#he can see her full darkness and her unkindness and when it's over he is still there beside her holding her hand | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ewanmitchellcrumbs · 2 months

Text

Unbidden

Pairing: Daemon Targaryen x f!reader x Aemond Targaryen Warnings: Cuckolding, voyeurism, smut. Word count: ~3k

Summary: Noticing his nephew's wife appears dissatisfied in her marriage, Daemon sets out to show them both that there is pleasure to be found within the marital bed...

Author's note: No tag list. Please follow @fics-by-ewanmitchellcrumbs and turn on post notifications. Community labels are for cops.

She has scarcely been able to take her eyes off of Daemon since he first arrived at the Red Keep. He possesses the classically handsome features bestowed upon those of Valyrian blood, carries himself with self assured confidence, and embodies an air of dangerous unpredictability which both frightens and excites her in equal measure. Though it is none of these qualities that keep her gaze fixated upon him.

Her interest is piqued by how utterly devoted he is to his wife. When she stood beside her husband, Aemond, in the Great Hall, as Vaemond Velaryon challenged the succession of Driftmark, her attention was focused solely on Daemon and Rhaenyra. He had been glued to her side, his gaze always seeking hers, and when Vaemond had dared to call her a whore and her children “bastards”, he had not hesitated in unsheathing his sword and slicing the man’s head in half. She wonders if her own husband would defend her so staunchly.

She is not blind to their starkly different situations; Daemon and Rhaenyra’s union is one of love, it is plain for all to see. Her and Aemond’s is one of political necessity. Although they have grown fond of each other over the last six months of their marriage, and he has never been unkind to her, she cannot help the jealousy that swirls, ugly and acrid, within her chest at the ease of which her husband’s half sister and his uncle interact with one another.

The two children they have together already, and the one that currently grows within the swell of Rhaenyra’s belly are proof enough of their passion for one another. However, the looks they exchange at the dinner table this evening are smoldering and filled with intent. Their fingers brush against each other as they pass dishes of food between them, and Daemon’s hand seems to find its way to her stomach, caressing her lovingly, unaware he is even doing it.

Her and Aemond’s intimacy is not so effortless, though it is not from a lack of trying on her part. He beds her frequently, and she greets his advances with enthusiasm, yet his stoicism renders him incapable of ever fully losing control. He is receptive to her pleas of “harder”, “faster”, but she is always left with the dissatisfaction of feeling he is holding something back, and outside of their shared bedchamber it is rare that he ever touches her. She has attempted to broach the subject with him before, framing it as a means for them to find greater satisfaction within their marital bed, but he always waves her away dismissively, clearly uncomfortable with the topic.

She can sense something dark and urgent bubbling beneath the surface of him, and longs to draw it out, to experience the full force of the fire of the dragon that runs through his veins, but she does not know how to entice it.

It had appeared prominent in his seeing eye as Dark Sister had cleaved the Velaryon man’s skull in twain, a potent mixture of bloodlust and desire, as his pupil had dilated ever so slightly. It had sent a shiver up her spine, heat pooling between her thighs, causing her to squeeze them together to fend off the dull, throbbing ache.

She longs for that look to be cast upon her, for her to be the recipient of whatever wrath that follows, and now she is sure that it is Daemon that holds the key to coaxing the darker side of her husband out to play.

The dinner is a tense affair. Aemond sits beside her, so tightly wound she is sure the lightest of touches would cause him to shatter like glass. When he finally loses his cool, throwing barbed words towards his nephews, resulting in an exchange of blows, the evening draws to an abrupt close, with each of them being dismissed to their respective quarters. As they depart the dining hall, her husband and his uncle lock eyes, a smirk of amusement flashing briefly across Daemon’s features as Aemond’s nostrils flare in irritation.

She can feel the heat of his anger radiating from him as he strides through the corridors of Maegor’s Holdfast, scurrying alongside him in an attempt to match his pace. That look has returned and with it her desperate feeling of lust. If she doesn’t seize the opportunity now, then she is unsure of when it will present itself again.

Reaching out for her husband, she grasps his elbow, her fingers taut against the leather sleeve of his tunic. His steps falter and he turns to look at her quizzically, chest heaving with the laboured breaths of his barely concealed rage.

“What is it?” He snaps.

Instinctively, she shrinks back, second guessing her decision as she sees the way he glares down at her, lip curled into a snarl. Despite her fear, she reminds herself that this is the side of Aemond she had been seeking, and leans into him, placing her hands upon his chest.

“I want you,” she whispers, gazing up at him pleadingly.

“Not here,” he sighs, his expression softening, as he gently grasps her hands in his, moving them back to her sides.

Though she remains outwardly calm, in spite of her disappointment, internally she feels so frustrated she could scream. The look she craves is gone, he has rebuffed her advances and she knows that once more she is destined to an evening where he will treat her as though she is made of bone china.

“I believe you were told to return to your quarters.”

The intrusion of Daemon’s voice causes Aemond to take a quick step backwards, away from her, as she turns to look. He stands before them in the corridor, posture rigid and chin raised up ever so slightly, giving the impression that he is looking down his nose at them both.

“We are on our way,” Aemond responds icily, drawing himself to his full height and staring down his uncle.

The smallest of smiles tugs at the corners of Daemon’s mouth, clearly unphased by his nephew’s hostile demeanour. “I shall escort you both, to ensure there is no further delay.”

Before either one of them has the opportunity to protest, he steps forward, one hand reaching for Aemond’s shoulder, while he places the other at the small of her back. Aemond wrenches away, huffing irritably as he continues walking. She makes no such effort to struggle away from Daemon’s touch, his fingers feeling like a brand against her flesh through the fabric of her dress.

The three of them walk in uncomfortable silence, the only sound is the echo of their footsteps against the flagstone floor. Her eyes widen in surprise when they reach her and Aemond’s shared chambers and, instead of bidding them goodnight, Daemon follows them inside, closing the doors behind them.

Aemond stares at him quizzically, eye narrowed. “What are you doing, Uncle? If you are here to reprimand me for what was said at dinner then–”

“I am here for your wife, actually,” he interrupts, turning his head towards her as his eyes move from her head to her feet and back up again.

She feels her skin grow hot under the intensity of his gaze, swallowing thickly as he regards her as a cat would a mouse.

“What do you want with my wife?” Aemond asks, his voice lowering in quiet threat.

It is the first time she has ever heard her husband speak of her so possessively and it makes her pulse race. She wants more of this, there is an intense thrill to having the attention of two Targaryen men placed solely upon her.

“Do not think I have not noticed,” Daemon says to her, ignoring Aemond as he continues to stare at her. “You have been ogling me all day. Why?”

Embarrassment prickles at her, and she lowers her gaze. Her voice is small and pitiful sounding to her ears as she answers. “Forgive me, My Prince. I did not mean to stare.”

“Look at me when you speak to me,” he commands, “and answer the question.”

She exhales shakily, lifting her eyes to meet his. His stare is piercing, his eyes darkened and predatory in the low lighting of her and Aemond’s apartments.

“I found myself…rather taken by how you engage with Princess Rhaenyra. You are quite affectionate with one another.”

Daemon’s brow furrows slightly as he cocks his head in curiosity. “Does your own husband not show you affection?”

A wave of sadness washes over her, causing her shoulders to sag at the reminder of the lack of intimacy between her and Aemond. She spares him a glance, noticing he has not moved from where he stands. His expression could be mistaken for neutral were it not for the fury that rages tempestuously within his seeing eye as he glares at his uncle.

Drawing in a deep breath, she looks back to Daemon, answering simply, honestly: “no.” Shame shrouds her, suffocating and dense, feeling the overwhelming urge to cry, her head dipping as she focuses on the spot where the hem of her skirts meets the stone floor. She cannot bear to look at either man, knowing she has spoken out of turn about her husband, not just in front of him, but to his uncle as well.

She gasps as Daemon steps forward, crowding her space, his finger crooking beneath her chin to lift her face up towards his. The touch of him makes her knees buckle slightly and she leans back against the table behind her for support, no longer trusting her legs to keep her upright. “What a brave little thing you are,” he whispers, an edge to his voice that twists her stomach into knots.

“I–I am sorry,” she stammers, eyes flitting nervously between her husband and his uncle. “I should not have–”

“There is nothing wrong with expressing your wants, your desires,” Daemon reassures her. “Perhaps my nephew just needs a little help in learning how best to please his wife?”

She squeals in surprise as he grasps the backs of her thighs, lifting her until she is seated upon the edge of the table she had been leaning against. Lips parted and eyes wide, she turns her head towards Aemond, and though his fists are clenched at his sides, his breathing accelerated in silent fury, he makes no move to stop what is happening. That look from earlier has returned, ravenous and half crazed, she interprets it as silent consent, wanting to do all she can to keep it fixed upon her.

“What of your wife? Will she not mind you…helping us?” She asks timidly, as Daemon’s hands make quick work of rucking her skirts up around her hips.

He chuckles drily in response, dragging her smallclothes down her legs, allowing them to dangle from a single ankle. “You and Aemond have much to learn, sweet girl. Fucking is a pleasure, and Rhaenyra does not mind how or with whom we seek it, as long as our loyalties do not falter.”

The very idea seems scandalous to her, yet wetness gathers between her legs all the same. Aemond has now taken up the seat beside the fireplace, watching them both intently, his stare unblinking and fiery.

Daemon’s fingers travel up her legs, until they reach the insides of her thighs. His fingers are thicker than Aemond’s, his touch is calloused and rough, where Aemond’s is deft, yet hesitant. His fingertips dig into her soft flesh, hard enough to bruise as he pries her legs apart, a hum of approval rumbling in his throat at the arousal he finds glistening there.

“Does your husband make you this wet?” He asks with gentle curiosity.

She nods enthusiastically, looking over at Aemond and seeing a small, prideful smile ghost quickly across his lips before disappearing.

“Good,” Daemon tells her. “No problems there then.”

His fingertips swipe through her sodden folds, his middle finger quick to locate her pearl and circle it with precision. The movement makes her tense, a jolt of pleasure causing her hips to buck as she mewls helplessly.

“Does he touch you like this?”

“N–no…” she whimpers in response.

“Hmm,” Daemon glances over his shoulder, before looking back at her. “Well, ensure he does in future. I am sure he will; he is paying close attention.”

Looking back over at Aemond, she feels herself clench around nothing, her desire building with a steady, rhythmic ache as she sees the lacings of his trousers strain against his hardness. He is enjoying watching this, lips slightly parted and eye hooded. The sight of it rids her of the last of her inhibitions as Daemon moves his focus away from her bud and dares to push his two forefingers inside of her. She tilts her head back, gripping the edge of the table tightly as she feels her muscles stretch to accommodate him.

“You must be prepared, thoroughly, before you are fucked,” he murmurs against the shell of her ear.

Her mind is foggy, struggling to comprehend Daemon’s words as he presses the pads of his fingers upwards, dragging them against a spot inside of her that causes her toes to curl and moisture to trickle down onto the tabletop. Does he really mean to fuck her? Surely that would be a step too far? Yet she finds it difficult to care when he is pushing her towards the precipice of pleasure itself with simply his fingers. Her mind reels with the possibility of what it would feel like to be stretched out around his cock.

As his fingers pump faster, she moves her hips in tandem, chasing the urgently building pressure that is growing inside of her. He pulls them from her suddenly, causing her to whine in frustration at being robbed of her peak.

Daemon grins wolfishly as his hands move to unfasten his breeches. “I think we have learned enough in that regard, and are ready to move on.”

She averts her gaze as he frees himself, her eyes finding Aemond’s, another silent check in for consent. His throat bobs as he swallows, his knuckles almost white with the force of the grip he has on the armrests of where he sits, but he makes no move to stop what is happening.

Her hands grasp at Daemon’s shoulders as he sheathes himself inside of her, knocking the air from her lungs. Aemond and his uncle are similar in many respects, but this is a matter in which the pair of them could not be more different.

It is odd to her that, despite being between her thighs, he has not tried to kiss her. Whether it is a mark of respect for hers and Aemond’s marriage, or simply because he does not want to, she is unsure, but she is grateful for his abstinence. A kiss seems too intimate a gesture, there is nothing sweet about this.

Daemon sets a brutal pace, once she has had a moment to adjust, rocking into her with a force that causes the table legs to scrape loudly against the hard floor. He is so much more self assured than her husband, utterly unafraid to violate her, and it is freeing to be handled so roughly.

She moans wantonly as he moves a hand to wrap around her throat, applying gentle pressure at the sides. “Do not be afraid to be a little unrestrained,” Daemon grits out, a statement clearly not meant for her, even though his eyes bore into hers. “I have yet to bed a woman who does not enjoy it.”

He has the right of it. The hand around her throat, coupled with the almost violent manner in which he thrusts inside of her is dizzying and, as he slips a hand between them to stroke at her pearl once more, she knows she will not last long. It has never been this intense with Aemond before; a lack of experience, coupled with a fear of hurting her means he is always gentle, hesitant where he need not be.

The grip on her throat tightens, the ministrations against her bud grow more insistent as she feels Daemon pulsate inside of her, his jaw clenching at the telltale sign that he is close. With a final, harsh thrust of his hips, she cries out in ecstasy as the warmth of his seed spills inside of her, triggering her own release as she tightens around him in rapid, successive pulses.

“Good girl,” he mutters quietly.

He is quick to pull out of her, as she leans back against her palms, pliant and breathless from the experience. She barely registers Daemon tucking himself away and slipping out of the chamber doors, as Aemond moves into view, standing before her.

Under ordinary circumstances, the wrathful insanity she sees reflected in his blue eye would frighten her, but tonight it has butterflies fluttering ceaselessly in her lower belly. His hand moves to the back of her head, gripping her hair tightly by the roots, tugging her head forcefully backwards. Her yelp of pain is stifled by him pressing his lips firmly against hers, his tongue licking against her own in a kiss that is more a desperate display of possession than a loving embrace.

“You are mine,” he breathes, letting go of her momentarily to tug at the lacings of his trousers.

“Yours,” she whispers back, satisfied excitement causing her pulse to thrum at the knowledge she has unleashed the side of Aemond she has always longed for.

Daemon’s spend has begun to dribble out of her, and as she watches the head of her husband’s cock push it forcefully back inside of her, she knows he will remind her every night from now on exactly which Targaryen Prince it is that she belongs to.

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bloomingflowersthings · 1 year

Note

Okay so here's my request!

Natasha was on a mission, and the guy she was fighting has mind control powers. Before the villain dies, he searches through Nats mind to see what she loves most, and ofc its R. He mind controls Nat to be unkind and mean to R for one full day. Nat is still herself inside, and is hearing herself say mean things and do mean things to R, and R is so confused and sad, and Nat feels so horrible and guilty. Maybe to make it sadder R is sick with a cold or something 😭 The next morning R is prepared for mean words but Nat apologizes over and over and explains. Insert fluffy happy ending 🤭 thanks for your time!

Sick of your attitude- part one

Pairings: Natasha Romanoff x sick! reader

Author’s note:This ask spent sooo many time in my askbox!! As soon as I read this idea, I had the whole story planned in my head but I couldn’t get the words out :’) hope you like it!!

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Dealing with Hydra facilities was never a easy task, but this mission had just been absurd. Natasha had to gather some intel from an abandoned laboratory, but she didn’t expect to encounter an enhanced scientist still working there. The man looked inoffensive, but he had mind controlling powers, so the widow had a really hard time fighting against him. She managed to defeat him, but before dying, he casted a mind controlling spell that would make the redhead be mean to the person who she loved the most for one full day. Unfortunately that person was you.

While piloting the quinjet, Natasha could only think about finally getting home, so she could see you.

ugh, she’s gonna be so needy…

Wait, what? no, she missed you and she wanted to cuddle you all day! where did this came from?

“I must be tired.” Nat mumbled to herself, trying to make sense of her thoughts.

Sighing to herself, she put the jet in autopilot, so she could maybe relax a little.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

You could hear some persistent knocking on your door, however, your fever riddled body couldn’t move and your hazy state didn’t allow you to call for help.

Yesterday you woke up feeling weird, but you pushed through it, since Nat was the piles of paperwork wouldn’t get done by themselves.

That was a very poor decision, you ended up the day laying down on the couch with a raging fever. At least Wanda tried to help you the best that she could, given the fact that you had always been stubborn about showing weakness in front of people.

“Y/N? can I come in?” Wanda asked. She woke up with the news that Natasha was coming home today, so she went to your room to check on how you’re doing and to cheer you up with the good news.

“Hmm.” You whimpered, as much as you wanted to tell her to come in, your sore throat only allowed to weakly hum.

Hearing your quiet whimpers and loud thoughts, the witch entered the room.

It was dark, your curtains were drawn and the TV was the only source of light and background noise. You were right in the middle of the bed, buried under layers of blankets, but somehow still shivering. Your chest made a wheezing sound whenever you breathed and you just looked miserable.

“Poor thing, I came over to see if you were feeling any better but I already know the answer.” She cooed, sitting crisscrossed besides you on the bed.

“hheh'tsh! Hu’tshhiew!” You sneezed on the crook of your arm, coughing slightly afterwards. The action was enough for Wanda to notice how congested you sounded.

“I really don’t like the sound of that.” Wanda said, bringing her hand to your forehead, frowning at the heat emanating from you.

You just nodded, whimpering when chills came over you.

“Do you know who’s coming home today?” She asked, running her hands through your hair.

“Nat’s coming home?” You asked suddenly, the action sending you in a fit of coughs.

“Shh… breathe, yes she’s on her way back now. What about you take a shower so we can get some medicine on you? I can make you some breakfast.”

“Thank you so much Wands, but I really don’t want to be a bother, I’m fine, really” You said, trying to untangle yourself from the blankets.

“You could never be a bother silly, and you know how much I love to cook, now go ahead and I’ll wait for you in the kitchen.” Wanda said, making her way to the door.

