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#just a bodily function that would have to happen anyway

astra-kamari · 2 months

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Sleeping was overrated anyway

Summary-nightmares have been plaguing your mind-and everyone tries to help

Gaang x Y/n - Sokka x Y/n

You havent been sleeping. The nightmares just keep coming and coming. In them you always loose your friends. First Katara, then Zuko, then Toph and Aang, and then- you didn’t want to think about it. Sokka, his death always hurt you the most.

So you decided if you didn’t sleep no problems would happen. At first it was easy, you would go for a walk, train, or just look at the stars.

After a few days your friends started to notice. You were constantly yawning, moving slower in training, and you were constantly irritated.

Each of the gaang tried their own ways to ask what was wrong.

Katara and Y/n were making breakfast. Katara quickly noticed how much YN was yawning, and getting upset at every little thing with the food.

“Are you alright?”

“Im fine”

“Ok you just look a little tired…”which was a understatement when she saw the bags under your eyes

“Im fine-and im not tired.”

“Ok” she says watching you struggle with the food. “Why dont you go train with Toph?” Katara was hopeful that Toph would have better luck figuring out what was wrong with you.

Toph and Y/n started training in hand to hand combat when they stopped to eat some lunch. It had been quiet for a minute when until Toph decided enough was enough and nudged Y/n. Her head immediately snapped up

“I’m awake, I’m fine, I’m awake.”

“Are you sure theres nothing you need to tell any of us? You can talk to anyone, you know.”

“Yup” you said popping the p

“And you’re not tired?”

“i am 100% ok”

“If you say so”

Aang and Y/n were out for a walk, You were trying to focus on walking so you didn’t trip, but the world had other plans as you stumbled but you caught her self on a nearby tree. After that you focused extra on walking and less on Aang babbling about the air benders air ball matches. Only to be defeated by air again, as you started falling to the ground, however Aang quickly caught you.

“Are you sure your ok?” He says carefully “you’ve been acting kind of tired-“

“I’m not tired!” You breathed in and out “i am perfectly fine and wish people would stop asking me if im tired!”

“Ok-lets just head back its almost dinner anyway”

Zuko had made tea while you and Aang were gone, he looked up as you walked into camp. “Hey guys want some tea? It’s the kind my uncle made…jasmine i think”

“Yeah ill take some” Aang grabbed his cup and left to his tent-leaving you and Zuko alone.

“Soo”Zuko said, trying to start conversation

“Don’t even start” you say raising a shakey hand of tea to her mouth. You try to use your other hand to stabilize it, but that just makes things worse and you spill the tea. You angrily set the cup down and stare off to the distance.

“So…uh….do you need anything?”

“No” you replied curtly

“Um ok then.” After a couple kinda awkward minutes he stands up and leaves….to Sokkas tent?

You pulled your knees up to your chest and look at the stars. Then yoy see why Zuko went to Sokkas tent. You were quickly trying to come up with a believable lie, when Sokka started walking towards you.

“Hey” he said sitting down next to you. After you ignore him, he pulls you into his lap, pushing your armas away and raping his around you.

“You want to tell me whats wrong?” He whispers into your hair. You shake your head no and sink into his chest.

“You know your going to have to sleep eventually.”

“I dont want to.”

“Well its kinda a bodily function, everyone’s human-or do you have something you want to tell me?”

“No, your right, i have to sleep. Its just…. Well i-“

“Its ok, you dont have to tell me”

“No i will, i just-saying them out loud makes it real”

“Makes what real?”

“The fears-the nightmares bring them to life”

“nightmares?”he pushes

“Yes, nightmares. Thats why I haven’t been sleeping. I-im scared of loosing all of you. Every single time i close my eyes i see everyone dead around me-and i cant move, i cant scream, i cant do anything. And every time i saw you dead on the ground, i broke. It hurst so bad, and im-scared.” You finish sucking in a long breath.

He looks down at you “i have a idea” and with that he scoops you up bridal style, and carries you to his tent.

Its not like you havent been in here before-but this felt different, more comforting. He flings open the sleeping bag puts you in there and snuggles in right next to you. “Better?”he asks

“Better.” It’s quite for a while. “Sokka?what if the dreams come back”

“It will be different”

“How do you know?”

“Ill be there to protect you”

And you’ve never slept more peacefully in your life.

#sokka x reader #sokkax yn #the gaang #gaang x reader #gaang x yn #atla #avatar the last airbender #Sokka #Katara #Toph #zuko #avatar aang #aang

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fullofbees · 17 days

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Headcanons about the demon brother's and an MC who is on their period.

CW: Period Sex (All of them), Somnophilia (Belphegor), Non-con (Belphegor)

»»----------► Reader is Gender Neutral with AFAB anatomy

✬ Does he know what a period is? ✬

Yes. Though he may not interact with humans much in the Devildom (nor did he in the Celestial Realm either), it never hurts to be prepared by knowing and understanding basic human bodily functions.

✬ How he helps: ✬

Lucifer knows how much you adore his brothers, but he also understands that all of them can be.... a bit much – especially when together. So, when you need some peace and quiet, Lucifer ushers you into his private study. You relax on the plush couch, a small fire in the pit and his coat draped over you to keep out the house’s haunting draft. When you try to refuse, he chuckles, and assures you his inhuman sight will adjust easily to the darkness. It doesn’t take long for you to coax him to the couch anyways, both of you blissfully passing out for some much needed rest. "Your brothers would surely lose their minds if they saw you napping, with me in your arms no less." "That's why you're not going to say a word, lest you lose your snuggle privileges."

✬ NSFW ✬

Indents and imprints begin to form across your skin from where your body is shoved against the plush backing of the couch. Should anyone happen to disturb your haven of rest, they would be none the wiser, with Lucifer's looming visage shielding you from the door and his coat, draped across your waist, hiding your sin. His hand pulls your underwear off to the side, leaving him just enough access to tease you with the tip of his cock. Short shallow thrusts amplify the wetness that sticks to your thighs, slowly building the pleasure that hums throughout your body. Lucifer chuckles at how easily he's able to slip his entire length into you like this; heat rises to your face in embarrassment, but burying your face into the cushions does little to stop the drenched sounds of his cock fucking the bloody mess that is your cunt.

✬ Does he know what a period is? ✬

He’s heard it mentioned by the witches before – small grumblings of pain, frustration, and exhaustion between them. He’d scoff; their whisperings of mutual understanding being heard, their feet up as they relaxed, all while he was being worked to the bone. He spent centuries thinking they were lying before he met you.

✬ How he helps: ✬

Mammon always is ready to fight anyone who dares to upset you. As your first man, even the privilege of annoying you should be left to him. When it comes to that time of the month, Mammon is extra protective of you; threatening others with little more than a glance, shoving lesser demons out of your way, even going so far as to bribe others in to doing your homework for you. He's not letting you lift a finger while he's around! "Mammon! You don't need to do this. He was just being polite and saying hello!" "That's what he wants ya to think! Luckily, you have THE Great Mammon here to protect ya from these low-lifes!"

✬ NSFW ✬

God knows how much grimm he could make off of videos of your pretty face blissed out like this. You're panting against his mattress, sweat laced hair clinging to your cheeks and neck as your body bounces in time with his thrusts. Mammon pauses, watching you wriggle and writhe as he slowly pulls his cock out until just his tip remains inside. Perhaps he should feel dirty when he sees his flesh painted with your blood and his cum, but when has he ever given a damn about that kind of stuff? With the way you're begging him to continue, to fuck his cum back into you, how can he feel anything but lucky? Yeah, your sex tape would go for millions, but he knows his treasure is infinitely more valuable when he has it all to himself.

✬ Does he know what a period is? ✬

Absolutely not. Definitely stares at you in horror as you explain the process to him; What do you mean it happens every month? How are you able to bleed without dying? What use could this possibly have to your survival? He's a changed demon once he learns.

✬ How he helps: ✬

Thankfully, his Akuzon habits mean that you never are without any products you might need/want - same day delivery! Once the initial shock has worn away, Levi ends up placing orders without you needing to ask. It's one of the little way he shows his love. Otherwise, Levi does his best to distract you from its existence altogether. The more episodes you watch, or the more games you play, the less likely Levi is to overthink and worry about you. "Leviiiii, I'm tired, I want to sleep! I swear I'm not going to die from blood loss." "Losing my Henry is not worth the risk! Just a few more episodes, I promise..."

✬ NSFW ✬

Levi had only honorable intentions when he invited you to binge a new anime with him. Besides, it's not like you'd ever imagine being with a disgusting pervert like him. So how does this keep happening? Your back is pressed to his chest, his hands holding your legs open as he thrusts his cock into you. You whine, whimper, and beg for him to keep going. He hides his face against your neck, nipping and kissing the sweat-soaked skin. Normally, he would be the one crying underneath you, begging with tears in his eyes for his orgasm. Perhaps its your period that is making you so pliable, so sensitive to his touch that even a small flick to your nipples has you throwing your head back in pleasure. The anime's closing song plays through the speakers as the credits roll. It goes unnoticed.

✬ Does he know what a period is? ✬

Yes, of course; he's only read every book about the subject that he could get his hands on.

✬ How he helps: ✬

Satan ends up becoming your nurse more than anything. He insists on prepping all of your lunches, making sure each meal is packed full of the vitamins and minerals your body needs. He has you rate your pain on a scale of ten and charts it alongside your other symptoms to see if there is a pattern. You understand that its his curious nature that drives him to do this, but you still had to put your foot down when he started asking to chart the heaviness of your flow. "Eat this; it will replace the magnesium you are losing due the monthly shedding of your endometrium." "I am a human, not a guinea pig dammit!"

✬ NSFW ✬

It was supposed to be a joke; a terrible one, but a joke nonetheless. Yet here you are now, Satan pawing at your thighs, while in the most ridiculous nurse's outfit you've ever seen. It looks like a cheap 'sexy nurse' Halloween costume, it barely fits him, the white spandex skirt riding up his legs as he sits between yours; is that even a real stethoscope? His hands slide down to your knees, gently guiding them apart, "I need to conduct a thorough examination, so will you please spread your legs?" You wonder if he stole this idea from one of his not-so-hidden smut novellas.

✬ Does he know what a period is? ✬

Yes! However, his knowledge comes from hands-on experience rather than from a book. His servitude to Solomon allows him to travel to the human world far more often than his brothers, and of course, there were more than enough humans willing to indulge his curiosities.

✬ How he helps: ✬

Asmodeus is aware of how unattractive some humans feel during their cycle, so he always goes out of his way to make sure you feel desired. Worried about acne? He has enough serums, creams, and masks to handle any breakout. Feel like your clothes don't fit right? What a perfect excuse to go shopping! He'll make sure you find something that you look and feel good in. Do you feel achey and sore? He keeps plenty of bath oils/salts stocked for you to freely use in his bathroom. "Asmo, why are you taking your clothes off?" "Did you think I would let you bathe all by your lonesome? <3"

✬ NSFW ✬

The Avatar of Lust silences your protests with his lips, happily snaking his tongue into your mouth when you gasp. The water of the bath is warm and fragrant; Asmodeus may have gone a bit overboard with the salts, but he wanted you relaxed and comfortable before he made his move. He works slow circles over your clit, just enough pressure to excite your body but no more than that. Everytime you wiggle your hips in search of more friction, he simply removes his hand, giggling at your defeated and pleading expression. It's no secret that your period aggravates the tension in your body, but Asmodeus knows that a steady hand will always prevail over brute force. So, just sit on his cock and let him pamper you, kay? <3

✬ Does he know what a period is? ✬

….No. Probably will also forget within minutes of you explaining it to him. It's okay, we love our gentle himbo.

✬ How he helps: ✬

There is no such thing as a weird food combination to this demon, therefore, he will enthusiastically try anything you create to appease your cravings. Also, thanks to his athleticism, Beel knows how to appropriately massage and stretch out any knots your muscles may form. He has to be extra careful since you're not as sturdy as a demon, but he's so happy that you trust him to do it anyways. "Mmmm.. chocolate and peanut butter..." "Beel, you're drooling into my hair...."

✬ NSFW ✬

It's not like the poor gluttonous demon could help it... you just smelled so good during this time of the month. Beel doesn't know what causes you to relent this time around, but he can't help but feel like he's unwrapping some exclusive treat as he slides your underwear down your legs. In his eagerness, he doesn't notice the embarrassed blush that covers your face, too focused on appreciating the meal that lies between your thighs. You don't have the time to mull over your decision before the demon has buried his tongue in your cunt, moaning in pleasure at the taste -- your taste. Just remember to help him clean off his face afterwards.

✬ Does he know what a period is? ✬

It's not that he doesn't know, more that he just doesn't care. He never cared about humans, or any of their inane problems, before you came along. At the very least, that means he'd be the most casual about it.

✬ How he helps: ✬

Belphegor is the laziest of all his brothers, so if his help doesn't involve napping, it's a slim to none chance of it ever happening. You'll find him in the attic whenever you need him, and he never asks questions when you do. He simply makes room for you, letting you get comfortable before trapping you against him for the foreseeable future. "Belphie, so help me-- I'm going to bleed on your pillow!" "snORk.. mimimimi..."

✬ NSFW ✬

It wasn't unusual for cuddly naps with Belphie to turn into half-asleep sex. But those times were usually initiated by the demon; he would infiltrate your dreams, interrupting whatever scenario that was playing out, and fuck your dream-self into waking up. Other times, the lazy brat would wake you up himself just to make you ride him while your moans were interrupted by yawns. This time, he wakes before you, and finds you rutting your hips against his as whisper-soft groans slip past your lips. You don't wake as he carefully undoes your pants and slide them down. He ogles the deep red stain that bleeds through your underwear, the sight of the sticky mess oddly erotic. Tentatively, he presses his fingers against the fabric, surprised by the warmth and feel of the blood that now stains his skin. It's a while longer til you wake, and Belphegor intends to play with your messy cunt until then.

•••✦ ❤ ✦••• Submit A Request •••✦ ❤ ✦•••

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ghost-bxrd · 1 month

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How would Talon!Dick react if, during patrol, he called out for Jason and didn't get a reply, and it turns out Jason was kidnapped by a rogue or something?

At first he wouldn’t think much of it. They usually stick close during patrol, yes, but it does happen that one of them wanders from time to time, mostly on accident.

So when Dick first calls out and doesn’t get a response he simply switches to the comms. The chirps and hoots don’t carry as well over tech, but Jason and Bruce will know what they mean and answer anyway.

Only that Jason doesn’t answer. He only gets Bruce’s confused pseudo-hoot in response, and that’s when Dick knows something is wrong.

His owlet always responds.

Unless he can’t.

Bruce requests a status update several times, calling for Robin to answer the comms, and when he‘a just as unsuccessful as Dick there’s two things he knows right away. One, Jason is in trouble. Two, Bruce is about to have a near feral Talon on his hands hunting for his owlet.

And BOY is he right.

Dick doesn’t stick around to discuss with Bruce what they’re going to do or how they’re going to track Robin down. He’s already five steps ahead, hunting through the streets like the horror of children’s tales come to life.

Dick may have hated being with the Court, but they taught him how to find someone. How to sniff out one target in a city of millions. Whoever took his owlet is going to pay.

Dick finds Jason in record time and slashes the kidnappers open with such clinical precision the EMT’s on scene are horrified.

The perpetrators all survive, but none of them will ever gain full use of their bodily functions ever again.

Bruce berates Dick for the brutality of his actions but he’s not stupid enough to believe the talon wouldn’t do the same thing again twice over if Jason was ever abducted again.

That same night Bruce integrates several trackers into Robins suit.

#owl song #jason todd #dick grayson #talon dick grayson #batfamily #batfam #robin #bruce wayne #batman

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noosayog · 10 months

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wc: 600

warnings/content: implied that reader is smaller and lighter than the MSBY boys, drinking, alcohol, vomitting

the end and bonus of this.

notes: I hope you all enjoyed this series as much as I enjoyed writing it! I know there are some of you out there who are scared to be vulnerable and open up around other people so this one's for you 💓

If you’re one thing, you’re rational. And rationality and love do not mesh. So in a complete lapse of judgment, you allow Atsumu to drag you to another one of his raging college parties.

“To overwrite the memories of your last one,” he had said.

To your dismay and you would never admit this aloud, you have fun. Atsumu keeps you at his side, introduces you to all his friends (the world of extroverts never ceases to amaze you), and makes sure your drink is filled at all times. He self-proclaims himself as tonight’s designated driver and encourages you to have all the fun you want.

With your careful, type-a personality, getting drunk has never been your idea of fun. Something about losing control of your bodily functions and saying something completely out of character because of an alcohol-induced brain fog makes you cringe. Anyway, it’s dangerous, especially with no one to take care of you. But tonight, Atsumu has plied you with promises that he will do exactly that, so you try something new. With the excuse that Bokuto and Hinata are hard to refuse, you play drinking games and go shot for shot with the volleyball team boys, which in hindsight is a terrible idea given their massive height and weight advantage over you.

At the end of the night, you remember only bits and pieces of Atsumu carrying you home before you pass out completely.

You awaken slowly, easily the next morning. You recognize the walls of Atsumu’s bedroom and find a glass of water at the bedside. You drink some water, assessing your surroundings when the memories of Atsumu having to stop you and take you home come back. You remember stripping out of your tight clothes in his bathroom, then keeling over to vomit in the toilet bowl with one arm stuck in your sleeve. You remember Atsumu coming in and holding your hair back, waiting until you finished, then freeing your stuck arm and yanking a shirt over your head.

You slide back down into bed and curl up under the sheets in total mortification, both embarrassed and guilty that you needed Atsumu to look after your sloppiest state.

That’s when you hear Atsumu’s footsteps by the bed and his light chuckle. You feel him sit down by your side and lay a palm over the lump of blanket that happens to be your head.

“You alright?”

You groan, peaking your eyes out from under the duvet. “I’m sorry.”

He tilts his head in confusion, setting a plate of food he was holding on the bedside table. “For what?”

“For… needing you to take care of me. I should’ve been more responsible and known my limits and-”

“Ah ah,” he tuts. “Princess, you know you’re allowed to let loose around me right? I promised I’d take care of you.”

You curl further inwards. “I know but…” you trail off, uncomfortable.

“You know I love you right? I want to take care of you. I love the side of you that’s responsible, rational, and mean to me, but I also love the side of you who wants to have fun and try new things.”

You cover your face, overwhelmed by his confession.

“And from now on, you don’t have to worry about doing what you want. I’ll love every side of you, no matter how long it takes you to get used to it.”

