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sylverstorms · 3 years

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Cassandra x Maiden ----Anonymity Ch.7

Ch.1 Ch.2 Ch.3 Ch.4 Ch.5 Ch.6

Cassandra gradually starts taking up more of your time. Or, more accurately, demands it like it’s her birthright.

Every day, you wake her up with a kiss to her shoulder or neck and a whisper of her name. She comes to you when she’s bored at random times during your shifts, to either talk –complain— about her sisters or to outright distract you. There are times at night when you’ll feel the chill of her slip into your bed and press up against your back, but she’s always gone by morning light, like a dream.

She used to be just another component to your nightmares. Now… she’s what takes them away.

And you’re afraid.

That you’re growing to like the time with her while she’s just playing around, that it will cut that much deeper when you find yourself on the end on her sickle. Because how else can it end, you reason, between the two of you?

The thought momentarily makes your liplock with Cassandra taste bitter, despite the sweet strawberry taste of her lip balm -and no way she’s putting that on for you, right?

She has you pressed deep into a plush armchair with her palm on your chest, while her thighs are locked tight on either side of yours. You want to tell her that you should stop –both because you’re literally in the open and anyone can walk in on you and because it’s late—but her lips are doing wicked things to your neck and you can’t find your voice long enough.

When Cassandra starts grinding down on you though, rather impatiently too, you have to speak up before she starts something neither of you can finish.

“Cassandra.” you say breathily. A sharp nip comes over your pulse, then slippery lips close around the area. “Ah! Cassandra. You’ll be late for dinner.”

She tsks and pulls back, expression much like a kid that got her hand slapped away from the cookie jar. She dismounts you with the same sour look, smoothing down her robes.

“Walk me there.” she orders.

You rise and fall into step beside her, trying not to linger on how strange it feels. It should be nothing, really, considering all the activities the two of you nightly indulge in, but it’s… something.

Cassandra, uncharacteristically quiet, keeps gazing out the windows as though calculating or pinpointing something while you make your way to the dining room.

She comes to a sudden halt just before you reach it, turns to you, steals a quick kiss and then quickly leaves you behind, a colder aura about her as she strolls inside.

You hear Lady Dimitrescu’s voice, but not what she says. Once a few minutes have passed and you can safely blend into the background, you join the other maids on standby within.

You used to hate it here. Having them all in front of you like that, serving them wine, when they’re all to blame for taking any semblance of normalcy out of your life. You never glance at what they’re eating. You still dislike dinner time.

But.

When Alcina makes a snide comment about Heisenberg and you hear Cassandra’s laugh above Daniela’s giggle and Bela’s chuckle…

It no longer seems so bad.

“Bela, stay a moment.” Cassandra says after Lady Dimitrescu leaves with Daniela in tow.

“Oh, no.” The blonde huffs under her hood.

“I didn’t say anything. Yet.” The younger sibling raises her hands in exasperation.

“When you go ‘Bela~’” You bite your lip to keep your expression neutral as you’re cleaning the table because hearing the normally stoic sister mimic Cassandra’s voice like that is just plain gold. “It’s never good.” her tone turns flat once more.

Cassandra very pointedly rolls her pretty eyes. “I need you to cover for me.”

“See?” Bela sighs. “Absolutely not.”

“Well, it wasn’t really a question, I was just trying to give you the illusion of choice.” Cassandra shrugs. “I’m going out tonight.”

“What?” Bela damn near hisses. “Have you lost your mind?”

“It’s fine it’s, like, thirteen degrees.”

“How is that fine?”

The elder sister’s gaze then flits to you. There is no other maid in the vicinity that can overhear them, but she’s clearly uncomfortable with you picking up the implications of their conversation.

You still don’t get it. You guessed their aversion to sunlight has to do with their mutations… but why would the cold be an issue?

The survivor in you wants to know more. To know if this is something that can be used to your advantage when the time and circumstances are right for a potential escape.

Another part of you… just plain worries.

“I know what I’m doing.” Cassandra says, stern.

“Then you’re doing it alone.” Bela turns to leave…

Except.

“Oh, well. Guess mother should know about that little maid you’ve been orbiting around, lately.” Cassandra comments. “The one you even did a favor for? Just imagine her disappointment in you, the shining example of the family, stooping so low.”

Bela’s back goes rod-straight. The piercing look she sends Cassandra sends ice down your spine. You think she’s going to pounce… yet she exhales.

“One. Hour.” Bela states. “If you’re not back in one hour I’m coming to drag your sorry behind to mother. And she—” A gloved finger points directly to you, “Won’t be coming back with you in one piece.”

Wait.

What?

You didn’t know Cassandra planned to take you with her. But she didn’t deny it when Bela pointed to you. After her sister left, all she said was: ‘Dress well.’

Which brings you to your current position, pacing by the entrance hall of the castle, in a warm coat and two layers of clothes underneath. You turn to look behind when you finally hear her steps descending the staircase.

And— you freeze.

Because Cassandra is not wearing her usual robes. She’s dressed in all black, yes, but the outfit is tight on her form, fitting every curve, hugging her wonderful legs like a second skin. She’s wearing knee-high boots instead of heels and her hooded, gothic overcoat reaches down to mid-thigh.

There’s not a single patch of her skin visible other than her face… and you can’t, for the life of you, explain why it’s that hot.

“You’re staring, plaything.” she chastises, yet doesn’t sound like she minds. Rather, she’s smirking.

“Uh—” you can’t really form words.

“We need to hurry, clock’s ticking.” she says as she jiggles the very key you’ve looked everywhere during work hours for. The key to freedom. To leaving the castle.

Cassandra double-checks her clothes before she opens the door. You file it as useful information for later as you hurry to catch up to her.

The path to the village –or what’s left of it— through the forest is… difficult. Mainly because Cassandra is entirely unbothered by any and all obstacles and moves like she’s on a walkway, leaving you to fight with every rock hidden in the snow.

You manage. Somehow.

Until a distant howl makes you jump and quite literally crash into her side.

Cassandra laughs. It’s a clear, beautiful sound in the dead of night. “My, my. Scared of a Lycan in my presence?”

“I thought it was just a regular wolf!” You whisper, mortified.

Yellow eyes blink at you. Then her gloved hand raises to yours, taking it in a secure grip. You didn’t realize you were shaking, yet the tremors quickly cease when she does that. It’s just your heart that still feels like it’s going to give out on you, but for an entirely different reason, now.

Cassandra safely leads you to the village. It looks more or less the same, except empty, void of life. You don’t linger on memories. You don’t.

“Show me your house.” she says.

You never thought you’d be tracing the steps of your front porch so soon. You only have to push the door for it to open. And the inside is just as you remembered. A quaint little house. It’s simply not… home, anymore.

Nothing is.

Maybe nothing ever was.

And the thought makes a thin, cracked wall inside you finally give. Cassandra is saying something a few paces behind you, but your vision has blurred, your eyes sting and hot, salty rivers roll past your lids.

“Are you listening to me?” she asks. “...Plaything?”

You can’t talk. If you do, you’ll sob and break to pieces on the floor like a pushed glass statue.

Cassandra’s grip is tight and demanding on your elbow when her fingers curl above it, but she turns you with gentleness you’d never think her capable of. You do not meet her eyes.

Her other hand comes up to your neck.

You can’t, you can’t—

“Alexia.”

Your eyes snap to hers when she says it, from the shock. You didn’t think she even knew your name. Cassandra shifts her weight from one leg to the other, then seems to decide on something and wipes the tears beading at your chin away with her thumb.

“Pack what you wish. We don’t have long.”

As you turn into your bedroom and open your wardrobe to pack a few clothes into a bag, just to feel a tad more yourself when you’re in your room in the castle, the sound of your name falling from her lips follows you.

Haunts you.

You have half a mind to get your mp3, phone and chargers before you return to her. Cassandra is holding whatever she wanted to get from the village in a box tucked between her arm and body.

“Come.” she orders. Her hand settles on your elbow again and practically drags you along.

You don’t talk on your way back to the castle.

From one of the many windows overlooking the front yard, you spot Bela’s eyes on the two of you until she retreats into the shadows. Rigidly, Cassandra enters and immediately goes by the large fireplace to warm up. You only then notice how much more fluid her movements get. Or rather, how sluggish she was during the trip.

You shut the door and turn the key and realize it’s much easier to handle your situation when you’re the one locking yourself inside.

You take off your coat and scarf, then make to head for your bedroom —according to your calculations you’ll only get 3 hours of sleep— until… you notice how cold Cassandra looks.

She’s one step away from hugging the flames. And you can still hear her call you by your name in your head.

Great. Another thing to keep me up at night. You think as you approach her.

Slowly, so as to not scare her, you slip your arms around her slim waist from behind. She’s like a block of ice in your embrace, at first. Her body thaws gradually, to the point she’s fully relaxed against you.

“Thank you for today.” the words don’t come easy –they’re like pulling teeth— but you manage to get them out clearly enough.

“You’ll thank me in very many ways, plaything.” she says. “Having your own belongings in the castle is not a privilege any maid gets. But.” her voice, although quiet, hardens the slightest amount. “If, despite my generosity, you harbor dreams of escape… I will turn them to nightmares.”

Your blood goes cold in your veins. You can only nod against her shoulder.

Cassandra turns in your arms to look at you.

“And if you ever try to leave me alone here… I will find you and kill you myself.”

#cassandra dimitrescu #cassandra dimitrescu x oc #resident evil village #bela dimitrescu #lady dimitrescu #fanfiction #because i've read on spoilers of sadness and heartbreak and we all need something soft to take the pain away #cue our fav pillow princess being mega darling to her girl

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starr-fall-knight-rise · 3 years

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HASO, “Abort?”

Happy Tuesday guys, I hope you are all enjoying your week. Forgive me any mistakes I make here as I only have a few hours to write before work, and I am usually in a rush.

“Both of you get your suits back on.”

“What the hell is going on!” Richards demanded

Adam took a deep breath, “Captain Richards that was not an opening for a discussion, that was an order. Now put the damn suit on, or I swear I will knock you out and do it myself. The three of them were floating in the module staring at each other, hands resting against what must have been no more than a few millimeters of aluminum.

He stared at them, and they stared back.

Adam did not break eye contact willing the two willing them to do as they were told. Chavez was the first to move, hurrying over to her space suit and struggling to pull it on in a near panic as bright lights flashed from outside. Inside his heart was pounding but he tried to remain calm for the two standing before him.

He hurried over to help Chavez pull on her gear, finally sealing the helmet in place as Richards finally moved to do the same.

Adam helped pull the hard torso over the man’s head and link it to the waist before helping him pull on his gloves and, eventually the helmet. Before he let go, he kept hold of Richards by either side of the helmet staring at him through the glass, “I promise, if you listen to me, I will keep you safe.”

He kept eye contact with the other man until Richards finally nodded, and Adam let him go to float over and put on his own suit. His hands were steady, for now, but he knew as soon as the crisis was over he'd be shaking like a leaf.

If he survived.

He gritted his teeth, cursing himself for thinking like that. He was Admiral VIr for crying out loud. He had survived far too much to go and die now. He returned to the helm of the command module as he looked out the thick window at the lights flashing on either side of them. Despite the war that was raging around them, everything seemed so strangely quiet. There was no sound no rumbling, not even a vibration as one of the jets flew past.

Despite being at the controls of the vehicle, there was nothing he could do. They only had a certain amount of fuel to get them to the lunar surface, and if he wasted any of it at all, they would be either caught in orbit, or miss the moon entirely.

He had to keep his cool.

Another bright burst of light lit the window to his right. This one was closer this time.

His heart leaped up into his throat.

Richards and Chaves joined him buckling into their seats.

“What is going on.” Richards demanded again, his mike distant and tinny with the sound of very old technology.

“I believe anti alliance forces are attempting to assassinate me. They have been trying for months now, and I think they are being encouraged by very powerful members of the government.”

They watched as another set of ships zoomed past.

He saw a flash of a silhouette, just enough to know that one of them was a thunderhawk and the other was a silver Rundi drone.

It confirmed his worst fears. The Chairwoman had been behind this the whole time.

***

Red nearly collided with the rocket. The Thunderhawk had pulled up the last minute, but he had almost been too late. He jerked the stick to the side, throwing up his wing ust in time to avoid hitting the rocket as it made it’s slow way through space. He dove down on the other side forced to break off pursuit and cut in front of another thunderhawk coming in from above. He made to look like he was going to ram them, playing a dangerous game of chicken which he won at the last second as the other pilot panicked and cut to the left.

There were too many of them. Only five out of the original twenty had been destroyed, and he and the rest of their pilots were busy just keeping the thunderhawks away from the rocket, much less to have any time of firing at them.He had sent one of his people down to earth and one of them off towards the moon for backup. The moon was still hours away yet, so the hope that some help would be sent from them was unlikely, and even the man he had sent down to earth’s surface was cutting it close.

He didn’t have much hopes that they would be able to hold out that long.

Inside the cockpit his warning lights began to blink and blair as one of the other jets got a lock on hi. He rolled right to avoid them and dove down, cutting off the lock but still being pursued by those behind him. Up ahead he saw one of the silver balls erupt into flames as it was targeted by an expert hit from one of the thunderhawk pilots.

He rolled right.

Someone else rolled left. He cut up just in time to avoid being hit and raced forward to cut off another bird that was heading directly towards the rocket.

***

Eris hurried down the hallway, her knees screaming as she did her very best to sprint, but despite her human anatomy, she was a little too much like a starborn. With a cry of frustration she reached up and tore off her hoodie, throwing it to the ground and engaging her anti gravity belt. The ribbons on her back billowed out behind her.

Light spilled in from the windows on either side of the catwalk she was now on, filling her with a buzzing energy that she could feel radiating through the ribbons like electricity. She knew from her study of starborn that they could travel at thousands of miles an hour in the vacuum of space, especially when under the power of a star. She didn’t think she needed to go THAT fast, but anything would be better than what she was doing now.

As if in response to her will, she suddenly began to glide forward, picking up speed as she swooped towards the end of the hall, wind catching her in the face and roaring along her cheeks. WIth her starborn skin, she barely felt a thing as she raced around the corner and out of the waiting door. Two men dressed in military ACUs dived to the side as she blew past them crying out in alarm and confusion as the “Alien” floated by.

Somewhere distantly, she could sense Conn racing in the opposite direction towards the base.

Sunny and captain kelly had Admiral Massie in their custody and were dragging him out into the hallway.

She blew across the open ground her ribbons snapping and billowing behind her as she did. She didn’t even have time to imagine what she looked like as she roared over the open field and towards the waiting news vans which were just beginning to pack up their things. They were close to leaving, but she set out a sharp hard telepathic pulse ordering them to stop.

Compelling them to stop.

They froze in their tracks and looked up to see her coming.

Someone scrambled to turn on their camera, not sure what was going on but sure it had to be something good.

She tried not to think about what they would see as the camera flared to life following her approach.

“Make us live.” She ordered

The news people glanced between each other in confusion, “But no, we aren;t”

“What are-”

She came to a sudden jolting stop before them, her billowing black hair fanning out behind her like a curling halo.

“I said, put us on air.”

This time the telepathic pulse was too strong to resist. Mostly that pair with the fact that none of them were sure they wanted to resist. She was too interesting to pass up. They hurried to do what they were doing, and Eris was given just enough time to feel nervous before the camera was turned to her.

They were live.

She read it in the minds of those behind camera who she cut off as she began to speak, “Citizens of Earth, there has been a horrible conspiracy against you. The UN president has ordered the assasination of Admiral Adam Vir and has continually attempted to sabotage the mission. Just now General massie was taken into custody after ordering the deployment of twenty thunderhawks to harass the rocket and make its destruction look like some sort of collision with space debris.”

The group gawked at her as she raised her hand with the small silver device and began playing the recording. She knew something like this would never be admissible in court. She was pretty sure it would be considered entrapment of some kind, which is why it must be heard now, before everyone, so that the actions of the president could be judged by a jury of the world where it could not be hidden by political machinations.

“Communications have been lost with Apollo 11. And it is….. Well…. It is likely that he is already dead…..” Her voice broke, “No matter what happens, I need you, and this nation to understand what is happening before it gets swept under the rug. I saw it with my own eyes, heard it with my own ears and experienced their meeting in the thoughts of a man who is both xenophobic and hateful to his own humankind.”

She kept talking trying to give them all the information she could, spilling thoughts she had heard in the head of the UN president. Every meeting, every liaison, every name until her voice was beginning to crack.

***

The UN president was just standing to enter her vehicle when a slow muttering began in the crowd behind her. SHe turned as the ground before her went silent. She watched as a wave ran through the people. A wave of nudging and whispering and showing off news feeds they had pulled up on their wrist implants. It wasn’t long before the entire crowd was either staring down at their arms or clustered around someone else for viewing.

“What is going on.” She wondered turning to one of her men who was staring down at her own wrist.

“Madame president?” He said with a look of confusion.

She could hear it now.

“Her and general massie have ordered members of the UNSC to adjust funds in order to hide the twenty thunderhawks they were squirting away for just such an event.” She hurried forward grabbing the secret serviceman by the arm staring at it as she watched the streaming newsfeed and the freaky white alien with the large dark eyes and flowing black hair.

“She is afraid of aliens, she wishes to isolate and eventually use humanity’s superior forces to overtake trade in the galaxy-”

The muttering behind her had turned into an angry grumbling, and she turned to see the eyes of hundreds hat turned towards her.

“Get me out of here.” She hissed

The Secret Serviceman took a step back with a look of confusion and indecision on his face.

“It’s your job.” he snarled

He just stared at her.

She hurriedly ran over to her car as the crowd began to filter in around them pressing close. A few of the secret service men pulled guns but a large majority of them were frozen with indecision and were taken over by the crowd. She scrambled into the back seat of her vehicle and slammed the door shut screaming at the driver to get moving.

The crowd was surrounding them now pounding at the glass.

She could hear their angry voices raised for her to be heard behind bullet proof glass.

Outside, she watched a lone figure step onto the platform where the lectern was and stare at her with it’s beady black eyes. The Chairwoman of the GA stood over the crowd like it’s filthy alien lord.

And even though Rundi could not smile, she could swear it was smiling.

***

Baby K hit a rough patch of turbulence coming down from the atmosphere. She struggled with the controls as she was thrown left and right inside the cockpit of her rickety shuttle. Donovan red had ordered her down here to grab the UNSC, but she was so scared and full of adrenaline that she had dropped it at too steep an angle. The ride was much bumpier than it was supposed to be, and her teeth were rattling inside her head.

“Unidentified vessel, you have crossed into UNSC airspace, identify yourself or be destroyed.”

She scrambled for her communications, but her fingers felt as stiff as wood as she scrambled for the button.

“I repeat, unidentified vessel, you have entered UNSC airspace, you are ordered to identify yourself or be destroyed.”

She slammed her first into the comms button nearly panicking, “UNSC.” Her voice was rattling, “This is B-baby K, and I….. The Apollo 11 is under attack!” she was breathless as she forced the words out.

There was silence over the coombs, “Say again.”

“Apollo 11 is under attack!”

More silence, “Roger that.”

Two jets pulled up to the side of her, those she recognized as two F-90 Darkfires.

One of them adjusted its angle and cut engines before switching to the fusion engine that rocketed it up and out of site.

The other stayed for a moment, “Unidentified vessel, please land on UNSC base airstrip one.” Before turning and following it’s comrade.

***

Conn raced towards the airstrip feeling the wind in the ribbons at his back. He couldn’t go nearly as fast as he wanted too with air resistance . Wythe hell did Adam always have to get into so much trouble, why did he always have to be the center of attention.

Everyone either hated him or loved him, but the problem was people who hated him also wanted to kill him.

Why did he have to be so controversial?

Why did he have to be hated for something that was such a big deal. Why couldn't he be hated for having controversial political opinions . Conn paused.

On second thought, controversial political opinions were kind of what had gotten them here in the first place, so he guessed that was kind of a useless comparison. How about being the kind of guy who liked to talk too much about fishing. That was a great way to make people hate you for being boring, but it didn’t usually mean that people wanted to kill you.

Maybe they could get the man a hobby doing something that wasn’t so controversial.

Kicking small Animals or.

Cannibalism.

He came roaring to the stop at the edge of the airfield ust in time to watch an entire platoon of pilots racing towards jets. He could hear their minds and looked up to see a rather dinky shuttle descending from the sky. He floated forward towards one of the jets as a pilot leaped inside.

He was going to need a ride.

The pilot turned to look at him but Conn just shook his head.

The pilot decided to ignore him in the confusion and Conn Grabbed on tight.

Starborn he had come to learn were a very interesting species in comparison to others. Vertically as from the top down he was very fragile and likely to break his neck or collapse his spine if there was any undue pressure, but with horizontal forces, he was practically indestructible. Below him the ship roared to life and soon they were gathering speed along the runway.

His grip was tight, and he used the extra energy from his ribbons to sped himself up along with the jet to reduce the pull on his arms.

His brip wasn’t that strong.

They went vertical almost immediately, and he made sure to orient his body in the correct direction as they went hurtling into the sky.

***

Red’s right wing had been hit. If there had been atmosphere around him he would have been a goner, but there was no air resistance here, so once he regained control of his roll, he pulled back into position and fired one last shot as the opportunity arose. The sixth thunderhawk was destroyed in an eruption of debris, which he dodged only with difficulty limping without the aid of the maneuvering jet on the end of his one wing. Things were only speeding up now, the Runid were almost gone and the pressure was being laid thick on his people. They were hard to hit but the pursuit made it almost impossible for them to do any real maneuvering of their own. He was almost hit again as another darkfire sped underneath him. They rolled this way and that rocking from one side to the other. Flying through debris and over strips of silver metal.

Below them the earth hung as a clowning orb.

Red cut in a wide circle coming in with the sun at his back using it to blind one of the enemy darkfires as he came in. he watched the group of them form up suddenly as a ring around the slow moving rocket intending quite certainly to rush it all at once. He screamed into the comm trying to order his men around, but it was going to be too late, he could already see it coming.

The jets rushed forward, and he did too screaming inside his helmet as they went to broadside Apollo 11.

And then with all the silence of space, sixteen F-90 Dark Fires came spitting overhead all at once raining down a line of ordinance that cut through the group of unsuspecting thunderhawks. Space around them was filled with a silent explosion as each and every one of them was ripped to shreds.

All except one.

He saw it at the last moment.

It had been hit in the tail and had gone wildly off course.

It turned sideways, but had just enough force….. For its wing to tear straight through the aluminum siding of the rocket.

Chavez and Richards had been ordered to strap into their seats. Adam had taken it upon himself to lock down the rest of the main cabin. Outside the flashing lights were like a fireworks display without sound. He grabbed onto one of the rails, forcing equipment back into the palace so that if anything happened it wouldn’t fly out.

His legs were kicked up behind him as he floated forward reaching for some of the controls as a sudden bright wash of light filtered in through the windows. He heard a scream over his com, and then the air around him was rent with a horrific tearing noise, which suddenly went silent. There was a rush, and he jerked forward as he was sucked back….. And out of the ship entirely.

His hands and legs kicked and flailed as he tried to right himself, hearing his own breathing as the only sound as he watched the rocket begin to spin debris erupting around him as air, and whatever wasn’t strapped down was sucked through the small opening.

The rocket was spinning wildly, he was spinning wildly in a silent abyss. Grunting against the force of his spin, he reached down for the controls to the CO2 canister built into the pack of his spacesuit.

He groaned not sure which way was up or down or back. He tried to right himself against the spin by firing in the opposite direction to slow his spin.he could see the rocket now spinning in the opposite direction with the sudden loss of oxygen. He hoped the other astronauts were ok. He saw the silhouette of a jet fly past in the distance making its way towards the spinning rocket.

At least there was someone here to help.

Maybe the others would survive-

And then he stopped, coming to a confusing halt in the middle of space.

That shouldn’t have been right. He should have kept going forever. He tried turning his head, but he felt like the pillsbury doughboy in this two thousand year old suit.

What was happening

“Did you miss me.”

Well shit, now he sort of wished he could keep spinning.

There was a tugging on the outside of his suit, and Conn floated into view in front of his helmet.

“Hey sweetheart.”

“You are probably the last person I wanted to see.” he said though he didn’t entirely mean it, and unfortunately Conn knew that too the mindreading asshole that he was.

I could hardly let the father of my child go spinning off into space without taking accountability for his family.”

“Shove it up your ass Conn.”

“No really, not even the vacuum of space is going to save you from your responsibilities. Now, about custody, I was thinking you could have every other weekend and a couple of major holidays”

He gave a ruful sort of smile as Conn grabbed him by the life support pack and started floating them towards the rocket, which the F-90s had somehow managed to slow the spin of the rocket, and pull it back on course with grappling magnets.

All around them space was filled with debris. No more darkfires were present and those that were were quickly being grappled. One sleek racing jet slowly cruises past them. One of its wings was damaged, but whoever was inside waved with one hand as he rolled past.

Adam lifted a hand as Conn brought him the last few hundred feet to the torn opening in the side of the ship, allowing him to step through.

