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bastart13 · 3 years

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I’ve had a lot of fun recently coming with with female mercenary characters for TF2. I really liked where the concept art was going with making them all individual characters rather than simply “if the characters were women”

The design style is fantastic for distinct simplicity so I tried limiting myself to basic colours and shapes to make these

and I’m pretty confident they pass the silhouette test!

Character names/bios under the cut!

Heavy

Name: Marie Jarrett

Age: Mid 30s-40s

Height: 6’5

Nationality: American (Hawai’i)

Bio: Raised in Hawai’i, growing up she developed more and more drastic measures to fend off the tourists swarming her home. Land mines, electric gates, guard dogs, none could stop them for long until she picked up her trusty minigun to send her message. But even still, she hears the click of cameras in the night.

Eventually, she left her home to explore the world. Enthralled with the image of seeing different wonders across different countries, she’s always disappointed. She’s travelled every continent and still finds nothing that lives up to her expectations. No place, no person. She’s outgoing and open to new experiences, only she usually hates them.

Mercenary life is a great opportunity to earn money, see sights, meet new people and kill them after they don’t meet your expectations. She hates New Mexico and takes every opportunity to destroy the buildings and insult her employer’s tastes. She finds some people she tolerates within the mercenaries as she hasn’t yet visited where they live. However much she hides it, she has a deep, instinctual fear of the Engineer.

Soldier

Name: Linda Smith

Age: Early 40s

Height: 5’10

Nationality: Canadian

Bio: Canada’s perfect woman… or so she claims. The star of war propaganda posters and clearly decided for the role because of her great tactical assets. She’s there to motivate people into the fight. To spread the glory of Canada and inspire her allies. She believes she has higher orders than anyone else she’s working for (ignoring the fact she hasn’t heard from them for a good few years) and is determined to follow them to the letter. She may have lost the letter but she remembers it good enough.

She represents the ideals of Canada: polite, friendly, apologetic, and pacifistic. None of these are contradicted by how she throws around rockets. That’s not what Canada means. She’s superior to everyone around her and graciously educates them on how to improve through example. She loves her French and British allies and will kindly tell the Americans how to be better.

She’s motivating and actually fairly competent, it’s just that competency might be misdirected. She’s damn good at rocket jumping, shooting her shotgun, and supporting her team, it’s just that you really need to get it in her head when she’s meant to be doing it.

Scout

Name: Patricia “Pat” Herald

Age: 50s-60s

Height: 5’4

Nationality: English

Bio: In her years, Patricia has learnt fear… and she’s learnt to laugh in its face. She wakes up at the crack of dawn, ready to leave at the drop of a hat, boots polished and laced the night before. Her years have taught her that with a gun and Jeremy by her side, she can survive!

The postal route of Appleby-in-Westmorland.

She’s been chased by geese, dogs, cows, elderly ladies, and when her postal route had her delivering post during the war, she developed a taste for blood. Nothing will stop her from delivering her post on time. Every day before 6am, every postbox will have their letters and parcels. One chucked across barbed wire, another house jumped over a river, another house miles into the country with dogs on her heels, she WILL get there and she’ll get there FAST.

But after a couple of decades, she needs a change of scenery, and the Gravels wars are just the holiday she’s needed. With her trusty black and white cat by her side (ignoring the yowling and scratches) she reckons it’ll be great time to enjoy herself.

Quotes: “Oh, hello, Human Jeremy.”

“Bloody fucking Ethel! Building her house out in the country… surrounded by bloody hills and rivers!”

Pyro

Name: Nikephoros Papadopoulos

Age: Late 20s

Height: 5’11

Nationality: Greek

Bio: Survival of the fittest. Nature gives and nature taketh away. If you’re not prepared for that, well, Pyro is more than happy to teach you the lesson. They embody the old values of the Greek gods: f*ck or fire. She indulges her every whim and unfortunately for the people around her it often involves arson.

One year for the Olympic games, she was given the noble title of torchbearer. On complete coincidence, the Olympics shifted to primarily water sports. Underwater sprints became the hot new trend!

She’s merry and chatty, never missing the opportunity to talk to other people about herself and her world view. She can’t wait to spread her gospel to help other people improve themselves (though she always gets a laugh out of those who go out screaming in the flames). She can’t help it if she has a sadistic side.

Engineer

Name: Mikawo Kojima

Age: Early 20s

Height: 5’0

Nationality: Japanese

Bio: Japan’s early-rising industrial revolutions in technology are best exemplified in Mikawo, a young upstart determined to rise to the top, learning everything she can and building the best of the best. Unfortunately, she’s never been the most creative but when you happen upon other people’s blueprints and happen to construct them first, what does it matter who came up with the “concept”?

At first, she appears to be every bit the quiet and demure young woman people expect, only when silk hides steel, that steel is a massive automatic sentry gun. She’s motivated by a distinct contempt for the people who get in her way. Especially those who try to be better than her. She enjoys the flexibility of English, especially the cusses, and she has no reservations about swearing up a storm, even if she still refuses to give a straight rejection, preferring instead to give a small “I’ll think about it.”

Quotes: “This GUN is fair use on your head!”

Demo

Name: Qingzhao Zeng

Age: Late 40s

Height: 5’3

Nationality: Chinese

Bio: The Zeng family has a long-standing family trade in demolitions and explosives, traced down the line all the way to the Song dynasty. Luckily, Qingzhao has sisters so, you know, it’s not all that important. She doesn’t even have to stop smoking and drinking. She hasn’t blown herself up (that much) so clearly, it’s working. Precision is for other people to worry about. She’s apathetic to a T, having seen everything. Measurements come from the heart. A pinch of gunpowder there, a splash of paint there.

Her family has a deep-seated rivalry with the DeGroots. Long ago in ancient China, a Zeng matriarch woke up in a cold sweat, a message from the stars to let them know of their Scottish rivals. Due to being a continent away from each other, the families have actually met each other only a handful of times, but the hatred needs to be kept up because, what if?

Turns out, Qingzhao has met Tavish even before finding employment under the Mann brothers. One drunken night, the two of them had a short, whirlwind friendship, sharing secrets and declaring each other to be their best friends. Luckily for them, they both forgot the night, merrily hating each other as tradition dictates. However, headaches and flashes of this terrible night haunt them both. Could they really get over centuries of hate and become friends?

Absolutely not.

Sniper

Name: Ansa Aaltonen

Age: 27

Height: 6’2

Nationality: Finnish

Bio: Snow. Sugar. Cocaine. Her life is run by many white powders. Ansa is a professional sniper, with a sharp eye and a steady hand… when she isn’t also high as a kite, lost in the snowy wilderness of Finland and screeching to the sky. When you’re up in the dark and cold, you need something to give you a little pep in your step. It just so happens Ansa liked having a bit more pep than most.

She’s there for a THRILL. There’s nothing better to get your heart pumping at 200 beats per second than a good headshot, embracing the chill, and a hit of sugar. She no longer feels the cold or heat or even pain, shrugging it off until she collapses. It just makes her feel alive. She’s efficient, fast, and determined to get her kicks.

She has an unusual taste, living off fermented fish and tree bark. To most people around the Finnish wilderness, she’s nothing more than an urban legend, but she’s very real and she’s looking for some excitement, happily found in employment in the Gravel wars.

Spy

Name: Yvonne Pleshette [Real name N/A]

Age: 30s

Height: 5’8

Nationality: American (California)

Bio: The silver screen calls to his woman and she’s happy to answer. She trains herself to act in every possible role she can, having a wide range of accents, body languages, and backstories. To truly test herself, she gave up her identity long ago. Lately she’s been going by the name “Yvonne.”

The world of Hollywood is cutthroat and full of backstabbers so she learnt to cut throats and stab backs. While some people tell her the terms are metaphorical, nothing else has given her more roles. Living the mercenary life is simply gathering research for her roles (and earning some much-needed money in the process).

She presents herself as a classic film star, despite being a minor name at best, mostly because she’s always changing it. She has high standards but a cheapskate personality. She’s a bit of a bitch, happily criticising others, especially if they’re working with her. What can she say? She’s a diva.

[Slutshames other spy]

Quotes: “Ugh, actors these days, they know nothing about getting into character. They still have names.”

“’AHHHHH—’ Wait, no. Once more from the top. Scream in agony.”

Medic

Name: Susan Monks

Age: 30-40s

Height: 5’7

Nationality: American (New Jersey)

Bio: The American Healthcare system. Is there a more glorious sight? The exploitation of pain. The money. The debt. The fear it strikes into the entire population it’s designed to help. To Susan, there’s nothing better. She squeezes every last drop from the people she helps, working on a purely transactional lifestyle. She’ll never help someone unless she has all of their insurance information and the payment secure in her bank, and god forbid she ever accept help. It’s not like she can afford her own prices.

She’s very self-aware of her own corruption and proud of it, though she refuses to be exploited in the same way, suspicious of anything “free” but also doing her best not to pay for anything.

That said, she doesn’t much care for how good a job she does. In her eyes, asking for surgery is one thing. Asking for successful surgery is another. She has a variety of skills in both cosmetic and military medicine. She just wishes the license board would stop sending her “malpractice” letters. Ugh, stick to your own business. “Disappearing” all their messengers is becoming a pain.

Quotes: “Why get someone else to do something for you when you can scrounge a way to do it yourself?”

#team fortress 2 #team fortress #tf2 #fem tf2 #tf2 heavy #tf2 spy #tf2 scout #tf2 medic #tf2 sniper #tf2 engineer #tf2 soldier #tf2 demoman #tf2 pyro #character design #art #i'm very happy with how these turned out

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scorpionyx9621 · 2 years

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When someone asks me if there ever is going to be a good Red Hood comic where he's just as capable and deadly as everyone dreams he can be.

I get that everyone yearns for a capable and deadly Red Hood. Everyone fawns over the Jason Todd who brought Gotham's crime scene to its knees in the matter of like a week in Under the Red Hood. I'm not here to say wanting that kind of comic is wrong because it isn't, I'm just saying Jason Todd has changed as a character. He's not the same character he was when he was brought back to life back in 2005.

If I wanted to stan a criminal mastermind who rules Gotham's underworld and strikes fear in the heart of criminals I'd just be a Joker kinnie. I'm being 100% serious. Why should I or anyone even bother with Jason Todd who by the definition of what everyone likes about him so much when I can get all of the same things from The Joker minus the daddy issues.

What? Don't believe me? Let's compare shall we?

Both Jason Todd and Joker are murderers

Both use guns

Both use other various weapons to kill people

Both have pretty sizable criminal followings

Both are obsessed with Batman

Both have come back from the dead

Both came from bad home lives (supposedly with Joker we aren't certain because they re-write his canon more than they do Jason's)

Both have their canons re-written by DC just about every new comic they're in.

Both have beared the title Red Hood

Both have a unique hair coloration/pattern

Both get enjoyment out of hurting/torturing people.

Both have used crowbars as weapons

Both have tried on numerous occasions to hurt not only Batman but a multitude of Robins.

Both have engaged in elaborate plots to try to get Batman to notice/fight them. Multiple times.

Both are considered capable killers who are very smart.

I can keep going. I really can. It's not hard to compare these two. Literally the only things separating Jason Todd from The Joker at this point are the fact that Jason is a conventionally attractive 6-foot tall, muscular white man and that Jason has in recent comics turned around and accepted his spot as a member of the Bat Family*.

It really goes to show that, maybe, just maybe, writers like Judd Winnick intentionally made Jason Todd take on the mantle of The Red Hood, Joker's original persona as a villain, and gave him a literal grocery list of similarities as a means to emphasize his villain-like behavior to serve as an in-between for Batman and The Joker. And this isn't even an original idea. Many times comics have made the comparison between Jason and The Joker. Three Jokers, DC Comics Truth and Justice, Death of The Family, just to name a few.

So again, you ask, since you went through all the lengths to compare the two, why don't you just go off in your corner and be a Joker kinnie? Well my friend, it's simple. I don't like the Joker. He's so oversaturated in the DC comics market and DC seems to have finally figured at least that part out. Jason Todd is an anti-hero who teeters between Knight in Sour Armor and Jerkass Woobie at best and falls into shades of Moral Sociopathy at worst (particularly under Winnick's penmanship) But Jason Todd is not The Joker. It's outright blasphemy to compare the two in most circles, but Jason Todd is a very compelling, albeit underdeveloped character.

It doesn't help that we have basically a decade of development for Jason Todd under Sc*tt L*bd*ll that we as a fandom have collectively decided to disregard. And rightfully so. Mostly because RHATO and RH:O was a discombobulated mess of a story with a lot of very cool and neat ideas that were in no way practical or truly even relevant to Jason Todd. L*bd*ll tried to make Jason into this self-insert of a 'bad boy seeking redemption' which really had no narrative follow-through because one issue you'll have Bruce and Jason chilling on top of a hill stop Gotham eating cheeseburgers discussing how Bruce trusts Jason with Bizarro more than he does with Lex Luthor. And then not 10 issues later Bruce is literally beating Jason to within an inch of his life. Jason even regarded how he thought Bruce didn't even hit the Joker that hard.

All of this is to say that we really don't have a truly good narrative for Jason that isn't him literally cosplaying as The Joker and causing chaos in Gotham in Under the Red Hood, a freshly out of the dip Jason Todd thrown into the world after being dead for who knows how long training to become the world's deadliest assassin all whilst killing countless people and sleeping with Talia,

We've been gyped of a good Red Hood narrative for going on two decades now. And truth be told I don't know if we're ever going to get a good story for Jason Todd on par with Dick Grayson and Nightwing. They've fumbled the ball with his initial characterization in his first redemption under L*bd*ll that I don't know if we'll ever get a truly satisfying narrative for Red Hood as an anti-hero. For now he's literally just a murderer who Bruce let's come with him on investigations and stuff who badmouths him at best to a 'regretable' punching bag at worse.

When you compare Jason to characters like say Frank Castle as The Punisher, whom despite being co-oped by the American alt-right, is a much more compelling character with a better narrative because Frank Castle knows what he is, and he isn't trying to be a hero like Jason.

With say Harley Quinn, we've had about a decades-worth of comics showing us Harley realizing that Joker has been abusing her. We've gotten to watch Harley try and fail many times at trying to turn her life around and do the right thing. To now after years of trying to and succeeding in doing the right thing, Harley Quinn is now a member of the Bat Family (in like some weird-off in the corner way)

This long-winded post can be finalized by saying I don't get why everyone is so obsessed with wanting Jason Todd who is 'deadly and competent'. If I wanted foil to Batman who is all deadly and a criminal mastermind I'd just follow The Joker. To me saying you only liked Jason from Under the Red Hood and think every subsequent title he's appeared in is OOC is like saying you like a cover-band of Journey better than Journey because you don't like Journey.

Jason Todd is a very compelling, interesting, and likeable character despite DC Comics bombing literally every title he's been in since 2010. He's a great character who is as fascinating as he is lovable. He needs a serious re-branding because while he is a great and complex character, DC needs to show us and not tell us how he's growing. However at the end of the day no one is going to be entirely happy with how he's portrayed and that's fine. You aren't wrong for wanting the Jason Todd of y'old. That's just not my cuppa tea. I just want a good, 4-part story by Wayne Family Adventures of Bruce and Jason finally beginning to work through their 800lbs of USDA prime-grade beef between the two of them in that fun cartoonish aesthetic because man, Bruce and Jason in WFA are both so pretty.. also WFA is the only comic that seemingly 70-80% of the fandom is at least okay with because it's kitschy and tumblr-baity but at least Bruce isn't hitting his freaking kids.

#jason todd #red hood #batman #bruce wayne #wayne family adventures #under the red hood #red hood and the outlaws #red hood outlaw #the joker #red hood lost days #rant #I just want a good Jason story but i know it'll never happen ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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caleiiiii · 4 years

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mcytbers as subway workers because i work at subway and i said so

i wrote this all at like 1 am im sorry

subway terminology (at least where i work)

waste out -means an item cant, or isnt, being sold, like overbaked cookies or expired milk. gets written down on a list for tax returns or smth

freezer pulls -pulling items from the freezer to the walk in fridge so they can thaw for the upcoming days

POS system -the software used for ringing up food, has a bunch of options per type of sandwich

generally 2 shift rotations , each one has a shift lead which is ur main opener or closer

characters

dream

makes sandwiches so fast.

how ???

he wraps the sandwiches immaculately as well

definitely a main closer

george

just. disappears during a rush

only to be found two hours later STILL doing dishes

dream and sapnap are not pleased.

sapnap

convinces dream to waste out bread for him so he can eat it

gives ppl he likes free cookies

terrible at wrapping sandwiches

tommy

always works with wilbur and tubbo. always.

he HATES freezer pulls but if he has to he can be seen SPRINTING between the freezer and the fridge

also bad at wrapping sandwiches

does all the online orders for tubbo because he cant read them well

tubbo

loves to bake the bread and cookies

got a complaint once because he read an online order wrong so tommy always does them

hates ringing people up but loves to make the sandwhiches

technoblade

only works like 1 shift a week but its the most goddamn productive shift of anyone.

always makes sure they are selling potato soup when hes working

another main closer

wilbur

always controls the radio in the store

always works with tubbo and tommy, drives them to work

bribes others so he doesnt have to do the dishes

main opener

philza

the manager

super chill about scheduling

turns a blind eye to people “accidently” dropping cookies and wasting them out

niki

a goddess at baking the bread and cookies

never burns anything ever

everybody wants to work with her shes so nice

fundy

is really good at ringing those ppl up with 28372 coupons

horrible at making sandwiches tho

the only one that knows how to fix the soda machine when it breaks

quackity

always gets asked to translate the writing on the boxes since its in spanish 95% of the time

loves stocking the milk cooler so he can take home the expired sodas n shit

always forgets to remind customers when stuff costs extra

schlatt

that one transfer from another store that does everything

slightly wrong.

its been long enough now that he should know better but nobody wants to correct him.

eret

has tons of pins on his hat, 10/10

really good at making the wraps

always says hello when customers enter

karl

the new hire

immediately taken under sapnaps wing, much to the chagrin of dream

much more bread is now wasted out.

bbh and skeppy

regulars that are just. always there

they know all the employee gossip and get discounts on food

phil is .5 seconds away from asking them if they want a job

normal shift schedules

wilbur, tommy, tubbo (day shift)

dream, george, sapnap (night shift)

eret, niki, fundy (day shift)

technoblade, quackity, schlatt (night shift)

karl mainly works with the dteam, but jumps around

random things

the cookie incident

once tubbo accidently overbaked like 2 dozen cookies

so he and tommy ate all of them during their shift

they did not come into work the next day.

dream and techno rivalry

dream and technoblade have a rivaly about who can close and leave the store the quickest

eventually they decide to time themselves and race eachother on their respective shifts

techno wins with a time of 3 minutes before theyre officially allowed to close.

they both get yelled at by phil

technoblade’s only mistake

the only mistake technoblade has made ever was accidently leaving the bread cabinet open overnight

wilbur, tubbo, and tommy find it in the morning and have to throw all the bread out

tommy and tubbo split the bread and each leave with a garbage bag full of subway bread

wilbur still wont let techno live it down.

hacker things

once fundy hacked the POS system to give him a 100% discount

used it for about a month before someone (quackity) accidently pressed the option and snitched to phil

luckily, he just sighed and reset the system

cookie dough

wilbur comes up with the idea to pop raw cookie dough in the microwave and eat it half baked

phil comes in one day only to make -direct eye contact- with tommy as he and tubbo lick cookie dough off of some deli paper

allows it to happen as long as they pay for the dough

subway garlic bread

on a really slow day niki and eret are goofing off and create

~subway garlic bread~

it instantly becomes a secret menu favourite among employees and regulars

the bet

once skeppy bet quackity and schlatt that they wouldnt start a fake argument during rush hour

skeppy recorded the whole thing

technoblade can be seen in the backround silently making sandwiches as quackity and schlatt scream at eachother about if quackity has a “flatty patty”

phil tries to be mad but sees all the tips they made and lets is slide

sacrifices

george is the one always sacrificed to deal with the crabby middle aged moms

its his punishment for not helping during the rush.

torture

sometimes for fun wilbur takes his meal break right before the dinner rush

tommy stares at him in fury the whole time.

betting pool

none of the employees can tell if bbh and skeppy are dating

its to the point that they keep a betting chart on a white board next to the “top failure of the week” spot

subway ghost

after a few freak instances wilbur is positive that the subway is haunted and convinces phil to let him do a séance after hours

he manages to convince half the staff that the store is haunted

(the ghost is drista or smth idk aksjdhajk)

top failure of the week

a tally on the white board in the back room of who dropped/wasted out thw most items

sapnap has the record top failure of the week, dropping a total of 42 loaves of bread in a week

schlatt got put on the board once. never again.

enamel pins

tubbo finds a enamel pin of a bee that he puts on his visor

its not technically allowed but phil lets him do it anyway :)

bandanas

tommy and tubbo take subway bandanas from the back room and initial them before trading with eachother

nobody comments that theyre not technically allowed to have a hat and a bandana

the war

at some point a rivalry breaks out between the day staff

wilbur, tommy, tubbo, niki, eret, and fundy

and the night staff

dream, sapnap, george (techno, karl, schlatt, and quackity stay out of it)

what starts out tame eventually leads to workers purposely messing up stuff for the next shift to deal with, like not stocking the fridge or mopping the floor

at some point eret switches to the night shift

the day shift does not take it well.

after about 2 weeks phil is forced to step in as the store quality starts to go downhill

he closes the store for a day and makes everyone clean it u

techno watches from outside the windows with a bag of popcorn

pogway

tommy starts placing the stickers they use to wrap sandwiches everywhere with the words “pogway” on them

everyone can tell its his handwriting but no one can catch him placing the stickers

phil even checked the cameras, still no trace of him

subway gun

sometimes tommy goes around spraying others with a spray bottle full of water used on the bread

he calls it the “subway gun”

wilbur gets fed up hides it in the freezer overnight

thats all for now! if i come up with anything else i might add it lol

EDIT PART 2 IS NOW OUT

#mcyt #mcyt au #tommyinnit #wilbur soot #tubbo #philza #technoblade #dreamwastaken #georgenotfound #sapnap #karl jacobs #niki nihachu #fundy #eret #quackity #jschlatt #mcyt subway au

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ckret2 · 3 years

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Alright let’s talk GVK spoilers!!!

My reactions as best I can remember them!

- love how Kong is humanized from the very first scene, like every time he shows up he’s humanized so much more than other titans are. If that was at the expense of other titans being made likable I wouldn’t enjoy it so much, but like, Godzilla is made pretty lovable over the course of Monsterverse, Mothra is too, and all the titans featured for long are given recognizable emotions that let us see them as more intelligent and feeling than “just” animals; so all of them are made understandable/likable/sympathetic. But of them all, Kong is the only one really humanized. Which makes sense, because like, big monkey! Basically our distant cousin!

- And they kept playing, like, normal songs for him, which cracked me up.

- I really appreciated how you could SEE the titans in this movie. After all the weather effects to hide the titans in KOTM, there was such a clear difference in this one from the very start. Kong in the daylight! Godzilla makes his first attack at night, and even then you can see him much more clearly than you can for most of KOTM! Nice!

- after the Iwi were portrayed as silent stoic witnesses in Skull Island, I really appreciated that they took an Iwi character, made her a main character, and gave her dialogue and a real role to play in the story while also keeping her deaf/mute. I think that was a good way to improve on the way that the Iwi got got sidelined in the last movie while still maintaining the worldbuilding!

- I didn’t appreciate so much that, y’know, they murdered the rest of her people off-screen in order to do it. Couldn’t they have gone “her parents died so she got adopted by a Monarch agent that was close to her family, but like, the rest of her tribe is fine”? Or at the very least “their island got fucked up so they had to be evacuated but like they’re settling in somewhere else”? “They’re living under this island dome with Kong and they know what’s up and Monarch’s keeping them in the loop and they decided they’re chill with their new dome home, but this one girl likes to go on adventures with Monarch”? Something? Did we have to kill them all off? Y’all make up an entire fictional indigenous culture and then murder them off-screen when you don’t need them? Just let them live.

- a few minutes in I was like “hold on, we’ve got two characters that speak sign language, we’ve got a giant gorilla, gorillas learn sign language, is there any reason they can’t teach Kong?” and then later I was like “OOOOOH!!” Humans and titans learning how to communicate with each other has been one of my favorite themes to explore in Monsterverse fanfic so I was absolutely tickled to see it getting explored in canon, too.

- That said I think it’s hilarious that the girl managed to teach Kong to sign without, like... anybody seeing. Kong’s hands are above the tree line and there are cameras everywhere, how did NOBODY with Monarch see him signing.

- Bernie’s weaponized being an annoying coworker to such a degree it can only be called an art, and I really appreciated it.

- Godzilla’s extra chonky in this movie and I dig it. Roomie noted he was extra crocodilian and I dig that too.

- “There’s been no confirmed titan sightings in three years” I don’t buy that for a minute. They’re BIG. Rodan NESTS IN VOLCANOES. They found a MOTHRA EGG. Humans have A SCARILY WELL-FUNDED ORGANIZATION DEDICATED SOLELY TO FOLLOWING TITANS AROUND. Like, most of the lore in GVK that I don’t personally like, I can be like “eh... I can tweak it just a little bit with headcanons to make it work for me...” but NO confirmed titan sightings? You expect me to believe ALL of them moved underground when we’d previously seen them all prefer to live above ground? You expect me to believe that now that they’re all AWAKE, they learned how to HIDE?? Uh-uh. And at the end of KOTM there was stuff in the credits about using titan droppings as biofuel, obviously they’re still walking around up top! Can’t take that from me. Nope.

- Who the FUCK is Ren Serizawa and how is he related to Ishiro Serizawa? IS he related? Maybe they just dropped the surname as another “yeah this is a Godzilla movie for Godzilla fans” easter egg but I have a hard time believing that he can’t be somehow related to the other character with the Very Important Last Name who was so important in the last two Godzilla movies. If he is related I’m sure it’s been explained in a tie-in comic or the novelization or something, I’ll look it up later.

- I had to look up how much weight huge battleships can carry while writing a KOTM fic where Ghidorah hitches a ride on one, and y’all, I had to pull weird gravity-negating magic to get him to ride on that boat. Godzilla and Kong woulda sunk that boat like a rock. All I could think during that scene is “this wouldn’t work and I know that because I DID THE RESEARCH and I wasn’t even getting PAID.” I’ll choose to believe that Monarch gets special heavy duty ships designed to carry titans but nobody mentioned it because it wasn’t relevant to Kong’s journey.

- The bit where they could see where Godzilla was swimming because he’d got half a ship hooked to him that was bobbing around on the surface, didn’t Jaws do something like that with a buoy? It’s been ages since I’ve seen Jaws. Anyway good reference.