You took your time getting out of bed and stretching your heavy limbs. It felt like you had been hit by Mjölnir

You took a warm shower, washing and untangling your hair. You wanted to look at least presentable for your girlfriend and were hoping that it would help you feel more refreshed.

Shivering as you got dressed, you cringed at yourself in the mirror. Sure, you were clean but the paleness was obvious on your skin and it made contrast with your flushed cheeks, there were bags under your eyes and you just looked sick.

You slipped one of Nat’s hoodies and made your way to the compound kitchen.

“Hey! are you feeling any better?” Wanda asked, fixing herself some coffee.

“Yep, breakfast is looking good! thank you Wands.” In reality you weren’t feeling better at all, but you didn’t wanted to make a big deal out of it, so you were trying to follow your routine normally.

“Don’t mention it!”

You both sat down in a comfortable silence and ate your breakfast. Until Wanda got up to train.

“Just take it easy, ok?”

“I will, thank you for everything.” You answered.

You decided to sit down on the couch and watch some netflix until Nat arrived.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Stepping out of the quinjet, Natasha was relieved to finally be home. However she didn’t failed to notice that you weren’t waiting for her.

As she entered the compound, Wanda greeted her.

“Welcome back Nat, are you ready for another mission?” She asked jokingly.

“Don’t even joke about it, I’m exhausted.” She chuckled.

“That’s fair, you deserve some rest.”

“Have you seen Y/N?”

“She’s in the living room, she’s not feeling well since yesterday.” Wanda said.

“Don’t pay any attention, it’s probably all just dramatics.” Natasha stated bluntly, mentally kicking herself. What was wrong with her?

Wanda looked shocked. He never saw the widow being cold towards you. Even when you two were fighting, she would still be kind to you. However she decided not to push it, she could feel Nat’s mind going loud and dense, however her thoughts were muffled, almost if they were blocked.

“Okay then… go to sleep Nat, you need it.” He said, giving her a side hug.

She was too perplexed to say anything, so she just made her way to the elevator.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“Miss Y/N, Miss Romanoff just entered the compound, you asked me to alert you when she was back.” FRIDAY said, pulling you out of your light slumber.

You rushed to the door to greet her just as she entered the living room, and hugged her tightly.

“Hi love, I missed you” You said, not failing to notice that she wasn’t hugging you back. stepping out of her embrace, she looked coldly at you.

“You look like shit, Y/N.” Nat stated, walking towards the couch.

“Umm… yeah, that’s because I’m a little sick, but don’t worry, Wan-“

“Can you just shut up for a second? I just got home from a rough mission and you’re complaining about being sick.” She snapped, her heart aching with every insult she made towards you.

“Sorry, I know you’re tired Natty, I’m gonna be quiet.” You stammered, holding back tears.

Seeing how miserable you were made Natasha’s heart sink. You were sick and missing her and she was being a little bitch to you. But no matter how hard the widow tried, whenever she opened her mouth she’d say horrible things. So she decided to just sit with you in silence.

She tried to lay her head on your shoulder but you pulled away from her with a heartbroken look. “Don’t touch me.”

Nat went white at your request, realizing how much she was hurting you, she couldn’t understand what was going on. However, the anger that wasn’t her’s wanted to make itself known, and the redhead spoke up again:

“Do you really need to be a dramatic bitch? This is the last thing I want to be doing in my time and you know it.”

The look in your eyes turned from sadness to bitterness, prompting you to stand up for yourself.

“Look Nat, if I’m bothering you that much I guess I’ll just leave!” You managed to say before choking in a round of painful sounding coughs.

“Oh please, look at you! You can’t even take care of yourself! it’s ridiculous.”

You glared at her like you never did before while standing up:

“You know what, Romanoff? I don’t need you to nurse me, Im perfectly fine!! Actually, I was better when you weren’t home.”

You said as you exited the room, leaving Natasha heartbroken by her own attitudes.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

You’d spent the rest of the afternoon in one of the compound’s guest bedrooms, mostly crying. You were all emotional and most definitely running a fever, you just wanted to run away from everything but the exhaustion in your body wouldn’t let you.

Suddenly, your thoughts were interrupted by FRIDAYS voice:

“Miss L/N, I must remind that you have a meeting in half an hour, however you seem to be in distress. Do you need any help?”

“No thanks, I’ll be alright.”

As much as you wanted to ditch the meeting, it had been scheduled a week ago, and you didn’t wanted Nat to think that you were being dramatic, so you dragged yourself out of bed to try and look presentable.

Of course crying gave you puffy eyes and aggravated the redness around your nose, and the flush on your fevered cheeks had darkened. Not having time (or energy) to put on makeup, you decided to just wash your face and quickly braiding your hair. You got changed in a T-shirt, a thick hoodie and some joggers, Hoping that it would end soon ao you could go back in your PJs.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

You got to the meeting room right in time, but everyone was already there. The team noticed your lack of enthusiasm and decided not to push it, especially when you sat the farthest away from your girlfriend.

Natasha had a worried look on her face, you looked much worse than before and it was her fault. As much as she wanted to hold you and nurse you back to health, she knew that you were still hurt by her previous actions, so she gave you space.

As everybody settled down, Steve started the meeting. Everything was going fairly smoothly, just with some sneezes interrupting you, but your breath got caught in your throat, and it send you in an awful coughing fit. Wanda was sitting besides you and started rubbing your back, while the rest of the avengers glanced worryingly at you.

As much as Natasha tried to hold back her tongue, the words slipped out of her mouth:

“Would you stop it? I know you’re faking it.”

The conference room went silent and everyone looked shocked, until Steve sternly:

“Natasha, respect is essential if we’re working as a team. Tell Y/N you’re sorry or just leave the meeting.”

You went tense with the glare the redhead sent to you, even though she looked annoyed by the situation (in reality, she was annoyed with herself), there was an apologetic look in her eyes.

She wanted to apologize. But the mental block was too strong, so instead of risking saying anything else, she got up and left.

“M’ sorry guys…” You said, feeling bad for causing all of this.

“You don’t need to apologize for feeling unwell, but perhaps you should go to bed and sleep off this bug.” Steve said.

So you got up and made your way to the guest room, shivering the whole way there.

You grabbed more blankets and buried yourself under them, wanting to sleep your problems away.

#angst #whump #natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanoff x y/n #sickfic #natasha romanoff #sick reader

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r-f-m-writes · 19 days

Text

Pretty, Dead Animals Chapter One

The shimmering shift of tattoos over refined tendons of muscle made Linette feel like she was being hypnotized as she swept the man's card through the slot on the side of the machine, not even glancing at the amount due.

“Your boss ’s sick, so he leaves a little girl alone to deal with grown men all day? More of a shmuck than I thought.”

The genuine ebb of concern in his tone made Linette’s knees feel wobbly as she handed the card back.

The tip of his index finger brushed against the soft underside of her wrist as he took it from her.

“I can take care of myself.”

When he scoffed at her it wasn’t unkind so much as disbelieving.

"Yeah, kid. I’m sure you think you can.”

Linette’s stomach was swooping itself into hot, excited knots as she stood fixing her hair in the spotty restroom mirror, yanking brown waves out of the claw clip and fluffing out her roots before arranging the tangled mess over her shoulders in a way the looked half presentable.

It had been scorching hot the night before, she’d barely slept. Her under eyes were sunken and blue tinged, she felt groggy and deflated - the clothes she wore had been grabbed thoughtlessly off the top of the clean washing hamper.

Linette didn’t look good, at all, and he had just pulled his black Semi into the truck stop.

He, who had an American accent, a full sleeve of brooding black ink tattoos, and a defined five o'clock shadow that made something primal inside her purr.

He, who had blue eyes, brown hair, and a permanent scowl that etched itself into the center of all her silly, girlish fantasies for the last four months.

He, whose name Linette didn’t know, was mysterious and new and scary in a way that thrilled her from the inside out.

Who could blame a girl for craving something fresh in the monotonous nothingness that came with life in a desert town hours away from anything important?

The shrill ting ting ting of the little ringer at the counter being hit impatiently three times snapped Linette out of her fussing, the girl giving her hair one last pass over in the mirror as she called out.

“Coming!”

The door to the bathroom bumped heavily as Linette hurried out, pretending to dry her hands on the front of her singlet. Blush stung inside her cheeks as she walked toward the counter.

A grunt and the sound of heavy boots shifting on the floor came before his voice.

“Sorry, kid. Thought it was the old fella on today.”

The nickname heated her up. She almost fell over her own feet when the rubber soles of her sneakers caught on the slippery tiles. When she cleared her throat to speak, her voice came out in mumbles.

“ ‘s all good. Ben’s off sick, I’ve been holding down the Servo for him. Pump five?”

Linette lifted her head to look him right in the eye, acting braver than she felt.

He was wearing a cap, gray, with the name of some sports team she didn’t recognize embroidered on the front. His buzz cut had grown out since last time he was at the stop, five o'clock shadow turning into a real beard, all filled out, thick and dark with no irregular patches.

That was how Linette knew he must be older, much older, than her. Boys her age who were trying to grow out their first beards always looked scraggly and gross, like they’d cut off their pubes and glued them to their face in uneven clumps. His beard was nothing like that. He was nothing like that.

Everything about him was mature and distinguished, polished in a finish of radiant masculinity that made Linette want to sink into a dependent puddle at his feet.

Even his mesh of black tattoos looked classic, and tattoos were something that, right up until seeing him for the first time, Linette had absolutely hated; taking them as a red flag of insecurity and a person’s incomplete sense of self.

On him, they looked downright lickable.

Him being the most beautiful man she’d ever seen outside of a TV screen certainly helped compel her intense attraction - but, for Linette, his voice was the nail in the coffin. Low, slow, smooth and rumbling, tinged with an accent she didn’t know how to place. She wanted to listen to him talk for hours.

The spot between his eyebrows pinched as he stooped to lean his elbow on the counter. The cut off black teeshirt he wore looked like it was fighting to stay together around the bulge of his bicep as it flexed while he held out his card for her to take.

The shimmering shift of his tattoos over refined tendons of muscle made Linette feel like she was being hypnotized as she swept his card through the slot on the side of the machine without so much as glancing at the amount due.

The payment was approved immediately.

“He’s sick, so he leaves a little girl alone to deal with grown men all day? More of a shmuck than I thought.”

The genuine ebb of disapproval and concern in his tone made Linette’s knees feel soft as she handed him back his card over the counter.

The tip of his index finger caught off the underside of her wrist as he took it from her.

Linette had to lock her shoulders back to keep herself from shuddering.

Her voice was embarrassed and quiet in her throat when she replied. “I’m twenty one. I can take care of myself.”

When he scoffed at her it wasn’t unkind so much as disbelieving.

“Yeah, I’m sure you think you can. You got anything behind the counter? Pepper spray? A gun?”

He slotted his card back into a neat, folding leather wallet as he questioned her. Linette watched the deft flick of his thick fingers and suddenly her mouth felt dry.

“Nope. Have a panic button, though.”

Pushing the wallet back into the front pocket of his dark wash jeans, he let out a short, humorless huff.

“Panic button. Shit. What‘re you supposed to do between pressing that an’ waitin’ for the cops to pull up? Just gonna stand there, smile all pretty, hope some guy my size doesn't try to rob the place or do what he likes with you?”

Linette was struck silent by the question. She had wondered the same herself countless times, but never came to any sound, practical solution other than doing exactly what he had said; standing still and hoping nothing bad happened to her in specific.

She shrugged hopelessly.

He looked at her. It was a long, strange stare that Linette didn’t know how to understand.

Eventually, he shook his head and sighed.

“What am I gonna do with you, kid?”

#original male character #original character #original female character #original novel #ao3 original work #ao3 writer #ao3feed #dead dove do not eat #dead dove fic #prettydeadanimals #pda #PDA

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paperbackribs · 8 months

Text

Witch Steve

(working title)

next: Chapter 2: The Aftermath

So 👉👈 You were all so encouraging that I was inspired to write 14 chapters of Witch Steve. This will eventually be going up on Ao3, but while I'm finishing it up and re-editing I'll post the start of it all on Tumblr. Chapter content: steddie to come, platonic stobin, ~2K words.

Edit/Update: This is a 15 chapter fic. Ao3 here.

Chapter 1 The Sacrifice

Robin fiddles with the vodka bottle full of gasoline in her hands, “…in the face of the world ending, the stakes of my love life feel spectacularly low.”

She sighs, stuffing one of their rags into the mouth of the clear glass and completing their next Molotov cocktail. Steve watches the resignation on her face and thinks that if anyone deserves to have a moment of love and joy in the face of the world ending, it’s Robin.

It’s all of them, he reflects, looking out onto the grassy clearing.

The forest of trees behind Lucas and Erica reminds him of where they will be taking their battle to shortly. Vecna waiting in the Upside Down like a venomous spider in his web. Manipulating the troubled emotions and frightening visions of his victims, ready to break them in more than one way for his selfish desires.

Exuberant laughter draws his eyes over Nancy tailoring her weapon to Dustin as he dodges Eddie’s outstretched hands. Fondness rises within Steve like the warmth of rising bread. The fading sun frames the two boys as Eddie speaks earnestly into Dustin’s grinning face, the bond between them obvious even from here.

“Maybe it’s not the time for romance,” he admits, pensive as he watches Eddie tackle Dustin to the ground with a cackle. “But isn't love the most important thing when it is the end of the world.”

Robin knocks her knees amicably against his and he knows that this is her way of saying she loves him. He smiles back at her; he loves her too. He says it silently because he does, more than he can say at this moment. The words heavy and stuck at the back of his throat.

He wishes she could have had her moment with Vickie before they face the coming danger. The fragility of their situation leaves him with a disturbing feeling of unease churning in his gut.

It’s the fear of losing Robin that further feeds into Steve’s increasing sense of foreboding, making his teeth clench and nails dig into his palms. He has to Know, Steve decides; he needs to make sure there is hope for a later where love and romance can be indulged.

In the heart of the quiet afternoon, Steve allows the sounds of the boys roughhousing and Erica’s sharp, but not unkind, words to become muffled. While he relaxes his fists and Robin fades from his sight, Steve unfurls his uncanny gift to see into the murky depths of their futures. He hears a soft, haunting melody reaching out to him through the ethereal and a glimmering sheen covers his vision.

Like a weaver of fate, he gently unravels the white threads of destiny that intertwine around the lives of those he cherishes. Even Eddie, new to the party but just as entrenched in their fight, running scared; yet Steve thinks, just as courageously meeting the more experienced members toe to toe.

And it is only Eddie’s fate that gleams a terrible ox-blood red, a twisted tapestry of the future revealing a grim reality. Steve’s unease deepens as he Sees two roads diverging before Eddie, each leading to vastly different destinies.

One road, he is unsurprised to find, is golden bright and brilliant, full of joy, love, and friendship. This Eddie would be the guiding light for those he loves and who will love him just as fiercely as he holds them to his heart.

Steve swallows over the hard knot in his throat at the thought of all the beauty that is stolen if Eddie loses that path: because the other is shrouded in a terrible darkness.

If Eddie chooses this road, a jagged tear will be torn through the tapestry of too many lives. An unravelling thread that leads to the frayed fabric of its survivors in a way that Steve thinks the self-deprecating Eddie would never suspect.

Aside from family, only one other person knows Steve’s truth. Keeps his secret close to her breast, alongside twin confessions on a bathroom floor. Robin haltingly refusing Steve’s advances to favour Tammy Thompson and Steve blurting out that he comes from a long line of Witches. Taught at his nana’s knee and made to understand that this is something just as private to him as Robin understands her sexuality to be to her.

He watches Dustin’s wide smile, still innocent amongst a grim collection of dark moments, and Knows that this will be a turning point for his young friend. One in which Dustin lives a life spirited and mirthful or another irrecoverable scarred and linked to a critical event of grief and regret. A shiver runs down Steve’s spine and he decides he can’t stand idly by, watching as Eddie teeters on the precipice of these two divergent paths.

Drawing from long lessons of heritage and the power he and his kind hold, Steve decides on a potent action that will allow him to weave a new pattern.

---

Scarlet lightning roars in the darkness behind Eddie and Dustin as the boys wait for Steve, Robin and Nancy to depart and attack Vecna. The trailer behind the boys is tightly wrapped in the sinister vines of the Upside Down and the smell of sulphur rains down with the grey ash that coats the world in a bitter blanket. Steve watches the ghostly flakes drift onto the cloud of Eddie’s bound-back hair, and he knows that this is the moment that he readied for.

Steve reaches out to Eddie with his uncanny gift — a glass sphere, like a marble, is cradled innocently at the centre of his hand. It is as big as an apricot pit and strangely swirls with warm browns and flecks of gold, like the gentle play of sunlight flickering through to a forest floor. Steve holds his open palm out to Eddie, his hazel eyes filled with a heartfelt entreaty.

"Eddie," he asks softly, "take the marble and swallow it. Please, trust me."

Even in the short time that Steve has known Eddie, he gets that the other guy isn’t known for his impulse control. Despite this, he’s still somewhat surprised when Eddie, with no hesitation, takes the marble and swallows it down. Doe-eyed pools of warm brown look up at him through dark bangs.

“I do,” Eddie shrugs with a mysterious smile.

“What was that” Dustin shrieks, the faux military tags he had insisted on wearing jingling in agitation.

Robin stays silent behind him; Steve knows she’s holding her questions for later, having cottoned onto that he was up to something mystical when he’d hidden in the RV for a while. Only clasping his arm briefly in support when he had walked past, sweating and still pale.

Nancy though is just as surprised as Dustin and looks on at them suspiciously.

Eddie knocks an arm lightly into Dustin’s side, “I don’t know, but it tastes like hot chocolate. Warm,” he chuckles softly, “even comforting.” He turns questioning eyes back to Steve, “but, yeah, what was that?”

Steve feels how tight his smile is. “A little insurance.”

