forgive me - rafe cameron

you’re ready to forgive Rafe, but first you’re going to make him work for it, sequel to ignore me

warnings: smutty smut smut (sorry not sorry), oral (female receiving), penetrative sex, lil bit of cockwarming (for @anxietyandtacos)

pairing: rafe cameron x reader

word count: 2.9k

a/n: in honor of me hitting 700, here’s the long-awaited sequel to ignore me, i hope yall enjoy 😏 (lowkey this isn’t proofread, sorry not sorry)

Rafe Cameron was the most annoying person on the planet, he was persistent and determined and so goddamn stubborn. He didn’t like to take no for an answer, and he knew every button of yours to press, and boy did he enjoy pressing them. He would pick and prod and poke until it drove you absolutely crazy and you had no choice but to acknowledge him. Above all though, he truly, deeply loved you and that’s why you could never stay mad at him. He didn’t need to know that, though.

After some of the best make up sex you’d ever had in your life, after you had left him in a huff to spend the night in the spare room once again, he’d ramped up his efforts to earn your forgiveness. The next morning he tried the breakfast angle again, this time bringing you eggs benny and a mimosa from your favorite brunch place on the island right to you in bed. You had to hide your smile as you sat up against the headboard and took the tray from him without even a half-hearted thank you. He didn’t say anything, but you saw the way his mouth twisted into a little pout and you could practically hear the gears in his head turn as he thought of his next step.

After you’d finished your breakfast, you made your way back home, thinking the extra bit of distance might further frustrate and motivate him. Lying on your couch, you spent your time scrolling through the several messages Rafe had left for you and giggling at his desperation. The earlier anger you had felt had all but faded, leaving behind soft fondness as you scrolled through various iterations of ‘I’m sorry baby’ and ‘I love you’ and ‘talk to me’ and ‘please’.

As it turns out, Rafe’s next step arrived after lunch in the form of Sarah Cameron holding a garment bag in one hand and a box that looked suspiciously like it might hold a necklace within.

You scoffed at the items in her hands, lifting an eyebrow as you told her, “If he thinks he’s going to buy my forgiveness…” you paused thoughtfully, eyeing the label on the garment bag and the Tiffany blue packaging of the jewelry box, “Well, damn he might be right.” Sarah only giggled and handed off the items to you, telling you that was only ‘the beginning’ and to be ready by 5.

Part of you thought about ignoring your instructions, slipping on a pair of fuzzy pajamas and watching movies with a glass of wine. The thought of Rafe’s face seeing you on the couch when he arrived that evening was almost enough to do it. But, truthfully, you weren’t even that mad anymore and you were really curious to see what kind of dress he had picked out for you. Looking at the time, you sighed. You really needed to shower, and you liked to take your time getting ready, so you got off the couch and headed up into your bathroom.

After your shower, you unzipped the garment bag and admired the silky, black fabric of the dress, more than a little impressed with Rafe. You spent the next few hours slowly getting ready, taking the time to do your hair and even bringing out the winged eyeliner. Your last step was slipping on the dress, loving the feel of the fabric against your skin.

At five o clock on the dot, your doorbell rang. You took your time swiping a thin coat of lip gloss to your lips before rolling them with a smack. Slipping on a pair of simple black heels, you checked yourself out in the mirror one more time. Rafe had done well choosing the dress, it was in your exact size and hugged the contours of your body perfectly. A small smirk graced your face as you imagined his reaction, and you couldn’t wait any longer, leaving the sanctity of your bedroom. You heard Rafe making small talk with your parents as you descended the steps. Your mother had loved Rafe the moment you brought him home as your boyfriend, but your father had taken longer to warm up to him. It made your heart happy to see the two of them getting along and so you rushed down the last few steps to keep from breaking out into a wide grin.

His jaw dropped slightly when you came into sight, eyes respectfully roaming the black dress hugging your figure. “You look beautiful,” he smiled, though his eyes furrowed when he noticed your bare neck.

“Could you help me put this on?” You asked softly, handing him the diamond necklace you grasped in your small hand and turning around, lifting your hair. You couldn’t help the shiver as his hands brushed against your décolletage and quickly clasped the necklace. He was grateful you didn’t feel how his hands shook.

Spinning back around, you grabbed his hand and tried to wish your parents goodnight and make a speedy getaway, but of course your father had other ideas.

“Have her back by 11,” your father gruffly reminded him and you rolled your eyes.

“Dad, I’m twenty years old,” You told him exasperatedly, but he just shook his head and reminded you that you were ‘under his roof’ for the summer.

“We’ll see you tomorrow, darling,” Your mom smiled, placing her hand on your father’s bicep to calm him. Grinning at her, you told them you loved them and all but dragged Rafe out the door. The second the door closed, you let his hand fall and walked purposefully to his truck. The way his smile fell a little hurt your heart, but you were playing the long game and it was too soon to give in. Rushing ahead of you, he opened the door and helped you in before shutting it for you and jogging to the driver side. He didn’t make a move to grab your thigh, and you found yourself missing the warm comfort it provided. While avoiding his gaze, you grabbed his hand from the wheel and placed it on its familiar position on your upper thigh, watching the way the side of his mouth upturned in your peripheral vision.

It didn’t take long to reach your destination, the cute new restaurant with seating on the waterfront. You had been talking about going there since it opened, but you and Rafe hadn’t yet found the time to go. You gave him a questioning look, there was definitely a wait list but he just shrugged and smiled before getting out of the vehicle and meeting you on the passenger side, opening the door for you again and helping you out. He tossed the keys at the valet, and walked into the restaurant, and you didn’t let go of his hand this time.

Sitting at your table overlooking the calm water, the late afternoon made its way into evening in a flurry of smiles and laughter and quiet conversation. You didn’t know if it was the way his larger hand held yours over the table, the soft adoration in his gaze, or the messy way his hair fell in his eyes, but by the time the entrees had been cleared from the table you knew you needed him. You could pretend the whole date hadn’t done a thing for you, or you could try and get him to show you just how sorry he was.

As he looked through the dessert menu, you squeezed his hand and murmured his name. He looked up at you and flushed a little under your intense gaze, asking, “Baby?”

“Take me home,” you told him slowly, and you saw his face fall. Sighing a little, he nodded “Alright-“

“No, Rafe. Take me home,” you emphasized the last word, tongue poking out to lick at your bottom lip. This time, you saw comprehension flash in his eyes and he nodded quickly, pulling out his wallet and dropping a couple hundred dollar bills on the table, more than enough to cover your bill and leave a generous tip.

The drive back to his house was considerably quicker than the drive to the restaurant, and his hand rested dangerously high on your upper thigh the entire drive, stroking it softly and ever so slightly moving closer to where you needed him without ever actually touching. The second he threw the truck into park, he was hopping out of the vehicle. Thankful that Ward, Rose and Wheezie were on the mainland for the week and Sarah was probably slumming it down on the Cut, Rafe pulled you into the house and slammed you against the shut front door, eerily reminiscent of when you had slammed it only a few days ago royally pissed off at your boyfriend.

You hungrily kissed him, hands running through and messing up his already messy hair. One of his hands gripped your waist tightly, the other cupped your left breast. Whimpering into his mouth as the hand on your waist slid down your side and slipped under your dress, you tugged on his hair. “Upstairs?” you asked when he broke the kiss to look at you. He smirked and you gasped when he threw you over his shoulder and carried you up the stairs, hand squeezing your ass just because it was right there and he could.

He set you down gently on your feet, both of his hands coming to rest on either side of your jaw as he pulled you in for a slow, passionate kiss. You felt your head spin, seeing stars as one of his hands slipped a little lower and began to gently put pressure on your neck. Gasping, you started to undo the buttons of his dress shirt, slipping your hand underneath the material and pulling it off of him. Your hands trailed down his toned chest and over his abs, before your smaller hands fumbled with his belt, pulling it clean from the belt loops of his dress pants. When you reached for the button, he pushed your hands away and spun you around to unzip your dress, pressing your chest into the door.

First, he pushed your hair over your shoulder and pressed a kiss to your shoulder blade before beginning to slowly pull the zipper down your back. Kissing every inch of back he exposed, all the way down to where your lower back met your ass before standing back up and pushing the dress off your shoulders, allowing it to spill at your feet. You turned around, back pressed to his bedroom door, and stood before him in just your matching lingerie set, and your entire body felt hot from the way he was looking at you – like you were everything he could ever possibly want. “You’re so beautiful, baby,” he murmured, causing your face to get even warmer.

Running his hands from your shoulder blades, down to your wrists, he linked your hands together as he pressed open mouth kisses down your neck and between your breasts. Pausing to mouth at your nipple through the lace of your bra, he continued kissing and sucking his way down your chest and stomach, stopping at the lace of your panties. You sucked in a deep breath as he sunk to his knees, pressing a kiss to your inner thigh before pulling your panties down your legs and helping you step out of them. He leaned back, admiring your core before stroking you slowly with his index finger, gathering the wetness on the tip of his finger. “Such a pretty pussy baby,” he whispered, “and all wet just for me,”

“Rafe,” you whined, hands moving to grip his hair as he lazily played with you, carefully avoiding your entrance and your clit. He smirked up at you, large hand gripping one of your thighs and lifting it to rest over his shoulder.

“Don’t worry baby, I’ll take good care of you,” he kissed his way up your thigh, tongue flicking out of his mouth to lick at your clit once, twice. You jerked your hips, one hand leaving his hair to grip the dresser that stood beside his door. He pulled his head back and tilted it up to look at you, continuing with a smirk, “as long as you forgive me.”

The way he was looking at you coupled by his grip on your thigh had you unable to speak. Rafe mistook it as you stubbornly holding onto your anger, choosing to press his thumb to your clit and kiss the inside of your thigh, causing you to gasp. “Forgive me baby? Please you know I can’t stand you bein’ mad at me. I miss you.” He murmured against the smooth skin of your leg. You still couldn’t speak, and so he pressed his mouth to your clit, sucking and licking as you moaned above him. Suddenly stopping, he leaned back to look at you, indicating he wouldn’t continue until you spoke.

“I- yes, I forgive you, please, I-“ you whined, tugging on his hair. Sighing in a mixture of relief and pleasure as he reattached his mouth to your pussy, your head hit the back of the door with a bang when he slipped a finger into you, then another. You couldn’t help but grind your pussy against his face as he noisily sucked and licked. Eating you out was one of Rafe’s favorite things to do, and he once joked that suffocating between your thighs was the only way he wanted to go. It didn’t take long for you to reach your high after he inserted a third finger into you, curling all three fingers and stroking your walls. Your legs shook and you whined his name as you came, slumping against the door. If Rafe hadn’t been holding you up, you’re certain you would have fallen to the ground, boneless. After he had licked you clean, he gently set your leg back on the ground and rose from his knees before he pressed you into the door, kissing you as you tasted yourself on his tongue. His hand wrapped around your body and easily undid the clasp of your bra, slipping the fabric down your arms until you stood bare before him entirely.

Pressing a kiss to your lips again, he began to undo the button of his pants, before telling you to ‘get on the bed, baby’. Your legs felt like jello as you made the four steps to the bed, crawling onto the bed and laying against the pillows, watching him slip out of his pants and boxers, mouthwatering at the sight of his naked body.

You waited with baited breath as he crawled his way over your body, leaning down to kiss you again, slipping his tongue in your mouth as your chests pressed together. You ran your hands up his muscled back, holding him close to you as you kissed. He leaned his body weight on his forearms that rested on either side of your head, before reaching down to guide himself into your warm heat. The stretch was so good it was almost painful as he slowly entered you, inch by inch until your hips met. He was slow at first, keeping an even pace as he pressed kisses against your neck, your chest. “See how good it can be when you forgive me, baby?” he murmured into your neck. You could only whine in response, holding him tightly to your body.

It was the way his hips thrust in and out of you, the soft affirmations he whispered in between breathy, whiny moans, the way he gripped the headboard. It was the way he told you he loved you when he was fucking you into the mattress, the look in his eyes as he hiked your leg up further up his hip to enter you even deeper. It was the perfectly imperfect combination of all things Rafe Cameron that had your eyes rolling into the back of your head, your pussy clenching on his dick, as you came hard for the second time. Groaning at the feeling of you around him, he fucked you through your orgasm, chasing his own high.

Wanting to help him, you pressed a kiss to the spot just under his ear, smiling when he rewarded you with a whiny moan. Mind clouded with the pleasure he was still giving you, you incoherently rambled in his ear, “God I love you so much baby, you’re so good to me. You make me feel so good, no one can make me feel this good but you.”

Groaning, he slipped a hand down to rub against your clit, hoping to bring you to your third orgasm as he approached his own. Back arching without warning, you came unexpectedly around him again, crying his name and “I love you” and “I forgive you baby, I forgive you.” Your words spurned him on, and he came inside you before collapsing on top of you, cock still buried deep in you. You held him to your chest as it heaved, willing your soul to return to your body.

“You forgive me, huh?” He mumbled, smirking against your chest, “Was it the three orgasms, dinner, or the Tiffany necklace?”

“Oh baby,” you giggled, leaning down to kiss his sweaty forehead, “I already forgave you before all that, just wanted to make you sweat a little.”

Throwing his head back in a whiny laugh, he pressed a kiss to your chest, “Cruel woman.”

“Ya, but you’ll forgive me.”

everything taglist: @velyssaraptor @danicarosaline @copper-boom @x-lulu @prejudic3 @rekrappeter @downbytheouterbanks @ilovejjmaybank @bricksatanakinswindow @jellyfishbeansontoast @sunwardsss @rudyypankow @im-a-stranger-thing @alexa-playafricabytoto @maybankfullkook​@girlsru1eboysdroo1 @sortagaysortahigh @socialwriter @bluesiderudy @anxietyandtacos

[Coco] Nuestra Iglesia, Pt 24

Title: Nuestra Iglesia Summary: Fake Priest AU. In the midst of the Mexican Revolution, Santa Cecilia is still a relatively safe place; all a young orphan named Miguel has to worry about is how to get novices Héctor and Imelda to switch their religious vows for wedding vows before it’s too late. He’s not having much success until he finds an unlikely ally in their new parish priest, who just arrived from out of town. Fine, so Padre Ernesto is a really odd priest. He’s probably not even a real priest, and the army-issued pistol he carries is more than slightly worrying. But he agrees that Héctor and Imelda would be wasted on religious life, and Miguel will take all the help he can get. It’s either the best idea he’s ever had, or the worst. Characters: Miguel Rivera, Ernesto de la Cruz, Héctor Rivera, Imelda Rivera, Chicharrón, Óscar and Felipe Rivera, OCs. Imector. Rating: T

[All chapters up are tagged as ‘fake priest au’ on my blog.]

A/N:  the problem with Ernesto’s murderous plans is that they tend to only have a 50% success rate.  Art is by @lunaescribe​ and @swanpit​​

***

“... And you killed how many Villistas?” 

“Ah, I lost count. At least thirty.”

“Five, more like!”

“Shut up! Maybe some were just wounded, but I killed no less than twenty of Villa’s bastards, at any rate.”

“Sí, sí, and then you wounded Pancho Villa himself. One would think that with such a warrior among us, getting through the Zapatistas on our way here would have been a child’s play. I didn’t see you hit a single one. Did you forget how to shoot in the meantime?”

“Ah, shut up. They fought better, is all. Everyone knows Zapata and his followers are twice the mad dogs as everybody else, and I did hit one!”

“Your own shoe doesn’t count, pendejo.”

“Shut your mouth!”

“You’re so full of--”

As an argument broke out, Héctor watched Gustavo sigh and fall back a few paces with his horse. His attempts at buttering up the soldiers to get any sort of useful information had amounted to nothing, when they hadn’t straight-up started an argument like that one. The only question he was able to get a real answer to was why Commander Hernández hadn't allowed them to spend the evening and night in Santa Cecilia before setting off. 

“Ay, he won’t hear of it,” a soldier had replied. “He heard of a battalion that was decimated like that - they stayed in a village overnight, but turns out it was chock-full of traitors and they called their friends in during the night, and the men were slaughtered before they could grab a gun. So he’s paranoid about that.”

The expression that crossed Gustavo’s face for a moment, that of a man who just sucked on a lemon, had been enough to tell Héctor that was very much something he had hoped to pull off in Santa Cecilia. Unaware of that, the man - “call me Chucho”, he had said - had added: “It’s a myth if you ask me, more likely all of them just got sick of this shit and deserted.”

“Can’t blame them,” someone had muttered only a couple of paces behind Héctor, only to be immediately shushed by no less than ten of his comrades. 

“Shut up, idiota!”

“You want the commander to nail you to a telegraph pole or what!”

“He’s off ahead scouting anyway,” the man had muttered, and promptly fallen in a sullen silence. Morale was low, Héctor had quickly realized; he had been aware of the fact the war was not going all that well for the Federal Army, but this was the first time he saw its effects on the troops. All things considered, he got the distinct feeling most of those men didn’t want to be there a hell of a lot more than Ernesto had. 

Only that Ernesto had seized his moment to escape, and they were still stuck.

“-- shoot that cigarette off your mouth from a hundred paces, and if you don't believe--”

“Amazing, think you can hit the men attached to the cigarettes every once in a while, too?”

“If what you're asking is a bullet through your brain--!”

“Brain might be a big word there…”

“Shut your mouth, Nachito!”

As the argument continued, Héctor did his best to tune it out and reached into his saddle bag for the water. They had been warned the water rations were scarce and he had been trying not to drink too much, but they had been riding under the sun for hours, he’d been sweating half his body weight, and there seemed to be no moisture left in his mouth. At least the sun was starting to get lower at the horizon, evening not too far away.

Héctor wondered how they’d spend the night. Would they make camp? Just sit around fires, rifle in hand, and try to shut their eyes for a few hours before they kept marching on? Surely someone would stand guard, were the revolutionaries really going to catch up as Gustavo seemed to think they would? Would there be a battle? How many would come? Or would they decided a few men off Santa Cecilia was not a big enough loss to bother--

“Water?”

“Huh?” 

Héctor looked up to see a man riding next to him, holding out a flask of water. He seemed about his age, maybe a little younger, an attempt at a mustache on his upper lip and an uniform almost as ill-fitting as his own. He tried to smile, grimaced at the heat, and awkwardly avoided his gaze at the same time. 

“You, uh. If you want water.”

“Ah. I’m getting mine, don’t worry. I don’t want to take your ration.”

“... Right,” the young man muttered, and kept riding by his side. Héctor took a couple of sips from his flask, just enough to make his mouth feel a little less like an entire desert had moved in, and glanced back towards the man. He seemed to hesitate, but as Héctor rather expected he finally spoke again. “So you are, uh, a novice?”

“I… I was, I suppose. I suspect leaving the parish to join the Federal Army means that’s going to lapse,” he said, trying to smile like the idea was funny. The man didn’t seem amused, and Héctor cleared his throat. “... My name’s Héctor, by the way.”

A nod. “Alejandro,” the man replied. “Look, me and the others - several of the others, we… I mean, back there, when the commander shot the gringo-- I mean, the priest, I would have never,” he finally blurted out, holding onto the reins so tightly his knuckles turned white. 

Ah.

Héctor had barely looked at Father John’s body on the cobblestones, focused as he was on the fact that man had Miguel, but the mental image had still been lingering in the back of his mind ever since they left. The pool of blood, the way it got into every crack, the sticky warmth of it through his robes when his knees hit the ground. 

Some men had taken him away to get him help, he knew, and the Federales had allowed it, but Héctor had no idea if any help would even be possible. He was probably dead, for trying to reason with someone utterly unreasonable, for trying to save Miguel. 

He found his martyrdom, at last.

Something in Héctor’s chest ached; the gringo was not a simple man to get along with, easy to despise and quick to judge, but he had tried to do the right thing and he did not deserve a bullet for it. Perhaps taking note of his pained expression, the young man fidgeted. 

“Maybe God will save him,” he murmured, and swallowed. “I… we wanted to ask… do you think God will curse us for this? For shooting down one of His servants?”

Why ask me, Héctor almost replied, but then again it was the sort of question one would ask to a priest and he was the closest thing to one those men had at hand. Part of him wanted to believe God would indeed curse them, all of them, Huerta’s damn Federales - but as he looked around himself now, those men who’d seemed to terrifying looked so tired, dirty from days of travel, many of them young and probably wearing their uniforms no more willingly than he did. 

How many had been taken the way they were in the first place?

“There is no mercy in war,” he remembered Ernesto saying when he was found out and they confronted him. “They die or you do. On and on, day after day, until you forget you’re looking at humans because it gets easier if you get that detail out of your mind.”

“... The Church says that as long as there is regret, all can be forgiven,” he found himself saying instead. Alejandro nodded, but he looked far from reassured and just fell silent as they rode on towards the top of a hill they were never going to get past.

***

“Those bastards were supposed to come through San Luz!”

Arms still aching and palms burning from the friction with the rope, Sofía made it down the belltower and to the churchyard just on time to hear the frustrated shout. Right before the church were maybe twenty men and women on horses, all of them armed, being filled in on what had happened by a few very confused bystanders who likely had no idea what was going on but were relieved that these new visitors were not Federales at least.

As Sofía approached with quick steps, the man turned his horse to face her. “Gustavo--” he began, and trailed off. He blinked. “... You’re not Gustavo.”

Sharp as a knife, this one. Nice to see we’re in good hands.

“Gustavo went with them. He told me to call for you,” she added, pointing up to the belltower, where the bell still swung slowly. “He said I should tell you to follow the trail.”

The man seemed taken aback, then he nodded. “Very well. What direction did they--”

“They took the road west, through the hills.” 

Imelda’s voice rang out suddenly, causing several heads to turn. She was riding an aging horse that had belonged to her family for years, but that was not what made Sofía raise an eyebrow.

The robes were gone, replaced by a gown and a blouse, a belt at her waist with ammunition and the pistol they had taken from Ernesto’s room. Her head was uncovered, her jaw set; the man stared at her a few moments before he tilted his head in recognition. 

“... Sister. I was hoping to meet you again in better circumstances than this.”

“José. You probably already gathered as much, but the Federales that took our men outnumber you, at least three to one. I assume you could use an extra pair of hands.”

“We could,” one of the women spoke up. She spurred her own horse closer to Imelda, a rifle slung over her shoulder. Her hair was braided back, showing a still healing cut on the side of her head. “How much practice did you get with that pistol?”

Imelda met her gaze. “Not much. I’ll have to hope what practice I could get will be enough.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“Then I die. Not the first or last.”

The woman smiled. “Very well. We’ll need someone to tell us what men not to shoot, after all, in case Gustavo can’t,” she added, and turned to look back at the man she’d called José. At this point, Sofía suspected she may have been mistaken in her assumption he was the leader there. “They can’t have gone very far, with the supplies and carts they took. We can catch up with them. Gabriel, you and I go ahead to dispatch anyone guarding the back of the column. If we don’t take them by surprise we’re fucked.”

“Well, you heard her, everyone. Let’s get going!”

As they kicked the flanks of their horses to get moving, Imelda looked back, and her gaze met Sofía’s. “... Sister,” she said, “I should mention this marks the end of my novitiate.”

Something gripping her throat - don’t die out there, she wanted to say - Sofía managed a smile. Trying to talk Imelda out of her plan, she knew, would be absolutely fruitless. “About time,” she said instead. “Go take back your stupid fiancé.”

The smile Imelda gave was sharp, telling her clearly that she wouldn’t go down without a fight. Not that Sofía had doubted that even for a moment. 

“You can be certain I will,” she said, and kicked the flanks of her horse, riding off.

“Ay, a novio,” one of the men muttered as he rode past. “And my heart breaks already.”

We had enough heartbreak as is for the day, Sofía thought, but said nothing. Instead she turned away from the galloping horses and let her gaze wander across the parish grounds. A few men were running off to grab what horses and hunting rifles they had and join the rescue party, but no trace of Ernesto. He’d returned, she knew, but no one had seen him since. 

Where in the world is that idiota hiding now?

***

Following the trail left behind by the column of Federales - the imprint of hooves, the wheels of carts, the cigarette butts they left in their wake - was easier than finding gonorrhea in a brothel.

Well, at least Ernesto supposed it was; he wouldn’t really know, as he had never in his life had gonorrhea or needed to resort to a brothel for pleasurable company in the first place. His good looks and charm had served him well enough with men and women alike, as Juan could testify.

Except that Juan was dead, shot like a dog in the middle of the plaza, what little color he had on his face draining away along with the blood; Ernesto had not seen it happen, but he could imagine it all too well each time he closed his eyes against the merciless July sun. 

Juan could never testify anything anymore, nor roll his eyes or start a lecture whenever Ernesto said something outrageous. He was far enough from Santa Cecilia that he could barely hear the bell anymore, but its toll was still ringing in his head, in every thudding beat of his heart. 

Dead. Dead. Dead.

I want them dead.

Sweat dripped into his eyes and down his cheeks, or so he told himself. Ernesto kicked the donkey’s flanks to make the stupid animal go faster, the reins of the other clutched tight in his hand, and wiped his forehead, teeth clenched hard. He clung to his fury, allowed himself to bare his teeth in something resembling a smile as his gaze fell on the caskets of wine. Holy wine, plus a special ingredient courtesy of the parish’s old rat problem.

He would see them dead. He would see them writhe and suffer, and he’d let them know it was by his hand; Juan would probably disapprove, that stupid stuck-up gringo, but he was no longer there to talk him out of it. He was no longer there to disapprove of him, and someone had to pay for it. How gracious of God’s church to provide the means to make it happen. Perhaps it was his will, after all, and who was he not to help along divine will?

Todo modo para buscar la voluntad divina, Juan had said.

Todo modo. Todo modo. Todo modo. 

Ernesto let the words echo in his head until they drowned out all noise from the bell, or perhaps it had stopped ringing, or he simply got too far for its sound to reach him anymore. He pressed on through the dusty path and up yet another hill until finally, finally, he saw it just below: a long column of men who were not long for that world. A few men at the back were looking up towards him, surely there to guard against rear attacks. But they saw no rebels there: only a priest, far more charming than the one they’d shot dead in Santa Cecilia.

Ernesto stared for a few moments, and finally let out a long breath, relaxing his frame. He wiped sweat off his face, opened his eyes, and smiled. A real smile, not a grimace; the easy, charming expression that got him in the good graces of men and women alike oh so quickly. 

Who would refuse a blessing in those difficult times? Who’d turn away a friendly face? Who wouldn’t accept some holy wine to wash down the dust and dirt? With some luck, it would be the last thing they’d do before they got to confess their sins to San Pedro himself. 

Good luck explaining away the murder of a man of the Church, Ernesto thought, and got the donkeys moving down the hill as quickly as he could. No turning back now, not anymore.

The thought did cross his mind for the briefest moment - what if they see through me, what if they recognize me - but it hardly even registered. At that point he was one deserter among thousands and he’d left his battalion as it headed north, with no plans to go back down towards Oaxaca. Chances any of those men came from his battalion were vanishingly thin, he thought, and to be fair he was almost entirely correct in that assumption. Just almost. 

Ernesto de la Cruz kept clambering down the hill on top of his donkey, with the smile of a friendly priest eager to deliver a very special blessing to the heroes of Mexico.

***

He wasn’t there, either. The slippery bastard wasn’t anywhere.

Santiago kicked his horse’s sides again, hands clenching on the reins. He had gone off ahead, ostensibly to scout for any sort of possible ambush, but truth be told it was only an excuse to be alone with his storming thoughts for a time. 

He already knew there would be no ambush: the idiots were still waiting for them in San Luz, or had given up waiting and were drinking themselves into a stupor, which was just as likely. A few more miles, and then they could circle back to take them by surprise in the middle of the night.He’d toyed with the idea before, but it was not the current plan: he and his men were expected in Yucatan within days, which left them short on time. 

But it was… tempting, nonetheless.

We could get some scum out of the way. And maybe de la Cruz is hiding there, or passed by. Someone might know something. Someone might talk.

Santiago closed his eyes and lifted his head, letting the sun beat down on his face. It had been a scorching hot day when he had found Alberto’s body, too, shot in the back of the head and left to feed carrion birds by the monster who’d greeted them that morning with a smile before they went off on patrol together. 

It should have been Santiago out on patrol with Ernesto de la Cruz  that day. It was his turn; it should have been him to fall face down in the sand with his brains blown out. But he’d pulled a muscle in his back the previous evening, riding felt like having hot rods pushed into his spine, and Beto had offered to take my place. 

Said I owed him a drink. What wouldn’t I give to pay back that debt.  

Monster, the gringo had called him. What sort of beast, he had said, but the idiota knew nothing of monsters and beasts that must be put down for everybody’s safety. He, at least, didn’t feign friendliness. He didn’t hide behind a smile. He warned before he shot, stated his terms and delivered on his promises.

If it made him a beast himself, very well; perhaps he was. Perhaps trying to take the child had been a step too far - but he’d sooner be a lion than a snake hiding in the sand. 

I cannot turn back anymore. No way to go but forward. 

But first, San Luz. If he’s there, I’ll smoke him out.

Santiago Hernández stopped his horse on a rocky outcrop and reached into the saddle bag to pull out his map, so he could work out the best route back for a quick attack. He opened it and studied it under the merciless sun, waiting for his men to catch up

It took him a while to realize it was taking them much too long.

***

“Oye! Come here!”

“There’s a priest!”

“We’re getting blessed, muchachos!”

“And we’re getting wine!”

“... Huh?”

As word travelled fast up the column, causing men to halt their horses and turn, Héctor glanced around in confusion. He looked over at Gustavo, but he seemed about as lost as he was at the notion of a random priest walking into marching Federales to offer blessings and wine. Where did he even--

“He says he’s the parish priest of the hole we just left,” someone added, and Héctor’s blood ran cold, something clenching in his stomach.

No, no, no, no. What is he doing here? They were looking for him. They’ll kill him.

“Padre Ernesto?” Francisco, a young cobbler who’d been taken with him that day, blurted out. Sidling up to Héctor, Gustavo elbowed him in the ribs. 

“What’s going on?” he growled under his breath. “Why is he here, and why did you get almost as pale as the gringo just now?”

“I…” Héctor swallowed, unable to force words out. Gustavo didn’t know, and this really was not the time to explain him everything. He needed to get to Ernesto immediately, warn him to get away while he still could, so he ignored Gustavo’s questions and spurred his horse to go back, towards the end of the column. The men there were already starting to gather, dismounting their horses… and passing around caskets of wine. 

Héctor braced himself for the moment someone would cry out in recognition and every man present would turn against Ernesto, but there was no such cry; the men were none the wiser as they talked and laughed, took the wine and kept gathering, all semblance of order gone. 

Above all, Héctor heard a familiar voice.

“... And once I realized I had entirely missed your arrival, well, I had to catch up with you,” Ernesto was saying, all charm and smiles as he helped unload the caskets of wine. “I couldn’t let my parishioners leave to serve this country without giving them my blessing, you understand. And you, of course, it is the least I could do - careful there, it’s heavy…”

It was like an impromptu party, but it was soon clear not everyone was simply in the mood to celebrate. Héctor did his best to approach, but he got knocked back by several men gathering around Ernesto. 

“Padre!”

“Can we have your blessing, Padre?”

“I have not had confession in months--”

“Haven’t heard from my family since March, I don’t know if they are well, pray for them--”

“What happened to that other priest-- the gringo, we did not--”

“Our commander lost his temper, a man of God, I would have never--”

“We would never--”

Ernesto turned to the men, and his smile wavered for only a moment. But then it was back, full of understanding. “... Padre Juan was a man of principle who did not always know when to hold his tongue, but he is with God now,” he said, and Héctor’s stomach sank. So he hadn’t made it. He was dead, and Ernesto showed no sign whatsoever of being affected. 

“His soul is safe, and I know he would want me to take care of yours,” Ernesto was going on, and he lifted his hand to impart a blessing, speaking loudly to be heard by all. He spoke in near-perfect Latin John Johnson would have been proud of, giving everyone present absolution before crossing himself. Many of the men mirrored the gesture, relief plain on their faces. Alejandro was among them, looking close to tears.