- Insert “they’re gonna need a bigger boat” joke

- I LOVED the part where they shut down all the ships to get Godzilla to leave. Both because, one, it’s a spectacular callback to KOTM’s “turn off all the guns so he knows we’re not a threat” that makes it seem like now that’s just what Monarch knows what to do to get G to chill out, and two... we know that Godzilla backs off either when he’s killed his enemy or when his enemy has yielded to him. At the end of KOTM—and the end of GVK—the act of yielding is presented as very ceremonial and uniform across species: everyone lowers anything they’ve got that could be dangerous (claws, fangs, beaks, axes) and bows to show Godzilla they’re not gonna fight. Battleships, obviously, can’t bow, but even without being inducted into whatever secret titan cultural intricacies might be going on, humans have figured out their own way to “bow” to Godzilla: cut all the power, so their ships can’t move and can’t use weapons. I know the movie presented it as “playing dead,” but c’mon, if Godzilla could hear MechaG power up from halfway around the planet then he could hear that Kong’s heart was still beating, and he’s been around enough boats to know humans can turn them off and on when they want. The humans bowed to Godzilla. He accepted that they yielded and left.

- Mark Russell looked like such a dad in this movie, like he’s retired 100% from being a rugged action hero and now he’s just Pure Dad. I like him better when he’s a dad, it’s a good development for him. He got like 3 lines and I’m like “I appreciate this character development.”

- Despite all my qualms about how conspiracy theories and extremist groups are handled in Monsterverse (and WHICH conspiracy theories they decide to reference), I really love Madison and Bernie’s dynamic. The adult man who’s the excitable wide-eyed believer in every BS conspiracy you can possibly imagine; and then the serious, severe Teenage Girl On A Mission who’s hypercompetent because she was raised for five years by a friggin doomsday cult militia; and despite having wildly different personalities they’re just, in total agreement about everything. Handled just a BIT differently (like, leaving out the more gross IRL conspiracies) they would be a wildly fun comedic duo—especially with Josh the Only Sane Man coming along as the hapless sidekick. And they all play off of each other so well! Both in a comedic sense, and in more serious moments—when Bernie talked about his wife, there was a real moment of empathy between him and Madison with very little said. I’d watch an entire movie just about the three of them. I’d watch a TV show.

- On the one hand I wasn’t too much of a fan of KOTM’s “all titans... are inherently In Tune With Nature... nature has a Balance, because that’s a Real Thing and not an anthropocentric concept to describe how we like nature to act, and they automatically restore it... because they’re like, some kinda borderline divinities or something... we should probably be worshipping them...” thing; but, now that it was totally absent in GVK, I sorta miss it. Like I feel like there needs to be a balance, a few humans who are like “i lowkey worship these dudes?” and a few others who are like “they’re cool but like, that’s a lil extreme” and that neither side be presented as Right in how they regard titans’ relationship with nature.

- “All titans come from THE HOLLOW EARTH” nah I don’t buy that it’s silly. Basically, what I object to is the idea that all titans have some sort of intrinsic similarity (they all come from the same hitherto-unknown location; they all are part of the same pack that has the same alpha; they all are fueled/fed by the same energy source; etc) rather than letting them be SEPARATE species whose only unifying traits are “they’re all big enough to fuck everything up everywhere they go” and “they’re big enough that the typically-insurmountable barriers between different biomes (mountain ranges, valleys, long distances with terrible weather) aren’t insurmountable for them, so even if they’re specialized in different environments they still all have to deal with each other pretty often.” I’ll make some exceptions for convergent evolution (i.e., claiming multiple titans developed similar traits that are relatively easy to spontaneously evolve and a prerequisite for a creature to survive at such a large size). But I can’t buy “this big gorilla has more biologically in common with this big crocodile-iguana than he does with, say, gorillas,” or most of the other “all these titans have THIS IN COMMON” claims that Monsterverse makes, including “everyone’s from hollow earth.” So I’m tossing that out the window and substituting my own headcanons. Some might’ve evolved there but some evolved on the surface. Maybe a majority of them like ducking in and out of the hollow earth like some kind of titan shortcut system. Kong’s species, I can buy, IS native to hollow earth, considering that they built a whole-ass society down there with tools and architecture.

- I’m SO curious about the little underground Kong home, the Godzilla motif in the floor, and the axe that appeared to be made with a Godzilla scute. What’s the story there??? We know Godzilla’s species and Kong’s species are ancient rivals. Is it because Kong’s species hunted Godzilla’s to steal their scutes to make weapons, seeing them as a valuable resource the way, like, early humans considered woolly mammoths a valuable resource—thus making that Godzilla on the floor equivalent to cave art of mammoths made by people who hunted them—until the Godzillas got pissed and started fighting back en masse? Or were Godzillas and Kongs already enemies when Kongs decided to start making weapons out of their corpses? Did they use to be allies, fighting together, with Godzillas voluntarily offering shed scutes and/or bones of their deceased members to Kongs, and that place used to be a shared home until they started fighting?

- What about that power source, is it something that was already there that both Kongs and Godzillas started to deliberately harvest for technology/atomic breath? Or did Godzillas automatically channel that stuff and Kongs exploited/borrowed/traded with Godzillas to utilize it too? Or is the power from Godzillas who collaboratively poured a bunch of power into the place thus that Kongs were able to use it too? I doubt Godzilla’s species CREATED all that weird energy but the question remains of whether, like, they channel it FROM underground, or naturally produce the same thing in their own bodies, or what.

- Godzilla using his atomic breath to dig a hole STRAIGHT TO KONG just to KICK HIS ASS is hilarious. How lucky that Hong Kong just HAPPENS to be straight over Kong’s house! Were all the tunnels to the hollow earth made by pissed off Godzillas who wanted to kick monkey ass??

- I loved the aesthetic of the battle scene in Hong Kong, with the brightly colored neon building outlines, VERY cool look. The choreography of the battle scene was great too, especially

- we literally broke into applause when Kong shoved the axe handle in Godzilla’s mouth. Love it, perfect callback, that was the ONE thing from the original King Kong Vs Godzilla I was hoping to see referenced and there it was.

- You could really see a difference in how Kong and Godzilla fought—Kong doing a better job at using tools and the environment, Godzilla fighting more like a reptile. They seemed to emphasize Godzilla’s more animalistic behaviors in this movie to accomplish that contrast—he was down on all fours and moving like a crocodile more often, he was clawing at Kong’s chest—but even though it seemed a bit different of a combat technique it also didn’t seem out of place compared to how he fought in prior movies. And we’ve already seen that if Godzilla’s involved in a fight and one of the combatants knows how to use the environment, it’s typically not gonna be Godzilla. (See: Ghidorah using the reflection in a building’s windows to see what’s behind him, and recognizing a nearby power source and biting it to juice himself up.)

- So many of Godzilla’s enemies seem to have specialized in negating his atomic breath in order to combat him! The MUTOs directly suppress his ability to use it—and it makes sense that that’s an inborn ability they have, since they evolved to use Godzilla’s species as prey. Kong has a weapon that both acts as a shield to absorb the breath and turn it back against Godzilla’s species—they didn’t evolve to counter Godzilla, but they developed tools once a rivalry happened. Ghidorah’s the exception—which makes sense, since he came from space—but even at that we see him using tactics specifically to take into account Godzilla’s most powerful weapon (such as keeping one head on lookout for when he starts glowing so that they know when they need to dodge).

- LOVED the reveal that MechaG was based off of Ghidorah’s brain, it has vibes of both the Kiryu Saga and the way that Heisei MechaG is based off of Mecha-King Ghidorah. Not the most surprising plot twist, since we’d theorized that they might use San to make MechaG, but I wasn’t 100% sure they were gonna go with it until they finally did. Even when I was going “huh, the mecha pilot’s chamber looks weirdly organic” I didn’t make the connection to WHY until the reveal, lol.

- “Ghidorah’s necks are so long that the heads have to communicate with each other telepathically” that’s COMPLETELY WILD but I love it, it follows very well from their prior portrayal as telepathic empaths in Heisei, it lines up with their emphasis on electricity (because BRAINWAVES AND ELECTRICITY, hey ho movie monster pseudo science!), and it very much compliments my own private headcanon that they’ve got some psychic/mind control abilities.

- The movie ended with both “Godzilla won, technically” but also “since they teamed up as equals, the ending doesn’t FEEL like ‘Godzilla wins, Kong loses’ but rather ‘they both won against a common foe’” and since I’m on both Team Godzilla and Team They Should Be Friends, I’m happy with this outcome. Plus since the last time they fought, the Japanese movie company graciously let the American monster win, so it’s only polite that the American movie company graciously let the Japanese monster win.

- There were just a few too many humans in this movie. I was intrigued by Ren but we didn’t get much out of him, but like I guess somebody had to be in the pilot’s seat other than the Apex CEO. Didn’t care for the author of the hollow earth book, I feel like his role was superfluous. Didn’t need the Apex CEO’s daughter there at all, coulda done without her. How about this, combine all three roles. Instead of having a whole-ass author who knows about the hollow earth, just casually reference that Rick from KOTM wrote a book about it since he was the expert, and (since he wasn’t in this movie) say that he tragically died going to explore the hollow earth himself, and that way we’ve got the book with the “titans are from there” theory AND an excuse to share the “humans die when they go underground” info. Now, have Ren be working for Apex as a pilot for Mechagodzilla, but have him be MechaG’s pilot because he’s also a good pilot in general, and can fly those HEAV things. Have Apex send him to Monarch to be like “hey, you guys trust me right, since I’m Ishiro Serizawa’s relative? We at Apex have heard all about your failed hollow earth expedition, and due to Ishiro I’ve got some past ties to Monarch so I’ve got high clearance with y’all, so I could bring over this useful Apex tech that’d let you go underground and use what I know about hollow earth from my past time at Monarch to help guide things.” Once they’ve got the little chunk of energy stuff and go topside, he hustles it straight to Apex and straps into his seat to run MechaG. Bam, you’ve combined “person who knows enough about hollow earth to help the expedition,” “person who represents Apex’s interests and gets the energy,” and “person who pilots MechaG” into one character, in a way that takes three flat/underdeveloped characters and turns them into a single interesting character with a lot going on and some intriguing ties to the rest of the cast.

I think that’s everything?? Hoo.

#gvk #godzilla vs kong #gvk spoilers #godzilla vs kong spoilers #godzilla #meta

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abbacchiosbelt · 3 years

Text

If It Bleeds | Yandere Mahito x GN Reader

CW: Yandere character, guns, manipulative behavior, mild not sfw content. 18+.

Word Count: 2.1k

The air in your house hadn’t felt the same since he’d wormed in his way inside - his disgusting aura clung to the walls like poison, inescapable and silently killing you. It’s nearly unbearable when he’s there himself, grinning as he watches your every move. Hiding is impossible from someone like him. He can slip through every crack, move through every wall. And so you’re stuck with him until he decides he’s had enough of you, the expiration date on your life ticking down day by day.

It’s all a game for Mahito.

Today, you’re awoken by the sound of his voice calling out your name, sing-songy and taunting. There’s no point in ignoring him - if you did, he’d drag you out of bed himself. Or worse, he’d climb under the sheets and wrap his unnaturally cold body around you, laughing all the while at your discomfort. With a quiet groan, you push the sheets off yourself and climb out of bed. Mahito calls out again, an edge of irritation in his voice.

“Coming,” you call back, stifling a yawn as you slide your feet into slippers and make your way out of your room. As you expected, he’s sitting at your small kitchen table. His long, blue hair is still tied into a loose braid that he’d forced you to do the night before. The soft groans he’d made as you brushed his hair and carefully threaded it into a braid were burned into your subconscious, the slight tinge in your lower stomach they awakened making you feel disgusted. It was one of the few things in your ‘relationship’ with Mahito that had seemingly gone unnoticed by the cursed spirit, though you’re sure he’d bring it up to taunt you at some point.

Mahito’s black shirt slides off his shoulder when he raises a hand in greeting to you like he was a friend who had just popped in. The strange smell that followed him — cloyingly sweet with the scent of rot under the surface — invades your nostrils the second you sit down in the seat beside him. Mahito leans forward and smiles, one of his hands coming up to brush your hair behind your ear. You shudder at his chilling touch, and he sighs.

“Humans are so touchy. You should be used to that by now, you know?” He rolls his eyes and sits back, staring at you for a moment before his eyes light up. “I’ve got something that’ll cheer you up. I’ve been doing some research.” Mahito leans to the side and drags a bag (one of yours, you note with annoyance) onto the table, unzipping the top. “Go ahead, pull out your surprise.”

A surprise.

You blanche, giving him a wary look. He laughs, his expression mirthful. “Ah, you don’t trust me, do you? Fine, fine. I’ll get it out for you.” Mahito reaches his hand in the bag and wastes no time pulling out your ‘surprise’, his lips curling into a sadistic smirk as he points the object at you. A silver, shiny gun is pointed straight at the middle of your forehead, the entity behind the trigger unpredictable.

You scramble out of the chair and Mahito is on top of you before you can run, his legs wrapped around your hips as he smiles down at you with the gun still in his hand. “You’re scared? You think someone like me would kill you with something as boring as this?” Mahito laughs, tilting his head towards the ceiling as he cackles. His mouth splits into an unnaturally wide grin when he finally looks back down at you. “I told you this was a present. I read something about what humans do for fun and thought I could give you a chance to play for once. This relationship is uneven, after all.”

Mahito doesn’t move from his position on top of you, even as you struggle with your full strength. The fact that he doesn’t even budge sends a wave of panic to your heart, the organ pounding against your chest so loud that you can’t even hear yourself think.

“M-mahito, let me up,” You grunt. Mahito tilts his head to one side, the hand he was using to hold the gun going limp as he carelessly waves it around. Your eyes widen in fear. “Please...”

Mahito considers you for a moment before he gingerly gets up, placing the gun back on the kitchen table. “Only since you asked so nicely. If all humans had manners like you, I wouldn’t exist.” He sticks his tongue out at you, the motion childish. “Good thing they don’t! Now get up.”

You get back on your feet and Mahito points to the seat you were in earlier, indicating for you to sit down. You follow him, not wanting to be tackled to the ground again. Mahito sits back down in his chair as well, sliding the gun across the table to you. “Pick it up.”

The weapon’s sleek casing shines in the light of the sun starting to trail through your kitchen window. You swallow. “I’ve never... touched one of these before.”

“That’s okay.” Mahito licks his lips. “There’s a first time for everything, right? Humans love that saying.” He nudges the gun closer. “I do too. There’s so much to do in your world, yet you humans don’t spend enough time indulging yourselves. I’m giving you a chance.”

You have no idea what exactly he’s going to ask you to do; Mahito was unpredictable and dangerous, just like every cursed spirit you’d heard rumors of. You never truly believed that you’d encounter one, and yet here you were with one sitting in your kitchen like he was an old friend. Mahito raises his eyebrows at your silence and you finally reach forward to pick up the gun.

The heaviness of the weapon surprises you. You tilt it this way and that, minding to point it away from Mahito even though he hadn’t given you the same courtesy. You knew little about guns except for the cardinal rule of never pointing a gun at anything you weren’t planning on shooting. You lips start to feel dry as anxiety sets into your bones as if you knew the weapon had been used before as a killing tool. Of course Mahito would give you something that had been used to take lives - it’s likely he had given it to other humans he’d played with before. Bile rises in your throat and you swallow it back. Mahito watches your discomfort with lidded eyes, entranced.

“Don’t you want to know what I want you to do with it?” Mahito scoots his chair closer to yours. Without warning, he tugs your chair close so that the two of you are sitting knee to knee. Mahito leans in. “Press it to my forehead.”

“What?” You balk at his words. You’d be lying if you hadn’t thought about trying to get rid of him, but it was fruitless. A fantasy. Was he really going to let you kill him? No, there was no way... He was playing at something. Just another one of his sick games. He frowns at your hesitation and suddenly grabs your arms until he forcibly presses the gun against his forehead, ignoring how your hands were shaking. The frown on his face is immediately replaced with a smile once the cool metal is resting against his forehead.

“Now, now” he croons, his voice sounding much more affected than you’d ever heard it. It disgusts you - he’s getting off on this. “Put your finger on the trigger.” This time, Mahito is patient as he watches you struggle with the action, letting it slide when he notices you’re resting your finger against the side instead of curling it around the trigger. “We’re going to play a game.”

“A... a game?” You stutter. Your arms already feel heavy from the weapon, yet you know if you let them down you’ll be in for something even worse. He holds his hands, five fingers raised on his right hand and only one finger on his left. When you keep looking at him in confusion, he sighs and purses his lips before he starts explaining.

“Jeez, you really are innocent when it comes to guns, huh? Well, this makes it more fun.” He waves his fingers around. “This gun has six chambers, but only one bullet. I found out about it when I was researching guns. It’s fun and deadly, which means humans never want to play it.” He rolls his eyes. “But we can! It’s called Russian Roulette. Even if you shoot me, I won’t die.” Mahito practically pants as he speaks, and you don’t notice the way he shifts his legs.

“But... What if you did die? Then what?” You ask. Mahito smiles at you, patronizing.

“I won’t. But if you don’t play, I’ll play it instead. Your chances aren’t very good, wouldn’t you say?” Mahito’s lips turn down. “But I’d hate to do that so soon. You are my favorite plaything, after all.” Your heart seizes up in your chest as his words hit you - if you didn’t play along with him, he’d kill you. There was no other option. Even if he secretly planned on punishing you for playing, not playing would mean dying. What hit you harder was Mahito calling you his ‘favorite plaything’, the words making your stomach twist. There was truly no escape. You resign yourself to your fate.

“I... Okay, i-if you really want to play.” Mahito purrs out your name when he hears your response. That small, unwanted feeling in your stomach flares to life at his words. What was wrong with you? Being around the cursed spirit was eating at your psyche day by day. Mahito must have planned for it all along, forcing you to fall apart while he toyed with you. Suddenly, the game sounds like a good idea.

Mahito notices the change in your mood and his legs shift again, his grin nearly splitting apart his face. “Mmm, now we’re ready to play. I got the gun ready. We’re taking one shot today.” He bites his lip. “We can try more shots once you’ve got some practice in.” Mahito presses harder against the gun, his eyes flickering with something you couldn’t quite place. “Pull it.”

Your finger shakes as you curl it around the gun’s trigger, putting no pressure on it yet. Mahito watches you with unrestrained glee. Without time to really think about it, you press down on the trigger and clench your eyes shut.

A click, and nothing else. Mahito laughs, and you reluctantly open your eyes. Your drop your arms in exhaustion and let the gun clatter to the floor, not caring about the danger. Mahito is practically howling with laughter as he watches you, his eyes boring holes into you as he watches you let out the breath you were holding. You sit and stare past him until his laughter fades out, your heart pounding in your chest.

He stands from his chair and drags you up against his body, groaning in delight. There’s a hardness against your thigh, wet and leaking, that you don’t want to think about. Mahito grabs your chin with his hands, forcing you to look at him as one of his arms keeps you pressed close to his body.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it? It’s too bad you lost, but I’m glad we had this experience together.” His breath fans against your face and you wince, the smell having no descriptor that would be fitting other than death. Mahito holds you for a few more seconds before he steps back, a lopsided too-big smile on his face. “See how much fun it is when you’re allowed to indulge yourself?”

Mahito ignores your blank expression, stretching his arms above his head as he peers out one of your windows. “I’d love to play some more, but I’ve got some things to take care of today.” He takes a step toward you, and you step back. He advances until he has you pushed against a wall. “You should be nicer to me. I’ve been generous towards you.”

Mahito leans in and presses a chaste kiss against your cheek, laughing at the startled look on your face. “We took a new step in our relationship today. I had to make sure you knew how much it means to me.” He abruptly steps away and starts to fade before your eyes, waving as his form shudders out of this dimension. “I decided something,” his voice whispers, directly against your ear. You can no longer see him, but you can feel an overwhelming presence surrounding your body.

“I think I’ll be keeping you around for a long, long time.”

#my writing #jujutsu kaisen #mahito #mahito x reader #gender neutral reader #yandere mahito #yandere cw #guns cw #manipulative behavior cw #jjk mahito #jjk #mild not sfw content

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biggest-stupidhead · 3 years

Text

Bad Timing (Levi x reader) Part 10

Summary: How do you tell your friends that you’re falling for your big brother’s best friend?

Word Count: 4.9 K

The loud buzzing of the tattoo gun was beginning to annoy Levi. The little pricks less annoying than the drone of the machine. He winced as the needle skimmed over a sensitive bit of skin.

"Try not to flinch." Farlan scolded as he readjusted his grip.

"Tch, sorry." Levi apologized through gritted teeth. Farlan reached for a wipe to clean off the excess ink, revealing the nearly finished piece. Like his other tattoos, this one was no different, the design was drawn out in thin delicate lines of ink. He had chosen to get this one on his tricep. Farlan spun his chair around to show Levi the design in the mirror, a flower, more specifically a lily of the valley. More specific yet, the flower for the month of May, the month his mother was born.

He nodded in appreciation a she admired the thin stem that led up to delicate bell shaped petals. The stems faded into a two leaves at the base of the design, they were all that needed to be filled in before the piece was complete.

"It looks good." Levi mused as he stared at the aggravated skin, the black lines were outlined with red angry skin.

"Thanks, I must admit I'm a bit rusty." Farlan chuckled as he leaned in with another wipe to clean the tattoo.

"Could've fooled me." Levi muttered as he turned in his chair to give Farlan better access.

"Let me finish this up and then we can go grab some lunch." Farlan gave the tattoo one last wipe down before he wrapped it in sandiderm. Once he was pleased with his work he tugged off the gloves and tossed them into the trash.

"Sounds good." Levi grunted as he stood up from the chair. Farlan had picked up tattooing as a side hustle, not that he booked many clients. It was more of a hobby for him, but he was rather good at it. As Farlan cleaned up the equipment and packed it back into his bag Levi went into the bathroom to wash up before they left for lunch. Isabel was out with friends, she hadn't been particularly interested in visiting the University with Levi and Farlan.

____

Levi trailed a few paces behind Farlan as they wondered through the sprawling campus. The campus had a dark academic vibe to it, with all the gothic architecture and the snowy lawns. Levi's trip was coming to a close, and he was glad that he had managed to squeeze in the visit. He spoke to an advisor, who was very enthusiastic about him applying. He figured that him coming from a single parent home, being an orphan with dual citizenship and good grades probably looked good for their statistics. So Levi and Farlan left, packets of information that they would need to apply. He decided that he should give Erwin a call, since he would be coming back home on the 26th, he originally intended on coming back after the new year but Hange had convinced him to come back early. Of course it was intended to be a surprise for Erwin and (Y/n), he felt bad for leaving Farlan and Isabel early but he figured that he could make up for the lost time when he got accepted into the University. They would have him all to themselves for four years if everything went according to plan.

"This place looks as good as any." Farlan paused in front of a small pub not too far from campus. Levi shrugged and kicked a chunk of ice out of his way. Farlan held the door open for him as they ducked into the dimly lit bar. The two settled into the barstools facing an impressive stock of alcohol, since it was about three in the afternoon the bar was basically empty save for a scraggly old dude that was mumbling to himself in a booth.

"Come here often?" Levi huffed as he inspected the sticky bar top. Farlan chuckled and waved for the bar tender.

"No actually, but I've heard that it's popular with the uni students." Faralan explained as he waited for the bar tender to finish counting the money in his hands.

"Two gin and tonics please." Farlan asked politely, the bar tender nodded and began to make the drinks.

"So you leave in what five days?" Farlan asked as he grabbed his drink and took a long swig.

"Yeah, sorry it was kind of last minute." Levi apologized, Farlan waved him off dismissively.

"Wait what did you get Isabel for Christmas this year?" Farlan asked as he slammed his already drained glass onto the counter.

"I bought her the DVD set for that one show she likes." Levi answered as he nursed his gin and tonic.

"Ah no way! That's a good one! The veterinary show right?" Farlan gushed, clearly impressed with Levi's choice of gift.

"Yeah that's the one." Levi nodded, a small smirk spreading across his lips.

"She'll love that. I got her some new jeans and a stuffed animal." Farlan shrugged, as he motioned for another drink.

"Not the shittiest choice." Levi mumbled as he brought his glass to his lips.

"Thank you Levi." Farlan held his glass up for a toast, and Levi indulged him, gently tapping his glass against Farlan's. Levi knocked back the rest of his drink before pulling out his phone to check his messages.

"What time should I pick you up from the airport?" Levi pursed his lips in thought before responding to Hange's text.

"Six in the morning." he typed his response quickly and sent it. He had already planned on arriving early to give himself plenty of time to prepare himself for the annual post Christmas party that your family hosted.

"See you then, don't have too much fun in France!" Hange's reply was instantaneous, Levi hated to admit it but he missed four-eyes and bushy brows. Hell he even missed Erwin's bratty sister.

_____

You draped your arm over your eyes in a feeble attempt to block out the blinding light that was flooding your living room. Although the snow was pretty, it sure was a bitch when the sun hit it, causing the light to reflect sharply in through the large windows in your living room. It was finally Christmas break, and you were enjoying it to it's fullest, basking in your sweats on the couch. Your mom had just gotten back from grocery shopping and was beginning to set out ingredients for the baking that she had planned to do for the rest of the afternoon. Erwin and Hange had gone ice skating with Mike and Nanaba, and planned to all meet up back at your house to assist your mom with the seasonal baking. Your phone chimed on the coffee table and you stretched to check it.

"Coffee and chill? 🥺" You rolled your eyes at Jean's message. He had been trying to contact you relentlessly for the past week. You had evaded him, not quite ready to confront him about his wrong doings. You ignored his text and instead favored to ask Mikasa if she wanted to come over to bake.

"hey I know it's been a while, but want to come over to bake cookies with me today? You could bring Armin and Eren if you want!" You sighed and dropped your phone back down onto the table with a sigh. You were pleasantly surprised by how quickly she responded.

"What time?"

"an hour?"

"See you then :)" You smiled at the screen as you read her response. You always thought it was cute how she preferred to use characters instead of emojis when she texted. You decided that a shower would be a good idea since so many people were coming over now, so you hustled up stairs. You were thankful that Hange and Erwin weren't home because they had made a habit of interrupting your showers. Whether it was Hange trying to join you in the shower to "save water" or Erwin coming in to take a massive dump while you were in the shower. So you fully took advantage of your uninterrupted shower time while you could. You took your time, washing your hair and the rest of your body and enjoying the hot water. By the time you were finished the bathroom was cloudy with steam from the hot shower. You wrapped yourself in towel and scurried to your room to change. You pulled on a pair of leggings and a cropped fitted turtleneck. You then proceeded to tug on a faded crew neck to complete the look. You loped down the stairs, but paused about half way down. The sound of shoes being toed off and a coat being hung up made you rethink your decision.

