#yes i did give these the twilight blue tint.....

[andr0medafallen]

Square

A/N: Republishing my old fics.

Pairing: Nathan Bateman x reader

Warnings: angst, hurt/comfort, themes of unplanned pregnancy, mentions of abortion, language, lmk if i missed anything

Description: When you find out that you're pregnant with Nathan Bateman's baby, you expect the worst, but maybe you weren't giving him enough credit. Because yes, he's an asshole, but he's your asshole.

Word Count: 2.6k

Love shouldn’t burn.

You had thought about it for a long time. Having a baby, that is. It had always been there, sort of niggling at the back of your mind. Your friends used to joke about it, calling all of your dates ‘potential baby daddy’, ‘potential baby daddy 2.0’, ‘potential baby daddy #3’, etc.. Funnily enough, Nathan had never received a ‘potential baby daddy’ nickname from your group of friends.

That didn’t seem to stop you from falling in love with him. It was all those little things that fascinated you, the things that not even ‘potential baby daddy 12x’ had done. Maybe it made you a narcissist, that the only person who could ever hold claim to your attention was a man who seemed so utterly incapable of affection for anyone else. Still, every time he answered your interrogations about a new piece of art in the living room will a shrug and a ‘I knew you’d like it’, or he’d let you drag him away from whatever super important project he was working on to watch Twilight on the couch, you knew that whatever it was the two of you had was the right choice.

Even if you did love Nathan, you had to be honest with yourself; Parenting seemed like just about the last thing he wanted to do. Having been stabbed in the chest by the last semblance of life which he had created, you certainly couldn’t blame him. You held no animosity towards him, although he certainly wasn’t anyone’s favorite at family reunions. Hell, you hadn’t even brought it up. You both already knew the answer. You had a good thing going with Nathan. You didn’t feel like ruining that.

You knew Nathan didn’t want kids. You didn’t even need to ask him when the answer was so obvious. It was that knowledge which led you to this moment, sitting on the lid of your toilet in Nathan’s ridiculously fancy bathroom, skylight casting blue-tinted sunlight over you, sobbing. Any attempts at keeping your volume at a minimum were ruined by heavy and restrictive breath which was wheezing past your lungs, as if you were a soldier shot on the battlefield. Loud, even after every ounce of your bleeding restraint was placed on it. 

You knew that Nathan couldn’t likely see you on his security cams. Conveniently enough, you were in the only room without them. They used to be in every room of the house (yes, closets included), but they had conveniently disappeared a couple of months ago after you had called him a paranoid psycho. It wouldn’t stop him from hearing you though, if you couldn’t get a handle on your emotions. He would hear enough sobbing in about 8 months, if he’s still around by then.

You’d been in there for a while. There were the 5 minutes, not patiently waiting for the results, plus the subsequent panicking which lasted God knows how long (after having received the results from the little pink plastic stick). In retrospect, you probably should have waited for a point in time in which Nathan was not home, but when all of the puzzle pieces of missed periods, vomiting sessions, and constant tiredness clicked together, you had been desperate for a confirmation. 

And hell, you’d gotten one. But you couldn’t stop picturing the look on Nathan’s face when you finally tell him. It's different in your mind every time. Sometimes fear, sometimes anger. Sometimes regret. Regretting you, your baby. The only life he’s ever made by accident. Add that to the list of God-like qualifications.

You sighed, getting up from where you were perched on the toilet seat cover, and grabbed the test; You had abandoned it on the counter after your first glance at the two little lines, as if setting it down and ignoring it would change the results. It didn’t. They were still perfectly visible, a testament to your own humanity.

You froze when a knock sounded at the door, weighing your chances of getting away with ignoring it. After a brief pause, you surmised that Nathan absolutely knew you were in the room, so instead you called, “Yeah?” Your voice came out as a croak, betraying the emotions that you were so desperately trying to hide.

“You’ve been in there a while,” Nathan pointed out. As if he hadn’t even noticed your pain, the fear in your voice. You knew he did, though. He was probably putting it into a data sheet at that very moment, categorized under ‘weird human feelings, investigate later’. “Are you okay?”

Then again, maybe he wasn’t jotting down data with robot-like precision. You were upset, and you hated him a lot some of the time, but there was a reason the two of you were together. Because he hated you and cared about you, and you hated him and cared about him. Because every once in a while, when you most wanted to punch him, he would ask you if you were okay.

“Yeah. I’m peeing,” you told Nathan, hoping that you would gross him out enough that he would leave. While that might have worked on any regular Tuesday, your voice was no less scratchy than before, and your lie was thinly veiled through your distress.

“You’ve been peeing for 20 minutes? What, d'you have a UTI or something?” Clearly you had underestimated the difficulty level in grossing out Nathan Bateman.

“Yeah. Sure,” you bit back. You knew that pissing him off would probably do the opposite of helping, but half a dozen stress-related endorphins were still pumping through your body, and you were nowhere near ready to give away your secret.

“Okay, cut the shit. I’m coming in.”

Before you had the chance to protest, the door clicked open. Stupid house and stupid key cards not denying Nathan access to fucking anything. As a myriad of thoughts along those lines raced through your head, your feet remained frozen on the floor, hand still clutching your test. You knew that your face was blotchy and red from all of your crying, and your hair was a mess. People are only ever pretty criers in movies.

You looked into Nathan’s eyes and followed them to where they met the item in your hand. It almost felt like slow motion, the way your grip loosened on the plastic stick and it fell to the ground, but time sped back up again as you backed yourself into the wall.

Your hands reflexively cradled your belly protectively as you watched Nathan bend down to pick up the small pink pregnancy test. Your knees went weak and you slid down the wall, and you watched his brow furrow as he realized what it meant. A part of you felt invisible, completely ignored as Nathan analyzed the data in front of him, brain clicking through possible outcomes and solutions to your problem before even looking at you.

When he finally did look towards you, his gaze noticeably softened. You were sitting on the floor, a complete mess all around. Eyes red, hair disheveled, brows furrowed in an attempt to slow your tears.

“Fuck,” Nathan muttered. That seemed to be the breaking point for you. With the cold marble tiles beneath you as the only thing grounding you, you burst into sobs, hands covering your blotchy face from Nathan’s view. There were a few moments where it was just silence, your sobs ricocheting off of the cold, hard walls of the bathroom, but then you felt a hand on your shoulder.

“Fuck, don’t cry.”

You looked up at him, ready to scream ‘fuck you’ at him and leave, but the way he grabbed your face, gently, almost tenderly, made up for all of the condescension in his tone.

“Don’t cry,” he tried again. It was slightly softer, this time. As if he was reading your mind, and could pinpoint exactly how you had been about to react. His demand was stern, but you could hear the clear edge to his voice; the little rasp that you’ve only heard before during late nights in his lab while he’s stressed by a board deadline. “Talk to me.”

You rubbed your tears away with the sleeve of your shirt–it’s his shirt, really. A dark red button-up that you had found in his closet months ago and refused to give back. The action causes your hand to knock his palm from your face, but you scoot to make room for him on the tile floor beside you.

“What do you want me to say?” You asked. He sighed and sat down on the floor next to you. You refused to make eye contact, but when you felt his arm brush yours, you slid your hand into his.

Your attempts at indifference were ruined when he tilted your face with one of his broad hands and your gaze met his.

“Tell me what happened,” He implored. You weren’t sure what he meant, not really. He had seen the evidence, it was an easy conclusion to make.

“Nathan, I want to… I’m keeping it.”

He groaned, head falling back to hit the wall.

He stayed like that for a moment, as if letting the implications seep into his head from the cold tile, before answering, “Okay.”

It was the answer you wanted, right? It was the answer that you should want, but–

“Okay? Nathan, what does that even fucking mean–”

“It means okay! What the fuck do you want me to say?”

You paused. Mouth open, before shutting in indignation. You tried again, this time making it to “I–” before your mouth snapped shut again. You couldn’t speak with his body, his hands, sending warmth to you. 

Standing up, you wrenched your hand from his grip. “You’re a fucking robot, you know that Nathan Bateman?”

It was only a few paces before you made it out of the room, and Nathan didn’t follow. It wasn’t hard to pull your suitcase out of the closet and begin to haphazardly throw any clean item of clothing you could find into it, but you had only managed around seven before giving up, breaking down, and returning to your new base state of dread and sorrow, snot and tears. Only difference now, though, was that if Nathan cared to look, you would be perfectly visible through his bedroom camera.

You wondered if he was looking.

Love doesn’t burn.

You fell asleep on the bed, in the same position that you had been crying in. You were still wearing his shirt, and you hadn’t bothered to take off your pants. You could only imagine how disordered you looked, but you were beginning to feel better. Your anger had melted into acceptance. It was morning. The sun was shining in through your window, and you had decided that you couldn’t change Nathan; That it wasn’t a fair thing to expect.

That only left the question, where do you go from here? 

You stood up, muscles aching as you stretched them out. You turned toward your suitcase, where it lay on the floor. The chaotic mess on clothes surrounding it almost looked like one of Nathan’s Jackson Pollock paintings. You had just barely started folding one of these said articles of clothing when you heard another knock at your door. You jumped, startled at the sound. After living with Nathan for so long, hearing people knocking on doors gave you more of a fright than people sneaking up behind you unannounced. You don’t know why it’s a habit that he has decided to break now, after so long.

“Door’s open,” you mumbled, just loud enough for him to hear through the door. You turned away from the suitcase and toward the bed, busying yourself with the covers. Maybe it was your conflict aversion that caused you to ignore the suitcase now that you were in his sight. You didn’t think it would slip his notice, though.

“Y’know Kyoko can do that, right?” He asked, crossing his arms over his chest and squaring his hips a bit. He looked the perfect image of a man in power, dripping with confidence and a know-it-all attitude.

You rolled your eyes. “Yeah, I’m sure she can do a lot of things.” You cringed at your phrasing the moment after you said it. It was the perfect set-up, and all you could do was wait for the, ‘she can’t get pregnant.’ It didn’t come though, much to your relief.

Instead, “Planning a trip?” Nathan nudged your open and half-packed suitcase with his foot.

You gulped heavily, your own tongue feeling like a weight in your mouth. “What do you expect me to do?”

Nathan shrugged. “I didn’t write your code. I’ll tell you what I want you to do, though.”

“I’m supposed to care?” You snorted. You finished making the bed, quite frankly not giving a fuck what Kyoko could or couldn’t do. When the dark grey sheets were all in their proper place, you squared your shoulders and faced him.

Closing the distance between the two of you, Nathan said, “Yeah, you care, princess. You’re not supposed to, but you do.” When you stayed silent, he rolled his eyes, placing a large hand on your stomach. “So I fucked a baby into you, huh?”

His hand stayed firm on the side of your stomach, face betraying nothing. It wasn’t even big, according to google, the fetus was currently ‘approximately the size of a grain of rice’, so what, he was just making a point or something? You placed one hand over his, and another on his shoulder, caught between wanting to push him away and pull him closer. Every time you told yourself to push him away, it was all you could do not to pull him closer.

“Well it isn’t baby Jesus 2.0,” you remarked.

Nathan chuckled a bit at your dry humor, tugging you further into his body. He stood like a beacon in front of you, strong and steady. Like the statue of liberty, but make it an entitled white man.

“You never told me what you wanted,” you pointed out. Nathan’s face was inches away from yours, closer than you probably should have let him get. 

You could feel his breath on your lips when he said, “I want you to throw that fucking suitcase in an incinerator.”

You hum, considering. “It was an expensive suitcase,” you joke, but your voice is more thoughtful than jolly. His eyes are boring right into you, as if he’s got a read on your soul. Like he did write whatever internal code you might have, or is running PCR on every strand of DNA in your body.

“Don’t leave,” he tells you. It surprises you, so much so that you take a step back, but his grip tightens. “This,” he gestures to your being, the suitcase, “All of this is you projecting your own insecurities onto me–”

“You don’t want a baby,” you argue.

“Maybe not, but I’ve got one. I’ve got two,” he teased. Is it a tease when he doesn’t sound amused, and you aren’t amused, and everyone is all-around pissed off? “So do you want me to call the fucking wambulance, or what?”

Despite yourself, despite your urge to blame Nathan for everything going wrong in your life, you laughed, burying your head in the crux of his shoulder. “You really…I find it hard to believe you're not mad.”

“Oh, baby,” His voice was dripping with playful condescension, so like Nathan, “Why would a God be mad that he created life?”

You leaned into his embrace, relishing in the way the heat seeped from his body into yours.

“You’re a fucking asshole,” you whispered, peering up into his eyes from where you were tucked into his shoulder. He tilted your chin up and pressed his lips to yours. As your tongue entangled with Nathan’s, you knew the answers to all of the questions that you would never ask and he would never answer.  The two of you were going to be fine, and you were going to stay, and you might even throw your suitcase in an incinerator, if you were feeling extra silly.

I would literally rather have 0 notes than 5,000 likes and no reblogs.

#nathan bateman #nathan bateman fanfic #ex machina #reader insert #ex machina fanfic #nathan bateman angst #hurt comfort #happy ending #nathan bateman x reader #nathan bateman fluff #oscar isaac #oscar isaac fanfic

[powdermelonkeg]

So, BO2W Breakdown

Buckle up, this is gonna be a long one.

Here we’ve got Ganon’s...energy taking over Link’s arm. Ordinarily, I’d call it Malice, but based on what it turns into, I’m just going to be calling it corruption. We don’t get much information from this scene besides this expression:

Link’s grabbing the corruption with his other hand, and wincing. It looks painful. I personally think it’s for cinematic effect that it was included, but it COULD be a gateway into a Phantom Hourglass sort of mechanic--Link has to function on a time limit, or using the corruption’s power could drain his life.

Next we’ve got a closeup of Ganondorf. F in chat to the rehydration theorists.

And the closeups of his jewelry. The only significant thing I can see is his necklace, which looks like a cross between the Gerudo symbol and a Fleur de Lis:

But what I’M most interested in is this tie on his belt:

For one, it’s WAY bigger than it needs to be, and that’s deliberate. Ganondorf’s got a jewelry aesthetic he’s already hit above; everything else is gold, why not this bit?

Most importantly, you can barely make it out, but the designs either look Sheikah or Zonai--they’ve got that same kind of swirly busy pattern to them. The red tint and tan-ish lines in it makes me think it’s possessed Sheikah tech.

Next, we’re shown Zelda falling. This looks like it happens right after these two caps from the first trailer:

So we reach for her as the ground collapses, and evidently, we fail to pull her back up. So my next question for that scene is going to be what the in-game reason is for us not diving in right after her. Maybe we won’t get one, since the appeal of the original BOTW was that you could fight Ganon whenever you wanted.

Up next, we’ve got a skydiving shot:

The first thing to notice is that Link’s pose while skydiving is just about identical to his pose in Skyward Sword:

Second is that, yes, he’s falling towards a floating island, and that in itself is noteworthy, but he’s FALLING. There’s something either above him that he jumped off of, or a force that carried him high enough TO fall, and I doubt Nintendo’s encouraging magnesis flying.

So, there’s a few options: Loftwings making a return (which is unlikely, but a hope I have), something like Revali’s Gale boosting Link up for a cinematic shot, indicating that the corruption arm has that kind of power, or islands higher than the one shown here.

Now the island itself:

In Skyward Sword, Skyloft looks like this:

And (spoiler alert) we loose this island here over the course of the game:

Now, it’s not a PERFECT 1:1 match, as most things between games aren’t, but a quick rotate and overlay shows it’s got the same kinds of shapes between the two. The same “W” shape along the eastern side, the same tiny island off the northeast point, the same relative edges.

Now, I don’t know what happened to the plaza at South Skyloft, or the Knight’s Academy isle, but it could very easily be drift away from the central island.

The presence of other islands through the clouds seems to support that theory. Now let’s look at Link here:

The outfit is new. We haven’t, to my knowledge, seen one of this design in other games. My gut reaction to this image was “oh, we go back in time and we’re the first hero now!” because it’s vaguely reminiscent of Tapestry Hero.

But upon closer inspection, that theory’s null and void. Under Link’s tunic in the image above, you can see that he’s still wearing the shorts he woke up in in the first game. So either Sheikah boxers haven’t changed in 10,000 years, or it’s taking place in present day. Jokes aside, I’m curious to know if the outfit he’s wearing is modeled after Tapestry Hero.

Next thing to point out is the obvious:

Link’s arm here looks less prosthetic and more...withered, I almost want to say. The corruption here’s made his hand look frailer, and armored them up with Zonai patterns before it fades out at his shoulder. Based on how the tattoos look, I think they’re an artifact of the corruption taking hold.

Also, the belt here:

Aesthetic purposes, or specific function? The presence of the second, smaller one on the side reminds me of Skyward Sword’s adventure pouch, which could be how the new game handles inventory size:

Next we’ve got another flying shot:

It seems like he’s flying towards Ruined Skyloft, and you can see the bottoms of islands above it, possibly meaning that the sky serves as more than just a hub world like it did in Skyward.

Now let’s look at the paraglider he’s using. It’s new.

This is how the paraglider looks in the original BOTW. It looks like we still have the Rito symbol in the center, but other than that, there’s a LOT of changes here.

First off is the color. We’re now blue and gold. The shade of blue makes me think of the Kochi Dye Shop’s navy blue:

So, possibly a dyeable paraglider?

The new pattern surrounding the Rito symbol makes me think that it’s combining the paraglider with Skyward Sword’s sailcloth:

Other than that, there isn’t much else to say about the paraglider besides the handles looking like they’re made of bone. Craftable paragliders? God, I hope not.

Back to Link:

Here we have him in different gear than the last shot. He’s wearing the snow boots, he has a shield with a stylized Eye of Truth looking upwards, and he looks like he’s carrying a traveler’s sword and an unknown bow. The presence of the bow makes me think that the shield here is a lower tier item, rather than this game’s Hylian Shield equivalent.

Now, let’s get a better look at the horizon:

The trees here look a lot like the smaller trees you can find in Akkala, but there’s a distinct lack of red among them.

Then it looks like we’ve got some ruins at the furthest isle.

Whatever the rock formations are over there, they don’t LOOK natural.

Another thing I noticed is the bottoms of the islands.

These look a little too geometric to be natural, too. Now, this one, I’m a little muddy on, because it COULD be a stylistic choice. But it also reminds me of the Shrines if you clip out of bounds:

And a little bit of the dormant Gate of Time from Skyward:

My money’s on the cube-like nature of the islands’ undersides being deliberate, rather than just a far-off render.

And then there’s this thing!

What is it? It doesn’t look broken at all; look how nicely the roof(?) is kept. The ribbing on the sides makes me think it might be a Zonai thing, but the shape makes it difficult to figure out. A giant temple? An airship? A sloped coliseum? This thing haunts and vexes me.

Our next shot is presumably from one of the islands, based on the color. Here we can see that there are definitely ruins all over the place. Link is in the same gear as before, so I won’t touch on him.

This, however, has my interest. The design here has more geometric patterns--Zonai ruins?

We’ve got another one off in the distance here. Sky checkpoints, like Sheikah towers?

Now this guy here. There’s a LOT to look at. First off is the eye design, it’s the same sort of upward looking one that Link has on his shield in the previous shots.

The energy that’s pulling this thing towards its base looks like the same green energy that surrounds the arm holding Gan in place in Trailer One:

This stuff. That, plus the fact that the robot has to be pulled into its base rather than just existing, implies that either A: Link activates it himself, like a trial thing, or B: that the green energy here functions in the same way Malice does in the original BOTW.

This pattern at its base is intriguing, too. I don’t recognize the gold symbol in the center, but the green around it reminds me of the portals from Twilight Princess.

Which, yes, everyone’s already said that the Twilight Princess patterns look like Zonai things. But another thing this weird dial thing reminds me of is from Lanayru Desert:

On top of that, the color palette of this guy looks like that of the Lanayru Robots from Skyward:

BO2W robot on the left, Lanayru robot on the right. Given that Skyward is a lot more vibrant than other non-Toon Zelda games, I think this is a fair enough comparison to draw similarities from.

And then we get a closer view of the sky ruins from the last shot. I don’t know if the geometric pattern in the corner is a deliberate carving, or wear from time, but since the pattern looks ALMOST mirrored around the corner, I’m going to go with the former.

A better shot a few frames later. The robot has HANDS, which I do not like in any way shape or form. However, we get a better look at the sky ruins.

We haven’t seen this style of stairs before, to my knowledge. The pedestal out front looks like a light source, and it has the same floral egg thing the robot above has on each shoulder; the eggs could easily be a power source for Zonai tech. And at the top of the stairs, we see a pedestal, backing up the theory that these ruins function as our new Sheikah towers.

This is our next shot. Which...

Unikoblins. Can we talk about that? UNIKOBLINS.

Anyways, Link is here again in his old clothes. This is a very early game shot, because his right arm isn’t corrupted yet; this means we get to explore Hyrule before we embark on the main quest. Which gives rise to a question: Where’s Zelda?

The hopeful side of me wants to say that she’s a tutorial companion, like Navi or Tatl, at least for the beginning here. The pessimistic side of me thinks that she’s waiting for us at a predetermined location, and this is just part of getting to her.

Now the unikoblin structure itself is built on a Talus, meaning that the dev team at least intends to have more inter-monster interactions. But if you kill the Talus, does that mean that the base falls apart, or does it just drop down as a separate entity?

Also, what are these background ruins? The one on the left looks like it’s a distinctly different style than the one on the right. It looks almost like a giant guardian arm.

Our next shot is Link’s arm getting corrupted. Which, first of all, the effects look beautiful.

Now, we can see a corner of Link’s hip here, and we know that this is his right arm. So Link’s lying down here. Unconscious? Knowing how Zelda games like to start with Link waking up, probably. Although it looks like at least part of his shorts got an update.

We can see what looks like circuits here. It looks a bit like the electricity puzzles you can find in the Divine Beasts and Shrines in the original.

Then we’ve got these strange symbols.

Whatever this circular stone he’s lying on is, it looks a lot like the Zonai puzzle from the “A Fragmented Monument” sidequest.

This one that everyone thought was the Mirror of Twilight for years.

Our next shot is Link using the corruption powers against enemies:

The spike ball itself looks solid; the question is, is this a duplication power, or a visualization of how the spike ball is set into motion?

We see it barreling over a poor Unikoblin or two, but I’d like to turn your attention to the Moblin and the background.

The moblins here have helmets, and the bases, while they carry the same design, look like they have more cause and effect in mind. The left base’s rock, for instance; that’s a lot bigger than the rocks we got to play with in the last game, and it looks like we can barrel anything in the screen over with it.

The helmet, though, concerns me a little bit. It looks natural rather than forged; like it’s the moblin’s horn, just very much deformed. Does it mean a harder enemy, or is it just for flavor?

Our next shot is this strange flower thing. Note that Link’s right arm is perfectly fine in this shot, meaning that it’s still early game.

This is what Link’s flamethrower looks like. And this:

Is Zonai art.

So the question is, what IS the flamethrower? My first thought was that it’s either a new item in its own, or it’s a Sheikah Slate upgrade. The latter might sound a little far fetched, but Link in this game is right-handed, and in BOTW, he always held the slate in his LEFT hand when using it.

We have more of the weird faded designs that we saw on the Sky ruins:

And we’ve got some kind of pedestal or stage behind the ground flower thing:

It looks like it’s either an altar or a grave, from what I can tell. The stairs aren’t the same design as the ones in the sky, and there aren’t any patterns on it.

More importantly, though, is that this place is underground. This could be a part of the game you’re required to go through, in order to get to Raisin Gan.

A few seconds later, though, we get our answer to what the flamethrower is!

It’s a shield!

Off to the left side, we can see pillars with more weird scribblings towards the top. These match the Sky ruins’ pillar shape, with a narrow base and a wider top.

Our next scene is...weird.

We see a puddle splash in reverse. It’s hard to tell if it’s actually water or not, but the design on the ground implies that it’s either been there for a long time, or that that’s a dedicated splash spot. And the quality and zoom makes me think that this is part of a cutscene. Return of the timeshift stones?

We then see Link...surfacing out of the island? I don’t know how else to describe it. However, his arm is changed again, and glowing, meaning that this is a corruption power. And the “water” he rises out of here looks a lot like the puddle in the last clip.

We get a good look at the Zonai Lights:

A Sky ruin that looks like it contains a room:

And a glimpse of other isles’ ruins in the far distance.

And then as the camera zooms out...

We can place a location!

We’re right over Thundra Plateau!

We also get a mildly better look at the back wall of the sky ruin, which looks to be some kind of table:

The next scene is Hyrule Castle:

The ground shakes and it starts to rise up. However, notice that the columns surrounding the castle are now missing.

We’ve also got red sparks in the air, like we would have in a blood moon. However, due to the sky color, we can assume that this is a conscious decision by Gan himself, and that he isn’t drawing power from his surroundings.

We then see that power bleeding out of the ground. It’s MUCH more red than Malice is, which has always been a kind of burnt pink-ish color.

However, even though Ganon lifts the castle up, he doesn’t lift it very high.

The castle’s about triple the height it was. But since we’re talking Skyloft levels of floating islands, this is still pretty ground-level. What’s interesting to me, though, is that in this shot, despite the game now being about sky islands that we should be able to see from ground level...there aren’t any here. This, to me, means that there’s going to be a sudden appearance of the isles in the sky, rather than them simply being accessible now.

And that’s the whole trailer! I have many questions.

My blog! If you have any opnions/questions/theories, feel free to drop an ask!

Part 2 is up! We missed a lot!

#botw #botw2 #bo2w #the breath just got wilder #breakdown #analysis #e3 #trailer #theory #zelda #loz #nintendo

[vrsin]

Heyyyyy~~~~~ Enno~~~ @twilightpoison @cafecourage

For the lovely drawing you made me!

Here is you Sky fic!!!

Hope you like it! Love you~~~ <3

~~~~~~~~~

Above in the heavens, there weren't any clouds to cover the breathtaking view. One would be terrified being this high in the sky, not able to see the ground below. 

Though you couldn't help but sit on the edge with your legs dangling staring at the scene in front of you. No wonder Sky was so excited to show you all his lovely home of Skyloft, it was godly and so beautiful.  

The Chain had arrived in Sky’s Hyrule a couple of weeks ago, the portal dropping them.

As in really dropping them, from the sky.

No one was expecting to walk through the portal to then just free fall in the air. Though it caused some unforgettable reactions from the chain! 

Legend was spinning around in circles holding down his tunic to not accidentally flash anyone in the chain. 

Warrior, oh warrior was the victim to be flashed at. His voice going so high pitched you would think a young girl had the scare of her life! In this case though, you wouldn't be wrong.  

Hyrule was flapping his arms in the air while yelling, “GOOD GREAT FAIRY! GIVE ME MY WINGS!” no one knew what he meant. 

Four and Wind were holding on to each other as they cursed like they have never cursed before. Even ending each other's sentences with very creative curses! It would have been very impressive in a normal situation. 

Wild was going through his Sheikah Slate as he kept yelling about finding his paraglider. “WHERE THE FUCK IS THE DUMB THING THAT WILL SAVE MY LIFE?!?! I DID NOT SLEEP 100 YEARS TO DIE LIKE THIS!” 

Twilight was holding on to the hair of Time as he was spitting out hair and fur from his fur pelt, pretty sure some got into his mouth and caused him to choke a few times. 

Time….

Well, Time was just standing straight, arms crossed over his chest, face blank. “I’m not surprised.” 

Yeahhhhhhhhh…. You might need to talk to Time after this, that...that's just not normal- 

You! On the other hand, were reacting how a normal person should react, yelling your lungs off holding on to the closest thing you could grab, in this case. Sky. 

Your arms wrapped around Sky’s torso, eyes closed with fear, you were thinking if this is where you were gonna die. You should tell Sky how you feel. “SKY!” Yelling over the sound of rushing wind you opened your eyes to look up at him, to tell him how you feel while staring at his ocean blue eyes. 

You expected to see a nervous and fearful-looking Sky, but yeah that's not what you got. 

Sky was smiling so wide you thought he would rip his skin from smiling so big!

 You really thought he lost it.

“I- WHY ARE YOU SMILING??” He didn't answer you as he lifted his hands to his lips to only let out the loudest whistle you've heard. Followed by the screeching of birds. 

One by one each of the Chain was saved by multi-colored large birds. Looking over at Sky his smile never left his face as he brought you close to his chest. Soon a giant red bird flew under you two as you both landed on the soft pillow of feathers. The pure happy laughter Sky let out posed as a small distraction from the confusing events that just happened. The ginormous birds flew to an island floating in the sky.  "We're here!" Sky's booming voice caught the attention of everyone in the chain. 

"This is my home! Skyloft!"

