#the lines/seams/whatever they are are steel probably | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

silkylious · 3 years

Text

Limbo (Bakugo Katsuki x Fem!Reader)

Pairing: bakugo katsuki x female reader warnings: heavy angst, eventual tiny bit of fluff at the end

omf this request is so nice i feel so bad that my writing is literally garbage in this, but thank you sm for requesting this!! <3 and im so sorry if i didn’t do your request justice (i legit hate my writing here :’))

To say the state of your relationship was unbearable would be the euphemism of the century.

Your thoughts often ran amuck, always hopelessly crawling back to that one despaired curiosity; wondering if he shared the same sentiment about your wishy-washy “friends” status as you did. He probably didn’t. That’s the seemingly unshakable brick wall that would inevitably dead-end your lovesick daydreams, each and every time. Though when his roughed-up hands linger on your skin a millisecond too long, when his steeled stare melts, hard rubies morphing into blazing lava pits, threatening to mar your very heart and soul with their scorching intensity –you’re not exactly certain you’d mind that– that’s when a flicker of something ignites within you. Hope, longing, doubt. Whatever it is, it terrifies you. Because you’re agonizingly aware of what that entails. He’s got you hook, line and sinker, but torturously he refuses to do anything with that. Almost like pulling someone in for a hug then abruptly and without explanation stopping midway, he keeps you at arm’s length. Not too far, not too close. And how that cycle destroyed you.

Katsuki was the type to jump into action and ask questions later. Except a lot of the times when these questions pertain to his own emotions, he didn’t even try to answer them, opting to shove them to the corners of his psyche, collecting dust, steadily accumulating until they become too much to ignore and he (sometimes quite literally) explodes. It’s a vicious loop that he could never break away from, he’d even come to find a sordid comfort in it. His coping mechanism was by no means healthy, far from it, but he’d grown familiar to the toxicity.

Katsuki couldn’t make heads nor tails of his feelings for you. Whenever he impulsively threw himself into the lion’s den that was your affection, caught in the moment, in the glimmer of genuine adoration in your eyes, he never came back the same. A piece of his heart would irreversibly split off and reside in the palm of your hand, he was scared that nothing would be left of it, that he wouldn’t be able to regain his bearings until it was too late. You so effortlessly juggled with his feelings, all with a single smile, it scared him that you had so much power over the fluttery sensation in his chest and yet, in the moment, it felt good. It felt so good to indulge in whatever fucky feeling was messing with his head, to let you hold him in the depths of obscurity with all prying eyes shut and what little words exchanged hushed. It felt so alleviating to feel skin on his own (for once not in battle), gentle, comforting but not coddling. It was unspoken between you that you were both more than friends. You knew it, he knew it. Neither of you ever mentioned it. What neither of you knew, however, was how far the other’s feelings ran.

But as high as your silent love made him feel, he crashed back down into the concrete when he was left to his own devices. Without your intoxicating scent, distracting touches fogging his rationality, Katsuki had all the time in the world to overthink. And overthink he did. His pride picked apart the delicate flowering in his heart, ripping it petal by petal until nothing was left but a garden of beautifully withered leaves, a condemnation to what he considered a weakness.

Katsuki was a taker by every sense of the word. Basking in your wispy adoration, only to brush you aside in favor of focusing on academics once he’d had his fill of your love. It was sickening.

Maybe it was the fact that you hadn’t outright confessed to him, maybe that’s what soothed the overbearing guilt that crawled up his throat whenever he saw that dejected face of yours, the one you made because of him. If your feelings for him ran deep, surely you would have said something by now, at least that’s what he thought. Or more precisely, that’s the excuse his mind conjured up in hopes of easing his conscious, trying to convince himself that self that yes, he was hurting you, but at least he wasn’t hurting you that bad. He was infinitely aware that this doesn’t put him in any sort of moral high ground, nor does it justify his actions, but, again, it was a last-ditch effort to relieve his anguish if just by a little bit, even if he knew that excuse was bullshit.

Surely he knew, there’s no way in hell someone as hawk-eyed as him didn’t notice the tyranny he held over the porcelain pitter-pattering of your heart, didn’t notice the fleeting, love-filled glances you sent his way. This was getting ridiculous, you were starting to believe he was taking some twisted sense of pleasure from your heartache, but he wouldn’t do that, right? He didn’t derive some sick kick out of having you indefinitely under his thumb, at his beck and call… right? A few months ago, you would have answered those uncertainties with a resounding “No!” defending his cruel behavior till the bitter end. But now…

Now you weren’t so sure.

And yet you still found yourself in his dorm, on his bed. It was supposed to be another study gathering, but one thing was glaringly missing. Y’know… the gathering. Kirishima was out training and he hadn’t bothered to invite the rest of his brain-dead, self-proclaimed squad. And that’s how you found yourself alone. With your best friend and secret crush. Just dandy.

Your hands were restless. Pulling at the seams of his blanket, cracking your own fingers, picking up your pencil for a brief moment of concentration, answering one or two questions only to drop it back on the mattress again and fidget some more. Katsuki wasn’t fucking blind, and your unease was ticking him off. Though he surprisingly hadn’t said a thing about it just yet, he was clearly nearing his wit’s end. His silence didn’t prevail for much longer, the meek sigh and not so subtle glance you chanced his way being his tipping point.

“What.” It came out as a statement, a demand rather than a question. What was he demanding? He hadn’t thought of that yet, his temperamental limbs already taking the wheel and pressing on the gas without a destination in mind, just being short fused for the sake of it. Was it even his place to be making demands in this situation? Katsuki knew the answer to this one like the back of his hand, a solid no.

“What…?” You really had no idea what Bakugo was expecting with a question like that. He still had the audacity to roll his eyes.

“The hell’s got you so jumpy?”

“It’s nothing…” It was a lot more than nothing, that’s for sure.

“Don’t lie to me, (name). What the fuck is up with you?” Ah, there it is again. That look. His words were as cut-throat as ever, and his mouth was still pulled into that seemingly permanent scowl. But his eyes conveyed something that was whole worlds asunder from his harsh tone. Golden brows furrowed as they usually were, though unusually upturned just the slightest bit. You despised that look. It ensured that you’ll forever be caught in his grasp, forever there for him when he never spared you the time of day.

Your lungs constricted by a force of gorgeously wretched agony. Katsuki wasn’t fair when he bared his soul to you like this, it filled you with such fervent euphoria that torrefied its way through your being, singeing your veins with luminous infatuation. And it hurt. Because you knew he’d cage himself right up as soon as the moment of vulnerability perished.

A crystalline sheen permeated your vision. This wasn’t going to end well.

“I said it’s nothing,” Your voice raised. You hadn’t meant for the words to be as frosty as they came out, but it seemed like your subconscious was utterly done with the tedium of heartbreak he keeps putting you through.

“What is fucking wrong with you? I was literally just asking why you were being so goddamn obnoxious today and then you go and make a big fuckin’ deal out of nothing!”

“Well, maybe I’m just fucking tired of giving you everything I have and getting nothing in return, Katsuki!”

Your chest rose and fell with each scalding breath that entered your lungs. The blood through your veins was pumping. Never had you been confrontational, and your sudden outburst wasn’t exactly welcome to your system. You wanted to vomit. This was not how you wanted things to turn out, you absolutely needed to leave, distance yourself from the emotional strain he was inflicting on you.

Without taking notice of the panicked glint in the cherry red of his irises, you bolted out of the suddenly claustrophobic room, leaving Katsuki to stare at his agape door before flickering his unfocused attention to your supplies still laying on his bed.

Katsuki erupted time and time again, with you being as patient as a receiving end could ever be. It’s specifically because of your godly patience that he never considered what he would do once you erupted.

With your back sliding down your dorm room door, and little friction stopping your descent, you wondered and maybe even wished he’d call after you, come banging on your door with bristling apologies on the tip of his tongue. However, the jarring reality was very clear to you. You’d decided on that day, with your head buried in your tear-stained pillow, that these were the last tears you’d ever shed on him, that you were going to put him through the same wringing hell he’d put you through.

You were going to ignore Bakugo Katsuki’s existence just like he’d periodically ignored yours.

The following week had been bleak at best and excruciatingly bitter at its worst for the both of you. It was so strange having to adjust to the absence of the other, even if your company more often than not had been a quiet one, it was company nevertheless. The most grueling part though, was your shared friend group. They’d noticed that something was obviously awry, but since neither of you said a thing about it, they decided it would be best if they didn’t either. The awkward dead silences during lunch were still purgatory to behold. But after a few more slow paced days, the sun seemed to shine bright again. For you, that is.

You didn’t realize how much of your schedule revolved around Bakugo until he was completely out of it. How much time you spent with him, dreading him, thinking about him… him, him, him. He’d consumed your thoughts from the first sparks of dawn till the hallows of dusk. You had so much free time now that he was out of the picture, it was crazy. The more time you spent on yourself, on your hobbies, getting to know other classmates outside of your immediate friend circle, the duller the ache in your chest. Until it was but a static buzz. Yet you couldn’t deny that, with time, your fury had mellowed out, leaving behind a cold loneliness you couldn’t elude whenever your aimless stare landed on him, almost like it was drawn to him by muscle memory.

He was the exact opposite.

You’d think the throbbing within him whenever you finally gazed his way then instantaneously looked in the opposite direction would knock come modicum of sense into his stubborn head. But nope. And seeing you thrive without him only cemented what he already knew. He really was no good for you. So much so that it barely took anytime for you to readjust to the lack of him in your life, and not only did you adjust, you were the best he’s ever seen you both mentally and academically. In the first week of you ditching him completely, his bruised ego kept him for reaching out to you, but now, seeing that elated grin on your face –the one that had been gradually dwindling over the past few months– he didn’t want to take your newfound happiness away, he’d figured he’d done you more than enough harm already.

Heart heavy with reluctance, Katsuki made the decision to give up on your relationship. Deciding to wordlessly cheer you on from the sidelines and watch you bloom, flourishing into the person he robbed you of being for a chunk of your life, though whenever your spring hit, it would be without him. Until some day in the future where his pride wasn’t as suffocating, where he could genuinely, wholeheartedly repent his grievances and only hope for your forgiveness.

Kirishima never took Bakugo for a quitter, hell would freeze over before he even thought such a thing. So this was certainly a shock. What was even more shocking – and overwhelmingly concerning– was the fact that Katsuki had willingly, on his own accord confided in him, and he’d, in his own roundabout way, taken accountability for being a gigantic douche to you. As much as the redhead respected his friend’s decision to stay clear of you, he couldn’t help but wish you’d just talk to one another for once. Kirishima really was a saint, having to listen to two idiots ramble about how much they miss the other.

“Listen, man. I know you feel bad and all that, but maybe you should just talk to her? I’m sure she’d like some closure on this just as you do, even if that doesn’t mean things will go back to the way they were.” Eijirou tried to reason, praying to whatever higher being out there that Katsuki would just get the fuck over himself and communicate with you.

“Fuck no. That’s not fucking happening, shitty hair,” Kirishima rolled his eyes at the oh so affectionate nickname, thoroughly done with his best friend’s melodrama. Welp, I guess there’s only one thing left to try. He heaved internally, mentally and physically preparing himself for Bakugo’s tantrum.

“Well, you know that if you won’t talk to her, others will, right? I heard some guys saying they’re gonna ask her ou–”

“Shut the fuck up! I don’t give a rat’s ass who asks her out!” He definitely did. Eijirou hid his smile. Checkmate.

“Whatever you say, dude.”

Later that day, three distinctly powerful knocks woke you up. Needless to say, you didn’t think that night would end up with you and Katsuki staring each other down, seated on your bed at one in the morning. Words got stuck in his throat, so he just… noiselessly watched your face, as if trying to telepathically ram his constipated emotions into you, in hopes that you’d make sense of them. Obviously, that didn’t work.

“Did you come banging on my door at one in the morning just to stare at me, Bakugo? I mean I know I’m pretty but still–”

“Shuddup.” Not really the best thing to say to you after weeks of radio silence. You were about to make another salty remark, but he opened his mouth first.

“I fucked up,” The fact that he was acknowledging he was at fault was… something. But that wasn’t nearly enough to pay off the debt off turmoil he’d caused you.

“No shit.” You replied without missing a beat. The ice that tinged your words caught him off guard, but he really shouldn’t have been surprised. He sighed, knowing he’d have to strip himself of everything, including his pride (especially his pride) down to his very core, to have a go at a second chance.

And so, he did.

He poured his everything out for you to observe, without an ego film distorting his words. Syllables reeked of muted agony, he really had rid himself of anything and everything that wasn’t his deepest soul. He finally offered you himself just as you had done countless times before. Katsuki swore that his heart would –and always has been– explicitly yours, he’d roar that fact at the constellations above if you so wished him to. And while it would take a while to heal from coruscating blisters he’d inflicted, you were more than content mending and welting your heart with his.

#bakugo x reader #bakugou x reader #bakugou katsuki x reader #bakugo katsuki x reader #bakugou imagine #bakugou katsuki #katsuki bakugou x reader #katsuki bakugo x reader #bnha bakugo katsuki #bakugo angst #this is so bad :'))#i kinda gave up at the end fuck #i literally hate this so much whats wrong with my writing #is it just me or does it suck idk #im going night night

417 notes · View notes

remakethestars · 3 years

Text

CABIN 10 — APHRODITE

Headcanons.

❝I want to apologize to all the women I have called pretty before I’ve called them intelligent or brave. I am sorry I made it sound as though something as simple as what you’re born with is the most you have to be proud of when your spirit has crushed mountains. From now on, I will say things like, ‘You are resilient,’ or, ‘You are extraordinary.’ Not because I don’t think you’re pretty. But because you are so much more than that.❞

— Rupi Kaur

Headcanon masterlist.

They’re the camp hairdressers. You need a trim? You want it cut? You want it died? You want to shave it all off? Hit ‘em up.

The type of people that will straight-up chop their hair if it doesn't match their outfit. Somehow, it always works out? I'm looking at Micarah Tewers.

They also run a secret ear piercing — or anything else you need to pierce — parlor.

Okay, but consider: children of Aphrodite that grow up to be models.

They can charm speak the photographers into letting them pick their own poses & not make them do seductive ones if they’re not comfortable with them.

Some create clothing lines that represent sustainable fashion & have big names but small carbon footprints.

Some are spies.

Think about it! They know how to switch subtle bits of their personality to fit in with everyone they come across, when & when not to use their charm.

The hide outfits under other outfits & can slip one off in public to reveal the other & lose a tail.

And they'd probably be great at disguise makeup. Add a prosthetic chin, contour their nose differently, pull off their wig, & they're a completely different person.

Plus, their combat training at C.H.B. makes them the perfect agent.

The floor next to their bunk is scattered with fabric cuttings, pins, needles, their sewing machine, serger, & measuring tape.

The number of times someone's gotten a needle or pin in their foot's a tad concerning.

Will absolutely not wear a top with an overstitched collar. Fast fashion is so tacky! Understitch is the way to go, the staple of a quality garment.

Vintage is better. Not because it's in style (that's a plus, though), but because the seams are big enough for you to let out, & it's made to last.

Experts at thrifting. Not just 'cause it's trendy or whatever, but because they're excellent at upcycling & far too many perfectly good clothes go into the land fill each year.

Make stunning dresses out of Good Will table cloths & curtains.

Or stitch two items together into one better whole.

They iron their clothes; they're not animals.

Really good at getting stains out?

Totally in on the corset bustier top trend, but they're using spiral steel boning in place of zip-ties. Because, again, they want things to last & they're not tacky.

Pass each other tips. Like to tuck your top into your tights to avoid the bulge under your skirt.

Some found big-name, organic makeup companies that don't test on animals. They use packaging that can be recycled or that's biodegradable.

Borrow their clothes, sure, whatever, but double-dip in their makeup & die. The bacteria will give them acne. (Or is it the oils? Either way, you'll perish.)

Happy to drop their skincare routine, though.

You need to cover up that tattoo you got from C7? They got you.

Flawless makeup on a budget. Expensive doesn't always mean better.

They're taking you to the pool for a first date? Take a seat, C10 knows just the stuff. They use what Disney Princesses use.

Can guess the right shade of foundation/lipstick for you on the first couple tries.

A lot of them invest in magnetic lashes because glue's a b¡tch.

Reusable makeup wipes.

Rick says C10 kids just sit around the lake & check their reflection, but consider: working out gets them their dream bod. So, yes, they do, in fact, train.

They just do it with intricate braids/hair gel & stylish sportwear.

And if a potential partner finds it unattractive that they’re “too muscly,” they’re no longer a potential partner.

Weapons disguised as jewelry or chapstick/lipstick.

Thalia had a mace canister that turned into a spear, & I gotta say, I.D.K. how she planned to get that through security. Imagine, alternatively, a tube that appears to be full of bright red lipstick when the T.S.A. agent opens it, but actually turns into a spear when opened by a half-blood.

(I have a headcanon that Riptide would just be a pen in the hands of a mortal. Bounced around for years as random objects until Poseidon nabbed it & took it to Chiron — recall that pen you lost?)

A pink, velvet choker that turns into a kopis with a dove embossed in the handle.

Many choose to train in heels. Might as well wear in training what they’ll be wearing when attacked in the street.

They’ve got no time for internalized misogyny.

“C10′s weak ‘cause they like being pretty!” Good way to lose a kneecap, Annabeth. You’ve grown up in this camp, you knew Selina, & you should know better.

They confront Piper’s misogyny pretty early on after The Lost Hero, but Piper still takes some time to get over her bias toward pink.

Are we not gonna talk about Rick’s fashion choices for Piper throughout the series? “She looks so fashionable.” To whom, Rick? To whom?

You couldn’t’ve done a little internet surfing just to see what was in style? I never leave the house in anything but jeans, Converse, & a graphic t-shirt from Walmart, & even I know she’s dressed like a middle-schooler! Probably because that’s how I dressed in middle-school… That’s not the point.

The point is just because a character likes makeup or fashion or the color pink, doesn’t mean they can’t/won’t fight for their lives & the lives of their friends if/when the time comes. And it doesn’t mean that they’re stupid or judgmental.

I don’t know a lot about makeup. Hades, I don’t even wear makeup — you can’t rub your eyes or scratch your face; it would drive me crazy. I don’t know a lot about fashion either. I don’t understand it, but I can respect it.

❝‘Jesus,’ Sara says as Branley walks past us. ‘Too cold to show off cleavage, so instead she goes for jeans so tight I can see her thong.’ ‘She looks nice,’ I say, and she does. Branley always looks put together in a way that tells me she spends hours in front of a mirror before going outside. And while I don’t understand that, I can respect it.❞

— Alex Craft, Mindy McGinnis’s The Female of the Species

According to The Lost Hero, all children of Aphrodite intuitively speak French. Cool, cool, cool — but consider, all of them also intuitively speak the language of flowers.

They see a red rose, and they just know it symbolizes love & passion. They see an orange lily, to contrast, & they know it symbolizes hatred.

There’s a copy of The Language of Flowers in their cabin, and it’s full of annotations, like, So-and-so gave these to so-and-so for Valentines Day! And, So-and-so gave these to so-and-so after their kiss on the Fourth of July; they obviously didn’t do their research!

They work together with C4 (Demeter) to provide flowers for funerals & the like.

C10 bookshelves also contain a lot of romance novels.

Beaten up copies of Pride & Prejudice & The Fault in Our Stars with faded highlighter over the beautiful lines & annotations in the margins.

The outside walls are a dusty pink, & the wood’s stained a dark brown that goes surprisingly well with the pink.

Inside, the walls are covered in faded wallpaper.

The southwest wall has a bay window with extra storage in the seat. (There’s not a body in there; they swear.)

(That’s an Arsenic & Old Lace reference, for you youngsters.)

The curtains have one chiffon layer closer to the window & a thicker floral fabric for inside. The thick curtains are replaced based on the season & whether or not someone’s decided to make a romper out of them.

They have a real bell jar with a real rose in front of the window. Legend has it it’s from Aphrodite herself.

Said window is a stained glass image of a dove.

The chaise lounge was probably beautiful when it was brought it, but it’s got fingernail polish & makeup stains on it now. Honestly, someone should really have that thing cleaned.

As you might have noticed, I placed a gif of swans at the top instead of a fancast for Aphrodite. This is because I think, as I believe most Percy Jackson fans do, multiple people should play her. I'd cast Arden Cho, Camila Mendes, Candice Patton, Diane Kruger, & Gal Gadot to start with.

