#anyway. drawing silly comics is calming. smiles | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

yanderart · 4 years

Text

Took me longer since the “drabble” that was supposed to accompany this turned into a kind of extensive one-shot, but here’s the next installment in the Yandere POV series. Inspired by a juicy request from some thoughtful anons!

Below the cut is, as customary, a fic I wrote exploring the underlying themes of the portrait (creepy best friend tamaki x reader, nsfw, dark themes, 8k).

TWs: usual yandere content (delusion, obsession, deceit, etc), explicit noncon, violence, Tamaki making the frienzone his bitch. Generous implementations of the pet name “bunny”.

If you had known the chain of events that would spiral from telling Tamaki about your new relationship… well, perhaps you would’ve stayed quiet. It wasn’t like it was that serious yet either, but you had an inkling (“I really like this one, Tamaki”) that made it worthwhile enough to mention in your book. Remarkable enough to share with your very best friend.

Besides, in your defence, you really had no way of knowing just what hid behind his agitated reaction. Nerves stretched thin, voice terse as he congratulated you with a smile that appeared a little too bright, a little too strained. With someone like Tamaki, it was easy to go chalk it all up to his anxiety, stress or an unfortunate mix of both.

So easy to underestimate him, wasn’t it?

Nevertheless, there were no uses for any what ifs in your future, speculations and paranoia not even close to creeping up on you yet. So almost a week after your reveal, when you got a call from Tamaki himself, you didn’t even hesitate as you picked it up in the last few dredges of your work shift.

“Need something?” you answered distractedly as your fingers continued typing on your keyboard, sorting out the last few remnants of some menial task.

The prolonged silence however, only brokered by a subtle sound you identified as actual sniffling, was your only response. Your hands stopped mid movements then, brows furrowed with worry.

“What’s happening, dear?”

This time your voice was as calming as you could compel it to be, your tone trying to imbed reassurance into every syllable, “Tamaki?”

You heard what sounded like a whine, a strangled sound that conjured up an image of tears trailing down his cheeks, bottom lip quivering in a sorrowful grimace.

Calling him dear despite having a boyfriend now, it was like you were taunting him.

“Bunny,” Tamaki’s voice was shaking as he called you by your old nickname, sobs making it hard to understand anything but how panicked his intonation was. “I-I need you.”

Thinking your pro-hero friend was having another budding panic attack, or perhaps on the brink of a new stress induced mental breakdown, you were on your feet before he even stopped speaking. The protective side of your brain had overridden any apprehension to leave your post, your hands already reaching to turn off your work computer before you wordlessly left your desk.

You were working overtime, anyways, and any consequences that came out of going to your friend’s aid were well worth facing in your book. And by that point too, you knew enough of all of their schedules to know yours would be the easiest to clear. Mirio and Nejire had their own heroics to worry about, while you only had an unremarkable office job to account for.

Not like he’d want Mirio or Nejire there, though. Not like he would ever call for them when he had you.

“I’ll be right there, Tamaki. Please stay put,” was the last thing you told him before hanging up and rushing to get your coat.

The urgency in his timbre, the utter need, was all you could think of as you left your building in quickened strides.

And by the way you were rushing, it was clear that you actually cared for him, your very best friend. All you needed was a gentle reminder of just how much.

You got to Tamaki’s apartment in a matter of minutes, letting your cab driver keep the change as you stumbled up the stairs in urgent skips. It wasn’t the first time he asked you to be there for him (asked you without actually saying it, because he would never dare utter the words), yet you knew enough of the turmoil he went through on a daily basis. A pro-hero he might be, but his anxiety was his eternally undefeated foe.

Although was it really that bad if it kept bringing you two together?

Opening the door into a room enveloped by shadows, you dropped your things without a care before attempting to make your way into the living room.

Barely a heartbeat later, an audible hitch in someone’s breathing alerted you quickly of your friend’s location.

“Y/N?” his voice sounded hoarse and choked up as he called for you. And it felt like a fist was squeezing your heart, the same that had been consistently gripping your chest ever since you first picked up the phone in your office.

“I’m here, dear.“ You comforted him while redirecting your steps to the sound of his trembling voice.

Despite the darkness, your eyes were acclimatized enough to distinguish the silhouette of his body hunched over the only sofa in the room. Even without getting a glimpse at his face, you could sense defeat and pessimism oozing off of him in waves. As you got closer, however, he made no movements of retreat, nor flinched away when you sat beside him.

Instead, it was like his body started to release all of his pent-up tension as a response to your proximity.

You were there and it was like he could finally breathe. You were there for him, right where you were meant to be.

One of your palms was reaching out and drawing quick circles across his back, the thin fabric of his t-shirt bunching up while your voice hummed what you hoped was a tranquilizing melody. With the other one, you clasped one of Tamaki’s own vacant hands and gave it a gentle squeeze, almost as if you were willing the worries to leave his body, a piper’s songs coaxing them out in the form of your enticing presence.

By that point, you knew enough about his episodes to know physical contact and reassurance were the fastest ways to get him to come back up from his lowest of lows. So it was no wonder, then, when your reward came quickly in the form of a content sigh leaving his lips, anguish still visible in his posture but his body clearly leaning into the solace you offered.

The balm you provided had always been intoxicating for him.

“I… I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he stuttered through distressed hiccups. He looked so fragile like that, so much like a kicked puppy, that you instinctually wrapped your arm around his waist and hugged him closer to your side.

“Oh, Tamaki…,” you shushed with a note of guilt, preoccupied with the fact that he would ever think you’d leave him hanging, “why would you even say that?”

You could feel his shoulders stiffen in your embrace, his hand tightening around yours for a moment before going limp in your grip. His lack of an answer stung even more.

It was ridiculous truly, to feel so protective over a man who was a pro-hero and clearly several times your strength. Even hugging him like you were, his lanky silhouette overshadowed yours in an almost comical portrayal of your height difference.

But he was your dearest friend —taking care of him came as second nature.

He adored you for it.

“You know I could never ignore you when you need me,” you whispered as your thumb drew patterns on the hand you were holding, soft insignificant drawings that to him felt like ancient secrets being exchanged. “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”

It was always like this with you two. Tamaki stayed quiet while you rambled on in his ear, trying to scatter any doubts or anxious thoughts still clouding his mind. At first you had thought it’d be annoying for him, overbearing in the worst of senses, but he had quickly insisted that you always knew just what to do to calm him down. You were his best friend, the one person besides Mirio and Nejire who just got him, who truly understood…

So it only made you feel guiltier, to think that you wouldn’t be able to help him this one time. He was a hero who saved countless lives, someone whose time was worth more than you could ever hope to achieve as a meager civilian. And yet you couldn’t even comfort him as a friend?

But it wasn’t your fault. You just needed to unlearn your behaviour. And if he truly was your best friend, didn’t you want him to feel loved too?

Which was precisely when an idea came to you, an epiphany from above in the form of a vivid memory of the last time you two met up, of the news that had seemingly left Tamaki acting oddly sour.

“You didn’t think I’d just forget about you because I have a boyfriend now, did you?,” you joked good-naturedly.

Only instead of having the comforting effect you’d hoped, your comment resulted in your friend stiffening even more, his face finally snapping to look at you with hurt written all across his features. The strength was back in the manner in which he was now seizing your hand, clasping it until you started to feel the blood circulation being slowly cut off.

“Isn’t that how it works, though?” His question was fretful on his tongue, barely above a whisper and with the slightest hint of resentment. His eyes were impossibly wide, impossibly alert as he studied your reaction, “Isn’t your boyfriend supposed to be your priority? The person you care for the most?”

But even with the switch in his behaviour and the worrisome path his words were taking, you were still too preoccupied by him to heed any of it. It was just Tamaki over analyzing things, as always, and his anxiety popping in to get the better of him.

“Human relationships don’t work like that, dear.” And there the fucking nickname was again, that jest of a loving pet name on your lips. “It’s not a hierarchical structure. I care about both of you in different ways.”

It felt silly to explain it out loud, to say such an obvious thing, but you couldn’t help wanting to appease some of the conflict eating away at your friend. Did he really think you’d ever drop him for anyone else? You had known Tamaki for years now, cared for him for what felt like a lifetime. The thought alone seemed completely ludicrous to you…

Even as his touch started hurting, as you felt a stern pressure that would surely become a bruise on your wrist, all you could think of was that this was just Tamaki being Tamaki, right? And you just needed to calm him down, like you always did.

He saw the misery on your gorgeous face, the blossoming pain colouring your expression despite your attempts at hiding it. For once, he wasn’t the only one hurting anymore, and he oddly enjoyed that.

“You’re saying that, but why… why can’t I believe you?” It sounded like he was conflicted, tone frantic as he attempted to wrestle down whatever doubts were increasingly plaguing his mind. He tugged at your wrist with a clenched fist, stealing a whimper out of you while his face got closer and closer, “Uh, I bet he doesn’t give you as much trouble either. Bet he takes care of you.”

I bet you love him was left unsaid. I bet you love him like I wish you loved me.

You attempted to push him off with your free hand at that point, discomfort quickly growing into annoyance despite your best intentions of being understanding. You were still under the impression that this was just a moment of clouded thoughts on his part, something bound to pass as he regained a grip of his senses. But the nerves flaring from the strength of his hold were impossible to ignore.

“Tamaki, let me go first,” you commanded in a carefully composed manner, still attempting not to sound as harsh as you would’ve if this was anyone but your anxiety ridden best friend, “and then we can talk about why you’re feeling like that.”

Yet his reaction was abrasive once more, twisting your arm by the wrist harshly until your entire body was collapsing into his.

“Don’t be like that. Don’t lie to me and tell me everything will be okay,” he was agitated, jittery and unstable in the way his eyes kept darting around. “All of this time I’ve been waiting… waiting to gather the courage…” He was making little sense now, just mumbling while he kept cradled your pained hand between his, a darkened gaze fluttering from your own eyes, to your lips and lastly some obscure point in the wall behind you. “And then you couldn’t wait for me anymore. And now you don’t need me.”

It was hard to think through the mist of your budding worry and the agony still emanating from your wrist. Somehow, your other arm had stopped fruitlessly hitting him and was instead just trying to keep him at a distance, your neck cramping from how far back you were trying to get yourself.

He was impossibly close, intense and expectant as his stare once again found its way to yours. You could still see the doubts twisting there, but it was rapidly becoming eclipsed by a new creeping resolution. Even while you continued silently fighting to escape his grip, as terror encased you and you tried to understand why your best friend was acting like that all of a sudden.

After that night, would you perhaps think a villain’s quirk was to blame? Or maybe you’d think one of his enemies had decided to impersonate him in a twisted bid for revenge? Surely you couldn’t accept what the reality was, the fact that his love for you was just that blinding.

Don’t worry, though, he’d make you understand.

Tamaki’s voice was feverish once he broke through the silence again, a new type of determination steadying his usual stutter in a way you’d never heard before.

“But I’ll fix that,” and then he was cupping your face with his free hand, your numb one still clutched tightly in his lap while his attention was diverted to your worried expression. “And then you will need me just as much as I need you. Then…“

And there was a pregnant pause before he continued, a space of time where his stare bore into yours full of hidden meaning, “We can go back to being best friends again.”

Somehow though, on his tongue the term best friends sounded suspiciously like something else entirely.

“Tamaki, listen…,” you tried again, refusing to quit still, before being interrupted by a terrifying sequence of actions unravelling.

Because he was tugging your wrist down again after that, but this time twisting and twisting until your entire field of vision filled with the aftermath of an unbearable pain. A snapping sound echoed in your ears, a scream clawing its way out of your throat before you had a notion of what was even happening —Tearing through the rest of your composure, probably hurting his ears just as much as it left your vocal cords feeling raw. By that point, the hand that was previously pushing at his chest with firmness had turned frenzied, clamped fists now carrying the weight of urgency.

Tamaki looked halfway surprised at his own actions, halfway scared. Halfway excited, too.

Following a pattern of behaviour which did little to deter the horror rapidly embracing you, your so-called friend inhaled thickly before, suddenly and without warning, capturing your lips in a kiss. Your eyes were opened wide as you felt the pressure of his mouth claiming yours, taking advantage of your numb state to persuade you into opening up and allowing an even more intimate intrusion.

It has to be a nightmare, you thought in shock as his hands fluttered against your cheeks, sliding down to your neck and massaging your shoulders. It was like he couldn’t decide whether to stay still, where to touch or caress as his lips openly devoured you.

He waited so long for this, an eternity of yearning for someone right at his side.

“T-Tamaki,”i, you willed yourself into speaking up once he broke away from you, gasping for air and with his hair looking as wild as his gaze, “I don’t know what happened but… you’re not being yourself.”

Were you seriously still trying to deny his feelings? Trying to pretend like it hadn’t taken everything in him to finally gather his courage and just act. What a fucking friend you were.

If he didn’t love you so much, he’d hate you for that.

“You need help. Something happened”, you were rambling, too intimidated by the intent with which your friend was now listening to your words. “Once you’re feeling better, we can talk. I… I’ll promise to be understanding.”

And despite the throbbing sensation in your injured hand, despite the disgust at his actions and unadulterated horror, the worst part was that you really meant it…

But who were you really trying to convince at that point?

His hands were still on your shoulders, but the way they squeezed around your flesh reminded you of the talons you had seen him grow with his quirk, sharp nails sinking without a warning and driving more half-hearted cries out of your throat. You looked like a mess now, lips still plump from the force of his kiss, mixed spit clinging to your face from it, fat tears freely cascading down your cheeks.

“But… Y/N,” his voice was oddly soft when he addressed you again. There was a timid smile back on his face, one that reminded you of the friend you refused to believe no longer existed, and you briefly wondered if you had finally gotten through to him despite the unflinching strength of his grip, “I’ve never felt better.”

He genuinely sounded so relieved too, so content with the dark implications behind his words, that you felt the blood become icy currents in your veins, liquid fear being pumped instead in its place. Before you even realized your course of actions, you were leaning your head to the side and biting down on one of his arms with everything you had.

Tamaki was the one groaning then, retreating his hands instinctively and giving you the spare second you needed before you were jumping from the sofa and diving for the door.

It’s unlocked, was all you could think about as you leapt to the exit. You could get away if you just managed to cross it, run until your legs gave up on you. You could go to your boyfriend’s place and wait there until you had enough courage to reach out to the police, to a hero —to anyone who could help you. Things could still be fixed.

And maybe, just maybe, the silliest part of you added, whatever was clouding your best friend’s senses would magically be gone once you had gotten away from his grasp.

You never knew how to quit, truly. But it was okay, he liked that about you too.

A suffocated cry was all the sound you could make as you were fiercely shoved to the floor, your face smashing against the carpet and your nose making a horrifying sound before your entire head felt like it was on fire. The white-hot pain was all you could think of, the dam lifting entirely from your eyes as tears trickled down your cheeks in copious amounts.

“D-don’t make me hurt y-you,” Tamaki didn’t sound at all winded, but anxious, pained himself from the wounds he had to inflict on you, “I want to make you feel good, not like… like this.”

Which only made it more fucked up when, once you started fighting again, you felt the unmistakable pressure of a growing erection pushing against your lower back. As pained as you were, you willed yourself to keep struggling after that, trying fruitlessly to get away or somehow kick him, bite him, do anything in your power.

In all honesty, it only made him get more excited. He really was a sick, sick man. But only for you.

“Stop, Y/N,” Tamaki pleaded in hushed whispers, his hands shaking as he tried to comb your hair out of the way. There was blood pooling around your face, flowing freely from the place your nose had smashed into the floor. You could barely breathe through it, your mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water as you attempted to otherwise fill your lungs through panicked gasps, "If you… if you stop, I’ll stop too.”

It was easy to recognize the lie as soon as it was uttered, a poor excuse for deceit as his hips stuttered into yours almost of their own volition. You heard him curse then, right as you both noticed that all your wrestling did was just press yourself harder against his arousal.

However, before you could voice your growing terror, one of his hands was suddenly on your back, drawing circles in a mocking imitation of how you had tried comforting him earlier. The sickness in the pit of your stomach at that gesture, that feeble attempt at consolation, was all you could think about as the tears of impotence continued furiously trickling down your cheek.

You were disgusted, not only at the monster humping you as he continued mumbling poor excuses and null reassurances, but also sick at yourself for willingly going there to attempt to help him in the first place. You couldn’t believe part of you still stuttered to call him your friend moments ago, yet, even through your disgust, you’d also be lying if you didn’t admit how hard it was reconciling your aggressor with the soft spoken boy you had grown to foolishly treasure.

“I’ve wanted you for so long,” his voice tickled one of your ears as he allowed himself to continue resting more and more of his weight on you, almost suffocating you under the pressure. He wasn’t even pretending like his hands weren’t wandering now, palms still mockingly gentle in their nervousness, but stopping his poor attempts at consolation long enough to grip your shirt and lift it up. “I don’t even remember what it felt like not to want you.”

You wished you could scream again, but breathing was already such a laborious task between your fractured nose and Tamaki’s hold. When you refused to turn on your back after he gently nudged you, his hands just closed tighter around your top and tore it apart from your body, leaving you shivering —not due to the cold but due to a fear and impotence that trumped any temperature.

Then, because he couldn’t even leave you to suffer in peace, you felt the torn fabric of your shirt being pressed against the side of your face, prodding you with a meekness that felt completely out of place as the cloth started to soak in the blood gathering around you.

“Press it against your nose, so it stops the bleeding.” He continued softly tapping it against your cheek until your unharmed hand went to roughly retrieve it out of his and do as he preached.

You could’ve told him nosebleeds didn’t exactly work like that when you had a busted nose, that just pressing a piece of cloth wasn’t going to help your case much (or that his kindness was void, when he was the reason you why were bleeding in the first place), but all of that implied talking, and right now all you wanted to do was shut up, pass out, dissociate. Whatever it took to ignore his fingers now drifting to the hem of your pants.

Yet he just wanted to take care of you. So why wouldn’t you let him? You were making it so difficult, when all Tamaki only ever wanted was to make you feel loved. Loved by him.

“You… hmm, you aren’t going to trust me right now,” it appeared like he was fidgeting with the waistband of your work pants as he drew out the admission, the thrumming in his voice sheepish and uncertain. It reminded you of how he would sound like when he attempted to talk to strangers, forcing himself into being pro-hero levels of courageous just so he could exchange a few words, “But that’s okay, Y/N, because you’ll understand.” One of his hands ghosted the plush curve of your ass, so lightly that you could’ve thought you imagined it in any other situation, “And when you do, you… you can break up with your boyfriend then. Things can go back to how they were. To just us.”

The image of your partner crowded your thoughts then, his kind smile being conjured up in your mind as you heard your pants being torn apart next. It was enough to have you openly sobbing, biting down on the fabric of your ruined shirt as you tried to quiet down the sound of your own grief.

But you’d thank him soon, once you understood. You already loved him before…so how hard could it be to love him again, but properly this time? To show him how much he knew you cared.

Once the remnants of your pants were thrown aside as well, you didn’t even get the luxury to cross your legs and put any kind of further struggle. Tamaki sat up on top of you, relenting the pressure in your chest and waist but comfortably setting himself on your hips, his legs encasing your thighs in an inescapable prison.

You could almost sense his eyes scanning your exposed flesh, hear his delirious muttering as his fingers got greedier and greedier in the paths they weaved across your body, the quick circles from before being exchanged by longer, drawn out movements. It felt like he was memorizing a map, with every little scar and indent in your complexion being the marks leading down to a hidden treasure, wonders to marvel at and inspect.

“I’m sorry, but I’ve dreamed of this for so long…” His tone was barely above a reverent whisper as you felt him finally reach your bra, unclasping it with a shaking that could only be attributed to unrestrained excitement, “dreamt of you even while awake.” He parted the fabric and left it precariously hanging off your sides on the carpeted floor, hands ceremoniously splaying across your shoulder blades next, “But you feel so different from anything I could’ve come up with. So much softer.”

His lips were on your back in an instant, almost as if he just couldn’t help himself, and he was sucking and licking while trying to cover up the sounds of his own elation. The slow grinding against your backside had stopped, though, and the weight of his heated groin lifted from your back for the first time since you had been crushed to the floor. It was such a relief, to be able to move again (even if you weren’t foolish enough to try and get away by that point), that you didn’t even realize the alleviated sigh managing to escape your mouth until it was too late.

You felt Tamaki’s lips curling against your spine, the satisfaction in his gesture crystal clear.

“Does this feel good, bunny?,” he asked you in a pleased little rumble, mistaking your sounds of relief for something else altogether. “Does it feel good when I kiss you like this?” He pointed his question by leaving another sloppy flutter of his lips against the nape of your neck.

But then his presence disappeared from your back altogether, a moment so brief that hopefulness could not even begin to be reborn before it was crushed at your feet. Because before you could savour the retreat,Tamaki was now grasping and lifting your hips with his arms, deft hands sliding the lone piece of underwear still hiding your modesty from his prying eyes.

You briefly wondered why he hadn’t just ripped it apart like he’d done with the rest of the items that got in the way, but the distinct sound of someone sniffing gave you all the answers you needed. Deep, earnest inhales followed by a purr of satisfaction. Goosebumps blossomed across your body from disgust.

But to him, that was just another sign of you being into it. You were just too stubborn to admit it, weren’t you, bunny?

“I’ll make sure to kiss you all over.” Your eyes were closed with such force, your intact hand losing colour from the strength you were using to grip the torn piece of fabric against your mouth. “If… if I’m honest”, and he was back to sounding sheepish, contradictorily embarrassed as if he wasn’t the one carrying out the assault, “Bunny, I’ve been wondering how your moans sound for the longest time, too.”

If you weren’t as determined not to let a single sound slip out, you would’ve gagged. But all thoughts of Tamaki’s words were soon replaced by his actions, cold calloused hands snaking between your legs as the pro-hero’s arms kept a secured grip that made sure you could not wiggle out of his grasp. He was hunching over you again, dark purple hair tickling your thighs, and your exposed entrance twitched as a gust of air was blown directly into it.

You wanted so badly to cry out, to protest again, but you were afraid of ever loosening your grip on the fabric that covered your mouth. So instead you tried to steer your body, not to get away but to move your damaged hand until it was being crushed by your own chest, new waves of pain radiating off of it in order to distract you.

Were you that afraid of liking it, that you’d take your own pain over the pleasure he’d deliver?

“Bunny,” he groaned that nickname again, laying a bed of kisses across your inner thighs, slobbering and disorganized while his hands kneaded your flesh with acute urgency. “Y/N…”, your name was chanted like prayer, the holiest of incantations being whispered into the flourishing goosebumps of your inner legs.

It was hard not to squirm when you physically felt his voice reverberating through your body, when the hands holding you up were so excruciatingly close to your now quivering hole. Even while fear coursed through your veins, what you dreaded the most was the way heat was starting to pool in your stomach.

You tried pressing harder against the limp hand below you, but Tamaki’s arms steadied you from their place around your legs before you had the chance to properly act.

“Stop trying to hurt yourself, please,” and to his credit, he actually sounded anguished himself, although you doubted it was due to the same reasons you were currently suffering. “I want to make you feel good, bunny. Please… please let me.”

He was kissing the skin of your thighs again before you had the opportunity to argue (not that you’d consider willingly opening your mouth again by that point). Your assailant trailed a path of shivers until he was hovering over your mound, tickling you with his quickened breathing as a wanton groan reached your ears.

“So beautiful,“ and his nose was pressing against you, face nuzzling your cunt with such an affection that only helped to make you feel infinitely dirtier, his voice dripping with reverence. “My bunny’s beautiful little pussy.”

You were wriggling again before you could attempt to calm yourself down, the alarms that had never stopped blaring now drowning any other thoughts circling your mind. But you had nowhere to go, nowhere to escape, and before another moment passed your entire body was tensing up again when you felt a wet appendage slowly licking up your folds.

He explored you through the movements of his tongue, guttural sounds of appraisal being smothered as he tasted your plush folds for the very first time. Even without the aid of his arms, still holding you up as they were, it was becoming increasingly obvious that he did not need them in order to thoroughly savour you.

So long he had been deprived of all sustenance, teased by your hugs and touches and left to starve while you went to seek affection elsewhere. Maybe he was undeserving, but could anyone blame him for finally snapping after so long? For finally, for once, daring to be selfish enough to demand.

“Delicious,” his trembling compliment was proclaimed between licks, lips slowly journeying their way to your clit before he was audibly sucking it in, his own whines echoing through your entire body once more and making you bite down harder on the bloodstained cloth. “And… you’re getting wet for me too,“ which was only accentuated by the lascivious sounds he made as he started lapping at your rapidly gathering juices. “Am I making you feel good, bunny?”

Shut up, you wanted to scream, shut up and just be done with it. But it was getting so hard to concentrate, your fingers cramping from the force you were using to keep the piece of your torn up shirt tightly in place. He kept gingerly savouring your unwilling excitement, relentless in the way his tongue continued teasing and prodding, even dipping into your heat as his gluttony for you became an unbearable constant.

When you felt one of his hands descend from your thighs, the sound of a belt being unbuckled, your eyes opened up again in fear. You almost stopped biting down on your shirt in order to voice one last protest, but then his mouth was wrapping itself harder still around your bundle of nerves —shoots of a pleasure you tried to ignore warming their way further up your stomach as the unwanted thrills in your gut built up to a crescendo.

“Fu… fuck, Bunny,” he sounded so needy between the squelching sounds filling the darkened room. “Are you gonna cum for me?”

You shook your head as the pressure kept building up, muscles cramping and your one free leg attempting to kick him out fruitlessly. Your head was filled with the cries you could not voice, heavy with an agony that far exceeded any physical turmoil. You wished the pain was enough to pass out, to mute the heat coiling up further and further, but such was your plight that not even the faintest mercy was granted.

Although even your silent rejection only served as encouragement in Tamaki’s mind. It was the first time you were acknowledging him, the first time you were responding to any of his comments after he had tackled you to the floor. Even with your mouth covered, the tears now dried against your mascara stricken cheeks, it felt to him like the sign he had been waiting for.

