#experimental but gave up halfway
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salmons :)
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Hello, may I request a one-shot of the Mandalorian x Reader who somehow gets frozen in Carbonite during a fight, then wakes up blind with the Carbonite sickness? I'm a sucker for that kind of hurt/comfort stuff :)
Listen, I lost my creative juices halfway through this, and didn’t get them back for quite a while… 😬 So I’m sorry that this has taken so long, or if it’s not really all that good, but I’m kind of happy to just throw it into the abyss and let you guys have it 😂😂
Thanks @deceiverofgodss for suffering through this with me, ily 💛
Pairing: Din Djarin x female reader
Word Count: 3.0k
Warnings: hurt/comfort 💛, carbonite sickness, temporary blindness, brief mention of canon-level violence, sweet loving soft amazing Din, the helmet comes off 👀, Grogu is heartbreakingly adorable, I think that’s it?
At first, all you could feel was cold. Biting and endless, you couldn’t decipher any other feeling than the all-consuming cold seeping from your bones.
Then there was a warmth… was it warm? It was certainly warmer than the hell you’d been in, that had to count for something. A firm grip held you close, cradling you into their chest as you laid sprawled against their lap on the ground. As the feeling in your body gradually came back – or maybe your brain was just starting to thaw out – you recognized the warmer surface that was pressed against you in so many places.
Beskar.
The next thing to hit you was the smell of leather and fire, a smell you were no stranger to. The smoke that rose off of weapons you handled in your day-to-day life, and the buttery smoothness of well-worn leather gloves that were smoothing over your cheeks, filling your nostrils with the familiar scent. Gloves you’d felt caress your skin countless times before.
It started quiet, the muffled sounds of the world around you. A deep voice was speaking, accompanied by soft footsteps making quiet clangs against the metal flooring beneath you. How many people were here? Where were you?
You felt your brows furrowing as you tried to focus on the sounds filtering through your ears, and you gave an experimental tilt of your head to see what kind of motion you could pull off. It was very slight, but it was movement. It was probably only noticeable to whoever was holding you if they were paying very close attention.
“Mesh’la? Can you hear me?” You made out, the voice above you laced with concern and panic.
Din.
You opened your eyes slowly to let whatever light beyond your eyelids filter in slowly, allowing your body to take the recovery process one step at a time.
But the light never came.
Maybe your eyes weren’t open?
“I told you she’d be alright, Djarin,” you heard in a thick accent from a few steps away. “She’s a fighter.” That gruff voice was Boba’s for sure, but you still had no way of confirming what you were hearing. Were your eyes just… adjusting?
“Make yourself useful and figure out how to get more light in here, she can’t see anything,” Fennec’s unmistakeable lilt snarked, and with an amused grunt fading away with matching footsteps, you knew she’d thrown her jab at Boba. Yes, more light. That’s all you needed, everything was going to be alright.
“Talk to me, how do you feel?” Din said above you, and you realized you hadn’t acknowledged him in your confusion. You made an effort to use your vocal cords, a few experimental groans coming out before you could manage any words.
“I feel… tired.” You heard a quiet, shaky laugh come out from under Din’s helmet, and it didn’t take much longer before you felt the familiar Beskar of his helmet on your forehead. You steadily lifted one of your arms to reach for him, your body still coming back to temperature, and he met you halfway. If your eyes weren’t already closed, they were now as you savored the feeling of his hand in yours, how irrationally warm it made you feel to have Din wrapped so tightly around you.
You heard Fett’s distant sound of triumph and a sputtering of electrical devices in the room around you. When Din slowly lifted his helmet, you attempted to open your eyes one more time.
“There she is,” Fennec sighed, and your stomach flipped. “How’s the light, is that a little bit better?” She asked gently.
You still couldn’t see anything.
“Mesh’la… what’s wrong?” Din’s voice was quiet, smooth. Like he was trying to keep himself calm in order to comfort you. “Hey, look at me, I’m right here.” Your heart jumped to your throat, your head beginning to spin when you thought about how impossible such a simple task sounded when all you could see was black.
