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cantwritethetword · 3 months

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That's Cheating

Fic Descript: During a training session, it's revealed that Miles is ticklish. Pavitr thoroughly enjoys the experience, and just when Miles thought it couldn't get worse, Miguel decides he wants to wrestle him. Surely Miguel wouldn't use Miles' weakness against him, right?

~ A/N - My first ever Into/Across The SpiderVerse fic !!!!

I absolutely adored these guys when they came on screen, and I finally have the fic idea to do their group dynamic justice!

By the way, this is also absolutely me being super self indulgent sdjsklhfkls cause I've had this whole scenario running around my head any time I'm training with these 3 specific people and it KILLS ME so I need to get it on paper lmao I'm so lee for so many of my wrestling friends it's not even funny jsdfhdfjhafk.

ALSO QUICK WARNING THIS IS A LONG ONE SDJHLKSDHAFLK ALL THE ONES WHERE I PUT ALL MY LITTLE LEE THOUGHTS INTO END UP SO FUCKING LONG LMAO APOLOGIES FAM IT'S LIKE ALMOST 3K

I hope it's good!

Enoy! ~

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Miles never turned down the chance to train with his fellow spider people. Since he first walked through the doors an was offered the chance to practice, Miles had grabbed the opportunity with both fists.

Not just because it was one of the few places he could properly use his skills and abilities to their full potential (without risking revealing himself as spiderman or injuring a civilian in the process), but there was something about training at the spider society headquarters that gave him almost limitless energy.

He wasn't sure how much of that energy was adrenaline, how much was power from the spider bite, or how much was just because he loved spending time with his favourite people.

But no matter the reason, this little quirk of his enabled him to continue sparring round after round when most would need a few minutes of reprieve between sets. And he would be lying if he said it didn't give him a little mood boost when the other spider people commented on his incredible stamina.

"Ugh, Miles do you ever get tired?" Pavitr groaned as he managed to flip Miles onto his back and clamber on top of the kid, pinning him to the ground. "We've been at this for like ten minutes straight!"

Miles grinned, his arms pushing against Pavitr's knees that were currently either side of his ribs to wriggle himself out. "You giving up already?"

"No way." Pavitr grunted, as Miles's movements had almost made him topple. "But I'll take a rest while you figure this out."

Pavitr, the asshole, decided to take this moment to shoot webs onto Miles's wrists - sticking them to the floor next to Mile's sides. Straining against the webs, Miles silently thanked the fact that it was Pavitr he was with. If this were an actual fight, Miles knew his face would currently be a punching bag.

But just because Pavitr wasn't going to injure him, it didn't mean there wasn't a threat.

"Come on Miles! Get out!" Pavitr teased, poking Mile's unprotected forehead.

The kid shook his head to try and get rid of Pavitr's annoying fingers.

Bad idea.

In the process of protecting his forehead, Miles had encouraged his friend to move his poking elsewhere. And it only took a few prods to Mile's neck for him to break into giggles.

"Agh- Pahahav-" Miles squeaked out before he could stop himself.

Pavitr stopped, an amazed grin across his face. "What was that?"

Miles froze for a second, realising just how severely his body had just betrayed him, before starting to thrash a little more desperately against the webbing trapping his hands.

"Are you ticklish?" Pavitr questioned with a teasy smirk, poking Miles's neck another few times.

"NO-!" Miles grunted, using every inch of willpower in his body to resist the laughter bubbling in his chest. "Don't!"

Completely ignoring Miles's pleads, Pavitr moved his prodding fingers down to Miles's collarbones.

And that was where the kid cracked.

"NOhohoho!" Miles squealed, shoulders trying their best to scrunch up and protect himself. "Pahahav stohohop!"

Pavitr beamed, absolutely ecstatic at his newfound discovery. "Oh my god, you are ticklish!"

"Shhhh!" Miles begged through his giggles, giving up on resisting his own reactions and focusing his efforts on preventing his ticklishness from becoming the newest piece of gossip.

"Why?" Pavitr laughed. "You're the one who's making all the nois-"

"What's this?" A voice chuckled from behind the two.

Pavitr paused his attack, and - after recognising who it was - Miles breathed a sigh of relief. Both because he could finally actually breathe again, and because the voice came from his old mentor - someone who already knew how ridiculously ticklish he was and hadn't told a soul.

Peter B, clearly having just finished a spar with someone by the looks of his flushed face and sweaty t-shirt, made his way to kneel down next to the pair before chuckling again.

"Ah, I see you've found Miles's little weakness."

Pavitr let out an indignant noise. "You already knew about this?!? And you didn't tell us?"

Peter shrugged. "Figured you guys would find out eventually, he's too ticklish to hide it for long."

"Peter!" Miles groaned. "Guys can we not talk about this right now!"

With a grin, Pavitr turned back to Miles. "Oh we can stop talking if you'd like..."

Before Miles could realise what Pavitr meant, ten fingers began tapping against the front of his ribs, and he was once again sent into a helpless fit of giggles.

"NOnononono Pahav people ahare gonna see!"

"Who would see?" Pavitr laughed. "It's just us over here; you, me and Peter."

"Plus Miguel, somewhere..." Peter added, looking around them for his friend. "But I doubt he's listening to your little situation kid, he's probably off doing Miguel things, as Miguel does."

Half expecting a beetlejuice moment at the three mentions of the guy's name, Miles flicked his eyes around the room (as best as he could - he was still pinned on his back) to try and spot Miguel. Thankfully, it seemed the slightly intimidating spiderman was too busy helping another pair of spiders with their match on the other side of the room.

"See!" Pavitr continued, digging a little harder into Miles's ribs. "Nothing to be worried about buddy!"

"IHIHIT'S STIHIHILL CHEHEATING!" Miles whined through his laughter, somehow managing to swallow the scream that almost burst out of his mouth at the sensation of Pavitr clawing into his sides.

"Ehhhhh..." Peter tilted his head with a grimace on his face. "Technically it's not, there's no specific rules against it."

Miles shook his head violently. "IHIHIT'S CHEHEHEATING!"

"You having so. much. energy. is what's cheating!" Pavitr responded, poking to emphasise his words. "But fine, let's ask Miguel."

Miles's eyes went wide, and his laughter turned to desperate begging. He couldn't possibly live through the sheer embarrassment of giggling like a child in front of someone as stone-faced and important as Miguel.

But no matter how many 'no's the kid strung together in rapid succession - a rather impressive display of his lung capacity to be completely honest - his pleading was fruitless, as Pavitr had already waved down Miguel, and the man was making his way over.

Thankfully there were a few seconds of rest until Miguel arrived that were completely tickle-free, so Miles had a chance to somewhat compose himself. Still, he knew that he would need much longer to reduce the redness his face had taken on in the last few minutes of torture.

"Yes?" Miguel said as he knelt down, one eyebrow slightly raised at the position the two boys were currently in.

"Is tickling illegal?" Pavitr asked genuinely, much to Miles's surprise. He was expecting some kind of teasy grin shot in his direction, but it seemed Pav was just as interested in Miguel's answer as he was in taking Miles apart at his fingers. Perhaps this wouldn't be so bad.

Even more to Miles's surprise was the quiet chuckle that escaped Miguel's mouth.

"Technically not, why?" Miguel responded, a small (but definitely present) grin on his face.

"Oh no reason..." Pavitr smirked at Miles (who was quickly realising he spoke too soon about how easy this interaction would be). "Just that I found out Miles was ticklish and wanted to try and see if he would submit because of it."

Miles could feel his face flush even redder than before, and he couldn't even cover his cheeks cause his damn hands were still stuck. So he resorted to rolling his eyes above his head to avoid looking at anyone for the remainder of the conversation.

Miguel once again let out a breathy chuckle. "Well, I haven't seen it happen before, and we're about to finish up the official training session... But we can always find out later."

That last comment snapped Miles's face back into Miguel's line of vision.

And, if this whole situation wasn't already flustered enough, Miles could have sworn Miguel winked as he stood up and called out to everyone to finish their current drill and pack up.

After chatting for a few moments with some of the other spider people, Miles watched as most of the group cleared from the gym. Aside from Miguel and Peter (who were practicing something on one side of the mats), the gym was practically empty.

Which made the sound of thudding feet all the more terrifying coming his way.

Miles yelped as someone tackled him to the floor and climbed on top of his hips.

"You didn't think we were finished, did you?" Pavitr grinned down at his friend, before digging his thumbs into the pocket right above Miles's hips.

"NOHOHO PAHAHAV!" Miles shrieked, caught so off guard he couldn't have stopped himself if he tried.

Pavitr laughed. "Glad we're on the same page then!"

"Stohohop ihihit!" The kid giggled, pushing at Pav's wrists - a much easier feat now that his hands weren't spider-webbed to the floor (but still not quite easy enough to push Pav's hands away).

With Miles now being able to fight back, there was actually a fight to be had. Still a very one-sided fight, but enough of a back-and-forth match to eat at Pavitr's strength.

And Pavitr's energy drained far quicker than Miles's did.

Keeping a very wriggly Miles consistently trapped and tickled was quite the challenge for India's favourite spiderman, so most of Pavitr's efforts were concentrated on Miles's hips. Certainly his hips were effective, but the hope of escape kept Miles going just long enough that Pavitr's teasy smirk started to fade into an open-mouthed grin (for maximum oxygen intake).

By the time Miles's breathing was wheezy, Pavitr sounded just as exhausted. Both boys were drenched in sweat, and neither were sure where their own ended and the other's began. Pavitr's thumbs slowed, and Miles was finally able to push those troublesome fingers away from his sensitive hips with one final residual giggle.

Letting himself breathe for a moment, Pavitr gave Miles's shoulder a friendly pat. "Damn you put up a good fight, I'm dead after that!"

Miles chuckled and nodded in agreement, still a little woozy from the post-tickle haze.

"You up for some food?" Pav asked, standing up and offering to help Miles to his feet.

"Sounds gr-" Miles began.

"Actually," Miguel interrupted the pair, making Miles freeze for a moment.

How long had he been watching them?? Had he seen Miles get absolutely wrecked?? Oh god, would Miguel ever take him seriously again after that??

Miguel continued. "Miles, want to have a round?"

That was definitely not the direction Miles thought this conversation was going. Thank god, Miguel must have only just finished with Peter. And now that he was looking, Miles could see a (somehow even more) sweaty Peter gathering his stuff and heading out of the gym.

Perfect. Miguel hadn't seen a thing.

Miles nodded, slightly intimidated with the idea of attempting to wrestle someone as experienced as Miguel, but keen to try (and perhaps get a little closer to the reserved leader of the Spider Society).

"Excellent." Miguel gave a small nod, and positioned himself in the centre of the mat.

"Well, good luck." Pavitr smiled, clapping Miles on the back before heading out towards the cafeteria.

Miles took a breath, calming his racing thoughts and tired lungs, before moving to face Miguel.

The pair moved slowly to start, attempting a few takedowns and swings at each other but not fully committing to any, before Miguel swiftly spun to the floor and knocked Miles straight off his feet.

God it was frustrating that Miguel could do that with so much control that it almost seemed to happen in slow motion.

Without even letting himself catch his breath on the floor, Miles tried to scramble to a crouched position, but Miguel was either too quick or predicted his movements too well.

One moment he was almost to his feet, the next Miles was flat on his back with the side of Miguel's chest pressing against the front of his. One of his arms was trapped at an outward angle by Miguel's hand, but Miles couldn't quite see what was going on past that with Miguel's back in the way.

Then Miles tensed.

A soft but unmistakably sharp sensation was gently tapping at his side, enough to fill Miles's chest with tickly anticipation but not so much that he was convinced that was what was happening.

Surely not. Surely Miguel was far too mature for something as childish as tickling.

Still, as Miles struggled to escape Miguel's hold, he struggled even more to contain the laughter threatening to spill out of his mouth at the tickly sensations radiating from his side.

"Mihi- Miguehel?" Miles strained, trying to keep his voice as steady as possible.

Miguel chuckled, and spoke with possibly the teasiest voice Miles had ever heard come out of his mouth. "What's the matter?"

Oooh that motherfucker. Miguel knew exactly what was happening, Miles could feel the smirk radiating off Miguel's face. And somehow that made it significantly harder for the poor kid to control himself.

"Whahat- Wahait- Mihiguehel-" Miles stuttered, giggles already peppering every word he spoke.

"Pavitr wasn't kidding..." Miguel hummed, his claws switching from tapping with all four talons to scratching a single finger up and down every-so-gently. "You really are ticklish."

Miles whined (though it came out sounding more like a laugh), his hips trying to squirm away from the tortuous feeling. "No, noho no no Miguehel plehease-"

"And I was curious what he was saying about submitting you just by tickling..." He continued, bringing back the rest of his hand to softly claw against Miles's lowest ribs.

Even that gentle sensation brought Miles almost to the brink, his eyes practically popped out of his head and a stream of uncontrollable giggles flooded from his mouth. How the hell was it already tickling this badly??

"Mihihi- Mihihgue- Nohoho stohohop!"

"Huh." Miguel chuckled again, god that sent shivers down Miles's spine every time it happened (which really wasn't helping). "Already that bad? What about if I do this?"

The agonisingly slow clawing turned to full-handed squeezing up and down the soft part of Miles's side, and Miles shrieked. As if waking a sleeper agent, his brain seemed to suddenly (and conveniently) remember he had two arms - and only one was stuck. Half punching his opponent in desperation, Miles thudded his free hand against Miguel's back to try and push himself out.

"NOHOHOHO MIHIHIGUEHEHEL PLEHEHEASE!" He begged, legs kicking wildly without reason or result. "STOHOHOP!"

Miguel paused, lifting his head and turning it as much as he could towards Miles (only being able to see the kid from the corner of his eye). "Is that you tapping out?"

Whilst momentarily catching his breath, Miles paused. On one hand, he was rather close to death, and wasn't sure how much more of Miguel's teasing he could handle. But on the other, there was something almost precious about seeing such a weirdly personal side of the stoic man. Should he submit, and cease the frankly torturous situation he had found himself in, or should he push onwards, hoping Miguel would eventually show mercy if Miles actually needed him to (though at this stage, it was hard to say he wasn't slightly enjoying the playful interaction).

Eh, Miles was always a stubborn kid. And he was proud of it.

"Nohohope!" He shook his head, bracing himself.

Miguel gave a surprised scoff. "You really do have a ridiculous amount of stamina, huh."

Miles tried to grin cockily, though even he knew it probably looked more like a nervous invitation for Miguel to continue.

And continue he did.

Like a switch had flipped, Miguel launched his clawed hand into a rapid tickle-assault against Miles's entire torso. Within seconds, every inch of the kid's sides, ribs, stomach, and hips had been poked and squeezed and vibrated against before Miles even had the chance to react. The sudden zero-to-a-hundred spike of intensity caught the younger superhero completely off-guard, making him squeal at a pitch he genuinely didn't think he could each anymore.

"NOHOHOHO MIHIHIGUEHEHEL!" Miles cackled, twisting and writhing under his attacker.

Miguel gave a surprised laugh at the increased movement. "Hey, you asked for it kid, not my problem."

"NONONONO IHI CAHAHAN'T!"

"Ok, Ok..." Miguel playfully rolled his eyes, not that Miles could see (or really pay attention), and released the kid from his grip.

Miles flopped both arms over his face, covering his burning cheeks, and laid there for a few moments panting. Miguel chuckled, reaching to give the kid a few sympathetic pats at whatever body part was closest to him.

Seeing a hand move out of the corner of his eye, in the general direction of his stomach, Miles yelped and curled away from it in a mess of giggles. "Nonono plehease, I'm dohohone!"

Giving the final laugh of the interaction, Miguel grinned at the kid. "So there is a way to tire you out... I'll keep that in mind."

#crow's tickle fic #across the spiderverse tickle fic

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hexalianrebel-blackfeathers · 10 months

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Let’s Just Call It Joyriding (Chapter 1/4)

Panda’s Notes: Panda is definitely in the market for a better title if anyone can think of one. >w< I'm pretty excited for this story; it'll be my first multi-chapter story for this fandom. Wish me luck. >w<

[Ao3] || [Commissions] || [Ko-fi]

It started with a glitter bomb. As all good mornings do.

There had been a cacophony of shouts before the large door to Jessica’s little “office” finally opened, and Gwen and Pavitr sprinted in opposite directions before firing their web shooters up to the nearest section of high ceiling.

“Go, go, go!” Miles was shoved forward by Hobie before the taller boy spun around and slammed a deafening chord on his guitar to disrupt the webs Jessica had fired after him. Shit, his hands ached; the mechanism on the bomb he made had misfired, causing it to pop off prematurely. He was kind of glad the others had talked him out of using any real explosive bits, but the spring-loaded case still hurt like a bastard when it went off in his hands.

The rainbow glitter covering his suit’s gloves was the last thing on his mind…But it did look pretty sick in Jessica’s hair.

Jessica, obviously, didn’t agree even a little. “You little shits have gotten on my last goddamn nerve today!” She snarled, and her fists clenched as she stalked toward him.

“Oi, watch the language there!” Hobie taunted, stealing glances over both shoulders to make sure Miles was gone. He stepped back as she advanced, starting to strafe to the side as he adjusted his hold on his guitar. “You been a Spider long enough; you know you’ve looked worse.”

A pair of webs lashed around the neck of his guitar, and Hobie had barely gotten his hand in place to unclip the buckle before she snatched it away and let it crash against the floor. Okay, yeah, this was getting a little personal.

“Hey, come on! Go easy on my lady; she has nothin’ to do with this!” His steps were getting a little nervous, but he reached into his vest pocket, his hand returning with a butterfly knife that he spun around as he put his hands up. “You wanna scrap, you come for me, yeah?”

His Spider-sense was kind enough to let him know his head had hit the wall behind him when a shot of web fluid struck his chest, a newly-formed sticky net pinning his arms awkwardly against his chest and the side of his face flat against the wall. Man, web fluid was a bitch to get out of his hair, too…

“Aye, best two out of three for it, man?” He tried to joke, definitely not getting nervous as she approached and fired another shot to stick his knees in place. He growled as she grabbed his wrist none too gently and forced him to drop the knife, and he tried to get his breathing to stop sounding like he was terrified.

“Where are they?” Jessica asked shortly as she kicked the knife, bringing her hands to rest on her hips. “Ya’ll lovebugs never stay apart for long.”

Hobie rolled his eyes, managing not to show the pout that came to mind. “I don’t know what you mean, and frankly, I’m a little offended that you think I can’t be independ—Don’t you fucking dare!”

She hadn’t bothered waiting for him to finish before prodding her fingers between the webs and scratching at his stomach. She wasn’t being patient here either, her nails zeroing in around his bellybutton through the thinnest part of his suit.

And, dammit, he couldn’t move! The ability to kick around a little at least gave some kind of outlet for the energy, but no. Hobie was stuck here between a literal wall and those little claws trying to rip giggles out through his guts or something.

“Talk, string-bean.” She demanded, and Hobie would have shaken his head if he could manage.

“W-Why do you even think I’d know…?” He strained out through clenched teeth, his eyes going a bit wide as her free hand started to move purposefully toward his chin. “N-No…!”

She quirked an eyebrow as she huffed, the slightest hint of a smirk on her lips. She dragged one of her nails along his cheekbone, fingers fluttering as she got to his ear before trailing down the side of his neck. Hobie huffed and tried to stop the smile taking over his face, but then: he cracked. Half a snicker slipped out when her tracing moved up under his chin.

And she was lightning quick to pounce on it. The hand on his stomach moved suddenly to squeeze his hip, and Hobie writhed as a cackle jumped out of his mouth. Jess hummed in a completely unsurprised way, moving the pad of her thumb to screw into his hipbone and knead up his side.

“You have the cutest smile when you aren’t being a smug brat, don’t you?” She taunted, gripping his chin as he laughed. Hobie couldn’t tell if she meant it or if she was just trying to get under his skin.

“Fuck off!” He barked out, loud giggles breaking up his laughter when those nails returned to crawling across his neck and cheek. “Leave me alone!”

She shook her head, eying Hobie with a growing smirk. She moved her other hand up again, digging her fingers into his ribcage and watching him try to struggle. “I’ll leave when you tell me where to go, hon. All up to you.”

“I-I don’t know what you wa—!” Both of her hands were suddenly scribbling across his neck, and Hobie would like everyone to know that he did not squeal. The cackling fit he was thrown into was absolutely undeniable though.

“I hope you know you aren’t as slick as you think.” She explained, apparently not caring if he could actually hear her or not. “Everyone knows you’re a little Ticklebug by now.”

She was bluffing; she had to be. She knew how Hobie would normally respond to a comment like that, and it took all his willpower not to let his autopilot screw him over. He tried to shake his head defiantly, struggling against the webbing to little effect.

“Or, I mean…They could know.” Jessica drew her hands back, crossing her arms as she watched him come down from his laughter. “Today; right now.”

Hobie froze, levelling a glare at her as he caught his breath. She smirked at him.

“Hobart Brown, you, of all your little crew, know I’ll do it.” She touched the screen on her watch. “LYLA, back me up here.”

“I got those files queued and ready, Jess~!” The little hologram appeared over her wrist, and she offered a similarly smug-looking smile as Hobie’s eyes went wide.

“Oh, fuck you both!” He snarled. “You don’t have shit on me!”

“You want to take that chance, kid?” Jessica tapped her fingers on her arm.

“These are awfully cute little clips of you, too, Spider-Punk.” LYLA spoke up, a little phone forming in her hand that she giggled at.

Hobie’s hands clenched tightly, the rage rushing through him until he let out a sigh through his nose. “Tink, you are a lying bitch, and everyone knows it.” He growled irritably, a hint of a smile quirking his lip as she looked offended. “I… I told them to meet me in the café. They’re probably takin’ the scenic route, but that’s where they should end up.”

“LYLA?” Jessica glanced at the pouting AI perched on her wrist.

“Gwen and Pavitr’s watches are moving in that direction, yeah.” She huffed. “Funny, though, I can’t find Hobie or Miles’ watches in the building.”

“Give ya three guesses why, eh?” Hobie smirked a bit through the cringe as Jessica shoved his face.

“Figures. Makes me feel better about leaving you here though.” LYLA vanished as Jessica turned to walk away.

“Lea—Oi, hey?!” Hobie cried out, trying to struggle again. “Get me out; you cannot be serious!”

“Consider it a timeout, since y’all want to act like little kids today!” She waved back at him before heading toward the hallway. “And if you don’t want to be tracked, it’ll be better if you just stay in one place.”

And then she disappeared, happily letting Hobie’s angry shouting fade behind her.

-------

After a minute or so, it didn’t seem like she was coming back. Hobie worried his lip piercing with his tongue. Had he stopped shouting too soon? Had he waited too long? Had she even left? He didn’t sense her nearby, but his Spider sense tended to pick up more on emotional intent than physical action.

He sighed. Quiet was probably good.

“Psst. Hobie?” He glanced up at the sound of his name, spotting Miles perched up in the corner of the ceiling. Miles grinned when Hobie found him, snickering a bit. “You good, Ticklebug?”

Hobie glared, and Miles inched closer to him along the ceiling and down the wall. “What are you doing?!” He snarled, trying to keep his voice down.

“Uh, surviving, apparently. She had you sounding like you were going to die.”

“Mmph… The shit I go through for you lot…” Hobie huffed quietly, nuzzling into the hand that Miles cradled under his cheek and smiling a bit as his thumb brushed away a streaked bit of his eyeliner.

“Hey, don’t try to pretend like this wasn’t your idea.”

“Oi, shut up. Did you get it?”

Miles beamed, pulling his hand back and taking his phone out of his jacket pocket. “Yeah, I got it alright.” He declared, showing him the saved thumbnail of a video in his camera roll. “LYLA has a point; you are super cu—”

He flinched as he looked back at Hobie, who was glaring a hole straight through his head, and he giggled nervously. “Oh! You meant this.” He reached into his other pocket, pulling out a strange-looking key with a card attached to its ring.

Hobie didn’t stop glaring at him.

“I’m just playing; don’t look so mad!”

“Cut me loose. Right. Now.”

Miles only slightly hesitated as he picked up the knife, moving to cut away the webbing around Hobie’s hands so he could start helping himself. As Miles sliced through the webs on his legs, Hobie leaned to reach into Miles’ backpack, pulling out the walkie talkie he’d stashed there and turning it on.

“Check in.” He said after clicking the button.

“Finally!” Gwen’s voice crackled back, her laugh cutting off.

“You okay, Hobie?” Pavitr asked, with Gwen’s laughter in the background.

“’M fine, Pav. Look, your head start’s up, and Jess is Brahms and Liszt.” He took a few steps to break the webs on his legs, and he snatched up his guitar before ripping the remaining strands off of his face. “Split up; ditch the watches.”

“She’s Brahms and Liszt, huh?” Gwen asked playfully, with Pavitr giggling nearby.

“Both of them, at once?” Miles asked into his microphone, apparently forgetting he was close enough to be smacked over the head.

“Nah, y’know what? I hope she gets the jump on both of ya.” Hobie growled, shoving Miles lightly as they crept into the hall. “Phase one’s in the bag; you better buy us some time.”

“Just don’t drag your feet out there.” Gwen called out, her voice bouncing slightly as she started to run. “Margo’s gonna be pissed if you’re late.”

“Love you guys!” Pavitr said into his own microphone this time.

Miles smiled brightly, and Hobie chuckled as he put his radio away.

The pair stuck close to the walls as they moved through the maze of hallways in HQ, mostly taking care to listen for Jessica just in case. Finally, somehow without incident, they found themselves down in one of the vehicle bays. The garage was nearly pitch black, aside from the small lamps that shone down over parking spaces.

“Why exactly do we even have multiple garages?” Miles asked softly, and he and Hobie scanned the room for any extra Spiders. “How many Spider-people even use cars?”

“‘S a monument to hubris, ain’t it.” Hobie responded, almost automatically, as he scanned a board near the entrance. “Making space for excess, even if ya never use it.”

Miles tried to keep his rolling eyes out of sight. “Sure, Hobie.”

“There.” The taller boy said firmly, tapping the board. “M-32, come on.”

They ran as quietly as possible, down the line of spaces until they found it: Jessica’s motorcycle. Hobie’s face had lit up, the grin on his face seeming just a little bit devious as he held his palm out to Miles expectantly. He handed over the key without hesitation, and Hobie chuckled as he moved to scan the card over a panel before walking the bike out onto the “path”.

“Are you, um…Are you still sure about this?” Miles asked warily, smiling nervously as Hobie examined the bike excitedly.

“Little late for cold feet, love.” He put the key into the ignition as he climbed onto the seat, letting out a laugh as the engine started. “Hah! Listen to that purr… C’mon, Sunflower, you know we’re gonna bring it back.”

“Little more worried about what Jessica’s going to do to us when she realizes what happened, honestly.”

“Which is why we need to not be here when she does. Saddle up, c’mon!”

Miles stepped closer as Hobie was starting to roll forward, grabbing his shoulder and jumping onto the bike while he drove into the open area just in front of the hanger door leading outside. Hobie smirked back at him for a second, dragging his leg to guide the bike into a few quick circles.

“Hobie!” Miles laughed nervously, gripping Hobie’s vest tightly and leaning into his shoulder.

“Set me up, man, let’s go!”

Miles lifted his jacket sleeve as best he could while trying to stay on the spinning bike, typing a destination into the homebrew watch he’d been given. A large portal, shifting all kinds of garish colors, started to form on the inside of the door, definitely wide enough to accommodate them and the bike.

Hobie laughed, menace that he was, and steadied the bike to rev it loudly.

Miles took the opportunity to grab the mic for his radio. “We’re going dark! Keep her busy!” He called, only to yelp and wrap his arms around Hobie’s waist again as the bike sped into the portal.

The vehicle bay was quickly returned to a calm silence.

Until the headlights of a certain unmanned car suddenly flicked on…

#a panda writes a thing #tickling #atsv tickle #atsv tickling #hobie brown #pavitr prabhakar #gwen stacy #miles morales #jessica drew #lyla spiderverse

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icyspicy4u · 10 months

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wading my way through this neighborhood (chapter one)

i literally don't know what to say about this one. i banged out like 10k of an anarcia spider-man au in mmm about two days. so. enjoy!! playlist linked here. ao3 link here.

Anetra is a friendly neighborhood superhero trying not to fall headlong into New York City's tangled crime web while also trying to avoid falling head over heels in love with her roommate. She doesn't really do a good job at either.

Although she’s typically winningly optimistic, Anetra is forced to admit that she might really be in deep shit this time.

She dives to the ground to dodge a punch from one of the men blocking her exit from this alley, and just as she hits the asphalt her phone begins to ring, loudly, because she definitely didn’t need another thing to worry about.

Whenever she wears her suit, she keeps her phone tucked in her bra, against her chest, safe from prying eyes or a damaging fall. Crucially, she also always silences it when she’s out on these little suited-up webslinging jaunts.

Except for this jaunt in particular, apparently.

This time, Anetra forgot to turn her ringer off before leaving, and the ringtone Marcia gave herself (Boss Bitch, by Doja Cat—Marcia swears it was worth the dollar Anetra had to cough up to buy the song) starts to echo through the slim space of the alley she’s been cornered into.

The man in front trying his best to pummel Anetra into the brick walls on either side of him pauses at the sound of the music.

Everyone does, honestly, including Anetra, standing in a defensive position and blinking a little in disbelief behind her mask as Doja spits out lyrics about high-heeled shoes.

“Um,” Anetra says, heroically. The man in front offers up nothing but a threatening crack of the neck, and then he’s lunging for her again, followed by his buddies.

Normally, Anetra would just throw a web up to the sky, land it on one of the roofs of the buildings forming this alley, and neatly pull herself out of this situation. Easy money. However, this alley is barely wider than her wingspan—she’d need more room than she’s got to effectively aim.

