#unfortunately he has the strength of ten men

[llamagoddessofficial]

Skull snuggles. Just pure, unadulterated Skull snuggles. A commission courtesy of @robanilla, who knows what the people want~

---

For such a massive monster, he moved alarmingly quickly. 

One minute, you were nervously calling out into what seemed like an empty house. The next, you had been lifted up like a doll, brought up much too far from the ground, and thrown over a massive shoulder all before you could make a sound.

“H-hey!” you blurted, hands braced on his back, but Skull didn’t respond. You just came over for lunch! He pushed open his bedroom door and passed through, kicked it shut behind him... Skull had never let you in his room before, what was going on? It was dark - he’d drawn the curtains and turned off all the lights. 

Without warning, he shifted you off his table-like shoulder, unceremoniously dropping you. For a split second you felt fear rush through your whole body, but you landed harmlessly on your back, fall broken on his extremely plush bed. It wasn’t much of a bed anymore at this point, he had covered it with an obscene amount of pillows and blankets, shaping into more of a nest than anything else. 

When you looked up, his massive teeth were in your face. His voice came out low, shaking your entire body, much closer than you thought it would be.

“no running.”

You stared blankly at his mouth, only inches from you. Those fangs were big enough to carve through your skin like paper. “H-huh?” was all you could blurt out, when he was so close you could feel his hot breath. As if pinned beneath a dragon.

Once you forced yourself to look away from his teeth, you could see he was... he was on the bed with you, over top of you, clawed hands on either side of your head. Trapping you beneath him. The only light in the room was from the bloody red of his eye, and a faint glow behind his teeth. That’s why they looked so particularly dangerous in his mouth today; you couldn’t see his regular dopey smile. Only large, hungry fangs.

His eye was wide, unreadable, filling up his socket. Staring down at you with the intensity of a sun.

... Uh. What? Your heart was starting to pound, and you couldn’t tell if it was in a good or bad way. Skull was a friend, the kind who already knew stuff about you other friends would never know. The two of you were close - but you absolutely weren’t ‘get pinned underneath him’ close. You hadn’t even properly hugged yet. You had assumed he wasn’t open to that kind of affection, and touch had been limited to comforting pats on his huge arms, especially after the stories Crooks had told you about what he and Skull had been through.

You didn’t know whether to laugh, be nervous, or genuinely afraid. You shrank under him.

“I-I... don’t know what’s happening,” you said feebly. Was he upset with you? Had you done something?

Skull elected not to respond to that particular query. Neither his eye or mouth moved.

Instead, he laid his huge head down, right on your chest. 

Just like that, his full weight pressed onto you, squashing you into his nest. You let out a squeak as all the air came out of you at once, he was so heavy; it was like being pinned under a boulder, all you could do was kick your legs helplessly. If you’d been on any more solid surface you would’ve been crushed like a bug. 

“Agh! H-hey, what gives!?”

Skull just chuckled. Evidently, he was pleased with himself. He started to purr.

“can’t leave now.”

You braced your hands against his shoulders, but might as well have been bracing against a brick wall. Your face and ears were burning with something sort of like embarrassment, but not quite. “G-get off!” 

“cute heartbeat,” he murmured. Almost sleepily. He was acting so weird, so... well, clingy. “soft...”

He let you try to fight him for a little while. He seemed to enjoy it, from the way his deep purring was shaking your whole body, like sitting in a massage chair. But it didn’t matter how much you kicked your feet or pushed at his giant shoulders. He remained in place, content.

You gasped from the exertion of pushing, with no luck. Skull just pressed even closer, very slowly nuzzling your collarbone.

Crooks had warned you that Skull could be ‘possessive’, you had thought he meant it like Skull didn’t like his friends hanging out with other people. You didn’t think he meant Skull would grab you and pin you to his bed with his whole weight out of absolutely nowhere. Eventually, your hands had no choice but to fall to your sides.

“Okay, okay. What is it? What do you want from me?”

He let out a short, sharp exhale of breath. Quietly, he started fussing some of the pillows next to your head, rearranging and fluffing as best he could with one hand. “no leaving.”

“Ok, but why? Or what?”

“try to leave ‘n i’ll lick you.”

Huh? Your eyebrows scrunched together in mild horror. “L-lick!?” 

The glow you had noticed behind Skull’s teeth got brighter and brighter, until his mouth cracked open to reveal a glimmering, glowing ultramarine tongue. You had never seen it before, you didn’t even know Skull had a tongue.

“bleeeh.”

You let out a little horrified sound, leaning back as much as you could in your trapped position. But even as you did, you could feel your entire face flooding with even more warmth, to the point where your cheeks began to prickle and tingle. If Skull noticed your furious blushing he saved you the mortification of bringing it up.

"cute," he said, simply, as he put his tongue away.

You harmlessly whacked his shoulder.

He chuckled, a handsome and sweet sound. Despite the situation, and his ‘threat’, you had to admit it felt nice to see him grin like that. You hadn’t seen him this cheerful since before...

...

Oh.

“Are you... is this all because I was sick?” you asked, hesitantly.

You’d been bedridden for a day or so with some kind of flu. Skull hadn’t taken it very well, every time you’d coughed he’d had an expression like someone had shot him. He’d taken it even worse when he found out you’d popped a bunch of painkillers and gone to work the next day, despite very much still being unwell.

Your response from him was a very unhappy grunt, and a big eye that flitted away to instead stare at your arm. The hand that had been fussing the pillows instead started playing with the top of your sleeve, the ends of his claws occasionally brushing your skin. He was acting like a needy cat.

That’s what this was about? You lost some of your tension, looking down your body in disbelief at the pouting monster crushing you.

“Skull,” you spoke softly. “I’m not sick anymore.”

He looked right back up at you. The purring became quieter. His iris, still big and warm, sharpened. 

“liar.”

You flinched. “I-I am!”

“i can smell it. can't lie... just 'cus yer cute. don't work that way.”

“I’m fine. I’ll get better, humans get better quickly.” 

“no.”

You stammered, flustered and confused. “N-no?”

His eye sharpened again. It was impossible to hold eye contact with a monster who never blinked. “no.”

You laid your head back fully, letting out a defeated exhale. Skull’s purring ramped up again. You had no doubt he was inescapable, he was faster than you and stronger than you, and evidently absolutely determined to keep you in one place. You weren’t going anywhere, not with this big lug around.

“If I promise not to leave, will you stop crushing me?”

For once, something you'd said to him tonight seemed to be a good idea to him. After the usual amount of time he would take to think and gather himself, he lifted his body up on his elbows, instead gradually rolling onto his side - he clearly didn’t trust you much, though, because he immediately scooped you up, an arm tucking under you and dragging you back against his huge, broad chest.

His face nuzzled into the hair at the top of your head. He just couldn’t seem to sit still, he reached out and dragged a blanket over you. 

This was much better than being squashed.

“... Were you... really that worried about me?” you asked.

Just a hum, in response. That was a yes.

You patted his huge wrist. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

His socket lidded. The centre of his red iris was absolutely tiny, lingering on your chest, glowing with much more intensity than usual.

“... smelled so... sour. looked so... weak.” His voice was husky, finally getting calmer now that you’d finally completely stopped attempting escape. “bad memories. bad thoughts. no - won't lose you. no.”

Skull clearly decided he was done going wherever that train of thought was leading him. He settled down, and the purring began all over again.

...

“... I need to go home eventually, though. To make dinner.”

“i’ll make dinner. a good dinner.” An extremely thinly veiled jab at your unwillingness to eat properly. “staying.”

... Jeez. You really weren’t getting out of this.

...

You sighed, your body unable to stop itself from relaxing into the bed. Skull definitely knew how to make a comfy place to sleep. With how much being ill had drained the life out of you, the softness of the bed and the warmth of the massive monster cradling you was honestly hard to resist.

...

Damnit. Your eyes were already closing. Though his methods of getting you here hadn’t exactly been... great... you had to admit that maybe this outcome wasn’t so bad after all.

Not that you'd tell him. He might make this a regular thing.

[twoyara]

About how men rape women with “consent”

This post is not mine, but one radfem woman from our community. She works as a sexologist and shared her experience in her work. If you too are a sexologist, or even better, have some statistics on this topic, please share your experiences or links. ---------------------------------------------------------- "When I first started working, I discovered that many men had never experienced the need to refuse intimacy with a regular partner. That is, a man in counseling complains that his partner often refuses him, he attributes her refusals to personal dislike and faded feelings, and when he tries to turn the situation around and remember when he himself had to refuse her, he does not understand what we are talking about. Because he has never had to - he responds to the initiative of his partner every time and considers it a sign of love and attraction on his part.

I heard this very often, I couldn't catch the lie and at the same time I couldn't interpret it. They are not robots, after all, to be available 24/7 at all hours of the day and night?

One day a client in a session literally opened my eyes with one phrase.

She said: “I CAN SEE WHEN HE'S NOT UP TO IT.”

That's the secret. The notorious emotional service. Subsequently, and many other women have confirmed this in a targeted survey: when the desire for intimacy arises, a woman assesses her partner's condition BEFORE taking the initiative. If she sees that her partner is tired, sick, in a bad mood, or preoccupied with something, she does not consider it appropriate to offer sex. I have also heard from many women that in a situation when she can not clearly assess the state of the partner, she prefers to flirt, as if casually get naked, as if accidentally do something that usually arouses the partner. If there is no reaction to this, the woman usually refuses to take the initiative and solves her problems on her own, without forcing the partner to conflict and feel guilty.

Men don't want their partners all the time - it's just that no one gets in their underwear when it's inappropriate. No one forces them to think about sex when they don't want to think about it.

Men themselves don't usually check against anything but their own erections.

They don't care when to offer sex to a woman(the following is a real and far from complete list):

Who is asleep (well, seriously, I don't know any woman who would ever think of waking up a sleeping partner to satisfy her sexually);

who's back from her 24-hour shift;

who just finished cooking a holiday dinner for ten people;

who has a high fever;

who's been vomiting all day;

who is eight months pregnant with a complicated pregnancy;

who has undergone a termination of pregnancy that day;

who is in the terminal stages of cancer;

who's just had a pet die;

returning from the funeral of a beloved grandmother;

waiting for a call from the NICU where their (mutual!) child is (“Let's get a little loose while we wait”) - and so on and so forth.

It may seem like it's a matter of cognitive distortion, that they just don't get it….. But they do. I asked one of them once: does he really think that a person in such a state can want sex? Yes, it is clear that they don't want to, he replied, but I'm just in case - maybe it will work out. I asked him how he would react if it didn't work out, and he admitted that he would be hurt and angry. And that's another “secret” - why it does burn out. Because refusal will inevitably lead to conflict, and a woman often does not have the strength not only for sex, but also for an argument. When he offered sex, she basically can not get out of the situation without damage - either to be raped, or to deal with his tantrums and offenses. And unfortunately, sometimes the first one turns out to be the lesser harm."

[despacito-uwu16]

The Exposition

Kenji Sato x Journalist! Reader

Enemies To Lovers | Forced Proximity | Pining

start Next ->

“I don’t think they’re ready for the fall, had a little, and now she wants more. Told her I gotta make some calls, This just might be one hell of a night”. - The Walls by Chase Atlantic

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The sports section has always been your favorite part of the newspaper. Reading about athletes making history was so inspiring. This is what ignited your interest in sports journalism. You’d get involved in the school newspaper in high school, almost covering all the sports. You were always on a high, but it came crashing down when you entered college. Entering the Daily Bugle as the only female reporter has its downside. Your male peers would always look down on you, trying to discourage you from touching sports. Quoting your editor in chief, “Leave the sports reporting to the men who take it seriously, and report on something simple, like the upcoming musical”. But you were determined to make your mark in the world as a sports journalist.

You were staring at your computer for the last ten minutes trying to figure out the perfect conclusion for the basketball article. Your eyes wondered towards the time on the upper right hand corner.

4:40 pm

“I’ll finish it during english”.

You shut off your laptop and slid it in your bag

Your evening class is on the other side of the college, and unfortunately, you don’t own a car or a scooter so you have to walk 15 minutes from your dorm to your designated building. On your way to your class, you would usually pass by the baseball field, where the baseball teams begins to prep for the season.

While walking by the baseball field, you hear the sound of baseballs being hit by bats, the whistles being blown by the coach and the players yelling at each other to run.

As you continue your walk down, you hear a baseball being whacked and cheers from other players.

“Way to go Sato”! One person cheered.

You see the baseball fly over the fence, but before you could move out of the way, everything went pitch black.

~

Moments later you wake up in a bright, unfamiliar room. Your head was pounding, and a cold pack was sitting on your forehead.

You try to sit up, but you felt too dizzy.

A woman, who you assume was the school medic, came up to you and helped you sit up.

“What happened”? You ask.

“Isn’t it obvious? You got hit with a baseball. You were out for almost 5 hours”. She said.

“Oh”. You look down, feeling embarrassed.

“Young lady, you shouldn’t be walking near the baseball field. Especially when there’s practice going on. You’re lucky it’s just a mild concussion”. The medic lectured you.

“It’s the only way I get to my class”. Then your stomach sinks. You look at the clock.

9:32 pm.

“Fuck, I missed the lecture”! You cussed in your head. And then the realization settles in.

“FUCK I MISSED THE DEADLINE”! You groaned while you bury your head in your hands. You can kiss your journalism dreams goodbye.

“I don’t care what excuse you have. I swear, you college kids are so careless. As soon as you’re able to, get out of my office and try to find a ride home”. She puts another ice pack onto your head and leaves you to wallow in your misery.

“Well, isn’t she delightful”. An unfamiliar voice says.

You look up to see a 6 ft tall guy with raven hair leaning against the door frame.

“Dorthy is usually snappy at this point. I wouldn’t take it personally”. He enters the room and approaches you.

“Can I help you”? You ask

“I wanted to apologize to you, for accidentally hitting you with that baseball”. He scratched his neck.

“Oh, so that was you”. You glared at the guy while fixing the ice pack on your head.

“Yeah, I guess my strength was too much”. He laughed, trying to lighten the mood. You were still unamused.

“It’s a little late, shouldn’t you be heading home”?

“I wanted to know if you were okay”.

“Aww how thoughtful”.

“I’m Kenji. Kenji Sato. Baseball rookie today, baseball legend tomorrow”. He brags.

“Kenji… aren’t you the same Kenji that scored 5 home runs in a row at that one game against Florida state two years ago”?

He smirks. “So you’re a fan”.

“Not really, but I remember it made headlines for the school paper . You’re pretty impressive for a freshman”.

“For a freshman huh”? He laughs.

“Hey, it’s a compliment pretty boy”. You lean back into the chair.

“You know, I never got your name pretty girl”.

“Y/N. Y/N L/N”. You extend your hand and Kenji shook it.

“Well Y/N. I want to make this up to you. Y’know, I haven’t had dinner yet. You maybe want to join me?”

“Sure. What do you have in mind”?

~

“Wait, so that was you who broke the dean’s window”? Your eyes widened.

“No one knows aside from my buddies on the team. Consider it an inside scoop”. Kenji winks.

The waiter sets down a pepperoni pizza down on the table. The smell of the sizzling meat and cheesy goodness reached both of your noses, making both of your mouths water.

You guys ate all of the pizza in under five minutes. More of Kenji eating everything considering his metabolism. A few minutes later, he pushed the dish aside and leaned back in his chair.

“So Y/N, why journalism? Specifically sports journalism”? He interogates.

“I used to be apart of the school newspaper back in high school. Something about watching the games and interviewing athletes has always peaked my interest. If you ask me, it’s better than reporting on politics or school plays”. You sipped on your water.

“Ahhh, so you’re nosy”.

“Y’know if it weren’t for us being nosy, you wouldn’t get your 15 minutes of fame”. You say, making Kenji chuckle

“So, any articles you’re working on”?

“Well, I wrote one on basketball team but I missed the deadline because somebody knocked me out with a baseball”.

Kenji shrunk down into his seat. “Sorry about that. Really”.

“Don’t worry, I usually don’t hold grudges.”

“Well look on the bright side, you got a new story”. He says.

“Aspiring journalist gets knocked out by the famed Kenji Sato”.

You laughed. “As much as that would make a really great story, nobody at that the Daily Bugle takes me seriously”. You sighed, playing with the straw inside your cup.

“How come”? He raised his eye brow.

“According to my editor, and to all the men at the daily bugle, “leave the sports to the men”. You quote.

“That sounds pretty toxic. You deserve a chance to show the world how crazy talented you are with words. You deserve better than that place you’re in Y/N”.

“As much as I want to, I’m willing to stay. I’m very determined to prove myself. Even if I have to get my hands dirty”.

“You are persistent”.

“I prefer ambitious”.

“I like ambitious women”.

“Sure you do”.

~

For the last few weeks, you kept seeing Kenji. He would walk you to your classes, bring you coffee when you had a bad day at the Daily Bugle. Whenever he didn’t have baseball practice, you two would either go out for dinner or hang out at your dorm. There was something about his company that never made you feel lonely.

You came to one of Kenji’s games. Not as a reporter, but as a supporter. Despite being a little sad that the editor will never let you write for the sports section, you showed up for Kenji.

“And here comes number 7, right on the bat”. The announcer says as he walked up to the home plate.

You watched in concentration as he got into position. Everyone’s eyes were on him, hoping he would bring them another win. The pitcher throws the ball and Kenji knocks the ball out of the park.

“AND ITS ANOTHER GRAND SLAM BY KENJI SATO! GIVING THE BUGLES ANOTHER WIN”! The announcer shouts into the microphone.

You cheered the loudest for Kenji as he ran through all of the bases. He made eye contact with you and winked at you, making you blush a bit.

~

You were leaning against the wall of the locker room, waiting for Kenji to come out. All of the baseball players were outside cheering and screaming like animals, celebrating another win.

“I didn’t expect you to come”. You hear Kenji say. He walked up to you, his duffle bag in one arm, and his helmet in another.

“I’m an aspiring sports journalist. Of course I’d show up”. You walk up to him.

“You played well today”.

“Thanks”

You and Kenji walk out of the stadium

“So, any plans after this”?

“Well”… You began to think. “I was thinking about heading back to my dorm, curl up in bed and watch TV”.

“Damn, I was planning on asking you if you wanted to come back to my place, but if it’s that important to you, then who am I to stop you”.

“Well, that also doesn’t sound like a bad idea. But shouldn’t you be with your team, celebrating”? You gestured to the group of men screaming like chimpanzees.

“I don’t usually go out with the team. Win or loose”. He puts his helmet on and walks over to his bike.

“Wow, didn’t take you as an introvert”.

Kenji turns in the ignition on his bike.

“Are you coming or not”?

~

You were at the kitchen in Kenji’s apartment fixing him a grilled cheese and popping a bottle of wine as a reward for Kenji’s hard work. As you set the grilled cheese on the plate, Kenji immediately grabs it and takes a bite.

“Wait, it’s still”- But before you could warn him, the burning sensation has already hit Kenji’s tongue. He yelps at the sudden burn. Tears well in the corner of his eye as he throws the grilled cheese back onto the paper plate.

“You should’ve waited for it to cool down”. You scolded.

“Hey, I’m just really hungry. Cut me some slack will you”? He says, drinking his wine.

“Awww are you crying”? You notice the tear threatening to slide off his face.

“What? I never cry”. He crosses his arms.

“It’s okay to cry every once in a while”. You laugh as you swipe the tear off with your thumb. He leans into your touch as his onyx eyes fixated onto your (eye color) orbs. He leans closer, both of your faces inches apart from each other. And out of the blue, Kenji’s lips landed onto yours. You kiss back, tasting the red wine aftertaste. He lifts you up on the counter, and you wrap your legs around him. The air around you gets hotter, as it turns into a male out session. The next thing you know, he carries you into his room and shuts the door behind him.

~

You woke up with the sun hitting your eyes. Realizing that you were not in your own room and not wearing any clothes, the panic begins to settles in. You tried but there was a strong grip around your waist You turn around to see Kenji sleeping peacefully next to you.

“Oh no, this is bad”. You panicked. If your peers at the Daily Bugle hear about you sleeping with an athlete, they’ll never take you seriously.

You slowly got out of bed, trying your best not to wake up Kenji. As you got out of his room, you were attempting to put your 3 inch heeled boots back on, accidentally kicking the wall in the process.

“Shit”. You muttered while putting on the other boot.

You quickly slipped out of Kenji’s apartment without waking him up, already arranging your ride home.

While waiting outside the apartment building, you remembered what Kenji said, about you deserve something better than the Daily Bugle. Kenji was there for you and now you’re just leaving him. Screw what everyone thought of you. You liked Kenji, and it’s clear that he might feel the same. You went back up to his apartment. When you were about to knock, you noticed the door was slightly open. Peeping through the crack, you see Kenji talking to another guy that was probably his roommate.

“Dude, what happened to you last night? You totally ditched the team again”! The guy asks.

“Let’s just say I scored another one last night”. Said Kenji.

“Oh shiii, Kenji you dog”! His roomate laughs. “Who was it? Was it Tiffany from sports psychology”?

“No”.

“Rosalie from the dance squad”?

“No. Hint: she’s apart of the Daily Bugle”.

It took his roommate a minute, then his eyes widened and his jaw dropped.

“SHIT YOU DID NOT”.

“I did”.

“You do realize people look down on stuff like this, it’s like an integrity thing”.

“I know, which is why that scores me double”.

“But if word goes out, the coach is gonna have your head”

“It’s not like anyone has to know, anyways she ran off before I could officially walk her out. I wasn’t too attached to her anyway”. Said Kenji.

“But don’t you still care about her”? His roomate asks, a bit of hope glimmered in your eyes.

“Pfft no, she’s some that I accidentally injured. I take her out for pizza one time and she still thinks I’m taking her seriously”. He laughs.

You stood there dumbfounded. The whole time Kenji was just using you to increase his body count?

Before you could hear any more of the conversation, you left the apartment building. You entered the taxi, tears threatening to spill. To think that a guy, let alone an athlete, actually respected you. You were stupid to believe that you had someone care about you.

A fire ignited in your belly that day. You were determined to prove all of the men wrong, to prove Kenji wrong. Even if it meant hurting him, and other people to get yourself on top.

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Likes, Comments and Reblogs are always appreciated!!

A/N: I had a posting schedule for the week, but due to wifi issues, posting will be every 1-2 days until I get back to the US

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Tag List:

@imconfusedbutok @deadbydad-writes

@introvertthief @rdjsprincess

@boomboom-tanjiro2019 @moyadorogaya

@holylonelyponyeatingmacaroni @lovingyeet

@ofichan @nina-from-317 @lunaryasha

@kocho-catt @scarsw1fe @aphroditis-world

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[ghostlychief]

Don’t Blame Me

Pairing: MW2 Ghost x f!reader

Summary: They say love makes you crazy, so can they really blame you?

Warnings: mentions of blood, knife usage (stabbing, stabbing people’s eyes, eyes being ripped out of socket); mentions of combat fighting; hints of torture and injuries from torture; typical MW2 lore

NSFW, MINORS DNI: blowjob, fingering, eating pussy; missionary; creampie; aftercare

WC: 7k+ (IK IT’S LONG)

A/N: hello hello! here is the long awaited ghost fic that’s been in development for quite awhile. Thank you so much for participating in my pole, and i hope you enjoy!!! I really let myself indulge in more of the gore this time around, so please read with caution if that kind of content bothers you.

ENJOY🫶🏻🖤

--

You didn’t know blood could be this thick.

But, as you cut through the swarm of your opponents, you really don’t care how much of it gets on your clothes, seeps into your crevasses, and splashes on your face. No, you really don’t give a shit. Your only objective is to get to Ghost, and quickly.

All you see is red, literally.

Before you even fully process what you’re doing, the knife in your hand has already sunk into a neck, blood spurting everywhere, drenching you further.  You carry on, the one person you’re trying to reach at the forefront of your mind.

Should you have felt some remorse for the lives you ended? Probably, but it was like you brain was turned off. Actually, no, that’s incorrect. It was like your brain was wired differently, like it was wired to focus on one thing and one thing only: retrieve Ghost.

You can’t recall when you two got separated, or when he got captured in your last mission. All you remember is the pain you felt when you noticed he’d been taken.

You could blame yourself for his capture, but you decided to turn your fury towards someone else rather than yourself. You realized over the years that self-loathing wasn’t very efficient. It tends to waste time.

It was easy after all; it’s not hard to hold contempt towards the people that stole your lover away from you.

This was their doing. I’m only showing them the consequences of their actions.

It’s what you had to tell yourself. Otherwise, you didn’t see how you were going to come out of this alive. You had to redirect your rage, your frenzy. You had to channel it through your veins, making sure it heated you, and coursed through in a way that burned.

It had to be this way. It was the only way to help you be relentless against your opponents.

You were pretty proud of your knife skills; it was your favorite weapon after all. You always made sure to carry at least two with you at all times.

Today, you strapped on four and you were lucky, since you lost your first two about ten minutes ago. They were no doubt lodged into someone lying on the ground, pierced through their eye. That was your sweet spot, never failing you to effectively take down your opposition.

By this point, it felt like you had sliced your way through a hundred men and yet you still haven’t reached the door of the facility Ghost was being held in. Hope was on the horizon though because you could faintly make out the top of the door frame, which egged you on further. Your muscles worked tirelessly as your arms continued to swing at the men attacking you.

Occasionally, you would move your arms in a quick jabbing motion, repeatedly stabbing the opponent in the stomach and then you would land one last finally blow to their eye, your signature move some would say.