The blessing done, absolution given, Ernesto smiled and spread out his arms. “Now, let us all drink the blood of Christ and--”

“Padre!” Héctor finally cried out, pushing his way to the front, and Ernesto’s gaze turned on him. His smile grew even wider. 

“My child!” he cried out, and pulled him into an embrace. “Ah, what a relief, having reached you on time to absolve your sins and give you the Lord’s blessing!”

Face smashed against Ernesto’s shoulder, Héctor barely managed to whisper. “What are you doing--” he began, only for Ernesto to turn his head and almost snarl into his ear, his voice so full of seething fury it made Héctor’s heart skip a beat in his chest. 

“Saving your scrawny ass so I can kick it myself. Don’t drink the wine, none of you. Tell the others.”

“Wha-- Ernesto, wait, they’re--”

“Not a drop,” Ernesto hissed, and pushed him off before anyone realized they had spoken to one another, patting his shoulder with a laugh. “Go to the others, tell them they have my blessing and that the parish will look after their families,” he added, and before he could add another word Héctor was almost ejected from the small crowd, reeling. 

What does it mean? What has he done to the wine?

He looked around to see Alejandro taking one of the opened caskets, saw the wine flowing and men drinking. Héctor wanted to stop him, tell him not to - he was not a bad person, he could tell; many of them were not bad people - but he knew he couldn’t do so without alerting them all, and in the end he had to back away. 

Guilt twisted in his gut, but he knew he had to ignore it and move quickly. The wine was being passed around so fast, and he had to warn Gustavo and the others not to drink it before it got to them. Regardless how tempting it was not to tell Gustavo, of course.

No one has recognized him. Maybe it will be all right. Maybe whatever plan he has is going to work. Maybe it will make them pass out, no one needs to die, Héctor thought, and with one last glance towards Ernesto - he was positively holding court now, men around him laughing at something he said or crossing themselves and asking for a prayer - he ran back to where he left the others from Santa Cecilia, trying to reach them before the wine could.

Whatever Ernesto had done with it, he knew none of them wanted to find out the hard way.

***

What got Santiago to lift his gaze from the map and realize his men really should have caught up by now was a very distant sound, one he did not recognize at first. He put away the map with a frown, focusing, and for a moment he thought what he heard were distant screams. It made his blood run cold and his hands clench on the reins. 

Had his men been attacked? Could it be? Was there an ambush - had he walked right past the enemy without realizing as much? Heart hammering in his throat, Santiago spurred his horse to trot back, straining to listen… and finally he realized what he was hearing were not screams. 

Well, they kind of were, but those were no cries of distress; there was a rhythm to it, all voices rising up together and then falling, then rising again, like… singing? Was that bunch of idiots singing at the top of their lungs?

Have they all gone mad?

Stunned and furious at the same time, Santiago kicked his horse’s flanks to spur it into a gallop back the way he had come. He knew those men’s discipline was almost non-existent, but that was ridiculous. He would see them punished for it, he’d make them march through the night, he--!

Insortaron a Cortez Por toditito el estado: "Vivo o muerto que se aprehenda Porque a varios ha matado!"

Soon he was close enough to hear the words and, after turning a bend, he could see that the sorry excuses of soldiers he’d been leading were off their horses and standing around or sitting in the dirt, drinking and singing like they were off duty in a damn cantina. 

He opened his mouth to shout at them, demand to know what was going on in their empty heads, but another voice rose up loud and clear and Santiago’s own voice died in his throat. 

Decía Gregorio Cortez Con su pistola en la mano: "No siento haberlo matado Al que siento es a mi hermano..."

He knew that voice; he heard it before in the barracks, at campfires, whenever a comrade picked up a guitar. He never missed a chance to sing, turning each break in a performance. 

Alberto had found it endearing; he’d found it annoying. Now it made him feel as though the sweat on his skin had turned into frost.

Still atop his horse Santiago turned slowly, very slowly, towards the source of that voice. He had not expected the priestly robes, and he’d had a beard when he’d last seen him, but he would recognize that despicable face anywhere; he’d dreamed of it almost every night, grinning down at him as he kneeled over Beto’s body.

And now he was there. 

How or why he had come to be there, let alone in a cassock and singing along with his men as they guzzled down wine, Santiago had no idea nor he cared to know. All that he knew, all that mattered, was that he was there within his grasp, and that he would never escape again. 

Santiago Hernández bared his teeth, and reached for the pistol at his hip.

***

BANG.

The gunshot was distant, reverberating through the hills, impossible to mistake for anything else. It made Imelda’s blood run cold, but she didn’t slow down; her horse was in full gallop, right at the heels of José’s own - which, come to think of it, looked an awful lot like Ernesto’s own missing horse - and she spurred it to go a bit faster, just enough to sidle with him. 

“Was that one of yours? Did you prepare an ambush?” she yelled to be heard through the rushing wind and beating hooves, knowing full well what the answer was but still hoping against hope to get at least some explanation for the gunshot. 

José shook his head, his expression grim. “No such thing. There may be insubordination among them.”

“Does it happen often?”

“All the time. But we’ll only know when we catch up,” he added, and spurred his horse again. Imelda could only follow, and hope for the best.

If he gets himself killed, she thought, I’ll have to kill him again.

***

The gunshot was deafeningly loud, and close enough to make Héctor cry out - him, and several other men - and the singing to stop abruptly. There were confused cries, men jumping on their feet and dropping their cups of wine to reach for their own guns, turning around wildly to find out who’d shot.

They didn’t have to look far.

“Ernesto de la Cruz.”

Still on top of his horse, pistol raised in the air, Commander Hernández stared at Ernesto with enough hatred to make Héctor tremble. He was vaguely aware of Gustavo and another couple of men from Santa Cecilia talking to him under their breath, asking what the hell was going on, but Héctor was unable to speak, dread gripping his throat. 

He found him. It’s over.

He wanted to cry out for Ernesto to run, to do something, but there was nothing for him to do and he could only stand there, staring in horror. Ernesto had stilled, realization beginning to dawn on him that he’d been recognized, and that he was trapped. 

The soldiers around him were not quite as quick to grasp the situation. “What--”

“Commander, we, uh, can explain--”

“Shut up, all of you, and seize that traitor!”

“... Sir, that is Padre--”

“That’s no more a priest than I am, idiots! It’s the deserter we’ve been looking for!”  the man screamed, and leaped off his horse, pistol still in his hand. “ SEIZE HIM, I SAID!”

“Qué?” Gustavo blurted out somewhere on Héctor’s right, and it seemed that sentiment was prevalent among the Federales as well, most of whom kept staring at their commander as though he’d suddenly started speaking Portuguese. 

Then Ernesto tried to run, and all hell broke loose.

Héctor had gone hare hunting once, out of sheer curiosity, watching from the sidelines and not really doing much. The pack of dogs, all of them friendly mutts, had seemed comically clumsy, wagging their tails and snuffling about, seemingly more interested in playing than hunting… until a hare had burst out of its hiding spot to run away, and suddenly the entire pack had pounced. The chase had been brief, the screams unbearably loud, the outcome bloody, and Héctor had felt queasy as the owner of the dogs lifted the prey, grinning from ear to ear while his dogs went back to goofing off.

“This,” he had said, “is why you never try running before even the dumbest dog pack.”

Now Héctor watched Ernesto make the same mistake, and again the dogs pounced as one. The hare had no chance of escape that day, and neither did he now. 

“STOP HIM!”

“Got him, I got him!”

“Get your hands of me, hijos de--”

“Agh! He bit me!”

“Get him over here!”

If any of the soldiers had doubted Commander Hernández’s words and still believed him a priest, Ernesto thrashing and screaming insults to their entire lineage - through the flea-ridden Spaniards who’d forced their way between their great-great-great-great grandmothers’ thighs and all the way down to the Garden of Eden - probably took care of it. 

As Héctor stared, petrified and not knowing what to do, he was dragged in front of the commander and forced on his knees, arms behind his back. Hernández put the pistol back in its holster, walked up to Ernesto, and grabbed a fistful of his hair to force his head back. 

He gave a cold, too-wide smile that still did not reach his eyes and said something Héctor could not hear. Ernesto’s scowl turned to shock for a moment, and then his features twisted in fury. He screamed and tried to rise up to throw himself at Hernández, almost made it, but too many men were holding him down and he was pushed back in the dirt. Orders were barked and they began dragging Ernesto away from the rest of the still confused soldiers, off the path and towards a small grove of trees and shrubs. One of the men carried a long rope. 

They'll see me hang, Ernesto had told them after being unmasked, and God, he'd been right. “No, wait!” Héctor cried out and tried to run, but something gripped his arm, pulled him back. 

“Stay here, idiota,” Gustavo hissed, his grasp on Héctor’s wrist tight enough to cut off the blood flow. He glared. “Won’t let you become a martyr on my watch, you’re insufferable enough as is. Whatever you’re thinking of doing, don’t do it. Did you know about him?”

“I can’t let them kill--”

“Did you know!” Gustavo barked, and Héctor fell silent, his expression probably speaking volumes. Gustavo groaned, rubbing his forehead with his free hand. “A Federale right under my nose and I never knew. Por Dios, José is never going to let me hear the end of it...”

“Gustavo, let me go, we have to help him--”

“Help is coming, idiota. Stay here.”

“But--”

“Help is coming,” Gustavo repeated in the forceful way of a man trying to will something into reality. “At least that damn liar delayed their march. Any moment now--” he trailed off when a sudden noise reached their ears amidst the confusion and exclamations, harsh and unmistakable - retching. Soon followed by another such sound, and another. And another. 

One by one, the men around them began looking very, very sick.

***

“Let me go! Let me go, you bastards--!”

Ernesto’s insults got him precisely nowhere, and his attempt at fighting off the men dragging him away was about as useless. Too many of them, too strong, his wrists already tied behind his back before they shoved him on his knees in the dirt before the cabrón who had somehow recognized his face.

When said cabrón stepped forward and grabbed his hair to yank his head back, Ernesto clenched his teeth to hold back a cry and glared up at him. Who was he? Dimly he knew he must know him, he looked vaguely familiar - something about the mustache, the unusually thin bridge of his nose - but he still could not put a name to the face the way that bastard had somehow put a name to his.

Unaware of his thoughts, the man sneered. “Ernesto de la Cruz - so the rat comes out in the open at last. What’s the reason for this masquerade? Did you think these robes would save you? They will not. I shot down a true priest today. Or was the gringo an impostor, too?”

Our commander lost his temper, one of them had said. 

That beast pulled out his pistol and… and… ay, I told you, he knows no God. To shoot a man of god like an animal!

YOU TOOK HIM AWAY!

With a wordless scream, Ernesto strained against the men holding him down, against his bounds, wanting nothing more than putting his hands around the man’s neck and choke the life out of him. He almost managed to stand, but the weight of several men was too much and he was thrown back down in the dirt.

“You, take him and follow me. Rojas, get enough rope to hang this bastard. Quick.”

“Yes sir.”

No no no no no!

Ernesto struggled, but to no avail. Bound and overpowered, he was easily dragged away from the path by the small group of men - towards shrubs and trees, where they could hang him by the neck and leave him to feed carrion birds. They would not give him a clean death, he knew. No fall, no broken neck. They’d string him up and… and… 

“Let me go!”

“Oh, as you wish.”

The men threw him down on the ground, and with his hands tied there was nothing sparing his face a painful impact. Ernesto ground his teeth to stifle a cry, only for that cry to be forced out of him when a kick in his side threw him onto his back. A knee pressed on his chest and the man leaned down, all his weight on Ernesto’s sternum.

When is the damn poison going to work?

Maybe the parish got scammed and that wasn’t poison at all. Wouldn’t that be a laugh, a fake priest dead thanks to fake poison. 

As he struggled to breathe, Ernesto blinked a few times to clear his vision and looked up. Seen up close there was something startling in the sheer hatred in the man’s gaze, and it caused Ernesto to still a moment. The soldier, John’s murderer, sneered once again. 

“Tell me, traitor,” he all but snarled. “Do you even know who I am?”

Don’t make him mad, part of Ernesto’s brain said, but the rest clung to the hope the poison would start working soon. Make him waste time.

“Should I?” he spat. A fist connected with his face as soon as the words were out, causing his vision to swim. Blood ran down his face from a split lip, went down his throat. Somewhere above him he saw the rope being thrown up over a branch, one end already tied in a noose. 

And then, before his eyes, the blade of a knife caught the sunlight.

***

He didn’t even recognize him.

Of all the ways Ernesto de la Cruz had wronged him, that somehow was the final straw, the worst possible slap to the face. He’d murdered his best friend since childhood and ran off, leaving him to obsess over revenge for months on end - unable to sleep without seeing his face or Beto’s body in the sand, or both - and now he dared say he didn’t even know who he was.

Ah, but he’d know. Before he died, when he allowed him to die, he would know. 

“I know who you are well enough,” Santiago snarled, and pulled out his hunting knife. “A coward, a traitor, and a murderer. You’re a Judas, and you’ll die as Judas did - and everyone will know why!”

De la Cruz tried to squirm beneath him, still dazed by the blow but all too aware of the blade of his knife. Santiago sneered, held the knife to his throat, and watched him grow still. There was terror in his eyes, unmistakable, and he savored it like a sip from a bottle of fine wine. 

“Ay, you’ll wish I made it this easy for you.” The blade slipped beneath his collar and ripped down through the cassock, baring his chest. 

De la Cruz tried to squirm again, this time with more urgency, eyes wide. “Stop!” he rasped.

Santiago smiled. “Why? Have you recalled my name?”

“I have done nothing to you. I--”

“Liar. I should take an eye for that,” he snapped, and brought the tip of the knife’s blade to rest right beneath a widened eye, drawing the tiniest drop of blood from his skin. “Think again, you Judas. Think of the day you deserted. Someone was with you.”

“What…” Ernesto de la Cruz paused and finally, finally, Santiago saw his expression change - from terror and confusion to realization. Of course, that must have jogged his memory: the two of them had barely shared a few words, but he must remember Alberto. And wherever Alberto went, Santiago followed.

Until, of course, de la Cruz had sent Beto someplace where Santiago could not follow.

You took him away.

Something ached in his chest, and all of a sudden Santiago felt ridiculously close to tears. But he had him now. He would see him die, Alberto would be avenged, and he would finally feel better. He had to feel better. He could not contemplate feeling the way he did forever.

“Thiago,” de la Cruz choked out, and he scoffed. Of course, even now, the self-absorbed bastard couldn’t be bothered to remember anyone’s name. 

“Santiago,” he snapped, and leaned in so close their faces almost touched, pressing the blade a little harder on Ernesto’s skin and causing another pinprick of blood to well up. “But it matters not. You know whose name I want you to remember, sí? That of the man you killed.”

De la Cruz swallowed. “Alberto,” he managed. “I-- I didn’t want to kill him. I swear. I only wanted to get away, I couldn’t stand it anymore, I... he would have stopped me, he--”

“And so you shot him like a dog!” Santiago screamed, causing that disgusting coward to wince. He pulled back, knees still pressed against his sternum, keeping him pinned down. The grip on the handle of his knife was so tight it ached. And he even had the galls, this bastard, to lecture him for shooting a gringo! 

“You left him dead to feed scavengers, and you really thought I would let it stand! You really thought I wouldn’t hunt you down like the beast you are! Tell me, did you kiss him the way Judas kissed Christ when he betrayed him?”

A shudder beneath him that may have been a sob. “P-por favor--”

“Oh, you’re begging now?” Santiago gave a loud, ugly laugh, and pressed the blade against Ernesto de la Cruz’s chest. “Very well, traitor. Go on and beg,” he said, and began to cut.

He did beg, but only for a few moments. For a good while, all he could do was scream.

***

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When A God Gets Lost

Chapter 1

Summary: There are bad ways to travel; then, there are terrible ways to travel. Teleporting to another dimension through the Æther is the latter, apparently. But as the old Bengali adage goes, even tigers will eat grass when they're starving.

Maybe a Midgardian from a different dimension isn't such a bad travel companion after all.

Author's note: This is my submission for the @allaboardthereadingrailroad 's Marvel Diversity Challenge. The OFC is an Indian- a Bengali, more specifically.

Tags: @what-just-happened-bro @is-it-madness @myraiswack @green-valkyrie @teenagereadersciencenerd @ohdearhiddles @whatafuckingdumbass @poetic-fiasco @mrs-wolfhard @your-favourite-skittles @lehuka123 @kellatron55 @shiningloki @latent-thoughts @outlawangel2020 @loki-yoursaviourishere

Warnings: Gore, mild violence, mentions of death.

Loki had known this would come to pass. He had known what he had signed up for, when he'd agreed to accompany Thor to Svartalfheim.

He'd even welcomed his own death.

At the time, the sweet prospect of release had seemed to be a gift from Valhalla.

So he hadn't tried to stop it from happening.

Except, he had.

Blood dripping from his mouth, Loki struggled to let go of strings of seiðr desperately anchoring him to his body.

Dust settled on his mottled blue skin. His ears were ringing, and blacks spots seemed to have been tattooed into his retinas.

If not for the pain, Loki would've laughed at the irony of the situation. Once again, despite all his orchestrations, he was a helpless spectator, strung tight while instincts battled brain.

White hot pain seared his entire body, radiating from the wound to his extremities, as he fought to make the tendrils of seiðr retreat. Unfortunately, it was tied to his genes, bound intricately to the essence of his consciousness. It kept him from slipping into the much anticipated slumber, tightening its hold exponentially.

Numbly, Loki thought of all the times he had heard people talk about life flashing before one's eyes before the final rest settled in.

Loki saw nothing, however. The only thing that passed before his eyes was the dreaded vision of violet sparks of seiðr curling around his own, slowly drawing his life force from him.

The salt of his tears mixed with the metallic tang of blood in his mouth. This helplessness was something he had vowed to never fall into, ever again. But here he lay, defeated yet victorious, in a veritable stream of his own blood, fighting the very instincts that had brought him thus far in life.

Odin, Frigga, Thor… Asgard. They had all taken everything from him, everything he had ever treasured. Self worth, family, his very identity…

Loki had hoped that he could find it in death. Who he really was.

But no, he had been stripped of that luxury, too. Not once, not twice… several times. Twice at his behest, and several times at another's, humiliated and agonized.

Maybe I should stop fighting.

But that wasn't who he was. Loki may not have known who he truly was, but he knew what he wasn't. He had never been one to stop fighting.

But what am I fighting for? Will this right my transgressions? Their transgressions?

Maybe sometimes… to stop fighting was to land the ultimate blow.

Gasping for breath, pain ripping his innards to shreds, he looked down at his midriff. There it was; his seiðr. The only measure of identity he had left. It was flowing from his fingers, from his mouth, weaving between his wounds, holding him together in every sense.

Loki's head fell back as he gave in to it, letting his instincts take over.

He didn't know how much effect his seiðr would have, but seeing as he couldn't do anything about it, apparently…

Unfortunately, he had underestimated the power of his own magicks. Seiðr, in every form, was sentient in its own right. Unbeknownst to Loki, continuous exposure to two infinity stones had affected his own magic in several subtle ways. Seiðr learns from itself and grows- he had learnt this even before he knew how to speak complete sentences.

Never had he thought that magic of such cosmic levels could mingle with his own.

Until he saw a few straggling fragments of the Æther hovering around his limp form.

In its urgency to revive him, his seiðr had drawn the Æther to itself, having turned into something resembling a magnet for cosmic powers.

To his horror, the bloodred fragments of the Æther clustered around him, forming a small tornado of dust and seiðr, swooping in to throw an eerie light over him.

The light only grew in intensity. The pain was lessening- his body was almost completely numb now. Wind howled in his ears, and flashes of green and red blinded him.

Satisfied with its work, his seiðr rose to greet the Æther.

Loki had been completely pinned to the ground. He struggled to look down, and saw that the wound had healed almost all the way through- enough to let him survive.

Immediately, he tried to draw back the seiðr. Enough damage had been done, he didn't need any more adventures.

The seiðr had other ideas, apparently.

Green and red danced together, shimmering and singing a shrill, haunting tune that rattled Loki to the core, producing a stab of pain in his gut.

Oh. His seiðr could only do so much. The spear that had impaled him must've been poisoned…

Which meant that his control over his seiðr was limited, and it knew it.

And thus, it was trying to regain strength by sapping it off the one of the most dangerous entities in all of the Realms.

Unlike normal seiðr, the Æther- as well as the other Infinity Stones- needn't be bound to an individual. They had their own separate existence.

Loki didn't even want to know what might happen if it bound itself to him.

Unfortunately, the velocity of the mingling magicks was growing, forming a pitch black void above him.

Fuck.

A sound of surprise and shock was the last thing that left his mouth before he was sucked into the vortex.

A deep rumble ran through the entirety of Svartalfheim when the dust settled- almost as though the Realm heaved a sigh of relief.

----

Aakshya's head hurt. Half an hour on the Arambagh local train with two three year olds bawling their lungs out less than two metres away could do that to anyone.

The last few days weighed down on her. It was all so surreal. Her last living relative- the last one she had been on good terms with, anyway- was gone.

Aakshya sighed softly, adjusting her glasses as her eyes filled with tears. She blinked them away. It wasn't surprising, not really. Her great aunt had been quite aged, but losing her was still a blow she wasn't quite prepared to deal with.

At least here, she could mourn in peace.

The Chandur forest had always been her happy place. After very long weeks at work, she had a habit of spending the weekend in a small resort here, sometimes. It was just quiet enough to help her recuperate.

The resort was still half an hour away. She decided to take her time today.

The sky was darkening, and she could see the moon through the spaces between the canopies of the trees.

The moon seemed larger today. Or maybe that was just the tears in her eyes.

She sped up a little, a prickly feeling spreading over her nape.

Were the trees rustling a bit more than usual? No, that must've been the wind… right?

Aakshya stopped dead in her tracks, clutching her bag tightly.

To her right, someone stumbled in the dark, groaning deeply and uttering a string of incoherent words in a language she couldn't recognize.

Maybe it was just the owner of the resort... Though why would she be here? Wouldn't she be at the resort itself?

"Sukanya Di, tumi?"she called out timidly. "Tumi ekhane ki korcho?" Is that you, Sukanya? What are you doing here?

She whipped around, frightened.

The sight that greeted her eyes was unnerving.

A blue-skinned, armour-clad man, covered in blood, was half sprawled on the ground, chest heaving as he struggled to rise.

The weirdest thing was that he was surrounded by red and green light that seemed to be trying to enter his body.

Aakshya stumbled backwards- but then she yelped when the man's hand shot forward and grabbed her upper arm, preventing her from fleeing.

"What is this place?"he rasped, using her as support to pull himself up to full height. Aakshya's eyes widened- he was over a foot taller than her, and he seemed to have been impaled clean through his chest.

Judging from the blood, the wound was fresh; but it was already closing in front of her eyes.

What in the world-

"I asked you something, mortal,"he snapped, shaking her a little. It affected his balance, apparently, because he swayed dangerously, catching himself by steadying himself against a nearby tree.

"Are you- is this some kind of a prank?"she squeaked, trying to pry his fingers off of her.

The man growled, and then coughed up a little more blood. "Answer the bloody question, girl."

"Earth, we're on Earth,"Aakshya managed, now fighting to get out of his hold. "Unhand me, you-"

If the fact that a man who had been impaled quite recently was stronger than her was a matter of concern, it didn't strike her then, as she attempted to scratch and bite him. The man merely grunted in annoyance, retaliating by giving her another shake.

"You're lying,"he snarled. "This cannot be Midgard."

"I don't know what's going on, but-"

"Unless… no…" He seemed to be speaking to himself now, though his scarlet eyes were on her.

It was completely dark now, and Aakshya was in the hold of some creep in a forest.

Well, I'm fucked.

----

Loki couldn't believe how bad his luck was. His chest stung with every laboured breath, and the Æther was still swirling around him, and now he had been transported to a different dimension.

He could feel it.

Which meant…

There were two of him in this dimension alone.

Oh, fuck.

Meanwhile, the girl was still trying to free herself from his grasp.

Loki gave her a crooked grin. "Looks like you're stuck with me now."

She gave him a look of outrage. "No, I-"

"What's your name?"

She seemed to quell under his gaze. "Aakshya."

"Pretty name. I'm Loki, God of Mischief and Father of Magick."

Aakshya scowled, trying to hit him. "Look, if this is some weird cosplay thing, I'm really not in the mood-"

Loki sighed, using the dredges of his seiðr to still her. "Girl, I've been impaled with a poison tipped spear and thrown into a different dimension, so I'm not in the mood for your tantrums."

Her eyes bulged with rage and she tried in vain to bite him.

"How about you and I go on a nice little walk, hmm? I can sense your loneliness and heartache, girl. I am very perceptive,"Loki said with a small smirk. "I can help you, if you help me. What say you?"

"I say you're a dangerous, senile man who's a bit too obsessed with mythology,"Aakshya spat, struggling to move.

Loki laughed softly. "Oh, but a little danger never hurt."

A story by heroes and vilains

Virgil Anker: a chance at change

Changes can be thrust upon you, or made by choice. Virgil has to make a few though decisions this year.

Virgil’s first day of his sophomore year started as a complete disaster. Over the summer his father had started on a ‘project’ he didn’t want to talk about at home. Which was weird. His dad loved talking about work. It was one of the few things that consistently got him excited. Last night he’d worked late, like really late, and Virgil hadn’t been able to bring himself to even go to his room. Instead he sat on the stairs, staring at the front door until his dad came through. After reading that headline that placed the horrible possibility of his father’s secret in his head he’d stopped searching. He’d bolted out of the library and into the park where he curled up under a tree, hid himself with his powers and proceeded to panic for what he later found out was a good hour. He’d always been a worrier and this discovery gave him so much to worry about. What if his father was Brain Storm? What if he was still a bad guy? What if he wasn’t but someone from his past was blackmailing him? What if he’d lose him when people found out? What if this project was something dangerous and something bad had happened? When his dad came home Virgil did something he hadn’t done since he was ten. He jumped into his father’s arms and hugged him tight. The panic he’d been keeping at bay all night rushing over him all at once. It took his dad a while to calm him down. Then he’d put him to bed with the promise of a serious talk after school. Then, of course, Virgil had overslept. His dad always left very early and usually Virgil was very punctual. But today he got up way too late and had to rush out the door. He barely took the time to shower, not even waiting for the water to get warm or to dry his hair properly. For breakfast he shoved a piece of bread in his mouth after which he rushed to the bus stop praying he’d still magically make it to the last buss that would get him to school on time. He had no such luck. When he finally arrived at school he rushed to get his late slip and thanked the heavens that the secretary seemed to feel enough pity for his sorry state to spare him a lecture and just gave him his schedule and told him the quickest way to his first class. “I hope you like where you are sitting…” The teacher’s voice faded out as he finally arrived in class. She looked at him, clearly not happy with his late arrival. “Ah, so glad you could join us Mr. Anker,” she greeted with a clipped voice. Virgil did his best to ignore the fact that everyone was staring at him. Maybe he should try and figure out if he could use his cloak in reverse and make himself blind to the presence of other people. He pulled his hood off as he muttered an apology and tried to avoid looking anyone in the eye. The teacher pointed to the back of the class. “Take your seat and spare me your excuses. I was just telling the class that these are your seats for the rest of the year,” she then continued addressing the class. “So I hope you like your neighbor, they are your new lab partner.” Virgil felt dread fill his stomach. Great a lab partner. And he got stuck with whoever was left sitting alone. He followed the teacher’s gesture and soon spotted the only empty seat in the second to last row in the back. He felt all tension leave his body as he saw that on the spot next to it sat none other than Roman Castile. Maybe today wouldn’t suck as much as he thought it would. The theater kid gave him a playful smirk and a wave. Virgil smiled back and sat down with a relieved sigh. “Man, talk about a lucky break.” “I agree,” Roman grinned. Before Virgil could say anything else, like ‘hi, how was your summer?’, the teacher started class and she was clearly not someone Virgil wanted to get upset at him. Soon they were given their first experiment. He and Roman were laughing, cracking jokes and throwing out nicknames and mild jabs the entire time and still finished early. Virgil couldn’t help the fluttering in his stomach. Roman was cute when he was having a good time. He was so gay for this guy. Trying to look like he was perfectly comfortable with his lack of sleep, breakfast and zero minutes spent with so much as a brush, he leaned back in his chair and looked at Roman curiously. “So how did you end up sitting alone in the back, princey?” There was no way Roman voluntarily hid so far out of sight from everyone else and so far from his usual friend seated in the front row. Roman looked a little awkward at the nickname. “Princey?” he repeated. Virgil rolled his eyes playfully. “Oh come on, you are clearly destined to be prom king senior year. And every king is a prince first,” he teased. Surely he knew that he was the most popular guy of their year? “Fair enough,” Roman allowed with a brief gesture of surrender. “I was last to arrive,” he explained with a shrug. “Simple as that. I didn’t sleep well last night and didn’t get up until my mother kicked me out of bed. She was busy with an order or she would’ve noticed sooner and dad was at the office, so he couldn’t drag me to the breakfast table either.” He made a gesture that seemed to say ‘what can you do?’ “You?” he asked. Virgil couldn’t help but make a face as he thought about the horrible morning he’d had. “Until an hour ago I was convinced the universe just hated me today, let’s leave it at that.” Roman chuckled, but not in a mean way. Then he got this look that Virgil knew meant he was about to be dramatic. “Ah, fate does work in mysterious ways my friend. It must have willed us to team up for this treacherous quest.” ‘How is he this much of a dork? And why do I like that about him?’ Virgil wondered as he laughed at his lab partner’s antics. He just couldn’t help it. Roman just had that effect on him. “Only you can pull of talking like a Shakespeare character,” he told his classmate. A playful light flickered in Roman’s eyes at that. “Well, only you can pull off dressing like a dark knight and still looking like a lost kitten,” he shot back. Virgil forced himself not to show how flustered he felt at being compared to a kitten. Did that mean Roman thought he was cute? And knight? That was a good thing right? Still, he had some kind of reputation he had to uphold. So he gave Roman a playful shove. “You take that back! I am dark and mysterious and intimidating!” Roman didn’t look like he was going to take it back. He looked like he took his protest as a challenge. But then Virgil saw a wad of paper hit his neighbor in the head and Roman’s mood immediately turned sour. Virgil was not far behind. There was only one person he could think of who would provoke the coolest kid in their year like that. Couldn’t Jan let him enjoy himself without him for five minutes? “What gives Bullard?” Roman hissed as they turned around. Virgil hated to see the look on his oldest friend’s face, the sneer, the jealousy. Because it was definitely jealousy that had Janus so worked up about Roman. “You take Smellington next time,” the boy next to Janus flinched in his seat and shot Virgil a pleading look. He recognized him. Virgil had stood up for him to upper classmen several times in the past. “Virgil is sitting with me.” That made Virgil mad like never before. He couldn’t just make decisions about his life like that! “Excuse me?” Roman seethed. “His name is Carlton.” “And you don’t get to say where I sit J,” Virgil added barely keeping his voice down. “I’m fine sitting with Roman. Besides you heard the teacher. No switching seats.” And once again Virgil found himself grateful for something that at first seemed like a bad thing. The teacher might have half a mind to give Virgil detention the second he gave her an excuse, but she also won’t let Janus have his way. Janus was a smooth talker and it got him out of trouble all the time. How Virgil didn’t know for sure, but he was almost certain it wouldn’t work this time around. “We always sit together!” Janus protests, there is a little bit of hurt hidden behind his indignation, but Virgil won’t let it get to him. Not this time. “Exactly. The world won’t end because I’m Roman’s lab partner J.” Really why can’t he have one hour to spend with someone else? “Am I interrupting?” Virgil heard a cold voice from behind him causing him, and the other three students to freeze in shock and turn to face the teacher. She was directing her eyes at Janus. Virgil was right, his friend’s usual tricks would not work this time. “Mr. Bullard, I don’t have you and Mr. Jonson’s assignment yet, which means you can’t be talking with anyone else besides each other right now,” she informed him in a dangerous tone. Two tardy students was clearly already more than she wanted to put up with on the first day of class. Virgil looked back at his friend and watched as Janus gave her his trademark ‘persuasive look’ his voice becoming honey like. Virgil had watched this get him extensions on projects, a better grade on those he had turned in… It was weird, and Virgil almost thought it might be a gift, but Janus would tell him, if no one else. Not to mention it didn’t always work. A gift should be more consistently successful shouldn’t it? “Ma’am, I can’t work with him. Virgil and I never had a problem in projects, can’t we…” “No.” The statement was firm and final and Virgil tried not to show how relieved he felt. “I put Mr. Jonson next to you because you are much too dependent on Mr. Anker’s presence. You won’t always be able to hide behind him Mr. Bullard. You better learn that now. And if I see any more problems here then all that’ll change is that Mr. Castille and Mr. Anker will be moved to the front of the class so you can’t distract them anymore. Is that understood?” Virgil was a bit surprised to hear all this. It seemed like the teacher had forced Janus to let Carlton sit next to him before Virgil or Roman arrived. He wasn’t sure if he agreed with her statement, but he wasn’t going to argue with the result. Virgil shot Carlton a reassuring smile, he’d make sure Janus would behave himself. There was no need for any fallout to affect him.