Also, with the way these dipshits have been bearing down on her, she barely has enough time to throw her arms up and block the punches, let alone take a step back to use her webshooter.

She doesn’t know who they are, or who sent them, or why they are so intent on rocking her shit.

Over the past six months of being the Spider, she’s made a fair few enemies from sticking her nose where people think she shouldn’t be—she’s learned most of the hallmarks of the underground’s major players that way.

But these don’t look like any of the lackeys she’s used to. They don’t bear the MIB branding across their chests that Mistress’ henchmen are required to wear or the LaDuca crest on the lapel that all of Loosey’s guys have.

It’s disconcerting—Anetra continues running through her mental list of people who most likely want her dead, and these men don’t seem like they’ve been sent by any of them.

With the same repeating thirty seconds of Doja’s voice as a backing track, Anetra drops to a low squat as the man in front swings another wide hit at her head. She takes advantage of her new position to lunge for his knees, then shoves her shoulder into him and wraps her arms tight around his calves to force his legs to buckle—the man’s now-overloaded weight brings them both crashing to the ground.

Anetra rolls away easily from the tackle, gets to her feet to try and assess the situation, but the space she’s clawed out for herself is gone as soon as it was made when the rest of the men charge at her.

“Jesus, guys, can I catch a break?” she asks breathlessly, throws one hand up to catch the fist flying at her face as another guy goes for her ankles and she has to leap out of the way. “I’m serious, here. Could use a breather. What about you?”

“Smart-ass spider,” one of them grumbles, finally breaking the professional silence the whole group has been keeping up until now, and Anetra flashes him a winning smile that she only wishes a little bit that he could see as he tries to headbutt her against the wall.

She’s lucky that these men don’t seem to be actually combat-trained in any way. They’re moving the way most hired muscle does, bear-like and unpracticed, the style of brawling that’s borne out of being consistently bigger than your opponents. They’re used to steamrolling people Anetra’s size easily, so they’re throwing punches that Anetra can block without thinking while she tries to formulate her escape plan.

Her phone has finally stopped ringing, but it chimes to signal a new voicemail as she triangulates a gap to slip through in the wall of muscle.

A brief sting of guilt passes through Anetra. She’s been missing a lot of Marcia’s calls lately.

She’s rarely home now—when she’s not working, she’s out being this strange masked vigilante, and these days it seems like every small crime that she stops leads to another, worse one cropping up a few blocks down.

She already had the suit on under her clothes when she left the apartment earlier, shouting a goodbye to Marcia with some lame excuse about covering some other dancer’s shift at the bar—she was actually headed to an abandoned studio space downtown to fuck around with her web calibration for a while. She’s managed to master some kind of formula.

Again, the suit was already on under her clothes. What was she supposed to do when she heard a scream from the alley, ignore it?

Yes, she thinks to herself bitterly, pinning herself against the wall to barely avoid getting kneed in the ribs.

What had started as an easy job—it was a simple mugging, she could shoot a few webs the guy’s way and leave him strung up easily, let the victim get free—had suddenly transformed into a much bigger problem when several of these men had showed up. She should’ve been home an hour ago.

The guilt twists, intensifies. She’ll buy Marcia dinner later this week, or something. They can get takeout like they used to, when Anetra was fucking normal and couldn’t walk on walls.

Hey, wait a minute.

Anetra scans the too-close walls on either side of her. It’ll be a hell of a Hail Mary jump, but maybe—

While she’s distracted, a meaty fist makes contact with the side of her face, hard enough to make her ears ring. She stays standing, years of practice from gone-wrong taekwondo fights keeping her feet under her, but just barely.

She spits some blood from her mouth against the fabric of her mask, tries to let her vision right itself, but then another hit catches her in the gut and her breath leaves her.

Okay. Okay, shit. She’s kind of losing control of the situation, here. She needs to get her half-formulated plan back on track.

She narrowly dodges out of the way of a third punch, throws a clumsy kick that she feels make contact with flesh, then stumbles backwards until she can feel the bricks of the alley’s back wall against her back.

Her head is spinning, but she tips her head back, ignoring the awful sensation of the blood from her nose and mouth running down her throat.

She assesses the slice of sky between the buildings. Her heightened instincts do the math for her on just how precise her jump needs to be to get her to safety—if she misjudges this, she’s either going to slam herself against the wall and do the henchmen’s job for them, or she’s going to fall right back down to earth. Also probably doing their job for them.

Speaking of which, over the distraction of their second fallen companion, the three remaining men begin their charge towards her. They’re each sporting a grin that says they think they’ve won, probably elated at the sight of blood staining Anetra’s mask and the heavy breaths she’s taking.

Anetra kind of admires the confidence.

With a clumsy wink that they can’t see, she crouches low, and then when they’re almost on top of her she leaps straight up into the air, her best shot, sticking her arms out in the cramped space to hopefully catch on the walls of the building. Pleasepleasepleaseplease—

It’s a near thing. She’s not capable of jumping all the way to the rooftop, but her fingers graze both walls thirty feet up. Just barely, but it’s enough contact to give her purchase on the surface. The invisible hook of her wall-clinging ability catches her on each side, keeps her bracketed between the buildings and out of reach of the men below.

The resulting giggle from her is a little delirious to her own ears, but she hopes it sounds victorious to them.

“Fuck all of you,” she shouts, grinning, curls her knees up to her chest and pushes off to hop up onto one of the roofs—made accessible with the minimized distance—and peer down at them from there. “Tell whoever sent you, they aren’t gonna get my ass that easy!”

Instead of being frustrated at her cockiness, as she would’ve expected, they’re all unnervingly calm. One of them tilts their head like they’re studying her.

“She won’t give up, you know,” that one says. “It’ll end in a lot less pain for you if you come with us now.”

“Hang on, it really doesn’t seem like we’re on the same page here, guys,” Anetra shouts, trying to sound breezy even though the ominous words send something skittering down her spine. “Who is she?”

The man who spoke grins crookedly. Maybe she didn’t sound as breezy as she thought.

“You don’t need to know,” he yells up at her. “All you need to know is that this won’t be over until she has you.”

“Don’t care!” Anetra chirps, maybe a little frantically, and casts a web to a billboard on an adjacent rooftop so she can swing away from the scene as fast as possible.

As the wind whips at her, a little abrasive against her tender bruises and scraped skin under the suit, the threatening words echo through her head.

This won’t be over until she has you.

She’s certainly had to develop a thicker skin since becoming New York’s resident superhero. Between the death threats and the unflattering mid-swing pictures people post online (the latter might genuinely be affecting her more negatively than the former), she’s had to figure out how to shove all of this Spider stuff into a big ol’ box in her brain and leave it there while she lives the rest of her life so that it can’t get to her.

This threat feels too real to put in that box, though. The way it was delivered, the way that man had looked up at her with something like pity in his eyes when she refused to bend—it makes her breath come a little shallower than is comfortable as she thinks about it.

Her heightened senses that came with that stupid spider bite don’t just help her assess the situation in fights, they also tell her when something’s wrong. If she doesn’t attend to the feeling and follow her instincts, the sensory overload of it all usually triggers a migraine.

She wouldn’t be too worried about this mysterious she that sent those men to collect her, but the hair on the back of her neck is standing up and she’s clenching her teeth without thinking about it.

Something about this is wrong, her body is telling her, and she has no idea what.

Suddenly desperate to stop thinking about it, she swings herself to a somewhat secluded rooftop, free from prying eyes, and pulls off her mask to give herself a second to breathe.

The sun is starting to set. She’s chosen one of the taller buildings in the area to rest on, so she can really take in the view, the pink-orange-gold-yellow tone of light shifting every hard angle of the city to something softer and sweeter.

She can see lights turning on in people’s apartments as the daylight fades, can see a few different rooftop bars start to fill up with patrons from up here. It’s a nice reminder that even with the isolation of her extremely unique life experience, she’s not alone. Someone’s always awake, someone’s always looking at the same skyline you are.

With her legs swinging off over the edge of the roof, Anetra pulls out her phone to finally listen to Marcia’s voicemail.

“Hey, it’s me!”

Despite her heart hammering around anxiously from both leftover and still-present adrenaline, Anetra manages a smile at that.

“Who else is it going to be, you dumb bitch?” she mumbles, rhetorical and fond.

“I’m figuring you probably just got caught at work and that’s why you’re not home. I was going to hold dinner for you, but I’m starving, so you snooze, you lose, Neech. Don’t know what to tell you. Your tacos are definitely going to be cold when you get home, and that is karma, is what that is.”

She pauses for a second. Anetra listens to her breathe, think about what she wants to say next. Her nose was probably all scrunched up when she recorded this like it gets when she thinks too hard.

“I miss you,” she says, and then the evening is quiet again, excepting the buzz of voicemail static. “Um. Anyway. Taco meat will be waiting when you get home. Please eat it. Or—just eat something with a modicum of protein. I’m begging you.”

Anetra has a full grin on her face when the message beeps, signaling its end. She swipes over to Google and searches up “modicum”, relying on autocorrect since she has no idea how to spell it, then sends Marcia a screenshot.

TO: marcia 🌸💖💫🧚💕🌷💗✨💝

(The emojis weren’t Anetra’s idea, believe it or not. Marcia gave her very specific instructions on which ones she wanted next to her name.)

[Attachment: 1 Photo]

You had to use this word right

Like needed to

You couldn’t have said “a little bit” or any of the various synonyms available to you, you needed to use that one

FROM: marcia 🌸💖💫🧚💕🌷💗✨💝

AHAHAHAHA

so sorry

Anetra smiles, but it slips from her face quickly as she realizes the fast response time is most likely worry-based.

I’m headed home now, she texts, wanting to quiet Marcia’s anxieties. Only a few minutes away :)

ok yay, Marcia sends back. The bubble appears, then disappears, then comes back again, indicating some rethinking. did the dancer shift end up ok? u just had to stay late?

Yeah

It’s all Anetra can really give her, even though the single-word response will only further Marcia’s suspicions. The doubling up on questions is already enough of an indication of her doubt.

Yara was on my ass tonight, she texts to try and cover. Yara Sofia is the manager at the bar, who lets Anetra come in for a dancing shift once or twice a week after her waitressing hours, and she is on Anetra’s ass all the time, even though it’s always out of love. It’s a real half-ass of a redirection, but Marcia, always graceful and always sweet, follows her lead anyway.

omg what did she do

Anetra takes some time to craft a decently wild story about Yara’s unorthodox marketing methods (she mentions Yara’s vibrant Onlyfans career, which is very real) to provide some scaffolding for her lie about her whereabouts.

Once she’s sent it, she gets to her feet, pulls her mask back over her face, and stretches, taking in the last of the sunset as the colors bleed out of the sky. The artificial lights have flickered on all around her now, doing their best to replace the sun’s warm glow and coming up just a little bit short.

She sends a web out to a streetlight on a parking garage nearby and hops off the roof. Since she’s still a little shaken, it takes her longer to find her rhythm than it normally does.

Cast out the web. Feel the resistance when it catches on a building or a lamppost or a tree. Swing from that node forward, let your body hurtle through the air, almost freefalling but not quite. Release, then cast again.

Cast, feel, swing, release. Cast, feel, swing, release.

She won’t give up, you know.

Cast, feel, swing, release. Definitely don’t think about the person with a vendetta against you who tried to get you killed earlier today. Cast, feel, swing, release.

“It’s Spider-Man!” she hears from below a few feet ahead of her, bringing her mostly out of her head. Within the crowds on the street, more than a few people have their faces upturned to gawk at her, but that exclamation in particular came from a little girl on her dad’s shoulders.

Anetra waves at her as she swings by on a streetlight, and the kid waves back, practically a caricature of cuteness sitting on her dad’s shoulders with her missing teeth and pigtails. Not a man, she wants to correct sunnily, but she stays mute. The public’s general assumption that she’s a dude keeps her cloaked in an extra layer of secrecy, and she can’t afford to shed any of those.

Sometimes she wants just a little bit—a modicum, one might say—of recognition. At least a small sign, somehow, that people get what she’s putting herself through, that what she’s doing isn’t for nothing.

But she understands that that’s not worth sacrificing her identity and her safety for, even if this life feels like it’s grinding away at her slowly. The isolation of it all is hard, but it’s for a reason. She can’t risk any of the Spider’s shit finding its way into Anetra’s life, because then that endangers all the people who know Anetra, tangles them all in the Spider’s web.

The Spider doesn’t have friends who can get hurt. Anetra does.

That man’s crooked smile shines in her mind like an afterimage of a bright flash. She lands hard on her feet in the alley behind her building, his words biting at her heels and hounding her.

Nothing from a fight’s ever stuck with her like this before. Chills travel down to the very ends of her extremities, and sparks scatter across her vision, the very first warning sign of an oncoming migraine.

Something is coming for her.

She zips up her sweatshirt so her suit is hidden, rips her mask off and stuffs it in the pocket, tries to shake off what’s left of the Spider unsuccessfully.

One shuddering breath is all she has time for before she’s cramming her key in the lock and opening the door, shoving it hard with her shoulder because it always sticks in its frame in the summer with the New York heat.

“Hi!” she shouts. It’s late, but Marcia doesn’t go to bed for at least another hour on weekends, so she’s loud just for the sake of it, just to jog loose the calcified anxiety in her mind.

“Hey!” she hears yelled in a singsong reply from the front room. After quickly making herself a taco from the ingredients Marcia left out, she heads that way with her hands in her pockets, a little more urgency in her step than usual.

On days where she spends more time in the mask than out of it, when the mental box she’s forced around her little vigilante hobby won’t stay closed and terrifying images flash through her mind every time she closes her eyes, she needs to get back to herself again, and Marcia’s always been her key for that.

She knows Marcia inside and out. Marcia knows her outside and in. They’ve been roommates since they both moved to New York, connected through one of those terrible Facebook groups that every desperate person moving to a big city joins on some wild hope that they’ll be able to find everything they need to survive in the posts there.

Anetra didn’t find everything she needed (no one on Facebook knows where to find good Puerto Rican food), but she did find Marcia. On her sappier days, she’ll say that that’s about the same thing.

Marcia is facing away from Anetra when she comes into the living room, sitting on their saggy old couch with her feet tucked up against herself and her laptop balanced on her knees. When she hears Anetra’s footsteps on their creaky-ass floor, though, she tilts her head all the way back over the arm of the couch so she can see her, and then she smiles.

Anetra feels her shoulders relax, and lets out a sigh under her breath. She’s okay, she’s here. Everything is well.

“Hi,” she says again.

“Hey,” Marcia says, repeating herself as well to go along with the bit. She’s still smiling, a few veins in her head popping with the upside-down position. “Oh, good, you found the tacos. You gonna say ‘hi’ again, or can I ask you how work was?”

“Work was fine. Now, sit your ass up or you’re going to pass out with all that blood rushing to your big head,” Anetra warns, hopping onto the other side of the couch and poking Marcia’s calf with her foot.

“Just fine?” Marcia asks once she’s readjusted into a normal seated position, ignoring Anetra’s jab about her head. Usually she’d make a bit out of it, act all wounded and everything. It makes Anetra a little nervous.

“I mean, yeah,” Anetra says, shrugging to sell it. “What, you want all the gory details of how my pelvis got a lot closer to a lot of old men’s faces than I ever wanted it to?”

“No, ew, no,” Marcia replies, scrunching her nose up in disgust. She’s wearing her glasses, so the gesture is a little funnier than it normally is. “No, I just—they’ve been asking you to take a lot of extra shifts, is all. Waitressing and dance. Is that okay? Are you… is, um. Is money okay?”

It’s a clunky way to ask a sensitive question, but it’s always been a clunky topic between the two of them. It’s very simple, really. Marcia comes from money. Anetra does not.

As far as how much rot generational wealth can cause in a brain, Marcia’s on the good side of things: she’s fairly aware of the privilege she’s held and continues to hold in society, lives modestly on her own teacher’s salary without help from her parents, and challenges her peers from youth on their wealth and what they’re choosing to do with it.

However, she still grew up a rich kid, and that’ll fuck a person right up.

There are things she’s never even had to begin to conceptualize because of the many layers of plush societal protection she was swaddled in from birth. It makes her a little dense on certain topics, like service jobs and financial etiquette, even after almost ten years away from her parents’ lifestyle.

“Money’s fine,” Anetra assures her, a little tightly. Marcia knows she’s very lucky to have a gold-lined safety net at the ready whenever she needs or wants it, and she consistently reminds Anetra of its application to her as well.

Never mind that Anetra would maybe rather die, eat shit, and give herself over to the mysterious woman that wants the Spider dead before she accepts help from Marcia’s parents.

Growing up poor’ll fuck you up too.

“Good,” Marcia says, equally tense, sensing she’s overstepped. “Okay. Yeah, that’s good.”

Anetra feels a little guilty. Marcia can be naïve when it comes to money stuff, but she would have good reason to believe Anetra’s hurting for cash right now, with how many times she’s said she’s covering a shift or dancing late when she’s really out tangling webs all over the greater metropolitan area.

“It’s not the money,” she says, gentler now. “I, um. I’m putting in the hours to try and get a better time slot when I dance. Kind of want to go for a more respectable crowd than the ten-to-midnight folks.”

Marcia nods, slowly. She takes her glasses off and stares at them intently while she polishes them with her pajama top.

“Dick move on my part, bringing up money,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“Hey, no, it’s all good,” Anetra says easily, because it really is. Marcia never means any harm. Her parents are assholes with no intent of ever redistributing their wealth outside of their family tree, and Marcia’s entire adult life has essentially been an exercise in atoning for that in any way she can think of—including offering trust fund money to her club dancer/waitress/general service worker roommate.

Anetra understands making what you can out of your shitty upbringing, she really does. She just tends to prickle at the slightest insinuation of charity. And Marcia is anything but subtle.

“I—You would tell me, if something else was going on?” Marcia asks, gaze still fixed on her lap, her voice a little faint. Her eyes flick up to meet Anetra’s, just once.

Well, Marcia, there was this spider in your coworker’s girlfriend’s lab that we toured that one time, and it bit me, and now I can traverse walls like gravity isn’t even real and I have superhuman reflexes and I can sense oncoming danger and I built myself these gadgets so I can swing all around the city and I’ve been using all these aforementioned abilities to fight crime—

“I would,” she says, cutting off her train of thought as she tries to get Marcia’s eye contact back. It’s a lot simpler than all of those other things she wants to say. It’s also a lie, or a partial one.

Not if it’s going to hurt you.

They don’t lie to each other if they can help it. But Anetra can’t help it, not in this circumstance, not if she wants Marcia to stay safe, so she meets Marcia’s eyes and compels her to believe her answer.

She sells it at least enough to get Marcia to relax, and she smiles again, a little wearier this time than before.

“Well, if stuff does come up, you know you can talk to me,” she offers, putting her glasses back on. “And I hope you get that evening gig. It sounds classy.”

Anetra snorts. “Nothing at Piranha is ever going to be classy.” She’s eager to move away from the topic at hand. “What are you working on?”

Marcia grins, and turns her laptop screen to face Anetra. “Just the choreography for the recital,” she says, the anxiety starting to fade from her posture as she sits up excitedly, shifts so that they’re sitting right next to each other. Anetra can feel the warmth of Marcia’s body through the layers of her sweatshirt and her suit.

“Oh, shit, yeah. Landed on a theme yet?” Anetra asks, clicking through the different tabs Marcia has open.

“Nothing’s good enough,” Marcia sighs, shaking her head and taking back control of the cursor to navigate to the document where she has all her brainstorming laid out. “I don’t want to do another recital where the teacher makes all the little girls dress up like flowers. That’s been done. It’s tired.”

“Oh, for sure,” Anetra says with mock seriousness, and then starts giggling when Marcia shoves her.

Anetra doesn’t really understand this whole world of dance that Marcia moves through with ease. She was a taekwondo kid. This is not her lane.

Obviously, that doesn’t stop her from attending every recital with a bouquet to throw at Marcia when the curtain falls, making it her personal mission to cheer the loudest for the kids out of everyone else.

She also likes to put in her opinions when Marcia brings her work home, like here, now, helping her decide on whether her middle-grade students’ suggestion of “Night of 1000 Beyoncés” as a theme is realistically going to work. Anetra sketches out a few test costume ideas while Marcia searches up some different medleys she can choreograph to.

Eventually, while they’re working side by side, as one in the morning comes and goes and two A.M. swiftly approaches, Anetra feels herself starting to drift off. Her body feels as if it’s melting into the couch, and without the adrenaline from earlier her bruises are really starting to ache. Her jaw feels tender where the guy clocked her with his fist, and she tried to clean off her nose but there’s definitely some dried blood up in there that’s making breathing uncomfortable.

She yawns widely, sticks her tongue out like a cat. That’s usually a surefire way to get a giggle from Marcia, but when it’s met with silence Anetra glances down to her side and breathes out a quiet laugh.

Marcia is slumped over, asleep, her head on Anetra’s shoulder. She’d been silent for a while, but Anetra hadn’t thought much of it, perhaps a little too singularly focused on the Destiny’s Child costume design she was working on instead of her overtired roommate next to her.

“Alright. Bedtime,” she murmurs, mostly for herself, not expecting a response.

First, she has to slip out from under Marcia without waking her, which she manages with a considerable amount of effort. She eases the laptop from the other woman’s lap, then plugs it in and lays it to rest on the coffee table. She moves to the kitchen to put away the tacos Marcia left out for her, feeling a delayed wave of tired gratitude at the gesture as she does, and finally sets the dishwasher to run as wipes down the countertops.

When she goes back to the living room, picking up pieces of paper and assorted trash as she does, Marcia is still out for the count. Her often-worried expression is always smoothed out when she sleeps, the normally constant lines of anxiety at her brow or temples thankfully absent.

Anetra stands there paralyzed for a second.

Something warm and sacred, a feeling that outpaces verbalization, beats in her chest.

Before she can let herself really feel it, Marcia is blinking awake, slowly, stirred by some invisible force, and whatever was striking through the lightning rod of Anetra’s body vanishes, renders her mobile again.

“R’you watching me sleep?” Marcia mumbles, teasing, stretching her body out long from the tightly curled position she had fallen asleep in.

Anetra tosses one of the crumpled pieces of paper she grabbed off the floor at the blonde’s head to take some of the weight out of the air between them. “Obviously,” she says, lobbing the joke right back. “How else am I finally going to achieve my mission of killing you after all these years?”

Marcia catches the paper ball out of the air easily, yawning as she does so. “Playing the long game, I see,” she replies. The bit isn’t worth entertaining further, so Anetra doesn’t try, instead goes to grab Marcia’s arm so she can haul her up off the couch.

“Come on, bed,” she coaxes. “You hate sleeping on the couch. It’s a bad couch, we should get a new one.”

“Nee-trah,” Marcia whines, gone childish with sleep, and Anetra just shakes her head and sighs before bending at her knees to throw Marcia over her shoulder like she weighs nothing.

She does this all the time, it’s a bit between them, but it used to be harder, before superstrength. It seems like an obvious statement, but it speaks to something she’s learning over and over again: her life has been irrevocably changed. She is different now, as much as she doesn’t want to be.

Marcia shrieks out a surprised laugh and flails wildly for a minute, like she always does just to be funny, but then she goes limp so it’s easier for Anetra to carry her.

“Should fall asleep on the couch more often,” she muses appreciatively, her voice getting raspier as she lets her drowsiness creep back over her, and Anetra snorts, jostling her a little bit to at least keep her awake until she can toss her on her bed. “What time do you have to get up tomorrow?”

“Not till nine or something,” Anetra replies, punctuating her statement by throwing Marcia over her shoulder onto her crumpled bedspread, then launches herself into the air to land hard at her side, giggling at the way the mattress momentarily buckles under her. “I don’t work tomorrow. What about you?”

Marcia flops over on her stomach and groans against the fabric of her quilt. “Seven. I don’t have class till nine, but Jan wants me in early so we can talk logistics for the recital at the end of the week.” She turns her head to smile beatifically in Anetra’s direction. “No chance you wanna go in my stead? Deal with Jan’s mania?”

Anetra winces and shakes her head vigorously. “Nope.” She stretches her arms long over her head, then looks over to where Marcia’s pouting and laughs. “What if I bring you lunch? We can eat together after your class.”

Marcia visibly brightens and nods. “Yes, please. Suki’s?”

Anetra hops up off of Marcia’s bed and salutes. “Tomorrow at noon,” she promises.

“It’s a date,” Marcia answers, yawns. Her eyes start to fall closed with the end of the conversation, and Anetra stands in the doorway for just a moment.

She had a crush on Marcia, way back when in those early days, debilitating and whole-heart-seizing. Her mouth went useless whenever her roommate asked her a question, and her heart would pick up to a terrible, pointless speed whenever the other girl leaned over her to plug in her phone or to grab the last egg out of the fridge.

Recognizing immediately that falling for your roommate is a terrible cliché at best and severely endangering your living situation at worst, Anetra never gave the feeling air, since it would’ve been more than a little stupid. She put her nose to the ground and worked her ass off, waitressing at the bar during the day and dancing at night, and eventually, with no time to dedicate to it, the crush died off like an uncared-for plant.

Marcia’s her best friend, and she wouldn’t trade that for anything, but sometimes that crush wakes up a little bit, shifts and rumbles around her chest.

Maybe it was never really asleep. Maybe, by not giving something air, all you do is make it writhe around and become more stubborn, more insistent.

Well. Whatever. She never told Marcia then, and she certainly can’t tell her now. It would be foolish to think something ever could come of it besides losing the closest person in her life.

She’s been working to get over this feeling for years—for years—at this point. She will, she can.

She leaves the doorway and goes down the hall to her room, slamming a mental lid shut on her waxing nostalgia as she does so.

As soon as her bedroom door falls shut behind her, Anetra shucks off the top layer she has on, her sweatshirt and pants discarded so that she’s just wearing her suit, then shrugs her way out of that too. She shuffles down the hall to their shared bathroom just in her bra and underwear, and sits heavily on the toilet lid to assess the damage from the fight earlier.

She sighs as she probes her various bruises with light fingers, flinching at the deep pain she can feel beneath the faintly tinged skin. Tomorrow, they’ll all be vibrant and awful and hard to explain, but for now all she’s got is a terrible ache, with no evidence of its presence. It’s kind of infuriating.

Other than her for-now-invisible bruises, her nose is tender from the hit earlier, but otherwise seems fine, and even though she sustained a few really rough hits it seems like she didn’t break any bones.

Once it’s established that altogether, she’s fine, she exhales, heavy. Heavy enough that her shoulders start to curl inwards with the deflation of her lungs. Her neck goes loose, and her head slumps forward over her chest.

She’s so tired.

It’s a kind of tired that has settled in her bones. She can’t sleep this off, she can’t shake this easily. The only way it feels like she’d be able to rest again, really rest, would be to hang up the mask, sitting in the pocket of her hoodie down the hall, for good.

She’s in too deep with this whole flip-side world to even entertain the idea of doing that.

For a while, she stares blankly at the tile at her feet—it’s cheap New York apartment tile, unevenly discolored and easy to stare at while you get lost in thought—but eventually, her aching body necessitates getting up from the uncomfortable toilet lid and picking her way back down the hall.

As she walks through her bedroom door, she strips off her bra and throws on a shirt to sleep in (it says EVERYBODY GET FOOTLOOSE! in egregiously large letters on the back, leading Anetra to believe that one of Marcia’s show shirts might have found its way into her laundry) before hauling her pained, overworked body into bed.

She’s exhausted enough that her eyes fall closed automatically, but then that memory from the alley today flashes behind her lids like a vision.

It’s the not knowing that kills her. The first few weeks of having powers was like this, too, a whole new world of danger where every other step was a stumble, but there were no consequences then. If she trips up now, with this mysterious woman on her tail, then she’s just going to fall and fall.

She needs to get her feet under her before that happens, she thinks to herself, turning over in bed and yanking the covers up to her chin. She doesn’t work tomorrow, so after lunch with Marcia, she can throw the mask on and snoop around under the radar, see what she can find out about this person who wants her dead. Once she has something like a plan in place, the anxiety’s clawed grip on her neck and chest relaxes slightly, allowing her to slip out of consciousness.

It doesn’t leave Anetra in complete peace, though. Her dreams are flashes of pure horror, painted in wailing, assaulting color, and she jolts awake soaked in sweat and pinned to the mattress with fear.

Her alarm clock reads 8:48. She knows she won’t get back to sleep, so she peels herself out of bed and walks out into the empty apartment with some half-baked idea of making some breakfast. She catches her sallow-looking reflection in the hallway mirror on her way to the kitchen, and points some finger guns at it.

“Lookin’ good,” she jokes softly, for absolutely no audience but herself, and tries to smile. It’s kind of freakish with how bad her eye bags have gotten, so she just stops looking. She makes a mental note to ask Marcia if she can raid the huge tub of different skincare products she has going in the bathroom, see if anything will fix the skin issues brought on by becoming a neighborhood superhero.

Because she has the morning free, she uses the time to take care of business.

First, she dunks her whole suit in a bucket and scrubs at the bloody patches with hydrogen peroxide until the water runs clear, then goes downstairs to the laundry room to chuck the whole mess in a washing machine. While she waits for the cycle to be done, she turns on some mindless show and cleans out the gunk from her webshooters, meticulously picking at the mechanisms with a bobby pin. Once she’s moved the suit over to the dryer, she folds herself up all wonky on the couch and searches up some variation of “femme mob boss new york” for at least an hour until she gives up because she realizes it’s pointless and at this rate she might end up on a watchlist.

She doesn’t have a guy in the chair, okay? It’s just her stupid ass stuck with trying to figure out all this shit. Sometimes Google has answers.

