#and those plastic bags were in a pretty nasty area

[survivingpierce]

.

#i had the weirdest dream today #and i don't even know where it came fromprobably because i rewatched an episode of season 2? #klaus caught katherine and forced her to collect plastic bags along with another group of caught people #and those plastic bags were in a pretty nasty area #he person who managed to collect the most plastic packs was granted freedom #and somehow katherine didn't manage to collect much although she grabbed even the most disgusting ones #like what? #what was that? #the worst thing is that i couldn't even finish the dream because the alarm went off #♕ i’m not the girl you think i am ▬ ooc

[sardonic-the-writer]

c!Superhero!Tommy x Reader Part One

━"Racooninnit"

━Tommy

━Tw: Rude behavior, mentions of fighting

━Notes: I spent so long writing and planning this for all the people who requested more Tommy stuff, and honestly I could not be more proud of it <33

━Song: "Brave As A Noun" By AJJ

Tommy hooked one of his fingers around his tight uniform collar, feeling the scratchy fibers scrape against his calloused thumb pads. With a soft grunt, he tried to fan cool air into the fabric of his stained and greasy button down shirt, but to no avail. Before he could even make any progress with the temperature change, a voice yelled in his ear.

"Order up for car nine!" It screamed out, along with the sound of a tinkling bell being rung. The words seemed to add another layer of eye bags under Tommys eyes, piling more and more weight the longer he stood there.

Tommy sighed heavily and skated over to the source of the noise; that being a busy kitchen with thick white steam filling up the crowded air. He skidded to a stop with his brakes loudly, holding his hands out in preparation to grab an order.

Out of nowhere a pair of arms loaded the blonde boy down with platers overflowing with burgers, fries, and sodas. Grunting almost inaudibly underneath the weight, he steered around to go skate off. The flimsy paper separating food from red tray fluttered noisily in the efforts of his movement.

Gravel and stray pieces of littler skirted around the edges of the swiftly rotating wheels on said boys skates. The worn out, red-ish orange quality of the shoes looked sickly in the beating sun. The once bright and neon color had been sucked clean of its original quality thanks to years of wear and tear.

Tommy winced as the sharp edge of leather cut into the side of his feet. He wanted desperately to take them off, but he knew that his boss would end up yelling at him again for "not following the dress-code" or some dumb shit.

He scoffed inwardly, thinking about the last time that had happened. Five dollars had been knocked off his next paycheck because of that. (Which he was pretty sure was illegal, but Tommy didn't have enough shits to give at this point. Pay was the last of his problems.)

Once more skidding to a stop in front of some beat down car, Tommy watched as a tinted window rolled down to reveal a group of four. Just some wasted looking teenagers craving a quick pit stop for fast food at the nearest place.

The usual.

"Here's your order." Tommy mumbled with the best smile he could muster. A few twenty dollar bills were thrown at him before he could blink, and off the rumbling vehicle sped.

Sighing with half lidded eyes, he bent over to the ground and began picking up the loose pieces of paper. Dusting off the grime from the floor, Tommy stood up again and skated away.

As he went back to his original position of leaning on a counter of condiments protruding from the side of a brick wall, Tommy scanned over his workplace.

It was a small thing. Smelled of grease and poor food, but after months of walking around in the joint he had gone nose-blind to it.

The diner-restaurant-food thing was mostly an outdoor establishment. A small, cloudy piece of plastic covering hovered over a bundle of nasty green colored benches. Four brick walls (one of which Tommy was currently standing cross-armed up against) came together to build the kitchen in which he would skate back and forth from for hours at a time. The rest of the area was filled with painted parking spots. Cars would pull in, press a button on these individual stands next to their window, order, and then leave.

A simple progress if you look past the fact that the manager was an asshole.

The tall Irish man's name was Dennis. He was a stringy thing that looked like he would tumble away if the wind blew too hard, but everyone knew not to mess with him. He didn't get all those scars on his hands for nothing.

An orange backsplash of freckles decorated his face, as well as a missing front tooth that showed when he yelled. Dennis had a bad temper and loud voice that was only amplified by the mop of fiery red hair framing his head. A wonderful bunch of habits to have when you run a place full of bored teenagers that don't pay attention for shit.

His favorite target seemed to be Tommy, however. Dennis would swoop in over the blonde's shoulder at the worst of times. It was either when he had gone five seconds over his break, spilled a customer's drink, or any other minor mishap. Hell- he even managed to appear when Tommy clogged the only employee's toilet once.

Point being, Dennis hated Tommy and Tommy hated Dennis.

Clashing of heads between the two boys was a pastime for the other workers. Even though all that would happen was Dennis would yell at Tommy for something or other, it always seemed to put Tommy in an even more of a bland mood for the rest of the day.

With a breathy sigh that tickled his nose, Tommy untensed his shoulders in an attempt to just relax. Something that he hadn't done in a while.

He brought a stray hand up to fix the mandatory paper had resting atop his butter blonde curls, praying that it wouldn't fall off midst-skate. I mean, its not like his uniform could get any worse. So why not just embrace the suck! At least, thats what his best friend Ranboo would say.

But something in the corner of his vision made the semi-conscious teenturn his head. The crackling audio of a news reporters voice raitationg from a small T.V hanging on the kitchens outer walls.

"-we are here on the scene where the weel known menace "Vilbur" has threatened to destroy in two hours if the hero "RacconInnit" hasn't shown his face. The area has been evacuated and details are still coming in, but there are reports of missing peoples still in the area. More on-"

Tommy has stopped listening the moment that the well dressed and heavily makeuped woman with a microphone on the T.V had mentioned missing persons. The sound of teeth grinding against each other was the only thing Tommy could hear as he started holes into the grainy picture.

"O' fuckin course this has to happen now!" He seethed to himself, balling up his calloused hands in a fist and resisting to urge to sprint over and throw a temper tantrum at the screen. "The one day I wanted a break and this lil shit had to crawl out of whatever slimy asshole he popped out from an-"

While the rage filled boy continued to rant and curse to himself, your kind narrator decided to fill the dear readers in on some important backstory regarding the man character.

Tommy did not choose to be called RacconInnit. Tommy did not choose to spend over half of his waking hours fighting the same fucking villian over and over again. Tommy did not choose to wake up one day and be thrown head first into the secret life of being a superhero.

But here he was. Seventeen and doubling two separate lives at once. During the day he was Tommy, deliverer of burgers and friends. And by night...he was just sleepy Tommy. Not much going on there. Most of the superhero stuff he was involved in happened around noon. It was like his arch nemesis had a bedtime, actually.

Speaking of arch nemesis-

Tommy looked back at the news report to see a shaky camera angle of Vilbur. He was sitting on a parked car, idly swingin his legs off the hood. His signature outfit of a leather brown trench coat fluttered around his feet as he kicked them. A crusty blood stained bandage wrapped around his head surveyed the insanity.

He had curls of hazelnut brown falling in front of sharp silver rimmed glasses. (Tommy would know that they're sharp; he got shanked with them once) Two glowing eyes of mischievous amber peeked out from behind the many layers of disguise, only further amplifying the smirk that painted his chapped and bloodered lips. It looked like he had had a nice cup of blood with his afternoon lunch.

Vilbur was the only person who could get under Tommys skin more than Dennis. Or anyone, for that matter. The man dosent even wear a fucking mask, and somehow Tommy still dosent know his secert identity. After hours of scouring the internet on his shift breaks, nights at home, and even trips to the grocery store Tommy always managed to come up empty handed as to who VIlbur could be.

The seemingly age-old rivalry between RacconInnit and Vilbur was well known throughout the bustling city of L'manburg. It was almost poetic, the similarities between Tommy and RacconInnit. How at work he and Dennis would clash, only for Tommy to rush off afterwards in a suit of his own design to fight yet another infuriating shitstain on the bedsheet of life. Different parallels in the same universe, he supposed.

As soon as the poorly visible image of Vilbur had disappeared (probably due to the restaurant's internet connection from 2003 that Dennis refused to change for "budget cuts") it faltered, the audio from the speakers crackling out. Taking Tommys connection to the dire situation with him.

"Tommy!" A familiar and booming voice shrieked.

His punching at the air vengeful quickly changed to Tommy fishing desperately in his uniform's tight back pocket for a phone. Bringing up a cracked and battered screen, his blue eyes scanned the time that read "11:47"

Okay. He had time.

"TOMMY!" His name was called again, yet this time much closer. Almost directly in his ear in fact. Tommy would have jumped ten feet in the air if not for the fact that he was used to loud noises. Comes with the whole, super, job and all. After all, dodging punches and sliding under cars weren't the quietest of activities.

Two hairy knuckled hands grabbed Tommy harshly by the shoulder blades and spun him round until he was staring straight at the swamp green eyes of Dennis.

"I have called your name five times boy!" He spat loudly, a few flecks of saliva splattering Tommys face as he resisted the urge to wipe it away. "I even muted that damn T.V so you would stop your mindless fuckin staring and listen! Do I need to take that phone away too?"

Tommy had a few choice words to say between the hot and putrid breath hitting his face, to the way Dennis' eyes glowed with the same malicious intent that he had seen Vilburs.

But Tommy held his tongue and swallowed those words.

"No sir." He said with a robotic tone. "I won't do it again, sir" He hastily added the last part as a means to get his attacker to back off and leave him alone.

Dennis scrunched up his nose and searched his tone for any type of sass, but when he found none let out a disappointed grunt and released his grip on Tommys shoulders.

"You're lucky the inspectors coming today. Otherwise I'd dock your pay even more."

That sparked an interest inside of Tommy. (Not the money part- he got told that every other day.)

"Inspector? What do you mean?"

"The health inspector, dumbass. They come around once every year to make sure this place is good enough for their standards. Normally I'd be brushing this off, but this year they wanted to get the eymployees-" Dennis said that word as if it were filled with poison "-opinions too. Apparently they brought in a new inspector and everything."

Tommy's ears perked up a little bit, this fact not going unnoticed by Dennis.

"Don't get your hopes up Minecraft." He sneered. "The inspector hates this place more than I do you. And with the amount of air floating around in that brain of yours it'll be no surprise to me when they lay you off."

And with that his perky posture deflated once more. Not necessarily out of disappointment, just the regular promise of a shitty day looming over him.

Dennis opened his mouth, assumingly to berate Tommy more, but it wouldn't have mattered. The sound of a car pulling up cut through his words like a hot knife. Tommy tore his eyes away from the frustrating manager and his harsh words to see a shiny silver car, looking way too important to be at a place like this.

The ignition was cut off by someone tuning the keys from inside tinted windows. Some muffled talking came from inside (it seemed as if there were two voices) before the driver side door slowly swung open. Out of the front popped out a very shrewd looking woman. She had hair as silver and shiny as the bar she had pulled up in, the locks twisted into a tight bun at the peak of her head. Her sharp nose and wrinkled frown elicited a shiver to run down Tommys spine. A stiff pencil skirt and button up blouse clinging to her skin like tightly pulled bow's made Tommy think she would be of more use as an intimidating vice principal than anything.

Heels clicked sharply against broken concrete as she started to walk over to Dennis, as well as Tommy. Dennis straightened up and not-so-secretly kicked Tommy in the leg to do the same.

"Hello ma'am." Dennis said with a smile, although it didn't show in his eyes. Did it ever though?

"Hello Dennise." She sniffed back at him. Tommy had to bring a hand up to cover his small snort of laughter. Dennise? If he had called his manager that, you best be sure he wouldn't have gotten away with it.

A pair of cold beady eyes snapped to him at the sound that had barely escaped his mouth and grazed the ears of others.

"You think health codes are a laughing matter young man?" The lady addressed him icily, taking out a clipboard that he hadn't noticed before. Before Tommy could straighten himself out and plead his case, she whipped out a sharp blue pen from a pocket and lowered it to the page steadily. But not before a hand flew out of nowhere to grab it.

"Woah woah woah Miss! There's no need to do a report on this fine fellow. I'm the one that's supposed to be interviewing the employees, remember?"

Tommy titled his head in just the slightest bit to locate where the new voice, along with hand, had come from. His curious cerulean eyes eventually landed on a smaller figure standing just enough behind the supposed inspector to be hidden from sight.

He continued to watch as they stepped out from her shadow with a relaxed smile, looking way more laid back about their job than their co-worker.

"(Y/n)." The inspector snapped with barely hidden annoyance. "How many times must I drill this into that head of yours. You are but a mere intern. You don't tell your supervisors what to and what not to do. Don't make me write you up again."

Tommy tried not to smile as the teen (at least who he assumed was a teen. They looked to be the same age as him) raised a hand and pretend-fixed the invisible glasses resting on their nose. It was like they had just ignored the harsh words that she had tossed her way. Which they probably had.

"But alas my fair instructor-" They said with a fake snobby voice "-you forget that 'tis I who is supposed to be conducting surveys for further accuracy! By orders of the fair lady of course." At the last sentence they had bowed in the direction of the inspector, making fleeting eye contact with Tommy on the way and winking.

He had to resist the further urge to burst out laughing.

A scoff flew out of the older lady's mouth as they mumbled something about "kids not taking their job seriously". But the point was, they had lowered their clipboard and no longer looked interested in writing anything on it for the time being.

"Come along Dennise. We have much to discuss." The inspector changed courses, already walking in another direction with a head held high and an irritated Irish man following after her.

And then there were two.

Tommy turned back to the oddly theatrical person that had swooped in and unknowingly saved his as. Although, taking another look at how they had sent a wink his way, maybe they were more aware of the situation than he thought.

Shaking his head slightly, the teen steadied his thoughts to get a better look at them this time instead. Although he couldn't really judge them at all considering his first impression.

They had eyes filled to the brim with energy and silly attitude. Chapped and lips that looked slightly chewed on bloomed into a genuine and almost constant smile as their eyes scanned Tommy with equal amounts of curiosity. A graphic t-shirt with a pun printed on it along with one too many holes dotting the fabric complemented their simple black sweatpants.

"You know, your manager seems like a real ass." They spoked up.

Tommy liked this person already.

"Im (Y/n)." They presented a hand with chewed fingernails for a hand-shake, to which Tommy gladly obliged. "You seemed like you needed some help back there."

He chuckled a bit, rubbing the back of his neck and releasing their hand from his shake.

"Yeah, just a little bit if you couldn't tell." He joked. A small feeling of warmth filled his chest when they snickered at his words.

"Ah she's always like that, the old coot." (Y/n) waved it off, surprising Tommy with her choice of words. "I've been wearing away at her though. Like granite that woman is!" They shook their first at the sky, making eye contact with seemingly nothing before looking back at Tommy expectantly.

"Are you always like this?" Tommy questioned before he even knew the words slipped out of his mouth. He felt his eyes widen and hands come up as a sign of surrender.

"Wait no, I didn't mean it like that. I was onl-"

"Nah, it's fine dude." They cut off his stuttering. "I get it. Someone like me riding co-pilot with a hard ass like her in the health code industry? Yeah I'd be a bit confused."

He felt his posture relax at the understanding tone that (Y/n) held, along with the way they were looking at him with a calm and friendly face.

"If I'm being completely honest, I wanted to be a photographer. You know, catch all the action that happens downtown with a flick of my thumb." They mimed holding a comically large camera, pretending to angle around Tommy to get multiple shots of him.

"I bet." He laughed. "You'd probably get lots of candidates after all with the muggings and break ins-"

"No no no." (Y/n) put away the invisible camera, still committing to the act even though they changed the topic. "I wanted to go bigger. Get the superheroes and shit in action."

And there it was. That one word that would make Tommy's stomach wind itself off in preparation. He couldn't make it one day without someone or other unknowingly mention the idolized figures to his face.

It was even worse when Tommy looked directly into (Y/n)'s eyes and saw that they were lit up with genuine wonder.

"You wanna get their autograph or something." He asked with a much more bland tone. He couldn't tell if (Y/n) noticed his lack of enthusiasm though.

"What?" (Y/n) looked genuinely confused at his question, therefore confusing Tommy. "No. I just want to get action shots , maybe write a paper or two on them. Besides, who names their super identity RaacoonInnit."

With a laugh, Tommy jumped right back in where they had left off.

"Right!? Its such a stupid name! That's what I've been trying to tell people for ages!" He exclaimed with an exuberant grin. "I mean really? Racoon? Come on, even the villains have cooler names than that."

(Y/n) doubled over laughing at his words, even though they weren't that amusing to the speaker. They had to reach a hand out and place it on his shoulder to keep them upright, not knowing how Tommy stomach did a tirade of backflips at the firm grip.

"This dude gets it!" They twisted their head around to shout at no one, only garnering the pair of them weird glances and rolled eyes.

"But yeah! You're right!" (Y/n) said once more solidifying the claim that they wanted to be a photographer. "I mean, if only I was downtown right now catching that action. Vilbur is always a win." They paused. "For publicity I mean. Not RacconInnit."

Tommy froze as the words sparked a familiar thought in him.

(Y/n) watched as his head flew around, the paper straw wrapper in his hair falling out with the severity of his movements. (They had noticed the wrapper in his hair a while ago, but decided to to say anything thinking it was cute) (Y/n) followed his frantic blue gaze to the still muted T.V on the wall (which she hadn't known was there.)

Tommy yelped as he scanned the live feed. Vilbur wasn't sitting on a car hood anymore, he was tossing around tiny pieces of lit dynamite undercard with a pissed off look on his face. The camera filming him zoomed out a great amount, putting Tommy's subconscious at ease that the filmers were at a safe distance.

But it looks like two hours had passed by longer than he thought.

"Hey it was really great talking to you, I hope you got the information you needed but my shift is up and I really really need to go see you later byeee!" He rushed out his words, the sentence coming out in one big bundle of nearly indecipherable letters.

He turned around to rush off to the nearest bathroom to change into his suit and rush downtown, but was stopped by a hand on his arm pulling him back.

"Hey! Take this so we can talk later! I think you're really cool and need more friends!" (Y/n) said quickly, a large and unabashed smile on their face. "Now run! Run like the wind blonde boy!"

He felt a slip of paper being pressed into his hands before he saluted them with a goofy grin, running off once more.

Only once he had changed into his suit and was jumping from rooftop to rooftop downtown did he realize.

"FUCK! I NEVER TOLD THEM MY NAME!"

I spent so long writing this, honestly, I couldn't be prouder.

This is my favorite thing that I've ever written. I'm actually crying tears of joy while posting this. Thank you to everyone who put up with my rants about this chapter. You mean a lot to me

Also, fuck Dennis. All the homies hate Dennis.

I head cannon that his apartment got blown up by Vilbur during the fight. >:)

-WayToSarcastic

#c!tommy #c!tommy x reader #dsmp #dsmp x reader #best thing ive ever written #part one #tommy superhero au #superhero tommy

[jeaneybean]

@beingatoaster So here’s my buggy playbook

First of all, sorry, this sucks to deal with. A lot. For me, I own a duplex and live in the top half and my downstairs tenants got an infestation that they ignored and they came up through the walls at me. So if you’re early on catching it you hopefully won’t have to deal with the haul we had. My apartment cleared up after a few months of treatment, but downstairs took a long while because they were literally beneath the baseboards.

-As you are aware bedbugs fucking suck. They’re nasty little things that are going to make you constantly on edge and feel awful. They are hard to get rid of and hibernate, so you’re gonna be paranoid for a while. So, this is gonna suck to deal with. -jazz hands- This part isn’t helpful, it’s just to affirm that things suck and it’s okay to feel bad about them.

-This isn’t your fault. You’re not dirty or gross or anything else that your brain might be telling you because society tells anyone who has bugs that it’s their fault. They’re very hardy bugs that can survive a lot and they can sneak ito your house from anywhere, from a hotel you stay in to a car you ride in. I saw one crawling across the gas station counter once. You just got buggies, don’t let it get you down more than you have to.

-When looking for an exterminator ask them about their guarantees and what they do if an infestation isn’t cleared by the initial sprays. My company came in and did three sprays (one every two weeks, it fucking sucked) and then every month after that did a maintenance spray until we felt comfortable that the bugs weren’t hiding. I can’t say anything about heat treatments because for the size of my house, they were too expensive to do. If you have breathing issues you’re gonna wanna be out of the house for about an hour after, and don’t sit on the furniture for a few hours. If you have pets, same deal. Get them out of the area and don’t let them on the furniture till it dries.

-The initial paranoia about all your soft stuff hits hard. We kept all our furniture (My friends eventually got rid of their bed frame with drawers and swapped to a wire one.) and our mattresses. But couches, chairs, all that, we saved. They’re going to go where you are when you’re sleeping a lot, so while a few might be in/on your couches or chairs, get them sprayed and don’t use them for a while and any survivors will come looking for you.

-Your bed is gonna feel like enemy territory for a while and I”m sorry about that.  I’m not sure what kind of bed frame you have, but the easiest ones to clear an infestation from are ones that have four legs. If you have a pedestal bed and you want to keep it, you may want to temporarily dissemble it, put it somewhere away from people, and have it sprayed and wait them out. Get a cheap wire one and use until you’re comfortable. Pull your bed frame from the wall, tuck any sheets into the bed and don’t let them drag on the floor. You can get these little plastic bowl things with sticky tape to put around the feet of your bed, and if you pull your bed away from the walls the only way the buggies can get t you is by a tactical drop from the ceiling which is pretty rare for them to do.

- So your mattress gets it’s own little sub heading. I couldn’t afford to buy one because spraying was expensive and I was broke. So if you wanna keep your mattress you’re gonna wanna spring for one of the mattress encasement. I got mine off of amazon, they’re basically thick mattress... bags that have a zipper that you zip tie closed. I had my mattress sprayed once, put that on, and I’ve never looked at it again. You’ll need one for a box spring too if you have one of those. I also got ones for my pillows. To avoid spraying those since, y’know, face full of pestistice is bad, I started tossing my pillows in the dryer for an hour whenever the bug spray came. Bugs don’t like high sustained heat or sudden sustained cold.

- For anything washable that you’re worried might have bugs, wash on high heat and dry on high heat for an hour. Bedbugs can adapt, but the can’t deal with sustained heat. For anything not washable that you’re worried about, put it in the freezer and leave it there for a few days. They can adapt, but sudden sustained cold kills them rather than has them hibernate. If it can’t be washed and it can’t fit in the freezer and it can’t be sprayed, isolate it. Keep it in a contained space that you use less frequently until about a year has passed.

-I know some peope have had good luck with using dimatecous earth in problem spots (I know my friends were using it around their bed) but I personally didn’t use it so I can’t judge.

IThis is about all I can remember, I’m also super tired so if I missed anything or if you have any questions, holla

[kookie-doughs]

Y/N L/N AND THE HALFBLOODS

Percy Jackson X Reader -Y/N L/N met Percy Jackson and everything was now ruined.

CHAPTER 11: Prepare For Trouble And Make It Double

In a way, it's nice to know there are Greek gods out there, because you have somebody to blame when things go wrong. For instance, when you're walking away from a bus that's just been attacked by monster hags and blown up by lightning, and it's raining on top of everything else, most people might think that's just really bad luck; when you're a half-blood, you understand that some divine force really is trying to mess up your day. Which was actually what's happening. So there we were, Annabeth, Percy, Grover and I, walking through the woods along the New Jersey riverbank, the glow of New York City making the night sky yellow behind us, and the smell of the Hudson reeking in our noses. Percy and I walked side by side with our hand still connected. Grover was shivering and braying, his big goat eyes turned slit-pupiled and full of terror. "Three Kindly Ones. All three at once. I was pretty much in shock myself. The explosion of bus windows still rang in my ears. But Annabeth kept pulling us along, saying: "Come on! The farther away we get, the better. "All our money was back there," Percy reminded her. "Our food and clothes. Everything." "Well, maybe if you hadn't decided to jump into the fight—" "What did you want me to do? Let you guys get killed? I was not going to leave Y/N." "You didn't need to protect me, Percy. I would've been fine." "Sliced like sandwich bread," Grover put in, "but fine." "Shut up, goat boy," I said. Grover brayed mournfully. "Tin cans... a perfectly good bag of tin cans." We sloshed across mushy ground, through nasty twisted trees that smelled like sour laundry. After a few minutes, Annabeth fell into line next to Percy. "Look, I..." Her voice faltered. "I appreciate your coming back for us, okay? That was really brave." "We're a team, right?" She was silent for a few more steps. "It's just that if you died... aside from the fact that it would really suck for you, it would mean the quest was over. This may be my only chance to see the real world." The thunderstorm had finally let up. The city glow faded behind us, leaving us in almost total darkness. Do you want to see?

Yeah that would be nice.

It was as if it was morning, I could see everything clearly. I wandered my head to make sure I could see everything. This is cool. "You okay?" Percy asked. "Yeah," Not really a fan of the current silence I turned to Annabeth. "You haven't left Camp Half-Blood since you were seven?" I asked her. "No... only short field trips. My dad—" "The history professor." "Yeah. It didn't work out for me living at home. I mean, Camp Half-Blood is my home." She was rushing her words out now, as if she were afraid somebody might try to stop her. "At camp you train and train. And that's all cool and everything, but the real world is where the monsters are. That's where you learn whether you're any good or not." If I didn't know better, I could've sworn I heard doubt in her voice. "You're pretty good with that knife," I said. "You think so?" "Yeah maybe you can teach me some tricks. "Anybody who can piggyback-ride a Fury is okay by me." Percy smiled. I couldn't really see, but I thought she might've smiled. "You know," she said, "maybe I should tell you... Something funny back on the but..." Whatever she wanted to say was interrupted by a shrill toot-toot-toot, like the sound of an owl being tortured. "Hey, my reed pipes still work!" Grover cried. "If I could just remember a 'find path' song, we could get out of these woods!" He puffed out a few notes, but the tune still sounded suspiciously like Hilary Duff. Seeing a tree coming up I tried to pull Percy to avoid it but Percy immediately slammed into a tree and got a nice-size knot on his head. I suppressed my laugh by covering my mouth which made Percy glare at me. After tripping and cursing and generally feeling miserable for another mile or so, I started to see light up ahead: the colors of a neon sign. I could smell food. Fried, greasy, excellent food. I realized I hadn't eaten anything unhealthy since I'd arrived at Half-Blood Hill, where we lived on grapes, bread, cheese, and extra-lean-cut nymph-prepared barbecue. This kid needed a double cheeseburger. >We kept walking until I saw a deserted two-lane road through the trees. On the other side was a closed-down gas station, a tattered billboard for a 1990s movie, and one open business, which was the source of the neon light and the good smell. It wasn't a fast-food restaurant like I'd hoped. It was one of those weird roadside curio shops that sell lawn flamingos and wooden Indians and cement grizzly bears and stuff like that. The main building was a long, low warehouse, surrounded by acres of statuary. The neon sign above the gate was impossible for me to read, because if there's anything worse for my dyslexia than regular English, it's red cursive neon English. To me, it looked like: ATNYU MES GDERAN GOMEN MEPROUIM. "What the heck does that say?" I asked. "I don't know," Annabeth said. She loved reading so much, I'd forgotten she was dyslexic, too. Grover translated: "Aunty Em's Garden Gnome Emporium." Flanking the entrance, as advertised, were two cement garden gnomes, ugly bearded little runts, smiling and waving, as if they were about to get their picture taken. I crossed the street, following the smell of the hamburgers. "Hey..." Grover warned. "The lights are on inside," Annabeth said. "Maybe it's open." "Snack bar," I said wistfully. "Snack bar," Percy agreed. "Snack bar," Annabeth joined. "Are you three crazy?" Grover said. "This place is weird." We ignored him. The front lot was a forest of statues: cement animals, cement children, even a cement satyr playing the pipes, which gave Grover the creeps. "Bla-ha-ha!" he bleated. "Looks like my Uncle Ferdinand!" We stopped at the warehouse door. "Don't knock," Grover pleaded. "I smell monsters." I turned to look at my knife. It had a light glow emitting from it. Probably because it was sheathed. "I think there's monsters." I was now reluctant and sided with Grover. "Grover's nose is clogged up from the Furies," Annabeth told him. "All I smell is burgers. Aren't you hungry?" "Meat!" he said scornfully. "I'm a vegetarian." "You eat cheese enchiladas and aluminum cans," Percy reminded him.. "Those are vegetables. Come on. Let's leave. These statues are... looking at me."

"Percy, I don't think---"