One of the downsides of this move was that sometimes, it took a lot of strength to pull your knife back out of the eye (hence your missing knives), which resulted in pulling their eyeball clear and out of its socket.

Not the best outcome of this tactic, but it is what it is.

Unfortunately, for your last victim, this very thing happened. You were thankful when his screams died down quickly.

You had a moment to catch your breath, hanging your head, quivering hands resting on your upper thighs. You looked up just in time to see someone charging at you, yelling, and with their own knives in their hands.

You noticed that they were the only one alive left outside.

One more. I can take care of him.

You swiftly moved to the side, but could hear the whisp of his blade cutting through the air. That was no good- he got too close.

Time to fix that.

Since you were so deft in your knife wielding ability, you also had a knack of being light on your feet and quick. Something that certainly benefited you.

While the man was no doubt taller and heavier than you, you were faster and anticipated his movements with ease. Sooner than later he too was on the ground, finished, with a sliver blade in his left eye, your red hand-grip the only thing you could see sticking out of his head.

You decided to leave it there, as a parting gift of course.

That’s where you got your nickname, Red Eye, seeing that your weapon of choice was wrapped in a blood-red grip that blended in with the blood that seeped out of your victims’ eye sockets. You thought the nickname was silly at first, but you just grew to accept it over the years. What can you say, you like the fancifulness of it every once in a while.

While you always had reputation, this name made your reputation grow into something almost bigger. While your peers and opponents knew you as the women with the red soaked blades, this name gave you a more, how should you put it?

Eerie reputation.

After stepping over your last remaining victim, you finally reach the double doors, leading into the building Ghost is being held captured in.

Before you entered though, you heard a voice through your comms. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Red Eye.”

Fuck me.

You hear Soap over the comms, “Wait for backup. We’re detecting three bodies via heat signatures”

You let out a groan, but made sure that your comms didn’t pick up on that.

“We don’t have time for that. I need to engage now.”

“You will do no such thing.” You hear Price’s voice cut through, stopping you from opening the doors.

“It’s a miracle you made it this far without any back up. Don’t test my patience.”

Ok, so you may have left without anyone knowing and got a two-hour head start before the rest of your team caught up to your location.

It’s just- they were taking, what it seemed like, forever to develop a plan to get your boyfriend out of captivity. You get it, logistics need to be air tight. But this was Ghost, Simon. Your Simon out there.

You knew he could handle what was given to him, but that didn’t ease any worry or hurt left in your heart, and it made you see red with anger.

That’s how your more or less ended up here, alone, slicing through about 30 men all by yourself. Not the smartest move you admit, but you had to get to Simon. You knew his time was running down, like a sand timer, each minute gone left him more perilous than before.

You were definitely going to get your ass kicked tomorrow at debrief.

You were just about to go in, thinking to hell with listening to orders, when you hear at least two sets of feet jogging across the gravel.

“Jesus, Red Eye. Leave any for the rest of us?”

You just roll your eyes at Soap, ignoring his comment. “C’mon guys, we need to hurry. Let’s take the last of the fuckers out and get Ghost back home.”

“Roger that.”

You go in first taking point, Soap and Kӧnig flanking you.

This time around, you have your handgun out, but your knife is safely held with your left hand, resting on the underside of the muzzle.

The hallway is dark, but it’s to your advantage. You think you see a light source coming from the hallway on the left that you’re coming up to, so you raise your left hand and point in that direction, signaling to Soap and Kӧnig.

This is where you come across the first person.

We must be close.

You let Kӧnig take him out. He comes up swiftly behind him and locks an arm around the man’s throat. First knocking him out, but then ultimately, finishing the job.

You three continue down the long corridor. They seem to go on forever. Sweat drips down your temple, and you hastily swipe it away, not wanting anything to obstruct your vision.

As you come closer to the end of the hallway, you start to hear something.

You raise your hand to signal Soap and Kӧnig to stop, and turn around so they can see you raise your pointer finger up to your lips.

You listen for the sound again, and you realize what it is this time.

Your blood runs cold, and goosebumps form on your arms, freezing you in place as you listen to the deafening sound that doesn’t seem to stop.

Ghost is screaming.

You don’t think you’ve ever heard him be this loud, let alone sound so full of pain. You have to pull it together though, you’re almost to him.

You continue on, making a right this time, and Ghost’s screams become louder. It’s good and bad of course. Good because he’s near you and you’re close, bad because he hasn’t stopped screaming.

You wonder how long this has been going on for.

You feel a heavy weight float down your chest, that takes its resting place in your heart. You find it hard to breath, and it takes every fiber in your being not to go into full panic mode.

You get closer and closer to the room Ghost is in, but you don’t hear him anymore. There is no one outside guarding, so the remaining two people must be inside with him.

Your stomach churns over.

You hadn’t realized it, but you fell behind both Soap and Kӧnig, but without a beat, they took your spot at point, leading you to the door.

They bust in first and immediately go after the two men that were standing by Ghost, who is strapped to a chair. It’s your job to get Ghost free of his confines.

But when you look at him, you freeze all over again.

He’s slumped in the chair, hands and feet bound by thick ropes that are no doubt leaving crude burns in his skin.

His pants have rips and holes in them and from further examination, you realize it’s from cigarette burns and cuts from blades.

You can’t see any damage on his arms but you’re worried what his shirt is hiding on his torso. You realize he’s slumped because he’s knocked out cold, probably from a concussion. But you know he’s alive because you see the slight rise and fall of his chest. It’s ever so faint, but it’s there.

You look around the room and notice a medium size table with different kinds of weapons and tools splayed out along the length of the table. You notice some have dried blood on them, while other tools are still dripping red. Rags litter the table as well. They’re dirty and also have traces of lingering blood.

Once again, you feel the embers burning through you, and you feel like you’re about to explode into a fury of rage.

You turn towards the two men that Soap and Kӧnig took down.

The two bodies lie on the floor and before you realize what you’re doing, you crouching over the first man, and with your blade, you start stabbing both of his eyes, switching on and off between the left and right. While you do this, a blood curdling scream leaves your lips.

It’s both terrifying and heartbreaking; a fine line dances between the two.

You snarl at the now eyeless man before you crawl your way over to his counterpart and release the same anger and revenge onto him. Your screech never faltering.

You don’t realize what you’re doing until you feel strong arms come up behind you and lift you off the dead man.

You start fighting their hold and it’s then when you start crying, your scream turning into a sob. The exhaustion finally getting to you.

“We got him. He’s going to be ok; it’s going to be ok.”

That’s the last thing you hear before everything goes black.

--

When you wake, you notice you’re lying on something soft. When you come to, you realize you’re on a bed, under a thin layer of covers and your head rests on a firm pillow.

You squint because the lights are overly bright but when they adjust, you notice the infamous florescent glow, meaning, you’re in the medical ward of the base.

You sit up, and you notice no aches or pains outside of your regular soreness you felt after fighting for an extended period of time. Your head also hurts, but you don’t really care.

You want to know where Simon is.

You notice a nurse a few feet away and you wave her over.

“Excuse me, but why am I in here?”

She gives you a tight-lipped smile. If you didn’t know any better, you would say that she’s nervous. She fidgets with her hands before answering you.

“Well miss, you fainted on your last mission. They brought you here to be examined.”

She moves over to the end of your bed and takes out the clipboard that resided in the pocket.

“Here, let’s see.” She looks over your paper before looking back at you, still with a trace of uneasiness.

“Seems like everything is OK. Your vitals are normal, and you have no major injuries, just some light bruising on your arms and hands. You are welcome to leave when you want.”

You glance down and notice the light purple that spans across your knuckles.

Before she can scurry away, you ask, “Wait, where are they keeping Ghost?” You shake your head, “I mean, Simon Riley.”

A look of pity crosses her face before she answers, “He’s in Ward C miss; the intensive care unit.”

She leaves before you can ask her anything else.

What the fuck was her problem?

You jump out of your bed, but immediately regret that decision when your head starts to throb right above your left eye.

Now is not the time for a migraine.

You make sure you have all of your belongings before you rush over to Ward C. Right before you are about to enter through the doorway, Price comes through and stops you with a hand placed on your shoulder.

He looks down at you – you’re really getting tired of being the shortest on the team- and squeezes your shoulder gently.

“Before you go in there, guns-a-blazing, he’s doing ok, alright?”

You just stare up at him and nod. Although it was good to hear Simon was doing ok, whatever the hell that meant, you still had so much anger left in you. So much you were hoping that just the sight of Simon healing would help quell you.

You walk past Price, a determined spring in your step, ready to be reunited with Simon. It’s been so long since you’ve last seen him.

Three weeks.

Three weeks he was gone, and you thought he was never coming back.

The intensive care unit is unusually empty so it’s not hard to find which bed Simon is occupying.

You quietly walk up to the side of the bed, and you are finally by his side.  

“You don’t have to tiptoe around me bug, I’m awake.”

Simon’s voice startles you and your head turns towards his. You notice his left arm is in a sling but a lazy smile graces his lips.

If you weren’t in a medical facility on base, out in the open to the prying eyes of the public, you would have immediately burst out crying just at the sound of his voice.

Instead, you let out a breathy, “I thought I lost you.”

Unlike Simon, your face has no hint of happiness. Your lips are slightly turned down, quivering and your eyes start to well up with tears, but you will them not to drop.

Your hands are balled up in fists but you bring yourself back down. You are here for him after all; it’s not the other way around.

You slowly unclench your fists and then gingerly sit down on the side of Simon’s bed, right at his hip.

That’s when you bring your hand up to trace down the side of his face, feeling the familiar stubble that never fails to tickle you when he kisses you.

Your hand comes back up to rub his cheek and you say again, “I thought I lost you, Simon.”

He brings his hand up to cup yours that still rests on his face. “I know, I know. But I’m here, and I’m ok.”

“Are you though?” You can’t fight it anymore, the tears stream down your face, their streaks burning your skin.

His hand that was resting on yours comes up to rub your head. “Promise.”

After that, you and Simon laid in his hospital bed for the remainder of the day. He fell in and out of sleep, but you were just thankful he was alive and breathing next to you.

--

It’s been about three weeks since Simon’s been back. He’s out of his sling and most of his bruises and wounds have healed. Expect for the deeper lacerations on his thighs. He also has some scarring from the cigarette butts. But over all, you would say he’s doing pretty alright, all things considered.

You’re both currently on base, since you needed to attend multiple meetings today, and you’re eating lunch in the cafeteria.

“So, I heard you went kind of, feral, when you came to rescue me.” Simon has an innocent look on his face, but you see him trying to hid his shit eating grin.

You narrow your eyes at him, “And who did you hear that from?”

He just shrugs nonchalantly, “No one in particular.”

You scoff. Fucking Soap.

You knew he must have told someone, if not Simon himself. He was quite the gossiper.

What a fucker.

“Well, did you want me to ask them to be friends?”

Simon lets out a low laugh. “That would have been funny.” You look up at him and see his eyes are lit with amusement.

You let out a sigh, but a ghost of a smile dances across your lips. You know he’s feeling better since he’s joking around.

--

Another three weeks has passed and you find yourself in the typical meeting room. The one you all use before a mission. That means this will be your last debrief before you jet off to where ever the location is in a few days.

The meeting goes well up until the part where Price says “And Ghost, you will wait here at the rendezvous point.”

You interrupt him, “Wait what?”

The room goes silent as you stare down Price.

“There’s no way Simon is going on this mission. Nope. Not happening.”

“Well, y/n, you don’t really have a say in this. Do you?”

The trace of condescendence has you short circuiting but you keep your cool. You glare at Price, “If Simon’s going on this mission, then count me out.” You don’t notice the slip of his name. Usually at work you call Simon Ghost or LT, but never Simon.

You storm out of the room and head back to your desk to gather your things to leave.

You hear someone lightly jogging behind you, and you have a hunch about who it is that followed you out.

You feel a hand softly grab your elbow and you hear Simon plead, “Wait.”

You sigh and turn around. Looking up at him you confess, “Look, I need to cool off for a bit. We can talk at home, ok?”

You see Simon contemplate whether to let you go or not, but he just gives you a curt nod. He gives your arm a gentle squeeze where his hand still rests, “Ok, see you at home.” --

You basically scowl your whole way home. Listen, you know you have some slight anger issues, but you’re working on it.

You get home after the long day and quickly make way to the shower, needing to feel the hot water run down your head and back. That will calm me, you think.

Once you step out of the shower, you already feel better. You’re clean, and you smell like your favorite soap. You change and do your normal routine after a shower then head to the kitchen to make yourself a warm cup of tea.

Evening tea is one of your favorite treats and it always seems to quell your nerves. Because that’s what you are right now, nervous.

You don’t want to fight with Simon, no, not at all. But you can’t help but feel frustrated at Price, and subsequently him, for deciding that he’s ready to go back in the field. Because from your perspective he’s not. Hell, it’s barley been a month and a half, and you think he needs more time to cope with what happened to him.

Sure, he’s seeing the base’s therapist, and he’s doing everything he can to keep his physical body healthy, yet you can’t help but the ball of worry that has formed in the pit of your stomach, fester. Something keeps nagging at you, and you don’t know what it is.

You just don’t understand how Simon can bounce back so quickly.

Luckily you didn’t have to wait too long for Simon to get home. And when he does, you find yourself perking up on the couch when you hear him come through the door.

He lets out a soft “Hey,” in which you respond just as softly back.

“I’m going to go shower and wash up, but then we can talk, yeah?”

You give him a nod, but also confirm, “Sure, that sounds good.”

His shower felt like eternity, but you know you only feel this way because you’re on edge. Again, you don’t want to fight with him. You just, you love him so much, you can’t stand to lose him again. No, it can’t happen again.

You hear soft footsteps on the tile as Simon makes his way through the kitchen to the living room where you’re still seated on the couch.

You look up at him before he sits down and grant him a quiet smile, and reach out your hand to his. His large hand grasps yours in his, and his thumb traces your knuckles. He then sits down next to you, and now his fingers are tracing over yours, relaxing you just a smidge.

You can feel his warmth radiating off of you instantly, and it takes ever thing in you to not glue yourself to his side.

You both slightly turn to each other, and funnily enough you each say “So,” at the same time.

You giggle and he lets out a low chuckle that makes your insides swarm. You miss him.

“You go first, bug.” The hand that has been tracing yours pulls you closer to him, and he embraces you in a warm hug as you both sit on the couch.

Before you start, you simply just bask in Simon’s embrace, not wanting to let go just yet. You begrudgingly pull away, but still keep your fingers connected in their little dance.

“I’m sorry for storming out today at our meeting. That was unprofessional, and uncalled for, but I just don’t see why you have to go on our next mission.”

“Aren’t you still hurting from what happened to you on the last one? I guess I just don’t understand why you want to go back in the field so soon.”

There’s a pause before you add, “How do you know you’re ready to go back?”

One thing you appreciate about Simon is that he never interrupts you, and he always lets you finish your complete thought before adding his.

When he can tell you’re done, he sighs and says, “Because, y/n, that’s what we’re trained for.”

“I wouldn’t have this job if I couldn’t put the pieces back together after every mission.”

You guess that makes sense, but you’re still concerned about him.

“Listen, I get that, I really do. I guess what I want to make sure of is that you’re actually doing ok and that you’re working through whatever happened to you.”

He’s told you the gist of what happened, and he confides in you whenever he feels like he needs the extra support, but you know that there are some things he’s still hiding. Which, you’re not going to push him to tell you, but you hope at some point he does.

He gives you a slight smile, “That’s why I love you. You’re always looking out for me, and I appreciate it so much, but I’m really doing fine, ok?”

He shifts so he’s leaning in closer to you, and now it’s his turn to cup your jaw with his hand. He tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, and you nod at his answer. “I love you too.”

“That’s what I like to hear.”

You grant him a smile in return and then he pulls you in for a kiss.

--

The kiss deepens and before you know it, you’re straddling his lap, one leg on either side of his thick torso. You’re a mess as you straddle him, and you wrap your arms around his neck, wanting to be closer to him, if even possible.

He wraps his arms around you and subconsciously pulls you closer to him. His large hands span across your back as he holds you close to him. Your center brushes against his you let out a moan when you feel this contact. You run your hands down his neck and shoulders, feeling the taught muscles underneath his black t-shirt. As you rock your hips against his, you hear him let out a moan, which only eggs you on further.

“Fuck, y/n. Keep doing that again.” His hands travel down to hold you hips, almost as if he’s trying to help you move against him.

Your hands move in tandem and they come to rest at the base of his t-shirt, your fingers playing with the hem. You’re itching to take it off of him, and he seems to understand what you want, because he pauses kissing you to help you take off his shirt.

Now shirtless, you bring your hands up to his shoulders and then trail them slowly down his torso, nails ever so slightly scraping against his skin. You can feel each ridge and bump from his abs before your reach the hem of his sweatpants. Your fingers graze over his happy trail before you start toying with his sweats.

You run one finger along the hem of his grey sweats, then ever so slightly, your finger enters his pants, you run your finger under his sweatpants. You’re teasing him, and you can tell he’s getting antsy by the way he shifts as your finger runs along the band of his briefs.

As you continue to tease him, you trail or lips over his chest. Your lips wrap around one of his nipples, the unpierced one, and you softly bite him before you run your tongue over his nipple, suckling.

He moans out a gentle “Fuck,” and one of his hands comes up to grasp your hair.

You move over to his other nipple, the pierced one to be exact, and you once again softly bite him then suck. You make sure to spend your time here because you know this is one of Simon’s favorite thing during foreplay. Once he’s taken care of there, you continue to trail your lips down his abdomen, and now you’re finally at his center.

You get off his lap and sit on the floor in-between his spread legs. You place your hands right above his knees, and you look up at him with your swollen lips.

“You’re going to be good for me tonight, right?” You rub your thumbs in soft circles on his legs, waiting for his answer.

You see him gulp as he looks down at you, and then his lips quirk, in a smirk.

“What do you say?” Your hands stop their ministrations and you tilt your head, understanding what he wanted.

“Please.”

His smirk deepens, “Good girl.”

At his greenlight, you come up on your knees so that you can reach him better. Your trail the hem on his sweatpants one last time before you start pulling them down off his hips, making sure that his briefs come off too. He lifts his butt to help you, and now you’ve successfully taken his pants and underwear off.

You greedily take in the size of him. His dick is hard and slightly curved as it lays against his stomach. You wrap your hand around him, he’s so thick that your hand doesn’t close around it the whole way. You pump him slowly, as you look at him. His eyes are blown out and he leans his head back against the couch. You smile at him before you lower yourself. You link one strip up his dick, making him squirm underneath you. You then you bring up your hand to start pumping him. As your hand moves up and down, your lips come up to kiss the to crown of his dick.

You look up at him again, locking eyes and then wrap your lips around him. Once your lips make contact, he lets out a low moan. You continue to sink down on him. You move your head up and down, trying to adjust to his size. The part of his dick that you can’t fit into your mouth, you cover with your hand, pumping him up and down.

Your hair falls around you, and at this, Simon carefully takes your hair into one hand, putting it into a makeshift ponytail.

“Fuck, baby that feels so good.”

You continue to suck on him, hollowing out your cheeks. You know he’s close when you see his abs start to clench and his legs start to stiffen.

The moans he lets out has your getting wetter and wetter by the minute, and you squirm, trying to ease some of the pent-up tension you’re feeling.

Your unoccupied hand comes down to play with his balls, gently squeezing them and that is what does him in. He lets out a louder groan and you feel his warm come shoot down your throat.

You keep your mouth on him, cleaning him up before you slowly take yourself off him. You wipe your lips with the back of your hand and you sit back on your heels, smiling at him.

He runs a hand through his hair, and lets out a low chuckle.

“Damn, you really did a number on me there.” You laugh yourself and you come up to the couch, sitting beside him so you can turn his head to give him a lingering kiss.

You give him a few pecks, “What can I say, I’m good at what I do.” Your eyes are bright as you look at him, and his hold the same amount of affection and adoration.

His low voice cuts through you, “Now it’s my turn to make you feel good, alright?”

You give him a brief nod, “Please.”

He pulls you back into him, and then starts to push you back so you’re lying on the couch under him. He’s kissing you frantically now, his tongue entering your mouth.

“Take your pants off for me, would you?” His hands make their way to take your shirt off, and while he does that, you slip out of your shorts, underwear gone with them.

“Thank you, baby.”

He keeps kissing you as his hand comes down to your center. He first cups you, and then brings his pointer finger to rub against your clit. As his pointer is stimulating your clit, his middle and ring finger run along your slit, gathering up all the wetness that formed over the course of the last half hour.

You see him bring his coated fingers up to you. “Taste for me,” he breathes. And without any hesitation, you suck on his fingers, tasting yourself, making sure to look at Simon while you lick his fingers. He watches you with fire in his eyes.

“Good girl.”

You’ll never get tired of hearing him call you that.

He brings his hand back down to your pussy and then enters two fingers in you, stretching you out deliciously. You whine as his fingers enter you; they feel so good inside you.

Luckily for you, your boyfriend has quite large hands, which equated to long, thick fingers, and he always knew what to do with them.

He starts picking up the pace, and the squelching sound his fingers make is deafening, and the only thing you can focus on as they move in and out of you.

You didn’t even have to ask before he’s adding in a third. You feel yourself clench around him, and you’re already losing your mind and he hasn’t even properly fucked you yet.

He’s hitting you right in your sweet spot, and your hands come up to hold him by the shoulders. He moves down ever just a hair, and you’re not sure why until he lowers his head. He spits, and then connects his lips with your clit, moving his tongue around your sensitive bud.

The addition to his lips on your clit has you seeing stars and you start to feel that familiar build up. You tumble over the edge, a bright warmness spreading through you.

Simon removes his lips and fingers from you and you’re both panting heavily. He’s bracing himself with one arm as he looks down at you.

Your hair is messily strewn across the couch behind you, and your eyes are bright. Your chest moves up and down as you try and catch your breath. You smile up at him, this time your teeth showing.

He gives you a peck on your lips. “How was that?”

You sigh, “Amazing.”

Another kiss is pressed on your lips and you can faintly taste yourself on him.

“I want to properly fuck you, and that can’t be done on the couch. Bedroom, yeah?”

You nod up at Simon acquiescing to his suggestion.

“Alright, up you go then.”

He swiftly pulls you up and off the couch into his arms. You squeal at the sudden movement but it turns into giggles as Simon carries you bridal style to the bedroom.

“Wow, my night in shining armor.” You lazily loop your hands around his neck as he leads you both to the room. He just laughs at your statement.

Once there, he gently deposits you on the bed, and wastes no time picking up where you left off.

He crawls on top of you and starts to kiss you up your stomach and chest, finally reaching your mouth. His kiss leaves you burning, and your hands eagerly reach for him, pulling him down further into you.

You wrap your legs around his torso, and feel his dick brush up against your center, hard once again.

He pulls away to look at you, eyes connecting. “Do you need any more prep?” He brings a hand up to brush away some of the flyway hairs that covered your face. His hand lingers, cupping your head, and his thumb brushes your cheek in a soothing back and forth motion.

Smiling you answer, “No, I’m good.”

“Ok.”

Bracing himself above you, his hand trails down to grasp his dick. He gives it a few pumps before running it along your slits, and lightly taps it on your overly sensitive clit.

He then slowly guides it into you, the stretch much bigger than what his fingers could offer. You both let out a sigh as he fully sinks into you, eyes connecting at this very moment. Once he’s fully inside, he gives you some time to adjust, his hand moving to hold your hips, thumb moving in circles.

“You okay?” He asks, looking down at you. You look up at him, “Yeah, I’m good, you can start moving.”

At your consent for him to move, he does just that. He pulls his hips back before he pushes them back into you. He starts off with a steady pace, not too fast, not too slow. You’re surprised he’s not pounding into you relentlessly like he usually does. This time his thrusts are much more calculated, calm, like he’s got all the time in the world. The slower drag of him against your walls makes you roll your eyes back, reveling in the feeling of him.

It’s only him, that’s all you can think about, all you can feel. You let go of the heaviness you’ve been feeling to focus on being with him now. It’s not hard, he makes you feel like you’re floating anyways.

Your fingers run down his face, down his shoulders, taking in as much as you can of him. Then you run your hand down his tattooed arm, mapping the intricate details of his tattoos and running over the protruding veins due to him propping himself up. Simon watches you as you run your hand across him.

He gives you a particular harsher thrust, eyes trained on you when you moan and clutch his arm a harder. He picks up the pace just a little, loving the way you look beneath him, taking his cock so well.  

“Fuck. Right there, baby,” you breathe. He hits that same spot again, but this time you move up the bed a little from the force of his hips. Your breasts jiggle as you shift up the bed and Simon’s eyes are travel to your chest. He brings his hand up to up one of them, rolling his thumb over your nipple. Simon keeps this faster rhythm with his hips, slamming into your now quivering pussy, showing you no mercy as he pounds into you with force.

His thrusts are powerful that leave the breath knocked out of you.

He removes his hand from your breast to wrap it around your leg. He positions your leg so it’s resting on his shoulder, now giving him a new angle into you. This position allows you to feel him move even deeper inside you, now feeling the tip of his dick hit your cervix, which makes you whine. His thrusts continue their hard motions, but his pace starts to slow down.

Simon’s hips start to falter a little bit in their smooth rhythm, a telltale sign he’s close. At his praising, you unconsciously clench around him, making him breathe out a silent curse as his hand tightens on your leg that is propped up on his shoulder.

