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angelic-holland · 5 years

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Puzzle Pieces // th x fem!reader

Summary:

Sometimes puzzles don’t quite fit, it’s almost perfect, but that almost perfect doesn’t make a puzzle whole.

Falling out of love wasn’t earth-shattering, it wasn’t a big revelation that hit you all at once, your world didn’t crumble to the ground around you quickly. Falling out of love was almost as painful as falling in love. Filled with many of the same moments, your chest tightens when you see them, your eyes grow wide when you think about your future, unsure and so wickedly unaware, you wonder if they ever loved you at all, or if that was the piece of the puzzle that didn’t quite fit. Defective. A factory mess up. Wasn’t meant to be.

Warnings: angst, fluff, smut if you squint

Word Count: an excruciating 10k

A/N: (***) indicates a time skip, long groups of italics indicate a flashback

One night you came across a Spiderman puzzle in the window of a toy store.

The look of pure excitement when he came back from filming Spiderman: Homecoming to see you laying on the carpet with Tessa, the puzzle box sat in front of you was all he needed to know that he was home.

“Hey baby, what’s this?” He asks, setting his suitcase by the door and greeting Tessa who ran up to him, jumping up and slobbering kisses all over his face.

“Thought it would be fun, a little puzzle for us to do while you’re here,” you shrug, “saw it in the window of the toy store on my way to work and thought of you.”

“Tessa’s gonna destroy this in a minute,” he laughs as he settles on the floor next to you, Tessa curling up by his side.

“Then we’ve got one minute to appreciate our work of art,” you grin, dumping the puzzle pieces out of the box.

It’s 100 pieces but it’s been a while since either of you have completed a puzzle so you and Tom spend the rest of the night giggling and playfully fighting over which red piece fits where on the spidersuit.

“It’s 2am,” you groan, Tom’s foot playing with your own as you push down the last piece of the puzzle.

“We’re like two pieces of a puzzle, fit together perfectly,” he says, fingers running over the last piece you added.

“That’s cute,” you smile, looking at your work.

Tessa was sound asleep next to Tom, stirring slightly as he moved to kiss you.

You rolled onto your back, Tom straddling your hips, “missed you,” He says, leaving kisses along your cheek to your mouth.

“Missed you more,” you sigh against his lips before your hands slid into his hair, letting yourself get lost in the feeling of his weight on top of you, one hand holding himself up, the other softly stroking your cheek.

His tongue met yours and you giggled as you heard Tessa rustling above you and the inevitable crack of the puzzle getting torn apart as she walked over it, wet tongue licking a stripe up Tom’s cheek, causing him to pull apart from you, body shaking with laughter.

“Tessa! Mum and dad are getting busy here,” he grins, rolling off of you and standing up, offering his hand to you.

“Are we locking her out of the room tonight?” You say excitedly as he pulls you down the hallway.

“Technically it’s morning, but yes, Tessa, it’s bedtime, we’ve got important business to get to.”

“Wait! She’s gonna eat those puzzle pieces if we don’t pick them up,” you say, pausing in your path.

“I’ll put it away, you go get naked,” he says, pointing at your bedroom and giving your ass a light slap before running back to the living room.

You laugh as you hear him greet Tessa again, the sound of the puzzle getting put back in the box moving to the back of your mind as you quickly pull your clothes off, laying on the bed and waiting for Tom.

“Tessa!” You hear him shout and you see the grey dog run into your room, jumping on the bed as Tom scrambles in, too late.

You’re in stitches as you pull the sheet over your naked form, giving Tessa a belly rub as Tom leans against the door. Eyes twinkling as he watches you both.

“My two favorite girls,” he teases as he tosses his jacket on the ground.

“Can we kick one of your favorite girls out, the other’s got a welcome back present for you,” you smirk and Tom nods.

“Get lost Y/N, Tessa and I have some cuddling to make up for.”

“Tom!” You scoff, tossing the sheet aside and crossing your arms, which may or may not have pushed your breasts up front and center.

“I’m kidding, pretty girl, now what’s that welcome back present you had in mind?” He laughs as Tessa jumps off the bed to greet him again.

Tom ushers Tessa out, giving her one last cuddle before closing the door, raising his eyebrow as he slowly strips for you.

“Hurry up mister, I’ve missed you,” you say, holding your hands out to urge him into bed.

“As you wish pretty girl,” he smirks.

You two spent the rest of the early morning rolling around in the sheets, making up for lost time, whispered and breathless “I love you” as you both took turns making each other feel just right. And you both were giggling, giggling when his elbow accidentally smacked the headboard or when you told him to “use your spidey strength”.

You remember telling your friend how you and Tom would usually find something to laugh about during sex and at first she said that was weird but then she quickly changed her mind.

“If you're able to find someone who can make you feel really good AND make you laugh while doing it? You must be in love.”

And you smiled because she’s right, you were head over heels in love.

***

And so it became a thing. Tom would leave for a little bit, you ignored how long he was gone, because it didn’t hurt as much if you weren’t constantly counting down the days until he’s back.

You would go about your normal routine, finding more and more elaborate puzzles for you to piece together when he got home.

“Hey gorgeous, I missed you,” He says, laying on his stomach next to you, hand gently resting atop your own as you smiled at him, Tessa vying for his attention on the other side, nose nuzzling his head as he gives you a quick kiss.

“How was filming?” You ask as he pets Tessa with his other hand.

“Tiring, but nothing would make me happier than making this puzzle, what’ve we got today?” He asks, eyes twinkling with interest as your hand sifts through the small puzzle pieces in front of you.

“The Iron Man mask,” you nod at the box in front of you.

“Using the box is cheating!” He says hand moving to shove it away.

“Is not! It’s just a tool we can use if we get stuck.”

“But we never get stuck, not really, we work too well to not be able to figure out a little puzzle,” Tom smiles, breaking out into a chuckle when Tessa nudges a piece of the puzzle with her nose towards him.

“I think she wants us to start,” you smirk, and Tom nods, his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth as the two of you concentrate on putting the puzzle together while you talk about the fun times he had on set with the cast and crew of Endgame, the conversation quickly turns to the best villain in the MCU, which he argues is “totally Thanos since they’ve been building it up for years and years.”

“Nope,” you grin, confident in your pick.

“Then who?” He asks, hand fiddling with a puzzle, only a few pieces left.

“Ego!”

“What? No way,” he says, shaking his head.

“Okay hear me out, you think he’s a good guy to start with right? Quill’s dad, finally found him after years and years of searching for him. You’re rooting for him and you keep rooting for him as he tells the story of how Quill’s mom and him fell in love, and you see Quill slowly let his guard down, his wall crumbles, he’s got a dad and he just wants to know more about him, who he is, what he can do. And it turns out who he thought was his dad was the villain all along. Absolutely devastating, nobody cares about Thanos or whatever shit backstory they’ll give him.”

“Okay, okay, I think you won this round, reminds me, let’s rewatch the guardians movies sometime okay? We can have a movie night?”

“I’d love that,” you say as your hand holds the final piece of the puzzle.

His hand covers your own as you gently place it where it belongs, the edges matching perfectly with the surrounding pieces.

“We’re like two pieces of a puzzle,” Tom starts and you erupt into giggles as his hand tickles you.

“We fit together perfectly,” you are able to finish as he kisses along your neck.

How something so perfect could fall apart so easily?

The answer to this question kept you up at night.

***

“Hey,” Tom huffs out as he collapses on the couch next to you, a small smile adorning his lips when Tessa sneaks from across your lap to lay between the two of you.

“Hi,” you grin, head resting on his shoulder as his hand intertwined with your own.

“Missed you,” he mumbles and you smile.

“Missed you more,” you breathe out. It was all seemed so easy. The little moments like this, the moments right after he returned, seeing him after he’s gone made your heart flutter. You were just so happy to have him home you wanted to spend every second he was back with him. Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible, you had work, you both had friends and family, but regardless, you carved out as much time as possible to spend with him. That’s why these silly little puzzles were so important to you. Because it was something the two of you did together, you always did, and it was something to look forward to.

The puzzle is sitting on the table in front of you, open but not disturbed.

“Shall we?” You ask, nodding towards the puzzle on the coffee table in front of you, a new addition to your living room. You should’ve had a coffee table when you first moved in together but it wasn’t something either of you thought much about until your mom jokingly chastised you about it.

“Where would you put your drinks, where would you put popcorn and snacks while you watch movies? And your coasters, just get a coffee table, you won’t regret it.”

And so you did, went on a furniture run and picked up a small coffee table that Tom and you put together one day. You smile at the memory.

***

“I can totally help,” you say, holding up the directions as Tom’s gentle hands build the coffee table.

“You’re holding the instructions upside down,” he laughs, turning them in your hands.

“I totally knew that,” you huff, smiling at him before showing him the next step.

He looked so hot building it, sweat beading on his forehead, eyebrows knitted in concentration as he built. Biceps flexing as he moved.

The second it was finished you practically jumped him, kissing him deeply.

“Did this turn you on?” He laughs as he sets you on the coffee table.

“Careful! We don’t want it to break!” You say, about to get up when his hands spread your thighs.

“Nah, I built it, it’s pretty sturdy, promise, we can test it out right now,” he says, kissing up your thigh.

“Great plan,” you breathe out.

***

“Guess so,” Tom says with a shrug, eyes no longer glimmering in excitement.

You watch as he kneels on the floor, you follow suit and sit next to him. You move to rest your head on his shoulder and he leans back to stretch at the same time, making you almost fall into his lap.

Maybe before it would be funny, you’d laugh and lay there as he played with your hair. The vibration of his body from his laughter comforting you. Now you just sat back up, head tilting curiously at the man next to you, seemingly a stranger as he fumbled around with the puzzle pieces, slowly placing each one in their spot. It was a big picture of dogs, one of which reminded you of Tessa, which was the reason you bought it.

“This puzzle’s boring,” he sighs as you're about halfway finished. The conversation at a stalemate, neither of you had much to say. You never did anymore. Telephone conversations while he was gone were now short and to the point. You started counting down the days until Tom was home, each day filling your heart with a sloshy mix of impending doom and heartache. Your mind wasn’t sure whether to be excited about his return, or afraid that the inevitable was quickly approaching.

“We don’t haveta finish it now, let’s just go to bed, you’ve had a long day,” you say, moving your hand to rest on top of his. His hand is tense and stiff under yours. Cold.

“Okay,” he mumbles, getting up, your hand drops to the ground, neglected. Before he would pull you up with him, kissing you like he did on your first date, short but sweet and passionate. Now it was a mumbled goodnight as you both turned in opposite directions on the bed, Tessa squeezing between the two of you. An unspoken barrier as you slept.

***

“Maybe another night,” Tom smiles as he greets you, hand tugging you into the bedroom when he got back from filming reshoots of Chaos Walking.

You figured he wanted to spend the night doing something else, something a little more R rated than a puzzle.

You sigh into his hug, his arms no longer bone crushing, lung squeezing, just limp around your waist.

“Missed you,” you mumble into his neck, kissing along it while his hands tighten on your hips. You think he’s going to pull you to him, make his body flush with your own, having you panting and moaning his name until the sunrise reminds you that you have other things to do.

Finally.

“Not tonight,” he says, hands pushing your body gently away from him.

“Okay,” you nod, head dropping to look at the ground, the empty space. Feeling the wall between you get thicker, once paper thin it’s now tough concrete.

“Just tired,” he sighs, stripping off his T-shirt and laying on the bed.

You follow suit, brushing your teeth, taking a very hot and very long shower to mask the tears you let trickle down your face.

When did his body start to feel so cold against your own? The hot water running over your bare skin reminds you of the heat you’d feel rise to your cheeks when he said he loved you, even after 4 years those three words managed to make you blush. It reminded you of his fingers dragging along your skin as you welcomed him home, an activity that wasn’t very common now.

When you got back he was fast asleep, body curled up with Tessa behind him.

You smile at the sight, something that never failed to make you smile even when you felt like this.

You changed into your sleep shorts and one of his shirts, carefully climbing into the bed so you didn’t disturb him.

As you lay, breath shallow, heartbeat fast against your ribcage, you faced the wall, staring at the window as the stars twinkled outside, wishing you were anywhere but here.

You freeze when you feel his hands pull you closer to him, head resting on your shoulder as your back rests against his chest.

Your body relaxes as his fingers run up and down your arm, goosebumps erupting along your skin, heart slowing to normal.

He’s silent, maybe he’s asleep, maybe he was just waiting for you to fall asleep so he can roll to the side and ignore you for the rest of the night.

You pushed aside the fear you would wake up next to an empty spot, covers pushed down, cold where Tom used to lay. You wanted to appreciate the now. Because you honestly didn’t know how much of this you had left.

As your breathing slowed to normal, your body much more relaxed against his own, you felt his lips mouth something against your skin, the words barely there, hardly scratching the surface of reality.

“Like pieces of a puzzle,” he says, voice groggy and sleep riddled.

That had to be the only way he’d say it now, in his sleep, he hasn’t said it in what felt like ages, why say it now?

“fit together perfectly,” he says, voice soft against your neck, legs intertwining with your own.

Perfectly.

You let out a shaky breath, “love you.”

“Love you too,” he mumbles against your neck, kissing it gently.

He’s not asleep. You feel the concrete wall start to crumble.

***

Tom had to stay an extra day in Korea. Which would’ve been fine if he called and told you. You got home from work earlier last night, changing into a pretty dress, the same dress you wore on your first date, long and floral printed. You and he had plans to go to a fancy restaurant near your flat, he’d meet you there once his flight landed.

The embarrassment you felt sitting in that fancy restaurant, hair done, makeup done, nursing a vodka soda while the waiter would come to check in every once and awhile was mortifying.

“Your significant other here?” He’d ask and you’d smile sadly.

“Think he’s ditched me,” you laugh, feeling the tears well in your eyes.

You quickly paid for the alcohol and left, not wanting to embarrass yourself further.

You allowed yourself a long shower, letting the mirror fog up with the steam from the heat.

Scrub. Scrub. Scrub.

Scrub the makeup off your face. You only did it to try to make Tom smile, maybe he’d call you his beautiful girlfriend and your smile would be so wide you swore it looked stupid, then he’d say he loved your stupidly wide smile. He was never a fan of your put downs. Always encouraging you to talk about the things you liked about yourself instead.

Scrub. Scrub. Scrub.

Scrub the heat into your skin, pretend it’s Tom because the only heat you’ve gotten is the heat you feel when you’re arguing, a bad heat, nasty as a forest fire that’s about to destroy something beautiful.

Scrub. Scrub. Scrub.

Scrub the pain in your heart when you think about what was and what is the status of your relationship.

Previously full of sensual I love you’s and long phone conversations when he filmed, about anything and everything and nothing at all, just to hear each other’s voices.

Now it’s mumbled and what felt like insincere love you’s and phone conversations you weren’t even sure could count as conversations. Mainly “I’ll be home then” and “I miss you”.

Did you miss him?

Once when he was finishing his press tour in China he told you over the phone he heard a song and made him think of you. You were shocked into silence. What did you say? What could you say? You weren’t expecting him to say something like that. You also didn’t expect him to think about you when he was away. Always busy, interviews, friends, photo shoots. Did he have time to stop and think about you? Despite constantly thinking about him, you figured his cold hands and concrete wall told you all you needed to know.

“Yeah, they were playing English hits through the years and one of them was No One Like You, by the Scorpians, have ya heard it?”

“No.”

“Well I dunno, just made me think of you is all.”

“I guess I’ll listen to it then.”

“You should. I gotta go but I love you okay?”

“Love you too.”

You got out of the shower and wrapped yourself in a towel, feet now cold against the floor of your flat you changed into your pajamas, another one of Tom’s T-shirt’s, your eyes welled up at the scent. The scent of him, clinging to your body in the form of his dark blue shirt. It smelled like expensive cologne masked by nature, the smell of pine and grass from walks with Tessa.

You settled on the couch, staring at the puzzle you had set up before leaving for the restaurant, lip quivering as you called him.

“Hi baby, how are you?”

“Forgetting something?” You ask, nothing but bitter discontent in your voice.

“Fuck,” you hear him groan.

“It’s fine, had my first vodka soda in ages while looking like a loser whose date stood her up. It was fun,” you lie.

“They needed me to stay another day, I’m sorry,” his tone pleading but not apologetic.

“Well you could’ve told me.”

“I’m sorry! How was I supposed to know they’d want me here another day? Don’t be mad.”

“I’m not mad at you Tom! I’m really not! Enjoy South Korea, please,” you sigh into the phone, fingers tapping at the coffee table, Tessa curled up by your side.

“I should’ve called you last night when I found out. The timezones are messing with my head.”

“It’s fine,” your tone portraying the exact opposite.

All it took was one phone call, so fucking easy. Even a text message would suffice. Anything to tell you that he wouldn’t be home.

“I’m sorry,” he says again.

“I’m tired, it’s late, I’m gonna go to bed,” you say, pausing, waiting for him to say something, an I love you.

“Okay.”

It never came.

You hung up before any more words passed between you. Besides, what else was there to say?

***

You’re exhausted as you slip out of your work clothes, tugging on your pajamas as Tessa runs circles around you.

“Taken you for a walk sweetheart, let’s go wait for dad alright?” You say, feet dragging your tired body to the couch, all but collapsing on it as Tessa wriggles her body to lay right on top of you.

“Silly girl,” you giggle, eyeing the puzzle box on the coffee table. He’d get home and you’d put the puzzle together and you’d laugh as his hand covers your own, nuzzling your neck as he whispers, “we’re two puzzle pieces, fit together perfectly,” as the last piece slides in.

That’s what you wanted.

Lately, it was a lot of, “Maybe tomorrow”, “this puzzle’s boring”, the puzzle boxes accumulating dust as they sat on your bookshelf.

You hear the turn of the lock and Tom’s feet dragging into the apartment, much the same style as yours.

“Hi,” he mumbles out, not bothering to stop in the living room like he always did when he returned from filming or press.

Tessa perks up and jumps off you, running to greet Tom.

“Hi princess,” he greets her, voice enthusiastic and excited. You don’t even bother getting up as he walks down the hallway to your bedroom. You hear Tessa move back and jump up on the couch with you, whining and nudging your head to look back at the damn puzzle.

You grumble, sitting up and opening the puzzle box, spreading the puzzle out in front of you. You bought one with the London Eye, where Tom took you on your first date. Hoping, praying, that maybe this would bring back the long lost spark in his eyes when he looked at you.

You settled in on the floor, leaning against the couch with Tessa curled up next to you.

“Might as well,” you sigh, collecting the edge pieces.

Your heart pounded in your chest as you waited for a ‘goodnight’ that never came.

What the hell were you doing here?

You feel a tear slip down your cheek and you laugh bitterly when Tessa licks it off, groaning at her slobber.

“Tess,” you giggle, hands busying themselves with fitting the edges together. You worked and worked as you heard Tom moving around in your bedroom.

Eventually, the noise stopped, he must be asleep. And you didn’t blame him, flights all over the world really wore him down and he had every right to sleep. You couldn’t be mad at him either, for forgetting your date, for losing touch with reality when he was away. You could never be mad at him, not truly. Your hands work mindlessly putting together the puzzle and you ignore the dull ache in your heart. You don’t even recognize that you’re still crying until your tears drop onto the puzzle. Your hand shakes as you wipe them away, body shaking with silent sobs.

What happened?

Time happened.

Distance happened.

You didn’t try anymore, neither of you put much care or time into loving each other. It wasn’t effortless like it was in the beginning. Falling in love was so much easier than staying in love. Making time for each other took energy, both exhausted from the toll of life, even going out on a date took a month’s planning. And even then it sometimes didn’t work out.

When was the last time Tom and you went on a date?

You laughed, the thought left a bitter taste in your mouth, face crinkled in disappointment.

Tessa noticed your discomfort and nuzzled her head against your middle, resting her upper body on your legs as you worked.

Time didn’t seem to pass, or it passed all too slowly. One mind didn’t work as fast as two. You wished there were a second set of hands, one resting gently on a part of your body, your waist, thigh, back, the other excitedly helping you piece together the puzzle. His voice sweetly whispering how you two fit together perfectly.

Your hand shook as it picked up the last piece.

This is it.

You’re done.

You gently whispered, “we’re like two pieces of a puzzle, fit together perfectly.” Your voice cracked when you said perfectly like your mind was telling you you’re wrong wrong wrong. There’s no fixing this. You frowned as you attempted to push down the last piece, a side of the London Eye’s base. A very important part, if this were the real thing, the whole infrastructure wouldn’t hold up, but it didn’t seem to fit, no matter how you turned it.

You sat back and your teary eyes scanned the rest of the puzzle, every other piece was where it belonged.

Right?

You grabbed the box, the picture was flipped down, you didn’t want to cheat as Tom would say.

Your eyes darted between the picture and the puzzle in front of you on the coffee table.

Every other piece was right where it needed to be, nothing out of place.

Then why didn’t this piece fit?

Your hands shook as you pressed down the piece into the puzzle.

Fit, fit, fit.

Why won’t you fit?

You didn’t realize you said this out loud until Tessa’s ears perked up, looking at you curiously. She had settled down to rest with her body pressed against yours. Maybe she knew you missed the warmth of Tom’s body pressed tightly by your side.

“I don’t know either,” you laugh, fingers angrily shoving the stupid puzzle piece in. It bounced right out, almost mocking you.

“Come on, come on, come on,” you cry out, knees tucking into your chest as you sobbed, tossing the puzzle piece behind you. Eyes squeezing shut as you breathed harshly through your nose.

Pointless.

You don’t hear the quiet patter of footsteps behind you, you don’t realize Tom was watching you this entire time, you didn’t see Tom sit down on the other side of you, puzzle piece in a shaky hand. Your eyes were squeezed shut, hot tears running down your cheeks.

The feeling of his hand on top of yours on the coffee table made you almost jump out of your skin. Your head turns wearily, forcing your eyes open to look at him.

“It doesn’t fit?” He asks, eyebrows raised.

He had a sad look on his face, it probably mirrored your own, his eyes were the same red-rimmed as yours, mouth downturned into a slight quivering frown.

You quickly shake your head, no, it doesn’t.

You were afraid to speak, of the word vomit that might come out of your mouth. Why is the world so cruel? Why don’t you love me anymore? Why don’t I think I love you anymore? How can we fix this?

Your mind whirled with these questions as his thumb rubbed the skin of your hand. Warmth spread through your hand, up your arm as his arms draped over your own.

You stared at the puzzle with the missing piece, the emptiness of the wooden coffee table between parts of the London Eye staring back at you, almost making fun of the hollowness you felt in your heart as it pounded against your chest.

“No, no, no! It’s pointless, fucking pointless,” you shriek.

What was pointless?

Surely you looked like a hysterical mess, arms throwing his off, hands tearing apart the intricate patterns that hold each puzzle piece to the next.

“Hey, Hey, it’s okay, I’m here, I’m here,” he says, voice shaking much like your body does as your hands toss the stupid puzzle on the ground, piece after piece.

“You’re here,” you choke out between sobs.

“Yes, I’m here, I’m here and I’m not going anywhere, not for a while, I’m here.”

He kept repeating himself, voice stronger and more sure with each “I’m here.”

Your hand grips the puzzle piece you’re holding tightly, the other closing in a fist and hitting the ground next to you.

“Y/N…” he sighs, his arms wrapping tightly around you, not letting up as you try to swat him away, fist hitting his arm again and again as you cry.

Bone crushing. Lung squeezing.

Slowly your hand drops the puzzle piece to the ground, other hand gripping his bicep, tears staining his gray shirt as your head stayed tight against his shoulder.

He let you cry in that awkward position, both your upper bodies turned to face each other but legs splayed out in front of you for a while. He was whispering into your hair as his hands steadied you into reality.

“I’m here,” he says, voice so sure, being strong for the both of you as you continued to cry.

Steadily he moved his arms to pull you into his lap, your legs perpendicular with his own as you wrapped your arms around his shoulders, clutching onto the back of his shirt. You were afraid, afraid that if you let go he would leave again, leave you cold and abandoned, the puzzle pieces scattered around you a cruel reminder of your state of being.

“Don’t go,” you whisper, voice hoarse as his hands gently run up and down your back underneath your, his, shirt.

You felt warmth spread throughout your body, a gentle warmth that you missed, the feeling of his fingers against your body welcoming.

“Never, never ever,” he whispers and you can’t help but think about how that was a promise that couldn’t help but be broken, there would always be another movie, always an obligation that took him away from you, and that was okay, because he was doing what he loved and you loved that he was happy. But worry and doubt couldn’t help but seep into your mind as you wondered if he would be better off with someone who had the same career, who could travel with him, who understood what it was like to be so utterly destroyed from jetlag. Understood parts of him you never could.

“Y/N?” He asks, thumbs running over your ribs as you took deep breaths, your eyes blinking away a few remaining tears, smaller hands still tightly gripping his shirt, your body is no longer shaking with sobs.

You hum against his shoulder, afraid of what you’d say if you speak.

“I’m sorry,” his voice is soft and sincere, he wants you to know how much he means it, how much saying this in person means.

What is he apologizing for?

For the increasing distance between you both the past few months. For not saying “I love you” enough even though he was always thinking about it. For being gone when you needed each other. For short phone calls that he wishes he could extend but he was just so tired. For the sleepiness in his voice, the bags under his eyes and the stars that died in his eyes ages ago, now just filled with utter exhaustion. And it wasn’t any fault of yours, nor his, not really. Things got in the way, it wasn’t this hard when he was gone on the Homecoming press tour, what changed?