"It'll be fine." Percy took my hand and went in. Be careful and don't look. Then the door creaked open, and standing in front of us was a tall Middle Eastern woman—at least, I assumed she was Middle Eastern, because she wore a long black gown that covered everything but her hands, and her head was completely veiled. Her eyes glinted behind a curtain of black gauze, but that was about all I could make out. Her coffee-colored hands looked old, but well-manicured and elegant, so I imagined she was a grandmother who had once been a beautiful lady. >Her accent sounded vaguely Middle Eastern, too. She said, "Children, it is too late to be out all alone. Where are your parents?" "They're... um..." Annabeth started to say. "We're orphans," I said. "Orphans?" the woman said. The word sounded alien in her mouth. "But, my dears! Surely not!" "We got separated from our caravan," Percy said. "Our circus caravan. The ringmaster told us to meet him at the gas station if we got lost, but he may have forgotten, or maybe he meant a different gas station. Anyway, we're lost. Is that food I smell?" "Oh, my dears," the woman said. "You must come in, poor children. I am Aunty Em. Go straight through to the back of the warehouse, please. There is a dining area. We thanked her and went inside. Annabeth muttered to Percy, "Circus caravan?" "Always have a strategy, right?" "Your head is full of kelp." The warehouse was filled with more statues—people in all different poses, wearing all different outfits and with different expressions on their faces. I was thinking you'd have to have a pretty huge garden to fit even one of these statues, because they were all life-size. I was anxious so I tighten my grip on Percy.  It's stupid for walking into a strange lady's shop like that just because we were hungry. For a child of Athena, Annabeth sure isn't making wise decisions. I mean yeah I agree, you've never smelled Aunty Em's burgers. The aroma was like laughing gas in the dentist's chair—it made everything else go away.  But Grover's nervous whimpers, and the way the statues' eyes seemed to follow me, to add the fact that Aunty Em had locked the door behind us. Made me more cautious. Sure enough, there it was at the back of the warehouse, a fast-food counter with a grill, a soda fountain, a pretzel heater, and a nacho cheese dispenser. Everything you could want, plus a few steel picnic tables out front. "Please, sit down," Aunty Em said "Awesome," Percy said. "Um," Grover said reluctantly, "we don't have any money, ma'am." Aunty Em said, "No, no, children. No money. This is a special case, yes? It is my treat, for such nice orphans." "Thank you, ma'am," Annabeth said. Aunty Em stiffened, as if Annabeth had done something wrong, but then the old woman relaxed just as quickly, I had to turn to Annabeth to check if there was something wrong with her.. Quite all right, Annabeth," she said. "You have such beautiful gray eyes, child."  I wonder how she knew Annabeth's name, even though we had never introduced ourselves. "Percy, I want to leave..." I whispered. "Just a few bites Y/N. Don't worry." He gave me a reassuring pat. Our hostess disappeared behind the snack counter and started cooking. Before we knew it, she'd brought us plastic trays heaped with double cheeseburgers, vanilla shakes, and XXL servings of French fries. I wasn't gulfing down my food like Percy was.  Grover picked at the fries, and eyed the tray's waxed paper liner as if he might go for that, but he still looked too nervous to eat. Annabeth slurped her shake. "What's that hissing noise?" he asked. I listened, but didn't hear anything. Annabeth shook her head. "Hissing?" Aunty Em asked. "Perhaps you hear the deep-fryer oil. You have keen ears, Grover." "I take vitamins. For my ears." "That's admirable," she said. "But please, relax." I don't like it here. I'm scared. Be wary of all things. Aunty Em ate nothing. She hadn't taken off her headdress, even to cook, and now she sat forward and interlaced her fingers and watched us eat. It was a little unsettling, having someone stare at me when I couldn't see her face, and I figured the least I could do was try to make small talk with our hostess. "So, you sell gnomes," I said, trying to sound interested. "Oh, yes," Aunty Em said. "And animals. And people. Anything for the garden. Custom orders. Statuary is very popular, you know." "A lot of business on this road?" "Not so much, no. Since the highway was built... most cars, they do not go this way now. I must cherish every customer I get. My neck tingled, as if somebody else was looking at me. I turned, but it was just a statue of a young girl holding an Easter basket. The detail was incredible, much better than you see in most garden statues. But something was wrong with her face. It looked as if she were startled, or even terrified."Ah," Aunty Em said sadly. "You notice some of my creations do not turn out well. They are marred. They do not sell. The face is the hardest to get right. Always the face." "You make these statues yourself?" Percy asked. "Oh, yes. Once upon a time, I had two sisters to help me in the business, but they have passed on, and Aunty Em is alone. I have only my statues. This is why I make them, you see. They are my company." The sadness in her voice sounded so deep and so real that I couldn't help feeling sorry for her. Annabeth had stopped eating. She sat forward and said, "Two sisters?" "It's a terrible story," Aunty Em said. "Not one for children, really. You see, Annabeth, a bad woman was jealous of me, long ago, when I was young. I had a... a boyfriend, you know, and this bad woman was determined to break us apart. She caused a terrible accident. My sisters stayed by me. They shared my bad fortune as long as they could, but eventually they passed on. They faded away. I alone have survived, but at a price. Such a price." Annabeth gave me a look of worry. I knew she realized something. "Percy?" I shook him to get his attention. "Maybe we should go. I mean, the ringmaster will be waiting." Grover was eating the waxed paper off the tray now, but if Aunty Em found that strange, she didn't say anything. "Such beautiful gray eyes," Aunty Em told Annabeth again. "My, yes, it has been a long time since I've seen gray eyes like those." She reached out as if to stroke Annabeth's cheek, but Annabeth stood up abruptly. "We really should go." "Yes!" Grover swallowed his waxed paper and stood up. "The ringmaster is waiting! Right!" "Please, dears," Aunty Em pleaded. "I so rarely get to be with children. Before you go, won't you at least sit for a pose?" "A pose?" Annabeth asked warily. "A photograph. I will use it to model a new statue set. Children are so popular, you see. Everyone loves children." Annabeth shifted her weight from foot to foot. "I don't think we can, ma'am. Come on, Percy—" "Sure we can," Percy said. "It's just a photo, Annabeth. What's the harm?" "Percy, I don't want to..."  "It's just a photo guys." "Indeed it is just a photo Y/N," the woman purred. "No harm." I could tell Annabeth didn't like it as well, but she allowed Aunty Em to lead us back out the front door, into the garden of statues. Aunty Em directed us to a park bench next to the stone satyr. "Now," she said, "I'll just position you correctly. The young girls in the middle, I think, and the two young gentlemen on either side." "Not much light for a photo," I remarked. But joke's on her I could see quite clearly. Don't look. "Oh, enough," Aunty Em said. "Enough for us to see each other, yes?" "Where's your camera?" Grover asked. Aunty Em stepped back, as if to admire the shot. "Now, the face is the most difficult. Can you smile for me please, everyone? A large smile?" Grover glanced at the cement satyr next to him, and mumbled, "That sure does look like Uncle Ferdinand." "Grover," Aunty Em chastised, "look this way, dear." She still had no camera in her hands. "Percy—" Annabeth said. "I will just be a moment," Aunty Em said. "You know, I can't see you very well in this cursed veil...." "Percy, something's wrong," I insisted. "Wrong?" Aunty Em said, reaching up to undo the wrap around her head. "Not at all, dear. I have such noble company tonight. What could be wrong?" "That is Uncle Ferdinand!" Grover gasped. DON'T LOOK. Annabeth turned to my direction, "Look away from her!" she then shouted. She whipped her Yankees cap onto her head and vanished. Her invisible hands pushed Grover and and I pulled Percy with me. We were on the ground, looking at Aunt Em's sandaled feet. I could hear Grover scrambling off in one direction, Annabeth in another. "Percy, we have to move!" I shook him. But he was too dazed to move. Then I heard a strange, rasping sound above me. My eyes rose to Aunty Em's hands, which had turned gnarled and warty, with sharp bronze talons for fingernails. Percy was about to look higher then her hands and I instinctively covered his eyes. "Don't look!" More rasping—the sound of tiny snakes, right above me, from... from about where Aunty Em's head would be. "Run!" Grover bleated. I heard him racing across the gravel, yelling, "Maia!" to kick-start his flying sneakers. "Percy we have to move please!" "Such a pity to destroy a handsome young face," she said soothingly. "Stay with me, Percy. All you have to do is look up." "Percy please!" Percy pushed my hand away and looked to one side. I turned to look as well and saw one of those glass spheres people put in gardens— a gazing ball. I could see Aunty Em's dark reflection in the orange glass; her headdress was gone, revealing her face as a shimmering pale circle. Her hair was moving, writhing like serpents. Aunty Em. Aunty "M." How did Medusa die in the myth? But I couldn't think. Something told me that in the myth Medusa had been asleep when she was attacked by my namesake, Perseus. She wasn't anywhere near asleep now. If she wanted, she could take those talons right now and rake open my face. "The Gray-Eyed One did this to me," Medusa said, and she didn't sound anything like a monster. Her voice invited me to look up, to sympathize with a poor old grandmother. "Annabeth's mother, the cursed Athena, turned me from a beautiful woman into this." "Don't listen to her!" Annabeth's voice shouted, somewhere in the statuary. "Y/N carry Percy!" "Silence!" Medusa snarled. Then her voice modulated back to a comforting purr. "You see why I must destroy the girl, Percy. She is my enemy's daughter. I shall crush her statue to dust. But you, dear Percy, you need not suffer. We won't even hurt, Y/N." I swung Percy's arm around my shoulder. But he was too heavy.  "No," he muttered trying to make his legs move... "Do you really want to help the gods?" Medusa asked. "Do you understand what awaits you on this foolish quest? What will happen if you reach the Underworld? Do not be a pawn of the Olympians, my dear. You would be better off as a statue. Less pain. Less pain." "Y/N!" Behind me, I heard a buzzing sound, like a two-hundred-pound hummingbird in a nosedive. Grover yelled, "Duck!" I turned, and there he was in the night sky, flying in from twelve o'clock with his winged shoes fluttering, Grover, holding a tree branch the size of a baseball bat. His eyes were shut tight, his head twitched from side to side. He was navigating by ears and nose alone. "Duck!" he yelled again. "I'll get her!" I tackled Percy to the other side. Thwack! Then Medusa roared with rage. "You miserable satyr," she snarled. "I'll add you to my collection!" "That was for Uncle Ferdinand!" Grover yelled back. Pulling along an out of a dazed Percy we scrambled away and hid in the statuary while Grover swooped down for another pass. Ker-whack! "Arrgh!" Medusa yelled, her snake-hair hissing and spitting. Right next to me, Annabeth's voice said, "Y/N! Percy!" Percy jumped so high his feet nearly cleared a garden gnome. "Jeez! Don't do that!" Annabeth took off her Yankees cap and became visible. 'You have to cut her head off." "What? Are you crazy? Let's get out of here." "Medusa is a menace. She's evil. I'd kill her myself, but..." Annabeth swallowed, as if she were about to make a difficult admission. "But you've got the better weapon. Besides, I'd never get close to her. She'd slice me to bits because of my mother. You—you've got a chance." "What? I can't—" "Look, do you want her turning more innocent people into statues?" She pointed to a pair of statue lovers, a man and a woman with their arms around each other, turned to stone by the monster. Annabeth grabbed a green gazing ball from a nearby pedestal. "A polished shield would be better." She studied the sphere critically. "The convexity will cause some distortion. The reflection's size should be off by a factor of—" "Would you speak English?" "I am!" She tossed him the glass ball. "Just look at her in the glass. Never look at her directly." "Hey, guys!" Grover yelled somewhere above us. "I think she's unconscious!" "Roooaaarrr!" "Maybe not," Grover corrected. He went in for another pass with the tree branch. "Hurry," Annabeth told him. "Grover's got a great nose, but he'll eventually crash." Percy took out his pen and uncapped it. The bronze blade of Riptide showed. He turned to me and gave the glass then offered a hand. "Percy you can't be seriously bring her along!?" "I'll go with him." Taking his hand, we followed the hissing and spitting sounds of Medusa's hair. I raised the glass so I could guide us. I kept my eyes locked on the gazing ball so I would only glimpse Medusa's reflection, not the real thing. Then, in the green tinted glass, I saw her. Grover was coming in for another turn at bat, but this time he flew a little too low. Medusa grabbed the stick and pulled him off course. He tumbled through the air and crashed into the arms of a stone grizzly bear with a painful "Ummphh!" Medusa was about to lunge at him when I yelled, "Hey!" We advanced on her. I had let go of Percy's hand to bring out my knife. So if she charged, I could help Percy. But she let us approach—twenty feet, ten feet. I could see the reflection of her face now. Surely it wasn't really that ugly. The green swirls of the gazing ball must be distorting it, making it look worse. "You wouldn't harm an old woman, Percy," she crooned. "I know you wouldn't." I could tell he hesitated. From the cement grizzly, Grover moaned, "Percy, don't listen to her!" Medusa cackled. "Too late." She lunged at him with her talons. I ran and raised my knife to block her talons, Percy then swung his sword, then we heard a sickening shlock!, then a hiss like wind rushing out of a cavern—the sound of a monster disintegrating. Something fell to the ground next to my foot. It took all my willpower not to look. I could feel warm ooze soaking into my sock, little dying snake heads tugging at my shoelaces. "Oh, yuck," Percy said. His eyes were still tightly closed, but I guess he could hear the thing gurgling and steaming. "Mega-yuck." Annabeth came up next to us, her eyes fixed on the sky. She was holding Medusa's black veil. She said, "Don't move." >Very, very carefully, without looking down, she knelt and draped the monster's head in black cloth, then picked it up. It was still dripping green juice. "Are you okay?" Percy asked me, his voice trembling. "Yeah," I decided. "Why didn't... why didn't the head evaporate?" "Once you sever it, it becomes a spoil of war," she said. "Same as your minotaur horn. But don't unwrap the head. It can still petrify you." Grover moaned as he climbed down from the grizzly statue. He had a big welt on his forehead. His green rasta cap hung from one of his little goat horns, and his fake feet had been knocked off his hooves. The magic sneakers were flying aimlessly around his head. "The Red Baron," Percy said. "Good job, man." He managed a bashful grin. "That really was not fun, though. Well, the hitting-her-with-a-stick part, that was fun. But crashing into a concrete bear? Not fun." He snatched his shoes out of the air. "I didn't know Grover got Luke's shoes."  Percy recapped his sword. "I can't fly." He shrugged.  Together, the four of us stumbled back to the warehouse We found some old plastic grocery bags behind the snack counter and double-wrapped Medusa's head. We plopped it on the table where we'd eaten dinner and sat around it, too exhausted to speak. Finally Percy said, "So we have Athena to thank for this monster?" Annabeth flashed me an irritated look. "Your dad, actually. Don't you remember? Medusa was Poseidon's girlfriend. They decided to meet in my mother's temple. That's why Athena turned her into a monster. Medusa and her two sisters who had helped her get into the temple, they became the three gorgons. That's why Medusa wanted to slice me up, but she wanted to preserve you as a nice statue. She's still sweet on your dad. You probably reminded her of him." "Oh, so now it's my fault we met Medusa." Annabeth straightened. In a bad imitation of my voice, she said: "'It's just a photo, Annabeth. What's the harm?'" "Forget it," I said. "You're impossible." "You're insufferable." "You're—" "You're both loud and stupid." I growled. "Yeah!" Grover interrupted. "You two are giving me a migraine, and satyrs don't even get migraines. What are we going to do with the head?" I stared at the thing. One little snake was hanging out of a hole in the plastic. The words printed on the side of the bag said: WE APPRECIATE YOUR BUSINESS! I was angry, not just with Annabeth or her mom, but with all the gods for this whole quest, for getting us blown off the road and in two major fights the very first day out from camp. At this rate, we'd never make it to L.A. alive, much less before the summer solstice. What had Medusa said? Do not be a pawn of the Olympians, my dear. You would be better off as a statue. Percy and I shared a look. We got up. "I'll be back." "Percy, Y/N," Annabeth called after me. "What are you—" We searched the back of the warehouse until I found Medusa's office. Her account book showed her six most recent sales, all shipments to the Underworld to decorate Hades and Persephone's garden. According to one freight bill, the Underworld's billing address was DOA Recording Studios, West Hollywood, California. I folded up the bill and stuffed it in my pocket. In the cash register I found twenty dollars, a few golden drachmas, and some packing slips for Hermes Overnight Express, each with a little leather bag attached for coins.  "Found one." Percy called. We went back to the picnic table, packed up Medusa's head, and filled out a delivery slip: The Gods >Mount Olympus 600th Floor, >Empire State Building New York, NY With best wishes, PERCY JACKSON <3 Y/N L/N "They're not going to like that," Grover warned. "They'll think you're impertinent." I poured some golden drachmas in the pouch. As soon as I closed it, there was a sound like a cash register. The package floated off the table and disappeared with a pop! "I am impertinent," Percy said. I looked at Annabeth, daring her to criticize. She didn't. She seemed resigned to the fact that we had a major talent for ticking off the gods. "Great, well Fred and George," she muttered. "We need a new plan."

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UwU bb I'm just licherali rippin off now srry -kookie-doughs

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@gayer-than-the-gayest-gay @the-natureofme @booknerd-3000

#Percy Jackson #Percy Jackson X Reader #Percy Jackson X Y/N #percy jackon and the olympians #pjo #luke castellan #Luke castellan x reader #Lightning thief #Y/N L/N #Y/N L/N and the halfbloods #Fanfiction #fanfictions #X Reader #Chapter 11 #Book 1

[noonachronicles]

The End of the F**king World Pt. 1

Byun Baekhyun X Reader

Word Count: 8k

Warnings: Language. Violent imagery if you squint.

Genre: Apocalyptic/Alien Invasion AU. Slow Burn (ish?). One pining pup and one idiot in denial to eventual lovers.

A/N: I mean, idk, but do I ever?  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Don’t forget to read the Prologue!

There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky, which left the sun free to beat down on every inch of the city. Showering it completely in light. It was nice, the sun, especially when it had been mostly dark and rainy for weeks. Basking in the light of the sun this city looked like every other city in the world. Absolutely every other city.

Cement sidewalks and asphalt roads with their gaping holes from where bombs and missiles had landed. Skyrise buildings half destroyed by fires or from flooding. Windows covered in plywood, plywood riddled with bullet holes. Not a business in sight that hadn’t been ransacked. Nearly every inch of wall space and every abandoned or crashed vehicle was covered in spray paint. Messages of hope for survivors, warnings about certain spots in the city, brief apologies and goodbyes from those who just couldn’t do it anymore. Plants, weeds, grass, and flowers growing through cracks in cement. Overgrowth in certain places making the city look like a literal urban jungle.  

Every major city in the world looked like this because every major city in the world got hit in exactly the same way. If not in the first wave then the second, and if not in the second then the third. And so on and so forth until they were all just empty shells of what they had once been.

The sound of your boots crunching against gravel and broken glass didn't even register to you any longer as you made your way down the empty street. Finally you found what you’d been looking for. A shop you’d noticed the other week but hadn’t had the chance to visit yet. The toy store was dark inside, left mostly untouched by looters except for the cash register. It had probably been busted open in the very beginning when people thought there would still be a use for money.

Old currency was rendered useless and the only survivors left now were the innovators, you thought to yourself as you peered through the window frame. It didn’t matter anymore what you had. Survival was about what you could do with what you found. The thought left you wondering how many people had walked past this shop without realizing its potential.

The storefront consisted of a three paneled window. Two of the panels had been smashed to nothing leaving an easy entrance into the store. The third window stood untouched, looking pristine. You rapped your knuckles against the completely intact glass and waited. It only took a couple of seconds. You could hear them before you saw them. A low hissing that sounded like getting the drool sucked out of your mouth at the dentists broke up with intermittent clicking. The sound either made your skin crawl in terror or it annoyed you. Today, luckily, it was just an annoyance more than anything else.

Grabbing the knife from the strap on your thigh, you focused in on the shadows of the aisles. There were two sets of four beady, silver eyes lurking in the dark. With a sigh you stepped through one of the broken windows and into the store. The hissing and clicking grew louder and more chaotic at your more obvious presence in the room. Resting the blade of your knife on your shoulder you made your aim. Then with a quick snap of your wrist the knife had shot through the air and projected into the shadows.

What happened next went fast, you knew it had to from your experience. As the first blade slipped from your fingers your hand had already dropped down to grab the second. The blade of the knife stuck between the four silver eyes and they went black. As the first grayish green, scaled beast fell forward into the light it’s counterpart opened its mouth wide to release a shrill shriek. The noise only pierced your ears briefly as you’d already thrown the second knife, the blade catching the beast in the throat. Those silver eyes drained to black as well and then it also fell forward into the light. Reaching into your pocket you pulled out your small flashlight and clicked it on. Quickly, you scanned the other aisles of the store for other Lurkers. You were pleased to find none.

First things first. You moved over to the cash register and searched the shelves of the rounded counter. As to be expected it was mostly tiny plastic trinkets at eye level that children would have instantly fallen in love with and would offer one last minute, desperate plea for. You did eventually find what you were looking for. There on the bottom self seated between a box of rock hard tootsie rolls and several bags of gummy worms that looked like they’d melted during the summer heat and then cooled into a blobby swirl of sugary color. A jar of, likely expired, blow pops. Tearing off the lid you shoved your hand in to grab one. You unwrapped it quickly and shoved the candy between your cheek and teeth with a satisfied sigh.

With your sweet tooth satiated for now you bagged the rest of the suckers as well as a jar of jolly ranchers. Then you went to pull your knives from the Lurkers you’d left bleeding out onto the linoleum floor. Placing one foot against the head of the first Lurker you tugged at the handle of the knife until the blade was released with a nasty squelch. You gagged at the sound, for some reason that was always the worst part for you, and moved to the second. With both blades freed from their victims you stood up and looked around your immediate area. Thick, black, gooey blood dripped from the blades onto the floor with little splats. On the shelf next to you there was a display of stuffed kittens with big, pitiful eyes covered in a thin layer of dust.

“Sorry, buddy.” you said snatching one of the kittens and swiping your blades clean against the soft fur before tucking them back into their holster.

You walked the front part of the store first, making a mental inventory of what was there that you would consider usable. On the other side of the room there was a spinning display rack that had been completely stripped of its contents except for one single package of batteries. That’s what you’d come in for.

“Fuck.” you muttered and snatched the lone package from the rack and tore it open.

At least you could replace the batteries in your flashlight, which had been functioning on borrowed time.

Once your flashlight was back at full power you started to make your way down the aisles. Continuing to take more notes of inventory, you searched for something that would be useful now. Dragging your finger through the dirt on the shelves you passed left a cleared line in its wake. You’d found baby dolls, Barbie dolls, and more stuffed animals. Princess dresses and plastic jewelry. There was plastic, silver tiara on one shelf, with little plastic jewels. You grabbed it and placed it on your head before continuing on.

Basketballs, tennis rackets, and skateboards lined the next aisle. The one after that had action figures and puzzles. You took a mental note to let Baekhyun know about the rack of lightsabers. Though considering how much trouble he’d gotten in the last time he had one you’d have to save both of you the trouble and tell him when Chanyeol wasn’t around. By then you’d nearly given up on finding anything when you reached the back corner and saw exactly the kind of thing you were hoping for. An entire display of toddler toys, each box with a red sticker and bold white letters that read, Batteries Included!

“Oh, jackpot.” you grinned, dropping your backpack on the ground and getting to work.

The first few months after the invasion were the hardest. The stress from uncertainty had aged everyone a hundred years. The four of you had stayed in the safe room for four days before venturing out. It took four days of Baekhyun and Chanyeol watching the security cameras endlessly and listening to the random frequencies the radio would pick up, trying to learn what they could, before they felt confident enough to open the door. It ended up being lucky because the night they decided it was time, was the night the electricity shut off for good. None of you slept that night. You just sat with the flashlight in the center of the room and waited for what you’d hoped would be enough time for there to be daylight outside.

It had to be daylight. If nothing else the guys had confirmed that the creatures never came out during the day. There were hoards of them during the night hours but there was something about the light that made them sensitive. Baekhyun had a theory that there was something wrong with their eyes. He didn’t think they could see or if they could they couldn’t see very well. He felt confident that their strongest sense was their hearing. He ended up being correct, you’d found out after watching them a little longer.

In fact they ended up being relatively ineffective threats once you’d figured them out. They were easy to maneuver around as long as there weren’t too many. They were blind as bats and pretty easy to kill if you got them in any of their softer areas which turned out to be anywhere on their necks and the diamond shaped patch between their eyes. The unfortunate part was that if you found one there were more than likely a dozen more and that’s when you’d find trouble. One or two were easy to kill. Even three was doable for a select few of you, if you were on your own. If you ran into a pack or you ran into them at night however, you were done for. They became chaotic attackers when they had the support of a hoard behind them. Like wild, rabid dogs they would tear their victim to shreds in a minute or less. Which was why they still terrified you even after three years.  

What you’d found when you walked out of the jewelry store on that fourth day was the complete destruction of everything you’d ever known. At that point almost everything still seemed to be on fire. Looters had come and gone, and were likely dead if they hadn’t gone into hiding in time. Buildings were still crumbling, sending debri crashing to the ground. Electricity was out everywhere but you did find that water was still running in some areas. You cried when you washed yourself for the first time in days. It wasn’t even anything nice. It was you in the bathroom of a coffee shop in your underwear, standing in front of the sink and wiping your body down with paper towels and hand soap. Still you cried. You’d cried a lot those first months, that whole first year really. You cried less these days.

Anywhere you walked you could see the creatures lurking in the dark, watching every move you made. Hissing, clicking and waiting for the sun to set. It’s why you’d all agreed they would be referred to as Lurkers, because that’s what they did. You didn’t go back to the jewelry store that night. You didn’t go back for more than a year. Instead the four of you collected food and what weapons you could before finding somewhere new and safe to stay. You did that every night for a week. You didn’t know exactly what Chanyeol and Baekhyun were looking for but you knew when they found it you could finally settle.

Hopping around from place to place is how you found Irene. She was a mess when you found her. Holed up in the corner of a broken cooler at a convenience store behind a barrier made out of boxes of beer. Trembling, sobbing, and dehydrated. It took hours for you to get her to even speak her name clearly. Later you found out her boyfriend had barricaded her in the cooler for her safety after he promised her he’d be back once he found his little brother. Then she watched him get torn apart by Lurkers through the cooler door while having to remain completely silent or risk being attacked herself. After that she joined your family, and the four of you became five.

As the days and weeks passed and you had become more comfortable and confident you started to explore the city. It was less for entertainment and done more so out of necessity. You needed supplies like food and weapons. The more you wandered and scavenged the more survivors you found. Groups of people like yours who’d been together since the invasion. As more people came out from their hiding spots obvious leaders showed themselves within your families, as your groups had been defined.

There were eight families and together you were the Community. The heads of each family met constantly in the beginning, trying to work out how best to work with one another and what they could offer each other. They all wanted to make sure that their families had everything they needed to survive without taking from any other families. In the end the city was separated into nine boroughs, a space for each family, each equal in square mileage. The ninth borough was the city center. All of the major arenas and theatres were there, all of the city's largest buildings. Underground parking lots at every corner. It was a hotbed for Lurkers. Entering any building was more than useless, it was a deathwish. Though it was safe enough to pass through during the day, so long as you stuck to the streets, by night it was wall to wall Lurkers.  

During the first year the Community met once a day after scavanges and doled out supplies. Each family took only what they needed and then the rest was stored by the original scavenger. After the first year half of the survivors were gone. Mostly loss came from accidents or illness. Things that happened that required a doctor, a doctor that you didn’t have. However on the rare occasion someone would walk outside in the middle of the night and scream at the top of their lungs.

Nobody thought them cowardly. It wasn’t an easy life, there was nothing desirable about it. You weren’t even sure where your own will to survive was coming from. It hadn’t been as if there was an expiration date on Lurkers. There was no timeframe for when this would be over. No ETA of your old life getting back to you. No visible end to the invasion. Still you woke up every day and you tried. When you went to bed you went to bed with every expectation of doing it again the next day.

After the first year the Community had become a well oiled machine. Everything had been so well organized. And there were so few people that supplies started to last longer and there was less of a need to meet up everyday. Now the whole Community only came together once a week for a check in. This week's meeting happened to be today.

Once you’d broken apart every toddler toy in the store and collected their batteries, you found a manager's office in the back. You sat down in the pleather chair and pulled your walkman out of your backpack, replacing the batteries that had been dead for a couple days. Having the sound of music flowing through you brought you a sense of joy and content that you couldn’t explain. It was the only thing you’d found since the invasion that could bring you any sort of content or calm. Without it your brain was constantly running a thousand miles a minute with worry and anxiety. You weren’t sure what you’d do when the city stopped providing you with AA batteries.

As the music played you twirled around in the desk chair a few times with a yawn, before deciding to check the room for supplies. There wasn’t too much, a couple things here and there, but in the bottom drawer of the desk you found five of the little airplane sized bottles of whiskey and a dusty, water warped copy of 50 Shades of Grey. After downing two of the little bottles you’d kicked your feet up on the desk and flipped open the book. Then, with a pretty good buzz brewing, you read aloud to an audience of two dolls, a stuffed monkey and three Batman figurines sitting on top of a file cabinet. The next thing you knew you’d amused yourself to tears and were late to the meeting.

Luckily you weren’t too far from the amphitheater where the meetings were held, just a handful of blocks away. You’d even tried to sprint it but were embarrassed to realize that the little amount of alcohol you’d had left you in less than peak condition. In all fairness it had been a while since you’d really had a drink. It had been a long while since anyone had indulged in a drink really. In the first few months a lot of people drank heavily as a way to cope and to avoid thinking about the reality of the situation. Reckless, unchecked drinking unfortunately led to a lot of accidents and those accidents led to the deaths of several people. There had been one night when a member of one of the bigger families drank half a bottle of tequila and didn’t close the door to their shelter well enough. That night twenty people were lost. After that it was rare for people to drink, it was even rarer for them to get drunk.  

The meeting had already started when you’d arrived. You could hear Chanyeol’s voice from outside the amphitheater as you stopped to catch your breath. Catching a glimpse of yourself in the reflection of a ticket booth window, you realized you were still wearing the toy tiara you’d found. Spitting the gum from your blow pop into some grass, you pulled the tiara from your head and shoved it in a trash can near the entrance.

Everyone was already there, which wasn’t a surprise but it was still embarrassing when they realized you’d just come in. Every head turned to look at you. Chanyeol, Hyunwoo, Jihyo, Taeyong, Solar, Hongjoon, Hanbin, and Seungcheol all sat in the center as the representatives of their families, silently watching as you made your way towards the group. You avoided eye contact with Chanyeol at all costs, ducking your head as you made your way to your usual spot next to Seulgi.

“You’re late.” she whispered as Taeyong continued with what it was he’d been saying in reply to Chanyeol.

“Obviously…” you whispered back, she pinched your side until you flinched, “Did I miss anything?”

She shook her head no and you both turned your attention to Chanyeol who had stood again to speak.

“General census has been that all families are low on food and the map doesn’t look great either, we’ve almost scavenged the entire limits of the city with the exception of the red zone. All food source locations are near depleted in zones with larger families, the others are getting close as well. Next week each family will send two members to the Farm for supplies and fresh food. Heads have been discussing that we need to put more focus on our own gardens around the city. We’ll be changing priorities from scavenging to gardening and livestock. The few of us who will continue to scavenge will need to...will need to start moving outside of the city.”

Unease ran through the group, and there was a steady hum of murmurs. Leaving the city limits was a nerve wracking suggestion because no one in the Community had left the city since the first wave. No one knew how things were out there. And of the very few people who had gone to scope it out, no one had ever returned. The only place the Community went that was outside of the city limits was the Farm.

The Farm was a huge compound on a stretch of farmland where an actual family had taken up residence. They had well stocked food storage, thriving gardens, and hoards of livestock. It was also protected under a massive security system. The family who lived on the Farm had come into the city not realizing it was occupied. When they found the Community and what you had to offer, they made a deal . They would exchange fresh fruits and vegetables, and eggs and meat from the livestock where they could spare it for fresh water which was the only thing they couldn’t seem to get steady access to. So twice a month the Community would send a group to collect the food supplies and drop off a water truck with a full tank.

Once the group had settled down after Chanyeol’s announcement there were still a few topics to discuss before the meeting was over. The end of the meeting really only meant that it was time for the group to break off into smaller cliques for further discussions and gossip.

“What if they don’t accept the water after the rain? That was a long stretch, they may not need it. What are we going to do without food?” You heard Sehun say as everyone talked over one another.      

You’d actually been pretty interested in listening in on that conversation but Chanyeol had sat down beside you. “You were late.”

“I know. I’m sorry, Yeol.” you looked up at him with your most convincingly innocent smile which only made him laugh.

“You know I worry. And worse, you know I had to hear about it endlessly from Baek.” he said, raising an eyebrow.

Nodding you pulled one of the suckers from your jacket pocket and offered it to him. “I got caught up and lost track of time. I’m sorry I made you worry. Forgive me?”

He already had the sucker unwrapped and stuck in his cheek when he nodded, “Forgiven. Just don’t be late back home. I don’t need you getting locked out.”

He patted the top of your head as he stood and you watched him take off. Seulgi who was talking in a group a little ways away saw him leaving and ditched her friends to chase after him. You frowned as you watched. It had turned out that they hadn’t been dating before the invasion like you thought. They’d definitely shared some pretty deep feelings for each other, but neither one had the nerve to make any moves. The invasion and imminent threat of death had apparently been the kick in the ass they’d needed to confess their feelings to each other. Still, of everything that had happened over the last few years the one thing you couldn't wrap your head around was people getting attached to each other. You just couldn’t understand falling in love.

Over the last three years the Community had lost so many people from death and disappearance. You had lost so many people. All your friends and family from before the first wave were just gone. Any family and all of your other friends. They were all dead as far as you knew. You would never get to say goodbye, never get to tell them how much you loved them. The hardest out of all of them to get over was Siwon. Things weren’t always perfect between the two of you but you’d been together for five years. As far as you had been concerned he’d been it for you. You’d been ready to spend the rest of your life with him, if he’d ever gotten the chance to ask you to. You’d imagined a future with him, buying a house and starting a family. Then in one day you had it all ripped away from you and the pain of it had been unbearable. You didn’t have a future, you didn’t have love. You didn’t even want it anymore. All you had and all you needed was to survive.

You couldn’t see the appeal of falling in love with someone who could be torn from you at any moment. Or intentionally putting yourself through the eventual pain of loss. You didn’t even like that you had to worry about losing Seulgi. The chance of risk versus the low reward just didn’t seem worth it to you. However, Seulgi was happy and as much as you didn’t understand giving your love to anyone anymore, you were happy for her. She was happy. She had a reason to keep going, and that’s all you could really ask for her or anyone else for that matter.

Throwing your backpack over your shoulder you waved goodbye to the others that were left and took off back up the stairs alone. Outside of the amphitheater you saw Hyunwoo chatting with Hanbin and Baekho, while Taemin and Jongin waited nearby. When he saw you Hyunwoo smiled and said something to the others before hurrying over to where you had been walking.  

“Hey,” he said, catching up to you.

“Hi.” you grinned.

“Hold up a second, I have something for you.” he said, grabbing your elbow.

You stopped walking and turned towards him, “For me? Why?”

“You know why.” he smirked. He moved closer to you so there was hardly any space between your bodies. One of his hands reached into his jacket and he pulled out a small, square, gold box with a red ribbon wrapped around it. “I know you didn’t want a big deal made out of your birthday, but I had to at least get you something.”

“You really didn’t have to get me anything.” you assured him, turning the box over in your hands.

“Fine. I wanted to get you something.” he corrected, “Will you just open it?”

You tugged the ribbon from the box and lifted the lid. A tiny gasp escaped your mouth at the sight in front of you. “Hyunwoo…”

“It’s expired, but only by a few months.”

Your eyes had filled with tears so quickly you couldn’t stop the single tear from slipping down your cheek. “It’s so beautiful. I love it. Thank you so much.”

He grinned as you pulled the chocolate bar from the box. “Don’t share it with anyone, okay?”

“Oh don’t worry, I will not be sharing with anyone. Not even you so don’t ask.” you laughed and wrapped your arms around his broad shoulders. “Thank you so much. Seriously, it means the world that you would give this to me.”

“You mean the world to me.” he said quietly squeezing you back, and then he pulled away, “To us. You mean the world to all of us. You’re always doing so much for the whole Community, my two idiots especially.”

You were grateful for the excuse to look away from him, to look over at Taemin and Jongin as your cheeks burned with a blush. “It’s nothing. You know I love them.”

“Alright.” he cleared his throat and looked over at the still waiting Taemin, Jongin duo. “Get home safe tonight. I have to get the kids home for dinner.”

“You be safe too Hyunwoo, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Tucking your gift into the pocket of your backpack you smiled to yourself. Maybe...maybe you could see yourself with someone like Hyunwoo. You’d seen him in action, you knew he could handle himself well in a fight. He didn’t need to be protected or taken care of. You wouldn’t need to feel responsible for him all the time or to worry about him too much. Plus he was a sweetheart and absolutely gorgeous, which never hurt.

“What was that about?”

Pulled from the thought you looked up to see Baekhyun. He was sitting on a short, brick wall. His feet dangled from side to side as he chewed anxiously on his thumbnail.

“What was what about?” you asked as he hopped off the wall and fell in line with you as you walked.

“Whatever just happened between you and Hyunwoo.” He was trying to be casual about the conversation but you could feel the energy vibrating off of him.

You sighed, “Nothing, Baek. Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you guys like together? You never said anything. Are you going to leave us? Are you going to stay with his family now? It’s just guys over there, you know? What about Seulgi? Does she know? She’ll be really upset.” he rambled nervously.

“No, Baek,” you chuckled, “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not dating anyone.”

“What did he say? It looked like he gave you something. What were you hugging him for?”

“Baekhyun!” You growled looking over at him with wide eyes, “Breathe. Calm down. Christ.”

He did as he was told and shut his mouth. He stuffed his hands deep in his pockets and took a deep breath. “Okay. I’m chill. You still didn’t answer any of my questions.”

“Well you asked about twenty all at once…” you said sarcastically and looked over at him and his big sad eyes. “Fine.”

Pulling your backpack around to your chest you pulled the chocolate bar from your bag and handed it over to him. He grabbed the candy and flipped it over in his hands.

“Shit. This is like ...European chocolate.” he said in awe, “This is the good shit. I haven’t seen stuff this nice in…”

“Months.” you said quietly.

“At least.” He handed the bar back to you, “God, what did he do? Ask you to marry him with that thing?”

You laughed as you put it back in the bag and then swung the bag back over your shoulders. “No. It was just a gift.”

“A gift? What for?” he asked, kicking a chunk of cement off the sidewalk.  

Baekhyun wasn’t going to let it go. You’d spent enough time with him to know that about him. Taking a quick look around the street to make sure there was no one nearby you said as quietly as you could manage without whispering. “It’s my birthday.”

“Your birthday?” he shouted, his voice echoing against the towering buildings that surrounded.

“Shhh.” you hissed.

“Why? It’s really your birthday?” He asked looking wounded, “You didn’t say anything.”

“It’s not a big deal, I don’t want anyone to know. So please...just shut up about it.”

“Hyunwoo knew. Did you tell him?”

You groaned, “Yes, but it had been by accident. He wasn’t supposed to find out.”

Still he looked upset, “I’m sorry I didn’t know. I would have gotten you something.”

You rolled your eyes subtly. “It’s fine, Baek. I swear it’s fine. I didn’t want anything, that’s why I didn’t tell anyone.”