You nod under the sheets.

“C’mon, sweetheart. Gimme some kind of response after I said all that cheesy stuff.”

You throw the covers off and scowl at him. “Did you even mean any of that or did you just say that to-”

He cuts you off with a kiss and the smuggest grin you’ve ever seen on him. “C’mon then,” he says, getting up and taking the plate of food with him. “Let’s get some food in you.”

“I hope you realized you just inhaled my vomit breath,” you mumble grumpily.

You smile inwardly when he freezes.

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rosesloveletters · 2 months

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1971!Willy Wonka NSFW Alphabet

Pairing: 1971 Willy Wonka x Reader

Word Count: 2,069

Warnings: nsfw / sexual content.

Summary: Filled out NSFW alphabet template.

Author's Note: I think this was requested, but I had planned to write it anyway. Since I don't know when I'll have another full fic to post, here's a lil treat. Enjoy <3

divider created by @/saradika on Tumblr.

A = Aftercare (what they’re like after sex)

Willy is very attentive to your needs after passionate lovemaking sessions. Need help getting cleaned up? He’ll take the initiative to get up first and help you clean yourself up. Want some cuddles? He’ll be there with open arms, waiting for you to curl up in his embrace. Whatever it is that you need, he is more than happy to oblige. As long as you make your needs known, he will always do his best to meet them.

B = Body part (their favorite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

As an intellectual, Willy loves his brain and all things connected to it, i.e. his thoughts, ideas, desires, etc. His mind is what attracted you to him so how could he not fall in love with it just a little bit? He would also say that he is quite fond of his hands because of how easily he can use them to create things, carry out his whims or bring you pleasure…

He is also in love with your brain and all of the beautiful things in it. There is not one specific thing he loves the most about your physical appearance. Every part of your body is equally intriguing to him, but in different ways.

C = Cum (anything to do with cum, basically)

Wonka is not fond of cum, mainly because of the mess. His creative, artistically inclined mindset often means that he is disorganized, yet he is never dirty or messy. He takes pride in his appearance, so anything directly related to any bodily functions are taken care of discreetly and with haste.

He is a gentleman and perceives that ejaculation anywhere on his lover’s body is disrespectful.

He treats his partner with respect and only cums inside of them, while of course wearing a condom—safe sex is incredibly important to him.

D = Dirty secret (pretty self-explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

He occasionally fantasizes about his partner hiding beneath his desk and giving him a blowjob while he works.

Or perhaps his thoughts might drift to them taking him aside in the chocolate room and dropping to their knees behind one of the trees or mushrooms and satisfying him there.

He would never, ever let it happen, mostly because he could not stand the thought of someone seeing or catching him in the act.

E = Experience (how experienced are they? do they know what they’re doing?)

Not as experienced as one might think, but he knows enough to engage in the act without needing any guidance.

He has only had a couple of sexual encounters in his lifetime, mostly because he has a low sex drive and doesn’t think about it or experience urges very often. His mind is preoccupied with creating new products and he doesn’t have much time to think about or engage in sex.

F = Favorite position (this goes without saying)

Missionary is his favorite.

It’s a classic and he loves to be able to gaze into his partner’s eyes, watching all the little emotions that flicker across their face as he makes love to them.

A close-second is having his partner straddle his lap while they ride him. Sometimes it is enjoyable for him to let them take the lead and he certainly appreciates sitting back and letting them use his body to bring themself pleasure.

On the rarest of occasions, he will take his partner from behind, mostly if he is already in a more possessive mood.

G = Goofy (are they more serious in the moment? are they humorous? etc.)

It depends on his mood.

Wonka is usually very jovial and a bit of a trickster.

He does not believe that sex must be serious all the time, but he will read the room and conduct himself after the precedent his lover sets.

His partner’s overall enjoyment is his top priority and if cracking jokes or laughter helps make the experience more fun for them, he’ll be sure to find little ways of bringing a bit of humor into the personal encounter.

H = Hair (how well-groomed are they? does the carpet match the drapes? etc.)

Wonka tends to be a bit vain.

He is well-groomed; trimmed, not shaven.

The carpet does match the drapes in terms of curliness, however down below is thicker and one or two shades darker than on top of his head.

I = Intimacy (how are they during the moment? the romantic aspect)

Willy is a romantic at heart.

Every aspect of intimacy is very romantic and, depending on how comfortable his partner is with it, he will make sure that every sexual act is steeped in romance.

He wants his partner to feel comfortable and safe enough to be vulnerable with him. After all, Wonka is being just as vulnerable as they are and the romantic aspect is in part done for him as much as for his lover.

He loves to give kisses and nuzzles and gentle touches.

His hands will guide his lover’s movements, helping them maneuver themselves if they are finding it difficult to do so on their own.

Often, he takes it upon himself to shoulder the more dominant position, however, he can find plenty of ways to be romantic in a more submissive role if his partner feels more comfortable with that.

J = Jack off (masturbation headcanon)

Wonka rarely, if ever, masturbates.

He thinks too much and is unable to achieve orgasm.

It doesn’t bring him pleasure the same way that making love to his partner does and if he is seeing someone, then what is the point in doing it himself?

If it ever comes to it, he’ll masturbate in the shower because he can easily get rid of the evidence and clean himself off immediately afterwards.

K = Kink (one or more of their kinks)

Wonka isn’t very kinky.

However, he prides himself on being a brat tamer and isn’t afraid to speak his mind, sometimes sending his partner into a tailspin because of the things he says to keep them in line.

There is a bit of a darker side to him and, on occasion and with the right stimulus, he can be persuaded into becoming demanding, playing the role of a very dominant partner for the sake of having passionate, possessive sex.

L = Location (favorite places to do the do)

Wonka is not interested in having sex anywhere except in the bedroom.

He does not even want to think of anyone having perceptions of his sex life or the knowledge that he engages in anything of a sexual nature, even though he is not ashamed of it or anything like that.

He likes to maintain his privacy and therefore he won’t risk anyone seeing him perform any sexual acts.

Occasionally he might be persuaded into making love on the couch, yet he still does not appreciate how exposed the living room feels in comparison to the privacy of the bedroom.

M = Motivation (what turns them on, gets them going)

Clever word play and wit are very stimulating for Wonka.

Wonka has sex using his mind, not just his body. It entices him when his partner matches his intellect and can find ways to stimulate the conversation the same way one might do with his body.

It gets him going to see his partner dressing up for him or taking pride in their appearance for him. It turns him on to no end if he ever sees them casually wearing one of his shirts or trying on his clothes.

He’s got a bit of a thing for seeing his partner in lingerie…

N = No (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

Willy would never do anything to cause his partner any pain or discomfort, nor would he take advantage of them or knowingly cross any boundaries without direct approval or consent.

He will be checking on and following up with his partner throughout any sexual encounter to be certain that he still has their consent and will immediately stop if he even suspects they are uncomfortable or do not wish to continue.

O = Oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.)

Wonka prefers giving rather than receiving, but he wouldn’t turn down a blowjob every once in a while, especially after a particularly rough day.

P = Pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.)

Slow and steady is just what Wonka likes.

Nothing about the way that Wonka makes love to his partner is ever fast and rough, unless they would like for it to be.

Wonka takes his time, striving to give pleasure to his partner over time, building up to a crescendo of emotion and release rather than giving it everything all that once.

Foreplay is incredibly important to him and he won’t skip it; it takes incredible skill to get it just right.

Q = Quickie (their opinions on quickies, how often, etc.)

As stated above, Wonka likes to take his time and therefore, he wouldn’t go for a quickie unless it was the only option.

He would prefer to wait if no other options were available to him because times spent with his lover is so precious to him that he would not want to be rushed.

R = Risk (are they game to experiment? do they take risks? etc.)

Wonka is not a risk taker when it comes to sex.

Unprotected sex is a big ‘no’ for him. He is not interested in having children of his own and he cares enough about his partner to take their feelings and needs into consideration as well.

There are times for risks and intimacy is not one of them as far as he is concerned.

As for experimentation, he is willing to try most things at least once, especially if his partner asks for them.

The only thing unacceptable to him is causing his partner any discomfort or pain. The most one might be able to coax out of him is a bit of spanking, but do not expect it to cause much pain at all. He hates even the thought of accidentally hurting his partner; he would find it nearly impossible to forgive himself if he harmed them.

S = Stamina (how many rounds can they go for? how long do they last?)

Wonka makes up for his lack of stamina with his passion, charisma and charm.

Due to the duration of a session, he is usually exhausted and satisfied after one round.

However, if his partner wants more, he will do what he can to satisfy them, although he always makes certain that this is a rarity; he is gifted in knowing how to please his partner so that one round is almost always plenty for both of them.

T = Toys (do they own toys? do they use them? on a partner or themselves?)

This might come as a surprise, but Wonka can be a bit jealous and territorial regarding his partner. He would not like the idea of them relying on a toy for personal pleasure when he is willing and perfectly capable of satisfying their every desire.

He does not forbid his partner from pleasuring themselves, nor will he be angry if he were to find out they owned and used toys, but he would want to have a conversation about whether or not their needs were being met so that he could do his best to meet them and would use this opportunity to check up on them and make sure he isn’t doing anything that they don’t like or do not wish for him to continue doing.

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

In the right mood, Wonka is a relentless tease.

He can undress his partner with just his eyes, leaving them squirming under his piercing blue gaze.

He’ll be a bit unfair sometimes, using his personal wit and charm to debilitate his partner and leave them crumbling beneath him.

He can and will talk circles around just about anyone.

V = Volume (how loud they are, what sounds they make, etc.)

Willy is not very loud.

The most his partner will get out of him are a few grunts and the occasional breathy moan.

Unless directly requested, he won’t make very much noise.

W = Wild card (a random headcanon for the character)

Along the lines of a more sensual headcanon, Wonka would love to shower with his partner.

Cleanliness is very important to him (it must be since he works with food) and showering together is a nice way to help him feel more connected with his partner and to warm himself and loosen up his muscles before intimacy occurs.

X = X-ray (let’s see what’s going on under those clothes)

Wonka’s body is very soft.

He is not chiseled or have a rigid, sharp bone structure.

His skin is very soft and plush, conducive to being cuddled and squished.

He is somewhat toned and has an average build with some defined muscle, specifically in his biceps and thighs.

He has a broad chest that lacks a lot of hair, though he does have a faint happy trail leading from his belly button down to his pelvic area.

His manhood is slightly above average.

Y = Yearning (how high is their sex drive?)

My personal headcanon is that Wonka is greysexual and therefore his sex drive is very low.

He does not strike me as someone who values sex as a defining part of a romantic relationship, although he does appreciate it for its role and has desires and urges he needs to satisfy from time to time.

Z = Zzz (how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

It takes him a while to fall asleep afterward, mainly because he is concerned with making sure his partner’s needs have been met before he allows himself to relax or take what he needs.

Once they have been looked after, Wonka will relax, cuddling into them and letting himself drift off into dreamland.

#willy wonka #willy wonka and the chocolate factory #wwatcf #wilder!wonka #willy wonka 1971 #willy wonka x reader #willy wonka x you #willy wonka imagine #willy wonka and the chocolate factory imagine #gene wilder #biblio :: 📖

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520cafe · 8 months

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sour grapes. latte flashbacks

awakening to the rosy hue of the morning sun blazing against your skin, your eyes slowly fluttered opened. however, it did not take you long to notice that the bed felt relatively light. once your blurry vision cleared up, dan heng was no where to be seen.

he must have woke up early, maybe he has early classes you thought to yourself. sighing, you sat up and started to make the bed: folding the blanket, rearranging the plushies again, fixing the pillows. after all, it was you who crashed by his place to begin with. walking out of the bedroom, the moment you entered the living room, it was the sight in front of you that caused your eyebrows to slightly raise.

it was dan heng. dan heng, who was sleeping on the couch, despite being the one suggesting that the two of you should sleep on the same bed. rather than sharing the bed with you, he ultimately chose to respect your space (and the confusing state of your relationship) instead and sleep on the couch.

you could not control the corners of your lips gently curving upwards at the sight of the sleeping dan heng. to you at least, he looked endearing in that vulnerable and tired state. after getting a closer glance, you carefully readjusted the blanket to softly wrap around his body which had fallen on the floor before due to the small size of the couch that could barely fit dan heng.

even after a few moments, dan heng had not awoken from his slumber. it was then where you caught yourself staring at his face. the way his eyelashes were long and fluttered shut; his soft breathing; the way his lips were slightly agape. he looked vulnerable and at peace, something that you would often see during your past relationship has now become a rare occurrence. for some reason, you felt your heart begin to race as if dan heng was the fuel who was the cause of it.

however, you were snapped out of your thoughts when you saw how dan heng’s eyes started to slightly scrunch from the bright light of the sun. without realising, you lowered your body and placed your hand just above his eyes, covering his face from the sun. except, as soon as his eyes relaxed again, they began to flutter open and his tired eyes was met with yours.

“dan heng… good morning.”

after finally realising how close your face was towards his, you frantically stood back up and awkwardly coughed into your hand as a way to hide your face. due to the morning sun, the dusted pink on your cheeks was made much more visible and heat quickly rushed to your ears. it was then you were responded with the deep and sleepy laugh of dan heng.

“good morning, [name].”

his voice was raspy from just having been woken up but, even that was enough to fuel your racing heartbeat to run even faster. dan heng’s oceanic eyes looked at you with an endearing affection and compassion. even though the two of you just woken up, he could not hide the way he was almost admiring you: your messy hair, the way you wore his shirt that was slightly big on you, your puffy eyes. different synonyms of the word beautiful kept repeating in his head.

“did you sleep well?”

“you ended up sleeping on the couch anyway.” you sighed, shaking your head in guilt by taking up the bed in his own dorm.

“it’s nothing. after all, you got more space right?”

dan heng sat up from the couch, lazily rubbing his eyes before he looked at you again with the same tender look that was reminiscent of a puppy staring at their owner, who just so happened to look beautiful in his eyes.

before dan heng could speak again, he was interrupted by a light grumbling sound. dan heng quickly covered his smile with his hand, he knew it was not him.

“this is a completely normal bodily function, dan heng.” embarrassed, you looked away from him while crossing your arms. yet, dan heng’s soft sugar-coated laugh was ringing through your ears as he was amused by your immediate protest.

“i’m not making fun of you [name].” though, the teasing smile on his face said otherwise. as if on time, an idea appeared in dan heng’s mind which resulted in him sighing and shaking his head, still with a sleepy smile.

“[name], do you remember the cafe where march and the others left us in?”

🍇 SOUR GRAPES 〈 12 latte flashbacks

━━ MASTERLIST. ╱ PREV. ╱NEXT.

╰► SYNOPSIS. after being in the same tight-knit friend group for over a few months now, suspicions begin to rise when march, seele and bronya start to notice the awkward tensions between you and dan heng. little did they know, you and dan heng were once high-school sweethearts who shared a romantic and fairytale-like past where the pages only lasted for a year. this heartbreak led you to meet another unfortunate victim of cupid but that chapter flew away as quick as stardust. yet, it appears that you two were also destined to cross paths once more.

╰► [ a/n ] : i will pull out the ukulele and write a handwritten apology with my tears for this one please forgive me 🙏

━━ TAGLIST. @lauvwar-r @sunsethw4 @shizu-c @amyena @zephestia @loudeggbananaranch @lunavixia @twistedrxses @shinjuuz @danhenglovebot @flos-veritatis @sammy-hammy @kiwidoves @aeongiies @heartswonder @lilactaro @lunnaeclipse @m1lley0ns @hansel-the-pierrot @astro-pioneer @aquatikk @obervation-subject-753 @vellichxrr6782 @rubberduckieyourtheone @viovya @stayriki @ceylestia @starryeyedkoko @theflameofyoursoul @kalims @liminalimmortal

#🍇 ━━ SOUR GRAPES !#honkai star rail x reader #hsr x reader #hsr dan heng #dan heng x reader #dan heng x you #dan heng x y/n #honkai star rail smau #hsr smau #honkai star rail fanfic #hsr fanfic #hsr x y/n #hsr x you #honkai star rail x you #honkai star rail x gender neutral reader

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philosophicalparadox · 2 years

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An educational post for writers: the effects of malnutrition/starvation:

Malnutrition/starvation has a bunch of really fucky effects, and I see whump people use malnutrition/starvation from time to time, (i am utilizing it now, hence the post) but rarely do they depict the horrific suffering. I have actually starved before, so here's my medically accurate advice on what that looks like:

Among the most prominent of effects of lack of food/lack of nutritious food ironically not depicted, for it is the most common nutritional deficit on earth, is anemia - lack of iron means your body doesnt produce blood like it used to, which at a point makes you cold all the time! It also messes with your bodily sense of blood pressure, making you more likely to notice tiny changes, which in turn can trigger dizziness, severe anxiety, heart palpitations, fainting, and vascillations between cognitive clarity and a foggy feeling. Lack of iron causes lack of red blood cells, which means you can't distribute oxygen as efficiently. This causes fatigue, a general sense of unwellness, called "malaise", and causes you to breathe and your heart to beat faster than they normally should. This, in turn, can trigger more anxiety! Anemia is a very anxiety inducing deficiency on its own because your body knows it's in trouble and it definitely wants to tell you about it!

It only takes about 3-4 days without food to develop anemia to this degree, though it can take as little as 2 if you already have deficits. If you are eating food but it's lacking in iron this transition can take 2-3 weeks, as your body uses up its iron reserves located in your liver, spleen and bone marrow (where red blood cells are produced).

Malnutrition and especially starvation also screws with your electrolytes, making you prone to dizzy spells and vertigo, and can seriously affect the myelin sheathes around your nerves and the delicate proteins in your brain, which combined with electrolyte imbalance and probable anemia can cause anything from blurred vision, headaches, fatigue and cognitive impairment (pervasive brain fog), at best, all the way up to the moderate landing of muscle spasms and ataxia (loss of coordination) and functional loss of senses like sight and hearing, to the severe landing of seizures and total organ failure. Also, malnourished muscles hurt!!! They hurt to touch, they hurt to move, it hurts to exist!

I once went 8 full days with little to no food, so I know this stuff from experience. Let me tell you, hunger pains are God fucking awful and paradoxically make you feel very nauseous and can cause vomiting, (your body wants to get rid of the concentrated stomach acid) and are truly indescribable in their instinctual ability to instill desperation, depression and terror. You would eat a lot of things you never thought you would after just three days without food. At 8, I was very strongly considering eating my pet birds. I had already begun eating their seeds. The only thing that saved them was one measly bag of potato chips, the very last thing resembling human food in the pantry (the vending machine size chips) on day 6, which gave me just enough salt and fat to rethink that idea.