Visit my Aphrodite cabin Pinterest board or my headcanon masterlist.

DISCLAIMER ━━━ I know I got a tad political with this one, but I didn’t & don’t intend to offend anyone. ━━━ These headcanons are what I consider to be canon in my fanfictions. They may be others’s headcanons I’ve subconsciously filed away in my noggin. If one’s yours and you want it removed or credited, please send me your post and let me know.

#Aphrodite #Aphrodite cabin #Aphrodite kids #children of Aphrodite #Percy Jackson #PJO #HOO #remakethestars #beauty #makeup #sewing #fashion #headcanons #headcannons #hcs

228 notes · View notes

robininthelabyrinth · 4 years

Note

A prompt for a continuation of your "NMJ goes mad with losing his brother" fic? It needs more. Preferably including A) NHS waking up as a fierce corpse and B) Lan Zhan, at least, not dying.

part 1, part 2, part 3

Lan Wangji wrapped his fingers around Wei Wuxian’s shaking hands, white-knuckled and fearful and unable to release his grip on the Stygian Tiger Seal. He didn’t say anything, only stood there, but that was fine, that was enough.

He was alive, and that was enough.

How Wei Wuxian had felt when he’d arrived to see him staggering backwards, Bichen falling from numb fingers, red staining his white robes –

He didn’t want to think about that.

It was fine: they’d arrived in time, it seemed.

Based on how everyone looked, and on the general state of the surrounding area, he’d guess that Lan Xichen had started fighting Nie Mingjue first, possibly after some conversation, and for a while they’d been evenly matched, but then Lan Wangji hadn’t been able to resist coming to his brother’s aid, the two Jades of Lan perfectly in tune with each other as they fought against a single opponent.

Working together and using their full efforts, they probably would have eventually been able to beat Nie Mingjue, even blackened and more fearsome than ever as he was now; but of course, once Lan Xichen accepted outside assistance, Nie Mingjue could as well.

It was a little terrifying to think that he retained his sense of fairness underneath it all, actually. That meant that whatever he’d done to the Jin sect, some part of him still felt it was just.

By the time Wei Wuxian had arrived with Nie Huaisang in tow, Nie Mingjue had already summoned the masterless sabers, which he’d brought with him in a qiankun pouch – just two of them, in addition to himself, and the balance of battle shifted entirely to his side.

The Nie sect was known for its offensive power, after all, and even the Twin Jades of Lan would have difficulty against their sabers.

Not would. Did.

Lan Wangji had fought against the two sabers himself, leaving Lan Xichen to fight Nie Mingjue unhindered, but the sabers had cut at him - he was fast, but they were faster, and his white robes were stained from a multitude of cuts to his arms, to his chest, to his hips and legs.

Little cuts, in large part, but it was only a matter of time before the little cuts slowed him down enough -

Before -

Wei Wuxian had seen Lan Wangji falling, had seen Bichen leaving his hand unwillingly, and his chest abruptly contracted in utter panic.

He’d reacted immediately, acted on instinct, whistling to summon any fierce corpses in the area.

Not that there were many, it being the Cloud Recesses, a place of purification – but in the end his instincts had only made things worse.

The masterless sabers were, it seemed, exactly as terrifying as Xue Yang had made them out to be: they were swollen with power, very nearly conscious, and enraged by the presence of evil. It was as if the mighty ancestors of the Nie clan had reawaken from their slumber to help their descendant wreak vengeance across the land.

Or at least it would be, if those ancestors were made of steel, knowing neither fatigue nor pain, neither mercy nor pity, and continuously drawing power from the earth and sky even as their opponents’ energy drained away.

They struck hard, chopping down again and again, an unstoppable force, inexorable, taking lives as a easily as a thresher reaped grain.

The low level fierce corpses Wei Wuxian had been able to summon didn’t stand a chance.

Desperate, he had reached for the Stygian Tiger Seal, unsure if he would be able to wield it before Nie Mingjue turned Baxia against him, not thinking of the consequences, thinking only that he had to stop this, he had to save Lan Zhan -

It would all have gone very bad if Nie Huaisang hadn’t intervened at that very moment, shouting, “Da-ge! Make them stop before they turn on me!”

Nie Mingjue had pulled back at once, a harsh gesture causing the masterless sabers to unwillingly retreat from battle and return to his side; Lan Wangji had in turn struggled off the ground to come to Wei Wuxian’s side, and now he was silently holding Wei Wuxian’s hands, letting Wei Wuxian feel his still-strong pulse, and Wei Wuxian could finally let go of the Stygian Tiger Seal.

“Thank you,” Wei Wuxian said, and meant it; he hadn’t been thinking straight.

Using the Stygian Tiger Seal so close to the Cloud Recesses, near the graves of all those purified Lan sect ancestors, all those common people in the villages not far away, everyone accustomed to peace – it would have been a disaster.

“Thank you,” Lan Wangji echoed. “You came in time.”

The sincerity in his eyes made Wei Wuxian’s face feel oddly hot, so he coughed and looked over to where Lan Xichen was leaning against a tree, recovering. “Don’t worry about it. You were doing fine.”

“We were not,” Lan Xichen said simply. “Thank you for your timely assistance, Wei-gonzi. It would have gone badly, otherwise.”

Lots of dead people, in other words.

Lan Xichen looked over to where the Nies were standing: Nie Mingjue’s hands were on his brother’s shoulders, his unguarded back to them – it wasn’t an insult as to their abilities, merely indifference to his own fate. Nie Mingjue clearly cared very little about anything beyond having his brother back. Their heads were bowed together as they spoke, and Nie Huaisang’s expression was positively fierce as he hissed out something.

Lan Xichen’s expression wavered for a moment, and then firmed with determination; he stood and walked over to them.

“Nie-gongzi,” he said politely. “I was hoping you could confirm something for me.”

Nie Huaisang looked at him, his expression utterly unfathomable for a moment; he seemed to be thinking of something. He moved away from his brother, Nie Mingjue turning to stand by his side but never removing his eyes from him, as though he feared Nie Huaisang would die again the second he blinked.

“Go ahead and ask,” Nie Huaisang said slowly. “And then – I have something to ask of you, I think.”

Lan Xichen looked almost as though he regretted Nie Huaisang’s easy agreement. Despite this, he asked, “Your death. If you remember it, can you tell me - who was responsible for it?”

“The Jin sect killed me,” Nie Huaisang said, and now Wei Wuxian was really paying attention: he’d been so busy conducting tests to make sure Nie Huaisang wasn’t about to come apart at the seams that he’d never actually asked for the details of what had killed him. “It was at the orders of Sect Leader Jin, but the execution of the order was at the hands of san-ge – sorry. Jin Guangyao.”

Lan Xichen closed his eyes, pained; it was as if he had been struck a harsh blow, knocking the breath out of him.

Wei Wuxian sympathized: who hadn’t heard of how fond Lan Xichen was of his youngest sworn brother? Who didn’t know that Nie Mingjue had only agreed to swear brotherhood with Jin Guangyao at Lan Xichen’s instigation?

“In that case, I am sorry,” Lan Xichen said, his voice low. “You would not have gone to Lanling alone, if not for my invitation. It may have been at A-Yao’s – at Jin Guangyao’s suggestion, but I trusted him, and you believed in me, and he killed you. The price for my blind faith was too high.”

Wei Wuxian winced. He hadn’t realized that Lan Xichen was directly involved in Nie Huaisang’s death, though of course it made sense thinking about it – Nie Huaisang had gone to Lanling alone, without any retainers, and despite the ongoing, if unspoken, war for influence between the Nie sect and the Jin sect.

It really did seem as though he had been lured there specifically to die.

And it had been done using Lan Xichen’s word of honor –

Lan Xichen’s mind was clearly going along the same lines: he inhaled once more, the sound of it agony, and said quietly, “It seems your brother was right to seek vengeance against me.”

“That’s probably true,” Nie Huaisang said, and Lan Wangji’s fingers twitched – they’re still wrapped around Wei Wuxian’s, even though he’s already put away the Tiger Seal, and for some reason Wei Wuxian doesn’t feel inclined to let go. “I’m not going to let him kill you, though.”

Lan Wangji’s fingers relaxed.

“I’m feeling very sensitive about people getting killed recently,” Nie Huaisang said, and shrugged. “For obvious reasons.”

He patted his belt in an instinctive motion and frowned, clearly having looked for something and found it missing. Wei Wuxian wasn’t sure what until Nie Mingjue mutely reached into his own belt and produced a fan, which he passed over; Nie Huaisang automatically opened it and held it in front of his face, only belatedly realizing where it came from and turning to look at his brother with concern.

“How did you die?” Wei Wuxian asked, both out of curiosity and because he remembered the stories Nie Huaisang had told in the Cloud Recesses of how his brother always rolled his eyes at his habit of carrying a fan, how silly and childish he thought he was being – that Nie Mingjue carried one with him now, even though he hadn’t known Nie Huaisang would be coming, even though he hadn’t known Wei Wuxian would be able to succeed –

Wei Wuxian thought of Jiang Cheng, searching fruitlessly for him for months, and tried not to think about it any more.

He didn’t want to think about what he would have done, if he were in Nie Mingjue’s shoes. Whether he would have made the same choices: to murder hundreds, if not thousands of cultivators, simply for the unfulfilling catharsis of revenge for a brother lost.

He thought there was a good chance that he might.

“Oh, you know, being led into a trap and left to die slowly and painfully while begging for help from someone who didn’t care to do anything – it was all very bad, and I’d prefer not to think about it, really,” Nie Huaisang said, and in retrospect Wei Wuxian would prefer that he didn’t as well – Lan Xichen looked as though he wanted to throw up. “A better question, though, is why did I die?”

That got everyone’s attention, even Nie Mingjue, who frowned. “You died because he killed you,” he said, his voice low and rumbling.

Nie Huaisang waved his fan in the air, clearly more comfortable now that he had it. “Yes, that’s the straightforward answer. But why kill me? Why risk your anger – admittedly, he may not have realized the extent of your anger, but why risk it at all? I’m no harm to anyone.”

“That is a good question,” Wei Wuxian said, and it was, now that he had a moment to think about it. “It’s not profitable in and of itself, and we all know how the Jin sect favors – ah, favored profit. If I had to bet on it, I’d say you probably found something out that they didn’t want you to know, so they felt they had no choice but to kill you.”

Nie Huaisang nodded. “I think so, too. That’s why I need Sect Leader Lan’s help.”

“My help?” Lan Xichen asked. He sounded tired. “What do you need my help for?”

“They were planning on killing da-ge,” Nie Huaisang said, and they all winced at that. Even Lan Xichen, who looked as though he had become almost resigned to the betrayal, nodded, accepting it: if he would kill Nie Huaisang, who was harmless, then plotting to kill Nie Mingjue, even if he was sworn brothers with the man…this Jin Guangyao fellow truly really knew no limits. “They were going to use you to do that, too. Something about a song you’d been teaching san-ge? I don’t know how you’d kill someone through a song, though.”

Nie Mingjue huffed, and the slightest trace of a sneer appeared on his lips – it was probably the closest thing to an expression that he’d had in the entire time Wei Wuxian had seen since his brother’s death. It was depressingly a relief to see the traces of the more familiar anger on the man’s face.

There was a sudden movement: Lan Xichen had abruptly knelt down, his knees going soft in horror if his expression was any judge.

“Clarity,” he said numbly. He had already been injured to the point of pain, and now he suffered another blow, more potent than any saber strike: it was horrible to watch. “The Song of Clarity – I taught A-Yao how to play one of the Lan sect’s ancestral songs. It was meant to help calm da-ge’s qi, to reduce the likelihood of a qi deviation.”

“So that’s probably how they were going to do it,” Nie Huaisang said, tapping his fan against his cheek. “Da-ge’s qi is already unstable naturally; if in the guise of playing music to stabilize it, you played something that would instead throw it into turmoil –”

“The Songs of Turmoil,” Lan Wangji suddenly said. “Brother – in the Forbidden Library…”

“He wouldn’t have had access to that!”

“He rescued you during the war,” Nie Mingjue said, his expression gone flat again. “You were carrying your clan’s books with you at that time, were you not?”

Lan Xichen’s head bowed. “Yes,” he whispered. “I was.”

Besides, Wei Wuxian thought to himself, Jin Guangyao had made his name by being a spy in the Nightless City - if he could fool Wen Ruohan, who was paranoid and trusted no one, then finding things out in the Cloud Recesses, where he was given free rein by the sect leader who trusted him...it would have been too easy.

“That leads me to my next question, I suppose,” Nie Huaisang said. His expression was hidden behind his fan, but his eyes were narrow. “And I would ask that Sect Leader Lan not take any insult at my suggestion. But I have to wonder: how many times is it plausible for a man to be inadvertently used as a weapon, before…?”

Before he himself should itself be investigated.

“That’s an unfair question,” Wei Wuxian said, even though it kind of wasn’t. If someone had been involved in multiple murder plots against him or his family, he would be suspicious of them no matter how virtuous they appeared to be. Still, this was Lan Xichen. “If he trusted him, he trusted him. The same initial fault led to everything else; it wasn’t anything new.”

Lan Xichen choked out a laugh, his voice raw and gasping. “I thank you for your defense, Wei-gongzi, but Nie-gongzi is correct. How many times must I be used as a knife in another’s hand before I take responsibility for my own behavior? How many other times did he use me as a shield of virtue to hide behind? I’ve always believed that he had reasons for everything he did…”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Nie Mingjue said.

“It matters to me,” Lan Xichen said, and he looked up, devastation and determination in every line of his face.

“Brother…” Lan Wangji began, looking concerned.

“No, Wangji. This is necessary. Da-ge – no. Sect Leader Nie. I have wronged you, you and your clan, in more ways than one. I submit myself to your jurisdiction, to be tried and judged, and welcome whatever punishment is appropriate under the rules of your Sect.”

Lan Wangji’s hand was so tight around Wei Wuxian’s own that it hurt, but Wei Wuxian didn’t say anything about it. His heart was in his mouth, watching the Nie brothers: with such a submission, Nie Mingjue could take Lan Xichen’s life with Baxia this instant, and Lan Wangji would have no recourse.

Assuming recourse was even possible. Those sabers...

Nie Huaisang coughed, interrupting the tense mood.

“Okay, okay, you can come back to Qinghe with us,” he said, waving his hand as if it were nothing. “We’ll figure it out from there. No more immediate executions; I think we’ve had enough of those – da-ge, I can’t believe you brought out the sabers! What were you thinking?”

“I don’t think he was,” Wei Wuxian said, his shoulders relaxing; he turned to smile at the relieved Lan Wangji. There was still hope for something vaguely resembling a good ending, maybe. “At all. You two really are brothers, Nie-xiong.”

“Rude!” Nie Huaisang huffed, but he was grinning. “You have to come to Qinghe too, Wei-xiong; da-ge won’t feel comfortable if you aren’t around, at least at first…Lan-er-gongzi, why don’t you come as well? Since you’re having such difficulty letting go of Wei-gongzi’s hand –”

#mdzs #wei wuxian #lan wangji #wangxian #nie mingjue #lan xichen #nie huaisang #jin guangyao #my fic #my fics #blackened NMJ #oneiriad #there will be two more segments after this

517 notes · View notes

zrtranscripts · 3 years

Text

Season 9, Mission 1: Cry For Help

Security breach detected

[alarm blares, crowd of soldiers rushes around in response]

GENERAL BAKARI: [over intercom] Dispatch is green, green, green. I repeat, this is General Bakari reporting from guard station 39. Security breach detected on my monitor. Access violation at east loading hangar. Full response dispatch is green, green, green.

[gate slams, crowd noise dissipates, alarm continues, GENERAL BAKARI approaches 555]

Sorry about the din, soldier. Hell of an alarm on the base. I know you're wondering why I asked you here. It's 555, isn't it? That nickname of yours. After your service number, I assume. 639555 is a bit of a mouthful.

I've noticed you're a quiet one, soldier. Always liked that about you. We haven't spoken much, but I haven't forgotten saving your squad from those mountain bandits. You owe me, and everyone says you're the honorable type. I need a favor. I want you to take something to the transmitter tower on the west side of Red Scorpion base. It's a portable data drive. I'll explain more when you're en route.

You know what security's like in the complex, soldier. If anyone gets caught out of place, it's shoot first, shoot second. Neither of us is cleared to access the tower, so this has to be done on the QT. I've set off a fake alarm to keep all the guards busy on the other side of Red Scorpion base. I'd go myself, 555, but I'm an old man with a bad leg, and the fake alert can't last.

I've reviewed your performance logs. You're faster than me. This is essential business, soldier. Trust me, lives are on the line. Head down that corridor toward the west side hangar door. I'll be on your comms set guiding you. We have to be fast, before someone clocks the false alarm. Run!

[alarm blares, drone whirs]

GENERAL BAKARI: Don't worry about the camera drone overhead, 555. I've commandeered it so I can follow you. Keep going through the storage bay past the metal crates. [running footsteps] Duck behind the crates, quickly!

FIRST SOLDIER: Three more storage bays to go.

SECOND SOLDIER: [speaks foreign language]

THIRD SOLDIER: Keep those eyes open, people.

GENERAL BAKARI: Six soldiers across the bay from you. Must be a stray patrol in the area. [a soldier whistles, running footsteps fade away] They're moving on. Keep going straight, soldier, quick sharp.

You know, 555, I'd rather not be doing this. Breaking the rules. Before I was here, I was in the UK for a long time. Had children there, of sorts. Jane and Tom. Adopted them after their parents died. I did my best to rear them. There was a lot of trial and error, I admit. They turned out difficult, disruptive. Got me in trouble with a local government, left me needing to flee the country.

This place seemed like the perfect escape. Isolated, secure, nothing unauthorized in or out. A bastion of routine willing to take an old soldier. At least, willing to take one with knowledge of certain UK research programs.

[sighs] It's been a sanctuary. I wish I could leave it undisturbed, but there's something here that needs to get out into the world. The thumb drive I've given you holds an encrypted message. Link it to the base's comm tower and the message will upload and send. The tower's just beyond the west hangar door outside the compound, but once you're there...

[gates rattle shut]

Damn! All the base exits are locking down. New orders from the head of security. The west hangar's been secured, 555. We need an alternative route. Stay calm! There's a fire exit near your position, needs to be locked manually. You can reach it before anyone else. Opens to the wrong part of the base. No choice. Down the stairs on your right, run!

[gate rattles open, alarm fades]

GENERAL BAKARI: That's it, soldier, you're out of the main compound and into the open. I've got my drone hovering nearby. Hell of a view, isn't it? Sand stretching off in every direction. It's easy to forget how alone we are out here, just a fence around a few gray buildings, surrounded by miles of empty nothing.

SOLDIER: Over here!

GENERAL BAKARI: Uh-oh.

SOLDIER: This way.

GENERAL BAKARI: That sounds like... Let me check my security feeds. Damn! Using the fire door triggered an automatic fire alert. The base knows someone's active in that area. Patrols are honing in. Look at that big greenhouse on your left, soldier. Guards are coming from that way. Turn right, 555. See the field of solar panels? Damn bright, aren't they? Reflecting sunlight like flares. Head towards them. The glare'll keep anyone from making visual contact. That's it, keep your eyes on the ground. There's dozens of those panels. Get lost in them.

Marvelous things, solar cells. Had to learn their workings to help Thomas with his homework once. Poor boy. Good at taking orders, but could be slow sometimes. Often ran afoul of bullies, needed someone to look after him.

SOLDIER: Triple check the area. Sweep for movement.

GENERAL BAKARI: The guards are searching the area you just left. Two squads. Stay low. If you can sneak across the solar field, the tower is nearby. [exosuits whir] Hell! The troops are using motion trackers. They've detected you. And those are fire team mechs, fully powered exosuits with heavy gun turrets. They're breaking out the anti-zom gear. That's not good.

It's okay, 555. One thing I learned from children: always be ready to improvise. Cut northeast across the solar field toward the stellar observatory. You know, the building that looks like a golf ball on its tee? You can lose the soldiers there. They won't fire on you in the panels. Go!

