#Prompt: strapped to an operating table

[veryrealimagination]

Whumpay Attempt, Prompts 1-4

This is me attempting some Whumpay prompts. I took the first four days and mashed them.

If you're reading the Murdoch Mysteries Portia AU, spoilers for what I have planned for last act of the first story

Watts groaned as his consciousness came back. The last thing he remembered was a meal from the Round Table. It had been almost empty, sad really as he enjoyed talking to several Portians. The waiter he didn’t recognize gave him his meal along with the tea. It had tasted wrong, but he didn’t like criticizing Fei’s things. Sometimes, people just have off days. It was making him a little sick, though, and just outside the Round Table, he had almost crashed into the ground if someone hadn’t helped him get back to his feet.

Expecting to be in the Clinic, or his room at the Workshop, he instead woke up in a cell. The walls were straight stone with no cracks or breaks to allow someone to work on destroying them. The door was metal, with a small window that was currently closed with a small door for slipping small things through.

He was viscerally reminded of his time with Duvos.

The only difference currently was that he hadn’t been left on the floor. They hadn’t given him anything to sleep on while he was captured. He supposed, that if he had given them the weapons they wanted, they would have given him things in return. More food, a blanket or a pillow. Whoever kidnapped him had set up a metal bedframe and a thin mattress. That told him it wasn’t Duvos. It was a sad fact.

Sitting up was a struggle, with his body uncooperative and unable to move decently. Once he did manage to get himself up, he had to use the wall behind him to keep up.

Nothing really changed with the move, until he saw that there was a strange red light in one of the corners. It was positioned over a small set up of a toilet and sink. Even that was more than what Duvos gave him. Now he was worried, and curious, as to who had set this up.

His stomach wasn’t happy. Whatever he had been drugged with was still in his system, which was making him a bit nauseous. A part of him was also hungry. The meal had only been half-eaten, and it felt as if he had gone beyond his normal wake up and starting time for the Workshop and the chores needed. His body wanted food, but it wanted something made by someone he knew. The chicken soup that Aunt Margy made or the pancakes on the winter’s morning before the hotpot.

Hearing sounds coming from the other side of the door, he sat up as straight as he could handle to face whomever was on the other side. The movement of metal on the other side alerted him to the locks that must have been in place. He wondered why it wasn’t a single one, as he heard multiple pops and clanks. *The place where a doorknob should be is already missing, as the person put a slab of metal that makes it almost impossible to open. That means the holes for locks is also gone. The window and the small delivery box is also unlikely near the locks. They don’t need that many.* He counted to three possible locks and hinges before the door opened.

James had dug up a photo of James Gillies, a week after they suspected. Watts had never seen him during his walks around the town. Not even anyone covered up unnaturally or in disguise. He had gotten good at that in Ethea with the other Builders and their help over there. The photo had not captured the intensity of his stare, or the hidden emotions that must have lurked when he had been in Portia the first couple of times.

Like the obsession he currently saw in the man right now.

He had a tray holding a bowl and a tea cup. Walking in, he sat it down on the far end. Right now, he knew that Watts wouldn’t be able to do anything to him. He was weak and it showed. “Llewellyn Watts,” he said, “I finally got you.”

It was hard to not plead to be let go. He didn’t know what the man wanted, but some of the horror stories were enough to give him bad dreams. The woman working with Duvos laughed at him when he started pleading from pain, after being whipped for the fourth or fifth time. James would have been of the same vein. “I don’t know if having me is such a great thing,” he pointed out, trying to keep a neutral and disinterested face up. It was challenging. “I was a nuisance to Duvos and have become a bit of a trouble magnet.”

He fake pondered that for a few seconds. “I don’t think it qualifies if I was behind chunks of your trouble,” he said. “Besides, it’s going to take them some time to figure out where I’ve set up this time. I would have to go out into Portia and manage to get one of the Corps members, or William and Pennie’s attention and they would have to follow me closely. And I right now have enough smuggled away to not need to go out for a season.”

That shook Llewellyn. He knew William and James would be smart enough to figure it out, especially once they find out he was missing again. There was likely clues left behind. But Gillies felt he had a good enough cover for his operations that they wouldn’t be able to find him until he went back out. His uncle would be tearing Portia apart trying to find him and he likely wouldn’t be able until Gillies popped his head up again.

The sickness in his stomach got worse the longer he thought about it.

“So, you and I are going to become much more acquainted,” he said, “And this is a peace offering. It’s your aunt Margaret’s soup.” Well, his wish of having food from someone around him came true. He didn’t like that fact that the man must have gone to his aunt to request and pick it up from her. They never told him what he tried to target his Aunt with. “Along with a lavender and chamomile tea. Something I dare say you picked up from William. Neither have been drugged, like what I did to your meal two nights ago.”

Two nights? How did the man manage to keep him sedated for two nights with a mere half a meal that had been drugged?! Either the man was lying about the time he had already been there, tearing into his slightly fragile mind, or what he had was severely dangerous. Quite possibly, not meant for human consumption and was meant for animals. Jack told him about medicines that were for horses and cows, that were stronger than the human counterparts.

Oh, it wasn’t Fei behind his meal, but somehow Gillies made it? Well, now he knew why the food wasn’t on par with the other man’s. Dare he think it, it sucked. The waiter that served it was too tall, so it wasn’t him that also served. *He has help? Oh, he might have help.* That could mean there was another person in the place where he was being held. If he managed, by a miracle, to get away while the man was incapacitated, then another person would be able to stop him.

He would only be able to get out with outside help. By Light, he wanted everyone bursting in to save him right now. He would feel embarrassed later on back home with a mug of cocoa while bundled up in a blanket leaning on either his Uncle or James.

Instead, he picked up the tea cup, noted that it was made of a light wood. That and the spoon and the bowl and the tray, were made from the same wood. Since it was light, he wouldn’t do much damage to Gillies if he tried to use it and bash it all on his skull. Planned most likely, along with something he couldn’t stab with. He slowly sipped the liquid. It was a bit more powerful than William’s, but it didn’t hurt his stomach.

“Excellent. I’ll be back in an hour to pick up the tray,” he said. “I don’t think you need any sort of warning about what could happen from keeping anything. Duvos likely did something to ensure you never tried anything.”

With a reminder of his last imprisonment, the man left through the door and locked it behind him. His next breath was a long and harsh one, trying not to cry and still letting out wetness. Watts would not let James Gillies break him. Duvos barely got there, and it took several weeks before he broke down crying from one of his torture sessions. His aunt’s soup tasted a little off, but he hoped that it hadn’t been drugged, instead just something being wrong with it.

Of course, he could have been lying about it being his Aunt’s soup. Watts wouldn’t be surprised if the man had all the ingredients and tried to make it himself. The tea would suggest that. It being stronger had him believing it wasn’t William’s specific blend.

When he was done with both, he stood up to carry the stuff over. Wobbling, it took him almost four minutes, having to stop before he collapsed before he got to the door. Once he placed the tray and everything in there, he was forced to close it before he could see who would be taking it. It would be interesting to see if it was Gillies or his current partner.

Then, there was shuffling back over to collapse on the bed. Not even much movement and he was already drained. *Likely done on purpose. He said he didn’t drug it, but I wouldn’t trust that man.* he laid down, unable to keep himself up even with the wall’s help. His sleep was troubled.

-

There had at least been one day. Not two, he hoped, before Gillies came back. “Come along, Watts, today, we start testing,” he announced. The man was entirely too cheerful. Llewellyn really hoped that the small amount of energy he had in him would be enough to get away.

When he got close to the man, he attempted to punch him. It was something he had watched Jackson do and he thought that there was enough force behind it. Which there was. Gillies had the foresight to move to the side when he attempted. Thrown off balance, he felt a hand wrap around his arm. Another worked through his hair and before he understood, his head was bashed into the wall. “Fighting me will not work in your favor,” he warned.

He got that now, as his head radiated pain and he had to hold back tears. The hand on his head disappeared and helped in capturing his arms. Being forced forward, his sight was a bit wonky, but he still managed to see some possible areas to ever explore if he got free.

The room he pushed him into was a quasi mash of medical and scientific. He recognized the setup for chemical mixings. Several areas of almost Builder related benches and tables. A sterilization area similar to the one that the Flying Pigs had in Orzu. Just off the center was a table, cleaned and polished metal, with restraints attached to it.

It was there that he was led. Gillies got his left arm down and bound. He couldn’t even try to undo it, the grips switched over to his right arm. Dragged onto it, he was tied down by his right as well. He sighed, “I should have made you take off your clothing in the cell.” That drew a terrified look out of him. There may have been some threats, but Duvos soldiers never touched him. “Oh, not for that. I need access to your leg.”

That didn’t help his terror. The man thought about his options for a minute before grabbing something off of a far away table. He pointed the gun on Watts’s head before undoing his left arm. “Take off your pants,” he directed, “I need to get to the location of the wound on your leg that my Jump Dancers attacked.”

Having it explained wasn’t quite as nice as it should have been. Reluctantly, he shuffled his pants down until they were over his knees and to the feet. The man ever so helpfully took off his shoes and pants before setting them aside. Then redid his arm to the table before strapping his legs down. The right one had an additional strap to make sure it didn’t move.

Gillies rolled over a table. From the small glints, he saw multiple types of medical equipment. The worse were scalpels, from the size of a nail to half a pointer finger. Two of the larger syringes weren’t the greatest either. “Let’s start with getting a good look at the area,” he muttered. A clipboard with a pen and paper were grabbed, as he inspected what was left of the wound. Prodding, measurements, pulling, he wrote all of his thoughts down on the paper. “I forget how good Julia is at dealing with wounds that should be fatal. She said it was something about Portia. I call that ridiculous. A simple place does not have abilities like this.”

After several minutes of simply recording observations with his eyes and fingers, he moved on. Bringing over a machine, he threw something over him except the wound area. It was quite heavy. He clicked it a couple of times, similar to a camera. Then, he was done and the thing was lifted. Sad, the weight was nice.

Something beeped and buzzed across the room. Gillies walked over and picked up what appeared to be pictures. Although they were odd, only in black and white and he couldn’t make out what they were. “Oh, how interesting. The areas of bone that were broken and shattered are quite visible. You’re healed, yes, but there’s notable build around the damage. It’s in one of their bite shapes.”

“I want to see it.”

Watts felt terror as something was shoved into his mouth and a strap wrapped around to keep in place. Even with the leg strapped down, he was able to move it. This annoyed Gillies. “Well, you will be trying out some of my new procedures. I need to be able to operate on living beings without issue while keeping them alive.”

Going over to the medical area, he shuffled through his chemical creations until he lifted something of a pale yellow. “First test of the paralysis serum,” he listed, explaining to his captive audience about what he had. To be fair, he hadn’t had an audience in ages, guests even less, and William didn’t appreciate it. Something about dark, inhumane, hurting his family and friends. Blah, blah, blah. He walked back over while talking.

“There were animals before the Dark Ages that had the ability to paralyze their prey by bite, by sting, before devouring them. Some of the journals, the animal guides, the medical research, survived. Held by those that understood that the knowledge had to be discovered again if any of those animals also emerged as humanity did from the darkness. I had access to them in Vega Five. It was part of my studies. I had plans about going into medical prescription. My Mother had such a fascination about the interactions of chemicals on humans. She helped people, bless her Light. Made medications that balanced a person’s brain chemicals, their organs, their skin. That one was due to me as a teen. Horrible acne.”

He loaded up a syringe, one of the ones that he didn’t enjoy the sight. “I heard about venom, poison, being the basis for some of the most well used and useful chemicals for human consumption. A part of me was curious when I came to Portia the first time. Something has become different about humans since the Day of Calamity and the Age of Darkness. A great deal have higher tolerances to the poisons from snakes and Dancers.” Gillies mockingly looked down on his victim. “Well, most of us.” Choosing an area near where he wanted to cut, he grabbed another bottle, which held some brown substance on a cotton stick, and rubbed it all over. “Don’t want you getting infected.”

Injecting it, Watts groaned in pain. The syringe was not small, and the yellow serum burned where it went in. “Excellent,” he whispered, following the small amount of color through his skin as it seeped in. “I will have to watch you tonight. I don’t want to paralyze your lungs. Just your leg, I can’t have it moving when I’m playing with it.” Swabbing more of his leg, Watts realized that he was going to cut into the entire section where the Jump Dancer had bit.

“Quickest place,” he muttered, readjusting the straps. If the paralyzing serum didn’t completely work, he still needed the physical restraints. Sharp scalpel, steady hand covered with gloves, Gillies quickly cut into the skin. Watts screamed, trying to move away from the pain instinctively. His upper body, arms, and the left leg twitched. His right leg did not, a fact that pleased the man. Although the rest of the movement did hamper him a small bit as it still moved when the thigh moved. “Would you stop?”

He ignored struggling for a few more seconds. There was only a little bit of muscle and fat that he was carefully moving and tearing off before he got annoyed and used another strap. This time across the young man’s neck. When air started being cut off, he dropped back on the table with much whimpering. Gillies enjoyed that.

Once he got down to the bone, he finally managed to see the raised growth needed to cover the bite marks. “Incredible. Your body went over quite a bit to make sure that the breakage wouldn’t happen again. Read about it in a few books, but the people rarely donate their bodies for science anymore, and medical practitioners rarely look anymore. Much less record with photographs. I wish people would think about the science needs.” He ran his fingers over it. The feel was incredible. He did really wish that he could have seen these on people that had gone into the Light. Or the Dark, which ever way they lived their lives. He just wanted to see under their skins.

Finished with this curiosity over the leg, at least, he removed his fingers and quickly stitched up the wound. “I believe I’m going to have to think about how much blood comes out when doing this. Robert wasn’t a fan of this. He left me when I was expelled. I mean, he joined me for some of it. Then, got cold feet. He’s working for his Daddy’s company. What a loser. I can’t believe I liked him. But, I’m going to need someone to act as my nurse and help.”

Watts, who was incredibly tired from the amount of blood he lost, didn’t like the sound of that. Who in their right mind would help James Gillies torture him? *Someone from Duvos. Like the woman that whipped me.* The terror from that faded, adrenaline wearing off. There was more prodding of his leg, which he groaned and tried to move away from. There was a tiny bit. The paralyzing serum stopped him from moving, not feeling pain. “And the serum is already wearing off quickly,” he frowned. “You haven’t even been here a couple of years and you’re starting to acquire the Portian healing that I’ve heard about. It made my testing horrid when I dosed the citizens the first time I was here. You were much worse when my Dancers bit you. I thought I was going to kill you. The standard treatment just prolonged what should have happened before Julia figured out the filter.”

Cleaning up, he wet a few gauze pads before cleaning up blood on his skin before covering the wounds. “I’m going to have to use you to strengthen my work. And find some way of working on your arm next. Either I train Li-Pon or I’m going to need a robot.” Looking down at him, there was an internal debate over whether or not he should leave his victim on the table. Cleaning blood off was easier when it was wet. “The serum isn’t going to your chest. Li-Pon can carry you to the cell and let you rest.”

Watts was shifting in and out of consciousness. He didn’t even attempt to fight when the straps were removed and the gag was taken out. Something strange showed up when Gillies tapped a button and a bell rang out. A human with a mask covering half their face. The clothes were odd. “If you wouldn’t mind, please take him back to the cell. I need to clean up.” He flinched, but that didn’t stop Li-Pon from picking him up and carrying him back through the hallways.

-

James Gillies had a few shortcuts in getting Llewellyn healthier faster. Nothing he experienced with Doctor Ogden. Part of the trials he had planned were health tonics and serums. Things he designed to replenish blood faster, heal the skin quicker. They were nasty, leaving aftertastes for hours. He had to resist urges to puke over some of them. He did once and was hit for it. Wasn’t his fault, his body was rejecting it as soon as he drank it. The man had to give him a needle in his thigh when he couldn’t breathe. At least he didn’t get that one again. Something about an allergic reaction?

Four days after, he came back into his cell with a gun. “We’re going to do this again,” he said, “It’s going to be your arm this time. Shirt off, otherwise I will have to cut it.” He motioned with his gun with the afterthought. “And blood. It’ll be disgusting with what I plan on doing.”

After a minute of mental steadying, he pulled his shirt off and walked over to the door. The hand on his shoulder led to an instinctive jump, but it must not have been noted as he was pushed back down to the room again. The person Watts figured was Li-Pon was standing beside the table. He wasn’t dragged on this time, instead pushed with the gun and motioned. Strapped down, the one around his throat was tighter than last time to even stop the idea of struggling. His right arm was pulled out and bound to a board strutting out from the side.

The clipboard was up and notes were taken immediately. It went quicker than last time. “Let’s photograph the area and get some lovely pictures of what my Dancers did.” The heavy blanket was thrown over him again, now with it not covering his arm, and the strange contraption was brought out. This time, he heard electrical whirling from the device, and something else after the shutter clicked.

Again, he saw the strange pictures that came from it. This time, he could see more. *Is that my arm?* Watts thought that the picture was of his arm bone, which he didn’t believe possible. Although, there were medical instruments that they hadn’t been able to get information on from the Corrupt Ages. One was something that supposedly saw through skin and muscle.

If Gillies could do that, why did he cut him open?

“I think your arm healed smoother than your leg,” he commented, “I don’t see as much bone build. How peculiar.” Placing the clipboard off to the side, he wiped down an area of his arm before injecting the same yellow serum that he did previously. While that was taking effect, Watts was gagged again during a whine from the increased burning sensation. Once he tried to move his fingers and saw that they barely twitched, Gillies picked up a scalpel while he whimpered and turned away.

He didn’t know it if was because it was his arm, or the face it was closer to his mind, but the young man felt the cuts more as the man made into him. He wanted to clench his hand into a fist, but his fingers didn’t even twitch. Watts was terrified that one single wrong move would damage his ability to build when he finally escaped.

Li-Pon must have been taught how to play nurse, as the being patted sponges and used a small tube to vacuum his blood when it dripped too much. Eventually, he got down to the bone. “Much, much cleaner healing than your leg,” he cooed, “Oh, how fascinating. What caused the difference in such healing?”

He eyed Watts’s chest with such an intensity that the young man was worried he would be getting autopsied at that moment. Instead, with his physical examination done, he sewed up the arm and made sure everything was clean again. “And since it was only your arm, you can walk back to your room.”

Blood lost not withstanding, he wobbled his way back to the room with Li-Pon following. Once inside, the door was locked and he crashed on the floor before getting to the bed. “It’s only my arm, he said.” Wincing, he crawled the last bit of space before hoisting himself up. That wore him out quickly. “Could really use a pissed off Uncle coming through right now.”

-

James Gillies visited.

Most of the time, he was analyzing what he got from Llewellyn. Blood samples, those strange pictures, his medical chart that he copied a few times. The food was delivered and set with the gun pointing at him as a warning. When he didn’t take him, it was to talk. Or well, drawn out interrogations about what symptoms he experienced, the aftereffects, how William was doing, if there was talks of a wedding between him and Julia yet, if Pendrick figured out his subconscious wants and desires.

He wasn’t sure about answering the stuff about William and James. It was creepy.

When his arm completely healed, the fear in him grew. First was his leg. Then, it was his arm. The last thing for Gillies to cut and examine was his chest. He didn’t see a way for the man to cut him open and explore his ribcage and keep him alive.

Hearing the door opened, he wondered if today would be that day. Looking over, Li-Pon was standing there before laying something down and closing the door again. It was not food. Whatever it was was staring at him, curled up on the floor. “D-desert hopper,” he muttered. That was one of the animals that had been modified for heavier venom. It was over there and he was on the bed, so that shouldn’t be an issue at the moment.

Then, the thing started bouncing over to him. He didn’t move, figured that it wouldn’t make that much of a difference on where he would go. The creature was likely going to chase after him. Not moving would make it less likely it might ignore him, hopefully. Nope, it hopped onto the bed. He had to cut off a whimper and his flinching when it landed by his left side. His expectation of bites until losing consciousness did not match up to what the hopper actually did. Llewellyn watched as it slithered over his chest and legs to curl up on him.

No attacking. Which was a surprise.

*“Desert hoppers are the descendants of an animal known as a snake,”* a disembodied voiced lectured. Gillies had a speaker in his room as well. He hated that. *“They’re cold blooded, which is why you won’t find the outside of the desert without some sort of containment and a heating lamp. Likely the reason why that one didn’t bite you the way I wanted it to. You’re warm.”* There was a hard sigh. *“I wanted him to bite you.”*

*I figured that.* He was trying not to react to the information. The hopper was settling down. He made the mistake of looking down to see what it was not asleep. Yellow eyes started directly back at him. “That was a mistake,” he muttered. Now he couldn’t stop looking.

The door opened again and Li-Pon came through. Without worry, the person picked up the desert hopper. The creature turned and hissed at being separated from its heating source. They merely walked out while letting something else in.