It only drove him madder.

You heard clothing being tugged down while he kept the eager rhythm of his tongue on you, pants and boxers being discarded in one go to free a surely painfully aching erection. Not long after that, his breathing became even more ragged against your core, one of his shoulders moving against your thighs rhythmically while his previously free hand stroked himself for some much needed relief.

The sounds he started to make, accompanied by the slow pace he was setting as he tugged at his own cock against your dangling legs, were ones of desperation and debauchery—whines that filled you up right alongside his intruding tongue. It made you curl your toes, close your eyes again as you tried and failed to will the sensations away.

You thought your teeth would snap at any moment too, just from how furiously you were biting down. Yet your cunt kept pulsating against his flushed face, answering to his relentless teasing by coating his mouth in more your juices, strings of saliva mingling with them as you felt the wetness gathering around his chin too.

“You… you don’t need to fight it,“ he was whispering right into you, humming the sounds until they were forcing themselves inside right alongside his tongue. “You can cum, Y/N,” and with the hand he wasn’t touching himself with, he finally freed your other thigh as well, opting instead to trail a path with his extended palm until he was reaching out for your face.

You were so tired, so preoccupied with the unwanted pleasure clouding your vision, that the thought of attempting to escape again didn’t even cross your mind. Both of your legs were now limp, supported only by his shoulders positioned below them, and the sounds filling the air were wet, squelching and downright sinful.

Which was why, when his palm started caressing your cheek, you were too far gone to run from the new coercive intimacy of his touch. His tongue was pulsating in and out of you, and yet your insides felt impossibly warm, impossibly empty.

“Bunny,“ that damned pet name again. It was something you remembered him calling you first after a particularly bad panic attack, sheepishly whispered as you held him and rocked the both of you in a calming motion. Only now it sounded absolutely depraved, filled with a lust that terrified you, and the word sullied as it was now half-moaned while Tamaki jerked himself off to your torment.

Or was it pleasure at that point? You kept wriggling, but he didnt think you wanted to get away anymore.

Some part of you noticed his rough fingers drawing circles again into the covered side of your face, another cruel joke that mimicked the way in which you had always thought appropriate to soothe him.

“Please,” he begged you and kept repeating it, mixing in the pleads with the insistent licks of his tongue, the shaking in his own face warning you of the furious pace his other hand was now setting for himself.

Please, please, please. Bunny, please.

Your orgasm hit you with a force that left you breathless, gasping for air and with a new current of despair trailing down from your dazed eyes, mimicking the arousal surely dripping down his lips.

You had never felt something like what you were experiencing, an orgasm so potent that it transformed your body into such a limp and pliant thing, enticing your mind into a forceful lull as Tamaki dedicated himself to drinking every last drop you unwillingly offered.

To your subsequent shame, the hand tenderly holding you pried the crumpled shirt away from your mouth. He was finally freeing the sounds you so selfishly kept from him, and by that point you were too far gone to think of stopping him, your cries and wails filling up the shadows of the room until they were bursting at the seams.

It felt like forever as you kept cumming and cumming, feeling like you were forcefully plunged from one climax straight into the next. Tamaki refused to separate from your heat, instead opting for continuing to mouth his appreciation right into your tender flesh.

“So gorgeous for me. So good. My sweet little bunny,” he wasn’t even trying to be coherent at that point, rapidly reaching his own peak now that he had you breaking down underneath him, now that he could finally witness your undoing at his hands.

While your orgasm reached its shaking end, however, your cunt clenching against nothing as Tamaki’s face finally left it alone and pulled back, you were again too preoccupied with the aftermath of your own pleasure to sense anything amiss. You failed to acknowledge the pause in his own movements, how his hand had stopped his own ministrations in order to reach out for your glistening folds instead, nervous digits twitching as they gathered your juices between them.

It almost hurt when he trailed your sex, your flesh sensitive still from the force of the after shakes still coursing through your body. A new unfiltered whine left your throat, jaw starting to ache from all the strength you had previously used in your bid to keep those very same sounds securely muted.

“Tamaki, please…” You sobbed, intending on pleading with him to stop, to grant you the mercy of wallowing in your shame all by yourself.

But all he could hear was the intoxicating sound of his name on your lips, your tone heavy from exhaustion and being utterly spent. It was the greatest melody you could’ve provided him with.

“F-fuck,” his exclamation was equal parts devotion and raw need.

After his fingers were retreating, it wasn’t long before you felt him lowering your hips gently. The warm pressure of his cock prodded at your entrance, already coated with your fluids and only getting messier as Tamaki trailed it up and down your slit.

“No, wait. Tamaki, wait,“ your voice was distraught and still feeble, what little struggle that still managed to cling to you coming back with a reckoning as a new kind of panic started setting in.

Of course he wasn’t wearing a condom, and of course your pleas did little to stop him now. A heartfelt sound of protest shook your vocal cords as he slowly breached your cunt, his cock sliding in inch by inch while drawing long, wet sounds out of you.

In reality, all he could hear was the sound of his name on your lips. You could’ve been insulting him with all of your might, Tamaki didn’t think he’d be able to stop himself even if he wanted to.

“Fuck, Bunny,” his hands fluttered between your thighs in hiccuped movements, fingers stretching your nether lips in order to give himself a better view of the place where your bodies joined, the sacrilegious union he had oh so desired for years now. “So,, he kept breaking into you inch by inch, “fucking,“ the length of him feeling eternal as he sheathed himself, “perfect.”

You had barely any time to adjust to being stuffed before apologies were scattering out of his mouth, actions contradicting as his hips rut into you, hands making sure to keep you on display for his gluttonous eyes. It was your new brand of torment— how snug he fitted inside, how full you felt and the way his shaft curved just enough to quickly turn any discomfort you were first experiencing on its head. You wanted to feel pain, but even that was out of your reach too.

You were chasing after a distraction, but why did you need to be running in the first place? You needed only to keep still, lay back and let your best friend take care of you for once.

The pace he set was slow, excruciatingly so as he savoured the way in which your cunt clenched around him, the way your walls spasmed with the memory of the orgasms he gifted you with earlier. He kept hitting that spot every few shallow thrusts too, the patch of skin on your insides that made you grind your teeth while whines still somehow managed to leak out. It was with maddening guilt, then, that your mind realized the extent with which your body truly welcomed him.

You felt dirty, violated by a man you had trusted for years, someone you had considered family beyond reproach. And while he kept drilling into you in that leisure way of his, you couldn’t help but wonder what exactly you had done to get him to obsess over you like that. What exactly you could’ve changed to stop your life from being utterly ruined.

But with all honesty, the answer to that was nothing. Because even without the pressure of your new boyfriend to pull him into motion, Tamaki doubted he would’ve been able to keep himself from you for much longer.

He had loved you for so long and for so many different reasons; Your laughter which was the greatest symphony to his ears, the kindness you had always embraced him with, free of judgement and ulterior motives. Your caring soul, too, and the way in which he just knew you understood.

“Please, please,“ and you didn’t know why you kept begging, your mouth running off on its own accord as your body tried to squirm against your intruder’s, unclear whether it wanted to escape or get even closer. “T-Tamaki.”

But most of all, he thought he loved the way you cried out while he fucked you now, a wrecked mess for his eyes alone.

“Do you think you can come again for me?” he asked you between frayed exhales, still oddly meek as the shallow thrusts into your hole made sweat drip down his skin and bathe you in its shine. “I know you must be tired but… I wanna… wanna hear it properly.” And there was an underlying greed just below his apologetic tone, a craving you wondered just how long had been there waiting to be let out, “Wanna feel it, too.”

It appeared like his own words excited him to a notorious degree, because he was rutting into you with quicker motions now, the sound of skin slapping against skin driving the despair even further into your heart. Your afflicted hand didn’t even throb anymore, your nose barely a faint nuisance either, for all you could think about was the way you contracted around him, the way the coil in your gut was once more beginning to tighten to a feverish degree.

And the palm against your clit too, which had stopped pressing against it in order to extend its fingers and circle them around, prodding and pushing until you were being overwhelmed by him, devoured on the carpeted floor with a face caked in blood and a body sore and resentful yet so damned inviting.

Your cunt was holding him so tight, it felt like you didn’t want to let go, like you needed him there… it made Tamaki, someone who had spent his entire life feeling different degrees of inadequate, think he had finally found a place to belong to.

“Shit, Y/N, you’re… really gonna cum again? For me?” You didn’t want to hear him, didn’t want to feel him, but when he pulled out almost entirely you found your hips shamefully pushing back until his length was being swallowed whole again. “Fuck,” you heard him curse as his hands left your sopping folds in order to grip the meat of your backside, barely contained strength nailing you to the spot as he set a new frantic rhythm, “so… needy for me. So tight and beautiful, does my bunny want it harder now?”

He was hitting your spot in relentless movements, his own hips stuttering as he strived to hold back his own impending end, and the groans coming out of you felt like they belonged to a different person. The tears in your eyes were still free falling, the taste of dried blood still covering your tongue as you continued audibly panting, and the tension in your muscles resembled a taut bowstring about to snap from the pressure.

Of course you didn’t answer, but you didn’t have to when your body spoke for you.

His pace was bruising, his hands kneading your flesh as he angled you just enough to get even deeper inside you. Yet not deep enough.

“I love you so goddamn much,“ one of his palms left your rear so he could grab one of your shoulders, forcing you to arch back just as he demanded. “Let me show you just how much, baby.”

By that point you were so tired, so drained from holding back, that you allowed him to manhandle you until your back was pressed flush against his stomach. His palm snaked their way from your shoulders to your chest, quickly pushing what little of your unhooked bra still clung to your frame so he could fully expose your breasts to his zealous treatment.

Your nipples were hard already, you really were loving this, weren’t you?

In this new position, it somehow felt like he was pushing against places you had never felt anyone reach before. Like, in a way, he was bruising your cervix with every one of his overeager thrusts, testing himself in order to go as far as your body would allow him. So fucking greedy for you.

Tamaki kept massaging your breasts while he fucked you, sensitive nipples being lightly toyed with while he buried his face in your neck from behind for an instant. Because unable to stay still as he was, soon enough his lips had started to kiss a slobbering path of adoration upwards into the shell of one of your ears.

“I know you… fuck, know you don’t love me like that yet,” he sounded feverish while he continued to thrust into you, voice faltering to the weight of his own lust, “but it’s okay. Right now…” He pulled out almost entirely again, only to dive in with all the more resolve before you had the chance to buck into him a second time, “I can love you enough for the both of us.”

And just like that, with the man you had previously considered your best friend whispering delirious nonsense behind you, his breath tickling your nape with each aggravating declaration, was when the overwhelming wave of your new orgasm hit you, shaking your entire body.

So fucking tight and needy for him. With your body clamoring for him like it did, who could blame him for foolishly thinking you felt the same way? Even if you tried refuting it afterwards, the way your walls clenched around him so delectably was all the honesty he needed.

Your body went limp in his hands a second time, for him to hold up and embrace as he saw fit, and you sensed the cadence of his motions grow even frenzier before finally slowing down into a sporadic rythm, his sex twitching inside you in a most telling way.

He was calling out your name in a litany of prayers, biting down on the skin he had gently been nursing before, teeth piercing you and joining the rest of the sensations overwhelming your spoiled body. And that was really all the warning you got before his release was spilled deep inside you, painting your walls in thick ropes of white while the remnants of your powerful orgasm proceeded to milk his cock for all it’s worth.

Through the mess of pleasure and shame clouding your vision, your sobbing became even louder.

“See, Y/N,” Tamaki whispered a few instants later, back to his nervous ways despite grinning timidly while his arms circled around you, “even if you tell me you care about someone else now, I’ll know you’ll never share with them what you shared with me.”

And it was such a ridiculous thing to say, preposterous words to proclaim as he refused to pull out and let any drop of his cum leak out of your bruised hole, as the heated hands on your skin replicated the same old patterns you had taught him inadvertently, the same motions supposed to bring comfort and which in reality only made you feel fouler.

“If you’d like, we can be an even more special type of best friends now,” he added after barely a beat, almost self-conscious when confronted with your somber silence, yet still bashfully content about the whole ordeal.

Best friends, you repeated inwardly while his hands kept stroking you without pause, perhaps truly trying to console you, or perhaps just wanting an excuse not to leave you alone. But you were so tired, so devastated, that it wasn’t like you had the strength to refute him verbally.

In Tamaki’s delusional mind, however, that was as good as agreeing. You two were really meant to be. Even if you refused to be the special kind of best friends he had in mind, he could always become your boyfriend instead.

Not like you were ever going to see your previous one, anyways.

…

Probably the longest piece of writing I’ve posted so far… and the filthiest. If people like it, I might start extending the lenght of my fics! Otherwise I’ll try to keep it on the shorter side for my next portrait/fic convo (a yan!aizawa one hehe).

And special thanks to my dearest pals @reinawritesbnha, @drxwsyni, @snappysnapo, @thermaflute and @coyambition. They helped me proof read, gave me precious feedback on both my writings and my art and were just overall sweethearts hyping me up!! love y’all fr fr 🖤

🥀 Requests/Suggestions OPEN btw 🥀

#bnha fanart #tamaki amakiji #yandere bnha #tamaki x reader #bnha x reader #yandere tamaki #bnha imagines #bnha art #tamaki fanart #tamaki smut #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #anime fanart #mha fanart #yandere bnha x reader #artists on tumblr #just art tingz

875 notes · View notes

harryhandstan · 3 years

Text

wonderful and warm

gif credit

I’m so excited to share this piece with y’all for @tbslenthusiast‘s dad-a-thon!! I’ve been debating whether or not to expand more on I Want Your Belly for a while now, so I’m considering this part two to that, though you don’t really have to read it first to understand this one. Hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it!

thank you @peachybloomss and @tbslenthusiast for beta reading for me! love y’all both!!

word count: 2.6k

You had been adamant about not telling anybody for at least the first two months.

Your mom’s complications with each of her pregnancies prompted a fear in you that you might share in that gene she carried, so you just wanted to be sure. Make it to your first ultrasound at least to confirm the baby was happy and healthy. Harry, of course, had agreed to whatever it was you felt was best. He wanted you to be comfortable and truth is, all the complications or things that could go wrong, terrified him too.

But the second you put this man in front of a crowd, all his previous filters go out the window and it was slipping from his lips easily, telling the world that you were having his baby. You were angry at first, spending half of the show trying to calm your shaky hands. Honestly, most of it was just nervous energy at the idea of so many people knowing. It was out, and you had no control over the reactions of the millions of people that shared in loving your Harry. He was quick to remind you that you were the one he loved, no one else’s opinion mattered to him and it shouldn’t to you either.

Making such a public announcement meant the news reached your families ears a lot faster than you’d planned too, and you just didn’t want any of them to be hurt that they weren’t told first.

Anne is the first one to contact Harry from his side, promptly inviting you to dinner the following weekend with a small group of Harry’s family. But the closer you get to the day, the more anxious you are and he once again reminds you how much his family adores you already, would now love you even more.

“Even more than they love me now, probably,” He chuckles, taking your hand on the drive to his mother’s house, “Gonna be just like any Sunday dinner at Mum’s, innit? We just have something a little extra special t’celebrate now, lovie.”

Gemma answers the door to let the two of you in and she tugs you in for a hug, pulling you into the house without so much as a glance to her younger brother.

“Nice to see you too, Gem.” He follows the two of you inside, shutting the door behind him.

“Ignore him..someone’s just jealous they won’t be Mum’s favorite anymore.” She giggles, rolling her eyes as she leads you into the kitchen where Anne mimics her daughter’s greeting, scolding Harry playfully that he spoiled the surprise so soon.

By the end of the night, the two of them are already making predictions about what the baby will be, giving family name suggestions, and planning a baby shower for you.

Calling your family was a whole new level of anxiety you hadn’t experienced yet on this journey, and you paced back and forth in front of the desk where your iPad was already set up to FaceTime them. Harry sits on the foot of the bed, waiting for your nerves to settle enough to contact them.

“D’you want me to join you?” He doesn’t look at you, just continues to fiddle with one of the buttons on his shirt.

Your head pops up to where he sits, “Of course I do, why wouldn’t I?”

He shrugs, “S’just..sometimes I think you might still be a bit mad at me. For letting it slip earlier than we wanted. Thought you might wanna talk to them alone first..in case they’re upset with me too.”

“I was never really mad. And I don’t think they’ll be upset..just may take them a little longer to accept that I didn’t tell them before you told everyone. They may not have even seen it yet.”

That was a lie. Your sister had texted you last night saying that she was thrilled to soon have a niece or nephew, but your mom had cried for a two whole days after they saw a clip from the show and your dad refused to even talk about it. Your brother was normally so far out of the loop that you truly didn’t know if he had heard the news, so you make a mental note to call him later too.

You wouldn’t tell Harry any of that though, not now anyway. Maybe later, when everything didn’t feel so tense. You knew your family wouldn’t be upset forever, they loved Harry almost as much as you did. The joy of having a new baby added to the family would soon override any hurt they were feeling now.

“Harry, whatever they say..this is still happening. I’m still having your baby. I can’t even begin to tell you how happy that makes me.”

The smile he gives you makes your heart flutter, drawing you closer to sit next to him.

“Say that again.”

“What? How happy I am..”

“No, the part before that.”

A giggle works its way up through your chest, a deep blush flushing your cheeks, “I’m having your baby,” You can’t resist, the tune now stuck in your head, changing the lyric slightly to fit, “It’s none of their business.”

“What? S’your family, of course it’s their..oh, right.” He shares in your laughter, melting away any tension that had settled in the room, restoring your confidence that everything would be alright.

As many changes as your body had gone through during pregnancy, one thing that hadn’t changed was Harry’s love for your belly. His obsession had grown with each month, constantly finding reasons to be close to you throughout your days spent together. Usually it was a hand nudged gently against the side of your bump, trying to coax the baby to kick or move for him.

Your child already adored the sound of their dad’s voice, would normally start to wiggle around the second Harry would start talking or singing anywhere around you. The first time it happened, the two of you were attending a birthday party for a friend and Harry was halfway across the room, animatedly telling a story to a group of your mutual friends. It was one of the many reasons you had fallen for him so quickly, his ability to have a room full of people so captivated by a tale you were sure they had heard at least 5 times before.

But he doesn’t seem to care about anyone else’s reactions, his eyes continuously flicking back to gauge your feedback, knowing which parts make you laugh the hardest no matter how many times you’d listened to him tell it. When your mouth falls open with a soft gasp and a hand clutching the side of your belly, he hurries through the ending to weave his way back through the party to you.

“You okay, love? Somethin’ wrong?” The tears falling on your dress don’t match the glowing smile radiating across your face and he’s turning his head amusingly from where he hovers over you.

“Everything’s great, H. Think someone just loves the sound of daddy’s voice.” You take the drink he still holds in his hand and set it on the table in front of you, turning your body to face him and tugging his wrist down to where you had felt the kick moments before, “Say something else now that you’re closer. See if she moves for you.”

“She? You find out somethin’ you wanna tell me, darlin’?”

“No, just a feeling. Haven’t you thought about which you would rather us have?”

He shakes his head no, his eyes bright with a pride you’ve never seen burn so intensely, “As long as you and they end up happy and healthy in the end, s’all that matters to me.”

He scoots his body to sit on the bench next to you, bending his head to speak softly, “Hello, little one. S’daddy. Mummy’s here too. Wanna move around a bit more f’us?”

He rests his head there for a moment, a hand rubbing along the side of your stomach, not caring who at the party may see the two of you or how silly he may look. He looks like a child who’s just been granted his one and only wish when your baby responds, a foot landing against where his cheek is pressed.

“There you are, baby. You kickin’ at me? Cheeky little thing y’are already..just like mummy, huh?” He turns to kiss the spot where the foot had been, ”We’re g’nna have so much fun when you get here, angel.”

Harry watches your feet a lot more closely these days.

You didn't notice it at first. But today as you're coming down the stairs, you catch his eyes watching carefully as he waits for you. One of your hands cradles your bump that seems to be growing daily now, while the other glides along the railing to keep yourself steady.

"Am I wearing mismatched shoes or something?" You lean forward in an attempt to look at your feet over your belly, nearly toppling down the last few stairs. The look on Harry's face would have been comical if it wasn't laced with so much fear as he lunged forward to meet you and help you the rest of the way down.

"Careful!" Even with you settled safely now against his side, his voice is full of worry, "Nothing's wrong with your shoes, honey. Just wanted to make sure you made it down safely, know how clumsy y'are."

"You worry too much, Harry. I would've made it down fine if you hadn't been staring at my feet."

"My girl's carrying my baby..m’allowed to worry about you both. Y'sure I can't convince you to stay home and let me do the grocery shopping this week?"

"No, I wanna go. Last time you forgot the bagels."

"Are you ever gonna forgive me for that?" You're glad to see the fear has fallen away from his face as you both reach the bottom of the stairs together.

"Maybe." You shrug, "Might take a few more kisses though."

"Deal." One of his hands comes to rest warmly on the underside of your belly, the other one still supporting the small of your back as he bends down to place kisses across your face.

A kick from within your stomach has both of you giggling and looking down to where it's pressed between the two of you.

"Are you mad at daddy too, hmm? Already two against one around here, I see. Alright then, baby gets kisses too."

“Harry will you please get up? We only have an hour to get ready and make it to the appointment. I don’t wanna be late!”

He rolls over, intending to pull you closer to him for a morning kiss, an important part of his usual routine. He frowns when he finds you’re already out of bed, digging through drawers of your dresser to find what you need to get ready for the day.

You haven’t noticed he’s awake yet so you keep encouraging him, “C’mon, made you breakfast. It’s an important day!”

“You’re not allowed to do that, y’know.”

“Do what?” You’re only half paying attention, tugging a dress over your head and scowling at your reflection in the full length mirror when it doesn’t fit over your belly. You quickly pull it back off and toss it in the pile you’ve already tried (and failed) to stretch over your growing bump.

“Daddy’s s’posed to make breakfast for mummy while she sleeps in, not the other way ‘round.”

“Well, mommy was too nervous to sleep in so she’s up getting ready, as daddy should be!” You tug one of your maternity shirts from a hanger in your closet and throw it over your head, declaring to yourself that it’ll just have to do. Thankfully it pairs well with the black leggings you’ve already struggled through pulling on. You plop on the edge of the bed, a deep sigh falling from your lips as you look around at the mess you’ve made of your shared bedroom.

“Mummy needs to relax. She looks beautiful in whatever she wears, no matter what day it is.” He rubs a hand along your back, up to soothe over the pinch between your shoulder blades.

“Nothing fits anymore, swear this belly gets bigger by the day. If I find out today you put a set of twins in me, Styles, you are gonna be in so much trouble.”

He throws his head back, a deep rumbling laugh erupting from his chest, “Aww c’mon, lovie. Twins would be so fun! Think we’d get lucky and have one of each? A boy and a girl?” He kisses your shoulder.

He’s pulling you in to rest against his chest now, the fabric of his well worn t-shirt cool and soft on your cheek. He wraps his arms around your shoulders, pressing a kiss firmly to the top of your head.

“Just lay with me a minute, hmm? Did you get any sleep last night? Felt you tossing and turning for half of it.”

“Maybe a couple of hours. I was too nervous.”

“You should’ve woken me. Hate the idea of you being awake and nervous alone, honey.” One hand trails up to cup your chin, a thumb smoothing over the tension set in your jaw.

“I honestly don’t know how you got any sleep. I wasn’t alone though, I think I kept the baby up half the night too.” You shift to face him, resting your chin on his chest, seeking the comfort of his face, “Are you okay? You’re not nervous at all?”

“M’fine. What’s to be nervous about? We get to see our baby today, find out what it is. I couldn’t be happier about that.” He brushes a strand of hair softly away from your face, tucking it behind your ear.

“Maybe it’s more excitement than nerves. I just felt..restless. Maybe it’s silly, but I just wanted to look nice today too and none of my good clothes fit me anymore.”

“You’ve always been beautiful to me, baby. But now? I’ve never seen anyone look as gorgeous as you look now. S’important to me that you know and believe that as much as I do. I’ll remind you everyday if y’need me to.”

“You really mean that, Harry?”

“‘Course I do. I know this has been new and scary for both of us, and I’m so proud of you. You’ve fallen into this with such ease and grace, already started gettin’ our home ready for our little one. I can’t wait to see you with them when they’re born.”

“You’re gonna be the most amazing dad. Teaching our child kindness and love, reminding them it’s okay to be whatever they choose to be. It’s important to me that you know how much I adore you and seeing you become the dad you were meant to be? It’s gonna be incredible. I can’t imagine doing this with anyone else.”

“Me either. Think I’d be miserable if it were anyone else.”

“Nah you’d get used to them eventually. Especially if they were having your baby.”

He laughs again, pulling you closer to smush his lips against your temple.

“Alright, up we get,” He scoots away to push himself up and off the bed, offering you his hands to help pull yourself up, “Let’s go see if our little bub got blessed with your nose or cursed with mine.”

You’re over the moon every time you see Harry’s beaming smile when he passes the black and white sonogram photo now proudly displayed on the refrigerator; your son’s nose a perfect mixture of yours and Harry’s.

#dadathon #harry styles imagine #harry x reader #my writing #dad!harry

236 notes · View notes

punemy-spotted · 3 years

Note

congrats on 400! 📝

this is a silly headcanon, but how do you think any character of your choice would react to you catching them watching their guilty pleasure tv show? (and what would the guilty pleasure show be?)

Thank you, Neptune!! 🥺🥺💖💖💖

I love this headcanon, it's not silly at all! I ended up... going a lottle overboard with it though, so please enjoy headcanons for: Helmut Zemo, Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes, Sam Wilson, and Andy Barber, all under the cut because it's long and I'm... a lot.

Thank you for the opportunity to think too much about them, and now I wish I was curled up with all of them watching whatever show they want.