But he didn’t want to tell you all this now. He wanted to make things right, he’s wanted to make things right for a while but he never found the time. Neither of you did. But he was determined to make time.

His heartbeat was painful against his chest as you continued to quietly sniffle, trying to collect yourself.

“I’m sorry too,” you whisper against him. He shifts under you slightly.

“Don’t go,” you whimper, heart racing in your chest. Now’s the time he tells you he’s sorry but he can’t do this anymore, now’s the time that the concrete wall becomes unbreakable.

You didn’t realize you were falling asleep until Tom’s hands started to lift you, your heavy-lidded eyes opening wide.

“Don’t go,” you mumble again, please.

Your voice sounded so small and broken, Tom’s heart ached hearing how hurt you were.

You both needed to stop being so stubborn and just lay out all your feelings, everything that’s happened in the past few months on the table. Now wasn’t the time though. You were falling asleep against him, grateful for his warm body against yours.

Tom came home exhausted but was now wide awake, mind reeling with every possible scenario that could happen.

I don’t love you anymore, you’d say, and his world would all but collapse.

I love you but I don’t know how to make this work, again his world would cave in on itself.

You could ghost him, something he had never thought of before but for some reason that idea was front and center. The thought of you completely dropping out of his life after so long caused his heart to pound in his chest.

“Gimme a second, let’s get you more comfy,” he says, strong arms moving back to your waist, helping you off him, your hands reluctantly letting go of his shirt as you slumped down on the ground.

“Come to bed, you need to rest,” he says, standing up with his hand outstretched.

You quickly took his hand in your own, he helped you stand up, your legs shaking as you looked at him, wide eyes staring into your own.

“Here,” he says, hands moving to grip your thighs, letting you jump into his arms.

It wasn’t an excited jump, like when you picked him up from the airport for the first, and last, thanks paparazzi, a twirl me around I’ve missed you and this is a cheesy romance film from the 1950s, jump. This jump was a jump of sheer exhaustion, both of you worried your legs wouldn’t be able to carry you the few feet to your bedroom.

“I-, I-, I,” you try to get the words past your throat but they don’t work. Scared of the response you might get, or the lack thereof.

“Shhh, I got you,” he whispers into your ear as he sets you down on the edge of the bed, tugging his t-shirt over his head before helping you lay down, facing away from him, your body flush against his warm chest.

You smiled weakly at how warm you felt with him next to you, the conversation you would eventually have to have pushed to the back of your mind.

“I’ve got you,” he reassures you, hand running up and down your arm as the other rested under your head, trying to be as close as he could to you. He never wanted to let you go again. Your legs shook still and he noticed this, brows knitted in worry. He gently used one of his legs and guided it between your own, hoping the extra warmth and closeness will help calm you down.

You’re silent as your heart tries to calm down, hands gripping the sheets in front of you as you stare out the window, the night sky clear and beautiful, stars twinkling.

“We needa talk,” you hear Tom say against your shoulder as the heavy weight of the day pushes you to sleep.

***

You wake up the next morning, heart still heavy with the events of the night before, now laying on your back. You yawn, still tired. Always tired.

Your hand reaches out to rest of Tom’s warm chest next to yours but you’re met with a cold bed.

Fuck.

You quickly get up, the sheets shoved to the side as you raced out of your room. You expect to hear Tom moving around, Tessa as well. But it’s silent.

The silence of the apartment is the loudest thing you’ve ever heard as you run down the hallway, checking the bathroom, no, the guest bedroom, no, the kitchen and living room were empty too.

The sinking feeling in your gut almost made you cry, tears welling in your eyes as your knees buckled and you almost fell to the ground. Out of the corner of your blurry vision you saw breakfast sitting at the kitchen table. What looked like a smoothie, eggs, toast. You tilted your head and moved closer, seeing a piece of paper with Tom’s handwriting scribbled on it.

You quickly sat down, shaking hand picking up the note.

“Took Tess on a walk, made you some breakfast before you haveta go to work, I hope you slept okay, love you, Tom xx”

You smiled at the piece of paper in your hand, heart fluttering as you imagined him waking up and taking the time to make you breakfast. The effort it took to make something other than cereal for breakfast when you both couldn’t cook very well.

Time and effort.

You blinked away the tears as you ate, fingers tapping along the kitchen table. You had to be at work at 10, 10 to 5, another long day you didn’t think you could handle. But there’s no way they’d find someone to cover for you in such a short notice. What time was it anyways?

Shit. 9:30. You had hardly enough time to quickly change into a nice blue dress and grab your purse, eyes darting to the living room, expecting to see the mess from the puzzle all over the floor.

Gone.

The puzzle was no longer strewn on the floor, the puzzle box not sitting up right on the coffee table.

You wonder if Tom picked it up after you fell asleep. His body leaving your own, leaving you cold. You wonder if he put it on the bookshelf with the rest of your puzzles so you ignore the ticking clock, telling you that work is waiting, walking quickly to the bookshelf that had your set of puzzles from over the years, all sitting perfectly still, dust collecting over the past few months.

You rummaged through all of them, even though you knew deep down it wasn’t here.

Where’d he take it?

You didn’t have time to dwell on everything so you pushed everything down and headed out.

***

Tom watched as you slept, his mind running a mile a minute, not letting him sleep. He thought about the puzzle you got, the London Eye, he wondered if you got it because it made you think of your first date. He wondered if he could ever recreate the feeling of your first date, not the awkwardness but the feeling as you left the London Eye, the feeling that he knew deep down you were the person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

You were the daughter of his mom’s new friend. The two of them decided to make you meet once, while they were out for coffee. It was an awkward meeting to say the least. He thought you were pretty, beautiful, and after he shook your hand he was flustered and looking for something to compliment you without being weird.

“I really like the way your skin feels,” He stammers.

What the fuck was that Tom? He thinks, almost smacking himself.

Your eyes grew wide, an eyebrow raised, your cheeks slightly blushing but not a match to his tomato reds.

“Nice handshake,” you laugh and Nikki elbows him.

The next day you agree to go on a date with him, telling him to make it worth your while.

He brought you to the London Eye. As soon as you arrived he sort of regretted it, the line atrocious, wait times were upwards of an hour. You looked so pretty in your floral dress and he managed to compliment you normally this time, saying how pretty the red dress looked, telling you that lilies were his favorite flower, loving the pattern of them.

He was worried you’d be annoyed with having to wait for so long to go on the Eye, something you’ve probably done before, and only for a short time. What type of date was that?

But as the line moved, slowly but surely, you allowed yourself to open up, the conversation flowing from what you were in school for to him becoming a professional certified carpenter, something his mom made him do when he never got called back about auditions. You felt the disappointment in his voice when he talked about auditioning and never getting the role so you changed subjects, he laughed when you stopped your rambling for a moment to stare at him, eyebrows knitted in concentration as your eyes roamed his face.

“This patch of freckles,” you say, fingers lightly tracing the side of his face, “looks like Ursa Major.”

“Hmm?” He asks, head tilted to the side as his eyes slipped shut, appreciating the feeling of your hand on his face.

“The constellation,” you say, finger lightly tracing the constellation among his freckles.

“Never noticed that before,” he sighs.

You’re at the front of the line.

You hop onto the capsule, ignoring as it filled with other people, situating yourself at the end, Tom standing beside you.

“It’s so pretty up here,” you smile as the capsule takes you up.

He turns, his body facing you. Your body was turned towards him but your head was turned and watching the sunset over the London skyline.

“It really is,” he says, eyes meeting yours as your head turns.

And before he realizes what he’s doing or that there are other people in the capsule, or that this was your first date and you hardly knew each other he was kissing you. It was short and sweet and he pulled away quickly because he wasn’t sure if you were going to kiss him back and he was afraid he made things awkward. He was blushing and before he had a chance to comprehend your response your hands are gripping his shirt, pulling him back down to your lips for a longer kiss, his hands resting lightly on your hips. You kiss like you’re the only two people on the capsule, eyes shut as your hands release his shirt and he hopes and prays you don’t let go or pull away, sighing into the kiss when your hands softly rest against his chest. Neither of you pulled away or even thought to pull apart until someone coughed loudly behind you, making you both blush and pull your lips apart, foreheads resting against each other.

“Wow,” you mumble, lips smiling as his thumb rubbed your hip over your dress.

“Wow,” he repeats, eyes twinkling.

***

And so Tom knew what he had to do. He woke up early, letting you sleep, he knew you would miss his body next to yours but he had a plan. A plan to bring you back to where you first kissed, your first date, and not try to recreate that moment because that wasn’t genuine, it wouldn’t feel right. But to remind you and himself of all the reasons you fell in love in the first place.

He sent a text to Harry and Sam, enlisting their help before making his way to the living room, eyes sad as he observed the mess from the night before. Tessa followed along behind him quietly, nose nudging some of the puzzle pieces as he picked them up, placing them in the box.

He called his mom, knowing she would have a better idea of how to make his plan a reality. They talked in hushed whispers over the phone before he decided to make you breakfast before taking Tessa on a walk. He contemplated sending you a next to let you know where he would be but he decided that a handwritten note would be better.

Please, please let this work.

Please come back to me.

***

Your day was filled with mundane tasks at the library, there was no children’s reading hour so you spent the majority of your time putting away books, cleaning, and checking people out. You focused on the busy work to distract yourself from Tom’s sleepy words last night.

We need to talk.

Who says that? People who are about to break up with their girlfriend, that’s who.

Your mind continued to repeat those words, we need to talk.

Talk about what? How we can’t seem to make time for each other anymore? How you once traced constellations along his freckles and now you could hardly spend five minutes with him before he was on to the next adventure? How you had both grown tired and the growing strain on your relationship was too much to handle?

How you missed him so much, you missed him even when he was here because he was so distant. His words, his hands, his body, his eyes a million miles away even when he was sitting right next to you.

You said goodbye to your coworker before you made the walk home, not bothering to check your phone, there probably wasn’t anything from Tom anyways.

You made it back home, expecting Tessa and Tom to be hanging out on the sofa, catching up on Love Island or some other TV show he hadn’t gotten the chance to see while he was busy.

The flat was empty.

You sighed, ignoring the living room and the reminder of your breakdown as you tossed your purse on your bed, laying down and taking a few deep breaths.

We need to talk.

You reluctantly got up and walked to the kitchen, you hadn’t had anything to eat since this morning so you were starving.

You grabbed a go-to of yours, peanut butter and jelly, too exhausted to make any dinner. You took your sandwich to the couch, about to sit down when you see the puzzle on the coffee table, you pause, feet stuck to the ground, a bite of your sandwich in your mouth, wide open. You quickly swallow before kneeling on the ground at the coffee table. The sandwich is forgotten next to a bouquet of flowers, lilies, your stomach erupted with butterflies.

You glanced at the puzzle sitting on the coffee table, the London Eye, but it was complete, no missing piece in sight.

This wasn’t the same one you did last night.

Next to it was another note in Tom’s handwriting.

“If you know, you know. Meet me at 6:30.”

Your heart started pounding as you checked the time, it was already 5:45. You knew right away where he wanted to meet you, the completed puzzle told you everything you needed to know.

***

Your mind raced as you sat in the back of the Uber, one hand tightly gripping your purse as the other tapped along your leg, bouncing up and down. You were never nervous for dates with Tom. At least you were going to assume that’s what this was until he said otherwise.

“Date night?” the woman driving you asks and you nod, gulping.

“Yep,” you voice shakes slightly with a nervous stutter.

The rest of the car is silent as you pull up to where you were 100% sure Tom would be.

As you walk up to the daunting ride, you look through the crowd of people, people taking pictures, people standing in line, looking for Tom.

You find him leaning against the railing by the water, wearing a blue button up shirt and nice dress pants. He looked beautiful in the slowly setting sun.

He waved, a backpack slung over his shoulder. Your feet moved faster and faster as you met him, breathless.

“Hi,” you smiled, faltering slightly, still so god damn unsure.

“Hey,” He says, your eyes widened as they searched his eyes, finding a slight glimmer amongst the chocolate brown.

“What happened to the puzzle?” You ask, head tilted questioningly as you let your hand slip and intertwine with his as you stood in front of him.

“It’s kind of a long story, but uh, shall we take a ride?” Tom asks, nodding at the Eye on your right.

“We’ll have all of fifteen minutes,” you try to explain and his other hand runs up and down your other arm.

Step closer, search for those stars in his eyes and on his cheeks.

And your body moves with your thoughts, chest flush with his as your hand rests against his chest.

“I’ve missed you,” you say, eyes darting between his eyes and his lips.

“I don’t want to miss you anymore,” he whispers, voice barely audible against the background noise.

You close your eyes, lips frowning as you thought about his words.

He didn’t want to miss you anymore?

What did he mean?

He noticed your curiosity and disappointment and shock over what he was saying, quickly following up.

“I just, I miss you constantly, and I don’t want to miss you anymore because I don’t want to be away from you. I can’t spend this much time away from you anymore. It’s breaking my heart,” he says, tears welling in his eyes as your thumb strokes his chest.

“Then I guess I don’t wanna miss you anymore either,” you giggle, blinking away a few tears, his hand moving up your arm to cup your face.

“Good,” he nods, wetting his lips as he stared at your own.

Your hand gripped his shirt, pulling his face down to meet yours, kissing him, mouths conveying everything that your words couldn’t.

“You know, I got us a special capsule,” he says when your lips finally pull apart, your cheek resting against his, lips ghosting your earlobe.

“Mhm? What’s that?” You ask, eyes glancing at the London Eye next to you.

“They call it the couple’s capsule or something, we get the whole thing to ourselves and we get extra time and everything,” his voice rising in excitement.

“And we still should talk,” he finishes, eyes looking in yours for cracks to your exterior.

“Okay,” you say quietly, eyes looking at the ground between you, your feet planted between his tapping against it.

“Come on, let’s head up,” he says, quickly kissing your cheek before dragging you along with him.

“What about the line?” you ask, nodding towards the long line of people all waiting in the evening summer heat for a few moments on the Eye.

“Nah, we get to skip ahead,” he says, coming to a little side entrance.

You board the capsule and Tom slips off his backpack, setting it down on the bench before sitting down, tapping the space next to him.

You sit down, sighing as his hand moves to rest on your thigh, appreciating the warmth of his hand against your bare leg.

“I’m sorry,” Tom starts and you interrupt.

“No, I’m sorry,” your eyes pleading with Tom to let you talk, to give you the opportunity to say what you so desperately need to.

“I’m sorry for being so distant lately, when you’re home, when we talk on the phone. I guess I just couldn’t put in the effort, I guess I was scared that you stopped caring, so I tried to not care either and this is what it got us into this mess.”

“Why wouldn’t I care? Y/N, I could never stop caring about you, I’m so fucking in love with you, hearing you cry, feeling how upset you are, it breaks my heart so bad, I can’t stand seeing you upset. I wish I could take away all your pain, I want to do better. Life’s slowed down and I’m back for a good while. We can be us again, we can see cheesy old romance movies at the drive in, we can take Tessa to the dog park, I can attempt to teach you how to golf again, we can have sex,” Tom pauses, eyes searching your face for your reaction.

You giggled then paused.

In.

“In?” You ask, lips quivering as you spoke.

“In? What do you mean?” He asks, eyebrows knitted in confusion.

“You said you’re in love with me.”

“Well yeah,” he says, a nervous laughter bubbling up his chest and out of his mouth, cheeks flushing like when you first met, “been in love with ya for a while.”

“Well yeah, you love me, I love you too, but you’ve never said that before, that you’re in love with me.”

“Huh,” Tom says, fingers pausing their movement on your thigh.

“I’m in love with you too,” you say in one breath, hand covering his own.

“Oh thank god, this would’ve been awkward if you weren’t,” he teases, nudging your side with his elbow.

“I thought, thought you didn’t love me anymore,” you whisper, not sure if you even want to say it out loud.

“What?” he asks, jaw almost dropping as he looks at you, visibly hurt that you would think that.

“And last night, I dunno, that stupid fucking puzzle, when the piece didn’t fit, I thought it was a cruel fucking joke, that we were over and even a child’s toy was mocking us.”

“Have I ever told you that you’re a little bit superstitious?” He says, breathing evening out.

“Not funny, I just thought, there was this wall, right, here,” you say, gesturing to the inch or so between your legs where you weren’t touching, “and it was so thick and I kept pounding on it, but I just gave up. And you didn’t build it, this barrier I felt, maybe I just made it all up in my mind but it felt so real,” you sighed, eyes watching his face as it glows in the setting sun.

Your other hand, the one not resting on top of Tom’s, moves to his cheek, fingers lightly touching the brown freckles against his tanned skin.

“You got some sun,” you comment, “your Ursa Major looks like Orion now,” you observe, fingers tracing the constellation on his skin.

“I’m sorry, if it didn’t seem like I was, uh, like I wasn’t trying as hard to knock that wall down. I was so busy I just never recognized it was there until it was so thick we couldn’t knock it over. Is it, uhm, still there?” He asks, nodding towards the small space between you.

You grin, shaking your head slowly, body inching closer to him, legs and arms touching, “not anymore.”

“I uh, I got you something,” he says, pulling his backpack onto his lap.

“You didn’t haveta-,” you start but let Tom finish.

His hand leaves your thigh as he unzips his backpack.

“They were just little things that made me think of you,” he says, pulling out a small red drawstring bag.

“Oh Tom, this is beautiful,” you whisper, holding up the necklace that glimmered in the sun.

“Got it in Mexico, Harry had put a clip of me with that guy in the video on instagram and I was so worried you’d watch it and figure out I was getting you a present. It’s got a red jewel, your favorite color, and it sparkled so pretty in the sun, and it made me think of you in that red bikini when we went to Hawaii, anyways, I was gonna give you this right away, but mum’s a genius and told me to hang onto it, give you everything altogether when the movie press was over.”

You thumb runs over the jewel, breath quickening as you put the necklace on, smiling at how it fit around your neck, dropping perfectly on your chest.

“From Mexico, yeah, and uh, here, this is from Bali, just a little hand stitched thing, they said if you hang it keeps the bad dreams away,” he says, handing you a beautifully stitched floral pattern on the small patch of white cloth surrounded by a wooden edge.

“Wow,” you smile, watching as Tom pulls yet something else out of his backpack.

“Here, tea from LA, the lady at the tea shop said it helps you sleep, and I know sometimes when I’m not home you can get restless and it takes you a while so. Yeah. And from New York, the new Janet Evanovich book, Becausewhen we were talking on the phone as I was in the book store you were telling me all about the murder mystery she wrote right before it and I saw this one was brand new so, yeah.”

You gulped, looking at the next thing he got as your mind raced with questions.

“And this is really pretty, it’s from China, I thought, it uh, matches your dress, you know the one you wore on our first date,” he says, hands holding a red silk scarf with a floral pattern.

Your hand shakes as you hold it and he pulls something else out.

“From Korea; they call it Hanji, it’s the art of paper making, its super traditional,” he says, gently handing you a delicate piece of paper with a beautiful scene painted on it, a man and woman sitting on a bench, looking at the sunset.

“You, you thought of me,” you whisper, as he puts the gifts back in his bag.

“Why- Yeah, of course I thought of you, every second of every day I’m away I’m thinking about you. I get distracted in interviews because I’m wondering how you would answer the question, or what you’re doing, if you are missing me as much as I’m missing you. And I dunno, I would just see these things and think about you even more cause they remind me of you.”

“Thank you,” your voice cracks as he sets the backpack down and you both stand up. He leads you to the edge of the capsule, you’re almost at the very top of the ride, looking out over the water.

“I want to fix this, because I love you too much to see you hurt, and I love you too much to leave you for so long again,” he whispers, as he pulls you into a hug, arms tight around your waist, head resting atop yours as your cheek presses to his chest.

You immediately reciprocate, arms tight around his shoulders as you smile.

Bone crushing. Lung squeezing.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry I stopped trying, but I love you too, and I never wanna stop loving you,” you mumble as he kisses the top of your head.

“And I never wanna stop making puzzles with you, and kissing you,“ he says, kissing all over your face as you laugh in his arms.

Your lips meet his and you’re the only two people in the world as you kiss, mouth open as his tongue meets yours. It’s passionate and it’s yearning and it’s needy and it makes you want to drag him back to your flat and show him how much you missed him.

So that’s exactly what you do. After hours of showing each other just how much you missed each other you shower together, enjoying the heat of his body along with the heat of the water against your skin.

As you lay in bed, facing each other, Tessa laying on the other side of Tom, like you used to, your fingers tapping along his palm, you smile as he intertwined his fingers with your own, thumb rubbing the skin of your hand.

“We’re like two pieces of a puzzle, he says against your lips.

“Fit together perfectly,” you finish together.

***

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unsettlingshortstories · 4 years

Text

Reeling for the Empire

Karen Russell (2013)

Several of us claim to have been the daughters of samurai, but of course there is no way for anyone to verify that now. It’s a relief, in its way, the new anonymity. We come here tall and thin, noblewomen from Yamaguchi, graceful as calligraphy; short and poor, Hida girls with bloody feet, crow-voiced and vulgar; entrusted to the Model Mill by our teary mothers; rented out by our destitute uncles — but within a day or two the drink the Recruitment Agent gave us begins to take effect. And the more our kaiko-bodies begin to resemble one another, the more frantically each factory girl works to reinvent her past. One of the consequences of our captivity here in Nowhere Mill, and of the darkness that pools on the factory floor, and of the polar fur that covers our faces, blanking us all into sisters, is that anybody can be anyone she likes in the past. Some of our lies are quite bold: Yuna says that her great-uncle has a scrap of sailcloth from the Black Ships. Dai claims that she knelt alongside her samurai father at the Battle of Shiroyama. Nishi fibs that she once stowed away in the imperial caboose from Shimbashi Station to Yokohama, and saw Emperor Meiji eating pink cake. Back in Gifu I had tangly hair like a donkey’s tail, a mouth like a small red bean, but I tell the others that I was very beautiful.

“Where are you from?” they ask me.

“The castle in Gifu, perhaps you know it from the famous woodblocks? My great-grandfather was a warrior.”

“Oh! But Kitsune, we thought you said your father was the one who printed the woodblocks? The famous ukiyo-e artist, Utagawa Kuniyoshi …”

“Yes. He was, yesterday.”

I’ll put it bluntly: we are all becoming reelers. Some kind of hybrid creature, part kaiko, silkworm caterpillar, and part human female. Some of the older workers’ faces are already quite covered with a coarse white fur, but my face and thighs stayed smooth for twenty days. In fact I’ve only just begun to grow the white hair on my belly. During my first nights and days in the silk-reeling factory I was always shaking. I have never been a hysterical person, and so at first I misread these tremors as mere mood; I was in the clutches of a giddy sort of terror, I thought. Then the roiling feeling became solid. It was the thread: a color purling invisibly in my belly. Silk. Yards and yards of thin color would soon be extracted from me by the Machine.

Today, the Agent drops off two new recruits, sisters from the Yamagata Prefecture, a blue village called Sakegawa, which none of us have visited. They are the daughters of a salmon fisherman and their names are Tooka and Etsuyo. They are twelve and nineteen. Tooka has a waist-length braid and baby fat; Etsuyo looks like a forest doe, with her long neck and watchful brown eyes. We step into the light and Etsuyo swallows her scream. Tooka starts wailing—“Who are you? What’s happened to you? What is this place?”

Dai crosses the room to them, and despite their terror the Sakegawa sisters are too sleepy and too shocked to recoil from her embrace. They appear to have drunk the tea very recently, because they’re quaking on their feet. Etsuyo’s eyes cross as if she is about to faint. Dai unrolls two tatami mats in a dark corner, helps them to stretch out. “Sleep a little,” she whispers. “Dream.”

“Is this the silk-reeling factory?” slurs Tooka, half-conscious on her bedroll.

“Oh, yes,” Dai says. Her furry face hovers like a moon above them.

Tooka nods, satisfied, as if willing to dismiss all of her terror to continue believing in the Agent’s promises, and shuts her eyes.

Sometimes when the new recruits confide the hopes that brought them to our factory, I have to suppress a bitter laugh. Long before the kaiko change turned us into mirror images of one another, we were sisters already, spinning identical dreams in beds thousands of miles apart, fantasizing about gold silks and an “imperial vocation.” We envisioned our future dowries, our families’ miraculous freedom from debt. We thrilled to the same tales of women working in the grand textile mills, where steel machines from Europe gleamed in the light of the Meiji sunrise. Our world had changed so rapidly in the wake of the Black Ships that the poets could barely keep pace with the scenes outside their own windows. Industry, trade, unstoppable growth: years before the Agent came to find us, our dreams anticipated his promises.

Since my arrival here, my own fantasies have grown as dark as the room. In them I snip a new girl’s thread midair, or yank all the silk out of her at once, so that she falls lifelessly forward like a Bunraku puppet. I haven’t been able to cry since my first night here — but often I feel a water pushing at my skull. “Can the thread migrate to your brain?” I’ve asked Dai nervously. Silk starts as a liquid. Right now I can feel it traveling below my navel, my thread. Foaming icily along the lining of my stomach. Under the blankets I watch it rise in a hard lump. There are twenty workers sleeping on twelve tatami, two rows of us, our heads ten centimeters apart, our earlobes curled like snails on adjacent leaves, and though we are always hungry, every one of us has a round belly. Most nights I can barely sleep, moaning for dawn and the Machine.