Conn patted him on the side of the helmet, “make sure to be home by dinnertime sweetie.” Before blowing him a kiss and vanishing back out the hole.

Adam floated there a bit nonplussed for a moment before turning back to the front of the ship where Chaves and Richards were still strapped into their seats. He floated over to strap himself in.

“Admiral! You’re ok.”

“Yes, it seems that I am, thanks to a….. Friend of mine.”

Just then Conn appeared again just before their right side window, and like the classy gentlemen that he was began rubbing his butt up against the glass.

He sighed, “Friend is kind of stretching it.”

“Apollo 11 this is Houston, do you copy!”

The man on the other end of the line sounded close to tears, and Adam hurried to respond, “Houston this is Apollo 11.”

On the other side he thought he heard the sound of voices cheering in relief.

“What is your status, over.”

“We are a bit beat up Houston, we have a tear in our hull, but our suits are ok, and we have help.”

“Prepare to abort mission.”

Adam frowned, “Now wait a second there Houston, I didn’t get sucked out the side of my own rocket to just quit now. Tell the boys to come up here and patch us up and we can finish the mission. All systems are still functioning, and we are back on course.” he glanced over at the others, “That is, if the crew wants to continue.”

There was a pause and then Chavez timidly piped in, “I’d be ok with that.”

Richards sighed, “Roger Houston, patch us up.”

Granted it may have been cheating. Apollo 11 hadn’t had support with special tools that cold just patch a space ship within ten minutes, but then again the original Apollo 11 hadn’t been in the middle of a firefight while on their journey to the moon. So it was with some trepidation that Houston allowed it, and before long they had air back inside the cabin back up to pressure, but they also had a sixteen man rotating escort for the rest of the way.

The group of them were even shocked to see Rundi drones join the formation only to learn that it had been the UN president who had allegedly called the hit on him. It was hard to believe, but they were only getting snippets here and then from over radio and from Conn, who floated around occasionally to rub another part of his anatomy against the window and give them teasing updates

The moon was growing slowly in their vision.

“I can see my house from here.” Adam remarked as they prepared to detach the lunar module from the rest of the ship.

They landed without incident observed by mobile camera crews and news reporters as he made his own footprint on the never changing dust of the moon’s surface. He gave them a thumbs up to let them know he was fine and hesitated only once before setting up the UN flag in the dirt. He refused to let his enthusiasm be dampened by the day’s events and hopped around dancing and leaping for joy as another one of his childhood dreams was fulfilled. That was before he plowed face first into the moon’s surface and required help from Richards to stand back up again.

They left soon after taking another three days of escort back to earth before strapping themselves in for final entry.

Conn left them just as they were entering orbit with a middle finger for all three of them.

“Your friend is super delightful isn’t it.’

“Try having a child with him.” Adam muttered refusing to elaborate even as they stared at him in confusion.

They fell from the sky and landed somewhere in the Pacific ocean, picked up by the waiting navy vessel who was within nine miles of their landing site. They were fished from the water and returned safe and sound to the ship to cheers and cameras. Adam’s legs felt a little like jelly after days of not using them, and he was finally able to relax lying on the deck of the ship under the sun as people ran around them on either side.

His hands shook slowly building up after the stress of the last week. He took long deep breaths and closed his eyes.

The next few days were going to be a real shit show.

209 notes · View notes

xjoonchildx · 4 years

Text

guarded | jhs x reader | chapter two: i’m screwed

summary: you’ve tried to separate yourself from your infamous crime family, but a new case has your carefully-constructed world crashing down around you. now you have to figure out how to heal old wounds and handle the new man who enters your orbit.

pairing: hoseok x reader

genre: mafia AU, E2L, slow burn, tsundere, eventual smut

rating: 18+

word count: 3.1K

A/N: you guys are? the? best? i’m so thrilled that you guys like the story and i hope you like this chapter, too. i’d like to thank my emotional support llamas @ladyartemesia and @taetaewonderland for being the amazing people they are and beta reading for me, too. they really are the best.

Chapter 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | EPILOGUE

************************

“What’s with the muscle?”

Donghyuk looks over his menu, eyes narrowed on the man just behind you. You sip your wine as you decide on how you want to answer that.

Jung Hoseok is seated at a table for one, barely three feet away. If you thought spending the last four days with him under one roof had been the most awkward stretch of your entire life, then you were dead wrong.

Tonight is infinitely more awkward.

“Personal security,” you say casually, picking up your menu to peruse the entrees for effect.

Donghyuk’s answering huff of agitation is loud -- probably loud enough for Hoseok to hear and your skin prickles with embarrassment.

“You need security to have dinner with me now?”

“Don’t be silly,” you say under your breath, hoping Donghyuk will take the hint and lower his voice. “I’m getting some heat on the Kwon and Lim case, so it’s just a precaution. Nothing to worry about.”

“Right,” he deadpans, one skeptical eyebrow raised. “I see you every day at work. How is this the first I’m hearing about this?”

“Must have slipped my mind,” you say with nonchalance, looking back to your menu.

You should be deciding on something to eat but your mind is wandering. You wonder if Hoseok has ever been to this restaurant before. You wonder if he purposely picked a table where he could see you but you couldn’t see him. You wonder what he plans to order.

You wonder --

“Well, you’re sending him home for the night, right?”

Your wine glass thumps against the linen tablecloth when you set it down with more force that you’d intended. A flush creeps up your neck.

How much of this conversation can Hoseok hear from his vantage point? The thought makes the tips of your ears warm as you fix your dinner date and occasional hookup partner with a warning glare. Smart as Donghyuk is -- with the law degree to prove it -- he can be downright thick sometimes.

‘No,” you say quietly.

He narrows his eyes.

“No, you don’t want to? Or no, you can’t?”

You blow out one long, irritated breath.

“‘Hyuk, I’m about two seconds from walking out of here,” you hiss. “Can we just drop this?”

He stops just short of frowning, eyes sliding back over your shoulder to Hoseok.

“And for the love of God, quit staring at him.”

Donghyuk slams his menu shut.

**********************

Jung Hoseok is like a ghost in your home.

He moves with a practiced stealth that makes it hard for you to keep track of what room he’s in at any given time. He’s awake when you wake and still awake when you head to your room at night.

You have no idea when the man sleeps or when he eats.

Conversations -- if you can call them that -- are stilted and awkward. Short discussions limited to working out the logistics of your day. You tell him where you need to be and when and he makes it happen.

Apart from that, there is silence -- thick and suffocating and constant.

In fact, Hoseok is so silent inside your home that when you’ve retreated to your opposite corners of the apartment you could almost pretend that things are normal. You could almost pretend that you don’t have a complete stranger living in your home.

But then you catch a scent.

It’s the smell of coffee that greets you when you wake every morning to a freshly-brewed pot.

It’s the clean, masculine smell that wafts under his bedroom door, carried on humid air after he’s showered.

And sometimes it’s the scent of gun oil that creeps into your room at night when he’s cleaning his pistol, bringing back memories you’d thought were long lost. Memories you’d hoped were long lost.

That’s the scent that always brings you back to your senses -- the one that reminds you that the man under your roof isn’t just any houseguest.

He might not look like the battered thugs who worked for your father all those years, but underneath the designer suits and composed exterior is a man cut from the very same cloth.

And you’d better not forget it.

***********************

The sunlight beating down on the window to your office this morning is deceptive.

Behind the protection of the thick glass, it’s powerful enough to make you feel uncomfortably warm in your lightweight sweater -- but outside it’s bitter cold.

Hoseok is parked just across the street from your building, like he has been every day this week. You can’t help but notice there isn’t any steam coming out of the exhaust of the sleek black sedan and you wonder if he’s warm enough in there.

“You busy?”

Hyejin interrupts your thoughts with a knock at your office door.

“Not at all,” you sigh, turning to smile at her before taking a seat at your desk. “I should be busy, I just seem to keep finding ways to put things off.”

“Tell me about it,” she laughs. “Listen, I was looking for the photos we got from the Daerim warehouse. I can’t find them in the file and thought maybe you pulled them for something.”

“No, I haven’t pulled them,” you say, lips pursing into a frown as your hands skate over the papers on your desk. You flip the corners of the folders up, checking to see if the photos are hidden underneath. “They’ve got to be here somewhere. Maybe Hajoon took them?”

Hyejin nods. “Yeah, maybe. I’ll check with him. You alright this morning?”

Tense laughter bubbles up your chest.

“Yeah, I’m okay. Just have a lot going on, is all. Let me know when you find those photos, okay?”

“Will do,” Hyejin promises before leaving you alone to your work and your thoughts.

Hyejin is probably the closest thing you have to a friend — but there’s no way you’d tell even her that your brother thinks someone is trying to kill you and you’re living with an armed guard.

That’s not a conversation you can have with anyone.

You grab a drink, straighten up your papers and get to work.

The raid at the Daerim warehouse turned up enough guns to arm the entire city. Police spent hours unpacking weapons from giant crates, hidden inside huge sacks of coffee beans and offloaded from a ship that docked from Colombia. The coffee was pretty decent, actually.

As for the guns -- you knew the Ssijog leadership was furious about the confiscation. In all, investigators estimated they took about 7 billion won worth of firearms out of that warehouse that day. That’s the kind of financial hit that could level any criminal organization, including your brother’s.

What you can’t seem to understand is why the Ssijog seem more worried about the men taken away at that raid than the guns.

You take a close look at the side-by-side booking photos of Kwon Jiho and Lim Joowon.

These are the kind of men who look like the muscle your father kept around. Heavily-tattooed, thick-necked and ears cauliflowered from one too many fights. Their criminal records read like street gangster templates, page after page of petty crimes starting in their youth graduating to more violent crimes in recent years.

Men like these are a dime a dozen in this line of work. So what makes these two so special that the Ssijog are this desperate to get them back?

You pull a post-it note out of your drawer and grab a sharpie. In big block letters you write the question you have to answer before this situation really spirals out of control.

WHAT DO THEY KNOW?

****************************

Car rides are the only time you let yourself get a good look at Jung Hoseok.

When he’s driving, his eyes never leave the road, never stray in your direction -- and you refuse to make him feel like some kind of glorified chauffeur by riding in the backseat. So you use the silent drives as an opportunity to steal glances at him from the passenger seat like a shy kid.

Hoseok has strangely elegant hands for a man with a career in crime, you think. Long fingers free of scratches and calluses; prominent veins that move when his hand works over the gear shift. And then there is his face -- his chiseled jawline and sharp nose and bow-shaped mouth.

He’s handsome, of course, and you -- a woman with a pulse and perfectly-functioning eyesight -- would be lying if you tried to deny it.

Tonight you are so distracted with looking at Hoseok’s face that you miss the fact that he’s skipped the turn he normally takes to get back to your apartment. It isn’t until you are well into the heart of downtown that you snap out of your stupor and take a look outside.

“Where are we going?”

“Your brother wants to see you.”

Your scowl is wasted on the man because he doesn’t bother to look your way.

“So is this how things work now? You and my brother decide where I go and when and I’m the last to know?”

Hoseok is unmoved by your obvious irritation.

“Just following orders,” he counters evenly. “You’ll need to take up any concerns you have about your schedule with Namjoon.”

“I’ll do that,” you murmur, turning to glare out the window.

A short while later you’re walking into your brother’s office, Hoseok trailing closely behind. Namjoon signals for him to leave the two of you alone to speak privately. You round on him as soon as the door latches behind Hoseok.

“If you want me here,” you say tightly, “Then tell me. Directly. I don’t like finding out I have plans second-hand from my babysitter.”

The corners of Namjoon’s mouth lift into a wry smile. “Good to see you too?”

You roll your eyes but you can’t help but smile back. Your brother seems at ease tonight, lighter somehow. It’s a good look on him.

“I want to know how things are going,” he says, leaning back into his chair. “How are you finding Jung Hoseok?”

Let’s see. Frigid? Intense? Unapproachable?

“He’s...quiet,” you say after a long moment. “And maybe unnecessary at this point. I haven’t had any more trouble since that letter.”

“I assure you, he’s still very necessary,” Namjoon returns quickly. “We’ve still got a lot to work out as far as this situation goes. My guys on the street say the Ssijog are in planning mode. I don’t want any of them catching us unaware with some kind of nasty surprise.”

You sigh. “So no end in sight.”

“Not right now. Just bear with this a bit longer, yeah?”

“Yeah,” you agree quietly, reaching into your pocket to retrieve your buzzing phone.

Your mouth pulls into a tight line when you read the waiting message.

hyejin: can’t find the pictures. hajoon doesn’t have [ 6:15 PM ]

you: ? i have backup on my laptop [ 6:17 PM ]

hyejin: okay need to make sure we have those tonight? [ 6:18 PM ]

you: yeah, i’ll call you from my place when i get them [ 6:18 PM ]

“Everything alright?” Namjoon asks when you rub your fingers against your temples.

“Yeah, just work stuff,” you sigh, a low-level anxiety simmering in your stomach. “I actually have to go, unless there’s something else you needed?”

“No, just—“ your brother looks like there’s something he wants to say, but decides against it. “— just be careful, okay?”

You nod and send him a small smile.

“I’ll try.”

You’re almost to the door when you hear him call out to you again.

“And Amsaja -- with Hoseok. Try being nice.”

He nearly laughs at the disgusted look you shoot back.

*****************************

HOSEOK

Hoseok’s got a pretty good idea of what a prosecutor makes in this town, and it’s damned sure not enough to pay for your lifestyle.

Your spacious apartment in one of the best buildings in town, your expensive furnishings, your fancy car and your designer clothes. Hoseok has done the math in his head and that shit does not add up.

You’re a hypocrite, he decides -- too good to associate yourself with the trash that brings money in for the Gajog, but apparently not too good to spend it. Living comfortably on the backs of men you wouldn’t acknowledge in the streets.

Men like him.

Hoseok wishes that didn’t get under his skin the way it does.

He wishes he didn’t feel resentment simmering under the surface every time he sees you, every time he even thinks of you. You keep to yourself and you don’t make demands and you haven’t really given him a reason to dislike you, but he desperately wants to.

He needs to.

He wishes he truly didn’t give a shit about the idiot you had dinner with the other day. The one straight off the assembly line of some prep school in the Seocho District. The one with the loud mouth and the loafers and the country-club grin. He wonders what you see in that guy, when all he can see is how punchable his face looks.

That’s why Hoseok doesn’t give too much weight to the furtive looks he can see you stealing in his peripheral vision. He doesn’t put too much stock in the way your cheeks color when he looks at you sometimes. He has to remind himself that underneath the polite distance and pretty packaging, you’re just desperate to be done with this entire situation. You’re desperate to distance yourself from him and people like him.

When he finds himself staring at you when you’re not looking, Hoseok forces himself to remember that men like him don’t warm your bed, they pay your bills.

And he’d better not forget it.

**************************

Hoseok can read the agitation in your body language loud and clear the second you slide back into the car.

He can see the way you keep scrolling through your phone, firing off texts and emails from the passenger seat. Tonight, you stare out of the window instead of pretending not to stare at him and he wonders what happened behind closed doors with your brother.

He almost lets it go because it’s none of his business. But he’s curious.

“Are you...upset about something?”

You seem to startle when he asks the simple question.

“Uh, yeah. Sort of,” you admit quietly, eyes falling back to your phone. “Work stuff. I have to find something when we get home.”

Hoseok nods, eyes glued to the road. “We’ll be there soon.”

“Thanks,” you say, turning to look out the window again.

Minutes later, you’re both walking into the apartment. Hoseok turns to secure the deadbolt lock and when he turns back, you’re gone. He hears the room to your bedroom click closed.

He briefly entertains the idea of asking you if you need help, but resists.

Instead he sweeps the open rooms of the apartment like he does every night before heading into his room and closing the door.

************************

The knock that comes almost two hours later is just short of aggressive. Hoseok jumps up off the bed, ready in the case of trouble.

He does not miss the way your eyes go a bit wide when he opens the door, dressed in a thin tank and sweatpants.

“You need something?” he asks when you don’t say anything right away.

“Uh yeah, sorry,” you say with a shake of your head. “I’ve just never seen you in anything but a suit. For a second I wasn’t sure you were the same man.”

“You think I sleep in a suit?”

“Well I wouldn’t put it past you,” you say hotly. “But that’s not the point. I need you to take me to the office. Please.”

Hoseok glances at his watch.

“Now?”

“Yes,” you sigh. “I know it’s late and I’m sorry. This is super important.”

“Alright, hang on,” Hoseok says, turning to grab his holster from the dresser. He slips into it and notices your gaze lingering on the pistol he fits onto his side. You clear your throat and look down at the floor while he slips a sweatshirt overhead.

“It’s just a precaution, okay?”

Hoseok doesn’t know why he’s bothering to reassure you. You know that he’s armed all the time, you grew up in this life. None of this should surprise you.

You say nothing.

It takes only ten minutes to get across town to your office, in the dead of night and in the absence of traffic. You look almost as irritated as you are surprised when Hoseok climbs out of the car to escort you inside.

“You’re coming in?”

“Yes,” Hoseok fires back, keeping pace just behind you. “It’s well after hours. No one will see us together, since that’s what you’re so worried about.”

You stop for a moment, turning to face him and mouth opening like you want to deny it. But you don’t.

“Fine,” you say under your breath. “Please avoid looking at the cameras.”

“I know how to do my job,” Hoseok manages between gritted teeth.

“I never said you didn’t,” you hiss back.

The two of you stand just outside the entrance to the building, trading glares.

The tension feels like a step backward somehow.

One strained elevator ride later, Hoseok trails you into your office. You flip the lights and immediately get to work going through file cabinets. Hoseok takes a look around.

It’s not a huge space, but the large windows looking out onto the street make it look a little bigger. Piles of file folders and papers are sorted into neat columns on your desk. A desk, Hoseok notes -- completely devoid of personal effects. No pictures, no mementos. He doesn’t know why that bothers him so much.

“Shit.”

It’s the first word either one of you has spoken in five minutes.

“Shit, shit, shit.”

Hoseok turns to find you on your knees at the base of a filing cabinet, a pile of flash drives scattered across the floor.

“What is it?” he asks, crouching down beside you.

“Oh my God,” you whisper, covering your face with your hands.

Hoseok picks up a flash drive, turns it to the side to read the small label. It’s dated three years back, with the name “Cheon” written on the side.

“All of my digital evidence is gone. All of it,” you whisper, voice wobbling with emotion. “I was searching the cloud at home and thought there was some kind of mistake. There’s no way this is a mistake. There’s no way my cloud and flash backups disappeared by chance.”

You’re right, of course, but Hoseok doesn’t voice that out loud. You look stricken already without him pouring salt in that wound.

“What about these?” he asks, handing you the flash drive.

“Old cases,” you say, shoving a hand through your hair. “They didn’t bother to pull my old cases. Whoever took them knew exactly what they were looking for.”

Hoseok almost forgets himself for a moment.

He nearly forgets who you are and who he is and what this is. He stops himself just short of reaching out to put a comforting hand on your shoulder.

You turn tired eyes up to meet his.

“I’m screwed.”

**************************

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gumnut-logic · 3 years

Text

Bruised

For @scribbles97 ::hugs you silly:: It is only little, but it is Scotty with a dash of Virg being Virg.

Sometimes the prescription is simple, if unexpected. A little Scott hurt/comfort.

I hope you enjoy it.

-o-o-o-

Thunderbird One shuddered as she slid into dock, her whole fuselage groaning as if in relief. As she relaxed, her airframe creaked, losing heat to the cool of the hangar and for a moment everything was still.

Scott let his shoulders loosen, his whole body slumping in his pilot’s chair. One by one, he uncurled his fingers from the controls, his joints stiff from holding them so tight.

His head dropped back against the headrest and his eyes closed.

God, damn.

Breath hissed between his teeth as he let it out as if he had been holding it in all afternoon.

It certainly felt like he had.

They couldn’t save everyone.

They couldn’t.

But god, how he tried.

He drew the breath back in and activated pilot retrieval. One’s main viewing hatch folded back and the platform extended out from the dock as his chair unfolded to meet it.

Even then it took him a long moment to move.

“Scott?” John startled him. “You okay?”

He drew his shoulders up, straightening automatically. “Perfectly fine, Thunderbird Five.”

There was a grunt from orbit. John didn’t believe him.

Scott was not surprised.

A sigh and he pushed himself out of his seat and onto the delivery platform, forcing the correct stance so he didn’t abruptly end his career on the concrete floor far below.

Machinery that had no concept of emotional state hummed smoothly and retrieved him back to solid ground. He took the last step.

Scott stared at his elevator for a solid minute before turning to the stairs and taking them instead.

He needed to move. Needed start his heart beating again. Needed to rescue himself from that vast hole that was sucking him down into its depths. That same empty hole those dead eyes had lured him to once the boy’s life had fluttered away and…

He closed his eyes and rubbed his face with a gloved hand.

It was always the eyes that got him.

These ones had been brown, somewhere between Virgil’s and Gordon’s and…oh god.

Move.

He threw himself up the stairs. Fortunately, there was a lot of them and they made his body work hard. By the time he made it to the locker room, he was panting.

His own breath was harsh in his ears and had a helplessness to it he didn’t want to acknowledge.

He shed uniform. His gloves hit the bench, followed by his baldric, his boots skidding across the floor. Struggling not to think, he unzipped his flight suit and shed the thick material, barely acknowledging the cool air as it hit the bare skin of his arms.

Another moment and he flung off his undershirt and shorts and padded over to a shower cubicle naked as the day he was born.

Goose pimples raised on his arms.

The shower was as hot as he could get it. But not hot enough to wash away the bruises he had no doubt Virgil would be targeting the moment he laid eyes on his eldest brother.

Scott’s sigh couldn’t be heard above the water spray.

Body scrubbed clean…ever so clean…red raw in places…the Commander of International Rescue stood under the steaming shower and closed his eyes.

You can’t save everyone.

It was his father’s voice. The same voice that came to him in all difficult moments. Grey eyes, reassuring smile and a strength Scott wished daily that he had. Jeff Tracy was a legend, bigger than life. Jeff Tracy was his father.

Jeff Tracy was a voice that guided him, that saved him, held him tight and prevented him from falling into that pit of despair that sometimes just loomed.

He turned the water off and let the remains drip off his body.

His left thigh was turning an ugly purple.

Damn.

Another sigh and he pushed aside the cubicle door and grabbed a towel.

It was big, extra fluffy, sky blue and all Virgil’s idea. He could still see his brother making his case for luxury towels in the locker room where they were needed. Mental health, he claimed.

Scott, Air Force to the core, had used abrasive cardboard squares masquerading as towels enough times to acknowledge the difference and how right his little brother was. It wasn’t a luxury; it was a necessity.

Scott buried his face in deep cotton as the cool air wrapped around him. Another moment and he was rubbing himself dry, his thigh, left ribcage and arm complained. The ache was creeping up on him. He hadn’t really noticed other than the sharp collision when he had initially fallen.

But he hadn’t had time. Arms full of dying rescuee with a building on its way down…he did what he had to do.

Still, it hadn’t been enough.

First John and then Virgil yelling at him over comms. He was fine. The teenage boy was dead, but Scott Tracy was fine.

Just fine.

He scrubbed his hair dry, trying his best to ignore the fact his left arm hated being lifted above his shoulders.

Hair hung in his eyes and he brushed it aside, irritably.

Somewhere outside the rock walls of the locker room a familiar roar swelled and he knew Thunderbird Two and his three brothers were moments away from invading this quiet space.

Scott straightened. It was inevitable. Virgil would not let him escape again, but there might be a few more minutes alone if he got his shit together.

One of the advantages of flying the fast ‘bird. First dibs at the showers and that moment to gather himself before his brothers cornered him.

Digging through his locker, he found some underwear, loose pants and an old t-shirt. His usual casual wear beckoned, but even he knew he wasn’t fit to go out again, even if Virgil hadn’t grounded him yet.

He wasn’t stupid.

Tomorrow, yes. Today? He needed a stiff drink and time to himself.

So that is exactly what he did. Detouring to the drinks cabinet, he nabbed himself a bottle of scotch and two tumblers. Two, because he was a realist.

Hair still a damp mess, he skipped up to his rooms, grabbed his tablet, and hid on his own private balcony. From here, he could see the Island, the villa below and the sky to the south. Mateo had birds hovering over it like it always did in the early evening as the day started winding down.

His eyes randomly tracked a lone bird, different from the others, coasting past high above the Island.

He threw himself into an overly plush lounger. Again, a sky blue and Virgil-instigated. Scott had returned from a mission several years ago to find it sitting on his balcony. Not a word had been said, but he knew it was Virgil. Just like the towels, it wasn’t extravagance, it was mental health and Scott had to admit to curling up in the contraption on many an occasion since.

The tablet, bottle of whisky and tumblers landed with a thud on the wooden table beside it.

His body creaked as he folded into the chair and he was reminded that he would likely have a medic brother on his ass sometime soon.

He lay back and closed his eyes and forced every to muscle relax.

And tried to ignore the eyes etched into his mind.

Only to be startled awake as someone loomed over him.

