#well here’s take two where she gets the fanfare she deserves

[1d1195]

Tulips Extra I

You can read Tulips here. I wouldn't read this if you're having a good day, lol. The original was therapeutic for myself so it's a little on the sad side for sure. It was good timing since I've not been feeling very positive lately.

Anyway, it's probably very angsty with a bit of fluff.

Thank you for reading my diary 😉

~4.7k words

Highly recommend listening to: Lung (Vines version) by Vines & Adrianne Munden-Dixon while reading.

“Shh,” he shook his head. “I got it,” he tilted his head at her. His voice was so sure. Like he was telling her the sun would come up tomorrow.

She supposed it would.

If she looked in the mirror, she would see a lot of growth. It had been six months since Harry moved in and she was more open, more communicative, and delegated more. Harry was perfect. Probably too perfect. It was almost unfair and if she thought about it too long, she worried a little too much about the ramifications of her own inadequacy.

Harry never let her feel that way. When she made dinner, he nearly threw a parade. If she was at Target and saw something she thought Harry would like and bought it, he thanked her for hours. It was a little overwhelming sometimes to be praised so highly. In previous relationships, she thought about the fanfare she would get from doing those kinds of things but after years of never getting it, she assumed it wasn’t in the cards for her.

But she hadn’t met Harry. He never let her feel that way. Everything she did was thanked with the utmost gratitude. It was unnerving sometimes that he adored her exactly how she imagined love was supposed to be. There were days, weeks, years, when she thought she wasn’t worthy of the love she dreamed about. Harry came along as if all that time feeling sad never existed. He praised her for things that didn’t need it, but it made her smile.

“M'a lucky guy, kitten,” he kissed her on the forehead while they watched TV. She had brought over a cup of hot water. Harry always had a cup in the middle of the afternoon. It was good for his throat, which was prone to colds and good for his vocal cords when he spent so much of his job talking to other people.

*

There were still hard days for her. Days when her mind ran wild and told her that she wasn’t good enough for Harry. That if she didn’t do everything perfectly or if she forgot something at the grocery story, she didn’t deserve to have Harry in her life any longer. Those years of not being good enough, or rather not feeling good enough, were hard to stamp out of her mind. Harry did a wonderful job getting most of it to disappear. But a bad day was a bad day; and it was hard to predict that. Hard to know when her mind would play a trick on her.

Work was okay except everyone was on edge close to the holiday. The end of the year was always a tricky time. Things needed to be wrapped up financially and socially. Honestly, she was probably the calmest one at work, but she was kind. Helping others with their workload because hers didn’t entail the same types of problems that everyone else was facing. But it did require a lot of her mental load. The satisfaction she felt from helping others was really good for her emotional well-being, but it came at a pretty significant cost: she had a really hard time saying no—especially when she needed to say no.

This led her to carrying several grocery bags into her apartment with Harry. She didn’t want to take two trips. Except she was struggling. Two trips would have been better. Or calling Harry when she got to the parking lot would have helped. He wouldn’t have minded either. He probably didn’t know she was grocery shopping after work, or he would have offered to go with her.

But unfortunately, they had gotten into a bit of a... disagreement the night before. Which only added to her stress emotionally. It was a well-based disagreement. Harry worried she was doing too much for her coworkers and thought (in the kindest way possible) that she should set some boundaries where she felt comfortable helping but still able to get her own stuff done.

In her head she did something wrong. Harry was so kind. Extremely understanding of all the boundaries that she failed to set in her work life and with her family. He knew it wasn’t easy for her. But it was hard for him to watch the person he loved struggle to feel okay with anxiety and stress plaguing most of her thoughts over things she didn’t necessarily need to worry about.

She was almost at the door. Her arm was sore from holding the bags up for so long. The circulation in her hand was disappearing from the bags that had slid down. Why she didn’t just set the bags down at the end of the hall will always make her wonder. But instead, of course, the bag ripped open. The one stupid paper bag she had to get from the store to fit everything. Of course, it had eggs in it. While trying catch it, she dropped the gallon of milk she had in her other hand that naturally exploded onto the floor with the eggs. She gasped and looked at the mess she created in the hall. Fortunately, her neighbors weren’t affected. She was so close to her own door the only one impacted would be herself or Harry.

“—her location says she should be home—oh,” Harry stuck his head out from the door. He heard a loud thud from inside the apartment. Paired with his missing girlfriend, he worried she had hurt herself or something coming up the stairs. Harry watched her for a moment, a frown settling onto his lips at the sight. Her shoulders shaking, her lip wobbling while tears filled her eyes. “Love, m’gonna have her call y’back. She jus’ got home. Think she had a tough day,” he murmured. “S’okay. I’ll take care of it. She’ll call y’back,” he promised. “Okay, bye,” he slid his phone into his pocket. Her gaze didn’t move from the mess on the floor, but she could sense Harry approaching her. Like an injured animal in the wild.

“Was that my sister?” She whispered.

He nodded, but she wasn’t looking. “S’nothing serious,” he promised.

“I think she needed help with her assignment or something. I was supposed to call her when I got home so I could read—”

“Love,” he stepped directly into the mixture of eggs and milk and put his hands on her shoulders. “S’not important right now,” his voice was so gentle. Almost too gentle. “Let’s go inside,” he tugged her gently toward the door. “M’gonna clean this up,” he offered easily.

She looked up at him, her eyes so blurred with tears that his expression was hard to make out. The only good thing her tears did was magnify her perception of Harry’s pretty eyes. They actually looked like emeralds and made her heart flutter despite how sad she was. “You don’t have to,” her voice cracked. “I dropped everything. I should clean it—” the tears fell from her eyes in slow motion. It was like she was watching one of those movies where the girl tries to keep working even though she just found out the love of her life died and she was basically ignoring it. She hated those scenes. They hurt so much. She swiped her hand across her face. “I just need to grab—”

“Kitten,” Harry stilled her movements as she tried to push away from him. “Angel,” he whispered softly. “Please stop.”

“No, I’m okay,” she promised, the saddest smile falling across her lips. Harry looked at her with so much worry and he shook his head.

“No, kitten. You’re not,” his voice was low and he cupped the side of her neck and held her in place. “What happened?”

“Nothing! It’s nothing,” but the words were choked and only half-uttered by the mixture of tears and her throat closing around the sound trying to force its way out of her vocal cords. “I’m fine.” It was like her body was trying to repel the words because she almost folded in half, she crouched and covered her eyes as she let the sobs take over for a second. She would be fine; she just needed a second to get some of the emotion out.

“Angel,” Harry crouched right beside her. “C’mon, kitten. S’not nothing,” he murmured.

She shook her head. No, things with Harry were fine. She wasn’t going to burden him with needless worries and all the anxiety that was coursing through her head. It was all in her head. Truly. It wasn’t something that he needed to—

Harry pulled her toward their door where milk and eggs hadn’t spread to yet. The remaining pile of groceries was mixed in the mess. She crouched by the door again, unable to stop the emotion long enough to make it past the entry way. Gently, Harry pulled her toward him and kissed the top of her head. He knelt beside her, hand cupping the back of her neck and the other gently rubbing up and down her arm. A neighbor peered into the hallway raised his eyebrows at the mess before turning to see Harry and the girl in their doorway. Harry shook his head so minutely he doubted she noticed. Fortunately, their neighbor saluted ever so slightly and retreated inside.

“I’m. Sorry,” she hiccupped.

He shook his head feeling so awful she was this distraught. This upset. He wished he had checked her location before her sister called to ask if she was ignoring her. Wish he had gone down to see where she was when he realized she was supposed to be home. “Shh,” he hushed. “S’nothing t’apologize for, kitten,” he promised quietly.

She continued sobbing and Harry wondered how on earth someone so beautiful, so kind, so utterly adoring could be so sad. It pained him to no end. Watching her breakdown like this felt like someone stabbed him right in the heart. He wanted to do whatever he had to do to make it stop. He knew she kept a lot of her emotions to herself. Years of bottling them up so as not to inconvenience others for simply existing.

“Kitten,” he whispered when her sobs subsided to sniffles. “Y’gotta talk t’me,” his voice was gentle but filled with worry. “M’sorry people let y’down. M’not one of them, though.”

“It’s hard,” her voice was so crackly and broken. Harry almost let it go because he wasn’t sure he could bear the weight of how sad she was.

“I know, baby, I know it is, but I love you so much. I want nothing but t’help you,” he hoped she heard how sincere he was. “I hate seeing y’like this. It hurts me, kitten,” he cupped her face and gazed into her eyes so hopefully she would understand how much he adored her and how much it hurt him. It wasn’t to minimize what she was feeling. It was to hopefully help her reach the conclusion that he was on her side, always. He would do whatever it took to make her smile.

“M’scared,” she whispered. “You’re just going to tell me that I’m being ridiculous—because I am, Harry. I am being ridiculous. I have you. You’re so perfect. You love me so much and you don’t care that I’m a little crazy and you don’t—”

“Kitten,” he frowned. “I would never tell y’that you’re being ridiculous. Please tell me y’don’t really believe that,” his heart felt even worse. How could she think that?

“Because,” she croaked. The seconds it took her to speak after felt like years. Harry waited so patiently, his heart pounding. “Because whenever I felt so overwhelmed,” she shook her head and looked down, despite Harry holding her face so she would have to look at him. She closed her eyes and sniffled.

“Tell me, angel.”

“I have never had someone,” she started again, squeezing her eyes tight. They felt red and swollen. She was certain she looked as terrible as she felt. “It was my own doing,” she whispered. “The reason I get so overwhelmed. When I complained even a little it was turned into something about how I did things wrong. I overwhelmed myself. It was just... in my head,” she whispered.

Harry wasn’t completely sure how he managed to stay upright. He swiped his thumbs below her red rimmed eyes. He thought she was beautiful even when she cried but it hurt him so much to see her like this. “S’not in your head, m’love,” it was hard to say the words without breaking out into cries himself. Seeing her hurt like this made him feel like the worst boyfriend in the world. “Love doesn't have t’be even, kitten. Being mad doesn't have t’be even. Being upset with something I do doesn't mean I have t’be upset with something you do. Y’can be annoyed with me, and I don't have t’bring up something m’annoyed by—which is nothing,” he assured her quickly because he could spot something he said creating a spiral easily. “But love, y’have t’tell me... talking has t’be done. I can't do this alone, kitten. I can't do this without you,” he explained as gently as he could.

“It’s not important,” she shook her head. Her voice cracked again.

Harry winced. “No, but it is, kitten. I can hear how important it is. I see it. I can feel it. Y’need t’tell me. I need you t’tell me everything y’feel. I can tell it hurts. All of it. I want t’fix it. I don’t want you t’hurt. M’not going anywhere. Ever.”

“But it’s… so bad to talk about... exes,” she whispered the last word like it was a curse—like she would be sent right to jail for it saying out loud.

Harry frowned. “Yeah, maybe if y’still in love with them. Do y’still love him?” It was rhetorical honestly. He knew she didn’t.

Her face paled immediately, her sad eyes filling with more tears. “Of course not!”

“I didn’t say it t’make y’mad, m’love,” His voice was gentle again. “I want you t’process this. I can’t have you all bottled up. I need t’know signs and feelings you’re having when y’don’t want t’share them. He messed with you so good,” he smiled without an ounce of humor behind it. It was the saddest smile she had ever seen on his face. He looked… so... disappointed. “M’usually good at figuring out what m’supposed t’do as a boyfriend. But y’stump me sometimes,” he admitted shyly. “It hurts me t’see you flustered and hurt without telling me why. I want t’be there for you. Always. In ways he never was because you—”

“He was always late,” she sobbed again. Harry pulled her to him immediately letting the tears pour out of her and he rocked her so gently. The words spilled out of her as fast as the tears did. “I swear he did it to piss me off and then he would say I was too controlling or neurotic. I was too planned out. He never got me flowers and my mom knew how much that bothered me. She knew he didn’t, even though I lied and said he did. I lied about flowers,” she felt so pathetic saying it out loud. “I lied about so many things he didn’t do because I was disappointed in myself. He didn’t see the point in romantic gestures. He didn’t think about how it kind of made me look like an idiot. I know that’s not the point of a romantic gesture, but I kept doing them for him and I—” the sobs choked her voice for a moment but Harry stayed silent. “I ignored all those red flags. All of them. Every single one of them. Why did I do that?” She cried; her voice sounded so tired. She looked so tired. Harry was quiet for a long time while more tears than he thought were possible fell across her cheeks.

“Because love is also red,” Harry whispered eventually. “Rose colored glasses are red… tulips, my sweet love,” he paused to kiss the top of her head, “are red.” It felt like hours she sobbed against him. The milk spread on the floor probably getting warm and souring the smell in the air and Harry just held her rocking ever so softly. “Thank you,” he said after way longer than anyone would have waited to speak. “For telling me that. I know that was hard. I promise I won’t be late. Ever,” he vowed. “Everything else between us? Might have t’be some compromises and more talking and we might argue. I might get mad, but it doesn’t mean it’s going t’end us, kitten. You have t’know that. M’here for the long haul... But late? On purpose? It won’t be me,” he promised easily. “Whether m’mad because I had a bad day at work or because of traffic, you’ll know the moment I know. M’not going t’miss a single time y’tell me. I will be there early.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He shook his head and kissed her temple, letting his lips drag along her skin for longer than he needed but it felt so soothing she nearly cried again. “S’nothing t’be sorry for,” he promised. “C’mon,” he stood, his knees aching from crouching for so long. He held his hand out to her and pulled her to stand beside him. He pushed her toward the sofa.

“What about—”

“Shh,” he promised. “S’fine,” he murmured pushing her to sit. Once seated, he pulled her shoes off, wrapped a blanket around her and kissed her forehead. He placed a book in her lap that she had started earlier in the week and hurried to the kitchen to bring her a bottle of water. “Stay here,” he kissed her forehead again, this time cupping her cheek at the same time and rubbing his thumb along her skin.

“But I—”

“Shh,” he shook his head. “I got it,” he tilted his head at her. His voice was so sure. Like he was telling her the sun would come up tomorrow.

She supposed it would.

*

As low as she got, she felt so much better, much quicker than she usually did. Harry was grateful for the change and was extremely mindful of things that caused her stress. He tried to read her mind as much as possible and was successful more often, which made him feel a lot better.

Talking was so much better. She had never felt so free. Harry knew her every thought. He didn’t belittle her emotions or make her feel like an inconvenience. Right before they fell asleep, she was snuggled close, her eyes watching Harry breathe evenly. The only light coming from a streetlamp outside their window. It wasn’t too bright but illuminated the room enough for her to make out Harry’s shadow beside her. His hand skimmed up and down her arm making her drowsy. “I love you,” she sighed.

“I love you, too, angel,” he murmured.

When they were out with friends Harry was mindful of her well-being. If she wanted to leave, he could sense it before she wanted to go. In fact, he even said he wanted to leave before she mentioned it. Taking her out of the equation made her anxiety lessen profusely.

If there was a problem Harry had (and rarely did that happen because he truly believed she was an angel) he looked her dead in the eye every time and promised her that he wasn’t mad. “I am not mad,” he held her face in his hands like she was a fragile vase. He waited until she nodded, he could see the emotions scrolling through her eyes like an index searching for one to land on for a moment. Only when she nodded would he continue. “I don’t like when y’leave the remote in the couch. S’hard t’find,” he explained. “Can y’try t’leave it on the coffee table?” He asked. She nodded. “Are y’okay, kitten? M’not mad,” he said reassuringly.

She nodded again. “I know,” her voice was soft. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “S’okay,” he smiled encouragingly. “Do y’have anything y’want t’share with me that’s bothering you?” She shook her head. “You’re sure? Not even the whole pizza thing?” He eyed her suspiciously. Harry put the whole box of leftover pizza in the fridge, and he could see the distaste in her eyes when he did so.

“It just takes up a lot of room,” she admitted.

“Good,” he smiled excitedly that she was telling him the truth and he kissed her forehead. “I’ll go fix it now; can y’find the remote?” He found giving her a manageable task was a good distraction when she voiced her worry. He could see her eyes fill with tears despite the fact he wasn’t upset, but he knew it was because she was more than likely overwhelmed with how easy that was. She swiped her hand across her cheek and dug between the cushions to find the controller. When he returned, she handed him the remote to put on a movie. He pulled her toward him, her body half resting against his chest. He kissed the top of her head. “I love you, so much, angel,” he promised.

“I love you,” Harry could hear how much that really meant to her in every syllable.

*

She was carrying her work bag, her lunch bag, and her clunky water bottle when her mom called. Most of the time her mom texted her. So, she assumed it was bad. She settled her things onto the counter as she answered.

“Do you know Harry texted me?” She asked.

“What?” Her heart leapt to her throat. Harry hadn’t ever texted her mother to his knowledge. She knew he periodically texted her siblings but never her mom.

“He shared a whole album with me. I had to have your sister help me open it because you know me with this contraption,” she laughed but she didn’t want to hear about her technological illiteracy. She wanted to know what the album was. “It’s just a bunch of bouquets of flowers. At least two dozen. Maybe closer to three. He said it’s every bouquet he’s ever bought you and the reason why. Birthday. Christmas. Valentine’s Day. Bad day at work. Being brave at the dentist,” she laughed again. She had a hand on her heart as she tried to quell all the emotions rapidly flowing through her in quick succession. “Sweetie,” she whispered, a smile in her voice. “He said he was going to add to it every time he got a new bouquet, but he wanted me to know that he got you flowers. Wanted me to have proof. Do you know what it’s about?”

She felt tears thicken her throat. “Yeah. Yeah I know,” she whispered. “It’s nothing you need to worry about,” she promised.

“I know you lied to me,” she said softly. It wasn’t accusing. It was exactly how a mom would react to such a statement. “You never lie about anything so it’s pretty obvious when you do. Especially about something so...little,” she felt horrible. But honestly, she didn’t feel like telling her mom that the flowers weren’t little. They were huge, in fact. It was a huge, glaring, obvious thing that she should have known was wrong. “I’m not too sure what’s going on with you and Harry lately, but I can see how much that man adores you and I know he would do anything to make you smile.”

She bit the inside of her lip to keep from crying. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“I know,” she responded. “I know why you did it.”

The tears rolled down her cheeks, but she doesn’t make a sound. “Yeah,” she nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” she repeated.

“Okay, well... I’m glad you have that album,” she took a deep breath. “I’m sorry to cut this short, but I’ve got a couple of chores to do, Mom.”

“I know, that’s fine. I just wanted to tell you how happy I am for you, sweetie,” she could hear her mom’s encouraging smile in her voice. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Almost as soon as the call ended, she sniffled. Then just as quickly, Harry came through the door and found her wiping her eyes. “Oh, kitten,” he frowned. “S’matter?” She wanted to say ‘nothing.’ But he was holding another bouquet of flowers. Half the tulips were red, and the other half was white. So, she was unable to utter a word and began to cry again. “Angel,” he set the bouquet on the counter beside her stuff and wrapped his arms around her tightly. “M’sorry, love,” he murmured into her hair and squeezed her.

“Can we get married?” She asked through her tears.

Harry didn’t even care how ridiculous she sounded. He continued as if this was a normal conversation that he had every day with her. As if she wasn’t sobbing on a Thursday night for no reason. Or if he asked her if she wanted fish for dinner. “Of course we can, baby, but I have t’propose—”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t care. Right now. Please. I love you so much. So, so much. I can’t—” she hiccupped.

“Hey, hey,” he pulled away and looked at her. “Kitten,” he smiled gently. It was a sad smile, but a cute one. Like he didn’t want to set her off completely. “I love you, too,” he assured her. “I want t’propose the right way and make sure you’re—”

“Then give me the ring now,” she looked at him squarely in the eye. The smile melted off his face and other than her soft sniffle, there wasn’t a sound in the apartment. “Please,” she repeated.

“Kitten,” he sucked his cheek in a bit and looked at her nervously. Like this was a break in her tired mind that he wouldn’t be able to handle. “What happened? Please tell me, you’re worrying me.”

She wiped her eyes again. “You told my mom you got me flowers.”

His entire body deflated, and it was like he just knew. “Stay here,” he said simply.

She swallowed the lump in her throat, nodded, and watched as Harry walked through their apartment. She wondered if he was walking so slowly on purpose. By now, she was used to Harry’s footsteps, and she listened to the sound of them: light and quiet on their hardwood floors. From the kitchen she could hear his dresser drawers sliding open and closed. It was as if he took ten times as long to come back to the kitchen as he did to leave it.

“How did y’know?” He asked.

She shook her head. “I didn’t.”

He smirked and pulled the little box out of his pocket and set it on the counter beside the flowers, her bags and her water. “I was going to wait until Christmas, y’gonna have nothing t’open.”

“I don’t need anything,” she promised.

He chuckled. “Kitten,” he sighed. “What am I going t’do with you?”

“I don’t know. But you have a lifetime to figure it out,” she vowed.

He smiled, shook his head. “Will you—”

“Yes.”

“Can you let me do it the right way—”

“No.”

He sighed. “Kitten,” he chided with a chuckle.

“Okay, okay, sorry,” she wiped her cheeks again and shook her head.

Harry took a deep breath. “Angel, will you—”

“I can’t do it, I’m sorry. Please just kiss me,” she begged.

He laughed, shook his head, and pressed his lips to hers. He held her so firmly in his embrace, dipping her backwards in the middle of the kitchen like this was the most romantic place in the world. When he stood her upright, her cheeks were flushed, and she was silent. She no longer looked anxious as she had when he entered the apartment. He grabbed the ring box, pulled the ring out of the safety of its little cushion and slipped it onto her finger. It fit perfectly. It wouldn’t need to be resized or anything. “Will you marry me?” He managed to ask without her interrupting.

Her response was immediate, though, barely finished the word ‘me’. “Yes."

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[dani-the-mark]

A Slept-On Review: AEW Dynamite 8/24/22

Chris Jericho and Daniel Garcia Promo 

Chris Jericho is here to get Daniel to “just apologize” for his wavering loyalty. Daniel shows a real conflict. He’s not wanting to apologize, but not sure about walking away. Bryan Danielson comes out to get him to see that he, and the crowd, think he can be so much: a wrestler. I agree. Daniel snaps and pushes Jericho to the crowd, standing on his own. Hopefully, he’ll be standing with the BCC soon enough.  

Dax Harwood vs Jay Lethal 

Surprisingly, this was a hidden gem. Between meaning very little as a match by itself, and a card where so much happens, they used their time well.  Lethal is a cheeky motherfucker, winning this match with a grab on the tights. After the match, we learn that Motor City Machine Guns are joining Lethal for the Trio Tag Team Chaimoship tournament. The crowd, and social media in general, seem quite excited about this. However, I have no idea who they are! Guess it’s research time. 

Thunder Rosa Backstage 

Thunder Rosa is injured and I am devastated. You can tell from the tears in her eyes, that this announcement was so hard to make. I’ve seen some criticism that she did not get as much time or fanfare as, say, CM Punk. To a point, I understand that and think that it is unfair. However, I wonder if Rosa wanted it that way. The words seemed so hard for her to get out, fairly, and maybe this was simply all she could do. 

Billy Gunn vs Colton Gunn 

From the beginning, this match had weird energy but was logical in the state of the current story. Really, I felt bad for Billy the whole time. He did great, but he’s clearly not in his prime anymore. Stokley runs in and causes a chain of shenanigans, leading to a victory for Colton. Swerve and Keith beat up the ensuing brawl.  

We get a backstage segment of Death Triangle, and more specifically Pac, being scary and threatening ahead of their match with United Empire. 

Dr. Britt Baker D.M.D vs KiLynn King 

I love Britt! I love KiLynn! This match was not the best they could do, but average. Obviously, it meant very little in the grand story, but there are two major takeaways. First, Britt Baker’s win allows for some momentum going into the match for the interim champion at All Out. I do not want her to win, but if a heel is going to take it she is first in line. Secondly, AEW really needs to sign KiLynn. She’s done enough to deserve it. 

Jon Moxley vs CM Punk 

We start with one of my biggest loves in this business, a contesting chant of participants' supporters. The added imagery of them circling each other like sharks adds to the energy. This was set up to be a hard-fought slog. Mox starts losing it on Punk in the corner, and while we get some Punk aggression back, Mox gets some major unique power moves in.

AND THEN IT’S OVER

Jon Moxley is officially AEW’s Undisputed Champion.

If I didn't have the knowledge there was more on the card, I would have expected this to last the full hour the show had left. I worry, as I’ve seen many others do too, that Punk has reinjured himself or simply wasn't ready to come back. 

Regardless, Punk’s time is up, and Mox’s time is now. 

I had to, he said it himself!

Ricky Starks Promo

Poor Ricky getting the death spot after all the emotions wore off and I was just left exhausted. Regardless, the passion is so there. There is a tangible hurt in his voice. He has accepted Hobbs turning against him, and it seems their feud has formally begun.

Also Christian has officially challenged Jungle Boy to a match at All Out, because of course he has.  

Death Triangle vs United Empire

They’re flipping! They’re slapping! They’re brawling! Both teams' expected elements in a beautiful, loud, harmony. Osprey’s reactions were lovely, especially when there was so much to digest. His being over the top made things so much easier to follow. This may be because I haven't followed Ospreay in quite a while, but him meeting his opponent's eyes with that still intensity, not moving for a minute while the crowd goes nuts? That sends me back. After the match, we have a stare-down between The Elite and United Empire. Or, more specifically, Ospreay and Omega. 

Shoutout to that poor kid dressed as Kip. He looked terrified. 

[shreddedparchment]

A Wife for Thor Pt.24

What She’s Done

05/19/2021

Pairing: King!Thor x Reader         Word Count: 5,590

Warnings: language, angst, fluff, Loki being the best bro, pregnancy problems

A/N: I’m sorry this is so late. I’m not going to explain too much as I want the focus to be on the chapter but I’m feeling better. Hope you all enjoy this one and I hope you can forgive me. haha As always, if you happen to reblog, thanks so much for helping me spread my work! xoxo

Please DO NOT repost my work on any other sites or blogs!

REBLOGS are always welcome!

The sound of the fanfare outside is muted. The heavy doors of the main room are shut.

Thor sits on his large steel, silver, and wooden throne. Normally, your own throne would have been moved into the room so that you could sit beside him. Today however, he wants you standing.

Loki stands on Thor’s left, his hands moving across his tablet at godly speeds. He’s busy. Always busy. While Thor has the final say, Loki sets everything up for him and comes to him with the choices that must be made.

He’s indispensable and both you and Thor know it. So, when the large doors are thrown open and Thor takes his hand off of your lower waist where he’d been massaging the knots away, as Ambassador Coates walks forward, you glare right at him and his judging distrustful look at the sight of Asgard’s Prince.

The music outside, large horns that sound more like a call to battle, slowly die and are completely cut off when the doors are shut. Just outside you know two Valkyrie are standing guard.

Inside, two more regular guards stand at attention.

“Ambassador Coates, I’m glad you saw fit to accept my invitation,” Thor says casually.

One wouldn’t know that Thor is angry. He sounds so welcoming. The charm he’s exuding is one you’ve never seen him use before but Loki doesn’t seem surprised by it. Instead, Loki’s lips seem to curve upwards a little in the teeniest smirk.

The Ambassador does as he’s expected and once he’s near the foot of the raised wooden floor where Thor’s throne sits, he gives a quick bow meeting first Thor’s singular eye and then your own blank gaze.

Keeping your anger in check is easy. You’re able to wipe your face of all emotion and it’s a skill now that you’re glad you learned in the orphanage you’d grown up in. Never letting anyone know how sad or hurt you are was key to your survival.

“Your Majesties,” the ambassador states, the irritation in his voice loud and clear for all of you to hear.

It looks like Thor’s plan to roll out the red carpet as if the ambassador were visiting royalty got his message across clearly.

“I hope I find you in good health? Are you faring well with the pregnancy?”

You don’t answer him. You simply stare.

“We’re well enough,” Thor begins. “Forgive me in my haste to get to the point, Ambassador Coates but as I hear it from my brother, you have been making it very difficult for Her Majesty the Queen of Asgard to meet with you, despite her warnings that what she had to share was imperative to the safety of Earth and human-kind.”

The ambassador blinks. He doesn’t attempt to speak or react in any other way than to show that he’s processing Thor’s words. All signs of irritation at his welcome gone.

“Would you say that is a fair statement for her having sent, what was it? Four emails and three phone calls?” Thor asks Loki.

“Seven emails and four phone calls,” he corrects.

“Right. Seven and four.”

“Your Majesty…”

“I think you have been under the impression that my marriage to my wife has been one in name only. She’s Queen but not really? Right? She has no power or authority? Is that what you think?”

Ambassador Coates swallows hard, sweat beading along his temples. He’s not a stout man. In fact, most women would think him good looking. Nothing to Thor or Loki, but for a human he’s handsome. His sweating in this climate makes no sense unless he’s suddenly stressed.

Maybe you shouldn’t feel bad but you do just a bit. You can’t imagine what he must feel being scrutinized by Thor, yourself, and Loki. Clearly he did something wrong and now he knows it.

“Your Majesties, I-I meant no offense. Unfortunately this is a busy time for myself and my colleagues and-”

“We have no time for your excuses,” Thor sits up straighter and draws his legs a little closer together before he licks his lips and holds his hand out towards you.

Taking it, you watch him get up and then he helps you sit before checking on you, “Better, cherub?”

You nod, looking up at him as he caresses the side of your head.