Every aspect of our new lives, from working to sleeping, eating and shitting, bathing when we can get wastewater from the Machine, is conducted in one brick room. The far wall has a single oval window, set high in its center. Too high for us to see much besides scraps of cloud and a woodpecker that is like a celebrity to us, provoking gasps and applause every time he appears. Kaiko-joko, we call ourselves. Silkworm-workers. Unlike regular joko, we have no foreman or men. We are all alone in the box of this room. Dai says that she’s the dormitory supervisor, but that’s Dai’s game.

We were all brought here by the same man, the factory Recruitment Agent. A representative, endorsed by Emperor Meiji himself, from the new Ministry for the Promotion of Industry.

We were all told slightly different versions of the same story.

Our fathers or guardians signed contracts that varied only slightly in their terms, most promising a five-yen advance for one year of our lives.

The Recruitment Agent travels the countryside to recruit female workers willing to travel far from their home prefectures to a new European-style silk-reeling mill. Presumably, he is out recruiting now. He makes his pitch not to the woman herself but to her father or guardian, or in some few cases, where single women cannot be procured, her husband. I am here on behalf of the nation, he begins. In the spirit of Shokusan-Kōgyō. Increase production, encourage industry. We are recruiting only the most skillful and loyal mill workers, he continues. Not just peasant girls — like your offspring, he might say with his silver tongue to men in the Gifu and Mie prefectures — but the well-bred daughters of noblemen. Samurai and aristocrats. City-born governors have begged me to train their daughters on the Western technologies. Last week, the Medical General of the Imperial Army sent his nineteen-year-old twins, by train! Sometimes there is resistance from the father or guardian, especially among the hicks, those stony-faced men from distant centuries who still make bean paste, wade into rice paddies, brew sake using thousand-year-old methods; but the Agent waves all qualms away — Ah, you’ve heard about x-Mill or y-Factory? No, the French yatoi engineers don’t drink girls’ blood, haha, that is what they call red wine. Yes, there was a fire at Aichi Factory, a little trouble with tuberculosis in Suwa. But our factory is quite different — it is a national secret. Yes, a place that makes even the French filature in the backwoods of Gunma, with its brick walls and steam engines, look antiquated! This phantom factory he presents to her father or guardian with great cheerfulness and urgency, for he says we have awoken to dawn, the Enlightened Era of the Meiji, and we must all play our role now. Japan’s silk is her world export. The Blight in Europe, the pébrine virus, has killed every silkworm, forever halted the Westerners’ cocoon production. The demand is as vast as the ocean. This is the moment to seize. Silk-reeling is a sacred vocation — she will be reeling for the empire.

The fathers and guardians nearly always sign the contract. Publicly, the joko’s family will share a cup of hot tea with the Agent. They celebrate her new career and the five-yen advance against her legally mortgaged future. Privately, an hour or so later, the Agent will share a special toast with the girl herself. The Agent improvises his tearooms: an attic in a forest inn or a locked changing room in a bathhouse or, in the case of Iku, an abandoned cowshed.

After sunset, the old blind woman arrives. “The zookeeper,” we call her. She hauls our food to the grated door, unbars the lower panel. We pass her that day’s skeins of reeled silk, and she pushes two sacks of mulberry leaves through the panel with a long stick. The woman never speaks to us, no matter what questions we shout at her. She simply waits, patiently, for our skeins, and so long as they are acceptable in quality and weight, she slides in our leaves. Tonight she has also slid in a tray of steaming human food for the new recruits. Tooka and Etsuyo get cups of rice and miso soup with floating carrots. Hunks of real ginger are unraveling in the broth, like hair. We all sit on the opposite side of the room and watch them chew with a dewy nostalgia that disgusts me even as I find myself ogling their long white fingers on their chopsticks, the balls of rice. The salt and fat smells of their food make my eyes ache. When we eat the mulberry leaves, we lower our new faces to the floor.

They drink down the soup in silence. “Are we dreaming?” I hear one whisper.

“The tea drugged us!” the younger sister, Tooka, cries at last. Her gaze darts here and there, as if she’s hoping to be contradicted. They traveled nine days by riverboat and oxcart, Etsuyo tells us, wearing blindfolds the entire time. So we could be that far north of Yamagata, or west. Or east, the younger sister says. We collect facts from every new kaiko-joko and use them to draw thread maps of Japan on the factory floor. But not even Tsuki the Apt can guess our whereabouts.

Nowhere Mill, we call this place.

Dai crosses the room and speaks soothingly to the sisters; then she leads them right to me. Oh, happy day. I glare at her through an unchewed mouthful of leaves.

“Kitsune is quite a veteran now,” says smiling Dai, leading the fishy sisters to me, “she will show you around—”

I hate this part. But you have to tell the new ones what’s in store for them. Minds have been spoiled by the surprise.

“Will the manager of this factory be coming soon?” Etsuyo asks, in a grave voice. “I think there has been a mistake.”

“We don’t belong here!” Tooka breathes.

There’s nowhere else for you now, I say, staring at the floor. That tea he poured into you back in Sakegawa? The Agent’s drink is remaking your insides. Your intestines, your secret organs. Soon your stomachs will bloat. You will manufacture silk in your gut with the same helpless skill that you digest food, exhale. The kaiko-change, he calls it. A revolutionary process. Not even Chiyo, who knows sericulture, has ever heard of a tea that turns girls into silkworms. We think the tea may have been created abroad, by French chemists or British engineers. Yatoi-tea. Unless it’s the Agent’s own technology.

I try to smile at them now.

In the cup it was so lovely to look at, wasn’t it? An orange hue, like something out of the princess’s floating world woodblocks.

Etsuyo is shaking. “But we can’t undo it? Surely there’s a cure. A way to reverse it, before it’s … too late.”

Before we look like you, she means.

“The only cure is a temporary one, and it comes from the Machine. When your thread begins, you’ll understand …”

It takes thirteen to fourteen hours for the Machine to empty a kaiko-joko of her thread. The relief of being rid of it is indescribable.

These seashore girls know next to nothing about silkworm cultivation. In the mountains of Chichibu, Chiyo tells them, everyone in her village was involved. Seventy families worked together in a web: planting and watering the mulberry trees, raising the kaiko eggs to pupa, feeding the silkworm caterpillars. The art of silk production was very, very inefficient, I tell the sisters. Slow and costly. Until us.

I try to weed the pride from my voice, but it’s difficult. In spite of everything, I can’t help but admire the quantity of silk that we kaiko-joko can produce in a single day. The Agent boasts that he has made us the most productive machines in the empire, surpassing even those steel zithers and cast-iron belchers at Tomioka Model Mill.

Eliminated: mechanical famine. Supply problems caused by the cocoons’ tiny size and irregular quality.

Eliminated: waste silk.

Eliminated: the cultivation of the kaiko. The harvesting of their eggs. The laborious collection and separation of the silk cocoons. We silkworm-girls combine all these processes in the single factory of our bodies. Ceaselessly, even while we dream, we are generating thread. Every droplet of our energy, every moment of our time flows into the silk.

I guide the sisters to the first of the three workbenches. “Here are the basins,” I say, “steam heated, quite modern, eh, where we boil the water.”

I plunge my left hand under the boiling water for as long as I can bear it. Soon the skin of my fingertips softens and bursts, and fine waggling fibers rise from them. Green thread lifts right out of my veins. With my right hand I pluck up the thread from my left fingertips and wrist.

“See? Easy.”

A single strand is too fine to reel. So you have to draw several out, wind six or eight around your finger, rub them together, to get the right denier; when they are thick enough, you feed them to the Machine.

Dai is drawing red thread onto her reeler, watching me approvingly.

“Are we monsters now?” Tooka wants to know.

I give Dai a helpless look; that’s a question I won’t answer.

Dai considers.

In the end she tells the new reelers about the juhyou, the “snow monsters,” snow-and-ice-covered trees in Zao Onsen, her home. “The snow monsters”—Dai smiles, brushing her white whiskers—“are very beautiful. Their disguises make them beautiful. But they are still trees, you see, under all that frost.”

While the sisters drink in this news, I steer them to the Machine.

The Machine looks like a great steel-and-wood beast with a dozen rotating eyes and steaming mouths — it’s twenty meters long and takes up nearly half the room. The central reeler is a huge and ever-spinning O, capped with rows of flashing metal teeth. Pulleys swing our damp thread left to right across it, refining it into finished silk. Tooka shivers and says it looks as if the Machine is smiling at us. Kaiko-joko sit at the workbenches that face the giant wheel, pulling glowing threads from their own fingers, stretching threads across their reeling frames like zither strings. A stinging music.

No tebiki cranks to turn, I show them. Steam power has freed both our hands.

“ ‘Freed,’ I suppose, isn’t quite the right word, is it?” says Iku drily. Lotus-colored thread is flooding out of her left palm and reeling around her dowel. With her right hand she adjusts the outflow.

Here is the final miracle, I say: our silk comes out of us in colors. There is no longer any need to dye it. There is no other silk like it on the world market, boasts the Agent. If you look at it from the right angle, a pollen seems to rise up and swirl into your eyes. Words can’t exaggerate the joy of this effect.

Nobody has ever guessed her own color correctly — Hoshi predicted hers would be peach and it was blue; Nishi thought pink, got hazel. I would have bet my entire five-yen advance that mine would be light gray, like my cat’s fur. But then I woke and pushed the swollen webbing of my thumb and a sprig of green came out. On my day zero, in the middle of my terror, I was surprised into a laugh: here was a translucent green I swore I’d never seen before anywhere in nature, and yet I knew it as my own on sight.

“It’s as if the surface is charged with our aura,” says Hoshi, counting syllables on her knuckles for her next haiku.

About this I don’t tease her. I’m no poet, but I’d swear to the silks’ strange glow. The sisters seem to agree with me; one looks like she’s about to faint.

“Courage, sisters!” sings Hoshi. Hoshi is our haiku laureate. She came from a school for young noblewomen and pretends to have read every book in the world. We all agree that she is generally insufferable.

“Our silks are sold in Paris and America — they are worn by Emperor Meiji himself. The Agent tells me we are the treasures of the realm.” Hoshi’s white whiskers extend nearly to her ears now. Hoshi’s optimism is indefatigable.

“That girl was hairy when she got here,” I whisper to the sisters, “if you want to know the truth.”

The old blind woman comes again, takes our silks, pushes the leaves in with a stick, and we fall upon them. If you think we kaiko-joko leave even one trampled stem behind, you underestimate the deep, death-thwarting taste of the mulberry. Vital green, as if sunlight is zipping up your spinal column.

In other factories, we’ve heard, there are foremen and managers and whistles to announce and regulate the breaks. Here the clocks and whistles are in our bodies. The thread itself is our boss. There is a fifteen-minute period between the mulberry orgy—“call it the evening meal, please, don’t be disgusting,” Dai pleads, her saliva still gleaming on the floor — and the regeneration of the thread. During this period, we sit in a circle in the center of the room, an equal distance from our bedding and the Machine. Stubbornly we reel backward: Takayama town. Oyaka village. Toku. Kiyo. Nara. Fudai. Sho. Radishes and pickles. Laurel and camphor smells of Shikoku. Father. Mother. Mount Fuji. The Inland Sea.

All Japan is undergoing a transformation — we kaiko-joko are not alone in that respect. I watched my grandfather become a sharecropper on his own property. A dependent. He was a young man when the Black Ships came to Edo. He grew foxtail millet and red buckwheat. Half his crop he paid in rent; then two-thirds; finally, after two bad harvests, he owed his entire yield. That year, our capital moved in a ceremonial, and real, procession from Kyoto to Edo, now Tokyo, the world shedding names under the carriage wheels, and the teenage emperor in his palanquin traveling over the mountains like an imperial worm.

In the first decade of the Mejii government, my grandfather was forced into bankruptcy by the land tax. In 1873, he joined the farmer’s revolt in Chūbu. Along with hundreds of others of the newly bankrupted and dispossessed from Chūbu, Gifa, Aichi, he set fire to the creditor’s offices where his debts were recorded. After the rebellion failed, he hanged himself in our barn. The gesture was meaningless. The debt still existed, of course.

My father inherited the debts of his father.

There was no dowry for me.

In my twenty-third year, my mother died, and my father turned white, lay flat. Death seeded in him and began to grow tall, like grain, and my brothers carried Father to the Inoba shrine for the mountain cure.

It was at precisely this moment that the Recruitment Agent arrived at our door.

The Agent visited after a thundershower. He had a parasol from London. I had never seen such a handsome person in my life, man or woman. He had blue eyelids, a birth defect, he said, but it had worked out to his extraordinary advantage. He let me sniff at his vial of French cologne. It was as if a rumor had materialized inside the dark interior of our farmhouse. He wore Western dress. He also had — and I found this incredibly appealing — mid-ear sideburns and a mustache.

“My father is sick,” I told him. I was alone in the house. “He is in the other room, sleeping.”

“Well, let’s not disturb him.” The Agent smiled and stood to go.

“I can read,” I said. For years I’d worked as a servant in the summer retreat of a Kobe family. “I can write my name.”

Show me the contract, I begged him.

And he did. I couldn’t run away from the factory and I couldn’t die, either, explained the Recruitment Agent — and perhaps I looked at him a little dreamily, because I remember that he repeated this injunction in a hard voice, tightening up the grammar: “If you die, your father will pay.” He was peering deeply into my face; it was April, and I could see the rain in his mustache. I met his gaze and giggled, embarrassing myself.

“Look at you, blinking like a firefly! Only it’s very serious—”

He lunged forward and grabbed playfully at my waist, causing my entire face to darken in what I hoped was a womanly blush. The Agent, perhaps fearful that I was choking on a radish, thumped my back.

“There, there, Kitsune! You will come with me to the model factory? You will reel for the realm, for your emperor? For me, too,” he added softly, with a smile.

I nodded, very serious myself now. He let his fingers brush softly against my knuckles as he drew out the contract.

“Let me bring it to Father,” I told the Agent. “Stand back. Stay here. His disease is contagious.”

The Agent laughed. He said he wasn’t used to being bossed by a joko. But he waited. Who knows if he believed me?

My father would never have signed the document. He would not have agreed to let me go. He blamed the new government for my grandfather’s death. He was suspicious of foreigners. He would have demanded to know, certainly, where the factory was located. But I could work whereas he could not. I saw my father coming home, cured, and finding the five-yen advance. I had never used an ink pen before. In my life as a daughter and a sister, I had never felt so powerful. No woman in Gifu had ever brokered such a deal on her own. KITSUNE TAJIMA, I wrote in the slot for the future worker’s name, my heart pounding in my ears. When I returned it, I apologized for my father’s unsteady hand.

On our way to the kaiko-tea ceremony, I was so excited that I could barely make my questions about the factory intelligible. He took me to a summer guesthouse in the woods behind the Miya River, which he told me was owned by a Takayama merchant family and, at the moment, empty.

Something is wrong, I knew then. This knowledge sounded with such clarity that it seemed almost independent of my body, like a bird calling once over the trees. But I proceeded, following the Agent toward a dim staircase. The first room I glimpsed was elegantly furnished, and I felt my spirits lift again, along with my caution. I counted fourteen steps to the first landing, where he opened the door onto a room that reflected none of the downstairs refinement. There was a table with two stools, a bed; otherwise the room was bare. I was surprised to see a large brown blot on the mattress. One porcelain teapot. One cup. The Agent lifted the tea with an unreadable expression, frowning into the pot; as he poured, I thought I heard a little splash; then he cursed, excused himself, said he needed a fresh ingredient. I heard him continuing up the staircase. I peered into the cup and saw that there was something alive inside it — writhing, dying — a fat white kaiko. I shuddered but I didn’t fish it out. What sort of tea ceremony was this? Maybe, I thought, the Agent is testing me, to see if I am squeamish, weak. Something bad was coming — the stench of a bad and thickening future was everywhere in that room. The bad thing was right under my nose, crinkling its little legs at me.

I pinched my nostrils shut, just as if I were standing in the mud a heartbeat from jumping into the Miya River. Without so much as consulting the Agent, I squinched my eyes shut and gulped.

The other workers cannot believe I did this willingly. Apparently, one sip of the kaiko-tea is so venomous that most bodies go into convulsions. Only through the Agent’s intervention were they able to get the tea down. It took his hands around their throats.

I arranged my hands in my lap and sat on the cot. Already I was feeling a little dizzy. I remember smiling with a sweet vacancy at the door when he returned.

“You — drank it.”

I nodded proudly.

Then I saw pure amazement pass over his face — I passed the test, I thought happily. Only it wasn’t that, quite. He began to laugh.

“No joko,” he sputtered, “not one of you, ever—” He was rolling his eyes at the room’s corners, as if he regretted that the hilarity of this moment was wasted on me. “No girl has ever gulped a pot of it!”

Already the narcolepsy was buzzing through me, like a hive of bees stinging me to sleep. I lay guiltily on the mat — why couldn’t I sit up? Now the Agent would think I was worthless for work. I opened my mouth to explain that I was feeling ill but only a smacking sound came out. I held my eyes open for as long as I could stand it.

Even then, I was still dreaming of my prestigious new career as a factory reeler. Under the Meiji government, the hereditary classes had been abolished, and I even let myself imagine that the Agent might marry me, pay off my family’s debts. As I watched, the Agent’s genteel expression underwent a complete transformation; suddenly it was as blank as a stump. The last thing I saw, before shutting my eyes, was his face.

I slept for two days and woke on a dirty tatami in this factory with Dai applauding me; the green thread had erupted through my palms in my sleep — the metamorphosis unusually accelerated. I was lucky, as Chiyo says. Unlike Tooka and Etsuyo and so many of the others I had no limbo period, no cramps from my guts unwinding, changing; no time at all to meditate on what I was becoming — a secret, a furred and fleshy silk factory.

What would Chiyo think of me, if she knew how much I envy her initiation story? That what befell her — her struggle, her screams — I long for? That I would exchange my memory for Chiyo’s in a heartbeat? Surely this must be the final, inarguable proof that I am, indeed, a monster.

Many workers here have a proof of their innocence, some physical trace, on the body: scar tissue, a brave spot. A sign of struggle that is ineradicable. Some girls will push their white fuzz aside to show you: Dai’s pocked hands, Mitsuki’s rope burns around her neck. Gin has wiggly lines around her mouth, like lightning, where she was scalded by the tea that she spat out.

And me?

There was a moment, at the bottom of the stairwell, and a door that I could easily have opened back into the woods of Gifu. I alone, it seems, out of twenty-two workers, signed my own contract.

“Why did you drink it, Kitsune?”

I shrug.

“I was thirsty,” I say.

Roosters begin to crow outside the walls of Nowhere Mill at five a.m. They make a sound like gargled light, very beautiful, which I picture as Dai’s red and Gin’s orange and Yoshi’s pink thread singing on the world’s largest reeler. Dawn. I’ve been lying awake in the dark for hours.

“Kitsune, you never sleep. I hear the way you breathe,” Dai says.

“I sleep a little.”

“What stops you?” Dai rubs her belly sadly. “Too much thread?”

“Up here.” I knock on my head. “I can’t stop reliving it: the Agent walking through our fields under his parasol, in the rain …”

“You should sleep,” says Dai, peering into my eyeball. “Yellowish. You don’t look well.”

Midmorning, there is a malfunction. Some hitch in the Machine causes my reeler to spin backward, pulling the thread from my fingers so quickly that I am jerked onto my knees; then I’m dragged along the floor toward the Machine’s central wheel like an enormous, flopping fish. The room fills with my howls. With surprising calm, I become aware that my right arm is on the point of being wrenched from its socket. I lift my chin and begin, with a naturalness that belongs entirely to my terror, to swivel my head around and bite blindly at the air; at last I snap the threads with my kaiko-jaws and fall sideways. Under my wrist, more thread kinks and scrags. There is a terrible stinging in my hands and my head. I let my eyes close: for some reason I see the space beneath my mother’s cedar chest, where the moonlight lay in green splashes on our floor. I used to hide there as a child and sleep so soundly that no one in our one-room house could ever find me. No such luck today: hands latch onto my shoulders. Voices are calling my name—“Kitsune! Are you awake? Are you okay?”

“I’m just clumsy,” I laugh nervously. But then I look down at my hand. Short threads extrude from the bruised skin of my knuckles. They are the wrong color. Not my green. Ash.

Suddenly I feel short of breath again.

It gets worse when I look up. The silk that I reeled this morning is bright green. But the more recent thread drying on the bottom of my reeler is black. Black as the sea, as the forest at night, says Hoshi euphemistically. She is too courteous to make the more sinister comparisons.

I swallow a cry. Am I sick? It occurs to me that five or six of these black threads dragged my entire weight. It had felt as though my bones would snap in two before my thread did.

“Oh no!” gasp Tooka and Etsuyo. Not exactly sensitive, these sisters from Sakegawa. “Oh, poor Kitsune! Is that going to happen to us, too?”

“Anything you want to tell us?” Dai prods. “About how you are feeling?”

“I feel about as well as you all look today,” I growl.

“I’m not worried,” says Dai in a too-friendly way, clapping my shoulder. “Kitsune just needs sleep.”

But everybody is staring at the spot midway up the reel where the green silk shades into black.

My next mornings are spent splashing through the hot water basin, looking for fresh fibers. I pull out yards of the greenish-black thread. Soiled silk. Hideous. Useless for kimonos. I sit and reel for my sixteen hours, until the Machine gets the last bit out of me with a shudder.

My thread is green three days out of seven. After that, I’m lucky to get two green outflows in a row. This transformation happens to me alone. None of the other workers report a change in their colors. It must be my own illness then, not kaiko-evolution. If we had a foreman here, he would quarantine me. He might destroy me, the way silkworms infected with the blight are burned up in Katamura.

And in Gifu? Perhaps my father has died at the base of Mount Inaba. Or has he made a full recovery, journeyed home with my brothers, and cried out with joyful astonishment to find my five-yen advance? Let it be that, I pray. My afterlife will be whatever he chooses to do with that money.

Today marks the forty-second day since we last saw the Agent. In the past he has reliably surprised us with visits, once or twice per month. Factory inspections, he calls them, scribbling notes about the progress of our transformations, the changes in our weight and shape, the quality of our silk production. He’s never stayed away so long before. The thought of the Agent, either coming or not coming, makes me want to retch. Water sloshes in my head. I lie on the mat with my eyes shut tight and watch the orange tea splash into my cup …

“I hear you in there, Kitsune. I know what you’re doing. You didn’t sleep.”

Dai’s voice. I keep my eyes shut.

“Kitsune, stop thinking about it. You are making yourself sick.”

“Dai, I can’t.”

Today my stomach is so full of thread that I’m not sure I’ll be able to stand. I’m afraid that it will all be black. Some of us are now forced to crawl on our hands and knees to the Machine, toppled by our ungainly bellies. I can smell the basins heating. A thick, greasy steam fills the room. I peek up at Dai’s face, then let my eyes flutter shut again.

“Smell that?” I say, more nastily than I intend to. “In here we’re dead already. At least on the stairwell I can breathe forest air.”

“Unwinding one cocoon for an eternity,” she snarls. “As if you had only a single memory. Reeling in the wrong direction.”

Dai looks ready to slap me. She’s angrier than I’ve ever seen her. Dai is the Big Mother but she’s also a samurai’s daughter, and sometimes that combination gives rise to a ferocious kind of caring. She’s tender with the little ones, but if an older joko plummets into a mood or ill health, she’ll scream at us until our ears split. Furious, I suppose, at her inability to defend us from ourselves.

“The others also suffered in their pasts,” she says. “But we sleep, we get up, we go to work, some crawl forward if there is no other way …”

“I’m not like the others,” I insist, hating the baleful note in my voice but desperate to make Dai understand this. Is Dai blind to the contrast? Can she not see that the innocent recruits — the ones who were signed over to the Agent by their fathers and their brothers — produce pure colors, in radiant hues? Whereas my thread looks rotten, greeny-black.

“Sleep can’t wipe me clean like them. I chose this fate. I can’t blame a greedy uncle, a gullible father. I drank the tea of my own free will.”

“Your free will,” says Dai, so slowly that I’m sure she’s about to mock me; then her eyes widen with something like joy. “Ah! So: use that to stop drinking it at night, in your memory. Use your will to stop thinking about the Agent.”

Dai is smiling down at me like she’s won the argument.

“Oh, yes, very simple!” I laugh angrily. “I’ll just stop. Why didn’t I think of that? Say, here’s one for you, Dai,” I snap. “Stop reeling for the Agent at your workbench. Stop making the thread in your gut. Try that, I’m sure you’ll feel better.”

Then we are shouting at each other, our first true fight; Dai doesn’t understand that this memory reassembles itself in me mechanically, just as the thread swells in our new bodies. It’s nothing I control. I see the Agent arrive; my hand trembling; the ink lacing my name across the contract. My regret: I know I’ll never get to the bottom of it. I’ll never escape either place, Nowhere Mill or Gifu. Every night, the cup refills in my mind.

“Go reel for the empire, Dai. Make more silk for him to sell. Go throw the little girls another party! Make believe we’re not slaves here.”

Dai storms off, and I feel a mean little pleasure.

For two days we don’t speak, until I worry that we never will again. But on the second night, Dai finds me. She leans in and whispers that she has accepted my challenge. At first I am so happy to hear her voice that I only laugh, take her hand. “What challenge? What are you talking about?”