He talks to both of them, trying to instil them to obey by the force of his words alone. Knows that Dustin can be a stubborn little shit. “Just… if this goes south, I mean, at all. You abort.” But his focus turns, inevitably, to Eddie. “Don’t be a hero, man. Okay?”

A flash of emotion crosses Eddie’s face too quickly for Steve to understand before he slings an arm around Dustin’s skinny shoulders. “Of course, look at us. We are not heroes.” Under his hoodie and headband, Dustin grimaces in agreement.

The deep feeling of foreboding in his gut is untouched by their reassurance, but Steve doesn’t bother to unravel his Sight again. He’s done what he can and now he follows the girls to battle Vecna and maybe free them all from this nightmare once and for damn good.

As they travel through the dark forest, neither girl notices the small glowing pulse that Steve presses to each of them. The marks fade softly before the other can notice it. Transported by a light brush over Nancy’s tight shoulders and a firm squeeze of Robin’s sweaty hand in his.

The attack against Vecna is fierce but the three of them have never struck more certain or true. Steve with his axe, Robin and her cocktails, and Nancy with the shorn-off shotgun. Their attacks land every time and between their physical assault and Max’s diversion, something must go right because the world shudders once, then twice, but stays steady before Vecna screams harshly and his pale, grotesque body falls broken to floor. His web of terror finally shattered.

The rest of the decrepit house, vines and all, quickly catch from the blazing gasoline and the three stumble after each other, racing to the still-rancid outdoor air. But it’s air free of Vecna and that makes it all the sweeter.

With a whoop, Robin jumps into Steve’s waiting arms and breathlessly he swings her in joy. Resting his forehead on hers, he knows she can see every nuance of his relief, sensing him finally releasing the suffocating fear of the Upside Down. “This is it, Robin. I can feel it.” Steve exclaims.

Robin’s blue eyes, which sometimes can be so cynical for a person this young, gleam in belief. Belief in Steve and that he can See the truth of it all. She wraps her hands around his shoulders and is shaking in a combination of comfort and ebbing adrenalin. “Thank god,” she breathes.

“Let’s hope so,” Nancy interrupts. But she’s looking on at them with a small smile.

Steve knows it will take a long time for her to believe that it is true. And she doesn’t have the benefit of Steve’s Knowing as they do. But she’ll get there, he thinks. Much like it will take them all time to heal, they will. And the kids will bounce back, he thinks with faith. They’ve been made to be too resilient for children their age but he’s grateful for it, nonetheless.

It’s at the thought of Dustin that Steve remembers Eddie and those two paths he had seen; he urges the girls on, back to the uncanny version of the trailer park. Impatience sparking through to his fingertips.

They’ve not quite reached it yet when Steve hears the haunting cries of anguish that echo through the empty forest and roads of the Upside Down.

Dustin is hunched over the still-warm but devastatingly motionless body of his beloved Dungeon Master and friend. Bright red blood spills everywhere, coating Dustin's hands and across his face where he has smeared a hand over his cheeks. Eyes filled with tears and pain, Dustin looks up at Steve and cries out that the older boy had tried to save him.

“He said he didn’t run, Steve. But he did. He did. He ran to the demo-bats and they— they—"

Dustin starts hiccupping between tears and short, frantic breaths. He grabs at Eddie’s camouflage jacket, shaking the body as if it will jolt the older boy awake.

“Eddie!” Dustin cries. His voice, often bigger and louder than his short body would seem, breaks through the empty quiet of the Upside Down. No more swarming bats or jagged bolts of red lightning to distract from the palpable sense of grief saturating into their tired bodies. The only cruel answer is the flakes of ash gathering over Eddie’s unresponsive body like this terrible world is already trying to bury him away.

Steve’s heart is breaking, he feels the crack of it cleanly through his chest and in the thickening at the back of his throat and burning behind his eyes. But he is not powerless; this is exactly what he prepared for.

With a firm, yet gentle hand, Steve unlocks Dustin’s stiff fingers and shifts him into Nancy’s waiting embrace. She tries to turn him in her arms, but Dustin refuses to look away.

Nancy must think that Steve is going to quietly close the lids over Eddie’s blank eyes, which should be bright and expressive; eyes that were full of mischief just hours ago. Or that Steve will try to pick up the body and take it back with them, impossible as it seems in the moment, to think of carrying a heavy and limp weight vertically and against gravity where climbing through the Upside Down gates, with only their own bodies to support them, had been hard enough.

He’s not going to do any of those things, Steve thinks fiercely. He won’t need to.

With an unwavering determination, Steve drops to his knees and pushes his left hand down, through and deep into the realm of the mystical, until he finds an answering beat, a corresponding warmth. He pulls, straining with every ounce of physical and spiritual strength he possesses. A pearlescent light suddenly pushes out from Steve's link to Eddie, it pours unendingly into the dark landscape before pulsing sharply. The ethereal cuts precisely through the unclean atmosphere before rapidly shrinking back into the connection between the two boys.

Steve's own spirit is being drained, a live wire shooting up his arm and threading through every vein of his body in a white, blinding heat. But Steve knows that it is in this critical moment where he could lose his own body and soul, where the world hangs in the balance between life and death, that something miraculous can happen.

And it does.

Eddie draws a shuddering breath and his eyelids flutter open. His chest starts to rise even as his gaze looks unsteadily out into the living world once more.

“Steve?” he whispers hoarsely.

“I’ve got you, Eddie,” Steve murmurs, checking that the wounds are healing under the slick blood. His left arm is numb, but he uses the shaking right to examine Eddie’s torso where jagged gashes are rapidly closing over.

“It’s all right, we’ll get you help, you’re gonna be okay."

“No, Steve, your eyes…” Eddie lifts a shaking finger to touch Steve’s face, leaving a red fingerprint behind to mark Steve with the very essence of his mortal life.

Steve knows what he must see since this has worked. Because reality is not the same as when Eddie had closed his eyes for seemingly the last time. As Eddie returned from the brink of death, Steve now sees the world through one rich hazel eye, while the other will remain forever white and sightless, an eerie testament to the price paid to mend the shattered threads of destiny.

If you liked anything, please consider leaving a comment over on Ao3 :-) It would make my day!

Taglist

My taglist is always open so let me know if you want to be added. Likewise, if you want to be removed let me know too. :) If I've missed you, definitely let me know because it's an accident!

@a-gae-af-racoon

@a-lovely-craziness

@aly-reads-alot

@bookworm0690

@cinnamon-mushroomabomination

@everyrandomthing

@goodolefashionedloverboi

@hallucinatedjosten

@ilikeititspretty

@just-a-tiny-void

@ledleaf

@littlewildflowerkitten

@lostonceandneverfound

@manda-panda-monium

@matchingbatbites

@nburkhardt

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@obliosworld

@oliver-sykes

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@rajumat

@scoops-stevie

@spectrum-spectre

@tartarusknight

@whackyrach

#witchsteve #steddie #platonic stobin #stobin #stranger things #steve harrington #eddie munson #robin buckley #dustin henderson #paperbackribs writing

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eosincuffs · 5 months

Text

Now that I have a writing blog as well as a lurking blog I can finally showcase my appreciation to my favourite authors who inspired me to start writing.

This is a gift for @ceilidho because I am ready to commit arson for you <3.

Ikea!Soap/Creepy Coworker!Soap IS @ceilidho ‘s IDEA! FULL CREDIT TO HER IT IS SO FANTASTIC I WILL EAT MY SCREEN. There is so much juicy content on her blog iswtg I will combust. Adults go check it out you will not regret it!

- This is alternate AU where the Christmas party doesn’t happen, instead its New Years being celebrated. (We don’t celebrate Christmas here but New Years is a really big thing)

Not proof read.

1.1k words

TW Non-Consensual Contact | TW 18+ | TW Near Panic Attack

So anyways hehe on the theme of gift giving.

Shivers slowly trot down your spine, you feel a leaden punty of panic manifest itself in your diaphragm as you sweat cold like condensed metal. There’s eyes on you, there are always eyes on you. An unforgettable gelid pair of blue ponds surrounding a pinprick pupil that track you everywhere you go.

One would think you’d be used to Johnny’s attention by now, both kind and unkind. But recently he’s been acting especially unsettling. These past few days he doesn’t talk, he doesn’t help you throw out the trash, he just stares… and grins, his breathing heavy.

It started a few weeks ago, when you decided to work overtime to later take a little break and greet the New Years away from work, in the comfort of you own apartment. No one except management should have known of your plans, but of course nothing is confidential for their sweet golden boy. Soap sniffed out your shift change so fast you’d wondered if he had a past with drug abuse, as it was his arms that suffocated you on your second evening shift.

Stacking boxes your soul flinched out of your body when two limbs wrapped around your torso like snares on a hare’s neck. Even through the multiple layers of cloth you could feel the heat of his forearms on your abdomen, molten rock flowing through his veins keeping his muscles taught. His chest pinned yours against the steel frame of the fifteen meter shelving unit but the grip of his arms remained, forcing you into an awkward arching position as he curved himself over your back.

“Hey bonnie!”

The Scotts cheery voice all but lashed through the echoey establishment, like the crack of a whip. It’s dark, cold and wet outside, snow turning into slag tainting everything from cars to shoes, much like Johnny’s doing to you; ironic considering his callsign. But there’s practically no customers in conditions like these, meaning your coworkers wouldn’t need to come to the back to look for something, meaning your trapped in here, alone, with a man at least twice your size.

You don’t say anything back, still reeling from having your quiet, meditative moment interrupted by what feels like a hydraulic press. But there’s a soft yet hard object pressing to your front? You look down to see what it is but your own chest is smack dab against the shelving unit blocking your view. Your hips are arched away from it allowing him to adjust something? Is he measuring your torso? What’s happening ?

There’s too many things going on, heavy breathing in your ear, the heat against your back and the frigid metal against your front. One of his hands is moving something along your abdomen, another feels up your womb area and then your crotch? You yelp at that and are about to scream but he shoves you against the steel harder, and knocks the breath out of your chest, but his hand doesn’t go any further.

“Shh, shh, sorry pretty, just makin’ some introductions dinnae worry yer wee head about it”.

A clack resonates through the space, and less than half a meter away you can see a black marker cap rolling away on the floor. What the actual fuck is happening. He feels you up some more, then his hand moves back and forth horizontally as if to mark something and just like that he lets you go.

The situation lasted 3 minutes tops and yet now you know what sharks feel like when they’re pulled out the water, microchipped and thrown back in. You turn around and Soap’s got his back to you he’s kneeling down to pick up the marker cap, there’s something in his hand but its wrapped in white cloth. He closes the marker and rotates a little just to face you.

“Hope you’ve liked meeting your namesake, lass. I know she was honoured for sure!” He leaves then, laughing lightly to himself, flushed and giddy. Your namesake? Did he mean the-

It’s finally time for your much needed break from work, and certain blue eyed men with separation anxiety. At the end of your shift you carefully quick walk to your car before a hand on your shoulder stops you. Speak of the devil.

“Wey bonnie, why are ye in such a hurry to leave huh?”

You’re surprised he actually talked to you after weeks of silence, but you’re also exhausted.

“Soap, what do you need I-,”

He stops you mid sentence by thrusting a sizeable wrapped box into your hands, a charming, large blue bow sitting at the top, as if preening.

“I know yer takin’ days off, but I bought a lil somethin’ for ya. Hope you enjoy it, I really do.”

Well thats actually sweet of him. Granted you don’t know what’s actually in the box. But its still nice that he cared enough to give it to you!

He sends you off with a tight hug and a smirk; gleaming snarl in the night.

Back at your apartment you’re so hungry that you forget about his sincerity for a while. Before the reflection of the bow in your mirror catches your eye, you don’t have a lot of blue in your apartment and this one’s the same shade as his eyes.

A little excited you unwrap the box and lift up the lid only to freeze appalled when your greeted by a dick. It’s a dick, a cock in a box, Soap has gifted you a dildo. Yeah he’s mentioned you being irritated in the past, how a “good shag’ll put ye right in yer place,” but what the fuck.

Come to think of it, it’s strangely realistic: with veins and even moles. The heads a light pink and the base…looks like his skin colour.

Weeks ago, Soap was about a hair’s length away from having an aneurism when he looked at the fleshlight in his hands. A black line marking its plastic flesh, from his feeling up he reckoned that’s about where your womb should be. Quite clearly you wouldn’t be able to take all of him but he reckoned that’s nothing a little practice couldn’t fix. And hey, since he had a version of you to greet New Year’s with, why doesn’t he gift you a version of him that you can cherish too <3.

#cod x reader #dark cod x reader #dark soap x reader #full credit to ceilidho for Ikea!Soap/Creepy Coworker Soap #mature themes #john soap mactavish x reader #noncon contact #non-consensual touching #TW #cuffsdrabbles #gift for ceilidho #creepy behaviour #TW near panic attack #18+

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sneaky-geeky · 1 year

Text

What if everyone in Limited Life felt their time differently. Lives not measured only in minutes and seconds, but in something else. Something unique. Something that had followed them though all the games before, and now counted down to their next death.

(4,283 words)

———————————————————————

For Grian, it’s the sun. He has a sundial, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, and whilst he knows how to read it, he’s not exactly clear how it’s meant to show him how many hours he has left. As far as he’s aware, and he double checks just to be sure, the sun is moving just as it always has, and under a cloudless midday, there should be only the smallest sliver of shadow. But that’s not what he sees when he pulls it out to check. The shadow is long and dark and tells him that it’s barely past dawn. He triple-checks the sun again, just to be sure, but it remains high in the sky, and so he turns instead to the horizon. There, only visible when he squints, is another sun, smaller and coloured a deep, dark red.

It rises quickly as his hours tick by, and soon he doesn’t have to pull out the sundial to locate it, hanging ominously in the sky. Even at night it burns, its harsh light a counterpoint to the moon’s cold glow, and a constant reminder of his times slow passage. By the time he turns yellow it’s nearing its height and begins to burn almost as bright as the other sun which had continued its normal rotations through the sky. And then it begins to descend and as his final life approaches, he gets to witness the most beautiful sunset. This small red sun which represents each moment of his life lights the very sky on fire, a blood-coloured glow which dominates the sky through night and day. There’s no escaping it, with each passing moment it sinks further below the horizon, and the sundial he now holds in blood-coloured hands shows him precisely how little time he has left. His own mortality hangs above his head in glorious colours, but he knows the rules better than anyone and he will break them however he has to to extend that sunset a little longer.

———————————————————————

For Scott, it’s the stars. During the days he can almost force himself to forget that now more than ever before, they are all doomed to die, but as the night closes in he has no choice but to face reality. During the first hours of this game, he notices no change, the night sky remains as illuminated as it ever was. His first sign that something is wrong is as he idly traces a constellation, but his eyes are caught up short as he notices that a star is… missing. He tells himself that it can’t be right, he must be looking at them wrong, or there’s some cloud blocking his vision, but no matter how he squints the star is just gone, and it only gets worse from there.

Each night the deep black of the sky stretches further, with fewer and fewer stars to break up the unending void. With each passing minute, another one blinks out of existence. He even sees it happen a few times, his heartbeat beating in time with the ticking clock inside him causing another star to burn away. As the hours pass and even he, once known for his mercy, is forced to do whatever he must to hold on a little longer, Scott realises that he no longer recognises the sky above him. The stars have become few and far between, leaving only the unkind void watching over him. He fights under unfamiliar constellations now, and as his time reaches its final gasping breaths, those last stars abandon him too. When his time at last runs out, above him hangs only the unknowable.

———————————————————————

For Pearl, it’s the moon. From the moment this new world began she knew that. The first night, before even an hour had passed, it hangs heavy and full and bright above her head. Nights like this one always made it hard for her to sleep, when the clear moonlight illuminated the world in silvers, and she chose to not even try and rest, instead lying in dew-soaked grass soaking in the light. For a second it brings her back to nights far up in a tower, alone save for the furred warmth of a dog by her side, watching the skies for any sign that she was not to blame, but that was another world. Here it’s a fresh start, and despite knowing otherwise she can manage to convince herself that she has all the time in the world as a full moon hangs above her.

It’s only because she was watching the moon so carefully that first night that she notices the changes so quickly. Even as her first hours slip away from her, the moon does too. No longer does it light up the world quite so brightly, and she can only watch as each night it wanes further. Under a dull half-moon’s glow she reaches her yellow life, and her minutes begin to tick dangerously low. She no longer has the time to lie back and simply relax, and her nights are no longer a time of pale light. Instead, she hunts for extra minutes through half-cast shadows, trying to slow the waning of the slender crescent she sees above her. As her final hours approach its light abandons her too, only a new moon left to watch over the same old story of their struggle against the inevitable. As her final death approaches, she is left with only memories of the full moon’s glow, and the knowledge that she will do whatever she must to return it to its full glory.

———————————————————————

For Scar it is, ironically enough, scars. He’s never exactly been great at staying alive, and that fact is clear for all to see through the reminders of those deaths which mark his skin. He’s not ashamed of them though. He knows his strengths, and he’s an expert at spinning the most dramatic tales of how he got each wound. It’s a surprise then, when he opens his eyes in this new world and finds only smooth, unmarked skin. The others notice, but don’t seem to think too much of it so Scar trie s not to let it bother him either. “New world, new me”, he thinks to himself, mind already spinning with potential schemes. Only as the first hours begin to pass does he realise what it means.

The first one to reappear is a blast mark down his left side from a creeper which had caught him completely unaware. Next, as time continued to tick, was a jagged mark on his right calf, the remnant of a broken leg gained in a sandy ravine a long way from here. Every few hours it’s another one: the mark of an axe slashing across his back, burn marks across his chest, claw marks down his forearms where the zombies had scratched at him. He knows what the final one will be when his time has all but run out; a scar over his heart where the line which once connected him to a soulmate had been ripped away. His scars are a sign of what he’s survived, but as each one comes back he knows that they’re also a reminder. No matter how fast he talks, what alliances he makes, his time is running out, and he’s never been good at avoiding death for long.