Brighter than its outdoor cousins, the flurpee immediately sought its target. Ice pelted Watts before he could even move. Wincing in pain, he made the decision to flip his bed to the side. The frame and mattress were poor shields. The force of the breath coming out was much harder than he thought was possible. The air was getting chilled fast.

*“Excellent.”*

He heard the patter of its footsteps trying to get closer. He saw the thing jumping to try and get at him. Sometimes, he felt ice pelt him a small bit. There wasn’t anything to use as a weapon. The bed wasn’t breakable. He tried.

His shield was yanked out of his hand, and the flurpee blasted him full on. Gasping for breath, the only thing he thought of was to kick. The creature squeaked when it bounced back. Shaking its head, it came back at him. Forcing himself up, he backed away and tried to stay out of range of its attack. With pain from the cold, Watts was slow moving. Rolling away from the blast of the ice breath made things worse.

The next time the creature got close enough, he took a chance and punched it along the side. It whined in pain and backed up, but came back over and slapped him a few times. It wouldn’t have hurt as much if he wasn’t suffering from freezer burn.

He barely noticed Li-Pon picking up the creature and carrying it out. The hands that started poking and prodding him after that he did. Gillies’s curiosity showed all over his face as he turned the new wounds around to see how much damage was actually done. “A good amount of burn,” he muttered, pushing in on one of the areas and earning a groan. Not to mention struggling from Watts to remove his limbs and curl in on himself. A squeeze on a painful area stopped it, temporarily. “Not as much as I was assuming, but clothing and the fact you defended yourself instead of taking the full onslaught shouldn’t be surprising. Strapping you to a wooden stand and unable to cover yourself would give me more information over the power of their breath.” Watts had a disturbing flash over how he was planning on his next experiment. When there wasn’t resistance, he pulled himself away and curled up against the wall.

Gillies merely walked out the door and locked it, muttering about what he could do later. Llewellyn gripped his legs tighter to stop his shaking.

-

When he was led out of the room again, Watts realized it was going to be for the last time. There was nothing he could try to stop it. Both Gillies and Li-Pon held weapons to make him walk ahead. The table was ready, and he had to be pushed to get on it. Strapped again, with his chest the main feature, something was placed over his mouth and nose. That was new.

“Once Pennie wakes up, the operation will begin,” he said, checking his tools.

Pennie? *They brought James here?* Shocked and terrified, he twisted around and found a chair occupied by one unconscious James Pendrick. “No,” he cried, fighting against the restraints. “No, no, don’t.”

“Quiet.”

“Don’t make him watch,” Llewellyn pleaded.

Gillies looked down at him with a cursed smile on his lips. “Aww, how quaint.” He patted his head before gripping some of the hair and pulling on it. “Pennie and William have been too happy lately. It’s time to install some fear and hopelessness back into them. Not everything has a good ending.” Walking over, he realized the older man was still unconscious.

He didn’t want to wait.

Smacking him, he smirked when Pendrick started groaning. “Wakey-wakey, Pennie,” he mocked.

“Fuck off, Gillies. Your manners haven’t gotten any better,” the man grumbled, immediately struggling with the restraints keeping him to the chair. During his movement, he managed to catch a glimpse of what he wanted to see. “Llewellyn!”

“James!”

The man tried to shout again before Gillies gagged him. “Now that the heartwarming moment is over, I want to start on what will be the crème of what I’ve been wanted to see.” Li-Pon turned the knob of some sort of tank filled with gas. Llewellyn didn’t know what was happening when he started breathing in whatever was coming in from the thing on his face. After a minute, his panic didn’t matter much as he slipped into unconsciousness.

“What my Dancers did to his chest.” He patted on Pendrick’s shoulder in mockery. “Too much interference, and I will kill him. Accidently or not, it will be unclear.” He glared at the villain, but realized getting the two of them out would be impossible if Gillies was planning on operating on Llewellyn.

Li-Pon was there with the new blood suction machine when he started his cutting. Instead of a nice single line that would have just gotten him in the area he needed, he decided on a y incision. It was something that he found out about from medical autopsy books. It would be a signal if Julia had to work on him on her tables.

Peeling back skin and muscle was much harder than it had been in the leg and arm. He was remembering the books that he read on the procedures to get to organs that needed operations. They understated what he would need to do. Gillies had to be careful about it. He was still thinking about using the boy much later. Not to the point of stopping himself in this experiment, but not carelessly enough to kill him out of spite.

When he finally removed enough to see the teeth marks on the ribs, he gasped. “Oh, this is even better than the ones on the leg.” He felt the edges made under his fingertips. “Still healing, and there’s a good amount of jagged edge.” It had been months since he had been attacked. He should have been healed by now. Unless the attack to his ribs had been worse. Or something else had happened in combination with the enhanced venom that hadn’t with the arm and leg. Perhaps since one couldn’t immobilize ribs as they could with the appendages and the consistant movement with the diaphram and his lungs have caused healing to be slower. “Oh, how interesting it would be to make it permanent. A testament to their abilities.” A low growling was heard from the chair. “Quiet, Pendrick.”

“You take that bloody scalpel and step away from my nephew, Gillies,” a voice commanded. Captain Brackenreid stepped out from the entryway of the room, with two of his team standing behind him. All three had weapons raised, but only Brackenreid was carrying a gun. “Or I’m gonna make sure you disappear on the way to the Knight’s Prison.”

He chuckled, looking at his intruders. “What are you going to do about that, Captain? I could always slice through one of his artieries now and leave him to die.”

While he was turned toward the Corps members, one of his tools embedded into his arm. The scalpel dropped, but not before being caught by Li-Pon. Staring in confusion, as they were the only one close enough, the variant took off their mask and showed an angry William Murdoch had actually been under there. “Oh, how did I miss that?”

George and Torva took the man and dragged him away, cuffing him. Murdoch ignored him while quickly slicing through the bonds holding James down. “Hart was one of the ones you brought, correct?”

The woman herself answered, striding in, “Made sure of it.” She quickly looked over Watts. The chest being open, the skin and muscles pulled back and still exposing the ribs, made her sick. “The best I can do is sew him up and stop the bleeding to get him back to the Clinic. I was trained for smaller injuries.”

James came over and looked at the machine that was being used to suck up the blood. “William, is this thing clean enough?” he demanded.

“I cleaned it before suiting up to replace whomever Gillies had for help.”

He nodded. “If there’s a way to manually warm up the blood, we can put it back into Llewellyn to help stabilze him for transport.” The man looked to the medic. “What else do we need to do?”

#murdoch mysteries #whumpay 2024 #Prompt: strapped to an operating table #Prompt: paralytic drug #Prompt: made a lab rat #Prompt: vivisection #i probably didn't do this right #but i still wrote #and i have another au going on with the next two prompts

[radiance1]

god the batfam thinking that Danny is one of them from an alt universe is simply gold and misunderstandings!!! But my all time favorite is probably when it’s Jason and when it’s dissection trope it’s even better so let me give you a little prompt

Danny who was runaway after being caught by the GIW and with the help of ClockWork gets him to a universe he could rest and he’s given the ring of rage and the crown but it turns into a tattoo on his neck and with the ring he’s more prone to violence to fix conflict and it matches up with Jason so when Danny gets kidnapped along with a few others and he’s shown off to the rest of the city in a live video the whole batfam is having panic attacks and shit and is on their way but Danny when the joker is monologuing he gets out quietly and gets (who would have guessed) a crowbar. He swings with all his force not caring that the Joker is not a ghost because he hurt people and the other hostages so he keeps beating him until he’s crying and he’s shaking purely because of the emotional and physical fatigue (he’s still healing) and when the batfam get there they’re met with pale blue eyes staring into them and surprisingly it’s Jason to step up and pull him away and comfort him because the pits went silent maybe and there’s something in him telling him to protect him

Anger came easy to him, after his crowning.

Easy to lose himself within its gently yet insistent lull, clouding his mind in nothing but red that made it so easy to just, let go.

But he didn't want to kill anyone, even after what they've done to him, strapping him down on a table and cutting him open, enjoying his pain and suffering and cutting flesh and examining his organs.

He just wanted to escape, he wanted closure, he wants peace and love and acceptance.

He did indeed get his escape that he wished for, but that only lead to his fall into more captivity. It was another dimension, one of capes and villains, and never in his life as he met a human so...

Disgusting.

Even when under that operation table, the ones cutting him open didn't seem to take any pleasure in the act. Simply doing what they were told and taking notes with cold efficiency.

But this, this one called the Joker. He took pleasure in hurting others, watching them suffer and squirm and cry and beg as he made jokes at their own expense.

Never had he felt the amount of rage he did then. So when he himself, was taken by the Joker, along with others he planned to air live.

He let himself fall into the safety of rage.

The Joker was cruel and cunning, but he was waiting for someone, for Batman. He used it to his advantage.

He took a crowbar and swung. Swung at his arm, his legs, every part of his body his rage clouded mind could process and kept hitting and hitting and hitting and WHY WAS THIS MAN LAUGHING!?

It only made him angrier.

He swung in his face, and the man still laughed, so he kept swinging until he wasn't.

And then, as he was slowly climbing down from that rage, he stopped, and a man- who he distantly recognized as Red Hood- approached him and gave him comfort.

Then he fell, not into rage, but the deep embrace of unconsciousness.

#dc x dp #dp x dc #dp x dc crossover #dpxdc #dcxdp #dc x dp crossover

[whumpay]

babe wake up new whumpay prompts dropped. like last year, im posting early for more time to prepare

Welcome to Whumpay 2024! Up above you will see the basic prompt list and down below the cut you will see it written out in a list, as well as three mini challenges (and by extension, the extreme edition)

Rules are the same as usual

You only have to use one (Or two, if you’re doing the extreme edition.) prompt a day! But you’re welcome to use multiple if you want to, and it still counts for both.

I know the description of the blog says it’s a writing event, but if you want to draw or make other kinds of content, that’s cool too.

Have fun, tag content warnings (such as noncon, graphic violence, etc) and try not to be crushed by the mortifying ordeal of posting your writing.

This is a pretty chill event so you can start posting whenever but I’ll be reblogging posts made to the #Whumpay2024 tag throughout May. For real this time.

These all also apply to these three special mini challenges, consisting of a 7 day, a 10 day, and a 14 day prompt list.

EXTREME EDITION: This year's extreme edition doesn't have its own prompt list, but instead, youll be taking all three mini challenges in order along with the main prompt list. Some of these fit pretty well, others less so.

1 - Mad Science:

Day 1: Strapped To An Operating Table

Day 2: Paralytic Drug

Day 3: Made A Lab Rat

Day 4: Vivisection

Day 5: Truth Potion/Serum/Spell

Day 6: Russian Roulette

1 - Attacks, Mental & Physical:   

Day 7: Heart Attack

Day 8:  Asthma Attack

Day 9: Animal Attack

Day 10: Panic Attack

3 - Ineffective Medical Care:

Day 11: Medical Torture

Day 12: Withholding Medical Treatment

Day 13: Medication Tampering

Day 14: Injury Brushed Off

Day 15: No Anesthetic

4: Mindfuck

Day 16: Presumed Dead

Day 17: Memory Loss

Day 18: Stockholm Syndrome

Day 19: Phantom Pains

Day 20: Love Potion/Spell

Day 21: Role Reversal 

5. Nature's Revenge

Day 22: Slowly Running Out Of Air

Day 23: Natural Disaster 

Day 24: Struck By Lightning

Day 25: Snowed In

Day 26: Heatstroke

6. Traps & Trauma

Day 27: Caught In A Net

Day 28: Traumatic Touch Aversion

Day 29: Used As Bait

Day 30:  Flashbacks

Day 31: Choose Who Lives

Mini challenge #1: Torture

#1: Tortured For Information

#2: Whipping

#3: Branding

#4: Begging To Be Killed

#5: Recorded/Broadcast Torture

#6: False Execution

#7: Shock Collar

Mini Challenge #2: Dialogue

#8: “Why are you doing this?”

#9: “Don’t look.”

#10: “You look awful.”

#11: “Who did this to you?”

#12: “No one is coming for you.”

#13: “No one cares about me.”

#14: “Don’t lie to me.”

#15: “Stay with me, please.”

#16: ”You’re scaring me!”

#17: “You’re a monster.”

Mini Challenge #3: Aftermath

#18: Fighting Against Caretaker 

#19: Seeking Revenge

#20: Taking The Blame

#21: Barely Conscious

#22: Disassociation

#23: Carried To Safety

#24: Scars

#25: Unhealthy Codependency 

#26: Infected Wound

#27: Survivor’s Guilt

#28: Touch Starvation

#29: Abandonment Issues

#30: Cradled In Someone’s Arms

#31: Adrenaline Crash

Alt Prompts:

Death Game

Came Back Wrong

Attack The Injury

Healing Malfunction

Left For Dead 

Mistaken Identity

Dazed

Trapped Under Rubble

Drowning

Disowned By Family

Hostage Situation

Have fun everybody!

#whump #whump event #whump writing #writing #whumpay #writers #writing event #whump prompt #whumpay2024 #prompt list #whump prompt list

[anonymousangstmonster]

Prompt #66

Both of the Fenton parents find out their son’s secret, separately, without anyone else knowing. But they have to keep up the act for each other, playing along like the ghost boy they’re trying to catch and vivisect isn’t their son.

They try their best to do their worst job at ghost hunting, but unfortunately their worst just isn’t bad enough.

They accidentally end up actually capturing Danny, bringing him to the lab and strapping him to the examination table and gagging him so he can’t say a word.

Maddie belts his head down with a pillow underneath “so it can’t injure itself and disrupt the operation.” She secretly combs her fingers through her baby’s hair.

Jack blindfolds him “so it can’t see where we are.” He subtly and gently squeezes his sons hand.

Danny notices that they’re both trying to comfort him, while making up an excuse to reassure the other. That all of this is unnecessary.

They are done with his abdominal cavity and well into digging around inside his exposed rib cage when he manages to get the gag off. Thankfully he tells them that they can stop pretending for each other before they cut into his heart trying to get to his core(because that’s where their readings and scans said that his core would be).

They were about to kill their son to keep up the act for each other.

#Danny Phantom #writing #writing prompt #Danny Phantom writing prompt #DP #writing idea #dp writing #fic #fic prompt #fic idea #DP fic #DP fic prompt #DP writing #DP writing prompt #AnAnMo’s DP writing ideas #danny fenton #maddie fenton #jack fenton #dissection #dissec

[misafiryanki]

Dirty pictures - Tomura Shigaraki x f!Reader

Word count: 813 Plot: You and Tomura engage in some provocative messaging while he's in a meeting with the rest of the League of Villains. You tease him with enticing lingerie picture Warnings: sexting, handjob, masturbation A/N: I appreciate the opportunity to participate in this fantastic writing experience. It's been quite some time since I last wrote anything. Wishing everyone a joyful and sizzling Kinktober! Masterlist can be found here My prompt was: lingerie

What are you wearing?

Not a minute passes before he senses the vibration against Tomura's palm, eliciting a fond eye-roll at the response.

If I spill the details, you'll go wild during the meeting, Shiggy

Shigaraki begrudgingly finds himself at yet another League of Villains meeting, an event he is growing increasingly weary of attending. After all, he is the one in charge, the undeniable leader of the operation. He views the rest of the members as his "puppets," and he hopes that they can handle some planning and decision-making without his constant presence. But, as usual, his expectations are dashed.

The frustration bubbles within him as he contemplates the necessity of his presence in these gatherings. It seems too much to ask for the League to function autonomously, and Shigaraki can't help but think that this is just another instance of life's cruel irony.

It's a risky proposition, a genuinely terrible one, but he's already in the process of unbuttoning his pants under the table. After all, nobody can see him from his concealed vantage point, and nobody requires his attention at this moment as the rest of the League immersed themselves in a fiery conversation.

I’m already jerking off

Shigaraki despises the stark coldness of the text, yearning to utter these words aloud, longing to dial your number right there and then. He could do it by sneaking into the bathroom, but he's already here, immersed in this moment.

Then a picture arrives, and Tomura has to stifle a groan as his hand encircles his rigid arousal. You're adorned in a black garter belt, stockings, and lingerie. The choice of lingerie is understated, exquisite, and tasteful – perfectly in line with your fiery personality. It exudes elegance and sensuality, alluring without being ostentatious.

Are you touchin' yourself right now, babe?

I’m so wet for you, Tomura ♥

Show me, now

He can't help but appreciate the meticulously crafted design, those delicate black straps connecting the lacy knee-high stockings to the fabric of the garter belt cinched around your waist. He maintains a steady, deliberate rhythm, avoiding any haste that might lead to a premature climax. He's torn; part of him wants to save this arousal for you, to build it up until he can release it all over you – your chest, your mouth. But he's also eager to tease himself, yearning for the sight of you equally aroused so that when he does finally unleash, you'll both be consumed by desire.

His gaze drifts upward to your breasts, tantalizingly displayed in the image. They're barely concealed beneath a gossamer layer of lace, the faintest hint of a pink nipple just barely visible. Aroused tension coils in the pit of his stomach.

Another picture arrives, this one zoomed in on your body, your hand nestled between your thighs. There's no bra or panties this time, just that tantalizing strip of lace and nylon, and it has him tilting his head back against the chair with a grunt. Glistening wetness gleams on your fingers, forming sultry strands from your core to your knuckles. He moistens his lips with the tip of his tongue, his gaze fixated on the image.

Little does he know, Toga glances up at him from time to time, her eyebrow cocked slightly as she senses that something is rather off with her boss.

You look so fuckin' hot baby, can’t wait to fuck that pussy

He quickens the pace of his strokes, just a tad faster. Tomura's yearning to lose himself between your thighs, to savor every drop of your arousal with his eager tongue. And he will, no doubt, he just needs to exercise a bit more patience. It seems you share the same insatiable desire because a text arrives at lightning speed:

I need you; when will the meeting be over?

Not for another hour. How many times do you think you can cum before then?

How many times do you want me to?

He grins mischievously, gives his cockhead a gentle twist, slowing himself down. His breaths come a little too ragged, and waves of delicious pleasure lap at his abdomen. Eventually, he comes to a halt, tucking his throbbing length back into his dark pants. He shifts in his seat, allowing the friction of his boxers to provide a slight but welcome sensation until he can feel your lips around him once more.

No less than four, I want you all sloppy

He shakes his head, a warm smile gracing his lips, as another picture arrives. Your hardened nipples are on full display, one hand firmly squeezing one of them.

For the remainder of the meeting with the League of Villains, he repeatedly revisits the messaging app, allowing it to fuel his desire for you, for your enticing body. Especially when you concluded the conversation with:

Yes, Shigaraki Tomura, I'm all fucking yours, Master

#kinktobercollab‘23 #kinktober 2023 #bnha smut #mha smut #tomura shigaraki #minors dni #shigaraki x reader #shigaraki smut #tomura shigaraki smut #tomura shigaraki x reader #tomura shigaraki x you #shigaraki x you #bnha x reader #mha x reader smut #shigaraki tomura #x reader smut

[dimepdf]

pls write a smut where you go to buy drugs off eddie in the woods like chrissy and end up fucking in the woods

DOWN LOW DEALER. + EDDIE MUNSON

masterlist. / taglist. / any request? synopsis. when you go into the woods to get drugs from Hawkins bad-boy Eddie Munson, you run into a minor snag. You don't have any cash, but Eddie, being the sweetheart that he is, puts an offer on the table that you just can't resist: you. author's note. i just want you to know that this was saved in my drafts as "omg omg omg what the FUOCK." so i just had to post this for my mental health.

[ ❥ ] pairing. eddie munson x reader

[ ❥ ] word count. 3.6k

[ ❥ ] genre & warnings. 18+, afab reader, pet names(princess, pretty girl, etc.), nerd!reader, semi-public sex, mentions of drugs, throat fucking, corruption kink, blowjobs, hand kink, praise kink, messy everything, hair-pulling, impact play, unprotected sex, table sex, choking, slight dumbifcation, soft!eddie, cum eating, masturbation, handjob, pwp

"Holy shit, Y/N." Eddie moaned, gripping the end of the table to keep his knees from buckling as you slipped just a few more inches of his cock down your throat, gagging on each inch.

"You don't know what you're doing to me, pretty girl." He was muttering as his fingers tangled in a knot of your hair.

Just moments ago, you were striding across the lunchroom with your best friend by your side, her fingers trembling with anxiety as you both approached Eddie's table.

His normal entourage of friends was giving you an odd look, having already stood there for merely seconds, and yet you had already felt out of place.

Eddie gave you both an odd look, and you felt your friend flinch, standing so close to you the moment he had made eye contact with her. You had to admit, from the sidelines, it was a painfully cringe-worthy thing to watch.