“I thought about what you said,” she tells me. She talks about her samurai father’s last stand, the Satsuma Rebellion. In the countryside, she says, there are peasant armies who protest “the blood tax,” refuse to sow new crops. I nod with my eyes shut, watching my grandfather’s hat floating through our fields in Gifu.

“And you’re right, Kitsune — we have to stop reeling. If we don’t, he’ll get every year of our futures. He’ll get our last breaths. The silk belongs to us, we make it. We can use that to bargain with the Agent.”

The following morning, Dai announces that she won’t move from her mat.

“I’m on strike,” she says. “No more reeling.”

By the second day, her belly has grown so bloated with thread that we are begging her to work. The mulberry leaves arrive, and she refuses to eat them.

“No more room for that.” She smiles.

Dai’s face is so swollen that she can’t open one eye. She lies with her arms crossed over her chest, her belly heaving.

By the fourth day, I can barely look at her.

“You’ll die,” I whisper.

She nods resolutely.

“I’m escaping. He might still stop me. But I’ll do my best.”

We send a note for the Agent with the blind woman. “Please tell him to come.”

“Join me,” Dai begs us, and our eyes dull and lower, we sway. For five days, Dai doesn’t reel. She never eats. Some of us, I’m sure, don’t mind the extra fistful of leaves. (A tiny voice I can’t gag begins to babble in the background: If x-many others strike, Kitsune, there will be x-much more food for you …)

Guiltily, I set her portion aside, pushing the leaves into a little triangle. There, I think. The flag of Dai’s resistance. Something flashes on one — a real silkworm. Inching along in its wet and stupid oblivion. My stomach flips to see all the little holes its hunger has punched into the green leaf.

During our break, I bring Dai my blanket. I try to squeeze some of the water from the leaf-velvet onto her tongue, which she refuses. She doesn’t make a sound, but I hiss — her belly is grotesquely distended and stippled with lumps, like a sow’s pregnant with a litter of ten piglets. Her excess thread is packed in knots. Strangling Dai from within. Perhaps the Agent can call on a Western veterinarian, I find myself thinking. Whatever is happening to her seems beyond the ken of Emperor Meiji’s own doctors.

“Start reeling again!” I gasp. “Dai, please.”

“It looks worse than it is. It’s easy enough to stop. You’ll see for yourself, I hope.”

Her skin has an unhealthy translucence. Her eyes are standing out in her shrunken face, as if every breath costs her. Soon I will be able to see the very thoughts in her skull, the way red thread fans into veiny view under her skin. Dai gives me her bravest smile. “Get some rest, Kitsune. Stop poisoning yourself on the stairwell of Gifu. If I can stop reeling, surely you can, too.”

When she dies, all the silk is still stubbornly housed in her belly, “stolen from the factory,” as the Agent alleges. “This girl died a thief.”

Three days after her death, he finally shows up. He strides over to Dai and touches her belly with a stick. When a few of us grab for his legs, he makes a face and kicks us off.

“Perhaps we can still salvage some of it,” he grumbles, rolling her into his sack.

A great sadness settles over our whole group and doesn’t lift. What the Agent carried off with Dai was everything we had left: Chiyo’s clouds and mountains, my farmhouse in Gifu, Etsuyo’s fiancé. It’s clear to us now that we can never leave this room — we can never be away from the Machine for more than five days. Unless we live here, where the Machine can extract the thread from our bodies at speeds no human hand could match, the silk will build and build and kill us in the end. Dai’s experiment has taught us that.

You never hear a peep in here about the New Year anymore.

I’m eating, I’m reeling, but I, too, appear to be dying. Thread almost totally black. The denier too uneven for any market. In my mind I talk to Dai about it, and she is very reassuring: “It’s going to be fine, Kitsune. Only, please, you have to stop—”

Stop thinking about it. This was Dai’s final entreaty to me.

I close my eyes. I watch my hand signing my father’s name again. I am at the bottom of a stairwell in Gifu. The first time I made this ascent I felt weightless, but now the wood groans under my feet. Just as a single cocoon contains a thousand yards of silk, I can unreel a thousand miles from my memory of this one misstep.

Still, I’m not convinced that you were right, Dai — that it’s such a bad thing, a useless enterprise, to reel and reel out my memory at night. Some part of me, the human part of me, is kept alive by this, I think. Like water flushing a wound, to prevent it from closing. I am a lucky one, like Chiyo says. I made a terrible mistake. In Gifu, in my raggedy clothes, I had an unreckonable power. I didn’t know that at the time. But when I return to the stairwell now, I can feel them webbing around me: my choices, their infinite variety, spiraling out of my hands, my invisible thread. Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose. It’s become my sanctuary here in Nowhere Mill. A threshold where I still exist.

One morning, two weeks after Dai’s strike, I start talking to Chiyo about her family’s cottage business in Chichibu. Chiyo complains about the smells in her dry attic, where they destroy the silkworm larvae in vinegary solutions. Why do they do that? I want to know. I’ve never heard this part before. Oh, to stop them from undergoing the transformation, Chiyo says. First, the silkworms stop eating. Then they spin their cocoons. Once inside, they molt several times. They grow wings and teeth. If the caterpillars are allowed to evolve, they change into moths. Then these moths bite through the silk and fly off, ruining it for the market.

Teeth and wings, wings and teeth, I keep hearing all day under the whine of the cables.

That night, I try an experiment. I let myself think the black thoughts all evening. Great wheels inside me turn backward at fantastic, groaning velocities. What I focus on is my shadow in the stairwell, falling slantwise behind me, like silk. I see the ink spilling onto the contract, my name bloating monstrously.

And when dawn comes, and I slug my way over to the workbench and plunge my hands into the boiling vat, I see that the experiment was a success. My new threads are stronger and blacker than ever; silk of some nameless variety we have never belly-spun before. I crank them out of my wrist and onto the dowel. There’s not a fleck of green left, not a single frayed strand. “Moonless,” says Hoshi, shrinking from them. Opaque. Midnight at Nowhere Mill pales in comparison. Looking down into the basin, I feel a wild excitement. I made it that color. So I’m no mere carrier, no diseased kaiko—I can channel these dyes from my mind into the tough new fiber. I can change my thread’s denier, control its production. Seized by a second inspiration, I begin to unreel at speeds I would have just yesterday thought laughably impossible. Not even Yuna can produce as much thread in an hour. I ignore the whispers that pool around me on the workbench:

“Kitsune’s fishing too deep — look at her finger slits!”

“They look like gills.” Etsuyo shudders.

“Someone should stop her. She’s fishing right down to the bone.”

“What is she making?”

“What are you making?”

“What are you going to do with all that, Kitsune?” Tooka asks nervously.

“Oh, who knows? I’ll just see what it comes to.”

But I do know. Without my giving a thought to what step comes next, my hands begin to fly.

The weaving comes so naturally to me that I am barely aware I am doing it, humming as if in a dream. But this weaving is instinctual. What takes effort, what requires a special kind of concentration, is generating the right density of the thread. To do so, I have to keep forging my father’s name in my mind, climbing those stairs, watching my mistake unfurl. I have to drink the toxic tea and feel it burn my throat, lie flat on the cot while my organs are remade by the Agent for the factory, thinking only, Yes, I chose this. When these memories send the fierce regret spiraling through me, I focus on my heartbeat, my throbbing palms. Fibers stiffen inside my fingers. Grow strong, I direct the thread. Go black. Lengthen. Stick. And then, when I return to the vats, what I’ve produced is exactly the necessary denier and darkness. I sit at the workbench, at my ordinary station. And I am so happy to discover that I can do all this myself: the silk-generation, the separation, the dyeing, the reeling. Out of the same intuition, I discover that I know how to alter the Machine. “Help me, Tsuki,” I say, because I want her to watch what I am doing. I begin to explain, but she is already disassembling my reeler. “I know, Kitsune,” she says, “I see what you have in mind.” Words seem to be unnecessary now between me and Tsuki — we beam thoughts soundlessly across the room. Perhaps speech will be the next superfluity in Nowhere Mill. Another step we kaiko-girls can skip.

Together we adjust the feeder gears, so that the black thread travels in a loop; after getting wrung out and doubled on the Machine’s great wheel, it shuttles back to my hands. I add fresh fibers, drape the long skein over my knees. It is going to be as tall as a man, six feet at least.

Many girls continue feeding the Machine as if nothing unusual is happening. Others, like Tsuki, are watching to see what my fingers are doing. For the past several months, every time I’ve reminisced about the Agent coming to Gifu, bile has risen in my throat. It seems to be composed of every bitterness: grief and rage, the acid regrets. But then, in the middle of my weaving, obeying a queer impulse, I spit some onto my hand. This bile glues my fingers to my fur. Another of nature’s wonders. So even the nausea of regret can be converted to use. I grin to Dai in my head. With this dill-colored glue, I am at last able to rub a sealant over my new thread and complete my work.

It takes me ten hours to spin the black cocoon.

The first girls who see it take one look and run back to the tatami.

The second girls are cautiously admiring.

Hoshi waddles over with her bellyful of blue silk and screams.

I am halfway up the southern wall of Nowhere Mill before I realize what I am doing; then I’m parallel to the woodpecker’s window. The gluey thread collected on my palms sticks me to the glass. For the first time I can see outside: from this angle, nothing but clouds and sky, a blue eternity. We will have wings soon, I think, and ten feet below me I hear Tsuki laugh out loud. Using my thread and the homemade glue, I attach the cocoon to a wooden beam; soon, I am floating in circles over the Machine, suspended by my own line. “Come down!” Hoshi yells, but she’s the only one. I secure the cocoon and then I let myself fall, all my weight supported by one thread. Now the cocoon sways over the Machine, a furled black flag, creaking slightly. I think of my grandfather hanging by the thick rope from our barn door.

More black thread spasms down my arms.

“Kitsune, please. You’ll make the Agent angry! You shouldn’t waste your silk that way — pretty soon they’ll stop bringing you the leaves! Don’t forget the trade, it’s silk for leaves, Kitsune. What happens when he stops feeding us?”

But in the end I convince all of the workers to join me. Instinct obviates the need for a lesson — swiftly the others discover that they, too, can change their thread from within, drawing strength from the colors and seasons of their memories. Before we can begin to weave our cocoons, however, we first agree to work night and day to reel the ordinary silk, doubling our production, stockpiling the surplus skeins. Then we seize control of the machinery of Nowhere Mill. We spend the next six days dismantling and reassembling the Machine, using its gears and reels to speed the production of our own shimmering cocoons. Each dusk, we continue to deliver the regular number of skeins to the zookeeper, to avoid arousing the Agent’s suspicions. When we are ready for the next stage of our revolution, only then will we invite him to tour our factory floor.

Silkworm moths develop long ivory wings, says Chiyo, bronzed with ancient designs. Do they have antennae, mouths? I ask her. Can they see? Who knows what the world will look like to us if our strike succeeds? I believe we will emerge from it entirely new creatures. In truth there is no model for what will happen to us next. We’ll have to wait and learn what we’ve become when we get out.

The old blind woman really is blind, we decide. She squints directly at the wrecked and rerouted Machine and waits with her arms extended for one of us to deposit the skeins. Instead, Hoshi pushes a letter through the grate.

“We don’t have any silk today.”

“Bring this to the Agent.”

“Go. Tell. Him.”

As usual, the old woman says nothing. The mulberry sacks sit on the wagon. After a moment she claps to show us that her hands are empty, kicks the wagon away. Signals: no silk, no food. Her face is slack. On our side of the grate, I hear girls smacking their jaws, swallowing saliva. Fresh forest smells rise off the sacks. But we won’t beg, will we? We won’t turn back. Dai lived without food for five days. Our faces press against the grate. Several of our longest whiskers tickle the zookeeper’s withered cheeks; at last, a dark cloud passes over her face. She barks with surprise, swats the air. Her wrinkles tighten into a grimace of fear. She backs away from our voices, her fist closed around our invitation to the Agent.

“NO SILK,” repeats Tsaiko slowly.

The Agent comes the very next night.

“Hello?”

He raps at our grated door with a stick, but he remains in the threshold. For a moment I am sure that he won’t come in.

“They’re gone, they’re gone,” I wail, rocking.

“What!”

The grate slides open and he steps onto the factory floor, into our shadows.

“Yes, they’ve all escaped, every one of them, all your kaiko-joko—”

Now my sisters drop down on their threads. They fall from the ceiling on whistling lines of silk, swinging into the light, and I feel as though I am dreaming — it is a dreamlike repetition of our initiation, when the Agent dropped the infecting kaiko into the orange tea. Watching his eyes widen and his mouth stretch into a scream, I too am shocked. We have no mirrors here in Nowhere Mill, and I’ve spent the past few months convinced that we were still identifiable as girls, women — no beauty queens, certainly, shaggy and white and misshapen, but at least half human; it’s only now, watching the Agent’s reaction, that I realize what we’ve become in his absence. I see us as he must: white faces, with sunken noses that look partially erased. Eyes insect-huge. Spines and elbows incubating lace for wings. My muscles tense, and then I am airborne, launching myself onto the Agent’s back — for a second I get a thrilling sense of what true flight will feel like, once we complete our transformation. I alight on his shoulders and hook my legs around him. The Agent grunts beneath my weight, staggers forward.

“These wings of ours are invisible to you,” I say directly into the Agent’s ear. I clasp my hands around his neck, lean into the whisper. “And in fact you will never see them, since they exist only in our future, where you are dead and we are living, flying.”

I then turn the Agent’s head so that he can admire our silk. For the past week every worker has used the altered Machine to spin her own cocoon — they hang from the far wall, coral and emerald and blue, ordered by hue, like a rainbow. While the rest of Japan changes outside the walls of Nowhere Mill, we’ll hang side by side, hidden against the bricks. Paralyzed inside our silk, but spinning faster and faster. Passing into our next phase. Then, we’ll escape. (Inside his cocoon, the Agent will turn blue and suffocate.)

“And look,” I say, counting down the wall: twenty-one workers, and twenty-two cocoons. When he sees the black sac, I feel his neck stiffen. “We have spun one for you.” I smile down at him. The Agent is stumbling around beneath me, babbling something that I admit I make no great effort to understand. The glue sticks my knees to his shoulders. Several of us busy ourselves with getting the gag in place, and this is accomplished before the Agent can scream once. Gin and Nishi bring down the cast-iron grate behind him.

The slender Agent is heavier than he looks. It takes four of us to stuff him into the socklike cocoon. I smile at the Agent and instruct the others to leave his eyes for last, thinking that he will be very impressed to see our skill at reeling up close. Behind me, even as this attack is under way, the other kaiko-joko are climbing into their cocoons. Already there are girls half swallowed by them, winding silk threads over their knees, sealing the outermost layer with glue.

Now our methods regress a bit, get a little old-fashioned. I reel the last of the black cocoon by hand. Several kaiko-joko have to hold the Agent steady so that I can orbit him with the thread. I spin around his chin and his cheekbones, his lips. To get over his mustache requires several revolutions. Bits of my white fur drift down and disappear into his nostrils. His eyes are huge and black and void of any recognition. I whisper my name to him, to see if I can jostle my old self loose from his memory: Kitsune Tajima, of Gifu Prefecture.

Nothing.

So then I continue reeling upward, naming the workers of Nowhere Mill all the while: “Nishi. Yoshi. Yuna. Uki. Etsuyo. Gin. Hoshi. Raku. Chiyoko. Mitsuko. Tsaiko. Tooka. Dai.

“Kitsune,” I repeat, closing the circle. The last thing I see before shutting his eyes is the reflection of my shining new face.

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nastybuckybarnes · 5 years

Text

Daddy Daycare

Pairing: Bucky X Reader

Summary: Seven months pregnant and elbow deep in work, you’re beyond pissed off to find out that your husband isn’t doing anything with your kids. So you take matters (and the TV cord) into your own hands

Warnings: Dad!Bucky. And fluff. But Dad!Bucky

Word count: around 1K

A/n: you already know wtf’s goin on

!!!REBLOGS ARE OKAY, REPOSTS ARE NOT!!!

~*~

“Mommy!! MOMMY!” You groan and push away from your desk as your son walks into the room.

“Yes honey?” He sighs and climbs up onto your lap. “I’m so bored, mommy. So bored! Daddy’s busy watching TV with uncle Steve.“

“Where’s Rebecca? Huh? Or Jamie? I’m sure they’d love to play.” Your five-year-old son scrunches up his nose at the thought of playing with his younger sister or cousin. “They’re babies, mommy. I’m a big boy.” You nod, rubbing your temples.

“A big boy like your father. In fact, I’m gonna go have a few words with him.”

You set Gabriel down on his feet then waddle out of your office space and into the living room. Steve and Bucky are engrossed in a football game and your nine month old daughter is asleep in her high chair, her cousin Jamie asleep in a matching one.

“Alright boys. That’s enough tv for today.” You march over to it and turn it off, crossing your arms over your chest as they groan. “Your daughters are asleep in their high chairs. James, your son is bored out of his damn mind, and I am seven months pregnant and trying to do some work!” They both stare at you with wide eyes.

“Now, go play with your kids and keep them occupied for the rest of the evening. If one person knocks on my office door you will both regret it.” You storm back to your office and plop down, pinching the bridge of your nose with one hand and massaging a tender spot on your swollen belly with the other.

~*~

Bucky and Steve sit frozen for a moment after you leave, exchanging glances then hurrying to get their daughters out of their highchairs.

“What do you wanna do, Gabe?” Bucky asks his son, gently rocking Rebecca back to sleep.

“Can we draw? I like drawing.” Steve smiles at his nephew. “Of course we can, sport! You know where your colouring stuff is?” He nods excitedly and runs to his room to grab his colouring supplies.

Rebecca whines and rubs her eyes, tiny hands clenched into tiny fists.

“Oh no,” Bucky whispers, trying to soothe his daughter before the waterworks. Her bottom lip quivers and she hiccups a few times. Sensing her cousin’s distress, Jamie starts crying, sending Steve into panic mode.

“I’ve got ‘em!” Gabe exclaims, putting his stuff on the table. He looks at panicking Steve and Bucky then to his sister and cousin.

“They need diaper changes,” he says matter-of-factory.

Before the two men can question it, they’re off to change diapers.

“How did you know they needed to be changed?” Bucky asks after returning, Rebecca and Jamie happy as ever.

“Because Becca always hiccups before she cries for a diaper. And Jamie’s just a copycat.” Steve scoffs at that but smiles. “Here, bring that stuff down by the couch.”

Gabe grabs his stuff and carries it over to the coffee table, organizing everything while Steve and Bucky bring the two troublemakers babies into the room.

“Okay ladies,” Steve says, “it’s tummy time.” He rests his daughter on her stomach on the carpet, Bucky doing the same. The babies are still for a moment before they start flailing and giggling.

“Okay. Let’s get to colouring now.”

Gabe grabs a red pencil crayon and starts colouring, his tongue sticking out in concentration.

Steve and Bucky colour with him, Steve drawing an intricate picture of a rose while Bucky draws some stick figures, each of them shooting glances towards their daughters every now and then.

“What are you drawing, buddy?” Bucky asks after a moment, trying to peak at his sons picture.

“It’s a surprise, daddy. You’re not allowed to look yet.” Bucky nods, smiling, then turns to where his daughter is pushed up into a seated position, clapping her hands and giggling.

She squeals as he scoops her up in his arms, picking her up and blowing raspberries on her pudgy little belly.

Jamie grunts and whines from the floor, looking at Rebecca and Bucky then over at her own dad. Steve sighs and picks her up, peppering kisses all over her face. She shrieks with joy and slaps his face with her chunky hands.

“You two are gonna be terrorists when you’re teenagers,” Steve whispers to his daughter, smiling as she looks at him with big blue eyes. Bucky chuckles, carefully lifting Becca onto his shoulders, one hand staying secured on her back. “That’s putting it lightly,” he murmurs, wincing as his daughter grabs onto his hair and yanks.

“C’mon now Becca. That hurts.” She giggles and rests her cheek on top of his head, sighing softly.

Bucky walks around slowly, humming to himself and his daughter and watching as his son continues colouring.

“I’m all finished, Daddy!” He exclaims, rousing Rebecca. “You wanna see it?” Bucky nods excitedly, furrowing his brows as he sees the drawing of Iron Man.

“You decided to draw Grandpa Tony instead of me or Steve?”

Gabe shrugs, inspecting his drawing, “Grandpa said that he likes attention.” Steve snorts, nodding at that.

“I think it’s an amazing picture regardless!” Gabe nods and places the picture carefully on the table.

“I wanna be a football!” Bucky chuckles and pulls his daughter off of his shoulders, setting her on the couch.

“Okay Steve, you ready to play some football?” Bucky asks, picking up his son and spinning around as Steve sets Jamie on the couch beside her cousin.

Steve opens his arms, chuckling as he catches his nephew. Gabe squeals a laugh as Steve and Bucky toss him around, being careful, of course, but having fun no less.

“Okay pal, I’m getting tired,” Bucky days, sitting his son down on the couch and collapsing on the floor.

Steve sits next to him, eyes falling closed.

The two super soldiers and Gabe fall asleep, leaving the two babies to roam free.

Rebecca slides off the couch and crawls over her dad and uncle, giggling as Jamie follows after her.

The make their way down the hallway towards your office, Rebecca squealing as she pushes the door open.

You turn around with a glare ready, your eyebrows almost flying off your face as you see no one.

“Mama! Mama!” Your heart melts as your daughter crawls in, a huge smile on her face.

“Mama!” She plops down on her bum and looks up at you with her fathers blue-grey eyes.

“Mama?” You climb out of your chair and sit in front of her, giggling as Jamie pushes into the room, a curious look on her face.

“Mama! Mama mama!” Rebecca reaches out for you and you grab her little hands, helping her walk to you.

“Hi baby. Hi! I knew your first words would be mama! I told your daddy that too!” She laughs as you pinch her cheeks.

“Rebecca? Jamie?!” You hear Bucky’s frantic voice calling for the girls, and they hear it too. They each let out a gurgling noise then fits of laughter overtake them.

Becca falls down on her bum and laughs and laughs. You giggle at the two of them, raising your eyebrows as Bucky walks into the room.

“Oh thank God they’re here!” You wait for an explanation.

“Steve and I closed our eyes for one minute and they ran off!” You feel yourself getting angry. “You didn’t put them in their play pens or anything? You just let them roam free?!” He winces and scratches the nape of his neck.

“Mama!” Rebecca shouts, grabbing onto your hand and slobbering on your wrist.

“Her first word is Mama?” Bucky asks, feigning betrayal. You roll your eyes at him. “Don’t think you’re out of the woods yet, Barnes.”

Rebecca nibbles on your arm while Jamie plays with her own toes, laughing and giggling the entire time.

“Mommy!! I need help!” Gabe calls from down the hall.

“Here champ, I’ll help you,” You hear Steve say. Bucky shakes his head, knowing your son will refuse.

“No. I want mommy! MOMMY!!”

~*~

Abrupt ending I’m sorry.

NO TAGS TILL THE 17th

#bucky x reader #bucky barnes #steve rogers #marvel #bucky #steve x reader #reader inserts #bucky barnes x reader #steve rogers x reader #captain america #dont let this flop #dad!bucky #pregnant!reader

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adrianoakley · 4 years

Text

That evening, he wasn't expecting a visitor. But, that's what he got. After having a refreshing shower he had wrapped himself up in his robe and lounged on the bed about to watch an episode of Schitt's Creek, he thought he'd best check his messages. A bunch of texts awaited him. 1 from Sydney.

'I'm near your place, I have urges and a new toy for you, I'm going to stop by. If you don't reply I'll take it that's ok. I hope you'll be naked and ready for me. xxx'

He grinned and licked his lip. Oh Sydney you wicked goddess! He mused as he stroked Angel, his long haired, grey Norwegian Forest Cat, who was curled up by his side. The text was out of the blue, but to be fair, he'd expect nothing else. They've been friends for ages. They dated for a while but at the time, their lives were on different paths so they split and remained acquaintances. Then a few years later they hit it off again and decided mutually that they could never work as a couple but friends with benefits hit the spot as long as either was single.

He wondered how far away exactly she was as he checked the other messages. 3 from Steph.

2, pictures of him and Edmund embracing near the studio window. OH My God Steph!! You sly minx, he thought, shaking his head and staring at the images. Reliving the moment in his mind. He could have been cross at Steph for taking the pics, but actually he found himself almost grateful and excited to have some record of the event. To have an image of Edmund he can view at his leisure.

Plus 1 video of the moment Edmund held Adrian closer, it was a clearly visible thing, Edmund pulled him into his body. Adrian remembered the sensation of Edmund's strong arms holding him, his clean yet musky scent, his hands rubbing into Adrian's spine. As Adrian's eyes lingered on the moving picture, it looked like he saw Edmund nuzzling his neck. Curious, was Edmund smelling him? That's how it looked. Adrian smiled a delicious, slow smile and was filled with a sense of wonder. He lay back, crossed his legs and continued to think over the afternoon, replaying the video at least 10 times. The most curious part perhaps was the final handshake goodbye, sadly not caught on video. His Gift was activated without conscious effort on his part and without sensing any pain in Edmund's hand. There was no pulling feeling as there usually is when he heals pain, which is almost like a sort of soft suction effect as his Gift is drawn into the ailing area of a person. No this was tingly and warm and if he'd kept on holding Edmund's hand the sensation might have made him giggle. This has never happened before. Adrian couldn't help wondering then what Edmund must have felt, and what is it about Edmund that triggered that to happen?