———————————————————————

For Jimmy, it’s feathers. He’d always hated when the others had made fun of him, called him cursed, or doomed, the canary of these death games. Every time he swore it would be different, but every time he died first, and every time it got a little harder to convince himself that it was just bad luck. He finds the first one before an hour had passed, a pale-yellow feather, almost golden in the sun. It’s caught in his hair, and as he flicks it away he manages to convince himself that the colour was just a trick of the light and he’d simply gotten a little careless whilst killing chickens. They come more frequently after that though. In his hair, landing softly on his arms, a flurry of them when he shakes out his jacket to put it on. Once there’s a trail of them, beckoning him into the woods and the fact that he decided to spend that day safely within his base is entirely unrelated. At least he can ignore them when his time is plentiful, but as time slips away, the reminder of his curse becomes more obvious.

When he awakens on his yellow life, he is greeted by a pair of wings upon his back, the feathers as vibrant as the name above his head. He can’t fly, of course, but the wings remain, a symbol of his role that’s clear for all to see. For a while he almost thinks that that could be the end of it, he has become the canary and he never needed a timer to beckon him towards his doom. But then the feathers start again. They don’t appear from nowhere this time, every golden plume which drifts past him now comes from his own wings. With each step, each passing minute, he loses more, and each yellow feather he sees is only a reminder of his own tragic fate. By the time he becomes red, his bedraggled and bloodied wings are those of a bird caught in a net, destroying itself in its own desperate struggle to find freedom. Every time he swore it would be different, but now more than ever time was not on his side, and his struggles will only quicken his own death.

———————————————————————

For Tango, it’s… nothing at first. He hears the others muttering about it at the beginning, in between the chaos of gathering resources and making alliances: the changes they can feel coming over them as the clock begins to tick, the constant dread of feeling time slipping between their fingertips. He feels nothing of the sort though, if anything he feels good! He’s got friends, supplies, and at least part of a base. Maybe, he thinks, this time it will be different, and something good will come out of these games.

Or maybe that optimism at the start was the cruellest part of it all. Without that joy, he wouldn’t have been able to notice the creeping anger which began to replace it. He tried to reign it in, to laugh and play along with the rest of them in pretending that nothing was wrong, but with each passing hour his control slipped away. Old hurts he’d thought forgotten rose unbidden to his mind. Time begins to slip away from him and the desire for revenge gets harder to ignore, the urge to find all those who’d betrayed and destroyed and left him for dead grows stronger. He finds himself seething with anger, remembering the people he’d thought of as friends turning their backs on him, the slash of an axe against his back, a home in flames before him. He can control it for now, but he knows that by the time his name is as red as the mist which begins to cloud his vision, there will be nothing left of him beside the rage.

———————————————————————

For Etho, it’s fire of course. It’s always haunted his steps in these games, and it’s only natural that it continues to do so. They all knew that their time was running out from the very first second, but no one else seemed to feel it the way that Etho did. Even at the start he couldn’t stay still too long lest the heat got too intense, and he tried to stay close to the team he’d found in the hopes that the babble of their voices would drown out the crackling of the flames. At least in the Nether he could pretend the heat was natural (and if he flinched at the sound of the popping lava at least no one noticed), but as the hours slipped by it got harder to ignore.

The warm tropical water of this place could do nothing to cool the fire which seemed to creep up his veins, and sometimes he found himself wishing for the familiar press of cold snow walls against his back, if only to give himself a moment of comfort. As green slipped into yellow what was once an uncomfortable heat across the back of his neck, would become a constant burning that was far too familiar. Even through the mask, every gasp would become like breathing in smoke. The pink light of a sunrise on the waves would appear, just for a moment, like a flaming inferno reaching towards him. He could hardly bear to enter the forest when every other tree seemed to burst into fire as he passed by it. He’d learnt the hard way that when the flames began, they would only spread, and with each passing minute they would only burn hotter. He could run from it all he liked, but when the timer got low, he knew that everything would burn.

———————————————————————

For Bdubs, it’s a clock. This comes as a surprise to no one, and he happily shows it off to anyone who’ll listen. It’s little more ornate than the one he usually carries, the gold bright and polished with delicate creeping vines and fragile flowers engraved around its edges, but this too is no surprise. The clock had always been a gift to buy his loyalty after all, and his loyalty is a beautiful thing. He soon realises that a clock is all the others see, however. Just a clock, with no strings attached.

As his time begins to tick, it is only Bdubs who sees the blood. The stains which begin to mar its edges as time runs down, the scrapes and dents and scratches. It continues to tick despite the damage, each movement bringing him a little closer to death. He finds himself holding it even closer than he normally would, almost hypnotised by its steady and relentless movements. He can’t wipe away the blood, can’t fix the damage that his love and betrayals have done but at least he can track the passage of his time and know how much he has left to devote to another. When his name is green, and even as hours pass and it turns yellow, he will give whatever he can, but he knows that one day that clock will shatter. When the hour gets late, he will do as he always has. His loyalty is a beautiful thing but just as fragile as a delicate clock face and when the clock stops ticking, he will be alone. He knows time better than anyone but now it’s not on his side, and he knows from bitter experience that loyalty alone will not save him.

———————————————————————

Joel doesn’t care what his is. He’s never been in these games to win, not really, and if anything he’s just waiting for his timer to get low enough that he can shed these false pretences. He makes alliances, builds bases, pretends to be civil, but he knows that it won’t last. He’s only here to fight, to kill, to feel the thrill of the hunt once more. The first time he went to grab his shovel and looked down to find a sword in his hand instead, it was almost funny. As the time passed, and it happened over and over again, however, he began to get an idea of just how his minutes were being measured.

After a few hours it became a challenge to swing his axe into the trees, to not take a few steps over and swing it right into his teammates’ unsuspecting backs instead. As time wore on it only got worse. In every passing moment he saw opportunities to kill, and something deep within him ached to see so many chances not taken. With the descent into yellow he gained some freedom at least, finally had the ability to strike back, to sate the biting hunger inside him. But as the time continued to tick it would never be enough, each kill would only hold it back for a time and even as his own death drew closer he would have no choice but to hunt for one more kill.

———————————————————————

For Martyn, it’s eyes. At the start, it’s more a creeping feeling of being watched than anything else, but at least he can blame that on the general feelings of paranoia which accompany these games every time. But as his time gets lower, with each minute taking him closer to yellow, it gets worse. Peering eyes become leaves or clouds or simply nothing at all when he turns to look at them properly, but he knows what he saw, and these days his own eyes are the only ones he can trust. He’s played many parts over these games: the loyal hand, the ally in the shadows, the spurned soulmate, but through every life they have watched and as time ticks lower, they stop even attempting to hide it.

Eyes watch him from the darkness of each restless night, and his every day is haunted by the peering eyes of figures he can’t quite make out. He still struggles against his fate, pointless though it might be, but soon even the eyes of his allies flash purple as he passes them by and he knows that everything he’s doing is only entertaining them more. When the sky itself seems to blink at him he feels his time running out fast, knows that the show is almost over. He could kill, draw their gaze away from himself a time as they go instead to watch the suffering of another, but they will always return. When his time runs out, he knows he will be surrounded by eyes uncountable, and he will have no choice but to perform.

———————————————————————

For Cleo, it’s flowers, and the rot which inevitably destroys them. For the first few hours they bloom wherever she goes, blossoms of blue and orange which follow in her footsteps. They find them creeping through the cracks in the makeshift base they’ve created, leaves and vines finding any gaps in the foundations and pushing inside. As their hours decrease, the flowers only increase in number. Trees seem to come into blossom as she passes, and if she spends too long in one place it becomes a riot of multicolour petals. She knows these games though, and from what she’s seen there are only two constants: decay and death. Alliances rot, leaving behind only hurt and thoughts of revenge, but even those teams which stand the test of time will eventually crumble as death claims them. There is no escaping the slow and steady passage of time.

As their name turns yellow, so too do the flowers which follow them, a sickly yellow which spreads across each petal. A creeping rot which withers the vines and eats away at everything it touches now follows her. Within just a few hours the flowers which still manage to grow in their path crumble like ash at even the softest touch, and instead of the colours, in her wake she leaves only grey decay. Time slips through her fingertips, life turns to death, and it is no longer only the flowers they created that decay away, but the entire world. Now the trees are brittle beneath their hands, a dark rot pressing up from beneath the bark, and when they stand still the ground rots away beneath their feet. By the end she is as grey as the dead world in which she finds herself, only her heart still beating a bright vibrant red. But whilst all else has decayed away, they still stand strong, and will continue to do so until the final hour.

———————————————————————

For BigB, it’s the shadows. The days are bright in this world, and it’s certainly warmer than any of the other times they’ve played these games, but even from the first day he can’t shake the feeling that it’s not quite as bright as it should be. Beneath the thick cover of the dark oak forest the dappled sunlight hardly seemed to reach him, and even out in the open fields there are shadows where there shouldn’t be. In another life he would have welcomed them, the shade providing cover for clandestine meetings and secret soulmates, but here it’s like the shadows are beckoning him and he doesn’t want to know what would happen if he listened to their call. If anything, the night is a relief, at least then he can convince himself that the darkness is natural, but each dawn the sun rises, his time ticks lower, and the shadows get a little darker.

As the hours pass, he realises that it’s not just in his imagination. Not only are the shadows deeper and blacker than they should be, they really are reaching out towards him, trying to pull him into their void. It doesn’t matter where the sun is, the shadows always lean his way and even down in the caves torches are no longer enough to banish the darkness. He knows his time is really running out when they begin to move. Shadows begin to writhe along the ground, cutting through the light like ink as they try to reach him. There’s nowhere left to run where they will not find him, and with the final minutes passing him by, he hasn’t got the time to left to search for another solution. It’s a familiar feeling, killing out of desperation to save his own life, but it’s a decision he’s made before and will make again if it buys him another few minutes in the light.

———————————————————————

For Impulse, it’s a pocket watch. He’s almost insulted when he first sees it. At first glance it’s a little too similar to a golden clock, glinting in the sunlight as he’s betrayed yet again, but as he inspects it again he realises that the similarities are only superficial. The face is beautiful in its own right, a delicate design of brass and a soft ticking noise which accompanies each movement of the second hand, but he’s more interested in what lies beneath it. When he finally manages to get some time alone and unscrew the back, however, the redstone inside is like nothing he’s ever seen, and even with his impressive talents, he can’t make heads nor tails of the miniature moving pieces. He spends some time fiddling with it, trying to understand the inner workings and figure out a way to quietly wind it back every now and then to give himself a little extra time, but whatever he does, the minute hand continues to move steadily forward.

For a while he thinks that’s the end of it, a complex little pocket watch that he always keeps close at hand, but as the time begins to pass, he realises that the ticking he can hear doesn’t originate from that at all and it’s only getting louder. It comes from all around him, the ticking of a life slowly running out, and soon it's impossible to ignore. With each tick, all he can think about is everything he has left to do: the allies he will leave behind, the plans left unfinished, the old enemies who still walk unpunished. He can’t die yet, but still the seconds pass him by. As the pocket watch he can hardly bear to put down draws closer and closer to its final chime, the ticking in his ears sounds more and more like a heartbeat, drowning out all else. It’s never been clearer to him that his time is limited, but he has never been one to leave things unfinished, and there are still things that must be done before the end.

———————————————————————

For Skizz, it’s only being able to watch as he is quietly and slowly abandoned. It’s something which has become all too familiar to him through these games. An army behind him, standing back and watching him charge in alone. A team he created, led, and then died for refusing to help him. But he was nothing if not an optimist, and at the start it was easy to convince himself that this time it would be different. As his friends gathered around him, announcing themselves his bodyguards, and promising to protect him he couldn’t help but laugh along, and even as he died again and again, he didn’t blame them. Their good intentions didn’t last long though, the good things never did in these worlds.

As his first few hours were stolen, he could see their attentions slipping away from him, leaving him unguarded once again. They weren’t doing it on purpose, he was sure, but as his time got lower it was like all memory of the alliances they’d once had begun to slip away. Even by the time his yellow life began, it was like the friendships he’d tried so hard to maintain were eroding, and he could only watch from the sidelines as the others fought to protect one another. He had never betrayed, had always given everything he could to his team, yet this was apparently his reward. Left behind by the very people who’d once promised to save him, his hours run down faster and faster. Then he really is alone, the others apparently forgetting that they’d ever been allied at all. Abandoned and afraid, he realises that there’s no one else he can rely on.

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sgtjamesrogers · 1 year

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Been Too Unkind

Rated: T | roy x jamie | post episode: 0308: We'll Never Have Paris [also on ao3]

Roy’s alarm goes off at 3:40 am the Monday after their Sunday match right on schedule, and when he rolls over to his nightstand and switches it off, the next notification is a reminder from his calendar.

After his eyes adjust he sees ‘PHOEBE DAY’ in all caps, with three swords emojis and a snake emoji after it. Roy had let her pick out the emojis.

“Fuck.” He sits up out of bed in the dark, fiddling thick-fingered through his phone to press Jamie Tartt’s contact and then ‘call’. It occurs to him, his brain slowly waking up as he listens to the line ring, that he could have sent a text. Jamie is always awake and ready to go now when Roy shows up for training, these days.

Too late, Jamie’s already picking up before Roy can think too hard about it.

“...Coach?” He yawns into the phone from the other end. “You’re like, forty minutes early. And calling me. You don’t call me. Did you get hit by a car on your way? Nah, no you didn’t. You’d still show up, wouldn’t you, holding someone’s bumper and saying summat like ‘Move your ass Tartt, I have some new weight training for you to do’.”

He sounds sleep-raspy but still manages to tip some more gravel into his voice for his Roy impression. Tragically, it’s not half bad.

“Was that supposed to be me?”, is what Roy says out loud. “You made me sound like Eeyore.”

“Ain’t that you?” Jamie responds breezily, the sound of a tap running water into a glass somewhere in the background. “Anyway, what’s going on? I haven’t even mixed my pre-workout yet.”

“Oh, right,” Roy says, and then continues gruffly, “I’ve got my niece today, she’s off school. We’ll have to cut training short.”

“Can’t you just strap her into a baby bjorn and we’ll take her with?” Jamie asks, the clatter of his blender bottle like a cup full of Yahtzee dice. “She’s like, two, isn’t she? How much could a toddler weigh? Two stone at max, I bet.”

“No?” Roy says, making a face. “Add five years to that. She’d hate it, and her legs are too long.” He shoves his sheets off, his free hand automatically feeling out the muscles above his knee like he’s making sure he has enough gas in the tank of his car. They feel loose enough, so he hefts himself out of bed.

There’s a long pause before Jamie smacks his lips into the phone receiver, the prick. Roy can almost smell the neon green sour whatever of his pre-workout. “Hold on, I might have something else.”

---

Fair is fair: the pedicab driver is easier to bribe than Roy expected.

Or perhaps ‘easy’ isn’t exactly the correct term, seeing as Jamie’s pocket ended up roughly five hundred pounds lighter by the time the driver seemed satisfied enough to hand over the cab to them, followed by a warning that he had a GPS marker tacked on, so ‘no funny business!’

“What funny business would we do with a cycle rickshaw anyway?” Jamie asks, turning to put his words over one shoulder.

The little shit’s not even out of breath yet; pedaling with his elbows propped lazily on the handlebars as he prepares to make a righthand turn at the next intersection.

“Oh, I dunno, scamming tourists hundreds of pounds for fucking taxi rides while playing whatever this is—” The inlaid speakers on the passenger wagon are vibrating faintly as they play a hellacious club remix of Karma Cameleon. “—at top volume with stupid flashing lights and feather boa trim, that sounds like funny business to me, fucking HELL!”

The wagon of the pedicab lists dangerously to the left side as Jamie takes the corner too quickly, the shiny silver Jaguar behind them honking repeatedly and at length. As soon as Roy feels like he’s not going to slide right out of the cab and go rolling across the pavement like he’s an extra in John Wick, he twists around to give the Jag’s driver the finger.

“If you get me killed, I’m killing you next,” Roy says shortly, checking his phone. A quarter to nine. “Take a left up here.”

Unfortunately for Roy, Phoebe is just as ecstatic as he thought she might be when they pulled up.

“Uncle Roy! I always wanted to ride in one of these, Mum always says they’re not for us, they’re for fleecing tourists.” She hops up into the wagon of the pedicab next to Roy, bouncing a little with excitement on the seat.

“That’s exactly what they’re for,” Roy says. “Tartt’s gonna pedal us around as part of his training, then we’ll get late breakfast at McDonald’s. Sound good?”

Turning around on his bicycle seat, Jamie gives her a jaunty little salute and a grin. “I’ll be your driver for today, miss. Any musical requests or sights you wanna see, you just let me know.”

Phoebe looks from Roy to Jamie skeptically and back again. Roy helplessly remembers every time he’s complained about Jamie Fucking Tartt while utilizing every curse under the sun, as well as making up some of his own curse words. Like a deranged Looney Tune. He gives her a wincing sort of smile in return.

Roy’s niece turns primly back toward Jamie.

“Do y’have any Little Mix or Jorja Smith?”

---

They make it through the DNA album and get partway into Salute before Roy takes pity on Jamie and has him stop in front of the McDonald’s on Eden. It’s not quite mid-morning and there’s a shambling group of uni students already queued up inside, looking so violently hungover for a Monday at 10 am that even Roy feels a little nauseously sympathetic.

Roy sends Jamie inside and attempts to send his card with him, but Jamie waves him off with a roll of his eyes.

“Put that away old man, I’m good for three McMuffins,” he laughs before heading inside to join the crowd. Roy doesn’t realize until after Jamie’s walked off that he didn’t even try to fight him on it. There’s something a little discomfiting about that, but Roy can’t exactly put his finger on why.

“Is he your new Keeley?”