~~~

Skyloft wasn't a very big place but it had its own charms to it, a sense of comfort. The chain was welcomed with open arms as everything was provided to them to ensure their utmost comfort. Sky happily showing around walking through every inch and crevice of his home, his goofy lovable smile never leaving his face. 

His face was so soft and filled with love while showing everyone his home, showing you his home. Introducing you all to every single person of Skyloft including Sun and Goose. Now everyone, after a small celebration, are fast asleep in their rooms. 

Everyone except you, who is watching the spectacular view. Dressed in comfortable pajamas provided to you. The wind softly brushes against you as the soft chill that was not uncomfortable. The air up is so crisp and fresh compared to the land below. 

"What are you doing alone?"

You stop at the sudden voice behind you but shyly turn around coming face what's a smiling Sky.  His smile never once wavered when he was back home. 

"I'm just enjoying the view"

 "Yeah, the view is really gorgeous isn't it…". You don't notice that he was looking at you as he said the statement. He coughed a bit to clear his throat, "How are you liking it here in Skyloft so far?"

Looking over at him, you couldn't help but stare a little bit at his charming face. "Honestly, it's amazing. Everyone here is so friendly, they act like one giant family. The views are absolutely gorgeous and not to mention the lovely birds you all have!" Laughter was shared between the two of you, as you both unintentionally scooted just a bit closer to each other. 

Sky's cheeks tinted a bit of pink raising his hand to rub the back of his neck. "I… um. I can show you the spot with the best view?" Poor boy's face was so red. Your face soon copied the same shade. "I… I would like that."

Standing up he presents his hand for you to take, his head turned to the side. Softly taking his hand he takes it upon himself to intertwine your fingers. 

You could feel the calluses and scars on his hand which are no longer covered by the gloves, though the warmth of his hand was overpowering. A comforting warm feeling, a feeling that you welcomed with open arms. 

Looking over the edge he squeezes your hand. 

"You trust me?"

Without hesitation, you answered. 

"Always."