GENERAL BAKARI: That's it, soldier. You're in the observatory foyer. You'll see a steel staircase leading up to a second floor balcony. Take it now. [footsteps on stairs] They won't be able to fit the exosuits through the observatory entrance. You know how strict Red Scorpion base is about protecting equipment. That just leaves the troops on foot. [soldiers shout]

All right, 555. You've crested the stairwell. The troops are crowding through the entrance behind you. Throw a grenade. Aim it for the middle of the stairs. Trust me, do it! [grenade pin clinks, grenade explodes, soldiers scream, stairs shatter] Good job! The explosion scrapped the stairs. The soldiers are scattering. That'll buy time. Head along the balcony through the double doors ahead.

[doors open and close] I've had to pull my drone back, 555. The soldiers might have noticed it. It's funny, most of them don't even know what they're really protecting here, just following orders. You should be in a large domed room with a mounted telescope in the middle. Go to the leftmost control panel and hit the green switches. [switches click] The switches will open up the observatory dome. [walls roll open] Head to the seam where the dome walls are parting.

SOLDIER: Stop them! [other soldiers shout]

GENERAL BAKARI: Damn! The guards found another stairwell. Get right up to the opening, 555, and look down over the edge. You'll see the observatory building beneath you. There's a metal maintenance gantry wrapped around it. Jump down onto the gantry, go! [boots clatter on gantry] You're down, good. The gantry spirals around the building. Follow it to the ground. You'll end up a short way north of the transmitter tower. The soldiers have reached the telescope room. They'll be coming down after you. Get down the gantry, then bolt south. You'll see the tower. Fast as you can, go!

GENERAL BAKARI: I've got you on camera, soldier. You're nearly there. See the transmitter up ahead? Looks like a huge radio antenna, doesn't it? You've performed incredibly today, 555. I want you to know this was essential. We are reaching out for help. Red Scorpion base is keeping secrets that must get out.

All right, you're at the tower. There's a touch screen on its base. Plug in the thumb drive, then hit upload. [computer beeps] You're probably wondering where this message is going, 555. I admit I'd rather not be reaching out to the UK, but I don't have anywhere else to turn.

It was my father who first got me into the service. He taught me what it means to be a soldier. You've got to have a code. Country, honor, family, hope. A soldier fights for all these things with whatever means they have. Damn fool wouldn't give up his cigars. Cancer got him, throat and lungs. Pneumonia finished him off. The way he just withered... He wouldn't have been proud. He didn't go out in uniform

[computer beeps] Ah, message uploading. It'll take a few minutes to send. Don't worry, soldier, I have an extraction planned for you. [soldiers shout, fire guns] The guards are catching up. Head to the southeast corner of the perimeter fence, fast as you can. I can get you out from there. Run!

GENERAL BAKARI: That's the way, 555. Keep following the barbed wire fence straight forward. I have a lot of respect for you, 555. You do your uniform proud. It means something special, a uniform. My father taught me that. It means being part of a whole greater than yourself, joining others to be strong enough to serve. You've served well, soldier, but I couldn't let them catch you near the transmitter. They might have found the message.

[over intercom] Attention, this is General Bakari, level three security adjunct. Emergency update to follow.

[over headset] I hope you understand, 555. Once the message is broadcast, the drive will wipe the data logs. Your mission is complete, and that's what really matters.

[over intercom] Source of security breach confirmed as soldier 63955, currently at perimeter fence southeast corner. Target is absconding with base secrets.

[alarm blares, soldiers shout]

[over headset] Put the gun down, soldier. You don't want to fight your own. It's okay to run, it'll look more convincing. I know this is a hard pill to swallow, but you're going out a hero. That message could save countless lives. We may not have ended on good terms, especially Janine and me, but I know the De Lucas well. They won't turn down a cry for help when there are innocents at stake.

[over intercom] 63955 is confirmed armed and extremely dangerous. Terminate on sight.

[over headset] That corner's a dead end, 555. Nowhere to go. I salute you, soldier. You've done our countries proud.

[armed patrol approaches]

SOLDIER: Open fire.

[gunfire]

GENERAL BAKARI: [very faint, over intercom] This is Bakari. Target down. Security breach resolved. All troops return to patrol positions. Repeat, return to patrol positions.

AUTOMATED VOICE: Data upload complete. Message tag: to Abel Township. Beginning transmission. Beginning transmission. Beginning transmission...

#zombies run #zrs9 #s9m1 #zr transcript #zrs9 spoilers

10 notes · View notes

in-a-pynch · 3 years

Text

Talk to Me

A Pynch Fic

Words: 2919

TW: Abuse (typical Robert Parrish bullshit), Food issues due to anxiety

Ronan paused in the entry way to the dorms at Harvard, struck by what some might call anxiety. Except it’s not. Because Ronan doesn’t get anxious.

What if he doesn’t want me here? What if everything is fine and I’m overreacting?

Ronan clamped down on that idea fast. He knew Adam. And because he knew Adam, he also knew that things have been off, and Adam was trying to pretend that they weren’t. At first, Ronan was going to wait for Adam to come to him, like the adults they were. Ronan didn’t like the idea of him having to beg Adam for information any time something was wrong. But that was before Adam’s roommate, Eliot, texted Ronan. Ronan swiped at his screen to look at the message again.

Yesterday 5:30 PM

Crybaby 1

Hey, I hate to do this but I’ve got to ask, is anything up with you and Adam? He’s been acting strange and distant for like 3 weeks now and every time we mention it he says he’s “fine.” The man is running exclusively on 5 hour energy drinks and granola bars twice a day. We’re getting worried but he won’t talk to us.

That text was what put Ronan over the edge.

He’d hoped that if Adam wasn’t talking to him, he would at least be getting support from his other friends. He hadn’t seen it until late, but he had immediately sent a response.

Yesterday 10:03 PM

No idea. Be up tomorrow.

Ronan paused, then:

Don’t tell Adam.

So now Ronan was in Cambridge. Standing outside his boyfriend’s building like some sort of coward. He knew Adam missed him. At least, he sure missed Adam. Still, the fear that Adam wouldn’t tell him what has been bothering him or, worse, Ronan is what has been bothering Adam, kept him glued to the sidewalk.

Deep breaths. What the fuck is wrong with me?

Ronan decided to take the stairs. For exercise, obviously. Not because he was nervous. Despite his racing thoughts, Ronan had to admit he was excited to see his boyfriend. Adam hadn’t made it back for spring break this year, and it had been far too long since Ronan had a chance to see his Magician. Stopping in front of Adam’s door, Ronan shrugged his backpack more squarely onto his shoulders, gave his trademarked slouch, rolled his eyes at his own ridiculousness, and then knocked.

The door opened. Adam stared. Ronan blinked. It was Adam that broke the silence.

“Ro? What are you doing here?”

For a second, Ronan had to gather himself, not really believing his eyes.

What the fuck Parrish?

Ronan wrapped his arms around Adam and pressed his cheek to the top of Adam’s head. Rather than give a real reply, a reply which Adam certainly would not have liked, he shrugged into the embrace and simply said,

“I missed you.”

Ronan doesn’t lie, but he also loves his boyfriend enough not to tell the whole truth. Yet. Instead, Ronan squeezed tighter.

Fuck he’s lost weight… Eliot wasn’t kidding about the granola bars.

Adam pulled away enough to look at Ronan’s face, likely trying to read his expression to see if there was more. Whatever he decided, he didn’t elaborate, replying with a tentative smile and a kiss.

“Yeah, well I missed you too, you sap.”

Ronan scowled without any real malice. “Shut up Parrish.”

Adam pulled away fully, but linked their fingers together, using them to tug Ronan into the dorm. Ronan shut the door and followed Adam into the tiny, but still cozy, bedroom. Ronan tossed his backpack on the floor and turned around to Adam pushing himself up onto the slightly elevated twin bed. Ronan stopped and took Adam in for just a moment.

As sexy as his boyfriend was, it was not a good moment.

Despite the smirk on Adam’s face as he watched Ronan get situated, his face showed the marks of what could only be pure exhaustion. Dark circles lined his kind eyes, and his bottom lip was chapped from where Adam nervously chewed on it. Just like he was doing right now, as Ronan so obviously analyzed his appearance. Fuck. Ronan forced himself to smile, he didn’t want to ruin the reunion.

We’ll talk about this tomorrow, Parrish.

“You know, Opal’s going to kill me for coming to see you without her,” Ronan admitted.

Adam laughed.

Damn if I didn’t miss that laugh more than anything.

“Oh yeah?” He replied, “Chainsaw isn’t enough to keep her occupied for the weekend? What ever will she do without you there to brood at her?”

“No you idiot,” Ronan vaulted himself onto the bed, planting himself firmly on the pillows. “The problem isn’t that I’m not there. The problem is that she isn’t here with your smiling face…” Ronan faltered for a second, realizing that if Eliot was being honest, this is probably the first time Adam has smiled in a while. Ronan pulled his leg onto the bed to untie his combat boots. Pulling one off and chucking it at the wall, before repeating the process with the other to procrastinate starting another conversation other than, ‘What is your deal?’. Adam must have sensed his hesitation, quickly saying,

“So, have you completed any of those projects you had set out to do on the farm the last time I was home?”

Ronan glowed at Adam’s description of the Barns as home and, just like that, Ronan and Adam talked as though nothing was wrong. Chattering about the new floors Ronan was putting in one of the stables and the new cow Opal had taken a liking to. Time slipped away as the two boys filled each other in on things too trivial to be worth mentioning in their phone calls. Not that Ronan didn’t notice Adam deflecting questions about himself or how his classes were going or what he had been up to with his friends lately. Ronan absolutely did, and each denial and topic change had his hackles raising because why won’t he just tell me what’s wrong?

Ronan was uncomfortably reminded of the early days of his and Adam’s friendship. When it had been clear that they had more in common than Gansey’s unyielding loyalty, but still didn’t quite trust each other with the things that mattered. The days when Adam would show up with a black eye and reply “Oh this? My hand slipped at the shop and I dropped a tool on my own face while under a car, dumb right?” Or the weeks after that god-awful dream when Ronan didn’t sleep because “fuck off Parrish, if I needed another Gansey I’d let you know.”

Ronan went to pick up pizza so as not to absolutely lose it.

And it worked. Mostly. Well, it worked until Adam sat there on the bed claiming he was full after having only picked at one small piece of pizza. Ronan ignored him, shoving another slice of veggie into Adam’s hand.

“You need to eat. Chainsaw eats more than you.”

Adam sighed, putting the pizza back into the box, not doing anything to help Ronan’s already stellar mood.

“I eat.”

“Fuck off with that bullshit, Parrish. When was the last time you ate a full meal?”

“Ronan,” Adam rolled his eyes playfully, clearly trying to lighten the mood. “You’re overreacting—“

“Am I Adam? You see, I don’t think I am, because it appears this isn’t the only thing you’ve not been upfront with me on recently.”

Adam’s eyes went cold.

“Cool, I was wondering when we were going to get to the actual reason you’re here right now.”

“Can I not just want to see my boyfriend after two fucking months apart?”

“Don’t lie to me, Ronan. You’re bad at it.”

“That’s fucking rich coming from you.” Ronan combated dryly, trying to restrain his frustration.

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

Ronan laughed without humor. “It means that for some fucking reason my boyfriend has been falling apart at the seams for weeks and didn’t tell me shit until it got so bad that his roommate texted me to see if he was okay! It means that you don’t look like you’ve been sleeping enough and you definitely haven’t been eating enough but you still start every phone call with ‘I’m doing fine how ‘bout you, Ro?’ It means that for some reason I’m being shut out, and you won’t tell me what I did wrong!”

After airing his frustrations, Ronan deflated. He rubbed his hands over his face, then through his hair to rest on his neck, curling in on himself. He sighed, resigning himself to whatever answer his boyfriend had to give.

“What did I do wrong, Adam?” His voice cracked.

Ronan looked up at Adam, who looked smaller than Ronan had seen him in a long time. As soon as the question had sunk in, Adam was immediately shaking his head, reaching to hold Ronan’s face between his warm dry palms.

“No, no.. Fuck, Ro, this isn’t your fault at all.”

Ronan put his hands on top of Adam’s, whose thumbs were rubbing small circles on Ronan’s cheeks.

“Then what is going on Adam? If it isn’t me that’s the problem, then why won’t you open up to me? I haven’t felt this distant from you since before you left that fucking trailer—“

Adam froze, a look in his eyes that Ronan hadn’t seen in a while: fear and… is that guilt? Ronan grabbed Adam’s hands tighter as the realization seeped in.

Robert Fucking Parrish.

“When?” Ronan said with steel in his voice, lowering their hands from his face but still gripping them tightly.

Adam avoided his eyes and gritted his teeth. “When what?”

“When did he fucking contact you Adam?”

“Ro you don’t get it. This is my fault.”

“In what universe has anything he’s ever done to you been your fault..”

“I told them they could—“

“Could what?!”

“Could contact me and—“

“And why the fuck did you tell him that?!”

“For god’s sake Ronan would you let me finish?” Adam said harshly.

Ronan closed his mouth, took a deep breath, and then opened it to use a word he’d been practicing.

“Sorry. Go ahead.”

Adam’s face softened, and then returned to the guilty look from earlier.

“When I graduated..” Adam swallowed. “When I graduated I went back to see my mom. I did it while my dad was at work. I had some crazy idea in my head that now that I had graduated and made it into an Ivy League that she would maybe listen to me for the first time in my life…” Adam trailed off, lost in his thoughts.

Ronan squeezed his hands and Adam’s eyes focused again.

“I had gotten it in my head,” he continued, “that my mom wanted to leave just as bad as I did. That she too was tired of my da— Robert’s behavior and would want to leave if she had another option. I asked her to move to Cambridge with me.”

Ronan inhaled sharply. Why didn’t he tell me?

“I figured that we could get an apartment and drop off of Robert Parrish’s map. It wouldn’t have been easy, but god if I didn’t want to do for her what you did for me.” Adam’s eyes went glassy and he squeezed Ronan’s hands tighter. “She said no, of course. Told me that she loves him and everything that happened was my fault, but it was obvious she was trying to convince herself more than she was trying to convince me.” Adam took a big inhale and then exhaled. “I said okay. I know as well as anyone that you can’t leave a situation like that until you’re ready, and even then sometimes it just doesn’t work out like that.” A tear leaked down his cheek, which he wiped clumsily on his shoulder as to not let go of Ronan’s hands.

“I gave her my phone number, just in case she changed her mind. I wanted to let her know that there’s a way out, even if she chooses not to take it.” Adam stopped, trying to calm himself, but Ronan could tell that wasn’t the end of the story.

“She called for the first time about a month ago and told me she was done, that she wanted to leave. I was so relieved. I told her to pack a bag and let me know a time and place, that I would drive down to pick her up. That we would figure something out. I immediately got online and started looking for apartments… I even applied for another job so that I could pay for it. But then I didn’t hear from her for a whole day, and I was getting worried. I didn’t want to call her in case he picked up because then she wouldn’t be safe, so I waited. A day and a half after she called the first time she called again and said she had made a mistake. That I needed to stop planting ideas in her head and that their marital problems were all my fault anyway. I could tell she didn’t mean it, that she was scared, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt.” The tears were flowing freely down Adam’s face at this point, but he seemed not able to bring himself to care.

“To make things even better, somehow Robert got ahold of my number,”

Ronan felt his shoulders tense.

“And, now, he calls me three or four times a week to remind me of how I ruined him and my mother, how his drunkenness is a result of how difficult I have made their lives, and how my entitlement was really the root of his inability to hold a job. Somehow.” Adam managed a watery chuckle in spite of himself, and then sobered. “I can’t block him because mom might change her mind. I can’t possibly imagine where I would be if you and Gansey gave up on me every time it caused you a bit of trouble.”

Ronan’s heart ached in his chest, knowing Adam was never any trouble to either him or Gansey, but also knowing Adam was not in a place to hear this. Instead, he pulled Adam into his arms, as if cradling him to the source of the hurt would soothe the pain. In some ways it worked. Ronan took a minute to gather his thoughts (also something he had been practicing) before he spoke.

“You have the kindest heart of anyone I know and the patience of a saint, Adam Parrish. You shouldn’t be punished for that kindness.”

Adam shook his head and the tears ran faster down his face as Adam turned around and swung his leg over Ronan’s. Now straddling him, Adam leaned his head on Ronan’s chest, hearing his voice vibrate through his good ear.

“I know you think that there is no other way to deal with this other than continually putting yourself through the very abuse you worked so hard to escape from. I want you to remember that, as much as your mom is a victim, she also had a duty as your mom to protect you and care for you.” Ronan kissed the top of Adam’s head. “She hasn’t held up her end of the bargain for the last 20 years. It’s a lot to ask of yourself to play the part she should have been playing all along when it means you have to face the very same verbal abuse she was complicit in.”

Adam nodded, but Ronan could tell that, while Adam knew logically that his mom’s situation is not his burden to bear, he couldn’t yet make his emotions reflect that reality. Suddenly, Adam sat up, face to face with Ronan.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Ronan,” he said softly. “I was embarrassed I got myself into this, and I knew you wouldn’t have approved of me talking to my mom again. I didn’t want to burden you with a problem that you would have been able to avoid.”

Ronan scoffed gently. “Idiot. I wouldn’t have known if I could avoid that problem or not because I’m not you. As much as I care about your experiences and try to empathize, it would be very unfair of me to make assumption based on my own life. I need you to talk to me. It sucks feeling distant and hopeless.”

Adam sniffed though the slowing tears, but smiled slightly. “Yeah, okay, Ro.”

“And we can handle this however you want. I am here for you regardless.” Ronan pulled his sleeves over his hands and used them to gently wipe off Adam’s face. “I just need you to work towards being okay again. Eating, sleeping… you know the basic bullshit we have to do as humans.” Ronan said with a half-smile.

Adam just looked at Ronan for a minute, giving him time to think, damn I’m lucky, before being pulled into a gentle kiss.

“Now,” Ronan said with a yawn and a smile, “it’s time to catch up on some of that sleep you desperately need.” He ran his thumbs feather-light over Adam’s dark circles before tipping the two of them over in bed.

Ronan tangled their legs as he pulled the covers over them both.

Fuck, I missed this.

“Tamquam,” Adam whispered into Ronan’s neck.

“Alter idem.”

Ronan closed his eyes as Adam snored softly.

This was my first fic so I’d love to know your thoughts!

AO3 @ in_a_pynch

#pynch #ronan x adam #ronan lynch #adam parrish #pynch fanfiction #hurt/comfort #abuse #food issues

22 notes · View notes

florenceandthemachine · 4 years

Text

MORE BROKEN TUMBLR ASKS I AM SORRY ANYWAY. holy fuck this got long and severely out of hand. also apologies to @casscent because apparently Tumblr responded to this ask this morning with the answer “a”. so that’s cool.

@casscent asked:

heyyyy hope you're doing great! Ok how about Eddie meeting Buck in south america, bartending, instead of LAFD? I've been having that idea but too lazy to write. Thanks, xoxo.

“Welcome to Padrino, how can I satisfy you tonight?”

“Oh God, is that seriously how you greet your customers?”

It probably said a lot about Buck that a sarcastic response through him that much, but hey, being one of the few English speakers in one of the best bars in Equador had its perks. It was huge, it was clean, it was easy to find, and the immediate distance to the U.S. Army base in Manta meant that there was never a short supply of American citizens, going to or from deployment, who only spoke (you guessed it) English.

Even now, he had to admit, it was surprising getting a response that wasn’t a clear dismissal (or a drink order, acting like Buck hadn’t said anything at all), but Buck had always been good at rolling with the punches.

“Trust me, looking at you? I could have said a lot worse.”

Business had been pretty slow, as it usually was in the mid-week, but even if the place had been bursting at the seams he would have taken the time to look his newest customer up and down. He was beautiful, that was no doubt—tan and tall, lean, with dark hair that lined his jaw and dark eyes that could probably melt steel if their owner should so desire to try.

The bar may not have been swamped, but it wasn’t empty, either—after taking Tall, Dark, and Handsome’s order (“Edmundo”, he had clarified, when Buck had to ask for a name for the tab) he bounced around the bar, but inevitably found himself back in Edmundo’s gravitational pull.

That in itself was curious; Buck had seen a lot of people at the bar, spoken to most of them, and flirted with most of them, but he hadn’t seen someone quite as captivating—while remaining as relatively silent—as Edmundo before. Most of the time, the men and women who were only a refuel and rest stop between Over There and home were another blend of insanity all together; they were rowdy, and loud, celebratory for all the right reasons, even the ones who came in alone.