After her pointless search, it’s just a matter of finally changing out of her pajamas, getting her suit out of the dryer and putting it in her backpack, and then hauling ass to Suki’s so she can beat the lunch rush and make it to Marcia’s studio in time.

They’re regulars here. It’s an oft-established pattern at this point, really. Whenever Anetra comes in to pick up lunch, Suki is usually there, and will try to engage Anetra in a conversation in Japanese, which Anetra definitely can’t speak. Then she inevitably switches to English, and asks after Marcia and what bullshit their neighbors are up to this month.

“When are you going to make that girl stop eating only vegetables?” she asks ruefully now, packaging up their order behind the counter. “Not healthy.”

“She’s vegetarian, Suki,” Anetra tells her with a snort, filching one of the mints from the register dish. “It’s a moral choice.”

Suki just clicks her tongue. “She needs meat,” she mumbles stubbornly. “Twig of a thing. You are certainly a bad friend if you aren’t making her eat meat.”

“I’ll let you know how me telling her that goes over,” Anetra replies, rolling her eyes good-naturedly, and opens her phone to check Marcia’s location. She’s on the north side of the building, so she’s still stuck in her first-grade class. The parents are probably bugging her again.

“Oh! I have news,” Suki says eagerly, interrupting Anetra’s idle scrolling, and Anetra locks her phone and puts it to the side, giving the older woman her full attention. “That Spider? On the news? I saw her.”

Anetra feels her body temperature shoot up exponentially, then plummet. She shivers without being aware of it. “Come on. What?” she scoffs, knowing she’s laying on the disbelief a little thick.

“In the alley outside of my apartment a week ago,” Suki says, and nods seriously. “With my own two old eyes. These two fuckers—” Suki prioritizes learning curse words in practicing her English—“were in the alley, breaking glass of my building, spraying paint all over the side of the wall, and then before I could even turn from the window, there she was! Immediately!”

“Everyone thinks it’s a man,” Anetra says carefully. Her throat hurts suddenly. She remembers that day. Two little racist shits, spraying awful words on the wall, a bruised old man slumped against the side of the dumpster who had probably tried to stop them earlier. “Did you see the face?”

“Ah, no,” Suki says, and Anetra’s heart only calms a tiny bit. “If everyone thinks it’s a man and it isn’t, then I can be the only one who is right.”

“It’s probably just some dude trying to be a hero,” Anetra says dismissively, and Suki raises an eyebrow, shakes her head vigorously. “He’s probably already tired of it.”

“Sophie, in my kitchen, she also saw the Spider in an alley. Last night! Last night, she saw her! Sophie, come here!”

A girl in an apron and a hairnet pokes her head through the swinging kitchen door, a fresh black eye ripening on her face, and Anetra’s eyes widen before she can stop her reaction.

The fucking girl from last night.

“Sophie, you saw the Spider! Right?”

“They saved me,” Sophie says kind of quietly, not coming any farther into the restaurant. “Some guy pulled me into an alley when I was walking home, and they—they got him off of me, I was able to run.”

Anetra swallows hard. “Wow,” she says, tries to nod. She’s never seen anyone she’s saved after the fact before. It makes her chest tight, her eyes burn. “That’s—I’m glad you’re okay.”

“See? She saw the Spider too! She is helping us,” Suki says determinedly, jabbing a finger against the countertop. “She is real.”

She’s holding the order in one hand, so Anetra grabs it from her quickly, stumbles backwards a little bit. “I. Um. I have to get this to Marcia, Suki. Sorry. Bye, Sophie.”

Suki eyes her a little too closely for comfort. “Okay,” is all she says. “Have a good day, Anetra. Say hello to Marcia.”

Anetra scrambles out the front door, bag clenched tightly in her fist. The box she keeps the Spider in in her head breaks open, bursts free, spills webs and fear and responsibility all over every other thought in her head.

She’s kept the two parts of her life separate for months now, she’s been okay, but now they’re coming together in a way that sets her teeth on edge. Is Suki in danger now? She’s unknowingly closer than a lot of news outlets to guessing who the Spider is. What about that girl, Sophie? Will she be all right? Did saving her once mean that she’ll be a bigger target later?

The streets seem too fenced in by the lofty skyscrapers on all sides all of a sudden, and Anetra feels trapped. She bows her head and walks faster, tucking her chin closer to her chest.

Marcia’s studio building comes rising into her periphery, all light metal and huge panes of glass, but the gorgeous design doesn’t soothe Anetra like it usually does. All she can think is how exposed that building is, how anyone could look in and see her with Marcia on almost any floor of the studio.

When she walks in, though, the panic abates slightly. No one here is talking about the Spider. It’s a uniquely focused atmosphere, the way taekwondo tournaments were for her back in the day. No one is talking about anything but the thing they came here to do, from the tiny six-year-olds enthusing about pliés to their beleaguered parents to the sharp-featured prima ballerina running through her fitness program with her teacher.

Anetra maneuvers through the herds of different layers of tulle to get to the front desk, where Robin, the desk receptionist, hands over a guest pass badge without asking for Anetra’s ID and gives her a tired smile.

“Hard day?” Anetra asks, and it’s settling, to go through this familiar exchange.

“It’s the first day of a camp week,” Robin says dryly. “A million little kids, all sprinting around this huge studio space, and all the upperclassmen think that it’s suddenly my fault that these children are underfoot even though this happens every single fucking year—sorry,” she edits herself, not sounding sorry at all. “Every single year.”

“Yikes,” Anetra says, laughing a little bit.

“Go give Marcia her lunch break, she needs it,” Robin tells her dismissively, waving her hand in the direction of the elevator. “Everyone gets fucked over on a new camp week. She definitely hasn’t sat down all day.”

Anetra gives a little salute. “Will do,” she confirms, tapping the top of Robin’s desk to punctuate her statement. “Good luck not getting fucked over.”

“Honestly, I fucking wish I could get fucked over—I won’t get to see my girlfriend until next week at this rate with the overtime hours they’ve stuck me on,” Robin mutters, slouching in her chair.

Laughing at the other woman’s exaggerated pout, Anetra begins to mime obscenely making out with the back of her hand until Robin screeches at her to stop, and then she hightails it to the elevator while giggling as the other woman readies to chuck something at her head.

She just barely wedges herself into the packed space, and her phone buzzes as the doors close.

FROM: marcia 🌸💖💫🧚💕🌷💗✨💝

SOS!!!!!!!!!

The nine exclamation points are honestly pretty typical for a text from Marcia, but the all-caps is a slight flag for alarm—when the elevator doors slide open to the sixth floor, Anetra steps with a quick pace past all the other open studios to get to the one at the end of the long hall.

“I’m sorry, but I really believe—” is the first thing Anetra hears, Marcia’s voice sounding more than a little exhausted. Marcia is sweet, the sweetest person Anetra knows, but she’s not a pushover, and her voice has taken on that edge that it does when you’re about to cross her line.

“I don’t care,” a woman’s voice interrupts. “You don’t bring this shit into a classroom. That’s for whatever you do at home—Lord knows I don’t agree with that, either, but you will not get my daughter involved in this life you chose.”

She pauses, likely about to barrel into an even more fervent tirade, but that’s when Anetra makes her entrance, unaware of the exact circumstances but ready to roll with pretty much anything.

“Marcia?” she asks, schooling her face into a pout of concern as she pokes her head into the studio space. “Sorry to interrupt, I just thought your lunch break started a few minutes ago.” She holds up the bag from Suki’s, then cuts her gaze pointedly to the clock above the door.

Marcia’s posture noticeably relaxes at the sight of her. A tiny smile flickers across her face.

“Yeah, I’m sorry, ‘Netra, I’m just wrapping up here,” she says sunnily, then turns back to the woman who has a blood vessel popping in her forehead. “I’m so sorry, but as I said, the Pride parade march was a clearly labeled part of this week’s camp, and if your child showed distinct interest that comes from them, not from me. If you’d like for them not to attend, that is between you and your kid and I don’t get involved. If there’s nothing else—” Marcia tilts her head and beams, her eyes flashing dangerously—“I only get an hour for lunch, and I’m going to spend it with my girlfriend.”

It’s a joke, a bit, and one they’ve done more than a few times to get out of sticky situations like this, actually, but Anetra’s cheeks never fail to warm at least a little bit when Marcia calls her that, even if it’s to make a point to a bigoted woman in a kid’s dance studio.

“This isn’t over,” the woman in question grinds out through a clenched jaw, crossing her arms over her chest. Despite her words, she thankfully abandons the conversation and stalks over to the other side of the room where her kid has been chatting with their classmates.

Anetra waves brightly at the woman’s retreating back. “Have a nice day,” she chirps, and Marcia barely manages to suppress a snort of laughter at the false tone as she walks over to meet her.

“Hey,” she says softly, her posture sloping forward into Anetra’s orbit, reaching out a hand to tug at the sleeve of her t-shirt. She’s like this, always; she needs to touch things to get herself back. Anetra has never once minded. She mirrors it and leans in right back.

“Rough morning?” Anetra says, keeping her voice low so the kids still packing up across the room won’t hear their conversation.

Marcia rubs her temples and manages a dead-eyed smile. “No. Why do you ask?”

Anetra slings an arm around her shoulders and traces a soothing pattern with her thumb. “I’ve got an order of veggie rolls with your name on it,” she says sweetly. “Plus we have a whole hour of your break for you to rant about everything that went wrong with camp today.”

“I don’t want to waste your time…” Marcia protests feebly, but it’s just noise and she knows it, knows that they both understand the entirety of lunch will be spent with her complaining and Anetra nodding along gamely. A grin breaks through, a real one, and she rests her head on Anetra’s shoulder happily.

Anetra is watching the last of the kids trickle out the door, waving to the few that are return dancers from last year that recognize her as Marcia’s roommate, when she feels Marcia stiffen next to her.

“Wh—” she starts asking, beginning to turn to check in, but then there’s the light touch of fingers on her cheek that finish the job for her and she’s looking right in Marcia’s eyes, inches away.

The prickle she’s been growing resignedly used to over these past few months skitters up and down her spine, the one that tells her pay attention or something’s up. The noise of it, the feel of it folds easily into the whole-body hum that’s happening under Marcia’s focused gaze, until everything in her is tuned towards the blond standing at her side.

“Trust me,” Marcia whispers, so quietly she barely moves her lips, and then when Anetra has nodded without even entirely being aware she’s done it Marcia is leaning in, kissing Anetra square on the mouth.

They’re two queer roommates. They’re open and generous with sexuality, that’s kind of in the handbook. They’ve made out when they’re drunk before on a dare, Marcia kisses Anetra on the cheek when she gets home sometimes. Casual intimacy is nothing new for them.

This is the same as all of that on the surface—Anetra doesn’t know why she’s being kissed soundly under the fluorescent lights of the studio, she assumes it’s for some bigger reason—but this is the first time she’s ever felt Marcia’s lips against hers when she’s completely sober. This is the first time she can taste that stupid expensive chapstick Marcia always buys, a waxy herbal flavor over top the sensation of spit and flesh.

Marcia pulls away, her eyes a universe, and Anetra’s constant crush is snapping at her heels again. This time, though, she can’t push it away—it’s gained sharper, exigent teeth.

She blinks a few times, and the world around them, which had faded into silence, comes crashing back in with sound and color, the studio space now apparently empty and the lights overhead seeming even brighter in the absence of anyone else in the room.

“Um,” is all she can manage. She casts around for a joke to make, something to make it seem like she wasn’t as affected by that as she was. Marcia is just smiling at her like it’s a regular Tuesday.

“Sorry, that fucking parent’s watching us through the window,” Marcia tells her, inclining her head just slightly, and Anetra whips around not-at-all-subtly to see the woman from before duck out of the hallway when she realizes she’s been caught. “Wanted to give her a little bit of a show.”

“Ah,” Anetra says weakly, the realization that she actually maybe never got over her crush on her roommate making her voice shake a little on its way out. “No, yeah, totally. Stick it to the man. Or woman.”

“Anyway,” Marcia continues breezily. “You have Suki’s for me, and I got an hour. Wanna eat up on the roof?”

Anetra just nods, and Marcia pushes off the wall they were leaning against to go grab her bag from the corner. Anetra takes the time to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth and shut away all of this to be dealt with later.

Being the Spider is hard. It’s the hardest thing she’s ever had to do. But most of the problems that arise from that can be solved with a well-placed punch or a couple webs tangling something (or someone) up.

This isn’t that.

She’s still got to do some reconnaissance on this person who’s got it out for her today. After lunch, she can swing around for a while and hope that a solution to this newly reinvigorated crush appears in the skyline while she does so.

Marcia skips back over to her, smiling wide.

“Ready to listen to me for an hour?”

It was sunny when Anetra left home, but it’s overcast and a little drizzly now. Neither of them mind as they curl up in two plastic chairs sat opposite each other on the roof, the access door propped open behind them with Marcia’s class binder.

Anetra can almost forget the charged moment in the studio, chucking the wrappers of the plastic silverware at each other and laughing at the stories Marcia tells about her kids’ antics.

“Fucking Michael F., then, what does he decide to do? Tries to execute a lift with Marie without telling me first. Not only does that not fit at all with the choreography, they’re also eight. They can’t tie their own fucking slippers up.”

Anetra nods sagely, like she’s also an experienced dance teacher and not some half-waitress half-dancer at a gay bar. “I think—” she starts, but then the access door creaks open.

That prickle, again, at the back of her neck, except this time Marcia shows no signs of suddenly jumping her bones, so Anetra sits up straight, casts an eye around, feels around for her backpack with the suit and webshooters in it.

“Hey,” she hears from behind them, and although her mind relaxes at the recognizable voice, her body stays alert, won’t shut down all her heightened warning systems.

“Hey, Kerri,” Marcia says through a mouthful of sushi, waving with her chopsticks. “Finally got a break?”

“Yes, finally,” Kerri grumbles, shuffling towards them, running a hand over her face.

Kerri is the prima of the company’s production of Swan Lake that they’re putting on this season. Marcia is Anetra’s favorite at the studio, always, unquestionably, but Kerri is raw fucking talent. She’s still young, but moves with the lithe grace of someone with twice her training. She dances so fluidly, all while keeping her eyes locked on some invisible, unreachable horizon. She’s kind of miraculous.

She’s also, at this moment, looking more than a little exhausted when she slumps into one of the vacant chairs by the two of them. Kerri and Marcia continue to chat for a while using dancer jargon Anetra only barely has a grasp of, and Anetra just sits there silently, her whole body ringing in alarm like a sheet of metal someone hit with a hammer.

Her knee jogs up and down anxiously. She has no reason to be afraid of Kerri. She knows Kerri, not well, true, but she’s been in Marcia’s orbit since she was a newbie at the studio. So why is she on high alert?

“You okay?”

Marcia’s voice cuts through the static of Anetra’s overpowered sense input, clear concern coloring her tone.

“Yeah, I—yeah,” Anetra says, shaking her head slightly as if jostling something loose. The ringing in her ears has grown louder. “Yes. Sorry. I just have to get going.”

“Oh, yeah, of course,” Marcia replies, obviously still worried. She gets to her feet quickly, gathers up all their trash. “I’ll talk to you about being a TA for that technique class next week?” she asks Kerri, and when she gets an elegant nod she smiles. “Okay, great. My lunch break’s over, anyway. Let’s get going, ‘Netra.”

Anetra nods a little weakly, almost unable to hear over the buzzing in her ears. Marcia takes her hand loosely, and she lets herself be tugged down the stairwell back down to the lobby. Every sound is grotesquely amplified, every light feels too bright. The months-old bite on her calf pulses and aches.

“Is it a migraine?” Marcia asks softly, and it sounds like Anetra’s listening to her from several feet underwater.

“No,” she tries to say as normally as possible, tries to achieve how she would normally sound. “No, I think I’m fine. I just need to go home.”

“I’ll walk you home,” Marcia tells her immediately, determined, and Anetra shakes her head again, maybe a little too quickly.

PAY ATTENTION. SOMETHING’S GOING ON; PAY ATTENTION. EYES UP, EYES UP, EYES UP.

She only gets this feeling when something’s about to happen. Usually, it’s an attack of some sort. She’s not endangering Marcia, not if there’s even the ghost of a chance that she’ll get hurt.

“I’ll be fine, Mar. I’ll text you,” she says dismissively, and the words sound small even to her, but they get Marcia to loosen her grip on Anetra’s arm.

“I… okay. Text me. I’ll see you at home?”

Anetra hates that she can hear the new uncertainty in Marcia’s voice. She hates that she knows that she put it there.

“I’ll see you at home,” she echoes, trying to put every bit of certainty she has into this one statement.

Marcia swallows, and Anetra can feel her eyes on her back as she all but runs out of the studio.

Once she’s out of sight of that terribly windowed building in an alley a block or so south, Anetra sinks to the ground, pressing the heels of her hands into her eye sockets.

“Ow,” she mutters. “Jesus Christ, this cannot be useful.”

She tucks herself behind a dumpster, strips and then pulls on her suit and mask. Her mind throbs.

She sprints up the wall, gets to a roof, and tries to breathe, gives in to the alarm bells her powers have been sounding off for the past few minutes straight. Her body tenses into a ready position instantly—she’s discerned over the past couple weeks that this feeling is most similar to a panic attack.

The adrenaline spike is overwhelming, but it’s all intentional, directed, pointed towards a prerogative that she hasn’t been clued in on yet. Sometimes, when she’s too scrambled, when she can’t follow the thread being led out for her, the heightened senses misfire and she ends up with a debilitating migraine.

She can’t afford to be laid up for the rest of the day; she needs to solve this, now.

“Okay,” she mumbles aloud to herself, darting up to the roof easily and casting a long, searching look to the streets below, letting her senses take over. “Okay, what are you trying to tell me?”

She cuts through the ambient noise of the city without effort to zero in on whatever anomaly is present, ignoring yelling children and car horns and—there.

A tug in her lower gut, not dissimilar to the feeling when a rollercoaster is about to drop, as she’s honing in on an alley in Midtown.

She’s swinging her way there before she even makes the conscious decision to do so.

When she lands hard on the ground in an abandoned stretch of sidewalk, she can feel her heartbeat in her teeth, every single cell in her body screaming at her that something is going to happen.

She rounds a corner, makes it to the alley she felt her hackles raise for, and the awful feeling somehow intensifies.

This is the alley from last night. Her blood is still drying on the wall a couple yards down.

Immediately, she’s up on the balls of her feet. If those fuckers from last night are back, she’ll pull absolutely no punches this time. This was a trap, that’s why, that’s why the space behind her eyes feels like it’s imploding.

She runs farther into the alley, fists up and head low, but no one bursts out—she stands there in the wind-whistling silence, tensed for a fight that isn’t coming.

Her shoulders drop. She’s breathing hard under the mask, and a spill of light blooms in her left eye, signaling an impending migraine.

“What do you want?” she screams to no one, and of course no one answers. She whirls around, ready to just punch the wall behind her until her suit tears and her knuckles bleed, but what she sees painted there makes her stop dead in her tracks.

A too-clean, too-perfect graffiti painting of her mask.

COME FIND MOTHER is painted in large, stark, even letters under the enormous paint job, a signature, a command.

Oh, fuck.

The dizziness that comes with all her migraines hits her in a terrible wave, and she has to sit down, staring up at the likeness of her face on the wall as it stares right back, the red slash painted over the left eye of the mask just like it is in real life.

Mother, she thinks through the oncoming fog, racks her brain and comes up with nothing. No one she knows of would use that as their moniker—it’s too old-fashioned, too traditionally powerful.

This development is newly unnerving. The city’s underground power structure is against the Spider, obviously, but none of them have actively singled her out yet besides this new player.

Mother isn’t like the rest of that structure, anyway; Mother is an unknown. Anetra doesn’t know what she’s capable of. And that makes her a hell of a lot more dangerous than the slimy mob bosses she’s used to fucking with, and this callout becomes a lot more fucking substantial.

Anetra stands up, her left eye beginning to black out with the migraine, and she stumbles a little bit. Home. She has to get home.

Unable to brave the subway in this state, and even more unable to walk the many, many blocks home, Anetra hobbles her way to the nearest northbound L tracks, casts a web to swing herself onto the top of the oncoming train and just hunkers down once she’s landed.

The wind is cool through her mask, soothing against the rising temperature of her skin, but it does nothing to calm her thoughts.

She feels stupid and small.

When she was a kid, and she wished for superpowers in the same way that every kid does, it was a fantasy about finally, finally having some control over her little life. No one can tell you what to do if you can punch through walls or fly at the speed of light.

The thing that her child brain couldn’t comprehend, though, is that your problems grow at a speed that outpaces your ability. If you could fly at the speed of light, then some time-space continuum thing would probably crop up that you wouldn’t be able to fix even with that speed. If you could punch through walls, then maybe you wouldn’t be able to punch through walls fast enough to save anyone.

And if you can swing around on webs and have a sense for danger, maybe someone will hunt you down for it, and you’ll have no idea how to stop them or who they even are.

Her migraine begins in earnest right as she stumbles through the front door, managing to lock it behind her as she walks through the house, closing all the curtains before the pain gets unmanageable.

“Suit,” she mumbles to herself. “Suit’s gotta come off.”

She flings it over her chair in the corner, then chucks a blanket over it as an afterthought to keep it hidden. Even that small action makes her head pulse. She grabs Marcia’s pajama shirt she threw on the bed this morning and tugs it back on before falling over top of the pillows, unable to even cross the room to close her own blinds.

She doesn’t sleep—she never can when she has a migraine. She just lays there until it passes. Usually, she feels the warning signs and prepares, grabs a cold rag and fills her waterbottle, but now she’s in the thick of it and all she can do is brace her body and wait for it to end.

Her door creaks open quietly after about an hour, and the small sound may as well be an ice pick above her left eye. She makes a small, pathetic, embarrassing little noise at the sensation.

Once the sharp ache dips back into a dull thud of pain, there’s soft footsteps over to the side of the bed, then the heavenly sensation of a cold towel being pressed to her neck—Marcia, Anetra thinks, and feels her whole body relax, just a little bit.

“You’re okay, baby,” Marcia murmurs, barely a whisper, the noise not aggravating the thrumming pain under Anetra’s skull. “I’m gonna close these curtains, make it darker in here.”

The word ‘baby’ sticks with Anetra for longer than it should.

Marcia closes all the blinds as quietly as she can, Anetra sighing at the slight relief it gives her, and then she comes back over to the side of the bed with Anetra’s waterbottle in her hand.

“You should drink water,” Marcia commands in her soft voice, and Anetra just sits up slowly, trying not to whimper at the pain the movement causes, and lets Marcia tip the bottle for her to drink from.

“‘M sorry,” she manages once she’s had a few sips.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Marcia murmurs automatically, then chews on her cheek for a second, just watching her. “Just… why didn’t you tell me you were having a migraine?” she murmurs, her expression unreadable in the dark room. “I would’ve walked you home.”

Anetra doesn’t have the brainpower to lie, so she slouches back down among the pillows, curling up on her side.

“I didn’t want you to get hurt,” she mumbles into the fabric of the sheets.

Marcia’s confusion is palpable. “No one was gonna hurt me at the studio if I walked you home, ‘Netra. I—camp is stressful, but it isn’t—you should’ve told me,” she says, then flinches when she realizes she spoke too loudly near the end.

“Yeah,” Anetra whispers. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Tell me next time,” Marcia says, her voice near-silent. “You shouldn’t have to—you have people who will take care of you.”

Anetra says nothing, her words all spent, so Marcia’s footsteps quietly retreat towards the door. The door handle turns softly, and without being fully aware she’s speaking Anetra hears her own voice—

“Stay?”

There’s nothing but the sound of two people breathing for a moment. Then, Marcia’s footsteps start again, this time coming closer to the bed, and Anetra feels the mattress dip as Marcia lays down, her body warm at.

“Is this o—” she hears Marcia begin, softly whispered then broken off into quiet, and instead of saying anything Anetra laces her fingers with Marcia’s and holds their hands together over her stomach.

Gently, Marcia’s thumb rubs over the fabric of Anetra’s pajama shirt, an unconscious, comforting movement.

“You’re okay, baby,” Marcia murmurs again. “It’s all right.”

It’s a running joke between them that Marcia is always right, about everything, for all time.

Everything is not okay, not in the grand scheme of things, but in this present moment, the world shrunk down to just two people, Marcia’s right.

Anetra’s okay. It’s all right.

#anetra #marcia x3 #marcia marcia marcia #anarcia #rpdr fanfiction #rpdr #spiderman #netra #kerri colby #zig writes

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locution-youngster-enjoyer · 6 months

Text

Gonna rant about my villain OC’s under the cut (TW: dr*gs mentioned briefly)

Any pronouns but preferably they/them (their personal philosophy is that “The only labels I believe in are designer!”)

Somewhere in late 20s

CC’s whole thing is that they are a fashion designer. Alignment wise they are very neutral, living by the idea that “any customer is a friend of mine, but any enemy of my customer is also my enemy.” Design wise they have a mullet hairstyle that is various shades of a blue/cyan color, light skin, and brown eyes. They will usually wear a white button down shirt that is slightly open, black slacks with a multicolor pattern on them, measuring tape instead of a belt that sticks out in a tail-like kind of way, and knee-high black boots with high heels. They usually where a lot of makeup and jewelry.

Power and fighting wise, they are not overly superhuman. Their intense knowledge of fashion helps provide them with various weapons, their main ones being Claw-Rings that they use not only to attack, but to also sew together clothing like a spider. They can also attach other bits of cloth to the rings.

Personality wise they are very upbeat and friendly. They are never mean to someone’s face, but will make snide remarks behind their back. Think similar to Mettaton from Undertale. If Wordgirl were a darker show, there would be a more unhinged side to CC suggesting that out of all the villains, they’ve probably have committed the worst crime ethically speaking and their personality would come across as much more bi-polar.

Ozzy and Mandy

Ozzy (he/him) and Mandy (she/her) are twins. It’s hard to tell their age because of how young and pretty they look.

Although both of them are villains, Ozzy has worse intent than Mandy. These two have two gimmicks, the first one being that they speak in Iambic Pentameter (so around 10 syllables per sentence). Their second gimmick is that they manipulate emotions and specifically make others fall in love with them. Most love poems are written in Iambic Pentameter and even their names are based of the poem Ozymandias, another poem written in Iambic Pentameter.

Mandy has curly black hair that goes slightly passed her shoulders and light skin with blue eyes. She wears a black and pink dress with a slit and fluffy pink sleeves, and high heels. A lot of her design features the symbol for women. Ozzy has similar skin and eyes with that stereotypical boy-band hairstyle. He wears a lot of black and blue, this time with a t-shirt exposing his chest, a sleeveless denim jacket, and black jeans, with the symbol for men being featured a lot.

Their main power involves emotional manipulation in a way that’s technically just mind control. To control a person, they have to either kiss them or blow colored fog (Mandy gets pink and Ozzy gets blue) in their face. Another big power they have is the ability to create several extra wispy, fog-like arms (once again, the color is different depending on who is doing it). Besides that, the two do t have many powers but can put up a decent physical fight.

Mandy, though she can be malicious, is also big on the theme of consent when it comes to romance and tends to be the more caring of the two. People generally prefer her over her brother. Ozzy is more interested in his own personal gain and has grown salty of people favoring his sister over him. Again, if wordgirl was a darker show, I feel like at one point the two could be used as an allegory for substance abuse, since there powers are really trippy.

#wordgirl #wordgirl villains #wordgirl oc #please let me know if you want to hear more about them #thanks for letting me rant

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literarygoon · 10 months

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So,

Celista had never seen anything like it, even in the most grandiose cathedrals of Europe.

It had taken her and Ellis nearly two hours to descend the narrow slope before them, which knifed into a looming cliff face that blocked out the Shuswap sun. The mountain before them disappeared into the sky far above where she stood gawking and transfixed, a slumbering stone giant silhouetted against the baby blue. She’d seen mountains like this from her aeroplane during her flight across Canada, their proud stone summits bald and untouched by humanity. Somehow it was more impressive to see one at eye level, to feel its awesome immensity from the ground. It reminded her of school days, when she’d learned about Mount Olympus and all the titans that dwelled there.

For the last twenty minutes of the descent she’d had to step through the tangle of fat tree roots obstructing their path like lazy pythons, swiping branches from her face and scratching through knee-high scrub bushes. Now suddenly the ground was bare, and before her was an astonishing and intricate crimson mural that reached out of sight. At its centre was a thick undulating serpent, twisting vertically, with clusters of tiny figures and symbols crowded on either side. Interrupted only by the occasional patch of moss or a deep crack in the stone, the blood-coloured paint almost seemed to be slithering up the wall while she watched. Her breath caught in her throat, her mouth agape, and the world around her went quiet. She felt like she was in the presence of something far beyond her comprehension.

“That’s where we’re going, m’ lady. This map is hundreds of years old, they say.”

Celista blinked in confusion. “Map?”

“That right there, that’s the Adams River,” he said, pointing at the snake. “They’ve drawn out every twist and turn, every eddy, all the way from where it begins up north to where it empties into Shuswap Lake. The accuracy is incredible, actually. They say it took them over a hundred years to complete.”

“And the paint, it doesn’t wash away?”

Ellis smiled, walked over to the stone, and cracked at the cliff wall with his hatchet. The paint remained undisturbed. “These are pictographs, and the Tribe of the River Eel have been using them for generations beyond count. It tells the story of their people, both their past and their future. This paint will outlive both you and I. They use ochre, mixed with fish oils, and it’s longer lasting than any paint white men have ever created.”

Celista shook her head in wonder. “And who is that?” she asked. “That figure on the tree trunk, with the long arms? Who does that represent?”