Helmut Zemo

Guilty Pleasure Show: Agatha Christie’s Poirot (featuring David Suchet)

He enjoys murder mysteries, things that puzzle the mind, and even though he insists the directors put enough clues into the episodes to help anyone solve them, he’s often frustrated when the twist makes no sense.

Catching him watching Poirot is an interesting experience — he’ll always invite you to watch, happy to let you curl up next to him on the couch even though Suchet’s voice inevitably makes you fall asleep. What will wake you is Helmut muttering curses under his breath at an absurd twist that derails the entire course of the mystery, suddenly pointing to a random element as the murderer instead of the person the show made you suspect all along. He very rarely loses his temper, especially not at a television show, but his disappointment in poor writing is often worse than his anger anyway.

Steve Rogers

Guilty Pleasure Show: Great British Bake-Off and Blown Away

Yes, both of these, because he vacillates between enjoying food shows — Great British Bake-Off is just an example, he’s completely find watching Anthony Bourdain and does not count anything by Alton Brown a guilty pleasure because he still uses those episodes to experiment in the kitchen when he insists on making dinner because he knows you’re too tired — and snickering under his breath at the fact that they call the glass ovens in Blown Away “glory holes” and other in-show innuendos.

He often watches guilty-pleasure shows like these as background noise, when he’s drawing or when he’s just settling down for bed and you’re working too late to join him, but on the occasion that you catch him watching, he’ll usually just flash you that perfect, sheepish smile and offer to change the show. You never agree, because why would you want to take away the thing that brings him joy, even if it’s secret between the both of you? You just offer to let him lay in your lap instead while he watches, so he can relax for once and you can play with his hair while you both watch — and critique the glass-art with all the cruelty of the judges (and sometimes more).

Bucky Barnes

Guilty Pleasure Show: Literally any space documentary and no, it doesn’t have to be recent

Though haunted by his past, Bucky Barnes does try to look towards the future, and there’s something hopeful about documentaries about space and the mysteries of the universe that make him feel… calm. He loves putting them on and just laying down, watching until he falls asleep and Netflix starts questioning whether he’s still paying attention.

Whenever you catch him like this, he’s honestly usually fast asleep. It’s actually adorable, really, how peaceful he looks. You usually just tell Netflix that yes he’s still watching and then proceed to tuck him into bed.

Sam Wilson

Guilty Pleasure Show: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

He’s not actually guilty about this — he can and will shoehorn Crazy Ex-Girlfriend songs into everyday conversation with you and you will always roll your eyes at him when he does. He’s taken you to at least one Crazy Ex-Girlfriend concert live, and no he’s not sorry. In his defense, it was excellent and you thoroughly enjoyed it.

Usually, you’ll catch him watching the show late at night because he can’t sleep, and it’s always just the highlights of his favorite episodes instead of actually watching for the plot. Sometimes you’ll catch him singing but not always — you just put your headphones in and let your podcasts run when he gets really into it, tucking yourself against him and having a lazy night doing whatever you want. Doesn't matter, as long as the two of you are together.

Andy Barber

Guilty Pleasure Show: Boston Legal (yes, with William Shatner and James Spader)

Look. As a lawyer, I know other lawyers. We love to hate legal dramas because they’re unethical, get the law wrong, and usually result in us getting clients coming in saying, “Well I saw James Spader in Boston Legal and he did…” and they never believe us when we tell them it’s a show and that’s not how things actually work in the courtroom.

But he loves it.

He loves watching all the nonsense they get up to in the show, he loves roasting the bad legal theory — he has an entire notebook dedicated to the bad legal theory, it’s genuinely comical— and if you catch him watching it, he’ll usually just flash you a sheepish grin before inviting you to join in and mock the show with him.

He does slightly admire Spader’s gumption though — and occasionally gets ideas for how he wants to treat you in the office.

#egcdeath #baron zemo headcanon #steve rogers headcanon #bucky barnes headcanon #sam wilson headcanon #andy barber headcanon #asked and answered #tessa's 400+ sleepover celebration

16 notes · View notes

mimik-u · 4 years

Text

Flower Child, Chapter 16: “Yellow (II)”

AO3 Link

Poppy took little care to disguise the surprise in her pale face, her brows disappearing into her hairline as she visibly struggled to comprehend why her employer might be asking such an unexpected question.

“Ahhhh, y-yes?” Came the clumsy, fumbling reply. “H-he is, ma’am. Room 11037. I sent the flowers there—just as you asked!”

She clearly assumed that she was in trouble, an assumption that Yellow made no haste to correct as her cool gaze traveled briefly to the brass plate on her own closed door—Room 11812—which she knew to be somewhere on the sixth floor from the snatch of conversation between nurses she’d heard from the hallway earlier. She supposed this meant that their rooms were relatively close to each other, give or take an elevator ride or two.

Perfect.

“Excellent,” she murmured distractedly. “Good.”

An audible sigh of relief that wasn’t her own punctured the clinical air.

Pursing her plump lips, Yellow Diamond pulled one leathery thumb over the other and twisted to face Poppy again, who was staring at her expectantly, her ambiguous knitting long forgotten as she leaned forward in her seat, perched almost—if not exactly—birdlike. The woman had wide eyes, bright and yearning, a lovely daffodil yellow. They were almost childlike in their keenness, achingly young, and perhaps it was this reminder above all which made the businesswoman’s own eyes soften minimally as she addressed her with all her usual brusqueness of being.

“Poppy?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Please,” Yellow grimaced, “if only for this conversation, and ideally, all the ones to come, you can drop the ma’am’s.”

It had been gratifying to be called such the first five years of their acquaintance or so, a marker that the CEO had come into her own as a figure to be deferred to with such honorifics. (Once upon a time, she had merely been the CEO’s daughter, a title which came with no accolades other than privilege and patronization.) However, she supposed that since they were drawing close to ten years of having known each other, of having cohabited the same space for so many hundreds upon hundreds of days, that the relationship between them was already well established.

Poppy was once again stricken blind with no time to recover her face.

Her thin mouth popped open and then shut in a comical, half-moon shape.

“Yes… of course, ma—um,” she floundered, her fingers spidering nervously on her lap. “Of course…”

Yellow’s lips twitched involuntarily, a gesture she duly paid for as a sharp pain cracked through her cheek—no doubt owing to the seven stitches laced there.

Oi.

“Semantics aside”—she waved her uninjured hand vaguely and suppressed a wince—“when you called up here… were you able to discover what was wrong with the kid?”

Poppy frowned, her pointed nose twisting in consternation as she thought upon it, and it was with a small sigh that she shook her head.

“No, ma’am”—she blushed furiously —“I mean, n-no. I don’t think they could tell me for patient confidentiality protocols… I apologize, Mrs. Diamond. Should I have pressed for an answer?”

“No,” Yellow returned shortly, her voice suddenly weary. “No, you did well, Poppy.”

“T-thank you.”

And they lapsed into a silence then that wasn’t entirely natural, taut like a wire that had only recently been strung. Yellow Diamond did not care for the silence—so alien to her and so heavy, like an intrusive embrace from a stranger. And yet, for the past four and sundry years, this very stranger had been living in her damn suite, taking up space on the couch she slept upon in the study, and accompanying her down the empty halls as she kept one ear primed to her left where the door of the master bedroom was perpetually cracked open, never closed lest she go in there and find her wife—

The stranger didn’t pay rent either.

Bastard.

Yellow went back to rubbing her thumbs together again, distantly soothed by the way that the striations of each digit intersected every so often before breaking apart again, over and over, like trains gliding over the rails of long worn tracks.

It was true she could just have asked her wife what was wrong with the boy.

Could have opened that tentative line of communication just a little further.

Could have stuck one of her heeled boots just inside the door.

But perhaps that was the unbroken thread in the grand scheme and scope of Yellow Diamond’s life, the recurring truth that reared its ugly head through the bars of her ribcage every time she so much as breathed.

Hypotheticals.

That was all she had anymore.

Mere possibilities.

Grains and ash and dust.

Teasing her empty fingertips.

Salting them.

I could have talked to Blue.

You would have— I would have—if only she would just be sensible .

(She’s never sensible anymore.)

(And you’re too demanding.)

(She called you cold, Yellow.)

(You’re cold. )

The thought struck Yellow Diamond cleanly, like a steel-edged blow. Her breath hitched, the strain pulling at her sore chest.

I shouldn’t have yelled at Pink that night.

I could have gone into her room.

It didn’t have to end like that.

But it did—and she did—and that was that, the damage irrevocable and irreversible and done, the finality of it all echoing pitifully through the emptiness of space and time. Like ink, its blackness spilled across the pages of her memory, seeped and spread and poured. Like sour wine, it was impossible to ever really swallow.

But, Lord, how the woman had tried.

She had wanted to move on, to limp forward the best that she could.

She had felt as though that this was the only conceivable way she could exist in a world without her daughter.

This was the means by which she could wake up every morning to a merciless sun and live with herself—dammit.

Leave Pink Diamond behind.

Allow the very image of her to become obscured by the rubble.

Run.

But perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps she had been wrong this entire fucking time, and she was only now realizing it, and it was too late to be realizing it because time, oh God, time—

Time made fools of them all.

It slipped down an hourglass and through her fingers with all the mere possibilities of the life she and her wife and her daughter could have lived—grains and ash and dust.

As fading sunlight slumped through the window like a body on the floor, Yellow’s eyes dared to burn as she stared at her long hands emptily. They were stilled on her lap, intertwined lightly, with all the tenderness of a feathery kiss.

Kissed, she thought to herself.

When was the last time she had been kissed?

How long had it been since Blue Diamond’s lush lips had pressed against her own with a kind of intensity that had consecrated them both divine? Oh, God, how inseparable they had been back then—colliding stars dancing together in the darkness of their room, the rumble of their voices the only echo of a sound in the space between them. They created supernovas every time they so much as breathed into each other’s skin; they expanded, and they collapsed into each other, and they knew each other, and they tangled in the stardust of their own bare radiances.

With all suddenness, they fell apart.

Their daughter died.

And neither of them could barely stand to look at each other lest they see the reflection of that twenty-one year old girl mirrored in each other’s eyes—her vivid smile, the heels of her red sneakers flashing against the hallway floor, the way her freckles used to bundle together when she laughed.

“Mrs. Diamond?” Poppy prodded uncertainly, and it was with a jolt that Yellow remembered that she was not entirely alone. Her gaze refocused itself on the maid as a dull flush suffused her sharply hewn cheeks. Her temples throbbed. Her entire body ached.

She missed Pink.

(Dead, gone, never coming back…)

And she missed Blue.

(She was terrified to so much as look at her.)

“Poppy…” She began reluctantly, and this in and of itself was an unstudied phenomenon, for Yellow Diamond was never reluctant.

The syllables strangled themselves in the cylinder of her throat.

“How…” She winced at her own weakness—she loathed herself—she pressed on anyway. It was all she knew how to do. “How have I done it?”

She paused heavily as she raised her head to greet the maid’s wide-eyed gaze. The white Peter Pan collar of Poppy’s blouse pressed innocently at the base of her slender neck. She wore a necklace strung with white imitation pearls.

“Done what, ma—Mrs. Diamond?”

“How… have I inspired your loyalty all these years?” Try though she did, it was impossible to subjugate the open wound in her voice into her usual cadence of tone—the hardness, the calmness, and the simultaneous assuredness of being which so defined the image of herself she projected to the world.

But there was no such thing as the world in that tiny hospital room.

It was only her and Poppy and the gentle humming of nearby machines.

“Heaven knows I pay you well,” she continued haltingly, “but if there’s one thing I know about money”—and the multibillionaire knew a hell of a lot—“it’s that sometimes… it can prove to be insufficient payment.”

Sometimes, there was just not enough money in the world to fix, to heal, to ameliorate, to restore.

Blue Diamond had called her cold.

Do you really think I could be so callous, Blue?

You act like it sometimes.

Perhaps she had a point. (She always had a point.)

“Forget it,” Yellow said abruptly, glancing away. This was stupid; she was being childish. She suddenly wanted to be left alone so she could revel in just how stupid and childish she was being without a one person audience to watch. “I’m being silly.”

It was not a dismissal at the same time that it was a clear dismissal; she folded her arms across her stomach and neglected to be gentle with the left one.

A dull ache spasmed through her hand.

She refused to meet the maid's gaze.

And yet, for all this, for every subtle and unsubtle portent that had been bluntly thrown her way, Poppy Aurelia did not move.

For nearly a decade, she had been by Yellow Diamond’s side, attentive to her every need, a feat which was only possible because she had become attuned to every microscopic nuance in her employer’s face, her voice, her body language. So she knew that she’d been dismissed, or more exactly, Yellow knew that she knew.

So, why then was she moored to her hardback chair, staring at Yellow from those pale, lamp-like eyes of hers?

Why then, with all the silent alarms trumpeting their signals, did she stay?

Poppy’s voice was uncharacteristically quiet as she began to talk; she fed her stuttering words to the floor, not daring to look directly Yellow in the eye. The flat of her left shoe bobbed nervously against the cleanly tile floor—tap, tap, tap.

But still, she spoke.

And she said, quite clearly, “I… I don’t think y-you’re being silly at all, Yellow Diamond… I… just think you’re… er… asking the w-wrong question.”

It was the first time in the entirety of their acquaintance that Poppy had ever interrogated the validity of Yellow’s words. She opened and closed her spindly fingers on top of her lap; every tense line in her body looked as though it was preparing for a retribution that didn’t come as the businesswoman only raised a brow in the surest measure of her restraint.

“What question should I be asking then?”

She obliged.

She played along.

She felt compelled to.

She had no choice if she wanted an answer, if she wanted to know why there were still people in her life who tolerated and endured her, who stayed and didn’t leave. (The list was growing precariously short with the passing years, but to be fair, it had never been especially long in the first place.)

“Ask me why I came in the first place, Mrs. Diamond. Ask me why I accepted your job offer all those many years ago.” A pause and then a hurried addendum, rushed, like a spillage of tea: “Only if you want to, though, of course. Please.”

Yellow Diamond simply stared at her—puzzled, floored, and somehow, incredibly enough, haughty all at once.

“You came because I stole you right from beneath Peter Hoffman’s snooty nose,” she returned immediately, almost flippantly. “He always thought he was better than everyone else just because his brother-in-law was the governor, but I showed him—”

Poppy cut across her.

Another first in their decade long relationship.

The maid at least had enough courtesy to look abashed at what she had done, her cheeks scribbled pink, and yet, she pressed on anyway, waving her long hands frantically.

“Not that part, Mrs. Diamond,” she said hastily. “I-I mean, it’s related to that part, my apologies, but… a-ah… do you remember what you said to me then? In the dining room? You were there for a business meeting, and all the other executives were heading into the lounge to smoke… but you… you lingered, Mrs. Diamond. You stayed.”

It was vague—she hadn’t thought much about the exchange even in the moment that it had happened—but snatches of that night began to collect like wispy clouds across the canvas of Yellow’s mind, swirling and listless, faint but undoubtedly there.

She’d just turned forty-six, and she was on top of the goddamn world.

She had straightened her tie in the same moment she had straightened from her chair… and there had been a girl, standing at the periphery of everything, who couldn’t have been much older than twenty.

She stared at her hands as so many suited men left the room, wincing each time one of them so much as glanced her way.

So many of them glanced her way, taunting.

Lecherous.

“I pulled you aside because Hoffman had said something stupid,” she recalled, in that same dismissive tone from before. Hoffman, a big technology magnate in Empire City, was always saying something stupid. It was a wonder his entire body didn’t sag under the weight of his massive ego.

But Poppy shook her head slightly.

“It wasn’t… just something stupid,” she corrected softly. Every premature line in the maid’s sharp face testified to the fact that she remembered these events with perfect clarity, the words that were spoken over a sumptuous roast pig, how maybe even the shadows of the candelabra danced across the gilded walls. She continued to curl and uncurl her fingers on top of her lap for the want of something to do with them. She saw images that Yellow didn't, heard echoes that the executive had scarcely deigned to register as sounds in the first place. “He told his colleagues that while I was a good maid… it was a shame I didn’t have more of an a-ass on me. I was just twenty-three, and that was my first major job, and h-he said things like that to me all the time, Mrs. Diamond. He was awful—that man. He likely still is.”

Another quick memory.

A sharp glimpse of it.

A wedding invitation that had sat on her desk for a few weeks before Yellow had unceremoniously shuffled it into the trash with the rest of the junk—in the fall, Peter Hoffman would be getting married for the third time, and his latest soon-to-be-bride was a thirty-four year old model from Europe.

He was getting close to seventy-three.

Poppy sniffed rather loudly and tried to hide the fact of it surreptitiously, swiping her beaky nose against the sleeve of her blouse.

“So, you pulled me aside, Mrs. Diamond, and you gave me a job, yes, but you also said something to me that I haven’t forgotten since then,” she continued.

And then, quite unexpectedly, with a suddenness that Yellow dimly recognized to be bravery, the tiny maid looked her employer in the eye, daffodil striking burning gold, and somehow, withstanding the heat.

Refusing, quite defiantly, to wither.

“You told me to never accept what I didn’t deserve, Mrs. Diamond,” Poppy said matter-of-factly, her voice confident, unwavering, irrefutably sure. She straightened a little in her chair, squaring her slender shoulders. “That I had a right to demand better than what I was being given, and that what I was currently being given wasn’t deserved. It’s advice I’ve taken to heart from the moment I accepted your offer, and it’s advice that has kept me in your employ all these years.”

“Poppy—” She hastened to interject, to protest, to contradict—consummate contrarian that she was. She wasn’t sure what she was going to say, only that whatever she said would be an attempt to stem the praise she could not possibly deserve. This had all been nine years ago; she had simply wanted to get back at a cantankerous old bastard whom she had always despised; words were nice, but they were never reliable measures of conduct.

But again—amazingly enough—Poppy Aurelia was faster. Again, she boldly interrupted Yellow, leaning forward in her seat. The sun from the window haloed her blonde hair, highlighting even the parts of it which stuck up at the top.

“I-I know you’re not the easiest person in the world… I’ve watched you and your family, and I’ve worked for you, Mrs. Diamond, a-and I know you, I think. You can be harsh, and y-you’re often demanding. Y-you get irritable when you’re tired, and y-you're honestly always tired… but that doesn’t make you’re a bad person, Mrs. Diamond. That doesn’t make you a monster.”

Poppy paused then, and she deliberated, and she chewed on her lower lip, seemingly weighing her next words against the risk of speaking them into existence.

Perhaps they were offensive.

At the very least, they were likely inappropriate.

In the end, though, she inhaled bracingly.

She ignored all the carefully drawn lines of etiquette.

She chose to let them fly.

“That just makes you… human.”

Five words, six nervously uttered syllables.

The sentence landed with a kind of finality between them, and there was tension in the air, electricity, as the two of them stared at each other over its heaviness.

Poppy’s eyes were protuberant with anxiety, the fear that she had finally overstepped scrawled all over her face in red blush.

Yellow Diamond could have been carved from stone for all that she could muster herself to move, her lips parted slightly.

She swallowed thickly.

A feeling like eruption constricted the column of her throat.

And then, through the silence, despite everything awful that the silence was and had ever represented, she said, very softly, very quietly, “Thank you, Poppy… I needed to hear that.”

Poppy’s mouth collapsed into a trembling smile.

She fell backwards into her chair, seemingly exhausted with relief.

Courage cost something after all.

“Of course, ma’am,” she said weakly. “I-I mean, Mrs. Diamond. I’m sorry! I—!”

But far from being affronted, Yellow Diamond laughed—actually laughed—the sound hoarse and a little reckless, half-mad and almost, if not explicitly, fond.

“You’re hopeless, Poppy.”

The maid's smile became teasing. She picked up her knitting needles again, holding up her scarf-sweater-doily-thing up to the light pouring in from the window to inspect it better.

“O-only a little, ma'am.”

ii.

When Yellow Diamond returned home from the office that evening, opening the door with far more force than the gesture typically required, she discovered her wife tucked into the far end of their white couch, knees pulled up to her chest, an open book perched cozily in her blanketed lap. The flames from the nearby hearth bathed the living room in warm, flickering tones—autumnal oranges and honeyed ambers deep enough to get lost in, tentative golds that seeped across the spruce floor.

Readers balanced carefully on the tip of her nose, Blue didn’t so much as glance up at her arrival, absorbed by whatever she was reading—likely some verbose classic or anthology or theological theory one. She pressed the closed end of her highlighter to her lips absentmindedly, almost appearing to chew upon it. Her long, brown hair was swept across the side of her neck, billowing in graceful waves over her left shoulder.

Yellow peeled her snow-dusted overcoat and scarf off with disgust and slammed each of these articles onto the adjacent coatrack, nearly sending the pole to the floor with the harshness of the action. She flashed a hand out and caught it just in time, but…

“Fuck!” She spat, glowering at the damn thing for daring to be so unsteady. “Shit.”

And it was with a soft sigh, knowing —in that almost haughty manner of hers—that Blue replaced her bookmark between the folds of her pages and finally looked up, her dark brow lifted along the lines of her weary amusement.

“I take it you’ve had a bad day?”

“No,” Yellow growled immediately, stalking over to the couch and plopping down next to Blue’s covered feet. Perhaps in the mood to defy all the studied rules of decorum tonight, she spread her legs wide and hunched forward, shoulders impolitely slumped.

A pause.

Her wife’s lips twitched in the place of a reply.

“Yes,” she broke. She admitted grudgingly. She dragged fingers through her stiff, blonde hair, pleasuring in the sensation of finally being able to muss it up once more. It took liberal amounts of hairspray to tame it into some manner of acceptability every morning. “My mother… we got into it again today.”

As she was only thirty to White Diamond’s sixty-eight, slowly but assuredly, there was a transition of power taking place at the older woman’s pride and joy, the company upon which she had built her titanium bones—Diamond Electric. Now a multinational conglomerate, it had begun simply enough by selling top of the line household appliances… but recently, beneath Yellow’s watchful eye and grasp of the new age market, the company was sinking its teeth into more contemporary avenues of growth, dabbling in radio and television broadcasting, as well as vehicle manufacturing.

“You’re always getting into it,” Blue said dismissively, but all the same, she placed her now closed book on the arm of the sofa—(Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard)—and leaned forward to listen more attentively, encircling her legs with her flowing sleeves. Her vivid eyes searched Yellow’s face in that singularly incisive way of hers, as though she was combing the woman from the inside out, taking her measure without so much as saying a word.

It was always an odd feeling.

To be so thoroughly seen, understood, and adored by another.

X-rayed, diagnosed, and still, somehow, against all odds, loved.

“But do you want to talk about it?” She pressed.

“No,” Yellow flushed immediately. She had seized involuntarily as firelight caught the warm expanse of Blue Diamond’s exposed neck, and, for the first time since her workday had begun, a feeling other than thinly suppressed frustration rose up the column of her own throat. Her mouth was suddenly dry… the beginnings of a mischievous smile rose on her lips, crooked at the corners. “There’s a different way I can work through my feelings, I think…”

She leaned forward then, very much intent on pressing her lips on the exact place fire had already touched her wife first, but with a laugh that was both exasperated and incredulous, Blue placed a slender hand on her chest and pushed her back playfully.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Yellow!” She shook her head, her lilting voice swinging with its own amusement. “Are you aroused by your own anger? Are you so neolithic that you think a hickey is going to make your problems with your mother go away?”

Rebuffed, rejected, disappointed, and intolerably aware that Blue had a point—the woman always had a point—Yellow slumped back against the couch and crossed her arms over her chest, feeling uncomfortably as though she was just another one of Blue’s pupils being scolded for putting a hand in the damn treat jar.

“Well, maybe it would if you’d let me try…” She muttered impetuously, sticking her lips out.

“Later,” Blue promised, a slight purr in her otherwise light voice. “But please forgive me if I’m not especially tantalized by the idea of disrobing knowing you’re thinking about your mother.”

Another point made.

It was no wonder she was a celebrated academic.

“Touché,” Yellow groused brusquely, and it was with all the petulance of a teenager that the heiress stared upwards at the white stretch of ceiling, so as to delay the inevitable moment when she would have to meet her wife’s all-knowing gaze again. The black fan whirled through its circular rotations rhythmically, cleaving the air with long blades that reminded her forcibly of her mother’s expertly manicured nails, lacquered the color of pitch and seven inches long.

Sharp.

Potentially fatal.

Yellow Diamond had grown up knowing what it was like to be stroked softly by them—loved by their cold embrace.

Sometimes, it wasn’t so bad.

The woman had loved her the best that she knew how—and this wasn’t an especially affectionate love, granted—but, at the very least, it was something.

She was not entirely unbending.

She was not wholly cold…

Other times, though, White Diamond’s love was like having a knife raked down the canvas of her skin.

She never nicked blood, but the threat was always implicit in the cut of her nails.

“She doesn’t trust me, you know…” The words were seemingly spoken to the empty air, drifting upwards with the fumes from the fire. It almost felt nice to get them off of her chest. Cleansing. “I make one call for the company, and she makes another, but everyone automatically sides with her because she’s just… she’s so… well… you know how my mother is…. You know what she does to a room.”

Just by entering a door, her mother could part the Red Sea and turn it blue if she so pleased; shoulders stiffened to obeisant attention; spines straightened; people paid attention to the words which poured silkily from her black lips.

If White Diamond said jump, employees at Diamond Electric were trained to already be ten feet from hitting the ground.

This was what authority was after all—control, power, unquestioning, unwavering respect.

“And she undermines me, Blue,” Yellow continued hoarsely, her fingertips digging into the soft press of her skin where she was holding on to herself. “And she makes me look like a goddamn court jester in front of the employees I’m supposed to be in charge of one day. Today, she called my inventory markup naïve in front of our entire team of accountants and proceeded to deconstruct why it was so inadequate for the next thirty fucking minutes… and all those bootlickers, damn them, they snickered behind their hands like were were in high school for God’s sake.”

The memory of the unpleasant meeting seared her wide-open retinas.

Much to her horror, her golden eyes burned where she sat.

She told herself it was simply the smoke.

