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heli0s-writes · 1 year

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You’re Toxic, I’m Slipping Under

Summary: He bristles, offended. And you try, with as much dignity as you can muster after the last two hours of being fucked blind, to not look so smug about it. “See you next week,” he hums.

A/n: To celebrate Glass Onion coming out, here’s ol’ boy Ransom because I hate him so much :) 4.1k words. Warnings: Smut; mild degradation, spitting, daddy kink; classism; Mind Games with Ransom Hour etc. etc. Please stop reading if you’re not 18+

Your whole apartment building seems to rattle when he arrives thirty minutes late. Like raucous fanfare to announce his appearance, the door slams shut, the latch clicks loudly, and then you hear his heavy footsteps pounding up the stairs.

His shoes are still on—of course they are—stomping your floorboards and dragging in dirt. You can practically see them, the usual suede loafers switched out for leather boots with the late fall chill, and probably mud-caked because he’s thankless like that.

With your attention still on your laptop, already irritated because you’ve been attempting a paper that’s only chased its tail for the last three hours, you ask, “Did you misplace your watch, Ransom?”

Turning, you show him you’re the screen reading 8:32 and blink pointedly, “Is that a yes?”

“Don’t be smart,” he snaps back. “You know I don’t like that.”

Your head’s been a mess of fog, body tense and frustrated for days, and although you’ve always prided yourself on tact and grace—patient like a saint—Ransom manages to bring out the worst. You hiss, “Take your damn shoes off, you know I don’t like that.”

You watch mutely as he does so, not without a sneer here, a shitty comment there. He takes three long steps and plops himself on your bed, hands curling into the quilt, thumbs brushing over the patchwork fabric disparagingly. He pinches a loose thread and begins to pull, tugging slowly at first, and then finding joy in unraveling a line of stitching until nearly three inches rip apart.

“I always thought you needed to replace this thing.” He twirls the string disdainfully, “It’s ugly as sin.”

He pretends he doesn’t know how you obviously love this quilt—handstitched and affectionately made, your damn initials are embroidered into the corner, after all. He’s made a game of testing your patience, gleefully punching at every button as he tries to get you to snap.

Ransom Drysdale Thrombey. You’d met him at one of the Thrombey’s family… functions. Dysfunction, you’d muttered under your breath when Walt beat his cane against the floor in a drunken tirade and Meg ran out back to wolf down a pot cookie that she was supposed to be saving for later.

She was on the cusp of a panic attack, words tumbling out like a car crash, her hand in her beret, then hair, then trembling over her maroon-painted lips.

“God, I’m so sorry— I thought we could just make a pit stop before heading out. The food’s always catered and really good— god… it’s a fucking mess.”

You waved her off because it’s not like you haven’t witnessed at least one aunt having a meltdown during holiday dinner before— family’s just like that—and tried to placate her with, “Can’t be worse than the cousin who asked if we’d be scissoring later.”

Meg’s face twisted in disgust. “Ugh, ew! Fucking Jacob! He’s a skeezy little incel— I swear he’s a moderator on one of those internet forums where they post revenge porn and upskirt vids— honestly, he was adorable two years ago. Then I guess he went through puberty and got radicalized on Youtube.”

You paused as she lit a cigarette and inhaled furiously before realizing that the two of you were thinking of two entirely different cousins.

“I meant the big one, Meg. This one went through puberty twenty years ago.”

“Ew, Ransom,” Meg frowned, “That’s even worse.”

“Ransom? What is he, a Disney villain?”

Leaves crunched behind your back and Meg looked up from flicking ash into the yard toward the sound.

“Let’s be honest, I’ve got the face of a leading man.”

Meg blew smoke at him, as if the fumes were enough to threaten his sensibilities. You figured not, he looked like a cigar smoker anyway—one of those guys who’d dedicate a whole room in their house with the humidity just right to keep them fresh. Rich people shit.

“Go away, Ransom,” she said, to clarify.

“I don’t recall addressing you, Megan.” He took a drawn-out look, lips pursing in scrutiny before lifting a brow, making a real goddamn show about it. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll bite. 400 on the dresser for an hour; you can get yourself something nice.”

You’re still not sure what it was about either your attire or attitude that allowed him to conjure up such an offer.

Maybe it was your shitty jeans and your sweater from freshman year orientation. Maybe you looked like an easy mark to tear down.

His audacity shocked out a laugh from you—a loud, abrupt guffaw that eased Meg enough for her to dip back inside to grab more from her stash. And when she was out of sight, focused on rummaging in the old clock, you responded, “Yeah, okay. I’ll bite back.”

Maybe it was an act of rebellion against your background in contrast to all this excess. The bitter aftertaste of eating bottom shelf food out of necessity for weeks at a time—those awful chicken bouillon packets and dried blocks of instant noodles your first year of college. No one paid for your schooling or housing so learning to balance an over-abundance of classes and a job because you needed to graduate early, needed to spend less money on tuition, meant that you were working yourself to death.

If Youtube radicalized Jacob, then habitually sleeping three hours a night in the campus library and skipping meals to afford textbooks while men like Ransom crashed Maserati’s for fun radicalized you.

So, sure. Game on.

He picked you up the following weekend without anyone knowing and took you somewhere expensive. It was a whirlwind of exorbitant dinners and being quietly sneered at down the straight line of his tall nose bridge. The front door to his bachelor pad shutting but not bothered with locking. Falling into the thousand-count Egyptian cotton bedsheets naked, the skylight’s beam spilling like gold-flecked champagne.

You promised yourself it meant nothing. Just an experiment of unbridled spite. If he wanted to throw money at you, hell, that’s his problem. If he wanted to fuck you, well, you’d give him the best fuck of his life— let him see that despite wealth, at the end of the day, he was flesh and blood trembling for the right stroke.

And sure, he trembled, but it was your mistake to pare it down so simply.

Ransom juggled fuck buddies much longer than you’d been fucking at all. He knew it was best with the right amount of emotion involved. Just enough to yearn. If he laid roses at your feet, kissed your knees featherlight and worked his way up to your jaw, cradled the back of your head, nosed the pulse of your wrist, your collarbones, asked for your eyes on him, and panted the lightest breath of your name at the edge of it all—now who’s fucking who over, sweetheart?

You were out of your depth. He was powerful, older, and more experienced. He touched you in ways that emulated affection—that brought fire and danger. His hands were large and callused at the juncture of his fingers. His pretty mouth was pink, wet, kissed greedy. His sharp eyes took everything in.

But, as you predicted, his moods soon volleyed in every direction as consequence of never being told no, and once the novelty of crazy hot—often angry—sex grew stale, you crashed back down to earth burned out. You ghosted.

“You’re, what…” he called through the door the week after you texted that it was both too much and not enough to carry on with, “breaking up with me? Seriously. This is a fucking joke.”

And you could have practically seen it—how his bottom lip would jut out as his incisors crossed, how his brows would sink when he got angry. He was never belligerent, only calculating.

You told him to leave, and he did, after a single loud kick to the frame, because he’s never begged for anything, and he wasn’t going to start.

The guilt came afterwards, with the bouquet of roses on the doormat, petals scattered around because he’d slammed them down after being ignored again and again, and you swept them inside to throw into a vase next to the three other vases with flowers in various degrees of wilted.

“Breaking up” prickled complicatedly in the middle of your chest, because despite the many shows of affection, you knew you weren’t exactly breaking up. You had never really been with him anyway. People aren’t… with Ransom. They’re towed along by Ransom, dragged by their hair by Ransom. Played with by Ransom until he inevitably gets bored.

It devolved into needless melodrama. Weekly episodes of a teen show with grandiose gestures of toxic relationships perceived as romance. Ransom’s habit of whisking you away, fucking you senseless, turning around to fight with you about any-goddamn-thing he pleased. Dropping off flowers and champagne. Restarting the whole process.

It wasn’t healthy—isn’t healthy, probably, according to most therapists—since he’s here, present-day, in your room, beginning to undress.

You fiddle with the sleeves at your elbows, thumbing cool satin before advancing, arms subconsciously crossed.

He’s only in his underwear now. A pair of nondescript gray boxer briefs fitted on his muscular thighs, taut as he leans back on his palms. He slowly spreads his legs, inviting you between them. His lips purse when you stand passively, knee brushing his bulge, hands resting over his shoulders. He’s warm.

One palm caresses your lower back and the other on himself, gliding up and down. His lids are half open, voice low, “You miss this?”

“No,” which is a lie. You missed it when evenings were boring, half-heartedly nodding to some boy’s drivel about campus life, mind wandering to someone who didn’t look freshly 21, didn’t date like it. Didn’t talk themselves up just to get you into bed.

At least Ransom was honest; he always said exactly what he thought, told you exactly when you were pissing him off, how he was going to teach you a lesson—where he wanted you, how he wanted you, and— a chill races up your arms.

He’s downright smug when he notices.

“No? You prefer sloppy frat boys pawing at you like virgins over me? Every time, you think they might fuck right but, well, you’re always disappointed.” He reaches beneath the short hem of the robe, splays his hand out over your thigh and very slowly feels his way up.

Your eyes shutter as he pulls you forward, gripping tightly and massaging up toward your ass. The pit of your belly is tightening, the rest trying to push down being too eager for him all over you, his broad shoulders, his strong hands, how he bends his grasp on your shoulder, fixes you in a perfect curved arch just the way he likes.

Ransom noses the robe out of his path, sinking his teeth lightly down until he scrapes a line over your breastbone, laying his face gently down like a child—like a lover.

“You know,” he begins, taunting again, “You make a… face.” He says it as he trails down beneath the swell of one breast, letting your nipple graze his cheek, before he presses a kiss to your ribcage. Hot like a brand, searing into your belly. And then he bites.

You flinch, hand going to his hair to pull him away. He throws his head back into your grasp, eyes glittering and amused. He quickly works your thighs apart, dipping two fingers between and sinking into your heat.

“There it is,” he chuckles when your eyes flutter, “Yeah... Really gets me off.”

You’re in his lap before you know it, your hold on him fallen off and now scrambling for his wide shoulders to hold yourself steady. He’s got you leaned back on his thighs, hanging off the edge of the bed and perfectly helpless, the only thing planting you even close to secure are your folded knees, your arms around his neck. He’s shushing you, one large hand on the small of your back, the other still working inside your pussy.

He says, “Calm down unless you want to fall,” but it’s goddamn hard when your heart is pounding with equal parts fear and arousal. He’s sucking on your tits, balancing you just precariously enough to thrill, fingering you all the while—like it’s nothing to him, like you’re an object he can manipulate however he pleases.

His cock is erect, flexing against the fabric over his groin, a swell of hard, aching muscle. You want to put your hand around it, feel its girth in your palm, simply hold it because you do fucking miss it. The places he can reach, the ways he spreads you, rocking in and pulling out—how he sometimes settles inside, and then does nothing but watch you squirm.

It’s undeniably gorgeous—and he is too—when you fumble it out after he lays you down and hovers over you with interest. You’re wetting your lips automatically, staring in awe at his thick shaft sprouting from soft, dark, curls, the tip of it smooth and almost purple, swollen up with blood.

“Legs up,” and the way he says it, how he just goes right out and says it, makes you groan.

Boys don’t do that. Too busy in their heads about peacocking and re-enacting the kind of porno where performers wordlessly move into new positions in sync, nothing verbal exchanged but high-pitched shrieking and nasally fuck me’s.

Ransom’s extremely verbal in bed. He easily says, “Look at me. Show me how much you want it,” and flits his eyes between your bodies.

You do, shivering, sliding two fingers along the sides of your folds, finding yourself aroused and damp, humiliated and incredibly turned on when he grins, simply content with watching. Your thighs are squeezing reflexively, abdomen crunching up trying to keep it together.

But he’s never been patient, and quickly tells you to hold your knees, rock back, make yourself small and exposed, and then he’s delving gently into your hole— thumbs taking turns, coaxing more.

Two fingers tuck in, then another two struggle next to them, and you can’t stop yourself from gasping and crying out at how he pulls apart the walls of your cunt.

The sound of it— sloppy, squelching, a light and hollow kind of noise like a tongue flicking inside an open mouth.

“Look at this pretty pussy.” He tugs a little more, and you wriggle into it, gripping your legs tighter, pulling your knees up, shins toward your burning face to hide.

He descends on your clit, tip of his tongue licking into your stretched hole, purposefully only running against the taut skin around his fingers. “You got a talent, baby,” he murmurs, buzzing. “I could fuck you the whole day, fuck you numb… but give you about half an hour and it’s good as new, tight and perfect.”

There had been marathon rounds of bouncing in his lap between being at each other’s throats, his thighs splitting yours, hands holding you up, nibbling at your ear. Then he’d turn you around, take you to the floor until you collapsed on the bearskin rug, the sweat on your neck and chest rolling into dark furs. Railed you until you were so sensitive anything would make you come; your body unsure if it was considered your own anymore.

Fuck, fight, rinse, and repeat.

“Are you—going to talk all night?” You grunt up to the ceiling, trying to steel yourself from panting or moaning and only barely making it.

“Thought you liked it when I talked.” His dark head is still between your legs, nose pressed into your skin, licking agonizingly slow with his entire tongue. It’s so warm, and gentle, and assertive. “What, you don’t like being told how good you taste?”

He keeps licking, pushing at the back of your knees when you try to switch positions, holding you in that bent up pose. He’s suckling at your clit when his fingers find their way back inside, easily hooking in three and pumping them smoothly.

“How—” he sucks hard, the shape of his full, plush lips fitted over you making a filthy wet smack, “mmm—I love the taste of your sweet pussy?”

When you come like it’s being ripped out of you, legs shaking around his head, lines of his spit dripping down your ass and onto the sheets, he lets you go with a hard slap on your sex, and you nearly wail.

“That’s my girl,” he says. “Yeah, you missed me, huh? You missed it like this, didn’t you? Tell me.”

“Unnng …” a high whine, “Ransom.”

“I know,” he mumbles, kissing up your belly, your neck, your ear.

He moves into position, entering effortlessly after all his prep work, and the shine of your juice still on his beard is fucking unholy hot. He’s grinning and panting, eyes fluttering briefly as he slides home.

“I know it’s big, baby. But you can take it, you’re gonna take it.” He’s a fraction unfocused, letting himself enjoy how you squeeze around him before he begins to punish.

Jesus, you missed this. Missed the agonizing drag of his shaft that feels like it goes on and on forever. Miss the way you get full of him, miss how it almost hurts.

His hipbones are hitting against yours, a steady fast rhythm because he’s experienced like that. Whereas some others might go faster when you’re close, Ransom stays at the pace that got you there in the first place. If anything, he pushes just a bit harder, makes you listen to the sound of his skin on yours, the choke of your breath he punches out.

You crunch yourself up smaller, toes touching the headboard now. Anything to get him further in.

“Fuck, you’re a slut,” he laughs. “Pretty little slut, god you don’t give it up like this for anyone else, do you?”

There’s not enough sense in you to argue even if you wanted to. The room is swimming, undulating, slipping further and further out of reach as the bed rocks and squeaks in protest. You’re sure you met a very handsome guy at the bar weeks ago but as soon as he started hinting that he was interested and stirred up conversation by asking your major, you left.

It just… wasn’t there. It wasn’t the same. No way in hell.

That boy wouldn’t have done this—wouldn’t be planting one foot on the bed, the other knee still down, enormous hands tight on your hips and crashing in.

You could cry, it feels so goddamn good.

Tears dribble their way out from the corner of your eyes. You turn your face enough to get a breath of fresh air, gulping it in frantically between the drive of Ransom’s cock and the half second he slides out.

You vaguely register his hand moving from your hip to your cheek, knuckles brushing upward.

“Oh,” he sighs, “pretty, pretty girl.” He slows his pace, nearly stilling. You squirm beneath him, inching away from how deep he is inside you, how intimate it feels as he kisses the hollow of your cheek and then toward your brow.

“So sweet for me,” he says, pulsing, making you whine with how he pushes against your sore walls. “Did I make a slut out of you? Huh? Make you stupid for my dick?”

“Make me come,” you say. “Make me—“

“Ask me real nice, baby. Ask daddy to make you come.”

You want to hit him. Kill him.

“No?” He whispers into the sensitive shell of your ear, “You don’t want it?”

You squeeze your eyes shut, embarrassment clawing up your face, but Ransom’s hold is tighter, sharper, and he really is— so fucking right. You want it. And he’s made you a little stupid, so yeah--

“Please make me come, daddy. I wanna come.”

The Cheshire grin that unfurls on his face is more panther than cat. “You wanna come on daddy’s big cock?”

“Yes, daddy,” you admit. “I wanna so bad.”

“Oh, that’s it, baby. You’re a good girl, aren’t you. You put on a little show just for me? Act like you don’t want it but soon as I get in you and you let me lay you out anywhere, make you say anything.”

You turn away but he’s got your fucking number— got you as a boneless, spineless mess beneath him as he begins to fuck you again, and harder, his calculating, beautiful, cruel face hanging above you like a fever dream.

“You gonna come? Gonna cry?”

He’s melting away, he’s everywhere, and the lights behind your eyelids are starting to glare and threaten to explode.

“Gonna come for daddy, huh. That’s it, baby. That’s my girl, let me feel your pussy— ah— there it is— you can’t help it, can you? Mmm, swallow daddy’s cock with your pussy.”

Your orgasm is a wreck of curses and teeth on Ransom’s shoulder when he drops down close enough to make contact. You shake and whimper, struggling to calm yourself through the aftershocks.

When you’re done, still floaty but more aware, the mess of your humming insides less tight around him, he pulls out and shuffles up until his swollen tip is at your chin.

You obey wordlessly, and afterwards, when the flex of his shaft is tell-tale, and he empties into your mouth, you hold it there, show him the mess.

“Baby,” he says, slowly making his way back down, admiring the come submerging your tongue.

Ransom licks his lips, licks the inside of his cheek, and leans back over again, his eyes liquid darkness and pleased as punch. And he drops a line of spit on top, drools it down over your teeth, into your mouth, and says, “Good girl.”

“You need a new laptop.” He’s tugging his belt until the clasp hooks into place.

“I don’t.”

“It looks old.”

“So do you.”

He bristles, offended. And you try, with as much dignity as you can muster after the last two hours of being fucked blind, to not look so smug about it.

“See you next week,” he hums.

You don’t say anything in response, only listening for the same heavy footsteps slam back downstairs—perhaps a fraction lighter—and the clunk of the door swinging shut. A long breath and you stretch slowly, letting your body regain its normal shape before he bent you into a goddamn pretzel. A few minutes pass, and then a few more, and you hear the roar of his car speed out of the parking lot.

Safe now, out of his reach, you amble back up into your computer chair to face the awful white, blank document staring back like a judgmental audience. You slide in and crack your neck, feeling the throb between your thighs yield to a less uncomfortable ache.

The problem, you’ve learned after leaving Ransom’s world, was that you had been ill-equipped to play his game. His game, and by extension, Meg’s game. All the Thrombeys and Drysdales and everyone in-between.

They belonged to a class you couldn’t really understand unless you were making a fucking killing—and graduation was just around the bend, so maybe you would, one day—but you were in the red with 45 grand of student debt and staring down the barrel of a subsequent degree because it was getting hard to make it with just a single bachelor’s in anything.

There was too much to do and not enough time to be jerked around by Ransom—not nearly enough time to feel frustrated about your situation in any sense. No, scraping by taught you to survive. You couldn’t be whisked off to the Caymans for brunch, couldn’t be fucked raw in hotel infinity pools, get lost for days meandering the Pacific on luxury yachts for the fun of it.

Your world was a little more drab, a little less rose-tinted.

So it was back to normal now, back to the grind, back to not wasting any part of your week on shitty dates, shitty sex, and coming home more frustrated than you left it. Because there was Ransom, so eager to make some kind of statement about proving you wrong that he’d be the last to know when he’s being used.

And maybe 4 out of 5 therapists would say that your coping mechanism to a normal sex drive is unhealthy—mind-fucking and regular-fucking your ex/not-ex will do that—but you wouldn’t know. You can’t afford therapy just yet.

You rub your back, patting out the tightness of overworked muscles. It doesn’t feel any worse than the cramp you’d gotten after staying up three nights in a row cramming for finals.

As if your brain has reset, your fingers begin tapping on the keys, and you realize your writer’s block’s been lifted.

#ransom drysdale #ransom thrombey #knives out #ransom x reader #ransom drysdale x reader #ransom drysdale smut #reader insert #fanfiction #ransom drysdale thrombey

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five-rivers · 8 months

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Ancestral chapter 15

For Ectoberhaunt 2023 day 18: unravel!

We traveled to the Revyvtech offices. At first, it seemed not unlike when we shadowed the young twins. There were places we could not go, then, too.

"Well," said Iris, as Danny translated, "Why didn't they investigate then?"

Do not think us incurious. There are many things that can turn aside such weak spirits. Not all of them are sinister, or even purposeful. Some of our number cannot be far from their kin. Some, their loves. Some may only walk the paths they walked in life–

"Are you saying that there aren't any ghosts here who used to work for Revyvtech?" asked Iris.

Gwensyvyr looked amused despite the horrific damage to her arm. There are, but in their own accounts, they were not highly ranked, and are quite sure their passwords will no longer work.

Danny wasn't so sure of that. He wasn't a computer genius, as indicated by his 'plan' to hack Revyvtech, but he'd spent enough time helping Tucker to be embarrassed he hadn’t thought of asking. He looked up hopefully at the other ghosts.