Ellis smiled proudly, gazing affectionately at the pictograph ten feet above their head. Surrounded by smaller stick figures, some of them draped spread-eagle across the top of the floating trunk, the ominous red man’s pointed knees reached up to his shoulders while he speared two paddles into the rippling water beneath him. He was spider-like and eyeless, and just looking at him gave Celista a quick shudder of foreboding.

“That is Nanor, or at least one version of him. He’s a shapeshifter of myth. The Tribe of the River Eel believe that it’s him that accompanies each new soul beyond the limits of death, paddling them beyond the limits of our reality. He takes them to join the countless generations that have descended into the Adams River to begin their new life amidst the tumult and chaos of the rapids. They believe that the souls of their ancestors live inside the water, and direct its flow. The river provides them with everything they need during life, then welcomes them into its arms after death.”

“That’s their religion?”

He shook his head. “The Tribe of the River Eel don’t have a religion, not in the way you and I understand it. You could say that the river is their God, but in their language there is no word for God. There’s no word for Heaven or Hell either. There’s only the river, and its messenger — Nanor. He is the bridge between this present moment, and eternity.”

“But isn’t he evil?”

Ellis laughed, and slung his backpack over a nearby branch. “Another concept that doesn’t exist in their worldview. Is the bear evil for eating the salmon? Is the eagle evil for catching its prey in its talons? Each being has its nature, its role within its environment. If there was no Nanor, some other being would have to take his place.”

Celista was still digesting this alien information as Ellis clambered further up the trunk, his movements effortless and languid. Again she marvelled at the fact that this was the same derelict who had wandered into her clearing the night before, seemingly starving and near death. Now he swung from one branch to the next like an acrobat, his muscles straining against his flannel shirt. Once he’d reached a spot twenty feet above his head, he leaned heavily until the entire tree drooped toward the cliff face in submission. With one outstretched palm he cupped a small protruding red stone, then turned it decisively to the right with a crack.

“What are you doing?” Celista asked, noting that the stone he’d turned was at the centre of a pictograph of the sun.

“This, right here, is the secret key.”

Years later, when society would know her as the world-famous Lady Celista Spencer, she would think back to this moment as a pivotal hinge in her life. If her initial trek across the Atlantic had been the moment she transitioned from girl to woman, this was when she fully embraced her future role as an explorer and author. It was about fear management — as a pitch-black hole appeared in the rock, its cleverly disguised stone door swinging into the darkness, she clearly saw the two choices before her: she could turn back now, and never understand what lay beyond, or she could trek forward with Ellis and experience whatever life had in store for her. It wasn’t a choice for her, really. Remaining ignorant would be intolerable; comfortable normalcy was not what she wanted out of her life. Even if it killed her, she had no choice but to soldier forward.

Ellis dropped from the tree with a thump, and gave her a lascivious grin. He retrieved his backpack and pulled it over his shoulders, then motioned toward the doorway. For a moment she thought she saw flames in his eyes, his sun-reddened face glowing with perspiration.

“If you’re afraid, I could take you back to the winery. We could be home by sunset,” he said.

“No,” she replied. “I mean to see this through.”

He chuckled happily, and swept his arm toward the entrance. “After you, m’ lady.” The Literary Goon

#shuswap #pictographs #AdamsRiver #LadyCelistaSpencer #fiction #canlit

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lemonlillybee · 2 years

Text

Whumptober Day 3

Title: A Hair’s Breadth From Death

Prompts: Gun to Temple | “Say goodbye.”

Fandom: Spider-Man (MCU)

Word Count: 618

Read on AO3

Peter’s heart races in his chest, each rapid beat loud in his own ears, the sound so overwhelmingly crowding his senses that he almost doesn’t hear the man cock his gun.

Even through his mask, the barrel pressed to the side of his head feels cold. He briefly wonders if he’s just imagining that part. One bullet had already been fired, surely the metal against his temple should feel hot instead of cold? Either way, the sweat suddenly drenching his suit is cold and very real, and Peter squeezes his eyes shut, prepared for his life to start flashing before his eyes any second now.

Even Spider-Man can’t heal from a bullet to the head.

“Say goodbye, Spider-Man” the criminal snarls, pushing the end of the gun harder against Peter’s head.

He has a sudden, fleeting moment of courage, and he opens his mouth. “Goodbye to you, or to that pigeon over there?”

His voice is surprisingly strong and clear and the man’s eyes flick down to his left, where there indeed is a pigeon mindlessly waddling along. It’s just enough of a distraction for Peter to duck down, twisting out of the man’s grip while simultaneously ducking down low, kicking the man’s feet out from under him. With a flick of his wrist, he secures the gun with his webbing and yanks hard, catapulting it out of the man’s hands and into the air in the opposite direction.

He quickly realizes that letting the gun fall to the sidewalk below where dozens of people are walking isn’t the best idea, so he wastes no time pinning the man to the rooftop with more webs before he sprints to the edge of the building. Launching himself off the side, Peter aims his wrist at a light pole mid-dive, securing a web before shooting a second one at the gun plummeting to the ground. It’s a little bit too short of a distance to safely let himself finish the swing, so he aims a third strand of webbing up at the neighboring skyscraper and pulls himself back up higher in a sharp upward trajectory.

He’s swinging far too fast and one leg clips the ledge around the top of the building as he approaches, causing him to flip forward, spinning head over heels and not quite sticking the landing. He falls to his knees, skidding several feet before tucking into a clumsy somersault and coming to a painful stop just inches from the far edge of the rooftop.

It’s not his most graceful landing, but considering he’d been held at gunpoint only a minute ago, it's not his worst either. He lies on his back, panting hard and wincing at the pain in his shins, knees, shoulders and back. Pushing himself gingerly up onto one elbow and looking around for the gun, he slumps back down in relief when he sees it on the roof with him. His skinned knees hurt the worst, and he can only imagine what they probably look like. He’s definitely going to have to sew up both knees in the suit, too, and maybe a spot on his left shoulder where the skin underneath is stinging.

Thinking about how he might have to work on that non-dissolving web fluid tomorrow in the lab with Tony, Peter pushes himself up onto his elbows again, then into a seated position to inspect his knees. Yep, definitely ripped, and very bloody. He’s pretty sure a non-dissolving web fluid would make the perfect thread to stitch up his suit, and now he has something to test it on.

Now he just has to figure out a way to tell Tony why he needs to make an indestructible thread.

#whumptober2022 #no.3 #gun to temple #say goodbye #spider-man (mcu)#drabble #blood #injury #guns #irondad #peter parker whump #whump #hurt peter parker

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indouloureux · 2 years

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hung up on you

peter parker x reader

summary: you and peter parker are left to deal with the aftermath of the snap, both grieving in your ways that includes inconsequential bickering and redundant jealousy. what happens when you get hurt during an unexpected mission and he's left to take care of you?

word count: 8, 729

warnings: enemies to lovers! mentions of grief, thanos' bullshit, knives and guns, violence, and someone's throat getting split open. reader uses she/her bc this is one of my old works and ive yet to study the usage of second pov back then so im sorry 😭

a/n: i wanted to write a fic about how peter didn't get blipped bc poor baby did not deserve that honestly. this fic includes wilson fisk, during the times he hired the ronin (as mentioned in hawkeye?), akihiko is here too, the person ronin killed in endgame. i wanted to try something new so here it is! ava orlova is an original marvel character and i do not own her.

MASTERLIST

༻✦༺ . ⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : – ⭒ ⊹ ⭒ – : ✧ : -˚̣⋅ . ༻✧༺

“Any plans for today? Or are you just going to sit in your bedroom reading a book on how to lose your virginity?”

“Hm, and you? Pushing eggs out of your stick-covered ass, insect?”

She pivoted her right arm. Peter swerved, panting as he bypassed her punch. She wasn’t convinced if the blush on his face was from the sweat he got from training too hard, or if he was flustered at her spider joke. Either way, it was amusing to see his ears turn red.

“For the last time, (y/n), I don’t push eggs out of me,” he stammered on his words, huffing. She chortled, brooking advantage as she drove downwards and swiped her leg beneath his, striking him down. “Ah, fuck. You hit like a girl.”

“I am a girl.”

“Really? ‘Cause last time I checked penguins don’t look like that.” He affronted, pushing himself back to his feet.

The groan that fled his parted lips when she punched the bridge of his nose using her uncovered knuckles assembled an impish smirk on her face. “And last time I checked, Spider-Man dodges punches.”

“I was just beginning to stand up,”

“Still.”

Peter took benefit when he caught her withdrawing the other glove from her left hand. But (y/n) was swifter, precluding his punch with the base of her palm and directly aiming for his unprotected stomach.

“Give up yet, Jabba?”

“Not a chance, Yzma.”

She headed toward him, vaulting and kicking him mid-air. But he seized her leg, hauling her to the ground. The impact rendered her a gasp, witnessing black spots in her vision from how badly she struck her head.

He bent down, legs on either side of her, squinting his eyes. “You alright, sunshine?”

Groaning loudly, (y/n) snagged both her legs around his neck, ploughing her heels harshly on his back and flipped him over so now she sat on his chest. She grasped his shoulder, positioned it between her legs, spreading down obliquely beside him, tautening on his arm.

“I’m grand, Spider-boy.” A harsh laugh followed. “Tap out, bitch.”

(y/n) may have underestimated his potency because he lifted her using the arm she harbored against her chest Broadening her eyes, Peter unexpectedly collided her down once more on the mat, allowing himself to hover over her and stapling her arms down to the ground with both his hands.

His chest upheaved laboriously, damp curls dangling from his forehead while he stared at her vehemently with a smirk on his facade, hands seizing her wrists in nuanced coarseness.

“Not a chance.”

With a scowl, her knee aimed for his crotch.

He let out a bitter cry, hands plugging down his genital region. (y/n) stood up, wiping her hands on her thighs; moving her hair out of her face.

“Not fair, Yzma,” he wheezed, forehead on the ground. “Not fair.”

She threw his towel at him. “No. What’s not fair is you using your weird super strength on me, Parker.” (y/n) placed her hands on her hips, bending down to smile at him. “Too afraid to let everyone know you got your ass handed to yourself by a girl?”

“Alright, that’s enough.”

Peter glowered at her as Natasha descended underneath the net, proffering both of them bottled waters. “(y/n)’s right, Peter. You shouldn’t have done that.”

“I- she punched me in the face while I was standing up! That was unfair. And she was ungloved!”

“No, that was strategy.” (y/n) spoke aloud. “Never wait for your enemy to recover, Jabba. Or else you might have an unfair advantage.”

“No, neither of you were fair,” Natasha commented. She pointed at (y/n), an arm crossed on her chest. “You punched his face without a glove.”

“It’s training, isn’t it? He’s gotta know what it feels getting punched in the face without a glove.”

Natasha sucked her cheeks in - a semblance of aggravation, although she retained it in, availing herself in toleration. “If it were training, both of you would know better than to not follow my rules. I’m assuming both of you came here to resolve some petty fight?”

“It wasn’t petty,” Peter grumbled. “She ate my sandwich. And hey, I’ve been punched in the face without a glove before.”

(y/n) groaned, turning to face him. “You wear a mask, Parker, it doesn’t feel the same. And for the last time, it wasn’t me that ate you’re god damn sandwich!”

“I come back home to help and this is the thanks I get? Babysitting?” Natasha whispered to herself, massaging her temples. (y/n) flipped Peter off, dipping beneath the net to clasp her own towel, patting the sweat off. “Anyway, I came here to stop you guys. Mission in 20.”

“Wait,” (y/n) jogged her way to Natasha, giving her a confused look. “Mission?”

Two and a half years ago the entire population of the universe got demolished in half. She witnessed the people around her shift into dust, get frittered away by the wind and by far it was the most cataclysmically mortifying thing she had to encounter. (y/n) had been in Wakanda when it ensued, reaching her friend instantly but when she left five voicemails she knew they were one of them.

Since then, the only people she had left in her life were the remaining vigilantes on Earth.

(y/n) wasn’t the one to grieve but she did – she had lost the only person she had left in her life.

During her times of affliction, she had lost hope – lost hope in herself; to the people around her. And if she had lost hope, she thought maybe that it meant everyone else did too. So (y/n), aside from presuming about how alone she currently felt, figured criminality would stop, with the world hopeless.

The only thing that held her up and made the world feel ordinary even for a split second at sullen junctures, was her endless puerile altercation with Peter. It was a shocker, and she felt vexed about it because it was true.

Crime did stop, nevertheless. The world felt despairingly amicable with corruption gone, and it left some of the people to think that Thanos’ sadistic, genocidal plan was for the greater good. With the lack of missions, it left the vigilantes, and (y/n), stuck inside the compound helping those in need instead of fighting and protecting that they used to accomplish.

Up until now.

“Yeah,” Natasha answered her. “Mission.”

“No one’s done crime in two years, Nat,” she mumbled. “What could they possibly be doing?”

“That’s what you think,” she replied. “Remember a couple months ago where you would always ask me why I always stayed in the surveillance room? And I said a bunch of murders started occurring, but you were too drunk to function?”

Natasha gave her a long stare, eyebrows raising. She stared back, pondering what she might have meant until her thought clicked into one person Natasha searched for in her sleepless nights. “You don’t think…”

“I found him,” she sighed. “I caught Intel from Mexico. This is it, (y/n).”

“What’s going on?” Peter approached the two of them and for the first time, she didn’t roll her eyes at his arrival. Instead, she pursed her lips.

“Natasha found the Ronin who she thinks is Clint.” She squinted her eyes at Natasha. “Which is impossible because no one has seen Clint in years.”

“No way,”

“Yes way,” Natasha began walking away from them, in which the two followed suit. “We haven’t heard from him since he got home arrest. And like you said, no one has seen Clint in years. None of us are sure if he blipped or not. And as for the Ronin,” they arrived in the living room, where Natasha mostly spent her time. Her finger swiped over the sent surveillance video, widening as it hit the center of the screen. “I know a Clint Barton when I see one.”

It was the Ronin, in Mexico, sent two hours ago, killing another group of rebels.

But something felt off.

“I don’t know, Nat.” she whispered. “It’s…I think it’s too dangerous. Going after him, I mean.”

“Too dangerous for you,” Peter mumbled, and she shot him a glare.

“This is the first sign of hope for me in years, (y/n). The thought of Clint out there, alive. It’ll help us. All of us,” Nat proposed, her hands on the edge of the table screen. “I can’t catch him alone. Steve’s out there being a shrink to strangers, Tony’s MIA, the weird space dudes are in a galaxy far, far away. You two are the only ones that can help me right now.”

Peter scratched his neck. “And Rhodey. He’s not AWOL, right?”

(y/n) shook her head. “Look, even if that is Clint, that’s not enough help to get everyone back, Nat. We don’t have the stones, they’re gone.”

Natasha severely tugged on her cheek sideways. (y/n) decided not long ago that being unpretentiously honest was the best for everyone. With the stones gone, there’s no reason left for people to be optimistic about the retrieval of those who perished. But perhaps she’d been too blunt at Natasha, who lost her sister, and possibly, Clint.

“(y/n), Peter, please,” Natasha almost begged. “I know Steve told me to look at the bright side but fuck it, there is no bright side in this world. Everything is just fucking grey.”

(y/n)’s eyes shifted to Peter’s, who was already staring at hers for some sort of approval – the one time they’re actually relying on each other to make a decision. She took a deep breath, eyes returning to Natasha’s, which were already bloodshot.

Perhaps there wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have another person in the compound.

“Okay,” (y/n) whispered, nodding vigorously. “I’ll meet you guys at the departure in 20. Besides, it would be nice to visit Mexico. Never been there.”

She swore she saw Peter smile a little on the corners of her eyes.

The gentle mechanical sound of Peter’s nanotech suit was the one that got her out of her daze. Natasha and Rhodey have yet to be seen, and it would be a shame to say that (y/n) appreciated Peter’s presence as of the moment.

Peter. He also mourned the loss of those who are important in his life – May, Ned, and MJ. As soon as he set foot on earth he did the first thing he could do that he couldn’t do in space, which was call aunt May.

He found out from some stranger who stole her phone that she blipped. And Peter found out from Brad Davis that half of Midtown high’s students were gone too, including Ned and MJ.

He mourned, like (y/n) did. But he attempted to look on the bright side, that he still had Tony and the rest of the Avengers. Yet he couldn’t prevent himself from crying every midnight, pondering about the people he loved that he lost, and blaming himself for what happened.

The only thing that kept him sane was the same as hers – the incessant bickering with (y/n). With her, everything felt almost normal. The only thing that would make him remember the present condition the world was in, was the absence of those he loved.

Even if he’s varied through this before when he lost Uncle Ben, that didn’t stop him from grieving. For Grief is a sensation that no one, even a stoic sociopath, could get used to. It’s inescapable; it’s never-ending.

“I’ve never seen Natasha like that,” Peter said softly, breaking the silence. “I haven’t – I didn’t imagine that she could be vulnerable.”

“She’s human, Parker,” she replied. Though her comment was sarcastic as opposed to practical, Peter though the latter. “She can be vulnerable.”

Peter sat on the stairs of the plane, body suited except for his face that looked unusually pale. His eyes scanned the area, his elbow on his knee. “I know. I just, didn’t think that she’d let herself be vulnerable in front of us.”

A sigh for another short reply. (y/n) crossed her arms, foot tapping in a slow manner as her hair blew across her face. “Neither did I.”

He stared at her for a moment, as if his aspect was plain observance. But really it was just curiosity – how could someone, despite losing everything, be so strong?

Despite the immense nuisance Peter felt for her, he couldn’t help but feel strong formidability for the girl. (y/n), from what he understood, lost almost everything in her life. And as for Peter, he was fortunate enough that he still had Tony to get him through his swarthy days.

Her mien demeanor signified a novelty of altruistic valiance for herself and for the people who presently need her. Did Peter need her? Maybe. He wasn’t confident enough to answer that question. But he hoped for her to abide in his life because she was the only one that kept his life moderately intriguing nowadays.

Peter shook his head to stop thinking about her, and instead: “Why do you stand like Quasimodo?”

“I- what?” her back straightened. “I do not!”

“Hm. I think I know a bell ringer when I see one.”

“It’s called scoliosis,” She scoffed, taking offence. “At least I don’t look like an idiot who dances around the campfire wearing badges and holding a stick of marshmallows in their hand.”

“I told you I was a boy scout one time!” Peter stood up. “And, hey! I said that with confidence.”

“Of course, you’re being defensive.” She gave him an amused grin, fingers formed for mock salutations. “Once a boy scout, always a boy scout.”

“I’m never telling you things about me ever again.”

“Oh, I’m so ashamed. Poor me, how will I live with myself?” she gasped in faux despair. “A life without the knowledge of Peter Benjamin Parker’s nerdy hobbies? Oh, the horror!”

Peter held himself in from webbing that pretty mouth of hers, knowing he’d be getting himself in trouble for taking (y/n)’s voice for at least two hours. Sure, he was pissy that she made fun of him for the hobbies he once had as a child, but he also felt his heartbeat rise — (y/n) remembered something about him that he told long ago.

Instead, he rolled his eyes, sitting down on the stairs once more. “At least I have hobbies.”

“Honestly, Parker, when are you going to have comebacks that don’t make you sound like you’re eight?”

“When I have a peaceful life, (y/n). So that I can look back at this day and tell myself how much of a loser you are.”

She grimaced. “Now you just sound like an eight year old kid who got bullied.”

“Aren’t you bullying me?”

“You started it!”

“I was stating a fact!”

“Both of you are eight year olds,” Rhodey stopped them from shouting at each other as they were on the verge of it before he and Natasha arrived. “’d you have your bags?”

Peter lifted his. “Yeah. Why’re we bringing a suitcase, anyway?”

“Because we don’t know how long we’d be staying there,” Natasha came out from behind. “Intel said that Cli- the Ronin strikes in alternated days. Which means, if he attacked yesterday, he’d hide today. Then he’d attack again tomorrow, then hide the next day. So on, so on, whatever.”

(y/n) carried her bag up the stairs, clutching it to her chest. “So we’re staying there for three days?”

“Maybe more than that,” Natasha replied. “Besides, Rhodey has a condominium in Mexico that we can stay in.”

“Bet (y/n)’s going to enjoy Mexico. You haven’t been out of the country in years, right? Because you’re too busy reading enchiridions while drinking the blood of a virgin?”

“And you? Too busy trying to look cool in children’s birthday parties at New York?”

“Three days of this,” she heard Rhodey mutter to Natasha. “I might kill myself tomorrow because of this nonsense.”

The entire flight felt as if though God Himself heaped miracles onto them. It was incredulous that both Peter and (y/n) lingered in silence the entire trip, as they were deep asleep. Of course, not that Natasha missed their endless quarrels – it simply felt uncanny to not encounter the hellacious arguments they had to witness from the two young adults that often transpired in enclosed spaces.

When they arrived, the air felt crisp against (y/n)’s exposed skin. She hadn’t felt fresh air for a while, since Peter was partly correct – she did spend most of her time in her bedroom.

The airport, in spite of how large it was, had merely ten people inside that weren't staff. The Blip militated on certain companies, particularly in public areas made specifically for the people’s entertainment. It felt as though the world had been desolated; like it had gone through extinction.

(y/n) was sure there was grass spurting from the cracks of the floors.

“I’ll go ahead and rent a car,” Rhodey spoke after a long silence, his voice echoing a bit from how quiet the airport was as they all took their passports. “Peter, you know how to drive?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“He knows how to drive bumper cars.” (y/n) retorted sleepily, rubbing her eyes. Yawning, she continued, “I’ll drive.”

Peter glared at her. “I failed my test five times, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to drive.”

“That ‘five times’ you said was enough proof that letting you drive is going to kill us all.”

Natasha shook her head, smiling a bit. “(y/n)’s driving. Sorry Peter, can’t risk it.”

Peter glared at (y/n), who winked at him as Rhodey tossed her the keys when he returned.

Rhodey’s apartment was an hour away from the airport. Stoplights were transient and traffic was inevident, permitting the car to drive steadily on the undulating highway. Though (y/n)’s eyes remained directly on the road only, she couldn’t help but detect the vandalism on the borders – do people actually believe that Thanos was right?

Sure, perhaps the absence of crime signified peace; the halt of overpopulation implied more resources; the scarcity of pollution from diluted oxygen meant nature’s retrieval, but how are you going to relish the drastic evolutions when the people you love aren’t with you?

She thought it was selfish – thinking about your own safety rather than long for those you lost.

Or maybe that was just her.

The two adults fell asleep the backseat, leaving Peter with (y/n) as company once more. His fist was on his chin and the other tapped gently on his knees as he stared out the window in boredom, mouth sealed. But when he sighed, knocked his head on the headrest, Peter looked at (y/n) with a small pout.

“I’m bored.”

“I have nursery rhymes on my phone if you want. Oh! I’m pretty sure I have a coloring book in my backpack, too.”

A long stare for a pause. “You have a coloring book?”

“You know, for when I’m babysitting you. I also have a 64 crayon Crayola!” she pipped, a sarcastic smile on her face

“You’re serious?”

“If I smacked you with a book would you believe me?” (y/n) raised a brow. “No but seriously, I do. It’s a stress reliever. Try it out, just, be careful with my colored pencils.”

Peter looked back, assembling his web shooters. “Which bag? Is it the red one? You always bring that bag when you’re visiting the compound.”

She frowned at his observance. “Yeah, it’s the red one. Careful, please.”

Her bag linked to his hand in less than a second. With the book on his lap and the pencils on his hand, Peter’s eyebrows furrowed in concentration. She wondered if he didn’t feel the subtlest bit of nausea – she can hardly skim at a sentence sent on her phone as the car drove. And here was Peter, coloring as if he sat on the table.

It descended into silence again. The fainted gentle bumps of the car and Peter’s scribbling filled the quietness filled her ears. Yet despite his attention being glued to his activity, she had sensed that Peter was disputing with himself on speaking to her, as he evidently glanced at her through his peripherals with twitching lips.

(y/n) waited.

Peter soughed in dissatisfaction a minute later, banging the open book on his head. Underneath, he looked at (y/n) with shy eyes, and she glanced at him when they stopped at the red light. She raised a brow. “Do you…have the nursery rhymes on your phone as you said?”

(y/n) looked straight back to the road, and answered, “No. But I have data, so if you want to watch-”

“Do you think Mr. Barton’s the Ronin?”

She hindered down. There were no cars around them except maybe for three more, yet she still slowed down, terrified of hitting someone as her head pivoted towards Peter’s direction, who looked at her with sincerity in his eyes and anticipated her candid answer.

If there was one thing (y/n) was adequate at, it was being candor. She could keep a secret, no doubt. Though regardless of the pest in honesty or the benefit of validity, she was too pragmatic to care about the chaos; better to be honest early, or let the truth divulge itself late that could convey chaos.

But when it came to Peter’s question, she felt like she had just sinned by the thought of lying to him. Which of course, it was.

An arbitrary question after another. It caught her off guard yet she couldn’t bring herself to be genuine with him because she was ashamed of her answer. But she consistently felt ashamed around him, or maybe it was internal shyness – when Peter’s around there were moments where (y/n) just couldn’t think nor function straight.

Her fingers tapped on the wheel. “I don’t know.”

Peter looked behind, seeing Natasha still sound asleep. But he didn’t need to observe her looks, given that he could just listen to her heart beat. Like (y/n)’s, which raised at each second.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t let my expectations up,” she glanced at him. “I don’t expect Clint to be Ronin nor do I expect us to catch him because I’ll just be disappointed in the end.”

He looked at her, hand twitching. “Y-yeah. You’re right. If you expect disappointment, then you can never really be disappointed.”

(y/n) raised a brow. “Wow. My first time hearing you say something wise out of your mouth.”

“It’s not my wise word,” Peter looked out the window, a small frown on his face. “It’s MJ’s.”

Rhodey’s apartment was as big as the whole first floor of the Avenger’s compound. There were at least three cabinets full of resources, and it occurred to be his so-called ‘bachelor pad’ as a bright-neon sign nearly blinded his guests as soon as they strode in through the door.

“Welcome, to my third home,” he placed his bags on the couch nearby. “I only have two rooms. I��m willing to sleep on this couch,” he patted on the one with his bag, “And you guys can figure out who shares with who. My suggestion is we lock these two kids together.”

Natasha looked at Peter and (y/n), who looked at her in horror. She rolled her eyes. “I’m only allowing this for precautions.”

“At what point in putting he and I in the same room are taking precautions?”

“I- You guys don’t even like each other! How will you even have se-”

“No, not like that! I meant that we’d most likely die by killing each other than a murderer killing us.” Peter had never witnessed her so flustered by a dirty remark, noticing her cheeks tint pink felt entertaining, despite himself feeling and appearing the same way. “I know you don’t want anyone’s death on your conscience.”

“It’s good that you know that, so please don’t kill each other. For me.” Natasha shoved their bags to their chests, looking at both of them. “And both of you are nearing adulthood. You know better than to be irresponsible, and you know better than unsafe sex.”

“Oh my God-”

“Now get inside, please? Get some rest. Better yet, strategize. Both of you will be working together anyway so if you’re not going to sleep, go ahead and plan.”

(y/n) was never fond of Peter Parker.

She tautened as he threw his bag aside, both of them gaping at the one small bed in the middle of the room. If she couldn’t stand being near him in confined spaces let alone an entire floor, what would happen if they share a bed?

Perhaps she could ask Natasha if she could sleep with her, but she felt too shy to say so. Besides, she respected Natasha’s love of privacy; maybe she could ask Rhodey to bunk with Peter instead?

She didn’t know, because her agendas are tackled by the thought of sharing the bed with the person she despised the most.

Unless, of course, one of them sleeps on the floor.

“I’ll sleep on the ground,” she offered, grabbing her bag and throwing it beside the window. “I…like sleeping on the ground, anyway.”

It was true – (y/n) primarily consumed her sleepless nights laying on the ground. Somehow she found solace in laying down on the cold floor with the covers over her body. She felt as though she didn’t deserve to sleep comfortably in the condition (she’s) everyone’s in. Besides, what use is the relaxing bed if she didn’t feel relaxed on the inside?

“Okay,” Peter didn’t oppose; he needed the comfortable bed. His evenings are spent rousing up every 10 minutes, eyes bursting open once the occurrences in Titan reappeared in his head. He didn’t care if her body ached the next day from laying down on the ground – Peter cared that he would at least get a whole, hopefully, dreamless sleep so he could focus the next day.

Dinner came by quick and they ate faster than dinner itself came, all rushing in their perspective areas. Natasha was in her room, studying Intel and Rhodey went somewhere neither of them knew. As for Peter and (y/n), they didn’t strategize – they bickered. Like they always did.

“Can you breathe quietly?”

Peter sighed loudly. “Sorry. I have asthma.”

“Bullshit. You’re breathing too loudly it makes me want to kill you so it would be quiet in here.”

“You talk too much it makes me want to staple your mouth shut.”

“You talk too much it makes me want to shoot myself in the head!”

“I’d actually be glad if you did that.” He ignored her violent threats.

She threw her head back, slumping on the chair. If she weren’t being careful she might possibly break her laptop by smashing it on Peter’s chest. Instead, she pulled her earphones out, giving him an exasperated tight-lipped smile before putting it on her ears.

Before she hit play she had heard Peter’s muffled voice, “Of course she wore earphones. Can’t even finish her problems.”

(y/n) threw a book at him.

He caught it, obviously, and he rolled his eyes at her.

Peter himself knew that he wasn’t like this before; he used to be a nervous, horribly skittish wreck. Hell, each sentence of his included at least two uh’s before getting to the point. But when the snap happened, where he had lost those who were in his life, he found himself altering into someone he’s not.

It was partly because of (y/n). Peter used to like her, but when he conceded that she was enduring things better than he did (even if he actually respected her because of that), immaturity had dominated him that despite the impressive fierce bearing she delivered out, he began to slowly detest her because of envy.

