#I wrote down every little detail that I could remember then eventually wrote a horror story based on those notes
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the morning after
pairing: yamaguchi x reader
genre: best friends to lovers
contains: even more fluff, slightly suggestive/nsfw
word count: 1.8k
summary: yamaguchi already cannot get enough of you and tries to keep you from leaving your room (as long you'll let him, of course)
note: surprise! I truly did not plan on writing a part 2 to this but I'm happy with the way it turned out. here’s part 1. p.s. I listened to theme of ms. okudera from the your name soundtrack the entire time I wrote this and I highly suggest playing it in the background while reading it b/c I think it makes everything sweeter :-)
You woke to the sweet sound of birds chirping and the feel of an arm draped over your bare waist, his grip just as tight as the first time he held you — as if he was afraid he’d lose you if he lightened his hold on you even a little. A soft orange glow painted the room as you replayed the night before in your head. Evidence of the newfound intimacy you’ve found with your best friend appeared in the purple marks scattered on your neck and your chest, he had a few of his own as well. His head lay on your chest and you smiled at his light snores, your fingers brushing through his hair.
Tilting your head to get a better look at him, you stared in adoration still having a hard time grasping the turn of events. You can’t remember ever feeling so content in your life.
You thought back to last night when you opened your door to find exactly who you were leaving your room for at 3am in the first place. You hadn’t planned on confessing though. You just couldn’t sleep and decided to go bother your best friend. He beat you to it, but he didn’t know that. As if on cue, Yamaguchi stirred and pulled you closer.
“Hi sleepyhead,” you whispered.
“Mmm. What time is it?” he groaned and shifted his position so he could bury his face into your neck, not wanting to face the new day yet.
“Too early. I think we only slept for like 3 hours.” You closed your eyes again and continued to massage his head with one hand, the other hand rubbing the arm wrapped around you.
“Hm, I wonder why,” he mused. You rolled your eyes and lightly smacked his arm. He chuckled and lazily peppered kisses onto your neck.
“Hey! This is your fault Mr. Pacing-outside-of-my-room-at-3am.”
“Shhhhhhhhh,” He put a finger over your lips in a shushing motion. You giggled and lightly bit his finger. “No more biting,” he mumbled, “only I can do that.”
Your laugh turned into a groan as you said, “Actually no, you can’t. No more from you. God, I don’t know how I’m gonna hide these from everyon--”
“Then don’t,” you felt him grin against your neck as his arm returned to its place around your waist.
“Tadashi, I’m serious!” You pouted and smacked his arm again, though you couldn’t stop the smile creeping onto your face.
“So am I!” he laughed and lifted himself up onto his forearms, moving to hover over you. Yamaguchi was never one to be openly possessive over you, but he couldn’t deny the ego-boost he got just from knowing he was the one to leave those marks on you. He finally opened his eyes fully, and boy was he happy he did. Seeing your dreamy state with your bed hair sprawled out onto the pillow felt like a dream. You looked so delicate under him, he was almost afraid to put any of his weight on you.
You rubbed the sides of his arms as he studied you, taking the time to memorize every detail in front of him for future reference (not like he’d ever forget). A blush crept onto your cheeks as his eyes roamed over every one of your features. His eyes trailed from your eyes, to your nose, to your lips, then down to your neck and your chest currently littered with the bruises he left.
“Wait, do they hurt?” he frowned a bit, lightly touching them. You jokingly hissed at his touch, pretending to shy away in pain. The second you noticed the horror on his face you laughed loudly. “I’m just kidding!” you said between laughs while holding his pouty face.
His eyebrows furrowed in annoyance and he purposely dropped his entire body on top of yours, earning a grunt from you. You continued to laugh as he hid his face into your neck again, stubbornly biting you again.
“Ow! Tadashi, you’re heavy!” you whined.
“I don’t care. That was mean.”
“If you’re so mad, why are you snuggling into me?” you poked at his sides, still giggling.
He stayed silent but you felt a small smirk against your neck. Your hand found the nape of his neck, playing with his hair again.
“So I can do this.” His hands met both of your sides as he tickled you mercilessly.
Suddenly you were shrieking and laughing, trying to escape his hold.
“No!!!!” You used both arms to still one of his, while his other hand continued tickling you.
“T- Tada-Tadashi p-plea-please! PLEASE,” a mix of your laughter and screams leaving you breathless.
You remained helpless until there was a sudden banging on your door. The both of you froze completely, expecting a noise complaint.
“Oi, oi, oi! Go easy on her Yamaguchi, you dog!!!” Noya yelled. Tanaka and Hinata howled with laughter. You gasped and covered your face with your hands. Yamaguchi blushed furiously as he shook his head and crawled back to hide his face in your neck again, the crook of your neck quickly becoming his new favorite spot.
“Wait, what?!” This time Yaku spoke up, shock evident in his tone. “Yamaguchi, Y/N-san, I hope you were safe!” You rolled your eyes at Hinata’s stupid giggles.
“Dear god,” you whispered, begging for everyone to just go downstairs and mind their business.
Yamaguchi groaned and yelled, “Shut up!” Their laughter only continued and eventually faded. However, the two of you smiled at one another anyway, too smitten to be annoyed for long.
Feeling a grumble in your stomach, you patted his back. “Let’s go eat, bub.” He reluctantly moved off of you, allowing you to get up, put your robe on and open the blinds.
“Wait!” He took your hand and pulled you towards him, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“You haven’t kissed me once yet this morning,” he pouted. Your heart clenched at his neediness. You loved it.
“Last night wasn’t enough?” you teased and stood between his legs.
“Not at all.”
Holding his head in both of your hands, your lips met his. You smiled into the kiss before deepening it. It started out slowly and gently until his hands began caressing your thighs. His kisses became hungrier and he grabbed both of your legs and pulled you onto his lap. This greediness was so unlike him, but neither of you cared. He was so, so lost in you.
You broke the kiss and sighed, his lips immediately attaching themselves to your jawline and your neck instead.
“‘Dashi, I’m hungry.” Though, you did nothing to stop him. One arm tightly wrapped around your waist while his other hand continued to rub your sides and your legs.
“I am too,” he agreed, breakfast clearly not on his mind. The growl from your stomach spoke for you, throwing you into fits of giggles. He laughed through his nose, still refusing to let you go.
Grabbing his face once again, you pecked his lips and moved back to lock eyes with him. He melted into your touch like putty. He was in a daze. Everything in him was begging you to stay in bed with him all day, not wanting to leave your room, fearing the reality of the world outside of your door. In here, you were all his and there was nothing that could take you from him. He was being selfish, but he felt that he had a right to be after having loved you for ten years now.
As if you could read his mind, you whispered, “Psst, I love you.” He closed his eyes at this, mentally keeping a recording of that for the times he inevitably would have his doubts. You both knew he was not the most confident person in the world, meaning that a relationship with him was going to require a lot of reassurance on your end. You didn’t mind this. The idea of reminding Yamaguchi how much you love him for the rest of your life made your heart swell.
You kissed him again, slowly and sensually before you pulled away and began peppering light kisses all over his face. “And there is much,” kiss “much,” kiss “much,” kiss “more,” kiss “where that came from,” you smirked. Desperate, he latched his lips to yours once more. You mindlessly grinded your hips into his and a groan erupted from his throat. Before his tongue could meet yours, you pulled away, leaving him a whining mess. “Later,” you winked and stood up, swiftly dodging his swipe before he could pull you back in.
“You’re so mean.”
“Maybe Tsukishima’s rubbing off on me,” you snickered. He smiled and rolled his eyes at the mention of his best friend’s name. He wondered if Tsukki already knew about the two of you; he wouldn’t be surprised if everyone in the house did. Regardless, he could already see the smug look on his face saying I told you so.
Yamaguchi watched you from his place on the edge of the bed, so utterly and deeply in love. As you roamed around your room getting ready for the day, his heart warmed at the domesticity of the scene.
“Tadashi?” You questioned. He was too dazed to realize you asked him a question.
“Let’s use the canoes on the lake today,” you beamed and he returned your smile.
You smiled warmly as he walked up to you, hugging you from behind in front of the mirror. You leaned into him as he lowered his head to press a kiss onto your shoulder.
“This. Everyday.” Another shoulder kiss. “I want this everyday,” he locked eyes with yours through the mirror’s reflection.
You don’t know why that was all the convincing you needed to stay in your room a bit longer. Ignoring how hungry you were, you suddenly turned and crashed your lips into his.
“Okay maybe breakfast can wait,” you mumbled against his lips. Yamaguchi grinned ear to ear and wasted no time picking you up and jumping back into bed with you.
------------------------------------
Once the two of you finally stepped into the kitchen around half an hour later, you were immediately met with howls and applause. Bokuto reached for a high-five only for his arm to be smacked away as you made your way to the fridge.
“Mannn, who would’ve thought!” Sugawara beamed.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, OKAY we got it,” you rolled your eyes, both of you shaking your heads at the relentless teasing. As you poured yourself a glass of orange juice, you looked up just in time to catch Yamaguchi smugly accepting a knuckle punch from Kuroo as he took a seat. You gaped at him across the kitchen island, Kuroo keeling over in laughter. Yamaguchi cheekily winked at you, his newfound confidence exuding off of him.
Deep down, you both knew it was all worth the teasing because the two childhood best friends, notorious for their honesty, were no longer keeping secrets. If everyone knew, then so be it.
All that mattered to Yamaguchi was that you knew that he loved you.
You loving him back was a major bonus.
#yamaguchi tadashi#yamaguchi x reader#yamaguchi fluff#yamaguchi x you#yamaguchi tadashi x reader#haikyuu fluff#haikyuu x reader#haikyuu imagines#childhood friends to lovers#haikyuu suggestive#hq yamaguchi
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Oooooo the red bock au sounds so interesting! Does Five caught himself thinking of his brothers just as numbers and weapons like Reginald talks in his book? Does he read Vanya book to remind himself that they are still human even though he reads it through lens of someone hurt by them all? And I feel like the handler would know either way about the books but o it's so much fun to see five being paranoid
I think having both books and both perspectives reminds Five that... he’s getting some very biased accounts of his own siblings. I think that when he’s still young, he writes down as many memories as he can remember because... he starts to forget, at some point.
Vanya’s book talks about how volatile Diego and Luther’s relationship is, and so Five writes down the time Luther and Diego teamed up to toss Five off a balcony when Five kept switching the pens in their hands with pipe cleaners during a lesson (and he will maintain until his dying day that he was just practicing his control, c’mon guys!)
when Reginald’s notes call Allison an “insufferable, narcissistic creature,” Five remembers Allison bribing him to cause trouble and distract Reginald so that she could use the microwave unobserved to heat up some water bottles as makeshift heat packs for Luther’s sore muscles
when Vanya calls Ben “easily manipulated,” Five recalls Ben arguing theories with him at 2am after one of Ben’s training sessions where Ben almost flipped his bed when Five jokingly suggested that he could use the horror’s tentacles to bounce up and down like a pogo stick before Ben tackled him and tried to beat Five to death with an encyclopedia of sea creatures (affectionately)
I think having Reginald’s journal actually helps in a lot of ways, because Five automatically autocorrects literally all of Reginald’s thoughts to be like, mostly inaccurate and much harsher than they need to be. So when he reads Vanya’s journal he also autocorrects and is able to recognize that it is a very biased and somewhat harsh view of his siblings
(he doesn’t distrust them as much as he does in canon, with only Vanya’s harsh words to cling to with no reminder that they were all raised by a man capable of unfathomable cruelty, no reminder that authors can be oh so biased)
outside of his equations, there’s notes to himself written in the margins of Vanya’s book. Sometimes they’re just small, pointing out that Klaus had fought to include Vanya in trap week (Klaus then proceeded to team up with her and managed to catch Five in a snare - he actually still has a scar around his ankle from his upsidedown thrashing before he managed to steal one of Diego’s knives to cut himself down) or pointing out that Luther’s chilly attitude when they were ten was probably the result of Vanya outperforming him in every standardized test they took because of Luther’s ridiculous inferiority-superiority complex
at the very least he has comparison, because Reginald’s book calls Klaus an absolute failure while Vanya’s book called him “sweet, as a child at least”
As for the Handler... she’s aware that he has Vanya’s book and a red notebook, but I don’t think she actually knows what’s in the red notebook! Reginald was notoriously secretive, after all
So the Handler assumes that the red notebook is where Five keeps his time travel equations because aw, he hasn’t given up! how cute!
She makes an assumption that, logically, makes sense. Of course Five is still trying to figure out time travel, no matter how much he denies it! Of course he’s writing the equations down! What a silly boy, thinking that he could hide this from her, of course she knows about his little plans to save his siblings ;3c
And because she’s so powerful and knowledgeable and one step ahead all the time, she makes an assumption and assumes that it is fact. Because she’s so smart, of course she isn’t wrong! She’s had Five clocked from day one!
(The Handler thinks she has Five all figured out, a creature so based in sentiment. Why would he carry a book around that details the torture his siblings went through? He hates his father, why would he ever carry around his father’s notebook! The Handler has a fatal flaw, and it is that she doesn’t understand loyalty and sneers at sentiment and those are two of Five’s most powerful driving factors. Five lives for his siblings and would die for his siblings, almost his entire life has been dedicated to saving them. Not the world, just his family.)
(She understands that Five considers his family to be exceptionally valuable, but doesn’t comprehend that Five is 100% willing to die for them should it come down to it. Why on earth would anyone value something like siblings over their own life? Absurd. I genuinely believe that the Handler thinks she could get Five to betray his siblings with the right leverage, and so she fundamentally does not understand Five as a person)
To be fair to the Handler, the whole academy’s morals and just. completely and utterly fucked. Luther condemns the murder of innocent civilians even if it would save the planet but doesn’t blink an eye at killing the ‘bad guy’ Commission agents. Diego stabs criminals as a pastime while still holding himself at a moral high ground for saving people, despite the fact that too many criminals are forced into crime by unfair circumstances. Allison used her powers to bolster her career without even blinking but now refuses to use her powers at all because of the manipulation of one (1) child, not even against ‘bad guys.’
I mean. Vanya wrote an entire salt book without consulting her siblings that had lasting impacts on at least one of her sibling’s career in the public eye and potentially impacting her siblings relationships with everyone who had every read the spark notes on her book, without the opportunity for reprisal. Publishing your entire family’s dirty laundry as personal emotional catharsis is... kind of a dick mood, lets be real. Especially when you were all abused children raised in an environment of excessive violence and rigid structure.
Like yeah, of course Allison is good at manipulation and lying - she grew up with an abusive and over-controlling father. She probably lied as easily as breathing about where she’d been, who she was with, what she was doing, etc. The only privacy they got in that household was what they seized with their own hands and carved out for themselves! Is it fair to say that Allison’s superpower is dishonestly?
Is it fair to say that Klaus got crueler as he grew? He was tortured and turned to drugs as an unhealthy coping mechanism, and then he sat down at a table and looked at all the other little kiddies who did not get locked into a crypt overnight. In fact, there was one child who never got any extra training at all! Can you imagine the jealousy? The bitterness? Klaus might have been exceptionally cruel to Vanya as a teenager, she had everything he wanted and dared to complain about it. Can you imagine listening to someone wistfully wish they could join in on missions when you know that the cost for doing so has been carved out of your soul?
My point is, none of these little bitches have anything that resembles a sane moral compass. They’re unpredictable as fuck! It’s like herding cats! You never know what they’re going to do next! Oh? Are they going to investigate in any logical pattern? No, because Diego just remembered Patch exists and helping her print flyers for the annual police ball is more important than saving the world or whatever lol
Luther is over there investigating the moon! The moon! Meanwhile Allison is breaking and entering her sister’s student’s house because she got shady vibes off of him one time and she has never heard of a proportionate action in her life.
Meanwhile Vanya is going through the phone book trying to call up psychiatrists who have any familiarity with whatever fucked up meds Dad put her on because like, she would like to Not Be On Them (fuck you dad) but also understands that danger of quitting cold turkey something you have been taking for years and would like a professional opinion on how to safely decrease and eventually eliminate her usage, thanks (Klaus is hanging over her shoulder pointing out the ones who will sell you non-prescription drugs for a price and Vanya mentally crosses those ones off of her list to call)
Five is probably joining on the breaking and entering because Allison promised she would sweet talk to eye dude if he did her this solid
(Five complains at length about how investigating the apocalypse should not be a solid because she would 100% die as well if the apocalypse came to pass)
#the red book au#plus like. some thoughts and opinions lmao#look Vanya's book was healing and cathartic for her#does that mean it should have been published?#FUCK NO#it's biased as all fuck for starters and could genuinely impact her siblings jobs and relationships#anyway the hargreeves are all cats#they do their own thing regardless of what they should be doing#their orders of priorities are fucked tbh#what do you mean vanya's job isn't equally as important as saving the world?#she has to pay rent somehow five !!#klaus is down to go threaten a seedy dude but can they investigate dad's will after pretty please?#maybe there's a clue! or numbers about inheritance!#if dad disowned them then diego is forging the will tbh#not because he wants the bastard's money but it's the PRINCIPLE of the thing#Anonymous#long post#far tua long
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Forgotten
It's been a two weeks and Alex still hasn't woken up. She was shot 2 weeks ago and still hasn't woken up. The thought hits you like a train going full speed. It's her birthday today, She wanted to watch the new Game of Thrones promo. No, no it was the new DC movie wasn't it? A horrifying realization dawns on you. Your forgetting her, its only been two weeks and your forgetting her. No you can't forget her. Kara tapping your shoulder to get your attention shakes you out of your thoughts.
"C'mon bubs. We might be able to get to the DEO faster if leave early." It's taken a toll on Kara too. Instead of being in an upbeat mood like she used too she was also rather depressed. It hurt to see your older sisters like this, one on a bed and the other putting an act on for you.
You nod and move gripping onto her shoulders as she takes on the familiar flight to the DEO but not before grabbing a post-it note stack off of the desk.
You start writing into the notes from your spot in a chair next to Winn in the DEO. He glances at you once or twice but eventually gets back to work on researching how to get Alex out of the small coma she was in. Apparently you couldn't help yet because your only 16 but that didn't stop you from hearing conversations and putting in you input where you could. You go back to writing keeping an ear out for any news.
She wanted to watch the new Spiderman when it came out
She always thought that donuts with chocolate sprinkles tasted different than rainbow ones
She almost got a motorcycle with blue decals because It looked more "badass" but ended up getting the black one because the other one was a triumph and she liked Ducati's.
Remember that she liked the alien gun "remakes" better when we worked on them together to rewire them so they'd shoot faster.
Once you and her snuck on to the roof of the DEO to see the clouds because you were bored. You almost got caught when you came down but she managed to get you guys away.
She always fought Kara for potsticker's but didn't really like them anyway
Little things like this kept on getting written down. For days you wrote everything down filling half of the stack of post its and moving them to a notebook small enough to fit in your pocket. Four weeks later Alex woke up and your notebook was forgotten for a few days. But instead of letting it happen you still wrote everything down
Once instead of saying c'mon guys she said c'mon gays and started laughing.
Her favorite song is Highway to hell AC/DC
It kept on going on and on and on. Eventually you stopped, realizing that she isn't going to disappear again. That Lena was good enough to bring her back again and then some. So you let lose a little. But you never let go of the journal. It stays with you in your pocket all the pages worn out and almost filled up with your handwriting. You never let anyone touch it.
But then Winn calls you from your spot in the lab looking at a piece of seaweed through the microscope because you've been in the lab for a couple minutes messing around with Alex, putting random things under a microscope just for the heck of it. The notebook gets knocked out of your pocket and lands on the floor as you race over to Winn with a smile on your face as he gloats about how he finally beat Kara at Pacman.
Alex finds the notebook face open to a random page. She knows that one of you are bound to trip over it if she doesn't pick it up. So she does and is about to place it on the table when she catches glimpse of the words inside. She can't stop reading after she reads the first sentence.
Her favorite movie is Moana but if anyone asks she'll say any horror movie.
Remember when you raced up the stairs to Kara's apartment and you beat her by 2 stairs
She loves to go rock climbing
Once we all rode ATVs and yours fell over and you couldn't stop laughing because you were fine and she was super worried
Once she almost
She hated
Remember when
She tried to
There are tears running freely down her face now as she see's you stumble back in the room tripping over the slight raise on the ground your head still thrown back laughing because of a gloomy looking Kara.
You have your back too her and are still looking through the microscope when she says your name
"Y/N"
You pause turning at her shaky voice and freeze when you see the notebook.
"I-uh" you try to find words, to try and explain how you needed to remember her. That you couldn't bear the possibility of not remembering every single detail about your older sister who was so painfully gone those days but now is here and is in front of you. She rises from her knees and steps closer to you.
Your voice comes out smaller than you'd like it too. "I didn't want to forget you." I couldn't forget you your brain screams as you run your hand through your hair
You elaborate "you were gone for so long it" your voice cracks "It sucked!" You pause chest rising and falling fast to try and phrase the next words, unable to look her in the eyes.
"I started forgetting things. Like your favorite movies or-or your least favorite song. I'm sorry"
Your voice died down to a whisper as you looked at your boots ashamed of yourself.
Two arms wrapped around you as you glance up surprised. Part of you wonders why Alex is hugging you. Why she thinks its forgivable to forget her, any part of her. The other part of you wants to sink into her arms and never ever let go. She seems to make the choice for you burying her head in your neck as you repeatedly murmur "I'm sorry" tears flowing from your eyes as well while you listen to the "its okays" and "its not your fault" falling from her lips"
At some point both of your tears stop and she finally lets out a small chuckle handing you back your notebook.
"My favorite movie isn't Moana by the way. Its Big Hero Six."
@bluberryboy
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Febuwhump Day 8 - “Hey, hey, this is no time to sleep!”
A/N: I can’t believe I just wrote this in one sitting. I know I’m super behind on Febuwhump, yikes...but I think this turned out pretty well! This got longer than I meant it to be, but then, so did most of the prompts in my drafts that I have for this month. This is actually my first time purposefully writing whump so I hope this was okay! Unedited btw, i’ll read it over in the morning.
TW: Burning building, explosions, second degree burns, mentions/descriptions of burn wounds, life or death situation, building collapse, concussed reader.