“The only reason you hold the job that you currently do is because my people and I chose to settle on Earth. You might say you owe it to us. Perhaps you’d still have been employed should we not have come here but from what I understand, your salary is considerably more than what it would have been were you in some other position.

“You are married and have children, too. Don’t you?” Thor asks.

“Y-Yes, Your Majesty.”

“So, it’s important to keep your job. Isn’t it?”

He says nothing, this time simply looking down at Thor’s feet.

“My wife is not just Queen in name but she has been exemplary in her devotion of ruling the people of Asgard at my side with honor and grace. The people love her. I’m not sure what made you think you could slight an Asgardian Queen but let me be clear. If our people should find out that there was such disrespect, believe me when I tell you that the loss of your job would be the last thing you’d have to worry about.”

“And just to be clear,” Loki cuts in as Thor’s taking a breath. “My brother is not threatening you. This is a statement of fact. We Asgardians are fiercely loyal and easily offended.”

You like that Ambassador Coates isn’t glaring at Loki anymore. The fear in his eyes is worrying, but you also know that your husband and brother would do nothing to actually hurt this idiot. They’re just making sure he knows where he stands.

Thor crosses his large arms across his wide chest. Though you don’t think he means it to be intimidating, you can see from the ambassador’s gulp that Thor’s minor flex has great impact.

Gods, he’s huge.

“As it just so happens, aside from being a Queen without fault to this kingdom, the Queen of Asgard has seen fit to continue to perform in her duties as the bridge between our two peoples. She refuses to let us make decisions for the human race and was attempting to contact you to warn you of impending dangers. And you, what was the phrase, love?”

“Blew me off.”

“That’s right, you blew her off. And yet we welcome you with respect and grace.”

“Your Majesties,” the ambassador begins, but Thor holds up his hand and he stops.

“Let this be a lesson in humility for you. I love Earth and for that reason alone, in addition to the fact that this is my wife’s home and now mine, we will forgive this lapse of judgement on your part,” you’ve never heard Thor sound more like a King than in this moment.

It’s also one of those moments where you really want to drag him back to the room and get him naked. He’s never been this attractive.

The ambassador bows his head, taking his punishment with dignity.

“Forgive me, your Majesties,” he begins to say something, but then stops himself.

“Speak your mind, Ambassador Coates,” Loki urges, seeing something you and Thor don’t.

“I merely wish to apologize for my lack of forethought. I was not the only one dismissing Her Majesty the Queen of Asgard but will be sure to rectify the behavior with my colleagues when I return.”

Loki smiles, turning his gentle gaze on you as he realizes that you were right. It wasn’t misogyny. Not on Ambassador Coates’s part. That might not be the case for everyone though.

“Perhaps I should schedule meetings with your colleagues so that we might have a quick talk about the expectations we have for our relationship going forward?”

Loki’s threat is veiled heavily, but Ambassador Coates still picks up on it and his face goes a little pale.

“I don’t think that’s necessary, Your Highness. I will pass along the sentiments, if you will let me.”

There’s a burning satisfaction in your chest. Something about watching Ambassador Coates finally show not just you but Loki the respect he deserves makes you so happy.

“My Queen?” Loki prompts you, looking to you to wait for your reply.

“I think we can give him a chance to express our disappointment for us. He is our ambassador. Isn’t that right Ambassador Coates?”

Coates looks relieved, pressing his hand to his chest as he bows his head to you again.

It’s a strange sensation to see the gratitude on his face and his posture relaxes as a result. You literally just did that. You gave him some forgiveness and it really does make all the difference.

“I will support you and the Asgardian throne with more fervor from here on out, Your Majesty.”

“Cool,” you shrug, reaching to place your hand on the back of Thor’s neck, absolutely beaming at him.

He chuckles and puts his hand back on your waist, giving you a gentle squeeze and shake.

“Are you happy, my cherub?”

You nod, unable to contain the smile that stretches across your lips and you lean into him.

“Good. My job here is done then. Now, I have some things to do,” Thor rises and moves around until he’s facing you and pulls you up into a chaste but loving kiss.

With a caress to your belly, he looks at Loki and nods.

“I’ll leave the rest to you and my Queen, brother.”

“Sif will meet you by the docks,” Loki nods.

“Wonderful. I’ll see you later, love. If you need me, just tell Loki and I will come running.”

“‘Kay,” you smile.

Thor turns back to your guest and moves towards him, clapping his shoulder as he passes, “Do better, Ambassador Coates. Do better.”

All three of you watch Thor strut for the large front doors. The guard opens it for him and when he’s out of sight, the doors shutting behind him, you move to take your seat on the throne. Loki scoots a little closer to your side but stands with his tablet ready.

“Now, I think we should get down to the reason I wanted to meet with you,” you start and Ambassador Coates stands a little straighter. “But...I don’t know about you but this whole towering over you sitting on a throne thing is not really my style and feels a little forced. Let’s go to my sitting room.”

Loki smirks as Ambassador Coates relaxes a little more and even smiles, “Yes, Your Majesty.”

As the three of you walk up the steps to the right of the throne room to climb up to the small sitting room that had been set aside for you and your private entertaining, you steal a few glances at Ambassador Coates.

He still looks a little rattled and you stroke your stomach, the long silk dress you’re wearing, ruffled skirt and loose waist giving it a soft flowing quality is still noticeable and Ambassador Coates steals a few glances.

“Didn’t think I was really pregnant?”

He blanches, “What? N-No, Your Majesty! I had no reason to doubt you.”

“It’s okay. A lot of people didn’t believe it until I came back from my little vacation. I just wanted to make sure that it would take. We’re all so dependent on this little one and a lot is riding on my having Thor’s heir quickly.”

“No one who has seen you rule since your marriage would doubt your commitment to this union, Y/N,” Loki assures you gently.

He’s your number one supporter and you’re so damn grateful for him.

All three of you fall into silence but with your heavy belly and your slow walk, it stretches on.

“I’m sorry about Thor’s enthusiasm to put you in your place,” you give Coates a small apologetic smile but he quickly shakes his head. “He can be a little passionate.”

“No, Your Majesty, the mistake was mine. I should have paid you the respect you deserved. It’s-You work in an environment for too long and you begin to adopt certain behaviors that you should know aren’t acceptable but when everyone is doing it and-I was wrong. I can’t blame Thor for setting me straight.”

“Thank you, for understanding,” you shrug.

“Thank you for not holding it against me and letting me do better.”

It takes only another few minutes to reach the sitting room and you make a beeline for the small loveseat before dropping into it and leaning back against the soft plush cushions.

“Whew, I probably should have done my research on how pregnancy would affect all aspects of my life before agreeing to it,” a joke and Coates gets it because he looks respectfully amused.

Loki scoffs, “With Thor, I doubt you’d have had much choice in the matter. He is also believed to be a God of fertility, you know?”

“Loki!”

The small shock on your face really makes Coates laugh this time and your neck, ears, and cheeks burn.

Not wanting to drag this meeting out for a long time you clear your throat and Loki sits down on the armchair beside you opposite Coates’s own seat.

“I should really be more formal, but I’m not kidding when I tell you that this pregnancy is taking a toll on me.”

“Think nothing of it, Your Majesty,” Coates assures you.

“I’m not sure what you’ll be able to do with this information and maybe it’ll be best if, with your help, you can get a meeting in front of both the United Nations and NATO scheduled for me to speak to them directly.

“Thor and Loki would be there with me, of course, but it was my idea to even bring this to your attention.”

“I will be of any assistance that I can be,” Coates nods, face serious and attentive.

“We wanted to wait until we had more concrete information to give Earth’s leaders but our Queen is adamant that an early warning is better than detailed information,” Loki explains.

“Is the Earth in danger?” Coates asks, worried now.

“Sort of,” you nod. “Truth is, we don’t know. What we do know is that there’s an energy signature that we’ve been monitoring for months. Almost my entire first year of marriage. What we do know is that the energy signal was strong enough to bring Doctor Foster here to look for an explanation and my brother-in-law has kept his eye on it too. It’s familiar to him and not unthreatening so we’ve been preparing watch stations across the globe. We have one in North and South America, Australia, almost every continent so that we won’t miss any kind of danger that comes falling from the sky.

“We don’t want a repeat of New York,” you look at Loki and Coates looks at him too but neither of you have any kind of judgement in your expressions.

Maybe a little for Coates, but he quickly turns his gaze back on you.

“I wanted to give the people of Earth time to prepare for that kind of attack. The Avengers are already on the case and have been helping build up a defense but they can only do so much. Their focus is going to be on the bigger fight if it comes to that. I want to give us a fighting chance on the ground where regular people are often the ones to get hurt and suffer from big threats like this.

“I don’t want the casualties to look like they have in the past when something or someone threatens us. So, I just want to give world leaders a briefing on what we’ve found, what we’ve built in defense, and give them the resources to keep track of what we’re keeping track of.

“We’re at a unique advantage with not only Asgard’s knowledge, technology, and resources. We’re still a growing nation and what we do have is lots of strength. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and while the Valkyrie have to stay here to protect my family, we have a sizable guard that can be split into a few regiments to send out to the places that will need it most and still have enough forces to protect New Asgard.”

Coates is thinking hard, then his hand dives into his pocket and he pulls out his phone, “I’ll start making calls and can probably have something set up the day after tomorrow. If the threat is serious enough to make you worry about us humans this much, I think the sooner the better.”

“It is serious enough,” Loki assures him. “Even if it turns into nothing, we would all rather have done everything we could to minimize damage to both the humans of Earth and New Asgard.”

“Then I’ll get started. Is there any kind of data that I should see in order to convince my bosses?”

You look to Loki and reach out, placing your hand on his arm, “Loki, take Ambassador Coates down to the dungeon and let him get a look at anything we’ve gathered in the monitoring station. You’ll forgive me for not coming with you, Ambassador Coates? I really can’t stand walking around much longer today.”

“Of course, please do not mind me,” he assures you, giving you a small bow.

“Shall I have your lunch brought in here?” Loki asks.

“Please?”

He nods and with a gesture at Ambassador Coates, leads the way to the door.

“When you’ve made any significant progress, I will be in here. Can you come and let me know?”

Coates nods, the phone now pressed to his ear, “As soon as I know something, Your Majesty.”

They leave you in an appropriate rush and you relax against the cushions of your sofa feeling like a small burden’s been lifting off your shoulders.

You’ve done your part now. You’ve warned your Ambassador, now it’s his job to convince his higher-ups and hopefully they listen.

Estrid does eventually come with your lunch and you eat slowly, thinking through your options for Coates and the rest of the governments of the world. Splitting the Asgardian army up isn’t ideal, but they pack a punch. Even just a handful of soldiers in a city would make a difference.

You finish eating and you finish your tea. You get up to walk a little around the sitting room but as the afternoon wears on, you start to feel suffocated inside and Estrid happily goes with you down to your gardens.

Most of your plants have been well taken care of.

“His Majesty made sure that we kept all of your plants healthy for you,” Estrid informs you, moving to walk a few steps behind you as you walk around with a small watering can.

His consideration brings a smile to your lips.

Thor really can be so sweet. So loving. You hate that some of the time from your first year was stolen by what happened with Jane, but it couldn’t be helped. He had to discover what it would mean to lose you and you had to learn that depending on yourself is still just as important married as it was when you had no one.

Maybe it’s even more important now? You can get lost in your relationship with Thor and while that’s super tempting, to have your world start and end with Thor and your married life together, you are still your own person.

You have goals for your career and shared dreams with him too. You’ve got your hobbies and Thor has his. Both of you needed the distance.

Despite that, even though you know that the space was good for both of you, even if it hurt like hell to get it the way you two did, you’re actually really happy to be back home.

As you reach over to water one of your taller butterfly bushes, you gasp and pull your arm back against your body as a small sharp pain rocks your senses and blinds your vision for a split second.

“Your Majesty?” Estrid hurries forward.

“I’m fine, Estrid,” you assure her, waiting another second to see if the pain will come back.

Reaching down you rub the spot on your tummy where you’d felt it and wonder if maybe the baby is just kicking especially hard today.

“Shall I fetch the doctors?”

“No, really. I’m fine, Estrid.”

You move to the next plant and water a few more as you head towards the small greenhouse with the Asgardian plants you’re still trying to perfect the care for but as you reach for the door, you double over as a shooting pain stretches across the same side as before then moves down onto the base of your belly.

The watering can falls from your hand as you reach out to brace yourself against the door and hits the floor with a clunk as the water goes all over your flats, soaking your feet.

“Your Majesty!”

Estrid races to you, hands placed on your back and arm to support you as she looks to steal a glance at your face.

With your eyes shut tight, you groan and whimper as the pain just gets sharper.

“Estrid…” it takes a moment to catch your breath. “Get the doctors.”

“Guard!” Estrid calls, forcing you to let go of the door so that she can lead you to a bench. “Guard, send for the doctor!”

“Thor,” you whimper, sitting slowly and gasping as the pain intensifies. “Get Thor.”

“I’ll send for him, my Queen,” Estrid assures you and now that you’re seated, she leaves you to run and hurry the guard.

“What’s wrong?”

“Loki?” you call breathlessly, searching for his face for the comfort you know it’ll give you to have him close.

“Here,” he calls out for you and hurries around the corner. “I’m here. What’s happened? What’s wrong?”

He hovers over you, leaning over, his hands carefully pressed to your cheek and the other on your stomach.

“It hurts,” you sob without tears, “Loki…”

“It’s alright,” he promises. “You and my nephew will be fine. Come on, put your arm around my neck.”

His certainty does help and you get your arm around him. With ease he squats down and lifts you into his arms and with you moves back into the palace.

~~~~~~~~~~

It feels like a long time when you open your eyes again. You’re dizzy a little and weak. Your body feels heavy and it’s a struggle to sit up.

Looking around, you realize you’re in your bedroom alone. The sky outside is dark and the room is dim with only the fireplace lit to cast a warm orange glow around the dark room.

“Loki?” you try, remembering him carrying you when he found you in the garden.

No movement.

“Thor? Estrid?” You’d sent her to get the doctors and to get Thor. Had the doctors come?

Thor’s favorite armchair is placed by your bed, angled towards you so he must have been in here sitting by you waiting for you to wake up.

With a heavy sigh, you realize that he must have been out of his mind with worry when he heard what happened. Is the baby okay?

You put your hands on your tummy and wait for movement. He does wiggle around a little. Normal for you and him and that makes you feel better about the pain that had come out of nowhere.

It takes you too long to get up and out of bed. You’re in your nightgown, a long simple piece with modern touches but it’s also very similar to some of the long flowing white ones you remember seeing in history books.

Taking extra time to stretch up onto your feet just in case the pain comes back, you breathe a sigh of relief when you take your first step and find that you’re okay.

“Oh, baby,” you reach down and rub the sides of your bump. “You scared me, rascal.”

You know that you should probably stay still. Staying in bed is probably what your Doctors suggested but the empty chair has you worried about Thor and what state he might be in.

So instead of staying where you should, you open your bedroom door and step out into the hallway.

The spots to either side where there’s usually a guard are empty.

You look up towards the other end of the hall and see that the two soldiers have moved to stand at the center of the hall, shoulders tense and obviously distracted. Further down, at what you think they must be staring at is a grouping of palace staff. People you recognize. Estrid stands among them, frowning at the small crack in the door through which pours a line of bright white light from the sitting room you share with Thor.

Did something happen?

As you pass the two guards the jump and hurry back to the sides of your bedroom door where they belong. Their flurry of movement must have drawn the attention of the others standing by the door. They also seem to jump, look shamed and worried, before they move away from the door and head in all different directions to get back to work.

One of the maids that passes you curtsies before she scurries off stealing a look of regret at you.

Estrid stands rigid, hands clasped to her front before she steps back a bit to give you room.

“What is it, Estrid?”

She doesn’t say anything. She looks upset, her lips fixed into a severe line, eyes full of anger as she shakes her head.

“Where’s Loki? Thor?” you check, stopping by her and she only looks at the door.

You can hear muted voices from inside and your heart begins to pound.

Is it the doctors? Are Thor and Loki getting bad news? The baby was just moving though!

Your baby has to be okay. Healthy even. Nothing was wrong before you came back home.

Clinging to your bump, you move towards the crack in the door and with the breath leaving your lungs in fear of what you’ll overhear you just go ahead and push the door open because eavesdropping hasn’t served you well in the past.

If something needs to be said, you want to hear it without hiding.

Of course, what you aren’t expecting to find is Loki facing you by the long sofa where Thor usually lounges, resting his head on your lap. Behind Loki, what must have given him that frustrated look on his face is Thor, Jane clinging to his arm as she finishes speaking the thought you just interrupted as they all turn to look at you.

“-can’t help it. I love you. I-”

The absolute fury that engulfs you is indescribable.

For one year-long second, you inhale and a million thoughts cross your mind. The one you grasp onto, in favor of the ones involving murder and hurt and violence, is the one of your baby.

This kind of anger is bad for him. You can’t let it consume you. Not when you need to stay good for him.

Loki looks down at his feet, disappointment and shame overcoming his pale, handsome features.

Thor quickly jerks his hand out of Jane’s grip and moves towards you but stops when you speak only a few feet away.

“Jane?”

She swallows hard, then frowns, “I only came to warn Thor that the readings have gotten stronger. I-”

“I don’t care why you’re here. I only care that you are here. You aren’t welcome in my house, near my husband, or on any piece of land in this Kingdom,” you take a step towards them and stop as you stroke your belly to remind you to keep calm. “I want you gone. Out of my home, away from my people, and if you trespass here again, I’ll have you thrown in jail. You aren’t welcome in New Asgard.”

“You can’t ban me from an entire Kingdom,” she argues, moving forward towards you.

“Try me,” you warn. “Out of respect for what you meant to Thor in the past, I’ve kept your name clean. I haven’t told anyone what you tried to do here, but here you are trying again. Now either you want me to trash you, or you seriously can’t take a hint.

“We don’t want you here.”

“Thor invited me himself, if he didn’t want me here, why would he do that?”

You grind your teeth, again stroking your tummy, “You’re right. I don’t know why my husband would invite you here when I have made it very clear that you aren’t welcome. Whatever the reason, he and I will discuss it together, because we’re married. Husband and wife. Until the day I die, at least, since he’ll outlive me by two thousand years.

“And whatever you two had in the past is gone. So, get out or I’ll have you thrown out.”

She opens her mouth to argue and you take two steps towards her, “I might be pregnant, but I can still do plenty of damage in the minute that it’ll take Thor and Loki to pull me off of you. Please, say something. Please, please I beg you. Give me an excuse. I have a really bad temper and I am dying to express myself. Please.”

Jane turns towards Thor, waiting for some kind of rebuttal from him but he’s got his eyes trained on you and you alone. The shame on his face, the agony of what you finding them all here might mean is not lost on him.

When he doesn’t say anything, Loki clears his throat, “I think it’s time to go, Jane.”

His urging helps and with a look of hurt and disbelief, she tears her eyes off of Thor and stomps out past you.

You watch her go, Estrid scurrying after her to lead her out the back instead of the front where she might be spotted.

“Loki?”

He turns to you, waiting.

“I don’t want anyone to know she was here. Anyone other than the group of palace staff that was standing by the door fucking listening to what was being said in here. Can you get Heimdall and send her home that way?”

“I’m on it,” he assures you and hurries past you, disappearing into the palace.

“I-” Thor begins.

“Don’t!”

He shuts his mouth.

“Not here.”

Turning, you lead the way back to the bedroom and the guard opens the door for you, Thor following closely behind.

As the door shuts you don’t stop until you’re sitting on your bed, hands stroking your belly as you shut your eyes and try to calm yourself.

“I asked you for one thing. One thing, Thor. I asked you not to make a fool of me. Seven people from our staff were listening to you and Jane. Seven! By tomorrow that’ll be twenty and by the weekend the tabloids will have picked up on the story.”

“I’m sorry,” he starts but you growl in frustration.

“I stood in front of our people and told them that Jane Foster was not welcome in our Kingdom and you walked her right in! I-I can’t do this. I can’t do this right now.”

You get up and point at the large doors.

“I need you to get out. I need space and I don’t care why you let her in. I don’t care why you’d make me look like such a stupid fucking joke I only know that you did and I’m done. I need you out. Don’t come looking for me. When I’m ready, if I’m ever ready to talk to you again, I’ll find you. Until then, leave me alone.”

“Cherub-”

“NO! You don’t get to do this shit, Thor-You don’t get to undermine me and bring that woman back into our lives and still get to explain yourself after she lied to you about being pregnant, and making a mockery of our marriage. You don’t get a say. You get out of my room, you keep away from me, you wait until I’m ready to hear you. Until I’m not angry anymore. Until I’m not hurting anymore.

“I don’t understand what it is about this woman that you just-can’t you see what she is? What she’s done? Don’t you understand why she can’t be here? Don’t you get-You know what? Just get out. I don’t care. I don’t care if you get it or not. Get out.”

“Y/N, please, I-”

“GET OUT!”

The silence that follows your outburst is interrupted only by the crackling of the fire. In the dim light, Thor’s face is grave and broken. You can’t feel bad for him though.

As much as you love him, as much as you wish this hadn’t just happened, as much as you hate to see him hurt, you can’t ignore the pain in your own chest, drowning you again in betrayal.

This is why you’d wanted to keep your distance. This agony is why you’d wanted to keep him at arm’s length.

This is why you can only depend on yourself.

Eventually, Thor bows his head and with heavy feet, he leaves your room shutting the door behind him leaving you to sob and throw pillows in anger.

[ultraintrovertedgryffindor]

Omg I have an angsty request that I’m sure is going to rip my heart out and light it on fire. It’s a super long and specific request so sorry if I get carried away:

Okay so reader had an unspoken thing in the glade with Gally but then he “died” so over the course of the events of scorch trials she got closer with newt and they start their own unspoken thing. But then in the death cure, newt (realizing he has the flare) starts encouraging her to reconcile with gally because he knows that he’s gonna die and gally will take care of her? But she’s confused on who she loves but kinda clings to what she has with newt because he needs her. And she’s just heart b r o k e n over newt dying but gally helps put her pieces back together in the safe haven and eventually they have their fluffy first time together?

Thanks!

*Fanfare* *Triumphant Music* I finally finished this one! Sorry it took a while, I really wanted this to be perfect. But I think I'm quite happy with how this one turned out! I hope you like it too, sweet Anon. Btw, I know you wanted smut, but I just didn't think it would fit with this one. Sorry, maybe on the next one!

Over 5.2k words, so strap in for a long one y'all

Possible Trigger Warning: Self Harm

~~~~~~~~~~

During your time in the Glade, you were practically attached at the hip with Gally.

He was your best friend, your first go to whenever you had any issues, and you were the same to him.

After his supposed death, you felt a void in your soul. You took on a nihilistic attitude, nothing in life making sense anymore. You didn't care about what happened to you or around you, you wished you had died with Gally, the idea of it being welcomed with open arms.

The thought of dying brought no anxiety, no dread. Even the thought of dying painfully didn't scare you, you wanted it. Everyday you thought about that spear going through Gally's chest, wanting to feel what he must've felt. You wanted to feel the same pain and fear, you wanted to feel like you were dying too.

No rational side of you could explain why you felt this way. Perhaps, if you felt the same pain he felt, maybe it would give some sort of closure. Maybe it would make you feel like you were still close to him, even in death.

It wasn't too long before you decided to act on those feelings. You had been only a knife to your chest, right where your heart was, hyping yourself up to push the blade into your skin.

You didn't want to kill yourself, no. You wanted your death to be natural, not forced. You'd suffer your own existence until your time eventually came like it did for everyone else. But Newt didn't know this when he happened upon you that night, just a couple centimeters of a blade shredding its way into your skin.

Newt panicked, immediately stopping your from hurting yourself, his heart racing at the thought of being too late. But thankfully, he wasn't.

You tried to seem somewhat normal, but the laughter bubbling from your chest couldn't be withheld, making Newt fear that you had lost your mind. He wasn't too far off...

He knew how much Gally's death impacted you, he knew you were in pain every second of every day, but he never thought you'd go so far as hurting yourself. He just silently patched you up, fearing anything he would say from a good place would only upset you further.

Eventually, you explained why you had done what you did. It obviously didn't sit right with Newt. He wasn't particularly close with Gally back in the Glade, but he knew well enough that he wouldn't want you to be living with this mindset.

After a while in the Scorch, you stuck by Newt the most and you started to get better. You felt so empty after Gally's death, leaving a hole in your heart. Newt helped lead you out of that void, trying his best to fit that empty space. But you knew nobody could replace Gally, not even Newt. You knew that space could never be filled, but just seeing Newt try to be that person for you, it was too endearing not to pull at what heartstrings you had left.

Then the complications happened, so much time spent believing that Gally was dead came crashing down as he stood in front of you all, very much not dead.

You thought it had to be a dream, could he really be here?

It was strange. You thought you'd run to him, leap into his arms and kiss all over his face, but you didn't. You stood next to your friends awkwardly as he took off his gas mask. To think you'd be more outwardly happy that someone you cared about was still alive. But you couldn't help the guilt that you felt when Gally said that they left him to die. Sure, it might've not been specifically directed to you, but you felt the sharp sting of his words resonate through you. It almost felt like a strong invisible force hit your funny bone, the volt of uncomfortable aching pain spreading throughout your entire body and leaving you in a breathless agony.

For Gally, he was overjoyed to see you alive and well. He so badly wanted to go to you, feel you in his arms again. But he knew he couldn't, how could he after how he treated everyone back in the Glade?

He didn't remember a lot, but he knew he killed Chuck. The blurry memories of that day, he saw it every night in his dreams. He remembered the sound of the gunshot, the sudden pain in his chest and not being able to breathe. He saw Chuck laying beside him, his expressionless eyes trained on the ceiling, unmoving. His chest wasn't rising and falling like it should've been, blood seeping through his layers of clothing. The most purest soul Gally ever met was dead, and it was his fault.

Gally couldn't even bring himself to look in your direction, he was too disgusted with himself.

Thomas punching Gally wasn't a big shock, he knew he deserved it. But Newt quickly came to his rescue, stopping Thomas from acting out irrationally. But a part of Gally didn't want the Greenie to be stopped. Being punched wasn't something he enjoyed, but Gally would willingly endure whatever punishment that would be inflicted and he'd accept that he deserved it. But nothing he could do or say would bring Chuck back...

When Gally did finally force himself to look at you, he wish he hadn't. You looked indifferent, which never happened with you. He instantly thought that you hated him as much as Thomas did, but then again, he deserved it.

It was really tough for Gally to keep a conversation with everyone while he took them to see Lawrence, especially when he noticed how close you stuck by Newt. But, he supposed it was only natural to find another person to be close to when you've lost someone else, he still couldn't help the feeling of jealousy that bubbled up in his chest. He hated how good you and Newt looked together, you seemed...happy.

At the moment, you weren't even close to happy; you were confused, and angry.

It sounded terrible, but a part of you was angry that Gally was actually still alive. You had to go through the mourning process, and you hadn't even finished it and now all of a sudden, he was alive all this time. It put your emotions on haywire, the most you felt was confusion, and if someone would've told you what you were experiencing was some sort of a twisted dream, you would believe them. But your feet were too sore and sunburn too irritating for this all to be a dream.

You sensed Newt's eyes trained on you, you knew he was probably worried, but you couldn't decide what for. Was he worried that you'd go back to Gally? Was he worried you'd replace him now that he was still alive? Knowing Newt, he probably just wanted to talk to you, but even then, you would have no idea what to say. What do people feel or say in situations like this? You were certain not everyone has to go through the loss of a loved one just to find out that they weren't gone, right?

It was late, and you were exhausted, as was everyone else; but you stayed awake, attempting to sleep only causing you to toss and turn, and eventually giving up. But someone else was awake, you were shocked to see that it was Newt. "What're doing awake?" He asked, taking a seat next to you.

"Could ask you the same thing." You replied, only getting a look from Newt in response. "Couldn't sleep." You sighed, caving in to his concerned expression.

"I know it's not my place," Newt started, wringing his hands together nervously, "but, you haven't said a word to Gally." You knew he was going to bring that up, you had that feeling as soon as he saw you were still awake. "I know it was a shock, to all of us. But I thought it'd effect you the most, to be quite honest. You two were pretty close..."

You shrugged weakly, shaking your head. "I don't know what to tell you. Was I supposed to react a certain way? Was I supposed to drop to my knees and burst into tears or something?"

Newt grimaced. "No...of course you're not supposed to act a certain way. It's just a bit strange to me that you haven't tried to speak to him at all."

"I don't even know what I'd say to him." You chuckled bitterly.

"I know you and Gally had something, something special. That sort of thing doesn't just go away. You were absolutely gutted after what happened, this is a chance to reconnect. You care about him, a lot."

"Hey, that doesn't change the way I feel about you. I care about you a lot too."

Newt smiled weakly. "I know, but I really think you should go and talk to him."

You could tell he was being sincere, but you couldn't understand why. You two had grown close over the past several months, so why would he want you to reconnect with someone you used to be even closer with? You weren't really given the time to think over it more before Newt was quickly encouraging you to speak with Gally, telling you where his room was, somehow knowing this conversation would happen and finding out beforehand.

Just a few moments later, you found yourself outside of Gally's door, fist extended out to hover over the worn wood, but you couldn't bring yourself to knock. Thinking back to how hard you tried to avoid Gally when he came back, what if he thought you hated him? What if he didn't want to talk to you?