Adrian could hear movement in the house downstairs, pulling him from his thoughts. Angel lifted his head and turned it toward the sound. "Oakley?! Where are you!?" Sydney called. 'Bedroom!' Adrian shouted in reply. His strength of voice, loud enough to startle Angel so that he jumped off the bed and made his way out of the room, tail up though, he wasn't offended. Sydney had had a key to Adrian's home for a few months. It just seemed to make sense with all the spontaneous combustion between them. It made it easier. Like he'd wake up in the middle of the night with her hand sliding between his legs from behind, when she very much wasn't there, when he went to bed. He too had a key to her apartment but always gave her some warning of his arrival. He knew better than to 'surprise' a woman alone in her home.

She appeared at the glass sliding door of his bedroom, in this ex factory building, which was now his home, looking determined and casually sexy as was her style. Her sandy blonde, shoulder length hair a little disheveled and a flush to her cheeks. There were a lot of stairs in Adrian's home, but also a lift which came in handy sometimes with such a large abode.

'Still alive then!' She said with a flash of her eyes. It was something of a greeting of theirs, and made light of the fact that indeed, it was something of a miracle that he was still alive. 'It would seem so!' he replied with a warm gleam in his eyes. She gave him a knowing affectionate look and then, 'You're not naked!' She chastised him with mock annoyance. He didn't have the time or really the heart to tell her it was because he was day dreaming about a 6ft something Detective Inspector who has had some profound effect,... on his Gift if nothing else. Sydney dumped her rucksack on the floor near the bed, moved swiftly to him, smiling warmly, clambering onto the bed and on to him. She clasped his face and kissed his lips firmly, simply once. 'I'm sorry mistress, I guess you'll have to...Aaaah! 'He began, but she'd pulled his robe open and pinched both his nipples firmly. '...punish meee!' He winced and tilted his head back, and then sighed as the pleasure, pain effect lingered in the little rosey buds even after Sydney had removed her cruel fingers. 'I have every intention of it Oakley, you'll see...or...'She chuckled as a wicked thoughts played on her mind 'or not see...'

True to her words, Adrian soon found himself naked, lying on his back, with a cushion beneath his buttocks to raise his hips a little and his arms velcroed up to the headboard of the bed. She'd then rummaged around in her rucksack for a little while and produced a box which she'd secreted away off to the bathroom. Normally he'd be more excited. He was certainly interested and could do with the sexual release but, truth be told, he was also, distracted. He told himself to stick with the present moment and give Sydney his full attention as she deserved.

And she was gorgeous and definitely the right side of wild when it came to sexual antics. When she emerged from the en suite, she was only wearing her boy shorts and a smile. She lifted her hand to show the toy to him as she approached. ' A new butt plug? ' Adrian asked with a grin, though his eyes lingered on her sweet little breasts, which were completely off limits, for the time being. However the plug...indeed, larger than his usual one and bobbled. 'Clever boy' She replied climbing on the bed between his legs, a bottle of lube in her other hand. 'Spread your legs wide for me' She commanded. He raised his brows and obeyed, happy to be displayed for her. But just like that? He thought, no messing about first? As soon as his thighs were to her liking, she lubed up her fingers and reached in to massage his anus and taint, with the slick substance. Her hands thankfully warm. He closed his eyes and hummed at the sensation. Her ministrations soon brought his cock to life. 'Look at me while I penetrate you ' She said smoothly and he obeyed of course. First she used her fingers to open him up. How serious and sexy she looked to him, a woman on a mission, as two of her fingers slid into his anus and made him gasp. He couldn’t help straining to raise his hips further in a kind of encouragement. Not that she needed any.

She knew to simply open him and not tickle that pleasure bud inside of him, not yet. She knew how he liked to be teased sometimes to the point of excruciation. But her mood that evening seemed more urgent, as though she was set on pleasing herself first and foremost, and to be fair, he was utterly, her willing subject after all.

He was tingling with anticipation as Sydney raised the new toy to show him again, with a wicked smile, before slowly, sinking it into his, now slick and prepared hole. The shape of the plug provided extra tingle certainly as his insides squeezed and then gave in to taking it, bobble by bobble. He blinked, his eyes watered. He licked his lips, bit his lip, softly hummed, nodded approval and gasped until it was fully inside him. He could feel the plugs broad base, wedged between his cheeks, lewdly. Its tip grazed his prostate giving a sudden stronger wave of tingle, the kind that only begs for more stimulation. It made his mouth open, his thighs tense and his brow crease with pleasure. The fullness of the plug nestled within him created familiar warmth through his groin and abdomen and made his lonesome cock twitch with need.

Adrian pulled on his wrist restraints then, to feel the sense of submission more keenly, to the woman between his legs. If only she'd fuck me with the toy, he thought as he gazed longingly at her. 'Good?' She asked abruptly and moved off the bed. Maybe she's going to just leave me here to stew in my juices...Adrian mused and pulled on his restraints a little more, testing them, and clenched his buttocks so as to feel the plug all the more. 'Yes Mistress' He replied. She moved around to his right side. 'But do you deserve good? Hmmmm?' She asked raising her eyebrow and ran her left hand over his chest, lightly at first and then dragged her nails over his nipples.

'Ahh' he gasped quietly as he involuntarily flexed his pecs. He'd have her do that again. It seemed like a trick question. 'I...probably not Mistress?' replied Adrian with as much humility as possible, even though his gaze could not help but fix on her breasts which he wished he could nibble and squeeze. She noted his gaze and teasingly fingered her own nipples, making them hard. Adrian couldn't help but smile, then his lips parted and his tongue darted against them to moisten them, as he felt a kind of parched all of a sudden. She chuckled and with her right hand she took his jaw firmly and bent to kiss him, but she captured his bottom lip between her teeth and bit it enough to pinch uncomfortably. 'nnnng' Adrian moaned with a frown. Sydney's expression bore no sympathy.

The next he knew, she was putting a blind fold on him, the sleeping mask variety. Oh pleaase please, touch my cock next...His last thought before his sight was stolen. Now in darkness, Adrian's other senses became heightened. He was more aware now of the scent of her, a soft floral perfume and her sex as he felt her weight on the bed, then a dip on either side of his hips and her heat by his sides. She was straddling him but not yet setting her weight down.

'Mmm please Mistress, ple' He began, but her fingers were then in his mouth, silencing him, so he obligingly sucked on them until she withdrew them, to pinch his nipples hard. He hissed in response at the sharp sensation, though he loved it, and it made him press his chest up to meet her touch all the more.

'So needy... my perfect slave...' She cooed, her voice all the more sexy sounding somehow, without the vision of her to distract from it. He hummed and rocked his hips which only made her grab a handful of his hair at the front of his head firmly. The pull on his scalp sent a burning sensation into the skin, enough to jolt him out of ideas of moving. 'Keep still' She said calmly and then released his hair and smoothed his cheek.

There was the sense of her moving above him, though he couldn't make out what she was doing and then her hand grazed his most inner thigh making him go very still before there was the sound of a click and then....Buzzzzzzzzz.

Oh god, now, that he wasn't expecting. The plug to not only be bigger and more interestingly shaped than his old one, but also a vibrator. The effect was immediate. 'Oooooh god' He sighed as the vibrations sent delicious tingles through his rectum, into his groin and against his prostate. His legs tensed, his toes curled...And then...then heat...and weight and pressure from above as he felt Sydney's cunny swallow his then, achingly hard cock. Only she didn't pump him with her body straight away. No, instead she ground her groin against his slowly. Dear sweet fuck...Were about the only words that came to mind and then a funny thing happened.

Unable to see at such a physical, intensely pleasurable, though tenuous moment, an image came to him, of Detective Inspector Reid on top of him instead. Completely naked, muscular, gorgeous toned arms and hairy chest... thick, bitable thighs spread, cock erect and bobbing shamelessly, all there right in front of him for the touching...His Edmund, wanton and grinding his arse onto Adrian's cock. Adrian shook his head but moaned with want at the same time which spurred Sydney on to start bouncing on his hips.

Lost, completely lost then to all the sensations, the tingles on his prostate growing to waves of gorgeous tension mounting to their inevitable conclusion, whilst his cock was sucked and warmed and pumped by Edmund’s tight, meaty arse.

Adrian's legs trembled as his G-spot erupted and he groaned an unrestrained 'OohEdmund!'. His cock had just caught up, as he abruptly felt the heat and the weight of the body above move off him. 'Ooohh fuck' He whined as he shot a load onto his own belly and realised his ridiculous error.

Still the buzzing continued inside him, threatening to make him come again. 'Mmmmplease, Mistress, I'm sorry...Turn it off, pleeease' He bit his lip and then gasped. He wriggled a bit in protest which only made the vibrator inside him all the more tingly. He whined. 'I'm... mmmmmsorrryyy'. He didn't know that Sydney was standing right near him by the bed, her hand over her mouth, chuckling quietly. She wasn't offended, surprised out of the moment yes, but not upset.

And to see him on the bed, hot and bothered and shamed. His hips raised, cock deflating, with his own come on his belly not knowing whether he was alone to be left there for the next hour like that or not,... was rather amusing to her wicked streak.

But her curiosity eventually overpowered her wickedness and she leaned over him, and reached between his legs to turn off the little switch in the base of the plug. Oh thank fuck!, he thought and sighed deeply. 'Alright...' She said softly and got onto the bed on his right side, and took his blindfold off.

Soft light, and her pretty face and the room all reappeared again. He blinked and swallowed and looked at her apologetically. But she was smiling at him playfully. 'You have to tell me. You've met someone haven't you? Someone called Edmund, who must be exquisite for you to think of him so, in the throws of our passion...' He was relieved to see her clearly unphased by his game changer vocalisations. He didn't even know if she came or not which was a new one on him. Not to be repeated. He nodded slowly and dared a smile at last.

'Yes’ He replied with a hint of a sly smirk ‘...and I can show you a video of him that might amuse you.'

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aria-writes · 5 years

Text

The (he)art of Craft | e.k. x reader

Words: 2173

Boys are clueless.

I know this, but for some reason I keep forgetting.

I crossed my arms in front of myself to rest them as Elmer leaped onto his bed like a flying squirrel. "When you asked me if I wanted to 'hang out with you (and the guys)', this isn't exactly what I was envisioning."

Elmer looked over at me as he scrambled to sit up, blinking in confusion. "Why? What did you have in mind?"

In all honesty, shirtless basketball in the park.

"I don't know." I shook my head and sat on the bed beside him.

I watched Elmer boot up the server, staring at the screen with barely concealed excitement. Four users were already online.

This is not exactly my idea of a hot date. Then again, maybe it's my fault for reading into things. On the other hand, I mean really, what usually comes to mind immediately when a really cute boy asks you if you want to 'hang out'?

See, that's what I thought!

You know what, though? All things considered, it could be worse. He could've asked me to play Wii Sports Bowling with him. It's supposed to be so easy the folks in nursing homes love it, right? Well apparently ole gram-grams has more virtual athletic ability in her pinky finger than I do in my entire body.

Elmer scooted closer to me and pulled out headphones, flipping the earpieces outwards so we could share the same set.

I watched as the screen started spazzing out. "Is that..." I trailed off, pointing at the screen and not sure how to put my thoughts into words as I held my part of the headphones up to my ear.

Elmer quirked an eyebrow. "Yeah, it's usual for this section. The reason it's so glitchy is because someone spawned way too many ocelot assets."

"Hey guys, Elmer has a girl ov—" Romeo started to say, but he was cut off by somebody who was way louder.

"You can never have too many ocelots!" A distinctive, high-pitched but still decidedly male voice exclaimed through the headset.

"The queen of the felines has spoken." Elmer rolled his eyes and smiled as his avatar started jerkily walking towards a large light blue and white building that touched the sky. "This is Racetrack's cat castle—"

"A cat-stle, if you will." Racetrack interrupted.

"I will not." Albert shot back.

Racetrack cleared his throat and adopted a 'tour guide' voice. "Business hours are from 9:00pm to 5:00am, or for the low low price of three diamonds you can get an all-access pass."

"Good grief." Albert muttered under his breath.

"Killing one of my sweet, adorable, cuddly babies— I mean, very loyal subjects— results in an immediate ban for life." Racetrack continued, undeterred. "Donations of precious gemstones and fish, cooked or raw, are always appreciated."

"Yeah, good luck with that." Romeo replied with a small snort.

"I'll come tour your catstle, Race!" Crutchie said cheerily.

"Finally, some proper respect around here."

I gave Elmer the side-eye. "Why isn't it pink?"

"Pink? You think I would use pink?" Racetrack asked with an air of disdain, scoffing. "Please. Pink is a strong, masculine color, fit only for the he-est of men. My graceful feminine eyes can only bear the lightest, most delicate shades of blue, as is befitting a most proper young lady such as myself."

Elmer made eye contact with me and shrugged.

"Also, pink is Romeo's color." Racetrack mumbled with a defeated tone.

Romeo let out a triumphant laugh. "Ya snooze ya lose, loser!"

Alerts in all caps popped up on the screen as three more usernames joined.

Elmer nudged me with his shoulder to get my attention. I tried and failed not to blush. "And to our left, we have Henry's trailer park. In Minecraft, imagination is the only limit, and Henry decided to build a trailer park. Why, I have no idea."

"Because heck you, that's why!" Henry said, but there was no bite in his tone.

"Watch your ****ing language on my good Christian Minecraft server!" Crutchie yelled.

The random conversations going on between others in the background went silent.

"oh no." Crutchie said really quietly, but we could all hear it due to the aforementioned radio silence.

Jojo started muttering The Lord's Prayer to himself.

Somebody let out a very loud snort.

"Gross!" Albert shrieked. "Say it, don't spray it!"

"Kiss my butt!" Racetrack shot back.

There was some fuzzy noise, like somebody dropped their headset on the ground and they were wrestling with each other now.

Jack sighed. "Hey, if y'all are gonna hate-boink, can you please mute your channels please and thank you!"

"Shut up!" Racetrack and Albert shouted at the same time.

Jack cackled like a maniac to himself.

"Okay, you know what?" Albert asked, clearly annoyed. "Keep it up, but I'm gonna tell Katherine all about your little problem with–"

Elmer gasped and pulled his earpiece away from his head. He quickly crossed himself before returning to listening in on the conversation.

"No!" Jack protested as Albert proceeded to spill some very personal information. "You wouldn't!"

"—Don't test me." Albert finished.

"I did not need to know that." Jojo said, clearing his throat awkwardly.

"Ditto." Henry murmured in agreement.

A notification popped up on the screen alerting everybody that Buttons was online and had joined the server, bringing the total up to eight. "Hey, guys! Know what?" He asked, innocently.

"That the unflappable Jack Kelly apparently has a raging butt rash." Romeo answered matter-of-factory.

Buttons seemed at a loss for words. "...Oh." he said, finally.

"I'm dealing with it, okay?" Jack asked, annoyed. "I have cream and I'm taking oatmeal baths—"

"TMI, bro." Albert interrupted.

"You started it!" Jack exclaimed, exasperatedly.

"Your mom started it!" Albert retorted. The height of maturity, that one.

"My mom is dead!"

"Oh yeah? So's mine, you ain't special!" Albert said breezily.

A chorus of 'So is mine' rang through the airspace.

"Okay, well that's depressing." Buttons commented. "Who wants to duel?"

"Ooh, pick me! I'm always a ho for dying!" Racetrack yelled enthusiastically.

"Race, are you okay?" Crutchie asked, concerned.

There was no response for a few seconds, and then I heard the sound of somebody facepalming.

"Race, you're an idiot." Albert said flatly.

"Oh, wait a second."

Elmer adjusted his grip on the headset. "What'd he do?"

Albert sighed. "He shot finger guns at the screen."

"Woooowww." Jojo said, totally done.

"You're just jealous." Race clicked his tongue.

Jojo scoffed. "Why would I be jealous of an evil leprechaun? Oh wait, no, that's Albert."

"Hey!"

I elbowed Elmer. "Are they always like this?"

Elmer nodded. "Constantly."

"Uh, guys? Anyone else's game bugging out?" Jack asked. "Oh wait never mind, I just wandered a little too close to the crazy cat lady's cottage."

Racetrack huffed. "Heck you, butt rash boy."

Jojo let out a mock offended gasp. "Such language!"

"Frick you, HoHo."

Jojo gasped again. "Frick you!"

"That's gay." Racetrack said, snickering.

"You're gay!" Jojo replied.

"So what if I am?! Gay means happy, and I'm the happiest person I know! So there!" Racetrack punctuated his sentence with a somewhat audible 'blep'.

Elmer fake-coughed and raised his voice loud enough to cover Jojo and Racetrack's 'argument'. “To our right is Mush's giant flower garden." He did a slow pan of the colorful, pixelated blooms.

I leaned forward to examine them. It was quite impressive, if only from the sheer numbers of mass collection.

"Dare you to steal one, Elmer." Romeo piped up.

Elmer shook his head vehemently. "Heck no, unlike most of you, I actually value my life."

"Lives having value?" Albert scoffed.

"In this economy?" Racetrack finished for him.

"Now we're coming up on Romeo's super tacky building." Elmer leaned back against the wall as a large, misshapen, pink, vaguely-heart-shaped structure came into view.

"Look, I had a plan originally, but math and grids are hard." Romeo explained.

Racetrack let out a derisive scoff. "Grids are literally the easiest thing, you wannabe fashion icon."

Romeo blew a raspberry.

"Your mom is literally the easiest thing." Albert commented.

I could practically hear Racetrack's smirk from here. "You know, what I'm gathering from all the 'your mom' jokes is, you just really wanna be my daddy."

Somebody started making vey exaggerated gagging noises.

"Uh, pass." Albert muttered under his breath.

"You coughing up a hairball over there or something, Jojo?" Henry asked.

Jojo ceased his gagging. "No, I'm good."

"I bet Race has rabies." Buttons quipped.

"Don't be ridiculous, Race doesn't have rabies!" Crutchie protested. "I had him tested and everything."

"Interesting." I murmured under my breath.

"This is my house!" Elmer announced with a large grin, completely oblivious. "It's one of those tiny houses!"

"That's a very pretentious way of saying 'dirt hut starter home'." Crutchie teased.

"Wow, that's so funny I forgot to laugh." Elmer shot back. "No, it's like one of those minimalist houses that used to be all the rage, but in Minecraft! See?" He gestured at the small building on the screen, eyes sparkling.

I smiled back, his energy practically contagious. "It's very cute." Just like its builder, is what I did not say to him.

"And fully functional!" Elmer opened the door and started pointing out various features. "In the floor is a crafting table and a bed, to the side we have a furnace and a double-wide chest—"

"Your mom has a double-wide chest!" Racetrack exclaimed gleefully before erupting into laughter.

Elmer snapped his mouth shut with an unamused look on his face.

"Dang you Race, I was about to say that." Albert said, almost whining.

Elmer let out a sigh and moved his avatar to the back of the house. "And here's a small vegetable garden."

"Po Tay Toes!" Albert exclaimed, immediately perking back up.

"Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew!" Jack added. The first thing he's said in a while, now that I think about it.

"You Irish people scare me." Racetrack commented.

"You're part Irish." Albert said flatly.

"Yeah, and?" Racetrack asked defensively. "I scare myself!"

"That makes two of us." Albert muttered under his breath.

I stole a glance towards Elmer, who was engrossed in harvesting his virtual vegetables. I can't say I understand how or why people invest so much time in this kind of stuff, but at least it makes him happy.

It'd be nice if I could do that.

I don't know what I'm doing, but if I don't ask then I'll spend years replaying this day over and over in my head at 2:00a.m. in the morning overanalyzing every single little detail. Here goes nothing.

I smiled teasingly and nudged Elmer with my elbow, gently. “So, do you invite all the girls out to watch you play Minecraft or am I just special?"

"Say what now?" Elmer looked over at me suddenly, blinking as if he was coming out of a trance as his eyes re-adjusted to the real world.

Uh-oh.

"This is a date?"

"This isn't a date?" We both asked in unison.

There was an awkward silence for about ten seconds, which was then broken by the sound of loud crunching over the headset.

"Henry!" About five or six voices exclaimed.

"What?" Henry asked defensively. "This is entertaining, thus, snacks are a must! Can y'all blame me?"

"Elmer," Racetrack sighed, "when you ask a girl to quote, 'hang out', unquote, that's code for a date. Just like Netflix and Chill is—"

"Stop! Don't ruin his innocence!" Buttons interrupted.

"I'm just saying, he's not gonna get very far if he doesn't know—"

Elmer pulled the headset down and placed it on the bed between us, hitting mute at the same time. "Look, this didn't go the way I planned, 'cause I was gonna ask you out for real, but then I panicked, so no wonder you've been getting mixed signals, but..."

He stared down at the floor and rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. "Can we just finish out today platonic and like, start fresh tomorrow? And I promise, if it's what you want, I will ask you on a real, proper date then."

I grinned and turned back to face the screen so I wasn't staring at him and making him even more uncomfortable. "Sounds good to me."

"Cool." Elmer returned the grin and did two thumbs up at me, shoulders scrunched up, then picked the headset back up and held it up to his ear.

I leaned in to unmute it and was greeted with a cacophony of all the boys arguing with each other over what exactly was happening on our end.

I hesitantly reached over to place my arm around Elmer's shoulders. "Do you mind if... is this okay?"

Elmer beamed from ear to ear and leaned into my touch. "Yeah."

"What's going on?" Romeo asked loudly, effectively putting a damper on the moment. "I need visuals!"

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cactibarber · 4 years

Link

Chapter 2 of my TMA x MBMBAM crack fic is up! (Chapter 1) Thanks so much to everyone who’s read it so far!

---

Justin cleared his throat and began. “Well, we were thinking about going on vacation, so we were waiting until we had some free time-“

“Not that we work hard,” Travis interrupted. “Not like you guys with your files and- are those tape recorders?”

“And we then we all got sick for like two weeks, so we figured we needed a break,” Justin finished. “So we wanted to go to Europe-“

“Gotta get out of the states, you know. It’s uhhh not great right now,” Griffin said. “And-“

“And we decided on London. You know, to- tae sae Bahg Baen,” Justin said, in what Jon guessed was an atrocious attempt at a Scottish accent. The voice didn’t go unnoticed, however, as the two brothers pounced immediately.

“No, no, no it’s Boig Boin-“

“Bae Baen-“

“Beyblades? Are you talking about fucking Beyblades, Travis?”

Jon rubbed his temples and resisted the urge to shout down the hall for Martin- hell, maybe Daisy or Basira could help scare them into giving a proper statement. He had to admit, he was a bit confused with what was going on- usually when people gave a statement, it was in a more listenable way, getting rid of all the feelings (and trauma) that clouded the statement. But these brothers sat in front of him, seemingly rambling about some thing that had happened to them, and they didn’t seem to care at all.

Jon attempted to focus back in to the conversation. The brothers seemed to be arguing about whether the Dick Van Dyke accent from Mary Poppins counted as a real English accent.

“-and the whole movie takes place in London, Griffin, so what I don’t know why you would think that it didn’t count-”

“Oh, just because the movie takes place in London, huh Travis? So if I started talking about ‘puttin it on the barbie’ in Niu Yawk-”

“Gross, Griffin, what are you putting on the barbie?”

“Yeah, c’mon Griff.”

“Gentlemen,” Jon said firmly, a faint crackle of compulsion in his voice. The McElroys sat up straight, as if shocked by lightning. “Please. Continue.”

Justin’s eyes narrowed slightly, and he started speaking again. “Well, the point is that we ended up taking a trip to London town-”

“Something no-one but our dad says,” Griffin muttered under his breath.

“-and we were out at one of the pubs here, having some drinks after our flight landed.”

“It ended up just being us three, since our wives decided to stay in the states because of all the traveling we’ve been doing recently. My wife, Teresa, in particular-”

Jon stubbornly ignored the chorus of “My wife” that erupted around the room. Justin’s face was beet red from trying not to laugh at his own joke, while Griffin looked at him, stonefaced and shrugging. Jon was surprised that his compulsion seemed to be wearing off almost immediately. At this point, he was wondering if he was going to be more hungry after this statement than he was before it.

“Anyway it’s just us in London right now. So we were in a bar-”

“Pub-”

“And we were leaving around 1 AM? We were pretty, uhh, out of it-” “Drunk- we don’t have to leave a good impression on this guy, Justin, we’re just telling him about how we saw Daz,” Griffin corrected.

“I’m getting to it,” Justin said, glaring at Griffin. He turned to Jon, holding his hands out in a “see-what-I’m-dealing-with” position. “Daz is, well, I mean, I’m getting to it.”

“We were leaving the pub-bar, and we were slightly stumbling to the street. Not like falling down drunk, but definitely tripping every few steps drunk,” Justin continued. “Travis was the worst off since he tried to drink a cocktail with a pie slice on top of it-”

“It was definitely worth it,” Travis said, pulling out his phone. “Let me show you a picture-”

“And when we were outside of the bar-pub, we heard someone ask if we had a cigarette.”

“Was he in the alley?” Jon asked, startled. This story was starting to sound shockingly familiar. If the angler-fish was active again, then it mean that the Stranger had already recovered from their attempted Unknowing.