“Sometimes people don’t change things like that right away,” he said. Jazz came back in as he spoke, and Danny set the phone on the floor while he took the jar and a pair of plastic gloves from her. “Maybe if we can find some people who only died recently, we could try out theirs?”

Some ghosts left the room. Others engaged in hearty bouts of mime. Others glared at him.

Gwensyvyr touched his arm with her uninjured hand, and gestured back at the phone. They glare because they are troubled by my injury. Danny was fascinated by the fact that Gwensyvyr seemed to have spontaneously reinvented texting lingo. Although, it was possible that her current batch of spelling decisions just happened to look like that. They should glare at me instead.

The ghosts looked more or less appropriately chastized.

“Right,” said Danny. “Okay.” He unscrewed the lid of the jar. “That doesn’t explain how you got hurt.” He frowned at the cream. “This works for me, but you’re intangible… I don’t know if I can even put this on you.”

Gwensyvyr shrugged, then held out her arm.

“Yeah, I guess there’s only one way to find out.” He pulled on the gloves and scooped out a small amount of the cream. Then he reached out, and to his surprise, was able to smear it on Gwensyvyr’s arm.

Although, maybe it shouldn’t be such a surprise. Ever since that first day, she and the other ghosts had been growing stronger. Just now, she’d been able to touch him, and he’d been able to feel it, and she had at the Masque as well.

“Oh,” said George. “That’s– That’s really weird to look at. Sorry, honored ancestor, but it is.”

Danny didn’t stop applying the cream. “Do you see her?”

“Not. Not really. More like, I can tell there’s… something. Like heat over a sidewalk. Where you put the cream.”

“Are you seeing the cream?”

“I don’t think that’s it,” said Iris. She sounded fascinated. “It’s like looking at glass in water.”

Danny was honestly just relieved that it was working. He took some more cream from the jar and continued up, past Gwensyvyr’s shoulder.

It felt as if Danny were on the verge of a revelation. As if he had the end of a string in his hand, and all he had to do was pull it to unravel the knot of this mystery. But he was missing something. Some puzzle piece, some scrap of information that would make this all make sense. Or maybe what he was missing was perspective.

Gwensyvyr had run into blood blossoms. Probably at Revyvtech. Blood blossoms hurt ghosts and half ghosts. Gwensyvyr was growing stronger. She was stronger than she’d been when Danny had first arrived.

He finished rubbing in the cream and started peeling off the gloves. “Can you tell us what happened now?”

Gwensyvyr reached over and tapped the phone, which had gone dark. It turned on.

“Huh,” said Danny. “Okay.” He unlocked it and brought up the keyboard. Gwensyvyr began to type.

The building was largely empty, and we became frustrated. I saw movement and light behind a door, and became convinced that secrets were being spoken of within. But the space beyond it was one that was barred to us. Once, before we grew so weak, I could defeat such barriers, push them aside. I pushed. The barrier defeated me, however. Gwensyvyr gave Danny a wry smile. Yet, in harming me, it revealed its nature. Although it seems that you already know the name of the scourge.

“Blood blossoms, yeah,” said Danny.

I thought them eradicated, or nearly so, wrote Gwensyvyr. I must ask, how did you encounter them?

“One time was a fluke,” said Danny, not wanting to get into the time travel thing, “leftovers from the sixteen hundreds. But then Mom and Dad found some old seeds and got them to grow. They put them all away when they realized I was allergic, but–”

“Wait,” said Iris, “it’s something you’re allergic to? The ghost you’re talking to was hurt by something you are allergic to in Revyvtech?”

Gwensyvyr nodded.

“Yes?” said Danny.

“What happened to–” Iris swallowed. “What happened to everyone but Vivian and Grandma Rose looked like an allergic reaction.”

Danny nodded. He’d already been solidly convinced that Revyvtech was up to no good (see: the Vlad look-alike), but he knew that the others might have needed more convincing.

They didn’t anymore.

But– Wait. Wait. “I’m pretty sure my reaction to blood blossoms is more of a syvyr thing than a family thing,” said Danny. “Jazz didn’t react like I did, when we had them in the house. Neither did Mom. There’s nothing to say that anyone else is going to be allergic.”

“We didn’t try to eat them, though,” said Jazz, “and regular things like that - allergens - can be concentrated, can’t they? Why not more supernatural allergens?”

“There’s another factor, if we’re taking all the, ah, magic to be true,” said Lewis. “If this thing works on ghosts.” He waved in the general direction of Gwensyvyr. “Maybe it’s more myth than fact, or an artifact of someone screwing up a timeline, but Gwensyvyr was supposed to have had children with her dead husband. A ghost. Unless there’s some kind of nasty scandal lurking unknown in the family tree–”

“There definitely is,” said Eugene, “there are always scandals.”

“--we’re direct descendants of that union.”

“Do you think any of your ghosts know, Danny?” asked Iris. “Any of them know Gwensyvyr when she was alive?”

“Um,” said Danny, looking sideways at Gwensyvyr. “Yeah. I mean, there’s probably someone. Around.”

The door to the room opened up, which was a shock, because everyone was accounted for, except–

Oh. It was Joanna. She was still in her pajamas, but she had her phone in one hand.

“What have you kids been doing?” she asked.

Iris looked down at her phone, which she had, up until that moment, been using to interrogate Aunt Alicia’s security detail. Everyone else looked at Lewis’s crime phone, which still showed the last thing Gwensyvyr had typed out.

“Investigating?” suggested Jazz.

“Have you been up all night?” Joanna asked in faint horror. Danny realized belatedly that most of them were still wearing pieces of their Masque costumes… They were kind of surreal in the early morning light streaming through the windows.

“We couldn’t sleep after hearing about Alicia,” said Eugene.

“And why did none of you wake me when you heard about this?” Joanna waved her phone, sounding like she was on the verge of tears.

“You seemed really tired,” said Eugene, lamely.

The more accurate answer, as far as Danny went, was that they were really tired, and then forgot.

Joanna looked back at her phone and rubbed her eyes with her free hand. “Why all these questions about Alicia’s medication? I don’t understand–”

“We’re pretty sure that Revyvtech was involved in the poisoning,” said Danny. “The first one.”

“Probably they were involved in the second one, too, with those special release capsules,” said Iris.

“I don’t know that they were that special,” said George.

“Pretty sure?” asked Joanna. “How sure is pretty sure?”

Danny turned to Gwensyvyr. “Would blood blossoms have affected them like that?”

Yes.

Which, of course, begged the questions of why– especially given that only some family members had been affected, and they’d apparently all been eating the same thing. Still, details like that could be worked out later.

“We know they at least have something that would act like the poison that killed everyone but Vivian,” said Danny.

“The spirits…?” asked Joanna, not finishing the phrase.

“Yeah,” said Danny.

Joanna took a deep breath. “Thank you, honored ancestors.”

Gwensyvyr gave Joanna a thumbs up. Joanna jumped. “Oh! For a moment I thought–” She shook her head and started pressing buttons on her phone.

“What are you doing?” asked Eugene.

“I’m calling your uncle,” she said.

“He wasn’t picking up for us or for security.”

“He wasn’t being called on his personal phone.”

The phone rang, tinny and distant to Danny’s ears. And rang. And rang. Joanna sniffled and switched to a different number.

“Who are you calling now?” asked Eugene.

“Mr. Kynbaz - yes, on his personal phone.”

Oh, so everyone just had two phones, now, huh? Good to know.

This time, the phone was picked up. Danny heard a tired “Joanna?” from the other side of the line.

“Kevin,” said Joanna, “I need you to authorize an extraction for Alicia.”

#danny phantom #ectoberhaunt #ectoberhaunt 2023 #ectoberhaunt23

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ride-thedragon · 10 months

Text

Chapter 5: A week later.

Lord Mooton had insisted on a dinner with their return. With the grandeur of Maidenpool, he should’ve anticipated. They had flown the entire way back without a stop, and even though she wouldn’t admit to it, Netty looked as though she wished to sleep until the following day.

They had dwelled the skies carefully, looking for Aemond to put an end to this chase to no avail.

She was well read enough, he learned, to have conversations with everyone they crossed. In their time apart, she spent it in a library, reading on small little things that guided their conversations. She cared for his input on minor suggestions derived from stories and myths she’d come across.

His thoughts of her had blossomed into a secret desire to unravel her. He had never thought they would be as close as they were, closer than they had been, but much like a gambler, he knew he could get more from her if he risked it.

That night, she talked with Lord Mooton of the Tullys and the relationship they had to their ledge lords.

The men that sat around her were drunk and giddy for it. Singing and dancing throughout the night, sure to find some willing lady before the night was done. The lights hung delicately in the air, casting warm shadows throughout the night.

Somewhere in their conversation, advantageous matches for houses had sprung, unbeknownst to him.

“If I had a son, he’d have been the first name I’d list for your hand, girl.” The Lord held his cup to a smiling Nettles, draining it in one gulp. When the understanding hit them both, her smile dropped entirely.

“I’d have hope to be so lucky, my Lord.” She caught herself, returning the unexpected compliment from him, raising her own cup. His brother, a shorter, smaller, and younger version of him didn’t see it, choosing to continue the conversation.

“Who are the suitors for your hand? A girl like you, natural born still, should have a place in the bigger houses. Maidenpool might be too small for her.”

The liquor and strong wine held the air. She had hesitated on what was best to say to it

“Her Grace is kind and understanding, I’m sure whatever choice she and His Grace make will be suitable for my service to them.”

He was almost shocked at how courtly she sounded. He had never heard her string words together that well, perhaps they had been there for too long.

At her response, all the glazed gazes found him, down in his cups next to her, now dreading the ignoring of the conversation being held in front of him.

“Are there any men who stand a chance for her hand, Your Grace?” His eyes met hers, half concerned for where the conversation had gone since he had tuned it out. Looking for her to be kind and help him, being met with a kind smile and gentle gaze from her, playing with her hands under the table.

“Lord Rosby has a son, Lord Corlys as well. The girl hasn’t voiced a preference, so I assumed we could wait until after the war.” It made his chest pull and blood rush. Perhaps he was too drunk or too occupied with the war itself to think about what would happen to her after. The others were granted lands. She was given coin along with them, but he couldn’t recall any discussions for her hand.

His daughters know stood in a precarious place if need called for marriage alliances, like with the Lord Cregan Stark. He looked back at her, gaining a wanting smile before she turned back, shifting the conversation towards potential alliances in the river lands and house Mooton, a topic that seemed to catch their hearts.

The thought plagued him for the rest of the night until they were alone. Long after the dinner, he stood at their room door, watching her unpack and repack for their upcoming journey.

“I like you when you’re less drunk. You’re more helpful.” She stopped at her bed, looking at him as though he had incriminate himself by just staring.

“You are a fool to not drink, especially when the wine flowed so generously.” He could feel it affect his speech as he slurred his last words. He hadn’t taken a drink in ages, it seemed, less than half of what he’d grown accustomed to affected him in his old age. He entered her room and sat on her bed, simply observing her in this state.

Her hair was loose and wild. The blue in her dress brought out an easiness in her that he welcomed kindly.

“Be glad, if I were to drink, you wouldn’t know who I’d be with. You wouldn’t have such good company.”

She scrunched her nose at him before turning away before she could see the disdain the idea caused him. He lingered cautiously around his new feelings towards her. She had yet to be as open as she had been since that night, while his thoughts of her ran wild with the need to covet her.

When he couldn’t bare her company, he simply buried himself in duty, if it didn’t aid in his quest to dissolve his desire he’d simply fall to it, as quickly as he could manage before avoiding it all together. It was a burden she had no idea of. Her company became a vice and inspiration to conjure some new fantasy when they were apart.

One visit to a brothel would solve it, he decided. He would explore the idea when she was asleep, but the thought of her suggested promiscuity wasn’t one he could quickly ignore.

“What is that supposed to mean, young lady?” He nearly burst into a fit of laughter at his tone. The idea that he’d wild some authority for her was amusing. A delight would be if she was hooked on the bait.

“The last time I got drunk was when Lord Corlys returned from the Step stones last year. I didn’t know where I was in the morning, but I apparently made great company with a married couple. They kept me there for two weeks after. I swore it off after.”

She laughed to herself at first until she saw him wide-eyed at the confession.

“I haven’t done it since.” She said almost defensively at his expression. He forgot that she was foul-mouthed when he first met her, almost viewing it as a confession from a lady for a moment.

He was completely unaware of her more provocative past. Only hearing speculation of how she would’ve survived on the street, making his best guess and avoiding the topic altogether with her.

“I like when you say these things. They catch me off guard how foreign they seem from our day to day.”

She was back at his side, laying out a nightgown to change into when he left. Her smile was brief, but there none the less for his memory.

“I’ll remember that before I spring it on you again.” She raised the dress up to her garter , nearly knocking the air out of him, before climbing up on the bed, adjusting her cover under her pillow, her rear up for a moment before dropping entirely on her stomach.

The dress curved and fell on her body, defining her thighs and back, an urge to touch her washed over him, choosing to run his hands through his hair and turn entirely.

“No need. I like to think it builds a trust between us.”

He should go, he thought. He could feel the pandemonium taking him past what he deemed appropriate for her to deal with. He should leave entirely.

“ I’d like to trust you, eventually.” There was an earnestness to her words that would undo him if she’d let it he though. He turned back, staring at her droopy eyes and soft expression.

They would both be late in the morning if they continued to talk, he realized. Standing up, from the comfort of her bed and presence, outing the candles before making his way to his room, following her leadership and simply rolling into his bed, not caring to change or take care of his pressing need.

He simply fell asleep.

“Daemon. “

“Daemon?”

“Daemon, we’re late.”

He felt her warm breath on his ear. He heard her words after hearing the chirping birds echoing the same sentiments that he’d overslept.

His head pounded at her constant words, feeling the full effects the night had taken on him, the smell of citrus wafting around the room.

His eyes found hers, pulling away due to his groaning at her intrusion, coupled with he dream he was lost in moments ago, causing him to be erect against his covering while she was hovering over him.

“Are you up?” She looked sternly at him, notably not aiding his predicament he looked down to meet her now sizable chest, nearly pressing against him.

He couldn’t form words, having to shake his head in this position until she rose up and dismissed herself entirely, leaving him in a similar state he’d started the days with recently with more incentive.

He thought of her between him and his wife as she briefly described in the same blue dress she wore well, then just her in the same dress hiked up on a hall somewhere, pushing himself over the edge twice with her lingering scent, before he approached the day.

It was certainly later than what they were used to, something she made note of when he was dressed and at her side for a quick breakfast.

“ We’ll simply survey the terrain today. He’s been attacking our supporters more spontaneously.”

He never looked at her, in her eyes after the act was done, feeling almost dirty at the thought of it, out of control for the most part.

“As you wish.” She said, going back to her meal, still tired from the day before. The Lord and men seemed to still be sleeping of the night. A sentiment he wished to share with his hangover.

She was quiet as the day went on, choosing to practice different fighting strategies on dragon back. He watched her, correcting her movements ever so often, mostly recovering from the previous night in her company. When they returned, it was past dark with no luck in finding him.

His thoughts ran back to Lord Mooton’s suggestion, wondering how much time they had until they overstayed their welcome. Manfryd would never say it to be sure, but even with the crowns' help, two large dragons were as much of a burden as they protected.

He missed hearing her voice today, even earlier into their stay, with her dry words. It was better than silence with wanting expectations.

They made their way to their rooms, taking part in the consistency of their day where he sat at his desk and read through the letters. This time, however, he simply watched the door waiting for her. He wondered for a moment if now would be the best time to go to a brothel. She’d come find him when she wished.

Ser Florian had mentioned the girls there in the past. ‘Young and wistful’ he said the eldest were no older than twenty with a menagerie of women from Essos and Westeros alike. As his mind slowly settled on the idea that at least one would look like his companion, she opened the door earlier than she had before.

“Is all well?”

He called out, all past thoughts slipping away in the hopes of a conversation between them. At her worst, she still spoke. He didn’t know why she had been so quiet all day.

“Of course, Your Grace. I just have a question.” She made her way, almost gliding towards him. She wore the same close they had departed in, reverting back to what he remembered was her past behavior or eating before she bathed.

She stopped at the other side of the table, looking at the map before meeting him, almost hesitant as she stood.

“Why haven’t we tried a new strategy?”

The question left him in a stupor before he answered. She had never taken any interest in any of his planning before. Choosing to obey and aid all throughout the war so far, the question came as a shock.

“Why do you ask?” He didn’t believe Lord Mooton was solely responsible for the idea. He was simply stalling for an answer.

“We’ve been here for months with no luck. Aiding the camps is certainly beneficial, but we were sent here to find and stop Aemond. We haven’t come close. We still haven’t seen him.”

Or perhaps he was solely to blame for the prompt. He saw the way his question had affected her, but he never thought it would mean she’d take it to heart so quickly.

“It is not the best plan, but it is better than any alternative I’ve thought of. We are safe here. If you’re to return, we need to be safe. Dragons have been killed, slaughtered in war before. It may seem slow and counterproductive, but it is for the best.”

No man had simply walked up and killed a dragon, and the only alternative that plagued him left her out entirely. As fair as her concerns were, it was the most they would do for the time they had left.

“Alright then.” She sat down beside him. He hoped he had quelled her thoughts for now. The last thing he wanted was for her to blame herself for inconvenience their presence seemingly posed for her.

“Aiding the camps is the best we can do as he continues. Two men have spotted Alys Rivers at his side. They call her a witch. Her grace has shown no indication that we disadvantaged the crown.”

His wife had yet to write to him, personally at all, sealing every decree without a thought of their journey.

He looked back at her unwavering in his gaze, waiting for any response at all.

“The full moon is tonight.”

She looked at him, switching the tone of the conversation entirely with a small hint of enthusiasm to a better man it would’ve been, almost, noted. To him, it was a light in the darkness. It made his day to hear it.

She wore a purple waiting gown, helping the new brightness in her expression to shine. He was ever so thankful to the lower cuts in the hotter weather.

“What do we do to celebrate the occasion?”

He sat down, waiting for her brilliant explanation for his clear jest.

“We watch it in water preferably.” His almost glared at the implication that she'd be able to leave the castle so late in the day, something she caught immediately.

“There is a bath with an open wall downstairs , I can see it from there.”

Anyone could see her from there, he thought. Wandering knights who happen on the female dragon seed who, from what little they knew, had not abided by the laws of the maiden in her life. He doubted she thought so far ahead on the idea.

“Before you say it is not safe, Lord Mooton has ensured that Ser Florian will be patrolling around there, and I will have two ladies with me who wish to see it.”

His mind hadn’t begun to cross that part of his disagreement with the idea.

“And you are more than welcome to join me. There are three large baths built into the ground itself. We simply pull the curtains and have our privacy, knowing everyone is safe.”

He looked at the way her happiness towards the idea had built into a campaign to deter his every excuse.

“I still don’t think…”

He trailed off into some nonsensical excuse on his preference for her to stay upstairs, only a door away, and watch it from there. The moon had looked well enough from there, during their stay.

“ What if it's just us in one bath? They are as big as you describe the ones in Harrenhall. We’d wear clothes, keep the maids near us to avoid scandal, and I’ll have the prince consort keeping me safe.”

She was smiling now, all he could feel was the burning desire to dissuade it all together, it was the worst idea in his new state, although he had abstained from burdening her with the newfound lust, it was seemingly placed on his lap as a jest from the God’s themselves.

“It still sounds strange girl.”

It was a hollow attempt to stop the unaware recklessness she conjured without knowing better.

“Do you not trust me?”

Her tone was almost defeated by his last statement. Now he only wished to take it back, and he only looked away from her entirely.

“I like to think there is some trust between us, stupidly or not. You’ve been my only and constant comfort here. I trust you more than I ever trusted anyone.”

It pricked his heart to hear her confession. All of this over a moon seemed senseless in a way he’d facilitate if she pushed further. The guilt he felt over it aided in his eventual agreement.

“Fine then, I’ll watch with you.”

He wondered for a moment just before her smile came if it would matter if he didn’t agree. If she’d just be angry and see it without him. He knew the God’s had their laughs at his expense tonight, but it seemed a small price to him when he saw it.

“Thank you.”

“You’re very disagreeable. I hope you know that.”

She flashed her teeth in an uncontrollable smile that made the day worth it.

“We’re one in the same. That’s why you like me.”

He almost flushed at the implication. She was nothing like him. He wondered for a moment how he looked in her mind, if it was so similar to her, whether she viewed herself worse or him better.

“I’ll return later to collect you. Wear white and thin clothes to not drown in your grandeur. I couldn’t explain it to her Grace if you died that way.”

She smiled again before leaving the room, leaving him at a loss for his previous plans. The Gods would think him a jester by his stupid decisions alone.

Three hours passed well into her night before she returned. In her absence he’d went through half the letters on his desk trying to distract from the precarious situation he’d entrapped himself in.

“I’m ready when you are.”

She stood at their door in a nightgown, her hair holding itself at her neck.

“Where are your maid girls?”

It was the only thing that kept him ensured that nothing untoward would happen.

“They are waiting for us.”

He looked at her, curiously, almost defeated by the agreement he made. He walked to her, choosing to simply wear his under clothes rather than meeting her exact requirements, as they neared the room, he realized how stupid the decision was in looking back.