"We want to buy some, stuff...and someone told us that you were the person to see for it." You spoke slowly and leaned down to whisper.

The moment you had pulled away, your eyes clenched shut just for a second, wallowing in the embarrassment of your stumbling question.

Eddie was quick to piece together your request, his brow raised as he glanced over your appearance.

Never in his life had he thought that someone as prompt and put-together as you would even want to be seen standing as close to him as you were to him.

Eddie agreed but told you that he never did his "business" on school grounds for obvious legal reasons and gave you the time and place to meet him after school.

As you walked away back to your table of friends with a beaming smile, giving them a thumbs up.

He was more convinced that the entire thing would most likely be some type of undercover setup, not seeing you as the type to do anything during the weekends but studying currently not seeing you ever getting high.

"Operation best sleepover ever is a go!" Your friend celebrated.

It was a very out-of-character plot for your normally very strict group of friends, though you would be the one to convince everyone that you were seniors and still haven't been to a single high school party because you are too busy having movie marathons and staying up late to study for quizzes to do normal teenager things.

You wanted to do something fun to finish off your senior year, and if that meant buying drugs from Eddie Munson in the creepy woods, then you were willing to take that risk.

You were clutching onto the straps of your backpack as you descended down the dirt path alone. Your friend chickened out on the hard part.

The girl was convinced that Eddie Munson was some type of devil worshiper, along with everyone else that sat at his table, still having the creeps from what had unfolded earlier in the lunchroom.

As you continued your steps all the way until you came into view of the planned table, only the sound of nature and passing animals were heard from the woods.

Your nerves were heightened when you noticed the curly-haired man waiting for you at the picnic table, his chin resting in the palm of his hand, a bored expression written all over his face, his eyes shifting over at you the moment you walked into view.

The distance left was a bit awkward as you bowed your head and picked up your pace to sit down across from him.

"Okay, so what did you want?" There was a pause as Eddie's fingers drummed over the tin lunchbox perched in the middle of you, a beat of silence before you couldn't realize that you knew absolutely nothing about buying or doing drugs.

"Um, is there like one that makes you...laugh a lot, I guess?" The question came off with a child-like innocence as your lashes fluttered and your tone was so soft and nervous.

Eddie swore you were whispering to him. He tried to make sense of the situation, his eyes squinting at you and his lips pulled into a thin line, not quite able to figure out why, of all people, would you ever want to get into doing drugs.

You were just so adorable to him, Eddie comparing you to a big-eyed kitten the way you were trying to avoid looking at him yet failing to stare directly at the rings that shone on his fingers.

"Your eyes are really pretty." Eddie blurted, wanting to see how you would react to the sudden compliment.

Your eyes only flicked to meet him as he watched your chest rise and fall at a more dramatic pace. Eddie smirked at that.

"Okay, how about we start you off with something more tamed. How would you like that pretty princess?" He was shuffling through the contents of his lunchbox, only taking glances at your fidgeting state.

Your mind was spinning from the nicknames, let alone the sudden bold flirting. You were starting to feel a bit light-headed.

Presenting a pretty moderate-sized bag of weed, Eddie sizes it off as enough to share with at least three other people, plus you. Just as your hands reach for the bag, he pulls back.

"Ah, ah, same time exchange, pretty girl, can't have you ripping me off now can we?" You felt just a tinge of embarrassment, your mouth gaping as you nodded your head in agreement to the payment.

Shuffling through your backpack for your wallet, you slowly realized all you had was your card and not cash, cursing your parents for having you be so responsible.

It was then that Eddie suggested other payment options. His tone darkened as he leaned in closer to your face, shamelessly biting his lip and making a show of him staring at your mouth.

You let him reach his hand out to caress your face. The cool steel of his rings contrasted with your flushed face, his rough thumb dragging along the bottom of your lip as he winked.

That was the moment you found yourself on your knees in the dirt, Eddie's pants undone and his cock drawn out from the hole in his boxers.

Your hands gripping the jean material of his thighs as your eyes watered and your mascara threatened to streak down your cheeks whenever he thrust his entire length down your throat, your nose tickled by the dark brassy hairs of his pubes.

Your tongue was circling the underside of his tip. Eddie's cock was quite large, at least in comparison to all the other guys penis you'd seen (which were mostly just pictures shown in health books). You were surprised he could even fit it all in your mouth.

You pulled back just a little more, replacing the rest of what you hadn't put in your mouth with the grip of your hand.

You couldn't help but moan. Eddie felt the vibration against his cock, throwing his head back and thrusting against your mouth, forcing his cock further down your throat without much warming.

You gagged. This one was more serious than the others. Eddie snapped from his trance and pulled enough for his cock to spring from your lips, giving you time to breathe as he held a fist full of your hair.

His breathing was rough as he glanced down, watching you coughing.

"Shit, are you good?" Something about your puffy cheeks and watery eyes from choking makes him look down at you in pure neediness.

You nodded up at him, shifting your knees as they were starting to get numb from resting against the dirt for so long.

You didn't want to admit that it had been the most sexually exciting thing you've done since you would pause the TV screen of your favorite celebrity crush, placing your lips against the static just to fit in the fantasy of kissing them.

In middle school, you were a different breed of hormonal. Whatever he had done had woken something inside of you, something growing in heat in your lower stomach. Whether Eddie had meant to do it or not, all you knew was that you wanted him to do it again.

"Can you fuck my mouth?" Eddie's eyes widened as his mouth formed into a smirk that you were starting to get familiar with. He had never expected to awaken such a different side of you, a side that had not matched your innocent looks.

It was like Eddie had awoken the beast inside of you. God did he love it.

"It's all yours, pretty girl. Go ahead and take it, just like that princess." There was more than enough invitation for you to open your mouth, your pink tongue sticking out promptly. You were being obedient.

Eddie's devil-like smirk carved into his mouth as he tried not to paint white all over your face at the sight.

Sliding his shaft into your hot, wet mouth, he hissed suddenly, the slight feeling of your teeth grazing against his tip sending a shiver down his spine as he had to recollect his footing.

From the sloppiest of spit rolling down your chin and how you would try to control your gagging struggle a bit to get into the groove of breathing through your nose, you stayed well grounded, letting him guide his hips to thrust in and out of your mouth.

"Awe, fuck...just like that." Eddie was merciful at first, just seeking the feeling of having the most innocent looking girl on her knees, loving the sight of you in a filthy position. He was going to drink it all in.

But you thought otherwise.

Wanting him to handle you with rough intentions, you wanted to feel the cool metal of his fingered decorated fingers wrap around your neck, trailing all over your skin.

Your mind was clouded with so much pure lust that the last thing you needed from Eddie right now was for him to be gentle with you.

Surging your head forward as he pulled away, feeling his fingers fist in your hair, his pace picking up a string of swears blurting from his mouth.

His grasp around your hair was tight, holding you in place enough for him to snap his hips into your mouth every time he hit the back of your throat.

You couldn't help but let out a lewd moan, getting so aroused over the male using your mouth to his heart's content. Feeling your underwear damp at just the thought of what else he would do to you.

Your mouth is dripping with your own saliva, your lips and chin glistening with a messy shine of spit.

"H–holy shit." Eddie was struggling to keep his eyes open, loving the sight of his dick disappearing in your hollow cheeks. as if you could tell he was starting when you looked up at him, your eyes wet with the threat of tears.

Eddie shivered, beginning to piston into your poor sore mouth at a faster pace. The wet sounds coming from your mouth only encouraged him.

You pull away, falling into a coughing fit as you hurry to catch your breath, your face a mess covered in your saliva.

Eddie sighs, losing the grasp on your hair, his hand stroking his cock, his wrist twisting as his fingers wrapped in the sticky coat of spit you had left on his length, not even inches away from your face.

Your mouth started to water at the sight of him. "Maybe I should just cum on that pretty face of yours, cover you in my cum? You'd love that, huh princess?" Eddie grunted, his tongue sticking out just a tad as his mouth opened, peering down at you.

You felt your thoughts flatline, your lashes fluttering as your brain struggled to process the completely lewd things he had said.

Something had switched in your brain, almost as if Eddie had turned the knob, making you driven by your horny desires.

Your mouth opened to speak only to close as your gaze was drawn to the man shamelessly pleasuring himself just inches away from your adorable yet confused expression.

"Yes...please." Your doe eyes looked up at him with a new set of determination, "Atta girl." He chuckled, guiding his cock back into the familiar warmth of your mouth.

"I wonder if your friends know what you're doing right now. Did you tell them that you're getting your pretty little throat fucked in the woods?" You didn't know what your friends would think and honestly didn't care at the moment, knowing the group of strict, prompt girls would have a heart attack at the sight of you.

"Fucking Christ, you feel so good." Just the idea of sex throws them into a frenzy.

The whole idea of doing drugs during a sleepover is an idea that took you months of convincing, let alone the entire school day for your friend to gain the courage to walk up to Eddie during lunch.

But there was just something about the whole teacher's pet being a slut for the school's outcast cliche that just made your back arch.

You hum around his cock, your tongue teasing the tip, dragging along the underside, coaxing a moan out of Eddie, your hand making work of the inches you weren't able to have in your mouth.

The wet noise from the suction of your lips is extremely lewd as they blend in harmony with Eddie's deep grunting.

"Stand up," Eddie commanded.

His dick drops from your lips with a lewd pop, tapping the side of your cheek with the tips of his finger, and you eagerly follow suit, standing from your knees, your stance unsteady as his hands find the curves of your hips, guiding you next to the picnic table.

You could feel him grinding into your backside.

The height difference, having his cock grinding against your lower back as Eddie reached a hand around your neck, tilting your head back and placing a sloppy kiss on your mouth, the other snaking under your shirt and squeezing your breast through your bra.

The weight of him pushing up against you, making your hips collide at an uncomfortable angle with the edge of the table.

"We're in public, you know?" You muttered, suddenly remembering how exposed you felt scanning the field of trees around as Eddie pecked a wet trail of kisses down your neck that left you weak in the knees.

"You didn't seem to care about that when my dick was in your mouth." Checkmate, shutting you right up as you bit your lip and tilted your head to the side, exposing more of your neck on display to him. Pushing yourself against him as your back arched.

"You're such a fucking tease." Eddie hissed, his fingers snaking to the front of your jeans, making quick work of your zipper as you shimmed your jeans down to your knees.

His hand trailed up your back and guided you to bend over the table, your arms cushioning against the rough wooden surface. Your heartbeat picked up pace as you gasped, feeling Eddie smack the plush of your thigh.

"You know, you look really good like this." The feeling of his cold, rough fingers needing the plush skin of your ass sent a shiver down your spine.

Eddie spread your ass with his hands before smacking it with a flat palm.

You whimper at the slight sting, not wanting to admit that he had unlocked a whole list of new kinks for you. "You're too pretty for me. I feel like I'm gonna' break you." Eddie sighs, his cock twitching in his grasp.

"You don't have to be gentle. I won't break." You rasped out, feeling his eyes trailing all over your exposed body.

Your back arches, feeling Eddie take the words of encouragement and hook your pants to the side with his pointer finger, burying himself deep inside of you.

"You're gonna be the death of me, lady." He murmurs, his eyes squeezing shut, setting his hands flat against the table at your sides.

He's more gentle than he was with your mouth, his thrusts cautious, his arm hooking over your lower stomach, helping your wobbling legs to keep standing as he stuffs you completely full, with an exhale of relief passing from his lips as he bottoms out inside of your warm walls.

"S—shit," he sighs, leaning forward, his chest resting on your back. The feeling of the pant of his breath fanning against the back of your neck, while he was balls deep inside of you, was a sensation that you wanted to engrave in your brain forever.

His thrust starts slow, rolling his hips against yours, the intense feeling making your knees buck at the feeling of his cock rubbing against all the places that made you feel like you were floating.

"—ah, Eddie." You croaked out, his hand reaching to grip around your neck, resting the entirety of his weight on top of you, tilting your head up.

"How do you expect me not to cum when you whine my name like that?" He grunts into your ear as he picks up his pace, using his thighs to spread your legs apart to thrust deeper inside of you. His slim hips slap against your ass as it perfectly bounces against his pelvis.

Your moans are soft and breathy, your knees weakening as he aims for the gummy spot inside of you that causes your entire body to react.

"Yes, yes—right t-there." Your voice comes out as a whine, pushing your hips back into his thrusts.

Eddie grabs the plush of your thigh, guiding your leg up and resting it against the table to angle himself inside of you deeper, the force of his thrust making your hips smack against the table's edge, the pain only adding more to your intense build-up of pleasure.

Eddie watches you with his mouth agape, his lips swollen from biting down on them to keep from being too loud, wanting to hear every little noise that slipped from your lips.

"Let me hear you, baby." Eddie grunts. The lewd sound of skin slapping and your pathetic whimpers are floating through the air and deeper into the woods.

Your hips are already bruised from being slammed into the table repeatedly.

Eddie piston's himself in and out of you his shaft covered in a creamy layer making a mess of your throbbing entrance.

The sensation of his fingers digging into the skin of your neck, your mouth falling open, your moans turning into punched out grunts, the build-up of pleasure becomes unbearable for the both of you.

"You gotta let go, princess," Eddie whispered. You suddenly became aware of how hard you were chasing your own orgasm, your hands fisting against the table.

"I can't, I can't." It felt like you were about to explode. The molten hot bubble that rested inside you was only getting bigger, your head spinning as you grind against Eddie, working toward that unbearable heat that left your toes curling.

"Go on, pretty girl, just like that." His voice was breathless as his hands unwrapped from your neck and between your legs, his rough fingers rubbing circles against your sensitive clit, the gesture making your knees buck, resting your entire weight against the table.

"Come on, lady, you earned it; take it." Eddie grinds himself deeper inside of you, his chest resting on your back as you lay his entire weight on top of you.

His cock molds your walls, gripping your hips. The feeling of his fingernails digging into your skin only adds fuel to the fire inside of you.

The slow build up of your body finally gives in to the pleasure as your legs tremble, your back arching as you bite into the sleeve of your shirt, your orgasm unrolling hard as every part of your body trembles as Eddie fucks you through your orgasm.

"There you go, baby," he says, slowly pulling out of you. You weren't sure how, but Eddie managed to sit you down on the bench, his hand clasping firmly around your jaw as it was automatic how quickly your mouth expected the familiar length to have been down your throat already.

"Are you ready for your reward?" Eddie grunted, and you watched with your eyes halfway open as his ringed hand gripped the base of his cock and jerked desperately.

"Ugh, baby, I can't-please—" Eddie slumps his chest forward as his hips stutter, his body reacting as if he had fallen into a daze as his cum had painted your face within seconds.

At first, catching whatever had landed in your mouth. You flinched as some rolled down your face and into your eye.

"Shit, sorry, hold on." Eddie apologized, using his thumb to wipe it away from your eye, his thumb dipping into your mouth as your tongue wrapped around it, cleaning his fingers.

Time felt nonexistent as you sat there with a slight throb of soreness between your legs. Not too long ago, you had been laying on your stomach getting your guts rearranged.

It was a little hard for you to try to regain your composure. Not only did Eddie Munson just give you a facial, but he also fucked you outside in the woods for drugs.

The embarrassment was beginning to settle in as your eyes reopened and you became very aware of the warmth painting your cheeks and chin.

Eddie smirked down at you, seemingly content, and you were torn between being mortified and extremely turned on.

"Aren't you gonna thank me, princess? I just gave you a makeover free of charge."

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#[ ⇢ ˗ˏˋ ★ — t.wrks. ] #stranger things #eddie munson #eddie munson x reader #joseph quinn #stranger things 4 #netflix #eddie munson x fem!reader #eddie munson imagine #eddie munson stranger things #st4 #eddie munson concept #eddie munson fanfiction #eddie munson fanfic #eddie munson x you #stranger things imagine #stranger things x reader

[lena-in-a-red-dress]

I'm actually really surprised that the supergirl writers didn't steal from a Charmed episode and have an episode where there was someone killing people in their dreams. Or maybe instead of killing people, he somehow traps their minds in their own nightmares and uses their bodies to do bad things.

Of course Nia would be the only one who could stop the bad guy, obvs, but I also had an intense desire to set this idea in the Sister, Sister verse, so maybe when the guy sets his sights on the superfriends, they're just like, okay we won't sleep then.

And everyone thinks Lena is most equipped to deal with the lack of sleep, so they don't really worry about her, until one evening Nia goes to Lena's apartment passed out on the floor, having hit her head on the way down.

They bring Lena back to the Tower medbay, but because she's fallen asleep, Lena's now compromised, so they have to restrain her. Except when she wakes up she seems totally herself, if a little panicked to be strapped down. Most people who are targeted by the bad guy are zombies from the moment they wake up, so Lena is so normal that they're kind of taken aback, and ultimately determine that maybe her magic protected her, question mark?

So they release her, and Lena gets back to work. Until Nia makes a discovery on a potential strategy and turns to find Lena behind her with a knife.

They fight, and once Lena is subdued, Nia dives into her friend's nightmare that she's trapped in, where Lex has her strapped to an operating table and is ready to pick her apart like a specimen. Nia is horrified, but understands that it's a manifestation of Lena's old fears, and tries to get through to her. Because maybe it'll be like the Black Mercy-- if Lena can reject the nightmare, maybe it will end.

It takes some effort. At first Lena can't even see her, and Lena's raw and palpable fear makes Nia's heart pound in her chest like the fear is her own. But little by little she gets through to Lena, and when Lena believes Nia, the straps release her and Nia can help Lena slide off the table. But they're still in a lab, with no visible doors.

How do they get out?

Then they hear Lex start clapping, and as they watch Lex's face melts away to reveal their true villain. Lena grips Nia's hand tight, and Nia can taste her friend's renewed fear. Lena can feel how her mind has been violated, her body made not her own. But Nia can also feel that old Luthor fight in her.

The bad guy monologues about how he couldn't tip his hand with Lena too early, before he fully had his claws in her, not when Lena had such power at her disposal. With Lena, he gloats, he could do anything he wanted.

"I don't think so," Nia says, lashing out with a bolt of dream energy. But the guy deflects with a magical field.

Nia looks to Lena. "Was that his power of yours?"

Lena swallows thickly. "Mine. I-- I'm sorry, I can't--"

"It's okay," Nia promises. "I got this."

And she does. But as she fights the villain, it becomes apparent that the magic he siphons from Lena is finite-- Lena visibly weakens as the fight progresses, and Nia falters.

"The more we fight," he taunts, "the more I drain from her. Kill me, and she goes with me."

But before Nia has the chance to face an impossible decision to choose one or the many, Lena grabs a scalpel from one of the trays amd slits his throat.

"Fuck you," she grunts, before she staggers.

Nia catches her, tearfully asking why she did that.

"Spite, mostly," Lena rasps, prompting a tearful laugh from Nia. She squeezes Nia's hand. "And because I couldn't bear it if he used my power to hurt you."

"Lena..."

"I'm sorry I blamed you for keeping Kara's secret. It should never have been your burden to carry..."

"Lena, stop--"

By now Lena is visibly fading, her life force bleeding away as Nia cradles her close.

"Thank you, Nia," she whispers. "For-- for everything."

It's the last thing she says as her eyes flutter shut. In growing panic, Nia shakes her head in defiance. "No," she declares. "Not like this."

She reaches out to where the villain is similarly starting to dissipate, and uses her dream energy to corral the sense of Lena that's bleeding from him. She gathers all she can, then compresses it into a ball of glowing light, an energy that's warm, and gentle, and familiar.

Using her power, she returns the energy to Lena, directing it to settle squarely in Lena's fading chest. It takes a moment, but then the orb of energy pulses, and the light spreads through Lena, bringing her back to opacity.

Lena's eyes open once more, her chest rising with a deep, full breath. Nia gasps in relief, and hugs Lena to her chest.

"Don't you ever do that again."

When they return to the waking world, everything seems to return to normal. Except for one thing that doesn't make the trip back with them.

Lena no longer has her magic.

#supercorp #sister sister verse #dream killer au

[andorerso]

Rebelcaptain Whumptober: Day 6

for the prompt recording (warnings: recorded torture, nothing too graphic)

When Cassian’s tracker was turned off, Jyn could tell something was very wrong.

Let it be known, she was against this from the start. When one of their agents discovered an underground crime syndicate called the Glorious Dawn before going MIA soon after, it fell to Cassian to find out more. It wasn’t an extraction mission; Agent Varga was presumed to be dead. But what little he’d disclosed about the Glorious Dawn before his disappearance was unsettling enough to warrant a thorough investigation.

Kidnapping people to be tortured for show. Broadcasting their death-struggle over the holonet. Letting viewers bid and choose what happens to those poor souls — and if that wasn’t horrific enough, large parts of that money went into the Empire’s pocket to fund their weapons and tech development. Bad news all around. An operation that needed to be stopped. Jyn understood that.