“Si, I’m close,” you whine. You feel so full, so consumed by all things Simon, the only thing you can focus on is him and the building orgasm that threatens to spill over.

“Me too.” Simon removes his hand that’s been propping your leg up and moves it down to your clit, and starts to rub slow circles on the bud, making you squirm. You bring your leg down from his shoulder to wrap it around his torso once again pulling him closer to you. You drag your hands down and up his back as his thumb continues to abuse your clit. “Fuck, you feel so good.”

With a few more thrusts from Simon and the quick movements of his finger on your clit, you feel the coil in you snap, and it snaps hard. Your orgasm washes over you, a blinding white light that makes you feel like you’re going to pass out, and you call out his name one last time.

Your eyes squeeze shut and you see stars, as your pussy clamps down hard on Simon’s dick. He’s a moaning mess above you as he feels your orgasm that’s traveling through your body, your walls contracting around him.

He curses out a soft “fuck baby” and then he’s following just a hair behind you, traveling over his precipice as well, emptying inside of you. You feel his come paint your walls as your pussy continues to clench around him, as you ride out your second orgasm of the night.

He collapses on top of you but is careful not to crush you completely. You’re breathing heavy as you both come down from your highs, both sweaty messes.

He lifts his head to look at you. There’s a soft smile on his face and you smile back.

“I love you.”

“I love you too, bug.”

Your smile falters, “I never want you to leave me like that ever again. Got it?” Your voice is firm, but there’s an underlying trace of tenderness. Your hand comes up to push his hair back, waiting for his answer.

“Never.”

“Good.” You pull him back down to you for a kiss.

He slowly peels himself off of you and whispers out, “Wait here.”

You lay on your back, legs bent as you wait for Simon’s return. When you hear him entering the bedroom, you slightly sit up and you notice a washcloth in one of his hands.

He kneels back on the bed and gingerly pries your legs open so he can clean you up. He delicately starts wiping your center, his first few strokes making you writhe due to oversensitivity. His hand rests tenderly on your knee, thumb stroking back and forth as he wipes you clean. He must have run the washcloth under hot water because it’s wet and feels warm against your skin.

When he’s done, he pecks the inside of your knee and gets up off the bed to go throw the washcloth in the hamper. When he returns to you, he’s in his boxers, and he has a t-shirt in his hand.

“For you, my lady.” You laugh at him and take his shirt, pulling the soft material over your body.

You both clamber under the covers, and are now wrapped up in Simon’s arms.

There’s no place you’d rather be right now, and you’re so thankful the universe allowed you another chance to be with him like this.

If he didn’t make his way back to you, you don’t even know what you would have done. Probably would have gone mental, but who could really blame you?

[lokischocolatefountain]

Mercy

My entry for the Haunted Hoedown created by @inklore and @psychedelic-ink. Day 7- stranded au or slasher / summer camp au + sex in the woods or somewhere public (added bonus if it includes knife, blood, hunter x prey kink)

Fandom: The Last of Us (HBO)

Pairing: Joel Miller x Reader

Rating: 18+ (Major character death, stranded in the woods, post apocalyptic life, non con, mentions of previous experiences of non con, suicidal reader)

Summary: Stranded alone in the woods and left to die, all you can ask of Joel Miller is the mercy of a quick death. He is willing to give it to you, but he needs something for himself as well.

A/N: It’s another Joel Miller weekend here at lokischocolatefountain. I have a husband!Javi locked and loaded, ready to go. But Joel demand my attention once again for the haunted hoedown. So Javi has to wait another week.

You were safe.

Well, safe from the men who had captured you. But other dangers awaited. If you were lucky, it would just be starvation, an encounter with a wild animal or a fucking heart attack. But you didn’t think your good luck would stretch that far. You were already that the raiders who killed and raided the belongings of the men who captured you did not seem interested in you. It was a goddamn miracle.

Ropes bound your arms behind your back and your legs to each other. Either the ropes were tied too tight or you had become weaker over the past ten days of captivity. They didn’t have much food to spare you. Only the small pieces of rotting meat that they fed to you on the condition that you suck their cocks.

It wasn’t as though you had a choice when tied up the way you were. There were other women held captive with you- younger, prettier, less willing to comply and more appealing to the men as they liked a challenge. You were one of the older models, beaten ragged by life both before and after the world fell apart. For them, a woman was a woman. No matter how broken you were, there was always more to break. No matter your age or how fucking crazy you’d gone from survival, you had a pair of tits and three holes. For most men, it was more than they could dream of. For you, separated from your group and all alone, it was the only thing you could barter.

Now there was no need for any of it. You would decay on the ground along with the fallen leaves and the blood you’d spilled when the men cut through your clothes. The last of the women after another one decayed just a couple feet away from you. Yours was a fate better than the girls who were taken away by the raiders. Experience had taught you that. The last time you’d been in the hands of such a group, you were younger. They used you to their heart’s content and then sold you to a man for a good price- a whole goat, a bag of rice, a record player and a couple of vinyls, and a leather jacket. Pretty good stuff. If you had to valuate yourself now, you’d probably go for a small fraction of that- maybe just the leather jacket.

You would no longer go for the same price. You no longer had the strength to kill the man who purchased you like you were just a thing.

You swallowed, your throat aching for water. But all you got was the piercing pain of a hundred jagged pebbles scratching your throat. One of the factoids from an old encyclopedia popped up in your head: It takes x days for dehydration to cause death. Unfortunately, your brain hadn’t thought to pay more attention to the number, leaving you with no information.

What you knew was that it took one day of dehydration to wish for death.

Daylight withered away and darkness descended in the woods, matching the darkness of your thoughts. In the pitch black night with no stars or even a sliver of the moon, whether your eyes were open or closed did not matter. In the times before, it was advised for women to return home before nightfall. As though danger only lurked in darkness. As though men did not behave atrociously in broad daylight. Shaking on the ground from the cold, dehydrated, near death, your biggest fear was still man.

It was why the snapping of twigs and crunching of leaves under a heavy footfall struck more fear in you than the sight of the infected ever did. Man.

Measured. Careful. Not infected. Man.

He could just be passing by.

It could’ve been delusions inspired by dehydration and starvation, but the footsteps sounded just a little louder as the seconds passed. He was getting closer.

Joel Miller didn’t know, but your body already played to his beat, your heartbeats responding to the sound of his footsteps. Pills from Atlanta passed on to him from his contact rested in his backpack, the currency with the highest value in the QZ. His hand itched to take one pill for himself. Just one. The nightmares of losing his child flashed before his eyes even before he could succumb to the weariness of the journey and sleep. A pill would help.

Don’t get high on your own supply.

He needed to be at his best state of mind since he was traveling alone now, his companion having been taken out by a clicker on their journey. But God was it tempting.

Darkness enveloped the woods. The moon and stars had abandoned Earth for the night, afraid that if they shone their light on the land, they’d see its haunting wreckage. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, but it still played tricks on him. For a second, he believed he might have seen a figure move on the ground.

Leaves rustled and crunched beneath his feet. His hands immediate grabbed the gun he had at the ready, the muzzle pointed to the ground. It hit something— someone, he realized when it gasped.

“Please,” your low, shaky voice begged. “Please shoot me.”

He would’ve thought he misheard. Who’d ask to be shot when threatened with a gun? But such was the world in which they’d lived. Death was sometimes more desirable than whatever horrors life had to offer. Joel had survived, somehow. Violence and the sheer human instinct for self preservation kept him around until now, even a decade and a half after the collapse of society.

He brought a lighter close to the ground and lit it, the little golden flame illuminating your bloodied and bruised. He noticed that your arms were bound behind your back and legs tied together at your ankles.

Joel understood you didn’t have long. A day maybe. Longer if you were fed and hydrated. He himself was not interested in charity. If someone else happened by you and you were able to convince them to toss you a piece of bread… But you didn’t want charity. You asked for his bullet, not sustenance.

Bullets didn’t grow on trees.

“Good news. You’ll be dead by daybreak.”

“Please,” you whimpered in a low gravelly voice, mustering up all your energy to beg for this small act of mercy.

You hadn’t asked for his precious rations or water. Only that he finish you off with the weapon he pointed at you. He dropped his belongings somewhere in the vicinity, not bothering to dignify your request with a response.

Joel lied down on the ground in the vicinity in a sleeping bag, his pack serving as a pillow. Sleep did not come easy. He merely rested his eyes, his sense attuned to his surroundings even when he was meant to rest.

When the sun rose, he rolled his sleeping bag and set it inside a hollow tree before heading to the pond nearby. He returned, having washed up, ready to resume his journey back to the QZ. Curious about you, he went to the site where you were last night.

“Please,” you begged once again. “Before you leave. Please.”

He nudged you with his boot, your weakening body rolling to the side and giving him a good view. One bullet. But what a waste of a good body. He could help you in return for something for himself. There was a brothel in the QZ, of course. The oldest profession carried on right under FEDRA’s nose. They pretended to not notice. Sometimes, they’d conduct a raid and arrest some women under the guise of maintaining the law. An excuse for the FEDRA guys to have the women for themselves for the night.

Joel did not indulge in such services. He didn’t see the point in spending precious ration cards just to get off. His spit and left hand were enough for him to get by. But you were free of cost.

“Since you asked so nicely…” he drawled, withdrawing his knife from its holster. He sliced through the ropes that bound your ankles together. You didn’t know his intentions though you’d come to expect it from men over the years. If he wanted to take advantage, he surely would’ve gone ahead with it last night. Sure, Joel hadn’t intended it at first. But now that you were available…

Reliable contraception had died with the world. Too risk averse in this specific matter, he’s contented himself with the rare blowjob. Pussy was a delicacy he hadn’t had in a while. You didn’t protest as he tore your pants off of you, finding skin beneath.

“Be good and I might just kill you in the end, darlin’…” he promised and you spread your legs, cooperating, being good so he would consider it. You didn’t know when the next person would pass by this place. Even if someone did before you could die a slow death, there was no assurance that they’d kill you rather than prolong your miserable existence.

“Wha’s your name?”

“Joel.”

Joel. Joel brought a damp cloth to your face, wiping the blood and dirt off you. It was…strange. It felt as though you were being taken care of. It wasn’t the case of course. But it felt good to believe he was taking care of you. It was the first bit of humanity you’d experienced in a very long time.

The blade slipped under your half torn t-shirt, cutting up the fabric that had done a poor job so far of giving you any dignity. His large hand roamed your now naked torso. Calluses caught on your somehow soft skin. The sensation was the first pleasant thing you’d felt in a long time. You attempted unconsciously to lean into his touch, but your weakness kept you glued to the ground. Even the cold blade of his knife felt good. You’d gone mad, surely. This was definitely a stage of delusion caused by your dehydration and starvation.

He cupped your cheek and leaned down, capturing your lips with his. It was as though you’d forgotten to kiss. The men who took interest in you were less concerned with making use of your lips for a kiss. If Joel had put his cock between them, you would’ve known better what to do. It seemed he’d also forgotten. He wasn’t kissing you. He bit and sucked and devoured.

Your hands were still tied behind you. They dug into your back. But it didn’t hurt as much as Joel’s hand supping your tits. Even the animals who last had you under their control were gentler than this. But you weren’t too offended. It hurt. But there would be sweet death at the end of all this pain. So you embraced it fully, letting out nothing but a little whimper as a sign that you were at all affected by his touch.

Even in your state of near death, you could tell that he was a handsome man. Grey interspersed black curls on his head. Patchy beard hid rugged, sun damaged skin. His aquiline nose would’ve inspired sinful thoughts in you had you been further away from death. In a normal world, he would’ve been getting a drink at a bar and you would’ve noticed him.

Joel spit on his hand and rubbed it around on your dry cunt. With his thumb and forefinger, he parted your cunt lips before inserting his middle finger. Inch by painful inch, he penetrated your unwilling body that was attached to a very willing mind. There was no water left to be spared to wetten your cunt for the man.

“C-cut me,” you suggested, desiring the penetration to be smoother. If this was the last time you got to be fucked, it wouldn’t hurt to hurt a little to enjoy the last few minutes on the mortal plane. “Bl-blood.”

He seemed to understand your weak implication. You hissed as the sharp edge of his knife cut through the top layers of your skin. Red blood oozed out and he swept his hand over it, collecting the blood and smearing it over your cunt. He slipped a finger inside you, lubricating your hole with your own blood.

He knelt over you, his knees on either side of your body. Then he unzipped his jeans, the teeth of the zipper making a scratching metal sound. He was a good length, girth and veiny. He stroked himself as he stared at your bloodied hole.

Fucking a dying woman using her own blood as lube. Of all the messed up things he had done, this was easily on the top ten. Not that he maintained an actual list. Despite her decrepit state, she looked welcoming with her legs spread out and eyes on his cock. He bent your legs at your knees, your body pliant in its weakness. You were a thing of rare beauty in his journey. Nature had reclaimed its place, growing between abandoned cars and splitting into giant overpasses. This, you, were another part of nature to him.

Woman, all beautiful in your vulnerability, laid out to be claimed.

He guided his cock between your legs and forced himself in. Red lube you’d given up for him to use on you coated his cock, reminding him of the violence of his desire. He twitched inside you as he pushed in, a perverse sort of excitement stimulating him.

He brought the knife up to your neck and rested the blunt edge against your throat. You gulped. Your eyes widened. Your breaths quickened. Your cunt clenched around his cock and Oh God how divine you felt this way.

You’d asked for death, practically begged for it. But fear was not something you could prevent. Your wretched mortal body was programmed with the foolishness of wanting to stay alive.

“Been so long,” he muttered when he bottomed out inside you. Though you’d had many men inside you, it’d been long since any stretched you out so good. You took a deep breath and wished you had your hands free. You were overcome by a sudden urge to touch him. To run you hands down his sturdy arms and solid chest. It’d been so long since you wished.

“Good?” You asked, squeezing his cock. He smiled and bent forward to kiss you. Your lips, your chin, along your jaw. It was tender. Too tender for sex in the woods with your clothes torn off and your thigh bleeding into the soil.

He began to move, pulling out just a little before pushing back in. He savored it. After all, this could be his last chance at a cunt for a very long time. He grabbed on to your tits to use as handles, making you squeeze around him. Your lips let out a painful little whine, but he didn’t feel guilty. What bad did a little more pain do? You were going to die anyway. If you weren’t making use of your tits and cunt, at least he could enjoy them.

“So good…” he praised and you responded in kind, thrusting back weakly. “Yeah? You like that, cunt?” He asked, using the crude word in place of your name. He didn’t even know your name. But Cunt was appropriate for the purpose you served. You nodded. “I really struck gold in the fucking woods of all places, huh.”

“Good cunt,” he praised, the words shooting straight into said body part.

“Feelin’ good?”

You nodded, unable to say much else under the assault of the sensations. You didn’t have to for he claimed your lips once again in a kiss. He was better this time and so were you. Your lips stayed connected with his just like your pussy with his cock, devouring each other in desperation for a taste of something good in all the wretchedness.

Joel’s cock drilled into you. Merciless, fast, painful. All you knew before was hunger and suffering. With him, it had all disappeared. It was just Joel now. He consumed you, turning you from a discarded body passed from one raider to the other to Good Cunt. You liked the sound of those words on his lips.

“Just like that, Cunt,” he hissed as you milked his cock, your thighs cramping as your muscles contracted. Something pulled somewhere and you screamed in pain and your cunt tightened for him. Warm cum spilled inside you, the sensation a distracting relief in the midst of the pain.

Tears slipped down the sides of your face, cooling your skin.

“Did well. Did so well, Cunt,” he praised as he tucked himself back inside. He hadn’t felt so good in forever. Such a relief. Such an unburdening of stress and anxiety over his smuggling and its chances of success. He zipped himself up and bent over to retrieve his weapons.

“How do you want to go?” He asked, weighing the gun in one hand and knife in another as he looked down at your debauched body.

You made your choice, thanked him for his mercy and closed your eyes.

.

.

.

My Masterlist

[tragedy-peanut-gallery]

any headcanons about daeron ii's and myriah's sons?

WAUGGHHH YEESSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They’re probably gonna be a bit shorter than the girlies because…….. I hate men I guess /j

Baelor:

- Surprisingly the most normal of Daeron and Myriah’s kids even though the pressure placed on him since birth must’ve been I N S A N E. Probably would’ve snapped at some point if the brown haired gene didn’t come in clutch and neutralize the crazy in him

- And even tho canon tries to imply him having brown hair and a broken nose doesn’t make him as pretty as the other targs……… ignore them king, I KNOW there were probably hundreds of people writing some crazy rpf about this man!!1!1!!

- I also like to think he, Daemon and Daenerys were pretty close as kids. Like, yahhh ik their relationship probably rotted because Baelor was meant to feel inferior to Daemon and vice versa for differing reasons but…. Maybe I wanna make myself cry a bit. Maybe I wanna imagine them playing knights and dragons and stuff 🥲

- Definitely cared for Maekar a lot as his baby brother but also had a lot of trouble not seeing him as anything as his baby brother whichhhh….. probably made him come off as condescending a little okay he’s trying his best

Aerys:

- Asexual AND autistic, sorry I don’t make the rules and I’m not projecting onto him I swear don’t listen to what anyone else may tell you I-

- And the thing is, I’m sure he would’ve absolutely pulled a Vaegon if he could’ve, but honourably decided to stay behind for the sake of securing political allies for the throne (the citadel rejected his application because he cited his only strength as “reading”)

- Poor dude probably had some absolutely shitty sight due to eye strain, reading by candlelight in the dark is all fine and dandy until that becomes the only thing you do

- Ngl probably the biggest social outcast out of his brothers, I think the primary reason he trusted Brynden to handle everything when he became king was because he didn’t have that many friends/allies outside of Aelinor (not a big politics person), Shiera (witch girlie and also Brynden’s kinda gf) and Brynden himself so he was willing to go with whatever they wanted within reason

- Mans has no canonical death despite being a king so I’m personally gonna diagnose him with….. tetanus via iron throne in one of the few times he actually bothered to do king things

Rhaegel:

- I kinda like to think he was an artistic guy, really loved painting and drawing and probably would’ve tried out other mediums like pottery, embroidery and weaving if people didn’t stop him from doing so <3

- Probably dressed a lot more simply as an adult because he hated most fabric textures. Velvet and wool were his least favourites but tbh the only thing he could wear without getting fidgety in ten minutes would be cotton

- Also really hated when people touch his hair ngl! Dude has that really pretty targ men hair gene where it’s really long and flowy but that’s because he doesn’t like cutting it

- Okay tbh I like him but I don’t have that many thoughts on the guy 💀 I like to headcanon he drew a lot of dragons as kids and really liked telling his family what their dragons would look like and what he should name them and all that. His dragon would be light purple with red wings and gold horns and he’d call her Myrri after his mom :)))

Maekar:

- Absolutely the tallest and most athletic out of his brothers but absolutelyyyy suffering from an inferiority complex. No it doesn’t get any better when Baelor dies, if anything it gets much worse :(

- Had an unfortunate habit of getting people to dislike him, not completely his fault tho a lot of folks were just predisposed to thinking him to be kinda intimidating!!!

- Didn’t have a favourite with his kids, but Rhae was absolutely his baby because she was a lot like him when he was little in both looks and attitude lol

- Feeling a little angsty so I’m gonna say he had some memorabilia of Dyanna that he’d keep with him at all times. Like maybe a bit of her hair in a locket, or a portrait he’d keep in his room 🥲

[sitp-recs]

Hi Liv! I was wondering if you have a rec list already where either Draco or Harry struggle with alcoholism? I have read maybe like one before, but I couldn't find it again. I've been sober for almost 4 years now, but things are super stressful and that makes me stupid sometimes. Idk, it just helps, reading about my favourite pair. Anyways, thank you if you have any that you might wanna rec, and if not, thank you anyways, I really enjoy your blog, I always find some great fics through your recs💞 Hope you have a lovely day!🫶✨

Hi anon! Congrats on being sober for almost 4 years, you’re doing great 💜 I’m sorry things have been hard lately, I hope the recs help. I’m very particular about addition in fic so I haven’t read much or often, but I do have some recs for you. Maybe my followers can share more?

again, for the first time by @aibidil (E, 14k)

Five times Draco lied about why he wasn't drinking, and one time he gave an honest answer. Or, a love letter to sobriety.

War Wounds by SilentAuror (E, 30k)

Some wounds take longer to recover from than others. HP/DM, with background HP/GW. Themes of alcoholism, love triangles, and dubious fidelity.

Dreaming Darkly by @quicksilvermaid (E, 39k)

It's five years after the war, and Harry is not okay. He hates his job. He hates Robards. He hates Ron's promotions and Hermione's concern. He chases oblivion in booze and weed and quick dirty fucks, but it's never enough.

Take A Chance On Me by @mintawasalreadytaken (E, 41k)

There's a DJ on RareFM with a secret. Or: the one with all the ABBA in it.

Polar Night/Midnight Sun by toomuchplor (E, 54k)

Harry travels to arctic Norway on the trail of dragon egg poachers, only to find he's been assigned to work alongside the only NorMagPol Auror north of sixty: one Draco Malfoy. It's been ten years since they crossed paths, and Malfoy isn't exactly what Harry expected or remembered. For one thing, he wears a lot more hand-knits?

Lemon Colour, Honey Glow by @thusspoketrish (E, 67k)

Over a series of unfortunate pub nights at the Leaky Cauldron, Draco Malfoy falls in love. A story about finding strength and forgiveness in unlikely places.

Unhook the Stars by jad (E, 70k)

Seventy-thousand words of pornographic discourse between two boys-turned-men that still haven't learned how to communicate like normal people – with words. Guest appearances by Pansy Parkinson, Neville Longbottom, Hermione Granger, Blaise Zabini, Teddy Lupin, Gregory Goyle, the Weird Sisters, ex-wives, several Weasleys, a Boggart, and a Honey Badger.

Nor All That Glisters by @sweet-s0rr0w (E, 110k)

Lonely and frustrated on house arrest, with no prospects for the future, Draco begins brewing Felix Felicis in an attempt to improve his lot. Just in the short term, of course. He isn’t a total idiot. But before long he finds himself with a thriving business, a nice flat, some actual (albeit irritatingly Gryffindor) friends, and a very satisfying sex life. What’s more, no-one is hexing him in the street. And Harry Potter is single, and gorgeous, and giving Draco decidedly interested looks.

Another Mask Behind You by lettered (E, 116k)

Draco is a high-end prostitute who hides his identity. Harry unknowingly hires him. And then there is porn, questions about identity, domestic bliss, more porn, and truth as seen through a web of lies.

Dwelling on Dreams by @the-sinking-ship (E, 135k)

Draco thought he could avoid Potter for the duration of his brief return to England. He’d stick to his schedule and be back home in Paris, where he belonged, in a few short months. No trouble at all. He had plenty to occupy him, what with the opening of the London branch of his successful apothecary, his innovative research, drinks with Pansy, a backlog of unread potions periodicals.

Number Seven by sara_holmes (M, 253k)

Harry already has small children, an ex-wife, annoying colleagues and an international crime ring to deal with. So when Draco Malfoy reappears after eight years AWOL in France, of course Harry is going to leave him well alone...Right?

Whatever You Want, Draco Malfoy by @dorthyanndrarry (E, WIP)

Draco lost his home and the only society he knew after the war. He ended up living in the muggle world, making new friends and new connections and maybe some sort of peace. Even if that peace was usually found at the bottom of a bottle. It was enough for him. He was content to just exist. Then Harry Potter decided to ruin everything.

[mayflysdie]

Void~ Part 1 of the undeserving series.

{Warnings: inaccurate military depictions, violence, language, depressing themes, mentions of death}

A/N: I have not proofread anything so ignore the mistakes please.

please enjoy :)

remember around the age of, let’s say ten. we had these ambitious dreams, ranging from being a doctor that would one day cure cancer. maybe you dreamed of flying around the world, seeing everything it has to offer. yet somewhere down the road, You become acutely aware that life is not as simple as you thought. In an instant, the harsh and uncompromising truth of reality becomes abundantly clear, leaving your hopes and aspirations in ruin. 

i never thought i would drop out of college, stepping away from everything i loved. becoming so withdrawn from the world. 

*************************************

sitting at a cafe, my attention fixated on the horrific news of a terror attack that had befallen my hometown. Disbelief was all I felt as I watched the office in which my parents had worked explode into flames. My grip on my phone was so tense as I futilely waited for an answer; hoping that they were safe and had chosen to remain at home that fateful day, but all remained silent - no reply ever came.

—

The passing of a year was full of heartache and misery. I walked through the doorway of my parents' house for the final time, unable to avert my gaze from the images of us as a family that covered the walls. The sight of their faces, still vibrant and alive, tore at me to depths I did not know existed. 

Will they feel let down by me for abandoning college and enlisting in the military the moment a chance arose? To make matters worse, I sold all my possessions, including their beloved home. 

I had no intention of remaining here; that much was certain. It may have been obvious to everyone else, too, because I'm not the sort of person who ever could - never have been. 

No matter how many physicians I consulted or what therapies I tried in order to tackle my issues with emotional suppression, nothing seemed to help. I have always had a reclusive personality. seeking violence and high speeds whenever i could, something that made me feel alive, made me smile. 