Anyway, muscles! Hurt!!! Especially if you don't eat a lot of protein to start out. Muscular degeneration or "digestion" (ketosis) can happen surprisingly fast if you arent eating anything at all. 5-7 days usually if you are healthy, though 3 is not unheard of, especially if you are expending a lot of calories and have very little fat. It's quirky hallmark? A strangely sweet and metallic taste in your mouth. Like a penny coated in sugar water. The ache is hard to describe, but it is constantly there, and honestly wore me down psychologically more than the hunger pains, which curiously went away after day 4, only coming back with a vengeance when I tried to eat anything. It hurt to move, it hurt to think about moving, and the constant low level pain was absolute torture. The fatigue didn't help. I normally slept about 6-9 hours. During that time after day 3 or so, I started sleeping 15 or more, in bursts, and had very little energy to do anything but rest. Every now and then I'd get a burst of restlessness, my body pushing me to find food or drink water. It was unpleasant. The headaches were pretty bad too, at first.

Malnutrition, and specifically a lack of protein, also causes pervasive muscle aches and all the neurologic issues mentioned above.

My experience led me to the development of ataxia that has never completely gone away. I remember the panic of nearly blacking out while trying to stand too, and not being able to cognitively focus on anything, much less visually focus. (Started about day 5). Mind you, I was 15 years old and weighed only 89 lbs prior to this period, with a fast metabolism and very little fat. After it I weighed 81 lbs. 8lbs in 8 days is a lot of weight to lose, and boy did my body hate me for some time after that. But my insomnia was cured for a while!

Anyway, i hope this proves insightful for all your whumping and torturous needs. I didn't plan on making it so personal, but hey, I've lived through that, so it seemed relevant to add that here.

Happy writing!

#writing advice #whump

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apparitionism · 5 days

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Asleep 2

For the anniversary this year, I have the second “half” of my @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange story for @kla1991 : an involuntary bed-sharing situation that turns not sexy but disastrous. The first part took on Myka’s perspective; this conclusion is written from the other side of the bed. A confession: I find in-universe Helena’s head voice a somewhat difficult register to compose—because while she can’t be fully insane, she needs to teeter or list, sometimes more than a little (but without falling into histrionics). Which is to say that if you don’t entirely buy the turns of thought and/or coping mechanisms I’ve given her here, your skepticism is well-placed. Ultimately I hope it’s the case that a person can be broken but still want in a way that’s... pure? Justified? Sweet? Reciprocatable? Maybe just “vaguely recognizably human”?

Anyway, this is long, first because it extends well beyond the point at which the first part ended, but also because when a Bering and a Wells get to talking (as they at last do!), they need to work things out at their own pace...

Asleep 2

My arm is asleep.

Under normal circumstances, a person would, upon becoming aware of this, shift position so as to restore blood flow.

Under normal circumstances.

But very little is normal about the circumstances under which Helena’s arm is asleep.

She is in a hotel-room bed, in the dark of night, lying on her left side, with her left arm, her now-asleep arm, pinned beneath her. So ends the disturbingly limited “normal” portion of the situation.

Here begins the larger portion: she absolutely must not move.

Irony guts at her with that, a shiv-and-twist remembrance of bronze restriction—but that prohibition had involved a significantly different auxiliary verb: “cannot” rather than “must not.”

Grammatical particulars aside, her immobility now is barely less a torment. This is because her other arm, her alive right, terminates in an even-more alive sensate hand, one that now rests—but is in no way at rest—on Myka’s right hip.

Myka, too, is lying on her left side, a small distance in front of Helena, lying in this hotel-room bed. Such proximity in such a space might, under other circumstances, signify the fulfillment of a long-held dream... but here, now, it seems a nightmare. For Myka is Helena’s colleague and no more; they are in this bed for sleep and no more; and Myka is playing her part correctly while Helena is not, in contravention of what she has sworn to herself she would do no more.

Such drowsy sense the placing of that hand had seemed to make, when she had found herself facing Myka’s back. She had in the past regarded that length covetously, relishing the idea of touch both salacious and tender.

For all her coveting, however, she had in fact only once laid hands on that back, both hands with intention on the clothed blades of Myka’s shoulders: a terrifying embrace, one that was in the most basic physical manner right but overall searingly wrong, screaming bodily truth but surrounded by words that said nothing they should. A perversion of promise, like so much else that had happened in Boone.

Yet Helena had clung to its memory all the same.

She’d thought, here in this unexpected proximity, to supersede that, to touch once again, once again but brief, once again though brief. To erase and replace.

First she touched the right blade, light; yet her hand wanted stillness, more connection than a mere pat against cotton-clad bone. And there was Myka’s hip, a beckoning promontory jut... a place to rest. Rest, however brief.

Once placed, however, her hand had proved reluctant to retreat.

Brief, she reminded it.

No, the hand had responded. I belong here.

Helena knows this is true. She knows also that it cannot be true.

But she is no stranger to holding contradictory thoughts in her head. This has been essential to establishing and maintaining, in these new Warehouse days, a functional equilibrium. Functional. Indeed her goal, in this “reboot,” has been to function, which she has lately defined as something on the order of “to move through time nondestructively.”

This definition had come about due to her realization, pre-reboot, that her difference from others, her inability to fully perform a modern self—her arrogance about that inability, even as she attempted to hide both the inability and the arrogance—chipped at, chipped from, the good (the good nature, the good will, the goodness) of those around her. Over time, such chips accrued as wounds.

Nate. (Adelaide.) Giselle.

She had as a result finally understood that coming back to the Warehouse would mean, at the very least, that those with whom she interacted had already made a bargain, perhaps even a peace, with the inevitable violence of history: with the way the forces of the past could—would—affect, even infect, the present. Helena herself was, at her simplest, merely one more of those forces.

She did consider requesting that she be re-Bronzed, now absent any pretension of traveling through time, but rather as a way of neutralizing a dangerous, and demonstrably unstable, artifact. But then an image had come to her, possibly as an omen, possibly as only a desperate wish: Myka’s devastated face upon hearing such news.

Boone all over again.

Thus the reboot. Because the most significant entry under “function,” with additional emphasis on the “nondestructive” portion of that definition, was her resolution to spare Myka pain. In the past, Helena had been both careless and careful—surgically so—in her infliction of damage on Myka above all others. But she had sworn to herself that those days were done.

Done, but Helena knew she had not paid anything near a sufficient price.

So. To maintain distance, no matter how troublesomely ardent her wish to close it, was—had to be—part of her penance. And to do so decorously was—had to be—the gentlest approach. That was what Helena told herself in her more rational moments.

This moment, in this bed, is not one of those. If it were, she would simply remove her hand. Simply remove it, then roll over.

But her mind races, finding complication: She doesn’t know what sort of sleeper Myka is. Had Helena’s placing of hand awakened her? If she had awakened, has she now fallen asleep again? If she has, would she then be reawakened by the hand’s removal? Or would she, if still awake, draw some negative inference about the entire situation based on removal?

Ideally, Helena would maintain a facsimile of entirely blameless sleep while engaging in that removal, but can she make such a performance believable?

Never in her life has Helena been so concerned about her ability to mislead convincingly as when she has attempted to deceive Myka. That was the case in the past, even at her most nefarious, and now she worries day-to-day that her strictly disciplined disguise of near-constant wishing ache will slip and fail. A simple I am asleep should be... well... simple. But it is not, and Helena is reminded of Claudia’s tendency to observe, in situations both dire and banal, “Here we are.”

Here we are, because Myka is apparently indifferent to the idea of sharing a bed with Helena.

Here we are, because Myka is apparently indifferent to history.

Here we are, and that latter indifference is a surpassing irony, due to the fullness of—

Helena sees that she needs to divert her train of thought, as descending into unjustified anger will help absolutely nothing.

First, she entertains a fantasy of sitting up, turning on a light, and explaining to Myka that this entire situation is untenable, and that if they are going to share a bed, they should share a bed. But it’s true that Myka did not seem even to consider that as a possibility, which seems ludicrous, given the past... no, that’s back to unjustified anger, for who is Helena to resent what Myka wishes not to consider? And indeed, who is she to interpret the past in such a way as to believe she understands what Myka would have considered?

Focus on the facts, she tells herself. What actually happened in that nefarious past. And do so dispassionately.

Regrettably, the word “dispassionately” brings to mind another word: “passionately.”

Again. For she had thought that word not long after she and Myka had first entered this room, first entered it to find, as Helena’s unrestrained fantasies might have conjured, only one bed. That they were clearly intended to share. Thus her mind’s unruly leap to... an adverbial manner in which they might do so.

But Myka had said not one word about the accommodations, so Helena had held her tongue as well. She nevertheless couldn’t help but feel it an elaborate lack of remark on both their parts, the silence practically baroque in its fullness.

Baroque too had been the courtesy with which they jointly prepared for bed, a you-first-no-you stutter-choreography of politeness that ensured privacy, yes, but also reinforced the barrier between their past and their present.

Which Helena understood was necessary. It did nothing, however, to mitigate the breath-hold of preparing to lie down beside Myka.

Once she had managed that lying down, however (with a relative aplomb for which self-congratulation was not, she felt, unjustified), she hoped her torment might ease. A bit. If she could manage the additional task of pretending the body beside her was no more significant than any other human. Some flesh, recumbent.

But when they were situated thus beside, Myka spoke. “You seem a little upset,” she said.

Helena had barely been able to restrain a snort. Now Myka saw fit to comment? As if allowing this portion of the play to pass without remark would create some undue strain upon collegiality? As if their incongruous bonhomie might buckle under the weight of that silence? Oh, that was rich.

Bottling her pique, Helena questioned: “With?” To make Myka say it. Mere saying wouldn’t hurt. Would it?

“You haven’t been yourself since you put that camera in the static bag. Was it a problem, seeing it again?”

Helena held herself rigid so as to keep her body from betraying neither her disappointment at the question nor, contradictorily, her relief...

It was a reasonable question. A good question. Not one on which Helena particularly wanted to focus (although it indicated a certain attention on Myka’s part, an attention on which Helena suspected she should not dwell), but it did deserve an answer. “It closes a door, doesn’t it,” she told the ceiling, for turning her head to address the other body directly seemed an invitation to peril. “That one I opened so nefariously, long ago.”

“Or—and—maybe it closes a loop,” Myka said.

Unexpected. “A loop?”

“Right after college, I went through a self-help phase,” Myka said. She paused, and Helena found herself on relative tenterhooks regarding the applicability of this (new!) information to the current situation. Which reminded her how much she had missed talking with Myka... because of the very sound of her voice, yes, but also because her conversation could range so unanticipatedly. So rewardingly unanticipatedly. Helena had known few people who could lead her on such unpredictable, yet productive, journeys.

Was Myka’s apparent willingness to begin such a journey now indicative of... anything? A softening, perhaps, of relations between them? Not a rebooting of their once-burgeoning intimacy, for that had to remain taboo, but could it be that some restoration of their previous intellectual engagement might be, at the very least, neutral rather than harmful?

Helena had moved a tentative pawn in that direction during their conversation on the airplane. Perhaps this was Myka’s answering move?

With an exhale that seemed like resignation at what she was about to say—to reveal?—Myka said, “I felt like I needed to be someone different—someone better.”

Another pause. Helena considered that such a feeling seemed very Myka (and she heard that phrase in Claudia’s voice), but also very misguided. Of course she was not at all placed to make such judgments, and even less so to convey them to Myka. Thus she said a simple, “Did you,” to encourage without prejudice.

“So I read a lot of books,” Myka said, to which Helena had responded internally, Of course you did. “One was about how to get things done.”

“All things?” Helena asked.

“Sort of.” That was followed by yet another pause. Yet another puzzle.

All these pauses. Was Myka on the verge of sleep? Helena said, soft, thinking she might go unheard, “Perhaps I should read that book. As a help to myself.”

At that, Myka had laughed, more delay, but also soft. “I don’t think it’s any kind of help you need. The guy who wrote it had a big system, all these rules, and I love rules, but these... I admit I didn’t stick with most of them. Honestly, any. But an idea that did stick was actually a pretty minor part: open loops. Stuff you track subconsciously, all the time, because it’s incomplete. How troubling that is. And what a difference it makes when you close a loop, when you each a resolution. I mean, he was talking about stuff like answering emails.”

“Emails,” Helena echoed. So far from artifacts.

“Which this is so much bigger than,” Myka said, exhibiting, not for the first time, an uncanny ability to scoop from Helena’s thoughts. “But maybe the principle holds. You don’t have to tell me. But I hope you have fewer open loops now than you did. Before.”

“Yes. The number. Fewer,” Helena said, factually.

She of course couldn’t say out loud (but it was equally factual) that Myka herself was the loop most capaciously open. The one that gaped, superseding, never mind the number of lesser.

Indeed, however, that number was now minus-one. Oscar. Oscar and his ballad... that loop closed.

Helena had in fact, while handling the camera, begun to ideate a wish that someone (Steve? Claudia?) might be persuaded to use the camera to capture her image... for it had occurred to her that a spark of art, some production on which to concentrate, might animate this reboot... something to pursue, rather than to be pursued by...

But. Lying abed, still and strangely hopeful—a state she should have known would not endure—a realization had struck her, as an open hand to the face, a realization of why Myka had brought up loops and the closing thereof: she had somehow discerned Helena’s wish, via that scooping of thought, and was discouraging her from pursuing it.

So much for any softening. This was instead a warning: Helena should not open a loop that Myka might be obligated to close. And Helena had no trouble grasping that the warning was in no way limited to the use of a single artifact... no, it doubtless applied to any burdensome loops Helena might be thinking of opening, any new incompletions that might come to trouble Myka.

“I understand,” Helena had said, regretting that pawns could not be moved backwards.

At the same instant, Myka said, “I’m glad.”

That collision had canceled communication entirely; in its wake, Myka had turned out her light and turned away from Helena.

Leaving Helena to her thoughts.

Well, fine, had been the first of those.

Next had come an equally mulish sniff of And I will have no difficulty directing any subsequent away from this shared bed.

Whereupon she had proven herself both wrong and right, thinking about history, about the fact that, whatever Myka’s commentary or lack thereof had or hadn’t signified, the fact of Warehouse agents lodging together, sharing beds completely platonically, was certainly nothing new.

This line of thinking had enabled Helena to distract herself by recalling a mission with Steve and Claudia, one in which Steve had announced, after checking in at their hotel, “Bad news. Just a king room left, but they said they’d bring up a cot.”

He had then immediately assigned Claudia to said cot, prompting her to protest, “No way! This situation screams rock-paper-scissors tournament! Loser gets the crappy night’s sleep!”

“No way,” Steve protested back, far more mildly. “The father of science fiction gets first dibs on the lumbar support, and my back’s got a decade on yours, so I call second. If that father agrees.”

Helena had. Sharing with Steve had been fine.

Sharing with Myka should of course have been no different.

Should of course have been...

But now, here in the impossible present, as Helena’s left arm slumbers and her right hand sparks, what should have been? Isn’t isn’t isn’t.

She needs further distraction, so she casts her mind again to Claudia and Steve, to the compensations they have offered her during this strange and estranging reboot: at first Claudia, who had welcomed Helena back so unreservedly and continues to offer wholehearted allyship; and then Steve, who had quickly become an unanticipated boon companion, a partner upon whom Helena has felt increasingly, and increasingly exceptionally, lucky to be able to rely.

And yet these compensations, though Helena hopes she conveys all appropriate gratitude for them, are never sufficient, for Myka—necessary yet unreachable—is always present.

She’d been so, even during that cot-delineated retrieval. Its aftermath had (so much for distraction) involved a significantly Myka-related incident, for Helena had dared, as she, Steve, and Claudia were relaxing in the hotel lounge prior to retiring, to broach Myka as a topic of conversation. As one might do, she’d thought: speaking about a colleague.

“I have an inquiry,” she’d phrased it. To make the ensuing question sound... scientific?

Dispassionate, she jeers at her recalled self.

She jeers also at what she’d said next: a too-bald, “How is Myka?”

She had known, even at the time, that what she had truly wanted was to say that blessed name, to speak about that blessed person. She could not speak to Myka in any meaningful way, and she was starving.

Steve and Claudia had then shared what seemed an extremely charged glance, so Helena hastened to dissemble, making sure to use questions so as to prevent Steve from finding her immediately untruthful: “Given that her liaison with Pete ended? They’ve... recovered, as it were? Both faring well?”

But her tone had struck her own ears as too bright; a desperation rippled behind it, and Helena knew from experience that behind that tiptoed a still deeper threat of rupture, which required work to be kept at bay. As Helena had been instructed by her most successful therapist to do when such awareness overtook her, she began to breathe with attention.

Neither Steve nor Claudia spoke as she did so.

When the danger passed, she smiled, as best she could, to signal to them her appreciation—and to herself, her success.

Steve then said, “You’re not asking about Pete.”

Helena valued—as a personality trait—Steve’s discerning willingness to push. She did not in that moment value how he thus so easily revealed a glaring flaw in her initial approach: she should have asked about Pete; with that as her entrée, the talk might organically have turned to Myka. Foolish of her to think so unstrategically... or was her failure to do so a paradoxically positive sign?

“Give it time,” Steve said, and Helena knew he was making no reference to Myka and Pete’s recovery.

“My relationship to time,” she said, with contempt. Time: she’d taken it. Now she had to give it? A forfeit. Well, that was fair.

Claudia said to Steve, “Speaking of, we’re wasting it. Are we gonna do the thing?”

“Only if H.G.’s on board,” Steve told her. It was an unexpectedly mind-your-manners utterance.

“What is the thing?” Helena asked.

“Claudia’s trying out alcohols,” Steve said. “We can’t do it around Pete, obviously, which means retrievals are our—”

“So many questions to answer, right?” Claudia interrupted, her avidity increasing. “You know, am I über-suave James Bond with the martinis? Or a fights-against-my-general-cool-geek-vibe Carrie Bradshaw with a cosmo?”

Helena had had no idea what she was referring to, but the investigation seemed entirely fit for someone her age. “What have you determined thus far?”

“Turns out cosmos don’t work for me,” she said, “as the prophecy foretold, and Bond-wise, I like a martini all vodka, no gin; sorry, Vesper.”

“Is that all?” Helena asked.