She also understood the horrible fate that had more than likely befallen Agent Varga, and she was damned if she let it happen to Cassian.

She couldn’t shake the ominous feeling that churned in her stomach on the whole journey to this small, backwater planet, but she dismissed it — tried to dismiss it as natural. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for her to worry about Cassian’s safety on a mission; it’s just what happened when you loved someone. Perfectly normal for her to be antsy. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that this was somehow different. Dangerous. Foreboding.

Jyn resolved to bite her tongue and keep her thoughts to herself. Cassian was an intelligence officer, and he didn’t need her to baby him. He was a far cry from a novice; that’s why Draven had chosen him. Because he was the best for the job. And he certainly wouldn’t have resigned from the mission regardless. Jyn didn’t think he’d ever told the rebellion no (Galen Erso and Scarif notwithstanding.) He’d happily carve out his own heart from his chest and serve it to the figureheads of the Alliance on a platter if that’s what was required of him. She’d only make it worse if she expressed her fears.

Because someone had to do it.

But why did that someonealways have to be him?

With mounting resentment towards Draven, towards the rebellion, towards this entire fucking operation, Jyn sent him off with a kiss and a plea to stay safe. She’d wanted, so badly, to ask him to check in as often as he could, but knew it would be too risky. He’d give sign of life when it was possible without compromising himself. And she’ll wait until he returned, or…

Well.

Jyn was just back-up, only to intervene if something went wrong.

Something like his tracker getting disabled a few weeks into their assignment.

The first thing she did was pull up that forsaken holosite on her datapad where they broadcasted their sick little game to their bloodthirsty audience. The site was strictly exclusive and carefully hidden on the holonet, not something you could stumble upon by accident — or at all. The password changed every week, but Cassian had forwarded the latest one in his last encrypted transmission two days ago. Which meant Jyn had access.

A part of her wished she didn’t. Because for the first time since they arrived, a new show had been announced.

An image of Cassian strapped to a chair greeted her. He was unconscious, his head lolling forward and his hair shielding his face from view. The buttons on his shirt were undone, sweaty skin and dark wisps of hair peeking out from underneath. But he seemed unharmed. For now.

Various tools and gadgets and syringes lay scattered on an equipment table next to him, and the words under the feed read “Show starts in two hours! Place your bid now!”

Jyn nearly threw her datapad at the wall, wanting to hurl.

Two hours. Two hours was all she had to find him before…

She squeezed her eyes shut and breathed in deeply. Tried to push down the fear and panic rising from the core of her, threatening to overtake her executive functions. She needed to keep her head clear. Stay alert. Figure out an action plan. But all she saw behind her eyelids was Cassian’s figure strapped to that chair, helpless and vulnerable, and the comments she read under the feed. Asking for him to be drugged, to be beaten, to be hurt.

It started out tame, as it always did, but the worse ones… The ones she couldn’t even speak.

A wounded sound rattled in her chest, her entire body shaking so bad she nearly dropped the datapad. She didn’t need a weapon, she would slaughter them all with her bare hands.

She just needed a location.

And she knew where to start. Agent Varga’s contact on the planet had to have known something. Jyn would make him talk, whatever it cost.

Opening her eyes, she ran her finger across Cassian’s figure on the screen and tried to summon all the strength she possessed even as she felt like crumbling to the floor. She couldn’t lose her composure now; he needed her.

“I’ll find you,” she whispered, a promise he wouldn’t hear. “If it’s the last thing I do.”

xxx

Agent Varga’s contact was a Rodian male who was proving to be rather unwilling to talk when asked nicely.

And Jyn had tried. To ask nicely. But time was limited. She wouldn’t leave Cassian to be cut apart piece by piece like a slab of meat.

So if violence was the only language the Glorious Dawn understood…

The Rodian squirmed in the chair she’d tied him to, blood dripping down his face from a large gash on his forehead.

“Tell me where he is,” Jyn said again.

“They know who is,” the Rodian spat, ignoring her question. “A spy for the rebellion. They’ll make it slow. Your man is coming home in tiny boxes.”

He laughed, loud and gleeful, and Jyn clenched her fists as she tried to control her rage. He was egging her on. Trying to get a reaction.

She had to be in control here, even if all she really wanted to do was beat his face to a pulp.

“If they know who he is,” Jyn said through gritted teeth, every word an effort, “then they know an intelligence agent is not the ideal target. They’re trained to withstand pain.”

The Rodian laughed harder, something almost maniac in his tone.

“What’s so fucking funny?”

“You’re mistaken. That makes him more interesting. Makes it fun to see how far we can push him before he cracks.” His mouth curled into a wicked grin. “The other agent cracked easier than we thought. Maybe this one will be more resilient.”

Jyn punched him, foregoing her batons this time. The idea of beating him to a pulp was looking more and more appealing by the second.

“Where is the base?” she snarled, no more room for the illusion of patience.

The Rodian spat a mouthful of green blood at her feet, but this seedy little motel room was so dirty, it hardly made a difference. “They’ll kill me if I tell you.”

“I will kill you.”

“I’m more scared of them.”

Her lips curled into a sharp, threatening smile. He had no idea what she was capable of. But he’d find out.

“Big mistake.”

xxx

Jyn twirled the bloody blade in her hand as she watched the last rays of the sun cast the landscape in a pinkish hue. She was losing time. The show would start soon, and Cassian would not survive the night.

He might hold out for a while, but she didn’t want to take the risk. Didn’t want to let anyone touch even a hair on his head.

Behind her, the Rodian was coughing and gasping for air around the blood in his mouth. She had to slow down before he actually died on her.

“So? Still nothing?” Her voice was coldly detached. She’d shut down, stopped feeling anything about twenty minutes ago. The only thing that still sparked a flicker of emotion was the thought of Cassian. Her partner. Her love. Her home.

If she didn’t find him soon…

“It’s too bad you’re a rebel bitch,” the Rodian wheezed, “you’re good at this. You’d fit right in with us. Not so different after all, huh?”

A cheap shot. Jyn let it roll off her like water.

“Don’t deflect. Where’s the base?”

“How much time can you waste on me? The show starts soon, and they’ll tear him to tiny pieces. Varga squealed like a little pig, you know. I wonder what sounds your man will make when they’re digging in his guts. I can get you VIP seats if you want.”

He laughed, though it was a strained sound. No longer so confident; a dying man grasping at his last semblance of control. Jyn tuned it out, her gaze trained on her datapad which lit up with a notification. A signal.

Heart hammering in her throat, she watched the pulsing red dot on the map. Hope flared in her chest, tentative but persistent. Cassian’s tracker. They turned it back on.

Which meant it was a trap. She wasn’t stupid. They were baiting her. But she had to go.

It was her only lead; and regardless… It might as well have been guaranteed death.

She’d always come for him.

“You’re right,” Jyn said, cutting off the Rodian mid-sentence. She had no idea what he’d been saying, but with a flourish, she turned and fired a blaster bolt between his eyes. “I don’t need you anymore.”

xxx

It took her less than fifteen minutes to arrive at the location where Cassian’s tracker had pinged outside the city limits. An abandoned imperial compound greeted her, imposing with its high walls and tall towers.

Jyn hopped off the speeder she stole and listened. Something was off.

No guards posted at the entrance. No movement from the yard. No sounds from inside. Only the wind whistled through the trees, raising the hairs on the back of her neck.

Ghosts were the only thing frequenting this building now.

But there was one window, on the third floor, where light streamed outside into the brisk, darkening evening. Jyn eyed it warily, that feeling of wrongness only expanding. The light seemed to almost beckon her, — come closer, come see — but she couldn’t shake the thought that this whole thing was off. The tracker being activated, the absence of living beings anywhere, that single light spilling from the window…

Jyn swallowed, shook her head. There was no time to waste. Blaster in hand, she made it inside the yard, more and more unnerved by the lack of resistance she found.

Trap, trap, trap, her mind screamed, but she ignored it and kept going. Cassian needed her. Her brain latched onto the thought of him, lending her strength and ignoring everything else.

She was furious enough to put up a good fight if they did ambush her. Let them try, let them fucking see what the daughter of Saw Gerrera was capable of.

She, too, was more than ready to give them a show.

More silence greeted her inside the compound. Jyn crept through the quiet halls, eyes flicking in every direction, but no one was hiding in the shadows, no one was trying to stab her in the back. Her footsteps were almost soundless as she made her way up the stairs towards the room where she saw the light. So close now. But as she reached the second-floor landing, muted sounds interrupted the eerie silence.

Heavy panting. A struggle. Something creaked.

Then, a cry of pain.

Jyn picked up her steps, no longer caring if someone heard her. There was only one objective hanging in front of her: find Cassian. Get to him before he was hurt. Protect him. The urge overshadowed everything else.

Perhaps that’s why she didn’t realize what was happening until she pushed the door open with her blaster.

The room was empty.

Jyn’s blaster slowly lowered as she stared at the scene before her with a sinking feeling in her stomach. Only a single holoprojector stood in the middle of the room, showcasing a sight she never wanted to see. Next to it, a forgotten tracker lying in the dirt.

It wasn’t a trap. It was a distraction.

Cassian was awake now, still strapped down in that chair, his chest rising and falling with quick, shallow breaths. The world tilted around her, her legs trembling, but Jyn couldn’t take her eyes off him. Unable to stop seeing what they were doing to him. One of his fingers was trapped in a vice, and a masked man wearing dark robes was in the process of tightening the tool.

Jyn stood, rooted to the spot, unable to move or breathe or think. It felt like it was happening to someone else. She stood until she heard the crunching of bones, the tearing of skin, and another pained shout tore free from Cassian’s mouth.

With an angry scream, Jyn kicked the holoprojector, sending it flying against the wall. The image cut off, and dead silence followed.

Time had run out.

“You fuckers!” she yelled before crumbling to the ground, all her strength gone. She’d failed. She didn’t find him in time, and now he was… Now he was…

Shivers wracked her body, the image of Cassian’s hand in that vice burned into her mind. That would be far from the worst of it, she knew. They were just getting started. The Rodian wasn’t kidding when he said they’d tear him apart bit by bit.

She’ll burn this fucking city to the ground —

Lightheaded, Jyn buried her head in her hands and allowed herself to weep. Though it hadn’t been her who was taken, who was tortured, she felt like her hand was in that vice too, crushed under its cruel grip. Paralyzing fear weighed down her limbs, making it impossible to think straight. For a wild second, she thought she might throw up, but she pushed the bile down, her fingernails digging into her own leg as she tried to find some sort of anchor to hold onto. Something to ground her. Anything.

She’d give anything —

Her thoughts spiraled.

She had to find him. She had to. It wasn’t too late, she could still — she could still save him, she could still bring him home and make sure he was safe, make sure he recovered, make sure nobody ever hurt him again. She had to find him. She had to.

Jyn lifted her head, taking deep shuddering breaths to get her pulse under control. Back to business, no time to fall apart. Get yourself together. She wiped away her tears, her hand coming back smudged from her eyeliner. Her heart rate slowed, a little bit. She needed a plan.

As appealing as it was to burn down the city, it wouldn’t help much. She couldn’t go knocking on door to door either, and the Rodian was dead.

It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. She didn’t have time to find anyone else associated with the group; let alone capture and interrogate them. But she had access to the live feed, though her stomach revolted at the idea of bringing it back up. Maybe she could get some clues from the show… Maybe she could pose as a bidder? Try to wrangle something, anything from the comments?

As her brain whirled with ideas, each one more desperate than the other, something else on the ground caught her eye.

Next to the tracker lay something small… Something purple.

With a frown, Jyn stood and examined it closer. It was a flower. She picked it up, turning it in her hand. A pang of familiarity washed over her as she stared at the purple petals with pink streaks. She’d seen that flower before.

Varga’s last transmission. Made from a room in a brothel downtown. The flowers on the wall behind him. Morning glory, it was called. The whole place was decked out in them.

Morning glory… The Glorious Dawn?

Jyn crushed the petal in her hand, determination hardening her features. Cassian had left her a clue, and she knew where he was.

She was coming.

#rebelcaptain #rogue one #therebelcaptainnetwork #dailyrebelcaptain #my fics #rcwhumptober

[lexosaurus]

and then he woke up

Happy @phandomholidaytruce to @bleedingectoplasm! I loved your prompts, especially the part where you said, "idk just hurt me<3" so I hope I delivered!

Characters: Danny, GIW, Sam, Tucker Words: 5103 Warnings/tags: body horror, angst, recovery

[ao3 link]

***

It had been a joke once. Back in high school, his classmates had once bantered about the limits to his healing factor. They giggled, theorizing different scenarios, each more ridiculous than the last. Instances where his finger was cut off, his ghostly tail chopped in two, his torso sliced in half. If he was missing an organ, would his body make a new one? Would he regrow it like a starfish if his arm was cut off?

He had laughed, then. Because of course, those situations were crazy. No one was going to take his organs out. No one was going to cut his arm off. 

It was a joke.

It was supposed to be a joke.

His breath shuttered. Above him, white blended with white blended with green. Fire and nothingness cloaked his body, his nerves too fried to produce even a twitch. But still, ectoplasm bathed his skin, pooling on the table below him.

Voices murmured off to his side, and the sounds of machines beeped and whirred around him. But everything was muffled, the white was too oppressive, make it stop, make it stop…

“It’s fascinating.” The fuzzy operative hovered above him.

Danny couldn’t react as metal tools pressed against his skin.

“His body seems to be regrowing his missing kidney. Look, you can see it.”

Another face entered his view. “That’s incredible. Level seven indeed.”

Danny shut his eyes. He couldn’t stomach seeing their faces. He couldn’t know who was opening his skin, shuffling through his body, tearing it apart and putting it back together like a crude jigsaw. 

He wanted to cocoon in his ignorance and wake up in his bed.

He woke up in his cell. No bed. No blanket. He was a ghost, and ghosts didn’t deserve luxuries.

He didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to assess the damage. He didn’t want to see how deep the nerve and muscle damage went, didn’t want to know if there was still a hole in his body, didn’t want to feel any dents where organs should be.

He didn’t want to know.

But deep down, some ugly part of him knew. And it admonished him, telling him to be grateful. He could have had it worse, he could have died. 

But then, wasn’t he already dead? No living person could have survived that.

No living person could have regrown a kidney.

His eyes burned, and his vision blurred over. After he passed out again, he would wonder what else they had removed from his body. What other things was he forced to regrow like some mutant lab experiment?

And to his horror, a few days later, he woke up.

Back on the metal table.

With another fuzzy operative floating above him, metal tools in hand.

The strap on his forehead stopped him from craning to see what was happening next to him, but instinct pooled in his gut anyway, and he knew.

He knew.

“It’s halfway regrown,” the operative said in a sterile tone.

“Time recorded. And what of his kidney?”

“It looks about a quarter of the way there.”

“Excellent.”

He wanted to ask, to beg, what was the first one? What were they talking about? Had they removed his kidney again? Didn’t they have enough fun the first time? Why were they doing this to him?

But even the mere thought of asking sent nausea down his throat and he couldn’t think about it, he couldn’t ask. His voice was frozen over anyway.

If he didn’t know the truth, then the realities didn’t exist.

When he woke up in his cell that evening, he tried to call out to Clockwork, to the Observants, to anyone who may see him. Who may know what he was going through. 

But no one responded. 

Of course.

Even though he didn’t expect an answer, it still punched him in the gut all the same. And those fears, those insecurities danced through his mind, twisting their imprints into every corner of his thoughts.

He wasn’t worthy of rescue. He wasn’t worth the trouble. He was just a thing, just a specimen to experiment on. He was…

Alone.

And then he woke up again on the table. And again. By now his nerves had been too torn apart to emit anything other than a numb tingling. The places he could still feel burned—they always burned—but he could ignore it. Shut it out.

Don’t think about it.

Don’t think.

He stared at the ceiling. Unmoving. Unblinking. Passed the masked faces above him, only catching the glint of metal out of the corners of his eyes. He listened as the operatives spoke, slicing parts of him away, but their words went in one ear and out the other.

He didn’t want to know.

And time passed. He kept waking up on the table with more things missing. He kept waking up in his cell knowing they had regrown. He kept waking up feeling tingling, burning in previously numb parts of his body, knowing that it was only thanks to the weekend that his nerves had begun to feel again. But then Monday would come again, and he would wake up with his body numb once more.

How much time had passed? How much of his body was no longer his? How much had regrown like an ugly patchwork of an ectoplasmic contaminated doll?

Was he even himself anymore if so much had been replaced?

How long until he couldn’t call himself Danny? 

And then he woke up.

Again.

***

He woke up to dimly lit glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling.

Those had been courtesy of Sam’s insistence. Something about grounding him after he woke up from nightmares—after all, the GIW didn’t have decorations in their cells. It was too bad the stars didn’t exist behind his eyelids. It would be nice to be able to prevent the dreams from happening in the first place.

He wasn’t sure what time it was, and he was too afraid to look at his phone to check. He didn’t want to know how badly he’d messed up his sleep for the night—again—he’d realized. But the room was dark, so he could only imagine.

On TV, when people woke up from nightmares, they got out of bed. Maybe they got a glass of water, hopped in the shower, or started getting dressed.

Danny always thought that was a load of bullshit. Because here he was, his frantic heart beginning to slow, brain flickering images that made him want to gag, and yet he couldn’t even consider the possibility of leaving his bed.

And so he lay there.

Staring up at the ceiling.

He must have dozed off eventually because one moment his eyesight went blurry, and the next he was waking up to the plastic stars. Except, sunlight streamed through the windows, and the stars had lost their sci-fi glow.

He still didn’t know what time it was. Maybe he should check.

Maybe.

His skin was uncomfortably warm, and he could feel his pillow not quite right under his head. His neck was stiff, but still, he didn’t get up. He could have slept for a week. He didn’t have the willpower to get out of bed.

So…he didn’t. He stayed in bed. A sluggish arm pulled out his phone and his fingers lazily scrolled through various social media sites without stopping to read anything. He let the minutes hours pass by until the stale taste in his mouth and his parched throat forced him out of bed.

It was a good thing Sam and Tucker weren’t here. They would be so disappointed if they saw how he spent his days off.

He turned on the faucet, washing toothpaste down the drain. His sink was getting grimy again, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cleaned his apartment. Sam would be so let down. Tucker would be too, though he wouldn’t say so many words as her.

So when his phone buzzed to life and familiar names appeared on his screen, he ignored them.

He couldn’t face them. Couldn’t do it.

Instead, he went back to bed. Not to sleep, just to…exist. Whatever that meant.

And when his phone finally rang, he turned it on Do Not Disturb.

(In his dreams, he woke up in his cell again.)

He woke up to the stars.

Again.

He stayed in bed, dozing until his alarm went off, signaling the start of the work week.

Had Sunday passed? Did his brain skip an entire day without him knowing?

So he had spent the entire weekend in bed. 

Fantastic.

He forced himself up, forced himself into the shower. He was careful not to touch his body anymore when he showered—that was what the loofah was for (another gift from Sam). His skin didn’t feel right anymore. It prickled at his touch in some places and burned in others. It had raises and bumps and lines that it didn’t use to. He couldn’t touch it, couldn’t admit to what happened, didn’t want to know.

Of course, it was impossible to forget.

He didn’t even notice he had transformed until he was already invisibly touching down at the subway stop. Danny Fenton took the subway to campus. At least, that was the story everyone else saw.

He detransformed—still invisibly, thank god he’d mastered that—and ducked out from behind the pillar. The invisibility dropped, and he slung his backpack over his shoulder as he made for the turnstile. 

Danny Fenton was a researcher getting his MS in aerospace engineering. Danny Fenton was looking for summer internships. Danny Fenton was a normal man, one who grew up with scientist parents, who never went into their portal, who was never kidnapped by the government, who never had his body cut open and was never forced to regrow his organs day and day again.

He was normal.

Very normal.

The sun hit his eyes and he tried to pretend that he wasn’t squinting at the sudden light. That he hadn’t just spent the entire weekend inside. That he wasn’t royally fucked for class today because he hadn’t even glanced at the prep work.

He followed a group of students inside his building and scanned his ID at the front desk. The security guard hardly looked up from his newspaper, and why would he? Danny Fenton was a normal, tired human student.

The elevator dinged at his floor, and he made the same trek to the office that he always made. Someone acknowledged him from the hall—probably Blake, he practically lived at the school—and Danny grunted in response.

He hoped he remembered to shave that morning. He couldn’t remember anything other than the relief and subsequent dread at waking up.

“Got some grading for you, Fenton,” the professor said as soon as Danny walked through the door. He tapped a stack of folders. “It’s a rough one, sorry.”

Danny’s voice crackled as he responded, “Sounds good.” He flushed, realizing it had been several days since he’d spoken last.