Edmundo, though… well, he almost looked like he was being sent from one war zone to another.

“So, Edmundo—“

“Eddie. Call me Eddie.”

He grinned. “Well, Eddie, you can call me Buck,” he started, tapping at his badge. “And before you so rudely interrupted me, Eddie—“

Another snort of laughter. Buck grinned.

“What’s got you looking so down? You look like you’re heading to the firing squad, not heading home.”

Eddie looked over him slowly, his eyes a mix of critical and curious, tilting his head to the side. “How do you know I’m going home?”

“Well…” Buck hummed thoughtfully, tossing a rag over his shoulder as he closed another tab out, sliding the billfold and a smile over to the couple who he hoped would take the hint and make out somewhere other than his bar. “You’re sitting here alone, instead of trying to bond prematurely with your future platoon, proving that you’re one of the boys, or whatever it is that makes guys crave the acceptance of other guys. You’re wearing your civvies, not your fatigues, which means you don’t have any expectations of formality when you get wherever you’re going, but it also means you’re not expecting any commanding officers to walk in and reprimand you. And because you ordered a Coors. Seriously, man, no one who’s about to go overseas orders something as boring as Coors. The last outgoing squad in here ordered Goldschlager for the entire bar. It was disgusting.”

Eddie let out a full laugh at that as he tipped his beer in Buck’s direction—and what a lovely sound it was—and Buck let himself preen a little as Eddie nodded his head.

“Got it in one.” He said with a smirk, taking another swig from his boring beer, his smile falling a little bit as he swallowed, seeming to come back into himself, weighing Eddies earlier question with an entirely new meaning.

“My flight is in three days, we’re waiting for some of my squad members to be cleared by medical before we go home. My CO offered to get me home earlier, but I guess… I don’t know what I’ll find when I get there. Somehow, Texas has become even more daunting than the desert.”

Buck didn’t know how to respond to that, so he just didn’t; he knew as well as anyone else that useless platitudes were just that, useless, and it didn’t look like any faux words of wisdom would have helped Eddie in that moment anyway.

The two were quiet as Buck poured another round of shots for one of the smaller tables at the back of the bar, watching critically as the patron stumbled on her way back to her friends, but as long as the tab was open and the drinks weren’t spilled, he wasn’t going to complain yet.

“What about you, Buck? Are you happy here, or just avoiding your own firing squad, like I am?” His brows rose again as he heard Eddie speak, not just because the other was initiating more conversation, but because he had been tending bar for almost a year and no one had asked him that before.

The question should have been an easy one, but nothing was easy, really, not when you were comparing backgrounds with a fucking vet—and try as Buck might, there was no way that ‘I ran away from my shitty parents and ended up crossing over Panama and I’m a bar tender because my options were either that or hooking’ would sound anything but whiney to someone who was coming home from actual war. So he shrugged, made Eddie his change, and tilted his head.

“Just taking it as it comes, Eddie. Like a lot of us. Like you will be for the next three days, it sounds like.” He offered, and Eddie snorted as he pocketed his change, leaving a few bills on the bar. A small wave was the only goodbye they exchanged as Eddie turned and walked out of the bar.

Repeat guests weren’t the typical norm in Padrino, and Buck had to admit, he was a little surprised to see Eddie walking back in the next night.

“Welcome to Padrino, would you like a taste?”

“Jesus, Buck, that was even worse than yesterd—oh, hey, are you alright? You get into a fight or something after I left last night?” Eddie asked, his teasing expression immediately clouded over by something that was strangely resemblant of genuine concern, and Buck blinked in surprise as he touched his own brow. “What? Oh, no, I just didn’t put any concealer on tonight. It’s just a birthmark.”

Eddie leaned in to examine it, and Buck held his breath, trying to ignore how close they both were, all of a sudden, and wow, Eddie’s eyes were a beautiful color this close, and—

“Huh. Cute.”

And now Eddie was calling him cute and Buck felt his cheeks heat up.

“Shut up, Eddie. What can I get for you? Same old boring beer?”

Their night went on in a somewhat similar fashion as before, with Eddie allowing himself more than one beer this time, and Buck having a few more customers to distract himself with when he felt himself pulled in by Eddie for a bit too long. After a wave of patrons had wandered out onto the patio and off of their property, Buck sighed in relief, pocketing a thick roll of tips as he tapped away at the bar terminal.

“I think I found a solution to your problem, by the way.” He said as he reappeared in Eddie’s corner, sliding another beer his way as he tossed the empty bottle into the recycling bin. Eddie looked marginally surprised, but curious, and gestured for Buck to continue. “For your hypothetical firing squad back at home. Clearly, the best answer is to just stay here in Equador. You can avoid getting shot, I can teach you how to make a mean canelazo, everybody wins.”

Eddie was laughing again—wow, what a nice sound—and Buck’s eyes were probably just playing a trick on him, but he actually looked somewhat remorseful when he had to shake his head.

“‘Fraid I can’t do that, Buckaroo. I, um. I have someone needing me to get home.”

“Oh? Wife? Girlfriend?… Boyfriend? Come on now, it’s the responsibility of every good bartender to know.”

Eddie looked torn for a moment, and Buck was worried he had taken a step past the line, until Eddie looked back up to him, and Buck felt his heart stop, because oh god—Eddie was being shy. It was adorable. Buck couldn’t handle it.

“Actually… I have a son. Christopher. His mom left us when I was deployed… I can’t make him wait any longer.” He fished a small chain out of his coat pocket, a small pendant dangling from the chain. The St. Christopher’s pendant swung between his fingers, and Eddie seemed to bring himself back to the present as he stowed the chain back in his pocket. “He’s, um. He’s a great kid. And I’m lucky to be his dad, I just… He’s been with my parents for four years, and he’s only seven.”

Buck couldn’t help but smile, leaning down, resting his head in a hand as he shook his head. “He’s only seven, and he’s the reason you’re afraid to go back?”

“What if he doesn’t remember me?”

“Eddie, please.” Buck said, a snort on his lips, shaking his head. “I’ve only met you twice now, and I can guarantee I will never forget you.”

The night continued on easily after that, conversation flowing naturally, even as Eddie put back a few more beers. When the time came for them to part ways, Eddie stood again, offering the same silent wave that he had before, and… well, that just wouldn’t do.

“Night, Eddie.” He called in a sing-song voice, considering it a victory as Eddie paused and looked back over his shoulder.

“Night, Buck.”

Though the previous night was technically his Friday, because Buck was a saint, he still answered his phone when the bar owner called at 1030 that night, fresh from the shower and with nothing else to do. Maria, his late-night cohort, had gone into labor in the middle of one of the busiest nights of the week, and like the saint he was, Buck was happy to fill in.

And take over the tips that night.

But mostly, to fill in, like the saint he was.

“Buckaroo!”

…okay, and maybe for one other reason.

Eddie was back in his spot on the bar (and when had it become Eddies spot?) and… had a row of shot glasses emptied around him, and if that hadn’t told Buck that Maria had worked her magic on him, the big smile on his face would have been key enough.

“It’s my favorite Bucky-Buck!”

Well, at least Eddie seemed like a happy drunk.

Buck didn’t even need to fake a smile, which was as surprising to him as anything else, as he clocks himself in. “Well, if it isn’t my favorite Edmundo.” He said, a teasing lilt to his voice, and the grin that Eddie shot his way was blinding. He immediately filled up a pint glass with water and slid it over to him, easily sliding into the business of the bar, handling a few extra tabs as customers poured in and out of the bar.

As easy as it was for him to tend the bar, it was even easier for him to converse with Eddie. Eddie was the ideal drunk, really—he was all smiles when Buck looked over, he was nice enough to any of the people who sat next to him, and more importantly, he was more than happy to throw back any drink that Buck put in front of him, including water.

“Buck, how do you get so handsome?” Eddie asked him after his fourth glass of water, looking up at Buck like he hung the moon. It wasn’t unusual for a drunken stranger to be so forward in their thoughts, especially regarding the bar staff, but that didn’t mean that Buck didn’t feel a little bit of heat rising in his cheeks every time Eddie directed some of those thoughts toward him.

“Buck, your arms look so strong! I bet you could lift me. Let’s try it!”

Oh, god.

“Buck, did I tell you how cute your beauty mark is? It’s so cute. Buck you’re so cute.”

No one had ever called it a beauty mark before, and Buck felt his flush raise high on his cheeks in the same moment as he balled up the rag he was using to wipe down the bar and chuck it at Eddie’s head.

Eddie started to calm down—dozing, maybe?—as the bar started to close down, midnight long since past. It was just Eddie and a few other parties at the bar, but where Eddie was quieting down, they were just riling up. And Buck was the lucky bitch who got to cut them off.

“Cmon, kid, I just want ‘nother drink. You can’t cut me off yet, I’m f-I’m fine! See?”

The blond man on the other side of the bar was certainly not fine, but far be it from Buck to judge—he just couldn’t serve him any more alcohol.

“I’m sure you are, so why don’t you drink some water and let your friends take you home?”

The hand that pushed at his chest was not a welcome surprise; hell, it wasn’t a surprise at all, Buck had no misconceptions about the kinds of assholes that would try to fight a bartender, but before he could even threaten to call the cops, the blond asshole was out for the count, body hitting the floor after the sharp slap of skin on skin contact.

“Don’t you fucking touch him.”

Eddie stood, body prone over the quickly-unconscious male, his fist still extended. Any signs of inebriation had apparently worn off; his body was steady, the punch was aimed well, and probably packed enough strength behind it to feel like a freight train. Wow, Eddie had muscly arms. How had Buck not noticed that before?

Okay, no, hold on, this was not the time or the place to be aroused by how strong and powerful and fucking insanely hot Eddie was. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind did Eddie look over at him, their eyes locking (and oh god, Buck was instantly hard, feeling that smoldering gaze trained on him), but the spell was almost immediately broken as Eddie took a step back, eyes wide and uncertain. Buck could read his customers like a book 99% of the time, and if the look on Eddie’s face said anything, it was that Buck had about a second before Eddie fled.

“Buck, I’m so sorry, I—”

“Stop, Eddie. You’re okay, thank you for doing that.”

“I shouldn’t have.”

“Eddie—”

“I have to go. I’m sorry.” Buck sighed as Eddie slapped a few bills down on the table and turned heel, nearly sprinting out of the bar with a surprising agility for someone who had only moments before been complimenting Buck on his ‘beauty mark’.

Oh well. There was always tomorrow.

Except, Buck realized the next morning, there wouldn’t be a ‘tomorrow’ Today. Whatever. Eddie had said that his flight was in three days the night they had met, which meant that he was going to be gone today. Hell, he probably already was gone.

Disappointment pooled in his stomach, but somehow, that made him feel all the more foolish. He doubted that Eddie even remembered who he was, let alone what the looked like, let alone the things that he had been saying last night.

Two years later, Buck’s world burst into color when Chim a calendar, of all things, brought his world full circle.

“Okay, now that… is a beautiful man.”

Buck had to turn, and then did an honest to God double take, when who else but Edmundo—his Edmundo, not that he had any right to think that—walked out of the locker room. He looked… different. More serious (or maybe he was just sober), but there was no denying the face, the hair, and if all else failed, the tattoos. He stood, frozen on the spot, as Bobby walked past him, taking turns to introduce everyone in the squad.

“Eddie, this is Hen, Chim, and back there is—“

“Buck?”

Two years. Two years had gone by, and Eddie still lit up like they were staring at one another across a bar. Buck couldn’t help it—he grinned back, taking a few easy strides to wrap Eddie in a hug, pleasantly surprised when Eddie didn’t even miss a beat, hugging him right back.

They pulled back from one another when Chim cleared his throat, but even then, they were only looking at one another, both completely oblivious to the awkward tension in the room.

“Uh, Buck, Eddie, are you gonna tell us—“

“What are you doing tonight?”

Buck blinked as Eddie cut right through Chim’s question, his cheeks pinking up a little bit even as he shrugged. “I don’t think I have any plans.”

Eddie’s smile could have lit the place ablaze, and Buck felt honored, not for the first time, that it was aimed at him, even as Eddie spoke again.

“Can I buy you a drink?”

#911 #buddie #buddiefic #evan buckley #edmundo diaz #this got so long and also got nothing done??? somehow?????? so I am sorry #they didn't even kiss wow what's wrong with me #flospeaks #mutually assured devotion

102 notes · View notes

oh-for-fic-sake · 4 years

Text

Phsychokinesis

You meet the League and butt heads with Clark.

Masterlist

Warnings: Swearing, Angst, Panic attacks

Phsychokinesis

You sat in the back of the batmobile for what felt like hours lost in your own thoughts, you regreted this already, why rock the boat now? you were fine, you were learning how to do this on your own, you didn't need anyone they'd get in the way Or hurt! Then they'd hate you, hunt you down, you wouldn't get away! Either that or they'd see you for the monster you was and just leave you somwhere this was a stupid idea, a silly childish hope of a fairytale ending of a home ,acceptance the hope of finding people who will understand, they wont, no one understands they can't. You panicked your breathing shallow, out! you had to get out slowly you looked around looking for the hinge that held the door infront of you closed it had flipped up like a trunk but in your panicked state you wouldnt be able to concentrate enough to send out your ripple instead you had to touch it you fumbled with the harness style seat belt cursing when your fingers couldn't grip finally useing your power the split the mechanism down the seam it must have sent a warning to him in the front as you heard his voice a few seconds later.

"Kid? Calm down Whats the matter?-"

"NO! Let me out stop, I've changed my mind I can do it on my own!" You cried out leaning forward blindly running your hands over the top of the door sliding your palms hurried wanting to find the weak spot to tear at sniffling as tears began falling blurring your vision 'stupid your so stupid!' You thought repeating over and over scrabbling over the top you couldnt find it! He continued talking low and calm trying to ease you out of your panic attack.

"Hey kid its okay your scared its natural to be scared okay? But I promise whatever your think is going to happen isn't, none of us are going to let anything happen to you, just take some deep breaths for me in......then out.....again for me in ...... and out....." you closed your eyes doing as he said kneeling on the floor shivering from the aftermath of your break down as you felt the vehicle stop. You slumped resting your head on the door in front of you and spoke in a quiet voice

"I can't do it again" You held your breath when you got no reply had he listened?

"Do what again?" You stayed silent he wouldn't have it and asked again in a different way

"What are you afraid of? Tell me so I can help, we just want to help"

"....I'm better off alone.." and there it was your words were loud and clear Bruce read between the lines the truth behind your fear and panic,abandonment, a kid who lost her parents and has been passed here there and everywhere thrown from home to home until finally you run away deciding you dont need anyone else he sighed.

"We wont leave you, not now your here weather you belive it or not the second you stepped into this car you were one of us and the others are eager to meet you"

"And when I hurt one of you? It will happen it always does its why they get rid of me." You venom in your voice made his blood go cold, you sounded like one of the many nut jobs he put away behind bars, the ones that wanted to watch the city burn with everyone in it ,all he could do was hope he wasn't to late.

"The only one you could hurt is me and if I'm not mistaken we have been over that already and you said so yourself you caught it, was I angry? Did I shout and attack you? Or call for back up? I could have but did I?"

You looked down fidgeting with your fingers a little feeling small he almost sounded like a parent and not in that hyped up I'm right and your wrong way you were used to it was more like trying to get you to understand him something you hadnt heard in a long time.

"Well? I expect an answer young lady"

"No, you didn't do none of those things"

"Right and you know why? It was an accident and accidents happen, besides one of us will always be there to watch out for you,everyone in this place is faster then you physically we are all stronger than you there is no need to worry, now lets go meet the team, We are already here." You sniffed a little wiping at your eyes.

"I suppose....I'm scared" He chuckled at that you sounded so tiny and vulnerable

"No their not scary at all come on" you waited a few breaths then the door opened and he was in front of you he sighed quickly lifting you out palcing a comforting hand on your shoulder. You looked around this place was huge with various different vehicles air land and sea all in matte black spanning the length of the huge space.

"Holy shit..." he hummed in agreement

"Immpressive huh?" You looked around some you recgonized from news footage in gotham.

"Yeah you have a lot of.....weird things here" he shrugged just happy that your little break down had passed, he knew the others were watching through the security eager to meet you, but he wanted to make sure you were okay. He cleared his throat nodding to the elevator that would take you up into the main tower.

"This way we can go and meet the team then get you settled in for the night" you blinked at him

"What?" He crossed his arms standing tall

"Well it is nearly eleven pm and your only what fourteen? you shouldnt be up this time, what about school?"

"Im sixteen and I don't go to school I do online...when I can be bothered" he sighed walking to the elevator you trailed behind him as he sent it moving up.

"Fine, either way you can stay here tonight, there is a room ready for you" you nodded a little apprehensive finally the doors opened revealing a huge room with a large round table the others sat around it smileing at you batman pushed you forward when he saw you freeze a little the small nudge sent you walking forward into the room. Wonder woman was the first to approach you with a smile

"Hello Im Diana its nice to meet you we're glad you decided to come" she was beautiful ,polite and looked kind, you almost forgot how powerfull she was just by speakjng to her

"H-hi Im y/n its....nice to meet you too" you said quietly scanning the room still nervous looking for escapes just incase, the window, thick glass but doable not sure how far the free fall would be- your thoughts were interrupted by a gruff voice

"I wouldn't we're pretty high" you snapped your gaze up to Aquaman he was....unerving to say the least, he gave of a chill and slightly playfull attitude.

"What?" He smirked nodding to the window

"Your checking for escape I could see it in your eyes, hell sometimes I want to throw myself out the window to escape this lot but were pretty high, I mean wonder boy over there would catch you no doubt but still waste of a window dont ya think?" You smiled a little blushing tangling your hands in your hoodie.

"Itd be fixed before I was a quarter of the way down, its just a habit.Sorry" He smiled waving it off

"Nah your fine its smart you want a back up plan I'm Arthur by the way." You nodded still lookkng around everyone noted you didn't drift to far from Bruce which in a way was good he become a sort of saftey net it seemed. They all new what happened on the way here and downstairs. You were holding up well considering how terrified you were. They all drifted to the table taking their seats, when you didn't follow Bruce came up behind you taking your bag walking to the huge round glase table you followed behind him.

"Jesus what do you have in here? Thats way to heavy for you to be lugging around" he complaind as he set it down lettingnyou take a seat next to him.

"Books,clothes, my phone ,headphones and purse I take everything with me when I leave the homes, its easyier that way don't have to go hunting for it later" you shrugged everyone in the room frowned. It was Clark who began speaking

"So thats everything you own?" You nodded a little scared of him if you were honest you were scared of all of them.

"Pretty much, when it comes to foster homes in Gotham their not the best to put it bluntly us kids are money makers, the state pays them to take me in, when your younger theres more to it they put you somewhere nice with good poeple that care, you know try to make you a model citizen all that crap but teens no we get the shit ones given a bed and told to get on with it we are lost causes by this point just waiting to age out and be fucked off, I haven't been to my foster home in three weeks they haven't tried to get in touch or anything they dont care, occasionally they file a missing persons report and police find you and take you back but thats only cos of the inspections if I aint there when the do a spot check the money stops and they can be stricken off the register loose about $400 a month, but I prefer being out on my own" He frowned crossing his arms infront of his chest taking a deep breath leaning back, you fidgited a little under his intense gaze leaning to Bruce he didn't look happy at all and you weren't sure what you'd done but you felt like you'd irritated him, you cast a glance to Batman who was giving you a similar look making you gulp.

"So where have you been sleeping then for these three weeks?" you snapped your head back to the Man of steel.

".......with freinds and stuff....." he raised an eyebrow he didn't need to hear your pulse change to know you were lying it was clear from the way you spoke quiet and high but he would leave it for now.

"Well from now on you will be home by eight at the latest" you blinked you were expecting an argument or some dismissive 'oh it can't be that bad' but not a curfew... honestly you wasn't sure what to make of it and that made you angry, you wasn't used to people caring for you, your first instinct is to scare them away.

"err what? not being funny but I'm here to get my freaky power under control not to get a fucking life coach, had one he quit...like not just me he quit completely something about having the devil inside or something...Not sure if that was aimed at me tho...Probably...He was old as shit" you shut up when he tilted his head leaning back it was a very...Parental gesture you swear your dad did the same thing when he was alive.