The room was beautiful as they walked in. Candles set up like stars to light the vast space. Three large pools sat across from each other, and red curtains were drawn to block them. They faced a large empty plain of land that stretched into the night. The moon just began to illuminate it.

They heard the splashes of water and when two girls came into view, soaking he saw the reason.

Their dresses were sheered in the water, clinging to their bodies as the light showed every detail. He felt an earlier stir come back at the sight. He settled his mind on the thought that he’d chosen the wrong way to spend his night.

“Are you done?”

“For the night, my lady. We have an early morning.”

The smaller girl, blonde and freckled, said, grabbing a robe, looking scared at the sight of him.

“And you as well?”

She turned towards the auburn haired maid. She looked barely older than the maester.

“I think Lord Mooton understood the point. The water is so cold I’d urge you against it if I didn’t know you.”

The girl smiled slyly at his companion, something he never expected.

“Set a hot bath for our return if you can then. If he gets into the water, he’ll lose his last clutch of eggs.”

A muffle laugh was sounded then immediately dismissed by his inquisitive look towards her.

The girls dismissed themselves to him and walked off, leaving a trail of wet footprints as Nettles made her way towards the bath.

She dipped her feet in before she spoke again.

“They were right. It’s freezing.” She plunged into the water without response. Surfacing in seconds with a loud splash and gasp.

“What is the business with Lord Mooton?”

She smiled as the water dripped down her face. She looked mischievous with the added inquiry. He needed to know now.

“Last night, I told him that back on Driftmark I’d swim during a full moon. He introduced the idea, drunk as ale itself. This morning, he was sipping on some vile potion from the Maester. When I brought it up , he had no clue what I was talking about, and he felt bad enough to arrange it. I even talked him into letting the maids come.”

She dunked her head as she finished her sentence, leaving him purely impressed at the thought. When she returned, they were both smiling at the idea.

“Now the clutch joke?”

She put her head up until her eyes into the water then, filling him with he urge to join her.

“Baela is the same way. She couldn’t stand the cold. You dragons temper ill in it.”

She swam away to the edge as he took off his doublet off to join her. It was a reckless decision, with all signs pointing him away until he himself was submerged in the water near her, freezing.

“I like to think I trust you too.”

He said as he made his way to the edge. His temperature raised near her , her two arms resting on the edge staring into the cold , bright night. He let he water fall out of his mouth and tried to adjust to the cool, his heart racing as a result.

“I’d have to know you better I think. You never talk about yourself.”

It was such a delicate line to balance with her. She turned to him, questioning his meaning.

“I think we should cut your hair, I’d like it better.”

She took a strand in her hand before turning away to the corner, propping herself with her two arms.

“Then I think you should trust me before we make such big decisions.”

In truth, his hair hadn’t been so long since the city watch. He had the smallest inclination to listen to her and drop it, but he needed the understanding to reach her. That she would simply trust him, even if it seemed for the worst.

“We should make a blood pact then. It seems to be the preferred Valyrian way.”

“What do you know about blood pacts?”

It was a tradition he was taught and was as old as Valyria itself. He had taught his children through his wedding to Rhaenyra. A promise made with dragon’s blood, the thing that bound them to their power.

“Jace and Cregan Stark made one. Jace and Baela as well.”

The mention of his name didn’t pull as much as it had before. It seemed more of a commemoration of what was lost with him, a memory she held. He hadn’t known his daughter had made one at all. For a moment, he wondered how she was with the war, weary of her temperament.

The girl was facing the moon again, her dress was sheer in the water, her skin a glistening blue in the moonlight. She was a different beauty entirely, one he felt as though he was the first to see. He could see her presence dwindle in her thought.

“Is this how you pray to the moon?”

He joined her in her enclosed space, seeing her draw back to their conversation with a light smile.

“Not exactly. She doesn’t listen often.”

He smiled at her attempt of humor. In some small way, he felt a triumph from it.

“Have I just been deceived into thinking we’d pray to the moon?”

He thought of it, idly perhaps she wished to spend time with him.

“They say there were two moons and one hatched open and birthed dragons. There are moon gods in so many places that it seems to be almost as constant as death.”

He stared at her, lost in her own little world, hesitantly. He knew of the myth in all its mythos from Quarth.

“When I was young, I looked for the moon when it got dark. It was always a better night. When I got older, I lost any faith in the seven I had, I didn’t think the maiden would care to hear from me, but the moon would always return. It’s a nice thing to have.”

He held his breath, not knowing what he could say to her, what he’d want to say.

“I’d do it if you would.”

“What?”

He was thrown off by the sudden change in the conversation. He should’ve expected her not to linger on it for long.

“The blood pact. We fly, we fight, we protect each other. We both return.”

There was an emphasis on her last words that made his heart skip a beat. As though she’d uncovered his worst secret. He watched her shift through the water, avoiding his eyes entirely at the idea.

He turned towards the moon, a beautiful, full sight that he’d never taken the time to simply stare at. Even in the helm of its beauty, the idea seemed simple and ridiculous.

“I fly every day thinking that.”

He threw his confession to the dead silence of the cold night and still water. He’d freeze to death in the next hour if he stayed, yet he did to be there with her. He didn’t need another word from her to know that she didn’t.

“You’re not a very trusting person, girl.” He felt the ripples in the water as her body turned to him.

“Should I be?”

Her words stung like a wasp sting. No, she should not and had no reason to be.

“Maybe after I make the oath, you can be.”

Her eyes lit up with the possibility as his heart sank. He’d break it if it meant she’d be safe, yet he still pursued it. He couldn’t help himself, knowing her had become a selfish want he wished to earn, to grasp at.

His toes felt numb in the water. He was sure to get sick soon if he didn’t leave.

“We should leave. You’re shivering, and we can cut your hair before the night is gone.”

She pushed herself closer to him, looking up at him, closer than she had been.

“You’re very warm.”

He could feel her warm breath on him, her eyes never breaking from his.

“Daemon, I won’t take care of you if you get sick, get out of the water.”

There was deception in her tone, there was a humor as well.

She pulled on her bottom lip for a moment, drawing his gaze to her plump lips. He drew nearer to her, past his own command, closing any hope of space between them. Her breast stood in the water with the adjusted posture, hardened by the cold. She looked hesitant, confused but not scared, never scared.

His cold hands met her waist, holding her in place, for a moment she was the moon.

He lifted her from the water and sat her on the edge. He stayed between her legs before meeting her eyes. They anticipated something he wasn’t sure of he’d fully conjured it. Her chest raised up and down, breathing deeply, awaiting a reaction. He had half a mind to earn it. To pull her back and taste her, as forbidden as it seemed, just once.

He pulled himself out beside her and stood up, going from the cold water to the cold night. He caught a breath he wasn’t entirely sure he knew how he had lost it. Pulling a robe on himself in the dead night. Wondering if any knight had passed in the mist of his longing.

With a splash, he heard her go back into the water, seeing her submerge herself entirely in the water and turn to the next side. He worried that he had compromised himself, his place with her.

She got out, taking a robe to cover herself in the sheer quality of the wet dress.

He made his way to her, cautious to her reaction towards him. She looked at him, a newness glazed her eyes as she did, a desire.

Her breath steadied in the silence, contemplating what had just occurred.

“You should go first before you freeze to death.”

https://archiveofourown.org/works/49138576

Her voice was restrained from the normal emotion, any warmth wiped away, allowing the heat to fully reach him now.

He looked at her again before walking away, completely resentful by the loss of himself in that moment. He was half mad. If he lost her to any capacity, would he leave then?

He reached their room as quickly as he could, going past her, shedding his clothes before submerging himself entirely in the hot bath, weary of the chill and its potential to fester illness in him.

#hotd #house of the dragon #a song of ice and fire #nettles #nettles asoiaf #netty #daemon targaryen #daemon x nettles #daemon targeryan x nettles #daemon targaryen fanfic #hotd fanfic #asoiaf fanfic #from eden ff

22 notes · View notes

memelleity · 2 years

Text

the gray man sentence starters

❝ you want some gum? ❞

❝ i get it. you’re glib. ❞

❝ who are you, my fairy godmother? no offense, i thought you’d look different. ❞

❝ what’s the catch? ❞

❝ what makes you think i wanna do it again? ❞

❝ nice suit. ❞

❝ who are all these people? ❞

❝ do you understand the risk i’ve taken by coming here? ❞

❝ let’s talk price. ❞

❝ where are you going? ❞

❝ deal’s off. ❞

❝ they didn’t tell you who i am, did they? ❞

❝ i got all the answers ’cause i’m telling the truth. they’re not. ❞

❝ you give ’em hell, ____. ❞

❝ i heard you. i just chose to ignore you. ❞

❝ these things take time. there are politics to unravel. ❞

❝ get out. ❞

❝ wanna explain whatever that was? ❞

❝ did he have anything on his person that you now have that you’d like to give to me? ❞

❝ last chance, ____. ❞

❝ you should go without me. ❞

❝ tell me what i don’t know. ❞

❝ how’s life in retirement? ❞

❝ i’m headed to a funeral. putting a friend in the ground. i’m getting to that age, you know? ❞

❝ it’s gonna be my funeral you’re going to next. ❞

❝ beats being on the wrong side of the bars. ❞

❝ you had your shot. ❞

❝ “mostly, it’s loss which teaches us about the worth of things.” that’s arthur schopenhauer. he was a german philosopher, a pessimist. he saw the value in suffering.❞

❝ i’d rather you punch me in the dick. ❞

❝ i will gladly punch you in the dick, ____. ❞

❝ so now i’m the scapegoat? ❞

❝ need anything? ❞

❝ good. you know my work. that’ll make this next part a lot easier. ❞

❝ you really wanna do this? ❞

❝ so how’s the private sector treating ya? does it pay as well as they say? ❞

❝ judging by your shallow breathing and puckered asshole, i can only assume you know why i’m here. ❞

❝ are you okay? you hurt? ❞

❝ i’m trying to figure out what answer it is that you want. ❞

❝ tell you what. why don’t we skip lunch, you can give me what you stole, and i won’t have to chop your head off? ❞

❝ when you say things like “chop your head off,” it makes you sound untrustworthy. ❞

❝ looks like you overplayed your hand. ❞

❝ they say that life in its most unadorned expression is a battle of wills. ❞

❝ i can kill anybody. ❞

❝ is there a point to this story? ❞

❝ you guys taught me how to kill people, not care for them. ❞

❝ we don’t chew gum in this house. ❞

❝ looking for your jacket? ❞

❝ did he deserve it? ❞

❝ you’re quite the conversationalist. ❞

❝ he’s a very smart man. only family i got. ❞

❝ maybe that kind of makes us family. ❞

❝ can i play a record? ❞

❝ you should go to bed. ❞

❝ that’s a very expensive laundry list. ❞

❝ where are you going? ❞

❝ i think you should go get yourself cleaned up. unless bloody and beaten is the kind of look you’re going for. ❞

❝ you know all about notoriety, don’t you? ❞

❝ that’s called harassment. ❞

❝ i mean, what could possibly go wrong, right? ❞

❝ he hurts people because that’s who he is. that’s who you’re protecting. ❞

❝ remove yourself from my personal space. ❞

❝ where’s my money? ❞

❝ what gave it away? ❞

❝ how’d you find me? ❞

❝ if i’m honest, i liked your old haircut. where you didn’t look like a bitch. ❞

❝ i got shot in the ass, ____! ❞

❝ what did you steal? ❞

❝ how do i know i can trust you? ❞

❝ i just made it up on the spot. just came to me. ❞

❝ it was a life of few pleasures. i clung to the ones i had. ❞

❝ if you utter anything remotely sympathetic, i will shoot you. ❞

❝ somebody very powerful is pulling the strings. ❞

❝ i thought we weren’t getting sentimental. ❞

❝ whatever they are paying you, it is not enough. ❞

❝ i told you to shut up. ❞

❝ this is quite possibly the most spectacular failure in the history of covert ops. ❞

❝ what i do can’t be taught. ❞

❝ i would like the opportunity to save you at some point. not that i want you to be in danger so i can save you. ❞

❝ you don’t have a handcuff key, do you? ❞

❝ how much longer do we need to wait? ❞

❝ we need a ride. i call not trunk. ❞

❝ who throws a loaded gun? ❞

❝ i’m gonna bleed out while we have this conversation. can we just unpack this somewhere else? ❞

❝ why’d you go to prison? ❞

❝ you think you can do it without me? ❞

❝ you know what i love about you? ❞

❝ you look like you’ve been hit by a bus, but it only adds to your mystique. ❞

❝ failing upwards does not qualify as success. ❞

❝ you wanna make an omelet, you gotta kill some people. ❞

❝ you’re making me destroy a historic building here! ❞

❝ what are you talking about? ❞

❝ you don’t have time to think. ❞

❝ i don’t care about the money anymore. ❞

❝ if your strategy relies on whether or not i’ll kill a child, you need a new strategy.❞

❝ aside from your childish sense of morality and eight-dollar haircut, we have a lot in common. ❞

❝ it’s really a shame this isn’t gonna work out between us. ❞

❝ i think i’m better than you. ❞

❝ let me see your face. ❞

❝ don’t leave me alone. please. ❞

❝ what i need are a few witnesses to corroborate my story. ❞

❝ what? do you have a question? what is that? ❞

❝ does this plan involve me living? ❞

❝ i don’t wanna see you back in here for quite some time. is that understood? ❞

❝ it is very dangerous for you to start thinking for yourself. ❞

❝ you threatened, ____? how pleasantly out of character. ❞

#sentence starters #rp meme #prompt meme #rp prompts #starter meme #sentence starter meme #roleplay prompts #rpc meme #roleplay meme

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windowsandfeelings · 10 months

Note

Nace & 7!

Nace - 7 - …to shut them up

Nancy loves a tangled knot of a mystery, the kind of case where she can hardly find a string to pull on, a thread to unravel; that is until she does and it all starts to make sense. It’s what she lives for, the thing that has been driving her forward since she was thirteen years old.

So, yeah, she got a bit caught up in her work today. She might have missed a few texts from Bess and George, a handful of calls from her dads, the hunger cues that meant it was time for lunch, and then the hunger pains that meant it was well past time for lunch. But that’s all fine, really, because she’s finally got a lead, and she’s been chasing it all day, and she’ll eat later. When she’s done.

“Nancy.”

She looks up from her laptop screen and discovers that her office is completely dark. Night arrived while she was deep in a message board thread from 2003, and Ace is standing in front of her desk with a take-out bag from Lu Chow’s.

“Ace,” she says. “What are you doing here?”

“When you didn’t show up for dinner I figured maybe you were still here. So I brought dinner to you.” He drops the bag on the desk, and then comes around the side of it to perch on the edge, in front of her.

Her stomach drops, and she buries her face in her hands. “We had a date.” The words are muffled by her fingers.

“We did.”

“And I missed it.”

“You did.”

She looks up, into his face. “I suck.”

He shakes his head. “Nope.” He reaches out for her, loosely looping his fingers around the hand she just had pressed to her face.

“I do, I suck,” she insists, while he pulls her up onto her feet, closer to him. “I got distracted and then I got all” —she gestures to her computer— “hyper focused and then I completely lost track of everything that wasn’t the case, even though I promised you I was going to try to stop doing that so much, and now I’ve missed our date night—”

“Nancy—”

“And I was looking forward to it! I had my outfit all picked out and everything. I even washed my hair—”

“Nancy—”

“And you made a reservation for us—”

He pulls her forward, the last few inches collapsing between them until she’s pressed against his chest, his knees tight around her hips, and his mouth finds hers.

There’s a split second where she keeps talking, her apology tangling in his teeth, but then she sinks into his kiss. Her fingers (as always) wind up through the hair at the nape of his neck, and she twists her mouth away from his so he can kiss along her jaw, and down her neck, and then back up again.. She presses into him, nearly bending him backwards over her desk.

His arm slides up around the small of her back, lifting her up into his chest, and he shifts them both off of the desk, walking her back until they’re up against her bulletin board, which rolls on its wheels and careens them into her filing cabinet. She stumbles over his feet, but doesn’t let go of him.

Ace is like a drug—she can’t get enough of him. Not after the months she spent pining. Not after the months she spent convinced they’d never find themselves anywhere near here, tangled up in each other in her office. Ace’s hands slide down her sides, finding all the spots he knows are sensitive, and she arches her whole body into him, bends a knee around the back of his until Ace and the file cabinet are the only things holding her up. She traces a finger down the shell of his ear, slides a thumb across his earring.

Her lips are open to his, and he tastes like the off-menu blueberry pie from Lu Chow’s.

Suddenly, she remembers exactly how little she’s had to eat today, and exactly how hungry she was before he walked in. Her stomach, pressed up against his, rumbles to underline the point.

“Nancy,” Ace says as her lips find his pulse in the crook of his neck, “would you rather be eating dinner than making out with me right now?”

She moans into his skin. “Maybe.” She tilts her head back to look up at him. “I skipped lunch”

He steps back, slow, so she can shift her weight onto her own two feet. “I’m not offended,” he promises. “Egg rolls are more important than kissing.”

“Only Lu Chow’s egg rolls, though,” she reassures him. “And Lu Chow’s blueberry pie.”

He grins. “Who said anything about blueberry pie?”

She leans forward again, presses her own smile up against his for a toothy, happy kiss.

It’s a while before they make it to dinner.

#12:45am is a great time for posting fic!#nancy drew #nancy x ace #nace fic #kiss prompts #nancy going after ace's hair yes but also his earring #you bend ace over that desk nancy #idk it's late and I'm barely awake so the end of this may be a total mess #but I wanted to post before the finale

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wack-ashimself · 6 months

Text

I don't know if you guys seen that recent sketch but a older male comes in and says I need an adult, and the other guy looks at him and goes you're an adult. I feel like that's my entire adulthood. I've never once felt like an adult until the past couple years and that's only because of equal parts a lot of younger people not knowing shit and asking me, and me actively looking older. I still don't know a lot of shit. I have a million billion questions. And I don't know if I'm going to get them all answered. Most of them is finding out the truth. Because once you find out the truth, it's kind of like a string. You pull it and it all unravels. The problem is the lies are so wound together it's hard to find an end. Because there's really only two ends. The beginning and where we are right now. Could you imagine if we knew the truth of the past? How many people would genuinely look like evil demons? I mean Trump and Bush families alone if you go back far enough they were awful fucking people. But most people don't even know a fraction of their past. And that's the point. If you don't know the past, you definitely don't know the current situation. Let me put it this way. There's absolutely no accurate book on the planet about history that every country agrees to. That's because if it was honest, every country would look like a piece of shit. No exceptions. So every country lies. Every single fucking one. At this point you're lucky to find the country that lies the least. Honestly that is a good question. Which country lies the least to their people? That would be a great reality show. It'd be the only reality show I'd watch.

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nutteu · 8 months

Text

the almost under your skin

[AO3]

There was something morbidly funny about avoiding bananas so vehemently, in hiding the tremble of his fingers, in covering himself in as many layers as possible in the summer. There was something devastatingly quiet in breathing in the air of repressed memory and fear that never quite made it into the surface, forever trapped under his epidermis. [Sykkuno-centric; because sometimes we ignore warning labels; published 2021-10-14; word count: 13,090]

It started out innocent enough, so easy. Sometimes it was laughably simple, to pull on the loose string of a stitch and watch as the tangle of yarn unravel.

One moment Sykkuno was wearing the same shirt five times in a week. Because he had three shirts with the same color, with the same pattern; because he had a washing machine. His friends had jokingly complained about it. Change your shirt, do you really like that one, did you shower, and he would laugh in high-ringing laughter that fit in with the rest of them. He liked his shirts, and then he didn’t.

The next moment, Sykkuno was wearing a thick sweater, with another shirt underneath, and another undershirt beneath it. Sweat was beading down his neck, and there might be something melancholic in being baked alive and listening to sweet acapella songs in the early evening. He didn’t really know, never bothered to check. There weren’t many things he looked into these days. He wondered when he became so stagnant, so stranded.

“You’re going to die from heatstroke,” Toast said in a low voice, and put a finger on the bead of sweat. It jolted Sykkuno into action, and the man frowned. He removed his finger. “Just shed off the sweater. We don’t have air con out in the open.”

“You’re exaggerating,” he said, and forced out a laugh because there had to be something said and done, lest someone looked past his bravado. “I’m fine. The breeze is enough. It’s going to be cold soon.”

“You’re soaked in sweat,” Toast deadpanned.

Sykkuno smiled and pretended that the conversation never happened. If he believed it enough, it might be overlooked and they never had to talk about this anymore. He discovered recently that he was a big fan of ‘not-talking-about-it’. When he didn’t say anything for another two minutes, Toast averted his eyes to their group of friends, and he let out a sigh.

Lily’s sweet voice blended in with Corpse’s low timbre, and Sykkuno wished everything could feel like this all the time. The soft breeze that didn’t quite manage to dispel the heat underneath the layers of fabric, the twang of the guitar, the crackle of the campfire they had painstakingly built, the soft hush of conversations that lulled them away from the fact that it was mere seven hours away from Monday.

Brodin took pictures of their outing, and Sykkuno wasn’t fast enough to cover his smile when the man directed the camera at him. He scooted over and showed the picture to him. Sykkuno looked serene, and nothing at all like the low simmer of nausea that consistently resided in his gut.

“You look relieved,” Brodin said, and Sykkuno looked at him through his bangs. Brodin had this knack of seeing things beyond what people put on the table, beyond what they had guarded so closely to their hearts.

