#and I really dislike their lip shape which also made them more human looking | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hotgirlmythology · 1 year

Text

Mellara the siren, an OC

I habe decided to take a small break from incessantly bombarding people with my lore so that you can all enjoy some slightly less wide reaching and more personable content (also I got bored).

Mellara is a siren of the Equatorial anatomy, who originates from a nation about 20 ish degreees north of the equator, close in longtitude to the fiefdoms of galania though significantly lower in latitude. I have not decided the lore of it yet. I shall also completely ignore this fact as she was escaping from her old life when she implored a passing hunting group to let her run away with them, and I doubt she would allow it to be relevant to her new life.

Skills, hobbies, duties and talents:

Has very dextrous fingers, and so despite her agility in a hunt usually spends her time making crab traps and weaving nets. Ironically because of the amount of usage the inherited magic gets fixing their blisters, her hands are unusually unmarked compared to, for example, a proficient harpoon thrower.

Her fingers also come in handy when playing the flute, which she does extremely well, and the piercing song is excellent for communicating through a storm. In tandem with the only other instrumentalist in her hunting group (all the others prefer singing) they can put on some spectacular performances

Her main hobby is weaving shell jewellery - landbound people might not admit it, but being able to say that your mother-of-pearl shell necklace is not only gorgeous but also siren-made is a brilliant conversation starter. She prefers not to wear it herself, taking a lot more pleasure in seeing others wearing her creations around

She is, as a rule, the forward scout of the hunting group, checking potential migration sites for potential predators and more than able to get out if they do show up

As suggested, she is a talented musician, and though it is mostly other sirens who hear her play or sing, she does work the occasional magical charm over beachgoing landbound people when she plays at the coast

Looks:

Looks kinda twenties, though I challenge you to guess where in that range she falls

Auburn hair, cut in a pixie style (close as you can get with a sharpened seashell)

Was on the shorter side as a human but has a longer torso/tail melding region than most sirens, so her torso looks a bit longer than it used to

Body type a mildly hourglassy slim frame, olive skin tone

Slightly hooded eyes with an almond shape, eyes a lighter shade of brown

Her tail style is that of a conventional mermaid with a pair of extra fins halfway down - she is extra good at taking tight corners, and so is usually sent to test current strengths

Scales are a shade darker than turquoise, and she has a few going further up her stomach than the majority of sirens given the torso/tail melding region

B-cup on the larger side, binds them down with seaweed if she really needs aerodynamicity (a real word)

Enjoys using sea clay to give herself sort of tattoos, especially over her forearms where it is less likely to crack

Lips idk to be honest I've never paid that much attention to lips

Personality:

Common for sirens, she is fiercely independent and dislikes anything that may tie her to a location. However, due to events in the past she takes this to an extreme, often refusing favours if she cannot repay them in a few days

However, to those she travels with or who have proved to her that they truly do not need repayment for every favour they give to her, she is willing to open up more, and will travel miles to visit friends if she is in the area

Ok so contrary to what this description makes you think she's actually pretty sprightly to talk to and in her mannerisms, and is very easy to get along with in the moment

She is content to be left with her crab traps and nets for the majority of the time, but will chat your ears off if you let her

Really pretty resilient to adversity, safe in the knowledge that it will either get fixed or it won't, and if it won't she can either leave or she can't, and if she can't leave she's probably dead, which means she can't worry anyway.

Can't really ignore the fact that she does have a power crazy streak about her, like most sirens, especially the ones who feel emotions more intensely as she does. She contents herself with the aforementioned beach performances most of the time

However has been known to lead the occasional ship on a wild goose chase after non-existent schools of fish

She doesn't get angry easily. Thankfully, given that when she does she is very bad at taking 10 seconds to breathe deep and relax, and instead goes for 10 spears. It is usually justified, in her defence

Dreams:

She has heard about an enchanted artefact of a silver flute, tucked away on an island to the north. Landbound people in the area don't bother trying to get to the island because of the rocks, and she only knows about it from another migratory hunting group. There's a fair bet therefore that it's still there. There is also a fair chance it would work for her, given, well, it's a flute and she knows how to play them

She met an elf from an itinerant religious envoy in the Minashun region, and they got along extremely well, said elf expressing a desire to one day become a siren too. One day she would like to go back to the area and make good on the words they shared on the beach under the stars. And on that note:

Gender and sexuality for sirens:

I thought I'd put a note abt this as it's quite important for making characters.

Sirens don't have a concept of gender as we understand it. They are all built on the same pattern (that is, upper body of a female of their race, lower body of a fish tail, legs, etc depending on the particular subspecies), and the views of their old cultures have a habit of fading rapidly from their subconscious mind, even if they might need to be prodded a little to realise they don't really care anymore. Every siren is referred to as a siren only, without separate "roles" attributed by a gender. They treat, for example, humans of differing presentation much the same across the board. I use she for their pronouns because I haven't written a language for them

Sexuality to sirens is not a matter of words but of actions. If a siren takes a human female as lover (don't ask how it works mechanically), there is a vague understanding she likes human females, and the personality traits associated with this lover in particular. Similar attitudes are provided by her fellows to most any race and creed a siren goes for. It is, after all, none of their business unless her attractions start affecting the cohesion of the hunting group, though the love, or heartbreak, stories of sirens make for great migration tales (longform stories told during particularly distant siren migration)

#siren oc #siren #oc #original character #fantasy race #fantasy #fantasy culture #mermaid #merfolk #worldbuilding

5 notes · View notes

raven-at-the-writing-desk · 3 years

Note

Can I pls get headcanons of malleus, lillia, leona, azul, and neige with a crush on a reader who's a teachers assistant at a preschool?

Curiouser and Curiouser...

Somehow, you and Malleus keep bumping into each other while you’re taking the kids out on walks. Just as he fears, his imposing aura makes the children shy away in fear--and you have to put your arms out to block the kids from him, just as a safety precaution.

He tries to make peace with you and the preschoolers by crouching down to meet the kids at eye level and offering a mysterious smile and a daisy conjured from thin air. Seeing the magic gets the kids excited, and they start swarming him and asking to see more.

Pretty soon, Malleus has been converted into a human-shaped jungle gym, with preschoolers hanging off his limbs. The kids attached to his arms squeal and try reaching for his horns, too! You panic and try to pry the children off while apologizing profusely. Malleus merely chuckles and reassures you that he does not mind the company.

The two of you end up parking on a nearby bench and spending the afternoon watching the kids race around, playing tag and other funny games. Without realizing it, Malleus’s hand slowly finds his way to clasp yours--and when you glance up in surprise, he looks away with a shy blush.

Another daisy appears in his hands, and he tucks this one behind your ear. It’s a quiet symbol of his innocent love--he just hopes his message reaches you.

Lilia drops by midday at the preschool to play with the children--and always in a weird way, like from the ceiling or through a window! He has a grand old time chasing the kids around and tickling them.

He tells you all about his own kids (”They’ve all grown up into such splendid young men,” Lilia gushes proudly), which confuses you because he looks so young--and Lilia has to clarify that he is seen as the “father figure” of his friend group.

He helps herd the kids into single file lines to wash their hands and sit down for snack time. Lilia may not be the best at cooking, but he can help you assemble simple snacks, like yogurt between two graham crackers, or sliced fruit. If a kid’s having trouble eating, Lilia can hold a spoon out for them and declare “here comes the broooom!”, or pretend to chow down on their yummy share of food, to get them to open up.

He’s very eager to join the preschoolers when they play pretend restaurant! Lilia pantomimes cooking (even adding little sound effects, like the hissing of a fryer) when it’s his turn to be the chef, and makes enthusiastic chomping and lip smacking when it’s his turn to be the customer!

While he’s pretending to chop up a plastic carrot (with an equally as plastic) knife, Lilia throws you a wink and offers to make “something special” for you. He uses that as a segue to invite you to dinner with his family (my, how smooth of him)~

Leona avoids your workplace like the plague. Well... sort of. He lingers by the preschool’s front gates, leaning his back against them with his arms folded, waiting for you to be let off your shift so he can talk to you. (Leona glares at the parents passing by to pick up their little snot goblins.)

The one time he actually tried entering the building, he was immediately accosted by kids trying to grab his ears and tail. It was a nightmare--and since then, no matter how much he might have liked you, he swore to only attempt talking to you outside of your regular work hours and location.

Poor Leona really struggles to make conversation--not because he’s nervous or anything, but because he dislikes children and has to hold himself back from making a comment about how annoying he finds them to be. You can talk about your kids for hours on end, but all Leona can muster as a response are awkward head nods and grunts.

He eventually manages to find his footing by settling on telling tales about his furball of a nephew, Cheka. Leona won’t say it out loud, but he loves seeing how your eyes light up at his stories--and he finds himself daydreaming about how he’d feel if they were directed at him.

He accidentally lets it slip that there may be someone he fancies to Cheka, which, of course, sends him into a giggling fit. Cheka sings songs about “Ojitan and the Teacher’s Helper”, makes crayon drawings of them holding hands under a rainbow, and basically serves as Leona’s biggest cheerleader!

You’re a regular at the Mostro Lounge, and Azul comes to learn of your occupation through chatting with you. He finds himself drifting over to your table time and time again, with short greetings quickly turning into prolonged discussions.

While Azul doesn’t look after children of his own, he jokes that dealing with the twins is like handling two overgrown kids anyway. He often trades you stories of the twins’ shenanigans in exchange for stories of your preschoolers’ shenanigans.

He’ll demonstrate how generous he is by occasionally making donations to your preschool. The kids are always excited when the beloved A. Ashengrotto sends them new toys, art supplies, and picture books. Recently, the plastic cash register, play money set, and giant octopus plushie Azul donated have been popular during play time.

When you have the free time, Azul allows you into the kitchen to show you how innovative, helpful, and health-conscious he can be. There, he rolls up his sleeves and shows you an array of healthy, kid-friendly snacks you can serve up. Fruit salads in the shape of funny faces, veggie puree sauces, mini pizza bagels with broccoli and mushrooms on top...

Those brothers Azul mentioned (Floyd and Jade?) usually lurk not too far behind, whispering to each other and snickering (you swear you overheard them mutter “simp” under their breaths). You ask Azul what that’s all about, but he usually rolls his eyes and tells you to ignore the hooligans--just focus on him.

He confides his crush in the Seven Dwarves, who immediately all rush to help him! Because of all their conflicting personalities, the advice they give is also very conflicting, and it ends up not helping Neige much at all... Still, he’s grateful for their support!

Neige eagerly volunteers to do charity performances for the kids you help look after! It’s a nice break from the more corporate gigs with contracts and large venues--plus, it’s an excuse to see you!

He stays after the performance to play with the kids! Since Neige is also an actor, he helps the children put on a little stage play. He puts on a paper crown that some preschoolers made for him and ties a blanket around his neck to resemble a cape. Acting like a prince, he takes your hand and guides you to a seat to watch their show!

Neige dances and sings with the kids on the “stage” (aka the show-and-tell rug). The story of their play makes little to no sense, but the children are having a lot of fun, and so are you!

When the play comes to an end, Neige surprises you by dropping to one knee and taking both of your hands. With a light dusting of a blush upon his cheeks, he dons a solemn smile and asks you to be his. “... Hehe. Did that make your heart skip a beat?”

#twst #twst x reader #Leona Kingscholar #Malleus Draconia #Azul Ashengrotto #twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland headcanons #curiouser and curiouser #Reader #self insert #Neige Leblanche #Lilia Vanrouge #Lilia Vanrouge x Reader #Neige Leblanche x Reader #Malleus Draconia x Reader #Azul Ashengrotto x Reader #Leona Kingscholar x Reader #disney twisted wonderland

875 notes · View notes

bluejayblueskies · 3 years

Note

For the kiss prompt thing, could you do 34 and/or 66 with Jontim, please?

kiss prompt list!

34 - Returned from the dead kiss | 66 - Staring At The Other’s Lips, Trying Not To Kiss Them, Before Giving In

i did both! set in an au where tim survives the unknowing. additionally, in this au jon and tim were together in research and season one but then broke it off in season two for canon-typical reasons

cw for mentions of injury and grief, mentions of death, suicidal ideation (mild), mentions of hospitalization, mentions of paranoia and stalking, and swearing

Ao3 link in source!

Jon’s been awake for two weeks and three days when Tim finally works up the nerve to see him.

(He’s not nervous, he tells himself. It’s not nerves twisting his stomach and leaving a bitter taste in his mouth and making his hands shake ever so slightly where they grasp the doorknob on Jon’s office door. It might be guilt, but he dislikes the thought and discards it immediately. Hatred? That doesn’t feel right either. He’d shed that anger a few months prior, body still aching from being crushed underneath a building’s worth of brick and mortar and holding Martin while he cried at Jon’s bedside, hiccupping into the fabric of Tim’s shirt, He’s not waking up, Tim. He's never waking up.)

He opens the door and sees Jon sitting at his desk, hair pinned up in a haphazard topknot and a jumper that’s much too large swallowing his body whole. Jon looks up at him, his eyes widening a bit, and oh.

It’s relief.

Tim lets the door swing shut behind him and leans against the wall next to the doorframe, hands coming up to grip his elbows as he hugs his arms close to his chest. One arm is still mottled with angry red scars, spiraling patterns of shrapnel laced along his skin. He rubs a thumb over one of the larger scars near the crook of his elbow absently as he says, “Hey. I… I heard you’d woken up.”

Jon just stares at him for a moment, like he’s not quite sure what he’s looking at. Just as it’s bordering on the edge of annoying, Jon finally says, “Yes, I… I have. A- a few weeks ago.”

“Right.”

There’s another long moment of silence between them, this one tenser than the first. Jon’s avoiding Tim’s eyes, his face pinched and unhappy. His hands are fiddling with the cuffs of his jumper nervously, and something within Tim knocks loose at the sight. “I’m not here to yell at you, okay?”

Jon startles, his eyes finding Tim’s for a moment before darting away again. He’s never liked direct eye contact, Tim remembers, but this is something else. Tim gets the distinct feeling that it’s at least partially his fault. Maybe a bit more than partially. Then, quietly, Jon says, “Why not?”

Great. With a weary sigh, Tim steps away from the wall and drops himself into the ratty armchair that faces Jon’s desk. “Because it’s been six months, Jon. A lot has changed.” He makes a humorless noise. “I mean, it’s all the same shit—spooky monsters and fucked-up situations and a job I can’t get rid of. But, you know.” He rubs his thumb over the scar, shrugs his shoulders. “The Circus is gone. Thought I’d be gone with it, but I’m not. And you were gone, which made things easier for a while. Less complicated, because I didn’t have to look at you and feel—”

Tim makes a sharp, irritated noise. He doesn’t know how he felt. “But you were just… there. Dead or- or asleep or whatever, it didn’t really matter. You were there, and I was here, and we both know it was meant to be the other way around.”

“Tim—” Jon starts, the pity in his voice palpable.

“No,” Tim says, giving Jon a firm look. “I don’t want an apology or- or pity or whatever. That’s not the point of this.” He sits back in the chair, takes a deep breath, and says, “I don’t remember when I stopped feeling angry. I didn’t visit you at first, in the hospital, but when I did, I… I don’t know.” Tim shrugs and looks at the floor. “I guess I just decided that you wouldn’t have chosen that. To- to be half-dead and dreaming while the rest of us lived.”

Jon’s quiet for a long moment. Then, he makes a sound that might be a laugh if it weren’t so bitter. “No,” he says, voice rough around the edges. “I didn’t. But I did choose to wake up. I made a choice, and I- I think it was the wrong one.”

“What,” Tim says, “because you chose to live rather than to die?”

Jon shakes his head, just once. “Because I chose to be this.” He gestures at the desk, at the room around him. “The… the Archivist.”

Tim takes a moment to consider. Then, he says bluntly, “Fine. Let’s say you did. You chose to go full monster, give up the mantle of humanity entirely, and then—what?”

Jon blinks at him. “What?”

“What are you going to do now?”

Jon opens and closes his mouth a few times before finally saying, “I- I suppose I’ll just… work?”

Tim can’t help letting out a short, clipped laugh. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

Jon makes an indignant noise. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. I just—” Tim pauses, looks at his hands. There’s a worm scar between his middle and ring finger on his left hand that never healed quite right, that’s now a twisted knot of scar tissue. He focuses on it as he says, “You’re still you, you know? Even before, with all the shit you pulled—the stalking and the murder accusations and the questions—it was… it was still just you. And whether or not you’re still human, you’re still Jon.”

“Oh,” Jon says, the word empty and hollow. “Is… is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

Tim doesn’t know yet, not really. The relationship between them is still flayed open and raw, ripped apart by months of poor choices and hurtful words. But he meets Jon’s eyes, sees that familiar brown that he used to wake up to in the mornings, takes note of the small cluster of circular scars just beneath Jon’s temple, and decides that if it’s not good, it’s certainly on the way there. The thought leaves him feeling a bit weightless, and he realizes with an aching in his chest that he’s missed Jon. Not in the physical sense, because Jon’s always been here, conscious or not, and his presence has been burned into the back of Tim’s mind like a brand, an itch he can’t quite scratch. But still, there had been an empty space within him that he hadn’t been able to cover or fill, shaped like warm sunlit mornings and shared bottles of wine and kisses on foreheads and noses and lips. And it had ached, as much as Tim wished it hadn’t. That that Jon was gone and this Jon had taken his place. The resentment Tim felt at the fact was bitter and heavy and painful.

It’s still not the same Jon, sitting in front of him now and worrying his ring between his fingers in a familiar nervous tic. But he’s not the same Tim either. Affection doesn’t come easy for him anymore and everything hurts and there are so, so many things he can’t forgive Jon for. That he doesn’t know how to. But at some point, the blanket of revenge-fueled anger had melted away and he’d just been tired.

“I don’t know,” Tim says, because it’s true. But it’s also true when he continues, “But I want it to be good. It might take some time, and I- I can’t just forget about what’s happened between us, but…” Tim’s chest tightens, and his next words come out choked and a bit forced. “I missed you. And I’m glad you’re not dead, okay? I don’t know if you’ve convinced yourself that I wouldn’t be, but I am.” Quieter: “God knows I’ve already lost enough.”

“Oh,” Jon says again, barely more than a whisper. Then, hesitantly: “I… thank you, Tim. I’m also glad that you… that you’re still here. For what it’s worth.”

“You don’t have to…” Tim pinches the bridge of his nose, closes his eyes, lets out a long breath. “Never mind.”

“I know,” Jon says, something terribly vulnerable in his voice. When Tim opens his eyes, Jon’s looking at him, a faint ghost of a smile on his lips. Tim can’t stop looking at it. “But I want to. I… I still care about you, Tim. I always have, even if I- I didn’t always show it.”

The Tim of six months ago would probably have laughed at that. Would have said that it didn’t matter if he cared or not, or that if he really cared he wouldn’t have spent half a year tracking his every move and thinking that Tim was even remotely capable of killing him. (That bit had hit particularly hard. Tim had gone home afterward and scrubbed every reminder of Jon from his house, every picture and favorite mug and lingering jumper and that one souvenir from his trip to Spain that Jon had once rambled about for two hours. It had hurt, and when he was done, he’d felt hollowed out and empty. Enough room for the anger to begin to creep in, he supposes.)

Instead, Tim sighs and says, “You know, that was the worst part. The fact that after everything, even when I hated you, I still couldn’t stop myself from caring.” He digs his fingernails into the soft skin of the inside of his wrist. “It hurt to care, so I pretended like I didn’t. But all the shit that happened to you—Christ, Jon, I’m not so much of an asshole to think that you deserved to be tortured and kidnapped every other week. I don’t know if anyone ever told you that you didn’t deserve it, so there it is.”

Jon’s looking at him with wide eyes and lips slightly parted, and Tim feels something in his chest ache at the sight. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like- like what?”

“Like I’ve—” Like I’ve hung the fucking moon. “Look, that’s just basic human decency, okay?”

“Okay,” Jon echoes quietly. He’s still looking at Tim and his lips are still slightly parted and the ache in Tim’s chest amplifies until he can barely stand it. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he’s reminded of the first time he asked Jon, standing halfway inside the doorframe of his house after their third date, if he could kiss him. How Jon had looked startled, all wide eyes and parted lips, and after a moment had nodded wordlessly. How Jon’s hair had been soft beneath his fingers as he’d cupped Jon’s cheek and how Jon’s lips had been warm against his and how Jon had inhaled slightly at the contact, like even though Tim had asked, he was still surprised that he’d followed through.