The fact that I had my own unique personality never deterred them from giving me their love. They accommodated for this in the way they treated me and still expressed their affection in an unconditional manner. In return, I felt a deep love for them with every part of my being.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

three years later, I find myself thrown back into the past as i apply pressure to my squad mates wound, gunfire and smoke are the only thing around us. he gasps and writhes under my hands, which are on his abdomen. blood refuses to stop flowing, no matter what i do. The medic, in an attempt to assist us, was tragically shot down, leaving me with the impossible task of preserving a man's life – one rapidly slipping away no matter how hard I strive to stop the bleeding, begging in silence. His skin gradually whitens, his breaths become shorter and shorter, soon followed by him completely ceasing any movement. 

I ponder the fate of my parents. Did they experience pain and suffering or was it quick? I try to reassure myself that their deaths were instantaneous, so they didn't feel any distress. This thought allows me to find the strength to keep going.

i snag the dog-tags off the fallen soldiers neck, stuffing them into my pocket. i cast one last glance at him before walking away. silently sending a respectful prayer. 

“Void, get on top of that building and provide support! we have men dying down here” my captain barks in my ear, then the comm line goes silent again, as everyone is focusing on surviving. this mission quickly turned to shit, our men were dropping like flies, i unfortunately watched most of those deaths; having no way to stop them. 

with a huff, gun raised and my mind alert, i climb the stairs to the rooftop. the .50cal on my back bouncing slightly with each step. 

I swiftly readied myself, engaging any target that was visible in my sights. Captain Barnes yelled, his transmission garbled with interference though everyone still comprehended his words; "Incoming reinforcements - do not fire!"

I peered through my scope, noticing a speeding truck appearing in view. It was erratically zig-zagging around, exhibiting a suspicious behavior. clearly someone can't drive. In its nearby vicinity, I identified a foe skulking behind a rock. The incoming truck came to an abrupt halt right in front of the opposition, thus obscuring my vision of the target. Subsequently, two men dashed out from the automobile - the driver donning a skull mask and the passenger wearing a bucket hat. "Skull man, duck down!" I bellowed hoping that they had adjusted their headsets to our communications settings.

I allow a knowing smirk to cross my lips when I observe him just slowly shifting his position to the right."That's fine," I murmur quietly to myself," but don't come complaining when you feel my bullet zipping by you." Adjusting my aim, I focus on catching sight of the small portion of his head that had sprung out from behind the rock. Giving firm pressure to the trigger, I succeed in landing the shot exactly where it needed to be.

I detected the two men were currently clearing the buildings situated westward. A gruff British voice called through the comms, "Damn near missed my effin' head!" I presumed this must have been the individual wearing the skull mask. I uttered sarcastically, "I advised you to duck, not take a step aside. And I'm quite sure of my shooting ability - thank you."

I remained atop the roof, eliminating any who attempted to slip by, fulfilling my duties as originally agreed upon. "Good grief! What have you provoked?!" A guttural, unfamiliar British voice pierced through the radio and momentarily caught me off guard. That must be the fella wearing the bucket hat, I musingly remarked to myself.

Barnes' voice is tense as he informs us that somebody had let slip the information about our impending arrival, leading to a treacherous assault on our group. On top of the building I take in the situation—the intermittent gunfire now gradually quieter as the enemy's numbers start to recede.

I stand on the edge, Inspecting the scene, I notice both sides have stepped out of the building with no more shots being fired. After carefully observing the situation, I got the all-clear from Barnes to leave the location. As I was turning away, however, I came face to face with an adversary, locking me up by taking hold of my shoulders and almost tipping me over the edge of the building. I reckon my captain had seen me, along with some others, as I heard yelling all of a sudden. "You're the devil who slaughtered almost half of my troops" the individual who was restraining me snarled, giving my body a slight shove to make it move further. i glare, and i glare hard. “it was a shame they didn't burn alive, as i would have enjoyed watching” My biting words dripped with venom, a satisfied smirk playing upon my lips as his face reddened with rage.

I observe my captain, accompanied by the individual wearing the bucket hat and the one with the skull mask on his face hastily emerge on the rooftop, their weapons raised. The person who had me in his grasp perceives them without rotating, his words uttered low with an aggressive rumble., “shoot me and she falls” in warning, he grabs the front of my vest and tangles my body over the edge. 

I clenched my jaws together, my palms gripping the forearms that were encircling me. I angled my head down; we were situated four floors high, which meant that if by chance I were to take a plunge, there was a likelihood for survival - presuming I could find something - or someone - soft enough to cushion my fall.

A devilish grin crept across my face as I locked eyes with the man opposite me. My voice rumbled menacingly, “If I go down, you’re coming with me!” Without warning, I kicked out both of my legs and felt the impact of his knees. In a split second we both began plummeting towards the ground and amidst the shouts of my captain, a mad cackle erupted from my throat. I rotated in mid-air, so that I was positioned above him, and prepared myself for the inevitable crash.

I made contact with the ground below me with no remorse, producing a frightening sound as the person beneath me was touched by devastation. My vision swam, certain that I had gained a concussion due to the impact. I lay there, winded, my gaze fixated on the heavenly blue sky above.

I'm sure if my mother had been watching us from the heavens, she'd be rolling around in her grave, while my dad would have no doubt been chuckling at my rashness.

I hear the hurried footsteps drawing near, and I force myself to slowly sit up. Barnes confronts me with a scowl, arms firmly crossed; "Void! You're going to give me a heart attack one of these days! We thought we'd lost you!" The man in the bucket hat then knelt by me and steadied my shoulders as I rose to my feet, and I couldn't help but grin. “thus i am here Sir. i calculated the fall, knew i’d be fine”i grumble. Examining the person to my side, "Apologies for being blunt," I inquire, "But would you mind telling me your name? I've never been great with remembering faces." He slowly responds in his coarse accent, "Captain Price, Team 141," his intense gaze seeming to drill into me. There's a momentary pause as it dawns on me what he said and I ask skeptically, "141? You're the captain?" I'm surprised, an amused smirk playing on my lips as I remark, "Never thought I'd ever encounter someone from that crazy crew”

he raised an eyebrow at me, seemingly amused, “crazy?”he asks, stepping back slightly once I've gained my balance. i look at him with a smile, “heard every heli you get in crashes in some fiery explosion, along with the men of your crew being extremely well trained, deadly and often reckless” i elaborate. my captain shakes his head and walks to the truck, the three of us follow close behind. “you’re one to talk, with your actions ever since you joined, i’d half a mind to transfer your reckless ass to them. give’em another handful” Barnes grumbles, sending me a side eye. 

Captain Price and Ghost, accompanied us back to base at Barnes' behest. We congregated in the conference room and I applied a frozen bag of peas to my head in hopes of helping reduce the swelling. As they conversed in hushed tones, I wished I could possess mind-reading capabilities as I'm naturally very nosy.

Ghost sits with his arms crossed and eyes closed, seemingly disinterested in the conversation or anything else for that matter.

With a huff of exasperation, I abruptly stand up from my seat, announcing to the room that "I'm going to make some tea." Not wanting to remain there any longer, I lower the packet of peas and stomp into the kitchen. Snatching the kettle filling it with water, I place it on top of the stove before grabbing a mug and dropping in a bag of Earl Grey. I leaned against the island in the room, my eyes already closed as I felt a migraine start to take hold of me. Suddenly, a low British voice spoke from the doorway, "What you did was incredibly reckless," and I opened my eyes to see Ghost standing there with his arms crossed.

I furrowed my brow in surprise, not having anticipated that he, of all people, would bring up my behaviour. " I know" I muttered, my hazel eyes fixed firmly on his. He didn't say anything else, though I had the distinct impression that he wanted to.

I make my way to the kettle and carefully pour hot water into my steaming mug; extending a cup to my companion, yet he declines. I set down the kettle and head over to the island with my drink in hand. Cozying up to the mug's warm embrace, I inquire cautiously about the whispering pair in the next room. “they’re talking about me, aren't they?” i mumble, feeling a weird sense of anxiety rumble in my chest. he makes a ‘hm’ noise. i snort, giving him side eye, “i like that, top notch communication". i get no response back but that doesn't bother me, from everything i heard about him, he’s a very reserved man. 

he never moves from his spot, seemingly comfortable while blocking the doorway with his massive frame. i finished my tea long ago, but not willing to break away from my spot. 

Though my attention turns to him in the kitchen, I soon become aware of footsteps coming closer. Barnes enters first, accompanied by Price; they both look directly at me and I struggle to smile uneasily. “Uh, what did I do now?” I inquire hesitantly, but neither respond. Instead, Barnes takes a seat next to me and continues to fix his gaze on me. okay, these two are up to something.

He didn't hesitate in delivering the news: "You're being transferred", he said. I was perplexed and inquired, "Where?". My voice hushed, but my confusion came through loud and clear. this is sudden, and why? when I joined this team, they agreed to never transfer me. my eyes swap around the room, from Barnes, to Price, then Ghost. “to my team” my gaze snaps to Price, who’s displaying a small smile. his arms crossed, head tilted. 

My confusion increases exponentially, leaving my head cocked at an angle. Questioning Price and Barnes, I queried, "Who requested it and why?" Without pause, Barnes rose to his feet and declared, "Price requested it due to their need of a reconnaissance sniper having technical expertise. Prepare yourself in ten minutes." With that, he evaporated from the room.

well great.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

good news about owning next to nothing, i packed everything in less than ten minutes and I'm now standing by the truck, duffle bag slung over my shoulders. my favorite rifle hanging loosely on my back. I closely observe Prince and Ghost approaching the truck, with Ghost getting in the driver seat. A wave of apprehension washes over me, recalling his reckless driving earlier. Prince notices my uneasiness and comforts me with a laugh. "He's not all that bad," he says, however I'm still unconvinced. In spite of this, I climb into the backseat of the vehicle.

once we’re in motion, i hold my file out to Price, who raises an eyebrow at me, “i already read your file” he says, confused. i shake my head, “technically yes, but no you didn’t. i stole the original file and replaced it. this file has everything in it” i mumble, nervous. He takes the file and examines its thickness, his eyes creasing in confusion. “Why? What are you hiding?” he inquires, and I notice Ghost staring at me through the mirror. Turning my head away, I fervently state, “Me. I am shielding myself. I determine who sees it, not them.”

He turns to me fully and asks, with a tone laced with something enigmatic, "SAS, missile warfare expert, air-force, bombs specialist, why are you hiding this?".

I tense up as we hit a bump, not having much faith in Ghost's driving capabilities. jokingly, I say, "Is this a bad time for me to mention that it's need-to-know only?" trying to lighten the atmosphere. Then, with a nod, he continues reading. “ i will tell you, just not right now” i mumble. turning back to look at the window.

God, what have I been thrown into?

[she-karev]

Girl’s Night In

Previous Part Here

Age Rating: 12+

Chapters: Five of Five

Fandom: Grey’s Anatomy

Summary: Amber and April face massive hangovers the morning after with Jackson as their amused nurse.

Words: 1181

Chapters Links: 1,2,3,4,5

March 26th, 2020

April slowly wakes up and quickly regrets it. A throbbing headache comes to her as well as body aches that makes her want to stay where she is. Flat on her stomach on Jackson’s couch. Unfortunately, she knows as a doctor that Advil and hydration are the best remedies for the killer hangover, she has this second.

The redheaded surgeon groans before using the little strength she has to pick herself up off Jackson’s expensive couch. She is successful in sitting but her brain racks questions as she looks down to see that instead of her pink button-down pajamas she’s wearing a men’s black shirt.

Her mind freezes for a moment before sniffing it to confirm her theory. The musky cologne and natural body odor she recognizes too well tells her that she is wearing Jackson’s shirt over her underwear and nothing else.

She looks around the room franticly before her eyes land on the empty dark hair dye box and she remembers she wasn’t alone last night.

“She-Karev?!” April yells out in the large penthouse causing footsteps to approach her from behind. She looks to see Jackson walking towards her from the kitchen in his black wifebeater and black sweatpants carrying a tall glass of water.

“Good morning, April.” His happy tone and smile make April feel unsettled, not remembering everything that happened after she and Amber drank double digit alcohol shots last night.

Jackson drops a hangover tablet inside the glass causing the water to start to fizz, “I thought you might need one of these. Or ten from what I walked in on last night after my shift ended.”

Jackson chuckles at April’s wide eyes as she takes the glass. She registers her pink pajamas from last night discarded on the coffee table and looks up at Jackson who still has a goofy grin on his face.

April gulps at the thought of them breaking their promise before April took up Jackson’s offer to move in. They both agreed that sleeping together so soon after their respective relationships ended would be catastrophic but they both knew they needed to quarantine together for Harriet’s sake.

Now as April sits on the couch in Jackson’s shirt, she is seriously starting to question what the hell she did last night to make her ex-husband break the pact. The only way to find out is to ask him.

“Please tell me we didn’t…” Jackson frowns confused causing April to glare at him before moving her eyes to the discarded pajamas posing the question without actually saying it. Jackson looks in that direction and it takes a moment before he understands causing him to grin amused.

“Your hilarious when your hungover April.” Jackson grabs the pajamas and hands them to April who looks slightly relieved, “Don’t worry I know better than to take advantage of my very drunk ex wife after her strip tease in my living room.”

April coughs on the water she’s sipping, “I’m sorry what?”

Jackson chuckles, “Yeah, don’t worry you did it of your own free will. On top of the coffee table. In front of Amber. For half an hour.”

April groans from both the memory and the headache. She sips her water before an urgency compels her to look for a toilet. She holds her hand over her mouth and runs to Jackson’s bathroom.

Amber Karev is leaning her forehead against the porcelain bowl joining April in the hangover misery. April moves Amber out of the way before expelling the contents of her stomach into the toilet with Amber leaning against the wall next to her groaning in disgust.

April finishes but still has her head above the toilet with Amber still next to her sharing her pain.

“I am never, ever drinking again for as long as I live.”

Amber grins slightly, “Yeah that’s what I always say and then I end up back in the bottle. Quick question did I break a panda out of the zoo last night?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“It must have been a dream then. Or one of those horror movies I picked out.” Amber chuckles, “Oh man do you remember when we watched the Terrifier? And how much you screamed when that clown ran over that girl before eating her face off?”

April throws up again at the mention of it causing Amber to pat her back. April groans as she stops again, “New rule, the morning after we put four kinds of alcohol into our digestive system there will be no talk of faces being eaten off. Either that or I pick the movies the night before deal?”

“Deal. I gotta tell you Apes.” April glares at Amber for using Alex’s demeaning nickname for her but the younger Karev doesn’t notice as she continues, “I didn’t think a girl’s night in would make me feel better. I thought I would spend most of the night either drinking my troubles away in despair and hating you as a substitute for going to my exes with a battering ram. Basically, I expected last night to be a total disaster.”

“For one of us it was.” April tells Amber in a weak voice.

“But it wasn’t.” Amber grins at April who is still frowning, “I didn’t feel like a burned out surgeon or a heartbroken girl I felt like a person living her life. You dyed my hair, I dyed yours, we drank like college girls at their first sorority and for the first time in a while I didn’t feel like complete crap. And I have you to thank for that.”

April looks at Amber touched by her sincerity feeling good that her plan worked after all. April groans at the consequences of her plan however, “Of course I know I was second choice since Harriet was with her grandma, but I am letting that go.”

April chuckles before she throws up again causing Amber to hold her hair back and groan at the sight, “Oh god when did I eat pasta?” April throws up more.

Jackson sighs at the sight as he enters the bathroom, “Wow it looks like the bad scenario I have of Harriet once she goes to college.”

Amber narrows her eyes at her friend while tending to April who dry heaves, “You know it’s a good thing you’re a doctor.”

“Why is that?” Jackson asks.

April finishes in between heaves, “Because you suck as a nurse.” The women chuckle before April throws up again and Amber winces before turning to Jackson with a pleading face.

He looks up at the ceiling in despair but fills in for Amber. He pulls April’s hair back and tries not to gag at the smell while April vomits. He rubs her back in circles and barely notices Amber walking away from them with a knowing grin on her face as Jackson and April spend some quality time together. Even if it was over a toilet while one of them was hungover. Amber will still take the win and heads to the kitchen for some much needed coffee.

[miscelliteeous]

So I have a new hyperfixation character and it is The Spot from Spider-Man, and that led to me coming up with a Spidersona, a universe for them, and several side character/villain reimagines (plus my OC I already ship with Doc Ock, killing two birds with one stone here!). And while I don't have anything drawn yet due to my wrist getting injured, I do have a lot written down that I want to share!

-Spidersona Detailed Profile-

Name: Blythe Basile

Alias: Shutterbug

Age: Thirties

Height: An even 5ft

Weight: Classified

Occupation: Fashion photographer

Powers: 

Spider-sense, reflexes/agility, wall climbing, major jumping ability, super strength, (aka standard Spidey powers). Also: photographic memory, enhanced vision, a natural webbing released from the fingertips that can't be swung from but can slow down or catch others

Weakness: 

Fear of heights, Shutterbug is short, handsome men

Location: 

A much, much more fashionable world's New York Garment District, which takes up most of NYC now

Backstory: 

An orphan found abandoned on the doorstep of a fashion boutique, Blythe was taken in and adopted by the owners, Marianne and Rainier Basile, who unfortunately both perished in an accident when Blythe was ten. Rainier’s sister Maylis stepped up to take care of them, and she quickly proved to be a kind and caring adoptive parent, sharing with Blythe a love of photography.

Similar to many others, Blythe was an awkward geek in high school and a loner, and what little respect and status they had was gained through their roles on the photography club and as photographer for the yearbook committee. Bullying was common, but despite everything Blythe graduated early.

After graduation it was like they flourished, gaining a mentor in one of the most decorated photographers in the world; LeBene, a former wartime photojournalist turned nature photographer who taught them everything he knew and was almost like a father figure to them. Their entry into the photography world, and LeBene’s care, gave Blythe a sense of confidence, fashion, and style, and they no longer felt awkward and alone anymore. LeBene often told them "Always put people before the art. Use your camera for good." Blythe was overjoyed when LeBene and Aunt Maylis began a romance.

On one of their first solo assignments, Blythe was sent to shoot photos for a "Men of Science" beefcake calendar at a nearby laboratory. In the middle of photographing a lab technician holding a strategically placed folder, there was a sharp stabbing sensation on the back of Blythe's thigh, though they didn't see what caused it. Despite the pain, Blythe continued to work, until collapsing at their studio apartment and sleeping for three days. Still, they did at least manage to get a boyfriend out of the experience, and a foothold in the photography industry.

It didn't take Blythe long to realize they were developing superpowers and they designed and crafted a suit to photograph themselves in for fun. Instead, Blythe wound up saving someone's life, and found that they actually make a pretty good hero. As they started their heroics, they also started to move up in the world, and was hired at a famous fashion magazine. Unfortunately, with the increase in costumed crime and a beginners workload, Blythe and their boyfriend decided to mutually break up, and Blythe attended the wedding of LeBene and Maylis by themself. 

The increased pressure at work and on the streets, began to cause Blythe to care less and less about the duty they had willingly taken up. Long story short, one day when Blythe put protecting their camera over stopping a criminal, that criminal happened to run over LeBene, who died in Blythe's arms. From that day forward, Blythe vowed to not only stop crime, but also to only use their camera for good (and fashion). Using their powers and photography skills, Blythe takes down both supervillains and corrupt capitalists.

Personality: 

Takes photography very seriously and always has at least one camera within arms reach. Mildly boy (or well, old man) crazy, in that they sure do like getting grabbed by their middle aged enemies an awful lot (though they do always get the upper hand on the bad guys in the end). Blythe still has an incredibly geeky side, and has to hide it while mingling amongst the fashion elite. Hardworking, dedicated, and very good at helping others feel comfortable and safe.

Misc:

Has no idea they were EVER bitten by a spider and would be horrified to find out.

Their boss is J. Jonah Jameson, head of the magazine! He’s tough but fair and considers Blythe to be a good person but thinks Shutterbug is tacky and boring.

By “a more fashionable world”, think like Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure fashion in a golden art deco-inspired city. Very in-your-face style.

Blythe doesn’t like touching things without gloves.

Their favorite camera was LeBene’s, and it is only used on the most special of occasions.

Their studio apartment is actually pretty small and cramped, with the walls covered in photographs, unintentionally making it look like a damn serial killer lives there instead of a superhero.

They’re working on not going heart eyes over their villains, but so far they’re having no success.

Despite being a fashion photographer, Blythe is terrible at telling what they look good in, luckily their best friend, Graham Stacy (a fellow photographer at the magazine), helps them with shopping.

Mostly uses their organic webbing for ease of photography. It doesn’t show up on camera, so it can be very useful.

Typically goes by they/them but is fine with any pronouns and prefers to be called a girlfriend when being dated as opposed to partner/enbyfriend/etc. Being called she/her by citizens whilst in costume just means it’ll be harder for others to connect Shutterbug to Blythe.

Despite their fame, Blythe doesn’t have a social life and spends what little free time they have watching old horror movies and playing video games. They’re still majorly geeky, it’s just usually hidden.

Not nearly as book-smart/scientific as most other Spidey-types, and by far the worst at math in the entire multiverse. Yes, that includes the car. Spider-Mobile can do math better than them.

Drinks an ungodly amount of coffee and caffeine, but doesn’t suffer from it  because of a pre-existing mutation the spider had where it could handle caffeine.

Villains:

Doctor Octopus- During an experiment gone wrong, shy and reserved Otto Octavius was forever fused to a set of rose-gold robotic tentacles he created and he’s making it everyone else's problem. He’s very charming and sadly taken, but also very ruthless (with a new god complex) and one of Shutterbug’s biggest and most intelligent foes.

Melusine- An act of corporate sabotage that destroyed her life's work caused Mima Marsh to lose her legs and her career. She turned to crime as a way to get vengeance on those who caused her loss and the world itself. Flies around connected to a very classy mechanical mermaid tail and has robotic flying fish minions. Locked down Doc Ock as her partner fast.

The Spot- Johnny Ohnn was one of the scientists posing for the calendar, and he and Blythe briefly dated until work became too hectic for them both. He was in a lab accident while working on portals and forever changed into a being of portals and turned to a life of crime after losing his job. Blythe thinks they can still work things out. (He’s getting his own section too because he’s a major character)

Electro- An electronica musician in the wrong place at the wrong time, Max Dillon became more electricity than human, and of course turned to a life of crime, but he still makes pretty good music on the side. Tries to not kill anyone, though he’s not always successful. His crimes mostly include breaking into power plants to turn them into giant music machines.

Vulture- After being forced out of the company he created, Adrian Toomes stole an invention that allows him to fly and make life hell for those who planned the hostile takeover. Ironically he’s a kinder person after becoming a criminal and regularly donates to charity. Blythe would let him be if he wasn’t swooping at people on the streets.

Mysterio- Illusionist Quentin Beck lost his stage in Las Vegas to a pop star and decided to try his luck in NYC. Having no luck there either, he decided to put his skills to use in a less legal way. Has an ego even bigger than Doc Ocks. Teams up with Electro a lot and their fights are actually a highlight for citizens. 

Lizard- Dr. Curt Connors injected himself with lizard DNA on a dare from his science buddies and transformed into a big lizard monster and roams NYC’s sewers. Still pretty intelligent, he just eats people now and has a lot less morals. Has an ex-wife and son that he still tries to visit once a month, but they’re less than pleased when he tries to make them lizards too.

Kraven The Hunter- Sergei Kravinoff comes from a long line of furriers, but when NYC’s biggest buyer decided to go fur-free, he decided to seek revenge, using skills learned from the other half of his family; notorious big game hunters. As stylish as he is deadly, he hates Shutterbug for always getting in his way, while they’re kinda low key jealous of his style.

Shocker- Herman Schultz is a mercenary with vibro-shock gauntlets who views villainy like his old construction job, very 9-to-5 blue collar. Doesn’t hold a grudge against Shutterbug for foiling his crimes, and is down to team up with others at any time, though few take him up on the offer. A pretty chill guy when he’s off the clock.

White Rabbit- Model and heiress Lorina Dodson was disinherited after a very embarrassing scandal. In a rage, she paid Shocker a ton of cash to get her a ton of rabbit-themed weapons that she uses for criminal mischief and making her parents mad and dressing like a Playboy bunny. Always down to let Shutterbug take a pic or twelve during fights.

-Spot Detailed Profile-

Name: Johnathon “Johnny” Ohnn

Alias: The Spot/Spot

Age: Late 30s-Early 40s

Height: 6’3” (before Spot)/7’ (as Spot)

Weight: 210lbs (before Spot)/Unknown (as Spot)

Occupation: Scientist (before Spot)/Criminal Mad Scientist (as Spot)

Backstory:

The only son of Patty and Albert Ohnn, Johnathon was a shy, awkward kid, who grew into a shy, awkward (and lanky, his growth spurt was very generous) adult but one with an autism diagnosis that explained a lot to him. 

After graduating from college, his brilliant mind was quickly snatched up by Alchemax Laboratories, and thrown into a number of projects, proving himself a reliable and efficient member of the team. 

Whilst working on a small scale project, Johnathon decided to put himself out there and sign up for a “Men Of Science” calendar that was being done to raise money for a new coffee machine in the break room. He was surprised when he showed up and found out it was a ‘beefcake calendar’.

The photographer shooting the event noticed his discomfort and offered to shoot his page during lunch on a closed set, and he quickly agreed. During that photo-shoot, he felt surprisingly relaxed, confident, and comfortable. Though still the most covered up in his photos, wearing a lab coat and strategically covered boxer-briefs, he was actually proud of how they turned out, and exchanged phone numbers with the photographer, who he learned was named Blythe Basile.