“No, I should have known already. I should have remembered from before.”

“I’m honestly glad you didn’t.”

“I just wish there was time for me to find you a good gift. I feel like a real jerk.” He sighed, “And Hyunwoo got you chocolate? Damn.”

“I promise you, it’s okay.” You assured him once more as he trudged dramatically down the sidewalk beside you.

Suddenly he lit up with a smile, “What about a joke? Can I tell you a joke? Have you had a really good laugh today?”

You grinned. Secretly you’d become pretty fond of his daily jokes. “That sounds like the perfect gift.”

“Okay…” you watched as his face turned quite serious while he thought of the best joke. “Got it. What do you call bees that produce milk?”

“I don’t know. What do you call them?” You couldn’t help your half smile at the fact that he was already chuckling at his own joke.

“Boo-BEES.” He said with the biggest, cheesiest smile.

The laugh came even if the joke was terrible. A real shoulder shaking, teeth out laugh.

“Oh my god, I hate you so much.” You continued laughing and he just smiled back at you.

“Good. I love you too.” He said, the same way he always did when you told him you hated him. “Happy birthday, Y/n.”

You blushed, the tiniest of blushes. “Thanks, Baek.”

“You’re welcome.” He sighed happily. Pleased, you assumed, that his joke had gone over so well. After that the rest of the walk back was comfortably quiet.

Cordially was a club downtown, or it had been before the invasion. It had been made wildly popular by its exclusivity. It was the only by-invitation-only club you knew of. They would hand deliver invitations every week. White cardstock with red embossment that red simply, ‘You are cordially invited”. Then on the back it either said Friday or Saturday to indicate what day your invitation was for. For a monetary fee an invitee could bring up to ten plus ones. The add-ons were where they really made their money. That and of course the alcohol.

The building was on the corner of tenth and main, which was the most popular area for high end restaurants and bars. It was a two story building that had been built originally for use as a concert hall. It had housed operas, plays, and musicals. Then it had shut down for a couple of years and came back renovated into a burlesque club. After that it became a venue for punk shows. For awhile after that it was a gay bar that played venue to drag shows. And in its final form it was Cordially.

Immediately upon walking into the building occupants would find themselves in what appeared to be one big empty hall. On one side of the empty, dust covered hardwood floor there was a short hallway that led to two restrooms and an office. The big empty space had previously been the dance floor. Along the back wall was a bar and on the other side of the dance floor, opposite the restrooms, was a staircase. Upstairs was a horseshoe balcony. There were two more restrooms, a half bar, and private alcoves that had been reserved for vip invitees who’d paid major money for the privilege. None of that was why the Cordially was so important to you. It was important because, technically, its final form was home.

“Honey I’m home!” Baekhyun shouted as you walked in through the main entrance. “Oh, I forgot...I don’t have a Honey.”

“Is everyone else here?” you asked, ignoring his comment, as you looked outside one last time as the sun set on your birthday.

He looked over at the dusty bar top where five shot glasses had been placed. Three were upside down, two were still rightside up. “Yep. everyone is accounted for.”

With a sigh you let the door close while you grabbed the two by four leaning against the wall. You slide the wood through the door handles, and secured the locks at the top and the bottom of the door, and as a last step unhooked the blackout curtains Chanyeol had installed. The room was still lit with the orange glow of sun through windows that lined the second floor. Moving passed the bar as he whistled a tune, Baekhyun flipped over the remaining two shot glasses. He stopped at the door on the farside of the bar and held it open as he waited for you.

“Thanks.” you said quietly before moving passed him and making your way downstairs to the dark basement.

“Anything for the birthday girl…” he muttered to himself as he shut and secured the door.

“Uh...Baek.” you said stepping cautiously down into the unusually pitch black room. “I thought you said everyone was here?”

“The glasses were flipped. Is there no one down there?” he asked as you felt him step behind you.

“No, everything is off and I can‘t see shit.” you complained, searching your pockets for your flashlight.

“Huh...so weird.” Baekhyun said flicking on his flashlight and illuminating the wall switch. “Hit the lights.”

Flipping the switch up illuminated the bright, white christmas lights that had been strung all across the basement ceiling. The room had also been decorated with streamers and balloons. Chanyeol, Seulgi, and Irene all stood in the center of the room sporting paper party hats and cheerful smiles. They’d been popping poppers and shouting happy birthday, but you could barely register it through your haze of emotion.

Baekhyun had come around you and put a cheap, cheesy sash that said Birthday Princess over your head along with a tiara on top of it. Chanyeol lit candles that had been stuck into the top of a stack of just-add water pancakes that had rainbow sprinkles mixed in. After a moment of genuine shock you realized they’d been singing the birthday song to you and were now waiting for you to make your wish.

I wish I was this happy all the time. You thought to yourself before blowing out the candles.

“I-” you chuckled lightly, “I’m speechless.”

“Do you love it?” Irene asked hopefully, “I know you don’t like to make a big fuss about this kind of stuff. I worried it would be too much.”

“Oh, no! I love it! Thank you,” you said giving her a hug and then giving one to Seulgi too, “I don’t deserve all this.”

“That’s not true.” Chanyeol said wrapping you in a tight hug before guiding you over to the couch where a large pile of gifts were waiting. “You deserve more.”

“Do you like your cake?” Seulgi asked, sitting down on the cushion next to you. “Isn’t it cute?”

You smiled reassuringly, “I really love everything. I swear. It’s perfect.”

“I made it, the cake, but it was Baek’s idea.” When you looked over at him he was leaning against one of the surveillance desks. His cheeks were a little flush as he smiled over at you. “It was actually all his idea. He did most of the planning and the work, but we all helped out a little here and there.”

“You really thought I forgot, didn’t you?” he asked, looking so proud of himself. It was only then you realized he’d been the one that had remembered the last two years. Of course it had all been a show. Baekhyun didn’t forget anything. “Oh man, I really got you so good.”

“Open my present first! It’s the best one!” Irene said with a grin as she shoved a flat, wrapped box into your lap.

After you opened it you laughed immediately and then pulled the diamond chandelier necklace from the box. It had been a running joke between the two of you over the past few years. Whenever a gift giving holiday rolled around the two of you exchanged frivolous gifts. Grossly expensive things that were useless at the end of the world.

“I...It’s beautiful. I can’t wait to have some fantastic event to wear this to. Thank you, Irene.” you grinned.

“I got it at that jewelry store on third street if you want to return it. The receipts at the bottom of the box.” she smirked, “But you should know it was twenty thousand dollars, and I think it’s going to look fantastic on you. You should wear it every day because every day we’re alive is a fantastic event.”

Seulgi’s gift was next. She dragged over a tall box that was wrapped up to look like a gift bag, and that was clearly very heavy. When you pulled the tissue paper from the top of the box you revealed no less than thirty bottles of your favorite shampoo.

“So,” she started, “I have spent the last six months during scavenges looking for this shampoo. I took every bottle from every store in the city that had any. Cherish them, they are probably the last bottles we will ever lay eyes on.”

“I love you, Seul.” you said as you wiped your cheek of it’s tears.

“Love you too, bestie.” She said squeezing you tight, feeling quite pleased.

“Alright, that’s enough of the lame gifts.” Chanyeol said, reaching over Seulgi’s lap to hand you his gift. “I hope you’re ready for a real gift, Y/n. Something actually useful and still very fun.”

“Shampoo is useful!” Seulgi said, pinching his arm, “Dick.”

You laughed at the two of them as they bickered and unwrapped his gift. It really did take your breath away when you opened the package. “Yeol...oh my god.”

“You know I don’t know anything about knives.” he said as you pulled one of the shiny silver blades from its sheath. “Sehun helped me. He promised they were the best knives in the whole city. He said you’d really love them.”

“They’re so beautiful, Yeol. Really, I’m...I’m so happy.” you sniffled as you tucked the knives back in the box, “I can’t even tell you how much I’m looking forward to being able to use them.”

“And!” Irene said enthusiastically, “We’re all giving up our wash time tonight, so it’s all yours.”

Cordially was one of the buildings in the city that still offered running water. The problem was that it was such an old building that too much use throughout the day caused the ancient pipes to groan and when they did it was less than quiet. The five of you learned early on that there was a certain length of time that the water could be used after dark without attracting Lurkers with the noise. That time was divided and a bit of time was allotted to each of you for any night time activities like cleaning up after a long day or even using the toilet.

“No.” you argued, “That’s too much.”

“Yes!” Seulgi said, shooting you a terrifying glare, “Take extra care with the shampoo I worked so hard to get you. Rinse and repeat, for once.”

“It really is too much.” you groaned.

“Just let me know before you want to go, Y/n.” Baekhyun said, and you realized he’d been unusually quiet this whole time. “There’s just one more surprise.”

The group refused to listen to your complaints about wash time so you let it go. Instead you all indulged in your pancake cake and talked about your days. After a couple hours had passed you had to switch from the beautiful lights overhead to your regular LED lanterns so that Chanyeol could turn the computers and surveillance equipment back on for nightly security checks.

Together Chanyeol and you checked the reports from other cities and the surveillance outside of your building as well as the water storage. After your first yawn hit you mentioned wanting to clean up and get to bed soon at which point Baekhyun disappeared upstairs for sometime. You’d been ready to give up on him and crash for the night without even washing when he finally showed up. You grabbed one of your new shampoos, a towel and pajamas before following him quietly upstairs with your lantern in hand.

In the beginning you’d refused to leave the basement at night. The sight of the dark open dance hall creeped you out and you were always worried that there would be something hiding in the shadows. Ironically, it had been Baekhyun that had helped you out of your fear. You’d gotten into a pretty good system of making sure you’d done everything you needed to before the sun went down. It worked out really well for you at first.

That was until you, and everyone else, started to realize that things were changing. With every month that passed you realized that the invasion was having a lasting effect on weather patterns. Even now, after three years, they were unpredictable. Winter had come fast that first year. Sunlight was sparse, nights were seemingly endless. Some nights lasting literal days, as if the invaders were trying to force people out into the night to search for food and water, leaving them open and vulnerable for attack.  

It was one of those long winter nights that Baekhyun realized how uncomfortable you looked. He’d laughed at first when you told him you had to pee, but when he noticed the genuine fear on your face when he suggested you just go upstairs he stopped. You’d been so embarrassed, it felt silly that of all the things left to be afraid of, that the dark was what paralzyed you. Then he offered to take you whenever you needed and promised he wouldn’t tell anyone about your fear. That winter night lasted eleven days and every time you had to go to the bathroom or wanted to wash up, Baekhyun was there to take you. He’d check all the shadows and stand outside the bathroom until you were ready to go back down. Even if you shook him out of a dead sleep you  never heard a complaint.

It had been a long time since you’d needed someone to help you in the dark. On several occasions you’d even gone on scavenges at night. Like for the past four weeks when it rained all day everyday. There had been no sun but you also had no choice, your family needed food. So it seemed silly to you that he had offered to take you upstairs now. In front of the upstairs womens restroom Baekhyun stopped and held out his hand, “Lantern please.”

“I’m going to need it, Baek…” you whispered back knowing fully well the solar powered electricity that Chanyeol had set up didn’t run upstairs.

“Your lantern.” he requested once more, quietly, but sternly. With a deep sigh you handed him your lantern and he smiled brightly. “Thank you.”

He knelt down putting your lantern on the ground and picking up a container you hadn’t noticed before. Standing back up straight, he offered you the container.

“My gift to you.”

“You’ve already done enough.” you said taking the container, “Your stupid joke was more than enough for me.”

“Then this will just be the cherry on top.”  he grinned, “Open it.”

You pulled open the lid of the container to find actual cherries. Cherries, strawberries, and blueberries to be exact. “How? I thought we were out of fresh food until the Farm trip?”

“I’ve been stockpiling my portions for you.”

“No, absolutely not. I can‘t accept this, Baekhyun.” you said shoving the container back towards him.

“You have to. I won’t eat it. I’ll let it all go to waste.” he shook his head defiantly, and you knew he was telling the truth. “It’s yours now.”

“Here,” Pulling open the lid once more you searched for the biggest piece of fruit you saw. You held the strawberry up to his lips. “Just eat one. I won’t be the reason your dumbass gets scurvy.”

He smiled happily, “Okay.”

You moved the fruit closer to his mouth and watched him wrap his lips gently around the fruit, you gulped at the sight but he didn’t seem to notice. “Do I get my lantern now?”

He shook his head as he chewed and swallowed down the berry, “Just go in, you won’t need it. I’ll wait out here on guard, You can have your lantern after.”

You looked at him suspiciously before turning to the door. With your fruit and your shampoo in hand you pushed the door open. You inhaled sharply at the sight. The entire makeshift shower room had been covered in candles and wildflowers. It was the most beautiful display you could ever remember seeing in your life.

“Baekhyun…” you whispered his name, not really knowing what else to say.

When you turned back to him he was smiling from ear to ear and he asked very hopefully, “Better than chocolate?”

You may have rolled your eyes but your smile and bright glow said everything he needed to hear, “I hate you.”

“Ah,” he blushed, “I love you too.”

#byun baekhyun scenario #baekhyun scenario #exo scenario #kpop scenario #TEOTFW #do we hate this? I feel like maybe we hate this.

[twiistedgalaxies]

Genesis: Chapter 4: Arrival

How two brothers can take two opposite paths. How a man can be made into a monster and how the other must pay the ultimate price to save everything he knows and loves. Or, alternatively: The origins of All for One and One for All.

Previous Chapter

First Chapter

        The Our Lady of Perpetual Help Orphanage was a dilapidated, angular building with sagging windows and chipping, sun bleached paint. It was two stories, the windows were small, and it had rose bushes in the parking lot that were withering and dying, despite the winter rains. This is what Tomura saw as he peeked out from the car window, worrying his bottom lip.

        “Alright brats,” Their driver barked, a man in his late thirties who smelled perpetually of nicotine and bourbon, “Get outta here, I got places to be an’ people to see.”

        He heard the car door click behind him as his brother disembarked. Tomura, however, hesitated. Was this really it? The pamphlets the social worker had pushed towards them had shown something more… not this.

        “C’mon, hurry up!”

        “Sorry,” he squeaked, pushing himself and his bag out of the car. He stood on the sidewalk, hands twitching nervously.

        “Are you alright?” His brother asked, eyebrow raised but a smile on his lips, clearly amused.

        Tomura felt his face flush and they began to walk towards the entrance, “Stellar. So what do you think the orphanage will be like? The pamphlet said there’ll be a recess area and shared meals and that we’ll have our schooling here and-”

        “Well, whatever it’ll be like, the pamphlet was clearly lying,” Hisashi’s face darkened, “Just try not to do anything I wouldn’t and you should be fine.”

        As if that statement wasn’t ridiculously vague. “Okay.”

        They pushed open the front double doors to the orphanage, revealing a shoddily lit front room. It was tiny, consisting of a single helpdesk, a folding chair by the wall, and a sad snake plant. A stern looking woman sat behind the desk, her features were angular and pinched, like a bird that had tasted something sour.

        "I presume you are the Shigaraki brothers?" the woman asked, voice high pitched and nasally.

        "Yes?" Tomura said, though it came out as more of a question than an answer.

        "You're late," the woman sneered.

        “Sorry,” he mumbled. Next to him, his brother gave a polite, albeit strained, smile.

        She stood up with a huff, “Come, I’ll have one of the children show you around.” They stepped through a door and walked down a long, carpeted hallway. The air smelled sharp, like mildew. “I’m Matron Abra, the head of this fine establishment. I will tolerate no horse-play, no dilly-dallying, and no backtalk. Tomorrow you will be given a schedule by which you eat and breathe, if you’re caught one toe out of line the punishment will be severe, understood?”

        Tomura nodded, biting his tongue to keep from protesting. This is ridiculous!

        “Say ‘Yes Matron’, I won’t put up with such disrespect,” she scowled.

        “Yes Matron,” the brothers chorused. Hisashi looked at her like she was a particularly nasty piece of gum stuck on the sole of his shoe.

        They arrived at the doorway of what appeared to be a classroom. A large chalkboard was at the front of the room, and desks were lined up in neat rows. The furniture was beaten and battered to hell, seeming to have taken many years of constant abuse. Despite being packed with children, the room was quiet. Eerily so. The stout, balding man at the front of the room paused his lecture to greet the matron.

        “Ah, Matron Abra! What a pleasure to see you,” he stammered, looking as wide-eyed and fidgety as his students.

        “Can it, Stewart, I need to borrow one of your brats.”

        “I- Why of course, who do you need?”

        Abra looked down at the class over her narrow, crooked nose, “Any of them will do, as long as they’re capable of basic tasks.”

        Stewart’s eyes swept the room, “Leo,” he barked, gesturing at a blonde teen in the back of the room, “You’re excused from class, just do as the matron says.”

        The boy nodded and hastily gathered his things before making his way towards the door. It shut behind him with a click.

        “I trust you’ll be able to show these two around competently, yes?” the matron said in a clipped manner.

        “Yes ma’am, but what about-”

        She cut him off, “Good. When you’re done bring them to the boys’ room and return to class. They’re to attend dinner after they arrange their things.” Abra strode down the hall towards the front room. Leo frowned at her retreating form, clearly frustrated.

        “Well, she’s uh..” Tomura began once she was out of earshot.

        “A witch of a woman?” Leo finished dryly, “The first rule of surviving here: avoid her as much as you can.”

        Hisashi quirked an eyebrow, “Why?”

        “Just trust me, crossing her is a bad idea,” Leo paused, “Anyways, I should probably give you two a tour, shouldn’t I?” He began to walk down the hall, gesturing for the two to follow, “The room you guys probably just came from is the reception area, it’s where we receive guests and stuff. Though, it’s not like we get any.”

        Tomura hummed, he couldn’t really blame people for avoiding this place, especially since he just saw a particularly monstrous looking cockroach skitter into a crack in one of the walls.

        “This hallway has two bathrooms and the classrooms. We’re split up by age, kindergarten through third grade share a class, fourth to sixth share one, seventh through ninth, and then tenth through twelfth.”

        “How do you learn anything like that?” Hisashi asked as he frowned, looking almost offended.

        “We don’t,” Leo coughed.

        They reached the end of the hall and stepped into a small room with ratty arm chairs and a stained rug. The walls were lined with ramshackle bookcases that were used more to store various knickknacks than hold any actual books. There was a large, imposing portrait of the matron hung over the brick fireplace.

        “This is the common area, we like to hang out here during our free time on rainy days,” Leo’s eyes lit up and he walked over to the shelves, he dug around and pulled out a monopoly box, yellowed with age, “A while ago, one of the other kids found this while they were out on an errand. We don’t get many games or toys, so… Anyways! If you want you guys can play a few rounds with us after dinner.”

        Tomura felt a smile dance on the edge of his lips, “Sure, that sounds fun, right Hisashi?”

        His brother shrugged noncommittally.

        “We’ll be happy to have you! So,” Leo gestured to a door to the right of them, “Down this hall is the eating area and kitchens. We haven’t been allowed in the kitchens since Matron Abra caught Thomas sneaking food.”

        Tomura winced at that.

        Leo pointed to a door to the left, “And this hallway leads to the two dorms, one for girls and one for boys, which is at the end of the hall. Do you guys have any questions?”

        “She said something about schedules?” Hisashi asked, arms crossed over his chest.

        Leo nodded, “Yeah, our day is split up between school and meals and such. She’s usually pretty strict about those, if she catches you somewhere you aren’t supposed to be you get in a lot of trouble,” he grimaced, “One time, I had to clean the gum off the bottoms of the dining tables for a month.”

        “How do we know which beds are ours?” Tomura inquired.

        “Oh, they should have a plastic name tag on them, just look for that. Unless you guys have more questions that’s pretty much it for what’s here. I should probably head back to class, if you need anything, let me know, okay?” Leo finished and went down the hallway they just came from. 

        “So…?” Tomura began.

        Hisashi hummed and headed towards the boys’ room, “We’ll be fine, like I said, don’t do anything stupid.”

        He followed his brother and stepped into the dorm. It was surprisingly large, but lined wall to wall with rickety twin beds. The floors were covered in dust, grime, and fading painted lines. On either side of the room were rusting basketball hoops. It took a little while of scouring the rows of bed frames before the duo finally found where they were meant to sleep. They were situated in the center of the room, bare and exposed for their peers to see. Tomura sat on his bed, ignoring the feeling of springs stabbing his butt, and pulled his stuff out of his bag.

        They were only allowed to take a precious few items with them. He himself had grabbed a few changes of clothes, toiletries, medication, joint braces, and a photo of his family tucked neatly into the pages of his favorite Captain America comic. Looking around, Tomura was at a loss as to where to put his things. There were only beds, no storage to be found anywhere. He hastily slid his comic under his mattress, and placed his hand on his chin as he worked out where to put his medical equipment. Glancing at Hisashi didn’t help, as the teen seemed to have already put everything away somehow and was lounging on the stiff bed with his phone. Eventually, Tomura decided to just shove his things back in his bag and place it on the foot of his bed until he found a better alternative. It’s not like the other kids could find much to do with joint braces anyways, so they were probably safe.

        Mimicking his brother, he pulled out his phone and checked his text messages. Since that night replies from Zach had grown less and less frequent, Tomura was worried, had he done something wrong?

                                                     4:50pm

                                                                                                                        [Hey]

                                           [You doing okay? Hisashi and I got to the orphanage.]

                                                                                                                        Seen

        Tomura heaved out a sigh. Figures. Still, ranting into the void was better than nothing at all, hopefully his friend would respond soon. Maybe he was busy?

                                                                     [The matron lady is suuuuper uptight]

                     [Man you should have seen her, she was like Mrs. Nott on steroids]

                                       [The social worker said something about our data being 

                                               cut off since our parents can’t pay our phone plan.]

                         [Talk to me when you can so we can move to Discord or smth :P]

                                                                                                                        Seen

        He flopped onto his bed with a groan.

        “You alright?” His brother asked, not looking up from his phone.

        “Yeah, I’m just really sore, and Zach’s ghosting me, and this is just all too much, ya know?” Tomura replied, throwing his hands into the air for dramatic emphasis and wincing as his elbows cracked.

        Hisashi sat up, eyebrows knitted together in a scowl, “Zach’s ghosting you?”

        He glanced over at his older brother, “Yes? But I think he’s just busy, this is our first year in middle school and finals are in a few weeks.”

        “Right.” the teen replied tersely, his focus returned to his phone. They sat there for a while like that, with Tomura reading web comics and his brother typing something into his device.

-@~*^*~@- 

        The dining hall was a large, rectangular room with high angular ceilings and stained glass windows depicting haloed figures. There were holes in the floor from where pews had been ripped out to make room for the lunch tables. It was loud with the chatter of children, both those who already had food and those standing in a line tightly wound around the room leading towards the kitchen door. The brothers sat at a table in the far corner of the room. Tomura tried desperately to eat the blandest mashed potatoes he’s ever had the misfortune of tasting to no avail. Hisashi, meanwhile, was chatting up a storm. While they were in line he had managed to somehow befriend most of the older kids. The preteen looked on at his older brother with envy. 

        “So how’d you all end up here?” Hisashi asked the others, a gleam in his eye as he leaned forward with mock-interest. 

        They were met with stories of drug deals gone wrong, of parents unable to afford to financially support their kids and dropping them off here, of parents leaving their children on the orphanage doorstep the moment they displayed the slightest hint of a mutation. His brother regaled them with the harrowing tale of the home invasion, painting a dramatic picture of their mother’s withered form in a hospital bed, surrounded by flowers.

        Tomura felt something catch in his throat. She was never given flowers. If he didn’t have an appetite before he certainly didn’t now.

        “How did you get that Monopoly board?” Hisashi asked, “I noticed it when we went in the common room, you don’t seem to have many toys, there must be a story there.”

        He frowned, hadn’t Leo told them already?

        One of the teens - a Hispanic kid, Jose - clapped another on the back, “That’s thanks to Rafi over here, he snuck out one night and found it in a back-alley dumpster, he smelled like garbage for weeks!”

        Rafi buried his head in his hands, “It wasn’t that bad!” he cried.

        Hisashi’s eyes narrowed slightly. He opened his mouth to say something, but Tomura didn’t hear. He got up to dispose of his food and wander into the dorm, fighting an onslaught of dizziness. He really didn’t feel good. Has the orphanage always been this cold?

        Tomura crawled into his bed, wrapping the cheap linen blanket around himself. He tried desperately to get comfortable but the thin mattress made such a task impossible. His face burned and itched. What the heck?! He closed his eyes and tried to sleep to no avail. At best he drifted aimlessly in inky black, at worst? The pain in his joints and muscles intensified into a shrieking crescendo.

        What had he done to bring this on? Tomura tried best he could to recall the events of the day, to a potential trigger of his flare-up, but he drew a blank. Sure, he’d been beyond stressed lately for understandable reasons, but that didn’t explain this sudden spike of agony. Had it been from wandering around the orphanage all day? Maybe, but the orphanage was really small, certainly not big enough to make his body do the electric slide of death.

        He let out a groan as the other kids entered the room, flicking on the harsh fluorescents and bringing noise with them. Tomura curled up on his side and pulled his pillow on his head in an attempt to muffle the outside world. There was a cold hand on his shoulder. He made a sound that came out like a whine.

        “Tomura,” His brother said, voice soft, “Did you remember to take your medications?”

        Oh. Whoops. In the blur of seeing the social worker and moving into the orphanage he must have forgotten. He shook his head causing the pillow upon it to shift.

        A sigh, and Hisashi rummaged through Tomura’s bag, “What am I going to do with you?” he muttered. “Hey Leo, can you come over here for a second?” the teen called. Tomura cringed at the sudden sound.

        “What’s up?” Leo asked.  A set of footsteps approached the pair.

        “I was wondering if it’d be possible to get my little brother some water, he needs it for his medication. The dumbass forgot to take it this afternoon,” Hisashi said, the last part teasing and aimed towards him. Tomura made a sound of indignation. 

        Leo hummed, “I can probably get a cup from the dining hall, hopefully the bathroom will be open.”

        “Alright,” Hisashi replied, “be quick.”

        The bed creaked as Hisashi sat by his side, “I take it you’re making a raincheck on Monopoly tonight?”

        Tomura rolled towards his brother, feeling his heart get caught in his stomach, he had forgotten about Monopoly, “No, I want to play.”

        His brother chuckled, “Not in this condition you won’t,” he pushed a long strand of white hair out of his younger brother’s face, then paused, “There’ll be other nights you can play.”

        Hisashi began to move his hand away from his brother’s face but Tomura grabbed it and moved it back. The cold skin felt nice against his burning, inflamed face. 

        “It looks like Leo’s back, sit up.”

        Tomura grumbled complaints, but sat up regardless, leaning against the metal bed frame. A plastic cup was shoved in his hands and he brought the cool liquid to his lips, “Thank you,” he said. Hisashi handed him his medications, and he downed them in one gulp. He pushed himself downwards to lie on his back. The lights of the dorms flickered out as the other kids settled down for the night. Tomura fell into a fitful sleep, to the sensation of his brother sitting by his side.

A/N: Woo! 2020 is over, thank the gods.  Updates may be a little slower because I am starting winter quarter classes this week, but I'll still try to get a chapter uploaded each Monday whenever possible. Next chapter should be Hisashi's POV, which I'm both dreading and excited to write. Please leave comments, feedback fuels my motivation!

AO3

Next Chapter

#bnha #mha #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #my hero academy #fanfic #fanfiction #my hero fanfic #fic #ao3 #ff.net #dad for one #all for one #one for all #genesis fic #pre-canon #pre-quirks #original holder of one for all #origin story

[insomniac-dot-ink]

Garden Walk

Genre: supernatural horror

Words: 3.7k

Summary: a young woman sees a figure strolling the gardens making an odd sound.

Ko-Fi ⭐Patreon ⭐ WordPress⭐Twitter

Content warning: slight blood and injury

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

There’s something eating the bees.

You read about the bees disappearing all the time in the papers and on the news every few years in big investigative reports. Usually, it’s all the same alarm and studies about colony collapse and human pesticides and disease spreading rapidly through hives. I know all that and I’m sure it’s real and dangerous and one of the many ways we’re hurting the planet.

But this is different. I know it is, I feel it in my gut and under my skin and throughout my nerves with this itchy burn.

I like to go to the library on my days off. I work in a Bath and Body works shop so my hours are pretty random and my days off vary from week to week.

Still, I usually managed to make time once a week to hop downtown and go to the Fairfield Public library. I either walked when it was nice out or took the bus or Georgia used to drive me when we were together.

I went a lot more often that spring. I was in the process of getting over a nasty breakup and it was hard to be alone in my apartment. After you live with someone for so many years being alone in your own home can feel almost… like a punishment. You have to kill your own spiders in the corner and unclog your own drains and feed yourself old Mac and Cheese with no one to really care.

It was a difficult breakup to say the least and left this ache in my chest that I couldn’t get rid of, but managed to ignore most days. Distractions helped, so I went to the library.

Fairfield Public Library is this massive place that they renovated a couple years ago with new wings and a fresh paint job and better air conditioning. The bathrooms still had weak hand dryers and there was never enough chairs, but they did install some gorgeous immense windows in the central seating area. They’re ceiling-to-floor panels that let in gallons of sunshine that soak the floor and give the whole plan an almost enchanted feel. Some days I would just go in and walk beside them for long minutes with my hand trailing in the light.

The windows weren’t my favorite part of the library though. The inside still smelled a little dry and musty and they kept the temperature too cold for my liking. My favorite part of the library were the gardens outside.

There was a river that ran behind the library and a good acre of land spanning from the back of the building up to the edge of the water. In between the two was a complex public garden. Macy Dickson was one of the librarians and she would talk my ear off about how they used native Iowa plants and local plant fertilizer and set-up hummingbird feeders and plants that ladybugs liked.

I nodded along, but I wasn’t exactly an outdoors kind of person in the way Georgia had been. Most plants looked the same to me, and I was prone to stepping in poison ivy and itching for weeks and accidentally pissing off local Canadian geese and being chased.

These gardens were friendly though, easy. The bushes were low to the ground and the plots held sturdy herbs and a few flowers popping up depending on the time of year. A path wound in and out of red oak trees and honeysuckles and bird feeders until it made its way to a rock garden with stone benches facing it. I would take a deep breathe there, sit, and attempt to feel whatever it is you’re supposed to feel when you’re outside surrounded by tweeting birds and wildlife sounds. I was never very good at being calmed by ocean noises or wind in the trees or anything like that, but to be fair I was never really calmed by anything. I had nervous habits like washing my hands too much and picking at my skin and applying hand sanitizer every few hours like clockwork. 

Maybe those were all the things Georgia couldn’t stand. I didn’t know.

Either way, sometimes that long walk out by the red trees and shrubbery did me good.

It was on a Wednesday in the middle of the week and the dreary weather had broken out into warm air and thin blue skies, I finally got to wear my strappy sandals again and walked all the way to the library. I was going through a reading period that my therapist might classify as “regression.”

One day I had been crying in the nonfiction aisle next to a true crime series and the next moment I found myself inching to the kids section. I crept into the bright wing as if in a sleep-walk and looked over the colorful covers of dragons and a boy and his dog and kids running from spooky shadows and little witches and I picked up a handful of kids chapter books.

I started reading all the books of my youth: Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, Nancy Drew, and Hardy Boys.

I read through them like you shake an old friend’s hand and there was something comforting about the non-threatening stories and consuming words of my youth. Of course, being a grown woman who was almost thirty reading children’s books… didn’t make me feel great.

I dashed into the kids section of the library that Wednesday and picked out two stories: Ella Enchanted and the Princess Academy. There was something so sweet and feminine about the titles that had me swiping them up and carrying them off like a burglar in the night.

I visited the nonfiction section next and picked out a book called “The Knife Man” about historical surgeries and went on my way. I had been padding my check-outs with serious books so the librarians wouldn’t give me funny looks.

In all honesty, the librarians and patrons and everyone I passed probably didn’t care in the least. But I was a nervous person. And sometimes my brain played tricks on me and told me that everyone was staring or thinking thoughts about me and noticing everything I did.

I didn’t make eye contact with librarian as she checked-out my “princess” texts and I slipped outside to the gardens to read in private. I may not have found solace in nature per say, but I did find solace in being alone there. I wondered up the white gravel path past the daffodils and beds of sage.

I sighed into the sweet air and turned to go to my favorite bench with a chunk missing from one of the arms. And then I froze. There were three teens loitering at my bench and they were all on their phones and sometimes glancing up at me.

I clutched my books a little tighter and, as if attached to a string, turned fluidly away from my usual bench and walked up toward the river. I didn’t know where I was going, but I just didn’t want to seem like I was lost or put-off by the teens.

Teens were the worst. They always looked like they knew things and were always exchanging whispers and furtive glances- none of which helped my state of mind. I did feel silly, being scared away like that, but the river was full and glittering and it almost felt worth it.

It took me a second but I found a large stone to sit on and got out of one of my books. I told myself this was better and it was good to switch things up. The afternoon passed in slow honeyed hours as I ate up one book after the next in a way that finally let my nerves rest. I could get lost there, forever, in those other worlds.

I only stopped when I noticed that the sun had gotten low on the horizon and the shadows were winding and long, and I realized I was very hungry.

I dusted myself off, stretched my stiff legs and arms, and turned back toward the library and the gardens. That’s when I saw him.

“Him” is the wrong word, but so is every other word for it. 

He stood on the path several feet away with the sun at his back. The path runs right beside the river and the area is usually empty since it’s at the very back of the garden and tends to accumulate trash like empty soda cans, lost plastic bags, and coffee cups and is not as pretty.

It was just me and the tall figure.

He was skinny, and gaunt and I squinted at him for a moment because he seemed even taller than my father who was 6’4. The figure wore a long jacket despite the nice weather and had a wide-brimmed hat that made his face disappear entirely. It was the type of hat you might see on farmers or adventures, beige and stiff and there was a loose string hanging beneath the chin. He had long, tangled brown hair that fell past his shoulders and hung lankly by his face in greasy clumps.