He envied her because she could handle grief better than he did-

They were both suffering, and he envied the fact that she was still strong and he wasn’t.

The other part was because Peter began to realize that he’d have to quit being such an apprehensive mess and stop being too nice to everyone – he was being too much of a pushover; he consistently saw the good in people that it put his life and those he loved in jeopardy.

So he changed, for himself, and for everyone around him.

And there was another reason. There were times where he couldn’t quite put his finger on it but when he looked at (y/n), sometimes he felt like he knew.

She sat there, in front of him, eyes glued to her screen. And Peter sat on the bed, staring at her with an amalgamation of abhorrence, and stoic ardor. Then he fell asleep.

“I got eyes on Ronin.”

Natasha’s voice startled (y/n). Peter smiled a bit, which made her roll her eyes before looking back at the window, having a clear view of Fat Man Auto Repair. She placed her fingers on the comm. “I got eyes on these guys wearing tracksuits. All…of them are wearing tracksuits why are they wearing tracksuits?”

“Some type of pop culture reference?” Rhodey suggested. “Millennials only do that. These idiots are in their forties.”

“What? Since when did teens wear tracksuits?”

“In the 90’s?”

“Wait,” Peter interjected, approaching the window with his mask finally on. “Kids wear tracksuits in the 90’s?”

“I didn’t,” Natasha scoffed. “Tracksuits are for rich losers, makes them look fat and lazy. Now, focus. We can’t miss any details. CCTV’s are down.”

A static after another before Natasha and Rhodey fell silent. (y/n) sat in front of the window, arms crossed yet her fingers tampered with the knife on her palm dangerously. Peter anxiously monitored her do it, fingers jolting for him to stop her from getting herself penetrated.

She tossed the knife at the wall, puncturing it onto the concrete before she pulled it out and reprise it.

Peter was upside down, a single strand of web stuck to the ceiling to sustain his weight. With his phone in hand, he resumed to explore through Star Wars theories and what-not; as of the moment, he was missing Ned and his weird fun facts that he sent to Peter every five seconds.

With no one to send Peter fun facts, he started looking for it himself, and thank God someone still posted them – the same author Ned favored did not blip.

(y/n) missed no one but her friend, Ava – Ava was the only one left for her to regard as family. With both her parents deceased and the anonymity of her siblings, she’d been the only one (y/n) deemed important enough to stay in her life.

In their past times, she and Ava would throw knives at each other. The leisure to them had no connotations of infliction, merely a practice of their dexterity and reflexes. There were points where their hands had been shrouded by little cuts by the end of the day; now (y/n) threw the blunt knife at the wall.

Peter bit his lip – he wanted to ask (y/n) a question, but he fretted the discussion might end into another brawl, as it consistently did. He was used to it, anyway; the boundless, pesky quarrels. He’d have to get used to it eventually, or else he would clog his ears with webs so he wouldn’t have to hear her silk voice that made his knees wimpy at moments.

He chuckled at his own morbid joke, cheeks reddening from what came after.

It caught her attention, spinning herself around to look at him with hooded eyes. She raised a brow. “Something funny, Parker?” she drawled. (y/n) tipped her head back, where Peter was convinced it would ache a few minutes later. She set the knife on the tip of her nose, lips parted in engagement.

The hasty blood rush to his head caused his eyes to sheer white. Peter shook his head, gradually dipping from the ceiling and onto the filthy, holed up bed. He rubbed his eyes. “N-no.”

“Sure? With that crackhead of yours-” she took the knife off her nose, drumming the tip to her temples. “-you might be hearing voices, Jabba.”

“I’m laughing because I remembered how sad it must be for you to spend your free time writing Smurf fanfiction while you ate cranberries out of the can.”

“Hey, I do not write Smurf fanfiction,” she sneered at him. “It’s Star Wars.”

“What was that?”

“I said I fucked your mom.”

“My mom’s dead.”

“Thank God I have enough patience for me not to stab you.”

“Thank God I have enough patience for me not to ruin you.”

She made a face at him before returning to the window. Just in time, she’d noticed a black van parked in front. The door unfurled, displaying a large man in a white suit, a caduceus in hand for an asset. (y/n) squeezed her fingers on her comm once more. “Nat- Nat there’s a big guy out here.”

“What big guy? Banner?”

She could discern Peter standing up from the bed, arranging himself behind her to take a glimpse – Peter recognized the man, somehow. He’d seen him around, in abandoned alleyways, always with a suitcase in hand that he’d be offering to nonnatives before walking away.

It was the same guy Peter kept tabs on but seemed to have forgotten about.

“No,” Peter answered. “I-I know him. His name is…Wilson Fisk. Kept tabs on him a few years ago but I forgot about it after the Snap happened.”

“Wilson Fisk,” Natasha muttered. “Know anything about him?”

“He used to take authority over juvenile gangs who run drugs for the mafia clans and what-not. He goes by the appellation ‘Kingpin,’ a name which he uses when he employs bad dudes. Has a niece named Maya Lopez, and studies Japanese art of sumo,”

“You don’t think he’s here for the Ronin, do you?”

“Intel said he’d be here, and now so is this dude. Pretty sure it’s not a coincidence,” (y/n) answered, feeling her dual batons inside her holsters. “Should we stay or should we follow them?”

The shuffling made her wince, as it was too clangorous. (y/n) glanced at Peter, whose eyes remained on the man outside their window. She winced once more when she heard Natasha’s voice. “Stay there, I need someone to keep an eye on them. I’m following Clint.”

“I don’t think that’s a good ide-”

Natasha turned her comm off. And she heard Rhodey’s voice next.

“I’m going on air to get a better view,” he informed them. “You two better stay there until we say so, got it? We still need backup and lookouts.”

“I really don’t think that’s a good ide-”

He turned it off.

(y/n) groaned in exasperation, pulling the knife off the wall. “Why won’t they let me finish my sentences?!”

Peter’s suit formed his mask, and he opened the other window at the back of the room where no one could see, adjusting the comm in his right ear before he looked at her with negligibly squinted eyes. “I’m going, too.”

“What?” she hissed, standing up, “No, you’re not; You three are about to do something stupid and the best I could do for this mission is make it two people doing something stupid.”

“I have to help them, (y/n),”

“The only way we could help is if we stay here.”

“Are you only saying that because you want to follow Natasha’s orders, or you actually want to come with me but you can’t and you want me to stay so you wouldn’t feel left out?”

Her back straightened, lips pursing and eyes anywhere but his as her foot tapped lightly on the floor, her hands quivering as it grasped her own waist. (y/n) dodged his (what seemed to be) delighted stare, in hopes he wouldn’t notice her shyness and chagrin in her eyes. “…both.”

His mask extracted itself, so she could see his wanton Machiavellian manoeuvers. Peter looked at her softly – in a way he never did before, and he chose to gaze at her like that in a moment where he wasn’t supposed to be. Her determination in persuading him to stay was ebbing away; his kind eyes seemed pious.

“Then come with me.”

“Someone has to stay and keep an eye.”

Peter tapped the spider on his chest, the emblem ascending to reveal a miniature flying camera, which established itself on the edge of the window as if it were an operating monitor. “I have that to watch over them.”

She hesitated. “If I come, it’ll be four people doing stupid things.”

“(y/n),” Peter started. “We always do stupid things. Besides, they can’t do it alone. I mean- not that I don’t trust Natasha because she’s really good- not that I also don’t trust Rhodey either- look, my point is: we haven’t done anything in two years. Catching them will stop the murders, and I know you’ve been wanting to go on a mission for a long time, and Natasha brought us with her for a reason.”

“Yeah, it’s because Steve and the others are AWOL.”

“You know what I mean. They need us too.”

She sucked her cheeks in. “Well, I haven’t really been in any missions since- since Natasha found me.”

Peter’s eyebrows furrowed, but his mask formed itself around his face once more. “I don’t know what you mean, but we have to go.”

Her eyes ricocheted between the small camera watching Kingpin, and Peter, who stood by the window with his hand dawdling on the frame. (y/n) sighed, yanking on the grappling hook stuck to her waist.

“Fine. But we have to be quiet. We can’t let them know we followed, and we only attack when they say so, okay?”

She did not linger for a response. (y/n) sat on the sill, enfolding the rope around her waist. Peter, existing like the indisputable dick he was, shoved her without warning.

The hook didn’t stick anywhere, and she was vamoosed, dropping 6 stories without any support. Peter hopped out the window, attached himself to the wall and shot a web to her torso.

It caught her before her back smacked to the ground, and from afar she could witness him giggling at the mortified look on her face not even a second ago.

Peter gently rested her to the ground, leaping down. His oblivious affront pushed her to haul a baton off her holster and torment him violently with it; to him, it may have looked humorous due to his morbidity, but to her, it seemed as though her dread of heights had been taken into frivolity.

The baton stung even through his metallic suit. Peter unmasked, looking at her with a painful smile. “Dude, ow!”

“That was for pushing me off,” she pointed at him. “You’re lucky I didn’t scream or else the both of us would’ve been dead the second I hit the ground.”

“Sorry! Just needed a little laugh.”

“And making fun of my fears is funny?”

“Yeah, because, well I hate you.”

“My God, Peter, that’s so fucking rational.”

He pouted before masking up again.

Kingpin walked toward a truck, a green one with a big sign painted Trust A Bro moving company. She hid behind one of the cars, with Peter beside her overhearing their conversation.

Peter etched closer. When (y/n) peeked over the hood of the car, Ronin had already been there, hood down but mask up. Her fingers fiddled with the comm, trying to contact Natasha but nothing came.

She glanced at Peter, who pulled her down. “He’s saying something about how he did a great job the other day. He’s sounding like he just hired a prostitute.”

“Peter.”

“Says he has one last thing to do before going to Japan. What’s in Japan? And this Ronin guy’s not talking at all, it’s just Fisk.”

“Ronin could be after the remaining Yakuza subordinates and Akihiko,” she suggested. “Nat had an entire dossier over Ronin that she showed me earlier before we left the condo. He’s been searching for Akihiko for almost a year now.”

“Why?” he shook his head. “Well whatever it is, we’ve got to stop him before he kills more innocent people.”

“The Yakuza’s aren’t innocent, Peter. They’re criminals.” She whispered harshly. “Besides, Natasha’ not here to stop all the murdering – she’s here to get him back.”

“Then why is he killing all these innocent people?!”

“Clint doesn’t kill people who are innocent. And right now, he’s been hired by Kingpin and we don’t know why he started Ronin in the first place and he sure as hell won’t be hurting innocent people without a proper reason-”

Peter unexpectedly tensed, grasping her wrist tightly. He placed a finger over his lips, gesturing for her to dwell in quietness. (y/n) furrowed her eyebrows before peering over the car once more, ultimately constructing eye contact with Ronin.

She plopped down once more, looking at Peter with widened eyes. Finally, Natasha’s voice emitted from their ears. “Where are you guys? Are you two behind that car? I told you to stay put!”

Peter’s hand made a spasmodic motion, clinging a man to the wall that (y/n) hadn’t detected was there from the hasty alarm she felt upon hearing Natasha’s voice. Her fingers dug on the ground, forcing herself up but Peter flung his body over her, deterring her from doing so.

Gunshots tinged everywhere, splitting through the glass, perforating through her exposed skin. With the other hand cladding her ear, she tugged a baton out, flogging the guy on the knee before she towed him down and captured his pistol.

“You know how to use one?” Peter shouted over the loud noise.

“Obviously! I can do anything.” Despite her answer, (y/n) threw the gun aside.

“Seriously?!”

“Can you be a useful arachnid and web the others up?” she commanded. “I’m going after Kingpin. Nat’s after Clint I’m sure.”

“Why do you get to go after Kingpin?”

“Because I’m more experienced?” she stated as more of a fact rather than a question. “Just do it if you want to live.”

Peter scoffed when she slid over, utilizing the exact approach she used on him yesterday – kicking their chest. Except this time she successfully managed to kick someone, dismounting on her foot before punching the next one on his face.

Peter’s hand aimed for the running man’s wrist. “Nice watch, man! My friend had one of those,” pivoting his arm in the other direction, he crossed the man’s hands, latching him. Peter yanked his pants down. “Now those boxers are amazing. Is that me? I’m flattered to have my printed face over your crotch man.”

He webbed the next one in the eyes, sticking another one in the chest before Peter pulled him to himself, fist positioned to his covered face. He winced mockingly. “Ooh. Sorry dude. Webs dissolve in two hours, don't worry.”

(y/n) propelled herself off of two guys, sitting on the man with her crotch at his face. She pulled on his hair, before her knuckles collided with his nose. She hissed at Peter. “Less talking, more fighting.”

The man threw her to the side. (y/n) wrapped her legs around his neck once more, using her might to flip him over onto the car. She struck the next one in the face with her baton, evading his punch with the palm of her hand, enclosing it so she could wrench it around his back, booting him from behind to send him down.

Unbeknownst to her, someone had come up behind to haul on her foot. Her chin banged on the ground, feeling her teeth clash together before she’s twisted over to see Clint’s eyes through his mask.

He wavered, staring at her but his sword remained dangerously close to lacerating her neck open. Kingpin had sauntered away, and Peter was too preoccupied to notice what was ensuing at the moment.

“Clint,” she whispered, hands raised on either side of her head. “It’s me.”

By the time Peter adhered another man to the wall, his eyes caught sight of Ronin looming over (y/n). She glimpsed at Peter, and he couldn’t decipher if her eyes denoted fear, or it was apprising him to stand down.

Either way, he would not have listened to her – Peter clung his webs on both Clint’s wrists, hauling him back. The sword on her neck had scoured scarcely to her skin and formed a slim slit over the base of her skin, yet it had no deterrence of bleeding profusely.

She inducted her palm gently over her neck, glimpsing the viscous red substance flaring thinly over her stained complexion. Peter tossed Clint aside, standing over her in sabbatical moratorium, eyes on his mask broad as (y/n) stared back at him with quivering hands and lax blood.

Another gunshot and Peter roared out in pain, hands shooting down to clutch his right thigh, kneeling to the ground. A man in a tracksuit held a gun in his hand, aiming directly for her head. If she wasn’t too jolted from how brisk things were happening—her having her neck sliced open the slimmest, and Peter getting shot—she would have shot the man first.

If only she hadn’t threw the pistol aside.

Natasha appeared out of nowhere, heeling the man in the front. Rhodey strode down, glancing at Peter who managed to stand up and web his open wound. “Get out of here. Get her anywhere, just get out safe. We’ll find you.”

Peter nodded too swiftly, carefully pulling her up. With his hand on her waist, she reluctantly encased her arms around his neck before being lifted off the ground and onto somewhere neither of them knew.

Her chest upheaved laboriously, and Peter gently positioned (y/n) on the floor. He located an abandoned warehouse, where they hid right after he made a quick stop at a store nearby to assemble supplies. Peter’s unmasked face goggled at her, his opalescent skin gradually going pale and so did hers.

“H-how’s the bleeding?” Peter asked her. She shrugged, wincing.

“Feels like I have a cough, but it’s painful both inside and outside,” she whispered. “What’s that?”

“I asked Karen how I could stop the bleeding on your neck and how to properly cover it up. I-I don’t think that needs any stitches.”

“And yours?”

“I just need to get the bullet out and I’ll be fine.” He sat facing her. “But I’ll do you first.”

(y/n) chuckled. “Do me.”

He rolled his eyes, but smiled afterwards.

His touch against her tainted skin felt like a thousand fires – painful, fortuitous, imminent; sentient. Something about it felt so wrong yet so right. (y/n) hated him – despised him, yet his skin against hers felt complex on ataraxy. His devout eyes were gentle on her weakened state instead of pridefulness, a contrast to what she expected.

The sanctification of Peter’s hand drafting the shape of her neck appeared as though he was treating her as if she were such a fragile métier he’d be too afraid to break. He scrutinized upon her unfamiliar eyes, desolated in trauma and somnolence.

Unfamiliar – Peter never knew her, the knowledge of his simply from his abidance in observation; from what he’d witnessed, she was strong, cosmopolitan, stubbornly obnoxious, complicated. He based it on his own facts, rather than asking her herself on who she was.

She chose to dwell in silence, as for him:

“When you told me, back at the apartment,” his hand carefully dabbed on the battered bruise on her neck, “how you’ve never been in a mission since Natasha found you, what did you mean?”

(y/n)’s eyes darted between his, blinking rapidly. “I grew up into espionage,” she began. “I’d been indoctrinated in the Red Room as a child, years after Natasha left them. They sent me out on a mission one time, undercover with people I barely knew, and I met this girl.”

“Ava,” Peter answered. “You talk to Nat about her a lot.”

She nodded. “Ava Orlova. She told me Natasha got her out from a Russian Mafia, and- I don’t know. Hearing her name made something click inside me. Like, it made me mad. All I felt was, when I heard her name, was that it was entirely taboo.

“One time, Dreykov sent me out and Yelena caught me, and she poured that weird red powder thing all over my face and I got out of my trance. I felt – I felt free,” she paused, shifting uncomfortably when Peter accidentally pressed on her open wound. “Natasha found me a safe house, and I took Ava with me. We stayed there until the weird flying donut came here.”

Peter placed the gauze over her skin, taping it gently. “How old were you?”

“Fifteen,” she whispered. “We stayed inside the safe house for two years, and I felt like I was normal. The whole thing about me being mad at Natasha was something Dreykov drilled into our minds.”

(y/n) grabbed the tweezers off of Peter’s hands when he began to poke on his wound. He let her, an unanticipated wave of trust relaxed upon her shoulders. Peter placed his hands behind him, leaning backwards.

“I got bit by the spider when I was fourteen,” he softly said, having the sense that she were to ask the same thing. “I was at Oscorp for a field trip and I wandered around into this room full of radioactive spiders before I got bit.”

She snickered. “Kinda boring.”

“Hey! I got cool powers, you know: super strength, heightened senses-”

“Being sticky, horrible senses.”

“My senses aren’t horrible.”

“If you were, you wouldn’t have gotten shot, Parker.”

The smile beginning to form on his face dropped, but hers remained. “I did it on purpose.”

He ignored the immense pain he felt when (y/n) left the tweezers halfway through his skin. “What?”

“He was about to shoot you,” Peter whispered. “I blocked him as soon as he pulled the trigger, (y/n).”

“What?” she hissed, yanking the tweezers off his flesh, “Why would you do that, you idiot?”

“Well I couldn’t just let him shoot you, couldn’t I?” he hissed back. “A thank you would be appreciated!”

“Jesus, Peter, you could’ve just let me take the shot!”

“You would have died!” Peter grabbed her wrist. “Why can’t you just accept that I saved you? Are you ashamed?”

“No! You got yourself hurt all because you don’t want me to maim your conscience? Do you realize how stupid that is? I thought you hated me?”

“I never hated you, (y/n) - I envied you and I've been in love with you.”

This- this was the answer he was looking for: he changed himself because he was undeniably, unconditionally, irrevocably in love with her. He changed into someone he wasn’t to force her away from his life because if he let her prevail like everyone else did, his heart would be vastly desecrated by anguish once more when he forfeits her.

What’s ironic was that he loved her the same reason he envied her.

"I envied you because of how good you handled grief- how good you were at handling things and I wasn't. I was vulnerable, and you weren't and it was unfair for me, and I wanted everyone to be vulnerable like I did and it was also unfair. The craziest part is that I love you because of the same reason I envied you. Your determination in trying to be strong for everyone, and how even on the inside you were vulnerable like me too.

“Trying to deny my feelings for you made me hate you because of how hard you are not to love. I hate loving you, and I love hating you."

Lachrymose on the threshold of her eyes, hand inching along the undulating arm of his that trembled in distress and fury. The specificity of what he felt caused her heart to flutter; his impetus aching for more of her tactile trace. He was a hamartia, falling for a girl he hated the most in the world.

Shamefully, she looked down on his wound. “I hated you because you talked too much.”

He laughed, curling his finger underneath her chin so she would look up at him. Peter tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “What? No I love you back?”

(y/n)’s lips tugged downwards in a teasing manner. “Ask me again tomorrow where I feel okay.”

༻✦༺ . ⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : – ⭒ ⊹ ⭒ – : ✧ : -˚̣⋅ . ༻✧༺

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whatanoof · 3 years

Text

A Push in the Right Direction

Rating: Explicit

Pairing: Cal Kestis x Reader

Word Count: ~7.6k

Warnings: fluff, smut, swearing, sexual tension, rough sex, sex pollen so by default it's dubcon, pining

Summary: Healing injured patients? Psh, easy stuff. Force healing? A little more tricky. Confessing your crush to your very close friend? Damn near impossible until a flower bush shoves you in the right direction.

A/N: Happy birthday my friend @marvelassassin221b!! I hope you are staying safe, and that your birthday will bring happiness and wisdom to your life. It's been a blessing talking to you and laughing at memes together <3 Thank you for giving me the push to get this fic done and posted, I couldn't have done it without you. Enjoy some of our favorite redhead Jedi ;)

You’ve always been terrible with directions. Like, it’s a miracle you haven’t gotten lost in more dangerous settings, but even your Jedi Master used to shake their head when you had survival exercises in your Padawan years. Greez too, makes comments about how atrocious you are at navigation. You hadn’t been allowed back to the holomap since a disastrous set of directions landed the Mantis on the more unfriendly side of the Outer Rim.

But even with all of your shortcomings at mapping, you have a solid crisis mode. You need to have one as a medic. It’s not a good idea to freeze when a patient is bleeding out on the ground in front of you, there is only one way that is going to end, and it’s not going to be a happy ending. Under pressure, all of the unsureness that surfaces during your attempts at navigation vanishes, and your body is moving before your mind even consciously thinks to. It’s your zen mode, almost your place of meditation, where you give into the inner instinct and allow the Force to guide you through the process. Too bad you can’t reach that state in any situation other than emergencies, maybe you would be able to navigate your moves in confessing a crush.

You had met Cal Kestis on Bracca. He’d cut his hand open on a jagged edge of wall paneling, and Prauf brought him to you, one of the few healers among the scrappers. You couldn’t tell what exactly it was that gave him away to you, but the instant his eyes met yours, you knew where he had come from.

Of course, you waited until Prauf had gone back to work to reveal yourself. Healing through the Force decreases the chance of infection, is painless, and is essentially instantaneous. While your normal supplies would have done the trick, the drama queen in you realized this would be the perfect way to show Cal he wasn’t alone. Force healing is tricky, but you’d had a surprising knack for it ever since your youngling years. The Order had trained you up in the way of Force healing and given you the tools to take advantage of your aptitudes. Cal’s face had been priceless when you simply waved your hand over his, and the wound closed within seconds.

There was a certain comfort in knowing you weren’t alone. Admittedly, in the long years after the Purge, you’d toyed with the idea that you had been the only Jedi to escape. Those had been dark days, where you could barely scrape together the energy to forage for food and water, laughing that the Jedi Order would die with a single Padawan who had lost her lightsaber along with everything she had known.

But then Cal stumbled into your little cordoned off area. You’d become close friends from that moment to the day Prauf died and the Ninth Sister shoved you both off of the cliff and onto the freight train below. The Mantis crew was surprised, to say the least. They had gotten reports of a single Jedi wreaking havoc on Bracca. But they welcomed you aboard and you had become the team medic, patching up Cal when he got back from missions and finding time in between to try and recover the Force abilities you had lost to time.

---

“Hey.” You look up from your work. Medical supplies lie strewn across the floor of your part of the room, bandages unwound and your meager supply of medication stacked methodically in the corner.

Cal looks down at you from the doorway, a streak of something across his cheekbone. You want to wipe it off, but you just smile back, “Welcome back. Find anything cool?”

His happy grin only widens, “You’ll have to come and find out.”

“What?”

He beckons you towards the main hull, “Come on!”

Cere and Greez are already there and seated around the meal table, and BD is perched on the table, chirruping animatedly as if talking to Cere. You take your place with them, noting the empty chair to your right. Merrin is back on Dathomir, searching for ancient texts about Nightsister magic and rituals. She’s been gone for several days, but you still find yourself seeking out her snarky comments and cool confidence.

“Okay.” Cal stands at the head of the table, rubbing his hands together in a way that makes him seem as if he is playing the adult. “I’m willing to bet you're all wondering why I’ve called you here today…”

“Spit it out Cal, you woke me up from a nap for this.” Greez eyes the redhead grumpily, and you fight to hide a grin. Cere also looks mildly amused, if slightly impatient.

Cal rolls his eyes, but continues, “Cordova left a message, saying something very valuable to our quest is locked in a vault in the Zeffo caves. I found the vault today and it matches Cordova’s description, but we need two Force users to access it.” He nudges BD, and the little droid projects an image of the vault door. It’s massive, with gold decorations swirling across it, and two obvious indents in the ground on either side for said Force users.

Everyone’s gazes flit to Merrin’s empty chair. It’s without question she would have been the best fit for this mission. Her combat style complements Cal’s perfectly, and Cere is still hesitant to use the Force.

Realization strikes you, and you glance up to see everyone’s eyes are now trained on you. You begin to shake your head. “That’s a bad idea--”

“We’ll be fine. I’ll lead us directly to the vault. I have my saber, and you have your Force healing. Worst case scenario, you have to patch me up in the field.” That is definitely not the worst case scenario, but there are no other options. This mission is time-sensitive, and you can’t wait for Merrin to get back from Dathomir.

You fix him with a stern glare. “I will come. But--” You hold up a hand when Cal opens his mouth. “You have to stick with me. No disappearing and popping out to scare me, because I will get lost We go in, and we get out.“

“I wouldn--” Cal protests.

“You would.” You snap.

“Yeah, he would.” Cere agrees.

“Sounds like something you would do.” Greez nods.

BD beeps cheerily from its place in the center of the table, clearly in agreement with you.

Cal shuts his mouth with an audible pop, and you cross your arms while staring him down. Yes he would.

“I need BD back here on the ship. I’m running diagnostics on the navigation programming, and I can’t do it alone.” Cere speaks up.

Cal hesitates. You understand; he never goes on missions without BD. The two are a package deal, but everything needs to be running at peak efficiency before you go to the Fort Inquisitorius. And there’s no way you’re willing to deal with a navigation error en route.

You speak up, “Yeah, it will be fine.”

Cal looks at you, “We need BD to unlock a shortcut. What happened to in and out?”

You wave him off, “We’ll take the scenic route. Cere needs BD back here, and we can manage without. We’ll have our comm units, it will be fine.”

---

Do you know that saying, “Famous last words?”

Yeah. You hadn’t realized just how famous those last words could be. It started when Cal realized he’d left his comm unit on the ship in the charging port. But it was fine, because you had yours. Until you dropped it into a puddle after tripping over a tree root.

The scenic route involved passing through the outskirts of a forest, and the terrain was a little trickier than you had been prepared to handle, obviously. So, commless and armed with a single lightsaber and two shared brain cells, you travel towards the entrance to the Zeffo caves.

A flower bush catches your eye. Its leaves are a shocking shade of red, with gorgeous blue flowers that seem to call you over to them. Cal keeps walking even as you stop and reach for the bush. You pluck the flower in the fullest bloom and turn it over in your hand, admiring the veins of deeper azure spider webbing across the petals.

Cal says your name behind you, “We have to keep moving if we’re going to get back before dark.”

Turning to face your companion, you tuck the blossom behind his ear and step back to admire how the blue contrasts against his hair. The word slips out almost without you noticing. “Cute.”

It’s almost comical how quickly his face blooms red. “Guh--”

“It’s a good look.” You reassure him quickly. “Adorable. Pretty. Cute.”

“--Thanks!” He ducks past you to the bush. “I’m just going to grab a seedling for Greez. He’ll like this one.” Cal grabs one of the large pods and breaks it open, removing a seed and sticking it into the pouch on his harness. “Okay, ready.”

But you’re distracted by the red pollen that explodes in a cloud around his head, dusting him with a fine mist that leaves scarlet traces on his face and shoulders. “What’s that?” You step forward and run a finger across Cal’s poncho, collecting the dust and rubbing it between your fingertips. You hesitate, then raise your hand to your face to smell the substance. The sickly sweet scent and underlying current of spicy musk sticks in your lungs. The back of your throat tickles, and you sneeze.

An echoing sneeze draws your attention. Cal leans against the flowering bush, one arm clamped over his nose as he sneezes over and over again. He glances up at you, coughing with watery eyes, “Wha--”

A spike of dread pierces through you. ‘Stars, was it poison?’ He won’t stop coughing, a dry rattle as his body tries in vain to purge the intruding red dust. You fall to your knees beside him. Panic fills your mind, blotting out logic and reason and you place your hands on his body, intent on Force healing him even though you don’t know what is wrong with him. Then, just as suddenly as the coughing started, it stops and silence rings through the trees.

“Cal!”

You're shoving your hand underneath his poncho in an instant to feel for his heartbeat. You hold your breath. You can’t feel a pulse. You scramble to rip his poncho off completely, dragging it over his limp shoulders and head. You shove your fingers against his throat again. There!

His heartbeat flutters delicately, beating a rapid tattoo against your fingertips. You allow yourself to breath. He’s alive. But his pulse is fast, too fast. You rip open his tunic, though you’re not entirely certain what it is you’re searching for.

Just as your fingers brush over his skin, Cal bolts upright with a gasp. “Wh-- where...?”

You swear you almost pass out from the relief that slaps you across the face. “Stars, I thought you were dead. I’m so sorry about the flower bu-- mmm!”

Cal smashes his lips onto yours, pushing you onto your back with the sheer force of the kiss. His tongue dips into your mouth, searching and probing and damnit you can’t breathe when he’s this close to you, this desperate. His hips jerk against yours with an unpracticed, aborted motion, dragging a very prominent erection against your body that makes you jerk back in surprise.