Sykkuno swallowed and politely asked him to delete the picture. It felt like a lie, and so, it shouldn’t exist. If he believed that it was a lie, then it wasn’t real.

Out of everything his friends had said to him, he remembered vividly what Rae had said. She said, he was too nice. She said, he should be careful, because there were a lot of people with a penchant for abusing people’s kindness, and if he wasn’t careful, then he might find himself in a world of trouble.

He didn’t know how to tell her that she was right. Usually, Sykkuno wasn’t afraid of admitting his mistakes, never shying away from apologies. But this time, he felt the burn of embarrassment over admitting that it was his fault to begin with. That it wouldn’t happen if he was careful, if he had seen it sooner, if he just stopped being nice for a moment.

He was terrified of the fact that he had made a mistake, and that it could never be fixed with simple apologies. It was his fault, and he kept it closely within the calluses on his fingertips.

Sometimes Sykkuno looked at himself in the mirror, looked at his hips, and his neck, and the shape of his face. There were the ghosts of fingers placing bruises on those places, and it wouldn’t happen if he weren’t so nice. So he rubbed on his hips, his neck, his face; rubbed them so harsh his skin was red and bruised by the end of it. But the whisper of the fingers was still there, and he had nowhere to run from his skin.

He was trapped underneath the epidermis—like his mistake, like his fear, like the fingers that gripped him so tightly and never let go.

He wished he was a little bit less nice, and a whole lot stronger. He wished, and before long, he realized that he had stopped picking up people’s things when they dropped it, had walked away from people asking for directions, had turned down a lot of invitations, and looked away when people aimed a smile at him. If he were a little bit less kind, he could stop the touch of the fingers from haunting his nights.

(But he knew that all it did was alienate him from everything else in his world, and left him stranded and alone with the fingers gripping his hips, closing over his neck, cradling his face. It was another mistake he wasn’t willing to say, and he kept it close within his fingertips, along with everything that had happened, and had never happened. Because he refused to believe it, and so, it wasn’t supposed to be real.)

His friends didn’t understand why Sykkuno started picking up cigarettes, and he never told them why either. It felt too much like opening a can of worms he wasn’t ready to deal with. So he stewed in his silence, and his friends chalked it up as something that would inevitably happen. A lot of people smoke, there shouldn’t be anything strange if Sykkuno started doing it, too.

If they noticed how his fingers trembled each time he held a cigarette between them, he certainly never heard anything about it.

The thing was, Sykkuno didn’t even have the intention to smoke. He wasn’t curious, nor was he interested in smoking. The acrid taste stayed on his tongue like a cloying nightmare, and he hated how hard it was to properly learn how to suck in the smoke before releasing it in an exhale. He learned quickly, though. He smoked a lot.

He said that it was just a habit he picked up along the way, and his friends reluctantly believed it. They didn’t ask where exactly he picked it up from. His friends smoked, too. But he spent years with them and he never even tried one to humor them. But Sykkuno had always been adamant in keeping his feelings inside a box with a tightly closed lid, and everyone learned to never pry him for something he wasn’t ready for. It took him a while to realize that he was treated like something fragile. He didn’t know what to feel about that back then.

But now, all he felt was fear. That he would be treated like glass, like a ticking time bomb if they ever found out that what Sykkuno didn’t say was that cigarettes felt like safety. That it was the painful drag of unfamiliar substance over a cold night in December, that it was the fumble of badly shaking fingers as he tried to not cough or choke on the smoke. What he didn’t say was that it wasn’t the cigarette as much as it was a chance to run away from a memory he tried so hard to forget.

So he stood next to Peter while their friends chattered away in the diner, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it up with a practiced flick of his fingers. He had a gross amount of practice. Because it was almost August and it had been eight months since December, and he still didn’t know how to run away properly. He was stagnant, stranded, trapped in a night when he made the biggest mistake of his life; a shame he could never erase.

Peter never asked, though. Sometimes he offered the lighter, and sometimes he offered his cigarettes when Sykkuno forgot to bring his own. There were moments when he looked at Sykkuno as if he wanted to say something, as if he knew about something. But those moments went away as quickly as the smoke that dispersed in the early autumn night.

The closest thing to truth that Sykkuno had ever said was that one time they went to Peter’s place, and he leaned on the railing of the balcony, taking a drag of nicotine into his lungs with Peter standing close next to him.

“I hate smoking,” he said, and Peter nodded. Maybe they all had just tried to be nice and let Sykkuno go on with his façade. “I hate remembering even more, though.”

Peter paused, and looked at him. There was a question waiting at the tip of his tongue, but Sykkuno didn’t look away from the night view of the city, and so the question never met the cold air of the night. They stayed in heavy silence.

Peter stopped smoking after that.

The thing was, in a way, Sykkuno had let it happen.

See, it didn’t happen in the blink of an eye. It happened in slow motion, and God, how he felt stupid for not seeing the looming danger on the horizon. The thing about humans was that they never realized their blind spots, and most of the time, they didn’t have anyone around to point it out either. So Sykkuno was blinded by a sweet smile and easy conversation, and awkwardness that slowly seeped out of his veins. He had felt comfortable, he had talked out of his own volition, and he was the one who sat there, long enough for his mistakes to catch up on him.

His t-shirt was thin, because he had left his jacket in Toast’s car. Because clubs were supposed to be packed to the brim with people, and not even the cold air of December could penetrate the thickness of sexual tension and frustration that people brought into the establishment. This time, the bouncer didn’t refuse Sykkuno entrance for wearing a t-shirt while his friends were dressed to the nine. He probably couldn’t be bothered, or maybe he just wanted to get it over with, because the cold air was biting and he had been standing there for too long to manage the people trying to get into the club.

Either way, Sykkuno was grateful that he didn’t have to borrow his friends’ clothes anymore. Perhaps, he should have. His friends liked dressing him up in intricate layers that fit to a certain stylish standard that he could never see the point and appeal of, could never understand the formula of putting on several different things into a complete attire.

But Sykkuno's t-shirt was thin, and he wasn’t shivering because the air in the club was dense and stuffed. He said, he didn’t really like drinking, because he didn’t particularly like bitter alcohol. The man had laughed, and Sykkuno remembered he had been mesmerized by it. When he looked back at it, he almost cried from laughing too much.

Because the nicest and the worst thing that the man had done for him that night, was ordering him a Dirty Banana.

It was sweet, and palatable on his tongue, and he smiled as the man paid for his drink. Oh, God, he was so handsome, and Sykkuno couldn’t look away from him. It wasn’t the kind of attractiveness that Sykkuno was familiar with, but he welcomed it nonetheless. He made another mistake of not looking at his drink when it was served.

But it was Dirty Banana, and it was sweet, and he laughed at the flirtatious joke the man had thrown his way. There was a slice of banana on the rim of the glass, and the man had taken that, pushed it into his mouth with tantalizing slowness that made Sykkuno's throat dry. Oh, God, he was so handsome, and Sykkuno was so, so stupid.

When the world spun around, he staggered to the packed bathroom. He saw Brodin, thought of calling out to him, because Brodin would always be willing to take Sykkuno home early. But his gut was churning, and the sight of people pressing against each other had become so blurry, and he had to lean on the wall to support himself.

And then there were fingers, pressing into the side of his hips, an arm around his waist, and Sykkuno leaned heavily on the hard chest behind him. He said, he wasn’t feeling good. He said, maybe he should go home. But his words fell on deaf ears, and Sykkuno wished that he had screamed instead. Because his world had zeroed in on a handsome face and charming smile and easy conversation, and it made the stench of his mistakes all that sharper on his nose. Because his world wouldn’t listen, so perhaps somebody else would.

But nobody could hear him here, in the empty alleyway where the cold brick wall dug into his back, and the cold air of December night made shivers break out all over his skin. Nobody could hear his softly whispered ‘no’, not even himself.

Then there was a leg shoved between his, and his body was unbelievably hot and weak. Like a liquid, like the worst of time to make a mistake. There were fingers, cradling his face gently, whispers of how pretty he was, how perfect, how he’d make Sykkuno feel so good, how he was a fucking dumb bitch for trusting a stranger in a club. His t-shirt was thin and it easily made way for strong hands pressing bruises on his hips, on his neck, a thumb pressing against his lips, and Sykkuno gagged from fear and shame.

He didn’t think that something so horrible could feel so gentle. Because he was kissed as if he was a lover, he was touched as if he was someone beloved, he was called with a sweet voice as if this wasn’t forced and he was instead in the embrace of someone he wanted. But Sykkuno had wanted him, hadn’t he? There wasn’t any world out there that didn’t spell out that this wasn’t his fault, from the beginning to the end.

And so Sykkuno swallowed back his scream, his shame, the churning nausea of his stupidity. This was his fault anyway, so why didn’t he just accept the retribution? He deserved this for not listening to his friends, for being too nice, for a t-shirt that was too thin, for a tongue that couldn’t handle bitter things, for laughing at goddamned distasteful jokes and a slice of banana.

“That’s right, darling,” the man whispered, and ran a hand through Sykkuno's hair so softly, like this wasn’t a wretched version of an embrace. “You want this.”

No one heard the ‘no’ he uttered; not the man, not even Sykkuno himself.

He wondered, if his friends were to find out. Would they be angry? Sad, on his behalf? Disappointed at his mistakes, be ashamed because he wasn’t strong enough to defend himself? Would they try to fix him, or try to forget that it happened altogether? Because Sykkuno didn’t feel broken. He just felt fractured, and there was no one to blame for that but himself.

The night was bustling, and Sykkuno had hickeys all over his neck, and he felt so sick that he wanted to throw up. The fingers on his hips were the only thing that wasn’t gentle, and he relished in the reminder that this was unwanted; stewed over the roiling pain that this was his fault.

But then those fingers were gone, and there were screaming and the sound of flesh hitting flesh, and Sykkuno was hauled into another set of arms as he stumbled through the alleyway and into the bustling streets. There were people there, but he could no longer scream, and he knew that no one would take a second look at him. He wondered briefly, that if he were to scream back in the club, would this still happen? It was too soon for him to be hit with another bleak possibility.

He was seated in a circle of people. They all looked ragged and carefree, and they laughed at Sykkuno. He felt like crying. He didn’t know where he was, and he still felt the taste of banana in his throat, and God, was there even a universe out there where he wasn’t an idiot?

But they laughed, and they asked if Sykkuno was dumb, and they pressed cool clothes on his skin, and gave him a bottle of water to chug on. He spilled water all over himself and a girl tsked in irritation. He tried to apologize, but his throat was parched and his tongue felt numb.

He was leaning on a ratty car seat that had been pulled out of its original place, and there was a small campfire that they all huddled together around. He watched the flicker of fire and the crackle of the burner, thinking of life after this night. How could he pick himself up after this? What did people even do in this kind of situation? Did they scream and cry? Did they brush it off and continue as if nothing amiss had happened in their lives? He didn’t know the correct protocol, and the girl with orange hair was right, he was too dumb to think straight.

Someone was shaking him, and he blearily tried to open his eyes. Someone was talking to him, but he couldn’t make out the words. He was too drowsy, the press of wet cloth on his neck calming and offering him a respite from the turmoil inside his mind. His body didn’t feel like it was his own; too numb and uncoordinated to properly move.

There were groans of irritation, and then he was hauled into someone’s arms. They said, they were going to help him. He didn’t know whether he should believe it or not. He didn’t know whether help meant something better or worse. There were a lot of things he didn’t know about tonight. Whatever might happen, he was too powerless to stop it.

But then he woke up in a room where everything was white, and there were three unfamiliar faces staring at him. He didn’t know them, but they seemed to know him. One of them grinned and said that he was down several bucks for the medical treatment, because they didn’t have money to pay for it after paying for the taxi fare. They said he had been sleeping for a day straight, and that some evidence had been collected from his body, in case he wanted to press charges.

Sykkuno was far too disoriented and nauseous to even think properly. All he wanted to do was to go home, curl up on his bed, and die of shame. The nurse gave him his clothes and phone, and told him to wait several hours more to see if there would be any health complications. He listened to him while Tetra, the girl said her name was, helped him drink some water. His throat was sore and dry and he tried to push down the memories surfacing onto his mind.

They were rebels, they said. They weren’t exactly homeless, but they didn’t go back to their families. They hung out with their friends, and sometimes they met someone like Sykkuno. They were ruthless in saying that he was an idiot, but Nicholas, the guy who had spotted him in the alley, said that his friends were just joking, that it wasn’t his fault. Sykkuno had stopped and threw up on the sidewalk upon hearing that.

It was nighttime, and they rubbed his back as he threw up whatever he had in his stomach. When the bitter taste of stomach acid hit his tongue, he was crying. Nicholas whispered something in his ear; something gentle, something Sykkuno couldn’t believe. They didn’t take him home, because he didn’t say he wanted to, and he told Toast that he was alright. He was just meeting some friends. He ignored the phone calls afterward.

When he sat around the circle of Nicholas’ friends, they all laughed at him again, but they also offered to hunt the bastard down and he laughed because he didn’t even know what he wanted. So they gave him a weird vegetable smoothie that tasted horrible, and taught him how to inhale smoke properly from the cigarette that Tetra had offered to him.

He choked and his eyes were watering, and they all laughed. But Nicholas offered him a bottle of water, and they all got into the bus and walked him home. He thought that it was laughable, how these strangers knew what happened to him, and he couldn’t even pick up Toast’s phone calls. Between the ten of them, they only have two phones that they used interchangeably. They gave Sykkuno both numbers and gave him a pack of cigarettes. They said they couldn’t give him nicer things because they were broke. So Sykkuno accepted it and didn’t tell them he wasn’t a smoker. Everybody could be a smoker, and he could start becoming one.

Cigarettes made his throat dry and his mouth felt like something had died in it. But he had been taught how to inhale two times before letting the smoke settle in his lungs, and exhale it through his mouth and nose. He didn’t like the taste, but he liked the feeling of knowing what he was doing, of being steady on his feet after the spectacular shitshow he had set up for himself.

Nicholas said that it wasn’t his fault, and Sykkuno nodded as they walked away from his front door, singing love songs in the wrong tune. He curled up on his couch, and cried until he fell asleep. He never told anyone that it had been his fault—every single thing. He didn’t think he could handle the shame and guilt.

So he didn’t press charges, and the hospital kept the DNA, and he started smoking in December, and he made friends with ten punks who only had two cellphones between them and harsh jokes that they all laughed at as if Sykkuno was a part of it. He thought that he might just be the biggest joke that had stumbled into their lives.

They all were huddled up in a diner booth, and Leslie ordered a banana smoothie, and Sykkuno clenched his thigh so harshly. He didn’t say anything, but Brodin put a hand on top of his and held his hand through the chattering. He thought that maybe Brodin knew, somehow; that maybe the odor of his shame was so strong, wafting off of his skin in roiling waves.

He excused himself to the bathroom, and threw up his meager lunch. His mouth felt like it had a cotton ball in it, and he sat on the toilet seat afterwards. His body wasn’t trembling, his fingers were. Sometimes he looked at them and thought of cutting them off. Because what haunted his nights weren’t the gentle whisper of wretched things, weren’t the kisses on his lips and his skin, wasn’t the bleak promise of something worse. It was the fingers, on his hips, digging in until they broke the skin barrier and made a home in the cradle of his bones.

Sykkuno threw out all the bananas in his fridge, avoided the rows of them on the supermarket aisle, and vehemently denied that he was scared. Because it was ridiculous. Out of everything that had happened, he decided to be traumatized by a goddamned banana. It was funny, and he cried about it for two hours until he had to run to the bathroom to throw up.

“You’re not okay,” Brodin said, pressing fingertips on Sykkuno's temple. His voice was low, even if they were away from their friends. “You look like you’re constantly being chased by something.”

He was frozen in place. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t know how to say it out loud. It was something so simple, but it weighed like a stone in his chest. He didn’t know what was worse—being told that it wasn’t his fault, or being looked at with pity. He didn’t think he was ready for either of those.

Logically, he knew that it wasn’t supposed to be his fault. But how could he believe it when he had been the one wearing a thin t-shirt, had been the one sitting there talking and laughing with him, had taken the drink with his own hands, had wanted him in the first place. He was dumb, dumb, dumb. He couldn’t have known beforehand how hard it was to admit that.

So he didn’t, and let Brodin hold his hand as if he was breaking apart. Sykkuno liked to think that he was alright, that he was only fractured. There should be a big difference, right? A fracture wasn’t something to worry about. It would heal over time, and if it didn’t, then he should have been able to handle it. He couldn’t possibly be that useless, could he? If he had endured that mistake he made in December, he could deal with the fracture that he had made with his own hands.

He looked in the mirror one day and the words he had said echoed in his mind. Pretty, perfect, dumb. He wondered how exactly he looked like to other people, people like him. If he were taller, bigger, rougher around the edges, would it still happen? If he were stronger, wasn’t so polite and delicate, would he still be approached by him?

His skin was pale and unblemished, but Sykkuno could see the stark bruises that had faded for months. For the most part, the only thing he felt was disgust and shame and guilt. But sometimes, he felt so angry and he didn’t know whether it was directed at himself, that man, or the world. He supposed it was all three of them. He punched the walls in his bathroom until his knuckles bleed, until he was breathless from exertion and tears. He would stare at his messed up hand and went out for a smoke, letting the air bring a new wave of pain over the broken skin. He wished he could be like his hand; if he was wounded it would heal eventually, and there would be no sign left of previous atrocity but scars that could barely be seen.

He didn’t heal. His fracture didn’t close up, and the invisible bruises always felt fresh every single day. Sometimes Sykkuno thought of the cause. Fractures didn’t just come up out of nowhere. But he found out that it was just as hard to admit that something had happened to him, that he had been knocked down and touched with strong fingers. That he had been fractured. It didn’t feel right to cry out about something that was his fault to begin with.

So he called one of the two new numbers he had in his phone, and they all merrily walked him to a hairstylist. The customers and the staff gave them a dirty look for being so loud and ragged, but Sykkuno liked their presence. They said that Sykkuno would look cool with an undercut.

“Like that one model in the magazine!” Cherry had exclaimed, and then laughed when Tetra reminded her that she had stolen said magazine.

Sykkuno came out of the place with ten not-quite-homeless punks, sporting lavender hair and an undercut. He felt fresh, felt new. He felt like his throat was clogging up because he knew this was just an act of running away. Nicholas put an arm around Sykkuno's shoulder and said that he was the Boss man, that he looked dandy as fuck.

He didn’t know what kind of things they had seen, but the moment Sykkuno said that he wanted to get a piercing, there was a look that crossed their faces and for a second he was paralyzed in fear. He felt like they knew exactly what he was doing, could read between the lines, could see the tremble of his fingers even if he hid them in his pockets. But they just jostled him and said that he was becoming a rebel like them, and pointed him out to this tattoo and piercing parlor that they said was nice, but too expensive for them to actually go into.

He had two piercings on his left ear, one on his right, and a small tattoo of lavender on his hips. They said he looked good with it. They said it suited his hair. He didn’t tell that it was because he wanted to see something else on his hips other than the invisible bruises.

His friends were shocked, but they all looked happy enough. Corpse was practically vibrating in his seat as he ranted to Sykkuno about earrings and having matching tattoos together, said that he was so cool and it fit him so well, and would he like some of Corpse’s chains and rings to complete the look?

Toast ran a hand through his hair, and didn’t say anything. Sykkuno let him; let the soothing motion lull him to drowsiness. When he woke up, everyone was gone, and there was nothing left but ladened silence in their wake. Toast had always been close to him, closer than anyone he had ever allowed to. He thought that maybe he could finally say it, if it was Toast. But his piercings felt new and aching, and the studs caught the shine of the overhead lamp, and his tattoo felt like it was burning on his skin. So he kept his mouth shut, until Toast sighed, as if Sykkuno had hurt him.

“Do you really want this?” he asked instead.

“Maybe, I don’t know,” Sykkuno answered, as truthfully as he could. “I feel like I had to.”

Toast’s lips pressed into a thin line. But he didn’t push, just ran his hand through Sykkuno's hair. It still smelled faintly like bleach and hair dye. “You look good,” he finally said, and closed his eyes.

Sykkuno lay there in silence, and stared at the lamp above them until his eyes watered. If he was crying, he told himself it was because of the harsh glare of the light.

Sykkuno didn’t wear chains or necklaces with pendants. Instead, he bought a bunch of chokers and put them on and relished in the sight of something else wrapped around his neck. He went back to the tattoo parlor with Nicholas and had a constellation inked alongside his lavender, had smattering of lilies on the other side. They looked like they were cradling his hips, and he pressed on them from beneath layers of fabric. They gave him a sense of safety; that people could still press bruises there but it wouldn’t show from beneath the starkness of his inks.

Rae said she liked this new look on him. That he looked more confident now. That he looked so chick and pretty with his new earrings and choker, and Sykkuno didn’t throw up. It had been more than a year, he wasn’t healing still, but he taught himself how to hear the same words without breaking out in a cold sweat.

Peter didn’t smoke, but he still stood next to Sykkuno in silence when he did. Brodin held his hand when they sat next to each other in cafés and diners and restaurants. Toast still looked at him as if Sykkuno was breaking his heart.

He took everything in stride and told himself that this wasn’t denial.