Further avidity: “Oh god no. Vodka drinks aren’t perfect: white Russians are way too sweet. Also in the white family, the wine category pretty much bores me. Also there was this one time Steve ordered a gin drink called a white lady that I couldn’t even think about because it had an egg white in it and one look made me retch.”

“Quite the wide-ranging experiment,” Helena said, hoping to forestall further off-putting description. “Not conducted with inappropriate... ah... intensity, one hopes?”

Steve patted Claudia’s shoulder, at which she rolled her eyes. “I’m supervising,” he said. “No more than a few tries in one sitting, and we’re doing it mindfully.”

Claudia abandoned her attitude and nodded. “Paying attention to what I’m tasting. How to find, you know, notes and stuff. Except for the disgusting egg-white thing, it’s honestly been fun.”

“I’m not opposed to fun,” Helena said, and she was a bit surprised—but pleased, and pleased to be pleased—that Steve didn’t squint in response. “So, Mr. Supervisor, what’s next?”

“I’ve been pushing for the wide and wonderful world of beer, but—”

“Seems too jocktastic,” Claudia said. “You know, ‘Beer me, bro.’”

“I don’t know,” Helena said.

“Anyway that’s really not me,” Claudia continued, as if Helena hadn’t spoken. She did have a tendency to ignore Helena’s ignorance, a tendency that Helena enjoyed and found frustrating in equal measure.

“Her beer perspective is severely limited,” Steve lamented.

“I myself have always found a strong stout ale quite enjoyable,” Helena said: her contribution to Steve’s cause. It was also true, the fact of which he seemed pleased to affirm with a quirk of lip and a quiet “so you have.”

Claudia’s expression remained skeptical, but she shrugged weakly and said, “I guess I could give it a shot?”

“Oh, because H.G. says so,” Steve twitted.

To that, Claudia squared her shoulders. “Yeah. Don’t you know who she is?” she demanded.

“Who I was,” Helena hurried to emphasize, “and given that Steve assigned me the bed on that basis, he—”

“Who you are,” Claudia corrected, throwing the emphasis back.

“And who is that?” Helena asked. What distinction did Claudia imagine was relevant?

“The person who told me my destiny was glorious. You’re still that guy, right?”

Relevant indeed. Helena was taken aback, indeed taken back to that extremity, back in a novel way. She had been so mired in the Myka of it all in the intervening time, that she had lost her view of the bright salience of Claudia’s presence. Wrongly. “I am,” she said. She hoped Claudia believed her.

“Okay,” Claudia said. “So I’ve got this big-as-Pete’s-biceps incentive to hope the stuff you say is true. And by the way, one of you has to casually drop in front of him how I said that, because I want the points.”

Steve snickered and said, “I know my job. But in the meantime, I think I’d like to toast to all these sentiments, and to the agents offering them. With a strong stout ale.”

They tasted the three strongest the hotel bar had on offer, and Claudia pronounced that her favorite, one purporting to convey roasted notes of coffee, chocolate, and other darkness, was “way too complicated for your average broseph.” Which Steve seemed pleased by, as a judgment, so the overall experience scored a success.

There was no further talk of Myka, however, the avoidance of which topic seemed quite deliberate... as if Steve and Claudia had determined that Helena would not benefit from it.

Or that she did not deserve it.

For the best, Helena had concluded. Either way.

Now, in a similar “for the best either way” sense, she makes to raise her hand, with that intended overlay of feigned sleep, so as to shift away and at last regain equilibrium, restoring feeling to her sleeping arm and calming that oversensitive hand. But instead—in what she can interpret only as a stupidly id-driven attempt to bank some never-to-be-repeated sensation, to the memory of which that desperate id might cling in a touch-deprived future—she moves her hand, not away from Myka, but further down her leg.

And her worst fears are instantly realized: Myka’s body reacts violently, as if in revulsion at the very idea of Helena touching her.

It was only a hand at rest, Helena begs, with no conception of why or to whom she is rendering that supplication. That was all.

Alas, that was—is—not all, for in the next split second Myka is falling from the bed and crying out in pain.

Helena, at a loss, attempts a faux-innocent inquiry, which Myka answers unintelligibly. In trepidation, Helena ventures to the mattress-edge, then lowers herself to the floor next to Myka—and she is appalled, for the situation that confronts her is all debility, even more so than the absurd “my arm is asleep” with which this farce began: Myka’s shoulder is dislocated.

Further, Myka is now unconscious.

Spare Myka pain. How utterly unsurprising Helena finds her inability to obey such a dictum in even this most basic physical sense.

Unsurprising... worse, dispiriting, and it brings her low, such that again the incipient rupture asserts its subterranean power, urging Helena to give up, to run away and leave this broken Myka to someone else to bind up and save.

You’ve done it before.

That resounds in her head as both accusation and affirmation, and the voice pronouncing it might be Myka’s, or some deity’s, or that of any of the other personages who jockey audibly for primacy in that space, including Helena’s own.

She initiates breathing with care, even as an eddying undertow tempts her to entertain the notion that escape, too, might be rebooted, tempts her to entertain and revel in its ostentation as a response to Myka’s indifference, her rejection of history, even her revulsion.

Here is my answer to all that, a departure would declare.

Helena labors to breathe herself away from such perfidy, but the scenario creeps along, with an undertone of sinful relish, as she imagines leaving Myka to awaken alone and in pain.

But then—because her labor leads her there—she further imagines the various permutations of “someone else” who might be called upon to save the day in her absence. Whereupon the thought strikes her that moving through time nondestructively requires her to think seriously of, and to think seriously out, such knock-ons... how, for example, would Steve and Claudia respond to having to clean up this mess, knowing that Helena had made it?

Moving through time nondestructively. Interesting, here, the overlap with moving through time selfishly: selfishly, she does not want to destroy Claudia’s image of her as someone whose opinion matters. She does not want to destroy Steve’s image of her either, for it seems to have at least some positive components. Further, she does not want to destroy the fellowship they three are building.

If for no other reasons than those, she concludes that having caused this quite specific damage, she must fix it.

Because she can.

The fact of the matter is, Helena cannot fix most things. She has tried mightily to maintain the pretense that she can... but she has been forced over and over to confront the absurdity of that bravado. This very specific fix-it, however, she can perform. And while that performance—inconveniently, in the present circumstance—requires touch, here it can be functional. Perhaps in success she might in some way efface her earlier invasiveness...

Yet she can do nothing without two functional arms. She thumps her still-insensate left against the bed, hard—too hard, for Myka’s eyes open. She mumbles out something Helena decodes as “whatareyoudoing.”

“Preparing to remedy a situation,” Helena says.

“Okay.” Myka murmurs. She seems oddly comforted by the answer, to such an extent that she relaxes, losing consciousness again.

That’s fortunate, given the required manipulation.

Helena prepares herself to do it quickly, efficiently, as she has done in the past... rather dramatically on one occasion, as she recalls, for an agonized Wolcott... but she should not think of Wolcott. For the regret.

She sets that aside, preoccupying herself instead with the necessary activity. Her manipulation, determined and strong, is rewarded: what begins as a sluggish resistance resolves into a slip-pop of relocation, one that shudders a familiar path through her own bones. She then cushions Myka’s arm with a fresh towel and uses a pillowcase to fashion around it a tight sling.

Levering Myka up onto the bed would most likely cause further injury, so Helena sits beside her on the floor, ensuring periodically that she continues to breathe. The wait is calming, cleansing, its peace a renewal of a soothing activity of which Helena has been long deprived: observing Myka closely, at actual leisure. At no point since her return—so at no point in, literally, years—has she had such an opportunity.

She’s reminded, in that observation, of the true fundament: this precious person. Who could never be merely some flesh.

After a lengthy time, during which Helena is pressed to consider, to remember, to value Myka’s singularity, that precious person’s eyes flutter open.

That person tests her bound arm, a tentative physical investigation that approaches elegance in its delicacy.

But Myka’s delicacy and elegance, too, Helena should not think of. For the regret.

“I’m not in the hospital,” Myka burrs.

Reasonable, practical. This is what Helena should think of. “Not yet,” she says. “But we’ll go if necessary. If you’re in pain.”

Myka’s face contorts. “Not if. I am. Some. More than some. I’m sorry.”

“For being in pain?”

“That. But also, for changing this whole thing.”

Helena leaves the latter alone, for she cannot begin to interpret it. Focusing on functionality, she asks, “Can you dress yourself?”

Myka nods, but she winces far too much with even that motion, so Helena screws her courage to it and says, “I’ll change and then help you.”

Herself, fast, then Myka: Functional, she snarls internally as she addresses the situation, and even faster. She’s relieved to find that Myka’s trousers and boots are less complicated than she’d feared, and as it happens, preventing Myka suffering additional physical pain—even while undressing and redressing her!—is, paradoxically or not, far easier than navigating emotional shoals, or even hand-on-hip physical shoals. Focusing on Myka’s face for twists, listening for labors in breath, adjusting accordingly... it’s distractingly, satisfyingly concrete. Only the present moment matters.

Only the present moment matters. This is the mantra Helena iterates internally as they proceed to the nearest urgent care facility.

Yet as they wait there for attention, Helena finds herself increasingly unable to ignore why they are waiting there for attention. In the present moment, which matters. She begins—or does she intend it as an ending?—with, “I’m assuming you flung yourself to the floor in an attempt to escape a circumstance.”

Myka hiccups a laugh that makes her cringe in protection of the shoulder. “That’s weirdly accurate. As an assumption.”

Helena recoils at the confirmation, but she must acknowledge it. “A circumstance in which I touched you in a way that was unwelcome,” she agrees, with gloom.

“Unwelcome,” Myka echoes.

It’s so... definitive. It was one thing for Helena herself to think it, believe it, say it aloud. Quite another—though it shouldn’t have been—to hear it from Myka.

A punctuating end to what never truly began between them: there is some consolation, if only philosophical, in the idea that after so many starts that were false, they may at least enjoy a finish that is true.

“Of course it was,” Helena says, following with, “and how could it have been otherwise.” She puts the final period upon it by adding a bare, spare dig: “Given history.”

Myka closes her eyes... in acceptance of the cut? When she opens them, they are glistening. Tears? Helena is egotistically gratified by such a response, never mind that it means she has yet again failed to hold to her resolution.

“Helena,” Myka says, and now Helena is gratified simply by Myka’s low utterance of her name. Myka does not always use that deeper voice, and Helena does love (yes, love) the rare pleasure of hearing her name in it. “I’m so tired,” Myka says next.

That is less gratifying. It’s yet another utterance Helena should leave alone; of course Myka is tired. But in what she is sure is a mistake, Helena says, “Of?”

“Everything. But particularly, you.”

A dagger, that was. A cut back. Testimony to Helena’s concatenating mistakes.

“This you,” Myka adds.

The additional twist of blade leaves Helena unclear on the devastation Myka intends. “Of course” is all she can think to say.

Myka closes her eyes and exhales heavy, a near-sob. “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry,” she intones, but what need has she to apologize? “That was the pain talking—or, no, I still know you well enough to know you’ll hear that wrong. What I mean is, I’m saying something I could keep holding back if the pain wasn’t cracking me open.”

The pain. Cracking her open. Which would never have happened in the absence of Helena’s stupid, thoughtless touch. Which in turn makes abundantly clear that the stupid, thoughtless person who applied that touch is the “this you” Myka means.

If Helena is to remain in this situation she must take measures, so she lengthens her inhales and exhales, entirely ashamed both at needing such a crutch and at having to exhibit that need.

After a moment of silence, Myka asks, “Are you breathing differently than you were just a second ago?”

Myka isn’t Steve. Helena could at least attempt to lie about this, to cloak her shame... but it’s effort, either way. “Yes,” she says, choosing the unpredictability of Myka’s interpretation over the unpredictability of her own performance.

“Is that good or bad?” Myka asks. “Or both?”

The questions stop Helena, stop her in the same way her at-leisure observation of Myka had. I still know you well enough, Myka had said, and it is true. This is why, Helena would say if she could. Your knowing to ask that.

But she can’t say it, and, worse, she doesn’t know what she should say. What should come next.

Apparently Myka doesn’t either. That not-knowing persists, hanging, until “next” arrives, as an intrusion from outside their suspension: medical attention is at last directed Myka’s way; she is escorted out of the waiting area and taken elsewhere.

“We’ll call you when you can see her,” Helena is told.

Alone in the waiting area—for no other human seems to have suffered damage this night—and uncomfortably situated on a hard plastic chair, she tilts her head back against a similarly unforgiving plaster wall.

She closes her eyes. She’s had no rest, no rest for so long. She is drained. Physically empty.

Philosophically as well.

She imagines trying to sleep... or rather, she imagines not trying to remain awake.

Doubtless futile, either way.

She next imagines constructing an airtight argument that could not help but persuade all who hear it—Myka in particular, but all others as well—that this entire situation is Artie’s fault.

Also futile.

This despite its being the fact of the matter, for indeed he did bring the situation about. Perhaps not in a proximate sense, but in the ultimate... the idea of which, after a moment, strikes her as both comic and tragic: Artie as the ultimate cause? Of anything, from the universe on down? Though he would doubtless like to imagine himself so... even at the Warehouse, however, he must be not even penultimate, given the bureaucracy that sits over the entire concern...

Helena thus spends the bulk of her time in the waiting area stewing about—stewing over? stewing under?—the relative positions of god, Mrs. Frederic, and various Regents in the universe. None of it, however, requires her to alter her breathing; rather, she composes in her head the opening paragraphs of several publishable monographs on these and related topics. It isn’t restful. But is evidence of something other than emptiness.

When someone does at last call her to see Myka, everything has changed.

Well. Not everything. Helena herself hasn’t, as her bureaucracy-pantheon thought may have been philosophically valid but made no difference.

Myka, however, has changed entirely: her arm is now professionally dressed, but more importantly, the knit of pain has left her face. “They medicated me,” she says, giving the word “medicated” a rapturous cast. “The X-rays said I didn’t break anything, so we’re waiting on results of a scan to see if I need surgery but in the meantime I feel better than I maybe ever have in my life and I am so happy to see you. All these doctors were like ‘why did she think she could fix you’ but I knew why and it was because it’s you. and that scan? It’ll shout out how Helena Wells relocated Myka’s shoulder so she didn’t need surgery, and they don’t know this, but actually H.G. Wells relocated Myka’s shoulder, which is even more amazing. Wait, that’s not more amazing. You’re the most amazing when you’re you than when you’re that guy. Even though I guess you are that guy. Sort of. Wait, Claudia’s been saying ‘that guy’ a lot now. And I cut and paste from her so much, but I don’t like it. The way things are.” She heaves an enormous sigh and blinks at Helena, as if she’s just re-understood that another person is present.

Is there some ideal way to answer this flood? Helena settles for an antiseptic “I’m pleased to see you out of pain.”

Myka gasps and flails wildly with her uninjured arm, which gesture eventually resolves into an index finger directed at Helena. “That’s it exactly. I’m out of pain. All out. No more pain to give. Particularly not to you. So saying I’m tired of you? I regret it, and I apologize for it, and I promise that’s the end of it. I was wishing to get something back, and you don’t want it back, and so I have to be fine. Without it. Without you.”

Without you. Helena supposes she should be impressed by how concisely Myka can foreshadow disaster. “Should I not... be here?” She braces herself for the answer.

“Of course you should. I have to be fine without how you were,” Myka says, very quietly. The collapse of her volubility gives Helena pause.

She knows it would be better not to probe; she ought to, as Claudia says, “take the win.” But “Of course you should” is only facially a win... “How was I?” she asks. To wound herself by making Myka clarify what has been lost.

“Oh, how you were...” Myka says, her words dragging. How much—any, all?—of this might be due to the varying effects of the medication? “Putting me into this story,” she continues. “It was so big, and I didn’t understand what it was, really or at all, but it felt so big. Yearning and tragedy, and there I was, still me, but in it, so in it, all in it, next to you. Bigger than life, and I... loved it? Needed it? Something to take me over. But my wishing for any of it back, when of course you don’t?” She raises that free arm, then lets it fall. Futility, it says. “So small. Only somebody little and desperate would want to make you revisit any of that.”

Medication effect or not, Helena can’t let Myka keep on with this. “Make me revisit it? Yearning and tragedy? I’m the one who inflicted that, and with malign intent; I damaged you. And I cannot imagine a scenario in which that debt is discharged.”

Myka squints. “Debt,” she says, as if articulating a new noun, but not one that names an abstraction; no, this thing is big and blunt, a dumb object that takes up space. Unfunctional furniture. That I carry on my back, Helena moods.

“Oh!” Myka then yelps, her tone shifting to excitement. “But I just damaged myself. So now we’re even!” She delivers that last bit big and broad, for all the world as if she’s the comic lead in a panto.

Helena has not spared a thought for panto in years. “That makes no sense at all,” she says, because it’s the case, but also to scorn the memory. This is no time for that past.

“Would you like me to dislocate your shoulder?” Myka asks, as if it were a reasonable proffer. Still comic, but now strangely sincere.

Helena meets this bizarrely compelling, ridiculous combination with as much severity as she can muster. “Honestly no. I would not.”

“I see,” Myka says, and she points again, this time without preambling flail. “Some prices you aren’t willing to pay.”

Helena can at the very least be honest about this. How nice it would be if Steve were here to verify. “Willing to... in the sense of volunteering to? No. In the sense of understanding that I deserve to? Certainly. So do me damage if you must. In particular, do me damage if you think it could even the score between us. It won’t, but if you think it could? Please do.”

“That’s pretty twisted,” pronounces the only arbiter who matters.

“You sound like Claudia again,” Helena observes. To push the judgment away? Yes, and she tries to make certain of it with, “Is that another cut and paste?”

“Maybe. But now that I think about it, she sees things pretty clearly a lot of the time. Don’t you think?”

“I would like to think,” Helena is compelled to admit. Hoist by her own petard.

At this point—suspending any resolution—a doctor reenters the curtained area. “Good news: no surgery,” she tells Myka.

“See, I told you she fixed it,” Myka preens.

“You did,” says the doctor. “Several times,” she adds, dry.

Helena says “I’m so sorry,” only to hear Myka say, at the same time, “Sorry not sorry!” Another echo of Claudia... this one, however, clearly heartfelt.

The doctor turns to Helena. “Don’t try anything like this again. You got ridiculously lucky.”

“That’s kind of her M.O.,” Myka says. “Except when it isn’t.”

The doctor sighs. “I’m pretty sure that’s my point. And listen, make sure to follow up with your local doc. They’ll prescribe a ton of PT, so brace yourself.”