"Oh Kenny! I'm so glad you made it!" Your mom gushed and you bristled. It wasn't that you didn't like Kenny, it was just that you weren't expecting him. It seemed that your house needed to keep an Ackerman on hand at all times because as soon as Levi left Mikasa and Kenny began coming around more frequently. Your mom invited Kenny over for coffee on Sunday mornings and you invited Mikasa over for sleepovers and craft nights.

"Hey sorry I'm late, I brought booze though." Kenny's rough voice felt foreign to your ears. Despite his sudden presence at your house he still felt like a stranger to you. Of course you could only blame yourself here, you tried your best to avoid him and his questions, not sure how you felt about the gruff man. He seemed nice enough but you weren't quick to trust him, Erwin certainly wasn't either.

"Ah (Y/n)! Perfect timing! Come down stairs and say hello." your mom called out, you winced but obeyed, descending the last few steps.

"Hey there kiddo, how's it hangin'?" Kenny drawled as you slunk into the kitchen sheepishly.

"Hey Kenny, I'm good how are you?" You asked politely, aiming to please your mother more than Kenny. The man smiled triumphantly and leaned further back into his seat.

"I'm fantastic." he stated with a smug smirk plastered on his lips.

"Mom, I invited Mikasa, Amrin, and Eren over is that alright?" you asked, dismissing Kenny.

"Yeah of course baby, the more the merrier!" she cooed as she continued to set up the mixer and prop up the cook book.

"So my little niece will be joining us tonight?" Kenny affirmed as he stood to help your mother untangle to cord of the mixer.

"Yeah." you trailed off, not sure if this was good or bad. Although the pair had both been frequenting your house recently, they hadn't run into one another yet. You knew that Levi had a bad relationship with his uncle, so you could only assume that Mikasa's relationship was also just as rocky.

"haven't seen that brat since she was in diapers." Kenny mused as he flipped through the cook book.

"really? Well she sure has grown. Such a lovely young woman." Your mother sighed dreamily as she thought about Mikasa.

"Glad to hear it.." Kenny mumbled as he paused on a gingerbread recipe. Before you could decode the meaning behind his bland tone, the door flew open and Hange sauntered in. Today she was dressed for the weather in a downy parka and leggings with a thick crewneck. Erwin followed close behind, dressed in joggers and a t-shirt, he tended to get hot easily. Mike however was different. Mike was dressed for Arctic temperatures with a thick quarter zip underneath his north face and a pair of denim jeans on his legs. Nanaba wore a quarter zip as well but leggings instead of jeans. You rushed to help them shove their coats into the cramped closet and put snowy shoes over vents to melt off the ice. Soon they were all crowding into the kitchen, Mike was quick to help your mom set out ingredients while Erwin went to light the fireplace. Hange was rushing up the stairs and Nanaba was skimming through the cook book.

Ah yes such a familiar scene. You immediately felt better in the presence of the upperclassmen, Kenny seemed to melt into the background as he watched you all fall into a familiar rhythm. Erwin returned to the kitchen, dusting his hands off as he entered.

"Hey." He greeted you with a slight nod before he stooped to pull a baking sheet out of the cabinets.

"How was ice skating?" you asked as you leaned against the counter near Erwin.

"Cold, we saw Petra and Oluo there." Erwin mused as he sat the sheet down with a clatter.

"Really? Are they a thing?" you quizzed, your interest piqued.

"Couldn't say, wouldn't surprise me though." Erwin shrugged, his large frame pressed against the counter opposite to allow Nanaba to squeeze through.

"I don't know Erwin, last time I spoke to her she seemed pretty fixed on Levi." Nanaba interjected as she stooped to pull out a bowl.

"I thought she was over him. He left her hanging at my house a few months back remember?" Mike reminded Nanaba who pursed her lips in thought.

"Oh yeah I remember that...she was upset." Nanaba agreed as she sat the bowl in front of you on the counter.

"Then why was she with Oluo huh riddle me that." Erwin challenged, a sly smirk on his lips.

"Oh they've always been close, doesn't mean she likes him or anything." Nanaba scoffed.

"Well he sure likes her, saw him checking out her ass." Mike chuckled, your mom gasped and hit him upside the head.

"That's enough you guys! (Y/n), Kenny mix cut this butter up." Your mom ordered, grabbing you by the bicep to drag you over to Kenny at the island. She dropped a huge brick of butter in front of the two of you along with two butter knives.

"Oh I can do it on my own mom." you insisted with wide eyes.

"Nonsense, show Kenny how it's done." she slapped you on the back and turned to help Mike crack eggs into the wet ingredients bowl. You and Kenny shared an uneasy glance, you took the knife and sliced the chunk of butter in half. You slid half to Kenny and took the other half for yourself. You began to slice the butter into thin chunks and drop them into a bowl. Kenny watched with raised brows, the knife hanging loosely in his hand. You spared him a glance and an amused huff.

"Just slice it into chunks and drop them in this bowl." you instructed, pushing the bowl closer to him. He chuckled and then began to tediously cut the butter into uneven chunks. You nodded in approval as he began to gain confidence.

"Where does this go once it's done?" Kenny asked as he finished chopping the butter.

"In the mixer." You directed, as you wiped your hands on a damp rag. The doorbell chimed and you weaved through the kitchen to answer it. You were greeted by the familiar faces of Mikasa, Armin, and Eren. The trio piled into the house and kicked off their shoes and shrugged off jackets.

"Perfect timing guys, we just started making cookies." You said as you helped Armin out of his coat.

"Great! We brought our piping tips." Eren said, holding up a plastic bag filled with piping equipment.

"Oh yeah I forgot that you're a natural at cookie decorating Mikasa!" you complimented as you guided them into the kitchen. You placed the bag next to Kenny who was staring at Mikasa with slightly widened eyes, she returned his gaze with a surprised expression.

"Hey hothead!" Hange called out to Eren in a sing song voice as she descended the stairs.

"O-Oh Hange!" Eren cringed at her volume as she swang into the kitchen.

"Hange!" Armin cried out excitedly, you'd known that Armin looked up to the brunette due to her intelligence.

"Aw hello coconut head." she cooed as she ruffled Armin's blonde mop of hair.

"And baby Ackerman!" Hange giggles, turning her attention to Mikasa who was scowling at the brunette.

"So nice to see you all!" Hange gushed as she pulled on an apron.

"That was an awful long shit. You constipated or something?" Mike scoffed as he whisked the eggs.

"Ha ha very funny Mike." Hange scoffed as she sidled up next to Erwin who was crushing almonds loudly with a rolling pin.

"I'm just trying to pick up the slack. Someone needs to make Levi's crass jokes for him." Mike sighed, setting the whisk aside.

"Ah I'm sure he will appreciate the sentiment." Erwin approved with a chuckle and another jaw-rattling smash of the rolling pin.

"Kids why don't you start rolling this dough out and cut them with these." Your mother instructed as she thrust the large mixing bowl into your hands and pointing over to Kenny. You led Mikasa, Armin, and Eren over to the open counter space. Mikasa was side eyeing Kenny as she sprinkled some flour out.

"I want to make a penis." Eren remarked, a stupid look on his face as he looked to Armin for approval.

"That's inappropriate Eren." Armin chided as he reached for the dough in the bowl. He dropped the heavy ball of dough with a thump and a whoosh of flour.

"Hah! I'd like to see it!" Kenny chortled as he brushed some flour off his shirt.

"See he gets me!" Eren chuckled as Armin began to roll out the dough. Mikasa and you both rolled your eyes at the boys. Nanaba breezed by and brushed her hand across both yours and Mikasa's shoulders as she passed.

"You girls want pizza?" She asked with an angelic smile as she stopped by the landline.

"Yes please!" Eren answered before either of you could.

"Shut up Eren!" You snapped before turning to look at Nanaba who was holding the phone up to her ear already.

"Yes please Nanaba, can you put pineapple on one of them?" you asked with a sweet smile.

"Ew pineapple on pizza are you insane?!" Hange screeched from across the kitchen.

"Now now, if you order one with pineapple I'll eat it." Kenny agreed as he pressed a cookie cutter deep into the dough.

"Ugh, you guys are disgusting." Mike shook his head in disappointment as he poured the liquid ingredients into the dry ones for the next batch of cookies.

"Alright everyone be quiet while I order this." Nanaba ordered as she pressed the phone between her ear so she could jot down the orders on a pad of paper. The volume in the kitchen fell from a roar to a soft murmur as Nanaba placed the order. Once Nanaba hung up the phone the bustle picked right back up. The cookie hustle only stopped once all the dough was in the oven and the pizza had arrived.

When it was all said and done you all settled in the living room to watch christmas movies and eat pizza. As the movie began to play you finally took some time to check your phone for the first time all afternoon. You were surprised to see at least twenty messages on instagram from a swagmasterfarlan. You clicked on the first message and your frown deepened.

"cutte assf."

"Let me show you parish"

"I cantreat you right."

":)"

The seventeen other messages followed a similar pattern. You noticed that the last message that had been sent two hours ago. You glanced at the clock and frowned, it was already eight pm. You considered blocking the account but upon checking, you realized that it was Farlan's side account. You'd seen drunk texts before and these were no different. You glanced up to see Kenny with his hat over his eyes as he snored on the arm chair. Your mom was already dozing off on the couch with her feet in Erwin's lap, Erwin had an arm around Hange who was babbling about special effects to no one in particular. Nanaba and Mike were in their own little world on the floor as they watched the movie. Eren and Armin were joking in hushed voices as Mikasa's head lolled against your shoulder. Yeah you could use some entertainment.

"I would love to see parish." you smiled at your response as you sent it. Not two minutes later a new message appeared.

"Woh, I'm durnk as shit."

"yes you are swagmaster ;)" you responded with a giggle.

"Let facetime before levi punches my face." Farlan's words were becoming clearer so you figured that he must be sobering up to some degree.

"Alright." as soon as the read receipts confirmed that he had gotten the message your phone buzzed as he called you. Mikasa grunted as you shifted to answer the call, you answered on the third ring, thankful for the darkness in the room which concealed your features for the most part.

"Heyyyyy kid!" Farlan drawled, you could tell he was in his apartment, the surroundings familiar due to the times you had facetimed Levi.

"Hey Farlan, nice to finally meet you. I've heard all kinds of things." You chuckled as he squinted at his screen.

"No kidding! Hey what time is it over there?" Farlan questioned as he brought his phone closer to his face, giving you a perfect view of his eyebrows.

"It's about 8:30 here, what time is it in perish?" You mocked his blunder from earlier and he gasped in offense.

"That's cold!" he moaned, playing along with your joke.

"Spell it right next time!" you snickered, you glanced up from your phone and met Hange's curious gaze, her head tilted to the left. When you returned your attention back to your phone you were surprised to see the camera was no longer on Farlan's face. Instead it was spinning, the sound of grunting and shuffling was deafening. You winced the struggle continues for a few moments before there was a thud and a deep groan.

"Get into bed now before I punch your lights out." Levi's voice was gravely and strained with exhaustion as he spoke. Hange's ears were still perked as she tried to figure out who you were on the phone with. Once she heard Levi's voice she stood up and skipped over to the sofa to sit next to you.

"I'm serious Farlan this isn't cute get the fuck in that bed or so help me-" the phone clattered down to the floor, and you could make out the sound of stumbling footsteps.

"What is going on?" Hange asked as she leaned on your free shoulder to see the screen. You shrugged and bit your lip as you tried to decipher what was going on.

"No Levi, I've got to talk to her, she's still on the phone!" Farlan grumbled, his voice sounded a bit far away.

"You can talk to her tomorrow just go lay down already." just by the tone of his voice you could guess that he was pinching the bridge of his nose the way he did when he was frustrated.

"nah I'll just go grab my phone and-"

"No." the sound of bed springs creaking and Farlan grunting hinted that he had been pushed onto a bed. After a few more moments of the bed creaking and incoherent mumbling, the sound of footsteps approached the phone and then finally the camera was turned back towards the ceiling as it was picked up. And then Levi's face filled the screen, his eyes widened in surprise, you snapped a screenshot of the moment much to his displeasure.

"What the fuck." he huffed as he took in both you and Hange's amused expressions.

"Hey Levi! How's it going?" Hange cooed as she angled your wrist to show more of her face.

"How-"

"He called me." You answered quickly as you angled the phone back onto your face.

"why?" Levi interrogated. You simply shrugged as you took in his face. You were relieved to see that he looked the same, maybe his eye bags were a bit darker, and his hair a tad longer. But otherwise, he was the same.

"What are you doing?" Levi continued to grill you, to answer his question you panned the camera around the room, sure to not linger on Kenny who was snoring in the chair across the room.

"Thrilling." he scoffed when you brought the camera back to your face.

"Yeah, we spent the day baking. What about you? Seems like you guys are busy." You began your own interrogation.

"Yeah, Farlan had one too many at the bar." Levi agreed as he dropped down into an arm chair with a heavy sigh.

"And you? Did you have anything to drink?" Hange asked with a sly smirk. Levi's brow creased at her suggestive tone.

"If you must know, no I did not drink.... a lot." he answered.

"Lucky, I wish I was drunk right now." you sighed wistfully.

"I never said I was drunk." Levi clarified.

"Any big plans for your birthday Levi?" You asked, quick to change the subject.

"No, just dinner and gifts." Levi replied with a shrug as he sank into the chair.

"That sounds nice." you smiled, Hange dropped her head to your shoulder, her chin digging into your shoulder as she did so. Levi shrugged and averted his gaze for a moment.

"Where's Isabel?" Hange asked as here eyes scanned the background, which was too dark to really reveal anything.

"In her room playing some stupid video game." Levi scoffed as he cocked his head in the direction which you assumed Isabel's room was.

"Fun." Hange mused as she closed her eyes.

"And you? What are your plans for Christmas?" Levi's question surprised you, but you still answered.

"Same as always, gifts in the morning, breakfast, hopefully be plastered by 2." you sighed, Levi scoffed at your answer but seemed satisfied.

"What about the 26th?" Levi asked carefully. you pursed your lips as you thought about your schedule.

"Hmm well I'm not sure, probably-"

"Oh I forgot to tell you, Annie is hosting a party and asked me if you'd come." Mikasa's sleepy voice startled you.

"Really? Huh that's weird. Are you going?" you asked, tilting your face down to speak to her.

"Yeah. We're smoking weed." Mikasa mumbled, her eyes still shut.

"Guess I'll go too." you shrugged. Meanwhile Hange and Levi shared a wide-eyed glance, this could throw off their plans. More specifically Hange's plans, even more specifically her plan to set you and Levi up.

"Weed?" Levi asked, clearing his throat after the word fell from his lips. You knew that he had smoked the stuff in the past, but recently he had stuck to his juul and the occasional dab pen.

"yeah, Annie has like 30 grams right now." Mikasa answered.

"I've never smoked weed before." you mused, excitement bubbling up in your chest at the thought of the chance for a new experience.

"Eh it's okay." Mikasa shrugged.

"Guess I'll just have to try it for myself." you teased, nudging her with your shoulder.

"Guess you will." Mikasa mumbled before falling silent once more.

"Well there you have it. I'm going to Annie's on the 26th." you smiled as you answered Levi's original question. With the 26th only three days away, it gave you something to look forward to.

"Fine. Do what you want." Levi rolled his eyes and stood from his chair, his whole vibe seemed to change. You wondered if it had been something you'd said or if he was just growing bored.

"I've got to go. Farlan's phone is almost dead." Levi said as he walked through the apartment.

"Oh well it was nice-" before you could finish he had already hung up, or the phone had died.

"Classic Levi." Hange chuckled as she rose up, stretching her stiff muscles before returning to Erwin's side. You rolled your eyes and sat your phone down in defeat. You reached behind you for a throw blanket to cover you and Mikasa, you shuffled over a bit so you were snuggled between the arm of the couch and Mikasa, who had followed you. Using the arm as a pillow you lied down as much as you could with Mikasa still using your side as a pillow, she had stretched out as well to prop her feet up in Eren's lap. Eren was already passed out, his head leaning against Armin's shoulder, who was in a similar position to you. It was nice, you hadn't made much time for nights like these recently. Since you had spent most of your time with Jean you had neglected your friends, and you felt awful about it.

You had missed them deeply, in fact this had probably been the longest you'd gone without a weekend like this. Your family had been close to the Jeagers since you were babies. Your mom and Dr. Jeager both worked at the same hospital and often worked together, they had only grown closer when your father died of cancer when you were 9. Grisha and Carla had helped your mother our a lot the months following his death. Meaning you spent a lot of time with Eren and Mikasa, and by extension Armin. That same year was when they took in Mikasa since Kenny had been deemed "unfit" for a second child in his care. You assumed that the Jeagers would be coming over for Lunch like they always did on Christmas, as well as Armin and his grandfather. You felt your eyelids grow heavy as you thought about all the preparations that were needed for you to host this year, and before you knew it you had fallen asleep.

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heyitssmiller · 4 years

Text

Clandestine

It’s here! The Sweater Weather/Coast to Coast Spy AU has officially begun! Thanks to everyone who’s asked questions/thought of ideas/showed excitement for this!! As always, characters belong to the lovely @lumosinlove! And thank you, @donttouchmycarrots for proofreading this!

Here’s the Clandestine Masterlist

Chapter One

Remus Lupin was being followed.

He hadn’t been out in the field for years now, but some habits would always stick with him. Surreptitiously glancing over his shoulder as he walked down the street towards his flat, listening for falling footsteps or sudden noises, and – most importantly – trusting his gut.

He could feel eyes on the back of his head and knew from experience that he wasn’t just being paranoid.

He took a few seconds to think about it, then grabbed his phone, pretending to be oblivious, and called Potter before slipping his phone back into his pocket and keeping his steps even and casual. Sure enough, his follower tried to take advantage of his supposed slip in focus and grabbed his arm. But Remus knew it was coming and caught the assailant by the forearm, using their forward momentum to pin him to a nearby wall.

“Why are you following me?” Remus demanded, breath clouding in the cool night air before he recognized his attacker. Dark curls, dove-gray eyes, high cheekbones.

Sirius Black, a prominent member of the Snakes, the Slytherin mafia. Sirius Black, who was actively being hunted down by the intelligence agency Remus worked for.

Sirius Black, who wasn’t even trying to fight back or break free. For some unknown reason, he was in Gryffindor - where an entire intelligence agency was trying to take him and the organization he was a part of down - and yet he seemed completely calm. Nonchalant, even. As if this were just a walk in the park on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Remus narrowed his eyes at Black. “What’s going on?”

Black reached into Remus’ pocket, pulled out his phone, and ended the call to Potter. “Not here. Do you have somewhere quiet we can talk?”

Remus arched an eyebrow. “Yes, but I’ll need to call that guy back. If I don’t he’ll panic and he won’t hesitate to shoot on sight if he thinks I’m in trouble.”

That wasn’t necessarily true, but Black didn’t need to know that.

After quickly calling Potter back and explaining what was going on, he hung up and led the way back to his flat. He knew that was a better option that going back to Gryffindor Intelligence. If he felt like this put him in danger, he could move pretty easily. It’s not like he had many belongings to begin with. Uprooting the agency would be next to impossible.

“If people end up breaking into my house after this, I will hunt you down.”

“Yeah,” Black scoffed, kicking a rock farther down the sidewalk, then kicking it again when he caught up with it. “You’ve done a great job of that so far.”

“And yet you’re here for some reason. That can only mean two possible things.”

Black had to abandon the rock as they took the stairs up to Remus’ flat. “Oh? Do tell.”

“One, this is a crazy scheme to slowly kill off Gryffindor Intelligence one by one and, for whatever reason, you decided to start with me.” Remus fished his keys out of his pocket and unlocked his door. “Or two, which is more likely, you need our help. The only question I have left is why the great Sirius Black is stooping to ask us for help.”

He closed the door behind them and watched as Black took in his surroundings. It wasn’t much: a ratty old couch, a coffee table, warm brown-toned walls, and too many dying potted plants.

He really needed to remember to water those.

“I ran away from the Snakes and I can help you take them down once and for all.”

Remus blinked at the suddenness of that statement. This… this could change everything. They might actually be able to take the Snakes down, after years of trying and failing. He had so many questions. What changed to make him want to leave? Why now? But none of those seemed to matter at that moment. There was only one question Remus needed to know the answer to immediately.

“What’s in it for you?”

Black shifted on his feet. “My brother…” He sighed, refusing to look at Remus. “He’s still there. And he’s innocent in all this – as innocent as he can be, in a situation like that. I need you to ensure that you can get him out safely before we take them down.”

“I’m sure something can be arranged.” Remus agreed. He knew of Regulus, of course. It was his job, after all. And he didn’t seem as innocent as his older brother was trying to paint him out to be. At the end of the day, though, it didn’t really matter. Letting Regulus go free, guilty or not, would be a small price to pay for taking down one of the biggest mafias in the country. “What’s your plan?”

For the first time Remus had ever seen, Black smiled. “It’s all in the flash drives.”

Remus called Pots and Moody over; this was too much for him to deal with on his own. James he trusted with everything - it didn’t even cross his mind not to call his friend. He was probably dying of curiosity after that phone call, anyways. Remus wouldn’t have been surprised if he was already on his way to Remus’ flat before he got the call. And Moody could sniff out a liar like no one Remus had ever seen. If Black was lying - about any of this - Moody would know.

James opened the door then, making a beeline for Remus and dragging him into the kitchen to talk to him in private. “Alright, Loops?”

“I’m fine.”

Pots relaxed, but only slightly. “So he just... showed up?”

“Tried to grab my arm on the way home.”

“So you brought him back to your flat? I mean, I know you voted for him as the most attractive in Criminal Choice Awards, but come on, Loops.” He said, referencing the game they’d played with the rest of Gryffindor Intelligence over New Year’s while outrageously drunk.

“First of all, we don’t talk about that game. That was a fiasco and should be considered top secret intel. Second of all, what else was I supposed to do? He said he could help us take down the Snakes. I couldn’t just let an opportunity like that pass us by.”

“Ok, fine.” James agreed reluctantly. “We’ll hear him out, but I can’t promise we’ll do anything else.” He then turned to walk back into the living room and glared at the stranger in the room. “Black.”

“Potter.” Black said with a taunting smile. “How’s the kid?”

“Don’t you dare – ”

Moody walked into his flat with his gun already drawn and aimed at Black. Remus sighed. “Is that really necessary?”

“You can never be too vigilant.” He mumbled, not taking his eyes off Black, who just grinned and sent Moody a sarcastic wave.

“If we’re going to get this done,” Remus interrupted, still clutching James’ arm in a firm grip to hold him back. “We need to work together. So stop antagonizing each other and let’s get to work. Black, you mentioned flash drives?”

Black nodded. “Riddle keeps all the information about the Snakes on seven separate flash drives. I could tell you some of the information, but there’s too many groups and people that I don’t have memorized. If you want to catch all the members and informants and organizations under the Snakes’ control, you need those flash drives. As soon as you try to take the Snakes down, they’ll all scatter and you’ll never find them again if you don’t already know who you’re looking for. Do you have coffee? It’s quite late and this is bound to be a long conversation.”

“I don’t drink coffee.” Remus lied, although he could tell Black saw right through him. “Keep talking.”

He sighed dramatically and rolled his eyes, leaning back on the couch to get more comfortable and staring up at the ceiling as he continued in a bored tone, “He keeps the drives in different locations. One he keeps with him at all times. One’s in a safe in his office, and two are with his most-trusted men – Bellatrix and my brother.”

“And yet your brother is innocent?” Remus asked skeptically.

Black glared at him, all sense of nonchalance gone. When he spoke, his voice was deadly. “He’s done more in terms of taking the Snakes down than you have. We’ve been trying to destroy them from the inside for years, but there’s only so much two people can do.”

Remus understood now why people were so afraid of him. That piercing gray gaze was chilling.

“Ok, fine. Where are the rest of the drives?”

Like a flip had been switched, Black reverted back to casual as if nothing had happened. “There’s three in separate safes across the city – one’s in the police station, and two are in safety deposit boxes in different banks. That’s seven.”

James met Remus’ gaze. “Winter? He’s the best at cracking safes.”

Black grimaced. “And there’s our biggest roadblock. The Snakes know who you are.”

“What?”

“All of your active agents, the ones who have tried to take the Snakes down previously, they have files on.”

Moody looked like he was about to have a stroke. Black shrugged. “Their informants are no joke.”

“So what do you expect us to do, if we’ll be recognized as soon as we step foot into the city?” Remus demanded, running a list of their agents through his head and eliminating nearly all of them one by one.

“Surely you have some agents who haven’t gone up against the Snakes yet.”

Remus blinked. “You’re joking. This is your grand plan? That eliminates about ninety-five percent of our candidates. And those five percent left? Maybe two percent are trained and ready to go out into the field. This is a huge op - we can’t just send anyone.”

“You got a better idea?”

“Hang on,” James said, and Remus groaned. He could see that glint in his eyes. The glint that meant he had an idea brewing.

Nothing good ever came from that glint.

“We can send O’Hara.”

“See? We already have a candidate!” Black cheered, kicking his feet up onto the coffee table. Remus bristled. “Who’s O’Hara?”

“We recruited him right after he graduated from Harvard last year. He’s got a near perfect memory, and he’s really good with people. He normally does stake outs or reconnaissance and the occasional honeypot.”

“He’d be good for this,” Moody gruffly added. “He can charm the pants off of just about anybody. Makes it easy to get what you want.”

“I think Tremblay would be a good fit, too.” Remus chimed in, thinking it through. They’d work well together. Finn might drive Logan insane, but they’d get the job done. Hopefully. “Bring in some extra muscle just in case things get dicey, which they always do with the Snakes.”

“He hasn’t worked a Snakes mission before?” James asked.

Remus shook his head. “He’s been back and forth between here and Beauxbatons, remember? Since he’s fluent in French.”

“Can he crack open safes?” Black asked impatiently.

“No,” James said, but he was still smiling. “But we know someone who can.”

Remus thought about it for a second, then turned to gape at James when he figured it out. “James, you can’t be serious.”

“Why not? He’s a perfect fit! And the only other person besides Winter who can consistently crack a safe.”

“He’s a kid.”

“He’s not that much younger than O’Hara or Tremblay, and you’re fine with sending them.”

“He’s never even been out in the field before!”

“Winter says he’s almost as good as himself.”

“He’s inexperienced, and he’s going to get himself or one of the others killed.”

“Ok, so then what do you suggest?” James demanded, throwing up his arms in frustration. “Do you know anyone else who could do it?”

Remus stared at him at a loss, much to his chagrin. They’d never had to worry about this before - Winter did all their missions when they needed to break into something. They’d never needed anyone else before.