“Yeah!” Griffin chimed in. “He was leaning against the wall like a gangster from the 60s. Have you seen Grease? Because he looked like-”

“Griffin, I swear to god, if you are going to say that Daz looks like John Travolta from Grease,” Justin exasperatedly interrupted. “Then I will be forced to-”

“I meant his posture, Juice,” Griffin said, rolling his eyes. “Y’know, one leg up like a fuckin’ cool guy.”

“Yeah, that’s what makes someone cool, Griff,” Travis laughed. “One leg up means a fuckin’ cooooool guy.”

Justin raised his voice over Griffin and Travis’ laughter. “The guy in the alley was in the shadows at first, so we couldn’t see him. None of us had any little, uh, smoke sticks on us, so we said no and were about to walk away.”

Griffin and Travis erupted into another round of laughter at Justin’s choice of words. When he was sure all three of them were distracted, Jon allowed himself a little smile.

“But the guy didn’t give up,” Justin continued, getting a little solemn. “He stepped a little out of the shadows and we were able to see him a little more clearly.”

“He looked like a normal dude at first. Like anyone you would see on the street,” Travis said, picking up where his brother had left off. “But as he kept getting closer, he felt, ummm, I guess off is the best way to put it?”

Griffin let out a bark of laughter. “Really, Trav? Is that the best you, a New York Times best-selling author can do?” Griffin put on a voice that Jon guessed was one crafted and honed over many years with a singular purpose of annoying his brothers. “Oh yeah, man he felt like, off I guess? I dunno, I haven’t learned anything past o in the alphabet.”

Justin burst into laughter as Travis pouted. “You describe him then, Griffin! Sorry I wasn’t trying to be all poetic and shit like in one of your cutscenes-”

“Hey, my cutscenes aren’t just poetic. They’re masterpieces in literature.”

Travis rolled his eyes at that and flipped Griffin off, which Griffin responded to by sticking his tongue out. Jon Saw™ a brief flash of hours upon hours of family dinners, many of which had gone the same way, and felt the chill in the back of his spine start to dissipate.

“I’ll give it a crack, though,” Griffin said. “I thought it was pretty clear why he looked off. He was too smooth.”

Jon took a bit longer than it should have to process that statement. “Excuse me?”

“I mean, I guess specifically his face was too smooth,” Griffin explained. “Like it would have been as if he did one of those Korean face mask treatments, but every day, since he was a baby.”

“How would you even put one of those on a baby?” Justin mused, leaning back in his chair.

“I bet you’d have to cut one of them up,” Travis answered. “Unless-”

“Unless-” Justin and Griffin answered back, almost immediately. Jon felt like he was watching a play at this point.

“Unless that’s our next business idea for when we get back! Baby face masks!” The three of them laughed heartily, only stopping to chant in unison, “TM TM TM.”

“But that’s what I meant!” Griffin said, trying to get back on track. “His nose was slightly crooked, but his skin was so smooth, it looked like it was merging back into his face. His mouth was stretched out until it was like the width of his face, and, it wasn’t like it was in the wrong place, it looked like it was supposed to be there. He had these black spots all over his face, but they didn’t look like birthmarks or anything, it was like those parts of his face were, I don’t know, sunken, but still, they were so smooth. Everything about his face was so rubbery and plasticky, I mean it was like-”

“Like he wasn’t a real person,” Jon finished. There was a silence in the office that hadn’t been there since the McElroys had walked in.

“Yeah,” Justin said, breaking the awkwardness.

“How did you know he was, what was the phrase you used, a video game monster?” Jon asked curiously.

“Well, we do this Youtube series called Monster Factory,” Justin explained. “And by me, I mean me and Griffin, because Travis is too busy trying to get into Supernatural or whatever-”

“It’s going to happen!”

“And one of the monsters we made was based off of late great character actor Dennis Farina.”

“Who-”

“Don’t worry about it,” Griffin said hurriedly. “I didn’t know who he was either, and I was in the video with him.”

“Well we took a facescan of Dennis Farina in some golf game and we really messed him up. I mean like, really rogered him right up. Actually,” Justin pulled out his phone and showed Jon a picture of a video game character mid-golf swing that did look “real rogered up”.

“So when he came up to us and asked us for a cigarette again, we got a better look at him in the light. His hair stood out too- it was all blocky instead of smooth like his skin. Like it was low-res,” Griffin said.

“And everyone knows, your hair doesn’t look like your skin,” Travis told Jon, in a faux-educational voice.

“And,” Griffin said pointedly, “his head was moving.”

“Moving?”

“Like he was- like he was breathing through his head. It was pulsing, like really slowly, but I definitely saw it.” Griffin shuddered. “Honestly- one of the top ten grossest things I’ve ever seen.”

“What about what happened today with the bugs and Slime-” Justin asked.

“Top ten means that there are other events on there,” Griffin said. “The use of the number ten instead of-”

“How did you get away?” Jon interrupted. This didn’t sound too much like the anglerfish since it could move around, but it still gave off hints of the Stranger. And if it was-

Travis muttered something under his breath, and Griffin elbowed his side. “I said, I yartzed on him,” Travis said reluctlantly, as Griffin stifled some laughter.

Jon shook his head slightly, as if trying to dislodge some rocks from his ear. “I’m sorry?”

“I yartzed! I threw up on his shoes, and we kind of just ran. We would’ve paid him for his shoes-”

“You would’ve,” Justin said, crossing his arms.

“But we were all kinda drunk, and he was really, really creepy. Y’know. Off.”

Jon sat up a little straighter, running a hand through his hair. “You… threw up. On the shoes of something that you don’t even think was human.”

“I mean, we didn’t say that yet,” Griffin said, jumping in. “Butttttt yeah. That’s pretty much what happened.”

“Things were pretty buckwild that night,” Justin said brightly. “But I mean that’s nothing compared to what happened earlier today.”

“Today- what do you mean today?” Jon said, confused. “Did something else happen?”

The McElroys looked at each other, each mentally telling the other to speak. Travis lost, sighing and saying, “Yeah, we saw another one of them today. And-and that’s why we’re here! Because-”

“Well, we want to stop seeing them, for one,” Griffin said. “But also, if this is some sort of weird nightmare hell realm pattern thing, where we keep seeing them, there’s one character we reallly, really don’t want to run into.”

Jon gripped the table, as he Saw™. “The Final Pam.”

#tma #the magnus archives #mbmbam #monster factory #sabs stuff #this one's got #daz #i can only write this #late at night #when my brain is loose enough #hopefully yall like this chapter!#i am stubbornly ignoring tma 160 #except for the first five minutes #mcelroys #griffin mcelroy #justin mcelroy #travis mcelroy #jonathan sims

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sagesparrow394 · 6 years

Text

Blueberry Body

Sequel to my fanfic Blueberry Blush, which can be found here! Read that one first.

Pairings: Logicality

Summary: In attempts to prove Willy Wonka is realistic, Roman tries to recreate the blueberry gum, with Logan as his tester. After many failed attempts, one finally has an effect.

‘Microsoft Nerd!’

Logan sighed upon hearing Roman call out. At least twice a week, Roman would ask for Logan to test a piece of gum in hopes it would turn the logical side into... Logan felt stupid just thinking it, a giant blueberry.

Basically, after last month’s movie night, Roman wanted to prove that the events in Willy Wonka are realistic and possible, and after a situation filled with misunderstandings, it led to Roman vowing to recreate the gum in the movie and Logan agreeing to be the tester. To be fair, when Logan agreed, he had thought the prince had been joking. That had been proven wrong, though, when Roman had come knocking on his door a day later with a stick of gum.

That gum had had zero effect. Neither had any of the others that followed. Well, except the last one, which had turned his tongue blue for two hours.

Logan stood from his desk and stepped out from his room before heading down the corridor and into the living room. Roman was stood there, a stick of gum in his hand. ‘I have a good feeling about this one. My apologies for the events that will follow.’

Logan rolled his eyes as he took the gum. ‘It’s not going to work.’ He put the gum in his mouth and started chewing. Roman waited in anticipation. Finally, Logan spoke. ‘The worst one yet. It doesn’t have any flavour.’

‘What?!’ Roman’s eyes widened in confusion. ‘But I put in extra blueberry this time, you should at least be able to taste that!’

‘Nothing,’ Logan shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, Roman, but it appears I’m still right.’ The teacher turned and left the room to get back to his work, smirking cockily. Roman sighed before turning to head back to his room.

‘Back to the drawing board, I guess...’

Logan sat back behind his desk after spitting out the flavourless gum, where he worked on making schedules for filming for the Sanders Sides episode that would come after the one they were filming the next day. However, after a while, he began to feel drowsy.

The logical side didn’t notice that, as he fell asleep at his desk, a blueberry flavour washed over his taste buds.

* * * * *

The next morning, Virgil was awake in his bed, headphones on and scrolling through Tumblr, as he had been since 2am. Roman was still in bed, a prince has to get their beauty sleep. Patton was in the kitchen, making pancakes for them all for breakfast.

Then a scream echoed through the mindscape, causing Virgil to throw off his headphones, Roman to fall out of bed and Patton to accidentally flip a pancake onto the ceiling.

Patton was the first to arrive at Logan’s bedroom door, closely followed by Virgil and then Roman. Patton tried the door only to find it locked.

‘Loganberry, are you in there?’ Patton asked, concerned for his boyfriend’s safety. ‘A-are you okay?’

‘Uh... y-yeah, I’m fine, n-no need to come in...’ Logan’s voice replied from the other side, sounding uneasy.

‘You literally just screamed, I don’t think I believe you,’ Virgil replied. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I... I just don’t want you to see me like this...’

The three sides outside the room shared a confused glance.

‘Lo, can at least I come in?’ Patton asked. ‘I promise, I won’t judge you for whatever’s going on.’

There was a pause before Logan replied. ‘Okay... But please don’t let the others see me, especially Roman.’

‘What? Why me?’ Roman asked, sounding slightly offended.

‘Of course, Loganberry,’ Patton replied to his boyfriend. He turned to Roman and Virgil. ‘Would you two mind...?’

The anxious and royal traits shared a glance before heading off into the living room. Patton heard the lock on Logan’s door click open. The moral side pulled the handle of the door and stepped inside.

‘Okay, Logy, what’s going- OH MY GOSH!’

Logan was stood in front of Patton, looking very different to how he had the day before. For one, he was blue from head to toe. His skin, hair, eyes, every part of him was the exact colour of a blueberry. On top of that, his stomach had a slight, but noticeable bulge to it.

‘It seems Roman’s newest version of the gum was more effective than I thought...’ Logan was staring at his feet, unable to look Patton in the eye.

The moral side was silent as he stepped forward, still staring at Logan. He reached out a hand and, after a moment of hesitation, gave Logan’s belly a small poke. There was a faint sound of sloshing and Logan’s face blushed a darker blue.

‘Well... I guess it could be worse...?’ Patton shrugged trying to look on the bright side.

Logan didn’t seem as optimistic, sighing as he sat down on his bed. ‘How is anyone going to take me seriously when I look like this? Look at me! My whole purpose relies on my being taken seriously so that you’ll listen to me in conversations, which is going to never happen again!’ He couldn’t help tears welling in his eyes. ‘I’m going to be a laughing stock... I understand if you want to break up with me.’

Patton sat down next to his boyfriend and lifted the logical trait’s chin, so they were looking each other in the eyes.

‘Lo, listen to me. I love you so, so, so much. I’d never break up with you because of this. If anything, it just makes the nickname I gave you more accurate! You are and always will be my little blueberry...’

He pressed his lips against Logan’s purple ones, both of them blushing their signature blues. Then Patton pulled away, giggling.

‘What is it?’ Logan asked, flustered.

‘Your kisses taste like blueberries,’ Patton explained. ‘It’s nice.’

Logan flushed darker, smiling slightly. ‘Are you sure you’re okay with this?’

‘Of course!’ Patton replied, taking the logical side’s hands in his own. ‘But you don’t have to let the others know until you’re ready, okay? I’ll be here for you no matter what you decide.’

‘Okay,’ Logan nodded, smiling at his boyfriend. However, his smile soon disappeared as he felt the familiar tug of Thomas trying to summon him. ‘Oh no... the video...’

‘The video?’ Patton paused before his eyes widened. He wrapped his arms around Logan, holding him tightly. ‘I won’t let you go up if you’re not ready, okay... I promise I’ll hold onto- ’

Logan was pulled from Patton’s grasp.

‘Patton!’

‘Logan!’

Patton shouting his name was the last thing Logan heard before rising up into his spot in Thomas’ living room. Then he was met with three different exclamations of surprise.

‘Oh my god!’

‘Holy shit...’

‘It worked! …Kinda.’

Logan couldn’t help but glare at Roman as hot tears welled in his eyes. Here he was, on camera, a video that would be watched by at least 2.8 million people, and he looked like a blue, bloated freak. And it was all Roman’s fault for making that stupid gum.

‘I am going to kill you.’

‘Huh?’

Two seconds later, Logan and Roman were wrestling on the floor.

‘This is all your fault for giving me that stupid gum!’

‘You agreed to test it!’

‘I didn’t think it would work!’

‘You still agreed!’

‘I thought you were joking the first time you brought it up!’

Logan managed to pin Roman down and raised a fist to punch him in the face.

‘Logan, stop!’

Patton’s arms wrapped around the logical side, pulling him away from Roman. As Logan looked up into the moral side’s disappointed eyes, he couldn’t hold back any longer. He burst into tears, burying his head into his boyfriend’s shoulder. ‘I-I’m sorry... I just...’ He paused. ‘I sh-shouldn’t blame R-Roman... This is my own fault...!’

‘Ssh, Loganberry... it’s okay... it’s not your fault...’

As Roman watched the usually calm and composed side falling apart, sobbing in Patton’s arms, he couldn’t help but feel bad... Logan was right, it was Roman’s fault. He had to make this right.

‘Logan...?’

The teacher looked up at the prince, his eyes bloodshot, purple tear tracks on his cheeks.

‘I think I might be able to do something to help you.’ Roman stood up and extended a hand to Logan.

The logical side stared at Roman for a moment, biting his lip in consideration. Finally, he took Roman’s hand in his blue one. The two of them sank out.

There was a moment of silence.

‘...What the heck’s going on?’ Thomas asked.

Patton and Virgil shared a glance before telling Thomas everything: the movie night and the events of it, Roman trying to recreate the Wonka gum, Logan inadvertently agreeing to the tester, and the results the newest version of it had.

��Oh my gosh...’ Thomas ran a hand through his hair. ‘And Logan’s stuck like that?’

‘Well, apparently not, judging by Roman’s actions...’ Virgil replied. ‘Anyway, Thomas, you summoned us for a video, so tell us, what’s going on?’

‘Um, actually, I think this solved the problem,’ Thomas replied. ‘My creativity’s been a bit lacking recently, and I’m guessing it’s because Roman’s been so focused on this gum thing.’

Speaking of Roman, he suddenly rose up into his spot. ‘I did what I could, which wasn’t much to be fair, but I tried.’

Logan rose up into his own spot. He was still blue from head to toe, but his stomach was now its ordinary size. ‘Thank you, Roman. I feel a little better.’

‘Don’t apologise,’ Roman insisted. ‘I don’t deserve it. I was trying to turn you into a blueberry, for Pete’s sake! What on earth was I thinking?!’ He sighed. ‘I really don’t deserve any thanks...’

‘Now, now, Roman, you still helped Lo in the end,’ Patton replied. ‘Don’t put yourself down like that.’

‘Yeah, that’s my job. We don’t need to self-hating sides,’ Virgil added.

‘Isn’t there anything that can be done about Logan’s skin?’ Thomas asked.

‘Unfortunately not,’ Roman shrugged. ‘You’ve read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Violet leaves the factory with her skin still blue.’

Logan looked slightly disheartened at this, so Patton walked past the camera and wrapped his arms around the logical side. ‘It’s okay, Lo. I don’t care what colour you are, and I love you all the same. And I’m sure these three won’t take you any less seriously.’ He turned to the others for confirmation, and Virgil, Roman and Thomas all nodded.

Logan hugged back. ‘Thank you, Patton, for everything. I guess I should just focus on what you said earlier: “It could be worse.” And, Roman, again, thank you too. You may have started this, but at least you tried to make up for your mistake, which is much better than a lot of people. And, anyway, I was slightly at fault too. Truce?’

Roman smiled. ‘Truce.’

‘So, it’s all good?’ Thomas asked, looking between all the sides.

‘Apart from the shitstorm that the Famders will start over me and this video, I think so,’ Logan nodded.

‘Language!’ Patton scolded. ‘But I promise I will help you through whatever follows this.’ He gave Logan a kiss, smiling as he pulled away. ‘Still tastes like blueberries.’

‘Well, this whole this has certainly been interesting. Call me back when something more relevant to me happens.’ Virgil sunk out.

‘I should probably go and clear out the gum-making stuff from my room and get started on the new script. You’ve really set me up for a lot of work with promising two Sanders Sides videos in one month, Thomas.’ Roman sunk out.

‘So, Loganberry, you feeling a lot more confident with yourself?’ Patton asked, stroking the logical side’s hair.

‘Yes, I think so,’ Logan smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, you’re the only person whose opinion I care about. And if you’re okay with this, that’s all I need to know.’

Patton rested his forehead against Logan’s. ‘I love you, my little blueberry.’

‘I love you too, Pat.’

The two of them sank out.

Thomas turned to the camera. ‘Well, this didn’t go as I planned... But I still think something can be learnt from this. People can get really hung up on their appearances and what people will think of them based on their looks, and think they look bad as they are and that they need to make changes, but this is a really unhealthy mindset. You are all beautiful and handsome as you are, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Don’t let yourself be pressured into changing yourself if you don’t want to.

‘I think a lesson about forgiveness could be learnt from this too. Getting revenge, while it may seem satisfying, often just makes you stoop to the level of whoever hurt you. By accepting their apology, you are the bigger person, and in some cases, may even make a new friend, or repair a friendship.

‘Well, that’s all for today. Take it easy guys, gals and non-binary pals. Peace out!’

Tags: @weirdonehereoops, @joygaytrash, @punsterterry, @katie-the-noble-fangirl, @pumpkinminette, @metryingtobeme, @robanilla, @nerdy-as-heck

#thomas sanders #sanders sides #logan sanders #sanders sides logan #patton sanders #sanders sides patton #roman sanders #sanders sides roman #virgil sanders #sanders sides virgil #blueberry #fanfiction #fanfic #logicality

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watery-lane · 6 years

Text

Contradictions.

Pairing: Thomas x Reader

Summary: Human psychology has never been a mystery for him. Until she came around.

Warnings: Light angst.

Words: 4k

A/N: I promised myself to not get back into writing fanfiction again. Oh well that didn’t work. Anyway, new writing blog here, will probably fill your dash with angst. Enjoy!

There is something odd about the human mind. Something twisted, ironic. How we claim to be different to everything from our surroundings, how we distance ourselves from even those of our own kind and convince our sorry minds that we are unique, better somehow than the ones right in front of us. But, at the same time, our actions give away our thoughts in the exact same way everybody else does: a blink in a specific moment, a tug on a hair strand, a sigh after a touch. The human kind is an open book, you just have to know the language its written in.

Thomas Shelby was an avid reader. No, he was not a newspaper aficionado, nor a novel hunter— He liked to read people. And hell, he was good at it. He spoke the language of the unconsciousness, he understood the behaviour of the soul.

He also liked challenges, jigsaws that seemed to be a mix from different puzzles at first, strings that look way too tangled to untangle without a pair of scissors. No need to say that he could resolve them all, whether with scissors or by forcing each piece together.

He had the knowledge of a scientist and the mindset of a soldier.

And with that, he obtained the power of a monarch.

There was only a period of time in his life where he had to leave his books aside. Not because he wanted to, but because he lost his ability to read. Those four years where he lost his sight, the darkness of the tunnels blinding him and the war corrupting the sanest man turned him into an illiterate: he could not predict any move, he could not plan ahead.

But every con comes with its benefit. Sure he could not read in the battlefield, but he had tons and tons of books waiting for him in Small Heath. He picked his first read after four years at the cramped train station when he arrived back from France: Polly, who was waiting for all of the Shelby brothers with a serious countenance but a fast breathing that made her chest heave noticeably under her thick coat gave her true colours away to Tommy. Polly Gray, the strong stone cold woman was praying for her boys to come back in one piece.

Maybe that’s why he fell for Grace. She was a book hard to read, a puzzle that he set himself to solve, and solved it at the end of the day. A book that became his favourite novel, a novel that he carried close to his heart and ended up receiving a bullet for him.

What a great surprise he felt the day he saw you walk in The Garrison for the very first time: humble clothes wrapped around your body but a wealthy man clinging on your arm. His lips felt dry as he spoke, a bitter-sweet déjà-vu flashing in the back of his mind as he asked, “Are you a whore?”

Your response surprised him even more, your arm letting the oblivious rich man go as you grabbed the amber filled crystal glass, leaning towards the Shelby and resting your other arm on the bar counter, hooded eyes with a glimpse of mockery staring right through him. “What would you do if I said yes?”

Tommy studied your features, mind working like a factory. Your face looked way too pure for you to spit words like those, your manners way too sober to be someone who looked like the daughter of a humble family. You were a theory full of contradictions, and he was eager of solving you too.

“I would take you with me and put you to work, then.” He mumbled, taken aback when you gave him a side smirk and focused all your attention back to the man you came into The Garrison with.

That could be the reason why he felt the urge of moving all his strings in order to find you. Not your criminal records or medical report, but you. He wanted to play fairly this time, he wanted to enjoy the experience.

But you were difficult to read. He could find you at the market fabric bag in hand, stacking it with fresh oranges and vivid green vegetables, serene smile on your face as you smelled the crimson apples, enigmatic eyes as your irises made contact with his. You didn’t exchange any words, your looks doing the talk.

Or he could find you in the most prestigious gala in Birmingham, the most beautiful dress helping you steal all the looks and get all the compliments, same man next to you with his hand on your lower back. But your smile was tense and fake, the same one he puts when he has business to do, he reckoned. Your eyes dull and wandering, as if your mind were in any other place but there.

“I must confess I am starting to fear for my life, Mr. Shelby.” Your voice rang in his ear like a sweet melody, his body turning around to face you. You knew his name. You might even know what he does too, while he didn’t even know your name. It seemed like you were a step ahead of him in his little game. “You’ve got the fame of the grim reaper and I am seeing you quite a lot around me lately.”

“Oh have no fear darling, I’ve met the grim reaper in person and he’s not the one we must be afraid of.” He said back, making you release a genuine laugh and pulling one out of his lips too.

“What shall I fear, then?”

“A life where It doesn’t chase you.”

Although you knew his words were for pure entertainment they hit you right in your chest. Tommy seemed to noticed that, the funny spark in his eyes waning little by little as he detected your uneasiness. Before he could open his mouth again, someone blew up the little bubble your conversation created.

“(Y/n)!” A deep and authoritarian voice called. You breathed in, your eyes dull again and your posture rigid like a porcelain doll. You cleared your throat.

“Sorry, I must go.” You murmured shyly. “A pleasure to finally meet you, Mr. Shelby.” You walked away, the man you came with taking you with him again, resting his hand on the same spot, again.

“Nice to meet you too, (Y/n).” Your name rolled in his tongue like poetry, the sip of the whiskey he took afterwards sealing the taste after the words escaped from his lips.

“You should not mess with her, Tommy. That man she’s with has more nobility titles than men under our orders.” Arthur’s cautious voice talked behind him, worry seeping through his statement. But his eyes were still nailed on you, your figure barely visible as you reached the other side of the gigantic hall. “Don’t mess with her, Tommy.” He repeated again after hearing no response from his younger brother.

“You know them?” He asked, absorbed in his thoughts.

“Tommy...”

“Gather all the information you can find about them, specially about that lovely lady I was talking to.” He ordered. He tried, but he felt like he couldn’t solve you without cheating a little bit. “Tell Michael to write everything down and leave it on my office before noon.” He walked away without even looking at his brother who protested loudly, turning some heads who watched him storm out of the party.

He couldn’t understand what got him. As his eyes focused on the dark road in front of him, his mind wandered elsewhere. Everything was happening again, like a vicious circle: his eyes capturing the face of a beautiful woman, his mind filling his thoughts with images of her. His brain incapable of reading her, his hands unable to reach for her touch. The only thing that made you differ from Grace was that her secrets were based on family honour and morals, whereas yours seemed to come from sorrow. Thomas shut his eyes briefly, waiting impatiently to reach his bed so he could sleep and wake up with the story of your life resting on his office desk.

“This is a bad idea Tommy, you could get us all killed. We’re not talking about Russians, Italians or coppers, Thomas. We’re talking about fucking British nobility.” Arthur stormed into the office, John and Michael following behind.

“I can track them down if you want to Tommy, pay them a visit in your name.” Michael offered, ready to help.

“Shut up Michael.” Shouted Arthur, who was getting more and more impatient at the sight of his brother losing it again for a woman. Behind him Michael rolled his eyes at his cousin, lazily lighting up a cigarette. “How well grabbed by the balls must that woman have you to have to use half of your men to get to her, ey? We have business to do Thomas, we have business and all you’re thinking about is-”

“Wait, is this because of a woman?” John mocked as he leaned against the door frame, amused smirk perking his lips. “Thomas Shelby is pinning after someone who doesn’t even want to give him the time of the day?” Thomas shot him a deadly glance which made John’s smirk even wider for much of his dismay.