“Hey, hey, it’s only me.” Familiar, soft baritone and deep brown eyes, Virgil was crouched down beside him. His brother’s hair was still curly damp from the shower and he was frowning…at the bruises on Scott’s arm. “Just chasing you up after that fall.”

Scott shifted on the lounger and his whole body protested. Damnit. “I’m fine, Virgil.”

“I’ll decide that.” That prompted the ghastly yellow scanner light to flicker across his body.

“Virgil!”

His brother’s lips thinned to a line as he read the scanner’s readout. “You’re off rota at least twenty-four hours, possibly more.”

“I know that.”

“I’ll note that against your diagnosis of ‘fine’.”

Scott glared at his brother.

Virgil rolled back on his heels, eyes assessing in that damned medical way of his.

“Virgil, I’m okay. A few bruises. I’ll live. Stop worrying.” He hated being the source of anxiety.

Still, his brother stared, his frown emphasizing that scar between his eyebrows.

“What?!”

Virgil’s eyes didn’t waver. “Sit up.”

“Why?”

“Scott…”

Fine. He pushed himself up out of the lounger and sat on its side, frustrated as all hell as to why his brother was being such a pain.

Virgil rolled onto his knees and before Scott could do anything, he found himself wrapped in a massive hug.

His brother’s arms, ever so strong, built for heavy lifting, held him tight, but gently, Virgil’s damp hair brushing his cheek as his head rested on Scott’s shoulder.

Startled, it took Scott a blink to return the gesture, his longer arms flailing for just that moment of surprise before curling around red flannel. “Virgil? You okay?”

His brother’s only answer was to tighten his hold a little more.

Scott frowned, unsure what the hell was going on, but Virgil didn’t let go and Scott could only stay tensed up for so long before he was forced to relax into his brother’s embrace.

“What are you doing?” It was asked against flannel and his own breath was warm against his lips.

Virgil still didn’t answer, but one large hand crept onto the back of Scott’s head, fingers stroking hair.

What?

But somehow the question never made it to his lips. Somehow, his body began to melt, each muscle falling limp, those strong arms taking the place of the tension in his body.

Fingers carded through his hair.

“Virg…” But it was little more than breath and he found himself blinking rapidly.

No.

Still, Virgil didn’t stop. Scott could feel his brother’s steady pulse, thrumming against his neck, his chest moving with each breath.

Scott closed his eyes.

Ever so warm.

He could have struggled, fought, pushed his brother away. But…

Brown eyes vacant and hollow. The image had him flinching and the arms around him reacted, shifting just a little. His brother’s baritone rumbled a reassurance he didn’t quite hear.

But still Virgil held him.

Held him.

Scott had no resistance left.

That baritone rumbled again and his brother’s free hand began stroking his back.

Nonsense words. His brother was spouting nonsense words.

But Scott’s eyes were closed and his body spent. He wilted into his brother’s arms and found himself breaking on the inside.

Vacant, hollow eyes.

So young.

So like a little brother.

Scott scrunched up his face, fighting his own reaction. But Virgil was still rumbling, still stroking his hair.

A single tear escaped to dampen red flannel.

No.

He let the wave of grief wash over him, but refused to react, waiting for it to wane away.

His heart beat too fast and it left him exhausted.

And still Virgil held him.

He lost time for a bit there. Eyes closed. Warm flannel. His brother’s voice. A small part of him resisted it. Virgil was a little brother despite their closeness in age. Scott should be the comforter, always…

But the little boy who had lost his mom, the young man who had lost his dad…the commander who lost a young teenager in his arms today…took that moment, grabbing it like a life line and accepting what his brother was trying to give him.

He sat there, he didn’t know how long, just existing, warm and safe.

Perhaps he would have fallen asleep right there in his brother’s arms, whether he would be embarrassed to admit it or not, but there were bruises and aches and eventually he was forced to gently pull away.

Warm brown eyes peered up at him, still worried. Virgil’s hand was on Scott’s knee as if he didn’t want to let go.

“Thanks, Virg.”

That hand squeezed his knee in acknowledgement. “Lie down and get some rest.” His little brother stood up and walked out of sight a moment, only to return hauling another lounger, this one in a deep green. “John’s coming down in the morning. We can debrief then.” Virgil grunted as he put the lounge down. “Grandma has an eye on Gordon and Alan, but the Fish has a new Buddy and Ellie series and Alan is hip deep in that latest game of his. I think they’re good.” He threw himself onto the lounge and the structure creaked under his weight. He lay back, crossed his feet at his ankles and closed his eyes. Virgil was obviously here for the long haul.

Scott wasn’t surprised.

The scanner lay discarded on the table.

A sigh and he lay back just like his brother. The sky was beginning to pink in the east, the echoes of a sunset he couldn’t see lighting up Mateo.

He felt far more relaxed than he had earlier. A tension had been eased, while not entirely, that would take time, lessened considerably.

He eyed his medic brother. The man looked like he was going to fall asleep. The sight of him had Scott yawning.

Damn him.

But it was thought with fondness and with a sudden urge to reach out and hug his brother again.

“Go to sleep, Scott.”

Virgil didn’t even bother to open his eyes.

Scott sighed and looked back up at the sky. It had been a shit day. Not the first. Probably not the last. Vacant eyes still haunted him and probably would for some time, but a pair of rich, brown eyes full of life and not a little love had somehow managed to take the edge off. His brother had filled that cold vacuum of a hole with warmth.

Virgil began to snore and Scott was forced to smile.

The snoring was probably fake, but it was lulling nonetheless. Safe and home.

Loved.

Scott closed his eyes.

And let himself drift away.

-o-o-o-

FIN.

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #Scott Tracy #Virgil Tracy

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221bsunsettowers · 3 years

Text

TK/Carlos: Please Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow

Fandom: 9-1-1 Lone Star

Pairing: TK/Carlos

Prompt: Dissociation

Carlos is missing, kidnapped by a criminal he brought down during an undercover operation, and TK is frantic. When they do find Carlos, they realize he's been shown a faked photograph of a murdered TK, and has completely disassociated.

I promise that everything does end up okay at the end! I always have to have my hurt/comfort angst with a happy ending. I can’t whump these boys permanently.

I did research on dissociation before and while writing this piece, but I can't promise my writing is medically accurate. Please know I tried, and I apologize for any inaccuracies.

CW: dissociation, some blood and bruising, faked photograph of a character having been murdered, one use of the f word

Can also be read on Ao3 here

It had taken three hours and fourteen minutes to find Carlos.

It had taken three hours and fourteen minutes after TK's phone rang, after he was told Carlos had answered what should have been a simple domestic dispute call, and never came back. That the house he had been called to was deserted and had been for years. That the only sign anyone had been there was blood soaked into the rug.

Three hours and fourteen minutes and the scent was fading off of Carlos' hoodie, the one TK had plucked from the closet just that morning, smirking at his boyfriend before Carlos had walked over with a laugh and kissed the smirk right off TK's lips.

Any members of the 126 that were off shift had immediately joined the search, paired up with any police officers that weren't already running down leads. TK had wanted to be everywhere at once, out there finding Carlos, at the police station listening to the tips and reports, at their home in case Carlos managed to make it there.

In the end, it was decided for him, his father and Carlos' captain finding a nearby hallway at the police station where TK could pace up and down its length, ringing Carlos' cell phone over and over, closing his eyes and soaking in the sound of his boyfriend through the words of his voicemail.

TK didn't eat, didn't rest, didn't stop moving, the absence of the love of his life like molten lava under his skin, burning and stinging and bringing tears to his eyes, wearing out his strength and hope with every minute it settled and hardened in his veins. The hood of Carlos' sweatshirt was pulled over TK's head, and when it all got to be too much he would turn his face and breathe in, trying to let the rememnants of his boyfriend's scent bring him any sort of comfort.

When the call finally came, it was an officer reporting that he and his partner had spotted Carlos through the window of an abandoned warehouse. From what they could tell, he was tied to a chair, three guys guarding him. And Carlos had looked limp, unmoving, head hanging low, and there was definitely blood.

Backup was already running out of the station and to their squad cars, but TK had collapsed to the floor, weeping into Owen's shirt, clutching at him with clenched fists. "We know where he is," Owen murmured soothingly into TK's ear, arms wrapped around his son. "And we're going to go to him, and we'll take it from there, okay?"

TK nodded, sniffled, rising from the floor and tucking his trembling hands into the sleeves of Carlos' hoodie. Owen kept an arm around his waist as he led him to the car.

When they reached the warehouse, TK leapt from the car as soon as it had slowed down enough. He had spent the ride running through every world-ending possible scenario in his mind, unable to turn off the terrifying thought that Carlos was dead or dying and their forever had already ended. Owen had had to pull off the road for a moment so TK could fall to his knees in the dirt and retch next to the car, his dad's hand rubbing circles on his back.

Now that he was this close to Carlos, TK couldn't stop himself, body magnetized to his boyfriend's orbit, and he was sprinting through the door and dropping to his knees next to the chair, hands fumbling to grab the wrists an officer had just released from the zip ties.

Feeling a pulse, too slow but still steady, TK gave himself one shaky exhale of relief before forcing his gaze up to sweep the rest of the scene before him. Carlos' face was bruised, his shirt slashed front and back with what were clearly shallow knife strokes, leaving narrow cuts still trickling blood.

But what was most heartstopping was the look in Carlos' eyes.

It was like there was no one there. Like Carlos' body was an empty shell. TK had seen so many expressions in those beautiful eyes, but never a complete lack of anything.

"Carlos, baby, it's me," TK murmured, gingerly cupping Carlos' face between his trembling hands. "Can you answer me, sweetheart? Let me know what's going on?"

Michelle had appeared, but Carlos did not react when she carefully cut off the remaining fabric of his shirt, his arms limp and dropping back to their previous place the minute her hold was released. TK knew Michelle was fighting back tears as she started cleaning and bandaging Carlos' wounds. TK had no power to resist his own sobs, tears streaming down his cheeks as he continued calling to Carlos.

"Please, Carlos, please, please come back to me, please," TK begged through his tears, and at the lack of response again, whipped his head around to the nearest police officer. "What the hell happened? Do you know what's going on?"

"We found him like this," the man responded, expressed pained as he took in the unresponsive form of his fellow officer. "I don't know, but this guy," he jerked his head at the wide-eyed, terrified, and handcuffed teenager next to him, "says he'll tell us what happened if we put in a good word for him at the station."

"Absolutely, anything, please, just tell me what happened, tell me what's going on." TK barely registered he was begging again, this time at a complete and utter stranger.

"My boss knew he'd been involved in an undercover op ," the teenager gestured towards Carlos, "and he wanted to know where exactly in the station his drugs had ended up. The cop wouldn't tell him, even after he beat him up some, got the knife." TK's body flinched involuntarily, tense with anger and heartbreak, and the teen spoke even faster. "Then he showed the cop that photo, and instead of spilling the details he just totally shut down. Then you guys came in."

Bending down, the officer picked up the indicated photo from the ground, and let out an involuntary "Fuck". Eyeing TK uneasily, he sighed, handing over the picture.

"Oh god," TK choked out, the picture shaking violently in his hands. He knew it was a photoshop, a damn good one but still fake, of course he did, he was here alive wasn't he, but Carlos couldn't have known. All Carlos would have seen was TK's dead body, bullet hole in his forehead, bullet hole to the heart, blood soaking through that yellow hoodie they both knew so well (and TK couldn't believe they had gone to that level of detail, didn't want to think about how they had found that out, but of course that was the kind of thing that would have immediately convinced Carlos).

"Ok, ok I know what's going on," Michelle's shaky voice came from over TK's shoulder."He's having a dissociative episode. He couldn't handle what he was seeing and he...he deconnected. Loss of feelings, depersonalisation, derealisation..." She trailed off, and TK turned his gaze on her, eyes pleading.

"How do I fix this, Michelle? How do I get him back?" TK wasn't even sure his words were understandable at this point, he was crying so hard, but Michelle squared her shoulders, biting her lip.

"Ok, you should try engaging his senses. Give him something familar to feel, really ground him with your touch, anything that smells like you, talk to him, but TK, I can't...I can't promise, I don't know..." She choked back a sob.

TK immediately pulled off the hoodie he was wearing, knowing it now smelled like a mixture of him and Carlos, and threaded Carlos' arms through the sleeves, zipping it up to the very top and pulling the hood up around his boyfriend's face.

"Carlos, baby, it's me, it's TK, I'm right here, I love you so much, so so much baby," TK kept up an unending stream of endearments, gaze glued on Carlos' face, and he thought for a second he saw a flash of familarity in his eyes. Grabbing Carlos' hand, TK slid it up under his shirt, pressing his boyfriend's palm skin against skin right over TK's frantically beating heart, then used his other hand to gently cup the back of Carlos' neck, brushing their lips against each other.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then TK heard a soft "Ty?" breathed against his lips, and he dared to open his eyes. He gasped as he saw Carlos start to cry, eyes full and familiar, and TK caught him as he collapsed off the chair and onto the floor.

"It's me, baby, I promise, it's me, I'm okay, I'm fine, it's all going to be alright," TK chanted into the crook of Carlos' neck, pressing his promises into his boyfriend's sweat-soaked skin. He clutched Carlos to him as their bodies shook and they sobbed, not even registering the warehouse clearing around them, Michelle pressing a hand to her heart as she tearfully moved outside with her kit at the ready.

"That photo," Carlos choked out, and TK shook his head, pulling back just enough so Carlos' could see his face.

"They faked it, I'm not hurt, not a scratch, I've just been a wreck over you, sweetheart," TK assured him, and Carlos shot forward, pressing their lips together hard enough that their teeth clinked together, and TK poured every ounce of love inside him into the bruising kiss. With a oh so grateful gasp, Carlos softened, and the kiss did too, mouths meeting again and again, Carlos seeming to settle more and more into his body as TK gently kissed his way across the bruises scattered across Carlos' face.

"Hey there Tiger," Carlos finally said, voice stronger, and TK laughed in sheer relief, resting their foreheads together.

"Hey there love," TK answered, and he saw a smile begin to turn up the edges of Carlos' lips. "There you are."

@bikingthroughhawkins @officereyes @i-had-bucky, @highqualitykhakis @meloingly

If you want to be added to my Tarlos tag list just let me know!

@badthingshappenbingo

#tarlos #tk x carlos #carlos x tk #tk strand #carlos reyes #bad things happen bingo #emotional whump #emotional hurt/comfort #hurt/comfort #angst with a happy ending #prompt answer #boys in love #fanfic #fanfiction #writing

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angstymarshmallow · 4 years

Text

never look back - ethan ramsey x mc

[a little note: I’m still drowning in in Ethan feels. Here’s a little something.]

[words counted: 1716]

She keeps thinking she'd feel different. Seeing him again after two months. But the moment their eyes collide, Sawyer feels like the air's been knocked out of her and she’s left reeling to steady herself upright again. She remembers her knees almost buckling from shock, terrified and relieved to find the feelings are all still there.

But within seconds, she stops herself from running to him. She digs her heels into the patchy grass and forces herself to remain still. She manages only a semblance of a smile instead while they swapped stories since he's been gone.

Within minutes, she has to remind herself that he isn't the center of her universe – he never was and whatever's left between them has to die.

It has to die.

Because what's the alternative?

She can’t imagine leaving Edenbrook. She can't imagine losing this once in a lifetime opportunity. But how long can she pretend before staring into those somber pools of blue threatens to be her very undoing? How long can she stave away feelings that’s been buried for two months before they claw themselves out back now that he's here?

How long can she keep it together?

Sawyer shakes her head, blond hair mussed as she swipes her fingers through its fine strands for what has to be the sixth time since this evening.

She doesn't know if she can keep it together. And she thinks missing him all this time is almost as bad as having him here.

Uttering a soft sigh, Sawyer drops the patient’s file she's been staring at for the past hour and gets to her feet.

Her mind is too conflicted. Drawn in too many different directions. Even worse, guilt travels to the pit of her stomach at the thought of paperwork still left until she makes the decision to take a break.

She's no good to anyone this distracted anyway.

She decides to venture to the break room, at this time of night she imagines her chances of running into anyone anyway is slim – let alone the one person she dreads seeing the most.

But fate much like the day is against her. Her heart skips a beat when she spots his familiar impossible height – standing close by to the snack machine.

She freezes for a moment, hand still on the door. There's almost no one else around but them. The last bit of people have trickled out.

The good news is his back is still turned and he looks too preoccupied to notice her slip away - if she really wants to.

You're a coward Hutton.

Her inner voice accuses, but Sawyer would rather be a coward than stare into those dazzling blues ever again.

Swallowing hard, the woman turns on her heels with the intention to hurry back until she hears his voice.

“Sawyer.”

Hearing her name on his tongue does something funny to her chest. It fills up with warmth and she has to suck in a breath a she body starts to feel tingly all over.

Sawyer forces her expression to remain neutral as she returns his greeting. “Ethan, hello.” She's even surprised by how steady her voice sounds.

Her eyes quickly drink him in – the slight wrinkles in his coat, the hard lines of his face she remembers tracing from their last night together and his dishelmed hair from what's probably been a long night – at least for them both.

The glasses hide the dark colour under his eyelids well enough until she gets closer. Even though she’s a few feet away, she doesn’t make direct eye contact. Not yet.

“I was just leaving.” He makes a wide gesture to the machine, “don't let me stop you.”

“Oh.” Sawyer wets her lips, trying and failing to find the right words to say. Is this how it's going to be from now on? Tip-toeing around each other because we're both afraid? “You weren’t.” She protests, disliking how hesitant she sounds. “I mean, it's okay.” She continues, smiling weakly. “I was thinking caffeine probably isn't the best right now anyway.” She rubs her arms, as she rambles on. “At least not so late.”

“You've been running on fumes for hours.” His words are stiff but underneath it all, Sawyer detects another layer of concern. “And you look almost dead on your feet.”

Despite his brusque tone, Sawyer manages a light chuckle. “Even when you’re worried, you know how to make a girl feel special.” Self-consciously, she pulls her hair away from her face. She's mostly teasing but there's a sudden glint in his eyes; a look that reminds her they were more than colleagues, once.

“You never look anything less than damn perfection Hutton.”

His words stun her and for a moment she's speechless until he quickly moves on.

“Besides, if we're going to get answers tonight – caffeine is the best cure we've got.” He turns away, reaching to grab something from the machine but Sawyer is still reeling from his words.

It has to die.

These are the words come back, like a knife to her heart. It hurts to twist them inside her chest but she knows she must. She knows she has to suffer through it, to fight for composure because this isn't just her life - it's his too and they don’t belong together.

Sawyer tests her own will by stepping a little closer. She thinks she can manage a reasonable amount of proximity without making a fool of herself. It's not the first time there's been lingering tension between them.

Before she can think of a response l, Ethan much larger hand is outstretched towards her; a silent offering of her favourite chocolate bar.

Her heart swells. He remembers.

She mumbles a swift word of thanks; their fingers meet before quickly pulling away.

But his touch lingers. On her skin. All around her.

She swallows, taking a considerable step back but she makes the mistake of looking at him – really looking at him and the sight of the torn expression flitting across his face has gutted her.

Sawyer sucks in a breath, her knees ignoring her desperate plea to remain upright and nearly buckles right then and there from under the intensity of his stare.

Her breath hitches as he keeps in her orbit, never taking his eyes from her face.

He's almost too close to be safe.

She doesn't know who reaches for who first – only that they've been fused together – limbs wrapping around each other, lips crashing against one another with such reverent urgency that she swears she sees stars.

He sinks his teeth into her lower lip.

A moan leaves her throat. And then another as the cool texture of the wall is pressed behind her, cocooning her against his weight.

He whispers her name; half as a plea and half as a denial but either way Sawyer doesn't want him to ever stop.

God, she missed this. She missed him.

His lips are a blend of passion and demand and she answers every kiss in kind.

Another kiss, another gentle tease of their fingers ghosting across supple flesh as he grows stiff against her wandering hand, moving to cup him. When his fingers tilt her head back, she braces one arm against the wall as continues her fingers keep pace with her light teasing, while Ethan's other hand rests snugly by her waist.

And for a moment the rest of the world fades away.

Just for a moment every voice inside her head that had been screaming for her to stop, is quiet.

Somewhere between all the ardent kisses and nonsensical whispers, they’re the only two people in the universe, basking in stolen kisses and the roaring of their pulses beating in erratic rhythms. When he breaks the kiss, it’s only to drag his lips to find purchase by her throat.

He kisses her wild and frantic pulse as she slams her eyes shut and rests her head against the wall.

It has to die.

The words break her from her reverie and the rest of the world bleeds back into perspective.

Sawyer bristles at the instruction, struggling for air.

She feels Ethan stiffen. She hears him swear before he reluctantly wrenches himself free; his features twisting in agony with the same torn expression that she's buried deeply inside her heart.

“We shouldn’t.” The words are clipped and cold – nothing like the Ethan, Sawyer has grown to know and has fallen heads over heels for. “We can’t.”

“We can’t.” Sawyer repeats but she ignores her shaking hands, ignores the denial in her heart as vehement as his words. She tucks them behind her back instead, before he’s able to see just how much his words hurt. Then she pushes off the wall and suddenly the space between them has become too vast for her to ignore.

Somehow Sawyer manages a nod, dragging her eyes away from his face before he sees the cracks in her armor. The cracks that have been there since his return to Edenbrook.

They step away from each other within minuscule of seconds, neither one of them quite meets the other’s gaze. And deep down, Sawyer tries to forget.

Her hand pauses in mid air, the chocolate bar nearly half-crushed between her fingers as she waves goodbye. “Thank you.”

Her voice has cracks in it too, like her armor that has no business being broken over someone that doesn’t want her – that doesn’t need her the way she wants to be needed, has forced her to change. To walk away.

Sawyer is he's still fumbling to put them back together as she whirls away, keeping a wide berth after Ethan's swift nod of goodbye.

As her hand braces against the door, Sawyer wrestles with the urge to look back. To kiss him and pretend the rest of the world doesn’t matter. But the only problem is the rest of the world does matter, it matters enough to keep them apart. And she knows if she does look at him again, if she lets those crystal eyes back into her heart – Ethan Ramsay will carve his initials and never let go.

With a staggering breath, Sawyer steels her nerves and pushes the door open; never giving herself the chance to look until the door slams entirely shut behind her.

#ethan ramsey #ethan x mc #ethan ramsey x mc #playchoices fanfiction #open heart 2 #opean heart fanfiction #choices stories you play #ethan ramsey x sawyer hutton #i love angst #have i mentioned i love angst?#choices fanfiction #an angstymarshmallow writes

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ruensroad · 4 years

Text

a matter of trust

I’ve been wanting to do a continuation of my Vampire!Jiang Cheng AU for awhile, and @bloody-bee-tea enabled inspired me.

This AU was originally Xicheng before it turned to focus on Jiang Cheng and Jin Ling. But this is me, so naturally here we are, back at the Xicheng. Not sure how legible this will be to people unfamiliar with the other two drabbles, so you may want to click the link above before continuing on here. :D

---

Six months. It was amazing how short a time could erase eighteen years of grieving and loss, eighteen years of thinking Jiang Cheng was dead and the Jiang fallen.

It was true enough that Lotus Pier was a ghost land now, tainted with bloodshed and dark miasma, but there was one victim it hadn’t claimed, only reshaped, and Lan Xichen couldn’t believe that even six months in, seeing Jiang Cheng sitting so peacefully in his rooms, reading a book with his shining violet eyes was still a shock to his heart.

He was not the Jiang Cheng that Lan Xichen remembered so fondly, had grieved so deeply, and at this point it was unfair to compare him to the shining boy that had been. He was still there, at times, in a gleaming smile, or his endless, if exasperated, patience with the juniors’ questions, but Lan Xichen knew these glimpses were all that remained.

Jiang Cheng was quieter, his focus an eerie tunnel. He was hard pressed to trust and seemed wary of anyone that wasn’t a child. Even Lan Xichen had had trouble breaking through the first walls Jiang Cheng had put up. He protected himself with the same stalwart armor he protected Jin Ling, and Lan Xichen had once despaired of ever getting more than a few grunts or stilted written words out of him.

Six months felt wholly inadequate for the amount of growth he’d witnessed during Jiang Cheng’s confinement at Cloud Recesses. With the cultivation world watching him for any one misstep, Lan Xichen would not have blamed Jiang Cheng for merely putting up with him and the juniors, to stay a careful distance and refuse to do much more than answer questions, eat, and lurk in the rooms set aside for him. But Jiang Cheng’s old stubbornness had only grown more bold, and it’d taken only a month for the entirety of the GusuLan juniors to adopt him.

It’d taken just as long for Lan Xichen to sit in a quiet with him that did not feel forced, and Jiang Cheng had even taught him a few of his signed words for the more common answers to his questions. Lan Xichen knew he’d been given a gift then, a spark of trust, and he’d done his best to never shake it.

Not until today, at the very least, and for all the leaps and bounds they’d overcome in their six months together, Lan Xichen wondered if it was still enough for what he was about to ask for.

Jiang Cheng’s mask was a wicked thing, a steel plate over his nose and mouth and tied at the back with a powerfully braided cord. It was carved into the likeness of bared fangs, much like his own when the mask was off, and Lan Xichen remembered laughing at the story behind it, which of course had involved Jin Ling and his general enthusiasm for everything scary and exciting.