Roy whips around to look at Phoebe so quickly that he feels a crick in his neck. She’s looking up at him with a squinting expression, not quite unimpressed so much as mystified.

“No one could replace Keeley,” he says quickly, something like a little minnow of panic swimming through his guts while he looks at her.

Even the fucking abstract concept of Keeley brought up unexpected is calling to mind standing in the Nelson Road car park and feeling words rolling out of his mouth like vomit while he asked for details he did not need, because he’d let himself think that assuaging his own culpability was more important than her privacy. If he hadn’t deserved her before, he certainly didn’t now.

Roy takes as deep a breath as he can, and rights himself. He looks at Phoebe sideways. She deserves to have a Keeley, even if he doesn’t. “Is that what you think I’m doing?” Just like Jamie, she rolls her eyes at him.

“That’s not what I mean. Mum says old people don’t really use ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’.” Her expression goes a little disapproving. “Boys can like boys, Uncle Roy. Don’t be silly on purpose.”

Roy puts his hands up in exasperated surrender. “I know that boys can like boys. Girls can like girls, for that matter.”

Phoebe crosses her arms. “Obviously. Keeley and Jack took me to the Science Museum last weekend. Her new Uncle Roy,” she adds, confidentially.

Closing his eyes, Roy counts to ten. Considers praying. “You didn’t call her that, did you?”

Worryingly, Phoebe doesn’t address that question. Instead, she looks inside the McDonald’s, and Roy follows her gaze. Jamie’s waiting for their food, and while Roy and Phoebe look on he visibly checks their order number on the ticket in his hand and compares it with the orders on the overhead screen. They watch him do it three more times in the next minute, as if he’s concerned he might have forgotten their number.

“See! You’re smiling!” Phoebe accuses him before he can look away. He looks down at her and resists the urge to clap a hand over his own mouth.

“I’m allowed to fucking smile,” Roy grumbles.

She crosses her arms, her earlier prim expression returning. It reminds him of Keeley when she knows she’s one hundred percent correct and is being horribly polite about it while she waits for Roy to figure it out.

“He’s different than you said,” she hedges. “He hasn’t been a selfish moronic cunt or a shallow fucking idiot this entire time.” She pauses. “There was one more you used to call him a lot, but I can’t remember it. It was really good, too.”

“You should probably forget the first two as well,” Roy says ruefully with a sigh. “...alright, he is different than he used to be. I’ll give you that.” It’s something that Roy knows in an abstract sort of way, but having his niece call it to his attention brings back that discomfited feeling from earlier.

Before he can get any more words out, Jamie’s back and distributing wrapped sandwiches. He pauses when he hands one off to Roy, tilting his head.

“Why’re you looking at me like I just shot your dog?” He shoots a horrified look at Phoebe as soon as the words are out of his mouth. “I mean—” Jamie attempts a smile as he reaches back into the bag and offers her a bottle of Tropicana. “Orange juice?”

“I like this one,” Phoebe says decisively to Roy, nodding at Jamie as she accepts it.

After breakfast, they head to the park and give the pedicab a rest. Phoebe sprawls on the grass reading The Phantom Tollbooth while Roy has Jamie run drills in the springtime overcast sunlight, and Roy feels prickly with awareness in a way he hadn’t before.

It’s as if his eyes are independent of his brain, and they just keep noticing. The bunch of Jamie’s shoulders. The tendons that leap out at the back of his hands as they flex. The wrinkle of his nose as he uses his shirt sleeve to wipe his face.

Roy’s not quite angry that he’s noticing all of this, but perhaps it’s frustration that it’s happening now. He’s had all the time in the world—from their shared locker room to now—to see these things and now his brain is treating them like an I Spy sort of puzzle book.

“Show me that one again,” Roy says after he’s sat next to Phoebe to check in on her reading, “It needs to be quicker.”

“And I thought you weren’t even paying attention, Coach,” Jamie tosses out with a grin, but dutifully runs through it as directed.

Roy wishes he wasn’t paying attention.

---

“Alright, what do you say to Tartt, then?” Roy prompts as she exits the pedicab and starts hopping up Roy’s front steps. The midday sun is high overhead as the clouds part for a few minutes, and Roy figures he ought to make her lunch from home after having fast food breakfast.

“Thank you Jamie for pedaling us around and also for the McDonald’s,” she sing songs. Her clear plastic backpack clunks against her back as she waits for him at the door, hopping on the balls of her feet.

Jamie grins as he gives her the same cheeky salute from this morning. Roy tries not to look at him too hard where he’s sprawled across the handlebars again. “You are very welcome, a girl with good music taste is always welcome in my cab.”

“You don’t have a cab,” Roy grouses as he follows after her. “You half-borrowed, half-stole this one.” He’s halfway up the steps and expecting a joke, a retort, even a goodbye—anything but a hand on his elbow, halting his movement.

Roy looks back at Jamie. Down at the hand on him like it’s a wet tentacle wrapping around his arm. Back up at Jamie.

He’s not even bothered, the fucker. He just points down at Roy’s shoes.

“Laces are undone. You can’t afford a fall, grandad. That’s when they all start going, you know. Real dark ‘beginning of the end’ business.” Jamie lets him go, and Roy relaxes. He’s in the clear.

Jamie takes a knee at Roy’s feet. Bending forward, he grasps Roy’s dirty shoelaces and makes them into bunny ears before he ties them neatly and double knots them.

While he’s bent over, Roy can’t stop staring at the tiny short hairs at the back of Jamie’s neck, at the barely there tan line from a necklace, at the faded roots of his highlights where they’re grown out from the crown of his head.

Roy’s hands flex at his sides.

After neatly and unnecessarily retying Roy’s other shoe, he looks up at Roy with a grin that crinkles his eyes. Roy feels like only weeks ago (months ago?), the sight of it made his blood boil and made him assign Jamie adjectives like ‘conceited’ or ‘arrogant wanker’.

Now he sees it spreading over Jamie’s lips and feels like he’s missed a step walking down the stairs.

“There, all safe now.”

Roy has never felt less safe, somehow.

#ted lasso #roy x jamie #royjamie #jesse writes fic #my fic #grips the sink and stares into the mirror......... Who Am I

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nightcovefox · 4 months

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Beauty And The Beast

Hello there! Foxy/Night here who created another story! As you read the title yes, but Mr Dark x Beep-O ship! Hopefully, you all enjoy reading this first chapter! I will add a second chapter if this gets to 15 likes. (Not bluffing)

Warning: Bad Grammar, I was too tired to check any grammar or misspelling mistakes. Throughout this story/chapter some characters will be out of character. And some fluff (Who doesn’t love fluff?)

Ships: Sullivan x Jeanie and Mr.Dark x Beep-O (In one of the future Chapters~!)

Enjoy Reading! (This is a musical you have been warned.)

Chapter 1: Prologue

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Once Upon a 'Time in a faraway land, a Old King lived in a shining castle.

Although he had everything his heart desired, the King was spoiled, selfish, and unkind. But then, one winter's night, an old beggar woman came to the castle and offered him a single rose in return for shelter from the bitter cold.

Repulsed by her haggard appearance, the King sneered at the gift and turned the old woman away. But she warned him not to be deceived by appearances for beauty is found within. And when he dismissed her again, the old woman's ugliness melted

awav to reveal...

...a beautiful Enchantress.

The King tried to apologize, but it was too late. For she had seen that there was no love in his heart. As punishment, she transformed him...

...into a hideous Beast and placed a powerful spell on the castle and all who lived there.

Ashamed of his monstrous form, the Beast concealed himself inside his castle with a Magic Mirror as his only window to the outside world.

The rose she had offered was truly an enchanted rose, which would bloom for many years.

If he could learn to love another and earn their love in return by the time the last petal fell, then the spell would be broken. If not.. he would be doomed to remain a Beast for all time.

As the years passed, he fell into despair and lost all hope. For who could ever learn to love a Beast?

~3 Years Later~

“I’m off to the bookstore!!” shouted a robot with rabbit ears, wearing a white sleeve shirt, around his shirt collar was a black bow, and he was wearing black pants with blue trimming at the bottom. Also, wearing black shoes.

“Be back by 11 Beep-O!!” his sister declared from the other room. “Right. Right. Bye see you later Jeanie~!” said Beep-O taking his satchel bag and putting it over his shoulders. “Bye Papa! Stay safe!” said and small t.v robot.

“I will. Take care of your aunt and Spawny for me,” said Beep-O patting his son’s head. “Mhm!” he hummed. “R2!!! Can you please come over?!” shouted Jeanie from the other room. “Coming!!!” he yelled back.

R2 hopped out of his seat and ran over to where his Aunt was. “Alright, let’s get this chore over with..” the intelligent robot muttered.

~Cue Birds Singing~

Beep-O walking away from his house, twirling himself self around and sing, “Little town.. It's a quiet village.. Every day.. Like the one before.. Little town full of little people

Waking up to say..”

Beep-O walking in town hearing many Toads/Rabbids/Koopas/Goombas/Creatures singing, “Bonjour!”

“Bonjour!~” sang a Toad opening her window.

“Bonjour!!” a Goomba open their Apple Stand.

“Bonjour!!!” a Paratroopa opened their Newspaper stand.

“Bonjour~!” a Drybones was in his jail.

“There goes the baker with his tray like always the same old bread and rolls to sell..” sang Beep-O seeing a Red Toad carrying his karts of bread, passing by Beep-O saying a short ‘hello’

“Every morning just the same since the morning that we came to this poor provincial town..” Beep-O shook his head. The same Red Toad walked up to Beep-O and said, “Morning Beep-O!”

“Morning Monsieur!” he replied back.

“Where you off to?” he asks.

“The Bookstore,” he answered, “I just finished reading the most wonderful story!! About a Princess who got kidnapped by a K-” he explained, but got cut off by Toad saying, “That’s nice, Cloud! The baguettes! Hurry up!!”

Beep-O sighed and continued his walk his way to the bookstore. Passing by some Toadettes. “Look there he goes that boy is strange no question!” they sang.

“Dazed and distracted, can't you tell?”

“Never part of any crowd

'Cause her heads up on some cloud”

“No denying he’s a funny lad that Beep-O!!”

“Bonjour!” a Koopa greeted the Toadette.

“Good day!” a young Toad lifts his cap, greeting the elderly woman respectfully.

“How is your family?” a Goomba asks politely to the other Goomba.

“Bonjour!” a Hammer Bro greeted a Rabbid.

“Good Day!” a Toadette sighs, “How is your wife?” she asks the Shy Guy, who got smacked in the head.

“I need six eggs!” wailed a female Koopa, trying to carry all her kids.

“That’s too expensive..” a male toad mumbled looking at all the jewelry.

“There must be more than this provincial life!!!” Beep-O sang, finally arriving at the Bookstore.

The door swings open, and the bell rings as G.G stops what she’s doing and looks over to see her friend. “Ah! Beep-O! Good Morning!” she chimed. “Good morning, I've come to return the book I borrowed..!” said Beep-O handing her back the book. “Finished, already?” she chuckled.

“Ohhh, I couldn't put it down!! Have you got anything new?” he asks, climbing on the ladder, searching for new books to read.

G.G shook her head, “Nope! Not since yesterday!!” she said, setting the book down. “That’s alright!” he said, picking up a blue book. “I’ll borrow this one!!” he exclaimed. “That one?! But you read it twice!!” she said.

“Well, it's my favorite

Far off places, daring swordfights, magic spells, a prince in disguise!!” said Beep-O moving his whole body, the ladder rolling left and right.

G.G chuckled, “If you like it all that much, it’s yours!”

“But G.G!!-” Beep-O exclaimed, climbing down.

“I insist.” she said, “Go on a thank you for being a great friend.”

“Thank you G.G..!! Thank you very much! I will repay you!!” said Beep-O, leaving the bookstore and passing by nosey Rabbids who were watching this whole scene.

“Look there he goes that boy is so peculiar?”

“I wonder if he’s well?”

“With a dreamy far off look and his nose stuck in a book!!”

“What a puzzle to the rest of us, is Beep-O!!!”

Beep-O sitting on the stone fountain, showing some young Rabbids are his favorite chapter. “Ohhhhh, isn’t this amazing?”

The Young Rabbid children look over at the Chapter. Very confused about what's written on it. “It's my favorite part because you'll see..” as he pointed to the picture, showing the children. “Here's where she meets Prince

Charming.. But she won't discover that it's him 'til chapter three..”

“Now it's no wonder that his name means 🎶🎵🌟❣️” said an Old Lady, tightening her curls. “His looks have got no parallel.. But behind that fair facade, I'm afraid he's rather odd…” she murmured.

“Very different from the rest of us

He's nothing like the rest of us

Yes, different from the rest of us is

Beep-O!!!”

A bunch of Ducks were flying in the sky, heading their way south, until a loud Bang can be heard. Shooting that poor duck…

The duck fell to the ground, but was picked up by a flatter(?) Rabbid. Woodrow sighed, “Poor Duck.. I will write a poem for you later..” he mumbled. Putting the duck in the bag quickly. “Wow.. You didn't miss a shot, Phantom!! You're the greatest hunter in the whole world!” Woodrow praised his friend.

Tom Phantom chuckled, “I know~” he smirked. Polishing his gun. The Tom Phantom. The famous Beast Hunter. He may be a ghost, but uhhh- Hmmm. What can he do? Float through walls? Yeah, that checks out. (Imagine a Siren singing and leading you to your doom)

“No beast alive stands a chance against you!!!” he said, “And no boy (and girl) for that matter!!”

“Its true Woodrow..” he mumbled, fixing his sleeves. He wrapped his arm around Woodrow, pulling him closer. “And I've got my sights set on that one,” he said, pointing his gun at Beep-O.

“The- The inventor’s brother?!” he stuttered in shock.

“He’s the one!” he purred. “The lucky one, I’m going to marry!!” he declared.

“B-But h-he’s-”

“The most handsome and intelligent boy in town~”

“I-I know, b-but..”

“That makes him the best.” He growled, glaring at Woodrow. Poor Woodrow his legs were shaking in fear. “And don’t I deserve the best?” He asks his partner. “W-Well.. o-o-of course y-you, d-d-do..!” He stuttered.

Tom Phantom dropped Woodrow. Woodrow face-planted on the ground softly whimpered a small ‘ow’

“Right from the moment when I met him, saw him

I said he's gorgeous and I fell here in town, there is only he, who is beautiful as me

So l'm making plans to woo and marry Beep-O~” he sang.

(Skiping The Girls who simp for- You know-)

“Bonjour!!” a Rabbids greeted Tom.

“Pardom.” said Tom Phantom trying to push his way towards Beep-O.

“You call this bacon?!” sneered a Blue Toad, holding straps of burned Bacon.

“What lovely grapes!!” a female Dry bones exclaimed.

“Some cheese, ten yards

One pound!”

” ‘scuse me!!” Tom Phantom grumbled.

”I’ll get the knife!” A younger Toad exclaimed. (Haha- Mom: What do you have there?

Gaz: A KNIFE!!

Mom: NOOO-)

“Please let me through!!” Tom pleaded.

“This bread, those fish-“ a female Rabbid pointed at the products.

“It stales. They smell.” A shy guy cross their arms.

“Madame’s mistaken-“ A Koopa said. The Rabbid agreed to him, “Well, maybe so-“

”There must be more than this provincial life…!” Beep-O sang, leaving town.

“Just watch, I'm going to make

Beep-P my (little) husband!!!” Tom Phantom declared, as the crowd began to cover Tom Phantom’s way.

”Look there he goes the lad is strange but special

A most peculiar Monsieur

It's a pity and a sin

He doesn't quite fit in

'Cause he really is a funny lad

A beauty/intelligent but a funny lad

He really is a funny lad

That Beep-O!!! (Bonjour! Bonjour!

Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonjour!)”

“Hello Beep-O!!” said Tom Phantom teleporting in front of him. Now why didn't he do that sooner-

Beep-O groaned, “Mother of Bowser..” he grumbled. Woodrow was running over to them, finally catching up to Tom. He was panting heavily. “Bonjour Tom and Woodrow..” Beep-O greeted the two of them. “Hello, Beep-O..! How is your sister and your kids?” Woodrow asks him, catching his breath. “They’re doing well-”

Beep-O was cut off by Tom Phantom grabbing Beep-O’s book, flipping through pages by pages. “Phantom. May I have my book, please?” he asked, trying to hide a hint of anger in his voice.

Tom Phantom ignores his ask. “How can you read this? There’s no pictures!” he said, sticking his tongue out. “Well, some people like to use their imagination,” said Beep-O crossing his arms. Woodrow nods his head, agreeing with Beep-O.

Tom Phantom throws away the book, “Well Beep-O it's about time you got your head out of these books and paid attention to more important things!” he said.

Beep-O groaned, “Like you?” he joked. Bend down and pick up his book. “Great it’s covered in mud..” he muttered, standing up. “Exactly! The whole town's talking about it. It's not right for a robot to read. Soon he starts getting ideas and... thinking!” the ghost grumbled, pacing back and forth. You see robots around these parts, are for service. They don’t think. They will only listen to orders. But in Beep-O’s case, he’s just an intelligent robot, who serves nobody. He is his own machine.

“Phantom, you are positively primeval!“ Beep-O glared at him. “Why, thank you, Beep-O. Whaddya say you and me take a walk over to the tavern and take a look at my trophies?” said Tom, wrapping his arms around him. Pulling him away from his way home.

“What do you say...we don't?” said Beep-O pushing Phantom’s arm away. Tom Phantom scoff. “Come on Beep-O, I think I know how you feel about me,” he said, holding Beep-O’s hand. Beep-O rolled his eyes, “You can't even imagine.” he mumbled, pulling his hand away. “If you excuse me. I need to head back home and help my sister.”

“That crazy lady. She needs all the help she can get!” Tom muttered, chuckling quietly. Beep-O’s ears twitch in annoyance, and his blue color turns to red. “Don’t talk about my sister that way!!!” he growled. Tom Phantom's expression turns to nervousness then to ‘anger’ bonking Woodrow’s head. “Yeah!! Don’t,” he growled. “Ow!!! What did I-I-?”