"Well that was before I learned of your situation and the fact that your living on the streets at the moment." you growled at him any fear replaced with anger and a little panic he knew... he definitely knew you were lying the air rippled around you coming to life.

"Are you deaf? I've been staying with friends.... Not that its any of your fucking business"

"Friends from your online classes you never do? now I don't see that somehow" you shook glaring at him

"Fuck you!" he stood up not taking notice of the way your eyes glowed you panicked normally that was enough to make them back off he wasn't, standing you faltered not sure what to do you wanted to scare him off, make him back down but you didn't want to hurt him, you freaked out a little as he continued coming around towards you swearing trying to pull back your power not wanting to attack him but in the state you were in it was hard you couldn't grasp it you winced hearing the crackling of the floor beneath you fighting it as it tried to rise up toward him.

"Calm down. I know your lying I can hear it in your pulse now I know for a fact that you've been on the streets and I'm guessing its more because your frightened of hurting them rather than all this teenage 'better of alone' bravado your trying to play it off as. And as for having a life coach Instead of that you'll be getting a family"

"Shut up!" you were really panicking now he had managed to figure you out break past your walls quick and you wanted him to stop.

"...I know your a good kid and have had a rough ride having to grow up to soon now its time to be a kid again. So from now on you will have a safe place to stay each night sometimes that will be here other times it will be with one of us" he kept coming slowly towards you, you stepped back only everyone watch tense but not out of fear or trepidation just ready to dodge what ever you might do.

"I'm not going to be a fucking charity case- this was a bad idea Im leaving" you made to grab your bag but it wasnt by you chair anymore you swore

"Your not leaving and your not going to be a charity casenow calm yourself down"

"What you can't force me to stay here!" You backed off now sending out your power feelkng for your bag wanting to get out of here fast, this was a stupid thing to do, trust people? You cant trust anyone.

"I will if I think thats whats best for you,you can't hurt me... You can't hurt any of us and that is probably scaring you isn't it? its been a long time since you wasn't the strongest person in the room, since you were able to be yourself with out having to have absolute control of every thought and movement... I know because I've been there myself when I was growing up and the shock and fear I had fighting Zod and Batman it was frightening realizing that I could be hurt, its terrifying having something you don't understand or control and you think no one will understand, thats the same for each of us at some point we realized we are not like everyone else and we were alone wanting help someone to turn to thats why we are going to help you, so you can have some form of normality" you gave him a side glance shaking he understood? you thought he must of had it worse you couldn't imagine having to deal with his abilities.

"Normal? Thats not an option for me, people can't even touch me" you cried out as he sped towards you tuggeding you forward to him making you jump everything happed so fast you couldn't catch it you closed your eyes tight shaking like a leaf knowing that you'd just attacked him unintentionally probably killed him you whined waiting for the inevitable attacks from the others instead the hug tightened he chuckled

"Look its okay"slowly you opened your eyes looking down the small spikes had snapped as they touched him instead of impaling him you gasped stepping back.

"They didn't?" he smiled shaking his head.

"No they cant...I told you, you cant hurt us" you smiled a little sniffling as tears escaped you felt silly but happy relieved you might be able stay here... you could be here with them with out worrying about loosing control they can handle it.

"I-I dont have to run?" he smiled pulling you back against him

"No you dont have to run...I'm sorry I had to make you attack me it was the only way to make you see you can't hurt me and its the same with Victor, Arthur and Diana Barry is to fast and Bruce well he will think of somthing he usually does, here you can be yourself and relax a little be a kid again and yes that means rules and curfews" you smiled nervously as he retreated a little he was sad you hadnt returned the hug he could tell you were touch straved and you probably didn't even know it.

"I-I cant stay what about the social workers-"

"Hey what did he just say? you be the kid we will deal with all that." it was Diana who had interrupted as supes made his way back to his seat faster then you could register pulling back looking at the floor correcting it as you sat back down.

".... was a dick move tho supes"

"Clark call me Clark, no need for our other names here we're family" you nodded a little it sounded strange when he said it.

"and I would appreciate it if you watched your mouth its not lady like" you snorted

"The only lady like thing on me is my v-jay" you deadpanned Arthur roared up at that as Clark rolled his eyes next to introduce themselves was a man who didn't look much older than you.

"Hi I'm Barry, its great to have someone not old here now, they look fun but they are all boring" you laughed at to chorus of grunts and scoffs.

"Well I can't promise I'll be much fun.." he shook his head

"Seriously? I cant wait to see you in action properly, its one thing to see it on screen but honestly, I wanna see you do the glass thing how does that work anyway? Like how do you do what you do?" You leaned back into your chair.

"Err its kind of weird.... its like ripples?" he tilted his head

"Ripples?" You nodded nervous knowing everyone was listening.

"Yeah o-or waves, Im always sending them out and I can feel everything they feel.... so sitting here I can feel the wall over there.....its close so I can make better sense of it and have better control I can move it like clay.... then to fix the things I break I just zip them up....I can show you if you like? and its okay?"you looked around the room everyone nodded a gruff

"Just be careful" came from behind you, within seconds your eyes glowed bright and the huge table shattered into hundreds of thousands of tiny pieces across everyone they stayed still holding there breath.

"did you hit it? To make it do that?" Arthur asked wanting to understand how it works.

"No I pulled it from all sides ,It feels like pulling apart a huge jigsaw when I do that.....tugging I can stretch it two but that makes it weaker I just make it thinner and larger when I do that.....then I just think of the pieces edges being a zipper that fits back together. Its ends up being so tiny you can't see it" You did as you said pressing them together slowly but surly the table mended itself creating three thirds then used the floor to push them up until it mended from the center out becoming crystal clear glass again.

"OH GOD THAT WAS SO COOL! Can you fix my phone screen its been annoying me for weeks?" You nodded as he produce the phone and you quicky fixed it for him he stared at it in awe running his fingner over wheee the cracks were

"Thats so cool...And usefull"

"Phsychokinesis" you turned slowly to the final man.....cyborg

"Phsychowhatsit?" He chuckled at you

"Thats your gift its called phsychokinesis like telekinesis but instead of moving things without touching them you can manipulate physical things, their forms, but my geuss is for some reason you can pinpoint actual molecules instead of clumps of them together" you tilted your head at him you it had a proper name.

"Yeah thats right I can't make things float, only move and change em and I can't do it on anything living no plants or animals." He nodded

"Im victor, the one who found you, I've seen you do some incredible things.....Are you aware of everything that you do or does a lot of things just happen?" You shrugged

"Most just happen, the table I did but.....when people make me jump I try to attack them" you cast a guilty glance at batman behind you he waved you off.

"I dont mean to and if I trip or fall the ground softens ,if i fall really high it rises to catch me...water to I can't go onnthe diving board it gets weird...I don't do any of that either just happens....but I catch them most of the time before things go to bad"

"Self preservation, you said you send out these....Ripples all the time? You cant pull them back?"

"No I tried once it really hurt it was like....It felt like someong ripping my skin off, of burning my nerves i passed out in under a mineut....my fault tho" Arthur sat up leaning over the table

"Whats your fault?" You smiled sadly

"I- after I killed my parents I put it away it was an accident but it was me who did it.....Stopped useing it completly I'd suppressed it then about a year ago.... yeah I had to use it to save my freinds on a school trip... I tried to sheild them protect them, but the oil tanker was huge! I couldnt hold it for long and as much as I wanted to I just couldnt push it back to the water and......my gift it was much stronger then I remembered it hurt.....couldn't hold it... since then I can't put it back"

"So you've always had it? Then surpressed it for years and then it blew up and now you can't control it? I think it reacts to protect you, when you fall you don't want to hit the ground and be hurt so it moves to accommodate you instead your power is trying to protect you."

"That....makes a lot of sense.... shit word tho my names gonna be fucking lame...." Barry laughed.

"eh we can thing of somthing.... well I can they all added man and woman to something" you giggled a little Diana got up smileing at you

"Y/n its late we should probably get you to bed" you blinked at her then got up slowly. Everyone said their good nights as you left the room looking around wearly

"Dont worry, nothing will happen here" she said moving closer slowly hooking an arm across your shoulder you tensed but it only flicked across the floor, like a stepping into a puddle of sand then levled again you relaxed again.

"See? Like Clark said we are family here so just think of us as your aunt and uncles we will protect you...now this is your room you can decorate it soon and there is a small ensuite to, all of us have rooms here homes away from home and soon you will probably be coming with us to our other homes aswell but for now you will stay here training for a while while we sort out the legal side of things. Im across the hall Clark is next door and Bruce two doors down"

"Bruce?" She rolled her eyes a little snorting

"Batman, he always finds a way to hide his own name paranoid bat" you sighed frowning

"ho-how are you going to sort out the social worker thing? I know you said not to worry but I wont be able to sleep..." she smiled patting your shoulder sitting on the bed with you.

"Adoption and as much as I would love to adopt you from what just happend I'm pretty sure Clark isn't going to let anyone else do it"

"Sounds like you knew my situation befor I got here, you can't just adopt me tho thats like a lot of home checks and and you have to pay a lot of money thats not fair-"

"We did know...Bruce has adopted his fair share already and will be pulling a few strings for us tho as I said I'm pretty sure Clark has decided already you need a more quiet stable home, as lovely as Bruces children are they are boisterous and human which can put you on edge which isn't what we want. Clark has one kryptonian son who is older than you and would be well equipped to help you over come any hiccups.Now just relax, go have a shower brush your teeth and get some sleep?" you looked at her wide eyed adopted...By Superman....and having a brother who you also cant hurt.

"Im not tired-" she tilted her head raising a brow at you

"You need sleep your a growing girl, I expect you in bed in half an hour I will know if your not and if your not I'm sending in Clark" you nodded in a way it was nice having someone who cared.

"Good night I will see you in the morning" she said closing the door. You looked across the room it was nice a large twin bed, your bag had been placed on it somehow, a desk tv on the wall built in wardrobe and a door in the corner what you assumed lead to the ensuite. after a few moments you got up using the shower and brushing your teeth before changing and crawling into bed, tonight was strange but it was nice to have somewhere safe to sleep and you was happy you couldnt hurt superman. you fell into a deep sleep fairly easily to warn out not to vaguly aware of someone pokeing their head in the room to check on you.

#justice league x reader #dc imagine #dc x you #dc x reader #dc x y/n #dc x teen reader #justice league x teen reader

256 notes · View notes

jinmukangwrites · 4 years

Text

Whumptober Day 24

Blindfolded | Sensory Deprivation

Ao3

Note: might continue this one if enough people yell at me. Do not ask to be put on a tag list.

Warnings: Torture of a minor, blackmail, blood, violence, vomit, more tws in tags

Summary: Slade blackmails Dick into joining him. Things go downhill for Dick when Damian tries to get involved, and Slade decides the interference is a perfect opportunity for a lesson in torture.

-o-o-o-o-

The gym is the only place in this entire mansion where Dick feels safe. Or, at least a little in control of his life. It's been months since he's sold his freedom, and while he's allowed free reign of the entire building excepting the west wing and the basement, there's hardly anything he can do in any of these empty rooms besides glare holes in the walls.

At least, while he's in the gym, he can pretend the faceless punching dummies belong to Slade Wilson.

Because fuck that guy.

It's the safest place in the mansion. It's the only place he's allowed to work himself up to the point of hitting, kicking, and screaming. As long as he doesn't harm the equipment or himself, Slade doesn't care what he does in here. Granted, if he shows his frustration too much anywhere, Slade will use it against him. Which is probably why whenever Slade needs something from him, he looks for him inside the gym.

So maybe it's not the safest place in the mansion.

But it’s still better than cold, empty rooms.

And Dick doesn't really care anyway. Everything stopped being safe the moment he was pinned to the carpet of his own apartment and whispered to that… that…

His knuckles ache. The punching dummy just wobbles, and Dick wonders what would really happen if he tore it apart.

He doesn't even get to entertain the idea of slamming his fingers into the tiniest weakness of the padded fabric to rip it at its seams, because before he winds up for another punch, the sound of heavily booted footsteps make themselves known behind him.

Which definitely means something is up. If Slade wanted to come in here just to mess with Dick, he could have easily left his movements more silent than a moth's wings. He punches the dummy, wipes sweat from his brow, then turns to glare at his captor.

It's not Slade who looks back, but Deathstroke in full attire.

Something is definitely up.

"Apprentice," Deathstroke says smoothly, sending chills of annoyance down Dick's spine. He hates everything about this, but Slade refusing to call him anything other than apprentice or boy is just an insult to injury. It's like Slade owns him. Like Dick doesn't have a right to any other name.

However, instead of lashing out like he oh so desperately wants, he straightens his posture, flattens his expression, and brings his hands behind his back to grasp onto each of his wrists.

Time for the most humiliating thing of all of this. His mouth already tastes disgusting.

"Master."

Dick can't see Slade's face under his mask, but he knows the other man is grinning. It's been months, and Slade has yet to tire from Dick's discomfort.

"Tell me," Slade practically purrs, folding his arms across his chest and looking too relaxed. "Do you remember the conditions of your stay here?"

What's Slade's game? Why is he bringing this up now? Dick grinds his teeth for just a second before forcing himself to respond.

"I do what you say, when you say it, and immediately follow any and all orders without question."

"And in exchange?"

Now Dick can't help but feel a little bit of his uneasiness show in his face. He swallows and shifts his feet.

"You won't detonate the bombs."

Dick can practically smell Slade's smugness as he asks "and where are the bombs located?"

Dick takes a deep breath. "Inside the skulls of Jason, Tim, Cass, Duke, and Damian."

How Deathstroke got the bombs inside all of their heads, Dick will never know. All he knows is that he came back from patrol one night to find Deathstroke sitting on his couch, the X-rays of each of their heads sitting on his coffee table. Of course, he didn't know it was their heads until he was overpowered and manhandled to the ground so Slade would explain it all too happily.

Dick doesn't know what Slade's plans are this time around. He hasn't done anything besides force Dick to train in various forms of combat. He hasn't said anything about joining his mission or killing people or… or anything. Just training. Dick's beginning to think he just enjoys having power over Dick.

"Come," Slade says, forcing Dick from his thoughts, "I have something I need you to do."

Dick forces himself to nod, and not question why Slade brought the bombs up. He simply brings his hands to his front, unwraps the tape around his knuckles, and follows along even though the sweat sticking under his workout clothes is uncomfortable and he'd much prefer a shower before dealing with whatever Slade wanted from him.

The walk through the mansion halls are as lonely as always. Dick's sure that even if Slade wasn't a jackass with the thirst to kill for money, this place would still be empty. The entire mansion was built somewhere within the Appalachian mountains, practically in the middle of nowhere. Hidden expertly within the trees and designed to be practically invisible to any eyes traveling above. To get here, they had to take a helicopter.

A helicopter. Dick cannot stress that enough.

He lets his mind wonder as he follows Slade. It's probably for some sort of training exercise outside. Maybe he's being brought to the gun range? He tries to tell himself it's nothing, but there's still an inkling of unease in his gut.

Why did he bring up the bombs?

Slade suddenly comes to a halt, and it's all Dick can do to not slam into his back. He stops and looks at the door Slade stopped in front of with widening eyes.

The door to the basement.

One of three places Slade has forbidden.

Slade doesn't bother with any dramatics like locks or passcodes. No doors are locked here. Dick knows better than to push anywhere he's not supposed to.

The literal heads of his family are on the line.

He watches with a horrible emotional cocktail of nervousness and curiosity as Slade turns the handle and opens the door. There's nothing special right away. Just stairs leading down into the shadows.

"Follow," Slade says, and Dick does.

The travel down is… uneventful to say the least. Nothing to see besides stone steps and gray walls. However, Dick quickly becomes aware of a drop in temperature. A dramatic one. One that seeps through his sweat soaked clothes and straight into his bones like freezing little needles.

It's when they reach the basement floor he realizes why it's so cold, dark, and secretive down here.

It can hardly even be called a basement once Dick gets a good look.

It's more like a dungeon. Long hallways, iron doors with iron bars, dim candles built into the walls…

It's Slade Wilson's personal prison.

Which is strange, because Slade doesn't often take prisoners. Dick's normally the only one to own that title when it comes to Slade.

Slade doesn't give him a chance to really take in everything and just continues down into the dungeon, passing door after door, each holding just glimpses of various dangerous looking tools and chains and contraptions… ones that have Dick's head spinning just by thinking about the range of torture that can be performed in each room.

His bewilderment must be more obvious than what he meant it to be, because Slade turns to look at him and lets out a chuckle.

"You have questions," he notes.

Dick swallows and turns his head from the doors. He forces himself to look Slade right in the eye. Or… the hole where his one eye is hidden under. "… I do."

"Ask."

Deep breathes. "What is this place? Why are we…"

Slade chuckles and turns away, grabbing at a ring of keys from within one of his pockets. It seems the no locked doors policy doesn't apply down here. "I didn't plan on taking you down here so soon," Slade explains, turning down a seemingly random corner. "I planned for you to know this place… intimately… soon enough. Except, well, something came up. And I supposed this portion of training could begin a bit earlier than planned."

He stops in front of a door, one that's more heavier fortified than the rest they had passed. The iron widow on the door is covered by a steel plate, possibly making the inside completely shrouded in darkness.

Dick watches with growing anxiety as Slade pushes the key into the door, turns it, then steps back to allow Dick a clear, complete view on what's inside.

His stomach twists violently. His breath leaves his lungs like he's taken a violent blow to the gut.

There's chains hanging from the center of the dark room, shackles locking tightly over clenched, bare wrists. There's a boy hanging from them, his uncovered toes just one chain link away from having enough purchase to let his heels touch the grime covered ground. He's not wearing a shirt, and his pants are torn near his knees.

Wrapped around his eyes is a blindfold. Over his mouth is a painfully tight looking leather gag. Locked over his ears is a pair of what is definitely sound canceling headphones.

Damian.

Dick finds himself backing away, his heart in his throat, but he quite predictably runs into Slade's chest. He can feel every single one of his nerves twist violently as Slade wraps his fingers around Dick's biceps to keep him standing there, in the doorway, with the perfect view of his littlest brother hanging in chains.

Then, his eyes slide to the side of the room where there are metal tables set with… with tools. Knives. Hammers. Whips. Pliers. Brands.

He almost chokes on his tongue when Slade leans down so his mouth is right by Dick's ear. "He tried to fight me all alone on my last visit to Gotham, demanding to know where you are. I easily took him down, but he needs to be taught a lesson, don't you think?"

Slade’s last trip to Gotham was three days ago. Has Damian been here… hanging here for that long?

"Slade…" Dick whispers, shocked that his voice still exists at all.

The hands on his biceps tighten.

"Master-" Dick quickly corrects himself, but it doesn't fix a single thing. Stirn, unmoving hands begin to force him to walk forward until he's fully inside of the cell, able to smell the faint reek of a child's sweat, and the smudges of blood that stick to his skin. Dick clutches his fists so tightly he can feel his fingernails threaten to break skin. The closer he gets, the more wounds he can see on Damian's mostly naked body.

Slade was careful taking him down.

"Now here's what you're going to do," Slade growls while Damian continues to hang there. Blinded, deafened, gagged, helpless, probably completely unaware that they're in the room. He lets go of Dick's arms and walks towards Damian. He curls a hand in Damian's hair, causing the boy to tense.

Dick wants to scream.

"You're going to do exactly as I say with no back talk." Slade tugs on Damian's hair, causing a muffled grunt, before he taps the pointer finger of his free hand right onto Damian's left temple. Right where the X-rays showed where the bombs were implanted. "Or else."

Dick can hardly sort his thoughts. He can barely breathe. All he can focus on is the hand in Damian's hair, watching as Slade pulls his head back so his neck is exposed, showing the beginnings of an Adam's apple that bobs nervously.

"Master-" Dick gasps, he can't even keep his voice even.

Slade squeezes his hand in Damian's hair, causing Damian to bend backwards even more and release short, almost panicked breaths. The sensory deprivation must not be doing any favors for him. The way his toes barely touch the ground doesn't even allow him to feel for vibrations.

"Pick up the knife, boy."

And something shatters in Dick's chest. "Please, Master- I'll do anything-"

"Pick up the knife!" Slade snarls, and Dick can't help a full body flinch. "If you question me one more time, I'll chain you up to watch me break him myself. Only, if I do it, I'll make sure he dies slowly, and painfully. I won't even use the bomb."