He’d seen Jiang Cheng with it off too, but it’d always been the man’s choice. Usually after he’d fed and no longer felt self-conscious about the smell of blood still on his lips. It was a sign of his relaxation, if nothing else, baring his face to the world, and he never did it in front of the juniors. Even Lan Xichen could count on his hands the number of times Jiang Cheng had removed the mask in his presence without being asked.

Lan Xichen hoped, in asking now, it would only lead to more trust and not set them back.

“Wanyin,” he murmured, gently so as not to startle him, and waited for that pin point focus to flicker towards him to move across the room and quietly sit before him. It was closer than usual, but not so close the man could not pull back if he felt threatened, and he was pleased to see it was only curiosity he was getting over the mask today, instead of wariness and uncertainty. “Would you say you trust me? Please, be honest.”

Jiang Cheng tilted his head, brow furrowed in thought, and his clawed hands set the book aside with more care than such sharp instruments should be capable of. Lan Xichen did him the honor of not watching him do so, but keeping their gazes firmly locked, calm and collected as he was studied.

His boldness was rewarded after a moment of scrutiny, with Jiang Cheng’s fingers lifting into the air and wiggling slowly in a downwards motion. Yes, or so he’d taught Lan Xichen, and he breathed out to see it.

“Thank you,” he said, truly meaning it, and shifted forward just a little more. Jiang Cheng allowed it, looking slightly confused now, and Lan Xichen could see his guard starting to rise, but only hesitantly so. Progress. “I have something to ask of you, then, but know that you can refuse my request. It is only for me, not for anyone else.”

Mm. A low grunt in the back of Jiang Cheng’s throat, telling him to go on. Lan Xichen took a breath for courage before slowly reaching up.

“Your mask… may I touch it?” he asked. It was not the true goal, but a good place to begin, and given he’d been allowed to touch it weeks ago a request easily accepted.

Jiang Cheng blinked slowly, a sign of his ease Lan Xichen had learned, given in his… advanced state did not need to blink. He smiled to see it, reminded so much of a cat, and traced over the roughly hewn fangs in the metal plating, feeling its unearthly chill and the smell of dirt and blood Jiang Cheng always carried.

Not the best smell, but far from the worst, and after so long an odd, comforting familiarity between them. In some amusement, Lan Xichen had discovered Jiang Cheng took on the smells of whatever was around him, including Lan Xichen’s favored incense, which hung over the man now like a shroud.

Jiang Cheng watched him with half lidded eyes, so deep and dark they seemed black, and he allowed the touching until Lan Xichen’s fingers brushed where the corded straps were tied. He did not flinch back, like he had the very first time, but gave a low sound of warning, and Lan Xichen obediently paused, though did not lift his hand away.

By the way Jiang Cheng went tense, gaze taking on a sharp glow, he knew his intention was understood.

“Wanyin,” Lan Xichen breathed, swallowing on the suddenly charged air, and lifted his other hand to mirror the touch, until he had the sides of the mask braced between his palms. “Do you still trust me?”

Jiang Cheng stared at him a long moment, glaring, but not stopping him, and when the permission came, it was with a sigh and closed eyes, resignation. Then he was pressing forward into Lan Xichen’s touch to signal him onward.

He could not stop the tears stinging his eyes, nor the awed shake in his fingers as he reached around to undo the corded knot at the base of Jiang Cheng’s head, well hidden under his wild cascade of hair. It took more of a tug than he’d expected, then the plate was sliding away and he had to quickly flail to catch it before it fell to the floor.

It was heavy and cold, so cold, with frost lining where Jiang Cheng’s breath had pressed. Lan Xichen swiped a finger through it, feeling the chill, and took a moment to collect himself before meeting Jiang Cheng’s eye again.

“Thank you,” he said, overcome and struggling to contain it. “For trusting me, I…”

Awkwardly, Jiang Cheng reached out, cradling his hands with his own, face oh so human with near panicked surprise. Because of course he did not understand Lan Xichen’s tears. He hardly understood them himself.

“Forgive me, Wanyin,” he said, huffing a laugh, and smiled down at the sneering mask, thumbs sliding over the fangs. “And thank you.”

Mn. Another low grunt, but finally Jiang Cheng relaxed again, eyes fading out of their glow and going hooded once more. He wasn’t smiling, but it was near enough to it that Lan Xichen felt his heart fly. So much, Jiang Cheng gave so much, had lost so much, and here was still giving more. Lan Xichen felt more like a thief than anything to ask for it, but could not help himself.

Because all progress was precious. Jiang Cheng was precious to him. As a friend, as a confidant. As an ever-present shadow. Six months and it was already growing hard to fathom returning to a life without Jiang Cheng by his side.

The reason was a terrifying one, if he allowed himself to walk that path. But that was a whole different kind of surrender and for now this show of absolute trust deserved its reward.

After all, trust went both ways.

“Wanyin,” he said, the only warning he gave before he carefully freed his hands and pulled up one sleeve. Wrist bared, he offered it wholly to the man, to his fangs and monstrous thirst, and watched his eyes go wide.

“You trusted me, so let me show how much I trust you,” Lan Xichen told him, firm in that, and wondered what it said about how far he’d fallen into Jiang Cheng’s orbit that he didn’t even feel afraid.

Jiang Cheng shifted back, uncomfortable and unsure, and Lan Xichen followed him with his arm, keeping it firmly in his space. “I trust you,” he said again. “I know you will not hurt me. Even if you bite, i know you will stop yourself.”

A sharp inhale followed that and Jiang Cheng’s brow was once more a storm of confusion and heavy thought. Perhaps wondering where this had all come from, given there had been no lead up. Lan Xichen would apologize for it later.

“Wanyin,” he reached for him with his voice, as soothing as he could be. “Please.”

He was not expecting the way Jiang Cheng’s shoulders dropped, or the way his eyes dilated and started to glow again. He was not expecting the tender way his hand was taken, cradled in the air, or for the feeling of cold lips gently brushing the inside of his wrist, where his pulse beat strong.

His heart jumped and heat flared into his face, unbidden and surprising at the force of want that arose in him as his wrist was nuzzled. Jiang Cheng, heedless to his reaction, or perhaps uncaring, closed his eyes and breathed him in, like Lan Xichen’s skin held his most favorite scent in the world, and slowly, with the lowest rumble he’d heard yet, the man began to… purr?

Oh no, was all he could think, hearing that, and felt his heart leave him completely. Or perhaps it’d already been willingly stolen by Jiang Cheng long before and he was only now feeling the absence. In either case, it left him nearly squirming, feeling far too much, his skin sensitive to where those lips and hint of fang caressed him, but managed some semblance of control if only because he did not want this to end. Not ever.

Maybe he was lost, utterly, and a fool for it, but he could not find it in himself to care, especially as a smile lit Jiang Cheng’s face, solely for him, and that made everything else disappear.

#ruenwrites #xicheng #vampire au #lan xichen #jiang cheng

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lambourngb · 4 years

Text

My brain is still a messed up bowl of depression and anxiety soup. However, I’m trying to get back into writing so I can finish Last Year’s Wishes. And hey, thank you everyone for reblogging my dumb not-fic this morning, that was sweet.

Anyway @tasyfa gave me some suggestions on re-igniting the fires of creativity- like re-reading the story, putting on the right playlist, thinking mindfully about the next step in the story.

I spent the morning re-reading, and it felt a bit weird. Like I know I wrote it, but wow it feels like a million years ago... bits that I love and can’t believe came out of my brain:

From Chapter 8- I loved writing stoned Alex.

The sounds of Michael moving about the cabin, the thunk of discarded boots on the wooden floors, the soft close of a door and the start of the shower all made for a soothing background noise that Alex drifted in peacefully. He shut his eyes for a moment, only to find himself awake to the strong scent of food again.

Michael sat a plate on the coffee table in front of him. Dinner was a pair of hot dogs slathered with relish and mustard, with baked beans spilling around it. He placed a can of soda next to it, sweeping away the now-warm beer bottle from his reach. “You awake enough to eat?”

“Yeah, I'm starved.” Alex rubbed the drug fatigue from his face, and reached toward his hip for the melting bag of ice only to encounter a fresh pack with his fingertips. Michael had thoughtfully changed out the ice and prepared him dinner, all after working a full day at Sanders's. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you do all this after working.”

Michael cracked open a bottle of beer, and settled back in the chair with an amused look. His own plate of food balanced on his thighs. The shower’s effects were present, the damp curls mussed and in intact locks around his face, and his grease-marked clothes exchanged for a simple sweatpants and t-shirt. “You make a terrible wife, Alex, not having a hot meal ready at the end of the day for your hard-working man.”

“Haven’t had a lot of practice.” Alex bit into the hot dog, noting to himself that Michael prepared it just the way he liked it with no ketchup to be seen.

“No? You never played house like this before with a boyfriend? I mean, once you could legally.”

“Can’t play house if you've never had a boyfriend.”

Michael paused, holding his beer to his lips in surprise. “What, never?”

It was flattering that Michael appeared so shocked by the idea. Alex chewed with deliberate consideration. “Depends, are you counting yourself?”

“I wasn’t.”

“Then never.”

***

From Chapter 12:

Michael swallowed hard, twin wet tracks of tears shining on his cheeks. “That family tree, the evil doesn’t branch out much, does it? Direct line to your dad.”

“I’m so sorry-”

“Don’t,” he cut Alex off brutally. “Don’t apologize. You’re not the one who put her in that cage. That was what, your great-grandfather Harlan? And you’re not the one who gave her that fucked up exam, that was just your granddaddy. And you’re not the one who killed her. That was just daddy dearest-” Michael choked harshly, as a sob caught in his throat. “Or me, depending on how you look at it. So don’t apologize, Alex. It wasn’t you.”

“No, just everyone I’m related to,” Alex replied bleakly, taking a seat next to Michael. He reached out to rest a hand on Michael’s leg cautiously. “I'm sorry that you saw that. I was… I was looking for footage of her where she was... where she was just in her cell. Not okay, but not being hurt.”

Michael tipped his head to the side, to meet Alex’s gaze finally. “Did you find any?”

Mutely Alex shook his head, as his own eyes welled up.

“Yeah, didn’t think so.”

His heart breaking at the amount of pain and hopelessness on Michael’s face pushed him to keep going, “It’s early though. I… I've only been able to crack two out of twelve of the drives. That one’s part of one that documents procedures. There might be others that are just surveillance.”

“Mmmm. So I can watch her pace in a glass cage, instead of being sexually assaulted. Cold fucking comfort, Alex.” Michael’s voice broke on the word assaulted, before it turned hard and angry. “When were you going to tell me you had these? When you found some nonexistent footage of her not being tortured?”

“I was going to tell you, I was,” Alex defended weakly. The justification for waiting for the correct time was just as Kyle predicted, feeble and without weight. This was the fruit of his cowardice. “It’s horrible, I know. I was trying to spare you the visuals.”

“I need you to stop doing that. You can’t keep trying to control shit by holding onto information and then saying it’s to protect me. I have a right to make my own damn decisions. She was my mother!” Michael ended his ragged speech with a harsh cry. He wrapped his left hand into a fist, pulling tight on the black wrap on his knuckles.

Immediately Alex tensed, as he wiped at an escaped tear. His brain, formed and shaped by his experiences with his father, went into high alert. Michael, with his own trauma-shaped instincts, caught his flinch instantly and exploded upward from his seat and away from Alex to place several feet between them in the close confines of the bunker.

“For fuck’s sake,” Michael shook his head, wounded as he fisted the curls back from his eyes. “I will never, fucking never, lay on a hand on you.”

More tears spilled from Alex’s eyes, as he took a deep breath to lock down his feelings. He was really messing this up with Michael, not that the reveal was ever going to go smoothly. The progress that they had made in the last few weeks was vanishing right before his eyes, and he felt helpless to stop it.

Trying for calm and conciliatory, he replied lowly, “I know. I know you wouldn't. We've never done that to each other.”

“Right. Never.” Michael kept to the other side of the room. He dropped his hands flat against his side, keeping them in view. His face was red, struggling to hold back his devastation at Alex’s response, merely compounding the grief triggered by the video. “I'm pissed and I can barely look at you right now because you kept this from me, but that. That’s not me, that’s not us.”

“I know, Michael.” Alex took another deep breath, and wiped at his face with his sleeve. Gradually he felt his pulse starting to slow, with the soft embrace of an upcoming adrenaline crash threatening at the edges. “Just... tell me what you need?”

“I don’t know. Short of a time machine, where I can rescue my mom, there's nothing. She’s dead. She lived a long, miserable life here. How ...how old was that clip?”

***

From Chapter 14

“Well, it’s like you said, I’m the expert in leaving.” He twisted his lips in a semblance of a smile, “I had just learned you had slept with my best friend and you were working on a way to leave orbit, how else was I supposed to react?”

“I don’t know, I guess I didn’t really think you’d care,” Michael paused, shrugging carelessly, “about either of those things.”

“Now we’re back to the ways in which I’ve fucked up with you.” Alex braved a hand on Michael’s arm. “I care about both of those things. I'm trying to come to terms with you moving on from me and that’s not going great, okay? This limbo we’re in, it hurts, but it’s nothing compared to what you leaving the planet will do to me.”

Michael blinked a few times forcefully as his eyes started to glisten. “Really?”

Alex tightened his grip on Michael’s arm, as he dug down for the words. He knew this was usually the point where he backed off and let things be understood instead of implicitly being said. The second, third, and fourth chances to get this right kept slipping away from him.

It would be stupid to waste another moment.

“It would kill me, Michael. I know I left in the past, with deployments and training rotations, but I was always going to come back. Even after the IED hit, I pulled a belt off my dead friend and killed my right foot just so I could live long enough to come back to you.” Alex swallowed hard, forcing the grief back down his throat. “I was prepared to hack the DMV once my assignment to Roswell was over just to track you down. But I can’t hack a spaceship, so I kept the piece from you. I’m sorry.”

A tear finally streaked down Michael’s face as he let go of the console and turned to put his arms around Alex. “God you’re such a fucking asshole.”

The sentiment was in direct opposition to the tight embrace Michael pulled him into, before he leaned back to meet Alex’s eyes. His hands trailed from Alex’s waist and glided up to cup his jaw, holding his face close, so he tipped his forehead against Alex’s. “Such a fucking asshole,” Michael repeated wetly.

“Does that mean you forgive me?” Alex ventured tentatively, soaking in his touch greedily.

****

From chapter 17:

“Yes, and no,” he admitted quietly, his fingers fidgeted with the discarded beer cap. “I want to talk to my best friend about my boy problems but he’s also your boy problem so that makes it hard.”

“Pretend he isn’t then,” Maria urged softly. “Can you do that? ‘Cause I miss you, Alex. There’s nothing I want more than to talk to my best friend about dumb boys again.”

Alex had had a lot of experience pretending it wasn’t Michael Guerin he was twisted up over and then seeking out the counsel of Maria in return. It wasn’t that much of a stretch when he thought about it. Over ten years of discussions about feeling he wasn’t saying the right thing, or being too scared to act on his impulses, and she had patiently held his hand through it all without once knowing the identity. Steady, supportive, and always with a wicked twist of humor to remind him just what a catch she thought he was.

When he was a teenager trying to fall asleep through the various dull aches that came from disappointing his father, he used to press his bruised face into his pillow and pray for two things. To not be Jesse Manes’s son, or if he had to be that, then at least let him fall in love with Maria Deluca.

God was cruel enough to keep him under Jesse’s roof and to leave his desires unchanged.

While his love for Maria skipped over the romantic track, nonetheless it still flowed strongly over the years. Scattered around the loft were various gifts that Alex had sent to her during his time away from Roswell. A wall tapestry he had picked up in Kabul hung from one wall. A pipe and ashtray set from an Istanbul market sat next to a wooden cigar box where Alex knew Maria kept her weed. A bright blue glazed bowl painted in the geometric designs of peacock feathers rested on a side table. It had been a gift from a thankful Yazidi father after his unit evacuated his daughters to a UN camp safely. He had meticulously packed and padded the bowl to ship to Maria two weeks prior to the IED. With the typical international shipping delays, he had already transferred from Landstuhl to Walter Reed by the time Maria had received it.

He held onto that connection, pushing down the lingering question of where Michael spent the night in the close confines of the loft. Certainly not on this small couch.

“Alright, deal.” Alex licked his lower lip in thought. “So there’s this guy, and we have some pretty heavy history together. We’re trying to be friends and like figure out who we are to each other outside of-” he broke off, glancing toward her bedroom alcove nervously before finishing, “outside of the bedroom.”

Maria followed his glance without comment, before taking another sip from her bottle. “That sounds like a healthy and adult decision, Alex. Can I take the credit for browbeating you over the years or do I have to share it with your therapist?”

“Depends, Maria, do you want to take credit for my complete failure here? ‘Cause for whatever reason I keep fucking it up.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

Alex raised his eyebrow skeptically, “Do you?”

“Yeah, you’re right, I forgot what a disaster you are,” Maria teased gently. “I mean you have a good job, you have amazing friends if I do say so myself, you’re the kindest person I know. And your face isn’t half bad either. So you have a few walls to climb, who doesn’t? Alex, you are worth the effort here.”

“He hates my job, and he really hates that I signed a new contract.” Alex tipped his bottle to finish the last swallows. Dully he looked down at the bottle cap pressed tightly between his fingertips, “My walls are pretty high, here. I either hold back on him, or I get scared and push him away, which means I’m either pissing him off or hurting his feelings. It’s no wonder he wants-” He stopped, leaving the rest of the thought unfinished.

“Being afraid of being hurt or rejected is normal. Life has taught you a lot of reasons why you need to protect yourself and if you’d share that with him, I’m sure he would understand.” She reached up to touch her necklace absently, before sighing. “I admit, I wasn’t thrilled when he told me you re-upped.”

“Not you too, Maria.”

“You were so close to being out-”

“I can’t leave until the job is done-”

“Please, that’s the kind of thinking that has kept us in Afghanistan for twenty years.”

A beat passed between them before Alex cracked a disbelieving smile at her sarcastic reply. “Did you just compare me to Donald Rumsfeld?”

Maria covered her mouth, as she started to laugh with him. “I mean, maybe? You have much better hair though, or at least you did. There’s only so much product can do to fix that boring flat top.”

“Thanks,” Alex replied drily, as he reached upward to his hair out of reflex. Maria giggled as he belatedly brought his hand away from his head. “My ego is safe with you around.”

“See? You need me around, you’d be lost without me.” Her smile widened with fondness, the old comfort of teasing each other over having high maintenance hair habits settling in naturally. This time, her words landed awkwardly into the air and her smile slowly dropped away. Her eyes grew bright and glassy in the warm light from the two floor lamps. The atmosphere between them changed again, as the unsaid pressed against them impatiently, nagging for their attention.

Alex dropped his eyes to the floor again. The words in his throat were tangled, as he wished one more time that he didn’t feel like this with Maria. He was caught in the rough current of feeling jealous and angry while being tossed against his ever-present pillars of self-loathing.

“What are we going to do?” Maria asked forwardly. She was braver than him like usual. “Are we ever going to get past this? I mean, I can pretend some more if you want-”

“God, that’s all I do these days, pretend, so maybe it’s best if we don’t.” He licked his lower lip, registering the dry chapped feeling from his nervous chewing. “I pretend with Michael, I pretend at work, and I don’t want to have to pretend with you, Maria.”

“I don’t think you’re pretending with Michael,” she pointed out, in a no-nonsense tone. Her eyes lost their sharp focus as her face reflected the changeover from friendly observation to a psychic read. “Unless you’re pretending that friendship is going to be enough for you. You love him and you’re not getting over him, and you’re sabotaging yourself with him because you’re afraid. You’re afraid that friendship is enough for him.”

The air in the room felt thin to Alex. He closed his eyes, and placed his hand on his chest to count the rapid beat of his pulse. The black spots in his eyes swam in front of him, and he blinked several times to clear his vision. “I thought he had already made his choice. But then living together, pretending that we never broke up- It’s complicated now. Messy. And I’m afraid if I really ask, he’ll tell me the same thing he did before, that love isn’t enough. That it’s too much baggage to get past and he won’t choose me.”

****

From chapter 19:

Michael closed his eyes, as a tear slipped down his cheek and turned his face into Alex’s touch, as he whispered roughly, “Losing her, my mom like that, I didn’t want to be known by anyone. Not by Max, and not by you.” He lifted his face away, his eyes still wet as his smile wobbled, “That’s why you found me at the Wild Pony.”

“I figured,” Alex replied, his throat tight.

“I know now that I hurt you by doing that. It’s a fucking weak excuse to tell you that I really didn’t think you would care. ‘Cause it doesn’t change the fact you did.”

“Michael.” He started to tell him that it was fine. That he understood. Except on one level, as much as they had laid out the pain and wounds that had been exchanged between them, some targeted, some merely shrapnel from outside forces, there was the unavoidable fact that it wasn’t fine. Discarding the emotions of it, which he was never going to find comfort with, Alex fell into the cold facts of what happened. “I wasn’t what you needed then, or wanted. And that’s okay. You are allowed to make that choice for yourself. You went through something unimaginably terrible, how could I begrudge you for turning to someone who made that a little better for you?”

The hurt miserable laugh that escaped from Michael as he pressed his lips against Alex’s palm in a kiss, sent a chill down Alex’s spine.

“You were exactly what I needed after Caulfield, Alex. You make everything, fucking everything, in my miserable life better. This whole month, every minute of it, you made me feel whole. I can take a full breath because of you. I am okay, and that’s so much more than I deserve to be. And I tried to fight it, especially early on when I was a dick to you, but as it turns out, hurting you so I could make myself miserable isn’t worth it.”

Alex was frozen, his hand still against Michael’s face as he worked to understand just what he had said. The first three thoughts circled back to Michael still being drunk, or perhaps this was delayed gratitude for helping keep them safe from the police investigation. For all that Michael spoke of not feeling like he deserved to feel okay, it was shockingly clear in Alex’s mind he shared that same sentiment. Their broken pieces were shattered on the same fault lines, not necessarily the mirror opposite that would fit together in the same way.

Michael kissed his thumb softly, looking up at him, “I can see by your face you are having a hard time believing me. If you let me do this, open up the bond print, you’ll get it. You’ll see that as nice as Maria is, she doesn’t have nearly the power you do. You’ll feel what I feel. Um, just what I feel, if you’re worried about your privacy. This is a one-way street.”

There was a brief moment of disappointment for Alex hearing that, but the lure of Michael’s offer was too strong to deny. “Okay. Do it.”

“Yeah?” Michael smiled brilliantly as he sat in bed, and gently pressed Alex back on the mattress. He spread his palm flat on Alex’s chest, directly over his heart, its beat strong and quick beneath the touch. Michael’s eyes flickered down at his hand and then to Alex’s tense gaze, his lips quirking with shy pleasure at what was about to happen. “Merry Christmas.”

Michael’s hand didn’t change in temperature, even as a red glow started to build in his palm. It was reminiscent of how his mother had communicated in those last doomed moments at Caulfield. And like that too-short interval from before, there was no pain on Michael’s face, just rapturous joy.

Alex stored that snap shot of Michael’s face, looking so unbelievably happy, away in the place he hoarded his good memories.

It was the last clear thought he had.

Oh. It was a lot.

His therapist had warned him a long time ago that trauma had changed his brain patterns forever. It wasn’t just psych jargon to understand that his electrical pathways of experiencing pleasure and joy were forever altered after his childhood. His doctor had argued to him that comparative MRIs would prove it. The therapeutic homework of practicing pleasure and reacquainting his body to positive feelings had been taken with a dose of skepticism. Michael had always made him feel okay in receiving and giving pleasure, but later Alex realized it wasn’t necessarily the comfort of sex that was the issue, it was happiness.

Michael loved him.

It washed all over his mind, like standing under a waterfall. The torrential press of love, joy, peace beat down on the brittle feelings of shame, of self-hatred, of feeling like Alex had been made wrong in some way right from the start, after all, why didn’t his father love him?

Michael loved him.

Water was the most destructive and most transformative force on earth. It was relentless. It sought out cracks, pouring into the hollows while it filled the caverns. Once inside, if needed, it could freeze and expand, to break down defenses, until the path was clear. It nurtured with the same unstoppable power, feeding the roots, nourishing the parched throats, cleansing the wounds and washing away the filth.

Michael loved him.

It was infinite. It was one thing to know it intellectually, after all, Michael had said it once to him, present tense and all. This connection made Alex feel ashamed, because now he knew he had never really believed it. It wasn’t Michael’s fault though; the core truth was Alex had made it 28 years believing he was the issue, that he was unlovable. Any words that Michael had said, Alex had dismissed as something shallow, or perhaps the result of a trick.

The connection battered at that belief until Alex had to discard it as false.

****

From chapter 21

There was a moment when he thought Michael would break away, he could feel Michael take a deep breath, his chest heaving in effort before he tipped forward into Alex’s body, a mirror of Alex’s earlier collapse. He caught Micheal’s weight easily, and held him securely.