(He talked plenty in his dreams, though.)

His advisor quirked a bushy brow at him. “You sleep alright?”

“Fine.” Danny swiped the stack of folders. “I’ll be in the conference room till someone kicks me out.”

“‘Kay.”

He was glad it was just grading. Math had formulas, it had plans. It was either right or wrong. A rocket ship couldn’t fly if the numbers were wrong.

And grading undergraduates was mindless. They either knew the material or they didn’t. In the case of Professor Patel’s class, most of them didn’t.

Which was fine with Danny. If that meant he had to take longer to grade these exams, then that was good. Great, even. It meant he could spend less time thinking.

But eventually, he finished, and Patel ordered him to get food before class.

Danny tried to remember what he’d eaten since Friday. Maybe he had…pizza? At one point? A sandwich? Some ramen? He couldn’t remember. He must have eaten something because he wasn’t that hungry.

“You sure you’re alright?” Patel had asked again as Danny gathered his coat and bag to leave.

“Yeah.” He refused to make eye contact. “Just tired. You know, busy weekend.”

Busy weekend of staring at the wall, more like.

“I get it. Grad school is tough,” Patel said. “Listen, I have some meetings later, so I don’t need you for the rest of the day. After class, just go home. Get some rest. Swing by tomorrow.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. Make sure you actually sleep this time.”

Danny attempted a weak smile. “I’ll try.”

Still, shame and guilt clawed at his hollow insides. He knew that he was giving nothing but empty promises.

He managed to go to class where he managed to take notes and he managed to follow along. Somehow. Thankfully. 

And then Danny Fenton walked to a secluded spot, transformed, and flew home.

His apartment was dark under the drawn curtains, but he didn’t bother with a light switch. It didn’t matter, he wasn’t human anyway. 

He grabbed a container from the fridge—takeout, some days old—and ate it under the light of the microwave clock. It was lo mein, some part of him recognized midway through. It tasted blander than he remembered.

Some part of him thought back to when the operatives had cut out his tongue. Partially to punish him for mouthing off, and partially just for fun. Sometimes he wondered how different his new taste buds were. Was this because they had regrown? Or did he just have issues?

No, don’t think about that. 

So he didn’t.

He woke up to his alarm. 

He went to school. 

Helped his advisor around the office.

Assisted with a class for undergraduates.

Went to his own class.

Had coffee with a classmate after. (What was her name again?)

Flew home.

Ate dinner. Ramen this time.

Woke up.

Woke up.

Woke up.

He woke up to pounding on his door.

He slapped a hand to his forehead, blearily sliding it down his eyes. Ugh, what time was it?

Who the hell was here this early?

Muffled shouting sounded from the hallway, but Danny couldn’t even begin to decipher what they were saying. But a second later, he recognized who was speaking and groaned on instinct.

“I’m coming, I’m coming.” He braced himself for the unforgiving atmosphere that existed outside of his blankets.

“Danny, if you don’t get to the door right fucking now, I’m going to—”

“Yeah! I heard you!” He snapped, dragging his lifeless body from the bed.

“Sam, come on—”

“No, he can’t ignore us, Tuck.”

“I know, but—”

Danny opened the door, blinking as the light from the hall hit his retinas. He yawned. “What the hell?”

“Danny, have you been sleeping all day?” Sam’s tone hardly reigned in her frustration. She stood, tapping her black boots on the carpet and glaring at him through her purple makeup and dyed bangs.

“What?”

“It’s two in the afternoon, dude,” Tucker said, pushing past the door.

Danny didn’t fight him. He’d learned months ago that isolation wasn’t a battle he could win with these two.

Sam wrinkled her nose, picking at his shirt. “Have you been wearing this all week?”

Danny rolled his eyes, stepping back into the dusty apartment. He couldn’t remember when he’d last changed, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. “Will you relax? I was just asleep. Sorry, I’ll change.”

“Danny…”

“Make yourselves at home. I’ll be right back.” He shut the front door and padded to his bedroom, rifling through his laundry bin of clean clothes he’d never managed to put away.

Tucker, of course, took that as an invitation to perch himself on the bedroom doorframe. He stared into the messy bedroom, his arms crossed, and that annoyingly tense look on his face that Danny had begun to recognize was the “you’ve done fucked up” look.

But as usual, Tucker didn’t offer any of that information first. No, Danny had to be the one to grind out, “Okay, what now?”

“What do you mean, what now?” Tucker said. 

“I don’t know. You look like you have something to say.” Danny turned away and shrugged his shirt off, speed racing through putting the new one on.

He couldn’t risk anyone seeing his torso.

Even if his two best friends already knew what that looked like.

“Danny. You already know what I’m gonna say.”

“No, I don’t.”

Of course, he did.

But that was enough to snap Tucker out of his judgemental glare. For his crossed arms to fall down to his sides, and for that unmistakable sigh to escape his lips. 

“Dude, you’re getting worse.”

He knew Tucker was right. But that didn’t stop instinct from spouting out, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m fine.” 

“Yeah, okay,” Tucker snorted, glancing at the piles of dirty laundry on his floor. “If you want to keep lying to yourself.”

“Danny? All the vegetables I bought last week are still in your fridge,” Sam said, poking her head through the door. A clump of her purple and black hair caught on her lipstick, but she didn’t move to brush it away.

Danny didn’t even remember seeing vegetables in his fridge. “Sorry.”

“Have you been eating?”

“I eat a lot at school. You know, networking stuff.”

Tucker quirked a brow, and Sam’s expression looked even less impressed.

He looked at his two best friends, both dressed in unwrinkled clothes with skin that appeared as if it saw the sun for more than five minutes each day. They had their careers, friends, and lives that Danny could only dream of. 

“Come on, let’s go get food,” Sam said.

“Food?”

“It’s past lunch, and I know you need it.”

It was pointless to try to fight them. “Okay. Give me a few minutes to wash my face?”

“Sure.”

Winter was nice, Danny decided. Winter air meant it was cold, and he had an excuse to bundle up. He didn’t have to worry about short sleeves or people seeing his bare skin.

He could cover it up, not talk about it, not think about it.

“I think you should talk about it,” Sam said finally, placing a sub in front of him.

Danny couldn’t recall ordering anything. In fact, he hardly remembered the walk here. Which was bad. That meant Sam and Tucker had seen him when he was zoning out. He tried not to do that when they were around.

Oops.

“You know I can’t,” Danny said. He picked up the sub and took a bite. It was nice, and then he realized that meant he was probably hungry.

“I’m not saying you need to give details as Fenton. Maybe you can find someone willing to work with Phantom?” 

“That’s impossible.”

“Nah,” Tucker said through a mouthful of his own food. He chewed for a moment and then swallowed. “Phantom’s been around for a while. You have a lot of support. I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to find a therapist who’s willing to work with you in ghost form.”

“Yeah, okay, let me just do that. I’ll just go ahead and risk finding a therapist on the off-chance they don’t call the government to come take me back there. Sure, no problem.” Danny glared at his food which suddenly didn’t look so appetizing. He huffed, putting it down on his plate, and dropped his head into his palms.

His hands were shaking. He hadn’t even realized they were doing that.

“Danny…” Sam’s voice was gentle this time. “Come on. There are other options.”

“Not really.”

“Sure there are. We can get you to a psychiatrist. You know, as a human.”

“They’d want to do bloodwork.”

Sam was silent at that. And then Danny could hear his breath, how shaky it was, and he hated that. He hated this conversation and feeling this way and he wanted to be home by himself staring at the stupid plastic stars on his ceiling again.

“You can’t keep living like this,” Tucker said. “I’m sorry, but you can’t. This is bad.”

“I know.” His voice was weak.

“So let’s think of something.”

“I’ve tried. There’s nothing else I can do.”

The three of them were silent once again. No one moved until finally, Tucker picked up his sandwich, and Sam followed. And Danny sat there with his head in his hands until the shakiness stopped and he could manage to eat another few bites. Sam wrapped up his leftovers and she and Tucker guided him home.

And that was that.

Until he woke up the next day to his phone ringing. It was Sam—of course, it was Sam—breathless on the other line.

“I’m here.” 

“What?”

“Tucker’s outside. Can you buzz us in?”

Danny groaned, dragging himself up again because these two idiots didn’t know how to leave him alone. He hit the buzzer and then waited at his door for the sound of murmurs, footsteps, and the polite knock that followed (it was Tucker’s knock this time). He opened the door to see his friends with their backpacks suspiciously full.

“Guys, stop,” Danny said, stepping aside to let them in.

“Stop what?” Tucker said innocently.

“Stop mothering me. You don’t need to bring me stuff. You already did that last week.”

Tucker hopped over to the kitchen. “Oh well, if you see Danny, tell him we’ll stop bringing him groceries when he admits he can’t survive on ramen forever.” Tucker set his backpack down on the counter and unloaded its contents into the fridge.

Danny mumbled incoherently, pulling out his phone to Venmo his two friends because he knew they wouldn’t accept repayment otherwise.

“Come on,” Sam said, pulling him away from Tucker. “Let’s watch TV.”

Danny allowed himself to be dragged to the couch, and he didn’t resist when Sam pushed him down and threw a blanket over him.

“There,” she said.

“I’m a halfa. I wasn’t cold.”

“But now you’re comfortable.”

“And you have groceries,” Tucker said, jumping onto the couch. He threw his hoodie-covered arm around Danny, patting his shoulder. “See? We got you.”

“I’m sorry,” Danny said reflexively. He was sorry. He was so sorry that they had to deal with him, that he wasn’t just fine and back to normal. That, for some reason, he couldn’t handle what happened even after all this time had passed.

“It’s okay, dude.”

“No, it’s not.” He moved his mouth soundlessly, shoving his trembling fingers under his blanket. He could feel the other two still beside him, and he wanted to unload everything, but that wouldn’t be fair to them. He couldn’t keep using them like this, it wasn’t fair.

“Danny, come on, we’re your best friends.”

“Yeah, but this is crazy. I’m crazy—or, I feel like it. You know? Like…I don’t know, I just feel like the world keeps slipping and I don’t know what to do.” 

Admitting the truth was bitter, and he couldn’t look at the other two. He couldn’t see their reactions. He didn’t want to look at Sam’s concerned expression, her eyebrows tight and pulled in, and he didn’t want to see Tucker’s wide eyes and their underlying hard look. Because that would mean that what he said was real and that the dreams were real and he couldn’t do that. He didn’t want to know.

“As we said before,” Sam said, her voice cautious. “You know, there are options.”

“Those are impossible for me.”

“Not necessarily.” Sam reached down into her backpack and pulled out a folder. “I hope you don’t mind, but last night Tucker and I went ahead and looked into some psychologists nearby. We compiled a list of all the ones who had liked or posted pro-Phantom posts on social media.”

Danny’s brain was slow to react, but when the implication hit him, he carefully reached out for the folder and opened it. Inside were stapled pages of various therapists. He leafed around to see printouts of their backgrounds, therapist pages, and their interactions with Phantom-themed social media.

“Wow…” He stared at the papers, hardly soaking in the words in front of him. His throat felt tight, and something prickled behind his eyes.

“Like I said, we got you,” Tucker said.

Danny quickly wiped away a tear that betrayed him. “I—I’m sorry.”

“You’d do the same for us, dude.”

“Wow. Well, still. This was…really nice.” He glanced at his friends and saw nothing but kindness behind their eyes. “Thanks, guys.”

“Will you let us help you find someone now?” 

Danny nodded. 

“Good.” Sam put her hand on his shoulder. “We’ll get through this, Danny. I promise.”

And if he had to wipe away another tear from his cheek, his friends were kind enough to not point it out.

***

“You look better,” Tucker said through a mouthful of a pastrami sandwich. “She’s good?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Danny sipped on his coffee, glancing toward the window. Snow flurries had begun to fall, though too sparse to stick onto the pavement. The sun was undecided if it wanted to commit to hiding behind the clouds and letting the snow commence, or if it wanted to break up the incoming storm in favor of blue skies. 

But regardless of the weather, the world moved around him. People hurried along the sidewalks, their hands shoved in their pockets and their eyes trained low, blinking away the little white speckles that stuck to their eyelashes. Cars whizzed by with bikes trailing alongside them. Across the street, a man dressed in all blue stood on a box, preaching to the scurrying passerby.

“I’m glad she’s working out,” Tucker said.

Danny was glad as well. Though, he could never express just how relieved he’d been. Looking back, it was almost embarrassing how quickly he had broken down to Amy. He couldn’t even remember what question she had asked him, just that it apparently hit the exact nerve he had spent months pushing down further and further into the recess of his mind.

That had been the first night in a long time he didn’t have a nightmare.

“How’s your job going?” Danny asked. “Sorry, I haven’t really asked.”

“All good, dude! And it’s been going well. My team’s awesome. I can’t really talk about what we’re developing—NDAs and all—but it’s been fun to figure out how to build everything. You know? It’s like a jigsaw puzzle.”

Danny felt the corners of his lips twitch up. It had been too long since he’d seen this, the spark that hit Tucker’s eyes when he got on the topic of technology. For so long, his daily routine had been making sure he didn’t drown, that he’d forgotten how nice it was to be able to breathe air.

“You can’t tell me anything? Not even a little hint?”

Tucker groaned dramatically, pulling his beanie down over his eyes. “Don’t tempt me, dude! Staying quiet about this is already bad enough without having you guilting me into spilling.”

“Aw, you’re no fun.”

“And what about you? You’re working for your advisor, right?”

“Yeah. Patel’s cool. You know, it’s mostly just me doing his bitch work. But he’s been talking about introducing him to some of his contracting buddies. So that’d be cool.” Danny shrugged. “Whatever gets my foot in the door, really.”

“The first job’s the hardest. After that, it gets easier.”

“That’s what Sam said too. And Jazz. And my mom.”

“Well, they’re not wrong,” Tucker said, turning his attention back to his sandwich. “You remember me complaining about my first job. My boss was an idiot who thought more lines of code meant more productivity. No matter how many people explained that fewer lines are actually—a lot of the time—better and that debugging was a thing, this guy couldn’t grasp the concept. I couldn’t wait to finish out my year and get out of there.”

“Bad bosses are everywhere, I guess.”

“Yeah. But you know, now I’m working at this kickass place and it’s great!”

Tucker didn’t have to convince Danny of that. Just looking across the table, Danny could see all the ways Tucker had changed since they were kids. He was taller, more filled out, and he sat with his shoulders back, head held high. He still had that shit-eating grin, but it seemed more genuine now. Kinder.

Danny had a lot of catching up to do. But maybe…maybe one day, he’d get there too.

“Well, I’m sure I’ll be complaining about my first boss too.”

“It’s a rite of passage.”

The laugh escaped his lips before he could stop himself. “Sure it is.”

“So what’s on your agenda for today?”

“Eh, nothing fun. I’m still catching up with all my schoolwork.” It hadn’t been fun facing the mountain of assignments and studying he had fallen behind on. But it hadn’t exactly been the first time he’d been in this academic predicament either. And as experience had taught him, once he’d started, he had found that his backlog of work wasn’t quite as bad as his anxiety had made it seem.

“We’ll be seeing you on Friday still, right?” Tucker asked. 

Danny took another sip of his coffee and nodded. “For sure. I’ll need the break by then.”

“Good.”

“And, you know, thanks.” Danny ducked his head. “I know I’ve been off. Thanks for sticking it out for me. I really appreciate you guys.”

“Dude, of course. You know, we moved here together, so we’re gonna stick together.”

“Yeah. Still, thanks.”

“We got you.”

When Danny woke up on Saturday, he wasn’t in his bed. He was on his couch with Sam and Tucker pressed up on either side of him. They must have fallen asleep watching terrible movies again. Empty cans of spiked seltzers and a family-sized bag of pretzels littered the coffee table, and the ‘Are You Still Watching?’ message splayed over the TV screen.

He heard the soft snores of Tucker and the consistent breaths of Sam, and something warm and fuzzy grew in his stomach. After months and months of feeling empty, the warmth was almost jarring at first, but that was quickly replaced by bliss.

Because even though it had been a while, even Danny couldn’t forget how nice this all felt. To have friends, family even. To be loved and cared for. To know that no matter what, he always had these two by his side.

Honestly, what would he do without them?

“Thanks,” he whispered, closing his eyes.

He could wait until they woke up too.

#danny phantom #fanfiction #phicc #my writing #and then he woke up #we got some trio bonding #we got some dissecc #i mean really what more could you need

[fonulyn]

my bingo card from @badthingshappenbingo (thank you!)

haunting in my head (tempting me, inviting me to fall asleep in its arms) - Piers/Leon - for prompt "vomiting"

the chosen - Mendez/Leon - for prompt "rape/noncon"

viva las vegas - Piers/Leon - for prompt "unhealthy coping mechanisms"

no lies tonight, chapter 1 - Piers/Leon - for prompt "strapped to an operating table"

no lies tonight, chapter 4 - Piers/Leon - for prompt "I will only slow you down."

no lies tonight, chapter 5 - Piers/Leon - for prompt "You're safe now."

wipe away this pain - Piers/Leon - for prompt "amputation"

metaltango angst - for prompt "russian roulette"

#me and my fics

[heisenposting]

Heisenberg doing consensual vivisection on his partner? ( prompt )

Imagine Karl Heisenberg has you strapped to the operating table—there's a safe word, of course. There is with everything the two of you do.

He's feeling benevolent tonight, so he applies a local anesthetic before he opens you up. He's propped your head up with a pillow and brought in a mirror so that you can see what he's doing.

He slices you open. You can't feel any pain, but the pressure is there—the puncture wound, the smooth line all the way down to your navel, the horizontal incision from left to right.

Karl's breathing is heavy as he peels back the flesh and examines your insides. You're mesmerized by how they all glisten. He grazes his fingers over one of your lungs, and you feel it again, that pressure. He licks his lips. Is he salivating?

You nervously avoid his gaze and glance up at the mirror. "What's that yellowish thing above my heart?"

"That's your thymus gland. It's where your T cells mature." He touches the edge of the incision, running a finger alongside it as he admires the layers of meat and fat, like a miniature slice of country-style ribs. He lifts his finger to his lips and licks it slowly, his eyes closing as he savors the way that you taste. He lets out a deep sigh, and for a moment he's silent.

"Oh." You chuckle nervously, eyes on the mirror. Your logical side tells you that you should be wary of him at this point, but his beatific expression as he lusts over your soft organs does something else to you entirely. "H-hey, I think those are my kidneys down there!"

"Indeed they are," he whispers, stroking the exposed bit of your left kidney. He leans in close to you, hands on either side of your head. "I want one of them." Karl strokes your cheek with the back of his fingers. "Will you give me one? You don't have to answer right now..."

But of course you do. He's waiting. He's staring at you with those bedroom eyes like he's ready to climb onto the table and make love to you, heedless of whether your guts spill out all over the floor. You can feel your heart pounding faster--you can actually see it, too.

He leans his head against yours and he croons your name. He whispers against your lips, "I'll take good care of you. I always do."

You swallow, and you give your answer. "Alright, you can have it."

There's a hungry gleam in his eyes, and his sensuous lips curl into a predatory grin. He preps you for a real, honest-to-god surgery, slipping a gas mask over your mouth and nose to put you under.

"I'll make this as quick and painless as possible," he says. His devilish smile is the last thing you remember as you pass out...

#imagine your f/o #imagine your fave #karl heisenberg #re8 #gore #cannibalism

[kalevalakryze]

Under Fire

For Bo-Katan Week Day Two: Prompt Wedding/Marriage Pairing: Bo-Katan Kryze/The Armorer Characters: Bo-Katan Kryze, The Armorer, Din Djarin, Axe Woves, Koska Reeves, Ragnar Vizsla , Din Grogu Warnings: canon typical violence, author trying to be funny, and probably failing. Summary: Blaster fire rained heavy on the ground around the small squad of Mandalorians, dirt, sand, and other debris tossed into the air with each shot around their stomping boots. A gloved hand shot out to grab Bo-Katan by the leather strap of her holster, tugging her under cover just in time for a burning red bolt of plasma to whizz through the air where she’d been only moments before. Bo dug her boots into the ground to change momentum, settling her elbows into the durasteel that The Armorer had pulled her behind. Yellow bolts fired from her Westar’s found homes in stormtrooper plastoid. The next one to pull her from an inevitable headshot had been Koska, who’d caught the E-11’s glint as the shot charged. “Hey!” Bo called to her golden helmeted companion as she reached for the blaster of a fallen stormtrooper. The sturm dowels were removed from their power packs, before she was launching them into the offensive firing line. Explosions reflected in The Armorer’s visor as she turned her attention to the Mandalore. “You remember what we talked about, a few weeks ago?” A blaster whizzed past, she felt it graze the side of her helmet and sear the paint. Shaking her head, Bo fired back. “I’m ready, I want to say the vows, with you, if you’ll have me!” 