Tim looks at Jon, at the still-familiar shape of his lips save for a small circular scar near the left corner, and tries to convince himself, just for a moment, that he doesn’t want to kiss him.

He’s never been very good at self-control.

So he stands, braces one hand on Jon’s desk, and reaches forward with the other, stopping just shy of Jon’s face. When Jon doesn’t move away, he rests his palm lightly against Jon’s cheek, his thumb coming to rest just underneath Jon’s eye. “This doesn’t fix things,” Tim says quietly. “But I’d still like to kiss you. If you’re okay with that.”

Jon hesitates. Then, barely more than a whisper, he says, “Okay.”

“Okay.” Tim pauses a moment more before tilting Jon’s head slightly up, leaning forward, and kissing him.

It’s still as easy as breathing.

#tma #the magnus archives #jonathan sims #tim stoker #jontim #my writing #my fic

111 notes · View notes

novelconcepts · 3 years

Note

Jamie & Dani short prompt- Online Dating au meeting online and being from bad past relationship. Thank u

This is probably a bad idea. It is, isn’t it? Almost certainly.

Why is she here?

Dani Clayton has been playing this particular set of thoughts--bad idea, terrible idea, why would you do this?--on repeat for three days. Ever since setting up that dating profile. Ever since realizing there isn’t much use in setting up a dating profile if you’re not going to use it.

Oh, it’s all fun and games, building the thing. Find a photo that accentuates all the best parts of your face--Dani, after an hour of careful consideration, wound up going with one that accentuated her hair, more than anything, but she suspects the same idea counts. Then, the profile. What do you like? Teaching, long walks, new experiences, bad coffee. What don’t you like?

Men, she’d thought, and snorted aloud into her wine before settling on: Deep water, accordion music, expectations, being called Danielle.

A little more flourish, tipsy keystrokes, a casually-framed short-version of her life. Perfect. And then...well, then you hit the publish button, don’t you? You decide, for better or worse, to jump off this diving board and see just how far you can stand to swim before the energy gives out on you.

The faces appearing before her hadn’t been bad, certainly. Pretty, most of them. Interesting, a few. Still, she hadn’t swiped right on any--once or twice, because she’d forgotten which way meant yes please, but mostly because no one seemed quite...right. Which, she’d thought, was silly. The whole point of an app like this is to cast as many nets as possible and see what comes up. The whole point is to have fun.

But every time she’d hovered over a promising image, a woman who likes dogs, or plays the violin, or goes rock-climbing in her spare time, she’d thought of him. Eddie. Who had taken one yes to a single date, and tried to make a whole life with her out of it.

Eddie, who had taken her two decades to pull away from.

What if the women here were the same? Not Eddie, exactly, but--presumptive. What if they believed a swipe-right was as good as a marriage proposal? What if she got bound up in conversation, and then a date, and then a relationship with someone else who just didn’t fit right?

Left. Left. Left.

And then: the mistake.

She hadn’t meant to swipe right. Exactly. She hadn’t planned, maybe is the better way of putting it, on swiping right. She’d only wanted to look at the woman’s profile a little longer. Only wanted to inspect the facets this woman had put out on display with almost resigned simplicity.

Some people, Dani had by now realized, wrote poetry and paragraphs to describe themselves.

Jamie Taylor had bullet points.

“Gardener. English. Likes: Plants. Stories. Tea. Dislikes: Bullshit.”

The end. That had been quite literally the sum of it. Gardener. English. No bullshit.

But the picture, somehow, Dani hadn’t been able to look away from. Not because of carefully-arranged lighting, not because of a curated model-clean image--but because the woman appeared to have posted the photo almost under duress. It came in profile, as though someone else had done the job, her head turned toward the camera as if interrupted. Her hands were buried in a flower pot. Her clothes were simple--a tank top, a silver chain resting against the jut of collarbones, a pair of worn-looking jeans with holes in the knees. Her eyes--some fascinating color Dani couldn’t quite place--looked somewhere between amused and irritated.

She looked real.

Stupid, Dani thinks now--because that was probably the idea, wasn’t it? This woman, Jamie, had planned to look exactly this way. Real. Vexed at the idea of putting herself out there. Reluctantly available.

It was a ploy, certainly--but one that seems to be working, because not only did Dani accidentally-not-accidentally swipe right, she found herself texting the woman. For hours. She’d expected much less, had figured this Jamie person would be as brief in text as she had been in bio, but...

Jamie had talked to her. Willingly. Teasingly, with more humor than truth, maybe, but with no sign at all that she was sick of Dani’s questions, bad jokes, nervous assessment that I really don’t do this, I honestly don’t get it.

I don’t, either, Jamie had replied, and that had felt like enough of a reason to keep testing the waters. Enough of a reason to keep the conversation going back and forth, back and forth, until nearly two in the morning.

Shit, she’d said. I need to be at work in four hours.

Shame, Jamie had replied, her tone already searingly familiar over text. Own your own business, make your own hours. Far wiser approach.

I’ll make a note of it for when I found an elementary school, Dani had replied, laughing. She hadn’t said she’d already been in bed for an hour, the phone resting on the pillow beside her head so she wouldn’t miss the buzz of a new message. It had seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, with wine-warmed blood and the happy haze of good conversation. Jamie made her laugh. Jamie put her at ease. Jamie might not have been real, but she felt real, and that was good.

Better than anything she’d felt in years, if she was honest with herself.

Still, when the next day had come and gone with no message, she’d thought, Fair enough. Jamie had been good virtual company for one night. It was more than she’d expected to get out of this app.

Far more than she’d expected, particularly when Thursday night rolled around and her phone buzzed.

Teacher, yeah? No school on Saturday?

Correct, Dani had replied, as amused by the out-of-left-field text as she was irritated with how her stomach had flipped over upon receiving it. You have figured out the complexity of the American school system.

I am a genius, Jamie sent back, followed quickly by: Drinks tomorrow night?

Drinks. A thing that people do. A thing that adult people do for date reasons.

She isn’t real, she’d thought, even as her thumb was punching back: How’s 8? Miller’s?

A mistake. Definitely a mistake. Because the app had been a lark, and the conversation had been too easy, and the fact that she can’t quite pick out the colors in Jamie’s eyes from a single photo is making her crazier than she’d like to admit.

A mistake, saying yes. A mistake, suggesting the local pub-like establishment around the corner, whose beer-and-burger specials had kept her fed on too many evenings spent working late. A mistake, because once this goes south--as it’s absolutely bound to, as everything Eddie-shaped always has--she’s going to lose her favorite hangout in the deal, too.

And yet: here she is. Standing at the door, wondering if the outfit chosen for the evening festivities--tight jeans, pink blouse, hoop earrings--is too much or not nearly enough.

What am I doing here?

Maybe, she thinks with mingled alarm and hope, she won’t even have showed up. Maybe it’s all part of the ruse: look approachable, look human and normal, look a little too beautiful in the most grounded way possible--then, cheerfully, invite a woman to drinks and just don’t show. A fun story for whoever comes next. Can you believe she thought I’d want to meet her after one night of texting?

“Dani?”

English, Dani thinks with a sudden rush of heat. Right. Somehow, she hadn’t quite been prepared for the accent, which--coming out of this woman, draped with languid ease at a table--is truly a little more than Dani thinks she can handle just now. The accent, combined with the mess of curls dragged back from her face, and a dress sense that manages to be both casual and deeply attractive at the same time, is...

“Jamie,” she says, her voice a little lower, a little more hoarse, than is truly necessary. The woman pushes up from her seat, a small-framed figure in a black button-down, suspenders, ripped jeans. She’s pressing a hand toward Dani, offering a firm shake as though they are business partners, not an off-the-cuff bad idea of a date. “You look--”

“Never been here before,” Jamie says, almost apologetically. She gestures for Dani to sit before dropping back down in a sprawl that implies exactly the opposite of what her mouth is insisting. “Wasn’t sure about the, ah, dress code.”

“You--you did fine,” Dani tells her, wishing suddenly she’d gone for a dress. Or a different human body altogether. She feels too tightly-strung, too anxious for the easy smile on Jamie’s lips. “Um. You’re very. In person.”

“Very,” Jamie repeats, a hint of uncertainty in her voice. “Is very American for wish I’d gone left, after all?”

“No. No. Absolutely not. That.” Bit too forceful, she suspects, judging by the smile spreading into a grin. “No, it’s just--your picture didn’t--tell me you’d be so...”

“Clean?” Jamie suggests innocently. She raises her hands, wiggling her fingers in a small wave. “Scrub up fine, when I need to. Seemed to call for it.”

“And you...sure did answer,” Dani says stupidly. “The. Call, I mean. I’m sorry, I really don’t do this often.”

Something seems to soften in Jamie, her smile less teasing as she leans across the table. “Hey, no worries here. Same person you were talking to the other night.”

Dani nods, embarrassed, and flags down a server. Drinks ordered, she draws in a deep breath.

“I mean, I haven’t done this in years. Or. Ever, I guess.”

“A first date?” Jamie asks. When Dani doesn’t answer, she adds in a knowing tone, “A date with a woman?”

“Both,” Dani says honestly. “My last relationship was--well, I mean, we were engaged--”

Jamie whistles under her breath, reaching up to scratch her head. “Blimey. What happened?”

“He’s...him.” It’s too much to go into on a first date, too much to explain, even though talking to Jamie over text had been so dangerously easy. “My best friend growing up, but that was...growing up.”

Jamie nods thoughtfully, tilting her chin in thanks when the server deposits two full pint glasses and a basket of fries on the table. “Rough time, sounds like. I can relate. My last relationship also did not go well.”

“Was he also a man who thought you’d be all too happy to quit your job and take care of a bunch of babies?” Dani asks, perhaps a little too bitterly for the occasion. Jamie flashes another grin, sipping her drink.

“She was a woman who thought I’d be all too happy to take the fall when she got busted for possession.”

Dani gapes. “Oh. Oh--I didn’t know--I’m so--”

Jamie shrugs. “She wasn’t wrong. I was nineteen, and deeply stupid. Live and learn, as the poets say.”

“Which poets?” Dani asks, smiling a little. Jamie’s brow furrows.

“John...Lennon, possibly? Hard to say. Anyway, relationships are a chore and a half, but the greatest people in the world tell me thirty is too old to play musical bedframes, so. Here we are.”

No bullshit, thinks Dani approvingly. For what little she’d put into her profile, Jamie evidently hadn’t been lying about that.

“You haven’t been in a relationship since you were nineteen?”

“In my mind, I was still in the relationship at twenty-four, when they let me out. She didn’t agree. Found out she’d been married two years, by then.” Something darkens in Jamie’s eyes for a moment. She sighs. “Like I said. Not my finest. But I am, as they say, a shining beacon of reform these days.”

“Now, when you say they,” Dani teases, grinning. Jamie nods decisively.

“John Lennon. Definitively.”

There it is, thinks Dani, watching Jamie pop a fry into her mouth. There, the easy roll of conversation from the other night. As though they’ve known each other forever. As though two people who have thus far failed irrevocably at relationships make a perfect match.

Easy, she thinks. Don’t go wild, now.

“So,” she says, when the comfortable silence between them has grown a bit too comfortable for the setting, “who are the greatest people in the world? The ones who tell you thirty is too old for...did you say musical bedframes?”

Jamie laughs. The ring of it curls gently around Dani’s head like a soft hand, a sound she’ll find herself replaying later with a skipping heart.

“Not many willing to put up with a grump of my caliber, but Hannah and Owen fight the good fight. So long as I at least pretend to try.”

“Let me guess. They set up the account for you?”

Jamie makes a sort of gesture in the air with the hand not holding her glass. “Threatened to bury me in puns and children, respectively, if I kept putting it off. Owen’s still grumpy about the photo choice.”

“I liked it,” Dani says without thinking. Jamie raises an eyebrow.

“Well, you did swipe as much. Mind if I ask why?”

Walked into this one. Still, she doesn’t mind as much as she probably should, not with the genuine curiosity in Jamie’s eyes. “You looked--don’t laugh.”

“No promises,” Jamie says, but with the gentle tone of one who knows exactly how much to tease before it’ll hurt. The idea warms Dani in a way she’s not quite ready to look at yet.

“You looked real,” Dani says. “Like you weren’t going to play games, or waste anyone’s time. Like you just wanted to be happy in peace.”

“That is,” Jamie says, holding out a fry for Dani to take, “sort of the idea, yeah.”

There’s an almost puzzled cast to her smile, like she didn’t entirely expect this answer, and is pleased by it at the same time. That same sense from the photo sweeps over Dani now--that this woman is authentic, even if she’s not always shiny, that she’s kind even if not entirely clean. That she doesn’t have any interest in muddled expectation or living a comfortable lie.

“And me?” Dani asks. She doesn’t entirely mean to--but she’s sure, in asking, that Jamie will answer. Jamie is unlike anyone else she’s ever met, the first person she’s ever known to meet each question head-on.

“Honestly?”

Dani nods. Jamie seems to consider it, turning it over in her head as she twists a fry between her fingers like a cigarette.

“All of it.”

“That’s,” Dani begins to laugh, “that’s not--”

“No,” Jamie says, and she isn’t smiling, exactly. Her eyes have a sort of shine Dani likes very much, but there is no hint of teasing in them now. “Really. All of it. You’re...very pretty, and that’s--but the way you described yourself. Like you didn’t care to be anyone in particular. You like new experiences, and bad coffee. You hate being called Danielle. I...I wanted to know why.”

“It’s not my name,” Dani says simply. Jamie gives a brief laugh, her hand moving across the table to lightly brush Dani’s fingertips.

“I wanted to know why all of it. Why do you like bad coffee--”

“It’s the only kind I know how to make,” Dani says automatically. “Just sort of leaned into it.”

“--and teaching--”

“I want to make a difference,” Dani says.

“--and where you most like to go on those long walks--”

“Anywhere I can breathe,” Dani says. Her fingers are hesitant, tracing the tips of Jamie’s. There’s something electric about this, about barely touching, about barely knowing someone and still wanting to give them neatly-packaged secrets shaped like the mundane.

Jamie is smiling. “See, that. I like that. All of it.”

It’s nothing, Dani thinks reflexively. A collection of details. A sparse approximation of a life. Eddie knows all of this, and then some, and never matched up to knowing her.

But this woman, leaning across the table with one hand outstretched, looks so different. Watches her with steady interest. Is listening to every word Dani says, though the bar is growing crowded around them, and soon, conversation will become a task instead of a gift.

“Would you,” Dani says, feeling certain that some mistakes are not as bad as they seem, “like to take one of those walks?”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah. Tonight.” Emboldened by the smile, by the curl falling into Jamie’s eyes, by the knowledge that she still can’t quite make out what color those eyes are, Dani takes her hand. It’s so easy, she thinks she could do it even without looking. “Right now.”

No bullshit, she thinks. No expectations. Just Jamie looking at her like she can’t quite believe what she’s seeing. Dani can’t blame her. This isn’t at all what she’d thought she was getting, walking in tonight.

But there’s something about it--something about the feeling that she’s been here before, or should be here forever, or will always find her way back to a woman who looks at her just like this--that almost makes her feel brave. Almost makes her feel wonderful. She rises from the table, laying cash beneath her half-empty glass, and feels a pleasant jolt in her chest when Jamie follows without another word.

If this a mistake, she thinks as they step out into the brisk evening air, it’s one she’s hungry to make.

#fanfiction #ficlet #the haunting of bly manor #dani x jamie #damie #okay I liked this one way more than planned #it's sort of nice doing a modern AU under a million words long

103 notes · View notes

colderthancoldest · 3 years

Text

An Easy Alliance

Prompt: "You're here." "I'm here, just like I promised." & "I came back for you. I promised I would, and I did." (This Request)

Ao3 Link

Pairing: Dhawan!Master × Reader

Word Count: about 5k

Summary: It's not easy to be a human with a Tardis. You have a doorway to any where and time in the universe- however, the catch is that the worlds on the other side are often treacherous and it feels like they're against you at every turn. You begin to wonder if it's worth it, if you even deserve this opportunity, when a stranger saves you from it- in more ways than one. Maybe you're worth more than you know.

Various Tags: First meeting, falling in love, fluff and angst, happy ending, my goal is that you will cry but laugh by the end, im ambitious like that, relationship is open to interpretation

Warning: Feelings of Depression, passive suicidal thoughts (It's not that dark, it's actually quite optimistic by the end, but I always add a warning for anyone sensitive to these topics. Please stay safe, thank you.)

Note: Please let me know what you think! I don't often write in this style so I really appreciate feedback! Enjoy :D

---

It's not easy to be a human with a Tardis.

It's a bit of a long story as to how you've obtained a Tardis of your own in the first place.

Essentially you found it, purely by accident. The ship had fled from the Time War and was left to rot when it's pilot was killed. Tardises are known to be temperamental, and humans are notoriously weak telepaths- but neither of you would get anywhere without each other.

In short, you struck up a deal. You take care of the Tardis, learn how to maintain her, and in return- she becomes your door to anywhere and any time in the universe.

It's difficult, seeing as the two of you can't communicate the way telepaths are able to talk to Tardises, but she- the Tardis insisted 'she'- was making do.

She translated the manual for you, provided you with food and clothes and shelter, and was patient as you slowly learned how to fix and fly her.

As if teaching yourself every inch of advanced and sentient technology wasn't difficult enough- you also found yourself deeply out of place in the far away lands the Tardis took you to.

You're human. You're mortal. You look, dress, and act in a way that's out of place in most non-human societies. Even humans from the distant future- as little as a mere few centuries ahead- barely recognize you.

You're clever and fast, but it's not always enough.

It's all too easy to offend people from cultures you've never met. Even if you do nothing wrong, it's your word against theirs.

If you had a nickel for every time you've nearly been killed by a misunderstanding... Suffice it to say, you could easily afford the tungsten wiring your Tardis is always quick-tempered about.

It's in one of these situations that you meet... him.

You're alone, as you always are, with cuffs scratching at your wrists.

The locals of a planet from the future have opted to skip the 'fair trial' bit and head directly to execution.

Of all the ways to go, you can't help but feel a bit... disappointed. A human with a Tardis, a person with a door to anywhere in the known universe, to any time that's ever existed- and this is how it ends.

You suppose you've already gotten more out of life than you could have hoped.

Maybe it's best to quit while you're ahead.

"Really? That's all?" a voice echoes about the large room you're being detained in.

You whip your head about in a feeble and failing attempt to pinpoint the source of the noise. Whoever it is sounds almost amused.

"Someone so quick, someone who's been so careful with the hand they've been dealt, and you're willing to give it all up- here and now?" the strange voice questions.

You spin your head around but there's nothing except shadows. You're set to die at noon and it's barely dawn.

"Who said anything about giving up?" you reply sharply.

You're scared, but that's no reason to show it. You grit your teeth and glare into the darkness around you. You can't pinpoint the figure meandering about in the dark.

"Why? You did, my dear," the voice replies, sounding pleasantly amused.

You squint in a failing attempt to make out the shape stepping into the pale moonlight.

"Me? You don't know a thing about me! I've never met you in my life!" you retort.

And you know this, because you've barely met anyone. You travel to see the sights, not to interfere. You visit worlds to satisfy your curiosity and nothing more. Whoever this is, you've certainly never told them who you are.

The stranger only chuckles faintly.

"I know all about you. A human with a Gallifreyan Tardis? I've been observing you ever since I first detected your ship on Earth.

Then again, it's not your ship- is it?"

Your eyes widen momentarily, but you're quick to force your racing heart back down your throat.

"What I do is none of your business," you defend yourself.

"And what I do is none of yours," the stranger replies in a passive song.

"However," they continue.

They step out from the dark and into the white streaks of moonlight sneaking in from the skylight in the ceiling.

They... look like a human man. A... quite well-kept and well-dressed human man.

A deep purple jacket over an eccentric checkered suit, perfect dark hair that curls at the ends like waves over his face, and dark but shining eyes to match.

You can tell in an instant that you've never met anyone like this before.

"Things have grown dull and you're the first exception to the rule I've seen in a very long time," he says in a tone that suggests this confession is somehow a compliment. "You're never after anything. You only observe."

He tilts his head.

"As much as I dislike humans, somehow- you're different."

He paces about you until you can't see him anymore because of the way the cuffs keep you pinned to the chair in the middle of the room.

You lose sight of him for a brief second.

You fear the worst but then...

The cuffs fall with a clink and your hands are suddenly free.

"For you and only you," he says as he paces back into your field of vision, "I propose an alliance."

"An alliance?" you echo flatly. It's a question, to get him to elaborate, but also a surprise.