“I really want to scream right now, just so you know,” Michael warned with a low voice in Alex’s ear. “I don’t want to be mad at you, but I’m fuckin’ mad.”

“You can be mad at me,” Alex offered weakly, keeping his arms around Michael.

“I really can’t, Alex,” Michael huffed a humorless laugh, “you tried to pick a fight five minutes ago about Maria, and I saw your face when you got here, you were totally white. You didn’t expect this reveal to go well, did you?”

Alex hummed a little in his throat, acknowledging Michael’s point without argument. He thought about the file that had his father’s request for testing when he was a child and locked down his feelings on it to deal with later. “It’s not all terrible news to report though. If the pod responds to intent, then we should have Liz and I guess Kyle, meet us at the cave so we can see what it might be doing to Max in the meantime. See if there’s any readings we can gather.”

Michael moved his warm hands up to cup Alex’s face, the fabric wrap on his left hand rasping lightly as he gently moved Alex back to meet his eyes. “I’m sure Liz was thinkin’ about saving Max, but he’s not the only one in a pod. What were you thinkin’ when you put your dad in there?”

“Honestly?”

“Uh yeah, of course.”

Alex smiled grimly, “I was thinking how good it felt to choke him out and finally win a fight. I was thinking he got to see my face as darkness took him, the way I used to see his face when I was a kid. And I hoped he was scared. I hoped he felt small and powerless.”

“God, I hope so too. I hope the pod is making him relive that non-stop,” Michael breathed fiercely as he tightened his hold on Alex for a moment, then he leaned in to capture his lips in a deep, hungry kiss. Alex opened under his mouth easily, surrendering to Michael as he backed him against the parked Bronco. He pushed his fingers into Alex’s short hair, pressing against Alex’s body as Alex’s tongue stroked firmly against his.

The warning burn in Alex’s lungs was the only thing that brought the kiss to an end, as he sucked in a gulp of air, the taste of Michael and a hint of beer still on his lips. “As much as I want to continue that, um, you should finish up here so we can make a plan with Liz and Kyle.”

“You’re lucky my trailer is at the cabin, otherwise you and me and a horizontal surface-”

****

Also from chapter 21

The warmth of Michael scooted up against his back as his arms snaked around Alex’s chest. He pressed his lips against Alex’s neck and offered softly in his ear, “Listen, if this is…. If this is something in your head, I can help with that. If you want.”

Anticipation and pleasure lit up briefly through the agony as Alex followed the train of thought to Michael’s offer and remembered Christmas Eve. It was beyond tempting but being back on active duty made that an impossibility. With regret, he shook his head, “No bond print, too risky.”

“Nah, not that, but I could go inside your mind, and um, persuade you that what you’re feeling isn’t real.”

“Oh,” Alex breathed. Michael inside his head, seeing his thoughts, seeing just how messed up Alex was, not that he couldn’t already guess it from the outside. The cramping seemed to intensify as he debated, from what felt like a stabbing feeling from the ball of his foot, to a deep burn into the arch of his instep, traveling up his right leg. “Yeah, okay, do it.”

Michael licked his lips at the acceptance and took a deep breath. He shifted in bed again until Alex faced him. He brought his palm up, to cup Alex’s cheek gently, meeting his eyes. Alex blinked heavily at the touch, tears from the pain slipping down his face as Michael brushed the wetness away with his thumb with love.

Then.

Then it was warm and bright. Michael was the joy of a perfectly played note, the pitch and harmony of Alex’s favorite song, slipping into his mind to curl around him. The percussion of matched heart beats, thundering in time together. The vibration of strings, dancing across two keys, one high and soprano, one low and deep.

That was Michael in Alex’s mind.

Alex though, Alex was a crumpled ball of paper. The painstaking drawing, scratched out in eraser marks and errant ink blots. The brush strokes of a self-portrait imperfectly translated from three dimensions to a flat disappointing two. Discarded and tightly balled up, waiting to be tossed into the trash.

Then.

Teasing at the edges, Michael picked at and pulled at the scrapped drawing, the furrowed shell of Alex. With infinite care, he worked to flatten out the wrinkles and to smooth the creases. This wasn’t a failed attempt; this was a work of art, worthy of being framed. He laid out love, ironing out the perceived imperfections, until the crushed bits, and worn notches were treasured marks of strength and experience. These weren’t deficiencies to reject, or blemishes to trash but well tested symbols of armor worthy of protection.

Then.

Alex blinked again, and swallowed down the sob pressing at the edges of his throat waiting to erupt as the pain was gone. Inside his head, every small scrape and cut was calm and soothed. Michael had wrung the tension from his mind and body, leaving him loose and shapeless.

“Better?” Michael asked, his hand still on Alex’s face.

“Yeah, much.” Alex licked his lower lip, his mouth dry. “Is that, is that really how you see me?”

An enraptured look slipped over Michael’s face as his eyes grew dark, “You are a work of art, Alex. You’re beautifully made, inside and out. I wish you could see yourself the way I do.”

Blushing, he had to look away, unable to meet the intensity in Michael’s gaze. “I think you’re crazy.”

“You’re the crazy one for not seeing it, but I know why you can’t believe me.” Michael’s expression saddened as he turned to catch Alex’s eyes, “He is wrong about you. He was wrong when you were a kid, and he’s wrong now.”

“Ah, you saw it. What my dad wanted to do.” Alex pressed his lips together tightly, and sighed.

“Yeah, I saw it.” Tension grew in Michael’s grip, as he moved his hand down Alex’s shoulder to his chest, pressing his hand against the rising beat of Alex’s heart. “He is a monster, and it’s his loss that he could find anything in you that was deserving of hate, but sweetheart,” Michael’s voice broke briefly, “it breaks my heart that you might agree with him on any level. Your body, the way you love, how you love, it’s all part of what makes you, you.” He paused, before finishing with a thick voice, “And I love you. You should love you too.”

“I’m trying, Michael,” Alex leaned in to kiss his lips gently, “I’m trying really hard to do that.” He let Michael deepen the kiss, sighing at the care Michael used in touching him, like he was that precious work of art he’d glimpsed in Michael’s thoughts.

“Don’t be ashamed of this,” Michael whispered, his mouth hovering over Alex’s.

Alex shook his head, and leaned up to trade another kiss, “I’m not, not anymore. Well, not most days. I’m working on it.”

Michael smiled in response at Alex’s honesty, “Good, anytime you need a reminder, let me know. We can fight those demons together, darlin’. Speaking of, how’s the pain?”

Stretching his right leg out, he rubbed his stump against Michael’s leg, and sighed in relief at the motion. “Gone.”

****

All self-indulgent clips.

#personal stuff #the writing process is tough #just reminding myself that I can do this #self-promotion sorry #oh hello imposter syndrome nice to see you #wip whine #ignore this as I give myself a pep talk

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elmidol · 4 years

Text

A Dark-Tinged Gray

Three Blind Tooke Part Three Death is an Art

Read on AO3

Warnings: None(?)

Three Blind Tooke

Part Three: Death is an Art

Chapter Forty-Eight: A Dark-Tinged Gray

While the sky is alight with fire,

We’re facing down the boldest liar;

Catching in my throat this breath,

Together preparing this first death.

Before the larger starships belonging to the Order of Ren could make a jump or a few through hyperspace to ward away suspicion from Phasma, the Supreme Leader instructed those under his command to bring a transport shuttle for the children. It would be filled with officers that would remain on the planet so that if some thermal scanners were utilized, it would add to the trap. It was unknown how many men Phasma would bring to the surface of the planet with her. She wanted you and the children dead, however would not destroy the planet from above immediately. The First Order would desire information on both the Resistance and the Order of Ren. That was information both you and Navrin possessed. It would be wiser for them to take you two captive after killing the children. While the transport was on its way, Navrin joined you with Kylo, the two Knights escorting him and the children.

Aris moved to where she was standing closer to you than any of the other younglings. Kylo Ren tilted his head to the side, cocking it at an angle to where you could tell he was clearly listening to her. She had narrowed her eyes when she noticed him. News regarding the surrender had already spread amongst the children. They looked equal parts hurt, terrified, and anger. That anger was also directed at you and Navrin. This was nothing you could fault them for. They did not understand that you were not giving up on them. This capture would be temporary. This capture would ensure that they kept their lives when Phasma arrived. Only Aris did not recoil from the presence of the Dark sider. She tapped your hand, slipping the weapon that you had given her into it.

“You armed a child.” You felt pressure in your chest. Anger bubbled inside of you as you readied yourself to hear the verbal jab. “War ignores age.” That was not what you had expected, to say the least. “You did well. I am always impressed.”

It surprised you as well that he was not gloating. That was a trait that he had not outgrown; you suspected that he would not risk putting you in any more of an ill mood before fulfilling this mission of killing Phasma. Kylo Ren could not make the same mistake of allowing the woman to best him. There would be no underestimating her.You chewed on your bottom lip for a moment while running through several scenarios in your head. Once the woman was dead, it was difficult to say what, exactly, the Force user would do. The Order of Ren’s Supreme Leader would not be unwise to keep you and Navrin as captives. It could play to his advantage to let you go. His history with Snoke and Hux had taught him much in regards to long games.

What complicated things was that it was not as though you had intended to have sex with him as you had. Approach him for a temporary alliance. The physicality of what had instead transpired bespoke of your constant inner war, and perhaps his as well. Tearing yourselves apart with conflict as the gray areas of the war threatened to break your resolves. The internal battle as to whether or not you should aim to kill one another; you were enemies, had been before you had become husband and wife. Marrying the one that you had each demonized, turned into a monster rather than human not only based on actions but sides in the war. Tore off the masks. Saw the humanity in the other.

You looked again at Aris. "His aim is not to kill you." Unspoken yet implied that the aim would be to control. Kylo did not miss this. He turned his head so that he was staring at you with those sightless eyes that somehow saw more of you than they ever should have been capable of. "I'm not abandoning you." A strange kindness from the Supreme Leader, he did not mock you in actions or words, nor did he contradict what you were telling the child. It was moments like these when you started to understand how it was Rey could harbor any sort of thought that Kylo could change, even though you doubted he could ever do so in the way that she would like to hope. There was no coming back from what he had done, what he continued to do. The cruelty of others, such as Hux and Phasma, did not excuse his actions.

That did not mean he was incapable of living in the gray area, possibly even indefinitely one day...if he did live, if he did survive this war.

Navrin stood by your side as the Knights of Ren who arrived with the transport shuttle for the children loaded the younglings up. One of those Knights would not be remaining on the planet, but instead pilot the ship back to the Star Destroyer looming in orbit. This ship had ample firepower to defend itself should a certain female from the First Order arrive early. That scenario would mean that the plan being put into motion failed before it could actually begin. You clenched your jaw at that thought. Glanced at Navrin. He was so quiet. It made sense, the man in the presence of the Master of the Knights of Ren and the other Knights. Former comrades. Temporary allies once more.

“Should we survive this… I will allow you to return to the Resistance.” You looked back at Kylo Ren. He was not facing you this time, rather toying with the lightsaber on his hip. His expression was contemplative. “There will be a price.”

You nodded. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.” The transport shuttle was becoming nothing more than a speck. Your heart was hammering in your chest, its pulse echoing in your ears. “It has to do with Rey, right?”

“And the other… Finn.” He was a glutton for anyone who had power, his need to control them so evident. Kylo Ren had a strong sense of entitlement that you knew you were capable of working around. “I will destroy Skywalker.” That was not to be repeated to Rey and Finn. He was simply making a statement, repeating his wishes. “He’s grown weaker.” A smile of satisfaction. It had you wondering if knowing more about the Force wouldn’t be helpful. “There’s something more.” A pause then he said your name. You took a step closer to him, weaving around the hand Navrin used to reach for you. “All the layers to this war will be revealed in time. If you, Rey, and Finn join me… and you as well.” The second you in reference to Navrin. “...then perhaps you will all survive.”

He genuinely wanted that, which nearly floored you. Kylo Ren did wish to rule the galaxy, but that did not render him incapable of feelings, not entirely. He felt a connection with Rey, a level of respect that stemmed from her abilities in the Force and grew due to similarities in their lives. With Finn, it was because the man was Force sensitive. And perhaps it, too, had to do with Rey. She cared for Finn, which both you and Kylo knew. Navrin had formerly served under Kylo, allowing the man to know the former Knight’s worth. Then there was you. You felt so out of place; you didn’t have the Force, and still there was that connection you and Kylo had.

A quick look at the sky showed that the Star Destroyer had already made its departure. There was not much time left. The Order of Ren personnel were getting into position to offer the illusion that children remained on the planet. You hooked the blanket around yourself like a cloak again, and Navrin surrendered his to the Knight that would be acting as a second LDS.

Navrin joined one of the Knights of Ren, heading off into the direction where the majority of the Order of Ren officers and troopers would hide. The remaining ships, to include your X-wing, had departed shortly after the transport housing the children. That left only the shuttle that you and Navrin had brought, furthering the deception.

“You’re wanting the ysalamir that Phasma and her troops will have,” you said once it was only you, Kylo, and the other Knight. “You’ll use that against Skywalker...and I can’t stop you.” Unless you tried to kill the creature, which you knew you would fail at. Doing so would mean repercussions were in order. You did not forget that this man had dislocated and later broken your fingers for your actions against him while you were his captive.

The Order of Ren’s Supreme Leader touched the back of his fingers against your cheek. The training that you had undergone in the splinter cell had extended past the physical. On top of that, your parents had raised you well and offered you some of the best education on Naboo. Uncovering motivations was sometimes second nature. What frustrated you currently in regards to the man’s plan for obtaining the ysalamir was not only his intention to use it against Luke Skywalker, but that you had also considered doing the same as a means of repelling the Order of Ren, which seemed to be growing in strength. Ending the quick caress, Kylo Ren motioned for the Knight to take his position.

Taken aback due to having believed that he would accompany the Knight, you shifted your weight onto your left leg. Your fingers touched the edges of your makeshift cloak. When he had stated that you would be bait for Phasma, you hadn’t imagined that he would put personal effort into keeping you alive. Not at the cost of being caught in the crossfire when Phasma was the target. It would be a repetition of what had happened the last time.

The Order of Ren protected us though. Phasma will be curious, will think she’s grabbing us as bait for them. She would quite possibly be planning to slaughter the children in front of you, well aware that it would serve as a vicious blow to your spirit. Corner Kylo to kill him for good.

Kylo instructed you to watch the sky. The ysalamir would deaden his abilities in the Force, and he did not have his sight to rely upon. He was relying on you. That was a switch from how it had been before. Unlike him, however, you took no pleasure from it. It was not power that you were after, not in the sense of fueling your ego. Only power enough to help end the war. Afterwards...afterwards…

Twigs snapped under your feet. You were in the position of leader as you walked to the position you had formerly used to keep an eye out for Kylo Ren and those who served him. You were familiar enough with the terrain to feel comfortable against the woman. The children were safe, or as safe as they could be, where they were. There was no need to be silent given that your opponents were not yet present. Kylo did not make a move to quiet his footsteps either. They were nevertheless much softer than yours. That was different than what you were used to.

As for the sharpshooter Knight of Ren, you did not know his exact location as of yet. Kylo had informed you that he would reveal it to you once you were settled. Because of this, you assumed that he would use the Force to pinpoint the other. It was not difficult to imagine yourself on a mission with Finn, Rey, and/or either of the Skywalker twins. Much like those Kylo had sent you on before the First Order had split into two, back when Rey had been the Master of the Knights of Ren. Her using the Force. You backing her up.

Perhaps when this war was done, you could continue protecting others in much the same way. There were always pirates and crime lords, sadistic hedonists in the galaxy.

“What are you thinking about?” You startled at his voice. “I can feel a sense of contentment from you. An odd time to experience that.” Had this been back with First Order Kylo Ren, even First Order Supreme Leader Ren, you would have hesitated to tell him. Now you were open with him. After all, this taste of gray helped you to accept parts of yourself that you had been struggling with. The parts of yourself that you had felt were monstrous for the deaths that were tacked onto your existence. “You truly are a fighter who adapts.” A compliment, not him mocking you. “You have a place in my galaxy.”

A laugh crawled up your throat and threatened to choke you as you refused to let it be released. The Resistance was your family, was who you fought alongside. It was their victory that you had been thinking of. To hear that there was this alternate existence that yielded a somewhat similar result, it felt surreal. It felt selfish that you entertained that outcome for even a moment as your mind wandered through multiple missions you might find in Kylo Ren’s galaxy. Under his rule, more would suffer. He had been content to follow the First Order, to follow Snoke’s plans. This deviated from the gray and started crawling back towards the darkness.

“I can sense your reluctance. If Rey joined me, you would as well.” Another blow at the armor you wore. Confusion swirled around you, wrapping around your throat, and again you found yourself feeling choked. This was why it bothered you Rey forever tried to catch glimpses of the good in people no matter what they had done. Even if it did make sense in this context; he was darkness, she was light, and you were trying to exist somewhere between.

Shaking your head, you shifted down onto your knees now that you had arrived at the right place. “That’s why you wanted Finn. Not only his power… He’s a path to Rey. The Resistance is our family.” Yet even families fracture; it was the strain in your voice that offered up this unspoken portion. You noted the smirk that settled on Kylo’s lips. He knew that you understood what he was saying. “If you somehow do manage to kill your uncle, you won’t be able to turn her.”

“Layers.”

You huffed in frustration. Fell silent, and focused instead on finding a comfortable position while also readying your weapon. Kylo Ren stood to your right. You puffed up your cheeks upon realizing that he had not brought anything to block off his heat signature. It would have been more bulk and weight to carry. Would slow down his movements when he set out to fight the enemy. You shrugged the cloak off of your shoulders, undoing it so that it was once more just a blanket. Able to hear your movements, Kylo bent down. He lifted the edge of the blanket and slid a leg underneath. Knelt above you with his legs on either side of you. Shifted again. You grunted. Wrinkled your nose. Despite having just had sex with him, you were none the bit thrilled that he was laying atop you. His arms propping himself up. He would not interfere with your aim.

Kylo Ren tucked his face into the side of your neck. You closed your eyes. Aware that there was limited time, that Phasma would be arriving any second. Allowing yourself more time to play make believe. Your favorite game with him; the game of what might have been. His hands were readjusting the blanket to better cover the two of you together. Then they were cupping your elbows. All the while you cradled your weapon.

“Let me touch you.” You furrowed your brow in confusion. A phantom caress stroked your arms though his hands did not move from your elbows. This was not for some sort of perversion. Kylo would now know when Phasma entered the atmosphere, and sooner than you would be able to see her ships. “She is a survivalist. You cannot forget that.” If you threatened her life well enough, she would target you. The woman would be wearing a shield of sorts. Not necessarily visible. Your first shot would drain some of its power. Then she would target you. Kylo could fight her once she was close enough. The ysalamir did not mean he would be any less of a swordfighter. The Knight of Ren would be able to take the shot at Phasma once her shield was down. Her soldiers and any TIEs she deployed, those would be focused on you and Navrin.

The Order of Ren would move in to collect any available ysalamir from there. You were prevented from doing so due to your proximity to Kylo, and Navrin because of the other Knight.

I’ll try anyway, you reminded yourself. The Force touches glided back and forth, easing your muscles. And then they were like fingers before they disappeared. You snapped open your eyes. The sight of the ships did not fail to take your breath away even though you had been expecting them.

“Don’t be afraid.”

“I will slam my head into your face if you tell me what to do,” you hissed. It was difficult to not be agitated. The mission you had been sent on by the Resistance had been a failure, and now you were starting to have flashbacks of the day Kylo had died in your arms. You were shaking, your weapon unsteady. His body atop yours made you felt suddenly trapped. Suffocated. His voice flowed over you. A command for you to breathe. That reminded you of Ip, which had you subconsciously obeying. Kylo’s hands were running up and down your forearm. The Force user was relying on your aim for this.

“So angry,” he murmured. You narrowed your eyes at the comment though you found that it did not annoy you as the other had. “I used to do this to you, back when we were true enemies. You would hunt me. Watch me. Become filled with anger and fear.”

Now he was fulfilling Ip’s role. Keeping you calm and ensuring that you were able to fulfill your mission and take down the target.

To help calm you further, Kylo gestured to where the other LDS had settled. You used the scope of your weapon to search for him. Discovered he was alternating between looking at you and the ship that was descending. TIEs flanked its sides, ready to protect it. You took aim at three of them without firing. This was another thing you had done when you had been hunting Kylo Ren. Waiting for the Command Shuttle to descend. Tracking the other transport shuttles. When high ranking officers had been your targets in missions, you had killed them then directed your attention on other key players, although this you couldn’t do too often.

This time, you would help take out everyone that you could from the First Order. It would be Kylo’s goal as well, which meant the odds were in your favor.

“Phasma leads from the rear,” Kylo whispered as the transport shuttle made landfall. Two others were not far behind. All three opened simultaneously. The TIEs circling them in formation. You grunted by way of response. Observed firsthand that he was not lying to you. Stormtroopers filed out of the transports. All of them were cradling weapons, and every tenth trooper had a small cage affixed to a portion of their armor. You set your sights on one. The creature inside did not move. Another. This ysalamir did move. You reported your observations to the Order of Ren’s Supreme Leader. “I would have been more impressed had they all been real.”

There was the snarky asshole you had been captured by. You smirked, at long last feeling in control of yourself and this situation. Phasma was playing into your hand, not the other way around. She was ignorant of the Knights’s presence. Would not realize she was the prey.

“They’ll have layers of shields. Aerial support would have been pretty handy here.” He grunted. Drummed his fingers on the ground. “Should I aim for her still? My position will be given away immediately.” Your body rocked a bit back and forth when he shook his head. There would be a specific set of stormtroopers devoted to guarding her. These would have the strongest weapons available, and the strongest shields. “I’ll wait until they’re closer then.” It would mean less TIEs directed your way if Phasma herself was near. Everyone else was an acceptable loss to her. “Her ship will pick up any transmission… I have a way to get in contact with your ship undetected.”

You told him where you had put the scrambler and comm device. It would take a few minutes for him to properly hook them together. More time to contact his ship and arrange for it to arrive for a full-on counterstrike. Peering through the scope of your weapon at Phasma, at her blonde hair and masked face, you ran your tongue along your lips. This signified another victory for the Order of Ren. Its Supreme Leader was in possession of the technology mastered by Rose Tico. It was not worth the time or energy to demand it back; at least, not yet. He was willing to bargain with you on many things, and you knew that Rey and Finn were top on his list. Not that you would betray them. Whatever he wished for you to tell them, though, you had every opportunity to twist. By returning the scrambler to you, that would ensure your complete loyalty to delivering the message in its pure form.

The stormtroopers and Phasma were nearing the point that you had mentally marked as being the location you would fire upon them. It was not only a single shot that you would take. Damaging the shields as much as possible before the TIEs started to streak your way, that was your goal. It gave Kylo just enough time to get the order in for his ships to return. The dogfights would be dangerous to all on the ground. That was another thing you were familiar with, however, from your time in the splinter cell. It was something you were fully ready for. Kylo Ren, too, was not unfamiliar to fighting under such circumstances.

His voice had a calming effect on you as you listened to Kylo interacting with on of his Knights. The connection crackled due to the distance. The interference was concerning; did that mean the scrambler would not be as effective? Those worries seemed insignificant. The chatter, even if picked up in portions by the First Order Star Destroyer under Phasma’s command, would reveal only a limited amount of information.

You curled your finger against the trigger. Exhaled slowly through your lips after inhaling through your nose. Kylo ended the transmission, tucked both your comm and scrambler back where he had found them, and told you that it was time. You pulled the trigger. The guard on the left of Phasma stumbled backwards. No time to see what her reaction was; Kylo would take care of that. Two more shots, one of which broke through part of the shield and pierced the helmet of the trooper. It would have obliterated the trooper’s skull as well. The corpse crumpled to the ground. Now you did spare a glance at Phasma. She continued on as though no one had died. Her wrist was set near her mouth.

The TIES above screamed, darting in your direction. “How long until we have support?” you asked as your husband rolled onto his feet and yanked you upward with him. His fingers dug into your skin as he clutched you, his legs pumping and you exerting yourself to keep up without losing hold of your weapon. “She’ll redirect them to your Knight if he fires.”

“No.” He seized hold of his lightsaber, igniting it. The red blade would be visible by the TIEs. Kylo shoved you towards the ground, turning and readying to...could he deflect a blast from a TIE? You were genuflecting as you pondered that question. Readying aim. It took you two shots to down the first Fighter. One of its wings flung into a second, shredding through it.

“She will be focused on us until my ship eliminates hers. This time, she will be the one to die.”

#kylo ren x reader #kylo x reader #kylo ren imagine #kylo ren smut #three blind tooke #elmidolfanfic #death is an art

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insomniac-dot-ink · 5 years

Text

The Grave of a Trees

genre: fantasy/DnD

words: 2.6k

summary: post-industrial revolution a hobbit goes to the ends of the earth to look for the Ents.