But before you could chicken out, you forced yourself to knock on Gally's door without thinking, soon hearing the thud of footsteps nearing. With bated breath, you waited for the door to open, anxiety gripping your mind so intensely that it almost triggered your fight or flight response. But Gally's almost hopeful and shocked expression when he saw you waiting relaxed you a little bit. "...hi." Gally voiced, the nervous and confused tone to his voice not going unnoticed by you.

"Hi." You replied, your voice probably just as shaky and nervous as his.

"Uh, come in." He said quickly, moving out of the doorframe, his hands slightly shaking when he motioned you to enter his room.

Your heart was beating out of your chest, so fast and hard that you were worried Gally would be able to hear it. Your hands were shaking, as well as your legs as you walked into his room, it was a miracle you didn't collapse right then and there. You tried not to jump as you heard the click of his door closing, you tried to take deep calming breaths before Gally turned to face you, the two of you almost on complete opposite sides of the room just standing awkwardly.

You stared at Gally, your gaze running up and down his body but ultimately stopping to stare at his chest. Tears quickly came to your eyes as you saw how healthy he looked, like a spear wasn't embedded in his chest months ago. You couldn't stop the flow of whimpers that came from your throat, putting your hands up to cover your face in embarrassment. You felt your face start to burn as you felt Gally's arms wrap around you as soon as you started to cry, but his warmth comforting you only caused you to let out more tears.

You never thought you'd be in his arms again.

Gally stood there silently, holding you and just trying to soothe you as best he could. In the back of his mind, he was astonished that you even let him come near you, you had avoided him altogether up until this moment. But the whimpers he heard coming from you, seeing the tears spilling from your eyes, he instinctively went to hug you. He also couldn't ignore the guilt he felt, thinking that you were crying because of him. He hated it. But you hugged him back tightly, burying your face in his chest and trying to stifle your sobs.

"You're here..." You cried softly, "you're really here..."

Gally's lip trembled, tears of his own brimming his eyes at how much pain you must've been in thinking he was dead all this time, your voice giving away your feelings. He exhaled shakily, "I am here." He placed a kiss to the top of your head. "I'm here."

For a few minutes, you and Gally just held each other silently. You both needed this, understanding how badly you missed one another. Soon, you were able to calm yourself, but you still didn't pull away. Gally only pulled away slightly so he could see your face, frowning when he saw your eyes were puffy and tearstained. "I'm so sorry, Y/n."

You furrowed your brows, shaking your head. "What happened wasn't your fault, Gally." You said genuinely. No matter how much pain and anger you felt about what happened to Chuck, you never once blamed him. You knew W.C.K.D. killed him, and every other Glader who died. But Gally's frown told you everything you needed to know; he still blamed himself.

"I should've gone with you." He whispered, resting his forehead against yours. "How can you even stand the sight of me?"

"Because I know you never would've killed anyone if you weren't stung, especially Chuck."

Hearing Chuck's name out loud made tears brim Gally's eyes once more, tightening his fists in anger at himself. "Chuck deserved so much better...he wasn't supposed to die..." He cried, causing you to pull him back into your embrace, rubbing his back while trying to not to cry again.

"None of us deserved to get experimented on."

Eventually, you lead Gally to sit next to you on his bed, holding his hand. It felt so right to be sitting there with Gally, you missed him so much that you despised ever feeling even the slightest bit of anger when you first saw that Gally was alive. But one emotion did not go away, you still felt confused.

While sitting there with Gally, you couldn't help but think about Newt. He was so adamant about you reconciling with Gally, was he hoping that something would happen between you two? You truly cared a lot about Newt, and you knew he felt the same way, so you couldn't understand why he was acting this way.

You sighed softly when you started to feel sleepy, standing up slowly. "I should probably head back."

Gally quickly stood up with you. "Uh, you could stay here if you want?" He stammered, causing you to smile a little.

"That's okay. I already had a sleeping bag set up for me downstairs, so..."

Gally tried to hide his disappointed frown, choosing to walk up to you until you two were face to face. Maybe it was too soon, but ever since he saw you, Gally had the strongest urge to place his lips on yours. He missed your soft lips that he only had the privilege of feeling a few times back in the Glade before everything happened. He gently grabbed hold of your jaw, tilting your face up and leaning forward slowly.

You wanted him, you wanted him so bad. But before his lips could connect, Newt's face popped up in your mind and you couldn't, you forced yourself to turn away.

You tried not to look at Gally's face, knowing that he'd probably look like a kicked puppy. You couldn't, it would be too painful. "It's Newt." Gally frowned, taking a step back.

Your eyes widened, finally taking a glance over to him to indeed see that his expression was one of disappointment and sadness. "I never said-"

"You didn't have to." Gally interrupted. "I see the way you look at him...it's how you used to look at me." You stayed silent, a feeling of guilt washing over you. "I don't blame you, Y/n, for finding someone else. I'd never expect you to grieve over me forever, that's too selfish."

Hearing this, you had a terrifying thought that you needed to voice out loud. "Did you ever find someone else?" You asked nervously, afraid of his answer.

"No..." He smiled weakly, "No one that could ever compare to you."

You hated that you felt relieved, you were the one who seemed to be selfish. But, you couldn't just drop what you had with Newt now that Gally's still alive. You couldn't say anything else, what could you say to that?

"You should get some sleep." Gally said, opening his door and motioning you to get out.

"Gally..." You whispered.

"Please. Just...we have a busy day tomorrow."

You sighed. You couldn't argue with him.

Newt watched you walk back downstairs, getting into your sleeping bag with a very prominent frown. Doesn't seem like it went well, he thought. He felt relieved and frustrated at the same time. Newt really cared for you, he could even go as far as saying he loved you, but he needed you and Gally to get back together, or become friends again at least.

It wasn't too long ago that Newt found out he had the Flare. He saw the black and purple veins slowly travelling up his arm, and the pain, the pain was the worst part. You had already gotten close to him, so he was heartbroken to know that you'd just lose another person you cared for. After Gally, he knew you wouldn't be able to handle another loss. So when Gally showed up out of the blue, it was like a miracle, Newt's prayers had been answered.

Newt felt jealousy, of course, he wanted to stay with you. He didn't want Gally to take you from him, but what use would he be when he was dead or a Crank? He tried not to be angry with you, it wasn't your fault how you were feeling, but he needed to know you'd be okay when he was gone.

Newt did try talking to you about it, but you always changed the subject or simply didn't answer him. Before you all knew it, it was time to start planning Minho's rescue mission. Thomas didn't want to use Teresa, and hearing that only made Newt's anger bubble to the surface.

It wasn't like Newt to lash out like that, he was always so calm and relaxed. Maybe the stress finally got to him, maybe it was something else...

You immediately followed after Newt when he stormed out after yelling at Thomas, not knowing that Gally's sad eyes were following you. You couldn't think of anything else, you just had to know that Newt was okay.

You found Newt on the roof, sitting on the ledge. "Newt?" You asked, concerned. "Are you okay...?" You stepped closer captiously, finally taking a seat next to him.

Newt only smiled bitterly. "No...no, not really."

You sighed, looking out to the horizon, trying to find the right words to say. "We all thought Teresa was our friend...it's okay to be angry."

Newt shook his head. "It's not that."

You furrowed your brows. "Then, why did you lash out at Thomas?"

Newt bit his lip to keep it from trembling. He never wanted you to find out this way. He didn't even want you to know. But after that scene he made, he knew there was no point in hiding it anymore.

Tears came to your eyes as Newt lifted up his jacket sleeve, revealing his discolored arm. You knew what it was immediately, seeing it on every Crank you came across. "No..." You whispered. "No."

"I know I probably shouldn't have kept it from you, but I was scared. I still am."

"We'll fix it!" You quickly said, it sounding more like a plead. "We'll find another cure!"

Newt only gave you a weak smile. "I don't think that's a possibility right now, love. Besides, Minho needs us."

"No, you're not allowed to give up like that, Newt. We'll find something to help you. If Brenda was cured, so can you. Teresa might-"

"Please, Y/n." Newt voiced sharply. "Please...just stop. I don't need false hope."

Before you could say anything else, you heard the roof access door open, Thomas walking up to the two of you. "Y/n, can I, uh, talk to Newt? Alone?"

You looked to Newt, who nodded, signaling for you to leave. You stood up, speed walking inside and down the stairs. The tears kept falling, blurring your vision, and you had no idea what to do. Newt was dying, and there was nothing that you could do about it, and it didn't seem like he was too eager to try and find a cure. You hoped Thomas could talk some sense into him. But in that moment, your feet subconsciously took you to Gally's little apartment. You stood in front of the door in tears, wishing that you didn't feel the urge to find comfort in him when Newt was sick. But, you knocked on the door, quickly placing yourself in Gally's arms as soon as he was in front of you.

Gally didn't know what was wrong, he barely got a good look at your face before you threw yourself at him. But the way you were shaking and whimpering, he knew you were crying, and he didn't have the heart to pull away from you. He walked backwards and shut his door, leading you to sit down on his bed with him. He just held you as you cried, leaning his head down on top of yours until you calmed down. He finally spoke when your cries were just quiet sniffles. "What happened?"

You exhaled a shaky breath, lifting your head to look at Gally. "Newt has the Flare..."

"W-What...?" Had Gally heard that right? Could his mind be playing tricks on him? He just assumed everyone that was in the Glade was immune, that's why they were there, right? But you repeated what you had said, confirming what Gally thought he heard. "I...I'm so sorry..." That's all Gally could say. He wasn't very well spoken in these types of situations, all he could do was bring you back into another hug.

You finally understood why Newt was pushing you to get close to Gally again; he wanted you to be close to someone when he died.

Yet another situation that had you confused. You knew you loved Gally, you always had, he was your best friend. But now you had Newt, he helped you through everything while in the Scorch, helped you try to overcome your grieve and probably saved your life multiple times. How could you possibly make a decision like this?

You and Gally never put a label on what you had in the Glade, and nobody asked either, not even Alby. You both just knew that you cared for one another, that you'd do anything for the other. But as time went on, you felt guilty knowing what you'd ultimately choose. It was always going to be a lose lose for you.

Newt needed you, and you couldn't leave him when he needed you the most.

Gally, deep down, knew what your decision was going to be. You had a big heart. You never would leave anyone behind, even if they were infected. Back in the Glade, Gally wouldn't have hesitated in sacrificing the few to save the many, but you were never like that. You cared about everyone, especially the people who were closest to you. You never were going to give up on Newt, you couldn't now. You would spend as much time with him as possible, what little time he might've had left. And you did, until he took his final breath.

You felt like you were a glass vase that had been shattered, and every time you tried to pick up the pieces, the glass would just cut deeper and deeper into your skin. It felt like life didn't want you to be put back together. Nothing felt real. Everything that happened in the Last City felt like a fever dream. You hoped that one day you'd wake up and you'd be back in the Glade, everyone was still alive. Maybe if you could go back in time, maybe you could save everyone, maybe you could've convinced Gally to listen to Thomas, maybe you could've held off Newt a bit longer in time for Brenda to give him the cure.

A lot of maybe's, a lot of hopes and prayers, never answered.

Now in the Safe Haven, you felt anything but safe.

You didn't talk to anyone for awhile, not even Gally. You had nothing to say, and you were afraid of breaking down in front of everyone. So, you isolated yourself. And then a couple weeks later, you finally felt everything bubble to the surface.

Sitting down somewhere along the coastline, not too close to the water, but close enough that you could feel the salty breeze of the waves hit you gently as the evening cooled when the sun started to go set.

You tucked yourself up into a ball, your knees as close as you could get them to your chest and your arms wrapped tightly around them. And, you cried. And cried. And cried. And cried. The ugly kind of crying. Your tears weren't coming out one eye at a time in a perfectly straight line down your face like in the movies, you weren't making quiet sniffles or whimpers, you were full on sobbing. Tears came out of your eyes so fast that you could barely make out the sun on the horizon, your shirt sleeves were most definitely covered in snot and whatever salty tears it had the chance to catch. Your throat felt like it was being torn apart by how intense your sobs were. The sobs sounded more like you were having a coughing fit, one of those phlegmy hacking coughs that made you feel like you were going to vomit.

You knew you most likely weren't far enough away from the camp to quiet your weeping, and you knew you were just embarrassing yourself, arranging for yourself to be completely humiliated the next morning when you had to face everybody. But in the moment, you couldn't care less. You loss someone so important to you, it felt like losing Gally all over again. But you knew this time, it was final. No surprise resurrections this time. You felt completely, and utterly, alone.

But you never were.

You felt so dissociated and detached from yourself, the wails of grief too much for your body to handle. You couldn't feel anything around you, not the warmth of the sand, not the slight chill breeze, not even Gally's arms wrapped around you tightly. You didn't realize until you passed out from exhaustion, waking up the next morning in a bed that wasn't yours, and a hut that wasn't yours.

Your vision was still a little bit blurry, all the tears from the night previous crusting to the creases around your eyes, making it a bit of a challenge opening them all the way. But, your other sense were intact enough to tell you that bacon and eggs were next to you on a bedside table. You hadn't eaten the day before, so it was mostly a primal reaction to quickly take the plate and gobble up the food.

You still had to rely on context clues to figure out where you were in the camp. As much as your eyes irritated you, they could now finally work once you were wide awake. You probably should've known immediately who's hut it was, but seeing that familiar grey knitted hoodie settled ungracefully over the backrest of a chair, you knew it was Gally's.

You blushed quickly after that realization. How did he know where you were, and how much did he see? The thought of him seeing you in such a state made you cringe. But what was more horrifying was that Gally was right outside the room, waiting for you to wake up. "Hey..." He voiced, his eyebrows knitted in concern, eyes full of sadness.

You had to look away, the heat rushing to your face making you feel like you were going to pass out again. "Hi." You croaked, your vocal cords still sore and raw.

Gally shifted his weight nervously, taking a step closer to you. "I'm sorry, for bringing you here...I was afraid you were going to hurt yourself." You snapped you gaze back to him in confusion, him quickly blushing, scratching the back of his head. "Uh, Newt told me about what you did to yourself after...after the Maze."

You self-consciously rubbed the spot on your chest where a big scar still remained. "I wasn't trying to...you know, kill myself or anything."

"Forgive me if I don't believe you." He said softly, taking a seat on the bed next to you.

You sighed, crossing your arms. "I just...I didn't know what I was thinking."

Gally gently grabbed ahold of your hand, making you uncross your arms, letting his warm hand take yours. "I'm so sorry, Y/n. Newt should be here with the rest of us. He was a good person."

You nodded as tears came to your eyes again, burning enough to make you whimper, and you leaned your head against Gally's shoulder. "I miss him so much." You cried.

Eventually, you and Gally became close again. He was always there for you. Whenever you had nightmares, whenever you were lonely, whenever you needed anything, Gally would always be there. You started to feel your relationship had almost gotten back to the point where it was in the Glade, it had been almost a year, but you still felt it was too early to be moving on. A part of you didn't want to move on, but you knew that's not what Newt wanted either.

You didn't read the note Newt wrote to you when Thomas first gave it to you. The grief was still too near, and you didn't know if you could handle it. But a couple months after your breakdown, you finally read it. Newt loved you, he had always loved you. And he wanted you to be happy, he didn't want you to be sad that he was gone, even though he knew it would be impossible. But he knew you would be okay, he knew Gally would protect you no matter what. Reading his note was part of the reason you knew it would be okay to be with Gally, it just took you some time.

One day, you and Gally were taking a break from working, just sitting near the forest tree line, and you did it; you kissed him, and you couldn't stop, you didn't want to stop. And you didn't, and neither did Gally.

After that, it was almost impossible to spend any time away from each other.