There was a shift on Yellow’s left—the shuffle of sweeping fabric, a gentle thud as a woolen blanket fell gracelessly to the floor. And within a few seconds of these events, Blue Diamond was pressed against her side, soft and warm and faintly sweet—her clothes, her hair, her smooth skin wreathed with the scent of her favorite floral perfume.

“Blue, you don’t have to—“

But Blue silently held out a hand.

There was a raised eyebrow of quiet invitation.

And with an immediacy that was instinct, and with an instinct that was sure, Yellow pried her arms away from her chest, and without thinking, without hesitating, without deliberation, rhyme, and reason, threaded her angular fingers together with Blue’s more slender ones until their palms touched, lifelines intersecting.

Together, they grounded each other.

They made each other whole.

“I’ve given you my thoughts on your mother before,” Blue began delicately, and these was a certain hesitancy in the polite intimations of her voice that Yellow knew was only thinly disguised disdain. The two had rarely seen eye to eye before, over matters both macroscopic and minute—but mostly over the problem of how best to love Yellow. The question, implicit but nonetheless distinct, often was, What did the woman deserve?

Softly spoken words of affirmation, generously given?

Or the type of tough, disciplined love which had allowed the thirty-year old to graduate at the top of her Harvard class, accolades upon accolades showered down upon her already impressive name?

“However… what I will say is this and leave it be for the night if you so choose…” Blue Diamond took a deep breath, as though steeling herself to utter something rather revolutionary. A long strand of her dark hair fell gracefully between her eyes.“She’s scared, Yellow.”

The effect was instantaneous.

Disbelieving, humored, scandalized, and perfectly unconvinced, Yellow laughed harshly and waited for the punchline that never quite came as she searched her wife over for all the telltale signs of humor, but the woman’s long face was quite serious, her thin brow collected cerebrally above her sea-sprayed eyes. “Have you met my mother, Blue?” She asked incredulously. “The woman’s got gems the size of a damn—”

But Blue Diamond cut across her incisively, frowning thin. “Don’t be crass… but I mean it, Yellow. Don’t you see? Your mother is nearly sixty-nine years old and the company is approximately half her age. She’s raised it as much as she claims to have raised you. This is her baby, whom she has cradled so tenderly for so many decades—her firstborn child that the emperor of age is now demanding that she gives up to him. Understandably, you’re too busy arguing with her to actually listen to the words she’s saying when she’s arguing back, but the message she sends is clear enough.”

“And what would that be?” Yellow returned testily, jerking her head.

Her mother was always a sore subject, tender to even touch.

But Blue, having long been accustomed to the recurring problem at hand, was unfazed; she continued with the maddeningly patient air of a teacher explaining that two and two made four to a toddler who had not quite gotten the concept yet. Her shoulder brushed gently against Yellow’s, brows bent almost pityingly.

“Every time she undermines you, she’s indicating that she’s not ready to part ways with Diamond Electric yet. Cutting you down reassures her that she’s still needed, that she hasn’t yet been rendered obsolete. Her critical eye is always going to be trained in your direction until you can prove to her that you’re ready to fill those ridiculously high heels of hers.”

“But that’s absurd!” Yellow cried. “She wants me to inherit the damn thing. That’s all she ever talks about—how I’m going to inherit the damn thing one day.”

“Yes,” Blue agreed softly, “but who said that human beings are always rational, Yellow? Our hearts are so often at war with our heads, and sometimes, logicality is subsumed by the primal. Your mother can want you to inherit Diamond Electric and also half-resent you for doing so all in one go.”

“If she’s feeling all that, then she needs to go get her head screwed on a little tighter. That’s stupid.” The words seemed peevish to her before they even left her mouth; she chewed on her own lip sullenly as the smile playing across Blue Diamond’s lips grew.

“Yes, well, I didn’t say you had to like it.”

They lapsed into brief silence then, unbroken except for the faint crackling of the fire in the hearth. The redolence of the smoke and the scent of Blue’s perfume wreathed Yellow with soothing familiarity.

She breathed in slowly.

And she breathed out.

Her heartbeat evened.

And all that suddenly became important to her was the notion, the fact, the incredible, undeniable proof that Blue Diamond was warm by her side; there was not an inch between their brushing shoulders; they spoke wordlessly with the interlinking of their hands.

“So what do I do with this information now that I have it?” Yellow asked after a few moments of this, to which the school teacher laughed lightly.

Her pupil had just asked another awfully stupid question after all.

“You simply remember it going forward,” she replied matter-of-factly.“You use it to understand your mother. And by understanding her, become better than her. You can avoid the mistakes she made. You can rise above her shortcomings and know—intimately and proudly—that you did.”

Yellow’s skepticism must have shown in her face because Blue only shook her head at the expression in it, cutting across her just as she opened her mouth to respond.

“Prodigious though White Diamond is, she has yet to realize her Achilles heel—that she, too, is vulnerable, that she, too, feels and aches and fears. And the longer she restrains herself from this self-knowledge, the less she resembles you, Yellow.”

“Me?” Yellow couldn’t help but laugh; it was her last defense against the unexpected knowledge her wife seemed to possess concerning the nature of her mother. Where she was coming up with all this, the woman could scarcely figure it out. Yellow had studied her mother for thirty years and still felt as though she was barely scratching that pristinely cut surface, smooth all over.

(Honed around the edges. Dangerous to behold.)

“Yes, you, Yellow Diamond,” she said fondly. “You, who feels so deeply. You, who loves with abandon, the telltale signs of your care scrawled all over your face in permanent ink. You and you alone.”

Blue leaned forward then, slowly, carefully, so that their foreheads were touching.

It was a familiar gesture, one that Yellow completed automatically, all instinct.

She pressed her lips against Blue Diamond’s hairline, tasting the scent of her fragrant shampoo.

“And that, my dear, is one of the many reasons why I love you,” she finished quietly. “Because I know, beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt, that you love me back.”

Yellow’s throat suddenly tightened; she swallowed, tried to regroup, and pitifully failed.

And she failed because she couldn’t stop thinking about how right her wife was; she had a point.

She rarely ever didn’t.

“Always,” she finally whispered, grateful, overwhelmed, adoring, undone. “Always, Blue.”

“Yes.” Blue’s lips grazed her own as the shadows on the wall swelled around them, flickering, dancing, expanding, convulsing… snow swirled across the tall floor to ceiling windows, flurrying white against an infinite night sky… “I know.”

They sunk together into the couch then.

They danced and expanded, swirled and convulsed.

Infinite.

iii.

With an abruptness that was almost violent, and an almost violence that sent a sharp pang up her injured arm, Yellow Diamond braced her shaking hands on the edge of the sink in the bathroom attached to her room. There were a few lacerations on her knuckles where they had scraped tiny bits of glass and debris when she had lurched forward in her seat during the accident.

Fresh, they stood out lividly against her skin.

She examined them with vague disinterest for a handful of seconds as a way to stall for time, to distract from the inevitable moment when she had to look up.

Brush her hair.

Adjust the collar of her pajama top.

Throw a little blush on for the hell and sake of it.

Face herself in the mirror.

Her sweat-slicked palms cooled on top of the scratched porcelain; the seconds whiled down and away, teething upon themselves with each minute she stood in that abysmally tiny room, with its cheaply tiled floors and dingy lighting.

It smelled like hand sanitizer.

Her head pounded, each thud forming a singular accusation against her temples.

(Coward.)

(The name spat itself out at her, landing directly between her eyes.)

(Coward.)

(There was no defense against its validity, no sheathe to blunt the force of its blow.)

(Coward.)

(The raw truth of it wrapped its hands around her organs and squeezed.)

In the end, she was so well-practiced in how to put on a face, that she finished getting ready to leave her room without needing to glance at herself. When she exited the bathroom, she palmed the light a little harder than was necessary.

Room 11037.

The nurse who came by to remove Yellow’s IV earlier had indicated that it was on the fourth floor in the Truman Ward, where chronically ill patients were usually admitted. This wasn’t necessarily news to the businesswoman—she had known for a couple of days now that the kid was rather sick. But even still, there was something about hearing it aloud, in such an objective fashion, that made it feel less abstract than it had when she had briefly talked to Blue about him, so overwhelmed had she been by the fact that her wife was standing in her doorway, seeking her out.

Wanting her.

It didn’t register then, like it was registering so sharply now: Blue was friends with a chronically ill kid.

A kid who might very likely die.

For the last four years, the woman had become a master at inviting her own misery, wrapping it around her shoulders like one of her favorite silken shawls.

Sitting on the edge of her hospital bed, Yellow pulled on her black loafers with painstaking slowness and tried not to resent the fact that her wife was pursuing someone whose death may very well kill her.

(For the last four years, Yellow Diamond had collected each and every last one of her resentments just beneath her skin, where they had writhed. God, how they had seethed.)

As a last minute preparation, she shoved the left hand sleeve of her pajama shirt over her brace and stood up in a motion that would have been fluid were it not for the fact that she teetered dangerously, catching herself at the last second on the post of the bed. She gritted her teeth.

She swore violently.

And then, with terrifying rigidity, unbending to the last, Yellow Diamond moved forward.

It was all she knew how to do.

One foot over the other, each step meticulously measured.

What exactly was she moving towards? The woman couldn’t very well say, much less articulate to herself in a manner that satisfied her rational faculties. Physically, it was the boy—it was the child called Steven, a stranger at the same time he was an increasingly intrusive specter in the household of the Diamonds, a ghost there with all the rest.

The simplest answer was that she wanted to see him for herself, wanted to lay eyes on the human who had miraculously healed her wife.

But the simplest answer was almost pleasant.

In the right light, it could even be construed as kind.

Yellow Diamond was many things.

She was not, in fact, kind.

iv.

“Argh!”

It was scarcely 4AM when the sound of silence shattered with an abruptness that was quite awful. A baby’s high, inconsolable, agonized wails pitched down the narrow hallway and into the half-opened door which led into the master bedroom, where Yellow Diamond’s sleep-laden eyes opened with a start, uncomprehending of what she was hearing for a handful of disoriented seconds until her wife stirred beneath the angle of her arm. Enveloped in the lock of Yellow’s limbs as she was, Blue struggled at first to lift her head from her pillow. They wrested for a few seconds in the disoriented awkwardness of it all, but eventually, Blue propped herself up on one elbow, her long, dark hair sweeping sideways down her back.

“Pink,” she whispered unnecessarily, glancing at the clock on her bedside table. “She may need changing.”

It was more than likely then that this was true; Blue had an uncanny knack for sussing out which of their daughter’s cries corresponded to each need.

“Wait,” Yellow yawned, swiping her free hand across her tired face. “I’ll get up this time. You need to get some more sleep. Big conference today.”

Blue didn’t need any more convincing.

“I love you,” she sighed in grateful relief as she slumped back down on the pillow in a movement that wasn’t entirely graceful. “Endlessly.”

“Don’t be so affectionate yet,” Yellow teased darkly as she snuck her arm from around her wife’s curving waist. “You can cover 4AM duty tomorrow night.”

“Aye,” came a faint voice muffled by blankets. “There’s the rub.”

Yellow chuckled quietly and pressed a kiss against Blue’s warm cheek before pulling herself out of bed in a flurried mass of tired limbs, bare feet hitting the plush carpet with a thud as she unfolded into the dark air. By the time she had gained the ten or so steps to the doorway, her wife was already asleep again, her light snores drifting upwards from somewhere behind her shoulder...

The path down the hallway to Pink’s room was smooth and familiar after nearly six months of having traced it night after night, called Siren-like to the inescapable sounds of the baby’s screaming. Yellow took the trip at a jog—mostly to wake the parts of her body that the crying hadn’t already—and gently pushed upon the incompletely closed door leading into the nursery.

Softly lit by the waning beams of moonlight pouring through the high window, the crib at the center of the room seemed almost incandescent—ethereal—even if the sounds emitting from it were anything but. Her eyes still half-gummed with sleep, Yellow proceeded to the side of the cradle, bracing her fingertips on the wooden frame as she looked down at her daughter—her beloved, her beautiful, her squalling daughter, Pink Iphigenia Diamond, whose tiny, button nose was all twisted in the agony of her continuing cries, face red and wet with the exertion.

It was with a certain steadiness that Yellow bent down and brought the baby into her arms, tucking her small head gently against her neck as she patted her bottom and bounced her up and down, up and down, as she’d done so many times before.

“Shhh,” she pleaded, cupping her palm around Pink’s back. “Shh, I’m here.”

The baby continued to whine for a few more minutes still, but the intensity of the sounds lessened the longer Yellow held her and rocked, back and forth, shifting her weight from one leg to the other until the six-month old was nearly quiet in the embrace of her arms. It was then that she made quick work of changing the dirtied diaper, discarding the soiled one in the garbage, and redoing the clasps on Pink’s onesie, always cursing how many of them there seemed to be.

Now laying agreeably on the changing table as Yellow fastened the last button, Pink stared at her curiously, the tender skin around her dark eyes still edged with the trace remnant of her tears. “Between you and the alarm clock,” she told the baby sternly, “I’m never going to sleep again.”

Pink gurgled in unknowing agreement.

From the changing table, the pair of them proceeded to the rocking chair next to the crib, which Yellow flopped into quite unceremoniously, even though she was gentle, ceaselessly careful, as she cradled Pink in her arms, swathing her in the woolen blanket that White Diamond had sent from her latest retirement travels in Peru. The woman was always sending Pink expensive trinkets from sundry countries, and with them, neatly written memos about the welfare of Diamond Electric.

Sometimes, Yellow swore her mother continued to keep up with the company’s stocks better than DE’s team of expertly trained accountants did.

She was also positively sure that this didn’t reflect well on that team of expertly trained accountants.

Between the lines of asking—(demanding)—for more pictures of Pink and declaiming—(boasting)—the exotic natures of her travels, White Diamond’s more pressing message was clear, even if it was subtle, in that overwhelmingly honeyed way of hers.

Keep moving forward.

Continue advancing.

There was never a finish line for success, and therefore, no room for complacency, so darling, my dear, keep one eye on the road and the other over your shoulder lest the wolves attack from behind…

As moonlight dripped gently upon their heads, Yellow glanced down at the now slumbering baby in her arms, whose tiny fingers failed to encompass the whole of her mother’s thumb. The glow of the night settled softly on her milk white face, darkening the freckles spread like cookie crumbs across her cheeks.

She wondered to herself, very quietly then, had her own mother ever held her like this, so softly and so tenderly in the calm of early morning?

It was absurd to imagine White Diamond as being anything other than immaculately put together, arranged in a striking jumpsuit, balancing a portfolio beneath one arm and pressing a phone against her ear with the other.

Softness, tenderness, gentleness, grace—these were not words that readily stuck themselves to her stick figure frame.

She resisted those labels.

Unfailingly mocked them.

How she’d hate to see her own daughter even now…

Pressing an almost defiant kiss against Pink’s smooth forehead, Yellow concluded that it was unlikely her mother had ever yielded to a night like this; that was what the long line of nannies and governesses had been for after all.

She didn’t feel any particular resentment at the fact; she had long made her peace with the fact that the mother-daughter relationship between them was more or less transactional, unless, of course, they were bickering and fighting.

And yet, as she rocked her own daughter in that chair which ever so slightly creaked with each rhythmic sway, Yellow pitied her mother, who—last time she had checked—was apparently drinking thousand dollar bottles of wine in Paris and still finding time to criticize her only child.

It sounded vaguely unpleasant, going through life with eyes wide open all the time, head perpetually tilted over one’s shoulder.

Surely, she thought, the woman had to be tired.

If Yellow Diamond attracted one pair of eyes as she crossed the clinically white hallway, then she attracted two dozen of them as nurses, doctors, patients, and visitors alike all stopped to stare at the spectacle to which they were being treated—the city’s most renowned CEO stalking through a hospital ward, wearing golden pajamas that were somehow finished off with polished business shoes.

Whispers hissed like tiny faucets all around Yellow as the engraved numbering on the doorways increased on either side of her.

11029.

“That’s her. Yes, I’m sure…”

11030.

“She was in a wreck, I think. Saw it in the news.”

11031.

“Looks like someone’s lit a fire under her ass.”

“Shhhsh!”

Yellow scowled, her fingers twitching irritably by her side, but nonetheless maintained a distinctly cool expression until she arrived at the fifth and equally unassuming door on the right hand side of the corridor.

11037.

The door was incompletely closed, which allowed the soft murmur of the television within to seep beneath the cracks, advertising what sounded like some… some kind of kid’s show with its high pitched voices and jaunty background music.

For there was a kid on the other side of this door.

A mere child.

And for the first time since she had conceived of this plan—(it was hardly a plan and more of an unsubjugated impulse)—the CEO faltered, staring at the wood blankly. A choice branched before her, the very dimensions of it almost tangible as she simply stood there, on that hard-tiled floor, feeling the bareness of her own self beneath the thin layer of her pajamas, feeling the cold draft of the hospital prickling uncomfortably against the back of her neck.

She could proceed forward into the room and glean something new about her wife.

For that was what it was all about, right?

At the end of the day, at the very end of this infernal world which they had inhabited together for so many years upon years, she was whom her entire life revolved around in all of its many facets.

Blue and Blue and Blue.

(Who was this mysterious boy to give her cause to smile?)

Or, Yellow could cut her losses as they were and let this final door remain unopened; she could walk away and assuredly regroup. Burying her hurts deep beneath her skin, letting them seethe there with all the others, she could tell herself—command herself even—to be satisfied with the outcome of a battle surrendered, her weapons laid down at the threshold of the final gate that was filled with noises from a children’s television program…

Her stiff fingers reached up and gripped the polished door handle, the brass so cold that it simply burned.

And she hesitated a little.

She bit her already cut lip.

She deliberated.

She was deceiving no one but herself.

She had long already made up her mind.

Because Yellow Diamond, for all that her rigidly composed exterior implied, did not know restraint.

She had spent a lifetime and an eternity scaling mountaintops in search of the next highest peak to climb, to conquer, to revel in, to find herself alone upon.

And so, she couldn't stop.

She wouldn't stop now.

She hauled her hand downwards in a singular vicious movement.

She pushed inwards.

And the door slowly opened to a room filled with dying sunlight, orange fractures slivering onto the walls like great, yawning cuts through the slats in the window blinds.

And there, to her left, propped up in the hospital bed, was the boy named Steven, staring at her from widened eyes.

She was shameless, appalled, entirely uncomprehending; she stared at him quite wildly back.

The nakedness of shock electrified the space between them.

After all, she was a stranger who had just bursted into his room without so much as a cursory knock.

And he was—there were no other words for it—a sickly, sickly child, small and emaciated, dwarfed even by the sheets which swathed him. Wires and tubes snaked across his body, invading him all over—his oxygenated nose, his arms, his chest. There were even a few protruding from his blankets. He had curly, black hair and big, brown eyes that were sunken in his face, grooved beneath with purple shadows.

Her wife wasn’t merely just friends with a sick kid.

(That would have been too simple, too uncomplicated, too convenient for them all.)

No, she was friends with a goddamn corpse.

The thought arrived before comprehension did, and she frowned at herself immediately, scolding.

Sickened.

Steven recovered first, hastily arranging his face into a polite smile that made one of his cheeks look swollen. With a click of his remote, he muted the show he had been watching—some kind of colorful cartoon, which, for unfathomable reasons, featured a crying egg.

Sunny side up.

“Hi,” he ventured; there was tentativeness in his voice but a certain curiosity, too. Yellow glanced to his side and only vaguely comprehended that the sunflowers she had tasked Poppy to send to him were sitting on his rolling side table, haughtily arranged in their vase. She crossed her golden-sleeved arms across her chest defensively and suddenly wished the maid hadn’t made such an appropriate choice in flora.

“Hello,” she returned abruptly, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. The room was much like her own, except a little smaller, maybe. Perhaps, though, it was the presence of so many machines hovering around his bedside which offered such an illusion of confinement. They were all hooked up to him in some form or fashion, humming and whirring. “You’re Steven, yes?”

“In the flesh,” he grinned cutely. “Steven Universe to be exact.”

She stared at him incredulously.

He had to be joking.

“What kind of name is Universe?”

He stared at her back.

Confused.

A little indignant.

His button nose scrunched up, quivering the oxygen cannulas.

“Well, I think it’s a good name,” he huffed. “My dad chose it for us.”

“It sounds contrived,” she returned haughtily, sniffing.

“You’re one to talk! Your name is a pun!”

Steven Universe covered his mouth quickly then, disturbing a nest of wires at they lifted into the air with the rash gesture, but the damage was already done; it was clear, painstakingly obvious, that the boy already knew her name.

“You know who I am then?” She asked sharply, demanding confirmation all the same.

“No!”

But when Yellow arched a supercilious brow, he broke just as quickly, uncovering his hands from his mouth and letting them fall with a dull thud on top of his blankets. “Well, I mean… not technically… but uh, you’re wearing golden pajamas, and when Blue Diamond dropped by earlier, she said that you’d been in an accident… and it wasn’t difficult to, well”—he peered at her nervously, wincing—“put two and two together… you’re Yellow Diamond, right?”

But Yellow wasn’t really listening any longer.

Because Blue Diamond had dropped by earlier.

She’d been here, talked to him.

Communed.

For some reason she could not entirely rationalize to herself, the thought of it compelled her to want to hit something; she made an awkward, jerking movement, which she only dimly recovered from by leaning her shoulder against the nearest wall, collapsing against it roughly.

“The one and only,” came her affirming reply.

She hardly knew her own voice, how bitter it was and how cruel.

Steven Universe simply stared at her in silence, his mouth parted slightly for a lack of words to say.

vi.

The years scurried forward, dashing across the sands of time with tiny, pattering feet. Pink Diamond became one became three became five in the interim and the rush, her chubby limbs elongating with each passing day that she scampered around the penthouse suite despite her mothers’ protestations—both to the scampering and to the inconceivable idea that she was growing up. She had once been so small, a minuscule bundle in the warm expanses of their arms. But now, the tuft of brown hair which had once barely covered her bald head had bloomed into a spray of curls that framed the sides of her freckle-splattered face, poking up a little at the top.

She was a funny little creature.

Exceptionally opinionated to be so young.

She liked her ballerina lessons, but she didn’t like her instructor, who she said smelled like socks. She had a bright, high laugh that often threw itself down the echoing halls as her various caretakers chased her down their lengths. Her chosen color was pink independently of her name (though yello’ and bwue were pretty colors, too). She loved dinosaurs—how they stomped and bit and roared. Her favorite foods were chicken nuggets.

And yes, these were obviously shaped like dinosaurs.

The little elf, they all called her: the various employees of the Diamond household, her tutors, her imperial grandmother, her mothers most of all. This was partially because she resembled an elf with her slightly tapered ears and big, mischievous eyes, but it was also a nickname derived from her uncanny knack of getting into places she wasn’t supposed to be: the kitchen cupboards, her mother’s claw-footed wardrobe, her other mother’s study—often hiding beneath the mahogany desk to lie in wait for someone to scare.

Usually a maid who was cleaning in there, but sometimes, Yellow herself if she could manage.

(Sometimes, amazingly enough, she managed.)

When the then thirty-six year old entered her office one sun-splashed autumn evening, anticipating a call from Hélène Colbert—a high-up ambassador for a steel manufacturing company in France—Yellow made a cursory glance beneath the furniture just to ensure that there was no silently giggling child tucked into the darkness there. But there was nothing—only that secluded strip of carpet and a few dust bunnies the maid had missed during her last sweep through of the study.

Satisfied, she straightened in her chair and snatched up a nearby pen so as to jot notes on the legal pad she kept on her desk at all times.

It had been a damn good week.

If she could secure an alliance with Colbert, it would be an even better one. The steel company had a plant just off Delmarva’s coast, and if they could work out a reasonable deal, then Diamond Electric would no longer have to import the bulk of their steel supply from a few states away. It would save the company a hell of a lot of cost in overheads, and it’d make the Diamonds that much money more…

The landline rang just as Yellow scrawled that it was September 30th on the top of a fresh page; her plump lips tipped upwards in a lazy smile as she picked up the receiver.

“Hello? Yellow Diamond, I presume?” The woman had a low, pleasant voice that rolled with her French accent.

“The one and only,” came her confident reply, and the two began to negotiate, back and forth, sparring gracefully with their words, back and forth and around the bend again. If they continued at this pace, Yellow could have an initial affidavit sent to Colbert’s office by morning… hell, she could make one of the interns drive down to Delmarva tonight.

“Thirty-five percent,” Helénè countered.

“My highest offer is twenty,” Yellow volleyed back.

And on and on.

Fifteen minutes in, just as the conversation was becoming less jocund and more argumentative, there was a dull thud against the door.

Plunk.

Yellow’s golden-eyed gazed narrowed as she stared at the diminutive crack beneath the door; a slight shadow played there, moving along the edge.

Perhaps it was that awful cat of Blue’s…. ugly creature… it shed everywhere.

“With all due respect,” the ambassador continued, irritation edging her carefully constructed words,“we would be supplying the steel for your latest line of airliners, which is no mean feat, Mrs. Diamond. We deserve at least thirty percent of the cut.”

“Steel you only manufacture for less than ten percent of the cost it requires for Diamond Electric to actually produce the planes in the first place,” Yellow reminded her smugly.

“That’s—!” Hélène seemed to be rendered temporarily speechless. DE’s accountants had done their due diligence when it came to researching the company.”That’s beside the—“

Plunk.

The door was rattled again—twice. Hélène paused mid-blustering tirade; apparently, this time, she had heard it, too.

“Pardon?”

Plunk.

“Excuse me,” Yellow said shortly, her jaw locking. “Let me just handle this… I won’t be more than a moment—“

Straightening from her chair, Yellow Diamond placed the receiver on her desk and swept to the door in a few magisterial clicks of her heels, wrenching the knob violently. If it was that damned cat again—

It was not the damned cat.

The swinging doorway gave way to none other than Pink Diamond, who was sitting crosslegged on the hardwood floor, a bouncy ball caught between her grubby fingertips, the unmistakable expression of guilt caught between the freckles spanning her face. The triangle of light from the study fanned across her tiny form; she crouched in her mother’s lengthened shadow.