The fellow was slowly ambling forward, taking loud thunking steps down the path with these hulking dirty boots that were even larger than the rest of him. Something about him unnerved me deeply. He was too tall and he moved too slowly, too clunkily, as if he was gradually moving some great weight. I would even say he was limping, but there were no visible signs he was actually staggering or missing a beat. It was just off.

He wore gloves and I couldn’t see an inch of his skin.

My shoulders rose like the haunches of a cat as I realized he was moving closer and I quickly turned to leave. I heard it as I was striding back toward the building: whistling.

A noisy and bombastic whistling that drilled through me into my core and left a smear there. It was an un-melodic messy tune I couldn’t place. I picked up speed and nearly fell all the way back to the nearest parking lot and other people.

At the time I didn’t know why I thought “other people,” because the man was obviously just someone out on a stroll. But I thought it all the same.

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

I was able to put the man out of my head for a good while. Our stores general manager position opened up and I was up for consideration, though I’m not sure I really wanted it. I was busy taking on extra hours and making sure my cashiers and floors people actually showed up for their shifts and lady’s in floral dresses didn’t make my workers regret showing up.

That sort of thing.

It must have been a month into proper spring when I finally returned. I got a day to myself and my apartment still didn’t feel welcoming or soft. It was always missing something and the ache was just as hungry as before.

I thought about her often. I wondered if Georgia was still making her famous quiche and bragging about her latest road trip she had planned but would probably never take and coloring her toenails a brilliant red color. I had hated the chemical smell of that nail polish during her weekly retouch, but now I missed it in a way you miss snowstorms in the lean months of summer. The hole in my chest gnawed at me and I entered the library and collected three titles: The Girl Who Swallowed the Moon, Julie of the Wolves, and a medical text detailing the history of malaria.

My eyes darted around to check that no one thought this was weird and then I slipped outside so I could breathe properly. I found my usual bench unoccupied and took a seat.

I ate the books up like a hot meal at your family’s house and was even smiling into the glaring sunlight when a whistling came. It was noisy and tuneless and entered my head space like a sharp thorn.

I jerked my head up and looked left and right to find a tall man with a long jacket and dirty lank brown hair standing in the gardens. 

My mouth became very dry and the light was slanting in just the right way so that I could see his face this time. He was wearing these thick, black sunglasses and had a haggered look and very stiff expression.

The worst part about him beside the hellish whistling though was the faint color of his skin. I had seen it in medical texts. Ever since I was a little girl I had a fascination with illness and germs: I hated them, reviled them, detested stink and mess and the idea of tiny creatures that could wiggle inside me unnoticed and change my body in ways I couldn’t control.

But something drew me to stare at pictures of illness over and over again as if maybe looking alone could protect me. That if I read enough about smallpox and studied enough pictures of dengue fever that I could break their power over me.

I’m not sure if it ever worked, but I had one thought as I stared at the man and his yellowing frayed complexion: jaundice. It was the exact same off-yellow complexion that no healthy human being sports. 

I scooted to the edge of my bench in order to get up and quickly hurry along, but the figure stopped in place. He was still out of reach and I had time to leave, but somehow I couldn’t tear my eyes away, in the same way I couldn’t look away from bubonic plague depictions.

He was standing by this wooden lattice work that held vines working their way toward the sun. He was humming his same terrible song and looking down.

I didn’t notice the bee until he put his hand out and the fat yellow creature was scooped into his palm. I didn’t usually notice the bees flying around with their complex paths and busy work that filled them with this determination to be on their way. I liked bees in that way, not just in the “helps the planet” way but how they always looked like they were on a mission.

Me and the man stood there and stared at the fuzzy yellow creature for what must have been a whole minute.

And then the man’s jaw dropped open and he crushed the tiny bee into his mouth and swallowed. I say “dropped” because his jaw shouldn’t have opened like that and it shouldn’t have closed like that either.

It was far too wide, his cheeks too concave, the skin too thin, and there was something crooked about the angle- as if the jaw wasn’t connected in a solid way. He had just gaped open his mouth into a black hole and ate the bee.

My heart squeezed painfully in my chest and eyes went huge. His head slowly tilted up as if to look at me and I didn’t stick around for him to really stare. I turned and fled down the path and as far away as I could possibly get.

I tried reporting it to library security and told the guard some man was eating things he shouldn’t outside, but the statements were dismissed and I could tell were not going to be followed up on it. I went home with that same eerie droning whistle playing in my head.

I had seen something eating the bees.

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

I tried to be rational.

It took several days, but I eventually smoothed out the jitters and settled into a type of shame-faced guilt. I wished I could have talked the events through with Georgia, but we had agreed on a “no communication” policy for the first few months. 

I decided it was just another case of my nervousness and over imagination messing things up. The man at the library was obviously a very sick person who needed help. He was eating bees from a garden after all and his skin was an unnatural yellow. I kept replaying in my head how a “proper” adult would have handled the situation: how I should have went over to gently talk to him or called some sort of hospital.

I gave myself a good talking-to and two weeks later I resolved to visit the library again. It was one of my favorite places and I figured if I saw him again I would try to reach out or get one of the staff to intervene.

It was a proper weekend for once and after I got my three books I went outside and my normal bench was taken by a family. I edged away, shuffling past the wild ginger and squirrels high in a tree and the disturbed rock garden and up the hill to the river.

The path by the river was empty and sunny until I reached the water itself. The figure was there. He was turned away, low to the ground, and facing the plants.

I gulped with great effort and any thought of trying to do the “right” thing went out of my head as I heard the horrible whistling tune once more. He was kneeling next to a Goatsbeard bush, Goatsbeard is a wide thick plant that holds several long white plumes of tiny flower heads.

His gloved hand was hovering over a resting bee on one of the white flowers.

It struck me at that instant that I knew what was about to happen and I really really didn’t want it to. The thought of his thing opening it’s gaping mouth and swallowing that bee was too much for me and prospect of watching it happen again was even worse.

I didn’t think. I just acted.

“Sir!” I used my voice even though it sounded too loud and too forceful in the still air and the quiet whistling still shivered through my spine. “You don’t have to do that. Sir!”

He ignored me and brought his face closer to the insect. My books dropped from my hands to the path. I was running, my hand out and heart pounding as he had scooped up the bee and I couldn’t stand it. It’s bright yellow body was stark against his brown glove and he held it in place as his lips started to part.

“Stop.” I must have stumbled because I lurched forward and fell toward him. I caught myself with the toe of my shoe, but my fingers brushed against his cheek. I’ll never forget the way his skin felt.

My fingers just barely touched the flesh. It was hard though, like cement or marble, there was no give and was cool to the touch. Most of all it was bumpy, bump after bump of puckered skin like running your hand over a warped building wall or a terrible pustule-ridden rash.

The sensation of the bumpy skin was just for moment before one of his enormous hands darted up with quick efficiency and took my wrist in a hard grip. I gasped and he stood up to his full impressive height and grinned.

It wasn’t a grin with his teeth and I still couldn’t see his eyes behind his dark black glasses, but that smile was all I needed to confirm the worst. “Mmph!” I yelped, but not very loudly. I was never very good at yelling, even when I was a child and found a dead raccoon in the backyard or needed to shout at my dad when to turn on the road.

It just yelped once and then stared in rapt terror as my stomach dropped and whole world compounded into that second.

My hand looked tiny in his and the whistling hadn’t stopped. I was close enough at that point that I belatedly realized there was no way he could have been using his mouth to make that noise.

His mouth opened ever so slightly and the sound erupted from inside him and it wasn’t whistling. His thin yellow lips peeled back to reveal rows of sharp teeth, but not blunt teeth or canines or incisors. They were all sharp white shards- like that of broken glass or pieces of bleached wood chips.

They were all slightly different sizes, thin and long and coming into narrow points that hurt just to look at. As he opened his jaw in that unhinged crooked way I heard the sound clearly: a buzzing coming from within him. An unmistakable, low buzz that you hear from TV static. And bees.

It seemed to surge from somewhere deep inside him like a nest of tangled angry sound flooding from his core. It had a frantic quality. Like it was trying to escape.

The waves of humming grew louder and louder as his mouth expanded and I barely registered as he brought my hand up. I broke out of my stupor at the sight of his needle teeth leering toward my skin and tried to pull back with all of my force. I furiously kicked him in the shin, but he didn’t so much as flinch and my toe stung from contact with that same unyielding hard flesh.

He held my wrist firm and his face drew closer and closer with those those same slow deliberate movements. The points of his teeth delicately dug into my fingertips, the ones that had touched him, and a bright spike of pain crashed over me. I think I finally managed to scream.

It was a sticky blur as I lost those fingertips. I do remember the blood running down his yellow chin and spilling down his neck in a steady trickle.

I fell to the ground in shock and my next memories were waking up in a hospital with bandages over the middle and pointer fingers of my right hand. The pad of each was gone.

I shook violently and called Georgia without hesitation. She came right away and drove me home in silence, not forcing me to talk or bring up the future police reports and descriptions I might have to give. We might even be friends again after that first week, I’m not sure.

The police investigated but found no man with that description by the library. The only evidence I had was that the librarians had records of less and less bees visiting their gardens recently.

But nothing more.

I think I’m moving out of Fairfield soon. I think I’ll move somewhere with less gardens and more cement and people everywhere and get a roommate and big dog and start renting my books from online.

There is something eating the bees.

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

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#supernatural #horror #writing #story #original story #creepy/ #my work #cw: blood #cw: injury

[imagine-loki]

The Slutty Webs one Weaves

Title : The Slutty Webs one Weaves

Chapter NO. 5 of 10?

ORIGINAL IMAGINE: Imagine Loki’s Asgardian wife learns women write fanfiction about him on a trip to Midgard. She’s edgy for the duration and lets him have it when they get back.

Author: lokilover9

Rating: M

Thor agreed Brianna going to Asgard a good idea as Loki presumed and shielded her from Heimdall's sight as a precautionary measure. Before leaving, the brother's sat observing Little Warrior lead Tony and Pepper to the couch and hand him a usb stick.

"What's this?" He asked.

"A computer virus. My revenge plan was to disembowel Jarvis if you hadn't kept your promise."

Stark eyed Loki who shrugged a shoulder. "Don't look at me. I only learned of it this morning."

"It's my creation, pretty nasty and should be destroyed." Said Brianna.

"How nasty?"

"It bears the potential to wipe out most of New York's power grids."

Tony was momentarily speechless. "I'll do that and am overjoyed you two became friends."

"Me too and sorry for being so rude when you touched my stuff."

"It's alright." Said Pepper.

"No it wasn't. You deserve to know why. Loki mentioned the homeless people right?"

"Yes."

"Dory was the first one I met. Taught me handy street smarts and helped shop for my boy clothes. Ran away from home because her moms boyfriend was a jerk. I encouraged her to call one day and when she learned they split up, convinced her to go home. Really smart person. Dreams of becoming an Astronaut. Anyway, she had a big crush on Captain America and gave me her favorite hat as a gift. Then I met Muriel. A mean looking older lady who was actually super sweet and protected me something fierce. Beat this guy up one night for trying to steal my blanket while cursing him sideways. She loved Chinese food and taught me self defence techniques, like how to poke a hole in someone's brain by shoving a chopstick up their nose."

Everyone's ears and attention piqued as Tony wondered if Muriel was a distant cousin of Sasquatch's. "Hopefully not on live subjects."

"No, silly. On a plastic skull she molded a face onto with clay. I paid for the supplies. Helping police identify people used to be her job in Arizona. Great way to kill zombies though. Best to behead them like with vampires and guarantee they've bit the bullet." Brianna then pulled a gold bracelet with a four leaf clover charm from her pocket. "Muriel was Irish and gave me this for good luck. It's too big so I carry it in my pocket. Before meeting you guys, they were the first people who were super nice to me. I fretted their gifts ruined in the wash."

"I'm sorry." Said Pepper.

"It's okay. I was just a little freaked."

'And nearly built a cave for the abominable snowman.' Thought Stark. "We were more worried about you after the fact."

"I could tell by your happy dance when I woke."

"Hey, badass did one too. In the hall. You didn't see."

Brianna giggled. "Thanks to you both for everything and I'm sorry for lying."

"Meh, we understand."

"I meant about not having a favorite Avenger. It's you uncle Cootyoodles. That's why I sought your help first. The Black Widow was my next stop."

Tony pictured Nat teaching her how to yank teeth out with pliers and felt twice as relieved for keeping that promise. "Nat's eccentric and hates zombies. I'm way more fun." Brianna suddenly hugged him tightly and kissed his cheek. "Awe, Little Warrior. Friends forever?"

"Damn straight!" Then she did the same to Pepper. "I forgot to explain why you're a badass role model. Working so hard to become CEO of a massive company like Stark Industries and executing all that embodies? You rock! I hope to grow up as astute, diligent and athoritative. Maybe I'll run a company one day."

"You already possess those traits and will exceed my achievements."

No one knew that better than Loki who cleared his throat. "Grandmother and Grandfather go to bed early, Min Lille."

"One more minute, please?"

"Alright."

She studied Stark, pondering the best way to implement her request. "You don't have to do this, but… Not all homeless people are bad or crazy like others seem to believe. Many hit hard times and the world is so expensive, they couldn't keep up. No one I met lived on the streets because they wanted to. There just aren't enough shelters or resources available. You're rich Tony and could help them. Will you try?"

As Loki had succeeded with Frigga, those beautiful pleading eyes won her case. "You really know how to pull a guys heart strings, kid. I promise."

Loki wasn't aware she'd intended to ask this, yet was so proud of her. "Min Lille?"

"I know." She politely replied.

"You have to go." Tony suddenly stood and darted for the hall. "Be back in a jiffy."

"Meet him by the elevator, or you'll never leave." Suggested Pepper.

He returned and handed Loki a loaded Iron Man backpack. "More things? Shall I conjure a crate for the bifrost?"

They'd already given her an overstuffed suitcase of clothes and toys and Stark held a gift bag in hand. "Be quiet, you. It's a peanut butter stash. Does Asgard have bananas?"

"Yes." 'Thank the Norn's.'

Tony knelt before Brianna. "I would've packed some tater tots, but you ate them all again."

She smirked. "My goof."

"Rascal. Try to ignore a wee, bitty smidgen, you aren't into girly stuff? We couldn't help ourselves with you off to Asgard."

Brianna pulled from the bag a pink baseball cap that said Warrior Princess in tiny diamond gems and proudly adorned it. "You sure know how to pull a girls heart strings."

"I put some Motown CD's in there too. Teach Dad to moonwalk." Loki sighed, pushed the elevator button and Tony playfully whispered. "From a distance. In case he trips over his own big feet." He hugged her again and summoned Jarvis.

"Yes, sir?"

"Our friend is leaving."

"Goodbye, Little Warrior." Said the AI.

"Bye. Sending you a virtual hug."

She joined Thor inside while Loki shook hands with Tony, his expression saying everything. "Any time. Now get the 'bleep' out of my Tower before I thieve your Daughter."

Brianna shouted as it closed. "There's presents on your bed! I'll miss you!"

Peppers was a black t shirt with gold letters that read Badass Role Model and Tony's was a monsterous box filled with tater tots.

"Don't do it, Butch. If you cry, I'm gonna cry." ***** Loki had purposely slowed the elevator allowing her time to give Thor a drawing.

"Mjolnir in a field of flowers? Thank you fair maiden."

"It's a scratch n' sniff."

"A what?"

Loki picked up Brianna. "You scratch the flowers, then sniff them. The effect is most appealing the stronger you inhale."

Thor took a whiff and wriggled his nose. "Quite the nostril tickler. What should they smell like?"

"Try harder." 'Doofus.'

He took another, looked cross eyed at Loki and began swaying. "...Brother..you…" Then down he went striking the floor with a thud the tip of his nose covered in sparkly dust.

"Sorry, uncle Thor."

Loki chuckled at her wince. "The spell is mild and shall soon wear off."

"Is he hurt?"

Loki let her down to hurle the hefty Thor over his shoulder. "Us God's are resilient. Your uncle once endured a skirmish with the Hulk." After escorting them through a portal and delivering Brother oaf to his bed, he lead Brianna through a second into some woods.

"That was awesome! Will you teach me how to do it?"

"Not in the near future. It's very complicated, darling and I'd hate to think you lost in another dimension." 'Or vanishing one day as an angry teen with a troublesome suitor I dream of throttling.'

"Okay." Brianna nervously scanned the area. "Now what? Carnivores hunt these woods."

"Northern Alberta is home to many. Never go outside without me and none will harm you."

"But wolves hunt in packs and grizzlies are bigger than you."

He booped her little nose. "I'll smell them before they smell us and neither possess deadly weapons in interdimensional pockets."

"Where our luggage is? I tried hiding bigger items in them and the darn things wouldn't come back. Hannah was furious, but I didn't care."

"What did you hide?"

"The back wheels of her Lamborghini, Gallardo. I overheard my Mother tell Claudia she got it from her rich boyfriend."

Loki recalled from spending time with Stark this wasn't a billionaire's vehicle, yet financially unattainable to the average Midgardian. "I see. Did she mention his occupation?"

"Plastic surgeon."

Brianna deserved that minor victory and although he wouldn't encourage it, one cannot preach vengeance a negative path when mapping their own. 'Perhaps he'll be useful to the sluts after I'm done.' "Ah. Care to see what I did while you slept last night?"

"You left me?" She confusedly asked.

He picked her up again. "It was necessary and I returned, yes? I won't abandon you, Og Min Lille."

"Never?"

"Never, darling. "Loki headed for a shack nearby nestled amidst some bushes. With its crooked roof, faded wood and door minus a hinge the structure looked ready to collapse.

"We're staying there?"

"Why not? I'll conjure an outdoor toilet." He teased. "Sheltered of course."

"Ewww."

"Come now. At night we'll have heated beds and during the day, roast squirrels on an open fire."

She scrunched her face in disgust. "Blech! I'd rather eat tree bark."

"You'll get an awful tummy ache."

They entered the dingy space and Brianna instantly focused on the filthy floor covered in forest debris. So intently, she didn't notice the sturdier frames of the structure only visible from within. "How will we keep the door closed and is that poop?"

Loki rolled his eyes at some turds in a corner. "The cabin is made of Brazilian Ebony."

"One of the strongest woods on earth." She commented.

He arched an intrugued brow. "Stained to appear aged, it's also bulletproof in light of human hunters. Consider the other materials deceiving movie props. The 'raccoon' poop is genuine." It vanished with a wave of his hand. "Now, did you mean that door?" It closed and he conjured a deadbolt onto the surface with a panel directly above. "Place your hand in the center?" Brianna did and it glowed green, spreading magic from the center throughout every surface like glowing, emerald fireflies. As they dimmed, Loki turned around. "Or this one?" The floor, suddenly cleared of debris had a sliding glass door in the center.

Brianna gasped in wonder, glancing between him and the mystery beneath. "Where does it go?"

"Did you think a sorcerer Prince would allow his Princess daughter to dwell in a shabby old shack?"

"Ancestry aside, I sincerely hoped not. Even an RV would've been better."

He chuckled at her frankness. "And you worried of uncle Thor bumping his head? The shacks purpose was added safety should a need arise and to keep our secret entrance hidden. "Once the outer door locks, only the interior alters. To outsiders, nothing changes." It opened and he carried her down a mutedly lit spiral staircase, each step progressively illuminating the space below.

At the bottom, she slid from his arm in awe. "Shut the front door! You 'definitely' have to teach me how to do this."

Min Lille was referencing conjuring. Another ability Loki thanked the Norns she didn't yet possess, having confessed so before requesting Tony and Pepper's gifts. "In time. Beyond that archway, another surprise awaits." Loki followed and suddenly pondered Brianna conjuring a future dwelling for herself and that troublesome suitor. 'Lessons commence when your forty.' ***** Thor woke to find two notes in his shirt pocket. One for himself the other, Astrid; 'Sleep well, Brother? We won't be returning to Asgard just yet. Please give this to my wife? I recommend waiting several days, discreet delivery and a hasty exit. A visit will follow and when interrogated, lie. Tell her Brianna came to you and don't mention her ice concoction. Unless you enjoy Father's company when several fries short of a happy meal. As I planned our escape without Tony's knowledge, do avoid his unnecessary panic and Pepper seeking our demise, by not telling our dear friend? Min Lille is safe.'

"That shyster." He grumbled. Jane returned in six days as would Astrid to a missing Loki. Waiting risked a molotov cocktail interrogation. His beloved and coronary inducing sister-in-law, banging down their locked bathroom door while the mighty Thor coward behind a shower curtain. Plus Maxi Waxis training schedule ended in two days. Bribery assured those lips zippered, but Heimdall would think his hastiness suspicious. He called to the trainee in the middle of the night, snuck into the palace and raced back to the observatory like the looney tunes road runner. "Spend it well nincompoo..eh he, Max. Asgard is lucky to have you."

Guilt ridden over her outburst and already missing Loki, Astrid returned in the morning to find the note.

Frigga was preparing to join her belly dancing instructor when she barged into the foyer and flung herself at the Allmother.

"Bwaaahahaa! I want a divorce!"

"Hells bells and bilgesnipe testicles. What has my shameless son done this time?"

"Frigga, your language." Scolded Odin.

She patted Astrid's back. "Oh shush. As if your cursing hasn't scarred the servants ears."

#Loki #others #submission #Submitted fic #The Slutty Webs one Weaves #lokilover9 #chapter 5

[twohearts-hs]

‘You’re A Monster’ - Shawn Mendes Gang AU

Words: 5k

Pairing: Gang Leader!Shawn Mendes & Surgeon!(Y/N) (Y/L/N)

Warnings: Swearing and Death

|| Masterlist in bio ||

-

“So you’re a surgeon?” The man in front of her asked, a smirk on his face. This wasn’t what she intended to happen, sitting in front of a quite large man in a dimly lit room in the basement of a warehouse. The email led her here for the job offer, therefore she shouldn’t complain.

“Was.” She replied, trying to keep a strong front. He nodded slowly, leaning back in his chair and giving her a look that sent shivers up her spine. He quickly leaned forward, inches away from her, creating a reflex of moving back for her.

“What’d you do to have your license removed?” He grinned mischievously. This definitely was not her scene.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” She replied. He shook his head and clicked his tongue.

“This is not how it goes, honey. What did you do?” She refused to speak, “Do you want the job or not?” He reasoned.

“Of course I want the bloody job.” Y/N replied all too quickly, while he merely shrugged his shoulders. She took a breath, “I saved a woman who was pregnant, but I didn’t follow protocol, so they stripped me of my license. I didn’t kill someone, I saved someone; that’s a surgeon’s job.”

It was all true. Y/N did indeed need a job as she was fired from the last one over trying to save a woman. But, she constantly reminded herself it was for the best because it would’ve been selfish to let the woman die in order to keep her license. But, she didn’t expect herself to be using her medical knowledge in potentially getting a job at a well-known gang. She was desperate, the med school loans were getting higher, and her bills were due or late; she had to figure something out, and this was her only option.

“Let’s get you to talk to the boss and see if you’re hired.” He told her, getting up and motioning her to follow. Y/N accepted, taking a deep breath and calming her nerves; after all, it was a gang; she was allowed to be nervous.

She grabbed her bag and followed the unknown man down a few hallways. He turned around, looking at her, “He can be a little too much sometimes.” Y/N didn’t know how to respond, so she kept walking. She really didn’t know what to expect, possibly some old man or maybe a middle age man that had way too many girls in his life or a wife that is more plastic than alive. But, she remembered the fact that she didn’t even know his name.

“Boss?” She bumped into the man interrogating her and looked up, seeing a tall man’s back ahead of her.

“What?” The man spun around and glared at the man calling him.

“Dr Y/L/N is here to meet you.” The so-called ‘boss’ raised his eyebrows.

Y/N looked at the man and had to admit that he was definitely not what she was expecting. Young, early twenties, curly brown hair, and chestnut eyes; he was attractive, yet her eyes wandered down and saw a pistol. This is definitely a gang.

“Who?” He growled. She was shocked by his tone; it was harsh, controlling.

“The new surgeon.” He nodded, walking up to her.

“You’re a surgeon?” He asked. She nodded and smiled.

“Uhh, yes, sir.” She managed to say. He nodded and walked away. Y/N raised her eyebrows and scoffed, “Am I hired?” she blurted, causing Shawn to stop in his step.

“Can you take care of a gunshot wound?” He asked, back to her.

“Of course I can,” she scoffed, “simple medicine.” Shawn turned around and stood in the same spot, a smirk on his face.

“Then you’re hired.” He told her, “Are we done?” She rolled her eyes.

A burst of confidence came to her, and she walked towards him, “I think we should talk terms in your office. I don’t work for whatever.” He smirked at her and shook his head.

“Princess, this is life or death right now. Work with me, you live, and if you don’t I’ll kill you on the spot because you know where we are stationed. There are no terms in this business, you work for me in order to keep your life.” He replied sternly.

“If I don’t accept, your men, doing illegal things, may I add, would die—” She began but was interrupted.

“I can call any surgeon to replace you. But, you can’t get another job, princess, your license has been stripped. Yes, I’ve read your file, Y/N.” He added, she stood still.

“Then call any other surgeon, I am not working to keep my life.” Shawn groaned, throwing his head back.

“You bloody doctors think you own the place with all your medical knowledge...thirty grand.” He tried to settle.

“A month?” He scoffed and shook his head.

“A year.”

“I am a surgeon. I make five times that.”

“You’re not a surgeon, not anymore.” He really had to rub it in.

“One fifty.”

He was so close to being done, but honestly, he was starting to dig her persistent personality, “One hundred, beautiful.”

She nodded, placing her hand out to him. “Deal.” He shook it, “So what do I call you, boss?” Y/N asked.

“Shawn, princess.”

-

Y/N hasn’t seen Shawn since and she had been there for a week. It was a job, she went there to help people because that was what she was destined to do. She went there to save people from bloody (excuse the pun) gunshot wounds, and repeat.

It was boring if she was, to be honest. Y/N missed the OR and holding a beating heart in her hands, having to figure out whether they live or die, but at least she still had a scalpel in her reach. The most interesting thing that had happened was a knife in the eye, where she had to give that man a pat on the back and an eye patch, nothing else to do.

Yet, it was a job. She could pay her bills, but it wasn’t the best paycheck to pay off med school. It angered her, how stubborn and unfair that her boss was. But, she was paying the price of her mistake; though she didn’t regret saving that woman.

Y/N closed the door to her car and locked it, shoving her handbag on her shoulder and taking steps to her townhouse. Another interesting day of gang members with awful tattoos hitting on her.

“Princess,” she jumped looking to her left and seeing Shawn leaning against a fence. Y/N placed her hand over her heart and let out a breath.

“Fuck, Shawn,” she mumbled, looking at him, “next time warn me.”

He laughed, pushing himself off the fence and walking to her. “Aren’t you gonna invite me in?”

She didn’t know how to reply, therefore she walked up to her door. “Think I have too.” She told him, opening her door and walking in, the handsome fella following her.

She set her bag on the kitchen counter and watched Shawn look around her living area, particularly eyeing her degrees.

“I’ve read your work. You’re an amazing surgeon. The boys and I are blessed to have you.” She scoffed, opening a bottle of wine and pouring herself a hefty glass.

“Your boys. Fuck, they have no respect for women.” Shawn raised his eyebrows and gave her a worrying look. Y/N passed him also a glass of wine, which he declined, making her pour his portion into her glass.

“What do you mean?” Shawn sounded worried.

She shook her head and brought the glass to her lips. “They are your typical ‘bad boys’. Catcalling, touching, etc. But, don’t worry, it’s my job to help them, live or die, ey?”

Shawn just looked blankly at her. “It doesn’t matter. They need to respect you. You’re a part of the group, princess. Fuck, you’re more valuable to me than them.”

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t care who and what is valuable, I’m not an object. I’m just there to do my job. Now, why are you here?”

He raised his brows and smirked. “A few reasons. For one, I want to tell you that I am your boss and you have to talk to me with respect. And, if anything happens to you regarding those shits or anything, you bloody tell me, ok?” She nodded, “Now, you’re well known for your surgical skills, so I need you to fake your death.” That came out of nowhere.

Y/N choked on her wine and stared, “what?”

He groaned; no patience in within him. “You are known to the medical community. If word got out that you were working with a gang and that leads them to me, that’ll be a problem. So, I have to do something. I’m going to arrange for you to die, so you can’t be traced, and then we go from there.”

She stared at him with shock. “What?” She sneered, “I’m not going to die, I have family and friends. I am not part of your gang.”

Shawn stood blank-faced and just stared at her. “Life or death, honey. Chose wisely.”

Y/N had no idea what she got herself into. She had no idea what this meant, “You keep saying that and I really don’t know what you mean.” She yelled at him, grabbing her hair in frustration, “I signed up to save your people, and I am pretty god damn good at my job.”

Shawn was mesmerized by her attitude. She wasn’t scared of him, even though he had killed more men than he could count on his fingers and toes. He had scars across his body, people quivered from his stare, and he was more than just deadly. Y/N didn’t give a fuck about all that, and it was mesmerizing to him.

“You’re not scared of me, eh?” He placed an arm against the wall and leaned in.

She scoffed, “Some people may be scared of you, boss, but I see the real you. I see the soft Shawn inside. I read people, and that is why I am so good at what I do. I know when people are in pain without them telling me.” She replied with no emotion. Maybe she knew, maybe she didn’t.

“Really? Tell me what you get from me then.” He whispered playfully.

“You are lonely, and you fill your days by being rude, nasty, mean, and murderous to try and make yourself feel better. But, it doesn’t work. At the end of the day, you just want someone to hold you.”

Shawn stayed still, not knowing what to say. “You don’t know shit about me.” He mumbled, smirk long gone.

“I know you don’t like people knowing your secrets.”

“I think you should be careful who you open your mouth too, princess.” He cocked, putting his hands on his hips and revealing a hidden gun. He looked at her once more and walked out the door. She knew that she couldn’t get out of this any more.

-

“Alejandro!” She exclaimed as she walked into the room, grabbing rubber gloves and placing them on.

“Mi amor!” She welcomed him with a big smile. She pulled the stool out and sat down, gathering her utensils to check out his wound.

“How are the grandkids?” She asked, beginning to remove the bandage from his arm.

The older man chuckled, “Fine, fine, mi querido. How are you, beautiful?” She smiled, as she began stitching his wound up.

“Quite dandy. So, tell me about your day?”

Alejandro was her favourite patient, always able to make her laugh and forget her worries. He was the kind of guy you’d never expect to be in the drug business. He was so kind and wore his heart on his sleeve. He was the only piece of sunshine in her life at the moment.

“Any cute boys in your life, amigo?”

She laughed. “I’ll tell you once you stop injuring yourself. Every week I see you in here. Your poor wife.”

He laughed, shaking his finger. “That bitch doesn’t care, amor. But if I don’t get hurt, I can’t see you. Boss doesn’t like when we hang around the medical bay.”

She laughed and nodded.

They talked for a few more minutes until they got interrupted. In a second, Shawn appeared with a gun to her friend’s head.

“Five million. Where is my five million dollars?” He spat out, not even looking at Y/N. It hurt him seeing her expression in the side of his eye. She stood there, shocked while clenching her forceps.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, boss,” Alejandro muttered, quivering by the tip of the gun hitting his forehead. Y/N stared at the man that she deeply believed had a little bit of remorse or nobility. She wouldn’t accept that she was scared, in fact, she truly believed that he was a good person.

“You stole five million from me.” Alejandro looked at him with a blank expression, and instantly he was shot.

Y/N screamed. Shawn looked at her, sadness in his eyes for her, but no pity for the dead man.

“Get him out of here.” He muttered to his two guys next to him, “And grab her.”

She was grabbed by the arm by some guy, yet she didn’t object as she was simply in shock. She was in shock because she just saw her only friend at the moment getting shot. Not just shot, but dead in front of her eyes.

Y/N had seen death many times in her life before. She had battled it for her patients every day, but seeing someone kill another was totally different. Death was nasty to her, constantly trying to steal people away from her. But, Death didn’t play the role today; Shawn did. Shawn took away someone.

Shawn closed the door behind him, telling his guys to leave them alone. She was left in a darkened room with a desk and computer. She sat, looking blankly at him.

“Are you scared of me?” He asked, closing the door, but still back towards her.

It took a while for her to find her voice, but eventually, she did, “No.” She muttered. He sighed, turning around and looking at her with the most loving eyes she had ever seen in her life.

“I’m sorry you had to see that, Y/N.” He mumbled, walking towards her and pulling a chair out, sitting and grabbing her hands.

He looked at her, wanting sympathy, yet she didn’t know where she was lying at the moment. He’d just killed someone. He was a murderer.  

“You killed someone,” she choked out, letting a tear roll down her cheek. He nodded, gripping her hands so tightly, as if he wanted human connection more than oxygen. He wanted to be real for a moment, to expose himself to her.

“I had too.” She shook her head rapidly, as she looked up to his chestnut eyes.

“You don’t have to do anything, Shawn. You killed a man who meant so much to me. He was the only person in my life that cared for me at the moment. You took that away.”

She was shocked not only by his actions minutes ago, but the way he was opening up to her was even more shocking, yet he still killed someone. 

“I care for you, Y/N. I care so fucking much about you, you don’t understand. I can’t sleep because all I can think of is you putting your hair into a ponytail or the laughter you share with the guys or the smile you have whenever you look at me. I care way too much for you and it hurts that I can’t be the person you want me to be.” He told her, holding onto her hands hard as they faced each other.

“Don’t use that as an excuse for what you did,” she spat. Shawn understood where she laid. He shouldn’t have brought up his feelings for her. But, he did, and that was what made him an awful person in his eyes.

“He stole five million dollars, princess.” She shook her head, pulling her hands away from his. His heart sank from the lack of heat from her small hands.