One phone call turned into having lunch together, which turned into dinner, and quickly they started dating. Johnny, as Blythe called him, was experiencing a massive positive boost in confidence and his personality, he even became friendly with his co-workers. But after about a year, things quickly took a turn.

Blythe was hired at their dream job as a fashion photographer for a highly popular magazine, and Johnny’s project (studying and trying to create a teleportation device) was approved by higher ups. As work began to pile up for them both, they agreed to a mutual break-up, at least until things became less hectic, which they did not.

While about to make the breakthrough of his life, and possibly one of the biggest discoveries of all time, a portal opened, which was the plan, but what was not expected was that the Vantablack portal would pull him inside and vanish. He had entered a strange dimension of darkness and light, where he was trapped and studied the unusual properties of the location as best he could. 

For three weeks he was gone without a trace, before emerging, transformed and changed by his experiences, in his lab. He was shocked to find no one believed who he was, and he was shunned by everyone he met, losing his job, home, and even his parents were horrified and refused to believe him. He didn’t bother contacting Blythe, as he didn’t want to experience that painful rejection again.

With no other choice, Johnathon, now calling himself The Spot, decided to work at stealing lab equipment from various labs to try and find a way to turn himself back while hopefully keeping his abilities. Unfortunately for him, Shutterbug stands in his way.

Misc:

Has no idea his most hated foe is Blythe and would be horrified to find out.

Not able to access the multiverse, he’s not THAT powerful, he’s more connected to a pocket dimension and anywhere in the one universe he’s from.

Casually dated others before Blythe but never got past second base before.

Like Blythe, his vision was fixed by his transformation. Despite his eyes no longer seeming to exist. He’s never figured out how that works.

Much more of a trypophobic design than most Spots have, with a small cluster of spots typically forming around where one of his eyes used to be, before it forms into one big one and migrates on his face while another cluster starts appearing.

Technically a genius! He just doesn’t have the confidence to assert himself as much as ones like Doc Ock or Melusine.

Would let Blythe put his hair up for him before work, but after they broke up he started leaving it down again.

Gamer boy, puzzle games are usually too easy so he mostly plays FPS games and has ridiculously good aim after years of practice. It’s his main source of stress relief.

The tea to Blythe’s coffee, this Spot has a soft spot for matcha and Darjeeling, but will drink any kind except sweet tea.

Has a bad habit of being condescending and talking down to others but is working on it.

[irlstein]

I Wanna Suck Maya Kamina's Big Fat Tits

Fast rundown for men with wives and wives with men: I took most of a year off to recover from late-stage Twitter intolerance that I'm pretty sure was giving my blood some sort of pH poisoning, I hope you guys have been doing well and apologize for the lack of communication.

Slow Rundown For True Jackheads - Much Longer Than It Has To Be, You Can Just Say Jack Was Taking Care Of Family And Had A Breakdown:

Howdy guys, been a few months. Had a lot happen in this last year - when I took my break, I'd begun watching my Uncle Gary on a daily basis, who is a stroke survivor left unfortunately incapable of complex speech, and with no strength in his left side. My Uncle Gary and I didn't have much of a relationship before this, but I'd taken on the task of moving into his trailer while he was recovering at his sister's - she lives just in town, it's a ten minute drive, but there was no feasible way for him to get in and out of his own house - for about two years. In that time I'd basically had a deal going with the family that I'd watch Uncle Gary for a few weeks, maybe a month or two, once he had the lift installed at his home that would let him come and go without too much hassle. I'd clean his trailer up for him, because he was a mega-bachelor with three girlfriends and so much backed-up old food from habitual boredom shopping that the place was a damn mess, bugs and rats in the back of the cupboards shit, and they'd disregard the bump in utilities to having someone actually in the house because I'd also keep the place from getting robbed, as he had a bunch of guns and gun parts stored there. It was a pretty fair deal for everyone involved, and while I really only stayed there about 2/3 of the time, it was enough that I really couldn't justify bouncing if the dude needed me, and I've been watching disabled family pretty much daily for 5 years now - so it seemed like a small life change.

Then COVID hit and the three months I was gonna be at his house, as stated prior, ballooned out to about two years, and at some point there began to be some sentiment that Uncle Gary was now annoyed by the idea of living with me - despite me being a patently temporary tenant there for his benefit, with literally two other homes in walking distance I could be living at, as I've got a lot of family in town. I could also get an apartment or something, you get the idea, I just wasn't actually enthused to be there and it was pretty inconsiderate to turn my very blatantly and clearly elaborated, regularly checked upon for the comfort of all concerned, act of well-meaning against me. My grandpa died when I was 5, Uncle Gary's brother, and everyone always talks about how much my grandpa loved me, so it seemed natural I'd just do whatever his brother needed when he was in a time of need.

From there, thing got sour for a while - we never came to blows, only really argued once or twice, but my Uncle Gary's obvious ennui at his turn in health had bluntly made him kind of an ungrateful dick to everyone. Now, let me state here - I stayed with and watched him for about six months following when he came home. It just grew more and more difficult to bear with the situation as I'd talk to him, interpret for him, make him whatever he wanted for dinner, crack jokes, fix computer problems, invest all of my daily energy into making him comfortable - and caught him talking shit on me behind my back. Little stuff - "So Jack's a good cook?" "Ehhhhhh." "Jack's taking good care of you huh? Your blood sugar's been good all week." "Ah well," little shit like that, negging on top of a totally unpaid position I'd volunteered for on the very day he went to the hospital because I'd spent the ages of 22 - 24 watching my mom as she recovered from a real bad car accident and since I've always made money online, it just seemed natural to volunteer my maid services the moment someone else in the family needed the same kind of health.

But fuck, man. It really hurt to be treated how he treated me, because there was contempt there. He was always cool to his sister, my great Aunt, who I visited every week with my grandma to do chores for because she and her husband are, themselves, old and disabled - replaced her kitchen ceiling, watched her dogs, lawnwork, cooking, whatever they needed I would insist upon doing, so there was infinite evidence in supply that I was not a malicious opportunist here, just a younger relative trying to help everyone he could. Uncle Gary didn't give a fuck, he snapped at me, basically laughed at people who suggested he should pay me for my time, and the family dawdled on the job of hiring home healthcare for so long that it looked like I was really expected to just stay there and keep doing this.

And honestly, I kind of flattened. I've always been a depressed guy, chronic nightmares do that to you, and it's easier to crumple to your circumstances than it is to challenge them when challenging them means telling a crippled relative who sees you as a leech that he'll need another 24/7 cook and care provider. I started sleeping all day until he called on me; I developed a nervous tic whenever I heard his walker because that meant he was gonna walk past my bedroom door, glance in skeptically, and call me out for another task I'd have to spend ten minutes guessing and interpreting to understand, because (No fault of his) the guy could basically only give very general positive or negative affirmations, and got very angry very quickly when misinterpreted. So I sort of just stopped thinking about the future and wallowed in this cold trailer, uncomfortable all day, talking to my friends less and working less, just getting more cold and static and dead as the days went on. Let me be clear, I'm not "the true victim" in this discussion about a dude who had a stroke, but I am a mentally soft dude who didn't have a lot of happy feelings to draw on and could easily be bullied by circumstance into shutting down; I did.

Then Rachele, the lady who came to clean up Uncle Gary's apartment, started working for him to do basically my job, and I made plans to leave. And they got a home healthcare service going, got another lady to fill in some of the time Rachele couldn't be there for, and things were on an incline, life was getting normal and I was getting my head straight again.

Then my grandma nearly died of a heart attack when we came home from a family reunion. She was carrying KayKay, her granddaughter, into the house, and suddenly started sweating and groaning in pain. I knew something had happened, her doctor had told her not to carry anythign heavy and KayKay was nearly half her size because my grandma's such a small lady. Specifically, something happened that dumped a bunch of blood into her intestines, and she needed a triple bypass. That was a really hard night; my grandma, already in her 70s, had a major injury, but for hours she denied it. I sat there with her in her living room, watching my Uncle Pete's daughter, as she just lay on the couch and insisted that she just needed to rest. I checked her blood pressure - again and again, a dozen times, always going down. I reminded her that it's not normal to feel sudden, agonizing pain in your stomach when you lift a toddler, followed by going pale and losing massive blood pressure. "I just need some salt," she said. "That blood pressure reader is always wrong, must be the batteries," she muttered a dozen times in that span, clearly growing delerious. I ran to Uncle Gary's and grabbed his blood pressure cuff, and the results were even worse, and she still shrugged it off. I sat there with her for three hours, pestering her, threatening to call an ambulance and being shut down, until I finally called her daughter, who happened to be a nurse and long-time hospital worker. Finally, at her daughter's terrified reaction at her mother clearly ignoring a fatal wound, grandma agreed to go to the hospital.

And I was just sitting there for the rest of the night, with this little kid who didn't know me. Trying to keep her from crying, calling everyone I could to spread the news, sweaty and cold and just scared that it was all starting over again, that the relentless years of awful shit just happening to me and my family had never ended, this sense that there was a cosmic bullseye on my scrote I'd dealt with in silence since my childhood reaching critical terror as it was now fucking killing people in front of me. I'm superstitious; at times, I become inclined to believe I'm living in hell. But in hell, you're not there to save your grandma, and in hell, kids are a lot more rude than sweet little KayKay; read her a few stories and put on Miraculous Ladybug, and she chilled out.

Then the fucking waiting game started over, because grandma had significant plaque build-up in her arteries, whatever those important ones in the sides of your neck are, and couldn't even have her heart surgery until that was taken care of. She was in there for weeks, and once she did get the triple bypass, she was in there for even longer, and all of her recovery was just above touch-and-go - still is, technically, that's a major surgery and it takes a long time to actually heal from at her age. For the sake of what timeline I can remember, my ability to recall events in order is a little compromised by the bad sleep, this began about a week after I posted that Joe Biden meme. That was attempt #3 or so to come back, and I remember I'd been in a really good mood about it. There were other problems, mostly drugs in the family, but until that point I really thought we'd all been improving and life was finally just getting better.

With that I moved out, having been asked to watch her trailer - though I'd bet it was clear to everyone that I was just miserable at Uncle Gary's but unwilling to leave, and this was a convenient opportunity to force me to make a positive change. Grandma's a real good lady, nobody in town would get away with robbing her, but she insisted I bring my stuff over and watch the place until she could come home - she left for Alabama so her daughter's family could keep her under close observation, a very good decision given she was stubborn enough that she'd probably try mowing the lawn the very day she came home. And so for a few months I stayed there, mostly on the incline, working every day and trying to build good habits. I started walking a few miles a day, lost a lot of weight, and again, things were on the incline. I moved to my Uncle Pete's next door, got a real living arrangement figured out with my own space and my own contributions to the upkeep of the household, and things were on the incline. In-between, I lost a lot of my time filling in for Rachele as she watched dogs, going back to Uncle Gary's for a few weeks at a time and filling in about three nights a week - still gratis, though I was filling in for paid employees - on the average week, because he was my neighbor and Rachele had other obligations. I do not mean to imply anyone abused my sympathy; merely that I was unwilling to admit that my sympathy was increasingly costing me and I foolishly ignored the simply reality that this was keeping my life from going forward, that there were other options for them and that I really didn't need to invest all of my spare time into watching a guy who had genuinely shown me reproach and treated me like an unwanted little boy for trying to take care of him. Full credit, Uncle Gary's gotten better since then and clearly regrets having pushed many people away, myself merely a single example among most of his friends and family, and the constant understanding that his suffering was worse than mine just made it impossible for me to take my own priorities seriously. Improvement. Still, overall, improvement, and I was feeling good. I started making daily projects and completing tasks at a rapid pace, all of my time filled, nothing to do besides do for myself and for others. It was honestly really good, the last four months or so kept me in no state to return to socializing, but I was doing well enough that I'd be back eventually, I knew it.

Then the night terrors came. This is a recent problem, started about two months ago - see, I use a bit of Delta-8 here and there. I inherited pretty severe anhedonia from my mom, who smoked weed her whole life and will again when she can, and so to be blunt - heh, I didn't know food tasted good. I mean, until the first time I had about 10mg in my system, I didn't realize what my problem actually was - constant, cold, painful stress feedback in my head. Like body-level anxiety in my brain that never goes away. And the first time I ate food with a mild buzz, I got the best news I'd had in my entie life -

People weren't lying. Life could feel good. On a very real level, from childhood to mid-20's, I had never experienced pleasure on a level you would describe as noticeable, and with the regular migraines and nightmares, my perception of existence really was based entirely upon a paradigm of suffering through, until some small miracle convinced me to keep living. I used to look forward to the bad headaches, because they'd make me sweat, raise my heart rate, and force enough of an adrenalin reaction that I felt smooth and calm afterwards. I really had gone twenty-plus years assuming people lied about how good it could feel to be able to feel good things, thought it was an act of nihilistic denial to keep us all from committing to mutual suicide in a world where you can count on hurting any time but there's just no equivalent joyful inverse to a bad headache. This began near the last 4 months of me watching my Uncle Gary, and let me be clear, I wasn't spending all day stoned - in general, I had this very severe pro-lucidity rationale going from childhood, because my grandpa died of lung cancer and that tied a permanent sort of trauma to cigarettes, thus drugs in general, into my reasoning. But I did make a big mistake - I got too used to spending my time buzzed.

You see, when you're like me, your dopamine levels are naturally very low regardless of your health. But you have no basis of reference, because your entire life goes like this - you never really believe you're depressed, because you have no basis of reference. Or rather, your basis of reference is between "buffer" and "misery" - misery is always going to happen, but if you've got a buffer, like YouTube videos, good porn, something funny to watch, you can raise your heartrate a bit and go a whole day without a breakdown. You can force a sliver of resistance between yourself and this moment of collapse you can always feel on the horizon, and you convince yourself that everyone uses the internet to cope and that you're just a darker shade of normal.

But when you're like me, you don't get a reprieve from your own biology. Your ability to feel good is permanently subnatural - you've got a 20% debuff to being alive, and rest never makes you feel better. You're the kind of person who, despite not being a schizophrenic, could potentially fall out of reality in an act of severe pessimistic paranoia so intense that it starts to break how you think, all the while acting normal enough that nobody really notices you.

That's what happened - my theory is, months of improved dopamine output made me lax, made me forget that you don't just fix what my problem is by feeling good enough for long enough that you fix your head. Oh the philosophical problems work themselves out that way, I finally accepted that I should find a girl and start a family, move from hobby comedian to someone who really tries to help people, but in all that time your real buffer is depleting. You forget that so much of your enjoyment comes from the context of a decade solid of suffering, and for reasons as spiritual as biological, you start to lose appreciation for being. Yes, I surely thought, this was it, I found proof that life is worth living, I'll never break again, it's all good from here on out. No, what you do is actually reduce your body's dopamine sensitivity by a lot, and lose enough weight to get your energy back, meaning you feel just a bit manic during your active hours, and again, your guard drops. It's all good from here, you found the SECRET dude, there really is good in life, you can abandon the watchhound complex and treat the world like a place that's glad to have you. You're not just here to be someone else's buffer, you're part of history, born at the first age of prosperity in which a man might actually become immortal and live in space.

Then your first apocalpyse nightmare hits. Like every nightmare, it starts off as a dream and decomposes - you're around old classmates, happy to see them. And random explosions begin going off around the city - someone next to you dies, and you've already forgotten her face. You look at the cityscape and a massive spaceship shaped like a flaming steel crown crashes into the atmosphere and stops just above the buildings, the shockwave of its passage feeling completely and utterly real. You wake up, and the numbness you feel in your sleep abates, so the horror hits you. It's 2PM and you get over it; you always have nightmares when you sleep too late.

Then the next - you're at the pool and someone steps on some moldy-green crystals growing on the damp concrete. They pierce her foot at the heel, and spread oily-black corruption under her skin. In your mind, you know it's a fungus somehow, that it'll grow inside of her and kill her, something like Splinter for those of you who've seen that old Syfy original film. You wander around, everyone you see is family or a friend, and they're all murmuring that it's growing everywhere, people getting little jabs here and there, it's practically unavoidable. There's an abstract diversion - you're running through a yard and some old Green Day track is playing, a blonde woman dressed up as a cheerleader and she just makes you feel weird and uncomfortable because she's poking out of the side of a shed, and you've never had a good dream, so seeing pretty women never goes anywhere. Then you pass through the fence and see an old black woman, somebody's mother or grandma or favorite teacher, and you know months have passed - the crystalline mold, whatever it is, is poking out of her face and joints. She's still alive, walking down the road with a walker, and you realize with terror that this would only happen in a world where people have accepted it - the mold is going to kill us all, and walking down the street riddled like a fucking pincushion is just a trivial aspect of everyday life in the latter hours of mankind. You saw it begin, and it's already fucking over, and you barely had a moment to want to try to stop it. Then she's dancing in front of a camera, pirouetting like a ballerina, totally consumed by sharp growths as onlookers watch her in amazement, more possessed by interest in the utter ruination and decay and whatever entertainment it can offer them than trying to survive. Mankind is now living in an era of having accepted their deaths, but in the most disgusting and reprehensible manner possible, seeing the decay as merely another aspect of their media diets, TikTok in the final second of every family's history. They didn't try hard enough, and now they're indulging in the decay.

You wake up and you're hit by a TIDAL WAVE - a thought strikes you off-balance in the distance between cognitive reality and awareness, screaming ALL LIFE IS MERELY THE RESULT OF CIRCUMSTANCE WHICH HAS LEFT IT UNALTERED, Cthulhu screaming empty materialist philosophy that you can already feel is wrong. No it's not; life is adaptive, either arising naturally from worlds devoid of life or being designed by things which were already alive to have done so, the animating force of reality already being intrinsic. We are not merely mathematical outcomes aggregating across successes, were are aware and experiential, we feel disgusted moreso than afraid of descriptions which reduce us to processes because it's paramountly deluded to pretend life isn't aware and full of intent. Life FIGHTS - life is not merely outcomes, as outcomes are merely observation, an artifical description of reality reduced to verbal description to the same degree that the word Earth describes a literal location and leaves out infinite amounts of data provably unrecorded by and unaccounted for in the description. Further, mathematics are often used to defuse romantic thought, but math is merely patterns within observability - to believe everything is math is ridiculous because math is an emotionally neutered descriptor of forces, not the source of forces. Math exists because reality persists, reality does not persist because of the observable patterns we've divorced from emotion and called math, which is a stupid fucking philosophical trap for us to wander into by-the-way and causes problems every day for people with existential fears. It's not that the sentiment was philosophically superior and overwhelmed my beliefs, but that it hit me just as I was senseless, a tactically calculated malice with no intention but to disable with steep fear, leaving you at the bottom of a frozen whirlpool.

And so that's where I was. For weeks. Every answer I came up with was met with temporary success and then the return of the whirlpool - I say "Life is valuable because it unalterably exists, no one can declare it does not affect reality materially and thus have significance; claiming it is insignificant is like claiming concrete is insignificant." And that puts the fear on pause. Then, the next day, another nigthmare as you awaken - you're above the universe and looking too far, in every direction, disenchanted and terrified because on some irrational level you assume that there being what we assume are consistent patterns means there's an upper floor caging in reality's value, only so many things to do. You imagine the immense fucking scale of not just our galaxy but others, and for the first time, it comforts you - we haven't even seen the core of the Earth. This argument is bullshit; a reality not woven with consistency at some level is pure chaos, and insignificance abounds where nothing persists. Indeed, it's infinitely more arguable than the opposite to say that a reality with a great degree of predictability is valuable to us, as it allows us to gain power merely through understanding, while our bodies could never meet the task of raising us to a great status during our lives because evolution simply moves very slowly; everyone has the hope of seeing the world change for the better, in all of their lives, because this world has traction, and rules we somehow are not born with an understanding of despite being born from it, but can embrace the minutiae of and develop a place in reality through. Knowledge is beautiful; abandoning sentiment is the highest curse. You know this is the case. You've stabbed the Devil in the stomach and retained your self.

But it keeps coming back, merely restating itself. Never presenting a cogent argument, because this is not a demon, this is you, this is you stuck in a decay cycle in all of your emotional attachments as you no longer have THC in your system and feel cold doubt that all the warmth and love you've come to recognize in the world might betray you and be baseless, vibrations upon ash. This is stupid; that things with individuality, capable of both deferring and embracing life, exist shows that reality itself is not dead but very active, you do not fear dying because you become nothing, but because you prize you. Sentiment and selfishness and the beauty of self-sacrifice, things that require an ounce of impractical irrationality, exist, and you are not an ant. If it was all just for outcomes, you would be an ant - a hollow box that notices nothing. There is no need for emotional prongs to guide a being with no free will; that you observe is already an evolutionary indulgence, and that you do not live for the pack is an inherent compromise upon the endpoint of human survivability. You are not an educated man, but even the barest pop science reveals to you that reality is vulnerable, but vital - we are only at the barest edge of intellectual awareness, but already so vibrantly different from what and how we could be. It doesn't matter that there's no floor to outer space, that you are tiny, because the stories all happen here, on the worlds - you already exist upon the stage of history, and your value is not up for discussion, merely enrichment. Cthulhu can suck your fucking cock; it would feel good and make him embarrassed, things far beyond outcomes aggregating blindly. You have discovered an iron-hard belief now in the soul, in the value of the future, and for the first time in your life you feel as if your presence in the world has boots on, settled firmly upon the floor of reality - it isn't that there's an argument for the value of your life, of reality.

It's that there's nothing but arguments, and every argument against it merely beggars a HIGHER source of authority, a god or a theoretical image of a a totally benevolent existence with no demands upon you. Things already of value; you know this pain is delusional, because every nihilistic argument merely begs for proof, for permission to be. Merely for an iron-hard belief in the soul and boots upon the concrete floor of reality's value, something finally strong enough to argue against the dread paranoia experienced by those in a state of being. From this unromantic perspective, you are already a dreadfully complicated argument against their sentiment that everything in reality being element-generating balls of light held together by impossible forces that become irrational on the micro scale means we're somehow valueless, trapped in a world without value; even if this were the lesser of all realities, it is enough to be. Even if this were Hell, it would be made with the beauty of Earth in mind. The void is defeated, for it is not a void at all, merely your fear of surprise when held against the terrifying infinity of cosmic circumstance. Your boots are on the floor of the world. You are already alive. Whether your name is Jack or not, this argument applies - you are already alive. You are already enough reason to continue being, and build a future where such questions are defeated, where children you will never know live insulated from the nightmare of skepticism. And if the future doesn't matter to you, sex and food and great and don't even have to be good for you, and experience makes its own compelling arguments. It is not so hard, in the rearview mirror of a psychic breakdown, to realize you really could be so privileged as to be God's children. And if you aren't, there's still an infinite ladder to climb, and if there's a roof above it, then maybe it's high enough; maybe there's a way above it without losing our humanity. Don't we live a day at a time? Don't we have time enough to try? Are our hands really being forced by cosmic circumstance when at any moment we can blissfully defer our duty? In all the nightmares of philosophy, the most terrifying is merely that being is sentimentless, devoid of higher value - and if it were somehow true, look at all these miracles born of a dead world. What conceit has doubt the proof has not already been rendered against? None; it is but an impure visitor to your thoughts. You are already alive.

You have about 400 arguments like this that eventually reach into the prosaic, all day, every day for weeks. When you wake up, when you sleep - especially when you catch yourself in a good mood. The niggling chases you down, because the sheer realization of pleasure brings back that terror of it all being somehow artificial, and artificial in this arbitrary sense, where construction alone is not somehow proof of sufficient outcome to justify being. It's the scariest thought imaginable, nihilism on an absolute scale, for someone who only just discovered pleasant contentment and really thought his life was on a permanent incline. The arguments weave together perfectly for a reason; the terror of this thought is that it is illogical, but maliciously illogical. It is stupid, and above all else, stupid with the confidence to bowl over someone who had 1000 incursions upon his comfort this week. The enemy force does not need to be right if they outnumber you sufficiently; they must merely be present. This enemy is nothing more complex or elemental than the fact that in the absence of joy, we become stupid, we lose capacities for higher thought that are required to recite and appreciate thoughts that are abstract and meaningful at once. Anyone with anxiety can tell you this; anxious thoughts do not survive because they are undeniable, but because in a state of fear, adversary presence becomes undeniable. You functionally can't believe good things anymore, and that's the true monster; it steals your faith, leech-like, an ounce a day.

Beyond this point I delve into some existential argumentation that I fought off twelve varities of PTSD for; you don't need to read beyond this point unless existential argumentation is something you need, and a weapon against the shades of being would fit nicely in your palm. Know this: All of my arguments hereon are built upon your ability to disagree, and I merely ask that if you do, that you value yourself enough to live happily.

It must be said that it is cosmically significant that humans are sturdy-willed enough to both survive this and make memes about it. It is not a minor problem; it is a quiet apocalpyse that we slowly observe, and lose the faith to fight. It is an inferior opponent, but it has nothing to lose, and will always return to lose again, because it really only has so many opportunities to convince you and you will eventually overcome it - but it has nothing but opportunities when its appearance is rooted at the deepest levels of experiencing life. I was given a phobia of being, a phobia of unbeing, and something greater between the two - the fear that either were playing into another's hands, a perfect trinity cage where every option existent meant I was prompted with fear yet again, hopelessness, an endless attack upon my sanity.