You both fell off the edge. 

~~~ 

Sky's Loftwing had dropped you both off on top of the goddess statue. Sky was right about the view, you could see everything! Not just all the skyloft but everything further beyond. The wind breeze was soft and it wasn't even cold. 

"I… I have no words." Sky smiled at your response. "I'm happy you like it here."

A nervous chuckle and cough followed up with Sky pulling out his harp from behind his back. You chuckle a bit, "I didn't realize you had that!"  Walking a bit closer to you he looks at the strings, "I have a song that I've been meaning to play, do you mind if I share it with you?" Feeling honored he asked you of course you said yes.. 

Softly beginning to pluck the strings of the harp he did the unexpected,  he began to sing. 

"I used to hear a simple song."

His soft voice perfectly matched the elegance of the harp. 

"That was until you came along." Plucking at the strings he would look up to you as he continued to sing. 

"Now in its place is something new." He seemed to gain confidence, as his voice began to sing louder. Him walking closer to you. 

"I hear it when I look at you." 

He looked up at you with nothing but love. 

A smile gracing his face when he knew he has your full attention. "With simple songs, I wanted more. Perfection is so quick to bore." 

Walking even closer over to you he softly caresses your cheek stopping to play the harp for a second

"You are my beautiful by far." 

Smiling softly he goes back to playing the harp, "our flaws are who we really are." 

Taking a deep breath he isn't afraid to sing his whole soul into this song, "I used to hear a simple song!" 

His eyes never leaving you his smile growing wider soft pink flushing over his cheeks and ears. "That was until you came along!" 

Tears couldn't help escape both of your eyes. You both realize the hidden meaning of the song, "you took my broken melody!" 

The way that Sky looks at you is filled with so much love and compassion. If anyone were to overlook this loving scene. They will mistake it as two star-crossed lovers finally confessing their love for each other, but in reality. They're not wrong. 

"And now I hear a symphony…"

Sky stopped playing the harp now his own voice continuing to be the elegant instrument. You weren't complaining, his voice was always your favorite instrument. 

"Now I hear a symphony..."

You were both so vulnerable to each other, the way that you were looking at each other. The song fresh in both of your minds. 

His hands shaking he went up to caress your cheek, you grabbed his hand and placed it on your cheek to reassure him. The choked-out laugh, his large smile filled with happiness including his tears of joy, sent the full message to you.

Wrapping your arms around each other never breaking eye contact.

Your eyes softly fluttered. 

As your lips finally connect. 

The kiss is so soft and filled with true love. The love you hold for each other. 

Sadly ending the kiss, your foreheads placed together. Your arms never stopped holding each other. 

"I love you."

"I love you too."

#linked universe #lu sky #linked universe x reader #I DID IT! #LOVE YOU! #PAYBACK! #linkeduniverse

[cherrysung]

highway to heaven

pairing: husband!mark x reader

genre: fluff / smut

warnings: unprotected sex (stay safe!), love making, slight marking, oral (f. receiving), grinding, soft sex

prompts: none

summary: with slightly tipsy eyes, and in a sweetness engulfing the night you two share, the love of your life chooses to convey just how big his love actually is for you. unimaginable heights of loving and caring.

requested by anon.

word count: 1.7k

note: me is crying :(, anonnie this was such a wholesome request! I truly hope you enjoy this!

cherrysung’s nagivation

The air smelled like scented candles and red wine, along with a faint tint of light beer. The twilight skies that managed to seep through the small framed windows were painted pink and purple paired with the softest shade of blue, and the bedroom you currently resided in was very dimly lit due to the golden fire that the tiny candles emitted.

Next to you laid your husband. A glass of wine was held nicely in his grip, a grasp you were oftentimes used to see letting things accidentally drop, or break, or ruin, or even burn. Today, it was elegant and relaxed, much like he rested peacefully on the fluffy mattress.

Though his gaze was usually clumsy, today it was also different.

Or so, you thought.

Although your husband’s eyes and hold appeared to be different from the usual, his personality still remained the same. Add in the amount of alcohol he had already consumed—he was absolutely reckless, and a huge clown. A clown you love.

His giggles echoed throughout the entire bedroom as you sat at the edge of the bed, a glass of the burgundy substance also in your hand. There was the biggest grin on his face, pearly whites showing shamelessly as they quite literally resembled ebullience itself. You could only smile to yourself, gently swirling the liquid in your glass before taking another sip. You were surprised he hadn’t spilled his own drink on the white sheets, yet.

“Mark, you’re drunk.”

“I’m not drunk, I’m Mark!”

You failed to hold in a snort, the sound leaving along with a roll of your eyes, but a loving smile nonetheless.

Amidst both your busy schedules whether it be jobs or visiting your nosy families, the two of you finally found a time where you could spend alone in each other’s embrace. Upon an anniversary that arrived during your break, your lover decided to celebrate one year of being husband and wife, with a thoughtful dinner, and now; this.

It was only meant to be a few drinks, not two bottles of expensive grape wine and four cans of beer. Not only did the two of you have too much to drink, Mark could barely keep up with even the lightest alcohol.

But, he was still conscious. So, it was fine.

A deeper dip on the mattress formed closer to you, followed by a pair of arms that snaked around your waist. “Baby…”

“Yes, Mark?” You giggled at his breath, smelling of sweet grapes.

“I love you.” He whispered simply, but you could hear the sincerity in his short words. His hands rested innocently under your—or much like his—t-shirt, kneading the skin there gently as they ran up and down your sides.

You placed your glass of wine on the coffee table before you, turning around only to be met with sparkling eyes, in which endless care and love swirled chaotically greater than any effects of tipsiness present. His stare immediately landed on your slightly red lips, gaze locking with yours once again in an attempt to wordlessly ask. “You’re my husband now, Mark. You can kiss me whenever you want.”

His pink lips locked with your own, moulding perfectly as he set a sweet pace. You could taste the alcohol on the tip of his tongue as he ran it across your bottom lip, but you could also taste all the love he had to give you. It dawned upon you that Mark absolutely loved you, and it was an understatement to say you were only head over heels for him. The love you two shared was impossibly more than that.

He carried on caressing your sides, body slowly lowering the two of you and swiftly changing positions. Hovering above you with his hands pressed next to your head onto the sheets, admiring the way your hair lightly sprawled around you and the way your eyes shined when they looked at him, he leaned in again. The kiss grew with more ardour by every passing second, conveying more emotions than you could keep up with.

Your arms rose up to touch his torso, one of your hands softly tugging at the little hairs on the back of his neck, eliciting tiny groans and whines that rumbled all the way from his chest. Soon enough his clothed length was grinding against your core, the bulge growing in size every time your heat chased after him.

Mark’s lips pulled away from your own, with a string of saliva still connecting the two of you before trailing down your jawline and to your collarbones, occasionally biting harshly and sucking into the sensitive skin. In record time, multiple spots ranging from purple, red, yellow and blue were adorning your neck like a fresh masterpiece, your husband’s giggles following soon after when he realized how mad you’d be getting at him later on. For now, he’d take advantage of your submissiveness.

“Can I take this off?” He whispered, hips still driving into yours in search of friction as he tugged impatiently at the shirt that still covered you up.

“We’re literally married, stop asking.”

“Even if we’re married I still always want to make sure you’re comfortable, Mrs. Lee.”

Your heart felt like it was melting at his words, bursting with appreciation while doing leaps out of excitement and gratefulness. You allowed him to take off the t-shirt, lips immediately returning to the skin of your tummy and down towards your most protected gift. To save him from asking for permission yet again, you quickly unclasped your bra, and pulled off your shorts along with your lace parties afterwards.

His breath hitched at the heat pooling between your legs, juices adding a beautiful shimmer to your pussy under the soft lights. “You’re so wet.”

“Do something about it.” Pleads escaped you, hands gently pushing his head closer until his lips were pressed directly against your folds.

Sparing you of any teasing, not only because you were impatient but also because he felt the same way, he dived right in, tongue shifting between sucking on your clit or driving into your dripping hole. Your legs were thrashing around at the feeling of his warm, wet muscle, his hands holding your hips down against the bed to restrain you of any movements.

“Mark!” You whimpered, hands gripping his hair before yanking roughly.

“Princess.” He moaned, the vibrations making your legs tremble more.

“Stop, stop,” you stuttered, bringing his face up to yours as you kissed him passionately, “I want you to cum inside of me.”

“I want to make love to you. I want to show you how much I love you.”

A smile formed on your face as Mark returned the gesture ever so slightly. The alcohol had almost all completely worn off, but the hint of the substance still remained on both your tastebuds. “Do it.”

Only now had you realized your lover was still fully clothed, and due to the consumption of two wine bottles, his clumsy fingers were struggling to unbutton his pants. You tenderly helped him out of the fabric, getting him rid of his dress shirt and underwear, cock springing up while precum ran down its veiny length.

You slowly stroked him, his head flying back in bliss at the feeling of your warm hand wrapped around him. Softly, you guided him into your entrance, moans and groans leaving the both of you as he continued to push his dick into your velvety walls, that welcomed him with a tight hug.

“You can move,” you mumbled against his lips, hands cupping his cheeks lovingly while your eyes locked in together.

Suddenly, it felt like your entire world was Mark and only him. The candles, the faint taste of red grapes on your tongue, or the dark night sky were no longer present in your thoughts. Mark thrusted into you at a decent pace; not rough, but also not too slow. His hands roamed all through your body, unable to stay still at a specific location before they felt like they had not paid enough attention to a different part of you. Sometimes, his fingers ran through your hair, or maybe they played with your perked up nipples.

In spite of everything he did, his mouth was always right by your ear while his teeth gently nibbled on your earlobe, whispering sweet nothings and love confessions that had your heart beating faster than normal.

His hips had considerably sped up; regardless, you could understand how much he loved you, connecting the two of you into one piece as he let you in into the deepest of his thoughts and emotions without having to utter out a single word. His actions were enough.

“Mark, I’m getting close.” You whined, arms pulling him flush against your hot body as you kissed at his neck, sucking purple marks into his skin like he had previously done on yours.

“Baby, I love you so much,” he smiled, “I’m so proud to call you my wife, there’s nobody else who I would’ve wanted to take that spot. I love you, you will never understand how much.”

You were unable to answer him back, but he knew you felt the same way too. His length slid through your walls perfectly, like a puzzle piece put together, caressing your insides as the tip of his member kissed at your sweet spot. Your whines got louder, and his groans also heightened in pitch when his climax threatened to arrive.

“Are you going to cum, baby?” He pecked your lips, hand reaching down to rapidly rub at your clit, enough to trigger your release.

“I’m coming!” Incoherent cries spilled from your lips, hips grinding up and down as Mark reached his height, the familiar white substance filling your walls satisfyingly.

He rode the both of you down from your climaxes, eventually coming to a stop as he laid on top of you, chests heaving and searching for breath. He held you in his embrace, where it felt like the world and its threats could not hurt you.

“I love you, too, Mark.” You gave him a short kiss, hugging him with appreciation as he nuzzled his face into your neck. “I love you, but tomorrow, I will beat the heck out of you, for leaving so many hickeys in the most visible places ever!”

“You weren’t complaining while I was making them!”

“Shut up.”

#mark #mark lee #mark lee smut #mark smut #nct 127 smut #nct smut #mark fluff #mark lee fluff #nct 127 fluff #mark scenarios #mark imagines #mark blurbs #mark drabbles #mark timestamps #nct 127 scenarios #nct 127 imagines #nct 127 drabbles #nct 127 blurbs #nct 127 timetstamps #nct mark #nct 127 mark #nct 127 fics #mark fics #mark lee fics #nct mark smut #kpop smut #nct127 #nct127 smut #nct mark fluff #mark x reader

[shangrila11]

Dreams do come true // Roxas (KH) x F! reader [Soulmate! AU]

You yawned as you made your way to her bed. It had been a long, hectic day (but enjoyable since it was your birthday) and you wanted nothing more than to catch some z's. You flopped onto your bed and snuggled yourself into it, trying to make yourself as comfy as possible.

"I wonder if I'll meet them..." you wondered as her eyelids grew heavy. For so long, you had been wondering who your soulmate was, how they were like personality-wise, what they looked like and whatnot. And now that you had reached the age when one would usually meet their soulmate, you would be getting those answers soon. Hopefully. With that thought in mind, you drifted off into dreamland.

                                                               xxx xxx

The first thing you saw when you opened your eyes was the colour blue, from the semi-cloudy sky above you to the mirror-like ground below you. 

"Wow. What is this place?" you gasped, looking around in amazement. It looked gorgeous and looked like something out of ...well, a dream. You took in the breath-taking scenery for a while longer before your eyes laid on a cloaked figure some distance away from you admiring the view as well. Their back was facing you so the only other feature you could see was their spiky blonde hair. 

"That should be them" you thought. With your heart racing in anticipation, you approached them, creating ripples with each step you take.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" you asked when you were near them. The figure jumped a little and turned around to face you.

"Who are you?" the figure, now revealed to be a male, asked with a frown. Now that he was facing you, you could see that he had eyes the colour of the very place you were standing right now. It then dawned on him. "Oh. You are that 'soulmate' person that Axel has been telling me about, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am," you nodded. You wanted to ask the male more about this Axel person but thought it was too soon for that. You extended out a hand, flashing the male an affable smile. "I'm (Y/N), by the way, and you are...?"

"Roxas," the male replied simply, taking your hand to shake it.

"Nice to meet, you, Roxas," you beamed. Roxas hummed in response and then retracted his hand. A somewhat awkward silence ensued for a while before you spoke up. 

"So what do you want to do?" you asked.

"Well... I don't have anything in mind, actually," Roxas shook his head. "But I'm fine with anything so I'll leave it up to you."

"Ok," you agreed. You tapped your chin thoughtfully for a moment before an idea popped into your brain. "Oh, I know!" You snapped your fingers and the place soon turned into a kitchen.

"Let's do some cooking! What do you like to eat, Roxas?" you grinned.

"...Sea-salt ice-cream," the blonde male answered. He said it with such a serious expression that you stifled a giggle.

"What?" Roxas frowned, slightly sulking.

"Sorry. The way you say it with such a straight face is pretty funny," you, unable to hold it any longer, laughed lightly.

"Haha, at least someone's amused," Roxas remarked wryly, rolling his eyes. But there was a hint of a smile on his face. "So how do we go about with it?"

"Let's see..." you began. A recipe book appeared in your hands and you read it. Roxas went over to look through it with you as well. Your shoulders touched as the two of you read together. You felt a little self-conscious about the fact that the two of you were so close to each other but decided to pay no heed.

"This is also my first time making this, actually, so I'm not sure if it'll taste like the one you're used to but let's give it a try, yeah?" you smiled at Roxas warmly. Roxas nodded. Together, the two of you made the ice-cream.

A while later, the two of you were holding their finished product with satisfied smiles on your faces.

"Alright. Let's dig in," you grinned. You and Roxas took a bite of the ice-cream. 

"Mmm... this is pretty good," you commented. The saltiness and sweetness of the ice-cream complemented each other well. Roxas nodded.

"It tastes almost like the one I usually eat back home," he agreed. He went quiet for a moment before continuing, "You know, you're not too bad of a person."

"Awww... I think you're really cool as well," you beamed sweetly. 

"Huh. That's good to hear," Roxas answered nonchalantly. "Oh, and happy birthday." A necklace with the roman number for 13 materialised in his hands. You gasped. It looked stunning.

"Axel told me that when it is the birthday of one half of a soulmate pair, they will meet the other half. Since it isn't my birthday, I figure that it is yours," he explained. "So... do you want me to put it on for you?"

"Oh! Err... yes, please," you, still feeling surprised, nodded. Roxas moved closer to you and carefully put the necklace on you. Your heart thumped wildly against your chest but you kept your composure.

After the necklace was put on, you clutched the pendant fondly.

"Thanks, Roxas," you smiled at him. "I'll treasure it."

"It's nothing," Roxas replied. Their surrounding was slowly becoming brighter now, indicating that it was almost time to wake up. "So I guess I'll see you again later tonight?"

"Of course," you beamed. From that day on, the two of you hung out with each other in their dreams every night, joking, chatting and doing activities together. Roxas was really good company and you enjoyed spending time with him. However, at one point in time, he forgot who you were. You were, of course, devastated. But at least he was still the same Roxas you knew and he did eventually get his memories back. You were overjoyed when that happened, so much so that you shed tears of happiness. Roxas, too, seemed delighted to finally remember you but felt guilty at the same time as he apologised to you repeatedly and held you close to him. Still crying, you assured him that it was alright. From that day on, the two of you grew closer than ever and even more so after a particular incident.

That day, you and Roxas were hanging out in your dreams, as usual. You remarked that the two of you hadn't met in reality yet and asked if the two of you could do so. However, to your disappointment, Roxas (nicely) rejected your offer.

"Why not?" she asked, dismayed.

"If I tell you the reason, you might find it hard to believe," Roxas explained. 

"Try me. I haven't even heard the reason yet so how can I judge whether it's believable or not?" you replied, gazing at him firmly. Seeing the determination in your eyes, Roxas sighed.

"Alright. Don't say I didn't warn you," he answered. He then went on to explain that he was a Nobody, that he was currently residing the heart of his original persona and everything else you needed to know. He answered whatever questions that you had as well.

After Roxas's explanation, you went silent. Noticing this, Roxas looked at you in concern. 

"(Y/N)?" he asked, almost cautiously. What happened next threw him off guard a little. You wrapped your arms around him in a warm embrace without warning, surprising the male. 

"(Y/N)?" he repeated.

"I didn't know you had been through so much," you remarked softly. "Also, I noticed that strange things have been happening around here but I didn’t expect it to be something that major. And for that, I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault. I didn't want you to get involved in all of these and that's why I didn't tell you until now," Roxas assured you.

"But still I could have done something," you countered, but not too harshly. You broke away from the hug and took Roxas's hands in yours, squeezing them gently. "Now that I know, from now on, do tell me what I can do to help and I'll do everything in my power to provide that assistance. You deserve to be your very own person, after all."

"I'll keep that in mind. Thanks," Roxas smiled. He paused for a moment before continuing, "You know, I was initially not too enthusiastic about this 'soulmate' thing. I don't like the idea of being forced to have feelings for someone." Your heart almost sank at his words but fluttered soon after when Roxas gazed at you tenderly as he said the next few words.

"But if it's you...  I guess I don't mind," he finished. He then averted his gaze away, his cheeks tinted red. "Man, I can't believe I just said that." You stared at him for a while before a giggle escaped your lips.

"Oh, Roxas. You can be so adorable sometimes."

                                                         xxx xxx

Some time had passed since then and now you were currently strolling along the streets of Twilight Town with Olette, Hayner and Pence.

"Thanks for helping us at the old mansion the other day," Olette thanked you with a warm smile.

"No problem. I did promise Roxas that I would help him," you smiled back.

"You mentioned before that you meet Roxas regularly in your dreams, right? So how is he like?" Pence asked. Your other two friends expressed their curiosity as well.

"Well... he may seem stoic at first but once you get to know him, he's a pretty nice guy," you smiled. You placed a hand over your heart. "He's someone I hold dear." But then you noticed your friends exchanging sly looks at each other and your cheeks immediately heated up.

"I...it's not what you guys think!" you stammered.

"Oh, really? Then why are you reacting like that?" Hayner teased. "Besides, we're all from the same town, you know? You think we don't know the meaning of you and Roxas being able to interact with each other in your dreams?"

"I... I... well..." you stuttered, getting more flustered by the minute. You and your friends were so engrossed in their conversation that she didn't notice that a certain blonde, a male with spiky red hair and a female with short, black hair had spotted the four of them.

                                                     xxx xxx

"(Y/N)? Hayner? Olette? Pence?" Roxas called out. The (H/C)-haired female froze before slowly turning around to face him. Hayner, Olette and Pence followed suit. 

"Roxas?" his soulmate gasped, her face a picture of shock. "Is that really you?"

"Mmmhmm. It's me," Roxas nodded. Tears welled up in (Y/N)'s eyes. She then tackled him in a hug, nearly knocking the wind out of him. But he didn't mind it one bit and accepted the hug.

"It really is you," she whispered. "So they've found a way to let you live a separate life from Sora?"

"That's right," Roxas agreed. He then broke away from the hug so that he could introduce Axel and Xion to (Y/N), Olette, Hayner and Pence, and vice versa.

"Ah, so you're Xion and Axel! Roxas told me a lot about you two," (Y/N) smiled, shaking their hands one by one. "It's nice to finally meet the two of you."

"It's nice to meet you too," Xion beamed ever so slightly.

"Huh. Glad you got our names memorised," Axel grinned. "And call me Lea, by the way."

"Of course," (Y/N) returned Lea's grin with one of her own. Lea and Xion exchanged greetings with Olette, Hayner and Pence after that and before long, everyone was making small talk. Laughter filled the air as they conversed with each other. Seeing his friends getting along with each other and that Olette, Hayner and Pence were not that different from the ones he knew, a small smile crept across Roxas's face.

"It must be nice to see your friends again," a familiar voice commented. Roxas turned around to see (Y/N) smiling at him.

"... Yes, it is," the blonde-haired male concurred. "I never thought I would see this day come. It's all thanks to Sora, our friends and of course, you." He smiled at her, his gaze soft.

"I didn't do much, really," (Y/N) laughed lightly.

"That may be true but it means a lot to me," Roxas answered firmly. "You being able to interact with me in our dreams makes being inside Sora's heart feel less... lonesome, as cheesy as it may sound. And you did help Olette, Hayner and Pence out at the old mansion despite the danger, didn't you?"

"I supposed that's true," (Y/N) agreed. "Thanks, Roxas."

"It's nothing. I'm just speaking the truth," Roxas shrugged. However, there was a hint of a smile on his face. The two of them then went to continue chatting with their friends. Even though neither of them had said it out loud, the two soulmates were glad to finally meet each other in person at last.

(Inspired by the prompt: Imagine that soulmates just have this ability to dream together/meet each other in your dreams regardless of whether or not you two meet in real life. Your dreams could then be like a real-life video game, for example, you two could be in a zombie-apocalypse type of dream and you both would try your best to help each other out. If one gets bitten/dies you wake up and your soulmate is there to tell you everything is alright or tease you how you couldn’t shoot fast enough and then you’d both go back to sleep and maybe start round two, found on tumblr)

(Picture does not belong to me. Credit goes to  梅野つぐ on pixiv)

#kingdom hearts #roxas #roxas x reader #soulmate au #fluff #romance #oneshot

[angst-king]

1-10

(This is a fanfiction for Haikyuu, Tendou is handicapped and uses a wheelchair to get around the school. He is able to walk and run but only for short period of time so he uses a wheel chair for most situations except for sports. I have this exact disability so yes this is real)

Tendou wasn’t himself today, he was quieter and seemed to be a little preoccupied but still focused. Tendou hoped no one would notice or question him, he was already on edge and anxious. He was in a lot of pain, he was having a bad day and his body was gonna make sure he knew it. He knew he was having a bad day when he woke up three hours before he usually did for school and couldn’t feel his legs. He couldn’t move on his own and practically dragged his body with only his upper body strength. By the time he had to get up for school it felt as if his entire lower body was on fire. He was sensitive and couldn’t even let his toes touch the carpet without shuddering, but. He had practice and he didn’t wanna miss it. Besides it was only a seven out of ten level pain he could get through it. He wanted to prove that he was a worthy teammate who didn’t flake out because of a bit of pain. Yeah it was only a bit, he could handle this, Satori had had much worse than this right? Well he had but he would come to regret not staying home.

Putting on his knee braces, then his ankle braces made it a little better. At least he could somewhat stand without the urge to crawl back into bed. He got ready for school even if it was a grueling task. His gym bag was packed and so was his bookbag, he hardly had the energy to eat, or make anything to eat so he just grabbed a protein shake and made his way to school.

It wasn’t a long way there but with his body feeling like it would give out on him, it felt as if it took ages to get to school. He had his gloves on which was good or else his fingers would be in just as much his lower body. HIs legs felt as if he had no control. He got to the gym and tried to act as if things were normal, trying to keep himself focused, stifling cries of pain. Each jump was agony, each turn and squat made him want to sob. Teeth clenched as he forced himself silent, not trusting his mouth to let out words. He knew that he was reaching his hard limits but he had school! And it was only an seven out of ten still maybe even an eight. He could do it right? He didn’t need to worry anyone over something he could handle right?

Classes went by, thankfully the elevator was working but his body wasn’t. He wanted to go back to bed and sleep this away, he wanted to be with Ushijima but. He always helped him, he always pushed the red head around if he got too tired to do it himself or get things for him if he couldn’t reach. Or push him to do better and better each practice. Ushijima was his boyfriend and his caregiver in multiple ways and Tendou loved and appreciated it but he felt bad sometimes. He felt as if he was being dependent on Ushijima. Using him for things, or not showing how capable he could be. Even on days he needed Ushijima the most he kept that to himself. Today was one of those days. If you asked him right now, on a scale of 1-10 how much pain was he in he’d say either 6-8.5. He didn’t like being vulnerable, vulnerable people are taken advantage of and he hated it, they were also looked down upon and he despised that. 

Wakatoshi noticed his lover’s slightly strange behavior. He knew the other was always in pain but had never witnessed his bad days. Only his meh days, his good days, and his I can do it ones. His bad or horrible days were usually kept out of view from others and rarely happened at school. He felt for the red head, he was truly one of the strongest people he’d ever met. Heck Tendou never complained about the pain he was in even if it were to get bad he never once said “I can’t do this” or “its too much” or just quit. He’d watched the guest monster bruise up his body which he knew wasn’t gonna be good for him in the long run but. Knew this was his only place he felt free of his handicap. He knew this was where he could truly prove himself and feel like he could be a part of something. Wakatoshi commenced Tendou for his drive to become stronger though. He sometimes wished he weren’t so stubborn and would listen to his body more. Take breaks, stretch longer than the others, tell them when it was too much instead of putting himself through hell. He had a feeling that Tendou wasn’t doing so well, he noticed the small movements, twitches, jerks, and sounds he made. He noticed the fidgeting, the weakness, and sluggishness in his moves on the court which Tendou did a good job of covering up He didn’t know how much longer he could take, his body was starting to shake, he could hardly hold himself up. The pain would migrate from his knees and down, up to just his hips, then his back and then become a dominating feeling from his lower back to the tips of his toes. It made him very fidgety and scared, it was sudden and exhausting for him, he was feeling drained it his shoulders and arms were already sore from the practice the day before. It got the point that he couldn’t hold a pencil. He was in math class when he picked up his pencil with a shaky hand but he couldn’t hold it still enough to write then. Sharp pains ripped through him up his back, each breath pain interrupted his thoughts. He couldn’t breath if it brought him pain so he held his breath but. His involuntary apnea forced him to inhale which made him cry out as his entire body felt like it had been struck by lightning. This was noticed by Wakatoshi who was only a few feet away. He eyes him curiously then he sees his shaking become more and more visible that it frightened him. He got out of his seat and called Tendou's name. “Tendou! Tendou can you hear me?!” Tendou nods quietly, tears welling up in his eyes, the class’s attention is brought to them. Tendou couldn’t stop shaking, his body had tensed up and he wasn’t breathing in normal patterns, inhaling and holding his breath to minimize those lightning pains but they had him gasping which made him cry out. “Gagh!” His eyes rolled back and his body jerked forwards almost hitting his desk which Ushijima stopped just in time holding him up, the teacher asked. “Is everything alright over there?” Ushijima didn’t know how to answer “I think something’s wrong with him.” Was all he could reply, while looking worriedly at Tendou. Whimpering and gasping Tendou was crying as the teacher came over. “Oh goodness, Tendou kiddo, can you answer me?” Tendou could hardly move let alone answer “Lets get him to the nurse’s office, I don’t know what’s going on but maybe she can help?” Ushijima nods and grabs Tendou’s bookbag off of his chair then wheeling his boyfriend out of the classroom with the teacher following in toe. The nurse had no idea on what to do with Tendou but let him lay down in a cot she had. This saddened Ushijima to see Tendou like this but he was able to breathe by the time he was laying down. “Hey Ten, you okay...can you tell me what hurts?” “m-my legs k-kinda hurt” Tendou lied, he didn’t want to make Ushijima stay with him, the taller boy had much more important things to do than worry about him. Ushijima shook his head and he could tell Tendou was trying to be brave. “Ten I need you to be honest please.” But the crimson haired male just shook his head. “I’ll be back with my book bag, I’m gonna take you home.” Wakatoshi knew how much more comfortable Satori was in his own home so he knew this method would work better. Tendou was feeling small and when Wakatoshi asked him all of those questions he felt smaller, like a little kid. Which in some circumstances was good, Tendou was an age regressor and it allowed him to be vulnerable in front of people so this would help Wakatoshi assess Tendou better.

Blushing Tendou frantically tries to decline “N-no Ushijima, please you don’t have to.” He was stuttering and wincing that didn’t prove his protest to be valid at all. Ushijima gave Tendou a kiss on his forehead and said  “But I want to” then he headed back to his classroom, the teacher wrote out an excuse for the two by the time Ushijima had come back. Bookbag on his back, he helps Tendou into his wheelchair and puts Tendou’s bag on the back of his chair. “You ready Ten?” Ushijima asked, earning a quiet nod, so the taller teen wheeled him out of the nurse’s office and soon out of the school. Ushijima could tell Tendou didn’t feel good, he could see the pain in the way he tried to curl up in the chair or the way he bit his lip and clenched down his facial features. All he could do was remind him that it was gonna be okay. Arriving at Tendou’s place he pushed his boyfriend up his ramp and helped him inside. “How about we change into some comfier clothes okay?” Suggested Ushijima Tendou nods shyly knowing he is gonna have to be carried up the stairs. Each loving gesture the team captain made towards Tendou made him feel so close to slipping into little space but. He didn’t want to be a burden and put more responsibilities on him. Even if Ushijima had taken care of Tendou both in and out of little space, he still felt bad about it sometimes. “Arms up babe” He says so Tendou obeys, raising his arms up, Ushijima carrying Satori bridal style to his room. Setting him down on the bed, Ushijima went through Satori’s closet when he heard a soft voice. “u-um...Ushiji?” Ushijima turned to look at Satori who was playing with the hem of his school uniform shirt. “Yes?” “I-i feel little.” He started bashfully with a blush tinting his cheeks a light pink. Wakatoshi gave a small grin and nodded “Alright then, wanna put on your comfy lil boy clothes?” Tendou nods at this question so while going through Satori’s closet he found a sweater that was colored by the colors of the ocean zones. It ranged from the sunlight zone all the way down to the twilight zone that had lil sparks of whites,blues and greens to represent the bioluminescent creatures that lived down there. Then he found some light cream colored soft comfortable shorts. He then helps Tendou who tried to undress himself but it hurts so he lets his daddy do it for him. Once dressed, Wakatoshi adjusts the straps of the stabilizing braces Tendou wore around his ankles and knees. Wakatoshi changed out of his school clothes into a sweatshirt and jeans. He always had some spare clothes at Satori’s place in case he needed to stay with him last minute. Dressed, Ushijima went into Tendou’s box of lil space items, finding his book bag and extra things. He put the bag on the bed and gave Tendou his blanket just like the sweater it was all of the zones of the ocean. Going through his bag Tendou grabbed his blue paci as Ushijima grabbed the stuffies they got each other for their first date. Tendou had an orca and Ushijima had a Manatee. The taller teen crawled onto the bed and brought Tendou close to him. “Lil one, I need you to be honest, on a scale of 1-10 how much pain are you in?” Tendou had been a little distracted but he knew what he’d been feeling all day and couldn’t lie. “Ei-eight.” “Alright baby, good job being honestly. I’m sorry it hurts so much, I know i can’t really do much about it but I’m still here if you need anything.” Nodding quietly he gets comfortable with his lover.Ushijima knew he couldn’t put his baby boy to sleep but he could keep him as relaxed as possible but. He knew it would be hard knowing at any moment his pain levels could go from an eight to a ten. 