You push him away from him for a second, propping yourself up on your elbows as you search his face for some indication of… you don’t know what. But this isn’t like him. “Cal, what--?”

“Need you.” He groans, his hands roaming over your body without fear or shame and inspiring a wave of pleasure as he squeezes your breasts. “Maker, you feel so good. Smell so good.” You bite back a moan. This really isn’t the time, not in the middle of an Imperial occupied forest. But to be completely honest, he feels really good too.

You’d imagined this before. Well, not these exact circumstances, but the idea of being under Cal. You’d imagined the feeling of his hands scraping over your skin and squeezing your body wherever he would like. You’d imagined his lips on yours, and other places for sure. But you’d really only ever been able to envision Cal as a gentle lover, all quiet moans and hesitant movements and unsure expressions. But this rougher side? You moan raggedly against Cal’s mouth as he shoves a thigh between your legs, rubbing up against your clothed sex. This is amazing.

Streaks of heat flash through your body, converging between your legs. Everything is amplified, the sounds around you, the grass beneath your knees, the blueness of the sky overhead. But it all seems to pale when your attention lands on Cal, who’s more flushed than earlier. You feel the heat beneath your skin too, but he’s got to have it worse right now, because you’re not the one sweating like you’re stranded on a desert planet. Maker, the pollen was some kind of--

His name escapes your lips in a tiny whisper that morphs into a moan halfway through. You allow your head to fall back, and it thunks against the spongy moss across the ground, knocking you back to the present. Cal’s lost in you, his nose buried in the crook of your neck as he ruts weakly against your thigh.

You shake off the haze clouding your mind, crisis mode kicking into full gear. You have no comms, one horny Jedi, and a completely hopeless sense of direction. “Cal. We have to move.”

He whines high in the back of his throat. “No.” It’s almost pleading, but there is an undercurrent of steel that makes you pause.

“Cal. We’re out in the open. Troopers co-- could--” Stars, you can feel the lust pumping under your skin, so close to the surface that it could burst out at any second. But fear hovers on the edge of your mind, pressing in and suppressing the need to jump Cal and reminding you of the certain torture and death that would occur if you were caught.

Cal doesn’t seem to have any of the same restraints as you. His fingers are carding through your hair, “Just wanna feel you. Maybe more.” His teeth latch into your neck, and the dull pain pierces through the haze more firmly.

He got dosed more heavily with the pollen. You resist the urge to curse as you gently detangle from Cal and sit up, biting back a sigh of relief as his teeth leave your skin. “We have to find shelter.” You begin to look around, but all you can see is the forest. You need something better, a place where you can figure out what exactly is wrong with Cal. You try to stand.

“Noooo…” This isn’t going to work. You actually do curse this time. How are you supposed to find effective shelter while dragging a full grown man around hostile territory without compromising stealth, all while your libido is cottoning to the edge of your mind, clouding your judgment?

“Come here…” Cal’s arm wraps around your neck, dragging you back down to the ground even as you try to stand. Okay that’s enough.

“You’ll forgive me later, Cal.” You press your thumb to his forehead and concentrate. His skin is dry and burning to your touch, and your brow scrunches. That’s going to be an issue. You reach to tap into the Force, but you pause. Your Force connection is… foggy. That’s the only way you can describe it in words, but it’s muted and dimmer than usual.

Your Jedi Master taught you a metaphor for using the Force: a barrier exists between you and access to the Force. It’s a wall, and your mind must become like a sharpened sword to pierce through and reach the Force. You can feel the barrier, just as always, but it’s like a second layer exists around it. If the normal barrier is made of thin glass, the new layer is crafted from paper; it’s strange, and thicker than usual, but still easily pierced with extra… force if you can say that without making yourself laugh at the pun. You summon the strength and press your mental sword forward through the barrier.

Rest. Cal’s eyes roll back in his head and he falls asleep with a gentle exhale. He relaxes against you, and you relax in turn when you see the pained lines smooth out of his forehead. Jedi healing includes your own personal anesthesia on demand. It will keep him under for a little bit, though you can’t tell what kind of effect the pollen will have on the Force sleep.

Through some feat of the stars themselves, you struggle to your feet. Cal’s arm is looped around your neck, and you want nothing more than to just sink down to the ground again and give into the weakness and lust pulling at your legs, coaxing you to collapse and take your pleasure. And stars, Cal’s heavier than you expected him to be.

But you shake yourself awake. Can’t get distracted. You glance at Cal’s drooping head. He’s been strong for you this entire time. The least you can do is be strong now and find some shelter. But where?

Voices filter through the trees, and your head jerks up towards the sources.

“Yeah, she told me to take the bucket off, or she would charge the full payment and…” Stormtroopers. Kriffing hell.

“Come on.” You hiss underneath your breath. You gather your legs underneath your body and push. Your muscles scream in pain, but they ultimately obey and you stumble to your feet and begin to move away from the approaching voices. Cal is dead weight over your shoulders, pulling and urging you to rest. It would be so easy to give in, to sink back to the ground and let Cal do what he wants.

The trees blur together as you move through the forest. The stormtroopers’ voices are getting louder and you grit your teeth. You don’t know their patrol route. How are you going to avoid them? All you can do is place one foot in front of the other. Then the mossy ground turns to stone underneath your feet, and you slow. Caves. Perfect.

You hurry inside, fatigued legs forgotten in your relief. There’s a bend directly beyond the mouth of the cave, and you gently lay Cal against the wall. You’re completely hidden from anyone looking from the entrance. You sit opposite him, your head falling forward to sag against your chest. Now what?

Your comm unit is busted, and Cal’s is sitting back on the Mantis, so you can’t contact the crew. You hold a hand to Cal’s forehead. His temperature is getting worse. You don’t know what infected him, so your Force healing is out of the question. The only bright spot is you’re pretty sure the stormtroopers won’t find you. They’re not exactly recruited for their brains, and you’ll be able to sense their muted Force signatures if they get close.

Speaking of…

You trail off, contemplating Cal’s unconscious face. His head sags against the rock wall and there’s a line of drool leaking out of the corner of his mouth. His brow is finally relaxed, his breathing deep and even and it strikes you that this is the most peaceful you’ve ever seen him.

You reach out through the Force. It has become a habit for you, Merrin, and Cal to find peace in each others’ Force signature. Whether nightmares or difficult missions, the others would be there as a silent comfort.

Merrin’s is a mixture of whites and creams swirling against a dark maroon background. When she uses her Force magic, there is an unmistakable green tinge through it. Hers is powerful, with a sense of underlying safety in her strength. True to form, Merrin has been a protector figure in the Mantis.

But Cal’s is more diverse, a blend of warm colors against a grey background with blue tinging the edge. But while the colors are chaotic, Cal keeps a firm hold on his Force presence at all times, never allowing it to surge violently from emotion. He does not suppress it completely anymore, but you know he has the ability to make it nearly disappear from the senses of another Force user. You should know, because you can do the same. Merrin grew up without fear of having to hide her Force sensitivity, but you and Cal survived the Purge. You both have firm grasps of your thoughts and emotions projected through the Force. So in Cal, you found a kindred spirit that understands you better than almost any other person in the galaxy could. You’ve become more familiar with his presence than even your Master’s before the Purge.

But now, your brow furrows as you search for his Force presence over and over, pushing into every crevice of the surrounding environment without violating his privacy. You’re not mistaken. It’s gone, almost as if he has been turned into a droid before your eyes. Every living thing has a Force presence, no matter how minute. But Cal’s comforting whirl of light is gone, vanished as though he is no longer connected to the--

Cal’s eyes fly open and he sits forward with a quiet gasp. You jump. It’s worn off then. You secure his body with the Force, holding him loosely so as not to cause any lasting damage. You would have to tackle the Force connection problems later.

“I need you to focus.” He pushes against the bonds with a whimper, and you bite your lip as you struggle to hold him still.

“Cal!” Your Force bind tightens, and he stills with a grunt. “Talk to me. Fight through it.”

He shakes his head, eyes screwed shut. “Hurts.”

“What hurts?”

“Every-- ah! Everything. Can’t-- can’t th-think. Only thing-- makes it better… you.”

What? Your concentration lapses and the bonds loose. He lunges forward and buries his nose into your neck again, inhaling you as his hands scrabble at your clothes. “Hurts less with you. Smell so good--soft. Please?”

Stars, you can’t think straight with him touching you like this. You bite back a moan as his hands roughly squeeze your breasts through your shirt. Surely, it wouldn’t hurt to give in. Just for a little. Indulge, and then you can figure out a way back to the Mantis. Then Cal raises your shirt and licks a long stripe up your neck, and that’s all the convincing you need.

You melt into his mouth, your hands running under his shirt and harness. His chest is just as feverishly hot as his forehead, but you can’t bring yourself to care when he swings a leg over yours so he’s hovering over you, knees planted on either side of your body. His hands shove your shirt over your head before setting to work on the button of your pants. You raise your hips to allow him to pull your pants under your butt. Your own hands yank at his clothes, silently begging him to strip with you.

But he doesn’t. He kneels between your legs and pulls your underwear to the side, exposing your wet folds.

“Cal--!” You’re cut off as he drags his tongue over your pussy, flicking against your clit at the end. Your stomach muscles contract, and it’s all you can do to keep quiet as he licks deep into your core.

---

The world is blurred. It’s like something crawled into his head and messed with his brain, dragging his focus away from more important issues… he can’t seem to remember right now. He can’t even feel the Force. His connection is compromised, the colors of the world are off, and there’s this bone deep ache within his body urging him closer to you. And as he’s drinking in your taste, the pain subsides and he can breathe again.

What is this? What’s happening to him? It has to be the pollen, it has to be its effect on his body, that’s why he’s lost all control over his mind and self. It’s why he can’t hold himself back from your body and you.

You’re all he can focus on; you’re so beautiful writhing under him as he tastes you. He’s never done this before. He can’t figure out why he hasn’t done this sooner, because you taste amazing right now and how you sound as he slides his tongue through your folds is doing things to him that he’s never experienced before.

His hips are dragging against the floor unintentionally. The friction of his dick against the rough material of his pants is a small slice of heaven, and he whimpers at the pure electricity spreading down his spine. He doesn’t want this to end so soon, but his body is shoving him towards the edge of release and the relief he knows is going to come with it.

---

A moan keens high in the back of your throat as Cal’s mouth presses against your soaked core. It’s sloppy and clumsy, but Maker if he doesn’t make up for it with enthusiasm. The only sounds coming from him are tiny moans and grunts and you shudder as his fingers dig into the pillowy flesh of your thighs, leveraging them apart and holding them there firmly. Of their own will, your hips roll up into his face, chasing after his touch.

You’re completely unprepared for Cal to growl when you do so. His grip tightens, and you squeak as your thighs are spread even farther apart and his mouth completely envelopes your clit.

Is this what heaven feels like? You can barely manage coherent thought when his tongue is devastating you like this, but thequestion rotates around your lust dumb brain as your toes curl and your back arches. Your release rushes up and sweeps you away, your core clenching as waves of pleasure wash over your body. You hear Cal whine as you cum, and you hear your own moans as you ride out your orgasm.

---

Stars, why hadn’t he done this sooner? The sounds that he’s pulling out of you right now could make him come in his pants on the spot, and the taste of your release has him rutting against the ground all the more insistently as he chases his own high.

But he doesn’t want to come in his pants, he wants to be inside of you. He wants you, your body squeezing tight around him, to feel the wetness seeping around his tongue rather than tasting it, even if it tastes divine.

He grabs your hips and yanks you down so your crotch is flush to his. He nearly loses his mind when your soaked core meets the bulge in his pants. Fuck, he thought he could wait, but he can’t.

But--something is still off with the world’s coloring. Where is the Force? The comforting pressure is gone from the back of his mind, the constant reminder of balance that keeps him in tune with his emotions and surroundings. Panic edges around the perimeter of his mind. In an act of desperation, he reaches for the Force, searching for the whispers of memories that accompany his world. They’re gone. Where did they go?

You whisper his name again, and this time his eyes meet yours.

---

You watch Cal carefully. He’s flushed, trembling as he hovers over your body, hands bare centimeters away from your skin. His eyes are desperate, and you can feel the pain in them as clearly as if it was your own. A bead of sweat tracks down his temple to soak into the collar of his harness, and he fumbles to rip the rest of his clothing off, discarding it on the floor as though it burned against his flesh.

“Cal.” He looks back at you. “Take what you need.”

It’s all the permission he needs. Relief and something else flashes through his eyes before he looks back down and fumbles with his pants fastening. His cock is flushed dark red, and his hands tremble as he pulls it out of his pants, jaw clenched as he lines up with your entrance. He slides into you with a bone-deep sigh of relief, and you cry out at the stretch. Every inch sparks pure electricity up your spine, and your eyes roll back in your head. He bottoms out, and for a heart stopping moment you feel a connection to him you couldn’t describe in words. Your hips roll against his, grinding the head of his cock up against something heavenly. Light explodes behind your eyes at the movement, arching your back and curling your toes.

Cal chokes, a beautiful sound you’ve only heard a few times before; the one that sounds like its been pulled from the deepest parts of his being, like he’s just ascended to another plane above the physical. It’s gorgeous and so insanely hot you’re completely unprepared for his sudden movement when he lunges forward.

Cal’s hand shoots out and presses against your neck, effectively pinning your upper body to the hard ground. You inhale shakily through your nose, but his grip does nothing more than hold you. You can still breathe, but the pressure on your throat sends a shock of heat between your legs with the reminder of the control you just relinquished.

“Stop that.” His other arm slams onto the stone beside your head, and your eyes lock. Cal’s pupils are blown, so dark you can almost see your reflection in the dim light of the cave as he glares down at you.

He doesn’t give you time to respond before he drags his hips away from yours, inch by painstaking inch and rocks back into your body with an easy roll of his hips. He exhales gently as he bottoms back out inside of you, a low moan rumbling out of his throat when he reaches that same depth within your heat.

It’s the eye of a storm; a hurricane you hadn’t known you’d entered. He rocks back and forth again, only there’s fractionally more force and speed to the motion this time. Again, and your body shakes with the force. Another, and you have to bite your lip to stifle the scream when he slams back into your body. It’s like the tide, coming in gradually, but more and more with each passing moment. The force swells, each thrust pushing into you a little harder and making your body shake a little more with each thrust.

A shuddering groan rumbles out of him as he finds the rhythm. The hand not pressed delicately around your throat slams down on the rock next to your head. When you look up towards the cave ceiling, Cal’s flushed skin and tousled hair fills your vision.

His hair, which is usually swept out of his eyes. Cal’s hair has always been so well cared for, usually brushed and slicked back so it doesn’t dangle in his eyes. Now, it’s soaked with sweat and falling into his face as he stares down at you like you’re the only star in the sky.

---

Take what you need? Holy stars, he can barely think enough to comprehend it, but some inner part of him aches at the sentence.

As soon as he realized his heart jumped every time you smiled at something, or that his brain short circuited at the sound of your laugh, he’d sworn he would keep it under wraps. He’d promised himself he would wait until after the galaxy finishes imploding and collapsing around your heads. The first time he’d jerked off to the idea of your body, he vowed to satisfy himself with his hand until it was safe. He’d wait until after the holocron is safe and there’s nothing to worry about, because relationships are messy and complicated and--

Fuck, he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about that promise, because how can he regret being balls deep in you while you’re whining and squirming underneath him, when you look at him with such trust even as he pins you to the floor by your throat? His eyes gravitate to the mark on your neck, red and irritated with the indent of his teeth, and he feels his cock twitch even as he continues to pound into you. He likes that.

The promise didn’t keep his eyes from wandering to your face at any opportunity. It didn’t prevent the pressure in his chest from growing over the weeks and months. It definitely didn’t keep Cere and Greez from noticing, and that was a conversation he would rather have scrubbed from his mind.

Take what you need. That one sentence is spinning his world on its metaphorical finger. Take what you need. As if he didn’t want it, but he needed to do it. In all honesty, it had really felt like he was going to die. The burning in his throat that caused the coughing fit, then the racing heart and the overheating; he thought he wasn’t going to make it unless he--

Well, unless he fucked you.

But even if he needs it, he wants it even more, had wanted it for too long. But everytime an opportunity presented itself, he pulled back. He remembers how he threw away the flowers he gathered on the mission instead of bringing them back to you on the Mantis. He remembers every time he denied spending time with you, because his emotions were too raw and close to the surface, and he couldn’t predict his control over his own tongue. Because he didn’t think he could have handled it if you didn’t want him back.

But you had offered to help. Maybe you’d wanted it too, because the whole galaxy could be shoving you in one direction and you would defy it. Nothing can make you do anything you didn’t want to, and that applies to Cal Kestis too.

---

Your orgasm swells up sharp and sudden, gripping you in its claws and shoving you into the attack of muscle spasms and searing pleasure that punches into your abdomen. Your body arches, accidentally hitting your head against the ground.

Cal’s rhythm stutters and his hips jerk forward. His hand leaves your throat as he drops to his forearms. His head drops down to press against yours gently, even as he whimpers and continues to grind forward into your soaking heat.

“Fuck.” Cal gasps, eyelids fluttering rapidly. “Fuck. ‘M gonna cum.”

There’s no time to respond before he’s drawing up and tensing against you. His hips piston in and out once, then he’s cumming and all you can do is lie there and take it. Fuck that’s hot.

You can feel him spilling into you, every warm spurt of cum and every twitch of his cock as he spends himself. Even better is the drawn out groan that trails into his upper register, ending in a tiny whimper. The tension drains out of his face and he sags down, sweaty skin pressed against yours. His arms wrap around your body and he hoists your limp body up as he rolls over. He sits against the wall of the cave, seating you on his lap, cock still firmly buried inside you.

You allow your head to sag back against his shoulder, relishing in the feeling of his body pressed so closely to yours. His hand paws weakly at the fabric of your shirt, and you raise your arms to slide it off. It’s better like this, skin to skin contact seems to calm him down. He buries his nose into your bare neck and mumbles something you can’t make out.

You nudge your head against his gently, “Hm?”

“Thank you.” His lips ghost over the delicate juncture between your neck and shoulder. “Thank you thank you thank you...” He continues to mutter the phrase into your skin, tickling your skin as he nuzzles closer to you.

You should say something. Confess, maybe, everything you’ve been hiding. “Cal, I--” You shift slightly, and something feels off. You furrow your brow and glance downwards at your joining point, “Cal are you still hard?”

He props his chin on your shoulder. “Uh--” He thrusts shallowly up into you, and you stifle a whimper. “Ye-yeah. Sorry?”

“N--” You gasp as his cock twitches. “No. Don’t be sorry. Do you need to go again?” Arousal stirs in your core again, burning a slow path through your nerves and reigniting the flames that had dulled to embers. Your breath catches in your chest and you grind your hips back into his.

“I--I think so.” His voice is strained and his breath comes in short gasps next to your ear. “Not-- not as-- as bad though.”

“That--ah!” Cal chooses that exact moment to pick a spot on your neck and latch on. He nips at the skin before soothing it with his tongue. His hands, roughened with callouses from his saber, climbing, and tinkering, scrape over your skin with just the right amount of friction. You bite your bottom lip. “That’s fine. Should I move?”

His hands find your hips and hold you firmly in place. That’s a no then. His hips rock up into yours gently, and you feel your cheeks warm at the wet sounds of your combined release. Cal grunts, “Let me.”

So you do. You lie back against his bare chest and just take what he gives you, whimpering whenever he brushes against that spot inside you that sends electricity up your spine. You’re gripping his arms so hard you’re sure he’s going to have bruises in the shape of your fingers.

---

Stars, you’re fucking perfect. Just lying here and giving yourself to him. He can feel the Force dimly, but it’s there. The pollen is leaving his system as he slowly fucks you on a cave floor in the middle of a dense forest while stormtroopers patrol outside.

You cry out with his next thrust, the head of his cock striking something inside of you that must feel good because you clench around him and--

Did you just come again?

The additional lubrication only increases the lewd squelch with every thrust, the mixture of his cum and yours only making sliding in and out of your channel easier. He can still feel the effects of the pollen at the back of his mind, and it keeps him hard and sensitive as he continues to fuck you.

He’s aware he should be at least a little worried about the implications, starting at the top with how he’s going to complete the mission and ending with what exactly fucking on a cave floor means for your relationship. Somewhere in the middle is the stormtroopers and the pollen, and the oath of the Jedi Order forbidding relationships. But he can’t grasp it.

Even if there are more pressing concerns, all he can do right now is continue pushing his hips up into your soaking core painstakingly slowly. He wants to enjoy this while he can, while he’s able to fool himself that you want him back. Unless…

---

The only solace you could find in the situation was that you could have Cal, even for these few short moments. Because as much as you may want to convince yourself, a tiny voice inside your head keeps whispering: it’s all the pollen. That’s the only reason why he wants you. And you force yourself to believe the voice, because it’s easier to block off any chance for pain and rejection.

But you know you’re in trouble the second Cal opens his mouth. The words are a harsh whisper, rasping out of his dry throat into your ear, “Beautiful. So gorgeous, giving me what I need, what I want.”

You arch against him and stifle the whimper rising in the back of your throat. His mouth is right next to your ear, so there isn’t anywhere for you to escape from the words that rumble into your brain; words you try to convince yourself are empty. You shove your hand against your mouth rather than allow any sound to escape.

He moans, “Want to do this again. Don’t want this to be just once.”

“Th--that--that’s the pollen talking.” You gasp when you feel his fingers graze over your clit, your own hand drifting back to latch into his hair.

Cal hisses when you tug with a little more strength than necessary, but he doesn’t tell you to stop. One hand supports your weight as he moves you up and down on his dick, the other rubbing little circles around your clit. His hips make up for the lost strength everytime they drive up into you at the lowest point of the rhythm, squelching with every thrust.

“Not--not the pollen. All you. All me.”

You blink, all temporarily forgotten when the words register in your hazy mind. “...What?”

“Wanted this. Wanted this for a while.” Cal finds your clit with his fingers, and you can’t prevent the way your legs jerk and your body seizes against his.

Fuck you’re going to cum. If the first orgasm was a flashfire, this one is a slowly simmering blaze. It creeps up slowly, burning a hole through your abdomen, curling around your ribs and inching down your legs. Your eyes roll back, and your head falls back against Cal’s shoulder.

“Cal. I--I thi--” You try to warn him, you really do. But words aren’t forming correctly right now, and it’s all you can do to hunker down and try to prepare yourself for this truly devastating crest that’s preparing to launch you over the edge.

If Cal gets your warning, he doesn’t show it. All he does is turn his head to the side, press a light kiss to your cheek, and groan, “I think I love you.”

Oh shit. Cal’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect if he planned it. Before you can respond, hell, before you can even begin to fucking process that last sentence, you’re coming hard. Maybe it’s the whiff of pollen you got earlier, or the fact that Cal is the one fucking you so sweetly and thoroughly, or the thrill of being mere steps away from discovery, or a combination of all of it, but this orgasm certainly feels like the most intense of your life.

Spasms ripple outward through your belly, curling you up in Cal’s lap as you ride out your high. Your legs straighten and your toes curl and you clamp down hard around Cal’s cock.

Cal shouts raggedly in your ear, pulling your body close. But even as you whimper and shake on the end of his cock, you remember that you can’t make too much sound.

As if he heard you, Cal burrows his face into your shoulder, his teeth once again finding a place in your skin to muffle his voice as he cums deep inside you once more. His body shakes as he spends himself again, the spasms slowly subsiding with every jerk of his hips into yours.

‘I did hear you.’ There’s a tinge of amusement to the nonexistent voice that echoes in your mind, and you relax back against Cal.

‘Feeling better?’ You nudge him back through the Force, revelling in the feeling of his colorful presence swirling around you once again. The pollen has worn off.

He doesn’t say anything in response, only pulls you close with his arms around you. His mind pushes at yours, and you let him in. You’ve done this a million times, usually on the tail end of nighttime panic attacks, but this time is different. This is the most loose he has ever been with his Force presence, and you allow it to fill the empty parts of your mind. Wait, he loves you?

He rushes over you in the same way the tide comes back to land, calming your fear at finally understanding the weight of his last confession. He’s relaxed, and the familiar energy has a new angle to it, a new emotion you hadn’t felt before in another’s Force signature. You grasp it gently, turning it over and admiring it in the eye of your mind. What is it?

The answer rushes to you just as Cal mutters against your skin, “Love.” The same thing you’d been feeling in the pit of your heart every time you looked at Cal, everytime he kept you safe from the nightmares in his arms and stayed with you until morning, every time you made him tea and did maintenance on his gear after a tough mission.

“I love you.”

You blink up at the ceiling of the rock cave, mouth open with the words just on the tip of your tongue. But they won’t come. The words are stuck in your throat, and try as you might, you can’t make yourself say them.

“Hey.” Cal whispers in your ear, and you shut your mouth. “You don’t have to say it back. But you know that I do, and I know a little of what’s going on up here.” His finger taps the side of your head lightly. "You don't have to figure out where to go from here. I'll navigate."

‘Thank you.’ You send the words through the Force, and he acknowledges them. Yeah, you're shit at knowing where to go when it comes to feelings. But at least with Cal, you won't have to worry about getting lost alone. You sit in peaceful silence for a few minutes, before a thought occurs to you.

“Cal.” His name is little more than a weak rasp off your tongue. You clear your throat and try again. “Cal.”

He grunts unintelligibly.

“Don’t bring that seed back to the Mantis.”

A/N: I will be the first to admit that this fic was hard, because I wanted to incorporate some previous feelings into this to make it less dubcon, and I didn't feel that all plot holes were filled. But that didn't make this any less enjoyable for me, and it was fun to explore a new facet of Cal's character.

Thanks for everyone who gave me inspiration and motivation to keep pushing this through the old brain up here. Smut isn't the easiest for me:)

Taglist: @alliterative-albatross

#cal kestis #cal kestis x reader #sex pollen #pining fools #pining #fluff #feelings #smut

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ptergwen · 3 years

Text

favorite crime

w/c: 1.6k

warnings: swearing, mentions of blood / death, lots n lots of angst

summary: you convince peter to go on the run after he’s framed for murdering mysterio, but he doesn’t want to drag you into his mess

a/n: this was completely based off the song by olivia lfmbsjfhs it’s so beautiful and i’ve wanted to write something for it for a while now so yee i hope y’all like ! pls lmk what you think <3

“we have to get you out of here, peter! come on!” you shout back to your boyfriend and tug his hand that’s laced with yours.

peter doesn’t budge. even when your grip on him tightens, when you pull him forward with all your might, he remains stoic.

there’s something he needs to do, and he’s been contemplating it since the day he met you.

it’s time to let you go.

“please, peter. i’m begging. i know you’re tired of running, but if we don’t leave now… they’ll find you,” you desperately choke out. peter squeezes his eyes shut, dreading what’s to come. “i can’t do this to you anymore, y/n. i… i’m sorry.”

emergency sirens and flashing lights approach the old apartment building serving as yours and peter’s latest hideout. the whole world is on the lookout for him, so you two stowed yourselves away in brooklyn for a bit.

you were hopeful the rumors would pass eventually — about how peter shot the beloved mysterio and left him to die in cold blood. they’re merely talk, of course. you’d personally seen the events of that day unfold on the tower bridge. hell, your class was right at the center of them.

quentin beck was pure evil, so rotten he defamed both peter and spider-man with a charge as cruel as murder. he’s wreaking havoc on him from beyond the grave, over a complete misunderstanding that peter had nothing to do with.

beck’s true source of anger is stark industries. yet, once again, peter ended up the collateral damage.

he was deemed a wanted murderer. posters revealing his name and face were plastered up around the city, a reward even being offered to whoever who turns him in.

you’d proposed the idea of skipping town until things settled. the way you saw it, it was peter’s only option other than prison for twenty-five to life. peter was panicking and couldn’t think straight, so he went along with your getaway plan.

a few weeks later, he’s regretting it.

you’ve been the one person he could trust through this madness. you’re right there to console him, to protect him just like he does you. through sickness and health, life and clearly death, you stick by peter’s side. you left everything behind without a second thought, for him.

peter loves you more than you’ll ever fully be able to comprehend, which is why he can’t ask you to do that. this is his battle to fight, not yours or anyone else’s. his.

you suddenly freeze in your tracks, turning around to look at peter. “what are you talking about? you’re fine, pete.”

his eyes roam everywhere except to yours as they water. blinking back tears, he fixes his gaze on your intertwined hands. you notice a stray tear fall down his cheek and use one of your thumbs to wipe it away, then press a reassuring kiss to his lips. peter lets himself reciprocate momentarily before jerking back.

“please just… stop being so nice to me. you’re making this way harder than i wanted to to be,” he rasps and squeezes your hand tighter. you’re still lost, absolutely clueless about what he’s referring to.

“look, pete. i wanna hear you out, baby. but… i think it should wait until we get to jersey.” you keep your voice as calm as possible, though you’re terrified for both of you. since the feds know your location, they’ll have the place surrounded any minute.

hopping cities isn’t cutting it anymore, so you’ll have to change states this time. new jersey is next on your list.

using his strength to his advantage to hold you in place, peter seizes both your shoulders. his bloodshot eyes lock with yours. a stern expression coats his features, one you’ve seen from him yet never been on the receiving end of.

“we’re not going to jersey, y/n/n,” he declares, the sirens starting to grow louder. you feel a pit forming in your stomach. “we have to!” you immediately protest. “it’s not gonna be easy finding our way, but it’s the last-“

peter cuts you off, voice softer now. “no, no. that’s not what i meant.” he waits a beat and inhales a deep breath, aiming to settle his nerves. it doesn’t.

