"I'm sure she's quite happy to have your companionship, then," you said, ignoring your own feelings on the matter, as anything detrimental you could say would only worsen your own heart's decay. "And I do like poetry. You can show me them, if you'd like."

"I -"

"Ahkmen!" Came a voice from the hallway, shouting with terror-laced words. "There's a fire in the kitchen!!"

"Again?" He groaned quietly, moving to his feet and running towards the hall. "I'll be back in a moment," he promised you before he left, disappearing behind a corner.

You almost smiled, but instead you turned to Nuru, who was still mostly asleep.

"He's a nice man, isn't he?" You said.

I hear thy voice, O turtle dove-

The dawn is all aglow

Weary am I with love, with love, Oh whither shall I go?

The edge of the sun touched the horizon, casting a hazy, golden glow across the land. Your skin tingled beneath its' touch, warm and familiar as you sat on the docks of the boathouse. Ahkmen was God knows where – you hadn't seen him after the fire incident, and assumed he was busy with princely duties. He had a fair amount of those. You, on the other hand, had spent the last few days fixing up the array of new plants near the garden walls.

"He likes poetry," you murmured aloud to yourself, your concentration on the setting sun and its' peach clouds wavering as you thought on the prince.

He hadn't ever mentioned that about himself before, but it was obvious he enjoyed it quite a lot, and as you thought of his poetry in crystal clear memory, you wondered if perhaps you could write your own poetry. Of course, it wouldn't be written down – you didn't have any papyrus or clay, and you didn't even know how to write. No, you'd have to memorize the words you pieced together, and you imagined yourself serenading him as you closed your eyes, letting your feet drop into the river water below.

You thought and thought, racking your brain for ideas or clues as to what you could do. Compare his beauty to a rose – a tad too feminine, but you hadn't any idea what else to call him. He was sweet; like a rose, and his skin soft, like the red velvet petals. His humor was the scent of a rose's nectar that delighted the bees so, and when you caught him brandishing a spear in a spar against his teacher, he was the thorns of a dark green stem. His life was the roots and you were the water, happy to be something within him, be it a thought or a melody – and he kept you close, safe, like the leaves of a rose bush and the spike of thorns protected every wonderful thing that coexists to form pure life.

You closed your eyes and breathed. You would remember; you had to. Hopefully it would stay in your mind for a good long while, as you had no idea when you would see him next, much less be able to actually speak to him in that manner. It was rather daring, though – a lowly worker infatuated with a prince locked up in a high tower. A reverse fairy tale, and as you opened your eyes to see the quiet ripples of the water, you thought of nothing but him and the stars he drew in your eyes.

Slowly the sun set low, dying once more as the moon took its' place in the sky above you. Looking up, you found the moon as a sliver, smiling in the dark. A cool wind settled over you, making you curl up to avoid the chill. Another deep breath and you turned to the water, watching the reflection of the sky dance, rippling with every slight movement.

Hours passed by and you stayed right there, memorizing your image of him, trying to imprint it in your memory. It would have to be perfect; he deserved no less, especially from someone so low as you. Neither of you had remarked much on your class difference, but every now and then it did bother you – you'd be less than human if it didn't. Sometimes class didn't matter, but sometimes it did, and that but had you gripping the wood of the dock tight. He was a kind man, of voice, touch, and words, and you had no doubt he could love someone beneath him. Whether he could love you was something else entirely.

Soon the darkest hours of night overtook you, and in the dim glow of the moon you could hardly see your hands, only feeling the way you drew your fingers up your thigh to rest in your lap. The silence that surrounded you was broken only by the roll of the river against the wooden dock, a few of the boats clanking against each other. You breathed deep, relaxing in the familiar scent of the Nile, comforted by the breeze and the dissipation of every physical thing. Nothing but pitch black – it might as well have been a new moon, as the distant shore melded into the faraway mountains without hesitation.

A hand touched your shoulder and you jumped, feeling the fingers run a line down your upper arm before stopping and disappearing. You looked up, finding nothing but darkness, yet as the figure sat beside you, you could hear the even breaths and the creak of the wood beneath them.

"What are you doing here so late?" Ahkmen asked softly, worry evident in his tone.

"I needed some time to think," you answered honestly. "There's a lot on my mind as of late."

"Would you like to talk about it?" He said after a moment to let your words rest in the space between you.

"Not really," you said with a smile he couldn't see.

The two of you sat there for a couple minutes, your shoulder brushed against his, his thigh against yours, and the chill wind keeping you close to one another.

"I wrote something for you," you finally said, breaking away from the thought of holding it back. What was the use of memorizing if you weren't going to tell him? Besides, you were alone – just you, and just him.

"Really?" He said, sounding surprised.

"I didn't actually write it down. I just put together some words," you said, smiling when he chuckled. You were looking directly at him and you still couldn't see him, but your head replayed every time you saw him grin.

"How does it go?"

"I want you to close your eyes," you murmured, moving to cup your hand over his jawline, running your thumb over his now-closed eyes. "Imagine the garden. My garden." Your heart raced when you felt his breath on your skin.

Once assured he followed your command, you began your recitation, digging your nails into your palm to avoid slipping up.

"I am yours like this garden," you said, keeping your voice soft either out of love or fear. "Planted with flowers, and fragrant herbs. Its canal is pleasant –– dug by your hand, cooled by the north wind. A lovely place to wander hand in hand; my body satisfied, my heart rejoicing, walking together. When I hear your voice, it's pomegranate wine –– I live to hear it, and if I look at you, at each look, it is purer than any honey or beer."

He didn't speak, but he remained in your touch, melting into the way you caressed his cheek. Raising his hand ever so gently, he set his own hand on yours, pulling it away just enough for him to kiss your palm, just enough to send you into a blazing blush.

"You remind me of the moon flower," you mumbled, barely able to get the words out without stuttering.

"A moon flower?" He asked curiously.

"I keep it in the garden," you said as your hand fell back to your lap. "Would you like to see?"

"Of course," he said, and the two of you stood, taking that familiar path back to the palace.

Gravel crinkled beneath your sandals, and birds circled overhead, but none of that fully processed with him so close to you.

"That was a beautiful poem, by the way," he told you in a murmur, almost reluctant to compliment.

"Thank you," you said, a small smile spreading across your face. "I suppose you inspired me a little this morning. I've never heard poetry before."

"Really? I've heard it quite a lot," he said.

"That's probably because you can afford it," you said, and the both of you laughed, leaning imperceptibly closer together.

He snuck you into the palace, and in return you snuck him into the garden, taking his hand and leading him onto the sandstone path. With a distant torch lighting the outside hallway, you could see the shapes of the garden trees and the walls. Ahkmen, ever so helpful, pulled a rushlight from his pocket, lighting it to reveal the closed lilies and, in the corner, the blooming petals of the Chinese flower. Once more you took his hand, leading him to kneel before it.