Cherry and Tetra and Nara taught him how to layer himself in clothes that wouldn’t suffocate him so much in the summer. So Sykkuno was down several thousand bucks from buying a whole set of new outfits for his wardrobe. The girls liked dressing him up, the way his friends did. They left him detailed instructions on how to mix and match the outfits. He remembered the formula, and when it didn’t feel right, he fell back on the assurance that he was clothed in at least three layers of fabrics. They wouldn’t give way so easily, not anymore.

Sykkuno didn’t go to clubs anymore. Whenever his friends invited him, he said that he was hanging out with the punks, and he spent the night pretending that he wasn’t five seconds away from throwing up, that his fingers weren’t trembling so badly that his cigarette fell. Reuben laughed the hardest amongst them all, and he slapped Sykkuno's back so hard, and they all pretended that the cigarette fell because of it.

Once, Cherry laid her head on his lap, and smiled at him. It looked a little bit sad around the edges, but looking away from it would be too rude. Sykkuno wasn’t so nice anymore these days, but he learned to prevent himself from being outrightly harsh and cold. She traced the line of his choker; suede, with a small pendant. “Pretty,” she whispered, and closed her eyes as if everything was alright in the world. Maybe it was, in hers.

Cherry was all giggles and fearless remarks upon her petty crimes. She was this kind of pretty with heavy make-up and an abundance of jewelries and a smile that looked too sweet amongst her ragged companions. She was an airhead that sometimes didn’t get the jokes her friends threw around, but she laughed anyway because she liked them. She was someone who stood at Sykkuno's chest, and twice as brave as he was.

“I was like you, once,” she said. “I cried so much, and I thought, how can I live with my mistakes?”

He looked away. He never talked about it. Not even after a year. He thought that it made him into an even bigger coward. But he curled up in the safety cocoon he had made for himself, all the chokers and piercings and tattoos and smiles that now felt a tad sharper than before. He wasn’t healed, still as fractured as before, but he learned to pretend better.

“It took me a long time to convince myself that I can be free from my shame and guilt,” she continued. “If you want to run away from it, that’s fine too. Maybe when you’ve run enough, you’ll stop and realize that you’re in a new place that you’ve built for yourself. It can be filled with things you’ve changed, things that still contain the memories and nightmares. But you’ll see eventually that it’s okay to stop and be alright.”

He looked at her, and she smiled at him. She reached out to hold his hand, and he gripped it tightly. He whispered, “I don’t know if I can ever run away from him.”

“Well, that’s okay, too,” she said cheerily. “Maybe he runs away from you too. Just because you two exist in the same plane of existence, doesn’t mean that you have to trap yourself with him. You’re here, aren’t you? You’re standing on your own feet, have made decisions for yourself, and you can be okay. If you can’t accept that yet, it’s okay. I’m sure I can remind you every day; I’ll borrow the phone from Nick and text you!”

He laughed and nodded. He couldn’t bring himself to believe everything she said completely, not yet. But he had run so far, and his feet were getting tired, and maybe it was alright to stop once in a while and breathe in the heated air of June.

He didn’t throw up so much from bananas these days. He simply ignored them and looked away when someone ate something that had bananas in it. He still thought that it was hilarious, that he was traumatized by a fruit. It was a sort of hysterical, morbid hilarity. But sometimes, when he was particularly so deep in his head, he could still taste the Dirty Banana on his tongue, could still see the slow drag of tongue over that one slice of banana. He didn’t think he could hate something as much as he did with it.

But it wasn’t the banana, was it? It was everything that preceded it and everything that happened afterwards. But his mind was left in scrambles, and it latched onto the safest and most dangerous thing from that night. If he didn’t drink that beverage, he wouldn’t be pressed up against cold brick walls, getting fingerprints all over his skin to be remembered a year later. If he wasn’t so caught up in the curl of his tongue over the slice of banana, he wouldn’t want him so much. He wouldn’t get—get—

He looked at his reflection in the mirror and the gaunt eyes stared back at him. What was the word? It wasn’t the right word, the one ringing in his ears. He didn’t get—he didn’t. And for some reason, it made everything that much worse. Because worse things had happened to people, things like what he had promised Sykkuno. It didn’t happen to him, and yet here he was. His piercings and tattoos felt like they were mocking him. It didn’t happen, and yet he was still fractured.

Maybe if it happened to him, all of this would feel justified. Everything he did would make so much more sense. Maybe if he had another dosage of trauma to complete that disastrous night, he would be allowed to feel this shaken, this hollow.

But it didn’t happen. It was an almost that ate him away, lingering under his skin and reminding him that it didn’t happen, and yet he was still left in shambles. It made him feel even weaker, that he didn’t get the worst of it, and still felt the need of running away, of changing, of forgetting.

Sykkuno didn’t cry much, now. He used to cry a lot, like Cherry said she did. He guessed that maybe his tears had run dry, and he was forced to deal with his emotional turmoil with vacant eyes and anxiety that weighed his stomach like a stone.

And yet, it was an almost, and Sykkuno had never felt as sick as he did right now. So he cried, clutching the sides of the sink, and thought that no one told him that it was so fucking hard to admit that he was stupid, that he was scared.

Sykkuno changed his hair color in the autumn. Nicholas and Cherry were the only ones with him when he came out of the salon with pink hair. For some reason, he never brought his friends when he got his hair done, when he had new piercings or tattoos, when he bought new outfits. He thought that it made him a bad friend, to keep this side of himself only to people whom he had known only for a year. But these people had seen him, had known what happened to him, and it was easier, somehow. It still took him a while to settle with comfort instead of unfairness.

Nicholas was the closest with him amongst the others. Sykkuno figured out that Nick was the one who told the others to never touch his hips; that they should only offer him a drink where he could see it, or the ones they had drank first beforehand; that they shouldn’t eat or drink anything with bananas near him. Sometimes they said something that made him tremble and nauseous, but he learned to swallow it in. He couldn’t keep shying away from words, no matter how much they made him feel the bruises all anew on his skin.

Nick said that he was pretty, and he said it so earnestly that Sykkuno was stunned for a moment. It was so different than when he called him pretty; it had been condescending, obscene. He had tried to run away from that word for a long time, now—had tried to change himself into something that wouldn’t conclude into that word. But Cherry looked at him with such wonder, and she called him pretty, and it was easier to stomach, then.

On Halloween night, he came to the party at Edison’s house dressed as a punk. Nick had lent him his jacket. It was endearing to see the man giving it to Sykkuno with embarrassment all over his face. He said that he had to wash it beforehand, didn’t want Sykkuno to smell his sweat all over it. It now smelled like Nick’s cologne and the stink of cigarettes.

He didn’t drink. He never drank anymore ever since that night, almost two years ago. But he felt pretty drunk still when Toast pulled him into the bathroom and asked why he chose to dress like a punk. He laughed and took a drag of smoke, and said that it was because it felt safe. Like the cigarette, like the tattoos and piercings and chokers and layers of clothes.

There was momentary blankness on Toast’s face, and Sykkuno looked away with a bitter smile. Toast had always been the smartest out of them all, and he knew Sykkuno well. Not well enough to know everything, but enough to read between the lines now that he was presented with clear clues.

They sat inside the empty bathtub, and Sykkuno looked up at Toast, who was sitting on the other end of it. The bathtub was too small for two grown men crowding in it, but it didn’t feel suffocating, somehow, when Toast surged forward and held Sykkuno as if he was the one breaking apart, as if he was the one carrying a fracture for almost two years.

Toast, too, felt safe to him. He trusted him, and he knew that Toast would handle it in ways that wouldn’t make things worse. But Sykkuno was—he was—scared. Oh, God, he was so scared, and he felt undeserving of sympathy and safety; of explaining himself and exposing his mistakes, his shame. He thought that time could make it easier, but it had been going on for long enough, and his fingers still trembled as badly as the first time.

“Don’t—“ he choked out, because he wouldn’t cry. “Don’t say that you’re sorry. It’s never been your fault.”

“I won’t,” Toast promised, but the way he cradled Sykkuno's face and pressed their foreheads together felt like a thousand apologies.

It made him feel so, so much worse, and so, so much better. He felt like he could breathe a little easier, the weight on his chest let up a little, and he wondered if soon, once it was completely removed, truth would pour out of the emptiness it left behind.

They didn’t go back to the party, and Edison let them sleep in the guest room. Sykkuno didn’t shed his clothes, Toast didn’t either. It was as if there was an unspoken pact between them; as if he had uttered an unsaid permission for Toast to see him clearly after nearly two years of hiding, of running away. The closeness didn’t bother him, it never did. His fear manifested in a million other things that caught him off-guard and stranded, scrambling for purchase. It wasn’t the way the media and articles had portrayed it to be, and yet it was. Sometimes there were some lines in-between left undisclosed, hidden from the light of the day, and yet felt so, so real.

It was the first time he had acknowledged it after so long. That it happened, that it existed; that the bruises he felt on his skin felt real, that the words were still ringing in his ears, that the taste of banana and his tongue were still vivid in his mouth.

He closed his eyes and Toast held his hand. He wanted to say, don’t let go, I’m so scared. Oh, God, Toast it was my fault. I was so stupid, I’m so scared, don’t let go. But he didn’t, couldn’t. He was unable to let it out of his throat, the way that word couldn’t make way past his fear. It wasn’t—it wasn’t that. It was less than that, and it was so much worse because it was an almost.

Toast held him closer anyway, and Sykkuno clung onto his shirt until his knuckles turned white. In the morning, he asked if there were things Sykkuno didn’t like. He swallowed and said, “Banana.”

Toast liked bananas. But he never ate it in front of Sykkuno anymore. In a way, it made it easier. In a way, he felt like he was even more fragile than before. Delicate. He tried to believe that he was anything but that, and it was easy enough to do because Toast didn’t treat him like a glass, or a ticking time bomb. He hurled insults and inappropriate jokes at Sykkuno all the same, leveled him with a flat look when he thought that Sykkuno was being particularly dumb, and didn’t hold back at all in knocking him down when they were wrestling around.

But sometimes, Toast was quiet, and he stood next to Sykkuno alongside Peter when he smoked, and he held Sykkuno as if he knew that he was trying so hard to be alright, to run, to hide. He bought chokers and earrings for Sykkuno, and snapped at the others when they commented on how many layers Sykkuno was wearing. It's winter, Tina, what the fuck do you care?

Sykkuno would smile and laugh and let Brodin hold his hand as Toast got into an argument with Tina. He thought of Cherry, of her sad smile, of being alright and stopping to see that he was standing in a place he had built for himself. He didn’t think he could be there, not for many years, but he could allow himself a moment of respite.

It still felt like pretending, like denial, like hiding his mistakes and shame, but he swallowed it down and convinced himself that he could pretend to be one more thing: to be alright.

Sykkuno changed his hair to electric blue in February. He took Toast with him this time. The punks had a great time trading insults and banters with him. They were in awe because someone like Sykkuno could have a friend as savage and hilariously tired of everything like Toast; they adored him and demanded why they hadn’t been introduced to him sooner.

“Someone like me?” he had asked jokingly.

“You know,” Tetra said, shrugging. “Soft and delicate and so smart it hurts. Actually, it’s not that surprising. You’re a sadistic bitch underneath all those sweet smiles, aren’t you? No wonder you got boytoy over here.”

“I can hear you,” Toast said through gritted teeth.

Sykkuno paused to contemplate her words. Even after more than two years, after every change he had undergone, there were still some things he couldn’t run away from. He was still undeniably, inevitably, himself. He supposed it should make him feel bad because it meant that he was still the same man who got—got. But… in a way, it also made him feel a little bit relieved, that he was still himself and more.

“Is that a bad thing?” he asked again. “To be all that?”

Tetra laughed and slung an arm around his shoulders. “No, dumb bitch,” she replied. “You’ve never been at fault for being you, for all that. Sometimes the world is just cruel, and there’s that. It’s a simple fact that you should try drilling it into that thick head of yours.”

It would be easy, to put the blame onto others. But Sykkuno had borne the burden for so long that he didn’t know how to do anything else. It was pathetic, and it felt safe for all the wrong reasons. Sykkuno was fractured in all the wrong ways. He didn’t like bananas, he covered every place he had touched with everything else he had chosen for himself, he wasn’t as kind as before. But his fingers still trembled, and he still stared at himself in the mirror and saw the man from two years ago, and he was afraid of being called pretty.

He had been himself and it had been a mistake. But now, no one touched him like that anymore—no one even approached him like that because Sykkuno had never let them. He turned them down flatly, and walked away with Nick’s arm around his shoulders. He was himself, too, now, and Tetra said that it was alright. He had changed, and he was still himself, and it was okay.

It felt pretty anticlimactic, but he would take it regardless.

“I feel like I should cry,” he said with a soft smile. He rarely ever smiled so softly anymore. He looked at himself in the mirror and practiced until his smiles held an edge to it, more guarded and less jovial. He practiced until he could send people scurrying away instead of getting closer when they saw his smile. It made him feel safe, made him feel like he was less likely to be pressed against cold brick walls in an empty alleyway.

“So cry, soft boy,” Tetra said with a bright laugh. “Cry until you’re breathless and curse at everything you’ve ever scorned. Cry until you feel like you don’t want to cry anymore, and then cry some more just because you can. Who the fuck will stop you? I might even join in.”

So Sykkuno cried, in the diner booth they visited, with Toast’s arms around him. He cried until the waitress threw him a concerned look, and cried again until he was all snot and blubbers. Toast didn’t say anything about it, just held Sykkuno close with one arm, and ate his lasagna with the other. Tetra cried with him and he kept laughing between his sobs because she complained about capitalism and the cage of society’s norms that was forced upon them.

The waitress came over with a gentle smile, and placed a banana smoothie on the table. It was on the house, she said. If there was anything else she could get him, just called for her, she said. Her name was Janice, and Sykkuno burst out into a hysterical laughter after she left. Because it was the motherfucking banana, and the world was fucking cruel for placing such a coincidence on him.

He took the smoothie and downed it in one go, and went to the bathroom to throw up. The taste of banana was replaced with the bitter tang of acid, and he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and saw that he was such a mess. His new hair was bright and soft because they had put so many products to prevent it from getting more damaged, and his choker was sitting tight and pretty on his neck, and his nose was runny and he looked disgusting, so to speak.

But God, he had never felt so fucking pretty than he was in this moment.

He went out and Toast dabbed his face with a napkin. “How do you feel?” he asked.

“Fucking dandy,” he answered, and Nick laughed so hard he keeled over.

Toast grinned, because he liked it when Sykkuno cursed, and held his hand throughout their meanderings.

In spring, Sykkuno shed a layer off his clothes, and still felt safe. It was less stifling that way, but he kept his jackets and sweaters all the time. He laid his head on Brodin’s lap and felt like he was a tad softer around the edges when Brodin ran a hand through his hair. He said, “I think I can be okay,” and Brodin nodded.

The punks loved the spring. They brought so many flowers for Sykkuno and made a circle to learn how to make flower crowns from Cherry. Reuben ate a bunch of sunflower petals and pelted the seeds at the rest of them. It was weird and slightly violent, but it made him smile. Nick gave him a bouquet of yellow roses, and told him what it meant. Cherry kissed his cheeks, because Nick was too embarrassed to do it, she said. So, Sykkuno leaned down to kiss Nick’s cheek and felt like it was alright. It still felt safe.

“What kind of cottage-core scenario did you just come from?” Toast asked when Sykkuno came to their outing with a flower crown and a bouquet of yellow roses and lavenders and chrysanthemums in hand. He thought he must have looked ridiculous; with his piercings and tattoo on the side of his neck, with heeled boots and leather jackets, surrounded by flowers.

People stared and Sykkuno held his head high. He said, “They helped around this florist shop, and the owner gave them a lot of flowers.”

“I’m sure Cherry stole some of them,” Toast said. He had known them for a few months, and he already knew how to read each one of them perfectly. Sykkuno felt a sense of pride at that.

“I want some flowers, too,” Corpse said, so Sykkuno gave him some. He looked incessantly happy about it.

When they went home, and Toast walked into Sykkuno's house with him, he threw the flowers around the living room and walked in circles with Toast holding his hand. The man shook his head and went along. This should feel alright. This should feel like a change and a part of himself. This should feel like taking a breath and dropping his pretense for a second.

Toast put a hand on his hips, and Sykkuno's breath hitched, fingers curling around Toast’s shoulders imperceptibly. But they were dancing to a song inside their heads, and he wasn’t being pressed against the cold brick wall, and it was alright. It was still safe.

They danced, and Sykkuno stumbled because despite his changes, he never did stop being so clumsy with his feet. Toast laughed and held him tighter, and it didn’t feel like a searing brand; it didn’t feel like a bruise. It felt like he was being held so he wouldn’t trip and fall. It made him feel delicate, but delicate shouldn’t be accused of being something so bad.

They fell into the bed and Sykkuno was breathless from laughter and a sense of relief. He was barely holding himself together, but he had pretended for more than two years. He was goddamned amazing at it, and he could pretend that he was alright a little bit longer. Maybe if he did it long enough, he could actually be alright.

They didn’t kiss, and Toast didn’t ask, but Sykkuno placed a soft kiss on his cheek, and slept with Toast’s arms around him. The punks might be onto something. Sykkuno fucking loved spring.

In October, everything fell apart.

Cherry called him, frantic and on edge. Sykkuno listened with a frown, and then stood up from the couch when he heard that Nick was detained. There was a fight, and the other guy was in bad shape. Brodin drove him to the police station, and he felt like he had just gotten a sucker-punch to the chest when Nick looked down and said in a soft voice, “It was him. He tried to do the same thing, and I punched his face.”

Sykkuno wobbled on his feet. Brodin steadied him and guided him to sit on a bench. Nick said that the police were on him, that he would be questioned and detained after he was patched up because he was caught in the act. This time, the victim was pressing a charge.

Everything came back to him with a vengeance. The sweet smile, the easy conversation, the taste of Dirty Banana, the fingers on his hips and neck and face, the cold brick wall digging into his spine. His head was blank, the stone in his chest felt like it had consumed him whole and he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe, and oh, God, he was so stupid. Oh, God, how did he let himself think that he could ever run away from this?

Brodin rubbed his back as he threw up in the bathroom, wiping the cold sweat on his temple and the traces of vomit on his lips. He trembled, now, all of him. It had been nearly three years, and everything had finally caught up to him.

Toast came over an hour later and bailed Nick out. He said, he’d hire a lawyer if Nick ever needed one. When Sykkuno got close enough, he heard Nick talking to the police. He had been released from the hospital and was on the way to the police station to be questioned. Samples of DNA had been taken from his victim, and Sykkuno thought back of his own samples that he had left at the hospital on that night of December.

Toast took one look at Sykkuno and sent him home with Brodin. He stayed with Nick at the police station. He clutched his jacket close, and felt so, so dumb. He didn’t shed his shoes, didn’t move away from the couch. He felt so vulnerable and exposed, even with his layers of clothes and his tattoos and piercings and choker. He felt like he was back to three years ago, laughing and wanting and it had been his fault all along.

Shame churned in his gut, words he could never bring to let slip past his lips. Words like scared, words like my fault, words like—like—

Toast came to his house a little before midnight. Sykkuno had been isolating himself in the backyard, smoking frantically with fingers that shook so badly he dropped several cigarettes. He sat next to Sykkuno, and didn’t say anything for a long time. He didn’t check to see if Brodin was still there. His head was too noisy and too empty at the same time. He wanted to claw his skin off, to uproot the bruises that feel fresh all over again beneath his tattoos.

Brodin joined them after some time, bringing a cup of tea for each of them. Sykkuno didn’t touch his. Toast spoke for the first time to him that night, then.

“They asked me if you want to testify,” he said carefully, cautiously, and Sykkuno hated how fragile, how delicate it made him feel. He was a glass, a stone away from breaking apart; he was the ticking time bomb, seconds away from exploding and hurtling debris all over his surroundings.

There were fingers, placing a soft touch on his hand, and Sykkuno flinched from it. He bit his lip until he could taste blood and buried his face in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

It should feel like truth, but it felt like a confession of sins instead. It felt like waiting for judgment and retribution. They said that he might feel better if he talked it out. But shame burned on the back of his throat, and the world seemed like it was watching him fall.

There were footsteps walking away, and he thought that they had finally left him after knowing the truth, his mistakes. He deserved this. He had wanted him, he had been the one who stayed and talked and drank that stupid Dirty Banana. It was all on him.

But then, there were fingers prying his hands apart, and Brodin was looking at him as if Sykkuno wasn’t a sinner. He looked at him as if he would be willing to take the burden with him. He said, “Toast thinks that you need some space. He’s waiting inside, for whenever you’re ready.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and it felt weird that it wasn’t Toast that he told this to, but Brodin felt like an encompassing blanket in a winter when he held Sykkuno's hand and sat in front of him. “It was my fault. It was all my fault. I made a mistake.”

Brodin nodded. “Maybe you did make a mistake. But it wasn’t necessarily your fault.”

“I was the one who stayed and talked to him,” Sykkuno said, and then laughed and laughed and laughed. He sounded like he was on the verge of losing it, on the verge of tears. “I drank that fucking Dirty Banana, and he brought me to the alleyway, and I told him no, I swear, I told him that.”

He was crying, he realized. He was crying so hard that his words were barely audible, and for the first time since it happened, Sykkuno felt like he was broken. There wasn’t any fracture, he was split apart and tattered at the seams. He was so weak—with his thin t-shirt and kindness and pretty smile. He was so weak, for being so charmed and mesmerized. And it had been his fault all along, because he had invited him, didn’t he?