***
The first thing Hawks notices when he comes to is the foul taste in his mouth. It causes him to gag and cough with his eyes still closed, though that doesn’t help his situation much if at all. The smell of something burning sears the inside of his nostrils and clogs his lungs, and he finds it incredibly hard to breathe as he rolls over onto his side, eyes finally fluttering open.
The second thing he becomes acutely aware of is how hot he is. No...how hot the floor is. Speaking of which, he couldn’t seem to recall what he was doing down there anyways. If only that incessantly annoying ringing in his ears would stop-
Wait. Wait a minute...
An image of you flashes behind his eyelids as he blinks them shut harshly to block out the billowing cloud of smoke filling the room, and it all comes back to him in a whirlwind.
There were villains. High class villains. Not your every day run of the mill villains, but villains who could really pack a punch when fighting back. They had been occupying a small skyscraper at the time as their headquarters, and you and Hawks had partnered up to take them down after months of steak outs and observation. But something had gone wrong...very wrong. Those details were still a bit blurry, but Hawks remembers something akin to an explosion- a loud noise, the building shaking, and a blast that knocked him unconscious.
All of the sudden he’s hyper aware of what’s going on- and he realizes he needs to move fast if he’s going to get out of here alive. He’s at least twenty stories up in the air on unstable structures, his feathers and hair are singed, and his head is foggy after inhaling too much smoke. Luckily he can still move, and it doesn’t look like he’s been burned too severely, at least not yet. But the flames licking at the bottom of the closed door in front of him cause alarm bells to scream out in his head, and he knows he doesn’t have much time to think. He needs to find you so he can grab you and-
Ohhh, shit.
As he rolls over onto his other side, he can make out the outline of a figure lying on the floor, and he’s almost certain it’s you. None of the villains stuck around after blowing the place up anyways, and he can just barely see the dulled colors of your hero suit behind the thick screen of smoke.
“Fuck! Oh god, Y/N.”
You’re lying too still for your own good, and Hawks thinks he can see the beginning of what he can only assume to be fire slowly eating at the wall next to you. He wastes no time and flattens himself on his stomach, army crawling in your general direction to avoid the worst of the putrid air. It doesn’t help much, but it’s better than nothing. He ignores the uncomfortable heat of his body and pushes onward, his movements still a little sluggish from getting knocked out cold. He’s not entirely sure if he can even use his feathers right now while they’re this singed, and furthermore, he hopes his wings aren’t completely out of commission; he’s going to need those if the both of you are going to make it out of this alive.
“Y/N!” he tries to shout, though it ends in a horrible sounding cough that comes from deep in his chest. As he draws nearer, he hears what sounds like creaking coming from above the two of you, and to his utter horror, the support beams under floor above you have burnt to a crisp and look like they’re ready to collapse any second. It had to have been a sheer miracle that the two of you weren’t already engulfed in flames yourselves. “Y/N! Come on, kid, you gotta get up! Move!”
Even as he tries to urgently get your attention his body seems to move on it’s own accord, and before he can stop himself, he sends a few feathers your way out of habit and concern that you might be crushed any second if he doesn’t move you somehow. It hurts like hell, and he’s pretty sure he’s bleeding. This is by far the worst he’s felt when using his feathers, but it does pay off, and you’re lucky that he made the split decision to move you- no sooner had he scrambled back with you had the ceiling collapsed into the floor.
He turns to you while staying low to the ground, shaking you desperately and firmly smacking the side of your face with his hand in hopes of interrupting your forced slumber. It works but just barely, and Hawks watches as you try to take a deep breath but end up choking just as he had. He gives you a once-over while you struggle to breathe, eyes flitting over your form to assess any damage you may have taken- and to his dismay, there seems to be a good amount of it. The entire left side of your hero outfit is singed, bits of the fabric even burnt into your skin in certain places where the heat must have been too strong. You hadn’t been able to move away or protect yourself in your sleep, and the burns on your arm and leg can definitely attest to that. They’re second degree, at least; some of the fire must have actually made contact with your skin.
“Oh, fuck- Hey, look at me. Y/N, focus here!”
He leans over you to look at your eyes, and he doesn’t have to shine a light in them or have you follow his finger to know that you hit your head a little too hard. They’re glossy and unfocused, and you can’t find a single place on his face to fixate on. You just keep looking all over, and Hawks can clearly tell your concussed.
Fucking great. He’s got to get you both out, and now.
“Hey, kid. Can you hear me?” He nervously awaits an answer with eyes trained on you, and the second you start to talk he lets out a small breath of short-lived relief.
“Hawks...? Wha...” You look so out of it and dazed.
“So that’s a yes, thank god...” Before you try to ask anything else, he stops you in your tracks and shakes his head at you. “Whoa, whoa, whoa- take it easy, alright? No questions, I just need you to listen and keep talking to me. Doesn’t matter what it’s about, I just need to know you’re awake and alive-” He pauses briefly to look around for something, anything he can do to escape.
There’s the door you both came from, the one that’s barely holding back the raging heat behind it- that’s a no-go. No way in hell is he trying to brave that. His wings won’t last five seconds in that, and you don’t have the means to protect yourself while you’re concussed. Another option is to try and escape through the hole in the floor that the ceiling caused...but that’s way too risky for the both of you as is, and it looks like flames are starting to creep in from that way, too. If he is going to take that route, he needs to do it soon. Maybe he can get to a staircase, or find a-
The sound of you moaning in pain cuts through his thoughts and his head whips back in your direction to find you grimacing and trying to move. “Ah ah- Don’t do that. Just keep talking, come on. I know it hurts, but you gotta keep talkin’ to me. I’m gonna get us out of this mess, somehow...”
Panic starts to set in as he realizes his options are limited. Terror grips him in it’s icy stone-cold jaws as he comes to the conclusion that his odds of survival are even worse.
“Hawks...it hur’s...” All you can do is roll your head back and forth and try to move, but your body just won’t cooperate with your mind.
“Fuck. Fuck! I know, I know...” His teeth grit together as he thinks, his thoughts racing a mile a minute. Adrenaline is starting to kick in, and he’s desperate for anything at this point.
He still has no plan in mind when he makes another split second decision to move you from where you’re currently laying. The fire is only spreading up onto the carpeted floor the two of you are on, and the smoke is getting worse by the second; this room is a hot box with no ventilation at this point. He carefully picks you up and cradles you to his chest, his wings wrapping around the both of you to both support your frame and shield you from the onslaught of unbearable heat. It forces him to take a few steps back, and he does his best to navigate through a screen of black without bumping into any furniture. He almost trips several times, but eventually he hits the opposite wall. Or, rather...
A window. Bingo.
“S’ tired...” you mumble. Your eyes are already fluttering, rolling to the back of your head as your limbs grow heavy in his arms.
“Hey, hey, this is no time to sleep! Y/N!? Come on, stay awake!”
“C’n we go...home now?”
He doesn’t like how ragged your breathing sounds.
He almost chuckles at the absurdity of the situation, but his lungs are already full of tainted air to laugh, let alone breathe properly, so he scoffs instead- and instantly regrets it. Between fits of coughs, he presses his shoulder to the glass behind you both to test the temperature, and it’s much hotter than it should be. Part of the glass is already blown out to his right, but there’s not enough space to crawl out without the jagged edges of it tearing up his flesh and wings. But if he could somehow break it...
His feathers. He’ll have to use up more of them, but if he uses the bare minimum necessary to break the glass and saves the majority, he may be able to make it out the window and fly you both to safety.
“We can’t go home yet,” he chokes out in response to you, finally. “I’m gonna get you out of here, and then you’re on your way to the hospital, yeah? You’re gonna be fine.”
He knows that to be true, so long as he can actually manage this. He backs up as far as he can go without subjecting either of you to the hot flames now openly invading the room, the entryway having burnt to a crisp already. From where he stands now, he hopes there’s enough distance to create the amount of force needed to shatter that damn glass. After a quick estimate of how many feathers he can get away with using, he readies them, and it all boils down this moment. If he can’t do this, you’ll both die. Both of your lives are at stake, resting on his weary shoulders. He can do this.
He has to.
“Wanna go home...wanna go...” You’re just murmuring to yourself, and it really puts Hawks on edge.
He hears the glass shatter before he sees it. He stumbles forward, wings still securely wrapped around you, and all but falls out of the edge of the window right before the rest of the floor collapses in on itself. He hears the devastation behind him, feels sparks on his back where the holes of his shirt meet the beginnings of his wings. He knows if he had hesitated or stayed any longer, neither of you would be alive right now.
Replacing his hold on you with his arms, he lets his wings drift open and prays he didn’t overdo it with the feathers, begs whatever gods may be listening that the two of you can at least slow the fall somehow. And to his pure joy and bliss, his wings, though bleeding and burnt and painful, are still very much holding up and allowing him to fly.
Now if he can manage to get you to a hospital...you’ll be just fine.
#febuwhump#febuwhumpday8#febuwhump2021#hawks x reader#keigo x reader#whump#bnha x reader#mha x reader#hawks#keigo takami#keigo
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eyoo, guess who wrote a creepypasta, I dunno if it's good in any sort of sense because I love writing horror but cannot read it
I don’t know when I first noticed it, but I remember not being afraid at first. When I was little, I mean. I remember sitting in the corner, back to the wall, and talking. It wasn’t the same voice every time, but someone would talk back.
I called them the “corner friends”, uncreative as that is. They’d ask me for things sometimes, snacks mostly. I’d leave a plate of milk and cookies there before bed every night, and in the morning they’d be gone. My sister always said it was dad tricking me, playing games and eating the cookies when I went to sleep.
Wherever she is, I don’t think she’d say that now.
It was when I was 8, I think, when I first started to realize that no one else talked to them. I’d bring friends over, have them sit with me in that corner, and talk, trying to get their attention. They’d never talk back while someone else was there. Eventually, other kids stopped coming over entirely.
I was frustrated, at first. I even yelled at them, just the once. I told them they were making me look like a liar. They were quick to calm me, though. They told me I was special, that they couldn’t tell me why yet, but that I was the only one they could talk to.
That was enough, really, for a long while after that. They had given me that idea, that I was “special”. I guess I just kind of rolled with it.
I used to talk to them about everything. The kids at school, my homework, my teachers, any new games I got. I had a few other friends, here and there, few and far between, and I talked to the corner friends about them, too. They always got quieter when I did, more bitter.
It was a long long time, though, before they ever saw me really upset. I had come to them, crying about how a teacher had yelled at me. Mr. S, I think his name was. I was 12 or 13 then, too old to be crying according to my sister, but the corner friends shooshed and cooed and listened more than they ever had before.
I don’t remember what happened, all the way, for all I know I might’ve deserved it. I pulled some pretty dumb stunts as a kid. They helped a lot though. They had me tell them every part of what happened, down to the last detail. It helped, somehow, to tell them. It was more of a story then, less of something that hurt, I guess.
Mr. S wasn’t there the next day. Or the day after that. There were rumours that he got fired, and even more that he just went missing. One kid in my math class even said she bet he got murdered.
I told the corner friends a bit less after that.
When I was 15, I got really mad at my sister's refusal to believe me.
She teased me for believing the joke for so long, keeping “dad’s cookie supply chain” up and running for all that time. I told her she was wrong, and that I’d prove it. We even set up a bet, saying that whoever was wrong owed the other a formal apology, and a whole bag of candy.
That night, we had a sleepover. We set up sleeping bags by the corner, with a flashlight and a plate of cookies inbetween the two of us, and a tripwire with a bell at the doorway so we’d know if dad came in. We mostly blew raspberries at each other and gloated about just how wrong the other was, but it was kinda nice, in a way. I tried to talk to the corner friends a few times, but I had about just as much luck as I did when I was eight.
Eventually, through all the insults and kicking each other through the sleeping bags, we both managed to drift off, way too tired to keep it up that far into the night.
When I woke up, my sister’s sleeping bag was empty and so was the plate.
By that night, there were search parties, police, flashlights, the whole thing. All trying to figure out where she was. But I knew.
That was when I stopped going to the corner. I stayed out of the whole damn room. It worked, for just a few days. And that was when I started hearing them in the rest of the walls, too.
“Can you bring us something to eat?”
“It’s because you’re special.”
“Why don’t you come to talk anymore?”
“Do you want to play something different?”
It happened every time I was alone, they wouldn’t stop. I started sleeping in my parents room, in the middle of it so I wasn’t near any walls, but after they were both sound asleep, the voices would come up from the floorboards, too.
On my 16th birthday, my parents bought me a car, and so I started sleeping there. I’d only come inside if I knew one of them was going to be with me and like hell was I going back to the room. I’m never, ever going back to that room.
I’m nearly 18 now, I still basically live in my car, but it’s been peaceful, in a way. I haven’t wanted to think about any of this, not for a long time, but I think it’s important now. I don’t want there to be no one who knows.
Because my parents woke up to a scream and a big hole in the wall, and I think my friends are coming to get me.
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Okay so request~~~~
So at the end of last blood, he never stays at his ranch. He tells the aunt “Idk. I’ll move around, like always.” And then proceeds to destroy his home and land beyond repair, you know that story i wrote about picking up first blood rambo?? Well, change that to old man rambo!
What about him having rhat random chance meeting with someone like SR(from the one i wrote) and staying with them. How they take care of him without even knowing him, and how he has a chance to try out a new life away from war and what he was with someone who’s young and starting out on their own ambitions.
I could totally see him being introduced to SR’s friends as “oh, my new roommate!” And him telling SR all about vague war stories, they teach him to cook and cook him breakfast. Honestly just rambo being taken somewhere far away and nice and staying with someone who definitely has their own problems, but takes on the therapy by helping him instead.
Basically, SR is very very damaged and rambo can tell- but they’re so sweet and responsible, mature, and loyal. They take out emotions and pain through spreading love instead of war, he can’t let that go. Not now
(Hopefully that gives you ideas!!!)
I'm sorry this took so damn long for me to write, and I'm sorry that it's so bad, too, but I hope you like it in any case!😓😅
Life Goes On.
John Rambo (Rambo: Last Blood) x Named!OC (not mine)
Warnings: injury detail, death, blood
Masterlist
John's eyes are barely open as he sluggishly guides the horse beneath him further on, their surfaces dry and sore even as he blinks them. By now it's useless, the dust in the air having gotten into his corneas within the first hour of his long ride, irritating his scleras very quickly. Exhaustion has long since numbed out any pain he still feels, his eyes becoming the least of his worries as he gradually loses the sensation in his lower abdomen, where his more serious wound is bleeding profusely onto his shirt, still oozing even after fifteen hours of being left alone. He knows the blood flow isn't too bad anymore, as his hasty attempts to patch himself up have left him with a better chance of surviving, but his other wounds are slowly driving him to a comatose state. The veteran can't move his fingers properly, the digits clunky and uncoordinated as he tries to grip onto the reins, the blisters from the tough leather split and leaking as he struggles to do so. Nausea has settled into his head, his vision blurred as his strength slowly fails him - he's too old to have survived as he used to. Without his medication, John finds himself plagued constantly by flashes of past grief and sorrow, images of his dead team back in 'Nam flooding his conscience, accompanied by the beaten and bruised face of Gabrielle.
Beneath him, the horse walks slowly, his thighs aching from the hours of riding, chafing sores lining them under the fabric of his trousers, his body slouched forwards in the saddle. Pity for the animal also gnaws at his mind, and he feels a pang of guilt as he realises that it's unlikely it will be able to carry him much further without any respite. It's head is drooped, steps slow and unsteady, panting breaths rushing from its throat in haggard bursts. If he had any energy, John would remove the tack from the horse and let it go, but he knows this isn't a plausible idea for him if he wants to survive. He owes it to Maria to survive.
His conscience starts to slip, just as the sun comes to its highest point in the sky, heat and dry air lulling him into a false sense of security as he feels his control leaving him. Unable to keep a grip on it, he succumbs to the darkness rising up in his vision, falling into it gratefully, needing the reprieve.
Vaguely, John seems to recall a car pulling up beside him, the door slamming closed as someone shouts to him, hands taking the reins from his. Gravity seems to take control, and John falls from the horse, landing heavily in the dirt, but he doesn't lie there long. Whoever has taken hold of the horse is swift to come to his aid, pulling him into their arms as they try to drag him back to their car. They're struggling, and he wants to fight back, to tell whoever it is to get lost, but he finds he can't, his throat too raw to even force a sound past, so he can only stay limp as they manhandle him into their vehicle, murmuring gently to him the entire time.
It's at that point that he finally loses consciousness.
*
Agony floods John's body as he comes to again, drawing a hoarse groan from his scratchy throat as he jerks upwards, his instincts still ready for action even after all these years. Blearily, he blinks, hands scrambling to identify his surroundings, dull surprise dripping into his conscience as he finds a soft duvet and pillows on top of a comfortable mattress, warmth encompassing him. Frowning, the veteran pushes himself upright, ignoring the pain in his body as he does so, his hand going up to cup his wound instinctively. Shocked to find a clean dressing plastered over the ragged injury, John blinks again and takes a look around.
He's in a small room, laying on a bed in the centre, the domicile unfamiliar to him. Idly he wonders if maybe he's died and found some kind of afterlife, but a sharp stab of agony from his side eliminates this idea from his head in seconds. The room is quite comfortably decorated, designed to be cosy and close, whilst remaining roomy enough to allow for decent living space. A few photographs line the wall, accompanied by posters of movies he's never bothered to go see, having never really managed to overcome the triggers they often set off when he's not expecting them.
Just as he goes to climb out of the bed, the door swings open, and an unfamiliar figure steps in, a first aid kit held in one hand as they juggle a bowl of water in the other. Instantly, John's on his feet, instincts taking over as he ignores the flare of agony that springs up in him as he swiftly moves over to the newcomer. In seconds, they find themselves pinned to the wall, a hand wrapped around their throat. Yelping in fear, they let go of the bowl and first aid kit, smaller hands coming up to grip his larger arm, eyes wide as they stare at him in shock, wincing as warm water splashes the two of them.
It takes all John has not to crush their windpipe, his rational mind taking over the militant instinct as he keeps them in a threatening hold, the youth unable to move at all. A wave of nausea washes over him, and he falters, vision spinning wildly as he drops back a step, losing his grip on the newcomer as quickly as he secured it, the sudden disorientation throwing him off as he falls to the floor again. Grunting in pain, he lands heavily, the impact jarring his bones and muscles roughly. Recovering quickly, the newcomer drops down beside him, eyes widened in concern now, rather than fear.
"Are you alright?" They ask him, voice soft with worry, searching his face for any serious problem.
It takes him a moment, but eventually, John manages a response, his usually rough voice coarse and gravelly now.
"'M fine."
They just scoff, hesitantly reaching out to help him back up again, heaving his heavy body onto the bed again.
"You are far from fine." They point out, "What happened, you fight a war or something?"
He almost laughs.
"Something like that." John murmurs bitterly, leaning his head back against the headboard.
Shooting him an odd look, the newcomer goes and fetches the spilt bowl of water, sighing at the mess before they hold it up for him to see.
"I'm just gonna get some more water, then I'll patch you up again, that alright?" They ask him, looking somewhat cautious.
Suspicious, John watches them for a sign of deception. Finding none, he simply nods, knowing he can easily take them out if he needs to. They smile, going to leave the room, only to stop in the doorway and turn around.
"My name is SR, by the way." They introduce themself.
"John." He grunts in way of reply, watching as they nod and leave the room.
*
Two months have passed and he's no longer bedridden, the veteran able to move freely around the house, even though there's still a little residual pain, and the mental horrors he faces every night leave him drained with no reprieve. With no medication to help him, it's no surprise that John has relapsed into a familiar state of sullen silence and brooding, finding himself reminded of the things he'd rather forget every day, in everything he does and everything he sees.
SR is no exception to this: he has warmed up to them, and he somewhat trusts them, the youth having shown him more kindness than he has experienced since Maria and Gabrielle. Their only downfall is that they remind him a lot of his murdered niece, the two having very similar traits that very quickly sussed out. Childhood trauma has led them to becoming very determinedly driven and friendly, ambitious and confident in some aspects of life, whilst also noticeably damaged in other aspects, that he realises very quickly. Somehow, however, they always keep themselves afloat, and choose not to show any of the weight bearing down on their mind, as he knows it is, though he is also very swift to realise that their way of dealing with this pain is very simple; they work to make life better for others. It's visible in everything they do: cooking for him every day, caring for him in any way they can, doing their best to let him know he can trust them.
At first, he had been somewhat cold and closed off to them, but they swiftly worked to help warm him up again, reawakening the more personable version of himself he managed to cultivate in his time on the ranch. It was nice to become a little lighter again, but his guard stayed up, and still is, though not as much as it was before. Vividly, he can remember the time he found himself trusting them further: when their friends had come over to catch up.
Naturally, they'd all been surprised to find some nearly hostile ex-soldier residing in their friend's home, living his life out with them. As soon as they'd said something, however, SR had leapt in to defend him, and had inadvertently shown their care for him on a much greater scale than before, reminding John of what his life was like with Maria and Gabrielle. When their friends had then left, an hour or so later, he had stepped up to them and told them how thankful he was, feeling more cared for than he ever thought he would.
Now, after weeks of being taught how to cook, and being cooked for, plus hours and hours of talking with each other as they helped each other to overcome past grief, he can very honestly say he is immensely grateful to be with them. They know more about him than he told himself he'd ever tell anyone, SR often listening with rapt attention to his war stories, eyes wide as they hear all of the harrowing details. He feels comfortable telling these tales, and they seem content to listen, so he appreciates them in whole new ways.
And when he finally opens himself back up to physical contact, the embrace he receives from his excitable carer is only too worth it, the first smile in months gracing his lips as he does so. Life feels like it's turning on its axis again - for the better this time.
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Price of Wishes / on AO3
Nie Huaisang tries to find a solution to his newest problem
The unexpected words ring loud into the room, shaking Nie Huaisang to his core. He gapes at Lan Xichen, eyes round and mouth open in shock, hardly able to breathe. The god looks down at the book, seeming mildly embarrassed, while Nie Huaisang manages to get himself under control.
"You can't read this particular style of characters?" he asks, all too hopeful. If that’s the problem, then with a little practice...