The white color that previously coated it was replaced with a vibrant pink, a color you were sure you hadn't ever seen before. If you had, it certainly wasn't as vibrant, and it didn't have you quite as awestruck as the flower did. The stem reached your shoulder when you knelt, covered in tiny petals, each belonging to its own blooming flower, ruffling in the slow breeze.

"I got it from a trader in the markets at Tanis," you told him quietly, careful not to break the trance of its' beauty. Turning to him, you saw his amazed face lit by the flickering rushlight, glowing in the dim of the garden.

"Where's it from?" He asked, his lips still parted in curiosity.

"She said it was from China. I'm not sure where that is, but she told me it's far in the east," you said, watching his expression carefully. The curve of his nose, the crinkles around his eyes, the slightest dimple from his smile filled with wonderment.

"I... I want to show you something, too," he offered quietly, as though you could ever say no.

"As long as it isn't too far away. Dawn will come soon," you said, noting the slightest variation in the pitch black sky.

"I don't care about dawn," he admitted as he took your hand. "Will you come with me?"

"Of course, my prince."

He pulled you to your feet, leading you away from the garden and into the palace. You turned down twists, letting him take you up staircases and through empty rooms. For a moment you thought to ask him as to his destination, but as you watched his delight in your curiosity, you let it be. You'd find out soon enough anyway – the palace wasn't outrageously large, though you'd bet without a guide it was easy to get lost. Fortunately, you had him, and he never let go of your hand.

Through hallways painted from top to bottom, through unused servant's quarters and empty storage rooms, and at the end of it all a large, wooden door in an unassuming hallway.

"My parents moved me here after Kahmuh started fighting with me," he told you, looking up at the bolted door. "I used to live in a much more occupied hallway, but I like the solitude. It's nice to hear the quiet."

You agreed but said nothing, letting his touch drop from yours as he worked with the bolt, eventually unlocking it with a heavy click. The doors slowly rolled open, aided by his hand till the whole of his room stood before you. In the center, pressed against the far wall was his bed, a silk canopy hanging above it. To the left his desk, and against the nearest wall a bookcase. At last your eyes wandered to the right of his room, finding the arches you saw so often from below, the open alabaster viewing the whole of Memphis.

When you didn't move forward he intertwined his fingers in yours, pulling you gently closer till he closed the door behind the both of you.

"It's a beautiful sight, isn't it?" He said, noticing your stare past the arches and into the city. "On festival nights the buildings light up like fireflies. So many people, all with their own thoughts and agenda, and all so small from here. Doesn't stop the city from reeking of alcohol, though."

You giggled, pushing him away as a dopey grin overtook him. While he went to light the torches hanging off the wall, you made your way to the arches, sitting on the cold floor and letting your legs dangle in mid air. His room had to be five or six stories above the ground, and as you looked down an anxious shiver ran through your body. Your legs and arms tingled, excited and fearful of the garden fall below you. Soon he joined you, letting his legs dangle beside yours, placing his hand right next to yours, where his pinkie could touch yours in a hesitant grace.

"You can see the Nile from here too. Fleets of ships, their banners covered in vibrant colors right next to the boats of fishers, whose boats carry no sail at all," he said, pointing into the distance where you could just barely make out the river. "It gets incredibly crowded sometimes."

"I see where you get your poetry inspiration from," you murmured, your eyes still stuck on the sight before you.

"That's not where I get it from," he said, and you turned to him with a confused expression, wondering why he was smiling and wondering where he was going when he stood.

Looking down, you picked at the dust on the floor, fidgeting with your nails as you turned back to the city. There were no celebrations or festivals, but still there were lights scattered across the many houses. If you keened hard you could hear the laughter of dinner parties and the music of dances.

Soft, calming notes came from behind you, struck on a harp. Turning around, you found Ahkmen sitting on a blanket, his legs crossed and a harp against his chest, plucking the strings with careful, gentle fingers. You didn't move – you couldn't, caught up in his focused expression, unable to tear yourself from his melody for even a moment.

"I'm not very good at harp," he paused to tell you, allowing you to break from concentration and make your way over to him. "I had to teach myself, and I'm not a very good teacher."

You giggled, covering your mouth with your hand as you did so.

"Is this what you wanted to show me?" You asked quietly, tilting your head.

"I... well.. yes, I'm... I'm just nervous, I'm sorry. I've never played in front of anyone, and I know you like harp. That's sort of why I, um, picked it up," he admitted abashedly, hiding his face from your eye.

"When did you learn that?"

"On one of our expeditions on the river," he said, his lip quirking up into a half-smile. "You were half asleep at the time. I don't expect you to remember it."

"I don't," you said, pleasantly surprised that he would remember that.

"The point is, I've been trying to get better. I practiced a lot, so hopefully I don't.. slip up," he said as he reached beneath a nearby pile of blankets, pulling out a roll of papyrus which he set in front of him.

You watched in curiosity as he cleared his throat, cheeks blushing despite the fact he hadn't even started. First he poised his fingers above the strings, then, after double checking the papyrus, he began. A sweet melody in major, simple to remember, and easy on the heart.

He cleared his throat again before he opened his mouth, a song falling from his lips. In that moment everything in your body stopped – you hadn't expected him to be a good singer. Hell, you hadn't expected him to actually be able to even play the harp, but here you were, being serenaded by your prince, comforted by his words and his simple presence.

"I love you, O still heart," he sang, "I stand alongside your image. Rejoice in sacredness, strong of voice – you are everything, perfect and pure, you are the earth and you are the sky. The ways I have hidden myself in you; My soul, My throne, O still heart, is yours."

When he finished you finally breathed again, your chest blooming a warmth you hadn't ever felt before. There were moments that could be considered similar, but when he looked up at you, uncertainty lacing his expectant eyes, nothing could compare.

You leaned forward, and wordlessly you pressed your lips up against his, kissing him sweetly in a moment he happily reciprocated. Comfort in his presence, happiness in his word, and it was home in his touch.

My hand in your hand

I walk with you

in all the beautiful places.

#ahkmenrah x reader #Ahkmenrah #Night at the Museum #rami malek #rami malek character #ahkmenrah x male reader #ahkmenrah x female reader

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electricbluebutterflies · 3 years

Note

Helnik + “You make me feel so small.”

This wasn’t originally INTENDED as smut but Nina is Nina and here we are. NSFW under the cut and also on ao3.

He’s not a worst-case scenario, Nina tells herself the third night.

Yes, Matthias is… complicated. She can blame cultural bullshit for quite a bit of that, just as the same could be said about her own quirks and tendencies, and there is a good man buried under those layers of ice. Frustrating as he is, he’s at least perceptive enough to realize they need to work together as much as possible until they are out of this frozen hell. And he’s kind, in his way, and-

Okay, maybe she’s officially broken him, she thinks as he strips down without being told.