Now it seemed like their biggest operation to date would be in the hands of a rookie.

After a beat of silence, Moody spoke up. “I agree with Potter. He’s our only option, if the rest of our agents are compromised. We can talk to Winter in the morning, see if he’s ready for this.”

Remus sighed, but didn’t argue.

“I’m sorry,” Black said. “But who are we talking about?”

James grinned. “Nut.”

“That’s his name?”

“Oh my god.” Remus groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose.

***

Leo Knut (it’s pronounced newt, thank you very much) sat at his work station with twelve different locks in front of him, along with his pick, rake, and tension wrench. He took a deep, steadying breath and started his timer before instantly getting his hands on his first lock.

Insert tension wrench. Use the pick to find the binding pin and set it. Set the rest of the pins. Turn the tension wrench and…

The lock clicked open.

Leo quickly set it down and picked the next one up, repeating the same steps and singing along quietly to the song playing on his phone.

“All I want, all I want is you, your violet disposition, my unsound intuit – aaah!” He shouted when someone suddenly sat down on the bench next to him. “Fuck, Winter.”

Kasey raised an eyebrow. “You need to pay more attention to your surroundings when you’re on the job. Also, you’re tone deaf.”

“Thanks.” Leo muttered, reaching over to stop his timer and turn his music off. “Why are you here so early? Aren’t you usually asleep right now?”

“Yeah, but I got a call from Loops.”

Leo, always one to keep his hands busy, began messing with another lock. “You got another job?”

“No,” Kasey said, drawing out the vowel. “But you might.”

Leo laughed. “You’re kidding.” After a few seconds of silence, he looked back up again. Kasey’s face was dead serious. Leo set his lock and tools down. “You’re not kidding. What the hell? What’s the job?”

“You’d be going after the Snakes.”

Normally, Leo appreciated being direct and straightforward.

This was not one of those times.

“As in the mafia? Those Snakes?”

“Yup.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yup.”

Leo knew of the Snakes, of course. And he knew that Gryffindor had been after them for years, which meant it was a big deal. So why were they putting him on the job and not Winter? He had experience in pickpocketing tourists in the streets of New Orleans and opening locks. He’d only started cracking safes under Winter’s instructions eight months ago. Why him?

“Is Loops insane? This would be my first job!”

“It was technically Pots’ idea.”

“Oh. Well, that makes a lot more sense.”

“Nut – ”

“That’s not my name – ”

“This is big for a first job.”

Leo fiddled with another lock, listening to the soothingly repetitive sound of pins setting. It was familiar, solid ground.

This, though, would be uncharted territory.

“I know.” He said anyways, trying to settle his nerves.

“You think you’re ready for it?”

Leo looked down, collecting his thoughts before speaking. “I’ve got to prove myself somehow, right? What better way to do that than by taking down one of the biggest gangs in the country?”

Kasey laughed. “You’re crazy.”

“I’m from Louisiana – it’s in our blood.”

“Okay, you crazy Cajun. You’ve got your first debriefing at 10:30. Please don’t be late your first day on the job.”

“Who am I working with?” Leo asked, tilting his head. “I mean, I’ve got to have partners, right?”

Kasey just smiled. “Trust me, Nut. You’re going to love them.”

***

Logan and Loops were the only ones in the briefing room so far.

And it was awkward.

Obviously Logan knew who he was – everyone knew his story – but they weren’t talking. The briefing room with the almost-hilariously large table was completely silent besides the occasional rustling of paper or the sound of the air conditioning turning on again. Logan couldn’t remember ever talking to the handler before. Maybe briefly, at that disastrous New Year’s party.

God, that party.

Logan steadfastly refused to think of the New Year’s party.

That is, until a familiar face walked through the door.

The redhead looked up, doe-eyes widening as he recognized Logan. “It’s you!”

Fuck, he was even more attractive now that Logan was sober.

Logan forcefully pushed aside hazy memories of laughing too loud at a story the redhead was telling, cuddled up on the couch with red solo cups in their hands and an almost-kiss as the clock struck midnight that Logan had wanted more than anything. He smiled faintly instead. “It’s you!”

The agent sat down excitedly next to Logan, eager eyes peering out at him from behind tortoiseshell glasses. “How’ve you been? Guess we’re partners now, huh?”

“Guess so.” He said faintly, the word fuck rattling around in his brain on an endless loop.

“I don’t think I caught your name at the party.”

“Oh. Logan. Logan Tremblay.”

“Finn O’Hara.” He replied, holding a hand out for Logan to shake. He then looked over to Loops. “We’ve still got a few more coming, right?”

He nodded reluctantly. “Unless one of you knows how to crack a safe, by any chance.”

Logan snorted, then shook his head. He wasn’t good at small, delicate things like that. Bashing heads in and upper cuts, though... “Nope.” He said simply, leaving it at that.

“Absolutely not.” Finn agreed.

Loops sighed. “That’s what I – ”

The door slowly opened to reveal a tall, blond boy with messy hair and cornflower blue eyes. He looked at the three of them, seeming a little nervous. “Uh, hey. I’m Leo – is this the right room?” He asked in a softly-accented voice.

“Yeah, come on in.” Loops said, which made Leo smile and –

Dimples.

Logan quickly shifted his focus back to Loops as he began to talk again. “Knut, meet O’Hara and Tremblay. They’re your partners for this mission. We have one more person coming before we can get started,” He glanced down at his watch. “But apparently he’s running late.”

“Oh, Lupin, you almost sound concerned.”

Logan’s head shot up at the voice. Sirius Black strode through the door, giving Loops a flirty wink before looking at the three of them. He grinned. “So which one if you is unfortunate enough to have the last name Nut?”

Leo sighed, while the other two fought to keep their laughter at bay. “It’s pronounced newt.”

“Not anymore. You can’t expect people to pass up a nickname like that, kid.”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“What? Nut or kid?”

“Both.”

Black just grinned again. “Not a chance.”

“Are you done harassing our operatives, Black?”

“Why? Are you feeling left out?”

Loops glared at him, but his cheeks turned slightly pink. “Why don’t you start debriefing them instead.” It wasn’t a suggestion.

“Buzzkill.” He muttered, but threw himself into one of the chairs. “You might want to write this down – I’m only saying it once and I don’t have any of it in files or anything.”

Logan couldn’t decide whether he should be impressed or repulsed by the lack of professionalism. He looked over at Nut, who was already waiting with a pen and notepad, clicking his pen repeatedly. Logan gritted his teeth and tried to tune out the noise. O’Hara was just sitting back in his chair, content to listen apparently. Logan settled for somewhere in the middle and grabbed one piece of paper and a pencil.

“Alright, here’s the deal. I’m sure you know who I am: Sirius Black, ex-member of the Snakes, blah blah blah. You get it. Well, I’m here to help you take the Snakes down. All the evidence we need of importing drugs, trafficking, laundering, bribery, blackmail – Christ, this list is long. You get the picture. Everything illegal they’ve done, the evidence is on seven flash drives. We need you to get all seven and get my brother out safely before we can officially take them down. Easy enough, right?”

“This is going to be a long op,” Loops cut in, making meaningful eye contact with the three of them. “I’m talking weeks to months here. We’ve got a lot of intel we still need, a lot of planning to do. And it’s not going to be easy. If you don’t feel like you’re up for the task, speak up now.”

Logan sent a surreptitious glance at his new partners. O’Hara looked excited at the prospect of a mission like this. Nut still looked nervous, but his eyes were determined, focused.

They all stayed silent.

“Perfect. Then let’s get started.”

#lumosinlove #sweater weather #coast to coast #coops #sirius black #remus lupin #o'knutzy #finn o'hara #logan tremblay #leo knut #clandestine

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halfway-happyyy · 3 years

Text

She’s My Kind Of Girl

AN: this started as an idea of the lovely @bskarsgardlove92‘s and i kind of just rolled with it! i hope you enjoy, and as always, feedback is welcomed and appreciated!

synopsis: Alex dresses in drag to attend a costume party with his girl, as one half of Swedish superband, ABBA! Absolute fluff ensues!

“Though you may hail from a long and distinguished line of inexplicably talented thespians, I know you well enough by now to recognize when you're not telling me something.”

Alexander passed a serviette over the front of his mouth and swallowed back a bite of salmon, cocking an eyebrow in amusement. “I beg your pardon?”

She sipped deeply from her glass of chilled wine, and cocked her head to the side, eyeing him. “Don’t play coy with me, Alex. You were on the line with Eija when I came into the kitchen. That glint in your eyes says so much and then nothing at all in equal measure.”

“One could almost say that you know me too well, kid.”

"Almost," She grinned around the delicate rim of her glass. “Now spill it, Skarsgård.”

Alexander leaned back against the oak chair, dangling a long arm over the back of it. “Dad’s seventieth birthday is next month. Eija’s hosting a party back home for him, and she wants us to be there.”

She thought fondly of Alexander’s father often; he had been one of the first faces of his family that she’d had the privilege of meeting when her and Alexander had started taking things a little more seriously. Where her own father figure had been virtually non-existent most of the time, she was blessed to have such a wonderful father-in-law in Stellan. He was such an integral part of their lives that the thought of not returning home to Sweden to celebrate him was almost too much to bear.

“I’ll look into flights tomorrow morning. What kind of get together is it? I would imagine knowing Eija as I do, that she's got something wonderful up her sleeve?”

Alexander's lips curved up into a devilish smirk and he cocked his head to the side.

“She's hosting a costume party.”

There it was…

“God, I can only imagine the ideas that beautiful mind of yours has already dreamed up.”

Alexander tipped the rest of his wine into his mouth, his blue eyes glittering mischievously in the low light from the dining room lamp. “Hm, you know how much dad loves ABBA…”

It was the precise tone of his voice that she reckoned prepared her for what was coming next. “Oh boy,” She giggled under her breath.

“Well, I propose that we go as Björn and Agnetha.”

She mulled the thought of it over in her head, and then an idea swam into her mind's eye that caused a smirk similar to her other half's to tug the edges of her lips skyward. “I'll do it on one condition, my love.”

His eyebrow lifted in intrigue. “I'm all ears.”

“I will do it if I can be the Björn to your Agnetha.”

His laughter- utterly loud and booming, filled every square space of their home with a warm and joyous sound. When it subsided, he leveled his gaze with hers and she noticed immediately, the blush that had risen to the apples his cheeks. After a moment, he nodded his head finitely. “You've got yourself a deal, kid.”

She glanced at the watch face beneath the bell sleeve of her silver, sequined blouse, and sighed heavily. “C'mon dancing queen, we haven’t got all night…” Alexander emerged from the bathroom door a moment later, a blonde, perfectly styled wig fell below the cups of a filled-out bra.

“I must say,” He reached toward her to tousle the brunette wig atop of her head, a smirk in place on his features. “Silver and forest green sequins do wonders for you, kid. Or should I say- Björn.”

“Oh hush,” She giggled. “I can hardly imagine the outfit you’ve conjured up for this evening." They gazed at each other in silence for a moment before she gestured to her vanity. "Shall I do your makeup?”

Alexander shifted from foot to foot. “If you wouldn't mind,” He murmured.

She stood on tiptoes to twirl strands of blonde hair around her finger. “It would be an honour, Agnetha.”

She followed Alexander to the vanity next to their bay window and turned on the lamp so that it illuminated his face perfectly. Pulling up a photo of Agnetha on her phone for reference, she set to work. “She sometimes likes to wear bold colours on her eyes, so that’s the look we’re going for this evening.” She started the process by moisturizing and priming his face, opting out of a foundation, and using a tinted moisturizer instead. “Alright, close your eyes for me, my love.” He did as he was told, and she allowed herself a moment to admire how breathtaking he truly was. After a couple of seconds of searching, she found a palette that was made up of different shades of purple and applied a muted lavender hue over both of his lids. Wanting to go a little darker, she blended a violet shade into his creases and stood back to admire her handiwork. Nearly done, she decided to go dramatic on the eyeliner, but when she reached for her favourite tube of mascara, Alexander faltered.

“I don’t need… falsies?”

She blanched. “Alex, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but your natural eyelashes are beautiful,” She took his face in her hands and gently turned it to the side, gesturing to his left eye. “Look how long and healthy they are. I think I have some cheap lashes lying around somewhere if you really want them, but I think a few coats of mascara will do wonderfully.”

He reached up to press his lips to the underside of her jaw, shaking his head. “No, I trust you.”

She kissed the tip of his nose and got back to work. “You’ve done magnificent so far. I’m just about finished…” She glanced around for her mauve pink lipstick, held a hand beneath his chin and applied the colour to his lips. “Alright, rub your lips together for me please.” She watched him do as she asked. “Now pat them together, as if you were smacking them.” She waited. “Alright, for the finishing touch,” She reached for her bottle of setting spray, told him to close his eyes, and let the mist settle over his face. “You my love, are finished and ready for the evening.

He leaned forward to inspect her handiwork closely, and a large smile grew on his face. “You’ve done a wonderful job, kid.”

She nodded towards the washroom door. “Go on then, Chiquitita. The party awaits.”

“You and your ABBA puns, huh?” Alexander smirked, before closing the door behind him.

“Oh, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Just wait until your brothers get a hold of us.” She snickered. While she waited for Alexander to wrap up, she began lacing up the white platform boots she had found weeks ago. They added an extra four inches to her height, and she fought back a giggle as she sipped the last remnants of her pre-game cocktail.

Ten minutes elapsed, and she began to feel the familiar tug of inebriation deep in her belly. Suddenly, Alexander cleared his throat. “I’m coming out. Are you ready?”

“I’ve literally never been more ready in my life.” She deadpanned.

Alexander emerged from the washroom, and all she could do was gape at his figure as he stood poised in the doorway. Lord knows where, but he had managed to find a hot pink jumpsuit with a silver-sequined trim around the neckline and a heart-shaped cutout that showed off his adorable, trim bellybutton perfectly. He donned glossy, white boots on his feet that only added to his seemingly immense height. “Well, what do you think?” He asked, dubiously.

She swallowed hard. “I have lots of feelings about it actually… but our car is here, and your father awaits.” She held her arm out for him to take. “Shall we go, my beautiful Agnetha?”

Alexander accepted her arm gratefully and bent down to press a kiss to her cheek. “Lead the way, Björn.”

“What are your brothers going as?” She asked, as they slid into the backseat of the sedan.

“Uh, I think Bill and his family said that they were going as Disney characters. Gustaf and Valter are going as Top Gun’s Maverick and Goose, respectively,” He paused so that they could share a laugh at that. “And I’m not sure yet what Sam and his family are doing.”

She scratched contemptuously at the back of her head. “I hate this wig already.”

Alexander snorted into his drink. “But it looks so good on you… the way it kind of frames your face in that ‘the 70’s called and they want their hair back’ kind of way…”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s the heart-shaped bellybutton window for me.”

Alexander guffawed loudly. “Oh really? We're playing that game? Well then, it’s the extra four or five inches that you’re wearing but you still don’t reach past my sternum, for me.”

They rounded the corner to Stellan’s street, and laughter bubbled up out of her mouth like a song. “It’s the fact that you look better than most women I know, for me.” This sent Alexander into such a frenzy that she paid the driver herself. “Alright, Agnetha, I have a dream and it involves you exiting this vehicle tonight,” She nudged his back to get him out of the open car door. “Let's go, girlfriend.” They ambled up the pathway hand-in-hand and stood giggling in front of Stellan’s door. Roaring laughter and bits and pieces of broken Swedish and English conversation could be heard from inside as her finger hovered above the doorbell. “You ready?”

Alexander nodded, finitely. “Go on then,”

She rang the bell and waited for what felt like years, before the door flung open and Eija greeted them in a demure, feline costume. Her face was disbelieving at first, but then her painted-on whiskers twitched; she cracked and laughter roared from her belly in happy waves. When she could speak again, she shook her head gleefully. “Come in, come in you two. What an honour to have one half of the world’s greatest band with us!” She ushered them into Stellan’s lively home, the scent of a freshly-cooked feast hung tantalizing in the air, and made her mouth water hungrily. “Just wait until papa sees you!” She clapped her hands merrily, pulling them into the adjacent living room.

Their entrance caused mass hysteria; pure laugher on a level that was hard to fathom. Gustaf approached them first, a pair of sunglasses sat perched atop his head, and he was sporting a mustache. Clad in a pair of army-green coveralls, the badge on his chest simply read, ‘Gus.’ “I have to say that when Alex first told me what the two of you were planning, this was not what I had in mind…” He scratched absentmindedly at the bridge of his nose, his smile wry. “But you two absolutely knocked it out of the park. Well done, brother.” He belly laughed, and wrapped an arm around Alex’s shoulders, and pressed a kiss to her cheek. “I can’t wait until dad sees you.”

Valter appeared before them next, clad in the exact same costume as Gustaf accept that his badge read, ‘Maverick’, and he had on over his blue eyes, a pair of mirrored Rayban aviators. “Mamma Mia, Agnetha! Such lovely bosoms you have!”

A hand appeared out of the abyss and sneaked its way toward Alexander’s ample breasts, but the younger Skarsgård's plan was foiled before he could get there with Alexander slapping it away just in the nick of time. “Touch them and die, Valter.” He beamed, devilishly.

Valter's grin was sheepish. “My apologies Agnetha- Björn.”

She tossed a wink his way. “Turns out she can take care of herself just fine.”

“Alright, alright, where are they?” Stellan’s achingly familiar voice- unmistakable anywhere, boomed throughout the room. When he caught sight of them, he stood stock-still and tilted his head back, his rolling laughter loud and genuine. It caused pleasant goosebumps to rise in waves over her arms, and she couldn’t help but laugh along with him. “This is it,” He announced. “I couldn’t dare to ask for another thing after this. My eldest boy and his love coming in drag as Agnetha and Björn? This is seventy, folks!” He closed the distance between them to wrap them both in a crushing bear hug. When he pulled away, his eyes were glittering brightly beneath the low light of the many lamps scattered around the living room. “How unbelievably wonderful it is to see you both here.” He kissed both of their cheeks over again, his smile wide and utterly contagious. “On a totally unrelated note- that you and Björn here have similar situations happening… ehm, up top, is really quite miraculous, isn’t it?”

Alexander rolled his azure eyes, laughing loudly at that. “Happy birthday, dad.”

“And what a wonderful birthday it turned out to be. Come, come. We have much to discuss.”

The night carried on in much the same fashion; drinks were had (and spilt), laughter was shared, pictures were taken- and all the while, she just felt unimaginably blessed to be a part of it all. Closer towards the evening’s finish, she felt Alexander’s hand tighten around her own, and she knew then, without a shadow of a doubt that this was her family. This was where she belonged.

#literal ICONS #who doesn't love little ABBA??#alexander skarsgard #alexander skarsgard x reader #alexander skarsgard imagine #alexander skarsgard oneshot #alexander skarsgard drabble #drabble #writing #fluff #alex sstuff

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hains-mae · 4 years

Text

Flowers

(Damian x Reader) Soulmate AU

Rating: T

Ages: Damian and you are 16, everyone’s ages follow after.

Summary: Soulmate AU where the wounds on your soulmate turns into a flower tattoo on your skin, if it heals with no scars the tattoo goes away, if it heals with a scar then the tattoo stays. You are just an ordinary girl, with an ordinary life, so one might think it only makes sense that your soulmate is just as ordinary as you. But that isn’t the case. Especially not when your body is constantly littered with flowers. Some of them fade over time, some stay, but one thing is for certain – your soulmate seems to get hurt. A lot.

Notes: Hey there you guys. Recently I’ve been caught up in a Batman fever, and I can’t do anything about it. I ended up creating a challenge for my friend @mrevaunit42 which was an “Character x Reader” Soulmate AU. Seriously, it was all in the name of fun.

And then I got caught up in it, perhaps a little too much – and created this. I’ve never written a soulmate au before, though I really wanted to. (Now I have! Yay~) So please forgive my writing since I’m a little rusty, and I hope you enjoy.

Stay safe everyone.

Disclaimer: I do not own DC. If I did, I wouldn’t make it as confusing as it is now.

I woke up to a burning sensation on my lower ribs in the middle of night. Hissing in pain I slowly pushed my feet out of the warm covers and turned on the lamp beside my bed. Pulling up my shirt I assessed the damage.

It was purple lilacs this time, stretched across the middle of my torso going horizontally to my side. I winced as the tattoo completed itself and just as the heat came, a cold chill ran through it and down my spine. Somehow it soothed the burn.

God, another one? I frowned at the beautiful flower and sighed. It worried me that my soulmate was prone to getting hurt. Sometimes the injuries made sense, like when I found them on my knees, I could easily chalk it up to falling and scraping – but injuries like these were more difficult to decipher.

How does someone normal get hurt this way?

They don’t.

“Unless they’re a criminal.” One of my friends stated dryly days ago.

“Or a hero!” Another said quickly.

Needless to say, I wasn’t in a rush to find out. Whoever this person was, I knew from the start that they were trouble.

The next time I woke, it was to the early morning rays that escaped my curtains and played a fiery dance on my eye lids. I groaned and pulled the covers up wishing I could sleep in for a couple more minutes, but I knew I couldn’t.

A few weeks ago my school, Gotham Academy, announced that they were holding their annual science fair at a convention centre as opposed to the regular school gymnasium, because surprisingly enough, Wayne Enterprise offered to fund the event.

It was no secret that Gotham’s economy was hitting below the desired margin. Many people don’t have jobs which resulted in an influx of crime in the past years. And so Wayne Enterprise collaborated with Gotham’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to raise awareness and encourage young minds to strive for a better, innovative future. They shouldered the expenses needed and created an international affair, to top it off; Wayne Ent. also offered scholarships to future college goers and internships in all their branches.

Which was why I couldn’t sleep in today. I had project to work on. In line with our team of sponsors, I decided to invent a weapon that could help the GPD when catching criminals. A gun that projects thin plastic case marbles filled with a chemical concoction that erupts into a quick hardening foam upon impact. The foam itself is not toxic, but it works with catching and detaining. It turns as hard as stone but there was another type of compound that I was in the process of creating to counter act it as a measure of safety.

I got up and started my day.

“Good morning sweetheart.” My mom greeted as I entered the kitchen. She smiled warmly at me as she placed a plate of eggs and bacon on the table.

I couldn’t help but return the gesture, walking up to her and placing a kiss on her cheek. “Morning Mom, are you working tonight?”

“I have to, but don’t worry I’ll be leaving something in the fridge for dinner.”

I thanked her and took my plate into the living room. Turning on the T.V., I easily found the news channel and watched the latest reports on Gotham’s activities.

Mom sometimes had to work on weekends just to make ends meet, which was one reason why I was so hard to get that scholarship and hopefully the internship as well. The other reason was…

A family picture caught my eye in the middle of the news and I bit back a sigh. My dad, my mom, and me. We all were smiling at the camera.

Dad was part of the Police force and died during a heist. Reports stated he was running after the criminals and got shot before he could capture them. That was another reason I chose this as my project. Dad always wanted to fight for justice, hopefully this invention could help.

I finished up my breakfast and helped my mom with chores before I slipped into science mode and continued tinkering with the project. The projectiles were complete and I was able to make 3 in total, which I stored in a small box encased with extra padding.

It was around evening after my mom left that I got another burn. I dropped the screwdriver I was holding and bit my lip. Gasping for breath I pulled my sleeve and watched another flower blossom on my forearm.

The pain was gone in an instant and the cold tickled the skin that was branded. I sighed and slowly straightened my poster. This person, after all these injuries, they better not die before I meet them. I grumbled to myself when I realised I was short on supplies. Poor planning on my part.

I grabbed my bag and locked the front door before I headed out to the nearest hardware store, careful to keep my marks hidden from view. I’ve lived in Gotham my whole life, and I knew that standing out, even in the smallest way, would lead into trouble.

The walk to the store was short and uneventful, thankfully. There were only a few customers. I manoeuvred my way between the isles and picked up what I needed. After paying at the counter I hauled my goods and ducked back into the streets. I almost wished I didn’t stop when I heard that woman cry out for help. I was unarmed, unprepared, and every cell in my body screamed at me to walk – no – run away from the scene that was unfolding before my eyes.

But she was helpless. Clad in a trench coat and rain boots, she didn’t look like much but her bag was definitely designer. The thieves in question had a knife pointed at her face. There were 6 of them. All were towering and bulky next to her petite frame. Their menacing stares struck a cold shiver in me and my hand involuntarily clutched the projectiles I was working on in my pocket. I had a feeling it would be safer with me than it would be at home, however this was not how I imagined I’d first be using them.

The woman screamed again and I clenched my palm.

I sucked in some air and got ready to shout at the perpetrators – until I felt the wind rush past my ear.

In a flash someone had swooped into the scene and kicked the man holding the knife to the ground. The sound of blades being drawn stole my attention. It was Robin. He took a stance between the woman and the men.

“Run. Now.” He told the lady.

She whimpered and scrambled up to her feet dashing towards me, towards the entrance of the alley. She zipped past and didn’t stop running till she turned the corner. I should be running too. But my eyes were fixed on the fight that was about to happen.

Robin seemed no older than me. In reality there was no way he could win against 6 huge men. But then again, this was Robin. No normal teenager.

“6 against 1.” He mused, the grip on his katana tightened. “That hardly seems fair.”

The one who held the knife, possibly the leader of the gang, growled thickly. “Get‘im boys.”

They all rushed towards him at the same time, hands in the air and weapons ready. Robin whipped his blade and easily knocked two knives down, the remaining used their strength and threw punches that looked like it would strike anyone straight to next week. The masked boy effortlessly dodged all their hits. Crouching, jumping, twisting, exactly when needed and not a second too late. His movements were precise; a quick jab below the rib striking the kidney with the handle of the sword, a sharp slam of his elbow to the chin, and to close the deal with a blunt blow force to the side of the neck. The goon fell like a tree that’s been cut down.

I gaped in awe.

The others rushed to avenge their fallen comrade, but Robin was quicker and used his blade to disable them. He kicked one of them into the brick wall, a sickening crunch echoed as the goons’ head smashed into it, then a howl of pain when Robin sliced his back. I cringed at the sight of the blood. It was a superficial wound, at least from my vantage point. The cut was deep enough to hurt and draw red, but not enough to kill.

The next lunged himself and grabbed Robin’s wrist, the boy growled and kicked him the face, forcing to free himself. He couldn’t see the other one running towards them from behind, the weapon aiming straight for Robin’s back.

“Robin!” I found my voice and screamed. “Behind you!”

He did a roundhouse kick and slammed the head of the one holding his wrist, then using the momentum back flipped and kicked the one who was behind.

I sighed in relief.

“What are you doing just standing there?!” He shouted at me as he readied himself again. “I said run!”

That got all the men’s attention. The ones that fell got back up and huffed angrily.