So distracting him with his phone, letting the little watch videos for a while would help.It had been a while and Ushijima needed to charge his phone so he started to get up shifting Tendou off gently then he felt Tendou hold onto him. “Hm baby I’m not going anywhere just gonna plug my phone in. I’ll use your laptop so we can watch videos o-” Then he hears soft sniffling, he looks down to see Tendou in tears, his hands balled up clutching Ushijima’s shirt as he shook. “Sator?” A sudden gasp came and a whimper came out. Burying his face into Wakatoshi’s chest, Tendou cried out “Ten! Ten!” At first he had no clue why the regressor was saying ‘Ten’ like this until he felt him tense and let out a choked out gasp. Eyes filled with worry Ushijima sits up and gets off the bed holding Tendou but more in a toddler hold. “Shhh shhh it's okay baby, I know it hurts I’m sorry.” He quickly tries to sooth him but he knows it's useless. “What hurts is it your back?” Tendou shakes his head”M-my legs!” Wakatoshi begins to walk around the room holding Tendou while rubbing his back to try and sooth him. “I’m sorry baby boy, just hang in there.” Crying into Wakatoshi’s shoulder, Satori is shaking hard from the pain, scaring him by its suddenness. “S-so scarwy, pw-pwease make it stop daddy!”Pain like this always made Tendou’s anxiety spike especially as a little, he didn’t understand why he’d be in pain all of a sudden sometimes. Wakatoshi truly hated to see his baby in such pain, especially seeing as there was almost nothing he could do to make the pain stop. Massaging it doesn’t help, pain medication doesn’t help and it will take a while for it to work any way. “Deep breaths lil one, I know just try and take deep breaths for me please.” Satori tried to relax himself but the pain was getting worse, keeping his lower body paralyzed as if his muscles, bones and nerves were set on fire. “D-daddy it hurts so much, it hurts!” The crying boy exclaims as his cheeks flush and his knuckles turn white from how tightly he’s holding onto Wakatoshi who doesn't wince knowing this little sting is nothing compared to agony his baby boy is in. Standing beside Tendou’s bed he gives him small gingerly placed kisses on his neck and temple while his hands caress and rub in small soothing circles. 

It's a while before Tendou calms down. The pain is dying down enough for Tendou’s grip to loosen up on Ushijima. He’s tired and still in pain but it's not as intense as the searing pain that ripped him apart. Ushijima sits back down on the bed sitting so Tendou is sitting in his lap. Ushijma grabbed Tendou’s stuffie and gives it back to him since he abandoned it as soon as the pain became too much. “You’re so brave, such a brave lil sea monster.” It was a nickname Ushijima gave Tendou which the redhead loved. “How bad is it now lil sea monster?”  He asked, Tendou thought about it then replied “eight” again “Alright, let me know if it gets worse again okay.” “o-okay daddy” “Remember Daddy doesn’t mind taking care of you because I know you need it. I know its draining for you to be all tough about it all day, especially on your bad days and I will be there for you. On your good, meh, and horrible days...even if you can’t move I’ll be there.. I won't leave you, I’m not embarrassed or ashamed. I love you with all my heart my lil sea monster.” His words had Tendou melting into the team captain’s strong frame that was warm and comforting. Fingers carding through scarlet locks pushing them down and out of his face to plant kisses there. Ushijima meant every word he said and Tendou knew it. “I love you too daddy”

#tendou x ushijima #handicapped tendou #hurt fict '

[runesfactory]

run cried the crawling | chapter 01

summary: Tasokare Hotel is a place that exists between the real world and the afterlife. A residing place for spirits whose fate has yet been decided. To die or to live on. Aesop has yet to discover the truth behind his own near demise. It was until a stranger walked through the doors of the hotel with an owl head that the horrific truth began to unravel.

pairing: aesop carl x eli clark

genre: mystery, supernatural, horror & romance

warnings:  mature themes. descriptive writing of violence and blood. body horror. strong angst. equally strong romance. heavy pining. mild profanity. death. tasokare hotel spoilers.

word count: 3261

chapters: 01 | 02 | ...

To Aesop, thoughts about your fate after death aren't unusual. The afterlife and qhat not. However, spending his time at a vintage hotel certainly never crossed his mind. A hotel in the middle of a barren world, might he add.

Yet here Aesop stands, behind the receptionist desk beside Vera Nair, the manager’s assistant. The Hotel Manager told Aesop that he’d be away for a minute or two. He knows very well that the Manager has just left his responsibilities by going around, aimlessly, or taking a nap somewhere in this hotel. “That damn useless manager!” Vera curses under her breath, slamming her fist on the desk. He doesn't feel like he’s qualified for a task like this, welcoming guests and all. Surely not because his previous occupation focuses mainly on interacting with the dead rather than the living. But they're technically not alive, are they? 

The Hotel Manager of this hotel is quite the character. He’s not human, first of all. He remembered feeling freaked out by the flame-headed man when they first met. However, he’s not the only non-human in this hotel. Vera Nair and Lucchino are the two other non-humans, though Vera seems human. He once tried asking her and she only gave her a knowing smile, saying ‘wouldn’t you like to know’.

This is quite the world. It feels as if time never passes. The sky remains the same, so it’s difficult to tell whether minutes or hours have passed.

At this point, who knows how long he’s been waiting until his time to move on as a spirit comes. When will that time be? He doesn’t know. For all he knows, it could be forever that he stays there. To be honest, he doesn’t mind it all that much. The unknown unease him and the questions around his own fate are filled with it. If he were to spend the rest of his life in this state of limbo, he wouldn't really mind. Maybe.

The window of the lobby glares the shade of yellow and orange from the sky outside. Time doesn’t move in this place. As its name suggests, time remains between the twilight and sunset. Most of the rooms have windows showing exactly that, but Aesop’s room has a piece of the night sky. He realized it has changed not long after his arrival. The dark blue sky littered with tiny freckles of stars decorating the blank surface. He quite likes it.

Perhaps the change of sky has something to do with his memory? That the change is significant? He wonders what it could possibly mean. Perhaps he died at night time. To have died at night... It makes him wonder whether he had a peaceful death of some sort. The very reason why he’s still glued to this enigma of a place that is the hotel.

His death. How did he die? And why?

Those are the questions that kept lingering in his mind. The key to his departure from this hotel yet the clues given to him left him were bits and pieces of memories and information of what his life might've been like. Nothing detrimental to his death. It leaves him with more questions than answers really.

His name is Aesop Carl. He's 21. He works, well, worked to be more precise as an embalmer. He was quite fond of his work, proud of his craft, perhaps still is. And he was (or maybe still is) in a relationship with a man. However, the portrait of him and said person had been burned off. The corner of the portrait had the initials ‘A&EC’ written on the back of it. He wondered if the initials belonged to them. It’s strange that he couldn’t recall the face of the man, but he believes the person was important to him. Perhaps still is.

It’s frustrating to not remember anything.

Those were the only things he knew about himself so far. Then other things came along such as he's not so terrible at cooking, quite adept in the art of ballet, and doesn't enjoy the company of strangers.

Nothing gave him a hint as to what might've happened to him. Not a single clue. The closest thing he knows to his death is the night sky of his room and the burned portrait. Perhaps, he was burned alive. A gruesome thought really, but he doesn't dismiss the possibility.

It's not enough to merely guess how you've died. You have to be certain. At least that’s what he concluded from observing other guests who’ve successfully passed on from here. Slowly, he's given up on the hopes of returning to the real world. Death is inevitable. That's what he says to himself every day as an Embalmer. 

"So much to learn yet not a single clue…" He mumbles to himself, leaning his back against the drawers behind him, and crosses both of his arms across his chest. His eyes remain fixated on the windows tinted with orange. He’s left by himself, Vera had told him that she needs to take care of the matters in the bar even though he knows they don’t have any guests. Well, he brushes it off. It doesn’t really matter.

"Mr. Aesop! Good morning!" A voice greets him and when he turns to looks. It’s Emma, the hotel’s gardener, and cleaning service. Her face is always covered with hints of dirt. The same goes for her whole attire whenever he sees her. She always greets everyone with a lot of enthusiasm, so warm and cheerful. Even to him although he’s more than aware he comes off as quite off-putting to most if not all people.

Aesop finds it difficult to get close to anyone, always thinking either they might not really like him or they’re out to get him. He finds it hard to tell if anyone is being genuine at all. However, Emma is one of the few exceptions. Her company aside, her peculiar interest in plants piqued his interest and reminded him of his own interests although his are much grimmer by comparison. Although, he's quite fond of certain plants himself and Emma's always more than happy to provide.

“Ms. Woods,” Aesop responds softly, nodding slightly. “Working hard in the garden as usual?”

“Yes! The mini garden I’ve created in my room has grown splendidly! I’d love to show you some of the berries that have sprouted.” Emma giggles, clenching her hands together while her eyes glimmer. “If you feel comfortable, please do visit my room when you have some time to spare!”

To the offer, he can only smile though eyes avoiding hers, “I’ll consider it.”

The entrance door creaks, opening itself. Both of their eyes shifted to the figure walking through the door. A stranger walks in with the head of an owl.

Upon their first arrival, each individual who hasn't figured out who they are will have their faces hidden. Not every person who enters the hotel has it, as he quickly found out. Their heads are often covered by some form of a mask. It seems that the same thing has happened to this individual.

"Welcome to Tasokare Hotel," He bows slightly, putting his best facade, "How may I be of service to you, sir?"

"A hotel?" The stranger tilts their head to the side. "Sorry, I just have no idea where to go and it seems that wherever I go I always encounter this building. A hotel, you say…"

"Yes, sir."

"How strange. I've never seen a hotel such as this before. Let alone in the middle of nowhere." The stranger tilts his head up, gazing around the building, taking in the atmosphere of the hotel.

"This hotel lies between the two realms of the real world and the afterlife." Aesop continues to explain while taking out the guest book, displaying it across the table to the stranger. "A spirit such as yourself encounters this place simply because you are lying between those two realms."

"A spirit?" The stranger continues to questions. "Ah, would that mean I'm dead?" He asks rather calmly.

Emma shakes her head, continuing off Aesop, "Not quite! You have yet to die and that's why you're here."

"I see." The stranger mumbles. Aesop wasn't as calm as this when he first discovered the place. He was quite frantic, panicking and adamant that it was all a dream. Possibly freaked the Hotel Manager off.

"Okay, sir. If you could just sign here please then I'll ask a staff member to help you."

"O-oh, I don't think I can afford to pay to stay here."

"There is no need," Aesop replies shortly, handing the stranger the pen. It might've caught the stranger off guard, yet he signed on the book anyway. 

"Well," He pauses, before calmly saying, "It seems like I don't remember my name."

"That's quite normal here, no need to worry." Emma smiles widely at the stranger. "It's part of our job to help you remember your memories!"

"My memories?"

"Yes! Your room will tell us bits and pieces about you and what happened to you. Of course, we can only help with certain things such as finding items that may look important to you. Items that might trigger them."

"Is that so? Will remembering help me move on from this place?"

"Bingo!" She gives him a finger gun gesture. "Either that or you may return back to the real world. The reason why most of us are still here is that our body's still somewhat intact in the real world."

"Most of us?" He seems surprised. "Ah, are you-"

"Most of us are spirits as well, yes." She puts it simply.

"Ah, I see. I apologize if I come off as insensitive." The stranger bows slightly. It's difficult to tell what expression he was making with the owl head though, from the soft tone he uses, Aesop can tell it was genuine.

"There is no need to apologize. This is hardly a normal circumstance to be in. Understandably it's hard for anybody to internalize." The second the stranger completes signing up the book, Aesop shuts it close and puts it back on the shelf. He turns his back towards the stranger, reaching out to a key in one of the drawers behind him.

He stands still for a moment. Perhaps that may be a little too harsh, Aesop thinks to himself. However, it's true. Arriving at this strange hotel, being told that you're hanging by a thread between life and death. Can anyone afford to be careful with what they say around the subject?

"You're certainly right, Mr…"

"Carl. Aesop Carl."

"Mr. Carl,” The stranger speaks his name gently. “Thank you for easing some of my concerns! And thank you too, Miss…”

“Miss Woods. You may call me Emma, I don’t really mind.” Emma waves her hand at him. “Mr. Aesop, you should take the kind gentleman to his room! Ah, ah, ah,” She lifts her finger at Aesop. An immediate response before Aesop could protest. “I’ll take over the desk for a while. Besides, we don’t get that many guests these days. It’ll be fine. Let me quickly change my clothes!”

For a moment, he hesitates. By the looks on Emma’s face, it wouldn’t go anywhere if he were to argue with her. He doesn’t like confrontation, so he lets out a sigh, Emma squeals at this then continues to rush to her room as fast as she could. Aesop turns to the stranger, “Alright, sir. I’ll be guiding and assisting you if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all! Please lead the way.”

The red carpet and vintage wallpaper across the halls of the hotel give off the old-style aesthetic. The whole building is filled to the brim with vintage furniture, even more so in the bar area where you can hear jazz music echo through the room. It is a miracle that the Hotel Manager was able to maintain the cleanliness of this space, though he’s very much convinced it’s all thanks to the staff that was here prior to his arrival.

Aesop and the stranger walk down the halls of the second floor. He lives on the same floor as well. It’s a very quiet floor. He likes the atmosphere. Each floor has similar grand decor, much different from the lobby. The red-carpeted floor with complicated patterns embroidered across it. Accompanied with a light, creamy wallpaper and the yellow tinted chandelier-like lights that go all the way through the hallway. It’s quite fancy.

Each step they take causes tiny thumps against the carpeted floor. It’s quiet. He appreciates that. He dreaded small talks, not quite because he dislikes the people themselves, but he just doesn’t know what to say. He much prefers this silence over having his thoughts rambling, him desperately grasping for any answers that would deem suitable to whoever he speaks to. Aesop thinks about the smallest details, the most trivial details. Simply put, small talks aren’t his forte.

He lets out a deep breath, stopping in front of the door of the room, “This is it.” He unlocks the door with the key in his hand then turns the knob, revealing the room.

Each individual room is like a piece of the person’s life summarized in a room. From the furniture to the color of the wallpaper and the flooring. The stranger’s room is quite simple. Aesop often encounters extravagant paintings, gold linen sheets, and such. But. There is nothing too extravagant about it aside from the peculiar birdcage standing near the bookshelf, not far from the door. The walls are colored in plain, navy blue shade with wooden flooring.

"This is quite the room." The stranger remarks, looking around the room perhaps with an awed look Aesop would imagine. “Does it fit your liking?" He asks quietly.

"Yes, yes, it does. I'm quite surprised actually. Impeccable service for a hotel in a stranded place” He jokes.

“No, any of the rooms can be like this. Depending on the guest.” Aesop puts it blatantly with a blank look on his face. The stranger laughs at the deadpan response. “I see. Even so, this feels… familiar. Almost homely.”

It always does. It did for Aesop. It didn’t take so long for him to get used to the comfort of his own chambers. The more he thought about it, it’s quite scary how easy he felt at home there. The familiar atmosphere and all. Almost as if to bring you a false sense of comfort. Every Time he steps outside of those comforting walls, he’s reminded again of the odd reality he currently lives in.

“So, I guess I’ll have to look around the room for clues, I assume?” The stranger walks toward the bed, grazing their hand over the metal frame of the bed.

“Yes. I’ll be assisting you in doing so.”

“That’d be immensely helpful. Thank you very much, Mr. Carl. You’ve been very helpful to ease my confusion. It’s quite comforting.” The stranger bows slightly before him, one hand behind him. The gesture caught Aesop off guard, though not to let it slip he simply huffs lightly. Again, he feels like behind that owl head he could sense a smile.

So the two began searching through the room.

There were only two rooms in this room. It’s quite small by comparison to the other ones he’s ever been in. However, spacious enough that it grants a jointed living room next to the bedroom. Aesop begins his search there while the stranger’s in the bedroom. Important documents and identification are his main priority. Those are the few things that could at least give the guests an identity to hang onto. A face to their masked selves. A person.

It wasn’t a long search. The room is quite small and there were only a handful of places they were able to look into. Aesop continues to fumble through knick-knacks around the room. There aren’t a lot of them around, barely any really. Rather, he finds plenty of journals and books regarding the stars, plenty related to birds as well. He concludes that the stranger is probably fond of owls the most, knowing his face is shaped as an owl. Aesop laughs softly at the excited scribbles of footnotes that they put in each of those journals.

However, he remains fixated on a couple of things. At the corner of every book he encounters, there’s an initial written on them.

E.C. Scribbled, carved, and written. His thumb grazed over the initial.

An initial that belongs to the stranger. It must be unless it’s a pseudonym. He wouldn’t really pass that possibility. Writers often do that. The more Aesop flicks through the pages, he couldn’t help but feel as if he’s seen such writing before. He brushes his fingers over the writing, deep in his own thoughts. Just who is this stranger? He can’t help but notice the way something is tugging itself in him.

He remains wary and curious all the same, but it wouldn’t help to bombard someone who has no clue of who they are with questions. He keeps the feeling to himself. After completing his search through the shelves, he heads back to the bedroom where the stranger is. The stranger was on the floor, surrounded by piles of documents and papers.

Aesop sees a man. No, the stranger, standing still, head looking down with his body facing towards the window. No longer did he have the head of an owl. The moonlight from outside casting over a halo-like outline of the strangers’ oddly still figure. It shines over the back of the head of the faceless stranger. He stands so incredibly still, almost statue-like. Aesop slowly approaches the figure, then-

“Eli,” The stranger speaks.

“I-I’m sorry?” Aesop stutters.

When the man turns around to face Aesop’s own grey eyes, he sees the lovely shade of navy blue. A glint of the moonlight reflected in their eyes and their dark brown hair. Now, maskless, he can clearly see the smile on the man’s face. “I remember it. My name. My name is Eli Clark.”

There’s a pounding in his head.

When Aesop takes a few steps closer to him, his eyes widen now feeling his body has frozen still. This is the only other room that shows the night sky. Moreso, they have the same view. It feels like looking out to his own window but from a different angle. He senses a thousand questions overwhelming his thoughts.

Eli… Eli Clark…

His mind echoes the name repeatedly like voices speaking simultaneously.

The other man turns to face him. The back of his head abruptly surged with an ache. As if he was--

-- hit on the back of his head. It was hard. Aesop's head greets the cold ground almost instantly. The impact left a ringing in his ear. His sight blurs. He hears an echo of the siren, slightly faint in his head. He desperately crawls his body across the ground, unsure of where to go but he remembers his lip moves.

The iron taste of his own blood lingers. A name on the tip of his tongue. Eli’s name. He needs to let Eli know. He feels his hand extend towards something. It reaches out towards a phone. Fingers grasping and scratching against the ground as he struggles to drag his body across the floor. He fails to notice the shadow that looms over his figure.

“Don’t you dare try to run away!” The figure cries out.

When the second hit strikes, his entire body remains still. He could feel the numbing pain across his head, the gushing liquid on the side of his head that leaks out slowly within his view. Before his eyes begin to give up, he senses another presence. The numbness reaches his head and before he knew it.

“E… Eli…” He whispers before passing out.

#identity v #elisop #aesopeli #aesop x eli #aesop carl #eli clark #mystery #supernatural #tasokare hotel au #thriller #romance #lots of pining #hurt & comfort #tragic but with a happy ending #runesfactory

[chubby-dragon13]

An Unexpected Visit

Welp It’s been a century since I’ve written anything on this blog. My current hyperfixation fandom now is League of legends though there is literally no WG stories for this fandom at all and the only ones ive seen are for the same females so ive just decided to write somthing for myself with my favorite ship, the two ninja masters Shen and Zed.

I WILL MAKE THIS AS OBVIOUS AS POSSIBLE. THIS IS A WEIGHT GAIN STORY SO IF YOU DONT LIKE IT JUST KEEP ON SCROLLING OK! PLEASE DONT LEAVE ANY HATE OK? THANKS.

He knew he was going to get caught. That was the plan after all. Did Shen wail on him a bit harder then he expected. Just a bit. It was honestly more surprising that he was alive if he really had to think about it. Like his father though Shen had that odd mercy that he never did understand and had him shipped to Tuula Prison where he was purged, rather painfully, of his shadow magic and left in a cell alone. Now he sits on his simple, slightly ratty bed and finishes his lunch for the day, just as he does everyday. He places the plate to the side and places his hand on his stomach. Looking down he flinches slightly at the new doughy softness that has made it’s self known slowly but surely in his time in this cell. Never being allowed to leave his cell much and eating more then he normally would has certainly taken its toll. The master of shadow never really ate much if at all most days and now to suddenly eat three meals a day and not move around much had added plushness he never thought he’d ever see on himself. He grimaces at the taught peasant tunic he’s wearing. It had been getting tighter recently. This would be the forth time he’d need a new shirt. A deep sigh escapes his lips as his hand moves over his distended stomach down to his thickened thighs. It was the oddest sensation to be so…big. Along with this size also came the weight. His movements were slow and and clunky compared to how they used to be because of it. Even walking has changed. From the smooth quick strides to an odd slow sway as his thighs push each other to move forward. Seeing what he’s become from what he was will never cease being embarrassing. Not that he can do much about it anymore. He lays back on the bed and winces as the bed frame creaks. Nothing to do now but lament what once was.

Shen isn’t entirely sure what he’s doing as he walks into the prison. For months now his mind has been filled with the thought of his childhood best friend since he was caught. Of course he pushed duty first above all else. He was caught and now paying for his crime. There should be nothing more to this story. It’s done and over with. At least it should be. His heart and mind seem to be telling him otherwise and was now dragging the Eye of Twilight to Tuula prison to see him. Perhaps if he sees him one more time he’ll finally get over this attachment. The guards are quick to let him in and don’t ask questions when he asks to be left alone with Usan. He’s informed where his cell is and makes a bee line there. As he gets closer though he slows and begins to second guess himself a bit. Why is he doing this again? What was the point? Usan was gone only Zed remained. Yet why did he keep thinking there was a bit of him that he loved still left in this albino man? No. He had to do this. Closer was the only way to truly move on. He’s walking pace renewed he quickly made it to what was supposed to be Zed’s cell but as he peers in he doesn’t see the slender pale figure he was expecting to see. In its place was still a pale form but it was much, much larger then he remembered. Quietly he takes a couple unsure steps forward towards the large man and experimentally calls out to them.

“Usan? Zed? Is that you?” The figure suddenly goes completely still like it was flash frozen and now a statue. Burgundy eyes look back at him with a wide surprised expression. He knew those eyes. This was most definitely Zed. Shen enters his cell and watches as Zed rolls his newly rotund body upright with a couple soft grunts. The albino puffs a bit and takes in a breath as he sits on the bed.

“Shen. What brings you here? I’m sure you’ve heard I am incapable of causing trouble without my powers.” The ginger looks down at the pudgy man with a raised eyebrow. Despite his shock of seeing Zed like this he keeps his voice in his usual calm monotone.

“I am certain the lack of power is a smaller reason for you not causing trouble.” The former Master of Shadows glares up at him. Ah, so there is still some fire in him. That’s oddly nice to see.

“Glad to see your eyes are still functioning.” Zed snaps back at him. Shen sighs.

“I did not come here to fight with you.” The huff that comes from the seated male tells him that he does not believe him.

“Then do tell. Why are you here?” A simple enough question to ask. Not so simple to answer. He supposes being truthful and blunt should be the way to go. Like pulling out a thorn.

“I came here to see you.” The expression of disbelief on Zed’s face tells him he’s still untrusting. Zed knows Shen does not lie but he couldn’t be here for such a simple reason.

“You came here. To see me? Why?” Shen breaks eye contact and lets his blue tinted eyes roam down towards Zed’s new acquisition. The bulging mass sitting heavily in his lap, taking up so much space on those larger thighs that are spread wide on the bed. He is completely transfixed on this new plump form. Every curve and bulge unique and begging him to reach out and explore the tattooed pale mass underneath that strained tunic that seems to be struggling to hold back the, what he assumes to be, slowly growing belly underneath. He clearly was going to need a new shirt soon and possibly new pants as well to hold all of him in. The normally stone face of Zed has gained a hint of red as the Eyes of Kinkou Master roam his body. He clears his throat to try to regain Shen’s attention and those glowing blue eyes look back up at his cherubic face.

“Well? Now that you’ve looked me over enough answer the question. Why are you here?” Shen coughs into his hand and is obviously trying to shove his awkwardness down.

“I told you, I came here to see you. I am not sure why either. You have…been on my mind a lot recently and I thought perhaps if I saw you again I could move on.” The truth has been revealed and a slightly uncomfortable silence fills the air.

“I see. Well, you’ve seen me. Can you move on now?” The slight sadness in Zed’s voice as he says that is not lost on Shen.

“No.” He says bluntly. It was true as well. Seeing Zed, and his new form, again has only increased his heart and mind’s desire to be close to the one he loved, loves, once more. A deep inhale and a couple large strides is the only warning Zed gets as Shen closes the space between them and crouches down to embrace him fully. The albino man goes completely still in shock. Oh. He was not expecting this at all. The embrace was so warm and strong. Large hands squeezing his soft, yielding flesh.Defined jaw and cheekbones pushed against pudgy, round cheeks. Muscular torso against plush belly and breasts. Contrasts so stark but so oddly pleasant against each other. It takes Zed a few moments to fully sink into the hug and return it with his own plush arms. They stay like this for a good while before one of the large hands moves to the front and gives the large fatty mass a gentle squeeze. This brings a sudden small gasp from the shorter man.

“So forward are we?” The assailant lets out a soft, short laugh, hand working the swollen fat slightly.

“I would be lying if I said I was not a bit curious to feel what your body felt like now.” A small strange shiver runs down Zed’s spine. Curious was he? Maybe he should indulge in Shen’s curiosity. He pushes Shen back a bit and lifts the tunic up and off him, letting the restrained tattooed fat flood forward.

“Oh.” Is all the Eye of Twilight can muster as his vision is filled with jiggling paleness. His mouth going a bit dry at the sight of so much ample fat. He can’t remember ever being attracted to larger men but there is just something about the way Zed wears all of this that just seems so nice. A pudgy hand rubs softly at the bulging stomach ever so tauntingly.

“Well, you want a feel?” Yes. Yes he does. Shen wastes no time in letting his hands sink deeply into the blubbery mound on Zed’s lap. It was so warm and lush so perfect for holding. He squeezes his way down to the marked underbelly and lifts the full mass slightly and lets it fall into place. Blue eyes locked in and completely mesmerized by the wobbling it does. A chuckle breaks his concentration.

“I did not take you for someone so interested in this?” Zed gestures to his bloated frame. Shen smiles slightly.

“Neither did I. I suppose I just can not resist you no matter what you look like.” Red flashes across ivory skin.

“Ah. Ever the one for flattery hm?” A surprising tender kiss lands and presses against his belly. The smile widening a bit more.

“No. I just speak truth. You have always been lovely and I still mean it.”  A gentle push that is so reminiscent from when they were young lands on Shen’s face. It seems he has managed to fluster the once cold shadow master. He watches in amusement as the albino squirms slightly and is red faced from embarrassment. Cute. His hand goes up to cup his soft cheek and rubs it tenderly. Getting up he continues to stroke Zed’s cheek. Light blue and burgundy eyes meet before closing. Lips meet with passion that had been pent up for so long. Hands eagerly taking as much of each other as they can until the stronger of the two pushes them down onto the bed. The hefty round frame is quickly straddled. Big plump belly pressed against hardened abs. The kiss breaks when they run out of breath and Shen is looking down at the panting face underneath and can’t help but dip down to kiss the thick layer of fat that has given Zed a second chin. A small laugh comes out of the pale man.

“Having fun?” A hand lands on the center of the tattooed girth and wobbles it a little playfully.

“Yes. How could I not?” Shen lays himself down next to Zed on the bed and holds him close. The hand has not left the shadow masters portly stomach and starts rubbing circles into it. A quiet groan escapes the bloated man. That feels so wonderful. A chuckle comes out of the ginger and he leans in to kiss the others cheek.

“Is that nice?” The white haired man nods and presses himself more into him. So desperate for the touch of one another. So much time has past. So much time wasted. Now they will waste no more time. No more what if’s or wondering what could have been. Living in the past no longer when the future holds something worth thinking about. The blue clad ninja squeezes him tightly, fingers caressing down the side and takes a large handful of a ripe love handle. The tattooed man in his arms holds on to one of his powerful biceps and rests his head underneath his chin. A position they have not had in many years. Calm, comfortable silence befalls them until a faint rumble disturbs the quiet. A dark eyebrow raises up and blue eyes cast down at the tint of red against alabaster cheeks.

“Hungry?” The sound returns to answer for the question. The albino in his arms grumbles as he tries to hide his face from the spirit eyes.

“I’ll take that as a yes then. I suppose I’ll have to remember to bring something for you to eat next time I visit.” A half hearted smack to his arm causes him to laugh faintly.

“As if I need more food.” Zed complains. His belly betraying his declaration with an audible rumble. A kiss makes its way onto his head.

“Well it isn’t like you are going anywhere and whats the harm of having something a little special when I visit?” Dark red eyes look up at him slightly narrowed in suspicion.

“If I didn’t know better I would be assuming you like me like this?” He emphasizes “this” by grabbing a hand full of his plush middle. A war worn callous hand grabs the pale pudgy one and runs a thumb across it.

“Usan, I will like you no matter your form. I will admit your new softness is pleasant but it’s you I adore more then anything.” The ever obvious blush that casts upon Zed’s face brings Shen a deep joy. Those dark ruby eyes cast down a bit as their owner musters up his voice.

“You are just flattering me.” The voice says softly. A finger and thumb come up to take the fat under Zed’s chin and lift his head up to meet loving blue eyes.

“We both know that I am not lying to you. I love you as much as you love me my Heartlight. No amount of weight will change that.” The kiss that comes after is filled with love that makes the once cold shadow master’s heart flutter like when he was young. Parting leaves them wanting a bit more and dip back in for a quick peck before they gain tender smiles on their faces.

“I know you do not lie. That has always been something I have done but not you. You’ve always been so blunt and to the point.” This brings a chortle out of Shen.

“I have no reason to lie and don’t always care for small talk when there is a matter at hand. Like what I should bring you. “ He says a bit cheekily. The large hand returns to its new favorite place upon the large engorged stomach and gives it a playful pinch. An equally playful swat comes down on the cheeky hand. The rarest of broad smiles appears upon the normally stoic face of the Eye of Twilight.

“Ass.” Is the only response he gets from the slightly pouty albino. The ginger decides in that moment would be a good moment to play dumb and reaches further back to pinch at the large behind of the Master of Shadows which prompts a quicker, slightly harder swat. Shen pretends to be confused and looks at him innocently.

“What? You said ass? I assumed that is where you wanted me to touch you?” Those deep red eyes narrow and a plump hand comes forth to squeeze at one of the blue coated large pecs. This in turn makes the cheeky ninja take in a sharp breath. A smirk is plastered on Zed’s face as it was now Shen’s turn to be dusted with red across his face.

“Hm? Is something wrong?” Oh so two can play at the pretending to be dumb game. Light blue eyes take their turn to narrow and the hand holding the wide doughy behind squeeze firmly making Zed gasp slightly. A tan face is quick to use the small distraction and worm its way to the side of Zed’s neck and bury itself. An assault of light kisses there follows and he can feel the blubbery body under him trembling and wobbling from the need to laugh and squirm. Stubborn, still is the shadow master and trying so desperately to maintain his composer in a losing battle. It’s not long before he’s laughing sparaticly and trying to wiggle out of the very strong grasp. Damn Shen and his ridiculous strength! The onslaught continues and the albino is helpless until Shen feels some mercy to let Zed breath. A pleased smile clear on his face.

“I hate you.” Is the response he gives to the man next to him. There is no malice in his voice at all as he says this and the spirit seer knows this.

“I love you too Zed.” That statement is punctuated with a kiss and a huff from the white haired man. He was grumpy it seems.

“My poor Heartlight. Did that upset you? Would you feel a little better if I bring you those dumplings I know you like the next time I visit?” The sudden stillness from Zed tells Shen all he needs to know. He still remembers fondly the times they would go and get them together and even the times Zed had snuck off to get some by himself. They were delicious and he could not blame his love for liking them so much.