Body heat is vital, in this space with nothing to start a fire with. Her powers will keep them stable, if it comes to that, but skin-on-skin as much as possible is still an important part of survival. He runs warmer than she would’ve expected, and between that and the size of him he’s quite comfortable to curl up with, even if he is…

Saints, he’s not even telling her not to look. What did she even do to him.

Under any other circumstances, and wrangling any other set of personal damage, Nina wouldn’t be overthinking this. She likes pretty, and whatever else he is, Matthias is definitely pretty. But already she can see a change from the first night, from him telling her not to look and hissing when she did anyways. Tonight he knows she’s eyeing him and it’s like he’s trying to show off for her, tempting her to say or do something.

She won’t. She isn’t in the mood. But she’ll think about it.

He is both solid and covered in fluff, always a nice combination. She’s trying to keep her eyes innocent, but if he wants her to look then she can and will take in everything. His prick would feel nice in her, if what it looks like soft is any indication. Now there’s a temptation. He thinks she’s a seductress, well…

“Your turn,” he says, snapping her out of wondering what it would take to get herself between him and a wall. “Only fair.”

Yeah, she can work with this.

Nina gets to her feet and steps into the center of the space, just close enough he could touch her if he wanted to and she wants to make him want. Been a bit since she’s had good enough reason to tease a potential lover like this and the idea is the most fun she’s had in too long. She bites her lip as she pushes her vest off her shoulders, daring him to say something, daring him to-

He stares like she’s the most perfect thing he’s ever seen, and she hasn’t even done anything interesting yet.

Skirt next, no formality to it just letting the fabric drop. She kicks off her boots in the same set of motions, and now she feels small and cold and-

Before she can overthink, she pulls her shirt off, and then they are equally exposed and cold and she is so conscious of her everything. She’s never felt small with anyone else, she thinks – sass and curves tend to negate that problem. But he’s more different than she’d thought, better different, and-

He crosses the distance and wraps his arms around her, surprisingly affectionate, and something inside her breaks.

“I shouldn’t have pushed,” he murmurs, and his mouth is way too close to her face. “Improper.”

“For you, maybe. For me this is nothing.”

He makes some kind of low horrified noise that makes her feel warm where she shouldn’t. “You are that casual with your skin?”

“I like sex. It doesn’t have to mean anything for me. Just as long as the other person is pretty and they want me.” As if to prove a point, she shifts her hips against his, feels his body perking up against her belly. Pretty and wants her. She’s already won.

“I don’t… how do I know this is real?”

Nina rolls her eyes. “Right now I’m using my powers to make sure I don’t turn into an icicle, not on your prick. Promise.”

He seems to accept that, shifts their positions slightly to confirm that yep his body is responding to this. “Still. Why me?”

“You’re here and you’re warm,” she murmurs, leaning up to kiss his jawline. “And you want me,” as she kisses his cheek. “And I love a challenge.”

“Challenge?” he repeats.

She puts her mouth on his. Pretty man has never done this in any way that counted, she knows that much now. “You make me feel small,” she says against his lips. “I’ve never had that. I’d like to know what it’s like when I’m being fucked into a mattress.”

Well, mattress is a bit of a stretch here, but… point holds, she thinks.

“You are asking me to…”

“Yeah. If you want. Get all your inexperience out on me so whatever nice girl you end up married to someday doesn’t have to deal with it.”

“You worry me.”

“Good.”

As if to prove some kind of point, she slips her hand between them and runs a finger over the tip of his prick. He’s already leaking for her, and he squirms but doesn’t move away from her touch. Oh, perfect pretty man. She’ll ruin him so well.

“What do you need me to do?” he asks, voice shaking.

“You can touch. Anywhere you want. I’m easy to turn on.” And warm enough he could lay her right now and it would be a good time for both of them, but she’s curious if the concept of foreplay has made it that far north and she wants to see what he does.

He takes half a step back, enough to take a good look at her. She’s already pink with desire, already easy to claim. One of his hands cups one of her breasts, then the other follows, and she sighs as he thumbs at her nipples. Good man.

“Does that feel…?”

“Unless I start yelling at you, assume I like anything you do.”

His hands slip down her body, slowly descending her curves and around to map her backside before looping back over her thighs and where she wants them. She’s dripping, she hasn’t looked but she can feel the mess on her inner thighs, and he makes a pleased sound as she finds it. She half expects some comment about her fluff down there, but-

“Now do I…”

Nina backs away and spreads herself out on the mattress, legs parted perfectly. “I’m good. All you need to do is cover me.”

He follows her, straddles her thighs like at least this part he understands. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You’ll know if you do. I trust you.”

She closes her eyes as he enters her and yes, she still feels small like this. Covered and warm as they adjust to the newness of each other, warm as he leans down for hesitant kisses. He could break her heart if she let him, and that scares her, and-

“Did I do something wrong?” he murmurs. His body is comfortably on top of hers, his face inches from hers. This is what she’d hoped for with body heat, and-

“I was wrong about you,” she breathes as she turns her head for more kisses. “I like that.”

He rolls his hips with the uncertainty of the inexperienced, finds inconsistent patterns and she’d love to be in his head right now experiencing the newness of it all right there with him. It is not objectively a good lay on that level, and yet the affection and the intent make it okay, the hesitance in his eyes as he takes a kiss every time he tries something else.

She doesn’t get off. For the first time, she doesn’t care.

“Are you…?” he says as he gets off her, the uncertainty of so many questions dangling between them.

“That was good. If I didn’t push you too far…”

“I wanted you,” Matthias says with a confidence that surprises both of them. “And you wanted me. And that makes it alright?”

“Something like that. Now get back over here. I’m sleepy and you’re warm.”

They won’t talk about it. They don’t need to.

#pixievixen #ebf writes fic #helnik

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writingithink · 3 years

Text

Improbable Multiversal Transcending Temporal Spacetime Event Pairing: Metacrisis Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler Rated: T Word Count: 7,101 Summary: The best way to show someone you care is to blow up their job ... right? Notes: I'm back! And it's not a Tangled Timelines update (sorry!) But it is something? I've had this in my WIPs for awHILE now, and when I was cleaning my studio the other night I found a planning page for it in a random tote bag and was like ... oh yeah. And the ending just came to me and I love it when that happens. Hopefully there will be another chapter up for Tangled Timelines soon, though!

As always, infinite thanks to my wonderful beta, @hey-there-juliet who is fine with me randomly sending her fics at all hours and with no warning XP

All mistakes are mine, as always.

<<READ IT ON AO3>>

If the other him in the other universe had taken the time to imagine their human life together in a parallel universe, the Doctor doubted he would have pictured this. His imagination, when it came to Rose Tyler, was always quite whimsical. Happiness had made him impractical, really. Because despite all of the drawbacks, all of the reasons he currently loathed himself, the Doctor knew every single reason why the other truly felt like this was the best possible option.

But maybe it wasn’t.

Sometimes, despite it not occurring too often, he was wrong.