Dick wants to cry. Instead, he sucks in a breath and turns to the table, picking up the first knife he sees with shaking hands. He tells himself that he's doing this to save Damian's life. That if he does as he's told… Slade should let Damian go.

Teach him a lesson. Teach him a lesson.

Slade's not sending a message. He's teaching a lesson. Which means he won't be forced to kill Damian.

Just learn how to torture him.

"Good boy." Dick can practically hear the smile in Slade's voice as he finally lets go of Damian, backing up so the boy is left hanging in his shackles, breathing hard and definitely fighting off anxious twitches.

He holds the knife out in front of him, the light is low in the cell, but he can definitely tell how sharp the edges are. He honestly would rather plunge this knife into his own heart than put it against his kid… but Dick has a feeling Slade wouldn't let Dick go that easily. Somehow, Slade won't let Dick die here. He'll keep Dick alive, then chain him up, and force him to watch Damian gain gruesome death that he doesn't deserve.

He's helping Damian. He's helping Damian. He's doing this to make sure he lives. That they all live.

So he holds the knife out in front of him, approaches, and forces his face to not show how much distress he's in. His lips wobbles, and Slade definitely notices it, but he doesn't comment on it. Just chuckles.

God, Dick hates him so much.

"Put the edge against his jaw… but don't press hard enough to cut flesh," Slade says, and Dick crawls away to some corner of his mind to do exactly as he's told. Robotically. Not feeling anything. His brain is screaming. "Run it down his neck, yes just like that. Trail the tip over his chest, not cutting, but let him feel it. Let him imagine the things it can do to him. We will prove his expectations to be underdeveloped in a minute-"

And Dick does as he's told. He trails the knife over Damian's skin, forcing himself not to flinch every time Damian's breath catches. He brushes where Slade tells him to brush, threatens with a small push when Slade tells him to threaten.

He breaks skin on Damian's back when Slade tells him to break skin.

I'm sorry Damian, he can only scream inside his mind as digs the blade in at an awkward and extremely painful angle near Damian's collar bone.

The kid writhes and certainly does his best to ignore the torture… but he eventually screams through the gag.

And Dick keeps doing as he's told. The shattered pieces of his sole are now a fine, crushed dust.

"There we go…" Slade compliments happily, when the first tear appears under Damian's blindfold. "You're doing great, apprentice."

And it doesn't stop there. And Dick keeps doing as he's told. He keeps pressing the knife. He keeps trailing it. Tearing skin. Puncturing sensitive places. Using Damian's struggles and tremors against him.

Like a monster.

I'm so sorry. I'm so so sorry.

Eventually, Slade finally tells him to stop. Dick backs away like Damian’s fire. He watches with wide eyes as Damian sags against the chains and heaves a shaking breath that rattles his entire blood splattered chest.

“Go upstairs, shower, and go to bed,” Slade says, putting a hand on Dick’s shoulder. Dick can’t help it, he flinches. All he can think about is how Damian is desperately trying to get a hold of himself. Unaware that the torture is over. Unaware that it was Dick who… who… who did this. Slade doesn’t seem to care about Dick’s flinch. He just tightens his iron strong grip and leans closer to Dick’s ear. His mask is off now. Dick can tell by his familiar hot breath against his cheek and ear. “You did good, apprentice. I’m proud of you.”

“What…” Dick breaths, memorizing every line of red on Damian’s skin that he caused. Dick swallows down a mouthful of vomit that tries to rise. “What about-”

The grip on his shoulder shifts, thick fingers squeeze the base of his neck dangerously. “I said go upstairs. Shower. And Go. To. Bed. The brat is no longer your concern.”

There’s a threat in Slade’s voice. One that Dick has been conditioned to immediately obey for fear of worse punishment. Fear of a button being pressed and every single one of his siblings…

He looks at Damian for a heartbeat longer; tells himself that Slade will let Damian go. That Damian will soon be back at the manor and recovering.

Dick nods his head then turns heel, forcing that little pit of despair to turn into something that could be mistaken as hope. He walks past all the other cells, not looking inside a single door, before he’s running up the stairs two at a time and sprinting to his room.

The moment he’s in his bedroom—a large one at that, but filled with nothing but a bed and a dresser—he beelines to his bathroom and is already stripping his clothes before he can close the door behind him. He tries to wipe his arms and hands with his shirt as he takes off his garment, but he can still see smudges of red on his skin. He turns on the water as hot as it can go then collapses by the open toilet.

He empties everything in his stomach, then continues gagging every time he smells blood on his body until steam has completely fogged up the mirror.

He flushes the toilet and steps into the scalding water, hardly even noticing how his skin burns.

All he’s aware of is the red running pink down the drain, and the drops of water on his cheeks that is definitely from the spray of the shower.

He’s not sure he’ll ever forgive himself.

He’s not sure he’ll ever be able to fully wash the blood from his body.

All he can do is stand there and let the practically boiling temperature of the water assist his emotional turmoil in becoming something physical.

17 notes · View notes

roci-by-book · 3 years

Text

Nemesis Games [WIP]

“Towers of curved ceramic and steel made great piles, denser than mountains. Hair-thin wire hundreds of kilometers long stood on plastic spools taller than Filip.” (5)

“Filip shuffled down the rows of welding rigs and metal printers. Tubs of steel and ceramic dust fine than talcum. Spiral-core mounts. Layers of Kevlar and foam strike armor piled up like the biggest bed in the solar system.” (5)

“At the emergency ward, he found himself wheeled into an automated surgical bed not that different from the ones on the Rocinante.” (158)

“The passage was the usual design of inflated Mylar and titanium ribs.” (221-222)

“The curve was like the airlock on the Roci, and the design of the latch. Martian design. And more than that, Martian Navy.” (222)

"The bridge looked like the Rocinante's younger brother" (222)

“She pulled herself out of her crash couch and walked out to the common room. It was so much like the Roci’s galley that her brain kept trying to recognize it, failing, and trying again.” (262)

“Magnetic pallets locked to the decks and walls in neat rows. She wondered idly where it had all come from, and what promises had been given in exchange. She went to the nearest, plugged the array into the pallet, and popped it open. The crates unfolded.” (263)

“A toolbox in the machine shop had a bent hasp and, given a few minutes, could be forced open. The Allen wrenches inside would open the access panel on the lift wall between the crew quarters and the airlock, which was where the secondary diagnostic handset for the comm array was stored.” (304)

“While she worked, pressing the plastic into the seams, scraping out whatever had gathered there, doing it again, she tried to fit the new information into the larger scheme of things.” (306)

“When the deck was clean, she dropped the spatula into the recycler, stood, and stretched.” (307)

“In her bunk, her fingers laced behind her neck, she stared up at the blackness on the ceiling. The interface screen at her side was dead.” (311)

“The ship lurched hard, snapping the gimbals of the couches forty-five degrees to the deck.” (329)

“One bulkhead failed to open, reporting vacuum on the other side, and they had to backtrack.” (330)

“The comm array was unable to transmit either broadcast or tightbeam.” (330)

“She popped the straps loose and sat up, pulling her leg away from the needle.” (338)

“In the lift, she selected the machine shop and gripped the handholds as the mechanism dropped her down the body of the ship.” (338)

“The machine shop was empty, all the tools locked in place, but with enough tolerance that when the ship lurched, they all rattled: metal against metal like the ship itself was learning to talk.“ (338)

“She stumbled, her head crashing against the metal shelves.” (339)

“All the wrenches, epoxy welders, voltage meters, and cans of air and lubricant were strapped in place, She flipped through the close-packed layers to a line of Allen wrenches and plucked out the 10 mm.” (339)

“She gathered up a voltage tester, a wiring crimp, and a light-duty soldering iron and stuffed them in her pockets.” (339)

“She killed the lift between the crew quarters and the airlock, bracing herself so that the deceleration didn’t leave her trapped in the middle of empty air.” (340)

“The access panel was fifteen centimeters high and forty wide and opened on the major electrical routing through the center of the ship. If she cut though all the cables there with a welding torch, all the traffic would have rerouted instantly to other channels. Apart from a few warning indicators, nothing would happen.” (340)

“The screws were integral to the plate and didn’t come free, but she felt it when the metal threads lost their grip.” (340)

“Ten. The plate came free. She scooped up the handset, checking its charge. The batteries were nearly full. Connection read good.” (341)

“Channel eighteen was a comm array using the D4/L4 protocols that the Rocinante did for broadcast.” (341)

“Hand over hand, she pulled herself along the shaft and then into the corridors.” (342)

“The narrow corridors of the crew deck seemed too wide.” (344)

“The occasional ticking and popping of the expansion joins adjusting to shifts in temperature were like the knocking of ghosts.”(344)

“He undid the straps on his couch, floating forwards.” (346)

“He stopped at the med bay on the way to his quarters.” (346)

“Fred landed feetfirst on the wall, ankles hooked into the handholds like he’d been born in the Belt.”(348)

““All the bunks are the same,” Holden said. “Except mine. You can’t have mine.”" (349)

“The halls had the same anti-spalling covering that the bridge and the mess had, but marked with location codes and colored strips that would help navigate the ship. One line was deep red with HANGER BAY written in yellow Hindi, English, Bengali, Farsi, and Chinese.” (355)

“Across the corridor from Alex, Prime Minister Smith was huddled behind the lip of a doorway.” (356)

“Another burst of fire sang past, tearing long black strips from the walls and deck and filling the air with the smell of cordite.” (356)

“She drank the same version of chamomile tea that the Rocinante made, and it felt like having a secret ally.” (364)

“The mess was empty, the screens turned off and the crew set away.” (364)

“First drawer: gauze and bandages. Second drawer: one-use blood cards for maybe a hundred different field tests. Third drawer: emergency medical supplies like decompression kits, adrenaline shots, defibrillation tape.” (368)

“The medic had her sit up, the cushion of the medical table crackling under her shifting weight. The analgesic was a spray that went in Naomi’s mouth. It tasted like fake cherry and mold.” (369)

“The cabinet doors were open, spilling test cards and preloaded hypodermics across the floor.” (369)

“She fell to the side, her belly to the deck, decompression kits the size of her thumb pressing into her face as Miral writhed around to kneel on her back.” (369)

“She wanted to say something, but she couldn’t, so she just watched as Karal opened the door then closed it behind him. The lock slid closed.” (371)

“Wet with her saliva and no bigger than her thumb, it was the sort of thing any mech driver kept with her. A tiny ampoule of injectable oxygenated artificial blood and a panic button what would make an emergency medical request for an airlock to cycle.” (371)

“Fred held up the coffee cup. The name TACHI hadn’t quite worn off the side, red and black letters half-erased by use.” (381)

“The crash couch was bolted to the deck with thick steel and reinforced ceramic canted so that any direction the force came from was compression on one leg or another.” (407)

“The drawers were thinner metal, the same gauge, more or less, as the lockers. She pulled them out as far as they would open, examining the construction of the latches, the seams where the metal had been folded, searching for clues or inspiration.” (407)

“The tiny black thumb of the decompression kit, she kept tucked at her waist, ready to go if she could just find a way.” (407)

“The mirror was polished alloy built into the wall. No help there. If she could take apart the vacuum fan in the toilet...” (408)

“A simple EVA suit hung there, suspended in the null g by thin bands of elastic.” (423)

“The indicator went from green to red under her thumb.” (424)

“The airlock door closed behind him, the magnetic seals clacking.” (424)

“The lock was small enough he could put flat palms on both doors.” (424)

“Naomi thumbed the emergency override. Three options appeared: OPEN SHIP DOOR, OPEN OUTER DOOR, RETURN TO CYCLE.” (424)

“Without magnetic boots, she’d have to reach it with bare handholds, but she was close.” (426)

“She plucked the black thumb out of her belt, twisted it to expose the needle, and slammed it into her leg.” (426)

“The airlock indicator on the Chetzemoka’s skin blinked, the emergency response received, the cycle starting.” (426)

“There were handholds on the surface – some where deigned, but others were the protrusions of antennae and cameras.” (427)

“Maneuvering thrusters lit along the warship’s side, an ejection mass of superheated water glowing as it jetted out.” (427)

“And then, Mfume was gone, bolting up the ladder toward the cockpit faster than the lift would have taken him.” (431 - 432)

“Holden tapped in an order for another coffee.” (432)

“Finding Sun-yi and Gor wired into gaming googles shooting the crap out of each other in simulated battles – because as weapons techs with no one to shoot at they were getting antsy – stopped being weird and edged into sort of endearing.” (432)

“The hatch to the cockpit was closed, but Holden could still hear the wailing of the raï that Mfume liked to listen to during his shift in the pilot’s seat.” (433)

“Holden sat on the couch beside Fred’s and leaned in.” (433)

“The first disappointment was that the controls were in lockdown. She tried a few passwords – FreeNavy and Marcoisgreat and Filip – but even if she got it right, there was no reason to expect that they’d left the biometrics profiles turned off.” (448)

“The three EVA suits that remained didn’t have batteries or air bottles. The emergency rations were gone. She expected the toolboxes to be gone from the machine shop, but they’d taken out the racks that held them too, the drawers from the cabinets, the LEDs from the wall lights. The couches were all slit open, gel and padding pooled on the deck beside them. The drug delivery system and reservoirs were gone. The only water was in the drives; ejection mass to be spit out the back of the ship. The only food was the residue in the recyclers that hadn’t been processed back into anything edible. The stink of welding rigs and burning still hang in the air, so the air recycler was probably running unfiltered.” (449)

“The deck shook under her, the vibration of thrust setting up resonances that no system even tried to damp down.” (449)

“There should be a way through the machine shop. All machine shops were supposed to be connected at the back.” (449)

“The EVA suits weren’t powered and didn’t have bottles, but they had seals and reinforcement. She could take the cloth apart, and salvage some lengths of wire. Maybe something solid enough to cut with. And could she use the helmet clamps as a kind of vise grip or clamp?” (450)

“In a real ship, it would all have been protected by conduit. On this piece of crap, the wiring had all been fixed directly to the hall with a layer of yellowed silicone epoxy.” (452)

“Across the space, maybe four meters away, an indicator light went amber, and she was falling sideways. With the extra illumination, she could see the round, tree-thick body of the maneuvering thruster. She put out her arms, catching herself against a steel strut.” (452)

“Three sorties ago -- number forty-four -- she’d thought there might be a diagnostic handset. Not that should could speak into it, but she might have been able to tap out a message. But despite the fact that handsets like that were standard and required, there wasn’t one” (454)

“She scrambled down, moving from strut to strut, watching her hands and feet with every movement so she wouldn’t midjudge.” (455)

“The air in her suit didn’t feel stale or close; the carbon dioxide scrubbers worked well enough on passive that she wouldn’t feel the panic of asphyxiation. She’d just gently pass out and die.” (455)

#nemesis games #the expanse #roci by book

1 note · View note

pathos-logical · 5 years

Text

One Picture, a Thousand Words

Roman is a wonder that cannot be put to words, Logan a marvel that ink cannot capture. They try anyway.

Hoo, this sure was a labor of love! Love because I love @bleepblopbloop56 with all my heart and labor because HOLY HECK WAS THIS HARD TO WRITE. But never mind any of that, because HAPPY BIRTHDAY, my friend!!! I absolutely adore you, and I hope your year is as fantastic as you are!!!

Trigger warnings: Food mention; a joking mention of hallucinations. I think that’s it, but please tell me if I need to add something!!

There are a thousand words Logan could use to describe Roman. He would pull a Shakespeare and invent a thousand more if it meant finding a word that could accurately chronicle the tapestry of Roman, all colorful patches and carefully stitched seams. But Logan is no artist, and his words seem an inadequate medium.

Beautiful, he thinks and immediately discards. That is too obvious, the truth of it plain to see. Lovely is- better. More intimate. But too soft, perhaps, for Roman’s flame-edged hair, the bronze of his skin and the steel in his spine.

He has tried countless words, none of them quite right. Larger-than-life. (And no, his charisma and magnetic smile absolutely did not excuse the way he didn’t seem to know how to shut up.) Captivating. (Roman did have a way with words, when he wasn’t being an idiot.) Extraordinary. (He was quite the artist and actor.) Brilliant. (Again, Roman was rather intelligent when it came down to it.) Perfect. (Technically impossible. But.)

All those words he longs to say, not one spoken aloud.

(Or- once. Alone in his room, he had tried the shape of mine on his mouth, thought about how it tasted on his lips and imagined the look in Roman’s eyes if he ever dared to say it in front of him. Once, and never again.)

Oh, he wishes. But Logan has always been better with words on the page than to other people.

Well, he thinks, looking down at the piece of paper in his hands, I suppose that’s what this is for. His eyes rove over the paper, skimming over phrases without really taking them in. If he reads it he’ll try to fix it, and at this point there’s too much of his heart in the words for him to change them.

He looks at the last paragraph. It’s the kind of declaration he sneers at in the romance novels Roman so adores, the kind of thing he would’ve sneered at barely years ago. But Roman always did have a way of making him question things he’d taken for postulates- himself included.

I tried, over the course of this letter, to pin down what exactly about you has drawn me so irrevocably into your orbit and left me floundering in unfamiliar space. However, as the length of this might indicate, I soon discovered that I could not.

You know me. It is very rare that I find myself lost for words. But I find myself unable to find the correct words to describe you, or even the correct words. Not because I have run out of things to say, or even because you have left me speechless, but because I could use a whole dictionary of love letters and fail to find the words that capture the way your eyes shine in the light when you laugh at your own jokes, and all the cliches in the world cannot express how I feel about every mundane, breathtaking thing about you.

But despite all that, I have three words for you, Roman, and I suppose there is no better day to deliver them than today (as of the day you receive this, at least).

I love you.

Roman has a sketchbook no one but him has ever seen.

The drawings are all in pencil, and Roman aches to paint them, to mix his colors until he finds shades that will truly bring them to life. But Logan is a peculiar kind of monochrome, with his navy hair and black polo shirts and countless blue ties, and Roman fears that no amount of paint could do that justice.

It’s undeniable that the warm brown of Logan’s eyes is a color he itches to find in a colored pencil, that the almond of his skin is one he longs to see redden at his touch. But those aren’t the things he really wants to capture when he puts pencil to paper anyway. No, when he draws Logan, his focus is on the subtle gleam that comes to his eyes when he speaks about something he’s passionate about, the curl of his lips when his emotionless facade breaks at some stupid comment Roman made.

Roman wishes he could show Logan the notebook, sometimes, the days when his longing overpowers his surety in the fact that it could never be reciprocated. He imagines coffee-colored eyes looking through the pages with delight, taking in the devotion clear in the meticulous lines. He pictures the hands he’s spent hours perfecting skimming over paper, taking care not to smudge the lead.

(He sees disgust settling in the curve of Logan’s lips and rejection showing in the set of his shoulders, and he pushes away the thought and hides his notebook under his pillow, pretends that he hasn’t memorized the shape of Logan’s smile.)

But he doesn’t think of any of that today. It’s Valentine’s Day, and Roman is dressed for it. He dons his armor that he definitely did not spend a whole two hours deliberating on and sets out the door armed with a kind of desperate false bravado, which is immediately undermined by how he jumps at his roommate Patton’s encouraging “go get ‘im, tiger!” shouted through the walls.

Still scowling at the door behind him, Roman briefly debates how desperate a text will make him sound before deciding, screw it.

Hey, we still on for lunch at Cream of the Cup?

The reply is prompt, as always, and Roman makes a futile attempt at smothering the smile he knows is blossoming across his lips.

>> Of course.

I’ll see you then!

Roman can so do this.