“Get the girl!” The leader shouted. “We can use her.” His leer sent bile rushing up my throat.

I squeaked as 3 of them started to chase me. Finally my legs listened and I dashed across the street onto the other pavement.

They were too fast though, their thundering footsteps grew closer towards me. My lungs burned as I tried to inhale some much needed oxygen, physical sports like running really weren’t my thing. I nearly tripped on an uneven tile as a scream rippled out of my throat. I braced myself for impact but it never came. Instead I felt a rush of wind across my face and a lightness below me. The ground was getting further and further away.

I realised I was being carried. Looking up, I was face to face with Red Robin.

“God thing I saw you when I did or you’d be dead meat.” He said dryly as we landed on a roof.

“Th-thank you.” I breathed, trying to gulp in as much needed air as I could. “Robin – he –“ But I didn’t know how to articulate. The adrenaline rush was messing with my head, and I could barely think straight.

Yet Red Robin nodded, understanding. He jumped off the roof and shot his grappling hook. I peered down and saw the fight started to move, from the alley to the side walk. The goons cornered Robin into a store front and were relentless as they threw punch after punch. The other 3 that were chasing me were already fighting Red just below the building that he deposited me on.

I watched in horror as the glass shattered everywhere around them. They weren’t just normal gangs I discerned, they knew how to fight. And unlike the birds and bat, they didn’t mind taking a life.

Clutching the projectiles again in my pocket, I brought them up with trembling hands.

“I hope this works.” I whispered to myself and pulled out my elastic hair tie.

Hooking one of the orbs onto the elastic, I aimed for the goons attacking Robin, and pulled as far as the band could go. Willing my hand to stop shaking, I said a silent prayer and released my hold.

Time seemed to go into slow motion as it flew across the air. I held my breath.

It hit the ground between two goons and burst into a big foamy cloud of vibrant cobalt, instantly seizing the men and solidified their prison as the concoction cooled.

Both fights stopped for a split second, as they watched the chemical reaction, which now looking back was a mistake on all parties.

I gasped and thanked whoever was listening.

The leader roared and pulled a pistol. I felt my throat tighten as the gun set a bullet free.

Robin and I cried out in pain as the bullet dug into him. Tears threatened to roll down my cheek as I clutched my burning shoulder.

A birdarang zipped towards the leader, catching his wrist and making him let go of the weapon. With a grunt, Robin kicked him hard across the chest stealing the perpetrators breath and with a quick turn, smashed his foot onto the mans jaw, cracking it before letting him fall with a loud thud.

The fight continued and Robin easily subdued his last opponent. Then he ran across the street to finish up with Red. Both of them moved in fluid motions like well trained dancers as they fought while protecting each others weak spots. They took down the last 3 goons and tied them up just as the police sirens blared within the distance.

I jumped up from my spot and turned to run but stopped when I saw the two Robins in my path.

“You.” The younger one started. “You were the one who shot the…”

I nodded wordlessly, still feeling the adrenaline coursing through my body. A nasty red splotch caught my attention and I believe they both noticed as I glanced at it. My own hand went up and clutched my shoulder unconsciously, a cold sensation rippled through where the bullet was.

“Oh my god.”

---

to be continued...

Part 2, 3, 4, 5 (end)

#Damian Wayne x Reader #Damian x Reader #Soulmate AU #fanfiction #my fanfiction #challenge #DC #Batman #Robin #Red Robin #my fan fiction

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everybodyscupoftea · 4 years

Text

anyone can cook

rafe cameron x reader

words: 3729

warnings: usual cursing, mentions of drugs

synopsis: college au, four times you cook for rafe and one time he cooks for you

Growing up, your mom taught you the importance of food. For most of your childhood, you loved cooking with her. Learning family recipes, and spending time in the kitchen with her instead of doing homework was thrilling to you. As you aged, you started to resent it, feeling like your mother was perpetuating the harmful stereotype that women are meant to be in the kitchen.

And then you left school early and came home to see the shit your dad was putting your mom through and was forced to immediately take that hard pill to swallow. Perspective was a bitch. Your mom didn’t cook to please your dad, she cooked to keep him happy enough for you to be fooled. It was heartbreaking.

You decided then that you’d not take any time cooking with your mom for granted. She loved you and she wanted you to be happier than her. For her, you could certainly fucking try. It was all going great until the storm that knocked out power, rendered the kitchen useless, and drove your dad’s patience level to its breaking point.

He’d never been that angry before, at least not in front of you. You weren’t sure what to do as he lashed out at your mom and then you, without warning and in the end, without apology. Normally if you were upset, your mom would make cookies with you, letting you use cookie cutters and dirty unnecessary dishes. That time though, you had to figure it out alone.

When you got to college, your parents helped pay rent for your first apartment. It had a good kitchen with lots of room, and your mom bought you a ton of kitchen tools, pots and pans, and other cooking necessities as a graduation gift. Her and your dad helped you move in, and that night, with shaky hands, she held your face in her hands. Tears in her eyes she whispered, “Promise me you won’t stop cooking.”

You couldn’t stop your own tears as you gulped and nodded a little frantically, “Of course not, Mama.”

Rafe lived a very different life. His real mother wasn’t in the picture and his step mother didn’t really want kids, so his experience with cooking was very limited compared to yours. Coincidentally that’s how the two of you met, outside your apartment building at 11:48 p.m. while the fire department sorted out the disaster that was his dinner attempt.

You knew it was his fault because he was very carefully trying to make himself look small. The only reason you knew what had gone wrong was you overheard the fireman talking to the landlord saying it was just a small kitchen fire in 227 and wouldn’t be too much to fix.

It was really out of character, but you walked over to where he was sitting on the curb and sat down next to him, “227?”

His head turned toward you sharply, “Figured me out, huh?”

“You were trying a little too hard to look inconspicuous.”

He shrugged, “Didn’t want a bunch of angry neighbors.”

Which you understood, so you nudged his shoulder with yours, “Well, I’m not angry and I know, but I’m not so sure I’d risk it with her,” you pointed at a lady who seemed to be ranting into the phone.

The boy followed your point and winced, “Yeah maybe not. Cooking clearly isn’t for me.”

“What were you making?”

“Kraft mac and cheese.”

You let out a loud laugh, assuming it was a joke. But then he didn’t meet your eyes or laugh along and you quickly stopped laughing, “Wait actually?”

With a shrug, he answered, “No one really taught me how to cook.”

And here you had a choice. Years and years of stored up cooking knowledge, endless recipes memorized, and a fantastic kitchen begging to be used by more than one person made the choice obvious.

“Well then take this as my standing dinner invitation whenever you want. I’ll give you my number and you can let me know when you’re hungry.”

“So, you’re gonna what, teach me how to cook.”

“Well, we can start small. I’ll cook for you first.”

One:

The first time Rafe texted you was on a night you actually had a fridge full of leftovers, but the boy who lived alone with sad eyes deserved better than leftovers. Rafe knocked on the door a few minutes later and he was dressed similarly to the first time you’d seen him, in sweats and a hoodie, and his hands were folded nervously in front of him.

You let him in, and he followed you to the kitchen, “So what’s on the menu for tonight?” he asked.

“Chicken pot pie,” you told him over your shoulder. You’d turned the oven on to preheat and had the potatoes and carrots chopped already. He stood behind you, peering over your shoulder.

Before you could continue, he cut in, “Is there something I can do?”

You thought for a minute, “You can control the music. My phone is synced up to the bluetooth speaker and I have Spotify pulled up, so have at it.”

Rafe nodded and sat down as you put the veggies into a pot and added water to start boiling them. You quickly went into your cooking zone as Rafe sat quietly queuing up songs. They were from your chill playlist and you appreciated that he was sticking to your playlists, humming along every so often.

By the time you pulled the chicken and veggie mixture from the heat, Rafe was leaning forward in his seat, and he looked excited to see what you’d do next. Reaching down, you pulled out a glass pie tin and looked over at him, “After I press the crust down, will you help me pour the mixture in?”

Rafe nodded eagerly and you made quick work of the pie crust, motioning him to come around the counter. He looked hesitant for the first time since you’d started cooking, and you tried to smile reassuringly. Returning the smile, he moved closer, “What do you want me to do.”

You held out the potholders, “If you pour, I’ll scoop.”

He picked the pot up and slowly poured the mixture into the tin and you quickly scooped the stuff that didn’t pour. Rafe set the pot down and you held the second crust out to him to press on top. He mimicked your actions from earlier carefully, and you couldn’t help but smile. You showed him how to press the edges down with a fork and he did so, slowly. Covering the edges, you let Rafe put it in the oven and then led him to the living room to start a movie while the two of you waited for it to finish.

The pot pie was a family recipe, and when Rafe tried it, the look on his face made it worth him seeing the secret ingredients your mom added to jazz it up. It felt good seeing someone enjoying your cooking again.

Two:

You weren’t entirely sure the relationship Rafe had with his family, but on fried catfish night, Rafe showed up at your doorstep unexpectedly. Fortunately, you had a few extra, so you invited him in for dinner. It wasn’t exactly what he was gunning for when he showed up, but he’d never say no to your cooking.

While you battered and seasoned the fish, he vented about his dad.

“I just don’t understand how a 4.0 isn’t fucking good enough. He’ll never give me any credit as long as Sarah does well in school and plays volleyball, I just want to be good enough.”

His words pulled at your heartstrings, and you found yourself tearing up on his behalf. You paused the music that had been softly playing in the background, “Fuck your dad, you deserve better.”

Rafe laughed drily, “I’ve done some dumb shit, this is my karma. I just don’t like it.”

“I fail to see any mistakes bad enough to warrant a parent totally disregarding their child like that. Did you kill someone or something?”

He shook his head, chuckling, “No, I didn’t kill anyone. But I had a drug problem in high school. I’m clean now, but it was me attempting to get my dad’s attention and it all spiraled out of control. Clearly it didn’t work out the way I wanted it to because my dad just kicked me out.”

You were horrified, “He kicked you out?!”

“Yeah, I went from couch to couch for a while until checking myself into rehab so I could get clean. I was tired of being dependent on something and really I wanted to prove my dad wrong.”

“God, Rafe, I’m so sorry.”

He shrugged and you started heating the oil up to start frying. There was an extended pause before he softly continued, “He didn’t let me move back in, even when I showed up clean. News of everything had gotten around town and he didn’t want me to further disgrace the family name.”

Brushing a tear off your cheek, you caught his eye, “Karma will come for your dad someday. You deserve only good things, Rafe.”

With a faint smile, he tapped his fingers on the cabinet, almost nervously, “Maybe one day I’ll be able to see it that way, but for now, I just don’t.”

“I’ll keep telling you until you believe it,” you promised fiercely. And you really meant it.

You finished frying the fish, silence between the two of you. It was no longer heavy and it wasn’t as awkward as the first time, you were proud of the progress. Rafe grabbed plates from the cabinet and at your instruction, the coleslaw you had already made and stored in the fridge.

Courtesy kicked in, and you let Rafe make his plate first. You figured he deserved to feel first choice for once. He almost looked like he wanted to argue, but you weren’t about to back down, so he filled his plate and sat back at the bar, patiently waiting for you to sit down before eating.

You fixed your plate and sat down next to him before squeezing his shoulder, “Thanks for keeping me company tonight.”

Rafe laughed, “Thanks for letting me rant.”

“Anytime.”

Three:

“Fuck,” you muttered under your breath and your laptop confirmed what you feared, your last bio exam had gone very poorly. It was just one test, but you weren’t used to seeing such a low grade, and you had to try really hard not to cry. Everything in you wanted to go lay down for days and forget about the rest of your classes, but the logical part of your brain texted Rafe to invite him for dinner.

He showed up not even five minutes later, and you decided breakfast sounded like the most comforting thing. You didn’t want to come across as too needy, so you didn’t mention the bad grade and tried to cover how you were actually feeling.

Unfortunately, the music you had playing gave it away. Rafe took one look at your face and the slight slump in your shoulders, and immediately wrapped you into a hug. You squeezed your eyes shut, fighting the tears, and he held you tighter.

“What happened, bud?”

“It’s nothing,” you tried to deflect, “fucked up on a bio test. We still have a few more, but it’s not a great start.”

“Which bio?”

“Molecular.”

Rafe thought for a few seconds, “I know a guy who has taken that, want me to see if I can get his notes?”

“That would be great actually.”

He smiled, “Good, now why don’t we get some happier music and get to cooking.”

And you could do that. Rafe changed to a playlist he’d made and sent to you a few weeks ago called Good Vibes for Cooking Nights and you couldn’t argue, they were good songs. A Wallows song started playing and you fell into a rhythm of pouring batter and flipping pancakes, feeling immensely better than when Rafe had first showed up.

You were thankful for him, this boy who had totally changed your life in the four months he’d known you. Four months of baring your hearts to each other in your own little ways. Rafe showing up to your apartment looking casual, not at all how he looked normally during the day. You letting him control the music and watch you cook, something so personal and special to you. It was new for the both of you.

Rafe heated up syrup while you quickly buttered the pancakes and washed some fruit for toppings. For the first time, you made your plate and sat down first. Rafe sat down next to you a few minutes later, plate heaped high with pancakes and raspberries.

After a few minutes of eating, the music being the only noise in the kitchen, Rafe turned to you, “You’re so intelligent and I don’t want you to let this one test discourage you. I know you’ll bounce back.”

“I studied so hard,” you told him, almost whispering, “I knew this was going to be hard, but I have no prior experience to fall back on, and it’s killing me.”

“But you’ll learn. Now you know how exams are structured, and you can adjust your studying habits. Next test will go great, I promise.”

You couldn’t stop it, it had been building between the two of you for months, and in your extra emotional state, you acted more rashly than normal. Setting your fork down, you turned to him and grabbed the front of his shirt. Rafe was startled, but turned to face you, not prepared for you to kiss him.

He froze and you almost regretted it, loosening your grip on his shirt, about to pull away embarrassed when he started kissing you back. Rafe tasted like syrup and raspberries, an addicting combination. Unfortunately, you eventually had to pull away to breathe, and Rafe pressed a soft kiss to your forehead while you caught your breath.

He picked his fork back up and smiled widely at you, “So that was nice.”

You blushed, “Yeah, um, sorry.”

“I’m not,” he stole a strawberry off your plate, “I didn’t want to make a move and make you uncomfortable if I was reading this whole thing wrong.”

“You, um, you weren’t reading it wrong.”

“I see that.”

Your blush deepened as he smiled wider at you. You shrugged, “So, what now?”

“Well, hopefully, now you’ll let me take you out and see where we go from there.”

“I’d like that.”

Four:

You weren’t sure if it was an out of sight, out of mind situation, but your parents planned a couple’s trip for Christmas, and you weren’t invited. Which would make this the first time in your entire life you wouldn’t spend Christmas with your family. You had mixed feelings. On one hand, you were hurt at the blatant disregard of you and your feelings, but on the other hand it gave you the chance to spend your first holiday alone with Rafe.

The two of you were eating hummus and doing homework when you decided to bring it up. He was on the floor, and you were on the couch, so you nudged his shoulder with your foot to get his attention, “How do you feel about spending Christmas together?”

He looked back at you with a wide smile, “I feel like it would be the best Christmas I’ve ever had.”

You grabbed a blank sheet of paper and handed it down to him, “Write down specific foods you want.”

“What do you normally eat on Christmas?” he asked, not taking the paper.

With a shrug, you pulled the paper back, “I don’t know, we normally do gumbo and cornbread and German chocolate cake.”

Rafe grabbed your ankle, shaking your leg a few times, “Let’s do that.”

“You don’t want to add anything?” you asked, hesitant.

He bit the inside of his cheek, clearly thinking, “Maybe we could do a baked mac and cheese. We had those a lot growing up before Mom left.”

“Find me the recipe and I’ll make it for you, bub.”

With a wide smile, Rafe grabbed your hand and pressed a kiss to the back of it, “You’re the best.”

When Christmas finally rolled around, you woke up early to start cooking. Your mom suggested a Dutch oven, something you didn’t already own, and to buy file powder instead of trying the cornstarch method. She also told you to make the cake a day earlier so you wouldn’t have to worry about it with the rest of the food.

You worked with Christmas music playing softly in the background, focusing on making sure the flour and oil combination didn’t burn before adding the veggies. The recipe wasn’t hard, but it did require a lot of stirring and paying attention and exact timing.

By the time it was ready to start simmering for about 30 minutes, you had started boiling the pasta for the mac and cheese. That recipe was simple, and you’d been playing with the cheese topping in your own time to make the flavor blend better with the gumbo, and you were pretty sure you’d figured it out.

With practiced ease, you finished it and poured it over the pasta before setting it to bake. By then, it was time to finish the gumbo, make the cornbread, and get dressed.

Rafe showed up just as you finished getting dressed and the cornbread timer was going off. He had a key and let himself in, and you knew he could handle taking the cornbread out.

“Babe, I’m here,” he called out as he shut the timer off.

“Coming,” you yelled back, smoothing your sweater down.

By the time you finally made it to the kitchen Rafe had set all of the food on the counter and he was leaned next to it in his own sweater and jeans. He held his arms out for a hug, and you walked into them happily.

“Merry Christmas, babe,” he told you, pressing a kiss to the top of your head. You hummed and reached up to kiss him.

“Merry Christmas,” you told him, pulling away.

“Food looks good,” he complimented, reaching for the bowls and plates he’d gotten out.

You looked over the spread and smiled proudly, “It does, doesn’t it?”

“You want to eat on the couch and watch the Jim Carrey Grinch?”

Nodding enthusiastically, you grabbed a plate, “Fuck yes.”

The two of you settled on the couch, a gingerbread scented candle burning in the background. Rafe started the movie and wrapped an arm around your shoulders, plate in his lap. You leaned into him and let out a long breath you didn’t realize you’d been holding in. This Christmas, while out of the ordinary, was your favorite one yet.

+ One:

You got home after work, exhausted. Your apartment was dark and cold and it made you want to curl up into a ball and cry. Work had been so time consuming over the past month you’d barely seen Rafe and you missed him. But if you got the promotion your boss had been hinting at, you’d get more manageable hours and higher pay, so you were grinding it out until then.

Dropping your bag by the door, you kicked off your shoes before slowly walking to the couch. Before you could sit down, there was a knock at the door. You considered ignoring it, but it persisted, so you walked slowly back to answer.

Rafe was standing there, giant grin on his face, with a steaming pot of something which explained why he didn’t use his key. It was very surreal and you blinked a few times in confusion before letting him in. He walked past you to the kitchen and set the dish down before digging through your drawer for the matches to light your favorite candle on the counter.

“Go get changed,” he urged, “I’ll get plates set up.”

Your phone rang as you were changing into shorts and you grabbed it out of the discarded pants pocket. When you saw your boss’s name, your heart rate doubled and you answered shakily. The phone call was brief, and the gist was that you’d gotten the promotion and the next day off.

Energy immediately filled your body and you ran to the kitchen where Rafe was scooping out what looked like mac and cheese onto plates.

“Rafe!”

He looked up, startled, “What’s up?”

“I got it!”

“The promotion?” he asked, eagerly.

You nodded, beaming, and jumped into his arms when he opened them. Rafe spun you around a few times and kissed you hard. Slowly setting you back down to your feet, he deepened the kiss, your hands winding into his hair.

Rafe pulled away first, pressing soft kisses to both of your cheeks and your forehead before standing up fully. You let go of his hair and took the hand he offered to you. Leading you to the couch, he sat down and motioned for you to do the same.

“Is this mac and cheese?” you asked, poking at the food with the fork he’d brought you.

“It is. I went on snapchat earlier and realized that it’s an anniversary of sorts. I wanted to make you dinner for once since I know you’ve had a long week.”

“Anniversary?”

A faint blush rose on his cheeks and he cleared his throat, “Um, yeah, a year since we met.”

You laughed loudly, “When you set your fucking kitchen on fire making mac and cheese?”

“A year ago, today. And with your cooking help, I can now make mac and cheese without setting the kitchen on fire.”

Poking at it again, you looked up at him, almost fearing the answer, “This isn’t Kraft right?”

“Of course not,” he scoffed, “I called your mom to get her recipe.”

Biting your lip to hold back the onslaught of emotions, you took in a shaky breath, “Right. Okay. Um, I love you, Bub. And this is genuinely the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

Rafe kissed your temple before lifting your chin to make you look him in the eye, “I love you too, and as crazy as it sounds, I’m glad I set my kitchen on fire.”

#rafe cameron #rafe outer banks #rafe cameron fic #rafe cameron x reader #outer banks fic #obx #outer banks #college rafe

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peterbparkerth · 3 years

Text

The Cloaked Rose ~ Chap 7

The Cloaked Rose Masterlist

Summary: What happens when a Psychic Nexus who feels anybody’s energy comes in contact with the Avengers but most importantly someone she thought she’ll never find.

Bucky X OC!Character

Avengers X Platonic!Character

A/N: The main character’s personality is based on myself and she’s not like Wanda just imagine the main character to be a different type of nexus and Wanda being just a witch not a nexus. Also it starts after Thanos dies meaning the falcon and winter soldier time but Tony and the rest are alive and Steve is a Nomad but the government is okay with him since He gave the shield to Sam. John Walker aka the US agent still exists but he’s on the down low. Loki is also an avenger now so chill.

Warning: Angst (Sorry for being MIA)

Chapter 7

Bucky’s POV

The next day I woke up next to an empty spot, I got up and looked around in search for Alara. “Al?” I called out for her only to find her standing on the balcony. I sighed and walked up to her, she wore my shirt and shorts.

As I wrapped my arms around her I heard her giggle “Good morning handsome” she said, I chuckled and replied “good morning beautiful” this made her turn around and look at me

“You want breakfast?” She asked as she cupped my cheeks. I smiled back at her and replied “sure doll”, she giggled at the nickname and walked pass me to go order us something to eat.

After having breakfast we both decided to walk around the park and have a relaxing day. The sun was shining bright as we walked through the water fountain.

“Love, I wish I could stay here forever” she said to me as I wrapped my arm around her shoulders. I grinned and asked “You want to stay here with you’re knight in shinning armour?” She hit me with her elbow and I faked cried making her giggle.

Few minutes had passed since we went out on a walk when all of a sudden Alara stopped and looked around us. “They’re here” she said panicking a bit. I looked around and asked “Who?”, she quickly grabbed my hand and before she could say anything there was a loud gun shot towards our direction which we dodged. “Voltron” she said and i made a mental plan to lead her out of here.

As I tried lead her out of all the chaos I made sure to contact Steve and let him know we were coming back.

In a matter of minutes i saw the quinjet in front of us, I led Alara inside immediately as Steve and the others tried battling some of the Alien looking beings.

Alara hugged me as I kissed the top of her head “we need to let MTF know about this treat” she said and I quickly replied “Doll you need to rest first, we’ll let them know while you’re asleep”

Wanda walked towards us as he held her hand out to Alara and said “come on Al, you need rest”. Alara looked at her and nodded before she stood up and walked with her. “Al” I called her and when she looked back at me I leaned in and kissed her to which Steve and others smirked at me.

It had been a few minutes since Alara had slept and the head of MTF, Zaire has finally arrived with her team. “Voltron is finally here and we need to come up with a plan of attack” Steve said as everyone gathered around.

“The only thing we can do is take Alara with us for training. She needs to be safe” Zaire said to which I immediately replied “she’s not going anywhere, she’s staying here with me”

Tony looked at me “Bucky I think what Zaire is saying is the right thing to do. They have better facilities to protect her. She’s a mutant” he said to which I scoff “no they don’t they—“ before I could continue Zaire spoke up again “Just because you’re her.. never mind. Just bring her here”

“What’s going on?” We all heard Al say as we turned around to see her get in the room. “You’re coming with us” Zaire quickly said “that’s much safer for you and for their safety. Voltron wants you, would you want to risk other people’s lives too?” She added. I clenched my jaw and walked to Al but before I could say something she replied “I’ll come with you Zaire”, “Are you nuts?!” I said to her. “Bucky please this is the right thing to do” Al said as she started walking to her room. “Al” I kept calling her as I followed her.

“You can’t do this to me Alara.” I said entering her room and seeing her pack her bags. “Bucky I’m sorry but I can’t get you guys in this mess, he wants me and I want you to be safe” Al said as she pulled her bags to the door. “Alara, I’ll be safe with you. Please stay, I love you” I said pulling her closer to me, “I love you too Bucky, but you need to move on” her saying this angered me “No! You can’t tell me to move on. I have finally loved someone more than anything else in the world and you can’t leave me”

She sighed and pushed my hands away “I’m leaving Bucky, I’m leaving you forever” she said pushing me away and grabbed her bags taking them down the stairs.

Alara’s POV

I know what I’m doing to Bucky is wrong. He deserves better than this, but that better is not me. I can’t risk his and many other people’s lives in danger.

I walked down with my bags and saw everyone standing waiting for me with sadness clearly shown on their faces. I smiled at them hoping they would smile back. They didn’t.

Wanda came up to me and hugged me pretty tightly “we’re here for you whenever you need us Al, I’m just a call away” she said as I hugged her back. I hugged everyone else hoping they wouldn’t be mad at me for leaving them like this. “Take care guys” I said and Tony smiled “you too kiddo”

I smiled back at him and walked out of the door towards the main entrance. I felt like something is not right but I let that feeling go. As soon as I placed my bags in the car Bucky came running to me. “Al please, don’t leave me like this. You’re the only person I can be myself with. I love you” he insisted.

I tried not to be weak in front of him as I said “Bucky I can’t do this to you, you deserve more than this” I tell him as he looked down at me. I have to push him away. “Why?” He asks me, I try not to let the tears fall “because I can’t be with you” I say as I push him away and sat in the car.

“I’m sorry, but this is what I have to do for your safety” I mumbled to myself as the tears fall down my eyes.

An hour later we arrived at the MTF headquarters and after getting settled in I walked to the main hallway, “when does my training start Zaire?” I asked her. She stood still facing the window as she replied “Tomorrow Alara” I nodded and excused myself to walk around the building.

While I was walking around the hallways I could see the engineers build something technical but before I could walk in on them I felt someone grab my arm and pulled me in to a room.

“You can’t stay here longer Alara” I looked up to see Ryan warn me “why not Ry” I asked. He shook his head and repeated himself “go back Alara, you can’t stay here longer, they’ll kill you”. Just when I was about to ask him who, one of Zaire’s close worker opened the door “you need to rest Alara, it’s really late” he said and I looked at Ryan before leaving to go to my room.

Two days had gone by since I started training for the battle. But it felt questionable as I was trained the same moves that I had already learned before. Whenever I would question about it to Zaire she would always ignore me.

Ryan on the other hand kept warning me about being here but this is where I have to be I can’t go back to the avengers.. to Bucky. “Alara come to the lab” I heard Zaire through the speakers.