They had spent five and a half hours on the beach at Bad Wolf Bay.

(I create myself.)

She had been so upset; said that after everything they’d went through, everything she did to get back, the other him owed her a proper goodbye. She had stopped speaking to him when he told her that, actually, he would never give her a proper goodbye.

And she didn’t let him explain why. Now that he finally could.

Now it had been 57 days since she’d last spoken to him. Since he’d gotten more than a brief glimpse of her with his own eyes. That he’d spent piecing together a picture of what her life had been like here, without him. Such a short time, really, now that it was over (almost over), but yet also some of the worst moments of his entire existence.

It seemed fair that the multiverse would demand just that extra sequence of pain, considering everything he could potentially get in return. What another version of himself could only hope for, bitterly gambling eternities, following their timeline through all of it’s complicated swirls and turns, names weaving around each other, stamping themselves on the structure of creation.

Forever isn’t something that ends.

(How long are you going to stay with me?)

Quite the opposite, actually. And he knew, eventually, she would remember that. Knew it, but didn’t feel it.

The Doctor finally understood what all of the human writers meant about falling in love. Not just the terrifying sensation of the unstoppable freefall, but also the immense pain of crashing into the immovable object at the end of the journey.

They had sat on opposite ends of a Zeppelin. He had gone back to the Tyler Manor with Jackie, and Rose had gone back to her flat. Hoping to see her, talk to her, he had immediately joined Torchwood (once they agreed to his very detailed, highly specific, entirely ironclad contract). Their paths rarely crossed, and when they did it was just tiny, insubstantial moments.

A flash of her at the far end of a hall. Her name in a report (a lot of reports). Snatches of her voice, there one moment and gone the next.

It all made everything hurt so much more, somehow, having her so close but yet further than he could have possibly imagined.

But yet …

His imagination, when it came to Rose Tyler, was still quite whimsical. So when he tried to think of the bigger picture, waxing poetic, alone on his office couch, the Doctor tried to look at the last few years as the impact, and this as the aftershock. Still, philosophical jaunts weren’t exactly a solution to his problem. A temporary solution was moving his office even further away, so that’s what he did.

Plus, he found it kind of fitting, commandeering the inside of Big Ben. UNIT may have it in the prime universe, but in this universe he had the fancy landmark office. Well, office-slash-home (without Rose Tyler, a proper house with doors and things was absolutely unthinkable). Not that it was just about having a private laugh. The gears soothed him, the sound of ticking helped the gnawing emptiness that had filled his mind ever since the TARDIS dematerialized without him in it. The Doctor had thought it was kind of fitting - the closest he could possibly be right now to time.

Not that he wasn’t spending every possible spare moment working on the baby TARDIS, just a tiny piece of coral still, currently sitting in the extended electro-percussive environment chamber. He wondered if, in three years (his best-possible projected timetable), when the new TARDIS would be ready for flight, she would still not be speaking to him.

Incidentally, the emergence of that thought and the start of his supposed ‘self-isolation’ coincided to an alarming degree for how coincidental the two really were. The fact of the matter was, he was busy. Tons of experiments to run, alien equipment to identify, classify (and more often than not remove from Torchwood entirely), a baby TARDIS to tend to, and a backlog of Rose’s mission reports to hack into made spending slightly over three weeks in his tower easy.

The problem was the fact that during that time the Doctor avoided sleeping, barely remembered to eat, and existed on overly sugared tea alone. Not sleeping didn’t put the demons at bay, but at least when he was awake he wasn’t forced to confront the man he never wanted to remember being.

It had been 57 days since Rose Tyler had last spoken to him, and the Doctor detonated a bomb in the abandoned annex Torchwood had scheduled to be demolished and rebuilt.

Then the counter reset to zero.

“What do you think you’re doing?!” she yelled, barging into the top floor lab where he had been checking the readings on the EEPEC.

Everything that he wanted to say to her, and the Doctor was struck mute.

“Whatever plans you think you have, however good of an idea it is, for the good of the planet or, or the galaxy or what, you don’t just go blowing up buildings without a word to anyone! Do you know that everyone else was too scared to come up here and have a word with you, because that highly confidential ridiculous contract you drew up made its way through the gossips and isn’t so classified anymore. Now no one wants to go toe to toe with the man who ‘speaks for the planet’,” Rose growled through the air quotes. “So tell me, Doctor, what genius reason you’ve got for blowing up the Records Annex?”

A slow smile spread across his face.

“It worked.”

“What?”

“Remember ‘run’?” he asked, bouncing away from the baby TARDIS and circling her, picking up his new sonic screwdriver as he did and deadlock sealing the only door off the floor.

“Run?” she frowned as he circled back.

“Run,” he whispered in her ear as he passed, running up a small set of stairs to flip a giant switch that activated the clock-lights outside of their automated timer. Likely no one noticed outside with the sun still out, but it lit up the lab. “Henrik’s basement, Nestene Consciousness, shop window dummies, you and me. How did that night end?” he asked, with a manic grin as he skidded to a stop in front of her.

“Oh, that ‘run’,” Rose breathed, trying to fight back a smile. “You blew up my job.”

“I blew up your job.”

She huffed, blowing her bangs out of her eyes, and crossed her arms. His shoulders fell, exhaustion pressing down onto each and every bone of his new, much more fragile body.

“I just want to talk,” he told her, only a moment away from begging.

“Alright then. Talk.”

Everything he wanted to say to her, and all of it felt disjointed in his overtired mind. Yet she was here now, and if she left he didn’t have a new idea for getting her back again. So he talked.

“I’m sorry. That I made this choice for you, even if it was technically a different me who did it. I’m sorry that this is the best option, the safest option. I’m sorry I never got the chance to explain everything to you before. But I am never going to say goodbye to you, Rose. Never. And I know that the power of words doesn’t translate as well for you, the science of psycho-kinetic-telepathic influence on the elements of creation. But there are some things I can never risk saying aloud. There are some beings that exist, at least in our original universe, that could easily- … still, no matter what universe we’re in, I’m never going to say it. Forever, Rose Tyler. It’s longer than you can comprehend. An eternal silence stretching infinitely ahead, timelines swirling in every direction. This one is ours, if you’ll- if you could just- if you could see in twenty-odd dimensions and focused on individual temporal waveforms, the quantum reality of specific-”

“Doctor!” she shouted when his legs gave out, immediately grabbing hold of him, joining him on the floor.

“I’m fine,” he insisted, but when he moved to get back up she easily held him down. Rose gently manipulated his face, giving him a basic medical check. He couldn’t help but smile a little at how much she had learned while they were away, only to then frown at how hard he imagined it all must have been for her. Floundering, he tried to make a joke. “So, I’m still the Doctor?”

Which went ignored.

“You look like a wreck,” she told him, and it wasn’t new information. The Doctor now made much more frequent trips to the restroom and was well aware of how pale he was, of the dark circles under his bloodshot eyes. He had at least been making a disjointed effort to shave, which was another activity that had increased with his meta crisis, and admittedly it had slipped his mind for a couple days.