“Pink!” The word pried itself loose from her mouth more harshly than she had intended. (Hélène Colbert was on the line… they were so close to securing a deal… she didn’t have time to deal with childish trifles… her nerves prickled just beneath her skin.) “What are you doing?”

“Playin’!” The child smiled sheepishly, her gapped teeth revealing themselves with the gesture. She lifted the toy and just as abruptly let it go, where it crashed to the floor with a massive plunk. “Ball!”

“Where’s Sonya?” She glanced down the hall, as though expecting the day governess’s tall form to suddenly materialize at the end of it, stammering her obsequious apologies. “Why aren’t you in the playroom?”

Pink tilted her head uncomprehendingly as the ball landed with yet another echoing thud; the cavernous ceilings did little to mitigate the acoustics of the sound.

“I don’ know…”

“Well”—she pinched the bridge of her nose in a concerted effort to stem her annoyance—“go and find her, honey. Momma’s working.”

“But I don’t wanna play with Sonya! I wanna play with you!”

“I can’t—“

“But why, Momma?” The child wheedled.

“I told you,” she said it forcefully—she almost growled it—as though she expected the five-year old to grasp the nuances of a rational refusal. Couldn’t she see that her mother was busy? “I’m working.”

“But—!”

“ Pink, ” she snapped, slamming her hand against the doorframe, “ not now! ”

The child's protestations were snatched into silence.

Horrible, gaping, protracted silence.

And then, there was a tiny sniff.

A trembling lip.

Yellow Diamond realized seconds too late that she had gone too far, had crossed the invisible line between scolding her daughter and yelling at her— scaring her. Pink Diamond’s face reddened immediately, the beginnings of tears standing in her eyes, her tiny chest heaving in the telltale signs that she was about to cry.

“Wait, dammit—Pink, don’t—“ But any words of comfort were stifled in her mouth as Sonya finally came running down the dark hall from the direction of the playroom, her horn-rimmed glasses askew, dark strands of hair falling out of her usually meticulous bun. She scooped the child in her arms, uttering her excuses rapidly between every one of Pink’s awful cries, which were now freely being wept. “—playing hide and go seek… got away from me… so sorry, Mrs. Diamond… won’t happen again.”

“Sonya. I mean, Pink. I—“

But before she could finish objecting, could explain, could thoroughly justify why she had made her daughter cry, the lithe governess had already pivoted in the opposite direction just as quickly as she had come, stroking Pink’s feathery hair and whispering soft words of consolation against her head, for the child had buried her face in Sonya’s turtleneck.

Like ghosts, they disappeared together around the corner.

And in the resulting quietness, the remaining darkness, Yellow glanced down.

Pink’s bouncy ball remained—red, abandoned, and ultimately harmless now without the agitations of its owner.

She kicked it away to release some of her feelings.

It plunked, plunked, plunked down the empty hall.

Slightly disoriented, irate, her chest prickling, the CEO eventually returned to her study, closing the door behind her with a click and apprehending the receiver again, where Hélène Colbert had waited, her silky voice armed with renewed rebuttals as to why the deal needed to be renegotiated. They sparred, and they fought, and Yellow unsheathed the best and worst that her blunt tongue had to offer.

And when they finally closed half-an-hour later, with Hélène swallowing twenty-five percent as pleasantly as she could manage without breaking the decorum of her own forced politeness, Yellow Diamond poured herself a celebratory glass of Moscato and reminded herself that she deserved it.

Pink was only a child.

She couldn’t possibly understand…

One day, though…

When she was older…

vii.

The silence staggered thin between the two of them for what seemed like an infinity, and within its breadth, for the first time since she’d woken up that morning in an unfamiliar bed, Yellow wanted to collapse beneath the weight of her own tiredness.

She was exhausted.

She was always exhausted.

When had there ever been a moment, in four goddamn years, when she had not been a corpse cruelly animated by the beating of a heart that was exhausted—spent, empty, irreparably, irretrievably drained?

Her entire body was the bruise that she leaned all her weight upon simply by standing upright as she met Steven Universe’s shy gaze in that crowded hospital room. The wall propped her up, rescued her, preserved what was left of her fragmented dignity; fleetingly, she thought of Blue Diamond’s silver cane.

“So…” Yellow hesitated, reluctant, unsure, lingeringly bitter. She attempted to subjugate these vulnerabilities into a voice that only barely managed to pass as level. “… my wife came by.”

She supposed, in the end, that it wasn’t this child’s fault that her marriage was on the brink of dissolution.

And so she concluded, if this indeed was the case, that she frankly couldn’t hold it against him.

(For the most part.)

“Not for very long,” Steven offered quickly, as though he thought that would help. “She looked really tired… she said she’d been in your room all night.”

It wasn’t lost upon Yellow Diamond how remarkable of an image that must have been: Blue sitting by her side—diligent, solemn, studiously concerned, her silvery brow skimming the tops of her oceanic eyes. For years, it had precisely been the other way around with them, the vigils she had observed by her wife’s calcified form long and unbroken. The sun would spread its arms around the morning sky, washing pink across Yellow’s weary face in gentle, ritual greeting. She would get up then, from the hardback chair where she sometimes sat, and begin her day anew: drink a cup of coffee, arm herself in a three piece suit, make business calls, go to the office, and call Livia constantly throughout the day for updates. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Sometimes, she would kiss Blue’s wrinkled forehead before she left.

Other times, she couldn’t bear to so much as look at her.

Acid would rise up the column of her throat.

Anger would scrape her fingers into fists.

Resentment.

It simply poisoned her.

Rinse, wash, repeat.

“I see,” Yellow returned unimpressively, glancing downwards; there was a scuff mark on one of her shoes, aberrant and unfathomable. (There were so many scuff marks across the neatly polished contours of her life; she could see every one of them clearly now, how they pulsed, how they bled, how they so inexorably bruised.)

Steven shifted in the bed as much as the tubes encumbering him would allow.

She looked up again.

“Blue also said you hadn’t been injured too badly… but I’m really sorry you were hurt in the first place.”

He paused uncertainly; the silence limped forward between them; it dared to approach.

The child had big eyes, brown and rather deep, even though they were sunken in unnatural hollows.

Pink’s eyes had been brown, too, chocolate smooth.

Playful and mischievous and kind.

The parallel did not invite comfort.

She would never see her daughter again.

“Are… are you okay?” He asked, his voice soft.

Tender.

It extended a warm hand across the silence between them; it tried to breach the gap. And this, above all, was the most inscrutable behavior to the practically minded businesswoman. This, above all else, simply galled her. Steven Universe didn't know her. In the three minutes since she had arrived here, she'd done nothing more than rudely abused his name, and still, he tried to breach the gap. Still, he was kind.

“You look like you’re... tired.”

“What’s it to you?” Yellow shot back instinctively, the words forsaking her before restraint held them back. Ashamed, irritated, weary, exhausted—she was always exhausted—she rubbed a chastising hand across her mouth, the heel of her palm rough against her lips. “I mean—shouldn’t I be the one asking you that? You don’t appear so rosy yourself.”

Even though she had just insulted him (again), Steven laughed, his bright eyes cutting through the gray flatness of the room.

“Maybe not,” he grinned, “but that’ll change soon enough… I’m getting kidneys today!”

He puffed his chest out proudly.

His smile, incredibly enough, widened.

And in that moment, his joy, his happiness, his unburdened, unmitigated relief was almost so tangible, that Yellow Diamond could barely stand to look at it. Painted in broad strokes all over his sunken face, it was impossible to miss.

Dying, somehow, he was the most alive entity in the room.

“You are?”

“Yup,” he laughed—exuberant, simply radiant. It was simply spilling from him now. “We just got the news this morning. Dr. M—she’s my nephrologist—she’s gone to get them… oh, but you wouldn’t know Dr. M… Dr. Maheswaran, I mean. She’s really…”

He babbled on.

It was inconceivable to Yellow Diamond—downright unfathomable—that he could be so buoyant and light, ensnared by so many running tubes and wires as he was, buried beneath them, dependent upon them, trapped. She tried to comprehend how he could nurse such pure emotions in a world that had been nothing but unkind to him. Always a rationalist, even to the bitter end of a universe which made no sense, she attempted to understand how anyone could still find it in themselves to be so good.

But when comprehension failed her—as it so rarely didn’t—she itched to be away from him.

The feeling swelled in her chest.

It choked her.

And yet, the woman couldn’t look away either, drawn, magnetized, inexplicably compelled like a flower leaning towards the sun, bent towards its light and warmth.

Was this what Blue Diamond had sought when she had befriended Steven Universe—this travesty of a human, this mere child?

Was she, too, looking for some of his sunshine to grasp onto, to bask in, to claim and call her own?

And if this hypothesis had merit—as so many of her hypotheses often did—then how could Blue Diamond possibly stand it?

(Blue, who had stretched out in the darkness of their unshared room for so long. Blue, who had decomposed in a bier of a bed that had been made for two. Blue, whose long face was lined with weary shadows. Blue, who was but a mere shadow herself. Insubstantial. Spectral. Going but never entirely gone.)

Steven Universe’s face, the very expression in it, was sunshine.

It was unbearable.

It was irresistible.

And it was unmistakable most of all.

Tenderness and goodness and an eruption of kindling, all-encompassing warmth—they had long evaded Yellow Diamond’s searching grasp, and now they stared at her openly, from the face of a small child in a hospital bed.

He smiled at her, and somehow, the very act of it was miraculous.

Because he, too, had been wrung out by the machinations of the world—he, too, knew its cruel hands, its ceaselessly grinding gears—and somehow, even still, he smiled.

The thought came to her, unbidden, that she once knew a child who would have done the same.

“Everyone’s so happy,” Steven finished, slumping backwards in his bed. It appeared as though the simple act of talking had worn him out.

The heart monitor on the wall fluttered a little more rapidly than sounded normal.

“And I’m also happy… and a little sad… but happy at the same time.” His brow furrowed as though it, too, was confused by the contradiction of emotions he was seemingly experiencing.

He coughed into the back of his hand, and the sound was rather terrible; it wrenched his entire body in a convulsive motion.

Yellow stared at him baldly while he caught his breath.

“I get the happiness,” she returned bluntly. (She didn’t really get it at all, but she wanted to—she was desperate to—and perhaps that made up for some of the difference.) “But why the sadness?”

He was going to get to live, and so that was the end all, be all, was it not?

Herein marked the end of his struggles?

Forever and ever—amen?

But the boy’s expression suddenly became modest again; he glanced away, a dull pink just barely layering itself over his cheeks which had ever so slightly paled further from when he had coughed.

“Well… I mean, everything happy is always a little sad, too, isn’t it?” He asked, and it was clear from the tone of his voice that he wasn’t particularly looking for an answer. “S-someone… died, so I could get their kidneys… and I guess… you know… that’s something to be sad about, even when I can be happy at the same time.”

Yellow Diamond hadn't expected this.

In all the tortured imaginations she had given to the faceless boy over the past couple of days, agonizing over who he was, and tormenting herself over what could be so special about him, and half-convincing herself that there was probably nothing really extraordinary about him at all, she hadn’t anticipated—in all her haste, her haughtiness, her great offense—to be proven wrong.

Because the words he had just spoken complicated everything she had hoped to confirm in the child.

For he was sage beyond his years.

His face looked as though as it was about a hundred years old.

He seemed to understand, in a more intimate way than Yellow had ever grasped in an entire lifetime, that emotions were not binaries, nor were they monoliths unto themselves.

It was entirely possible, Steven Universe said, to be happy and sad at exactly the same time.

It was possible, Poppy Aurelia had implied, to be neither good nor bad but some mixture in-between.

It was human, very likely, to experience so many things all at once: grief and joy and aching relief and horror and kindness and sadness and warmth.

Perhaps then, it was conceivable… rational even… that she could worship the very ground her wife walked upon and still be angry with her.

She could be goddamned relieved that she was doing better and equally bitter that it hadn’t been because of her.

She could love Blue Diamond and wonder why she hadn’t been enough.

Why they hadn't been.

The realization staggered her.

Simply undid her.

And perhaps the naked emotion must have shown across her face because Steven winced, as though he had perceived he had done something wrong.

“I’m sorry… was that too much?” He asked, averting his eyes. “I know that’s kinda, like, weird to think about.”

“No,” Yellow Diamond replied immediately, and she was surprised to discover that her voice wasn’t entirely unkind.

Her lips jerked.

It wasn’t a smile, but it wasn’t quite a frown either.

“No…” She repeated distantly, and somehow, the sound became softer in the ensuing echo. “It wasn’t too much at all.”

In fact, maybe, just maybe, it had precisely been enough.

“D’you want to sit down?” He asked softly, inclining his head towards the empty chair next to his bed. “I don’t think my folks’ll be back for a bit…”

His smile was its own invitation.

It tilted lopsided across his mouth.

Yellow hesitated, and she chewed on it, and she ultimately shook her head, inadvertently loosening a crick in her stiff neck.

“Well," she said dryly, "I suppose I have nothing else better to do.”

Blast him and damn him, Steven Universe simply beamed.

viii.

“Here, Starlight.” Extending a skeletal hand from the swaths of woolen blankets covering her lap, White Diamond pressed a handful of quarters into her granddaughter’s outstretched palm. Caught by the stark, gray light leaning in from the window, the matriarch’s complexion seemed especially frail and powdery next to the thirteen-year old’s smooth, unbroken skin. “Take these and buy yourself something interesting from the vending machine.”

“Thank you, Gran,” Pink returned hastily, flustered, flushing, pleasantly surprised. She, like her mother, had expected this visit to comprise of White lecturing her over the tiniest details: her dyed hair, the length of her shorts, the couple of piercings running up the length of her ear. But instead, she was being handed a readymade out after only ten minutes of being informed that she needed to buy clothes that didn’t have artistic tears in them. Her fingers flashed to a close on top of the coins before she unceremoniously shoved them in the back pocket of her “too-scant, hardly appropriate, vaguely promiscuous” shorts, where they jangled next to each other with a telltale clink.

“Just avoid the crackers, darling. They’re awfully stale.” White’s darkly painted lips curled upwards in an encouraging smile. “And take care not to choose anything too sugary either. Heaven knows the damage you could wreak upon your teeth.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Pink grinned—(her grandmother didn’t catch the implicit sarcasm)—before she flounced off, the heels of her red sneakers clipping against the tiled floor with each exuberant movement.

A door opened, and a door just as abruptly closed, and the cheerful footsteps died down the hall, leaving Yellow Diamond alone with her eighty-two year old mother.

There was silence then.

Strained.

Fraught.

And a wordless tango that only the two of them knew.

They stared at each other coldly, appraising each other without so much as saying a single word—one sitting stiffly in a fancily upholstered armchair, while the other somehow wore her wheelchair like a throne. The matriarch’s bony elbows rested judiciously upon the armrests, fingers templed delicately beneath her pointed chin. Her spiked hair was combed back in its usual fashion, voluminous and almost wild looking, rather like the mane of a lion.

It was an impressive effect—it always was with White Diamond—marred only by the unexpected context of her surroundings. Ritzy though the Spire certainly was—by plebeian standards anyway—it was still an assisted living home, and because it was an assisted living home, because it implied age and dependence and a lack of self-possession, it was an affront to the founder and former CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

Desultory to the regal majesty with which she had always comported herself.

Offensive.

“I was beginning to believe you had forgotten me,” White began, the sugar in her voice acquiring a crystallized edge. “What has it been? Two weeks? Three? Forgive me for not knowing the intimate details, dear. Senility, you know.”

“Please,” Yellow rolled her eyes. “Spare me the histrionics, Mother. This is a temporary arrangement until—“

But White interrupted sharply, breaking the bond of her hands to wave one airily. “Until my physician concurs that I have fully recovered from an incident that I could have perfectly rehabilitated from in the comforts of my own manor. Yes, I am well aware.”

Nine weeks ago, she had stroked out and only barely survived to complain about the tale. She laid in a hospital bed for weeks upon weeks. It had only been luck, if such serendipity existed in an unthinking, unfeeling world, that the maid was cleaning that day, that she’d found her employer stretched out across the marbled floor in the kitchen.

The line of Yellow’s pursed lips thinned.

“You’re being too cavalier,” she said bluntly, shifting a little in her chair. “You almost died.”

“Yes, well, I didn’t, and now I’m here, and my own daughter can hardly spare a moment from her schedule to visit her poor mother in the nursing home she consigned her to.”

“Your doctor recommended—“ She began hotly.

“My doctor, wuss that he is,” White cut across her again, her thin nostrils flaring ever so slightly, “indicated that the fate of my whereabouts rested in your capable hands, and I see that you have chosen to wash them both free of me, a Pontius Pilate arranged in an Armani suit. How charmingly novel.”

Each word was expertly chosen, a weapon drenched in syrup so sweet, that to swallow it, was saccharine.

Silence simmered between them again, electric like exposed wires seething through the air.

They challenged each other with nothing more than their eyes.

They waged a quiet war.

And Yellow lost.

Spectacularly.

A recurring theme when it came to her mother.

“I’ll arrange for you to be sent home tomorrow,” she folded, her voice clipped, almost petulant. Her arms covered her chest so tightly that she imagined she was leaving an impression exactly upon the spot where they laid.

“Thank you,” White returned, equally curt. “That is all I have asked for.”

Then cut.

End scene.

Cue the curtain descending upon a familiar stage.

This was how appointments with her mother usually concluded after all, with her asserting the final word and Yellow tucking tail to run, hide, nurse her shining wounds, and pretend that they had never been inflicted in the first place come the next morning.

But then, complicating everything that Yellow had ever known about her, upending every assumption she had ever made in forty-four years of having been her daughter, White Diamond did something quite unexpected.

She sighed, the sound filtering thinly through her nostrils.

It was just a sigh, but it was also an implicit gesture of vulnerability.

An admission to weakness from a woman who had marketed her entire persona upon being impenetrable.

And the both of them knew it.

Rather than acknowledge it, though, White glanced away immediately, staring out into the wide window which stood next to her wheelchair. The pale light gently touched her face, bringing the lines etched into those leathery folds into starker definition. Countless botox injections and cosmetic surgeries had not entirely worked their magic, for Yellow saw, in that protracted moment—viscerally understood—that her mother was getting old, if she was not considered old already.

The thought gripped her.

Inexplicably stung.

On top of her blankets, the ridges of the matriarch’s bony fingers trembled slightly against an invisible cold.

“Mother…?”

“Starlight is getting so tall these days,” White murmured, as though Yellow hadn’t said anything at all. “You were tall, too, when you were her age, I believe… but you always slumped your shoulders, dear, and it detracted from the effect. I scolded you when I caught you at it.”

A chill that had nothing to do with the autumnal day collapsed down Yellow’s rigid spine. She had never once, in so many unflappable years, ever heard her mother engage in nostalgia, an emotion she had always more or less derided to be regressive.

Looking backwards, after all, distracted from the now.

White’s ebony gaze never left the window, though she continued to speak, her voice ever sharp but somehow, simultaneously distant .

Detached.

As though the two women, scarcely four feet apart though they were, occupied two different realms of existence.

“I scolded you tor so many trifles, Yellow,” she went on, giving no visual indication that she remembered her daughter was in the room. “Your grades, your occasionally taciturn personality, the very way you spoke sometimes, fearing naturally that your youthful shortcomings would reflect upon our hallowed name.”

“Mother,” she tried again.

Yellow wanted it to stop.

For nearly five decades, their relationship had been a contract that they had both meticulously observed, and now, before her very eyes, White Diamond was ripping it cleanly asunder.

She was looking back, and she was sighing.

This wasn't how things were supposed to go; this wasn't how their world turned.

“You don’t have to—“

“And maybe,” White Diamond hummed, the sound glasslike, almost fragile in that light filled room, “I scolded you too often. I instituted so many boundaries upon your life and nary gave you a means to shake them… goodness knows I likely didn’t intend you to… you are, after all, everything I ever dreamed in a progeny—successful, confident, shining… but I wonder… mmm, I suppose… no… no…”

She trailed off then.

The words fell emptily to the ground and laid, injured, at her slipper-enclosed feet.

Yellow Diamond attempted to pick them up the best that she could, though they shivered in her palms.

“You did your best, Mother,” she said, her voice strained.

Small.

She almost felt like a child again, standing outside her mother’s study, hoping to be let in.

“That counts for something, yes?”

There was a pleading note in her voice.

She loathed it.

She despised herself.

She had long since convinced herself she didn’t need her mother’s approval to illuminate the successes of her life, and yet, here she was—forty-odd years later, still begging for it, nearly on her hands and knees to get it.

White Diamond sighed again, the gesture infinitesimal. She never quite divorced her eyes from the window. Mist swirled across the flat expanse just beyond the glass, smoking the world beyond it silver, shroud gray.

“You should take a day off every now and then,” she only replied. “Accompany Starlight to buy less vixen-like clothes. Perhaps arrange a vacation between the three of you. Paris is always lovely in the fall.”

It was unexplainable, even to herself, but anger suddenly seared her chest as she realized what White was driving at.

“Mother—“

But before she could continue, before she could defend herself against White Diamond’s unsubtle accusations, before she could point out the hypocrisy of it all coming from her of all people, the door opened again. Pink came back in laughing—she was always laughing—boasting of her acquisition of the last pack of gummies in the vending machine.

And in all the commotion, washed beneath the noise, Yellow almost didn’t catch the words that slipped from the side of White Diamond's pinched mouth.

“Maybe I should have taken you to Paris, too.”

ix.

The adjustment from the wall to the chair next to Steven's bed came with no small relief, her body reveling in the sensation of finally being able to rest her tired bones. For Yellow, admit it though she never would, had overexerted herself, had walked too long and stood for even longer. As subtly as she could manage, she massaged the outer part of her right thigh where it had struck the side of the door during the wreck.

Without really knowing it, she knew—almost certainly—that the impact had left a bruise.

(Oh, well.)

(It could join all the rest—the contusions and scrapes and cuts and aberrant scuff marks.)

(Just another quantity more in the collection of open wounds that made up her life, that haunted it, haunted her.)

Careful not to disturb any of the lines and tubes which tethered him to so many humming machines, Steven Universe painstakingly twisted his tiny body to stare at her through the rails of his hospital bed.

And Yellow Diamond stared at him just as intensely back.

And somehow, quite instinctively, she gleaned the impression that he pitied her.

She shrunk uncomfortably beneath the emotion.

Protestation immediately sprang to her defense.

But in the end, he was kind; he only asked her a simple question.

“You sent me those flowers, didn’t you?”

With a small smile, he tilted his head to the tray which now stood directly in front of Yellow, where honeyed light from the window caught the petals of so many sunflowers crowded in a blue vase. She cursed Poppy once again for choosing such a metaphorically apt arrangement; she despised, viscerally, how one of the flowers seemed to drip below its peers, its long neck broken.

Hopeless.

Pathetic.

“And what of it?” She asked stiffly. Irascibility remained her go-to safeguard against uncomfortable questions, all those pesky, prying things. “That’s simply what you do when someone is in the hospital. You send flowers. You tell them to get well.”

But, once again, Steven was brighter than she had initially given him credit for because his rebuttal was such that even the Zircons couldn’t have refuted it, prodigious at making counterarguments though they were.

“Sure,” he grinned, mischievous, shit-eating. His dark eyes twinkled with his own playfulness. “But that’s not really something you do for total strangers, right?"

No, no in fact, it was not.

Damn him.

“At ease, Sherlock,” Yellow scoffed, simply fuming. She half-hated this child still. She crossed her arms over her chest and felt as though she would never unbend them from her stony frame again. “You only received them because of your relationship to my wife, of what you mean to her.”

But even the very mention of Blue Diamond did something to her, transformed her in the instant it took to articulate her existence.

Her golden eyes softened.

Her hands clenched on top of her lap.

And she was weak; she almost felt indecent; she glanced away.

“You mean a lot to her,” Yellow shrugged, hesitant, almost childish. It was childish to talk about one's emotions in such a bald way. “And that, in return, means something to me.”

She could feel his dark eyes settle upon her, sensed the intensity of them, the quiet warmth, and once again, the hackles of all her best self-defenses attempted to stir to her aid, dull anger writhing in the pit of her stomach.

She stared outside the window, at the indigo drapes that were pulling themselves over an orange sky, and tried to master herself.

She returned her gaze to the sunflowers almost against her will.

And found yet another thing to hate about the whole arrangement.

How the vase was midnight blue.

“You... you mean a lot to her, too, you know,” Steven whispered. Each word fought to be heard over the sounds of the many machines which kept him alive, but still, they fought; they ached to be heard. “She loves you… she’s just… she’s—”

“What?” Yellow pounced upon the words harshly. She clung to every last one of them as though they promised the secrets of the universe in their hesitant syllables. She didn't even attempt to strangle her question into a murmur to match Steven's own.

She was desperate.

Craven.

Blue Diamond loves me, but what?

What unspoken things remained in the gulf between them? (There were so many, likely too many to ever really surmount.)

What final barrier tore their collective world asunder?

(Was it Pink? Was it grief? Was it Yellow herself? Perhaps, simply enough, it was everything; it was all.)

Steven was gentle, almost apologetic, as he proffered an answer.

"She's... forgotten how to say it, I think," he said. "And she's trying... she's really trying... to remember how."

It was three mere words.

They were trite and cliché; every child knew them.

I and love and you.

And yet, for the first time in four years, Yellow understood her wife perfectly; she knew that it could hardly be as uncomplicated as that.

For it was those same three words that never came easy, even if they were said, even if they were masterfully articulated.

Because love was not a string of syllables.

It was not a phrase, nor a trivial, commercialized thing.

It was bigger than that, grander and more terrible.

More inconceivably profound than three words could ever possibly hope to suggest.

Love was action.

It was light and touch and sound.

I and love and you.

"I love her too." The words came before Yellow Diamond ever really registered them; they seized at her constricted sternum; they eviscerated her raw throat.