“I’ll take that as a yes and perhaps I should bring you some larger clothing as well? Im sure these garbs won’t last much longer and I would hate for you to be so uncomfortable. Maybe even a couple sizes bigger so you have a little room to grow into.” A much deeper red spreads across those chubby white cheeks. Shen tugs curiously on the hem of Zed’s pants. There was not much give there and the stitching down towards those thick thighs were becoming quite strained. The larger body clearly needed room to breath, and grow. The blushing man was oddly quiet which in Shen’s experience means that he is right in his assumption.

“You think I will get bigger?” An uncertain voice says. Blue eyes soften at the question. He muscular man sighs and caresses a warm cheek.

“I do not know but I will love you none the less. I am serious though. I would like to make sure you are comfortable.” The slightly concerned expression turns into questioning.

“I am in prison. I am not supposed to be comfortable” Ah, there he goes starting to push away his love slightly again. Shen will not let him do that again this time non again. A warm soft hand is placed upon his firm jaw draws his attention.

“I know that face. It seems you are determined to make me as comfortable as possible and I can not do much about it can I?” A low chuckle comes out from the blue ninja.

“No, you can’t do anything about it. I will love you and let it be known to you in any way I can.” He says confidently. A pleasant smile grows on Zeds’s face.

“I should have expected nothing less. I love you too My Heartlight.” The albino ends that sentence with a full hug, unifying them once more. They sigh in blissful comfort and time seem to stand still. The world feels so distant from this moment and neither of them wish to return to reality. Unfortunately time does pass and eventually Shen’s visit must come to an end. When the Eye of Twilight shifts to get up Zed knows his blissful time with him is tragically over. Fully sitting up he watches his love stand and stretch before offering him a hand to get up himself.

“Guide me to the door?” A dry short laugh leaves Zed. The door was only a couple steps behind Shen but it would be rude not to see him out. He takes the offered hand and heaves himself up to his feet. All that fat he is carrying drops down and bounces a bit. Standing up he follows the same route that Shen did and stretches a bit leaving his belly open for a couple hands to cup the bulging fat. His own hands meet the strong firm ones as he smiles up at the owner.

“I will miss you.” The master of shadows says honestly. He does not know how long his beloved will be gone but even now before he has even left his heart already aches for him to return. One of the hands moves up to stroke his cheek. A strong, hard abdomen pushes into his lush belly. Those eyes still full of affection he long since thought he would never see again. The lips he longs to kiss over and over part to speak.

“And I will miss you as well. So much. I will try to visit you as much as I can. Perhaps one day when you will be released we can try to have a normal life. As normal as we could have it.” A hopeful dream. Zed would normally crush those dreams as soon as they arise but this time there just seemed to be so much mirth and hope in this one that he just did not have the heart to break it. He would love to try and start life over with Shen once more. Fat or not he would have his love and that is all that mattered now to him. The order would survive with Kayn, it was not like he could do much in this state anyway. Why not try to be happy for once in his life?

“I would adore that, My Heartlight.” The taller man smiles warmly before leaning down to ensnare his plump love in a deep final kiss. Their arms wrapping tightly around one another as if they would never see each other again. Who knew how long it would be before they would see each other again. The kiss breaks with slight panting and immeasurable amounts of fondness. They are stalling for the inevitable departure, they know it, but it is hard to say goodbye after just fully reconnecting.

“Please…be safe.” Is the one request that comes from the shorter man. A hand squeezes his plump upper arm reassuringly.

“I will. For you. In turn I expect you to behave. If you seem like you’ve change it could make it easer to have you released from here.” A hand gestures to the surrounding cell. A short chortle leaves the prisoner.

“By the time I’m allowed to leave I am sure I will be as wide as the doorway.” Zed says sarcastically. Shen glances behind him to look at the aforementioned doorway. It was quite wide. At least double the width Zed was now. A small flash of thought fills the gingers mind for a moment. The thought of Zed being that large made his insides unusually warm. He keeps his stoic face and doesn’t show a hint of what he was currently thinking about.

“As I said and will continue to say. That will not bother me in the slightest. As long as it is you, you may look however you wish. I will always love you.” The heartfelt sentiment is reciprocated with a quick kiss to the jaw from the shadow master.

“I know. I suppose this is where you leave?” Those burgundy eyes glint with a touch of sorrow. Shen breathes heavily with equal amounts of gloom.

“Unfortunately. I will send letters to you between my visits. If we cannot see each other frequently then we can at least write.”  The forlorn feeling in the room lessens slightly at that proclamation.

“I would like that. Very much. Goodbye My Heartlight.” Zed says softly.

“Goodbye, My Love.” Their departure is marked with the actual final embrace and deep passionate kiss. How they wish they did not wish to part but alas it can not be for now. They had waited years for each other with their dispute what is a few more with pleasant visits and and ever growing love.

#my fanfiction #long story #weight gain #male weight gain #weight gain story #League stuff #I dont have the nerve to put the actual league tag lol #weight gain kink

[nightwingshero]

1, 15, 25, 35, 45, 55, 65, 75, 85, 95, 100 for the OC(s) of your choice.

Thank you, love!!! 

1. Does your character have good aim?

Wren: She does, actually. She’s excellent at throwing knives and such, which shocks the hell out of her. 

Whitney: NOPE. Not even a little bit. She wouldn’t try, she would either embarrass herself and say breaking her nail as the excuse not to. 

Blair: Not...really. It got somewhat better with training with Oliver, but...there’s a reason she never played any sports. It’s not really her thing.

Camille: She does now, after training with Clint and Natasha at S.H.I.E.L.D. It took her a bit longer to get it, but she did get there eventually.

Naomi: Yes! She used to play softball when she was in high school, she’s rather athletic. Good luck challenging her to a game of darts. Just saying.  

15. Did your character ever want to be a cowboy?

Wren: No, not at all. She wanted to be a rockstar astronaut at first, something her mother thought was hilarious. Wren swore up and down that Rocketman was about her, but uh...she didn’t really get the lyrics at that young of an age. 

Whitney: Absolutely not. She was definitely a princess kind of girl. Being a cowboy was never her thing, she would rather be the princess or damsel in distress that gets swept off her feet. 

Blair: Not really. She wanted to live on Mars and be an astronaut too. She loves space and always has. Blair grew up to be an astrophysicist though...close enough. 

Camille: I could see that, sure. I don’t think it was specifically a cowboy, I think she wanted to be the Lone Ranger, like the show her father watches. She would make her dad pretend to be a bank robber so she could go after him. 

Naomi: Nope. Not at all. She was more into cops and robbers or princesses, to be honest. Cowboys just didn’t really hold her attention. The only one that could was Woody from Toy Story. 

25. Does your character experience sexism for the job/title they hold? (ie: she’s a girl, she can’t be x,y,z because only boys can be)

Wren: Not necessarily sexism, but Pratt does hit on her and stupid ass comments that piss her off. It’s borderline sexist and she’s borderline ready to punch him in the face.

Whitney: Yes, she does. She was raised treated like that, honestly, and she was raised to believe it’s okay. Joseph definitely treats her like a housewife, even as Mother of Eden’s Gate. She doesn’t know better, even though it really does piss her off. 

Blair: No, not at all. Her coworkers love her and don’t at all think that she shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing. She’s smart and well-respected in her field. And that doesn’t change with the teams at all. Blair isn’t disrespected like that, that’s a big no no. She also helps Mick with being politically correct. 

Camille: It depends on which job we’re talking about. She’s had her fair share as a doctor, her knowledge and rep questioned because she’s female. Now, in S.H.I.E.L.D., she has had moments, but not nearly that many. S.H.I.E.L.D. is known for having diverse agents, and the very few she’s witnessed be assholes, she’s corrected (or Nat has rather quickly.) With the Avengers, it’s a hard no. Her place was earned and she’s respected by members of the team, and those members are quick to address those issues when they witness someone treating her that way (they drink their respect women juice.)

Naomi: As a war correspondent, absolutely. Being told that “this is no place for a girl” was something she received a lot. But she did a badass job at it. Now, S.H.I.E.L.D. was a lot better, for sure. They welcomed her and her skills for gaining intelligence with open arms, she’s a resident badass. Once S.H.I.E.L.D. is taken down, she becomes the PR for the Avengers, in which she’s someone you don’t wanna cross. She becomes highly respected. 

35. Naptime, yes or no?

Wren: YESSSS! That girl loves naps! Give her a slice of cheesecake or some ice cream right before, and she’ll curl up on the couch and nap while watching The Twilight Zone. 

Whitney: Eh, not really. Whit is normally busy with something, and she would rather be doing something productive than nap. 

Blair: Yes! Most of it is because she’s working all hours of the night on something in the lab, so when she gets home, she’s not getting enough sleep. So! Yummy hot cocoa and naps!

Camille: Eh, she’s not known for it because she works a lot during the day, but if it happens, it’s because she’s pulling long hours and needs a break. But Camille isn’t really a frequent napper, it makes her more tired, if she’s being honest.

Naomi: Nah, that’s not really her thing. She’s used to long hours, and knows that if she naps, she won’t be able to sleep that night. So she’ll power through and maybe just go to bed a bit earlier to catch up on sleep. 

45. Would your character kill someone to get what they want?

Wren: Ehhhh...that’s a hard maybe, depending of if we’re talking pre-cult or not. Wren is morally grey, and if she had to have it, she would once she’s joined Eden’s Gate. But before? Not as likely. 

Whitney: Yes! She actually has, to be honest. Joseph and the others pretty much numb her to killing someone, so she’ll poison someone who crosses her. She literally kills with kindness. 

Blair: Absolutely not. Blair doesn’t put her personal needs/wants above the value of others and their lives. She’s very much against that and couldn’t live with herself if she did. 

Camille: I have a hard time seeing it, unless it was a mission in which it needed to be done (her wanting peace, killing bad guys for it, etc), but those are few and far between because she doesn’t do a lot of the things Natasha does. But she is a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent.

Naomi: Eh, not really. If it is a “want”, its going to be revenge. But it’ll be with the right intentions and in the name of doing what’s right. She’s not as scared or worried about getting her hands dirty as long as it’s for the right reasons, not necessarily because of something she wants. 

55. Do you have any characters who despite trying their best ended up being horrible parents?

Wren: I think it would depend on how you define ‘horrible’. Because Wren tries her best to be the best mother she can be, but feels as though she’s become her father and failed Harper. Mostly because Wren kept a lot of the Wrath and Judge stuff a secret, and Harper doesn’t take kindly to that. It’s not her being a horrible mom, just making bad decisions that affect her kids (mostly Harper) negatively. 

Whitney: Yes and no. While yes, she protected her son and put him in hiding with Ivy, she still stands by Joseph for the longest time instead of leaving to be with her son and to take her daughter and sister away from danger and toxic relationships. She is able to redeem it, though. Her and Wren both, actually. 

The other three (that I chose to do this for) are good moms, so I don’t think this really applies.

65. Is your character energetic?

Wren: Oh yeah, she definitely can be when she’s comfortable. She can get pretty excited and pumped up, often making Jane, Ivy, and Whit a bit tired. Randy, Gray, and Ro just go along with it, Mel and Quinn join in and encourage it. 

Whitney: Yes and no. She really is, but she tries to keep it on a leash and not show it, because she was raised being told that it wasn’t lady like. The more she grows (as a character) and hangs with the rest of the group, she loosens up a bit. 

Blair: She can be when she’s had too much coffee. Blair is naturally mellowed out though, often being more calm. She’s not reserved at all, she just...has more of a calming upbeat presence. 

Camille: Sorta! It depends on the situation, she’s more reserved when you first meet her. There are moments when she’s with friends that she does absolutely get energetic, but she’s mostly energetic after working out or going for her morning jog. 

Naomi: No, not particularly. Like Camille, she’ll get amped up for a workout, and there may come a time where she’ll get energetic over a big event, but she’s not one to get super energetic. 

75: Do any of your characters wear glasses, sunglasses, goggles, or monocles?

Wren: She’s obsessed with aviators. She collects them, and they’re usually blue, silver, or black. She eventually steals John’s because she digs them. 

Whitney: If she’s gonna wear sunglasses, they’re either the 50′s or 60′s kind. Some cat-eyed, or those bigger glamorous butterfly styled ones. But she does have some nice Gucci and Coach glasses she’ll wear. It depends on what matches. 

Blair: She’ll wear regular sunglasses, mostly Ray Bans. She wears reading glasses from time to time, but she mainly uses contacts. Blair has a pair of backup glasses that have the tinted lens. 

Camille: She used to wear glasses when she was younger, but she eventually got Lasik, so she doesn’t wear them anymore. As for sunglasses, she wears modern cat-eyed or just rectangle ones. Anything that looks good and is her style. 

Naomi: Aviators, and that’s really it. She’s not really big into them, she has one pair of brown aviators, and that’s it. They do the job. 

85. Has your character ever been led down the wrong path because of their anger?

Wren: Absolutely. That’s the whole point of her canon, actually. The Wrath leads to her joining Eden’s Gate and becoming the Judge. She eventually redeems herself, but it does lead her down a dark path. 

Whitney: Yep. She starts killing for Eden’s Gate because of it, but it’s funny, because it’s her anger that actually helps her redeem herself and gain her freedom: killing Joseph and Ethan. 

Blair: Yes and no...? Kinda...? Like, when she woke up from her coma, she found out Carmen had left her for someone else, essentially moving on. The anger is what led to her maybe running into some unfavorable company (Leonard), where she decided to just give him her engagement ring instead of running the risk of him robbing her at the bar they happened to run into each in (his favorite bar). In her anger, she purposefully went to a bar that was known to be a frequent place for criminals. But that anger also had her moving to Star City, where she became a hero. Sometimes her anger can get her in trouble with her powers, but that gets better. It all depends on how you look at it. 

Camille: Sort of. The Civil War incident really...was something else. Camille didn’t see it as a dark path, it was what she believed was right. She was angry that something so wrong went down in Lagos, so she sees the need for restrictions and boundaries. Her siding with Tony caused turmoil between her and the others, even Steve, and it led to a huge fight at the airport while trying to bring them in. Rhodes getting hurt added salt to injury. Later, it’s shown to her that perhaps choosing the Accords was the wrong path after all. 

Naomi: Depends on how you look at it, honestly. As head of Public Relations for the Avengers, most just assumed that Naomi would be in agreement to the Accords, but she’s not. She’s angry that the government is trying to have control over them, especially after with what happened with S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra, she even says that to Camille when they’re fighting about it. She fully believes Steve and sticks with them as things become divided, and she becomes a fugitive right along with them. So, depending on what side you’re on, it’s either yes or no. 

95. If given total rule over a country, would your character step aside to turn it into a democracy?

Wren: I think this depends. I think, yes, for the most part. Wren isn’t one to be a leader, she would rather not, but can rise to the occasion when needed and if she knows it’s better she’s in charge. But she would want everything to be fair and such. It would have to be a true democracy. 

Whitney: I see her as keeping control, honestly. Whit is the kind of person that will claim she knows best, and maybe she does, but she wouldn’t relinquish control. Not when she’s never been allowed to have it. If given the opportunity to do so, this queen would absolutely rule. 

Blair: Absolutely. She would try her best to set it up with the right candidates, honestly. She wouldn’t want to put anyone in the wrong position where they can do harm, but politics are honestly not her thing. 

Camille: Yes, without hesitation. I could see her turning to Steve, because who else would know better than Captain America (and no, not that knock-off Gucci Captain America they have on The Falcon and The Winter Soldier--we don’t support Walker in the Camille and Steve household), so she would ask who would be better to hand it off to.

Naomi: She would give that up so fast, without thought. She agrees fully with Sam when he says that he’s just the soldier, because she feels something very similar. She wants nothing to do with leading something like that, she doesn’t want that responsibility. It’s why she doesn’t really join the Avengers. She has zero interest in leading. 

100. Are any of your characters queer?

Honestly, it’s safe to say that most of my OCs are. I have more queer OCs than I have straight OCs. But I have so many OCs, I’m just gonna list the ones I’ve done so far, and if you wanna know more, you can always send me an ask!

Wren: Bi, hands down. Her first relationship was with a woman named Lilith in college. She honestly preferred women in the beginning because she doesn’t trust men easily. 

Whit: She’s bi, but still in the closet. She hasn’t had a chance to really be with a woman, but the attraction is there, and so it the want to do so. 

Blair: Definitely pansexual. She thought she was just bi for the longest time, but she’s actually pansexual, and she’s comfortable with it. She was engaged to a woman before she went into a coma, and a few hook ups afterwards have been a mixture of genders. 

Camille: Straight. One of the few that I have that is, honestly. She’s tried in college, but it wasn’t for her. She supports it completely, though. One of her best friends is gay, and she went to their wedding. 

Naomi: Bi, definitely bi. She’s had a mixture of men and women in her dating history, but ultimately none of them worked out because it’s hard to have a personal life when you’re in war zones for the sake of journalism or working for S.H.I.E.L.D. where you’re undercover often in order to gather intelligence. 

#oc: wren blake #oc: whitney seed #oc: blair chambers #oc: camille riley #oc: naomi clarke #my ocs #asks #guileandgall

[hockeytrashgoblin]

Ice Cold ~Part 6

A/N: The second part of the night! There’s probably going to be a lot of days/nights where I upload two parts at a time so I can get to the final part by halloween!

I was aware of voices but I couldn't open my eyes. They were hushed voices but I still heard them. I couldn't distinguish at all though who it was. I was vaguely aware that my ears were ringing and that it smelled like William a little bit. As I laid there I was becoming more aware and started shifting. All the voices stopped when I turned over and groaned.

"Where am I?" I mumbled.

"Hi (y/n), would you like some water?"

"No, where am I?"

"You're in my house, it's Morgan by the way."

"Why am I here? Where's William? Is he okay?" I asked panicking, trying to sit up. A cool hand pushed me back to lay down.

"William is perfectly fine, not a scratch on him."

"How is that even possible?"

"I can't tell you that right now."

"You guys really are pulling an Edward Cullen on me."

"Do you want me to get Will? You two should talk before the rest of us."

"Where is William?"

"He's in the other room talking to Auston."

"Oh God..I'm gonna ruin everything again." I said tears slipping out.

"You aren't ruining anything. I'll go get him for you."

"Thank you Morgan." I smiled at him through the tears and he smiled back, rubbing my shoulder before leaving the room. William came in almost immediately.

"Hi baby."

"You better start explaining."

"Can you at least tell me how you're feeling first?" He said sighing.

"I'm fine. Confused as fuck and mad that you weren't here when I woke up."

"I had to talk to Auston. I needed to calm him down. He doesn't want me to tell you any of what I now need to."

"Stop beating around the bush Will. Why am I not dead? Why are you not dead?"

"You already have a pretty good idea of how. You weren't that far off when you brought up Edward Cullen."

"William stop fucking around and just tell me! If you love me like you say you do please just tell me without the half truths."

"Fine. I'm a vampire. Is that better?" He growled making me flinch. His face softened immediately.

"I mean yeah. I'd rather have the truth." I tried to sit up and he pushed me back down. "For God sakes can you let me up so I can look at you? I promise I'm fine." 

"I'm sorry, I'm incredibly worried."

"I just want to look at you William. Please?" He let me sit up this time but just sat incredibly still and quietly. "I have some questions."

"I figured you would. I'm really nervous for this. I don't know why, Morgan has seen how this plays out."

"Then don't be nervous."

"What if you hate me?"

"What if that's never gonna happen?"

"What are your questions?"

"Well okay how come your eyes are normal?"

"They aren't. We all have contact lenses, I have red eyes when I'm thirsty but blue when I'm fed so to keep it consistent we wear them."

"Can I see what they look like without them?"

"Of course. I despise wearing these things anyways. It'll be nice to not have to wear them with you anymore." He took them out and blinked at me with red tinted eyes. "I don't know what they look like right now, I hope not too frightening."

"They're red around the edges that's all. They're kinda cool."

"Kinda cool? Never had that reaction before." He said with a laugh.

"Alright so are you indestructible? It seems like yes."

"Pretty much. Twilight got that part right. Rip apart and burn the pieces. Nothing else can really harm us at all physically and we can't get sick."

"That's good!" I said nodding. "How old are you?"

"I have a different story than most. I was born this way. I only age until mid twenties then I stop."

"How does that work?"

"My parents are ancient vampires. Old royalty can give birth to vampire children. We age a little slower than human children but then we stop forever."

"So your family is pretty powerful then?"

"Are you afraid?"

"No why?"

"Your heartbeat sped up."

"You can hear that?"

"I can hear everything your body does." I blushed making him speak up again. "I'm sorry was that too much? I just want to be completely transparent."

"No, no, you're fine. I want to know everything!"

"Okay I just wanted to make sure. I don't want to overwhelm you."

"I can handle it."

"I know you can, I just worry."

"Are you guys all..you know?"

"You can say vampires (y/n). We don't mind. But yes the 5 of us all are."

"I thought so. You guys were really cliquey when I first met you."

"What do you mean?"

"You always just stuck together. When everyone broke away into smaller groups it was always you 5 and everyone else."

"Oh. Yeah I suppose we do, do that."

"Anyway you didn't answer me. How old are you guys?"

"I've been alive for 36 years but I'm only the equivalent of 24. Morgan is almost 100 years old."

"So Morgan's the leader?" I asked and he nodded before continuing.

"Kappy's almost 70, he joined Morgan about 20 years ago. He was a wild one, I'll let him tell you the story since I know he's been dying to."

"I'd like to hear about it!"

"Auston is around the same age as Kasperi. He was alone until he joined us when he got here. Mitchy is the baby, he was only turned 3 years ago."

"That must be so hard for him. Living with so many people around?"

"It was at first but he's better now."

"That's good. So did they get that part right? Newborn vampires are out of control?"

"Not as bad as twilight makes it sound." He said with a smirk. "But for the first couple months the thirst is intense."

"How did you find your way to Morgan?"

"I didn't like the way my parents worked, how they behaved. They were drunk on the fear people had for them. I don't want to scare people so I ran away when I was about 16 human years old. I started playing hockey and moved to Canada. I got picked up by the leafs and now here I am. I met up with Morgan when I got here in Toronto, I knew of him so I was looking for him."

"What happens to you guys if one gets traded?"

"We just go. We come back here for the off season. A couple years separated is nothing in the grand scheme of things."

"It sounds so simple." I teased.

"It's really not. I'm glad you know now though, that's going to make it much simpler."

"How come you told me?"

"Well I couldn't exactly leave it after my little display outside last night now could I?" He asked snorting.

"Well no but Mitch said you've been arguing with Auston because of a secret you wanted to tell but he didn't. So obviously you've been planning this."

"This is going to sound crazy."

"Crazier than all the rest of this? Try me."

"So you know how Morgan sees stuff?"

"Yeah. Hey do any others have gifts like that?"

"Mitchy can read minds when he stops his hyper shit and concentrates. Other than that none of us can. There are hundreds of powers out there though."

"That's cool!"

"Yes indeed." He murmured smiling warmly at me.

"Stop making my brain melt." I said giggling pushing his shoulder. 

"Anyway back to what I was saying. Morgan saw you coming."

"He saw me?"

"Well he saw you with me."

"What do you mean?"

"Vampires have soulmates. Which sounds nuts because we don't have souls but that's the only way to put it. We're kind of like penguins, stay mated for life. We only have one so if it doesn't work out, that's it and we're alone."

"Oh wow no fucking pressure then!" I said sarcastically.

"Anywaaay." He drawled rolling his eyes with a small smile. "After I joined his coven I guess you'd call it, he started seeing my future. You're in it every step of the way." He finally looked into my eyes at that last part and I melted completely.

"Oh wow."

"Your heart is beating fast again. You're anxious, why?"

"I'm um.. a little overwhelmed I guess?"

"Why?"

"Well I wanted to be around for a long time and I felt like that would happen but to know that you've seen me there.."

"Technically Morgan saw you there. I didn't see anything, I just feel it. I feel very strongly for you."

"I love you." I said moving up the bed to hug him. He was stiff for a minute but then relaxed and held me softly. I pulled back with a smile on my face. "I'm not gonna break if you hold me a little tighter than that."

"I just don't want to push you or anything. This is a lot to take in, I don't want you to be uncomfortable."

"William I'm not. Can't you see that? I don't care what you are. I love you and I know you're not going to eat me so it's okay."

"I was wondering when what I eat would come up."

"I'm not worried about it. As long as I'm not in any danger I couldn't care less. You don't demand to know what I eat usually." I said eyeing him up.

"Well if you weren't so stubborn and would eat as much as I know you need to I wouldn't have to ask! You don't take care of your body the way I want you to."

"Whatever I'm trying."

"I know, love. You're doing good."

"Anyway since it's been brought up I am curious about what you eat."

"I eat mostly animals. We all do. Probably twice a month but we need human blood too once a month or so. We use blood bags instead of people. As I said I don't want people scared."

"Wouldn't it be better warm?" I slapped my hand over my mouth in embarrassment. "I'm so sorry ignore me."

"No, I want to know what you're thinking." He pulled my hands down and looked at me pouting with a big smile spreading across his face. "I love it when you blush. You look do cute with red cheeks."

"Stoooop!" I moaned blushing harder.

"Blood is better warm but that's what we get from animals. We don't want drinking human blood to be pleasant."

"That is fair enough."

We were quiet for a minute as I took in what he was saying. I couldn't say I was surprised at all. The way these boys acted and played the game was a little unbelievable. And the way they all looked. Barely human, more angelic looking than anything. I started thinking back at all the weird things like him hearing my phone vibrate in the bar, how fast he got to my house when I was scared, how he never really ate, how he was never cold. It all started making a lot of sense.

"Have I scared you?"

"Are you dumb? I'm not scared of you." I asked giving him a weird look.

"I just wanted to check. Do you think you'd be okay to go talk with the rest of the boys?"

"I'm fine babe. Are you ready for me to go talk with the boys?" I could tell by the way his eyes momentarily went wide that my question caught him off guard.

"Everything I just told you and you're concerning yourself with me?"

"Always." I said taking his hand in mine.

"I'd like you to know if I could blush I would be right now." He said quietly.

"Cute." I said pecking his lips.

"I am worried about you talking to them."

"Why?"

"I'm worried mostly about Auston. He's still mad that you know."

"Auston can fucking bite me." I said bitterly without thinking. "Shit wait no no i don't want that at all I take it back!"

"You're so funny. As if I'd ever let anyone else bite you." He said in a teasing tone.

"Hey, hey, hey, wait! You're planning on biting me?!"

"Not anytime soon. And I'm not planning it at all. Morgan said that he sees that it's your idea completely. You beg for me to do it."

"Not the only thing I'd beg for." I mumbled.

"What?"

"What?" I asked pretending I didn't say anything.

"I literally hear everything (y/n). I know exactly what you said. And you might not want to think stuff like that. I kinda asked Mitch to listen in to see how you would take everything."

"Are you kidding me?! Oh my God!" I smacked my forehead as if that would get the image of me on my knees begging William out of my head. It didn't. I was just more aware of those thoughts which made me think of them more. "I hate it here!" I yelled dramatically falling back on the bed.

"It's not a big deal, he's used to it."

"Yes it is!"

"He's not going to judge you."

"He will!"

"No I won't." Mitch said walking into the room and flopping down on the bed beside me.

"Uuugh." I groaned covering my face with a pillow.

"Nice to see you again too. Willy Morgan wants to talk to you. Something about Aus' bullshit probably."

"Alright. I'll be back soon, love." He got up and left leaving the room silent.

"So you know now huh?"

"Yup."

"You still want us around?"

"What the fuck do you mean?" I pulled the pillow away from my face. "Of course I still want you guys around."

"Sometimes it takes some time to come around that's all. Morgan's girlfriend took forever. She wouldn't see us for like 6 months because she was upset and felt betrayed. You just never know. Well unless you're Morgan."

"So she knows too?"

"Yup she knows everything."

"Does your girlfriend know?"

"No Steph has no idea. I don't think I'll ever tell her honestly."

"Why?"

"I'll tell you some other time."

"Do you think he was wrong to tell me?"

"Absolutely not. Seeing William happy is the best! He hasn't seen what Morgan has seen but I have. Sorry for snooping, it was just exciting! I couldn't help it."

"What does it look like..?" I asked quietly.

"It looks like complete happiness. Everything you've both ever wanted in life is going to come to you. It's kind of really fast moving from here though."

"Do I end up like you guys..?"

"I don't want to tell you the details of your future." He said carefully after considering for a second.

"I don't want to know everything I just want to know if I'm gonna get old and ugly while he stays gorgeous.. " I blushed and Mitch laughed.

"That's such a silly thing to worry about! Don't worry. You're not going to get old and gross. But that's all you're getting from me!"

"That's good enough for me." I said as William walked back in.

"Are you ready to see the guys? They want to talk to you, especially Morgan."

"Yeah sure." I said getting up walking over to him. I hugged him tight around his waist and leaned up to give him a kiss. "Let's go."

"Uh yeah sure." He took my hand and led me down the hallway of the spacious house. I took in my surroundings with awe. The house was beautiful. A perfect balance of dark and light. There was modern furniture but a lot of antiques surrounding it all. When he brought me around the corner I saw all the guys sitting there. Even Mitch which surprised me but then I realized that these guys were faster than anything. Auston looked salty, but he always did.

"(Y/n) please sit." Morgan said with a smile, gesturing to the love seat across from him. I did as I was told while William and Mitch sat on either side of me. "How are you feeling?"

"Um I'm okay. How are you guys?"

"We're well."

"Speak for yourself." Auston mumbled while Morgan sighed.

"For the most part we're well. You've learned a lot of new information today."

"Yeah I have."

"How do you feel about that?"

"Not bad. I have a lot of questions but I don't think I'm in danger so I'm feeling good I think."

"I'm surprised she didn't go into shock." Kasperi teased.

"Come on give her some credit!" Mitch defended. 

"Yeah Kas come on. I'm tougher than that."

"You realize that you knowing this is a big deal don't you?" Morgan asked.

"Of course I do!"

"You realize that means you can't tell anyone right? Not even your dumb photography friend? And especially not your reporter friend?" Auston spit out.

"Obviously I would never ever do that Auston."

"Girls tell secrets."

"Not one like this!"

"How can we know that?"

"Auston you're honestly being ridiculous right now. I would never do that to you guys." I looked at William who was avoiding my eyes. I grabbed his hand desperately trying to keep tears out of my eyes from the confrontation. "Will, baby, you know that don't you? That I would never hurt you and your family like that?"

"I'm a little worried."

"What?!"

"See if he's worried, I should be too." 

I just stayed quiet. Ripped my hand from William's, wiped a tear roughly from my cheek, and crossed my arms. William tried to hold my hand again but I pulled back.

"Don't."

"Guys she's not going to say anything." Mitch said, sounding bored with the whole thing.

"(Y/n) why don't we speak in private?" Morgan said carefully.

"Okay." I got up despite William's protest and went with Morgan to his office.

"I'm sorry about them. They're both idiots." 

"I feel like I'm in trouble in a principal's office." I said laughing with him.

"Well I promise you aren't in trouble at all. I don't know how much William has told you about me.."

"Um he just said you were the oldest, the leader, and that you can see the future but he never elaborated on anything."

"Everything I see is definite. There are no areas where it changes. What I see is what happens. I've never been wrong in my hundred years. This is why I'm so sure that you won't tell anyone anything."

"Even if you didn't see it I'd never tell. It's not my secret to tell."

"The boys are just worried. It's been a long time since we've told anybody. The last one was my girlfriend 2 years ago. The last before that was 65 years ago. Auston and Kasperi have had some bad experiences. Mitch isn't worried because he can see inside everyone's heads. He can see how your mind works, he knows like I do. In fact I can tell you the next time you willingly on your own tell someone about vampires and it's not for another 20 years."

"What exactly does that mean?"

"There will be a time in approximately 4 months that you will say something."

"I don't think I'd share that but I'm not willing to bet against you that I won't. I'm sorry that I do that."

"It's nothing to be sorry about. When you do it, it's out of necessity, survival."

"I'm still sorry."

"I'm sorry that William is being untrusting. It seems Auston has gotten into his head."

"Not a big deal." I shrugged.

"It is. Trust is the most important thing. To know you're not trusted is a punch in the stomach." I raised an eyebrow at him and he continued. "When I got with Tessa and told her everything she didn't trust me right away. She thought I was going to feed off her or change her without permission. It was incredibly difficult."