The teacher left and both he and Roman turned back around in their seats. “Sorry about that.” Virgil had no clue what possessed Roman to say that, but he was not having it. “I should be apologizing. He’s my friend and he was bothering you.” Possibly not for the first time. Why had Roman never mentioned it? “Yeah, but I did something to piss him off… Don’t know what, but he hates me. And if you were my best friend and some dude I hated was being all charming with you, I wouldn’t like it either.” Virgil laughed in relief. He was glad Roman seemed to understand what had Janus so worked up. And while he’d love to protest the ‘he hates me’ bit, he couldn’t. So he focused on getting back to teasing each other and enjoying themselves. “Charming huh? You certainly have a high opinion of yourself.” His jab had the desired effect. All conflict and worry left Roman’s face and he returned to his dramatic self. “Oh, my knight, why must you hurt me so?” Virgil laughed and allowed himself to enjoy the way being called his knight made his heart flutter. “Thanks… I needed that. J isn’t so bad, but he can be…” Virgil bit his lip, unsure what to say. “Yeah, not your fault,” Roman assured him before perking up. “Hey, why don’t you two come sit with us over lunch? Maybe if he feels included, he’ll calm down?” he suggested. Virgil’s eyes widened. That would actually be kind of amazing! Half of Janus’ thing was that he thought they were on the ‘outcast’ side of school hierarchy. If they both got into the ‘cool’ group then he could relax and go back to being the Janus Virgil would gladly do anything for. “You sure?” he asked hopefully. “Of course. My friends all think you are cool and they’ll think Janus is cool too, once he gives them a chance.” Virgil really wanted to accept, but a voice in the back of his head pointed out that this was too good to be true. What if Janus was right and he was unknowingly walking them both in a trap where Janus would end up feeling hurt and betrayed and never want to talk to Virgil again, leaving him with a choice between being all alone or following Roman around like a lovesick puppy for the rest of high school? Another, more rational voice pointed out that Roman had never exhibited any behavior that suggested he’d do that. That voice sounded a lot like his dad, and his dad usually made more sense than the bad voice. Still, why would Roman offer to put up with Janus? “You don’t like him. How do you know they will?” “I don’t like how he talks to me,” Roman admitted. Well, that was only fair. Virgil wasn’t very fond of the way Janus talked to people in general the past year either. “But he’s your friend, so how bad can he be?” His endorsement was that valuable? And had Roman mentioned that his other cool friends thought Virgil was cool too? When did that happen? Maybe, maybe sophomore year could be a new start. “Okay, I’ll suggest it.”

He should’ve known better. “Absolutely not!” Janus had huffed. “Jan, it’s just lunch. If it’s not fun then we can bail on them any time. You are the one who’s so obsessed with our spot on the social ladder. What do we have to lose?” Janus rolled his eyes. “I don’t expect you to understand this Virgil. But the offer wasn’t for us. Roman wants something from you. And he’ll have his friends be nice to me around you to get it.” “I know I’m not exactly mister sunshine, but that’s overly dramatic and pessimistic. Roman is cool. Like genuinely. And if you gave him a chance…” “Oh please Virgil! You are not this naïve! Why do you want his friendship so badly that you blind yourself like this? He can have anything from anyone he wants! Why would he want to be around some awkward outcasts? Except to make himself look good? What end does that serve? Everything anyone ever does serves some selfish end Virgil. Even the most noble of deeds are ultimately out of desire to be seen as good.” “Except for you of course, you only have my best interest at heart!?” Virgil pointed out. Janus hesitated and then he leaned in, too close for Virgil’s comfort, and he spoke in that tone. “You are my only friend Virgil. Of course I want to protect you, even from yourself. Don’t let Roman’s flowery words and cute pet names get to you.” Virgil tried not to flinch. Did Janus know? No, he couldn’t know. Still, Virgil had to remember that he could hear everything he and Roman said to each other. “I give him a week before he gets bored of you. And I don’t want to see you hurt by that.” And Virgil believed him. So he followed Janus to an empty table in the cafeteria. He saw Roman perk up, smile and wave when he spotted them. And he wanted so badly to just turn to him and go sit with Roman, Janus could either join or eat alone if that made him happy. But he didn’t. He smiled apologetically and shrugged, indicating he tried. The way Roman’s face fell in disappointment made his heart break just a little. He was mad at himself for being so weak. The rest of the day he sulked, not talking to Janus at all, not that his friend seemed to care. He apparently was of the opinion that Virgil would come around soon enough. Virgil wasn’t so sure. The sadness and anger he felt about the whole thing didn’t seem to go away like it usually did.

And then there was the talk with his father. “Home!” he called out as he tossed his keys over the hook at the door. “Kitchen!” his dad called back sounding tense. Virgil took a deep breath and joined his father at the kitchen table, gratefully accepting the cup of tea. “Virgil, I want you to know that you are not in trouble. I am not mad or upset with you in any way. Alright?” Clearly he wasn’t as good at hiding his nerves as he’d hoped. He nodded. “Last night… Was that the first time you went through something like that?” Virgil looked down. He knew he had to be honest with his dad right now… But it wasn’t an easy thing to admit. “No… Sometimes I just think too much and I worry and then I freak out and… It always passes, but it’s…” He feels tears spring up in his eyes. He feels so stupid. Who freaks out over some stupid thoughts? Not his dad. He’s rational and calm and in control. “Frightening I’m sure.” Virgil looked up in surprise at his father’s understanding tone. “Virgil,” he began as he pushed a piece of paper and a pen towards him. “I have a list for you, I’d like you to read over it and indicate next to each item how often you experience them on a monthly basis. It’s important to me that you are honest. I have a suspicion of what may be causing this, but I get that talking about it might be hard for you. Therefor I provided you with this as a way to boil it down to simple facts. Can you do this for me?” Virgil nodded and accepted the paper and pen. He started reading and writing. He tried not to think too much about how bad it was that there were so many things he experienced at least once a week if not several times a day. When he finished, he almost didn’t want to return it to his dad. Would he be disappointed? “It’s alright Virgil. I know I’m not always, good, at expressing my emotions, but I do love you. More than I expected to when I first agreed to take care of you. Nothing could prepare me for how much I love you and how proud I am to call you my son. Whatever you wrote down, won’t change that.” Virgil took in a deep breath and shoved the paper forward. There it was gone. Silence lingered for a moment as his father read the paper and nodded to himself. “I’m sorry you’ve been struggling with this on your own Virgil. Can I ask for how long?” Virgil frowned and thought about that. “Um… start of last school year? I didn’t notice it was bad until shortly after Christmas though. I was in the park and started freaking out. After that I was more aware of it I guess,” he explained. His father simply nodded. “Why did you feel like you couldn’t tell me this?” he asked worriedly. Because the first time I freaked out it was because I thought you might be a former super villain and I didn’t know how to even begin explaining that. “I… I wanted to… but then I started freaking out about freaking you out and…” he forced himself to take a slow breath and a sip of his tea. “I just figured I could deal.” Logan nodded thoughtfully. “Virgil, I think you might suffer from heightened levels of anxiety. That doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with you. I would like for you to talk to someone about it though. If only to help you figure out a way to handle these attacks and the thoughts that come with this better so it doesn’t have to interfere too much with your life. Does that sound agreeable?” “A shrink?” Virgil asked nervously. His dad nodded. “I know there is a stigma against it… But my psychiatrist has helped me a great deal with your mother’s death. I hope he, or one of his colleagues can help you with your anxiety.” This came as a surprise. “You… you went to therapy?” He always seemed to be so in control of his life though. “Still do from time to time,” his dad nods simply. Virgil thinks about it for a moment. Well, it couldn’t hurt to see what whoever this doctor was had to say right? If he has his dad’s approval… “Okay… just… can this stay between you and me?” he pleaded. He wasn’t sure how Janus would respond to him having anxiety. Knowing him he’d probably become even more protective and he didn’t need that in his life. His dad nodded in understanding. “If that makes you more comfortable.” “Thanks,” Virgil smiled. Then he finished his tea and excused himself to make homework. His dad got him a first appointment for the start of October.

Things didn’t change much for him in that time honestly. Roman grabbed every opportunity to talk to Virgil and tried to coax him into conversation. And he would love to just throw caution to the wind and enjoy the hour they shared as well as the stolen moments where they ‘ran into each other’ or where they defended the same kid. But, he just couldn’t do it. The doctor was a unique individual. Virgil wasn’t sure how well they’d get along at first. “Now, Virgil, I can call you Virgil right?” Picani asked kindly. He was nice, but also… extra. Even Roman might think he was a bit too intense. “Sure,” he mumbled in response, toeing of his shoes and curling up in a ball on the couch. He didn’t miss the fact that Picani took note of that. “Well, I’ve heard why your father thinks you should be here, but what I’d like to know, Virgil, is why you want to be here. Are you just looking for some medication, some breathing techniques or are there some things you actually want to talk about?” Virgil looked at the doctor long and hard to see what his angle was. He couldn’t find one. And it was a good question. What was he doing here if there was so much he couldn’t share? He shrugged. “Not sure… I know my dad wants to help. But…” Picani made a dismissive gesture. “Your father isn’t my patient right now. You should only come here if it’s something you want. Your dad will just have to learn from Jazz Fenton’s example,” Picani smirked. Virgil chuckled. “Well, he’s a lot like her, he just might.” “Oh?” Picani’s eyes lit up. Virgil didn’t know this but it wasn’t often that his patients saw the show he was referencing and indulged in the analogy. “You know, not as serious as he likes to believe he is. Well-meaning and levelheaded most of the time… supportive of his loved ones… but he could maybe be a bit more accepting and patient I guess.” “I was indeed getting at the patient part. Jazz did a great job waiting for her brother to be ready to ask her for help and offered him aid from the sidelines. Protecting him from their parents’ antics in the process.” “But she still thought she knew better than him and while she accepted his powers she didn’t get him until they actually sat down and talked,” Virgil countered. Picani cocked his head curiously. “I mean… I’m bi, and my dad is very accepting of that. And he tries to encourage me when I do art, even if he doesn’t really get it. But… I feel like he expects me to tell him everything, but he’s hiding so much… this is between you and me right?” He was pretty sure that was a rule, but he preferred to check. “Until you give me the ok, your secrets are locked up in here,” the doctor tapped his head and then his notebook, “Safer than in a secret vault.” Virgil smirked. “Figured you’d be a potterhead too. Huffelpuf I assume?”Picani nodded proudly. “But we’re getting of track. You were saying?” Virgil sighed once more. “Right. You probably know that I’m adopted?” he verified. “That was in your paperwork, but I wasn’t going to bring it up unprompted,” the doctor acknowledged calmly. “Well… I’ve come to terms with that, really, I’m not ashamed or anything. But I know nothing about my birth parents. I ask about them, and Lo… dad,” he hates it, but sometimes his father’s surname slips into his mind, especially when he thinks about his birthparents. Never in front of him, but still, he finds himself thinking it more and more often. And he feel really bad about it. “You can address him however you’re comfortable Virgil. I won’t say a word.” Virgil nodded. “Logan won’t tell me anything. I don’t have any pictures or their names and I know he knew them. I want to understand that it’s hard for him for whatever reason. But I want to know where I come from.” Picani nodded calmly. “And this secrecy… could that be what brings out some of the anxiety you’ve been experiencing?” Virgil nodded. “It’s not the only thing though,” he admitted and before he knew it, he told Picani all about how things had changed between him and Janus and the feelings he was developing for Roman who was completely out of his league. Picani was understanding and careful about how he addressed the Janus situation. He did encourage him to accept Roman’s attempts to reach out to him.

Virgil agreed to make another appointment with the doctor and he really wanted to make an effort with Roman. But he was much too scared of being rejected when Roman inevitably found out he had a crush on him. Picani wasn’t frustrated with him when he admitted he’d chickened out, much to Virgil’s relief. Instead they talked about how the coping tools he’d recommended were working out and then they talked about the fun things he’d experienced that year. “Hold on, you described yourself and Janus as outcasts. But you just said that Roman, the main character of your year, as you described it, thinks you,” he pointed at Virgil with his pen, “are cool. I normally advice against this, but maybe you should pay more attention to the rumor mill in school Virgil, and see if Janus’ view of you two might be different from that of everyone else.”

It was an interesting thought. And Virgil did just that. Over the next week he eavesdropped on conversations where he heard his name drop. And what he heard, boosted his confidence to say the least. People called him brave, and attractive, smart and mysterious. They were hyping each other up to ask him out. Some were questioning why he was wasting his time with someone as ‘sketchy’ as Janus. “Doesn’t he know what that guy is like?” “Wouldn’t surprise me. That snake seems like the type to strangle a kitten with one hand while offering Anker some chocolate with the other.” He didn’t really like that bit. But the rest was pretty good.

Then there was his meeting with Patton Bonnaire. He’d left his third appointment with Dr Picani and decided to catch a ride home with his dad, considering he would be done soon. He was working on his mysterious ‘project’ over the weekend. The university wasn’t far from Picani’s office. Virgil told the receptionist who he was and sat down to mess around a bit on his phone while he waited. “Hello?” Virgil looked up to find a man his father’s age looking at him with a curious smile. He was dressed funny. Light blue cardigan and a grey sweater tied around his neck. Like some sitcom version of a suburban gay dad character. He looked very nice though. Wide bespectacled blue eyes and freckles all over his cheeks. “Um… hi,” Virgil greeted as he got up and offered his hand. “Virgil Anker, I’m waiting for my dad,” he explained. Seeing a random teen at the university on a Saturday afternoon would be rather surprising. “Oh my goodness! You are Logie’s son!” Logie? Virgil felt a smile fight to break free. This was going to be good. “Um… Logan Anker is my dad yeah… he told you about me?” he asked politely. “Oh, you’re the only way anyone can get him to talk about anything other than work. I know all about you, but I still don’t know what kind of cookies to bake for his birthday,” the man pouted. No, that’s not fair! Virgil didn’t know how to deal with disappointed faces like that! Well, considering his dad had told this man all about him already, it was probably fine to tell him this little thing about Logan. “Anything with Crofters Jam and you are his hero,” Virgil divulged, with a mildly devilish smirk, imagining the look on his father’s face when he suddenly received treats with his favorite guilty pleasure. How the man pulled it off, Virgil didn’t know, but he could swear the man’s eyes sparkled. He grabbed his hand in both of his and started jumping up and down excitedly. “Oh kiddo! Thank you so much! My name’s Patton! I teach moral philosophy. I love your cool jacket, and you did your make-up so well!” Then he lifted his sweater sleeve to reveal a heart shaped emblem on the cuff. The heart wore glasses and brandished the pan colors. Patton winked indicating he picked up on Virgil’s color scheme. Virgil smiled. “Thanks, I made it myself,” he informed him. “Wow! Such a talented kid! No wonder your dad is so proud of you!” Patton gasped in awe. Virgil blushed. “I’m alright,” he said dismissively, not very used to that type of praise from an adult. Patton reminded him a little of Roman. “Now, don’t say it like that. The design is good and you’ve sown it so well! Did you teach yourself?” Virgil nodded. “Well that’s amazing. I’m not surprised though. Whit a dad as clever as Logie.” Virgil is so going to tease his dad with that nickname. And maybe set these two up. At least if he isn’t the mysterious ‘project’. Was this dad’s way to hide that he’s trying to date? Patton was clearly interested. Ew… why does he even have to think about this? Scratch that. He knows why, he’s the only wingman his dad has. Technically there is uncle Thomas, his dad’s old college friend, but last time he’d tried to set Logan up, they’d ended up not talking for a month for some reason. As far as Virgil knew he hadn’t dated anyone since he adopted Virgil. The man needed to get out of his office. “For how long have you known my dad?” he asked curiously. “Oh we both started here around the same time. He won’t admit it, but I think I’ve… Crofted my way into his heart.” Virgil, not used to dad jokes, couldn’t help a chuckle. “Oh, you are so precious! Can I keep you?” Patton pleaded, only half joking if Virgil read him right. “Ask my dad out and maybe I’ll end up calling you papton.” That was terrible but Patton seemed to love it anyway. Then the rest of the sentence seemed to register and he blushed. “Um, wait no. I mean…” he sighed and chuckled awkwardly. “I’m that obvious?” “Only a neon sign with ‘date me Dr. Anker’ would be more obvious. And in my dad’s case, you might need that. He’s a bit dense when it comes to matters of the heart. I don’t think he’d notice if you had his all pitter Patton.” This gets him another bout of laughter. “You shouldn’t sell your old man short though kiddo,” Patton manages a few moments later. “He was a tad stiff in the beginning. But recently he’s quite lit, I believe the word is?” Virgil froze when he saw Patton dig through his messenger bag and retrieve copies of familiar cards. “He let you copy his flashcards?” he asked in surprise. “Oh, yes. I walked in one day to borrow a marker and heard him say ‘cobi’? He was tossing something in the trash and the class applauded. So I asked his secret and he showed me his cards. I asked if I could borrow them and…” Patton couldn’t finish his story because Virgil had lost the battle with his composure. He was laughing. Tears streaming down his face and clutching his stomach, barely keeping upright. “He actually said… god, I didn’t expect…” he wheezed.

“Virgil!” At the sound of his dad’s distressed voice he looked up and struggled to signal that it was alright. “Virgil if you can hear me squeeze my hand.” Oh no, dad thinks I’m having an attack. “Fine, fine,” he managed as he squeezed the hand that held his. “Just, can’t… Oh my god, hilarious,” he wheezed. “Virgil, are you having an attack?” He shook his head impatiently and tried the breathing exercise Picani recommended. It worked, surprisingly. Pretty soon he whipped at his eyes though he would have to wash his face in the restroom unless he wanted to look like a horror movie monster. He looked up at the two men in front of him. Patton was absolutely smitten. Seeing his dad in protective parent mode clearly didn’t turn him away. Quite the opposite. “You are using the vocab cards,” he explained. “Of course they were a gift from you, why wouldn’t I use them at any opportunity?” Patton clasped his hands in front of his mouth to stifle a squeal. Virgil rolled his eyes. “Yes, because you were complaining about not understanding some of the things your students were saying. I didn’t expect you to actually start yeeting your trash.” And then his dad readjusted his glasses, looked him dead in the eye and said: “Yeet is for distance. For trash I need accuracy, therefore the term used is ‘cobi’.” Virgil lost it again. His dad just… Gods he can’t wait to tell Roman… Wait, since when was Roman the first person he thought about to tell stuff like this. They weren’t even really talking right now. But telling Janus felt… when was the last time he and J had a proper conversation? Before summer? Yeah some time before art week. These thoughts brought down his mood enough to get him to stop laughing. Picani might not be entirely wrong to suggest that the friendship was in serious danger of becoming toxic. Though he didn’t use the label, Virgil could read between the lines. “Anyway, great meeting you Patton. It’s good to know dad has someone so nice looking out for him.” Then he turned to his dad. “You should invite him over for dinner some time. He’s a lot of fun.” Patton’s face became beet red, but more importantly his dad was getting flushed as well. “Well, you two talk about that, I’m going to wash my face,” he stated as he marched away, feeling rather good about himself. He always felt better about everything after a visit to doctor Picani. In the morning doubts and worries would return in full force. But right now, he was feeling good. When he returned he saw his dad standing alone, staring off in the distance. “Dad?”

“Dr. Bonnaire asked me on a date,” Logan breathed. “I think you can call him by his first name if that’s the case,” Virgil grinned. “I… I suppose…” His dad was in shock… wow. “You did say yes right?” Virgil clarified. “I… yes, I don’t know what came over me… I’ve never…” “Wait… you’ve never been on a date?” God the man who had the talk with him had never been on a date. “Not like this!” Logan exclaimed with a wild gesture, surprising Virgil. If he raised his voice this has to really be bothering him. “Last time, I was an arrogant college student who felt like he had to answer to no one but himself. Now, I am a single father, going out with a coworker. This is an adult outing. I can’t just…” Virgil smiled sympathetically and patted his father on the shoulder. “You really like this guy huh?” Logan sighed and nodded with a blush. “He’s so patient and friendly and… I just never thought he could ever…” “Now stop it right there. Me turning out like a somewhat stable person, proofs you are awesome. And you just showed him all the reasons why he should date you while taking care of me. You’re welcome by the way. Patton is cool. He’s already met your kid and passed the test. The scariest bit is over.” Suddenly his dad turned towards him and grabbed his shoulders. “You’re really fine with me going out with him? With me possibly entering a romantic relationship?” Virgil shrugged. “I mean, I’m not a fan of the change, but I want you to be happy. And if Patton is your pick… I wouldn’t have suggested he come over for dinner if I didn’t like him.” Virgil rolled his eyes, but the gesture lost some edge when his father hugged him. “I am fortunate to have you as a son.” Virgil shoved him away, blushing awkwardly. “Yeah, yeah. Whatever Logie,” he huffed getting a flustered stammering as a reward. “Let’s go home,” he suggested with a smirk before heading to the parking lot. The date was planned for the next weekend, after Halloween. And for Virgil it was a Halloween to remember.

He really wanted to go all out, Halloween was his favorite day of the year. But he didn’t want to ruin his costume or get Janus on his case. So, for school, he went with the bare minimum vampire costume, leaving his more elaborate creation for the trick or treaters to enjoy. He was texting his dad, who was still nervous about his date, and waiting for class to start when his day went from okay to awesome. “Greetings peasants!” the booming voice sounded warm and teasing and drew all eyes to the dark prince who’d just entered. Roman stalked trough he class, ‘scaring’ everyone with grand gestures with his arms and even drawing a fake sword threateningly. Making promises of never ending suffering upon the land. Virgil texted his dad that he’d talk to him later and to focus on his classes for now. Eventually Roman pulled back his chair and climbed on it, planting one of his feet firmly on their desk and raising his sword to the sky. “I! Prince Roman of the damned marshes declare war on all that is good and pure!” he bellowed. Virgil leaned back and enjoyed his front row seat. “And you,” he held out a hand to Virgil as if offering to pull him to stand at his side. “my coldhearted friend, may rule at my side!” he announced dramatically. Virgil felt a rush of adrenaline. Roman had effectively pulled him into his improvisation and Virgil didn’t feel like backing out of this challenge. Even if it involved having all eyes on him. “Is that a fact?” he chuckled amused, but otherwise uninterested. He had to be in character after all. And he didn’t look like a vampire bent on world domination. “Of course!” Roman’s delight at his participation settled warmly in his stomach. “You, dear count, are the only other of noble lineage! No one else is worthy of a throne!” Virgil did his best ‘whiny teen’ voice for his reply. “But ruling sounds like a lot of work.” To his surprise this got him a round of laughter, the good kind. People found him funny. “Then you may feast on my enemies!” Roman offered, not missing a beat. Now they were talking. But just then class started. Roman sat down next to him and shot him a hesitant smile when their eyes met while they got their books ready. Virgil felt kind of bad. Roman must’ve been wondering what he did wrong to go from ‘almost friends’ to ‘barely get two words that are not about class’. He returned the smile warmly, making sure that he knew that he was back. Janus criticized the whole endeavor of course, but Virgil didn’t really care anymore. “Roman and I are lab partners, and we’re going to talk. And sometimes we’re going to have fun doing so. You have zero right to tell me who I can and can’t spend time with. I’m not your pet.” That shut Janus up. Perhaps he finally realized that he was acting the way he’d always said Roman would if Virgil gave him the time of day.

Virgil sat alone during Spanish, Janus had an exemption for his language elective because he was already proven fluent in both offered languages. Virgil had no clue what Jan did with the free hour, and he didn’t really care. “Hey, Virgil?” Virgil looked up and saw that some guy from Roman’s usual group had paused at his desk. He was dressed like a crazy professor. “Hi?” he greeted, not sure what had brought this on. The other boy grinned and offered his hand. “I’m André. I’m friends with…” suddenly he chuckled to himself and changed his posture and voice to fit his character more. “I mean I am a humble servant to Prince Roman. I have heard you have allied yourself with him for the day?” he inquired. Virgil chuckled. “Depending on how it goes the alliance might last past midnight,” he allowed. Then, as if on cue, the doubt started to creep in. “You have a problem with that?” he asked slightly challenging. “No my liege, never!” André assured him. “We have all been eager to meet you. A friend of the prince, after all, is already family to us.” It was exaggerated, but the sentiment was clear. He wasn’t seen as a threat, in fact he was already considered part of the group even if he never hung out with them. Before Virgil could really say anything the class started. André joined him on their way to the cafeteria and asked about how he did his hair and where he got his hoodie. He was halfway asking for a commissioned jacket when they entered the cafeteria and Virgil was pulled towards a table in the middle by an excited Roman. “At last there you are. It’s time to introduce these cryptids to their new rulers!” Virgil looked up at Roman who gave him a questioning look. He could decline, return to his little bubble of anonymity and pretend this never happened. But… Maybe, hiding away all his life wasn’t how he wanted to live it? So, why not? No hiding today. Or not unless he really had to. “With pleasure Princey,” he grinned, feeling satisfaction in being the cause of Roman’s delight once more. He did that. It was worth whatever Jan threw at him later.

They spent about ten minutes on improv and Roman managed to make Virgil forget about the audience completely. And when he, regretfully, left Roman to sit with Janus he could hear the whispers. But no one was laughing at him. There were so many looks of awe and admiration, it couldn’t not give him a little ego boost. “Talk about putting yourself on blast! What were you thinking?” Janus seethed. “Yolo,” Virgil shrugged, grinning as he imagined his dad saying it. “No one says that anymore,” Janus reprimanded. “It’s what I was thinking,” Virgil shrugged. Already planning his next act of defiance. He felt kind of bad taking advantage of his dad’s first date nerves and his worry for him, but if this was his teen rebel phase then there were worse things he could be doing while his dad was out of the house. “Are you sure…” “Yes! Just have a nice time. Text when you arrive at the restaurant and when you leave. I don’t have school tomorrow so don’t hurry home,” Virgil assured his dad. “Pat, steal his phone if he checks it even once during dinner,” he then instructed his dad’s date. “I will,” Patton winked. “Good, you crazy kids have fun and don’t do anything you wouldn’t want me to do,” he grinned teasingly. “Virgil!” his father chastised. “Love you too!” he shouted as he shut the door in his father’s face. Then he rushed upstairs and took out the vampire cape he’d worn for the trick or treaters this year. He then put on a black long sleeved shirt, black jeans and black converses and a cheap black zoro mask. He wasn’t planning on being seen tonight but if he was, he’d rather not be recognizable… and maybe the cape was more for dramatic flair. Roman’s antics had been kind of fun and he wanted to try it out for himself. No one was going to see it anyway. And if he liked it he might make himself a proper costume for future outings. He walked through some sketchy streets until he found what looked like a gang waiting for a victim. They didn’t see him thanks to his cloak and he hid himself in the shadows not too far from them. He took a deep breath and willed them to forget about their surroundings and instead focus on each other. It was easy when people were either not the sharpest mind or not really paying attention. He’d only gotten past his dad that one time because he’d moved in absolute silence. And that trick had taken a lot of energy. His peers in the hallways were easy because most weren’t even watching where they were going let alone trying to see where he was. This was a large group, but they were kind of preoccupied with their conversation and not very smart. So it was easy making them ignore the hand full of lost people that passed them by in a hurry that night. A buzzing in his pocket caught his attention. He checked who it was. Janus. That could wait. He wondered what other ways he could use his cloak for the greater good. Another buzz in his pocket. He checked. His dad. “Paying now, home in ten minutes.” That was his cue to go home. He’d only seen three would be victims, but those were three people who got home safe to their families and might not have otherwise. That was something. He knew that to him, one person coming home or not was everything. So feeling satisfied with his first attempt at true heroism he moved through the streets and hurried home. He just managed to hide his mask and hang away his cloak before he heard the front door. He threw on his headphones and put on some music while he sat himself on his bed. Hoping he’d look like he’d been distracting himself with music. Maybe it would be better if he wore more casual street clothes next time. There was a knock on the door and he pulled off his headphones. “Come in!” he called. His dad poked his head inside and let out a sigh of relief when he found him on the bed, not having a panic attack. “You should be asleep,” he pointed out gently. “I wanted to make sure I could tell you good night. How was it?” The soft look on his father’s face said it all. “I will brief you in the morning. Now you should get adequate rest. Sleep deprivation is detrimental to both your physical health and creativity.” Virgil thought it was kind of funny how his dad had started to use his artistic ambitions as motivation to take care of himself lately. “Okay, night dad,” he muttered in surrender as he got up to get ready for bed. “Night Virgil… I love you.” Virgil smiled. Dad was never one for saying the words. But ever since the start of this year he seemed to be making an effort to change that. It was nice. Virgil had always known, but hearing it meant more than he’d expected it would. “Love you too dad,” he told him, once more feeling a little guilty about sneaking out, and for planning on doing more of these dangerous things. But he was sick and tired of playing it safe all the time. He had the ability to protect others. He should use it for more than just some bullies. Science class was a lot more fun now that he and Roman were talking. It wasn’t very personal. They just exchanged witty banter and complained about school stuff. If he confided in Roman, Janus would hear and he didn’t want to upset him even more. Turns out Janus would absolutely bully others. Or well… Pick fights with classmates over little inconveniences. Luckily Roman wasn’t afraid of him like everyone else seemed to be. He even kept it somewhat civil, just staring him down until Janus backed off. Virgil wasn’t as patient. He didn’t like fighting in public like this, but he was just so done with this BS. Every confrontation made him wonder if this friendship was still good for either of them. But just because he was considering doing it didn’t mean he was ready to hear others outright say it. The rumors were one thing. People theorized on why Virgil was still friends with Janus now that he clearly showed his ‘true colors’ to him. All involved Janus being some sort of villainous mastermind and Virgil the tragic hero trying to save everyone at the cost of his own freedom, safety, or whatever. They were ridiculous, but he could deal. What hit him hard was when Roman voiced his concerns. Janus had been goading a senior into a fight, which was beyond weird. Janus knew that he couldn’t take him on. He always stayed far away from the arbitrary lines high school hierarchy drew between different years. Virgil wasn’t alone in breaking up the fight. Roman was talking the senior down while Virgil got Janus to follow him to their next class. The principle heard about the almost fight though and Janus was called out of class halfway through. Roman approached Virgil when they crossed paths on their way to their next classes. Still no Janus in sight. “Are you alright?” he asked worriedly. Virgil nodded as he collected his things from his locker, unsure what to say to Roman on this unfamiliar topic. This felt much more vulnerable than their usual chats. “Listen… I’m probably way out of line, but I don’t think I can handle seeing him use you like this any longer…” he started and Virgil, while he knew that Roman was absolutely right and that he probably should take the help he was offering, switched to survival mode. He didn’t want Roman of all people to see what a mess he really was. So he snapped. “You are right. You are way out of line. You don’t have the full picture and you have as much right to tell me what to do with who as Janus. So back off!” he growled before storming off. He regretted every word before he was even around the corner. That night he worked for hours on an apology. The next day he slipped Roman the note. It basically said that he appreciated the worry, but that he had it handled. Along with an apology for being a rude idiot. Roman tucked the note away and gave him a thumbs up to show it was okay. His dad’s date with Patton went well. Not a day went by where Virgil didn’t hear at least one thing about Patton, good or bad. Apparently his father could get a little frustrated with Patton’s humor and his excitement could be overwhelming at times. But even with all that the man made his dad happy with his warm and understanding nature. They’d only had one fight Virgil knew of, and that was resolved quickly. It was good to see his father be excited . It also made Virgil feel bad to realize he’d been so unhappy all this time because of… “Your father’s choices and issues are his to handle Virgil. It’s not fair of you to put the responsibility of his happiness on you.” Virgil looked up and sat back upright in the couch, folding his legs underneath him and studying his nails. He’d gotten a new galaxy polish the day before. He briefly wondered if Roman would notice. He always seemed to see it when Virgil changed something about himself. He forced himself to return his attention to the conversation at hand. Picani probably had a point. Still… “He’s known Patton for years, and I’m pretty sure they’ve both been interested in each other for a long time… if not for me…” “If not for you he might not have taken the job at the university in the first place. It’s like in The Prince of Egypt. When Mozes found himself in the nomad’s camp he felt unworthy of their kindness. But the priest told him that it wasn’t a single man’s place to judge the worth of his life. You’d have to take a step back and oversee all the people you’ve met and the effects you’ve had on their lives and how that ripples throughout the world around them.” “Wow, a movie. Out of cartoon references?” Virgil teased, choosing to table the doctor’s point to think about later. “I like to broaden my repertoire from time to time,” Picani admitted. “So… Have you told your prince yet?” he queries letting go of the subject in favor of another tough discussion. “I… We are barely friends. I don’t want to push him away like that.” He expected Picani to draw a comparison to Kim Possible or something. But the doctor could surprise him sometimes. “Could it be that your father had similar reasons not to pursue a romantic connection until now? Out of fear of upsetting a status quo he felt comfortable with?” Virgil frowned as he considered that. Maybe, maybe he had a point. His dad was one for schedules and predictability. A new addition to their family dynamic would shake that up. So, maybe his dad had needed a shove in the right direction. Should he… No Roman is straight. Nothing good is going to come from this. “You mentioned that he said he hadn’t expected to care so much for you. Sometimes you don’t know what you want or need until it falls into your lap. Your father didn’t know he wanted a son until he had one. And similarly he might not have known he needed a partner until you shoved him and Dr. Bonnaire together.” That…Well he had a point there, maybe. He also made Virgil feel so relaxed at times that he wanted to open up about  his gift, even if just a little. Just mention that sometimes weird things happened. But he wasn’t sure if being gifted was one of those ‘if you might put yourself or others in danger’ exceptions to doctor patient confidentiality. Being a hero in the shadow’s had downsides though. He wasn’t authorized to make arrests. He didn’t have any kind of professional protection or equipment, and the police didn’t know who he is and to let him do his thing. Virgil had decided how he wanted to change the city though. He would listen in on conversations, record them without risk of being caught. And if those recordings ended up with the police and that lead to actual arrests... well that was almost as good then wasn’t it? He had plans for more daring escapades later. When he got better at healing and hiding. Baby steps. But that rule couldn’t apply to everything. After almost two years of dancing around Janus’ jealousy and his own wishes to make some other friends, the straw that broke the camel’s back came in a startling realization that brought everything crashing down. “Sociology would be a good choice.” Virgil hummed absentmindedly as he chewed on his sandwich and looked over the offered elective classes. The past two years he hadn’t been sure what to take and joined Janus in whatever he picked. But after a full year of hearing Roman encouraging his art, he’d spent a few Friday afternoons in the studio. He’d been surprised at how accommodating and understanding the other artists were. They saw him work with his headphones on and left him alone. No one looked at his art if he didn’t want them to and they didn’t care if he looked at theirs when they displayed it. They even asked him his opinions on their pieces. And rumors about his ‘talent’ had joined the whispers in the hallway he listened in on every now and then. “I was thinking to take an art elective,” he told Janus. “Why?” The question surprised Virgil. “Because I’d like to actually learn some techniques? I dunno. They say to pick something that fits our interests. I’m interested in art,” he explained a little annoyed. “But we can’t do anything with that in college,” Janus pointed out with a roll of his eyes. “I suppose it’s a decent extracurricular,” he allowed before going off in a rant: “though something with sports will be better. College’s eat that stuff up…” Janus kept talking but Virgil didn’t really listen anymore. He just realized something. Jan never stopped talking about decisions he made as if they were for the both of them. Even now he talked as if Virgil would even consider joining the football or debate team with him. Virgil who hated public speaking and would have a panic attack at the thought of football practice alone and all the injuries that could happen. “But… I really want to do art. The new teacher is a pretty awesome artist I’ve been kind of following for a while. This might be my only chance to learn from him,” Virgil pointed out. He really hoped that Jan had just not realized he was talking as if Virgil would follow him wherever he went. “Don’t be dramatic V. It’s not like you can make a career out of drawings.” Virgil thought back to every time Roman had praised him and said he had potential. Wasn’t that how friends were supposed to act? His dad, who had the job of keeping his feet on the ground was more supportive of his interest in art than Janus was being. “It makes me happy,” he muttered feeling hurt and rejected in a weird way. “A career isn’t about what makes you happy, it’s about what gets you ahead in life.” And the tone made it clear that Janus wasn’t going to talk about the subject any more. That was fine with Virgil. He too, had made a decision. The next appointment he sat himself on the edge of the couch and looked at Picani with an intense determination. “I’m ready.”