"I can't read at all," Lan Xichen announces, ruining Nie Huaisang’s fragile hope. "It didn't exist when I was alive. By the time it came up, I had started to decline as a god, and I was too busy surviving. Besides, I'd figured it was just a passing fad."
"You… just how old are you?" Nie Huaisang gasps, feeling nearly dizzy.
If Lan Xichen is so old that writing didn't exist when he'd been mortal… then he had to be born centuries ago, or even a dozen centuries, or more. His head spins trying to understand that length of time. Nie Huaisang’s own sect was founded only a few centuries ago, there are records of it. Even Gusu Lan and Qishan Wen, by far the oldest of the major sect, and older than most sects in general, are much younger than the invention of writing.
“I’m not quite sure my age,” Lan Xichen admits, frowning slightly as he tries to remember. “Keeping track of that hasn’t been a priority. I… I’m sorry. Is it really so inconvenient that I can’t read?”
Nie Huaisang wants to cry, and bursts out laughing instead, his voice high and hysterical. He brings his knees against his chest, trying to ground himself, while Lan Xichen watches him with ever growing concern.
“Inconvenient doesn’t even begin to cover it!” Nie Huaisang squeaks, desperately hugging his legs. “Gusu Lan is a sect of scholars! You’d be expected not just to know how to read, but to be exceptionally well-read, to know all the classics, to have a deep understanding of poetry…"
Nie Huaisang pauses, nearly breathless with horror. He didn't think to put these things on his list. His mind was so full of his stupid crush on Lan Wangji, it seemed so obvious it didn't need to be detailed, and now this is biting him in the ass.
Again.
"This is an absolute disaster," Nie Huaisang hisses. "We're going to be caught, and I’ll be in so much trouble, and then da-ge will hear about it and he’ll be furious, and he won’t keep your altar, and then what will happen to you? You’re nice, I don’t want you to die! But I also…" he gasps in horror. "Oh no, Lan Qiren is going to kill me if he figures out that I’ve…”
“I won’t let anyone harm you,” Lan Xichen earnestly interjects, setting aside the book to put his hands on Nie Huaisang’s shoulders, trying to comfort him. “I will protect you. What happened is my fault more than yours, I’m the one who misunderstood what you wanted.”
Nie Huaisang, whose laughter has turned into weak tears, pitiful nods. It says a lot about Lan Qiren and the terror he inspires that Nie Huaisang feels even a god might not be enough to protect him from the venerable teacher's wrath.
Then, realising something, he gasps.
“My list! How did you understand it if you can’t read?”
Lan Xichen’s hands move away. Instantly Nie Huaisang misses their weight on his shoulder, the slight warmth of them. It really had comforted him to be touched like that.
“I’m not sure how that was possible,” Lan Xichen says after taking a moment to consider this. “I don’t think I read it exactly. But you offered that list to me, and so I understood it, if that makes sense?”
Nie Huaisang’s tears stop, and he quickly wipes the lingering wetness from his face.
“Then maybe…”
Just as quickly as he fell into despair, Nie Huaisang's brain starts racing. There's got to be a solution. Already he can think of one… no, three things to test that could solve their problem. If this one doesn't work, then that one. Or maybe they could…
He stands up again, and goes through his qiankun pouch once more until he finds some blank paper and his ink. While a puzzled Lan Xichen watches, Nie Huaisang paints a quick portrait of the god, one that he would normally be ashamed to ever show anyone, but which is enough for his purpose. Then it’s just a matter of setting a piece of fabric on the nightstand, putting a candle there, installing this picture of the god, and making a first offering out of some candies Nie Huaisang has on him.
It’s not the best of altars, and any other god would surely be deeply offended by this, but surely Lan Xichen won’t mind.
“You really don’t need to pray to me right now,” Lan Xichen mumbles as he comes to stand besides him, sounding mortified.
“I do,” Nie Huaisang retorts, rushing to grab the discarded book of Lan rules and placing it on his improvised altar. “My lord, accept this humble offering,” he says in the most formal tone he’s capable of, putting the book on that improvised altar.
Nie Huaisang bows down before his little altar, then waits a moment before turning to look at Lan Xichen who appears more puzzled than ever.
“It didn’t work,” the god sighs. “Whatever you were trying to do, it didn’t work. I’m sorry.”
Nie Huaisang shrugs. “It’s fine, I didn’t really expect that to work,” he admits, going through his pouch again.
He's still panicking, but it's a productive sort of panic now so it's fine. Fear just makes him think faster, which is what they need right now. They only have three weeks to prepare, every instant counts.
“I’ll just try something else, until something does work. And I have a plan if nothing works, as well," Nie Huaisang explains with a grimace, "but it’ll involve more actual lying than I’d prefer, so it’s a last resort.”
Grabbing the book again, he opens it at random and copies the rule there onto a piece of paper. He tries to be more careful with this than he was with the portrait, trying to make the character nice and neat in spite of his trembling hands. Before the ink is even dry, he presents that new offering onto the altar, bowing before it and praying silently to Lan Xichen.
“Oh!” Lan Xichen gasps. “Have a strong will and anything can be achieved. Is that right?”
“It is!” Nie Huaisang exclaims with a grin. “And if you look at the paper, does it change something?”
Lan Xichen comes close to the altar, and picks the quickly scribbled piece of paper. There is a slight frown on his face as he inspects it, but he eventually nods.
“Now when I look at those characters, I can recognise them,” he admits, before sitting down to pick up the book and observe it as well. “Have a… strong… oh, the way you wrote that one is really different, so it’s harder to recognise. Then… anything… can be… yes, I think I can recognise them, once you’ve offered them to me. So I suppose if you were to offer me every character there is…”
“I’ll have to,” Nie Huaisang sighs, the initial joy of his discovery crushed as he realises the enormity of the task ahead of him.
That’s a few thousands characters to share, and Nie Huaisang knows he’s nowhere near as cultivated and well-read as a young master of Gusu Lan would be. He’ll have to do more tests, see how much his own understanding of characters is necessary if they are to be transmitted to Lan Xichen. And that won't solve the problem of all the books Lan Xichen should have read, books Nie Huaisang definitely doesn't have on hand right now.
“This is a nightmare. I don’t know if I can…” Nie Huaisang takes a deep breath, fighting a sob. “I don’t think I can. But we’re going to try anyway.”
He sighs again, and looks at Lan Xichen who seems so truly sorry that Nie Huaisang can’t even be angry at him. It's annoying, because it means he can only be angry at himself.
“And you’re also going to try to learn the normal way as well,” Nie Huaisang announces. “I’m going to find you a book to teach children, so you can study while we travel. It’s… we’re going to make this work." He hesitates, and looks up at the god. "We are, right?”
Lan Xichen doesn’t answer right away, as if seriously considering their chance of success. For some reason, and in spite of his anxiety, Nie Huaisang likes that better than if the god had immediately agreed. It makes it more meaningful when Lan Xichen finally nods.
“We will do our best,” Lan Xichen says. “I will learn all I can, and... If you believe in me, I know I can convince others that I am what you wish me to be. I will work hard to ensure I do not bring trouble for you.”
Nie Huaisang smiles weakly. He trusts Lan Xichen to try his best, which surprises him, considering they haven’t known each other very long. Nie Huaisang doesn’t think of himself as particularly trusting. Aside from his brother, his cousin Nie Zonghui, and Lan Wangji, he just can’t think of anyone in his life worth trusting. Those three, and now Lan Xichen too, never mind they have just now started being honest with each other.
Even though it is already late, Nie Huaisang decides to copy a few more rules for Lan Xichen to learn, this time starting from page one. No matter how many times he’s been forced to copy those stupid rules before, it’s the first time he’s paying so much attention to every word of them. He is careful to use his most legible style of writing, so Lan Xichen can learn the words properly, so he can recognise them more easily if he encounters them in another style. Lan Qiren would probably approve of his efforts, which would be funny if the situation weren’t so strange.
Nie Huaisang only manages to copy a dozen rules that night before he gets too tired to write properly. When he figures he won’t manage more than that, he places his sheets of paper in front of his improvised altar and offers them to Lan Xichen. The god recites the rules one by one, flawlessly, and even manages to read part of the next ones, since it touches on similar concepts. It is incredibly encouraging, Nie Huaisang decides, though with only three weeks ahead of them, they might still lack time to do everything.
It's fine. He has an idea for that, as long as they can get Lan Xichen to a certain level of familiarity with Gusu Lan's way. Nie Huaisang wants to start explaining that, but his god stops him.
“You must rest,” Lan Xichen advises, giving Nie Huaisang a critical look. “It has been a rather intense evening for you. Let’s go to bed, and see in the morning how to proceed next.”
Nie Huaisang nods sleepily. He should feel his modesty take offence at the idea of undressing in front of a near stranger, but he’s too exhausted to care. Anyway, Lan Xichen is so old he doesn’t really count, and also they might get married someday, and then it’ll be normal to undress like this, so Nie Huaisang doesn’t see why he should make a big deal of it.
That logic makes sense in his exhausted mind, but it can only go so far. Nie Huaisang, once in his under clothes, looks around to decide which bed to pick, only to realise with horror that there’s only a single bed in this room.
“I thought this was a room for two?” he gasps, feeling a little faint.
Lan Xichen, slowly divesting himself from the many, many layers he has to wear to pass as a Gusu Lan disciple, nods distractedly.
“It is a big bed, Nie gongzi,” Lan Xichen says. “we could fit three or four in there.”
It might be exhaustion, or it might be embarrassment, but Nie Huaisang feels a little faint. Sleeping in the same room as someone else was already big, but this is huge. The last time he’s slept in the same bed as someone else was…
It hasn’t happened since those first few months after his father’s death, when he had nightmares and couldn’t stand to be alone, terrified that his rageful father would return during the night and do something terrible. So it's been years, and at least Nie Huaisang was young back then, which excused the impropriety.
Maybe if Lan Xichen showed any trace of unease, Nie Huaisang would try to protest. But the god treats this situation as if it’s perfectly normal, and maybe it is for him. Maybe in the olden days, people just slept like that. Nie Huaisang thinks it’s something poor people do, but of course he wouldn’t really know. He is too tired to try to explain why it’s odd, anyway. If Lan Xichen thinks this is fine, then it’s probably fine. Gods are supposed to know what’s right and what’s wrong, don’t they?
If Lan Xichen doesn’t mind, Nie Huaisang will try not to mind either.
Before things can get a chance to get awkward, Nie Huaisang climbs in bed and curls up under the blanket, as close as possible to the edge of the mattress so there will be plenty of space between the two of them, for propriety. He then closes his eyes tightly, desperately trying not to notice when Lan Xichen comes to lay down next to him.
He fails in that endeavour.
Lan Xichen doesn’t lay particularly close to him, the way lovers do in certain books that Nie Huaisang isn’t supposed to own, but he isn’t particularly careful to keep distance between them either, as if this doesn’t mean anything to him.
Perhaps it doesn’t.
Nie Huaisang can’t help but curl a little tighter when he thinks just how much of a stranger the man in bed with him is. All Nie Huaisang knows for sure about Lan Xichen is the fact he had been lying to everybody, and would have lied to him as well if he could have gotten away with it.
Or would he? Lan Xichen said he wants them to be friends, that he doesn’t like feeling Nie Huaisang’s fear of him. Was that the truth, or another lie to fit with what the list demanded?
Maybe Nie Huaisang doesn't know anything at all about this god he’s going to help deceive everyone.
What he does know, then, is that he wants to trust Lan Xichen, even if it goes against all good sense. Lan Xichen hasn’t done anything to hurt him so far, has he? On the contrary, he has been kind, he allowed him to take refuge in his temple, granted him a wish so huge that Nie Huaisang hadn’t ever thought to actually ask for it, and now he’s trying his best to make Nie Huaisang comfortable and…
It’s not that Nie Huaisang has much to complain about. He knows he’s lucky, that he’s never lacked for anything, that his brother loves him, in his own manner. The Nie elders don’t like him too much, and he’s not close to any disciples, but he has a friend in Wangji, and he has his birds, so he’s not lonely, not really.
Not exactly.
He’s not lonely, but nobody has ever acted like being at his side was worth making an effort. Wangji just doesn't have anyone else, his brother can't go against blood, his birds are kept in cages. Nobody had much of a choice. Not until he met this odd god, who is ready to go to incredible extremes just to be around him.
A mean little voice in the back of Nie Huaisang’s head tells him that it’s just because Lan Xichen is so desperate for believers he’d latch onto anyone at all, that Lan Xichen is forced like all the others, but… but it’s still nice to have been the one who entered that temple, who made those offerings, who prayed to that abandoned altar, and thus became worthy of those efforts. At least, he hopes he’s worth it. He hopes Lan Xichen won’t regret choosing him. He hopes…
“You need to sleep,” Lan Xichen orders, shuffling closer, close enough to almost touch Nie Huaisang. “Is there a problem? Is the bed not comfortable? Are you cold?”
Nie Huaisang curls so tight on himself that his chin pokes the space between his knees. Briefly, a sill thought crosses his mind. If he says he’s cold, what will Lan Xichen do? Hug him for warmth like people do in stories? The idea makes him shivers, and he quickly shakes his head, because he’s terrified Lan Xichen would really do something like that, because it’s ridiculous how much he wants a hug right now. It’s been an awful, intense evening, and he’d give anything for a hug, but he’s sure he’d die of embarrassment if Lan Xichen were to hold him.
“If you’re nervous about this situation, we can always think of another way to deal with this,” Lan Xichen offers. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow if you like, but for now…”
Lan Xichen puts a hand on Nie Huaisang’s shoulder, seeking to offer comfort, or to calm him perhaps, but Nie Huaisang flinches so violently that he nearly falls off the bed.
The offending hand is immediately removed, and Nie Huaisang can feel the god’s eyes on him. He braces himself for questions, or accusations, or anything at all really. But Lan Xichen just sighs sadly, and moves away, closer to the other edge of the bed, and that’s the end of it.
Nie Huaisang curses himself. Of course even when something good happens, when someone tries to be nice to him, he has to ruin it.
Sighing as well, Nie Huaisang tries his best to fall asleep, while cursing himself for making things so awkward when clearly Lan Xichen is just being friendly. What else but friendly could he be, anyway? Even if he modelled himself after Nie Huaisang’s list, it’d be stupid to ever expect him to fall in love or anything. After all, Nie Huaisang knows he isn’t a very likeable person, or else his brother wouldn’t always be angry at him, and he wouldn’t have needed to invent a version of Lan Wangji that doesn't just tolerates him.
Likeable people don’t need a deal with a god to find someone to marry them.
And with that thought in mind, Nie Huaisang finally manages to drift to sleep.
When he wakes up in the morning, the other half of the bed is empty, and Nie Huaisang finds that he has been carefully tucked under the blanket. It must have happened recently, because he knows he moves a lot in his sleep, something his brother has complained about at length those few times they shared a bed.
Nie Huaisang knows he should get up, get dressed and grab some breakfast so they can continue their journey toward Gusu. He should do that, but instead he stays in bed as long as he can, enjoying the warmth of that blanket so meticulously wrapped around him, and pretends it means something even when he knows it doesn’t.
#xisang#nie huaisang#lan xichen#mo dao zu shi#mdzs#jau writes#xisang wishes au#I've had a rough week so nhs gets to have high anxiety and a small breakdown#as a treat
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hi
this shit long
tw: drugging, kidnapping, manupilation, i think age regression? i dont know if i wrote this well enough for it to be considered age regression, im so sorry if this would be considered offensive <33
inspo: none lmao my brain is just big
imagine wilbur gets tired of tommy trying to stop him from jd'ing everyone so he tries to drug tommy so he just sleeps through everything and tommy is terrified. tommy is running through a forest and runs into techno. he collaspes into technos arms and begins to sob into his chest about how wilburs trying to drug him and how scared he is of him.
techno begins to run his hand through tommys hair and comforts him softly, rubbing his back slowly and whispering to him. wilbur calls out for tommy and tommy tells techno that they need to run away somewhere. techno sighs and just grips tommy tighter, and yells for wilbur, telling him where they are. tommy panics and begins to scream and kick and cries harder, and techno lightly kisses his forehead while wilbur sticks a needle in his neck and injects the drugs.
tommy stomps on technos foot (not that harshly cause drugs) and tries to run. he goes as fast as possible (about a third of how fast he was running before cause drugs) and eventually collaspes against a tree. wilbur hums while picking him up and techno just watches. tommy just gives up and sobs into wilburs shoulder while wilbur slowly rubs him back to comfort him. they make it back to the ravine and wilbur lazily ties tommys wrists together and he and techno stay with tommy as he eventually passes out. dream shows up just as tommy is about to fall asleep and all tommy can hear dream say is 'goodnight kid. you guys ready to go?'
bonus points if schlatt finds him and takes care of him during his coma
okay have some more things that happen cause i like details.
as wilbur picks up tommy and he gives up and goes limp while sobbing, dream starts following them but tbh that doesnt need to be included.
wilbur ties tommys hands behind his back.
as tommy begins to pass out, techno and wilbur both coo at the sight of his eyes drooping and him getting tired.
you can add this or not tbh i just like platonic cuddles, wilbur lays down with tommy as he passes out and plays with his hair.
as tommy loses consciousness, he forgets what just happened and tells 'wil' and 'techie' that he loves them (OW HURT MYSELF THERE)
while caring for tommy, schlatt lets tubbo visit him a bunch. he normally walks in on tubbo cuddling with tommy, making him flowers crowns, or just talking to tommy about his day.
tubbo still believes that tommy can hear him. tommy can. which means he hears niki and fundy make up, eret and dream casually talk shit about eachother, sapnap and george fighting *all the time*, phil coming to visit him and crying everytime, and wilbur and techno apologizing. and schlatt and dream and literally everyone else of the server beating up wil and tech.
OW I HURTED MYSELF WITH THAT
more :DD
techno and wilbur call tommy 'bubba' as they talk to him (I LOVE PEOPLE CALLING OTHER PEOPLE BUBBA OKAY SHDJVSHSJVSK) while he passes out. also whlle hes in a coma.
tommy hates to admit it but he still trusts wilbur, dream, and techno with his life
phil beats the fuck outta techno, wilbur, and dream
imagine that in a different ending tommy wakes up to techno and wilbur laying on either side of him, hugging him while they talk boredly. theyre covered in soot (haha wil) and ash but look happy. tommy asks what they did as he tries to sit up and gasps as he realizes that he cant and his hands are tied behind his back. he tries to squirm but gives up as techno and wilbur laugh at him. he doesnt really remember what happened and his speech is slurred so techno and wilbur come to the conclusion that tommy is still drugged up a bit. they tell him to go back to sleep and he listens.
after he wakes up again, his arms are untied and wilbur is gone but techno is still laying behind him. he asks what happened, again, and this time techno answers him, telling him about wilbur drugging him, how they did it to protect him, and how they blew up manberg. tommy goes into shock and starts crying, and manages to ask about tubbo.
techno tells tommy that he's lucky that wilbur has a shred of his sanity left, because the three of them, techno, wilbur, and dream, decided to spare tubbo, eret, niki, and anyone who didnt die from the explosion. luckily, schlatt was the closest to the bigger blast, so he was the only one that died. but george, sapnap, and quackity are all dying from their injuries and might not make it. but they probably will.
tommy breaks down and begins sobbing, causing wilbur to walk in. he looks to techno, who was panicking and helping tommy sit up, and then sighs faintly. wilbur walks over and hugs his baby brother and does his best to comfort him. tommy tries to squirm away but he just woke up, theres still a little bit of drugs in his system, and wilbur can easily overpower him.
m o r e
okay so for the second ending i 'wrote', imagine if techno and wilbur run away and take tommy with them and baby him the whole time. even with their mental health issues they try their best to take care of him, even if that means sleeping in the same bed as him so he cant leave in the night, or if it means having to keep secrets from him, or if it means having to have at least one of them watching him at all times, theyre still doing it to 'protect him' and in their head, its working.
once, tommy cut his arm because a zombie had a sword. immediately, techno, who was watching him, went feral and murdered the zombie by bashing its head in. tommy had a chance to run, but he didn't take it. he felt frozen in place. wilbur had heard the commotion and immediately ran towards them and found techno beating down an already dead zombie and tommy watching in horror.
he starts to baby tommy, per usual, and turns his head away from it and hugs him tightly, quickly gushing over tommy and panicking over his sliced arm. tommy lets him, he learned quickly to just let them baby him.
after the three get back to the little hut they made, shock wears off and tommy begins to cry because it hurts?? and techno and wilbur panic and wilbur shushes him and starts to cuddle him while techno stiches up his arm. they both lay next to him as he falls asleep and for the first time since they left he feels genuinely comforted.
THATS RLLY BITTERSWEET
more
somedays, while techno, wilbur, and tommy sit at the dinner table and eat potatoes, tommy plays with his food and contemplates grabbing a steak knife and running. other days, he looks to the boarded up windows that he could easily break through and decides to walk into the living room and cuddle with his older brothers.
he begins to completely depend on techno and wilbur, with the way they baby him. his personailty changes. he whines when he doesnt get what he wants instead of nodding his head like he became used to in the wars. he cant fall asleep without wilbur or techno near him/cuddling with him. he forgets how to make food for himself. he forgets how to wrap wounds.
hes used to not being allowed to get himself a cup for water because 'the cupboard is to high up'. hes used to boarded up windows, with alarms on ever door, with a tracker via a braclet sitting on his wrist because 'we want to keep you safe'. he's used to the cameras in almost every room besides his and the bathrooms, that was the only thing he didnt allow and will never allow because 'we need to know where you are, what if you get taken from us?'. he's used to being coddled and kissed when he gets hurt because 'youre to young to understand why we do this'.
when schlatt finds them and everyone comes and takes away his brothers, his family, his caretakers, he panics. he screams and cries and begs for them to not take them away. he's surprised to see schlatt alive because his brothers told him that he was dead, so he thinks hes hallucinating. he kicks and squirms when he needs to be sedated for them to be able to leave, causing a panic attack at the memories that come flooding back to that fateful night that brought them here.
when phil comes to the smp, he does his best to care for his youngest son. he truely does, but its difficult, especially due to tommys now much more prominent mental health issues.
and now you write the ending
btw my friend fear is writing this as a whumptober prompt <3
#tommyinnit#technoblade#wilbursoot#wilbur soot#philza#jschlatt#tubbo#dreamwastaken#dream#georgenotfound#sapnap#minecraft#hard fucking drugs#kidnappings#trauma#manupilation#lotta shit to unpack here#ive made a shit ton of text posts#and still dont know how the hell im supposed to tag#help???#tommy angst tommy angst#tommy angst#tommy angst to#anyways#how y'all been?#btw i support blm <3#just thought y'all should know#thank you all so much for the traction ive gained over the past couple days#genuinely thank you so much#<333
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Petty Revenge pt1
Note: I started playing Mozart's route, and boy, does he know how to push my buttons (I know I'll probably fall for him eventually, though). MC being her sweet and innocent self, is all like "I'll get him to like me", while I just wish I could punch him. So it got me thinking: what if instead of forgiving ball of sunshine, our MC was someone who was not above messing with the boys to get some payback. Also, let me know in comments if you’d like a part 2.