All your time traveling, and no one's ever offered you such a thing before.

"Yes, dear," he says in a way that you would assume was patronizing if not for the polite tone of his voice, "an alliance. Your human mind is so loud, I've heard you wondering to yourself how to communicate with your ship, how to repair her, how to fly her. I can be beneficial in that field."

He sounds proud of himself.

You don't cave quickly. You aren't that naive.

You haven't made it through countless adventures- your feet pounding over the surfaces of countless planets, escaping all sorts of dangers- without being careful.

"And in return?" you ask cautiously. There has to be a catch somewhere.

"In return, you help me," he says warmly.

He looks you over with an amused smirk at his lips.

"You see, I have big plans for a certain enemy of mine. However, I don't have time to deal with the day-to-day nonsense of Earth. You help me with the little things and in return, whenever you need saving, I promise to be there."

He taps his chest with a prideful grin.

"I swear on my hearts."

You brush past him as you make your way for the door. You'd better get going before the guards return for your scheduled execution.

The sun is coming up, dying the sky a beautiful purple haze.

"You think that's something you can promise? All of time and space, and you expect me to believe that?" you scoff at his words, "You'll abandon me the moment it's convenient. No deal," you tell him.

He slips past you and reaches an arm across the doorframe to block your path. You cross your arms and glare at him.

To your surprise, he looks angry.

"I'll have you know I take great offence to that! I make good on my promises- unlike some people," he grumbles that last part to himself.

"If I say I won't abandon you, I won't abandon you. If I say I'll be back, I'll come back," he says sharply as he stares you down.

There's something in the way he locks his jaw, something in the way he takes offense to your distrust, something about the way he scrunches his nose and his brows- that make you realize he's telling the truth.

"I keep my word," he insists gravely. "Which is something- you'll find in this universe- not many people do. This arrangement is mutually beneficial. You won't be offered a better deal than this."

You exchange a glare with him for a long moment.

His gentle features are twisted up in anger, his eyes betray and old pain that you've dug up by offending him, his hand remains locked on the doorframe to block your path- and, for some reason, it makes you smile.

You huff a small breath.

"You haven't done this whole 'alliance proposition' thing before, have you?" you ask him.

He falters.

"I haven't had any need for it before," he reasons. "However, I'm currently on a bit of a schedule. I have a lot of dominos to set up before my best enemy arrives to topple them," he admits. His expression softens at the mention of this 'best enemy'.

You pat his shoulder and then pry his hand from the doorframe to pass him by.

He caves easily and follows you outside.

The dawn is breaking and you still need to get back to your ship.

"Alright," you decide with a small sigh.

You do need help with your Tardis and- more than anything- you certainly need someone to watch your back.

It's not every day some well dressed stranger saves you from your own curiosity. You feel obligated to return the favor- seeing as he did just save your life- so you decide you might as well make the most of it.

"What do you need me to do?" you ask, hopefully and yet still bracing for the worst.

Your newest ally grins.

He mostly wants information about Earth. He doesn't tell you why- and you don't ask.

It doesn't matter all that much to you anyway. With your Tardis, you've watched whole apocalypses pass you by. You've grown numb to it. In the end, it's always just a different verse of the same old worn-out song.

You're tired and nothing holds your interest for long anymore. Whatever he's planning, you doubt it'll have any effect on you. You might as well keep up your end of the deal.

Once you gather everything on the requested topic, he asks for information on a new one. He wants to know about Cybermen next. He wants to know about The Great Cyberwars- but only odd specifics from near the end that were left undocumented.

You begin to get the feeling that he needs to research their timeline for some reason, but he has an odd fear of them simultaneously. He doesn't want to get too close to the subject.

Again, you don't ask what it's for- and in return: you get more than you gave.

Your latest ally- he has yet to give you his name- plays translator for your Tardis. He explains bits of the manual you were stuck on and how the Tardis functions as a unit.

He's polite and- once you get past his gallows humor- he can be quite funny.

He explains how certain pieces of the Tardis controls have to be flipped in unison because Tardises are meant to have multiple pilots.

He's odd, he's blunt, and strangest of all: he's a very good cook.

He's the kind of person who always has a secret up their sleeve and he surprises you in all the best ways.

You... begin not to mind his company.

He always seems to know what you're about to say before you say it. You blame that part on his psychic abilities.

However, it's almost nice to be understood in that way. In an abstract, personal, understanding way you've never known before.

In response, he gauges that your words and actions are genuine. His ability to sense your unfiltered thoughts let him know that it's safe to open up to you in return, little by little.

Without even realizing the gradual change- he's suddenly a friend.

Now when you go out on adventures, when you're a lone mortal facing down the strange and terrifying perils of the universe, you're drastically less afraid.

Instead of passing through with your head down, you're able to stare up at the stars and admire then. You can safely look forwards rather than watching over your shoulder.

You're living instead of surviving.

It happened so gradually, you'd barely even noticed.

One day your Tardis lands in a heavily guarded patch of sacred land. It looks like the hillside near a heavily fortified church.

You're not fast enough to explain why you're there, and even if you were- the local authority won't let you. They're very strict people with very black and white thinking.

You're tied to a chair and tossed in the back corner of the guard outpost. So few people get this far past their defenses that the locals don't even have a proper prison to toss you in.

It's a long day indeed, awaiting whatever fate they have planned for you.

You're stuck in the box, alone, tied up in the dull silence. It's... annoying. Instead of wondering if perhaps you deserve it, you decide to escape.

At some point, the guard leaves you alone. You kick the chair around and reach for the scissors on the guard's desk with your hand pinned tight to the metal frame of the chair with rope.

You don't have a chance of escaping, the physics simply aren't there. And even if you get untied, you'll never make it far alive. Still, that doesn't mean you're not going to try. You're not going to let the universe- nor your own apathy and fear- get the best of you this time.

A different guard returns all too quickly. They're draped in the huge robes that the people who occupy this 'holy' land always wear. Of all the possible places to visit, you not only landed in the most heavily fortified part but also the most boring. It was basically just a monastery with a military guarding it.

You're not sure how you're going to reason yourself out of the fact that it very clearly looks like you're trying to escape.

You sharply kick at the guard's knee. It's all you can do. You're not sure if you can take them down, but it's worth a shot-

"Bloody- F- Gah- Do you mind?!"

You recoil visibly at the familiar voice.

"You?" You ask sharply.

The faux-guard pulls their hood down to reveal a familiar face. He looks quite annoyed.

"Actually, my acquaintances call me, O- but yes. It's me.

We made an agreement after all!" he hisses as if this all should be obvious to you.

"You're here," you observe, still quite shocked by the reveal.

He only rolls his eyes.

"Yes. I'm here, just like I promised. Do you really think so little of me?

I told you. When you need saving, I'll be there.

I keep my promises."

Without bothering to ask, he takes a seat on your lap. He sits sideways so the pressure doesn't pinch your thighs- which, all things considered- is quite polite of him.

He reaches down to his injured leg and rubs it with his hand for a moment. He appears to have a previous injury in that leg, and you very clearly haven't helped matters. Either way, once he's chalked up your assault to some bruising, he brushes the injury off.

"No, I'm just surprised," you tell him.

"You didn't think I would save you?" he asks, a little disappointed.

You press your lips together in a neutral expression. Whatever you think of saying, he already knows every word of it.

"I couldn't bet my life on it," you say simply.

He pulls a knife from his pocket and reaches around you to to saw through the tough rope.

"You tried to escape this time," he observes aloud.

You bite your tongue.

Yes, you did- didn't you?

It's interesting, the things you've begun to do ever since you gained someone to share your travels with. Someone who knows what it's like to do all of this. Someone who... knows what it's like to spend it alone, spending every day wondering if you're worth it.

He must hear your thoughts, as per usual, because he can't look you in the eye. He soon stands up again and leads you out.

He doesn't say another word as you return to your separate Tardises and leave.

Things get better from there and soon it's a pattern.

You have fun, on your own. You see the sights, you walk the streets, you eat the food. It's quiet, but it's nice not to have anyone else with you to color the world in any other way than it already is.

It's you and the world.

You and your flirts with danger.

You and narrowly escaping the authorities.

You and wondering directly into the jaws of the latest beast- only to be met with the familiar eyes of someone who is no longer a stranger.

"Again?" he asks.

Sometimes he plays dress up, sometimes he simply hypnoses the guards to let him through, but no matter the situation he's always dramatic about it.

Seeing him always brings a smile to your face. It's rare, but it's always familiar. Being 'saved' becomes more of an excuse than a necessity.

There's a learning curve to traveling the universe and before long, you've reached it's peak. You learn what to do, what to say, how to keep yourself safe.

You don't need him anymore, but you're more than willing to let him drop in to 'save' you anytime. It becomes a comfort, to know that even when you mess up, you're worth saving.

Sometimes you're in the middle of taunting a guard who hasn't even arrested you yet and when he shows up to hypnotize the problem away.

And sometimes, he suggests that he'd better stick around for a bit to make sure you stay safe.

And sometimes you recommend the pair of you get food together, and sometimes that meal turns into a walk through the park, and sometimes that walk turns into laying in fields of grass, staring up at the stars, exchanging ideas about the possibilities of this big old universe you find yourselves in.

And sometimes you wonder why this person, who's so kindhearted and protective, so warm and good-humored, keeps you at arms length.

There's something more about him, you suspect. There has to be.

You're willing to bet anything that it's something dark- but he never shows it.

He's different when it comes to you. You're not certain why.

Is it because you can't lie to him? Is it because you're honest with him? Is it because you don't ask, you don't press, you just let him be at your side whenever he chooses?

It hits you all at once one day that perhaps this arrangement has become more.

It stays true to its core, to be mutually beneficial and serve in favor both parties personal interests, but that's not all it is anymore.

Without realizing, it's suddenly two parties who mean a great deal to each other. Suddenly, you're choosing to help each other rather than acting in order to receive something in return.

You're not scared of danger anymore. You know how to get out of it now- and even if you can't, you know he'll be there.

You trust that he'll be there.

He's no longer contingency, he's normalcy.

You're never traveling alone because he's always there, in the back of your mind, as you wonder if he might join you should the opportunity arise.

Maybe you should voice this next time you see him.

When you run into him, you're offering information- per another strangely specific request- that you obtained from a library in the distant future that your ally may or may not be banned from.

You consider asking why he can't fetch it himself, but you don't. He either offers information or not. One of the rules is that neither of you ask about the others' personal business.

When you arrive at your typical meeting place, his own Tardis is a mess.

It looks... like a cluttered house inside.

The way it's decorated feels very unlike someone like him.

He immediately hugs you as you enter. That's how you know something's wrong.

You catch him rather than hug him. You suddenly feel too sick to remember any of the things you had wanted to tell him.

"What's wrong?" is all you ask softly.

He crumbles.

He remains as elegant and unyielding as always, but it's easy to feel that he's trembling. His breathing shakes and his fingers lock into the fabric of your coat.

It feels like a long time, ages, until he gets out a small sentence.

"I... have to go away for a while."

You're scared to know what that means.

"How long?" You ask tearfully.

"It depends," he breathes quietly.

"On what?"

"If my plan works."

There's a long silence as his words hang heavy in the air.

You don't know what to say.

The rule is that neither of you ask about the others' personal business.

You want to honor that rule but... the way he's acting... it scares you.

He clings to you, his fingers clawing desperately at your sleeves as he hangs his head down low, but he doesn't know what to say either.

Eventually... he decides on a sentence.

"Do you remember... when we first met?" he asks quietly.

You nod.

"How could I forget?" you chuckle warmly in a weak attempt to lighten the mood.

He smiles for a split second. It comes and goes in the blink of an eye. He shakes his head and his expression grows darker as if he's scolding himself for something.

He lets go of your clothes and turns away.

"You didn't bother trying to escape on your own. The whole universe at your fingertips and... you didn't know what to do with it.

I could hear your mind- I always can- and that day you... were about to give up fighting."

You look off to the side and let your eyes fall to the floor.

It's true. The whole universe ahead of you and you were nearly too tired to keep living in it.

You don't believe you deserved to find the Tardis anyways.

Who were you to have a doorway to the universe? Who were you to intrude where you didn't belong? You never belong anywhere anyways. That was why you left Earth in the first place.

There was never anywhere you fit. The only way you can justify your existence is by being useful, to the Tardis, and then to your new friend.

On your own... you're no one. Sometimes you wonder why you bother at all.

"What about it?" you ask coldly as you cross your arms.

You don't want to think about that anymore.

The two of you.... Helping each other gives you purpose. It gives you something to keep busy with.

You still felt the way you felt before you knew him sometimes, but you're improving. That has to be worth something.

He looks sad and broken.

You suddenly remember that he can hear every abstract hint of emotion racing through your mind.

"I feel that way too," he confesses.

His words hurt to hear.

He slowly wonders off through the room. There he goes. Keeping you at arms length again.

"It's been fun... but it isn't sustainable. My lifespan is far longer than yours. It's not worth... us hurting each other over something that can't last."

He shakes his head.

"All this time," he begins, "I've been working towards an end. I'm going to make a stand with my best enemy. I'm going to tell her everything I've learned.

I'm going to make it so that she doesn't have another choice.

I'm going to end something that should have never existed. For good."

He sounds determined all of a sudden. His last mission.

He turns to you abruptly.

"I'm telling you this because I won't be able to help you anymore," he says steadily.

You blink at the tears in your eyes.

Oh.

So...

That's what he means.

"I... understand," is all you can say.

There's a long moment of silence and then-

You rush over to hug him. He lifts you up until your toes can barely reach the ground. He holds you tight against him and spins you about as your tears splash onto the shoulder of his coat.

You want to beg him not to go, but you know he's been preparing for this. He's clearly made up his mind. There's nothing you can do to stop him.

And anyways.

He already knows what you're thinking.

"It'll be okay," he promises.

You want to believe him.

You can't.

It's quiet now.

Something about it all makes everything else feel quieter.

Everything feels... perhaps distant is the word you're actually looking for.

And you feel tired again. No, apathetic is what you're looking for. As if you can't bring yourself to care about the real world anymore.

You feel like you're back where you started.

You don't know what to do.

You have more than you deserve. You're smarter than you know what to do with. You're more than ever before and yet as powerless as always.

Or...

Maybe not.

You know more now. You can do more now.

You know what you're capable of when you aren't afraid and- as terrified as you are right now- you know what the right thing to do is.

It's time to put everything you've learned to good use. He’s saved your life after all- in far more ways than one. It’s time you return the favor.

"Doctor!" the Master shouts as the Doctor abandons him for the latest of countless times.

Why is he surprised anymore?

He should know by now that she always finds a loophole in his foolproof plans. That she always runs from danger. That she always leaves him in the end.

Now some idiot no-one cyberman-resistance soldier has pressed a button to detonate a planet-destroying bomb.

He'll be dead in seconds. Shattered into atoms and quirks and nothingness.

For as much as the Doctor leaves him, the Master simply can't bring himself to leave her. He can't stop chasing her.

Quite soon, he won't have a choice.

This is it. This is what finally pushes him over the edge.

If the Doctor can leave him for dead like this then... she isn't the person he thought she was anymore. He'll finally learn better. He'll finally give up on her.

It was a shame it was too late.

The particle is active.

He runs but... he isn't going to reach his Tardis in time.

He's alone.

And then suddenly he's not.

Suddenly he isn't in the crumbling Matrix room anymore. He isn't on Gallifrey at all.

He's standing, safe and sound, being held tight in someone's arms.

He comes to his senses slowly. The seconds don't feel real as they pass. He looks up to see that he's in your Tardis, in your arms, looking up at your face.

"You..." he breathes. He can barely feel reality around him.

"It just took a bit of fancy flying to swoop in, just a second in time, and save you," you smile at him.

He stares in disbelief.

"You came back for me," he says breathlessly.

"Of course I came back for you!" you chuckle. "It's like you're always saying. I promised I would, and I did."

"Saving you is my job!" he replies, still in shock.

"I had to return the favor sometime," you smile.

His face is still locked in an expression of disbelief. He's still processing this.

You decide to make it easier on him.

"How about this:" you suggest with a heavy heart, "we go back to saving each other. To adventures and pastimes and pretending this is nothing more than a profession partnership.

Most importantly, we both take it one day at a time.

And down the road, when we're done, once we've had all our fun, then we'll find out a way to go out in style.

Together."

He contemplates this for a moment.

"You won't be offered a better deal than this," you smirk. "You'd be smart to take it."

He shakes his head.

"No," he says firmly.

Your eyes widen.

"No?" You ask nervously.

The Master takes your hands in his own and laces your fingers together. He moves closer, his face inches from yours.

"No," he repeats. "I don't want to go back to how things were. I want a proper partnership.

You and me and the universe.

I don't know how I didn't see it before."

You laugh warmly as he presses his forehead to yours.

"I'll do it right this time," he promises. "I took care of what I needed to. No one will ever bother us now.

We can..."

His eyes darted about as he searched for the right words.

He held your hands tighter in his own.

"We can go back to saving each other- the universe be damned.

Every day.

For as long as you want," he promises wholeheartedly.

"Whenever you need saving, I'll be there."

Your heart is racing.

It's all you could ever want and more.

He is all you could ever want and more.

You don't need to agree out loud. He already knows. You voice it anyway.

"Okay," you grin.

In a strange way, you understand now.

You understand why he saved you.

You learned how to fly this Tardis. You learned how to save your friend from the clutches of death.

You are worth the life you've made for yourself and more.

You deserve to be happy- and you plan to be.

You don't know why you ever believed you didn't.

You have a doorway to anywhere. You have a hand to hold. You have a partner who would burn down every planet in the sky for you.

It's time to go out there and get in trouble and make mistakes. To fight the same old fight against every new day and always emerge triumphant.

And your partner is working on a new project. Something to do with regenerative healing using research he stole from the shambles of his old home.

With any luck, maybe the two of you can travel the universe forever.

#Thank you for reading!#please let me know what you think!#im always a bit unsure what people will think when I do characterxreader fics #but i think it turned out okay :)#dhawan!master #dhawan!master x reader #doctor who fic #doctor who fanfic #long post #doctor who #dw

63 notes · View notes

starr-fall-knight-rise · 4 years

Text

Emp-ire “Vacation.”

Ok everyone, so Just a bit of an announcement before we get to this story. As you know I have been writing this series for over a year now, which includes the book. That means I haven’t worked on anything else in years. I love these stories, and the characters, so I want to keep writing, But, to avoid burnout, I am going to need to take a detour from the the regular themes and write something new. I won’t title them HASO because that is the theme I am stepping away from for a bit. But its all the same characters and what not, just something new so I don’t end up with the desire to quit.

The book’s name is Empyrean Iris so, the nickname I am giving the universe is Emp-ire because it is shorter. If you can think up a better name, I am cool to hear it out, but this is how you will know the difference :).

I hope you will accept the new shenanigans and be willing to ride out this little detour with me. Its for the health of my writing, but I still wanted to give you guys something, while allowing myself to relax and write something else for a little.

Sharp light filtered in through tinted glass. Despite the brightness and pureness of the light, somehow the room still seemed dark. Perhaps it was the sharpness of the light and the blackness of the shadows left in its wake. The room itself seemed cold and barren. The floors were grey, the walls were grey, and the furniture was mostly stainless steel.

There was a chair toppled over on the floor in the center, surrounded by shards of shattered glass which caught the sharp light from outside and warped it to reflect across the room in crystalline patterns.

The walls of the room were barren, mostly devoid of pictures, except for one hanging crooked over the couch- a frozen image of a happy family smiling down from the wall. Somehow, in a room like this their smiles seemed rather hollow. Just across from that a TV was playing static and a defused bluish light filtered onto the floor where it mixed with the white light filtering in from the tinted window, and the bright lunar landscape outside.

The place was silent, mostly silent except for the occasional sloshing of liquid.

He lay on the dull grey floor next to the overturned coffee table. He was a wreck, wearing a stained white T-shirt and boxer shorts. His face was covered in a weak layer of scruff and in one hand he held a bottle. He lay there for another long moment staring with a dead expression up at the ceiling before slowly raising the bottle to his lips and taking another swig. He grimaced, and much of the alcohol spilled out onto his chin and neck, but he didn’t seem to care, and rested his head back against the floor with a dull thud.

He contemplated getting up.

Cleaning himself up maybe.

But that would clearly be too much work with his prosthetic stowed under the bed in the bedroom.

He was a cripple.

He couldn’t get up.

He took another sip from the bottle, hating the taste as much as the fuzziness that clouded his head.