“My sister is not crazy!!! She’s a genius!!!” said Beep-O. A loud explosion can be heard, Beep-O turned around and saw his home covered in smoke. ‘Shit!!!’ His red color quickly turned to purple. (Concerned/Scared)

Beep-O hurriedly ran to his house, hearing Phantom howling with laughter.

“Jeanie!!! Jeanie!!” he shouted, opening the door quickly and going inside. “Jeanie!!!?” he shouts again.

“Over here!! *cough* I’m fine!!!”

Beep-O opened the door, to see smoke everywhere, but also see Jeanie covered in dust. “Oh Jeanie..” he mumbled. He ran over to her and checked if she had any injuries. “Don’t worry Beep-O..! I’m fine!!” she laughs. “Just.. a minor miss-calculation…”

“Can we come out now?” said a voice but it was quite muffled. “Yes, you can..” said Jeanie opening the barrel lid off. R2, Spawng, and a Rabbid pop their heads out of it.

“Sullivan? What are you doing here?” Beep-O asks the Rabbid who’s name is Sullivan. “Well, I’m on my break and decided to come here to visit my dear Jeanie~,” he said, with a lovely sigh. “Hey!!” R2 and Spawny pouted. “And come to see my soon-to-be nephews of course!” he said, getting out of the barrel. Helping R2 and Spawny out.

Beep-O ‘almost’ forgot Sullivan a and Jeanie were engaged fiánces. Sullivan proposed to Jeanie a few weeks ago. They don’t know when they will have their wedding, but once they do, Sullivan will be part of this little family of theirs.

“So, Jeanie what is your invention and why did it blow up?” Beep-O asks his sister.

“You know we had to buy power-ups? Well I decided to turn regular flowers into power-ups! But I regret putting a tiger Lily in the machine..” she muttered, ears going down.

“At least we know, not to put Tiger Lily’s in the machine?” Spawny laughs nervously. Jeanie nods her head, “Right..”

“Oh… I’m a failure guys… this stupid invention will never work…” she mumbled, her ears going down, and her light blue color turned to a dark shade.

“Oh Jeanie/Sis/Auntie..”

“Jeanie you are a genius!!”

“How Beep-O? I just make everything worse..”

“Not true! You make useful inventions in this house!”

“Like making a Spark feeder!” said R2.

“Oh! Oh! Also, make that telescope thingy to see who’s outside the door!!” Spawny added.

“And the invention of the radio to hear the Galaxy Network Music Podcast,” Beep-O added.

“Also to invent this special whistle!!” Sullivan added.

“See? All the things you invent help us!! Now Jeanie.. Don’t give up!!” said Beep-O, his expression having a determined face(?).

“Right..!” she nodded, quickly going to her invention, fixing some screws and bolts. A few minutes passed, and she put her wrench down. While her other hand was holding a red rose. “Ready?” she asks.

“Ready!!” They all shouted. Sullivan pulled the kids behind him and hid behind the barrel. Beep-O looks over to see what that train conductor Rabbid was doing. “Just in c-case!!” he stuttered. “Right..” Beep rolled his eyes.

“Here goes nothing!” As she put the Rose in the machine. Clogs were twirling and the machine was making lots of noise. “Please don’t explode.. Please don’t explode..” she prays. An item popped out. It was a Mushroom! A red mushroom to be exact. “I…I..I did it..” she muttered. “YOUUUUUU DIIIIIIIDDDD ITTTTT!!!” Beep-O shouted, hugging his sister and twirling her around. “BEEP-O!!! I DID IT! I DID IT!!!” she shouted, feeling so happy. Sullivan, R2, and Spawny came out of their hiding spots and quickly joined in the hug.

“See!? I know you can do it!!”

“You did it!!!”

“Now we have an infinite amount of power-ups!!!”

Beep-O and Jeanie chuckled as Beep-O set Jeanie down. “This calls.. For a celebration!!” Sullivan shouted. “YEAH!!” the kids agreed. “Oh, I wish hun.. But I got to go right now! Thethe contest is tomorrow!!” said Jeanie sadly.