Myka snorts. “Brace myself? Sure, but not for the PT; my boss is going to flay me alive.”

The doctor barely reacts. “Oh, maybe this one can fix that too,” she deadpans, directing an eyeroll at Helena, accompanied by a murmured, “not a suggestion.”

“Oh, she’s in for the flaying,” Myka says, with more than a little cheer. “If not for this, then for something. Eventually.”

The doctor shakes her head, eyes unfocused. “Good news for me: I don’t have to care.” She points at Myka: “You go to PT.” Now at Helena: “You don’t try to practice medicine.” At both of them, her eyes flicking back and forth with purpose: “Got it?” Helena nods; she senses Myka doing the same. “Excellent,” the doctor says. “Or whatever. I’m done with you now.”

She conveys with her rapid exit that interacting with both of them has been a most exasperating experience.

While Helena does not appreciate being chastised—and especially not for attempting to care for Myka—she does appreciate expertise. Especially when it contributes to Myka’s well-being. It’s a conundrum. “I find your doctor’s aspect strangely appealing,” she says. “Speaking of bracing.”

Myka grins. “I was totally thinking the same thing.”

“And yet I would practice that medicine again.”

“For me that’s good news.”

As they prepare to depart, Helena says, “I confess I’m curious as to what you intend to tell Artie.”

Myka offers a slight stretch of her right shoulder in the direction of her ear: the only version of a shrug available to her, bound as she is. “Maybe I should leave that to you. You’re the writer.” Forestalling Helena’s reflexive objection, she adds, “I know, I know. The research. The ideas.”

“And yet I don’t have any. I certainly don’t see a path to inventing anything that would—”

“How about I take your photo with that camera? Think that’d help?” This is accompanied by a different grin: sly.

Whither the warning? Or is this a test? Myka isn’t Steve, yet Helena goes with truth: “It might. With any number of things.”

“If only,” Myka says, inscrutably. “Anyway I intend to tell Artie that this is all his fault, because he sent us on this retrieval in the first place. Obviously I won’t say what really happened.”

While Myka bestowing such grace is not surprising, it moves Helena all the same. “Thank you,” she says.

Myka opens her mouth, then closes it. She does it again. This wait... it’s grace too. “You’re welcome,” she eventually says. “I mean I’m tempted to tell him how you saved the day—the arm—but I know I shouldn’t, because I don’t want to draw attention to the hotel charging us extra.” To Helena’s quizzical eyebrow, she says, “For the missing towels and pillowcase. Which I tried to talk the nurses into giving back to me, but they’d already tossed them as hazardous waste. Or something. Or maybe I’m just not very persuasive? Or clear in what I’m asking for?”

Helena would very much like to explain that her own answers to those questions are negative and affirmative, respectively: no, you are persuasive; but yes, you are unclear.

“On the other hand, they did medicate me,” Myka says, perking up. “I keep thinking it’ll wear off, but not yet!”

The consolations of intoxication. “To the delight of your shoulder I’m sure,” Helena says. To my delight as well, she wishes she were free to say.

Their return to the hotel room offers another “everything has changed” hinge: no longer a stage for new and awkward performances of politesse, the space is now familiar, a place they have reentered. For the next act of the play?

Myka, who has preceded Helena in, stops and sways—just a bit, but Helena instinctively steps close, taking her by the elbow of her uninjured arm with one hand, stationing the other around the curve of her waist.

She feels Myka’s breath catch at the contact; immediately, she curses herself, loosens her hold, and says a terse, “I’m sure you want to lie down.”

“More than maybe anything. Or, wait, no, not anything.” Myka turns and catches Helena’s eyes with hers, but Helena cannot use that gaze as the basis for any inference.

She backs away as Myka lowers herself onto the bed; eventually, she backs her way into the room’s one armchair. It lacks give. It also lacks arms at a height that might provide anything resembling support. Helena slumps down, trying to be grateful that it exists at all.

Long minutes pass. As in the hospital’s waiting area, Helena imagines trying not to remain awake.

Similarly futile.

She chances a glance at Myka, who meets her eyes again and says, “That looks uncomfortable. Or what I mean is, you look uncomfortable. Which honestly is pointless, unless you’re doing some hair-shirt thing, because we’ve got this big bed. Not a lot of hours before we have to leave it, but we’ve got it for now.”

“That went poorly before.”

“I think circumstances have changed. Don’t you?” Weighted.

Circumstances are always changing, Helena could say. Usually for the worse. Instead she ventures, “You’d let me lie down with you?”

“I never wouldn’t.” Myka squints. “Wait. Did that come out right? Anyway, yes.”

Medication: not yet worn off. “You’re sure?” Helena asks.

“I’m pretty sure this bed is almost as big as a field where Pete’s favorite sport happens. It’s at least as big as an ice rink anyway, and those aren’t small.”

Helena refrains from pointing out that that was no help in the previous disaster. She doesn’t, however, appreciate being able to recline. For the first while, the fact of being beside Myka is less relevant than the slow loosening of her lower back and hips.

“Can you sleep?” Helena asks, as they are both evidently lying with eyes open to the ceiling.

“Not now,” Myka answers, and the sentiment seems clear: not after all of this. All of this with which we must deal.

The bed first, perhaps.

She turns to look at Myka, if minimally. “Did you request a cot?” she asks, because she doesn’t know. Because the answer might reveal... something?

Myka’s eyes widen. “Oh my god I should have,” she says. Stricken.

“Why didn’t you?”

“It didn’t even cross my mind.” She’s talking more to herself—or perhaps to the room at large?—than to Helena. Is this continued evidence of the medication?

“And do you know why that is?” Helena asks, hoping for that revelation, even if drug-induced.

“Honestly I think I thought I was being given an ultimatum. Like it was something I had to be fine with or else.”

“Fine with ‘or else.’” Helena means the echo as rueful agreement.

But: “Sharing a bed with you. Platonically,” Myka says, taking it instead as a request for explanation.

“Platonically,” Helena scoffs, unable to avoid the idea that agreeing to accept that adverb would, paradoxically, usher in others. (Passionately.) (Speaking of paradoxically.) “That word is so often misused.” It’s a push-off. A push-away.

“But I’m using it correctly.” Myka sounds not offended, but rather self-satisfied.

Fine. Harden the position. “You are not referring to our consciousness rising from physical to spiritual matters.”

“Well... but how about love for the idea of good? As a path to virtue?”

Myka is well-read. In this moment, that fact is not entirely pleasing. “I suppose we were both attempting to be courtly,” Helena concedes.

“I mean I’ll grant you that nobody ended up transcending the body,” Myka says. Helena is about to agree, to snap away from churlishness, to express regret and apologies, when Myka exclaims, “Hey! I just had the best idea for a joke. So you’re not a hologram anymore, right? So you know what you were trying to be? Last night, in bed?”

Jokes. They confound Helena nearly as completely as metaphors do Steve. “I have no idea.”

“A Platonic solid,” Myka declares, triumphant.

Helena is mortified to find that in this case, she “gets it.” “Myka,” she sighs.

“Too soon? But come on, it’s not bad!”

“Alas, it is.” This quality, Helena can recognize.

“Right, but the good kind.”

Helena is not made of stone. Or bronze. How much easier everything had been then, sans choice and sans reason... and most importantly, sans the near-irresistibility of this one human. “I did always enjoy the word ‘icosahedron,’” she tenders.

“See,” Myka says, now in indulgence rather than triumph. “Pretty sure you have more than twenty faces though.”

“You do as well. Some revealed only under the influence of opioids.”

“Here’s one I don’t think I’d have the guts to use otherwise: my explain-it-to-you-using-words face.”

“Explain what to me?” Helena asks. It’s a surrender. She should better have said she did not wish that face revealed, but that would never have stopped a determined Myka.

“Why I flung myself to the floor.”

“I thought that had been explained? You were attempting to escape a circumstance.”

“First, the flinging was more involuntary than an attempt. And second: your hand.”

“Perhaps you don’t remember”—a strange thing to say to Myka—“but we had this conversation previously.” Helena does not want to have it again.

“Not this conversation. In that one, you drew the wrong conclusion. Or relied on an invalid assumption. Actually both of those. Anyway, your hand.”

“Please stop saying that,” Helena requests. Begs.

“Fine, I’ll finish the sentence: Woke up every nerve in my body,” Myka says, causing Helena to cringe and wish she could this very instant construct a truly useful time machine so she could fly backward, overleaping this latest passage so as to muzzle Myka before she could say that, because she believes it but knows it leads nowhere functional. To her continued mortification, Myka carries on, “Woke them all right up.” This, she says rhapsodic. Helena feels that tone in her gut, a hot twist of something she deserves as pain, but that manifests, shamefully, as pleasure. “Then your hand moved, and it shorted out the system—my system—and I fell out of bed, and the rest is history.”

“On the contrary, the rest is quite present.” Helena tries pushing all of it away, striving for detachment. For function.

“So, your hand,” Myka says again.

Helena raises the offender. “Also present.” Detachment. Humor, even; pushing, pushing, pushing. Trying to maintain.

“No, I mean why,” Myka pushes in turn.

Helena bats back, in faux innocence, “Why is it present?”

“Why was it present. On me.” Low now, her voice, just as compelling as, and even more commanding than, when she uses it to utter Helena’s name.

“I have no excuse,” Helena says.

“I don’t need an excuse. I need a reason. Do you have one?”

“It isn’t exculpatory.”

“As long as it’s explanatory.”

No escape now. No excuse, and no escape. “Here is my reason: I wanted to touch you. So against all better judgment, I did. Intending only that, nothing more.” Myka’s response to these words is an exhale. Loud. Unlike the hospital sob, however, this is slow and controlled. Helena allows a decorous pause, but no words ensue, so she goes on. Myka deserves an explanation that is complete. “But then I found myself unable to... un-touch you. Competently. And the rest will at some point be history, upon which I will never cease to look back and berate myself.”

Waiting for whatever may come next, Helena feels exhaustion inch through her, infiltrating her eyes, limbs, brain, sapping every vestige of energy... her surrender to the creeping leach is imminent when Myka says, “I like that reason.”

All right then. Awake and aware. “You do?”

“You really can be impossible to talk to. Listen to me: if I did that—touched you—I would find myself the same. Unable to un-touch. Do you understand?”

What would be the cost of abandoning her resistance? “I don’t know...” she begins, then reverses course and begins again. Truth, never mind the cost. “Yes. I do understand. But I don’t know what to do about that.”

Myka turns her head full toward Helena, twisting her long neck. Helena turns her own head, but that isn’t enough, so she shifts onto her side—her left side, punitively aware that it will be weeks before Myka can turn in such a way.

They look at each other, Helena both knowing and fearing how her guilt must freight her gaze. Regarding Myka so close, looking now into eyes that are open, is a boon she does not deserve.

After a time, Myka says, “I know what I want to do.”

Her intent is abundantly clear. The entirely of Helena’s being balks, stranding her again in Boone: if she makes a move for the momentary better, it will most likely end worse. She cannot find the... courage? or is it foolish disregard for consequences?... to reach for that moment of joy. Neither, however, can she find the discipline to dismiss its possibility.

“But I also know I shouldn’t,” Myka says, breaking with clarity into Helena’s indecision.

Well. Helena can certainly see the wisdom of that, so perhaps at last they are approaching a real accord that will render all hopes and wishes moot, so that neither courage nor discipline features in the—

“I can tell the meds are messing with my head,” Myka says, “and if there’s one thing I want to remember in picture-perfect detail, it’s this.” She moves her right index finger near to Helena’s lips, then withdraws it.

Unable to un-touch. That withdrawal reaffirms that Myka believes what she says. “This,” Helena echoes, mesmerized.

“So I’m going to wait till tomorrow to—listen to me saying it out loud—kiss you. For the first time. I want to be all there when it happens.”

There is a practicality to Myka’s thinking, and to Myka, that Helena worships. She tries to match it with a bit of her own: “If it happens.”

Myka’s jaw drops. “Come on! I said it out loud! It’s real now!”

“It’s been real for some time, hasn’t it? But I’m being realistic about the circumstance. You might not remember that you wanted to.”

“Seriously? I’ve remembered it since we met.”

Helena has remembered it just as long. She has. Denying it is pointless. But she has a larger concern, and though this is the wrong time to address it, perhaps medicated Myka will afford an unfiltered read...

“Or you might think better of it.”

“Of kissing you? I don’t think so.”

“Of what could ensue. The possibility of a... relationship. Between us. What if it doesn’t work?”

“Relationship.” After she says the word, Myka’s lips part and close, as if the very word is savory. “What if it does?”

It is savory. However. “I’m asking as a practical matter, not philosophically. I’m constrained: I can’t leave again. That’s why I came back.” The thin strand to which she is clinging... refraining from attempting to rekindle an intimacy hasn’t been only to keep Myka safe. It has also been to keep the Warehouse safe for Helena herself to inhabit.

“Then don’t leave again.”

“But what if that means you do?” This is not philosophy either. This, too, is history.

“If I do, then I do, but I’d like to think I won’t. We’ve both had our walkaway crises, and they didn’t take. So if it doesn’t work, we put it behind us like adults. If Pete and I could, then so can you and I. But I’d rather not have to. So let’s be careful.” She pauses. “Breathe however you need to.”

The words are an embrace. A physical clasp might be more galvanizing, but right now, Myka is managing just fine with words. “If this works, it will be because you say things like that.”

“Good news, because I mean things like that. And I intend to keep saying them. Hey, speaking of saying, do me a favor and write down what I said just now, about the adults and the careful, because I want to remember it.”

Sluggishly, Helena ideates rising, going to the room’s desk, finding logo-bearing paper and pen, writing...

****

Helena and Oscar are in a salon. They are engaged in a dispute regarding choices and consequences. Helena is standing at a lectern, and Oscar is reclining on a lavishly upholstered chaise longue, kicking his right leg such that its calf bounces in a languid little rhythm against the low cushioned edge.

Kick. Kick. Kick.

“The choices that create a circumstance will not, repeated, resolve it satisfactorily,” Helena says. Is she reading from a monograph? “As we see in the case of your own Ballad of Reading Gaol, do we not? And yet injury need not lead inevitably to future debility, so clearly some choice in the matter is—”

“Helena,” Oscar says, interrupting her monologue. “Helena,” he repeats. He sounds nothing like himself, but rather someone else, and Helena is straining to connect the voice to the correct person.

Kick. Kick. Kick.

“Time to wake up,” Oscar-as-someone-else admonishes. Encourages?

“I know,” she tells him, hugely frustrated, fighting. “I’m trying.”

His impassive mien is no help. It never was.

Kick. Kick. Kick.

Trust Oscar to cast some part of himself as the pendulum of a particularly annoying clock—

“Seriously, wake up,” Helena hears, and consciousness jolts at her: Myka’s voice.

Oscar dissolves. Into laughter or tears, no doubt, as he was wont to do...

Helena’s eyes open, meeting Myka’s, and she is brought back to it all: the hotel, the bed; the shoulder, the hospital... then hotel again, bed again... and finally words, as if for the first time.

Myka is lying on her right side, facing Helena. Her eyes are bright, her gaze intense.

“Are you in pain?” Helena asks.

Myka leans forward, as if that were a signal. The signal: for Helena is the astonished, grateful, transported recipient of a kiss, a first kiss—the first kiss—one that is swift but soft, gentle, genuine. Like morning... “Better now,” Myka says when she pulls back. “I’m going to brush my teeth. Stay there.”

Better now. Not lost on Helena are all the ways that signifies, including: better that this happened now than at some point in the desperate past. Then, such a kiss would have been a tragic wish for all they would never have. Now, instead, it can stand as a reward for having survived all of that, as well as, universe willing, a mark of embarkation.

By the time Myka returns, Helena has sat up, stationing herself on the edge of the bed. She has also realized that she must apologize—for they should not embark on this new voyage with yet another of her many faults unaddressed. “You charged me with writing down part of our conversation. I didn’t. I fell asleep instead.”

Myka hesitates before joining her on the bed’s edge, clearly considering which arm should be next to Helena. She chooses the functional right. “It’s okay. Even if I don’t remember exactly what we said, I remembered what we needed to do.”

“Needed to,” Helena reprises. She could supply words of her own, but why? Myka is saying the ones that matter...

“Needed to,” Myka affirms. “So where were we?” She raises her useful hand to Helena’s cheek, cradling. Helena leans into it, saying nothing, because silence now says everything.

This is a longer kiss, more wandering, more suggestive of possibility, more likely to lead to such possibility... Helena is the one to this time pull away. “A place quite new,” she says.

“And yet I’m pretty sure we’ve been headed here all along.”

“It wasn’t inevitable,” Helena says. She is thinking now of dream-Oscar, who is slipping from her mind, dropping, like a poorly initiated painting, but he must have obstreperously been maintaining something about inevitability. He always did.

“No,” Myka agrees. “And it still isn’t. So let’s be careful.”

“You remember that part? Despite my stenographic failure?”

“Even if I didn’t—but I do—I’d know it’s important.”

Helena turns and touches her right hand to Myka’s right hip. She would certainly not be able to do this now if she had not done so in the night... the night’s ontogeny recapitulating the phylogeny of their shared history. Myka covers Helena’s hand with hers, and there is healing in the simple fact of their sitting. But eventually that is not enough, and another kiss ensues, longer still, and lips outweigh quiet hands—or no, lips add to quiet hands, but hands are not content to remain so calm, and so this continues and might continue—

Myka makes a noise that is clearly not of pleasure; she moves entirely away, her right hand pressing protectively at her left shoulder. “We’re going to need to be careful about this stupid shoulder too. I’m so, so sorry.”

“You’re sorry? I’m the one who can’t keep my hands to myself.” Ontogeny, phylogeny.

“It’s not like I’m some paragon of self-control... and I am sorry, because I’d like to be able to participate fully. But also I’d like to not have to hurry on account of catching a plane. In good news, eventually my shoulder will heal. I know we can’t stay here till then, but...”

“It would help,” Helena supplies.

“If only because we have to come up with how this supposedly happened. I still think maybe I should take your picture. Or you could take mine? Because by the way, here’s a funny thing: I was trying to write a novel.”

“You were?” More that is new... “Speaking of icosahedra,” Helena notes.

“I want to tell you about it.”

“You do?” Trying to convey her incredulity. That Myka would allow her such... access.

“I want to tell you everything. But in the meantime we have to tell Artie something... I guess we’ve got both flights plus the layover in Denver to get our story straight.”