Virgil I can’t do this

>> why not?? youve been planning this for weeks, youll bbe fine

actually, knowing you, orobably months

Jfkdkfkfkfk

it’s

LOGAN

>> im aware, weve only veen best friends for years now

…

if yoy send a long rambling text ahout how wonderful logan is and how you dont deserve hkm im gonna lose it

roman i swear to god

HE’S JUST SO SMART AND AMAZING AND I’M JUST ME I DON’T DESERVE HIM AND WHAT IF I SCREW THINGS UP BETWEEN US FOREVER AND HE HATES ME OR WHAT IF IT’S AWKWARD I’M OKAY WITH JUST BEING FRIENDS REALLY HE PROBABLY DOESN’T EVEN LIKE ME THAT WAY ANYWAY I MEAN WHY WOULD HE

Whoops sorry

>> youre not

I’m not

But

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

>> okay roman, listen up, because I’m only gonna say this once.

first of all, cut it with the self-deprecating crap. one, that’s my thing. and two, I WILL pull a patton and fight you.

stop doubting yourself, it doesn’t suit you

I might not have known you as long as I’ve known logan, but I know

I can see you typing. shut up.

maybe I haven’t known you as long as I’ve known Logan, but I do know you’re a good guy, and you /clearly/ love him

KSKFKFKKFKGD W H A T

>> yes, everyone knows, no, Logan does not, LET ME FINISH

it means a LOT to him that you actually read the articles he sends you about mars rovers at 3 am and that you don’t tell him he’s annoying for infodumping about alpha centauri or whatever star system he’s planning to go to and that you deal with his hypocrisy about sleep schedules and his general inability to do emotions

also, knowing him for years means I know his type, and trust me, you’re it

and even if by some miracle he doesn’t like you back, you guys are too close to ruin your friendship. okay? so however this ends, I promise you’ll still be friends

>> But

ROMAN

listen, you don’t tune him out when he starts babbling, and he does the same for you. he loves listening to your rants about art theory, he goes to every single one of your shows, and he started learning Spanish just to impress you. yes, he’s learned more phrases than just insults, he’s just been hiding it so he can surprise (aka impress) you later

and roman? he really really does value your friendship. you know that we’ve known each other since forever, so you know I mean it when I say that I’ve NEVER seen him get so close to someone this quickly.

and… you’ve been good for him too, okay? he’s not really the type to get lonely, but that’s just because he gets so tied up in his giant brain he forgets there are people in the outside world to talk to. but it really is important to him that you’re always there for him, and… I can tell you right now that he’s told me how much he appreciates you for it

after all that? I’d say he loves you too, dude. go for it.

you can talk now

Holy heck you DO love me

>> eh

Holy HECK

Wait

Did you turn on autocorrect just to yell at me???

>> Only for you, babe.

Please never do that again

yeaj that was oncredibly unconfortable

now GO GET YOUR MAN

Roman, for all his theatrics about love at first sight and true love’s kiss, hadn’t mentioned Valentine’s Day plans once in the weeks leading up to it. Then, exactly one week ago, he’d texted Logan with a simple request to meet up at a nearby cafe. Logan knew him too well to miss the possible connotations of such an invitation. But it was entirely possible that this was merely meant to be an outing between two friends. A platonic outing.

A platonic outing where there was barely room to stand, forget sit. Logan curses under his breath. He’d decided for once to not show up fifteen minutes early, as that would only give him more time to second-guess himself, especially as Roman was notorious for being chronically late. But he had failed to account for the obvious fact that, it being both a Saturday and Valentine’s Day, the usually quiet cafe is filled to the brim with couples ordering the heart-themed specials and kissing and generally clogging the air with sweet words and PDA. And no, Logan is not irrationally annoyed about this, he’s just worried he won’t be able to secure an empty table for him and Roman.

But just as the thought crosses his mind, he catches a familiar head of fiery hair at a table against the wall, bent over his phone and apparently completely absorbed by whatever he was looking at. An incredulous “Roman?” slips from his lips unbidden, because- well, Roman had once nearly been late to the first show he was the lead in. But there he was, reserving a table at exactly 12:30 with a croissant in front of him. Maybe today really was a day for miracles.

He watches with amusement as Roman jumps and looks up at the sound of his name. His face lights up as soon as he registers who it is, and Logan abruptly goes from amused to filled with some kind of fluttery warmth he doesn’t want to quantify.

“Logan!” Roman exclaims, hurriedly tucking his phone away. “Hey! How are you?” His smile beams out like the sun, but it dims upon Logan’s next words.

“Not well, unfortunately,” Logan informs him gravely. “I fear I have been having severe auditory and visual hallucinations. For example, I am currently experiencing one so vivid that I believe I am conversing with a friend in a cafe when I know that there is no chance of him being here yet.” Maybe Logan should feel bad about the way Roman’s expression morphs from worry to alarm to overblown outrage, but the challenging gleam in his eyes arrests him as surely as that of of Roman’s heart-shaped studs, and he can’t bring himself to regret it.

“Hey, I’m not always late!” he protests so loudly several patrons turn to look at him, perhaps expecting a scene.

Logan can’t help the smirk that creeps across his face as he slides into the seat opposite Roman, surreptitiously tucking a navy blue folder besides him. Thank goodness for Roman being typically Roman and reserving a booth that could seat six for a party of two. “Roman. Once Virgil and I deliberately told you to meet up an hour after we were actually supposed to meet so that when you inevitably showed up late, it would only be by five minutes rather than fifty. And the very idea that you could be on time for something went so flagrantly against the laws of the universe that the universe struck back by making your car break down, and you missed the meeting entirely.”

“Is that what happened?” Roman asks, looking so genuinely gobsmacked that Logan can’t help the snicker that escapes him. Roman’s expression flips to one of self-satisfaction, and Logan tries to ignore the little burst of fondness in his chest at the sight. Even if the rest of today goes horribly, at least he can savor this easy banter between them.

And banter they do, debating over whether Logan’s physics professor or Roman’s marketing professor is more inept before commiserating over the “perpetual hell week” that is college. They bounce from the disappointing latest installment of one of Roman’s favorite series to a terrible documentary on aliens Logan had found on a “science” channel (“It’s called a having a basic grasp of eighth-grade geometry, Roman- which, unlike this nine-thousand year old civilization, these morons have clearly never achieved!”) to every little thing in between, their food forgotten in front of them.

It’s nothing special, technically- they’ve been friends for years now, and they often have talks about everything and nothing. But today Logan can convince himself that an electric current is charging the air between them, flushing Roman’s cheeks and lighting up his eyes as Logan is drawn in, helpless against his magnetism.

There’s no decisive moment where Logan thinks, this is it. There’s just Roman, his laughter like bells in the breeze, and Logan, gazing at him like he’d put the stars in the sky.

“Roman,” he says. That’s it- Roman.

Roman is still giggling at his rendition of the student who’d spilled their coffee on the drama professor on the first day, but he sobers at whatever look is on Logan’s face. “Hey- you good, Lo?”

The nickname catches at something in Logan’s chest, pulls it open so the next words come just a little harder, just a little easier. “Roman,” he says again, looking down. “I do not wish to… ruin the mood, but I have something to confess.”

(He’s looking down, so he misses the way Roman jumps at the last word.)

But when he meets Roman’s eyes, open and curious, Logan’s confidence abandons him. He exhales slowly in an attempt to regain some of the feeling from before, like the memory of Roman’s voice will fortify his. But all that comes out is: “I wrote- would you-”

Logan’s throat fails him entirely, something a little like dread and a little like hope clogging it up. Without another word, he slides the folder he had kept tucked at his side to Roman. When Roman raises a curious eyebrow, Logan simply smiles- a quick, brittle thing- and motions for him to open it.

Earlier, the noise in the cafe had distracted Logan, had made him frown when it rose over Roman’s voice. But suddenly it all fades into the background, the chatter of voices and clatter of spoons receding in favor of the thwip of the folder opening, the little breath Roman takes when he reads the first two words.

Dimly, Logan thinks he must have used up all his words in the letter. His fingers lay still at his sides, mind is utterly blank as he watches Roman read it. But his heart is pounding loud enough that for an absurd second, he’s sure Roman can hear it in the sudden quiet.

Logan waits for a minute, maybe five. He thinks he’d wait for Roman forever if he asked. But Roman doesn’t make him wait that long, because when he looks up his eyes are wet with tears, and when Logan uselessly opens his mouth- to do what? His voice certainly hasn’t returned- Roman lurches forward, clumsy in a way Logan has never known him, and seals their lips with a kiss.

And when they finally draw apart, Logan thinks he’s regained his words (or maybe just these three), because they force themselves out of his lips like they’ve been waiting to do so since Logan said Roman’s name. And Roman, his face a study in the kind of shock and delight that can only come from a thought-to-be-hopeless dream coming true, returns them.

#logince #roman sanders #logan sanders #sanders sides #virgil sanders #patton sanders #my writing #a whole dictionary of love letters

164 notes · View notes

stoplookingupforheaven · 4 years

Text

Glory

a piece inspired by bastille’s glory music video. the italicized dialogue is taken from that video and is not mine.

special thanks to everyone who helped me figure out how the hell to format this and how the “keep reading” function works on tumblr. i love you lot.

If tonight had a soundtrack, she decides, it would have to include a cello. Cello tones, hovering under the industrial sounds of the airport. Cello tones, long, low, and slow, to balance out the quick, bright flashes of silver and red and blue on the planes that take off overhead.

The whole scene feels like exhaling a breath she didn’t know she was holding. Sunday night. Airport grounds. A sky bruising purple-brown. The heat of the car’s hood. Passing the paper bag back and forth. The tiny, musical crash of the drops inside the bottle as it moves between them.

“What about when you were driving?”

“Yeah, you lost your phone.”

It had been in a fit of daring, an instant when Friday overtook his mostly-rational mind, and he’d dropped his phone out the passenger window. The sky was steel-gray and heavy with thunderclouds, the air oddly still despite the pre-storm breeze that rippled across the fields they were driving past. She hadn’t heard the smack of plastic on asphalt. She didn’t see how the screen cracked on impact, a spiderweb of lines criss-crossing it as they shot down the road. They’d laughed about it, said no one could find them now.

“And that weird dive bar we found…”

It was tiny, dark inside. He played pool with strangers. She danced alone. The atmosphere faded from pale blue to glowing red, as night fell outside and all thoughts of tomorrow were wiped from her brain.

“When you were dancing on the table, with that blonde wig-”

“It was pink!”

She snickers, knocking her leg lightly against his, relishing the slow buzz that runs through her body when he reciprocates the gesture. Cello tones, she thinks.

“You nicked that car.”

“I borrowed that car.”

They hadn’t bothered to stick around and find out whose it was, driving through the night instead to God knows where. They talked about nothing and everything - water, winter, warmth, how the world felt so wild, like it had gone mad and there wasn’t really a whole lot they could do about it. She let the breeze slip around her arm as she reached out, watching the lights play on the back of her hand, lonely orange and inky-blue.

“You ran into that lake with your clothes on.”

“It was someone’s pool, and you were supposed to come with me!”

It was a summery kind of cold, and he’d engulfed her in a bear hug afterwards, water streaming off of him and onto her, raising goosebumps on her arms. They were stuck in a bubble where time didn’t quite exist, where minutes stretched into hours and days collapsed into seconds. Where you were conscious of the world moving around you but you couldn’t - or maybe didn’t want to - move out to join it. Where gray skies meant warmth and not sadness, and green hills covered in flowers felt old and not new.

But there’s a glitch in the scene, and she can’t quite put her finger on it. There’s a disconnect in their narrative, something that should overlap but doesn’t. Some small detail, just a word or two-

She ignores it, because this is memory, and therefore the story is shaped by the person telling it. The cello melody is back, twisting around her head.

“What about those two guys that wanted a fight?”

“Oh they were fine, they just wanted to dance…”

How small she’d felt! But despite their unsmiling expressions, they really had just wanted to dance. And so she danced. It was an odd dance, but it was dancing. The tips of her shoes had moved over the concrete floor. Dancing with strangers was not something she normally did, but then again, nothing about anything felt normal anymore.

“You dared me to run through that couple’s house…”

The recklessness of youth is always easier to bear when someone else is made to suffer with you, she’d decided. It eased the thrill, spread the high out just enough so that the body did not completely succumb to the rush of adrenaline, so the mind was not overwhelmed by fear and bliss all at once. The house was aggressively mundane - beige walls, landscape paintings, area rugs over hardwood floors - and it felt hostile, like it didn’t want to accept the misfit of a young adult that she was. Like little kids, she’d dragged him through the living room, hand in hand, barely registering the shock on the couple’s face so much as-

“And the old guy had a gun!”

“What?”

He laughs, and she does too, and she misses the same feeling of a mismatch in the back of her mind. It fades away before she realizes anything’s out of place. Another red-and-chrome body soars over their heads. She thinks yet again of the sound of a cello.

“You didn’t want to dance in that class.”

“What are you on about? I totally outdanced you.”

They’d stopped in a town somewhere between the Midwest and the West, the kind of place where it was perpetually mid-afternoon and no one dared disturb the feeling. It looked like every place she’d ever been, and nothing like anything she’d ever seen. It was unique, and it was stereotypical, and it was too perfect, as though someone had set it up with the perfect small-town main street in mind and hit the mark a little too well. She’d laughed as he did toe taps and flailed his arms in time with the rest of the class. She’d danced away the memories of signs on the edge of town, signs that called for glory and heaven, two things that she felt were better left not chased.

“You slept through all the good bits.”

She’ll never know if that’s true, but she does know that she propped her feet up on the dash of the car, and dreamed. She dreamed of golden hours, Ferris wheels, old cars, kidnappings, and oceans. Rain pattered on the windshield. Inside the car it was dark, and the dim interior wrapped around her like a blanket, the evening stretching on into perpetuity. Was it evening? She didn’t know. But the old car held her and she sank into its embrace.

“Why steal such a shit car?”

“It’s a classic!”

She’d leapt in regardless. He’d adjusted his baseball cap (was that there before?) and they left, chasing the sun. Or maybe the night.

Whatever the car was, it had held up every mile, against all odds, past farms and fields and trees, the gray exterior blurring with the road beneath and the sky above until the car - and its occupants - were a part of the landscape, instead of simply passing through. And they’d stopped it as the sun set, sitting on the curb at a rest stop and watching-

“That weird sky was full of pinks.”

It was unreal. There was no adjective in any language she knew that could begin to capture what that sky was like. The clouds were a child’s Photoshop project, purple and yellow and even green, dancing across a sky that darkened from pale salmon to something resembling wisteria - if wisteria could feel haunting and cozy all at the same time.

“I remember it being all yellow.”

There it is again - that flashing instant where something is not quite right, where there’s some odd catch in the world’s fabric. She tries to catch hold of the feeling, to make sense of it, because she wants to fix it. She wants to correct the mistake - for surely it is only a simple mistake - and mend the perfect seam she’s been stitching out of pictures and sounds. But it’s too fleeting, too fragile, and the feeling slips away like water through her fingers, melting into the perfect scenes she’s remembering. In her head, the cello plays on, the music writing itself without her aid.

“I beat you to the top of that mountain.”

“Pretty sure you didn’t.”

It was the only time she could clearly remember something and definitively call it pain: the burning in her lungs as she scrambled towards the top, the aching in her limbs as they stumbled back down. It hadn’t even been that much of a mountain. She wasn’t sure why she’d called it that. It was a mound of woodchips in a lot somewhere. But the only word that her lips could form to describe it was “mountain,” as if the world was telling her that she had to make it fit this narrative, which was feeling increasingly as if it didn’t fully belong to her, because who really recalled details like these? Vivid colors, but not complete pictures. Trains of thought inspired by a journey, but not the trip itself.

But he’d wrapped an arm around her shoulders as they walked away, and she’d forgotten the pain.

The rest of it is just flashes. Stoplights glowing through the rain and the windshield wipers. His fingers running through his hair. The young man dancing in a parking lot. Roads that wound through mounds of rocks. A burned road sign of overlapping triangles. She’d mentioned that it felt ominous, but he’d told her it was probably her imagination. The smile on his face when he spun her on the dance floor.

And this corner of the night. The middle of this airport service road she’s not sure how they got onto. Planes overhead, and lights in the sky, and his arm thrown around her shoulders.

It feels right, and that’s what makes it feel wrong.

“You tell it differently every time.”

“Well, I like my version better.”

She wants to look him in the eye as he says this, but her head won’t turn. She wonders why she said “every time.” They’ve never spoken about these memories before - have they?

She considers thinking about it, but chooses instead to watch the planes leave them behind. After all, it feels right, so she doesn’t worry about it.

In the morning she wakes in her own bed. There is no dive bar, no burned road signs, no weird pink sky. No airplanes. No strange memories. No one but her.

There’s a cello melody in the back of her head, and she’s not sure where it came from.

#rain writes #glory #glory music video #bastille-inspired #help what do i tag this

7 notes · View notes

thekytchensynk · 4 years

Text

An Honorable Challenge (Fictober Prompt 7)

Prompt number: 7

Fanfiction Fandom: Natsume’s Book of Friends

Rating: G

Warnings: No warnings

Read this story on AO3

There’s never a good time to hear your friend’s parents ask if you’ve seen them, but Natsume isn’t sure it can ever feel worse than this.

“Ah, well thank you,” the monk on the other end of the phone line says. Natsume can tell he’s trying to sound upbeat, but concern bleeds through. Who could blame him. Coming home early from a work trip, only to find his son missing, bed un-slept-in?

“I can call some of our other classmates if you’d like?”

Mr. Tanuma pauses. Trying to think if he knows the other classmates, Natsume guesses. Their names. Their numbers. “That would be kind of you,” he says after a lengthy pause. There is a subtle sadness there. His job keeps him away from home a lot, Natsume knows. Long hours. Sometimes days at a time. He knows some of his son’s friends, but assumes he doesn’t know all of them.

It makes Natsume feel a little bad for the man.

He calls around, but no one’s seen Tanuma since they were leaving school earlier that day. He looks outside at the darkness that’s settled over the countryside. He sees Aunt Touko watching him, her own worry in her eyes, and refrains from asking if he can go out to look. He’ll only worry her more.

It’s not until an hour later, after he’s retired to his room and is trying ineffectually to work on his math homework, that he realizes how quiet Nyanko-Sensei has been. What a sly expression he’s watching Natsume with. And of course, of COURSE when he asks, Sensei knows something. Of course.

“It took you a while to bother asking,” he says, nibbling on a meat-stuffed pastry he swiped from somewhere. “Though I expected you’d find the invitation before asking me.”

“Invitation?”

Sensei gestures with one stubby paw toward the window. And when Natsume crosses to the window and peers outside, he can see fireflies milling around a section of the yard. Once the house grows quiet, he prowls downstairs to check out the spot more closely.

The little flowers he finds there aren’t a type he thinks he’s seen before, pale yellow and glowing like tired stars. They spell out, “I challenge. Arch of Stars.”

“Arch of stars?” murmurs Natsume.

“It’s a place, but not in the human world,” Sensei says, as though explaining such mundane things is a chore for him. “It’s not far.”

The bored attitude is grinding on Natsume’s nerves. “And this has to do with Tanuma?”

“Not to do with him. But it’s probably connected to his disappearance.” How can he be so calm?

They travel through the night mostly in silence, broken only when discussing directions or when Sensei grumbles about needing a drink. And at last, with the moon peeking through the trees, they arrive in a weedy clearing and the remains of a house.

Natsume has no eye for the age of human things, but this home has clearly been here a long time. Been empty for a long time. He can see the remnants of it, what had once been a modest home with a little stone garden, but the garden can only be seen as seams between the weeds and the house only shows a skeleton of its former self. The weathered remains of the stout timbers that marked the intersections of walls pointed accusations at the sky. The doorway still stands, a sketchy shadow against the night.

“Through there,” Sensei says, looking at the doorway then back at his ward. “You’ll find the arch of stars on the other side.” At the doubtful look on Natsume’s face, he adds, “Trust me, you don’t want the story of how this became a doorway to the spirit world. We don’t have time for you to have an emotional moment. Come on.” Then he walks up to the doorway and disappears.

Natsume still hesitates at the threshold. Most of the building is gone, but the crumbled remains have tumbled inward, turning the interior of the old house into a minefield of splinters and jagged chunks of wood. But Sensei, whatever his faults, wouldn’t lie about something like this. So steeling himself, he steps through.

Into a blue twilight.

He stops after that first step, just looking around and drinking it all in. A series of blue flowers grow off slender vines which have wound into all the trees in the area. The pollen in the center of each bloom glows like a dusting of moonlight. He twists to look at the arch he stepped through to find that it’s seemingly made entirely of the vines. Their light makes his hands and clothing luminescent. A faint smell, summer and vanilla and something otherworldly, hangs in the air.

A few paces ahead of him stands Sensei. And beyond that hulks a giant yokai, watching him with eyes like polished obsidian. When Sensei just watches him impatiently, Natsume addresses the creature. “Are you the one who left the message?”

The creature moves, and Natsume realizes it had been kneeling before, but now it is unfolding, taller and taller, until it’s a good twenty feet tall. It speaks, its voice like two rocks grinding against one another, low and slow, so slow that it takes Natsume’s brain a bit of stitching to put the words together.