“Awww..” the kids pouted. “Maybe when you come back..! When you win that is..!?” Sullivan suggests. “Right!”

~~~~~

“You pack food and water yes?” Beep-O asks for the 12th time. “And clothes?” he added.

“Yes and Yes. Don’t worry brother!” she said, putting her bags over Muffin’s back. (Horse Name)

“Make sure to bring gifts Auntie!!” said Spawny jumping up and down. “Lots of it..!” R2 added. “Boys.” Beep-O scolds them. “Haha! Will see you boys.”

“Be safe my love..” said Sullivan kissing her lips(?) gently. “I will.. And you should too..” she said, kissing(?) him back.

Spawny and R2 stick their tongues out. “Eww/Yuck!!”

Beep-O rolled his eyes. “Come on Sullivan, I want to tell her goodbye as well.” he huffed. Sullivan pulled away and chuckled sheepishly, “Right..”

“Be safe Jeanie.. Here are some power-ups.. Just to be safe..” said Beep-O handing her a little power-up bag. Inside have all kinds. Except for a star.. Now those are rare.

“Thank you..” she said, putting it in her dress pocket. “I’ll be back tomorrow! Wish me luck!” she said. “Come Muffin, let's go!”

As Jeanie and Muffin (The horse) walked away, Beep-O and the others saying goodbye. Hopefully nothing bad happened to her.. Right?

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bonus Facts:

��Woodrow was supposed to be a librarian but I scrapped that idea out. (I’m so sorry Woodrow-)

•G.G stands for Genius Girl (From M+RKB)

•I might add little Easter eggs just for fun (How many have you spotted?)

•R2 (My Oc) and Spawny were adopted by Beep-O (R2 calls Beep-O Papa while Spawny calls him Mr.Dad/Robot)

You're free to repost, I will publish the second chapter once it gets to 15 Hearts. Foxy/Night out~!<3

#m+rsoh #rayman #beep-o #Jeanie #sullivan #Jeanie x Sullivan #R2(Oc)#Rabbid Spawny #Mr Dark x Beep-O #Beauty And The Beast AU #Chapter 1

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peerlessscowl · 24 days

Text

under an expanse of stars

swordmaster mastery; word count 811

It was as though a vacuum had formed in the town square, the simultaneous draw and repel of whispers swirling around a single point.

'What is he doing here? Doesn't he know that his kind isn't welcome here?'

'Don't be unkind, those people don't have many civilized places that they can go nowadays.'

'Well it doesn't mean we want him here. See that blade on his hip? That one's a mercenary, making dirty money no doubt.'

Raymond peered around his mother's broad shoulders, leaning back to see – he was almost grown, almost the same height as she but not nearly eclipsing her just yet, but if he craned his neck he could just barely see the flick of long, dark hair and the edge of a robe, patterned and embroidered at the edges, somehow at once vibrant and drab.

'Don't stare, Raymond.'

He stiffened, snapping straighter at the chastisement in spite of his curiosity. It was not every day that one saw an Eastern swordsman in the markets of central Lycia, and rarer still that Raymond would have had the opportunity to lay eyes on one, sequestered in the halls of Tintagel and the surrounding villages as he was.

Their myth preceded them, even in the most unkind lights – the flash of a blade in the dark, the speed of their strikes trampling the stoutest foe like so many hoofbeats before they wandered off into the setting sun. That was how he'd heard it told, anyhow, and to see one in the flesh was exciting, despite that the landed gentry of his father's march did not seem to favor them as much as he did.

It did not occur to him until much later – far too late for it to matter, he supposed – why it had been so inappropriate, even in his curiosity, to watch the swordsman in the market. Even with the dark whispers that he might have been a mercenary, there was something further lingering, and it didn't strike him until his service to the Lady Caelin, a Sacaean herself, and a legend made flesh, the prodigal star in Marquess Hausen's dimming sky.

There were rumors, rumblings and whispers around every corner, at how she had rounded up her own band of mercenaries, how she had stormed the castle to seize it from its rightful owner, but the girl before him scarcely seemed the type, too forthright to brook the underhandedness that came with being a Lycian noble.

They were alike in that way – more alike than she surrounded by these courtiers, more alike than he surrounded by the rough men who merely sought the coin they thought Caelin might have had.

It was merely a matter of time before they crossed blades, before he got to see the spirit of Sacae in full form before him – she tore through sparring partners as a hot knife through butter with her skill, her technique, and that foreign blade of hers.

"I guess I just consider it an extension of my arm," Lady Caelin had said thoughtfully once, with a grin and an unself-conscious laugh as she held out her hand, palm out, as though inspecting it.

He could not say that he agreed, necessarily. A sword was a tool, no more a part of him than the armor he clipped on in the morning and stripped off in the evening, and to consider his weapon an extension of himself threatened to leave him in a precarious position. It was easier for Lady Caelin, he supposed, to have a blade that called for its other half in her soul, but he could not afford to be so sentimental.

But there were times when she moved, the spins around him that forced him to jerk the scabbard from his belt to hard block, to parry, then drive her back with his greater bulk – that he could see it. He could see the flow of movement, not merely from the points of force in her arm, but with the turn and bend of her entire body, and he could see the ripple and flash of her blade that followed, as easily as she breathed.

It wasn't envy that he felt – if he watched for long enough, clashed blades with her over and over, it was something he could emulate, if not embody the spirit of.

He saw more of Lady Caelin's ilk as he traveled, allegiance shifting from company to company, the same dark hair and embroidered robe he had seen all those years ago, though it didn't occur to him to ask if it had been the same swordsman, didn't think that it would have made a difference.

Gravitated toward him in the end all the same, his greeting merely a nod, and an extended hand.

"Come on. Let's spar. I don't think these idiots could match you if you were asleep."

#in character #drabble: under an expanse of stars #mastery: swordmaster #this one goes out to lyn my bestie lyn

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basilone · 4 months

Note

Because she is technically yours, I am going to ask you for Maggie Paquin and a kiss at war's end - but who she kisses is entirely up to you! Have fun!

Maggie, baby, it's been too long. I love her so very much, but she's absolutely more yours than mine at this point in time. 😉 But I'm really excited about this, and I hope I'm side-stepping your fic canon just a little here! (And thank you for letting me taking her for a spin!) You know who she kisses. You know it's gonna be Lieb. Here's how that happens! Want to send me a prompt like Merc did? Read the details here.

there's a light in everything

She should be glad. Should be joining in the smiles – under the shouts of how lucky are we! – and should definitely be making use of the last remnants of champagne. The thing is, and Maggie Paquin knows full well how utterly absurd this thing is, she’s not feeling very lucky. Or very thrilled.

Her shoulders hunch as she shoves her hands into her pockets. Her fingers close around a stray lighter and a packet of gum reflexively. She balls them into her fists, until the lighter chafes against her skin and the packet feels squishier than before. Her feet kick at the rocks that litter this side of the water, further out than their usual swimming-and-diving haunt.

At first, there’d been victory in Europe. Which had been more than fine, really, and the ensuing party had made up for any lingering doubts about it at the time. And she’d still had those doubts come in, alone, later on, staring up at the ceiling in a bedroom that was at least triple the size of what she had at home. Doesn’t know how anyone would not have them, not after everything.

It’d just been easier than victory in Japan is proving to be. After all, once the doubts had set in so had the information reels about the war over in the Pacific. She’d married her doubts to that – to the crabs, so many of them she thinks she could’ve set one on Webster every night and still have been overrun herself, and the flamethrowers – and it’d been all right to act nervous when even Captain Speirs had blinked faster than usual at what they were seeing. The war hadn’t been over after all – all those damn calisthenics they’d made them do, with Sarge gettin’ real antsy every time they got it wrong – and there was something reassuring about that.

Maggie takes aim at a particularly large rock. Kicks it so viciously that it rolls down ponk ponk splat straight into the water.

“I’d ask what that rock ever did to you, Packin’, but I don’t wanna get my shin kicked next. Fuck.”

She rolls her eyes before she realizes her back’s turned to him. “It’s not about the rock,” she bites out, casting a glance full of ire over her shoulder. Rolls her eyes again for good measure. “Your shin’s looking better to me by the minute.”

Joe Liebgott actually smirks at that. “Tempting, is it?”

“I’d kick it if I thought you’d survive the way it’d snap under you like a little twig.”

“Since when am I off the Lieb-must-die list?”

Maggie huffs out a breath. Clenches her fist so tightly around her lighter that she can feel the imprint it’s making in the palm of her hand. Since there are people that actually want you dead, she almost says, except she’s not that cruel and the world’s been unkind aplenty already.

“Dunno,” she shrugs instead, turning back to the water. “Guess since they told us we’re at peace now.”

“Are we?”

Maggie’s eyebrow raises imperceptibly when more rocks are kicked down to the water by feet other than her own. It’s a loaded question – are we at peace? – that she hasn’t got the faintest hope of answering. It’s like she’s in a tunnel, these days, one of those dark tunnels that’s barely got a light at the end, one that’s almost pressing in on her every time she tries to breathe. And she’s got trouble breathing now, doesn’t she, now that the soil’s come up to her mouth and the smoke feels like it’s never gonna clear her lungs and the light goes completely pale and there’s just no air and…

“Breathe, Packin’,” she hears as if through a fog. “Fuck. Breathe, come on”– and she knows it’s Lieb, knows it’s his hands on her upper arms and his breath on her face, but she’s all inhale and no exhale and feeling damn light-headed for it –“come on, Mags, don’t do this to me, fucking breathe.” And just like that, she’s bundled up against a very firm chest with arms closing in tight around her, so warm that she startles in a breath and exhales a hiccup instead. “There you go, that’s right, breathe already. Fuck.”

Joe Liebgott’s head rests atop her own as she shudders through the next breath, then the breath after that. She hiccups again upon the exhale, not burying it in his uniform fast enough if his sharp Mags is anything to go by. She’s heaving through her breaths now, heaving until her stomach joins the somersault her lower belly’s making, and he’s just standing here holding her like that’s a thing they do now. It’s never been a thing they do – aside from shoving each other and one unfortunate foxhole-share in the past – and it’s that fact alone that’s shaking her loose from the tunnel.

“If you wanted a hug,” she says, coughing now that he’s squeezing her even tighter, “you should’ve asked.”

“Right, yeah,” he huffs, “it’s about the hug.” She can practically feel his exasperation take up root in his belly, pressed against her like he is. “Sure, Mags, whatever.”

And she’s Mags now, like she’s sort-of been since things went to shit and they got round to talking about futures as if they had any. He skipped straight past Maggie and definitely shot straight past Paquin – she’d joked, once, about Marguerite being too much for his tongue to handle – and somewhere in between all the namecalling he’d decided to land on Mags.

“Joe,” she whispers, trying to answer in kind for reasons she can’t fully fathom, “you can let go now.”

He does, in a way, except his hands now come to rest warm on either side of her face and he’s still standing too close. His eyes are closed – like they’re stumbling around in the dark, like he’d still know her blind regardless – and his breath exhales out of him in shorter puffs than usual. He looks tired, this up close, strung out somehow, and there’s such an absence of joy that Maggie can’t help but step closer to.

It’s as if she’s trying to fill a void. Like this is what she can do, even though she’s much smaller than him and hasn’t a hope of filling up a space that big. Like this is what he lets her do – and he does, she realizes, when his hands land at the base of her neck – and like this can mean something.

Maggie lets go of the pack of gum in her pocket. Lets go of the lighter, too, and gives her left hand a little shake to clear the worst of its imprint. She doesn’t trust her hands to be soft, or gentle, or anything of the dainty sort. Doesn’t think it matters any now. It’s the end of war, and she knows they’ve both never been more afraid.

“I don’t wanna go home,” she says, casual as anything, adjusting his collar and brushing her knuckles against his jaw. “I don’t know. The girls keep talking about it. Keep asking me what I’m gonna do when I get back.” She shrugs. Bites her lip as her hand lands on his neck and stays there. “I haven’t a fucking clue.”

“Yeah,” he exhales, breath warm on her cheek. “Know the feelin’. Guess you could come live in the trunk of my cab.” He chuckles, low, not mean. “You’d fit.”

“Yeah? I have a big personality, Joe. Worth a passenger’s seat at least.”

His eyes crack open just a sliver, just enough. “You upgrading yourself already? Ungrateful, fuck.”

“I’m worth it,” she grins, prodding at his chest for emphasis. “You don’t even know.”

“Don’t I,” he starts, and –

She thinks he stoops down and kisses her, first. He thinks it was her, or so she learns later, stepping up on tiptoe and kissing him first. They’ll argue about it – she knows this even as she’s kissing him, kissing Joe – and they’ll bicker about who’s first just to find someone to blame for it. But there’s no blaming this, no blaming the fire that shoots through her at the surprised sound he makes when she doesn’t pull back, no blaming his hands going to her waist while she invites him closer.

It’s the goddamn end of war and I’m kissing Joe Liebgott, she thinks, filing it away as the one thing from this victory day she’ll never tell Niamh about.

“Mags,” he says, wondering.

She wants to bolt.

“Joe,” she says instead, and reaches up to mess with his hair just to start a fight. “You fucking moron.”

#joe liebgott #maggie paquin #joe x maggie #basilonefic #band of brothers

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laxmiree · 1 year

Text

[CN] Season 2 Chapter 38-3 [Freezing Moment] Translation

a.k.a that one chapter where the boys collab together-

⚠️ SPOILER ALERT ⚠️

This post contains a VERY HEAVY SPOILER for the S2 chapters that has not been released in EN yet! Feel free to notify me if there are any mistakes in the translation~

Translation under the cut~

For context, here’s the summary of this chapter batch. tho honestly the summary couldn’t describe how good their silent cooperation in this part lol.

Six days ago, the skywalk under the bloody sun.

A loud gunshot exploded in my ears, and I shuddered uncontrollably, squeezing my eyes shut.

There was no accompanying pain, no irregularity, and even the large, strong hands behind me held me steadily.

I wanted to turn around to see Victor, but a buzzing sound persisted in my ears, my vision was shrouded in a blur of heavy shadows, and a transparent barrier was fleeting beside my temple.

I looked in a trance at the bullet that had fallen at my feet and suddenly heard a sharp and abrupt sound cutting through the air in the distance.

-Bang!

Before I had time to react, there was a slight pain, and all my senses were instantly pulled apart by force.

The second before I lost consciousness, I felt as if I saw a strange and massive flash of white suddenly appear in front of me.

[Switching POV]

A large white fabric appeared out of nowhere with the sound of gunfire, instantly enveloping the girl completely.

Poseidon was the first to react among the crowd and quickly approached Victor.

But it was too late. As the white fabric loosely slid down, it shook a few times and disappeared like a magic trick, leaving Victor alone on the bridge.

Hades: …Where does Nox go?!

Everything happened so suddenly that the crowd remained silent for half a second before the murmur of voices arose.

Victor did not change his expression, as if not surprised by this sudden change, and only looked at a stairway on the side of the bridge with a sullen face.

A steady step was heard at the bottom of the stairs, and an imposing figure soon appeared.

Victor: Ares.

Lucien: Am I interrupting a gathering of old friends here?

Lucien calmly walked up the stairs and indifferently swept through the crowd. The dark coat in the lingering sun outlines a faint silhouette, just like an unapproachable sculpture.

In his left hand, he casually holds a specially styled gun as if he were the perpetrator of the charade.

Hades: Ares, did you do this?!

Poseidon: How amazing! The traitor of the organization... No, Professor Lucien of the Secret Research Division of the Task Force.

Poseidon: Is the show you prepared for the reunion of old friends, a superb performance?

??: Stop wasting time with a traitor! Hand over Nox now!

In the face of a series of unkind questions, Lucien helplessly shrugged his shoulders.

Lucien: Indeed, I am here for the CORE. After all, CORE's existence is too important to be handled so rudely by all of you.

Lucien: It's just that...

Lucien put away his icy smile. His eyes skimmed over the angry and impatient faces in front of him and fell on Victor, who had not said a word.

Lucien: I'd like to know who was responsible for this flashy and poorly executed performance.

Lucien: Mr. Victor, I wonder if you would be willing to give us an answer as to where CORE went.

Like hearing something ridiculous, Victor's eyebrows rose unyieldingly with a scoff, and his tone was full of contempt.

Victor: The CORE carrier used to belong to BS, so why hide her when I can always decide whether she stays or goes?

Victor: Besides, CORE is not necessary for us to achieve our goals

Victor: If it weren't for somebody’s "persistent research”… There would be no CORE in this world anymore.

Lucien smirked and lowered his eyes, leaning leisurely against the bridge's railing.

Lucien: Are you sure you want to continue to confuse the audience, Mr. Victor?

The air was a little frozen, and the tense atmosphere made it impossible for everyone to act rashly.

No one could instantly judge who had taken the girl, and as they looked at each other, Hades kicked the bridge pillar hard.

Hades: I don't have time to listen to your riddles here.

Hades: BOSS, you've been CEO for too long. I'm afraid you've forgotten what BS's style used to be like.

Hades left without looking back, but a sudden black wind blocked his footsteps. As the wind swirled, the dust rolled, and the sky darkened.

The crowd narrowed their eyes and looked up, watching a lone figure standing on the railing not far away.

The white uniforms fluttered in the wind, and the last rays of the sunset reflected a solemn glow, lining the bright and cold amber eyes.

Gavin: [shout] Special Task Force on duty!

Gavin: Everyone put down their weapons immediately and handed over the CORE carrier!

Those sharp words were delivered with an irrefutable command, and the words hit everyone in the room with a strong impact.

A white light flashed in the crowd, and it seemed that someone among the main gods was condensing Evol. Moments later, Poseidon was the first to break the stalemate.

Poseidon: Captain Gavin is forgetful. Didn't you destroy CORE at Monument Square?

He exaggeratedly made a resigned voice and swept an unpredictable expression at Victor, who was standing still.

Poseidon: Not long ago, Gavin's unit came to the headquarters and arrested some organization members for creating contraband.

Gavin slowly raised the gun in his hand, and the cold muzzle of the firearm intentionally pointed at the figure at the end of the crowd.

Gavin: BLACK SWAN is suspected of privately producing contraband, and the Special Task Force has grasped the latest clues.

Gavin: Hades, you have to come with me.

Hades coldly raised his eyes. The birthmark on his face looked hideous. Before he could say anything, Poseidon released an exaggerated gasp and widened his eyes under his mask.

Poseidon: Captain Gavin, you shouldn't talk nonsense.

??: You guys are too loud.

-A mocking scorn interrupted Poseidon, wafting into everyone's ears from high above in the chilly air.

Under the first moonlight, a silver hair glowing with cold light, the backlit figure is lonely and distant, sitting lazily on the top of the bridge pillar.

In the darkness, those pairs of eyes reflected a searing golden light, looking down on everyone.

Hephaestus: Oh, it's getting lively.

Helios smirked, fiddling with a delicate dagger in his hand.

Helios: Is this bunch of idiots also want the CORE?

He scanned the crowd with a disdainful look, manipulating the actions of the others as if they were ants.

The next second, Gavin leaped into the chaotic crowd. The harsh wind whistled past and exploded at the feet of those who took advantage of the chaos to leave.

The air was filled with a dangerous and burning scent, a pale gray mist that seemed to be alive scattered towards Gavin's feet.

However, within a few seconds, the mist was nailed in place by an icicle that suddenly flew out.

Lucien's sharp eyes swept past the several main gods who were condensing Evol and then slightly raised his fingertips.

Several rattling icicles appeared out of nowhere, flying with a freezing cold light, and hung in front of the opponents' necks.

Hades: Ares! You!

There was a "pop" sound as countless icicles shattered and fell. A sharp dagger broke through the ice, straight into the railing beside Lucien.

Helios: Don't do anything unnecessary.

The golden eyes climbed up with gloom, and Helios leaped down sharply, just like a sheathed blade.

In the silent confrontation, a chilling presence suddenly passed through the crowd, and before anyone could react, a stern gun was placed against Poseidon's forehead.

Moonlight glistened in Gavin's eyes, and his clear eyes seemed to ignore that person.

Gavin: Don't move.

Gavin: Otherwise, I don't guarantee your safety.

Poseidon's pupils contracted for a moment, but he quickly regained his pompous tone and raised his hands slightly.

Poseidon: I am a good citizen. It's a pity that Captain Gavin is so unreasonable.

Victor: Wait a minute. We must take care of some internal issues before the special task force can take people away.

Victor's faint voice was heard, and he turned his eyes to Poseidon.

Victor: Poseidon, why don't we discuss your mechanical box first?

Victor: I'm curious. Who gave you the nerve to stir up trouble right under my nose?

In the early winter night, there is an endless coldness, and the floating shadows appear in the night, gradually overlapping over the city.

In the center of Loveland City, the earth is faintly shaking, sending a horrifying roar into the silent night sky.

Like a sigh of relief from the ancient world.

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#they're probably besties #that loves to throw snarky comments at each other LOL #mr love queen's choice #mlqc spoiler #mlqc victor #mlqc gavin #mlqc lucien #mlqc kiro #mlqc translation #mlqc #mlqc cn

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sebsunset · 7 months

Text

"A CUMBERSOME AND HEAVY BODY"

On one of Nami’s first missions alone, a failure drives a knife through her arm. The aftermath is justifiably un-wholesome.

Prompt 25 of 2023's official whumptober list: "You're not delivering a perfect body to the grave"

WHUMPTOBER DAY 1!! i want to make all 31 fics for it >u< read it here or under there!!

“You’re not delivering a perfect body to the grave”

It all begins with a fly: her uninjured hand swats at it, with equal amounts of swift freneticism and fruitlessness. Her head thunks against the back of the barrel, and she breathes in deep, stifling her cough as well as she can.

The smell of rot clings to the air.

It’s been some time since she woke up. Familiarity with the sensation - the pressure behind her eyes, the parched feeling in her mouth, the film of sweat over her skin, the warmth she feels when she touches her forehead, and the cold that leaves her shivering.

It's the third time in a row that Nami wakes up to that, though, and she is nearly back to her crew.

She tries, for a moment, to convince herself that she’s done enough to pay for some medicine from the fishman crew.

to which her nose wrinkles, her mouth opens - the whole barrel tastes like decomposition, as well.

It's almost a sweet smell, sickly even before mixing with something foul beneath, notes of it making her wonder how nobody in the ship she's stowing away at realized that the barrel is not, in fact, full of apples.

Well- it was already quite spent when she snuck in, she figures.

It's for the best that they forgot. It has been three days, and the two apples in the barrel are nothing but stems, gathered near the heels of her bare feet.

She bites her tongue to stifle down a whimper, and takes to wriggling around the barrel, far too tired and feverish to mind any hints she gives, too wrapped up around the little finger of her discomfort.

Sadly, neither the painful pressure against her back nor the throbbing burn of her arm are relieved by the movement.

Nami is in the dark - eyes closed or open, she can't see the wound. She can only feel it, wet even through the sloppy bandage she'd fashioned from a strip of her shirt.

She stops, shudders, and realizes just what it is that laid waiting in the gash across her arm.

The finger over the wound stills, and she knows her eyes are wide, her heart dropping in her chest:

There is something wriggling in her wound, under the bandage.

... She's going to die.

The thought slams against her, unkind and sadly familiar: it has been a while since she stopped believing that she'll get to grow up.

In fact, she realizes, as vomit she can't bear to spend climbs its way up her throat, between swallows as she stifles the gag reflex and the panicked, heaving breaths alike, Nami won't deliver a perfect body to the grave.

She misses not having to think about death. Her own, and others: her sister's, so far away in this spot of the east blue, and... Of course, Bell-mére.

The memory is the clearest one of that time, a clear finish line to the fuzzy, blurred outlines her mind bears of happier days: The strike, her mother falling to the ground, the silence that preceded the laughter.

It was so loud, it still echoes in her ears, when she's barely awake, either out of a dream or in those awake-but-not-there moments, where Nami finds that the memory jumps back up.

She'd thought she'd die like that mother of hers: a quick shot, a bullet through her head or her heart. Something quick, almost polished, a second of pain preceding the eternity which would certainly wait for her afterwards.

She'd just hoped she'd get to swindle Arlong into freeing her village, before he went on and did that. He'd said plenty of times that that was all that awaited her.

Still - Nami had hoped.

Her eyes can distinguish the outlines in the dark, the painful wound wet with blood and pus, the thick fluid squeezing out like milk from a carton, or maybe like yoke from a cracked egg, when she touches her arm, sneaking her fingers into the wound she haphazardly hid away.

She gasps, biting into her lip.

Nami had often felt alone - between everyone at home, even her big sister, thinking she was horrible and a sea-witch and a lot of really unsavory things (fishman whore, pet, bitch-).

There was some mockery, she was sure, in the small bumps she felt on the flesh under the cut, on the buzzing of flies in her ears, and the slight movement she felt under her skin.

There is a clear hole near the original wound.

... It wiggles when she touches it, at which point Nami truly begins to cry.