“It’s not easy, doing this without you,” he admitted. “But if you need more time, I want you to take it. I really am alright. There’s just so much I need to tell you, now that I can.”

“What do you mean, ‘now that you can’?”

“Different universe, firm walls in between. I don’t have to worry about using the wrong words at the wrong time and having cosmic consequences … for a lot of things, not all things. With our timeline in a different dimension and reality back as it should be, at least for the moment, I can tell you all sorts of things. Though the most important one, the one I’m never going to miss an opportunity to say, is that I love you, Rose Tyler. Forever.”

“I love you, too,” she sighed, caressing his cheek for a moment before helping him up. “But I’m still mad at you. Now you need sleep.”

“But I’m not done talking,” the Doctor complained, dragging his feet as she led him over to the sofa in the corner.

“We’ll talk more after you’ve gotten some rest, okay? I promise.”

“Thank you,” he sighed, more horizontal than he remembered being just a moment ago. Something soft and warm ensconced his body. He hadn’t realized how cold he had been until just then.

Another breath and black oblivion overtook him. Peaceful until it suddenly very much wasn’t.

A shockwave. A rift in time and space. A breached void. A crack in reality. A big red button. No more. Howling, howling, howling.

“Wake up!”

His eyes snapped open.

He didn’t know where he was. Nothing felt right; not the air, not time, not even his own body. The Doctor tried to do a quick systems check, and the results were all wrong. His hand flew to his chest, where only one heart was beating.

A choking scream echoed through the space, which seemed to be tick tick ticking, and he didn’t realize that it was him who shouted until soothing hands were brushing through his hair. Vision focusing, he saw Rose Tyler kneeling next to him, or at least it was something that looked like Rose Tyler. She felt too cool. Or maybe he was too warm.

“Are you real?” he asked, hoping that she wouldn’t lie to him.

Just one heart working, and it was beating too fast, refusing to slow down. The air was too thick, he couldn’t breathe.

“Yeah.” A sad smile. “I’m real.”

The Doctor didn’t know if he believed her, closing his eyes so that he wouldn’t have to see the moment she inevitably vanished. “I’m dying,” he told the being-who-might-be-Rose as he shuddered and collapsed back onto some sort of sofa.

“You’re fine,” she lied, but it was a lie she seemed to believe.

“Only got one heart beating,” he admitted, trying to get his breathing under control as his malfunctioning body began to sweat. The room ticked away, and he wondered if all of this was about to explode, if he should be running, if he even could run. His legs felt like lead. So did his arms. The air was too thick, dragging him down.

“That’s-”

The Doctor shut his eyes tighter, tears escaping that he hadn’t even realized were there. She must have vanished, just like he knew she would. And if she was never real to begin with, why did it have to hurt so much for her to go?

A weight rested on top of him, and he would never forget the feel of her. He vaguely wondered what it meant for him, to be having tactile hallucinations. Olfactory hallucinations. Even the buzz of time that had never left her skin after she took in the vortex was present.

“You’ve still got two beating,” Rose whispered as his arms wrapped around her in a tight hold that didn’t feel nearly strong enough to keep her. He wasn’t strong enough to keep her.

Her heart beat steadily over where his right heart had failed.

“I’m scared,” the Doctor admitted, eyes still closed though it was oddly easier to breathe.

“I’ve got you.”

“Please be real,” he whimpered, even as his mind grew foggier.

She said something, but he didn’t know what. Everything was fading away, darkness becoming darker, becoming void.

Nothing.

The Doctor awoke alone on the couch in his office. According to his time sense, he had slept for eighteen hours and twenty-one minutes. He felt better than he had in weeks, but also so much worse. He grabbed his pillow and screamed into it.

“What’s wrong now?”

The pillow dropped from his hands and his eyes locked with Rose’s as she raced up the slight stair onto the platform that separated his primary workspace from the rest of the top floor.

“What?” His voice cracked.

Rose Tyler sat next to him on the couch, hand immediately resting on his forehead, primitively gauging his temperature. The Doctor cleared his throat before trying again.

“Rose, what are you doing here? Not that I’m not glad, I’m so very, very glad you’ve come.” Her hand dropped away and he was able to get a good look at her, dressed in a pair of his boxers and one of his shirts (Jackie had bought him a ridiculous amount of clothes before he left the manor, all of which he sent out to be cleaned). He swallowed audibly. “W-why are you wearing my clothes?”

“‘M locked in here. Door’s deadlock sealed.”

Flashes of memories began to speed through him. Attaching a re-calibrated Tziklian implosion grenade to a newly-repaired retroreflective Clishtahrr drone. Obsessively trying to circumvent his vision in order to peer at his own timeline, making himself sick. A contained rift event in the lower levels of the tower that made him feel like he had looked into the untempered schism again.

(Run, run, run!)

“I’m sorry. I don’t … I’ll just …”

He pushed himself up onto unsteady legs, found his sonic screwdriver and unsealed the door. And he wished he hadn’t trapped her with him, even if he was starting to remember why (inky black terror crawling up his spine, wrong universe, wrong universe, wrong universe).

“Do you remember what happened yesterday?” she asked, following him as he went to check the TARDIS on autopilot, looking as if she was worried he would collapse (again).

“It’s coming back to me,” the Doctor admitted. Still had a good four hours to go before the shatterfry process would be complete. He straightened his shoulders, trying to stand tall as he turned to face her. “Things got a little, uhm, unpleasant. I’ll do better.”

“Unpleasant,” Rose scoffed. “I’m pretty sure you had a bleedin’ breakdown!”

“It’s been a difficult regeneration,” he deflected, turning away, leaving the platform and making a beeline to the tiny kitchenette tucked off to the side. Tea. He just needed more tea.

“So, this how it’s gonna be, then? All that stuff about wanting to talk, but now you’re just done?”

He nearly spilled the kettle with the speed of his turn, brows furrowed and mouth falling open. “What? Of course I want to talk!” the Doctor exclaimed. “Just, er, what did I say? Before?”

Memory was still a bit of a blur. Successful energy funnel for the TARDIS’ growth tank. Vodka tasting different in a universe without potatoes. Reports saying: Correct universe. Wrong time - past. No contact.

“You don’t remember?”

“I said it was coming back to me, it’s just not coming in the right order.” he sighed, refocusing on the tea.

“Well, what’s the last thing that you vividly remember?” Rose asked, moving around him, easily finding mugs and sugar and milk.

“Thirteen days ago, creating a temporal disruption chrono-field manipulator. Needed to siphon rift energy for our TARDIS. She needs a very specific growth environment.”

“Thirteen days?! Wait, siphoning the-” She leaned against the tiny countertop and covered her face with her hands. The only sound for a few moments was of the electric kettle quickly boiling the water. “Our TARDIS?”