A hard won victory. 

  Masterpost

@cirishere​ @hestianerd1​ @moonlightshow00​ @naturallyunstablegamer​ @alias290​ @meowthefluffy​ @frida0043​ @angelic-cali​ @selenechris​ @theblackveilinreverse​

Sanctuary -Chapter 49

Warnings: none

Tagging: @c-a-v-a-l-r-y​, @alievans007​, @thunderintheshadows​, @innerpaperexpertcloud​, @valkyrie-of-the-light​

Nik has arranged a private flight; her list of wealthy and well established connections is long and prosperous, with more names being added as the days go by. Most are former satisfied clients offering services in exchange of hefty payments, others are associates of big name and influential marks. Word travels fast in the dark underbelly of the soldier for hire world, and once you've established a reputation, it follows you; your client listing growing larger, the money offered much more substantial, the jobs more dangerous and life threatening.  

She'd reluctantly given him the departure time; slightly remorseful for causing an even bigger issue than she'd intended, and eager to keep the peace between Tyler and her herself. It would never be the same. They both know that. The last thread that had been keeping their friendship intact has finally been severed, relegating them to nothing more than colleagues. There's been too much damage done; the years of pursuing him and attempting to convince him to commit adultery, the trust issues that have been plaguing them since he refused to dump Ovi in the street in Dhaka (going against her direct orders), and now going behind his back and almost single handily ruining his marriage.   The latter is partly his fault as well; he shoulders his blame and has had a little more than twelve hours to torture himself over the decisions he'd made. With more meds in his system; he's finally starting to think straight again; the confusion beginning to lift,  the doom and gloom dissipating, the harsh reality of what he'd done sinking in. He's disgusted with himself; for resorting to the means he'd had, for allowing himself to spiral so far out of control that he hadn't even realized he was making a mess out of himself and his life,  for keeping such a horrendous and vile secret from his wife and for not letting her help him sooner.  And for reacting the way he'd had during their fight; for that brief moment when he'd come so close to not being able to control his temper and had thought about grabbing her or hitting her.

It makes him feel sick even now. When he thinks about getting to that point. That he'd allowed his brain to get so fucked up that hurting her had even become an option.  Under normal circumstances, the thought would never have even crossed his mind, not even in the midst of their nastiest and most intense of fights.  And the fact that it had had been enough to make him realize just how much things needed to change. How much he needed to change.  So instead of going on a bender and drinking away his misery, he'd proceeded to raid the mini bar in favour of dumping every bottle of booze down the drain to avoid temptation, and instead of going into an uncontrollable rage and trashing and destroying the hotel room, he'd sat down and had an emotional breakdown instead. Allowing the tears to fall and the sobs to wrack his body; feeling emotionally and physically spent afterwards, but determined to make his life better. He wasn't going to lose his wife and his kids. And he was going to make whatever changes he needed to make to ensure that didn't happen.

His hands are shoved in the pockets of his flack jacket as he crossed the tarmac; Nik and Esme are at the bottom of the stairs that lead up to the floor of the jet, quietly conversing as one of the stewards finishes loading the bags. Nik sees him first, attempting a small smile that he doesn't return, and her lips set themselves into a grin -almost remorseful- line before she whispers something to Esme, gives her upper arm a tight squeeze and then climbs the stairs to the jet without a glance back.

“Hey,” he simply greets, and attempts a smile. He's been miserable since she walked out the night before; heartbroken and desolate instead of angry and destructive. But he'd kept his promise; staying away from her, not even calling or texting, no matter how desperate he was to talk to her.  It's the first time in almost the entire five and a half years they've been together that they've gone that long without talking; always finding ways to communicate even when he was halfway around the world.  And he didn't realize that he'd miss her that damn much in such a short period of time.

Hey,” she sounds tired, sad. And he hates that he's done that to her. But her smile is genuine; it makes her smile sparkle and the bridge of her nose to crinkle. She's still the most beautiful thing he's ever seen; no make up gracing her still youthful features, clad in a pair of jeans and one of his hoodies.

“I was looking for that,” he teases, and nods at the sweater.

“You know it's my favourite one. I wasn't going home without it. And it still smells like you, so...” her voice trails off. “...what are....?”

“I know...”  he begins at the same time, then gives a small laugh. “Go ahead. Ladies first.”

“Age before beauty,” she playfully retorts, and even this small return to their often playful banter gives him hope.

“I know I said I'd stay away from you, when you called me to let me know you were leaving, but Nik told me what time the flight was at.  And before you get mad at her, I kind of put a huge guilt trip on her and forced her to tell me.”

“What are you doing here? I thought we both agreed we wouldn't see each other until you came home.”

“I'm not here to try and convince you to stay. I want to. But I won't.” He wonders if she wants him to; if she wants him to grovel and beg. Because if if that's what it will take to change her mind, he's more than willing to do it. He's far beyond worrying about his pride.

“You need to concentrate on the job,” she says. “And you can't do that if I'm here. You'll spend too much time worrying about me and the baby. And that's dangerous. If your head isn't one hundred percent in things.”

He nods in agreement. “I got a hold of Ovi. He's going to give it a couple of days and then they're going to make their way back to Colorado. I told him not to go to the house and to go to your mom's instead. It's going to be crowded as all hell there. Especially with Nik staying with you.”

“I told her she didn't need to, but she says it's for the best. She feels better if she can keep an eye on all of us. She said it would probably be okay if we went back to the house, but I don't want to be there without you. I'd feel better if you were there with us.”

“And I'd feel better if you stayed away from the house,” he says. “Until I got back. Just in case.”

“Are you okay?” she asks, and takes a step towards him.. “And don't say you're fine. Because I know you're not.”

“I'm not okay, but I will be.”

“You're taking your meds?”

He nods.

“Are you sober?”

“Yeah. I am. And I'm going to stay that way.”

Her smile is a little bigger this time, and she moves even closer to him.

“Have you been back there?”  she inquires. “The storage place?”

“No. Not since yesterday. Not since we...well...you know...”

“And are you going to? Go back?”

He shakes his head. “I told Mark to handle everything. That I wanted nothing more to do with it.  That I never should have done it in the first goddamn place. And I'm sorry. That I ever did do it. And that I never told you how fucked up my head actually is. As soon as I did it, I should have told you.”

“You thought you had a valid reason,” she says. “That's what your brain was telling you.  And I get that. That it was you but it wasn't you all at the same time. Promise me this won't ever happen again. That that's a direction you won't go in again. Because that isn't who you are. No matter what your brain tells you.”

“I promise. It won't ever happen again. That's not who I am; you're right. And it fucking makes me sick that I even thought about it.”

“Don't do that to yourself, Tyler. The guilt. Don't dwell on that. It happened. You can't go back and change it. For what's it worth, it wasn't all your fault. You had people enabling you. Making you think you were doing the right thing. And that's not who you are either. You don't normally give a shit what anyone says.”

“Guess I'm even more fucked up than I realize.”

“You're sick, not fucked up. And when you get home we'll deal with it. Together. Not on your own. You're not in this alone.  And the sooner you realize that, things will get better. You have to let me help you, Tyler. I know that's hard for you. You think I've already done so much. After Dhaka.  But I'd do it all again. I'd make the same decisions. In a heartbeat.”

“I didn't mean what I said. About wishing you'd let me die. I was just pissed off and on the defensive and...”

“I know...” she lays her hands on his hips.  “...I know you didn't mean it. And maybe things would have been easier. If I had have. But I wasn't letting you go. Not that easily anyway.”

He smiles at that.  

“I'm going to call the doctor when I get to my mom's. I should probably get into see her as soon as possible. I think I'm further along than I either of us think. Probably close to three months. If not a bit past it.”

“When I came back from El Salvador,” he easily recalls, and she nods. “Yeah, that was a wild eighteen hours. When I first got back. You were kinda...noisy...that night”

She blushes. “Yeah, well you have that effect on me. I just can't let it out when there's kids in the house. And if that's the case, that that's when it happened, I  need to get in to the doctor sooner rather than later. Just to make sure things are okay.  But I'll call you and let you know what she says. She'll probably want to do an ultrasound. To check on everything. I can send you copies of the pictures if you want.”

“Yeah, I'd like that. Then I go around showing them to complete strangers, bragging about my super sperm.”

She laughs, and shakes her head. “You're never going to let that go, are you.”

“Probably not.  Billy Flynn called. The IRA agreed. They'll take him off our hands. For everything we asked for. I'll let him know where you and the kids are. So he can have his people go there. So once I hand McMann over, that part of the job will be done. And no, I won't be doing it alone. I'll have someone there with me. So I don't flip my shit and fuck him up even more than I already have.”

“He'll get what's coming him to Tyler. Even if it's not you that does it. And I don't want you to be the one that does it.”

“I won't be,” he assures her, and reaches out to take her face in his hands, thumbs gliding across the tops of her cheeks. “I leave for New Zealand, In two days.”

“You found them? The kids? He told you where they are?”

“He just said they're in New Zealand. It's up to me to find out exactly where. But I'm thinking you were probably right about the grandmother's old store. That it's somewhere I should check out.”

“Don't go alone, okay? Because McMann may be out of the picture, but the Buckmans are still in it. And those are people you do not want to cross by yourself.”

“Mark and one of his guys are going to come along. Just in case.  As much as I can't fucking stand Mark...”

“He'll have your back. Mostly because he knows I'll kill him if he lets something happen to you. Please be careful, Tyler.”

“I will.”

“Because I kind of want you to come home,” she says, and fights back tears. “I really, really want you to come home.”

“I'm coming home, baby. I promise.”

She nods, and then drops her forehead onto his chest, arms wrapping around his waist. And he can feel her body trembling against him as she cries.

“It's going to be okay,” he drops a kiss on the top of her head, then places one hand on the nape of her neck, the other on the small of her back. “Everything is going to be okay.”

“I'm sorry. For some of the things I said. I know how bad they must have hurt you and...”

“Don't be sorry. They were true. I needed to hear them.”

“I would never, ever, take your kids from you. And I never should have said that. That was a horrible thing to say you but I was just so shocked over the whole thing and I was so angry with you and I was so hurt when you said you wished I'd let you die that I just snapped and....”

“Esme, it's okay,” he presses a kiss to her temple. “What I did was fucked up. And I'm sorry I did it. That I lied to you. That I disappointed you.”

“You're a great dad, Tyler. And when I said that you should try being a dad for once...”

'Baby, stop. Just stop.  It's okay. And it's true, I've been away more than I've been home. I've missed a lot. But I always tried to make for it. With them. But I never tried hard enough to make up for it with you. And I'm so sorry. I'm so fucking sorry.”

“There's things we both need to work on,” she says, and he nods.

“Me more than you though. I've got a lot more shit to work out.”

“We'll do that together, right?” she sounds worried, and she looks up at him, her top teeth digging into her bottom lip. “This isn't something you want to alone or...”

“I'm coming home, baby. I already said that. Neither of us are going to do this alone.”

She smiles at that. “How long do you think? That you'll be in New Zealand?”

“Few days. A week at the most. It'll take us a couple days once we get there to track down a location. Unless the IRA can get more info out of McMann before they kill him. And I asked for proof. That he's dead. So we know for sure. So we don't have to worry about showing up on our doorstep a year from now.”

“I'll definitely be able to sleep better at night if I know for sure he's gone. And when you're home and I don't have to sleep in that big old bed by myself.”

“Yeah, that'll be nice. I know I know I'll sleep like shit until I get home.”

“You sleep like shit anyway,” she sniffles.

“Well I'll sleep like bigger shit until I get home,” he chuckles.  “You should go...” he rubs his palms up and down her back. “...Nik's probably starting to get antsy. Your mom picking you up at the airport?”

“Kyle said he would do it.”  The youngest Drummond boy. The only 'non cop'. A firefighter in Denver. For the most part he's neutral when it comes to his opinions on his sister's choice in men and her hasty marriage and pregnancy. But when his mother gets out of hand and he can't handle anymore, he becomes what they call 'Pro Tyler'.  It's mostly to piss her off, but they appreciate the support. And he's a good uncle; taking the time out of his schedule to spend time with his nieces and nephews, unlike the others who have a hard time even remembering birthdays.

“You'll call me?” he asks. “When you get there? So I now you're safe and sound?”

She nods.  “Don't go to New Zealand without letting me know about it, okay? I'm thousands of miles away, but I still like to know where you are and if you're alright.”

“I'll call you,” he promises. “Give the kids hugs and kisses from daddy. Tell them I miss them. That I'll see them soon.”

“I will,” the tears are threatening again. “Be home soon, okay? I'll miss you.”

“I'll miss you too,” he takes her face in his hands and kisses; tender, sweet, long. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, Tyler. Please stay safe.”

“Always,” he says, and places a kiss to her forehead before taking a step backwards and watching her as she climbs the stairs to the jet. Smiling when she pauses in the doorway to give him a small wave before disappearing inside.

****

Kyle is already waiting at the edge of the tarmac when they arrive; leaning against the passenger's side door of his pick up truck, hands stuffed in the pockets of his navy blue Denver Fire Department jacket. The third youngest, he's the tallest and biggest of the three boys; just hitting six feet, with broad shoulders and chest and strong, powerful arms. He's the spitting image of their late father; brilliant blue eyes, the same easy smile and witty and sarcastic nature,  the graying hair clipped short to his head in a brush cut. He gives his sister a bright, cheerful smile as she raises her hand in greeting as she descends the jet steps, then hangs back as she and Nik exchange a brief conversation and a quick hug before Nik departs to meet with the waiting 'security experts' she'd assigned to the family.

“Who's that?” he asks, as he quickly strides towards his sister, relieving her of her carry on bag and suitcase. Watching as Nik...in her well tailored charcoal grey pant suit and pink blouse...climbs into the back of a Lincoln Navigator.  

“That's Nik. She's going to be staying at mom's too.”

“Friend of yours?”

Esme nods. “She's also Tyler's boss. Sort of. She's the one that calls him when she has work she needs done.”

“What kind of work?”

“We've talked about this. A million times. Private security.”

“Private security, huh?” he slings the strap of the carry on over his shoulder. “Why do I get the feeling that's code language for something else entirely?”

“It's been five and a half years, K. Let it go.”

“Yeah? Well It's been five and a half years of thinking you're full of shit. Hold up...” he places a protective arm across her stomach when the Navigator comes within feet of them on it's way off the tarmac.  And he notices how Nik is watching them; oversized sunglasses covering her eyes, a slow smile spreading across her face.  “She's cute,” he says.  “Your friend.”

“She's with Mark.”

He frowns. “Mark as in...”

“As in my ex Mark. The Mark who you dragged out of a bed at a hotel in Aspen and beat the shit out of in front of a prostitute. That Mark.”

“He's lucky all I did was beat the shit out of him. I should have killed him. I could have, you know. With my bare hands. I could have honestly killed him. Why would someone like her want to be a dick like him?”

“Maybe she didn't realize that you're single and 'looking to mingle',” Esme playfully digs her elbow into his side. “I mean, what's not to like about you? You're buff, crazy handsome, a firefighter. Chicks dig men in uniform. Even someone like Nik, I bet.”

Kyle chuckles. “Easy now. All I said was that she was cute. I'm not looking for you to hook me up.  Besides, I don't know if I could get with someone that's been with that prick. Not after all the stuff he's done to my little sister.”

“Typical, K. Always the protective older brother.”

“Always,” he declares. “How you doing, kid?” He wraps an arm around her shoulders and pulls her tight into his side, pressing a kiss to her temple. “Not sure about the red. Never thought I'd see you with that colour. What's that all about?”

“It is a long story that I do not have the energy to tell. But I'm dying it back as soon as I can get to a store and get a box of hair dye. I want this part of my life to be over. It's been a nightmare and I need every memory of it gone.”

“It's hair.”

“And I want it gone. It needs to be gone.”

“We can stop at a store before we get to mom's, if you're that hell bent on changing things. What did Tyler say about? Did he like it?”

“He was okay with it, I guess. He never complained about it. But I just want it gone. I don't like what it represents. I don't want to hang onto those memories. I need this part to be over.”

“This part as in Tyler or...”

“What?” she gives a short laugh. “No. Not as in Tyler. Tyler and I are fine. Sort of.”

Kyle arches an eyebrow.

“We aren't splitting up, so don't get hopeful.”

“Why would I be hopeful? I actually like the guy. I'm the only one who does. Everyone else has their heads so far up mom's ass they just go along with whatever she says. But I think he's  a good shit. It's kind of cool having an Australian as a brother in law. And he's good for you. Good to you. Worships the ground you walk on. And he's a great dad.”

She nods. “He is.”

“But? Why do I feel like there's a but coming on?”

“But, we're having some issues,” she admits.  “Not bad enough for us to call things quits. But bad enough that I had to come home. He's got a lot on his plate. With work. The thing he is working on is stressful and it's taking a lot out of him and he's not doing well. Mentally. I was only in his way in Ireland. He couldn't concentrate on doing his job when he was too busy worrying about me all the time.”

“This all sounds a little ominous,” he loads her things into the back seat of the truck, then opens her door for her, a hand on her elbow as he helps her climb into the seat. “All the more reason I think this private security business goes way deeper than you're letting on. What would he be doing in Ireland that would require private security?”

“Nik has a lot of international clients,” Esme explains, as she buckles her seat belt. “Tyler goes where she needs him.”

“For private security.”

Esme nods.

Kyle shakes his head. “You're full of shit,sis,” he says, and slams her door closed.

****

Their on the highway for several minutes before either of them speak again. Kyle turning down the volume on the radio and then taking a sip of coffee from the take out cup sitting in the holder between the seats.

“You want to talk about it?” he asks. “Whatever is going on? Whatever is happening between you and Tyler?”

She gives a small, almost apologetic smile. “Not really.”

“How bad is it?”

“I already told you. Not bad enough to split us up. There's no reason to hire a lawyer and get divorce papers drawn up.”

“What if I told you that mom's already been on google looking up good lawyers and taking their numbers down?”

Sighing, she shakes her head in disbelief.

“I know,” Kyle snorts. “What a bitch, right? Considering her marriage is a huge dumpster fire. She should be the last person judging anyone for their choices. You know she's convinced that he has women all over the globe? That he's hooking up with different people every place he goes?”

“She's a piece of work. I can't believe I'm willingly going there.”

“Does he? Have different women everywhere?”

She laughs. “No. He doesn't.”

“Is he cheating on you? Is that what the issue is? You found out about it and you're pissed and...”

“Tyler is not cheating on me. Tyler would never cheat on me. In the same way I'd never cheat on him. Why the hell is everyone so against us being together? It's been five and a half years. We have four children together. We are people still so bent out of shape about this?”

“Well you did run off to Australia, meet some random guy, hook up with him, and never come home. First time we're hearing about him is when he's in the hospital near death? In some messed up work related incident? What? What is a work related incident when you're in private security.”

“It's like being a cop. In a way. It's dangerous. Maybe even more dangerous than being a cop.”

“So he's packing heat, then.”

She nods. “And being shot at by other people packing heat. Among other things.”

“And he almost died?”

“Yes. On the job. He was shot...in the neck...and almost died.”

“Almost bled out. In your arms.”

She sighs. “Yes.”

“How the hell would that even happen? Why would you even be there? Where he's working? While he's working?”

“Because I was working too. With him. On the same thing.”

“Wait? What?” Kyle laughs. “I thought you were in Australia on a business trip.”

“I didn't meet him in Australia, Kyle. I mean, I did. In a way. I went to his place in Australia to meet him because we were going to be working together and Nik thought we should meet each other first.”

He frowns. “Nik? His boss? She's also your boss? What? How? I thought you were in business. Why would you and Tyler be working for the same person if he's in private security and you were in business?”

“This is a very long story. And it's weird and it's twisted and it's complicated and...”

“And we've got a two hour drive so start talking,”  he interjects. “What the hell is going on, Esme? Because there is something that you're not telling me. There's a lot you're not telling me. So talk. Now.”

She sighs heavily, chewing nervously on her bottom lip.  “I wasn't in business. I was in intel. I was hired by people like Nik to go places and get information. Valuable information. That no one else was able to get. On people that are suspected of doing some horrible things.”

“Like a spy?”

“Sort of, I guess. I don't know. I would just go where I was sent and weasel my way into peoples' lives and I'd get the information they'd need and then they'd go in and take care of things.”

“They? Who are they?”

“Mercenaries.”

Kyle's eyes narrow.  “Excuse me, what? Did you just say mercenaries?”

Esme nods.

“As in soldiers for hire?”

Another nod.

“You're kidding, right?” he gives a short laugh.  “You've got to be kidding. So what does this have to do with Tyler?”

“Tyler isn't in private security, K. He's a mercenary.”

“What?” he chuckles. “You're really expecting me to believe that? This is all a joke right? Some big joke that the two of you have cooked up to play on mom. Get her riled up. Give her some more gray hair and maybe some heart issues. There's no way you're being serious. Tyler? A mercenary?”

“It's how we met. Nik recruited him for a job that she needed me to take. We were sent to Dhaka.”

“Isn't that the capital of Bangladesh?”

“A drug lord kidnapped another drug lord's son. But Nik couldn't figure out where they were keeping the kid other than somewhere in the market area. So she went me in to poke around and make nice with the locals and see what I could dig up. And she sent Tyler with me to protect me. And to eventually get the kid away from bad guys and home safe to his family.”

“I am having a really hard time wrapping my head around all of this,” Kyle admits, confusing on his face, brow deeply furrowed.

“Tyler and I were pretending to be newlyweds there for humanitarian work. That's how we ended up...well...you know...”

“Fucking,” her brother finishes for her.

“And it went really well until it didn't. Things fell apart on the way to the extraction point. Tyler wasn't able to get there safely because the kid's father sent someone to try and steal the kid off of Tyler and....”

“What the fuck? What are you talking about right now?”

“I'm explaining it to you!” she snaps. “They didn't want to pay Tyler his money so they tried to steal the  kid back and all hell broke loose and we were the only two people from the team that didn't die and I had to hide out in the forest until the coast was clear and then walk back into town to meet you with Tyler and Ovi and...”

“Hold up...just hold up...Ovi? As in Ovi who lives with you?”

“There were cops everywhere,” she continues. “And the cops were in on it. And this drug lord Asif had these street hooligans chasing after us and it was still a big mess, so we had to hide in a sewer and Tyler's friend had to come and rescue us and he took us back to his house and then he back stabbed Tyler and Ovi had to kill him and...”

“Jesus Christ, are you honestly serious about all of this? What the hell, Esme? What in the ever loving hell?”

“...and we had to try and get across the Sultana Kamal Bridge but we needed help so Tyler got the guy that originally tried to steal Ovi back in the first place. And we had to split up and I went with them and Tyler stayed behind and...”  her hands begin to tremble, tears brimming in her eyes. “...and Ovi and I got across okay but Tyler had a harder time and a sniper shot him and get back up and then this kid...this fucking kid shot him in the neck...”  she wipes at the tears that manage to escape. “...and he was bleeding out and I was holding him and I was telling him not to give up...that he'd promised me we'd do all these things together and get to know one another better. And I had to put my hand over his  neck and there was so much blood. There was so much of it and there was nothing I could but watch him die.”

“Okay...okay...calm down..” Kyle drops one hand from the wheel and rubs at the back of her neck.  “Do you want me to pull over? I can pull over. Want me to?”

She shakes her head.  “That's how it happened How it really happened.  That's how Tyler nearly died. When he was stable, they transferred him to Australia and I went with him and I decided to stay with him. I didn't want to leave him there alone. I didn't want him to wake up and not have anyone there for him. So I stayed. And then I realized it was because I was in love with him and I wanted to be with him. And then I found out I was pregnant with Millie. So when he was well enough to be released, we moved in together and he asked me to marry him. That's how I ended up in Australia. With Tyler.”

Silence descends on the truck. Nothing but her soft sniffling and the windshield wipers back and forth as they clear away the light rain that's begun to fall. Out of the corner of her eye, Esme can see her older brother watching her; mouth slightly again, rendered speechless by her incessant rambling. And the hard truths it brought forth. His eyes rapidly -and repeatedly-  flicking between her and the road. Eventually, he pops open the compartment between their seats, pulling out a bottle of water and a handful of fast food napkins, gently drop the bounty in her lap.

“Thank you,” she manages through the remainder of the sobs wracking her body, and when she has a hard time opening the bottle because of the tremors in her hands, he does it for her.  Rubbing her knee softly when she gives him an appreciative smile.

“It's okay, kid,” he says. “Just try and stay calm. Everything's okay.”

“It's not. It's really not K. It's fucked up and it's a mess and I wish we'd never had to keep it a secret. But we didn't have a choice. It was to protect you guys. Just in case someone ever wanted revenge on Tyler. Just in case they didn't go right after him and went after family first.  We didn't want anything happening to any of you.”

“I get that. I do. I understand why you couldn't say anything. But...Esme...what the fuck right from the beginning? Why would you even get involved in all of this? Why would you even get involved with him?”

“It just happened. We didn't go into it wanting it to happen. Or expecting it to happen, It just did. And then it kept happening. For the entire five days we were there. We couldn't stop. And then when the job was done...my job was done...we realized that we wanted to keep seeing each other. We were going to take some of the money we were paid and travel. Spend time getting to know each other. To see if we could have something. Something real.”

“But why?  Why would you want that for yourself? Someone like him? That does that for a living? Something that's dangerous and scary and...”

“Being a firefighter is scary and dangerous,” she interjects.

“Being a firefighter and being a trained killer are two totally different things.”

“He isn't a trained killer. I mean, he is. If he has to be. He kills because he has to. He doesn't do many jobs where he has to kill people intentionally. Like assassinations or hits.”

“Oh my God,” Kyle groans. “This just goes from bad to worse.”

“He mostly does extractions. Like he did for Ovi. He gets hired to save people. And sometimes he kills other people to save them. To save himself.”

“Are you listening to yourself right now? Are you? Your husband kills people. And he gets paid for it. Does that sound at all normal to you?”

“I just told you! He doesn't just kill people. He helps people. Sometimes he has to kill. Especially if it's to save for himself.”

“Jesus...fucking...Christ...” Kyle mutters. “And you're okay with this? That he has to sometimes kill people?'

“It is what it is. It's the job. The people he kills deserve to be killed. He's not killing innocent people.”

“How do you know that? How do you know someone doesn't hire to take out someone that is innocent?”

“Because I know Tyler. And Tyler would not do that.  Every job he takes, he's very thorough and very detailed and he leaves no stone unturned. And he has great instincts and they never let him down.”

“I can't believe you're trying to rationalize this. How long has he been doing this?”

“Since he left the army. So about fifteen years, almost sixteen years, I guess.”

“And he's still doing it ? Even though you guys are married and have kids.”

She nods. “This is his last job. He has two kids he has to be find. They're being held somewhere in New Zealand.”

“And you came home because...”

“Because I knew he wouldn't be able to focus if I was there. That he'd be too worried about me and his head wouldn't be right into the job and those kids need him to be totally on his game. He wouldn't have been if I'd stayed.”