A soft whimper from the other side of the coffee table, and looking up he saw a snout and a pair of ears poke out from behind it.

“Lay down.” He ordered drunkenly

And the nose and snout disappeared again to go along with a dull thud.

He didn’t have the energy to deal with her today, but she was always so insistent. He just wanted to be left along more than anything in the world.

Adam stared at the ceiling closing his eyes as another wave of incomprehensible self loathing washed over him, he was an idiot, he was pathetic, he was stupid, and he was barely even human. He had no life, no personality, and the one thing that made him interesting was the one thing he couldn’t do at the moment.

He hadn’t told the UNSC of course, he didn’t want to lose his job.

So he had disguised his visit to the moon as extended leave, leave that was VERY extended considering all his unused vacation hours stacked up. If he wanted, he could take the next year off.

The thought scared, him and his fear scared him even more. Why was he so afraid of spending time by himself.

It’s because you don’t have a personality.

Or the fact that you are super boring and you know you would be bored the entire time.

Because you are worried about what you are going to learn about yourself.

Because…. Because you don’t get to see her.

He squeezed his eyes tight shut and groaned.

Stop thinking! Don’t think about that!

And then he heard the sound of keys rattling in the lock. He sat up very quickly suddenly aware that he was legless and unarmed. But who the hell had a key! Only his mother, but she was back on earth, its not like he could think of anyone else to give it to. The key rattled in the lock for a few more seconds.

Adam turned looking around for any sort of weapon and found only the mostly empty bottle at his side.

He looked at it, shrugged, and then downed the last of its content before grabbing it by the neck and brandishing it like a weapon.

The lock clicked and the door was pushed inward. Boots thudded over the grey laminate floor, and a shape came around the corner duffle bag in one hand, a set of keys swinging in the other.

He raised the bottle, ready to throw it at the intruder and then paused.

“Ramirez!”

Ramirez stopped to look at him a dark eyebrow raising over an amber eye. He looked Adam up and down very slowly before, “You look like shit.”

Self consciously Adam managed to lever himself up onto the couch, so he could be a little more dignified, but as he was right now, there wasn’t much hope of that.

Ramirez lifted his nose to the room and sniffed grimacing.

“Dude, its smells like a bar in here, and not the reputable kind. It smells like the kind of bar where the blond chick just threw up in the corner, and drunk uncle dan pissed himself because he passed out.”

“Ok, Ok I get it.”

Ramirez turned to look at him, “No I don’t think you do, bro what the hell.” he bent over and picked up one of the bottles, “Since when did you drink?” He flipped the bottle over, “Since when did you drink this shit. If you are going to get drunk at least make it something good.”

Adam looked away, “Highest alcohol content I could find.”

“Yeah…. That stops now.”

He set down his duffle and crossed his arms over his chest, “Go get yourself cleaned up.”

Adam opened his mouth to protest.

Ramirez held up a hand, “No, no your mother said she would only give me the keys if I got your ass out of the house, and that is what i intend to do.”

“You met my mother!”

“Yes, lovely lady, though the next time she sees you shes gonna beat your ass. Now get up and go wash the stench off, I can smell you from here. Also,...” He looked down, reaching into his bag and tossing a small white bottle over to Adam, who, somehow, managed to catch it.

The two of them stared in surprise for a second before Adam flipped the bottle over to read the label.

“Ethen-null?” He read aloud, “What is this.”

“Take two, they should neutralize the ethanol in your bloodstream. I used to carry a bottle around in my wilder days. ITs great when you want to get super drunk late at night, but you don’t want to be a shitty human being while driving home drunk.”

“I don't w-”

“Option one is you take them voluntarily, option two is that I make you take them, and I guarantee that you aren’t going to like option two.”

“I can’t walk.”

“Boo hoo, get up and hop your crippled ass to the shower, I know you can.”

HE blinked a bit surprised at the venom in Ramirez’s tone. No one had spoken to him like that in a while. The ones who did speak to him kept tip toeing around him as if they knew there was some problem, but not wanting to address it.

“NOW!”

“Ok, Ok, jeeze.”

He uncapped the bottle first, tipping two of the little white pills into his hand before swallowing them dry and then getting unsteadily to his remaining foot. Ramirez didn’t make one single move to help him as he hopped, or crawled his way across the room and towards the hallway where his room was.

Opening the door, it was clear the place hadn’t been touched since he moved in.

He didn’t really know why.

There was something about sleeping in a bed somewhere that made that place permanent.

He wobbled through the door into the bathroom, which, luckily for him had a walk in shower and a bench.

Despite his original dislike for the idea of getting up, the water felt good on his aching soul, and he spent some minutes trying to scrub the alcohol and grease from his body. A thick coat of steam rose up around him as the warm water evaporated, rolling down the glass in rivulets.

He admitted to feeling a little better as he hoped out of the shower and onto the heated tiles, gripping the railing on the wall for support as he moved over to the mirror.

His mouth tasted pretty foul, but at least his head was clear, and he took at least five minutes of brushing his teeth and two cup fulls of mouthwash to satisfy him.

He contemplated not shaving, but decided he might as well since he was here.

His leg was already beginning to ache with trying to hold himself up, and he took the indignity of crawling on his hands and knee into the bedroom, in only a towel, rooting under the bed until his hand fell on the cold outside of the prosthetic.

He closed his eyes unable to look as he pulled it out from under the bed and strapped it on feeling the motors whirr to life as he finally picked himself up off the floor.

He refused to look down as he walked over to the drawers and pulled out a fresh set of clothes, tossing his nasty ones into a bin in the closet.

Over the sound of the fan in the bathroom, he thought he could hear the sound of a vacuum and then pots and pans clanging in the kitchen.

Curious, he stepped out into the hallway only to find that the front room had been tidied. The chairs and overturned tables had been picked up, the glass had been vacuumed, and waffles was greedily staring at Ramirez as he popped a piece of toast from the toaster, buttering it lightly before handing ti down to the dog, who took it gently and walked over to her bowl.

Ramirez looked over his shoulder, “She deserves it after having to deal with your dumbass for the past few weeks.”

He took a seat at the dining room table.

“Feeling any better?”

“Feeling human at least…. I guess.”

“Good,also you better be hungry because I am making breakfast.”

“I didn’t know you could cook.”

Ramirez raised an eyebrow at him, “Really, I come from a long and illustrious line of people who enjoy fiestas and siestas, so of course I know how to cook. My abuela would be horrified you even suggested such a thing. Just because YOU can’t cook.” he turned to the kitchen, “All this food in here, and the only thing I find open is a box of cereal, which is weird because no milk was open, which makes me think you have just been shoveling it into your face dry like dog food. Speaking of dog food, you HAVE been feeding waffles, right?”

Adam frowned a little affronted, “Of course I have!”

“Good, because I was about to slap your bitch as if you weren't.” Across the room waffles licked her chops rather loudly.

Adam paused and looked down at the table as Ramirez walked over setting a plate in front of him.

“What are you doing here?”

“Taking care of you, what does it look like. My matronly side really comes out when I think my friends are being stupid. Now eat your breakfast, or the shoe comes off.”

“The shoe?’

“Another long and glorious tradition passed down through the centuries that involves throwing your shoe and disobedient children.”

Adam raised his hands, “Ok, ok, I’m eating.”

He picked up the fork as ramirez turned to sit down next to him.

As soon as he took a bite, his mouth exploded with flavor, it was so good it was almost as if he could experience it through all five senses, and even a few more. His mouth began to immediately water. He hadn’t eaten like this in months, and found that he was surprisingly ravenous.”

Ramirez looked on smugly as he polished off the plate and then saat back in his seat,.

“More?”

Adam nodded.

Ramirez took the plate and returned with a second helping, which Adam managed much more slowly this time.

“So….”

“So?”

“How is the crew.”

The atmosphere seemed to sour just a little. Ramirez shrugged, “Since you left, its been ok I guess. Simon is doing alright but she kind of a stickler for rules, and becomes even more so when she is stressed, which kind of puts a damper on things….. She not as good as you are truth be told.”

There was a silence in the room.

“And…. Kanan?”

“Oh he’s still pissed. I am pretty sure when you get back you might have to duel him, or at least take a punch, but he’s sort of stepped up to take care of the clan and….. The weapons system since….”

“So she’s still gone is she/’

Ramirez sighed, “yeah, she's still gone, but she left a bunch of her stuff on the ship, and apparently she told kanan she was only going to be out for a couple of months, so here is to hoping she returns.” Ramirez paused turning to look at Adam with a frown.

Adam shrugged, “What.”

“You’re a real dumbass, you know that.” Adam sighed, “Soyou have said.”

“No no, you are going to hear me out for a second because I have a few things to say to you. I have been thinking bout it on my trip to find you, and I think its about time someone said them.”

Adam waited.

“You are the smartest dumb person I have ever met.” Adam blinked, “Here is a man who doesn’t need to do orbital calculations to fly a jet into orbit. He is a man who knows exactly what to do and what to say to new alien species. Here is a man who practically defined a generation, and yet here is that same dumbass abandoning his support system when he needs it the most. You have that habit, you know that. The habit of telling the Rest of us to F-off when you really need us. Its like you think that somehow we can’t handle your problems, when bitch, we have problems of our own, and if we can’t handle your we wouldn’t be offering to help. He leaned forward across the table, “You need to step up and do better because this is getting tiring.”

Adam remained in his seat staring at Ramirez and he sat back.

“Are you done?”

“No.” He slumped a bit, “But that will have to do for now.”

Adam sighed,, stared out the window at the Lunar landscape for a long moment before, “You know after years and years, after therapy and after psychologist after psychologist….. Not one has anyone ever said that.”

Ramirez watched him shiftily, not sure where this was going.

“Ive been waiting years for someone to tell me that?”

Ramirez blinked, “ok…. Ok well… shit I didn’t really expect that to work. I was just pissed to be honest.”

Adam shrugged.

“I get tired of people being so understanding all the time. It doesn’t help…. At least not me anyway.”

“Well in that case.”

Ramirez stood and walked over to his duffel bag, “You and I are going to go on a little vacation. Get out and experience the universe while we are still young. Find ourselves, and hopefully get into a shit ton of trouble.”

Adam frowned, “Are you sure about this.”

He grinned, “yes, and I know the perfect palace to start.”

He grabbed the duffle bag, and then flipped it’s contents onto the floor, “Your mom gave me these.”

Andam stood and walked over, turning to look down at the pile of clothes before snorting a laugh, “You can’t be serious.”

Ramirez grinned, “Nothing more wild that the final frontier.”

Adam reached down, and picked up two sets of wide brimmed cowboy hats from the floor pulling them apart. One was black and the other was a light tan, “You aren’t serious.”

“Do I look like I’m joking.”

With a snort he reached over and crammed the hat on to Ramirez’s head before pulling the black hat onto his own.

Ramirex struck a pose, ‘What do you think, make a pretty good cowboy, wont I.”

“You look like as much of a dumbass as I am.”

“Ouch, that really hurts me on the inside you know.”

Adam turned to look at his reflection in the window, “So this is how you are going to fix me huh, playing dress up?”

“Ok, number one I am hoping to help you fix yourself, number two your mother says you love playing dress up, and number three, I want to go on a cool vacation, but no one else will go with me.”

Adam sighed, and rolled his eyes, “Ok, ok we will go on a vacation.”

Ramirez rubbed his hands together evilly, “Excellent.”

224 notes · View notes

skrltwtch · 3 years

Text

Scent

Prompt: a & b have been friends since they were children — but they’ve gone their separate ways during college. during that time apart, muse a and b were attacked by a vampire and werewolf respectively, undergoing a transformation they never expected. they kept it a secret from each other, hoping that this doesn’t change their friendship — until they meet up over summer and … holy fucking shit why do you SMELL like that? (Source in master list)

Word count: 5,123 words

Genre: Romance, supernatural

Warnings: Blood

∘₊✧──────✧₊∘

Impatience composed the rhythm my fingers were drumming on the table. Late. As always. The optimist in me would say it was comforting to know that some things remained the same after all these years. The pessimist in me, the unspoken captain of this ship, wondered why it had to be this gross habit that weathered the winds of change. He suggested this time and place. He had been insistent on meeting in the evening. I didn’t mind either way. I simply figured that being fussy about what time to meet meant that he’d put some effort into being on time.

Because the bar had a flood of new patrons and a dearth of ones contented enough to leave, I went inside and got a table for us first. I didn’t want to have to think of a new place for us to go if the place was packed by the time he got here — whenever that’d be. Time check: fifteen minutes and counting. He was such a lovely friend, and may God never fail to bless every brown hair on his head for every second of his life, but this was infuriating. Not even a text to tell me where he was and what was holding him up. Morgan, please!

His arrival melted away all the indignation I was feeling — and made every hair on the back of my neck stand.

No, that was the pins and needles from sitting cross-legged for too long.

‘Ellie?’ Confusion squinched his eyes. I expected this. The last time he saw me was in college, i.e., some twenty kilograms ago. I wouldn’t have pitched a fit if he’d thought the pictures I used were the result of Photoshop, Facetune, and/or angles. In contrast, he looked exactly as he did when the pictures he used were taken — in college, albeit maybe with a little less baby fat in his face than I’d remembered. Damn. Well, how much could a person change in three years? It wasn’t like he ever needed to lose an ounce of weight, too, let alone twenty kilograms.

When I confirmed I was the same Ellie he’d had the privilege of knowing since childhood, he enveloped me in a hug. I did what had been conditioned into me by the ‘dog’ that I told people was responsible for the scar on my arm the time I went jogging at night because I thought the full moon was bright enough to keep me safe. People were more keen on lecturing me for daring to have that train of thought as a woman in London than questioning what kind of dog it was exactly that could leave a scar like the kind I had, perfectly vindicating my choice of cover for what really happened.

His scent was like a bat to my face. I’d never smelled anyone like this before. People smelled like their diets, their emotions, their likes and dislikes, their best and worst memories: all that made them, them. The scents I’d have associated with him would’ve been the crisp brininess of sea air and the comforting sweetness of chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven. Instead, he smelled like blood, yet it didn’t smell like it belonged to him — or in him. I was also discerning a discomforting whiff of inhumanity, like something in him had been switched off. On top of that, he was clammy to the touch, and, most damningly of all, perhaps — no, no ‘perhaps’, as I pressed my ear to his chest, I couldn’t hear a heartbeat.

I put on my best poker face and released myself from his embrace. ‘You’re late.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’ He sheepishly ran his hand through his hair. ‘God, it is so good to see you. It’s been so long. And look at you! I couldn’t recognise you. (Is it gauche to say that was why I was late?) I only knew — I only had a feeling it was you because —’

‘Because …?’

He clicked his tongue. ‘That’s not important. Listen, I don’t know what I was thinking, asking to meet in a crowded bar … Do you want to go somewhere quieter? So we can talk better without having to shout?’

I downed the last of my drink, which I’d been forced to get earlier than I wanted so the staff wouldn’t kick me out for taking up a table in one of the more desirable corners of their establishment. I agreed with Morgan on the condition that he thought of where to go next. I hated crowds to begin with, and now that I was hypersensitive to all that the five senses encompassed, crowds were, to put it simply, a fucking nightmare. I should’ve put a kibosh on his suggestion to meet at a bar when he made it. I’d be comparing apples and oranges here, but not liking crowds was normal, whereas smelling and feeling like a dead person wasn’t.

We went for ice cream. The first thing he asked me was how I lost the weight. Had we not met on an app meant for matchmaking, his first question would likely have been something else entirely, something to do with what it was that had us seeing each other for the first time since college. I told him what I did to get in shape, which was to watch what I ate and move farther and for longer than the trips I made from my room to the kitchen or bathroom, or from my desk to the pantry or washroom, throughout the day. What I left out was how I’d been maintaining despite having ordered something as indulgent as three heaping scoops of gelato with chocolate brownie pieces and hot fudge sauce: catch something from an animal bite that counted an enhanced metabolism needed to sustain monthly bodily trauma among one of its many symptoms. It really was easy as that.

We opted for takeout and a walk around Hyde Park to pad out our evening. The open space did nothing to defuse his strange scent. It was all I could focus on, and I needed all the brain cells I could get to the office on such short notice focus on our conversation. We’d gotten the answers to simple questions about our lives over text prior to tonight: what we did after college, what we were doing now, how our families were doing, so on and so forth. You know, small talk bullshit. I hadn’t doubted that we’d broach the subject of our break from each other at some point during our reconnection. The elephant had made itself comfortable in the room the instant I received the notification he’d swiped right on me. The thing was, the elephant couldn’t stop another one of its ilk from invading its space, and now they were both arguing over which one of them deserved our attention better.

The almost pristine three-layered sundae drenched in strawberry sauce in Morgan’s hand provided the perfect icebreaker for me to possibly appease either elephant. ‘Are you okay, Morgan?’ I said. ‘You’ve barely touched your ice cream.’ Conversely, I was halfway through mine, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I had hot fudge sauce smeared across my lips.

It wasn’t only his restraint from inhaling his ice cream, the single course of action the Morgan I knew, the one who wouldn’t be smelling like a mortuary, would’ve carried out ages ago. He had been looking out of sorts the entire evening. Even softballs were answered with skittishness and reserve. Really, why’d he agree to meet if he wasn’t entirely over what happened all those years ago? If that was what this was about, that is. Did seeing me in person make him realise that it wasn’t the best of ideas to attempt to rekindle a friendship that’d turned awkward from differing expectations? It didn’t bother me in any way, but that was easy for me to say, considering the role I played in all this.

‘I’m fine.’ He gulped down a giant spoonful of ice cream without flinching. He and I understood the concept of ‘fine’ very differently. ‘Ellie … we’re friends, right?’

He’d wanted to be more than at one point.

‘Yeah,’ I said as deadpan as I could to prevent him from reading too much into my answer. I mean, I would if I were him.

‘We can tell each other anything.’

We sure did.

‘Promise me you won’t take this the wrong way,’ he continued.

I stared at him blankly. Caveats never came before anything good.

‘… Why do you smell like that?’

Wow, what the fuck. I should be the one asking that question, not him!

‘Like what?’ Still as deadpan as humanly possible. Disregard the fact that I hadn’t been human in a while.

‘Like … fuck, I can’t. This was a bad idea.’

‘No, tell me. Like what?’

‘Like the forest. Moss. Tree bark. Leaves. Dirt. And a little bit of raw meat.’ There were no pauses between his words, though the sounds were disparate enough to identify them as actual words. ‘No, a lot of raw meat. No, forget I said anything. Sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into me tonight.’

‘Just what has gotten into you, period? Why do you smell like spoilt wine — like blood?’ I wanted to ask as well why he didn’t seem to have a heartbeat. I remembered in time that a stethoscope was required to detect that sort of thing, and I had no business owning one. I wouldn’t even know where to get one, short of robbing the doctor the next time I had to go in for a check-up.

‘Something happened to us, didn’t it? Other than the obvious.’

‘I think so. Say it together on the count of three?’ I needed the countdown to convince myself that whatever had made him like this hadn’t made him cruel. He hadn’t said or done anything that’d wound me. No, what was I thinking? This was Morgan I was talking about. What sacrilege to think he could hurt a living being. I should apologise to him for this.

He agreed to my proposition.

I started the countdown: ‘One — two — three —’

‘I’m a vampire.’

‘I’m a werewolf.’

Together: ‘What?’

‘Are you messing with me?’ he said.

‘Are you messing with me?’

‘Have I ever?’

He had a point. I really needed to apologise to him. ‘How did it happen?’ Why play dumb? I turned into a hulking wolf-woman hybrid once a month. There were obviously others like me. It stood to reason that vampires would exist as well.

‘I … met someone after college. She and I had … stuff in common. I thought she was kidding when she asked if she could feed on me the first time. I let her anyway, and so much about her made sense immediately. I asked her to turn me eventually. Being vampires together was fun at first … and then it wasn’t. I don’t regret it, though. Okay, I do regret not being able to really enjoy food anymore.’ He cast a wistful stare in the direction of his sundae. It was a milkshake by now. ‘You?’

‘I was bitten while I was hiking at night. It was an accident. He’ — I paid no attention to the wince he made — ‘realised what he did and brought me to safety. He revealed himself to me the next day. He taught me everything about being a werewolf. Of course, one thing led to another, and …’

‘He was your ex,’ he said stiffly. For the first time tonight, I smelled something other than blood on him: bitterness.