“I knew he stole five million dollars from you, Shawn, he told me when he did. He was so afraid of you. Yet, he stole it to save his village back at home. He stole it to send his granddaughter to university; she wants to be a doctor. You have so much money, Shawn. He wanted to be a good person, someone you could never be.” She told him, getting up and heading to the door.

“You said you’re not scared of me.” He said right as she was about to grab the doorknob.

“I’m not scared of you, Shawn. But, I do think that you’re a monster.” She told him, turning around and looking at the man she had caught feelings for the last few weeks.

She walked out. Shawn closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, anger and misery beginning to consume his bloodstream. She told him that he was a monster, and she walked out. And in theory, he did believe he was a monster.

-

Shawn didn’t sleep that night. He constantly rolled around his king bed, trying to find comfort, but her words lingered in his brain. “You're a monster.” To him, Y/N was perfection in his dark world of corruption. Shawn opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. He needed to clear things with her, but at the moment it was so raw. He was falling for her, and he was falling for her hard.

He got up, walking through his apartment and grabbing a glass of water. It was a little past three. He opened the fridge, looking for something, but there wasn’t much; leftovers mostly. He groaned the only light in the room was the fridge light and the moonlight coming from the big window behind him.

The brunette was up all night, therefore he had time to think. He was a monster; he had come to terms with it. But, he got into this business, so he had to be. But, he wasn’t a monster to her. He was trying so hard to be perfect to her. But, Shawn was quiet and rude around her. That, or flirtatious and mysterious. He was a player, but for her, he’d go down on his knees and beg for mercy.

A knock was what brought him out of his daze. He walked towards his door, loose sweatpants hung to his figure, messy hair and tired bags complimented him. Yet, he wondered who would come at this time. He hadn’t gotten a call telling of an emergency, but he had an urge to open it.

“Y/N?” He opened, staring at the girl’s worried expression. She stood in front of him, with pyjama pants and a coat. She looked at him, and he questioned everything about why she was there.

“You sell drugs, right?” She asked out of nowhere. He was still trying to place puzzle pieces together; how she knew he lived here, why she was here, was she ok.

“Yes.” He answered. She looked cold and he just wanted to grab her and hold her forever.

“Do you have enemies?” Y/N was so emotionless with her questions, and it drove him to pain; he needed to figure out what was wrong.

“Of course.” She nodded, noticing now that he was shirtless, scars littering his body.

Yet, she didn’t know how to put this next statement to him, “I feel unsafe,” she muttered, “I went to the warehouse to find you, but you weren’t there. Matt told me your address.”

Shawn instantly got worried and opened the door to let her in. He closed it and turned to her.

“I was about to go home, but there was a guy hanging by my door. I stayed put in my car for an hour and he didn’t move. I can’t call the police, so I came to you.” Shawn nodded, looking at her as she stood in the moonlight, and all he could do was be in awe.

“What did he look like?” He watched as she dropped her coat and grabbed the blanket that was thrown across his couch. “Here, let me get you a hoodie.” He mumbled, walking back to his room and retrieving one and handing it to her.

Y/N reluctantly put it on, and she was so cute in it, so perfect. “I couldn’t see his face, but he had this tattoo on his arm. It was like a skull and a triangle and-”

“Fucking Isaac.” He muttered, running his hands through his hair and looking at her. “You aren’t going back to your house until this is sorted. I’ll get one of the guys to grab you some stuff, but otherwise, you’re staying with me.” He told her.

“Shawn, is that really necessary?” He looked at her and placed his hands on her cheeks.

“I care about you a lot, Y/N. Isaac is from our rival gang. He must’ve heard how important you are to me. So, yes, it is necessary. You aren’t to leave without me, you go with me to work, you are to never be alone. Because this could go either two ways: he kills you, or he kidnaps you, and that’s worse than being killed.” She nodded. He let out a shaky breath and grabbed her shoulders, bringing her into a hug.

Y/N was surprised for a second, yet later wrapped her hands around the gentle giant. Shawn nuzzled his face into her hair and placed a delicate kiss on her head. He pulled away and tucked her hair behind her ears and smiled. She had to admit, he may be a horrible person in his work environment, but he was the softest person to her.

“Thank you.” She muttered, looking up at his eyes and he smiled, grabbing her hands and bringing it to his lips.

“Bedtime for you.” She nodded, as she followed him to the guest room.

“But Y/N, thank you for being in my life.” She smiled, getting into the duvet as Shawn closed the lights and headed to his room.

The minute his head hit the pillow, sleep drowned him. He was finally able to sleep at this late hour, but it didn’t take long till he heard small paddling of feet in his hallway. As a person who is constantly in danger, the smallest sounds wake him. His eyes shot open and he heard his door open and instantly - forgetting that he had Y/N staying over - he leaned to his left and grabbed his gun on his bedside table and pointed it at the unknown figure.

“Shawn?” Her small delicate nectar voice was heard and he relaxed, placing the gun down.

“Hi, honey,” she leaned against the door, “can’t sleep?” She nodded. Shawn bit his lip and placed the gun back to where it was. He pulled the duvet up to signal her to come in; which she complied.

Y/N sat on the mattress and swung her legs over, watching as Shawn placed the blankets on her small body compared to his.

“Thank you.” He smiled, watching as she turned away, therefore he followed.

Moments later, he heard the ruffle of blankets and a body moving. He was welcomed to an arm swung across his frame and a face nuzzling into his neck. He smiled, feeling so happy at the moment. Y/N was cuddling him. His future love was touching him in a matter that wasn’t forced. She was asleep in his bed and she was holding him, so he fell asleep with a smile on his face.

-

His first feeling was heat. He felt sweat and heat between two bodies and he instantly remembered the beautiful lady in his bed. A humble smile came to him as he opened his eyes to morning dawn and the chirping of little birds outside his window.

Shawn looked around and saw that her face was laid on his chest and his arms were wrapped around her. It was perfect. It was the most beautiful way to be woken up. He just pitied himself for not having this happiness sooner.

He placed a kiss on her forehead and she began to move gently. “Morning,” he mumbled as her pearl eyes opened. She wasn’t afraid, far from it.

“I have to get to work.” Is all she mumbled. Shawn let out a little laugh and she smiled.

“Let’s get something to eat first.” He mumbled, playing with her hair as he stared into her eyes. She gave him a smile.

“Shawn?” He cocked his eyebrow. “Kiss me.” He laughed awkwardly, but she was so much in a daze to realise.

“Y/N-” She shook her head.

“You care about me, I care about you. We have major tension between us. We have feelings for each other, so just kiss me.” He nodded, leaning down and grabbing her cheeks gently as their lips met.

It was so clichè, but it was perfect for them. He was gentle, not dominating, as they kissed each other with perfect rhythm. Her fingers were in his hair as his hands wandered to her hips. He tugged on them, making her move to be on top of him as they continued to make out. But, it was pure bliss and way too overwhelming to worry about anything.

“You’re so cute,” she mumbled, pulling away and looking at him like a lovesick puppy.

“I prefer the word sexy or hot, honey, but that’ll do.” He told her, kissing her lips again.

-

They left each other at the warehouse with the linger of a hand touching and a kiss to the cheek. It was cute, honeymoon-like. And every one of Shawn’s mates would agree that he deserved this, he deserved to be happy.

Little did she know what the problems were with being with a gang leader. He was constantly in danger.

Y/N hadn’t heard from Shawn all day. Honestly, she wasn’t worried about it. She sat, hanging around, checking up on her patients, going out for lunch with Geoff and grabbing a coffee for herself, and doing a little shopping. She honestly thought that being out in broad daylight wouldn’t cause problems, and Geoff was with her. So, that night she filled it with drinking wine and watching reruns of a sitcom.

But, she went back, hearing from Geoff that there was a heist that night and had to return back to the warehouse. Yet, he let out all the details as to just how bad this fight was.

“What do we got?” She asked, grabbing gloves and walking to Geoff. He gave her a look and pointed to one of the medical beds that a curtain covered.

She went to it, opening it and stared. Shawn. Shawn was in her medical bay and he was hurt...really bad.

“Don’t touch me. Get my girlfriend.” He muttered to one of the guys who was trying to apply pressure to the gashing wound on his stomach.

“Get, Y/N. She’s the best, don’t bloody touch me!” He kept going on and on and Y/N took a breather.

“Shawn.” His eyes shot up to her and he smiled, yet recognised her worried face.

“Baby. I got a little roughed up, that’s all, I promise you.” She nodded, walking towards his wound and pulling open the bandage. She closed her eyes and looked at him.

“What happened?”

He smiled, trying to lighten up the mood. “Just got in a fight, that’s all.”

She laughed. “A fight? You’ve got a cut in your abdomen, so close to muscle. And your shoulder is dislocated.” He smiled an awkward smile and she groaned. “Everyone get out!” She turned away from him, gathering supplies to disinfect the wound and to create stitches. “You’re gonna be out of the ballgame for a little while.” She muttered, turning around as he looked at her with puppy eyes.

“Baby…” She raised her eyebrows and walked towards his dislocated shoulder.

“This is gonna hurt… a lot. Scream as loud as you want.” She told him grabbing his arm and placing it to the side, hearing a groan. Then, slowly she moved his arm so that his hand was behind her head. Finally, she began reaching for the other shoulder and his shoulder popped right in.

“Fuck!” He yelled, making her giggle.

“Stop being a pussy.” She mumbled, grabbing the needle and forceps and getting down to business.

“So, keep that patch on for a few days. I live with you, so I’ll change it soon.” She told him, still not making eye contact with her boyfriend.

He sensed her anger and worry. Yet, he knew she shouldn’t let personal feelings break through. Shawn was hurt, yes. Shawn got himself in trouble, yes. So she shouldn’t be such a bitch.

“Y/N,” she turned around and stared at him, all bandaged up, “come here.” She obliged and walked towards him.

Shawn grabbed her hand with the hand that wasn’t strapped within the brace and looked at her.

“Thank you,” She smiled as he gave her the kissy lips, which she leant down to, connecting the two together.

“I love you,” he muttered, pulling away. She looked at him, as he realised what he said.

“Y/N, princess, I-”

She smiled, placing her finger against his lips, “I love you too, doofus.”

-

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[eltanin-malfoy]

Life Kills (Kill Or Be Killed I)

pairing : draco/fem-collegestudent!y/n (not that romantic.. or platonic)

word count : 3.4k!

warnings : smoking, swearing, mentions of murder/violence/poisoning, angst!!!!

a/n : this is set in an original modern non-magic AU, and the story is based off of (MAJOR SPOILER ALERT, DO NOT CHECK OUT THE PROMPT UNLESS YOU WANT TO SPOIL THE REST OF THE STORY lol) this prompt on @writing-prompt-s. there is no real romance between draco and y/n in this chapter, and i’m not exactly sure there will be. the premise of this story kind of makes that a little crazy. for now, it’s pretty much just animosity. there is the slightest possibility of this turning into a slow burn fic.. so hold on, i guess. this is definitely not your typical x reader. at all. i would appreciate any and all feedback from you guys! requests are open as well :) also i hate smoking irl but it just fit here, sorry.

Chapter 1 : Life Kills

Smoke. 

That beloved scent filled Draco’s lungs as he took a drag from the wrinkled brown stick in his hand, his steely eyes shutting as its end glowed red. He held it away for a few seconds as he exhaled, white clouds slipping out of his lips into the cold air in front of him. His eyes followed his own exhalation into the sky, his fingers fidgeting with the green lighter he’d used to ignite his toxic addiction with. 

He grinned, then brought the cigarette to his lips for another puff, then another, then another, till slowly, the tube of tar was finally used up. He folded up what was left of his papery weapon with his thin fingers and finally tossed it to the ground. He reached into his pocket for his pack, searching for even more release.

He lifted his gaze to the scene in front of him, the concrete jungle that was Bond Street. The expensive logos were practically calling out his name. It’s just my fucking luck, isn’t it? He scowled at the crowds gathered around the area. My lovely parents just had to go get themselves arrested and leave me all by myself. He instinctively grit his teeth as memories of his awful father fluttered through his brain. At least I don’t have to associate with that.. that.. tyrant anymore. 

“Draco? Two minutes left in your break, son.”

The pale blonde rolled his eyes as he stared out front, but looked back and flashed his elderly boss a (fake) smile. She nodded and stepped back inside, arms crossed around her portly frame as she shivered. 

It had only been a few months since his parents had been arrested by the government after being convicted of illegally possessing and smuggling famed works of art, literature and the like. When the authorities first began their investigation, Lucius had said that it would all work itself out, even though the police’s suspicions were absolutely correct. He had connections everywhere, after all. But, alas! A search warrant had made its way to Malfoy Manor before his parents had the opportunity to sweep everything under the rug, and.. even their very expensive defence lawyer wasn’t able to hide the fact that they were caught red handed.

This had led to a crapload of problems in Draco’s own life. To begin with, he wouldn’t be able to see his mother for at least another decade. His parents’ fortune (and his trust fund, of course!) was seized by the government, leaving him absolutely broke, and forced to drop out in the second year of his Chemistry degree at the very prestigious Oxford University. He’d tried hard to find some kind of a placement in any of his parents’ friends’ companies, but no, they’d decided to stop associating with any member of the Malfoy clan. So, he managed what he could and left his old grand life in Wiltshire for some kind of meagre lifestyle in London. Working as a cashier at Tesco probably wasn’t the worst thing he could be doing.. It was minimum wage, but, it wasn’t hard. Didn’t require much energy. 

Draco, for one, had never understood his parents’ motivation to undertake that.. that.. stupidity. 

His parents’ family fortune had had practically no purpose in the first place. There wasn’t a glint of compassion in his father’s heart, and all he wanted to use it for was to satisfy his own wants. Illegally purchasing stolen historical artifacts? Of course. Selling them off to others for even greater profits? Sure! But giving a beggar even a single pound? Absolutely not. This total greed and attitude of disgust his father had had used to interest him when he was younger, back in secondary school. He’d made a habit of showing off his wealth and talking down to those who didn’t have much in comparison. But as he grew up.. he’d realised how awful it was.

Especially now that he was only twenty, absolutely alone and having to live off of four hundred pounds a week. It seemed like a lot, at first, but once you factored in rent, food and basic needs, he was barely left with a handful to work with. His heart practically broke every time he caught sight of a homeless person and somehow, so different to his former self, he’d find himself searching in his wallet for spare notes to hand them.

He quickly opened up the pack of cigarettes and pulled out one to satiate himself, stress bubbling up in his veins. He shoved the box almost haphazardly back into the pocket of his coat, then held it to his lips and flicked his lighter, the brilliant orange flame lighting the tip of the cigarette. He took a drag and looked around again, slowly turning to walk back to his place of work. He took a few deep puffs and was just about to trash it when he heard.. what sounded like a struggle? 

He headed down the alleyway, to a bit of a darker turn, instinctively slicking back his platinum blonde hair. He finally got a glimpse of what was happening. There was a girl, probably around the same age as him, having a dynamic disagreement with a.. homeless old person? His protective instincts kicked into gear as he saw her swatting at him with the umbrella in her hand, yelling at him for what sounded like.. attempting to trip her?

The old man was shielding himself with a blanket, his arms over his head as he called for help. Draco, feeling almost like his saviour, pushed the girl away, which, he realised was not the best move with his tall figure, made her fall to the ground with a loud squeal. The old man set the blanket down and looked up at the lack of commotion, then gave the lanky blonde a smile. He even mouthed a soft ‘thank you’ and Draco waved his hand, reassuring him that it was no big deal.  He took a deep breath, about to turn on his heel to leave, but found himself scowling down at the girl, who was slowly getting up again.

“Why did you do that?” She panted, her hair messy as she got back onto her feet. She wasn’t exactly well built herself, her face was a bit pale and there were hints of shadows under her eyes as she glared up at him. She dusted herself off and placed her hand on her denim-covered knee, wincing the slightest bit. She quickly rose up again and brought her hands to her hips. “Don’t need to look at me like that.” She clenched her jaw and Draco realised that he’d been silent all this while.

“Don’t need.. idiots like you treating helpless people the way you did. Fucking awful, that was.” He looked her over quickly, his gaze pausing at the straps of the backpack on her shoulders. “You.. you students think you can just get away with anything, don’t you?” He found himself getting a bit more heated, his cheeks slowly beginning to turn purple. 

She opened her mouth to speak, but Draco rolled his eyes and finally turned to leave, walking back down the alleyway without a word. “Well, we don’t need pricks like you defending these oh so helpless people when they try to steal something from someone.” She called out after him and he stopped, staring to the front, before looking over his shoulder. Instead of locking eyes with her, he saw the same homeless man, staring into space as he huddled up with that blanket. Draco felt the slightest pang of guilt in his gut, but ignored it and continued, still choosing to believe that she was just.. an embodiment of his own father. 

Nasty and entitled. He thought to himself as he slipped off his coat, setting it on a rack in the Employee’s Only room. Bet she hasn’t known any real problems in her life. Bet she’s not even a fucking good student. He felt his rage boiling up within him again, but stared at himself in the small mirror by the door. He placed his hands on his reddened cheeks and forced himself to calm down, taking deep breaths and reassuring himself of his own ability. Looking very flustered wasn’t exactly ideal for a cashier in a supermarket, after all.

***

Draco ran the carton of milk over the scanner. Beep. He passed it over to the red haired boy to the side of him, who began to stuff it into a plastic bag. He tried his best not to glance at his customer, but his curiosity bested him and he reluctantly flashed the dark middle aged man a smile. He shook it off and stared at the monitor in front of him. “That’ll be ninety four pounds and thirty pence, sir.” He looked over at the man as he pulled out his wallet and ruffled through it to hand him a few notes, along with a few coins. 

“Oh, and I found this in the Car Care aisle.” He pulled out yet another wallet from his pocket, a black, leather one… just like Draco’s father’s.. He let out a sharp exhale and gently took it from him, setting it on the counter. “Thank you, sir. We’ll announce that it’s missing right away.”

The boy then stuffed the notes into the drawer of the cashier, pulling out the one and returning it to the man. “Here’s your change! Thank you for shopping at Tesco, have a nice day!” He forced the words out of his mouth, his voice dry. He could act well, back in the day, but now, he wasn’t exactly willing to try. The ginger opened his mouth to speak. “Hope to see you again, sir, thanks for returning the wallet you found!” A bright smile on his stupid face. Ugh! Always got to suck up to them, doesn’t he? Draco grit his teeth as he shut the register, looking up to see that there was no more customers queuing at the counter. 

He opened up the wallet and looked it over, then noticed the name on a credit card in one of the sleeves to the front. There were a couple of ID cards in the others, but.. he couldn’t exactly be bothered. He leaned down and pulled out the small microphone wired to the counter, thought his announcement up, pressed the button besides it and opened his mouth to speak. 

“A black leather wallet belonging to a Y/N Y/L/N was just found in the Car Care aisle. Kindly approach counter number 4 for more details, please.” He called out, almost monotonously, closing the wallet up and setting it away. He turned it off and set it away. He looked over at the wallet again and goddamn Lucius’ face flashed in his mind again. 

“Can’t seem to learn to act a little nicer, can you, Draco?” Draco lifted his gaze to look over at him, eyes flitting down to the name tag by his collar. Ron… what a bloke to be forced to spend these hours with.. Draco furrowed his brows and just shook his head. “No, I can’t. And that’s the way it’ll be. I’m saying what I have to say, and I shouldn’t be judged for not feeling like a chirpy little bird all the time.” “Okay.. whatever.” Ron rolled his eyes and fiddled around with the bags attached to the hooks by the counter, then looked around. “Not a very busy day today, is it?” 

Draco looked down as his eyes widened, somehow Ron had mastered getting on his nerves. “No, it’s not. Not a lot of people out this late at night on a Sunday, Ron.” He looked over at the digital clock by the exit of the store, tilting his head and rolling his shoulders lightly. ‘10:47’  The clock read. Less than a quarter of an hour until my shift ends and I can get out of this shithole. He stared into space as he bit down on his lip, grateful that Ron had finally decided to remain silent. It wasn’t too chilly inside, but it was unbearable for every other reason. This forced happiness with every single customer, the annoying radio somehow constantly playing only the songs he seemed to hate, his annoying bag packer.. maybe retail really wasn’t for him. He shook his head and fiddled with the edge of his blue uniform shirt, staring at the clock and waiting for time to pass. 

Easy money, isn’t it? He continued to think to himself. Have to press a couple of buttons, say a couple of words, stay in my place, everything works out. He took a deep breath. Good cover too. No one’s too careful with managing who does the shifts either.. Great alibi, Draco. Could just lie and write my name up in the lists.. No one even cares. A small smile grew on his face. No one would even know if it was me.. Not one. Murder isn’t that hard when you’ve got control of the inventory as well. Change a couple numbers, bag a couple of items and take them out with you through the employee’s exit, no one would even know a thing. 

After having to leave university, Draco had grown very, very confused as to what direction to steer his life in. Money wasn’t exactly what he was after.. and it seemed like any past hopes of his of being a research scientist were pointless without some kind of a degree. Chemistry had been his subject of choice, much to his father’s great disdain. He was fine with Draco not even going into tertiary education at all, he had the family business going for him, didn’t he? If you could call it that, then yes. But.. it wasn’t for him. Smuggling wasn’t what interested him, really. It was murder, now.

Draco had liked reading about true crime since he was a child. The horrors, the mysteries and everything else had fascinated him to no end. He thought it had just been some kind of juvenile interest of his, some way to satisfy his curiosity. He could never have seen himself attempting any of that. But that was until he was forced out of his lush lifestyle, this whole change had not only upped his anger and generosity towards the rich and the poor, respectively, but also his desire to get rid of the stress inside of him. Nicotine had soon become his drug of choice but.. 

He craved something more.

Roland Hoyt… oh boy.. That was the one serial killer Draco had truly been fascinated by. That absolute genius had managed to kill eight people in an old English town with the use of chemicals. It was some mixture of cyanide and barbiturates that he had managed to feed to most of his victims which lead to their death, but what had truly drawn Draco in was the few cases in which Hoyt managed to use his own version of the famed lethal injection. It was beyond wicked, truly. Draco felt like it would be one hell of an insane mission, had felt crooked to the bone even thinking about doing it, but truly, there was no better way to get out his frustration than to just.. do the same. He couldn’t exactly afford any kind of games, or gym membership or as such any longer. And even his most recent ex, Pansy, had seemed to lose any interest in him once he lost his fortune. Talking to girls wasn’t exactly his forte to begin with, anyways. 

He just wanted to try it, really. Out of curiosity. Just someone who no one would miss, would even know they were missing. He knew it was absolutely awful of him to even try.. But he’d studied up enough to know how to get away with it, and try he very well would. Or at least try to try, right?

He was snapped out of his thoughts with a nudge to the shoulder from his accompanying bag packer. His head shot up and looked over at him. “What is it, Weasley?” Ron pointed over at the other side of the counter where a new customer was stood.

“Not you again..” 

Draco suddenly froze, instantly recognising that voice. He looked up hesitantly and locked eyes with her. It’s that bitch from earlier! Should bar her from coming in here, really! He grit his teeth and pursed his lips slightly, but soon opened his mouth to speak. “Good evening, miss.” His tone seemed a bit cheery, but was obviously rich in sarcasm. “The wallet’s mine.. “ He almost snarled at this, but placed the wallet on the counter. “Are you sure? Or are you just trying to..? You really Y/N Y/L/N?”

She rolled her eyes and took the wallet, opening it up delicately. “Do you really think I’d steal a wallet? You shouldn’t be allowed to work here, honestly.” She pushed a single bottle of antifreeze forwards, fiddling with the ends of her hair. Draco quickly sized her up as she moved forward. The backpack was gone, replaced by a small satchel bag over her shoulder. She seemed to have changed as well, while he couldn’t remember what kind of shirt she was wearing, the jeans she had on were replaced by some shorts.. and what seemed like a small plaster over her knee. He took the bottle of antifreeze and brought it up to the scanner.

“Well, good thing I have a kind manager, then.” He rolled his eyes as the machine beeped, passing the bottle along to Ron, who almost dropped it at first. Draco looked over at him and his eyes were practically stuck on the girl as she glared at Draco. She suddenly looked over at Ron as well, launching into another attack. “Has Tesco seriously started employing assholes who push customers around when no one else is looking?” She bit down on her lip, awaiting some kind of a response.

“Well-well..” Ron stuttered out and Draco couldn’t help but cringe for him, pressing a few buttons on the register. “He’s just the one.. Really. The rest of us are.. not bad.” The girl seems unsatisfied with this response, but continued to look at him, studying his reaction. “So.. you’re not bad then?” She asked, eyeing the redhead quizzically now. “I can be great for a pretty girl like-” “That’ll be seven pounds.” Draco looked over at Ron to see him staring back disapprovingly, arms crossed over his chest. He could feel the slight snarl growing on his face, but snapped out of it, knowing he couldn’t have this girl actually complain about him to his superiors. “Paying by card?” He flipped a card reader over to her, then pressed a few buttons on his own register. She nodded and fit it into the slot, waiting patiently as it flashed an ‘Approved’ sign. “There..”

Draco rolled his eyes yet again, reaching over to grasp the receipt that had just finished printing out. “Miss, you need to sign and write down your contact number here. Just for verification purposes.” He placed a pen right next to it and took a slight step back, studying her for a second. She seems.. easy? A bit violent.. But easily taken care of. Fell like a twig. He shook the thought from his head for a second, looking down as she finished up.

Almost unpredictably, she looked up and flashed Ron a smile, whose ears immediately flushed pink. Sure enough, the signatures matched and he handed her her bag, after which, she soon stepped out. “What the hell was that, Ron?” Ron just shook his head and looked over at her, before glancing back at the Employees Only room.

Y/N Y/L/N. He thought. How convenient. He looked over at the girl exiting, making a mental note. He quickly closed up the register and placed a ‘Next Counter Please’ sign for the next employee to take off. Ron had already cleaned up his area and had started heading back to the Employees Only room, probably to change. 

Y/N. Draco finished up and put his hands in his pockets, heading back himself as he noticed a few other employees shuffling over. Physically, she’s an ordinary female, but mentally, just as spoilt and awful as Father.

Think I’ve found myself a first victim, haven’t I?

Chapter 2

#draco x reader #draco malfoy #draco malfoy x reader #draco #hp au #draco imagine #draco malfoy imagine #hp imagine #angst #murder

[eye-raq]

Daddy’s Home Pt.1: The Pull UP

Okay so ya’ll gonna trip off of this one HERE. Thanks to my girl @hdkween I had to do it man i had to!!!!!!

Summary: Erik serves seven years of his ten year sentence, getting out on good behavior to finally teach his girl who left him almost four years ago a lesson (A NASTY LESSON) *tehee*

WARNINGS: SMUT (18+) This is long, and nasty, and just badddd yall.  If I haven’t tagged you please let my ass know because everytime i make a tag list i loose it lmao!

Mariposa County Jail.

That’s where she visited now. From her understanding, it was very strict. She got a further warning from her good friend Brianna, who had an ex-boyfriend there that she visited often.

“Girlllll, I'm just gonna warn you now, you can forget all the treats you could sneak in at the other jail, and paying off some of those crooked officers to fuck in the bathroom, NOPE. No bending the rules or you’ll be staying there too.”

Upon arrival there, Callie couldn’t even park and leave her 2015 Infiniti Q50 without some correctional officers approaching her vehicle to check it. She clutched her Pink tote bag, an attitude etched within her pretty brown features as she watched them attack her car, never missing an inch of space. After about ten minutes, they finally lifted from her vehicle, turning to escort her into the Institution.

It seemed they really wanted to be cautious, because now Callie had to go through a metal detector, also having to send her bag down the conveyor belt to get checked by a women correctional officer. Callie was used to this part, having to be searched before she entered, but not as extensive as her car.

She even received instructions before coming here to not wear similar colors that resemble that of the inmates. They wore blue from head to toe, so she wore an all black Pink tracksuit with her curly hair up in a simple top knot bun. After going through check out, Callie had to sign some forms, handing over her ID, stating her name, and date of birth.

“Callie Demetria Carter, 4/4/90.”

“Visiting?” The boring officer asked, his eyes never leaving the papers in front of him, the balding patch of thin hair on his pale head giving her a view she would normally laugh at if it wasn’t for her already overgrowing irritation.

“Erik Stevens.” Erik Stevens, graduate at MIT who took on the job as a hacker instead of an engineer.

At that the officer went to pull out a stack of visitors lists, finally finding Erik’s, scanning to see. Callie had always been curious to know who else visited Erik, her eyes staring through the thick panel of glass, squinting them to make out more than one name scribbled there.

“Alright, let's go. Leave all personal belongings here, and follow these few officers through that door to the phone room.”

Callie never had to visit Erik in a phone room. She always came to see him at the other institution in a wide open room where all inmates came to see their visitors whether it be friends, family, or even enemies. Callie tried to block out the image of the one visitor who sat next to her, the prisoner stabbing their neck repeatedly, before doing the same to themselves. Callie had nightmares about that for nearly a two months.

Finally lifting from the chair, Callie walked empty-handed as she allowed the slow swinging doors to close. It was a long dimly lit hallway, the sounds of her vans walking across the shiny hardwood flooring that had the smell of pine sol wafting from it. She gripped the zipper of her tracksuit hoodie tightly, her expression hardened.

Callie avoided her last visit to see Erik for reasons she didn’t want to bring up. She supposed Erik needed time to adjust here as well because he had transferred to this Institution for his own safety. Erik literally owned the last prison he stayed in called San Quentin State Prison. Erik had the warden and the correctional officers eating out the palm of his hand, he even had his own cell in a secluded area of the prison from the other inmates. That alone earned a lot of hate and jealousy towards him.

Callie remembers visiting Erik in the earlier stages of his arrest, face bruised purple and red from fighting, he even walked out with his orange jumpsuit undone, a bandage on his broad chest from an attempt stabbing in the courtyard:

“E! What the fuck?!” Callie wanted to cry.

“Aye! I told you, I got this. Don’t go wasting your tears on me. You got the weed right?” Callie’s somber expression turned to that of annoyance as she pulled out the plastic bag full of kush, his special kush that he smoked in jail to keep him level headed, especially if he planned on getting out on good behavior.

“Thanks, baby, you like my little Bonnie, always holding me down.”

Callie’s attention was brought back to the present as the doors to the phone room opened, revealing a long stainless steel counter sealed off by a thick pane of glass separated by a wall between each visiting area, a rusty black phone for the visitor and the prisoner to use, and hard plastic chairs. From the way this was set up, there would be no more weed for Erik and no more quick sex sessions. Callie finally takes her seat at the instructed area, pulling her chair close and pressing her elbows firm on the counter in front of her. As if on cue, the correctional officer on the other side of the glass opened the door, a buzz sounding out as awe transformed her face.

There, standing at 6’3 220 lbs with little beady beads in his hair, unkempt facial hair, and crisp blue pants with a matching top was Erik himself. Callie felt a blush creep up her face, all of the memories with this man flooding her brain again, giving the wicked imagery that she wasn’t prepared for. Adjusting herself in her seat, Callie clears her throat, trying her best to stare into the eyes of her incarcerated boyfriend, clear resentment festering within him. Callie couldn’t lie, she felt fear in her belly, even through the thick glass. Erik kicks back the chair, settling with a loud thump of the chains around his wrists, body slouched and eyes cold with fury. Callie took a chance to look around her, nerves a damn wreck before picking up the dirty phone, bringing it to her ear slowly. She motioned with a lift of her chin for Erik to pick up his phone, watching him snatch it up with so much aggression, fear churned in her stomach.

Callie could hear him breathing, his chest from what she could see rapidly moving as if he were suffocating on his rage.

“Hi E, how you been baby?” Callie licked at her dry lips. She waited for him to respond for what felt like a minute, the fingers on his right hand tapping at the counter deathly slow.

“I heard some things.” That's all he had to say to her, no hi princess, no wassup baby girl, no you miss me, just THAT. Callie felt disrespected, the number of times she would visit his ungrateful ass, and that’s all he had to say.

“Oh? So no hi how are you? No hey baby girl, wassup love, nothing?” She grimaced.

“Are you gonna confirm what I heard?” he gave her a dirty look with a shrug of his shoulders.

“I’ll entertain your rude ass since that’s what you clearly want me to do.” Callie seemed to have forgotten how aggravating her boyfriend could be.

“Word on the street is, my girl entertaining some other nigga.” Callie’s expression closed up, her fingers fidgeting while her eyes landed on a vein popping out the side of his neck.

“Wassup? You can’t speak?” Erik whispers with rage, his jaw tight and eyes bloodshot. He leans closer, his face almost pressing against the glass.

“It ain’t even like that.” She felt small. Callie felt like everyone in that room could hear what was going on.

“It ain’t even like that huh?! From my understanding, you let this nigga into my place, fucked this nigga in my bed?” He laughs.

“Erik chill out. I came all this way to see you.” She started to feel her anger stab at her brain.

“I’m finna break this MOTHERFUCKING glass.” Erik brings a single finger to the glass, stabbing it.

“I’m growing hella tired of the games Callie. You wanna stop with all that playing and tell me what’s really going on?” Callie’s leg fidgeted under the table, her eyes closed. She was afraid to even tell him anything from the reaction she was receiving right now.

“Fine! I met someone.” Callie nibbles on her fingers, her eyes wavering. He just sat there, immobilized with fury, his eyes deranged and a look as if he’d been slapped.

“You wanna run that shit by me again?!” The spit from his mouth hit the glass.

“I-I met a guy, his name is Lamont. We hung out a few times, and I invited him over. We kissed and he felt me up a little but that’s it! That’s all I didn’t let him hit I sware on my life!” Callie fucked up, she knew she fucked up. Erik had friends in AND out of jail. Callie briefly wondered besides his lawyer, were there others who would report things to him? She felt stupid.

“You stupid or what? You really thought you could fuck with another nigga while I was away? Especially since you’re MINES. What you thought I wasn’t gonna find out? I can’t believe your little simple ass.” He could taste the blood on his tongue from his rage. Erik pounded his fist on the counter, causing one of the correctional officers to approach behind him.