Mozart:
Traveling through time to 19th century, only to find herself trapped in a mansion full of prominent historical figures, who also happen to be vampires, MC was not exactly having a good time.
Well, seeing as there was no going home for a whole month, she offered her help around the mansion, which is how she came to be responsible for delivering a breakfast next morning to one Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, AKA His Royal Rudeness.He used every opportunity to remind her how annoyed he was that she was even here, which is something she had no control over.
After exhausting all her energy on trying to talk to him only to get showered with insults, she finally gives up. If he wants to hate her, she will give him a good reason for that.
The hardest part was finding the right moment to carry out her plan. He rarely left the mansion and spent most of his time in the music room. Finally, after being asked by le Comte, he leaves one night to perform at the ball. She picks up tools that she managed to “borrow” without Sebastian noticing, and with a smile on her face heads to the music room.
Next morning, after setting down his cup of coffee and music sheets, Mozart sat down in front of his piano, only for the bench to let out a laud creak. He froze up, then moved slightly, as if to make sure that really happened. And sure enough, there was that sound again.
Not wanting to deal with it at the moment, he tried playing while sitting stiff as a board, making sure to only move his hands, but even that was followed by that annoying noise, so he marched out of room, frustration written all over his face.
He got Leonardo to fix it for him, only for the bench to start creaking again a few days later. He found himself in a never-ending cycle, fix the problem, only to have it reappear, sometimes even later the same day. One day, he stormed out of music room, red faced and eyebrows scrunched up with anger, and went to the town to buy a new one, hoping to finally put the matter to rest. It didn’t work.
Maybe it’s telling you that you’re fat attitude should go on a diet. MC stood at the door, gazing at Mozart leaning defeated over piano. He turns, seeing her smirk, realization finally dawns on him. But as she walks away, he simply stands there, mouth open, having to many things to say, but being too exhausted to voice them.
Theo:
She didn’t think that he ever used her name, sometimes she doubted that he even knew it. No, to him she was Hondje, a dog. And when he wasn’t busy calling her one, he was busy comparing her or treating her as one. That he claimed to like dogs did little to make her feel okay with it.
No amount of polite asking did anything to change this. Fine. There were other ways to get the message across. It was Sebastian who gave her a perfect idea, letting her know an interesting little detail about Theo. Honestly, the amount of information that guy had on the residents was frightening.
It was a long day for Theo. After spending it running across town, selling paintings, trying to butter up stuck up nobles, and then getting into a fight with those assholes from L’ Academie, he was really looking forward to seeing his bed.
After he checked up on Vincent, who was still painting despite the late hour, he headed to his room, only to run into MC in hallway. Hondje, you’re still up? He expected her to pout, as she always does when he calls her that, but instead she greets him with a smile. Just finished my chores. I was on my way to my room. And as she passed by him, her smile growing even bigger, she adds Good Night, Theo. Something in the tone of her voice told him she was up to something, but he was too tired to deal with it tonight.
Finally arriving at his door, he opens them, light from the hallway spilling into his room, and he freezes. It’s a miracle how he managed not to let out a scream, or how he was even able to lift his hand and pinch his cheek to insure that what he was seeing was real.
His room was filled with cats. Not a cat, which was terrifying enough. Cats. Ten, he thinks, though it’s difficult to count them due to them jumping all over the place.
Somehow managing to close the door, he practically runs back to Vincent’s room. He grabs him by the sleeve, like a little boy, and stuttering explains to his brother what’s wrong. Vincent enlisted Arthur to help, and between the two of them, they soon got all the cats out into the garden.
After he cautiously walked into his room, Theo found a note on his bed.
Just letting you know, I’m more of a cat person.
Arthur:
To put it simply, Arthur was a walking, talking, breathing sexual harassment. MC could deal with his flirting; him trying to bite her, however, was another matter entirely. He gave her some kind of apology, saying how he did it because he wanted to warn her about vampires, because words are apparently overrated.
He continued to flirt, seemingly unaware of what personal space means, and well, it was quite exhausting. She wanted to punch him so many times, but she knew that would do little to solve the problem, it might even encourage him.
Watching his interaction with Dazai, who seems to be the only person capable of getting under his skin, gave her an idea, something very simple.
Arthur was heading to the library, intent on doing some research for the book he was working on; only to find it occupied by one very pretty skirt. She had her head in the book and didn’t appear to have noticed him walk in.
Smirk on his face, he slowly approached her, already picturing her little gasp of surprise that was sure to be followed by a glare, as he set next to her and threw his arm around her shoulder. But her reaction wasn’t what he expected, in fact there was no reaction, she simply turned her head and looked at him.
He was taken aback for a second, but than flirt mode was back on. He went on and on, teasing her and complimenting her, yet she didn’t blush or said anything. She just kept looking at him, eyes narrowed in concentration, as if she forgot something, and was trying hard to remember it. Noticing this, he too fell silent, and for a moment they simply stared at each other. Suddenly, her eyes went wide, she snapped her fingers, smile appearing on her face. It’s Sherlock, right? I’m sorry, I’m not very good with names.
From then on every time he talked to her, she referred to him as Sherlock or that guy who wrote Sherlock. To make matters worse, Dazai joined in on the game.
Sebastian:
He is a perfectionist and very strict, understandable considering his occupation. She didn’t mind that; after all she volunteered to help around the mansion, which quickly proved to be a not so easy task. She understood that she needed to learn the ropes as quickly as possible, otherwise she’d just make things more difficult for Sebastian, so his constructive criticism didn’t bother her too much.
What did bother her, however, was his passive-aggressiveness. He would always make some snide remark, delivering it in a way that left her unable to reply lest she end up being the rude one. Add to that his habit of flicking her forehead, as if she was a little child, and well... He had it coming.
So one night, after diner she was volunteered into cleaning up the kitchen by herself, after being flicked again, because a single spoon wasn’t polished to Sebastian’s standards.
The next morning, Sebastian walked into the kitchen, part of him expecting to find something out of the ordinary, after all we are talking about MC. The kitchen was spotless and nothing appeared to be unusual, at least not at first glance. Feeling relieved, he went on to start preparing breakfast and make coffee for the residents.
He opened the first cupboard to take out coffee cups, and stared at it in shock. Gone were the cups, as well as all glasses that were supposed to be there as well. Instead he was greeted by plates that should be in a different cabinet. And not only were they misplaced, they were stacked completely out of order, piled in one disorganized mess, rim soup bowl on top of a salad plate, on top of a dinner plate, on top of a bread and butter plate, and so on.
He proceeded to the other cupboards and drawers, his horror growing with each one opened. He found saucers in the drawer where utensils were supposed to be, cups and glasses where plates used to be kept, spoons, forks and knives all mixed together, frying pans, cooking pots, spices, all piled in one giant nightmare.
It is a miracle how he managed not to have a heart attack. He started pacing, hands running through his hair in frustration, desperate to figure out how to begin putting kitchen back in order. It was at this point that MC walked in with a cheery Good morning!, soon to be followed by the rest of the residents.
What happened here?, asked le Comte. Looks like Sebas loves cleaning so much, he does it in his sleep, only not as successfully as when awake, MC said, and before he could deny it, the boys were already cracking jokes about it, while he was left desperate to try and maintain his cool.
Later she was left alone to clean up her mess, which was fine, she wasn’t trying to make Sebastian’s job more difficult, she simply wanted to get a reaction out of him. She paused for a moment to rub a red mark on her forehead. He flicked her so hard, she was sure her brain did a flip. Worth it, she grinned, Wait until he finds out I changed the order of keys on his key chain.
#ikemen vampire#ikevamp mozart#ikevamp theo#ikevamp theodorus#ikevamp arthur#ikevamp sebastian#ikevamp akihiko
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Here but I’m Gone
a/n: I had a Hotch-thought about where that hand thing started and then I wrote something! It is a little bizarre and very imperfect but oh well. Only 1k words so it’s like a small snack. Implied abuse I suppose but nothing graphic.
The exact memory of his fingers being crushed had been lost. There had been yelling and crying and pain, most certainly pain, but unfortunately there were too many memories like that for those to be helpful markers. Had it been an accident? It was possible. The distinction between accident and intention blurred with each carefully recounted story. When he was very young, his mother made a game of it. “Tell me how it happened,” she’d prompt, except in this game none of the words meant what they should. Then she’d have him repeat after her, exactly how it did not happen. He would say it first for practice, then for consistency. If you played correctly, the repetition eventually made it true. The key to belief was the inversion of meaning. It wasn’t lying, only a message lost in translation.
He wasn’t sure if he had been leaving or returning, only that before he could make it all the way there, the door had been slammed shut. Though the events surrounding the moment are long gone, the image of his hand without fingertips is crisp. Unnaturally abbreviated and frozen, the clarity of that instant made it a touchstone in the uneven landscape of his childhood story. What he did remember in detail were the months that followed. The time spent watching his small, dented fingers swell and then darken, the nails turning black where he had been caught.
He can remember days later, the world spinning indifferently onward, forgetting himself and gripping a pencil full force. His hand dropped it immediately, insulted by the carelessness. He stared down at the uncooperative digits, then experimentally pressed down on a bruised nail. He had gasped at the sharp pain, quickly releasing the pressure. But then he did it again, a little longer this time. Again and again he repeated the test with each of his fingers. The three in the middle had sustained the majority of the force and produced the clearest pain. He imagined that pain as a needle, drawing all his focus to its point. Everything else faded out, not real enough to be a part of this revelation.
He discovered he could use this powerful focus to his advantage. When the tension at the dinner table crackled like an electric storm, he pressed his thumb against his injured middle fingernail and like a wish fulfilled, his mind slipped out of the present. Neither parent noticed, his wide, unfocused eyes trained down on his untouched plate. Their currents of anger snapped uselessly above his head, no longer a lone figure on a hill. Instead he sank into the controlled discomfort, an unusually docile cousin of the chaotic rage that permeated his home. He built a room inside that sensation. It was simple, austere maybe, white walls and white floors. It could be blinding but so much more preferable to the dull purpled-blues and black-reds of reality. He visited this place often: when the yelling downstairs became one sided, when staccato footsteps hunted in the hallway, when he couldn’t remember the correct answer to “What’s your problem?”
He thought he had always been nervous, though not inevitably so. In a different set of circumstances his sensitive reflexes would have made him a celebrated competitor. Instead he was a trapped animal, neurons rapidly firing information to brain, all desperately repeating the same instruction: run. Convinced he would listen to their overwhelming plea, his systems started doing the work of escape. His heart beat faster trying to pull him forward with its own momentum. His lungs dragged in as much air as possible but were never satisfied, each gasp trying to outdo the last. Every muscle strung so tightly he could hear the tendons singing. He didn’t move though. He pressed on a fingernail, outlining the nail bed with his thumb. It released the tension like a steam valve. Now he could be still, now he could do as he was told. Slowly the fingers healed, the damaged cuticle growing out into shadows like tired moons, disinterested in rising. The bruise black became algae brown became waxy yellow.
One day he made a mistake and knew the correction would not be easy to endure. Seeking to hideout in his stolen space, he applied a now-familiar gentle pressure only to have the entire fingernail pop off. He looked at his hand in horror, suddenly as foreign as first sight. Where a whole nail had once been was something small, thin, the pale pink of new skin. It was still a fingernail but only half the size it should be. He felt it gingerly and found there were deep grooves in the plate, no longer smooth and perfect. Recognizing an underlying truth exposed, he brushed it with his thumb again, memorizing the new topography. He was so caught up in the discovery that he didn’t flinch when a familiar crack echoed through the house.
He wondered if the other nails would fall off as well, revealing more of the gnarled creature he knew lay beneath. One did not, but one did. He was content with two out of three. The nails grew larger but never lost the ridges. He felt them frequently, assessing their shape, their progress. The months of seeking escape this way created a habit he was no longer in control of. Each time his anxiety rose, his fingers curled around themselves, seeking comfort in a finely cultivated sensation.
He managed to grow up whole and left as much of that house and those memories behind as he could. He didn’t have to hide in an imaginary room, only able to protect his mind, and that just barely. He was the one to fear now, but he did his best to not let that be the only truth about him. He didn’t realize he still rubbed his fingers instinctively when he was uncertain. No one would ever point this out to him. Everything else about him was so controlled that they noticed, they wondered how he didn’t notice. They won’t know how it started or how he would find a twisted humor in this lingering piece of a carefully excised childhood—that his secret comfort has become his only obvious sign of unease. They leave it be because everyone is allowed a little escape.
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baby, you’re a haunted house (ot4)
summary: Michael really wants to go to Sydney’s most famous haunted house. He may or may not get super startled by one of the actors, and may or may not hit them in the nose by accident. And, after that, he might keep coming back to to try and apologize properly. And the haunted house might just have a never-ending supply of cute guys working there. (That’s a lie. There’s only three he cares about). ao3 found here
prompt: “I’m working as an actor in a haunted house and when I scared you, you punched me in the nose. Now I’m bleeding and someone had to get me an ice pack, and you won’t stop apologizing. You’re lucky you’re cute” (except i changed the POV because i wrote the prompt and i can do what i want thank u <3)
word count: 12,433
content warning: blood! there is nothing too graphic, but, as depicted in the prompt, someone is accidentally hit, and there is a nosebleed. it is all handled and fine, though, and it isn’t too detailed. lots of pining :)
A/N: whew! i’ve worked on this baby for the last two months and only just finished her this week but i am PROUD! i actually really love the way it came out, and my plot! please let me know what you think, i’m a slut for feedback! this was done for my sexy, sexy halloween event that is happening right now! massive shout out to @mikeycliffords and @glitterblazercalum for beta’ing this! maddie ur comments gave me endless validation and i adore u, and iba u caught all my sexy grammatical errors and i love u for it (and ur reaction to luke’s major <3). and to both @calumcest and @clumsyclifford for having to listen to me scream and not know what i was writing. unfortunate shoutout to Mr. Gerard Way for the vibey Halloween song i named this after. baby, you’re a haunted house slaps.
Michael loved Halloween. He was pretty sure it was his absolute favourite holiday, and would say that to almost anyone who dared to ask, though most people who knew him knew not to. It was in Fall, so it was nice and chilly, and he had an excuse to bundle up in hoodies and stay there until spring. And he was an absolute slut for horror movies of any sort. He absolutely adored them, no matter how cheesy and poorly-produced. If he had any talent in it at all, he said fairly regularly to his few friends, he’d be an SFX artist. But he didn’t, and he was stuck working as a barista and getting his degree in film studies.
So when his best friend in the whole fucking world landed a job working with Sydney’s infamous haunted house - known for being realistic, and terrifying, and all the makeup being technically perfect - and invited him to come see it, insisted he can get him in, who was he to say no? He absolutely couldn’t refuse - didn’t even want to, and he’d wanted to go for years, so this was the opportunity of a lifetime - and that was that. It was most of his favourite things all rolled up into one, with the bonus of it being sort of exclusive. Because it was so well known, they always ended up having to open a month early, and the line still wrapped halfway around the block every night. Michael was going to get a backstage pass to all sorts of shit.
He dressed fairly warm for the occasion, even if it wasn’t quite cold enough yet to justify it, with his hoodie on, oversized so he could cover his hands with the sleeves. Sue him, okay, it was comfortable and warm and he liked tugging on the sleeves or his hoodie strings when he was anxious. Not that he ever wanted anyone to know he’s anxious. Michael worked fairly hard on keeping that part hidden away, so no one else could ever see it. It wasn’t that he was embarrassed, exactly. He just...didn’t want anyone knowing. It took level eleven Michael friendship to unlock his insecurities, thank you, and even then, there weren’t many he'd really disclose.
Sydney never got properly cold, so the hoodie was more than enough to keep him warm in the chilly end-of-September breeze. He made his way to the haunted house, queuing up in the line with the rest of the people preparing for the best fucking scares of their lives.
The waiting process was the worst part of the whole thing. It was just him standing by himself in line, bouncing slightly on his heels every so often and worrying with his sleeves, from excitement, nerves, and maybe it was actually slightly chilly for once. He texted his friend a few times, only to get no reply. He frowned at his phone after twenty minutes of trying with no success. He was supposed to come get Michael at some point. If he was waiting to show him around at the end, wouldn’t he want to know which group he’d be in, or when he was going through the haunted house? Or at least answer him and tell him what his plan was? Apparently fucking not, though, since he made it up to the front without a single stupid text.
His jitters weren’t helped at all by that, but he eventually just jammed his phone into his hoodie pocket and hoped it didn’t fall out in the house. Michael and the people around him were finally let into the haunted house and given the long list of instructions. It was all the usual shit, that everything inside was fake, and to keep that in mind. To remember that the actors were just actors. And to go over the last few warnings - like that the actors would jump out, target people to scare them, ask questions, and generally, you know, act. Everyone agreed to the rules with varying degrees of excitement, and then they were all corralled into the waiting area.
Michael was back to bouncing slightly in place, hoodie sleeves fully over his hands at this point. The decorations weren’t too scary yet, just meant to keep the haunted mansion theme going. The premise was something about a doctor and his torture chamber and all his patients gone wrong or something. Michael has forgotten a couple of the details, but he remembered the gist of it. He couldn’t make out anything specific, really, not through the awful dim lighting and the light fog rolling in close to the ground, thanks to the hidden fog machines, only adding to the chill in the cold building.
One of the women in front of him was murmuring quietly to her boyfriend, gripping tightly to his hand. She didn’t seem much like she really wanted to be there. Michael hoped, for her sake, she’d remembered the safe word. Which was a nice touch, making sure everyone could yell it if needed. That rule was burned into his brain: if you yelled the safe word - mercy - any actor nearby would drop their act and escort you to the nearest exit, and you would absolutely not be allowed back in. Michael wanted to make sure he remembered it, but this was practically a once in a lifetime chance, and he really didn’t want to blow it.
Finally - finally - they were allowed into the actual haunted house. The first room wasn’t too bad, just the doctor guy’s living room with some narration about who he’d been and a little about his ‘abominations’. Michael got enthralled in the story pretty quickly, gaze lingering on the (fake) family portraits on the (equally fake) mantle and on the walls.
Room two brought a couple of scares, but he still wasn’t doing too badly. They were easily moved from room to room, sticking together in a clump. When the narration ended, basically, that was their cue to move on. Or for some sort or scare to jump out.
But, of course, the greatest horror house in Sydney wouldn’t stay predictable. After room number three, the smooth transition was broken up by a long, dark corridor, with the sides pressing in on everyone as they went through. Michael curled in a little on himself, shuffling forward so close to the next person in line that he accidentally stepped on their heels. They didn’t even have time to be annoyed before they were in the next room.
After room number four was worse. They went down an equally dark staircase, Michael’s grip on the handrail white-knuckled, pale skin almost luminous even in the pitch black. He shuffled forward once he managed his way down, unable to see anything, but didn’t bump into anyone. Which was...odd, given how tightly packed they’d all been up to this point. He took a gamble and swallowed his pride, sticking both arms out and stumbling forward, completely blind in the dark. Only then did the awful strobe light kick on above him, even fucking worse than the dark. He only got vague glimpses of where he was, and he couldn’t even see anyone around him in whatever room he was in. Fucking great, he had the best fucking luck in the entire world. Which he mumbled to himself as he continued his blind zombie-shuffle forward until his outstretched hand brushed a wall. Finally.
He kept that palm pressed against the smooth (fake) stone, moving in one direction he chose to believe was forward. He was pretty sure it was the opposite direction from the staircase, at least. Hopefully he’d make some progress that way. This was so fucked. Where had his group gone? He was very, very sure he’d been with them. They’d filed down the staircase with him, hadn’t they? Where the fuck were they? Where the fuck was he? This certainly seemed like a fucking dungeon.
He kept going until the shadows seemed to stay in one corner. He stretched out his unoccupied left hand, fingers brushing against another wall. He let out a frustrated groan, quiet and under his breath, even though he was pretty damn sure he was alone. He pressed his hand against it, palm against the cool stone, and he felt it open with a soft click. And he really didn’t care what was on the other side, he just wanted out of the stupid fucking strobe lights.
And, of course the strobe lights turned off as he stepped towards the open door. His luck was so fucking perfect today, wasn’t it?
He stepped through the hidden door (or whatever it was, Michael really didn’t care at this point), letting it slowly close behind him with the same soft click that definitely wasn’t ominous at all. This room, at least, wasn’t completely pitch black. There were lanterns hanging from the ceiling, and fake torches along one stone wall, that provided dim lighting. He skirted over to the side of the dungeon that was lit, gaze lingering on the shadowy side. His eyes still hadn’t really adjusted to the lighting, still absolutely fucked up from the stupid fucking strobe light. He would enjoy this a lot more if he knew this was intentional - if it was intentional - or if he was with his fucking group. Sue him, okay, maybe this shit was slightly better with company.
He heard something shift from the direction of the door, gaze sliding over there. The room really wasn’t that open, and was pretty small in size. He felt something brush his left shoulder and jumped, stumbling forward toward the shadowy side of the dungeon room - backward, now, maybe, since he definitely whirled around to look at whatever the fuck had poked him, only to find nothing but the stone wall. What the fuck was this fucking place? He knew that wasn’t a bat. Maybe it was a bat? He really, really didn’t know.