It was confusing to me as to how she called me to the lab. I haven’t been in there since I came back. I walked to the lab but before I could enter it, Ryan pulled me into his room and locked the door.

“Ry! What are you doing?. Zaire called me in-“ but before I could finish what I was going to say Ryan blurted out “Voltron is here. He’s your uncle and he wants your powers so that he could rule the galaxy”

“My uncle?” I questioned, “yes, you’re not from here.he destroyed your planet and your real family. Zaire is working for him so no matter what you can’t go to the lab” he answered “but while you’re here Bucky’s in danger”

I looked at him confused and asked “Bucky? Why is he in danger?”. Ryan sighed “You have no idea what he is to you right?” I rolled my eyes as he continued “Alara, Bucky is your soulmate, he’s a healer and Voltron’s men is also after him because if anything happens to you or if you get in major injury, he can heal it” on hearing this I ran out of the door but Zaire’s men hurriedly pulled me in the lab

“Let me go!” I shouted but they tied me to a chair that was attached to wires. I looked around as a man in full black suit with complete black eyes came up-to me and patted my head“I finally got you Alara” he snickered He looked as if he’s many many years old. ‘How could he be my uncle? And where are my parents?’ I started to come up with an explanation for it

“Now I’ll have what I had always desired” he added to which I spat on his face. He growled and punched me “ha! You’ll never get my powers” I said and jumped up kicking him on his sack. “Get her!” Zaire shouted as I punched and kicked anyone that came in front of me. “Al!” I heard Ryan call me. I ran to him and within minutes he turned into this vicious monster that he always kept hidden inside him, ‘a beast, a werewolf’. I jumped on his back as he ran towards the exit.

I used my laser beams at Zaire and her men but some how I missed one. “Bang!” I heard the loud sound and before I could do something it all started getting black. “Bucky…” I tried to say.

Taglist

@amayatheowl @motherbarnes @azaraspirit @exmachina187

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watchinglikeafangirl · 3 years

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Kiss Me Again - first reactions

Out of boredom, I started watching Kiss Me Again also because I've already watched Dark Blue Kiss. I saw many people saying both shows should be seen as two seperable things because some important details got lost on the way of making spin-off.

Let's see how much of a difference there actually is. From what I've heard, Pete is going to be very different. Anyway, here are my first reactions during the watching process:

Episode 1

Oh well, Pete is so different. He's a whole other person here. He's the typical cool guy who just wants to show off but at the same time, he's a bit socially awkward and I love it. This faked boredom and annoyment are only there because he doesn't know what to say when Kao is around and especially when they are alone because the atmosphere is just weird between them. Acting all annoyed is his way of socializing and I like it because I believve we all have weird tactics to try to lighten the mood or find a topic with peopl we don't know. Here, Pete is "annoyed" to look cool but I guess, he does this because he tries to find something they both can agree on and annoyment is the simpliest way. You can easily agree with people on negative emotions concearning a topic, so it's the easiest choice to pretend to be annoyed. What's funny here is that Kao is really not impressed by it and already knows Pete just wants to be cool. I think, Kao just doesn't like Pete in the beginning because he sees Pete is just pretending and is never true. I guess, that's why he will fall for him later, because they will probably have real talks and bonding moments.

Episode 2

Okay, Pete and Kao shared an awkward kiss and now things are even more weird. Here's one difference to the Pete I know from Dark Blue Kiss: he's not honest. Now, whenever Kao wants to address the kiss, Pete gets defensive and aggressive. Yes, it's probably because of his confusion but in Dark Blue Kiss, Pete always addresses everything - even the uncomfortable or negatively loaded topics - but not at this moment.

And also, I know, Pete is not the nicest person at this moment but he is really respectless. After the kiss, he stares into Kao's eyes in surprise, pulls away and then wipes his mouth in disgust more than once. As if Kao's lips and the taste of them are dirt on his lips and that's so disrespectful. Kao is obiously hurt by it and I would be too. Of course, you are allowed to not like a kiss but reacting so disgusted is very harsh.

Episode 3

And now, Pete is bullying Kao by isolating him from the group. He makes the others believe Kao doesn't like them, so he will end up being the king of the group since Kao is not the kind of person who talks about such things and just accepts the circumstances.

The scene between So and Sansuay in the parking lot was obviously not right bahavior on So's part because Sansuay was clearly uncomfortable being pressed against another car. She had no way out and I love the random dude walking by and just checking if she is okay. No romanticizing. Just a statement that this behavior is wrong.

Episode 4

Pete and Kao now claim to be "annoyed" of each other and all the other ones are still left wondering what the real problem is.

But at least, Pete confides to Sandee and confesses he only gets angry because of the kiss. I mean, we as the audience understand him better but I just find Sandee's frustration very amusing. Pete is obviously not realizing his feelings and is just helpless. Sandee is such a mood.

Until now, I really don't like R at all. He is pushing Sanwan around and invades her ersonal space all the time while saying he cares. Dude, if you care, don't force her, don't drag her into your car and especially don't kiss her when she doesn't want to.

Episode 5

Its just my speculation but I'm pretty sure Pete is bisexual because he has an ex-girlfriend (we know of) but seems to be attracted to both gender and he's not the kind of guy who falls for the personality or character of someone. The gender matters to him, I would say. But it's nice to see a bisexual character because mostly shows want to tell me that people are either homo- or heterosexual but there are obviously many other sexualities in between. Living in a gay relationship doesn't mean you define yourself as homosexual, real life doesn't work like that and I like they give us a character who is neither homo- or heterosexual.

What's going on with the men in that show? WHy are there so many red flags? Except for Kao, Mat and Sun, everybody pushes the women around and invades their personal space in a very uncomforting manner. Are they all going to "change"? I don't know if I will be able to believe them...

Episode 6

Mat's mother wants Sanson to "turn her son straight"? Okay, just gonna leave that there because I don't have words how wrong this thought is.

Oh, the scene which I saw many gifs of, happened. But I thought Pete and Kao would spend more time laying in the grass. I though this was a very romantic scene. But it's just a second long. But who cares, their relationship took a next step. They stop fighting and come to some sort of agreement (the agreement being that fighting is pointless). But somehow this scene feels like they broke the ice and finally found peace.

Episode 7

And again, a scene I've seen very often: the hospital. But it's really sweet they all went there because of Pete and wait all together until he can go home. That's real friendship and I think this show portrays their friend group really accurate because they are so natural with each other. They are a bunch of people thrown together who bond over weird fun talks at night and getting home drunk. Even though they are so different, they are loyal and trustworthy. It's heartwarming to see a group of friends be portrayed like this because mostly in shows, the protagonist has one really good friend and just a few people they know but are not very close to. but a group of friends is exactly this and it's rare on TV because showing a whole group bonding is difficult and also because they dynamic is totally different.

Episode 8

Kao (giving me the chills): Mint, even if he doesn't like you back, it doesn't mean you are not good enough. No matter how beautiful you are, no matter how good you try to be to him, if he's not into you, he's not the one for you.

I can't believe So gets away with stealing Sansuay's phone. She will never know it was him. I don't know what to think about him.

Epsiode 9

Sun flirting with Kao over coffee makes me cringe so much right now. This is uncomfortable and not as romantic as Sun may think it is. And then, Kao is scared Sun meant him, this is uncomforting to watch. Also, I really don't think Kao and Sun are a match. It doesn't fit at all and I hope it will be over soon.

What? Wayu wants to rape Sanwan? Did I miss something? How did we get here? I thought this was a warm show for teenagers. Now there's rape? I could deal with the sexual harassment even though that was not fine to watch, but rape? I'm confused how we got there? But of course, R saved her.

Not Mork casually cleaning his gun...

Episode 10

I love the fact Pete and Kao just quietly accept the fact they spend a night together. It happened and they can't change it. They don't even mention it and I'm relieved there's no "don't ever tell anybody" or something. It just happened and that's it. Nothing further to dicuss about it. Also, they made pretty clear already they have certain feelings for each other. The wuestio now is just how they are going to deal with this and if they will be in a relationship.

Kao: I will stop seeing other people when things between us become clearer.

Episode 11

I can't believe they actually address the bullying I mentioned before. Kao is very right when he says Pete needs to earn his trust because of the past. This is just right because you can't forget the past just because of romantic feelings. If you don't address the other person made you feel ad, you won't be able to move on from that and relationships are about trust, so I find this very mature and good for both of them. Pete needs to understand he hurt Kao in the past and can't just change his mind over night and Kao will say yes right away.

A planned engagement? Isn't that a bit old-fashioned? Sanwan and R don't know each other at all and why would their parents decide this for them. It doesn't look like it would be good for family's business or something. This seems so random.

And Wayu tries to rape Sanwan again? How? Why? And what is wrong with Sindee for initializing this? But of course, R saves her again.

Episode 12

Oh Mint. I always had mixed feelings about her and now i know for what reason. Is she fine? Making someone feel bad for leeting her go by threatening she would hurt herself is not healthy or normal or anything. That's a serious matter. No wonder, Pete feels like his life is messed up and is extremely stressed about it. And then, Mint woders why he's not comfortable at all and doens't see Pete just let her stay out of fear her threat might be the truth. Because he's a nice person. But Mint is just crazy and plays mind games.

I've never seen a drunk kiss be that cute and meaningful. They are just pure. Now, I really know why people love Pete and Kao so much. I already fell in love with their dynamic in Dark Blue Kiss but seeing the beginnings of their relationship tops that. This script is too good. They both know, the kiss meant a lot and I like they are way past the regretment state. Or at least, they don't regret the kiss. They regret they are not in a relationship which makes the atmosphere afterwards more sad and hurt. Again, they are so mature about this.

Mint took a picture? I can't with this woman.

Episode 13

Why did tehy not report Wayu? They are covering up a crime. And Sanwan doesn't seem to be traumatized which makes me wonder a lot. She is more than fine and I'm not buying Wanyu's apology at all.

And now Mint send the picture to Pete's dad. Does she have no shame? It's not her right to out Pete. That's a thing between Pete, his dad and Kao. Mint has and nothing to do with it and shouldn't have ever. She took Pete's power away by letting his dad now. Things were in Pete's hands and I hope Pete will tell mint very clearly she had no right to do that and her behavior is wrong.

Wow, Pat has guts. Telling your best friend you like them even though you know they don'yt like you is very brave. I love Mat being so cool with it because it's obviously a hard moment for Pat to outlive.

Episode 14

I love Pete's dad. They both were so scared but he doesn't say anything and I like what he says. He talks with them like they are adults (which they are) and doesn't talk to them like they are kids who don't know anything. They don't need to be lectured by their parents. They are adults already and make their own life decisions. I like very much he has this calm talk with them and then drops the topic.

Sanson being the first to confess fits very good because mAt is alway the wuieter one of them. This scene is so bittersweet and Sanson is so vulnerable, it hurts my heart. If it stays like this, then it would be a strong statement of the show because not everything works out in the end. You can try, you can ask, but in the end, maybe your efforts were all for nothing.

Finally, Pete calls Mint out. But he forgives her?... But at least, he doesn't want to be her friend any more.

Of corse we have happy endings all over the place.

#kiss me again #dark blue kiss #pete x kao #suddenly phupha and nam(atoats) are there #why doesn't prize just leave?#and what is boss (2gether) doing there?#can somebody please report him?#i still like rain #and mork #and i still don't like sun #but pete and kao are so pure #i can't

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snowdice · 4 years

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Road Trips and Missing Persons (Part 6)

Fandom: Sanders Sides

Relationships: Patton & Virgil, Virgil & Deceit, Logan & Patton, Emile & Remy, Roman & Remus & Janus

Characters: Patton, Virgil, Deceit, Remus, Roman, Logan, Emile, Remy

Summary: Patton was just getting groceries. The next thing he knew, there was a knife at his throat and he was an unwilling uber driver. Virgil’s on the run after the murder of his dad, and it’s not just his paranoia that’s telling him he’s being chased down. He has to get somewhere safe, somewhere he can trust, and all he has is a couple of stories from his dad and a name: “Green Bellow Foods and Dispensary.”

Notes: Secret Agents AU, knives, carjacking, kidnapping, murder mentioned, guns mentioned, pepper spray, blood mentioned, drugs mentioned (more to be added)

This is a fic I’ve been writing on study breaks that you have probably all already seen at this point. I’ve affectionately named it the Goblin Brain Fic because it’s helping my brain actually get motivated for studying. I’ve slightly edited it for wording and grammar, but not for content from my previous posts. Feel free to send in asks to direct it because I’m not 100% sure where this is going and you can help decide if you feel so inclined! You can see the process I went through to build this at this link.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 My Master Post

Roman and Remus piled into Janus’s car to head to the grocery store. It was pulled into Remy Gate’s driveway and only a few feet away whereas Roman had parked down the street and Remus had likely parked somewhere nearer to the park not that Roman cared to get into that death trap. (His father and Remus had built it together when Roman and Remus had been 14 and Roman loved them both dearly and dad was smart, but he wasn’t an engineer or mechanic and Remus was a beacon of chaos. It did not matter that the car had managed to hold up for almost 10 years whereas Roman was on his third car. He still would never trust the dammed thing. Ever.)

Janus’s car was the exact opposite of Remus’s. Roman wasn’t very good with cars, but even he could tell it was an expensive one (that was likely not constructed by a teenager and his dad in a garage) with no dents or rust and it still had that new car smell when he got inside. Roman could probably buy his apartment complex for how much money the thing was worth.

Yet, despite that, Remus seemed familiar with the car. He hopped straight into the passenger seat and started pushing buttons, the functions of which Roman did not know. One thing he did understand was the dials for the radio and that when Remus tapped the saved radio station under the 3rd slot, it switched to Remus’s favorite channel.

Remus then leaned back against the seat and put his feet up on the dash.

“Why do you have to be this?” Janus asked sounding exhausted the moment he opened the driver’s side door and the very intense bagpipe music met his ears. He reached into the car to slap Remus’s calves.

Remus didn’t move them but just smiled. “It’s piobaireachd day,” he said happily.

Janus shook his head and moved to sit down. He yelped immediately and shot forward on the seat. “You turned on the seat massagers?!”

“Of course, I turned on the seat massagers, Jay.”

“Ugh I don’t want those things on.” He started pushing buttons himself.

The hazard lights came on as well as the windshield wipers and some beeping started up. “Ugh! Remus! How do you turn these things off?” He slammed a hand against the dashboard and lights in the back suddenly were blinding Roman. “Stupid piece of scrap metal!”

Remus batted his hands away and put the car to rights again rather quickly. Janus mumbled a couple more curses under his breath but didn’t do anything more as he put the car into reverse and started driving down the street.

“Okay,” he said once they were moving, his creepily calm attitude back in place again.

So, this was Remus’s partner? Roman of course knew a bit more about what Remus did than most of the other people in the agency considering Remus was his brother. Not to mention, they were both the sons of Logan Sanders so if they wanted to talk about anything when they got together to have dinner every other Saturday, it was probably going to end up being about the covert spy operations everyone went on. (Dad pretended not to be a gossip, but at the end of the day…) So, Roman knew that Remus was a triple agent. He pretended to spy on dad for Barbara Nelsen when he was actually spying on Nelson for dad.

Roman also knew a bit about his partner. Remus had even let slip the nickname Jay a couple of times and talked affectionately about him. Janus was a double agent turning on Nelson to work for dad. However, Roman had not been aware that Janus was Nelson’s son, a fact which he’d surmised since Janus had said his mother killed Remy.

Which was… hmm. Obviously, dad had to know that information and trusted him enough to take his word as a double agent, but it still gave Roman a bit of pause. Not to mention, he was clearly a cold and efficient a liar which served to put Roman even more on edge.

The only thing keeping Roman from insisting they leave him was the way he acted around Remus. Remus had provided the only cracks in his carefully constructed calm but vicious front. Every time Remus did or said something Remusy, Janus would give him one of those fondly exasperated looks that only Remus could provoke, and they seemed to be more than just partners, but friends.

So, Roman was going to choose to trust him for a moment, attributing the roughness to his missing brother.

“What’s the plan?” Janus asked when they pulled into the grocery store’s parking lot.

“I have an FBI agent ID,” Roman said. “I can go push for information at the front desk.”

Janus nodded and his fingers tapped twice against the steering wheel before he stopped the nervous tick. “He might also hide outside the store. There is a small creek behind the store he used to go get muddy in. He will be, well… maybe he will be less likely to run from me and I know the area so I’ll check there. Remus can check inside the store while you ask around.”

“Okay, that works,” Roman agreed. “Meet back at the car afterwards?”

Janus nodded as he pulled into a parking spot. Remus slapped Janus on the shoulder before exiting the car and got a scowl at his back in return.

Roman shook his head and followed them out of the car. Janus separated from them a few feet before the door to the grocery store and Remus and Roman entered the store together.

“I’mma go check out the store,” Remus said.

“Okay, don’t do anything stupid,” Roman said as he walked away. He got a flippant wave in return. “Remus! Don’t do anything stupid, please!” And… he was gone. Roman shook his head and turned, searching for the front desk.

He reached for his wallet and smiled at the employee at the front desk. “Hello ma’am,” he said. “I’m looking for someone and I was hoping you’d help me.” He pulled out his only sortof fake FBI ID to show her.

“I’m looking for a teenager who has gone missing and is connected to a case and we have reports that he may have come in here. Perhaps you’ve seen him,” Roman said. He took out his phone to show her the picture of Virgil that he’d been sent only to find that his screen had been cracked and it wouldn’t turn on, likely damaged in the fight with Janus. Great. He looked back up the woman. “I apparently don’t have a picture to show you at the moment, but you’ve possibly seen him before as he lives in the neighborhood. “Virgil Gates?”

He got a blank stare in return.

Fantastic.

He spent another 15 or so minutes trying to explain to the woman who he was looking for (a difficult task as all he had to go off of was the memory of one picture that he’d been sent an hour ago) and getting shrugs and apologies in response. Eventually he left and looked around the store for a bit himself. His brother was suspiciously absent from everywhere Roman looked.

Eventually he wandered back to the front by himself only to see Remus coming from the checkout with a bag full of snack foods.

Roman crossed his arms. “You were supposed to be looking for a missing minor, not shopping.”

“Chill,” Remus said making Roman want to do the opposite of ‘chill,’ “I looked for the kid and shopped at the same time. I even got Cheetos!” he smiled widely as they left the store. “Also, I broke into their security office!”

“You what?!” Roman asked.

“I broke into their security office,” Remus repeated happily.

“And why,” Janus asked tiredly while walking up to them, “did you do that.”

“To get the security camera footage, duh,” he said pointing at a camera near the top of the door. “I figured he might have not gone inside, but the neighbor said he headed in this direction, so that thing probably saw him.”

“That’s actually pretty smart,” Roman said. “Though we probably could have just asked.”

Remus shrugged. “Luckily they apparently save security footage to a cloud and I was able to download it pretty easily. We should be able to see everything that happened inside and outside the grocery store in the last two hours assuming you’ve got something to watch it on.”

Janus nodded and led them back to his car where he took a laptop out of his trunk. Remus downloaded the footage and then handed it over to Janus. “You’ll be able to spot him best since you know what he looks like better than us.”

It took almost 20 minutes of Janus watching the surveillance video for him to find what he was looking for. “Got him,” he said. Roman leaned over to get a good look at the screen. The video feed was a bit blurry, but he could see a lanky teenager with dark hair running to the grocery store parking lot. He took a break when he got there and looked behind him probably to make sure he hadn’t been followed. Then he found a bush to hid behind. They watched for a few minutes until finally he hopped back up and started walking towards a car.

“What’s he doing?” Roman asked as the boy on the camera glanced around himself to make sure nobody was watching before starting to fiddle with something.

“Oh god,” Janus groaned, “why did I teach him how to pick a car lock? Emile was right.”

They watched as he managed to pop the door open to the stranger’s car and slipped inside. Not even 5 minutes later, a man with grocery bags got into the front seat though it was too blurry to see who he was or the license plate on the car. The car drove out of the parking lot after a few more minutes.

“God dammit, Virgil,” Janus hissed and Roman barely saved the laptop from crashing to the ground. “Now he’s just in the back of some random person’s car!” he started pacing back and forth, steam practically pouring from his ears. Roman was almost scared for Virgil when Janus managed to find him because he looked ready to commit a murder. “That was over an hour ago. Who knows where he could be by now! Who knows what could have happened to him by now!” And, oh, Roman realized. He wasn’t angry. Not really. He was terrified. “What the hell am I supposed to do?!” he kicked the car fender, leaving a dent and then he kicked it again.

Then a phone rang in his pocket and he froze, all emotion draining off his face startlingly quickly. Roman was confused because he was pretty sure he’d seen Janus step on his phone earlier, but the one he pulled out now was a different type. He glanced at the caller ID and said, “it’s my mother.”

Want to read more? Click below!

Part 7

#sanders sides #remus sanders #roman sanders #janus sanders #creativitwins #emile picani #remy sanders #virgil sanders #patton sanders #logan sanders #platonic moxiety #knives #kidnapping #carjacking #murder mentioned #guns mentioned #adriana writes #road trips and missing persons

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maria-scribbles · 4 years

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glitter + crimson (let’s start a riot)//part five

summary: in the aftermath of hurricane agatha, the pogues are thrown into a mess none of them are ready to deal with. things that don’t exactly top sailor’s ‘fun things to do this summer’ list: surfing in the middle of a hurricane, getting punched in the face by a stupid kook, and stumbling upon a mystery that turns her and her friends into the damn scooby gang. when she said she wanted an exciting summer, she should’ve been more specific. 🙃

word count: 8.1k+ (it just keeps getting longer and longer 😅)

ship: jj maybank x oc (sailor flynn)

warnings n stuff: mentions of abuse/neglect/gambling addiction, child abandonment, anxiety, self-worth issues, jj being both soft af and hot for his best friend, weed usage, underage drinking, unresolved sexual tension, sailor being thirsty, swearing, guns, fighting, blood, that one trope where two characters only call each other by their nicknames/last names until they don’t because of ~reasons~ that makes me lose my shit every time (like a lot of the obx fandom, i also headcanon that jj stands for jesse james), references to the three stooges (jj=moe, pope=larry, and john b=curly and that’s a fact lmao), to all the boys i've loved before, avengers infinity war, and david attenborough, and a line heavily inspired/influenced by taylor swift's "dress" (a song that happens to be on the playlist for this series)

a/n: we’re finally entering canon territory, y’all (with a few tweaks, of course!) but i’m determined not to make this a rehash/retelling word for word of the show ‘cause that’s just no fun, so expect smaller pieces (vignettes, i guess?) of storytelling as i expand on canon with sailor and the rest of the pogues. think of it like a mixtape of sorts, but with words instead of music if that makes sense lol. this part originally covered episodes one and two but i wrote so much that i had to split it, so we're just covering most of episode one for now (i still can't even believe how much shit actually goes down in the pilot lol). i was veryyyy excited to write the kegger at the boneyard 'cause some ~juicy~ stuff happens there lol. fun fact: the title of this part is a term used by surfers to refer to getting up at the ass crack of dawn to hit the waves. as always, this is unbetaed so any mistakes are mine. enjoy!

gif credit to @jj-maybnks

~Masterlist~

part five: dawn patrol

The next morning, Hurricane Agatha hits the island with all the force of a knockout punch; the sound of rain pounding against the roof echoes impossibly loud throughout the Chateau but Sailor’s bewildered shriek is even louder.

“You’re gonna what the what?!”

John B shrugs as the stunned redhead, lounging on the couch, looks away from watching the storm and fixes him with a wide-eyed stare.

“I’m gonna surf the surge.”

“Hell yeah, bro!” JJ yells from his spot as her footrest, punching his fist in the air and she sends him an exasperated look, both at his enthusiastic encouragement of John B’s downright moronic idea and the fact that she already misses the feeling of his thumb drawing circles on her bare ankle.

“Are you two insane?”

“Possibly.” John B states, grinning when JJ follows that up with, “Absolutely.” The blond boy pushes Sailor’s legs off his lap as he stands which earns him another displeased scowl from the redhead. “Come on, Sail. Live a little.”

“Oh, I’ll live alright, but you idiots won’t,” She takes his offered hand, letting him pull her to her feet and then down the hall after John B as she continues, “because this is the dumbest idea you’ve ever had.”

“See, this is why we keep you around,” He replies, laughing when she dodges his attempt to ruffle her hair and dashes forward to beat him to the spare room. “We do something stupid, you and Kie read us the riot act. It’s tradition.”

Sailor grabs her long-sleeved rash vest -if she’s going to sit on the beach to keep an eye on these fools in the middle of a damn hurricane, at least she’ll wear something that offers a little bit of warmth- and heads to the bathroom to change. “Yeah, and then I’m there to patch you up when you inevitably hurt yourselves.”

“Can’t help that you have that healing touch.” His cheeky response floats through the closed door and she catches herself smiling -wide and just a little bit sappy- in the mirror.

After a quick detour to pick up Pope, who’s already drenched from sneaking out his window, the pogues (sans Kiara who never answered John B’s text in the group chat and, knowing her parents, was probably on hurricane lockdown) head to the beach, where the rugged gray surf hammers against the shore with unrelenting brutality. Sailor trails behind the others as they grab their boards and make a break for the water, blatantly ignoring the barriers that read ‘beach closed’ in large, impossible to miss letters. A few hundred feet down the coast, she can barely make out The Sandbar all boarded up for the storm and she thinks of her mother, wondering if she's riding it out inside or at home; either way Carmen's all alone and Sailor's stomach twists with guilt, both for letting her phone battery die so she didn't have to answer her calls and for leaving in the first place, even though it was the right thing to do for her damn sanity.

“These signs are here for a reason, guys!” She calls over the howling wind, squinting through the rain at the rough waves with her hands tapping uneasily against her thighs. Watching John B run into the ocean with reckless abandon (Pope following with a little more caution, thankfully) immediately puts her anxiety on edge so she sits down heavily on the wet sand, wrapping her arms around the knees pulled to her chest and looks up at the blond boy who stayed behind. “Aren’t you gonna join the other stooges?”

JJ shrugs at her question, glancing out toward their friends before dropping his board to the ground and taking a seat behind the trembling girl, his chest to her back. “This one can’t just leave you hanging out here all alone, lookin’ all sad and shit. It’s kind of pathetic.”

“Wow, you really know how to make a girl feel special, J.” She smirks and scoots back in the sand, lips curling into a full-fledged smile when he lifts his arms to drape them over her shoulders. As he tucks her securely against his front, the warmth of his body helps ward off the biting chill of the rain, and so does the fact that he knows her so well, that he knows this is exactly what she needs to help calm the panicking butterflies in her stomach.