You never thought you'd smile again, but Gally always found a way. He made you so happy, and it made you cry one night when you finally realized that you were happy, and you knew somewhere out there, it made Newt happy.

~~~~~~~~~~

Cries in Español

[voiceless-terror]

And Many Happy Returns

a sequel (or companion piece) to Inseparable, my childhood friends AU. chapter 1 of 2.

“Next week?” Jon shrieks, slamming a hand down on his desk and startling the nearby students. “That’s not nearly enough time to prepare!”

Martin does that blinky-eye thing that means Jon’s being too loud, but he can’t help it! Martin’s turning eight in six days (less than a week!) and didn’t think to tell him. They’re best friends, he should know these things. He curses himself for not asking about this at the beginning of their relationship, when he was collecting Martin facts. Favorite color and book seemed more important at the time. 

And while Jon doesn’t think birthdays are that important, it’s still a fact he ought to have known. Well, his Nan doesn’t consider birthdays important. These past two birthdays he’s gotten one new (!) book and a dessert after dinner, but that’s about it. Nan doesn’t have money to spend on frivolous things, and Jon’s never needed much, but he wouldn’t mind a bit of fanfare. His mum always made sure he felt very loved- he got plenty of hugs, a fun cake, an outing where they would do his favorite things. But maybe that’s something only mums do. Nan, with her rare, stiff hugs and general stand-offishness was never one to put up much of a fuss.

“It’s not that big a deal,” Martin mutters, his pencil twitching in his hand as he refuses to meet Jon’s eyes. He doesn’t like it when Jon starts fretting about him. “We never do anything for it, anyway.”

Martin’s mum isn’t anything like Jon’s, that’s for sure. It’s not every day you turn eight. It’s a nice number, very even and divisible. Much better than boring old seven. When Jon turns eight, he’s going to get fifteen extra minutes added to his curfew, and he’ll be able to walk to the corner store all by himself. He’s already walked there several times, but it’ll be nice to have permission. That’s the real treat.

“So you’re not going to bring in cupcakes for the class?” he asks, remembering the last birthday they celebrated- it was Lydia’s, a quiet, unassuming girl that Jon doesn’t mind but also doesn’t think much about. As soon as Jon asks it, Martin gets that sad look in his eyes again, the kind that’s always followed by an “I’m sorry” or something equally nonsensical. Jon hates that he’s the cause of it, him and his stupid mouth. Think before you speak, that’s what Nan always says. She says that for most anything he talks about, though, so he takes her advice with a grain of salt.

He reaches out to pat Martin’s arm consolingly, giving him his best sympathetic head tilt. “It’s alright. I’ve never brought any in either. Just thought I’d check in case you needed help bringing them to school.” Jon’s not very good at carrying things, but for Martin he would make an attempt.

“That’s nice of you,” Martin replies, though it’s not really nice, it’s just a normal thing a friend would do. Jon’s read books about it, he ought to know. “But yeah. I don’t think Mum’s planning anything, much less making cupcakes. She’s really busy.” Martin’s always saying how busy his Mum is, but Jon’s pretty sure she doesn’t do half the things around the house that she’s supposed to. Martin already knows how to cook and make tea and do the laundry without hurting himself. It’s very admirable. The last time Jon attempted to do laundry, he flooded the cellar.

“Do you like cupcakes, though?” Jon asks, scooching closer to Martin’s desk. “Lydia’s mum brought some for her birthday, but they were all carrot cake. Blegh.” He makes an exaggerated face to get Martin to laugh. It works.

“Carrot cake’s not so bad,” Martin says, poking lightly at Jon’s hand with the eraser of his pencil. Jon flinches back dramatically, putting on his most wounded look. “You just don’t like it cause it has the word carrot in it.”

“I don’t like it cause it has actual carrots in it,” Jon sniffs, turning away from Martin to show his displeasure. He decides not to talk to him for the rest of the day, or at least until he has something else to say to him. He’s got a lot on his mind now, and he needs to be left alone with his thoughts. Besides, Martin will poke him again once he gets bored enough. 

Jon flips open the school planner that he’s never used for actual school work and starts to write. He’s got a birthday to plan, and he’s going to give Martin a Mrs. Sims birthday special.

______

It’s a Thursday, which means Martin can’t play on account of his many, many chores. Jon hates Thursdays.

But this time it works in his favor, as he’ll actually have time to plan without Martin thinking something’s up. Jon very rarely cancels on Martin; he’s his most important (and only) friend. But he does on occasion get a little mixed up. One time, he thought it was a Wednesday instead of Thursday, and wound up at Martin’s flat when he didn’t show up at the park. Martin was very nice about it, though, and gave him a cup of tea to ‘calm down’ to drink in the hallway, before he went home. Martin thinks a cup of tea is calming. It doesn’t really do much for Jon, but it is tasty, and Martin gives him extra sugar just the way he likes.

But today is most definitely a Thursday so he scurries on home, slamming the door open and screaming a greeting to Nan that goes unanswered.  She must be off at the shops, otherwise she’d be giving Jon an earful for being too loud. He kicks off his shoes and gazes at the picture of him and his mum on the wall. If his mum were here, she would know exactly what to do to make Martin’s birthday extra-special. But she’s not, and Martin’s mum seems like kind of a jerk, so it’s Jon’s responsibility. “I won’t let you down,” he solemnly tells her smiling face, and turns to take the steps two at a time.

After grabbing his planner and throwing his backpack into the corner,  he pulls out the chair to his messy homework desk, which is usually only used for doodling or writing stories or reading when he wants the activity to feel more official. He flips open his planner to next Wednesday, Martin’s birthday (!!!) and taps his pen impatiently against the page. 

What do birthdays need? Food. Presents. Happiness. The first two might be a bit difficult to pull off, considering his lack of money and cooking skills. Martin deserves a lot more than stale discount biscuits from the grocery. He can get those any day.

But a whole cake is going to be hard. If Nan won’t make one for Jon on his birthday, she most certainly won’t do it for ‘his little friend,’ even if she thinks he’s a good influence. Martin is always very quiet and polite when he sees her, and Nan always gives him a smile in return for his good manners. She doesn’t smile at Jon like that. He tamps down his jealousy and gets back to birthday thoughts.

He thinks he had a purple- or was it pink? - cake on his fifth. It saddens him that he can’t remember. He thinks he’d forget his own mother’s face if he didn’t look at it every morning and night. Memory’s fickle like that, as his Nan likes to say.

Maybe, if he’s very nice and good tonight, Nan will take him with her on the weekly shop and he can convince her to get Martin a cupcake, a good one. One that doesn’t have any carrots in it, even if Martin says they’re alright. He must like them so much because they’re orange, like his hair. Unsurprising. 

He stops wiggling in his chair and straightens his back, as if Nan can see him in his room right now. It’s good to practice, he thinks. If he can sit still all through dinner and not make a mess, she’ll come round. 

Next, an essential part of any birthday: a good present.

His mum never really showered him with gifts, but she always gave him something good, something from the heart. The last present he received - Augustus, an orange cat plushie- still sits on his bed. It’s kind of babyish to sleep with a stuffed animal at his age (or so Marcus declared during recess one day) but Jon doesn’t really care. It helps him sleep.

Unfortunately, Jon can’t buy Martin a stuffed cat. He doesn’t have much money except for what he’s found on the ground and in sofa cushions. And he’s supposed to give that to Nan if he finds it (which he does, mostly).

He could be creative. Make him something. Jon’s not very good at crafts, though. And he doesn’t have a lot of supplies. But he has almost a week to figure something out, minus the times he’s playing with Martin. Well, even then he can stare at him and hope it jogs a good idea.

Lastly, he’s got to make it the happiest, most special day he can. Martin should feel special all the time, but Jon knows how hard that is, especially when you go home and you’re lonely and it seems like you’re the least special person there is. But if Jon is very nice to him and makes the day as fun as possible, maybe he’ll be able to keep that happiness all night, even when Jon leaves. 

That’ll be the hardest part, Jon thinks. He’s not the type of person to make someone happy. Sigh in aggravation, maybe. Roll their eyes. But Martin does neither of those things, so Jon might have a chance. He’ll try and ‘tone it down,’ though. His Jon-ness can be too much at times, and he doesn’t want that to get in the way of what should be Martin’s day.

Everything’s going to be perfect. 

________

And then it’s Saturday, and Jon still doesn’t have a present for Martin. 

He somehow managed to get Nan to agree to the cupcake bit- he’d asked very politely, ate all of his dinner and didn’t spill a thing. Though he thinks it has more to do with her liking Martin. She always acts surprised when she sees him over, like she’s shocked Jon kept a friend for longer than a week. He’s not that bad. But Tuesday she promised to take him to the grocery with her, so it’s fine. One part of his plan is done.

But the present. 

Actually buying something is clearly out of the question- he already exhausted his Nan’s good will in that department. And Jon, for all his usual creativity, is plum out of ideas. He could give him one of his books, but he does that already without prompting. He doesn’t have any good toys, and Martin certainly isn’t getting his best pen, the one that glides real smoothly on the page.

“Are you alright?”

He’s been staring at Martin too long. “Of course,” Jon snaps. “I just like your shirt today, that’s all.”

Martin looks down at his worn t-shirt. It’s not Jon’s favorite, but it’s Martin’s, so he likes it. “Thank you!”

“You’re welcome.”

They’re out in the woods behind Mr. Fletchley’s house to investigate what Jon thought was an ancient ruin but just turned out to be a couple of crumbling cinder blocks. It was an incredibly disappointing find, but Martin wasn’t discouraged.

“We don’t know where they came from, or why someone dumped them here,” he reasoned, a hand on Jon’s shoulder. “What if they were stolen? What if they’re part of a...a crime, or something?”

Jon doesn’t know what crime would need a cinder block, but he intends to find out. They’ve been walking down the relatively short path (it’s not so much woods as it is a cluster of trees) and haven’t seen anything suspicious, besides a few empty wrappers and a particularly sharp stick that Jon’s been whacking against the ground. He thinks it could’ve been used as a weapon.

“What are you going to do when you’re eight?” he asks, nudging Martin in the side. He hasn’t mentioned his birthday since the first time, so he’ll be in for a real treat come Wednesday. Jon just hopes he can think of something good in time.

“Mm, I don’t know.” Martin slows down to a mosey, and Jon tries to match his strides no matter how much he wants to jump ahead. Martin’s a real ‘slow down and sniff the flowers’ type of guy. Jon’s more of a ‘run ahead and accidentally trample them’ type. “Probably the same as I’m doing now. It’s not like it’s an important age. I can’t drive or anything like that.”

“It’s a very important age!” Jon insists, though he doesn’t have much to back that up. He’s mostly just excited because it’s Martin’s very first birthday with him. “You should look forward to something.”

“I dunno, I don’t want anything to change,” Martin says, his face going a little red as he stares at the ground. “I’d just like to spend more time with you. Have fun. That kind of stuff.”

Jon blinks. “We do that now, though.”

“Yeah. It’s the best.” Martin gives him a toothy grin, the kind that Jon puts away and thinks about later when he’s at dinner with Nan or getting ready in the morning. People don’t smile at him like that, only Martin. He does it all the time when Jon tells him a good joke, or shares his food, or passes him a particularly funny doodle.

And now Jon’s got the perfect idea for a present.

part 2

[fatefulfaerie]

Mortality

Zelink Week 2021 prompt #7/7 @zelinkweek2021

Word Count: 3,684

Incarnation: Breath of the Wild 2 (pre)

Additional Prompts Followed: Forsaken Fates, Lost Eternities

Inspired by this art by @morniae

A big thank you to @braidy-maidy and @linktheacehero for beta-ing!!

He wasn’t expecting a fairytale reunion as his horse trotted slowly, arriving at the Forgotten Temple with next to no fanfare. All sorts of geniuses from every race of Hyrule had gathered to study this place, to pull it from its lost state and unearth its secrets, to discover the reason behind its eternity and maybe even why its fate was to be forsaken and forgotten to all of history.

Link left his horse with the many others that were being cared for on the left side of the canyon and began to navigate the ruckus on foot. It seemed crowds of scientists and historians alike were out here securing their tents, making food, and languishing in a well-deserved rest. Link felt as if he stuck out like a sore thumb with his small brain, but no one paid him any mind, not even her.

In fact, she was nowhere to be found.

Perhaps he was expecting some fairytale reunion as he peered his head around every Sheikah, Goron, Rito, Zora, and Hylian in sight. He didn’t care that there was no fanfare, in fact, that may have made it even harder to spot her if it were a big deal that the hero of Hyrule had arrived. Thank Hylia these ruins were more interesting, that no crowd had congealed into a true tidal wave of obstacles. He missed her dearly, after all, no matter how short a time two weeks was in comparison to a hundred years.

He made his way all the way to the shrine in the back when he finally saw her. Zelda smiled when she spotted him and bounded over, clutching the Sheikah Slate.

“Thank the goddesses you’re here,” she said, pecking his cheek. “They haven’t made anything good for dinner in days.”

She walked right past him. Link’s mouth popped open as she practically flew to another inscription of the ruins being studied. Purah, following close behind Zelda, approached Link as he looked over.

“Two weeks she hasn’t seen me and I get a colder welcome than ten thousand year old ruins.”

Purah clicked her tongue and began to cross past Link.

“Sounds like you better get cooking.”

And so he didn’t see his blur of a girlfriend until dinner, when he was serving a ladle-full of meat stew to everyone who passed by with a bowl, salty chunks of meat and sweet carrots swimming in a broth that radiated a scrumptious scent for at least a mile.

The last person he served came up wearing a forehead beaded with sweat and sticky blonde hair from a hard-days work. As she approached, she lightly hit the empty wooden bowl against her hand, and pursed her lips taut with eyes almost apologetic. Her steps shuffled in the sand.

“Look who it is,” Link said before she could muster an apology. He looked more amused than upset, anyway. Zelda sat on her heels in front of the cooking pot and handed him her bowl.

“Sorry,” she said, “it was just a busy day. We think we’re close to finding--”

Link and Zelda’s eyes met. They both knew what she was going to say. The entrance to the caves. The hidden reason why this expedition was such an extensive operation. Only Purah and Impa knew the true reason, after all. Everyone else was just here for research. Bless their hearts.

They knew they needed to find it, but not finding it meant more of an excuse to not go down there.

Yet.

To not let go of the illusion of peace.

Yet.

To not face their mortality once again.

Not yet.

Link looked down to pour soup in her bowl. With everyone else fed--and Zelda more than likely went to the back of the line on purpose so that she would be the last one to eat--Link poured himself a bowl as well. They soon sat down in front of Zelda’s tent.

“When are Impa and Paya arriving?” Link asked.

“Tonight,” Zelda replied, but she swallowed hard, regretting taking another spoonful with a “mm”. 

“Oh my gosh I almost forgot!” she said enthusiastically. “You should have seen it, Link. The reunion between Purah and Robbie? They just marched up to each other, both short, old, and wrinkled, said each other’s names and walked off. It’s hard to believe they used to be lovers.”

Link choked on his stew.

“What?”

“Did I not...mention that?”

Link was still coughing, eyes tearing up.

“No?” He croaked, before coughing a couple more times. “You’d think I would remember something like that.”

“Believe me I wish I didn’t,” she said, before changing the subject. “Oh yeah, how did the meeting go?”

“Horrible,” Link said between spoonfuls.

“What do you mean?” Zelda inquired, slightly disappointed. She had hoped diplomacy would work.

“If I had known that Kohga had an eight year-old hiding somewhere in that hideout, I never would have attacked him,” Link started. “Apparently we needed him to keep his son in check. The kid is so hell-bent on revenge that he didn’t even read the treaty. He’s determined to hunt us down until the end of our days. Even his guards think he’s taking it a bit far. I could see it in their faces when Sooga was going on and on about his forces being strong and ready to fight. Those poor men and women are tired.”

“I thought the Yiga wore masks?”

Link shook his head.

“Not anymore,” he replied. “Sooga wants them to be proud of themselves, whatever that means. Goddesses, that whole meeting was like getting a child to eat their vegetables. I’m pretty sure Riju was about to slap him at the end, the little runt recycling the dogmas of the Yiga that are ten thousand years old now. Even when I ask him why he said such things about Hylians, he doesn’t give a straight answer. He knows less about history than I do and I had amnesia. He’s just been conditioned, raised to hate.”

“That’s unfortunate, but not hopeless,” Zelda said. “I’m sure Riju and the rest of the Gerudo will be able to work it out if the entirety of the clan no longer backs him. Is there any danger until then?”

Link shook his head and swallowed his current spoonful.

“Not yet,” he said once he could. “The only reason they haven’t attacked here is because he wants to find the entrance of the caves as much as we do. He didn’t say it outright, but he’s waiting for us to do it for him.”

“That’s not frightening at all,” she said sarcastically. “We’ll have to increase security when we do eventually go down there, make sure he doesn’t follow us.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it, Zelda,” Link said. “He’s only eight years old, and he’s pretty short and lean.”

Zelda smiled as she sipped her soup.

“I remember a little eight year old like that who could best adult knights,” she said with a smirk. “People say he saved Hyrule.”

“Really?”

“Never grew an inch after eight years old though.”

Link scoffed.

“I can and will pour the rest of this stew over your head,” he said as he held it up. Zelda laughed, but put her arms out in defense.

“Don’t you dare!” She exclaimed. She stood up and began to back away “I’m a princess!”

“Not anymore,” Link said, forgetting about the soup and tackling her. They wrestled playfully, rolling down the rocky slope and laughing joyfully until they stopped suddenly in a gulch, Zelda hovering over Link and sharing with him panting breaths.

“I win,” she said.

“By chance,” Link argued. He brought a hand up and lightly coaxed her head to lower. It, however, did not take much effort, as Zelda more than willingly met his lips to his, exploring his mouth and enjoying the sensation. She felt her cheeks warm. Kissing was all they had ever done, so being flush to him was frankly exhilarating, but she didn’t mind it in the slightest.

They both heard the reigns of horses, the clatter of a covered wagon, the jingle of Kakariko-style bells, but it blended too much into the rest of the ruckus for them to think anything of it.

“Paya, you brought us to the wrong place,” Impa said. “I wanted to go to the research expedition, not a mating ritual exhibition.”

Zelda pushed herself off Link and attempted to fix her hair, composing herself as best she could. Link stood up, but he let his messy hair be.

“H-hey Impa,” Zelda said, walking towards her oldest friend. Despite her feeble frame and short stature, Impa hopped off the wagon like a child. “How was the trip?”

“Long,” Impa said, bruskly.

“She’s a bit cranky,” Paya explained as she stepped off and started to untie the two brown horses from the wagon. “Where do these go?”

“Over there,” Link said, pointing over to the mini-stable on the left of the canyon. “And your tent is the one next to ours. If you’re hungry, there’s probably some stew left.”

“Please,” Impa said, allowing the young man to lead the way to the appropriate cooking pot. She even let him help her walk when the terrain wasn’t the smoothest.

They had left Zelda alone, but it gave her the opportunity to help Paya with unloading the wagon, and to catch up with one of her newer friends before they all turned in for the night.

Zelda was surprised to find Paya as reserved as she was when they first met, but after a bit of grilling she admitted to Zelda that Impa had told her of their true purpose here, that sealing Calamity Ganon may not have been an ending they could trust. Her red eyes were sad and apologetic for learning the secret but Zelda wouldn’t have it, insisting to Paya that it was okay, that it won’t be a secret for long, and that Hyrule was going to be okay.

That last one was a lie Zelda thought about well into the night.

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

“Zelda.”

He opened his eyes to the dark tent, the edge where tan cloth met a small patch of dry grass.

Link couldn’t believe a whisper was what woke him up. Still half awake and already turned away from the center flap of the tent, he kept his eyes closed, hoping he could doze off again.

“Zelda, wake up.”

Someone gently shook Zelda’s foot, and Link guessed the voice belonged to Paya.

Link felt Zelda’s arms slide away from holding him and he tried to slow his breaths. They both would feel so guilty for waking him.

“What is it?” Zelda asked, the rustling that followed suggesting that she got out of the tent. “Should I wake up Link?”

Paya must have shaken her head, or said something to suggest that it wouldn’t be necessary, because that was the last Link heard of the conversation.

He inwardly wrestled with the decision to get up anyway since he was, in fact, awake, but his comfort insisted otherwise and he drifted off before he made up his mind.

“Link.”

The sunlight was bright, even through the dulled filter of the canvas tent.

He felt Zelda’s hand on his shoulder, and he rolled over at the gentle prompt. Link found her green eyes.

“We found it,” she said. “An entrance to the caves.”

Link closed one eye and scrunched up his face. Zelda knew he did that when he was both tired and confused but with his messy bedhead she saw it as adorable.

Link moved his arm to the other, pinching his own skin somewhere around the wrist and, once he felt pain, his entire body sighed exasperated. He faced the top of the tent and closed his eyes far too tight to go back to sleep.

He opened the blue gems one at a time and took a deep breath.

“I assume we are leaving as soon as possible?”

Zelda nodded.

Link didn’t say another word when he got up and started getting ready, almost ignoring Zelda and how she sat on her heels in her own silent and undetectable bout of sadness. He even left her there in the tent but Zelda let him have his space, let him breathe his last breaths in this wild, fresh air, let him hear the birds and see the sun before she dragged him down to hell, back down to war, back down to fear and panic and worry and trauma and everything he had worked so hard to heal from.

It wasn’t until they were several steps into the caves that his stoicism really started to wear at her. One statement and all of him was left in the tent. He just…walked, looking forward, not saying a word. Zelda hated it as much as she did a hundred years ago. She tried to remember that he wasn’t really mad at her back then, so he couldn’t be mad at her now…

Right?

She looked over at his profile again.

Right?

“Link?”

The hooves of the large, blue ox behind them clapped along.

“I, uh…” she began when he gave no response. “I’m sorry about all this.”

“It’s not your fault,” Link said quickly and briskly.

Zelda’s lips parted. Her pacing slowed to a halt. If she hadn’t stopped pulling the ox along, it would have rammed into her.

Link looked over his shoulder when he realized he was the only one moving, turning around completely to see Zelda with a slightly furrowed brow.

“Why don’t I believe you?” Zelda asked.

He decided to look elsewhere as he hugged his arms close, the stone ground, the cavernous chasm above them, the rocky wall, anywhere but Zelda.

“I’m not mad at you, I...” he said quietly, “I’m just feeling a little off, okay?” He said quietly. “I had trouble breathing when I left the tent this morning.”

Zelda’s expression softened. She closed the distance between them and attempted to comfort him with a hand on his shoulder.

“You could have told me that,” Zelda said. “I’m nervous too. We have a right to be. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Yet Link still refused to look up.

“I almost collapsed, I felt so weak,” Link said. “The dread, the fear of facing it all again, the thought of losing you…it gathered, I felt it here.”

He placed a hand on his chest and he started to pant. His fingers began to clutch at the brown leather, the blue cloth and he stumbled to his knees.

“Link!” Zelda exclaimed as she grabbed him under his forearms, kneeling down with him. His breaths were shaky and fast, and he stared down at the ground.

“Link,” she repeated. “Link.”

The next sound from Link was the combination of a spurt of fresh paint and a croaking frog, warm vomit spilling from his mouth in smelly chunks of beef and carrots. It was instinct that Zelda stood up with a yelp and backed away with arms floating up, the gathering of vomit ending up mere inches from her toes. If she had stayed where she was, her pants would have been covered in Link’s partly-digested dinner.

“Oh gosh, Link,” she said once she got over the shock, rushing to his side and drawing circles on his back. He didn’t react though, only staring at the mess on the floor with his weight on his hands.

Zelda’s eyes stung with tears as she ran her fingers through his hair, some drops even lopping onto Link’s mess. She held him as best she could while still giving him the distance he needed, but that could never stop her from the occasional kiss on the side of his head and whispering sweet assurances of love into his right ear.

After a couple fruitless lurches of his back and neck, Link hurled a second time. As ironic as it was for her to hope for anything from the goddess anymore, Zelda prayed it was the last one.

“Zelda,” he said between heavy breaths. It was apparent his lungs were exhausted. He coughed a couple times.

Link looked into Zelda’s eyes, finally, although they veered towards horror, the green marbles conveying desperation for how to relieve this poor young man.

“I know,” she said, trying to smile. She wiped away Link’s tears. “I know.”

Wary of the mess near them, she brought him into a proper embrace, rocking him back and forth and holding him in such a way that she was sure he knew he was held. She wasn’t sure how secure he could feel on the cusp of embarking into danger, but she would try her best.

“I’m scared, too,” she said. “Down here is an untouched wild that was left alone for a reason we know not of. Nothing is scarier than the unknown, especially for us who have been hurt again and again by the unknown. Hope has betrayed us too much for us to readily depend on it, but we have to try.”

Link looked up, tilting his head to see her.

“How?”

Zelda lips parted. She stammered speechlessly. He seemed so hurt by her hopefulness.

“Together,” she said, attempting to fake her confidence. There was still a small question mark at the end of her statement that she didn’t mean to expose.

Link stood up and faced away from her. He crossed his arms.

“Do you know how long a version of Ganon has been terrorizing Hyrule?” Link asked. “How long he has been reincarnating?”

Zelda, who was now sitting on her heels, shook her head.

“No,” she said honestly.

“Do you know what makes us any different from the people who tried to stop him in the past?”

“No,” Zelda repeated, again, honestly.

Link nodded.

“I don’t either,” he said. “And that scares me.”

Zelda stood up.

“Link, we—”

“I can’t lose you!” Link exclaimed, turning around quickly. “I ignored it, okay?! All this time when you talked about there being caves, there being another journey, I ignored it! I put it off! I casted it aside! I focused on us.” His voice broke. “I thought that was all there would ever be…”

He placed his hands on his hips and collected himself.

“This morning it all collapsed,” he said. “Right before my eyes. Everything I could have ever hoped for.”

Zelda scoffed.

“Do you think I was happy to have found these caves?” Zelda asked rhetorically. “To have been woken up in the middle of night and told that this place I saw in my nightmares was indeed real, that I was to investigate a threat that hasn’t been faced in ten thousand years of Hyrule birthing warriors more capable than you? I had to keep a straight face, but Link, I wanted to scream so loud that even Lurelin could hear me!”

Zelda released her residual anger at the world in heavy pants of her breaths. Once she sighed herself calm, she snagged a small rag from the heaps of resources strapped to the patient and by now likely deaf ox.

Zelda stepped forward and washed Link’s stunned face clean of vomit.

“Then I thought of our future,” Zelda continued. “I was angry because coming down here means jeopardizing that. I scorned myself for how selfish that was. I told myself that this wasn’t about me and you, that this is about a peaceful Hyrule. That helped but...do you want to know what really helped?”

“What?” Link asked.

“The people of Hyrule want to live in peace, and so do we. They want to raise families without worrying about another Calamity.” Zelda smiled. “I think we do too, when the time comes.” She perished the thought. That was a long while down the road. “But this isn’t just about a peaceful Hyrule, it’s about our peaceful Hyrule. I’m no longer a princess, distanced from others by a pedestal, and you are no longer a knight, distanced from others by a sword. We actually feel like a part of Hyrule this time. Of course we loved the Champions, my father, but we aren’t acting as Hyrule’s weapons anymore. We don’t feel like cards to be discarded or pawns to be knocked off in a game of chess. All of this is voluntary. We can’t blame a kingdom or a calamity this time. The possibility of losing each other is already giving us stomach-churning guilt because no one told us to go down here. We came down here because we want to preserve peace for all of us, preserve peace beyond even our lifetimes.”

Zelda placed a hand on Link’s cheek.

“And we will,” she said. “We have to believe we will. If we don’t think we’ll get out of here, then there is no chance we will. This is our first on-our-own decision and it’s a damn risky one. We can always turn back if--”

“No,” Link interrupted.

Link’s hand went to hers and his thumb stroked her soft fingers.

“No,” he repeated, however shakily. “We are going through with this. I just need to process it, that’s all. I didn’t think we would actually be doing this. I think we both held on to the fantasy of peace. I definitely held on to it too much.”

He finally let her touch soothe him.

“I’m here,” Zelda assured him softly. “I’m right here.”

She took his hand and placed it on her heart, the rhythm of which pulsated through his own veins.

“I’m not supposed to be alive right now,” Zelda said. “I should have died an eighty year old queen about thirty years ago but here we both are, young and spry. These caves are filled with dangers we don’t know, but with my heart in your hands and your heart in mine I know we can dare to do the impossible again.”

Link met his forehead to hers and closed his eyes. He tried to breathe the way she was, to feel her calm and to adapt it into his own body.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m ready.”

[twdmusicboxmystery]

11x02: Acheron, Part 2 - Analysis

Okay, let’s talk 11x02. And 11x01. Because it’s a two-part episode, it’s important to consider them together. I have a LOT to say about what’s going on in these two episodes, so I’ll have plenty to post all week. Let’s dive in!

***As always, spoilers abound below for TWD 11x02. Don’t read until you’ve watched! You’ve been warned!***

Maggie

The first thing we see is a point of view from under the train car. The instant I saw that, I knew how things would go. I never thought Maggie would die (if nothing else, there are scenes with her in the trailer we haven’t seen yet) but I was curious as to how she would survive. When I saw this POV, I knew she’d end up crawling under the train. Just as Glenn crawled under the dumpster. Massive parallels to Glenn. Which by extension, massive parallels to Beth. Major resurrection theme.

It's also important that when she reappears, she comes from underneath the car. Obviously, that’s logical given that she crawled underneath the car, but they make a point of asking if the pounding is coming from the roof. Gabriel says no and then they open the bottom hatch for her. Her coming up from the ground like that is a visual representation of a resurrection.

So we see Gabriel, Negan and the others enter the train car. The spatial details here are important, and I had to watch the episode twice to get them all straight. It’s a little confusing the first time. So, the group jumps down into the train car through a hatch in the roof because they couldn’t get the door open in the last episode. The thing is, if you watch closely, you come to realize they’re not in the train car on the end. They must have walked along the roof for two or three cars before finding a hatch that let them in.

So, when Gauge shows up, he comes behind them, and that confused me because I was thinking they came from that direction. And they did, but they entered through the roof, not the door. Anyway, they can’t get the door open. So honestly, even if they’d tried harder, I’m not sure they could have saved him.

This scene accomplished a lot of things, character-wise, that we need to touch on. It’s important to note that Gauge’s death happened due to his own choices. Does that mean he “deserved” to die or that they shouldn’t have tried to save him if they could have? Of course not. No on both counts. But that doesn’t change the fact that his choices sealed his fate.

It's especially interesting that he called Maggie a Liar. Not only is that a throwback to the Governor, but it’s a particular type of mentality they’re showing here. Even the fact that he didn’t shut the door behind him is really interesting. My first thought was to be annoyed with him. Why WOULDN’T you shut the door. You live in this world. You know better. But it’s all ego. He can’t imagine something bad will happen. He just assumes if it does, someone will save him.

But the most telling thing was how angry he got before saying Liar. It just shows very much how he approaches life. When he messes up, he doesn’t feel bad, and accept that it was his fault, and try to learn from it. No, instead he gets pissed and blames everyone but himself and his own actions.

If this had been Daryl or Gabriel or Alden or any of our other heroes, they would have recognized that opening the door would have gotten their friends and family killed and would have sacrificed themselves. Especially if they realized they’d screwed up. But Gauge became angry and defiant, even killing himself.

Anyway, I’m rambling. This really has nothing to do with Beth or TD other than perhaps being a future template for something. But I thought it was a really fascinating character sketch.

The thing is, this isn’t really a matter of Gauge being wrong and everyone else being right.

Maggie is…not doing so well either. As I told my fellow theorists, Paola Lazaro said in TTD last week that Maggie was kind of off the rails. I think she said that a little prematurely, because we really didn’t understand Maggie’s state of mind just by watching 10x17 and 11x01.

It's not until she tells that messed up story about the house she found and the people in it that we understand that her state of mind really isn’t at its healthiest. Even saying she wanted to kill Negan before is…understandable given their past. But it makes more sense now why Negan is so nervous. He’s sensing her state of mind that her moral conscience isn’t as strong as it once was, so of course he’s fearful for his life.

I don’t know where they’re going with this Maggie story line, but I have a feeling this attitude of hers will cause conflict down the road. Several of my fellow theorists believe it will cause a rift between her and Daryl. And we can see that somewhat through Alden. At first, he was very much defending Maggie, especially against Negan. He has a lot of loyalty to her. But he didn’t like her abandoning Gauge, and you can see his loyalties starting to waver.

At the very least, what she said about not feeling anything about it is the opposite of what Beth always stood for. Daryl was trying hard not to feel things during Still, in the wake of the prison going down. She made him feel things because that’s the only way a person is truly living, rather than just surviving. Now Maggie is in that state of mind.

And I’m gonna argue that makes it a prime time for Beth to return to help her. But of course I’m completely objective over here. ;D

Maggie’s Story:

Maggie’s story was definitely dark and horrible, but interesting to analyze. I’m assuming there was cannibalism going on there. That’s why the missing limbs. The men in the house were eating the female prisoners. No only a callback to Terminus, but remember that Bob’s leg was taken for food, so I’m sure that’s what we’re supposed to infer here.

She talked about no eyes, no tongue, no limbs, vocal cords ripped out. So definitely the see no evil, speak no evil themes. With the limbs, it’s also a matter of not being able to escape or save themselves.

In terms of the plot, I do have one question about this that I think may be significant. Maggie first talks about three deformed people (she says, “I wouldn’t call them men”) coming toward her. She kills them, and only after that hears the noise from the attic.

My question is, why were they deformed? If they’re “men,” then they must be at least Maggie’s age, if not older, which means they’ve been around since before the apocalypse began. Even eating human flesh doesn’t cause one to become deformed, so why the deformities? I have no idea, but I wondered if there is a radiation theme going on here. Something they’re hinting at, but not saying. Just thought that was intriguing.

After that, things go sideways and everyone almost dies until Daryl arrives to save the day. So, let’s skip to his story.

Daryl:

We first see him bust through a wall with Dog. So, dog took off in the last episode, but the first time we see Daryl, he’s already found Dog again. At least, the first time. This is where he sees the murals on the wall, the walker with the handcuff and the suitcase of money, etc. I already talked about most of that in great detail HERE, so I won’t rehash it, though it’s very important.

One thing I will say about the mural is that thematically, it’s a match to Still. So, in the golf club, we had lots of rich people who clearly hid there when the world first went bad. And I don’t remember this particularly, but several of my fellow theorists have told me they remember the TTD after Still and that the writers talked about how the golf club was a statement about the class system. You have these very rich people, but their wealth couldn’t save them. Death, walkers, the apocalypse…none of these things discriminate based on wealth or position.

On the wall, we see people with crowns standing at the top, but below, they are homeless, and one of them is being attacked and torn apart. Meanwhile, Daryl sees a line of text that says, “it comes for us all,” probably meaning death.

Well, guess what? Angela Kang, in talking about the murals, said that this, too, was a statement about the class system. So thematically, this is meant to be a parallel to Still.

It’s just interesting to contemplate because if you think about it, most of our heros—Rick, Daryl, the Greene family, etc—weren’t at all wealthy. Rick was humble and well-grounded. Hershel worked hard his whole life and never had any glory or fanfare. And then there’s Daryl, who was “nothing. No one.” They all survived.