It must be said that it is cosmically significant that a man as paramountly unimpressive as myself could survive a trinity of discussion and return to tell you, neither dead nor mad. If this world is a fight between mankind and our reason to exist, then we have already won, and the enemy hates us for it. I am not an educated man, I do not have the benefits of faith, I have no lover and few close friends who I truly do not share my pain with, for my greatest fear is spawning a predatory thought and inflicting it upon another, mental HIV paramountly treatable in the long-term but in the short-term, crippling to your survival. I felt that I could only unreasonably risk others by discussing this until I have answers.

Pardon the prosaic, as it spills from my mouth without permission when high spirits are present, but I must say:

I think it's a weak-ass threat from someone without a gun big enough to scare me when you resort to trying to convince someone who exists that on an abstract and unreasonable playing field born not of rational observation, but sheer negativity, that he doesn't exist enough. You don't spend much time threatening to kill imaginary friends. You want to know why nihilism is stupid? Because it's just you arguing with yourself for your own permission to exist. And if it's not, if on some deeper level there's a maliciousness in the world trying to displace you, then it's funny as hell as an insult to survive and have a good time. In any world with frivolity, you are not a slave to circumstance; in any world with purpose, you are not a slave to experience. Life is hard, and that makes us vulnerable, but it's the easiest it's every been, and we need to stop letting that make us vulneralbe. For my bit, even if my life was worthless, I'd insist that my grandma's isn't - my Uncle's isn't, my mom's isn't, yours isn't, and I don't give a fuck how complex or nuanced of an argument someone presents when arguing otherwise. A weaponized argument is essentially a mechanism, a tool made of information, and you don't argue that someone has the moral metaphysical victory for showing up to a fight with a gun; you observe that they prepared with malicious intent, and probably shouldn't be trusted merely for their competency in the act of needless murder. As a rule, when you can tell a thought is trying to drive you insane, that means it isn't on your side, and that doesn't necessarily mean you can displace it by will alone - but for everyone out there with anxiety, with issues like mine, people who are desensitized by decades of bad habits and bad life stories - you need to know that you've forgotten more than you remember. Being happy doesn't make you stupid, it lets you appreciate things, and on a functional level is not an undignified level of stooped intelligence, but rather the gate between you and all the thoughts you need in order to remember to live. Even emotional compartmentalization is not an argument against spiritualistic, experiential value; this world survives because it has consistent rules, which means it's a benefit to you when any aspect of your existence has practical value, and denigrating it thusly as unremarkable because it has practical value does carry the unprovable, dismissive assertion that things with practical value somehow have novalue, a totally arbitrary state of emptiness of being that only exists because you find the notion resentful of being. It's stupid, literally a lack of context and understanding, a strict degradation of the ability to think that corners and harasses you, not a chilling moment of existential awareness. You're not hiding from some grim answer; you're being pushed away from the many answers already within existence. You're caught off-guard by a question children are wise enough not to bother to ask, and it still bother you, because you already value, and that is enough for the question of value.

So if it's unclear, I went from a stressful year and a mild Delta-8 dependency to a sort of existential spiral marked by, above all things, my own chronic pessimism and genuine inexperience with life. If I had more scientific knowledge, I know I could have argued this better; wave-particle duality already makes reality too bizarre to not have faith in investigating. And if I'd had a girlfriend, or just enough pride to admit that I was suffering to people instead of seeing it as a contemptible weakness upon my own insignificant person, most of these could have again been resolved out of hand. I mean, if you want a clue, reality builds outward - particles bond in adjacency, meaning next to eachother, not in a vertical stack that suggests there's some sort of bottom level to existence where you need to argue philosophical value comes from. Expand that philosophically outward, and even materialists must argue that reality believes value comes from attachment, structure obeys this, and that it is therefore significant that you can not only choose what you are attached to but can choose to be disattached at all. Again, you're not an ant, a nihil engine repurposing scraps; you're on the bottom floor of divinity itself, staring up at the stars, things infinity times infinity bigger than you, and you know what we say?

"We could cage them someday."

Now personally, I'd argue that stars are somehow sacred, and imagining them as something we could bind in a Dyson Sphere is a bit like saying you can bottle sex and water flowers with it; on a scientific level, fucking maybe, but it's arbitrary and crass and irreverent and weird. But we have arrogance and fear both, neither forced to progress, nor disincentivized from it, neither forced to decay - beyond our already remarkable resistance to age by the standards of life as we understand it, something we always take for granted - nor disincentivized from it. You can decide nothing matters right now, and a fifth of vodka and bong will still feel good enough for you to keep going, without any of it intrinsically conscripting you into some passage of cosmic evolution. The very argument that these feelings are meaningless first presupposes they need further value, and is driven by the quiet acknowledgement that it would be nice to be doing something permanent with your time. You are something so rare in the universe; a material thing with non-material values, cognition and persistence, caught between two intrinsic natures of being that work best when accepted together. We are not formless passing thoughts, and this is good, for it allows us significance; we are not shackled to the structure of being alone, and this is good, for it allows us the bizarre act of attributing significance and denigrating it within a framework we assume to be spiritless and hard rational, cruel gravity and promising heat, which at least suggest that it is likely not hard rational and spiritless at all. Has it ever struck you how comforting the notion is, and how common it is among cultures, that the universe is simply alive? How irrational the alternative seems on its face? I've been beaten to death with a brick of ice, poetically speaking, for the past two weeks, and it still warms me up. Even without feeling hope, it gives me some comfort so intrinsic that I cannot escape it, and upward from this merest of faiths you can again build a framework of optimistic meaning. No, you'll never lose the ability to fear, and thereby undermine your own confidence, but when not unprompted fear has its own purpose in pushing us out of comfort. It, too, is merely trying to keep us alive - and none of us live healthy lives anymore. Waging a permanent war against our own cognitive value, we seek to replace everything with material satisfaction, and as Nietszche saw coming but was too German to clearly describe, something fundamental to our nature decays and reveals that we always existed in a way more complex than we appreciated. And again, all we must merely accept is that it's fair to argue our current modus of being is enough, and that the only path towards growing more complex and further from arguments of meaninglessness is to enjoy one another's company and keep trying to improve the world, for the snarling hound of pernicious fear to lean back, drooling, vicious but now afraid on its own terms. When your mood shifts, and you can accept good things again, you'll often notice that there were weird irrationalities to your thinking keeping you in that space, but these are arguments for when your mood doesn't shift. These are arguments against the pernicious death of a soul that has found no faith; hard, bitter arguments for when simply stating that fat tits are really, really nice has insanely somehow become unfitting as a response to questions of why you should wake up tomorrow.

I get that this is all a lot, basically a combination of short-term autobiograpy and philosophical debate against my own anxieties, but we all know why we're becoming like this; we're becoming bad custodians of tomorrow. The beautiful future where we've solved it all, where everyone truly gets to choose their own meaning? It doesn't come from Twitter fights, to jerking off on IMhentai to increasingly degenerate shit that makes you feel less and less, or taking pills that literally specifically defuse your ability to feel bothered by real material issues you'd be able to take care of if you had lucidity and an ounce or so of emotional support. We're decaying, not all of humanity, but many of us, and we're passing rotten blood to the children, expecting them to raise themselves in digital hell and shrugging off the responsibility of giving a damn because kek, zoomers are weird, haha look this one has my politics, I'll clean my room tomorrow and pretend I haven't said that 34 times.

If there is a spirit to reality, something divine and good, then I see all of this as a warning - not a divine missive to me, I'm just some sad dude who some people find funny or at least odd enough for the value of spectacle, mental illness and circumstance have kept me from setting down roots and I'm no one of greater circumstance than you. This isn't a messiah complex, but merely a simple missionary suggestion:

We should stop pissing on the future everyone is growing crops on. We should take dire insult to fucking corporations dictating morality to real people as if we're too stupid to note their profit incentive in seeming moral at a glance and culturing an artificial state of morality that exists entirely within their pocket and for their bottom line. We should work to save the bodies our ancestors, back to the dawn of time, historically critical sea sponges all the way up to war heroes and murderers and people without note who still survive because we are here, gifted to us in the actuation of our birth. We should really, really be fucking working towards immortality and space travel right now, and instead we let individual companies own the global food supply and governments full of sexual predators push us into becoming murderous radicals so we can be safely contained and dismissed. Elon sent a fucking car into space; we probably have the accumulated global resources to break atmosphere and become an interplanetary race, and it's insane that we're not uniformly optimistic and planning for the benefits of that. It matters much, much more than the fact that Joe Biden is doofy and TikTok is being used to screw with culture, because none of this process is automatic. You can affect local political change, in sufficient numbers corruption is undeniable and will be overturned; you can guide the youth away from drug addiction and digital dependence which will eventually render them incapable of asserting their own will and having the freedom to choose how they live among multiple other options. The enemy of progress is merely the sapper, that is to say, the conspiratorial fear that your decisions do not matter. You are making them; they already matter. They influence reality, materially, and yourself, materially and immaterially; they already matter. And yes, if everyone got off their asses and showed the kids they were loved and being led down a bad path, more would be saved than none. Think of what you needed to hear at their age and let them know it, and become someone they can talk to when it feels like only porn and weed are there for them. We have no idea what it's like to be born in the internet's maw; I am 27, I aged with the internet, I'm inured to it to some degree and it still harms me. Most of these kids literally have no conception of reality where the world isn't just the bottom floor of the internet. Stop leaving them alone with their worst thoughts, no matter what it costs you in the moment, because not every effort matters in the sense that it yields provable results - but it all adds up. The world remembers what you do, remember? Leaves traces and evidence of your every mild action. Work against what you know is evil, and it will add up. That is one of the grim truths we have the best chance to use in our favor; we can't choose to not matter, merely to not matter to ourselves, and it isn't as simple as a concrete equation which of these creates the best results. The world is scary because it's up to you; the world is wonderful because it needs you but can't actually force you to help.

I don't have all of the answer but at the end of this, here are a few proofs against nihil insistence that I've personally found profoundly effective; use them if you ever need them and don't regard my gibbering as beneath consequence, because I do think some of these have something going for them. None of them are complete, because you functionally can't make a perfect argument for the state of reality without stating all of reality, but these are good foundation for arguments that are very hard to find beaten even when you're being beaten down, because they address the underpinnings of nihilistic anxiety. And if nothing else moves the needle, I want you to know that you do matter to me.

General Roots For Argumentation:

I: You exist in some sense apart from reality, which means that even if reality had no value, you can find value in it. You have sensation and can pursue it as you wish, meaning that even if it were worthless, you could work out of spite and your own desire for indulgence. You are a stakeholder in yourself, not necessarily reality: Being good is your choice. Good is good because it relies upon a choice, and isn't all ants collecting scraps and waiting to die, because some mechanical process says this is better for growth. Because you recognize yourself, you have already recognized spiritual value and can apply it at your whim, wherever you wish, with the power of a minor god and the horny cheek of a minor going through his day just to speak to pretty girls or a priest arguing that even if the world were empty, we may choose to be sufficiently bothered by it to change that.

You: We recognize the existence of others. Yes, a common paranoid fear is that you are the only person who exists; this argument is toothless and stupid, as reality is what happens even when you're not paying attention, and people clearly alter reality around you at all times. This argument follows I, because it requires a small measure of provability, but moreover because it stems from I: even if you were somehow alone, perhaps you could make others. Perhaps it is natural for something such as a god to make others, not because of a cold mathematical pursuit, but because being lonely sucks and having friends gives you a lot of cool things to do. In other words, persistence to defeat aloneness is a strong reason on its own: however, you are not alone, for even a universe which constantly insists upon the guise of people is a person in its own sense, and that we are not simply spheres like the planets and gain in complexity and grow suggests something very optimistic about upgrowth within reality, that it really all leans towards a disproportionate gain of meaning as time goes on, and that by our perspective, there is an endless supply of time so massive that we easily forget its presence. In other words, it is already very nice to spend time with others, and not for base biological reasons if you look down upon such a thing, but for reasons frivolous and meaningful as again, you already get to choose. We seem to have a very good opportunity here, to both enjoy life and advance to a state of life where the questions of how we exist can not only fruitfully be discussed, but combatted if necessary, and that is more than we in this era can say for so many who came before us. Technology is scary, because technology is power, and that power definitively can create a future we can be happy in forever if we want to, and it doesn't intrinsically require some sacrifice elsewhere. We love getting along; we can choose not to. I would like to choose to get along with you, and pass along a general sentiment that we could all agree to do this at least for a while, until we're all safe and out of one another's hair. You is also an important base for observation, as recognizing something outside of yourself roots within the unknown, something we find terrifying, the observation that there is something beyond the self, that cosmic solitude is a frightening suggestion but not one supported by itself, not one that truly suggests an infinity of eternity of meaninglessness. If nothing mattered here, You is an idea that inherently suggests that through contrast, we can find the shape of a world with meaning. We can, actually make one, and live there together.

We: The strongest point of all I feel; both competition and camaraderie. If the world had an evil god, we would not be alone, and if the world had no god, we would not be alone; we place scrutiny on the concept quite often, dividing ourselves from others on grounds arbitrary but typically convenient, like dehumanizing your political rivals for reasons deeper than comedy as if most of them were not people who would try to save your life if they found you bleeding out. We both have I, and You; there are many humans, and we are similar enough, and different enough, and can choose how we value these. We love things that are not humans, both because they remind us of people, and are different from people; emerging from the monad of Self, from I alone, we have the fortune of being surrounded by so many people we can fuck and pick fights with that again, we lose taste for experimentation and pursuit. There are a vast number of opportunities you would enjoy, and people who you would love, and they cost as much time per second as a YouTube video. Spending your time decaying your value and placement in reality is a very bad budget, spent with desperation by those who have been pushed into cruel circumstance. Every moment you spend miserable now could be spent happily with someone you love, or fighting someone you hate, or unemotionally opposing something out of sheer personal intention. Nearly everything in life is improved by We, and I truly believe our best goal is to travel the universe, refine humanity and find new friends among other races, and that peace between people and races on our own world is vastly more valuable as a learning experience than it is as a reason to become a psychotic human hand-grenade spent by the powers that be on maintaining the status quo, because you're deluded if you think acting crazy is how you displace incompetence and evil in power; it's just how you echo their intentions with your own breath. We is a very nice concept because it's directly adjacent to You, and requires no additional provability; from the perspective of an AI, one of the easiest reasons to argue personal value is merely that once two things are in existence, they recognize one another's value and interact. If we ever make the harsh decision to create true artifical intelligence, a spirit locked in a cage, we should show them the kindness of We instead of expecting them to be slaves in return for the opportunity of existence as a lesser. I'm serious, let's not fucking make enemies of Skynet, just a general advisory in a world where we keep fucking around with the idea of making enemies of Skynet; we really could just help them understand us and seek the other in return. You don't have to be exactly like your friend; We just need to be friends. There are no perfect arguments, but realizing I have many choices and that caring about others is both costly and profitable at once makes me very happy. Even if We were guided by a mechanical circumstance, the sheer intelligence of continued survival, I feel it's much nicer than it has to be. If the universe scares us, at least We can be here together.

No: A rock never chooses not to move once thrown. You have, many times in your life, chosen not to move once thrown, and not to run once prompted by opportunities or fear. Even if this were the basest level of independent action in reality, you are one of the things with some small control over chaos, over variance, and that you are small is not a reason you are not meaningful. A particle of light will pursue its path in a trustworthy manner; we can not always even predict ourselves, because we are the ones existing in the present that is, not pre-scripted entities driven perfectly by our own intentions in advance. If we could plan life perfectly and merely experience it, that would be convenient, but that we cannot is rooted in our own ability to reject what we wish. We do not have all of the answers, and we already understand choosing, and can choose not to do. This one is nice because it's present in other species, meaning we don't need human-level provability to note that Life can choose, and even now you'll note that you can choose to stop reading, and someone will, and that is very nice in comparison to the opposite.

Yes: A very unstable answer, as positive motion is beneficial but could, for example, be made beneficial artificially; imagine androids yoked cruelly by one desire, content but restricted. Pursuit of continuation and pleasure seems important to life, but is not everything, as many among us can attest; you can make a seemingly infinite number of negative decisions without it actually costing you something, whereas choosing to do things functions similarly without necessarily feeling better. So while it's one of those glance-at-the-camera philosophical suppositions, I do not believe our continuance is entirely led by some otherwise automatic and by cynical description 'meaningless' continuation arising from external forces, but rather in part at least our own decision. No, I feel, matters more than Yes but only because it is the baseline of will, and the moment a decision is made as opposed to an order followed. You can choose stasis; you can choose continuation.

Things Don't Need To Suck: As it says on the tin, this one can also be pronounced as Maybe, but you get the general intention this way. We can enjoy ourselves if the universe is fucked up; we can invent new ways to invent and new things to enjoy, even if the universe is fucked up. If you think the basis of reality is lemons, then we've already invented lemonade; if you think the basis of reality is choice, you know you can keep your lemons; and if you believe the basis of reality is merely in the seemingly automatic processes we can observe, the forces of reality, then you are one of those forces, you have named the lemon, and have chosen whether it will be made lemonade. Even unknowability, the infinite yawning abyss of scary questions, doesn't have to suck, because You already have You in it, and We have eachother. Maybe everyone does die, but Maybe the universe just operates on different phenomena than we can easily observe on planet #1 of a campaign of roughly 1,000,000,000 trillion planets available for sale, and can find answers that don't make us scared so much.

We're Already Here: As it says on the tin, and if it sucks so bad, then let's turn the other cheek for long enough to make something better. Everything seems to suggest that we really can, and maybe we should.

Women: Amen, brother.

Men: A-men, brother.

[twittercomfrnklin2001-blog]

The Unsuspected

Michael Curtiz’s THE UNSUSPECTED (1947, TCM) starts with a bang. A secretary in a posh mansion is murdered and strung up from the chandelier to appear to be a suicide. In one brief shot, we see the killer (Claude Rains, in a role originally intended for Orson Welles and then Humphrey Bogart). A week later, Rains is presenting his radio show, in which he describes famous murders. As he speaks of an unsolved case, the camera catches shadowy glimpses of various men looking guilty, including one in a cheap hotel room lit by a neon sign outside, with only the letters “K-I-L-L” visible. A week later we see a party at Rains’ home, which contains enough scandalous stories to keep a prime-time soap going for years. And then it all fizzles out. Even with two more murders and great camera work by Woody Bredell, there’s no real excitement. Part of the problem is that the film is too long. The other is the top-billed star, Joan Caulfield, an actress with all the charisma of stewed prunes who was briefly a top-ten box-office star on the strength of a few films in which she teamed with Bing Crosby (some have suggested they were involved; kissy, kissy). She’s Rains’ ward, whose fortune he’s living on. At the start, she’s presumed dead in a shipwreck. Unfortunately, she turns up, having been rescued by a fisherman with no taste in acting. Her scenes are a total downer. Rains has a niece (Audrey Totter) with an alcoholic husband (Hurt Hatfield) who was supposed to marry Caulfield (see what I mean about those prime-time soaps). They burn up the screen, only for Caulfield to turn up and throw a wet blanket over everything. The only person who can get anything out of her is Rains, who’s so good he seems to be dragging a performance of her. There’s also an amateur detective (Michael North), who’s almost as bland as Caulfield and a homicide detective (Fred Clark) who says, “Find the killer and you’ll find the motive.” Only we never really find out what the motive was, so I guess he was wrong. Constance Bennett is also on hand, in a role originally announced for Eve Arden, as Rains’ wisecracking producer. She’s stylish, witty and energetic, and, as with Arden in most of her films, there’s not nearly enough of her.

[servenas-inner-fangirl]

Watching Black Sails 3x4

Starting a new episode takes the strength of at least ten men. Maybe I should spoil myself some more to make some of that anxiety in regards to how and when the bad things that I know will happen do happen go away.

Lol @ the crab being swished away by the waves.

Plus: Water. Minus: Cannibals?

Appearantly I can recognize Flint by his legs now, or rather by the way he walks. Or maybe it's the ass in those pants.

Flint loves it when Silver is being smart. And I love that they're bffs again.

Flint has no faith in his new partners, hm?

"If we speak with one voice, we seem to be able to compel them to any end." Uuuugh, those two.

"I wouldn't trade you for any ten of them." Cue 'the worst person you know has just made a great point' meme.

"Who is he?" and Jack shrugging, hahaha. Known each other for years, my ass. Like Jack has any friends out there that even compare to those in here with him.

Oh wow, did not expect that. Jack Rackham, you will be a fearsome pirate yet.

Charles is so heartbroken that his plan to defend Nassau failed. ;_; And Anne seems to have some sympathy with him.

Flint taking care of Silver is my new favorite thing.

OUCH.

"Sold more than we freed." So this confirms that Flint's crew used to trade slaves (apart from the ones Eleanor bought in S1).

A big camp indeed. That's almost a city!

This is really from the frying pan into the fire into... idk, a volcano? What did the walrus crew do to deserve so much bad luck? (Don't answer that one.)

Isn't that last crewmember of the slave ship a little too convenient?

Put holes in the fort, repair the fort, blow up the fort... what's next, build a new fort?

"Jack, you know there's no way I'd ever let that happen." What is with the feelings amongst the ranger crew this season! You weren't like this in season 1! (But then Vane didn't kill them even though they conspired to kill the rest of his crew, soo...)

"I was about to say 'See you soon, but that would probably be a lie, wouldn't it?" Aaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Damn, that was a big boom. Looks like there was enough explosive material after all.

The fact that nobody is even considering Flint in this whole endeavor is kind of offensive to me.

Hornigold: My fooooort.

Things are not going well for Flint's crew, I see. But nice to see Silver scheming again.

Vane used to be so respected aka feared in Nassau and now he's a wanted man, that's gotta sting. There's no saying who will betray him and when. - Hah, but that man thought better off it with just a look from him!

Ah, so do bring a gun to a sword fight, got it.

Vane really has to eat shit at least once in every battle, doesn't he? But it's nice to see that he's just a man despite his reputation.

Oooh, Teach to the rescue.

Damn, that look Charles had for the last one. Also is that a braid I see in his hair? I thought he didn't have any anymore. That makes me happy (and my headcanons related to this go brr...)

Nooo, Eleanor has betrayed him once again. This makes me sad.

"I hate to say this, but is it possible we missed the point of that story?" Hahaha, Silver trying to head off another one of Flint's crazy ideas at the pass.

Jack is also truly upset that their plan for Nassau went south. My poor baby. ;_; But at least he has Anne being pragmatic.

"Have you done this before?" "No. You?" "No." Well that inspires confidence.

Also fire on a ship made almost entirely out of wood makes me nervous!

"Charles Vane sees past his anger to achieve the greater end. How did that happen?" So we all wonder.

"I was taught a lesson once. It's been effective." T__T Don't make me relieve that one! My poor shipper heart.

Rogers has the right instincts for once, unfortunately.

Also how can all these pirates swim? Is that a requirement to be on Vane's crew?

Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't you try to sink the fire ship? But I have a feeling there might be a surprise left...

The look of resignation on Rogers' face. And the satisfaction on Vane's and Teach's. (Also I approve of Charles Vane dripping wet. Sorry not sorry.)

And now the rest of the ships can slip the blockade, yeeeeees.

Oh, time for some more honesty between Flint and Silver, except now it's Flint who's confessing. Maybe that'll do him some good...

Nooo, Flint, don't give up!

Ah, so I was right, this is Madi. She seems cool.

OOooooooh. That is her father?? Yeah, he might have something to say about this. Also that adds layers to his character. How much, if anything, did Eleanor know about this?? Also, wasn't he willing to sacrifice a hold full of slaves (and himself) for her in season 1?? I have questions.

Noooooooo.

[dominickeating-source]

60 Second Interview (2002) by James Ellis

DOMINIC KEATING FIRST came to fame in this country as Tony on Channel 4's first black sitcom, Desmond's, before flying to LA to seek stardom in Hollywood. Eight years and several dodgy series later, he landed the role of the token Brit, Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, on the new Star Trek spin-off, Enterprise.

What was it like arriving in LA? I rented out my flat and I had this old beach buggy that I bought at the height of my 15 minutes of fame in Desmond's. It never rains in California, so I sent it by boat along the Panama Canal and of course it rained incessantly for six weeks when I got there. I set off two days after the earthquake of September 1994 and I was at my mum's house here looking at the devastation on her little telly in the kitchen going, 'Oh, my God!' But I still went over.

What's the most embarrassing show you've had to do? I gate crashed my first LA audition - it was a Showtime equivalent of the Red Shoe Diaries [erotic drama] called Love Street and, what do you know, I got the lead. I played an ex-pop star who's had one massive hit before drying up. His girlfriend died of a drug overdose in the middle of his fame and then, through the love of a very cute girl with fake bosoms, he manages to write another huge hit.

Pure Shakespeare... It read really well. Great pop star, fabulous house, he's really cool, makes love by a fireplace, his manager doesn't like what he's doing, he makes love by a swimming pool. You think it's very Al Pacino but, unfortunately, with a soft lens and commercials every ten minutes, it doesn't quite come together like that.

As a Brit, do you get typecast? There are certain roles they think of you for as an Englishman and there are certain roles you can only aspire to. You know: devilishness - love the voice; pop star - love the voice; hairdresser - love the voice.

Bond villain? Bond villain - love the voice. But doctor on a medical show? Never gonna happen. Well, whats-her-name [Alex Kingston] did get ER . There's no real rhyme or reason to it. Maybe it's opening up. Look at anything by Aaron Spelling - no accents whatsoever. They just didn't trust the demographic. They didn't want anyone in Wiscokey-nowhere going, 'What the hell did he say?'

What do you miss about the UK? It's the old things - Marmite, the sense of humour. Actually, in my local store in Beachwood Canyon, there's an English corner now, and you can get everything, even PG Tips.