"It all worked out though right?"

"Yes of course! I promise things will smooth over between you and William."

"Thank you Morgan. I really appreciate it."

"I'm going to let you go since we all have places to get ready to be soon. Mitch will drop you off at your home."

"Thanks. Good luck at the game tonight."

"Thank you. See you later."

"Bye." I let myself out. I didn't like to be told what to do but something about the authority in his voice made me not question or talk back. Mitch was standing down the hall a bit.

"Hey, you ready to go?"

"Absolutely. No offense but I don't want to be here right now."

"That's totally fair. I'm sick of hearing Auston's thoughts right now."

He started towards the door and I followed as close behind as I could manage. Once we got outside I was in awe. I always loved the forest and this was taking forest living to another level.

"How come you're sick of hearing him?"

"I'm always pretty sick of hearing him these days."

"Is it my fault?"

"What no! That's actually a welcome distraction. He's hiding something from me." 

I was looking out the window as we drove but that shocked me enough to look at him. I was very confused and he could probably tell because he snickered at me.

"How the fuck could he do that?"

"He's had experience with people like me. He knows how to block thoughts from me. It's so annoying bro."

"I'd like to learn that." I said thinking back to what William said earlier.

"(Y/n) I couldn't care less what you want to do to William or have him do to you. Be as kinky as you want. I'll tell you what I'm into if that'll help?"

"Uh maybe next time." I said laughing with him.

"In all honesty I could probably help! If he's not doing it right I could tell him how to do it better."

"As sweet as that is Mitchy, I think I'd rather see how he fucks first before I call in mental backup."

"You guys haven't fucked yet?"

"No. He didn't want to while there was still secrets."

"That's nice of him I suppose. I could never do that."

"I like that he's patient. I've been through a lot of bad stuff with men.." before I could stop thinking Mitch interrupted me as we pulled into my driveway.

"I'm so fucking sorry that happened to you." He pulled me into a hug and I let a tear slip out.

"It's okay, it's done."

"It might be done but it haunts you. Have you told Willy?"

"Not yet. I will before I sleep with him though. I don't want secrets either. But now I don't know if I even should. If he can't trust me, can I trust him?"

"Auston is in his head. That's literally all it is. Wills deep thoughts know and trust you. His surface thoughts are frazzled."

"Well he's being shitty and can honestly just get fucked." I said making him laugh.

"That's fair."

"I'll see you guys tonight!"

"We'll be listening for you."

"Sorry what?" I asked half out of the car.

"William is going to want to know when you get there. So he's gonna listen for your voice and I'll be listening for your thoughts. Just to calm him down."

"Well in that case I'm gonna talk shit and think get fucked the whole time." I said laughing with him.

"I can't wait to play hockey with an angry William."

"See ya." I got out of the car and went to my house. I cried a little but then got ready to go.

#nhl imagine #nhl story #hockey #hockey story #hockey imagines #hockey imagine #maple leaf imagine #toronto maple leafs #leafs #maple leafs #william nylander #william nylander x reader #mitch marner #kasperi kapanen #morgan rielly #auston matthews #halloween #vampire

[mimik-u]

Flower Child: Chapter 15 (Daze)

AO3 Link

3:32 AM:

If fault was to be placed, assigned, consecrated, and ordained, then Blue Diamond supposed it was her own fault in the end.

This was nothing new.

How could it possibly be when it was everything familiar? 

It was a cycle studiously recapitulated, and it was a tango long danced, and it was a litany of the damned carved deep into the facets of her memories, buried there and intimately known only to the ghostly choir of her own head.

It all circles back to me, does it not? She had asked on a balcony full of light. She had very nearly collapsed. I’m sorry, Yellow.

For being like this.

For being me.

When Blue pulled her nightgown on that evening and stared at her sleeping pill for a few seconds less than her usual disdain for it entailed, she supposed that she should have estimated right then and there that hope was not enough to save her from the night, and that hope was an imperfect solution, and that while grief was one dangerous entity, hope was still another.

At least she knew grief, the very dimensions of it and what it took from her—piece by piece over so many days, months, and years. 

She couldn’t say the same about hope, the emotion having eluded her for so long.

If grief was wasting, then hope was generous. It gave and it gave, and it swelled like a tentative blossom in her chest, rising up from a ribcaged ground against all the odds of a cruel, forbidding world.

It gave her a false sense of security.

It gave her the strength to swallow one sleeping pill more.

And so, when the dreams came that night, seething over Blue like a restless tide, she hadn’t expected to be taken so far away from the shore, dragged beneath the undertow, and churned and churned and churned.  

She sat on the edge of the hospital bed, leaning over the pale form of Steven Universe who smiled up at her with all of his teeth. Even in the feathery edges of a dream, his dark, brown eyes seemed to be lit from within, candles behind tinted lantern glass, flickering gently.

Sunlight drifted in from the nearest window, falling like a thin, golden blanket across them both.

She dreamed that she was kind, that she reached up and brushed a stray curl from his clammy forehead as various machines hummed all around them. The oxygen cannulas weaving around his ears and into his button nose hissed pneumatically. Wires indicated his aliveness, his hereness and his thereness, in steady, rhythmic beeps.

“Hello, sweet boy,” she murmured, the beginnings of a tentative smile lifting her parenthetically enclosed lips. It was becoming a little easier every time now—to smile and to mean it, to smile and to do so without reflexive condemnation.

“You looked away from me, Mom,” the child beneath her whispered, her skin cool beneath Blue’s long-fingered touch. “Why?”

Pink Diamond had taken Steven’s place in the bed, brown eyes dull and feverish, her accusation and her question alike caked on her cracked lips. Blood dribbled warningly down her mouth in a thin line.

“Pink!” The name was stolen from her, violently wrenched. She was just a little girl, and they still killed her anyway.“I—“

“Excuses,” Yellow Diamond scoffed in that singularly imperial way of hers.

Pink was gone—she was always gone—and her wife remained, her sharp facial features arranged in a knowing sneer. If Steven Universe’s eyes glowed like candlelight, then the businesswoman’s amber eyes seemed to burn with all the ferocity of a dying sun. It was a wonder that she didn’t simply implode on herself with all of that anger, shatter from the inside out and crumple to thousands of unrecoverable pieces.

“That’s all you have these days, Blue. Excuses, excuses.” Each word was a cruel crack of the whip driven into her skin with relish. How they loved to rake the nails of their words across each other’s faces these days; how good it felt to take some of the pain out on themselves and each other and the whole, damn, godawful world. “Why? Why now?”

Blue’s tongue fumbled for an answer, but it was hard, nigh impossible to think over the insistent shrilling of the disconnect tone of a long interrupted call. How long had she sat in that waiting room after Yellow had hung up?

Five minutes?

Maybe ten before the woman named Amethyst plodded over? 

Seconds were eternities these days; they felt like years upon years upon bitter, aching years.

“Defend yourself,” Yellow demanded.

“You’ll never let me grow up, will you?” 

“So, please , Blue Diamond… please don’t look away,” Steven Universe whispered.

He begged.

Blue Diamond did not wake with a start.

Nor did she wake with a scream.

She woke because a doorbell pealed through the silence of the penthouse suite, its sliding tones slipping beneath the darkness and into Blue Diamond’s half-empty bed, pressing an insistent hand against the wrenched open ‘o’ of her mouth.

It was a gruesomely familiar sound, heard so many times in so many different iterations of the same echo which seized across the twilight zone of her memories.

2:38AM.

That was when a police officer came to their front door and shattered the portrait of the Diamonds’ picturesque lives.

He’d rung the doorbell ever so politely.

He told them that their daughter was dead.

Pale eyes wide in collecting, growing, abscessing horror, Blue Diamond slowly turned her head to the left where she could just make out the change of one minute to the next on the alarm clock as the bell continued to chime, its music walking briskly down the hallway, its urgency knocking insistently at her bedroom door. 

3:36AM.

She waited for Yellow Diamond to burst through the threshold in a mass of panicked limbs and bedstruck hair, alarm in her golden eyes, the collar of her silky pajama shirt rising against her neck, but no such reassuring image erupted in the darkness.

The knight didn’t clamber through the trapdoor.

Her wife didn’t come.

It was an untenable oxymoron to Blue.

A contradiction.

An impossibility.

Because Yellow always showed up.

Perhaps she never arrived as quietly and as kindly as Blue would have preferred. Goodness knew that she was loud. Heavens knew she was harsh. The entire world called her abrasive and was almost entirely correct to do so. She wielded the sharpness of her persona like storied warriors had once done their gleaming swords.

But even so, and all the same, Yellow Diamond, for all of her faults, was there—constant, unwavering, stoic, and steady. She was never more than a step across the hallway, the door to her study never completely closed. 

She hadn’t come home before Blue had gone to bed, though.

She’d texted.

Brusquely.

And indicated that her meeting would hold her up.

“Don’t stay up. I’ll be home shortly afterwards.”

The doorbell chimed again, loud and ugly.

Ruinous.

8:13AM:

Stunned silence followed the nephrologist’s proclamation as morning light leaned in from the window, eager and insistent, yellow fingertips braced on the sill, as though it was straining to hear the news, too. They crowded around Steven’s bed—Garnet, Amethyst, and Greg—and stared at Priyanka Maheswaran with open disbelief, the emotion naked across their wide eyes and half-opened mouths. Greg’s fingers gently gripped his son’s shoulder.

Softly.

With all the delicacy that his condition required.

Kidneys.

His son was getting—

“No fuckin’ way, Doc!” 

Amethyst’s exclamation shattered the vacuum that the extraordinary words had made, and it was with a smile that transformed her entire physiognomy—so harsh and often weary—that Priyanka Maheswaran succinctly replied, “Yes, Amethyst. Yes fucking way.”

It was the most visible marker of how exultant she was that the usually prim doctor swore aloud in front of Steven.

And it was the most audible sign of how overwhelmed Pearl was that she, on speaker phone, didn’t bother to even scold the doctor, her affected gasp nearly unheard over the resulting din. For, in the blurred rush of seconds that followed, there was only incomprehensible noise and laughter and celebratory yelling as Garnet picked Amethyst up and spun her around through the light filled air. And there was an excited tangle of voices on the other end of the line as Peridot and Lapis were handed the news, too, the thin pillars of Pearl’s voice shaking at their foundations. The girls screamed, and they shouted, and they dissolved in paroxysms of disbelief, while a cat somewhere in the midst of them happily meowed. And there was a hoarse sob, thick and unrestrained, as Greg’s shoulders shook with a relief that felt so much like agony that he could barely stand to stand upright. His knees buckled as though were about to give way beneath his feet, the ground shuddering almighty and, strangely enough, not all. 

“You mean it, Dr. M?” Steven’s throttled voice entered the fray. His heart monitor had sped up somewhere in the middle of all the commotion, betraying his emotions before his sunken face ever could.

Because, as Greg glanced down, hardly able to comprehend what he was seeing through his tears, he could at very least ascertain that the fourteen-year old’s face was partially closed off, furrowed brow questioning as he peered up at Dr. Maheswaran from darkly grooved eyes. 

This year had taken so much out of him.

He couldn’t afford another loss.

None of them could withstand so much as a singular blow more.

“I’m…” Steven grappled with the words as though each one was new on his tongue, heavy and awkward, a little clumsy between the teeth. Greg, wiping at his snotting face with one hand, brought the other downwards from his son’s gowned shoulder and onto his wrist, touching it lightly, careful of all the slithering tubes. “I’m getting kidneys?”

Complete silence then—sudden—expectant and almost fearful.

Garnet set Amethyst down.

Static crackled on the line as Pearl and Lapis and Peridot all held their baited breaths.

And then, Priyanka Maheswaran did something very un-Priyanka Maheswaran-like, and Priyanka Maheswaran had just dropped the f-bomb in a room with a fourteen-year old for God’s sake. 

With a movement as slow as it was gentle, as tentative as it was quiet, the careworn doctor sat down on the edge of Steven’s bed and placed one of her lined hands on his blanketed leg. It was a mother’s touch—Greg could tell from the way that the pads of her fingers were arced ever so lightly on top of the wool, as though she was cupping the boy, holding him, and not simply touching. All the accumulated furrows in her face seemed to breathe with a kind of easiness that seemed contrarian to the woman’s unbending nature.

Paradoxical.

Dichotomous even.

But not wrong.

No.

Tenderness very much became Priyanka Maheswaran.

“In roughly half an hour, I’m getting in a helicopter that’s going to take me across the city to Empire Gen,” she began, “to an operating room where I’ll stand for a couple of hours waiting for Dr. Keating to say that it’s time. And there they’ll be, Steven.”

Her dark eyes widened.

A smile crept, all clandestine, onto her lips. 

“Your kidneys, ready to come home.”

She squeezed his knee then and held on to it—held on to him, anchoring him, or perhaps even herself, and maybe both of them together.

And in the space following this gesture, there was a pause, a slip of a second of a beat, before Steven finally let out the shuddered breath that they had all been holding.

The skepticism melted from his face, making way for acceptance, and on the heels of acceptance, relief.

“Took them long enough,” he grinned weakly.

It was the kind of joke that wasn’t funny, but, at the same time, very much was.

In that hospital room, filled to the point of excess with light and noise, they all laughed so hard, it was a wonder that they weren’t crying.

9:29AM:

For the first time in months, there was music in the kitchen.

There was dancing, and there was laughter, and there was joy.

Oh, God, there was joy.

So much of it.

Simply overflowing. 

Lapis turned the radio on and knobbed the volume up as loud as it would go, and Peridot, cradling a bemused Cat Steven in her arms, swayed breeze-like to the folksy, jangling beat. And the kitchen smelled like bacon and eggs and the warm doughiness of freshly made waffles. And this and this and this. And sunlight glanced in through the open windows, wreathing them all in crowns made of rosy gold and capes of salt-weathered wind. And the waves jubilantly whispered the news against the shore. And the susurrus swelled to a crescendo just as the song on the radio proclaimed its triumphant chorus: love, love, love, precious love.

And this and this and this. 

And though Pearl tried to attend to the oranges that needed squeezing for the juice they would eventually drink, and though she attempted to slice a few strawberries to garnish their waffles, Lapis only shook her electric blue head and pulled the slight woman into the center of the wooden floor to dance, their fingers tangling with the sounds of their laughter and shitty singing, with the unfettered sounds of celebration and euphoria and bliss.

And this and this and this.

Because Steven was getting kidneys today.

He was going to live.

And Pearl had no choice but to be swept up with the commotion of it, for the kitchen and the beach house and all the people and animals within its boundaries were simply kinetic with it—the emotion, the feeling, the loveliness, and the respite.

She tried to care about breakfast, but Lapis’s freckled nose, scrunched up in one long, continuous laugh, distracted her.

As the song’s bridge played, they twirled on the oaken slats of the floor as Lion wove between their legs—in and out—trying to catch the rhythm of their bare, tangoing feet.

And Pearl tried to come back down to Earth, thinking through the financial logistics of the surgery that they would still have to contend with after the fact or maybe even before. Finding the kidneys was only one variable in the equation; affording them was the hefty other. And what of Steven’s hospital stay? And all the medicines he would have to take after the completion of the surgery? When would all these bills pile up with the rest? When would the numbers climb so high that her painfully organized ledger could scarcely hope to scale them?

But these worries, always so pressing in the organized corners of her minds, slipped between the folds of her thoughts as though they were but loose grains of sand as Peridot—Peridot!—barreled in to her near the conclusion of the song. Cat Steven fell lightly to the ground, and the engineer braced her slender arms around Pearl’s midsection, fingers curling into the fabric of her shirt. Physical intimacies had never come easily to the reticent twenty-one year old, and so, for this to be the expression of her own relief, for a hug to be how she communicated it to Pearl, was something extraordinary indeed.

Pearl staggered beneath the sudden weight but somehow remained upright, instinctively wrapping her arms around the girl, too.

And they both stood there for what seemed like an eternity compressed into a handful of seconds—fleeting and simply infinite.

The last notes of the song fell through the sun stricken air, and the jockey began to cycle through the daily news. It was seventy-eight degrees outside, sunny without a chance of rain, the wind crisp and cool. Traffic on I-65 leading into Jersey was pretty slow, so drivers might want to consider an alternate route.

It was going to be a beautiful day.

“This is really happening, huh?” Peridot asked, the question muffled against Pearl’s pajama top. A shock of wild, blonde hair brushed the edge of her chin.

“Pinch me,” Pearl only replied, her throat thick with emotion. “I half-think I’m dreaming.”

“Don’t wake up,” Lapis advised dryly as she moved back over to the counter, plucking a piece of bacon from a plate and snapping down hard on it.

“No…” And she smiled then, very softly, the gesture quiet but somehow, simultaneously loud. “I don’t think I will.”

The radio jockey said something then that Pearl tried to care about. Famed Diamond Electric CEO Yellow Diamond had been in a car wreck last night in Empire City. No one was seriously injured, but—

And that was all she deigned to hear before she kissed Peridot lightly atop of the head and extracted herself from the embrace.

“Lapis,” she laughed fondly, “you’re going to eat all the bacon.”

“Oh, like you eat it anyway.”

10:01AM:

Her name was Laura Norwood, and she had been twenty-eight years old—a young woman in the prime of her life. Someone’s daughter. Someone’s fiancée. Someone’s sister. Someone’s very best friend. A drunk driver pulled out in front of her tiny Impala at a red light, and that was that, the damage irrevocably dealt and done.

Five seconds was the difference between Laura Norwood being someone and becoming an empty shell, her head all bandaged up, a ventilator breathing for her because she no longer could. Five seconds was scarcely longer than the blink of an eye, and yet, it was enough to the eradicate everything this girl had been and anything she might have ever hoped to be. 

She had a pale scar on her upper lip.

There was a tattoo of the phases of the moon trailing down the fair skin of her upper right arm.

A strand of curly auburn hair escaped the confines of the gauze wrapped around her head wound.

It was always these little things that struck Priyanka Maheswaran so fiercely, piercing her through like a nail hammered in at just the right angle.

Apart from being Steven Universe’s savior, she had been her own person first.

For twenty-eight years and never again.

In the spacious OR at Empire Gen, Priyanka stood in line with the rest of the surgeons who would receive the last gift Laura would ever offer to the world: her organs. The theater was quiet, studiously solemn, as Dr. Alan Keating, the transplant attending, made the first incision, his hand steady as he dragged the scalpel down in a fluid motion that spoke to so many years of having done this dance of vicious contradictions. He had a bushy brow that collected like fuzzy caterpillars above his eyes. Crow’s feet pecked the leathery skin just beneath his wire-rimmed glasses.

“Some of you don’t know the drill,” he said, the bluntness of his words somewhat muffled behind his mask, “but whenever I do this procedure, I have to have a little pick me up, somethin’ to keep me going, somethin’ to remind me why I’m toeing the lines of the Hippocratic Oath that prevents all of us in here from doing any harm.”

Priyanka knew what was coming, and yet, she briefly closed her eyes against it anyway, nausea and aching relief commingling in the pit of her stomach. When she opened them again, she looked at Laura Norwood’s hand, stretched out at a perpendicular angle, and saw that her nails were painted a bright sunshine yellow.

“Startin’ from the left, tell me what organ you’re picking up and who it’s going to.”

Dr. Keating pointed his scalpel at the first person in line, a nervous-looking resident in maroon scrubs. They nearly dropped the cooler they were holding beneath the spotlight of the surgeon’s stare.

“H-heart,” they stuttered, but there was a certain conviction in their voice that spoke volumes. “Masumi Hashimoto. Forty-two years old. She and her husband want to travel the world after she recovers. First stop’s Paris.”

“Good,” Keating nodded gruffly as his fellow passed him an instrument. “Excellent. Next?”

And down the line they went.

“Lungs. Leo Russell. Nineteen and three quarters. He’s the captain of his uni’s debate team.”

“Liver, sir. Jane Myrick. Sixty-three years old. She wants to spend more time with her grandkids... there’s so much more she has to give them.”

“Pancreas. Kitty Coleman. Thirty-one. She and her partner are hoping to rescue a puppy soon.”

And on and on. 

Because Laura Norwood’s parents and fiancé had both agreed that she would have wanted to give everything, even if it meant that there was barely nothing of her left. 

When Keating’s gray eyes finally lit upon Priyanka, there was a silent understanding that passed in the clinically clean space between them.

Because they’d both been here together, dozens of times—what felt like hundreds—locking gazes over death in order to save just one life more.

“Steven Universe,” she said, her voice low, thick with sudden emotion. She conjured his beaten face in the theater of her mind’s eye. The echoes of all the hands and arms that had embraced her in his hospital room earlier that morning pressed against her skin with a softness that the nephrologist scarcely allowed herself to know. “Fourteen-years old. He’s going to get to grow up, Alan.”

It was a quick gesture, fleeting, but Keating smiled beneath his mask, the wrinkles around his eyes creasing.

“Those stories are always my favorites.”

10:10AM:

If consciousness was a black sea—sloshing, vicious, endless, primordial—then Blue Diamond’s soft voice was the lighthouse that called Yellow Diamond’s vessel safe to shore. She heard the faint strains of it from somewhere within the darkness, and she crawled towards it, simply stumbled, like a child just gaining its feet, all clumsiness. She craved its gentleness. God, how she wanted to be enveloped in its silken embrace. How she wanted to come home.

(Because home was not a place to the consummate businesswoman. It was not a multimillion dollar penthouse suite, nor a study, nor a master bedroom in which she never slept. It was a person. It always had been—Blue and Blue and Blue.)

“She was... inebriated?” 

The incredulousness in her wife’s hushed tone was so pronounced, that it was almost, if not entirely, offensive. 

“Heavily, Mrs. Diamond,” returned a wry voice that Yellow didn’t recognize. “I doubt she’ll remember even being in the ER when she wakes up, which is a shame. She was absolutely engaging.”

“Insomuch as?”

“She threatened to sue anyone who so much as touched her as we tried to assess her injuries.”

“Ah…” A rustle of heavy fabric and then a sigh, soft and exasperated. “Charming.”

When Yellow Diamond finally wrenched her eyes open, she struggled at first to gather a cohesive impression of her current situation.

Her entire body ached all over, stiff with the sort of heavy soreness she vaguely associated with her college running days, when she’d wake up riddled with cramps after doing ten miles the previous day. If she thought about it, though, really focused, most of the irritation was isolated to her left arm and her head... 

Granted, if she had to guess, the latter symptom had more to do with the copious amounts of alcohol she had imbibed the night before as opposed to anything else. 

(Another recalled relic from her university days—what it felt like to have a goddamn hangover.)

Apparently lying flat on her back, wherever the hell she was—though she was already beginning to construct a solid theory—Yellow’s heavily-lidded gaze found an unfamiliar white ceiling, upon which she pieced together scattered memories of the night before. Her temples ached dully. There was a heaviness like concrete settled in the dry oasis of her mouth. 

They’d been on their way home at who knew what time… it was amazing she had possessed enough of her faculties to be capable of calling her valet to begin with… traffic must have been bad because she kept yelling at the poor woman to drive faster… and then, there was a metallic screeching sound… a simultaneous jolt… a collision… someone had rear ended them… glass shattered with a piercing kind of finality… smoke poured into the entrails of the car, smothering the leather, her clothes, her hacking mouth… Yellow hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt… her entire body had slammed forward with the momentum… and then there was darkness, rushing… the sound of sirens clambering through the night… a jumble of confused noises… people in white coats trying to demand her attention… the coppery scent of blood in the air…

With a wince that wasn’t entirely voluntary, and a conviction that was wholly sure, she concluded that she was absolutely in a hospital.

The question now was the state of her own body.

What was the damage?

How fucked up was she?

Careful not to move her head, she glanced downwards and saw that her left arm was propped on top of a pillow and wrapped tightly in a stiff, dark brace. It comforted her, at the very least, to see that it was not a cast. A cast would have implied brokenness; a brace opened up the possibility that she had been lucky, that she may have escaped nearly intact.

A quick surveillance to her left proffered the view of a wide, glass window with the blinds pulled down. Pinpricks of daylight seeped through the slats, making horizontal rows on the darkened floor. 

“She was lucky, Mrs. Diamond.”

Yellow briefly smirked to herself.

Damn right she was.

“As far as we can tell, she only has a hairline fracture in her left wrist and a few small abrasions on her face and neck where glass shrapnels hit her,” the woman she surmised to be her doctor explained. “However, I want to keep her another night for observation, just to ensure that she doesn’t have a concussion we didn’t catch during triage.”

A pause as her wife mulled over the words in that thorough manner of hers, grazing them slowly in the silence.

“That makes sense,” she finally returned. “Thank you, Dr. Reed.”

“Mm, of course.”

The voices waltzed together on Yellow’s far right, the one direction that had escaped her otherwise thorough assessment of her surroundings. Though, perhaps escaped was not the correct word. Escaped was too coincidental; it eliminated the possibility of foresight; it implied a scarcity of intent. And Yellow Diamond, consummate to the last, was not the type of woman who ever committed an action without purpose, who made a movement that did not have an objective neatly attached.

For she was a tactician in her bones, all utilitarian ideology.

Everything had a place stiffly governed by reason.

Every movement was a cosmological chess piece in the game she so adamantly played against the cruel machinations of an unthinking world.

She hadn’t looked to her right because she hadn’t wanted to.

Because she couldn’t bear to face her wife.

Couldn’t stand to comprehend the emotions in her tall, oval face—whatever they happened to be.

The fear.

The shame.

The silent disappointment.

And maybe, worst of all, the love which had long been absent from her grief-torn physiognomy—that Yellow Diamond had craved—desperately—at the very same time that she had grown to fear it in its deficiency.

It was ridiculous—goddamn absurd—but if Blue Diamond still loved her, and it was written all over the softly curving lines in her face, then Yellow didn’t know what she would do.

She supposed she would say it back.

And she would mean it.

Absolutely.

Entirely.

Or, maybe, just maybe, four years of anger and bitterness and sadness and grief and horror and painstaking care and long, sleepless nights and how many missed meetings and hundreds of trips to the cemetery and hundreds of trips to the doctor’s office and fear and loneliness and frustration would rise up the column of her throat and erupt.

Maybe, just maybe, she would simply explode, and the both of them would burn where they laid and stood.

Turning to ash and dust together at last.

All their history consigned to smoke.

So, even now, as Yellow made a motion to slightly tilt her head in that direction, she only allowed herself to ascertain their elongated shadows on the floor, where they stood in the rectangle of light thrown into the room from the hallway. She saw the hem of Blue Diamond’s dress pooling at her feet, and comprehended the metallic supports of her cane sucking the cold, hard ground.

But didn’t dare to glance up.

Because she was afraid that her wife still loved her, and she was terrified that she would say something fucked up to ruin it all over again.

Because that alone was what these four years had so deeply instilled in her, the pedagogy now as habitual as the cup of black coffee she drank every evening.

Insomuch that they still loved each other, they had hurt each other just as much and maybe even more intensely so.

“Do you think she will sleep for a little longer still?” Blue asked, her voice hushed. Yellow Diamond abruptly closed her eyes as she felt the pair’s gazes drawn towards her again, as though suddenly magnetized.

“Possibly,” Dr. Reed replied, her scratchy voice edged with amusement. “We gave her a hefty dosage of sedative.”

“For her sake?” The question was dry, resigned. “Or your own?”

“Excellent question, ma’am.”

In the darkness, Yellow’s brow twitched irritably. 

The nerve of this woman.

“In that case then… I think I may go home for awhile—rest… she won’t miss me.”

She said it so casually—and so lightly—that the businesswoman knew that the doctor wouldn’t suspect a thing, but Yellow knew. Or, at the very least, she could hazard a well-educated guess, that Blue believed in the verisimilitude of her statement. Words were always so carefully collected on the palate of her tongue, always loaded with fullness of intent.

It was funny, Yellow supposed.

Downright hilarious.

How belief, then, could be so condemning.

“We’ll keep an eye on her,” Dr. Reed said reassuringly, “and call you if there’s anything urgent.”

“Please do, and thank you. Sincerely…”

“Of course, of course…”

Yellow Diamond heard but did not watch as one pair of footsteps died away and another pair drew closer, the perpetrator’s soft soles shuffling almost imperceptibly against a tiled floor. The clinking and the clanking of an accompanying cane was just a little louder.

It felt as though her heart was about to violate her throat, pulsing so loudly, the sound and the sensation slippery and wet and hot.

Surely, she thought—she dreaded, she half-hoped—Blue Diamond could hear it, too.

Yellow didn’t dare unclose her eyes, though, this shell of a ruse her last defense against a vulnerability she was not yet prepared to confront. She was weak. She was a coward. God, she was so many other foolish things besides. Somewhere, in the hallway just outside the door, the humdrum and quiet cacophony of a hospital swarmed around the two of them like the droning of hazed bees. Somewhere, in the vast, stretching darkness, Blue Diamond stood above her, only feet, mere inches away. Perhaps she even leaned, for the velvety fabric of one of her sleeves grazed the blankets above Yellow’s chest, tantalizing a touch that the woman’s entire existence yearned to re-experience.

How she ached to be touched.

Tenderly.

By the person she loved.

But there was no such relief.

Blue Diamond pulled her hand away.

10:43AM:

While a nurse drew blood from the crook of Steven’s right arm, Garnet dutifully held his left hand, curling the striations of her fingers over the spines of his knuckles—lines and mountains and lines.

He hated needles—this she knew—but he needed one test more in order to ensure that his body was ready for the transplant surgery.

“Hey,” she grinned suddenly, and it was hard to keep the triumph from her voice as she nosed the top of the boy’s pale forehead. “Steven.”

“Whatcha cookin’, good looking?” He returned just as playfully as the nurse withdrew the needle in a flurry of expert motions. She bandaged the spot with a swath of gauze and tape before placing the blood sample carefully in her bin. With a small smile, she took her leave.

“I think it just hit me,” she said softly. She whispered it into his dark hair. Her heart swelled with the emotion. Simply soared. She could have shouted. She half-wanted to still. “You did it, my little fighter. You won.”

“The referee hasn’t called the match yet.” Steven lifted a black brow, taunting her, teasing. She could make out the barest sliver of his face beneath her.

How the side of his mouth was lifted in the beginnings of a smile.

“No,” she murmured, kissing him sweetly, “but it’s all but over.”

11:59AM:

“You suck,” Steven laughed as Amethyst slurped down the dregs of her chocolate milkshake, the straw sucking vacantly at the bottom of the styrofoam.

Because he would be having surgery in a few hours time, the kid wasn’t allowed to eat anymore.

Of course, both of them knew his ribbing was empty anyway.

He hadn’t entirely held down solid food in days.

But hey—it was a special occasion.

She gamely went along, her mouth teasing itself into a wicked smile as she propped her feet up on the side of his bed, crossing her ankles with a kind of delicacy that would have made Pearl both exasperated and faintly proud.

“I’ll drink t’that,” she snorted, raising the empty cup up in the air. “That nurse said you’ll be slurpin’ down milkshakes with me this time next week.”

And it was then, with a suddenness that nearly choked her, all the possibilities of the next chapter of their life opened up to the twenty-eight year old like a good ass preview right before the beginning of a movie.

They were going to get to hit up the Boardwalk for fry bits together again and slam all the burgers and pizzas that they wanted. They would play tag on the beach with Lapis and Peridot and Garnet and sometimes, when she could be enticed, Pearl. They would swim in the shallows of the ocean, riding the salt crusted waves until the sun set low in the carpet of the sky, signaling it was time for dinner. 

Time to come home.

They would get to live.

No more hesitations.

No more strings (or tubes) attached.

“Oh,” the little asshole simply smirked. “I can hear Pearl now. That’s disgusting! Are you cave people?”

To which Amethyst could only laugh so hard that her stomach began to ache.

Maybe she shouldn’t have drunk her milkshake so fast after all.

1:12PM:

Tender sunlight threaded itself all silk-like through the blinds as Steven’s soft snores drifted upwards from his half-open mouth. Pearl had only arrived at the hospital a little over half an hour ago, and he had remained awake long enough to smile sleepily at her and say hello before drifting off into the easiest sleep she had seen him surrender to in weeks. 

Because it was always a fight these days.

A skirmish.

A war.

To a boy with chronic kidney disease, sleep was as much as a threat as it was a relief.

But now, his purple-ringed eyes were closed in a gentle sort of way, strands of his curly black hair falling across his forehead in loose curls. Pearl was not brave—not in the way Garnet was, at least—she didn’t dare crawl into the hospital bed with him lest she accidentally disturb an important line, a wire, a tube.

Her upbringing was such that she treated all the boundaries she was presented with the respect they may or may not have deserved.

It hadn’t been until she met Rose that she began to wonder what would happen if she toed the tightrope a little more boldly than her strict mother had ever allowed.

It had been Rose who had taught her that love, in all of its sundry, multifaceted forms, was rebellion in and of itself.