He wasn’t aware that he was saying everything out loud until Brodin’s hands tightened around his. He swallowed and laughed bitterly. “I tried to change myself, to erase the marks he placed on me. I smoke because it was the first sign of safety I had after—after that. I put things in places he had touched me. God, I can’t believe I’m still so afraid of being called pretty, because he had called me that. Had called me pretty, called me perfect and dumb because I trusted him. I said no, and he still touched me. If I had fought, if I had screamed, maybe I wouldn’t get—get—“

He swallowed, and looked down at his shaking knees. When he whispered the world out loud, it felt like a millions different fractures on his fragile glass.

“—assaulted.”

He wiped the tears with the sleeve of his jacket and smiled. “I wasn’t even raped, you know? He didn’t get to do it before Nick found us. I was just assaulted, and I wasn’t raped, and yet I carry around a fracture for three years. I changed myself and I tried to forget and I keep thinking that I can run away from this. But I can’t, and I’m still as weak as I was before. It was my fault, and I don’t know how to live with that.”

Sykkuno understood, then, why Toast looked at him like Sykkuno was breaking his heart. Because when he looked up, Brodin looked the same. He let go of his hand, and sat next to him, and put his head on his shoulder. Sykkuno grasped his knee to stop the shaking. It was futile.

“It wasn’t rape,” he whispered. “It was an almost, and I feel so sick because I shouldn’t have felt like this. It didn’t happen. But why do I feel like I’m breaking apart?”

Brodin held him in silence, and Sykkuno cried until his eyes hurt. “It’s not your fault,” he said after a while. “I know you might not be able to stomach it right now, but it’s the truth and sometimes it’s harder to acknowledge it. That’s alright, too. If you can’t right now, I’ll keep it for when you’re ready.”

He didn’t believe it, couldn’t. Cherry said the same thing, Tetra said that too. But it was so hard to dispel a narrative that he had believed in for so long. It had been so hard, keeping it inside, and Sykkuno felt like he shouldn’t forgive himself so easily because of it.

“Sykkuno,” Brodin called out. He lifted his head a little to sign that he was listening. “Just because someone is shot with an arrow instead of ten, doesn’t mean that their pain is invalid. It doesn’t mean that they aren’t justified to cry and feel hurt because of it. Pain isn’t about a competition where you determine who deserves to feel it more than the others. An arrow can still kill someone; an almost can still break you apart.”

Sykkuno felt sick to the stomach, but he also felt like he wanted to cry and be held for a long time. Brodin shifted to look at him. He said, “Just because it wasn’t rape, doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to feel afraid, to feel anything that you’ve been keeping for the past three years. It’s okay, to say it, to be scared. You’re allowed to.”

He was tired of crying, but there were tears clumping in his eyes and he held onto Brodin so tightly, afraid of being alone in his head again. “Oh, God, Brodin—“ he choked out. “I’m so scared, I’m so scared—I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what I should do. I was so fucking dumb—God—“

There was so much he wanted to say, to tell, but his throat was clogged up and he couldn’t stop crying. Brodin held him, didn’t let go, and for a while it felt alright—to be scared, to finally think that it wasn’t his fault, to be an almost.

He was brought back into the house, and Toast was so silent as he swaddled Sykkuno in a blanket. He gave him a cup of herbal tea that Rae liked to give to him so much. He sipped on it carefully, and felt numb all over. Brodin lay down on the couch, and Toast wiped Sykkuno's face with a wet tissue, brushing over his tear tracks and snots and traces of shame. He took away the empty cup, and took off Sykkuno's boots and socks. He helped him up and guided him to the bedroom.

“We have time,” Toast said, brushing a hand over his now mint-green hair. “You don’t need to say everything. Take it at your own pace, I’ll still be here.”

Sykkuno nodded and held his hand. “Can you- can you stay?”

Toast nodded and took off his jacket, put it on the hanger, and walked over to the bed. He was cautious still with Sykkuno, but he lay down next to him. “I’ll take care of Nick and the allegation. It’s okay if you don’t want to testify, they’re looking for similar victims. They told me the court will be held in more or less two weeks from now.”

“Is Nick okay?” he asked.

“He was threatened to be detained again, because he punched that bastard again as soon as he saw him,” Toast informed, and it brought a small laugh out of Sykkuno. He looked at him, and took a deep breath. When he reached out a hand, it was trembling. “I was so close to committing a crime, you know? I don’t think I’ll regret it.”

“I don’t want you to get into jail,” Sykkuno said, and held the trembling hand tightly in his. They both were shaking, for different reasons. But he found kinship in it, and scooted closer to Toast. “I’ve thought, for the longest of time, that I can pretend to be okay.”

Toast rubbed his thumb gently on the back of Sykkuno's hand, and whispered, “You can be.”

“I don’t know how to believe in that,” he admitted, and felt the prick of tears in his eyes. He was so tired of crying, of everything, of this.

“I’ll remind you,” Toast said. “I’ll remind you of that, everyday. I can help you, if you’ll allow me to.”

“You sound like Cherry,” Sykkuno smiled.

Toast smiled back. “And she’s fucking right in doing so.”

Sykkuno didn’t take off his jacket as he fell asleep. He didn’t feel like he was safe enough to do it, but Toast didn’t mind. He just wrapped his arms around Sykkuno and held him until they fell asleep. He was so scared, God, he felt like he wanted to scream and rip his nails out, but it was alright to be afraid. Brodin’s words echoed in his mind.

He was allowed to be scared, to feel vulnerable and weak and hurting. He had been shot with an arrow, and it might not be ten, but it was alright to acknowledge that it broke him apart all the same. It was alright, even if it was an almost, lingering under his epidermis, the most taunting omen that had chained him down for three years.

He was allowed to be an almost.

In November, Sykkuno testified in the court against Bryan Algere. He spoke with stuttered words and occasional pause in-between, but the judge was ever-patient in waiting for him to finish his testimony. The police had gathered three other men and women who had fallen into the same trap. They contacted the hospital Sykkuno had been brought into, and used the sample of DNA that was still stored there. He had a sudden thought that it was hilarious, that this happened now instead of a year later, because they told him that a DNA sample could only last up to four years.

He didn’t look at Bryan the whole proceeding, and he allowed himself that, too. He might not be brave enough right now, but that was okay. He retold the story, and kept words like ‘it was my fault’ and ‘I stayed and talked and I didn’t scream’ under his tongue. He said that he had said no, that he had said it twice. Sometimes, he had to look down and thumb the pack of cigarettes in his pocket because they didn’t allow him to smoke inside the courtroom. He said that it wasn’t a penetrative rape, but he was assaulted nonetheless, and it was one of the hardest things to say in his life.

“I’m a case of almost,” he said, and looked at his trembling fingers instead of anyone in the room. “But it doesn’t mean that it’s not a horrible thing to experience. It doesn’t mean that I’m not scared for the better part of three years of my life, that I don’t fall apart because of it. It was an almost, and it still fractured me.”

He didn’t know what he was trying to say, but it felt like relief, saying it out loud. It felt real, it didn’t feel like a lie. It existed out in the open air, for everyone to hear, and there was nothing that could erase it. It made three years of emotional turmoil and sleepless nights spent crying and throwing up in the bathroom, changing himself and pretending to be something that wasn’t pretty, wasn’t weak, wasn’t someone who would have this happen to him, a little easier to bear.

Because it happened, and no one could take it away from him, and maybe it made it so much harder, but it also meant that he was allowed to feel like he was breaking apart at the seams. It made him feel like he was deserving of help, of being heard. Even if it wasn’t rape, even if it was an almost.

He stayed throughout the whole thing, and Toast held his hand. The whole gang of the punks was sitting on the rows of benches to show support for Nick and Sykkuno, also to give their own testimony of Sykkuno's story. When the judge finally decided that Bryan was guilty of the charges against him, it almost felt like the first taste of air after being held underwater for too long. His chest was burning, and he was heaving for air, but God, it felt fucking good.

Toast held him close to his chest as the punks cheered and hollered, staring coldly at Bryan as he was taken away by the police. Sykkuno was still convinced that Toast would contemplate murder anyway, even if the whole thing had been taken care of legally. It felt new, this vehemence of protectiveness. The punks had taken care of him in their own way, but they were also understanding of Sykkuno's reluctance to talk about this. Toast was unforgiving and uncompromising in his anger.

Cherry kissed his cheek and gave him a jacket with patches and spikes on it. They had been making it for weeks, to give to him because he was their yellow rose, their forever friend. He thought that despite their gruff appearance and their personal view of the world, they were people with innocence still held tightly intact with bleeding fingers and torn nails.

He wore it alongside his three layers of clothing, and tried to teach himself to feel safe again. He still smoked as much as before, but sometimes he allowed his hand to be held by his friends so he’d know that someone else was there for him; that cigarettes weren’t the only indication of safety.

In January, he changed his hair back to black. Cherry put on a plastic flower crown on his head, and twirled around him. “It suits you, the black hair,” she said softly. “But then again, everything you choose with certainty suits you well.”

It took him months before he took off a layer of clothing, and Nick threw him a party for that. A party meant that they were eating pizzas and drinking coke until they barfed, because now Nick had a part-time job and he wasn’t as broke. Toast stopped them from earning a noise complaint by throwing them all out before nine, and cleaned up the mess as Sykkuno thumbed a new tattoo on his wrist. It wasn’t to cover up the bruises, this time. He inked a tiny yellow rose there because it meant something to him.

As spring came around the corner once again, Toast gave him a bouquet of yellow roses with tufts of astilbe around it, and a single red rose in the center. Sykkuno took it and held his hand as their friends chattered. Cherry had finally worked in the florist shop they liked to help around with in spring. Reuben still ate sunflower petals and pelted them with the seeds.

When Sykkuno allowed someone to touch his hips again, Brodin took him by the waist and they danced to a soft love song. He tripped over his feet, but he was held in strong arms. Lily’s voice blended in with Corpse’s and it was familiar, it could be safe, too.

He pierced his lower lip, and when Toast ran a thumb over it, Sykkuno didn’t feel like he would be left with invisible bruises. He just felt like he was breathless, like he could fall at any moment and be caught. He trusted that he would be alright. If not now, then it was alright; his friends would remind him, everyday. Or, at least, his therapist definitely would.

He looked at his reflection in the mirror, and still saw the man who had been so afraid, so frantic in covering up his shame and fear. But he also saw the man who had allowed himself to be helped, to be okay. He practiced smiling again. He kept the smile that made people afraid and wary, but he tried to remember how to smile softly, gently again. If not for himself, then for the people he held dear.

Almost was a word he remembered for years after that night in December, and on some days, he still felt the ghost of bruises on his skin, the press of cold brick walls behind him, and he still woke up feeling disoriented and afraid. But he wasn’t alone, and he had people who understood that almost had made a fracture in him, had knocked him down and held him underwater for so long. Almost could be as dangerous as happened, and he was allowed to acknowledge that, too.

So Sykkuno had changed, and was himself still. He had multiple arrays of outfits that he now knew how to coordinate; he had three piercings on left ear and two on the right; he wore chokers and necklaces because he liked how they look on him; he wore layers of clothing because it felt safe and it was dandy as fuck; he had tattoos all over his body, to cover the invisible bruises and to remind him of good things in life.

When Toast kissed him, it didn’t feel like terror. It felt gentle and too much and not enough, and he was worshipped in a way that made him boneless with affection. He called Sykkuno pretty, that he was perfect, that he was everything Toast could ever want, and they didn’t feel like words that he had to stay away from. When Toast held him close and left his marks all over his skin, Sykkuno pressed on the bruises to remind him that they didn’t always mean a bad thing.

Toast taught him how to file restraining orders, because even if Bryan Algere wouldn’t be getting out of jail anytime soon, it was okay to be prepared. Toast still held grudges, and Sykkuno sometimes caught him making what he had dubbed as ‘murder-face’. He kissed him and said that he wouldn’t want Toast to go into jail when they hadn’t even seen Reuben’s collab with Lily and Corpse yet.

Every spring, Toast gave him the same bouquet of flowers, with the amount of red roses gradually increasing each year. On one spring, Sykkuno gave him a bouquet of pink roses, with twenty-eight red roses in the middle. Flowers were another language that he was getting familiar with, something else that made him feel safe.

It was nearly eight years after almost, and Sykkuno wasn’t quite okay still, but that was alright, too. He was allowed to take it at his own pace, and he was quite happy with it. Because there was someday that existed for him, where he was okay and safe and loved. And right now, it felt pretty damn close, if he was honest.

So if someone asked, if he was okay, how he was feeling, he would think back to years of fear and guilt and shame, and then years of building himself up again and layering himself in things that would come to bring him a sense of safety and happiness and relief; a sense of mercy and chance for himself.

He would think back to Peter’s silent presence, to Brodin’s reassuring arms, to the punks’ rowdy companion, to Toast’s encompassing devotion and assurance, and he would say, “I’m feeling fucking dandy.”

#video blogging rpf #shiki writes #from ao3 #toastkkuno #sykkuno #disguisedtoast #brodin plett #modern au #read the tags please

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ricard-blythe-ffxiv · 2 years

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Tangled

It was funny how quickly things…threads, lives…stories, could get tangled.

How quickly a vendor, after sharing the same story day after day for a week, could accidentally ‘forget’ and share a bit of information they hadn’t meant to. Or how a supplier might let it slip in a side conversation, just loud enough for customers to hear, that there was actually a surplus of what they were looking for instead of the deficit the merchant was claiming. Or sometimes how a child might accidentally let it slip where their parents were actually going on those evenings when they came home a bit too late and they discussed their adventures a bit too loud.

They’d find themselves in a tangled, knotted mess and then it was simply a matter of finding which string to oh-so-gently pull to unravel it all and let all the secrets come tumbling out.

Not that Ricard expected his task to be quite so easy. Whatever organization was responsible for the infiltration of the Ashen Wolves’ hangar was likely to have taken steps to keep their…’ tangled knot’ of information well guarded, which meant he was going to have to be cautious in his poking and prodding…and quick about it too.

No stranger to black markets and their clientele, Ricard kept a wary eye as he moved through the crowds - Ul’dah was not a location he was overly fond of on a good day, the black market of Ul’dah even less so-, stopping to ‘browse’ as he kept his attention and his ear turned towards a nearby stall. He’d spent enough time moving through the area to get an idea of the vendors more likely to take on stolen ammunition and the vendors most likely to discuss the vendors who had taken on stolen ammunition.

And then there were the folks who just had a difficult time keeping their mouths shut in general.

Those were his favorite kinds.

But at the moment, he was simply looking for someone who seemed overly eager…some one who needed to make a deal. If the information he’d received the day before was good, and he had no reason to believe it wasn’t, then this particular individual would lead to a very interesting conversation…

[The evening before]

“...and then she turned this bright red color and started screaming at the poor man.”

“Really? Right there? Seems awfully rude…what else did she say? Oh, and go ahead and have some more if you like. They’re here for the taking.” Ricard smiled gently as he nudged the plate of baked goods over towards the trio of teens seated across from him.

He’d seen the type before. Working odd jobs among the vendors of the market, likely orphans - which he later confirmed while speaking to them -, they saw and heard just about everything that happened in the day to day, but were noticed by almost no one.

Exactly the type of person he needed to chat with, and the promise of a good meal and a little gil had them chatting up a storm.

The second teen pipped up as the first reached for one of the baked goods, quickly popping it into his mouth. “Something about how she was left with this ‘smoking gun’. The man just said that he was the messenger and she was supposed to ‘get rid of it’...whatever ‘it’ is.”

Finally the third popped in, but not after cleaning off the last item on the plate. “Probably didn’t help that she never gives nothin’ away for less than double what it’s worth. She’d charge you 100 gil for the air in your lungs if she could, and they was sayin’ to get whatever ‘it’ was gone. They had somethin’ better.”

“No idea what ‘it’ was though, hm?”

“Nuh uh. Didn’t get that close. She get’s real pissy, like she things we’re gonna get some kinda taint on her precious merchandise or somethin’.”

“Well…” again, Ricard smiled, pulling out three small pouches of gil and handing one to each of the teens. “I have no such issue, but I trust that we can keep this conversation between the four of us, hm? And this should be plenty to get you a roof over your head for a few evenings, food, and a decent start for getting out of here. A pleasure talking to you all.”

[Present day]

He hadn’t given a name, hadn’t left a name, he had heard a faint ‘holy fu-’ as he’d walked off and one of them had opened the pouch to see the amount of gil within, but the response didn’t matter. He’d gotten the information he needed and that’s what did matter, and what led to him approaching a rather obnoxious looking storefront, forgoing his usual suits in favor of the ‘uniform’ he’d been forced to wear while employed by his uncle. No identifying marks, but also not something that he’d typically be seen in.

The area surrounding the store was given a glance to make sure nothing was out of place before Ricard entered the store itself and started moving towards the back in search of the woman meeting his informal informants' descriptions.

It didn’t take him long to find her, as the woman, a blonde hyur that appeared to be about his age, seemed to manifest from nowhere, her narrowed eyes scanning over Ricard critically. “...something I can help you with, sir? You don’t appear to be one of my usual clientele.”

There was a pause before Ricard offered a small, cautious smile.

If she was suspicious already he was going to have to be careful.

“That’s because I’m not, ma’am.” He held a hand to his chest and bowed quickly before meeting her gaze once again. “My name is Alwyn Nader. I am a former employee of Milner Acquisitions. The company fell to pieces since Bernard Milner passed away last year under rather…mysterious circumstances. I have my suspicions, but I’m not in any place of authority to pursue those. Regardless another issue for another time. Since the company has passed on to other hands I have since moved on to a more…freelance type position, since in acquisitions.”

Her eyes narrowed further. “And what does that have to do with you being in my shop, Alwyn?”

The calm appearance remained, but the wheels were turning…she wasn’t buying it.

“Because I have a proposition for you…as I’ve been informed that you too, work in acquisitions of more unique goods. But I wouldn’t expect you just to take me at my word, here…” He reached into the bag at his side and pulled out a piece of jewelry, diamond-encrusted with emeralds scattered throughout the piece, his gaze cut to her for a moment and he saw her eyes widen just a hint…enough to indicate she was interested, before looking up with a grin.

“...and where did you get that, mister Nader?”

“I didn’t leave Milner Acquisitions empty-handed. I considered it part of my severance package. Discovered during the course of the Dragonsong War. It was believed to have been in the Vault at some point, but as with many things, it eventually found its way out. Under the right circumstances, I’d be willing to part with it.”

“And what would you want in exchange?”

“That may be a bit more of a private discussion…”

“Easy enough to achieve, mister Nader…” She moved past him, pulling a key from one of her pockets and closing the shop door, locking it - quickly testing the door before making her way back over to him.

Ricard was not so foolish to think that there were not other security measures within the shop, but one step was better than none. “Quite easy. Well then, I mentioned I’ve been doing a bit of ‘freelancing’ yes? The individuals I’m currently working for recently obtained personal means of air travel. They’d like to be able to protect themselves while in the air…but don't want it on record that they have such capabilities, if you catch my meaning.”

“And what makes you think that I would have access to what it is what your employer is seeking?”

His grin widened as he slid the piece of jewlery he was holding back into his bag carefully, licking his lips before giving a low chuckle as he watched her gaze follow the piece carefully. “Ah, now if I shared all my secrets what mystery would be left?”

“...Fine, let’s say I do have what you’re after and I am interested in what you’re offering…”

“Mmhm?”

“How do I know that the piece you bring to the able is worth as much as what I have available?”

Brazenly, Ricard stepped up, leaning down to where his gaze was equal to hers. “Well, I’ve shown you mine…it’s your turn to show me yours….” He trailed off with a cheeky grin, only to be met with a frim hand to the center of his chest as he was shoved back a step.

“I’m interested in the piece of jewlery, mister Nader, not your dick. This way.”

He licked his lips watching as she - Eir Collier - walked off towards the back off the shop, motioning for him to follow. She may have shoved him back, but perceptive as he was, he hadn’t missed the way her gaze had cut down for a moment and if she thought he wouldn’t use that to his advantage if needed then she was incorrect. He adjusted his shirt and followed, keeping a hand over the bag at his side as he mapped the directions, just in case he needed to make a quick escape.

The shop didn’t look all that impressive from the outside, and the inside wasn’t much better, but the back and the basement below were something quite different.

“Well well…hiding all the good stuff underground, are we?”

“Can’t have just anyone see everything I have to offer, mister Nader.” Eir turned, waving a hand towards the back of the room, and several shelves that were well stocked. “I imagine this will more than meet your employer’s needs.”

Ricard hummed lowly. “Do you often keep such a supply under your shop, miss Collier?”

Her eyes narrowed in his direction for a moment, as he took a tentative step towards her, and then shifted to move towards the ammunition instead.

“No. This delivery is recent and I don’t expect it to be here very long. In fact, I have a buyer already lined up and am having it shipped out later this evening…”

He heard the door slam shut and ran his tongue across one of his canines with a small grin as he felt the tip of a blade against his back.

“So tell me, ‘Mister Nader’, what it is you’re really here for.”