Read below or on my website: iawriting.com

The rumble of the car vibrated up Bast’s spine. It moved all the way from his toes to the top of his head, sending his teeth clattering and tail bone aching. The jeep careened around corners and sped along dirt roads with a certain gusto reserved for berserkers in battle and water nymphs drowning lecherous young men. It was something one was born to relish.

Bast was weightless for a moment as the car floored it over a small hill, his stomach swooping and body floating like an astronaut caught in orbit. Gods help the shocks on this thing, he thought to himself.

They landed with a crash and Bast yelped helplessly, Floria in the front just chuckled to herself at his reaction. An imp was the only person he could get to take him out this far.

The whole vehicle was scented with something like tar and licorice, the imp would sometimes glance in the mirror back at him. Luckily, the engine was so ferocious and feral that it’s noise blocked out any thought of having to make small-talk. That fit Bast just fine.

It was well-past noon by the time the car considered slowing down, skidding across the barely-there gravel road and approaching the thickets of woods. The far west had enormous forests like this covering it’s coast: dark, closely-knit and energy hovering on carnivorous.

The dark between the trunks was absolute and the leaves rustled far above with a threat between their teeth. The forest floor was sparse and padded with leaves and dark moss, there wasn’t enough sun leaking through the canopy above to help anything grow there.

The car gradually hissed to a halt as the lumpy road gave a final rocky wheeze and disappeared altogether. The car lurched violently into park and the engine rumbled thunderously before falling quiet.

Floria took the keys out and turned around, a perpetual smile plastered across her face and two shiny fangs protruding out from her mouth. She had red skin and cherry-blossom pink hair that hung at her cheeks in a bob, her eyes were inky black blots. Little tiny wings flapped on her back as she faced him.

“I’d play a funeral march now, but the radio conked two acres ago.” She commented breezily. “I noticed.” The only thing louder than the engine of the car was the gravely screamo remixes blaring from the speakers for the last four hours.

Floria grinned somehow even more widely, “are you sure you’re up for this, little ranger?” Bast just frowned delicately, “there’s nothing for it.” He whispered, patting his pocket and then reaching for the door, “this is it."

There had been stories, long ago and buried under other frayed memory, of hobbits that talked to the trees. They bonded with them deeper and longer than even the elves and the druids and all the folk in between. Bast owed it to them to keep trying.

That’s what his ancestors would have wanted, however long dead and forgotten they were.

Floria just snorted in return, “I’ll be back in a week. If you aren’t here in a couple hours I’m going back to the town and telling ‘em you died sucking tree bark.” Bast rolled his eyes elegantly, “I appreciate it,” he said dryly, “try not to lose your hearing on the return.” “What?” She said loudly and he met her eyes just in time to see the sparkle there. They shared a very brief chuckle. “I’ll see you Floria.” He hopped out, shouldering on his massive pack and only pausing a moment to glance back at the imp. “Wish me luck.” Floria leaned out of her jeep and threw up a peace sign, “pull some magic out of your ass, Halfling. You’re gonna need it.” Bast just wrinkled his nose and turned around, Floria revved her engine and sped away in a rainfall of dust and small rocks. Bast took a deep breath.

He stared at the trees for a long, tense moment, listening, feeling sweat lick down his neck and the cool breeze beckoning from the depths of the woods. This wasn’t a place for mortals, but very few forests were.

He patted his left pocket in a reassuring way, felt a large lump there, and then began to walk.

˚*❋ ❋ ❋*˚

There was a moan in the wind. It was hushed, barely there, just a shiver under his skin and a soft finger across the back of his neck.

There was, nonetheless, a moan on the breeze. Bast’s ears twitched as he picked up on it, flicking back and forth. He had spent years being teased for their size, called “elf-blood” by peers and worse by everyone else. It was only by irony alone that his ears saved him time and time again.

Bast jumped over a dead tree and weaved back and forth among enormous trunks, following the moan deeper, deeper into the Forest of Saints. The name was a bit of a misnomer since no saints had died here, and since no one lived near there at all. The locals hoped it would call in some divinity to a place most considered generally “cursed to hell and back again.”

It was true Bast didn’t find a lot of holiness here. He just found shadows, spiderwebs, and the prints of animals bigger than anything under the mortal sun. The size of them matched the size of the trees themselves- trees so wide and dark they felt like walls.

It was quiet, no bird songs or bugling of elk, nothing but his own hushed footsteps and steady breathing. It smelled of something wet and green, dizzying and promising head colds every morning.

Bast thought it would take longer to be sucked completely into the heart of the woods, but the pulse of this place ate you whole and brought you into its bloodstream as quickly as any hungry mouth. It was vast and took you exactly where it thought you needed to go.

It led him past berry trees with fruit so red it almost stung to look at and trickles of streams and stone monuments by men and elves that had fled this land long ago. Bast endured it quietly as he saw the same stones and streams and broken shrines again and again.

“Show me,” he whispered to the dense trees, “please.”

The sun hung low and sour in the westerly in the sky when a new noise permeated the silent thickets. Bast stopped dead in his tracks, a growling coursed through the thin empty air, he turned around in circles, “I mean no harm.” He spoke in Common.

The growling was visceral. It was bloody, raw, and filled with things so old it could turn a normal person to dust and mold.

The sound grew with each passing moment, Bast’s skin crawled and his impressive ears perked up with a quiver. “I am a ranger,” he called, putting his hands up in the air. “I am Bast, son of Hemla. I am here for the trees.” The growling seemed to come from all directions, surrounding him and planting itself deep in his chest. He turned around once more, every hair on his body standing on end. Then he stopped. A great green-grey beast stood on a low branch above him.

Bast’s eyes went huge, his whole body taut and breath catching in his throat. It had a massive snout, trailing white whiskers, and two triangle ears, it stood on the lowest branch of a huge mother tree.

The beast’s paws were the size of Bast’s head and her legs as wide as his body. She was covered in dark dappled moss and growing things- like an island onto herself.

Underneath the greenery was grey fur so thick it looked like you could cut your hand on each hair.

Bast stumbled backward when the great beast leapt down, gracefully landing in the place in front of him. He felt the impact in his teeth.

“Forest wolf,” he whispered, but he knew she was something more than that. Much more.

An ancient dire wolf, bigger than any he had seen before. She had yellow eyes like glowing amber and a pelt covered in the very forest itself.

Bast put his hands further in the air, “I am Bast.” He said again, slowly, carefully. “I am a ranger. I can make the plants grow and the waters flow. I am not here to hurt your forest.” The forest wolf twitched her great snout, sniffing the air deeply. Her growling withered away and they were left at an impasse. She watched him through slitted eyes.

“Great guardian,” Bast tried one last time. “I want to save the Ents.” He winced so hard it hurt, “I have something.”

She watched him expectantly. Bast reached into his pocket, heart throbbing painfully. There was nothing for it, he had come so far or there was a high chance the guardian would bite his head off and think nothing of it. He swallowed thickly, cradling his treasure in his hands and hunching over.

“I know what we’ve done to this world,” he looked down at his feet, “mortals are hungry, no matter the species. We’ve hurt many forests.” He shook his head, “but I found this. At the very bottom of the Ashen Well in the volcanic plains.” He held up a single seed, about the size of a baby’s fist, it was a perfect acorn shape, and it pulsed warm in his hand like a tiny beating heart. It was shiny and hard, the throb of it was barely there, but it was still warm to the touch. “I’ve tried everything,” Bast whispered, “but I can’t raise him. I don’t know how, we need… I need to find someone to help, please.” The guardian looked down at the seed of a baby Ent, something worth more than all the gold in the world. It was said hobbits of old had a connection with the Ents, that they talked and listened and grew orchids together.

Perhaps I can do this yet, Bast thought to himself as the great forest guardian regarded him. Perhaps the planet is poisoned, perhaps it’s already over, but I can still do this.

The wolf closed it’s maw and padded closer and closer to him, he could smell the earthy scent of mulch and blood on her. She saddled up next to him and Bast looked dumbly back up, her belly reached the very top of his hat.

She lowered herself, haunches bending in an elegant arc and folding down to his level.

The wolf began to growl again, “okay, okay.” Bast returned the seed to his pocket and slowly approached her, she waited for him to grab onto a handful of fur. Her back was slippery with moss and hair thick as pine needles but he managed to clamber up high on her shoulders.

“Woah,” he was jostled backward the second he swung his legs over her back and had to hold on desperately with both hands. The wolf bounded across the forest floor and her back rolled like an ocean underneath them, they took off toward east of the sun.

Bast held on for dear life and his eyes began to water as the two of them pounded the earth and sped along the forest floor, the scenery becoming a blur of green as they moved.

His already-bruised tailbone ached as they crashed through the underbrush and went deeper and deeper into The Saint’s forest.

Will I be able to find my way back? Will I come back from this at all? A stray worrisome thought entered his head, but he dismissed it. I have to follow the forest spirit wherever she will take me.

It could have been an hour, it could have been five when the breakneck pace slowed.

The she-wolf lumbered to a slow stop and Bast cracked his eyes open, just as he heard the babbling of distant water and bird songs.

He blinked up, squinting into blotches of sunlight filtering in from up above. “Oh,” he hummed, feeling his chest expand.

This was a totally different part of the forest, dappled light spread all across the grassy floor- thick with foliage and animals skittering back and forth. “Thank you,” Bast said slowly, “thank you so much old mother.” The wolf just gave another brief growl and Bast swung off her back, landing with a heavy thunk and shudder felt through his knees. Bast managed not to topple over and firmly righted himself, the forest guardian started walking away the second he landed.

“Wait for me Old Mother,” he trotted along behind her and looked around once more. “Is this where they’ve been hiding?” He asked in a hush, “I’ve waited so long.” It had been five full moons since he had found the seed of an Ent. He was sure others existed but kings and treasure hunters craved them out as well, and then who knew what happened to the other tiny seeds. There was no telling if the one in Bast’s pocket could even still sprout.

The woods guardian led him toward a break in the trees, entering to a damp clearing with birds chirping high above and deer picking their way along the edges of the light. Bast could feel sacred energy of this place, he craned his neck back and took a deep breath.

“Great Ents!” He had to try, “please hear me!” He spun around in circles, “I have brought one of your own.” Nothing but chirping responded to him, Bast kept looking, circling the area and cupping his mouth to call out again and again. His voice echoed and the whole forest seemed somehow much stiller and emptier than it had before.

“Forest shepherds, tree lords, Ents of old,” his spirits began to flag, the sun was wilting into the earth, it was nothing but shadows brewing now. “Speak to me." Bast stopped when the wolf turned from him, facing the center of the clearing and padding away. Bast started to stomp after her, “why did you bring me here Old Mother?” He couldn’t keep the frustration out of his tone.

The wolf turned her massive head and Bast looked past her, the clearing had water running down the roots of a tree and pooling in a small clear pond at it's base. It was the largest tree he had ever seen, fit to house mansions or cities or more.

It breathed old life and the promises of all of time.

Bast ran, “is that one?” He called, a wild smile growing across his face. "Is this where the Ents have been hiding?" And then he looked up, the tree swept tall and larger than life, but the branches were bare, empty and bark ashen, it was only the hollow of a tree.

Bast’s shoulders fell, his heartbeat slowing and chest squeezing painfully. He turned to snap at the wolf, the birds, anyone, “is this some sort of game?” If this was ever an Ent, it was not living anymore.

Then he paused, stopped, eyes growing wide as he looked down. Some of the roots tangled into a shape: a little pocket woven like an uneven bean, filled with water so clear and blue it almost glowed. A cradle shape.

Bast trembled, he softly approached the cradle, fingers trembling toward the clear bubbling water. He could feel the magic there. The wolf followed him, her fangs exposed slightly and ears perked up.

There was still a chance he could lose his head.

Bast just nodded, he reached into his pocket, and he plucked out the little beating heart.

“Dear one,” he whispered to the baby, “I will protect you, we will do all we can, just,” he squeezed his eyes shut, pinpricks of water forming there. He slowly, slowly held the seed over the cradle of water, “come back to us.” He eased the seed into the Ent water. The seed settled at the bottom of the cradle and Bast looked down at it’s tiny pulse, beating hard and fast.

Please little one, he prayed, barely breathing, it’s your turn now.

A tiny, silken, white hair sprouted from the top of the acorn.

#fantasy #original story #writeblr #flash fiction #hobbits #ents

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starr-fall-knight-rise · 4 years

Text

Humans are Space Orcs, “The Shatter Protocol”

Lol I think you guys are going to totally hate me for this one. Its exciting tho, so there is that. Please don’t hunt me down in my sleep :)

“Commander on Deck!”

Commander Vir took a seat in the captain’s chair spinning around to face front, “Status report!” He barked hands gripped firmly to the seat arms jaw set.

“Rundi radar systems have detected twenty burg short cruisers and at least a dozen kree orbiting satellites, sir, its the whole fucking armada!”

“Keep yourself under control lieutenant! We’ve had worse.” And the way he said it made the crew almost believe him, “Are those satellites armed.”

There was a pause, “No sir, I don’t detect any weapons, mostly just power banks and mild warp capabilities.”

Off to his left, Sunny had taken her seat at the weapons station, “All weapons systems online.”

“Order the first and fifth fighter squad to deploy.” He said, “Have them pull around back.” He turned to the communications officer, “Get the GA on the line and get me more ships! I don’t care if i have to sell my soul to the GA, but we need more firepower. We aren’t going to win this if we can’t flank them.”

“Yes sir.” He engaged the radar screen, and deployed the forward cameras even as the front blast shields closed over his line of vision, only to be replaced by a projected image of the same.

“Commander, burg warships moving into position.”

He clenched his teeth into a snarl, “Why won't these bastards just give up already.”

“Sir Kozlov and Ho have arrived, and are maneuvering into position.”

“Good. Get me the Burg command on the line. I want to talk to them.”

“Yes sir.”

He waited there for a moment, hands still resting lightly on the sides of his seat, though he did engage the manual controls with one thumb as he did so resting his feet lightly on the pedals and moving his hands to the control sticks.

A projected image appeared in his vision, and it was big and ugly, with too many legs, a couple of mandibles, and some twitching antennae. Commander Vir wished he could meet the thing in person, simply to spit in the creature’s face.

“Commander.” it hissed, it's sibilant clattering voice making him want to open up his skull and itch at his brain.

“I’m afraid you have e at somewhat of a disadvantage…. I don’t know your name.”

The creature hissed, “We are on equal playing fields, commander.” It placed a little emphasis on the last word.

Commander Vir kept his face neutral, “You and I have never been on equal playing fields.”

“I think we have.”

“Well no, you see because ever conflict humanity has had with the burg, we’ve won. Three times. Some of your peop’e were defeated by army ants, so forgive me if I am skeptical.”

INstead of flying into a fit of rage like he had become accustomed too, this creature simply chittered its mandibles, “That will change soon enough.”

“Don’t suppose I can convince you to surrender?”

“No, I don’t suppose you can.”

Commander Vir tapped his fingers against the chair seat, “Than I suppose you will die like the rest of your predecessors.”

The burg commander, still calmly, “There are worse things than death, commander.” ANd then the line went dead.

Commander Vir frowned, but was cut off from his thoughts, “Sir, The burg ship is preparing to fire.” “Beginning evasive maneuvers.” At the back of the ship, the rear thrusters pulsed and they shot downwards jolting much of the crew in their seats. They couldn’t feel the projectile pass, as there was no blast radius in space, but the COmmander’s quick maneuver had stopped them from taking a round straight to the nose fo the ship.

“Sunny, fire when ready.”

“Yes sir, predictive engine has been booted.”

“Predictive engine?”

“Sunny flipped up the joystick on her weapons module, “Yes sir, I designed it for times just like this.”

Commander Vir watched nervously as she worked, finger twitching towards the trigger on his joysticks, but she was the weapons expert, it was time to let her work.

Two shots fired one slightly delayed from the other. The first of them aimed for the far right deck of the burg ship. It missed entirely as they maneuvered to the side and straight into the path of the second.

Commander Vir had never seen a hit so solid in his entire life.

He blinked in shock as pieces of debris exploded into space around the burg ship.

“Direct hit, sir.” She said. If she had had time to think, she would have been pleased with herself. The predictive engine she had spoken of earlier, was a piece of engineered software she had designed just for this occasion. It used probability, mathematics and fast calculation to determine the most likely course of action for a ship maneuver in comparison to a fired shot. In this way she could predict her target’s movement to an accuracy of 65% and almost up to 72% if she played her cards right.

Commander Vir tightened his hands on the joysticks, “What do you need me to do, Sunny.”

“You do whatever you need to, commander, and I will match you.”

She has sent off anther careful volley of shots, slowly rotating the guns in pairs of two to give the others time to cool off.

Bright white lights lit up the vast darkness of space as the two groups began firing back and forth at each other. The Celzex ship glowed an almost neon purple for a second before a massive discharge cut across the intervening space at speeds nearly incomprehensible.

A burg ship exploded, almost atomized on the spot.

The burg line broke, and dissolved into chaos breaking left and right. Commander Vir maneuvered his ship to the side, and cut forward, dancing the massive ship like a delicate ballet dancer across the stage of space.

As they cut by, Sunny armed close range ballistic cannons, sending a rapid onslaught of tungsten rods straight through the burg hull depressurizing an entire side of the ship. Captain Vir rolled to the side out of the way of another line of fire.

Outside, the fighters swarmed around his ship keeping burg fighters at bay. At a distance, the fight almost appeared like a swarm of bees around the head of a bear, one lumbering, the the others fast and graceful.

The burg tried to cut around to flank them from the back, but Captain Kozlov and Ho were waiting for them. The two crossed their firing fields, and decimated anyone who was stupid enough to enter. The Rundi ship covered the Celzex ship with it’s shielding, dropping it only on occasion when the Celzex’s weapons had charged back to full power.

Their weapons were slow, but when they hit, they absolutely decimated whatever they touched.

The ship shook as one of the burg fighters brought a line of rapid gunfire down their hull. Commander Vir cursed, knowing he could do nothing against an attack from such a small fighter.

Two more sharp blinks of light in the middle of space, and a Terasaki ship appeared escorted by another Rundi imperial.

Their appearance on the fighting stage was so sudden, the Burg had no time to react.

The Terasaki, as innovative as they were shot off a projectile towards two burg ships. It missed entirely, or so it seemed unti l there was a bright pulse of blue light, and the two ships jolted suddenly sideways as the absolutely massive magnet pulled them together.

They did not remain their long as the Celzex took the opportunity blasting both ships and the Tesraki magnet into atoms.

However, while their shields had been momentarily down, the burg had fired another volley, and the rundi ship rocked violently to the side. At least six burg ships concentrated their attack on the limping cruiser as its shields flickered on and off. The concentration was too high, and commander Vir maneuvered around and back behind them as a pice of the RUndi shi was blasted off. Bodies were sucked out of the open compartment and into the vastness of space.

He was flanking them now having turned a full 180 from their their original position.

Sunny humed in pleasure.

On board the ship’s most powerful railguns fired in quick succession. Commander vir jolted in his seat as the huge weapons bounced the backwards forcing the rear thrusters to fire in response, keeping them steady.

The first round blasted apart the Burg shield, and the second round cut right into the burg engine bay.

He was almost blinded by the bright light as the ship seemed to atomize right there on the spot as the Burg warp core was perforated, and the half that did not atomize imploded. The sudden destabilization of the warp drive was powerful enough to create a rift in the airspace that immediately warped the back halves of two and the front halves of two burg warships into oblivion.

Debris Pelted their companions mostly warded off by shields, but some scored lucky hits on the ships that had already had their shields damaged.

The Celzex took care of the rest blasting an entire field of burg ships into powder.

That was when Commander Vir sensed something to be very very wrong. He didn’t know what for sure, but a pit had formed in his stomach causing his heart to drop into his pelvis. The battlefield around them was chaotic, the burg having switched sides.

He was in back now, and there seemed to be a lot less burg ships than originally.

But where…? He wasn’t sure what made him turn the ship around, but he did, and when he did he saw the reason for his sinking stomach.

“Commander come in do you read, we are sensing a power anomaly behind you.”

He barely heard the words that came over the coms, as he watched the final satellite drop into position in the ring, and when it did a massive pulse of blue power erupted from around them.

When his vision cleared, what lay before him, caused the pit in his stomach to bore it’s way out of his body, his metaphorical heart sinking onto the floor.

Desperately, he fired all thrusters full forward.

The massive churning black abyss before them was powerful enough to warp space around it. Rings of light rolled at its edges pulsing around and over like a halo, though the center was of the deepest most malevolent black he had ever seen.

Screaming erupted on the bridge.

His ship jolted, and without his bidding slowly moving forward despite their full thrust backwards.

“FIRE THE WARP CORE NOW!” He screamed his hearing popping out to be replaced only with a ringing.

“FIRING WARP CORE.” One of the front panels of the harbinger broke off and went careening towards the black pit.

The ship’s hull screeched.

There was a sharp pulse, and then a jolt. That rent the air around them.

He almost passed out with the powerful wave of warp energy that blasted over the ship, and then died.

“WARP CORE MALFUNCTIONING!”

INside his heart was hammering, his throat was tight and his eyes stung. He stared at the gaping blackness before them and it’s swirling halo.

Comms lit up, “Commander we can’t get any closer, commander!”

It was at that moment he knew.

Suddenly, very suddenly his heart slowed, his breathing evened out. HIs eyes stopped prickling and despite his skin being cold he did not shake. He was still in the command chair as chaos reigned around him.

He heard himself speak as if from outside his own body, a voice that was calm, and decisive, and cool despite the hint of sadness that touched it. Though he did not shout, the power of his voice silenced the bridge, “Initiate the Shatter protocol.”

Everyone was silent.

“Everyone evacuate to the life pods and sealed decks immediately.” His seatbelt clicked into position, and he took a deep breath.

“But commander.”

“I said evacuate, now.” he did not raise his voice but the tone made it clear he would take no argument.

The crew stood from their seats.

Commander vir reached out and under his seat pressing a button that he had never wanted to press. Purple light blinked on around them.

Initiating shatter protocol.

The bridge crew filed out of the room as commander Vir stared stoically forward.

Please report to a restraint harness on an air locked deck or to the lifepods.

Commander Vir closed his eyes thinking “Conn, are you there?”

A soft voice, “Yes commander, I am here.”

“Can you get my dog-”

“Already done commander, she is safe with me.”

“Conn.”

“Yes?”

“You know I never mean the things I say to you, right?”

“Yes, commander, I know.”

The Bridge was almost completely empty now.

Shatter protocol to initiate in three minutes.

A hand on his shoulder.

He looked up, and saw sunny standing over him, her golden eyes wide with horror, “Adam, what are you doing!”

“Someone has to stay behind, Sunny. I have to manually fire them if I want everyone to make it out.”

“Bullshit.”

“Sunny, if you don’t leave right now I swear to god I will hate you for the rest of my life.” He locked eyes with her seeing the confusion and hurt there, “I will hate you because you will have murdered someone I loved.” She stared at him still not comprehending what he had said, but that was ok.

He stood allowing the seatbelt to disengage.

He stood Resting his hands on her upper arms pushing her slowly back towards the door.

When she wouldn’t move fast enough, he hugged her close pushing harder until the door was just behind them.

He turned his head to look up at her.

He leaned up moving onto the tips of his toes to reach sliding his hands onto the cool chest plate of her carapace.

She looked down at him confused, maybe scared.

He leaned up a little further bracing his toes against the steel, and shoved hard.

Sunny stumbled back pitching to the floor as he raced forward and slammed his fist into the locking button.

The door slammed shut as Sunny leaped to her feet.

Sealing ship decks.

All around the ship powerful airlocked metal plates slid down from all the doors, locking each individual deck into an air right compartment.

He heard the metal snick into place behind the door in front of him.

A captain goes down with his ship

He turned and took his seat back in the captain’s chair back straight chin held high.

He reached down and pressed the button again.

Jettisoning Deck F

Once upon a time, some engineer somewhere had designed a plan for an event like this. Lifeboats and escape pods were ok for small numbers of people, but for large amounts at a short notice, it just wasn't viable. So they had designed it where the decks of the ships themselves were lifeboats.

In an event of an emergency the decs would be sealed off into airtight compartments and then, one by one, jettisoned backwards from the ship using all systems for external power.

OUt in space, the Harbinger broke apart starting from the back forward. Thousands of escape pods and chunks of the ship rocketed backwards all at once fracturing like a pane of glass.

Commander Vir felt the power and lurched slightly forward in his seat. The lights around him dimmed as the command deck was cut from power. As the thrusters vanished, there was nothing to keep him stable and he rocketed forward towards the gaping maw of the black abyss.

HE rested his head back in his seat watching the hole grow wider before him.

He thought of his mother, hoping she wouldn’t cry too much, of his father who had never lost a son. He thought of his brothers. He thought of Dr. Krill. He thought about his crew, and he thought about Sunny.

Nothing but blackness in his vision.

In the darkness of the bridge, he whispered one final phrase to ALL of them before the command deck spiraled into blackness and vanished.