So of course it’s a socioeconomic statement, but it’s also one about mindset. It takes not only grit to survive this world, but a certain amount of humility. Ego always gets you killed eventually, as it did with Gauge.

I’ll also mention that I thought the guy with the crown who was being torn apart was being set upon by walkers, but AK says they’re specifically not walkers. They’re people.

So, it’s not a coincidence that we see this juxtaposed with the Gauge situation. His ego gets him killed and we literally see him being torn apart because of it.

Moving on.

Daryl finds a bag with a $100 bill with a letter written on it. This is a massive TD clue from start to finish. 100 is an important number. The hundred dollar bill features Benjamin Franklin on the front and Independence Hall on the back. Look either of those up and you’ll find lots of fun parallels we could point to. I won’t go into all that today except to say it’s definitely part of the Revolution theme.

This is what’s written on the bill Daryl finds:

“Dear Dad, you always said if you don’t come back in a week to move on. Mom didn’t listen and went looking. It’s been three weeks, so we’re going next. I’ll watch Jesse and turn on the radio every day at 10. See you both soon. Love Tom and Jesse.”

He also finds a picture of two kids. So, the “three weeks” jumps out because of Rick’s line in 5x10, “it’s been three weeks since Atlanta.” It’s also about missing family members, going searching for them, etc. Possibly important that the mom is also missing. I can’t help but think of the song from Still. “Our mother has been absent, every since we founded Rome…”

There is a 10 in there, which is an important number. The turning the radio on every day is both the radio/airwaves theme (also a line from the song) but a callback to Rick and Morgan and their walkie talkies. So, really interesting symbols here.

The two kids immediately reminded me of Noah’s twin brothers. I don’t think these two are supposed to be twins. I’m assuming the brother is older. But still obviously siblings. And it hearkens back to the last episode Beth was technically in. Which also had a lot of the CRM/Revolution theme in it. (X, X).

AK says this family probably didn’t make it, so I’m not expecting these kids to show up in the narrative. But it’s also important to note that the little girl is carrying the toy rabbit Maggie found earlier. So the rabbit also ties into all this symbolism. (P.S. I didn’t get to my rabbit post last week. I planned on it, but time got away from me. I should get it posted later this week.)

So, this is massive in terms of TD symbolism. I’ll talk about it fits into the bigger narrative in a minute.

Then Daryl kills the sleeping bag walker. I wasn’t sure the significance of this at first, but I think it ties to the tents and sleeping bags we saw in Atlanta in 5x06, Consumed. Daryl and Carol passed them while looking for Beth. So, this just shows us that this is tied to her storyline and Daryl searching for her.

You could also argue that the walker was “hidden” at first, and it’s significant that Dog found it/realized it was there before Daryl did. 

The other thing is that as he’s looking at the sleeping bag walker, there’s a random shoe on the ground next to it. Missing Shoe/Foot theory, which is also indicative of Beth. 

They hear another roaring sound and Dog takes off, running into the dark tunnel.

Here’s the thing. I think most people will assume the roar he heard was just more air being forced through the tunnels by the storm, as Alden explained it in ep 1. But I always watch with the subtitles on and I noticed at this part, the subtitles said, “Man Roaring.” So they actually did hear someone screaming. And that’s probably why Dog ran toward it.

After watching it again, I realized it’s probably supposed to be Roy. He’s the white-haired guy, played by C. Thomas Howell, who Daryl finds wounded after he emerges from the Tunnel. I think whatever happened to him when he went topside but then got attacked by walkers is what Dog heard and went running toward.

Maybe not terribly significant in the plot, but it’s important symbolically. Because once again we have something Daryl hears from a distance but doesn’t see. Dog (a proxy for Beth) runs toward it, and Daryl follows. When he does, he find someone who had previously separated from the group. They’re hurt, but alive. See the parallels?

I will say the Roy situation confuses me just a little. He’s clearly hurt, and when Daryl tries to bandage him, he refuses, saying, “just tell my kids I didn’t die a coward.” But then later he’s with the group, all bandaged up, and seems to be okay. (He dies when they reach the Reapers by taking an arrow to the head, so he still dies overall.) But it’s just weird that it seemed he would die, then seemed he was fine again.

It may well be something that foreshadows a future situation, and that’s why it’s not making tons of sense right now. Only time will tell.

Anyway, I kind of glossed over Daryl crawling through the dark tunnel. I don’t have much else to say about it except that it’s a SUPER potent symbol for Beth’s arc and very important that he emerges on the other side and finds this person. Annnd then goes to save TF. (Dark Tunnel Symbolism).

So, he hears the gunshots and finds the train they’re on. He comes up behind the walkers attacking them from the front, kills them, moves the bench blocking the door, and lets everyone through. Then he uses a grenade to blow up all the walkers. (Ew.)

After that they all get out of the tunnels and go topside. The next scene is also super important. We see the stars above. That’s partly to show that the storm has passed now, but also constellations = Sirius.

Maggie asks what he has and he tells her about it. There is one weird moment in this scene. When she tells them about the supply depot she wants to stop at, she says Georgie (from S8) set it up for emergencies, for people on the outside to use. When it says this, the camera focuses on Daryl for a LONG moment, and he looks almost sad. I’m not sure what they’re trying to tell us there.

Anyway, they all head out. Unfortunately, when they reach the right neighborhood, the Reapers are there to meet/kill them. And Roy is the first to go.

So, a couple of things here. I’ll probably do a details post because I’m leaving out MOST of the background details throughout the episode, and there are a lot of them. Lots of details to be gleaned in this scene.

But the second time I watched it, I was struck by the people hanging upside down. Obviously a grim sight, but it occurred to me that these people hanging this way look a LOT like the deer diagrams from Scars. Let me show you some pictures:

Top pick is 11x02. Middle and bottom one are from Scars.

See what I mean? So, chances are something about Scars foreshadowed the Reapers, which is interesting. They clearly see human beings in a certain way (as animals to be strung up and…perhaps eaten?) And that makes me think that what Maggie found in that house may tie into the Reapers as well. Just kind of interesting foreshadows of coming plots.

Eugene:

Let’s talk Eugene and then I’ll shut up for today. Eugene’s stuff was very intriguing. First thing you need to know. And understand, I didn’t know this. @wdway​ pointed it out. Some months ago, the actress cast as “Stephanie” was announced. This is her:

And that’s clearly not the woman who steps into the train car at the end. Which means this isn’t really Stephanie. She’s a decoy. In fact, the actress from this episode is billed on IMDb as “woman 2,” not as “Stephanie.”

Knowing that, if you go back and re-watch the parts with Eugene’s group, they mean something very different.

On the surface, it seems that Zeke, Yumiko and Princess are taken away in a sinister fashion. Then Eugene melts down and tells his story. (Note: while he focuses on his feelings for Stephanie and I think most of that is true, he still says he lied both to her and to his friends about being from a large settlement. So, he’s still keeping large chunks of the truth from them.)

Again, on the surface it seems that they accept his explanation and just decide to allow them all in. All the stuff with the other three is just a misunderstanding.

But if “Stephanie” is a decoy, that can’t possibly be the case. I think Zeke and the others told Eugene the truth as they know it, but they’re all still being manipulated.

After Princess left to pee, the guy told Eugene no one was in the room and acted like he had no idea who Princess was. They were definitely using psychological torture on him, trying to break him.

I think they know very well that Eugene's group is still lying about their settlement, and they're using a decoy "Stephanie" to find out the truth.

My point is that it goes back to the hallucination, making-someone-think-they're-crazy theme. It will be really interesting to see how this unfolds, because there's all kinds of psychological shenanigans going on here.

@galadrieljones​ made a really interesting connection some time ago. She noticed that back in 10x18, at Leah’s cabin, there is a metal, heart-shaped chair. The same chairs show up in the Commonwealth’s sales video from the trailer. So there’s some kind of link between Leah, Daryl’s memory of her, and the Commonwealth. We don’t know what it is yet, but all of this gives credence to the idea that she is either an outright hallucination, or Daryl is just remembering things wrong.

It also might mean that the Reapers are connected to the Commonwealth in some way. We don’t really know yet, but I’m having tons of fun trying to figure it out.

I want to touch briefly on the train car theme. Once again, there’s a parallel in both story lines (Terminus, and this one at the Commonwealth). Daryl’s group is in train cars this episode. And while Eugene’s group has been at a different compound, they started in the train yard and end in it here. But what I noticed is that Eugene enters the train car at the end, which is furnished inside, and finds his friends there. They all have a happy reunion.

It made me think of the fact that when Rick, Daryl, Michonne, and Carl enter the train cars at Terminus, there is also a family reunion. What happened beyond that was not good or easy. Clearly, Terminus was not a good place. Many of them almost died at the trough and they had to fight their way out through a walker blood bath.

I’m just saying that, while it obviously won’t play out exactly the same way, something similar is probably waiting for Eugene’s group outside that train car. Not good.

Acheron Overall:

Okay, let’s get to the big cheese, here. The overall narrative. The template.

These two episodes are called Acheron part 1 and part 2. So here’s the skinny:

Acheron = Underworld. Daryl’s group going into the subway tunnels (dark, underground) is what constitutes Acheron and why the episodes are called that. That’s why, at the end of this episode, they emerge from the tunnels onto the surface (i.e. the living world).

Given all the death, cemetery, and dark tunnel symbolism around Beth, given that she ventured into the land of the dead by being shot, maybe clinically dying for a time, and being thought dead for so long, what this tells me is that everything that happens in these tunnels is a foreshadow and template for what will happen this season.

I maintain that Dog = Beth and we will soon see something where Daryl hears something (not necessarily her; it was a man screaming so I still think it will be Rick he hears word of) and goes chasing after it. While searching for it, he stumbles across Beth. Then the two of them (both Dog and Daryl returned to the train car) go back in time to save TF from something.

This is most likely why the Roy thing is weird. In a super understated way, he represents Rick in the template. Daryl will find him, but only after he finds Beth. Even consider what Roy says. He says, “tell my kids I didn’t die a coward.” And that’s all well and good, but did we even know Roy had kids? No. Have we met them? No. But who has kids that Daryl IS concerned with? That would be Rick.

So I’m thinking that maybe when Daryl finds Rick, Rick will think he’s dying for some reason, and that’s why the dialogue here. But he won’t, which is why we see Roy with the group later.

And no, I’m not thinking that Roy dying via the Reapers will extend to Rick. It’s more like what they’ve done with countless characters that have been Beth proxies. Eventually, they kill them off. He’s a minor character they were using as a proxy, and when they are done with him in the narrative, he becomes walker chow. Or, in this case, Reaper fodder.

Anyway, I think everything will end up being a foreshadow for something. Maggie and Negan. The Gauge situation. All of it. I’ll try to keep coming back to this as the story progresses to show what everything foreshadows. I’ll stop there for today.

[lilyofthesword-writes]

Impossibly Redeemable - 21 - Tape Car

Summary: Shortly after faking  his death in Svartalfheim to fool Thor, Loki wakes up to find himself in a  realm that is not the one he “died” in. After meeting another person in  a similar predicament, he learns the only way home is through  redemption. But how can he possibly do that? Monsters like him don’t deserve redemption, do they?

Pairing: Loki x F!Reader

Word Count: 2,145

Warnings/Disclaimers: Loki hits a bit of anxiety.

A/N: This one turned into a doozy!

Masterlist

Loki grinned from his perch on top of the car, raven locks whipping furious from the train’s high speed movement. He had every right to feel elated. Once out of the Chrome Car, he had been able to release his seiðr, causing his form the shift with no conscious effort from himself to the Asgardian form he was so attuned with. You and Eva were still by his side without showing even the tiniest inkling of fear. And now? Now he could see the Engine just a single car down. Now Eva could get help to live the life she deserved.

With his harpoon pack, he swung himself back down to the catwalk near where you two were waiting.

“You won’t believe this!” He excitedly bounded up to you.

“Lemme guess, the Engine is only one car away,” you joked with a heavy eye roll.

There had been times where you all theorized there was no front of the train at all. You hadn’t been able to catch sight of it so far. Why would it be here now?

Loki just widened that fox-like grin plastered on his face. He almost laughed when your jaw dropped.

“Wait, seriously?!”

He nodded. “If you so desired, we could use the pack and arrive that much sooner.”

You chewed your bottom lip and watched Eva carefully. Neither of you had enjoyed your last venture soaring through the air despite the safety Loki provided. He could see the cogs turning in little Eva’s head to think this through. She stared at the catwalk looming ahead, her timid nature emerging once again.

“I… Mmm… Just one more car… Maybe?” She looked up between you and Loki.

She was stalling. That much you could both tell. Loki could practically see the thoughts running through her head. They were the same as his.

He tried to tamp down his nervous energy, but his mind was running quicker than the Bifrost. What if the Conductor let her leave immediately? Would she want to? Would she be disappointed if it turned out she had to wait? Or… What if she could not leave?

“Yeah.” Eva’s voice suddenly turned iron. “One more car. Please?”

You both nodded, faces attempting to uphold comforting smiles. None of your trio wanted to even mention what this car could be to all of you.

She stood between you, taking a hand from each of you in hers to pull you across the catwalk and to the door like she was leading the charge. With one final look at each other, you and Loki reached out and turned the handle, because why not be dramatic about it.

The doors opened swiftly, no creaks or squeaks to act as fanfare. It was quiet, and while it was brightly lit, a foggy haze infected the air, preventing even Loki from seeing far ahead. Then, the doors you had just passed through shut silently, warping the fog behind you into a poof that brushed past your feet.

Eva’s grasp disappeared only to be transferred to your clothing like she was trying to melt into you. Switching up tactics, Loki looped an arm around your waist to keep you close and a hand on Eva’s shoulder. Instead of forcing you all to move ahead, the god settled his mind and reached out with his seiðr.

There were people here, but they were under mounds in the floor? Or was it ground? Everything was white in color, yet the floor acted like dirt. And there were strips poking out of each mound. What in the nine realms was that about? There was something else… Well, a lot of something else. Whatever they were had large metal bodies and held little sentience. Loki sent his seiðr out further-

“Hello!”

A cheerful yet heavily modulated voice dropped in front of them accompanied by a cold mask and metallic tendrils to hold it up. The sound snapped Loki out of his trance. He opened his eyes just as you and Eva squeaked in surprise, folding yourselves into him. The god kept his arm locked around you. His other hand, now glowing emerald, shot out in front of him, aimed at the creature.

“Who are y-” Loki tried to demand, but the beast cut him off.

“Oh! Sorry! Forgot to pop this off. Didn’t mean to scare you!”

“Kind of,” came a melancholy voice from inside the mask.

Loki was not about to let his guard down, not even when said mask flipped up to reveal a little white sphere. A black line divided it vertically with two white spheres stacked to be what he guessed were eyes.

“Hello, again!” the happy voice singsonged.

Its “eyes” curved up into an arc. It was… happy? Friendly? What were any of you supposed to make of this? If anything, it only made him engage his seiðr more.

You pulled Eva closer, fitting her in between you and Loki.

“Hi,” you tried to say strongly, the word coming out more like a question than anything.

“Oh, good! You are friendly,” the little ball chattered. “So, I’m One!”

“And I’m One,” came the depressed sounding voice again.

“And we make One-One,” the happy voice finished.

Glad-One, as Loki started to nickname to keep things less confusing, continued on with your names, pointing each of you out until he got to Eva. “… and we don’t seem to remember your name.”

“Or we didn’t know it in the first place,” Sad-One clarified.

Scared, confused, curious - Eva was stuck between emotions, concealing herself further, now almost behind you. Glancing up at Loki questioningly, your face seemed to say it all. Do you reveal her name?

“We should know it though. How long have you been on the train?” Glad-One asked.

Eva just shook her head vehemently, scooting even more behind you.

Sad-One chimed in this time, “Oookay, then…”

“We’ll just skip ahead for now,” Glad-One interrupted. “So, what are you all doing here? This is where you start. It’s not a place to travel to.”

In a moment of silence, Loki pondered what to do next. It doesn’t seem hostile. Then again, it also didn’t seem to understand that the mischievous god was ready to shut it down in an instant. Yet…

“We are looking for the Conductor,” Loki finally answered.

“Oh!” Glad-One exclaimed. “You’re quite lucky, then!”

“Depends on your definition of ‘lucky’,” Sad-One quipped.

“We’re the Conductor!” Some of its tendrils spread out in a “ta-da” motion.

Loki couldn’t sense a lie from the sphere, not that he had much experience with detecting honesty in anything mechanical, but he wasn’t going to dwell on that notion right now.

“Lucky, indeed,” the god almost muttered. “Perhaps you will be able to assist us, then.”

Its tendrils clapped together. “Let’s see what we can do!”

One-One had your company follow it through a labyrinth of ladders and catwalks to a new area where you could actually see all the walls. It called it the “Passenger Preparation” room.

Panels of dark grey metal laced the walls and floors. A large monitor covered the entirety of the front wall, accompanied by a plethora of switches, levers and buttons. The middle of the floor was taken up by multiple lanes of what looked like water each with a queue of… Bodies?

Those were definitely bodies, mostly human with a smattering of other species from across the realms, being tended to by large metal creatures made up of white plating and grey tendrils for appendages. The people were floating down single file to a center stage.

The pit in Loki’s stomach hollowed further as he inspected the scene in more detail. There were filmstrips atop the people’s heads. These were pulled up and viewed when they reached what looked like a scanner. A person’s right hand would be lifted palm up, and the mechanism would produce a green laser that ran across the skin. Could this… Could this be where the numbers come from? Where it all begins?

Continuing their trek did nothing to quell the anxiety threatening to boil over in the trickster’s stomach. It all felt so sterile, devoid of any natural touch. The place definitely lived up to the creepy factor of its name.

One-One brought you all to a stop near the front of the room. Glad-One broke the silence, “So, what seems to be the problem?”

Loki swallowed his snarky retort. Asking the metal being, “What makes you think there is a problem,” would not be the best way to start. He gave a quick squeeze to Eva’s hand that was clinging to his. While she had loosened her grip throughout the journey, her eyes still held apprehension, something he couldn’t blame her for.

Kneeling down next to the little girl, you ran a free hand through her hair. “It’s alright. You can show them,” you murmured to her before you addressed One-One. “It has to do with her numbers.”

“If it’s about getting them down to zero,” Glad-One started.

“We can’t help,” Sad-One finished.

Glad-One made a strange noise, presumably towards its counterpart, and continued. “I’m sure you’ve seen the video. You have to- Oh. Well, this…”

Eva had revealed her palms to One-One, the dull grey of the digits matching the surrounding metal.

“I don’t think we have come across this before,” Glad-One mused.

“We definitely haven’t,” Sad-One deadpanned.

Loki cleared his throat to clarify the situation. “We believe she was conceived by two Passengers whilst on the train.”

One-One’s tendrils stretched out towards Eva’s hands which retracted almost instantly. The sphere that made up One-One popped out of the main mechanics, its peg-like legs scuttling down the metal appendages. Loki almost considered it cute. Almost.

“Can we have a closer look?” Glad-One asked curiously but sweetly.

Eva nodded and held out her palms again.

“Fascinating!”

One-One gently prodded at the numbers on both hands.

“Weird…”

And then they went silent. The three of you exchanged looks. What was this little thing thinking about?

“So, what’s your name?” Glad-One finally piped back up.

“E-Eva…”

“Well, Eva, here’s another question for you. Have your numbers ever changed?”

She nodded quickly, ducking her head down and murmuring, “They always matched Momma and Papa’s…”

“Fascinating!” One-One released her hands and scurried back up to its previous place. “Now, we’re guessing you would like to be able to leave the train at some point like other Passengers.”

Eva hesitated, taking a brief moment to look between you and Loki before giving a tiny, quick bob of her head. A somber smile that matched yours tugged at Loki’s lips as you carded your fingers through the girl’s hair.

“Alright!” Glad-One cheered. “There’s a few things we can try.”

“Don’t know if they’ll work,” Sad-One let slip.

“But! It’s something! It doesn’t hurt to try!”

Loki paced on the sidelines, a whirlwind of thoughts plaguing his mind.

One-One had figured out how to help Eva. Since a Passenger’s numbers were supposed to be on the right hand, the machine used to tattoo their palm could be reversed to remove the unnecessary one. Then came the issue. The machine was unable to give Eva her own digits.

It made some sense. She both was and was not a Passenger. She wasn’t originally meant to be on the train. Yet here she was.

This line of thought gave you an idea. Since, Eva’s numbers had originally been connected to her parents, perhaps they could be rerouted. It was worth a shot.

Loki immediately suggested they try to connect to your markings. While he had adamantly avoided checking his own, he still remembered that yours had lowered significantly. If it all worked out, both you and Eva would be free. She wouldn’t be stuck waiting for who knows how long.

You were currently with Eva at the machine, the green light scanning over your hand to read the signature, where he caught a glimpse of your number.

52

Norns, you were so close. You’d be back where you belong in no time.

The green light shifted to Eva’s palm. It narrowed back down to a laser and began to rapidly trace across her skin. It soon retracted, leaving you and Eva elated. She coiled her arms around your neck with a squeal.

So it had worked. Eva would leave alongside you…

If you noticed the grimness in Loki’s smile, you didn’t show it when you turned to him momentarily with a victorious grin. It wasn’t until One-One arrested your attention that he finally decided to look.

To the god’s surprise, the sleeve didn’t need to be pushed past his wrist far. Maybe his departure wouldn’t be much farther away either.

Tag Lists:

Loki (Impossibly Redeemable): @buckybarnesthehotshot @kaogasm @superheroesandstardust

Loki (General): @nahthanks @lucywrites02 @whatafuckingdumbass @gaitwae

[crusherthedoctor]

Sonic Heroes: Sweet or Shite? - Part 2: CREAM

There are some heroes I like. And there are some heroes I don’t like. But why do I feel about them the way I do? That’s where this comes in.

This is a series in which I go into slightly more detail about my thoughts on the heroes in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, and why I think they either work well, or fall flat (or somewhere in-between). I’ll be giving my stance on their designs, their personalities, and what they had to show for themselves over the course of time. Two things to keep in mind:

1. These reviews will be focusing mainly on game portrayals. Though alternate media will occasionally be mentioned, it’ll be for the sake of adding onto a point if a portrayal is similar enough, or to compare and contrast if a portrayal is different enough.

2. These are just my own personal thoughts. Whether you agree or disagree, feel free to share your own thoughts and opinions! I don’t bite. :>

Anyhow, for today’s installment, it's a vast departure from the mayhem of Silver’s world. A much more down-to-earth character, it's the Chao-approved little girl who only the most Eggman of Eggmen could possibly hold in contempt... Cream the Rabbit.

The Gist: One day, Sonic was off on another advance adventure. Eggman was starting shit again, so Sonic was obligated to cause shit for him. This time though, upon confronting the doctor early on, he noticed there was an unfamiliar hostage on the doctor’s metal-fisted person, in the form of an adorable bunny girl.

This was how she was evicted from Team Sonic Racing.

Sonic may not have recognised her, but that's okay, because he's Sonic, and no Sonic that isn't the Fleetway one discriminates. With his good heart - and more importantly, his skill in breaking apart Eggman's machines like they’re made of tissue paper - he saved the day, and the bunny was eternally grateful. But all was not sorted out, as it seemed that Vanilla, her adoring mother, was still under threat...

No matter. With the help of her little Chao partner named Cheese, she would handle the problem herself.

“How the fuck did this happen?” - Eggman, Sonic Advance 2 (2003)

And... that's about it? I told you this was a far cry from Silver, didn't I? Compared to Sonic's other friends, Cream just kind of showed up without much fanfare. No elaborate backstory, no dramatic plot twists, just a girl wanting to help out.

Well, if it makes this part of the job easier...

The Design: Just like her story (or lack thereof), there isn’t too much to say here. Her design is fairly simple, but it gets the job done.

“We’re going to have so much fun when we turn our enemies into dust and make them feel inadequate, won’t we Cheese? ^__^”

The best Sonic character designs are perfect at blending the right colours together, and Cream is no exception to that rule. The mix of cream (of course) and brown makes for a suitably warm and cozy package, and the further addition of orange and yellow provide a nice contrast to the reds and whites of her older sister figure, Amy. And speaking of Amy, although it might not be completely intentional, I like that Cream’s style of clothing isn’t too far off from that of the pink hedgehog, given their close dynamic.

I know some may take issue with the fact that her ears are technically backwards, but I personally don’t care. It’s cute, it’s fiction, don’t worry about it.

The Personality: Simply put, Cream is a kind, polite, innocent soul who would feel immensely guilty in the event of accidentally hurting a fly.

“I was not programmed to d’aww...”

This is in large part because she’s a devoted pacifist by nature, meaning she would only be willing to annihilate the absolute shit out of you if she had no other choice in the matter. Not that you should push her if it came to that, since I’m not exaggerating when I say that she’d wreck your shit. No mortal should have the awe-inducing power that Cream wields. (Seriously, is there any game she’s playable in where she’s NOT broken?)

Did I mention she’s cute as a button? Cause I’m gonna mention it again.

Come on, how could you hate this bunny? Is there no place for cuteness in this franchise starring plush-sized cartoon animals and giant red springs?

The Execution: If you haven’t noticed by how shorter this is than the average Sweet or Shite review, Cream is an extremely straightforward character to describe and discuss. But is that a bad thing? No, not necessarily. It doesn’t hurt for a character to have more to them of course, but compared to being as ridiculous and as complicated as, again, the whole mess involving Silver, it’s easy to appreciate when things are kept nice and simple.

If you also haven’t noticed, I would protect this girl with my life.

“Thank you for bowing down to your superior, mister!” “Chao!”

Okay, so maybe her voice can get a little ear-piercing at times, even though I’d argue that hasn’t been the case with her most recent voice actress. Maybe her dedication to her pacifism rubs some the wrong way, since it can cause some unnecessary complications from time to time, most notably during Sonic Battle, when her (initial) refusal to fight in an intense situation led to Emerl getting beat up by Original Gammas, Do Not Steal. Or maybe she’s simply not ~radical~ enough, if you’re that sort of fan.

But me? I like her. I think she has a place, and I think she deserves to keep that place. As such, I also think it’s a tragedy that it appears as though she’s been getting phased out from a lot of Sonic products, possibly due to all these accusations directed at her. IDW has been the biggest exception to this trend thus far... but we all know what happened there, don’t we?

MFW I’m told to sign up on Bumbleking to understand a comic’s piss-poor writing.

Still, even if this unofficial phasing out continues, I’ll continue to defend Cream with the same passion I’d reserve for plenty of Sonic’s other chums. For one thing, she’s not wearing a ganja leaf.

Regardless of the game, Cream’s interactions with the rest of the cast are genuinely sweet, whether it’s Amy, Sonic, a weapon of destruction like Emerl, or a complete stranger like Blaze. She even managed to be nice and understanding to Chris Thorndyke, which is an amazing achievement considering it’s Chris Thorndyke. (Of course, even she lost her temper with Chris Thorndyke at one point, because it’s Chris Thorndyke.) Cream is not the only character who adds heart to the Sonic universe - other examples include Amy, Tails, even Sonic himself at times - but she has her place in doing so all the same... unlike Chris Thorndyke.

I’m always going on about how it’s important to acknowledge Sonic’s world for all it has to offer, rather than take one aspect of it and take it up to eleven at the expense of everything else. That belief of mine also applies here, because as much as it may be a balls to the wall playground filled with cartoon edge and badass attitude, the main star is still a blue hedgehog who rolls into a fuzzy ball, the Ultimate Lifeform with a tragic past is still a black hedgehog who wears hover skates, and the main villain, horrible and brutal as he is, is still shaped like an egg. Appealing charm is inherent to this franchise, no less so than bodaciousness. So Cream isn’t any less appropriate than someone like Shadow.

Although how she hasn’t yet been traumatized by all that she’s been through will be a riddle for the ages. Abductions, abductions of her mother, dead robot friends...

“Shit happens, kid.”

Crusher Gives Cream a: Thumbs Up!

Well, that was a refreshingly easy one. Now if you’ll excuse me, I better get out of here before Trudy takes issue with me for swearing so much in a Cream-related context... oh god, here she comes-!

[nalgenewhore]

masterlist - ao3 - next chapter 

+*+*+*+*+*+* Five Years Before +*+*+*+*+*+*

Elide looked at herself in the mirror, smoothing her hands over the pleated chiffon skirt of her dress. It was a gentle lavender colour, something Aelin had picked out for her.

The queen, and Elide’s cousin, had grown up in the press spotlight, poised and groomed to be the perfect monarch. Left as an orphan, much like Elide as the same plane crash had taken their parents, she had fallen victim to insidious advisors with personal agendas. 

Aelin had slipped up plenty in her life and as a young woman of nineteen, aged well beyond her years, she was determined to give Elide the life any teenager deserved. 

So, she personally chose Elide’s outfits for public events or even private ones attended by diplomats from around the globe. Aelin wouldn’t have her so-called baby sister dragged through the mud. 

Elide’s dress was tea-length, its skirt flowing gently with its countless pleats. A matching sash cinched it around her waist, making the bodice snugger. Elide fiddled with her pearl necklace, making sure it lay just so, dipping slightly beneath the modest neckline. She checked the cuffs’ buttons, ensuring that the long, loose sleeves wouldn’t be causing her any problems during her speech. 

Someone knocked gently on the door of the dressing room. Elide turned, delighted in the way her skirts twirled with her, “Come in.”

The heavy door opened and a head of shockingly silver hair poked in. Elide smiled at Rowan, feeling calmer knowing that he would be escorting her to the ball. “Elide, is everything alright?” 

She laughed brightly. For all of Aelin’s easy-going, carefree spirit, her beau kept her grounded with his instinctive worrying. “Ro, everything’s fine.” 

His seemingly permanent frown lessened the slightest bit, “Good. We’re all waiting.” 

“Oh, I just need to get my shoes,” she said, stepping off the mini-catwalk and plucking a pair of pointed-toe white pumps from their box. She sat down to slip them on, nodding gratefully when Rowan passed her the blackwood, silver tipped cane she used. 

It stung, knowing that her ankle could be fixed with simple, straightforward surgeries and still, her uncle and legal guardian, refused to let her, citing ridiculous and out of date reasons as to why she couldn’t. 

Rowan’s green eyes hardened, no doubt thinking about the ways he’d like to maim Vernon Lochan. Elide didn’t blame him. 

Elide’s hand slipped around the silver raven’s head that acted as the handle and she stood, resting her other hand on the forearm Rowan offered her. 

Just as they crossed the threshold, Elide froze, her pearl-coloured, almond shaped acrylics digging in the silky material of his finely made tuxedo. “I…” 

Rowan patted her hand, “You’ve been preparing for this your whole life, Elide. You’ll do amazing things.” 

She flashed him a thankful smile and he squeezed her hand in response. “I’m ready.” 

He nodded again, escorting her down the marble hallway, her cane clicking sharply against the polished stone.

Soon enough, they arrived at the grand hall. Aelin wasn’t to be seen, but that was expected as the queen was to make a short introduction before Elide’s turn. It wasn’t the first time she’d been in the spotlight - paparazzi followed her nonstop - but it was the first international address she had ever made. 

They slowed to a stop before the doors. Elide smiled at the guards and her personal maids, as well as the woman who ran her day-to-day schedule - Finnula. As they waited, Elide chatted with everyone until Finnula checked her earpiece, nodding in confirmation. “It’s time, milady.” 

“Finn, I have six more years till I’m the duchess,” she said, blushing a bit. Elide wasn’t yet used to her title-to-be. 

Finnula winked and scurried to the doormen, letting them know what was happening. 

A short fanfare played and Rowan let go of her hand. He leaned down, kissing the top of her head. If Aelin was Elide’s big sister, Rowan was the protective big brother she’d never had, “Knock ‘em dead, Ellie.” 

She gave him a dazzling grin as he slinked to the side and the doors opened. Elide let out a long breath and walked out, smiling politely and waving to the attendees as they clapped. 

Aelin was waiting at the podium for her, grinning proudly. There were errant tears caught in her lashes as Elide stepped up. The queen kissed her cheeks, “I’m so proud of you, my love.” 

A lump was caught in Elide’s throat and she couldn’t speak, so she just squeezed Aelin’s hand and nodded, mouthing I love you. One tear slipped down Aelin’s cheek before she wiped it away and slipped off to the side. 

Elide turned to face the crowd, leaning her cane against the ornate rostrum. Cameras flashed and she swallowed, suddenly feeling very underprepared. The seconds seemed to tick by tortuously slowly as her mouth dried. 

There was a glass of water that she sipped from, taking the time to collect her thoughts. 

When she placed the glass back down, Elide straightened her spine and raised her chin. People prayed on her downfall and she wouldn’t hand it to them. 

With the weight of her mother and father’s eyes looking down on her, Elide began her speech. 

“Good evening, everyone. I would like to thank you for joining me tonight. Having heard and learned about you all for the past decade, it’s lovely to finally meet you,” she said with a dry smile, waiting as a slight chuckle ran through the room. “I hope that you have all been curious to make my acquaintance as well or this would all be rather awkward.” 

She looked to the back, seeing Rowan give her a supportive smile. Elide felt herself relax and she continued, “I’ve asked you all here today to inform you that, despite statements made by the current duke regent of Perranth, I plan to take my rightful title when I become of age. This is my home and my birthright, something I’ve planned for my entire life.

“As your duchess, I believe I can restore Perranth to the rich and beautiful land it once was.” Elide paused, taking another sip of water. “My heart and soul truly belong to my home. I hope that I have your support moving forward and will strive to reconnect with allies and strengthen weakened ties.” 

The rest of her speech flew by in what seemed like a single moment. Elide blinked, remembering to smile, nod, and wave. 

Another short fanfare played and Elide turned, taking her cane once more and walking behind a column as the dance commenced. Aelin and Rowan were waiting for her, both wearing those proud, almost parent-like smiles. 

Elide rolled her eyes goodnaturedly and accepted the hug Aelin crushed her into. “I’m so proud of you, Ellie-Boo. You did so well, so well. I love you.” 

Her throat tightened to the point where she could hardly breathe. “I love you too, Ae,” she croaked. Next Rowan hugged her shortly, never one for excessive physical affection, with all but Aelin, of course. Elide was quick to block out the countless times she had caught the two in compromising positions. 

Aelin fixed her hair, smiling brightly, “Dance with me, darling! I shall have no other steal your first dance from me.” 

Elide laughed and nodded, lacing her hand with Aelin’s. As they walked to the middle of the room, Elide glanced upwards, past the gilded, painted ceiling to the heavens high high above. I hope I make you proud.

+*+*+*+*+*+*

an: thank u to my lovely betas 🥺 u guys r the bomb diggity 

@mythicaitt​ @tinywolfofeyllwe​ @schmlip-scribble​ @the-regal-warrior​ @empire-of-wildfire​ @ladyverena​ @ttakeitbacknoww​ @shyvioletcat​ @alifletcher2012​​ @tswaney17​ @ourbooksuniverse​ e @flora-and-fae​ @thesirenwashere​ @queenofxhearts​ @maastrash​ @mynewdreamwasyou​ @cursebreaker29​ @empress-ofbloodshed​ @b00kworm​ @hizqueen4life​ @silversprings98​ @amren-courtofdreams​ @minaidss​ @superspiritfestival​

[grayson1996]

You Have to Let Me Go

https://archiveofourown.org/works/34210816

No. 1 All trussed up and still nowhere to go.

"You have to let go" | Barbed Wire |Bound

Unlike what most people assumed, the cave was not usually a quiet place.

How could it be, when each one of Bruce’s children would filter in and out throughout the day and night. To ask questions, to spar, to prepare for patrol. Each inhabitant of the manor came with their own soundtrack that when put together created a familiar and comforting symphony.