“I’ve been quite upfront with you about my purpose here, miss Collier. I’m here for the ammunition. And I’m afraid I won’t be leaving here without it. You see…what I wasn’t upfront about is that the ammunition, well…it belongs to my employer and well, it’d be a shame to just let you sell it without putting up much of a fight…”

He slammed his heel down on top of her foot before jamming his elbow back into her stomach, reaching back and wrestling the knife from her grip before turning her quickly, pinning her arms behind her back and holding the knife at her throat. The cut was quick and practiced, and Eir Collier made one quick gasp before falling to the floor dead.

“Really should’ve invested in better security. Now, let’s see what we can find.”

Shipping manifests, buyers, sellers, prices, potential costs, all information he could use, and more importantly, confirmation that the ammunition present was the ammunition he was looking for…but nothing that told him who had brought it to her.

Just a note telling her that the was to ‘get it shipped out’ sooner rather than latter, just as the teenagers had told him, and a side note indicating that part of the ammunition was on it’s way to Thavnair.

It wasn’t exactly what he needed, but it was something, and it gave him a direction at least.

He huffed, pulling a cloth from his bag and wrapping up the knife before tucking it away - he’d have to clean up and do a sweep of the store before he called in a crew - and then reaching up to his linkpearl to message Nijah.

Nijah,

Located part of the ammunition, probably about 2/3rds in a shop in Ul’dah. Coordinates incoming. Responsible party is still unknown, they’re good at covering their tracks, but the last batch of ammunition seems to be heading to Thavnair, so that’s where I’m heading too. I’ll keep you updated.

-Blythe

He let his hand fall away from his ear and turned to the room before tilting his head from side to side, not even bothering to space the corpse of Eir Collier a glance. "Time to see what other interesting tidbits you had hidden away down here. Now the real fun begins."

Though he couldn’t help but wonder…if they had this much ammunition to sell, and Collier already had a buyer in mind what might they have that was ‘better’ already lined up? Just who were these people?

Mentions @nijah-wolff-xiv

#the perceptive smartass #stories #blurbs

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i-am-hoo-iyam · 1 year

Text

Idk I still wanna write so

This is what selever does on a normal day. He bugs his mom in the middle of church service, he scares his dad, he messes around with other dimensional beings, he makes shopping take 20 minutes longer, he pays for his neighbors broken window.

“And He brought blessings onto this land witch He created” “MOM IM BOOOORED”. “Siddown church isn’t half over! Ahem sorry about that! Shall we continue”. “No”. “SELEVER! If you can’t be respectful during Sunday church then PLEASE LEAVE”. Someone else piped up from the back. “But church is less boring eith you!” “I’m a demon. I don’t even really worship god. I respect him because I love my mom very much, but imma go to the arcade or something… mom PLEASE stop dragging me to church!”

Selever got out of there and went to find ruv. Ruv was in the bathroom of their house carefully cleaning eye boogers out of his bad eye or whatever’s under there. Sel snuck behind him. “BOO”. Ruv got startled and poked his eye ( or wherever he has under the eyepatch). “(Insert string of Russian swears loud enough to crack glass) SELEVER HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I SAID DON’T DO THAT ITS NOT FUNNY!” “I’m bored”. “Scram”. “But I’m bored”. “Scram or I’ll wring your neck.” Selever scrammed.

Selever went to the park. There was a street blocked off nearby that looked like it was getting sucked into some sort of dimensional rip. Some skeleton guy with a giant paintbrush and some thread and a sewing needle was sewing the rip shut. It was almost finished and all that was left was to seal the rip and fix the road. Sleepover noticed a string on one end of the rip. “Huh what’s this”. He pulled on the string and it unraveled and the rip nearly sucked him in. The skeleton was just staring at it while holding his head. “Do you know HOW LONG it took to fix this rip that the blue haired human made while messing around where he shouldn’t? This rip nearly killed blue (swap sans)! And NOW I HAVE TO START ALL OVER”. The skeleton took a vial off his sash of vials. “Here have some Sorry juice so you’ll feel very sorry for ruining what took me a week to fix with no breaks”.

The skeleton took the coal and splashed it all over selever. Selever felt really really bad. He didn’t mean to. He didn’t know why it was a good idea to pull the string. He pulled a piece of used fum out of his o socket ant tried to use it to close the rip. “Bruh”. The skeleton facepalmed. “Your a being of magic right? Oh you never learned my name I’m ink! Anyways you know magic right? Since you created this mess why don’t YOU fix it”. “Wait if your the ink god guy who creates all then can’t you just snap your fingers and fix the rip?” “Nope. Two different universes with two different magics. If I tried to fix it with my magic I’d turn it into under tale Friday night funkin and this isn’t undertale”. Selever took inks paintbrush and went to the other side and used the paintbrush ink to seal it from underswap side. He teleported back. “Problem solved”. “Oh… I never thought of fixing it from the other side”. Ink vanished without a goodbye.

“Huh I wonder what I can do with this giant paintbrush?” Selever tried painting a donut but it turned into black ink mush cuz inks magic residue had worn off and the paintbrush only worked when ink used it. “Darn.” Selever got an idea. He pulled out a sharpie and drew a funny face on it. He graffiti’d his name. He sold it to skid for his allowance money. “OH BOY A GISNT PAINTBRUSH! Pump! Wanna go paint a giant Mona Lisa?” “Yeah! Can we make her a monster Mona Lisa?” “Of course! It is the spooky month after all!”

Selever ran into the bully and his goons. “Your a rapper right?” Selever snapped his fingers and turned bullies hair blue. “There now you look like a better rapper”.

Selever found his dad with a bandage on his eye getting groceries. “Here can you get this too?” Selever added s give bag of candy. “Put it back”. “Aw”. Selever put it back. “Can we get this”? Selever put a really expensive rc car in the cart. “Put it back”. “Aw”. Selever put it back. “OOOOO DONUTS! AND THEIR ON SALE”. He added a box of donuts to the cart. Rub looked at it and thought. “Go get another box”.

They sent to check out. “Hey look dad your in the news again”. “Huh… ‘breaking’ news… angry Russian breaks neighbors reinforced extra thick double pane window glass with Russian swears… in other words… nothing new in funkin city… look at what you did! You made me break the neighbors windows again!” “I said boo. I didn’t say the swears loud enough to break the windows”. Ruv glared at selever. “Your paying for broken windows this time”. “Fiiiiiiiine”.

#fnf selever #fnf #mid fight masses

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cha-melodius · 1 year

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Hi :)

I'm so haply you're taking prompts. Can't wait for the fics!!

So, my humble request is number 2 for Napollya (obviously, lol). And just in case, for back-up: number 8 for Napollya in an AU where they are both professional chefs (maybe Gaby can be the judge of which dish is better - she deserves all the free food for putting up with their pining).

In case you like the back-up prompt more, feel free to write that one and ignore the first one.

Thank you and I hope you'll have a great day!!

(I went for your first one, 2. “Are you even tall enough to put the star on top of the tree?”, although your backup was definitely awesome as well. Gonna have to get around to them as rival chefs eventually some day... Thank you!)

A Home for the Holidays

Read it on AO3 (G, 1.3k)

“How long is this going to take?”

Napoleon pauses where he’s in the midst of untangling a mess of Christmas lights and stares at his partner, who’s slumped gracelessly in one of his armchairs, a glass of eggnog in one hand and a chess knight in the other. The annoyance as he flicks it around his fingers is palpable, as if Napoleon is the one responsible for his boredom.

“You know, I don’t recall inviting you over tonight,” Napoleon says with a hum, resuming his untangling. Illya grunts a non-answer. “In fact, I’m pretty sure you just showed up. As you usually do.”

“Because we usually have dinner and play chess. But now you insist on…” he trails off and waves at the tree. “This. Useless.”

Napoleon lets silence stretch for a few minutes as he works on the lights. He knows the decorating is uselessly sentimental. He also isn’t going to apologize for it. “Do you know the last time I actually put up a Christmas tree, Peril?”

“No.”

“Neither do I,” Napoleon says flatly. “Always wanted one when I was a kid, but my father never had the money to buy one at the lots in the city. I told myself when I was old enough I’d have a tree of my own. That way Santa wouldn’t be able to skip over my house, like he always did.” He pauses, glancing up from his work find Illya listening to him intently, the knight frozen in his grip. “This is me finally giving in to that childish oath, I suppose.”

“Why not before?” Illya asks.

“Huh?”

“You had money before now. Could get a tree any time you wanted.”

Napoleon huffs a humorless laugh and shakes his head. “I guess it never really felt like the right time.”

He doesn’t say that Christmas trees are for homes, not hotel rooms or temporary apartments. That a life constantly on the move wasn’t really conducive to celebration. That, despite the fact that he constantly surrounded himself with the who’s who of high society, he never had anyone to celebrate with.

As if he can tell what he’s holding back, Illya asks anyway. “What is different?”

“Dunno,” Napoleon lies. “Just is. You could help, you know.”

Napoleon doesn’t expect the jibe to prompt Illya to move from his perch, and he certainly doesn’t expect a large hand to pull the tangle of lights out of his grip. He looks up to see Illya staring down at him with an expression on his face that Napoleon would almost call soft if he didn’t know better.

“Thought you would be better with knots, Cowboy.”

There’s no way Illya meant it to be as suggestive as it comes across, but that doesn’t stop a smirk from quirking Napoleon’s lips. It’s simply too much of a softball to resist. “I’m better at tying them, actually.”

To his surprise, Illya’s eyes go slightly wide at that, and little spots of color appear high on his cheeks. “Noted,” he mumbles, clearing his throat and focusing a little more intently on the lights.

Illya, as it turns out, is actually a lot better at untangling the strands than Napoleon is. No doubt this will be another thing lorded over him from now until the end of time, although that would mean Illya would have to admit he actually helped Napoleon with his Christmas decorating, so maybe he’s safe. They get into a groove of Napoleon stringing the lights on the tree as Illya unravels them bit by bit, until soon enough the tree is quite thoroughly lit.

“Pretty sure this is a fire hazard,” Illya huffs in a blatant attempt at maintaining his rapidly failing grumpiness.

“Shut up and hang some ornaments,” Napoleon retorts with a grin, and he doesn’t bother to try to fight the warmth that fills his chest when a tiny smile slips onto Illya’s lips.

Eventually all that’s left is the star for the top of the tree, which Napoleon is contemplating when it’s unceremoniously plucked from his grip.

“You are too short for that, Cowboy,” Illya teases, grinning now. “Good thing I am here after all.”

“Excuse you, I’m plenty tall enough to reach,” Napoleon scoffs.

He makes a grab for the star, but Illya dodges him and holds it over his head, which is just not sporting. Too bad for him they’ve been sparring in the months since UNCLE set up its headquarters, and by now Napoleon is well aware of all the weak spots Illya claims not to have. He knows, for instance, that if he goes for a particular spot on Illya’s waist he can make the Russian fold up like a clam, which brings the star well within his reach. Snatching it away again, he tries to flee, but Illya is too quick. He catches Napoleon’s wrist and twists it behind his back, almost shoving him face first into the Christmas tree. His thumb digs into the soft spots between Napoleon’s tendons, forcing his hand to open. Illya doesn’t let go once he’s recovered the star, though; instead, he takes a step closer, so he’s basically pressed up against Napoleon’s back with his arm trapped between their bodies. Frankly Napoleon has no clue what he’s doing, until Illya reaches over his shoulder and deftly places the star on the top of the tree.

“You’re insufferable, you know that?” Napoleon huffs, but then he twists enough to look back at Illya’s smug, triumphant expression, and fuck.

They’re, well. Quite close together. He knew that, logically, given that he can feel the heat of Illya’s chest against his back (to say nothing of his paradoxically cold hand still wrapped around his wrist), but the reality of it didn’t really sink in until this moment. He can tell it didn’t occur to Illya, either, by the way the smirk slowly slips off his face. His grip on Napoleon loosens, but he doesn’t step back, and Napoleon doesn’t pull away.

“I lied before,” Napoleon murmurs, the words spilling from his lips before he even knows he’s going to say them. Illya blinks at him, understandably confused by the abruptness of this statement. “I do know why it’s different this year.”

“Oh?”

He really shouldn’t. He needs to just shut up before he does something monumentally stupid. There’s such a thing as too much honesty, which is not something he’s ever had a problem with before. Apparently he’s had too much eggnog tonight, though, because he says, “It finally feels like home. This place. UNCLE.” He pauses and swallows. “You.”

Illya’s hand falls away from his wrist then, and Napoleon is sure he’s just fucked it all up. Only an absolute idiot would admit to his partner—a man he has to see every day, who he’s known less than a year, who probably thinks of Napoleon as a kind of annoying friend at best—that he feels like home, Christ, what was he thinking, well he wasn’t, that’s the problem, and—

Then Illya’s hand comes up to his jaw, drawing him into a soft kiss, and the cacophony of his spiraling thoughts goes blessedly silent. There are no more doubts, no self-recriminations, no catastrophizing—just the feeling of Illya’s lips moving gently against his, the scrape of his stubble, the press of his fingertips into Napoleon’s scalp, the heat of his body as his other arm curls around Napoleon’s waist and holds him close—and if Napoleon thought he’d found his home before it was nothing compared to this. It’s as if he was made to fit in Illya’s arms, their bodies slotting perfectly together, and quite frankly he never wants to leave.

Eventually, though, Illya pulls away slightly, just enough to stare down into his eyes, his thumb sweeping almost idly over the crest of Napoleon’s cheekbone.

“Not that I’m complaining, but what was that for?” Napoleon asks, not bothering to try to suppress the no doubt utterly besotted grin that tugs on his lips.

“Because it is the same for me, Cowboy,” Illya answers with his tiny smile. “This… feels like home.”

#napollya #napoleon x illya #napoleon solo #illya kuryakin #tmfu #the man from u.n.c.l.e.#the man from uncle #napollya fic #tmfu fic #my fic #1 million words challenge

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casspurrjoybell-22 · 28 days

Text

The Art of Sin - Chapter 18 - Part 1

•Bain López (Werewolf)

•Noir Laurent (Dark Elf & Sun Elf)

*Warning Adult Content*

My mind felt heavy yet my body was light, as if it wasn't even there.

I saw yet I couldn't at the same time.

Everything was white, a blinding white that would have made me close my eyes but I couldn't seem to move my body.

I couldn't even tell if I had one.

'Am I dead?'

The thought struck me, my mind racing to try and unravel the confusion that was my memories.

Slowly, I started to string together what was my life.

There wasn't any order though.

I couldn't remember the order.

Scenes both disturbing and wonderful played out in my attempt to remember.

I was disgusted by most of them, wanting nothing else then to turn away and bask in this white world.

I couldn't though.

In between the bad, I saw images that made me unbelievably happy.

I was surrounded by people who cared for me, who I cared for.

It was enough to make me keep going.

I began to piece together my existence starting from when I was a child to what I was sure happened recently.

Then the final piece fell into place.

My family held by men.

Their pleas for me to stop.

What did they want me to stop?

Oh. I remember.

Oberous, the vampire the other men followed, was using my body.

It was my plan but I didn't want it.

I hated what I was doing, what my family was forced to see.

It was disgusting.

Even as I took Oberous's life force, I felt shame.

I couldn't help but be happy as I curled up on the floor in agony, choking up blood, as if it were some sort of punishment.

A punishment I still felt I deserved, even in this weird place.

"You wish for punishment?" the voice echoed through the white space, slipping into my ear like a whisper.

I knew who it was immediately.

Oberous.

I didn't panic, knowing exactly what was happening.

"You cannot hurt me in my own mind. Even as we speak, your life force is being broken down and soon you'll be no more."

He chuckled, making me uneasy.

"Ah but you forget, I'll become a part of you. Since we'll be together for a long, long time, how about I tell you about myself?"

I was unable to stop the flood of images from appearing, similar to how I had pieced together my life.

This, however, was much more gruesome.

There was blood, so much of it.

Almost every scene was one of murder, of him ripping into someone for the simple joy of killing.

He didn't need to feed.

He didn't need anything.

I felt nauseated as they continued.

I didn't know how time flowed where I was but it felt like an eternity.

An eternity of blood.

Through it all, he laughed.

He laughed at the disgust that I felt.

He laughed at the expressions of his victims.

It stopped when Lord Nikoli came into view, however.

********

A man, beating him by only an inch in height but by a lot in brawn, stood before a younger Oberous.

The man stared at him and he trembled beneath his gaze, one he loved, one he hated.

Eyes so similar to his own yet completely opposite, held indifference.

"Why?" Oberous whispered, still not looking at the man.

"Why won't you love me, Nikoli?"

Lord Nikoli sighed, running a hand through his hair as the corners of his mouth pulled into a frown.

"It's not that I won't but can't. Love cannot be forced."

"BUT YOU'VE SLEPT WITH COUNTLESS OTHERS."

Lord Nikoli's eyes snapped to the now burning ones of Oberous.

There was no love, there never had been though Oberous had claimed there was.

He did not love Lord Nikoli though try as he might to convince everyone including himself.

He loved the power of having Lord Nikoli, one of the most powerful of their kind, as a lover.

He wanted the respect, the fear, that came with it and for that, Lord Nikoli denied him.

"Fine," there was a dark look in Oberous's eye.

"One day, one day I'll be as powerful as you. I'll find you just to show you that I didn't need you or your love and when I do, Oh you're going to regret it."

With that, he stormed off, leaving Lord Nikoli standing there with suspicion in his eyes, eyes that didn't miss anything.

Not even the slight trembling in Oberous' body or the single tear that made its way down his cheek.

********

Silence.

Neither of us spoke.

"Was that really the reason you came here? Why you did those things? Because Nikoli denied you?"

I felt rage, more than I'd felt in years.

The air around me seemed electrified, sizzling with my fury as what he did, what I did, came back to me.

The pain he caused, the pain my family felt, was because Lord Nikoli wouldn't take him as a lover.

"It's pathetic."

"DON'T YOU DARE TELL ME THAT."

Everything went dark as his voice thundered out with such venom that it stunned me.

The white became an inky black.

My light body suddenly became heavy.

The air was muggy and weighed me down, slowly my thoughts.

It got worse as Oberous spoke.

"He was my everything. I did whatever I could to please him, to make him happy and do you think he cared? No. He ignored my love for him. He destroyed it and turned it into hatred. So I decided to destroy his love."

He chuckled darkly, revealing scene after scene.

In each one, he watched from a distance.

It took me a moment to realize that in every one, Lord Nikoli was the focus, Lord Nikoli and the others.

One scene, in particular, stopped me cold.

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sporksaber · 2 years

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Paranormal soulmate concept, combining my love of a setting that's just the real world but also ghosts are real and my preferred soul mechanics.

Main character is absolutely obsessed with soulmates and the study of them. The study of soulmates, as well as ghosts, is kind of looked down upon. Not in a "that's ridiculous," way but in a "you are going to drive yourself insane over somthing that can not be solved so just stop," kinda way. Every theory is a dead end, every law will be immidiently disproved, the only ones that arent are flexible and vague. Mc is locked onto finding answers though, and the vague ones wont cut it.

Insert accidental ghost acquisition. The ghost is not happy about it, but these things happen sometimes. The mc is also not happy about it, especially since the ghosts responce to their question on how to break their bond was just "chill out and wait till we untangle," whatever that meant.

So it's a while of annoyed antics between the two of them and the ghost teasing mc about their soul obsession.

Their soul obsession is a coping mechanism. They had a complicated childhood, and a bit of undiagnosed mental issues, and got it in their head at a young age that if they could figure it out they could fix everything.

There is eventually a huge argument that ends in the ghost offering to tell them the real secret of soulmates. This stops them dead in their tracks because what the fuck?

They ask what it is. Ghost asks if they're sure they want to know. They barely hesitate before saying yes.

Soulmates arent real. That's the fact they start with.

Mc loses their shit. Goes out to a convenience store to buy anti ghost stickers. They end up spending all the cash in their wallet on them because just one pack wasnt enough. They sit and sulk in a park to cool down. People walking past laugh at them a bit, because normal teenage shenanigans.

Eventually they talk again (they stickers all peeled or wore off after a little over a day). Mc has more questions that ghost says they dont need to know. Mc asks if they're not allowed to say. At which point ghost is like ok, fine.

The mechanics:

Souls, as they exist as the core of any being, aren't their entirety or their condensed self, but rather a power source. They are the power source that their being is tied to. Their being itself is made up of all the worldly connections they make.

Their is a stand of power connected between you and everyone you know, between you and all the places you've been, and between you and every action you've taken.

As these strings extend from every being in excess they are prone to tangle. You see someone and are immidiently drawn to them? You already know their words before they speak them? You share an Identical mark? All from soul tangling.

Ghosts occur because while the soul detaches from the body when it dies, it doesnt always detach from the ambient strands (it usually does. The strands that remain are what cause simple apparitions. Things like faces in windows and still hearing your neighbor shuffling down the hall at 5am every morning months after their funeral.)

The process of a ghost slowly moving on is called unravelling. The soul will detach from the connections or lose power over time. Itll happen at different speeds depending on personality and outside factors (curses, other ghosts, entanglement).

The final stage of unravelling is separation from the self. I picture it like a baseball. Once all the ties are removed you're left with the core. Without the worldly ties the surface level personality pulls away (this section is like the white outside of the ball). Then comes the more complex personality traits that came from life experiences (the thread just below the cover). Next is the deeper traits that are intrinsic to that person (the wool layer). And finally the base instincts that come with their living form (the rubber layer). And then just the soul is left (the cork at the center of the ball).

[Note: I originally based the baseball thing off one my dad hit with the lawnmower as a kid. The make up was different than the official ones, though I like them better for this. It was thread then a bit of yarn and then what we thought was cement. This isn't actually relevant tho.]