“i’m going to jersey. you’re staying.”

tears cloud your vision the second those words leave his mouth. you shake your head furiously back and forth, willing him to take them back.

part of you was always afraid peter would get second thoughts. not only about running away with you, about ever being with you. you’re both so young. your entire lives are ahead of you, and peter won’t allow you to risk your own because this isn’t worth a single bit of it.

he’d warned you how dangerous it was to be associated with spider-man. it’s why he held off on telling you about his alias for the longest he could. you naturally began asking questions whenever peter bailed on dates and showed up to school covered in bruises. he hated lying to you, using his stark internship as an excuse, so he finally came out and said it.

peter sometimes wonders if you’d be better off not knowing at all. it’s too late now, though.

“wait, what? why- why can’t i go with you?” you plead, peter’s fingers coming up to cup your cheek. his fingertips lightly caress your skin. “i’m a criminal, y/n. you’d be my accessory.”

it takes everything in him not to break down and sob along with you.

you lean into his palm, already missing his touch. “i don’t care... i don’t give a fuck. i just wanna be with you, peter.” peter literally has to bite his tongue to fight the urge to cry. hands grabbing either side of his head, your fingers twist in his hair roughly. “i’ll do anything, pete. i really will, i swear. name it.”

peter threads his own fingers through yours again, bringing your hands to his chest.

“i’m so sorry, angel. i never should’ve gotten you involved,” he murmurs out and pecks your forehead. “you have nothing to prove to me, okay? you’ve done more than enough. i’m gonna return the favor.”

you let out a strangled whine, your knees buckling as you come to terms with the gravity of your situation.

this is it. this is the end of yours and peter’s story.

“hey, none of that. it’s okay,” peter coos, neither of you convinced. the tastes of salt and metal flood both your senses. he helps you back up and hugs your waist, peppering your cheeks in more kisses. you’re bawling now, arms wound around his neck, clutching at his tattered jacket.

free tears escape peter’s eyes at last. “i love you. i love you so goddamn much, y/n. never forget it,” he nearly whispers. you sniffle and push your forehead against his. “i’m not saying it back ‘cuz that feels like a goodbye, and i- i can’t say goodbye to you yet.”

“it’s not a goodbye,” peter reassures you, rubbing circles on your lower back. “it’s, uh, it’s a see you later. i’m gonna figure something out and be back to you before you know it. can’t get rid of me that easy.”

that earns a faint giggle from you, peter managing a grin. you two attempt to ignore everything happening beyond these walls, only focusing on the other.

“then, um…” you clear your throat. “i love you.” his smile dwindling slightly, peter nods and meets your gaze. “i love you too, baby. you should probably get going soon.”

affirming his advice, a booming voice that sounds from a microphone commands peter to come out with his hands up.

your worry spikes, instinctively drawing peter in closer. he forces himself to put on a brave face for you.

“i’m scared, pete. where… where am i supposed to go?” you rush to ask him. “home, y/n/n. go home,” peter decides, pressing a final kiss to the top of your head. “just don’t get caught, and you’ll be fine.” carding your fingers in his undone curls, you sigh. “easier said than done, but i’ll try not to.”

you’d never pictured that the sweet boy with a heart too big and brain even bigger, who sings you to sleep even though his voice sucks and spends his last dollar buying you flowers, would be accused of first degree murder. it isn’t true or fucking fair.

what’s worse, he has to bare this storm alone now.

you lift your heavy backpack off the cold ground, slinging it onto your shoulders. peter stares out the window and down at the assembly of swarm troops crowded together.

“are you gonna be okay?” you catch his attention. he snaps back into reality, pulling your hood up so it covers your head. you’re wearing a sweatshirt of his, after having gone through all your own clothes. “i hope so. are you?” peter repeats your question. “i hope so,” you echo.

tying your hoodie strings tight, peter offers a smile. “say hi to may for me. ned and mj, too.” it’s going to be tough to face his family and friends after this. “i will. i’ll let them know you’re alright.” you kiss his cheek, placing a hand on his chest. peter lets your touch distract him from the mess he’s about to be hit with.

“thank you, y/n. i’ll see you soon, baby. you have my word,” he promises, stepping back so you two can go your separate ways.

you watch him with fresh tears threatening to spill.

“i’m gonna hold you to it. be safe, spidey.”

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fortuositywritings · 3 years

Text

Love Bug (Wanda x Reader)

Summary

So when Peter is bitten by a spider, he gets cool superpowers; but when you’re bitten by one, you get loopy and say things you never meant to say.

“I can’t get your smile out of my mind. I think about your eyes all the time. Beautiful but you don’t even try.”

Word Count: 5688

Warnings: None unless you count someone fainting and mention of spider

*********************

“That is freaky.”

“Come on, you’re impressed. Just say it’s impressing.”

“It’s impressingly freaky,” you say tapping on the glass of the container that holds Peter’s new tech. “Stark really took taxidermy to the next level.”

“Relax. It’s mechanical. It needs a name. I’m thinking ‘RoboSpider’,” Peter says enthusiastically as you are both watching the metallic spider crawl in its container. It looks so real. It’s creepy.

“That’s a stupid name,” you turn to Peter.

“I think it fits him.”

“Of course you do, Spider Boy,” you reply. Peter just scoffs.

“What does it do?”

Peter narrows his eyes on the spider. “I think it has a camera for surveillance. I’m sure it does something cool.”

“Didn’t they tell you when they gave it to you? Or give you a manual or something?”

“No, they don’t know I know about it yet, but I’m sure we can figure it out,” he says as he begins to open the container.

“What do you mean they don’t kno-”

“What are you two doing?” The unexpected voice behind you has you and Peter turn around wide-eyed so quickly you could Pietro a run for his money. You and Peter stand in front of the container and let out a panicked, “Nothing!”

You finally take in whom the voice belongs to and the panic washes away from both you and Peter. You honestly should have known who it was off the bat when that very damn voice haunts your dreams. Well, ‘haunts’ isn’t really the right word.

“Oh, it’s just you,” you sigh in relief as Wanda approaches you both.

“Just me?” she quirks an eyebrow.

And suddenly, for reasons unknown (you know the reasons, you just won’t admit them yet), the panic comes back and you begin to ramble, “Yes, I mean NO! I mean yes you but not like ‘just’ you, you know? Like ‘it’s only you’ - er ‘it’s you only’ but like a good ‘it’s you only’ as in we’re glad it’s you and not someone else who came in -”

“Y/N, I think she gets it,” Peter stops your ramble.

You see Wanda giving you what seems to be an amused smile. You feel your cheeks heat up as you try looking anywhere else. Is it getting hot in here?

“Well, I was looking for you to ask if either of you wanted to watch a movie named ‘13 Going On 30’? Pietro says one of the characters looks like Bruce.”

You look to Peter to answer. You don’t think you can open your mouth anymore without embarrassing yourself.

“Yeah, we’ll be right down,” he replies with ease, lucky asshole.

You finally look at Wanda as she gives you a parting smile and you give an awkward one in return. Your eyes follow her until she is out of sight.

“You’ve got it bad,” Peter teases.

“Shut up,” you reply as you turn your attention back to the container.

Peter continues, “Like I thought I was bad at talking to girls-”

The empty container. Panic seems to be the mood for today as it comes back full force.

“Peter.”

“-but that was like next level.”

“Peter!”

“What?” he finally turns to you.

“RoboSpider is missing.”

“Aha! See, it’s not that stupid,” he says with a victorious smile on his face that quickly falls, “Wait what did you say?”

You simply point at the glaringly empty container.

“That’s not good.”

You give Peter the most sarcastic face you could muster.

“Help me look! It couldn’t have gone far,” Peter gets on his knees and begins searching for the spider.

You frantically search countertops, “Does it not have an off switch?”

“I don’t know.”

“Obviously or this wouldn’t be happening right now!” you whisper scream.

“Here, RoboSpider. Tsk tsk tsk. Come on out, boy,” Peter starts calling.

He looks ridiculous doing so from the floor. You step in front of him.

“You really think that’s going to work?”

He looks up at you and shrugs. You feel like you’re a minute away from sweating. Less than a minute based on the tickling sensation on your neck. Maybe Peter can tell to cause he’s looking at your neck, his eyes widening. You don’t know why it’s so shocking you’re sweating as he should be too because if Tony finds out you lost RoboSp- the damn spider, he will have your heads.

“Y/N, don’t freak out.”

Why did he have to say that? Freaking out is in your very nature. You do it so well. You’ve been doing it all day. Suddenly, you are all too aware of what you thought was sweat tickling your neck but now realize, unless you have discovered a new ability and become a water bender, sweat does not move like that. You close your eyes and try to steady your pulse. Don’t freak out.

“Peter. get. it. off.”

As hard as you tried to stop it, your pulse begins racing again as Peter slowly rises to his feet grabbing a cup and a paper from the counter. “Relax, I don’t think it bites.”

You open your eyes and ask once you see Peter reaching out, “Why the paper and cup then?”

“Precaution.”

You feel the spider still and somehow that pushes you over the edge. Your pulse goes into overdrive, your whole body breaks into goosebumps, and you finally let the urge to swat at your neck take over. It’s as if Peter and the spider sense this. All too quickly, the following happen: you bring your hand up to smack at your neck, Peter races to it first with the cup, and the spider bites down.

“Ow, shit!”

“Got it!”

Peter smiles triumphantly as you rub at your neck. He places the spider back in its container and properly closes it.

“You said it didn’t bite.”

“I also said not to freak out. Are you okay? Let me see,” he takes your hand off your neck to check the bite.

“Is it gross? Is it red? Green? Pulsing? Am I gonna die? Peter, say something!”

“It’s not there. I don’t see any bite. I think you might have just smacked yourself with your hand.”

Your hand comes back to your neck as you feel around. You don’t feel any bump. You take out your phone to look for a mark but don’t see one.

“Count yourself lucky, Parker,” you glare at him over your phone.

“Okay, but you should have seen your face,” he laughs as you both exit the lab. You just roll your eyes.

As you are walking to the common space, you feel your legs go a little numb. Peter notices you walking funny.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” you assure him, “I think I’m still a little shaken up is all.”

You stop Peter right as you’re about to turn into the common space. You warn him, “We do not speak of what happened in the lab.”

Peter raises his hands up in defense, “Hey, I’m not trying to get in trouble either.”

“Okay, good.”

“Great. Now let’s join everyone and watch Bruce’s twin on screen while you stare at Wanda the whole movie.”

You smack his arm and then grab it leading him into the room as you comment, “Okay, but like that guy really does look like Bruce. How have I never noticed?”

That you didn’t deny the Wanda comment is not lost on either of you.

You can already smell the popcorn in the air right as you walk in. You immediately spot Wanda standing by the TV talking to her brother who seems to be growing frustrated with the remote. You note everyone who has joined you for the movie. Bucky and Steve are sitting on the long couch talking. Bucky looks like he had just woken up from a nap, his shirt wrinkled and hair slightly sticking up on one side. Steve is freshly showered wearing his usual attire. With his muscles showing through his shirt and his posture even as he’s sitting down, he looks untouchable, but you know differently with the bandage on the side of his forehead covering a wound he claims to be from a mission. Turning your head a bit more, you see Nat and Clint heading over to the couch with buckets of popcorn. Both are dressed for the gym but neither looked sweaty so you assume they decided to watch the movie instead. Farther down you see Bruce kneeled beside the single massage chair people usually fought over. You think he’s lost something under the chair.

You turn back to Wanda. She looks so soft in her matching sweats and crew neck sweater that you had not noticed she was wearing earlier. Granted, you were busy freaking out about getting caught with the spider. You can see her eyes shining bright and lips form a line as if trying to hold back laughter. She looks so carefree in the moment and you don’t think you’ve ever seen anyone so ethereal as she crosses her arms covering the bottom of her gorgeous cascading hair that always tempts your fingers to touch.

I wonder if it’s as soft as it looks.

“What is?” Peter says breaking your reverie.

“What?” You turn to look at him.

“You said you wondered if it’s as soft as it looks.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Do you think we should go help Pietro? He looks like he’s struggling,” you change the subject.

“Yeah, it’s kind of painful to watch.”

You and Peter walk over to the twins. Wanda spots you two first and gives you both a friendly smile. Trying not to look silly standing there blushing, you clear your throat, “Having trouble there, McQueen?”

Pietro looks even more exasperated after your comment.

“Once again, Y/N. Your teasing is of no use if I do not know what you are talking about.”

You roll your eyes, “I swear, one of these days it will be my turn to pick a movie and rest assured, it will be Cars. Now what is wrong with the remote?”

“I press up and down but it is moving side to side on the screen. And then I press the off and on button but it does not do it on time. It is broken.”

Peter takes the remote from Pietro.

You hear a quiet giggle from Wanda. You look at her and can clearly see her holding in laughter. You throw her a confused look wondering what could be so funny to have her like this. She nods past your shoulder so you turn to look. In your line of vision, you see Bruce fiddling with a remote on a massage chair that looks out of control rocking Bruce forwards and back over and over. You turn slightly to see Peter on what you now understand is not the TV remote pressing the up and down buttons. It is single handedly, the funniest goddamn thing you’ve witnessed. How Wanda kept it together that long, you don’t know because you do not last a second when it all clicks in your head. What you do know is Wanda’s laughter is the loveliest sound you’ve ever heard. Forget your favorite song of the month. You could hear her laughter on repeat forever.

Everyone in the room turns to look at the two of you laughing. Finally, after calming yourself down and wiping the tears from under your eyes, you wordlessly take the control from Peter, walk on over to Bruce, trade remotes with him, walk back over to Peter, and give him the correct remote. Everyone laughs save Peter, Bruce, and Pietro who look embarrassed.

“For two of the smartest people I know, that was just absurd,” you tell Peter. “I mean I get Pietro, but you Parker. Shame.”

“Hey! I understood that one,” Pietro replies.

Wanda just giggles beside you and you don’t know if it’s simply because of the whole control fiasco or because of her laughter that you feel so light inside. So light and happy in fact that for the first time since you met her, you look at her and you give her an honest to god genuine smile first. It is not an awkward smile you returned but one you gave her first without feeling shy or embarrassed. This time Wanda is giving you what you think looks like a shy smile though you know that could just well be wishful thinking. It is a smile nevertheless and it makes you feel like you are flying. You actually have to look down to make sure your feet are on the ground. You only look back up when you hear her voice again.

“I’m going to get some drinks. Y/N, come with me?” She nods her head toward the kitchen.

Quick, what do I say. “Of course, I’ll come with you anywhere.” NO! Absolutely not. That sounds dirty.Yes, I’ll follow you anywhere. Nope. That one sounds creepy. Oh, god. Now she’s looking at me weird. Oh my god, please don’t be reading my mind right now.

“No, you are very much saying everything aloud right now,” you hear Pietro say. You see color rise to Wanda’s cheeks. You turn to Pietro and Peter and if anything goes by Peter’s shocked face, you very much did say everything out loud. Pietro’s face is so damn smug as he passes by you and whispers, “I personally think ‘I’ll follow you anywhere’ sounds romantic.”

Peter follows closely behind Pietro and just gives you a shrug that says “what am I supposed to do?” when you give a desperate look that screams “HELP ME”. You close your eyes as you turn back around to Wanda.

“Can we just pretend I said ‘yeah, sure’ and nothing I actually said?”

You hear her say, “If that is what you want, okay. Now let’s go. I don’t think they will wait for us to start the movie.”

You finally open your eyes when you feel Wanda tug on your arm. She doesn’t let go until you make it to the fridge and when she does you feel warm where she touched you. You really need to get it together. She opens the fridge and takes out several sodas. As she hands you a few to carry, your fingers brush and though the cans are cold, you know they are not the reason goosebumps suddenly appear along your arm. You clear your throat and take a quick step back. Maybe a little too quick as you bump into the counter.

“Are you alright?” Wanda asks.

Embarrassed you answer, “Yep, totally cool.” Totally not thinking about how badly I’d like to hold your hand or anything. Nope. Totally cool. “Awesome. Excited really to um watch the movie.”

She looks up at you with rosy cheeks and a confused look. You can’t blame her. You don’t even know where you are going with this.

You feign hearing something from where everyone else is.

“I actually think I hear the movie playing. We should um go. We don’t want to miss the-the start and everyone is probably thirsty,” you stutter walking backwards back to the TV viewing area.

You turn around and shake your head at yourself. You can hear Wanda’s footsteps following not too far behind. You both begin handing out sodas to everyone who decided to watch the movie. You stand off to the side with the soda you were left with looking for where to sit. Bruce was still sitting in the massage chair that is now working in the way he likes. Nat, Bucky, Steve, and Clint sit on the longer couch. Pietro lies on his side on the floor right in front of the TV. Lastly, on the smaller couch sits Peter and now Wanda. Seems like you will be taking the floor as well.

You decide you’ll sit by Pietro. Better this way than sitting by his sister who is looking at you so intensely as if studying you or trying to figure what you are thinking without actually reading your thoughts. You know she wouldn’t do that if she could help it. She respects everyone enough to not invade their minds. Little does she know she invades yours everyday in the least expected way.

Just as you are about to sit, Peter calls your name, “Oh, Y/N, here you can have my seat.”

Fucking well-mannered asshole, you think to yourself. But then you are not so sure you kept that in your head after you hear Pietro chuckle.

You walk on over to the small couch as Peter crouches to the floor. You’ve been trying to avoid Wanda’s gaze but the closer you get the harder it is. You finally look at her and her gorgeous eyes that always make your head spin. You’re rather dizzy by the time you make it to the couch.

No, but like actually dizzy this time. Maybe you are coming down with something. That would actually be a godsend at a time like this. You don’t think you can last a whole movie sitting so close to Wanda.

You actually do feel a bit better sitting down. She gives you a small smile which you awkwardly return. Great. Back to awkward you. You stare down to the unopened soda can in her hand - orange soda. You know she isn’t going to drink that. Fortunately for her, you hold her preferred drink - Dr. Pepper.

“Here. Trade you,” you offer your drink to her.

“Oh!” She looks surprised, but pleasantly surprised you’d say based on the smile on her face when she sees the drink you are offering. “Are you sure?”

“Very,” you say. “I like orange better.” Lie.

“Thanks,” she takes the drink from your hand and gives you hers. “You know, this is actually my favorite.”

I know.

“Well then good thing I sat here as it worked out for the both of us,” you respond, your nerves settling down somewhat letting your body relax on the couch.

Of course that doesn’t last long when she also leans back comfortably looking you dead in the eye as she says, “Yeah, lucky me.”

You swear you feel your heart skip a beat, possibly a whole 16 bars worth. Then you think your heart stops beating all together when she leans her side into yours. You are pretty certain the couch is spacious enough to have no touching happening. You are in no shape to say anything though as you are basically trying to catch your breath while the movie plays. When you finally do breathe in deep, you suddenly wish you hadn’t. All you can smell is her shampoo.

How can anyone smell so good? It should be illegal. What is it, strawberry? Smells a little like flowers too.

“Good nose,” Wanda whispers, leaning more so into your space giving you a mini heart attack. “It’s strawberry shampoo and the lotion is rose scented. I can show you later if you want? Here, smell it.”

Wanda practically shoves her wrist under your nose. You are trying to remember the words to “Hail Mary” because this just might be the moment you die. You hesitantly sniff her wrist and though you wish you could stay there until all the oxygen in your body is replaced by that scent you quickly pull away.

“Yep, roses.”

You turn to give her a quick smile and shit she’s close. Any closer and you’d be bumping noses. You linger there for what feels like forever but you know it’s more around 5 seconds, 4 seconds longer than you would have ever allowed yourself before. Your throat goes dry.

“Sorry,” you whisper quickly as you turn your head to the TV to try to distract yourself. You pop open your soda and nearly chug it down all the way. Wanda is quiet beside you seemingly invested in the movie as she takes sips of her soda but you know she is not following along because every other minute you see her glance your way from your peripheral vision.

You feel her pull away from you and get off the couch, and you almost sigh in relief until you see her come back with a blanket. You finish off your soda and leave the can on the floor as she sits back down. You try to ignore her but she calls your attention by waving a side of the blanket in front of you asking if you want some. You shake your head no and Wanda pouts. Like she actually pouts and she waves the blanket again looking at you expectantly.

God, you’re too cute. Like I could ever say no to that face.

You nod giving your thanks as she throws the blankets over you as well.

“Good to know,” she says. As you’re about to ask what is good to know, she leans fully into your side, loops her arm around yours, and lays her head on your shoulder turning her attention back to the movie without a word. She either doesn’t realize or she doesn’t care that her actions have broken you. You are stiff as a board but you quickly will yourself to relax. You reason if this is the only chance you get to be with her like this, you may as well enjoy it.

As the movie goes on, you feel more relaxed than you ever felt. You don’t know if it is the warmth of the blanket or of having Wanda pressed so close, but you feel sluggish, almost tired-like but you know you’re not ready to sleep yet. It is almost like your brain is taking a little longer to catch up to what is happening.

When Wanda’s thumb is rubbing your hand, you sigh.

This feels nice. I always wondered what holding your hand would feel like. Now that I know, I don’t ever want to let go. You think or you think you think.

When she squeezes your hand, you’re not so sure you kept that in your head but this time you don’t really care because she sinks further into you. You don’t even know when she decided to hold your hand, but you are not complaining about it.

A few scenes go by, but not without your commentary. Usually your commentary gets a chuckle here and there or is ignored but these comments you make are not so forgettable. Not when you say things like

“You should try giving Nat a dollhouse, Banner” to Bruce making him blush and everyone stare at you incredulously and some laugh

and

“If your laugh was my ringtone, I would have so many missed calls because I’d want to hear it all the way through” to Wanda when she laughs at your previous comment. This has her blushing now. You hadn’t realized you said that until her cheeks turned pink and Peter whipped his head around to look at you with wide eyes. You ignore him and continue not really knowing where this is coming from. “You’re cute when you blush.”

Everyone is looking at you both now. She ducks her head and if she wasn’t blushing before, she is flushing now with all the attention. The movie is long forgotten. You pull her head to hide into your neck as you chuckle, “Hey, there’s no need to be embarrassed. If anything, Captain USA over there should be embarrassed telling everyone his head injury was from a mission.”

Steve’s eyes widen but so do Pietro’s for a different reason as he rushes over to you.

“Tell me everything,” he says like a child on christmas.

“Alright, alright. I hurt myself in training, okay?” Steve interrupts.

“Well, that’s not that interesting,” Pietro huffs.

“He threw his shield and it ricocheted,” you stage whisper.

Pietro’s eyes shine with glee. Everyone turns to look at Steve to see if there is any truth to the story and his face gives him away. Everyone bursts out laughing and you feel Wanda laughing as well in your arms.

“How did you even know that?” Peter asks.

“Tinman has cameras everywhere. I bet he has it recorded somewhere.”

“Man, I have to see it!” Peter exclaims and has most people agree.

“Okay, I promise it’s not that funny, guys,” Steve tries to calm everyone down.

“No, if you want funny, you should watch Guns and Arrows duet. What was it “Love is an Open Door?” you reply directing everyone’s gaze to Nat and Clint. Even Wanda pulls from you to look at them.

“You showed her the video?” Natasha glares at Clint.

“No, it’s on the internet for anyone to watch as they please. Clint makes a great Anna by the way.”

“This is the greatest day of my life,” Pietro says as he pulls out his phone searching for the video. “I don’t know what put you in this mood, but thank you.”

“I’ve got a lot more too,” you say as you get up from the couch, legs feeling a little wobbly, “but that will have to wait til I get back. I drank the soda too fast trying to calm my nerves from sitting so close to your sister.”

“Why would you be nervous? It’s just Wanda,” Pietro says.

You gape at him in disbelief as if he had just insulted you and he might as well have. It is as if everything else just disappears.

“ ‘Just’ Wanda?! You say that like she isn’t the coolest person in the world! Which makes you cool by default because you’re her twin, so you should be thanking her.”

You try to lean in closer to him as if to tell him a secret but your body is more swaying off balance than anything, “Don’t tell anyone but I get nervous around pretty girls. So of course I would be nervous around your sister. Also, don’t tell Peter cause he thinks he’s better than me at talking to girls and I refuse to admit he’s right.”

Pietro is wearing a shit eating grin as you move back. You don’t see everyone’s matching shocked faces as you turn. You turn too quickly and due to your weird state of being you fall face first into Peter. Luckily he catches you with ease.

“That was a close one,” you giggle. “Thanks, Spider Boy.”

“Y/N, are you feeling okay?” Peter asks. Everyone rushes over to you both.

“I’m great,” you respond as helps you up. “Is the room spinning or is it just me?”

“You should sit down, Y/N,” Wanda looks at you with worry.

You frown, “Hey, what’s wrong? Did Pietro eat your sandwich again? It’s okay. I can make you another one righ-”

“PARKER! L/N!”

Everyone’s heads turn to the voice coming from the elevator that could only be Tony’s.

“Do you think he knows about the spider?” you whisper to Peter as your vision goes blurry.

“How could you let the spider out! Do you even have a clue what it does?” Tony’s silhouette makes his way to you.

“So maybe it did bite you,” Peter looks at you guilty and picks you up as your knees give out again.

“Fucking RoboSpider,” is the last thing you say before everything goes dark.

***

When you finally come to, you are in your room in your pyjamas with a pounding headache. You slowly sit up on your bed. Your body is aching as well. Hearing your movement, Peter springs up from where he was sitting against the wall.

He approaches you slowly and hands you a glass of water, “Hey, how are you feeling.”

“Like a damn Stark tech spider bit me after I told my friend not to mess with it,” you manage to glare at Peter after

“Sorry. Are you mad?”

“Unless I got some cool spider powers out of it. Let’s see.”

You touch several objects around you exaggerating your actions so he clearly sees nothing is sticking to you.

“Nope, guess that answers that.”

“Look, I’m sorry, okay? I shouldn’t have let it out. That’s my fault and I totally take the blame. I told Mr. Stark that too,” he says as he sits by your side.

You accept his apology. You sit there with him in silence for a few minutes letting everything that happened settle in your mind.

“Oh, god. Everyone is probably mad at me. Why couldn’t I stop talking?” You take a pillow and scream into it.

“It was the spider. Apparently instead of venom it has a sort of truth serum-like substance that works I guess but it works I guess more like alcohol,” Peter explains.

“Remind me to never get drunk around any of you.”

Peter laughs and takes the pillow from you.

“If it’s any consolation, no one is mad at you. They, um, saw the video of you freaking out with the spider and say it’s even now.”

“Nooo,” you whine and Peter just chuckles beside you. His laughter dies down and he looks at you for a moment like something is pressing on his mind.

“Why are you looking at me like that? Did I do something else?” you start to panic. “Oh, my god, did I pee my pants?! I remember having to go to the restroom but I don’t remember going. Is that why I’m in my pjs? Did everyone see? Did Wanda see? I’m never coming out of this room.”

“Breathe, Y/N, breathe!” Peter places his hands on your shoulders and breathes with you.

“I was going to say that Wanda is waiting outside to talk to you.”

Your eyes widen, “Somehow that’s worse! How do I begin to apologize? I embarrassed her the most out of everybody.”

“Just talk to her. I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think,” he says getting up.

“Peter, don’t leave me yet. Peter!” you whisper yell as he makes his way to the door.

“You’ll be fine. We both know I’m better at talking to girls than you but I still have full confidence,” he replies cheekily as he exits leaving the door open.

“Asshole!” You call after him but to your misfortune Wanda walks in at the same time.

“Well that’s different. Usually I get a flustered greeting from you,” she says amusedly.

“S-sorry. That was for Peter. Not you. Never you. Unless, you like asshole -er being called asshole, but you probably don’t so… Hi, Wanda. What can I do for you?”

“There it is,” Wanda chuckles. You blush in return. She glances at the spot next to you where Peter had been sitting. “May I?”

“Yes,” you squeak. You clear your throat trying to sound less nervous. “Of course.”

You take a deep breath as she sits down closer than Peter had, your shoulders touching. You look at the door while she looks at you. You try to calculate how fast you would have to move to run out the door before she can close it with her powers. You know that even if you had Pietro’s speed, you still could not run fast enough to escape this conversation. It’s been a long time coming. It was time to own up and accept the feelings you tried to ignore. You would not run away this time. You will not deny what you’ve made blatantly obvious to everyone. You are in love with Wanda Maximoff.

“What’s going on in that head of yours?” Wanda asks.

“As if you don’t know. You’re the telepath here,” you turn your face to hers.

“You know I won’t do it on purpose. I’ll only hear thoughts that-”

“Are loud,” you finish for her. “I know. I also know my mind is practically screaming my thoughts at you.”

“I’d rather hear them come from your mouth,” she replies quietly.

“Before I go and ruin everything-”

“You won’t,” Wanda interjects and moves to hold your hand.

“Before I go and ruin everything,” you begin again, “I want to apologize if I embarrassed you yesterday or made you uncomfortable in any way. That being said, I cannot apologize for what I said because I meant every word and I refuse to take them back even if it makes us being around each other awkward or difficult. I just want to be honest.”

You squeeze her hand and take a deep breath. You look right into her eyes, your heart beating fast. You’re scared but also excited to finally say the words.

“I love you.”

The words are said with such confidence, you’re shocked. Maybe, you’re more shocked they didn’t come from you. It takes a moment for you to shake from your stupor.

“I-I was going to say that.”

“You were taking too long,” she says as she leans in and kisses you. It takes you two seconds to get your act together and kiss her back. You close your eyes and your heart slows to its regular beating as a calm washes over you. All worries of unrequited feelings forgotten. There are no nerves to interrupt your actions. No doubts hold you back from kissing her harder as she moves to sit on your lap without breaking your kiss. When the need to breathe can’t be ignored, you pull back feeling light headed.

She smiles at you and she is the most beautiful thing you have ever come across with her chest heaving, lips bruised, and strands of her hair falling in front of her face. You look at her adoringly as you push her hair back to see her whole face.

“I love you,” you finally say.

“Wasn’t too hard, was it?” she laughs.