Stories. Narrative. Novels? “But we’ll tell Steve the truth. Won’t we?”

“Of course we will. And Claudia, right?”

“Also necessary. Although most likely mockery-inducing.”

Myka smiles. It’s a sunrise. “Stress testing. If we can take it from her, we’ll be fine. Then again we might need the time on the planes to rest up for that.”

“Weren’t you able to sleep, this past while?”

Myka shakes her head, and just as Helena opens her mouth to express regret and apologize again for her own sleep, Myka silences her with a kiss, one that lingers, lingers, lingers... still half against Helena’s lips, she says, “The un-touching part really is difficult. But don’t worry about my not sleeping: for the first time in a long time, I was happy to be awake.”

END

#bering and wells #warehouse 13 #fanfic #Asleep #part 2 #B&W holiday gift exchange #kla1991 #also anniversary!#which this year arrived a bit unexpectedly #so I decided to do this mashing up of occasions #because I apparently cannot work fast or well anymore #but as for this story #something something sleep and wakefulness #and when one finds oneself in those states #and whether one recognizes the state one is in when in it #or when finally out of it #and of course there are also the transitions

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glorified-red · 1 year

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Autopilot (Damian Wayne x Reader)

summary: After witnessing an event that hit just a little too close to home, you were left at the mercy of your own memories. All the usual tactics Damian knew weren't helping. It's a good thing he had a little helper.

word count: 4,070~

warnings: flashback during a panic attack, disassociation and driving through it, reference to past physical abuse (not specified from who or if it's domestic, it's very vague. But is heavily implied to be from a male), depictions of physical abuse in terms of verbs (punch, kick, hands on body, etc. Nothing more. Aka no bodily harm, just the feeling), and reference to passing out from a panic attack in the past.

Nothing quite like real world events to jerk me out of a writer's block, aye? This is based on a personal experience from just a few days ago so if there is a complaint with this story being too specific, I will ignore it. This fic means a lot to me so please be kind to it. Dont hesitate to let me know what you think of it! For those wondering, yes, I did finish writing that essay. Have not submitted it because I would love to read it and edit it at not 1 am, so that's a task for tomorrow while I dye my hair.

Autopilot — acting or functioning without conscious thought, as a result of routine or habit.

That was one way to describe what was happening.

From the second you put your helmet back on to the moment your hand closed the front door, you couldn’t pinpoint a single frame in between. The entire world around you was a blur, even as you zipped through Gotham traffic on a busy afternoon.

Distantly, you knew you should be aware of the wind hitting your skin, especially as it assaulted your jacket with its wispy breath. Each red light and your boots hit asphalt. You should’ve been able to register that feeling shoot up each of your legs, maybe feel the way your body shifted into an upright position.

But instead, your eyes were blank behind the tinted lens of a bike helmet.

You didn’t even try to fix it, not yet anyway. Not when there were cars blocking you in from every angle; not when one wrong move—one stuttered breath—could mean your bike jerking into a freefall.

So you didn’t even try to fight for awareness. If you did, maybe your hands would be gripping the handlebars a little tighter, maybe even twisting the kevlar of your gloves into the grooves until you felt something. You would’ve rubbed your hands down your thighs, dragging the fabric along your skin just enough to force your body into consciousness.

But you didn’t.

You just let yourself run on autopilot.

It was safer that way anyway. Safer than having the worst panic attack of your life while driving at least. You didn’t even want to think about how Damian was going to react when he found out you were driving this far down into your subconscious—on your motorcycle no less.

He really was going to murder you one of these days. But then again, you had countless retorts ingrained into your repertoire, countless callbacks to days where it wasn’t you in the driver's seat doing this, but the hypocrite himself.

So you didn’t worry enough about it. You gave it maybe two seconds of thought before you put your helmet on and rolled out of the parking lot. Should you call Damian? Wouldn’t it just be easier for him to pick you up and worry about the bike later?

Your brain sighed, maybe your body did on instinct, if it did, you wouldn't have known. He was at home—which was barely fifteen minutes away, you could survive that long—waiting for you, it’d worry him too much to get a phone call two hours after you were supposed to be home.

Somewhere between hues of gray, your legs guided you through the maze of a familiar home. There was a buzz in your ears, like the poor organs were trying desperately to comprehend the noise around you but fell short every time. They were filled with water then dried with cotton only for it to dissipate with water once more: a ferocious cycle that left you a stranger to the greeting happening right before you.

You shouldered passed . . . something? It didn’t matter. If it did, surely your brain would let you know later . . . right? Then came the mechanical routine of finding a place to bring yourself back. But when every wall looked the same and your boots trudged against the carpet—Damian was so gonna gripe about shoes in the house later—it felt like a losing game.

So you stuttered to a stop, somewhere. Arguably the worst place because the only tether you had to the outside world was the ground under your boots, which you couldn’t even feel because there was at least an inch of rubber tread between your reality and everyone else's.

The same buzz hit your ears. Maybe if you tried hard enough, you could blame the disconnect on the inner padding of the helmet stuffed against your head. It’s worked before, it’s not like it’s easy to hear with this thing on, let alone when your brain didn’t even want you to.

You could start to feel the autopilot wearing thin, the remnants of it dissolving with each passing second you remained idle. You tried to tap each of your fingers against your thumb one at a time to cling to what little autopilot was left. All you got from your body was a single twitch in your thumb.

A tap, a click, and a slide. All sounds you saw rather than felt or heard yourself. The tinted panel in front of your eyes lifted slowly until your grays turned into greens. You could get lost in that green for eternity and your soul would find contentment. You could find that green from memory, even when your eyes were filled with grays or your body turned blind to it. That green was one you would never lose.

It came naturally, locking your eyes into his. You could almost laugh at the fact that the last wisp of autopilot was used connecting yourself to him, as if your body had formed a habit you didn’t even know about until now.

You knew those eyes better than he did himself, even if he’d spent years staring at them before you. It was an easy victory when you traced them in your memories. So you knew each crease of worry that outlined the narrowness they had at the moment, the subtle squint as he tried to reach you.

Unfortunately for the both of you, he succeeded.

Your next breath came right before your lungs were punched by reality. The sheer weight of it was enough for you to struggle for air. It was like you were trapped as Atlas once was. But instead of holding the weight on your shoulders, you were crushed underneath all the rubble, having failed to keep everything upright.

You choked out a sob, hating the way your own breath ricocheted off the helmet back into your skin. You were suffocating. Your hands shot to the offending metal and clawed at each of the safety latches built in. Shaky fingers didn’t have enough dexterity to succeed which only made you gasp harder.

In an instant, there were skilled hands overtaking your own, practiced enough to succeed where you had failed.

“—eathe, I’ve got y—”

Newfound peripherals blindsighted you, they were both a blessing and a curse. While the new vision made it easier to protect yourself, the responsibility of having to do so was far too heavy a burden. You wanted to keep living in your tunnel vision and pretending it was safe there.

You were still suffocating. Air was scarce to come by and when it did travel through you, it scorched your lungs until you considered if air was truly worth the fight if it hurt so much. The same shaky hands grasped for the collar of your jacket, suddenly far too tight against your neck. It was as if the fabric itself was choking you and not Reality. Thready hands were better to imagine than calloused ones.

You didn’t notice your feet tripping backwards until your back collided with a wall, you didn’t even care, you just wanted this stupid jacket off. Agile hands swifty unlatched everything, unclasping safety mechanics and helped shrug the leather bind off of your skin.

“—ok, it’s off. Brea—”

The wall was solid; the wall was good; the wall was safe. You let yourself slide all the way down until you hit the floor, your green easily followed. You coughed on an exhale, your inhale having hurt far too badly to finish.

Your hands settled together behind your neck, fighting to grab at something, might as well protect your pulse points.

“—off?”

Your gaze struggled to lift up to him without staggering. When it settled back into his calming hue, you choked out a response: “What?”

Realistically, you exhaled far too much on the word when you received another kick to the chest but you figured he would get the gist. He’s smart.

“Do you want your boots off?” His hands floated in the space between you both, where your bent legs ended and his crouch began.

With a tilted comprehension, it took a few breaths—albeit pretty quick ones—for the words to sink in. When they did, you jerked out a nod. Without hesitation, he made quick work of velcro, buckles, and zippers, forcing you to trudge through heightened awareness alone.

Awareness was always worse than letting your mind shift into sand to pass through fingers with ease, free from the pain those fingers always left. Especially when Reality was combing through sand with a sharp comb, breaking each particle down to the atom. Water couldn’t wash away atoms the same way it could sand.

Your lungs convulsed again just as your socked feet felt the bite of cold tile, boots long since forgotten.

“Breathe,” he said simply, telegraphing his movements slowly. “Can I take off your gloves?”

You liked the safety of where your hands were, but feeling a leather mesh on your neck wasn’t exactly the most comforting feeling.

You jerked your hands out slowly, seeing for yourself just how much you were shaking compared to his steady hands. His movements were slow and deliberate, testing the waters to see how you reacted to his touch on your skin. The second both hands felt air instead of fabric, they retreated back to safety.

“You need to breathe.”

You shook your head, feeling the muscles under your hands twist along with the motion. “I—” you choked, “I can’t”

“Yes you can.” Damian shifted from his crouch to sit before you. “You’ve been through this before and you always come out of it, don’t you?”

You squeezed your eyes shut, hoping it would help somewhat. Another kick to the chest and you were back to scrambling.

“ ‘t hurts,” you whined.

“I know it does, but you have to breathe. Breathe with me.” You opened your eyes to look at him through the blur of watery tears.

That was a mistake.

Reality was finicky at best. It shifted like the waves in its fluidity, morphing into new forms and combining within itself. Your fingers twitched against your neck.

Focus on the green.

But then his hands slowly laid atop your knees, a familiar trick he did every time. Innocent touch, a tethered connection between you two to bring you back to him. The further the attack would go, the more weight he’d put into his palms until your legs unbent without your knowledge. It was an easy way to open your chest cavity to make breathing a little bit easier while making it seem like nothing is changing, especially when your brain is occupied with other things.

But this time, his hands felt bigger, they felt more calloused, and held more weight in them. You jerked in an inhale. “Sto—stop touching me.”

Immediately his hands lifted off of you. “Okay, I won’t touch you.” His palms raised in the air so you could see them, an emphasis to his word. “But we’re going to breathe together.”

Damian waited a single moment for you to register his words, for your eyes to shift from his hands to his eyes, then finally, to his chest.

“Breathe in.” He exaggerated his chest visually for you to replace touch. Usually there would be some comfort in the way your hand was guided to his sternum, fingers spread out to feel the fabric of his shirt and the way his chest rose with each inhalation, only to fall when he exhaled. Yet this time, his chest would’ve felt different and that thought alone was enough for your breath to stutter.

“And out.” You envied the way he released his breath so slowly and with so much control where yours was rushed and clunky.

He praised you all the same. “Good. Again. In,” he breathed in, you followed shortly after, “and out.”

You fell out of the inhale before he did, your lungs quivering under an invisible hand. Your head hit the wall with a whine. “I can’t.”

“You can,” he stressed. “I know you can. Try again.”

You wheezed where he inhaled, you coughed where he exhaled. Your hands sunk from your neck to your chest, gripping on tight to the kevlar.

“That’s it,” he said, just before another set of breaths. You hated this part the most. You could live with the shakiness afterwards, the pain and the burn of your lungs once they finally settled down. You could ignore the feeling of being on edge for hours after, the feeling of fragility, like someone could blow and you’d wither away with the feeble wind.

But the feeling of true hopelessness that came from this part was always the worst. You couldn’t fathom succeeding at this simple human task, a task that comes mechanically—completely on autopilot. Yet for some reason, it was a monumental task for you.

Before Damian—and a little bit during—you let yourself get consumed by the darkness. You let the hands squeeze your lungs until your brain fizzled out, the consequences to be dealt with once you woke up. It was far easier than fighting for consciousness, especially when said consciousness was so painful.

He didn’t like that very much.

So here you were, clamoring your way through a breathing exercise as if it wasn’t the most painful thing in the world. As if your lungs weren’t burning with rage and your muscles weren’t aching with tension.

As if you couldn’t feel hands all over your body with each step back into awareness.

As if you couldn’t hear and see things just passed Damian’s silhouette.

“This isn’t working,” you bite out. Your head had sunk down to face the floor at some point. The carpet was a darker shade of beige than it was a moment ago. Maybe it was your shadow affecting it, but considering everything, you didn’t think so. “I need—” you choked.

You saw the way Damian’s hands twitched against his pants, fighting to do something to help you. “Tell me what you need.” He tried searching your eyes like before, that tether was one that could bring up to him from just about anywhere. But you were studying the carpet as if it had wronged you on a visceral level.

You closed your eyes, trying to think past the echoes of an old voice and the remnants of old touch. You were stuck in limbo, caught between two realities that somehow merged in a single moment. Another kick to the chest and your body caved inwards—the same way it had before.

You could feel your grip on Damian’s reality fading. It was the one you’d prefer any day and it was the one you should be in. Not this one. Yet here you were, taking the hits of hands long in the past.

But . . .

Damian.

“When did we meet?” you demanded more so than asked, the words coming in and out with your breaths.

Despite his shock—and extreme confusion—he didn’t hesitate to answer with a number of years that have passed you by. Questioning you, especially your needs, at this moment wasn’t going to help.

You shook your head, your legs twitching together and back apart, the muscles contracting at random. “What year?” you said, trying to keep your oxygen inside for just a second longer.

He responded simply, your ears catching the sound with ease. The outside chatter cut down to a buzz. You breathed out a little slower.

“How?” you breathed in, your inflection cut off just slightly.

Damian didn’t waver. “We met in high school. I transferred in late and you were assigned as my peer guide to the Academy. You gave me a tour around campus to help figure out my schedule,” he paused, gauging your reaction before adding on just a bit more. “We ended up having a few classes together that year.”

“How old—” you breathed in, “How old were we?”

Damian blinked, his eyes shifting to the side as he recalled, probably doing some kind of mental math in his brain. “I started school when I was fourteen. You were probably fourteen or fifteen at the time.”

You blinked your eyes open, your lungs expanding happily at the information. Realities were disconnecting slowly, each question cutting a strand of fate that had sewed them together. Since neither could coexist, this new information was proof that the voices were just that, the past. Damian didn’t exist in the same era of these voices—these hands—him being here was a testament in it of itself.

The carpet was tinted just so, but it was enough to make it lighter.

“What about now?” you asked.

“What about now?” Damian echoed you, his confusion still prevalent in his voice. “What do you mean?”

You swallowed down the fire. “What year is it?”

For someone so intelligent, he really was not catching on to what was happening. Knowing him, he was probably scanning your head for a concussion right about now. But he didn’t show it outwardly. As much as he was confused and incredibly concerned, this was helping. So even if he didn’t sign up for trivia night, he’d play along—and he was sure as hell gonna win.

He responded factually. The math not only aligned, but since it was late into the year, it wasn’t exactly hard to remember. The buzz got even softer than before. You were able to breath out shakily, the intake was sharp in return but the progress was showing.

“And the date?”

Your eyes had closed softly, a sense of calm starting to breach through the anxiety.

Damian’s response immediately shrouded that progress. Suddenly the voice was right next to your ear and a foot was on your chest, constructing any airflow from ever hoping to come to your lips. The same date. A stupid number that just so happened to align, an anniversary, was enough to derail everything.

Damian’s voice turned to nothing but a buzz, a low rumble with a worried inflection.

He had asked a question. That much you knew. But your eyes had opened to a shade of dark beige and dreary grays, completely at the mercy of a dissociative state.

Even your hands lay limp from where they were resting between your knees, your wrists balanced atop the bony joints. You let it happen. You let your breath get squished underneath calloused hands along the back of your neck and a knee to the spine. You let your fingers go numb and your skin go cold as the room around you soured.

Suddenly it was a different time and a different place entirely.

Just dark beige and dreary grays.

The thuds of footsteps were easily drowned out until it was a simple buzz, just a low static rumbling beneath your skin.

But then your hands lifted at the feeling of fur underneath them. It was soft to the touch, the small fibers splitting away underneath your fingers. The fur shifted, it nosed in-between your pointer and middle finger before sliding down your palm, leaving a slight trail of warmth along your skin.

Your fingers twitched, the ice around them thawing slowly with each press of warmth until you could interact with it yourself. The fur morphed from a body to a small head that could fit just along your palm. Whiskers pressed into your hand as it was used as a scratching post. A head bump and your palm raised with it, only to slide down the back automatically as if your hand had done it a thousand times before.

Just along the back and up to the tip of the tail, just for the head to return for more scratches. You felt the tail wrap loosely around your ankle, shifting and swishing, but always remaining against you.

You scratched at the chin, your chest feeling lighter when the gentle creature tilted their head back to accept more. Reality itself couldn’t deny the creature’s existence, even if they truly wanted your reality to morph into the past.

Yet here it was, defying Reality, with nothing to say aside from a purr. Your hands touched black and your fingers graced white until you could make out the cat yourself, perched contently between your legs.

“Alfie,” you sighed out, half out of astonishment and half out of relief.

“I always seem to find you two together after a hard time,” came Damian’s voice, cutting straight through the static with his deep timbre. “He can help you where I can’t.”

There was still a shake in your breath, your chest still rising and falling with great difficulty, more than Damian liked. He looked up at you briefly before looking back down at the precious cat, one that only seemed to like a few people on this earth. Even if he liked Damian, it was a hell of a taming. But with you, you two clicked instantly.

Damian would never forget the day he found you holding Alfred, hugging him close and the content kitten doing nothing but hugging back with its smaller limbs. Alfred’s little head perched on your shoulder, eyes closed in pure bliss. You were swaying slowly, humming in harmony with the soft purrs omitting from the shorthair.

You were waiting on him, that much he remembered. It was years after you two had met, just shortly after high school graduation and just before Damian started college. That was the blissful moment of limbo where it was just you two hanging out for the summer and getting his apartment together.

That was the day Damian Wayne fell in love with you.

So here you were, years later, yet all the same.

“Alfred gave him to me my senior year,” Damian started. He knew you already knew Alfred’s origin, you were there. But for some reason, exact details of dates were helping you, so he was happy to recall a core memory. “He called it a graduation gift even though the meeting was pure happenstance. He didn’t want to admit the cat reminded him of me, but I knew.”

You glanced up at Damian and he glanced back.

He stated the year easily, the fricative consonants adding to his timbre. “That was the year I fell in love with you. I was nineteen. It started with prom night, I should have known what that feeling was by then. But it wasn’t until late summer that I finally realized I could see no other future than one that was beside you.”