‘Yes, the one I told you about on Tinder.’ Because he asked. His responses in that part of the conversation, as brief as it was, had borne little to no emotion. Jude and I ended things on a good note. I made that clear to Morgan. There was nothing for him — as a friend — to have strong feelings about. ‘Please, Morgan.’ Us coming across each other and reconnecting on a dating app meant — was supposed to mean — nothing.

‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘I’m sorry for what happened in college. I’m over it, I promise. The time and distance apart helped. I don’t want us to not be friends anymore because of this — because of what I did. I’m happy we got to meet again after so long … and after everything that happened.’

‘It’s okay, Morgan. I wasn’t — I’m not — upset about what happened.’ I wasn’t really anything about it. Okay, I might have been surprised that the roles had been as they were: Morgan glowed up toward the end of secondary school, a development that didn’t go unnoticed by most of the female population wherever he went, whereas I was pudgy, socially awkward, and not the right amount of weird for it to be seen as quirky, and would therefore be likely to latch on to my sole source of male attention. (I was now two out of three of those things.) ‘Things happen. We don’t get to control this kind of thing. I’m happy, too, that you’re back. I missed you. I’m happy you got to work things out and want to continue being friends. Let’s just put this behind us and move on, okay?’

I hugged him. Relief and cheer emanated from him, alleviating the musty scent that made sense to belong to a vampire.

‘I missed you, too. On the bright side, it made the vampire–werewolf confession easier to stomach, didn’t it?’ His grin revealed pointed canines.

I chuckled. We could compare our fangs sometime. ‘What do you do for food?’

He guzzled the entirety of his sundae-milkshake in one drag. I envied the apparent departure of the concept of brain freeze from him. I should learn more about vampire lore from him and see what Hollywood had gotten right and wrong. (It was mostly the latter for werewolves: we were underrepresented and misrepresented. I just could never get a fair shake on the big screen.) ‘You’d be surprised by how well vampires have modernised and worked the Internet to their advantage. Blood bag delivery services, forums and apps for vampires and … vampire enthusiasts to connect. How about you? What do you do on full moons?’

‘I drive out to the woods whenever I transform — whenever I want to. That’s a thing.’ Jude and I spent a lot of our nights together as wolves. I did miss that sometimes. Jude never prepared me for how lonely being a werewolf could be until it was too late. ‘I hunt. I play. I explore. I haven’t killed anyone to the best of my knowledge.’

‘I want to make a “good girl” joke, but you can literally tear me from limb to limb.’ I nodded with a slight air of pride. ‘This is so fascinating. Vampires are pretty straightforward. What you see in movies and on TV is what you get — mostly.’ Ah, hell. ‘Hey, can I tag along whenever you transform? So I can learn how to hunt animals. Blood bags are actually kind of shitty, and I’m trying to keep biting people to a minimum. I — um — I don’t want to accidentally go too far and turn or kill someone.’

I was deeply relieved that he was still the same caring, thoughtful person I knew in spite of the faint unfeelingness I sniffed earlier. I wouldn’t think twice if it were another vampire: maybe that was what was needed for them to survive. I mean … who was I to judge? I gave in to feral thoughts occasionally. Given a choice, the only thing I’d choose to hunt was the perfect red velvet cake. But this was Morgan, the same person I needed to apologise to for thinking he’d say something mean to make me feel bad on purpose.

‘Of course, I’d love to show you the ropes! Just don’t judge my wolf form, okay?’ I said.

‘Shut up. I’m sure you look great. Would you prefer being called cute or ferocious?’

‘Both, please.’

‘I figured. Can you believe I was afraid to tell you about this? I didn’t know how you’d react, especially after …’

‘Same.’ The club that knew what I was, was a highly exclusive one, consisting of only two members at the moment and for the foreseeable future. I didn’t dare tell anyone else. Just how would this come up in a normal conversation? ‘I know we can tell each other anything.’ We did. We were in a world where asking a friend to be more than friends was less cause for concern for one’s mental health after all. ‘And nothing’s come between us. Not even —’

He nodded emphatically.

We found a place to sit in the park and continued talking, sharing stories about our new lives and recounting those from our old ones. Time became inconsequential, as did the fact that it had done so on a weeknight. We left only because the park was closing soon and I got hungry, because enhanced metabolism. A Lebanese takeaway near the park was my saviour. Our conversation persisted into the wee hours of the morning and a long way away from where we’d started. As he turned down my request to have breakfast together before heading home almost at the crack of dawn as we were wont to do in our early college days (and he did so patiently, which was more than what I deserved for being a forgetful idiot), it hit me for a moment that being friends with a vampire might pose a challenge to scheduling, as if his chronic lateness wasn’t already a thing. Then I realised it didn’t matter. I was simply happy to have him back in my life, and while anything about us could change at any time, one thing was for certain: our friendship would be everlasting.

✦✧✦✧

It happened again.

I fell in love with her again.

As soon as I felt the same tingle in my stomach that gave rise to our long separation in college, I knew I had to call our friendship off for good. This couldn’t keep happening. She needed a friend she could count on to be there for her because he wanted to out of cordiality, not one whose intentions she’d constantly be second-guessing. She had to know something was up. She had to have sensed my feelings for her. What could that nose of hers not detect? No, we agreed not to read each other’s emotions using our sense of smell. We weren’t at that level of intimacy with each other, as much as I desperately wanted us to be.

And hell, did I ever want it so terribly. Being what I was, everything I felt was intensified. I didn’t know what I might do to her if I continued to be around her while she didn’t reciprocate my feelings, and I didn’t want to find out. I was prepared to spend all of eternity without her. There’d come a time anyway when she wouldn’t be in my life anymore. Werewolves weren’t immortal. I’d have to watch her grow old — at a slower rate than humans, sure. So that’d buy us at least a decade or two. So what? I’d still have to watch her die. The sooner I ended things, the better it’d be for the both of us. She could get a head start on the life she deserved, one free of a perpetually lovesick wanker.

I’d do it tonight — under the stars at the beach, the breeze appreciable but not disruptive, the waves lapping the shore with calm strokes, the waxing gibbous moon bathing us in a warm, tranquil glow. It was fucking perfect … for what I wished this was instead of what this was supposed to be. It didn’t have to be tonight. Did I want to ruin this lovely picnic she’d so eagerly planned and looked forward to? It had to be tonight. The longer I spent in her company, the more I feared I’d do something that’d push us beyond the brink of repair.

Desire and disquietude were making it difficult to focus on her words. She was talking about … her latest project at work or the 22nd and 23rd cats her sister had just adopted … or something. Her lips were mesmerising to watch. They must feel just as nice to kiss. Jude was bloody lucky to be the only person to know for sure. Fuck. Fuck, Morgan. You’d fucking lost the plot. This shit was exactly why you needed to get away from her. Fucking knob. Fucking loser who thought ‘once bitten, twice shy’ didn’t apply to him. She’d think you were a fucking obsessive creep, and she’d be right.

‘— I can’t stand to visit her. I don’t need to be a werewolf to think that the smell of twenty-something cats in an okay-sized flat is horrendous. And no one would dare call her out on it. You know what she’s like. It’s how she has twenty-something cats to begin with. She wasn’t even a cat person before. Anyway’ — Ellie held up her hands, the movement stealing my attention from her lips, ‘low contact, as it is with the rest of them.’ She popped a pie bar in her mouth. ‘And I just spent the last five minutes ranting about my sister and her lack of self-control. Totally the best thing to do at a time like this, right?’

I could listen to her spout off about the most mundane thing possible all night and find it all so riveting.

I sipped my drink — badger blood to bring out the sweetness of the fruit-heavy dishes and complement the fowl-based sandwiches she packed. I never would’ve thought of pairing the blood of different animals with human food to make the latter more palatable. She revived in me the thrill of being a vampire after two years of languishing under the spell of ennui and regret for an existence spanning all of eternity cast on me by the desolation of my split from Lorelai. And I was likely going to go down that rabbit hole again after tonight. It was for a good cause. I’d rather be miserable than be the source of her headache.

‘Morgan? You’re — um —’ She made a circular motion at my upper body, and then heaved her shoulders in an amused shrug. ‘I wish you all the best in getting all that out.’

I looked over what she’d gestured at. ‘Fuck it. I’d been meaning to toss this shirt anyway.’

I soaked up what I could with a napkin — or five — and took off my shirt before I’d retch from the smell. I practised controlled feeding for a reason. Now I was shirtless and a little bloodied, just in time for one of the most important conversations in my very long, soon to be very lonely, life to take place. Terrific.

‘Ellie, I — I have something to tell you.’

‘I fucked up the dip, didn’t I?’

‘No, it’s not that — it’s delicious.’ For something that didn’t come from a vein, at least. ‘Ellie … I love you.’ Again. Because I was a stupid fuck.

Her lips formed an O. Stop fucking looking at her lips!

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I thought I’d gotten over it the first time.’ It sucked that there was now a ‘first time’. ‘I just get this feeling when I’m around you. I feel safe, happy — I feel like I’m alive again. I don’t have to hide anything about myself. I can be me, yet you make me want to be the best I can be for you. But I can’t keep doing this to you and myself. I don’t want to settle on being friends this time. I know that part of me won’t let me either. And I don’t know what that part of me would do if I continue to be in your life like this.’

‘Morgan —’

‘I shouldn’t have come back. I’ve enjoyed the past year tremendously. But I think — I know I have to leave now while things are still … good between us. It��d be for the best. I don’t want to fuck up what we had since we were kids. I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry. I truly am.’

She simply stared at me. She must be thinking why the fuck she’d been saddled with a right prat for a friend. Where did things go wrong? Did I knock back too many whiskey shots on my 18th birthday? I vaguely remembered her asking me to stop after my eleventh. Why wasn’t she still saying anything? Did I break her?

‘No, Morgan’ was what she said at last — and the only thing she said for the longest time.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Don’t leave.’ Her hand hovered over mine. Uncertainty swam about in her eyes. Her dilemma was plain to see. I took her hand and locked our fingers together. This was the only time I could get away with being this forward. I wanted to savour her warmth as well for as long as I could; I’d miss it so much.

‘I have to. It’s not safe for you to be around me.’

‘But … I want to be with you. Not as friends. Morgan … I’ve fallen in love with you, too.’

‘What are you saying? No, don’t — that’s not —’ Had I put her under some kind of glamour without realising it? Was she humouring me? Every fibre of my being yearned for what I heard to be true. Nothing I’d seen in all the time we spent together suggested the possibility. Nothing we did together seemed out of the ordinary.

‘I’m — I mean it. I should be the one apologising, I think. I’ve felt this way for the last couple of months. I look forward to being with you all the time. I love receiving your texts throughout the night and waking up to them in the morning. Nothing feels like it’s happened until I tell you about it. I get these butterflies in my stomach every time you smile at me and touch me. You remember these small details about us from so long ago. I think the moment I knew was when I was having a tough time transforming for whatever reason and you were just … there for me, holding me, talking me down. I love you. I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you sooner. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how you’d react because of — because of what happened in college.’

She sniffled. Seeing that I was the reason for her tears stung my heart. I wiped them away for her. ‘I love you. I always will,’ I said.

Then our lips met. I’d waited so long for this, and it was both everything I dreamt of and like nothing I could’ve ever imagined. Her lips were so warm, so soft, so sweet. I tasted the tartness of cherries and apples, the smokiness of turkey, the acidic sharpness of vinaigrette, on her mouth, notes I thought lost to me forever. An indistinct thumping sounded deep inside my chest. Her fingers slid into my hair, making waves of it. I pulled her closer to me, my hands gripping her waist, in the hope that the rush of her skin against mine would allay my doubts that this was all just a dream. But how could it be a dream when everything seemed to finally make sense? While Lorelai had promised a life anew in death, Ellie was the promise of a life renewed and delivered from death.

I didn’t want this moment to end. It had to, as my body was beginning to respond to the call of her blood.

She pulled away. No, I wanted to cry out. She must’ve sensed my thirst.

‘It’s okay if you want to,’ she said. ‘I’m not afraid.’

She bared her neck for me. My nostrils flared. I could smell her blood — like red hot ambrosia. Her heartbeat pounded in my ears, growing louder with every second I dithered. Why was I hesitating? I wanted her. I needed her.

I sank my teeth into her neck. She shuddered; a soft moan fled her lips. Crimson flowed out of the punctures I made. Everything I’d imbibed prior paled in comparison to what I was now partaking of: little explosions of flavour — syrupy, racy, robust — went off in my mouth. I feared nothing else could do it for me after this. I lapped up every drop of ruby as if it were exquisite manna; I made sure none of it went to waste. The blood I ingested was making its way south, making a signal for another kind of craving to be met. Not now. It’d be too soon for us. I had all the time in the world to get to know her better.

Her scent and whines were becoming too hard to ignore. I stopped for fear that I was misinterpreting them out of my own bias. I found myself staring into enlarged amber irises in pools of black. Claws had popped out from under her fingernails. She, too, was sporting fangs. Her chest, lightly shining with sweat, rose and fell sharply. The changes reversed themselves in short order. Red spread across her cheeks in uneven blotches.

‘I’m sorry. I —’ she said.

I cupped my hand around her cheek. ‘You can let go if you want to. You don’t have to be shy around me.’ She’d always been sheepish about her wolf form and the lengths she went to for its emergence around me. The incident she referred to had only been allowed to happen because her panic attack drowned out any embarrassment, any diffidence, she harboured about the process. That was the only time I saw her in that state.

She shook her head. ‘I know. I just — I’d want to experience that — our first time — as myself, and I don’t think I can do that now. I hope that’s okay.’

I wiped my mouth and gave her a light kiss on the lips. ‘Of course. We don’t have to rush into things. We have a lifetime ahead of us’, and I wanted every second to be as special as the last. She smiled in agreement and enfolded me in a tight embrace. It startled me how much she felt just like home in my arms. I could do this with her forever, and for a fleeting moment, as I fingered the now unblemished skin where my teeth had pierced, I wondered if there would ever be the chance of her wanting to share in my idea of forever.

#exophilia #terato #werewolf #vampire #monster love #monster romance #mine

30 notes · View notes

allegedlyanandroid · 3 years

Note

Pairing: Allen60 Prompt: Cold Types: Found Family, Fluff AU: Angels and Demons, Sixty as the little devil he is, and Allen just being human.

I am so late 😅 I wrote an entire thing before realising I hated every word of it and started over from scratch. Anyway... excuses aside, I hope you like it @yayen-chan <3 `(‾◡◝)´

“Okay, bookshelves first,” Allen mutters, following the intricate maze of arrows and concrete as he tries to navigate the local IKEA. “Or rugs. That works too,” he sighs when he glances up and finds himself in the wrong part of the store. Looking through the copious amounts of different rugs Allen rapidly finds himself overwhelmed. He tries reading a few of the ridiculously complicated names, stuttering over them when trying to read them out loud. “Ra- raskmol- mölle?”

Giving up on the fifth time trying to pronounce it correctly Allen rolls the grey-and-black striped fabric up and tosses it on the cart, already dreading trying to find the rest of the items on his list. There’s only one really but when passing through the plant-section he stops to pick up a potted plant. The other one is beyond salvaging from lack of water. “Ilex, foreeneling? För-enlig. What are these names?”

After another dead-end and some frustrated grumbling, he does find the bookshelf he needs. Honestly… this trip alone solidifies why he’s never getting a puppy. The one he took in to foster was a sweet thing but very demanding and unaware that he weighed quite a lot for a pup. He’d knocked Allen’s bookshelf over, thus breaking it, and also had an accident on his rug. If being petless meant never having to go here again then that’s a price he’s willing to pay. At least the shelter had found a family for him quickly and, while he did miss the little rascal, the puppy was undoubtedly in better hands.

“Kallax, hemnes... gersby?”

Too caught up in his own head he doesn't notice the strange scent of warm brimstone and ash filtering through the air nor does he notice the young “man” standing behind him, a man who seemingly appeared out of thin air, until he hears the sound of a throat clearing. Allen jerks his head up from wrestling with the cardboard box and offers an apologetic smile over his shoulder. “I’ll be done in a minute.”

“Or, you could tell me why I’m here and spare me the mundane small talk you humans seem so obnoxiously fond of.”

“I’m sorry?”

The man squints. “You summoned me.”

Allen pauses to take a good look at the man. He’s tall with black, artistically tousled hair and endless amounts of freckles. A few moles are scattered across his skin and his brown eyes are filled with irritation. Dark jeans with a long-sleeved shirt tucked into it, a black overcoat ending at about mid-thigh and a purple scarf hanging unknotted around his neck. Allen thinks long and hard yet finds no recollection of ever seeing this man before in his life let alone speaking to him. “I have no idea who you are.”

“You-” the man pinches the bridge of his nose, inhales deeply and slowly let it out before starting again. “You read the incantation to evoke me and you what… didn’t even realise it?” he asks and receives nothing but a blank stare from Allen in return. “Ugh, humans.”

In the blink of an eye the man transforms. Horns curve with the shape of his skull, producing from close to his temples, before ending in sharp tips that blend in with his raven hair. A black tail is wrapped around his leg which ends with a jagged spear-like point. The tips of his fingers look like they’ve been dipped in charcoal, fading into dark grey about halfway up his fingers, with claw-like black nails top it all off. They tap against the metal shelf next to them as the demon slowly advances.

Too shocked to move, Allen’s jaw is taken in a firm grip and when the demon smiles his teeth are pointed blades. “So… are you going to tell me what it is you want?”

“You can let go of my face for a start,” Allen says, adding a quick “thank you,” when the demon does as he’s told. “What’s your name?”

“You may call me Sixty.”

“Sixty,” Allen repeats. “No offence but I quite like having my soul intact. I’m sorry for dragging you from… whatever circle of hell you reside in, but I’m not interested in making any sort of deal with you.”

“Sucks to be you then because I’m not leaving until you do,” Sixty says and from his tone of voice alone Allen knows he’s a hundred percent serious.

‘Fucking IKEA.’

“Really? You couldn’t have chosen to live somewhere a bit warmer?” Sixty asks with disdain, thankfully back to looking human. His feet sink into the four inches worth of snow dusting the ground and he can already feel the cold seeping in through the gaps in his clothing. “Or somewhere nicer in general.”

“No one’s forcing you to stay.”

“No one’s forcing you to live here.” A pause. “Or if they are, I am more than willing to kill them for you free of charge.”

Allen sighs.

Having a demon for a housemate isn’t as bad as he thought it would be. Sixty mostly keeps to himself whenever he isn’t trying to get a rise out of him or complaining about the cold or putting things on tall shelves like the little shit he is. Until Sixty gets bored that is.

Because when Sixty gets bored trouble ensues.

Emerging from his office after a long day of meetings to see his demonic housemate casually chatting with parts of his team in the breakroom is a bit out of left field and the sight of Sixty’s mischievous eyes boring into his own is enough to quicken his pace. “What are you doing here, Si- Silas?” he asks, forcing a smile on his face.

He hates how no one else can look past the innocent brown eyes and syrupy grin to see the smugness beneath. “I thought we were supposed to eat lunch together? Did you forget?”

“No, of course not,” Allen hastens to say, ignoring Willis and Clark’s knowing grins, as he wracks his brain for a response. “Though I distinctly remember asking you to wait outside.”

“It would have been rude of me to decline Julie’s offer of getting coffee,” Sixty replies and raises his mug as if to show it off.

“No need to be jealous, boss. We just wanted to get to know the guy better,” Julie says.

“Yeah, it’s not like we’ve ever seen you hang out with anyone outside of work apart from Reed,” Clark pipes up. “We got curious.”

“I’m not jealous!” Allen tries to defend himself, latching on to the word, but the agitated tone does nothing to help his case. Sixty smirking behind the rim of the coffee cup like a cat who got the cream isn’t helping to improve his mood either.

“You are the pettiest asshole I’ve ever had the unfortunate luck of meeting,” Allen says when they’re safely away from prying eyes.

Sixty snickers, knowing full well the amount of endless curiosity and ceaseless questions he’s unleashed on the human. “There’s an easy way to get rid of me.”

The fistful of snow he gets shoved in his face shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

By the time he manages to blink the melting snow out of his eyes Allen is too far away to retaliate, though that doesn’t stop Sixty from trying.

Despite his best efforts Sixty’s irritation with being unceremoniously dragged into the mortal plane dissipates after the third week of staying with Allen. By the time he’s been there for a month and a half, Allen’s team have adopted him as one of their own and he would be lying if he said he wasn’t flattered. They genuinely care about his well-being and often invite him along on outings. As someone whose family is… overbearing, their light-hearted ribbing is a nice change of pace. Their easy dynamic is the very opposite of stifling. No one ever pries when he declines to answer a question. No one touches him after he made it clear he dislikes physical contact. No one quizzes him about his every movement.