"... but you've forgotten how to say it," Steven finished for her.

Yes.

But she couldn't bring herself to admit it, so she nodded thickly, and somehow knew, from the way that he smiled sadly at her, that Steven Universe understood.

Dusk fell through the high window in Yellow’s study in strange shafts of amber light, illuminating the stack of papers she was attempting to decipher in the growing dimness. Her readers sliding down the edge of her nose, her mouth moved soundlessly to the heavy cadence of the words, the words, the words—but her tiredness unmoored her; her comprehension only barely kept pace with the speed with which her eyes skimmed the long sentences. So it was a relief when a faint knock at the door gave her a tailored excuse to set the damn thing down for a brief moment.

Indeed, she was so glad not to be reading a dense passage on consumer statistics, that she forgot to sound irate at being interrupted.

“Come in,” she called, her voice hoarse from hours of disuse.

Obligingly, the heavy door creaked inwards, and there, in the triangle of light thrown forwards by the lamp on Yellow’s desk, stood Pink Diamond in that ratty, old hoodie that Blue so despised, a pencil caught in her feathery pink hair, an apologetic smile caught on her lips. She had only recently turned seventeen a few weeks ago, and for some reason, right then and there, it struck Yellow Diamond that it absolutely showed.

Gone were the traces of baby fat from the girl’s heart shaped face, replaced by a certain angularity which bore the trace distinctions of pride, confidence, and the beginnings of a distinct ego. Gone were the gapped teeth that had defined many of the photos from her childhood. Gone were the awkwardly lanky limbs that had made her so self-conscious during her tween years; as she entered the office, her movements were graceful, shaped by all those years of ballerina lessons. She walked on the tips of her toes, gliding silently across the wooden slats.

Her daughter had grown up somewhere in the rush of so many years.

And somehow, it had escaped the woman’s attendant notice.

Was it not just yesterday that she had fit perfectly in Yellow’s arms, cooing at her softly through the darkness?

Was it really today that she presented herself before her mother as a young woman, so close to becoming an adult and simultaneously so far from actually being one?

Pink broke the trance first by collapsing into the armchair in front of Yellow’s desk, pulling her spindly legs up from the floor, so that she could cross them. There was a My Little Pony bandage on her left knee where she had only recently scraped herself trying to shave.

For some reason that she couldn’t entirely articulate to herself, the presence of it soothed the businesswoman.

Reassured her, perhaps, that there were some parts of the child who still remained.

“Well, Mother,” Pink sighed heartily, “I’ve finished my History essay. Can I go to Carmen’s party now?”

Carmen Luíz, as Yellow knew, was both a classmate of Pink’s at the private school she attended and the daughter of two wealthy business executives who were highly reputed in all the important social circles as parents who let their underaged daughter throw raucous parties in their manor on Wide Island any time they found it upon themselves to celebrate their wealth by taking vacations.

They often celebrated their wealth.

Yellow exhaled through her nose and returned to her papers; the paragraph on statistics hadn’t become any less incomprehensible in the couple of seconds it had taken for Pink to ask her asinine question.

“My answer hasn’t changed since the last time,” she returned, her voice clipped as she adjusted her readers, pushing them back on her nose. “You know my position on parties.”

“But—“

“But nothing, Pink.” Yellow never entirely looked up, uncapping her favorite red pen to make a few scratch marks on the packet. They were less in the service of productivity than they were the illusion of it. “My word is final.”

Pink fell silent; she knew better than to cross her mother’s carefully drawn lines so late at night; instead, she picked sullenly at one of her mismatched socks, the pink one with patterns of roses embroidered across the cloth.

Yellow scowled, partially in response to the particularly dense sentence she was trying to divine meaning from, and partially because she hated when her daughter grew taciturn. It was a tactic which worked well enough on Blue when Blue was feeling merciful, but she, on the other hand, had as much tolerance for moping as she did country music—which was to say little all.

“Is there anything else you needed?” She asked pointedly, glancing up once more. “I’m rather busy—”

But her daughter’s dark eyes had shifted away, her ever veering attention suddenly caught by a point of interest somewhere just behind Yellow’s shoulder. Yellow followed her gaze slowly and immediately understood that she was staring at the photograph perched on the shelf there; the sunset caught the edges of the silver frame and swept an orange hue over the subject it contained.

With a faint jolt in her stomach, she recognized it at once—a picture of White Diamond holding Pink on her third birthday. The two of them were sidled together in an armchair, the toddler sitting on her grandmother’s lap. White looked ever impeccable in a stunning black jumpsuit, which was cinched at her tiny waist with a silver belt. She wrapped her bare arms around Pink and placed the point of her sharp chin atop of that abundant spray of brown curls.

Meanwhile, Pink was laughing in the image, her childlike exuberance radiating across the space of so many elapsed years, her face covered in what looked like the vestiges of chocolate cake.

A smile that was remarkably genuine pulled at the corners of White Diamond’s black lips.

Somehow, amazingly enough, her eyes creased pleasantly beneath all the botox.

It was the happiest Yellow had ever seen her own mother, and perhaps that was why she kept the reminder in her study.

It was a testament to the damn near miracle that the woman hadn't entirely been made of ice and burnished steel.

That she had loved—incrementally, sparingly, meticulously—in the best way that she knew how.

“Gran,” Pink murmured, a small smile threatening to disturb her freckles. “I’d forgotten she always wore a lot of eyeliner.”

“When I was younger,” Yellow returned slyly, “she used to inform me that there was no point in putting on makeup unless it was to create an intimidating effect.”

“Which explains the black lipstick,” Pink laughed, miming the act of drawing a smile across her lips with an invisible tube.

“Precisely.” Her own laugh was like a bark, short and rather blunt. Amusement climbed up her chest and nostalgia—the press of so many memories in the span of a handful of seconds.

But then, to her horror, there was a lump in her throat that had nothing to do with either emotion.

White Diamond had only died a year ago, but sometimes, only sometimes, the fact of it still caught Yellow off guard when she was least expecting it.

It had been her time.

Assuredly.

Absolutely.

She had been eighty-five.

She had had another stroke.

But still, the woman—her mother—for all her many faults, had always been there—the stubbornly unyielding presence at her shoulder.

Unshakeable.

Invincible.

Some days, it registered with Yellow a little more forcibly than usual that she would never pick up the phone again to be treated to a forty-five minute lecture on production inefficiencies at Diamond Electric.

And more often than not, this realization did not come on the heels of relief.

“It’s weird,” Pink said quietly, voicing what her mother had silently been thinking, “but sometimes, I kinda forget that she’s gone, you know? She only dropped by so rarely… it’s almost like she could still be vacationing in Rome, Milan, Tokyo, or any of her other favorite wine spots.”

She had many favorite wine spots.

“Yes, well”—with some effort, Yellow pulled her head back to its forward position—“that feeling goes away eventually.”

She tried to glance down at her packet again.

The words glittered malevolently beneath the lamp.

“I mean,” Pink pressed softly, “I don’t know… it’s kind of comforting to think she’s still out there somewhere, right? I-I know she’s not, but, like—“

“You’re right,” she returned flatly. “She’s not…”

The dismissal in her voice was clear.

She dared to glance up again and saw that an embarrassed flush had scrawled itself across Pink’s cheeks. But this time, the teenager obediently unfolded from her seat, stretching her limbs high over her head before bringing them down by her sides.

“Yeah… I’m just being silly,” she said, glancing away. “I’m going to go see if Mom’ll edit my essay for me. My conclusion paragraph’s shit.”

“I wouldn’t count on it, dear.” Yellow penned yet another useless mark on her paper. “You know how she feels about plagiarism.”

“True,” Pink smirked, regaining some of her youthful jauntiness, “but she hates the idea of me making anything less than an A even more.”

“Touché.”

The door opened and then closed once again, leaving Yellow Diamond alone in an office full of dusk and dust and thin, fading light. With as much delicacy as she could spare in the silent seconds that followed, she replaced her pen on top of her desk and templed her hands lightly on top of her stomach, breathing in deeply.

Exhaling harshly through her nose.

Perhaps it was the rationalist in her—militant, rigid, almost unfailingly correct—who took no comfort from the fantasy that her dead mother was still somewhere in the world, enjoying a fruity cocktail, smiling lazily beneath a European sun.

Or perhaps it was the pain which such an image inexplicably wrought.

Subtle, though sharp to even prod.

For there was no comfort in death, no assuaging its keen sting.

There was only the coldness of its reality, the aching bitterness, the confrontation of an unassailable truth...

But perhaps she had been premature in teaching Pink that.

Perhaps she had been too hasty in preventing her from holding on to one last childish daydream more.

After all, the seventeen-year old had plenty of time to grow up—to learn, to know, to intimately understand that the world turned viciously, perpetuating its endless cycles over and over again—recapitulating them.

It turned and turned and turned.

And sometimes, all they could do was turn with it.

#bellow diamond #yellow diamond #blue diamond #pink diamond #steven universe #s: steven universe #mimiku #flower child #;-; oh my god it's finished

87 notes · View notes

thejessofmess · 4 years

Text

Comics Going on BREAK! (And other news)

I really hate to do this but I have to take a break from comics. I'm not going to get into the details but my mental stress has been in the danger zone for awhile Not actually because of the comics, other life things...plus pandemic and all. But that has resulted in decline in motivation/passion to work on comics or art in general and to me art is something that should be fun. I will probably still be drawing here and there but Unbreakable and Hollowtale are paused. So here's the deets:

**Unbreakable** - This is a good stopping point to pause. Things are calm and there is no major cliffhanger.

**Hollowtale** - I have two more comics planned for this month. A side comic will be released on Saturday 10/24. The final Part 4 will be released pre-Halloween on 10/30.

**Discord Public Opening** - While it seems silly when there will be a pause for the comic I'm doing it anyways. My discord channel will be opened publicly on 10/30 for the day! I post doodles in there and sometimes stream on off days. Also will chat in there ^^

**Streaming** - I will still be trying to stream on Saturdays!

I don't know how long it will take me to get out of the funk, and I may still be working on stuff here and there in the background. But for now I need to just take some time and sort out my head.

I want to thank EVERYONE who has been supporting/following me and my projects. It makes me really happy that others enjoy my work and always brings a smile to my face. Honestly, talking with people online and sharing interests has really helped. I'll still be around online and doodling!

73 notes · View notes

herstarburststories · 4 years

Text

Quarantine Boredoom (Dick Grayson x Reader)

✾ A/N: It’s been a certain couple of months since I wrote smut/erotica, but here you go! Although, I think it’s better classified as silly porn aka Nightwing’s type? Anyway! Thanks to my friend for being my beta for this one.

✾ Request: hiya! i saw that your requests are open and then i had a mini asthma attack because i had come back from binge reading your masterlist oops,,,,that got me thinking,,,how funny would it be if reader has asthma and just has to use their puffer during sex? like could you imagine if that were to happen to dick or jason? i’d like to see that happen 👀 also your writing is absolutely amazing!!! keep up the good work!! 💕👌🏻🤠

✾ Disclaimer: fingering.

A purposefully loud huff escaped your lips when your body met Dick's couch. He looked away from the copy of Robin Hood in his hand to raise an eyebrow, but the only response he received was a dramatic sigh.

"(Y/N), are you okay?" Bludhaven's protector ultimately asked, placing his book on the desk to offer his girlfriend unrestricted attention.

"I’ve never been so bored in my life," you grunted, tilting your head in one of your best dramatic performances. "Quarantine isn’t as fun as it looks in the movies."

"I'm sure zombies will appear and we’ll convert to cannibalism soon, (Y/N). Don't worry," Dick replied, humor obvious in his tone. You rolled your eyes, huffing once more. "Also, it’s only been two days. You can't be that bored, right?"

"Easy for you to talk, Nightwing. You still go out on patrol every night. Something you shouldn't do, by the way." You changed the subject of conversation, returning to a topic which you and Dick widely disagreed. Fortunately, the acrobat had an idea of how to entertain you and change the subject to something less likely to end up with him sleeping in the room he currently resided in.

"You know I can’t abandon my role, (Y/N). Especially at a time like this. I take the necessary precautions, like using my sticks instead of punching them in the face, don't worry." His patented wink was followed by the classic playful smile. Before you could rationalize the joke, he continued, "But I might have a hint of how to get you rid of your boredom..."

The suggestive tone in his speech caught your interest instantaneously. "I would love to hear your idea, Dick Grayson."

Grayson's next words evaporated upon his lips, giving space to a malicious smirk as his body leaned over yours on the couch. His mouth easily found its home; your lips, into the slow, lazy beginnings of a kiss.

When you drink for the first time, it is easy to get drunk. Then, you start drinking on more occasions and your limit increases. Two glasses are needed when, a while ago, it would take just one. The organism gets used to it and needs more to achieve the sensation of the first time. With Dick, it always felt like the first time. It didn't matter if he had kissed you two minutes or two months ago; every single touch of him reached a new layer of everything good that someone could transfer to another person, like discovering a new exciting part of yourself.

His hand cupped your cheek, drawing you closer in. The world existed outside that apartment, each minute still had sixty seconds, and Dick Grayson was willing to spend all of them making your body reach a new level of highness for him, without even needing more doses of change to do so. Your heart felt like it was tied to his touch and his only. Dick's hand slowly fell down on the side of your face. His thumb pulled down your lower lip, a farewell present in the intense softness of the gesture.

You giggled, and Richard smiled at you. The playful fingers began their private journey in search of paradise itself on earth. More murmurous kisses were offered as bargain and readily accepted by you. It was a small distraction from the new heights your body was reaching.

Fingers from your chin to jaw, his tongue found yours and caressed it as if he were trained for it. Kissing him was like a dance, it always had been. Grayson's hand stopped on your neck for a moment, but there was no trace of pressure there. Dick just kept dancing, holding on; you wanted to wrap your legs around him, offer some comfort to your wet pussy, even if it was just pressing it against his erection, which was now hard against your leg, to make his self-control more difficult. Yet, you knew better than that. He would have already pulled your legs if that was the plan. His fingerprints on your chest indicated the antics the hero wanted to use.

Dick placed his lips on your neck, lavishing attention upon that spot as much as he wanted. You closed your eyes, unable to decide what you liked most: the bites and gentle suction on your neck or the tender fingers that were already on your stomach. Your hips moved of their own will, seeking the carnal solace you craved as you moaned softly. The former Robin laughed in pleasure at your neediness, moving away from his little branding job to look you in the eyes. He loved to watch you like this, spreading your legs for him while his hand found its way inside your pants.

And now, looking at you and feeling wetness in your panties, Dick decided to keep it a bit slow, as if to see how far you would go. After all, it had been three long weeks without sexual activity. Between his work of detective division vigilante and yours in full-time journalism, 24 hours weren't always enough, but in this moment, all he had to worry about was how needy for him you could get.

Grayson's digits circled your vulva, playing on the edges of its outer lips until he received an impatient sigh from you. He laughed, temporarily satisfied. You looked at him, ready to tell him to do what he knew how to do, but you were silenced by one of his fingers entering your vagina. You pressed your lips together and pushed hips towards him, a nonverbal way of saying that you wanted more. Dick, however, just moved his finger out of your reach. It caused you to open your eyes, stunned.

"Dick!" You were breathless, probably from the rush of sensations he had been — and was supposed to still be — making you experience.

"What?" There was false innocence in his voice that contradicted everything that was happening, especially when he took the finger that was inside you to his mouth and sucked, expression shifting into contentment. "You taste so good, baby. Imagine when you're coming for me."

"Richard John Grayson, if you don’t put— Fuck." The ensuing groan encompassed an ugly word. One of his fingers was still inside you while the other was pressed to your clitoris.

"How am I making you feel, huh?" he asked, despite knowing the answer as well as he knew your sweet spots. Adding another finger, Dick started looking for your G-spot, clitoris being well taken care of by his ring finger. Fuck, he was almost salivating by just thinking about eating you out, your taste, putting his tongue in the warm, wet place his fingers were, but for now, Grayson wanted to watch you enjoy yourself. It was in the way you bit your lip, whimpered for it and moved your hips to get more as if you didn't already have it all when it came to Dick Grayson. "Am I making you feel good?"

"I..." The weight on your chest worsened significantly, almost as if you had put a rock there. You mentally screamed at yourself. Fuck, out of all possible times, you had to be literally running out of breath while your pussy— Come on! The only good thing was that you knew your own body language well enough to quickly understand what was going on. "Dick, I can't breathe."

Dick, on the other hand, was too involved in taking you apart to reach the same conclusion as you.

"I’m making you breathless now?" Indigo eyes meet yours, full of lust. For a millisecond, you wondered if you could handle the random crisis, or if you could be confused about two different things with similar symptoms. That is until the shortness of breath had gotten worse. Fuck.

Well, the opposite of fuck now.

"No, Di— FUCK!" Feeling like the air wasn’t getting into your lungs and the fact that your boyfriend had just found a certain spot inside you while simultaneously rubbing your clitoris didn’t help you remember how to breathe. "I’m literally... My puffer!"

"Wh-- Oh my God, your inhaler!" Mentioning your little miraculous friend that wasn’t between his legs finally brought Detective Grayson's dormant instincts to the surface. He almost jumped away from you, hastily looking for the inhaler. "I'm sorry— I thought... Wait." The scene would be comical if you weren’t coughing in despair, gasping for air and yet simultaneously turned on. He found the puffer on the floor, beside the desk, and handed it to you. Relieved and mildly frustrated, you forced oxygen back into your body for a few moments. You forced yourself to calm down until the inhaler could be discarded next to Dick's book where it originally was.

You faced each other. What could be said? Sorry for forgetting how to breathe while you fingered me? Sorry for confusing your moans of "I can’t breathe’’ for "You’re making me breathless"? Can we agree never to use this expression again? So, I almost died, but am I still up for it? Is my cock still hard after your near-death experience?

For the second time in the evening, words were passed over to make room for another way of communication. The two of you burst out laughing, loud and scandalous. What the fuck just happened? A few good minutes later and you looked at Dick with a smile, your hand full of sin located on his thigh.

"We still got plenty of time. You know, quarantine perks."

Noises of 'you are unbelievable' from him were drowned out by a few more giggles, which soon gave way to corny moans. Perhaps the last two options were the right things to say.

287 notes · View notes

georgemackayhey · 4 years

Text

Rules For Falling In Love: #2

summary: In which George wants to get married. But… you’re not dating. Why should you say yes?

a/n: The love for this fic has really made my heart ache in all the best ways! I hope yall love this update and I look forward to all your feedback of any and all kinds, as always ♡

w/c: 2k

───※ ·❆· ※───

You had a week from hell, one where you seemed to live and breathe your work against your will. When you were free to do as you pleased, all you wanted was to do was absolutely nothing.

When you got home to find George seemed to have been waiting there all afternoon like a puppy, you rolled your eyes, entirely too exhausted to consider having fun. But before you had the chance to give that speech, George ushered you to the sofa.

"The last season, it's starting right now." He explained, turning the volume up on the telly that was already on. The show in question was one of those horrifically trashy ones. A silly little show you both got hooked on when you had the same cold, nowhere to go, and nothing else to watch. Now you needed to know what happened next.

The days weren't always like this. Between the years, you'd drifted apart from each other, floating back together for odd dinners and weekend getaways. It wasn't even like this when you started living together. But it seemed like in the blink of an eye you were spending more and more free time side by side, planning more than a few shared breakfasts and rainy afternoons.

Nights like these were expected by now, and you realized you'd be amiss if they ended anytime soon. George had called off dating some year or two ago, shaken by the Hollywood scene and the popularity contest he seemed to be in on, during films and even off set, in local shops he'd gotten recognized in. You'd forgotten that dating was a part of social life, far too preoccupied with your work and the plans you always had with George after hours to get to know anyone new.

It all made too much sense. So when the first commercial break kicked in and George passed the snacks he was holding over to you, as if he just remembered you were there, you spoke up.

"I'll do it."

You took the snacks, holding George’s eyes as his searched yours. You knew that he knew what you were agreeing too. Just when you thought he was about to speak, the show came back on and both of your focuses shifted entirely on the screen. You hadn't known what to expect... But the way everything seemed so vastly normal, sort of jarred you.

And for the next couple of days... neither of you talked about it at all. Sure you're busy with work and George had been fretting over a couple of important telephone interviews. But you thought surely he'd be more anxious to discuss logistics, or bring up the subject he invented, at all.

It wasn't until the next weekend, that the conversation picked up where it left off, again.

You'd spent the early Sunday morning roaming through the storefronts of an overpriced market. You ducked inside to relish the air-conditioned sales before dipping back out every few feet to admire the booths full of flowers, handcrafted gifts, and expensive decor. You'd buy absolutely everything here if you could.

You did have a mission. It was to pick up something to bring to dinner, a Sunday evening tradition with George's family. You'd been invited for as long as you could recall, and you'd never shown up empty-handed. Usually, flowers and desserts did just fine. But you were entirely too indecisive over what to purchase, this morning.

You'd become lost in a conversation with a woman who sold soaps and lotions, locally and expensively made. You rambled with her for so long that you'd lost sight of the person you'd come here with.

When you spun away from the lady selling soaps as new customers flocked closer to inspect her products, and you went on the hunt for George. You spotted him from behind, leaning in to speak with a vendor nearer inside. And just as you start to drift in his direction, he noticed you, too, through the crowd. And as the people part and you're nearly toe to toe, George doesn't greet you like usual.

There is no jab about where you'd been missing for so long, there isn't even a hello. Instead, you watch as George's smile grows mischievous, before bending at the knee.

Between his thumb and finger is a ring, just your unique style. It's from the booth he knelt in front of now, where hundreds of other delicate and novel jewels were displayed.

"What's all this then?" You laughed, standing in front of the guy you'd known longer than how to do simple maths.

"Marry me?" George asked, for the hundredth time, it seemed. You hadn't ever expected the question. But after this week, it came again at long last. You wondered if he'd ever bring it up again. But this time was different. This time, he smiled softly and held a real promise in his hand, looking up to you with a squint to block out the sun.

"I suppose I will." You grinned, answering quietly as George beamed up at you.

A couple of old ladies gasped from a couple of steps away, turning to watch on as George rose to his feet, grabbing your hand with both of his.

"Thank you, y/n. I cant wait." He said as if he'd been planning this for longer than he'd been pestering you about it.

"Why, we're practically already married." You laughed, mocking the statement he kept returning back to over the weeks. You watched as George slid the ring on your finger, with a pretty little design you couldn't have chosen better if you tried.

"Kiss her!" One of the elder spectators demanded like she was watching a wrestling match and coaxing on the fighters.

"I suppose I should," George remarked, mocking you, from moments ago. When he dipped down to place a teasing, chaste kiss on your lips, the old ladies cheered. When you swatted his arm with a playfully furrowed brow, the old ladies grumbled, completely let down by the way you ruined the moment.

"Don't blow it, Mackay. Go pick one for yourself, now." You warned your friend who was already giving you a playful smirk as you pointed to the collection of rings he was meant to choose from.

He found the perfect band, with specks and flecks that matched your own. And he liked it, best of all. The two of you walked out of the shoppe with matching rings, in fits of laughter as you imagined all your friend's reactions.

To celebrate, you stopped at a stall selling frozen yogurt and ordered one big container; because it was extremely overpriced, and George didn't mind sharing, because according to him-

"We're official." George boasted, digging into the dessert as you walked back toward your neighborhood, enjoying the perfect morning weather.

"Not quite." You reasoned. "We've still gotta get the worst part over with."

"The worst part?"

"Throwing a faux wedding. Lying to our guests. Drawing far too much attention to ourselves. This feels so much more like a business interaction than an event. Not that I'm not glad to do business with you, of course." You laughed, stepping in time with your closest friend.

"We don't have to make it a whole big thing. I only asked to be married, not for a garish wedding. We could stick to signing a few papers and call it a day."

"Are you serious? I want you to be explicitly clear about what you want because whether we make it one or not, this is a big deal."

"I'm okay with it." George chuckled, forcing the frozen treat in your grasp for a turn. "Either way, we'll need some witnesses."

You grumbled, remembering he was right. You weren't ashamed to marry him. Only embarrassed at the slightest bit of misjudged attention, and worried that your decision would be mistaken for something it wasn't, by anyone you explained it too.

///

"I've forgotten to get something to bring! I've never not brought something to dinner." You panicked, feeling your pockets in a last-ditch effort to find something to keep the tradition alive. George let out a little chuckle as you stalled in his parent's driveway. You reprimanded him for not being just as panicked as you, but he just laughed harder as he reached for your hand.

"Well how about this time I bring you."

A new set of nerves danced on end when you remembered the ring on your finger. You'd walked into the entry of his parents lavish countryside home like clockwork, without a gift but with very big news. But even in the strange twist of events, the familiar setting and George's calming presence meant nothing was out of the ordinary. You were only making the decision to keep it that way. Surely everyone would understand.

As you waltzed further into the home, there was no grand greeting. His father was sat in the living room, focused on a game that flashed across the telly. He turned his smile to the pair of you just before shouting back at the team he was rooting for. George's mother was in the kitchen, and upon hearing the pair of you come in, started rambling about how dinner wasn't quite ready and how hectic her day was.

You and George stalled in the entry of the kitchen, sunbleached wallpaper and worn old furniture welcomed you. When George's mother turned from the stove with a huff and a hand on her hip, she glanced between you and her son and asked why you were both just standing there.

"Has something happened?" She asked in a grave low tone.

George glanced to you as if to ask you for permission to say something. Or maybe to warn you he was about to, anyway. You knew it was best to rip the bandaid off. So you gave the smallest nod and held your breath.

With a look across the way to his father clicking the telly off in perfect time, George made his announcement.

"We're getting married!"

Despite George's sound excitement and the glowing smile on his face, his mother let out a breath with a hand to her heart.

"Oh thank God, I thought someone had died." She explained, reaching back to turn a knob on the oven. Her relief was comical, and just as she spoke up, you realized all the excitement you'd expected, was stored away in the girl bounding down the stairs.