A feeling so much bigger than a fixed and finite set of rules.

A sprawling complex of sensations and experiences and memories upon thousands of flickering memories: her spidery fingers tangled in pink hair, Rose’s loud, round laugh, the thrill of protest, the nights they spent exchanging secrets beneath an alabaster moon with its sprinkling of silvery stars. Lips against lips, palms against palms, the shuffle of their warm breaths coiling with the spring breeze. They waltzed together in perfect union, synchronized to even the very last step. 

And then she met Greg.

And they fell in love.

And had a baby.

And Rose died.

Simply ceased to exist, as Pearl’s world continued to turn on.

Slowly.

With distant and detached cruelty.

It was an oversimplification of their history, scrubbed free of all the complications that Pearl had agonized over night after night, trying to untangle all the knots in the hopes she would find the lifeline that would tell her where it had all gone wrong.

But the deeper she plunged, the less sure she became, her fingers all red for the effort of trying.

And so, in the end, it was easier to stick to the simple facts.

She had loved Rose, and now she was gone.

But she had left behind Steven for her to love, to cherish, and to protect.

And love?

In and of itself?

Love was rebellion—the woman knew that much at the very least. Love was leaping over sure lines, and it laying your life down on a line. It was eschewing all the boundaries of a normalized existence. It was bravery.

A gentle smile curving the shape of her thin lips, Pearl reached up and pulled the side of her hand down the side of Steven’s face, holding him gently.

Tomorrow morning, she would wrap her slender arms around him.

She would be hard pressed to let him go.

3:28PM:

The hours dripped by, the minutes plunging like saline in a steady, rhythmic drip. Time was meticulously regulated in the space of an OR, systematically quantified and accounted for by the narrow screen on the far wall where huge, red numbers indicated that five hours, twenty-five minutes, and eighteen seconds had elapsed since Keating had made his first incision. Each second, down to its tenth, counted when surgeons literally held lives in their hands, an adage that was especially true of organ procurement surgeries where even the slightest of complications could delay gratification for so many others. 

One by one, the various doctors received their organs and made their bow from Dr. Keating’s operating theater. There were places to be, lives to be saved, and new stories to tell in the darkness around the warmth of a kindling fire.

Masumi Hashimoto was going to get to travel to Paris.

And Leo Russell was going to kick ass at debate team.

And Jane Myrick was going to have the opportunity to spend more time with her grandkids.

And Steven Universe… Steven Universe was going to get to grow up.

Sitting on a stool as she waited for Alan to call her up, Priyanka wasn’t quite seeing the Empire Times crossword puzzle that she’d been working on for the last hour or so. Instead, she saw the contours of Steven’s future stretch out before her, bright and tangible where they hadn’t quite been before. There was a lot of smiling and laughter. And there was a flash of sweet mundanity as she pictured him shouldering a backpack for the first time in nearly a year as he wound his way through a crowded school hallway, And there was a certain warmth as the scene suddenly shifted to Greg and the Gems enveloping their boy in the tangle of their arms as they welcomed him home from a long day.

Healthy, safe, and sound.

It struck the nephrologist then, as it so often did when she was caught unaware, that these were all the little things that she sometimes took for granted with her own daughter—going to school and coming home all intact.

Not every parent could say the same.

And so, as Dr. Keating’s team prepared the ice slush that the surgeon would wrap around Laura Norwood’s kidneys in preparation for removal, Priyanka resolved to herself that she would be more attentive to the mundane, to the little moments, to every smile that Connie worked herself up to proffer. 

Because the kid had been smiling more often these days, the lines of her lips twitching upwards with more regularity than the doctor was used to knowing.

“Dr. Maheswaran,” Alan said suddenly. 

He only ever called her by her formal title when he was about to deliver bad news that any good friend would try to avoid. 

His fellows had abruptly stopped what they were doing, hands frozen above Laura’s body, eyes drawn to her midsection. 

It was like a grotesque Renaissance painting.

The light head glared unholily onto Dr. Keating’s bowed head.

“Come here for a moment.”

Priyanka’s entire stomach constricted where she sat on a stool that suddenly felt too small for her body. She knew that voice, but it was different this time. 

Because she'd gone soft. 

She was compromised.

She cared too much about her patient to accept the reasonable outcome of a blow.

“No,” she whispered. Her voice was garbled behind her mask. Guttural. “Alan, no.”

“Blunt kidney trauma…” he replied softly. She knew that voice. It was his best patient voice. The voice doctors used when they were delivering bad news. The voice Priyanka, in all of her studious harshness, had never entirely mastered. “…sometimes doesn’t produce outward signs… I’m sorry, Dr. Maheswaran.”

They’d called each other by their first names for nearly half a decade.

His gruff voice tripped over itself.

It hesitated, and it stared down into the precipice it had to jump. 

“These kidneys are unsalvageable.”

4:07PM:

The minutes inched onwards with all the delightfulness of paint drying on a damn wall. They crawled into hours, and they languished like poetic lovers, taking their slow, sweet time. Each second was seemingly savored by the analog clock on the wall, the hands lingering far longer than they should.

A world in love with itself.

How disgustingly saccharine.

Though Dr. Reed was pretty damn sure that Yellow didn’t have a concussion, she was also pretty damn reluctant to let the businesswoman go until her head completely stopped pounding. For, even after she had woken up properly, the dull, localized jabbing hadn’t gone away, persisting around her temples.

A hangover headache. 

“Perhaps,” Dr. Reed had hummed noncommittally, pressing a skeptical hand below her chin.

“Trust me,” Yellow returned darkly, rubbing the left side of her head tenderly with her middle finger. “I know when I have a hangover.”

But the batty woman still insisted that she stay, just so they could rule out the possibility of latent brain injury, which was why Yellow was currently hooked up to a banana bag as a means of working the last of Lagavulin out of her system. 

Because, if it was indeed a hangover, this simple remedy would assuredly help with her headache. 

And, well, if it wasn't, it would replenish her electrolytes at the very least.

Thrilling.

Situated in the chair next to Yellow’s bed, Poppy’s thin brow was woven together in concentration as she knitted what appeared to a lumpen, misshapen scarf—or was it a sweater?—her metallic needles clicking together every so often in the silence. The maid had arrived nearly an hour ago to bring her employer a set of pajamas to change into, as well as some paperwork from the CEO’s office. However, with her usual fumbling obsequiousness, she had insisted that she could stay for awhile.

She could attend to Yellow’s needs while her arm was out of commission.

Could satisfy her hourly duties.

But Yellow was no fool.

The slight woman did not linger out of the simple contract which existed between them as employer and employee. Indeed, she suspected that Poppy’s fidelity ran deeper than even that—that the maid dared to like her despite Yellow’s general sharpness of exterior, that she wanted to keep her company in a hospital room that was as empty as it was cold.

In the end, she supposed that she was… grateful for the implicit support.

She supposed, if she was forced to name an emotion at gunpoint, she would have no choice but to admit to her appreciation of someone who had been by her side, attendant to her every want, for nearly a decade.

But there was no steel barrel pressed against her tousled hairline, only the tinny clinking of those infernal needles and the occasional shuffling of papers as Yellow Diamond tried and subsequently failed to skim the brief the Zircons had left in her inbox. It was well-written—comprehensive—as it always was with Diamond Electric’s head attorneys, but what was an abstract lawsuit to the very real questions which tumbled ceaselessly across the furrows of the woman’s otherwise neatly tilled mind? What were words—nouns and verbs and adjectives—next to the torment of her wife’s almost touch?

To the simultaneous miracle and utter insanity of her sudden recovery?

Sick, angry, guilty, overcome, Yellow plucked her readers from the bridge of her nose and slapped them neatly on the tray next to her bed. The sudden thud startled Poppy from her knitting.

“D-did you need something, ma’am? Can I get you a glass of water? A snack from the vending machine?”

“No,” she snapped, and then, correctly interpreting the stung look on her maid’s face, she remembered herself.

She took a deep breath.

It wasn’t Poppy’s fault that her wife was doing better.

However…

“I mean,” she amended herself gruffly, “no thank you, Poppy… I do have a small favor to ask of you, though.”

“Yes, Mrs. Diamond?” She leaned forward in her chair, her scarf, sweater, or whatever it was flopping limply over her neatly crossed legs. “Anything.”

Gathering her thoughts in the very same way she gathered her lined fingers into a temple next to her stomach, Yellow thought to herself first that perhaps it was about time she gave her maid a raise.

Her second thought was the one she verbalized aloud, the question doled out in carefully measured words, nouns and verbs and a dash of barely repressed reluctance for good measure.

“That boy… Steven… he’s in this hospital, too, yes?”

#bellow diamond #blue diamond #yellow diamond #steven universe #garnet #amethyst #pearl #priyanka maheswaran #greg universe #s: steven universe #mimiku #flower child #oh my god i am exhausted #lapis lazuli #peridot

[steebharringt0n]

Shadows of the Night | Vampire AU

dusk | night | dawn

Billy Hargrove doesn’t remember the last time he’s seen sunlight, or the last time he’s stepped inside a church. For over 500 years he’s been a vagabond, a wanderer, searching for a place to call home - until his travels land him in Hawkins, Indiana and his whole existence as he knows it is turned upside down.

pairing: billy hargrove x fem!reader rating: m (blood, a tint of smut, abuse, language)

a/n: OOOH boy this is gonna be a three parter! (as I forget my other stories - HA) anyways, this is a mix of Twilight/True Blood/Interview with the Vampire-esque type~ Please let me know if you want to be tagged for the next part! I’m hoping to finish this up by the weekend since it being halloween and all. This does take place in 2019, so yay for technology! Enjoy!

---

Part 1 - Dusk

The sun quietly set over the tall pine trees as the rumble of his 2019 blue Camaro drove past the brown sign that welcomed him into the little town. He enjoyed the drive down the winding roads, it was peaceful and still, and he didn’t have to hear anyone’s thoughts as music pounded through his sound system.

walt: heading back to ny?

He heard the familiar buzz of Iphone as it sat in one of his cup holders. He knew who it was, so he didn’t bother answering him. Besides, he kept track of his whereabouts through the phone. It was their agreement, he stays away from him but he keeps track of where he goes. It was how their relationship worked for the last 500 years, and he intended on keeping it that way.

It wasn’t that he hated Walt, but he wanted his space, his chance to explore the world without someone breathing down his neck. Walt had taught him well enough to know the 3 cardinal rules like the back of his hand - avoid churches, avoid sunlight and most of all, avoid giving into blood lust. Walt always had a penchant of reminding him every now and then, but he would just dully agree.

He wouldn’t consider Walt a father per say - but he was the only person who cared for him, looked after him, made sure his flask was always filled to the brim with the liquid that sustained him. 

Besides, Walt was the one who turned him into the creature that he is today.

He chuckles at the memory, it’s still so fresh in his mind. He wonders what his life would have been if he hadn’t been turned that fateful night. But he was out drinking, and stumbled upon thieves who proceeded to beat him within an inch of his life. In 1500s Europe, no one would have batted an eye at him as he withered on the cobblestone, blood pooling from his mouth. 

But Walt did.

Walt found an 18 year old William Hargrove dying by his feet in a dark alleyway. He pitied the boy as he gasped for air, pleading to be sent to a medic. Walt scooped the boy into his hands and took him to his house, where he proceeded to turn him - into a vampire that is - and subsequently saved his life. 

He knew the responsibilities that came with turning someone into a vampire. Walt was constantly in tune with every emotion he felt - anger, sadness, pain - he felt a sense of fondness for him. Walt taught him everything he knew, how to properly feed, how to avoid getting caught, and how to harness his powers for the greater good, when he had to use them of course.

William then shed his name and became Billy, Billy Hargrove. Billy and Walt traveled all around the world, met fascinating people, pretty much saw history become history before their eyes, but they could never stay in one place for too long. People would become suspicious, people would start to talk, and that was the last thing they wanted.

Walt was one of the originals, Billy never asked how old Walt truly is, but he knows that Walt is old, very, very old. Walt was close with the Council - a high order of vampires who lived in the darkness within the streets of Rome. Billy swears that they were the first vampires created, hence why they have such a high importance within the community. 

Whatever they say goes, and if you go against with that they say, it’s your head. So when Walt and Billy decided to part their ways, Walt made sure that Billy knew the basic rules of being a vampire.

Walt hoped that Billy would never have to meet the Council - they were a terrifying bunch that looked more monstrous than human. They were cutthroat, void of any empathetic emotions. Any run in with them was never any good - if you were summoned before them you had better hoped that you came out of it alive.

Billy heard his phone buzz again, the two minute reminder that he still had an unopened text. He let out an exhale through his nose, grabbing the phone and unlocking it with his thumb. He opened the text, but when straight to the telephone icon, pressing the button then pressing the phone to his ear.

“Still in Indiana I see?”

Billy let out a soft chuckle, “Yeah, one of my favorite bands were playing in Indianapolis, I missed them in New York. Thought I’d make a trip out of it and drive over”

“Ah, I see. Was Peter a good host? Hope his guest coffin wasn’t too small”

“Pete was great - he’s a bit of a talker that’s for sure. Would not stop talking about the Renaissance period though, as if I haven’t lived through it as well” 

Walt laughed over the line, “Ah yes, he loves to bring up the Renaissance. Do you have a place to stay for the morning? I could ring up old friends nearby”

Billy glanced over at the clock in his car, it flashed 8:06, the night was still young, he’d figure something out.

“Nah, I’m good, I’ll hit you up if I can’t find anywhere though”

“Alright Billy - stay safe”

“You too Walt”

He promptly hung up the phone, placing it back into his cup holder. His eyes landed on the silver flask next to his phone. He wasn’t too hungry, Peter made sure that he left with his belly full, but a sip wouldn’t hurt. With the flick of his thumb, he removed the top, taking a swig of blood. As he placed the flask back down, he noticed signs for a nearby 7/11, he figured he could stop and pick up a pack of Marlboro's for the trip ahead. 

He made a sharp left down the road, driving down until the luminous sign for the convenience store appeared out of the darkness. He parked his car in the closest space and hopped out, stretching his legs and arms. He sauntered into the store, heading straight for the register.

A blonde girl whose eyes were attached to her phone didn’t notice his presence. She annoyingly smacked her gum, laughing softly at whatever was on her phone. Billy cleared his throat, hoping to get her attention. She held up a finger to him, which irritated him to no end.

When she finally glanced up at him, her eyes widened. 

Holy shit he’s fucking hot

He snickered at her thoughts. Since turning into a vampire, his complexion paled significantly, and it always was jarring for people to see him under fluorescent lights just how pale he actually was. Along with his baby blue eyes that popped, he was a sight for sore eyes. He knew the magnetism he had, he could charm the ladies with a wink and a smile. He had lost count how many lovers he had, but he was quite the expert in the sack.

“Hi. A pack of Marlboro’s please” he said, his voice came out like molasses, deep and rich. 

The girl fumbled with her phone, shoving it in her pocket and hastily grabbing the pack of cigarettes behind her. With shaking hands she placed the box on the counter, ready to ring him up. He grinned at her.

He gently placed his hand over hers. She was warm compared to his cold skin. She glanced up at him, he could feel her heart start to race erratically as he started to charm her.

“Listen, I uh, forgot my wallet at home, is it cool if I just take this from you?”

His blue eyes bored into her green ones. He stared at her intensely, until his eyes started to turn red. She was completely hypnotized, another victim of one of his powers. He could manipulate people to do anything he wanted and for right now, he wanted a free pack of cigarettes.

She nodded slowly, her face void of any emotion as he released her hand and swiped the cigarettes off of her. His eyes turned back to the familiar baby blue as he winked at her, breaking the spell. 

He turned his back towards her, starting to head back to his car when a shout stopped him in his track. He turned around, the girl at the counter leaned over with a soft smile on her face.

“Hey! Uhm, not sure what you’re doing tonight, but there’s a party going on, big Halloween bash, everyone in town is going to be there, maybe I’ll see you there?”

Billy pondered over it for a moment. He completely forgot that it was Halloween, being a vampire makes you lose track of time, and it’s not like he had to be in New York in the morning. He nodded at the girl, “Sure, what’s the address?”

He shuffled back over to the counter, retrieving the address from the back of an old receipt. He shoved it in his pocket and walked back into his car. As soon as he sat down, he pulled out the receipt and typed it into google maps. The house was located in the middle of the woods, and was only a few miles from here.

He revved up his car and pulled out of the 7/11 parking lot and towards the dark woods.

Little did he know how much this party would change the course of his life.

---

He arrived at the party, it was in full swing mode. His eyes scanned out the crowd that was outside the house and figured the rest of the party was inside the house. Everyone was in costume, except for him, but it wasn’t a problem. He glanced up at himself in his rear view mirror and opened his mouth. 

His canines promptly turned into sharp fangs. He brought his thumb up to his mouth and with a quick bite, blood expelled from his thumb. He dabbed a little bit of it in the corner of his mouth, creating the illusion of a vampire costume. It was simple disguise and no one would question it.

He stepped out of his car, and was met with loud blaring music that pumped loudly throughout the night. As he neared closer to the house, his mind was suddenly slammed with everyone’s thoughts. 

Most of them involving girls (and some guys) wanting to fuck him, while guys leered at him with contempt. He tuned out the thoughts as he entered the house, heading towards the punch bowl that he was sure contained jungle juice.

He poured himself a cup and scanned the crowd, leaning on a kitchen counter. Costumes were an abundance in every genre, horror, mythical, some straight up stupid, but when his eyes landed on you, the whole world suddenly came to a hard stop.

He wanted to laugh at how fate worked that night. You were in a tight black dress, fishnet stockings and heels. Your hair was curled to perfection and your lips with a bright ruby red. There were faint bite marks on your neck which he assumed were fake, and fangs sticking out of your mouth, which he then knew, that it was fake.

When you decided to go as a vampire, it was a last minute option. Your best friend let you borrow some make up and with a few touches, you looked like the mistress of the dark. You weren’t really into the whole dressing up thing anyways, the party was more of an opportunity to get drunk, maybe get high and just let loose.

Billy started to inch closer to you, focusing his attention on trying to read your thoughts.

But he was met with radio silence.

He frowned. This had never happened. He concentrated harder on you, but still, your thoughts were nowhere to be read.

His heart began to pound loudly, so loud he swore it drowned the music out. He suddenly felt a buzz in his pocket - it was Walt, he could sense him.

He pulled out his phone and read the text

walt: r u ok? i feel you panicking, is everything alright?

Billy took a large gulp of the jungle juice, trying to bring himself back down. He quickly typed back to Walt.

billy: i can’t read her thoughts, what does that mean walt? 

Billy heard rumors swirling around back in the 1800s of humans whose thoughts were unreadable to certain vampires. Walt had always said that if he encountered a human of such, to run away, far and quick. However, he never thought he’d encounter one at this party, let alone one ironically dressed as a vampire.

His phone instantly started to ring and Billy darted to the bathroom. He placed the phone in his ear and was met with an alarmed Walt.

“Billy, wherever you are, leave, now!” he barked at him.

“W-what’s going on ... I don’t understand, why can’t I read her thoughts. Why do I feel this way?” 

Billy heard Walt sigh loudly over the phone, he imagined him rubbing his temples in frustration.

“I never thought I’d see this day come ... but it was foolish of me to think otherwise. This typically happens with vampires, but ... she is a human, and that is rare, dangerous in fact” he quickly started to explain.

“What is it Walt?! Tell me!” Billy urged, his tone becoming more frantic.

“Billy, she is your Beloved. She is the one you’re destined to be with for the rest of your life ... but she is a human ... this is not good, not good at all. You need to come back to New York immediately” 

“W-what does it matter if she’s human?”

“Because if she rejects you ... you’ll turn into dust Billy. She is your soulmate. If your Beloved happened to be a vampire, it’s a whole other story, but she is human, and it’s dangerous. Your heart cannot handle the intense pain of being rejected by your Beloved” 

Billy stood quiet on the other line. His mind was racing a million thoughts, you were his soulmate, his other half. Walt had always told him that vampires who found their soulmates became stronger, so strong that they were able to withstand the heat of the sun. They became almost invincible because they had found their other missing half.

“Your powers won’t work on her Billy. It’s impossible - “

“No. I’m staying here” Billy cut him off.

“Are you mad?! You need to leave now!” Walt angrily exclaimed.

“Give me a week Walt. A week and I’ll have her fall in love with me” he paused, his mind going back to how the moment his eyes landed on her, how his heart felt like it could burst out of his chest, how he would drop everything in an instant to be with her, his mind, body and soul. She was the missing piece in his life, and he was determined to make sure she never left his side. “If she rejects me ... then I die, I can accept that”

“No! William! No!” Walt shouted. Billy flinched at the sound of his actual name, Walt only used it when he was either extremely pissed off at him, or in situations like these.

“This is my only chance Walt, my only chance to be with my soulmate. Please do not take this away from me”

Walt stood silent. Billy was his only ‘child’, his closest confidant and friend.

But if wanted to risk his life for a puny human, than so be it. Walt had taught him enough in his life to know right from wrong, the only thing he could do was support his choices.

“A week Billy. You have a week” he finally relented.

Billy let out a sigh of relief, closing his eyes and nodding, “Yes, a week. I promise I’ll bring her back with me to New York”

“Good luck dear friend”

Billy heard the other line go dead. He shoved his phone back into his pocket and walked back into the party, his eyes instantly scanning out for you.

But you were nowhere to be seen.

Billy crushed the cup in his hand, fuck.

He closed his eyes, trying to concentrate on where to find you. He turned to the guy dressed up as Captain America, maybe asking around would help.

“Hey, Captain America! I’m looking for my friend, she has her [Y/H/C] hair in curls, wearing a tight black dress in fishnet stockings, she’s dressed as a vampire?” 

The guy in front of him pondered for a second, then it was like a light bulb went off, “Ah yeah! You mean [Y/N]!” he exclaimed.

The name was like a melodic song to his ears, Y/N.

“Yeah! Ha! Too drunk to remember her name” he jokingly pointed to his empty cup of jungle juice, but the guy didn’t seem to mind.

“Yeah I think she’s outside with the smokers, you can head on back that way” he used his head to point towards the back door where the rest of the party seemed to continue. Billy gave him a pat on his shoulder, a way to thank him for the information, and headed out the back door.

He then instantly spotted you, a cigarette dangling from your fingertips, your mouth opened as you let out a laugh. He swallowed thickly as he felt the world start to slowly freeze. Every step he took towards you felt like his feet were attached to cinder blocks. His emotions were thrown in a whirlwind and he instantly knew that you were the one for him, you were made to be his.

As he inched closer to your circle of friends, everyone stopped in their tracks. Sentences were cut short, the laughter suddenly stopped and all eyes were on him. You glanced up, [Y/E/C] met blue and you forgot how to breathe - as if all the oxygen in the world had been sucked up.

Everyone watched as he stood in front of you, ignoring everyone’s look of jealously as his eyes melted into yours. The ash on your cigarette began to burn but you didn’t care. Your whole attention was focused on this Adonis of a man in front of you - you had never seen him before but something told you that you knew him in a past life, like an old lover.

He towered over your small frame, delicately grabbing your hand and placing it into his large, pale ones.

Your skin burned into his, he was in so much pain but he didn’t care. He ached for you, he longed for you.

“Hey Y/N ... do you know his guy?” one of your friends asked, their eyes still attached to him.

You shook your head slowly as he raised your hand, placing it to his lips and planting a soft kiss.

“I - I ... I think I do?” the words stumbled out of your mouth as he smiled brightly, his fangs in full display. What a coincidence that he too was dressed as a vampire, you thought to yourself.

He was cold to the touch, but you didn’t pull away. 

“Hello Y/N” he said. You swore you had never heard a voice so rich, so seductive. You felt your cheeks turn red at the mention of your name, never had a man had an effect like this on you before. Even your friends were exchanging concerned looks.

Billy glanced around to the people circling around you.

“Leave”

Without blinking, they all quickly left, leaving the two of you alone in the backyard. You didn’t even bother to realize that your friends had left you alone with a stranger, but you didn’t care.

You shuffled your feet, nervously placing a piece of your hair behind your ear. “And you are?”

With your hand still in his, he placed his other hand on top of yours, feeling the warmth course through his body. He shivered slightly, squeezing your hand, “Billy, Billy Hargrove”

You nodded at him, your eyes still locked onto his. The whole world could have been thrown into chaos, but it didn’t matter, what only mattered was the two of you, in this moment. You opened your mouth to speak but the both of you were thrown out of the love trance by the jarring noise of your phone ringing incessantly.

You quickly pulled your phone from your chest (you had no pockets so you resorted to sticking it in your bra), and your eyes widened in fear at the time.

“Shit, shit, shit, I have to go, I’m sorry” you quickly spluttered out, throwing the cigarette down on the ground and reluctantly pulling away from Billy’s touch. He watched as your demeanor instantly changed at the sound of the alarm. Something wasn’t right.

Billy’s forehead puckered, before you could even dart at the back door he grabbed your wrist, pulling you back. “Where are you going? I can take you home”

You furiously shook your head, “No, please, listen, put your number in my phone, I’ll text you, just don’t come near my house, okay?”

You shoved your phone into his hand, prompting him to enter his number. Swiftly he entered his number, handing you back your phone. With a pained smile, you gave his hand a squeeze and before he knew it you disappeared into the crowd of people.

What you didn’t know was that Billy had every intention of following you home. In his eyes you were completely and utterly his, and seeing you panic at the sound of the alarm set off warning bells in his head. Someone or something had a hold over you and he didn’t like it one bit. He rushed through the crowd, reaching the front lawn just in time to see you pull out of the neighborhood in a black car.

He had a week, time was quickly ticking away.

But Billy had a plan, and Billy never loses.

#billy hargrove #billy hargrove x you #billy hargrove x reader #billy hargrove imagine #billy hargrove fanfiction

[poeticwritingblog]

A Daylight Under Dark

    As the light fell, it was if the autumn and summer had leaked their orange tints.

    The forest floor was ambient. A florescent current rose from the last day of autumn, a stream of blue graced the floor. Steam emitted as breath from the whisp from lungs hidden as ravines.

   Like an orange flame, the leaves fell in sequence over the grazing earth, every leaf was grass. It was of a lady’s finesse, there she aged with beauty. Outside, it lurked within the depths, without sight or sound. Perhaps it heard the other’s calls, lost laments, a glass bubble, sparkling with it’s supernatural twinkle. It, the other was self-contained, deep within itself were the trees of flickering lights within iron skulls, mechanical retinas of frosted irises, it’s fluid of air brushing the breeze of the hairlines of steel strands. As it slowly grew with concrete waves, growing with time, It would take, collecting, from whom was born as a surrogate saving itself the strangers who assimilate, footprints of streets, and all waking knowledge of here she lies, the city.

   Hundreds of years they were in solitude.

   Until they were aware of their presence.

   They, separate intelligences, the urban breath caught in the autumn of the wild.

   Eyes, but not to be seen, ears not to be heard, no living body, but a living presence.

    It was of both entities. And both providing of different natures, they were of time, aged of knowledge youth incarnate: were they not mothers?

   Upon first glance, their motherly nature wouldn’t bear a resemblance. But they were of a mother’s ways, to bear a life, bare of wisdom, a way their child will grow to realize.

   Past and future moved to the method of a mother. The warm past of a child must move to the grace of a grandmother. The fallen leaves moved by as dying waves as they graced the mineral of soil, memories washed over as the breath of the wild took them without a predestined path. The ground absorbed serpentine, confetti, perhaps lost toys and other things children forgot.

   They were carried over the ancient nutrients through to be caught in hairlike roots of ancient trees. Then things lost and forgotten, and forgotten things as napkins, eggshells, papers, burnt embers of forest campfires, made to be left behind by the foreigners from the city, those footsteps to vanish upon moss over-grown rocks of isolation, people from the steel and glass complexes, the many, many cries from the shrieking mechanical beasts that tread, there long after.

   The future, rose gradually, hinted urban airs into the autumn forest breeze. The stark black strings of hair, the mother would rise gradually, giving the air of urban into the autumn forest breeze. It would wait in the darkness of transparency, of time upon new light where she dwelled.

   It perceived the living floor.

   A young boy was there.

    He was sun-darkened, he preferred to stay out of the shade. Each day, he would walk into the woods, as to grow within it’s bounds, to talk to trees as to understand them. But he never left. There, an elderly woman who sat next with him while having a picnic lunch. Sometimes, they’d hold hands while strolling through the woods, at times, they’d listen to the robins with whom they’d sing and the wind would sing along.

   The luminescence rested on the trees. It was the end of autumn and leaves fell as memories of before passed. October. A part of summer felt there, but was shutting down as winter from the city filled the forest.

   Any day, she may leave and never return.

   Today she must leave for the town.

   They would sit upon the grass feeling the remains of the summer-autumn warmth. The birds would play their piece softly and the boy stirred fitful grunts, whilst eyes closed. The elder lady did not tilt her head from where it was positioned. She stared at the remains of the sun, drinking the aging dandelion wine, her mouth enclosed to a slight humble smile, she opened her eyes.

     “Is there something bothering you?” she asked.

     “I had a nightmare,” said the young boy.

     “Nightmares during the daytime?”

     “You know what I’m talking about Grandma, a bad dream, haven’t you had one of those in the afternoon?”

     “Not anymore, my child. I’ve dreamed all the dreams to colour the fragments of dusk with the remnants of dawn.”

     He sat there, fingers and palms interlocking. “Grandma, I had a really bad dream”

     “What about?”

     “I don’t know anymore” he said as if it just lingered out of his mind. A shame of the very moment he were to speak the words, he lost them, he had already forgotten. Now, he shut his eyes again, he longed to remember.

     “Was it about me?” she asked, stretching to regain her composure.

     “No” he said.

     “Why, yes, it had to have been.” she said whilst gently smiling to the boy. “I was off to another land, distant from here, that what troubles you.”

     “No.”

     “No need to be afraid.” she said. “There I was leaving this place, and you were looking for me, and somehow, lost in smoke you were, found me and all of a sudden, I have a heart-attack or something.”

     He gave a noticeable doubt. “That’s crazy talk, Grandma.”

     “Let’s see now,” said she. “Why would I do such a thing? I knew there was something off-putting with those biscuits.”

     “That’s not funny, Grandma,” said he. “I can’t bare to think about carrying you and the basket all the way home.”

     She quietly laughed. “Did it bother you that much?”

     He nodded. “Daydreams are the worst, they make me feel sad, dreams should only be for the night.”

     “I’m sorry you feel that way” She took his little hand. “Anything I can get you, to help cheer your mood?”

     “No.”

     “We have some cookies? Cheese and cracker perhaps? Some wine?”

     “You’re very kind, but no. I’ll be all right. It’s just that, well, the last few days haven’t been right. This is different than how it used to be in the early summer. Something’s happened.”

     “Is this between you and your mother?”

     “Oh, no, Grandma of course not,” he said with slight haste. “But don’t you feel places change people? I don’t know, I feel things like parks change people, the carnivals, and all that. Even today, like you said, the biscuits taste funny.”

     “I was kidding, why do you feel this way, how do you mean?”

     “They taste old. Don’t worry, I’m not talking about you Grandma. It’s hard to explain, but I’ve lost my appetite, and I wish today never happened.”

     “You sure are a funny one. You know what? Enjoy today for what it is, when tomorrow comes, you’ll wish it were yesterday.”

     “I’ll try,” he said. “If only today didn’t feel so funny and change everything. I don’t know. But now, out of all the other days I just had a feeling to go back home.”

     “Because of your dream? Me, then booking it and then my heart-attack because I’m old and done with this place?”

     “I don’t mean it like that!” he said “Now, I have to think about a bunch of things, I don’t know if I can remember! I think I’ll have, what’s the name? What you’re drinking, I’ll have some of that stuff.”

     She laughed brighter than she has in the weeks that past her. “Don’t tell your poor mother you said that, it’s a shame you can’t remember your dream.”

     “Don’t worry.” He hugged her tightly. “I’ll protect you no matter what!”

     “Don’t worry about me okay? Just worry about yourself for the time being,” she whispered gently. “The autumn leaves dances to the whisps of the wind, but never against the current to die where whom was born.”