It's not just the pain or the disgust:

It's this horrific thought: she will die here, a nameless stowaway in some old merchant's ship, with a bag of money and a deadly gift from a pirate, a kind of payment for her service of swindling him out of a bag of berri.

She'd give anything for the swift demise she’d imagined herself having, before that moment, when Nami realizes that the numbness isn’t her being strong, or her wound healing, but her flesh dying around the wound.

She swallows down a sob, trembling lips shut as she focuses on wriggling around, trying to lay her arm as far away as she can have it in the barrel, twisting to try and make “go away!” the fly that landed on her cheek at that moment.

Nami is going to die here, she’s sure. The sea and her waves rock her, back and forth, a lulling sway.

It’d be calming, if she didn’t feel maggots right under the wound, unbandaged now, airing out as the fetid, vermin-riddled bandage hangs by her side.

She thinks of Nojiko, back at home. Of the tangerine farm, of the wind blowing past the trees, the flowers of spring falling in piles of petals.

She thinks of the village, of warm food and the warmer sun, of rare moments when her travels take her to the islands a bit further away, paradisiac and warm, idyllically peaceful in the moments where Nami falls to the sidelines and takes her petty sprees of crime with her.

She thinks of it, and meditates to the throbbing pain, lays in her shuddering fever, boils in the blistering cold surrounding her.

She can make Cocoyashi somewhere peaceful again - just like those homes in which she’ll never belong.

There’s no after, and there’s no now; all which remains, for the remainder of the trip, is the sidelined thought of the infection, and this thought: nothing comes out intact.

Something will grow from her grave.

She arrives home on foot, trodding with her sandals hanging on by a slivered thread. The midday sun fails to warm her up, and yet, Nami’s hair sticks to her forehead, her vision swaying.

A hand clings to one of the poles by the park’s entrance, and, from the moment one of the fishmen notices her onwards, the slowly burning agony is left behind, in favor of the dirt against her knees.

It’s not that she tries to bow - she simply falls, when Kaneshiro comes forth. More neutral than cruel, watching instead of participating in anything the crew involves Nami in.

There are a few of Arlong’s pirates who don’t… Actively try to make it so her road to the grave is short, really.

Even so, Nami flinches, trying to pull back when a hand wraps itself around the back of her neck, dragging her up by her hair as an easy substitute to the usual scruff that fishmen fry and fingerlings have.

She’s been here for four years, and anything that she hasn’t gone through yet is something that she’s seen happen to someone else - but this time, there’s little to do but collapse, held at a safe distance by Kaneshiro, as he analyzes her, putting webbed fingers against her forehead.

“Fever.” his lips move. “Sick, prolly.”

There’s a tilt of concern, to her, who kind of knows what fishmen expressions look like, half the time.

“Oi- oi.” she sees his lips move, a bit blurry, and she squeezes her eyes, trying to clear away the odd way her vision warps. “Kid, you alone?”

She takes a second to figure out what he meant by that, but catches on when she finds him looking around himself.

He’s making sure she hasn’t brought anyone along.

At that point, something in her crumbles. It hurts so much, and she just needs to catch her breath before she leaves, to go away, find someone else she can pay to get rid of the wound on her arm.

She leans against his leg, bracing herself to catch her breath. His hand is still against her head, and it’s surprisingly hard to be afraid of one man now, when she’s spent the whole trail from the docked ship through the village down to the west entrance of Arlong Park staring into death’s eyes.

“Holly shit.” it echoes a bit. “I- lil’ fry, get off my leg. I’m gonna catch som’thin.”

Maybe she apologizes, maybe she doesn’t. Nothing feels clear enough - she can see that she won’t remember any of this once this is over.

At least she hopes. Seeing any concern from someone else is enough to mess her up, for lack of any better words.

Still, when Kaneshiro’s hand wraps around her arm, it takes everything in her to not scream.

He doesn’t have that much gut in him: a sound worse than anything her throat could make rings out, guttural in fear more than pain, hand shaking around in the air as if to rid himself from the infection, despite no wounds to which it can spread, as she’s kicked down to the ground, onto her elbows.

That’s when she actually yelps, before tilting a little to her side, on top of her less pained arm, to try and guide her not-quite-responding, bruised-black hand to open the back of berry she’d been carrying tied around her waist, meager but, in her feverish mind, somewhere close to decent enough to, in some distorted view, prove her life worth preserving for just a little longer.

“Leave that for later.” he hisses, an aching note of concern slipping through the angry edge of his words.

He doesn’t leave her time to writhe away from his grasp, even as she cries out, before he grabs at her, grabbing onto her easily.

Her heart races, but she freezes. Kaneshiro picks her up, tucked, precariously but safely enough, against the side of his chest, held in his arms with a bit of reluctance.

“Sorry.” she hears - and a part of her is half-sure she hallucinated even that, knowing, to some extent, what her fever might mean.

For all Nami knows, her brain is fried.

She won’t remember this too much later, she figures. She hopes not - the pain drives her to bite into her tongue until she tastes blood, the copper not quite distracting enough.

She’s been smelling it for days already, the only thing besides pus that snuck its way into her space for a very, very long time.

When she comes to life again, she’s no longer being jostled around.

Instead, Nami is in the infirmary - a rare privilege, perhaps given to her by the presence of the writhing maggots.

“You’ll give us a fly problem.” she hears. “Oi, lil’ fry, wake up.”

A rough, oversized hand pokes at her face, nudging her until she manages to force her eyes open, a sigh slipping through.

“Good, good.” Arlong’s smile is venomous, for lack of anything else she can give to it in the moment, when it comes to proper words.

“Now, why the fuck did you come home with more maggots than money?”

She chews her excuses, tries to pick out whatever is the easiest to convince him off.

She coughs.

“Pirate stabbed me.” she says, “I managed to plant the bomb on his main ship.”

She breathes. A hand falls on top of her head, entangles in the greasy, matted mess of her hair, pulling on the knots. She’s lying on her belly, she realizes. Splayed on a cot, even though that leans to one side, Arlong’s mass making it shift.

She manages to finish her sentence:

“I snuck here on a boat.” she says, “The main one sunk. I made sure of it, despite the cost.”

“Namely, most of the treasure.” His petting turns into a violent tug, her head pulled back as she lets out a small whine. “And what did I tell you to do?”

He’d given her a pretty… Big plan, she figures.

… A part of her is starting to think that her captain wants her to die. That’s what captains are for: they pick the best members for their crews.

The worst ones become disposable. Piracy is a gambit - to Nami, it’s one she falls in the losing end of.

“I needed to load up a boat with the chests in the captain’s cabin before setting off the explosives.” she says, voice muffled by how the side of her face lays against the mattress.

“And what did you fucking do?” her captain asks, twisting her head until she’s facing directly against him.

Involuntarily, a pained sound slips from her.

“Not that.” she says. “I failed. I got found out and- and he’s dead but so’s the treasure.”

“Fucking seas, you little bitch.” he says, pulling her up until her face is fully off the bed, shaking her, dragging until she drops, leaving him with a lock of hair in his hand and not much else. “You come home filthy, with barely a bag of cash, and with a nest of flies on your goddamn arm. Your writing arm.”

“I can write with the other one.” she says. “I- If you get the flies out, I can stitch it up.”

The back of his hand crashes against her cheek, tears the pain from her lungs with a yelp. His ring finger scratches her forehead, a small gash that bleeds nonetheless, matting her eyelashes.

“Where’s your head at?” he yells, tugging at her ear. The pain on her face distracts her from the pain on her arm-

And she is kind of used to this kind of attention, already. She takes what she can get - this time, answers.

And he says;

“We’re gonna have to rip out that whole fucking arm.” he says, and her world freezes for a moment; “You’ve got to be glad, you know. You’ll owe me even more after this.”

She has to cut herself off - still, her face speaks louder than anything she can say. Children can lie with their words, but their faces are like open books.

He has it in him to growl at her.

“Say shit and I’ll turn back.” he says, “Dump you out on the sea, feed you to the lesser fish. Throw you to your place.”

Like Nami said: she had kind of stopped expecting to bring a perfect body down to her grave.

There’s not even enough time for the shock to settle in. The door opens, another crewman shovels his way in, lumbering with a bottle of sake in his hand.

First, Arlong drinks, tongue licking against the neck of the bottle.

Then, against Nami’s lips, the remaining contents of the bottle are dipped. It burns her mouth, astringent and bitter, like boiling water or spicy broth on its way down.

A scaly hand forces her mouth closed, and to her there’s nothing to do but swallow.

“You brought her in, you hold her down.” Arlong says.

It’s the crewman from earlier - no relief. They are all the same, no moment of pity lasting for enough time for her to remember it.

“Sorry.” he says, under his breath, and does as he’s told, tucks his tail between his legs and sucks it up to Arlong-

The same way she does, in the end.

There’s no otherness - she won’t deliver either a perfect body or a good soul to her grave.

Nami knows it’s not a proper operation. That’d always go unsaid. Arlong’s crew has no medic, at the end of the day.

They don’t expect threats that Arlong and his strength can’t fix.

That’s her downfall for coming home, for expecting the necrosed skin to be recoverable. The alcohol should numb her senses-

Or, she supposes, at least slow her down. She’s uncomfortably aware of how little control she wields over this situation, as her arm is stretched out, and as Arlong tuts out something akin to a laugh.

He might be drunker than her, for this. The grip he has on her hurts - but she’s kind of glad that a small chunk under her shoulder is intact enough to stay.

The thought sends her heart racing, but she stays still, even as her eyes don’t quite want to focus on anything but the knife that Arlong bears, the light it catches from the sun outside, a white glint against the polished blade.

“Alright, whomever wants the job of cauterizing it, step up.” Arlong calls, and she can’t quite see what’s going on behind him, but some shuffling leads to him shifting in his seat.

“Stay still, Nami.” he whispers. “I’m not a sturgeon, but I can be a surgeon.”

He lets the crew laugh. This is a joke to them.

The vermin crawl along her bruised, bloodied skin. The coagulated surface of her cut has long been peeled, the blood and pus dripping onto the fabric covering the cot.

A dance of the pain and the humiliation precedes the moment where she realizes how much of a joke her well-being is to the crew:

Arlong’s knife falls onto her hand, right along the joint of her wrist, instead of where it should, right above the end of her infection.

Nami screeches, writhing in place, her feeble attempt to twist away from the knife tearing through the flesh and veins of her wrist bringing forth nothing but a mixture of two sickening sounds: her flesh ripping apart, and cackling.

“Oops.” he shrugs. “Alright, alright, I guess it’s better for me to stop joking around, before this gets boring.”

A hand presses against her mouth, almost as a challenge: bite it, and see if we let you walk out of this.

She quietens down, squeezing her eyes, tears falling free, sniffling against the hand that covers up the lower half of her face.

The knife raises up in the air, and the sun catches bright once more, a white-golden glint against the blade.

“Hey, don’t bite.” the owner of the hand that’s pressing itself against her mouth warns, “I might break your neck without meaning to, if I try to get your teeth unstuck.”

It falls with a thunk. The sound precedes the pain - that, stuck right between the strike and Nami’s scream.

Her vision goes black, cold wrecking through her. The laughter rings out, ever-echoing, mocking. If someone didn’t join in on the ruckus, it’s not someone who stopped it, either.

It feels, for the moment, like it won’t ever go away. With her nerves set ablaze, the pain trailing up her arm and echoing out all through her body overtaking any thought she could possibly muster up, felt in the way she’s held down from even her thrashing.

Into the flesh of the stump, digs a claw: “Stay still, sunshine.” her vision is going black, and she might soon stop moving at all-

But then she thinks, somehow, through the agony that floods her senses. Manages to take action and stay awake, even through the smell of blood and rot and the sake she feels on her own breath.

That’d be for the best. That’d be what they want.

So she stays awake, even when the decision to cauterize her wound is taken. The same sheets that soak up her blood take the brunt of the filth from the knife, before a lighter is raised to it, slowly warming the metal up.

“This won’t take long.” Arlong chirps. There’s blood on his shirt, and he licks the side of his mouth, before gnawing a bit on his lip, as if taking more focus to properly heat a knife than to use it to sever her muscles and nerves. “Hold tight for me. It’s just like the tat’ you got on that pretty arm, right, right.”

He’s all smiles, and she sees red.

There’s an unblinking stare, an overlooked promise of vengeance, and a sizzling sound as the blade meets her flesh.

She tells herself, through the haphazard attempt to cauterize her wound, through the way it’s swaddled poorly in some old gauze:

Nami won’t be like Bell-mére - she won’t be a pretty body on the casket.

But she’ll make sure the Arlong Pirates don’t get a nice corpse out of their captain, either.

#whump #whumptober 2023 #whumptober #no.25 #lyric #one piece #fic #maggots #straight up tagging that too. yeah boy im. im so sorry #take this gun #eat the bullets #one piece fic

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22poetry · 6 months

Text

Witchy woman

Give me all your times of day

There are black masses in the courtyard

Won’t you come on out to play

Ye old squatters and their neighbours

Who find envy in their shiver

I’ll sing you into blight

Pack all my arrows in this quiver.

The rain came on black daffodil and all her wilted petals.

She says she misses the taste of love.

Her eyes all donned in glass they cut the butterflies when she might kiss em.

Baby’s broken

Without her God.

Take my hand oh little flower

And we can walk on down to eden.

Maybe then she’ll see alone she’s better off.

Maybe lust will wrap around her like the arms of my dear devils

Take her in and show her how to dance at dawn.

Swoon for me

Oh specimen of the unkind, my dearest friend.

She rests her head upon her lilac pillow and weeps now for the end.

I weep with her beneath the same moon.

There is nothing shameful about our own decay.

Sad boy, And all your midnight masterpieces. You wear those hands that make me into pudding. The hands that craft such hunger into delicate art. Between squirming and coughing up blood I think about sad boys and having sex with my enemies. I dream about the withering black daffodils and falling into the arroyo head first. Lust bound. There is something Celtic and creamy about death’s obsession with me. How he lurks into the souls of my loved ones and hovers over me with the chill of night. Sad boy, I’m however afraid, there is nothing as attractive about my obsession with you.

You should never have Allowed me to wander into you. For now I dream of being wisped away and fed. Play again with my dark parts and bow to my sins. Paint portraits of my smile in your notebooks full of turmoil. Walk with me into the mouth of madness and allow me to become the insanity that eats me.

You move like a black wave, you perform with an elegant swell. You make me ponder expiration, searching for the silhouette of darkness between the horizon and my own being. Doubt dissipates into power and I am whole.

Sad boy you talk so kindly to my flowers. Your eyes do tell me otherwise, even in moments made of crumbs. I know that you have seen my creatures, and that those visions fail to fade from what’s become. My teeth get sharp when I’m aroused, and I remain with a desire that soothes me to decompose. I live with many voices, putrid and pleasant alike. I am the same daffodil in the garden that hangs over the weeds and weakens into rot. Still I feel nothing but held.

Know now that flowers begin their pursuit of the sun from seedlings, and only death doth take their pulse and give wings of prayer to their halos. Darkness is quite the embrace should we discover the arms of death and the comfort of cold bones. To feel the grip close around our little flower petals, those sweet kitten throats. If only the others could see that what pain is to love, black is to white, Veronica is to Betty.

To all of my sad boys and their desire for my flowers:

I exist with a screaming heap of mischief. As soft as I may appear to you in intimacy, know that I may also cradle my own vanity at your expense. As it is above, so it will appear below.

you are allowed to love only half of who I am. And you are plenty allowed to never even love me at all.

xo.

#poem #poetry #creative writing #abstract #art #poets on tumblr #boys #writers

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necrosin · 8 months

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a corpse of a place / a ghost of a girl —— there is no certainty nor reason nor certain reason, she is simply here and present and cast in golden light that feels too warm against her skin, like sunlight filtering through paper-thin white curtains, like sunlight peaking through dusty window panes, as if she were fading —— away ——

the wall is high and not so high, after all, easily reachable yet so very far. the woods are safe, now, no nobodies to linger and lurk in its shadows. they are simply dark and cool and seemingly endless but a lighthearted schoolboy and his companions could wander through them / even the ghost-girl could traverse them well enough. there is no reason why she remains within ( or rather, atop ) the towering walls of twilight town except that —— except that ——

difficult to conceptualize. difficult to put to thought. difficult to perceive wholly and fully. this, or you?

she : who is nothing and shall become nothing and will always be ——

circular thoughts. tangential thoughts. there is that rotting roof and those creaking walls and she can imagine it with ease, how the third step always whined, how the doors could do nothing but shriek. that room / her sham of a room / pure white and covered and papered in shattered fragments that she had pieced together, bit by bit. that room, that place, where the pitiable non-hero ( but he had been, but he is, he's just —— ) sat before her and who she told, voice soft and carrying and trying to be gentle, that he was never supposed to exist.

unkind words / she had tried / but had she, truly? always, always she had been guiding him towards oblivion, towards a lack of existence separate from the lightened hero trapped in the dark / she had not hesitated for all that, to her, @heartinhands seemed like a falling star. ephemeral, entrancing, never meant to last, but deep inside there had been that quiet hope : that he would carry on, still.

that he would : appear, real and whole and individual, as if out of nowhere at all. as if she had pulled him from memories and made him real once more, as if by mere thought she could bring him forth, as if she had been hoping and lonely and WHEN HAD SHE NOT BEEN LONLEY, AFTER ALL?

it takes a moment to register. and then another. warmth around her shoulders, a steadiness near her / against her / a touch that makes her shoulders tighten for all of a moment / a presence that registers as NON-THREATENING with such immediacy that for a moment she finds herself confused with the instinct. as if pulled out of her memories, ❝ —— roxas, ❞ surprise lilts her tone. she feels somehow caught, something twisting in her chest, strange and ill-shapen and odd. she hadn't expected / hadn't known to foresee / but then : roxas loves twilight town, doesn't he?

she wonders what he's thinking about, to touch her so casually, to look over the towering walls of twilight town and over and over and over to that haunted place. haunted, still, because while the wraith no longer wandered those halls, there were still ghosts that lingered in every corner. every room. every last place they had touched.

for a moment, she doesn't know what to say. can't offer heartening words, eternally incapable of such a paradoxical thing. she wonders if roxas recalls what she does with such clarity. supposes that he does, surely / but he's too kind to her to hold it against her, isn't he? he's bright in her vision / everyone is / a falling star in the dead of night. ❝ i was thinking... ❞ she looks back to that barely visible roof and wonders over physicality and existence.

roxas existed, and it had been mournfully wondrous to see, and she —— had not, had NOT, had not in any sense of the word and he had been —— a falling star —— and NOW there is his arm and there is him and there is her / a ghost / and a house full of ghosts, weeping and screaming in sorrow.

a ghost of a place / a corpse of a girl.

❝ that... even though you weren't meant to exist, ❞ can a ghost learn kindness? is it still unkind, to repeat those words? WHY WOULD YOU SAY SOMETHING LIKE THAT... EVEN IF IT WAS TRUE? a star, a world, a meteor falling and burning. roxas, roxas, who looks at her with a face that is a mirror / isn't a mirror / who looks at her and is that something pensive, on his face?

everything would be easier, would everyone just hate her.

❝ ... i'm happy you exist, ❞ can something such as happiness exist within her? ( yes / no / certainly ... not : but hadn't it been happiness when he had come for her, when the hero had come for her? ) his arm is warm against her shoulders / and it's a wonder he can touch her / can reach her / that there's anything to touch at all, and he's so —— perhaps a falling star cannot encompass it all. perhaps it is more apt to say that he is simply a boy who wants to exist. WHO DOES EXIST.

and isn't that more profound than a falling star?

❝ i'm... happy to have met you. ❞

[ wrap ] – for the sender’s muse to casually wrap their arms around the receiver’s neck and lean on their shoulder from behind.

#NAMINÉ，in char.#NAMINÉ，post-kh3.#heartinhands #heartinhands : roxas.#breaking news : meems can't shut the fuck up #idk what this is it's all nonsense rly

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kylo-wrecked · 7 months

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Horror themed sentence starter: ❛ there you are, my darling! ❜

A harbour full of ships stood as a tribute to the bustle of Singapore. Rows upon rows of them, coming and going with goods and people and the dreams of magnates sitting in high offices far from the open sea. Like its port, the city it was always moving. Writhing. Ebbing. Flowing. Layers upon layers of goods and people and dreams. The air was weighted by the equator. The streets were cleaner than New York.

He’s in a cafe. His hair is longer. She wondered if it bothered him, to have it curl around his ears like that. She wondered if he knew he was being watched. If he knew that a man drinking a latte four tables away studied his every move. She wondered if he knew the man was armed. If he knew the trouble he was in.

She wondered if he still took his coffee the same way.

His trouble smelled of red-ink and rubber. The kind that came in a sealed envelope with newspaper clippings, photos, and page six nicknames that were unkind but not, perhaps, untrue. There was a number too, attached to his mother. This wasn’t an assignment she’d normally be given. Special request. Drowned in red tape and red flags. It’d piss off her father. She’d accepted.

His features were sharper than the fuzz of memory had allowed. Sharp, like words said on concrete streets and through mobile phones. Sharp enough to puncture. To wound. To maim. Sharp enough.

She approaches from his peripheral; pressing the past down with training and stubbornness. The latte in the corner shifts. So did a cappuccino by the window. An unexpected inconvenience, dressed in silk.

“There you are, my darling” her arm slips around him, hands moving the way lovers do. Her lips press to his jaw, tangling a whisper into the hair that curled around his ears. “Play along.”

There were other words she’d have said first, under different circumstances. Probably ‘fuck’. Probably fumbled over. She sits opposite him, gaze quiet and unwavering. “Are you ready to go? I have so much to tell you.”

For him, mornings were Kopi-O and kaya toast. Mornings were passing by barefoot women in front of Sri Mariamman Temple, as junior college students lined up for chicken rice lunch on the corner, and crows feasted from the nearby hawker center, barking at humans who dared intrude upon their trays. A walk. Chinatown stone, savory drafts from the bakkwa shops, sun. Solitude. Sequestration.

This late morning brings Ben to Clarke Quay, a cluster of rowhouses and boats splashed with the colors of the rainbow, a bobbing tourist trap. A good place to disappear, to observe unbothered, because his presence here, as an ex-pat, is rote. He can linger (behind charcoal Moscots) and languish (in washed linens). Without being watched, or so he thinks.

Ben should know when the hairs on the back of his neck prick or when the café conversation he's been scrawling bits and pieces of in a paper bag notebook takes a precipitous departure:

'She's Ah Lian.'

'No, she's just white, la. Only crazy rich Americans come to SG dressed like that.'

'Good looking Americans.'

[Hokkien]

'Ew, la! So crass.'

The tone and volume of their conversation morphs again into something more delicate. Of course, Ben jumps. His heart jumps. He doesn't take the touch for a stranger's, but he doesn't take it well. Gripping his pen, jaw tensing into something slicing, eyes narrowing beneath the cirrus of dark locks he refuses to brush aside. Can she feel him twitch?

He leans his brawn (notably sparser, hollowed out by heat and a persistent dullness he can't kill) as far back as the wall and chair will go without him toppling it. Ben wonders if this is easy for her, if Brunnhilde might even take pleasure in the scheme. He doesn't wonder why she's here or meet her gaze. He stares into the coffee grounds at the bottom of his cup, reads his omen. A black scud of an omen.

"What a pity." Ben sucks his teeth and raises his eyebrows. "I was just on my way to see my attorney. Give me the elevator pitch, and he'll take it from there."

Then he rises, stretching his long legs. Settles his bill with cash and his notebook on his person, lights a cigarette on the curb while he, unbelievably, waits for Brunnhilde until she joins him outside, rustling silk, lithe, lightly freckled shoulders. Briefly, he wonders how she's not sweating, if the fabric's supposed to cling to her navel, or if every inch of it's drenched.

"Seriously?" Ben turns to her and lays his gaze over hers. Smoke on his lips. "I don't want to know who cleared this."

His gaze is not quiet, though his voice is. Ben keeps it low. Exhales into the baseline resounding from Chupitos, the spider's web paned canopies, the mash of bodies, slippers, t-shirts, tudong.

No offer to share the cigarette. No sea, no tangle of bedsheets.

"I'm ready to 'go.'" he says. "Shall we?"

#valkxrie #m. au | modern!ben: the senator's son #v. tbd #r. method of modern love #queue de la k #{look who doesn’t know a n y t h i n g}#{it’s Just Ben}

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