“If you want,” the Doctor muttered, lifting a hand, wanting to touch her, but then thinking better of it. He clenched his fist as it dropped to his side.

Rose groaned as she turned back to him. “Of course I want that, you daft alien git! But you don’t exactly make things easy, do ya? I spent years getting back to you, and then suddenly there’s two of you and one of you abandons me just like I was always afraid of, but one of you stays and I’m expected to be able to process any of it? And then for weeks it’s an effort just to give myself space, knowing that wherever I go you’re so close, part of me wondering why I’m even trying to stay away when all I wanted for ages was to be back with you. Then suddenly you’re gone! I still know where you are, but there isn’t a chance that I’d actually run into you. And I still don’t know what to feel, but coming here yesterday, seeing you … I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look so broken.” There were tears in her eyes. His nails dug into his palms with the effort it took not to wrap his arms around her, to wipe them away. “I can’t help but feel like it’s my fault.”

“It’s not. It’s my own fault. You haven’t done a single thing wrong,” he assured her.

“That’s not true and you know it,” she tried to laugh, but it came out watery. “I’ve been an absolute cow. And I still haven’t answered your question. You’d said some things about words being a type of science, and that you could say things here that you couldn’t in the other universe. Like you were paranoid, under surveillance or something? I think you tried to describe how your time sense stuff works, but you almost fainted.”

“Fifty-seven days without you and that’s what I was talking about?” The Doctor grimaced.

The kettle clicked off.

“If it makes you feel better, it was kinda romantic. The stuff about not saying goodbye and forever and blowing up my job.”

“Blowing up your what?!”

“That’s why I had to come here. You blew up the old Records Annex.”

“Riiiiight. That explains the drone bomb. It’s not like they weren’t going to blow it up anyway. Didn’t I help?”

Rose rolled her eyes before moving to fix both their teas. “We’ll get into that later. Right now I don’t even want to talk about us. I wanna know about you, what you’ve been doing these past two months. Because I didn’t even stop to think what this all must be like for you.”

Cuppa in hand, the Doctor led her back to the couch as he tried to think of how best to explain something that he barely understood himself.

“I was created in a two-way human-Time Lord instant biological meta crisis. Hundreds of years as one being, then suddenly two. Exact same mind, almost the exact same body, but different enough that I can barely comprehend existing in it. If you remember, the first forty-eight hours of the regeneration cycle are complicated and dangerous. Barely a few hours into mine I was dropped outside of the prime universe that all Gallifreyans are meant to exist in, cut off from all telepathic contact as the walls of reality continued to sway, slowly falling back into place. It’s been … an adjustment. Sometimes things don’t feel real, even when they are. Sometimes things feel incredibly real, even when they aren’t.”

“You had a nightmare,” Rose told him, placing a hand on his shoulder, thumb rubbing soothing circles through his layers. “I woke you up, tried to help. You didn’t think I was real. You thought you were dying, because you only had one heart.”

He tried to smile, and the action felt painful. “Sounds about right.”

“I’m sorry. If I hadn’t been so selfish-”

“There’s nothing for you to apologize for. I want you to put yourself first.”

“But I can’t stand seeing you in pain like this. What can I do to help?” she asked, a desperation in her eyes that he couldn’t bear.

“You’re already helping,” the Doctor sighed, finally giving in and leaning into her touch, lying his head on her shoulder. It was the closest he’d felt to time since they’d been left on that bloody beach.

Memories were still racing through his head. Energy coils radiating artron energy into a centrifuge. The smell of burnt flesh against the remains of a Bverni navigational system. Reports saying: Correct universe. Wrong time - future. No contact.

“The other Doctor said that you needed me.”

He laughed, but there was no humor in it.

“Yes, because he needs you. He also said that I was dangerous. I am. He is. We are. But you already knew that. It’s easy, you know, to yell at yourself. Not often that there’s actually a separate you there to yell at. I destroyed the Daleks, but we’d already done that before we met. In fact, so did you. The other me was lashing out, knowing what he would have to do but not wanting to do it.”

“That’s another thing,” Rose said, moving to face him, dislodging his head, “you said that us being here, in this universe, was the best, safest option. What was that about?”

“Something’s coming. Has come. Ended and began. There’s a massive paradox surrounding me in the other universe. Incredibly dangerous, potentially catastrophic. All I know is that it has something to do with a woman named River Song who claims to be my wife.”

“Your wife?!”

“I said claims. And she did seem to be telling the truth, besides the fact that what she was saying was entirely preposterous. My soul is entirely bound to yours.” The Doctor took her hand and squeezed it. “So I think I have an idea of the kind of man I’ll have to become in order to keep the universe intact.”

“What’s that?”

“A liar. If she is going to believe that I could possibly join myself to someone else, someone who isn’t you, I’m going to have to lie. I’m going to have to forget. I’m going to have to lie so well and for so long that even I believe the fiction I’ve created for myself.”

He wondered what the other him in the other universe would think, then, whenever he caught a rare glimpse at their timeline surrounded in gold, bound with Rose’s for all eternity. What kind of explanation he would craft. The Doctor shuddered.

“But that sounds horrible!” she cried.

“It’s the sacrifice he’s making for the sake of the universe. My timeline is dangerous and someone, something is tampering with it. You and I made one tiny little paradox and it almost destroyed everything. This one is circular, might be able to be maintained, but the scale of it, Rose. And who knows if it will even work. River seems great and all, at least I hope so, but I don’t think she has much of a handle on time travel. That, or she’s a manipulative psychopath. Suppose that’s a surprise for the other me to find out.”

Rose sniffled and he pulled her into a hug.

“He’s going to be all alone.” The words were muffled into his shoulder, his shirt growing damp with her tears. He cringed and tried to think rationally, that of course she would feel this way, that it had nothing to do with how she felt about him him. But then again, maybe it did.

“He won’t be alone. He’ll find someone. I always do, eventually.”

“B-but I-”

“We’ll figure it out. How to get you back there, once it’s safe,” he whispered into the top of her head. Maybe that would be it- what she needed this him for. And if so, it would be enough. It would have to be enough.

“Really?”

The Doctor nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

“So it’s not- you really weren’t abandoning me here?” Rose lifted her head, eyes brimming with a hope that had been missing before.

“Never.” The word felt as if it was torn out of his very being.

She cupped his cheek, stubble beginning to smooth out into the beginnings of a beard. He really needed to shave.

“I thought you said to never say never ever?”

“That was before.”

It occurred to him that he had tea, so he took a sip - it had gone cold.

“Oh, right, all the, uhm, psychic-kinetic-telepathy science stuff.”

He opened his mouth to correct her - she was very close, though - but was interrupted by the ringing of the giant clock. It was heavily muffled by the sound proofing adjustments he had made while setting up the office, but still audible enough.

“It’s eight now, yeah?” Rose asked, even as she moved away.

“Yes.”