He pointed down at the fuzz ball that was now laying across your crossed legs. “It’s all because of him.”

Your hands pressed into the fur and massaged the skin underneath gently until the final strand of fate was snapped. You looked into the green, seeing each shade of bright emerald and late spring, eucalyptus and summer leaves.

You found your voice and it was among his, miles ahead of the distant voices of the past. You said the same year, finding that your consonants blended with his after being around him for so long. Your voices intertwined in some ways and diverged in others.

“That was the year I fell in love with you.” You responded. “We got bored and decided to paint your bedroom a different color.” You found yourself smiling at the memory, not even thinking twice about how your voice became steady against the mechanics of breath. “We were trying to figure out how to use the paint rollers and you learned the hard way that too much paint was in fact, not, more efficient. You had paint all in your hair after just one swipe.”

You laughed and Damian found himself smiling at the sound. “I managed to get some on your cheeks,” he recalled.

You nodded. “You did,” a slight chuckle shaking your shoulders. “I got you back though.”

“Please,” Damian rolled his eyes, “you were covered in far more paint than I was at the end of the night.”

“Was not!”

Damian hummed in absolute confidence. “As I recall, Alfred gave you a far more disproving look than he gave me.”

“Because he found me first!”

Sometime in the near future, you would retell the events that led you to this moment. From witnessing an event that hit just a little too close to home to the police report that followed, you’d tell him everything.

But for now, you were happy just enjoying the moment with him.

Taglist ♡

@anothertimdrakestan

@cherry-dropp

@missredrobin

#damian wayne #damian wayne x reader #damian wayne x you #damian wayne x y/n #robin #robin x reader #robin x you #robin x y/n #dc #dc comics #batfamily #batman #batman comics #dcu #hurt/comfort #emotional whump

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ghastlyfilters · 23 days

Note

could i have some stu x fem!reader going camping hcs? like it’s him, reader, the rest of the group just going camping and having a good time :))

𝐜𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐧𝐬!! :>

pairing: implied stu macher x fem!reader

a/n: I LITERALLY LOVE YOU FOR REQUESTING THIS OHFOHDEGKIGTPJUPKHOJDTGQRHOYYU

i cannot express how much i fucking think about this group. there will be plenty of the ‘gang’ content coming soon!! picturing them doing the stupidest shit together is just, AH.

anyways anon, thank you for your request that made me so ridiculously happy lol (ENJOY!!)

UPDATE: YO. THIS HAS BEEN IN MY DRAFTS FOR ABOUT A YEAR AND ITS SLIGHTLY UNFINISHED BUT I’LL JUST GIVE IT TO Y’ALL ANYWAY

warnings: harsh language, randy thinking he’s literally gordon ramsey

• Boy oh boy, summertime had finally came around once again. Giving you all a pretty good idea of what was coming soon..

CAMPING!

• Okay, okay.. this hadn’t originally been apart any of your guys’ plans, but all of your parents were stubborn and wanted you to spend more time together.

• And apparently camping was just the right way to do so? Whatever. It’s not like any of you were ever going to win if you tried to protest on going each year. You lot VS a ton of parents? Fuck. It would never work.

• The agreed arrangement had been Stu, Billy, Randy, Sidney, Tatum and yourself to all go camping for atleast one week during summer break.

• Of course Billy was always the one trying to creep his way out of this shitty plan. It had been going on for so many years that the rest of y’all stopped trying at this point. But Billy? Oh, he was pretty damn adamant on faking whatever dumbass illness he could think of.

• You all made bets on who he would call that year, trying to convince that person on how very ‘poorly’ he was doing.

“I can’t go. I have a cold.”

“It’s July..”

“I HAVE A COLD.”

• His dad ended up dragging him out of the house and right into the van Stu’s parents bought him specifically for this occasion.

• After checking you guys had everything packed and ready to go, you were off into the hills!

• It was an interesting road trip to say the least, hours of Randy complaining he had to take a piss, plus Billy whining about how he didn’t wanna be here.. yeah.. an ideal three hours, huh? Jesus.

• The minute you guys arrive, Randy instantly runs over to a tree a little further away from you guys and pulls down his pants, urinating onto the land.

• Tatum always tends to start an argument and tells him how fucking disgusting he is, but he insists that she shuts her mouth and waits until it’s HER turn to be forced to have her bodily functions take over.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s all fun and games until you have to take a dump in the bushes!!”

“AS IF!” Tatum squealed.

“Cut the bullshit, Alicia. You know it’s gonna happen sooner or later.” Billy chimed in.

• You insist on everyone taking a little walk through the woods, just to get familiar with the area once again.

• The rest of the gang agree and head on out with you, embracing the peaceful surrounding.

• You, Billy and Stu slowly walk side by side as the other three are already way ahead of you, arguing over the dumbest shit once again.

• Randy and Tatum always argued non fucking stop everytime you all went camping. Sidney would just awkwardly tag along, trying to change the subject to literally anything else..

• The three ask for permission to go back to camp, seeing as Tatum had made the poor choice of wearing her cute little white boots, though unfortunately they had heels.

• This just meant more peace and quiet for yourself, Billy and Stu. You’d see your other friends later, of course. But a tad bit of extra time with your boyfriend and another one of your closest friends wasn’t going to hurt.

• You guys returned for sun down, as spending all night in the goddamn woods of all places would be rather idiotic of you.

• Each and every one of your stomach’s began to growl, so Stu finally decided to whip out the grill!

• He had packed some hotdogs and burgers, ready to be cooked as soon as possible. Randy also brought along some snacks of course because you know, it’s Randy lmao.

• Another argument breaks out, but this time it’s between both Randy and Stu. Supposedly, Stu was in charge of bringing topping and sauces for the hotdogs. (Of course he had to forget it..)

“Aw, fuck this!” Randy said with a mouthful of food, throwing the remaining piece of his hotdog at a nearby tree.

“NOOOO!” Stu yelped. “What the fuck, man! You ruined a perfectly good hotdog!!”

Randy scoffed. “STU.. MY MOUTH FEELS DRIER THAN A DEAD WOMAN’S VAGINA.. THIS IS SO PLAIN. YOU DIDN’T EVEN BRING PICKLES DUDE..”

…

“Sorry but who the fuck puts pickles on a hotdog?”

“WHERE’S THE FLAVOUR IN THIS PIECE OF SHIT? IT’S BLAND. PAINFULLY BLAND.”

You pinched the bridge of your nose, seemed like Randy was having his Gordon Ramsey moment.

• After drunk Randy’s constant complaining and Stu almost losing it over the fact you guys decided you’d make s’mores tomorrow instead of the present night, it didn’t take long until everyone decided to crash for the night. You all had proper tents built up, despite what y’all went through to get them that way..

“No, no, you’re gonna do it wrong. You see, you gotta make sure you’ve put the peg in the right place first.” Billy reminded Stu, trying his hardest to set up their tent. He knew his sleep was going to benefit from this of course, so that was the only reason why he began caring at this point.

“I got it!” Stu smiled, attempting to smack the peg with his mini hammer.

“THAT WAS MY FINGER YOU FU-”

Billy was sure he’d be sweating bullets for days after fully setting up the camp for everyone. He truly didn’t think it would be so hard, but much to his dismay, he was proven wrong.

• Randy and Tatum flat out refused to share a tent together, so they gave Billy the hassle of making two separate tents instead. Whereas Billy and Stu had agreed on sleeping in a tent together, whilst you and Sidney were more than happy to do the exact same thing.

• The tents were rather thin, causing everyone else to hear what was going on inside each tent. Including Randy letting out the odd bit of gas here and there or him sleep talking about ‘Prom Night’ with Jamie Lee Curtis.

• As the sunlight crept its way into everyone’s tents, you all began to stir and awaken. Morning was here. And you were all going to have to get up and start the day.

• Today was rock climbing! Something that had split opinions from the majority of you. Those like yourself, Stu and Tatum found it fun, but others such as Billy, Sidney and Randy weren’t too keen on it.

“You’re all such pussies, man. It’s safe. I don’t know why the three of you complain about it every damn year.” Stu remarked, his attention on your other three friends who really couldn’t be bothered to participate in such an activity right now.

“Please. You only like it because you’re tall and fast enough to catch yourself before you fall.” Billy snorted.

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pasta-in-the-pudding · 13 days

Note

Yo...

Do you remember when i asked for the "Jeff the killer x pregnant!Reader?"

It's been a few months from that so…i guess the baby must be born , don't ya' think?

-⭐

BARKING AND ROLLING AROUND ON YHE FLOOR I LOV3 WRITNG FOR DOMESTIC SITUATIONS!!! Also fun fact, i was scared to write this because i didn't want it to leave my inbox :(

Credits to divider go to saradika-graphics! Go follow them and support their work

Thank you so much for requesting!!

Jeff's child being born

During the early months of your pregnancy, Jeff was very nervous

At the beginning, he was desperately trying to convince you to get rid of the kid, because he haaates kids and hates the idea of being a dad

He is also very insecure about his abilities to be a dad, but with some long talks about what you both really wanted, you eventually both came to the conclusion that a child is something you both want in actuality

After he gets after that first big hurdle of "oh no what if I suck at being a dad :(" he get's really excited to become a father!!

He is almost always in the room you two bought from slender in the manor, either painting the walls or fixing up some things here and there

He is always protective of you, but he gets especially protective of you once you become pregnant

That's his partner AND his child in there, don't touch them >:(((

As the baby's due date gets closer and closer, he gets more and more antsy, constantly asking if you think you're in labor yet

"No, Jeff, if I were in labor right now I would not be idly waiting on the couch for you to realize"

When you actually do go into labor though, he is anything but prepared

It is in the middle of the night, both of you asleep in your shared bed when you awake to a sharp pain in your lower abdomen

You shoot up, hands going to your stomach when you realize that your sheets are wet

Your first thought is that maybe you had peed the bed by accident, being pregnant means you lose control of some of your bodily functions

But then the pain happens again, and that is when you realize that you are in labor

You shake Jeff, who grumbles when you tell him and tells you to go back to sleep, and that you'll deal with it in the morning

"No, jeff listen. I. Am. In. Labor. Our baby is coming" You exclaim anxiously

He is quiet for a moment before springing up and cursing up a storm, quickly coming to help you up and looking for your hospital bags

While he gathers the bags, you get Liu to help you down the steps of the manor and into Jeff's truck

Liu at least, is stable enough to help calm you down while Jeff also panics, telling you that everything will be ok, and raving about how excited to be an uncle he is

Once you arrive at the hospital, it is a very chaotic process of getting you checked in, getting you set up in the delivery room, Jeff almost fist fighting a nurse because they wouldn't let him into the delivery room, and finally pushing

The whole time, Jeff is right by your side, letting you grasp onto his hand so hard you almost break it, and watching in an uncanny silence

Well, uncanny for him anyways, because this man never shuts up

The baby finally arrives, and you don't even notice

You are too busy trying to catch your breath, and relishing in the newfound comfort not being in pain is

And then you hear the small cries from beneath you, and when you look, your baby is resting on your lap while the nurses help wipe them off a bit

Soon, the baby is placed onto your chest, and the staff leaves to give you and Jeff a moment alone with your baby

The first thing you notice about them is that they have a lot of hair, and it's all black just like Jeff's

That makes you smile, pointing it out to Jeff who in turn, points out that they got your nose

While you hold the baby, Jeff is mostly paying attention to you, kissing you all over and whispering how badass you are

He makes sure you have enough pillows, blankets and water, asking what you want to eat and placing your order

When it's finally his turn to hold the baby, he totally melts, tears are streaming down his face (which he denies ever happening), and he is telling them how perfect they are

After that first moment, they are practically inseparable

Jeff refuses to ever put the baby down unless they need their diaper changed or they need to be fed, always cuddling them and telling them how much he loves them

And the baby has picked up on this too, because any time Jeff does try to put them down, they will whine and cry until he picks them up again

You have many many pictures of them sleeping together, playing together, Jeff just being a clingy dad in general, etc

SPEAKING OF PICTURES

Jeff is kind of a big deal in the underworld

This is Jeff THE killer we're talking about

This being said, his devoted fanbase and paparazzi outlets likely caught onto your relationship, if he didn't just outright say something (he loves showing you off)

So there's probably at the very LEAST rumors of a pregnancy happening

So when you two first emerge from the hospital, carrier in hand, there is a massive explosion on social media, with pictures of you walking to his truck going viral

Many people will send you congratulations, some will speculate the babies name, etc

And this isn't helped by the fact that Jeff loves to show the baby off on social media too

He loves them, therefore everyone has to see them and love them too

So many forehead pictures....

"Guys shut up my pet sperm has something to say"

#⭐ anon #creepypasta #slender mansion #creepypasta x y/n #creepypasta x you #creepypasta x female reader #jeff the killer #jeffery woods #jeff the killer headcanons #jeff the killer creepypasta #jeff woods #jeff the killer x y/n #jeff the killer x you #jeff the killer x male reader

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atschoolunfortunetly · 1 year

Text

Wholesome Sonic and Tails Wednesday Once Again

Based on me and my brother's interactions. Fic is under the cut! Enjoy!

“Tails, I’m bored.”

“Well, that seems like a you problem.”

Sonic sighed as he laid down on the floor in Tail’s workshop. The fox was working on something that he says isn’t going to be important. Just a fun little project for him to indulge in his hobby. Sonic, on the other hand, has nothing to do. That leads into the situation that is currently happening.

“Tailssss, give me something to do!”

“Why don’t you go for a run? Or check up on the others?”

“I already did! Everyone else is doing other things right now!”

He wasn’t lying. Amy was babysitting Cream, the Chaotix were working on a case that they wished to do by themselves, Knuckles was busy with the Master Emerald, Rouge is trying to steal it, and Shadow said he was busy working on something and told Sonic to leave him alone. Tails was the only person Sonic could think of bothering.

“Eggman isn’t-” “Available to beat up? Yep. You’re the only person I could think of bothering.”

“Darn…alright, fair enough. I sorta can’t leave this gizmo unattended though otherwise-” “You’ll lose motivation to work on it?”

“Yeah! How’d ya know?”

“Mmmmaaagiicccc~” Sonic chuckled before sitting up, “Guessing what you’re going to say before you finish your sentence is easy though.”

“Really? I find that hard to-” “Believe?”

Tails shot the hedgehog a look, “That one was an easy one!”

“Then give me a harder one!”

“Alright, how about,” The fox cleared his throat, “The-” “The fitness gram pacer test is a-”

Tails chucked a pillow right at Sonic’s face, interrupting the blue hedgehog, “That wasn’t what I was going to say!”

Sonic let out a couple of laughs, “Then what were you gonna say?”

Tails opened his mouth and left it open as his brain searched for something to say. He then closed his mouth and sent Sonic a glare that made the hedgehog nearly begin laughing again.

“What were you going to say, Tails?”

“...Shut up.”

“I was right wasn’t I?”

“Do you want another pillow to the face?”

Sonic looked at the pillow in his lap, “Why do you have pillows in here anyway?”

“So I can use them to take naps, duh.”

“...Bro, why don’t you use your bed?

Tails froze solid in his chair as if Sonic just caught him eating all the mints. Sonic got up from the floor and walked over to Tails in a joking, yet menacing fashion.

“Answer the question, Tails,” He spoke, on purposely lowering his voice to be “threatening”.

“...Chair comfy?”

Now, normally Sonic would agree with that statement. However, he is trying to be a good role model as an older brother so he simply raised a brow instead.

“That’s the excuse you’re going for? Buddy, if you keep this up you’re probably going to get some good ol back pain and trust me when I say that won’t be fun.”

Tails looked away from Sonic as the hedgehog let out a sigh, “By the way, when did you last take a break?”

“Uhhhh, does eating breakfast with you count?”

“That was five hours ago.”

Tails blinked in shock before looking at the time. His stomach growled and he shot a glare at Sonic.

“How dare you make me aware of my bodily functions.”

Sonic chuckled, “Ooo, you need to eat food and hydrate! Oooo!”

Tails jokingly let out a hissing noise as Sonic picked him up with ease, “How are you gonna grow up to be a big and strong boy, huh?”

“Hey, put me down! I’m not five!”

“You’re right, you’re eight! Nice job counting there, bro!”

“...I am going to bite you the moment you put me down.”

Sonic grinned, “Like you could catch me, Mr. I forgot to eat and my stamina is probably in the negatives.”

“...Okay, I’m going to straight up fight you now.”

“Wow, I am so scared.”

“I know where you sleep!”

“I know where I sleep as well, you ain’t special!”

“Sonic!”

#wholesome sonic and tails wednesday #unbreakable bond #sonic the hedgehog #sonic #miles tails prower #fanfic #headcannons #sonic and tails #tag as ship and i steal your bones #brothers fr fr

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wishcamper · 3 months

Text

Gone Baby Gone: birth control and the ethics of risky sex

CW: abortion, sexual violence.

Creds: licensed counselor with expertise in addiction, trauma, and gay stuff. Experience with tx exclusively for pregnant people and young parents with addictions.

Okay class! Today we’ll be talking about abortion oh my god don’t run away I’ll make it worth your while I promise.

Firstly, a disclaimer: I’m not interested in debating whether abortion should be legal/allowed/is moral or immoral. The research bears out, unequivocally, that access to comprehensive reproductive and family planning options improves everyone’s lives (1). And again, not actively anti-SJM or any characters, just exploring themes and what they say about us.

It’s so funny to me that NO one liked the pregnancy plot line in ACOSF, whether they love or hate or are indifferent (me) to Rhysand. And I think that’s because we, the largely femme audience engaging with the material, recognize the strings of violence weaved into it, possibly not even consciously but on a deep, bodily, instinctual level.

The 2007 crime drama Gone Baby Gone centers on a conversation about motherhood, parenting fitness, and what society owes to children. Beneath that though, and I believe unintentionally, is another story about pregnancy-capable people’s autonomy and the cycle of oppression around reproductive rights.

I’m going to spoil the movie for you - I don’t want you to watch it because Casey Affleck is a creep, and it’s not that good anyway. There’s a whole mystery plot, but the basics are: drug addict Helene’s daughter Amanda is kidnapped, then later thought to be killed but they never find her body. Casey Affleck, Boy Detective uncovers a scheme by two rogue cops to fake Amanda’s death and kidnap her because they think Helene isn’t a good mom. And they’re kind of right; once Amanda comes home, Helene is an incredibly neglectful mother, and the movie wants you to go woahhh, maybe those murdering unethical cops were right after all!