I love you

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punishandenslavesuckers · 5 years

Photo

Mollymauk Tealeaf wakes up in a grave by the road ten years after he died. Things have gone a bit wrong since then and he might be the only one who can set things right… since it’s the Mighty Nein themselves who’ve gone wrong. AU: Where Molly comes back to yell at his super-powered Level 20 friends. (AO3 - part1) (AO3 - part 2) (AO3 - part3) (AO3 - part4) (AO3 - part5) (AO3-part6) (AO3-part7) (AO3-part8) (AO3-part9) (AO3-part10)

Mollymauk is getting accustomed to this teleporting thing.

He’s getting accustomed to a lot of things, really, like the dying. Like the constant apprehension painted in a thin, burning layer across the inside of his lungs. Like the taste of blood in the back of his throat and the way resurrection magic slithers through his body – like a climax but turned horribly inside out. Molly’s getting used to this dissociation now between his physical self and his soul as he’s pulled through reality from point A to point B. That tooth-click that keeps happening when he stops being nothing and exists again suddenly. That weird ‘pop’.

Molly pops back into being standing in what looks like a dim and unkempt professor’s study.

It’s a big room. There are long wood tables scarred with chemical and arcane fire. Books stacked and laid out everywhere, papers scrawled with shorthand that seems to slither on the parchment when Molly looks at it. The place smells of burnt ozone and there are fading white runes painted onto the flagstones beneath his boots. Suggesting to Mollymauk that Caleb’s pulled him somewhere very specific. He’d hazard it’s Caleb’s personal workshop by the vaulted ceilings literally top to bottom and wall to wall bookshelves stuffed and stacked with tomes.

Caleb Widogast is still gripping Molly’s hand. Like a man might have hold of a handle.

On immediate instinct, Molly tries to extract his hand. But Caleb doesn’t let go so they just stand there. Caleb is still just a little bit shorter than him, but his eyes are still lit from the inside by whatever power lives in him like a star dying behind his irises. He’s staring at Molly and as Molly watches, the blood and gore and the crushed pieces of dead insect that coat his skin begin to flake away, floating and peeling off like embers off a log until Caleb is whole and healed and his hand is hot around Molly’s knuckles.

Through his teeth, Molly says, “Let go of me.”

Caleb’s eyes seem to focus then, like he’d been staring at some other layer of reality until Molly’s voice brought him. His fingers unfurl and he watches Molly instantly back away three paces, massaging his hand where the wizard touched him, rubbing off whatever lingers in the ink and scarring. If he’s offended by this, he gives no outward sign.

“Don’t touch anything. I can’t promise the items here won’t hurt you.”

Molly tells him to go fuck himself in Infernal.

Caleb blinks, then says, “You say that a lot, ja?”

“Well, you haven’t listened to me yet and I really think you fuckin’ should,” Molly snaps, frantically looking around the room. There’s no visible exit, just a strange constant convergence of walls and shelves and acute to obtuse that don’t seem to quite follow the laws of geometry as Molly understand them. It makes the room simultaneously bigger and more claustrophobic. Molly finds breathing harder all at once. “What do you want from me?”

“To talk,” he says, “for now.”

Molly processing that for a minute.

Then snarls, “Are you out of your bloody mind?” When Caleb knits his brow, Molly waves his hands around. “Kidnapping me? You think holding me hostage is gonna do shit? I’m the magic undead teifling, you dumbarse. You can’t threaten me. I’m literally the most useless hostage you could take. What’re ya gonna do?” He puts on a sarcastic voice. “Kill me?”

“I don’t plan on it.”

Molly’s still got one hand around his own wrist, rubbing restlessly at the tattoo run over his knuckles. His fingers dig tight until the bones in his hand pulse with his own rabbiting heartbeat. His entire body feels wound too tight to take. Shaking to bolt or battle, but his hasn’t got any weapons now and he’s standing near enough to touch to a man that kills with one word. He consciously slows his breathing. Tells himself to stop bloody shaking while Caleb studies him head to foot. Incrementally. Like he’s committing details to memory.

“Will Caduceus be alright?”

“That cell has more air, if that’s what you mean.” Caleb circles to Mollymauk’s left. “I wouldn’t use a fire-based spell otherwise.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Molly steps right to keep the same distance between them.

“He won’t die,” Caleb says, still circling, forcing Molly to move so they’re slowly orbiting one another. Caleb never breaks eye contact and Molly’s heart keeps racing, panic telling him that, and just that, could be some somatic component in a spell. Caleb shrugs. “I don’t know if he’ll be okay. That’s a bad enchantment. It can, ah, affect people.” He waves a hand vaguely at his head. “You know, that way.”

“Torture spells are traumatizing?” Molly snaps. “Fascinating. Who knew?”

“You think Caduceus is so gentle.” Caleb’s brows lift. “So soft, ja?”

“No, he skewered a dragon and trades in man-eating beetles. I’ve met trolls that were less scary. That doesn’t mean I’m on your side.”

“Of course not.” Caleb stops to face Molly full on. “You’re on the side of those who raised you. It’s understandable.”

“Oi, bite me, Mr. Widogast. I was on your bloody side until you killed me on a whim and word.” Molly squares himself to the wizard. “Don’t try to play victim when you bring up demons and attack your friends without a kindness of warning. If you mean to make me see your reason in all this, I’m tellin’ you now it’ll be a hard fuckin’ sell.”

“I know,” say Caleb. “Mollymauk, I’m going to show you something, but you need to do a few things for me.”

“Ha!” Molly didn’t mean to laugh that loud, but he’s a little hysterical at this point. “I’m not doing fuck all. You can drag me around on a magic leash first.”

Caleb sighs, then waves a hand… and Molly starts to glow. Or rather, his mithril-chain shirt and his bracers start to glow. Also, the rings on his index finger and thumb. Also, the half-dozen charms hanging around his neck and the clasp around his right horn, and the empty sword sheathes at his hips. Molly is lit up all over, glowing from every magic source on his body which is – with Nott’s insistence – quite a lot of magical aid.

“Take all that off,” Caleb says, hand still shimmering with the detect magic charm.

Molly doesn’t move.

“I’m not identifying any of that shit,” Caleb says evenly. “Take all of it off.”

“Nott gave these to me.”

Caleb’s expression cracks. A slight widening in the eyes suddenly – not of surprise but hurt. Then it’s gone under a stern indifference and he tilts his head a little and raises his other hand, thumb pressed to his middle and index finger in the precursor to a snap.

“Last chance,” Caleb says.

“Nott gave all this to me,” Molly whispers, “to protect me from—”

Caleb snaps his fingers and the air behind him displaces as something massive just materializes in the space directly behind him. Molly jerks back, his hips hitting a worktable. The thing behind Caleb sort of… unfurls. A broad, muscular back shifts as gargantuan leather wings arch up and flare over the wizard’s tawny head. Blue hide, riddled in plates of scale, shimmers in the torch light. A long serpentine neck arches up and up until the beast turns giant predator-gold eyes to fix on Molly. Its skull is the size of a battle shield, its jaw long, draconic, and toothy. Talons big as coat hangers clack and scrap on the floor as what appears to be a bull-sized blue dragon rises up behind Caleb the way a hunting dog comes to quarry.

“Blue dragon wyrmling,” says Caleb, reaching up to pat the beast’s horrifying jaw. “They like magic. Frumpkin doesn’t get to play with anything magic in this form, you see. My work is too dangerous.”

“Caleb,” Molly starts to say, fingers, digging into the table edge behind him. “Don’t—”

Caleb says a word in Zemnian. On that command, his hulking familiar looses a joyous predator scream.

Then it lunges at Molly.

It tears past Caleb, so smooth it barely disturbs the wizard’s fine black and gold robes. Molly, to his credit, immediately hurdles the table, dive rolls, and comes up sprinting on the opposite end of the table. Frumpkin hits the table, missing Molly by inches, then it hits the ground behind him, claws scrabbling on the stone like an off-balance Labrador. Molly feels it on instinct when Frumpkin swipes at his back. He ducks right, going low, skidding, razor-sharp claws whipping through the air over his head.

But then he’s on the ground and Frumpkin is huge.

Frumpkin’s jaws snap closed on the back of Molly’s tunic and with a whip of his head, the hurls Molly against another long table like a cat slinging a mouse against a wall. He crashes through a pile of books which – wondrously – take flight and scatter like a flock of disturbed pigeons. It would be neat if a small dragon didn’t then slam Molly like a battering ram. The beast pins him under massive claws, landing so the pads of its feet are crushing Molly’s upper arms flat, his spine bent back over the edge of the table as Frumpkin the blue dragon wyrmling start to bite excitedly at the mithril chainmail beneath Molly’s tunic.

“CALEB!” His tunic shreds under eager dragon teeth. “FUCK! WHAT THE FUCK!?”

Frumpkin drives his massive bony head against Molly’s chest and instantly cracks two ribs. Molly still manages to scream. Then Frumpkin is grinding an anvil-heavy skull against him like a cat might shove its face in a pillow of catnip except it’s his fucking ribcage and stomach. Frumpkin snuffles at Molly’s skull, chewing lightly at the clasp clipped to his horn before giving that up as a back job and rearing back to study him.

Then Frumpkin’s jaws start to open, crackling with blue static, a long tongue lashing with sparks. Molly sees it coming but he can’t stop it. Frumpkin licks Molly’s neck which… you know, fucking electrocutes him. Molly chokes as a short, agonizing current rips through him, lashing every muscle in his body into a garrote-wire of tension before the current dispels into the wood and it’s over.

Molly isn’t conscious of Frumpkin getting off of him, only of hitting the floor and rolling onto his side, his entire body throbbing and his neck searing where the dragon-thing licked him. He smells burnt skin and ozone.

“Okay, ah, that was a bit much…” Caleb is saying. “Bad cat.”

“Fuck you,” Molly snarls, but it’s undercut with a sob. His entire chest pulses red rivers of fire with every breath.

He curls his one arm around himself and just lays there in a heap with his forehead pressed to the cool stone, tail wrapped around his body at the knee. He has one palm pressed to the floor near his waist, but he can’t find the strength to get up. Through the feverish glow of pain, he feels a hand touch his neck and that cold palm smooths from the hinge if his jaw, down the line of muscle to his clavicle. A slow bleed of magic slides through the gash, like pouring liquid salve into the wound and from there it travels down, down, spreading out inside his chest until the hairline cracks splintered through his ribs go cold as well. Soon, there’s no pain left. Just a numb buzzing in the nerves.

Molly lifts his head.

Pale blue eyes stare back.

“Are you going to take off your enchantments or do you want Frumpkin to try again?”

Molly shoves Caleb in the chest.

This knocks the wizard onto his butt. He didn’t seem to have expected that, because he just kind of drops on his ass and blinks. Surprised while his gigantic wyrmling familiar sniffs at his hair. Molly levers himself into a sitting position. Then he starts pulling the rings off his fingers, palming them, before reaching up to remove the clasp from his horn and the earrings that stave off cold. He unstraps the bracers, pulls the charms from around his neck and sets all this aside. Then he glares, gets to his feet, and turns his back on Caleb while he reaches up and tugs his shirt off over his head from the shoulders.

That way no one can see it while he wipes his eyes with the back of his hand.

Molly puts his ruined shirt on the table while he pulls the chainmail off, leaving on nothing but the thinner, sleeveless under-shirt he’s been using to pad the chainmail. The rings are still leaving marks in his skin. He’s not used to armor. Molly starts to pull his shredded tunic back on over his head when he feels Caleb start to move toward him again and –

Molly whips around, snarling, the words going Infernal in his throat: “Back off!”

Frumpkin the wyrmling starts to growl, but Caleb waves his quiet. There’s pause. So, Molly turns back around and finishes pulling his clothes back on. There’s an ache in his bounding heart now, a low panic like a current in his blood that makes him want to double over and start screaming for the frustration of it. The fucking unfairness and stupid cruelty of it. He straightens his shirt and pushes his hair out of his face, then turns to look at Caleb.

“What now?”

“That wasn’t intentional,” Caleb says.

“You sicced your giant bloody cat on me.”

“I warned you.”

“Oh. Well. Alright then. All’s forgiven.”

There’s a tense silence.

Then, “Follow me. Don’t try to run or Frumpkin will sit on you again.”

And then quite suddenly there’s an obvious doorway on the wall to Molly’s right. Caleb crosses the room and opens it, going through, not stopping to check if Molly follows. Probably because Frumpkin is now standing directly behind Molly, breathing static on his neck. Molly pauses to glance back up at the giant familiar. He literally has Molly’s cursed sword sheathes between his jaws like a grinning dog with a stick.

“Your boss is a bastard,” Molly says.

Frumpkin just blinks and nudges him in the shoulder.

“Fine.”

Molly follows Caleb.

Through the door is a long hallway, mostly featureless and should be cold for all the empty stone space, but the air seems to be magically regulated to a comfortable room temperature. The silence is broken only by the soft slap of boots against the floor and the terrible scraping clack of Frumpkin’s talons. They walk through the hall. Caleb keeps surreptitiously checking a dark metal pocket watch as they walk, but the face of it is blank and makes Molly’s eyes hurt to look at it directly.

“The others are looking for you,” Caleb says.

“You don’t seem worried. I would be.”

“I have time,” he says, pocketing the weird watch. “Jester’s young god still needs time.”

“Famous last words.”

Molly glances at a hanging tapestry on the wall nearby – a map of a land he doesn’t know. He’s certain now that he’s passed it a few times. He’s getting the impression that Caleb’s lair really does not obey any laws of physics and the only reason they’re moving through it at all has to do with the wizard himself. Frumpkin, once more, nudges at Molly’s shoulder. Like a border collie keeping a flock of one in line, confirming this really isn’t his first time playing guard dog to visitors.

“The others have told you I’m trying to end the world,” Caleb says.

“No.” Molly folds his arms across his chest, tail lashing anxiously around his boots. “They were very specific that’s not what you’re trying to do, just a possible side effect of what you’re trying to do. That’s what they told me.”

“Hmm,” Caleb says.

Molly feels a heat flare in his throat. “What?”

“I thought they’d lie a little more. I’m surprised.”

“Maybe you just think all your friends are against you when really they’ve been busy – you know – being crazy with grief or kidnapped by demi-gods. Which, by the way, I’m curious, did you try to get Fjord out of there?”

Caleb looks over his shoulder. “Of course. Did they tell you I didn’t?”

“No.” Molly rolls his eyes, leering for effect. “But you’re such a jackass right now…”

“No one could reach Fjord,” Caleb says plainly, blinking. “None of my magic meant anything in the face of that. Nothing short of a god could get close and the only god we had was Jester’s. Fjord was gone so long…” Caleb pauses. “I thought he’d be insane by the time we got him out or thralled to the Serpent.” Caleb’s eyes are unfocused, looking sidelong and away. “It seemed impossible he might still be him.”

Molly hesitates before saying, “Fjord’s stronger than you gave him credit for.”

“Maybe, or maybe he’ll turn on the others in due time. Jester has a blind spot for him. Always has. She would not accept that Fjord might be gone. She obsessed and no one could talk her down from it. Not Nott or Caduceus or anyone. Maybe Beau could have talked her down, but Beau was gone and Yasha was gone and so…” Caleb shrugs and looks forward again. “She was taken too.”

Molly tilts his head. “You say ‘taken’.”

“Yes. There’s a difference.”

“You sure?”

Caleb glances again at Molly. “Caduceus left me. He promised he’d never do that, but he did. He wasn’t taken by anything. Neither was Nott, but I don’t blame her. She was scared. I scared her.”

“You’re a moron,” Molly says.

“Thank you, Mollymauk. Nice to have you back.”

“You’re both morons,” Molly insists, bending at the waist a little to put some emphasis on it, really enunciate. “Caduceus stuck by you because he’s an optimist who couldn’t see you’ve got your head so far up your own asshole there’s no fuckin’ sunshine. Caleb, I’m here to tell you.” Molly cups his hands around his mouth. “Pull it the fuck out, mate! You’re going to end the world because you feel bad about Beau dying.”

“You act like you’re the first to tell me this.”

“I know I’m not the first, but since you won’t listen to literally anyone else, the gods brought me back from the bloody dead specifically, I think, to tell you to stop being a bastard stuffed bastard in bastard sauce and just stop.”

“I can see why the gods in their infinite wisdom decided to intervene and raise you from the dead.”

Molly spits. “I didn’t come back from the dead to persuade you of shit.”

“Apparently.”

“I’m not your conscience, Widogast.”

“You’re saying that like I ever thought that was the case.”

Molly folds his arms again, gripping his elbows in his hands and swallowing, glaring at the wall to distract himself from the slow crush of panic and futility coiling around him. It seems impossible he was in the Blooming Grove less than an hour ago. That he was laying in the grass, chatting with Caduceus. That he’d been surrounded, however briefly, by familiar faces and there was a plan, however, tenuous, as to how all this was going to end and now… he’s here. The shock of loneliness stings his throat and eyes all at once.

“You know, I’m not sure what I am, really.” Molly drags a palm across his face, pulling his hair from his brow again, wiping his eyes. “I thought my job was to get everyone together to, I don’t know, dogpile you until you stopped being a lunatic, but that doesn’t seem to be working.” He glances at Frumpkin who bares horrible fangs around belt and scabbard set in his mouth. “I don’t think I’m doing this right.”

“You got Fjord out,” Caleb says.

Molly blinks but Caleb doesn’t look at him, just keeps walking.

“It’s not your job to save us. You’re your own person. You don’t serve our purposes, Molly.”

“You can’t say that and hold me hostage, Widogast.”

“I know, but I’m a terrible person. Imagine someone better said it. It’s still true.”

Caleb’s hand is pressed against the wood of a heavy looking oak door. Molly can’t say when it was that the distance between the infinite hallway suddenly started to close, but it’s closed now and Caleb looks over his shoulder to meet Molly’s eyes. The wood beneath his hand is complex with runes and sigils, cut with some kind of arcane formula. It, like so many things in this place, ripples and changes before his eyes just looking at it. Caleb keeps staring at him, his burning stare inhuman and bright.

“Have they told you about Beauregard?” he says.

Dread drives a rod straight through Molly’s gut. His pulse rabbits fast.

“They told me a little. Like what she did, how she went down.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean have they told you about her. Do they talk about her?”

Molly hesitates. “If you mean, do they tell me funny stories about her, like what a shithead she was or the time she, I dunno, snorted oatmeal up her nose laughing at breakfast… no. They didn’t.”

“Ja. It’s hard for them.” He kind of looks away. “I remember her. I remember everything she ever said to me, actually.”

“Beauregard… she was pretty important to you.” Molly looks meaningfully around the giant mage-lair around him and the miniature dragon leering over his shoulder. “You’ve done a lot to save her. You’ve, well, you’ve pushed away everyone else who cares about you to do this. I can tell you’re dedicated but, speaking as a formerly dead person… you sure Beau would want to come back like this?”

“They didn’t tell you she became our leader, did they?” Caleb doesn’t wait for Molly to answer or acknowledge his previous question. “She told me once, that she had a reoccurring nightmare. In this dream, she’s standing on that cart on the Glory Run Road. She can’t move, her boots are frozen to the wagon wood while Lorenzo kills you.” Caleb’s looking at him with this strange expression, unreadable as a wall. “I don’t think she ever stopped having that nightmare.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Molly says.

“She called you ‘the best of us.’”

“Wow, okay.” Molly managed an exaggerated laugh. “That’s just because you didn’t know me very well and your bar was low back then. I should have told you all about this one time, in this port town, there was this thing with noodles –”

“It doesn’t matter,” Caleb cuts him off, visibly irritated. “It doesn’t matter that you’re an obnoxious, loud, carnival man that we barely knew. It doesn’t matter that we never really understood you, that you kept secrets, and died before we knew them. None of it matters because when you died, Beauregard regretted that it was you, instead of her.”

Molly stiffens a little, shoulders tensing. “Look, that’s a nice notion and all, but from what I’ve seen over and over, none of you much remember me like I was.” A beat. “Like I am.” Another beat. “Like I was before? Ah, fuck it…”

“Stop being flippant.”

“Sure. Stop holding me hostage.”

The wizard shakes his head, looking tired all at once. “You’re not going to listen to a word I’m saying, are you?”

“Caleb,” Molly says, “If you want me to listen, I would do that. You wanna sit down and have a cup of tea and talk? Great. I’d love that. Gossip is my thing. But I don’t think you’re trying to convince me of anything. I think you’ve already made some godawful decision and you’re just thinking out loud in my face.”

Caleb says nothing.

Just… stares at him.

It’s so strange. It’s Caleb, like it’s always been Caleb, just five degrees off Molly’s memory of the man – cleaner and more put together. He’s had a haircut and a proper shave. He looks like he should be on a council to something important somewhere, telling people to do things… but through every bit of that there’s still the fucking eyes. Just… empty and sad and resigned in exactly the same way he remembers but so much fucking deeper and blacker than that.

“I can’t talk to you,” Molly says softly, “if I’m a spell component and not a person to you.”

Caleb stares. “I don’t think you’re a spell component.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I want to know if you want to kill Beauregard.” He says it so blankly, so hallowed with exhaustion that it feels impossible that he’s been able to mask it until now. A deep festering despair in his voice that goes all the way down to the core of him as he laughs a little. “Because it seems now that everyone else in our little family has decided to kill her and it occurs to me that you, Mollymauk, might be the only one undecided on the issue.”

Molly doesn’t say a goddamn thing.

“Would you answer me?”

“It’s not as simple as –”

Caleb cuts him off saying, “Until I’m done asking questions, you should tell me the truth, Molly.”

And the suggestion takes hold of him. Gently. Not dominating but it slides over his tongue with such an easy familiarity Molly’s swallowed it before he can make even a token resistance and his shoulders kind of relax, tension easing out of his limbs for the first time since he was torn from the Blooming Grove. Caleb’s hand, holding something nonobtrusive at his hip, opens and he reaches up. It’s familiar. Molly lets him pat his cheek and thinks, unbidden, about Hupperdook and a very fucked up Caleb slurring, “Yeah. Th’only magical thing here… is you, friend.”

There’s something sticky on his palm. Smells like honey or…

“Just tell me what you think,” Caleb says.

“Okay.” Molly feels… strange, a little drunk almost but in a nice way, a mild anxiety in his breast that compels him say, “I don’t wanna kill, Beau. Bloody hell, of course I don’t.” It’s such a relief to say that, he goes on a little urgently. “Everyone is saying this is the right thing to do, but it makes my whole fucking body ache to think about. I don’t want to do it.”

“Do you think you can do it, if you had to? If it was down to you?”

“No.” The admission physically hurts to say aloud. Molly clenches his eyes shut. “I can’t.”

Caleb’s quiet for a moment.

Molly feels a hand on his head, pressed over his left ear, beneath the curl of his horn and he looks up at Caleb.

He looks strangely relieved. “Me too.”

“I’m not on your side, Caleb. It’s the wrong thing that I can’t do it. I can’t do it because I’m selfish and I don’t want to live with doing that to my friend… but I know it’s wrong.”

“I know.” Caleb laughs a little. “You feel poorly about that. I don’t. I’m not willing to kill Beau to save the world.” He shrugs. “I know its not fair or right, but she was… she really was the best of us. I can’t let her go like this.” He shakes his head, a wry smile suddenly on his lips. “This mistake. I don’t have to let it stand like the others.”

“Good people die all time,” Molly whispers. “The world’s not a fair place. It’s our job to make it fair as we can, but you can’t bloody do this.”

“My people don’t have to die,” Caleb says. “Not this good person.”

“Caleb, just stop—"

“You cared about Beau, yeah?”

“I died for her, didn’t I?”

Caleb studies his face and in his stare, Molly sees it – the bald-faced fact of it: He’s not looking at a man expecting to get away with anything. He’s not looking at someone with a tomorrow in mind. Then Caleb waves a hand and Molly feels the enchantment release its hold on his thoughts. It’s a cruel hand pulling a warm blanket off his shoulders and he’s standing in the sudden cold aftermath of the spell. All the compelled words sour suddenly on his tongue and a ripple of rage and grief lances through him simultaneously.

“I’m sorry. I needed to know where you really stood.”

And Caleb pushes the door open.

When he does, the air in the room rushes out. It’s freezing cold, turning Molly’s breath to fog instantly and penetrating him to the bone. He shivers, arms jumping up to tuck around his chest, his teeth chattering almost immediately in the artic chill. There’s light coming from the other room, cold and blue and anti-septic. It’s a large circular chamber, empty of everything, just stone walls etched in the same magical formula as the door except all the runes here glow gently blue, humming a slow two-two beat. Like a pulse.

Which makes sense because sitting the in the middle of the room, legs crossed, and facing them… is Beauregard.

She’s seated on a low stone dais. There is a barrier of blue light around the platform. The air glows around her, a vertical shaft of cold azure magic from floor to ceiling. She’s sitting as if in meditation, back straight, hands in her lap, eyes closed. She’s wiry and dark. Small and dense with muscle. Denser than he remembers. Her arms are probably bigger in the bicep than his now. Around her arms are silver bracers, smithed in the symbols of Ioun. There is blood on her fingers, on her knuckles, her lip split, her eye darkened with bruising and that… that makes her so familiar it turns something tense in Molly’s stomach.