AO3 Link: here

“There’s an Imperial base that’s in operation in the remains of Concordia,” Axe informed the leaders as he and his apprentice, Ragnar Vizsla, entered the war room. Koska followed behind the pair, helmet tucked under her arm, her brows pulled in a contemplative expression.

“Scans have proved the existence of the Beskar alloy they’d been using to make the super commando armor, and heat signatures prove that the old factories are back in working order,” Koska added in as she set her helmet on the war room console.

The Mand’alor frowned as she pulled the star map up. They’d only recently managed to get the proper equipment in the atmosphere to keep an eye on the healing Mandalore sector, the storms slowing down after they’d bartered trade with the New Republic to fix the environment. They were even on track to restarting the old Mando-Motors buildings, and started to get details in the books to renew ship manufacturing, so having Imperials on Concordia when they could be using the planets resources for materials instead of bartering, just wouldn’t work for her.

“Ragnar, what do you think we should do?” She questioned the young apprentice, lips quirking as he tensed from the spotlight. He was meant to be learning strategy by now anyways, and his inexperience could prove useful in dealing with the troopers.

“Well, Lady Kryze, we could take a small squad for a scouting operation, and decide from there how to continue depending on what we see? Our scanners could still be faulty with the storms,” His hand traced the chin of his helmet in thought, though Bo-Katan was nodding her head.

“That’s a good plan, Ragnar. Does anyone oppose?” Bo-Katan looked around the room, nodding her head at the shakes of everyones head. “Perfect, Din, Grogu, could you two run interference and surveillance from the Gauntlet while we hit the ground?” She turned to the Clan of Two, where Din was pointing out different locations on the map.

“It will be done, Lady Kryze,” He affirmed, his hand resting on Grogu’s head, where a miniature helmet covered the brunt of his head, though there was no visor, and his ears were also uncovered, the beskar would protect from anything fall, something she was glad to see the Jetti apprentice wearing.

“Alright, if you’re in this room, congratulations, you’ve all been drafted for recon, load up,” She patted her hand on the table, a smile pulling at her lips at Axe’s laugh as the man threw his arm around his apprentice and led him to the newly reconstructed hangars. Bo-Katan and The Armorer were the last to file out of the war room, mostly so the Mand’alor could press a soft kiss to the hard gold metal of the woman’s helm.

Letting Din and Grogu pilot, Bo-Katan, The Armorer, Axe, and Ragnar loaded into the drop transport, while Koska stuck in the cockpit to run the scans. The ship rocked and rumbled as they breached the storms in the atmosphere, when they broke the edge, The Armorer’s hand reached to settle on Bo’s waist, under the impression of helping her stay steady, since the Mand’alor refused to strap into one of the seats.

“We’re breaching atmo, there’s activity on the surface,” Din called over comms, the ship rattling as he pulled it harshly to avoid hostile scanners. “I’ll drop you as close as I can, and then we’ll sit until you call,” The floor of the gauntlet started to shift, until Bo was leading the drop, the others unstrapping and freefalling after her.

They couldn’t activate their thrusters until they were closer to the ground, which meant it would be close, especially since Ragnar didn’t have nearly the same amount of skill as the others. The comms were silent as the air rushed around her, her head turning just enough to catch the gold and blue of her squad. In the last few feet they had to spare, five sets of thrusters engaged in tandem. When her feet touched the dirt, her rangefinder dropped to scan their immediate surroundings, watching for some indication that they’ve been seen.

“It has been some time since I have been here,” The Armorer spoke with a hint of nostalgia, though Bo and her Niteowls all nodded their head in agreement. They’d all been a part of Death Watch, had hidden themselves from New Mandalorian rule under Pre Vizsla’s order, and had terrorized their people under his command, until they’d had no choice but to flee.

“It has been some time,” Bo agreed her head as she started towards the closest facility, where she last knew the most secure facility to have been. “The manufacturing centers were all forced to shut down, or to transition into making ship pieces for Mando-motors, though while Concordia was under the rule of Pre Vizsla, Death Watch managed to restart the production of Beskar alloys, and make produce enough armor to renew each set that had been given up by families who’d bent to the New Mandalorian’s pacifistic ways,” The redhead explained quietly as they walked, keeping her head on a swivel as they moved.

Koska nodded her head with her gauntlet held in front of her face. “Though, the mass production was nothing compared to what the old armorer’s were doing, before the new laws.” The Armorer listened to them speak as she marched on beside Ragnar and Axe. She hadn’t seen life inside Death Watch, as her clan had derived from those who managed to break away, she’d only been subjected to the consequences of their actions, and then the consequences of The Niteowls actions in turn.

“We’ve got movement ahead,” Ragnar called, pointing towards an observation balcony built into the side of the facility. The trooper was turned around, so the team had enough time to move in and press themselves close to the exterior walls. “We can’t drop him, yet, I don’t want them knowing we’re here until it’s too late,” She signed using dadita to keep their cover.  

Nods of affirmation came from the four others in the squad. They waited in anticipation for several minutes, until the sounds of a door sliding open and the retreating of footsteps met their ears. Bo-Katan shot a line from her gauntlet that wrapped around the railing, pulling herself up quietly the balcony. No cameras met her eye when she landed, so she gestured to the others to follow.

The moment they got the doors open, Koska and Axe pushed forward to breach the interior, leaving Bo to cover the rear as they picked their way through old halls. The two Niteowls in lead had more experience than Bo-Katan in any of the production facilities, since her spot as Pre’s lieutenant had kept her away from the ‘grunt work’ of the job.

The resistance in the base was minimal, so Axe brought Ragnar to the front of the squad so he could work on his silent takedowns. The team managed to get all the way to the control rooms and place the charges before they’d ran into their first major issue. The guard rotations had been completed, and a janitor had stumbled upon a plastoid armored corpse in a closet.

Klaxons blared as an Imperial called orders over the ringing. Soon enough, the halls were filled with the sounds of shouting and blaster fire as the squad of Mandalorians made their way back to the exit. “Din, we’re going to need a fast pickup!” Bo called into the comms, only getting static in response. “We’re jammed, push outside and we’ll try again,”

A thermal detonator was chucked into the fray, though Bo couldn’t tell who’d thrown it. Before she could react, a bezoar hammer was smashing into the side of the explosive, sending it barreling into the squad of troopers keeping them from the exit.

Leaping past the prone bodies of stormtroopers, Bo-Katan was the first into the dim sunlight, her shield ejecting and raising in perfect timing to deflect a blaster bolt that would have destroyed her visor.

Clearing a path, The Mand’alor managed to secure room for the entire squad to take cover behind as more troopers rallied both in front and behind them. “Axe! Ragnar! Koska! Keep our shebs clear!” Bo commanded as she started firing into the troopers in front. The Armorer pressed ahead to the riot line with her hammer and tongs, leaving Bo-Katan to pick off anyone who tried to snag her while she was occupied in melee combat.

The thrusters of a jetpack sounded as another rifle joined their cause. “Where’s Grogu?” She called as Din landed beside her, his whistling birds striking home in three trooper’s chests.

“Piloting!” The mandalorian returned, his rifle mounted on the Imperial barricade wall by the entrance, yellow plasma ejecting from his rifle to take down the growing numbers.

It was truly only mildly concerning that Grogu was piloting, but she trusted Din enough to not leave any of them in bad hands.

“Heavy turret!” Bo called, her gauntlet’s cable shooting out to wind around The Armorer’s waist and drag her back before the blaster fire could open on her position. “Cover me!”

Without waiting for a reply, Bo-Katan’s thrusters engaged to send her into the air. In one fluid motion, the Mand’alor was dropping from the sky, allowing gravity to control her speed and the troopers body to cushion her fall. The trooper on the turret caved under the weight of her boots, with the feeling of bones cracking as she pushed herself off of him a relief in her mind that he would not be getting up.

Her shield engaged, while she pressed into melee combat to free up enough room around the turret. When she made the room, Bo-Katan smacked an ion grenade against the barrel, before springing back off in the direction of relative safety.

Blaster fire rained heavy on the ground around the small squad of Mandalorians, dirt, sand, and other debris tossed into the air with each shot around their stomping boots. A gloved hand shot out to grab Bo-Katan by the leather strap of her holster, tugging her under cover just in time for a burning red bolt of plasma to whizz through the air where she’d been only moments before. Bo dug her boots into the ground to change momentum, settling her elbows into the durasteel that The Armorer had pulled her behind.

Yellow bolts fired from her Westar’s found homes in stormtrooper plastoid. The next one to pull her from an inevitable headshot had been Koska, who’d caught the E-11’s glint as the shot charged.

“Hey!” Bo called to her golden helmeted companion as she reached for the blaster of a fallen stormtrooper. The sturm dowels were removed from their power packs, before she was launching them into the offensive firing line. Explosions reflected in The Armorer’s visor as she turned her attention to the Mandalore. “You remember what we talked about, a few weeks ago?”

A blaster whizzed past which she felt graze the side of her helmet and sear the paint. Shaking her head, Bo fired back into the enemy line. “I’m ready, I want to say the vows, with you, if you’ll have me!”

Din’s head snapped to the two warriors, though he remained silent as he covered where The Armorer’s defense faltered. “Would everyone bear witness?” She questioned to the closing squad.

“This is the way,” Echoed from the two children of the watch, while Koska and Axe took three seconds to slide credits into waiting gloves, before they called their approvals over the blaster fire.

“Keep us covered!” Bo-Katan tugged The Armorer so their heads were covered by the barricades. It was far from rare for Mandalorians to say the vows on the battlefield, all they truly needed to do was recite the vows with a witness present, and then trade a piece of armor (or, on the off chance one of them did not make it, the armor would be given before the last rites and the songs were sung before the pyre.

Bo took The Armorer’s hands in her own, lasers like fireworks overhead as the two took cover between their friends. ”Mhi solus tome, mhi solus dar'tome, mhi me'dinui an, mhi ba'juri verde” They spoke together, The Armorer shifting so her helmet rested against Bo-Katan’s in a keldabe kiss. Truly, it was what the redhead had always imagined the situation would be like for her, though she had never really considered there would ever be somebody on the other end.

“Ibic haar Yust.” Sounded from those who bore witness, and the Mand’alor gave herself a moment to breathe, before she and The Armorer were rising as one.

The pair moved past their defenses in tandem, Bo-Katan nearly pressed against The Armorer’s back, firing over her shoulder as her newly appointed Riduur bashed her tools into troopers, cracking plastoid, flesh, and bone as they went.

The gauntlet soared overhead, turrets raining blaster fire down to help clear the path, as the rest of the squad filed in close order, covering their leaders backs as they found their opening.

Grogu was an exceptional pilot, they learned. When they piled onto the gauntlet, the apprentice was at the controls, using the Force to man the turrets and his hands wrapped around the throttle, standing on the console to be able to reach. Din slid into the seat to get them in the air, as Axe and Koska jumped onto the turret controls, allowing the Jetti turned Mando to fall into his fathers arms, clearly spent from using his abilities.

Bo-Katan pulled her helmet off the moment the ramp was raised and they were shooting back into atmo. “Ragnar, blow it,” Came the order, which the teenager was more than happy to comply with. The explosions from the factories control rooms shook even their ship as they started to breach from the moon’s gravitational pull.

“We can send squads to ensure there are no survivors, and set up our own base of operations in whatever remains, to search out any other factories they may have gotten running,” The Armorer decided, looking to Bo for approval.

“I’ll put out a call to volunteers as soon as we land, Axe, Ragnar, would you two take lead on the operation?”

“Of course, Lady Kryze,” Axe nodded his head as he turned from the console. There were no TIE fighters swarming their position yet, promising that if the hit wasn’t a total wipe, it was still substantial enough to put them on their ass.

“So,” Koska started as she pulled her own helmet away, leaning back in her seat as she looked between Bo and The Armorer. “Bo, you owe me fifty creds for not waiting until next month,”

Axe laughed openly from his seat where he was cleaning his blaster, and Bo snorted. “Seriously? You two made bets?”

“Speaking of,” Din turned in the pilots seat once the autopilot engaged, causing Koska to groan and pass over more credits.

“Really, Din?” Bo shook her head in mock disappointment, though her expression changed to shock as Din handed the credits to Grogu. “My favorite green nephew, seriously?”

“Patu,” Grogu babbled with a crooked smile, his ears laying flat as he stuffed the credits in his pouch.

Shaking her head, Bo-Katan dropped herself into an open seat beside The Armorer, letting herself lean into the warmth of the woman behind her, instead of against the backrest. “I see how it is,”

“Do we still get to come to the wedding?” Koska asked, causing Bo to roll her eyes as the younger niteowl plastered a shit-eating grin onto her face

“You were literally just there,”

“You two still need to exchange armor,” Axe pointed out, kicking his feet up on the console, “Then it’ll be official, then she really will be walking the way of the Mand’alor,”

“Why are you two like this?” Bo questioned, though she knew she would receive no response. Instead, she turned towards The Armorer. “Have you thought about what piece you’d like to exchange?” Typically, a gauntlet or a pauldron would be traded off, though Bo-Katan’s full armor varied greatly from The Armorer’s helmet and chest plate.

The golden helmeted warrior paused in thought, before reaching to her own armor. “I give you my heart, Lady Kryze,” She spoke softly as she pulled the kar’ta from her armor. Even with the Riduurok taken, the woman still waited for Bo-Katan’s permission before removing the Mand’alor’s own Iron Heart.

Bo-Katan’s hand closed around The Armorer’s once both their hearts rested in her palms. “I readily give my own,” She confirmed, squeezing the hands in her own. The Armorer slid the red heart into the open space in her chest, as Bo-Katan did the same with her own against The Armorer’s chest. They weren’t perfect fits, but Bo-Katan had the perk of being with the tribes best blacksmith to perfect the fit.

Translations Jetti - Jedi dadita - Mandalorian morse code shebs - ass/rear Mhi solus tome, mhi solus dar'tome, mhi me'dinui an, mhi ba'juri verde - We are one when together, we are one when parted, we will share all, we will raise warriors. Ibic haar yust - this is the way Riduur - spouse kar'ta - iron heart Riduurok - vows

#bo katan kryze #the armorer #bo katan x the armorer #nitearmor #armorkatan #the mandalorian #star wars #take off your helmet #the mandalorian season 3 #riduur #riduurok #mando'a #crack #i tried to be funny #this might be the funniest stuff I've ever written #I can't tell if that's sad or not #bkw2023 #Bo Katan Week #Bo Katan Week 2023

[whumpshaped]

prompt: "just don't look"

tw lady whumper, restrained, lab setting, noncon drugging

"Just don't look," Whumper said as she snapped on some surgical gloves. "And think about the fact that it's so much better that out of the two of us, you're the squeamish one. Imagine if it was me. Do you want a squeamish surgeon?"

Whumpee could barely follow the words with all those drugs in their system. They opened their mouth to react, but Whumper was already talking about something else. They rattled their restraints a little, a movement too slow and weak to achieve anything other than remind them where they were - all strapped down onto an operating table.

And despite the friendly advice from the doctor, their eyes eventually landed on the scalpel in her hand, which guided their gaze down and down and down and holy shit that thing was going to cut into them oh god holy fucking shit-

Whumper's hand remained steady despite the screams. Good thing she wasn't squeamish.

~

@ashh-ed @whumpsday @whump-queen @dustbunnywhump @the-scrapegoat @hidden-dreamland

#whump drabble #whump #lady whump #lab whump #restrained #drugged #noncon drugging #thank u !!!!

[no6secretsanta]

The one who is wise in mind sits apart in meditation

To/giftee: @aowyn

From/URL: @whims-of-insane-fandoms

Happy Holidays!

Dear aowyn,

I hope that I met some of the prompt for your Secret Santa assignment! Unfortunately, I got sick after finishing this fic so I couldn’t edit it so excuse any bad grammatical errors. Barring that, I loved doing this and this also challenged me to do a pov that is not Nezumi or Shion’s. I have never written a Safu pov so thank you for allowing me to do so and especially in a Safu lives AU (mostly based on the manga). I didn’t get to do everything from the prompt, but I hope that the narrative was enjoyable for you. 

I think Safu and Nezumi can become best friends in due time and I’d like to believe Nezumi doesn’t really leave in this au. Safu and Shion are platonic soulmates and Nezumi and Shion are romantic soulmates. The three of them bond with their love that was strained thanks to No. 6’s actions but they’re the winners. Safu, Shion and Nezumi win in this au. 

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

-whims

Safu had become used to staring aimlessly up at the ceiling, arms and legs outstretched in the bed. It had become a strange habit of her to lay in bed like this, but the habit had been unbroken for two weeks. She had become used to the freedom of being able to move her limbs, to not have her limbs strapped down in the operating table or to have her conscience exist outside of her own body. The softness and warmth of her bed was always a grounding reminder that she wasn’t in that dreadful and cold correctional facility and her nightmares of that place could only harm her mind rather than her body.

Surprisingly, she had woken up today without a scream being ripped from her throat due to the memory of those dark days. The less she thought about those painful memories, the foggier they became. It was helpful that she had become preoccupied with other thoughts and memories.

Safu slowly eased her way to the edge of the bed where her wheelchair was waiting for her. The reminder of her current condition made her want to curl up in bed and stay there. However, she refused to do that. She was lucky and grateful to be alive. 

She was lucky to have a working body at all, was lucky that Elyurias had taken pity for her plight and had preserved her body and conscious after the destruction of the correctional facility. Science deemed her resurrection impossible and Safu still thought it was impossible. She was dead, her brain ripped out of her body with no way of being a human again. 

Shion and Karan called her resurrection a miracle. 

She could still remember the moment she had awoken in a hospital bed, wondering if the afterlife really was real, and felt a warm hand on hers. She remembered turning her head to see Shion asleep holding her hand, a blanket covering his shoulders. There had been fresh tears on his eyes, and, for a moment, she thought she was dreaming.

This is no dream, a voice inside her head had told her, think of this as my gift to you to truly make you happy. 

When Shion had woken up, it had been to the embarrassing sight of her crying, thanking Elyurias for letting her have this chance to live, to see Shion again, to let her live alongside Shion and for truly making her feel satisfied. 

Safu got on the wheelchair with no trouble this time. She’d become particularly good at maneuvering her way through it after so long being wheelchair bound. Despite Elyurias saving her life and reuniting her with her body, the goddess could not completely negate the effects of her brain being outside her body for a long period of time. Her body needed time to relearn things she had taken for granted before, like walking or running or easily curling her toes. Until she fully recovered, she would have to use a wheelchair indefinitely. 

It didn’t matter to Safu how long she had to use the wheelchair for.

All that mattered is that she was still alive. 

Safu wheeled her way to the door, opening it and wheeling out to the hallway. It was still early in the morning, so she wondered if Shion was awake yet. Recently, he woke up much later than normal, staying in bed until he couldn’t anymore. A traitorous and green-faced side of her reminded her that he had a very human-shaped reason to stay curled up in bed, but she ignored that thought and headed to the kitchen.

“Safu, you’re up early!”

Safu was startled to see Karan, Shion’s mother, already awake and finishing a batch of bread for her bakery. Her hair was up in a high ponytail and Safu noticed it had gotten slightly longer. She had some flour in her apron and she was smiling brightly. 

Safu was grateful to see Karan. Ever since she had been found in the ruins of the correctional facility, there had been talk about where she would go after being discharged. Her old home had been already sold and she had no other living family. However, it was Karan that had shut down all conversations and demanded that Safu come live with her and Shion. Karan had been the one that had advocated for her by talking with the doctors on her behalf. Karan had done so much for her when Shion had to deal with issues regarding the dissolution of No. 6 and West Block and other outdated things No. 6 had. 

It was Karan that was by Safu’s side almost every day since she awoke when Shion had to deal with other matters. Karan was the one that always attended her visits with the doctor as they checked on her progress. Karan was the one that helped her bathe in the first days, before Safu could properly move her arms. 

In these two weeks, Karan had become Safu’s closest friend.

Safu smiled, “Good morning, ma’am, I thought you’d still be in bed.”

“I couldn’t stay asleep any time longer and decided to get a head start. Do you want some bread? Fresh off the oven.”

“Yes, please.” 

Karan set down a plate of food and Safu noticed there was another plate and a mug with steam rising from it. With a start, Safu realized someone else was awake and, based on the smell of coffee, it was the one person she still had a hard time understanding.

“Morning.”

Nezumi strolled in from another part of the house, nibbling one of Karan’s breads. His hair was down, an unusual thing to see from him since Safu had mostly seen him with his hair up, and he was wearing some of Shion’s clothes. She remembered that Shion had told her that his clothes were dirty and had to be washed. 