“Why? You're a big girl. You can take care of yourself. What would he be worried about?”

“I'm pregnant,” she reveals.  “He didn't want anything happening to the baby.”

“Esme are you serious? You're pregnant? You're having a baby?”

She nods.

“Holy fuck...” he runs a hand over his hair and down onto his face. “....what the hell have you gotten yourself into? Are you sure? That you are?”

“I'm one hundred percent sure. We've been trying. To have a baby. It's just happened sooner than we thought it would.”

“You're willingly bringing a baby into this goddamn mess?”

“I already have four. Tyler's been a mercenary longer than any of them have been alive.”

“Is that why you sent them away? With Ovi? Because of this mercenary shit?”

“Someone was after Tyler. They threatened to grab the kids and hurt them. So Tyler told Ovi to take the kids and run. To protect them.”

“This is insane,” Kyle breathes. “This is fucking insane.  My brother law kills people for a living.”

“Stop it!” she orders. “That's not all he does. He helps people.”

“I'm going to break his fucking neck. I'm going to hunt him down and I am going to beat the ever loving shit out of him.”

“For what? What has he done? Other than provide for his family?”

“What has he done?” He's gotten you...my sister...mixed up in this bullshit. In this life!”

“He didn't get me mixed up in anything. He didn't force me to stay with him. To fall in love with him. I did all of that willingly. It's not like he held a gun to my head and forced me to have sex with him or to marry him. You can't blame this entirely on him.”

“Like hell I can't! He got mixed up with you knowing what kind of life it would bring you. He could have just walked away and left you alone. And that's what he should have done. Even if you guys just fucked each other and then went your separate ways! But to get you tied up in more than that? Let you get mixed up in that life? He should have just fucked you and left you alone.”

She smirks. “I honestly never thought I'd hear you say that. That a guy should have just fucked your sister and took off.”

“I never thought I'd have to say it. But this isn't a normal guy. He's a fucking mercenary! He kills people!”

“And saves people,” she reminds her brother.

“I don't give a shit. Killing people sort of takes the shine away from saving them, don't you think? He had this life all along and he never should have let you get mixed up in it. If you loved you the way he says he does, he would have cut you loose. He wouldn't have wanted you to live this life. Why would you want this for someone you love?”

“Kyle, I got into this life knowing what he did and knowing what he's capable of. He didn't force me into anything, okay? You can't hold Tyler totally responsible for this. Because he's a good man and he's a good husband and he's a great father. And you can't deny him any of those things.”

“I didn't say he wasn't any of those things. But just because he's those things, doesn't mean he's not a goddamn hired killer.”

“For the last time!” she shouts. “That's not all he does! He helps people! Innocent people like Ovi! And if wasn't for Tyler, I never would have gotten out of Dhaka alive. So you need to shut the fuck about him being 'hired killer' and show him some respect. Because he's so much more than his job. So much more! And if you'd all give him a goddamn chance,  you'd realize that and stop shitting all over him all the time!”

“Whoa...whoa...settle down.  I'm not mom. I don't hate the guy. You know that.”

“He's my husband. He's the father of my children. And I am fucking sick of how she treats him all the time. Because he doesn't deserve that. He's not the horrible person she thinks he is. That she tells everyone he is.”

“I know that.  And I've never thought that about him. Ever. Like I said, he's a good shit. And he treats you well and he treats my niece and my nephews even better. And you know much I adore those kids. Like they're my own. I would do anything for those kids. And they wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him kicking in some DNA.”

“I'm just so tired of her shit and I know she's going to get on a tirade about him and I'm not in the fucking mood to deal with that. I'm worried about him and I miss him and I'm sick all the time and I'm so goddamn hormonal because of this baby!”

“Alright...easy...easy...” Kyle chuckles, and rubs the back of her neck soothingly.  “Just calm down.”

“I don't know what is wrong with me. It is so bad this time around. My hormones are out of control! They've never been this bad before.”

“”You're kidding right? They have been this bad before.”

“When?”

“When you were pregnant with the twins. You were off the charts insane when you were having them. Don't you remember? You were either crying or you were raging. No in between. Who was the one that was there? When Tyler was away? Who came to spend time with you and help out with Millie? I did. I was the one who had to bear the brunt of your hormones. I remember it very well.”

“Maybe I was a little...off.”

“A little off the reservation, maybe,” Kyle laughs and she glares at him.

“You're going be okay, kid,” he assures her. “You and that baby are going to be just fine. And I promise I won't kill Tyler when he gets home.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that. Because I kind of  like him and I like having him around.”

“I may break some of his bones or mess up that face of his.”

“Yeah, not the face, okay? He's kind of nice to look at it and I'd like to keep him that way.  Just don't go off on him. He's having a hard time and he doesn't need that shit. He's trying so hard. To keep his shit together. To keep us together. He's not a bad person, K.”

“I know he's not. And I know he's wildly and crazily in love with you. I've never doubted that for a second. I just worry about you, Esme. This is a hell of a life to be caught up in.”

“He's keep me and the kids safe for five and a half years. I trust him. With my life. With their lives. I'm safe with him. We're safe with him.”

Kyle nods slowly, considering her words.

“I just want this to be over with,” she laments.  “I just want him to come home. And stay home. Is that too much to ask?”

“You'd have to ask him that. Does he want to give it up?”

“This is his last job. He's done after this. And it's time. Because it's starting to break him down. I hate what it's doing to him. What it's doing to us.  I just want him home.”

“Soon,” Kyle says. “I'm sure whatever he's up to, it'll be over soon and he'll be back. He'll come home, kid. You know he will.”

She nods in confirmation, then leans the side of her head against the cool glass of the window. Seeking some relief for the overwhelming fear and loneliness threatening to swallow her whole.

Brooklyn’s Sweetheart Chapter 4: Don’t Get Handsy, Doll

Pairing: Stucky x Reader

Chapter Summary: The calm is supposed to come before the storm, but with Steve, it comes after. Unfortunately, he’s a storm that goes on and on and on.

Word Count: 5042

Warnings: Language, abuse (slapping), smut between Steve and Bucky (rough blowjobs, handjobs), manipulation tactics and Steve being a controlling asshole

Masterlist / AO3 

The weekend started off cloudy and rainy, much to Y/N’s chagrin. She had been enjoying the nice weather and their days spent swimming together. It was like old times, and she felt liberated from the constant watch of her father. She knew Steve was supposed to be upholding her father’s stern rule, but he seemed to forget himself in the past few days as they played around, allowing her the freedom to act how she pleased and do what she wanted—as long as she didn’t get too bratty with them.

After a breakfast of French toast and a mid-morning nap on the sofa, Steve and Bucky took a work call in the office, leaving Y/N up to her own devices for a short time while they spoke to Tony about mob developments. The phone call took almost an hour before they were done. Then they were walking into the kitchen discussing what they should do for lunch.

“It’s whatever you want, Buck,” he snapped, a little harsher than he meant to. Steve didn’t want to deal with it. He didn’t have the patience for it. 

He hadn’t started the day off in a good mood. The phone call with Tony had worked him up even more. On top of that, Peggy was still cross with him, and she hadn’t been accommodating for phone sex, so he was frustrated in more ways than one.

His relationship with Peggy was one of convenience at first, but more and more these days it was becoming the opposite. He began dating Peggy about a year before because he liked her, her beauty, her sharpness, how refined she was, so he fell into a relationship with her. Then, it became clear that she wasn’t the type of woman who would understand the mob life—she didn’t grow up in it; she only came to New York from London for work. 

Sometimes she spoke to him about moving back to London—together. He never told her he had no intention of doing so—more because he didn’t want to deal with the fight that would result, but he also didn’t want to break up with her for the time being. His relationship with her was just so easy for him—sex and affection when he wanted it, and radio silence at other times.

But she wasn’t pleased that so much of his time was spent with the mob—which was only increasing now that Tony was giving him more responsibility. That was why she was so mad about the trip to Martha’s Vineyard. She said if he had time to go on vacation there, he should be able to spend more time with her in the city. She didn’t understand that it was his job to be there, protecting Stane’s daughter. 

Peggy didn’t understand most of the things he had to do because of the mob. That was the most annoying part for him.

And now, Bucky and Y/N were both testing his limits.

Their days at the pool were almost torture, with Bucky’s short shorts and her little bikinis. Bucky had spent all day the day before cuddling up to him and batting those long eyelashes at him. Steve didn’t even know if Bucky knew what he was doing to him. And Y/N had spent the last few days provoking them any way she could, pressing up against them in the pool, getting them to put sunscreen on her back. He definitely knew she didn’t know what she was doing to him.

Regardless of how they both made him feel, he knew he couldn’t act on it. Peggy didn’t deserve to be cheated on. When he started dating her, he broke things off with Bucky—but they had always been on-again-off-again, so he didn’t think Bucky would mind. They would start fucking when it was convenient and stop fucking when they started dating other partners. If either of them wanted more than a friends-with-benefits situation—well, neither of them ever said anything.

And Y/N—she was probably off-limits. Stane’s daughter? Steve would be missing nine fingers if Stane found out Steve was after her. But then again, nobody really had to know—right? Not this summer when they would be practically alone on Martha’s Vineyard almost the entire time.

Steve had warred with himself in his head like that since he first saw her in that pearl choker necklace.

Unfortunately, his arousal only added to his anger from the call with Tony, and now his irritation was threatening to boil over at any moment.

“Y/N!” Bucky called into the house, getting out sandwich ingredients. When he got no answer, he called again, “Sweetheart, c’mere, we’re gonna make lunch!”

Several minutes passed and they still had no answer. Steve and Bucky shared a look, and his irritation mounted with each passing second that she ignored them.

He shouted her name using his no-nonsense-voice. “Get down here, now!”

She wouldn’t disobey one of his direct orders.

Right?

“Buck, go get her.”

Bucky sprinted upstairs, and moments later, Steve heard several doors opening and closing. He called her name, his voice soft but a little panicked. “Steve! She’s not up here?”

Bucky and Steve checked the downstairs rooms quickly before Steve was growling, “She’s not here, where the fuck is she?”

“Calm down, Steve,” Bucky tried, but Steve shoved past him and into the backyard. She wasn’t there either, and it was still drizzling a little bit, so she wouldn’t have gone far.

Right?

“She’s over there!” Bucky called. He was at the edge of the backyard, looking over the fence, and then darting out the back gate. Steve quickly followed, and then he saw her.

She was some ways away, standing at the edge of the water, the hood of her windbreaker pulled up to protect her from the rain. Her old Polaroid camera was in her hands and she was crouching, taking photos of the tide.

Steve yelled her name, anger clear in his voice. She straightened up immediately and looked over at them. One hand raised in a tentative wave, but Steve was on her before she could say anything. “What the hell are you doing?” he growled, grabbing her by the upper arm and dragging her back towards the house.

“Ouch!” she yelped, and his grip tightened. She wasn’t walking as fast as he wanted her to be, and she whined at him, stumbling a little in her effort to keep up with his long strides. “Steve! Stop! What are you doing?” He yanked her forward and she whimpered. “Steve, please! You’re hurting me!”

But he didn’t stop, not until they were back in the house, where he shoved her roughly onto the sofa. There were tears in her eyes and her hand came up to rub at her arm where he has grabbed her.

“Just what the hell was that?” he snarled.

“I just wanted to take some pictures,” she answered, voice reedy and wavering. “The sea foam gets really pretty when it rains and I wanted some pictures of it…”

Steve couldn’t fault her for wanting to take pictures of things she liked—she did that all the time, ever since her father had given her a Polaroid camera when she turned 12. Snapping pictures of sun beams through the window, fresh snow on the streets of Brooklyn, the asphalt just after it rained. He was used to it. 

But he couldn’t shove down the intense panic he felt when he realized she was gone.

“You should have told us where you were going,” he told her, anger still boiling over, lacing his words and the tone of his voice with venom.

“I didn’t want to interrupt you,” she said, “I know you guys were on the phone. I knew it was important…”

“Don’t give me that. You should have waited for us or—"

“I didn’t do anything wrong!” she protested, standing up abruptly. “You’re being such a jerk about this!”

They all heard the crack of Steve’s palm against her cheek before any of them had time to process it. He hadn’t smacked her that hard—her father had surely done worse—but a bright red mark was already clear across her cheek.

Bucky jumped slightly at the sound, but he knew he couldn’t intervene. Steve would never allow him to. He watched the two of them, every single muscle in his body tense.

Slowly, she turned her face to look at him, eyes shimmering. But Steve wasn’t finished yet.

Swiftly, he gathered her hair in one hand and yanked her head back, straining her neck as he forced her to look up to him. His face was close to hers as he spoke and she could feel his breath on her lips. “You don’t talk to me like that,” he growled, “You don’t disrespect me like that.”

“Steve—”

“Shut your mouth!” he barked, silencing her easily with a yank to her scalp. “You’re going to listen to me carefully, sweetheart. I will not tolerate your attitude, nor will I tolerate you disobeying my rules. Now, I have rules for a reason—to keep you safe. You’re not allowed to go off by yourself without telling us first. I do that to keep you safe. Do you understand?”

A few tears slid down her cheeks, and she didn’t answer him until he yanked on her hair again, shaking her a little. “Answer me!”

“Y-yes, S-Steve,” she stuttered through a fresh wave of tears.

“Good girl.” Steve met Bucky’s eyes, gave a quick tilt of his head towards the couch, indicating for him to come and help him comfort her.

Then he released his tight grip on her hair, but he slid his hand down to grasp the back of her neck firmly. She was boneless under his touch, and he maneuvered her easily so that she was sitting sideways in Bucky’s lap. Steve sat close, her legs draped over his thighs so she was practically sitting in both their laps. As Bucky stroked up and down her spine to soothe her, Steve kept a hand on her neck so she couldn’t turn her face away.

For a moment, Steve just watched as she cried, appreciating the sight. Flushed cheeks glistening, red rimmed eyes and nose, eyes sparkling in the low light. She was one of the prettiest criers he had ever seen, and something swelled inside his chest at the idea that he was the cause. That she looked all pretty and vulnerable for him.

He really did have a thing for making people cry—Bucky was right; he didn’t know what it was, it just did something for him.

However, it wouldn’t do to get hard now, with her on their laps like this, so Steve tamped those thoughts down. Still, he made sure to mentally catalogue the image of her tear-stained face for later.

“Let it out, sweetie,” he purred, voice taking on a gentler tone as he pulled her into his chest, stroking her hair. As she sobbed, Steve met Bucky’s gaze. The other man’s eyes were dark, and as Steve looked at him, he licked his lips. He had a knowing look on his face, like he could see every one of Steve’s thoughts.

Steve only smirked at him.

She eventually pulled back, and he used his thumbs to wipe the tears from her cheeks tenderly. “I forgive you,” he whispered, stroking a few errant strands of hair from her forehead. “You’re okay. We’re okay.”

Frowning at that, she tried to pull back, knowing she wasn’t in the wrong—Steve was. Both Steve and Bucky kept her close with their firm grips. She felt conflicted. After all, she hadn’t done anything wrong, and then Steve got so angry and slapped her. But then he was so sweet and tender, soothing her as she cried.

“I know you want to be a good girl for me,” he murmured, still stroking along her cheeks, large hands framing her face. He thumbed along the dip right below her lower lip, just a fleeting touch. “We have rules for a reason. Be a good girl and follow them.”

She supposed he had a point. He was supposed to keep her safe, and how could he do that if he didn’t know where she was? 

Plus, how could he be bad if he was being so nice to her?

Steve saw it when she resigned herself to him, to his will. He smiled softly at her and leaned in to kiss her forehead, his firm grip keeping her close for a moment. She could smell him—all peppermint and sharp aftershave. When he pulled back, he touched his own cheek with a finger, asking her for a kiss. She relented easily, leaning in to press her lips against his jaw.

Manipulating her had always been so simple.

Satisfied that he had her wrapped around his finger again, he patted her thigh. “Now, you’re going to go up to your room and stay there until dinner. Understand?”

She didn’t hesitate before nodding. Helping her up and leading her to the stairs with a hand on her lower back, he kissed her on the crown before sending her off.

Once her door closed, he went into the kitchen, gesturing for Bucky to follow, and poured a glass of scotch for both of them.

“You liked that a little too much, I think,” Bucky said, watching Steve as he downed the entire glass at once.

Steve exhaled with the burn of the drink, and then poured another. He needed it. Her insubordination had been just the right catalyst for his anger to boil over. Yelling at her, manhandling her—it had released a little bit of his tension, but he needed more. Now that he had seen her crying so pretty for him, his anger had shifted more to a heated desire simmering under his skin, one that needed taking care of now.

He had sent her up to her room so he wouldn’t do anything he might regret.

To her, at least.

“You think so?” he asked, eyeing Bucky. Bucky was only wearing a pair of short shorts and one of Steve’s sweatshirts. The thin cloth of his shorts didn’t hide his erection, which rivalled Steve’s own.

“I know so.”

“Looks like you enjoyed the show, too.” Stalking towards Bucky, he gestured towards Bucky’s groin. 

Bucky didn’t respond to that, but he did blush fiercely, so how was Steve supposed to resist? He was on Bucky in no time, pressing their bodies together. “I’m feelin’ a little worked up here. Care to help me out?” The subtle grind of his hips against Steve’s own told Steve all he needed to know.

“This why you sent her to her room?” Bucky asked, already a little breathless. 

Smirking, Steve moved closer to whisper into Bucky’s ear, “Well, it wouldn’t do to fuck your mouth in the middle of the kitchen when she could just walk in on us, would it?” He could smell Bucky’s cologne and a little bit of cigarette smoke as he ran his nose along the side of Bucky’s neck, eliciting a shiver out of the man.

“That’s never stopped you before,” Bucky groaned as Steve shoved a thigh between his own, pressing up into his crotch. Their bodies were pressed so tightly together that Bucky could feel Steve breathing, the rapid thrum of his heart.

Steve hummed. “No, it hasn’t. I wouldn’t care if she saw me using you like that. But it might confuse her. You know how she is.”

“A virgin, you mean?” Bucky’s hands came forward to grab Steve’s hips, his head falling backward as Steve pressed up against his cock.

Steve huffed a laughed. “Yeah. She’s just so… innocent.”

“You liked it when she cried, Stevie?” Bucky goaded, trying to provoke him more. He loved it when Steve got all hot and bothered like this.

“I did,” Steve confirmed, pressing his cock up against Bucky’s hip, grinding into him for some relief. One hand came up to cup Bucky’s jaw, thumb tracing his lips. “Looked so pretty, all teary-eyed for me.” His other hand came down and cupped Bucky’s cock. “And you? This? Where did this come from, hmm? Did you like to see her cry? Or did you like it when I slapped her? Or maybe it was when I sat her on your lap and wiped her tears away.”

God, it was just so debased, but yes, Bucky had enjoyed all of it. For some sinful reason, Bucky was turned on by Steve’s rough handling of their girl, and Bucky had wanted nothing more than to kiss her and hold her while she cried, distract her from the sadness with something else—something she wasn’t ready for. 

More importantly, Steve knew that Bucky had enjoyed it. Steve knew exactly what Bucky wanted.

It was a dynamic of theirs. Steve yelled at her, she cried, and they comforted her together. Bucky had always done most of the comforting, being extra sweet to her for days afterwards to try and make up for when Steve was an ass.

Bucky just… wanted more.

Steve was kissing at his neck now, sucking harsh marks into the skin below his jaw. Bucky buried a hand in Steve’s hair and yanked his head up, joining their mouths in a sloppy kiss. It had been a while, but they knew each other’s bodies too well, knew how to move together, how to make each other feel good.

Steve bit at Bucky’s lips and then was putting pressure on his shoulders. As Bucky sank down to his knees, he nipped at Steve’s neck, pushed up his shirt to lick at his abdomen, then, once he was seated back on his ankles, leaned his head forward and nuzzled into the line of Steve’s clothed cock.

“Such a good boy,” Steve praised him, petting his head and then pushing his face into his crotch more. Bucky loved it, could feel his own dick leaking into his shorts. Bucky mouthed at his dick, wetting the fabric of Steve’s joggers with his mouth. “Take them off, baby.” Steve pulled his hand away from Bucky’s head.

Bucky obeyed, quickly pulling Steve’s joggers and thin briefs down. Steve took control then, fisting Bucky’s long hair with one hand and taking his length into his other hand.

“Open,” Steve commanded, and Bucky complied. Steve traced the line of Bucky’s lips with the tip of his cock until they were glossy with precum. “Pretty,” Steve said reverently, “So pretty like this.” The praise went right to Bucky’s cock.

Bucky licked his lower lip, just a quick little flick of his tongue to taste Steve’s precum, salty and a little bitter.

Steve didn’t waste any more time. He pushed Bucky’s head forward with the vice grip on his hair and slid his cock into the man’s mouth swiftly. “Oh, God,” Steve groaned. Bucky was always so good at this—always had been able to take Steve right down to the root, nose buried against his dusty blond pubic hair. 

And God, Bucky just loved it. He loved the feeling of Steve’s cock obstructing his throat, the weight of it in his mouth, stretching his lips wide.

Steve stayed there, reveling in the feeling of Bucky’s wet mouth, tongue gently caressing the underside of his shaft, throat convulsing around the head of his cock. Then he adjusted his grip on Bucky—framed his face with large hands on either side of his head, fingertips digging into the place where his jaw met his neck. Steve could feel his carotid pulse right on his fingertips, and if he pressed hard enough, he could cut it off, make Bucky real dizzy.

Just the thought of Steve doing that made Bucky dizzy. Well, that and the fact that Steve’s cock was still lodged in his throat, cutting off his airway. But he had always been able to hold his breath for a long time. It came in handy.

Steve pulled back and immediately set a punishing rhythm, fucking Bucky’s throat without delay.

It was rough, sloppy, saliva pooling in his mouth and dripping down over his lower lip, trailing down his chin. His jaw ached and he was making obscene noises every time Steve’s cock stormed the path across his tongue, past his gag reflex, and right into his throat—and back.

“Fuck—yes,” Steve grunted, “So good at this, baby. Your mouth was made for this, Buck. Made for my cock.”

Bucky palmed at his own erection lazily, just to relieve some tension while Steve used his mouth. Steve noticed. “Good God, baby, you’re so fuckin’ hot for this, aren’t you? Love it when I fuck your mouth like this? It turns you on?”

Bucky gave a broken little moan in response, but it was quickly cut off by Steve’s cock. Steve laughed at the noise and hummed. “Yeah, I know, sweetheart. Can’t help yourself, huh? Should use you like this all the time, keep your throat around my cock every second of the goddamn day. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Bucky gave another rough little noise, and then Steve was groaning loud, grip tightening on Bucky’s jaw. “You would like it, I know you would. God—fuck,” he groaned and his hips stuttered. It didn’t take long to get him to the edge after his lack of sexual activity for the last few weeks. “Too good at this, Buck, gonna make me—ohh—come—fuck!” He growled and buried his cock in Bucky’s throat. Bucky’s lips and nose pressed against Steve’s pelvis as he came, forcing Bucky to swallow everything.

Finally, he pulled back, and Bucky took several moments to catch his breath, dark spots dancing in his eyes. Then Steve was pulling him to his feet and kissing the taste from Bucky’s mouth, tongues dragging together lazily in Steve’s post-orgasm haze and the oxygen-deprived fog of Bucky’s mind. The only thing keeping Bucky standing was Steve’s unyielding body pressed against his.

“Thank you, Buck,” Steve muttered into his mouth, then dragged his lips down Bucky’s neck. “Can I—” He didn’t wait for Bucky to answer before Steve was shoving his hand down Bucky’s shorts to palm at his hard cock. “No boxers, Buck?” Steve teased, “Were you hoping for this to happen?”

“Mmm,” Bucky moaned as Steve quickly stroked up his length. “Maybe.” Truthfully, he had been horny since they had gotten to Martha’s Vineyard but Steve had hang-ups in the past year about not wanting to cheat on Peggy, so Bucky hadn’t pushed his luck.

He supposed that Steve’s resolve to remain faithful had gone right out the window now.

Multitasking skillfully, Steve slipped his other hand down the back of Bucky’s shorts, kicked his legs further apart with one foot, and continued marking up the column of Bucky’s neck, all while whispering filthy things against his skin. “Been teasin’ me all week, these little shorts, goin’ around shirtless. What’d you want, Buck? You wanted this?”

His fingers circled Bucky’s rim, only pressing lightly, not breaching his entrance. He pressed a knuckle against his perineum while still fisting his cock, swiping his thumb over the head with every stroke, making a mess with his precum.

“Fuck, Steve,” Bucky gritted out, grinding his ass back against Steve’s hand. “Please, yes, fuck,” he babbled nonsensically as Steve worked him, and in no time he was begging to come. Steve knew exactly how to work him.

“Yeah, Bucky, come for me,” Steve hissed. Bucky tilted his head up for a kiss and moaned his orgasm into Steve’s mouth. Steve kept stroking him as he came, sloppy and wet with each spurt of ejaculate. Steve kept touching him until Bucky was shuddering and pushing Steve away.

“Fuck,” Bucky breathed, running his hands through his hair to collect himself. “Fuck, Steve.”

Steve laughed, pulling his hand out and lapping at the mess on his palm and fingers, humming at the taste. “That was pretty good, huh?”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Don’t get too cocky.”

“Hey, we both needed to blow off a little steam,” Steve said, dipping his head to press his lips to Bucky’s jaw, just like their girl did to him not long ago. “The sex is best when it’s like this. You know it.” Then he gave Bucky a gentle kiss, loving and sweet, running his clean hand across Bucky’s waist. They kissed like that for a while before Steve pulled back. “We should get cleaned up.”

Bucky smirked. “Wanna shower together?”

“I suppose so,” Steve teased, “After all, she’ll be in her room for the rest of the day. We can take advantage of that.”

“Well you know the walls aren’t that thick. We need to keep quiet so she doesn’t hear us.”

Steve shrugged, kissing Bucky again. “I’m not too worried about that.”

Steve dragged Bucky upstairs and into the shower, and they stayed in Steve’s bedroom for the rest of the afternoon.

Once dinnertime rolled around, they cleaned up one last time and slipped out of Steve’s bedroom. They both went down the hall to her door. Steve knocked softly, and when they didn’t get an answer, they opened the door and glanced inside.

Her back was facing the door where she was sitting at a little blue desk pressed up against the window. It was still raining lightly, and she was working on something in front of her. She had headphones on, so she didn’t hear them come in.

They both snuck up behind her and looked over her shoulder. She was writing in a journal, one that they had seen her working on before. They knew the pages were filled with sketches and poetry and little blurbs that she wrote. The one she was working on had a little drawing of a cluster of sunflowers, the stems dropping down to frame the words she was writing.

She had always been artistic. Steve taught her when they were kids how to draw and paint. He was satisfied to know she still had that creative side in her.

She still hadn’t noticed them, so Steve dropped one hand on her shoulder abruptly. It startled her and she yelped, turning to look at them with wide, red-rimmed eyes. When she calmed down, Bucky slid the headphones from her ears.

“Hey, sweetheart,” Bucky said, “Time for dinner. I was thinking spaghetti Bolognese. How ‘bout it?”

Her stomach growled at the mention of food. She was very hungry, not having had the chance to eat lunch before she was sent to her room. But something seemed different between her boys. She had heard weird noises earlier, and she had wondered what it was, but she didn’t want to risk another punishment by leaving her room. And now there they were, Steve’s arm slung around Bucky’s shoulders, almost too casually.

“What are those?” she asked, pointing to Bucky’s neck, where dark purple bruises lined his throat.

“We were wrestling earlier,” Steve answered for Bucky. Bucky smirked at the euphemism. “We both needed to blow off some steam.”

She was silent for a moment, considering them both, eyes flickering between them, like she was trying to figure out what was wrong. They were both looking at her with easy little smiles, eyes on her almost predatorily. 

“C’mon, doll,” Bucky said, trying to disarm her, “We know you’re starving.”

Steve added, “We’ll even let you have a little wine with dinner.”

Something seemed to settle in her eyes, her shoulders relaxing, and she smiled. “Spaghetti Bolognese sounds good.” Nothing was wrong, nothing had changed. They had forgiven her for earlier—she had nothing to worry about.

She stood, and Bucky said, “Hey, wait a second.” His hand fell to the hem of her shirt. She had changed into a pair of athletic shorts and a faded blue t-shirt—one that was suspiciously familiar. “I don’t think this belongs to you, doll.”

A blush came over her face, but she smirked at him instead of seeming bashful. “Yeah, well. It looks better on me.”

He agreed, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. “Oh, you think so?”

Bucky’s hands slipped to the sides of her waist, and she tensed up again, because they both knew she was the most ticklish on her sides. Before she could try and stop him, he was digging his fingers in, tickling her as she squealed.

“Stop!” she gasped, moving away from him and into Steve’s waiting arms. Steve tightened his arms around her, holding her in place for Bucky to tickle, and they both laughed at her cries for help.

“You’re both evil!” she gasped through her laughter as she thrashed in their grip.

“Say uncle and we’ll stop,” Steve said evenly. She caved to him almost immediately, crying out uncle and begging them to stop.

When they let her go, she shot away from Steve, only to run into Bucky’s chest. He grabbed her around the waist and hauled her over his shoulder, making her screech again. Walking to the stairs with one hand resting on her upper thigh to keep her steady, he said, “Listen, you’re gonna eat everything on your plate since you didn’t have lunch.”

“You’re bossy.” She reached down to pinch his ass through his shorts.

In retaliation, he smacked the skin of her thigh, soliciting another shriek. “Don’t get handsy, doll, you won’t like the result.”

Steve watched on with amusement, following them downstairs.

As Steve tossed together a salad, Y/N brushed a loaf of ciabatta bread with garlic and olive oil and snuck tastes of the cabernet Bucky was using in the sauce. Once dinner was done, they sat down and enjoyed the food.

Steve had to admit that Bucky was a very good cook, but he would never say that to Bucky’s face. It would just feed his ego.

 After dinner, they put on a movie, and Steve held her close to him as a way to apologize and make up for his anger earlier. As he sat there, with his girl in his arms and his boy at his side, he felt more content than he had in almost a year.

I could really use a body swap right about now, and one of them finding some incriminating evidence that the other boy like him, and confronting him, but don't make it a long body swap, let's just sat they swap for like a few days, cause reasntly I read this other one and the body swap went on FOR-EVER

Billy had a rude awakening Wednesday morning but not in the way he was used to. Instead of a banging on his door and a yell to get up, it was the beep of an alarm clock. The last he checked he didn’t have an alarm clock. In his sleepy haze he’d thrown his blankets aside to see skinny legs in a pair of pajama pants. His heart could’ve jumped out of his chest. What the fuck?? He rubbed his eyes, looking around. That’s not his fucking room. He scrambled out of bed, running to the first mirror he saw in the room. 

Steve Harrington.

Okay so. This is just a dream. Has to be. He pinched his arm. Nothing. Shit. He wasn’t even going to bother trying to figure out what’s going on, he needed to find his body. What if Steve’s in there? He’s not lending his body to fucking Steve. He opened his drawers, looking for the least preppy outfit he could. Jeans, black button down that probably isn’t meant for casual outings, and a leather jacket he really didn’t expect to find. 

The clock read 7:15 am. He definitely had some time to explore the room. Why did Steve even wake up this early? He didn’t think he worked out, he would’ve noticed. He looked through drawers, finding the usual teenager things. Magazines. Lotion. The whole gambit. Yeah maybe he didn’t expect to see a men’s sport magazine under the porn magazine but hey that’s not his business. Billy would do that if he wasn’t so heavily monitored. He shut the drawer of the nightstand and moved onto the little shelf below the nightstand. Not much to see. Some records. A small box. He sat up on the bed(which he took the time to make, your welcome Harrington) and opened up the box. There were several photos of Steve and the kids. Steve and Nancy. Trinkets that probably meant something to Steve. Then alllll the way at the bottom was a picture of him and Steve. He recognized it right away. It was taken after they had won the basketball state championships, there was a crowd of people around them and Billy had hugged him in the excitement of the moment, someone with a camera nearby deciding that was a good moment to capture. He didn’t think Steve would save the photo. He set it back in the box and put the box away, moving onto the desk. He sat down in the chair, opening the first notebook he saw. It was some basic stuff like history notes. He flipped all the way to the end where he found some doodles and little notes.

stupid blond asshole

That had to be him. 