“I… I can’t,” you whispered, unable to stop the quiver as you finished speaking, the panic starting to set in. You didn’t know where you were trying to go but your body went into overdrive, legs scrambling for some kind of leverage to sit yourself up. Before you could go far, Din’s hand squeezed yours a little tighter, the arm wrapped around you firm as he pulled you into a sitting position while keeping you curled up against his chest.
“You can’t what?” Din’s voice was too calm, it was unsettling. Usually knowing that he was able to keep his calm in a less-than-ideal situation would be comforting to you, encouraging you to do so yourself and realize that you were okay. But it had never been this bad before. He wasn’t going through what you were. It was easy for him to find his calm, he could still see.
“The bounty… what happened? What did he do to me?” You settled for, working yourself up as your brain reeled for an answer, an explanation, any morsel of a solution.
“Easy princess,” Boba said from across the room. “Take it one step at a time, comin’ outta Carbonite isn’t as easy as taking a clam from a Gungan.”
Carbonite… you could vaguely piece together a memory of fighting. Some slimy bounty you and Din had picked up as a side job on your way to Tatooine to visit with your friends in Mos Espa. What was supposed to be a standard grab-and-go mission had turned complicated fast.
“You held your own,” Din’s voice said above you, no doubt watching you try to remember. “He caught us by surprise and managed to kick you back into a carbonite freezer. There was no way you could’ve seen him coming.”
As he said it, the memories came back to you. Stalking around a dark warehouse beside your Mandalorian, lights scanning for any sign of movement. You’d heard a clang come from beside you, and before you could alert your partner that you were going to check it out, you’d been knocked against a metal container. You were able to process hissing sounds as your head stopped spinning, and as you shouted back out to Din, you watched him tearing to get to you before everything went cold.
“How… how long was I in there?” you tried quietly.
“A few hours at the most,” Fennec answered. “Mando reached out to us pretty quickly, and as Daimyo of Mos Espa, getting clearance wasn’t an issue. When we got there, Djarin was rooted to the spot next to you with a dead Trandoshan not too far off.”
“We thought it’d be best if we defrosted you here at the palace,” Boba chimed in. “Give you time to acclimate without rushing you outta there.” Then there was a familiar gurgle, small noises that went directly to your heart. “And give the little one a chance to run around.”
“But he’s been too worried about you to go anywhere,” Din reasoned softly. It was hard to tell if your eyes were still open, but you could feel the tears coming nonetheless at the thought of Grogu waiting patiently beside you.
“Can I..” You wanted to ask if you could see him, but that seemed like a redundant question. “Where is he?” You heard the hesitant thump of Boba’s boots against the metal floor as he approached you.
“Hold out your hands, mesh’la,” Din urged, releasing your hand while keeping you close. You did as he said, and before you could ask why, you felt a familiar weight being set in your arms.
There were little hands on your cheeks and Grogu’s familiar gurgle of attempted words that were usually matched with his little toothy grin… What little restraint you had was shattered, and you felt the tears welling up in your eyes, and start to roll down your cheeks where they collided with your foundling’s fingers. Din pulled you closer as you cried, and you curled into him with Grogu in tow.
“Why can’t I see, Din?” you whispered, and you heard how broken your voice sounded. It at least matched the way you felt; broken.
“Carbonite takes its toll,” Boba started, and you felt Din’s body make a small, quick movement. You could only guess that he’d snapped his head up at the daimyo’s dramatic choice of words. “I just mean that there are usually side effects… but I’ve seen people come outta carbonite after weeks and turn out just fine.”
“So… how long will it take me to get my vision back?” you choked, trying to put a stop to the stream of emotions that continued falling as you listened around you. Din’s leather-clad hands rubbing soothing patterns into your back was definitely helping on that front. “If I get it back.”
“Don’t say that,” your Mandalorian’s firm voice countered. “You weren’t in there long. Your body will recover.”
“He’s right,” Fennec piped up. Not being able to see where your party stood in the room was proving to be a strange sensation, figuring out where the speaker was in the room proving to be its own mental sport. “Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell when it will wear off. Carbonite affects everyone differently, so we could be waiting a few hours, a few days, a few weeks... It depends on how your body reacts.”
There was a heavy silence in the room as Fennec’s words settled, forcing you to come to terms with the reality of the situation, and how little you could plan around it.