There it was again, that pit on the bottom of her stomach that made her feel green. Safu recognized it easily, she wasn’t oblivious to her feelings. She was jealous of Nezumi. She buried those feelings away, but they always found a way to creep back without her wanting them to come back.

She’d wondered a lot who Shion loved. What was that person like? That curiosity had stemmed many years ago since Shion had adopted that faraway gaze, his eyes always seemingly looking at something none of them could see. His eyes were always gazing into a distance, the look that were described in books when wives waited for their husbands to come back after a long separation. 

It had resurfaced again that day when they’d encountered the mouse, before she left to study abroad and when she had made her intentions and feelings clear. While she had confessed, Shion had still remained with that calm and cool expression. It hurt to remember it and it also hurt when she remembered him finally show emotion and chase after the phantom he longed for.

Even when she desperately wanted to see Shion during her captivity in the correctional facility, her thoughts had still wondered to who that special person in Shion’s life was. Who was the person that made Shion act so differently? Who was the person by Shion’s side?

When she first met Nezumi, she understood.

“Is Shion still in bed?” Karan said in a tone only a mother could pull off.

Nezumi shook his head, “Yes and no to that. He’s awake, it’s just the prince is planning for today’s trip.”

Karan smiled, “Oh, right. Shion was talking to me yesterday about all the different places he was going to show you and Safu. Safu, are you excited to explore the area that used to be West Block?”

Safu smiled and nodded, “Of course. I’m especially excited to properly meet Inukashi. Shion talks very fondly of their hotel and their dogs.”

On the third day of being back in her body, Shion had talked to her about West Block. About Rikigia, Inukashi and even the children that Shion had come to talk to. He talked about the dog hotel and his days spent helping clean the dogs and about the theater and the many different shops. He especially talked about the place that Shion called ‘home’, the place where he and Nezumi lived during his time away from No. 6. 

“There’s so many books, Safu!” He’d excitedly chattered that night, curled up in the bed next to her, “So many books that I know you’ll want to read. It’s really cozy there too so you can stay there for hours reading. Nezumi and I can read with you there!” 

Yes, she was very excited to see these places she’d only heard of. Places that made Shion’s eyes glint with joy and mirth in a way that No. 6 could never truly invoke from him. It was also the difference in how he saw her and how he saw Nezumi. The comparison made Safu sick because she was comparing herself to the same No. 6 that tormented her, Shion, Nezumi and countless others.

Karan sat down, eating some bread, and offering Safu her own plate as promised. Safu thanked her and the three of them began to eat their breakfast quietly. Safu found the silence enjoyable. It felt so easy to eat breakfast when she had such good company. 

“Don’t get too excited with the dogs, Safu,” Nezumi warned, “Shion and Inukashi really like them, but those mutts are a handful.”

“Nezumi,” Karan chided him, “they’re very lovely animals. Oh, Safu, you’ll simply adore them. Their fur is very soft, and the dogs are so mild mannered. Inukashi is also very respectful and kind.”

“They only appear that way with you, ma’am. Inukashi is very rude so prepare yourself for that.”

Safu chuckled as Karan playfully scolded Nezumi while Nezumi cheekily spoke with her. Nezumi was so witty, a testament to his brilliance that Safu was aware he had. It made sense that he was brilliant, she’d noticed how intelligent and intense his gray eyes were the moment they met. Even if the two of them had not been in the best shape when they first met, she knew Nezumi was brilliant. 

After all, he was the one Shion had fallen for.

“Good morning!”

Safu turned her head and saw Shion grinning at them from the hallway. She offered her own smile as Shion grabbed one of the breads that Karan offered him. He ate it and hugged his mother. Karan laughed, chiding him softly, as Shion turned to look at her. Shion enveloped her in a warm hug and Safu felt herself feel lighter. 

Shion hadn’t changed completely like she’d feared. Yes, Shion had lost that faraway gaze of his and he was more open in his affection. He had more confidence now, too. However, there were parts of him that had been irreparably changed due to what No. 6 had done to him. 

Shion’s pale white hair and his striking red eyes and the red snake-like scar that was all around his body replaced the image of the boy she had grown up knowing. His eyes, his hair and his skin were so different. There were also nights where she was made aware of his mental and psychological changes when she heard him screaming in the dead of night. Shion never talked to her about it, only asking about how she was doing, and it worried Safu. Like he felt that he couldn’t truly tell her the extent of his pain, of his trauma.

Do you talk to Nezumi about it?

Safu wanted to ask Shion that question so desperately. What was the extent of Nezumi’s position as the one Shion allowed to stay by his side, the one Shion loved? Was Nezumi the one comforting Shion after his nightmares? Was he sweet and gentle with Shion or was he callous and cold? Did the two of them exchange horror stories about what No. 6 had done to them? Did they find comfort tangled in their shared bed, gripping their hands, and knowing that this was all real? Safu could not relate, could not understand, when she woke up to nightmares with no one by her side. 

What a depressing thought. 

“Safu, whenever you’re ready, we’ll get going!” Shion said, pulling back with his eyes glinting in excitement, “We have so much to see today!”

For some reason, Safu felt a sharp pain in her chest looking at Shion. Something about his smile looked so. . . un-Shion-like. It was more strained and almost rehearsed. She wanted to ask what was wrong, but Nezumi spoke first, asking him to at least let them enjoy their nice breakfast. Shion took time convincing to do that but, luckily, the four of them were able to enjoy a nice breakfast before she was going to have her grand tour.

After breakfast, Safu, Shion and Nezumi made their way to what was formerly West Block. Thanks to Shion’s efforts, the wall had come down and there was easy access to and from the two areas. Shion had also advocated for aid to be given to the poor individuals that had been forsaken by the unfeeling officials of No. 6 so there were still many tents at the old border. There were medical tents where doctors gave the residents free checkups and food tents that gave the needy free food so they would not go to bed hungry. Overall, Shion expected there to be a lot of people they had to carefully navigate through as they were the “talk of the city” as Nezumi so eloquently put it. 

Sadly, Karan could not go with them in their venture to the slowly recovering slums since she had to tend to her bakery. There was an explosion in clients due to her amazing baking skills, all of them clamoring for a taste of her delicious pastries. Safu was sad that she wouldn’t go with them, but she didn’t mind so much when Nezumi and Shion were such good guides.

Shion helped push her wheelchair, pointing at markets where Nezumi would haggle for their food while Nezumi added a comment or two to make fun of him. Sometimes, Nezumi would be open with them and admit to something that had happened to him in the years he first spent living in West Block. Those stories painted a very tragic picture of Nezumi’s already horrific past, but Nezumi waved away her sympathy.

“He does that often,” Shion whispered to her as Nezumi went to get them some snacks from a place Shion loved to eat from, “He doesn’t like to be pitied, despite how sad it was for him.”

“He’s very proud, isn’t he?”

“Proud and too stubborn to let anyone see him as weak,” Shion agreed.

“You two better not be gossiping about me.” Nezumi shot back.

“Never,” Shion said, looking at Safu and shooting her a wink. 

When she laughed, Nezumi looked a bit annoyed but, surprisingly, was also smiling when he saw Shion smiling. Now that she thought about it, Nezumi looked more relaxed than she ever remembered seeing him. He was still on edge, but it was clear that was a result of habit rather than feeling unsafe. He glanced over his shoulders and his hand inside his jacket pocket clutched something he no longer had there.

He also kept looking back to look at Shion, another habit that apparently formed because he didn’t want to lose Shion in the crowd. Every time Shion led them somewhere with excitement, Safu could see the fondness and adoration in Nezumi’s eyes. 

Nezumi loved Shion, just as much as Shion loved him. They didn’t express this love openly, but they didn’t need to. Sometimes, Nezumi would linger close to Shion, eyes fixated on the boy who was engrossed in something else. Other times, Shion would touch Nezumi and continue touching him even if he didn’t have to. It made Safu jealous to see this because she still loved Shion despite everything.

However, it was clear that Shion loved her too.

While Shion stared at Nezumi with love, he didn’t hesitate to look at her with a similar gaze. She knew it was love, just not romantic. Shion didn’t have that faraway look when he looked at her. He was actually looking at her, smiling at her, basking in her presence. 

It occurred to Safu that her near death experience and their separation had truly rattled Shion. While he had loved her before, his expressions told her that he loved her more deeply now. When he stared at her now, it was as if he were looking at something extremely precious. . . or could it be possible that Shion always looked at her with this level of affection, but she had been too busy focusing on his faraway gaze to notice the extent of his love for her?

Shion was a mystery, she concluded, and he kept mysterious company.

“The hotel is right around here,” Nezumi said, looking bored and disgruntled.

“Nezumi, be nice,” Shion laughed, “Inukashi misses you. You’ve been avoiding going to meet them here.”

Nezumi huffed, “It’s because of Shion.”

Safu frowned, “Shion. . .?”

“Not me,” Shion clarified, “Shion is a baby that Inukashi is taking care of. I found him after. . . I found him when he had no one to take care of him. That’s around the time Nezumi and I were picked up by the correctional facility, so I sent him to Inukashi.”

“And Inukashi has been attached to the little kid since,” Nezumi snickered, “Who knew they had any parental instincts? Maybe their mother did actually gave them positive qualities.”

Shion rolled his eyes and, with that, rolled Safu in the direction of the hotel. True to his word, the place was filled with many dogs and, just like Karan said, they were kind and soft. Inukashi was exactly as Nezumi and Shion described them. Karan could see the positives that Shion saw while also seeing those other traits Nezumi talked about.

“So you’re Safu, huh?” Inukashi asked, eying her with sharp eyes.

They were clever and inquisitive, reminding her a lot of Nezumi. They also had a foul mouth but, like Shion had told her, they were honest and charming. Unlike Nezumi, however, Inukashi was less guarded with her. Safu thought it was not their norm based on what Nezumi had talked about and she was proven right when they redirected their attention to the small baby they were taking care of.

“So, as someone who lived in that horrible place, what do you think of our charming, shitty neighborhood?” Inukashi asked, bouncing the baby on their leg.

“It’s very. . . real.” Safu admitted, “Nothing about this place is artificial. Everything here that is beautiful is because it’s natural. It’s nothing like the beautiful places in No. 6. It’s so. . . lively.”

“Great, you are as smart as Shion said you were.”

Safu smiled, “And you are just as described. Less rude than Shion and Nezumi made you out to be, though.”

“Give them a minute or two.” Nezumi retorted. 

Shion laughed, patting Inukashi’s head, “Trust me, Safu will never see that side of Inukashi. Not while baby Shion is here.”

“Hey, don’t make me out to be too nice,” Inukashi said, almost pouting, “I have a reputation to hold, Shion!”

“Ah, of course, the world will end if people know you’re soft on your friends,” Shion said, winking at Safu.

“Hey!”

Shion and Inukashi led her through the hotel, Nezumi pushing her wheelchair when she got tired of wheeling it. Shion pointed out many dogs and said their names while Inukashi told her that there was another pregnant stray they had found. Based on the dog’s physique, Inukashi figured they would give birth soon and asked if Shion could come to see the birth. Shion promised he and Safu would be there, and she found it odd that Nezumi would not join them for the puppy birth.

They ate food in Inukashi’s hotel, enjoying the light breeze and the sunlight in their outdoor picnic. Inukashi and Nezumi bickered playfully while Shion pointed out to her more dogs. Inukashi kept praising Karan’s bread and Safu asked if Inukashi would let her spend a night here with one of their dogs. Nezumi tried to discourage that, but Shion said it would be a great idea for a sleepover with her, Karan, and himself. Again, strangely enough, Nezumi was absent from this plan.

By the time they left the hotel, Inukashi informed them that Rikigia had gone to visit Karan in her bakery so they wouldn’t be able to visit him. Instead, Shion decided that this was the perfect time to go to the place where he and Nezumi lived while Shion was in exile. Nezumi agreed and, with that, they set off to that old, quaint room filled with books that Shion always talked about.

“Welcome, Safu, to our home!”

It was a small room, as expected, with things like a bed, a cute table in the middle, a couch, and other knick-knacks. It was nothing compared to the luxury of some of the homes in No. 6, but Safu immediately loved this place. Not only that but, true to all the stories of this place, this room was filled with books. Safu had never seen real books like this, used to the e-papers that No. 6 relied on. However, upon touching the spine of a book called Don Quixote, she realized she was equally enamored by these books. 

“Do you have every book in existence?”

“No, I’m not the Library of Alexandria.”

Safu snickered, picking up a book with no title, “Can I read these?”

“That’s what books are for,” Nezumi replied, picking up a book and giving it to her, “Try this one.”

“Hamlet?”

“I think you’ll like it.”

Safu nodded, opening it to the first page. She began to read, finding herself engrossed by the story as she learned about the ghost of a dead king appearing before people. As she began to read about the succeeding king and the heir, the titular Hamlet, she could see that Shion and Nezumi were moving around the room. She was going to ignore them until she saw Shion give Nezumi a bag filled with things like matches, water bottles and other supplies.

“What are you two doing?”

Shion jumped and Nezumi closed the bag. Shion looked at her and gave her a strained smile, as if he was going to lie to her. Nezumi did nothing but stare at her, as if already expecting a scolding for something.

“We’re just-.”

“Packing.”

“Packing? To move this stuff to your mom’s house, Shion?”

Shion hesitated before shaking his head. Nezumi opened his mouth, as if to explain when Shion grabbed his arm. Something was wrong. Something had changed. No, that wasn’t correct. Nothing changed, it was just that she was going to finally get clarity on . . . on what? What was it that she had not realized.

“Shion? What’s going on?”

“Safu. . .” Shion sighed, sounding defeated in a way that made Safu’s chest ache, “Nezumi is. . . Nezumi is leaving.”

Safu’s eyes widened as Shion avoided her gaze. Nezumi was quiet, still holding onto the bag. She looked at the two of them again and could see how defeated Shion looked. His shoulders were slumped, and she finally understood why Shion had looked so sad before. 

“Where is he going?”

Nezumi shrugged, “I’m leaving this place and going out to the world.”

An exploration? It fit Nezumi’s wandering, inquisitive nature.

“When will you come back?”

Nezumi shook his head, “Safu, I don’t have a place to come back to.”

Shion put back a book on the shelf, avoiding her gaze. She knew that he did that when he didn’t want her to guess how he was feeling. Safu knew exactly how he felt. Shion must have been destroyed.

She knew what Nezumi was to Shion. Nezumi was a thief that had stolen a part of Shion’s self for himself, and Shion had stolen a piece of Nezumi for himself. They were intertwined, star-crossed lovers that were hopefully meant to live together for a long time. One without the other was lost and they would rather die together than have one live and the other die. They would do anything for each other, would be willing to live on for the sake of the other despite their traumas and scars. 

To hear Nezumi wanted to leave and leave Shion behind as if those bonds were not there, as if Shion’s pain couldn’t destroy him. . . it was too cruel. Safu didn’t want Nezumi to leave. He couldn’t leave. Not when she was beginning to understand this person.

Safu liked Nezumi. Her affection towards him could never be the same as how she felt about Shion, but she had come to hold Nezumi in high regard. Nezumi was the one that had broken through Shion’s seemingly apathetic existence and breathed life into him. Nezumi had been the one to protect Shion, had nearly died for Shion and had lived for Shion.

Nezumi was kind to her, even if it was in his own way. He had understood her intentions in the correctional facility, had honored her wishes and had even mourned her. While Karan and Shion were the ones most involved in her care, Nezumi was the one that had made her laugh for the first time after returning her body. Nezumi had been the one that had not treated her like she was fragile. He respected her and it made her respect him, in turn.

Nezumi was kind, intelligent, witty, scholarly, strong, rude, and cynical. He was able to be vulnerable and open despite being so jaded and cruel. How could he leave when she was barely learning all of these things about him?

How could he leave them?

“. . .No. You can’t leave.”

“. . . What did you say?”

Shion still wasn’t looking at either of them, making an expression Safu couldn’t see. Nezumi gazed at her and Safu felt naked under that intense gaze again. Nezumi’s beautiful eyes were just like the boy himself – beautiful, intelligent, and dangerous. Safu had a hard time composing herself.

“You can’t leave.”

Nezumi raised an eyebrow, amusement washing over his features, “Are you playing the role of my mother, Safu? I don’t need your permission to leave this place. I was just telling you.”

Safu felt herself frown, “If you leave, then you can never show yourself in front of Shion again.”

“Safu!”

This made Nezumi frown, a dark expression crossing his face. That was an expression Safu didn’t think he could make. He wasn’t just angry, he looked hurt and upset. He looked on edge, as if the threat had hit a nerve. Good, she was glad that he was angry too. She was livid.

“Who are you to make that decision?”

Safu lowered her friend, clutching the arm of her wheelchair, “I’m the person that loves Shion the most in this world and he is the person I love the most. It doesn’t matter anymore if that love is romantic or platonic but it’s true. We love each other. Because of this, I know that you leaving will leave Shion torn. It doesn’t matter if he has his mom, Inukashi, Rikigia or me in his life. You. . . you are his precious Nezumi, the one who did what no one else could and breathed new life into him. Leaving him when you don’t have to. . . how selfish is that?! You are so selfish!”  

Safu was so angry at Nezumi. How dare he throw Shion aside, leave his side on purpose, when that had been the position Safu had been dying to occupy? She wished she had been in Nezumi’s spot even when she thought she’d die. Her desire had been to remain at Shion’s side, to stay with him, to live with him. Nezumi had everything she had wished for when she had been dying and he was throwing it away. 

It wasn’t fair.

Nezumi scowled at her, “I’m selfish for wanting to leave this place for my own sake?”

“Yes.”

“Then are you not also just as selfish, Safu? You don’t care about my feelings on this matter, you only seem to care about your own and, by extension, Shion’s.”

“I am selfish,” Safu replied, “I won’t deny that, I won’t be a hypocrite. I, unlike you, try to avoid hurting others with my selfishness.”

“I’m not trying to hurt others but I’m not going to sacrifice my wants for others. I’m not that self-serving. I refuse to be that selfless.”

Safu was angry and Nezumi was angry too. Just when she thought that she understood Nezumi, he did something like this. Why? Didn’t he care about Shion? About Karan, Inukashi or her? Was he not thinking about how lucky he was that he had all of this? 

They could have died two weeks ago. For a moment, she and Nezumi had truly died and left this world. They could’ve left behind this world that, while cruel and broken, was filled with beauty and the people they loved. They were lucky to be alive, lucky to continue living and enjoying the small gifts of being alive. How was Nezumi willing to throw it all away for a selfish whim? Why couldn’t he just appreciate what he had right now?

“You’re so-!”

“Stop it, please.”

Safu and Nezumi turned to look at Shion who had a single tear roll down his cheek. He was clutching his coat tightly and his lower lip was wobbling. He sniffed, blinking away his tears. She could see Nezumi turning to look away, as if guilty. 

“This day wasn’t supposed to end in a fight,” Shion muttered, wiping his tears, “I just wanted to enjoy this day with two people I love so much. You’re both so important to my life and I almost lost you both. I thought this day was a dream come true. . . please. . .  please don’t fight.”

Safu pointed at Nezumi, “He’s the one that wants to leave. It’s not my fault that he doesn’t understand that no one wants him to leave, not even me.”

“She’s the one who won’t consider my point of view.”

Shion shook his head, “Unbelievable. Two of the smartest people I know . . . and you’re both idiots.”

“Hey!” Safu and Nezumi shouted.

Shion smiled weakly, “Safu, I don’t want Nezumi to leave either but that’s his decision. No. 6 has hurt him badly. . . it has hurt us too. Our scars that remain from that pain remind us that it happened, and we can’t erase that. No. 6 imprisoned Nezumi and took away his freedom, even when Nezumi was no longer in their hands. No. 6 is gone and Nezumi is truly free. Safu, I-I don’t want to be another jailer for him.”

“But you love him,” Safu whispered, putting her head down, “Why would you let him leave if it’ll hurt you?”

“Because it’s what he needs.” Shion smiled, crouching down to hold her hands, “Safu, it would not be an eternal farewell. Nezumi would come back, I know that. I don’t want him to leave but I can’t chain him down to stay by my side. You understand that, right?”

She did. She understood it because, when she thought she was going to die in that dreadful correctional facility, Elyurias had asked her if she had wished for Shion to die with her. The answer had been that Safu loved Shion enough to not be that selfish. She wanted her beloved Shion to live, to live on and change the world, even if it meant she wouldn’t be by his side. She squeezed Shion’s hands tightly, conveying her understanding.

“Oh, Safu,” Shion said with adoration and love, “I’m happy that you’re my friend, my irreplaceable and precious Safu. . .”

“Shion, I just don’t want you to be sad.”

“I don’t want that for him, either,” Nezumi admitted, “I just don’t truly have a place for me here, not in this place that holds too many memories. Good or bad, these memories are something I need to spend time figuring out. I need to. . . I need to understand certain mysteries.”