I wish he’d stop smirking at me like that.

He smiled, shutting the notebook. Sounds like someone’s a little frustrated. He wasn’t sure if it was just plain old frustration or sexual frustration but it made him pleased because that’s exactly what he was trying to provoke. he stood up and left the little room, shutting the door quietly behind him. The house was completely silent save for the ticking of a clock that got louder as he approached the kitchen. Jesus, where were his parents? He opened the fridge, grabbing out the carton of eggs.

He’d admit, it was kind of nice not having to rush to eat his food. He hated pulling up to school in the fucking Beemer. He had to tear apart the whole car just to find a cigarette just to find out that Steve doesn’t even have Marlboros, he’s got the weak shit. It was nice not getting bombarded by girls and Tommy. He could see the Camaro further up the parking lot so he started to head inside. He tried not to break into a run. He just wanted his body back. Sure enough he saw himself leaning up against his locker awkwardly. 

“Hey!” He called out. God he hated sounding like Harrington. He didn’t hate Harrington’s voice per say, but he hated that he had to use it until god knows when. It just doesn’t fit him. He could’ve screamed when he saw the get up Steve had him in. A sweatshirt he never wore, jeans, and his hair up. It looked pretty normal but it’s simply not how he dressed for school. Steve looked about ready to lose it himself, which is fair. Billy had to admit, he thought the outfit he picked out looked pretty hot. He watched Steve walk over before he grabbed Billy’s arm and yanked him into the nearest bathroom. 

“What the hell did you do to my hair?” That’s his concern? The hair?

“I made you look hot, you should be thanking me.” Steve just looked at him deadpan. Did his face really look like that? I mean damn Billy would admit he’s got the looks he knew that, but he just had this look settled in his eyes. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

“No. If I did I would be trying to undo it instead of going to school.”

“Did you go through my shit?”

“Hardly. There’s no time to do anything in your house.” Billy’s heart practically jumped from his chest when he realized that Steve was actually in his house around his family for an hour at least. “Uh..you’re looking a little pale there man. You good?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you gonna get mad if I ask you a question?”

“Depends.”

“What’s your dad’s problem? The guy’s a complete asshole.” Billy felt like his world was falling apart around him.

“Uhm..he’s just like that.” He’s sure he could brush it off. “So what’re we gonna do until this is..undone or whatever?”

“I don’t know. Just pretend everything’s alright?”

“Okay then you can’t dress my up like that. It looks like I just got home from the artic or some shit.”

“And you can’t flirt with everyone who speaks to you.” Oh great, they’re getting into this part of the conversation.

“I don’t! Do not sleep with anyone.”

“I don’t know that seems out of character for you.” He felt like grabbing and pushing him against a wall but he knows Steve’s got the upper hand here being in Billy’s body. 

“You have to do the dishes after dinner every night. Nobodies gonna remind you but you don’t...just don’t forget to do the dishes. I’ll have my schedule written up hour by hour and we can trade homework after school. If I give you my notebooks you better fucking keep up with the notes in class and do NOT dent my c-”

“Billy! Jesus christ I got it. We can write up schedules and rules for each other.” 

Steve’s schedule and rules were much shorter than Billy’s. Billy spent at least 20 minutes writing and used 2 pieces of lined paper. Billy read over the schedule in the car, surprised to find that he shouldn’t be expecting Mr. and Mrs. Harrington until Saturday, if it even lasts that long. Steve even included his entire hair routine on the back side of the paper. Suddenly Billy understood why Steve needed an hour in the morning. Billy included a mandatory workout routine so he guessed he could stick to a hair routine. He almost forgot Steve drives kids around whenever they need it. So if some Dustin kid called, Billy had to do whatever he needed and do it nicely. He felt like he was in a nightmare.

He got scared when he saw a car in the driveway of the Harrington house. He checked the rear view mirror, just making sure he looked as Steve as possible, before getting out and heading inside. 

“Stephen?” Stephen?? He wanted to burst out in laughter.

“Hello?” He hung his jacket on the hook and made his way towards the voice that had called out to him.

“Did you just get home from school?” This must be his mom. He had nothing to gain from her so he could just be him which was such a relief.

“Uhm..yeah. I thought you were coming home this weekend?”

“I know but I was just so exhausted. I figured we could spend some time together? I know I haven’t really been the best about spending time with you but I’ll be home for a few months so we can make up for lost time!” Billy hated that he wanted to cry. So he just smiled and nodded.

“Alright that sounds good.” 

He watched a movie with Mrs. Harrington and she told him about some guy she met who’s supposedly famous. She hugged him goodnight. She’s a good mom. After she went to bed he, went downstairs and called his place. It rang for a minute before he heard his own voice. Thank god.

“This is weird but do you want to meet up at the quarry?” He’d tell him about his mom at the quarry.

“Sure. I’ll meet you there.” He hung up and was out the door so fast.

He had spaced out, laying on the hood of Steve’s car. He was waiting to smoke until he got his cigarettes from the cup holder of the Camaro. Speak of the devil, he heard his car roll up. It’s hard to not know it’s his car. Before he knew it, Steve had sat beside him on the hood of his car.

“Hey.”

“Hey. Your mom’s home.”

“Awesome. She tell you how disappointed she is in me?”

“No? We watched a movie. You have a good mom.”

“My mom is hardly ever around.” Billy was silent. He wanted to tell him that his mom didn’t even call anymore, let alone drop in for visits. He didn’t want to elicit pity or anything.

“How’s my house?” He doesn’t know why he asked. He already knows.

“Your dad yelled at me for putting my elbows on the table and then mocked me for playing the top 40. Max thinks you’re possessed.” 

“You played fucking top 40? God you’re so bad at this whole acting thing.” He laughed. He’d laugh a lot more if he wasn’t appalled by the image of his own body dancing to that shit. “I hope this is all over tomorrow.”

“Me too. I did some cleaning in your room by the way.”

“And?” 

“Didn’t know you’re into guys Hargrove.” He’s never wanted to jump in front of a moving vehicle so badly.

“If you say anything I will-”

“I don’t mind. It’s not a big deal.” He sat up and looked at him. Did he always have a distant look on his face or is that just Harrington?

“Then I guess you know-”

“I don’t mind that either I think you’re...nice.”

“Nice? Is that all I get?”

“I don’t know, I’m not telling you I think you’re hot.”

“You just did!!!” He laughed. “When we get our bodies back, will you be mad if I kiss you?”

“Not at all.” Steve looked at him, with the most Steve looking grin. 

(they woke up in their own bodies Friday morning. they kissed so much.)

for the drabbles can you make a Jake Jensen, smut + fluff #4? if that's possible annaka

SMUT!

“Oh, look at that, the one-bed situation”/ “Stay with me tonight? Please?”

You held your bag in your hand as you stood next to your friend in the doorway of the cheap motel room. A sigh escaped your lips as you both stared at the double bed in the middle of the room; deciding to take the initiative you stepped forward into the room, allowing your friend to close the door behind him and toss his own backpack on the small kitchen table.

“Oh, look at that, the one-bed situation,” You heard your friend grin from behind you.

You were almost too tired to argue with him, instead, you chose to turn around and look at the grin on his handsome face.

Jake Jensen was, in every sense of the world, a pain in your ass. You had been friends for as long as you could remember, him easily taking you under his wing after Clay had brought you into their little band of misfits. You both had a similar sense of humor, both spending you time tossing banter backward and forwards.

It also helped that he was extremely easy on the eyes for you.

You don’t even remember when the crush on him started, just one day you woke up and saw him in a different light. His white-toothed grin made butterflies erupt in your chest, his hand on your lower back whenever he leaned down next to your ear sent goosebumps throughout your body and a warmth pooling between your legs that you hadn’t felt in a long time.

It was a rock, paper, scissors decision that landed you in the only room with one bed with the man of your desires.You quickly realized that this was either going to be a really good idea, or a really shit idea.

“Want the shower first?” He offered as he pointed to the small offset bathroom, already opening up his backpack and pulling out a new pair of briefs.

You could feel the grime of the day’s events running off your body so you nodded and opened your own backpack, pulling out underwear and a large shirt. You briefly wondered if you should also grab a pair of pants or something but quickly diminished that thought. You weren’t going to share a bed, if you had too, you would sleep on the couch as uncomfortable as it looked.

There was no way in hell you were going to share a bed with Jake Jensen.

Famous last words came to mind later that night when you were both showered and arguing over who should get the bed. He had offered you both share, something you quickly shook your head at and scolded, “I’m not sharing a bed with you,”

“We’re adults. We can share a bed as friends,” He argued with you, “I’ll make a barrier between us if it makes you feel better,”

No barrier was going to help you.

He grabbed you by your upper arms and started to walk you towards the bed, pulling back the covers and pushing you into a sitting position on the edge. He held up a finger and told you to wait as he rushed back to the couch and grabbed several of the small cushions, placing them in the middle of the bed; “Your side,” He pointed to where you were sitting, “My side,” You gave a small eye roll as he continued, “Can we please sleep now,”

It was easily after midnight, so you agreed, pulling your feet into the covers, wrapping your body like a cocoon and rolling on to your side; “Night Jake,”

“Night,” He replied as he switched off the light.

You laid there staring at the wall for what seemed like hours. You could still feel the man’s heat through the pillows he had placed between you. The butterflies in your stomach were still going mad as you swallowed deeply. A small sigh escaped from your lips as you rolled on to your back to stare at the ceiling.

You wonder if counting sheep would help.

“Can’t sleep either?” A whisper came from next to you.

You rolled over to your other side to face him, pushing the cushions down so you could properly see the man staring back at you; “Strange place,” You lied, “I’m a terrible sleeper in motels,”

“Liar,” He replied simply, he shrugged and rolled on to his back, placing his hands behind his head, “I can’t switch my brain off,” He answered the unasked question in return.

“How come?” You sat up a bit, resting your head on your hand, “What’s on Jake Jensen’s mind?” You said with a smirk.

There was a pause for a moment before a small breath came from his lips, you didn’t think he was going to answer until; “There’s this girl,”

Oh.

“Like usual. So what’s got this one stuck in your head?” You joked, trying to cover up the fast beating of your heart.

He was still staring up at the ceiling, “She’s just….she’s smart. Beautiful. Funny as hell. I can’t get her out of my head no matter how hard I try too,”

“Is Jake Jensen in love?” You smirked, your stomach sinking into your feet.

He nodded once, “I think I might be. I dunno. I can’t…I’m too scared to say anything to her you know? Sometimes she looks at me and I swear she could hear my heart beating from across the room,”

“She’s a lucky girl to have the affections of you. You need to tell her, she’d be stupid to turn you down,”

He suddenly turned to face her, his eyes searching yours in the moonlight lit room, “Do you think so?”

“Yes. There’s nothing worse than keeping feelings like that inside, watching them fall in love with someone else again; always wondering why you weren’t good en-” You were abruptly cut off.

“I love you,”

Your heart stopped for a moment, your breath caught on your lips, “What?” You breathed out.

“I’ve been in love with you for this awful amount of time, and-and now I’ve probably screwed this friendship up I-I’m sorry just forget I said anything,”

You stopped him from rolling over away from you, as a hand on his cheek; feeling his stubble under your hand, you leaned over the cushions he had placed down and pressed your lips to his own.

Immediately, you felt him respond, his hand moving to the back of your head as he pressed his tongue against your lips, asking silent permission. You pulled away for a moment to move the cushions off the bed and on to the floor before moving closer to him.

His hands roamed under your shirt and up your back, both hands splayed across as if they were trying to cover your entire upper back.

Your tongue pressed into his as you swung your leg over his and rolled until you were straddling his lap, his eyes blown with lust as his hands rested on your now bare thighs. You moved away and sat straight, you could feel his erection pressing against your inner thigh. His fingers toyed with the bottom of your shirt, his eyes asking if you were sure this was something you wanted.

You both knew that the second you took this step that something was going to change between you. It could either change your life for the better or make things awkward as hell between you.

You swallowed deeply; “Stay with me tonight? Please?” You whispered to him.

A smirk crossed his face as your hands covered his and began to remove your top, allowing your breasts to break free from the constraints of the shirt. Jake swallowed deeply as you leaned forward and pressed your lips to his once again, your bare breasts pressing against his chest.

His hands moved down to grip your ass tightly, almost as if he was trying to remind himself that yes, this was in fact happening. You broke away and began peppering his neck with small, gentle kisses, making a moan escape from his lips.

Your hand straight away moved to cup his mouth, there was no way in hell that you were going to let your teammates know that this was happening right now. He pressed a kiss to your hand before you started moving down; pressing harder kisses to his chest, your tongue licking his nipples on the way down.

Lower and lower until you came down to the waistband of his underwear.

His head was perched up, eyes watching you intently as you began to lower his underwear, making his member spring free as you continued to pull his underwear down his bare legs.

You kissed up his legs, pausing for a moment before licking one large stroke up his member.

An even louder groan came from his mouth than before; you looked up at him, a sheepish smile on his face as he grabbed your pillow, showing you, and placing it over his face.

A laugh escaped your lips as you placed your entire mouth over his member. You could hear his muffled groans as you bobbed, licked and sucked.

“Stop, stop, stop,” He moved your head away from him as he pulled you up, pressing a deep and longing kiss to your lips, “You keep doing that then there’s no way that I’m going to last,”

He reached behind you and slid your underwear around your thighs and with your help, they were quickly removed.

His fingers slid in between your wet folds, making you let out a small gasp as two fingers plunged deep inside you.

“You feel amazing,” He breathed out, his fingers curling inside you.

You shook your head, moving off him and hovering just above him, “I need you so badly,” You breathed watching as his head nodded in agreement.

You held his member between your hands, placing it at your entrance before slowly sliding on top of it. A groan escaped both of your lips as you stayed still for a moment, adjusting to not only him, but the realization that this was happening.

This was actually happening.

With Jake Jensen.

Slowly, you began to rock your hips, a gasp coming out of your mouth as his hands tightened around your thighs.

He brought you down to him, his own hips thrusting to meet yours. His mouth captured your lips, tongues wrestling for dominance. A moan escaped your lips as he hit that spot, he must have noticed your reaction because he slowed down and began moving with slower, more prominent thrusts.

“I need you to cum for me,” He whispered in your ear, his hands still resting on your hips. His hand moved down to your clitoris and began rubbing your sensitive bud. A moan escaped your lips as the familiar heat began to pool in your stomach.

A few more thrusts and Jake let out a loud groan, still thrusting as you came yourself; your body began to shake and your heart began to beat faster again.

“Fuck,” You whispered, feeling arms wrap around you and a kiss being pressed to your forehead.

You slid off him, moving to be by his side, arms still wrapped around you. He pressed several short kisses to your lips, “I meant it though, I love you,”

A grin spread across your face, “I love you too,” Your face furrowed for a moment, “but we’re keeping this between us for now right? Cause we would absolutely not hear the end of it from the rest of the guys,”

Jake laughed, “Anything you want,”

mozart x reader; cadenza

“I once asked Mozart for lessons too, back in the day,” Arthur reminisces.

You instinctively clutch the violin case closer, waiting for him to continue.

“He told me I’d make a terrible student and point-blank refused,” he concludes cheerily. “Good luck.”

/

Actually, Mozart agrees immediately. He’s actually even more driven about it than you are.

He says you’ll meet three times a week. He’ll be going over the basics of music theory, then playing technique, and then have you master one piece by the end.

You didn’t expect to get this far. You just thought of the idea because you wanted to spend more time with him without being too obvious about it.

The determination in his gaze makes your stomach flutter in ways both good and bad.

“Put that aside for now,” he says, nodding at the violin its case. “We’ll see how soon you can play.”

You really hope…that you don’t disappoint him.

/

Mozart is easily disappointed, you see. When inspiration doesn’t come his way. When the melody isn’t what it should be. When the voice doesn’t fit in the ensemble.

It’s music that helps him feel so vividly. It’s music, his world, that you’ve decided to step into, without even knowing if you fit.

You took three works of piano lessons in the far past. You can recognize basic lullabies. You can maybe carry a tune. That sort of thing.

Mozart lays out the basics.

“Since you’ve taken lessons before, you’ve probably learned various scales in various keys. But the truth is, anyone can subconsciously pick up on the patterns,” Mozart is explaining. “The distance between one note and its neighbor. This is fixed in every piece; it was standardized before my time. This is why any person who listens can tell what follows in a scale.”

To demonstrate, he sings aloud to you.

His voice has a sunny, bright tone. It just sounds like Mozart. It’s beautiful.

“It’s important to know the distances between notes that aren’t adjacent either.” Mozart demonstrates on the piano, thumb against middle C, pinkie somewhere else. “Otherwise, the only melodies we’d ever have are flat scales going up and down. It would be boring.”

“So I need to learn the distances?” you confirm.

“You need a good ear for the violin, because most people can really only play the absolute pitch eighty percent in tune,” he replies. “If you know the distances between the notes, then you can find their precise physical distances on the violin’s fingerboard.”

He watches your expression carefully, and smiles a little when he sees you still puzzling over it.

“Okay,” he says. “That’s all for today.”

/

You ask Leonardo for books on music theory. Though puzzled, he hands you an entire stack. He throws in some blank parchment for good measure.

“For Mozart?” he asks knowingly.

You have to show that you’re serious about being his student, because he’s serious as your teacher. You take the books.

“For Mozart,” you respond softly.

/

“Going well, I hope?” Arthur asks you after the first week.

“Have you started playing?”

“Not yet,” you admit, a little nervous.

According to Mozart, your foundation was adequate enough to move on. That was probably thanks to the tuning forks Isaac had on hand. You played them for hours in your bedroom, thinking that you would go mad.

“He mentioned we’ll be working on posture,” you add.

Arthur beams reassuringly at you. “You have great posture. You’ll be great.”

/

“Your elbow is far too low. With that angle, your bow won’t make proper contact with the strings, and then you can’t draw out the full sound of the instrument. Also, your shoulders are slightly slouched. Widen your stance, your feet are too close together. And raise your left hand—the scroll of the violin should be at least parallel to the line of your shoulder, not pointing at the ground.”

You look to Mozart, panicking a little. That was a lot of things at once, and you elevate the violin, but your mind draws a blank everywhere else.

Mozart sighs, which makes you shrink a little—but he walks over to you anyway. He leans in close, placing his hands firmly on your shoulders, molding your form like clay to fit his liking. (His palms are warm.)

His gaze is solely focused on you. He moves your right elbow up, turns your upper body slightly towards the left. Uncurls the death grip of your left fingers around the violin to rest comfortably instead against the neck. 

His hand travels to your waist to keep you steady when he forces your feet farther apart with his boot.

It lingers there, on you, branding you. Your cheeks are probably red now. Mozart only smirks when your eyes meet.

“There,” he says.

“How do I look?” you manage to get out.

“Flushed,” he replies in amusement. “Now, let’s practice scales with pizzicato.”

He plucks one of the strings as an example.

You try not to let your disappointment show. “Not with the bow?” 

“Absolutely not,” Mozart says. “When a beginner plays, they should never start so early with the bow. It’s for the sake of your ears just as much as mine. Now, scales.”

/

You practice those scales for hours after you finish helping around in the mansion. You make sure you know the distances between on the fingerboard. You make sure your fingers are relaxed and fluid so that the skin doesn’t peel from pressing too hard. You try your best on posture and hold your violin as upright as you can.

Sebastian catches wind of your lessons, of course.

“Broadening the mind,” he says approvingly. “Music is shown to help with concentration and complex thought processes.”

You can tell. Mozart’s hyper-focus lasts for days. And complex thought processes for sure—you can never tell what he’s thinking. (You hope that you’re doing all right.)

/

Shifting proves to be a little bit of a problem. You hadn’t realized there were several ways to play the same note, but on different strings.

“Paganini was rumored to be able to play some pieces on only the two lowest strings,” Mozart says knowledgeably, but also sounding a bit like he’s personally offended. “The man had freakishly long fingers.”

It figures that notes don’t end beyond the so-called first position. But then, shifting smoothly is practically impossible considering you have to stop to actually move your hand up the violin while keeping it upright.

He watches you struggle for maybe ten minutes, radiating misery and shame, before he realizes something.

“Ah,” he says, gesturing for you to stop.

You meekly lower your hand.

“This won’t do,” he announces. “We’re going out tomorrow. Bring your violin.”

/

“I want a shoulder rest for this one,” Mozart says to the luthier, gesturing to you. “Nothing too hard or firm on the shoulder though. Maybe a thick cloth?”

“We have sponges,” the old man says.

Mozart stares at him uncomprehendingly. “Sponges?” he repeats, skeptical, but makes you try them anyway.

“How is it?” you ask.

“Don’t ask me,” he replies, lips quirking up. “Does it feel like the violin will slip off your shoulder now?”

“No,” you say, pressing your chin down against the chin rest, inclining your head toward the scroll, lifting your right hand experimentally to the string.

When it’s been quiet for more than a few seconds, you find him staring at you.

“Mozart?” you ask, breaking form.

He blinks and then shakes his head, reaching for your hand. He smiles.

“I’ll take two,” Mozart calls over to the luthier, and when he turns back to you, it’s all fondness in his violet eyes.

/

So you completely understand now why Mozart had started you off with pizzicato. You move onto the bow in the fourth week. He compliments you on your bow hold.

And then you play.

It’s abysmal. It’s actually horrible.

All of the confidence you’d slowly built up from Mozart’s soft gazes and casual touches topples the moment you drag the bow across the strings, right into the fiery depths of the deepest hell. To his credit, he doesn’t even flinch. You cancel your attempted seance with the underworld as soon as you realize.

“That was…” you say, at a loss. “I don’t…”

“The bow may need more rosin,” he offers. “But it’s mainly due to the force. You’re not pressing hard enough.”

You feel like you could snap the strings. With uncertainty, you search at Mozart. His teasing smile is already ready.

“It can’t be helped,” he says. “Stay still.”

He comes up behind you, raising his arms, fitting himself over you. With his right hand, he envelops yours over the bow. With his left, he places his fingers between yours on the fingerboard. His chest is firm and radiates warmth against your back.

This is the world’s most awkward hug.

“Relax. Let me,” he says somewhere behind you. The warmth of his words puff against the shell, burning you.

He’s the one in control now. Of the violin, and of you. He guides the bow, with our hand, over to the violin. He drags it across the string.

Two people playing one violin doesn’t sound good. It’s loud and garish, and you make a face.

“Like this,” he says, and you feel the vibration of his words in the contact between you. “This amount of force is good.”

“It doesn’t sound very elegant,” you say, a little dismayed.

“Was Rome built in a day?” he replies, leaning over to inspect your expression, arms still wrapped around you. After he makes sure you’re holding onto the violin, he slips them around your waist and places a soft kiss to your forehead to smooth the lines. “When I started, I sounded like this too, you know.”

“Liar.”

“Don’t believe me?”

“How could anyone?”

Mozart presses his nose to your hair and exhales quietly. “It takes patience and determination. Both of which you possess.” And then, playfully: “And an excellent, benevolent, kind teacher. Whom you also possess.”

You charge up your battery with Mozart’s affection, resolved to resume this battle anew. You can’t let him down now when you’ve come this far. And he almost sounds…proud.

“Ready?” he asks when he senses the shift in your posture.

“Ready,” you confirm, and brace yourself for the next two hours of absolute cacophony.

/

You practice until you can feel your arms shaking, until you can feel the ache in your upper left arm. The joints of your fingers don’t fare any better; they’re almost as sore as your neck is.

Arthur takes one look at you—and laughs.

“Someone’s been busy,” he says, gesturing vaguely at your upper body.

Practicing, yeah. You agree. “It’s been tiring,” you say honestly.

“Then you should just tell him, you know?” Arthur says. “I’m sure Mo-kun can restrain himself for a few days.”

You don’t exactly understand what Arthur is talking about until you reach the piano room. Mozart takes one look at you—and then takes a second look, blinking.

His fingertips reach out to the underside of your jaw, just below the chin, on your neck. His cool touch is sweet, sweet relief—but also dangerous, dangerous temptation.

“It’s awfully red here,” he says. “You shouldn’t be pressing so hard against the chin rest. Part of the violin’s weight should be supported in your left hand.”

“Oh no,” you gasp, thinking back to Arthur. And literally everyone else you’ve passed in the hallway today, including Napoleon who had blinked, Isaac who had fled, Dazai who had smiled, and Sebastian—who stayed blank as ever.

Mozart tries to reassure you over the sound of your dignity departing forever. “It’s still early for you, so it hasn’t become a habit.”

/

Mozart starts cutting practice shorter and shorter. 

And you’re not getting any better. 

The more you play, the worse it seems that you sound. And though you’ve been practicing bowings and shifting like your life depends on it, you can hear when it’s out of tune, and it kills you.

Maybe Mozart is getting frustrated with your lack of progress too. Because over the course of three months, you two went from three times a week, two hours a day to twice a week, thirty minutes a lesson. At this rate, he might not even assign you a piece to play.

Usually Mozart would have told you by now, very bluntly, if he thought you were beyond hope. But even if he doesn’t, you can take the hint.

All those books you borrowed, all those scales you memorized, all those positions you learned—you don’t want it to be for nothing. Mozart’s time, that he spent on you, teaching you, being patient with you—you don’t want him to feel like he wasted it.

So before the first rehearsal of the next week, you practice ten hours a day. You go over three octave scales until your right arm refuses to stay above your waist. You practically go over the fingerings in your dreams, shifting in your sleep.

“Let’s hear it,” Mozart says at the next lesson after tuning your violin. He hands it back to you and sits expectantly on the piano stool, observing.

You take in a deep breath and place the bow on the string.

He doesn’t comment when your B goes sharp, but you and he both know.

Then comes the legato. You pray for smooth shifting as you work your way up. His eyes don’t leave your fingers.

But when you shift into fifth position, your body refuses you.

A stab of white-hot pain sheets up your left arm and hits your neck, leaving you still, not daring to move. Your shoulders lock in self-defense. You suck in a sharp breath, curling in with the violins till on you—the bow comes to a jerky stop on the E string.

Mozart has become deadly quiet. When you dare to look, his gaze is unreadable.

“What was that,” he asks. The fury in his voice is basically unmistakable.

“Sorry,” you quickly rush to appease. “Let me—I’ll start from the—“

Mozart takes the violin from you. And then the bow. And he looks right into your eyes and says, “No.” He says firmly. “No more violin for today.”

“But—“

“You were going through the material so quickly… How did I not notice?” he mutters to himself. 

And then he pins you with a glare and spins you right around, ushering you to the sofa. What you didn’t notice earlier is now clear in the way his voice trembles—he’s worried and upset.

“The way that you’re playing—the amount that you practice—is just asking for a chronic injury. You would benefit more from rest than practice at this point.”

“But,” you protest as he sits you down, “I don’t sound good.” Miserably, feeling disgraced with your shoulders and neck aching, you look down at your fingers and curse your body for betraying you. “I can hear how bad I am, Mozart. I don’t want to disappoint…”

Mozart kneels down in front of you, forcing you to look at him.

“You’ve improved every time we’ve met,” Mozart tells you earnestly. “You have consistently impressed me with how fast you learn.” He cups your face with his hands, pressing your foreheads together. There’s nowhere to hide from his words. “How can I be disappointed when I have such a hard-working student?”

“But…I sound worse than before,” you say in a small voice.

“That’s what you think. But in reality, your ear has simply improved. You can hear yourself better. Your standards are higher,” he says simply, facing off your insecurities just like that. “Now.” He frowns. “I was reducing our lessons because you were going at such a breakneck pace. And because I wanted to spend more time with you outside of violin. But that evidently backfired.”

“Sorry,” you murmur, genuinely remorseful.

He smiles gently and then releases you.

“The one who should be sorry isn’t you,” he says. “To think I let it get to this point. Lie on your front. I’m going to work out the kinks in your back.”

You acquiesce, meekly maneuvering onto the sofa.

“Where did you even get the idea that I would be disappointed?” Mozart remarks, carefully digging into the sore muscle.

“I didn’t want to—ah—waste your—time—“

Mozart’s fingers draw firm circles into the juncture between neck and collarbone. You tremble under his hands, feeling your eyes sting with pain and pleasure.

“I agreed to teach you,” Mozart says slowly, “because I wanted to spend time with you. How would that be wasting it? Silly.”

/

Mozart’s a bit of a worrywart. So some days later, after he stops fussing over your shoulders, you try your luck again.

“I’ve gotten this far. Won’t you still teach me something?”

Mozart looks thoughtful. Then he smiles at you, and leans down to place a soft kiss on your cheek.

“I’ll compose something,” he says. “And I’ll be your accompaniment.”

His hand rests confidently against your hip as he plucks the bow from your fingers. Then the violin.

“But what really comes first to you now?” he asks, pulling you close and frowning. “Don’t tell me you like the violin more than me?”

Seeing his almost-pout, you reach up to peck him on the lips. He makes a content sound in the back of his throat and keeps you there against him, tilting his head to deepen the kiss. Letting him have his way, you reach around him. He releases you, looking satisfied with your answer.

Your fingers close around the violin and bow.

“I like the violin,” you say, laughing, and make a run for it out the piano room.

“Wha—get back here!”

Getting to know your monkey mind

tldr: Spending several days in sensory deprivation, alone, with just the monkey in your head is extremely hard but teaches you a lot about yourself and how your brain functions. Misery is universal. Everything always changes and passes away. The causes of suffering are attachment and aversion. It's fruitless to get upset about or attached to something that will pass away eventually. Befriend your inner monkey.

The things I learned during a 10-day Vipassana course

1. How to fart very (!) quietly

2. That men are far more creative than women when it comes to building armchairs and thrones with meditation pillows

3. A ten days meditation course somewhere in the German outback would be a perfect setup for a horror movie.

Jokes aside.

The thoughts and realisations that one has during a Vipassana course and in the time around it, can easily fill an entire book (as Tim Parks shows in "teach us to sit still"), so please excuse me, if this text is a little long.

For the ones who do not know what Vipassana meditation is, please click here or here. There are a lot of reviews, stories, lessons learned out there (e.g. here, as well as at least a dozen YouTube videos on the topic) - go check them out if you feel like it.

I did a course following the teaching of S.N. Goenka. These courses are pretty much the same all around the world if you do it in one of the > 200 centres: the sound and video files, the timetable, the quality of the food and the fittings of the rooms. Even though, the setup does not change, the experience is always unique, so much as even one person taking the course several times will have a different experience with different insights each time.

So, where to start?

I want to first quickly summarize the basic idea of what is taught during the course (the cause of suffering) and then dig into a few aspects that I found particularly interesting: the parallel of meditation and psychedelics and the influence of meditation on the perception of pain.

The cause of suffering

Disclaimer: I don't believe in the existence of a non-physical thing as "a soul" – a non-substantial entity that exists independently of physical matter and/or that can be transferred from one physical body to another through reincarnation - but I clearly draw a distinction between the conscious and the unconscious parts of your brain. Within the Vipassana teaching, the believe in reincarnation is extremely important, as to explain why suicide will not save you from suffering.

According to the teaching, there are some basic principles:

1. Misery is universal - all humans suffer.

2. Everything constantly changes - every experience, every condition, passes away eventually.

3. External information enters the brain through our senses and immediately causes a physical reaction (change in heartbeat or breathing, feelings of heat or cold, pain, comfort, or any other physical sensation).

4. this physical reaction is subconsciously perceived and interpreted as "good/pleasant" or "bad/unpleasant" and this information is transferred to the conscious mind.

5. The conscious mind only receives this already processed external information - an evaluation of what is going on outside and reacts with attachment or aversion.

6. This leads us (humans) to constantly jump from aversion of unpleasant experiences to attachment to pleasant experiences and back.

7. Since every pleasant situation passes eventually, the attachment to it leads to suffering. And since unpleasant stimuli will always appear (and disappear), the aversion of these leads to suffering as well.