George's sister nearly tripped over herself as she squealed into the room. You might have wanted to plug your ears, but the girl bound your way, babbling incoherently, grabbing your hand to see the ring she expected to see there.

"I knew it. I can't believe this day has come but I knew it would." She gasped like she'd just become a billionaire, as if her very own dreams had just come true. George's father sauntered closer, glancing at your ring with a pleased hum, offering a simple and pleasant congratulations on his way to steal a bit of dessert before dinner.

"So now I can finally expect some grandchildren, yeah?" George's mother shuffled toward the cabinet full of wine, a place she only searched through when the very best and worst news hung heavy over your weekly dinner parties.

"I don't think that's possible." You choked out in a hurry, as George's sister dropped your hand, spinning to face her brother who was holding back wild laughter at your expense.

"You can always adopt, dear." His mother pushed, spinning back to the oven when it dinged. George was in the middle of explaining your plans to his sister, who was shaking her head in disapproval.

"No! No way will I stand by and watch you get married without throwing a party. Can't we talk about a big white wedding? Oh please." She turned to you with big pleading eyes.

"No, no no no. I can't do that. I'd pass out before saying I Do and what's the point of that? We're just gonna get it done." You pointed.

"I'll just see about that." She stormed deeper into the kitchen at the sound of her mother asking her for help finishing your traditional Sunday meal.

"I'll try and thwart her plans to decorate the register's office with rose petals." George brought his hands to your shoulders with a smile you shared, as he led you to the table. His parents argued over what bottle of wine to open, while his sister went on making plans of her own, just for you. Normalcy remained.

///

"You two cannot be serious." Dean sat slack-jawed across a high tabletop in your very favorite pub. He'd barely touched his scotch, but you and George were on your second round of drinks you'd been downing while waiting on your friend to show up to tell him the news.

"Who else would we ask, Dean? You're our third wheel." You laughed, leaning in to shout past the music overhead. You'd already told George's family and asked his sister to be one of your witnesses. The girl was more excited than you and George for your big day. Dean was the only other person you could imagine inviting along, whose presence wouldn't make you break out into a nervous sweat.

"No, I mean you can't be serious about getting married!" Dean laughed, keeping his wide, dark eyes boring into yours.

"We've already worked most everything out. Will you please come?" George leaned in closer, taking his turn at coaxing his best pal into being there for the two of you.

"Yeah, fine," Dean softened, his smile reaching his eyes. "But I'm bringing a cake. Not to celebrate, but to stress eat." The fellow raised his glass in a silly toast. You laughed as you clinked your glasses together, then swiftly ordered another round.

"Well I don't want to steal your thunder but I've been meaning to tell the both of you something..." Dean shifted in his seat as you and George settled into a quiet focus on your friend.

"I've been seeing someone. Only been out a couple of times, but I quite like her already" Dean explained, a blush creeping under his eyes. George encouraged his friend to tell everything about the girl he'd been dating. You urged Dean to bring her around some time, thrilled at the prospect of having a fourth wheel to join in your nights of fun.

As Dean went on telling the tale of his first date with his new girl, your drinks came.

"Won't you miss dating around?" Dean seemed to worry, after thanking the waiter for his drink.

"I haven't missed it this far." You shrugged, sipping your fresh cocktail all the while. As free as you'd been till now, the thought of getting to know someone new, letting your guard down, building trust, just thinking of it all exhausted you.

When George leaned over you to accept his new drink, he flashed the waiter a tipsy smile.

"We're getting married!" He chuckled, and you did too. As you two broke into drunken giggles, the waiter offered unimpressed congratulations. Dean slammed back his new order in time to ask for another; either to catch up with you and George or to deal with the pair of you, you couldn't tell.

───※ ·❆· ※───

taglist: @whenthe-smokeisinyoureyes @andux @imaginationandlove @velvetgoldsilver @queen-bunnyears @maria-josefin @dearevansamham @belledamsceno @nilletellsstories @haileymorelikestupid @loulouloueh @visionsofmelodrama

#george mackay #george mackay x reader #george mackay imagine #george mackay fanfic

62 notes · View notes

queensdivas · 4 years

Text

That Silly Wig!

I’ve never written a short so fast in my entire life of my God! Not a super long one because I have other stuff to do sadly!

I was deeply inspired by the recent drawing of @eileen-crys with her comic and I literally threw everything aside to write this! I gotta stop doing this kind of crap so much so I can focus on my remaining school work! But anyway. Hope you enjoy!

That lovely artwork of hers!

masterlist

taglist

@filmslutt @mexifangorl @leah-halliwell92 @i-live-for-queen @its-funny-til-its-not @brianmydear @bonafiderocketqueen @jd-johndeacon-or-jackdaniels @painkiller80 @seven-seeds-of-rhye @seven-seas-of-fuck-you @sevenseasofky

@yourlocalmusicalprostitute @minigirl87 @natalijalucreziah @crayonwriting @owensgrxdy @deacyspatronusisacheesetoastie @darlingyourebeingabore @queenwouldyourathers

Rounding up what Freddie calls the Deaklings was a lot more difficult than you could ever imagine. Have to make sure that Laura has her favorite stuffed animal, making sure Michael wasn’t annoying Robert too badly, then packing the diaper bag for Josh and his favorite toys. And all without a nanny! Super Mom right here! Though Chrissy has made it very appealing to finally get one but Robert and Michael are basically grown children so it’s a little easier now in a sense.

But today is meant to a very good day for the six of us which includes Deaky. We’re finally spending some family time by taking them out for a picnic in Bushy Park! We’ve been wanting to take the kids there for a while, yet our timing has been non existent. He has to do some filming for a new music video then on lunch he plans on taking a longer one for us to go.

“Alright kids! We’re moving in t-minus five minutes!” Yelling up the stairs for the thunder of children to start running down the stairs. Robert and Michael were the first ones down as Laura was slowly making her way down with her stuffed Fox Brian gave her when she was born.

Grabbing Josh's diaper bag from the floor to throw on my shoulder to then pick him up from his play crib. He wrapped himself around me as I picked him up. Kissing the top of his forehead as I walked out of the house, locking the door to see the kids are already in the car ready to go. Man did we raise some very well behaved kids! Until Robert and Michael start fighting over their toys.

We arrived to the set where they were filming their new music video as the kids beginning to bounce around in the backseat. I pulled into the parking spot to see Brian coming out with his hairs all in plastic curls in his hair and in his regular clothes.

“Uncle Brian!” Laura screamed as they all rushed out of the car to hug their Uncle. I got out to unbuckle Josh for him to cling himself on me again. Ever since Josh was born he’s always just kept himself attached to me and for a reason he hasn’t really had much interest in John which is very concerning. Maybe it’s just a very long phase.

“Well hello there Daisy! What brings you to our neck of the woods?” Brian picked up Laura who gave him a huge hug.

“We’re going on a picnic to Bushy Park!” Richard yelled as we began walking into the set for the hustling and bustling of the crew.

“Say. Where’s Chrissy anyhow?” Asking Brian as he put down Laura.

“She’s got work and the kids are off with my parents for the week so Chrissy and I could have some us time.” Nodding as we turned the corner for Roger to come strutting out in a school girl outfit! Trying to not laugh but Robert was already losing it.

“Uncle Roger is dressed like a girl!” He began strutting himself towards us to make Laura and even Josh giggle a little bit.

“Can’t believe you managed to round up all Dealings in such a fashion!” Roger commented as Robert finally stopped laughing at Roger’s getup. I’m guessing that this was either his idea or Freddie’s idea. But I’m definitely leaning towards Roger at this point because he’s really enjoying himself.

“Let me guess Roger. This was all you?” Asking as he took off his sunglasses to wink at me. Oh goodness it was! Well he looks fantastic! Brian took off his robe to appear in a pink nightgown and to slip on his pinky bunny slippers. Oh dear God! Wait. ARE THOSE JOHNS PINK BUNNY SLIPPERS!? I got John those slippers back in college because he always complained about his feet getting cold whenever he would come over for homework! He still kept them?

“Love the slippers.” Even one of the buttons is missing when Robert pulled them out when he was a baby. I know it seems stupid to be happy about a old pair of bunny slippers but ya know. We’ve been together for so long and with all our children, it's easy to forget the times when we would do silly stuff like that all the time.

“Mommy where’s Dad?” Laura asked as we could hear John and Freddie laughing down the hallway as Paul came out of the dressing room. He looked at us to roll his eyes and continue on his way to wherever he was going. Paul says that bringing our kids to the studio or the set isn’t a good idea, so John always makes sure we stop by to say hello.

“Dad is probably getting ready so we shouldn’t disturb him okay.” I told her as she held onto her toy fox a little tighter. She is definitely daddy’s little girl and at this age feels kind of empty without him. Trust me it’s difficult when he’s at the studio for ungodly hours and she wants John to read her a bedtime story. She doesn’t throw temper tantrums or anything, just gets all quiet and holds onto her fox a little tighter. Such as she’s doing now. Brian bought that for her on her first birthday and she loved it ever since. Trust me she will never let go of it even if her life depended on it. But it is pretty cute so who could blame her.

Roger began walking us to where they were getting ready with Michael riding on his shoulders and Robert walking ahead of us. Not sure why but Michael has always found Roger to be his favorite out of the three of them with Robert being close to Freddie since he spoils the living hell out of them for birthdays and holidays.

“How’s the music going Rog?” I asked him as we rounded the corner to hear Freddie laughing.

“It’s going great! Freddie’s got another hit in the works so it should be something pretty good as always.”

“Awesome! And how's Dom?”

“She’s doing fantastic! Plan on taking her to Switzerland for the week to celebrate our anniversary.” Oh my god when John and I went to Switzerland before Michael was born was such a wonderful time!

“That’s awesome! Tell her I said hello obviously.” Smiling to see Freddie coming out of their dressing room in their costume. Oh my god they look terrific! Freddie wearing a beautiful black wig with huge pink earrings and pink lipstick. He wore a pink sleeveless top and a black leather skirt.

“The Deaklings!” He laughed as Robert ran towards him and gave him a big hug. Like I said Robert was his favorite and Freddie loved Robert. Hell I think Freddie would want to be his godfather.

“Uncle Freddie! Did Dad tell you we finally got a cat!? She’s super fat, super furry, and the biggest green eyes!” Robert told him which made me smile.

“Never thought she would let you! What’s its name!?” Robert dug into his coat pocket to pull out his Polaroid of the new cat.

“Her name is Matilda!” He handed Freddie the pic as he smiled for the fuzzy cat on the picture. Yes we finally got a cat for the family because they’re easy to take care of, and hello! It’s a cat!

“She absolutely gorgeous. Oh my goodness she’s humongous! Can’t wait to meet her whenever I come over for tea!” Him and Robert began going off as John came out of the dressing room looking like an old lady with puffy grey wig. I couldn't help myself to start laughing for my husband to be looking like my own mother! What on earth is Roger doing to my husband!

“My dear husband what has Roger done to you?” Walking over to him as he placed his hand on top of Josh's head to kiss him. Josh turned himself to start reaching for John to scoop him up and give him another forehead kiss to leave a lipstick mark on his head.

“He’s brought me to misery.” He groaned as he leaned in to kiss me. Giving each other peck to see Robert giggling again at John with Michael just smiling.

“Dad why are you dressed up like grandma!?” Robert laughed with made Freddie laugh. Robert definitely gets Deakys witty comments and his ability to make everyone laugh.

“I think you look cool Dad!” Michael cheered.

“Thank you Michael!” John smiled at the children as Freddie grabbed their hands to start walking them to the set for the free food.

“I’m assuming you’re having loads of fun.” Keeping my eye on Josh for him to latch himself around John as I was hoping in the end. Phew.

“Darling of course.” He kissed my lips again as Laura was still hiding behind me. She squeezed her stuffed Fox trying to hold back her sniffling. Her eyes began to water as her sniffling continued to grow a little more louder.

“That’s not my dad, that old lady doesn’t look like dad..where’s dad..” Wait what? We looked down to see her starting to cry.

“THAT’S NOT MY DAD! WHERE IS PAPA!” Laura exploded in tears as we both looked down at her in confusion. She hid her face behind her stuffed Fox for not knowing her own father before her.

“Laura that’s papa! He’s just wearing a silly costume.” Trying to make her smile but it was not working whatsoever. She was still sobbing as John kneeled down to me to hand me Josh. He moved her in front of her so he could face her and try to calm her down.

“Laura, my princess it’s me! It’s just a costume and a little makeup.” He whipped her tears away so she could see John in all his makeup. She still wasn’t convinced so he ripped off his wig for his poofy hair to expand!

“See? A silly wig and makeup!” He smiled to toss the wig on the ground for her to stop crying. She moved the fox away from her face as she jumped into his arms.

“You scared me Papa!” He got up with her in his arms as her fox dangled behind his neck.

“I’m sorry Princess! Papa wouldn’t scare you on purpose!” John held her tightly as he was so upset he made Laura cry. Even though he’s busy with his work, he loves our little Deaklings with all his soul and hates it when they’re upset. Especially his princess.

“Mr. Hamish doesn’t want you to cry now does he.” He grabbed her fox to place in front of her so she could hold it again.

“No Mr. Hamish doesn’t want me to cry Papa.” She giggled as he put her down on the ground to hold her hand. He even went so far to scoop Josh from me so he could walk with his kids to the set. Grabbing his wig from the floor to watch as he walked away with our children laughing with them.

How is it even possible to love someone so much? I feel like my love for him could explode as he’s such a wonderful father, a loving husband, and one cheeky devil.

#john richard deacon #John Deacon #john deacon one shot #John Deacon x reader #John Richard deacon x reader #queen band #John Deacon Fluff #Freddie Mercury #Brian May #roger taylor #I want to break free #Was inspired by a God!#her artwork is beautiful #made me sob #love dad deacon #respect deacons privacy #my dude retired to fuck off

42 notes · View notes

citrinediamondeyes · 4 years

Text

A Beautiful Mess: Chapter One (My Hero Academia)

Here is my chapter story I’ve been working on! Hope you enjoy!

Summary: Izuku Midoriya finds himself in detention, of all places. There, he meets an interesting girl with a cute smile and a tough exterior. She offers to teach him how to fend for himself, and with her help, he starts to realize that maybe he isn't useless after all... [Quirkless AU]

Rating: M

TW: Depression, Anxiety, Mentioned/Implied Self-Harm, Mentioned/Implied Childhood Abuse, Severe Bullying, Childhood Trauma, Scars

Characters: Midoriya Izuku, Bakugo Katsuki, Uraraka Ochaco, Iida Tenya, Todoroki Shouto, Asui Tsuyu, Yagi Toshinori/All Might, etc.

Pairings: Izuocha (slow burn)

Links: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13594271/1/A-Beautiful-Mess https://archiveofourown.org/works/24204889

"Just in time, Midoriya," Mr. Aizawa droned, looking up from his roll call list.

Izuku, his face beet red as everyone's eyes rested on him, plunked down in the seat closest to him. Imagine being late for detention. He was already enough of a failure as it was...

"Bakugo, Katsuki."

Izuku heard a growl from the back of the room, and shivers went up his spine.

"I'll take that as a 'here'. Midoriya, Izuku."

"Here," Izuku whispered.

"Uraraka, Ochaco."

"Here."

Oh. There was a girl sitting next to Izuku! Or, well, Izuku sat next to her. Izuku peeked out from under his curly green-black hair, and he only caught a glimpse of auburn hair before his attention was brought back to the front.

"Now, I don't really care what you do for an hour. Just don't leave the room and don't disturb me."

Izuku and the rest of the students looked on in curiosity as Mr. Aizawa brought out a sleep mask and tipped his chair back, planting his crossed ankles on the desk.

Izuku blinked for a solid five seconds, trying to make sense of what he was seeing, before giving up and grabbing his homework out of his bag. Might as well get started on this mountain of homework...

He tried to focus on his Calculus - he really did, but he could feel Kacchan's eyes on him from the back of the room. To calm down, he started doodling on the side of his assignment, stark black lines against his messy scrawl. He directed his thoughts to making the lines smooth and the strokes confident, even though he himself was not. Still though, his hands were trembling, and his pencil slipped in his sweaty grip. It rolled onto the floor next to the girl's foot, and he paused for a moment, fear making his mind irrational and paralyzed. The girl - whose name was Ochaco, Izuku remembered distantly - swooped down and picked up the pencil casually, leaning over to give it to him.

"Oooh, is that All Might?" she asked in a hushed voice. Izuku flinched before nodding as his left hand went to the back of his neck nervously. He glanced at Ochaco quickly, taking her in. Her caramel brown eyes were wide with interest and framed with dark lashes, and her thin lips were pulled into a small but genuine smile. She had rosy cheeks that didn't look like makeup, and her choppy bangs suggested a self-done job. She had a small silver hoop through the left side of her nose and metal piercings going up her right ear that glinted in the sunlight from the far windows. Her leather jacket was worn through at the elbows, cuffs, and collar, and her fishnet-and-combat-boot combo made Izuku mentally flush.

Oh no. She's cute. And kind of... intimidating?

His eyes trailed down to the hand that was still offering his pencil. Her hands were small and delicate-looking, with small silvery scars running across the top. Her fingertips were scarred pink.

Izuku gulped quietly and looked back at Ochaco's face, hoping she didn't notice him blatantly staring at her. She was looking at him, too, an unrecognizable look on her face, (Did she notice the scars on his arm? She had to have noticed his bruised eye...) but it didn't make Izuku feel threatened or self-conscious like it normally would have. Instead, he felt a strange kinship to this girl with the scarred hands. He slowly reached out and tugged his pencil out of her grip, giving her a small smile.

"T-thanks."

She blinked dazedly before smiling brightly, her eyes resting on his. Izuku's stomach swooped - that grin was directed at him?

"No problem. But yeah, that drawing is really good! So you're an artist?"

"Oh, I mean, I wouldn't say that," he chuckled nervously. He remembered that she recognized his drawing, though, and latched onto that. "Y-you know who All Might is?"

"Yeah, my friends and I play his video games! They're really fun - especially the one where he goes into space?" Her eyes lit up, and Izuku found himself smiling along with her, feeling more comfortable by the second.

"Yeah, that one has great graphics. I love his teammates' powers, too! Thirteen's Black Hole is so powerful!" Izuku exclaimed, tapping his eraser on the desk mindlessly.

"Oh my gosh, Thirteen is my favorite!" she declared, still keeping her voice low while pressing her hands to her chest passionately. "I just know she would beat even All Might in a fight."

"No way," Izuku snickered quietly. "That's why he is called All Might. He is 'all mighty'."

He had no idea where this bravery was coming from to tease this enigma of a girl, but seeing the competitive spark in her eyes was worth it.

"All he does is punch stuff and tackle things with brute force. Thirteen, while a more defensive hero, takes more strategy to play. Her intelligence would beat out his brawn any day. And besides, ya can't out-punch somethin' that is pullin' ya inwards!" Ochaco finished excitedly, her tongue sticking out.

Oh gods, did an accent come out during that last bit? So cute.

Izuku's face took on a look of determination - sure, this girl might be attractive, but he had to defend his favorite hero All Might!

"See, now that's where you're wrong. All Might doesn't just 'punch stuff', he can use his moves to cause the air to move around him. This can be done in precise kicks or powerful punches. When playing him, you have to use his power in different percentages to make sure not to harm any bystanders and cause the least amount of damage to the environment. He is always calculating. Also, if you noticed, every time he goes into battle, he says his catchphrase, 'I am here!' He recognizes how important it is to be a symbol of hope for the people. I recognize this is a game and not reality, but this was done on purpose. All Might knows what he is doing. I think - "

Ochaco cut him off with laughter, and Izuku froze, feeling shame wash over him. Ah, he did it again. He got weird and did a mutter-storm. She probably thought he was a total loser. He felt his head droop, and he whispered out, "S-sorry."

Her giggles abruptly stopped, and he felt her eyes on him for a second before she leaned closer over the aisle and spoke in a low, soothing voice. "Hey, no, I'm the one who's sorry. I was just laughing because you really know your stuff, and you were talking so fast, and it just really surprised me!" She smiled sadly and looked like she was about to touch his arm but instead fiddled with her long side bangs. "It wasn't my intention to make you feel bad for liking something."

She was apologizing to him, the massive screw-up?

Embarrassingly, Izuku felt his eyes swell with tears, and he turned away, wiping them back quickly. He swiveled back to face her and gave her a wobbly smile. "T-thanks," he said gratefully, his voice quiet.

She smiled again, this time a soft one, before turning back to his math homework. "Hah, isn't this for Mr. Ecto's class?"

"Y-yeah. Probably will need to redo it now."

"I always have the worst time in that class," she grumbled, her lips going into a slight pout, and Izuku felt his cheeks getting pink.

"What's wrong? Maybe I could... help?" Izuku asked, wincing at the end. He didn't want to sound presumptuous, but math was his best subject...

She lit up again. "Really? That'd be great. I'd been going to Momo for help, but she's been nagging me lately. Something about her not wanting to condone me 'breaking rules'. She's a good pal, but it's been annoying to say the least," Ochaco blew some hair out of her face while giving Izuku a silly smile.

"B-breaking rules?" Izuku asked curiously, before realizing that might've been rude and going red.

"Yeah. I mean, how'd ya think I ended up here?" Ochaco giggled, pulling out her math homework and laying it out on her desk. She scooted her desk closer to him and pointed with her own mechanical pencil at a few circled problems.

"These are the ones that are just killing me."

"Okay, let's see what we can do," Izuku cracked his knuckles, feeling more in his element, and leaned over to start reading the problems.

The hour passed by quickly, with Izuku and Ochaco muttering and quietly discussing Calculus. As Mr. Aizawa's phone alarm went off, the two were packing away their books and discussing the current All Might and Nighteye comics.

"To be honest, I think Nighteye is going to confess his love for All Might," Ochaco confided, making Izuku choke on a laugh.

"E-EHH?"

Before Ochaco could respond, Mr. Aizawa stood up and threaded a hand through his long, dark hair, yawning. "Alright kids, good job at keeping it down and civil. Some of you, I'll see tomorrow, like usual." He looked pointedly at Ochaco, and she smirked, waving her scarred fingers.

Geez, what did she do to get so much detention?

Izuku was so focused on this exchange that he didn't notice someone coming up behind him until it was too late.

"You're in my way, nerd," Katsuki growled, his eyes flashing dangerously.

"Ah, sorry, Kacchan," Izuku whimpered, losing all confidence and shrinking into himself as he practically scuttled out of the way of the blonde boy. He felt Ochaco's gaze on him and felt ashamed, but, well, it was better for her to see him for who he truly was before he got too attached, anyways.

"Why not just go around him?"

Izuku's eyes widened, and he glanced at Ochaco in horror.

"You got something to say?" Katsuki turned his attention to the girl, who was staring at him like he was something she stepped in with her boot.

"You heard me. There are plenty of other ways to get to the door. You actually had to go out of your way to go up the aisle to pass by his desk," Ochaco explained, all previous warmth in her voice gone.

Katsuki's left eye twitched for a second, before he rushed over to her and stood in her space, looming over her. She met his gaze fearlessly.

"I'd be careful what I'd say, Round Face."

"Oh no, I'm so scared of a stereotypical guy with anger issues," Ochaco droned, her brown gaze almost looking bored. As Katsuki seethed, she scoffed. "See, you aren't going to do anything." She looked at Izuku, her eyes softening slightly. "Let's go."

Startled that she wanted to go anywhere with him and eager to get out of the tension, he hurriedly grabbed his backpack and scrambled to get out the door.

"Wait, just a minute, Deku," Katsuki grabbed at Izuku's shoulder, his grip making Izuku wince.

"You might be able to hide behind Uraraka right now, but just know there's nothing you can do to stop me from kicking your ass the next time you are alone," Katsuki threatened, his voice low and truly angry.

"Alright, that's enough. Geez, kids these days are so dramatic," Mr. Aizawa said tiredly, pinching the area between his eyes. "Just go home, all of you, and for god's sake just leave each other alone."

Izuku wanted to scream out that it wasn't just dramatics, but pure fear kept his mouth shut as he robotically walked to the door. Katsuki grinned and ran a finger across his throat before walking in the opposite direction down the hallway. Ochaco grabbed his arm and tugged him down the hallway, releasing him after a moment. They walked in silence for a few seconds, reaching the outdoors before she cleared her throat.

"So, uh... that guy has some issues," she noted, kicking a pebble in the walkway.

Izuku could only shrug, his ears burning. At her questioning look, he looked away before explaining, "Kacchan is... complicated."

"Hah, that's a word for it..." she muttered. They let silence fill the space between them again.

"So, your name is Deku?"

"E-eh? N-no." Izuku looked at his feet, surprised he could feel even more shame than he was already feeling. "Deku is what Kacchan calls me to make fun of me. 'Defenseless Izuku.'"

"Oh," Ochaco said, and she almost sounded disappointed. "It just sounded like a nice name for you. Kind of like 'I can do it!', ya know?"

"O-oh." His face flushed pink. "D-Deku it is!"

"I can do it", huh?

"D'ya think he was really serious about beating ya up?" Ochaco's voice was light, but her face was serious.

Izuku laughed bitterly. "How do you think I got this?" He gestured at the shiner surrounding his left eye. "That's why I was in detention, after all."

Ochaco nodded grimly, saying nothing. Izuku wondered vaguely how long she was going to walk with him.

"Tell ya what. Let's make a deal. You help me with my math, and I'll teach ya how to fight!" Ochaco's hands where balled into fists, and her eyes were bright.

At this, Izuku looked up at her in shock. "EH?"

"Yeah! Come on. Notice how Katsuki didn't want to mess with me? It's because he knows I can hold my own. I'll teach you how to defend yourself, although it might not be street legal," she teased, "and you can teach me the difference between differentials and integrals!"

Izuku stared at her wordlessly. This tiny girl, who admittedly dressed like a punk rocker but was as bubbly and friendly as the day was long, knew how to fight - and in ways that weren't street legal???