“It’s business.” He promised, his mind already tracing a map on how could he benefit his family with the outcome.

“Trying to stick your cock in a noble’s woman is not business, it’s a suicide attempt.” John supported his oldest brother, nodding slightly at his direction. “Just go and ask Lizzie or go and get a whore, we’ll pay all the charges.” Thomas rolled his eyes and sighed, stood up and grabbed his coat.

“Where the fuck are you going now?” Arthur shouted behind him, raising his arms and letting them fall on his sides as he talked.

“To the market, have to get Polly some groceries.” He shouted back as he walked out the door.

“Don’t we have maids for that?” Asked Michael sarcastically.

The market was unusually crowded today, people wandering around happily as the unusual sight of the sun shining above them made every person in Small Heath stick their noses out and sniff the fresh air. He needed no effort to walk through the crowd, every person who recognised him moving out of his way.

He found you at the fabric stall, a meek and plain dress adorning your body as you laughed with your head back to whatever the seller said to you, your features showing no worries and your body language showing your happiness.

“The silk looks pretty nice, how much?” Tommy asked to the lady behind the stall, whose face turned pale at the sight of a Shelby in front her. You looked at him, surprised at his presence but with a hint of pleasure and relief, as Tommy noticed when he vaguely glanced at you..

“On the house, Mr. Shelby.” The lady stammered, grabbing the piece of cloth clumsily.

“Oh no no no, no need for that.” He gestured with one of his hands making the old woman stop, confused. His other hand went to his pocket and grabbed ten pounds. “Here.” He handed her the note as she blinked gobsmacked.

“Thank you Mr. Shelby, god bless you.” She thanked, both of her hands feeling the ten pounds note with delight.

“Talking about God...” Tommy commented. “I was going to visit the local church, it’s been awhile since I’ve confessed my sins.” He turned to look at you, a small smile spreading on his face the moment he saw yours. “Will I have the pleasure of your companion, (Y/n)?”

“Sorry, not a religious person.” You teased, fighting your smile to become wider.

“Then let’s take a stroll around the lake.” Thomas proposed, offering you his arm for you to wrap around yours. “God can wait.” You calmly accepted, nodding goodbye to the seller, who was watching the scene in disbelief.

“So, not a believer, huh?” Thomas broke the ice. “Wouldn’t take you for an atheist.”

“God only takes care of those who are privileged.” You answered absentmindedly. Tommy simply nodded in support, not sure if you were merciful or if you were affected by such injustice, just like him.

“Wise words. Guess you are the compassionate kind.” He commented, watching your reaction through the corner of his eyes. You sighed, eyes losing brightness.

“I guess I am.”

“How about heaven and hell, huh? Not afraid of those?”

“It’s not like I’m living a life where the Grim Reaper keeps chasing my soul.” You sighed, remembering his words the second time you met. You stopped by the lake and gracefully walked down the muddy slope, not caring one bit about your dress getting dirty. Tommy watched your movements, brain filled with confusion as he watched a refined woman carelessly feeding the ducks as mud stained her dress. At that moment, he felt it. He felt the heat pooling his stomach, his cheeks warm and his heart skipping a beat. He shut his eyes for a second, collecting himself and concealing the wreck of emotions he was experimenting.

“I must assume by that statement that you want to be chased by it indeed?” He asked as he saw you returning with an empty bag. You looked at him, ignoring his question as you got closer to him, reaching for the cigarette Tommy had resting on his lips and putting it between yours.

“It doesn’t even matter. Neither heaven or hell exists for me, so what’s the point?” You whispered, releasing the white smoke from your lungs, getting closer and closer to Tommy as if you tried to reach the afterlife as you tried to drown in those crystal clear eyes. Like a reflex he automatically wrapped his arm around you and pulled you even closer, chests colliding as you looked up in order to keep your stare on his eyes. He didn’t know what he was doing. He lost himself in the book, he was way too distracted to think about the puzzle you were. He just wanted to get a taste from you. And so he did, as Thomas Shelby gets everything he wants.

And joy pumped through his veins when he felt that you were melting like wax with his touch just like he did with yours. He wanted to prove you wrong, he wanted to show you that heaven exists, and how this was closer to earth than you thought.

So he took you to a church and with heavy breaths and sinful words, he brought heaven to you.

“I can’t believe you fucking did it, Tommy. I can’t believe you managed to fuck a stuck up lassie with titles on her name.” John Dogs laughed at the backseat, an inexpressive Thomas swallowing his words.

“It’s not the first time he does, though.” John remarks. “Women like her love to mess around with bad men like us. Turns them on.” Tommy’s nostrils flared at the two men laughing in the backseat, his eyes still focused on the road as he made his way to your man’s mansion. For business, he claimed. Arthur simply sat next to him silently, looking through the window.

He walked his way through the long hall, his two brothers and John Dogs covering his back while a bunch of maids received them and guided them to the archduke.

Truth be told, there was not much business to do with that man. Tommy listened to his brags with an interested demeanour, his haughtiness testing his capacity of restraining himself from rolling his eyes. He had sent John Dogs to check all of his horses before the meeting, and he was informed that most of them were malnourished or did not fit the standard for competing. On the other hand, he kept checking the door, praying for a certain woman to show up. He didn’t care that you were not his. He knew you wanted him, and that was all it mattered. An archduchess, pinning over Thomas Shelby.

After a long speech and the realisation of the lack of interest Thomas was showing, the archduke cleared his throat.

“Well, seems like none of my offers are good enough for you, Mr. Shelby.” He clicked his tongue as he looked out. “It’s getting late, how awful would it be from me to not offer you and your men a stay for the night?” He exclaimed, raising his hand. A servant appeared next to him, ready to receive orders.

“Oh no, there’s no--”

“Oh Mr. Shelby I must insist. I have something that may be from your interest.” He said, a certain mocking tone tinting his words. “Bring them in.” He ordered, his servant nodding slightly and proceeded to approach the door, disappear behind it and then opening the gates widely for a trail of young looking maids. “These ladies will fulfil every single need for you during your stay.” The man left his chair and stood next to Tommy, who was wearing his cold expression like a mask, covering his uncertainty. “Oh, and here comes my favourite.” He celebrated, clapping his hands loudly as he laughed.

You shyly stepped into the room, your eyes automatically leaving the floor to lock your gaze with Thomas’ for an instance, humiliation washing over you as John Dogs snorted loudly.

“A fucking whore! HA! She was a fucking whore, Tommy!” You couldn’t avoid looking at him anymore. Your pleading eyes scanned his face. His lips were parted, eyes wide open as he looked at you as if you were a complete stranger.

“Not exactly a whore,” The archduke corrected, making Thomas finally tear his gaze from you to look briefly at the man standing by his side, who was now moving slowly towards your small figure. “but she’s not in the position of rejecting anything I put her up to, are you dear?” He mocked as he grabbed you by the chin with his thumb and his finger, making you shake your head with disgust.

“I’ll take her.” Tommy decided, his two brothers who remained silent during the whole meeting looking at him with surprise. The archduke turned around to look at Thomas, who was now standing and fixing the neck of his shirt. “I’ll take your favourite whore.” He remarked, looking straight at you, a pinch tearing your heart and watering your eyes.

“Great choice, Thomas.” He called him by his name. “I’m pretty sure you’ll choose your future horse wisely just like you did right now!” He reminded. “Now (Y/n), please take Thomas to his room as his family picks, okay?” He slapped you in the ass as you proceeded to leave the room, making you flinch. Tommy, who walked next to you, did nothing but keep his stare straight.

As soon as you closed the doors behind you and turned around, Thomas grabbed your wrist and put a few coins on hand.

“I guess I am not very good at distinguishing actual statements from sarcasm. Here, this is for your service at the church.” He said coldly before walking away from you.

“I am not a whore.” You whispered weakly, hand still on the knob, fighting back your tears.

Opposite you, at the other side of the king sized bed stood Tommy, who had already taken off his shirt and was in the process of taking off his belt, ice cold expression looking at you, head slightly tilted upwards as if he was superior than you. You wondered if he was hurting just like you did. He did. Maybe not from sorrow, but from pride. You managed to twist his wires, you managed to blind him. You managed to make him forget about Grace, and you were not even half of a woman she was.

“Take off your clothes.” He commanded, something clenching in his chest as he saw the hurt cross your eyes.

“I am not a whore.” You repeated, your hand leaving the know as you got closer to him.

“Now.”

“I said I am not a whore!” You shouted, taking longer strides until you reached his side, hand flying across his face. Your hand stung the moment it hit his cheek, his head turning to the other side. “I am the daughter of a baron and you shall treat me with respect.” You didn’t know where did you get the strength of doing so. You didn’t know where you get the courage from. Maybe it from was the old you, the one who would fight anybody who doubted your worth, your bravery.

He looked at you, not ready to show his surprise at your words.

“A baron.” He repeated, still trying to put all the pieces together.

You stood there silently, giving up and letting all the tears stream down your face. He wanted to act upon it. He wanted to take a step forward, clean your face and pull you into a hug. But he knew he wasn’t in the position of doing so.

“A ruined baron who’s desperately seeking fortune and a higher rank.” You confessed weakly, fighting back the sobs as you proudly hung your head up high. “A baron who is willing to give her daughter to a heartless archduke who will use her as a token, who will use her as a deal sealer until he finds the “right time” to marry her.”

“And a daughter who’s willing to do anything for her family.” Tommy finished your statement, eyes looking down as he finally put all the pieces together. Sure he solved the mystery you hid, but why couldn’t he read you still?

What people also don’t understand is that no matter how good you are at reading those surrounding you, there will always be a book you will never learn to read: yourself. Because we will never be able to think outside of our own minds, because we will never be able to look past ourselves. Tommy couldn’t read you, because he’d have to learn to read himself first. Life had put you through circumstances so similar you two managed to shape ourselves in an almost identical way. You two were broken by the same reasons, but your remaining pieces were shaped differently.

“When I said that God only took care of those who were privileged,” You broke the silence, now an empty void where your heart used to be, making your voice resonate in a way that made Thomas Shelby flinch at his spot. “I meant the ones who had the freedom of choice.” You chuckled. “That wasn’t a problem for me, you know? Until you came around.”

“You have it now.” Thomas reassured, fighting for his legs to remain firm. “The freedom of choice, you have it now.” He repeated again, the real meaning of your words starting to seep into his bones, his heart starting to beat faster and faster at the premises. “I can get you out of here.” You shook your head at his words, which were sprouting out of his lips senselessly. “The Blinders have men that can protect you, we control half England and--”

“Is there anything you wouldn’t do for your family, Tommy?” You asked, finally taking a step closer, your hand cupping his face, silencing him.

The truth is that there wasn’t. But he would never admit it to you, not if that would give you an argument to leave him when he didn’t even get the chance of make you his. But you took that silence as a no, and you slightly pinched his cheek, trying to cheer him up.

“That’s what I thought.” You whispered, sniffing as you kept looking at him. His hands were now around your waist, holding you close as if it were the last time he was going to have you again.

“What would you choose?” Thomas asked after awhile, now his head resting on your hair, taking in your scent. “If you had a choice, what would you choose?”

You intertwined your fingertips with his, head resting on his chest, hearing his heart do the talking.

“I would’ve chosen a life with you.”

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#thomas shelby x reader #tommy shelby x reader #thomas shelby fanfic #thomas shelby one shot #thomas shelby imagine #thomas shelby fanfiction #tommy shelby imagine #tommy shelby one shot #tommy shelby fanfic #thomas shelby angst

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themurphyzone · 6 years

Text

Oneshot: Mascot Murphy

“So what did you need me for again?” Milo asked, glancing over his shoulder at the water fountain Melissa had pulled him away from. A leak sprung from the side, covering the floor in a metallic-tasting liquid. “I hope we aren’t above the cooking class….”

Right on cue, screaming erupted from the cooking classroom.

“They’ll be fine. Mr. Ortega probably has a skill he got from ‘The War’,” Melissa said, trying to make a dramatic face, and Milo burst out laughing at her exaggerated pout. “Anyway, I just need you to establish a buffer zone so I can grab a few boxes from my candy stash. I wasn’t expecting sour gummy turtles to be so popular this week, but hey, profits are profits.”

“Okay, but why do you need a buffer zo-“ Milo wondered, almost stumbling into Mort’s back. He took note of the crowd that had gathered around the bulletin by Coach Mitchell’s office. “Sorry. Hey, what’s going on here?”

A dozen heads turned at the sound of Milo’s voice, and the crowd whispered nervously to each other and quickly stepped to the far side of the hall.

“Thanks,” Melissa grinned. “I’ll be right back.”

She slipped into the girl’s locker room from the pathway that had opened up.

“Coach Mitchell’s holding tryouts after school for someone to wear the gecko mascot outfit at the game tomorrow,” Mort explained. “You know, since Paulie’s really…not up for it at the moment.”

Everyone knew that Paulie was still recovering from the sewer rat incident. Since he still freaked out at anything that involved the rodent family, Coach Mitchell and Principal Milder had agreed to find a substitute Gecko for this week’s game. Mostly because the opposing team used a field mouse as their mascot and they didn’t want to terrify the poor guy into becoming a recluse for the rest of his life.

“Yeah, sounds reasonable,” Milo admitted. “Poor guy. Maybe I should try out for the position! I’ve always wanted to stick to walls like one of those cheap sticky hands you get out of the capsules from the grocery store!”

He eagerly scribbled his name on the bottom of the sign-up form. Many of his classmates’ eyes widened to comical proportions, and one of the 8th graders passed out.

Then Melissa emerged from the locker room, her backpack bulging slightly with the corners of several boxes sticking out. She followed their looks of fear back to the sign-up form. “Oh, that explains it. Well if it cheers you guys up, I’ve got more sour gummy turtles. That’ll be two dollars a pack please.”

As several people dug into their pockets and bags for money, Mort simply watched them from the side. “I’m getting mixed signals from their aura. Their excitement for sour gummy turtles is punctuated by dread.”

The PA rang loudly, shaking Mrs. Murawski out of another desk-induced stupor. “Now I’ll never know what Oakley was gonna say!” she yelled. “I am so having a word with you, Elizabeth!”

Principal Milder’s voice crackled through the old speakers, and some people in the class covered their ears. “There’s been a change of plans. Because Milo Murphy was the only student whose name was not scratched out or colored over with red pen…seriously people. You’re in middle school. It’s possible to erase properly without tearing up the sheet of paper or getting red pen all over the bulletin. Anyway, he gets the part.” She didn’t bother disguising her deep sigh. “Look, if you’re participating in the game, try not to do anything that requires an ambulance or gets the attention of the school board. Milo Murphy, report to the gym after school for practice and the rest of you bring your personal shields just in case. Thank you.”

Bradley scoffed, glaring at Milo across the room. “So how are you gonna pull this one off? Covering yourself with merch from the other team won’t work this time since you’re our mascot. I predict we’ll lose by at least a hundred points.”

Melissa clicked her tongue at him. “Oh ye of little faith. The game hasn’t started yet and you’re already so certain we’ll lose.”

“I’m just being realistic,” Bradley said. “One little fluke’s not going to suddenly give us a winning streak.”

“Wait and see, Bradley,” Melissa smirked. “Prepare to eat those words tomorrow night.”

“Geckos! Geckos! We got class, we’re gonna climb right up your glass!” Milo cheered as he took a flying leap for the glass pane. It shattered before he could make contact, and Milo fell onto a spare blue mat.

“Yeah, we aren’t going to win,” Coach Mitchell muttered.

Principal Milder coughed from the bleachers.

A smile quickly spread across Coach Mitchell’s face. “Uh, I mean we’re gonna win! And I can’t think of anything peppy to say right now so please stop giving me that death glare!”

“I’m only going to stop sitting in on your practices when you stop giving your players self-fulfilling prophecies,” Principal Milder said. “In addition to seeing the cost of the damages Milo Murphy causes so I can fudge it with the school board later.”

“Sorry about that,” Milo said. “But look on the bright side! A limo didn’t plow into the gym at least!”

The cheerleaders and football players screamed as cracks appeared in the floor around them, jumping out of the way as the tiles collapsed. Just as everyone managed to scramble for safety, a mass of squashed milk cartons and tin cans rose from the hole.

“Hey, how do you like my subterranean submarine?” Scott shouted to the group. “With this vessel I will RULE! ALL! OF! SUBTERRANOUS! Terranous, terranous….”

Everyone stared at him.

Scott scoffed. “Fine. Tough crowd. I’ll go find someone who appreciates this kinda stuff.”

Then he disappeared back into the hole, taking the massive amount of garbage with him.

“Right, let’s ignore that and get back to practice,” Coach Mitchell muttered.

“Okay!” Milo cheered. “Geckos! Geckos!”

As he tried to leap over a hurdle, his tail caught on the frame and sent him tumbling head over heels into a wall. “I’m okay!” Milo yelled. The gecko suit did a good job cushioning the impact, even though his tail hog-tied all his limbs together so he could barely move.

“Doom….” Coach Mitchell sobbed into Principal Milder’s shoulder.

“Milo, are you sure you don’t need any help?” Zack asked as he watched Milo hop around the empty bus as he tried to put on the gecko suit.

Milo tripped over a seat, his legs flailing in the air while he pulled up the fabric. “Don’t worry! If I can manage a huge, poofy ballroom dress, I can handle this just fine! Seriously, you’d be surprised how easy it is to get lost underneath several pounds of fabric.”

After several minutes, he managed to get his arms in the suit as well. Milo reached over his back for the gecko head, but found that he couldn’t get a grip on it. Zack pulled it on for him.

“Thanks!” Milo exclaimed. “To the field!”

“And you’ve got the detachable tail if you’re in a pinch,” Zack reminded him as they got off the bus.

Milo nodded. “I know, right! You guys are just full of surprises.” The tail popped off, thrashing wildly and tripping students who’d come to the game before taking out the tire of the school bus. The bus crashed to the ground, a fire springing from the engine.

“Moving on,” Zack said as they headed to the field. “Just try not to land yourself in the hospital this time.”

“I make no promises!” Milo exclaimed.

Zack joined the huddle of football players who were listening to Coach Mitchell run over the game plan. “Hey, Milo!” Melissa called from the stands. Everyone else had moved to the highest seats, nervously checking over their shoulders for any sign of Murphy’s Law.

“Melissa! What’s up?” Milo asked.

Melissa gave him the ‘I have a plan’ smile. “So, I did a little recon on the Field Mice of Fieldmouse Middle School. Which is a pretty uncreative name when I say it out loud like that, but that’s besides the point. Their mascot is Lola Sundergard, your female doppelganger we ran into at the recycling factory. At the end of the second quarter, you two will swap places. And the Geckos win yet another game! So what do you think?”

“Wouldn’t they notice the switch?” Milo asked.

“I’ve already met up with my counterpart, Melanie,” Melissa shrugged. “She’s agreed to facilitate the trade as well. Though if I know my counterparts, she’s probably got a plan of her own. I’m not really sure. She seemed a little too eager to make the trade. Oh, well. It’ll work. Just you wait and see.”

“Presenting the Jefferson County Middle School Geckos and the Fieldmouse Middle School Field Mice!

“Okay, meet up with you later! I’m on!” Milo yelled over his shoulder at Melissa as he did the traditional sprint around the football team. “Go Geck-ACK!” He tripped over a football that had been lying out in the field, sending him sprawling onto the turf.

“Geckos!” Milo cheered one more time before running off the field and joining the cheerleaders.

By the end of the second quarter, neither team had scored. Mostly because the goalposts being on fire, the bats occasionally diving into people’s faces to get an insect, and the giant robots which occasionally fired laser beams in random directions drove people away from the end zones.

While everyone else was distracted by the defunded marching band, Milo hopped over the gate to join Melissa. “Something’s up with the other team,” Melissa noted. “I don’t get it. They should’ve been mercilessly crushing us. Anyway, our rendezvous point is behind the concessions stand. We debated setting it by the restrooms, but I don’t think you’d appreciate nasty public restroom water all over the suit. Then again, I didn’t launch into the details of how exactly we beat the Tigers either.”

Melanie and Lola were already waiting for them behind the stands.

“So, you didn’t back out on our deal,” Melanie said. She leaned coolly on a railing, popping her gum at them. “Okay. Let’s trade mascots.”

“Now why would I back out?” Melissa asked innocently. “We both agreed this would be a hilarious prank on both schools once they realize the switch.”

Melanie shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

“It’s like Melanie has a secret twin who’s just as clever as her,” Lola marveled. “So, we’re switching now?”

It took five minutes to get Milo out of the gecko suit since the zipper was stuck, but with a little teamwork from the girls and a generous amount of popcorn butter, they finally managed.

“Shouldn’t geckos have tails?” Lola asked, holding up the empty gecko suit. “What happened to it?”

“It’s an old suit and our school’s underfunded,” Melissa said. “It’s only natural for some parts to be frayed.”

“Here’s some popcorn butter roller,” Milo said, tossing Lola what appeared to be a lint roller. “It’s like a lint roller, but it absorbs popcorn butter!”

Thankfully, the mouse suit was a lot easier to put on. Milo and Lola stood side-by-side as Melissa and Melanie adjusted the heads to mask the slight differences in their facial features. By the time they finished, the football players were gathering on the field for the start of the third quarter.

“We’ll meet back here after the game,” Melissa said, winking at Milo as she led Lola back to their side of the stadium. “Well, you look like a fully hatched Gecko now, so I just need to make sure you know the main cheer so you’ll blend in.”

“Looks like you’re a field mouse now,” Melanie said. “How’s it feel to trade one prey animal for another?”

Milo tugged on his tail curiously. “Is this detachable too?”

“Nope, but it squeaks if you press the button on your hand,” Melanie said. “Try it out.”

Milo pushed it, only to flinch and hold his hand as far from his body as he could when the button emitted a loud, high-pitched sound. Everyone in the vicinity screamed and covered their ears as all of the lights blew out in the stadium.

“Everyone stay calm and don’t panic!” the announcer shouted. “If you need me, I’ll be in my secret totally not-a-panic-room.”

“Maybe we should check the power supply first,” Milo suggested, quickly crushing the small box to stop the sound.

“Everyone, grab hold of me!” Milo shouted to the Fieldmouse cheerleaders behind him. They latched on to him quickly, and he swung a rope up to the bleachers. He hauled himself into the stands, helping the other cheerleaders escape the feral cats below. “You girls okay?”

“We had no idea you could do that, Lola!” a blonde girl exclaimed. “Can you teach me someday?”

Milo chuckled. “Well, you see-“

Thankfully, Melanie came to his rescue. “Okay, ladies!” she clapped her hands and pointed down to the field. “You have some important cheering to do! Get down to the field and squeak like you mean it!”

The other girls glanced nervously at the feral cats, who were still circling the track nearby.

“You might want to take these,” Milo suggested. He handed every cheerleader two balls of yarn. “Cause when the cats are away, the Field Mice will cheer during play!”

A blonde girl with braces giggled behind her pom-poms. “Ooh that’s a good one! Can we start using it?”

Milo nodded. “Yeah, go for it!”

As they watched the cheerleaders resume their positions on the field, Melanie gave Milo a thumbs-up. “Congratulations on besting the Kitty’s Curse,” she said. “We should be dealing with at least five more tonight. Six if the escargot vendor slips.”

“Five more?” Milo asked, ducking when a Gecko’s helmet flew over his head.

Melanie counted on her fingers as she lifted off a slew of various curses. “Lightbulb curse, country music curse, xylophone curse, pom-pom curse, and the one our team is banking on tonight, the Emu’s Curse.”

Milo whistled. “That’s a lot of curses.”

“Yup. Lola and I agreed on this switch so we could break the Emu’s Curse on our team,” Melanie said. “We’ve had it since the beginning of the season, when a herd of emus carried off our assistant coach. We’ll never be able to win a game unless we can break it.”

“So that’s why Melissa said she thought you guys were plotting something,” Milo mused. “And while we’re revealing secrets, this is the second time I’ve dressed as someone from the opposing school to win a game.”

There was only five minutes left in the game, and the teams were still tied with zero points each. It would probably be going into overtime.

Permanent overtime, Milo realized. The game would continue forever if nobody scored. And they would probably have to draft a new government, create the rules for a new society within the cheap stadium walls, try not to inevitably dissolve into anarchy….

“We heard about your victory over the Tigers. The news spread around the district like wildfire. We wondered how a team who holds the district record for a thousand straight losses and counting could even win against a group of sweaty adults,” Melanie paused, tapping her chin in thought. “Hold on. My school has never played the Geckos before tonight due to you being infamous around the city. They know all about the Emu’s Curse too. So why did they schedule us to play against each other?”

Milo shrugged. “Maybe someone forgot to look into it?”

Melanie raised an eyebrow. “That’s the best case scenario. But the staff of Fieldmouse Middle School are timid, much like their namesake. They wouldn’t take responsibility if someone was injured. There’s a third player somewhere. And we better find out who it is before this game goes on for an eternity. And believe me, that’s not a hyperbole.”

Tempers were running high and energy was nonexistent as the game dragged into the third overtime period. The cheerleaders from both sides were benched and refused to cheer anymore, and the tuba player on the Gecko side had keeled over from the sheer weight of his instrument.

“Just score and don’t die out there!” the Fieldmouse coach ordered.

Coach Mitchell picked Zack and Mort to provide enough water to Randy, who was too weak to drag himself over to the water tank.