Damian was the sound of quiet purposeful footfalls, followed by the scurrying steps of a small animal trailing dutifully after him. He was small huffs of breath made out of annoyance or interest (or amusement if it was a good day). The metallic sound of a sword being drawn out of it’s sheath, followed by the dull thud of it striking one of the many wooden posts in the training area. When Damian first appeared at the Manor he had been like a ghost, gliding along and hiding in the corners of rooms and the sides of hallways. The League believed that their assassins should neither be seen nor heard. The sound was a relief to Bruce, an outward sign of his youngest growth.

Cassandra, like Damian, was taught to be silent. Deadly quiet. And to this day Bruce couldn’t hear her coming and was often spooked by her sudden appearance, much to her amusement. But she too had her own trills. The sound of the skin on her hands rubbing together as they signed to whoever was nearest to her. A breathy chuckle, usually in response to something done by Stephanie or Dick. The awful sound of knuckles cracking striking through the cave. Despite Alfred's reasoning that it would cause arthritis Cass wouldn’t stop and frankly Bruce thought the twitch that appeared above his surrogate Father’s eyes when it happened was hilarious.

Tim was the slurping of coffee, and the rumblings of an empty stomach. He was the quick typing of a keyboard, and the distracting tapping of his foot against the side of the computer console. People thought that Dick was the most fidgety of his children, but it was Tim. Though true that Dick enjoyed moving, his movement was always purposeful. While Tim’s seem to flick out of him sporadically and without much thought. Tim was also the most spatially unaware of his children, though whether that was from lack of grace or just sleep deprivation was anyone’s guess. It wasn’t uncommon to be alerted of his approach by the sound of something being knocked over or of a quiet curse being uttered after stubbing his toe on the stairs.

Jason perhaps contributed to the symphony of the cave the least, though thankfully his presence had become more and more common in the years since his resurrection. The sounds he made were purposeful and designed to annoy. The sound of chips being crunched by an open mouth during a mission report. A scoff at the end of an order or request. And on bad days the sound of arguing, of things being thrown and property being destroyed. But on softer days it was more comforting. The crinkle of a packet of cigarettes in his back pocket being smushed as he leaned against the computer console. Leather rubbing against leather as he crossed his arms. A quiet ‘thank you’ to Alfred after being handed a cup of tea. Or even a softly sarcastic ‘See ya old man’ if Bruce managed to get through an interaction without pissing him off.

All these sounds, these beautiful little noises that told Bruce his children were home, were safe. All of these sounds were gone from the cave. As he sat alone, staring blankly in front of him at the black computer screen. Half dressed in a torn and ripped Batsuit, his cowl and gloves having been discarded at some point. It was a space he hadn’t left for nearing three days much to his family's chagrin and thinly veiled concern. At the end of the first day he had locked them out, pushing back the familiar feeling of guilt as he did so.

He wasn’t sure if he was punishing himself. Perhaps he deserved this, deserved to be denied the comforting presence of his children, and deserved the oppressing quiet? Or perhaps he just didn’t have the energy to get up from this spot, to do anything. Perhaps it was easier to just sit here alone in the dark and quiet, because moving seemed impossible at the moment.

Usually when he sequestered himself away from any stimuli or love, he would be hounded by his thoughts. He would allow them to fester and devour his happiness, and drain him of anything resembling hope. He would allow himself to feel as awful as possible, because he deserved to tear himself up from the inside out.

Now however his thoughts were blank, deafened by the silence as though he were wearing noise cancelling headphones and his thoughts were the outside world. It was all blank, silent, there was nothing except him and his chair and the blank screen in front of him.

Then a warm hand gently placed itself on his shoulder.

“They’re worried about you.” Bruce let out a heavy sigh.

“I know.”

“I’m worried about you too.”

“I’m fine.” A snort of disbelief followed his statement.

“Clearly.”

“Why are you here?” The silence grew again and for a moment the hand began to retreat.

“I can go if you’d like?”

“NO!” Bruce spun around in his chair and reaching out he grabbed the tan hand and held it tightly in his grip. His son raised an eyebrow but did not retreat further.

“Alright I won’t.” Sitting down on the ground next to him, Dick’s gaze did not move from Bruce. “You look like shit.” Despite himself Bruce let out a huff of amusement, and felt warmth as Dick grinned back in triumph. “Seriously, take a shower B and get out of those clothes. You know Alfred’s upstairs dying to get you a proper meal.” Bruce shook his head, his grip tightening around Dick’s hand.”

“I can’t.”

“Sure you can, all you have to do is stand up and put one foot in front of the other.” Bruce shook his head again.

“I can’t leave you.” Dick let out a heavy breath, and his eyes softened at the admission.

“You can’t stay down here forever B.” Bruce felt his chest tighten and his gaze quickly flickered over to the med bay where the curtain was drawn.

“I’m not ready.”

“Bruce-”

“ I’m not ready.” His tone was stern and for a moment Dick’s eyes narrowed, much like they had when the two were younger and always at each other’s throats. When it was just the two of them and neither knew how to be a Father or a Son. But just as quickly Dick’s face smoothed over, changing into something kinder then pity. Empathy perhaps.

“Okay, you’re not ready. But at least let the others down here Bruce. Isolating yourself like this, keeping them locked out and grieving on their own? It’s not kind B, you should all be together.” There was truth in his son’s words but still Bruce couldn’t let himself get up and see his other children. Because to see them, to let them in and to acknowledge what had happened meant that it was over. It meant that Dick was dead, and all that remained was his body now being kept cool in the medbay so that it didn’t begin to decompose.

And if Dick was dead then what the hell did that mean for Bruce, for the rest of them?

Dick was the one to calm Damian down after yet another fight with Bruce. Dick had been the one to soften the boy, raise him even. Damian didn’t deserve to lose the man. Didn’t deserve to lose the kindest person in his life.

Dick was the one to pull Tim away from the computer screen when he was going on his 3rd night of no sleep. To pry his phone out of his brother's hand, and tuck the boy into bed. He was the only one who could get away with treating Tim like a child. He was the only one who could get away with showing Tim love, without the boy recoiling in uncomfortableness.

Dick was the one who brought Jason back. Maybe not back to life but to the family for sure. Dragging the man in after him for a family dinner, pushing Jason to the table and breaking the tension with a quip or bad joke.

Dick was the one who brought Cass to her first dance lesson, and encouraged Stephanie to get her Masters, and got Alfred to take a break and join them for movie nights.

Dick was the one who had given Bruce hope again. Dick was love, Dick was family, Dick was goodness and righteousness and fury and passion. And all of sudden he was gone, with little fanfare or reason. He was just…. gone.

“I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this chum.” Dick shrugged his shoulders, a small smile on his face.

“You just do it Bruce. You just get up and move forward. It sucks and I’m sorry but sitting here alone is only going to make it worse… and it’s only going to make them resent you.” Bruce knew he didn’t deal with death well. It was obvious in the black eye Dick sported after Jason’s death, in his anger after Damian’s. His whole life was built around it, and while he loved what he and his family had created as Batman, part of him hated it as well.

“I’m not a man who can change Dick…. It’s not something I ever learned how to do.” The confession was quiet and Bruce felt uncomfortable by the unusual genuineness of his words. Dick chuckled and shook his head incredulously.

“Of course it takes me dying to finally get you to open up.” The words were said without any scorn but it still caused something heavy to settle in Bruce’s gut. Dick however continued. “You have to grieve Bruce, you can’t push this away and ignore it. You have to let yourself grieve, and you have to let the others do it to. And it will suck and it will be hard and some days you won’t want to say my name because you just can’t . And some days you’ll forget for a moment that I’m not gone, and you’ll go to call me or turn to talk to me and then you’ll remember. And it will hit you like a brick.” Dick smiled sadly at him. “And it will be especially hard because you have lost a lot of people in your life but you haven’t let yourself experience that loss”

“ I can’t do this Dick . I’ll break.” Dick shook his head.

“So you let yourself break. And then you do what anyone who has lost someone does, you put yourself back together.”  Dick sat up from the ground and moved to kneel in front of Bruce. Placing both his hands on his Father’s knees. “I can be there for them Bruce you have to be, which means you have to let go. You have to let go of me and let yourself fall, and trust trust that you’ll be able to get back up again.”

Maybe it was because this was all happening in his mind. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation and lack of food and water. Maybe it was because looking at Dick all he could see was the little boy who over 20 years ago first taught him how to actively live life again. Maybe it was the knowledge that the same little boy was now lying several feet away, dead. Whatever it was Bruce knew that he needed to do things differently.

Jason’s death had felt like a punishment. Dick’s felt like a lesson.

“I’ll try Dick… I can’t promise that I’ll do it all right, but I’ll try.” Dick smiled and standing up he pulled Bruce into a deep hug. The arms seemed less real then they had before, but the warmth and love was obvious. “....I’m going to miss you Chum.” A small huff of amusement brushed the top of Bruce's head.

“I love you too B.”

[blossom-hwa]

Attach - MARK |Swing!|

I wrote 50k words in 10 days I think my brain is going to shut down

THANK YOU @deathbykpopboys​ FOR GIVING ME THE IDEA TO CONTINUE THIS FROM THE ORIGINAL DRABBLE (here). I LITERALLY OWE YOU MY LIFE. THIS STORY WOULDN’T EXIST WITHOUT YOU I SWEAR. THANK YOU FOR LETTING ME USE YOUR IDEAS, YOU DESERVE THE W O R L D

One more thing: a long time ago I promised @zhengtongue​ (fari love u) that all further Mark stories I wrote would be dedicated to her :) :) here’s the first Mark story I’ve written since then :) :) dedicated to you and @deathbykpopboys​ :D

Pairing: Mark x fem!reader

Genre: fluff, angst, Spiderman!au

Triggers: a lot of cursing, mild violence, some descriptions of sex (as in like. sex ed. no one actually does it), PANIC ATTACKS IN FUTURE CHAPTERS (I in no way meant to romanticize these triggers. If you feel I did, please let me know and I will fix it.)

Word Count: 9.2k

A disastrous field trip to OsCorp leaves you and Mark with two spider bites and a decision to make.

Attach >> Arc { 1 - Drifting Apart | 2 - Coming Home } 

NCT Masterlist | Swing! 

You wake up with a misplaced sense of excitement that makes you even grumpier than normal. It’s six in the fucking morning, finals and AP exams are in a month and a half, so what the hell is there to be excited about?

Then you open your eyes enough to see the permission slip sticking out the top of your bag and it clicks.

The field trip to OsCorp is today!

A grudging smile comes over your face. It might be six a.m., but you’re about to go on a field trip to one of the biggest biotech corporations in the world – you have a right to feel excited. You may be in high school, and some may say that getting excited over field trips is for little kids, but it’s OsCorp. Not Stark Industries, but still pretty damn close.

Quickly, you shower and dress, careful not to wake up your older brother. As you pass by his room, you feel a stab of guilt. Johnny worked another late shift last night, and he’ll probably have another one tomorrow. And here you are, taking a field trip.

Mood slightly dampened, you head out the door, locking it behind you with a quiet snick. In the lobby, you wait a few minutes for Mark to arrive. Exactly three minutes later, you hear his feet pounding down the stairs.

Any guilt you felt washes away at the sight of your best friend smiling behind his round glasses. Mark is what people might call a typical nerd – you’re a little too confrontational for that label – but you’ve known him for over ten years.

He’s so much more than that.

“Ready for OsCorp?” Mark pushes up his glasses, grinning widely.

You smile back just as eagerly. “Fuck yeah.”

The smiles stay throughout the train ride to school. Mark’s gets slightly smaller when Flash rolls through Midtown High’s gates and gives him that stupid smirk, but you distract him with talk about the labs you guys will get to see. The bus ride passes without fanfare – though Mark gets into a spat with your friend, Haechan, about the merits of computer science versus physics, fucking nerds – and soon enough, you’re is pulling into the huge parking lot at OsCorp.

Even Flash, who was griping about not getting to see Stark Industries and having to “settle for” OsCorp, is stunned by how immense the building actually is from the inside.

It’s fucking amazing. Pristine walls surround your classmates, while people in lab coats and business suits mill around beyond the huge lobby. Conference rooms with walls of glass let you see people giving presentations with complicated diagrams you’re itching to see.

Beside you, Mark catches his breath in delight. When you turn to him, he grins with so much excitement in his face that your heart melts for a moment.

He deserves a break. He deserves this excitement. With that, you link arms with him as a cheery intern starts the tour.

. . . . .

There’s nothing Mark would trade for being at OsCorp today. Even though he can’t go everywhere, the tour guide, Joy, makes the most of the places she has access to. With each new lab Mark enters, his wonder only heightens.

If this is OsCorp, he thinks, how cool is Stark Industries?

The tour ends with a video about what you all could do as future scientists and world leaders, and then Ms. Wilson herds the class back into the lobby to wait for the bus.

Mark has to use the bathroom. Though Wilson clearly isn’t happy about it, she lets him go with a stern warning to hurry.

He finds the bathroom quickly and starts to head back. But at some point, he takes a wrong turn or something because he’s now in a stark-white hallway that he hasn’t seen before.

Oh, come on. He doesn’t need Wilson to hate him any more than she already does. Confused, he looks around for someone to ask for directions, but there’s no one in the hall. In his frustration, he rolls his eyes towards the ceiling.

He barely suppresses a scream at the dangerous looking blue and red spider sitting up above him.

Normally, Mark just leaves spiders alone unless they get too close. He doesn’t have much love for insects or arachnids, but he doesn’t enjoy killing them. They just want to mind their own business, like he does.

This one, though, just oozes malicious intent.

Other spiders just want to do spin webs and eat bugs and stuff. Not this one.

Before he has time to yell, this one fucking leaps, silk tracing behind it, lands on his arm, and bites him.

A sharp sting races up his arm and the spot where the stupid arachnid bit him starts to throb. Belatedly, he starts shaking his arm to get rid of the thing, but it’s already climbing back up the wall and onto the ceiling.

For a moment, Mark just stares at the spider, clutching his arm.

“Mark?” Your voice jerks him out of his daze. Relief floods his veins, but terror and worry soon replace it. He opens his mouth to tell you to get away, but he can’t fucking speak. Then you turn down the hall.

Too late.

“Dude!” You jog forward, ignoring or misinterpreting Mark’s outstretched arm trying to push you away. “The bus is here! We need to –” You stop talking, finally realizing something’s wrong. Your eyes go to his arm, which is now bright red. “Mark? What’s –”

His vocal cords take that moment to start working. “Look up,” he whispers.

The spider leaps without warning, barely after a second after your eyes have even registered it. It settles on your arm quickly and you yelp.

It must have bitten you too.

Thankfully, you have more of a destructive instinct than Mark does. Your arm smashes against the wall with a resounding thud and the crushed spider drops to the ground. A spatter of liquid stains the white paint. You wipe your arm against the wall.

For a moment, you and Mark just stare at the spider’s corpse. Mark can feel the blood draining from his face.

“It bit you too?” you finally ask.

Mark nods tightly. “Yeah.”

You take a glance at your arm and blanch. Mark winces, seeing your skin already darkening with inflammation. With trembling fingers, you untie your jacket from around your waist. “Hide it,” you tell him when he looks at you questioningly. He numbly pushes the sleeves of his hoodie down.

Ms. Wilson yells at him a lot when he gets back, which he takes with a bowed head and many apologies. He barely hears it, though. The throbbing in his arm is almost overwhelming, and his mind is racing too fast to comprehend much of anything. When you all finally board the bus, you drag him to the back where the two of you sit, silent and scared.

That spider wasn’t from any lab he visited today, which means it was probably from some classified, secure experiment. Well, one that was supposed to be secure.

It was bright red and blue. It attacked without provocation.

Clearly, it wasn’t meant to have gotten loose.

Why was OsCorp even making these things?

Mark sneaks a glance at his throbbing arm. He doesn’t dare look under the hoodie sleeve for fear that someone else will see, but it hurts.

What effects will that bite have?

Can I even treat it?

Dread pools heavy in his stomach. Some spiders are extremely venomous.

Am I going to die?

Mark’s hand reaches over and grasps yours tightly. You try to give his hand a reassuring squeeze, but your hand is clammy and cold with anxiousness.

Any residual excitement from visiting OsCorp is gone. Only terror floods his veins.

. . . . .

The spider bite doesn’t go away for seven days, and with every hour that passes, the stupid thing only looks like it’s getting worse.

You try to ignore it at first. After all, you can’t exactly call in sick for a bug (or arachnid, whatever) bite. If you did, that would a) sound stupid and b) make your brother worry, which he really doesn’t need. So for the first three days, you grit your teeth, cover the bite with long sleeves even as the days begin to warm uncomfortably, and trudge to class.

The only thing that keeps you going is that you’re not alone. If anything, Mark is panicking a lot more than you. With every day that passes, he grows more and more outwardly concerned with the spread of red inflammation and the aches all over his body.

At least at first, you’d like to think that you hide your concern better than Mark. But by the third day, the inflamed part of your skin is about the size of your hand and hot to the touch, and you’re sure you don’t look much better than your best friend.

Mark comes over after school that day because Johnny’s working late and the two of you want to talk, alone. But at first, you don’t even speak – just lie on your bed and stare at the angry red spots on your arms.

“Are we going to die?” Mark finally mumbles, somehow sounding both panicked and resigned.

You want to reply with a ‘no, definitely not, stop overreacting,’ but the aches feel horrible and you have the strong urge to vomit. Neither of you have looked up your symptoms because the spider was clearly unnatural and WebMD will only make you feel worse, but you don’t need to be a genius to know that something is very wrong.

Nothing gets done that night, and it’s with a sinking feeling in your stomach that you hug Mark tightly before he walks up the several floors to his own apartment. Not wanting to eat for fear of it just coming back up, you messily scribble some answers to your homework and pass out.

You wake up the next morning and vomit all over the floor.

Johnny wakes up to the sound of crying and retching and immediately calls in sick for both of you when he opens the door to you trying to drag yourself to the bathroom, studiously avoiding the pool of sick on your floor.

Bleary-eyed and lightheaded, you text Mark and tell him you’re not going to school. He doesn’t reply until several hours later. He went to school but got picked up early after he threw up in class.

By day five, you have a high fever and Johnny has to take another day off. Luckily, it’s Saturday. You don’t have school. You hope you feel better by Monday.

But on day six, Sunday, you’re shivering and aching all over and the fear of death breaks you down. Tears stream down your face as you toss and turn in bed, intermittently yelling and muttering gibberish that Johnny can’t understand. At one point, you become aware of him sitting on the side of your bed, silently crying. With the last of your energy, you touch his fingers and squeeze lightly, tears still running down your cheeks.

You hope desperately that Mark feels better than you do.

On day seven, you feel slightly less disgusting. You stop vomiting sometime in the afternoon, and the redness of the spider bite has started to fade. The aches are still there, but they’ve concentrated in your stomach, back, and legs, so you don’t hurt everywhere anymore.

You wake up the next morning, already resigned to missing another day of school. But something immediately feels very, very wrong.

You don’t hurt. At all.

This makes you panic even more than when every part of you was in pain.

You roll out of bed with a frantic thud and practically rip off the blanket to check your arm. No redness. No heat. No sign of inflammation.

Your back doesn’t ache. Neither does your core. But wait, what the fuck - are you taller?

Everything’s clear, you realize. No blurriness from your near-sighted left eye, even without your glasses. You can see every leaf on the scraggly tree just outside your bedroom window.

You might have stopped vomiting, but this all still makes you feel like dry heaving. A hand goes to your stomach and you freeze.

Peeling up your shirt slowly, you look down and almost scream.

You have abs.

Abs.

With shaking fingers, you pull out your phone and dial Mark’s number. You know he’s fine enough to pick up – you and him were texting sporadically yesterday. He answers with a groggy, “Y/N, what the fuck.”

“Mark.” You try to breathe. “Do you hurt at all?”

Dead silence on his end.

“... No.”

“Is the bite still there?”

“... No.”

“Do you have fucking abs?”

“No – what the – Y/N, what the fuck is going on, what the fuck?”

He might be hyperventilating at this point. You can’t blame him. You think you’re about to vomit your guts out again.

“Meet me outside,” you snap, hastily changing your clothes. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but those spiders at OsCorp were... they weren’t fucking normal.”

That’s an understatement.

It takes ten minutes to convince Johnny you’re fine, you really are, you swear, you’re not vomiting and you can’t miss your French quiz today, you’ve already missed a week of school, yes you promise you’ll call him if you throw up again. When he finally lets you go, you race down the stairs faster than you’ve ever gone before.

Mark’s already there. For a minute, you two just stand outside the ratty apartment building with similar looks of shock and panic on your faces. Quickly, you tell Mark about what’s happened to you. He confirms it all.

“Are we like. Fucking. I don’t know.” You pull on your hair out of frustration. “Superhuman? Spider-people?”

On any other occasion, Mark, lovely logical intelligent Mark, would laugh and ask you if you were feeling all right. But now?

He shrugs, but you can tell he’s at least considering your words. “Maybe?” he replies in a very small voice, and then you realize he’s shaking.

The overwhelming need to protect your best friend rises up in you, but you can’t protect him from the spider venom in your veins. Frustration bubbles up in your chest and you clench your fist, but one look at the lost look on his face drains the panic from your body and you just envelop Mark in a hug that he immediately returns. “We’ll figure it out, Mark,” you mumble in his ear. “We’ll be fine. No matter what. Okay?”

“Okay,” he whispers in your ear.

“Good.”

Then you find that you can’t fucking detach yourself from him.

It’s not that you don’t want to. You literally can’t. Your fingers are somehow stuck to the back of his shirt and you have a feeling that if you yank hard enough to pull yourself away, a patch of cloth is going to come off with your hand.

“Mark? Try to let go of me.”

It turns out he can’t either.

“Mark, we have ten minutes before the next train leaves.”

Long story short, you miss the train. And as the two of you sheepishly walk in late to homeroom, you have a terrible feeling that you’re going to be missing many more trains in the future, too.

. . . . .

That first hug, sadly, does not bring an end to the adventures of Mark and Y/N sticking (literally) together.

Mark tries to be careful, he really does. He knows you’re trying too. But you’re both so used to linking arms, hugging, and holding hands that it’s difficult to remember that touching literally anything could result in a whole stupid fiasco.

You two are late to homeroom every. Single. Fucking. Day. Of. That. Week. Because neither of you can remember to keep your stupid hands to your stupid selves.

On Tuesday, it’s the hug.

On Wednesday, he grabs your arm to avoid a group of rushing passerby.

On Thursday, you playfully shove him.

On Friday, Mark wakes up praying for one day of peace, just one fucking day before he can bury his head in his pillow for two days straight and dream that this never happened.

And it would’ve been perfectly fine if you hadn’t fallen asleep on the train.

It’s not your fault, not at all. The night before, you were up so late trying to fix a bug in your computer science assignment that you almost fell asleep waiting for the train. Almost as soon as you board, you’re passed out.

Mark is stupid.

Normally when one of you falls asleep, the other will hold their hand or arm to keep them from slumping over completely. It’s basically instinct now, so when your head lolls onto his shoulder, Mark quickly grabs your hand and nudges you upright.

Then he realizes his mistake.

Fuck.

His slight jolt of realization shakes you awake. Mark’s heart sinks as your tired eyes open and immediately zero in on their linked hands.

You’re wide awake now.

You try to tug away. It doesn’t work.

“Fuck,” you say eloquently.

Mark winces. “Sorry. I swear I didn’t mean to, it’s just…” He winces again. “Habit?”

Honestly, after a week of this, Mark would have thought the two of you would get better at detaching from each other. But every morning, without fail, it’s been exactly like this – flailing limbs, anxious yanking, clothes threatening to rip.

The two of you stumble into the train station still stuck together. With his free hand, Mark checks his phone and groans.

“We have five minutes.”

Unsticking takes fifteen.

Mark is normally a pretty mild person. He can take a lot more of Flash’s shit than you can without batting an eye, and his teachers usually like him for his calm demeanor. But as he slips into his seat, face hot and ears undoubtedly bright red, he thinks he’s going to lose his mind.

Four late days in a row. Four fucking days.

He stifles a groan. If you two don’t figure out this sticking situation soon…

The bell for first period rings literally minutes after he sits down. With a sigh, he reaches down to pick up his bag, praying that he won’t stick to it, when Mr. Thomas, his homeroom teacher, calls for you and him to stay behind.

“Someone’s in trouble,” Flash sneers as he passes by.

Mark wants nothing more than to punch him in the face.

Thomas is a cool teacher, as far as Mark has known. He’s chill, likes to make jokes, and has two kids of his own – he knows and cares for his students. This knowledge just makes Mark feel so much worse, and as the two of you walk up to his teacher’s desk, he readies himself to make an apology.

“So, I’m sure you two know why I wanted to talk to you today.” Mr. Thomas’s mild voice contains a hint of reproach, and Mark winces. Next to him, he sees you do the same. He opens his mouth to apologize.

“I understand.”

Both of your heads snap up. How does he know?

“First love can be very overwhelming, especially at your age.”

Mark blinks. Then he blinks again.

His teacher just smiles benevolently. “Believe me, I would know. I met my wife when I was in high school, and we had some crazy memories. First love is a beautiful thing.”

Mark doesn’t want to hear anymore. He can already feel the redness creeping up his cheeks.

Please, Earth, just open up and swallow me whole.

“But let me give you some advice.” Mr. Thomas leans forward slightly, looking the two of you in your unwilling eyes. “Romantic rendezvous in the morning shouldn’t be more important than getting to school on time.”

A sort of strangled eep comes out of his throat just as you sputter, “Romantic rendezvous?!”

“You both are very intelligent and hardworking students, two of the best this school has ever seen, and I do think you two are a good fit for each other,” Mr. Thomas continues as if he hasn’t heard anything. “However, it’d be a shame for such good students to give up on your schooling for a boyfriend or girlfriend.”

“We’re – we’re not dating,” Mark protests. “Mr. Thomas, seriously –”

His teacher holds up a hand. “Mark, Y/N, if you two can’t control your… urges, you should at least be safe. I trust that you two both know that.”

There’s a stapler next to Mr. Thomas’s computer. Maybe he can staple his hand and go to the clinic. Or he could bash his head against the edge of the desk and knock himself out. Maybe grab those scissors in that cup of pens and just slit his throat right then and there.

Some sort of croaking noise leaves your throat. Mark doesn’t need to look at you to know how you’re feeling.

Mr. Thomas sighs. “But beyond that, school really should be your first priority.” He flashes a smile that Mark can’t find the presence of mind to return. “That’s all I wanted to say. I’ll give you two passes for next period. What do you have next?”

Passes in hand, the two of you stumble into the now-empty hall. Mr. Thomas’s parting words – “Remember my advice!” – rattle around in Mark’s mind.

That didn’t actually happen. There’s no way Mark’s homeroom teacher just gave the sex talk to him and his best friend who happens to be of the opposite gender. This is all just a really, really long nightmare, and Mark will wake up in a few minutes, wrapped in warm blankets.

He pinches himself. It hurts a lot.

Not a nightmare.

“That has to be illegal,” Mark mutters. “Fucking… what the fuck even was that?”

“I want to die,” you mumble.

There’s a bit of silence.

“Well…” You swallow hard, resolutely looking anywhere but Mark’s eyes. “I’ll be… going to class?”

He nods dumbly, then watches you disappear down the hall. The closing of the door jerks him out of his daze and he turns around, heading to his own class.

Head down, he hands the pass to his teacher and takes his seat, ignoring Flash’s smirk and Haechan’s look of worry. He grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to wake himself up from this real-life nightmare.

Could this day get any worse?

. . . . .

You honestly think, after leaving homeroom, that nothing could make this day even worse.

By third period, you’re cursing your naivete.

It’s like the stickiness is on tenfold today. Your fingers glue themselves to everything – textbook pages, the disgusting desks, pens, even a whiteboard marker from when you go up to solve a problem in calculus.

It takes a five-minute tugging match for Mr. Garcia to finally peel the marker off of your skin. The giggles of your classmates join the vestiges of Mr. Thomas’s “advice” in bouncing around your brain like a million vicious ping pong balls.

After that, you avoid raising your hand to answer questions at all.

By the time you meet back up with Mark, you two have come to a silent agreement to not touch each other whatsoever. You studiously ignore each other all throughout English, and at lunch, you sit across the table, not next to each other like normal. At the same table, your friends look like they want to remark on the situation, but they wisely keep their mouths shut.

When you get up to throw your trash away, Diana, a girl you know but don’t really talk to, walks up as well. “Hey, Y/N,” she greets.

“Hey.” You try to smile.

“Um, I just wanted to ask.” She bites her lip, looking sympathetic. “Did… did you and Mark break up?”

You can almost hear the Windows shutting-down noise as your brain short-circuits.

How could you have broken up if you were never dating in the first place.

With an effort, you turn to her and swallow. “We were never dating,” you enunciate carefully. “So we never broke up.”

Diana immediately flushes bright red. “Oh, fuck, sorry. It’s just, Flash told everyone the two of you were together? And you guys seemed super close and all so it really looked like you were. I really did think you guys were dating, you looked super sweet together. But you didn’t talk much today, and you two looked pretty worked up this morning, so people thought…”

You’re going to kill Flash. You’re going to beat him up behind the school and slit his throat with your own nails.

“Well, we’re not.” You smile as best as you can. “Um, yeah.”

It just doesn’t stop. Until now, you never realized this many people actually paid attention to your personal life. Five more people have come up to ask if you and Mark are okay by the time chemistry rolls around, and as you take your place behind the cramped lab table with the boy everyone thinks you’re dating, you can practically feel the steam billowing out of your ears. Mark doesn’t look nearly as angry as you, but he looks a lot more confused and annoyed.

You brush fingers a few times as Mark pours out the acid and you try to set up the buret for today’s titration. Thankfully, you don’t really stick this time.

But then Mark gets his hand stuck to the Erlenmeyer flask and you have to spend ten precious minutes trying to tug it off, causing you to almost not finish the lab and earning both of you another black mark in Ms. Wilson’s mental book.

You ignore anyone who tries to ask you or Mark anything as you all but run out of school, only relaxing once you’ve thrown yourself onto a seat on the train. Mark slides down next to you and puts his head in his hands.

“Tell me this is all a nightmare,” he mumbles.

You don’t have the heart to tell him the truth.

By the time you’ve walked up the stairs to your apartment, you think you’re going to pass out. It’s been a long day. You don’t care if you have homework or if Mark’s staying over for a bit – you just want to lie in your bed and sleep away the horrors of today.

Then Johnny opens the door before you even have the chance to unlock it and you just know from the glint in his eye that everything is about to get ten times worse.

“Y/N, Mark. What a lovely surprise!” Your older brother is all welcoming words and terrifying smiles. “I got a very interesting call today from a certain Mr. Thomas. Mei did too –” and at this, poor Mark looks like he’s going to faint right then and there – “but she couldn’t leave work, so she asked if I could come home early and give you both a talk.”

You think you’re going to vomit.

“Johnny, whatever Mr. Thomas told you, it isn’t true,” you plead. “I swear on my life –”

“So you two haven’t been late to school every day this week?” Johnny raises an eyebrow.

You think you’re going to die. “Well, yes, but –”

“Have a seat.” Johnny gestures grandly at the small kitchen table, where he’s pulled out two chairs. To your horror, it looks like he’s enjoying this. “Mei and I think it’s time we gave you The Talk.”

If your day was bad before, Johnny gleefully takes it straight to hell.

“So boys have appendages that are called penises,” he begins sagely, “and girls have vaginas. You may know these by more colloquial terms, but those are a bit crass for my household.”

Bullshit. Johnny calls his co-workers dicks and Ten an ass every other night.

“Both of these are integral to the process of sex, and thus, baby-making,” Johnny continues. “During sex, the male – or whatever they identify as – will put the penis inside their partner’s vagina. Of course, that’s traditional. Other forms of sex include oral and anal…”

You’re five seconds away from putting your hands over your ears and just screaming bloody murder. Mark is looking down, fists screwed into his shirt, and his face is so red that he looks like he might implode.

Meanwhile, your evil older brother is grinning like the Joker. It’s infuriating and terrifying. You really, really want to reach out and punch him and just brawl like when you were younger, but your feet feel rooted to the floor.

Johnny’s spiel pauses for a second as he takes a dramatic breath. Immediately, you’re on guard. Whenever Johnny wants to be dramatic, it’s never a good thing.

“So in anal sex,” Johnny starts, “the appendage goes in the –”

Oh my god.

“We’re not fucking!” you finally explode.

Mark breathes a sigh – you think it’s one of relief, but you can’t be sure – while your brother just blinks. “Pardon?”

Your face burns hot, but you grit your teeth and stare Johnny in the eye. “Mark and I are not fucking,” you repeat carefully.

“Who said anything about you and Mark?” Johnny raises one perfect eyebrow.

Oh, you want to punch him so badly.

“But thank you for bringing that up!” Johnny smiles benevolently like a teacher rewarding you for doing something good in class.

You groan, knowing you’ve just made things so much worse.

“You two are hormonal teenagers, so you’ve undoubtedly already started to feel those urges.” Johnny keeps smiling pleasantly, even as you’re having war flashbacks to this morning in homeroom. “That’s perfectly normal. So – and I’m not saying you’re fucking –” he gives you that look that means uh huh, I totally do not believe you, but I’ll drop it for now until you prove yourself wrong – “but if you do become sexually active, you should always get tested for STDs and STIs first, and take preventative measures such as using condoms and birth control.”

That’s it. You’re just going to die. Slit your own throat with, you don’t fucking know, the pencil lying by Johnny’s arm. Maybe you’ll just grab that piece of paper over there and cover yourself in tiny papercuts and bleed to death. That couldn’t possibly hurt as much as hearing Johnny talk right now.

“Now back to anal sex!” Johnny smiles.

Mark lets out a small groan and buries his face in his hands. If anything, Johnny’s smile grows wider. “Anal sex is when –”

“Jesus Christ, Johnny!” You grab the pencil you wanted to slit your throat with and hurl it at your brother. The blunt point pokes him harmlessly in the chest and falls to the floor. “I don’t know what the fuck Mr. Thomas told you, but I – we –” you gesture helplessly between you and Mark – “we’re not doing anything! And I know all of this, dude, I go to high school!”

Even after that excellent point, Johnny still goes on for another ten minutes before he allows you to drag Mark to your room and slam the door shut.

“I’m so fucking sorry,” you mumble into your pillow.

Mark just makes a little pained noise in his throat.

The two of you do end up passing out for the best part of an hour before spending the rest of the afternoon finishing homework. Mark can barely look Johnny in the eye when he says goodbye, and as soon as the door shuts, you round on your older brother.

“What the fuck did Mr. Thomas say on the phone?” you snap.

Johnny raises his hands in a gesture of surrender as he stirs pasta in a pot. “He just said you and Mark have been late to homeroom every day this entire week, and he was sure it wasn’t much because you are both stellar students, but he worried that the two of you were becoming distracted because this wasn’t normal behavior.” He scrunches his eyebrows. “He might’ve mentioned… romantic rendezvous?”

You sink to the floor with a groan.

“I was just messing with you earlier.” Johnny’s words make you open your eyes to catch his teasing smile. “Seriously. I think I know you and Mark well enough to trust you not to do anything stupid.”

Suddenly, you become very aware of the spot on your arm where the spider bit you, the stupid thing that caused this whole mess in the first place. “Uh huh.”

“But I do want you to be careful.” Johnny’s eyes turn serious. “Mark is still a teenage boy, and you’re still a teenage girl. I do trust you, but things can still happen, even if they’re unexpected.”

Internally, you gag. Outwardly, you just nod. “I know.”

“Good.” Johnny turns back to the pasta, then quickly looks back at you. “Doesn’t it look like Mark filled out a little?”

Your heart literally leaps into your throat. You hadn’t really thought about it before, but the spider venom has caused you both to pack on some muscle overnight.

Sure, part of you is worried that Johnny is catching on to something weird. But something else is also making you sweat.