Callie rubbed angrily at her face, tears that she didn’t want nor needed, falling. She put up with Erik’s jailbird ass long enough, four years in jail to be exact. Callie had a lot going for herself, a college degree in Health Science, a great job with benefits and a salary wage, she wanted to feel guilty, but why should she? Erik landed himself in jail for credit fraud on multiple counts for some stupid job she warned him not to take, now he was serving seven to ten years behind bars.

“Fuck this, I don’t feel sorry about shit,” Callie yells, her limbs shaking.

“So you don’t feel sorry for getting with some clown while I’m in jail!!!?” Erik yells back into the phone.

“No, I don’t E. I feel like I deserve more than this arrangement we have going on.” Callie could see the hurt in his eyes, his nostrils flaring.

“What this punk nigga got that I don’t have?!” Erik smirks deviously then, his eyes low and predatory.

“Freedom.” Callie couldn’t believe she just said that.

“What a FUCKING SHAME. That’s all? Just freedom?”

“Freedom is better than dick Erik. Dick that you can’t sling behind bars.” Callie was on a roll. Did she know that from her words, she dug a deeper hole with Erik, but so? What could he do right? He was away for seven to ten years, by the time he got out she could be somewhere overseas living it up.

“You feel real tough on the other side of that glass. I’m giving you this one fucking warning Callie, DROP THAT NIGGA. Don’t look at him, don’t speak to him, don’t even breathe the same air as him.” with every word he spoke, he poked the glass so hard it shook.

“Erik, I’m tired of this shit. I’m sick of you trying to control me, I’m sick of coming up here with the same damn routine to see your sour ass, I’m TIRED! I’m fucking tired E.” Her eyes almost left her sockets as she spoke the words she’d been feeling for a while. Callie didn’t deserve this kind of lifestyle because of his mistakes.

“So WHAT?! You fucking leaving me?! What kind of girl of mines you supposed to be if you leaving me HUH?! Gon’ fucking dip out on me after all the shit I did for your ass. If the tables were turned you think I would do you dirty like this?! I can tell you now I WOULDN’T.” His voice was at its highest peak now, so deep and thunderous it earned the attention of practically everyone in that room.

“You are embarrassing right now! Calm your big ass down! You want the whole world to know our business?!!.” Callie scoots her seat back, lifting from her chair.

“Who the FUCK told you to exit! Were not fucking done Callie! I swear on EVERYTHING.”

“What?! Last time I checked I’m over here and YOUR over there!” Callie rolls her eyes at him, turning to leave with a middle finger to the sky.

Erik stands from his chair frantically, causing it to fall to the floor loudly. He snarls, nodding his head, pointing a warning finger to her retreating back as the officers lead her away.

“I’ll see you and that bitch ass NIGGA on the outside bruh!!!!!!” He felt the firm grip of the officers on his arms, causing him to laugh.

“Ain’t shit going on with me I’m GOOD.” Erik shakes them off. All he could see was her walking down that hallway, not even a backward glance.

“IT’S COOL BABY GIRL KEEP THAT SAME ENERGY WHEN I GET OUT!” Erik rubs at his nose, blinking his eyes rapidly while his fists clenched.

“Go ahead and bounce then Callie since you leaving.” He could feel his chains being pulled, his hurt face turning away from her blurred body as the officers lead him back to his shared cell.

Present Day: January 2019.

“Hey, Stevens!”

There were about four correctional officers headed towards his cell, the one leading the way going by the name of Johnson. All of them were big and intimidating, but none compared to Erik himself.

Standing at 6’3 246 lbs of thick muscle, body littered in tiny raised scars that represented each day he resided behind bars, skin a deep almond, hair in wild dreads that sat atop his head with a sharp temp-fade around the sides, bringing in the strong features that consisted of a broad nose, sharp brown eyes, wide lips that drew back into a snarl from the pull-ups he was currently doing, dark messy eyebrows, and teeth littered in gold.

“It’s showtime! Grab your stuff, were escorting you out.”

Erik drops down with a loud thud of his faded Timberlands against the smooth concrete of his cell, waking up his cellmate, causing him to groan. Erik gives Johnson a once over with his eyes, and a wicked smile before adjusting the drawstring to his pants, the fabric almost slipping from his waist to pool around his feet.

“It’s that time already Johnson? I thought my good behavior release didn’t start till next week on Wednesday?” Erik turns his chiseled back on Johnson and the others standing on the other side of his cell bars, walking over to his untidy bed, grabbing up the duffle he had already packed with some gear he definitely couldn’t fit anymore, throwing it over his shoulder.

“Where’s your shirt?” Johnson asked with annoyance.

“What’s the weather?” Erik looked up at the tiny window on the ceiling, the sun peeking through, staining his scared shoulders.

“It’s about 75 degrees.” Erik scuffs, pulling out a white long sleeve henley, throwing it on quick before walking up to the gate. Johnson begins to unlock it, Erik’s heart practically banging against his solid chest from how relieved he was to finally leave that shit hole. He served seven years of his sentence, SEVEN. He knew his lawyer would look out for him, the sexy bitch finally getting what she always wanted. The day Erik found out about his good behavior leave, his lawyer by the name of Marcia Grey requested to see him in private. Erik confused out of his mind showed up within that room to find Marcia in a tight nude bodycon skirt, with her white blouse undone giving him a full on view of her ample cleavage that begged to fall into his mouth. How many years has it been? Three years and eleven months since he had pussy? That’s about 1452 days. When he and Callie were together, they always had an arrangement of sex the four years before that, but since she called things off, Erik was left to beating his meat in hopes that the other prisoners couldn’t hear him.

Marcia made her intentions clear with Erik, that she wanted to fuck him in return for getting him his good behavior release. Erik didn’t have to be told twice, he lifted her up by the back of her thighs and fucked her a good two times, getting his nut in on that hard ass table. That was at least three months ago, now he really needed it craved it, and the only person to deliver that was Callie herself.

Callie Demetria Carter.

Could be Callie Demetria Stevens, She was lucky Erik loved her ass. He took his anger out on lifting weights, and punching bags, sometimes even racist prisoners who rubbed him the wrong way.

All that thinking, Erik hadn’t realized that the exit was inches away from him, the fresh air wafting his nose. FINALLY, no more smelling his cellmates shit in the middle of the night, no more quick showers because he wanted to avoid the homosexual prisoners who already gave him a look that made him want to break their faces in two, no more filling up on stale bread and ramen noodle hookups with tuna fish and eggs, and no more being pushed around by the crooked ass correctional officers.

Erik watched as Johnson opened the final gate to freedom, a car waiting for him ahead, HIS car, a 2018 NSX in electric blue.

“That’s you?!” Johnson was astonished.

“I might have been behind bars, but that doesn’t mean I ain’t got bank.”

Erik didn’t give a final farewell, walking up to his car, his good friend since childhood named Kendrick walking up to dab him up excitedly.

“Yee wassup big homie!” Kendrick pats Erik’s back.

“What’s good bro, YO, thanks for looking out for me while I was away, I owe you one big time.”

“That’s what friends are for right? You’re my nigga, of course, I was gonna look out for you.”

Erik practically runs to the drivers' side, itching to feel that leather on his back and smell that new car smell. Pulling off at 70 miles per hour, Erik starts talking business.

“My clean slate is already in progress from my understanding, I got some people in high places who owe me some favors.”

“AND, I found your girl, MISS CALLIE.” Kendrick clarifies.

“Is that RIGHT?” Erik’s grip on the steering wheel doesn’t go unnoticed, the leather making a loud crunching sound.

“YEP. she’s been dating that same nigga Lamont. Supposedly they’re going out tonight for a date, I think it’s RA Sushi on Lancaster Street.”

Erik’s irritation crackled.

He had something in store for her ass, just wait. He had a backup apartment where he did business that he could stay for a while, and then tonight he would pop up on Callie and her temporary nigga, serving up punishment by dick.

9:00 pm, Friday

“Look at you! You know how much I love RA Sushi.” Callie grabs Lamont's hand as he helps her out of his matte grey G Wagon, his hungry eyes never leaving Callie’s body. Tonight she wore a skin-tight camouflage bodycon dress, her lips painted a wine red, natural makeup on her face that brought out her hazel eyes, long hair done in soft curls, and her feet covered in nude So Kate red bottoms.

“I remember your love for Sushi Callie, figured we could start the night off right with dinner before we head over to the Hookah Bar.” Lamont stood at 6’1, a tall glass of chocolate milk with a bright white smile and chiseled features. His hair was shiny and black, blending perfectly with the fitted black sweater he wore and the dark wash denim of his jeans. He had a simple silver Rolex on his wrist with a silver rope chain, the smell of rosewood wafting her nose every time he took a step closer to her.

“Just hookah bar afterward? Nothing else you had in mind?” Lamont turned to her with a suggestive flicker of his thick black eyebrow, his lips turned up into a crooked smile.

“Callie you always want some damn dick.”

“What’s wrong with that? You telling me you don’t want to fuck?” Callie chuckles with a shocked look on her face. She never met a man who would turn down sex, especially if his women was ready and willing to provide that for him.

“OF COURSE I love fucking you Callie, but I was thinking tonight we could watch some movies, you know, get all boo’d up.” Callie actually scrunches her face at that. She hadn’t had the dick in about a week and all he wanted to do was lay in bed and watch movies? It was so foreign to her. As much as she hated to remember him, Erik never seized to please his women in AND out of the bed, that was before he got his ass locked up. Cali always wondered how he’d been holding up, sometimes thinking the worst, but she knew Erik could hold his own.

“Earth to Callie?” Callie hadn’t noticed her arrival in RA Sushi, standing in front of the hostess.

“Table for two right?” She asked all chipper.

“Yes, a booth near the window please,” Callie asked, watching as the hostess picked up two menus, escorting them to their table.

“You sure you good? You spaced out back there.” Lamont put an arm around her shoulder, squeezing her soft arm, bringing her body flush against his.

“Yeah, you know how I can get, lost in my thoughts.” They both settled into their seats, Callie letting out a deep breath before opening her menu to appetizers.

“You sure you telling me everything?” Lamont squinted his eyes in suspicion at her.

“Stop worrying about nothing and order us some appetizers! I was thinking we should share a bowl of ramen.” Lamont didn’t press her further, the waiter's arrival providing relief for her.

They both sat with glasses of water, undecided on what drinks they wanted with their chopsticks digging into the hot bowl of noodles, broth, beef, eggs, and veggies. Callie was so caught up in Lamont wiping some broth from the side of her mouth, that she hadn’t noticed the arrival of a special guest, but Lamont did.

“Can we help you brother?” Callie looks in the direction of Lamont's question to find THE ONE FUCKING PERSON SHE DIDN’T EXPECT TO SEE.

“AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!” Callie screams in shock, jumping back in her booth seat, hitting her head against the brick wall. She whines in pain, her hand rubbing over her weave, eyes wide in terror, her hands shaking as they covered her mouth.

“Miss Callie Carter, AKA Daddy’s little slut with the trick tongue.” Erik rolls his shoulders, arms folded across his chest with his dreads freshly twisted and stroked to the side, gold-rimmed glasses on his face, a white v neck t-shirt with an oversized distressed denim jacket, light wash drop crotch jeans with red and black Jordan 1’s on his feet. He smiles brightly, revealing golds in his mouth. Callie could not remove her eyes from him, she COULDN’T BELIEVE that Erik himself stood before her with at least twenty pounds of muscle added to his body and a head full of dreads. Was this the nigga she left in the phone room almost 4 years ago?!!!

“What the fuck?! NIGGA, WHO ARE YOU TO SAY SOME SHIT LIKE THAT ABOUT MY GIRL? Did you lose your fucking mind bruh? Get the stepping homie!” Lamont was fuming now, ready to stand up out of the booth, but Callie put out a hand to stop him.

“Lamont!!! no, just no…”

Lamont gives Erik a nasty look before turning to Callie with confusion.

“You wanna tell me who this nigga is that claim you’ve been sucking his dick?” ERIK barks out a burst of laughter that caused a waiter to stumble with a tray full of hot saki shots.

“My nigga you don’t know?!! I’m the one Callie left almost four years ago.” Lamont had this dumb expression on his face that made Erik want to go upside his head even more.

“You lost you coffee faced nigga!? Check this out..”

Erik seats himself next to Callie, her entire personal space now filled with the smell of warm cinnamon, mint citrus, and Indian patchouli clouding her, it was provocative allure and power with distinct magnetic notes. Callie hated the fact that she loved the smell, she was livid because her seat grew wet.

“Since it seems that Callie here is the QUEEN of secrets, let me reveal her biggest one.”

“Erik DON’T” Callie yanks at his jacket, causing him to turn his blazing eyes on her.

“Get your fucking hands off me. You punished.” Callie felt like she’d been slapped in the face, her jaw slack and her hazel eyes almost leaving her sockets.

“Now back to you nigga with the temporary dick, I’m Erik, Callie’s man who’s been away in jail for seven years.” Lamont marinated in resentment, not a word spoke just pure hate in his eyes as he stared at Erik unblinking.

“You look like you wanna kill me right now, but I bet that shit doesn’t match up to how much I wanna end your fucking life,” Erik spoke that low and careful, so Lamont could catch every single word.

“And as for you,” Erik points to Callie without even looking at her.

“I told you not to come near this nigga, didn’t I? I told you not to breathe the same air as him and look at what we got.” Callie could only shake her head, her lower lip trembling. She didn’t know what would happen next, but she KNEW it wouldn’t be the perfect reunion.

“Say goodnight, Callie, we leaving.” Erik lifts from the booth, walking away a little to find Callie still seated.

“Oh? So Daddy gotta punish you further huh? That’s cool, I’m up for the extra work.” Callie looks at Lamont, his eyes staring down at the table without a single gaze at her. Erik whistles, getting Callie’s attention again as she finally lifts from the booth, now on her two feet.

“Sorry, Lamont.” She says over her shoulder, guilt creeping up her belly.

“Sorry, not sorry,” Erik says with a smile, knowing that Lamont wasn’t stupid enough to get up and try anything with him. Callie takes tentative steps towards Erik, all eyes in that restaurant on her like she was walking the walk of shame.

Erik holds up his hand to her, stopping her.

“What the fuck you doing?” He says with a harsh breath escaping his mouth.

“Is that how you're supposed to approach big daddy? You forgetting something?!” Callie’s body stiffens, turning her face away from him. He had so much CONTROL.

“You can’t be fucking serious right now Erik???” He cocks his head at her response.

“Oh I’m DEAD Fucking serious, get on all fours NOW, and crawl to me before I leave your ass in this restaurant.” Erik snaps his fingers, pointing towards the floor rapidly. Callie shakes her head, kneading her shoulder, she just couldn’t do it in public NO FUCKING WAY.

“I DON’T CARE WHERE WE ARE. You’re Daddy’s little slut who likes to be on her knees.” Callie massages the back of her neck, her eyes wavered as she lowers herself to the floor in the middle of that restaurant. She flips her hair over her shoulder angrily, placing her hands onto the floor now, crawling towards him slowly with her piercing hazel eyes on his dark deranged ones. Erik laughs bitterly, walking back towards the door with his eyes trained on his Callie, her plump body swaying with each crawling motion. Finally, at the door, Erik stands with his back against the archway, arms folded, waiting for her to kneel in front of him. Callie makes herself comfortable on her knees, her eyes still on him, because she didn’t want to risk pissing him off further in public.

“I been gone from that pussy for too long for you to entertain some other nigga, some wack ass nigga you stupid?! You thought you would get away with it huh?!” Erik kisses his teeth, bending over to grip her chin roughly. Callie gulps, her lip quivering.

“Erik,”

“AYE.” She snaps her lips shut, her tongue rolling along the inside of her cheek.

“DADDY. Please, I’m-I’m fucking sorry okay I-I-I?!!”

“I-I-I-Too late Callie.” Callie could feel everyone's eyes on her, Erik looking up scanning the restaurant with malice.

“Fuck yall looking at?! Mind yall fucking business!!!”

Callie wanted to slap his fine ass clean across his face.

“FUCK-YOU-ERIK.” She said that with spite, already regretting it.

“Fuck me?! NAH, kill that IM FUCKING YOU. And I’m fucking you hard, and rough. Too many years in that fucking cell.” His voice grew so deep and terrifying. It not only had her fearing him, but it also had her pussy wet and calling for him.

The pleasure, the terror for the MAN.

“Round one of your punishment, I miss those naughty lips wrapped around my dick.” Erik lifted his shirt to his mouth, his hard, sensuous, able-bodied, sturdy, powerful, brick house frame came into view littered in these interesting scars that had her starstruck and dazed.

“Each one of these scars represents the number of days I spent behind bars, seven years worth of days.”

His thick fingers took its time to undo his pants, her throat bobbing and spit forming in the corners of her mouth. She salivated for this man, her face giving him a fake scowl. Erik knew her all too well, a mischievous smirk on his face as he stuck one of his hands down his briefs, pulling out a whopping 10 inches of thick dick, gripping it firmly at the base, Callie going cross-eyed as her eyes took in his thick head, and veiny shaft.

“What you supposed to do with this?” Erik could hear the audible gasps and objections from the people inside the restaurant. Callie’s tongue flicks her bottom lip slow, her eyes trailing from his impressive piece of meat to his sexy eyes.

“I’m supposed to suck it, DADDY.” Callie felt butterflies in her belly from that.

“That’s a start, and how you supposed to suck me off?” Callie wiggles on her knees.

“With both hands behind my back, using only my mouth.”

“THAT’S RIGHT. Only using that FUCKING MOUTH. No hands, just the lips, that tongue…”

Erik’s dick sits on her lips then, Callie’s head shaking from how good it felt to have that heavy thing rest on her bottom lip, staining it red.

“I don’t wanna see my dick, you better use that throat to your advantage! Make my shit disappear like you ain’t got no barrier!” He barked that shit out rough. Callie brings her hands behind her, opening wide, sinking her mouth on his stiff dick smooth and clean, her throat vibrating around him. It felt like home sweet home the way his dick sat deep to her uvula, her inner cheeks contracting around him giving his dick the best tension. She couldn’t believe that Erik had her on her knees, in front of EVERYONE with his dick in her mouth, fresh out of prison.

“Taste like it used to right? Ain’t change one fucking bit.” Callie nods her head, sucking him with a twirl of her mouth causing his dick to hit her inner cheeks each time, a hiss escaping his mouth deeply. She releases with a pop, spitting on it, then gliding her lips over him again, now bobbing her head quickly, the gurgling sounds so loud in her ears, the shock from the people around them became less audible. She loved it, every single inch of it no matter how upset she tried to be. She missed the dick, and it made her own the humiliation even more.

“Suck on my sack bitch.” That’s the only warning she needed, her mouth popping off his dick to suck on his hefty balls, Erik grabbing hold of his dick then, smacking her cheek. Her tongue thrashed wildly over him, sucking him up into her mouth one at a time, her pretty eyes taking in the strain of pleasure that was etched across his face.

“Look at you, for somebody that wanted to leave me so damn bad you sure as hell giving me a good welcome home present. Nasty ass.” Callie licks her way back to his dick, her lips sucking hard on the tip of his dick, which caused Erik to grip the sides of her face, fucking into her mouth so rough her nails dug into the skin on her hands.

“DON’T RUN EITHER LET ME TAKE THIS MOUTH.” He fucked her mouth like it didn’t belong to her, Callie’s body shaking and her entire face covered in spit. She couldn’t keep her eyes off of this sexy man, he was even sexier than before, and the thought of him fucking her tonight had her praying to God to wake up the next day with the ability to walk.

“Still got that dangerous tongue I see, FUCKKK.” He threw his head back, that lip she loved to suck on between his teeth.

“This my mouth now Callie, Let me cum in my shit.” Erik’s hips banged into her mouth faster and faster, his groans growing louder.

“FUCK YES!” She whimpers around him, his cum spilling out in loads down her chin, neck, and chest. It was SO MUCH, she couldn't even drink it all. Callie never knew Erik to cum that much.

Erik withdrew his dick, smacking her on the lips with it before scraping up some cum, feeding it to her. She drank every single drop with love and affection, her makeup ruined and clothes, the humiliation in the back of her mind.

Callie’s hands fought to gain control as she opened her apartment door, the hallway deathly quiet with the exception of Erik’s hard breathing on her neck. He yanks on her weave hard, pulling her back and causing her to slam her door closed after successfully opening it. Callie’s throat felt like she swallowed rocks from how sore it was, Erik, making her suck his dick again on the ride over.

“You thought you would run out on a nigga? Fuck another nigga?” Erik smacks her ass rough causing her to draw in a sharp breath.

“ANSWER ME!”

“No! I-I no Daddy no!!!”

“No? So you didn’t fuck him?”

Callie felt him yank on her hair again, her right foot almost causing her to fall.

“I-I, EEEEEEE.” She knew if she told him, he would get her.

“shut -that-whining-up-right-fucking-now.”

“DADDY, pleasseeee.”

“SAY IT.” Callie hiccuped from her whimpering.

“Yes. yes, I did.” She felt his nose press into her face, taking a deep breath in, blowing it out, then take another deep breath in, holding it. She did it.

“Open that door baby girl, right now.” Callie felt Erik release her hair, her hand gripping the knob to let them into her place.

“STRIP.” Erik doesn’t wait for her to get to the bedroom, let alone all the way into her living room, watching Callie step out of her heels, pulling her dress up and over her head, revealing an emerald green g string underneath with a matching push up bra. Erik runs a hand down his face as he takes in Callie’s heavy titties, down to her round belly, straight to her pussy, down her thunder thighs, and finally landing on her pretty toes.

“My nasty little bitch got thick on me. Look at you, mmm, ass so phat pussy so phat, titties sitting pretty, chunky and sexy.” Callie clutched her chest, the look in Erik’s eyes making it hard for her to stand on two feet.

“Now you KNOW that pussy too fat to fit into a g string, look at it.” Erik takes off his jacket, pulling his shirt up and over his head, practically knocking her out with that killer body. He looked like he belonged in the military running drills. With a body like that he could lift her up and over his head, knock a nigga out with one clean punch.

“Pussy lips hanging over the sides, eating that fabric.” His tongue flicked his upper lip repeatedly. Callie’s eyes were trained there, her mouth hanging open.

“You like that? You like the way daddy flick his tongue?” Erik started teasing her then, flicking his tongue over his lips LL Cool J style, biting them with a wrinkle of his nose, puckering them, flicking his tongue between his fingers, she couldn’t take it.

“I bet Lamont wack ass couldn’t eat the pussy like me COULD HE?” she jerked her leg to calm her pussy.

“Say no daddy.” He instructed.

“No daddy.”

Erik approaches her, taking his fingers to yank her bra down, her titties jumping out at him with surprise. Erik frantically lowered his mouth, sucking up her nipples in a sloppy manner, making lurid noises. Callie didn’t hold back a single moan as he attacked her heavy chest, her hand's yearning to touch him, causing him to smack it away.

“What I say? You punished right? Say yes daddy.”

“Y-yes daddy.”

Erik unclips her bra, tossing it to the side in her living room, grabbing two handfuls of her titties sucking her nipples so good it almost made her fall flat on her back.

“I missed this mouth daddy.”

“I bet your thick ass did. You can’t get nothing pass me.” Erik trails his tongue down her belly now, kissing and nibbling.

“You remember how daddy liked to eat the pussy?” Callie nods her head.

“You got a mouth right? USE THAT SHIT.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“So how Daddy used to do it then?” Without a further word, Callie got to the floor, turning with her back arched and bent over, her pussy spreading for him in that tiny ass g string.

“GOOD GIRL. You know your position like the back of your damn hand.” Erik kneeled in front of her, fisting her panties before ripping it clean off.

“DAMN DADDY.” Callie’s eyes rolled in lust. Erik’s hands came down on her ass roughly, watching her skin grow red. Callie winces, and each time she would assume he was done spanking her, she felt another ping of pain.

“OWW!” She wanted to grab her ass but Erik wasn’t having that.

“Say I’m so sorry daddy.” Erik’s hands weren’t letting up, Callie felt her eyes began to water.

“I-I-I’m so sorry daddy.” He wasn’t convinced. Erik takes three of his fingers, sucks on them slow, before arching her back further, sliding his fingers into her wet pussy in one motion, Callie’s fist hitting the carpet. She attempts to close her legs but NOPE, Erik wasn’t having that shit.

“APOLOGIZE BETTER THAN THAT BABY.” Erik pumps his fingers over her g spot, spreading her wider with his knees, watching the way her body bounced with a need on his fingers.

“Callie, what I say?!”

“IM SORRY!!” Erik’s hand came down on her ass again like a whip, while his three fingers pumped her pussy quick. Callie’s toes curled, and her ass jiggled from how forceful Erik stroked with just his fingers.

“CUM. That’s the only warning I’m giving you.” Erik wasn’t playing with her tonight.

“Mmm” *stroke* “mmm” *Stroke* “mmmmmm” *STROKE* *STROKE* *STROKE* It was sweet torture.

Callie’s body bent lower, her cries muffled into her arm as she squirts on her plush carpet.

Without warning, Erik bent down to her pussy, laying her flat against his mouth, his tongue thrashing and lips rubbing all over like a mad man. Callie felt like she was in another dimension the way he ate like a savage. He ate her like he was starved like he hadn’t eaten for months. She could only lay there and cry, and Erik just kept on going, aiming to give her orgasms that would shatter you from the inside out.

“FUCK MY FACE.” Callie began bouncing on his mouth, and everytime her pussy hit his lips, he would suck her up like she was running from him.

“Oooooooooooo I can't take it!”

“Fuck my face like I said, give Daddy that fucking pussy, MY fucking pussy.” She wiggled her pussy on his lips, the suction sooooooo gooooooodddddd it had her lifting from his mouth. This alone earned another thunderous smack to her ass.

“What I tell you to do?!!” His fingers gripped her hips hard.

“Fuck your face.” She shook madly.

“So where that pussy going? fuck-my-mouth-like-I-said-right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well let’s go then I haven’t eaten all day bitch,” Callie whines her hips on his tongue, Erik slowly french kissing her pussy, actual kisses involving the slow sensual movement of your lips, with the surprise of a tongue, and the deep suction of the mouth. That’s what Erik gave her, but with more force.

“HAHA, That's the way you feed a nigga some pussy.” She fought the urge to grip his dreads.

“Yeah, daddy yeahhhhh.” She whimpers repeatedly like a song, her body tensing up as Erik continuously swiped his lips and tongue over her clit. Callie’s arms gave out on her, her body collapsing as her pussy creamed his entire mouth, too weak to jerk let alone moan. She passed out on his mouth, Erik still sucking like she had some left, but her pussy felt like he sucked her dry. He parted her pussy lips, sucking on everything there, flicking his tongue in its wake, causing her to flutter, her belly growing tight. She places her head on her arm, rocking her body back and forth while he did what he came to do FUCK HER UP.

Erik came to give her that torture and now Callie was a moaning mess, her clit so sensitive and the pressure in her belly so tight that she lifts from him frantically, crawling away. Erik growls in anger, his dreads wild in his face. Callie couldn’t even make it to the wall without him slamming her against it, parting her legs, laying flat on his belly while he finished the job. Callies, toes pointed roughly into the carpet, thighs shaking, her hands gripping a handful of his dreads.

“Ima squirt, ima squirt!” She squeezes her eyes shut, the pressure knocking at her hard, and finally gaining access to Erik's mouth as she slid down the wall. She gave silent cries to his assault, finally feeling his lips leave her pussy, but of course, he smacks her there.

Erik’s chest rose and fell rapidly, lips set in a hard line as he removed his bottoms, kicking them off. She couldn’t keep her eyes off his DICK. It was so damn big it made her moan just from the sight.

“Oh don’t worry, you bought to get it now.” Erik picks her up and over his shoulder, guiding her to her room.

“I haven’t heard you cry enough tonight. I’m gonna make you scream from this dick.” Erik kicks open her bedroom door, throwing her down onto the bed watching her body bounce and jiggle.

“If I buss it wide open will you scream for Daddy?” Erik yanks her pillows and covers from her bed, kneeling between her legs. He brings his hand to her wet pussy, smearing the sloppy juices over his hand, and bringing it to his dick.

“If I pound you into this bed will you cry? I really wanna make that ass cry.” Erik pulls her legs back so far she winces, her feet touching her headboard and her knees touching her ears.

Erik leans over her, his dick sliding between her folds, whispering low into her ear, his breath fluttering against it.

“Daddy gonna stretch this pussy.” He whispers so low you have to be still to catch it.

“Daddy gonna beat it up.” Callie taps her toes against the headboard.

“Watch how daddy does it.” Erik lifts, his hands latched to the back of her thighs, his dreads hanging in her face, and his dick slowly sinking into her purposely. Callie frantically shakes her head, pushing at his rock hard chest, the texture of his scaring soft against her fingers. He jerked forward rough, causing her to bounce. She felt like the wind had been knocked out of her chest. Erik repeats himself, the sound of smacking flesh hard and rough in her ears, the springs creaking like they begged to break. She shook from the pleasure and pain as her eyes swam with tears and her jaw dropped. Erik went without stopping, Callie no longer differentiating between consciousness and unconsciousness.

“You watching me punish you, look what you got me doing.” Erik drew his lips into his mouth, his eyebrows scrunched and his dimples smiling at her.

“Keep them eyes on me, watch me fuck this pussy up.” She gritted her teeth, nothing left to do except to grip anything. Her eyes observed his dick fucking her while his pupils flared. Callie couldn’t take the way his strong arms held her big thighs open, and the way his thick dick went in and out with a stream of wetness coating it.

The momentum increased times 1000 now, Callie digging her nails into Erik’s shoulders, his big goliath frame pumping her pussy so hard, her body jerked like a fuck doll, a shrill scream escaping her mouth.

“There you go, that’s it. Scream while I’m in the pussy.” There was sure to be a gaping dent in the middle of the mattress the way Erik fucked her, using Callie’s pussy like a punching bag, his stamina insane just as much as that dick.

“I gotta cum!” Callie cries.

“You always gotta cum, ain’t nothing I don’t already know.”

“Daddy it’s right-there!” She screams to the ceiling. Callie’s pussy was THROUGH she couldn’t take anymore.

“Where the fuck is it?!” Erik searches with his eyes, his lip between his teeth while glowering.

“DADDY,” Callie jerks so wild that Erik’s grip on her slips, her liquid pouring on him.

“You getting more of this dick though so BEND OVER.” She couldn’t even move without falling into the mattress, Erik flipping her over, positioning her so that her ass was in the air pointed to the ceiling and her arch was so deep her spine was non-existent. Erik grips her wrists, jerking forward into her cleanly, her head throwing back before falling forward in defeat.

“Say fuck this pussy hard from the back daddy.” Erik jerks slow.

“Daddy-fu-fuck this pussy hard from the back.”

“Where your fucking manners??”

“Fuck-fuck this pussy hard from the back pleassse.”

“GOOD JOB.”

If back shots could kill, Callie would be dead. If getting your back blown out felt like the dick itself fought to claim your soul through your pussy, then Callie would be a shell. Erik fucked like a monster, his dick not only residing in her guts but her damn chest. Callie turned to look at him in the middle of his assault with a tear stained face and a blank gaze, her hair a tangled mess and her lower lip quivering.

“You look lost, something I can help you with??” her ass was a tidal wave as it bounced off his body.

“Slow down daddy.” Callie practically pleaded with this man.

“How old are you?” Erik asked between deep breaths.

“28.”

“So what that make you then? A little girl or a grown woman?”

“A grown w-w-women.”

“So be a grown woman AND TAKE THIS DICK, take it no problem.” Erik lifts one leg, crossing his arms on her back, fucking her as hard as he could go, Callie’s head falling to the mattress, so close to banging on the headboard. Erik noticed her eyes rolling to the tops of her lids, her arms going limp in his.

“I can’t believe this shit, my dick got you passing out!” Erik couldn’t help the triumphant smile on his face, His dick growing sensitive in her pussy he just KNEW he would feed her his cum.

“Whether you’re here with me or not tell me if you feel this nut in this tight SHIT.” Erik groans repeatedly, finally snapping his hips forward rough, his nails dragging over her skin. Callie felt possessed, her pussy like a cream filled doughnut. Her eyes snap open frantically, as Erik jerked himself empty, her arms flailing in his grip. “We don’t run from the dick Callie! Stop acting defiant.” Callie pushes at Erik with her foot, rolling off the bed and running for her bedroom door with a limp in her walk. Erik wanted to yell from how angry she just made him.

“WHEN YOU GONNA ACT YOUR AGE AND TAKE THIS DICK CALLIE?!!!” Erik lifts from the bed, his dick swinging, searching for her with a swing of his head, dreads shaking.

“We playing hide and seek now?” Erik chuckles deep, turning left in her living room finding call standing on the other side of the table with a pleading look and a continuous shake in her thighs.

“The fuck you doing?! Bring that ass over here now!”

“No E! I can’t take it no more the dick is too much! What the fuck You been doing lifting weights with the dick?!” She observed the way his dick stood erect, hard enough to break a damn brick in half.

“That shit just won’t go soft.” She cried like a baby.

His forehead creased in frustration, “when I catch you, I’m fucking you into whatever surface there is. EVERY TIME YOU RUN, it’s just gonna earn you a harder fuck.” Erik jolts left while Callie goes the other way, pausing when Erik makes a quick move to her side. She tried to run but her foot caught on the side of her dining room table chair, causing her to trip and Erik to wrap his big arm around her waist, lifting her naked body up and on the table. The plant in the middle falls over, littering soil on the surface and water. He has her ankles now, pulling on them and finally resting them on his shoulders.

Her eyes were glossy, head shaking as Erik spread her legs again, yanking up her hand and wrapping it around him.

“Put this dick in my pussy.” He instructs. Callie does as she’s told with a shaking hand, her pussy disobeying her advances from how tight and swollen she was.

“Oh so now the dick can’t fit?! It was just in there a minute ago!” Erik starts jerking his hips, the more he jerked, the more his dick would stab into her pussy. Callie’s brows drew together, her back arching as Erik’s stiff dick finally made its way into her pussy again.