There was a weird sound from the shadowy side of the dungeon, which he was way, way closer to, now. He turned to look at it, only to flinch back when something lunged at him, snarling. Michael whirled around to look and let out an absolutely dignified shriek, reacting entirely on instinct, which was the only reason he realized, seconds too late, that that horrifying crunching noise had been his fist colliding with the thing’s nose.
The thing, that he was now realizing, was an actor, chained to the wall with long chains. They’d made the noise earlier, scraping against the floor, as the actor had shifted. Probably. “Oh, fuck,” Michael said automatically, eyes widening. His knuckles fucking hurt, sure, but he was more focused on the poor actor.
The makeup was, as promised, spectacular. He was a half-turned werewolf, shirtless and covered in gruesome patches of fur and deep, gory claw marks. He had some sort of fangs in, too, and weird orange contacts that definitely made him look feral. What Michael was most focused on, though, was the blood dripping from his nose that was definitely not stage makeup.
The actor had a small frown on his face, two fingers coming up to gently touch his nose. He let out a soft hiss, frown pulling more at his lips. “Damn,” he murmured.
“Oh, fuck,” Michael said, ever so eloquent. “Oh, fuck. Dude, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t- I’ve never hit someone before in my life, I don’t know what the fuck-“
The actor shook his head. “It’s alright. It happens.” He gave him a small smile, one corner of his lips pulling up, before it dropped right back into a frown. Probably aggravated his injured nose. That Michael had done. Fuck. “Hazard of the job, you know? I told them not to activate the strobe lights and then put a jump scare after them. They make people jumpy since they fuck with your vision. They put people on edge. And then to have someone jump at you out of the dark….” He just looked sort of amused. Vindicated, too, maybe. “I figured it would happen at some point. I just got lucky until now, I guess.”
“Fuck, I’m so….I don’t even…..I’m so sorry,” Michael said again, brows drawing together. He really hadn’t meant to. Had he made that clear enough yet? He hadn’t meant to. His panic wasn’t helped by how fucking cute the werewolf was.
The werewolf just ran a hand through his brown curls, pushing them back out of his eyes. “It’s alright. Really. It happens.” He eyed Michael, amusement in his eyes despite Michael’s clear panic. “I’m Ashton, by the way.”
Michael felt like he was still a few steps behind. Shouldn’t the werewolf be mad at him? Or kicking him out of the haunted house or something? “Oh. Uh. I’m Michael.” Ashton was a pretty name. And Michael was pretty sure it suited him, since it was clear Ashton was pretty attractive, even under all the makeup. And the blood. His nose was definitely bruised.
Speaking of his bloody nose, Ashton pressed two fingers right below it again, frowning as they came away covered in blood. “Well, Michael, you can definitely pack a punch.” He looked almost amused again before it gave way to concern. “Are you okay?”
Michael’s internal monologue still hadn’t shifted from ‘fuck. Fuck. fuck. Fuck. fuck. Fuck. fuck. Fuck.’ on loop in his head, so it took him a second to register the question. He still felt like he was short circuiting, adrenaline from the scare and the acute embarrassment immediately after still tingling up his spine and all the way to his shaking hands, fingers trembling a little where they were uncovered by the hoodie sleeves. “Wha- me? I’m- yeah? Fine, I- yeah, uh, think. I think, I mean. I mean I am, I’m fine. Okay. Yeah. Good.”
Ashton raised an eyebrow, stepping just a little closer. Michael was pretty sure he could hear his own heartbeat, too loud and too fast, echoing in his ears. Not loud enough to cover the unsettling scrape of metal against stone as Ashton’s chains moved with him. He focused on breathing, pretty sure he’d stopped for a second, inhaling the stale taste of the synthetic fog, permeating through the entire building, though the air lacked the telltale haze of a fog machine, and the equally stale, dank smell of the room itself. It was grounding, sort of. He was definitely not freaking out, though. Not at all. Not with Ashton right in front of him now, gaze fixed on him, Michael’s right hand still tingling, knuckles still aching. This definitely wasn’t social anxiety nightmare fuel. He was definitely perfectly fine.
Ashton reached for Michael’s hand, Michael numbly letting him take it, unable to do much more than watch. Ashton leaned forward a little, chains scraping again against the floor to make the worst sort of unholy noise, grating on Michael’s frayed nerves, thankfully on the edge of what he was paying attention to. He was too focused on how warm Ashton’s hands were, fake blood splattered over them like he was supposed to look like he’d been clawing at himself. “You’re bruised,” Ashton said, inspecting Michael’s knuckles where they’d made contact with Ashton’s nose. “Or, you will be, at least. You didn’t hit as hard as you could have, so I think you’re okay.”
With Ashton tilted forward, it was easier to see that he was definitely still bleeding - which, fucking duh, it hadn’t been that long since he’d punched him - dripping slowly but steadily onto the floor. Noticing Michael’s gaze, probably, Ashton took a few steps back out of Michael’s space, head still tilted forward a little. He lightly pinched the bridge of his nose, giving Michael what was probably supposed to be a lazy half smile.
“Should you- do you need help?” Michael asked lamely. It was a pretty fucking stupid question, since he’d literally just punched Ashton in the nose. And he was bleeding.
“It’s not that big a deal,” Ashton said, as calm and collected as he’d been the whole time. And fantastic, at least one of them was. “I’d go tell someone, but I’m a little bit stuck.” He raised his free hand, chains rattling a little bit. “I’m actually chained to the wall. Someone comes by and lets me out between every couple groups or every couple hours so I can use the bathroom and grab a drink and all that shit. I can’t get myself out on my own.”
“Oh, fuck.” Michael frowned. “That seems like a pretty big fuckin’, like design flaw. Who the fuck came up with that?”
Ashton laughed, short and sweet before he cut himself off, probably because his nose hurt. Which sent a jolt of regret and embarrassment through Michael. “There’s a lot of stuff like that for the sake of ‘authenticity’. Don’t tell anyone I told you, they’d have my head. I don’t mind too much, though. Only lasts two months every year, and it’s fun. Well, except for the occasional scare that goes too well.” He gestured at his face to prove his point, smile tugging slightly at his lips again before it dropped.
Michael didn’t get a chance to reply before someone came in, freezing at the sight of Ashton slightly tipped forward, nose still dripping, but much slower before, and Michael standing stiff and shocked in place. “Oh, fuck,” the stranger said, echoing Michael’s sentiments. “What the fuck happened?”
“Well, Michael here got so startled when I jumped out that he hit me.” Ashton answered for the two of them. “We’re all good, he didn’t mean to. He’s been keeping me company.” He winked at Michael, making Michael’s face heat up, especially noticeable in the gloomy chill of the fake dungeon room.
“Fuckin’ hell, man,” the strange guy said, immediately moving forward to free Ashton from the stupid chains. “So, you mean, the same shit you kept saying was gonna happen, happened?”
Ashton let out some sort of noise that was probably meant to be a laugh. “Yeah, pretty much exactly.”
“Fuckin’ hell,” the stranger said again, succeeding in freeing Ashton. He leaned in close to look at his nose, frowning. “Well. You definitely need to be cleaned up. You’re out of commission for tonight, we’ll just leave the room empty and the supervisors can suck my dick. Come on, let’s clean you up and get you an ice pack or something, and you can sit down for a while.” He wrapped an arm around Ashton, hand splayed out in the middle of his back. They were clearly comfortable with each other, and had the easy familiarity of close friends. Or something. The stranger nodded his head at Michael. “You, uh, Michael, was it? You can come with us, we’ll get you out.” He paused. “Unless you want to finish the house..? But I’m gonna take a wild guess and say probably not, after that.”
Michael startled a little at being addressed, temporarily forgetting he had a corporal form. “Oh. Uh. No, not really. I”m- that was enough, I think.”
The stranger nodded his head. “Makes sense. You kind of got separated from your group, it looks like. Usually people are in groups of two and three. You sort of had shitty luck tonight, huh?” He said it kindly, though. Like he was sympathetic. “My name’s Calum, by the way.”
“He’s not usually the responsible one,” Ashton teased, shooting Calum an amused look, only making Calum roll his eyes.
“Yeah, yeah. Ashton. You’re always Mr. Responsible. That’s why we’re going to patch up your boo boo.” Calum patted his back consolingly, shooting Michael a grin. “So is this your first time here?”
Michael glanced up, fingers pausing mid-tug where he’d been fiddling with his hoodie sleeves. “Oh. Yeah, it is. Uh. Always wanted to come but it’s hard to get in and last year I got stuck closing most days and couldn’t make it early enough.”
Calum nodded, like it was a solemn affair, or he was thinking. Michael’s ability to figure things out - he was pretty sure it was called perception, but it just proved his point - was absolutely shot through with his adrenaline. He was still waiting for someone to get pissed at him, to kick him out and ban him for life. “It’s a fun place, yeah. I can’t remember if I actually ever went through it before getting to work here and see ‘behind the scenes,’ but we get pretty good reviews.” Calum grinned. “I’d say a bloody nose means you’re pretty fuckin’ scary, Ash.”
Ashton let out a half laugh. “Yeah, I guess so. Or people scared shitless and blind in the dark don’t like jumpscares. One of the two.”
Calum had led them through a couple dark, narrow back hallways, clearly meant for the employees, the whole time they’d been chatting. They get to the doorway of a brighter-lit room and hear a woman gasp. “Oh, Ashton! What happened to you? Oh, god, it wasn’t those dicks from last night again, was it? I swear I’ll hunt them down-”
“No, it wasn’t,” Ashton consoled, stepping into the room where the woman started fawning over him, leaning up to inspect his face and make sure he was okay. Calum, letting her take over, gently nudged Michael out of view and stepped back into shadow with him.
“Look, Ashton’s a trooper, he’s okay,” Calum murmured, nothing but soothing sincerity in his eyes and coating his voice. “I promise. You seem pretty worried but, uh...The floor managers might not be too happy, you know? We’re missing our werewolf for the rest of the night, so the room will be empty...No one else gives a shit, I promise, I just mean that if you want to come back, you might want to leave before anyone figures it out, you know? Not personal at all.” He gave him a sweet smile that probably would’ve rendered Michael incoherent and weak-kneed any other time, but with his nerves as wired and burnt-out as they were, it only tugged at his anxiety-ridden heartstrings.
“Actually,” Calum continued, tilting his head, “I can get you a ticket or something for another night if you want to do this again.” He gave him a lopsided smile. “You know, as long as you don’t hit another actor again.” Michael assumed he must’ve looked panicked, because Calum was quick to console him. “Hey, hey, I’m kidding. Sorry, too soon.”
“Holy, fuck, Ashton, is that real?” Someone else asked, entering the room behind them.
Calum looked back at Michael, expression apologetic. “I’ve gotta- I’ll have to run damage control, Alisha - the girl - is nice but he’ll need, uh, help. Uh...The exit’s right through there, down the stairs, to the left. If you can get back before we open sometime, cut the line and ask for me. Uh. Calum. That should get you in.” Michael only realized Calum had put a hand on his arm at some point when he squeezed it gently and let go.
With another hasty apology, Calum had to return to Ashton and the whole mess Michael had caused. Michael stumbled on nerve-numb feet through the dark employee back-passageways, hearing the occasional shriek from the haunted house proper. He couldn’t help but berate himself and wish he’d done the entire fucking thing differently. And where the fuck had his friend been? Maybe he wouldn’t have been so nervous to begin with if the fucker had actually texted him back at some point.
This whole thing had been social-anxiety massive-fuckup nightmare fuel. Seriously, Michael thought as he finally managed to make his way out of the stupid house into the city, shivering in the much-cooler nighttime air, this was going to haunt him for years. Let alone punching anyone in the first place - his hand still sort of hurt, though not a proper hurt, more like the vague ache wrapped in the anxiety-spiking memory of what he’d done - but punching an absolutely gorgeous guy in the face? Fucking hell. Worst thing he could think of.
It was still fresh on his mind as he tucked himself into bed, fresh from a shower as he’d tried to scrub the stupid memory off his skin. He just hoped he managed to actually get over this and it didn’t haunt him forever. Though, he’d been pretty fucking haunted when he’d gone to grab pizza and when the guy had said “enjoy your meal,” he’d said “you too, thanks, mum.” He hadn’t even realized his mistake until he’d gotten outside with his prized pizza. In his defense, he’d been texting his mom, and gotten mixed up. There wasn’t really a defense here.
Fuck. He really hoped this didn’t haunt him.
-----------------------------------
Well. It haunted him. That first night had really, really sucked. Like...really sucked. It had taken ages to manage to fall asleep after that, since every time he tried, he was painfully reminded of the moment he hit Ashton right in the nose, and how awful that had felt. And everything afterward had just been an anxiety-fueled mess.
He had class the day after, too, which really fucking sucked, but it meant he didn’t have to sit and dwell on every single mistake he’d ever made in his life. The biggest one was obviously his birth, followed very closely by hitting Ashton. He decided, though, by the end of that day, that he definitely wanted to go apologize again. Just because it hadn’t felt quite like enough just saying he was sorry. He needed to actually prove it somehow. Maybe. Or he was just an idiot. Only time would really tell.
He got a gift card for the coffee shop where he worked, because he got a discount on it, and everyone liked coffee. Did Ashton like coffee? He really hoped he did. He was still kicking himself for not getting his number so he could make sure he was okay and apologize, but, in his own defense, everything had gone upside-down topsy-turvy really, really fast.
He got down to the haunted house, still a while before it actually opened. He went straight to the front of the line, remembering Calum’s promise to get him in. Hopefully he could use the advice to apologize properly to Ashton. The guy at the front of the line was kind of a dick towards him, but Michael managed to find a worker in one of the designated t-shirts for the house.
“Hey, uh, is Calum or Ashton here?” Michael asked, praying he didn’t seem near as awkward as he felt. He just wanted to apologize and leave before he embarrassed himself any further, that was all. Everything was fine. It was fine.
“Oh, yeah. Are you one of their friends or something?” The guy glanced at him before shrugging. “Calum’s working customer service and merch. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Michael followed the guy into the house, down a hallway that wasn’t super obvious, to what was clearly right after the exit of the house. There was a booth set up, shirts dangling from the top and displayed in the back, along with magnets and other sorts of merch along the table. Calum was sitting behind it, earbuds in, focused solely on his phone. The guy Michael had been following tapped on the table to get his attention, making Calum’s eyes snap up. He grinned over at Michael, pausing his music and tugging his earbuds out.
“I’ve got to get back to the front, but this guy was asking for you and Ashton. You know him?”
Calum’s smile didn’t dissipate. It didn’t do much to sooth the suddenly overactive butterflies in Michael’s stomach. “Yeah, I do. I’m good, you can go.” The guy nodded and left, leaving Michael alone with Calum.
“Hey,” Calum greeted, grinning again. “I wasn’t sure you’d come back. I was hoping you would. Are you here for the house?” His smile went coy. “Or for me?” He was clearly teasing, but Michael’s face flushed.
“Uh. I- well. Uh. I came- well, I’m here to apologize. Yeah. To, uh. To Ashton. Again. For hitting him. I mean, by accident. I didn’t mean to.” And wow, way to be smooth. Michael just didn’t know how to function around cute guys at all. Especially not when they sounded like they could possibly be flirting with him, if they were on another planet, where people actually flirted with Michael.
Calum just gave him another sweet smile, standing and leaning against the table. Michael definitely didn’t pay attention to the way Calum’s back arched, or the way he tilted his head sometimes without meaning to, or how good his jeans looked on him. He didn’t see any of that at all because he was a good person. He just..wasn’t blind. And Calum was cute. “Ashton’s fine. I think he’s working tonight, but I can shoot him a text.” Michael didn’t even have to reply before Calum was pulling his phone out of his back pocket and sending a text, presumably to Ashton.
“The house opens soon,” Calum continued, “but we’ll see if we can get him up here.” He smiled a little. “You know, after you hit him by accident, they tested out some fake chains. They thought it worked great - until they did a test run, and Ashton broke them when he moved forward. Guess even plastic couldn’t hold up to his upper body strength, huh?” He smiled, eyes squinting a little when Michael flushed darker. Everything was absolutely, perfectly fine.
Calum’s phone vibrated again and he checked it. “Oh, shit. He’s a bit hung up right now. You want to stick around for a minute and see if he can swing up here? I can give you a bit of a behind-the-scenes tour.”
Michael considered but nodded. “Yeah, uh. That would be great.” His friend - who still hadn’t fucking gotten back with him, it had been two days, asshole - was supposed to do that when he’d originally come to the house. Better late than never, at least, even if he’d never gotten to actually make it through the haunted house proper. He just had to survive spending time with a super cute guy in the stupidly narrow employee hallways.
Calum grinned again. “Great!” He slid over the top of the table, knocking a couple magnets to the floor. He glanced at them before shrugging. “I’ll deal with that when I’m back. Come on.” He grabbed Michael’s wrist, his hold warm and gentle, and lightly tugged him towards another hallway. “So what do you want to see first? How we put everything together? How we make a couple of the rooms function? Where we keep all the fog machines?”
“Uhhh……” That was….a lot of options. Michael honestly wasn’t sure where to start. The last comment earned Calum a laugh, short and a little nervous. “Anything?”
Calum nodded sagely, like Michael had made some interesting comment that could be considered, instead of fumbling over his words. “I’ll just start with the basic tour then.”
Calum tugged him into another room, launching into an explanation of how they put it together, and how it matched up with the other rooms in the house. He talked about how they had speakers in each room, and made sure the haunted house genuinely felt like an old rundown mansion with a stone basement. The next room was every bit as interesting, if a bit colder.
“That,” Calum explained, “would be because we keep one of the fog machines in this false wall.” He knocked on it, the sound hollower than a real wall would have made. “It adds to the vibe.”
Michael just agreed that it did, in fact, add to the general vibe of the haunted house, unsure what else to say to that.
“You know,” Calum said, eyes lighting up a little when he smiled, bright and mischievous, “I’m pretty sure they spent most of the decorating budget on the fog machines. In order to get the light fog in the dungeons, we had to keep one every couple rooms. And then the one in the front room, so people know we’re spooky.” He wiggled his fingers with his free hand, his other hand still warm on Michael’s wrist where he hadn’t let go yet.
Michael laughed, earning another triumphant smile from Calum. “That sounds right,” he said honestly. The basement - or what little he’d seen of it, at least - had definitely been neat, with the very light fog swirling around his ankles. He just hadn’t really made it that far.
And, like Calum was a mindreader, he almost immediately said “Hey, you didn’t finish the house, right? Want to get a tour of the basement? I can show you where I had to use Klorox wipes to get Ashton’s blood off the floor.” Another grin, clearly amused with himself.
“Uh...Yeah, okay, that sounds good,” Michael said, ever so eloquent. Being in the presence of a pretty guy did not help him at all, only serving to shut down any critical thinking skills he’d ever had.
“Great! This way-” Calum started to gently lead him out of the room, hand still warm on Michael’s wrist in the chill of the room, before he was interrupted by his phone buzzing. “Fuck, what now?” He pulled his phone out of his back pocket, which Michael found impressive given how stupidly tight they were. Calum let out a huff, letting go of Michael’s wrist so he could send a text back. “Fuckin’ hell. I’m gonna have to go.” He gave Michael a look that really looked like apologetic puppy dog eyes, but Calum somehow pulled it off. “We’re letting in the first group soon. I’ve gotta go back to my booth.”
“Oh, shit.” Michael was pretty sure that was the right response. He was still distracted by the smiles Calum had flashed him just moments before. Sue him, his weakness was cute guys, okay? And social interaction. Especially social interaction with aforementioned cute guys. Like Calum.
“I’m sorry. I guess Ashton will be wrapped up in that, too.” Calum frowned, thinking for a moment. “Are you free tomorrow?”
Michael flushed, a natural reply to being asked that by A Cute Guy. “Uh. Yeah. I have class in the morning, but I’m free after.”
Calum grinned again. “Great. Swing by here again? You can ask for either me or Ashton. We’ll get you taken care of, don’t worry.” He winked at Michael, smile still on his face. Michael felt himself flush deeper, praying it wasn’t too visible in the dim lighting of the haunted house.
“Yeah, uh, okay. I can...I can do that.” Maybe he was reassuring himself a little bit. But it would be fun. Calum led him back out of the room, his hand going to the small of Michael’s back, warm even through his hoodie. If Michael’s blush had faded, that brought it back full force. Calum’s hand dropped once they were back in the hallway, but his hand brushed Michael’s on every other step as he led him back to the front, to the area where Calum’s merch booth was.
“Here we are. I’ll see you tomorrow?” Calum asked, expression earnest. He squatted to pick up a couple of the magnets and buttons that he’d knocked to the floor earlier. Michael definitely didn’t glance at his butt, because he was a very nice person, and very good at resisting things.
“Yeah, I’ll, uh, I’ll be here.” Michael was completely fucking incapable of going one sentence without stumbling over his words. It was annoying. It was like being near any attractive guy whatsoever made his brain completely short circuit and stop working. He was pretty sure he just suffered from Dumb Bitch-itis or whatever. It was fine.
After a quick goodbye, Michael made his way to the exit and started the walk back home again. He couldn’t say that excursion was really a failure but he still hadn’t done what he’d meant to do. How many cute guys could work there, anyway? That had to be it. So hopefully he’d function properly next time he had to go, even if Calum and Ashton both completely shut his brain down. The gift card was still in his pocket, even as he reluctantly shucked his outside-hoodie to switch to his sleeping-hoodie. At least this time he didn’t have too much to haunt him before he fell asleep.
Except punching Ashton, his brain helpfully supplied. And with that, his hopes for some peaceful sleep went out the window, just like his critical thinking skills had earlier when he’d had to talk to Calum.
-----------------------------------
Michael prayed that this was the last time he’d have to go to the house. He didn’t dislike it, honestly, it was interesting and incredibly well put together. But he really just wanted to apologize to Ashton and have the whole thing be done with. Or, half of him did, at least. He hated when things got drawn out like this, and something hung over his head. He didn’t like feeling like he owed any debts at all. The other half of him, though, kind of didn’t want it to be over. Because then he wouldn’t get to see Calum or Ashton again. And alright, maybe he was a bit of an emotional masochist knowing that they wouldn’t like him but it was...nice, kind of, hanging out with people. And he wasn’t going to complain about getting to hang out with cute guys. Like...ever.