A memory of your linked hands from the morning flashes through your mind. In it, you realize, Mark’s arms are bulkier. A lot more than before.

Heat rises in your cheeks. You want to fling yourself into the void. “Y-yeah,” you squeak.

“Y/N, dating your best friend isn’t anything embarrassing –”

“We’re not dating!” you protest.

Johnny just gives you The Look again as he pours the water out of the pasta. “Okay.”

For the umpteenth time that day, you will whatever god is listening to just smite you down right then and there.

. . . . .

There are a lot of things that come with being a sort of spider-person that neither you nor Mark realized would happen, but in hindsight, they kind of (not really) make sense.

. . .

One: the sticking thing. It does make sense. Spiders walk on walls and other vertical surfaces by sticking to them with the little setules on their legs. Mark hypothesizes that maybe there’s some sort of electrostatic force between your skin and objects around you that makes you stick. After a moment of thought, you agree.

Doesn’t matter. Mark never wants to go through that ordeal of the first week over again.

He used to idolize Johnny. Johnny was something between another parent and the older brother he never had, embarrassing but cool and kind and so, so strong. Even after your parents died and he had to drop out of university to take care of you, he always stayed strong.

But now? After that disastrous Friday, Mark knows what you mean when you complain about Johnny being a menace to your health and well-being.

And of course, that’s not the end of it. Aunt Mei just has to get her hands into it too. The literal day after The Talk, you walk up to his apartment to work on a research paper together for the lab you two volunteer in. When he takes your laptop to read something, the device somehow gets stuck to his skin.

Mei comes home early that evening and walks in on you practically straddling him, trying to yank your laptop away.

Even Mark knows that it definitely doesn’t look that way from her perspective.

But all she does is say, “Use protection,” and close the door behind her.

(You leave early that evening, rushing out of the apartment with a face hot with embarrassment and lowered eyes. Mark slinks out of his room at some point to get something to eat, and Mei just gives him a smirk.)

Thankfully, after a couple more weeks, the two of you more or less figure out how to stop sticking to every goddamn thing you touch. It’s more of a thing that happens when either of you are nervous or stressed, so as long as you two keep calm and purposely remind yourselves not to stick to stuff, you’re fine.

Mr. Thomas still gives you a few looks, but now that you’re coming in on time to homeroom, he doesn’t say anything.

Thank fucking God for that.

. . .

Two: both you and him somehow buffed up overnight. Well, probably during the time that you two were sick. That explains the aching muscles in his stomach and his back – he has abs, and he’s definitely taller. So are you.

Spiders are strong. Relatively. So the new muscles kind of makes sense, even though it’s hard for Mark to get used to at first.

What doesn’t make sense is how much strength these muscles actually contain.

The first casualty is Mark’s apartment doorknob. You go to open it one day after visiting the lab and it just… fucking… twists all the way around. Mark finds himself staring at a doorknob in your hand and an open door with a hole in it.

You squeeze your eyes shut and sigh heavily. Mark rubs a hand over his face. “Mei is going to kill me,” he groans.

The two of you spend five panicked hours fixing the doorknob instead of working on the research paper and Wilson’s lab report. When Mei comes home, she doesn’t notice anything (which really is a miracle), but from that day on, whenever the doorknob squeaks or stalls or does anything weird in his vicinity, Mark freezes.

A trail of broken things starts littering your paths. A stapler he pushed down too hard. His locker door, which now has a dent in it. One of your bedroom floorboards, though you hide the crack in the wood under a pile of clothes. Someone’s old MP3 player on the sidewalk literally shatters beneath his feet. Pens, pencils, and highlighters break in your hands. No one wants to lend either of you supplies anymore, so he becomes more vigilant about his own.

Oh, you also “accidentally” step on Flash’s calculus binder, flattening the metal rings and breaking the covers. But you don’t regret that.

It’s like he’s a toddler again, hiding broken toys or messily fixing them with scotch tape and glue. The only difference is now, he uses duct tape and superglue and is somehow even worse at hiding things than before.

Mark starts putting away all of his and Mei’s valuables into high-up cabinets with the excuse of keeping them safe from his clumsiness. He advises you to do the same. Eventually, you two learn to control your strength and the number of things you break slowly dwindles to zero.

Of course, there are accidents. One time in PE, you run the mile a little too fast (which is an understatement – you beat everyone else in your group, which has never happened before), and now Coach wants you to join the track team. Then Mark squeezes a glass buret a little too hard in chemistry one day and the thing just fucking shatters onto the table. While he hastily grabs the broom and starts sweeping up the pieces, you tell Ms. Wilson he accidentally dropped it while Flash keeps insisting that he saw Mark snap it with his bare hands.

Ms. Wilson might vehemently dislike you and Mark, but she now thinks Flash is insane. The one spot of joy Mark now finds in chemistry comes from Ms. Wilson narrowing her eyes at Flash whenever he says something remotely stupid, like she’s thinking of sending him to the school psychologist.

After all, who would accuse spindly, nerdy Mark of having the strength to shatter a reinforced glass tube in his palm?

He’s never particularly liked the stereotype people placed him in, but now he’s pretty thankful for it.

. . .

Three: he has reflexes sharper than he’s ever had before.

It’s not the same as, say, having his senses enhanced. They are enhanced – both of you can see clearly without glasses, he can hear things he’s never been able to before, and his nose wrinkles at smells no one else can detect. Sometimes it’s overwhelming and he has to duck into a quiet shop to escape the bustling noise of New York City.

But this new sixth sense reflex thing? It’s different.

It isn’t fake. Like, Mark could say he’s developed a sixth sense for when Flash wants to be a little shit, meaning he hears when Flash snorts or shuffles around in the back and knows to duck his head.

But this?

Mark first realizes it a few weeks after the spider bite. He’s minding his own business, talking with his friends before class, when Flash decides to be stupid and throw an apple at his head.

Mark doesn’t see Flash. He doesn’t see the apple. He doesn’t hear any swoosh of wind or feel anything in the air. But something in his head screams DANGER DANGER DANGER and he whips himself away from the apple, which smacks into his locker.

The hall falls awkwardly silent as Mark tries to process what just happened.

He didn’t even notice Flash’s arm or the apple. He didn’t see it, didn’t hear it, didn’t feel it. But somehow, he knew something was wrong. He knew to duck away.

You recover a few seconds later. “What the fuck, Flash?” Then you pick up the apple, throw it back with far more force, and the hall descends into its normal levels of chaos. You all go to class, but in his peripheral vision, Mark can see you raising an eyebrow at him.

“What was that with Flash?” you ask later, when you two have boarded the train home. “I know you didn’t see that apple coming. Your back aas completely to him.”

Mark shrugs. “I just felt… I don’t know, really. I didn’t see him or hear anything. Just, something in my brain screamed danger and I just kind of moved.”

You look around, making sure nobody is paying attention. “Spider thing again?” you whisper.

“Maybe?”

For the next week or so, nothing happens that would trigger whatever the hell that was again. Mark makes sure to keep everyone he talks in sight, not allowing anyone to get behind him or to surprise him. He only ducked away that first time, but is surprised again, he has a feeling that his reactions could be a lot worse the next time. Like more violent.

The two of you are walking home from the lab when you hear scuffling in a nearby alley. Common sense tells Mark to keep walking, but as you two pass by, he can’t help but look. You stop walking too.

It’s a mugging, but the muggers clearly don’t have a lot of experience. Sure, they’re in a mostly-empty place, but the sun’s barely gone down and they’re trying to get money from a teenage girl who probably doesn’t have much on her. But one of the two has a gun.

He should just walk past and ignore it. Things like this happen all the time. Cops would just escalate the situation, and he’s too weak to help much.

The realization hits him with a jolt. But he isn’t weak anymore.

Mark feels your gaze on him and he turns to meet it. You raise an eyebrow, cocking your head slightly toward the alley. He nods.

He’s always been light on his feet, but the spider bite seems to have made him almost soundless as he steps into the alley. The muggers don’t notice either of you at first, they’re too focused on their crying victim.

It happens quickly. You dart behind the unarmed man and pull him into a chokehold. His partner has fast reflexes though and immediately aims the gun at Mark.

DANGER DANGER DANGER DANGER –

Mark drops to the ground seconds before the bullet sinks into the wall behind him.

Together, you subdue the men, leaving them groaning by the side of the street. Under the blanket of darkness that’s now fallen, Mark crushes the gun with his shoe, hoping nobody is paying attention to the dark object under his feet or the cracking noises. The girl thanks you effusively and runs off, and the two of you head on home.

This is what gets him thinking. You two are strong now, sticky, and have a sort of sixth sense for imminent danger.

It terrifies him to think of it, but the more he does, the more it makes sense.

You guys could keep doing this. Patrol the city, help people get around safely. Everyone knows the NYPD and the justice system aren’t shit. They couldn’t charge the drunk kid with a rich daddy who killed your parents. They couldn’t find the thief who shot his uncle. People will keep committing crimes, and the NYPD won’t be able to stop them.

But maybe, just maybe, Mark thinks, you could.

. . . . .

Mark is the one who brings up using your newfound skills – you refuse to call them powers, that’s just a step too far – for the good of the neighborhood.

“Think about it,” he says, looking at his hands. His face is pale, but he keeps going. “We have these, uh, enhanced abilities. Remember how we helped that girl get away from the muggers? What if we could do that for more people?”

You’re usually the brash one in most situations, but here, you take a step back. “There’s a lot of things to think about if we want to do that, Mark.” You chew your lips, thinking. “We can’t get caught, or else we could get arrested too. We need to be able to get away quickly and without injury, or Johnny or Mei will find out. We can’t afford a lot of hospital bills, either. We would need to move fast. Really fast.”

Mark nods. “I know. It’s just…” He looks at his hands again. His fingers are just as slim and graceful as they used to be, but both of you know the strength that now lies within them. “I don’t feel right, being able to help people but not doing it. You know.” He looks at you, and though his face is pale and his voice a little shaky, he’s resolute. “You and I have always tried to help people whenever we could.”

There’s bitterness there and you echo it, remembering the inept, corrupt legal system that couldn’t even bring justice to your family. The same law enforcement that couldn’t bring justice to Mark’s.

You could help prevent that. You could prevent the crimes in the first place, find the criminals and tie them up for the police to put away. Help make sure no one else has to deal with what you and Mark went through.

“Okay.” You rest your chin on your fist. “All right. Let’s say we hypothetically do this. We need to be able to mask ourselves as much as possible, keep our DNA away from the scene. This can only happen when Johnny and Mei are doing late shifts, so they don’t catch on.”

“First aid,” Mark adds. “We’ll probably get into scrapes and things. But we’ll also need to be able to immobilize the criminals and get away fast…”

Silence falls as you start thinking. Ropes are bulky and get heavy. Chains are even worse. Carrying them around would slow you down, so there’s no point. What you need is something lightweight and sticky, but strong.

An idea begins to form in your mind. You and Mark volunteer in labs at a nearby university. Professor Wang in the organic chemistry lab is really chill and lets you perform experiments with polymers and stuff he doesn’t need anymore. Mark works in mechanical engineering with Professor Tuan, who lets him build things out of scrap plastic and metal.

Spider bites.

Spider webs.

You could create synthetic webs, while Mark could make something that lets you shoot them out. There’ll be a lot of test trials and you’ll need to find an empty space for that, but if it works?

It’ll be so worth it.

Your mind races with possibilities. You could immobilize criminals, stick them to walls or the ground. You could stopper guns, or at least slow bullets down. You could trip people up with webs on their legs, keep them from punching or shooting with some on their arms.

And you could swing from buildings, which solves the travel problem.

“I have an idea,” you say. Mark raises an eyebrow.

A smirk grows on your face. “But we’re going to need to work on your fear of heights first.”

. . . . .

Mark thinks he’s going to have a heart attack, and he’s not even the one jumping first.

The two of you have taken a day off to go to Central Park – not for fun or anything (well, you insist it’ll be fun. Mark has other opinions), but to test out the strength of your web fluid. You’ve already done some trial runs with inanimate objects and you think it’s strong enough to hold both yours and Mark’s body weights, but you need to check.

Mark wants to argue that you have the rest of summer break to check, but you insist on doing it as early as possible. “We need time to fix mistakes,” you point out. “Plus, the earlier we finish this, the earlier we can... start doing stuff.”

He can’t exactly argue with that.

The web shooters are working well, Mark is finally thankful to say. Every single time he remembers the first test trial, he wants the earth to just open up and accept him into the void.

(He didn’t realize just how strongly the shooter would actually eject your “webs.” He also didn’t know how to aim very well. Long story short, you got a glob of polymers right to the face and Mark consequently wanted to die right then and there. The ensuing purple bruise on the side of your face made you the subject of several kinky jokes on Flash’s end.

They stopped when you picked up his new calculus binder and hit him over the head with it.

At least you found out the webs were indeed sticky enough.)

“I’m going!” you yell, startling Mark from his thoughts. You’re at least twelve feet up in a tree in Central Park, looking determinedly at a sturdy branch poking out from another trunk around ten feet away. Mark’s heart flips when he sees how high up you are.

Jesus Christ. Twelve feet, and he already feels like he’s going to start screaming.

What’s going to happen when he possibly has to swing off a building?

With shaking hands, Mark holds up his phone, fingers poised over the record button on the camera app. For whatever reason, you’d insisted on recording each “trial” like it was an actual laboratory test. Mark just goes along with it.

“Ready?” he yells.

“Yeah!”

He presses the record button.

For a second, you stand on your branch, staring steadily ahead. Then you raise your right arm, shoot a line of webbing to the next tree trunk, and leap.

Mark’s breath catches.

A screeching yelp tears itself from your throat as you swing through the air, using your momentum to rise back up and land neatly on the tree branch. Mark holds his breath as you wobble back and forth slightly, then drop into a steadier crouch. He sighs in relief and stops the video.

“Holy shit!” You climb down the tree and run over. “Holy shit! That was so fucking cool, Mark!”

“I’m sure,” he replies in a faint voice, looking at the tree you leapt from.

Twelve feet. It’s just twelve fucking feet, not like the monstrosity that is Trump Tower. It’s not even as high as his apartment building.

And yet he still wants to die.

Fucking acrophobia. Mark squeezes his eyes shut and forces himself to take a breath.

Your hand goes to rest on his shoulder. “Hey, Mark.”

He looks at you.

“If you’re really not ready today, it’s fine.” The excitement in your eyes is gone, replaced by calm concern. “We can do this another day. Or we can figure out another option closer to the ground.”

God, what did Mark even do to deserve a friend like you? Even after all the work you put in to making the synthetic webs – a stroke of genius, by the way – you’re willing to put it all aside for him. Just for him.

He steels himself. “I’m good. I’m fine.” He flashes you something resembling a smile and starts hauling himself into the tree. “I can do this,” he mumbles once he’s on the branch.

Then he looks down and almost throws up.

Placing a hand on the tree trunk, he looks away and forces himself to take a deep breath. He’s fine. He’ll be fine. He trusts in his web shooter to be accurate. He trusts in your webs to be strong enough.

He trusts that even if he falls, you won’t let him get far. He trusts that you’ll keep him safe.

“Ready?” you yell. Mark looks down again to nod, but the world isn’t spinning anymore. He locks his eyes onto the tree you jumped into and aims his web shooter.

“Ready!” he yells back. Faintly, he hears the beeping noise that signals the start of the recording.

Thwip. Web fluid shoots out and latches onto the branch. Before he can lose his nerve, he jumps.

A yell rips from his throat as he hurtles to the ground. Air rushes past his face as he swings his body up, up, until the branch is in view and he can plant his feet against it, using the last of his momentum to pull himself up. He wobbles a bit, then plants his arm against the tree trunk to steady himself.

He gasps shakily. The ground still looks so small from here, but the drop feels a fraction less frightening than it used to be. He takes one more deep breath, then starts to slowly climb down the tree.

As soon as he reaches the ground, you race over and engulf him in a strong hug. “You did it, Mark!” you all but yell into his ear. “You did it!”

Despite himself, Mark lets out a trembling bout of laughter, hugging you as close as he can. “Holy shit,” he mumbles, drinking in the steadiness that you bring to him. “Holy fuck.”

The two of you spend the rest of the afternoon in the secluded spot, leaping from the tallest trees you can find for longer and longer distances. You take notes as Mark pulls the sticky but mostly solidified web fluid from the branches, analyzing how some of them seem to have solidified and cracked a little under stress. “They need a little more flexibility,” you tell him as the two of you pile the web fluid into a bag. You think you can recycle it to make more. “With the adjustments you make on the shooters, I think they’ll be even better next time.”

“Yeah.” It’s all Mark can say. As he sits down next to you on the subway, he suddenly feels so drained and tired that he automatically slumps and places his head on your shoulder.

A small, surprised laugh sounds next to his ear, and he feels your hand go up to pat his head. “You did great today,” you murmur.

He smiles. In that moment, while your hand continues stroking his hair, he feels like he could do anything.

Anything for the world.

Anything for you.

[alder-reid]

Part III.

Judas.

The Village. The nearby prep school. The Career Academy. 

He was being given his own command. He wasn’t stupid, he knew having his face attached to such a move would make a powerful statement, but it was still everything he’d been asking for, right?

It was an essential capture, they told him. The final network points that would knock down all the safeguards to the crown jewel of District 2, their military center tucked into a hollowed out mountain nearby. This would be the turning point for everything.

When this had all started, when he’d first been thrown into the Games, it all felt so easy to determine who was good, who was bad, who deserved mercy and who didn’t. The Capitol and Career districts in its lap were the enemy. Those from outer Districts who thought like him were allies. 

But then he’d fallen in love with Maverick. Gotten attached to Cain. The Santoses always had his back, even when they had every reason to not. Even some of the stylists and escorts and other Capitol citizens he’d encountered in the past two years weren’t even so bad, some were even caring and kind, just so naive and sheltered from reality in the districts that they truly didn’t understand. 

The village, the schools, those places would be filled with those sorts of people. Filled with their children. Career children, but still children. Some could get hurt, even die. While he knew many more would at the hands of the Games if they failed, it still bothered him. Did they have to be the sacrifice? Did that make it right?

He didn’t smoke, but he envied Maverick’s habit of it in this moment, pacing the roof of the hospital when he was supposed to be sleeping. Alder itched for some sort of physical comfort to stop the trembling in his hands and near constant flow of anxiety through his veins. He looked over to the line of mountains rising up at the edge of District Two, the foggy glow of light somewhere just behind it that he knew was light from the Capitol. Where Maverick was. Where Maverick was alive.

He wished he was here to the point his chest felt like it was going to cave in with grief.

“What do I do?” he asked aloud, voice breaking, as if the wind might whisper to him the answer. What would Maverick do? What would Mom and Dad do? Someone tell me, what should I do?

Tears burned in his eyes, he looked back to his feet. His parents. Would they be proud of him? Disappointed in him? Would he be failing them if he didn’t go through with this?

They’re talking about doing this to children, the voice in the back of his mind reminded him in answer. Just like you were when everything happened to you. 

The thought took him by surprise-- he didn’t know when he’d stopped thinking of himself as a child, a lost teenager, and when he’d started thinking of himself as an adult. As a man.

The people who had killed his parents had been under orders. He had been under orders when he’d blown up the lab that had cost Olympia’s mother her life. But it didn’t have to be that way again, and he refused to accept that the only path to ending the Games had to be in them becoming the same monsters that had cast him into this fight. If they did this, where did the cycle of revenge stop? There had to be another way. 

He couldn’t convince them to change their mind. He’d tried on smaller matters, and he knew that any power he now held at the commanding table was purely for optics. He wouldn’t be surprised if they wanted to film him burning down the Victor’s Village themselves. If they had been set on this strategy for months now, if they accepted the capture and torture of their own and a strategy of disregard for those who weren’t, there wasn’t anything Alder could say to change things from inside. They’re children. If he didn’t stop this, they’d lose everything like he had. Worse, they might turn out like him.

That made the decision for him, didn’t it? He only paused at his bedroll to gather his few items into a backpack, zipping his black hoodie all the way up and tugging his hood over his head. He wrapped the scarf he usually used to cover his face during missions around his neck. If he needed, he could sink half of his face into the fabric to obscure it. It wasn’t even hard to sneak out-- he knew the watch changes and where he could slip away unnoticed. There’d be fifteen minutes until someone wondered why he hadn’t come for his shift yet. That was more than enough time.

Once in the streets, he didn’t know exactly where to go, simply turned to walk toward the mountains. He followed the network of roads spiraling to the outer reaches of the District Center’s boundaries, where Maverick had once told him a few quarries were tucked against the foothills. 

The sky behind him was brightening to lilac by the time he found what he was looking for, a few beaten up transportation trucks along a road to one of these quarries. It took a few tries, but eventually he found a driver going toward the Capitol that morning with a load of polished granite. Alder unzipped his bag, removing a wad of cash he’d kept hidden for the past two months, all he had left. Anything else important or traceable had been left at home. 

The man counted it up, asked if Alder had any more. When he shook his head, he sighed, and pocketed the cash. For a moment, Alder was afraid he was going to take it and force him to leave-- or worse-- but instead he opened up the passengers side door and waved him in. “Just be quiet.”

He got some sleep during the bumpy ride into the mountains, unable to resist the lull of the open road and the insistent pull of the constant exhaustion from daily missions. Shaken awake by a hand on his shoulder, he blinked as the midafternoon sun glared through the windshield and directly into his eyes. “Buck stops here kid. Can’t take you any further.” He thanked him and slid out through the side door, squinting around him as his eyes adjusted and he emerged from the fog of sleep. He didn’t recognize where he was, but it didn’t matter-- he was in the Capitol, he recognized the crisp, thin air and the way the mountains cradled the nest of skyscrapers on the horizon ahead. Tucked behind a few other buildings, he recognized the Tribute Tower, glimmering spectacularly in the golden autumn sunshine.

He left the transportation stop on foot, walking up unfamiliar streets. This far out, things were more middle class, a part of the Capitol he’d never seen before, but reminded him of the area Maverick’s tiny apartment used to be. Finally, at the end of a street, he found what he was looking for: a Peacekeeper station. He pushed open the glass doors, an officer turning toward him with a tired expression from a desk a few feet away. “Yes?” Alder took off the hood, pulled his scarf away from his face. 

“My name is Alder Reid. I’m here to talk with the President. I want to make a deal.”

***

The confusion the Peacekeeper had experienced would have been almost comical if Alder hadn’t been actively trying to not pass out. He held his expression as neutral while the Peacekeeper with a large belly and nearly purple face fumbled with a phone, trying to explain what had just happened. As he did it, Alder resisted every instinct to take advantage of the flustered moment to bolt out of the station and disappear into the woods. The only thing keeping him rooted to his plan was Maverick, the mantra he’d taken to of Maverick is alive, Maverick is alive, Maverick is alive. So long as Maverick breathed, he’d always come back for him, and he’d become more certain than ever that the Black Eagles were going to let him die.

Eventually, he was moved from a holding cell in the small station with a little more fanfare, handcuffed and blindfolded for transport somewhere else. He complied with it all. What he hadn’t bargained for was the second cell. 

This one was sealed tight save for a small, glass window on the door looking out into the hallway beyond. At first, he figured this was temporary until he could speak to someone.

Then several hours passed. The night. A day. Two. Three. Four. The only sign of others was a friend’s face through the glass window in the cell across from his own.

He was given little food and water through a slot in the door, just enough to survive. After the first day had passed, he had thought that maybe they were trying to make sure things checked out, that he’d come alone. The second, he’d thought maybe Battenberg was somewhere else. After the third and fourth, it dawned on him that he was a fucking idiot.

How could he have possibly thought they’d negotiate with him? He was a known traitor, a public face of the Black Eagles, and he’d fucking walked into the Captiol and handed himself in. He might as well have walked into the city center, handed a Peacekeeper a gun, and staged his own public execution.

On the fifth day, he was jolted awake as the door was opened to his cell, light flooding in. He sat upright, a line of Peacekeepers parting to reveal a woman, dressed in a clean, black suit and platinum hair slicked back into a strict bun at the back of her head. When she spoke, her voice was clear and her enunciation of each word precise.

“Good evening, Alder. We are prepared to negotiate. Follow me.” *** His terms were clear. Information for Addy and Maverick. The woman laughed, informed him that was not how this would go. That he held no cards. He had been prepared for that answer, but it had made his skin go clammy regardless.  They talked. Bartered. But even has they did, Alder realized that he didn’t have the leverage he really wanted-- he was a prisoner here too. He wondered why they hadn’t tried torturing information out of him yet. He feared it was because they’d already gotten it from Maverick.

Maverick and Addy, he kept insisting. Maverick and Addy back, we all walk free for information. She finally stepped away, consulting with someone for a few minutes outside of the room. When she returned, she sat down, fingers folded and lips turned to a scowl. One. You get one of them so long as you agree to my non-negotiable term. You choose.

He stared back at her. No. No, she couldn’t do this, she couldn’t put this choice on him. Her one non-negotiable, as sinister as it was, he was prepared to accept. It would only affect him. But choosing? How the fuck was he supposed to do that?! When he didn’t respond, she stood. “I’ll give you some time.” Once he was alone, he put his head down on the cold metal table, not caring that he was probably being watched. If he wasn’t dehydrated, hungry, exhausted, he would have cried, but he had no energy for it. Instead, he stared at silvery surface, the way his breath fogged it then faded with each unsteady breath. He was saving innocent lives by doing this. He was only giving away information about the attacks he didn’t agree with, the ones on the Academy, the Village, the school. The ones that would kill innocent kids. He wondered why they weren’t torturing this out of him. Maybe they knew he’d be indifferent. He’d come toe to toe with the Capitol’s threat of death before, he’d spat in its face and waited for it to claim him readily. Maybe they knew he was too fucking eager to be a martyr if given the opportunity. Maybe they knew he saw it as the easiest out. Maybe they knew killing him would pour fuel onto the fires of rebellion.

He wanted to believe he was doing this for a greater good, and maybe part of him really believed it. But another part of him, undeniable and dark, knew it was because he couldn’t live if anything happened to Maverick or Addy, he’d do anything it took to protect them. He couldn’t possibly survive if he knew that this war he’d pulled them both into was the reason either was dead. He barely got up in the morning as it was after what he’d done to Addy. He loved them both. 

How was he expected to fucking choose? 

Addy, his family when he’d had none, the sister he’d found in the darkest of places. The person he’d have never survived his first months out of the Arena without. The only person who seemed to ever take him exactly as he was without needing explanation or reasoning. The person he’d already betrayed, who suffered every day because of him. Someone he owed a debt, someone who never asked to be involved in any of this, someone who, more than anyone else, deserved a bright, full life back home and safe. Maverick, his best friend, his partner, someone he’d move the mountains for. Maverick had shown him love he didn’t know existed. Now he was here, suffering for it, tortured for it. They’d shown him the x-ray of the bullet an inch from his spine, and while Alder knew he should doubt its authenticity, in his gut he knew it was real. He’d signed up for this, but Alder didn’t know if he could live without him. He couldn’t possibly leave him at the hands of this woman either.

He couldn’t help but remember that neither would be in this mess if it weren’t for him. If Alder had died in the Arena like he was supposed to. Finally, the woman returned. Alder sat up straight, trying to force a breath in, then out. 

“I’ve decided.

We live in a bad world. I don’t think anyone’s hands are clean.

[impishnature]

Hell Hath No Fury

Number two! Look at me! I can do this! <3 Imptober Prompts so far 

AO3 Fandom: Good Omens Rating: T+ Prompt: Kidnapped Summary: Warlock is in trouble. And Nanny will not stand for it. 

.

"How? How could they have let this happen?"

The pacing had been going on for a while now. Small heels clicked on marble flooring, over and over. Snap snap snap. If the very ground beneath her feet had burst into flames with her fury neither of them would have been surprised, each drag of her heels a spark of wrath that only added to the burning embers raging through her entire mildly shaking form. 

As it was, the floor seemed hard pressed to refuse the gouging lines she was trying to physically force into them with every sharp step.

"Crowley-"

"Don't Crowley me, Francis." Ashtoreth snarled, spinning toward her companion, a whirlwind of emotion and fluttering skirts. "You're as angry as I am."

"Quite." 

She blinked at the blatant admission, fury momentarily forgotten in a puff of cold shock. She took a second to look him over, note the ice that sat within his gaze, the stone sharp gravel in the rumble from his throat and the tight tremor in his fist. His was a cold anger, the storm that froze all beneath his stare, but he was doing his best to reign it in. 

After all, it wouldn't do for the gardener to rant and rave, it wasn't his place.

And he was so good at playing his part. 

A Nanny, however, was allowed to be beside herself. She'd probably even be permitted to be a little bit hysterical whilst the parents were not looking... but as it was she wanted to be neither of those things.

She wanted heads to roll. And she refused to stand idly by, waiting for others to make it happen.

"But we cannot move, Cr-Ashtoreth." Francis's eyes turned softer, his gaze concerned as he patted the seat beside him. "We're already under suspicion, everyone in the house is. Until the young master is found we must sit and wait-"

"We already know where he is!" Her voice was punctuated by the crack of her umbrella against the ground, enough force to make the marble groan and dent beneath her iron will. The drone of voices in the nearby room hushed and Francis couldn't help but make quick shushing hand gestures, glancing between her and the doorway. "There's already a ransom." Ashtoreth's face took on a twisted dark smile, disbelieving and repulsed in equal measures, even as she lowered her tone to placate him. "One day." She held a finger up accusingly. "Just one day we let them look after their own kid without our intervention and this happens." 

"That's not entirely fair." The words were asinine at best, and at least said with such hollow sincerity that she had no issue with ripping them apart.

"Oh? Is that why you're so stoic all of a sudden? You don't blame them, you blame us?"

Ashtoreth didn't really know what she was aiming for, only that she was in pain and she wanted him to be in just as much pain as she was.

One defeated look from Francis though was enough to make her wish she hadn't, even if she couldn't back down entirely. 

It was a look that said he was aching just as much as her.

That he blamed himself more than anyone else in the world.

And she felt it too, that awful twisting, gnawing guilt but also the vicious harsh reality of the situation that it wasn't fair.

Parents were meant to love their children, protect them no matter the costs.

But at least one of the parents they were employed by seemed hellbent on forgetting his family existed even when they were right in front of him until it was too late.

It shouldn't have been this easy, this simple- they'd never had any issues when they'd looked after him.

"You do, don't you?" She took a step back, resting slowly on her umbrella as she gave him an appraising look. "One day off. That's all we've taken in years. We both needed to report in with our respective management. They should have been able to look after him for. One. Day." 

"They don't know they're dealing with the antichrist."

His eyes said it all. We lost him. We misplaced the antichrist. 

No one else. 

Us.

But that wasn't fair.

And it did not help the matter at hand.

"This has nothing to do with that and you know it. This is bog-standard human idiocy and cruelty. No Angels or Demons needed for that." Ashtoreth's expression soured, a bitter taste at the back of her throat as she continued, disbelief and disgust colouring her voice. "Kidnapping a child to get at the father." The next words came out in a much harsher mutter, more hiss than words and more bite than bark. "A father who doesn't deserve him."

"Crowley." There was far more warning there than there ought to be as far as she was concerned.

Luckily, she never was very good at listening to warnings.

"It's true- and you know not to call me that, Angel." Ashtoreth cursed at the raised eyebrow she got in return, that look that called her a hypocrite without actually saying anything at all. "This isn't helping." She knew her voice was becoming desperate, pleading in a way that would normally fill her with shame, but there was no space inside her narrow frame to hold any more emotion than she was already dealing with. "We know where he is, what's stopping us from just-"

"We can't." Francis stood up, gripping her shoulders tightly but gently, a soft shake to try and drag her back into the reality they faced together. "You know we can't get involved. If we get involved, management on both sides will find out. How will we explain all of this? What will happen then?" His eyes tried to catch hers, moving this way and that but she refused to give him the satisfaction. He gave up with a sigh. "They'll decide we're not up to the task, that's what will happen. And then they'll get others to look after him." He tried to pull her closer, but she refused to budge. "You know that can't happen, deep down under all this anger. We can't let that happen and it will if we-"

She pulled out of his grasp, cutting him off as she pushed his hand aside. "I can't. I can't just- not again. Not this time. I've sat and watched too many things happen before and I refuse to do it again." Her eyes gleamed, locking with his in determination and even though she could feel them welling up she refused to cry in front of him, even in anger. "I don't care if this is part of some ineffable plan- some- some divine intervention or pure fucking coincidence- I will not stand by and let him get hurt. Not now. Not ever."

Francis stared at her, eyes wide and mouth slightly agape in shock. Of course he was startled by her venom, this was a job, after all; that's all it should be for either of them. 

But it was also so much more.

They'd lived through so much and seen so much and she'd be damned if she carried on letting God hold all the cards.

"Of course not." The words were soft, understanding flowing through them in a way it hadn't before. Then came a small nod of approval- acceptance, perhaps even a little bit of pride- and it was all she needed to take a few more steps back, breaking what was left of the hold that kept her at bay. "Of course you can't." 

She turned her gaze away from him, unable to stand the sad smile glimmering in his vision, the eyes that saw through her, saw what she tried to hide, knew her more than she'd ever allowed anyone to be. 

But he'd been there too. Seen the ark, the wars, the suffering- the innocents who didn't deserve their fates. 

But not this little boy. 

Not this time.

This time she could make a difference.

"If one hair is- If they have hurt that child in any way there will be nothing left but ashhh when I am done with them." Her forked tongue was making an appearance and she swallowed down the urge to change, to tear the world apart in search of her boy.

Francis nodded, eyes already darting about as he tried to come up with a plan of action. "I'll do what I can to keep the peace here. No one will even know you're gone. Just be careful- and quick. Hopefully, it won't take too many miracles for us to pull this off and if we're careful no one will be any the wiser." He frowned thoughtfully, fingers tapping nervously. "At least us being separated should help with that."

"Oh, don't worry." Ashtoreth grinned, a vicious wide snarl that showed too many teeth and stretched too far across her cheeks. "I'm not planning on using that much influence on them."

Francis raised an eyebrow. "Aren't you going to change at least?"

"No, I think I look perfect for this particular mission."