He leans close, lips brushing against the shell of her ear when he whispers his next words like a secret, low and just for her even when there’s no one around to hear them. “Trust me, Sail, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

She suddenly finds those butterflies in her stomach fluttering for a whole different reason.

The Chateau sits in complete darkness, the power having been knocked out since they returned from dropping Pope off at his house that afternoon. Sailor thinks it’s about ten at night as she lies on her back on the mattress of the sleeper sofa, listening to the wind rip through the trees outside with Binx curled up at her feet. The spare room was way too hot without a working fan, even after she braided her hair off to the side and changed into a crop top and shorts, so she and JJ had returned to the living room where it was cooler, if only by a little bit.

John B has already retreated to his room for the night; he’d been acting quieter than usual since their little adventure at the beach but between a lantern-lit dinner of semi-stale cereal and passing a joint around, she never got the chance to ask if he was okay before he made his escape. JJ lies beside her with his limbs all askew and from the slow rise and fall of his bare chest she’s 99% sure he’s out like a light until, out of the blue, he mutters into the stagnant air, “Can’t keep your eyes off me, huh?”

She blinks heavily -that weed must’ve hit her harder than she thought because she hadn’t even realized she’d been staring- when he lazily turns his head to stare back, a halcyon grin on his face and in the dark, his pupils are blown so wide she can barely see the blue of his irises. Her hand itches with a longing to sweep that one stubborn strand of hair away from his forehead but instead she blindly slides it to the left until she finds his and holds on tight; his fingers automatically lace with hers even as the space between his eyebrows furrows and the smile falls from his lips.

“Sail?”

“I don’t think my dad’s ever coming back.” The redhead’s mouth blurts before her brain can catch up, heavy words lingering like a storm cloud ready to downpour. The thought had been weighing on her heart for a while now, from when she’d first suspected it two months ago, and it feels bittersweet to finally admit it out loud, even when she hadn’t planned doing it.

Her bedmate is silent for a long time as he looks at her through the shadows and she focuses on the touch of his palm against hers instead of the awful mounting pressure behind her eyes -hadn’t she promised herself she was done crying over her dad?- until he asks quietly, “Why? I mean, good riddance 'cause he's kind of the worst, but why?"

“A feeling,” She murmurs around the sudden lump in her throat, biting the inside of her lip hard enough that she tastes the metallic tang of blood on her tongue. “He...he usually comes back after a month or two but this time it’s been almost five.” A bitter laugh escapes from her chest and she shakes her head. “I guess he finally decided he’s done dealing with my worthless ass.”

JJ’s eyes flash like lightning as he rolls over to face her, the hand not entwined with hers reaching up to cup her cheek. “Sail, shut up. Don’t you dare say that.”

“Why shouldn’t I? It’s true,” She says sharply, words acerbic and biting and full of a self-hatred that’s been poisoning her heart ever since she was old enough -eight and far, far too young- to discern the way her dad’s love for her was fickle at best, non-existent at worst. “I could’ve been a better daughter- a perfect daughter- and he might still be here and my mom wouldn't hate me. I should’ve tried harder-”

“Jesus Christ, Sailor!” He interrupts, calloused yet gentle thumb wiping away the tears she just now registers sliding down her cheeks and the shock of hearing her full name come from his mouth makes the rest of her vitriolic thoughts fly out the window. “Do you even hear yourself right now?”

The image of him blurs through the darkness in shades of black and she closes her eyes, jaw clenched in an attempt to quell the tremble of her lip as he goes on in his low, soft voice, “You should’ve tried harder to do what, huh? What could you have possibly done better?”

She’s quiet for a long time, so long that her tears run dry and all that remains is smeared salt on her skin because she doesn’t have an answer. What could she have done? That terrible thought in her mind rears it’s ugly head again, the one that tells her she’s not good enough, that everything’s her fault because she doesn’t do enough, but when she asks it what more she can do, there’s no reply. There never is.

“Hey, look at me.” She hears the rustling of sheets and feels his fingers slip from hers before they come to rest on her cheek, both hands now cradling her face; she opens her eyes to find him hovering over her and the sheer lack of distance between them makes her heart skip a beat. “You...”

“What about me?” Her voice cracks as she speaks and in a mirror of her from earlier, JJ shakes his head, causing that stubborn strand of hair to once again fall into his eyes.

“I wish you’d see yourself the way I do.”

Her breath catches in her throat. “And how do you see me?”

“Fucking amazing.” He says simply and in the dark, she can barely see the flush slowly starting to creep up his neck. “Smart, brave, and loyal as hell. A beautiful badass who doesn’t take shit from anybody. A girl who listens when someone needs to be heard.”

The redhead stares up at him with wide green eyes as he goes on and on, listing all these wonderful little things that her traitorous mind has a hard time processing, let alone believing; he really thinks about her like this? “You care so damn much,” “You’re kind but not afraid speak out,” “You’re the one I trust the most.”

Her hand slowly releases its tight grip on the sheets and slides up his bare arm, feeling the heat of his skin under her palm as she touches his face, not trusting herself to speak because she’s so afraid of saying something dumb or stupid and ruining everything ('like I always do,' her mind echoes).

“You’re my best friend, Sailor, and yeah, you’re not perfect. You drink and you smoke weed and you don’t get straight As in school but fuck, you’re real and so not worthless.” He says each word with such conviction that its impossible not to believe him, as much as her brain screams at her not to. “And I want you to know that what your parents think of you doesn't matter at all, got it?"

Without warning, she flings her arms around his neck and JJ loses his balance, falling onto her with a soft oof of surprise but Sailor doesn’t even feel the extra weight as she rests her face against his shoulder and finally finds her voice. “Thank you.”

He takes her with him when he rolls onto his side, arms wrapped tight around her waist and nose buried in her messy braid. “Just...trying to do the right thing, I guess. For once.”

She pulls back at his words, then leans forward and slowly presses her lips to his flushed cheek, just missing the corner of his mouth. She lets them linger for a beat longer than necessary before leaning back -not too far, just enough- and looking him in the eye. “Thank you, Jesse.”

He usually hates being called by his first name (she found that out pretty quickly into their friendship, “never call me Jesse” being one of the first things he ever said to her) but he just looks at her with a soft, endearing smile on his face as he leans back onto the bed, once again bringing her with him. “Promise me something, Sail?”

She glances up at him from his shoulder and meets his eyes. “Yeah?”

His fingers tuck an escaped red curl behind her ear. “Just...be you. Don’t worry about what anyone else thinks.”

She wishes it were that easy, that she could just step inside her mind and flip a switch and she could stop all those thoughts that’ve plagued her for years but it’s not. It’s gonna take time -time and a lot of patience and maybe even a miracle- but damn it, she’s gonna give it her all, not just for herself but for him and the rest of the pogues, too, the best friends she's ever had, so she nods and settles back down at his side. “I’ll try my best, J.”

“I know you will.”

"Sail, you're the best swimmer out of all of us. Think you can dive down there and check it out?"

The redhead peers over the edge of the HMS Pogue and into the water, where the murky shape of the sunken Grady-White sits thirty feet down on the bottom of the marsh, then nods at the rest of the pogues, an excited grin on her face.

"No problem," She answers John B, hopping up onto the very tip of the boat's bow with practiced ease before diving headfirst into the water to JJ's yell of "diver down!" It's dirtier than usual because of the hurricane but she doesn't let that stop her as she swims down and down until she reaches the top of the boat and pulls herself the rest of the way onto the deck, carefully scanning the area for...fuck. Honestly, she's got absolutely no clue what she's looking for but she assumes she'll know when she sees it.

'It' turns out to be a motel key, resting all alone on the floor by the steering wheel and she quickly reaches out to snatch it, sliding the silver key ring around her finger securely. When she pushes off toward the surface, she leaves the ghostly Grady-White behind with more questions than answers.

The rest of her friends are lined up in a row along the boat's railing, all staring at her with near identical expressions of anticipation as she breaks through the water and holds the key aloft with a triumphant smile.

"The Summer Winds Motel called, they want their key back!"

A little later that evening, Sailor would really regret finding that damn key but right now, she's having a great time dancing at the Boneyard with Kiara at the traditional post-hurricane kegger, second refill of beer in hand, spiked with Fireball from the flask tucked in her back pocket. To her, dancing's a lot like surfing -steady feet, swiveling hips, snapping shoulders- and she thinks that might be the reason she's so bad at it, anticipating the fluidity of water instead of the solidness of dry land. Or it could be that she just doesn't have rhythm when she's a little buzzed. That works, too.

"Ow, Sail!" Kiara winces as the redhead steps on her foot again, rolling her eyes fondly when she throws her head back with a loud, tipsy giggle.

"My bad, Kie!" She twirls in the sand, hair dancing around her shoulders like fire, and finds herself spinning right into a herd of dancing tourons, all too drunk to care that she's spilling her beer all over their feet. Large, olive-skinned hands grab her waist to spin her again and she laughs, smiling over her shoulder at a cute dark-haired touron as he slides one palm over to settle against the bare skin of her lower back. She pushes one hand on his shoulder with just enough resistance that he doesn't get too close into her personal space as he leans in to speak in a low Southern drawl, brown eyes turned a pretty bronze in the glow of the nearby bonfire.

"This probably isn't the best thing to say to a beautiful girl but you kind of dance like a giraffe."

Sailor bursts out laughing at that. "Hey, I think giraffes are very elegant creatures so I'll take that as a compliment!"

The boy grins and she smiles, too, letting him take her free hand and pull her into the throng of dancing bodies. He's almost as bad a dancer as she is but he's fun to talk to and together they gleefully show off their worst moves until their feet hurt -she's lost count of how many times she stepped on his toes- and her solo cup is empty. "Come on," She says and this time, she's the one to grab his hand and lead him over to the closest keg, where John B's dishing out beer with an expert flourish.

"'Sup, Sail," He lifts his chin in greeting as he fills her cup, smirking when she immediately pulls out her flask and adds a long pour of Fireball on top. "Who's your friend?"

"JB, this is Adam, he's visiting from Tennessee. Adam, meet John B, one of my best friends and a total moron," She makes quick introductions, smiling into her drink as he scowls and playfully sprays some beer at her feet before filling another cup and holding it out to the other boy with a jab at her expense.

"Be careful around her, man. She's a handful."

The touron accepts the drink with a shrug and a quick wink in her direction. "Good thing I happen to like 'em a little crazy."

Ugh. More than a little miffed at that, she rolls her eyes and takes a long sip of beer to hide her annoyance when Adam laughs and slings his arm around her shoulders. Calling her a giraffe was actually kind of cute in a very weird, endearing way but he instantly lost whatever points he had with her the second that 'c' word came out of his pretty mouth. She glances around the Boneyard while the boys start talking about surfing (she scoffs to herself, what does a farm kid from Tennessee know about that?), scanning the crowd for the rest of her friends and a chance to ditch him. Kiara's sitting on a big piece of driftwood, chatting up a stunning, deeply tan girl with glossy black hair -she waves when their eyes meet and shoots Sailor a cheeky grin before returning to her conversation- while the ever awkward Pope seems to be stuck in the middle of one of his rambles about autopsies as he stands around the fire, the willowy blonde beside him looking more and more uncomfortable by the second. She'd deliberately lost track of JJ a while ago, after she watched him getting a little too close to a tiny brunette, his hand low on her back as she passed him a drink and ran her fingers up his bare arm, coaxing that killer smile of his onto his face (that girl may have gotten his smile but Sailor got his eyes and they watched her until she pointedly turned away).

Honestly, she's a bit -okay, a lot- peeved. Here she is, thinking that they're the closest they've ever been before (they've always been close, ever since that day in sixth grade, but this is a whole different kind of close), and just when she feels like she may finally be ready to admit some things, some feelings, he's off doing who knows what with another girl; to be fair, she's off with another guy that she'd, until a minute ago, fully planned on kissing, but that's only because of him! Him and some weird need she has to keep him looking at her, to make him jealous -she shakes her head and takes another swig of her whiskey-spiked beer. Nope, nope, not gonna think about that.

Poor Pope looks like he's really struggling so Sailor pushes all thoughts of her blond best friend from her mind and goes to rescue him, ducking out from under Adam's sweaty arm and walking away without a backwards glance, ignoring the confusion in his voice as he calls her name. She pushes through the crowd to her friend and steps right in front of the girl he's trying to talk to, grabbing his hand with her free one.

"Come dance with me?"

The smile of pure relief that breaks out over his face makes her own widen as he lets her pull him back through the mass of bodies to a less-crowded part of the make-shift dance floor, the tension bleeding out of his hunched shoulders with every step.

"You're an angel, Sailor."

She laughs and wraps her arm around his shoulders, leading him in a carefree twirl across the cool sand. "Tell me something I don't know."

Like a leaf caught up in a whirlwind, he's helpless to resist her infectious joy as they dance, grinning like fools and poking fun at each other; for a while, the redhead tries to forget about stupid, clueless boys and focuses on Pope who, while still a clueless boy, doesn't expect anything from her but pure, unconditional friendship that she's all too willing to give (although she did have a teensy little crush on him when they first became friends, she got over it pretty fast the second he started talking about the bodily functions of dead bodies in explicit detail). She shares her drink with him, giggling at the way his face morphs from curiosity to disgust to delight at the taste of her cinnamon beer concoction and lets him down the rest while she drinks straight from the flask that she pulls from her back pocket.

"You've got a shadow." Pope says, slightly nodding his chin over her shoulder and she takes his hand again, slowly spinning herself under his arm to take a quick glance, rolling her eyes when she spots Adam staring at her from the edge of the crowd. "You know him?"

"Unfortunately. Thought he was cute, then he called me crazy." She tucks the whiskey away with a shrug at her friend's sympathetic wince, then steps closer to him and raises a conspiratorial eyebrow. "Wanna help me tell him to take a long walk off a short cliff?"

"Uh-"

"I think I can help with that," A familiar voice cuts off Pope's reply as JJ suddenly appears at her side, slipping his hand into her back pocket to spin her right into the circle of his arms before he plucks the flask from the other and takes a big sip in one smooth kinda sexy move. "Straight Fireball? Damn, Sail."

The redhead carefully schools her features into a blank mask but her body has other ideas, one hand instantly settling on his chest like it's second nature and her face flushing from more than just the alcohol as she casually replies, "You know I like things a little spicy." Completely aware of the way he's watching her every move, she snatches the whiskey back and downs the little bit that's left, trying and failing to ignore the thrill that shoots through her at those bright blue eyes of his darkening when her tongue darts out to lick her lips. Pope rolls his eyes at them both before muttering a quick 'see ya' and hastily melting back into the crowd.

"So, who're we telling to fuck off?" His voice is just a little strained and she feels her cool facade start to crack as she scowls, subtly tilts her head toward where Adam's still staring at her with an expression that looks like he ate a sour lemon. JJ spins her around to take a very conspicuous peek and her mouth curls into a grin, mask breaking completely when he shoots the touron a glare that screams 'try me, I dare you'; the heat from his hand still in her pocket burns as he leans in until his forehead rests on hers. "Let's give him a show."

Sailor hums and pretends to mull it over even as she coyly snakes her arms around his neck and pulls him closer, the harder panes of his body sliding almost sinfully against her softer curves as they sway together, "I don't know, you looked pretty cozy with that other girl earlier..." Is it kind of petty to bring it up? Yes, yes it is, but she can't resist toying with him like he did to her, just as she can't help the breathless gasp that escapes her lips when his fingers press hard into the toned flesh of her ass through her shorts.

"Why, Flynn, are you jealous?"

"Please, I saw that glare you gave him. If anyone's jealous, it's you, Maybank." She fires back while carding both hands through his hair and the pure gratification she feels at his slight shiver is nothing short of euphoric. Out of the corner of her eye, she barely takes notice of the frown Adam sends their way before he turns and stalks off toward the other side of the beach; honestly, she's so caught up in JJ and everything about him -the slow swing of his hips, the hands burning hot against the strip of her back exposed by her crop top, the darkened look in those ocean eyes- that she'd completely forgotten about the touron she danced with earlier in an effort to forget the boy she's dancing with now. She should've known it wouldn't have worked: Sailor could never forget JJ, no matter how hard she tries. He's like a permanent mark on her, a tattoo inked in gold, a beautiful, wonderous scar that she never wants to fade away.

"Seems like we scared him off so I don't have to worry about that anymore." His flushed face is so close she can feel his breath on her lips as he speaks and her eyes quickly flick down to his mouth on their own accord.

"And what about me?" She asks, twirling her fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck, heart beating fast in anticipation as he smirks wickedly at the way her own face turns cherry red.

"Sail, babe, you don't have to worry about a damn thing."

All one of them has to do is tilt their head and everything will fall into place and she can once again know what it's like to kiss him-

"Let it go, Topper!" A sudden, annoyed shout breaks the two apart before they can close that final distance (Sailor's not sure who would've made the first move and she's both relieved and disappointed they won't get to find out), turning away from each other in tandem toward the gathering mass of bodies chanting 'fight, fight!' at the shoreline.

"JB, he's not worth it!" At the sound of Kiara's voice, they take off running across the sand and shove their way to the front of the crowd just in time to see Topper Thornton in all his frat boy glory get absolutely slammed with a hard punch to the jaw, courtesy of John B. The kook barely hits the ground before he's back on his feet and lunging forward to tackle him into the water, landing a hit of his own square in the eye.

"What the hell happened?" Sailor grabs Kiara's elbow and the dark haired girl looks at her with wide eyes as the boys continue to roll around, exchanging brutal blows while a stunned Pope watches from her other side.

"I don't even know, they just started wailing on each other!"

JJ stands silent to Sailor's right, jaw clenched and hands curled into fists as he stares at the brawl and she reaches over to wrap her fingers around his wrist, thumb calmly running circles on his skin.

"Top, seriously! Stop it!" Sarah Cameron stands in the sand just before the crashing waves, yelling furiously at her boyfriend and throwing her arms in the air when he ignores her. "What is wrong with you?"

The moment Topper lands three punches in a row on John B's battered face, Sailor decides she's seen enough. She rushes forward without thinking to grab the blond boy's arm, pulling as hard as she can in an attempt to get him off her friend and barely has time to register what's happening when the fist he was aiming at John B suddenly swings at her. It connects solidly with her left cheek and makes her stumble back, her hand flying to her throbbing face before she goes down hard onto her butt in the surf.

"What the fuck, Thornton?"

"Did you just punch a girl?"

"Ohhhh shit!"

A cacophony of voices yells from the shore as the kook boy stares down at her, momentarily stunned when he realizes who exactly he hit, and it gives John B an opening to wrestle him back into the water and land a solid punch right to his nose. Everything happens so fast after that that the redhead, still reeling in a wide-eyed daze, has a little trouble keeping up. First, Kiara and Pope splash through the waves to her side, kneeling down to help her to her feet with their arms around her waist. Second, Topper gains the upper hand and straight up tries to drown John B, holding his head under the water while Sarah screams at him to stop. And third, JJ -reckless, bold, protective JJ- pulls out that damn stolen gun, effectively bringing the whole mess to a grinding halt when he stalks forward and presses the barrel to the side of Topper's head.

"Your move, broski." He threatens and the beach is so quiet everyone can hear the click of the safety being switched off. The kook slowly raises his hands in the air and John B emerges from the water, stumbling forward onto his hands and knees with a horrible wet cough.

It's all too much for Sailor's poor tipsy self to take. The world spins beneath her feet as her head starts to pound and her shaking fingers fail to find purchase on Kiara's and Pope's shoulders.

"Guys, I don't feel so good," She manages to whisper and their looks of concern (the former) and panic (the latter) are the last thing she sees before her legs give out and everything goes black.

The first thing she registers is the pain that radiates from the left side of her face, her whole head throbbing with every beat of her heart and the sound of loud whispering right by her ear isn't helping at all.

"That's the best you can do, J? Seriously?"

"The power's out! I can't exactly pull ice out of my ass, Kie."

Something semi-cold gently rests against her cheek and she audibly sighs at the little bit of relief she feels, her hand sluggishly rising to hold it a little closer as she mumbles, "I wouldn't want your ass ice anyway." At least she tries to: her mouth feels like it's full of cotton and she's pretty sure the only thing that comes out is unintelligible gibberish.

Sailor opens her eyes and finds herself lying on her back on the sleeper sofa at the Chateau, a passed out John B to her right. Pope sits on the edge of the mattress by his side, holding a beer bottle to his friend's black eye and he sends her a relieved smile when he notices she's awake.

"There she is," JJ says from her other side and she turns to face him, not at all surprised to find him already looking at her, and the unabashed concern in his eyes sends a golden warmth through her whole body. Her fingers slip down the hand that's still holding the bottle to her cheek so she can run her thumb over the delicate bones in his wrist in a silent thank you.

A different, softer hand rests on her knee and she tears her gaze away from his face to smile at Kiara as she says, "Good to see you're okay, Sail."

The redhead sinks back into the pillow in embarrassment and covers her eyes with her free hand. God, she really passed out, didn't she? She passed out after taking one lousy punch to the face by a fucking kook, no less. How completely mortifying. She swallows thickly and sounds like a chain smoker when she says, "I'm so sorry, guys. I'm a total idiot."

The other three conscious pogues start protesting all at once -apparently there's many, many, different ways to say she's not an idiot- and the resulting volume of their combined voices is enough to make her headache even worse. She sits up and scoots back until she's propped against the couch and sets the now warm beer on the side table before massaging both of her temples.

"Will you please shut up, I can feel my brain beating in my skull."

For a second, there's wonderful, blissful silence and then:

"Holy shit, thank you," A groggy voice says to her right and she turns to watch a bleary-eyed John B claw his way back to consciousness. "You guys are fucking loud."

"He lives!" JJ shouts, ignoring the four glares sent his way and reaching over to clap his hand against the brunet boy's shoulder. "Welcome back, dude."

"Ugh," He suddenly rolls onto his stomach -Pope deftly catching the bottle when it nearly falls from the bed- and his muffled voice floats out from the pillow he shoves his head under like an ostrich in the sand. "Knock me back out."

"Aww, poor baby." Sailor gives his back a sympathetic pat and chuckles softly when he blindly feels around for her arm, pushing it away with another deep groan and a 'fuck off, Sail' that lacks any type of venom.

"Okay, now that you're both kind of conscious, let's agree that neither of you will ever fucking do that again. Got it?" Kiara addresses John B and Sailor as she stands from the bed and crosses her arms, fixing the latter with a piercing look that makes her feel like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar; she opens her mouth to defend herself but before she can say anything, Kiara turns her furious gaze to JJ and points an accusing finger at his face. "And you! What the hell were you thinking pulling that damn gun out, huh?"

"Jesus Christ, Kie!" He suddenly rockets to his feet and throws his hands in the air. "Sail got socked in the face and JB was getting fucking drowned, I wasn't really thinking much at all!”

The dark haired girl can't seemed to think of a response to that and looks away, staring at the floor with her jaw clenched as Pope, ever the mediator, rises to his feet, too, and rounds the bed to step between them placatingly.

"Let's just drop it for tonight, okay? They need to rest." He says, nodding toward the two still on the bed before wrapping his hand around Kiara's elbow and turning her toward the front door. She immediately pulls her arm from his grasp but still nods in agreement, the hard look in her eyes softening when she glances at her injured friends.

"Yeah, okay." She says and glances down at her watch, wincing when she catches sight of the time. "My parents'll kill me if I'm not home soon, anyway."

"Come on, I'll take you guys home." JJ says with a conciliatory look in her direction as Pope tosses him the Volkswagen's keys from his pocket and when she nods back, a small smile pulling at the corner of her mouth, Sailor knows that all is forgiven, at least for now.

"Are you sure you're good to drive?" She asks and immediately rolls her eyes at his sarcastic reply of "Yes, Mom," and the obnoxious wink he shoots her.

The trio leaves after a quick round of goodbyes and John B waits until he hears the sound of his van driving away before finally emerging from under the pillow and rolling onto his back.

"Sensing the immediate danger has passed, the ostrich cautiously pulls its head out from the sand..." She says in her best David Attenborough impression, laughing when he tosses the pillow at her head with an amused grin.

"Ha ha. I was trying to avoid getting a Kie lecture," He explains, running both hands down his face with a heavy sigh. "It feels like my head's gonna explode."

"You and me both, dude." She carefully probes at her swollen cheek and is more than a little surprised to feel the beginnings of a scab forming near her eye. She knew Topper landed a solid punch but she didn't realize how solid that hit was until now as she catches sight of the tiny bit of drying blood left behind on her fingertips.

"That looks like it hurts. You okay?" John B asks and she looks up from wiping her hand clean on her shorts, stiff from dried saltwater, with a wrinkle of her freckled nose.

"I'm alright. How about you? No offense but your eye looks like shit."

"I'll live." He answers with a shrug as he pulls himself upright on the mattress and leans his head against the back of the couch. "Thanks, by the way."

"For what?"

He sluggishly turns his head to look Sailor in the eye and shrugs again. "For trying to help me out. Sorry I got you punched."

She smirks and reaches over to give his hand a brief, friendly squeeze as she replies, "It's not your fault I got myself punched. I'm sorry your ass almost drowned."

He snorts at that and she's relieved to hear it, knowing that he can still joke around and he's not, like, completely traumatized or something. Poor guy's already got enough to deal with without adding a mental breakdown to the list. She swings her legs over the edge of the mattress and slowly stands before taking a tentative step forward; when her knees hold and she doesn't fall flat on her face, she makes her way to his side and holds both hands out to him with a small, lighthearted smile.

"Yeah, you're delirious. Near death experiences do that to you." She says, helping him to his feet and, after looping his arm over her shoulders and sliding hers around his waist, the two teenagers carefully shuffle down the hall in the dim light of the emergency lantern on the kitchen table to his room, where she unceremoniously dumps him onto his bed. "Sleep it off. And for the love of God, please change. You smell terrible."

She goes to leave as he laughs again, tugging his shirt off and tossing it into the growing pile of clothes near the closet before saying, "Hey, Sailor?"

The redhead pauses with one foot in the hall and leans against the doorframe. "Yeah?"

"You know you're a badass, right?"

She laughs and sends him a wink but her heart is oh so light as she turns and heads to the spare room, calling back over her shoulder, "Nice to see someone acknowledge it. Now go to bed!"

The sound of the Chateau's front door opening and closing startles Sailor awake and she blinks heavily, wondering when exactly she'd fallen asleep. Last thing she remembers she was staring out at the fireflies through the open window as she steadily ran her hand down the length of Binx's back and their ethereal glow, combined with the breeze dancing around her shoulders, must've pulled her right under. Down the hall, she hears a loud thump, followed by JJ cursing as he runs into something and she giggles to herself, rolling onto her side to face the hall. He appears in the darkened doorway a minute later, rubbing his knee with a scowl on his face and she laughs louder at his quiet, venomous hiss of "fuck that fucking chair."