Beau with a black eye.

Beau standing on the back of an ice-cracked wagon.

Beau screaming his name, her blue eyes wild in the dawn light, as Lorenzo –

“Why is she bloody?” Molly manages.

“She’s been like that since the day she struck down Oblivion,” says Caleb. He’s still got his hand on the door, his eyes on Beau. “Nothing touches her except divine magic. Caduceus and Jester used to heal the wounds, but they always return. Nothing we do stays. She always… goes back to the way she was in the moment she killed the Oblivion.”

Molly moves into the room. With every step toward Beau, the temperature drops, until Molly’s shivering so hard, Caleb must see it because he taps Molly on the shoulder and warmth slides through his clothes and insulates him in a thin layer of heat that makes his skin steam slightly in the freezing air. Molly moves close enough that he can see the light around her is not just light, but a thin, runic barrier – a magic layer of transparent blue writing so fine it looks like mist moving up and down the surface of the barrier wall.

“You can touch it,” Caleb says. “It only contains.”

Molly cautiously presses a palm against the magic and his hand cleaves lightly to it, like glass, like Beau’s a thing in a shop window he’s trying to see.

Molly can see now that the stone where she touches it is calcified and cracked, frozen as if by a spill of liquid nitrogen. Frost cakes the ground around the platform in shimmering white. The air near her is… humming. Shaking in Molly’s bones, buzzing down to the atoms that compose him. It feels awful and familiar all at once.

But he can see Beau clearly.

She is dressed in battle attire, or what remains of battle attire. The kind of thing you wear when you go to war for the gods.

Her long sleeveless jacket is shredded along the hem and shorn as if by a blade. The royal blue fabric is dark with blood which does not appear to have dried somehow. Her tunic is shredded open to the athletic small clothes beneath. There are etched and glowing bands around her arms, around her wrists, obsidian studs in her ear lobes that shimmer with enchantment. Her dark hair looks exactly as he recalls: shaved along the sides then knotted up at the top. Molly recognizes Yasha’s touch in the beads woven there in braids and plaits. There’s a tattoo of a posie beneath her right clavicle.

Molly’s throat knots up.

“Yasha and Beau…” Molly says, only after her gets his voice working. “Did Yasha—?”

“Marry Beau then lose her?” says Caleb. “Yes. On the same day in fact.”

Molly’s eyes burn. He clenches his hand shut against the barrier magic, leaning his weight against it. He can feel Caleb moving to stand at his right shoulder, watching him react but he doesn’t care. Frumpkin’s heavy footfalls place the dragon creature to his left, hovering protectively as Caleb touches Molly’s arm.

“Yasha won’t survive it.” His voice is certain and indifferent as sunset. “Losing her completely after Zuella—”

Molly knock his hand off his arm, yanking away. “Don’t!” Infernal heat laces his breath. “Don’t you try to use her—”

“You know I’m right.”

Molly pulls his hand from the barrier. “You want me to help you, don’t you? You’re trying to get me to help you.”

“No.” Caleb sounds sorry. “Just… confirming some things.”

He snaps his fingers and there’s a flare suddenly from the light barrier and the color of the runes, glowing faintly from every stone surface, changes suddenly to a deep, seething purple. Black steam immediately begins to burn off the sigils and Molly lunges back from Beau’s alter, hands up like he can defend himself from anything Caleb is doing. The wizard is ignoring him. He has some kind of crystal in his right hand suddenly and he’s drawing signs in the air with the fingers of his left hand. The signs stay there, like ghost writing, shivering with terrible potential energy. Like a bow string pulled taut except pulled through the whole fucking universe.

Frumpkin bumps into Molly’s back, his tail lashing in a sudden half-circle around him, penning him in suddenly, wings flaring up over head.

“I think the gods are on my side,” Caleb says, still casting his spell. The crystal in his hand disintegrates to dust and he waves a hand. Summons a blade from somewhere and uses it to slice open his left forearm, but doesn’t stop casting. “I was hasty before. I didn’t see it.” Blood splatters the floor. “All the spells to bring Beau back are so complicated without sentient sacrifice. Willing sentient sacrifice. I’ve had to build workarounds. So time consuming but now it’s so simple…”

“I’m not dying for your bloody spell!” Molly snarls.

“You already did.” Caleb looks over his shoulder. “You died for Beau ten years ago and not just a little; you died a true death. You were dead of a different kind. The kind that matters and makes gods intervene.” There’s a smile then, on Caleb’s lips, both sad and victorious. “That magic is forever, Mollymauk.”

Light flares blinding from Caleb’s fingers, igniting the blood on the flood so it burns white and evaporates into a red steam. Caleb closes his eyes. He breathes in and the crimson effluvium disappears down the wizard’s throat and when he opens his eyes, they’re burning red as a blood-letting sunset. He turns and presses both hands against the barrier wall that holds Beauregard in. Red light injects itself into the magic, spreading out like a cancer along the surface of it.

Molly feels a pull. Not on his body but a pull he’s come to know in the transition between life and death. Every time Vax’ildan sends him to and from the plane between realms– something is pulling on his soul.

“Caleb!” Molly feels that pull again, hideous and cold and Molly hits the floor on his knees, clutching uselessly at his chest. “Fuck! Stop! Stop!”

“It’s okay, you won’t lose your soul,” Caleb says. “I just need it here…”

There’s a flare from the barrier wall and Molly screams as the light seems to shove himself out of his flesh and the sliding back in feels like falling into a solid slab of screaming nerve and blood and it hurts. It hurts. Molly’s doubled over on the floor, arms knotted around his body, tail curled around himself. This spell has no guiding touch on it. No raven knight errant gentling the transition between astral and material and its like dying a little over and over. Nauseating and awful.

“I’m sorry. Most sacrifices are dead when this is happening.”

“Oh really?” Molly grits, getting one knee under him.

“Just a little longer,” Caleb murmurs. “It’s just a little farther—”

Molly doesn’t let him finish. He snaps his fingers.

Instantly, there’s a flash of light from Frumpkin’s mouth as the empty scabbards in his jaws ignite with conjuration magic. Frumpkin’s head jerks back, the dragonling snarling in surprise. But before anyone can lift a finger, Molly pivots around and lunges at him, faster than he can remember moving in his life… and his fist closes around something solid. He dive-rolls past the familiar, tearing the scimitar from its scabbard. Molly spins up, sword in hand, breathing frantic.

Caleb is glaring at him.

“Stop fucking around.” There is a dark and throaty edge to his Zemnian accent. His eyes flare in his skull, burning brighter, fixed on Molly. “You think you’re going to fight me, Mollymauk?”

“No.” He shakes his head, breathing fast and shallow. “No, I can’t fight you.”

“I know this has been… confusing.” There’s blue flame gathering in the man’s hand. “It’s an admirable instinct, but—”

Molly reverses the sword. An easy, almost casual flip of the blade in a two-handed grip, and sets it point-first against his own sternum. No hesitation. No time. The hit at first: like being punched, the breath driven from his body, then the pain (the feeling Lorenzo taught him ten years ago on the Glory Run Road). Mollymauk shoves it through his ribcage and—

He wakes up standing on a hill beneath the shining moon.

He’s clutching his breastbone, fists stacked where the hilt of a blade was driven in the Material plane. The moonlight is shining, shimmering on his skin like a sheen of diamond dust on his knuckles. Molly stumbles. His knees give out but before he can fall, he’s suddenly tackled as a blur of blue and skirts and arcane light bursts into existence and lunges at him. He collapses against them, arms seizing instinctively around their neck and their hair is silky, chiming with silver, and smells like carnival caramel when he breathes in.

“Jester!” Molly clutches her, fingers sinking into her hair, hooking his elbow around the back of her neck as she laughs and hugs him back. “Bloody hell.” He plants a big kiss in her hair, catching the curve of her ear. “Fools flock together huh?”

“Molly! Molly! Fuck! Shit!” She’s kind of crushing his ribs. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you? How’d you—?”

“Caleb didn’t kill me,” Molly whispers. He hugs her more tightly. “I did it myself.”

Jester freezes. Her fingers dig more tightly into his shoulder.

“S’alright, Jes.” He tries to laugh, but it’s not very convincing. “I’m a one trick tiefling.”

“Can you go back?” Jester whispers. “Molly, were you with Caleb? I can break through another way, but if you can go back–”

Molly pulls back, lets Jester cup his face in shaky fingers. “Caduceus put the Death Ward on me.”

Jester nods. Her eyes brim bright with tears, her pretty white teeth biting at her lower lip. Molly carefully mirrors her, fitting his hands around her dark, heart-shaped face. She starts to say something, but it comes out a sob, so Molly just drops his brow against hers and stays that way for a moment. Feels her tail lash protectively around his right knee, her fingers sink a little more deeply into his hair.

She murmurs, not words, but a low Infernal subvocalization that has no translation into the common languages of the realm – it just means… sadness, sadness, rage, regret.

“Tell me about it,” Molly says in kind.

Jester moves her hands down his neck, to his shoulders, his arms, taking his hands in hers.

“I’ll do it, Molly.” She squeezes tight. “I can stop him.”

“I know.”

A voice over his shoulder says, softly, “You will have half a moment.”

Molly smells dust, old soil, the faint scent of decay – not of flesh but some older less transient material. Jester tucks herself close to his side, gripping his arm tight and it hurts how much strength he can draw from that. Molly turns. Vax’ildan stands again on the hill with them, beautiful and familiar, but unlike every time before… Molly can feel the eeriness in the Raven Queen’s champion. The size of him suddenly astronomical behind his physical presentation.

There’s darkness rising from his shoulders, a strange canopy that stretches up from his back and spreads out in translucent gloom. Molly hears the rustle of wings, of feathers, of a thousand, ten thousand ravens taking wing. When he looks up, he realizes the darkness is merely the massive arch… no… just the shadow of two leviathan wings. Vax moves forward and the moonlight avoids him where walks. Molly doesn’t flinch, even when he fits both palms to either side of Molly’s face and lifts his eyes.

“ I can give strength you don’t remember, Mollymauk. But that’s all I can do. Are you ready?”

Molly pauses, then, “Kiss for luck?”

Vax’ildan – wreathed in darkness, gaze holding the mass of collapsed stars, the voice of the Raven Queen on his tongue – gives him a look. Then rolls his eyes and says, amused, “Fuck it. Kiss for luck.”

Then he leans down, tilting his head and kisses Molly gently on the mouth.

And Molly opens his eyes.

He’s standing in the same room, holding the scimitar point first against his chest, in the precursor of killing himself. There’s blood all over his forearms, his hands, and soaked through his tunic. But he’s still on his feet and Caleb is staring at him with this… startled expression. Eyes wide, mouth open as if in the middle of saying something. He’s still got one hand against the burning red magic that’s holding Beau, the other hand kind of raised in the attitude reaching or casting.

He looks frightened. That fades though as Molly releases his grip on the blade and it clatters to the floor. Molly exhales, his breath a silvery cloud and he backs up a little, shaking his head at if to clear it.

“Why did you do that?” Caleb says blankly. “Killing yourself won’t make a difference.”

“It did to me,” Molly pants.

“Please, don’t do that.”

Molly stares at him. “Caleb, I wish I could I say I’m sorry about this… but you’ve been an asshole.”

And that’s when Jester – stepping out of the ether like a woman stepping through a door – grabs the wizard from behind and punches him. It’s not, like, a ‘how dare you slap’. She snatches his collar in one hand, rears all the way back, and cracks him across the jaw with the other. Caleb staggers, shoulder slamming against the barrier wall. He scrabbles at the wall, visibly struggles to stay conscious through what is certainly a concussion and a broken jaw. Jester doesn’t give him the time. She raises one hand over her shoulder. A massive lollipop bursts into existence – pink and white and brilliant with ribbons. Then she takes the handle in both hands and she swings.

She hits him like a kid playing stick ball.

There’s an arcane flare – of magic hitting magic and Molly feels it as unmovable object meets unstoppable force. The lollipop hammers a defensive spell Molly has no understanding of and the impact ignites the air in blinding radiance. Molly is knocked to one knee by the shock wave alone. A body launches from the center of the room like a rachet ball and then slam into the far wall like a rag doll. It’s definitely Caleb. He hits the floor in a heap, a swirl of passive magic siphoning around his body.

Frumpkin, by then, has finished tearing across the room and lunges at Jester, jaws full of lightning –

“Bad kitty!” she screams.

Her eyes flare white and Frumpkin poofs out of existence.

Caleb seems to be regaining consciousness. He shudders and levers himself up on one elbow, head hanging low as he sways dizzily. He coughs blood, red splattering the flag stones. There’s blood in his hair at the back of his head. He can’t seem to orient himself or speak, suggesting that his skull might be cracked so badly its costing him basic functionality. He tries, with difficulty, to lift his head. His eyes are flickering erratically, brightening and dimming, like a circuit is shorting in him.

Jester, again, does not wait. She disappears then reappears standing directly over him.

She doesn’t say a damn thing.

She just raises a hand and with a flare a soft orb of pink magic blooms around her, encasing herself and Caleb. Immediately the passive magicks moving around Caleb go dormant and disappear. Over her shoulder, the massive lollipop rests like a mace in her hand. Invisible winds disturb her hair and skirts. Her eyes burn green in the iris and she just… waits. Because Caleb is bleeding out at her feet, fast losing consciousness in the neutral bubble of her anti-magic field.

Still he manages, “Jes…ter…?”

“Where is Caduceus?” she says. But when she speaks, her voice quavers. Water drips from her chin. “Did you kill him, Caleb?”

“Nev… I’d never…”

He can’t finish the sentence.

Jester covers her mouth with one hand, eyes squeezing shut, and Caleb slumps unconscious on the floor. For a moment, there’s just silence. Blood freezing on the cold stone floor. Then Jester dismisses the spiritual weapon and drops to her knees. She fits her hands to Caleb’s bleeding head. She combs the bloody hair from the ugly split in his skull and magic begins to sink gingerly into the wound. She’s whispering something softly, like a refrain.

Eventually, Molly moves to kneel with her inside the dome.

“He’ll be okay,” she says, attempting cheerfulness as tears overrun her eyes. “He’ll be okay. I’m asking the Traveler to break some of the… the forbiddance spells around the keep. The others will be here soon. We’ll be okay.” She chokes a little on her own voice. “Everyone’s back together.” Her fingers close in the back of Caleb’s robes, the magic dissipating from her fingers, and that’s when Molly loops his arms around her. She grabs his shirt, clinging suddenly, something building in her chest until she blurts, crying, “What did we do wrong, Molly?”

“Nothing.”

He cradles her head, rocking a little as she starts to sob.

“We tried so hard!”

“I know.”

Jester is wailing now, just gut-wrenching heaves against Molly’s shoulder. “I miss her so much!” She can’t seem to breathe, giving in entirely to ugly crying, almost hiccupping. “I miss Beau! She said we needed to take care of each other and we didn’t.”

“Hey, the world asked a lot from you. S’not your fault if you didn’t do every damn thing on the list.”

“I’m sorry!”

“Shh, stop it. It’s over,” Molly murmurs, hugging her closer. “It’s over, Jes.”

Jester just keeps crying until it seems like she may never stop, but even as he begins to think this, there is a sudden rush of warm wind and the scent of… of somewhere else. Somewhere green and summer-y, sap-sticky, and hot against the skin and Molly feels someone step into the space to his left and kneel. There’s no one there of course, but Molly sees it when Jester’s hair moves a little, an invisible hand tucking strands behind her ear and only then does her wailing become a sniffle.

“I know, but I didn’t want it to be this way,” she says loudly to no one.

Molly feels that murmur of wind again, so comforting it wipes away the cold of the room.

“You promise?” Jester says, looking up at the empty air.

And there’s a chuckle, resonate and deep. Molly gets the impression of the ‘yes’ and a whisper like a cloak against his shoulder, passing by.

And Jester turns to Molly and says, “It’ll be okay. I’m okay.”

Molly gives the room a wary once over. “You sure?”

Jester starts to smile. “We can fix it. It’s… it’s going to be—”

“Finally,” says a voice.

The word splits through Molly’s skull like a nail through the roof of his mouth. He’s on the floor before he can process anything farther, his every limb locked up around a sucker punch that didn’t happen. Dizzy, he struggles to lift his forehead from the ground, but the voice goes on like a tuning fork jammed inside his brain.

“Hey, man. Don’t run, I have some questions for you.”

Molly manages to lift his head. His vision is splitting, going dark around the edges. It hurts to look.

But, there in the middle of the room, Beauregard is standing. The barrier spell around her is gone. She’s stepped half way down from her dais, one foot sill up on the platform, the other on the floor in the attitude of descending a short flight of stairs. Her body is on fire. A pillar of blue and black flame sheathes her skin, billowing the torn edges of her jacket.

She’s looking at something forward and slightly to her left.

Her left arm is extended and her fist closed around something Molly can’t see. Her arm jerks slightly, like something is fighting her hold but she’s smiling this kind of confused, mildly annoyed smile. Like someone is being a little rude at a dinner party or something and she steps down fully. Ice bursts across the floor where her feet touch the stone, the temperature in the room going sub-zero and Molly knows without knowing that if the anti-magic field drops, they’re going to get the brunt of it.

“Wow. Stop spazzing out. I just want to talk,” Beau is saying in that awkward friendly-but-I’m-kind-of-faking-it voice she does when she’s working at being a person to someone she’d rather punch. “Hey. Listen, buddy. This isn’t like before. I’m something else and I need to ask you some stuff.”

And suddenly there’s someone standing in front of her. They’re struggling to get away from Beauregard, who has one iron-fingered grip viced relentlessly around their wrist.

They’re the size of a regular person, tall, slender, arguably a male build. Their skin is strange and iridescent and glowing faintly with a dim greenish warmth that penetrates the cold around them. They are dressed in adventurer’s finery – good boots, a clean blue tunic… and a long, long forest-green cloak that’s pulled up over their head and shadows everything but the lower half of their face.

Jester, seeing this, screams in horror.

But Beauregard doesn’t seem to hear. Her focus is entirely on The Traveler. She uses her free hand to grab a fistful of their cloak and drag them closer.

“I’m trying to be nice here,” she says, exasperated when her captive shoves a hand against her chest. “I’m a new god too, you know. We should stick together.” The Traveler doesn’t say anything, just bares their teeth and light flares through their body, snapping through Beauregard like a blow that knocks her face to the left. “Fucking. Rude,” she says, glaring down at the other god in front of her. “Stop it.”

“I don’t have answers for you,” says the Traveler. His voice cuts through the disharmonics from the other god, dragging a swath of relief through the room allowing the mortals there to breathe again. “I didn’t kill a god to become one.” A smile pulls briefly at his mouth, wry, and fiercely proud. “I found a faith stronger than any in the world and she believed in me. I don’t know what you are, half god. You are not like me.”

Beau-Who-Is-Not-Beau thinks about that.

Her eyes, Molly notices now, are pitch black hollows full of nothing.

“You’re right. Duh. I need to talk to her.” She thinks about it some more, then looks suddenly toward the two tieflings huddled together against the wall. “Hey, Molly. You know Vax’ildan, right?”

“Oh no,” Jester whispers.

“I wanna talk to his boss,” Beau says. “Can you tell him that?”

Then she smiles at Molly… and of course it kills him instantly.

#critical role #mollymauk tealeaf #caleb widogast #the mighty nein #critrole #long post #this one goes up to eleven

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forlornmelody · 5 years

Text

2018 in Quotes

@joufancyhuh asked members of @thewritemoment to list the top five quotes from their writing this year. I couldn’t choose just five, so here’s a quote from each fic I wrote in 2018.

Aaand it’s a lot. And some is NSFW, so look for it under the cut.

Kaidan says nothing, only yanks her close and buries his nose into her shoulder. His body shakes with his sobs, and his hands grip her back like she’s still falling away from him through the vacuum of space.

Shepard holds him just as tightly, as if some Cerberus shell is about to throw him into the wall of a shuttle repeatedly. Never again, she promises to herself. “It’s alright. I’m here,” she whispers into his ear.

His response is muffled against her skin. Shepard pulls back slightly, searching his eyes. “What?”

Kaidan’s eyes fall, and his voice breaks. “For how long?” --After Rannoch

——

Joker’s mouth struggled to form words. This couldn’t be happening. “Cass! That’s not my vid library—”

It was only when the actor playing the Alliance’s most infamous pilot dropped his own pants and freed his erection that Shepard finally realized what they were watching. “—It’s your porn collection.” --Movie Night for @alyssalenko

———-

Shepard holds onto him for dear life as the world seems to turn on its axis, and the energy of the sun washes over her it hot waves. She isn’t aware of her screams until her voice goes hoarse from the strain. She isn’t aware of Kaidan’s release or his pulling out until they land in a heap on the floor. When Commander Shepard Goes Commando

———

Crap. Bart means to ask him the question--the question, but all he can think about right now is how his heart is pounding in his ears. This is probably too soon. He’s probably going too fast. He’s always going too fast, but he can’t help it. Bart means to say the words, but instead he ends up laughing like an idiot. ----Crashed for @commander-hot-pants-blog

——

“She moves so fast and hard she nearly launches him into orbit.” --“Orders, Sir?”

——

“The shuttle takes off, and Hope is giving coordinates to their new home, but it doesn't register in the Clone's mind. She's too busy running the scenario by her implants over and over again, trying to find where she went wrong. The implants fail each time, and it's then the Clone realizes she was never programmed to save lives. She was brought here to destroy them.” --Spare Parts

——

Shepard has done countless impossible tasks--taking down a thresher maw, coming back from the dead, even sealing an alliance between the Krogan and the Turians--but she feels even more powerful in this moment--with the man she loves under her sway. ——Patch It Through for @joufancyhuh

——

“So you know about selecting a frequency based on your implant type? Good. Telling your CO you fried your amp and your pussy in the same night is less fun than it sounds” Not Your Hanar With Tits for @purerapture

—-

Dr. Chakwas watches her closely, looking for physical symptoms she can treat. But what medicine can treat guilt? What can cure the shame of an entire system of souls dead at Shepard’s hand? —-About That Uniform

—-

Her lips explode into laughter, ringing louder than the music, and Jeffrey Moreau can’t breathe. —Masha

——

Then she smirked. “Let’s hold hands and talk.” Pervert that, Jane. I dare you, she seemed to say.

Her clone pouted playfully, licking her lips. “Alright. Holding hands.” She reached over, tracing her fingertips across the back of Shepard’s good hand. “And talking.” Jane leaned over, whispering into her ear.

—-Double The Trouble

———

Sometimes Cassandra Shepard just needs to disappear. After Horizon, the Normandy docks on Omega, supposedly to follow up on some leads with Aria, but the Queen of Omega can wait. A drink or three at Afterlife cannot. --- OC Kiss Week #1 for @fantasmagoriam

---------

The argument she never waged cycles in an infinite loop inside her head. Booze won’t solve anything, but at least it’ll shut her brain up for a while. —-OC Kiss Week #2 for @bronzeagelove

————

She closes the hatch, but she still sees the stars racing by in her head. She sees every soldier in her platoon dead on Akuze. She smells the ooze of Thresher Maw acid, and the miasma of rotting corpses. She hears the groan of Thorian creepers, the screams of soulless rachni torn from their mother before their time.She sees Toombs on a gurney, sobbing as yet another needle pierces his veins. —-About Horizon

——-

Sean snickered, sauntering over to the bed, and undoing his shirt. Nihlus decided right then and there that he liked the idiosyncrasies in this human—the hard yet soft, the angled yet curved, the warm yet cold. It ignited a fire that promised to quench his thirst, which made this rather unfortunate. —-Curious for @commander-hot-pants

——-

When a thresher maw, a fucking thresher maw tosses the Mako into the air like a tennis ball, Shepard doesn’t feel strong. When her team climbs out after having shot the damn thing to hell, Shepard doesn’t feel resilient. She doesn’t feel like a goddamn hero when she rails at Kaidan–Lieutenant Alenko for telling her to snap out of it and drive. He fucking saved their asses and all she can do is scream at him for being out of line and breaking the chain of command. It’s bullshit and they both know it. It’s not Kaidan’s fault, but he’s there, within range, and a visible target. —-Six Years Later

——

Something about the way she said it--the drop in her voice, the stir off her biotics against his own in such close proximity, the heat of her body next to his, sent a pulse straight down his spine.

Holy shit. He was attracted to her.

Kaidan hadn’t felt this way about anyone, man, woman, or otherwise, in years. He had forgotten what it felt like. Clearing his throat, he answered, “No, this is a first.”

The woman next to him faltered. “Am I being inappropriate?”

Kaidan’s words are out of his mouth before he can stop himself. “Not at all.”

Shit. He was attracted to her. —A Sudden Downpour for @commanderduckling

——-

Cass shrugged. “The Krogan didn’t seem to mind. Some of them even started snapping pictures.” —Caught for @bronzeagelove

#melody writes #holy shit that is a lot of fic #also tumblr is absolute shit at searching my tags #I might have to migrate this stuff to AO3 just so I can find it reliably

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gumnut-logic · 3 years

Photo

I think this one is worth a reblog ::hugs all of you so tight::