Din, surprisingly, was the first to break the silence.
“I’ll be here by your side each step of the way,” he started, his serious tone reassuring, backing up the weight of his promise.
Unsurprisingly, Din kept his word.
In the days that followed, Din was with you every moment possible. He was there to help you up in the mornings, tender touches and slow movements in the private quarters your clan of three took up in the palace. His hands rarely left you as he helped you maneuver around the space, and had endless amounts of patience as you worked together to get through the day.
Grogu definitely took a little bit to adjust. He was used to you picking him up and smothering him in affection too many times throughout the day to count. Now you often felt him at your feet, making soft sounds as he asked for you to lift him up. But when he started to understand that you couldn’t see him, his response broke your heart.
Each morning Din would put Grogu in your arms, and without fail, those little hands would find your cheeks right before you would feel a strange sensation course through your body… He was trying to use his powers to heal you, much like you had seen him do with Din in the past. You wouldn’t let him do it for so long that he would tire himself out, but the two of you entertained his efforts – at the very least to make him feel better, but also to see if it would even work.
In staying by your side, Din took to showering with you, too. Trying to convince him you could handle it was followed immediately by fumbling with the soaps until they clattered to the floor, and Din was knocking on the fresher door in moments. It was kind of amusing, at first, when he would step in behind you and you could hear the clang of the water against his helmet.
Amidst the confusion and the disorientation of your lack of sight, the silver lining had been the day Din fully realized how much he could get away with when you couldn’t see him. Your entire relationship you kept your eyes shut tight – or left the room altogether – when Din removed his helmet, honoring his creed. But now he could go without it whenever he so chose… as long as it was in the confines of your room.
Waking up to his soft kisses had been a warm welcome, one that was met with his enthusiastic affection scattered across your face. “We should do this more often,” he sighed, making you laugh against him as he kissed your cheek, the scratch of his facial fair tickling your skin.
You grew accustomed to roaming your hands around his body so you could navigate to his soft curls, combing through his hair and massaging his scalp with your nails. You mapped the planes of his face with your lips, traced his pouted ones with your fingertips… and by the Maker, you were basking in the sound of his voice without the vocoder filtering it through his helmet. You could hear his smile when he spoke, could hear even the smallest huff of amusement his helmet usually kept from being audible, and his comforting tone wrapped you in a warmth you wanted to stay in forever.
…
“Mesh’la,” you heard as you slowly came into consciousness. You gave Din a sleepy smile as he peppered kisses over your cheeks, the scratch of his mustache tickling your skin. “Someone’s here to see you early this morning,” he whispered, and you felt his side of the bed shift as he sat up. You kept your eyes closed through the whole process, like you did every morning, wanting to soak up the softness of your little family for just a little bit longer before facing the disappointment of not being able to see anything.
In the last week, there was… some improvement. You knew you should be grateful for any steps forward your condition was taking, even if they were slim, but after the first few days, it just became exhausting. You could make out the vague shapes of the figures around you, and you could tell the difference between light and dark, but that was about it. Din had been ecstatic when you reached out for him that first morning, his excitement growing each time you turned towards him as he leaned in to give you a kiss.
You just wanted to see again.
When Din’s weight returned to the bed – your eyes still closed – he brought with him a familiar bundle that was set directly on your stomach. Grogu didn’t wait for your hands to find him before he was crawling clumsily up your body, and you shared in Din's laughter as you each gave him a hand to help him to his destination.
“Well good morning to you too, little one,” you smiled, pleasantly surprised by your foundling’s newfound eagerness to get started with the day. “You must be hungry if you’re wanting to get this over with so quickly.” There was only a babble in response as he situated himself on your chest, and you could just imagine him reaching his little hands out to make it to your cheeks without losing his balance.
Din grunted as he shifted, this time getting up off of the bed, no doubt to go tend to make Grogu something to eat before it got past the point of no return. And yet, when his little hands finally reached you, there was no urgency. With your eyes still closed, you focused closely on the feeling that began spreading through your body, breathing deeply when the familiar feeling of weightlessness his powers brought you relaxed your muscles.