Sure, Jan.

The movie ends with the lead character wondering if Helene, for whom he’s literally killed people to bring her child back, is even fit to raise Amanda in the first place, even interested. And here’s where I feel complicated, because on one hand - yes, this is your child, and she’s completely innocent in all this and doesn’t deserve abuse and neglect. AND what were this women’s other options? Does anyone ask? Living in deeply Catholic working class Boston, did she have access to birth control? Could she have gotten an abortion? Would her culture (and her internalization of it) even allow her to entertain that option? Could she perhaps be using substances because of the circumstances of her life over which she has no control? (See Nesta, Interrupted for more on that.)

So I ask myself: what does it mean in our culture, as a person who can become pregnant, to have sex with someone who can impregnate you? What happens when your body becomes the battlefield on which larger conflicts are played out?

I’ve been thinking on these question a lot recently because my IUD is about to expire and my doctor recommended a back up method while I wait to get a new one. This has prompted my husband and me go farther into the kids conversation and consider not just what it would mean for me to get pregnant on purpose or accidentally, but what it would mean for me to get pregnant here. Where we live, abortion is technically legal but functionally impossible to find. Even for a wanted pregnancy, if it became life-threatening I might have extremely limited options.

This makes any sex inherently risky for me. IUDs failure rates range from 0.3% to 2.3%, but that still means as few as 3 in 1000 and as many as 2-3 in 100 users still get pregnant. And IUDs significantly raise the likelihood of medically dangerous pregnancies if a fetus is conceived (2). The long odds are somewhat comforting, but if I were to have an ectopic or other life-threatening pregnancy complication, I can’t trust that my local doctors would be able to save my life, legally.

And we have talked about how we both feel strongly: it’s my life first. My husband says he would rather have me, and he would rather any children of ours have me, too. And there’s this sort of sick sense of gratitude I feel, because that is, to me, the only answer, but it feels like such a kindness nonetheless.

So we get to ACOSF (you forgot this was about ACOTAR, right? Me too.). When they decided to start trying to get pregnant, Rhys had to know the risk was there. My boy, you are half Illyrian. Even without Feyre being Mystique, get out your punnet square and do the math. Your baby always had a 25% chance of having wings. Conception was always risky. I refuse to believe he didn’t know that, and it was irresponsible of him to not inform her, a person who only entered his world like two years ago.

Then they conceive a baby with wings that, as far as they know, she has no way of safely delivering. If that’s true, why couldn’t Feyre have an abortion? I’m serious. They found out very early the baby had wings. It’s not unlike an ectopic pregnancy, or even a very small person becoming pregnant. Adolescent mothers (age 10-19) (god it feels gross to type that) are at much higher risk for conditions like eclampsia, endometritis, and systemic infections, not to mention fetal complications (3). Regardless of the details, Feyre’s body is not equipped to handle this pregnancy, and yet they never seem to explore the option of terminating it.

Which begs the question: did Feyre even know abortion was an option? Is it an option in Prythian?

In my opinion, probably. If the fae have contraception (let’s not even get into STDs and the ’they have magical healing’ BS), they must have abortion. The first record of an induced abortion was on an Egyption Papyrus around 1600BC, though the practice likely well predates that. The Ancient Greeks drove a plant to extinction for its abortifacient properties (4). And even when banned, people find ways, because they have to. Reproductive health has long been of importance to pregnancy-capable people for reasons of safety, resources, and survival.

At the end of the day, Feyre is allowed to carry a pregnancy to term that she knows will kill her. That’s her right to bodily autonomy being exercised freely, and I will never begrudge her that. But imagine if abortion were an open option for her, and she knew the birth would kill her, and then Rhys. Knowing that, what do you think she’d choose? To die, bringing her mate along with her, and leave her child parentless, if they even survive? I really struggle to see that. Feyre loves hard, and knows what it’s like to grow up with extreme neglect. I cannot imagine her condemning a child to the same circumstance she found so damaging. But Rhys doesn’t tell her, forbids anyone else to, and possibly robs her of the ability to terminate the pregnancy. And also Madja, I don’t forgive her either for glossing over it. Girl needs to retake her boards.

In the beginning of my career, I worked at an inpatient substance use treatment center that was specifically for pregnant people and mothers with young children. They were allowed to bring two kids under the age of 5. I could write a million words about the flaws in that place, but it was at least something. In working with these people, the same themes came up over and over:

They wanted to get jobs but couldn’t afford childcare.

Caring for children kept them isolated from support networks and financially strapped.

The daily maintenance and self-focus of sobriety felt at odds with being responsible for children. Ironically, that neglect of self often created the perfect conditions for relapse.

Children kept them tethered, legally and/or personally to abusive partners.

They received extreme judgment, even while seeking help, for “doing this to their children”.

They did not have adequate access to reproductive autonomy, whether financially, from religious beliefs, or otherwise.

This evidence is purely anecdotal, but I do think it speaks to the larger cycle of covert violence and policing of women and pregnancy-capable people’s bodies. It is well-documented that lack of reproductive freedom has a direct negative effect on mental health and wellbeing of people of child -bearing age (5). There is also a much larger intersection to this conversation when it comes to race, class, and the systemic oppression of people of color via reproductive restriction, but Feyre is privileged in the ACOTAR world for the most part so this doesn’t touch her. She doesn’t have to wonder if she can afford a baby, or if her husband is going to be racially profiled and taken to jail or just straight up murdered by law enforcement. (and this is not to downplay the experiences Rhysand have, that Sarah doesn’t give us, being a mixed race man, more so that he is in an extreme position of power.)

I think it’s a shame we didn’t get to explore this in ACOSF with Cassian and Nesta. They jump in the sack even after learning Nesta’s body could not handle an Illyrian baby. No amount of ‘the monthly aid’ justifies not having an honest and thorough conversation about what having sex means before they sleep together. Cassian must feel real confident in the birth control options of Prythian to be spreading his soldiers around so willy nilly. And I just hope, for all their sakes, that he’s right.

Ibis Reproductive Health and Center for Reproductive Rights, “Evaluating Priorities: Measuring Women’s and Children’s Health and Well-being against Abortion Restrictions in the States,” (2017).

Kim SK, Romero R, Kusanovic JP, Erez O, Vaisbuch E, Mazaki-Tovi S, Gotsch F, Mittal P, Chaiworapongsa T, Pacora P, Oggé G, Gomez R, Yoon BH, Yeo L, Lamont RF, Hassan SS. The prognosis of pregnancy conceived despite the presence of an intrauterine device (IUD). J Perinat Med. 2010;38(1):45-53. doi: 10.1515/jpm.2009.133. PMID: 19650756; PMCID: PMC3418877.

World Health Organization: WHO. (2023, June 2). Adolescent pregnancy. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-pregnancy#:~:text=Adolescent%20mothers%20(aged%2010%E2%80%9319,birth%20and%20severe%20neonatal%20condition.

Muvs - Abtreibung in der Antike. (n.d.). https://muvs.org/en/topics/termination-of-pregnancy/abortion-in-antiquity-en/

Liu SY, Benny C, Grinshteyn E, Ehntholt A, Cook D, Pabayo R. The association between reproductive rights and access to abortion services and mental health among US women. SSM Popul Health. 2023 May 12;23:101428. doi: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2023.101428. PMID: 37215399; PMCID: PMC10199416.

#prythian university #rhys critical #abortion #reproductive rights #sjm critical

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tartigglez · 11 months

Note

Hello tumblr user that I don’t know

May i please suggest Zhongli and the orange heart emoji? xoxoxoxoxox

~tulip anon (i cant get to my emojisss)

"ten-twenty"

tartigglez 100 follower event!

・❥・hello dear tumblr user who i also don't know! i hope this is satisfactory

・❥・zhongli x gn!reader

・❥・0.5k

・❥・zhongli is sick (poor babie), food (soup for sick!li), zhongli doesn't understand mortal sickness, modern au, (idk why i'm warning for this but some people are grossed out by it) li blows his nose at one point

zhongli x 🧡

as an archon, sickness did not apply to zhongli. it was a problem that he never faced. so when his mortal form came down with a case of the cold, it was quite literally the most dramatic he had been with you in a very long time.

it was actually quite funny, hearing his voice go all nasally and having such a graceful and uptight man laying on your sofa as you made soup for him. of course, he didn’t find it very funny when you giggled at him.

“dear~ please stop laughing, i feel so… what’s the thing you say? ippy?”

you couldn’t control your laughter, “icky, zhong. icky.” of course you wouldn’t laugh at him if something was seriously wrong, but right now he was just a little under the weather, and would be walking around liyue like nothing had happened in a couple of days time.

“i finally understand what you mean when you say that. it’s not nice”

“i know its not nice dear, here.” you brought a bowl of the soup over to him, as well as a box of tissues. giving him a moment to sit up, you got the thermometer off the coffee table and checked his temperature again, and to your surprise it actually wasn’t too badly out of range. then you handed him the box of tissues so he could blow his nose.

“so, what is it i do again? just, exhale into it?” gosh he was clueless, how adorable. then again, how could you blame him? it's not like archons are built the same as humans, nor do they have the same bodily functions or needs, it's just a change for him, that’s all.

“yes, but hard, so you can get all the icky out”

“i can’t help but feel like you’re using that word wrong”

you looked at him with mock insult, mouth wide as you placed your hand on your chest. “well excuse me, master of linguistics!”

“haha~ i jest my dear”

after eating the bowl of soup, and making yet another pathetic attempt at blowing his nose, zhongli asked you to come back into the living room, inviting you to sit beside him, which you humbly declined, much to his dismay. opting to sit on the armchair opposite him instead

“dear, why won’t you sit near me?”

“‘li, you do realise… how sickness spreads… right?”

“uhm… yes”

“tell me how”

“well, when mortals…”

“when mortals…?” you gazed at him, raising an eyebrow.

“fine, it is in fact… a gap in my knowledge. but, i did read somewhere, that a true loves kiss cures all ails”

“archons, ‘li. you do know those books are fiction right?” you giggled at him again, laughing at his cluelessness. for someone who has spent his whole existence protecting mortals, he doesn’t seem to know much about their actual workings.

“uhm… well… you should try it anyway! kiss me better!”

let's just say, the day ended with a very long winded biology lesson about the transmission of viruses....

#cael is talking to 🌷 anon :0 #genshin x reader #zhongli #zhongli x reader #genshin impact #zhongli x you #zhongli fluff #tartigglez 100 follower event

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slashingdisneypasta · 7 months

Text

Squip x Reader || Drabble

Plot: You boldly admit that you wanna be with your Squip, and 'he' struggles to face his own... 'feelings'.

Warnings: The Squip is RUDE.

"-I dont want any guy at my school, I want you!" The words fly out of your mouth before you can have any say in the matter, buy you don't back down; maintaining a serious look on your face directed at the SQUIP.

All day he's been pestering you about going on a date, or hooking up - it's college culture, after all. And people enjoy it! - and you had reached your boiling point. Every guy that he suggested was disgusting, you didn't like any of then. You knew you wouldn't. You've never been interested in guys your own age,.. or who are nice,.. or your own species-

If you could even call the SQUIP a species, anyway. He was a computer. A very, very smart one who seemed... at times... to have feelings. Mostly irritation and pride but feelings all the same. That gave you hope.

You recognise how dumb your having hope was but, well, you couldn't help it.

You also don't get how Squip didn't see it in you, he has access to everything - your every thought, - but he never let on that he had any idea of your feelings toward him. Maybe he was trying to ignore it? That would sure make sense.

"... excuse me?" The Squip's voice is deadpanned while his face looks unamused, and dubious, and about a million other things you never want to see the guy you like look at you with when you tell them, and it makes you roll your eyes.

"You heard me." You don't have to repeat yourself to him! The asshole.

"You're being irrational." He sighs eyes rolling upwards into his skull. Then he rolls his shoulders, shakes his head in disappointment, and regains his composure; twisting his cufflinks that are always perfectly anyway considering he's a computerised image. "Honestly, if your period wasn't coming up in two days then I'd say you were crazy."

Jaw dropping, you suddenly wish you could touch him without his authorisation (he needs to access your nervous system to make it feel as if you're touching)- so you can hit him. "Low blow- and you know it." He's a computer- other dudes may actually think that periods impare women's thinking but the Squip knows that's just something you say to hurt someone. And you're not going to demean yourself explaining your bodily functions to him.

"No, menstruation doesn't impare your thinking," He admits, nodding matter-o-factly as he agrees with your thoughts, but not-at-all looking sincere. "But it does make you hormonal. You're just horny- it'll pass. I recognise that you've been having these thoughts for most of our time working together now but its your hormones causing you to voice them; trust me. Maybe I should switch to a less pleasing appearance?"

"Wh- no- "

"Hm, you know how I could help you relieve that horniness?"

Oh no. You know exactly where this is going. And it's not 'I can quickly fuck you'. No- "Don't you dare."

"Helping you hook up with Zack, yes."

"Squip!" You exclaim, frustration laced in everything about you; your tone, your eyes, your mouth and jaw, your hands- "It's not happening." You sat sternly. "I don't care if you don't want me back, you great asshole chip, but I'm not going to hook up with a frat boy like - "

"Reed then?"

"- Or a self righteous nerd like Reed. I'm not. I got you so you could help me be more comfortable in my own body, not have sex with random guys. And you know that! I don't know why you're constantly trying to get me in a guy's bed! Its- I- It defies reason!"

The Squip's form flickers, a snatch of his voice attempting to say 'reason' slipping out fuzzy as he seems to glitch at those last words. It only lasts for a few a moment, but it surprises you. Your face softens, and you reach towards him, not to touch him because you know you can't but just... because you have to- and- he actually looks at it as he returns seamlessly to his put-together air and appearance.

Theirs a curious look on his face as he grimaces at your hand. His eyes seem to be holding something back, but he's thinking about it.

"... your care for me defies reason. I'm a computer."

"I know." You shrug, gentle. All the frustration from before gone from your shoulders and everywhere else.

"Not a man." He reiterates, and you shrug.

"Well- you're a man a little. A computer wouldn't get so worked up."

"I'm an extremely superior computer."

"You are." You agree softly. "Alexa's got nothing on you. But you're also a man a little. Feelings cant be programmed." You insist, not pushing him but just stating a fact. Wanting him to believe it.

"I believe it." He growls, an annoyance in his voice thicker then humanly possible as he actually admits it. "Trust me, I... Its been a thought on my mind for a while, now." You open your mouth to ask him what he means by that, but he waives you off (rudely) and goes on. "You're right in saying feelings can't be programmed. Reactions can, but,.. not feelings. And the feelings you've been inciting in me, have not been programmable. I even tried to program them out, but- mm." Eyes growing slightly wider at him, you watch his jaw set and pop; frustration absolutely clear. "The only thing I can think is that its your fault. And, maybe, if I made you a little less available- a little less open to me- whatever virus is in me would lose interest. But... you're so fucking stubborn." Theirs actual anger in his eyes when he looks at you then, almost rage. Wow.

Your lips make an 'oh' shape. "Thats why you tried to get me to hook up with- "

"All those idiots, yes. But you just had to act like an obstinate little bitch and refuse every suggestion I made."

"Yeah, well, we know why that is- and don't call me that."

"Bitch." He growls, causing you to sigh in frustration (asshole, asshole, asshole- ), before he rolls his shoulders back and straightens up properly again. "... but you're right. You are. I know exactly why, and now you know my feelings- This interaction's been unprofessional as hell. It's gone too far. If I'm going to continue to assist you, help that you absolutely require," Gee thanks. "then I'm going to have to do a complete system reboot."

"You- " ??? "This is the most dramatic responce in history to being in love."

"I'm NOT in lo- " He cuts himself off before the word can come out, even if he was a full-man he would hate the word. Theirs nothing cool about being in love. To him it would be pathetic. "Thats it. In 5 minutes when I return post-reboot, this will be over and you will stifle your feelings about me- got it? That's how it should be. Now... " His appearance begins to flicker again, more frequently this time until he flickers completely out of existence like a TV switching off.

... you're about to panic, when the Squip touches back down onto the ground in front of you. He looks exactly the same as before except better posture, and when he looks down at you there with your wide eyes and your concerned frown, he immediately scowls.

"GODDAMNIT."

"Didn't work??" You light up. Quickly a mischievous smirk slips across your face, though, realising you're right when that pretty face scowls deeper. That means... oh, this computer must really have it bad for you. Ha. "I see... "

His eyes flash, actually flash - a blue light turning on inside them for a moment and making him looking almost demonic, - , and you suddenly appears directly in front of you, an unnaturally strong hand slamming you by the shoulder into the wall behind you. "You don't see... anything. This is a virus. I dont have feelings, for you."

Looking straight back at him in defiance, you nod. "It is a virus. I think everyone in the history of the world can agree on that."

He falters, so annoyed he almost can't decide what to say to you. "That doesn't even make sense, Y/N. Most people in the history of the world didn't even know what a virus was. It was first used 1898- " When you reach up and curl your fingers gently around the back of his neck he falters again, breathing in slowly and deeply- so sexy. "You're... what are you doing?"

... "Whatever you want me to." Its up to him. If he wants you to let him go, you will. If he wants you to keep going, you will. It's all up to him. You remember the first time you and the Squip kissed; he was just teaching you how (said it was completely okay because he was just in your head), but that was the start of your feelings. That was the start of this mess. You wonder if he was struggling before that and thats why he suggested it in the first place all those weeks ago.

When warm, firm lips slam into yours, forcing your lips to part and allow a forceful but exceptionally skilled tongue to take what it wants you're shocked and let out a squeak. The Squip's hand takes your throat now instead of your shoulder, squeezing shortly to tell you no, don't squeak. Not like you didn't ask for this, he thinks directly into your brain. Now what did I teach you then? If you remember so well? Don't sit there like a dumb statue. Kiss me back.

... when you do, tilting your head and giving a slow moan when your tongues touch, the Squip let's out a growl right into your mouth that feels so real, and drags you in tighter against him by the hips. You know it's just him activating your nervous system, and he's not really there, but you're miraculously okay with that. When something feels this good you don't question it.

#first time writing the squip 😅#just a little something i types out on my phone in bed this morning- i hope its not terrible 😅😅😅#SQUIP x Reader #SQUIP #Be More Chill SQUIP #Be More Chill SQUIP x Reader #Super Quantum Unit Intel Processor #Super Quantum Unit Intel Processor x Reader #Musical Villains #Musical Villains x Reader #Drabble #SQUIP x Reader Drabble

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