The thing was, though, it wasn’t like he could really be friends with them. He’d fucking punched Ashton right in the face for fuck’s sake. The friendship ship had long since sailed, and he’d lost any chance of talking to him like a functional person as soon as he’d panicked and hit him. Which sort of destroyed any chances he had in befriending Calum. And maybe he was a little bit lonely, and tired of spending all his free time by himself. The cute guys at the haunted house were a no-go, though, so he wanted to be done with them as soon as he could be.
Michael tugged his hoodie back on, and made his way back out into the outside world, where people weren’t so kind, and there were cute boys to accidentally hit and regret your entire life over. He didn’t want to think about having to talk to Ashton again, or Calum, doing his best to save all of his brain power for actually having to socialize, rather than wasting it on indulging his anxiety now.
He cut through the line again, though it was a bit earlier this time, so it wasn’t as long as it had been, and made his way to the front of the house. One of the workers, in the same haunted house shirts he’d see the others in the days before, stopped him.
“I’m here for Ashton?” Michael said, still not entirely sure of himself, like this wasn’t the second time he’d come back to the house and had to ask for them. “Or Calum.”
The girl glanced Michael up and down quickly, seeming to assess whether or not he was telling the truth. And really, why the fuck would he bother lying? He wasn’t even really trying to get into the house, but apologize fully to Ashton so he could hopefully stop being haunted by the memory of his major fuck-up.
“Alright, come on,” she said, turning on her heel and leading him inside. He followed her back through the room Calum had been stationed in the day before, the merch booth left empty, now, no cute guys with equally cute smiles there to drag him through the maze of the house.
The girl led her down a couple hallways Michael definitely didn’t remember, but he really hadn’t been paying as much attention to the hallways of all things the last time he’d been there. But he was pretty sure he didn’t remember any of this. Which was only reaffirmed when she stopped in a doorframe. “Luke,” she called in, hand on the doorframe. “This guy’s asking for Calum and Ashton. I’m busy downstairs. Can you try and track them down for him?”
Michael could see over her shoulder, but couldn’t see who she was talking to. Luke gave her some form of affirmative, he guessed, because then she was turning back to look at him. “Right. You stay here with Luke. He should be able to find Calum and Ashton. You can wait with him. Good luck.” She turned and headed off back down a couple narrow hallways, leaving Michael more confused than he had been before she’d tried to help.
“Come in, I don’t bite,” came a guy’s voice from the other side of the room. Michael reluctantly shuffled in, already tugging his hoodie sleeves down over his hands. How many times was he going to be shuffled from person to person before he managed to actually give Ashton his stupid gift card and go back to his life of reclusivity, hidden away in his single dorm room. Then he’d finally get to forget how massively he’d fucked up, and not have to think about all the stupidly cute boys that worked at the stupid haunted house.
The room had several chairs set up, with a couple of tables cluttered with a bunch of weird bottles, makeup palettes, and gallons of stage blood. It was empty, except for a girl sitting in one of the chairs, and a guy working on her makeup. He was tall, with ridiculously long legs, and his blond curls pulled back into a small bun, messy, with flyaways wisping around his temples and a couple strands of hair in his eyes when he flashed Michael a quick smile. “Alright,” the guy said, pulling back to inspect his work. “You’re good to go. But maybe try not to fuck up your chest wound next time? It’s not so easy to fix.” She murmured some sort of agreement - and what sounded like an apology - before heading back out, probably to wherever she was supposed to be stationed.
The guy turned to Michael and flashed him a smile, tucking his brush behind his ear and wiping his hands on his thighs before offering one to Michael. “I’m Luke. But, uh, I think you already knew that.” His smile went a little sheepish. Michael just shook his hand, internally cursing himself for having cute boys as a major weakness. Because Luke was definitely cute.
“I’m Michael,” he said, because he was pretty sure he hadn’t yet, and it seemed like the proper time for an introduction. His brain might short circuit a little bit around cute boys, but he didn’t completely forget everything. Usually. Not yet, at least. He was just hoping to keep at least a fraction of his critical thinking skills. So he didn’t end up hitting him in the face, his brain supplied helpfully, even though that had only ever been the one time, and under very different circumstances. It didn’t make him feel much better.
Luke broke into a smile almost immediately, letting out a laugh - more of a giggle, really - that made his nose crinkle. “You’re the guy that punched Ashton,” he said, eyes crinkling a little with amusement. “Holy shit. You’re a legend.”
Michael flushed, feeling his whole face heat up, even though the room was just as chilly as the rest of the haunted house. “Uh. Maybe just a little. The one time.” He scuffed the toe of his sneaker against the ground, suddenly a little nervous. Or...more nervous. Luke was just as cute as the others had been, stray glitter stuck to his hands (and Michael’s palm, now, after he’d shook his hand), and his hair in that stupidly endearing bun. And apparently he knew about the biggest fuck up in Michael’s entire life, which really wasn’t all that good for his already not so fantastic self esteem.
Luke nodded, still looking only a couple seconds from laughing. “The one time. Yeah. Ashton thought it was hilarious. It worked out, though, he got the rest of the day off, and convinced them to fix his position so it hopefully wouldn’t happen again. Well, I mean, they mostly agreed that he could keep his phone on him as long as it was silent so he could call Calum or something to come get him if something happened. But he counted it as a win.”
Luke leaned against the table, hip causing a couple bottles to fall over. Luke flushed, pink covering his pale skin, as he rushed to sort everything out, right all of the bottles. He knocked one of them off the table, squatting down to grab it and smacking his head against the edge of the table on his way back up. It knocked the brush from behind his ear, which hit the floor with a quiet clatter. Luke managed to stand up properly, though, his face red, and clearly flustered. “Um. Anyway. So you- Uh.” He shook his head, more curls coming free of his bun and dancing around his temples when he moved. “Ashton wasn’t upset, you’re okay. He’s kind of hard to rattle. Calum and him have been joking about it, mostly. They just didn’t mention you were cute.”
Michael had watched Luke’s moment with the bottles, eyebrows furrowed in concern, but he hadn’t wanted to overstep. He’d gotten it sorted, anyway, and his head seemed fine. So he didn’t ask, just watched him with the same slightly cautious expression. Luke’s last sentence threw him off, though, and it was Michael’s turn to flush, staring at Luke a few beats longer than socially acceptable. “Oh, uh- you think- I’m not- I’m pretty, just, you know- uh. Thank you. You’re- the same. Cute. I mean.”
Luke laughed, soft and gentle and warm, meant to be with him rather than at him. Michael’s blush darkened, but he didn’t feel quite so bad about being an absolute idiot. “Thank you,” he said, head tilting a little to the side, smile back on his face. Luke was tall. Taller than Calum and Ashton had been, enough to make Michael aware of the difference. No wonder he’d been clumsy, though he’d seemed to have reclaimed his grace now, lanky limbs seeming only to add to his charm and poise rather than detract from it now that his footing was stable and no bottles were falling on the floor.
“So why’d you come back, again?” Luke asked, yanking Michael out of his reverie. He’d moved to straighten some of the bottles and makeup palettes cluttered on the table. He glanced at Michael before his eyes shifted back to what he was doing. And yeah, that was definitely stray gold glitter stuck to his hands, front and back.
“Oh. Uh. I wanted to say sorry to Ashton again. I just...haven’t been able to catch him. Came back yesterday and same thing.” Michael tugged at one of his hoodie sleeves, watching Luke’s long fingers tighten what looked like a tall bottle of latex. And okay, maybe he’d watched a few too many behind the scenes videos of his favourite horror movies, and wasn’t completely brand new to SFX stuff.
Luke glanced up at him again, interest in his blue eyes and all over his face. His hands paused where they were. “You were here yesterday?”
“Uh. Yeah? I was just with Calum for a while but then he got some text and I didn’t get a chance to see Ashton before I had to leave.” He didn’t know what about that was so interesting, but whatever. At least he wasn’t tripping over his words now and could talk to Luke like a proper functioning human being.
Luke hummed but didn’t offer an explanation for asking. “Do you want me to do your makeup or something while you wait?” He asked, as random and out of nowhere as anything.
“What?” Michael asked, brows drawing together again. He was pretty sure Luke hadn’t said what he thought he’d said.
“Do you want me to do your makeup while you’re waiting?” He repeated, gaze as earnest as ever. He wasn’t lying.
“I mean, holy shit, yeah,” Michael said, maybe just a tad too eager. Get his makeup done by a makeup artist at the haunted house that had won awards for SFX? Hell fucking yeah! He wasn’t turning that opportunity down. Hopefully it went better than attending the haunted house had.
Luke beamed, looking absolutely pleased with himself. “Okay, come over here and sit down and I will. Do you want, like, a cut or something? I have a couple spare prosthetic injuries I could use. I know I can’t do the missing eye one on you, you can’t really see in that one. I have a couple of the small claw ones, like I think I used on Ashton? If you want some of those.”
“Uh. Yeah, that works.” Michael made his way over and sat down in the chair, shifting a little bit. He’d never really had his makeup done before, but he was more excited to get to see someone do SFX up close. On him.
“Can you pull the hoodie off?” Luke asked over his shoulder, starting to sort through his supplies. “I need more space. I can do it right below your collarbone, I think. That’s enough space. With Ashton, I think I slotted some at the top of one of his pecs and then some on his ribs, on his side.”
Michael flushed but tugged his hoodie off, getting his head stuck in the stupid thing only momentarily, before it was off and he could ball it up in his lap. Luke turned back to look at him, humming softly to himself. He tugged his hair free from the bun, curls falling freely to frame his face, before pulling it right back again. Just like before, curls too short to fit in the bun curled around his temples and his ears. Luke ignored it, stepping closer with the small prosthetic in hand.
He hummed a little again, eyeing Michael’s collarbones and chest. He tugged the neckline of Michael’s shirt down a little bit, holding the prosthetic up, just below his collarbone as he’d said. “This should work pretty well. Has anyone ever done makeup on you before?” Luke turned to grab something else, probably his adhesive, before turning back and frowning. “It might be easier, since I’ll need both hands for this. You can put it back on afterward, it’ll sit right above your neckline. Right here.” Luke tapped a finger lightly where he planned on putting the prosthetic.
Michael flushed. “Uh. Yeah, okay, I guess.” He really wasn’t used to this. Going shirtless in front of a cute guy? Yeah, that really didn’t happen. Like, ever. He reluctantly tugged his shirt off, though, still not about to turn this opportunity down. The shirt joined his hoodie, both balled up in his lap. He was rewarded with a sweet smile from Luke, before he was surveying the area he wanted to stick the prosthetic, which did little to help Michael’s blush.
“This might be a little bit cold. It’s room temperature, kind of.” Luke started applying the adhesive, completely in Michael’s personal space. “So did you like the house?” He asked, fanning the adhesive with his hand, gaze shifting to Michael’s face. “When you came? Before the thing with Ashton, I mean.”
“Yeah, I did. Uh. I’ve been wanting to come here for years, and I finally got to get a look. I really, really like horror shit, and thought about being an SFX artist but I don’t have the talent at all.” Michael resisted the urge to shift in place, or bounce his leg. He didn’t want to fuck up whatever Luke was doing. “It’s, uh, really well put together. No wonder it’s won awards and shit.”
Luke hummed, tapping the adhesive before grabbing the prosthetic and leaning down, tongue sticking out a little in concentration, as he carefully stuck it down. He held it in place for a moment, pulling back to inspect his work. He moved to grab one of his makeup palettes. “Yeah, it’s a lot of work to pull it together and get everything set up properly. But I can get out of some of it sometimes, since I do makeup.” He grinned at him before starting to add colour to the prosthetic. “You wanted to do SFX?” His gaze flickered up to him again, before again it dropped to what he was doing. “I could always show you some stuff, if you wanted. I’ve been doing it for a couple years, so I think I’d probably be okay at that.”
“Didn’t you guys win something last year for your makeup?” He asked, tilting his head a little bit.
Luke turned pink. “Well, yeah, but that wasn’t just me, that was the whole team. But, um. If you wanted that, I definitely could.”
It was then that it really clicked what Luke was offering. This was a chance for Michael to actually get hands-on experience with SFX and get to see it up close. Not only that, but he’d get the chance to actually do it himself, with someone else’s guidance, and see if he was actually shit at it. And that someone happened to be award winning. And really cute. “Fuck yeah, I definitely want that.” Okay, he needed to curb his excitement. Just a little.
Luke let out another one of his giggles, still working on the colouring of the prosthetic. “Okay. I’m happy to show you. I’ll get your number when I’m done? So we can set up a time?”
Michael definitely didn’t turn pink at that or anything. He was totally suave, totally used to getting cute guys’ numbers, especially while he was shirtless in front of them. Obviously. And maybe that was a little bit of a lie, and this was brand new. And maybe he was a little bit pink. “Uh. Yeah, that sounds good.”
Luke hummed, attention mostly back on the prosthetic. He was silent for a few moments before he spoke up again. “You said you wanted to do SFX. So what do you do instead?”
“Oh, I’m a film student. I work at, uh, Great Awakenings? The coffee shop a couple blocks down from here on campus.” Michael, again, had to resist the urge to shift around in place. Not because it felt weird, but because he didn’t know what to do with himself, or his nervous energy. He couldn’t even tap his foot or anything on the ground, for fear of fucking up what Luke was doing.
“Oh, that’s neat! I’m doing philosophy right now. Ashton’s doing English. Focusing on literature, I think. And Calum’s doing psychology,” Luke flashed Michael a bright smile before going back to his work, still carefully adding pigment to the prosthetic.
“Oh, that’s, uh...pretty cool. What made you choose philosophy?” Michael asked.
Luke hummed a little to himself. “I dunno. Just thought it seemed interesting. I’m pretty happy doing this, but I don’t know if I can make a career out of it. Or if my skills are even enough to try.” He paused. “I know I’m good enough to work here, I just don’t know about beyond that,” he corrected, fingers stilling where they’d been working. It only took a moment before he was back at it again.
Michael understood that, honestly. “Yeah, I know what you mean. That’s why I’m in film. I don’t know how far I’ll make it, either,” he said honestly.
Luke gave him a frown, more adorable than it had any right being. “I’m sure you’ll be good at it, Mikey.”
Michael flushed at the nickname, but didn’t have any time to add anything before Luke was turning around to face the table. “Okay, I just have blood and then I’m done.” Luke grabbed the bottle and a tiny brush, turning around to face Michael yet again. He gave him a tiny smile before he was back to work, tongue poking slightly from between his lips in concentration.
Luke was pretty. Michael was struggling to think about anything else, even with how desperately he wanted to do SFX, and how much he’d wanted to visit the haunted house. It only took a few minutes before Luke pulled back slightly, surveying his work. Good thing, too, Michael was starting to get chilly. “Okay,” he said, eyes still on the prosthetic, forehead creased slightly, lips pulled into a small pout. He looked thoughtful. Michael refused to admit it was adorable. “I think I’m done.” He gave Michael another smile, nose crinkling slightly with this one.
Michael’s number one weakness was definitely still cute boys, because his brain short circuited immediately. He was saved from having to say anything, though, when a girl poked her head in the door, knocking twice on the doorframe to get Luke’s attention. “Hey, house’s opening in a few. Stand by in case of any fucked up makeup.” Luke just nodded, and then she left.
Luke frowned a little at Michael. “Okay, you’ll probably have to go before we officially open and groups start coming through. I might get busy, and we aren’t supposed to have visitors.” Luke chewed at his lip, thinking. “Okay. Uh.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket - Michael didn’t know how he fit anything in his pants pockets, they were stupidly tight and didn’t look all that comfortable - and offered it to Michael. “Give me your number? I’ll text you and figure the whole Ashton thing out so you can say sorry to him or whatever. And then I can show you how to do makeup.”
Michael nodded, taking the outstretched phone from Luke and obediently putting his number in. “That, uh, sounds really great. Thanks, Luke.” He passed his phone back and earned another smile from Luke that definitely didn’t make his stomach flip. Michael went ahead and tugged his shirt back on, careful not to fuck up his new prosthetic.
“Okay, sweet. Can you find your way out or do you want me to show you?” Luke asked, as sweet as he’d been the whole time.
Michael shook his head at the offer, though. “I’m okay. I can get out. Thanks, though. I’ll...I’ll catch you around?”
Luke gave him another smile. “Yeah. See you, Mikey.”
Michael made his way out of the haunted house for the third time, hoodie balled up in his hands despite the evening chill so he didn’t get fake blood on it. And maybe he stopped in front of the mirror once he got home to look at his makeup, stupid grin on his face remembering Luke (and the other cute boys that worked there). And maybe, just maybe, that was the first night since he’d punched Ashton that he didn’t seriously struggle to sleep.
-----------------------------------
Michael had almost forgotten the whole dilemma, when he woke up to a text from Luke. The phone screen was stupidly blinding in the darkness of his bedroom, and he cursed himself for bothering to check his phone in the first place. To be fair, though, he’d only wanted to see the time - he slept with his phone on do not disturb for this very purpose - he hadn’t expected the text.
Luke H: hey, r u free 2day? :-)
Michael stared at the text, blinking sleep out of his eyes, before he managed to get his brain to function enough to reply. And of fucking course Luke added a nose to his emojis. He might have only met the guy once, but it definitely seemed like a Luke thing to do.
Michael: yeah I should be. y?
Michael didn’t have a chance to even roll over before Luke had replied, phone buzzing again in his hand. Did Luke have nothing better to do? It had to be fucking early in the morning, and Michael’s main priority was going back to sleep. Though, in Luke’s defense, it usually was.
Luke H: no reason
Luke H: can u meet me at that coffee shop @ 1 later 2day?
Luke wasn’t making any more sense, even with his clarifications. And Michael was way too tired to think too much about his cryptic messages. So he just agreed.
Michael: yeah
His phone buzzed again, seconds after he’d hit send. Did Luke have nothing better to do than text Michael at fucking nine am on a Saturday morning? Didn’t he know how to sleep in?
Luke H: great :-)
Michael tossed his phone to the side with a sigh, resolving himself to being awake way, way too early. This wasn’t usually how he spent his mornings; normally, he slept in until noon if he didn’t have work, and spent the day catching up on homework he didn’t feel like doing during the week, and finished the day with pizza and a few rounds of FIFA. He didn’t usually meet cute boys at the coffee chop, for god knows what reason, and he usually didn’t wake up so fucking early.
The rest of his day passed slowly, starting with two cups of coffee to try and keep himself awake and functional. He could hear his mum in his head, reminding him that nine am isn’t even that early, that most people were already awake and functional by that point. So he just shook his head and told his imaginary mum to piss off, and that he wasn’t most people.
He managed to waste most of the day away until he was already running late to meet Luke. He tugged on a hoodie that he’d only worn once that week, making it objectively cleaner than most of his other ones.
By the time he made it to the coffee shop, he was a couple minutes past one. Which was fine, it was pretty standard for Michael. He never really knew what time it was, but he tried his best. At least he was only a couple minutes late this time. Hopefully Luke didn’t mind too much.
Speaking of the devil, Luke had taken a seat in the corner and, when Michael spotted him, was mid-laugh at something Ashton had said to him. Ashton, who was sitting right next to him, grin on his lips. Oh, fuck. Had Michael just been invited to fucking third wheel them or something? You could third wheel a friendship. Michael knew that, from trailing after a pair of best friends when he was a kid, before he’d just decided to be a loner for the rest of his life. But they seemed awfully cuddly now, too. Maybe they’d just invited him to laugh at him.
Or, the much smaller rational part of his brain pointed out, maybe Luke had invited Ashton since Michael had wanted to apologize to him again and had never gotten the chance. Maybe Luke was just being nice.
Michael just did his best to shove all those thoughts aside. There was no point in freaking himself out now that he was already here. Better to just figure out what Luke had planned and get it over with. Or enjoy it, maybe. Maybe.
Michael made his way over to their table, awkwardly taking his seat in front of them. Luke turned and gave him a bright, happy smile. “Hey, you made it!” He greeted, clearly pleased. “I went ahead and brought Ashton, I hope you don’t mind. You said you wanted to apologize, and we both think you’re pretty cute, so-” Ashton smiled fondly, but nudged Luke anyway.
“Don’t freak him out right after he gets here,” Ashton chided gently. He gave Michael that warm smile, shifting in his chair. “Hey, Michael. Good to see you again.”
Michael nodded a little, socialization abilities immediately leaving him. “You look good,” he said, before flushing. “No, you don’t. I mean - fuck - I don’t mean that, I mean you look good now that you’re not covered in blood. Or, you looked good then too. Well, not really, because I hit you in the nose-” Michael snapped his mouth shut. “I mean, it’s good to see you too.”
Ashton just laughed, good naturedly, but Michael was pretty sure he was one fuck-up away from them hating him. Still, though, his laugh managed to calm some of that built-up nervousness he was holding on to.
“You look good too, no worries,” Ashton said, corner of his mouth pulling up into a smile.
Michael just nodded a little, steeling himself before he spoke. “I’m, uh. Really sorry about hitting you. I didn’t mean to at all, and still don’t know how I managed to fuck up that badly.”
Ashton gave him another smile. Luke was busy fiddling with one of his curls, clearly only half paying attention to the conversation, if at all. “It’s okay. Really. You didn’t do any lasting damage, and you didn’t mean to. I’m fine now, and it made the managers have to reconsider the position. Besides, it just meant Calum and Luke were a little overprotective for a few days. I’m fine now, but they were worried for a couple days about bruising and possible lasting damage. You should really be apologizing to Luke for having to deal with blood.” Michael must have looked confused, because Ashton continued. “I don’t know why, but it freaks him out. He’s fine with all the SFX shit, he’s okay with gruesome fake injuries and fake blood, but any time there’s real blood? He freaks out.”
Luke abandoned his curl, tucking it behind his ear, to pout at Ashton. “Hey. I just don’t like it.”
Ashton gave him another stupidly fond smile and draped an arm over the back of Luke’s chair. “I know.” Michael felt like he was third wheeling, again. Which, okay, Ashton and Luke were cute, but he couldn’t help the way his stomach dropped a little. He’d thought they were pretty cute, and he hadn’t deluded himself into thinking anything would happen with either of them. But it didn’t really make it feel much better to realize he was third wheeling.