The soft clanking of dishes from the living area of your room in the palace brought you back to the present, which meant that it was time to start moving through your day, and giving Grogu a chance to rest after using his powers once again. You opened your eyes as you sat up, hoisting Grogu up with you and returning the little smile that spread across his cheeks…
His smile. You could see it.
You could see.
“Hi baby,” you whispered, your throat suddenly feeling very constricted as you took in the sight of your foundling. His big, dark eyes bore into you as his ears perked up at the attention he hadn’t seen from you in so long. He gurgled happily as he used his grip on your cheeks to encourage you to lean forward, pressing his little forehead against yours.
You heard Din’s broken voice say your name, speaking softly as if he was scared to break whatever trance he was in. Without thinking, you lifted your head from Grogu’s and turned to look in his direction, and for a moment you couldn’t believe what you were seeing.
Din stood frozen in place when he met your gaze, his warm brown eyes speaking a thousand words that would never pass his lips. His dark curls that you had felt so many times sat in a mess atop his head, matching the scruff and facial hair that decorated his golden skin. The prominent nose you had felt was more handsome than you could have ever imagined, the pouty pink lips you had traced time and time again as inviting as ever.
You had imagined this moment a thousand times, thought of every possible situation or turn of events that might ever lead to seeing your Mandalorian without his helmet. Your worst fear was that it would be an accident – like it was now – and that his expression turning into disappointment, anger, or something worse that would mean he wanted nothing more to do with you.
But the face looking back at you had nothing but anticipation and adoration written across his striking features.
“Mesh’la…” you whispered, trying the Mando’a endearment on your tongue. The corners of his lips began to turn up in a tentative smile, and the sight you had just gotten back started to blur with the water flooding your eyes. “Beautiful… Din, you’re beautiful,” you sobbed. The last thing you saw was Din rushing to your side, quick to wrap his arms around you and kiss the top of your head as you closed your eyes once more, letting the happy tears flow freely across your cheeks.
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#din djarin x reader#din djarin#anonymous request#thanks for requesting shit from me#the mandalorian x reader#the mandalorian#the book of boba fett#boba fett#fennec shand#carbonite sickness#carbonite#angst#din djarin angst
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hey hey! May I ask for a choso x fem!reader in where user is also like choso—a half curse; but she’s stronger than choso.
Thank you if you do this and have a great day <33
Mysteries choso x fem!reader
note: of course, lovely!! choso is always welcomed in my inbox!!!! also i'm not sure if this is what you wanted i hope this is okay :)
content: reader is a little bit cocky, but choso is down for that, getting together, fluff
The first time you two crossed paths it wasn't a big deal. You were headed to see some old friends and he was headed to see his brother. That first time you saw him he was at the mall with his brother. You couldn't help but stare because he stuck out like a sore thumb, in an attractive kind of way though.
This time though, you're walking down a busy street when he bumps into you and keeps walking like he hasn't just almost knocked you down.
"Uh excuse me?" You wasted no time catching up to him, once you realized it was him it gave you an excuse to talk to him.
"Huh?" He asks not even sparing you a glance. There was something about this guy that just struck him as odd.. he definitely isn't a human. At least you don't think he is.
The man in question is a bit taller than you are, his shoulders stiff and he's even hunching a little bit. Wanting to get a better look at him you pull him down an alleyway, which causes him a little bit of shock.
"How did you-"
"You're not human, are you?" The question that's been plaguing your mind for only a few seconds finally surfaces. Something in your brain screams, "jeez let the guy breath before you harass him with questions!"
His eyes widen giving you his answer but he avoids your question by asking the one he was previously going to ask, "How did you pull me with such little force?"
"Training. Answer my question." It causes him to wonder, just what are you?
"You're not human either." He accuses, which is true...
"For your information I am half human. My father was a curse." You respond with sass and the man in question stares at you wondering if he should tell you what he's thinking.
"I'm half human too.. I haven't met many like me. My father was a curse.. well rather taken over by a curse and it's what created me."
You both stare at each other for a while in awe at being one in the same. People passing the alley might think you two are crazy or homeless but what does it matter?
"Well Mr. half and half, what's your name?" He raises a brow, a question already at the tip of his tongue, "What's yours?"