“You know what I think?” Erik grips her hips, pulling her body onto his dick like she couldn’t move a muscle.

“I think you like to play like you don’t want me to fuck you. But guess what? I like the chase, the more you do it the more I want it.” His hips snapped forward and the muscles running along his abdomen flexed each time. Callie couldn’t take the sight of this beautiful man fucking her.

“You taking my pussy daddy?!!” Callie’s mind and body seemed to warp to his control. She felt him bring her knees to her ears, angling her body so that each time he pounded, her lower half would meet his thrusts. Callie screams from the deep diving of his dick, causing her to slap him hard across his face, so hard she could see the vein in his neck snap.

“DO THAT SHIT AGAIN.” Erik dated her to, his eyes damn near black, face contorted in fury. Callie slaps him again, the sound compared to the sound of a belt breaking skin. He growls.

“You so mad at Daddy fucking you into this table slap me again! Hit me again right?! Do it bitch since you so sick of me fucking this pussy up!” Callie started to punch at his chest, her hands now yanking hard on his dreads, bringing his head towards hers, his eyes squeezed shut from the tension. Erik stabbed his dick angrily into her, the table scraping against the floor now hitting the wall.

“You mad and I’m taking this pussy AND you can’t run.” He was smug about that. Callie’s walls clench and unclench around his dick then, her tiny hand coming to his throat then.

“YOU JUST LOVE MAKING ME SQUIRT HUH?” She yells. You could hear her wetness building inside of her like Erik was plunging his dick into a body of water repeatedly.

“You love ME making you squirt. Like I told you, I’m taking this pussy and every single squirt and cream with me.” Erik bit down on the hand that tried to choke him, causing her to wrap her legs around his neck, her body shaking like a wave, squirting on this mans dick AGAIN.

She watches as he slips out of her, bringing his mouth to attack her wet pussy.

“You eating it for what though?!!” She cries, her body already going limp from Erik’s tongue.

“Spread that pussy open Callie.”

“No nigga.” She pushes at his big head, but of course, his neck is made of muscle too.

“No? You don’t tell daddy no you tell daddy yes.”

Erik sucks her up so much her liquid began to form around his mouth in bubbles, she had NEVER been this damn wet. She couldn’t control herself, as much as she cried and pleaded her hips rolled over his tongue.

“Fuck you and that mouth!” She could feel it growing in her belly again.

“You love it when I make you cum stop acting brand new!!!” She screams, her pussy squirting on him AGAIN. She almost falls to the floor from the feeling, Erik’s face shining, his lips dripping, his chest and abs glistening. Callie slips from the wet table, backing away from his crazy ass before running to her door. Erik doesn’t move just yet, kissing his teeth in annoyance before looking down at his still erect dick. His conscious begged him to cum again, he had to. Imagine being away for so long with only a memory to beat your meat to and not the real thing. Erik walks into the living room to find Callie unlocking her door, slipping out. He runs like he was doing sprints on a race track, catching her by her hair, closing the door, and lifting her body to the door. There they both stood, naked in the hallway for any of her neighbors to see, and I guess they both got there wish.

“What the HELL is all that noise out here!!” Callie’s neighbor Miss Daniels yanks her apartment door open in one of her house dresses, old titties swinging and shower cap halfway off her head.

Callie didn’t mean to give the old women a heart attack she really didn’t, but the look on her face made it look like she needed medical attention. Erik didn’t even give the lady a glance, his eyes fixated on Callie’s voluptuous body up against that door.

“Miss Daniels go ahead back in he’s not gonna move.” Callie warns the women, watching as she closed the door softly, her eyes popping out her head.

“You catching cardio while I’m tryna get in them GUTS. You got the neighbors watching and shit fuck wrong with you?!” Erik takes his dick again, teasing her tight entrance before sinking back into her so deep her eyes roll cross-eyed. Erik smirks at this, now bouncing Callie on his dick so good and loud everyone in that apartment we’re definitely sure to hear now.

“You gonna run from this good dick again or act right?”

Callie’s lip trembles from the way his head glides along her g spot.

“Act right Daddy.”

“And if you don’t act right, what Daddy gotta do?”

“Punish me further.” She whispers

“Yeah, that’s what daddy gotta do. If you just let me paint them walls again with this nut, I’ll leave you alone for the night.” Erik opens the door, walking into the apartment with Callie still around him, bouncing her slow.

“You still keep that vibrator in your top drawer between your socks?”

Callie couldn’t believe this nigga wanted to use a sex toy on her after already torturing her pussy enough that night.

“Mhm.” That’s all she says, her head falling back and Erik’s lips and teeth latching to her neck. Back into her bedroom that reeked of sex, Erik puts Callie on the bed, walking to her dresser to find her vibrator. She had a few new ones now, pulling out a gspot one that he itches to use. Erik walks back to the bed, flipping Callie up on her side, resting behind her while bringing her leg up and to her shoulder. Erik couldn’t keep his hands from gliding along her wet, sloppy pussy, finally turning on the vibrator and placing it inside her sitting right over her spot.

“Ahh!” She attempts to curl her body up, making Erik dig into her hips, dick twitching as he sinks into her again with a shake of his head in blissful ecstasy, rubbing along her outstretched thigh before gripping a handful of her ass from behind. Erik could feel the vibrator jump along the tip of his dick each time he fucked up into her.

“DAMN, we gotta do this more often. Shit feeling good.” He bites her ear hard, causing her to screech.

“Shit feel amazing right? Say uh huh daddy.”

“Uh huh daddy yess” Callie’s body couldn’t help it, the way he rubbed in her and the way that vibrator glided on her spot had her shaking with pleasure.

“You don’t wanna run no more huh? You tired of running from this dick?”

“Yess.” Erik keeps his eyes on the side of her face, his dick buried deep like he was digging for gold. Callie turns to meet his dark eyes, bringing her mouth to his frantically, letting this man use his cum stained tongue to ravish her mouth. Erik wanted her wider, trying to stretch her body more and more so he could feel the vibrator too. That shit had him going wild, his teeth biting down on her bottom lip and his abs flexing on her back.

“You gonna cum daddy?! You better cum too since you fucking me so much!!” She spoke that through clenched teeth.

“Cum in me deep daddy pleaseee!”Callie asked innocently her hand gripping his face. 

“BEG ME.”

“Fuck me good and cum in me deep DADDY! please, please fuck!” Erik trails his eyes down to her pussy, his head falling forward as he roughly fucked up into her, her body jerking and hands pulling at the last bit of sheets on her bed. She couldn’t take it, her head fell back against him and her eyes fluttered shut. Here she was, giving him her final squirt of the night, the most powerful squirt mixed with his thick white cum.

“LET ME CUM IN YOU DEEP.” Erik was frantic.

“So fucking deep you better SUCK ME DRY.” He bangs into her two more times, before shouting a string of curse words to ceiling, the pressure of his dick against that vibrator causing Callie to release herself all over him some more.

Erik slipped out of her slow, his dick throbbing, and the vibrator buzzing madly on the bed. Callie could only lay there, feeling the bed shift behind her from Erik rising to turn off the lights. She felt used and filled, laying in her own juices while Erik draped his heavy ass arm over here in the dark. He gives her cheek a sloppy lick, and then a kiss, snuggling close to her with his dick pressed between her cheeks.

“You off punishment. Get some sleep.” That’s all he says, his nose buried in her had and his breaths evening out into that of quick slumber. All she could hear was his snores in her ears, and all she could see was pitch black. Callie couldn’t help the frustration that began to settle within her.

This nigga then fucked her so good she couldn’t even sleep.

Fuck that jailbird.

@panthergoddessbast @whoramilaje @allhailnjadaka @vikkidc @erikismybitch @eriknutinthispoosy @hearteyes-for-killmonger @blackpantherismyish @trevantesbrat @hdkween @wifin-niggaz @blowmymbackout @killmonger-dolan @killmongersaidheyauntie @killmongersgurl @killmongersmistress @wawakanda-btch @wakanda-inspired @muse-of-mbaku @thiccdaddy-mbaku @madamslayyy @chaneajoyyy @bidibidibombaclaat @scrumptiouslytenaciouscrusade @laketaj24 @abeautifulmindexposed @blxckquiescent @missmohnique @misspooh @missumuch1918 @supersizemeplz @unfriendly-blk-hottie @princessstevens @princesskillmonger @blue-sunflowerr @youreadthatright @youcantkillamutant @disneysdarlingdiva @purple-apricots @softnani @loosewindmill @janelledarling @ange-sensuel @n-jadaddy @forbeautyandlife @deja-r @wakandawinning @thehomierobbstark @jozigrrl @shesakillerkween @sonofnjobu @drsunshine97 @iamrheaspeaks @brittyevans @killmongerdispussy @marvelpotterlove @heyauntieeee @tiava143 @raysunshine78 @destinio1 @forgottenthoughtsandmemories @thehonorablekingerik @shookmcgookqueen @hidden-treasures21 @nickidub718 @tamagxtchii @teheeboo

[haazeycoffee-archive]

A "Hot" Kiss - Short .:Friendlypack Fic:.

"And thank you again, sir, for allowing me to deliver you the freshest water in all of Los Santos, with a maximum of only 10% lead per bottle! Feel free to call back anytime you need Stan the Water man's top notch wat-".

"Yeah yeah, thanks. Whatever".

Stan was quickly interrupted by his customer, who had just slammed the door in his face. The blond-haired delivery man just mumbled out a simple "huh", before walking back over to his delivery scooter and getting on "Maybe I...talk too much? hmm.." just as he was about to drive away, his phone started to ring. 

huh... who could that be?

Kiki, Reggie, and Anna were all busy doing another big photoshoot, which, according to Kiki, was hobo-exclusive this time, so Stan couldn't go. Garrett was taking a day off form work to party with his friends, which included Alan. Brenda was busy with work, and so was Jimmy, who was selling oxy. 

A sudden nasty feeling gripped Stan's heart when he looked at his phone and saw his new boyfriend's number. He and Jimmy had just gotten together the week prior, and for some reason, Stan started to worry about him more often. Maybe it was because of all these new feelings? Stan, and Jimmy for that matter, had just came out as bisexual a week ego, so these last few days have been pretty emotional.

"Hey there, Jimmy! Everything alri-".

"ST-...AH AH STAN!".

Getting interrupted yet again, Stan was taken aback by Jimmy's vigorous breathing; it sounded like he just ran a marathon!

"Jimmy? W-What's wrong? Why are you so out of breath?".

"STAN, I-I'M AT YOUR APARTMENT. I-I NEED YOU".

Stan's expression changed from concerned to absolutely confused "Wha- ...why-".

"J-JUST GET OVER HERE, PLEASE!" Jimmy begged before violently coughing into the phone.

"O-Okay okay! I'll be right over!".

-----

After finally making it back to his apartment building, Stan parked his scooter and hurried to the stairs, running past Vincent in the process, who was trying to get his attention "CAN'T TALK NOW, VINNIE! JIMMY'S IN TROUBLE! I'LL TEXT YA LATER".

Stan was already in his apartment by the time Vincent responded, so he didn't get to hear what the ShamWow guy had said, but he was too focused on Jimmy anyway. 

"Jimothy?" Stan muttered as he stepped into the kitchen "J-JIMMY!".

To Stan's shock, the younger man was sitting on the ground leaned against the counter. He was also shaking, and was sweating terribly. His sunglasses were sitting on the counter, so Stan could clearly see that Jimmy's face and eyes were super red. Wait, ...was he crying? Was he high? And why was he panting so hard?

"STAN!" Jimmy jolted himself up to his feet and tightly hugged his water-obsessed boyfriend, before quickly pulling away.

"Jesus, Jimmy! What the hell happened?" He gasped "D-Did you overdose?!".

Jimmy sighed in aggravation "S-Stan, if I overdosed, I'd be fuckin' dead on the floor! N-No I didn't fuckin' overdose!".

"WELL SORRY FOR ONLY BEING WATER-SAVVY! What's wrong with you then?!"

"O-Okay, s-so, I-I was....I was out selling oxy, ...l-like normal, right? A-And... and the guys that robbed us at the bank, ..uh-uh b-bird, clown, bear? Th-They wanted some oxy, s-so I was more than glad to sell it to them, y-ya'know, b-because I thought if I ..d-did-didn't, they'd kill me. So I give them the oxy, a-and instead of paying me with money, they gave me a plastic zip-bag of-of peppers. I-I knew they'd probably shank me if I said no, s-so I just took the peppers and left".

Stan crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow "Okay...".

"So, I decided to take a little, ..o-oh Jesus Chri-" Another harsh cough interrupted him, and he bent over a little, placing his hands on his knees to cough more easily "EHCK, eh.. I-I sat down on a bench t-to take a little break, a-and I ate some of the peppers". He straightened himself up and wiped the sweat from his forehead "I ate three......a-and it tur-t-turns out they were ghost peppers".

"Ghost peppers?! Those SUPER hot peppers that'll burn your mouth?!".

"yES!!!" Jimmy replied with another cough, making his voice hoarse. 

"Well did you drink any water? I have plenty here!".

"DAMMIT STAN, WATER DOESN'T DO SHIT WITH STUFF LIKE THIS!! …..B-But....y-yeah, ….I drank the rest of the water in your apartment...".

"WHAT? If you knew it wasn't going to work, why'd you do it?".

"MY MOUTH IS ON FIRE, STANIEL! I PANICKED, OKAY? Y-You seriously don't have any milk?!".

Stan gave a typical glare "You know I don't believe in that crap!!".

Jimmy let out a groan of pain and frustration as he stressfully rubbed his face and pulled at his dark-teal hair with his fists "C-Could you drive me to the store s-so we can buy some milk?".

"No way! No boyfriend of mine is drinking that tainted liquid!".

"STAN, PLEASE" Jimmy begged desperately "I-I'LL PAY FOR IT! I-I just need it, please!!".

Stan sighed "Alright alright, c'mon you big baby. Let's go".

-----

"Apologize, you big a-hole! Jimmy is in a butt-load of pain and you just scolded him like a fudging jerk! Sure, milk is terrible for you, b-but if it's the only thing that'll help Jimmy, then it's fine in SOME circumstances. You love Jimmy, but he doesn't know that because you yelled at him like a big meanie!" Stan scolded himself in his thoughts as he drove to the convenience store with Jimmy in the passenger seat, who was still sweating and panting.

As they stopped at a red light, Jimmy leaned back in his seat and dramatically pressed his palms into his face "A RED LIGHT?! COME ONNNNNN! I'M DYING HERE!".

As the teal-haired man groaned, Stan worked up the courage to apologize to him "H-Hey Jimmy?".

Jimmy sighed and turned his head "Yeah, Sta-Stan?".

"I'm sorry for yelling at you back there. Water is more perfect than anything, but...it doesn't work for every situation, so... I'm sorry for being such a jerk.".

"It's okay, Stan... I-I'm sorry for yelling too...".

"A-And besides, ...water is perfect, …b-b-ut...there's two things I cherish in life more than water: my sweet baby boy Roy, ..and you".

Just for a moment, the pain from the peppers subsided, and Jimmy's heart swelled. He couldn't help but smile from ear to ear.

Stan awkwardly shuffled his hands, which were sitting on the steering wheel "U-Uhmm… heh, ...uh..." a faint shade of pink painted his face "U-Uh, me...kiss you....?".

Jimmy laughed, remembering how awful Stan was at flirting "Yes, Sunflower. Me kiss you".

Stan smiled widely and leaned closer to his beloved boyfriend, with Jimmy doing much of the same. Their lips pressed together, and as their eyes closed to enjoy the moment, Jimmy gently placed his hand on the back of Stan's head.

Sure, these two got into their fair share of fights, but they loved each other more than anything, and moments like these were always super affectionate and romantic. Warmth filled their hearts as they kissed.

After a good while of sharing sweet smooches, the two men backed away. Jimmy was still dying of the ghost peppers' unforgiving heat, but he let out a small sigh of relief "Heh, w-Why don't we... ..w-why don't we do that more often?" he asked, realizing he was out of breath again from the peppers.

"'Cause we're stupid" Stan chuckled jokingly as he began to drive when the light turned green. Jimmy, still suffering, managed to laugh gently at the man's amusing response.

Just as they started to pull into the convenience store's small parking lot, Stan began to feel a hot sensation pool in his throat. His eyes widened and he parked the car, feeling sweat gradually start to build up at his forehead.

".....St-......Stan...?".

"H-Ho-Holy shit, I-I mean crap! H-HOLY CRAP!" Stan frantically unbuckled his seat belt, his hands fumbling a little "FUCK, IT'S HOT! I-I MEAN FUDGE!".

Jimmy's eyes lit up and his jaw dropped in realization. That kiss... it must've transferred some of the scolding hot pepper taste to Stan!

Stan was in full panic mode, and was now just as sweaty and just as bright red as his boyfriend "WATER!! WATE RWATER W ATER".

"STAN, WATER'S NOT GOING TO WORK!" Jimmy shouted as they rushed out of their car and into the store. 

The cashier just watched speechlessly as the two men rushed over to the refrigerated area and searched for whatever it was that they needed. Jimmy made a break for the milk, grabbing a small bottle so he could chug it right then and there. Stan, on the other hand, was chugging down all the water he could "WHY ISN'T IT WORKING?!" he panted.

"H-Holyyyy shit, that's soooo much better!" Jimmy sighed, the pleasantness of relief and milk graced his taste buds as he continued to drink more "Thank you, sweet cow juice" he mumbled quietly as he hugged the medium-sized carton of milk close to him.

"STAN, WHAT THE FUCK?!" A sudden piercing voice disrupted them, and they both quickly realized that it was Kiki Chanel, who was with Reggie and Anna.

"Kik-K-Kiki? W-What are you doing here?" Stan panted, his mouthful of water spilling out onto his blue polo shirt.

"I told you, Stan! We're shooting for my next line of KOC! Hashtag SPICY~" Kiki posed fabulously as she named the hashtag "What the hell are YOU doing here?".

"W-WELL, JIMMY GOT GHOST PEPPERS FROM A GROUP OF CRIMINALS A-AND ATE THREE OF THEM, A-AND AS I WAS DRIVING HERE TO GET HIM SOME MILK, W-WE KISSED IN THE CAR A-AND NOW MY MOUTH IS BURNING UP! I-I WANTED TO MAKE HIM FEEL BETTER FOR YELLING AT HIM EARLIER, B-BUT I FAILED TO REALIZE THE CONSEQUENCES OF KISSING SOMEONE WHO HAD JUST EATEN GHOST PEPPERS".

"You two are dating? Well congratulations, Staniel! Damn, I didn't think you'd ever actually find someone" Reggie said with his trademark, maniacal laugh "Like, EVER!".

"Yeah, congratulations Stan! We're really happy for you" Anna said with her sweet, soft voice.

"O-OH THANK YOU" Stan coughed, his voice cracking and starting to sound emotional.

"OOH!" Kiki clapped her gloved hands together "THIS. IS. PERFECT! Stan, Jim, you two just keep doing what you're doing! Anna, Reggie, get into position and get ready to say 'hashtag spicy' on my say so!".

The two models posed fashionably in front of Jimmy and Stan, who were both still suffering from what was basically heat stroke at this point.

"HASHTAG SPICY!" Reggie and Anna spoke in a synchronized manner after Kiki told them "go!".

"Ah! Fannntastic! Wonderful! Now c'mon, team! Just two locations left! See ya later, Stan! Thanks for the photo op~". 

With that, the trio of models were gone.

Stan groaned painfully as he slammed his fist onto the fridge door, whining loudly.

Jimmy, now mostly relieved of the heat, walked over to Stan and kissed him gently on the cheek "Are you sure you don't want any of this milk? It'll make you feel better than if you popped an oxy".

The agonized water man wailed in defeat "alriiiiight!" he cried out, grabbing the milk and quickly downing the rest of it. His face immediately contorted into an expression of pure disgust. 

Jimmy sighed with a roll of his eyes "Feel better, Sunflower?".

"A-A little. Can we just go home now?" Stan continued to whine.

Jimmy chuckled "Yeah. C'mon, you big baby" he teased as he took hold of Stan's hand "Let's go".

-------

Written by: @Gay-Spaghetti

Hope you guys enjoyed this! :3 Mayyyybe I'll write more Friendlypack fics if I come up with more ideas :P Thank you, Dorkskittles for letting me submit this! Love ya! <3

Response))OMLLLL SPAGHETTI THIS WAS SO GOOOOOOOOOD!!!!!!!!! EEE SO TENSE AT THE BEGINNING BUT IT EVENED OUT AS IT WENT ON!!! SO GOOD SJSJSJ YOUR WRITING IS VERY ENJOYABLE TO READD!!!

#gayspaghet #not my writing #friendlypack #gOOD SHIT 👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻 #stan the water man #friendly j #submission #long post

[violetnuisance]

The Pure Attract The Toxic

Pairing: Travis Phelps/Larry Johnson Rating: Explicit Words: 2,224 “Larry Johnson was an enigma, a terribly troubling conundrum.”

a/n: There isn’t nearly enough content for these boys, and it’s depressing. This is a multichaptered fic (5 chapters in total). This first chapter will probably be the only I post to Tumblr. I will, however, post a link to my ao3 whenever the fic is updated.

Larry Johnson was an enigma, a terribly troubling conundrum.

He had greasy, slick backed hair that was left unwashed more than it was ever washed. The lights from high school reflected off the messy mane, exposing how absolutely filthy it actually was. If Travis stared too hard, he was sure he could make out the white flakes of dandruff from the lack of hygiene Larry paid to his hair. It made the blond’s stomach churn, made him want to take the scissors from his kitchen drawer and saw the nasty locks off. He wouldn't be satisfied until he had left the brunet with a slipshod haircut, scalp exposed in some spots from cutting it too close.

However, there was the rare day that Larry showed up to school with his hair properly washed. It was frizzy and wavy from being crudely dried by the air conditioning in his rusty pickup truck, but it was clean nonetheless. When it was washed, Ash would run a brush through Larry’s hair during homeroom despite his bemoaning, and Sal would play with it casually when he sat behind the brunet in classes. On those days, Travis caught himself staring too hard at Larry.

Larry caught Travis staring at him too hard too.

The first time their eyes clashed, Travis had nearly caved in from a disturbing mixture of embarrassment and disgust. The blond had stiffened in his chair, fingers clenching around his purple pen as Larry glared at him. The brunet’s lips curled back in disgust, and he redirected his attention back to the teacher before Travis could return the sneer. The blond had fumed from where he sat, scribbling his notes down a little harder than normal that class.

The second time Larry caught Travis staring, the brunet rolled his eyes before tuning back into the lecture they were supposed to be paying attention to. Travis had let out a harsh huff before tearing a piece of notebook paper out of his binder a little louder than necessary. Each fleeting moment they had where their gazes connected ended up in Larry letting out a sign of annoyance and Travis feeling the urge to punch someone.

However, there was one instance where the golden rule didn’t hold true.

Larry had swiveled around in his seat in their calculus class one day, undoubtedly to talk to Sal, but happened to catch Travis staring for the millionth time before he could begin a conversation with the blue haired male. At first, he had just raised both of his brows at the blond, obviously exasperated and confused as to why this was such a common occurrence between them. Travis had lowered his lids into a glare, refusing to look away from the other out of shame of being caught. It was then, the exact moment that Travis could pinpoint as his sanity slipping from his mind’s grasp, that Larry Johnson winked at him.

The brunet’s lips had pulled tight into a monstrous grin, showing off the stupid gap between his two front teeth and the array of snaggled teeth behind them as Travis’s skin had erupted into a vibrant flush. The blond had averted his gaze in record speed, but he could still feel the other’s stare smothering him. His hands shook, smearing ink from the notes he was desperately trying to jot down until Larry turned his attention away from him.

Travis thought he would get off scotch free, despite the unusual reaction from Larry. The brunet hadn’t done as much as throw him a single other glance during their shared classes for that day, and Travis couldn’t help but let relief wash over him as the last bell rang. He threw his belongings haphazardly into his messenger bag before barging out of the classroom door and navigating the crowded halls until he was out of the school's doors and walking towards the parking lot. It wasn’t until he was in sight of his bicycle chained to the lot’s chain link fence did he swallow in trepidation. He blinked his eyes furiously as he walked closer, begging for the figure that was leaned against the fence by his bike to be nothing more than a trick his eyes were playing on him.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” a low voice chuckled, and Travis had to face the fact that the figure wasn’t a mirage. He took a deep breath before he looked up, staring Larry down as best as he could as he approached his bike. The taller male just smirked pack, raising a hand to brush his brown hair back behind his ear from where the wind had whipped it into his face.

“No, just a damned soul,” Travis replied, voice coming out monotonous. Larry snorted at the comment and shifted his weight to the side. His hands dug their way into his jean pockets as the wind blew harder, no doubt cutting through his thin faux leather jacket.

“Is that why you’ve been ogling me so hard? My damned aura too much for you?” Larry leaned down closer to Travis, and the blond crinkled his nose. The pungent stench of cigarette smoke wafted from the brunet’s breath, and Travis wondered how many years the nasty habit would take off Larry’s life. Larry’s tongue darted across his lips, worsening their chapped state as Travis struggled to formulate a reply. “Or do you think I’m pretty?”

No, if there was one thing that Travis knew, it was that the beast standing in front of him was not pretty in any aspect of the word. Dark circles marred the area underneath his squinted eyes, clear evidence of nights spent doing God-knows-what instead of resting. His nose was unproportionally large to the rest of him, and Travis wondered if the thing affected Larry’s balance. And even if Larry hadn’t pried his braces off back in junior high, his smile would still be revolting from the plaque buildup coating his teeth.

“There’s nothing remotely attractive about you,” Travis bleated out, honesty coming out cruel. Larry leaned back, lips pressing into a firm line. It took the brunet a few moments to respond, obviously trying to figure out how to recover the situation he wanted to instigate.

“I swear that when you were a blushing mess earlier you could’ve thought otherwise,” Larry suggested, shrugging his shoulders. Travis tensed, shoving the strap of his bag farther up on his shoulder.

“Buzz off faggot,” he snipped, leaning down to undo the chain on his bike. Larry was faster though, hand clasping around the lock before the blond could touch it. They both stood in an awkward half-squatted position, and Travis looked back up to sneer at Larry. However, he was distracted from the way the brunet’s ratty band shirt hung on him in this position. The collar gaped down far enough for Travis to view the way the other’s freckled skin stretched over his collarbones before his eyes traveled further down Larry’s chest, only stopping when the other cocked his head.

“If you’re going to undress me, don’t just do it with your eyes,” Larry teased. Travis stood up, acting like he had just been shocked. The brunet slowly followed suit and stretched his arms over his head. Travis pretended to not ogle the brunet’s hip bones as the shirt was hiked up, and Larry pretended not to notice as he brought his arms back down to his sides. “I think we’ll be seeing more of each other,” the brunet stated before finally leaving Travis.

The blond watched him go with wary eyes, feeling thoroughly disturbed. His skin itched, and he had never needed to take a scalding shower more. He let out a sigh before bending down to unchain his bike.

- - -

Travis’s legs felt like jelly when he had finally hopped of his bike, letting it fall on its side in his gravel driveway. He had pounded the pedals more viciously than he ever had, needing to get home, so he could stop the insufferable itching that built up under his skin. His eyes did a quick scan of his driveway as he briskly walked to the door, noting that neither of his parents were home yet. All the better.

His legs carried him into the building and up the stairs as fast as they could. He made a pitstop in his room to toss his bag on the bed before he continued his rampage to the bathroom.

Once the door was shut behind him, he paused. A slow breath, one he didn’t know he had been holding, drug past his lips. His shoulders relaxed a bit, but he was still so terribly tense. As if to prove it, his right eyebrow twitched as the anxiety continued to well within him. Eager to try and rid himself of some of the emotion, he finally pulled the shower curtain back. The plastic made a creaking sound under his death grip causing Travis to cringe at the unsatisfying noise. His other hand pawed at the spicket until the spout hissed to life, water spurting out slowly before jetting out. The blond quickly ducked his head out of the area, not wanting to wet his clothes.

His fingers were quick to latch onto the bottom of his sweater and pull it over his head. After the garment was discarded on the floor, he awkwardly hopped around for balance as he pulled off his socks. His pants and boxers were the last to be pulled off and strewn across the floor.

Travis’s eyes caught his reflection’s in the mirror above the bathroom sink as his fingers worked at the clasp on his necklace. He stared at himself and paused his ministrations, letting the cross fall back against his skin, perfectly sitting between his collarbones. He ever rarely took the accessory off, only discarding it to bathe and sleep. However, his stomach began to lurch at the thought of unclasping it this once for him to get into the shower. Too many emotions were clouding his head, and the necklace was safe for him. It was a gentle reminder for him to not do anything idiotic. The blond pursed his lips, feeling overly stupid for standing naked and staring at himself. Shaking his weird thoughts off, he kept the necklace on and stepped into the shower, pulling the curtain closed behind him.

The steaming water immediately hit against his bare skin, and Travis let out a low hiss. He wouldn’t normally run it this hot, but he needed the slight discomfort to clear his head. His body stood still as the water began to run down his abdomen in rivlets. Steam began to fog up the small area, and his skin was becoming flushed because of the heat. As he grew accustomed to the unfamiliar temperature, his hands finally felt for the shampoo. His eyes fell shut as he squeezed a small amount of the soap into his palm before lathering his hair up with it. His eyebrows furrowed and eyes shut tighter than needed as he raked his fingers through his locks, being none too gentle when passing through knots.

There had been a fervor in all of his actions that day that wasn't normally present, and showering was no exception. By the time he had washed himself, angry red welts ran up random areas of his body from where his nails dug a little too harsh into himself. Travis’s eyes stared dumbly at the tub beneath him as he watched what little remaining water was left flow down the drain. Goosebumps erupted along his skin from the absence of the hot water, and his toes stretched and curled into the tile beneath him. His attention was only directed from the tub’s floor when the gurgling of the drain sounded, signaling it was time for him to get out.

Exhaustion hit him as he clambered out of the shower. His hands rubbed at his face in an attempt to ward off the sluggishness. He still needed to get through his nightly bible reading and get some homework done before he could let himself rest. However, his eyes threatened to droop closed as he wrapped a towel around his hips and gathered all of his dirty clothes. It wasn’t fair that one interaction between him and Larry could wipe him out both emotionally and physically, but he persevered. He slipped out of the bathroom and into his bedroom, making sure to drop his clothes into the hamper that sat by his doorway.

After pulling on a new pair of boxers and a housecoat to preserve his modesty, Travis sat cross legged on his bed. His fingers were curled around his favorite copy of the bible. The cover was worn, and an assortment of sticky notes poked out from the edges of the book, marking some of his favorite passages. Just having the book in his hands did help relieve his turmoil some, and a soft smile played at his lips.

Maybe Larry Johnson was a test for Travis. His fingers scrambled against his nightstand until they made purchase with a highlighter. He opened the book with one hand and tugged the cap off the highlighter with his teeth. With revived energy, he flipped open to Romans 1:26-28.

The verse had always been one of his Father’s favorites.

#trarry #larvis #whatever their ship name is #sally face #sally face fanfiction #larry johnson #travis phelps #larry x travis

[yeenybeanies]

g/t prompt list

3. theft

frank castle / the punisher & borrower!reader ( 2nd person pov ).

 3,343 words

language warning, as is normal

please keep comments to the tags!! thank you!! 

The human looks... pretty beaten up. He always looks beaten up, in all honesty. It seems like he comes back from whatever he does every day with new cuts and bruises. It’s like he never heals, or he never gives himself the opportunity to heal. You don’t know what he does, exactly ( and you’re definitely not about to go ask ), but you can assume that it’s dangerous. The injuries tell you as much, and the plethora of weapons the human possesses tell you more. Your knowledge on humans is limited, but you’ve seen a few movies and tv shows. All this stuff he has looks like it’s enough to supply a small army of humans. But it’s just him. It’s a one-human army. 

In addition to his weaponry, the human also has this safe house––your home––strung up with tripwires and traps and alarms of all sorts. You’ve explored before; you’ve seen what they’re attached to. It would not be pleasant if any of them were to be set off. Luckily, he knows how to avoid them, and you do too. You don’t know if you’re even big enough to trip one, but you’re also not willing to try. Some things you can live without knowing. 

One of the benefits of living with a wildly-militant bean, though, is the massive amounts of gunpowder and other flammable materials available to you. It comes in handy, having stuff like this. You can start little fires to cook or heat food, and, with winter approaching, you’re certain you’ll be able to keep yourself warm in even the chilliest corners of the house. Besides, the human won’t miss a couple bullets or a few scoops of powder. 

That’s what you think, anyways. But then you see a change in his behavior. After all the painstaking effort you’ve gone through before to get the bullets, you watch nervously from one of your many hides as he packs up the boxes of stuff you need into a large duffel bag and moves them. It’s all you can do to keep up with him while remaining hidden as he walks through the compound, but you have to see where he intends to put your fire starters. Much to your inconvenience and horror, it seems he’s deemed the best place to put the bag on a shelf over his bed. Not only is it high up and isolated ( difficult to reach ), but it’s over his bed. 

God dammit. Why is the world so against borrowers? 

It takes you a couple of days to formulate a plan to get up to the much-needed heat resources. In the meantime, any bullets and gunpowder left lying around in easier-to-access areas get borrowed from ( at least those that aren’t obvious traps ). You’re determined to survive this winter. He doesn’t need this stuff to stay warm! 

After day three, you think you have a decent-ish plan. It’s treacherous, dangerous, but it’s the best you’ve got. First, you wait. The human either needs to leave or fall asleep. The latter seems like the most likely option this time around. He’s been inside all day, nursing some nasty wounds he’d come home with yesterday. You caught a few glimpses of the cuts that he’d had to stitch together. This human is like a real Frankenstein ( or is it the monster? You haven’t seen the movie in a while ) with all the sutures he has holding him together. But you can only imagine what the other guy looks like. 