Sometime into his quiet sulking (which only could’ve lasted a minute or two at most), Calum had come up behind him, because now he was pulling out the chair next to him. Michael was effectively caged in now by attractive guys. Which, okay, was manageable. If his brain would stay functional. At least now he wasn’t third wheeling Luke and Ashton by himself anymore.
“Hey,” Calum greeted all of them, smiling in the way that made his cheeks squish up and his eyes squint. And okay, yeah, Michael definitely needed to get back into the dating world.
“Hey,” Luke said, brightening a little again at the sight of Calum. “Michael came.”
Calum nodded, giving Luke the same fond smile Ashton had. “I can see that, babe.”
Luke reached his hand across the table, towards Calum. Calum took it, gently squeezing his hand. And fucking great, had Michael gone from third wheeling to fourth wheeling? Was fourth wheeling even a fucking thing? It clearly was, if what he was thinking was correct. Because Calum, Luke, and Ashton seemed awfully fucking close - Calum had just called Luke babe, for Christ’s sake - and he was pretty fucking sure they were all dating. Or involved together in some way. So why fucking bother inviting Michael if they were going to act like that? It wasn’t like he thought it was a date or anything, but it seemed...rude to just be all couple-y with a fourth person there.
“I’ve gotta take a call,” Michael said, and the excuse to step out sounded lame even to his own ears. But it had seemed like they’d been...maybe not flirting with him, but flirty, and he felt pretty fucking awkward fourth wheeling them the way he was doing. So he wanted an excuse to step outside for a moment and breathe. He pushed his chair back, wincing at the noise it made, and awkwardly stumbled outside of the door. The bell above the door chimed as he did, which did nothing for his annoyance.
He took a few steps to the side, so he wasn’t in anyone’s way if they tried to go into the little coffee shop. He leaned back against the wall with a sigh, forgetting his excuse, and completely forgetting that he should probably at least pretend to be on the phone. Even if his phone hadn’t been ringing in the first place.
His melodramatic inner monologue of suffering was interrupted by the stupid bell chiming again. It earned enough of his attention to look up. And none other than Luke was standing there in front of him, apologetic smile on his face. “Hi,” Luke said, making his way a little closer.
“Hey,” Michael said, a little unsure.
“I just, uh...I’m sorry,” Luke said, fidgeting a little in place. His gaze shifted down to his feet, where he was absently scuffing the toe of his converse against his other foot. “I should have warned you about us. We just...it’s still kind of new, telling people, and we all...well, we all thought you were really cute, and I thought the rest of it would be easy if I managed to get you here. But life isn’t really like the movies, and I was kind of a dick to not at least warn you. Ashton said I should have, and he was right. I should have.”
Wait...what? Michael was left reeling a little. At least he wasn’t fucking crazy, and he’d been right about the three of them being together. Or, that was what it sounded like, at least. But the rest of it? What did Luke mean by them thinking he was cute? What the fuck? Why did Luke have to be so cryptic? “What?”
Michael was pretty sure Luke blushed. He just scuffed his toe against the ground again, before making eye contact. “I’m dating Calum and Ashton. Or, we’re all dating each other. Um...and we thought you were cute. We think you’re cute. And I fucked up and should have explained all of that earlier. So you didn't, uh...get blindsided by it when you got here.”
Well, that was...a lot. And unexpected. “So...is this a date or something?”
Luke shrugged. “It is if you want it to be.”
Michael considered that for a moment. Did he want it to be? He’d never dated more than one person before - hadn’t really dated many people in general, honestly. But he didn’t dislike the idea. He had gotten along with all of them individually pretty well...and they were already established, right? So maybe it would be easier for him to just join that. Maybe. “I think so, yeah.” He nodded a little.
Luke grinned, shoulders sagging a little with relief as. “Great! I’m sure we’ll talk about everything soon. Like, boundaries and limits and telling other people and the future and stuff like that. Ashton and Calum are pretty good about all that.” Luke reached for Michael’s hand, and he took it, letting Luke lace their fingers together. “For now, though, let’s go get coffee.” Luke tugged him back into the coffee shop, a triumphant grin on his lips. Michael couldn’t help the smile he gave him, just as fond as the ones Calum and Ashton had worn earlier. Something about Luke’s happiness was just...contagious and sweet. It made you happy to see him so happy.
-----------------------------------
The relationship ended up working out like a fucking dream. Michael had never felt so supported in his life, and he was pretty sure his boyfriends felt the same way. After the initial coffee date, they’d gotten themselves established, and talked about what they wanted and what they wanted the relationship to look like, and the future, just like Luke had said. And, to absolutely no one’s surprise, the conversation was guided by Ashton.
Telling his mum had arguably been the hardest part, but even that was made a little easier with their support. Answering her questions hadn’t been fun - he’d deflected the over-the-line questions, as anyone else would, and flat out refused anything rude - but they’d gotten it taken care of, and she’d been about as accepting as Michael could have hoped.
As promised, they managed to get Michael a job at the haunted house the following year. One of the managers had gotten fired after the incident with Ashton - not that that had been the cause, but he’d been a massive dick about it, according to Calum and Luke, and it hadn’t been a good look, so he’d gotten canned - which let Calum get a promotion. Ashton was happy to stick with being an actor. As long as, he’d said when they’d broken the news to Michael, stupid grin on his face, no one else punched him in the face. He didn’t want another boyfriend. It had earned him three eye rolls, and three fond smiles, from each of his stupidly indulgent boyfriends.
But it had meant there was an opening for the merch stand, and Michael would get three glowing reviews. So they’d managed to get him the job. And, Calum had reminded them at the time, pleased smile on his face, they had a lot of sway with one of the managers.
So after everything got settled, Michael’s life was the best it had ever been. He had three loving, supportive, wonderful boyfriends, a job he loved, and date night every Friday. Even if he was working, they were happy to come sit and entertain him until he was off. He didn’t feel left out with them anymore, either; after that first time, they’d gotten it sorted, and were quick to comfort and console him.
Ashton never fucking let him live down the way they met, though. He made dad jokes about it as often as they let him - “watch out for Michael, he packs a punch,” “ah, Michael’s got quite the feisty personality,” “Michael’s really got a nose for this sort of thing. He fucked up mine, so it’s only fair, I suppose” - which was way, way too often, given how bad they all were. Michael couldn’t even bring himself to care, though. Not when accidentally punching him in the face had been the one thing to pull his life together. Ashton’s dad jokes were definitely worth all of that.
#5soshalloweenevent2020#5sos fanfic#ashton irwin fanfiction#luke hemmings fanfiction#michael clifford fanfiction#calum hood fanfiction#my writing#queue#yall i am BUZZING im so excited for this and that i wrote PROMPTS and people are WRITING THEM#like i DID THIS SHIT!! and people participated!!#VIBRATING w excitement...#i mean this is scheduled#but its likely that im around when it posts#i need instant gratification u see#i will b getting ready for virtual halloween tho <3
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~hello~ !! For the meta asks!: 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, and 25 :))
Hello!! Thank you for sending these; I was really excited to see that ask game and I was hoping somebody would send some in. It still took me a while to actually answer them though, and for that I apologise. But without further ado! Some meta answers (under the cut because they ended up being fairly long, whoops):
3. What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (Consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway.)
I thought of a few examples, but they could basically be grouped together under a common theme: whumpy/angsty scenes that were self-indulgent as all heck. The whole self-indulgent aspect often required the characters to be just the teeniest, tiniest bit OOC and/or necessitated rather unrealistic plot circumstances. So it was simply easier to keep such scenes as maladaptive daydreams, rather than trying to think of explanations for the character/plot issues…or exposing myself to judgement for them LOL.
Receiving permission to write/share one such scene anyway is an opportunity I can’t let slip by though. It might be because I’m writing this while running on zero (0) hours of sleep—let’s hear it for insomnia, y’all!—but I suddenly couldn’t remember any of my newer ideas under this category. However, I did recall a one-shot I had started writing a couple of months ago that sort of counts? “Sort of” because I could actually be arsed to write it since I was, ya know, writing it. Only got about six hundred words down though.
…should I share those six hundred words…?
………nahhh. I don’t think I’m quite ready for that yet.
But here’s the gist of it: Coulson and May (because of course it’s Philinda) were married for quite some time before the Attack on New York. But then Coulson DiedTM and then got ResurrectedTM. But gasp of horror, he had to lose his memories of his romantic relationship with May because reasons. (I actually did have some ideas for those reasons but sshhhh this is about me yeeting context and setup.)
The first half of S1 still happens as normal (except MayWard doesn’t happen because??? Vows) and it’s now post-E20 “Nothing Personal”. The morning after (or a morning soon after, whatever) the T.A.H.I.T.I. reveal! May’s mom—who doesn’t know about GH.325 and whom May fed a cover story about Coulson divorcing her or something equally as oof, IDK—shows up at the hotel and starts ripping into Coulson for breaking her daughter’s heart, then dragging her back into the field with her ex-husband (him), then accusing her of terrible things and forcing her away again.
Poor guy’s confused as heck, and so is the team, and soon enough so is Lian. The only one who understands what’s going on is May, and she’s freaking dying off to the side like why is this happening to me and eventually everybody’s like! Explain??? (Was thinking about including something from Coulson like, “Are you still keeping things from me?” Just for that extra smidge of angst, yay!)
So yeah then May gives a, like, two-sentence debriefing that elicits more questions than answers. Coulson decides to take May aside and they have a heart-to-heart. Lots of feelings and angst and hurt/comfort and at some point plenty of kissing too. Just! May hiding her feelings for Coulson’s sake but really magnified, plus some actual apologies and consideration of the grief May’s been through on Coulson’s part.
And uhh yeah that’s basically it I dunno hdsjncjshd. I warned y’all it’s OOC, plot-bendy, and very self-indulgent!
6. What character do you have the most fun writing?
I don’t think I could name a single character for this. I get different things out of taking on different voices, you know? I guess recently I’ve found myself gravitating towards more taciturn and introspective points of view, like JQ from my original novel Rosewood or M. Yisbon from my…other original novel Temple.
Generally, however, I like tackling stories from an outsider’s perspective. That’s why I so rarely write my more “substantial” (serious? demanding? for lack of better words?) projects from the PoV of my “preferred” character. This usually means writing from their love interest’s perspective, but not always. With shorter fanfic, using a more removed/unconventional/niche PoV can be really fun. Like, I once wrote a canon compliant ficlet purely(-ish) about Philinda from Tony Stark’s perspective. That isn’t always sustainable with stories that demand more character development or closer character studies, however, which is why it’s a good thing I like writing drabbles!
9. Are you more of a drabble or a longfic kind of writer? Pantser or plotter? Do you wish you were the other?
My word counts tend to run long, but I usually only write one-shots for fanfic. If I’m even inspired with a novella- or novel-length story idea for a fandom, you already know I’m in deep with them. And if I actually find the motivation to plan and execute that idea? Dangg. That’s only ever happened…twice, maybe thrice, and I’m in a lot of fandoms.
At times, I wish I could go for more of a middle ground ’cause, like, you know what I love to see? An AO3 dashboard with several completed novellas for my ship/character of choice. I mean yes, I hecking love >90k fics, but sometimes I’m in the mood for quick reads…and what am I supposed to do when I burn through all the drabbles and 2k one-shots? (Besides despair and/or reread my faves desperately.) Novellas are basically always safe for me LOL, and I’d hope to be able to give as much as I take.
Ultimately though, I think I’m okay with where I am with regards to that. I wish I could write more in general, but I’d be okay with “writing more” just meaning “writing more one-shots”, ya know? More than okay, really. I have mad respect for fic writers who have, like, a hundred or more one-shots under their belt for this one ship. The fandom ecosystem would be incomplete without them (as well as every other type of writer, but sshhh that’s the type of writer I’m closest to being right now).
I’m definitely a plotter, and I definitely prefer it that way. It’s cool having such a detailed record of my process. I like feeling like a frazzled genius on the brink of a major discovery with all of my different outlines and colour coding and many drafts and various websites.
12. Do you want your writing to be famous?
Not exactly. It might be cool if my original works were recognisable in the world, but I don’t think I’d want to be recognisable. As for fanfic, I’d low-key enjoy gaining a place in that fandom’s community as a fic writer. Like someone who gave and got fic gifts from fic writer friends, who participated in challenges and GCs, who received writing prompts on Tumblr, whose name was known for doing a certain trope/genre a bunch of times… Ya know what I mean?
Unlikely to happen when I’m so hecking hesitant to publicly (i.e., outside of AO3) claim credit for my writing, but fjnskfsjhfjs. A writer can dream, right?
15. Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)?
Of those three, tags are the easiest for me, for I have a reliable system for figuring out those.
Next easiest would probably be titles. For fanfiction, I like to use titles that are a quote from the source material. You should have seen all of my old Hamilton fanfic… I was really proud of some of those titles. And I don’t mean, like, whole lines—usually only two to five words. It’s a unique type of wordplay that I just love dabbling in.
And lastly, summaries. Sometimes inspiration strikes me and a snappy and intriguing synopsis just jumps out—one that I’m quietly pleased with—but most of the time I’ll spend way too long trying to think of such a synopsis and eventually just go with whatever I’d come up with so far. And live with my quiet dissatisfaction for the rest of time.
18. Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (Plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations...?) Tell us about them!
Typically, no. If I have deleted scenes, I save and publish them separately, but that’s about it. I sometimes think of AUs for my own work and might talk about them in my author’s notes—might even talk about writing them—but I never really do anything with them.
Although…
It’s not uncommon for me to decide a plotline isn’t working for a certain story or to think of an interesting but undoable arc for a certain character, but what I’ll do is make a whole new story for those ideas. Once I’m done developing the original idea and the branched-off one, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell they grew from the same roots. Does that count?
21. What other medium do you think your story would work well as (film, webcomic, animated series, etc.)?
That depends on the story. I’ve actually written stories in other mediums—movie screenplay, musical stageplay, poetry, TV show scripts, play scripts, roleplay—but the novel does tend to be my comfort zone. Sometimes, if I have an idea that I think could work, or would even work better, as another medium, I’ll label it as such in my folder of ideas and decide not to write it as a novel.
Most of the time, my non-book projects are collaborations. I’m working with five different people on six different story ideas: two webcomics, one stage musical, one anime, and two animated TV shows. Little concrete progress has been made in any of those, mind you, but they’re still fun to discuss!
24. Would you say your writing has changed over time?
Absolutely. But I’ve been writing stories since I was five years old, so we would hope so, huh?
I wouldn’t say my writing’s changed completely, though maybe that’s just my insider’s perspective.
25. What part of writing is the most fun?
Oh gosh, I can’t believe you’d make me choose. Writing is just such a wonderful experience for me; I love just about everything to do with it. Admittedly, not all the time, but. Since that barely qualifies as an answer, however, I’ll give you this—
The endings. Not only that intense feeling of rightness when you wrap up that last sentence, but also the moments before. The adrenaline of knowing you’re almost there but you gotta push just a bit more to actually get there. And also the part right after—the real wrap-up, honestly: the revision and the editing. Heavens, I love revising and editing my work.
Which is not to say I don’t like writing it out for the first time, too—there’s nothing quite like seeing your cursor scroll to the next page, like going from a blank expanse to a Oh man, how many more lines are even going to fit on this page?, like watching that page counter tick up another number. However, there’s something cathartic about finally ironing out those problems I had to force myself to stop worrying about earlier because “just finish the first draft dangit”.
I guess that’s not really the end of the writing process, but whatever. Close enough (as fic writers are wont to say).
Another thank-you for these asks, and feel free to come back with more at any time! ;P
Send in fun meta asks for your friendly neighbourhood writer!
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Demonbirds
Chapter 4: House of Mystery
The battle was over. The titans rested on the cold hard ground gasping for air, unable to process what just happened. They've been fighting non-stop for hours, killing off every parademon they see. It seemed like it would never end at first, and they feared that they might not be able to hold them off any longer. But then, to everyone's surprise, all of the parademons suddenly shut down.
"What just happened?" Beast Boy asked, shifting back to his human form. His left arm was broken, his legs and face bloodied and bruised. A look of confusion covered his face, not knowing if he should be happy or terribly worried.
"They're all down!" Superboy said in disbelief, he sets himself down on a piece of metal that fell off from a building. "I can't believe it..."
"That must mean they succeeded." Damian said matter-of-factly. He wanted to look calm and collected but his face betrays him. A wave of relief hits him, his lips curving up.
Everyone cheers. They hugged each other, cried tears of joy, and healed each others wounds. Now it was a matter of waiting for the justice league to come back.
Three hours passed and finally a boomtube appears on the sky. The familiar faces of heroes fly down and land softly on the ground. Their bodies were badly wounded too, but they seem to be holding up better now.
Damian runs towards his father but says nothing. He looks around, noticing the lack of numbers. 'Where is she?' he thought.
"They will follow us shortly. Cyborg couldn't handle opening a boomtube big enough for everyone to enter. Constantine will be opening a portal anytime soon for the rest." Batman announces to everyone as if reading his son's mind.
"Were there any heavy casualties?" Donna speaks up, worried about Diana who stayed behind to teleport with Constantine's group.
"None." Batman answers. "There's no need to worry, it was a success. Everyone did a great job."
The titans let out a sigh of relief and cheered again. "Let's celebrate!" Beast Boy shouts happily, Shazam and the others join him.
"We'll celebrate after we fix up the mess." Superman said, killing the atmosphere. "Don't get me wrong I'm not against it, after we're done with this we'll have a big celebration sponsored by Batman." he adds quickly, feeking guilty for ruining the mood.
Batman glares at him but he doesn't protest. Everyone cheers again and chatter excitedly about the future party.
"What's taking them so long?" Damian asked. He didn't care about the party, instead he felt impatient and uneasy. He worried about Raven, his chest hurt thinking about her. 'Is she injured too? Did Trigon hurt her? Is she healing now?' Countless thoughts run in his head wondering if she's alright.
"Be patient dude." Superboy said, patting Damian's shoulder. "Raven's a strong girl, I'm sure she's fine."
"I know she's strong." Damian felt offended that Superboy thought he saw Raven as someone weak. "But you've seen how Trigon has hurt her, and that's him being trapped in the crystal imagine if he was set free."
"Well Batman said everything was fine. If something bad happened to her I'm sure he wouldn't lie about it especially to you. " Superboy shurgs. He enjoyed seeing Damian being a lovesick fool, it's a fresh breath from his usual rude and cold demeanor. Whenever he teased her about Raven he would always get annoyed but he could see that he didn't actually hate it. Although he worries that his friend is clearly still in denial of his feelings and how this may become a hindrance in developing their relationship.
"I suppose you are right." Damian admits with a defeated sigh. He didn't understand why he felt so overwhelmingly worried about Raven. He didn't understand why seeing her made him feel so at ease. Lastly, he didn't understand why he didn't feel those same emotions towards his other team mates. 'Why do I feel like I'm being biased towards her? Why do I have these feelings?'
Suddenly a bright golden circle cuts through the air, and in it John Constantine steps out carrying Raven, with the the other heroes following behind him. Panic swells in Damian as he watches John carry her seemingly lifeless body.
"Calm down boy she's asleep." John said quickly, noticing Damian's look of horror the moment he steps out of the portal. At first he thought he looked horrible and disheveled to the point of shocking the boy, then he remembers who he was dealing with, why would Damian care about he looked? He followed Damian's eyes which landed on the girl he carried and he remembers. 'Oh yeah, I nearly forgot. That boy fancies this girl.'
Damian releases his fist, he wasn't even aware he was clenching it so hard. Behind him Donna rushes forward towards Diana. They hug and nod at each other, having an unspoken understanding.
"Why is she in that state?" Damian's voice was calm but terribly cold. "You said there were no casualties father."
"Trust me, it could've been worse." Batman replies. "Be thankful Zatanna and Constantine knocked her out before her unstable magic cause any damage to herself and to others."
Damian felt frustrated at how only Raven seemed to be the only one carrying the burden of this whole plan. "Let me carry her."
"Yeah about that..." John hesitates, looking at Zatanna for backup.
"Damian," Zatanna speaks up. "We sense something strange about Raven's magic so for the moment John and I will take care of her at the house."
Damian was speechless. 'I dont have the right to protest.' he thought. He simply stared at Raven's sleeping face and memorizing every detail, scared of never seeing it again. "Make sure you take care of her well." He shuts his eyes and force himself to turn away, looking for any distraction.
"When can we see her again?" Starfire speaks up. Damian felt thankful for her voicing out exactly what he wanted to say. 'When will I see her again?'
"She's still part of the titans. We need to know when we can have her back or when we can see and visit her." Nightwing supports Starfire.
"We're not taking her away forever, she's your team mate and if the house lets you in then sure you can visit." Zatanna explains.
"Since you want to hold her so badly, carry her for a minute while I summon the house of mystery." John said to Damian.
Damian doesn't hesitate to carry her, he held her as if she was the most precious treasure in the world. "Quite heavy isn't she?" John jokes.
"Not really." Damian replies. "Maybe your arms have gotten weak."
John rolls his eyes and proceed to summon the house of mystery. A few seconds later, a huge wooden house appears out of thin air. "Viola! This is the base for the Justice League dark, where Raven will be staying temporarily."
Damian was amazed but he wouldn't admit that. The other heroes gather around the house, wanting to seek refuge where they can rest properly. "All of you can try to enter, if you're accepted by the house then you can relax but if you're rejected...well you better use that flying skill of yours."
John steps in the house first, followed by Zatanna. A couple of heroes entered too but many of them were sent flying out a few seconds later. Damian was relieved to have his feet remaining on the floor, the house accepted him and Raven.
"Where's the bedroom?" Damian asks.
"Aren't you a little young to be doing such things?" Green Lantern teases, much to everyone's surprise he wasn't kicked out of the house.
"Not cool dude." Flash comes to defend Damian. "That joke is so not appropriate right now."
Damian ignores them and proceeds to go upstairs. Somehow it felt like the house was guiding his feet to go to the right direction. Soon enough he found himself in front of a dark door labelled 'Bedroom'.
He opens it, and to his surprise the room was furnished nicely. He carries Raven to the bed and placed her down carefully. He sits on the bed, watching her sleeping figure. 'It doesn't seem like she's having any nightmare.' he thought. 'Trigon really is no longer trapped within her crystal.'