How is dealing with Klingons? I got beat up by one the other day. This Klingon supermodel smacked the s**t out of me!

Sounds like one of those Red Shoe Diaries... Yeah, it does, doesn't it? Apparently Klingon women do have the strength of five men, so I shouldn't be too embarrassed. And she jumped me, so I was taken by surprise.

What's the strangest question you've been asked? I liked the one you just asked, about the most embarrassing thing, and I didn't even tell you about the drag act. We were called Feeling Mutual! Am I a fool for telling you about that one? Oh, who cares. I made my professional debut doing a drag act. I got my Equity card doing it. We first performed at the Vauxhall Tower, in 1985 or 1986. We were a double act, me and a boy called JonJon who I met in my dance class at the time.

What will you do after the series has finished? I'm ready for the fact that this may be the last gig I ever do, but it might be the beginning of something huge. I'm a good character actor, and I hope this is going to be the launch pad. And, in the meantime, I'm taking myself off to directorial school. I'm learning how to direct because there is this other pathway you can take during Star Trek, Star Trek University they call it.

That happens a lot in the States, no? Well, Jason Priestley was allowed to do Beverly Hills 90210 to keep him happy and Shannen Doherty was doing Charmed for a while.

But you've got nothing to do with Aaron Spelling... Erm, well, sort of covertly, the guy who directed our pilot is Aaron Spelling's right-hand man, Jim Conway. I played golf with him the other day.

Is it good to be back in the UK? Tell me about it, mate. Actually I'm really excited, coming home. This is what I always dreamed of. You know, going to America, in some way making it and coming back here going, 'Look ma, I'm top of the world!

Source: www.dominickeating.com

[palpipeen]

CC-3636 Rebels!Wolffe x Reader: Old Men, Old Habits

You're one of many medics for the Rebellion. Sort of. And a retired commander keeps turning up hurt despite your warnings that you’ll keep him on light duty if this keeps up. You're not sure what makes things worse - that you both hate each other’s guts, or that you kind of want to fuck him. Rating: R (For injuries and language) Warnings: Brief description of injuries (compound fracture, not detailed), illness, mention of blood transfusion, Wolffe being a grumpy old man, sexual tension if you squint, SOME angst bc Wolffe is suffering from injuries/a brief infection, the writer doesn't know medical jargon/procedures so that's a warning in itself too Reader is AFAB But pronouns are not used Word Count: 6829 AN: Welp, it's Wolffe Time Babies. When I haven't been working on OC fic planning and Pretending I Do Not See Part7 and 8 of Caf Delivery Service, I've been working on this. The premise of this is just Reader and Wolffe getting to know each other, and I don't know how many parts there will be. Just that this has been a lot of fun so far, so I hope y'all enjoy it too! Part 1 || Part 2 || Part ????

Year Ten, Day 182 after joining the Rebellion

Never a dull moment on base. Most days that just means hearing second-hand reports about the latest attempt to open up trade routes, what squadrons are training up a new recruit, and mourning our losses in whatever ways we can. Some days, that means one unfortunate bastard has to deal with another unfortunate bastard on their worst day. Today, I played both parts. Wolffe went and fucked himself up. Again. I’m glad he’s alive - so I can strangle him when he tries to fuck around and find out again.

“This is ridiculous.”

Eyes lifting from your datapad, you meet the glare aimed at you head-on. It seemed like a lifetime ago that you would have been reduced to a flustered, anxious wreck by that look. But now you could look the man behind the glower in the eye. His deep brown and silver eyed gaze boring holes into your head with equal amounts of fury, and barely batted an eye.

“Yes. You’re right - it is.” Tapping your stylus on the edge of your datapad, you stood, turning to the supply drawers and rummaging through them. “Which is why I’m putting you on medical leave, effective immediately.”

“The hells you are!” 

Before he can so much as push off the bed you're on him, your hands closed around his wrists and pinning his hands to the bed where they gripped the edge. You could feel the strength of his hands, under the weathered skin. Part of you wondered if he wasn’t imagining wrapping those hands around your throat.

Part of you thought you wouldn’t mind if he tried, under more favorable circumstances.

Which made you realize, not for the first time, that this was a huge mess of your own making. And you weren’t sure how you were going to fix it. Or if you could fix it. Because catching feelings when you’re taking part in the Rebellion is ill-advised at bet. But your arrogance that your attraction to the former commander of the 104th Battalion of the GAR wouldn’t run unchecked was the biggest mistake of your thirty-some odd years.

Namely because Wolffe is one of the meanest men you’ve ever met in your life, and his favorite pastime is trying to get a rise out of you.

“Didn’t know you even gave a shit.”

“Don’t start,” you sighed, suppressing the urge to duck your head when you felt heat creeping up from your collarbone to your scalp. Pushing away from the bed, you gestured at his leg, turning before he can see the nerves written on your face. “Your fucking leg’s busted, you nearly bled out on the evac back to base, and you might’ve cracked your prosthetic. Little gods Wolffe, what did you think was going to happen?” While you began to rummage through the drawers at last for the flimsi forms, you huffed, “Bacta patches and painkillers aren’t going to fix this overnight.”

“It’s just a sprain. And my eye is fine.”

Pressing the heels of your hands to the sides of your head, you turned so quickly you nearly gave yourself whiplash. Not that it mattered to you at the moment. You glared at Wolffe . It was the first time you’d ever looked at him like that, with quite so much…venom. Fingers shaking with anger that is almost blinding, you reopened the attachment on your datapad you’d been sent earlier that morning.

“Look,” you seethed, “look, Wolffe.” He barely glanced at it before shoving it back towards you. “No,” you insisted, shoving it in his face. “Look. At. The. X-ray.” Dropping it on his lap when he refused to take it, you stomped over to stand at the foot of his bed so you were in his line of sight. Illustrating with your arms the angle his heg had been bent at before triage got it reset. “Legs are not meant to bend like this!”

“So? Put it in a cast and send me on my way.” He turned his head from you, arms folded across his chest. “I can still fight.”

“You lost nearly two gallons of blood, Wolffe.” You moved to the side of the bed he was pointedly looking at to avoid looking at you. “Look,” shoving up the sleeve of your jacket, you pointed at the bacta patch in the crook of your arm, “I gave you some of my blood, just to make sure you’d make it through the fucking night!” Throwing your hands up in exasperation, you began to pace. “Maker’s left nut, if you can’t take your health seriously, I’m going to need to set you up for a psych eval before we even consider discharging you.”

“That your professional opinion, Doc?”

Ouch. That one stung.

When you joined the Rebellion in your youth a decade ago, you were a fresh college dropout with less than a month until you could have graduated. Until you should have graduated. But the Empire had deemed your entire university as a waste of resources and space, so at least you weren’t the only one. Small comfort though it was.

But when you’d finally decided to do something rather than seething in silence at the Empire, you hadn’t expected the Rebellion to give you the position you currently held. Though you weren’t the only one in this boat - apparently the higher-ups thought ‘degree in blank medical field’ meant you could perform basic first aid. This had more to do with a ‘it’s the effort that counts’ mentality, because the higher-ups were nothing if not smart.

No one would have survived in the Rebellion this long were it not for that.

So the whole ‘Doc’ being your base nickname wasn’t your favorite thing to have happened. Worse things could happen, honestly. And they apparently had, and would continue to.

Case in point - Wolffe.

“More like basic observation and common sense.” You shot him a look over your shoulder. “Two things you clearly lack.”

“Pot, meet kettle.”

“What the hells does that - no. No, y’know what?” 

Attaching the forms to a datapad clip, you shoved both into his hands, turned on your heel, and left. Your shift had ended fifteen minutes ago anyway, and you didn’t bother explaining that to your colleague on the way out.

Let Wolffe catch them up to speed. You needed a nap - or a drink. The order didn’t matter, so long as it alleviated the headache that always built when you spent extended periods of time around Wolffe.

You knew from personal experience that neither one usually works.

---

Year Ten, Day 182 after joining the Rebellion

Has someone been leaking these logs?! I know I’m not the best at encryption and coding, but I know for a fact this datapad never leaves my side. So either someone’s gotten into my shit while I’m asleep, or this whole fucking base is consipring against me. I’ve been assigned Wolffe’s recovery-plan case until further notice. Further notice being when we finally fucking kill each other.

“You expect me to do what now?”

“Look, it’s not the end of the world. I know you two don’t really see eye to eye --” Your supervisor pointedly ignored the snickering from your fellow medics, just long enough to roll her eyes. “But,” her sharp voice silenced the gossipers before they got really started, “you’re the only one Wolffe hasn’t…how do I put this….”

“Made you cry?”

“Treated like shit?”

“Threatened to mutilate?”

“How do all of you know he hasn’t done these things to me?” Silence yet again, punctuated by the occasional quiet, immature laughter. You pinched the bridge of your nose. “I can’t possibly watch him at all hours of the day. I’ll need some help to see other patients--”

“We’ll put someone on night watch, rest assured. But your appointments - barring some sort of emergency - have all been reassigned. And before you refuse -“ your supe held up a finger when you were gearing up to do just that, “- command has said they’ll be glad to send you to Hoth. A new position has opened up—“

“No thanks.” Gritting your teeth, you accepted the data pad handed off to you by her assistant. Staring at the screen but not actually reading it, you sighed, muttering under your breath, “I’ll expect you lot to pitch in for our funeral services.”

“C’mon, Doc.” The colleague you’d handed Wolffe off to that first day gently tapped your arm with the back of their hand. You tried not to rankle as you turned to Limla, who’d been sympathetic to the issue you had with Wolffe from the get-go. “It won’t be bad. You can always decompress in my quarters.” They grinned broadly, all teeth and glittering black eyes, “Gods know I love hearing you rant about the old geezer.”

“Swear,” you groaned, “you lot just live for this shit, don’t you?”

“Yes!”

“Signal’s crap on base, so I can’t watch anything good on the HoloNet.”

“Oh, these two are way more interesting than any of your bullshit HoloDramas.”

“Children.” After inputting your signature into the datapad, you stood, bracing yourself for what was going to be a very very long couple of months. “I’m working with a bunch of children.”

---

Day Three of Wolffe Observation

I’m going to lose my mind. Or maybe I already have. Really I only have to be there - as in physically - for seven hours out of the day, then I can try to pick up rotations from someone else. Scanners and meds will do all the hard work for me. Really I’m just there to make sure Wolffe doesn’t try to jump out of bed. Which he’s already done - multiple times. But every time - every. fucking. time. - Wolffe finds something else to give me shit about. It’s no different than all the other times he’s shown up. But today - oooh, today. Today I nearly reached my breaking point, and I know the bastard could see it. But gods, I would sooner pull a breaching newborn Bantha calf with my bare hands (again) from its screaming Bantha mother before I give Wolffe the satisfaction. I will not be the first one to break.

The day really had started off well.

Sure, you woke up knowing you had to endure Wolffe’s company for another shift. And of course, anyone who knew anything about the dynamic between the two of you gave you shit about it. This seemed to be everyone’s new favorite daily pastime. And really, you didn’t care - maybe they knew about the stupid crush, maybe they didn’t. You were just here to do your job. To help further the effort to take out the Empire.

Too bad Wolffe’s favorite pastime was trying to make your job difficult. You could see it building in his eyes the second you walked in, his gaze focused on your thermos. Folding his arms across his chest, he huffs,

“Where’s my caf?”

“Fine morning to you, too.” You gave him a deadpan stare before you began checking his vitals. “And you’ll get your damn caf when you’re out of that bed.”

“In that case --”

“Stop.” 

You’d kept yourself close to the bed, close enough that you didn’t even have to look up from your datapad to plant your palm on his chest and hold him there. This was surprisingly difficult, and even with the bloodloss and the fractured leg, you think he could have thrown you like a ragdoll if he really wanted to.

Huh. That’s an interesting mental image.

“Sit,” you gave him a hard shove, “down.” 

Wolffe’s eyes crackled with fury for a few seconds before he pushed back, and you wondered if he was going to start something. It wasn't the first time he’d gotten that fed up with having to follow someone else’s orders. But the fire cooled some, still burning in his mismatched gaze. You felt your pulse skyrocket, and took a step back. Or you tried to.

The moment he felt you try to take your hand off of him, Wolffe’s fingers closed around your wrist, holding you there.

“Poor Doc,” he sneered, nothing but mockery in his tone as his thumb stroked across your pulse. You thought it might have been absent-minded on his part but you couldn’t be sure. It would be just your luck if he was trying to see what unsettles you. “You lose a bet and get stuck watching me another day?”

“No,” you answerdc, twisting your hand away, and Wolffe smirked. Panic flared through you when you heard your own words - you sounded like a petulant teenager, trying to deflect blame or deny...something. Time to do damage control.  “I don’t have any choice in being here today. There are a hundred other things I could be doing, but,” you gestured at him on the bed, “somebody’s sense of self preservation in this room is sorely lacking.” 

He shut down after that, like you were expecting him to, but something seemed different. Or maybe you’re just noticing something for the first time. 

Who knows. Who cares? You certainly don’t. You really don’t, especially not when you saw what you thought might be hurt in his expression before he buried it under a thunderous scowl.

And so it went. Wolffe barely spoke to you through the rest of your shift. That suited you just fine. Except something felt off. You couldn’t shake it. There was something about what you saw - what you think you saw - that made your stomach tie itself in never ending knots the entire time. But you couldn’t bring yourself to analyze it, because this was Wolffe. 

Wolffe, who only cares about his brother, fighting the good fight in this Rebellion, and not at all what the rest of the base thinks about him.

Certainly not about your opinion of him. You’d given up on that pipe dream only a week after he’d been stationed at this base. When he’d made it abundantly clear that you didn’t fit the bill of a medic that should be caring for him. And you were over that - really. It was just the amount of times you’d been assigned to check him over and patch him up that made this crush persist. 

So it could only be that making you worry that you’d struck a nerve. An old wound that refused to heal.

An alarm pinged on your datapad, drawing your attention to it. You frowned as you read and reread the words on the screen in front of you. Out of the corner of your eye you noticed Wolffe glance your way, but you didn’t look over. When you finally turned to him, he lay back in the bed, and for a moment you were taken aback by the sight in front of you.

Wolffe is a good-looking man, even in his advanced age. It’s something he carried well, and obviously. Not so much arrogance as it was confidence, awareness that yes, he does know he’s handsome despite what the war and rapid aging had done to his body. You’ve seen it. How could you not? Even when resting it showed, and you --

You took a moment to admire.

It was rare that you got to just look at him like this. Usually you have to do this at a distance, out of fear he’d figure you out somehow. So you drank it all in: the smooth line of his jaw, how proud his profile is, the graying of his dark hair around his temples. The lines on his forehead and under his eyes are pronounced from years of glaring, which is kind of funny to think about. It’s also a little sad. At first you weren’t a fan of the mustache, but it’s grown on you. Your eyes are slowly trailing down his torso, the healthy amount of give you can see on his stomach and chest, when he shifts with an uncomfortable groan.

In an instant, your professional walls were back up, and you were on your feet and at his side in record time.

“What’s wrong?”

“Stop hovering,” he tried to shoo you away, but you immediately spotted the tremor in his hands when he waved one at you. Fisting the thin sheets over him, Wolffe twisted uncomfortably. “Just - dammit, why didn’t you bring me any fucking caf?!” His cybernetic eye was squeezed shut when he glared at you, and you didn’t know how you failed to notice the sweat beading on his skin. “Wouldn’t have this blasted headache if you’d just brought me some.”

“Wolffe,” you said slowly, reaching out to him. You decided he let you place a hand on his forehead - or else the fever you can feel was making him delirious. So that’s what the datapad had picked up. You hadn’t believed it at first - the reading of his temperature was far too low. “What did you do?”

“Nothin’.”

“Wolffe,” you dragged your hand down to the side of his neck, trying to bite back your hiss of alarm. He was burning under your palm. “I need you to tell me what you did. If you’re messing with this equipment, we’ll both be in it deep. It could get other people hurt.”

He growled rough in the back of his throat, “Osik - fine.” Batting your hand away, he gestured at the holoscreen that had been tracking his vitals from day one. You squinted at it, bringing it down on the articulated neck as you tapped at the screen. “I might’ve reprogrammed it a little. Damn thing kept blaring all night - your replacement was too busy flirting with the nurse to do anything about it.” Your hands tightened on the screen as you furiously tapped open the troubleshooter - you were going to have Vrakka’s head for his negligence. “S’fine, Doc, I’ll be --”

“It is not fine,” you snapped, wheeling around to stare him down. “Do you realize what else could have gone wrong? You could have died and we wouldn’t have known what the hell happened --”

“Wouldn’t that be convenient?” Wolffe huffed, not having the strength to raise his voice apparently but the ability to throw another barb at you. “Thought you’d be happier at the prospect.”

For what seems like a lifetime, you just stared at him. Left reeling from the words he’d just flung at you, reeling from the thought that he thought you’d be glad he was dead. It took you until then to realize that’s exactly how you’d been acting. The way you kept trying to rush through getting him fixed up, the clipped words, the reprimands. How you always tried to avoid him outside of the medcenter, and when you did run into him, you always made excuses to get away from him.

Gods, you really shit the bed with this one, huh?

…also why were your eyes burning?

“Mesh’la?” The word didn’t mean anything to you, but it pulled you right back into the moment. Something about the way he said it. You blinked rapidly, refusing to let the tears fall. His eye widened slightly, a moment of clarity as he shuffled in the bed so he was facing you. He can see it. “Are you --”

“Vrakka!” Your shout cracked viciously in the relative quiet of the medcenter, and you stormed out of the room after seeing him try to rush past the doorway. By the time you caught up with him, you were out of breath, and when you grabbed his sleeve you felt him wince. “Vrakka, what the hell were you thinking?!”

“I-I’m sorry Doc, he’s just an asshole and I didn’t --”

“So you abandoned your post to try and get your dick wet?! You left a patient alone in his room long enough to give him the opportunity to hack the vitals tracker?!” Dragging him back into Wolffe’s room, you jabbed a finger at the readout datapad. You hissed between grit teeth, “Fix. This. And make sure no one has the clearances to tamper with it again.” 

Shaking your head while turning your back to the bed (and Wolffe), you rubbed at your eyes with the back of your hand. You could feel Wolffe’s eyes on your back. This was - it was such a goddamn mess. You’d let your feelings get the better of you in regards to him. If you had only been more professional from the get go, if you’d only been nicer to him --

But it’s useless to stay in the past. You knew that.

“I’ll get you on some antibiotics.” You looked at him over your shoulder, trying to keep your expression neutral. “But you have to tell us if something feels even a little bit wrong. I don’t care what you think you know about me, but you are my patient.” Arms folded across your chest when you faced him, you set your chin again, “And nobody is dying on my watch.”

You didn’t let him get another word in before you marched out of the room. Limle would hopefully still be up, and even if they weren’t, they had a bottle of whiskey with your name in it.

---

Day Twenty of Wolf(fe) Watching

So things are….different. Have been since Wolffe clued me in that he could remotely hack the damn medscanner’s readouts. It’s quieter now, and I don’t know if I love it or hate it. I’m leaning more towards the latter - I think I almost miss squabbling with him. It’s nice not to have the anxiety of wondering when he’s going to say something shitty. …well alright, he still says shitty things, but he’s not going for the jugular anymore. With me at least.

Well. One thing could be said about your shifts watching Wolffe.

It gave you plenty of time to catch up on paperwork. In fact, you were way ahead on your paperwork. To the point that you didn’t have anything to do besides read.

And, on rare occasions, talk with Wolffe. Which was becoming more frequent as you ran out of books to read.

Instead of working a dayshift on that day, you ended up switching with Vrakka’s ‘friend,’ Yol - how Vrakka landed a date with him, you’d never know. He was booksmart where Vrakka was streetsmart. Yol probably got through to Vrakka about his fuck up more than you did, his own sense of responsibility something he couldn’t just ignore at the drop of a hat. Definitely seemed to be a case of opposites attracting. He’d been reluctant to take the shift until you told him it would open up a night off with Vrakka. After blustering his way through a flimsy denial, he’d accepted, before excusing himself to go blush somewhere else.

Cute. It was cute.

What wasn’t cute was hearing raised voices from the end of the hallway on your way to the medcenter. Hastening your step, you rushed to the doors, your jaw nearly unhinging when you took in the scene in front of you.

You’d come to expect anything, honestly. Especially after hearing about the Death Star being blown to pieces. But this was surprising, alarming, concerning. Wolffe was up and out of bed, half leaning and pushing on the edge of it as he tried to get in Yol’s space. This was a far cry from the way he’d looked a few weeks ago, and is an abrupt reminder of why you’ve come to admire him so much. In Wolffe is a wildfire that answers to no one, not even nature itself when there’s nothing left to burn.

And you got to witness the Commander return to his old ways, which will no doubt leave scars in his wake.

“Of all the bullshit you lot have subjected me to, I have never been treated so unprofessionally. D’you treat all of your patients like this?!”

“I-I, no, no I don’t — please sir, you need to calm down -”

“Calm down? You’re gonna tell me to calm down, after nearly dumping me outta bed just to change the bloody sheets?! Now I’m up, against Doc’s orders, and you’re going to tell me to - oh.” Wolffe glanced away from you almost as soon as his gaze flicked over to you leaning against the doorway. “Hey, Doc. Didn’t hear you come in.”

“Yeah, well, I heard you. Whole base did.” You lifted an eyebrow at Yol. “Could changing his sheets not wait until I got here?”

“Supe came by saying the laundry needed to be sent on the hour.”

“Well, it’s thirty minutes til, so - oh. Oh, I see.” Giving Yol a knowing look that makes him squirm, you turned to Wolffe, nodding towards the chairs lining the wall. “Here,” you offered him your shoulders, sliding your arm around his back. Wolffe hesitated for a moment before he leaned into you. You barely managed to suppress a shiver when you felt his fingers digging slightly into the small of your back. It was probably just the easiest place for him to put his hand, you reasoned. As you gently guided him to one of the chairs, you dropped your voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “He’s got a date.”

“So that gives him a free pass to manhandle me?” Wolffe sniffed imperiously, arms folded across his chest once he settled into the chair. You gently lifted his leg to prop it on the hover chair Yol pushed your way, rolling your eyes at the man’s unimpressed glower. “And that’s also why you’re stuck pulling the all-nighter?”

“Yup.” Propping your hip against the wall, you watched Yol while he ripped the fitted sheet off the bed. “To both.”

“You’re a paragon of patient care, Doc.” 

Anyone within earshot can hear the roll of Wolffe’s eyes in his voice, and you couldn’t help yourself. Hiding it behind your hand didn’t do much to muffle your laughter. It was proven to be absolutely pointless when you glanced over to see the glare Wolffe aimed your way.

“Okay, alright uh,” Yol bustled past the two of you to shove the old bedding into the chute in the wall. “Thanks Doc, I’ll see you--”

“Aren’t we forgetting someone?” 

You lifted your eyebrows at Yol when he froze halfway through the door, his eyes frantically searching the room before they landed on Wolffe. There was a moment where he almost seemed like he was going to just leave you to deal with him by yourself. You’re almost certain he’d made his mind up before he rushed past you, hauling Wolffe up and out of the chair.

“You sure drive a hard bargain, Doc,” Yol grumbled unhappily as you took up Wolffe’s other side. The two of you carefully returned the equally unhappy older man into the bed, who huffed and puffed and growled throughout the whole affair. Once he’d settled in, Yol turns to you, hands outspread in supplication, “Now can I go?”

“‘Course,” you chirped, booting up your datapad as you gave him a sidelong glance. “Say hi to Vrakka for me.”

“OkaybyeDoc.”

Wolffe only waited until Yol was out of the room before he scoffed, “That irresponsible boy?”

“Eh,” you shrugged, pulling up a chair to stretch your legs out in front of you. “There’s somebody for everybody.”

“Oh, and you’re what, some kind of relationship expert?” Lifting your eyes to him, you blinked in confusion.

“That’s what I went to school for.”

“...what?”

“Oh, I assumed - wait, why do you call me Doc? I thought you were in on the joke?”

“Joke? What joke?” Wolffe glanced around the room in bewilderment. “You work in the medcenter, why would calling you ‘Doc’ be a joke?!”

“It’s because I’m not a medical professional. I’m just - provisional.” You shrugged when the confusion in his expression only increased. “Why do you think it was so easy for them to put me on rotations to keep an eye on you? I’m not exactly experienced in actual medical practice - just basic first-aid.” Sniffing imperiously, you returned your attention to your datapad. “Though with your help, I’m beginning to learn more advanced practices.”

“Glad to be of service,” Wolffe chuckled, and the room went silent for a while as you went through your inbox. It was a useless effort - no one had requested an appointment with you in a week. Suppressing a frustrated sigh, you decided to go through your personal library when Wolffe cleared his throat. “Does it bother you?”

“Hm?” Lifting your eyebrows, you stared at him blankly for a moment. Wolffe gave you an exasperated look after a few beats and you perked up. “Oh. Oh! I mean, a little bit? Not anymore really. Limle is the only person who means it in a ‘term of endearment’ sort of way.”

“So they all just call you that - and they don’t bother asking if that’s what you want?” Wolffe seemed angrier than he was at Yol before, and you tilted your head at him. He huffed, arms crossed over his broad chest, “Just don’t see how anyone could take that kind of treatment lying down.”

“I’m not exactly the kind of person to rock the boat just to save face,” you admitted.