Once only the souls is left it drifts until it is absorbed by or into somthing else. If it had lost all it's power it just stops existing. The less power the less strands that can be maintained. Completely running out cuts off anything remaining.

The story's ghost is approaching the last stages of unravelling. I havent envisioned the characters enough to know exactly where I'd take the story yet. My goal for it would be like, a soft hearted comedy. I really enjoy toying with the concept though.

#your entire being #story concept #this is the only soul mechanic i like when a story actually needs soul mechanics #the only other one i like is more paranormal scifi and also technically not souls- its just a #term used for type thing #i have a lot of concepts using the power source concept #i want to fo a demon and android concept with it atm #please ask me about this and the other soul mechanic concept #like really p l e a s e

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existentialmagazine · 2 years

Text

Review: Jacks And Atoms newest indie-rock single ‘What I Know’ boasts an anthem of living in the moment

Forming nearly a decade ago, Jacks and Atoms began when Daven and Dan began creating as a duo on what would become the band’s 2016 debut album, an indie folk rock release titled ‘Over the Mountain.’ Ever since, the pair have been honing their skills on stages from Chicago to the Midwest, putting together an enthralling live show to match their ever-evolving sound. Bassist Arthur Wolff joined the crew mid-way through their journey, and ever since completing their lineup Jacks and Atoms began working on new indie alternative rock music. Latest single ‘What I Know’ slots perfectly into their growing discography, showing off everything they’ve learned over the years and more.

As the track sours in with a lively vibrancy, ‘What I Know’ sets off with a steady drum beat, colourful electric guitar strums and haunting ‘oh’s from backing vocals that all build up an atmosphere of vastness still interweaved with familiarity and warmth. With the verse slowing things down, seeing just thudding beats and drawn-out piano notes accompanying the vocals, there’s a secluded moment of intimacy to pull you in before the volume progressively raises towards a chorus of profound impact. Exploding into a wall of prismatically coloured noise, ‘What I Know’ bursts from its seams of the building verses, letting loose as every strum is more vigorous, every beat is more powerfully hit, every echo rings out greater, and the vocals emotionally soar atop it all. Capturing hearts with the choruses powerful lyrics, ‘it’s raining and I’m waiting on my own, winds are changing the face of what I know’, Jacks And Atoms encourage you sing along at full force, snipping the essence of what it feels to be alive into a three and a half minute journey filled with similarly empowering lines. With a bridge that switches things up, the guitar finds itself reimagined for a powerful contrasting riff and a moment of deeper and richer tones, before we fall straight back into the sound of ‘What I Know’ that we know and love.

Exploring the challenge of truly knowing yourself, ‘What I Know’ sees the three-piece trying to unravel their identities in a world of constant change. As we’re constantly torn between putting on a front to fit in, and discovering who we really are below the surface, ‘What I Know’ seems to capture the essence of how beautifully but confusingly we’re always adapting as people - whether it be for better or for worse. As many find themselves caught up in the future rather than the present, lines like ‘It’s getting hard to breathe, the future’s hard to see’ bring about an aching reality of encouraging you hold onto who you are in a moment than thinking of who you could possibly become, cherishing every detail without letting them pass you by. Pulling on your heart-strings and evoking a little emotion along the way, Jacks And Atoms have such poignantly bottled up the feeling of reliving a one of a kind memory, capturing hearts in lines like: ‘It’s the moments that make you, it’s the moments that break you, it’s the times you feel most alive.’ If you felt a little detached from reality or behind when the world seems to be constantly moving on without you, this trio are here to remind you that who you are now is more than enough, and living constantly looking ahead is only dragging you down.

Check out ‘What I Know’ for yourself here to experience the vast sonic experience that Jacks And Atoms have created, leaving you to feel reaffirmed within yourself as well as encouraged to live your life to the fullest.

Written by: Tatiana Whybrow

Photo Credits: Wendy Davis

// This coverage was created via Musosoup, #SustainableCurator.

#music #singlereview #jacksandatoms

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lavender-lucifer · 2 years

Text

little moments with them pt. 2

pt. 1 , pt. 2 - Satan, Asmo, Beel

tags - fluff, gn!reader

wc: 862

Satan: hushed whispered, lopsided smiles, banter. Satan offered to help you out with work from the hex class you both took. You’re sat beside him on one of the tables by the window and he’s been explaining something for the past few minutes but you haven’t been paying attention. No, instead you’ve been looking at how his nose crinkles when he’s explaining something and the stray blonde strands that fall onto his forehead. It’s picture perfect, a work of art that belongs in a museum. “If you keep staring any longer your eyes will get stuck like that”, he says and pulls you from your thoughts. An awkward laugh escapes you “sorry…I was-“

“Staring at me while I tried to help you? I noticed.”

There it is, that smirk he gives you when he’s right or when he catches your loving glances. You brush your shoulder against his with a small smile, “you’re acting as if you didn’t ask me to come with you to the library.”

“I simply offered help and you accepted.”

His eyebrow is raised now as he leans in closer to you, arm resting on the back of your chair. That’s fine, you can play this game too. So you lean in close, your lips almost touching, you can feel his nose brushing against yours. “I think”, you whisper, “that you should admit you wanted to spend time with me.” You tilt your head up to look straight into his eyes. Satan knows this routine all too well, that’s what makes it fun with you two. He’s finally found someone who’s willing to indulge him in his harmless schemes and he loves it. He takes your chin between his thumb and index finger and presses his lips against yours. You smell the pine scent of his cologne as he pulls away. “I think that’s good enough for you, right?”

Asmo: warmth, hushed whispers, connections. There’s a soft smell of jasmine in the air and sound of water splashing. The foamy bubbles collect on your skin as Asmo places feather like touches on your back. He has always been soft and gentle with you, his fingers dance along your skin as he spreads the citrusy soap. It’s moments like these that you love, Asmodeous without the glitz and glamour. Just two lovers speaking in hushed whispers, drawn to each other by an invisible string. The water is warm and sends ripples throughout the tub as you lean into Asmo’s touch. “Feeling alright?” Asmo asks with a hum.

“Hmm yeah. Feels nice.”

“Good. Thought it would be nice for us to spend more time together, hmm? ♡”

You twist around in the tub and wrap your arms around Asmo’s neck, bringing your chests together. His eyes always reminded you of the sunset, how the orange rays melt into shades of pinks. A small giggle pulls you from your thoughts ,“Grimm for your thoughts, darling?”

“Just looking at you. You’re really beautiful y’know?”

He presses a kiss to your temple and brings a finger to trace your cheekbones. “Of course I know, but keep telling me, okay?”

“Always.”

Beelzebub: You’re currently shuffling through one of the many closets in the House of Lamentation in search for a medical kit. Not too long ago Beel had sent you a message asking if you could bring him bandages and antiseptic but not to be alarmed, it was only a minor fall he had at fangol practice. After finding the kit you make your way to his room to see him nursing his wrist to his chest, a small pout forming on his lips. “Hey”, you walk into the room and he turns towards you with a soft smile, “what happened?” Beel gives a small shrug.

“We were doing some practices and I fell. It’s okay though, promise.”

He starts to take the supplies from you with his other arm when you stop him. He gives you a confused look, staring at you with wide eyes. Cute. You plop down beside him and gently take his right arm to guide to your lap. “The wrist, right?” You ask as you unravel the bandage. Beel faces you more letting his arm rest comfortably in your lap. Your touch is delicate and he notices he feels different when he’s with you, the little nagging in his head is suddenly not so loud but replaced. There’s butterflies in stomach when he’s with you, no longer hungry but itching for something else. He watches you with curious eyes, it’s not often he gets taken care of like this. It’s nice. You finish wrapping the bandage around his wrist before brining it up to your lips, placing a small kiss. That’s what sets it off, the flush on his skin, the heat racing to his cheeks as he brings his gaze falls to his now bandaged wrist.

“Better?”

Now you’re giving him that look, the one where he wants to cup your face in his hands. He gives a small nod and you notice the prominent shade of red that coats his cheeks. Beel takes a second to clear his throat, “let’s get something to eat, hmm?”

#obey me fluff #obey me #satan x reader #beelzebub x reader #asmodeus x reader #reesie writes

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saintshigaraki · 3 years

Text

THESE ARE HARD TIMES FOR DREAMERS

title from bones by ms mr

pairing: yandere nanami kento x f!reader

word count: 2.6k

excerpt: You wish you’d studied the stars more, ingrained them so deeply into your psyche that you’d carry the night sky with you, always.

You wish they’d never been stolen from you in the first place.

a/n: nanami if ur reading this i’m free thursday night.

tags: yandere, angst, reader is once again full of rage, nanami love what have you done, overuse of the word hate

warnings: yandere tendencies, obsessive and possessive behavior, slight infantilization, noncon/dubcon, gaslighting (?), kidnapping, slight stockholm syndrome, mention of past suicide attempt

MDNI!

You can’t exactly pinpoint where it all went south. There’s not a specific date that stands out to you when you actively noticed things taking a turn for the worst. It’s like that fable. About the frog slowly being boiled alive. Except, in this case, the frog is you and the boiling water is Nanami. And in this case, this is not some story your mom used to read to you about the dangers of gradual escalation, it’s your life. If you can even call this monotonous hell you’re living a life.

You’ve got to hand it to him, you really didn’t see it coming. Nanami’s always been smart like that. Even now, after everything, or maybe even especially now, after everything, you can’t deny that.

You don’t bother moving from where you lay, sprawled out on the floor, when you hear the first click of many locks signaling that your sweet and doting lover has returned.

You used to try to rush him, or get the jump on him with the heaviest thing you could find. Once you started to get really desperate, you just screamed over his shoulder before he had time to clamp a large hand over your mouth.

None of it ever worked, of course.

It was months ago that you decided hopeless escape attempts simply weren’t worth Nanami’s wrath. He’s faster than you, stronger than you, and far bigger. And he always will be.

When your relationship with Nanami was still somewhat normal (though looking back you can’t help but notice all the things that weren’t normal, you suppose hindsight really can be quite the bitch in that regard) you never really thought too hard about how much stronger he was compared to you. In some ways, it might’ve even been comforting, instead of just horribly depressing. No one could touch you when your hand was tucked in his.

It hurts more than you’d like to admit that something you once found such solace in, is now what stands between you and any semblance of normalcy and shred of happiness.

(And fresh air. God, you miss fresh air so much it hurts, a dull never-ceasing ache deep in your chest. You miss the stars too. Sometimes, when you’re laying on the floor like you are now or in the dead of night when it’s all you can do to swallow down your screams, you try to map out constellations on the ceiling. You’re not very good at it though, and the few constellations you actually remember are starting to slip from your memory like water through fingers, no matter how desperately you try to hold onto them.

You wish you’d studied the stars more, ingrained them so deeply into your psyche that you’d carry the night sky with you, always.

You wish they’d never been stolen from you in the first place.)

It takes Nanami’s slightly disapproving hum to snap you out of your celestial spiraling.

You tilt your head back, just enough to find he’s towering over you. His mouth set in a grim line. His glasses, jacket, and tie have already been discarded, his shirt rolled up to his forearms. The sight of him like this use to make your cheeks burn. Now, it’s hard to rein in the urge to spit at his feet and hiss out every seething thought you have about him burning below the surface.

But the lecture you’d receive after a ‘tantrum’ like that wouldn’t be worth it. He always manages to twist your words, your own feelings, sometimes even your very sense of self, until you can hardly tell what’s up and what’s down. Until you can hardly distinguish your reality from his. Until all you can hear is Nanami’s voice in your ear, reminding you of everything you’ll never be. Of just how helpless you are.

(It’s like his hands are around your throat, choking and choking and choking.)

And once you’re nothing but a sobbing heap on the floor, he’ll pull you into his lap, tuck your face against the curve of his shoulder, and rub soothing circles into your back while saying something along the lines of ‘It’s okay, it’s okay. I’ll always be here take care of you’ until your sobs have quieted to the occasional hiccup.

You hate it, how he manages to make you feel so dependent on him. He’s so, so good at knowing just what string to pull so that you’ll unravel completely, just so he can put you back together again with his painstakingly gentle hands.

Nanami’s smart like that.

So, you’ve learned to bite your tongue.

“You’re insistence on laying on the dirty floor when we have a perfectly good couch and bed truly astounds me,” he says, monotone.

You don’t justify his sarcasm with a response, partly to stall what inevitably will come after this and partly to annoy him. Nanami doesn’t like it when you ignore him. It’s one of the few things you have the power to do that manages to get under his skin.

It’s these little rebellions, you’ve found, that make all the difference.

You eye the couch warily, it’s plush and huge. The perfect place for an afternoon nap. Nanami had traded out the smaller one he’d had before, for this one, a few months after you’d started dating. He’d wanted one big enough that you two could comfortably lay together as you slept and he read. You spent countless hours there, tucked into his side, with the setting sun warming your skin.

It’s also where you had told him that you wanted to end things. That he’d gotten too overbearing, too controlling. That you felt suffocated. That you still loved him dearly, but that you couldn’t do this anymore. It’s where you left him as you walked out with only a single bag in hand.

That night you went to sleep in some shady motel room and woke up back in Nanami’s bed with a padded handcuff chaining you to the frame.

These memories from before have a way of coming back to haunt you, they pass through the walls, whispering poison in your ears, caressing your skin one moment just to dig their claws in deep the next.

They mock you as you sit and rot and dream of stars you’ll never see again.

“You’re stalling.” He always manages to sound so distinctly unimpressed with you whenever you don’t follow one of his unwritten rules (and God even if you were actively trying to follow them, there are so many that keeping track of them is nothing short of an impossible feat).

You finally get to your feet, wringing your hands in a way that you know makes you look weak and pathetic. Just the way Nanami likes you so that he can swoop in and take such good care of his little darling love.

“Kento, I-”

“Save it,” he says, already walking towards the bedroom.

You could put up a fight, but all that’d do is make him angry, and then you’d have to do what he wanted anyway and deal with being tethered back to the bed for a few days while Nanami fusses over you like some sort of deranged mother hen.

You make your way over to the bedroom, already starting to strip, ready to get this over with as soon as possible.

You’re half-naked by the time you enter his room.

Even after months and months of this, the humiliation of standing nearly naked in front of him while he stays fully dressed never dulls, it’s still just as sharp and awful as the first time he made you do it.

(It’s like you’re peeling back your own skin, defenseless as he rubs salt in the wound.)

You suppose you should feel lucky that he lets you keep on your bra and underwear. Not that the undergarments he bought you really cover all that much, but in these four walls, beggars can’t exactly be choosers.

He takes off his watch, setting it carefully onto his dresser before walking over to you and starting his nightly inspection for any cuts or bruises you may have received (or given yourself) throughout the day while he was off at work. Off in the world you’ll never see again. Just the thought is enough to make you want to scream.

You used to be able to wiggle your way out of this, before the incident, as Nanami has dubbed it, but now it’d be a cold day in hell before he doesn’t painstakingly go over (almost) every inch of your skin with a careful eye and calloused hands.

His thumb always brushes terribly gently over the scar a few centimeters to the right of one of your jugular veins, where you had attempted to slit your throat after you realized that you would probably never escape this place. Never escape him.

You’d never seen Nanami as scared as when he walked in on you holding a knife to your throat. And you’d never seen him as angry as after he’d wrenched it from your hand using a type of speed that shouldn’t even be humanly possible.

He took a full month off work after that which coincidently also happened to be the worst fucking month of your life.

He cups your face in his large hand and presses a kiss to your temple. A sign that he’s deemed you just as pristine as when he left you and that he’s very pleased by it.

You want to bite his hand. You want to rip his flesh from the bone. You want to hold his heart in your hand and crush it.

(You want to go home. You want to feel the earth beneath your bare feet. You want to sit on a roof in your childhood neighborhood and watch the sun dip below the horizon and drown the world in golden light. You want to step out on an autumn day with winter just around the corner and smell the crispness in the air, feel it claw its way into your lungs.

You want to remember what it’s like to be human.)

Nanami’s lips are on yours before you can think, soft and enticing. You could push him away or just say no. He’d listen. Not even he can apparently justifying forcing you.

(We all have our limits, don’t we?)

But you don’t. You haven’t in a long while. And you hate yourself for it more than you could ever hate him.

He loses his shirt rather quickly and you manage to discard your bra before he lifts you up and tosses you on the bed. You don’t get a second to breathe before he’s over you, monstrous and awful and so terribly beautiful.

He takes a moment to caress your face, his knuckles brushing over your cheek so tenderly that it nearly makes you sick. You’re thankful when he finally says, “Open up.”

You do as he says and in the next second two of his fingers are stuffed into your waiting mouth.

“Suck.”

And you do, without hesitation, because you know what’s coming next. You know that for the next hour or so, there’ll be no denying the fact that you’re alive, that you’re not some ghost haunting these halls. It’ll prove that it’s blood that flows through your veins instead of stone, that you have not yet started to rot in your own skin.

He he pulls his fingers from your mouth without a word and leaves a trail of burning kisses down your sternum and stomach. He wastes no time pulling your underwear off and attaching his calloused thumb to your clit, rubbing tight little circles in a way that has you keening almost immediately.

In an embarrassingly short amount of time you’re wet enough for him to comfortably slip a finger in. Just one of them reaches spots you never quite manage to hit on your own, and you hate how much you love it. It has you moaning, nearly loud enough to drown out the lewd squelching by the time he adds a second finger.

“You’re so, so good for me,” he murmurs, voice rough. It sends a shiver down your spine.

You hate that the praise has you clenching his fingers in a near vice grip. You hate that he still affects you in any way after what he’s done to you. After what he’s reduced you to.

You don’t have time to stew in your self-loathing before his fingers find that spongy spot inside of you that has you seeing stars.

(And this is the reason you don’t push him away.

You’ll never step foot under the night sky again. But here, with his fingers hitting all the right spots in your cunt, you’ll make your own galaxy and pretend that it holds a candle to the real thing.)

With the pace he sets, his constant low grunts of just how lovely you are creaming around his fingers, and the way his thumb never lets up on your puffy clit, you’re coming within minutes, you spasm around his digits so hard that the stars you so love burst behind your tightly shut eyelids.

He eases his fingers out of you and licks them clean, his dark eyes half-lidded and nearly glowing in the dimly lit bedroom, burning straight through you.

You’re the one to look away first. You always are. Shame settling heavily in your gut. Shame that you enjoyed it, shame that you didn’t push him, shame that you’ll do this all over again tomorrow.

When he finally sinks into you, he does it slowly. Sometimes you wish he wouldn’t, sometimes you wish he’d make it hurt. It’d be easier to hate him instead of yourself if he did.

When Kento fucks you like this, chest to chest, there’s not a single part of you not swallowed whole by him.

You hate it.

You hate yourself more for moaning when he changes the angle and starts fucking you so hard and fast that your hands can’t help but scramble for anything to hang on to, they tear down his back, drawing blood which seems to only spur him on to go harder.

“Kento I-- I’m-,” but you can’t finish the sentence, not when you can feel your orgasm teetering on the edge, so, so close that it’s painful, you just need-

“You want to come?” He asks, his voice annoyingly steady.

It’s unfair of him to expect you to be able to answer when he has you nearly folded in half. You can hardly even think.

(But when has Kento ever really been fair?)

“Use your words, darling.” His lips are right against your ear, his tone unbearably condescending, and maybe a bit mocking.

You hate him for asking you to beg.

You hate yourself more for giving in.

“Kento, please,” you whine.

He laughs, low and mean, you feel it in your own chest and for a moment it really is as though you are nothing but an extension of him, a limb left useless without Nanami guiding you. You hate it. You hate it.

Eventually, he relents and brings his thumb back down to your clit, resuming those tight, firm circles, and that’s all you needed to finally push you over the edge.

This time, when you come, there are no stars to comfort you. Just Kento’s eyes, bright and burning.

Your cunt clamping down on his cock is all it takes for him to let out a low groan and still completely inside you, the warmth of his cum flooding your cunt is awful in it’s familiarity.

His eyes finally close as he drops his forehead against yours, breathing your air and forcing you to breathe his.

He closes the gap between your lips, gently, sweetly. You can almost pretend for a moment that this is the Kento you knew years ago. Who held you so sweetly and smiled when you smiled.

You don’t realize you’re crying until he kisses your temple tenderly and wipes away your tears. He’s not worried, you cry more often than not after he fucks you. You don’t really want to think about why.

You let your mind wander as he carries you bridal style to the bathroom, where in a minute he’ll run a warm bath for you two to share, then afterwards he’ll dry you off with the utmost tenderness, then dress you himself before carrying you to the kitchen where he’ll set you on the counter as he makes dinner (you won’t be allowed to help, of course) then he’ll force every last bite down your throat if you refuse to eat (he hasn’t had to do that in a long while though), then he’ll have you curl up on his lap, head tucked into his shoulder, as he reads. After about an hour he’ll bring you back to the bathroom where he’ll brush your teeth for you because you never do it right, and then he’ll drag you into bed no later than 10:30 PM so that you can do it all over again tomorrow.

“Do you want the lavender or rose soap today?” Nanami asks you.

You ignore him in favor of trying to remember the details of your galaxy, but it’s already faded away to nothing by the time you close your eyes.

a/n pt 2: i feel like it was painfully obvious that this was my first attempt ever at smut. i’m so sorry yall. i really did try.

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