Seeing her sleep so peacefully made him feel drowsy too. The tiredness from the fight earlier seemed to finally settle in his body. He rubs his eyes and slaps himself, trying to fight off the fatigue. Too bad he couldn't fight it off any longer, eventually his eyes close and his body fall on the bed right next to Raven's.
'Only for a few minutes.' This was his last thought before he succumbed into deep slumber.
***
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Anyway I wrote this when I was sleepy af last night so I hope this chapter isn't a complete mess.
Hope you enjoy it :)
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Cookies
Look- okay I know how this looks and I know that it’s one am-ish but sometimes people want to lose themselves in imagining a fluffball of a man giving his children cookies when they had a bad day okay? I do not kin Patton, I simply admire from a distance. Okay? Do you understand why this is occuring? Good, now enjoy the one of, if not, the fluffiest thing I have ever wrote.
Logan- Another day of being ignored until the last second when finally they realized he was in the room. It usually didn’t wear down on him too much but today was different. He admittedly made efforts, even raised his hand but to no avail. At least it was over and he could relax into his room’s bed as Thomas has was in his room in the real world. He vaguely heard a knock on the door but didn’t care to answer. He needed a nap, or maybe coffee.
He woke up 30 minutes later to his alarm to remind him that he did have to update his planner to account for the recent shift in schedule due to today’s meeting outcome. He was about to reach over and silence his alarm when his hand fell on a plate. He glanced over to what appeared to be a dark blue plate with a circuit board patterning and a warm cookie with Crofters Jam filling. he was confused until he noticed the hand-written note in light blue marker. The letter described how, presumably Patton, was grateful that Logan was trying his best and that even though he may not always be heard he’s cared for. A small creeped on to Logan’s face as he put down the note and bit into the warm cookie apparently made with love.
“Thank you, Patton.”
Roman- Of course, bring removed form the coveted status of hero certainly bruised more than just his pride. At the moment he was at his desk still vigorously writing out his ideas for new TikTok sketches when his eyelids began to feel heavier than his sword and shield after a long battle. He knew he had to earn back his worth but perhaps his beautifully crafted four-poster bed with silk sheets and the fluffiest pillows he could imagine would be a nice change of sitting arrangement. He changed into his comfiest pajamas and slipped under the covers as he vaguely heard a knock at the door but sleep had already claimed him.
He growled as he was suddenly awake by his sing bird alarm clock and took note of the wonderfully delicious smell coming from his nightstand. What was that smell exactly? Was it white chocolate and red velvet? He gazed around his room to find a plate with his crest circling the edge and a warm cookie that looked as good as it smelled with a hand-written note. Roman lifted the plate gently to read the note from his favorite padre. It talked about how he was perfect no matter what and that even he wasn't hero he certainly Patton’s. The note almost brought a tear to his eye as he took a bite of the soft yet form cookie and let the chocolate melt in his mouth.
“Thanks, Padre.”
Virgil- It was not a god day for Virgil. Not only did that lying snake weasel his way into Thomas’s acceptance but also he had the nerve to reveal his name. Not only that but now that Thomas is having an internal war, Virgil has mountains of work, what feels like daily anxiety attacks, and he has to see that scaley horror every day. He would rather figure how to permanently kill a side then deal this much. Today was even worse though because apparently he’s the villain for having eyes and seeing a snake as a liar. Whatever, he just needed a depression nap and his playlist. He almost heard a knock at the door as he let himself drift into world where he could shoe those two sad excuses for sides what he really thought.
He had no idea what time it was but it was probably late. He woke up as his playlist was on Black Parade and sniffed something sweet in the air. He didn't remember anyone warning him about Patton baking so he began to panic until he saw a plate sitting barely in view behind the Nightmare Before Christmas pillows and Jack the Skeleton plush. He pushed himself over tot the other side of the bed to see what someone had put there. It was a plate with storm clouds all over it and a Panic! at the Disco logo obscured in the center by a dark purple cookie with black sprinkles on it. Underneath was hand-written letter which Virgil carefully pulled out to read. It talked about how Patton understood that right there was a lot going on but that he could always reach out. It detailed that it was okay to not be okay and that it wasn't a burden to help him. Virgil smiled as he grabbed the cookie and bit into it’s soft sweetness.
“Thanks Dad.”
Janus- Today was probably one of the worst days he’d ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Rivalries were normal and that’s fine but it’s not fine to go that far below the belt. Janus was angry pacing his room trying to talk himself out of murder and failing miserably. It was just too much at the moment. Knives were always pointed vaguely in his direction not right at his throat. It always seemed like physical appearance was the problem here even though they know shapeshifting is an option but it’s also not an option- what do they want out of him?! Eventually he landed on the idea that he may as well just sleep it off and sharpen a knife when he woke up. He crept into bed after changing into something comfy and warm, turned on his heat lamp and descended into sleep as he almost heard a knock.
He woke up to an unfamiliar sweetness filling the air of his room. It was sugary sweet and rather enticing but for all he knew Remus could’ve gotten bored again and done something dangerous. This time, to his surprise, there was a plate on his nightstand. His glanced over at the scaley pattern along the plate that only stopped at the sunflower in the center. There was a yellow cookie with dark chocolate chips layed intricately on the baked good. He noted a small written letter under it and decided it would be rude not to read the note first. It talked about how the sides were still warming up him and that eventually everything would be normal. The letter also noted that it was brave of him to let down a wall for them and that it is okay to be vulnerable. Janus let a real smile cross his face as he began to enjoy the sugary treasure.
“My thanks, Patton.”
Remus ( yes really ) - It took quite a lot to throw Remus into a full on frustrated rage. Somehow, today managed to do that. He understood he wasn’t the most likeable aise among the seven six of them. Even so, did they really have to pull the evil twin card and the unstable card? It was like playing strip poker in the middle of a blizzard, it’s not fair! He was trying his best just like any other side so why do you appreciate precious little Roman and leave Remus’s corpse for the dogs to eat? In fairness the biting would be kinda nice but that’s besides the point. Maybe a nice long murder fantasy would get him back to something more tolerable. He changed into a crop top and booty short and threw himself in the general direction of the bed before passing out.
He woke up and immediately fell off the bed which he was barely even on in the first place. What a great way to resume his 24 hours. As he picked himself up he smelled something sweet but also a little bleachy. He looked around before his eyes landed on a plate covered in tentacles with his logo in the center. He sniffed it before noticing the note. He picked it up almost spilling the plate and read the written note. It said all these things about how even though he was a little strange he was still loved. He was still creativity just a different kind and that should be respected. He gave a toothy smile as the note informed his that this dark green cookie was made with expired ingredients, mildly burned, and had bleach for flavor. He nommed on the cookie with delight as the disgusting taste filled mouth.
“Thanks, Daddy~”
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Additional: Patton knew his kiddos pretty well and he knew that today was one of the not-so-good days. He always liked to calm down with a cookie so he may as well treat the others! It took an hour or maybe two to bake all the different cookies and write all the notes. It was certainly nice to see his kiddoes sleep peacefully on or half-on the bed. Knew they would, now he made them all he needed was for them to be happy. He certainly didn’t expect letters back. A small white envelope with Logan written dark blue, a parchment esk envelope with a red wax seal and Roman written in red ink, a mangy ink splattered letter with Virgil written in Tim Burton font, a yellowed envelope with Janus in careful yellow cursive, and a torn and bitten letter with Remus made out of letters from articles and newspapers. Each one talked about how kind the gesture was and how much they each appreciated it, with some more sappy than others. His favorite thing though was they all ended by saying thank you in their own way. It was all a dad could ask for.
#fluff#sanders sides fluff#logan fluff#roman fluff#patton fluff#virgil fluff#janus fluff#remus fluff#fluff fic#tw remus#tw remus being remus#proud dad#patton dad#patton cookies#very fluffy#baking fic#slight hurt/comfort#slight angst#mostly fluff#format fic#impulse fic#it's very late#i should be sleeping#but i'm not#i'm very awake#sorry for any mistakes#i'm about half awake#half asleep#enjoy this tho
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omegafrisk is om-over-frisk, apologies, and unreleased stuff
i want to preface this by saying that every time i admit to a mistake i get people trying to minimise it. if you’re getting ready to do that, please don’t. it makes me feel terrible. even if you don���t agree with how i feel, i violated my own morals, and that means a lot to me!
so, omegafrisk is definitely over. it’s partially that i was in a bad bad place when i started this comic and it’s always gonna be tied to that for me, partially that i’ve just become a much better writer since then and i’d have to reboot the whole thing to be satisfied with it, and partially just that i’m not into undertale enough to make a whole comic anymore.
and speaking of being in a bad place: letting that bleed through into my writing is what i want to apologise for. i’ve come to realise i was a victim of grooming when i started this comic (and as i continued to write it). it messed me up, and i wrote messed up stuff because i just didn’t know better. the child gore, the flippant use of suicide, the extremely inappropriate jokes about kids, probably other stuff i don’t remember - it all disgusts me now. i’m so sorry i put that out into the world and that it took me so long to address it.
i thought about password protecting this blog and shutting it down altogether, but i’ve decided i won’t do that. after wrestling with tumblr a bit i think i’ve deleted the worst stuff, but if you think there’s anything else i should get rid of please bring it to my attention through IM, or through the submit box if you’re shy (you can submit anonymously if you log out).
again, don’t defend me. if you don’t agree keep it to yourself. i will block you if you try to minimise this.
heavy stuff out of the way, onto the content, which i’m sure most of you are much more interested in.
ABOUT THE STORY
i thought about releasing my entire plot outline, but... it sucks. that thing predates mad mew mew. it’s terrible. there’s barely even any detail. whatever you’ve come up with yourself is more interesting.
i do have plenty of stuff to share though! this summary got long as hell, so the rest is going under a cut.
since it’s so long, i’ll put the one thing i am mostly happy with here (obviously sui/child death implications):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1modE5IQiwNIwRPHBBkwADAEbPttbpIzJBWFaBZlvYHY/edit?usp=sharing
this is the script for an ask i was planning for ages. first written in 2016 apparently?? with the help of the fantastic emouse. it’s a look on what was going on in the original timeline while frisk and chara were off gallivanting through spacetime.
the one thing i’m not pleased with is i don’t think it’s totally ic for flowey to start resetting again. i left it in though ‘cause i don’t feel like updating it.
another thing i’ll leave you is the playlist of instrumental themes i collected for chara and frisk, which i don’t think i ever released. this must also be from about 2016.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVSr-S6q61wCF5IFuBO2Ipl0Nb-u3r4xo
it starts out with frisk’s themes, life/universe and high score are shared themes, and after that chara’s themes begin.
summaries of the rest of the event and the ending under the cut!
A WRINKLE IN TIME
i can at least summarise the rest of the event i had planned. mettaton was about to turn the tables on everyone by having a camera crew burst through the ceiling (which were gonna be some people’s cameo’d ocs). he’d broadcast the debate over who got the soul live to try and bully everyone into giving him it. he had some fair points - he’s the only one of them that’s literally indestructible (at least to monsters and small children) - but both asgore and undyne were determined that they would be the ones to take it.
flowey would then pop up with his own plan. he’d kill everyone in the room except for charadyne (and mettaton just because, again, indestructible to magic). it would’ve been a cool little animation that scrolled past everyone’s shocked faces as bullets appeared behind them with that jarring sound effect they have in game, then cut to black with a cacophony of them all turning to dust.
this was all to force charadyne to load their save. he thought they’d be able to load to before undyne absorbed chara’s soul, which would be impossible as that moment would’ve been undyne’s first save point. (i’m only now realising the hole in this - surely he would’ve known that after his fusion with chara? but wait, he didn’t know about resets until he was revived, can beasts just not save? fucking undertale man)
regardless, chara and undyne would try to reset to, in chara’s words, “the last time you were... filled with... determination”. i wanted to do an animatic to half of [this song]. sweet chimes as undyne rifles back through her memories for that moment, building up to her getting ready - a blast of sound as it rips the timeline to shreds.
chara’s soul is so fragmented, only exacerbated by being in a foreign timeline, that they can’t reset properly. i was thinking of styling the catastrophic glitch that resulted after an undertale corruption because those things scare the shit out of me and also can be fucking hilarious. love me some comedic horror.
chara and undyne would eventually figure out they had to leave the timeline and manually straighten it out. because it was knotted. it was wr. there was a wrinkle. in the timeline. a wrinkle in time. because the event is called. it’s c. a wrinkle in time
that’s where i was hazy on details - you can see just how much was made up as i went along. somehow, they’d be separated, and undyne would have left enough dt in chara’s soul that they’d be able to go down to the human village and yoink some souls from the mausoleum there. (i had worldbuilding stuff around that - the soul jars used in the underground are based off what humans use for burial in general. burying your body in a grave = having your soul stored in a mausoleum. there’d also be equivalents to cremation and such)
i hadn’t really thought much about that - the actual idea was that chara would find their old house and we’d get a flashback sequence about their backstory (eugh, glad i didn’t get around to that). and then, idk, the mausoleum would be empty or something? i didn’t think about what might happen if they were actually able to get all those souls. that is to say, i didn’t think about the story implications - i totally thought about chara becoming a cool shapeshifting rainbow beast because i’m like that.
THE ENDING
rest assured there was gonna be a happy ending. chara and frisk were gonna have a big cool battle bursting through various timelines where frisk tried to talk chara down and chara tried to kick frisk’s ass. at the end, frisk would’ve given up and let chara kill them. but chara wouldn’t have been able to. as viciously as they attacked, they could only do a single point of damage - they and frisk are both made of magic now, and magic works on emotion, and chara cannot truly hate frisk enough to end their life.
so they would’ve made up, broken the barrier in their original timeline together, and lived happily ever after with no more resets.
i remember daydreaming an animatic of the two of them trying to break the barrier, stumbling a few times and gradually achieving synchrony, to [this song].
you might notice i don’t mention flowey here. i was kind of struggling to figure out what to do with everyone else in regards to like, actual methods of character development. i had some ideas about chara bringing wrinkle-in-time flowey along with them on their adventures and him somehow getting his memories spliced with og-timeline flowey’s near the end but didn’t really think them through.
here’s a shittily-sketched old concept of what i might’ve done with him though:
not exactly my most beautiful work but it’s all you’re getting. it’s just visual notes, so i didn’t think it through much.
i daydreamed a lot about a cute ending animatic to [this song]. i don’t remember my thoughts well enough to summarise, but i hope you can come up with something cute yourselves!
aaand that’s all for this post. thanks for reading!
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Jen is a character out of an unwritten book. Fairy Michael said it best, "That girl is from another planet." The girl with the spider legs. I say is because a person like Jen doesn't just leave this planet when they die, it'll take awhile before a sparkle like hers dissipates. She was fire, fun and one of the most hilarious people I'd ever met. She was smart as a whip and great company. Jen and I were the girls dating the Hungarians. Thomas and Sam were attached at the hip, which meant for better or worse, so were Jen and I.
The four of us lived a few months together in a rusty shipping container until the rainy season hit and we were practically flooded out. That was November 2015. The rain in Big Sur fell especially hard that year, breaking California out of it's drought. We were always together in the beginning. Jen would wake at dawn to work her morning shift at Ripplewood and Sam was always ready to walk her to work. If you were unfortunate enough to be in the Ripplewood parking lot around 6am, you'd encounter them with their tongues down each other's throat. Sam and Jen were always making out. I remember once my parents came to visit from Boston, so we took them to the aquarium and my dad joked that Sam and Jen missed the whole thing because they were too busy engulfed in each other.
Living in the shipping container in late October provided minimal heat and sometimes the night temperatures dropped below freezing, so we spent a lot of our time at the pub. To stay warm Sam, Jen and I spent hundreds of hours in the soft glow of the pub's fireplace, while Thomas worked in the kitchen. The pub was located in the same parking lot as our little container, so we would joke it was the living room. I'm sure I'm not the first to say that about the Maiden, and if you were lucky to have spent an evening there, you understand how special it was. A little cozy corner community of people off the beaten Highway one path.
To bide our time I wrote. And drank.
Harassed the bartenders.
Sam read countless books. But Jen could never sit still. She would pick up a book she was interested in, read a few pages and then start another one. She'd get bored, order a beer from Spencer or, if it was Friday night, from Heavy Metal Chris. She'd roll a cigarette on the bar, go outside by the barrel to smoke and every time I’d glance out the window at her, she would be hugging someone new. Lots of times she'd spot a friend in the parking lot, jump in their car, leave her stuff inside and come back hours later to her beer and purse, right where she'd left them. You don't deserve that kind of community love unless you work for it and Jen certainly did. She was always around and if I needed her in a pinch, I only had to use the “Big Sur telephone”, "Hey everyone!” I’d call into the open doors of the pub, If you see Jen, tell her I'm looking for her." "Which Jen?" Someone would ask. "The one with the long legs." I’d reply. "Crossed eye Jen?" That was another thing about us. We both had occasionally lazy eyes.
In November Thomas and I moved into our Kia Forte and Sam and Jen moved into her Jetta. We didn't see them as much. Sam and Jen stayed in the valley, sleeping at The Grange while Thomas and I drove down to the south coast and spend our time off surfing at Sand dollar. I remember once we took Sam and Jen out to surf. I let her borrow my board and watched in horror like a worried mother as she flipped and flopped and smashed her and my board over and over again until she realized she could use just use it as a boogie board. I can still remember the endless joy on her face, even today, years later, holed up in a giant downtown apartment, far far away from the Pacific. That cute squinty smile. She wouldn't give me my board back for the rest of the day, no matter how much I pleaded.
In late December Thomas and I decided to move to Monterey. The day we signed our lease I drove to LA to get the rest of my stuff I had left behind when I abruptly decided to follow my heart and move to Big Sur. When I came home to Monterey, the apartment had been completely decorated. It looked like a homeless hippie had vomited all over our walls and, I guess she kinda did. Jen welcomed me with her big goofy googly eyed smile and offered me a plate of burnt cookies. That wasn't the only time Jen decorated my apartment or cooked for us .Once she made a stew of eggs, beans, greens and any condiment and spice she could find in the fridge and cabinet, including the fish sauce. We all took bites to be nice and then fed our portions to the dogs when she wasn't looking. Poor dogs.
Jen and Sam lost their jobs that winter and survived off of Chips Ahoy. They'd sleep over regularly to do laundry, take showers, smoke giant bong rips. We’d get massively stoned and lounge around listening to music while braiding each other's hair. We always had some new abalone or jade or money or doobie or gossip to share. Our collective favorite drink was a latte with a double shot of Bailey's so when they would sleep over, as a thank you, Jen would always make us Bailey's coffee in the morning. One thing Jen was exceptional at, other than being a phenomenal friend and muse, was making lattes.
Once Jen hosted a dinner party at Coast Gallery, where Henry Miller’s famed water colors hang on the walls. It was just the four of us and Geologist Steve, who was living there at the time. Jen welcomed us at Steve’s door as if it were her own home. The small apartment had access to the latte machine in the commercial kitchen and together we drank at least 10 if not more coffees. She had made little foam hearts in every cup.
High on caffeine we walked out to the balcony where the cafe serve sandwiches and drinks and looked out at the moon shinning off the ocean. There were few clouds in the sky as the marine layer had dispersed and clearly we could see shooting stars falling around us. Thomas took me by my hand and we started to waltz, as we circled around, I caught a glimpse of Sam and Jen, tongues down each other’s throats. It’s silly how when you are young you believe a moment can last forever.
Jen and I were like sisters. We didn't always get along in the beginning and we'd go long spans of time not seeing each other, but we always had the other's back. If I needed a job, she'd find one for me. If she needed to talk, we'd find each other. Once I took her to that dive bar in Seaside every Big Sur local has been to. I forgot the name. It was noon on a Tuesday and the place was packed. We spent too much money on booze and too much time complaining to each other about the difficulties of being us. After a very short lived game of pool, we decided it was time to leave, but as I reached to open the door, a man blocked my exit and said, "Where do you think you're going?" I stood motionless, freaked out, but Jen just swatted him away and walked out of the dark into the daylight without a blink.
Eventually she and Sam made a deal with some deeply loved locals and ended up building their own little shack on a mountainside. Jen found a book on gardening and designed her own, at one point she dug out her own stairway down to the garden. Sam and Jen’s only other source of entertainment was a keyboard piano. When Thomas and I would come to visit, Jen and I would play duets. We were shit at it, but that didn't matter. Jen and Sam were living in a dream world. They forged for seaweed at the beach and dried it. They found a colony of bees and tried to harvest the honey. Two of their four walls were made of glass. They watched and documented the Sobranes Fire from their bed. One day as the fire raged, we climbed on their roof and drank Bailey's coffee from their makeshift kitchen: a tarp, a cooler and a small propane stove
.It's been 3 years since I've seen Jen. Thomas and I ran out of money and options after the Pub closed, so we decided with heavy hearts to move to the other side, my side, of the country. She and Sam broke up about a year after we moved. A poor choice, a painful ending, a breakup I wonder if I could have stopped, had I been there.
Despite the distance, I still shared photos with her, of the dogs, of our wedding, our first born little girl. And Jen has never left us, it wasn't even a week ago Thomas and I were sharing memories about her. I still have the pieces of jade we traded, but I'm realizing now that she's gone, how little of her I still keep. My apartment used to be where she kept her books, her clothes, some memories. Typically when a person you love dies, there's a funeral to attend, a gathering of friends to mourn with, but all I have is Thomas and somehow we'll have to tell Sam. How do you tell someone the greatest love of your life is dead? I'm sure it'll be a few more hours until I find out the details of her passing, a few more hours until the shock wears off and I find myself mourning my friend while playing with my children, doing the dishes or driving in the car.
Everyone has their own idea about what happens after we die. Thomas thinks we live on only in memories and DNA, I think a bit more spiritually than that. Anyway, what we think doesn’t matter. Wherever Jen is, besides in all our hearts, I know she's having a hell of an adventure and I hope someday we can ride those waves again at Asilimar.
#bigsur#big sur#pub#bestfriends#best friends#love#shortstory#short story#death#angel#guardian angel#caligirls#california#nerd#nerdalert#nerd alert#twitch#twitchtv#highway1#pch#theneverendingsummer#sparkle#shine#bff#forever
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