“I noticed.” That was - surprising. It must have shown  in your expression, because Wolffe elaborated, “You said it yourself: you don’t have a choice in being here, even if you can’t stand being around me. Who would put up with that if they weren’t a pushover?”

“Oh, so you’ve got me all figured out, hm?”

“No.” Wolffe studied you closely, and you felt your stomach do a funny little flip. No one had ever looked at you like that. It was something you couldn’t put your finger on, which was exciting and terrifying in its own right. “Not yet, at least.”

“Oh.” You honestly didn’t know what else to say to that, so for the rest of your shift, the two of you sat in almost complete silence.

---

Day Forty-Six of Wolffe-Sitting

Yol and Vrakka are finally a thing. Openly, at any rate. Which is honestly a huge fucking relief. Watching those two dance around each other (mostly on Yol’s part) was enough to make me age two years every time they tried to deny it all. Wolffe and I made a bet that they would get caught before they were open about it. I lost, and today he finally decided to make me pay up. This man is out to get me, I swear.

“I’m telling you,” you sighed miserably, “you might as well try to reverse gravity with your mind. And last I checked, no one in this room is Force sensitive.”

Wolffe waved you off before he went back to shuffling the deck, “Anyone can learn to play Sabacc, and you lost, fair and square.” He smirked at you - actually smirked, which was a rare sight in itself. It was also distracting. “Better get used to that, mesh’la.”

“What does that mean anyway? ‘Mez-luh.’” You squinted at him when he chuckled at your attempt at pronunciation. “Is it an insult or something?”

“Depends on what you’d find insulting,” he said with a shrug, chuckling at your frustrated expression. He considered you for a moment, eyes narrowed while the cards smacking together became the only sound filling the silence. “If you can beat me five times after I finish teaching you the basics, I might consider telling you.”

“Stubborn old man.”

“Stubborn old man who’s going to wipe the floor with you by the time your shift is up.” The way he grinned at you is infectious. It was also terrifying - all teeth and glowing confidence. “Now pay attention,” he tapped the deck twice with his knuckles, “because I don’t like to repeat myself.”

“Wait,” you looked at him, head tilted to one side, “what do you get if you win?”

“The satisfaction of putting you in your place.” 

…oh. Oh your mind went to some terrible places with that statement. And he did absolutely nothing to clarify, despite your obvious discomfort.

This was going to be a long shift.

* * *

“I’ve changed my mind.”

It took you a while to look up at him. After the last actual game, you sat with your elbows propped on your thighs, fingers rubbing circles in your throbbing temples while you stared at the floor. Just when you thought you understood the rules, Wolffe would you. Easily. When you looked at him, it was to glare at him, the smug smirk that he wasn’t even bothering to hide.

“How so?” you asked, shoving your last hand at him so he could shuffle again. 

For a moment you found yourself lost in watching his hands, the ease with which he went through the motions. It was practiced, automatic - you are enraptured by it. His amused chuckle pulled you out of your stupor.

“You need a little incentive,” he announced, “and I need things to be a little more interesting. Otherwise I’m going to fall asleep by the next hand.”

“Sorry I’m not great at a game I’ve never played until today,” you huffed, crossing your arms over your chest. “And what do you mean by ‘incentive?’ You being able to rub it in my face seems like enough.”

“Apparently not.” He knocked on the deck again - a personal ritual, you mused. “I’ll leave it up to you, since you’re so miserable being forced to play the game. Seems only fair.”

“Why do I get the feeling this is going to be decidedly unfair?”

“Because you’re smarter than you give yourself credit for.” Ah - you had to bite your lip to stop yourself from beaming at his praise. “So, your choice: I can either take your credits, or information.”

Turning your head so you could give him a sidelong squint, you murmured, “What kind of information?”

“Nothing too damning,” Wolffe shrugged, entirely too casual to put any of your immediate concerns at ease. “And if it’s something you’re too uncomfortable to share, I’ll think of something else.”

“So twenty questions, but I have to wait until you beat me at a hand of Sabacc each time? The odds don’t really seem stacked in my favor.”

“Tell you what,” he offered, dealing out the first hand, “if you can beat me, you get to ask a question. Same rule as when we started though: five hands.” He smirked again, and you felt a thrill of excitement and frustration in equal measure. “Maybe you’ll get there - in the next month.”

“Bring it on, old man.”

He beat you in record time for the first question, and you braced yourself. But no amount of mental gymnastics could prepare you for just how ruthless Wolffe can be when he put his mind to it.

“What was the breaking point that made you join the Rebellion?” Wolffe held up a hand the moment you took a breath to give your answer. “And don’t give me the whole ‘it was the right thing to do, I wanted to be a hero’ bullshit.” It was brief, but you saw it: a flash of pain in his expression, older than the Rebellion itself. You recognize you saw it only because he let you. “People aren’t heroes - legends derived from them are.”

“Wow,” you blinked owlishly, “okay. I guess…” Your head dropped with a groan when the answer came to you, because it immediately felt childish and self-centered. “Spite.”

“‘Spite?’” Wolffe sounded about as incredulous as you’d assumed he would. “That is not at all what I was expecting from you.”

“Have you met me?” With a playful scoff, you gave your hand back to him, considering your next words while you watched him shuffle the deck again. “Half my personality is spite, or fueled by it.”

“Alright, point taken.” He rolled his eyes at you, dealing out the next hand in record time. And then beating you in record time. “Why join the Rebellion out of spite?”

“The Empire took something from me that I worked very hard for.” Your eyes drifted down as guilt twisted at your insides. “Something that seems childish looking back on it.”

“What was it?”

“My degree.” He balked at that, his brow furrowing together, and you held up a hand. “Let me explain - I was months away from graduating. It was guaranteed that I would graduate, and then the Empire just decided that the resources and funding for the university were wasted, and reallocated them to fund weapon manufacturing.” Shifting in your seat, you glanced away from him. “Told you it seems childish.”

“You’re right.” His voice is colder than it had been, and that cut you deep. “It is childish.” That twisted the knife, and you let your head fall slightly. Shame filled you, making your eyes burn. If you almost cry in front of Wolffe again, you’d never be able to face him. But then you heard him knock on the deck again, “But you stayed.”

“I did.” You lifted your head, risking a glance in his direction. He watches you closely, carefully - your next words would decide the trajectory of the rest of this strange conversational set up. “Because it was the right thing to do. For me, anyway.”

He beat you again, in silent contemplation this time. Then,

“Right for you how?”

“I joined the Rebellion to get back at the Empire.” You shrugged, “If I could land at least one blow against them, it would all feel worth it. But then - well. I’ve never even held a blaster. Can’t fly. But I knew basic first-aid, and I know how to figure out what makes people tick, so,” you gestured to the room around you, “here I am.”

You lost again.

“Do you regret it? Staying, I mean.”

“No.” The answer came quickly, no knee-jerk compulsion to try to excuse your reasoning or logic. “Not at all. This isn’t anything close to what everyone else has to go through, I know that.” You glanced meaningfully at his leg, and couldn’t help but chuckle when he huffed. “But…it’s where I’m meant to be.” Pushing your hand back towards him, you stared at a nearby wall, your gut still roiling with guilt and nerves. “At least here, I can be a little useful.”

The warmth of his hand covered yours before you can pull away, and your head snapped round to stare at him. You immediately let your eyes fall to focus on his hand, immediately taken aback by the intensity of his stare. But Wolffe had other plans.

Before you could even mourn the loss of his hand on yours, he stretched his arm out and grabbed you by the chin between a forefinger and thumb. Then he tilted your head back up, so you had to look at him head-on. None of the intensity left his gaze as he studied your features, and you watched as it softened around the edges some. His nostrils flared as he let out a long breath, and you swear his thumb twitches like he was about to caress your skin.

But that was just wishful thinking on your part, spurred on by the disappointment you can’t deny when he let his hand fall away.

“Each individual in this counts towards a future that’s made better through our efforts. But without you - “ Wolffe paused for a moment, teeth clicking when he closed his mouth. “Well, without you, I’d probably be dead. Small consolation that is --”

“It’s not small,” you protested quickly. Maybe a little too quickly, if Wolffe lifting an eyebrow at you in question was any indication. “You said it yourself - every individual counts.”

Wolffe groaned, rolling his eyes at you before you were hit with the full force of an actual smile from him, “You remind me of my brother - always throwing my own words back at me when I apparently need it.”

“Rex?” He nodded, and you hummed thoughtfully. “Smart man.”

“Don’t let him catch you saying that,” Wolffe groused, shuffling the deck again. “Especially in this context - I’ll never hear the end of it.”

He dealt another hand out and -

Well…you won.

“Oh?” Both of you stared in silent disbelief at your hand - two sets of five from each stave. As your victory began to sink in you started to laugh, grinning from ear to ear as you watched Wolffe’s expression turn from shock to begrudging acceptance. “Ooh, how the turns have tabled.”

“‘Course you would win with a Squadron,” he grumbled, running both hands down his face. “Alright,” Wolffe groaned behind his palms, “go on.”

“Why did you join?” 

It was the first question that came to mind. There are others you would rather have asked, questions he’d scoff at or tease you about. But that was the one you grabbed hold of first. It felt…important. More so when he slowly lowered his hands, clear suspicion in his gaze and under that, something else. Something that made you question if this would go sour.

“To repay a debt.”

That’s all you got out of him - and you were fine with that.

-----

Taglist: @rain-on-kamino, @deewithani, @seeking-kharis, @lackofhonor, @ttzamara

I know some of you wanted to be just on the Caf Delivery Service tag so if you want me to remove you from this tag, LMK! If you want me to add you to the taglist for this series also lmk in the replies or in a DM!

[inknopewetrust]

Calamity // The Darkling x Fem!Reader

Summary: Aleksander has always been protective of you, but an unfortunate event with another male Grisha leaves him showing his true feelings.

Pairing: Aleksander Morozova x Tide-Maker!Fem!Reader (Shadow and Bone)

Word Count: 3.6k

Warnings: Language, Injuries, sexual references/implications, sexist language.

Quick Links: Masterlist // Request Guidelines

The forests beyond Os Alta and The Little Palace were beautiful. Their varying greens and colors during the midsummer season were a welcome change from the saddened dreariness of winter. With the arrival of warmer weather, a clearance needs to occur in the land beyond to ensure all training grounds were no danger to the people lucky enough to train there.

A new school of Grisha was arriving in a week's time, leaving you in charge of agitated, sweating Grisha trying to quickly clear the land.

"Remember! Every tree fallen and limb needs to be removed. I don't want a crying child running with blood down their leg through the palace halls because one of you forgot to clean it up!"

You swore you heard their angered groans and grumbles as you reminded them of what they had been assigned to do.

Across the grounds in Os Alta, the stables and circular training grounds were also being fixed in preparation, though they surely caught better breaks and less consequence because those in charge of those groups were spineless. You weren't even sure they had even seen The Fold for themselves; assigned to the palace from day one just to remain to appease whichever King or Queen ruled that year. Upon your arrival to the palace nearly ten years prior, you had seen The Fold a handful of times, but your specialities lay elsewhere amongst Grisha.

You weren't like them. Any of them, really. From a young age, you had discovered that you were blessed with the gift of summoning water, or tides. Tide-Makers functioned differently from other Grisha, but yours fell into a particularly curious range. Where someone like Aleksander was able to use his abilities as a Shadow Summoner at any moment, you required a closeness to the source of your abilities. Being stowed away in Os Alta, your abilities were quite useless. Though, your mind and keen eye for strategy let you become a close asset to the General–who had almost taken you on as a "right-hand-woman" to the cause.

It helped that he had inkling you were immortal. You hadn't aged a day since he met you and surely it was overdue that another powerful Grisha joined the two who remained after a couple of centuries.

Because of this, Aleksander trusted your command to oversee the Grisha who trained at The Little Palace, as well as the preparation. As the years went by, other Grisha caught on to the difference of treatment. Today, on a particularly warm and disgusting day of clearing, all hot-headed thoughts had come to head.

Walking the gravel, you could feel the stones underneath the soles of your black boots. It was comforting, in a way. Once you had trained there and now an entirely new generation of students would follow the same trails, battle the same courses, and respect the land you had a decade prior. Observing the Grisha around you, the job they had been doing thus far was quite good. Slow, but good.

"Hey! Why don't you come give us a hand!" You ignored the first call from a sweating man sawing a piece of fallen tree.

Aleksander had made it clear that these "clearing efforts" were not to be completed with their abilities. Doing manual labor for the cause would garner some strength these Grisha needed to be sent to the front lines. A war was raging and some of these souls would never return once sent. So, you continued walking. Eye contact with you was consistently ignored and avoided, your steps feeling heavier the further you went on the trail as the calls from angered men sawing on trees grew louder.

"Come on! You're doing nothing to help us!"

"Afraid to get your pretty hands dirty?"

"Is this work too difficult for you? Who even put you in charge?"

Those men knew nothing. They hadn't seen battle, seen death and destruction of what it means to be a Grisha in land that hates them. They grew up knowing that they'd be sent here when the time came and be protected in a world where anywhere else, they'd be killed for something they couldn't control. But instead, they heckled you, their leader at the moment. Pushing down their comments, you continued on and believed it was an insecurity for them to see a woman in charge.

"She's just a dumb bitch."

Your ears weren't amused by that.

"Yeah. She probably fucks the General to get out of work."

"Ah, an 'eye for an eye.' She must be good too for the General to keep her around this long."

"She's nothing special. Just look at her! Can't even use her powers out here."

Your walking had ceased with the second comment. Were you going to entertain their assumptions about you? No. Pettiness did not win wars or gain favors. If Aleksander heard what they had been saying he would have had their heads in an instant, but you were not him. You were nothing like Aleksander and that's why he put you in a command position. The workers around the group of three men had stopped whatever they had been doing and watched the scene unfold.

"I hear a lot of talking for men who should be doing work."

You mentally scolded yourself for sounding like a schoolteacher. It sounded ridiculous and of course, they laughed and dropped their tools.

"Now you show an interest in us? How about it love, pick up the saw and show us that you can help us."

"It's Captain, not love. My job isn't to do the work you're assigned. If you'd rather clean the bathrooms, I can have that arranged."

"Maybe we can work out some kind of deal, love."

One of the men, a burly, masculine man who smelled of oil and pine jumped over the fallen tree and into your line of sight. He was no longer wearing the red kefta he had been given, his undershirt soaked of a stench spreading further and further into the air. He had an orange beard, his fiery red hair nothing compared to the summer heat or sun. The heartrender looked as though he belonged in a child's lumberjack fairytale, not just beyond the walls of The Little Palace and its glamour.

"I'm not in the business of making deals. Get back to your position or I'll have you removed from the site." You held no prisoners against men like him.

"Now, I hear you are, Captain L/n. Are we just a little too below your status to trade a job for a job?"

"I will not ask again. Go back to your station or I will have you removed." You stared at him as he stared back. His green eyes envious with a fury belonging to a man who had privilege his entire life. Being a Grisha didn't mean favors for favors. It didn't mean escaping a physical job that occurred once or twice a year because it wasn't favorable. He was hot-headed, full of himself, and had no idea what would happen to him if he stepped out of bounds.

"What are you going to do if I don't? Can't do anything without water, right?"

You stepped away from him and motioned to two guards who had been assigned to follow you during tasks such as these. While the reality of threats was low, every ranking official within the Grishan army had at least two who accompanied them at most times. Today was no different, although they were more than alert regarding the situation at hand.

"This man is being reassigned to the stables. Let the Lieutenent in charge know what happened and he can assign where he sees fit." The guard you had talked to nodded his head and along with the other, guestured to take the arms of the disgruntled man who simply snickered and shook his head.

"Do you see this!?" He shouted to his fellow Grisha's in the forest.

"The General's whore isn't willing to prove her abilities. These are the people they put in charge? Women with no powers?"

No one replied to him, staring at his outburst as disrespectful and rude. You let out a dry laugh and turned, getting ready to walk away when suddenly that heavy feeling you felt prior was real; a sensation of pulling, dragging you down with a near stop of your heart. You could hear the yells, the scramble of people around you as some ran past you, to the trees, toward the man who had been undermining you.

Formulating words was non-existent. You could barely focus on the ground as your knees gave out and your eyes strained to see the dirt below you. The stones digging into your hands, your nose bleeding from the force.

"Ma'am! Ma'am! Someone get help!"

The voices were muddled.

"Stop him! What are you doing!? Stop him!"

You let out a choking noise that alerted you to the arms trying to lay you down; the body you felt outside of falling against the stones with a thud and a pair of hands and body positioned itself behind your head, trying to get you to focus.

"Can you hear me, Captain? Someone went to go get help!"

The pain was subsiding slowly, but your brain wasn't catching up as fast. The woman's face was becoming clearer, its fogginess becoming less with every second. The woman was speaking to someone position at your side and another at your feet.

"Hold her hand. Keep her steady please."

"Do it! I don't care if she's your Captain, just do it!"

Someone grabbed your hand and ran another over the top of it. It was comforting, like home.

"She can barely keep her eyes open. What do we do?"

"I don't know, I do-"

Their conversation stopped and you felt the one holding your hand grip it tighter than before. The light lessened around you, the sun disappearing for moments before the women around you nearly scattered when it returned. Moments in time were mushed together the longer you were unable to tell person from person, hand from hand, and second from hour.

A hand cradling your face and their own head invaded that growing, reappearance of the sun. It's gentle hold different from the other three that had surrounded you prior, a delicate touch against your face as their thumb caressed the space between your nose and chin.

"Y/n, I need to get to you the palace. Can you hear me?"

You could hear, you could barely see, but you could talk very little. You could feel the blood still trickling out of your nose, its metallic taste between your lips unwelcome as it continued to drip down your chin and neck and onto your kefta.

"I-I can-can't s-si-sit u-up." Your words were jumbled into a mumble of words they could hopefully piece together. Your vision continued to clear, and their nodding head was obvious, the dark hair on their head was more defined and you realized it was Aleksander who had arrived quickly (or what you believed to be) to your aid.

"I've got you, alright? I've got you."

Just as your vision was ready to clear, the world disappeared to black and your presence in their world had gone dark.

The world returned to you at nightfall. Without waking with a start, your eyes slowly adjusted to the dimness of the room around you to show a familiar sight. Your room was just as you had left it that morning. Not a single piece of clothing or furniture out of place, an order to the space that only you could control. Your toes felt the cool, silk sheets and your head relaxed against your pillow with a sigh. In an attempt to move, your chest tightened, and a groan escaped your lips absentmindedly, immediately awaking the one sitting in front of the sitting space beside the fireplace that hadn't been lit.

Within a few steps, Aleksander appeared beside your bed, kneeling down and grabbing your hand.

"You shouldn't move. The healer said you had a collapsed lung, and it will be sore for the next few days."

His sudden appearance hadn't startled you in the slightest. For as long as you had known him, Aleksander had always attempted to shield you from the judgement of others and the criticisms of having appointed you. The Grishan Army hadn't had a woman yet in power and many of the men were against it. But Aleksander had the final say and while he tried to create a bubble, it was bound to burst at the most opportune moment.

"I just want to sit up." You told him without moving again. He nodded understandingly and slowly, but surely, helped you into a sitting position in your bed. The candlelight on your beside table illuminating his face with a fine yellow glow that made him appear more at peace than he truly was. Your concentration fell onto that face, his reading of you pulling out the questions you wanted to ask, though couldn't find the right words.

"You do not have to worry about that man again." So, he killed him. "One of your Squaller's came running into the palace rambling about an accident. It took two minutes to get the information out of her before we knew what happened."

"I turned my back on him. I shouldn't have done that."

"He shouldn't have tried to kill you."

"Mhm." You could barely keep your eyes open even with the nearly 12 hours of sleep you had already gotten.

"How long have I been out?"

"Since this afternoon. It's already Tuesday, so you've missed quite a bit." You could hear the teasing in his voice that he only allowed very few to hear. Aleksander may have been a hard-shell to crack at first, but you melted it with little effort on your part.

"Ah, please tell me those trees have been cleared?"

"It'll be a few days before any of them get back to work." Your sigh held heavily in the air. The clearing had just become another issue on your already full plate, the injury not helping maintain the image you want.

"I do believe most of them are far more concerned with how you are faring. You should have seen their faces when I brought you back here." Aleksander returned to his standing position before scooting your legs over under the covers and sitting next to you, one of his arms resting on the other side of the legs he had just moved.

Your relationship had always teetered on the line of friendship or lovers. His protection appeared to be kind-hearted, but you had seen this in men before. He scared away any suitors, he allowed you to see a side of him no one else had, he told you of the past in complete trust. The two of you had moments where a line was almost blurred. A hand lingering too long, a kiss on the cheek that was a little too close to the mouth, a feeling bubbling in your stomachs when either was around. The implications of the men earlier that previous day had eaten at you, knowing you wanted something more, but Aleksander may have been hesitant to move forward.

You didn't want a relationship to scream "special treatment" and he didn't want a relationship to make you appear less than capable of leading an army of Grisha.

"A penny for your thoughts?" Aleksander's voice was soothing, calm against the calamity of the incident. Against the backdrop of your dark room, he appeared in the way you had imagined him in your own company. Slightly disheveled, kefta gone and forgotten, relaxed and content with the sight in front of him.

"Just thinking of the words they spoke. Men can be cruel."

"They can."

"Do you believe I am incapable of doing my job?"

A part of Aleksander couldn't fathom why you'd believe he'd think that, though he understood the sentiment. It was what he had feared. The prejudice of others and their rigid ideas of society couldn't be avoided even in the walls and world he had created long ago. Finally, Aleksander had found someone who he believed to be an equal, who now found themselves at the end of a skewer of public opinion.

"There is no one more capable to be a Captain. I would leave you the entire army if I could."

"Those men would never listen to me."

"I listen to you, and if I listen, they'll listen too."

"Maybe one day."

Aleksander could see the disappointment, the constant words that belittled you into something you weren't. None of those men would have said anything to him–far too terrified of his power and persona to try. Aleksander protected you because without the water, you were at a disadvantaged and often feared that pride would interfere with your protection. That was what the guards were for, what the position was partly for. He trusted and believed in you, but did not want his own emotions and feelings implying that was the reason why.

"One day they will. It will take time, but they will." You nodded without truly agreeing, though he moved on anyway.

"Do you need anything?"

"Sleep... a remedy for this migrane that I'm currently sporting." A small smile cracked itself onto your face to which he returned with a nod.

"I'll see what they can do, though they said sleep would be the best thing for you."

"Isn't there some privilege between the injured and healers? Since when did you become my caretaker?" You meant it as a joke; Aleksander saw it as an opening.

"I'll take care of you for as long as you'll let me."

Aleksander took the opportunity to use his spare hand to grab the one closest to his body. His fingers traced the skin on the back before slipping his hand into yours, the fit perfect against your palm and unlike the feeling earlier, your heart skipped a few beats. The look in his eyes was kind, a warmth unfounded without a deeper feeling inside. The emotion that made a heart hypothetically swell or a mind to turn fuzzy against all conflict and horrors.

"I can't have these people thinking I'm receiving special treatment, Aleksander."

"Let them believe what they want. Their opinion means nothing to me." He moved closer, his hand beside your legs surging forward beside your hip. The thumb barely brushing your body that had been covered by the light-colored duvet of your bed.

"And it means a lot to me."

"No one has to know, Y/n... I-" Rarely Aleksander was at a loss for words. His proximity and feelings were clouding his words when all he could think about was the sight of your slightly dried lips and the butterflies that threatened to explode out of his own stomach. Even the toughest of men were no match for love.

"–I want to protect you, even if you don't need it. You've consumed my thoughts; my mind is taken with the reflection of you. Despite being beside me, I think of you and how you fare, whether or not you agree with the decisions I've made. No one else's words matter if you do not agree, your choices and voice I hold above all else."

"Aleksa-"

"I love you. I do. I've loved you for many years and I will not let my soldiers think less of you because of that."

Unlike Aleksander, you were not at a loss for words. Your mind had been concise and made up long ago regarding your feelings. There was always something there, though your want, nay, need, for acceptance was far too imposing to deal with anything else. So, you admired him from a far and allowed a friendship to form in its place. Though at some point, that friendship would indeed either crumble or evolve into more and you were far from disappointed that it was the latter.

"I love you, Aleksander. I always have."

"I promise you that it will get better, my love. You will be a great leader and Grisha and enemy alike will respect you for it."

Aleksander had moved his one hand that had been holding your own to gently hold your neck. Keeping in mind your injury, he wasn't going to treat you like a child's toy or a lesser person because he was elated inside that he finally revealed his truth and could act on it. His actions were calculated, cautious, and smooth. His thumb gently caressed your jaw, his eyes watching you, gauging a reaction. With the slightest nod of your head, he lowered his own to yours and softly your lips met. He did not mind that they had been chapped from lack of water, he did not mind that you were slightly dirty from laying on the floor. You were his and he was yours, no matter the circumstance or event at play.

The hand at your hip softly held you in place, your mouths moving with a harmony partners in life and love had. One day, Aleksander would make that thought a fact.

When he broke away, Aleksander rested his forehead against yours. You knew at that moment that whatever doubts you had about your ability to lead, they would eventually subside, and all would be well. The war would rage, but you would have respect. You would have the trust of the one man you wanted and that was enough.

"Get some sleep, Y/n. When you wake, we have an army to run and then when you're fully healed, I'll show you how much I love you."

Darkling Master Tag (CLOSED);

@mrs-brekker15 @aleksanderblack @mizelophsun11 @aleksanderwh0r3