He needs to fall asleep. That is step one. You wait, a little impatient. This human is not much for routine. He’s up late doing gods-know-what. ( Why couldn’t you live with a normal bean with normal heat sources? Like a fire place? ) But it eventually does happen. Late into the night, you hear the groan and squeak of springs––a telltale sign that the human’s set his weight onto his mattress. It’s almost time! He’s going to bed! You gather your supplies and stuff them in your satchel, and scurry on over, unseen, to a crack in the baseboards beneath his bed. Even in the low light, you can see the dip on its underside where it’s supporting the human’s body. From there, you wait. You need to be sure that he’s asleep before you make your next move. It’s difficult to tell when that is, though. You may just need to wing it. 

You need that gunpowder. 

You wait for what feels like an eternity ( really only about twenty minutes ), then start on your journey. The bed frame isn’t too difficult to climb, nor is the mattress. It’s only once you’re on top, though, that you start to feel queasy. You’ve never been this close to a human bean before. Borrowers avoid beans. This is going against everything you’ve ever been taught, everything you’ve learned. You can see him outlined under his covers. He’s so . . . big. His head isn’t visible from your position, but you can see his broad shoulders, and you can hear his breathing, slow and rhythmic. 

Okay. You can do this. You scurry around the big hill in the sheets that you assume is the human’s feet and come to the wall. Here comes phase two: from your bag, you grab some scraps of tape and fasten them to your gloves and boots. The shelf is up too high for you to throw your hook; you have to climb the wall. It’s a daunting task, but you’ve done similar things before. The tape should remain sticky enough to get you up. 

And it does. And you do. Save for some little scares when the human turned in his sleep, during which you froze and prayed to whoever was listening that he wouldn’t see you, the climb went without a hitch. You pull yourself up onto the shelf, feeling very proud of yourself, but there isn’t much time to celebrate. This isn’t finished yet. Moving quickly and quietly, you make your way to the bag and climb up the tough canvas. The zipper proves to not only be a pain in the ass to open, but it’s also loud, filling you with even more anxiety. You have to pull it slowly, so as not to be too noisy ( you hope ). Luckily, you don’t need to open it too far. Just a little crack is plenty for you to get in. Bullets could work, but they’re cumbersome, and would make your return trip hell. You’d rather just get at the gunpowder. It’s got to be in here somewhere . . . 

Bingo!  

Once you’ve collected all you can carry ( yes, you’re quite proud of the two big bags, holding nearly your weight in powder between them ), you secure everything to yourself and waddle towards the edge of the shelf. It’s a long way down. You gulp. Okay. Now you can use your hook. You test the string and the knot, then set the sharp point into the wood and test it again. It should hold. You hope it will hold. You’re halfway through this journey; you can do this! 

You actually believe that, too, up until you feel a jolt in the string. You look up, eyes wide. There’s just barely enough light for you to see your hook slipping. No no no no! You plead silently, begging it to hold for just a little longer, but the hook doesn’t seem to be interested in listening at this point in time. The world moves in slow motion for a second. The hook gives. 

You fall. 

You land. 

You land on something both soft and hard, warm, and moving under you. Every muscle in your body freezes. No. This is not happening. You did not just land on the human! 

But you did. Your platform moves under you again with his breathing. He’s still asleep! Almost too afraid to move, you tentatively look around, trying to figure out where you are. Much to your horror, it appears you’re on his stomach. And you very much need to get off. If he didn’t wake up when you landed on him, then maybe you can climb your way off and make your getaway. Very carefully, you push yourself up to your feet, struggling to keep balance on the uneven, ever-shifting surface. One step . . . two steps . . . you’ve got this. 

You do not got this. You’ve got nothing tonight. Every other step has the human moving just a little. He’s starting to mumble. The danger’s growing. You’re almost there, almost to his hip, when you feel him move again. It’s not just a shift this time, though. This time, you feel more of a jolt, and then something heavy claps down on top of you. You scream out. You can’t help it. 

That’s when all hell breaks loose. The human flinches hard. It’s his hand that’s fallen over you, which you realize once it grabs you and throws you. You let out another shriek as you sail through the air and hit the wall. The powder bags break some of your collision, but the wind is still knocked out of you when you land back on the mattress. You can barely move between the pain in your body and the jostling around you. 

When the light clicks on, you’re even more disoriented. The movement on the mattress stops, which you assume to mean that the human has spotted you. Now he’s going to kill you. 

“ The fuck . . . ? ”  You flinch at his words. The light is still blinding, and you’re sure one of your bags of gunpowder is busted, but your self-preservation instincts kick in again. You bolt, not really sure which way you’re going, but any direction away from that voice is good. Unfortunately, the human is able to keep up pretty well with a disoriented, injured, weighed-down borrower. He catches your intact powder bag first, which you detach, but then he catches you immediately after. Thick fingers snatch you right up, closing all around you, tight and constricting. 

“ Let me go! ”  You manage to squeak out. You can feel yourself moving in space, which makes you nauseous. Then the pressure lets off, and you feel yourself falling again. Any scream you can make gets cut off abruptly when you hit cold, hard glass, and you realize where you are. You’re in a jar! ( Actually, it looks more like a cup, but it serves the same purpose. ) Now that your eyes have adjusted to the light, you see the human standing over you, pulling plastic film from a roll. You shrink back as much as you can when he puts a layer over the cup’s opening, and you curl in on yourself, head covered, when he stabs through it a couple of times with a very large knife. That knife, then, is set into the table next to your glass. From as much as you’re willing to peek at it, it looks like the blade alone is twice your height. 

“ You the one that’s been taking my stuff? ”  Somehow, his voice sounds even more terrifying through the glass. You don’t say anything. You don’t move. But you do squeak when you feel your prison jolt. You’re thrown back against the curved surface, and struggle to keep some semblance of balance. 

“ I’m talkin’ to you, short-shit. ”  Once everything stops moving, you see his hand wrapped around the glass to your back, and you see his bruised, cut-up face right in front of you, glaring at you. He’s holding your prison now. He could shake you, or crush you inside the glass, or just dump you into his mouth, or–––

“ You just gonna ignore me? ”  You open your mouth to speak, but he cuts you off again, holding up your powder bags in his other hand.  “ This yours, hunh? The hell you doin’ stealin’ my gunpowder? Tryin’a set this place on fire? ”  

“ No! ”  You shout and settle back against the glass, shaking.  “ I . . . I need it to, uh––I need it to stay––stay warm . . . ! ”  The human’s gaze is hard, like he’s looking right through you. He’s so big, so terrifying . . ..  “ please, I won’t––– ”  

“ Shut up. ”  And you do shut up. Your fear is palpable. You can’t even begin to tell what’s going on inside his head. You can guess ( more like you can’t help but guess ), but you really don’t want to. 

After a minute, the human moves again, setting your cup back down on the table. You look up, confused, then back to him. Is he going to let you go? Please have him let you go . . . 

“ Got a name, kid? ” 

Kid? You take a little offense to that. You’re grown! But you are also way too terrified to correct him right now. 

“ Let me go––– ” 

“ Your name. Don’t make me ask again. ” 

You swallow your spit nervously.  “ [ Y/N ]. ”  

“ Okay, [ Y/N ], how long’ve you been in here? ”  He’s watching you, studying you. He leans back in his seat, making himself a bit more comfortable, but it does little to unnerve you. One of his hands is still on the table, looking ready to grab you again at any moment. 

“ Since, uh––a–about two months ago . . . ”  

“ You been stealin’ from me since then? ”  

“ Borrowing. ”  That’s your first time correcting him. You feel sick to your stomach.  “ I don––I don’t steal. I just, uh––I just borrow. That’s––I’m a borrower. I just take what I need . . . ”  

“ See, thing is, [ Y/N ],  that ain’t really how the world works. ”  He leans forward again, looming over you. Behind your glass, he clasps his hands together, surrounding your cup with his arms. You can’t possibly shrink back any more, try as you might.  “ Just ‘cos you need somethin’ doesn’t mean you can take it. Besides, that ain’t exactly what the word  ‘ borrow ’  means, ‘cos I’m guessing you haven’t really returned anything, hunh? ”  

You stare up at him in fearful silence. 

“ Answer me. ”  One of his fists slams down on the table near you, making your glass jump and assaulting your ears with a cacophony. You yelp and cover your head, close to tears. 

“ Yes! I’m sorry! I just––– ”  You’re just trying to survive. A sob cuts you off before you can say anything more. Fear shakes your whole body, your chest spasming with every breath. It’s a miracle that your heart hasn’t given out yet. 

A few minutes pass, during which you manage to control your crying, but you keep yourself curled up, forehead to your knees and arms covering your head. You try to focus, try to calm down, but it’s not so easy when there’s a scary-as-all-hell human staring down at you. Only when he moves, though, do you look up again. You watch him remove the film from the top of the glass, eyes wide. Is he going to let you go now? He picks up the glass, and you can only look on helplessly as he tips it towards his awaiting hand. It happens too quickly for you to even attempt to hold on, not that you’d have anything to hold on to on such a sheer surface. You tumble and slip and end up on your back, smack in the center of the human’s palm. It’s warm and leathery and terrifying. You move quickly to sit up, and he moves in turn, his fingers curling in over you like a horrific cage. 

“ Alright, small fry, I’ve got a proposition for you, ‘kay? ”  You don’t say anything. You don’t even move, save for the shaking you can’t seem to stifle.  “ You stop takin’ my shit, and I let you stay. Won’t hurt you, won’t rip the walls out to find you, none a’ that. Otherwise, you can hit the curb. ” 

You still say nothing at first. It sounds like a very bad proposition. In your ears, in your head, what he just said was you starve and freeze to death inside, or you starve and freeze to death outside. The hand under you bounces a little bit, jostling you from your thoughts. 

“ But, uh . . . ”  you struggle to find your words. It’s hard to think when you’re in a cage that could curl in and squash you at any second.  “ I need f–food . . . and heat, and––and––I won’t, uh––I don’t have enough supplies to–to survive the winter . . .. I would die i–in either scenario . . .. ” 

The human seems to be thinking. What about, you have no idea. His expression is unreadable. He bounces you in his hand a couple more times, getting a squeak or two out of you. 

“ I don’t need a freeloader, ”  he says finally. You stop breathing. He’s going to kick you out! He’s going to throw you away like some garbage! He’s–––  “ You’re not some pet. I can help you out, give you what you need, but we’re gonna have to figure out somethin’ you can do in return. ”  He’s not kicking you out . . .! You’re giving yourself emotional whiplash here. The human stands, forcing you to lean against one of his fingers to maintain some balance. 

“ I . . . don’t know what I could do . . . ” 

“ ‘s why I said we’re gonna figure somethin’ out. ”  He walks as he speaks, and you sway lightly with every step. It’s dizzying, and a bit nauseating when you feel yourself being lowered. His fingers uncurl near the floor, like he’s letting you off, and you quickly accept the opportunity. Before you can scurry away, though, that hand blocks your path again, forcing you to halt. 

“ Hey. ”  His voice is rough, booming behind you. Tentatively you turn around, looking up at the human with wide eyes. His other hand moves towards you, to which you back up until you hit his palm, but he doesn’t move to grab you again. No, instead he drops the packet of powder that survived all the commotion in front of you.  “ I’m goin’ back to bed. You keep this, stay warm tonight. When I wake up, though, I’m gonna call for you, and you’re gonna come out, alright? You don’t, and these walls are comin’ down, and I’m gonna find you. Capisce? ”  

You grab that bag of powder and hold it close, not daring to take your eyes off of him. Quickly you nod, finding that you don’t have much choice. It’s another lose-lose scenario for you. But . . . he’s letting you go. For now. He didn’t hurt you, and he let you go. Both of his hands pull away from you, granting you your room to run away. You don’t move just yet, though.

“ Y––uh––your . . . name? ”  You speak as though it might be forbidden information, too much to ask for. It seems to throw him off a little. 

“ Uh . . . Frank, ”  he says, looking down at himself, then back at you. He stands, and you snap back into flight mode, now making your getaway, under the bed and into the crack in the baseboard. You have your powder now. You can stay warm tonight. But tomorrow . . . you’re going to have to talk to Frank again. The very thought fills you with dread. 

#g/t #g/t marvel #g/t fiction #g/t writing #marvel #punisher #frank castle #hyena writes

[oharaisbaee]

Former Sky Blue players, staff lash out over poor playing, living conditions

NEWS

Former Sky Blue players, staff lash out over poor playing, living conditions

By John D Halloran, Dan Lauletta, and Allison Lee

July 17, 2018

 On July 7, former Sky Blue FC forward Sam Kerr returned to her old stomping grounds at Yurcak Field for the first time since leaving the club in January. Now playing for the Chicago Red Stars, Kerr scored a hat trick that night against her former team.

However, the striker’s celebrations were muted, almost apologetic, and after the game she explained how she’d nearly been in tears at some points during the game.

“If I’m honest, I didn’t enjoy it,” Kerr told reporters after the match. “I wish things were better here, and that I could stay. It just sucks that that’s the way it had to be.

“I wish I could take every single one of them with me,” she added, nodding in the direction of the Sky Blue bench area, “but that’s not the way it is.

“I’m just going to say the girls deserve better, and leave it at that. These girls are great girls. They give everything for this club and this league, and they just deserve better. I scored a hat trick, but I wasn’t myself today. I feel sick playing against these girls.”

Since then, The Equalizer has spoken to a half-dozen people affiliated with the club, some of whom requested to remain anonymous. All shared a bleak picture of life at Sky Blue beyond the club’s current winless season: stories of poor housing situations, poor facilities, and broad mismanagement.

Caroline Stanley, who played for the club in 2016, knew from the first day she arrived at Sky Blue that something wasn’t right.

“The first day I actually got there, I landed, checked my phone, and had an email saying the place they told me I was living had been changed,” she told The Equalizer.

“It was Day 1, new team, moving across the country, the place I thought I was living I’m no longer living and it’s just kind of ‘To Be Determined.’ The comfort, and the management of off-the-field quality of life was just really poor and unorganized. I ended up getting shoved into a really tiny little house in a beach town with four other girls, and it was two sets of bunk beds.”

MORE: Sam Kerr’s unhappy hat trick

“Last year housing was a disaster,” said former assistant coach Dave Hodgson, who left midway through the 2018 campaign. “Like one of the houses that players had to live in just should have been knocked down. Plastic bags for windows, sheets of cardboard for windows, comforters stuck in holes in the wall. I’m not exaggerating. Stuff like that’s horrific.”

General manager Tony Novo said that housing is a challenge in New Jersey where cost of living is high and beach front property is at a premium in summer months, but said the only player who was shuttled around this season was one who chose to arrive late.

“Especially over the last three years—’16 to ‘17 and from ‘17 to ‘18—we’ve made it better,” Novo said. “More housing and better housing for our players. We currently have three, three-bedroom apartments that are very nice—I’m going to use the term plush for those apartments. Those are the more senior by age players. Then we have a five-bedroom house that is five blocks from the beach that is furnished. I can clearly say that our housing has gotten better over the last three years.”

Novo said the rest of the players live with their families in the area or with host families plus one player who has elected to go on her own with a friend from outside the team.

While Hodgson conceded that housing for some players has improved in 2018, two former players said that some other players have lived in five to seven different locations in a single season. Multiple sources also said that players currently with the club were relegated to sleeping on couches in other players’ apartments, and that housing for the players on the bottom tier of the roster is as bad as before.

“We have never made anybody sleep on a couch,” Novo said.

Multiple sources also told The Equalizer that in a previous season some players were forced to live with an elderly man who repeatedly made inappropriate comments to the players and made them feel uncomfortable. When the players addressed their concerns to the team, the players were told they would have to find alternate housing for themselves. Other players who addressed concerns regarding housing were told the same, and multiple players did arrange their own living arrangements when those provided by the team were unsatisfactory.

On the house with the elderly man, Novo acknowledged that particular house did not work out as planned and was dropped after a season but added that when asked, only one of five players said she wanted to move out and that her request was granted.

Complaints about the training facilities and the team’s home field at Yurcak are also common.

“When there are no showers in your stadium locker room, you don’t feel like a professional. When you don’t have an equipment manager and you show up to practice in your training gear—you don’t have a locker room—you throw your crap on the side of the field like it’s club practice and then leave in your nasty clothes and wash it yourself, you don’t feel like a professional. You cannot perform under those conditions.” – Caroline Stanley

One training facility is referred to as “The Jungle,” and multiple sources confirmed that the team’s training facilities have no locker rooms, no running water, and no bathrooms absent a porta-potty.

“They don’t enjoy being the red-headed stepchild of the league,” said Hodgson. “They don’t enjoy having Rutgers as their home, because it’s crap. I mean, there’s literally a hill on the side where there should be bleachers. There’s no showers—there’s no showers. The two-time World Player of the Year [Carli Lloyd] has to get an ice bath in a 50-gallon trash can. It’s ridiculous.”

Novo explained that the team began the season training at indoor turf facility Sportika Sports Complex and then moved to Rutgers where bathrooms and showers were a short walk away. With Rutgers sports in need of their field back, training has now shifted to a field in Jackson which, according to Novo, was to be supplied with portable bathrooms and showers this week. As of the start of training on Tuesday, they had yet to arrive.

Besides the lack of proper ice baths—or in some cases, ice itself—players also noted the lack of basics like ultrasound equipment, stim machines, and leg recovery systems.

“When there are no showers in your stadium locker room, you don’t feel like a professional,” said Stanley. “When you don’t have an equipment manager and you show up to practice in your training gear—you don’t have a locker room—you throw your crap on the side of the field like it’s club practice and then leave in your nasty clothes and wash it yourself, you don’t feel like a professional. You cannot perform under those conditions.”

Multiple sources also complained that the lack of training gear provided, combined with the lack of laundry services, meant players would sometimes have to wear dirty gear during practice sessions.

“We are given two socks, two shirts, two shorts for practice gear for six months,” said one former player in an email. “We get one pair of cleats for the entire year. We use this gear every training and some days, multiple times.

“We do our own laundry. One player was given children’s cleats to play in. Some of these seem insignificant but we are talking about a professional organization and professional athletes.

“At least in college we are given enough gear to wear so we don’t have to re-wear our sweaty gear for a double day,” she later added.

Novo said that in the past, so few players took advantage of the laundry service that it became pointless to keep it, and emphasized that game uniforms are washed and returned to the players on match days.

“Sky Blue has always been unfinished projects and broken promises,” said another former player. “Each year it’s been less of a progression and more of a digression.”

Complaints about travel were also common. To save money, multiple sources told The Equalizer that the team does not reimburse the players for baggage fees, finds cheaper travel by forcing the players to take very early and very late flights, provides per diems on the road that often don’t cover the cost of food, and has, at times, stopped at gas stations and fast food restaurants for meals on the road.

“Just every single trip is a debacle,” explained Hodgson. “It was a debacle last year. Our first trip to North Carolina this year, the credit card didn’t work. There was no money on the credit card. We couldn’t hire any vans. Our players were sitting at the airport for two hours. Just a debacle.”

“When we travel for one, two, or three days, most of the players bring a carry-on.” Novo said. “We provide them with team bags where they can put their personals, and then we carry all of our equipment. I haven’t been asked for a big need for checking bags.”

The GM added that per diem meal money is in line with league standards with team meals excluded from the day’s total. Continental breakfast at hotels is in lieu of breakfast money for the players.

Medical bills for injuries sustained while playing for the club have also been a problem for some players. Stanley says that while playing for Sky Blue, she was injured in a match against Portland and needed multiple doctor visits to deal with a separated shoulder.

“I just received a call from collections a couple weeks ago,” said Stanley. “I had no idea. I had my credit dinged pretty hard for a $50 doctor’s visit that wasn’t taken care of by the organization.”

“The girls that are scared to use their voice because they fear losing an opportunity—I will do it for them. I have nothing to lose.” – Caroline Stanley

Other players have told Stanley that they’ve had to “hound” the organization to take care of similar situations. Novo acknowledged that, on rare occasions, medical bills have slipped through the cracks. He attributes this to players not using the club’s mailing address during doctor’s visits and Sky Blue not seeing bills in a timely fashion. “We would never purposely not pay a $50 bill.”

The team, for its part, has repeatedly told players and coaches that things would improve, including a move to better, permanent training facilities and a new stadium. However, multiple sources confirm that the new training facility has not materialized this season, as promised, and there is little faith left that the club will live up to its promise of a new stadium.

“Sky Blue has always been unfinished projects and broken promises,” said another former player. “Each year it’s been less of a progression and more of a digression.”

“There’s the old saying that a fish rots from the head down,” she added. “For Sky Blue, this is where it is. It’s that the owners are not invested, they’re not. I haven’t seen them invested in any year and the owners are in charge of the GM.”

Stanley says that the current players are afraid to speak up, worried that doing so could harm their career prospects going forward. She says that’s why she’s decided to come forward.

“The girls that are scared to use their voice because they fear losing an opportunity—I will do it for them,” she said. “I have nothing to lose.”

“I want my friends’ quality of life, who play in the league, to be better,” said Stanley, who now coaches at Tulsa. “If they don’t have people standing up for them, I’ll do whatever I can. It’s been crazy how many girls have texted me this week and called me about this whole situation.”

Multiple sources explained to The Equalizer that Sky Blue has become a way station, of sorts, for the players. The players themselves widely believe that the ownership views the club simply as a “tax write-off” and, stuck in a difficult situation, the players hold out hope that a trade, a move abroad, or new team ownership might improve their situation.

“The players really want to be bought out by owners that give a damn,” said one former player.

The poor conditions around Sky Blue are not only a major factor for large amounts of roster turnover between seasons, but also for the team’s 15-game winless start to the current season. As Stanley said, it’s hard for the players to play at an elite level “when your quality of life is so poor.”

Several sources expressed concerns that the off-field conditions surrounding the team coupled with its on-field performance this season have put the team’s future in jeopardy.

“My concern is I don’t want the team to fold because I care about the team and the past organization that has built my career,” one former played explained. “But it’s something that I cherished and my friends are involved in, and I love that. And I don’t want a Boston to happen or a Western New York to happen. But it’s like, how do we prohibit this?

RELATED: When Sky Blue nearly joined Red Bull

“I don’t think that there’s any pressure. Again, this is the NWSL’s fault because they’re not involved, they’re not harping, and if they’re not harping, then the owners feel like they can get away with stuff.”

Sky Blue co-owner Steven Temares declined to be quoted for this story, but made it clear that the team’s ownership remains committed and that Sky Blue will be part of NWSL for the 2019 season and beyond.

Numerous sources close to the team also told The Equalizer that the league and NWSL Players’ Association are aware of the problem, but that the players have given up hope after being ignored for so long.

“I think it would just be best for everybody if they dissolved as a club. Their owners can find a new tax write-off,” said Stanley.

“Something has to change. To me, I don’t know how it would happen internally. I really don’t see how you could turn that club around at this point, unless it was bought out by somebody else.”

#nwsl #sky blue fc #new jersey #soccer #futbol #woso #caroline stanley #Tony Novo #Phil Nurphy #Dan Lauletta #Grant Wahl #USWNT #US Soccer #kelley o'hara #carli lloyd #kailen sheridan #janine beckie #imani dorsey #savannah mccaskill

[myheadcanonacademia]

The Gang talks about puberty.

Words: 2134

Class 1-A was in the middle of their English course, most of the students desperately trying to translate their assigned passages before it was their turn to speak. Compared to most of their other academic courses the language ranked highest. While general studies and hero support pushed proficiency in mathematics and the sciences, it had become apparent early on that the quadratic equation wasn’t going to help fight villains any time soon. The main focus of academics in the hero course was on language, and along with that the arts, theater, and writing.

Every hero course student had to be proficient in hero vocabulary and conversational English before they graduated, besides that they had to have a working vocabulary in at least three other chosen languages. Long nights were spent when the students could be heard talking to themselves in German, French, Arabic, Spanish, Mandarin and even Russian. They drilled phrases like ‘How can I help you?’ and ‘Are you in danger?’ as well as any possible replies that they could get. At lunches the week before an exam other students would raise eyebrows at the exhausted looking class 1-A as they rambled back and forth to each other in broken German asking ‘Have you seen this child?’ over and over again. The theory behind the study of the arts and writing was that heroes would have a higher attention to detail and be able to have the put what they saw into description. The theater classes assisted in their public speaking confidence.

Kaminari Denki was currently sight reading his chosen passage, a fairly complex paragraph from an American novel. Several students lay back in their seats, having already tried and failed to accurately translate their homework. Kaminari was without a doubt the star of the language class. While students like Iida Tenya and Yaoyarozu Momo excelled in all subjects, watching Kaminari flawlessly translate passages from Harry Potter on the spot was akin to watching a meteor shower. Beautiful and yet somehow terrifying.

After Kaminari finished his passage, Bakugou Katsuki stood up. His eyes and hands were on his open book of English readings. He had picked the hardest one he could find, a section out of a story by Edgar Allan Poe, and now he was regretting it. Slowly and firmly he tried to wrap his tongue around the odd fitting Anglo-Saxon language. He stumbled a few times and did as he had been taught to do when something frustrated him, take a breath, count to three and try again. It worked in an academic setting at least. But he stumbled over his words, glaring at Kaminari who was looking at him with a smile. Him and the rest of Bakugous group had been slaving away over their languages for days with little improvement.

And then it happened. It being, one moment Bakugous voice was an even raspy growl and the next it jumped up to a decibel that only dogs could hear and then falling to a deep bass. Bakugou froze mid sentence, counted to three, cleared his throat, and turned bright red. Even so he slowly began again, his eyes wondering over the faces of his class, most of them hadn’t even been paying attention, no one seemed to bothers by it at all. Bakugou raced through the rest of the passage and dropped back into his seet. He hid behind his arms crossed over his chest.

The second time it happened it was several days after the first incident. Bakugou had completely forgotten about having his voice break in the middle of class. But puberty never let you forget her for long. He was in the middle of a sparring match with Kirishima Eijirou, his best friend. Kirishima was acting as a punching bag as Bakugou viciously slammed his bloody knuckles onto his friends stony body.

“Why won’t you just give in-“ Bakugou was cut off mid threat by his voice rocketing up from its normal tenor to a soprano.

“Dude.” Kirishima laughed, he faltered in his defense and Bakugous right hook caught his chin.

Later that same day Bakugou and his little gang of losers had crowded the kitchen are of the common space. The only one who was actually using it for its intended purpose was Bakugou. He slaved away over the kitchen stove prepping meals for him and Kirishima. They were both trying to bulk up. Kirishima was trying to help by cutting the vegetables but he was so slow and kept crying over the onions that Bakugou had demoted him to ‘guardian of the Tupperware’. The defeated redheaded boy stood holding the plastic storage containers, trying to be interested in Bakugou as he explained why he never boiled broccoli, but Kaminari was being way too interesting. He had discovered a website that had a bunch of English profanities and they were all trying to memorize them but their pronunciation was so off most of what they said was nonsense but with the amount of laughter it was apparent that it didn’t really matter.

“Kirishima pay attention, I’m only making enough food for both of us this one time.” That’s what he said two weeks ago as well.

“Dude relax.” Kirishima laughed, glancing at the broccoli beef Bakugou had created. He waved the Tupperware around. “I’m ready when you are!”  

Kaminari poked Bakugou on the shoulder. “You should be listening to these they are so funny!”

“Why the fuck would I be interested cursing in English. No one will know what im saying.” Bakugou rolled his eyes. Sometimes his friends got excited about silly things. Silly harmless things that just made them happy, it was Bakugous job to shit on those things as much as possible.

“Come on man, try this one.” Kaminari raised his phone. “Your mother was a hamster and your father smells of elder berries!”

“Your… Fa… Father was a hamster…” and Bakugous voice cracked again, no one made a move. Bakugou reached behind him and grasped one of the (only)  clean saucepans and in his rage launched it out of the kitchen and towards the sitting area. The handle wedged into the wall where it would remain for generations to come. He small gang of friends laughed at Bakugous expense.

“Dude, your voice  has been cracking all day!”

“I’ve noticed, Hair For Brains. “ Bakugou returned to his cooking, his face growing ever redder. He was furiously mixxing garlic into the beef sauce. “it’s fucking annoying.”

“it’s puberty, don’t sweat it dude.” Kaminari leaned back against the cool counter top, his finger scrolled through his phone but his attention was on Bakugou. “We are all suffering.”

“I don’t see you turning into a soprano in English class.” Mina laughed. “Fucking Sarah Brightman over here nearly made Iidas glasses crack.”

Bakugou growled at the pink haired girl. “it’s not a big deal, my voice breaks too. Remember in Hero training? I was trying to warn you that Sero was behind you and all that came out was nails on a chalk board.” Kirishima comforted Bakugou with a pat on the arm from the Tupperware.

“I’m moist like all of the time.” Mina happily chirped. The boys looked to her visibly shaken. “oh you wish! I mean I’m sweaty all of the time. Even now, you should feel my back.”

“I’d rather not.” Sero cringed.

“That’s gross.” Bakugou looked over his friend group carefully, reconsidering his choices.

“I’m allowed to be just as nasty as you Palm Sweat.” Mina used her foot to give Bakugous rear a quick kick. She pushed herself up onto the counter top and pulled a bag of chips out of MInetas shelf.

“I have a semi like 80% of the day.” Kaminari admitted way to comfortably. “And not for any reason. Two days ago I opened a pudding cup, boom, raging boner.” He laughed, everyone’s eyes drifted from his face to his crotch and back.

“Okay all of you are-“

“I’m pretty sure im going to be hairy as fuck.” Sero continued with their little confessional. Bakugou accepted that his had stopped being about his cracking voice and was now an all included ‘my body is doing fucked up shit’ power hour.

“Dude I saw you have chest hair and everything.” Kirishima laughed. He pulled out his shirt collar and looked down at his smooth skin. “Lucky.”

“You want chest hair?” Bakugou winced. “Why?”

“it’s manly as fuck.” Kirishima added.

“Let me see!” Mina was lifting Seros shirt, and he was letting her. He had a small patch of hair growing out of the middle of his chest between his pectorals, and one hell of a happy trail. Mina plucked a hair off from around his nipples and laughed. Sero cried out and frowned.

“Dude there aren’t that many!” he stole the hair back from Mina.

Bakugou rolled his eyes and nudged Kirishima to hold out the tupperware. He stated sectioning out the large quantity of food. Kaminari eyes him closely. Bakugou sneered as Kaminari adjusted his pants silently.

“Oh my god! Ew!” Mina jumped back up on the counter top.

“I’m sorry okay!” Kaminari wiggled around in his jeans. “It won’t stop! I don’t know what to do!”

“Just go jack off in your room.” Kirishima suggested, not even teasing, just trying to give friendly advice.

“I do… all of the time! I can’t jack it anymore! MY. DICK. HURTS.”

“All the time?” Mina now seemed kind of interested. Kaminari inched away from her.

“It’s that or I great the world dick first for the rest of my life.” Kaminari was wildly waving his arms around as he spoke, but it was going nothing towards distracting everyones eyes from his obvious boner.

“Maybe you could use it as a Taser?” Sero clowned a pelvic thrust. “ZAP ZAP!”

Kaminari seemed to be considering it. Mina burst into laughter.

“You won’t even need your charge director. You could have been using your dick this entire time.” The pink girl was screaming.

“Just imagine Kaminari running around, dick flying through the air, shooting lightning!” Sero had to support himself on the tile next to Mina.

“Cockbolt!” Kirishima slammed shut the freezer after him and Bakugou had packed way their meals.

“Stuncum.” Bakugou muttered a little quieter.

“Cum-inari Dick-I” Mina was getting way too loud.

“Fuck all of you guys.” Kaminari was choaking on his laughter. Sero was hardly even breathing. Kaminari turned to Kirishima as he wiped tears from his eyes. “And what about you? You as rock hard as I am?”

“Me?” Kirishima looked a little shocked that they were even curious about what ever damage puberty was wrecking on his body. “I don’t know… kind of all the normal stuff I guess?”

“Normal stuff?” Kaminari wanted details. Bakugou couldn’t deny he didn’t also what to know what the apparent faultless puberty god had to say. Kirishima seemed to be going through a short list in his head, trying to pick out the most interesting.

“Sorry, I don’t really know…” he scratched at his head. Kaminari wasn’t accepting that.

“Come on! Something? Is one of your feet bigger than the other? Do you smell bad? Acne in odd places? Come on! have your balls even dropped?”

“Of course they have! Im just saying that I cant think of anything funny to say. Nothing can really beat your fucking boner!” Kirishimas face was starting to match his hair.

“I bet Jirou would like to beat it.” Mina muttered under her breath.

“Really?” Kaminari perked up. “How… how do you know? Did she say-…”

“Kirishima cries a lot.” Bakugou announced coldly. All eyes were on him.

“I do?” Kirishima questioned. He didn’t think he cried a lot.

“You’re an emotional wreck.” Bakugou was pulling out more rice and meat, he wasn’t going to let them know but he was making everyone a late lunch. He just felt like cooking. “you cry at almost every movie we watch, even the ones that aren’t sad. Yesterday you dropped you pen in class and when you couldn’t reach it I saw fucking tears in your eyes.”

“Kirishima you big soft pussy. “ Mina spoke bluntly.

Kirishima looked to be in a state of shock. He guessed that maybe he had been crying a bit more than normal, that silly things like missing shoes and low batterys were pulling tears from him in the gallons. But he was an emotional guy so it made sense. Kaminari pulled Kirishimas head to his chest “my soft boi.”

“Get off!” Kirishima struggled against Kaminaris grip. Sero put his hand on the back of his head and pushed it down.

“NOW SUCK THAT DICK!” Kirishima escaped just in time, the group sans Bakugou laughing. Bakugou started putting the food he had just taken out way. Fuck these people, they could starve.

#my hero academia #fanfic #i just started writing and this came out #its silly yall #im just here to have a good time #katsuki bakugou #kirishima eijirou #sero hanta #mina ashido #kaminari denki