She walked over to his desk, where the Doctor now noticed a pile of her folded clothes sat. He frowned when she brought them over to him.

“Do you think you could sonic these clean for me? I’m gonna quick hop into your decontamination shower.”

“Th- there’s a proper shower, it’s two floors down. First left, third right, door marked ‘Security Level Alpha’.”

“What, really?”

“Didn’t want random lab techs using it. Has a retina scan. It’ll let you in.”

Rose laughed, ruffled his hair, and gave him a kiss on the cheek before disappearing to get ready for work. The whole thing left him confused. He went through his list again, checking and double checking to make sure that this all was real . It was, just as it had been all morning.

More memories. Recalibrating the tower’s new sub-basement weapon’s vault. Burnt toast and no more jam left. Reports saying: Correct universe. Wrong time - future. Contact made.

It wasn’t fair that she had spent almost an entire day with him yet he had missed most of it. Still, he sonicked her clothes, as well as his tea. Finished his cuppa, and then had a second before Rose came back from her shower.

“Why’s there no one around?”

“Dangerous radiation leak,” the Doctor shrugged. “I fixed it almost as soon as it happened, but apparently there’s ‘procedures’. How’d you get in?”

She bit her lip, fighting a smile. “Mighta shot a few of your doors,” Rose admitted, picking up an electro-pulse blaster off of a nearby cart. Non-lethal on organic matter. Very effective on fancy doors. “Nobody told me anything about a radiation leak, though.”

“Classified radiation leak.”

“And why’s that?” she scowled, hands on her hips.

“Everything to do with time travel is classified to this office. Bethany is not being very cooperative about putting you down as a liaison-whatever. Please believe me, I wasn’t trying to keep anything a secret.”

“Oh.” Rose glanced over at the EEPEC, absently biting her thumbnail.

The Doctor didn’t know what she was thinking, didn’t know if he should ask. After a moment she disappeared into the loo to change, promising to be back in a tick.

It was a funny multiverse, really, that his reunion with Rose Tyler would be such a stilted thing. That it would be about him and her, but not this him. Acknowledged with a few questions after his health, sure, but that was just polite. She’d always been compassionate, caring for others. Rose didn’t see him as the Doctor. Not the proper one. Sure, she used his name, but it would be easier for her to do that this time around.

He looked just like him.

He was him.

But he wasn’t.

Memories were still coming. Adjustments to Torchwood’s alien tech retrieval protocols. Nutrition shots. Reports reading: Correct universe. Wrong time - past. Contact made.

He went through the list again. Still real.

Unless it wasn’t.

Unless he wasn’t.

What would have stopped the other Doctor from knocking him out and uploading him into a matrix? Giving him a half-life with a programmed Rose Tyler?

The air here felt wrong.

(Wrong universe. Wrong universe. Wrong universe.)

“Doctor!”

(Daleks exploding. “What have you done?!”)

Pressure against his hands. Why was it so dark?

The Doctor opened his eyes to see Rose in front of him, pulling his fingers away from his palms. Oh. He was bleeding. Hadn’t even noticed.

“Sorry, sorry.” He spun away from her in order to grab the first aid kit from his desk.

“What happened?” she asked, vibrating with barely contained panic.

“Nothing, nothing. Things just got jumbled for a second,” he assured her, efficiently cleaning his palms and wrapping them in gauze in a practiced motion.

“How often do you-”

“Hard to say. I’ve been graphing them. Seems to be stress contingent, but generally decreasing. My senses are gradually acclimating to this universe, so I have to hope that once they do, I’ll be fine. Perfect. Molto bene. No inconvenient lapses.”

“Stress? What h- oh.”

He didn’t like the sound of that ‘oh’. The Doctor clenched his jaw before facing her.

“We still haven’t talked about us,” Rose pointed out, approaching him slowly. Like he was a wild animal. Like he would hurt her. “And you … you don’t really remember yesterday still, do you?”

“Not really.”

His hands hurt. His body ached. One heart, and it was beating so quickly that he was sure it would give out.

Rose wrapped her arms around him and he automatically returned the embrace.

“Maybe I should just call in,” she suggested as she pulled away. “We can just take the day?”

“Or don’t and stay anyway,” the Doctor couldn’t help pointing out. “Some bits have come back, and didn’t they send you here?”

She burst into laughter. “Oh my god, they did!”

And it was beyond words, how great it was to hear her laughing again. To see her smiling.

But …

That was wrong.

Rose was upset with him.

Time didn’t feel right.

The air tasted off.

Wrong Universe. Wrong Universe. Wrong Universe.

The Doctor staggered backwards.

His respiratory bypass was malfunctioning. It was like it wasn’t even there. He couldn’t get air into his lungs.

Everything went black.

There was a shot of gold, and then a different kind of black.

“Doctor,” said a whisper in the dark. “The timer went off for the TARDIS. ‘M I supposed to take her out of that thing?”

A TARDIS timer?

TARDIS … timer …

The timer for the extended electro-percussive environment chamber!!!

The Doctor shot up from where he had apparently been lying on the couch and ran over to the EEPEC, swiftly shut it off, removed the tank housing their baby TARDIS, and then poured in the pre-prepared aqueous nutrient solution before inserting the tank into the quasi-dimensional artron chamber (currently set to it’s highest opacity setting).

“Hah!” he exclaimed, punching his fist in the air and itching to switch the chamber’s outside view settings to transparent. He turned to Rose, opened his mouth to ask her, and then paused.

It all came back to him, all of it, not just the jumbled recollections he had been getting earlier. Apparently he had fallen into a healing coma, and it seems to have been just what he needed … but it all truly hadn’t been fair to Rose. Though, to be fair, she was currently smiling like it was Christmas, so-

Christmas. Healing comas.

Huh.

“Shall we switch it to transparent?” the Doctor asked, unable to reign himself in any longer. “It was clear when Benny - quite the coincidence, right? - helped me set it up. This is a quasi-dimensional artron chamber. It’s funnelling in rift energy and centrifuging artron particles, and the end result in that chamber is the specific environment needed to properly grow a TARDIS. Well, along with the chrono-nutritio aqueous habitat. Benny describes looking into it as being similar to taking DMT, which, by the way, is completely inaccurate. It’s exactly like looking into an Eye of Harmony. If it’s malfunctioning, it’s like looking into the untempered schism, which I don’t recommend. But everything’s stable now, we could-”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to look into the vortex?” Rose interrupted, and …

“Right … erm, well ,” he hedged, scratching the back of his neck, “I mean, it isn’t actually the vortex, but you’re probably not completely wrong. Best not risk it.”

Excitement abating, the Doctor slumped against the chamber and at that moment realized that he had been changed into jim jams.

Jim jams. Healing comas.

Huh.

At least these were his own pajamas, and not some ‘friend’ of Jackie’s, though how strange was it that he owned his own pajamas in the first place?