Milo and Melanie used the opportunity to meet up with Melissa and Lola behind the concessions stand again. Melissa yawned loudly, not bothering to cover her mouth. Lola had lost the Gecko head somehow, but nobody was paying enough attention to notice.

“Sorry about the costume,” Milo said as he handed the tattered gray remains of the mouse suit to Lola. “A group of moths got hungry.”

“No worries!” Lola exclaimed. “Being a Gecko was fun while it lasted!”

“Same for being a Field Mouse,” Milo agreed. He decided against wearing the costume, since putting it on would take too much time. He stuffed it into his backpack for safekeeping, making a mental note to return it to the school later.

“We both know something’s up,” Melissa said, fistbumping Melanie for a job well done. “But who would benefit from the shameless exploitation of middle school football?”

“Shameless exploitation,” Milo repeated. “Melissa, we dealt with someone like that once. And if I’m right, you have to give me your cheese sticks at lunch for the next week!”

“I’m only agreeing to three days,” Melissa said.

The steps up to the announcer’s box were slick with oil, so they held onto the railings tightly so they didn’t trip. Milo took the lead, pressing on as his shoes were slathered in oil. Melanie and Lola were practically climbing on their hands and knees. Melissa was just a few steps below him.

“I knew the announcer was behind this!” Melissa exclaimed. “Don’t declare that you have a secret room on the mike if you don’t want teenagers checking it out.”

“And not just any announcer!” Milo added. He caught himself on the doorknob as he slipped on another patch of oil. “The real culprit is…”

He kicked the door open, only to land flat on his face when his foot slid too far from his body. The man at the microphone whirled around in surprise.

“The real culprit is Victor Verliezer!” Milo exclaimed, quickly getting back on his feet.

“You!” Verliezer shouted.

“Weird guy who cursed me at the grocery store for taking the last chocolate bar!” Lola yelled.

They stared at her.

Lola coughed. “Well, they had other brands. You didn’t have to curse my phones into failing every month.”

Verliezer hissed at them, clutching the microphone protectively. “That was the one of the few brands without peanuts and you know it!” He cleared his throat as he launched into his villain spiel. “We meet again, Murphy. After you and your little friends robbed me of my livelihood, I was forced to stoop to this! Just a common man in an idiotic school district. But lo and behold, I did some digging into the school files and discovered that you and Ponytail here happened to go to the schools that were never allowed to play against each other lest you be locked into a stalemate! Then I thought, why don’t I just let them play forever? You’ll be trapped, and I’ll make millions from the clueless masses who tune in mindlessly to a football game that goes on forever!”

“You do realize that nobody watches middle school football on TV,” Melanie scoffed.

“Or that you probably wouldn’t have a lot of ratings even if people did tune in,” Lola added.

“And everybody can hear you because you didn’t bother to turn the microphone off,” Melissa smirked.

Verliezer paled. “You all heard that, didn’t you?”

“Yes, yes we did,” everyone in the stadium chorused.

Verliezer stumbled past Milo, muttering about how another plot had been ruined. Milo waved at him as he slipped all the way down the stairs, straight into a group of police officers. “Feel free to take your sweet revenge on me once you come up with something that could actually work!” he shouted.

Melissa frowned, pointing out the window. The players were either lying on the turf or the benches, while the cheerleaders used their pom-poms as pillows. Even the coaches and referees were too tired to egg people on. The football laid in the middle of the field, completely forgotten.

“We should probably end this game,” Lola suggested. “I mean, all we have to do is just take the ball into the end zone.”

“Rock-paper-scissors for who gets to win,” Melanie suggested. “Best two out of three.”

“Bring it!” Melissa jumped at the challenge, and the girls engaged in a fierce game of rock-paper-scissors.

Milo yawned after ten minutes, realizing the game wouldn’t be going anywhere since they kept pulling the same hand gesture. “I’ll run the ball down myself,” he said to Lola. “And I don’t know which end is which because I wasn’t paying attention, so both schools have a 50-50 shot at winning. I’d say that’s fair.”

He used an inflatable pool ring to sled down the oil-coated stairs, crashing into the fence by the field. Then he hopped over the barrier and picked up the football. He glanced at both end zones, debating which one he should run to.

Then he decided to take his chances with the one that was swarming with alligators rather than the one surrounded by flocks of Canadian geese. As he passed the thirty-yard line, an exposed water pipe exploded, scattering metallic-looking water all over the field. The geese on the other end honked angrily, taking to the air. There was a scream from the stands, and Milo turned to see Elliot leaping over the students in his hurry to get out of the stadium.

Several birds smacked into Milo, almost making him lose his grip on the football. The alligators waddled after the geese, clearing a safe path in the end zone for him.

Milo cheered as he crossed the line, throwing the football to the ground for good measure. The crowd whispered and pointed to each other, and several people had to shake themselves out of a stupor.

Then the visitor’s side erupted into cheers.

The Field Mice won the game.

Milo was immediately tackled by Lola as she excitedly led him around the field in a victory lap. The football players cheered weakly from the bench.

“Here. You take the attendance sheet down to the office,” Bradley scoffed to Milo, tossing a few pages at him. “And remember that the office is at the front of the school so that you don’t go to the wrong side like you did on Friday.”

“Lay off,” Zack muttered. “You would’ve been an eternal spectator if Milo and Melissa hadn’t foiled Verliezer’s plot.”

Bradley rolled a pencil back and forth across his desk, now utterly disinterested in the conversation.

“Paulie will be back as the mascot this week,” Melissa said. “Though he’s making a makeshift head and tail out of tin cans for the rest of the season. The school this week has a goat for their mascot, so he should be fine.”

Zack coughed.

“Using a very loose definition of fine.”

#gecko spirit week #milo murphy's law #melissa chase #lola sundergard #zack underwood #fanfiction #oneshot

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julesdelorme · 4 years

Photo

faller

Chapter 10

the boy

We never did make it to the creek.

I never really thought we were going to make it there anyway.

I never thought that the broken man would make it all the way without falling down.

In the end him falling down had nothing to do with it.

We were almost halfway across the field. He was stumbling along and looking like every step was going to be his last one upright, but he kept on walking.

We were near the plastic wading pool with the cartoon whales on it.

I remember that.

I never knew where that pool came from. It was there for as long as I can remember. Since the beginning of time. Like that stupid pool filled up with dirt and old dog shit and skeletons of dead animals and the flies always buzzing around it just belonged exactly right where it was. During the winter there’d be ice and dead field mice stuck in the ice. It was all cracked and covered in dirt but you could still see the cartoon whales even though they were faded and you could tell the pool used to be blue, but it wasn’t the blue that you could see now or the blue that it was supposed to be.

The broken man stopped and was looking down at the pool like he wished it was full of water instead of dirt and shit and dead animals.

He was still kind of swaying back and forth and staring down at the pool.

You could hear the river making lapping sounds at the rocks from there. You couldn’t hear the creek but you could hear the river.

I could almost feel how thirsty the broken man was. I could almost taste his thirst every time he tried to lick his lips, so dry, and his tongue fat and bloated with thirst. I didn’t think he was going to be able to take another step. I was sure he was going to fall down right then just from the thought of the water and I still wasn’t sure if I was going to do anything about it.

He was skinny, but still too big for me to carry or drag.

I could go to the creek myself and bring him some water, but I wasn’t so sure if I would.

That’d be a lot of work.

I didn’t know him. I didn’t owe him anything. And I didn’t know if he wouldn’t do something bad once he had some water in his belly. I wasn’t sure if I cared what he did, but it seemed like a lot of trouble to bring him water just so he could do me bad. It seemed like a lot of work for something and somebody I didn’t care about one way or another.

He stood there for a while swaying back and forth, looking at that dirty plastic pool and probably listening the river, maybe thinking about the water he couldn’t make it to or drink even if he could make it there.

Nobody in their right mind would ever drink from that river no matter how clean it looked. Factories still dumping chemicals in there. Just not the chemicals that makes the river stink and change colour

And then the broken man took one little step.

And then another step.

I was surprised at that.

Even Goat looked surprised that he took another step.

I was sure he was done. I was sure he was going down. I was sure he was going to fall down right there and never be able to get back up.

But he didn’t.

He took a couple of steps and then he took a couple of more, and I followed him and then got out ahead of him again.

That was when the racket back at the house started.

At first it was just people showing up. A car pulling up and then things falling down. I heard it but I just figured it was Dianne and I was keeping my eyes on the man to see if he was going to fall down. She was probably just leaving food again, in the place that I showed her. Maybe some clothes. And maybe she dropped some things. It was better if I didn’t have to talk to her anyway. She did her best but there was always those questions in her eyes, and the worry too. It was always better if I didn’t have to talk to her. That’s why I showed her the hiding place. Sometimes I would see her coming and I would go off just so I wouldn’t have to see all the questions and worry in her eyes.

Reminding me who I was. Reminding me what I was.

Goat started to call out. She knew Dianne always brought food. I’m guessing Goat would have preferred if we went back to the food.

Then I heard another car pull up. I wanted to look then, but I was sure the broken man was about to fall down and I didn’t want to miss that.

There was a little pause and then the screaming started.

The broken man turned around.

He turned in this slow strange way, where he moved his body instead of turning his head, and I thought he was going to fall, but then I wanted to look too.

I saw the cop.

The one that was in charge of the other cops.

We didn’t call him Chief because the Island already had a Chief, so most people called him Captain. He didn’t seem like a Captain to me, so I didn’t call him anything at all. Not to his face. He was just a cop and him showing up was never good for anybody. He always acted like that badge and uniform made him the big cheese but he was just one more bad guy on the Rez looking to take whatever people have left. He looked more like an Indian than most, even though he was only about a quarter Indian, if even that. But it was on his mother’s side so he got to say he was an Indian and looking like an Indian sure helped him get that badge. He was always smiling like he was your best friend but I’d seen enough of him to know he wasn’t anybody’s friend but his own. He was usually after my father or my uncles but sometimes he just showed up because he got it in his head again about sticking me in some home.

There usually wasn’t enough in it for him to bother for long though.

So far.

And he was a little scared of Goat.

Goat head butted him right in the nuts one time. He walked right past Goat without greeting her.

Everybody knew you had to say hello to Goat if you didn’t want her to go after you. It was just good manners, even for a goat. But he went charging by and she caught coming back out.

He went down like a sack of bricks.

That was a funny day.

That made me smile.

Goat had a way of making me smile more than most things or most people did.

The cop was standing there holding Dianne by the shoulders and she was screaming and pointing at us.

I couldn’t figure out what she was so upset about.

I know she tried real hard but she did get upset pretty easy an awful lot. That’s how anyone could tell she wasn’t from the Rez.

I stood there and the broken man stood there and the two of them kept looking over at us like someone had died or somebody had robbed a bank.

A bank in the city. Not on the Rez.

The cop let go of Dianne’s shoulders with one hand and kind of reached for his gun.

I felt more than saw the broken man’s body sag like he knew exactly what was coming.

I just stood there.

I didn’t know what was going on. I couldn’t figure out why everyone was acting the way they were acting. Sometimes people are nothing like anything I can understand. Most times people are a mystery to me.

Most times I’m a mystery to me.

That’s why I like having Goat around. Goat makes more sense than most people.

The cop pulled out his gun.

The broken man fell to his knees and put his hands behind his head without being told.

Dianne kept on screaming.

Goat was screaming now too.

The cop looked confused at first, like he couldn’t figure how whether to stay with Dianne and try to calm her down with the gun still in his hand, or come after us. But I still couldn’t figure out why he would want to do that, or why he had his gun out.

I’m not stupid.

I knew that they thought that the broken man was dangerous.

It was just so obvious to me that he wasn’t, and it seemed stupid to me that they thought he was. I could never figure out how people talked themselves into so many stupid things.

The cop lifted his gun up a little like he was going to point it, and then stopped, still looking like he couldn’t figure out what was going on. He told the broken man to lie down on his stomach and keep his hands behind his head, and the broken man did that. The cop didn’t yell. But his voice was shaking a little.

He told me to walk towards him but I just stood there.

He seemed more dangerous with that gun to me than the broken man ever was.

He said it again and the broken man told me to do it. His face was in the dirt and his voice sounded funny coming through the dirt.

I still didn’t move.

Goat was screaming and Dianne was screaming and the cop was pointing his gun.

There was too much stuff coming at me all at once.

I was all filled up with the stupidity and the nonsense of what was happening.

When I get filled up like that all I want is to get away from people so that’s what I did.

I turned and ran back into the woods. I needed to leave all that screaming and all that craziness behind me. Trees don’t yell at you and birds don’t tell you what to do. Even bears make more sense than people. The woods were always the safest place that I knew.

I could hear all the screaming and the shouting and then a gun shot and all I knew was that it didn’t make any sense and it was all too much of nothing, so I just kept right on running.

My Grandmother told me that in the old days the People would outrun the British and the French. They would run for miles without getting tired. White men called them Indian Runners. The People called them the Dog Runners because they would walk and run and walk and run without stopping the way a dog or a wolf or a coyote would do.

I wondered how far I could run without rest or sleep or food before I would fall down dead.

I wondered how far I could run before I would never have to turn around and come back.

I wondered how far I could run before all the noise in my head would just stop.

I wondered if Goat was following me.

I wondered if the broken man was still thirsty.

And I just kept on running.

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kenpaisworkshop · 7 years

Text

Cyber-Sin: “Pawns”

Subject: @sinquest AU “Cyber-Sin.”

Characters: Cyber!Ken’pai ( @rumongray ), Cyber!Warlock ( @tomis-jb )

A follow up to “Ruins”.

A single light bulb burned its light against Ken'pai's scales, their sensitivity heightened as a side-effect of the sedative that was now wearing off. A chill cascading over his body with every breath.

Left shirtless, his arms wrapped around the wide back of a chair, bound together with handcuffs. The chair's width was such that the cuffs were stretched to their limit, putting the lizard-man in a much more uneasy state of discomfort. His muscles were stretched just enough to cause pain, and not allow him to relax as much as he would've liked.

His eyes started to clear, their focus sharpening on the door in front of him, with a red light over the top. Locked. Of course, he wasn't in any position to even attempt to open it anyway...all he had left was to wait it out. He wiggled his legs a bit, coming to the realization that they were of course, empty. No phone, no credit chit...his captors weren't stupid.

In fact...they were still here.

Light drifted back into his eyes, catching onto a pair of armed men in the far corners next to the door, wearing combat gear that didn't match SecuWatch, that much was certain. Still, it looked rather factory-new, right out of the assembly line, which made sense. Mercenary units were often better equipped for the most part.

A third man stood off to Ken's right, looking away and hunching over a small table. He wore a black t-shirt that clung tightly over his large upper body. Lower down, he was still wearing similar armor to his cohorts, but it was clear that he was in charge. A large holster sat on his left hip, his right hip had an electrical baton hanging down the side. Short, professionally cut hair adorned a light-skinned head, atop a thick neck with a deep scar on the back that ran under his shirt, presumably into the center of his back. On the table were all of Ken'pai's belongings that he had been missing.

“Finally awake?”

His voice was deep, gravely, experienced. Ken'pai had only heard one other person with that level of worldliness to the way they spoke, and that was Tomis. He was definitely in charge.

Perfect.

He had to hold back his smirk.

The man turned around and clasped a thick hand onto the lizard-man's shoulder. “I'm not going to mince words or play up the theatrics. You know why you're here, and so do I. My client knows that you saw something that they didn't want you to see, and they want to make you an offer.”

Ken'pai cleared his throat, smacking his lips and tongue after being dried out from the drugs.

“An offer? From BIOSERV? Can't wait to hear it. How much?”

“How much? You keep quiet, and you don't get to lose teeth. Or implants. Or arms. Or legs. Or maybe...”

A thick, metallic boot stomped down hard on Ken's tail, the reptile yelping in pain.

“Hmm...that was an interesting noise. I wonder if you actually like this...”

Ken'pai growled. “Not...from you...”

The man let out a hearty laugh, walking on Ken's tail with the same foot and putting all his weight on it before stepping off. His merriment wore off quickly, as circled the chair and grabbed Ken's snout like a dog's, forcing their eyes to meet.

“You see...the fact that you know it's BIOSERV is actually a problem...I was hoping that you'd be a little more forgetful than that.”

Ken'pai struggled to speak before the man forcefully released his snout. “It's hard to forget something like that. Industrial sabotage on that scale looks to make BIOSERV a pretty penny whey they have the solution. I'm guessing they're kicking you a little off the top to keep little guys like me quiet.”

The man's eyes widened. He forced a heavy blink in effort to hide his surprise. “To keep criminals quiet, yes.”

“Criminals. Right. Interesting talk from a mercenary.”

“You're quite smug for being tied to a...”

He was stopped short from a noise coming from the nearby table. A deep, rumbling hum, followed by a delightful beeping ring-tone coming from the phone that lay there among Ken's other possessions. He scooped it up and swiped the screen, seeing the words “Incoming call” and a number he didn't recognize. He scoffed.

“You...gonna answer that?” Ken'pai asked.

The man casually lobbed the phone onto the ground, forcing a chuckle as he stomped it, sending bits and pieces of electronics splintering into the air.

“Hey--!”

Ken was silenced by a powerful backhand to the side of his face. He grunted in pain, the sudden impact causing his teeth to slice open his lip slightly. He spat the resulting blood onto the ground, keeping his head hanging there just in case.

The man grasped the top of Ken's head. “Mister Haggard, I don't think you understand how much trouble you're in.”

Not as much as you think, considering you don’t know my real name.

“I know that...” he sputtered, spitting out another load of blood-drenched saliva, “...that even if I do agree, you're still not going to just let me go. Gotta...get your kicks in...right?”

The man huffed and smiled. “Just need to make sure the lesson sticks, that's all.”

“That's...fine...” Ken smirked. “...I had...other plans anyway...”

The red light above the door blinked from red to green, the telltale beep of it unlocking put all three men on high alert, readying their weapons and aiming them toward the door.

Tomis.

The black-cloaked figure darted into the room, wearing a metal mask with lit, purple-tinged eyes under a dark hood. Immediately he thrust a heavy kick to one of the guards, slamming him against the wall and using the momentum to propel him toward the other guard, wrapping his arms around his neck. As the other guard started to stand up, long nanotech-powered metallic tentacles slithered from under the man's black coat, darting across the room and constricting the far guard's throat. They twisted sharply, causing a satisfying snapping sound...almost as satisfying as the one he'd made on the other guard with his own arms.

The two fell the floor, lifeless, as the mercenary leader grabbed a huge pistol and held it against Ken'pai's temple.

“One more step...”

“Do it,” Ken'pai ordered.

Tomis chuckled. “Yeah, do it.”

Growling, the man pressed the barrel in harder.

Tomis took a step forward.

He pulled the trigger, the room echoing its hollow “clink” sound, followed by three warning beeps, and a red LED light on the back of the gun blinked.

“...What the fuck--”

Before he could inspect his gun, he found that Tomis had a machine pistol aimed right at his face, the light on the back blinking green. Ready to fire.

“Now, you're going to put that gun down, and you're going to release my friend here.”

The man slowly, delicately lay his gun on the ground, raising his hands up when he was done. He moved behind Ken'pai, pulling out a small key and unlocking the handcuffs. When finished, Ken'pai darted out of the chair and behind Tomis, rubbing his wrists and rotating his shoulders.

“Sit,” Tomis ordered.

The man kept his arms up, and sat down in the chair. Tomis scooped up the cuffs and attached them to the man's wrists and forced them behind the chair, the captor becoming the captive. Satisfied, Tomis put his gun back into his coat, handing Ken a small device.

“Here's your phone.”

“Thanks man,” Ken said, unlocking the screen and pulling up a few windows within seconds. He moved toward the nearby table and began to pick up the rest of his stuff, shoving it into his pockets.

“Sorry it took so long.”

“Long? Man you were maybe like...a couple seconds later than I thought, that's all.”

“I don't understand!” The bound leader shouted. “How did you get in here?! How did you slip past my men, and the cameras?!”

“Cameras?” Tomis asked playfully. “There were cameras?”

“Oh right,” Ken'pai nodded. “Those cameras.” The lizard-man leered close to his new captive. “See...those cameras haven't been recording anything for the last six hours...they've just been playing an hour-long video loop over and over again.”

Before he backed off, the reptile spat one last round of blood onto the man's face.

“Now mister...Mehnkov, was it? Dmitri Mehnkov?” Ken asked.

The man grumbled. “Filthy criminals...”

Tomis gasped melodramatically. “Criminals?! Man, he called us criminals! That's awful!”

“I know! Especially since SecuWatch has a warrant out for one Dmitri Mehnkov for the kidnapping of a SecuWatch operative!”

“...What...?!”

Ken flicked through his phone, bringing up a screen with Dmitri's face on it, showing his full name, home address, phone number, and ID number. The charges on the warrant matched what Ken'pai had described, showing another status on the bottom. “Wanted: Dead or Alive.”

“I...what is this?! Who are you two?!”

“Just a couple criminals.” Tomis shrugged.

Ken snorted a little, the joke still hilarious in his head. “Sorry about the gun, by the way, but you really should try to distance yourself from the ID-tag system. It's pretty easy to do...well it's easy for ME anyway...and almost undetectable. Plus, you don't run into the issue of having the ID-tag signals jammed from a single cell phone. Mostly why my partner here didn't have to worry much about the guards here.”

“Might want to hire a few more people for patrols too. Without having to worry about the cameras, your security is nothing but holes.”

Dmitri growled and strained against the cuffs, but even his frame wasn't powerful enough to budge them. “So what do you want?!”

“Well, we were thinking we might need your help in taking down BIOSERV. See...we need to make sure that when we do go after them, that we don't get interrupted, so we could use some extra manpower,” Tomis explained.

“And why would I help you do that?”

“Well,” Ken shrugged his shoulders, “other than being tied up here, I could make this nasty warrant go away, because I'm the SecuWatch Operative that you'd kidnapped. It'd be pretty easy for me. But...if you want more incentive, how about this...we pay you what BIOSERV was going to pay you, courtesy of the MegaCorp themselves?”

“What? Why would I ever...”

“Let's see...”

Ken'pai swiped through the phone faster and faster. “They were going to pay you...25000 right? Well here's the thing...somebody working for BIOSERV actually fried quite a lot of valuable, sensitive electronic equipment of mine, so I hope you don't mind, but I had to take that for myself. Reimbursement, you understand.”

“You lousy reptile!”

“Oh, oh don't worry, I didn't take that out of your paycheck, Dmitri. I took that from BIOSERV themselves. What's interesting though, is that your paycheck is never going to arrive.”

“What?!”

“Aww, he doesn't know!” Tomis smiled.

“Know what?!”

“That BIOSERV was never planning on paying you,” Tomis chuckled. “Mercenary units in this city are wise to the MegaCorps' method of hiring by this point, but you...you guys are new here. As evidenced by the traditional, by-the-book methods, the factory-sealed, new equipment, your reliance on ID-tagged gear...it was all your undoing, and BIOSERV knew they could play you for saps.”

“That's...”

Ken'pai shook his head. “It's okay partner, he's not gonna believe us. But maybe he will when I send him copies of the company's emails. They were going to pay you through a dummy account, one that's been designed to look like it had a specific amount in it--namely 25000 credits--but as soon as the transaction was going to be completed, 'oops, the account was hacked! We'll get back to you on your payment!'”

“I...”

“Yeah, I know. They played you in order to get to us. But here's the thing...that 25000 I skimmed off the top? I can do that again, it's actually pretty easy, but this time I'll do it for you instead. Sound good?”

Dmitri growled again and stared at the floor. It was obvious that he knew he didn't have much time to make the decision. Neurons fired as his eyes darted around the room, so many revelations hitting him at once. He didn't like being played for a fool by these guys, but he hated getting the exact same treatment from the MegaCorp that hired him in the first place. All of this as his business was just getting off the ground...

The man looked toward Tomis and Ken'pai, and slowly nodded his head.

“Good!” Ken affirmed, moving behind Dmitri and undoing the handcuffs. Before the man stood up, he found the machine-pistol aimed at his face again. “Stay,” came the command. Like a dog.

Ken'pai moved toward the door, which slid open in a satisfying hiss. Tomis backed toward the door himself, staying between the two and making sure Mr. Mehnkov remained seated. Ken flicked through his phone again, waiting for a process to finish before nodding.

“There. The emails should be in your phone now, this might be a good time to look through them, because this door's lock isn't going to open again for another 45 minutes. I'll contact you in exactly 72 hours. Be ready to respond. I'll use Haggard as my call sign.”

“I...understand...” Dmitri replied, pulling out his phone.

“Sorry about having to do this by the way,” Ken conceded, “it was really the only way to get your attention on the matter without you getting so...hostile.”

“Take care,” Tomis said, waving while holding the gun.

The door hissed shut, leaving Dmitri alone with his device. The first thing he did was run a search on any warrants for his arrest, which he was relieved to find were non-existent...the lizard kept his word. Soon, he opened his emails and found that once again, Ken'pai was correct. They corroborated what he'd said almost down to the letter, even the part about blaming the dummy account being hacked.

A single light bulb burned its light against his skin.

But not nearly as hot as his inner rage at being played as nothing more than a pawn.

#Short Form #Series #CyberSin #Sinquest #Cyberpunk #Cyber!Ken'pai #Cyber!Tomis #SFW #Fun to write #I really have to do more cyberpunk #Thanks for reading #My Work #Writing

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