“Accept. Challenge?” The words make the ground underfoot tremble slightly.

“First, have you seen my friend?” Natsume asks.

The creature regards him for several long seconds, then to his surprise, it lowers its head to look at Sensei. Natsume’s not sure if they have some way of talking he can’t hear, but a moment later, Sensei says to him, “Tanuma is here somewhere. He’s fine. He’ll be released safely after the challenge, whatever the outcome.”

Sensei’s not lying, he can tell that much. And some sense of tension saps out of him at the news his friend is actually here and will be OK. Can be kept safe.

And it was only then he finally thinks to ask, “why challenge me?”

“Name,” comes the rumbling reply.

Natsume almost laughs in relief. “You want your name returned?” The creature nods once, moving with aching slowness. “Then I’ll be happy to. If you just tell me what-”

“NO!”

Each word before made the ground vibrate, but now it tremors violently, as though the forest itself were reacting to the power of that one word. Natsume loses his balance, falls to the ground awkwardly, then looks up, expecting the creature to attack. But it just stands there, watching him with the glassy eyes.

“Reiko. Says. Gifts. Are. Debt.” It grinds out. “Fight. Me. For. My. Name.”

Fight?! The creature was a giant, strong and solid and the trees themselves seem afraid of it. But what choice did he have?

“Very Well.”

The creature doesn’t reply, it just raises one enormous fist into the air and starts to bring it down. Natsume scrambles to the left… but no impact comes. The ground remains still. He looks up. The creature looks quizzically back down at him. Seeing Natsume looking at him again, he starts the motion again. Fist up. Fist down halfway once. Twice.

Natsume understands on the third repeat of the gesture. And on what would have been the fourth, he put his hand out, palm down.

The creature studies his hand. Then its own hand, in the same configuration.

“Tie,” It mutters.

“Tie,” Agreed Sensei, sounding thoroughly bored.

Ten minutes later (and after an unusual number of ties) Natsume loses the game of roshambo and returns the name -- Hikarihana, fittingly -- to the giant. It’s smile was strangely pretty, like the unfolding of a flower’s petals.

Then he’s led down a path to a little enclosure of the flowering vines. At their approach, the vines part like a curtain to reveal Tanuma. He sit on the ground, head leaning on his hand, elbow propped up on a rough table made of more vines, all wound together, eyes closed. He’s dozed off waiting here in this quiet little room. A few pieces of fruit, untouched, lat on the other side of the table, presumably for if he got hungry.

“Hey,” Natsume says, crossing to his friend and shaking his shoulder gently. “Tanuma?”

Tanuma’s eyes flutter open, and he looks puzzled for a moment, before sleep releases its hold and he seems to recognize where he is. “Ah. So it’s over?” he asks with a smile. "Did you lose?”

“Did I …” How does he know that? And when Tanuma casts a glance at Sensei, he knows, he KNOWS that the cat had known everything all along. He rounds on Sensei. “You knew about this!”

“Yes I did,” the cat replies. “What about it?

Natsume can’t find the words, but assumes his expression does the talking for him.

After his moment of defiance, at least Sensei has the good grace to look a bit ashamed. “That one was adamant about the right way to challenge for his name,” he explains, hopping up on the table, where Tanuma pats his head absentmindedly. “I tried to tell him you weren’t Reiko, that challenging you would be different, but he’s basically a rock, and once he has the shape of a thought, it’s hard to change it. He was convinced the proper form was to steal something important of Reiko’s as a challenge. She would come and they would play. He always lost. How one can lose at a game like that every time…” he shakes his head.

“Why didn’t you just come get me?”

“There wasn’t a lot of time,” he retorts. “He was planning on taking Touko, you know. So I went to your friend to set this up before he could.”

Natsume blanched. “Aunt Touko?”

“Yeah. You can reward me for my quick thinking and negotiating skills later,” Sensei says, seeming mollified now that the blame had gone out of Natsume’s voice. “Since the temple was near, I asked Tanuma.”

“I wasn’t doing anything tonight anyway, so just sitting around here to help out your aunt seemed like the right decision” the latter says apologetically. “And my father’s out of town until Monday, so-”

“Uh…”

He doesn’t even have to say anything more. Tanuma looks confused for a second, then his eyes widen and shift toward the wall of the little room as though he can see the temple from there if he tries hard enough. “I gotta go,” he says, looking up at the giant, who nods ponderously. Then, more formally, he adds, “Thank you for the hospitality.” Then he is following Natsume out, through the glowing woods and under the arch and into the old yard where no one had lived for decades.

As they make their way rapidly toward the temple, Natsume seeths. “I can’t believe he did that.”

“He was trying to protect your family, you know,” Tanuma says, not exactly chiding but more … clarifying, Natsume guesses. Which wasn’t wrong. He just doesn’t like how long Sensei had kept silent about it despite knowing what was going on.

Although … if he’d said something, Natsume would have run out right away. Worrying Aunt Touko. Which would have defeated the purpose of the plan they’d put in place.

Sometimes, he thinks ruefully, having people looking out for you could be more stressful than going it alone.

They cobble together an explanation for Tanuma’s dad about him falling asleep while reading in the forest, and the prospect that his son just dropped off to sleep for this long in the middle of nowhere clearly worries the man, but the worry isn’t enough to overcome the relief at seeing him back. He offers to let Natsume stay the night, but Natsume thinks guiltily of Aunt Touko wishing him a good night with worry in her eyes, and politely declines. He makes his way home and goes to bed sometime after two in the morning.

Sensei doesn’t return until the next morning, drunk and with a lingering glow like the flower pollen around the edges of his mouth, which gives him some idea why Sensei did all this instead of just cowing the spirit into submission right away.

But he can’t find it in himself to scold him. Everyone’s safe.

So, he supposes, it’s fine.

#fictober20 #7 #fanfic #natsume's book of friends #natsume takashi

1 note · View note

touchmycoat · 4 years

Note

I love you and your writing and I hope you have a wonderful day! Not sure if this is hardcore enough, but can I ask for Sabo and Ace being super possessive/jealous of Marco after they find out Marco and Shanks have a past?

ksjdfnsd hi anon filling this prompt was a Full Journey of Self-Discovery™ and that self-discovery was that a bitch! can’t! write! jealousy! you can literally pinpoint the exact moment I decided this wasn’t going to progress further without emotional resolution first ksjdnfksjdnfksdjf

So. Here it is. Marco/Ace/Sabo, past-Marco/Shanks, rated M for all kinds of grabbiness.

“It’s not that,” Sabo said, Ace’s knife pressed to Marco’s throat, “we’re jealous.”

It was a testament to the progress of their relationship, Ace thought, that Marco never even flinched. When the knife first came out, Marco might’ve even looked a bit excited, gaze like soot-strewn rocks with molten seams emerging from a forest fire. Now though, there was a dust of ashy confusion across his eyes, as his pupils searched Sabo’s face. Should I play along? the posture of his hands was telegraphing to Ace. Ace wasn’t sure how to answer.

“Of… what, yoi?” Marco finally asked, when neither lover gave him further clues. The knife sat just at the base of his Adam’s apple, angled up and lethal. But not to Marco, of course. Without the silver going black, Marco would, in a sense, remain ultimately unaffected by whatever Sabo did to him.

And that was the crux of Sabo’s upset, which Ace understood only too well. This was not a new feeling, wanting to gouge his mark upon the world. It wasn’t until Marco (and Sabo, but in a slightly different way) that Ace felt so keenly the desire to gouge his mark upon another person (after all, he and Sabo already carried each other under and over their skins—ink and scar tissue).

It was Ace who answered, tone laced with strangeness, “you and Shanks.”

The frown that twitched onto Marco’s face spoke of genuine perplexity before transforming into confounded comprehension. That was good.

“Oh—you mean…?”

In a deft and fluent motion, Sabo flipped his grip on the knife and plunged it into the wall right by Marco’s neck. Marco flinched, because Sabo had turned the knife, scoring a harsh line across Marco’s skin; the mark rapidly filled with red, but was kept from going blue.

Then, those fingers, gleaming with angry black chrome, transferred from dagger grip to Marco’s hair, knotting themselves in and yanking. Toward the blade. Its dull back bit and Marco bit too, incisors gritting in pain and defiance. Sabo was relentless—the diamond cutter’s insistent whet of gem on polishing wheel.

But Marco was no crystalline composition, just a man through and through (well—plus and minus some mythological bird bits and ocean magic bits). He was full of things like axons and myelin, while Ace, since youth, has always been pure action potential. Ace surged forward, clung flush to Marco’s torso before generously applying teeth, sharing Sabo’s mission to redden. They gave Marco marks of matching color on both sides of his neck. Fucking red all over.

Marco’s first gasps came out shocked. A hint of pleasure. However, the noises quickly deepened to affront.

“He told you?” Genuine aggravation was such an uncommon and delicious tone on Marco. Ace felt like he could eat it up directly, tongue lapping right against the buzzing vocal chords. Marco didn’t mean, of course, the simple fact that he and Shanks had slept together. He meant—

“Every detail,” Sabo confirmed. When Shanks had been the one here (alone; it took two of them to fill one Yonko’s sandals), it hadn’t been a small dagger, but the whole of Shanks’ sword. Ace worked really, really hard to not think about the symbolic comparison.

“We asked him to,” Ace added in a sullen mutter against Marco’s collarbone. Remembering Shanks’ tale, told to him and Sabo over drinks, Ace quickly plunged a hand down the back of Marco’s trousers. Buried his fingers into flesh until a groan stuttered out of Marco. “We had to know.”

“There’s nothing to—”

Marco’s denial stuttered out with a dull dark flush; he didn’t make a habit of lying to his lovers. He got a pinch on the ass for it from Ace, and Sabo tugged at his hand until it obliged the direction, curling over the back of Ace’s neck.

“He said,” Sabo reminded as Ace felt the grounding sting of his hair being pulled, “you were rough.”

“Did he now.”

“He said,” Ace’s turn, nails scoring in four jagged aisles down the center of Marco’s chest before rubbing warmly at his belly, “you only got gentle in the end. Was that how you wanted the second time to go?”

“Would you have kissed his wounds better?” Sabo muttered as he did just that. Finally relenting his grip, Sabo’s mouth now found the knife mark he’d painted on. From where Ace held himself against Marco he could see warm blood under Marco’s skin touching one side of Sabo’s lips, cold steel the other. He could see the soot-eyed slip of tongue filling the gap between.

Breathing beneath him, Marco shuddered in and out of focus. The hand Sabo placed on Ace wasn’t pulling, instead cupping, a warm sheath of need holding Ace close. Marco’s other hand had found its way to Sabo’s belt, fingers hooked in and clinging. It wasn’t gentle, but it wasn’t rough; they’d deviated from the script of Shanks.

“I was—” Marco once again fizzled out, his frustrated sigh sounding like water poured over burning charcoal. “If he told you everything yoi, then you know.”

“Do we?”

The tone of conversation had taken such a turn that Ace had to pull both hands free of Marco—for just a moment. Marco’s wrist though, soon fit snugly in his grip, and Ace pressed a discontented kiss to the center of Marco’s palm.

“You wanted—” The dagger came out of the wall with a generous jerk from Sabo, and it felt like the opening of veranda doors. Everyone all suddenly had more exits, should they need one. Marco looked peculiar, while Sabo looked hunted. Ace wondered what his own expression told them. “—a second time. Unless he lied.”

The roll of Marco’s eyes, when it came, was long-suffering, and in that, intimate. It did nothing to calm the race of Ace’s heart.

“He doesn’t lie.” Years. It must’ve taken years for that tone of Marco’s, when talking about Shanks, to ferment. Uncorked, the sound was so cloying that it put a frown on Ace’s brow, a sneer on Sabo’s lips.

Marco must’ve caught the unhappy scent too. Splitting a pleading look between Ace and Sabo, he kept his hold on both their bodies, willing them not to take off.

“Alright,” he exhaled. “He’s got his turn, is it mine now yoi? Every detail.”

They—the three of them—were way past the point where every little dissatisfaction, every seam of insecurity rendered a frighteningly brittle portrait of their futurity. Ace had to make sure Marco knew that they knew this though, so gathered Sabo in one arm and crowded them all much closer. Like seabirds huddling for warmth, an alcove habitat of surviving tissue.

“Yes, it’s true.” Marco sounded much more settled now, and Ace could take comfort in that. “I offered a second time yoi. I offered more than a second time. He turned me down.

“But it wasn’t—” The continuation was insistent, though not too emphatic that Ace would doubt the earnest entreatment of Marco’s hands, Marco’s eyes. “—something large. The way Red Hair wanted me was as an opponent yoi, and the way he treats his opponents and rivals? Like they’re not that at all. Just look at Mihawk.” It’s not like this was a painless interlude in Marco’s life though, both Ace and Sabo could tell. They silently offered support in the still of their bodies, and Marco peeled away from the wall, leaning gratefully in. “That’s not something I can stand, not for a serious relationship. I knew that going in, I did. But I offered anyways.”

“But only,” Sabo added on slowly, “the smallest slice of feeling you could give, ‘cause you knew it probably wouldn’t work out?”

That got a chuckle out of Marco, all three of them feeling the vibrating sound waves in their touching chests. “I do try to be careful, yoi.”

“Actually,” Ace confessed, “Shanks told us you’re the one who turned him down that second time.”

“He would put it like that, wouldn’t he?” That eye roll again. Ace felt a bit better prepared to weather it this time.

“But we knew, right?” This was the same, unspoken knowing Marco had been the first to bring up. “We could read between the lines. We know you.”

We know you fell for him, and you turned down his offer of a second night stand to protect yourself.

“Yeah—” A dark flush had crept its way up to Marco’s ears, and Ace traded incredulous looks with Sabo when Marco glanced off sharply to the side. “—but it’s embarrassing more than anything else, yoi. That’s why I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re right. Falling for Shanks is embarrassing,” Ace and Sabo managed to say in perfect synchronized stereo. What followed was a truly violent scuffle as Marco went full phoenix and tried to fling himself out the nearest window; Ace became a blockading wall of fire, while Sabo just fully jumped on Marco’s back to wrestle the bird back to earth. Even after he was pinned, Marco maintained all his dangerous talonpoints until Ace, exasperated, plopped a kiss to the top of his head.

“Okay, so we were a little jealous. But it’s fine. We get it now.”

Since Sabo was still sitting on him like a huge, self-satisfied cat, Marco just kept lying flat on his front, forehead and nose mashed to the ground.

“Do you.”

“I mean, we’d fuck him too,” Sabo shrugged. The speed at which Marco’s head shot up and the sheer temperature of the glare he shot Sabo were what finally soothed the last dredges of insecurity in Ace’s chest.

“Don’t you dare, yoi.”

But Sabo wasn’t going to be cowed by Marco; there was still something he wanted. Setting his knees on either side of Marco, Sabo pulled Marco up by the lapels, and Ace wordlessly slipped in from behind.

“Only if you make it up to us.”

“Make it up to you for sleeping with Shanks once, before I’ve even met either of you?” The words were sarcastic, but Ace heard only intrigue in Marco’s tone. He slid a hand back down Marco’s pants, the front this time.

“Shanks told us you left marks on him that didn’t go away for weeks,” Ace whispered conspiratorially into Marco’s ear. “Sabo’s been huffy after that.”

“Huffy,” Sabo scoffed, as his hands traced Marco’s neck. The transformation into phoenix had successfully rid Marco of all previous marks. When Sabo ducked it under Marco’s jaw, it was only to lick, not to leave more red. “I’m only trying to right a grievous injustice.”

“Revolutionary,” both Ace and Marco muttered, in matching tones of faux-sympathy.

“…Well.” The way Marco shifted between them felt like the relighting of a pilot flame. Ace saw Sabo being pulled closer by a hand on his back, and felt a matching grip on his own thigh. With a sinuous grind back into Ace’s hips, Marco pulled Sabo down into a kiss generous with tongue and suction. Ace conveyed his own pleasure at this sight with a stroke of his hands, and felt Marco sigh against his chest.

And then Ace, impatience getting the better of him, took a handful of Sabo’s hair. He pulled, and Marco laughed, obliging the order to get on with it already, applying teeth to throat.

“I’m sure we can fix that, yoi.”

#anon #fic fill #my writing #thank you for this prompt truly from the bottom of my heart #i really did my best dkjfnskdjfsd #marcoacesabo #this characterization of shanks was also a Decision™#fndsjfdndj this would be something i want to rework #i love this idea that there was a pre-canon shanksmarco possibility that fell apart #and i'm so invested in exploring how #.#but i'm also a cOWARD WHEN IT COMES TO UNPLEASANT EMOTIONS SO UH

24 notes · View notes

mysewingadventures · 4 years

Note

Do you have any tips for making corsets? I see how expensive they can get online especially for custom made ones so I want to eventually work up to making my own.

Hi! Absolutely! It really depends on what style you’re going for, but I found this book online that has a lot of patters from many different decades and I use it all the time for reference and patterns. I’ve made one 18th century pair of stays and one 1890s corset and I am working now on another 1890s corset and I’ve made my fair share of mistakes that I hope helps you to avoid them.

But first of all: Print your pattern on paper in real size (the ones from the book are all in real size!) tape it together and roughly fit it to your body. Where I went wrong the first time was, I didn’t realize where exactly it’s supposed to sit and was very surprised to find later on that my corset would slide down to its natural position (which I had thought was way too low.) So, assuming you’re going with a standard Victorian corset, it would be an overbust corset, but most of them are technically “half bust” if you will, they rather push your bust up than cover it completely. Which is exactly why I was so confused haha.

Anyways, once you’ve determined where it sits on your body and have roughly checked the size and corrected it to your needs, it’s time to cut the pattern back up into its original pieces and cut everything out of fabric. Don’t forget to leave about half an inch (1,5 cm) seam allowance so you can sew the pieces together! Now, I did leave this step out because I thought hey, I’m good at this I can do it, but nope. Sizing on paper is very inaccurate, that’s why I said roughly. Paper doesn’t lay flat on your body the way fabric would. Also, when working with paper and you feel like it’s just a tiny bit too small, it’s probably just right. I’ve made things bigger before and it ended up being way too big.

You don’t need to make a full corset with your scrap fabric now. Some people do it, and sizing it this way is probably even more accurate, but you should be fine just making a one-layer mock-up.

Now you can try this one one and it might already fit you, but if not, don’t worry. People sometimes end up making several mock-ups until it finally fits, and fit is very important with corsets. Skipping this step has made me end up with a really beautiful but very poorly fitted corset that I can’t wear because it’s really uncomfortable. It’s really worth it to take your time and have patience.

Once you’re happy with the result, go ahead and use your actual fabric. 99% of the time, corsets are at least 2 layers if not 3. Lining your corset gives you stability and more layers between your body and the boning! And when lining, you could either flat-line it (sewing two panels together and then making the whole corset), or you could sew the outer layer and the lining separately and then attach them to each other. I recommend flat lining, as the result is neater in my experience, but whatever works best for you!

Speaking of boning - firstly, the usual Victorian boning is flat steel. If you can’t get a hold of that (which I don’t even know where to look for it!) you can use cable binders. Definitely not the same, but before steel bone, baleen would have been used - whalebone. Obviously, they don’t sell that anymore and fake whalebone is really expensive, but cable binders have a very similar structure.

Secondly, and that goes more into the corset making, once you’ve put in all the boning, make sure to sew the boning channels shut before you apply the binding (a band to seal off the edges.) I speak from experience when I say that not doing it will result in several bones poking out after wearing it a few times.

If you have cording in your corset, you can apply that with a zipper foot. I’ve personally never tried it as I just got a new sewing machine and didn’t have a zipper foot before, but I’ve heard it works.

But generally speaking, the most important part is the sizing. Once you get that right, you should be fine for the rest.

And if you have any specific questions, feel free to message me again! I hope this helped and I’d gladly help anyone out if I can!

PS: oh, wow, I almost forgot: little thing I always do that I think works really well - I always put the eyelets right in between two bones, one on each side. There’s going to be a lot of strain on the eyelets and the bones help to stabilize and Idk, it might work without as it’s not in every pattern I’ve seen but I’d just be scared of it tearing all the time.

#ask #corset #corset making #victorian #victorian corset #fashion #victorian fashion #sewing #sewing tips

4 notes · View notes