Safu felt horrible for yelling at Nezumi, but she didn’t regret it. Nezumi looked upset but not devastated. Clearly, he wasn’t just being mindlessly selfish about leaving. He had clearly thought about this decision a lot. She couldn’t begrudge him that. She had just been shortminded in thinking that he was mindlessly leaving out of selfishness and that he hadn’t loved them all enough to stay. She hated this feeling more than the jealousy that sometimes turned its ugly head.

“Nezumi, how about a deal?”

Nezumi looked at her, raising an eyebrow, “A deal?”

“My deal is this: you can leave No. 6 only after I’m fully healed, and I can walk again.”

“That could take months, years or maybe it’ll never happen.”

Safu nodded, “You’re right, but I think I will recover eventually. It’ll leave you enough time to think about leaving right away. You don’t know if you’ll regret leaving months after you’re gone.”

“You think I’ll change my mind, Safu?”

“I hope you do, Nezumi. I really don’t want you to leave and I’m sure Shion, his mother, Inukashi and even Rikigia won’t want you to leave either. But, like Shion said. . . you’re free. We’re not your new jailers and forcing you to stay. Once I’m recovered and you still want to leave. . . we won’t stop you. Just don’t leave right now. We still need you here.”

Nezumi’s eyes were soft as he looked at her. What did his eyes see? Her fear, her jealousy, her anger, her pain, her guilt, her lack of guilt? Her genuine wish for him to not leave? She wasn’t sure what Nezumi saw as he stared back at her. She wasn’t even sure what she saw when she looked at him with the same calculating eyes. He reached out his hand and Safu took it. She could see Shion looking up at Nezumi, also anticipating Nezumi’s answer.

“. . . Alright.”

Safu and Shion smiled, looking at each other and reflecting their relief at each other. Shion hugged Nezumi, burrowing his face against Nezumi’s chest. Nezumi looked caught off-guard, but he melted into Shion’s hug, releasing a sigh that sounded so tired. Shion turned to look back at her and hugged her too.

“Thank you, Safu!”

Safu patted Shion’s back, “I just bought us more time.”

“That’s all I need! All I need is more time with people I love- you, Nezumi, my mom, Inukashi and Rikigia. I’m just so happy to get it.”

Shion was so easy to make happy, Safu thought with a start. She was surprised how easily he had gotten happy with a deal that could still lead to his first love to leave him and, possibly, never return. Some things truly never changed, she supposed. Shion had been easy to make happy too, before that day that Shion was stripped of his elite status, and she was glad that it was a trait that had never been robbed from Shion despite how much the world had changed him.

Shion slowly left her embrace and walked away from Nezumi and Safu. The two of them exchanged puzzled looks as Shion stopped in front of the bed, staring at it for a good minute in silence, until he laid down.

 “Come on, let’s take a nap right now.”

Safu wondered if her confused expression was mirrored by Nezumi’s. Shion patted the bed, staring at them both, and repeated himself. Despite repeating himself, Safu was still unsure what Shion wanted so she continued to stare. 

Nezumi shook his head, “We won’t fit. Your Highness needs plenty of space to sleep.”

Shion glanced at him, “We will fit if we squeeze together.”

Nezumi groaned and made his way to the bed. Safu smiled and was about to head to the couch to continue reading Hamlet when Shion turned to look at her. He smiled, eyes still red-rimmed with tears, and patted the bed. She felt herself realize that the “we” Shion was referring to wasn’t just limited to Nezumi. The invitation was for her too. 

Safu got out of her wheelchair, leaving the book on the chair to read later, and squeezed into the bed alongside Nezumi and Shion. Shion grabbed Safu’s hand and Nezumi’s, closing his eyes. Nezumi sighed, leaning closer to Shion’s side.

Safu stared at them and thought the three of them made quite the sight. Three heavily scarred people that No. 6 tormented who, despite the actions of vile and careless individuals, survived. They had gotten the last laugh, able to live on in a world that they would change for the better. This is how it should be.

They had their roles to play that could, eventually, lead them down separate paths. Nezumi’s nature was to be a wanderer, free as the wind and trying to see it all in search of himself. Shion’s nature was to be someone who remained, ensuring that the wanderer had a place to return to. Her nature was to be an observer, watching everything and keeping memory of the world around her. 

It was possible that Nezumi would leave even after the deadline of her walking expired. However. . . However, that didn’t matter right now. What mattered right now was the warmth that Nezumi and Shion had, how tightly Shion held her hand and showed her that he loved her deeply. Nezumi’s head was leaning against Shion’s, eyes staring at Shion with a saddened look in his eyes.

“Go to sleep, Nezumi,” Shion whispered, opening one eye, “Don’t stare at me like that. Besides, I’m taking you both to the theater tonight.”

“Ugh, I don’t want to see any bad performances tonight.” Nezumi groaned.

Shion snickered, turning to look at Safu, “Nezumi used to be an actor called Eve.”

“Don’t tell her that.”

“He looks so beautiful onstage, and he has the most beautiful singing voice. When you see him perform as Eve, it’s like a whole different person. I hope you see that one day.”

“Before you leave, then,” Safu said, clutching Shion’s hand, “Nezumi, you have to perform for us. One last performance.”

“I have to be paid to perform.”

Shion moved and she heard Nezumi give out a soft groan. Based on their position, Safu knew that Shion had elbowed Nezumi slightly. The guarded young man, tough and strong as he was, shared her weakness – a soft spot for Shion. No doubt that, if it had been someone else, Nezumi would have retaliated. But he didn’t with Shion. . . not with Shion.

“Fine, it’ll be a free performance. However, I won’t do it in front of others. Just you two.”

“And Shion’s mom.”

“. . . Fine, in front of her too.”

“What about Inukashi?”

“They’d have to pay but I can give them a discount for the baby.”

“What about Rikigia?”

“He pays full price.”

The three of them laughed. Shion asked Nezumi which of his plays he’d perform. Nezumi replied he was open to any suggestion. Safu asked them if she could browse the books later and get to choose the play which Shion agreed with. Eventually, Nezumi caved in and said that Safu would get to have the choice of which play he’d perform.

The three of them stayed like that, muttering ideas and plans for the future. Shion tried to get up to write some of them down, but Safu and Nezumi pulled him back into the bed. It was too comfortable right now for any of them to move. Shion, a pushover for their demands today, obliged and said that Nezumi would have to remember all of their plans. Nezumi reluctantly agreed, teasing Shion that “his majesty’s wish is my command.” 

Safu found that she didn’t ever want to leave this room. She wanted to stay in this room with Nezumi and Shion and forget about the world outside. She wanted to stay here a bit longer and forget about what the future would hold. For a moment, she wanted to stretch this moment into a lifetime. She wanted to remain this happy, at least for a little bit longer. 

Safu turned to look at Nezumi, feeling herself growing drowsy, “Can you sing for us?”

“What, like a lullaby?” 

“Mmhmm.”

Nezumi smiled and Safu thought he looked younger when he did that with no malice, “Alright, then.”

Safu closed her eyes and a beautiful yet sorrowful song echoed in this cozy and warm room. Safu let herself drift between waking and sleep, feeling herself as light as the song. The hand holding hers was still warm and the voice was so soothing. She felt like she was floating just like when she no longer had a body. However, unlike before, she knew that she had two people right next to her, floating with her. 

“You have a beautiful voice, Nezumi. . .”

Whatever happens later didn’t matter anymore. 

All that mattered was the present as the wanderer, the one who remains, and the observer drifted into a restful sleep in a room where they could be safe and sound. 

#submission #no. 6 #no. 6 secret santa #nezushi #safu #nezumi #shion #aowyn #whims-of-insane-fandoms

[melanie-ohara]

Oh, The Weather Outside is Frightful - Chapter 2

Whumpuary2024, Day 02 - Prompt: Captivity

Ryder sets out to rescue her turian

AO3 here

Ryder stopped the video and played it again from the beginning. Vetra looked down at her with frantic eyes, the skin around them raw and red from the freezing air. She watched her burying the helmet and scooping snow over it with fingers that didn't bend, and then allowing herself to be dragged away by those kett bastards.

"SAM," Ryder said, surprising herself with the steadiness of her voice. "Trace the radiation signature from the shuttle engines and cross reference with the impact vector from the wreckage. Find me that ship."

"Processing," SAM said. 

Normally Sara found the clipped and artificial tone of his voice soothing, but now it grated on her ear and she tapped her foot impatiently as she waited for him to speak again. 

"The shuttle disappeared fifteen kilometers to the north-east, where an area of high-albedo ice interferes with scanners. It is the likely location of a kett base."

"Peebee, Drack, we're moving out," she said, and handed Vetra's helmet to the krogan for safekeeping. She handled it almost reverantly, and he grabbed her shoulder before she could turn away.

"We'll get her back, Ryder," he growled.

"You're damn right we will."

*

The kett installation was buried under a sheet of bright white ice almost twenty metres thick, which at least meant they hadn't seen the Nomad coming. Peebee cracked the security on a side door, which is where Ryder left behind her usual cautious, methodical approach. The door slid open and she darted inside with a biotic blink that took her halfway across the room. By the time Drack had even armed his shotgun the two kett guards were dead, heads severed from their necks by deadly strikes from an asari sword. Sara barely glanced at the bodies and instead went straight to the wall console, looking for feeds from the base security cameras. 

"Let me," Peebee offered. Ryder was getting better at operating kett tech, but her speciality was still the Remnant. Peebee half expected the Pathfinder to snap at her, but she shoved herself away from the controls and let her take over. 

The base was bigger than they had expected, but it wasn't the staging ground they feared - the kett presence would be manageable, especially given that most of them were new converts from the exaltation facility, but the scale of the operation was a shock. Peebee kept flipping through the feeds, looking for Vetra.

"Have the kett exalted any turians before?" Drack asked, leaning against the half-open door that led deeper into the facility so he could cover the corridor with his shotgun.

Nobody spoke.

"Ryder," he prompted. She sighed.

"Not that we know of," she said, focusing studiously on picking imaginary dirt from the pristine leather wrap of her sword hilt. "Dextro-amino acid chains aren't compatible with kett physiology."

"Yet," Peebee said. "They aren't compatible yet. "

Ryder tapped the blade of her sword against the armour plate on her thigh, and fought the urge to tell Peebee to shut up. 

"There," the asari said, finally finding a useful camera feed. Sara sheathed her sword and hurried to the viewscreen, where her stomach sank into the ground. The camera panned slowly down a row of cells that looked more cages than somewhere to keep prisoners, too cramped for comfort - especially for someone as tall as a turian. Most were empty. Some were stained with blood. There was an adhi in one, strapped to an operating table and stuck through with so many tubes Ryder first thought it was some undiscovered species of spider. And then, in the last cage of the row, was Vetra. She had been stripped to her underarmour and strapped to a similar table. The restraints wrapped around each of her limbs, one for each joint, and pinned her head down. Surely the kett could see that turian necks were not supposed to bend that far back? 

"Is she alive?" Ryder asked. Again, she was surprised to find her voice flat and stable.

"I… can't tell," Peebee said. "But look, she's hooked up to something." She pointed out a thin translucent tube that ran into Vetra's arm from one of the kett's strange insectoid machines.

"What the fuck is that doing to her?" Ryder growled. Her fists balled at her sides and her mouth ran dry.

"Don't know," Drack said. He hadn't moved from the doorway, but now he shoved the sliding door all the way open. "Let's go put a stop to it."

*

Sara could focus while they were fighting. Every biotic lance she threw, every knock her shields took, every kett that died on her sword kept her mind on advancing and off that dreadful image of Vetra strapped down in the cage. It wasn't long before the newly exalted kett were just fleeing before them while Drack complained about the lack of fight in them. 

"Fight back!" Sara screamed at them, but they ignored her. She wasn't ready to face that room, not yet, but she still wasn't going to shoot them while they fled. "You bastards!" she shouted, but none of them turned back. Peebee grabbed her arm to stop her chasing after them.

"It's this way," she said, softly, and Sara didn't like her tone - it made her feel like a frightened child. She gripped her sword and tried to get a hold of herself as she nodded. 

Someone shut down the power to prison to cut them off, but Sara had Drack to lever the door open and the three of them stepped into the darkened room with their weapons drawn. Their armour-mounted flashlights drew bright fingers of light across the bare metal ground, casting hard shadows of the cage bars around the room. The smell of blood and death lingered in the air. Sara pushed past Peebee and winced at the echoing of her footsteps. If there was anyone in there they'd have heard them already, or seen their flashlight beams, so she didn't bother with caution.

"Vetra!" she called out, but didn't get a reply. Instead, she could hear muffled arguing - unmistakably kett voices. Sara unclipped her sword from her back and carried it in her off-hand, reversing her grip so she could rest her pistol against the crook of her elbow as she advanced past the empty cells. 

There was a loud and disgusting wrenching crunch followed by a rattling screech as the kett did something to the adhi. Ryder couldn't make out their words, but they were clearly killing it. She had to stop them before they moved on to Vetra.

If they hadn't already.

The benefit of cages instead of sealed cells was that Sara didn't have to open the door to kill the scientists inside. There was no way she could save the adhi now: they had peeled open its ribs to plug cables and tubes directly into its organs. Anything that wasn't pierced by something mechanical was being leeched of so much blood that the flesh had turned white. Ryder's stomach lurched thinking about Vetra suffering the same cruelties, and spent a few precious seconds putting the adhi out of its misery with a shot to its exposed heart. It died with a gasp that sounded like relief. 

Vetra was in the next occupied cage. Drack and Peebee kept their distance to cover their flank, halfway convinced that the fleeing kett were a ruse and the power cut was a setup for a counter-attack. Sara ignored their tactical concerns, too hell bent on finding her turian to worry about things like escaping or even surviving.

Standing over Vetra's still form was another kett scientist, Ryder recognised from the more delicate shape of its limbs - much more suited to delicate scientific instruments than combat. He held a sharp blade to the gap between Vetra's brow plates and made soulless eye contact with Sara through the bars.

"The door is sealed, human," the kett said, voice barely more than a whisper. "If you kill me, my blade will pierce this woman's brain and she will die. Which neither of us wants." 

Ryder felt her lip turn up in disgust, but she forced herself to lower her pistol until it dropped from her fingers entirely. 

"What do you want?" she snarled. 

The kett's grip on the knife tightened. He spoke, but Ryder was too busy looking at Vetra to listen to him. Her thin lips were an unhealthy shade of blue, and the exposed skin around her eyes was bulging, red and raw, out of the plates of her face. But there was a subtle rise and fall of her chest, and an occasional movement of her eyes under their lids. She was not only alive, but conscious enough to dream. That was good enough for Sara.

"Sorry," she said, cutting off the kett scientist mid-sentence. The cage bars were narrow, but still spaced out enough that the brief incorporeality granted by a powerful enough biotic blink carried her through them like empty space. Her sword flashed up from her side in a movement so fast she didn't even see it move, slicing diagonally through the kett's wrist and connecting with the hilt of his blade hard enough to hurl it across the room. By the time it had stuck fast in the opposite corner, Sara had brought the sword down hard between the kett's eyes and split his head open.

"No deal," she said as he slid to the floor. 

She heard Drack whistle at her stunt from the other side of the cage door, but she was too busy rushing to Vetra's side. Her sword dropped from her grip as she pulled up her omni-tool - first as a blade, to slice through that vicious strap keeping her head pinned too far back, and then as a medical scanner.

"Vetra, tell me you can hear me," she begged as she passed the warm orange light down her body. She had been out in Voeld's freezing temperatures for far too long, but the kett had been raising her core temperature and applying medi-gel in a way that almost seemed gentle . By the time the scan had finished, Sara had no doubt that without her captors, Vetra would have died. 

She decided to thank them later.

The rest of her bonds and the drip were easily severed with a flash of her omni-tool, and by the time her limbs were freed Vetra was starting wake up.

"Sara?" she croaked, and tears welled into Ryder's eyes before she could stop them.

"I'm here," she gasped out from under a wave of relief. The fear still lingered - there could still be lasting damage if they didn't get her to Lexi on the Tempest soon, but she was breathing and speaking, and that was enough to calm her worries for a moment.

"It hurts," Vetra managed, trying to lift a frostbitten limb. "I can't open my eyes."

Ryder couldn't look at the welts around the only exposed skin on her face. "Don't try," she said, trying to sound confident that she would be okay. "There's nothing worth seeing here anyway."

Vetra made a sound that might have been a laugh and Ryder's heart somersaulted in her chest. She felt Vetra's hand brush against her wrist and quickly grabbed her hand. 

"Ryder, I can't feel my legs. I can't walk," she whispered. 

Sara was glad, for now at least, that Vetra couldn't see. She pressed angrily at her eyes to stem the tears and nodded. 

"Drack?"

"I got it," the krogan said as he wrenched open the door and lumbered inside. Sara only let go of Vetra's hand while Drack carefully lifted her off the operating table, and then immediately wrapped her fingers back around Vetra's once she was settled.

"Not the first time I've had to haul you out of a cell," Drack pointed out. He was joking but there was a strain in his voice that made Ryder acutely aware that he had been just as scared as she was. 

"No," Vetra croaked, "but this one makes us even." 

Laughing almost broke her, but Sara choked back her hysterics. She'd save them for later, when she should could share them with Vetra alone.

"Let's get you out of here."

#whumpuary #whumpuaryno1 #captivity #mass effect #mass effect andromeda #sara ryder #vetra nyx #fanfic #ao3 link #whumpuary2024

[ramdeity]

old man yaoi

"A murder machine. That's undoubtedly the best way to describe this man. Standing at a towering six feet, his visage was a grotesque amalgamation of stolen flesh and scrap metal, giving rise to a jaw that struck terror into anyone who dared meet his gaze. I had the misfortune of knowing him personally. He was the kind of person who would go on his brutal rampages, returning with his own head dangling from his hand, a guttural groan escaping his mangled lips as he rasped my name..."

With a deafening crash, the door flew open, protesting loudly from the accumulated years of abuse. In one hand, he clutched his severed head, while the other gripped the door handle. He staggered through the building's dimly lit interior. Red-tinted goggles were strapped tightly to his face, alongside swaths of bandages and a black bandana that concealed most of his face.

"Doc…" He groaned, and his large, gnashing teeth grated against the harsh steel of his artificial jaw. The sound was akin to a fork scraping across a ceramic plate, making it agonizing to the ears.

'Doc' swiveled his chair around, his expression revealing clear displeasure. He had grown weary of this routine.

"Wimbleton, did you succeed on your mission?" Wimbleton nodded as best he could, considering his head was not attached to his shoulders.

"Good." Doc gestured for the man to recline on the operating table beside him. He stood up, preparing for the surgery without the courtesy of anesthesia. After all, Wimbleton had developed a high pain threshold from his numerous ordeals.

Wimbleton winced as he gingerly lowered himself onto the table, wincing as he inadvertently pulled at a previous mission's stitches. Doc heaved a sigh of exasperation.

"You really have to exercise more caution. These wounds won't heal if you keep tearing them open." He noticed Wimbleton picking at a scab on his arm and swiftly swatted his hand away.

"Stop it."

The doctor commenced the painstaking task of removing bullets, one by one, each extraction accompanied by an unpleasant squelching sound. While in the process of stitching up the neck wound; Wimbleton suddenly slumped over, life extinguishing from his body. The scene would have been morbidly comedic if not for the fact that all of Doc's work had been undone as Wimbleton hit the cold, unforgiving concrete floor.

Doc's fingers flipped a switch to start charging his defibrillators. He tugged at Wimbleton's lifeless form to ensure it lay flat on the ground, his practiced hands swiftly discarding his jacket and shirt. He rubbed the defibrillator paddles together, the friction sending sparks flying before he forcefully applied them to Wimbleton's chest. Nothing happened.

Undeterred, he repeated the process, rubbing the paddles together and then pressing them firmly. The body jolted, and Wimbleton sat upright, hand on his chest, gasping for air.

"If you're finished with your little episode, kindly get back on the table," Doc spoke with an icy detachment, his years of experience having numbed him. He rose to collect his tools, but he paused as he heard something unexpected from the man behind him.

"Thank… You."

Doc's eye twitched in response to this unusual display of gratitude. For a man who had been more machine than human for quite some time, hearing a genuine 'thank you' was nothing short of remarkable.

"Hank, get off the floor," Doc addressed him by his first name, an odd hint of emotion in his voice. He extended a hand to assist Hank. Doc had pieced him back together countless times; he knew how to take him apart.

Hank's head flopped to the side, prompting Doc to reach over to his counter and retrieve his needle and thread. He continued stitching up Hank's neck, glancing down to notice that the man still wore the ring from their long-forgotten marriage.

"...and I wouldn't have it any other way."

#fanfic #2bhank