She nudged him playfully with her black bookbag. The various pins on it jingled and clicked against each other. "So, whaddya say?"

He stopped walking to actually ponder her proposition. When he was honest with himself, he recognized that he couldn't live like this anymore. Dodging Katsuki day in and day out, being scared of even breathing the wrong way, lying to his mother and friends about being okay, hiding his scars underneath sweltering hoodies - it was exhausting. He didn't even know who he was anymore, besides a timid artist with a slight All Might video game obsession.

He wanted more. He now realized he might have that opportunity, or a chance at one, thanks to Ochaco's offer.

He looked up and met her slightly nervous gaze with a determined grin. "Let's do it."

#my hero academia #quirkless au #fanfic #fanfiction #mine #do not steal #writing #Midoriya Izuku #Uraraka Ochaco #Midoriya x Uraraka #read the trigger warnings first #TW: implied violence #TW: scars #TW: implied self-harm

1 note · View note

nozomijoestar · 5 years

Text

I had an idea for Violentine eventually getting married and because society as we know it has been dead so long they just get creative about the whole thing

Also time jump from the end of the game and Texas Two is now Big, AJ is a preteen, Clem and the older of the former kids can now pay their taxes if those were still a thing

BGM if you like that when you read, lyrics here

“Been a while huh Tenn? Everything’s so busy these days I haven’t had the time. I’m sorry.”

She sat cross-legged on the partly overgrown ground. A small wreath of fresh flowers hung from the top of a cross. The wood was faded and weather-beaten, but the name carved there could never leave her memory. From her pocket she pulled a paper, unfolded it, then placed it. Violet sighed, even her smile seemed exhausted. Her eyes threatened to brim over with tears she thought she’d long left behind.

“AJ made that for you. He’s gotten a lot better at drawing you’d probably love it. He’s a little past your age now. Shit I’m, I’m taking too long to get to the point aren’t I?”

The breeze picked up making the trees rustle as though they communicated the will of ghosts. She looked around. The crosses had multiplied through the years, each one a new nick on her heart. She chewed her lip and fiddled with her bun. Now wasn’t the time for death. Her stomach churned butterflies. A genuine smile bled into her voice.

“I wanna ask Clem to marry me. Just saying it out loud feels weird and amazing all at once. I honestly didn’t think she’d want me this long but life kept happening.”

In one motion she laid spread eagle and stared into the pink clouds that signaled dusk. She closed her eyes as another sigh fell from the trees. The sound of people beyond the graveyard drifted in voices, laughter, and song. Though the years since there’d been largely silence were gone she could never shake a need to be prepared. Even if the walls had expanded far past the former Ericson gates, danger never slept. It was something Clementine loved to reinforce.

The thought of the way her face went stern and her voice deepened made Violet chuckle. She rose to her feet and dusted herself.

“I should get a move on. It was great talking to you again.”

After a final readjustment of the wreath she passed through the yard. A flag decorated with many stitches flapped in the wind reading ‘Texas Two’. Sometimes she looked up at it and still laughed at its ridiculousness. Though since she’d been responsible for it, that was the same as laughing at her old self. Her old self, she pondered, the Violet who hadn’t dared to entertain the thoughts she did now. When had that person changed? She didn’t think she’d ever know.

Inside the old admin building echoed a section of Chopin’s ‘Winter Wind’ in A minor. The anxious dance her nerves were doing calmed. Louis would be finished teaching piano lessons for the day. Her stride became confident. If she was going to make a sappy fool of herself it would be out of public view. Of her old mannerisms she could at least keep that one.

He sat continuing to play though he knew she’d come by the pattern of her gait. His lack of a tongue elevated a need to pay notice to the finer things in other ways. She leaned against the doorway and folded her arms. They carried on in silence. Violet closed her eyes again, taken by her imagination. The shrieking highs and nervous lows seemed to pull every worry she’d ever had like threads off a loom.

She saw Clem’s head bashed open like a ripe fruit, or the paling of her bite ridden skin and its missing chunks. Right behind it came the thought of AJ’s neck dyed red as he took Tenn’s place at the bottom of a herd and picked clean. Their home at the bottom of smoldering ashes. Worst of all above the extremes, she would bare her soul for Clem greater than she already had to see her spirit fall. In one moment for some reason or other everything they’d made of love would fracture, and Violet might as well quit the venture entirely.

As if reading the tone of her thoughts the music stopped. Her eyes reopened to find Louis scribbling on a scavenged notepad. With a grin he turned it to face her. His eyes twinkled with their unquenchable charm.

‘That get your attention?’

She tucked her raw feelings back into their cage. The processed version rolled off her tongue.

“A little too hard Lou. Guess that means you’ve graduated from sucking.”

She finished with a soft laugh seeing him flip her off. The way he wiggled his eyebrows told her he found it funny. He gestured for her to come over and made room on the piano seat. She sat with her hands folded and stared nervously into her lap. Her stomach churned while the words she wanted to find were slow to come. At the touch of his hand on her shoulder she shook her head.

“It’s nothing bad I’m only overthinking again. I just...tonight I’m gonna propose. I want to. What do you think?”

He smiled and stared wide eyed filled with glee. A rush of air she guessed equated to a gasp came as he clapped. It made her blush and seem sheepish curling into herself. The sound of Louis scribbling excitedly refocused her attention.

‘About damn time! I almost thought you’d never bring it up. My advice, take her to a spot important to you guys. Get her thinking about all the deep stuff you’ve done together. If you’re really feeling it serenade her. That’s what I’d do.’

“I want her taking me seriously not laughing her ass off. By now my singing’s gotta be shitty.”

‘Oh come on Vi, live a little. Singing or not the point is you may never do this again. Make it a memory. You two were doing just that all this time anyway.’

Violet sighed and rested her forehead against the piano, defeated. The keys she pressed let out a wail. Another note was put before her.

‘Don’t sulk tell her how you feel. Clem’s gonna love you more than she already does.’

“...How do you know she won’t say no?”

He cocked his head and interrogated her with a bewildered stare. Her stomach sank; her voice had been whiny like a child’s. In the end, she was being silly. It made the confidence she’d mustered drop in shame.

‘We don’t know Vi but if she’s stuck around this long it means something. Clem’s the kind of girl to take off if she really didn’t believe in what she sees.’

She groaned and the keys played an ugly sound.

“You’re right. I’m being a coward. I fucking hate it. I thought that side of me was done with.”

‘It’s ok to be scared. This is a big deal! You know how you’re guaranteed to fuck it up though? Having a negative attitude. Positive vibes Vi, positive.’

“Yeah yeah. You’ve given me an idea. If you see her tell her to come to the bell tower tonight. That it’s urgent.” She said with a lazy smile.

They bid each other goodbye leaving Louis to start up the piano solo of Kreisler’s ‘Liebesleid’. He’d reached halfway using a laser-focused concentration when another, larger presence filled the door. His deft hands stopped. Clementine smiled and clapped as she walked towards him. Without a moment to waste he ripped out the used pages of his notepad; they were stuffed into his coat pocket. It didn’t go unnoticed when Clem raised an eyebrow but gave no comment.

She stood balancing her weight on her natural leg and leaning against the piano. Were she anyone else, even Violet, Louis would’ve sooner scolded her for lacking manners. He looked down to find her prosthetic ( a newly improved design of Willy’s built with higher mobility in mind ) still in good condition.

“Caught ya.” She said giggling.

He looked up at her strong face, thick eyebrows, and overwhelming mane of curly hair. She had a stern beauty that always caught him by surprise for its rarity and strength. Violet sure knew how to pick ‘em.

‘Wanted to make sure your foot was ok. Doubt Willy would screw it up but still y’know?’

“Thanks. Listen Louis...are you free for a little while? There’s something I wanna talk about. I want your honest opinion.”

A glint in his eyes betrayed his excitement. His gut instinct gave him an inkling of what hovered unsaid. He almost laughed at the coincidence of it all. She slowly sat at his invitation and fiddled the keys. After a meandering pause she cleared her throat; he wore a grin.

“You know Violet and I have been together a while now. Longer actually than I ever thought possible. I’m grateful for it everyday. It’s sadly not something a lot of people can say. That’s why...I don’t know if this is still the right word but, I want her to be my wife.”

She stared at him and twiddled her thumbs. Rarely had he seen her hesitate, much less be meek. The sight made him sit up straighter, listen harder. From the corner of her eye she caught his expectant stare.

“I guess regardless of what it’d be called these days that’s what I want. She’s too important for me to lose. It’s time she really knows it and how I feel.”

For a moment she gauged his face for the slightest reaction. The intensity radiating as if a conjured aura from her body reminded him of someone constipated; he again fought a laugh. It was as though she resigned herself to a do or die mission. A determination not a far cry from what she summoned up before a supply run. In his opinion, they both were taking this to lengths so ridiculous it bordered on comical. That however would remain a secret.

He nodded with enthusiasm and that seemed to lighten her worry. On his notepad this time he thought hard before writing.

‘It can mean whatever you want it to Clem. You love her, that’s the most important part. I say go for it. Any plans on how you’ll ask?’

“Well there’s really only one way right? I have to tell her outright, just not sure where to do it.”

‘Y’know she asked to meet with you tonight on the bell tower. There couldn’t be a better spot if you ask me.’

“Did she? That makes this easier.”

She sighed in relief and rested her head on his shoulder.

“I love her Louis. More than she might know.”

‘Tell her not me.’ he said with a smile.

After dinner the night air blew warm embracing the essence of summer. Clementine found Violet pacing in front of the ladder they’d once helped construct. She remembered seeing her like this then too, anxious over everything turning out right. Her suspicion turned on and her eyes narrowed in concern. She had yet to be noticed from a distance.

In seconds that weighed like minutes she sighed and mumbled to herself.

“Alright Clementine all you have to do is talk. Sure Clementine, like it’s that simple. You’re stalling now. Get yourself together.”

“You sure don’t mind keeping a girl waiting.”

Violet’s voice seized her attention from the grasping hands of her thoughts. Before she could say another word laughter filled the silence. It made her blush even as she frowned in mock irritation.

“I didn’t think you’d notice.”

“I wouldn’t have if we weren’t the only ones here. Feelin ok?”

“Yeah just was wondering what’s on your mind to have us meet at this place.”

She smiled feeling a kiss on her cheek. Violet wore the look that always came when an idea longed to burst out before it drove her mad. Clementine slowly trailed her eyes up and down as though they were meeting for the first time anew. The demure air in her posture broke the obscuring fog of Clementine’s own nerves. Her expression softened into a look of curious wonder.

The streaks of moonlight cast across Violet’s face bent her grin toward the mysterious. She ran her thumb over Clementine’s knuckles and gestured at the ladder.

“Come with me and you’ll find out.”

Above them the stars filled the horizon into an infinity none would ever measure. The moon aided their brightness and bathed all it touched in an ethereal glow. The ground beneath her feet shined as though she walked on a river of silver; as though she were weightless. A breeze carrying the scent of flowers and wood-smoke, of life below, rustled Violet’s hair. Clementine felt her heart thud louder.

The bell tower had remained untouched through the years save for a few new cracks and crumbling bricks. Vines entangled a section of broken stone railing, the same as the first night they’d sat together. She dared to imagine the ghosts of their old selves caught in a roller-coaster of teenage emotions; each burning more intensely than the last into love. They stopped and leaned against the railing beside the spot.

They were gazing at the sky when Violet spoke first; her thoughts tumbled from her like a waterfall. A part of Clementine was relieved.

“So uh, Clem, I wanna be real honest with you. These past seven years went by so fast some days it feels like my head’s spinning keeping track. All this below us? All these people? If you’d told me before we’d be dealing with this I’d have called you crazy. Hell, if you’d told me there’d be a time where I could have nights not having to worry something would break into the school, I’d never believe it.”

She took a break to breathe and look over the dozens of smaller lights in varying buildings that stretched into the pushed back treeline. Each one signified a condensed hope and dream from those it kept warm. Their numbers lifted Violet’s spirit to continue. Clementine stood mesmerized, her eyes trained to Violet and Violet alone. It was as though each word revealed a deeper truth than the last.

“We wouldn’t be here right now if it weren’t for you. I know you can say it was a group effort, it’d be true, but you’re our motivation. I don’t think I’d be half the person I am today if I hadn’t met you and AJ. Point is...remember when I said once I couldn’t imagine life without you?”

“...Of course. It took me completely by surprise.”

“I still feel that way. Clem, I want you in my life till it ends someday.”

The breeze stirred into a mild wind as Clementine’s eyes widened softly. She stumbled to speak then went silent when Violet leaned closer. Her entire body pleaded a need for recognition, as if another chance would never come again.

“Marry me.”

Without hesitation Clementine pulled her into an embrace as their lips met. Her hands wandered to cup Violet’s face and not let go. They pressed together and sunk slowly to their knees. When at last they separated neither cared if anyone below had seen. Violet’s eyes shut in bliss feeling a gentle stroke on her chin and kisses peppering her face. There came a whisper on the verge of tears into her ear when Clementine hugged her tighter.

“You beat me to it you ass.”

“Heh, I can still keep you guessing.”

“Troublemaker.” came the reply with a grin.

AJ stood watching Ruby arrange bundles of wildflowers with the same care she gave all things. Though only twelve he’d nearly reached her height. He’d lost some inches shortening his hair to a buzz cut hidden beneath Clementine’s faded baseball cap. It was something he continued to be reminded of when Ruby’s motherly presence loomed so large.

“Hey there shorty could ya give me a hand? These bouquets can get real messy.”

“Sure, but it’s Alvin Junior.”

“I know I know. Reminding me ain’t gonna help us no faster. I’ll tell Clem if you do good.”

That made the hint of sourness in his expression bloom into an excited smile. Around them a small team of five busied themselves with the same task. They moved as Ruby directed to arrange each in a circle open only at the northern and southern sides. A myriad of colors blue, white, orange and so on occupied the center of the restored sports field. AJ sweated hoisting another bundle for the ring and nearly dropped it. Wordlessly Ruby caught it before it hit the ground and with that the last of it lay in place.

They stepped back performing a final check several times until Ruby proved satisfied. On a clear spot amidst the flurry of activity around them (an army of chefs led by Omar; Willy’s team arranged benches) AJ rested. A sheen of sweat covered his face and exhausted eyes. The first clue he’d received for what lay ahead came when Louis slipped him a note and a wink at breakfast one morning. ‘Congrats on the new mom kid!’ he hadn’t understood what it meant; a part of him still felt he didn’t even when Clementine explained that no, weddings weren’t something you ate.

As he felt the day’s work burn in his muscles he concluded whatever it looked like had to be worth the aches. He spotted Aasim approaching with a squirming bundle in his arms; AJ sprung to his feet. Every lecture he’d ever received on slacking echoed in his mind in unison. Aasim towered over AJ’s stature exuding an almost regal air were it not for the slight gruffness of his beard. In his shadow AJ straightened himself and stifled a laugh when a baby’s hand swatted his chin. His stare spoke of a sense of urgency matched in his baritone voice.

“Have you seen Ruby around AJ? It’ll be her turn to look after Susanna during the ceremony. Seems like that’ll start any minute now.”

“We worked on the flowers together but after that I’m not sure. Maybe she went to check on Clem and Vi-”

“The brides are ready Aasim, just had to go fetch ‘em after their fittins’.”

From behind them Ruby appeared with a blushing Clementine and Violet in tow. She pressed a kiss to Aasim’s cheek before reaching for the baby.

“Guess everything’s ready. I’d have come sooner but we had to finish cataloging that cache of recovered books in the library.”

“It’s alright I’ve got her, you just focus on those two. Lord knows they’re eager to get started and I don’t blame ‘em.”

Susanna piped up in her mother’s arms and stretched a hand toward Clementine.

“Ba!”

“Hey there Susie you doing ok?” Clementine cooed as she let her nose be patted.

“Guuu-ba!”

“Looks like you’ve got a way with kids that aren’t AJ too.”

“Well Vi she’s not Auntie Clem for nuthin’. Go on and say bye to Auntie Clem and Violet, Susanna.”

“Baaba.”

They waved in parting as Ruby left for the quickly filling crowd. Dozens well over a hundred sat chatting among themselves; more than a few stole curious glances to center stage. A hundred and so on more joined soon after. Clementine felt Violet graze her arm and gesture at a dazzled AJ. His eyes held awe that grew when Clementine pet his head.

“Ruby told me you were a real help goofball. I appreciate it.”

“You guys...you both look amazing...”

“Thanks kid. The rest of it’ll blow your mind if you stick around and watch.”

Without needing to be told further AJ nodded and made way for the benches; he looked back only once wearing an encouraging smile. The field was bare save for its key players, and the crowd fell into silence. Aasim signaled to take places then addressed those seated with a wave of his arms. Clementine and Violet stared at one another on opposite ends of the ring; Clementine’s grin made Violet blush and stare at her feet.

“Good afternoon everyone! We’re here today to witness the ceremony of a union; one long in waiting. This couple wishes to affirm their love for one another through a promise of lifelong devotion. You may both enter the ring.”

They obeyed having eyes only for each other; it formed a safety net against the pressure of so many others upon them. Softly Violet mouthed “It’s ok.”

“We’ll begin the professions of love. Clementine you may start.”

She cleared her throat and traced over every inch of Violet, of her flowing hair and single braid that whipped up from the back of her tunic in the breeze. The blue fabric lined with white threaded patterns complimented her pale green eyes. A crown of flowers adorned her head. Every detail was memorized.

“For as long as we’ve known each other you’ve supported me; even if you took time to open up. There’re so many moments, so many close calls where I’d never have made it out if it weren’t for you. Each day makes me feel more alive than the last. Not just because of our friends, or because of all we’ve done, being able to know you’re there is enough. I dedicate this dance to your affection.”

Slowly she took a step forward then pivoted into a practiced twirl. A dance of passion sent her traveling about their arena. Sweat flew from her brow and splattered in places on her belt’s spinning tassels. One misplaced step threatened to topple her but slyly she recovered before worry could disturb Violet.

With a grin she launched into a new phase. Her arms spun and, where able, her legs kicked. The movements blended so fluidly few could pinpoint the moment aggression gave way to softness. To even fewer it revealed its heart; a reflection of her lover’s metamorphosis.

There were moves describing sarcastic defenses, cowardly silences, sections mapping the rush from kind words and intimate quiet. As if anew they were pulled into the haze of honest kisses, the whirlwind of lovemaking that went deep into sleepless nights. On occasion they were plunged headfirst before icy fear and protective worry that pricked to the bone. Those moments would be quickly broken by a return to memories of the warmth in living.

Almost instinctively the full result of a week’s practice strengthened its control as she neared the end. Her mind sank into an empty plane, speaking only what little remained unsaid through her rhythm. When it was done the sight of Violet brimming with tears told her everything. Wordlessly she gathered herself then bowed.

Aasim stood in entranced silence. The edges of his solemn eyes had grown misty, defying his self restraint. He gestured and caught Violet’s attention away from her thoughts.

“Feelings have been expressed that require an answer. Violet, you may give your reply.”

“I’ve heard them. Clementine you taught me it’s alright to feel; that holding everything in and running from help is what makes a coward. Choosing who I want to be in life by learning from others is a gift that takes courage. You kept trying even when I wanted to shut you out. I’d never seen anyone so dedicated. Because of you I remembered the people who care about me, away from the ghosts I wanted to chase. I dedicate this dance to your strength.”

This time the was an elegant start defined by tight turns and precise footwork. Each move linked firmly to the last and the next. Clementine’s chest tightened as she watched; her breath caught in her throat. Within the dance she felt herself be peeled back. There was the Clementine she saw herself as, steel willed and cautious, in places fragmented. It morphed to show the rare moments of worry and the storms that wracked her in anxiety. In a few moments that still churned her stomach she felt a lurking shadow of the cruelty that’d tumbled so easily from her whenever she’d been cast astray.

Her body grew hot, her shoulders heavy before she saw the dance shift and the feeling passed. There was a return to gentleness and the power in mercy. Like glittering bubbles memories flooded her mind fresh as they days they’d been reality. She’d cried and screamed and torn her hair each time someone had been lost; yet she pressed forward hopeful. She’d witnessed distrust seize people’s eyes as they coveted rather than strive for understanding; yet never closed her ears to humanity. She’d cried awake sunken to the floor and teeth grit replaying each life she’d taken, each selfish need she’d served; yet her remorse was proof she retained a soul.

Tears trickled down her face, and she felt not a care to stop them. The sensations of the present returned only when Violet had finished. In an instant that moved in her vision like slow motion she was embraced. Aasim’s voice grounded her beyond the sensation of Violet’s heart beating in time with her own.

“We have witnessed them speak to each other’s deepest self. In this they have found unity, and taken hold of that which they seek for themselves in another. It is time for the final step. Let them now dance together and display the bond when two become one. Music for them, if you’d all please.”

Clementine felt Violet shift against her the crowd clapped a beat.

“You ready?”

“Yes.”

They took up position smiling through their flushed faces. The dance moved slow and contemplative as if longing to savor each moment. All else began to fade replaced by a rhythm that held a peaceful trance. Neither kept track of how long they swayed until Clementine said,

“Why don’t we show them what we’ve got?”

“Ready when you are partner.” Violet replied grinning.

In one motion they separated still holding on by one hand, throwing themselves into a spin that ended in a twirl. Violet laughed finding herself again in Clementine’s arms then out once more. She took her turn twirling Clementine, her eyes sparkling and heard racing. They spun holding each other then separated to link arms each facing the other’s back but continuing to lock eyes. It prefaced another separation as they spun alone only to jump back together. At this they laughed.

Violet’s vision was filled by the bright sky when Clementine dipped her then leaned close. Violet wrapped her arms around her neck and pressed their foreheads together.

“I love you.”

“Love you back.”

“Promise?”

“Hell yeah.”

Their kiss found Clementine with hands roaming her hair but she didn’t care. A ways away the roar of the crowd filled their ears. Beside them Aasim clapped and wiped his face. He turned one last time to project his proud voice.

“I present to you all a married Clementine and Violet! May they have a happy life together.”

“That better not have jinxed anything Aasim.” Violet teased with a snicker.

“Shut it and go have fun with your wife. You guys deserve it.”

“Thanks for all this, really.”

“Keep treating her right Clem.” he replied smiling.

The after party blew quickly into a spectacle. Louis had attracted a cheerful gathering as he played pieces back to back. Clusters of people filled the admin building to the seams; further groups had piled into the school yard. The campus in its entirety lay at the heart of town from which hundreds of simple houses, storage, and shops fanned out. The multitude of guests had been guaranteed with more passing colorful banners AJ had overseen.

A few carried weathered but functioning instruments, guitars, harmonicas, large and small drums. They formed a small band that led the tune of those dancing in the yard. A sizable banquet had been prepared from their surplus; beside Ruby chatted with Aasim while Susanna sucked on her bottle. From the balcony at the admin building’s face Clementine stood observing. Out of her regal wedding attire she nearly blended into the revelry were it not for her commanding presence.

Any tension soon melted from her when she felt Violet’s arms around her waist. She smiled and leaned into the nuzzle against her neck.

“How’s it feel? Thinking of anything?”

“I was wondering how things are closer to the wall and that group we sent out a day ago.”

“You mean Randy.”

“None of us can afford him screwing up. He’s been very...vocal lately. It’s giving me bad thoughts.”

“Hey none of that ok? Today’s our day to celebrate, we can worry about later when it comes.”

Clementine closed her eyes and pressed their foreheads together.

“Where’s AJ?”

“With the other kids. Us grown ups are too intense for him right now. I don’t blame him, he seemed happy though.”

“I can think of one reason to justify that.” Clementine teased in a husky voice, her hand wandering below Violet’s waist.

“Clem not while everyone’s around.” came the reply followed by a giggle.

“Just teasing. We can go over it all later.”

“In that case you’ve got my interest.”

“Really? How about something like this to start.”

She pulled Violet closer and leaned her back against the railing. She studied the way Violet tilted her head as their lips met; saw the beauty in how her hair framed her face. Slowly she traced her fingers along her jaw, welcoming the feel of Violet grabbing a fistful of her shirt. They broke off at the whistles thrown at them from below. One glare and eye roll from Clementine silenced them. Violet chuckled. Her arms wrapped lazily around Clementine’s neck.

“I’ll never forget today.”

“I hope not. If you ever do I’ll remind you.”

“Heheh, yeah.”

The music and chatter came to a sudden halt with a banging at the yard’s iron gates. Shocked dancers parted a pathway for a team in neat ranks, their boots marching in step. A man with a thick trimmed beard and thicker hair led them and adjusted the grip of his spear. It had a long curved edge akin to a beast fang and tassels that jiggled in time with the pistol on his belt. The well kept armor he wore, decorated in the motif of a cougar as his rank allowed, enhanced his bulk. His burly arms were defined by gnarled scars that betrayed his continued Old World hobby of rigorous exercise.

He signaled a stop by raising his fist and was immediately obeyed. His beady eyes stared at Clementine without faltering. She read the challenge within them clearly and stood stiff backed,unwavering. From the crowd she felt multitudes looking to her in surprise that yielded to fear. Beside her Violet’s expression hardened and simmered with open disgust. The man spoke, his voice embed by a natural cunning.

“We’ve returned from our expedition with a generous offering from the community to the west.”

“Welcome back, I trust everything went well along with it.”

“Yes, yes of course. Nice to see we’ve been missed.” he said letting a sarcastic bite slip into his tone as he looked around.

“C’mon Randy we can talk about this anywhere but in front of everyone. There’s no need to put on some kind of show.” Violet added.

His eyes studied her in frayed patience then flit back to Clementine. He made a gesture and his group dispersed.

“Sure I can be civil and play house with those wearing the big pants. Let’s have a private chat.”

He disappeared into the admin building. Clementine sighed deeply and let herself slacken. Tenderly Violet touched her hand, she took it without hesitation. She stared into the sky gathering herself until at last all her courage was summoned. With a nod she followed Violet’s lead into her office, something more animal than man fast approaching.

#twd #twdg #violentine #my writing

80 notes · View notes