“C’mere,” Rose said, beckoning him back toward the couch, which she was sitting next to, but not on. Not your typical decision, but he had likely taken up all of the space earlier. “I made you some tea.”

It really wasn’t worth it, cataloguing the similarities between this and when he had first regenerated into this body … even though the list did seem to be growing.

“Perfect! Just what I need!” the Doctor smiled as he walked over, taking a seat next to Rose on the floor.

Silence fell as he sipped his tea, and he found himself unsure of what to do or say next. There was too much to say, and he’d certainly done a piss poor job of organizing his thoughts earlier.

“Feeling better?” she asked, after another moment.

Small talk. He could definitely do small talk.

“Mmm yes, very much so.”

“Better enough to talk?”

The Doctor coughed, having swallowed his tea incorrectly (bloody hybrid body, still acting up), before nodding. Rose moved onto the couch and he scrambled to join her.

“So,” she began and paused, face scrunching up in concentration (it was nice to know that he wasn’t the only one who found this whole business incredibly awkward), “I guess … what is it that you actually want? Aside from a working TARDIS, that is.”

His brows furrowed.

Sure, there were plenty of ways he could answer that question and have all of them be true, but he had a feeling that she was looking for a specific type of ‘want’.

Problem was, the Doctor wasn’t quite sure what that was .

“What?” he asked, in lieu of any better things to say (as the runner up response was to ask for some jam, or maybe a banana, or some of the takeaway from the shop down the corner and blimey, he was hungry).

“This whole time, all of it, since you c- since you were- since you stopped just bein’ a hand- ” the Doctor had a list of complaints and corrections that he barely held in “- nobody’s asked what you wanted. The D- the other Doctor chose for both of us, really, and I hadn’t really looked at it that way before. An’ I wanna know. What do you want?”

Removed from the actual experience itself (and therefore not feeling incredibly, deathly ill), visions of the slight peek he’d gotten four days ago of his own timeline played in his head.

The Doctor grabbed Rose’s hand, weaving their fingers together.

“I want this.”

She smiled and gave his hand a squeeze.

“Care to elaborate?” she asked with a slight laugh.

“Nope,” he replied, popping the ‘p’. “Because as long as you’re happy, everything else is just- just semantics. I mean, obviously it’s going to be a bit dull until the TARDIS has grown enough for proper travel, but I think we can make do?” At least, he really hoped so. It hadn’t been going swimmingly so far, but the Doctor sincerely hoped that he could chalk all that up to the initial side effects of the meta crisis, compounded by all of the, er … technical difficulties he had run into while constructing the TARDIS’ growth tank. Also, his new hybrid body needed much more maintenance than he was used to, including sleep. Really was rubbish without regular sleep. Such a waste of time.

“So, if I were to suggest you moving into the flat?”

He opened his mouth, intending to immediately agree, but then frowned. The TARDIS was here, after all. And he absolutely could not move her. Not at this stage. Not until she could connect to other dimensions on her own. The Doctor looked over at the quasi-dimensional artron chamber, once again wishing that he could switch it to transparent and watch the process unfold.

“How moved in is moved in?” he asked once he forced himself to turn back toward Rose.

“You’d sleep there, shower there, eat some of your meals. Most of your clothes an’ stuff would be there. Y’know. It’d be where you live. With me. If you want.”

“And that’s what you want?” he double checked, trying not to telegraph his surprise - he must have missed a lot while in a coma, as last he knew they were teetering on the edge of a row.

Rose rolled her eyes, and that was much more in line with where he thought they were at, er, relationship-wise.

“Well, I don’t fancy living in a clocktower office. When I’m done working, I’d like to not still be at work, ta.”

She did make some excellent points … but still, it all implied that they would be staying together. And that was what he wanted, of course it was, but the Doctor still couldn’t help but feel he had missed something crucial despite the fact that he could now remember everything clearly.

“You blew up my job. ”

“I love you, too. But I’m still mad at you.”

“You’ve still got two beating.”

Maybe there wasn’t something to have missed. Human emotions were relatively complex, after all, and there was no rule requiring them to happen in isolation.

“Are you still mad at me?” he asked, realizing as he did that to Rose it was coming from seemingly out of nowhere.

This was confirmed as she blinked, brows furrowing.

“I don’t know. Maybe a little, but …”

“But?” the Doctor repeated, unable to stand the suspense.

“It’s hardly the first time we’ve had a fight, yeah?”

He nodded, unsure of where she was planning on going with this and hoping that he wouldn’t need to begin apologizing for every insensitive thing he’d said or done since they first met. It would take ages.

“Well, we always end up workin’ it out. And we did live together, travelin’ on the TARDIS, whether we had a row or not, so …” Rose shrugged, now examining her fingernails.

Speaking of the TARDIS, though …

“First things first,” the Doctor began, rubbing the back of his neck as he stood up and began pacing, “I want it on record that I would absolutely love to live in a flat with you, with carpets and doors and things. Assuming we’d spend much of our time traveling about, that is.” He turned back toward her, having paced his way back over to the TARDIS’ QDA chamber. “The thing is, it’s … I don’t want you to think that- the TARDIS. She needs me here. This is a critical development period. For the next three to six months, the TARDIS will be growing in the chamber, learning how to connect to and create dimensions. Until she can manage it, I can’t move her and she requires near-constant monitoring. Every hour or two.”

“She’s like a newborn baby,” Rose commented, getting up and joining him at the chamber, where she stroked the side.

“Exactly.”

“Well, I suppose this’ll have to do then,” she reluctantly … agreed? “As long as we’re living in the flat as soon as she’s moveable, mind. The bathroom here is two floors away.”

“It’s a clocktower, Rose! There’s only so much space.” The Doctor scrunched up his face as he said the word.

“Then why’d you pick this place? I know because of the Rift, but doesn’t it stretch further than just the tower?”

“Nope,” he shrugged.

It’s not as though he hadn’t checked.

“Really?”

“Small rift.”

“Yeah,” Rose laughed, “a small rift right under Big Ben.”

The Doctor laughed with her, amazed that he finally could.

Then he frowned.

It was all a little too good to be true.

Was this real?

“Hey.”

He refocused. Rose was right in front of him, their eyes locked.

“You were getting that look in your eyes,” she informed him.

“Look? What look?” the Doctor asked, though he was pretty sure he already knew. Some sort of dazed tell, some sort of glaringly obvious indicator that his grasp on reality was failing him.

“This look you get when you start thinkin’ you’re in the wrong universe.”

Wrong universe, wrong universe, wrong universe.

“Well, I am in the wrong universe,” he couldn’t help but point out.

“Yeah, I know. Me too. But y’know what?”

Rose wrapped her arms around him, and it was almost as if she were his tether, grounding him to this new reality they’d found themselves in.

“It’s better with two.”

#TenToo x Rose #doctor x rose #pairing: rose x doctor #timepetals #fic: improbable multiversal transcending spacetime event #fandom: doctor who #my fic

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