~~~

Miles away, in a small unremarkable building, surrounded by police, with each window manned by an unscrupulous kidnapper, the ringleader would come to find that a rather large oversight had been made.

If anyone were able to ask him what exactly had happened that day, he would have to say that despite their fortifications, the back door had been found mysteriously and rather irresponsibly unlocked.

The creak of the floorboards and the clack of small heels would be the only warning any of those in the building had to what would befall them in the next few moments. Before a striking red headed lady in a long black dress walked into the main room with little fanfare as if she hadn't just wandered calmly and obliviously into a hostage situation.

"Who the fuck are you? And what are you doing here?"

"Oh, where are my manners." The lady smiled, though it was the kind of smile more suited for a predator staring at prey than a seemingly unarmed lady surrounded by guns. 

"I'm here for my Godchild." 

~~~

Francis hovered fretfully, only a few hours since her departure. He had heard the news- a team of special operatives had managed to surround the building and break in, pushing forward until the kidnappers gave up their hostage. It all seemed too good to be true, and if he was honest, rather reckless to put the hostage at risk in such a manner.

But then again, he knew a manipulation of reality when he saw one, and at least it was only a small demonic miracle to get the police to believe they had been the ones to save the boy instead of what had actually happened.

He assumed that the assailants would also assume that they had been brought in by the police, though the brutality they no doubt had faced at Ashtoreth's hands might be a lot harder to explain away. Perhaps they had fought back... no doubt she would tell him exactly what had taken place when they had a chance. 

For now, however, he just waited with bated breath as a familiar head of red hair came into view, a small boy wrapped up safe and sound in her arms as she slowly walked down the garden path to the back door of the house.

He quickly did his part. He'd kept the family and police calm, kept them out of Ashtoreth's way while she worked until he'd had the signal that she was on her way back. And now he cleaned up. As far as any of those in the house knew, Warlock had been brought home a while ago, they'd had their tearful reunion with him and now he was being quietly settled by his diligent Nanny, to make sure that he wasn't too traumatised by the entire event.

Perhaps it was a bit malicious to not actually let them have their tearful reunion... but he couldn't say that the denial wasn't a little bit deserved too.

A little bit of divine punishment, if you will. 

He opened the door for her, quickly beckoning her in before closing it just as abruptly, locking out the world from their small bubble if only for a moment. "How is he? Is he alright?"

"He's sleeping." The anger seemed to have abated now, a much softer, warmer simmer to her entire appearance as she cradled him against her shoulder, her words cooing and placating. "It's been a long day but he seemed to think it was all one big adventure." She gave him a sidelong look. "So if my management does for some reason ask, that's what I'll tell them. I took him on an excursion and showed him what he was capable of."

Francis blanched. "He didn't actually see-"

"Of course not." She rolled her eyes at him. "No ones going to hurt him, let alone me." She continued to rock him, humming softly. "He's too young to see... all that." Her smile turned sharp again, grim satisfaction gleaming in her eyes.

Francis shivered. No doubt she had left her mark and the kidnappers would renounce their ways if they knew what was good for them. "G-good. Well, everything is sorted here. You needn't worry about anyone taking him off your hands for a bit." 

Ashtoreth blinked at him blankly for a moment, before glancing down at the boy in her arms. It seemed to dawn on her then that if the parents had tried to take him from her, she might have fought them tooth and claw. She sniffed, standing straighter in a haughty attempt at dignity. "I don't know what you're talking about, gardener. But, I think I should get Master Warlock up to bed. It's been such a long day, we shouldn't disturb his sleep."

Francis smiled, a knowing look that made her scowl deeper as she stalked past him. "Of course. You always know what's best, Ashtoreth."

"Of course I do. I'm his Nanny."

~~~

The next day was a whirlwind of an affair.

The media hounded the door, trying every underhanded method to be the first to get an interview. Security was tightened, meetings were held, and droves of people, relatives, friends, work partners, appeared out of the woodwork to check up on the family- or at least be seen doing so.

That was the crux of it all, Francis couldn't help but think, as the pair sat by and watched the humans do their little dances, the little rituals repeating over and over again. Anything to make sure they were seen, make sure they were heard, each one of them there for reasons that the two of them found distasteful and unremarkable as they instead kept their eyes on what was important- the small boy running around as if nothing had even happened the day before.

Or at least, mostly acting like nothing had happened.

You see, the young boy had a rather interesting story to tell to every new person he was introduced to. 

Each time his parents called him over, only to parade him in front of people to prove that he was alright, they would be treated all over again to the show. They would stand with amused, affectionate smiles that didn't quite reach their eyes as he would grin and wave his arms around, proudly remarking that his Nanny had come to get him from the bad people. 

The adults would laugh, the kind of endearing laughter that adults did when a child was being ridiculous and they had more important things to be discussing and off Warlock would run, back to his games until the next time he was called on to be their pride and joy. 

But his story never changed, no matter how many times he told it.

Nanny had come to bring him home.

She'd always promised him that nothing bad could happen to him, and she'd made good on that promise.

Francis gave Ashtoreth a sidelong glance as they sat on a picnic blanket, propped up against the garden wall as Warlock ran between them and his parents. Ashtoreth kept her eyes on Warlock, acknowledging his glance with only the tilt of her head. It was an unspoken agreement now, that Warlock was always in sight of one of them, neither of them prepared to let anyone else do their job from now on.

"I thought you said he didn't see anything?"

Ashtoreth finally pulled her eyes away from the boy, if only for a moment, to look at him over the top of her glasses, eyes sparkling with mock innocence and mischief. "I said nothing of the sort." 

"You did. You said-"

"I said I didn't let him see any of the violence. That's all." She turned away from him, laughing and shaking her head along with the other adults that looked their way as Warlock yet again retold his tale, an endearing gleam to her eyes that only Francis could see behind her glasses. "Kids say all kinds of impossible things after a traumatic experience, didn't you know?"

Francis smiled, shaking his head as he sat back against the wall. "That they do. That they do."

[nightingaelic]

@shotce​

As soon as Eugenie caught sight of Libby Wen waiting inside the doors of Big Bend Tunnel, she laughed with joy and wrapped her up in a hug. Libby submitted to the display of affection, even joining in with a little chuckle. “Long time, no see, Eugenie. How are you? How’s everyone up at your compound?” 

“Oh, they’re just great, Libby, and I’m glad to hear you ask.” Eugenie released the guard and straightened her ushanka. “I’m good, too. Better now that you’re at the helm, Kieran ‘n’ I had a rough run last time.” 

“So I’ve heard.” 

“Yep, he’s takin’ a break for a bit to go visit his family and nurse that arm of his.” Eugenie shifted the pack on her shoulders and sighed regretfully. “Honestly, the man deserves it. He’s been good to me, even if he’s about as fun to talk to as a pile of scorchbeast guano.” 

Libby nodded. “Bet you a drink he’ll be back too early, as usual. He just can’t stay away.” 

“Well, neither can I.” Eugenie’s black eyes sparkled. “Shall we get moving? Deadlines, expected shipments, all that.” 

“Right.” Libby raised her shotgun and turned to the other guards, a pack of part-timers looking for a quick cap. “Fall in! Same objective as always: Keep the brahmin safe while en route to the west end of the tunnel. Expect armed resistance, we always get some.” 

“Same load as usual, premium arms and ammo headed up to the settlers crazy enough to colonize the Savage Divide,” Eugenie added. “Same reward at the end of the tunnel too, so keep us all in one piece and we won’t have a problem. And keep an eye out for anything we might’ve dropped on the last run, you get a bonus for those.” 

“Everyone watch our back and flanks.” Libby slapped the closest brahmin on rump, and the caravan began to move. They made their way up to the watch station, where another guard was waiting to welcome them. 

“Libby and Eugenie, together at last,” the gas-masked guard said, before growing too cocky and adding a wolf whistle. “I pity the Blood Eagle who decides to get on your bad side, ladies.” 

“The only one gettin’ on my bad side so far today is you, ya hooligan,” Eugenie replied with a glare. “Anything to report, or are ya wastin’ the air in here?” 

“Eugenie,” Libby warned, though she was smirking at the merchant’s spirited defense. 

“What? Just protectin’ my best guard from vicious rumors.” 

“There’s uh- it should be pretty clear today,” the masked guard stammered, before turning to face the yawning darkness of the tunnel. 

“That’s what I thought.” Eugenie shot one last withering look at his back before prodding the brahmin to continue. 

“He’s an asshole,” Libby confided, once the caravan was out of earshot of the entrance guard. “Keeps prodding me and Carver about whether we’ve ‘stopped dancing around and gotten down to business.’“ 

“That squirrelly kid you’re usually stuck with? Man, used to be a simple ‘no’ meant ‘no,’ and everyone backed you up on it.” Eugenie shook her head. “Unless you two actually are straying beyond business.” 

“Pffft.” Libby rolled her eyes. “I don’t usually go for the squirrelly ones.” 

“Is he a good partner, at least?” 

“He’s fine. A little green, and I get the sense he’d rather be anywhere else when we actually run into some action.” 

Action reared its head at that moment, when the group interrupted a band of Blood Eagles attempting to set up a blockade. The caravan guards dispatched them quickly, and Libby easily disintegrated the few concrete blocks the assailants had managed to lay down with a small charge. 

“Easy now,” she called to the others when the rubble had cleared. “Don’t let them get the drop on us.” 

“Huh,” Eugenie remarked when they were underway again. “Usually the ‘ghoul merchant’ heralds a louder fanfare. They must be saving their big guns for up ahead.”

Sure enough, the Blood Eagles had gathered their main forces in the high-ceilinged center of the tunnel to block their escape. Libby cursed and emptied shells into every body she saw, while Eugenie whooped and took potshots at the enemies’ captain from behind a pile of sandbags. The caravan managed to beat back the assault with only minor injuries, though the brahmin were as agitated as Libby had ever seen them, lowing nervously and knocking into each other. A part-timer raised the gate the Blood Eagles had constructed, and the supplies train moved forward. 

“I’m always in awe of how much of a professional you are,” Eugenie remarked with an admiring glance at the lead guard. 

“Thank the crew as much as me,” Libby said with a smile. “Drinks all around after our shift today. I know a vault dweller who makes a mean Blackwater Brew knock-off.” 

“How’re your folks doing, Libby? How’s the rest of the Wen crew?” 

“No changes there.” Libby shrugged. “My sister’s getting a little restless, maybe because of the example I’m setting by working out here. Mom would never forgive her if she left, too, but she’s going to have to face that decision sooner or later. I told her she has a place with Blue Ridge, if she wants it and is willing to work for it.” 

Eugenie nodded. “That’s tough. I know what it’s like to decide whether to stay with what you know, what’s safe, versus taking a chance and heading out to see the world.” 

Libby raised her fist suddenly and brought the caravan to a halt. “Watch our six. Something isn’t right here.” 

“Oh, goody.” 

Blood Eagles and their snarling mutts emerged from the shadows in a last-ditch effort to seize the caravan’s goods, and bullets flew. Eugenie pulled Libby backward just in time to avoid a swing from a particularly brave individual’s machete, and Libby ended the attempt on her life with a shotgun blast to the face. “Head for the exit!” she yelled, as soon as there was a lull in the gunfire. “Let’s move, double time!” 

“Make a break for it, people!” Eugenie added. “Go, go, go!” 

The brahmin didn’t need any more prompting, and the cows galumphed their way toward the western entrance as fast as their stumpy legs could carry them. Libby, Eugenie and the others pounded after them, and the light of the Ash Heap fell warm on their faces as more Blue Ridge Caravan Company employees pried the doors open. 

“Well, thank god for that,” Eugenie said in relief, feeling her leather armor up for any punctures. “I’m alive, and I’ve still got wares to sell.” 

“Mission accomplished,” Libby said breathlessly, hanging her shotgun over her back. “Let’s head outside everyone.” 

“Thanks, Libby,” Eugenie added as the two of them brought up the rear. “Like I tell everyone who asks, things always run smoother with you in charge.” 

“You’re a gem, Eugenie. If my shift were over, I’d say let’s grab a drink.” 

In answer, Eugenie pulled a bottle of beer from inside one of her brahmin’s packs and popped the cap off. “Blackwater Brew, like you said. I’m pretty sure you and I know the same vault dweller. And don’t worry, I won’t tell Vinny if you won’t.” 

Libby grinned and drank deeply. “You’re full of surprises, Eugenie.” 

[theroyalmile]

No Returns, No Exchanges

Disclaimer: I have debated for quite a while whether or not I should post this blog.  Social media is such a curated space for joy and happiness, it can feel oppressive at times.  There is so much life-changing positivity, from engagements to new jobs; and don’t get me wrong, that happiness is great to see.  But on the other hand, all of that positivity makes me feel like sharing any kind of negative information is attention-seeking and an immense overshare.  So let’s ask ourselves why I feel that way.  Why is happiness celebrated while the sad, sometimes harsh realities of life are thought to be oversharing?  More specifically, why do we feel like life-changing news can only be shared when it doesn’t make other people uncomfortable?  Our expressions of pain should not be regulated by the comfort levels of the people who surround us.  There comes a time when not sharing something begins to feel like hiding something, and hiding something turns to shame.  That is a feeling that I refuse to welcome into my life right now.  So here we go. 

It has been a while since I posted anything… a really long while.  It has been rare, these past few years, that I have even felt I had anything much to say let alone write anything, mostly because my life has been fairly normal, fairly unextraordinary, and I am rather blessed to be saying that during such a difficult time for so many. The few moments where I have felt like I had something to say have been fleeting, and after a good 2am word vomit on paper, I have filed these musings under “not to be seen by the light of day” which is probably for the best.

 Sometimes in the past I would find myself wishing I had something interesting going on in my life, something worthy of commentary… I don’t know, I was thinking like a cool hobby, an interesting skill, a kick-ass career, or a run in with Tom Hardy like I’d always dreamed of… something.  

 Well, to whoever is in charge, this is not what I meant, and I would like to request a refund. 

 Because as its final parting kick in the ass 2020 decided to gift me with breast cancer.  This isn’t a bad punch line, it’s just the truth.Let me give you a second to process that one.  I certainly needed a few.

 The thing is, a little itty bitty 3-centimeter tumor- that’s not something I can give back, as much as I might want to.  It’s not a too-large sweater you can return with a gift receipt, and it’s not a bad haircut you can complain about and get your money back (though it certainly will include one in a week or so!)

 A lot of you already know this story and frankly it’s not one I can tell with much finesse or humor, so I will keep it brief.  It was a dark and stormy 6pm when I found a lump in my breast in the shower back in November.  My initial thought was “you’re a crazy lady and a hypochondriac, let’s give it a few weeks since this is probably nothing.”   A few weeks, when my imaginary lump seemed to not actually be imaginary, I figured okay, it’s time to see my doctor, it’s probably nothing but we need to make sure.  I was in fact so unconcerned about it that I didn’t even see my regular doctor. I figured I just needed a medical professional to feel me up and let me know what to do next.  I didn’t even bother mentioning it to my parents. (For context of my laissez-faire, when I was 14 I found a lump in my breast that turned out, after little fanfare, to be a cyst which was unceremoniously drained on a cold metal table by a male doctor in a somewhat traumatizing but ultimately benign event.  That’s a longer story for later). 

 Cue a physical exam, confirming I was not crazy and there was a lump, but it was probably nothing; an utltrasound, confirming the lump was a shape that they did not like, but it was probably nothing; and an ultrasound guided biopsy, in which the probably nothing was sampled.  The week between Christmas and New Year’s was spent impatiently waiting for the news, increasingly feeling that my probably nothing was maybe, actually something.

 On December 28 around lunch time I received a phone call in the middle of the work day from the radiologist, who while very nice, was someone I had only met once while she shot a needle in and out of my boob.  She asked me how I was doing and then told me my test results were in.  “I’m sorry to say it’s not good news,” she said.

 And believe it or fucking not my immediate thought was “It’s not good news… it’s great news!” My brain supplied this as if on autopilot like some kind of 90s game show host, knowing fully well that I would not be so lucky because we are not living in a Brooklyn 99 episode.  It’s weird where your brain goes under duress.

 It was one of the most uncomfortable phone calls I have ever had, wherein I found myself trying to reassure a complete stranger that I was okay and I’m pretty sure I even said, “it is what it is.”  I was told a breast surgeon and oncologist from my provider network would be in contact and the call ended. Ultimately, I was diagnosed with Stage 1B Triple Negative Invasive Ductal and Lobular Carcinoma.  No returns, no exchanges.

 I am two months into my diagnosis, and 1/8 of my way through chemotherapy, the first part of a three series treatment (to be followed by surgery and then likely radiation.)  This Friday, after my second chemotherapy treatment, I will begin to lose my hair.  Anyone who knows me at all knows that the hair loss will be a pill likely far harder for me to swallow than the chemo itself.  And while the look may have worked for Demi Moore in GI Jane, I do not have her bone structure, nor her body.  I anticipate I will look more like the yellow peanut M&M, which while obviously the best M&M of the bunch, I think we can all agree is not a cute look for me.

 I do not say this to be melodramatic, I just say this because I am cynical and pragmatic by nature: I am not particularly surprised that I have cancer.  And this is for several reasons, some of which probably deserve a longer blog later.  To put it simply, I have been surrounded by cancer, both by choice and by cruel fate and happenstance, my entire life. 

 Cruel Fate and Happenstance: Having several relatives who have gone through cancer, and a mother with a BRCA 1 genetic mutation (which I had a 50% chance of inheriting, and in fact did) I always figured it would eventually happen to me.  The odds this condition dealt me? “About 13% of women in the general population will develop breast cancer sometime during their lives. By contrast, 55%–72% of women who inherit a harmful BRCA1 variant… will develop breast cancer by 70–80 years of age.”  That 55-72% is the kind of percentage you want winning the lottery, but the lottery this most certainly is not, and that much I understood. So, I always figured something like this would probably happen.  Did I think I would be 28? No. But I figure that just makes me an overachiever. 

 Choice: I volunteered at a cancer support non-profit from the time I was 12 to the time I was 22, and I wrote my college senior thesis in anthropology on women with ovarian cancer, the cancer that killed my aunt Lizzy when I was 4 years old.  I have likely read more books on cancer than your average newly diagnosed person, which I find to be both a blessing and a curse.  On one hand, I know some of what’s coming.  On the other hand, I know some of what’s coming.  Of course I don’t think any of these things gave me cancer but you might say I have been training for this my whole life.  I think this joke is far funnier than pretty much everyone I say it to except my immediate family, because the Tenney/Koss folk are very big on gallows humor, in which case this is hilarious.  Comedy is our family coping mechanism, and I am guilty of occasionally forgetting not everyone is wired like that.   

 So where are we right now? Taking it day by day.  Do I frequently find myself wallowing in self-pity these days? Sure.  But all the same I feel truly lucky.  This is a feeling I am trying to hold on to, because I think the other options might be truly unbearable.  Why? Well, I found this tumor.  I’m 28-years-old, which means I am hardly old enough for a regular mammogram and MRI.  My last yearly physical was a TeleHealth appointment (hence no actual physical) and I will be honest, I never made a habit of regularly checking myself like I should have.  But this tumor just presented itself casually during a shower.  Breast cancer, when caught early, is highly treatable and curable, and I am fairly confident, knock on wood, that is where this particular nightmare is headed.  The fact that it was caught early: pure luck. 

Another reason I feel lucky is for the most part, I feel like I actually have the stability to handle the oncoming struggle.  I have a large and wonderful support system, an incredible and supportive partner, a savings account with actual savings in it, and a job where I am cared about as a human.  If this had happened to me three years ago, almost none of these things would be true.  There will never be a good time to have cancer, but some times are apparently better than others.  Of course, the ongoing pandemic means I can’t have people go with me to chemo, or my wig fitting, or my surgery consultations, and alone a lot of this seems much more daunting and difficult than it might otherwise have been, but I am trying to make a habit of counting my blessings, and despite this terrible thing I’ve been given, my blessings are many.

 There isn’t a “right way” to have cancer, but I think there might be a “right way” for me.  I am a private person and I find sharing some of these details difficult and more than a little uncomfortable, but I am also intimately familiar with the healing nature of writing and comedy, so I am going to give it a shot.  

 And now that I think of it… the peanut M&M is going to make a really great Halloween costume.