You roll your eyes and you kiss her this time.

***

“So, how’d it go?” Peter asks a few hours later.

“Her hair is as soft as it looks.”

#wanda maximoff x reader #my first attempt at writing #wanda maximoff imagine #wanda maximoff #peter parker

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infernal-fire · 3 years

Text

Arachnophobia

Warnings: sexy times, a bittt of dubcon (only if you really squint), some spitting, arachnophobia

Wc: 1.3k

Summary: A surprise visitor interrupts your sexy times, but that doesn’t stop Bucky.

a/n: i bet you won’t even be able to tell i’m deathly scared of spiders by the end of this fic ;)

Bucky’s room was always clean.

On an average day, it looked like no one lived there.

In fact, the only way you knew he used his room was because of the one pillow and lightweight blanket that had its conspicuous presence tucked away beside the little couch.

The room’s occupant opened the door and easily spotted you in the otherwise empty room. He bore into your panty-clad form perched on the edge of his bed and leaned into the doorframe, amused.

“To what do I owe this pleasure?” Bucky jeered.

“I’m... apologizing.”

You stood up and weightlessly padded to him while he closed the door without looking back.

“You’re damn right you are,” he taunted.

“Don’t make me regret this,” you rolled your eyes, still refusing to close the gap between your bodies.

Earlier that week, you ignored a direct command. You stormed a room that had one too many agents to take on by yourself; you managed, though. Nonetheless, you would be a fool to think Bucky would ever let you hear the end of it.

The quinjet was mostly silent, minus the occasional quip from the super-soldier. Even Steve had told him to lay off after the first few jabs, but he was relentless.

The provenance of this angst? No one had known. This arrangement of yours? No one had noticed.

“Why do you care so much, Barnes?” you finally countered. The rest of the team silently wondered the same thing.

It may have shut him up, but since then, you couldn’t go a day without thinking about the hurt that disturbed his face; it momentarily betrayed his indomitable demeanour.

Only took 6 days before you buckled.

Bucky gently placed his hands on your hips and pulled you to him.

Kiss to the forehead. Kiss to the nose. Finally, a soft kiss to your lips.

“I was wondering when you’d come around,” he mumbled into the deepening make-out. He began guiding your clueless form to the bed. The back of your knees hit the corner of the mattress and Bucky sat you down. He began pulling at the lace that outlined your body, diving into the crook of your neck for more kisses.

You lightly pushed him away, keeping your hands at his shoulder while standing up again.

“This is about you,” your nose nudged his cheek as your lips brushed along his jaw. He cupped the back of your head and let you nibble his earlobe, before pulling you off.

“I’m equally guilty. Sorry for yelling at you.”

“I shouldn’t have said that either.”

“You still haven’t said sorry, doll.” He smirked, and once again, you roll your eyes.

“You’re really pushing it.”

He let out a chuckle before he pulled you in for an embrace.

“This is nice,” you murmured into his chest.

“Right.” He didn’t sound happy, his tone lacking any intonation or conviction.

Suddenly, the super-soldier shoved you onto the bed. You couldn’t even get a word out before he was on top of you, growling like an animal, tearing at your baby doll.

“I told you not to go in that room,” he grunted as he took out his cock from the confines of his pants.

“Take off the rest,” you urged, picking at his sleeve.

“You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

You watched in surprise as he lewdly spitting on your pussy and rubbed the little button.

“Whoa, slow down there, Barnes,” you groaned, clutching his wrist.

“Shut the fuck up,” he muttered while lining up his angry, red tip against your slit. He pushed the tip in and you braced yourself for the rest, but he stopped.

“Open your eyes,” he slapped your cheek. You hadn’t even realized you closed your eyes.

“Look at me,” he moaned as he sunk in, “Look at me while I ruin you.”

He buried himself to the hilt and slowly dragged it back out.

You still didn’t understand why he was so mad. He thrust back in with ferocious intent and you involuntarily yelped.

He didn’t let you adjust. You begged.

“Slow down, please, please, please,” you chanted.

“Gonna make you remember to never disobey me again”, he replied into the shell of your ear. Bucky had buried his face in your neck, taking refuge in the heat while he pounded away your poor cunt.

You clenched your eyes shut and held onto him for dear life. Too much pleasure. Brain- it’s... short-circuiting. Somehow, though, he knew you closed your eyes again.

“Open your fucking eyes.” Tears that your eyelids had been safeguarding came trickling down your cheek.

Bucky’s room was always clean.

On an average day, it looked like no one lived there.

So why, for fuck’s sake, was there a cobweb in the corner?

You stopped your gurgling when you picked up on it. Even through your blurry vision, it was easy to make out the figure of a massive spider idly hanging on the remnant of a web.

“BUCKY! SPIDER!” you screamed.

He cussed and sat upright with his cock still resting inside you. His head snapped to the corner of the room where he spotted the creepy-crawler. Rather than pull out, he smirked and rutted into you again.

“Bucky,” you wailed, “Spider.”

“I know. His name is Greg.” Your eyes widened in confusion and before you could register what was happening, the Sergeant pulled out and flipped you onto all fours. You ungraciously squealed as he pulled your hair up. You were now directly looking at the monster.

He resumed his onslaught, pulling you up to his chest while he was at it. One of his hands snaked its way to your now-swollen bud.

You cried a little. You screamed even more.

“I’M SO SORRY, PLEASE, STOP! STOP!”

Bucky ignored your pleas, his balls now slapping your entrance as he slid in and out. He knew you could take it - if you truly couldn’t, you would have screamed the safe word, not ‘stop’.

The spider moved a little and you screamed even louder in response. At the same time, Bucky doubled his efforts to make you come. Now, you weren’t sure which one you were screaming for.

Finally, you came and felt Bucky’s warmth coat your insides as well. You wanted to enjoy the ride down, but all you could think about was that fucking spider, Greg.

Bucky untangled his limbs from yours, effectively dropping you face-first onto the bedding while he pulled out.

Exhaustion was piling over you, yet you couldn’t stop sleepily mumbling about the spider. You saw Bucky stand up on the bed, sticking out his vibranium arm to let Greg crawl onto him. He grinned at you deviously.

“No, no, no, no.”

All your sleepiness was gone, with Barnes now inching closer to you with the beast in hand.

He laughed loudly, clutching his chest before making his way to the window and gently dropping the demon spawn. He made a little shooing motion and reminded Greg to come back after you were gone.

“What the fuck, Barnes?” You stared at him incredulously. A yawn overtook you and you laid down again, cautiously peering at the corners for any more mini-devils.

“That’s a lesson for you,” he yawned too and climbed into bed. He pulled into his chest but you resisted and he snickered again. He pulled you in more forcefully and you huffed as you settled into his arms.

“Fucking Greg.”

“Hey, don’t talk shit about Greg. He listens better than you,” Bucky quipped back.

“Your room is always so clean, how the fuck did that get in here?”

“I can’t destroy his web. That’s his home!” You sighed and looked up at him, unaware of how to deal with him.

“Plus, he’s great company,” he added.

“Oh yeah, yeah, of course. I’m sure you could find a good spider to fuck as well. Maybe I should call Peter in here for good measure?”

“Shut the fuck up before I stuff your mouth with my cock and bring him back in to watch.”

“You’re sick in the head, Barnes,” you defeatedly rebuked.

“But you love it.”

You shook your head and dug your face into his shoulder.

Little did you know that Bucky could feel the faint outline of a smile against his skin.

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leafs-lover · 3 years

Note

not really a question, but maybe idea for btpgd. i know young elise was hardcore daddy’s girl, maybe a fic where she has a nightmare and goes to mom and dad’s room while partaking in some adult alone time..

A/N: I love getting ideas/ suggestions for blurbs and bonus chapters. Elise is around 5 in this blurb, and for the record, she will always be a daddy's girl

By clicking ‘keep reading’ you are agreeing that you are eighteen and are game to read smutty themes and a few swear words. If you don’t agree to these things, then keep on scrolling ;)

“You’re ridiculous,” you giggle as his hands roam the front of your body, cupping your breast under your loose t-shirt.

“You love it,” he rasps in your ear. His tongue is hot on your neck as he drags it across your skin. Moisture pools in your core as the space between you closes, his index finger swirling around your clit.

“I do,” you grin.

Turning around to face him your hand scrapes through his beard. Fred tries to lean in but you beat him to it, quickly pushing him onto his back. Rolling on top of him, your knees fall to either side of his hips. The feeling of his growing bulge against your clothed center makes you moan. Smirking you slowly begin rocking your hips over his length; your head tilts back and your lashes kiss your cheeks.

Pushing your shirt up his fingers dig into your hips, helping to encourage your movements. “Fuck skat,” he groans as your core brushes over his throbbing erection. Fingers toying with the hem of his boxers you push them down a few inches and begin gently tugging on his length.

“Elskede,” he grunts, his voice almost trapped in his throat.

Continuing to pump over him, you spread the leaking precum with your thumb around his bulbous tip. His abs clench as you lick your parted lips. Leaning down you close the gap, one of his hands tangles into your hair and he sucks on your bottom lip.

“Elskede,” he repeats with more desperation this time.

Using his other hand he slides your underwear to the side as you adjust over him. “Jeg elsker dig så meget,” (I love you so much) he mumbles against your lips as his tip prods at your entrance. Heat hits your cheeks, always feeling like a teenager in love when he admires you. Opening your mouth to return the affirmation a creaking door catches your attention.

“Daddy,” your daughters trembling voice calls out. A tangled mess of hair is on her head, she holds Marty, her stuffed penguin, tight to her chest, tears freefall down her cheeks and her bottom lip quivers uncontrollably.

“Fuck,” you whisper, eyes going wide at the intrusion.

“Shit,” his hushed tone matches yours.

With a rapidly beating heart you climb off Fred who immediately sits up, pulling the duvet over his lower half. Shifting awkwardly in the bed he runs his hand through his red hairs that are sticking out in every direction.

“Hey Elise,” Fred’s voice is soft. “What’s wrong prinsesse?”

“There is big spiders,” she cries, rubbing her eyes.

“Oh Elise,” you say softly, “come here sweetie.”

Pulling the blanket back to create space she sniffles while making her way to the bed, Maggie not far behind. Fred reaches over and helps Elise climb into the bed and she immediately wraps her arms around his neck.

“It was scary daddy,” she whines against him.

Shimmying closer, you brush some hair from her forehead, sighing at the tears that roll down her cheeks. “They were really big,” she sniffles against him, “they were on my wall and…it was scary…”

She gasps through her sobs and Fred presses his lips to her forehead. “Kæreste,” he hums, “it was just a dream, they aren’t real.”

“There was so many,” she sobs.

“Let’s go look baby,” he kisses her forehead again, “I’ll show you it wasn’t real, just a dream.”

“No Daddy,” she cries tightening her grip around his neck, burying her head further against his shoulder.

“Okay,” he looks to you with soft eyes, the realization you won’t be continuing your earlier activities written on his face.

“Want to sleep here with me and daddy?” you question softly. Brushing away some tears you grin at Fred and shake your head slightly, the answer was obvious the second she opened your door.

“Yeah,” she whimpers with a faint nod, hot tears stinging her eyes.

“Okay,” you sigh.

The three of you fall into the bed, Elise and Marty curled tightly into Fred’s chest while he soothes his thumb over her arm, trying to help her fall asleep. Maggie finds a spot beneath her, lying her head across your legs as Elise’s sobs become few and far between, her breathing slowly evening out.

Taglist: If you are in this list you have expressed interest in the series (either through likes/reblogs or by asking). If it’s crossed out your tag didn’t work. If you would like to be removed or added to the list send me an ask:

@mandypants95 @hockeyjedi13 @hockeyunits @meishaabae @localcalumhoe @dana-hqy @sixmapleleafs @puccbunni @starswin @hockeyinaussie @je-ne-regrette-rien @mollybirk @daniellepulice72 @0kikina0

If you have any ideas, events you would like to see them go through, feel free to send it along. Currently I have three more I am writing up, but I don't have a timeline on them. They are longer than this, so they will take more time to draft up.

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spideymarvelws · 3 years

Text

Pillow Fort

Fratboy!Peter Parker x Fem!Reader

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A/n : Got this idea from when i made a pillow fort in my room cause i was feeling lonely :’) Also this isnt really a part two to behind doors, just a branched off oneshot from further down in there relationship

Summary : Peter is tired from a rough night of patrolling and comes home to you sleeping in your very own pillow fort

Warnings : SMUT! (oral [fem rec], dirty talk, sub/dom dynamics) some nice floofy floof

Word Count : 3.7k

...

Peter had never felt so drained after patrol.

Maybe it was because he stayed up all night studying for a Physics quiz or that classes throughout the day seemed to drag on because you weren’t there to entertain him with your silly pick up lines you came up with on the go. After his last class ended, he didn’t want to go out as spider-man. All he wanted was to swing by your apartment and cuddle for the rest of the day, but when he heard about a new gang terrorising the city on Mr. Delmer’s radio, he knew he had a responsibility to stop them.

One gang and a drunk driver later, he found himself landing in front of your window, knocking lightly on the glass. After a few seconds of not getting a response, he assumed you were already asleep. Carefully, he slid open the window, stepping inside your bedroom. He locked the window before taking off his suit with a heavy sigh, leaving him in his boxers, ready to slide into bed with you.

However, as he sat on your bed and his eyes adjusted to the darkness and he noticed that it was stripped bare of any blankets or pillows. He stood straight up, looking around your room until his eyes fell on a deformed structure hidden in the corner.

It was a pillow fort.

It was flimsy, a significant dip in the roof (he could only imagine how much it annoyed you throughout the process of making it) but it kept hold. The wooden chairs on either side were the only support for the fort, heavy books keeping the sheets secure. It was rickety, but a fort nonetheless.

Peter let out a small sigh, a soft smile forming on his lips as he walked up to the structure, trying to find the entrance in the mountain of blankets. Getting on his knees, he crawled through, his hands and legs ending up on either side of your sleeping form.

“Baby?” He whispered, placing his hand on your cheek, “Sweetheart? Love? Babygirl?” He littered your face with kisses, slowly waking you up.

You let out a loud groan, stretching your arms out and almost knocking the flimsy blanket ceiling. Peter raised himself slightly, trying his best to give you enough room to stretch in the small space

“Shit,” you mumbled, making Peter chucked at your sleepy state, “Oh... Hey Petey,”

“Hey, Y/n/n,” Peter mumbled back, letting out a breathy laugh, “Missed you,”

You raised your hand to push the loose curls falling down in front of his face behind his ear, giggling at the fact that it felt right back in his eye. He blew the strand with his mouth, his nose crunching up cutely when it went right back to tickling the side of his face.

“I need to cut it soon,” he said, lowering himself into your body, his head buried in the middle of your chest like a puzzle piece fitting perfectly in place.

“I strongly disagree,” your said, almost offended at his words as your passed your fingers through his soft, pillowy hair, “Cut it and I’m asking Tony for his blasters,”

“Are you sure he’s going to let you borrow it after last time,” Peter looked up at you, his left cheek squished against your shirt, his lips slightly parted.

“Who says I haven’t been practicing?” You smiled, scratching his scalp, enjoying the feeling of his body melting into yours.

“Oh really?” He mumbled, “I’m going to have to see those skills sometime babe,”

“I don’t know Peter...” you dragged, biting your lip and tugged on his hair gently, “I don’t want to steal your thunder,”

“That confident huh?”

“That I could beat you in a fight, one hundred percent,”

Peter shook his head, “I’m sure you can,”

You gasped at his sarcastic tone, “You have no faith in me!”

“I never said that,” he pinched your side, raising back on his arms to hover over you.

You pouted angrily, crossing your arms over your chest, “It was implied,”

“Oh was it now?”

“Yes, yes it was,”

Peter rolled his eyes playfully.

“Maybe I just don’t want you to get hurt,”

“Then I’d tell you to go fuck yourself. I’m incapable of getting hurt and I don’t need your protection,” you replied smugly, sticking your tongue out.

“Is that so?”

You hummed in confirmation.

“Okay then,” he grinned, trailing the pads of his fingers up the side of your waist, “Protect yourself from this then!”

His hands pulled the bottom of your shirt up, revealing your stomach. Without hesitation he attacked the soft skin, wiggling his fingers in the places he knew would make you scream.

“For fucks sake Peter!” your hand shot up to his chest, trying to push him away as the giggles took over your body, your chest bubbling with joy while your breath escaped your lungs.

“Stop! Peter! Oh. My. God. Stop!” you laughed, fists pounding at his hard chest.

“Then tell me, you wont get those blasters Y/n!” he said, a sinister smirk on his face, “I’m not letting you go until you tell me!”

“I-” you heaved, “Peter! I-” you giggled, “Holu fuck!” god damn did your chest begin to hurt, “Okay! Okay! I won’t get them! Now stop!”

His hands suddenly left your body as he leaned back on his calves to admire the mess he made of you. Your chest raised up and down with desperate breaths to calm your rapid beating heat, your face blown out and your eyes closed in a silent thank you. You sighed, letting your stiff limbs fall back into the cushioning with a thud, relaxing fully.

It reminded him of a very different scenario other than the aftermath of an innocent tickle fight.

“You know I was having a great time before you showed up,” you murmured after a while.

“I find that hard to believe,”

“Oh really?”

“Yes really, I’m amazing!”

“You’re a monster.”

“Your monster though,”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever makes you sleep at night,” you paused, opening one eye to look up at him, “You’re still not cutting your hair though,”

“You’re still on this!”

“It was the point of this whole conversation! Of course I’m still on this-”

“Oh, that's it.”

With your one eye still closed, you let out a surprised hum, circling your arms around Peter’s neck, as his lips met onto yours. You sighed into the kiss, his body relaxing into yours while his hands trailed the side of your body once more, lifting your left thigh against his waist. The kiss became hungrier, soon both your tongues became entangled with each other. You didn’t bother to fight for dominance, knowing Peter already took that role when his hand rested on your ass, squeezing tightly at the skin.

“I hate you,” he mumbled, pulling back and pressing his forehead on yours.

“Sure seems like it Petey,” you whispered, voice low and sultry.

With a low growl, he smashed his lips back on yours, forcing his tongue into your mouth. God you loved getting him riled up, as much as you loved your shy, little nerd, the other side of him you saw in bed turned you on more than you could think of as you slipped into sub space.

But you didn't want to do it in something as unstable as a pillow fort.

“God, I’ve missed this,” he whispered into your mouth, moving to your jaw and down your throat.

“Peter,” You groaned, pushing on his shoulders lightly, “Not here, baby.”

Sucking on your collar bone, Peter mumbled, “Why not?”

“I don’t- fuck,” you gasped as Peter pulled up your shirt and latched his lips onto your nipple, massaging the other with his hand, “I don’t think fucking in an unstable pillow fort is going to be really advisable,”

“Don’t knock it till you try it right?” He snickered, moving his lips to the other nipple.

“Were going to knock the fucking thing down,” you grunted, bitting down on your finger while the other grabbed the sheets underneath you.

“Well it’s either here or your bare mattress,” he whispered, raising his head back up near yours, tugging at the bottom of your shirt and pulling it over your head, leaving you in just your panties, “You decide.”

“You ride a tough bargain Peter,” you whispered back, biting your lip at the darkness in his eyes.

He continued down your body, his voice deep with lust, “You know me princess,” he placed a kiss on your stomach, moving down your hips before reaching the side of your thighs, taking them in his hands, “I like when you beg,”

You groaned at his words, throwing your head back as his lips hovered over your clothed core for a split second. But he avoided contact at all costs, focusing on biting and sucking on your thigh, moving between the left and right and getting closer to the place you wanted him the most.

“Peter,” you whined, running your hand through his hair, tugging at his locks once again.

“I thought you heard me earlier princess,” he chuckled, wrapping his arms around your waist, pulling your heat closer to his face, “I want you to beg,”

You groaned, not wanting to give in. But the light kisses to your clit and his hands moving up and down your thighs, you didn’t know how long you could resist before you broke.

“Come on pretty girl,” he bit the inside of your thigh, sucking the skin to form a bruise, “Beg for it, beg for what you want so badly,”

You tucked your head into your shoulder, “Touch me peter,” you mumbled, yelping when he slapped your thigh.

“Louder pretty girl,”

“Oh god, touch me Peter! Touch my pussy, please,” you said audibly, your hands shooting to his hair, desperate for something to hold onto.

Without any further discussion, Peter teared off your underwear and buried his face between your thighs, lapping at the juices that started to escape your lips minutes before and continued flowing onto his tongue. If there was something he loved more than life itself, it was your taste. Nothing could match up to the sweet nectar that your body gave him. He loved giving you pleasure that nobody else could. He glanced up at you, head thrown back, thighs closing in around his face as your hands pushed him deeper into your core.

If there was a heaven, this is what he imagined it would be.

He shook his head, flicking his tongue deeper inside of you before moving up to suck your on your clit gently. One of his arms stayed securely on your waist, keeping you down so you didn’t destroy the structure around you while the other moved closer to your heat. He tested the waters by gliding his warm finger tip over your cunt and slipping it in, paying attention to your body’s reactions, jerking and tensing under him.

“More,” you whimpered, “More, please Peter,”

“What was that baby? Did my needy girl want more than what I’m giving her?” his laugh sent vibrations up your torso, “What did I say?”

“To- to beg,”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Peter, Peter please give me more, I want it faster, harder, anything! Just please!” you cried, jerking your hips off the ground but his strength held you down.

“Good girl,” he smirked, adding another finger while quickening his pace. His mouth stayed working around your sensitive bud, brushing his tongue along it like he was painting a precious artwork.

His fingers however were ferocious, pumping in and out of you at an inhuman rate. Your juices began to soak the sheets beneath you, hips grinding back down like the desperate whore you were, pulling his digits deeper inside you.

“Peter, I’m- i’m gonna cum,” your legs began to shake, your voice rising higher and higher while you orgasm approached, “Please Peter! Can I cum? Can I cum?”

“Go on baby, cum for me, cum in my mouth, cum all over my fingers,” his fingers moved impossibly faster, plunging in and out of your pussy, “Fall apart for me princess.”

You screamed when your high hit, your back arching out of his control. He slowed his movements, sailing you through it, prolonging it for as long as possible. When your body slumped back on the floor, he trailed his lips back up your stomach, staining your skin with your cum. He pushed his lips on yours, moaning as you devoured his mouth, drinking up every last drop.

“Fuck,” he groaned, “You ready for more princess?”

All you could muster was a nod, playing it off as exhaustion from your recent high. Even after a years of dating, you were still as closed off and shy from when he met you in bed, holding back your precious voice from him. He tried his best to keep you talking, to tell you that screaming like a banshee was all he ever wanted. But every time you came back from your euphoric state, you were always self conscious of doing something wrong or saying something out of line.

He was determined to make that your biggest confidence using the little things he picked up along the way.

“Come one princess,” he muttered groggily, moving to your neck and kissing your pulse point, nibbling and sucking on the skin, “I’m not going to do anything if you don’t speak up,”

You looked up at him with doe eyes, a completely different person from the one that was bickering with him earlier. One that was willing to do anything and everything he wanted. But he wanted tonight to be about you, he wanted to do what you wanted, to pleasure and worship you the way you deserve.

It was your pillow fort he was about to fuck you in after all.

“I- uh, you could do what you were… you know, going to do?”

“And what was that sweetheart?”

Heat rose to your face, you hid your head in your shoulder in an attempt to avoid saying such vulgar words. Peter only squinted his eyes, the gears in his head turning as he thought of something to get you to speak up.

“Alright then,” he smirked, “Have it your way.”

You watched with curious eyes while he slipped out of boxers, taking his hard cock in his hand and guiding it to your puffy hole. He slowly unsheathed himself inside you, resisting the urge to pull back out and slam right back into you. You were always so tight around him, and your uncontrollable clenching just destroyed him even more.

In one swift motion, he turned the both of you over, careful to keep his chest pressed against yours so you didn’t raise up and mess up the fort.

“There we go,” he sighed, letting you settle comfortably in the new position with your hands pressed against his shoulder and legs on either side of his waist, keeping his cock buried deep inside of you.

“Peter I-”

“Ah, ah, ah, my turn to speak now princess,” he cut you off, squeezing your hips when you moved around a bit too much for his liking, “Now, we’re going to work on our communication skills okay? Meaning, everything you’re feeling as I fuck you, I want you to tell me. And by everything, I mean every detail princess,” he lowered his voice, “I want to know how my cock feels inside of you, what goes through your mind while you fuck yourself sensless,” He rutted his hips up, smiling when you fell further against his chest, whimpering into his neck.

“I. Want. To. Hear. Every. Word,” he punctuated each word with the thrust of his hips, “Or else this ends, you got that princess,?”

You instinctively nodded but quickly caught yourself, “Yes Peter,”

“That’s my good little princess,” he took your cheek into his palm, bringing your head and to press his forehead against his, “Ready?”

“Yes Petey,” you nodded, letting out a shaky moan when he started bouncing you up and down his length, meeting you halfway.

“Go on princess,”

“It- it feels good,” you stuttered, closing your eyes to focus on the pleasure and not Peter’s lustful eyes staring back at you, “You’re… you’re really big Peter. Stretching… me out… so, so good,”

“Good girl,” he groaned, quickening his pace with every word, “Keep going.”

“I… I-” you slumped fully against his chest, “I can’t, all i feel is you Petey. I- I can’t think, all I… I could only feel-”

“Then tell me what you feel Y/n, tell me everything.”

“Amazing… so- so full and deep.” your fingers digged into his skin, “Could you go faster? Please Peter, I- I need more,”

“Anything for you princess,” he mumbled, planting his feet on the floor and ramming into you at the same pace he did with his fingers.

“Ah fuck!” you tightened your arms around his neck, “Peter! Oh god Peter! I- I-”

“Are you close princess? Gonna cum on my cock?”

You nodded into his neck, all you could manage was a whimper, “Yes… can- can i?”

“Go ahead princess, cum on my cock… you deserve it,”

You bit down on the skin of his neck, trying to keep your head from throwing itself back. Peter stilled his hips, filling you up with his seed while keeping you close, sighing as shot up into you. You sunk into his body, your breath hot against his skin while you regained your energy, snuggling closer for comfort.

In the silence that followed, Peter couldn't help but chuckle.

“Round two then?”

...

“Soo,” Peter whispered softly, crawling back into the sheets and lying besides you, “Why the pillow fort,”

You cuddled closer to his bare chest, letting out a soft breath once your cheek made contact with the warm skin. No matter how cold the air around him got, you could always count on your boyfriend to be your own personal heater.

“Was feelin’ lonely,” you mumbled, letting out a big yawn, “And I got bored,”

Peter chuckled, running his hand down your bare back sending shivers up your spine, “It’s nice, comfortable,”

“Yeah, I did a pretty good job didn’t I?” You smiled, curling your legs around his, “Took me three tries to get it right,”

“Three tries?”

“Well my college dorm doesn't really have much stuff to work with now does it,” you looked up at him with hooded eyes, blinking slowly while jabbing your finger into his left peck drowsily, “Would’ve been easier if my boyfriend came earlier though,”

“I thought you liked that I lasted long-”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

“That’s not what you said a few minutes ago,” He laughed when you smacked his chest, placing a sweet peck to your forehead as an apology, “And I’m sorry for being late, got caught up with some bad guys and well… you know the drill,”

“Yeah, I know, I know,” You hid your face in his neck, snuggling in closer to his body, “Shouldn’t you be back at the house by now?”

He sighed. Harry had asked him to help out with cleaning up the house for your hopeful arrival in the next couple of days. Him and the rest of the boys planned out the week already, and today’s plan was to fix up the place and set new rules that kept it that way. But seeing you lying besides him, glowing like an angel by his side... words couldn't describe the emotions he felt in that moment. All he knew was that he couldn't wait, he felt like he waited long enough.

That this could be the perfect, special moment he hoped for.

“They could survive without me for one night,” His hand tightened around you, “I- uh, actually came here to ask you about something until we got... well, distracted,” he laughed lightly.

You hummed, acknowledging his statement and urging him to continue.

“I was wondering if you would want to move in with me?”

“Wait, wait, wait,” you sat up on your elbow to look at him directly, “You’re saying you want me to- you want us to live together? With everyone?”

You felt Peter clam up under your palm, biting his lip as he avoided your gaze, “I mean, you’ve already met everyone and they all love you, probably way more than me. And I can’t you know, guarantee your safety here not to mention i have to disable all the cameras around the block if i want to swing into your window and, and-” he took a deep breath, taking your face in his hands, “That and I really love you, and I would love to take this step with you, only if you want to,”

You immediately engulfed up into a tight hug, awkwardly fitting yourself in his hold but you could hardly care about your uncomfortable position.

“Of course I would move in with you peter,” you smiled, pulling back to look at him, “Honestly, I’m growing tired of this small place anyways,”

“Good, that’s good,” he bit his lip, trying to suppress the urge to screech at the top of his lungs at the thought of your ever saying yes, “We- we’d sort all of this out in the morning,”

“Of course, of course,” you nudged your nose against his, “In the morning,”

Before he could lean in to kiss you, he heard something fall on the floor with a thud and without warning the sheets above you fell, slapping the both of you in the face.

“Maybe chairs with wheels wasn't the best choice for this,” you giggled, pushing up the sheets from your head.

“You think?” Peter joked along with you, helping to get rid of fabric blocking your eyesight.

He witnessed the blanket being pulled off of you, relieving your glowing skin and bright smile staring back at him. He knew he was taking the right step with you, he knew that you were the one for him because with a simple look or touch you made him a complete mess. He was wrapped around your finger just as much as you were around his.

And he couldn't be happier.

“To the bed?” he whispered.

“To the bed.” you responded, finally locking your lips on his, sealing in your love in the now fallen pillow fort.

...

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