"Rude. It's not the chair's fault you always run into it." She teases and he shoots her a flat, unamused look before turning to glance down the hall toward John B's room, his fingers holding tight to the door frame.

"He's okay, you know. Told him to get some sleep." His head swings to face her when she speaks with soft words and even in the dark, she can see the way his tense shoulders slowly relax and his hand loosens, falling back to his side as he nods, stepping into the room and closing the door behind him.

"And you?" He asks, his eyes never wavering from hers as he kicks his boots off and pulls his shirt over his head; the sight of his messy hair and the muscles in his arms make it a little hard for Sailor to breathe, the gentle wind she once thought of as cool now doing nothing to help calm her flushed skin when she scoots over in bed to give him room to lie down next to her. Binx looks as disgruntled as a cat can look as he loses his comfy spot and jumps down from the bed, only to immediately leap onto the windowsill and stretch out.

"What about me?"

JJ rolls over to face her, reaching one hand up to cup her injured face and runs his calloused thumb under the cut on her cheekbone. "Are you okay?"

Nodding, she shifts closer and lays her head on his outstretched arm, covering his hand with her own and effortlessly fitting her fingers into the spaces between his. "I'm fine. Even better, now."

He leans forward to rest his forehead against hers. "Good, 'cause I don't know what I'd do if you weren't."

When those pesky butterflies come raging back with a vengeance, she realizes she's fighting a battle she hopes to lose.

The sound of a conversation in the kitchen, low voices drifting through the closed door of the guest room wakes Sailor early the next morning. Sunlight filters in through the windows and she squeezes one eye shut against the painful brightness, the other still squished into JJ's shoulder. His arm is a welcome weight slung over her hip and his deep, even breaths are soft against her forehead as he sleeps on, dead to the voices down the hall. With the corner of her mouth turned up in a small smile, she smooths his fine blond hair away from his face and runs her fingers along his jawline before carefully sliding out from under his arm and quietly heading toward the kitchen.

Pulling her hair into a messy ponytail, she rounds the corner and stops short when she catches sight of the person standing by the table, her cheerful 'good morning' getting stuck on her tongue; she was expecting Pope and Kiara, not the goddamn sheriff! Shooting John B a wide-eyed look that makes him shake his head (what the fuck did that even mean?!), the redhead forces a smile and hastily offers her a wave.

"Uh, good morning, Sheriff. Sorry to interrupt, just, uh, grabbing some water."

She just nods in acknowledgement before turning her attention back to the brunet boy and Sailor breathes an inaudible sigh of relief. Holy shit, is that woman scary. She heads to the sink and keeps one ear on the conversation as she quickly fills a glass with water and pops two aspirin, the headache from last night made even worse by the addition of a whiskey hangover.

"I didn't realize you had company, John B. Wild night?" The sheriff asks and Sailor meets her friend's eyes again, her anxiety rising when she sees his thinly veiled panic. Her back to Peterkin, she silently implores him to say something, anything -hell, she even tries to subtly mime surfing with her hands to help him out- but he stays silent, so she gathers her courage, plasters a smile on her face, and twirls to face her.

"Busy day, actually. We went surfing all day after cleaning up the yard." She says, jerking her thumb toward the heap of broken branches piled by the fire pit visible through the living room window; when the sheriff turns to look, she quickly elbows John B in the side, ignoring his huff of surprise as she nods her head in her direction.

"Yeah, surfing! All day." He blurts out, sending Sailor a lukewarm glare when she quickly mouths 'what the fuck was that?' before they both straighten up and spin back to the older woman just as she turns to face them again.

"Right." Peterkin hums and arches one eyebrow as she glances back and forth between the two teenagers. "Now tell me, how'd you both get those bruises? They look pretty painful."

"Oh, this?" Sailor asks, pointing at her cheek with a casual shrug, "I tried to hang ten and bit it pretty hard. My board caught me right in the face."

Peterkin looks at her for a beat longer than normal and the redhead does her best to keep her expression neutral as her palms start to sweat. "Surfing, really? Thought you were pretty experienced in that department."

John B adds, offering some much needed back up, "Even the pros wipe out every once in awhile, you know?" He crosses his arms and leans back against the counter. "My board got me good, too."

"Yeah, it just was not our day," She says with a nervous chuckle, refilling her water and slowly starting to back out of the kitchen, pretending she doesn't see the dismayed look her friend sends her way; her anxiety can't take another second of the sheriff's piercing gaze and she needs to get away fast, lest she start recounting every single second of their activities both legal and not so legal- from yesterday in explicit detail. "And I'm still pretty tired so I'm just gonna go back to bed for a bit. Nice talking to you, Sheriff."

After disappearing around the corner before either of them can reply, she creeps down the hallway, keeping her footfalls as light as she can, and she's so focused on trying to listen in on what Peterkin's saying that she runs smack into JJ, standing in the doorway of the spare room. His arm instantly darts out to wrap around her waist and pull her close, keeping her from falling right on her butt as he says, "There you are-"

"Shhh!" Sailor hisses quietly, covering his mouth with her hand, "The damn sheriff is here!"

He mumbles something into her palm but she she holds a finger to her lips, pushing him back into the room and softly closing the door behind them before pressing her ear against it and dropping her hand from his face. He mirrors her position with a question clear as day in his wide eyes, 'what the fuck?', arm still looped around her lower back.

"She's grilling him about yesterday," She says simply, then turns her attention back to the faint voices floating through the door. The duo listens in silence, trying and failing to discern what's being said until they hear the sound of the sheriff's boots on the front porch and her squad car tires crunching through the gravel as she drives away and they exchange a worried look. JJ had it right: what the fuck, indeed.

"Holy shit, guys," John B's voice suddenly says from the hallway. The door opens before they have time to back away and it sends them sprawling to the floor in a twisted pile of limbs; the brunet boy -who'd usually find something like that hilarious- barely reacts to their position and sends them both a tense frown, his next words dropping like a damn anchor in the marsh.

"We need to go check out that Grady-White again, and fast."

Sailor groans and lets her head fall back onto the floor with a thunk. "Here we go."

let me know what you think! fun fact: ostriches actually do put their heads in the sand, but it's not because they sense danger. female ostriches bury their eggs to keep them safe from predators and they'll occasionally stick their head into the sand to check on them and give 'em a lil turn 😊

taglist ❤: @sinkbeneathwaves @jiaraendgame @hmsjiara @maysbanks @alexa-playafricabytoto @sunflowerbecca @obxlife @obx-adventures @sexualparkour @coltonparayyko @miawantsapuppy

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atc74 · 4 years

Text

The Sharp Knife of a Short Life

Warnings: Fluff, parental crap, fluff, love, scary situations, canon level violence, TW: Major Character Death

Summary: Y/N finds love with a young man who is new in town. Will their love last forever like she hopes, or will it end before it’s really begun?

Pairing: Lee Webb x Reader

Word Count: 4025

Written for: @amanda-teaches Amanda’s 2K Writer & Reader Challenge (“I can’t explain right now, but I need you to trust me.”), @alleiradayne‘s Summer Shut In Challenge (“Can you please come get me?”), and @katymacsupernatural Katy’s Make Me Feel Challenge (”That’s...a lot of blood.”. Writing has been such a struggle that I combined them all!

Beta’d by: @crashdevlin and @dean-winchesters-bacon. Thank you both so much for taking a look and being so supportive of a new character. Also to @dolphincliffs for continually supporting (and feeding) my Christian Kane fix.

A/N: We all know the orgin stories of our favorite, and not so favorite characters. But when a new character is introduced in the way Lee Webb was, there is so much to learn. He is a blank slate, except for his ending. We really don’t know what is and what not is OOC for him, so this is going to be so fun. I was inspired to write this after listening to The Band Perry’s “If I Die Young”. I’ve always thought this would be a great intro for a hunter, and I finally found it. I hope you enjoy the journey!

P.S. I am using my forevers and my Dean list, since he does make an appearance. Please let me know if you prefer not to be tagged, should there be future Leo installments. Thank you.

Circa 2001 - Somewhere in Oklahoma

“Mama, he’s a good man,” Y/N sighed loudly as she set the table for supper.

“He’s a drifter, Y/N. He’s only been in town a short time. And working at that place!” her mother, Ruth, spat.

“Not everyone gets a good family upbringin’. He’s had a hard life and is trying to make it better. And it’s a bar, Mama, not the Devil’s playground.” Y/N protested, slamming the last fork down harder than she intended.

“That’s exactly what it is! Nothing good ever happened in that place and you’re not going there!” It had been a long time since she had heard her mother raise her voice.

“Mother, I am twenty years old. I am not a child. Lee is a good man and I’ve been seeing him for more than three months. He’s coming to supper and you’ll be the gracious hostess we all know you are. Please reserve judgement until you’ve met him. Isn’t that what Jesus would do?” Y/N smiled sweetly, knowing how her religious mother always followed the Golden Rule.

“Of course I will, Y/N. I’m not a heathen!”

“Supper was delicious, Miss Ruth. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a meal this good,” Lee smiled at her as he stood to clear the dishes.

“Well, I’m pleased you liked it. I’ve got plenty left over. Would you like me to pack you some to take home?” Ruth blushed at the compliment from her daughter's boyfriend as she searched for a container for his leftovers.

“That would be wonderful, thank you ma’am. Now, you ladies go enjoy your tea, I’ll clean up here,” Lee shuttled the remaining dishes from the table to the sink.

“Nonsense! Guests don’t do my dishes,” Ruth swatted him away with her towel.

“Then let me dry, please. It’s the least I can do after such a meal. I haven’t eaten that well in, forever I think,” Lee offered.

“Mama, let him help.” Y/N’s voice carried through from the dining room as she carried the platter of fried chicken to the kitchen.

~*~

“He’s a good man, Y/N. I can see he cares deeply for you,” her mother told Y/N quietly that night after Lee had gone. They sat on the back porch, sipping chamomile tea, as the sun set.

“He loves me, Mama. And I think I love him, too.” She smiled ear to ear. “You changed your tune pretty quick, though.”

“He told me a little about his life, ya know. How his daddy left and his mama got sick. That’s no way for a child to live. But he’s making something for himself, and for you one day,” she commented. “He looks at you the way your daddy used to look at me.”

“Yes he is, but please don’t go putting a ring on my finger. I’ve barely started living. I won’t always be working at the library, content to stay in this town,” Y/N stated.

“I know, baby girl. There’s big things waiting for you out there. But leave room for him, too.”

“Mama, three hours ago you didn’t even like the man, now you want us to run away together and get married?” Y/N laughed.

“No, baby. I want you to get married, then run away and live your lives. I don’t want you stuck here like I was after your daddy passed. It’s no life for a young woman so vibrant and with so much to give the world,” Mama sniffed slightly, running the crumpled tissue in her hand underneath her nose. She rose and kissed the top of her head. “Goodnight, girl. Don’t stay up too late.”

A pack of coyotes howled in the distance as Y/N thought about what her mama had said. “Goodnight, Mama.”

~*~

“Lee, what are we doing all the way out here? Why did you bring me out here? It’s dark and creepy,” Y/N muttered as Lee led her away from his truck, the path dark and obscured by shadows from the ancient pines towering above them.

“I have a surprise for you, darlin’,” Lee smiled, his dimples carved deep into his cheeks. “Ta da!”

“What is this?” Y/N gasped seeing a crippled cabin in front of them. The porch steps sagging from years of rot, the roof following suit.

“It’s ours...well, mine. I bought it from Ed for just the deed transfer fees. It’s going to be incredible,” Lee beamed at the compromised structure, then turned back to Y/N, his smile falling as he did. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

“Is it safe?” Y/N asked hesitantly, brows furrowed.

“Not yet. It needs some work, but I’m gonna fix ‘er up real good. It’ll be a good home for us, darlin’.”

They sat on the hood of his truck and Y/N listened as he told her his plans for the small two bedroom cabin, his thumb brushing over the knuckles of her hand folded in his. Y/N was content to stay tucked under his arm, his body fending off the chill of the night. Time passed as they talked about their future, laid out under the slivers of moonlight. “I love you, Lee.”

“I’ll love you forever, Y/N.”

It wasn’t until the night air became too cool that they decided to head back into town. “Let’s get you home, darlin’.” As Lee opened the passenger side of his truck, the sound of breaking glass came from the direction of the small cabin. He pushed Y/N inside the cab and shut the door. “Get behind the wheel, if I’m not back in five minutes, leave! Call the sheriff.”

“Lee, let’s just go!” Y/N shouted through the open window as he grabbed a two by four from the bed of his truck. He turned and winked at her, then kept walking, right around the side of the cabin. Four minutes.

The night was too dark to see anything solid, the slivers of moonlight playing tricks on her eyes as she scanned the small clearing. Three minutes.

Y/N slid across the bench seat and started the old beast, her engine rumbling to life. Two minutes.

She heard nothing as she continued to search for Lee, her eyes darting back and forth, the headlights of the truck brightening the clearing. One minute.

“Damn, baby, you smell so sweet!” A man jumped through the passenger window, breathing deeply through his nose. And then he smiled at Y/N. Only there were far too many teeth and they were all wrong.

A scream ripped from her body as he grabbed her arm, pulling it towards him as he tried to shimmy further into the truck. He suddenly lurched backwards and Y/N heard a sickening crack as wood connected with his skull. Lee rushed around the side of the truck and wrenched open the door. Y/N scooched over to give him enough room to get behind the wheel.

“What the H-E-double hockey sticks was that?” Y/N cried, noticing the tears on her face for the first time.

Lee threw the truck in reverse and gunned it back down the dirt road to the main highway. “I don’t know, baby. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I think so.”

“Something is going in this town. That man, and others have been squatting in our cabin from the looks of things. I’m calling the sheriff as soon as I get you home. He’ll figure it out. Maybe they have something to do with the two missing people,” Lee pondered as he slowed down as the highway came into his rearview mirror. He straightened the truck out and put her in drive, heading back towards town.

“Who’s missing? Why didn’t you tell me?” Y/N asked.

“Coupla regulars down at the bar. I reported it to the sheriff. Not really the type of guys that people miss, but they hadn’t been in for a few nights and that’s not normal. Sheriff confirmed today, they just up and gone, or so he said,” Lee shrugged.

Lee drove the last few miles into town silent with his hand clutching Y/N’s. He pulled into her driveway and cut the engine before getting out to open her door. Always the gentleman, Lee walked Y/N to the door, but this time he came inside. “What’re you doing, mister? My mama’s upstairs!”

“Just checking that all the doors and windows are locked. Gotta make sure my girl is safe,” he winked at her before he went up to the second floor. He returned moments later. “All set upstairs.”

When he was satisfied with his inspection of the first floor, he came to a stop in front of Y/N. She was leaning against the counter, a cup of tea next to her. She pulled him tight to her, fingers trembling as she grabbed his shirt. “Don’t go.”

“I won’t. I’m here.” He pressed his lips to the side of her head, holding her gently, as if he was afraid she’d break.

~*~

The library was empty the next day as Y/N settled behind the counter, her third cup of coffee in hand. She didn’t want to work today, but since Miss Birdie was out of town visiting her grandchildren there was no one else to open the library. It’s a library, so it is usually quiet, but it was too quiet. Even the online courses couldn’t drown out the quiet today as she followed along and took notes.

Y/N was lost in the online lecture until the bell above the door dinged, reminding her she was still at work. A tall young man, dressed in a leather jacket walked through, smiling at her as he passed the desk. He headed to the back, where the periodicals are kept. Y/N returned to her laptop, but now unable to concentrate on anything for longer than a few minutes, her mind occupied with Lee, their “future” and the events of the last few days. She sighed and gathered the stack of books next to her, adding them to the cart for restocking.

It took less of her time than she hoped to return the books to their rightful place on the shelf. Y/N went back to the desk and closed her laptop, stowing it in her bag, when she heard a voice from the back.

“Dad, I’m telling you, there’s nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch!” The young man was on his phone, waving his free arm in annoyance. “Yeah, okay. Bye.”

Y/N looked at the clock, noticing the time. “Sir, we’re closing in a few minutes.”

He was walking towards her, a confident swagger in his step. He winked at Y/N as he passed. “Thanks, Sweetheart.”

She flipped the lights off and followed the young man out the door, locking the doors behind them. Y/N took a deep breath of fresh air and hooked her bag across her body, starting the walk home. It was just past five in the evening and the weather was perfect, not too hot yet, but warmer than it had been. She smiled, making her way down the street. She wanted to rush home and get supper ready to bring to Lee down at the bar.

He was working so hard, for them, for their future, and he deserved home cooking more than he got it. Y/N swung left through the small forest in the middle of town. It would easily cut ten minutes off her walk and that was more time to cook for her boyfriend. Lee was indeed her boyfriend, and hopefully, with the way he talked, her future husband. Y/N smiled at that. Husband.

~*~

Y/N had said she would bring him supper even after he told her she didn’t need to. She just said he needed to eat proper and if he was being honest, he liked it. He was in love with that girl. Lee wanted to make her his wife, provide a future for her, for a family. He wanted to make her happy, even if that was letting her bring him supper at work, for now. He was such a goner. And for the first time in his life, he was okay with that.

The bar wasn’t busy being a weeknight and all, but it was still early, only a hair past nine. A few regulars at the bar, a couple new faces playing pool, and a handful taking up tables. Y/N should have been there by now, or at least called. Lee started to worry. He should call her and check in. He should have told her to stay home, with everything that was going on. He cursed himself as he reached for his phone. It started vibrating in my pocket. Y/N’s picture lit up the screen and he breathed a sigh of relief.

“Baby? Are you alright? I was so worried!” Lee blurted out.

“Can you please come get me?” Y/N sniffed and she sounded small, almost fragile.

“Where are you?” He asked, signaling Ed he needed to leave.

“I think I’m at the cabin. I don’t know. Someone grabbed me on my way home from work, and now it’s dark. I don’t know, Lee,” she was crying so hard, he could barely understand her.

“The cabin? I’m on my way, baby. Hold tight!” Lee was already in his truck before the call disconnected. The cabin was only about ten minutes outside of town, but he wasn’t obeying traffic laws that night. Lee needed to get to her and now.

The waning moon barely broke through the cover of the trees overhead as he eased his truck down the narrow drive. There were no other vehicles in sight, so if someone had brought her here, they had done it on foot, or left already. Either way, it didn’t sit right. What did someone want with her? Sure, Lee hadn’t always been a law abiding citizen, but he had done his time, made his peace with God, and changed his ways. Y/N made Lee Webb a better man. He wanted to be a better man for her.

He killed the engine and slowly opened the door, trying to be quiet. Lee searched the bed of his truck, looking for a weapon of any kind, and all he could find was a length of rusty pipe. It would have to do. He slid around the back of the cabin, searching for any sign of movement or sound, but it was quiet. Almost too quiet. He crept up the back steps and the door was ajar. Someone had been there recently. Lee pushed it open and walked inside. Something fast moved in front of him and before he knew what hit him, he was flat on his back, the air knocked out of his lungs, his weapon rolling across the sagging floor.

“I knew you’d come for me!” Y/N cried out, straddling Lee.

“Y/N? Baby, what happened? How did you get here? Are you okay?” The questions flew from his mouth faster than he could process the lewd smile on her face.

“I don’t know! One minute I was walking home from the library, taking the shortcut through the woods, when a man grabbed me. I think he knocked me out, or I passed out, I don’t know. But when I woke up, I was here. Alone. I don’t know what happened or where they went, but I knew you would come for me,” Y/N recounted the events since she left work rapidly.

“Of course I came. You’re my girl and I’m going to protect you and take care of you. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there, but I’m here now, baby. I’ve got you,” Lee cooed softly, holding her tight to him, just relishing in her safety for the moment.

“I was so scared,” Y/N sniffed, her face buried in the crook of his neck.

“Shhhh, I’ve got you now. It’s okay,” he soothed before pulling back and inspecting her carefully. Y/N looked okay, a little disheveled, but she didn’t appear to have any injuries that he could see immediately. “What else do you remember? Anyone come into work today?”

Y/N shook her head. “A few families came in for story time, Billy and his girlfriend, Jenna, to study for a couple hours.” Then she remembered. “There was a man, a man I didn’t recognize. He was tall, wearing a dark jacket, maybe gray. He had um, spiky, light brown hair, and was wearing a necklace, with a weird looking pendant on it.”

“I saw that guy tonight. At the bar. He was with another man, an older guy. Thought they were just a father and son, having a beer and playing some pool. Son of a bitch!” Lee growled, knowing exactly the man she was talking about. “I’m calling the Sheriff.”

“No, baby, don’t. We can do that later. Just hold me,” Y/N begged, putting her face back into his neck.

He was angry and scared that someone took her, but his instincts to hold her won. Her body was warm against him and he let his thoughts linger over what she would feel like laid out beneath him. They hadn’t gone far in that department, as much as he wanted to. He loved her enough to respect her wishes and she wanted to wait until they were married. Lee thought it was sweet, and he did love her. He had been with many women who were quick to please, but none of them could hold a candle to the woman he held in his arms.

He felt her shift above him, slowly grinding her hips into his as she licked and sucked along his neck. Lee attempted to stop her. “Y/N, baby. This isn’t what you want. You’re scared and you need me to tell you you’re okay. I’m going to do that, but not like this, okay? I told you I’d wait for you and I will.”

“I don’t care anymore about some stupid promise. I want you now,” Y/N bucked into him harder, and he responded in kind, despite how strong he thought he could be.

“No, not like this. If we do this before we get married, we’ll do it proper, not on the floor of a dirty, run-down cabin,” Lee gasped, pulling back, but she didn’t loosen her grip on him.

“No!” Y/N screamed, biting down hard into the meat of his neck.

“Jesus Christ, Y/N! What the hell was that?” Lee screamed, pushing her back and jumping off the floor.

“I’m the new and improved Y/N. If you won’t fuck me, maybe one of these men will,” Y/N smiled wickedly, Lee’s blood dripping from her lips, and that’s when Lee noticed they weren’t alone. Two men slinked from the shadows and stared him down.

Lee looked around the room, gauging the distance to each of the two exits, when he spotted a body by the front door, slumped over. And another near the hall. “What is going on here, Y/N?”

“Oh, we gave your girl here a makeover. Stronger, faster, better. We’re immortal and we’re going to live a long, bloody life with her by our side. Eat up, baby girl,” one of the men said, grinning as he took in the look on her face. She was hungry and he knew the feeling too well.

“Come here, baby. I want a taste. It’s your choice. I change you and we live happily ever after. Or, I bleed you dry and my new friends here will be my first, and second. What’s it going to be, baby?” Y/N laughed maniacally as she advanced on Lee. “You want a real taste of this tight little body? Make me cum over and over for eternity?”

“No, this isn’t you, Y/N!” Lee shouted, rounding the small table, trying to put a little distance between them.

The front door blew open, wood flying through the small cabin. The two men from the bar entered, blades raised.

“No, it isn’t Y/N!” the older one announced and the first two men advanced on the newcomers.

Lee watched in disbelief, possibly shock as well, as the older man swung his blade, easily decapitating the first man as Y/N screamed, launching herself at him. The younger fought against the second guy, fists flying and grunts filling the small room. It was like a well choreographed fight scene from an action movie until another head rolled to a stop next to him.

“What the hell is going on here?” Lee demanded.

“We can’t explain right now, but I need you to trust me.” The younger man approached him, while his father restrained Y/N.

“Trust you? You just killed two men and I should trust you?” Lee bellowed. “This is my house and you better explain yourself right now!”

“Those were not men. They were monsters. They took your girl here and changed her. She’s a monster, just like them. And now, she’ll die, just like them.” The older one spoke, dragging Y/N to a chair and securing her tightly. He pulled his machete from its sheath and lifted it high, ready to swing.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Just stop! What the hell are you talking about? Tell me now!” Lee demanded.

“My name is Dean Winchester and this is my dad, John,” Dean said. He then pointed to the headless men on the floor. “Those are, were, vampires. And that is a newborn vampire.” He gestured to Y/N tied to the chair.

Lee looked at the girl, the woman, he swore to love forever. Her teeth were bared, long blood stained fangs brushing against the soft pink of her lips he had kissed so many times. He looked down at himself, the front of his shirt bright red with blood. Then he remembered she bit him.

“You bit me?” Lee asked her.

“You are my first meal, or should have been, if these assholes hadn’t interrupted dinner time,” she laughed. “I was going to feed on you, then turn you so you were like me and we could live forever, fucking and killing, the way it should have been.”

“What?” Lee asked, still reeling.

“Vamps think they should rule the world. No cares, just living out their basics instincts, for an eternity,” John announced.

“Feeding and fucking, “ Dean shrugged, a small smirk on his face. “Now, Y/N, sweetheart, do you have anything you want to say before we chop your head off?”

“Fuck you!” Y/N spat at the two hunters. She looked to Lee, her teeth returned to normal and smiled sweetly at him, a small glimpse of the girl he loved. “Please don’t tell my mother. Tell her I’m in heaven, please. I’m so sorry, Lee. I really do love you.”

Lee took one step closer, aching to kiss her once last time. “Y/N, I’ll love you forever.”

“Dean, son, take him outside, he doesn’t need to see this,” John ordered his son.

“Come on, man. Let’s take a walk.”

Lee hesitated, but Y/N just nodded and smiled. He turned and stepped out into the cool night, Dean by his side. He flinched when he heard a thump from inside the cabin. Their cabin. Where he planned to love her, start a family with her. Funny how forever can be severed by the sharp knife of a short life. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, before letting it out and opening them again.

He looked down at his shirt with tears in his eyes before looking back up and meeting Dean’s eyes. “That’s...a lot of blood.” Lee dropped to his knees in the dirt.

“You’re going to be okay. Eventually,” Dean told him, pressing a cloth to the side of his neck. “I’m sorry this happened to you, to your girlfriend. Everyone has a story. This is how yours starts.”

~*~

Did you like it? The nicest thing you can do for a writer is reblog their work and tell them, and others, how much you like it!

~*~

The Whole Enchilada: @iwantthedean @dolphincliffs @mrswhozeewhatsis @flamencodiva @blacktithe7 @evansrogerskitten @amanda-teaches @hannahindie @wotinspntarnation @winchesterprincessbride @winecatsandpizza @kickingitwithkirk @wi-deangirl77 @hobby27 @mogaruke @gh0stgurl @alleiradayne @idreamofplaid @manawhaat @crashdevlin @thoughtslikeaminefield @emoryhemsworth @imaginationisgrowth @babypieandwhiskey @deans-baby-momma

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#alleiradayne's 2020 SSSI #amanda-teaches #katymacsupernatural #tw: major character death #Lee Webb #lee webb x reader #lee x reader #lee webb angst #lee webb fluff

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