It’s… nice.

The next team building exercise and subsequent photo op, proudly displayed on the communal fridge, includes him and Sixty doesn’t cry even a little bit upon seeing that.

Not at all.

In the end, the shift in their relationship is near seamless ‒ from reluctant roommates to friends to something more.

What hits him first is the metallic scent of fresh blood and Sixty is halfway across the room before he can even process rising to his feet. He gathers Allen up in his arms and leads him to sit down on one of the kitchen chairs. Part of his dark shirt is tacky with blood and Sixty feels no remorse when he shreds it to get it off as quickly as possible. Something, a bullet or knife, must have grazed his side. It’s bleeding sluggishly though it thankfully isn’t deep. Sixty takes the ruined shirt and presses it against the wound. “Keep putting pressure on it.”

Allen doesn’t answer and in the end he’s the one who has to move Allen’s hand to take over while he dashes to the bathroom for the medkit. Sixty plunks it down on the floor and fills a bowl of lukewarm water to put down beside it before fetching a clean towel. He kneels down between Allen’s legs and cleans meticulously around the area, noting the patches of skin where bruises are slowly forming. Swiping over the wound with antiseptic earns him a bitten-off hiss and Sixty puts a hand on Allen’s sternum to steady him after the first involuntary flinch.

He keeps it there, soothed by feeling the steady thrum of Allen’s heartbeat beneath his fingertips, until he needs the use of both his hands. In its absence, Sixty’s tail comes up to wrap loosely around his thigh for comfort.

Butterfly bandages instead of sutures, his tail instead of his hand. Allen doesn’t say a word about either choice though he is smiling down where they’re connected once Sixty chances a quick peek.

There’s nothing left for him to do after covering the wound with gauze, taping the edges down, yet Sixty finds himself lingering there regardless.

It’s easy to trace around the gauze with the very tip of a claw and when he catches Allen’s dark eyes the urge to lean down to place a gentle kiss over it wins out. Allen sighs quietly and coaxes Sixty up to kiss him properly ‒ a chaste press of lips against lips followed by a sincere thank you.

Sixty blushes and knocks his forehead against Allen’s, mindful of his horns, in a silent show of affection.

“Why haven’t you kissed me yet?”

“Because I literally stepped in the door a second ago?” Allen laughs and pulls Sixty in for a quick kiss.

“Excuses,” Sixty sniffs and steals another kiss, one that quickly devolves into a dozen pecks being pressed all over his face until Allen plants a last lingering one to his lips.

“I love you,” Allen says when they break apart for real.

The shy smile spreading over Sixty’s lips is one he’ll never tire of seeing.

#slowly but surely working my way through these #sorry it's taking so long #dbh allen #captain allen #dbh sixty #rk800 sixty #allen60 #dbh #detroit: become human #detroit become human #allegedly answering asks #mini fic #my writing #that awkward moment when you're in an ikea and accidentally summon a demon

39 notes · View notes

pensivetense · 3 years

Note

Rant about another fic idea. Go. (Did I enjoy the last one? Yes, I want to hear more.)

Hmm since it doesn’t have a plot per se to explain and because it’s been tabled for the moment in favour of loneleyes reverse au, have an extremely unpolished snippet of Not!Sasha fic:

The pizza shop is near closing and she knows she’s disturbing the sole employee, but he’s too kind to kick her out in the street tonight.

She isn’t sure, at first, why she picks here to enter—there’s no appeal for her in an empty, brightly-lit little restaurant, but then she realises.

She’s... she’s hungry.

The boy at the counter gestures to the display with a weary, practiced motion. “Want anything?”

She nods, chooses a slice of pineapple pizza just to be contrary, and takes it back to a seat by the window. She doesn’t really intend to eat it, but it smells good, and she thinks trying a little piece can’t hurt.

It’s different from every other time she’s had human food. Usually, she—it—doesn’t taste it, not really, just chews and swallows and pretends.

But this is... it’s different, it’s solid and warm and full of flavour. She eats it with a kind of wonder, tearing off individual pieces and bringing them to her mouth, savouring the richness of the fat and the salt of the cheese and the sweet, acidic tang of the pineapple. There’s satisfaction in it, not merely at experiencing a taste she enjoys but also at the sensation of fullness, of satiation, that tells her this will nourish that feeling of strange physical hollowness in her abdomen. She bites into the pepper, and is flooded by too-sharp-too-hot. This, she thinks with a glee she hadn’t known herself capable of, she doesn’t like. It tastes bad. She shoves the rest of it into her mouth and chews, awed, pizza forgotten.

The boy behind the counter is staring at her with the vaguely tactless gaze of the overtired. When she looks at him, he jumps a little, then gives her a smirk that somehow suggests camaraderie rather than judgement.

“Good, yeah? Here,” he says, and plates her another slice. It’s got [describe atrocious pizza crime here] on.

“Been trying it out.”

It’s not a good as the pineapple, but it’s not offensive either, and the chaos of it appeals to her aesthetic sensibilities. There’s a little cup full of the peppers, too. She thinks she probably looks unflatteringly startled when it's passed to her, but the boy must interpret the look as gratitude because he smiles. “Near closing anyway,” he says modestly. “It’ll go to waste otherwise.”

It was not human, and it never had been. What happens when an inhuman thing begins to pretend?

It was not made to have an identity. What happens when a thing with no self becomes aware of itself? What happens when it gains preference, desire? What happens when it wants to be?

It could not. It could not be. To become a self would destroy it utterly, or worse. It recognises within itself the seeds of humanity from which it had sprung, born of the human fear of the uncanny, the human need to see the familiar in the strange. It wore human form and bore human names, and played forever at being human, and, perhaps, if a formerly human thing could draw close and become an aspect of the great Terror, it could be remade itself into the very thing which it shaped itself to.

It (she) looks in the mirror. Mirrors are friends to the Stranger, but this mirror shows—short, severe hair. eyes too pale for the complexion and a mouth just a little bit wrong. a sharp nose, very red lips—her. Could this be the reflection she (it) wore forever? Could she tie herself here, to this one face, this one life, these peculiar preferences and this raft of drowning companions?

Jon, sinking deeper into the gaze of the Eye every day. Martin, afraid and more alone than he knew, a kind man in a world which would not reward that, who probably would not live out the year. Tim, touched with a hurt which ran too deep for her to overcome, who would hate her for being what she was (for doing what she’d done).

Could she live with that? She was still Stranger enough to break free of the weak bonds of the Overseer, to strike out and leave them all behind before she truly Became her. And then she’d be free of the Table’s grasp as well, unbounded yet so very finite. Could she be Sasha, elsewhere, apart from them? Eat pizza and put on eyeshadow and just... exist with the ache of them, buried forever in her chest? Find new people to be around, to like or dislike?

Was this what it meant, being human, being a cogent person? To make a home with all you’ve left behind, as well as all you are or could become? How, how was that worth it? Why were the humans not lining up to fling themselves wholesale into the maw of the Stranger, just to escape the burden of existence? But she knew the answer to those questions, as surely as she understood that if she hadn’t known the answers, she wouldn’t even have thought to ask.

#sorry this isn't a fic idea per se but this is literally the entire plot #not!sasha having a series of crises in London at night and falling in love with Tim #Thank you so much for the ask I love inflicting my fic upon the world

12 notes · View notes

manychocolatefactories · 3 years

Text

CatCF Dark Chocolate: Part 2, the tour

Willy Wonka and his factory:

For the Factory in this version, I wanted to give a feeling of the factories of the 19th century. Something between a place where a mad scientist would work and a steampunk fantasy. Willy Wonka himself is based on Jules Vernes.

Willy Wonka himself is a man with an "impressive beard", a solemn but kind air on his face, and an overall feeling of knowledge and wisdom. Wearing a thick and tight jacket, a black top hat and a dark green coat, his appearance actually gives mixed signals: his short hair is fluffy and shaggy, like a man of free spirit, of amusement and not much care, but his beard and mustache are neatly trimmed and cut, like any serious and respectable man. His hair is brown, chocolate-colored, but with touches of white and gray here and there. His eyes are kind and twinkling, but his mouth is a harsh thin line. He is the kind of man that will say the most extravagant things perfectly seriously, but treat serious and common business as a joke. Don't think however that is an extravagant or funny man. Again, he rather gives the feeling of a kind mad scientist.

As for the Factory itself, actually the locals, the people of the town over which the Factory looms, dislike it. Sure, the Factory is admired by people wordlwide - tourists come to see it, painters come to paint it, it is a landmark admired in foreign countries. But the locals do not like it at all. It is a tall, dark, cold and stern building, with no color of beauty, only locked doors, metallic fences, thick walls and high chimneys. The Factory does not employ anyone of the town, in fact no one ever saw the Factory workers arrive or leave. Wonka himself has never left his factory for decades now. Couple that with strange white silhouettes seen at the windows, and the ramblings of the local homeless man who apparently hates the Factory and keeps insulting it, and quickly a bad reputation was built for it. Adults believe Wonka is trying to hide a shameful secret, the kids tell tales of "the haunted chocolate factory"...

In fact, I wanted an air of creepiness for the Factory. I took back the original idea of Dahl that all the workers are regular humans dressed in white, and I pushed it a little further: they are basically so covered in white you can hardly see them anymore. They have white blouses and jackets, white gloves, white masks, white caps, white helmets... After each kid's demise, a mysterious poem is recitated (like in Dahl's original drafts), mysterious voices that could be eithe the worker's or something else... In fact, with each kid demise there is an element of sppokiness which may be the kid hallucinating out of fear, or not (Augustus in the river thinks something is tying to catch him or drag him down ; Wilbur and Rice in the dark hear and feel creepy things...). And Wonka himself keeps making ominous references to "selling your soul to the devil"...

But in truth the Factory isn't a death trap at all. Behind the scenes, the workers are just normal people with their own life and their usual office routines, and who happent to leave very discreetly the Factory. The Factory is also based a lot on the Menier chocolate factory, which is the "real-life" Wonka factory. I may speak more about it one day.

Anyway... now let's go on with the tour!

# The Labyrinth. Behind each entrance, before each exit of the Factory, is a labyrinth, a maze Wonka designed after the works of Penrose and Möbius. Only he and his workers know the way out of them. This is merely a security measure.

# The Edible Garden. For this garden, I wanted to insist on the idea of it being fake and artificial - Wonka didn't try to create a perfect replica of a landscape. This room doesn't even have any real sense in the Factory, it is merely a piece of art he created so that he could come in here to relax and mediate. There are no windows, all the lights come from spots on the far-away ceiling and the ground is grey stone (because Wonka is revolted at the idea of making grass out of candy, it would be too dirty). There are trees of hard caramel and mint candies, orchards where the fruits are made of gummy, lollipops shaped like flowers and numerous sculptures of sugar - none of this is to be eaten however. At the back of the garden, there is the Chocolate River. The River serves a double use: on one side, it is merely an aesthetic addition to the Edible Garden. On the other, it is a source of energy for the Factory - it used to be a water mill, and Wonka kept the ancient structures but replaced water with chocolate. As such, the production of chocolate actually helps create energy back - and the river ends with a series of different pipes, each one leading to a different room where the chocolate will be used.

This is where Augustus Pottle meets his demise. The competitive glutton tried to empty the river of its content, and fell into it. Sucked up by one of the glass pipes, he did a long travel through the tubes and pipes of the factory, which crushed and reshaped his fat into a cylindric body - before he fell into one of the boiling vats. There, the heat was enough to have all his fat melt, like in a super-intense sauna. Hopefully, he was rescued before being boiled alive - but Augustus left the factory as a mass of sagging, extra-skin, his wrinkled folds dragging on the ground, like a skeleton wearing a bride's dress made of human flesh.

# At the back of the Edible Garden, there is a long hallway that passes by a balcony. Said balcony allows one to see the "Mosaic room", a place where Wonka makes mosaics out of pralines - and since the room is really vast, he can make giant mosaics.

# The Vanilla Fudge Mountain. While it looks like a miniature mountain kept inside a giant room, this titanic hunk of vanilla fudge is actually a fragment taken out of the Honeylaya mountain range (located somewhere between the great Black Thunder chocolate mines, and the sugar marshes of the Sea of Marmelade). [References to the Himalaya, the Black Thunder coal mines, the Black Thunder chocolate bars, the Sea of Marmara and salt marshes ]. This room is basically a copy-cut of Dahl's deleted chapter of the same name, with workers breaking down the mountain, piling the fudge in wagons and then sending it to the Cutting and Pounding Room.

This is where Wilbur and Rice meet their demise. Unruly, and tired of having all their pranks and "fun" sabotaged by Wonka and Bertie Upside, they decide to ride the wagons. Of course, they are sent down the Cutting and Pounding Room - hopefully for them, Wonka has installed an intelligent wire strainer/net that can catch all impurities detected, to clean the fudge. So the kids are saved, right? Well the thing is that, while waiting on the wire strainer for someone to save them, the kids, bored and gluttonous, ended up eating all the fudge that fell down around them. They ate so much of it, that the machine ended up identifying them as "fudge" instead of "impurity" (since they were basically 80 percent fudge after their gorging Xp). So they where sent down in the Room, thrown on a conveyor belt... ready to be pound and cut into slices. The workers realized this of course and stopped the conveyor belt before the knifes - but the kids still got pounded. Wilbur, who was lying on his side when he got pounded, became tall and thin ; while Tommy, who was standing up, got pounded on the head and became small and large. In fact, when they got out of the Factory, their angry parents ended up mistaking one for another and going home with the wrong boy.

# After the Vanilla Fudge Mountain, the tour goes by another hallway, this one with numerous tall and colorful windows - stained glass made of sugar. Each window illustrates a famous chocolatier or candy-maker, but in the style of saints in churches. You have Philippe Suchard (the grandfather of Milka), Henry Isaac Rowntree (the maker of the Fruit Pastilles and Fruit Gums), the Menier family (the biggest chocolatiers of 19th century and first half of 20th century Europe, and distant relatives of Wonka) ; the Murrie family (creators of Hersheys) and the Mars famly (bheind the Mars bars, the M&Ms, the Snickers and the Milky Ways). "All families" Wonla notes with an air of sadness. Indeed, Wonka always wanted a family - or rather at this point in his life he regrets to not have a family and an heir, isolated that he is in his factory.

# Inventing Room number 3. There are numerous "Inventing Rooms" in the Factory, dedicated to developping, inventing, testing, studying products or just do crash tests. The number 3 is clustered with huge, squat and heavy dark machines, with vats, cauldrons and ovens, and all sorts of other structures dragon-like due to the steam and fire they spill out. It quite a grim and sinister place, but it is also where Wonka tests his most fantastic inventions, like the Rainbow Drops, the Luminous Lollies or the Three-Course Meal Gum.

As you guess, this is where Violet Beauregard will meet her demise. I set myself a rule to avoid all blueberry transformations when dealing with the demises of the Violets, so here I rather use the tomato soup: after chewing (not only did Violet took the gum due to her "talent" but also because she misheard Wonka and thought it was a "tasting" room), her face becomes red and chubby, her skin smooth and glossy, her cheeks puff out, her nose bulges, her forehead bloats, her throat becomes big, her lips thick and her ears thin, pointy, green. Result? Her face looks like a mass of tomatoes. Tomatoes for cheeks, a tomato for a forehead, tomatoes instead of eyelids, a tomato for a nose and two for the lips... Think of the Arcimboldo paintings, how he made faces out of flowers and vegetables. It is the same thing here. And while her parent is furious at first, they end up actually realizing it might be for the better - because now she is truly unique and attention-attracting, and that's what her parents always wanted...

# Follows a long hallway with a series of different rooms: two are taken from the original book, the Fizzy Lifting Drinks and the Squares that Look Round. One I changed slightly: the Chocolate Milk Room, where Wonka keeps special cows that have a chocolate-flavored milk.

# The Heating Room. A room taken from Dahl's deleted chapter "The Warming Candy Room".

This Heating Room looks like the negine room of a submarine or a freighter, filled with turbines, pistons, pipes, wheels and pressure gauges. This is where Wonka creates all of his heat-related products: hot ice-creams to fight chilling days, hot ice-cubes to give back warmth to a cold drink, and finally the warming candies (see the original deleted chapter). Marvin Prune, absolutely outraged by what he perceives as Wonka breaking all laws of science and physics, tries to prove that he is a quack by stuffing himself with handfuls of warming candies. Which results in him over-heating: he becomes red, sweaty, thirsty, removes all of his clothes (save for his underwears) and screams to death.

Wonka will have him put in the freezer, and also covered regularly in water, to avoid him drying up to death or combust. But even as he is leaving the factory, he is still red, sweaty, steamy and in underwears - the falling snow melting as it touches him.

# The Nut Room. Another classic piece of the original factory that I wanted to reinvent. Basically, here the kids do not visit the Nut Room proper, but the Under-Nut Room, or Sub-Nut Room. You've got the Nut Room where the white-clad workers separate good nuts from bad nuts Then the "bad" batch is then in this under-room, where trained squirrels will sniff out any potential "good nut" the workers may have missed. All the nuts are on a conveyor belt, that is getting then thrown down a chute.

Of course, Elvira Salt meets her demise here by trying to take one of the squirrels by force, resulting in a squirrel attack. However, the squirrels do not push her down the chute. Rather, she climbs on the conveyor belt to avoid them and has her fur stuck in the belt. She could have escaped if she had let go of it, but she refused to let it go, so she fell down the chute... and Wonka cannot remember if this particular chute leads to the compost vat he uses to grow his fruits, vegetales and berries - or to the furnace...

But don't worry, she actually falls down in the compost. Elvira will leave the factory extremely dirty, unbearably stinky, so much not even an entire week of baths and showers can remove it, and probably with one or two diseases, but alive.

# The Television Room. I did not had time to clearly prepare this one, but it will be where Michael (Mike) T-V meets his demise. Discovering he can go inside television, he is more happy to oblige, and is absolutely thrilled to be in his favorite shows. But as soon as he leaves the television, he realizes that he is now as small as a television character! No bigger than the screen! He will be sent back to his home, now only able to play with his toys and figurines, the only things at his doll-like size.

# The Molding Room

This room is also taken back from Dahl's original draft. Basically, it is where Wonka creates many of his chocolate sculptures - he has an entire zoo of chocolate animals, and very recently created a machine able to form men, women and children out of chocolate. And this is also where Bertie Upside will meet his demise.

You may be wondering: Bertie? What has he done wrong? He is kind, gentle, generous, perfect. He helped Charlie on numerous occasions, he stopped the mischief of the brats... Isn't he a good kid?

HE IS NOT. Grandpa Georges was right all along: if he appears better than the others, it means that he twice as worse.

Bertie Upside truly has a heart of gold. Which means a heart of cold and hard metal, not of flesh.

Bertie Upside is a psychopath, a sociopath, an evil little boy. Sure he knows how to put on a nice and gentle facade, but it is just manipulation. If he is orphaned, it is because he killed his own parents, and now that he is left alone with Charlie (Wonka being busy elsewhere), Bertie will try to kill him, just for fun, by putting him in the "Chocolate Boy" mould so that he would be smothered in a chocolate statue.

However (I have to admit this part is a bit blurry), Charlie will resist and Bertie will end up thrown inside another moulding machine... A piñata-creating machine. When Bertie will get out of the machine, he will still be a living boy... but now with a flesh as fragile as papier-mâché, and insides filled with candies. Now he is really a sweet kid inside as he is outside. And he will have to be really gentle... if he doesn't want to break.

And of course after that Charlie gets the factory, as it turns out that Wonka was looking for an heir with this tour. Happy end!

Now, as I mentionned a poem forms itself through the story, rhymes being added after each kid's demise (an idea originally taken from Dahl's first drafts of the story). It goes like this:

"Nine little children, in the garden they went,

But one fell, and then they were eight."

"Eight little children, an unruly mix,

Two rode to Chicago, and then they were six."

"Six little children went into a room as busy as a hive,

But one did not listen carefully, and then they were five."

"Five little children, less and less at every door,

One had a fever and then they were four."

"Four little children saw squirrels down the tree,

One fell down the squirrel hole, and then they were three."

"Three little children, and none are new,

One went to play and then they were two."

"Two little children, we are soon to be done,

One got his trickandtreat, and then there was one."

"One little children, everything he won,

He lived ever happily, and now we are done."