     “I don’t know what you’re talking about; But it sounds smart, it’s funny, how funny it is to hear how you think Grandma.”

     “How silly.” She breathed of light laughter. “How silly the flow of time really is.”

      The rested quietly, the sun and the twilight sky sparkled last light.

     “You know,” said Grandmother thoughtfully, “I understand the reason of your concern. This place, it seems to be shifting. As if it were moving from one place and today the movement to the other is somewhat within our senses.”

     “I’m glad you feel it, too.”

   She turned her head slightly as if she noticed all the details, rest ridden, smiling softly, shutting her eyes, catching the fallen sunlight. “We, mother the night. We, mother the night.”

   Murmuring “We.”

      The sea of night washed on dawn’s shore throughout the time, softly. The afternoon sunset came on. The sun struck with a graze upon the skies with fading flashes.

   Throughout the land, not a sight or scent of parks of metallic shine, long gone metal-glass domes that would appear in time, grey-to black where the growth dwells. The smells of fried meat and burnt onion soon to be seared filled the wind on concept metal. The concrete mixer whispered to the moss slated-boulders and stirred like an image, a vision soon to be realized, reflected in reverse back and forth, shining the silent shards.

   The crows flew over echoing discreetly. They darted through like dark arrows to split the sun. Underneath, the child and the grandmother did not move. Only their eyelids under a split sun’s shadow flickered with awareness, only their ears were alert. Now and again, the shade would bend the trees to faint silhouettes sliding along the grass, they’d move to catch the warm winds.

   Sly prickles of frozen white embers appeared on their brows to be burned away from the sun. She lifted her head, observant, listening to the dual winds. The robins sighed. She put her head down for a minute.

   The boy noticed a slight change in scenery. He opened one eye and he rested on one elbow, on his backside looking around, at the stream, the islands, the leaves, at the trees.

     “What’s wrong?” asked Grandmother

     “Nothing,” he said, lying down again.

     “There has to be something troubling you” she said

     “I thought I heard something.”

     “Is it the birds?”

     “No, not the birds, something else.”

     “Birds that don’t belong here.”

     He didn’t answer. Grandmother felt as the limbs of the forest, roots tense and relax, tense and relax.

     “I hear it” she said. “There it is again.”

     In the distant of the quiet, they both listened.

     “I don’t hear anything, Grandma.”

     “Be patient” said she, quietly. “It’ll reoccur.”

     Winter’s waves broke unto the night, freezing shards dawning the evening to turn quietly cold, ice coloured from moonlit mirrors, glass bulbs whose shine auras whisper.

     “I see mother.”

     “That’s nonsense. Mother isn’t here.”

     “Time is speaking to us, do you hear?”

     So, for the moment they listened.

     “I’m sorry Grandma, I don’t hear anything,” said the boy sensing a subtle chill. He went to a sudden stance, quickly he stood. There was no colour in the sky, the wind was suspended, the stones froze, the trees were hollow.

   The silence was in mirrors, it was staring to be the wind blowing over his ears, to preen along the light, leading the light somewhere beyond the fibres of his arms and legs. Grandmother took a step that would lead down the hill from their resting place.

     “Grandma, don’t!” said the boy

     She looked around the forest, oddly, as if it were gone away. She looked to the glass capsule of iron trees, afar, she was still listening.

     The crows suddenly, a boldness of air, sounding with the full hint of human, sang softly, through echoes. They mothered the melody and rhythm and words:

     “It is the evening of the day-”

     Grandmother to the tune, she turned to the sky’s aria of leaves to see the robins perched on branches, where the tuned traced.

   Meanwhile, the little boy made a wry face, raising his open palm violently. “Quiet down.”

     “The robins are singing, my dear boy!”

     The boy turned again. There the robins were, he waved to them, trying to smile.

   It was two o’clock.

   The sun left golden streaks upon the grasses. The ancient grandmother of time spoke the seeds of the    fruit of a withering flower, blew quiet husks in the cold. The robins held atop the hallowed branches and crows suspended in the sky.

   The moon, dark and distant struck through the sun’s orange fermentation that poured along the leaves of grass; caught between two islands of idle contrast of the whiteness that drifted to one place as it fell from the black. The shimmer of ice, the frosted irons of the brain under-ore, the leafed trails, the tide of dusted moonbeams saw themselves in rivers, spreading complexion.

   Grandmother still lay in the grass, the little boy beside her.

   Music, the one who wanders rose as with the mist of lost waters. It was whispers of the deep underground of midnights of memories and passed years, of salt and flavours of mists, of acceptance and the familiar dusks of the strange.

   The music sounded not unlike the ripples of water passing through sediment, snow falling, The depths of lines, drawing of the soft sound of roots growing from time. It was the sing of a voice time lost in caverns of fallen mountains. The hissing and sighing of frozen tides in deserted caves of engrained soils and missing treasures. The turn of limbs of elemental thistles of brushes brushing the sounds to be humours for buried skulls underneath sprouted earths. The warm phosphorescence and the cold, sun falling into night and a motherless moon, beams passed through generations, alter, shift, of sight.

    Only a few more hours. Grandmother might leave at any time. If only the boy would decide to leave as well, just as well to gone of refined elements, elemental interiors of home.

   The end of the daybreaking wind stirred silently, aware of his faded face and his stature, of the feeble child sinking by roots that grew shale molded of soil. Aware of him caught, held, as they sank ten and a thousand leagues down, on a sluice that wandered with a will of unthought wits, smoke unsparked turning as frantic, vapourized seeds, invisible smoke,

    to the depths of daylight underdark.

   The city lay in deep shadow, the sun’s fires of flat rays dying without conception of the city’s breath, and the frosted warmth of her fabric of living matter missing fires, the dusts of jewels dissipated, the ice of salted smoke feeding on faint breath, the sound was there, but only of airform lungs without breathing wings.

   Waves that thought of time moved the soft and changing dusks within dawns into the shallows were tepid as the rivers feeding on the earths and the two o’clock sun on a translation turning in phase or time.

   She mustn’t leave as to go away for the call of distance. If she leaves now, she’ll never return.

   Now. The warm island mind drifted, drifted. Now. Calls across the woodlands of windless noise in the early afternoon. Come down to the city. Now, whispered the music. Now.

   The little boy covered his ears.

   “Smiling faces I can see, but not for me” mimiced the crows sweetly.

   “I sit and watch as tears go by-”

     “Dear boy!” Grandmother reached over and embraced the boy. “Why must you scream?”

     “I must quiet them,” said the boy, hiding his woe, looking into the woods.

     It was three o’clock. The sky was all sun. Calm, Grandma stood up.

     “Should we leave?” she asked.

     “Can we go to the stream first?” he asked.

     “I feel tired walking there and back.”

     “Please.” he pouted. “Now.”

     “Did you want to see the minnows?”

     “Yes, I want to see if they’re around.”

     “The minnows? God, you must be dying!” She took the boy along to the stream.

     He helped Grandma walk there. Then he noticed she was more feeble. He stood there listening to the wind’s words.

   He heard nothing. He looked at the water past the glints of shattered sunshine, underneath he saw currents to carry minnows. The stream quieted.

   There was only a faint, far and fine pattern, where the rivers carried the minnows to their delta. He saw himself with them, only difference being he was in the current of wind to follow a path in infinite repetition.

   He squinted, sun from water, water pierced his optical memory again and again at the memory he looked from. He bounced back.

     “Look, there’s a big fish; he’s swimming up the stream!” He pointed, ecstatic, to it. “He’s already stopped, he’s looking at us!”

     Grandmother looked at the salmon and saw that it was quietly resting. She saw the minnows let the waves carry them to a new bank while the aging salmon’s life was brought to a quiet close.

     “There, she let the water take her. Her younglings didn’t choose how she was to go, but they must accept, to move on without her, move with the current, or to rest with the sediment.”

     He ate his cookies in silence. “A shame,” he said, without hearing what she said, “A big fish like that, turning belly-up. What a waste.”

     “Here” she said, unscrewing a thermos, “you must be thirsty. Finish the lemonade.”

     “Thanks.” He drank. He looked into the cold water with haste. He had to keep her here somehow. Without knowing why, he slapped his hands together and said, “Well, I’ll go in the water now.” He looked anxiously at the city and the moon.

     “That’s silly child, come,” she said, just remembering it: what he was trying to do.

     “Just one more thing,” he said just remembering it: he had to keep her here. “Can we go back and get some more biscuits? I’m all out.”

     “Is there anymore in the basket?”

     “Yes, last time I checked.”

     “I know you tell me your mother is always at work and you don’t see her that often,” she said. “But, okay.” She took his hand, loping steadily.

     The boy rushed off to their picnic place, every once in a while waiting for her to catch up. She knew she had to let him go and this was her last day before something was to claim her.

   She looked, smiling at the forest’s edge. She kept following the boy, out to what was waiting for her, that she didn’t know, she saw a warm presence.

     You can’t have her, the boy thought. Whoever or whatever you are, she’s here, and you can’t have her. I don’t know what’s going on; I don’t know anything, really.

   All I know is we’re gonna be here tomorrow at dawn. And tonight doesn’t change anything. So you can go back and wither where ever you were born, city, night, winter, future, or whatever is wrong today.

   Do what you will, you’re no match for us, he thought. He picked up a stone and threw it what seemed to be nowhere, until he saw his mother.

     “Mom!” he cried. “You.”

     Grandmother was standing beside him.

     “Oh?” He jumped right back.

     “Hey, you alright? You were standing there muttering.”

     “Was I?” He was surprised at himself. “Where’s the biscuits? I need some biscuits.”

     The thing that stood there vanished. The boy looked out at the city from time to time, eyes squinted,  nodding at the town as if to say, “Look! You see? Ah-ha!” He looked at the stone that mysteriously appeared in his hand.

    The words were engraved:

     Time Speaks To Us. The End Of Daylight Is Here.

Winter and Night, They Watch Above.

      The silence was in shadow.

   What extra-influence could reconstruct the shape of such words out of such precise craft?

   What was speaking to him?

 “It’s getting cold.” She gave him a hand.

They were half way leaving the forest.

     “Where are we going! Why leave so soon?”

     She turned as if he wasn’t her child anymore.

     “Something’s troubling you, what’s wrong?”

     “Why we just had a picnic and ate a whole lot-

   you can’t walk that far, you’ll get cramps!”

     She sighed. “Old wives’ tales.”

     “Just the same, you have to think about how  things just happen and you can’t help it, do you understand? It’s better to learn to accept certain truths sooner when you’re younger.”

     “Ah,” he said dismissing it.

     “I guess we could stay a little longer.” She turned, and he followed, looking at the night.

     Three o’clock. Four.

   The change came at four thirteen.

   Lying on the grass, the boy saw it coming and relaxed.

   The clouds had been forming since three.        

   Now, with a sudden rush, the fog came off from the trees at the edge. The wind, warm, humming the tune of the crows or robins had turned cold.

   A new wind blew up out of nothing. Darker clouds moved in.

     “It’s going to snow,” she said.

     “What a warm welcome,” he observed, sitting with arms folded. “Maybe our last day, and now, this snow, winter must be pleased because it’s clouding up.”

     “The weatherman,” she confided, “said there’d be a blizzard all night and go over our heads tomorrow. It would be a good idea to leave tonight.”

     “We’ll stay, just in case it clears. I want to get one more day of swimming in, anyway,” he said.

   “I haven’t been in the water yet today.”

     “We’ve spent the day, having so much fun strolling on this walkabout, time passes.”

     “Yeah,” he said, looking at the city which he started to see.

     The fog flailed across clouding the city, hiding it: the city was gone again.

     “There,” he said. “The snowflakes are disappearing.” His eyes were animated and young again. He was almost triumphant. “Come again, sun.”

     “Child, please, your mother is worried. We must return.”

     “Good old sun!” he said. “Let’s put these blankets away. We’d better run!”

     She tried to get his attention. But he was preoccupied.

     “Your mother will be here soon. You have to realize I won’t be here for much longer.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “I can’t take care of you anymore.”

     “No.” His face paled. “We have to go home, or we’ll catch a cold.”

     “The only home now is out there, your mother will take care of you.” She turned away from the city.

The wind rose, picking up the falling snow.

     Marching ahead, the boy headed for the house. He was singing softly to himself, the tune he heard the wind sing.

     “Hold on!” she said.

     He halted. He did not turn. He only listened to a voice far away.

     “There’s someone, fallen through the frozen stream!” she cried. “He’s sinking!”

     He couldn’t move. The wind halted him.

     “Wait there!” she shouted. “There’s someone out there! He isn’t moving! A little boy, I think!”

   “What boy?” he asked. “His parents will get him!”

     “They’re not here! Left without him!” She ran down to the stream, into the wind of winter.

     “Come back! Please come back!” he screamed. “There’s no boy there! Please, oh no, don’t!”

     “Don’t worry, someone will return for you!” she called. “The boy can’t move, standing, sinking in broken ice, drowning, being swallowed, you see?” she called. “My Grandchild is out there!”

     The smoke came in, the snow pattered down, a white flashing light raised in the dark sky.

   He ran, the boy after his grandmother,

   then the scattering snow from the blizzard rushed against him,

   crying, tears rushing from his eyes.

     “Don’t!” He put out his hands.

     She was lost into a dark fog.

     The boy waited under the dying sun.

     At six o’clock the sun was shrouded behind black clouds. The snow fell softly on concrete, white fading to grey.

   The forest vanished, the city appeared.

   It was there, the night, the future, the moon’s illuminated white shining on steel pillars. Among the night lamp streets, looking deep under, A man of his teenaged years saw a boy sink under water. Familiar. The snow globe bubbled and broke. The city was built, destined to replace the woods, like a pebble thrown into water, the reality rang with his thoughts, a part of life quickly lost as found.

   Youth. Familiar. Like memories, they’re lost. Nothing to them after they go. The future forgets the  past, like night forgets day, like the city forgets the forest; The man in the moonlight saw the boy with a face familiar to him sink into the streets, just lie there, doing nothing. There was nothing he could do. Strange. Disappointing, a vision of the past that clear, after all the years of waiting. What to do with him now? The boy from the woodlands peers into something he can’t see, the man looks back in memory it seems, his eyes stare, his skin pales. Silly boy, wake up! You have to wake up! The boy disappeared, grandmother, the forest with it. The memory? A life once lived? The mind of motherly roots vanished.

   He was then released. His mother, concerned called to him. He ran to his mother who was waiting there in the snowy night.

   The snow continued to fall, caressing the glass dome. Distantly, under leaden skies, from twilight dusks, a little boy screamed.

   A splinter of time appeared and vanished.

   Ah-the ancient winter stirred sluggishly in the air-isn’t time like a mother? The past ages and carries him to  the future? A daylight dome underneath the night?

   At seven o’clock the snow fell thick in the city. It was night and very cold and all the houses along the street had to turn on the heat.

#fiction #writers #science fiction #mystery #literature #short story #nature #memories #time travel #literary #rememberance #coming of age #youth #old age #wisdom #imagination #fantasy #poetic #post-modernism #creative #intellectual

[forbetterorworsefinalspace]

Cut Snake

Rating: Teen and Up

Fandom: Final Space

Part: 6

Link-  🌌

_______________________________________________________

Sheryl tries to teach Gary some life skills, well, life skills to her and it ends up biting her.

_______________________________________________________

“What is it?”

Gary’s tone was skeptical, and Sheryl supposed that was fair. After all she had just given him a wadded, brown, paper sac , budging with content. The offering was unsightly and a little ominous looking. It also didn’t likely help that she had stuffed it into his hands as soon as she got home.

Since he was kidnapped, Sheryl just let Gary stay at the camper whenever she went into the city. She was mostly looking for her own leads as Scheer did his, while also getting supplies and hunting down mercenary jobs. She had a few here and there, getting some extra money for food and ammo.

As for what the jobs were for, well, a merc doesn't kill and tell.

That money had also paid for the package in Gary’s hands.

Sheryl slumped into the folding chair by the outside cooking fire, gesturing to him as she started to smoke. “Open it and find out.”

Gary eyed her, but started to rip into the bag. He moved slowly, trying to not jostle whatever was inside, or tempt it to bite him. Sheryl just sighed out a cloud of some as he snailed onward, until her could get a good peek inside.

Gary’s jaw dropped.

“You like?” She asked, cocking her head.

Gary reached in, pulling out the laser blaster inside. “I-is this a gun?”

“Yup.”

“Your giving me a gun?!”

“Yuuup.”

“A REAL gun?!”

“Yuuuuuuuuup.” Sheryl leaned back in her chair, popping the p syllable when she spoke.

Gary stared at the blue laser gun, back to her, then the gun and back to her again in disbelief.

“What?” Sheryl asked, brow lowering.

“T-this is…” Gary blinked. “Y-you never gave me anything before…”

Sheryl looked off in the distance. “Well, first time for everything.”

“Why did you get me this?” Gary asked, raising the object in question and holding it by the barrel.

“I got it because if something finds camp while I’m in the city, your buggered.” She snorted, flicking away her finished ciggy. “Which means our things are buggered to.” She stood and walked over, pulling the gun from his hands. “And don’t hold it like that! It will throw off the sights and its bloody hot when you fire it.”

“Oh…” Gary said, staring at the gun intently.

“Now here, look and listen to me, I’m gonna show you some of the parts of  your gun.” She held it out so he could see. “Heres the trigger, trigger guard so it doesn't fire if it's knocked, this is the barrel, this is the battery port, and this is the most important part. The safety.” She made a show of turning the safety on and off a number of times. “See this? On. Off. On. Off. When your not using your gun, Safety is on- LET ME REPEAT-” She spoke louder and made Gary look her in the eyes. “When YOUR not using YOUR gun, the Safety is ON. Do- you- under-stand?” She poked him a few times in the chest for emphasis.

“Yes.”

“Then say it back to me.”

“When your not using your gun, the safety is on.”

“AGAIN.”

“When your not using your gun, the safety is on.” Gary repeated, eyes wide.

“Show me how.” Sheryl ordered and handed it back. She watched the boy clumsy shift the safety on and off a few times, though it got smoother the more he did it. “Good. Give.”

Once she got the gun back she knelt and lined it up with her eye, closing her other one. “See this tab on the top? It's called the sight. It helps you line up the end of the barrel with your target. Keep yah arm steady and pull the trigger to fire.” She pulled a square battery from the paper bag, showing Gary how to unlatch the back of the gun. “This is how you load it. Each battery has 100 shots.”

She made a show of putting the safety back on, then handed it to him. When he took it, she noted in the back of her mind that his hands were a bit… small for it…

She shook the thoughts away. “See that tree there? Try shooting it.” She pointed to one in the middle of the swamp nearby. Dead and withered. Gary stepped up, latched the safety off and lined it up with his sights. His tongue peeking out the corner of his mouth.

PLOW! PLOW! PLOW!

The local bird population, or well… the planet’s equivalent to them, flew off in the sky in a flurry of angry noises. However, the tree was untouched, Gary missing it by a few feet. The boy slumped and Sheryl rolled her eyes.

“Well. Its fires…” She grunt. “So it should at least keep anything away until I get back. I mean it won’t kill them, but it will make a decent hole in flesh. I’ll teach you how to clean it later, that's gonna be your responsibility. Keep it clean and it’ll keep you safe.” She said. “As fer ammo, that's your responsibility to. I buy my own, you buy your own.”

“What? I don’t have any money!” Gary said, looking back at her.

“You'll get money for doing work around here.” Sheryl tisked. “Every job you do, you get some money but ONLY if you do it right, and do it well.” She frowned. “And that you can prove you did it.” She pointed at the gun. “That should hold you while you practice. There's two more batteries in the bag.”

Gary stared at her. “So this is to keep me safe?”

“Yup.”

“And… teach me money management?”

“Amongst other things I guess…” Sheryl frowned. “ Frankly I need something to protect our stuff, and I can’t be arsed to do upkeep on a gun I don’t use. I learned this stuff around your age.” She grunted and shrugged as Gary walked over to her.

She didn’t really know why the idea of Gary being left at camp unarmed bothered her. She knew how to use a gun as a child, but she never owned one. She mostly used knives, or made due with them. Gary should have been able to as well. Yet when she saw the gun for sale she couldn’t stop herself from getting it for him.

Better than nothing.

Sheryl stiffened when Gary threw his arms around her waist, pressing his face into her stomach. “This is great! Thanks mom!”

“Ugh…” Sheryl stared down at him before awkwardly putting a hand on his back. “Y-your welcome?” She patted him.

She wasn’t really hugged often. Hell she had hardly gotten a handshake since John left her. She was tense for the first few seconds, but managed to relax slightly.

Ok, not so bad, but it was still weird…

Hmmm-

PLOW!

“AH FUCKIN’ HELL!!! ”

Gary screamed and Sheryl shoved him away, gripping her thigh where the gun had hit. Blood seeped from between her fingers and she doubled over, gritting her teeth. “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”

She pulled her hands up to assess the damage. The wound bled but not as much as it could have, likely cauterized slightly.  It was the size of a quarter, an inch deep and hurt like a bitch . She groaned in pain, but when she locked her eyes on her son it turned to a deep growl. Gary had landed on his rump, eyes wide and frightened, gun still in his hands.

“Y-you lil bastard!”

Gary flinched. “N- no! No mom! I’m sorry! I’m sorry- I-I-I didn’t mean to-”

“I SAID PUT THE FUCKIN’ SAFTEY ON!!” She shouted. When she tried to straighten up, she almost lost balance and stumbled a bit.

Gary scrambled to safety the gun before he got to his feet and ran to her side. “I’m sorry! I’m really sorry! Let me help-”

Sheryl snarled and she grabbed him without looking, tightening her hold to a vice grip. “I swear to god, I’m gonna kill you!!”

“M-mom-”

“If I started building walls today, and didn’t stop for forty years, there still wouldn't be enough to fuckin' put you through-!!

“M-mom!- It hurts-!!”

Sheryl growled and looked at him, she had her hand buried in his hair so tightly her knuckles were white-

She was holding him by the hair…

Sheryl wrenched her hand back, letting go of Gary in the process. She stared at him, still slightly pained, then to her hand, grinding her teeth.

“M-mom-?”

“I can’t-” Sheryl stumbled back into the folding chair, gripping her injury. “I can’t fuckin look at you right now..” Her voice was cold and furious. “Just get the first aid kit from under my bed.”

Gary ran into the camper and came back with it in record time. When he gave it to her Sheryl still couldn’t stand to look at him. Instead she focused on her injury.

She drowned it in rubbing alcohol, biting down on her hand to help numb the pain and dull her noise. Then she pulled out a needle and thread, painstakingly closing the injury with shaking hands. After that she put on gauze and rolled on bandages, strapping it shut.

Once done she pulled her pants back up where she had tugged it partly down and slumped in the chair, grimacing in pain and staring up at the sky as the sun set. She knew Gary was still sitting nearby, she could hear him. She didn’t want to speak to him, see him, or even think about him right now…

So she reached over and forcefully turned on the radio they found in the camper, one with a plug so you could play songs from any device. It was still tuned to Gary’s phone, full of music he and John used to listen to.

Thankfully it wasn’t Loggins again, but a Prince song.

As she shakily started to light another smoke, Gary curled up into a ball, eyes looking to the ground but not really seeing. Over the red tinted twilight of the swamp, the music played on, echoing and slightly eerie for its content.

♪♫- He told me several times that he didn't like my kind

'Cause I was a bit too leisurely - ♪♫

♪♫- Seems that I was busy doing something close to nothing

But different than the day before

That's when I saw her, Ooh, I saw her

She walked in through the out door, out door- ♪♫

♪♫- She wore a raspberry beret!- ♪♫

This Was A MISTAKE.

#Fanfiction #sheryl goodspeed #gary goodspeed #good parenting #kinda? #abuse #Past abuse #Hurt no comfort #injury

[cant-think-of-something-better]

8 people i’d like to know better

Thank you for tagging me @lol707lol707lol !!! except now I can't tag you :\

name: Would it kill the mystery if I write it? (I think I’ve wrote it here before but the odds of real life people finding my tumblr has increased recently lol)

birthday: February 1st!

zodiac sign: ooh recently one of my friends had me figure out my entire zodiac: Aquarius, ascendent Taurus and moon in Aries. I don't put a lot of faith in astrology but most Aquarius stuff is pretty spot on for me. And I was happy cuz Taurus’ are usually my favorites 

hobbies: I like to draw but tbh all I do is work rn haha. I sporadically pick up hobbies that dont last too long, I think the last one was knitting (I can only do hats lol). I’m a very dedicated sleeper if that counts 

favorite colors: Idk if its the depression talking but I’ve been saying grey for a while (might be a thing stolen from a song once again). I like it when its got a bit of a blue/purple tint to it tho.

height: 5 feet 1.5 inches. so about 156 cm I think (sorry I’m a useless American and conversions hurt my head)

favorite book: I really like Phantoms by Dean Koontz! horror stuff is my jam but if I pick up a teen romance-y book I read it so freaking fast cuz its like brain candy (The amount of times I have read the Twilight series is kinda embarrassing) For series I really loved Maximum Ride and I gotta stop now cuz I could go on and on about books. (send me asks for book recs plzzz)

last song i listened to: I’m listening to Billie Eilish as I write this! Currently Bellyache is playing

last film i watched: Circle (2015) I literally consume random netflix horror movies like candy these days. I watched this before I went to work the other day XD. would recommend, pretty interesting 

inspiration or muse: Usually music or random snippets from tv shows gets me drawing. If I really love a fic sometimes I do fan art for it... I haven't finished any of those tho 

dream job: God if I could draw better and understand computer programs better I would love to be an animator. I’ve thought about being a wildlife vet before (I realllllly like birds) but i gave up on that for some reason... heheh time to stop thinking about this

meaning behind url: pretty self explanatory. I’m awful at coming up with names but I kinda wish I came up with something more original/that would give me some cute tumblr nickname but oh wellll. Sort of reminded me of a lyric from a Twenty one Pilots song

I feel like I’ve been bugging people with all the picrew things recently so I’m gonna take a break from tagging people (*cough cough* my go to person already did this *cough cough*) but any of my followers who see this are now automatically tagged! yes you reading this! feel free to do it if you want!

#We stay in place Cause we don't wanna lose our lives So let's think of something better #If u wanna find my name ur gonna have to scroll through my blog cuz I dont even remember when I posted it #or just ask nicely lol #ask game #excuse the amount i ramble here #oh and the song is Forest

[singingcookie]

X me, xion and roxas, Dance with me!!

Leave a “X Me” in my ask, and I will write whatever it is that you wish, [specify.]

Another day, another mission.

But even fighting Heartless for, you know, the hundredth time–it wasn’t as bad today. The last few times Roxas had been assigned to Beast’s Castle, he had been paired with Xaldin. And while he didn’t exactly hate anyone in the Organization (apparently he couldn’t with “no heart” or whatever), the man with side burns didn’t really make his, ah, top-picks as far as partners went. Most of the things he talked about went right over the blond’s head. And Xaldin seemed to get exasperated with his cluelessness pretty quick.

But for the first time in a while–Roxas was paired with one of his top picks! He glanced over his shoulder after finishing off his own Heartless. Xion hopped back on one foot, her black coat fluttering around her, and sent a fireball at the Shadow now a fair distance away. Once it faded, she spun around to the final enemy, hefting her own weapon above her head to land a finishing blow. She clearly had it handled.

The Keyblade faded away from his grasp in a shimmer as he decided to take in the room now that it wasn’t crawling with their targets. It was still as bright as the last time he had arrived. Xaldin had said when they investigated the castle before, that it was clear the Beast avoided this room. Judging from the lack of destroyed decor that littered every other inch of the castle. There were hardly even scuff marks on the floor, it was pristine even.

Roxas actually…really liked this room. There really wasn’t much in it. No furniture even. Just the banisters that held up the U-shaped second story, encompassing the wide open space that he and Xion had been clearing the Heartless from. And then full-length windows that showed off the dark forest past the castle grounds. Perhaps it was the lighting. Yeah. The warm red surrounding the windows, the tanned flooring with the pattern in the center, and the powerful glow of the candles… It reminded him a lot of the best view in Twilight Town.

He dropped his head back, gazing at the gigantic chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Somehow it felt like the centerpiece of the mural. Even though he had no idea how a golden chandelier would relate to the mural of clouds, filled with–what had Xaldin called them again?–cherubs, that’s right. He couldn’t explain why but it just worked.

“All right, that was the last one here!” He hummed in reply to her cheerful tone, tearing his gaze away from the artwork above them. He was about to turn around, when she passed him with an interesting hop in her step, her eyes ever forward. “The ballroom’s pretty nice, huh?”

Ah. Ballroom. That’s what Xaldin had called it before too. “Yeah…” He took a few steps further in, his gaze following hers to the windows and the inky scenery that lay through them, dotted with the sparkle of stars. “But what’s this room even for anyway?”

He heard her tinkling laughter beside him, and he suddenly felt very warm in the face. “Roxas, didn’t Xaldin tell you?”

“I mean,” he started, raising a hand to rub the back of his head feeling a bit awkward as he admitted, “sometimes I don’t completely listen when he starts being a downer. Which is, y’know–”

“Often,” she agreed with another peal of giggles. She said that she and Demyx had talked about it on one of their missions here together–another person who was on the lower end of Roxas’ picks for partners–which explained why she had actually listened to the explanation. “It’s for dancing. The people here would hold big parties with upper class people and everyone would dance all night long!”

He tilted his head, mumbling the word under his breath as though it might get it to stick in his brain this time. The word was familiar somehow. But he knew it wasn’t from his time in the Organization. Perhaps in his old memories–his old self and what he couldn’t truly recall–was where it originated. “Xion… Do you know how to dance?”

A grin spread across her face so bright that it had the corner of his lips tilting upwards too. “Yeah! I mean, Demyx told me all about it! He even showed me how it would go at these parties! You wanna try?”

He didn’t know what exactly to expect here, but he gave a tiny nod anyway. “It’s like this…!” He pitched forward when she grabbed the hand closest to her, tugging him closer. They had a step between them and he wondered vaguely if they had ever stood so close before. From the pink that dusted Xion’s cheeks, and how she mumbled an apology about pulling him so suddenly, he didn’t think so.

After he assured her that it was fine, she started to change their position, telling him as she went. First, they were to keep holding their hands this way. He didn’t mind that. It was warm. And then he was supposed to put his other hand on her waist. He was about to ask if that was really alright when she rolled her eyes, and used her free hand to place it there herself. Okay then.

Once that was done, she placed that same hand upon his shoulder. Now there was even less space between them. Now everything was warm. Their hands and definitely his face. Yes, his face was very warm now. “Um, is this it?” he wondered. That was hard to ask–his throat was dry now too.

She was laughing a lot today. But it made him smile and forget about his hot face. She started to explain how the steps went, telling him to watch his feet at first. She counted them out and smiled patiently if he accidentally trodded on her feet. It took a little while but…

“I think I’m getting it!”

“Demyx said that it’s not getting it if you have to stare at your feet the entire time,” she informed him with a giggle. He hummed, giving the smallest nod before glancing back up. Only realizing now that dancing this way, there was no way to really look at anything except for her.

Her short, black hair was messy and all over the place. Probably from fighting earlier–and all the bouncing around she tended to do probably didn’t help. Her face was more pink than it was earlier and he wondered if she felt as warm as he did.

But it was her eyes that mesmerized him. He knew they were blue. But had they always had that purple tint to them? And did they always sparkle like that in this light? He had never really looked at her straight on like this at the clock tower.

He didn’t know how long they spun around the floor. All Roxas did know was that time was definitely passing. And they needed to RTC, but he really didn’t want to stop. “Roxas, I’m feeling a little…dizzy.”

“Oh. We have been dancing for a while.” Their eyes were still glued to each other, and he wasn’t really sure what to do here. And it felt like his words were leaving his lips without him willing them too. “Maybe we should stop.”

“We have stopped.”

And she’s right. They’re no longer spinning, but they’re still holding each other. As though they might pick it back up. Maybe they would, if they stayed like that too much longer. Axel might wonder what happen if they got back too late. And it’s with that thought, that Roxas removes his hand from her waist, taking a miniscule step back. “W-we should probably be heading to the clock tower.”

She takes a step back as well. “Right. Don’t want Axel to eat our ice cream, huh?” Their clasped hands finally separate; and they only look at each other for a moment before Xion starts to lead the way back. It was quiet as they made their way through the silent castle corridors, to return to their portal home. “So”–he sees her brush some hair behind her ear and the pink dust is back on her cheeks–“did you like dancing, Roxas?”

They aren’t standing as close, but he still feels just as warm as when they were dancing. He doesn’t even have to think to answer her. “Yes.” They should do it again, someday maybe. But he doesn’t say that part out loud.

#Roxas #Xion #Rokushi #the cookie sings #OTP:Tugging Invisible Heartstrings #when they stop dancing is def based off of the one scene in Anastasia lol #I am such a slow writer orz #solfeggioninja