If this sounds weird to you, this jumping from attachment to aversion and back can be explained by checking out a typical Saturday morning:

You lie in bed and don't want to get up, because it's comfortable (attachment), but then you get hungry and want to get rid of this unpleasant feeling (avoidance), then you probably overeat because the food tastes so good (attachment) and you start complaining about your aching stomach. Your partner makes some nasty comments about your eating habits which hurt, and you get mad (avoidance). To leave the situation, you go on to the next step of taking a shower. The shower is warm and comfortable, and you don't want to leave it (attachment). You step out of the shower; the air is fresh and uncomfortably chilly, and you quickly start to rub yourself dry with a towel to get warm again and so on and so on.

Of course, nothing is wrong with what's going on during these first hours of a Saturday morning. This is just an example of how deeply rooted the evaluation of situations into the categories of "pleasant" and "unpleasant" is.

This is exactly, what one is confronted with during a Vipassana meditation course - the constant habit of your mind seeking pleasure and avoiding discomfort without any possibility to change the situation you’re in for the duration of the course.

The effects of sensory deprivation

10 days without vocal or non-vocal communication, without books, music, entertainment, sports. Reading and writing was forbidden as well as performing any sexual activity or a change of environment by leaving the area around the centre. This means a strong sensory deprivation that appears to be rather extreme in contrast to our "modern life" that's overflown by information and distraction. The only stimuli that one encounters are occasional walks on the area of the centre, two meals a day and a lot of tea. On top was the fact that the only real "me-time" than one gets are the 15 minutes locked in the bathroom while taking a shower. Everything else: sleeping, eating, meditation and recreation outside is shared with others.

Usually we are used to immediately distract us when things get uncomfortable: We check our phone as soon as we are bored for 5 seconds at the bus stop, we prefer watching a movie when we should actually study for an exam, we quickly get mad at the people in front of us in the queue at the grocery store because they are so f***ing slow. We get easily irritated by others, we never truly experience boredom, and we never check what’s happening within our bodies because we’re so focused on the outside world.

As soon as one is forced to shift the focus towards the inside of the mind and the body, one realizes this voice that's constantly talking.

The tasks during the meditation are quite simple: focus on your breath (1st day), focus on the area of your nose and upper lip (2nd day), focus on the area of the upper lip, feeling the touch of the breath (3rd day), leading this focus from body part to body part starting from head to feet and back (4th to 10th day). But this becomes incredibly hard when your mind constantly jumps from one thought to the other like a monkey jumps from branch to branch. This voice that keeps on jabbering consistently is able to talk you into anger, paranoia, lust and most importantly, into the conviction that what you do right now (sit on the floor and try to focus on your breathing) is definitely and absolutely unbearable.

Whenever the voice talks, one usually automatically follows it and within seconds, the focus is drawn far away from the breath or the physical sensations and after a few moments to minutes, one realizes what just happened and tries to pull the attention back to the task of observing the breath, just to notice a few moments later that the mind is following the prattling again and so on and so forth. This becomes very frustrating and I personally experienced the task of pulling your focus back without getting mad at myself as incredibly hard and very exhausting.

But this is exactly what meditation is all about: Learning how to keep your mind focused, learning how to notice subtle, changing sensations within your body, and most importantly: observing everything that’s happening while remaining equanimous.

 Besides leading me into frustration about my incapability to keep up my focus, the sensory deprivation had the following effects for me:

Improved vision, hearing and sense of smell. I missed my partner equally as I missed time alone by myself. I also missed small interactions with others – a smile, a gesture, a soft touch of comfort when you see that someone else goes through a rough day.

And after a few days, I felt the strong urge to express myself through writing, which is quite interesting because normally I spend more time consuming other people's content than producing anything myself. This urge is the reason why I’m writing this blogpost right now.

Now, I wish to dig deeper into two more specific aspects, that appeared particularly interesting to me.

It’s a psychedelic experience

Don't get me wrong: I'm far from calling myself “experienced” with psychedelics. I don't know very much about the different substances, their effects on the brain or the vast variety of experiences they can trigger, but I took LSD a few times and I know some stories told by more experienced people, so I guess - keeping my psychological background in mind - it's valid that I claim the following:

One major task of our brain is to filter the incredible amount of information we encounter every moment. This is very important, because it allows us to function in an otherwise constantly overwhelming environment. It's important for the brain to be selective about the information that reaches conscious awareness. Psychedelics, to some extent, turn off these filters which leads to an increased sensitivity towards stimuli and changes the way these stimuli are processed in the brain. This is also the reason why it's rather exhausting to take psychedelics - the mind has to process a lot more input than normally.

What happens during meditation is the following: The sensory deprivation and the focus on the observation of physical phenomena on the surface of or within the body (breath, heartbeat or sensations like tickling, warmth, cold, itching, pressure, pain or whatnot) enables the conscious mind to perceive the otherwise suppressed "random noise" that is constantly produced by the sensors of the body. This random noise occurs for example through spontaneous action potentials produced by neurons. Action potentials, necessary for the conduction of information are stochastic phenomena. With every stimulus the probability of the formation of an action potential increases, the stronger the stimulus, the higher the probability. For a notable sensation, many action potentials have to happen at a time. From time to time, action potentials happen, even without the presence of a stimulus which leads to a sensation without an actual cause - random noise. This happens within the sensory cells as well as in the neurons that conduct the information to the brain. This noise is subconsciously suppressed and normally not perceived by the conscious mind. The same goes for sensations in body parts that are not important to being consciously payed attention to at a particular moment. For example, there is no necessity to feel the pressure of the seat on the back of my thighs or the sensation of a slight coolness in my feet while I'm focused on talking to a person or writing this text right now.

The conscious (and non-judgemental) observation of these usually supressed sensations within the body means, as mentioned above for psychedelics, basically turning off the filters of the brain.

When you close your eyes, you never see just pure blackness. Your brain constantly produces shapes, colours, patterns, movements or entire pictures which you can observe if you watch closely - again - they are just random noise. From day 3 or 4 on, whenever I went to bed at night, as soon as I closed my eyes, I had visual sensations that reminded me a lot of what my brain created on LSD: I saw fractals, bright colours and moving structures that made it hard for me to fall asleep. Also, my sleep was heavily disturbed. Sometimes, I could not tell apart whether I just woke up in the middle of the night or whether I just got out of a meditation session. This felt exhausting, like there was a lot for my brain to process. But despite this somehow disturbed sleep, I felt awake and alert during the day. S.N. Goenka claimed, that a regular meditation practice reduces the amount of sleep needed and there seems to be scientific evidence that this is true.

What is pain?

According to the International Association for the Study of Pain, pain is "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage". This definition is outdated for several reasons (please check out the website for further details) and currently under review. The newly proposed definition is as follows: Pain is "an aversive sensory and emotional experience typically caused by, or resembling that caused by, actual or potential tissue injury".

In my opinion, both definitions do not sufficiently explain the experiences that one might have while sitting on the floor meditating. Pain accompanies the entire experience of a 10 days course. For some it's the back or the butt, for others (like me) it was mainly the knees that drove me crazy because they almost constantly hurt very, very badly up until the point where the pain was still there in the morning after 6 hours of sleep.

But it wasn’t as simple as that. One part of the meditation practice is to closely observe so called "gross" sensations like pain very closely for 1-2 minutes and check if any other sensation can be identified. One quickly notices that the simple "my knee hurts" sometimes turns into a far more differentiated "in this part of the knee, there’s pressure, in another spot, there’s heat in addition to the pain and in another part, a throbbing pulse within the tissue can be felt" and so on. And, from time to time, just by simply putting the focus of attention onto an are in a muscle or limp that's screaming with pain, the pain goes away. It simply vanishes. It's like these moments, when a crying toddler is asked " what's the matter? " and immediately stops crying, maybe out of confusion, maybe because of the realisation that there was actually no reason to cry after all.

Physiologically, this does not really make sense. But, according to the theory behind the Vipassana teaching the cause of suffering is not the sensation itself, but the interpretation of the sensation, the judgement of "good/pleasant" and "bad/unpleasant", as described above.

What does this mean, that at least some pain or unpleasant sensation can be "thought away"? Sometimes, this effect can be explained by relaxation because tension can cause pain. But apparently, there’s more to it than just the capability to relax in uncomfortable situations.  

It is scientifically proven that people who do meditate regularly have a higher tolerance for unpleasant feelings like pain induced by thermal heat (I have no access to the full article, but here’s a talk by Kelly McGonigal about the paper). Non-meditators showed a stronger activity in “evaluative regions” (prefrontal cortex, amygdala and hippocampus) than meditators. Meditation practitioners however showed reduced activity in these “evaluative regions”, but higher activity in brain regions like the insula, the anterior cingulate cortex and the thalamus, that are “primary pain processing regions”. This means that meditation practice enables the decoupling of the sensory and the evaluative component of a painful stimulus.

A very good and vivid example for a person who practices exactly this effect which leads to almost superhuman powers is Wim Hof, also known as “the Iceman”. He developed the so called “Wim Hof Method” that is a combination of breathing exercises, meditation and exposure to cold temperatures and he broke several world records, including hiking past death-zone of the Mount Everest in shorts and sandals without oxygen supply, running a marathon in the Sahara desert without drinking water and sitting in a container filled with ice for almost two hours without his core body temperature being lowered. He’s an impressive person and if you haven’t read about him yet, I encourage you to do so. His method can be performed by everyone and results can be seen immediately.

So, what is pain? I don’t know. But these examples show, how big the influence of our mind is on the way we perceive the world around us. Far more is possible than we usually think. We might not have an influence on all the things happening to us, neither good, nor bad. But we do in fact have the chance to learn how to deal with them differently and thus not only become calmer but also happier, healthier and able to experience things beyond what we thought is possible. It’s worth a try.

 Let me try this again: The things I learned during a 10-day Vipassana course

1. I cannot change the people and situations around me, but I can change how I react to what I encounter. My reaction has an impact on myself. If I let any situation make me angry, I do harm to myself and might harm others.

2. It’s not realistic to expect my mind to be able to focus on something as simple and “boring” as my breath for 10 hours straight when I usually train my brain to constantly think of a million things at the same time, always have an overflowing schedule and a cluttered room as well as a cluttered mind. I first have to calm down some aspects of my life before I can calm down on the inside.

3. I learned to be compassionate with myself. I understood, why my mind acts the way it does and I started to befriend my inner monkey.

Recommended to watch:

A video about meditation and “flow”

A Ted talk about pain and mindfulness meditation

A vice documentary about the Iceman Wim Hof

Recommended to read:

Becoming the iceman by Wim Hof & Justin Rosales

Happiness – A guide to developing life’s most important skill by Mathieu Ricard

the Universal Forces Pulling us Together

Toogata Mirio x reader

-

“Baby... y’know,” You reached for one of Mirio’s broad shoulders with a feather light hand. He didn’t acknowledge your touch, but released the tension in his upper body beneath your fingers. With this reaction in mind, you fully slid your arms across his back, rubbing smooth circles into his shoulder blades. “I know things have been a lot lately,” Your hands moved to wrap your arms around him into a tight embrace from under his arms, face smushing into his back, between his shoulder blades. “and I know a relationship, no matter how rewarding, can be...” You took a deep breath, pausing to think over your words a moment more. “a bit taxing. If you need a break, I would completely understand. I’ll still love and support you every single step of the way,” You placed a soft kiss to Mirio’s shoulder, relishing in the relaxed sigh he emitted. “But if you need to take some time for yourself, and just for yourself, whether that be to cope with everything going on, or figuring yourself out after all you’ve just gone through, I wouldn’t hate you.”

“You wouldn’t?” He croaked out. You could tell he was on the verge of tears from the shaking in his voice.

“No, not at all. I would still love you, and I would still care about you. It’s because I love you and care about you that I think if you need some time to yourself, you should take it.”

“Thank you.” He whispered. You could tell the tears had finally spilled from his eyes. You kissed both of his wet cheeks, tightening your hug. He allowed himself one last bittersweet kiss from you. “I love you.”

“And I love you.” You echoed.  “Don’t be afraid of me just because you need some time for yourself. Even if we aren’t together, you can always reach out and talk to me. If you need something, I want you to know you can always rely on me.” Your fingers carded through his golden locks of hair. “And when you’re in a better place, if you ever feel like trying this again, just give me a call. Okay?” He nodded, leaning into your touch a little further.

“I will." He whispered to you, punctuating his sentence with a gentle kiss to your cheek. That’s a promise.”

-

Four years had passed since you last heard from Mirio. He was doing well for himself as a pro, using his quirk with the same incredible precision that he had in high school, almost as if he had never lost it. You supposed by that fact that Eri was doing well for herself too. Your mind drifted back to him again, the interview he gave on the local news playing on your television slowly turning to white noise as you did. This happened every so often, and each time you scolded yourself internally for being so foolish as to keep tying yourself to him. You had long since come to terms that you weren’t going to hear from him, but the last slivers of hope would always show themselves thinking back to the conversation you held shortly after he got out of the hospital. You really needed to let him go.

You changed the channel to some daytime soap opera, returning to filling out and filing paperwork for the office job you had taken at a hero agency after graduating. Maybe the life of a hero wasn’t cut out for you after all, but you figured you might as well put your knowledge of the industry to good use. The ambient noise of the television served well to keep up your workflow until it slowly began to lull you to sleep.

You awoke nearly three hours later to a shrill ring echoing throughout the walls of your apartment. And another. And another shortly after that. It took three rings to shake out of your delirious state before you recognized the sound as your telephone.

It’s gonna be that kind of night, huh?

You stared at the ceiling for a moment, debating whether or not you should even get up to answer it. There wouldn’t be any harm in saying you missed the call by mistake right? The only people that really contacted you were either old friends, coworkers, or the occasional relative. Surely they could just call back at another time. But that undying hope inside of you...

You shoved yourself off the couch, starting to despise yourself for being one of the last people on the planet with a working landline, and drearily pressed the phone to your ear.

“Hello?”

“Uh, hey, (Y/N)! It-It’s Mirio.” You nearly dropped the phone, deciding to rest it between your ear and your shoulder. “Toogata Mirio... Y’know, from high school. We went to UA together.” His audible apprehension made you smile. Same man as he’s always been...

“I remember you, Mirio.” You giggled. “How could I not?” Mirio’s heart swelled on the other end of the line from hearing your laugh again. He talked with you for hours, both of you maintaining giant dopey grins the entire time.

“I just called to catch up. So, how are things going at work?” It wasn’t until a moment of silence fell upon the two of you after a fit of laughter that he finally remembered why he had called in the first place.

“Hey, uh, so, it's kinda late..." You felt your heart drop to your stomach at the reminder that you'd eventually have to hang up the phone. "Would you maybe... want to hang out some time so we can finish catching up?" Your heart immediately perked back up, seemingly going from a complete still to nearly beating out of your chest. Your lips spread into a wide smirk.

“Mirio, are you asking me out?” You teased

“Hmm... That depends. Hypothetically speaking, would you say yes if I did?” He teased back.

“Yes, I’d like that a lot.”

“Great, I’ll pick you up this Saturday at 7?”

“Yes. Saturday at 7.”

“Great I’ll see you then.”

“Can’t wait...”

“Me either." Mirio stayed on the phone for a moment in a love-struck daze. It wasn't until he heard your soft 'good night' that he remembered something important. "Hey, wait!"

"Yeah?"

"Before you go,"

"Mhm?"

"Would you tell me where you live so I know, uh, just where to pick you up from?”

-

He had brought you to the roof of the fancy apartment building he lived in now. He had ordered takeout, having sonehow remembered your usual order from high school, and told you he wanted this to be a home-cooked picnic, but he would burn water if it was possible. Several hours had gone by, and the sun was now beginning to sink below the skyline, but you two remained on his roof, captivated by each other's conpany.

“-but it was always the same thing. The same weird undying hope that you still would want to see me again, even after I left you after I had lost my quirk. Even after I didn’t reach out to you the second I was back on my feet again like I should have, even after four years with no contact at all, and from there I guess I just knew I needed to call you soon or I might risk never hearing from you again. I couldn't have that..." He explained to you. You had never heard him be so sincere before. The only thing you could do was scoot yourself closer and rest your head against his shoulder. "And even then I planned that phone call for like a week and still screwed it up.”

“I don’t know how much you really could’ve screwed up.” You giggled, looking out at the sun settling below the skyline. “I’m here, aren’t I?” He threw a strong arm across your shoulders, squeezing you closer as he spoke.

"You are." He muttered to himself in awe. "You really are..." Silence fell upon you as the sky became various hues of scarlet, tangerine, and indigo. Mirio allowed himself to take it all in, staring at the watercolour sky, admiring this very particular moment for all that it had to offer. And you allowed yourself to admire Mirio. The way the evening glow kissed his skin and reflected in his eyes, and how bright and wonderful he appeared as he gazed out at the sky. You suuddenly questioned how you ever let this man slip away.

"You know," you snuggled closer into his side. "I missed you a lot..."

"I missed you too." He hesitates a moment before placing a kiss on the crown of your head. Both of you marvel to yourself for a moment about just how right it seems to feel. "Just being with you again makes me wonder how I managed to get by so long without you." He laughs, but you can tell that he's being sincere. Another moment of silence falls upon you as the sun finally droops below the horizon. "Hey, can I ask you something?"

"Of course you can." You shift your body so you're facing him with your chest pressing into his side. "What's up?"

"Are you mad at me?"

"Why would I be?"

"I've just been thinking a lot, even before I asked you out, and I realized that what I did really wasn't fair to you..."

"What do you mean it wasn't fair to me?"

"I shouldn't have just left you like that. And I shouldn't have avoided you, or took so long to reach out." You opened your mouth to speak, but he only kept going. "I just... felt so inadequate," He murmured. "without my quirk, you know? I had lost Sir Nighteye, and then I had lost this part of myself that I'd become so reliant on, that I..." He trailed off for a moment, looking remorsefully into your eyes. "I felt like I couldn't ever be enough-"

"Mirio." You cut him off. "I'm not upset with you. I could tell you needed space and it would only have been selfish of me to not have given it to you. And besides," You move closer, trying to make yourself as eye-level with him as you could. "You know how they say if you love something you should let it go? And if it comes back to you it was meant to be?" He nodded. "Well, you're here aren't you? Call it destiny or call it dumb luck, but I'm so glad you called."

And with that, he cupped your cheek in one of his large hands and kissed you. And when you kissed him back, it truly felt like the world around him could slip away. All that mattered was the feeling of your lips moving with his.

-

You didn't seem to realize just how much you loved being around Mirio until he was around you all the time, floating into your day to day life as often as he could. You began to cherish each moment you spent with him more and more, and they only seemed to keep coming as the days went on.

He began to spend a lot of time at your apartment. Months of knocking at your door at absurd hours, using the excuse that he was just so tired, and your apartment was so much closer to his agency than his own, or that his heater was down again and he wanted to "share your warmth," or even the occasional just because, his job was so busy and he wants to see you, or any world of other excuses persisted before you finally caved and gave him a key to your apartment.

"Now you can let yourself in, and finally let me sleep when I pass out over my paperwork for the day in a stress-induced coma." You explained.

"This is so great! Now I can just carry you to bed before you completely ruin your spine, and you're the first thing I get to see in the mornings before I go to work."

"Yeah, yeah." You grumbled, trying to hide the small smile you had. "Besides, most of your shit's here anyways." You gave him a small kiss on the cheek. "I even cleared out a drawer for you to keep your junk in."

"I have a drawer?" He asked excitedly.

"You have a drawer. A junk drawer to call your very own." Mirio excitedly stepped into your bedroom, opening the drawer you shouted was his to see the shirts he's left there folded neatly, exactly where you said they'd be.

"See, this is already going great." He remarked. His enthusiasm was becoming infectious, and the small smile you wore as you watched him became a full on grin.

"Yeah, now that you live here I ca-"

"I don't necessarily live here, think of it more as an extended sleepover!" One of your eyebrows arched curiously and he chuckled before adding. "That sometimes includes things like grocery shopping, and sex."

"So you mean like living here?"

"No-"

"So like living here part time?"

"That's close enough." He laughed, wrapping his arms around your waist.

"Well I guess if there's anyone I'd have an 'extended sleepover' with, it's you. So as lame as you are, I'm glad you're here..."

"Aww..." He gave you a quick peck on your pouted lips. "I like you too."

-

"Baby," You giggled. He stops what he's doing and turns around to shoot you a dazzling smile. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

"Absolutely positive." You laughed some more.

"Do you want some help with that?"

"No, just let me treat you right." He answered, feigning exasperation.

"You already do treat me right. You don't have to do all this because I'll adore you anyways" He ignored your comment, determined to do something nice for you since you'd been so overwhelmed at work.

You silently watched him at work, until a few minutes of content quiet later without turning to face you he speaks.

"Hey, can I tell you something kind of crazy?"

"Hmm, I love crazy. Tell me." He finally turns to face you, leaning back against the counter with his arms crossed.

"I really think that I'm in love you..."

You chuckled. The two of you still had never really put a label on your relationship, even after all this time. You never minded, knowing that with his job came a lot of risks. To you, the only thing that mattered was that you knew how you felt about him, and you understood how he felt about you in return.

"You're right..." You replied. His eyebrows knit in confusion. "That is crazy." His smile fell a bit. "Because I think I'm in love with you too."

His eyes lit up. You giggled as he strode to where you sat and lifted you into his arms, kissing your lips over and over again as he spun you around. "Hey, wait!" You managed to get out between kisses. "Do you smell something burning?" He turned around to see puffs of black smoke coming from the pan he had been cooking in moments ago.

"Shit, I forgot about that."

-

Shakes racked through your body. The cup of tea you had brewed earlier sat on the coffee table in your apartment, completely cold and practically untouched. Your eyes stayed glued to the LCD screen of your television. The temperature of the room was frigid and you sat shivering, wearing only one of his shirts.

None of this mattered, as they had basically broadcasted the moments before what could be his death live on national TV. The broadcast cut off at the worst part of it, likely due to villain interference, and your whole body had been frozen the entire time following.

You had no idea whether he was still alive or not. Or worse, that he was still alive and being beaten senseless or tortured by some criminal association in a dingy basment for whatever cruel reasons they may have held.

God, three years at UA, a job strategizing world-saving missions with one of the best hero agencies in the country, and you still couldn't even begin to guess what sort of condition he could be in.

You would help the heros of your agency put together a mission to fix things if you were glued to the TV by your nerves alone.

C'mon. You silently pleaded. Whatever universal forces that brought him back to me, please bring him back again. Let him out of this one alive.

You weren't sure how long you had sat there. Ten minutes? An hour? Three hours? You were freezing, and your spine began to ache from sitting hunched over waiting for the news broadcast to mention Mirio again, but you couldn't feel any of that. You sat there for god knows how much longer when you heard your front door open and slam shut. You turned your head in a panic and saw him.

He was still in his hero costume, and bruises were beginning to bloom all over his body, but he was home.

"(Y/N)?"

"Mirio!" You bolted towards him and threw your arms around him. "Oh my God, I was so worried." You managed to choke out between sobs. "I thought you were gonna die." He began to rub smooth circles into the small of your back. "I'm so happy you came home."

"I'll always come home. I would move heaven and earth to keep you by my side of that's what it took."

"I love you so much." You sobbed into his shoulder.

"I love you too."

"You should probably clean up." You sniffled. "You wanna take a shower 'n I'll bandage up your cuts afterwards?"

"That sounds nice..." He mumbled "Join me?"

Her Master and Commander: Chapter 12

No curse AU smut. The infamous Captain Hook buys a pleasure servant to keep him company on a long journey, only to learn that she is a princess, sold into slavery by an evil queen. A dark!Hook fic.

So first of all I am not technically back yet. GoT season isn’t quite over so I’ll be working on Jonsa fics for a bit longer, but this insane idea came to me (because I possibly have a brain tumor or something) and I knew how much you guys deserved this.

As for what this is... I have no fucking idea. By far the most fucked up thing I have ever written in my life. In fact, I have read a lot of fanfiction and I am confident in saying it is definitely up there with most fucked up of all time. This is like some cheese-before-bed-while-on-period-hentai-sex-nightmare shit. I cannot express to you enough how intense this is. There is something wrong with me. I don’t even expect anybody to like this because it’s so out there but whatever. I accept the shame.

WARNING: This fic contains severe dubcon, extreme penetration aided by magic so like this is no your average EP, not exactly a enema but like pretty much only more fucked up and THERE ARE NO TAGS FOR THIS FILTH and I am so so sorry. Expect the worst and feel free to bail at anytime.

Btw, I know this is not how anatomy or physics or fucking eclipses work but I really went high fantasy with this one so deal with it.

This fic is also available on ff. net and Ao3.

Chapter 12: That’s Some Fucked Up Black Magic

Months past on the Jolly Roger. One morning Emma came of the captain’s quarters to see snow falling from the sky in magical little flurries. In the distance she saw a white strip of land passing by. Killian told her it was Arendale. Emma furrowed her brows. Arendale was more North than the Northern kingdom. Where could they possibly by headed

Weeks past, then months again. The days rolled on, tumbling sunrise over sunset into the perilous beyond of an apparently empty sea. It was cold for a long time. Every night the chill would seep into Emma’s bones and Killian would stay up all night tending the fire.

Finally, after at least an entire season, the weather started to turn. The sun grew hot and bright and the clouds parted to reveal a clear sky. Emma now found herself sweating through her corset in a way that made her feel awful. Instead she wrapped her breasts in muslin and wore one of Killian’s black shirts with the sleeves cut off, secured at the waist to a red skirt with a large brown leather belt.

The heat persisted for a few weeks until finally the crow’s nest announced the appearance of land. Emma dashed up the steps to the upper deck and as fast as she could take her. “Where are we?!” she gasped at the captain.

Killian was smiling happily. “Can you see it in the distance?”

She looked. Far off on the horizon Emma could just see something glimmering like a star. “It’s... shining.”

“Yes. Gold tends to do that.”

She looked at him in confusion.

“Emma, have you ever heard the legend of El Dorado?”

She scoffed, “Of course. It’s a myth sailor’s tell in whorehouses.”

“Aye. A myth. That’s what I thought. But, turns out,” he said, taking a swig of rum from his flask, “I am the greatest pirate on the high seas. And many years ago I discovered the city of gold.”

Emma watched the sparkle in the distance grow brighter. “Is it all true? They practice black magic?”

“Aye. The El Doradians worship ancient heathen gods of rage and sex. They’re rituals involve rape and blood sacrifice. It is a very dangerous city. We’ll have to be careful.”

“If it’s a dangerous city then why on Earth are we here??” Emma bit out spitefully.

Killian sighed, brushing his nose with his thumb. “The truth is Emma, I bought you for... a nefarious purpose.”

Emma sent him a sarcastic expression, “No.”

“Indeed.” Killian said seriously, missing her insinuation completely, “The pleasure of gave you, the countless orgasms, long, excruciating orgasms--”

“Yes, captain , you are very talented.”

“Well it was supposed to be a ruse so that I could use your body for an ancient and powerful ritual that would involve impregnating you with dark magic producing a monster that will defeat my greatest enemy.”

“WHAT?!”

“Yes, it’s rather gruesome. But the good news is I won’t have to hold you down because I have thoroughly seduced. Aren’t I clever?”

Emma slapped him hard across the cheek, “You tricked me! You made me think that you cared for me!”

“Emma, I do care for you!”

She went to slap him again but he caught her arm with a dark look in his eye. “Clearly not as much as your revenge.”

“Did it ever occur to you, princess, that my revenge is the same thing as your safety? With the Dark One dead the Dark kingdom will fall, along with it’s prince. Your parents will be free of their deal and you’ll be free to marry who you like.”

“Oh, Killian,” Emma begged, “I know that this sounds like an easy solution but dark magic isn’t the way. There are always consequences.”

“Emma you don’t understand. El Dorado isn’t another kingdom, it’s another realm. It’s rules are different from the Enchanted Forest. Here, there is no dark magic, only black magic. It’s powered by there gods who aren’t evil here, but revered. It’s how their society works. Anger and lust are virtues here.”

With an incredulous look she implored him to tell her what he was leaving out.

Killian scratched behind his ear nervously, “The thing is... they’re a tad misogynist.”

“How misogynistic?”

He winced, “According to their religion women were put on earth to sexually please men. It’s what they do, all day, everyday, anytime they’re desired. They also operate on a caste system, so some women are considered communal property and can be taken by anyone at any time. The result can be... a bit disturbing.”

“So they’re just raped in the streets?!” she said in horror, trying not to be aroused by the idea. Killian had turned her into a very sick girl.

“Well, not all the time. There are flowers that grow everywhere called fire flowers. Their magic causes men and women to crave sex constantly. If they go without it too long they get violent. Which isn’t good since the flowers also case men to have fifteen inch cocks.”

“No, they don’t.” Emma said rolling her eyes. The light had grown dark with dusk approaching and the gold light was getting closer by the minute. “That is a myth that lady’s maids tell late at night because they are silly little girls. A man couldn’t fuck any woman with a fifteen inch cock.”

“They can with magic. When women step on this island their bodies change so that they can take it.”

“But it would hurt!”

“Well I hear it’s a little difficult to breathe if you don’t arch your back enough but I assure you it’s quite pleasurable. Imagine your favorite spot lining your walls all way up to here.” He slid his fingers from her crotch to the spot just below her cleavage. Then he grabbed her puller her to him facing out. He put his hand on her stomach, “You see, their pregnancy ritual is unlike any other. The man needs a long cock so that he can cum directly inside the womb.”

“That is not how the human anatomy works!”

“It is here.” he said insistently. “He then fills the womb with so much come her belly starts to bulge. He fucks her some more and the flowers make pain cause pleasure so he makes her come which hurts more, which makes her come until finally he fills her with as much as necessary. Now he can barely fit because her ass is full too.”

“With what?!” Emma shrieked.

“Come! On the island men can come continuously for half an hour. He puts a couple of liters in her ass before he starts filling the womb. She has to be completely full until she looks around ten months pregnant. In a month she’ll be ready to give birth, usually to quadruplets.”

“That is the most repulsive thing I have ever heard!”

“Don’t be silly. I told you, pain brings pleasure here. You’ll enjoy every second of it.”

Emma turned around “What the hell makes you think I’m doing that?!”

“Emma, we have a solution to all our problems. We love each other, the ritual is harmless and notoriously enjoyable. There is no reason why we can’t make a monster who will destroy both the Dark One and his wretched son. I can take you home and--”

“And what?! And I can marry you?! Hook I can’t marry a pirate, what good would that do my kingdom? You’ve murdered, you’ve destroyed villages. You’re a criminal. You can’t sit next to me on the throne.” Emma blinked. How had those words come out of her mouth? It felt like she believed them, but how could she? Her parents had taught her that love was more important than anything else, but was the love of her kingdom more powerful that her love for a pirate? The look on his face was heartbreaking. He looked as if she had struck him. He was shocked. Did he believe what she said?

After a moment, Killian’s face grew dark. He grabbed her roughly by the arm and walked her briskly over to the railing. “The sun is setting.” he said, “The next time it rises it will be nothing more than a ring of gold and will stay in the sky for a month. Tomorrow we will perform the ritual which will likely take all day. You’ll be pregnant for a month, and then you will give birth to a magnificent beast capable of destroying our enemies. If you resist, I will tie you down. If you somehow cause the ritual to fail, I will spend the next month fucking you with my fifteen inch cock and I will fill you with so much come you won’t be able to physically move. Do you understand?”

Emma gulped. What had she done? The pirate had gone mad with jealousy. She thought of a place fueled by black magic. It would make him worse. More angry. More violent. A month was a very long time. But she had nowhere else to go.

KEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEK

El Dorado was truly incredible. Emma marveled at the architecture. Great pyramids made of gold soared high into the sky. The streets were filled with vendors selling strange meats and gorgeous fabrics. Everything was adorned with gold and jewels. Killian took her to the top of a pyramid where he had rented a beautiful apartment. She explored the rooms that wound through the top point of the pyramid. It was an incredible place. The bedroom had a large balcony that looked over the city far below. As night fell, the lights on the ground shined brighter than the stars. This realm was much more advanced than the Enchanted Forrest.

She managed to drift to sleep, reluctantly sleeping Killian’s arms. She tried not to acknowledge the hope in her heart that the foolish pirate’s plan would work. But what would she have to go through to get it.

KEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKE

The next morning Emma woke to darkness. She walked out onto the open balcony and breathed in the cool springlike breeze. The weather was perfect here. In the sky was the sun concealed completely by the moon save for a thin rim of gold. She had been dressed in a humiliating garb. She wasn’t allowed anything but band of gold medallions around her waist holding up two thin swaths of fabric, one for the front, and one for the back.

Killian had said he would be walking in the pleasure gardens which were filled with fire flowers. Apparently it would only take a few hours for his body to change. Hers was changing too. He’d filled the entire room with the bright orange blooms. The men felt rage and lust, but she felt no anger. Only the endless stream leaking out of her. She felt empty. Her body ached for stimulation. And just then, he wrapped his arms around her from behind.

“Killian--”

With a growl the captain pulled Emma onto the bed and put her on all fours. “I was thinking, perhaps the reason you don’t want to do this is because you actually want to be with Baelfire.”

“Killian, don’t be ridiculous.”

“Oh, it doesn’t sound so ridiculous to me. I mean, he’s a prince. Prince’s are gallant and honorable. They do don’t to their princesses what I’m about to do to you.”

She heard trouser come off and felt the head of an enormous cock at her entrance. She cried out in fright, “No! Killian you can’t! That’s... that’s...” He chuckled darkly, straightening his back, “Too big for you? Yes, it is. It’s astoundingly large, isn’t it? Four inches thick, at least.”

“Hook, there is no possible way that I can take that without pain. It will kill me!”

He laughed, spanking her hard, “Pain feels like pleasure. And your body has been altered. Your anatomy is different.”

“This is insane!” she sobbed.

“This has to be done,” Killian lined himself up and guided her upper body down to the mattress. Emma took a deep breath. “You need you arch your back.” he said, forcing her into an extreme position.

He forced his bulbous head past her lips and she immediately felt the stretch. She sobbed. “Shhhh...” he cooed, “It’s alright, you can take it. I promise it won’t hurt. You’ll feel it, but it won’t hurt. You’re very wet.” She whimpered as he forced himself deeper. Inch by inch he penetrated into the depth of her body. It was as if his cock never ended. She felt him press against a wall of resistance and she winced at the pleasure pain it caused. Her body was quivering around him. “I-is that all of it?” she asked hopefully.

“No. It’s only half.”

She cried out as he pushed past the wall, somehow going deeper than should have been possible. Emma was making helpless noises now. They were loud. It was an agonizing feeling to have a four inch wide, rock hard cock buried at least elbow deep. How was she alive? How did it not hurt? She could literally feel him in her stomach. She was stuck like a pig, completely unable to move her body, too overloaded with physical sensations to move her limbs. But most shameful of all, the amount arousal that was pouring from her body was immense. Her thighs were dripping like a leaky faucet. Her walls were pulsing and aching for him to move. “No more!” she begged. “Arch your back more.” Emma moaned as he pushed the last few inches in. “There you go, princess.” then he burst into a fit of laughter, “Darling, you’re so full. Tell me how it feels.”

Emma tried to respond but couldn’t speak. Every time she took in a breath she could fell cock pressing against every single part of her. He spanked her several times until she said, “I feel stretched!”

“Can you move?”

She shook her head.

Killian laughed giddily. Without warning he pulled out and slammed his cock into her so hard it knocked the wind out of her. He fucked her deep and fast, making her bottom half slam into his hips hard enough to bruise. Her eyes rolled back into her head at the pressure instantly started to build but he stopped after just a few seconds. She sobbed at the lack of sensation. She wanted more. He spanked her several times, the tight sound echoing around the walls. “This dirty pirate is going to fill you with his come until your body runs out of room. And then your precious prince can have the filthy rag that’s left.”

He wasted no time in fucking her like a fucking machine. It was surreal. Her body was somehow taking him, but just barely. He was pounding into her so hard and so fast she felt like nothing more than an abusable toy. The pressure suddenly exploded inside her and she came so hard she thought it would literally kill her. As her body shook uncontrollably her pussy clenched around his massive cock and water poured from her like a river. The pleasure inside her grew until the spasming muscles became blindingly painful. When it finally released her she gasped desperately for breath. Killian didn’t stop fucking her for even a second. He brought her to orgasm in just seconds, this one just as painful as the last, and fucked her through it, sliding through her clenching walls in a way no human man should be able to. The pain felt like pleasure indeed. Every time his cock would push extra deep it would trigger another orgasm and another until they began to overlap. Her body fought it like pain which made it agonizing, but as soon as it stopped she wanted more.

When Killian turned her on her back he slowed down. He kissed her passionately and said, “Watch.”

Emma looked down her bare body to where is join hers. He very slowly entered her and her eyes widened as she took in the sight. His cock was as thick as his arm and as long as a small sword. She trembled around it as it went deeper and cried out as her stomach bulged with it’s girth.

“Look at that.” he chuckled. There was nothing but a sick darkness in his voice and eyes. He pushed in further and angled up so that the bulge forced her back to arch. She moaned pathetically.

“It’s feels too big. I feel like I’m going to burst.”

It feels that way but you won’t, I promise.” He then began fucking her slowly, never taking his eyes off the moving bulge that proved his utter domination of her body. Sometimes he force her into an arch just to hear her beg for mercy. He fucked hard until he was ready to come and then he quickly put her back on all fours. Somehow, his cock slipped easily into her virgin ass. Her body shivered as he pushed it in halfway and with a few pumps began to release his seed.

His body spasmed endlessly and Emma began to panic as she felt the amount of hot come growing steadily inside her. Deep inside, in a foreign place, she began to feel full. He had said she needed to take two liters, but she didn’t know how much that was. The presseure built gradually until it was making her wince.

“I’m getting full.” she said worriedly.

“It’s alright,” he grunted, “It won’t hurt. Men and women from our world do something similar without the magic of pleasure pain. You’ll be stretched to your limit but you’ll be fine.”

As minutes past she felt her stomach stretching. She gasped when her hand felt the bulge growing in her belly. “My stomach! No more, please!”

“It’s alright Emma. You can take quite a bit more.”

He filled her, stretching her insides with a warm pressure until it felt like her gut was full of lead. There was so much in her it was as heavy as a bucket of water. Finally he pulled out and let her fall to the bed, but not before forcing a soft plug into her ass to keep it in. Emma slowly struggled to roll over. Her bowels were filled to bursting. She could barely move but managed to sit up against the ornate pillows of the bed. She put her hand on her stomach and ogled in amazement. How could there possibly be that much come inside her? It looked as if she were five months pregnant.

When she looked up, Killian was stroking his already hard cock.

“No!” she cried.

“Emma I have to fill your womb now.”

“With as much?” she asked, lip trembling.

“Twice as much, I’m afraid.”

“But I can’t! I can’t take you like this!”

He walked over to the bed and kissed her hard. She kissed him back, hungry for his lips despite her hate. When they parted he growled, “I will not let Baelfire have you. Now, get on all fours, it will be the best position for you.”

Emma sighed, but obeyed. There was no point in resisting now. With a full belly she rolled over and pulled herself up, sticking her as in the air for him. This time he could barely force himself in, her insides were so full of come,  but when he did he wasted no time. She could feel his long cock fucking her deep. Amazingly the pain from his immense girth pressing against her full bowels just made her come. When the pleasure resided the pain returned and sent her spiraling again. Sh came hard and saw nothing but white for what felt like hours. Her body welcomed his cock despite the tight fit. And then he began to come.

She could feel the hot liquid spilling inside her. Immediately the pressure caused her already large bulge to grow. This part of her body was much more sensitive to heat and she began to whimper, “It’s hot, Killian. It feels like it’s on fire!”

“Shh...” he managed, “The hot spring... it was extremely hot, but it didn’t burn you. You can take it. Let me fill you, Emma.”

She breathed, telling herself over and over that the magic of the island would protect her body. Even so, his cock was now taking up way too much space. Her bowels were filled, her womb was filled, and there was a fifteen inch pole plunged through her body. She could do nothing but let him pump her full of liter after liter of come. When he was finally done her pulled her up. She fell into him, unable to speak. His hands came down to rub her large belly. “Look at how full you are.” he laughed, “My little come keeper. I like it. I can put as much as I want in you and none of it comes out until I say so. Isn’t that right.”

“Please let me... my... ass is too full.”

“You want to expel. Not yet. It’s an important part of the ritual.”

“But it’s cramping.”

“Cramps are good. They make you more sensitive so when you come it’s more intense. Watch.” He gently pressed on her stomach her scream out as the pressure on her bowels blinded her with pain only to send her spiraling into an epics orgasm. Water poured from her and her body attempted to clench around the liquid inside her. Killian forced her to come this way several times just to prove a point, then he flipped her over and entered her slowly, but soon was fucking her hard and deep. The orgasms were ripping through her. Every time she thought she would pass out from the cramping her body would clench and come harder than before.

When Killian came for the last time a dark glint sparkled in his eye as he watched her bloat with his seed. In the end, Emma gave in to the curse of this evil island. She laid back and enjoyed him filling her past the point that she thought would surely kill her. She watched her belly rise. Her whole body was telling her she needed to release the pressure yet it survived the procedure.

Emma lay there, a vessel for a dirty pirate’s come. How could she ever go back to her old life now? Her body was undeniably his. Not only had he marked it inside and out, but he’d stolen her heart.

Killian came to lay beside her on the bed. His hand went straight to her swollen belly. “I wish there was a child in there.”

Emma whipped her head to him in fear.

“There’s not! This will be a baby monster created by ancient heathen gods of rage and sex. Much less frightening.”

“We can never have children. Where would we raising them, the Jolly Roger?”

“I don’t see why not!”

“And you’ll teach our sons to be gentlemen while stealing from and raiding villages?”

“Oi! A pirate’s life builds character and I’ll have know disparaging my profession from the woman stuffed to bursting with my come.”

“What happens now?” she asked with a wince. It hurt to speak.

“You need to expel what you can. It will help. You’re womb will stay full but the cramps will go away.” He helped her to the bathroom and after helping her clean, took her to bed. All night, Killian kept his hands on her swollen belly. She put her hand on his and felt a blush rise through her. It did feel like she was pregnant.

For just a moment, Emma closed her eyes and imagined she was carrying their child. A boy with black hair and blue eyes just like his father. She fell asleep to the image of her giving him a child.

The happiness she felt was troublesome and she knew it would be the death of her.

I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.

Two Sigma

Introduction

There's this thing in education called the Two Sigma Problem, which is the exact opposite of a problem. It refers to the fact that students educated one-on-one (or one-on-two) by a competent tutor will do two standard deviations better than students taught in a standard classroom. Or, in other words, the average member of a tutored class will get better marks than 95% of a taught class. This is important to people who work in education, partly because it shows how effective tutoring can be, but mostly because it gives a lower bound for the upper bound on education's effectiveness; that is, it's theoretically possible to do at least this much better. Much of the research done about education is motivated by a desire to bridge this gap, to achieve some of the positive effect of daily tutoring for everyone without the obvious impracticality of arranging daily tutoring for everyone.

To me, this is kind of like one-time pads. The thing everyone else seems to take away from OTPs is that they represent an ideal (if awkward and unscaleable) form of cryptography, and demonstrate the extent to which defence trumps offence in information security. The thing I take away is that, holy crap, there's a simple form of encryption which literally cannot be broken, and that's a really cool thing to know. Similarly, what I take away from the Two Sigma Problem is that tutored students do way better than taught, so teaching should be replaced with tutoring where possible.

So, long story short, I've been designing a sixth form in my head, based around the schooling equivalent of “why not build the entire plane out of black box material?”. My ideas are elaborated in the notes below: please judge for yourself if I've achieved enlightenment, gone mad or both.

Section I explains the school experience for students. Section II categorises the tutors involved, and explains what each type gets out of the arrangement. Section III lays out the ways such a utopian institution might be able to support itself financially. Finally, Section IV ties everything together by laying out a schedules for a typical day in Two Sigma Sixth Form College.

I: Students

Content

Having only a small number of subjects, and limiting the combinations permitted, makes scheduling far easier, and allows the compression of the school day.

Most subjects are quantitative and/or technological in nature. Courses are selected for minimal coursework (to ward against accusations that tutors contribute an unfair amount to students' coursework), high difficulty (everyone's getting As, may as well get them in subjects where it's most impressive), and useful in future life (because seriously, why wouldn't they be?). Everyone attending Two Sigma takes A-level Maths, and is strongly encouraged to take Further Maths for at least the first year.

The School Day

The school day proper consists of four hours spent with tutors, plus a one-hour break for lunch, lasting from 10am* to 3pm. Exact details are highly mutable, and liable to change based on evidence coming in, but my tentative outline would be one two-hour session, lunch, and then another two-hour session on a different subject.

Tutoring is done in open-plan rooms dedicated to the subject. Discipline and crowd control aren't a problem, since there are a maximum of two students per adult in a room; similarly, having multiple responsible adults present in the room at all times makes safeguarding a non-issue.  And when a tutor misses a session, it's easy to find a substitute.

Under typical circumstances, a student has two tutors for every subject they study. It would be possible for them to always have the same tutor – in fact, it would probably be more convenient for everyone – but this would risk students not being able to differentiate between disliking a subject and disliking a tutor. Switching tutors is common; a tutor being frequently nominated for switching is treated as cause for investigation.

Outside School Hours

From 3pm-6pm, students are encouraged to stay and study in one of the dedicated classrooms, each of which will have a few tutors hanging around to answer questions when necessary. Students are obliged to consult Google, and at least one other student, before bothering a tutor with questions during these hours, but having tutors present nixes the worst-case scenario where a student spends hours struggling with a trivial problem**.

During holidays, staff run activities and workshops designed to give students skills they can use in the real world. None are mandatory, but it's considered a good idea for students to attend at least ten days of supplementary activities a year. Topics include personal finance, University applications, cookery, computer repair, etc.

*Obviously, this isn't ideal; a perfect school day would start much later than 10am. Teenagers need their sleep! However, as I'll explain in the next section, some tutors put a high premium on being able to leave at 3pm, so 10am is the latest we could kick off; sometimes you need to give reality an inch in order to prevent it from taking a mile.

**True story: the person I tutor for the GMAT once spent a solid two hours trying to make sense of a practice question; when they brought it up during a session, I found that their confusion was rooted in mistaking a comma for a decimal point, and resolved it inside of a minute. (It turns out the convention in their country is to only start adding commas once numbers exceed six digits, such that 10000000000 becomes 10000,000,000 instead of 10,000,000,000. So they couldn't parse 5,800 as anything but 5.8)

II: Tutors

For the majority of tutors, a job at Two Sigma consists of four hours' work every weekday. Trying to get a steady supply of capable workers to agree to this may seem difficult; in this section, I will provide several profiles of workers who would jump at the chance.

Career Tutors

Career Tutors are tutors who want to make a full-time career out of tutoring. In my experience*, and the experience of people I've spoken to, there are three main reasons why this is difficult and awkward.

On weekdays, nobody wants a tutor before 4pm, since the schools let out around 3:30pm. Consequently, tutors' practical working hours are severely limited, and they have no ability to make their working hours match the standard 9-5 Mon-Fri schedule the rest of the world coordinates on.

Travel time cuts into work considerably. Most students expect tutors to show up at their home; travelling for an hour to deliver an hour's tutoring isn't uncommon.

Work is extremely unreliable, and getting it requires a talent for self-promotion.

All of these are issues which a 10-3 weekday commitment at Two Sigma ameliorates.

A weekday commitment, capped off by a few hours' private tutoring, makes something closely resembling a normal job.

At Two Sigma, a central attraction of the system is that students come to you. It's a running joke, and a sincere commitment, that tutors don't have to move their lower body between 10am and 3pm. Further, from 3pm onwards, they are free to use the campus as a meeting-place for private tutoring sessions**, letting them chain together several sessions without travel time between them. Tutors who want money uber alles will still rush off to tutor rich kinds in Kensington when the bell rings, but those willing to sacrifice income for convenience can still make good money with sessions arranged on-campus.

Working the 10-3 shift is a good source of connections and references tutors can use to get private work. If they want, they can also just straight-up ask their students for extra business; it's not allowed to tutor someone for pay in the same subject you've been assigned to tutor them for free***, but there's no rule against arranging to teach your Physics students origami. The steady income of the 10-3 shift does a lot to offset the volatility of private tutoring. Afterschool classrooms do more to bring down the variance: “Your private student cancelled at the last moment? Wow, sucks to be you. As a consolation prize, we'll pay you to haunt one of our rooms until 6pm.”

Scholarly Tutors

I've found that most adults – myself included – lack the capacity to spend more than four hours a day learning tech skills. At the same time, there are a lot of people who consider learning tech skills to be their top priority, and best way to advance their career. So what do they do with the rest of their time? One answer is “work a full-time job”, which is great if you can manage it, but some of us like our sleep and social lives. Another is “party!”, but that doesn't look good on a resume, and not everyone has the funds. A part-time job which meshes well with their studies is often the best compromise; Two Sigma does all it can to fill this role.

The tech-slanted curriculum lets Scholarly Tutors keep their low-level skills sharp while developing higher-level skills; teaching A-level Maths or Computing from 10am-3pm, then spending the rest of the workday building websites or tinkering with neural nets.

Two Sigma keeps rooms free for Scholars to work on tech skills from 3pm onwards. This makes setting up a routine for learning tech stuff easy, and helps ward against akrasia****. Working in the same room as other Scholars studying similar things also helps avoid getting stuck. The admins set up Schelling points on what topics and online courses Scholars 'should' be using (often setting up group discounts for courses which cost money), but everyone's free to ignore them.

To sum up: for Scholarly Tutors, Two Sigma is an excellent place to spend a year or so gitting gud before joining or re-joining the mainstream working world.

(This wouldn't just be for tech skills, of course. There are other important things which a person can't make themselves spend more than a few hours doing, and which mesh well with tutoring: “studying for the GMAT” and “developing educational resources” are two good ones. But the endeavour I'm most familiar with, and the biggest draw, would probably be the tech skills.)

Disabled Tutors

There are a lot of smart, capable people who are – for whatever reason – temporarily or permanently incapable of working a standard eight-hour day. Two Sigma is okay with this.

Some disabilities limit motion and physical activity. This is a big deal, because a lot of work (especially part-time) involves being on your feet near-constantly. For them, the promise that tutors won't have to use their legs from 10am to 3pm stops being a joke and starts being an accommodation.

Some impairments limit reliability: on a regularly irregular basis, the afflicted will wake up not having the energy to do the work they're typically capable of. In Two Sigma's programme, taking sick days on short notice is okay, since there are always enough other tutors that whichever students you stand up will be able to join someone else's tutoring group. Being able to come into work ~80% of the time is more than sufficient.

There isn't a hard-and-fast distinction between this type and the other two. A Disabled Tutor could decide to do their four hours, and then hang out in a dedicated classroom or learn some coding skills iff they have the spoons that day.

Refugees from Teaching

In the UK, conditions for teachers are pretty bad, and getting worse all the time. One person I know ditched a teaching career for tutoring after the stress of it drove them to a breakdown; I guarantee there are others. Two Sigma welcomes these people with open arms, and makes a conscious effort to avoid everything that frustrated them about their old profession.

Teachers who couldn't handle crowd control find no need for that in their new role: each classroom has one tutor whose job is to handle discipline in the rare event that discipline need handling, and everyone else can just educate. Teachers who spent hours of unpaid overtime planning lessons and marking work have those burdens lifted: Two Sigma encourages tutors to only plan in the vaguest terms so they can adapt to their students' needs, and a major upside of being responsible for only a few students is only having to mark a few students' work. Teachers frustrated by bureaucratic hurdles and contradictory dictats from the Department of Education are given the freedom they crave: Two Sigma gets good enough results that the government is willing to grant their agents unusual levels of leeway. In summary, teachers are finally free to teach.

(Technically, the Refugees fit in one the three already mentioned: most spend a term or two adopting a Disabled Tutor schedule while they find their feet and recover from burnout, then evolve into a Career or – occasionally – Scholarly Tutor position. But they're a large enough fraction of the intake that they deserve their own section.)

Recent Graduates

What Two Sigma needs in its tutors is familiarity with the subject matter and ability to get along with young people. For this reason, it hires a lot of its own students on graduation.

Some can't afford college, or want to pursue paths outside formal tertiary education; others want a laid-back job to fund their gap year adventures and look decent on a resume. If you got an A or above in the relevant subject(s), Two Sigma is willing to give you a shot; the fact that every student has two tutors per subject means that one of them can be new and uncertain without putting the student's academic life in jeopardy.

Like Refugees, Graduates will mostly evolve into Scholarly or Career roles, but like Refugees I thought they deserved their own section.

*I've come to the conclusion that doing low-level tutoring for a living is impossible, and that the tutoring company I work for is effectively a scam, but without the saving grace of benefiting the scammers. Joke's on them; I was only using them to get teaching experience and avoid suspicious-looking gaps in my work history.

**”Where do we go to do the private tutoring?” is far from a solved problem. Tutors are expected to show up at clients' houses largely by process of elimination: children won't be sent to a private place with a tutor for safeguarding reasons, and there's a shortage of good public places in which to arrange tutoring sessions, so the client's house is the only sensible option. If there were a safe, supervised environment where students could go to get multiple types of tutoring in a row (cutting travel time for them too), that would be a gamechanger.

***Principal-agent problem (with an actual Principal, no less): if tutors can be hired to help students with what they teach for free, they have an incentive to teach it badly during class time. There's also the possibility of corruption in a “take afterschool macrame classes with me and I'll put more effort into teaching you Chemistry” paradigm, but I don't think that's likely to happen; students don't try to bribe teachers for more support in the current system, after all.

****Fun fact: I wrote this section while procrastinating on a Udacity project.

III: How The Hell Do We Pay For This?

So here's the $64,000 question: how does Two Sigma Sixth Form College pay for itself?

The depressing answer is that it likely doesn't. My weird little thought experiment, in all probability, does not have legs. A standard sixth form has a class size of around a dozen students per teacher; a sensibly naive analysis suggests Two Sigma would have twelve times the personnel costs, and be completely unable to self-sustain.

But it's not quite as hopeless as it seems. From my current vantage point, the plan looks merely implausible, not impossible. I have three unconventional ways to save money, and six unconventional ways to bring in more.

Doubling Up

The original Two Sigma study freely equivocates between one-on-one tutoring and one-on-two tutoring; my experience confirms that if two students work together well, they can get all the benefits of a 1:1 session out of a 1:2 session. This might not work for every student or every subject, but it could drag the lethal factor of twelve down to maybe eight. Progress!

Low Pay For Tutors

None of the target demographics for tutoring are primarily motivated by money. Career Tutors want a reliable source of income which complements and facilitates private tutoring while mitigating the inherent risk; Scholarly Tutors want to learn tech skills (or pursue whatever other endeavour they have going on) while not starving; Disabled Tutors want a workplace which will accommodate spoon shortages. In addition, Refugee Teachers are relieved to work somewhere that isn't horribly dysfunctional; Recent Graduates are amazed that they're paid for their work at all.

This means Two Sigma can get away with paying tutors much less than equivalent teachers: I'm thinking of an hourly rate based on the London Living Wage, with a little extra for those who have an unusually high level of experience, take on extra responsibilities, or teach Further Maths. With these assumptions, a typical mid-level teacher's salary pays for two tutors, and covering the other six starts looking only moderately insurmountable. Let's keep going.

No Frills

The focus on tutoring gives Two Sigma cover to cut back on some things. Real estate is one. In Section IV, you'll see the mildly pathological lengths I've gone to to make sure every room is in productive use for as long as possible. Two Sigma doesn't need a sports yard, or shiny recreation facilities; the compressed school day and the two-hour sessions mean students who have a free period can just sleep in or go home early instead of hanging out on campus.

Equipment is another. Students and tutors bring their own laptops*; a few spares are kept in the back of the Computing and Further Maths classrooms, but most people don't use them.

More generally, anything done primarily to give the impression of competence is avoided. You need motivational speakers or pretty murals to inspire your students? Show, don't tell; a grade letter improvement in the first term is plenty inspiring. You need to look good for a brochure? Two Sigma's brochure is “WE GIVE STUDENTS 20 HOURS OF DIRECT TUTORING WEEKLY” and “WE CONSISTENTLY GET UNDERACHIEVERS A GRADES IN MATHS AND FURTHER MATHS”, scrawled on toilet paper in green ink. They fundamentally do not give a care. Cheap signalling is needed until and only until you have access to stronger signals; a reliable two-standard-deviation improvement is necessary and sufficient for ignoring other status games.

So, that's expenditures. How about incomes?

Taking Cuts From Private Tutoring

I hate to say this, mostly because I've had tutoring agencies take cuts from my income and it sucked, but taking cuts from private tutoring income arranged by or on Two Sigma is probably necessary. Make it a consistent, smallish proportion of gross pay – 20% sounds good – and compensate tutors by helping arrange sessions, giving them access to teaching resources, etc. Career Tutors aren't fond of this, but they know it goes to pay the salaries of themselves and their colleagues, and they see the positive effects on the young people Two Sigma supports, so they roll with it.

Government Grants

Two Sigma does a lot of things the government really approves of. The titular improvement in test scores and life outcomes aside, Two Sigma also narrows achievement gaps**, employs many people who would otherwise have a hard time making a living, and acts as a fascinating natural experiment into education. For these reasons, the college can expect more funding than a typical sixth form would merit.

Paid Access

Some people will want access to the community of Scholars without becoming a tutor. I'm mostly thinking along the lines of people with high-paying, full-time jobs who want to get through their tech-upskilling courses as quickly as possible. They – or their companies – pay Two Sigma to let them join the tech group from 7pm onwards. To make this option more attractive, some Scholars who've finished the relevant courses are paid to hang around and help their corporate counterparts like the tutors in an afterschool classroom. I think this is where a lot of the deficit is made up; corporate clients are where the money is.

In a similar vein, there's the possibility of allowing outside tutors to pay to use the campus as a tutoring hub, and of letting outside students pay to join the afterschool classrooms. I'm suspicious of both, because if they seem like the sort of thing other schools could easily set up if they worked, but there's no harm in trying.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Large companies, under external and internal pressure, plan and fund schemes to benefit society.

There's an organisation I do contract work for whose business model is based largely around this. They run free events for young people on a regular schedule; when their clients (which they get using the other parts of their business model) need to hit internal CSR quotas but don't have the time or inclination to plan anything themselves, they can sponsor one of these events and take credit.

I don't think CSR could be used to pay tutor salaries: not shiny enough to look good in a newspaper article or an annual report. But it could be used to fund workshops and other “enrichment activities”*** over the holidays. To sweeten the deal, participating companies get to see students in action, and offer internships to the best and brightest.

Corporate Workshops

Speaking of workshops: once Two Sigma has developed and A/B tested events on its students for free, it can start delivering the best of them to corporate clients.

There's more synergy with the last point than there seems. Obvious opportunities are obvious: CSR events act as free advertising (corporate representatives show up to admire the impact of their contributions and notice how useful workshops would be for their own people), and events for students act as opportunities to develop them for companies and vice-versa. But there's a subtler angle, which I don't fully understand myself.

The organisation I mentioned in the previous section has a thing where sometimes, instead of letting clients buy services and sponsor events separately, they offer the main service and the event sponsorship as a package deal. Somehow, this is more attractive to companies than either offer individually, and the organisation gets far more business than it otherwise might. I don't get it, but whatever alchemy is in play here can be invoked by Two Sigma.

Alumni Support

Two Sigma delivers life-changing support to its students. Hopefully, at least a few of them will be inclined to help make this opportunity available to others after they graduate.

I don't know how much, if anything, alumni could be expected to donate directly, but having a network of graduates supporting the college – and each other! – makes every other method of fundraising easier.

*I hate that people are taught programming skills on computers they don't own. In the current standard paradigm, students can go home after a day of programming Python scripts, only to be completely incapable of making any in their own time or for their own use. The only reason this makes sense is standardisation: teachers need to make sure all students' hardware behaves similarly, so they can push them all through the same content without hiccups. Needless to say, at Two Sigma this isn't an issue.

**The original study noted that tutoring, while benefiting everyone, brought the highest achievers' and the lowest achievers' scores closer together. This is a statistical artefact: it's a lot more feasible to improve someone's exam score by twenty percentage points if they're currently expecting 55% than if they're expecting 75% (or 85%!). But the apparent effect of Two Sigma's approach is improved educational equality, and that's what they feed the bureaucrats.

***That isn't a euphemism, I'm just incapable of making myself write phrases like “enrichment activities” without quotes.

IV: Schedule

Weekdays

6am: A few Scholars, deciding that they prefer learning before teaching, show up in the early morning and begin studying. Mostly, the campus lies dormant.

9am: Tutors arrive and briefly prepare their lessons.

10am: First session. A few students with free periods hang out in the Hall to socialise or study; most just don't bother to show up unless there's a lesson to show up to.

Noon: Lunch break. Tutors eat in classrooms, students eat in the Hall.

1pm: Second session. As with the first session, a few students with free periods hang out in the Hall, but most just head home early.

3pm: The school day ends. A few tutors call it a day and depart. A few more hang out in afterschool classrooms. Most set up in now-abandoned classrooms to tutor private students, or move to the Hall to study.

7pm: A number of Scholarly Tutors filter out of the Hall. Their numbers are matched almost perfectly by Corporate Scholars filtering in.

10pm: The school finally closes. (Scandalous claims that Two Sigma turns a blind eye to tutors sleeping in disused classrooms have been rigorously investigated. In particular, Two Sigma reaffirms its stance on exploiting the homeless and vulnerably-housed by offering them a place to crash along with a job.)

Weekends

It's a generally-held tenet of Two Sigma that nobody should need to work on the weekend. On the student side, the attraction of Two Sigma isn't that it pushes them harder, but that it can achieve extraordinary results with a normal amount of effort on their part. On the tutor side, similar feelings apply; in particular, Refugee Teachers and Career Tutors are attracted by the possibility of actually having a regular forty-hour work week while working on what they love.

However, some people want to do extra work, and Two Sigma accommodates them. Some students want more time in dedicated classrooms; some Career Tutors find private work most easily on the weekends; some Scholarly Tutors resist their four-hours-a-day limit by studying four hours every day; some Corporate Scholars are occupied all weekday every weekday, and can only show on weekends. Managing space is far less of an issue, since most people are on a Mon-Fri schedule.

The Schelling point for being at the college on a weekend is 1pm-5pm, a length of time chosen for not overlapping mornings or evenings, and (hopefully) being short enough to avoid contributing to burnout. Outside this span, the college is typically empty, unless some third party hired rooms for an event in the morning or evening.

Holidays

Over term holidays, Career Tutors have the run of the classrooms to teach private students*. For everyone else, the schedule is unchanged, except that their tutoring commitments are replaced by supporting students during extracurricular events.

*In my experience, tutees who want help during-and-only-during holidays are very common, and tend to pay above-average rates.

Closing Thoughts

I remind the reader, at the end of this essay, that my plans will not work. Most critically, the budget is held together with hope and fairy dust. And if it could be made to balance, there is probably some fatal flaw elsewhere in my plans*. And even if the entire scheme would actually work perfectly, we'll never know, because I'm not a headteacher or politician, I'm a twenty-four-year-old sentient balloon with delusions of grandeur.

But that's okay. The point of Two Sigma isn't to exist, it's to be a compelling vision of what a functioning education system might look like. The interlocking set of ideas that make up this ideal, while they support each other, are mostly independent; an eschaton to be immanentized piecemeal.

In particular, Further Maths has small class sizes**, attracts unusually dedicated and intelligent students, and has a massive impact on life outcomes (and probably on the state of wider society). If you were going to pick one subject in which to partly or completely replace teaching with tutoring, it would be this one.

*Like how I haven't looked into the evidence base I just spent 5000 words building a fantasy on. If I actually planned to do anything about this idea, I'd definitely have taken a closer look at the original study, and dug through the relevant literature for replications.

**This becomes more true as time goes on, due to the eye-watering attrition rate; the Further Maths A-level class I was part of finished its two-year run with about half the students it started with, and I gather that things are similar at other schools.