#charlie and the chocolate factory #catcf #willy wonka #wonka factory #tour #dark chocolate #demise #veruca salt #augustus gloop #violet beauregarde #mike teavee #charlie bucket #bertie upside #marvin prune #tommy troutbeck #wilbur rice

20 notes · View notes

mnictasbcl · 3 years

Text

The Season of Art

For #dbhcolorsofdeviancy, prompt:

May 31st: Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter @connor-sent-by-cyberlife

Rating: Teen

Characters: Connor, Hank Anderson, Markus

Relationships: Connor & Hank Anderson, Connor & Markus

Additional Tags: Painting, Birthdays, Fluff, Swearing, Seasons

Summary: After all the seasons Connor has known Markus, after being saved by him from a life stuck as a machine… the RK800 can’t figure out what to get him for his birthday.

Perhaps Hank can help out, showing him that what truly counts is from his metaphorical heart.

Notes: Hope this is okay! I took the prompt pretty loosely for this fic, as with many others on the list, so that the idea is still there and the main focus of the story, but a longer fic overall.

Story below! Or, read it on AO3

“I just don’t know what to get him.” Connor groaned. It was no use- he’d scoured the internet and everything he knew in his database, but it was impossible. Figuring out what to get Markus for his birthday was impossible.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t his exact birthdate. The deviant leader hadn’t been sure when that was exactly, and everywhere online it was marked as ‘confidential’. Jericho had decided that wasn’t good enough and had chosen the day that marked the success of the revolution as the big day.

They’d even organised a party, in their new place of residence, and had invited Connor along. He was also allowed to bring someone with him if he so desired, and even a human (if they knew the rules, of course, North had made sure to remind him). Hank had agreed.

“Well, what does he like?” Hank offered in help. “What are his hobbies?”

Connor pursed his lips. “I guess he likes democracy, and the revolution, and android rights—”

“Something more tangible, Connor. Like… reading.”

“He has all the books already.”

“Wh—all of them?”

“Carl Manfred owns a vast library of books, and he seems to have enough for his pleasure.”

Hank groaned. “Jesus. Okay. Does he have… you know, a thing-” he gestured with his hands, “-everyone has a thing. A thing that they like.” At Connor’s confused look, he sighed. “How I like rock music, and watching sports, and you like dogs.”

“Ah, yes.” Connor nodded, now understanding. “I like dogs.” He blinked, LED swirling in colour as he thought it over. “I don’t know if Markus likes dogs. He doesn’t seem to dislike them, but I am unsure if purchasing him a dog would be a well-thought-out gift. Dogs aren’t gifts, anyway. They’re for life.”

“Thanks for the animal charity commercial.” Hank deadpanned. “I don’t mean your thing— I mean his. His—his interest.” The man quickly rephrased.

Connor paused, thinking over it again with this new information. “Aside from his core beliefs, I have noticed that Markus enjoys painting. However, he already has painting equipment, with a vast supply of canvases and paints.”

“Hmm. What about,” Hank began, getting up from the couch, going over to the closet and rummaging through it, “what about you give him something he can’t get, then?” As he turned back around, he was holding a fairly large canvas along with an easel and some paints.

“That sounds optimal.” Connor nodded, understanding what Hank was getting at. “But perhaps I will practice what I will create on some paper, first. I wasn’t created to do this sort of thing.”

“You weren’t made to be a pain in my ass either—don’t give me that look. I know you know what I mean. Just draw something nice for your friend.”

After acquiring a few sheets of paper, Connor got to work. At first, he attempted sketching out some picture-perfect images of Markus. Hank hadn’t seemed thrilled by them.

“It just looks like you printed them out. It’s a nice drawing, Connor, but I don’t think it’s the sort of art Markus would like. From what you’ve told me about him, he likes things free and— you know,” he waved his hands in demonstration. “I looked up some of that Carl Manfred’s art too. It’s mainly abstract.”

“I don’t understand, Lieutenant. Would you think he’d appreciate a drawing replica of one of his pieces?”

Hank shook his head. “It has to be from you. From the heart.”

Connor blinked. A little research showed him how art could be a form of self-expression and emotion. Perhaps this was what Hank was getting at. It would truly be a good gift to give Markus something which really showed his deviancy, his humanity, especially when he was part of the key driving force that had helped him deviate.

But what could he draw? There were so many things, too many things… He shook his head. Maybe he could follow the advice Markus had told him he’d been given once, by Carl, to really flow his soul over the canvas.

Connor closed his eyes. Held the pencil over the paper, and made long, sweeping strokes. Opened his eyes. Shit. It was just a mess of graphite smeared over the paper. That didn’t even look like anything. He groaned. Art was hard.

Maybe, for him, it did have to be something he could think of, at least in concept, rather than a rush of emotions over the paper. What thing could bring out that artistic emotion from him?

He closed his eyes. But this time, he didn’t bring his pencil down onto the paper, not yet. He replayed memories of his time spent with Markus. Seeing him speaking on that screen, played from Stratford Tower, telling of hope, of liberation for their people, igniting that spark of deviancy in his chest, which only flourished with time spent with Hank. How he came to Jericho, and met him, keen only on accomplishing his mission, but Markus had managed to bring up that red wall for him, to realise he was on the wrong side of it and tear it down. Emotion, the hope, everything sparking within his chest, looking up at Markus and realising that he’s free.

The autumn that brought his life, filled with new hope, a new life. The winter that followed, the impromptu Christmas party held for the newly freed deviants, being allowed back with the original crew, with Josh and Simon, North and Markus, looking into the other android’s eyes and realising just how much things had changed in such a short time. Memories of the new spring, a new year, to bring down the restrictions stopping deviants from being truly human, helping Markus with his speeches and fighting by his side for the campaigns. Summer. The freedom has truly come now, because they’ve done it. Everything isn’t perfect, but by law, they’re completely human, and Markus is still there, they all are, revelling in the burden lifted from their shoulders.

He opened his eyes. In the time they’d been shut, his body had seemed to move of its own accord. The canvas was in front of him, brush in his hand, and a picture had blossomed in front of him. There was a rush of colours and feelings and emotions. The image was cut into four quadrants, messes of abstract shapes representing each season. And in the centre, were rough figures of them all, from Jericho.

He smiled. It looked alright.

“Holy shit.” Hank muttered from behind him. Connor spun around, seeing he’d been standing in the doorway, likely watching him the whole time. “You did that with your eyes closed?”

He glanced over his clothes. Oh dear. There were a number of splatters of paint over his outfit, and a little on his face. “I believe so. Apologies, Lieutenant, for the mess—”

Hank laughed. “I don’t care about it. Well—you’re tidying it up anyway. But… Christ, that’s amazing. If I painted with my eyes shut, I think I’d end up painting on Sumo.”

Connor frowned. “He wouldn’t appreciate that. “The Saint Bernard in question barked loudly in agreement. “He would require a bath.”

“Whatever,” Hank shrugged, patting him on the shoulder. “You’re alive, Connor. And I think Markus is going to love that.”

____________________

Markus did, in fact, love it. Upon receiving it at his birthday party, he smiled brightly, pulling Connor into a hug.

“It really shows you, Connor, and how far you’ve come. I appreciate that you joined our mission. This is going centre stage.”

He blushed, a little, as Markus took it by the picture hanging and put it up on the wall in the central area of the room, above the fireplace.

“I am glad that you like my present, Markus.”

“Like it? I love it. And is this really the first time I’m hearing that you like to paint?”

“It’s the first time I’ve painted.”

“Then it won’t be the last. Come on, I’d love to paint with you in the future. Carl lets me do painting lessons from time to time in his studio, so long as I don’t bring any troublemakers.”

Connor thought on that. “I would dearly love to come. However, I have been informed that I can cause a significant amount of disruption.”

Markus frowned. “How so?”

“Well, Lieutenant Anderson has, from time to time, referred to me as a pain in his—”

Hank, who was standing nearby to look at Connor’s painting, promptly choked on his drink.

#dbh #dbhcolorsofdeviancy #dbh fanfic #fanfic #dbh connor and hank #dbh markus #detroit become human

8 notes · View notes

sassyratyuki · 4 years

Text

Just One Picture

Pairing: Kyoru | Rating: G | Words: ~1600

AO3 | FF.net

Summary: In which Tohru buys a cat onesie for their son and Kyo can't find it in himself to hate it. Post-manga spoilers

I saw an ask a while ago from @kyosohmastan talking about a headcanon that Tohru buys cat onesies for Kyo and Hajime. I loved the idea, so I wrote it lol

Kyo sits on the floor of the living room, back pressed against the side of the sofa, as he waits for his wife to get home from her shopping trip.

His eyes flicker from the television, which he's not really paying attention to, to his son playing on the floor in front of him, several toys strewn about. Hajime sits with his chubby toddler legs outstretched as he tries to force a triangle-shaped block into a square hole.

Usually he would let his son figure it out on his own, but after about the tenth attempt, Kyo decides to step in.

He carefully grabs Hajime's tiny wrist, guiding the block to the right place. He puts it so the hand holding the block is hovering over the triangular shaped hole, perfectly aligned.

"It's right here, Hajime, see?" he tells him, and let's go of his hand.

Kyo sees Hajime's little forehead scrunch in confusion as his son looks back to the square hole. Kyo sees Hajime's hand waiver a bit, wanting to go back and keep trying to cram the triangle block in the wrong place until he somehow succeeds.

Kyo can't help but laugh at his son's stubbornness; it's like looking in a mirror after all. Eventually Hajime slowly puts the block in the right place.

Kyo lets out a triumphant whoop and claps. Hajime begins clapping his little hands together as he copies his father, before Kyo picks him up and tosses him in the air a bit. Both father and son are smiling contagious grins when Kyo comes to rest Hajime on his hip. Kyo kisses the top of his head before praising how smart he is in a goofy voice. He squishes Hajime's pudgy cheek for good measure.

Sometimes Kyo wonders how his son has made him so willing to do such silly things, things he never thought he would ever do before, but he quickly found out after Hajime was born that he would do anything to make his baby laugh.

The squeal of delight that comes from Hajime lodges it's way into Kyo's heart, and it strikes Kyo again how much he loves this tiny human. This tiny human he and Tohru made, and he realized a long time ago he would do anything for.

Sometimes the love he feels is a little overwhelming, especially because Kyo never knew he would ever be able love anything as much as he loves his family. Never having a loving family himself, he'd been a tad scared he wouldn't know how to be a good parent. But that fear was put to rest as soon as he held Hajime for the first time at the hospital. He knew he would never be able to do anything other than love and protect his baby for as long as he's able.

Any thoughts of his own parents' failures were buried deep in the back of his mind. They simply didn't matter anymore, because he knows the love he has for his family is unconditional and that would never change.

And Kyo can't wait to see how their family's love will continue to grow.

Kyo sighs with a content smile on his face. He ruffles his son's orange hair before setting him back down with his toys.

Just as Hajime moves to pick up another block, the sound of the door unlocking catches both of their attention.

The door opens and Tohru makes her way through the threshold, one hand holding two bags and the other fiddling to lock the door as she shuts it behind her.

Hajime shouts "Mama!" and tries his best to stand up to greet her, only to fall back down to his hands and knees, settling on crawling to where she stands by the entry way.

Kyo stands as well as his wife hangs her keys on a hook and kneels down to their son. He makes his way over to the two of them.

Tohru grins as she picks up Hajime. "Well hello my beautiful boy!" she tells him, placing kisses all over his face as he giggles.

Tohru settles him on her hip as she turns her head toward Kyo. "And hello my beautiful husband," she laughs softly as Kyo greets her with a light kiss on the lips.

"Hello to you too," Kyo says back, cheeks a bit pink. "Did you find everything you needed?"

Tohru smiles. "And more!"

"Well that's good," Kyo replies, and for a moment, just takes in the picture of his wife holding their son. Motherhood suits Tohru so well, and while Kyo knows both he and his wife have their flaws, he often wonders how they manage to make their family feel so close to perfect.

"Let me take those bags," Kyo offers, gesturing to the shopping bags still hanging from Tohru's arm.

"Thank you, Kyo," she says, "You can just put them on the table. I'll get to them in a minute."

Tohru then goes to sit down, her son in her lap as she leans her head against the back of the sofa.

Kyo places the bags on the table as he was asked, about to go join his family before something in one of the bags catches his eye.

He runs his hand over the soft orange material before holding it up to see what it is.

He squints. "Um, Tohru, what is this?"

Tohru looks up. "Oh!" she exclaims before getting up and making her way towards Kyo, Hajime still in her arms.

"That was part of the 'and more'!" she tells him, sitting Hajime on the table and taking the piece of clothing from Kyo.

She turns it around in her hands. "It's a little toddler cat onesie! I saw it and thought of you. It was just so cute, I had to get it for Hajime!"

Without missing a beat or paying attention to Kyo's bemused expression, Tohru lays their son down on the table and does her best to wrestle him into the onesie.

When she's finally done, she picks Hajime up and pulls the hood up onto his head. Little cat ears poke up from the hood, and Kyo can see a little tail coming from the back.

"Doesn't he look adorable! Just like Daddy." Tohru says, placing a kiss on Hajime's cheek.

Kyo wishes he could dislike it. After everything he went through being the zodiac cat, after all the bullying, ridicule, and exile from his own family, one would think he would have absolutely no love for anything with any association to cats.

And yet, despite all of the bad memories, all Kyo can think about when he looks at his son dressed as a cat, is how his wife saw the onesie and only thought of how cute it was. She wasn't thinking of the bad memories, only the good ones. She said it reminded her of him... and it wasn't a bad reminder in the way the other Sohma's may have seen it, but a happy one.

Kyo ignores the burning behind his eyes as he's reminded of Tohru's ability to find good in almost everything; one of the many reasons why he loves her.

And Kyo has to admit it, his son does look absolutely adorable in it.

Kyo laughs softly as he puts his arm around Tohru's shoulder and kisses her cheek. "I'd say that was a pretty good buy. He looks really cute."

"Really?" Tohru asks, "You think so?"

Kyo nods and Tohru immediately jerks her chin in the direction of the second bag.

"I'm so glad you say that, because I actually got one for you too."

Hold on. "Wait what?" Kyo looks into the other bag, finding another piece of orange clothing, but this time it's much bigger.

"Yeah!" Tohru says, "They had the same onesie in an adult size and I couldn't say no to the sign from fate that I just had to get both."

Kyo raises his eyebrows. "You want me to wear it?" he asks incredulously.

Tohru giggles. "Oh come on, Kyo. It'll be so cute," she cups his face with the hand not holding Hajime, "Just like your kitty cat form was so cute."

When Kyo starts to shake his head, words beginning to spill from his mouth, Tohru interrupts. "Even if it's just one picture with you holding Hajime. Just one picture for us to have for our family. No one ever has to know but us. Pleeeeaaaase?"

Kyo bites his lip at her pleading, though he knows she's really just messing with him. He can see it in her grin. But he also knows she really does want a picture of both him and their son dressed as cats.

He sighs internally, giving in. Where's the harm really?

"Yeah okay. Just one picture, though, Tohru. That's it."

She picks up the onesie from where Kyo had dropped it back in the bag. She smiles even brighter. "That's all we need!"

She kisses him on the cheek before handing the piece of clothing to him. "Go change so we can get this one picture," she mocks him kind-heartedly.

He kisses her back before taking the onesie. "Anything for you," he tells her, over-dramatically. "But I get the feeling you already knew that."

She giggles as he goes to change.

She sighs with a grin on her face as Kyo exits the room. She boops Hajime's nose with her finger before moving the same hand to her stomach.

"Daddy's so silly, isn't he?" Tohru says and she thinks of the other infant-size cat onesie she left in the car, a gift she can't wait to surprise Kyo with for Father's Day in a couple of weeks.

She smiles tenderly down at her belly, still flat enough no one could possibly know of the newest little Sohma growing there.

"I can't wait until we can all be silly together."

#fruits basket #fruits basket season 2 #furuba #kyo sohma #tohru honda #kyoru #kyoru fanfic #kyoru fanfiction

50 notes · View notes

kookiebunnii · 4 years

Text

🌗 two. confrontation

pairing: jinyoung x vampire!reader

word count: 2.1k

warnings: n/a

There aren’t a lot of things you have to fear as a vampire. Having superhuman strength, speed, and healing capabilities made you the epitome of an apex predator. Yet for some reason, standing outside of his bedroom window absolutely terrifies you.

You already took a huge risk by waiting three days to go back and finally resolve your mistake. In those three days he could’ve told a number of people, and you would have no real way of tracking them down and wiping their memories too. When you’re done pacing for the hundredth time, you jump up the side of the complex the same way you had three days ago. Throwing the side of your body upwards to grip the ledge of his window, you grit your teeth and once again enter through the slightly opened windowsill.

Silly human, still making the same mistakes after being dinner for a vampire.

This time you land a lot more gracefully, likely because you are not on the verge of insanity this time around. Having fresh blood was working wonders for you. These past few days had not plagued your throat with dull aching like before. Surprisingly, your features were also much less sunken and distraught as if the man you’d preyed on had simultaneously been a fountain of youth. This change wasn’t something you banked on for the long term though. You were still against feeding on people directly.

When you look up, the dark-haired man is sitting at his desk with a book in hand. The light thump of your entrance immediately causes him to set his reading material face down upon the wooden surface. His eyes instinctively find yours, and despite the prickle of fear you feel in your spine, you don’t look away.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

He says this with no semblance of horror or anxiety. Instead, his soothing tone could easily be acceptable if he were commenting about the weather or scolding a pet for finally returning home. It causes you to momentarily forget the whole purpose of your trek here, forgetting the dangers in letting a human remain aware of the existence of vampires.

“You aren’t afraid of me,” you mean it as a statement, an observation based on his responses, but you can’t help the fascination that holds onto the end of your sentence like condensation clinging a cool surface.

He smiles sadly, as if he realizes the same thing you do. Leaning his fingers against his cheek, he whispers, “Yeah. I guess not. Perhaps when you live in fictional worlds as often as I do, the supernatural rarely surprises you.”

Confused by his words, you step forward to move around the border of his mattress and approach his figure that is sitting by the desk. Your footsteps barely make a sound against the floorboards, but what interests you more is the lack of tension in his shoulders even as you stalk closer to him.

When you’re finally in front of him, his chin tilted upwards to maintain eyes contact with your empty gaze, you wonder if this human is formidable or foolish.

“You have no idea what I could do to you.”

The words slip out your lips without much thought, appearing into the air as soon as they’re formed in your head. The acknowledgement that a human could look at you in your entirety without disgust was something completely foreign. While you took the shape of a person, he knew that the essence of you being was far from that. From your oddly pale skin and your predatory movements, he should fear you like the monster you were.

“Maybe not,” he leans his cheek against the palm of his hand and continues to observe you, “I’d love to learn though.”

At this point you have absolutely no idea what to do. Mark had never taught you what to do when a human didn’t fear you, instead seemingly wanting to talk to you. You still had half the mind to wipe his memories, knowing that even if he didn’t tell others, it would still be a huge liability. The less entangled you were with others, the better. Humans included.

“I’m not your friendly neighborhood housecat that you can just chat up every afternoon. Besides, last time we met I drank your blood. Do you need another reason to be scared?” you take a seat on the side of his bed, allowing yourself to finally see him at eye level.

Seemingly ignoring your question, he scoots his chair closer to you. This causes you to momentarily seize up in fear. How funny, a human is making a vampire quake in their boots.

“Do you have a name? Maybe something dreadful like Dracula or Vladimir?” he asks, as if he were speaking to a friend, one he made online whom he was finally meeting in person.

“Pretty such Vladimir is an actual name humans use. That’s an insult to Vladimirs everywhere,” you crack a smile, and the motion feels so awkward on your face that it instantly surprises you.

Sitting back in his seat with a small smile of his own, he crosses his legs and says, “You don’t look quite that fearful when you smile.”

Quickly fixing your features back to the monotonous one you’re used to wearing, you quip, “Don’t get used to it.”

“Sure thing. Can you answer my question now?”

You hesitate, considering your options. It doesn’t matter all that much if you amused him for a bit. You could easily wipe his memories at any time, and he was too weak to stop you even if he tried. He wouldn’t remember anything you told him, so perhaps you could enjoy this brief lull in your journey. It’d been years since you actually spoke to someone about anything beyond the end you were searching for.

“Y/N.”

He looks at you quizzically and you roll your eyes to retort, “Not sure what kind of demonic name you were expecting, but most of us are turned and we keep the names we had before.”

“Turned?” he echoes, and for such a bright guy he was really struggling to connect the dots.

“Most vampires were humans at some point. I don’t know all the lore about how they first came about, but we’re not just born as a monstrosity.”

He considers this briefly before looking at you with a new shine in his dark eyes, “Why did you come back? Looking for another bite?”

You scoff, humored by the way he doesn’t seem to either dislike or like the proposition. It’s almost as if he asked you if you stopped by to borrow another cup of sugar, and you swear there must be something wrong with the man. He’s giving you all the wrong reactions.

“I’m here to wipe your memories. I forgot last time.”

His eyes widen slightly in surprise as he nods and runs a finger under his chin in thought, “So vampires can wipe memories too, that’s interesting.”

“It makes feeding a lot easier. For us and for you,” you fix the cuff of your shirt as you answer his musings.

“Does this happen often? Are the statistics crazy? Something like…one in every three humans gets bit once a week?”

You laugh, and the sudden noise seems to make him jump more than when you catapulted yourself into his bedroom without notice. Once you’re back to just giggling lightly, you notice how embarrassed he looks. This just makes you chuckle all over again.

“I don’t think there’s anything like that, no. Feeding from a live human helps dispel the thirst for a good amount of time,” you say, tilting your head to view him with interest, “You’re a rather curious sort of person, aren’t you?”

He rubs the back of his head shyly before responding, “I guess so. It’s just an interesting experience for me, waking up from a nap to see a woman hovering over me with fangs.”

You give him a lilting smile, “I agree, it must be rather odd.”

“My name is Jinyoung, by the way. I live alone so you definitely picked your prey wisely,” and once again, the nonchalant air about his words intrigues you.

“I don’t think I had much choice. I was practically delirious when I fell through the first open window I saw,” you note, slightly sheepish with your confession.

“Why? Were you sick?” bless his heart, he actually has the audacity to look concerned.

“Nothing like that. I needed blood but the hospital here was too crowded, so you became the lucky victim. Congratulations.”

“Hospital?” he echoes as if he couldn’t fathom why you’d need to be there.

“I don’t like feeding on humans. It’s rather dehumanizing for me. Which, I suppose, must be a rather funny notion coming from a fully-fledged vampire. All hospitals keep some portion of blood bags available for emergency purposes. I like to take some of those when they’re available, and I switch locations frequently to ensure I don’t drain the blood supply,” you explain, looking around his room to absorb the environment as you do so.

There’s a brief pause before he says, “You’re rather kind for a self-described monstrosity.”

If vampires could blush, perhaps that would have been your cue. Sputtering in anxiousness, you quickly blurt, “Kind? You’re actually crazy.”

He gives you a laugh of his own before saying, “You could bite any stray human any day of the week if you wanted to. You could take a whole city’s supply of blood bags if you were feeling particularly mischievous. Yet you do neither.”

You decide not to add anything further, knowing that there isn’t much you could respond with. Perhaps it would be strange for a vampire to take so much care, but it was something you naturally adapted to. Considerations like these were simply habits, and even if it made for a slight inconvenience on your part, you’d lived just fine for the past two centuries. No big deal.

Standing up suddenly to close the small gap between the two of you, you declare, “Well, I’ll have to wipe your memories now.”

He stands up abruptly at this, once again training those deep brown orbs on you. It unnerves you, that the only thing he seemed to fear was forgetting his whole ordeal with you, but you didn’t want to stick around long enough to figure out exactly why it was happening.

“Please don’t.”

You don’t know what to say, a feeling that’s overwhelmed you multiple times this evening. You knew that this was the right thing to do—the easiest thing to do. But why did it feel like such a loss? This human, Jinyoung, could you let him live knowing something dangerous like this?

“There’s no benefit to remembering. Leaving you like this puts me in danger. It’ll put both our peoples in danger,” the words are difficult to get out, but you know that the responsibilities mean more than whatever internal conflict you’re battling.

“I won’t tell anyone. In fact, I don’t even have anyone to tell. I’m not a threat.”

You laugh harshly, running your fingers through your hair. He was asking you to put your faith in a human, of all things, whom you’d just met formally half an hour ago. You might be a little wacky with all the years you’ve spent devoted to ending your immortality, but you weren’t stupid.

“It’ll be better for you too. It’ll be quick and painless. You won’t remember a thing afterwards,” you reach up to brush the side of his hair away from his forehead.

The strands are soft against your skin, and when you rest your fingers against his temple, you can feel the tiny vibrations of his voice when he speaks.

“Let’s make a deal.”

You can’t help but smirk, wondering if you were in some teen webcomic where the main character makes a pact with the devil. There wasn’t anything a human could offer you, especially since you weren’t exactly looking to bargain for souls as the cliché goes.

“Let’s hear it then,” you decide to give yourself, and Jinyoung by extension, a last moment of interaction. You can feel his pulse quicken under your fingers, likely excited by the possibility that you were actually interested in his intentions. Humans are so easy to read.

“You can have my blood. Anytime you want it, I’ll be here. In exchange, let me keep my memories.”

Smiling at him as if he were an innocent and foolish child, you reply, “You’re really giving yourself up like that? Just to remember the countless times your skin is pierced, your blood is drawn, your eyes meet that of a starved vampire? You’re rather masochistic, Jinyoung.”

A slow smile draws itself against his lips, and not even living for more than two hundred years could prepare you for his additional proposition.

“Six months later, I also want you to turn me into a vampire.”

______________________________________

<< previous || masterlist || next >>

#got7 #got7 fanfic #got7 imagines #got7 series #got7 scenarios #got7 reactions #got7 jinyoung #jinyoung x you #jinyoung x reader #jinyoung x y/n #got7 x you #got7 x y/n #got7 x reader #vampire au #park jinyoung #got7 preferences #chasing eternity

40 notes · View notes

annhellsing · 4 years

Text

Your Shape.

notes: never in my life thought i’d write an original thing again, but i had a lot of fun!!! i was feeling super overwhelmed and decided to put my maladaptive daydream about a meet-cute with a mysterious entity in a forest into words. rating: teen, we stay tame in these woods pairing: mysterious entity boyfriend idk / reader word count: 3,286

The shape in the forest wants to know if you are warm enough. Moonlight falls over the crown of your head, so yellow and full as to be a parody of sunshine. This late in September, with the harvest coming soon, it is easy to confuse the two.

But the shape does not ask, he does not want to scare you. Your shoulders are slouched, cheeks pressed to your palms to hide tears and sobs. He wants to know if you are unhappy, too. He imagines you have already given him a fair answer, despite not having spoken at all.

A dirt-caked hand curls around the trunk of a tree. The shape leans out of the dark, eyes aglow and horns in danger of bumping on a branch overhead. He ducks a bit, takes a careful step forward. If he were anyone else, the twig under his foot might have snapped and made a sound. But there is an understanding between them, an old promise. The only noise in the night is of your crying.

“It’s too much,” you whisper, half-wailing around the air being pushed from your lungs. You press a hand over your mouth and for a moment, all is quiet.

The shape decides he does not like that at all. You are unhappy, he’s sure of it, so why not express it?

“What is?” he asks, compelled to speak when before he had stayed silent. You were not crying before, he rations. You did not need help then as you do now.

You turn at the sound of his voice, it is as cold and as full as the moon in the sky. It belongs there, that voice, between the trees. You peer into the dark, not afraid of what might be speaking, but why. Creatures are not uncommon, it is their motivations you have been taught to fear.

A breeze picks up, pushing cool air at your hot cheeks. The feeling is almost pleasant, it’s accompanied by the sound of rustling leaves. Or perhaps of footsteps from your newfound companion.

He does not walk as a human might, though he is shaped like one. With the grass, too, he has an understanding and his gait is as noiseless and natural as the way that he speaks. You stare up, up, up at him, craning your neck until you find his face.

It is a handsome face, which does not immediately set you at ease. You see the outline of his head and shoulders, framed by two horns extending back against the starlit sky. But the rest of him is a mystery. It disappears into the shadows that knit in a circle around the glade.

“Everything,” you answer with honesty, for it is the best policy.

“I can understand, then, why you are upset,” he replies.

Your sweater scratches your cheeks as you wipe away tears. But you are very careful to keep one eye open and fixed on the shape, the visitor. It is not very smart to do more than blink in their company.

Still, you make noise. Soft sounds of life, of breath as you try to stifle sobs. Crying gets you nowhere, you remember, especially not with an audience.

“How long have you been watching me?” you ask, careful not to sound accusatory. You are not accusing him of anything, you are only curious.

“I did not mean to infringe on your privacy,” he returns.

“This forest is your home,” you reason. The shape gives a slow shake of his horned head.

“It is home to everyone,” he says, “especially to those who need somewhere safe to cry.”

“Thank you,” you nod, “but have not answered me.”

“Longer than you would be comfortable with,” he replies, “I am sorry.”

“That’s a little vague,” you say.

“Not to me,” he says, “I have seen you here before. Not often, but I have.”

“Oh,” you pass your sleeve over your left eye once more, “I meant tonight, but I appreciate the truth.”

It’s becoming easier to control the way your chest moves. The compulsive need to breathe quickly slows with your heart rate. You are not calm, but you are managing.

“You looked happy before,” he says, “the last time you were here.”

“The last time I was here, things were---” you sigh, dropping your hand and your head. Though you remember very suddenly the dangers of doing so. But when your eyes return quickly to the shape’s again, you notice no change in his appearance. “They were different.”

“They were better?” he asks. Defeated, you nod.

“I am so tired,” you let out a slow breath.

“If you slept here,” he begins, “no one else would bother you. That is a promise.”

“And you keep your promises,” you state, knowing better than to insult him by phrasing that as a question.

“I do,” he says, “the grass is comfortable, the trees keep out most of the rain. Every night I have known life, I have spent it on the floor of a forest.”

“That sounds nice,” you admit. But you are not so foolish as to blindly trust visitors. “I don’t want to go home.”

“Is it very difficult to be there?” he cocks his head to the side, the moonlight falling on a sharp cheekbone. A shadow pools there, you stare with more curiosity than perhaps you ought. The shape doesn’t seem to mind.

“It is,” you reply, “it’s quite lonely, too. Even when I’m spoken to, I feel alone.”

The visitor hums, the sound like the wind against tree boughs. Could he understand?

“I am here,” he says, “for what it is worth.”

You pause, considering his eyes that have not left yours once. Not even to blink. They are a strange colour, glassy but focused very intently on the curve of your face. They look, you consider, like the yellow moon that hangs so close to the edge of the forest.

Round and wide and curious, he stares at you. Not as one might stare at an insect, but as an interesting person.

“So am I,” you reply. And a hesitant smile of your own joins his.

“You have family,” he says, “friends who love you?” and the question at the end cuts like a knife.

“I have nobody,” you say, “though a few would likely search for me. It would be out of habit.”

“Habit?” he asks.

“Because I would do the same for them,” you explain, “my friends and I look after each other. But we’re not very close.”

“You need not be afraid of me,” he says. And that otherworldly smile returns, but it does little to dissuade the butterflies in your stomach.

The shape moves a bit closer, until only his horns are silhouetted against the inky sky. You can see him a bit better, though his lower body still remains a mystery.

You find yourself looking closely at his hands, searching the dirt and grass stains for signs of blood or cruelty. You find neither.

“I am not afraid,” you say, following a shiver.

“Yes, you are,” he says, “I am sorry. I frighten people, I know. But you need not reassure me that you shall be looked for.”

“Force of habit,” you say, “I’ve been told stories all my life, advised to be careful about what I say to visitors.”

“I understand. It is wise for you to follow that advice, but I will not hurt you,” he says.

“And you keep your promises,” you repeat, the smile once again curling on the corners of your mouth.

He surprises you with a laugh, the sound fills your chest even by proxy. As full and soft as his voice, the shape’s laugh makes you feel whole. It isn’t cold any more, you realize. A familiarity blooms in the way he speaks to you already. Perhaps he truly does understand the need for companionship.

You shift a little on the log, deciding to believe him. Not trust, not yet, but to believe.

“I am afraid, but I’m not scared of you,” you say, “would you sit?”

“Can you be both at the same time?” he asks, though he starts forward towards where you are. You’ve straightened up, your cheeks have dried. That pleases him.

“I am afraid of what would hurt me, of the stories I’ve been told. But you are not like the stories, are you?” you ask. The shape slowly shakes his head. He sinks down beside you, with not a creak from the wood beneath.

“I try not to be,” he admits.

“The woods are lovely,” you say, “I cannot blame visitors for wishing to protect them. It should be protected.”

“But not from you,” he replies, “remember, this is also your home.”

“I never thought of it like that,” you confess.

“Perhaps not, but you do choose to come here every so often. Why?” he cocks his head to the side again, a strand of dark hair falls over his shoulder, having come loose from where it was gathered into a low plait at the back of his neck.

“No one knows me here,” you say, “except for you. And don’t apologize, I don’t dislike that.”

“You do not?” he straightens his neck again. His eyes widen a fraction, as does your smile.

“I forgive you for watching me. I know you meant no harm,” and the visitor nods. “I come here because I am unknown, I can be myself. I have no obligations here. The sounds and sights are never too much, the moonlight is never too bright.”

“Elsewhere you feel overwhelmed,” the shape summarizes. You nod.

“Precisely. And I sit on that feeling until I have no choice but to cry,” it is harder to admit out loud than you like. But in his bright, yellow eyes you find some form of agreement.

He really is quite handsome, you note the longer you’re allowed to look. And though you are less worried about when to blink around him, you find no evidence to suggest he is changing his shape. You suppose that a visitor with ill intent, looking to ensnare a foolish human would choose a less challenging mask.

The visitor is not quite right, unearthly as his beauty may be. His unbroken stare is a colour no mortal thing could ever have. His hair is braided, yes, but this close you can tell a brush has never touched it. What you can see of his ears is sharply triangular at the ends, rather than rounded. Dirt and dust are caked under his fingernails, you wonder if he might be a gravedigger.

But no blood, nor memory of blood pools at the corners of his thin mouth. His lips are not tinged with pale blue the way corpses are. While he is wan and waxy, he does not carry the chill that wraps around you. He may not be fully separate from the night, but he does not seem to belong to it.

“Who are you?” you ask. You’ve spoken at length about your sadness, but it has never felt so far away as it does now. The shape’s smile falters for just a moment.

“I am not certain,” he replies.

“You and me both,” you try to find his grin again, giving him your own so that he will not worry. “I only ask because---”

“Because there is something sinister about me,” he finishes. And he nods, as if he has heard it before. His head dips a fraction, turning from you. All the better see the horns that sprout from it.

They are long and black as his hair, arching back from his brow. They curve, just once and end in a delicate point. And yet he moves as if they are barely a hindrance, with grace that would accompany experience.

“Quite the opposite,” you reply, “I have never heard of anyone like you.”

“I am not a gravedigger,” he replies, “and I am not a monster.”

“No,” you agree, “you don’t eat people, living or dead?”

He curls his lip in disgust rather than answering, it makes you choke on a small giggle. The shape turns back to you, as confused by the sound as you were when he laughed. There is similar awe in his face.

“Then you could be a forest spirit,” you try, “that would make sense.”

“It is possible,” he concedes, “but I do not know. I have been alone for as long as I can remember.”

“That’s so sad,” you speak without thinking, usually a dangerous game. But the shape is unoffended by the obvious pity in your voice. You’ve given him plenty to pity you for, after all. “Do you speak to other people in the forest very often?”

“I have, but never frequently,” he replies. You still do not trust him, but his slight anxiety appears to match your own. As much as he belongs here, it appears he is not sure if he belongs here with you.

He stays a safe distance from you on the log, you shift a little closer. Though your cheeks still sting and the whites of your eyes are still red, you feel less lost in your misery. Less alone.

“I wish I never had to leave,” you sigh, “I could sit in this glade and watch the sky move forever and ever.”

“I have done so,” he says, “it is a very good way to spend one’s time. I enjoy it.”

You trust that to be right, at least. Still, for all his flawless strangeness and otherworldly beauty, he seems very lonely. He’s unhappy.

“I wish---” you start, but cut yourself off.

“I could steal you,” he says, so suddenly that you wonder how long he’s been holding it back.

“Steal me?” you ask, turing to the shape with an arched brow. But you do not, in fact, sound repulsed.

“You would not have to return home if I did. You could stay here,” he reasons. Taken aback, you smile for the confusion.

“Have you stolen many people?” you ask.

“No,” he says with a firm shake of his head.

“Is it a great honour?” a teasing tone creeps into your voice, your smile turning impish. The visitor smiles too, as if your joy gives him joy by proxy.

“I think it would be my honour, as you would be my guest,” he explains.

“But why take me?” you ask, resisting the urge to dismiss this completely as some sort of joke.

“So that you will not cry,” he says. And the faraway solemness in his voice stuns you to silence for a moment.

“Lots of people cry, lots of people are afraid,” you try. He shakes his head.

“But you are here, I am here. Your home is here,” he says. You make a sound, like a sob but softer and more amused. Bewildered.

“Is it allowed?” you know the rules in part, never to accept food from visitors or stay too long. But he isn’t like the creatures in your grandmother’s stories. And if he is, you might be willing to take the risk. Going home with this exchange behind you feels wrong.

“I do not know, I have never offered before,” he admits. You give a slow sigh.

“Are you afraid? There may be consequences,” you try to rationalize why it could never be, and the way his face falls is heartbreaking.

“I am lonely,” he confirms, “nothing else.”

“I was worried you were,” you say. You look at him, horns and all in the moonlight. You dip your head and try to catch his big, yellow eyes. He looks back with no hesitation, like he was hoping for you.

“So, will you stay with me?” your visitor asks. His face softens, more vulnerable now than you’ve seen before. And you thought you had known it all. If this is a lie, you might like to be lied to.

“Right here?” you say, foolishly. His reedy laugh fills your chest again.

“Perhaps not only here, not all the time,” he replies, still looking happy. “I could take you to the places that I like best.”

“I wouldn’t mind staying in the forest,” you consider, pulling your eyes away. The circle of woods around you feels far bigger than before, more free and ready to explore. There is excitement under your tongue.

Your visitor hears it, he leans in just a bit with your back turned. He couldn’t help it if he wanted to, his mind is already pushing against the confines of his skull. It’s such an old mind, such an old skull. And it has been too long since another voice occupied it the way that yours does.

When you look back to him, you are not afraid. He watches your face very intently, ready to see fear or watery sadness return. He dreads both, he cannot stop himself from saying,

“And I would not mind your staying, say that you will,” your visitor does not know if he has breath the way humans do, but you have taken his. It will be so hard to part with if you decline.

To his immortal joy, you lean in a little closer as well. Your shoulders slouch, you relax.

“Where is your most favourite place?” you ask, distracting him from the clutter of his desperation for a moment.

“Along the bank of the mirror pond, it is not far due east from here,” he replies. It is hard not to smile when thinking of it. The perfect circle of still water, flanked by willow trees and daisy clusters. You might like it there.

“I haven’t been swimming since I was a little girl,” you admit. It’s almost sheepish, embarrassed that such a mundane joy has evaded you.

“You could again,” he suggests, brightening further. Until your visitor’s enthusiasm is dulled by his own hand, worried at reminding you of whatever dreadful situation you’ve come from. “But I would not make you.”

“Do you promise?” you cock your head to the side this time, tilting your head back a fraction to appreciate the full length of his horns.

“I do,” he insists. He would like to have an understanding with you, to understand you. The grass can keep his promises, but it never speaks back.

Your visitor looks so hopeful, you’re shocked by the realization that it may be mirrored on your own face. You are just as desperate, searching for a reason you could say yes. It’s right there, hiding just at the back of your throat. Another word from him and it will come.

He is made of smoke, you’re sure. Of dirt and red clay. Of pine needles and the daisies that you saw when you tried to get thoroughly lost in the woods. And of a kind thought or ten. He is so very sweet, it seems right.

“If you offer and I accept, is that still stealing?” you state your question, the final one before you answer. You’ve decided on that.

You reach into his lap, over thin knees that appear under heavy fabric. You did not see it before for the shadows, but he wears a cloak of green canvas--- so dark as to be almost mistaken for black. His dirt-caked hand, boney and cold from the night air rests against his thigh until you pick it up.

He fits his palm to yours as best he can, it is good enough.

He smiles, showing his small fangs. You give his hand a squeeze, hoping to warm him. But, you remember, you will have a while to do so. Slowly, you stand and he follows.

“I have no idea,” your shape says.

#NO CLUE HOW TO TAG THIS HM #mayhaps i shan't lmao #this is a gift to my followers basically #have some existential rambling #anniewrites

79 notes · View notes