"I asked first!" And while it's true, this man is quite stubborn. "I won't tell you mine until you tell me yours." His voice is lower than before. It's obvious that he is trying and failing to intimidate you. Maybe if you were any other person you'd be scared but you find it adorable how he scowls at you because it looks more like a pout.
"Fine. I'm [name], who are you?" You place a hand on your hip and the guy finally decides to answer after a long exhale.
"I'm Choso." You wait for him to continue but he doesn't. He just stares at you and you stare at him.
"Well... uh. I'll be going now." Your brain starts to panic as he walks away so on instinct you grab his wrist and pull him toward you with so much force it causes him to fall on top of you.
"Uh.... sorry. I forget how to control my power sometimes.." The wild wide eyed look he's giving you makes you a little shy all of a sudden.
Without thinking you lean in to "inspect him a little better" but you momentarily close your eyes and he gets the hint. His lips meet yours halfway, and it's a gentle experimental kiss.
When you pull back you stare in shock and wonder, "I just kissed a stranger.."
"That's what you were implying right? That would be very embarrassing if I read that wrong." He sputters out of nervousness and maybe embarrassment. Choso looks anywhere but at your face, suddenly the old brick wall was very interesting to him.
"No yeah, I uh- think that's what I wanted? I mean. It was nice. I liked it." Clearly you had no fucking clue what you were doing so you were ranting to make it seem like you planned that out.
"Um.. here's my card. Call me!" And you're the one to run off leaving Choso wondering what the hell just happened in the span of seven minutes. Yuji would probably tease him and say, "YOU? You played seven minutes in heaven with a stranger!!???"
He would have to remind the younger that it was NOT a game and just a random by chance kiss. He carefully placed your card in his pocket. Maybe he'll get to see you again one day, and he'll kiss you for real.
#choso#choso kamo#choso x reader#choso kamo x reader#choso x female reader#choso fluff#choso jjk#jjk choso#jjk#jjk x reader#jjk fluff#jujutsu kaisen#jujutsu kaisen x reader#jujutsu kaisen fluff
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A Lost Cause
Synopsis: The trusted keeper of all the Heroes' secrets, Civilian's existence is kept a tightly guarded secret itself. So how did the villain find her? And how will she withstand the attempts of his scientist to break her open and discover those secrets himself?
CW: nonconsensual drugging, medical whump, medical experimentation, mentions of wounds from torture
They ambushed her at one AM on a Wednesday night. She had just chugged a glass of water and was walking back towards her bedroom when five men appeared like plumes of smoke in the dim light of the living room lamp.
Immediately she smashed the glass on the head of the nearest one. He stumbled back and tripped over the corner of the coffee table, blood gushing down the side of his face. A second man got a donkey kick to the knees and an elbow to the face. But then she tripped on the baggy hem of her sleep pants and that gave the other three men all the opportunity they needed to hold her arms down and chloroform her.
When she woke up, mind foggy with cotton mouth, the familiar walls of her home had been replaced with metal. She sat tied to a chair and sitting across the metal table from her was a man she’d never seen before.
It wasn’t the why that perplexed her. Even though she never participated in the famous battles that raged across the cities of the world, or had her face blazoned on billboards, or plastered all over the news like the rest of her superhero brethren, she was the most valuable member of the team for one simple reason:
She knew everyone’s secrets.
Their real names and social security numbers. Their home addresses and family members. Their bank app passwords. The limitations of their powers and their weaknesses.
She knew these secrets because that was part of her job. She coordinated their lives. When someone got hurt, she arranged medical treatment. When the teammates that couldn’t fly had to go halfway around the world, she kept the private jet refueled and paid the maintenance crew. When someone’s family was in danger, she put them into hiding. She bought booked air bnb rooms under false names, she ran the grocery lists for their base, she made sure Mother’s day cards and birthday presents were sent on time.
Her teammates trusted her with this because she was a vault herself. Her power nullified everyone else’s in a wide radius around her. She had training in three forms of martial arts, could hack into almost any database around her and thus prevent from being hacked, and could shoot with fairly decent accuracy multiple types of guns.
And when all of that didn’t work, she had a memory palace like an ancient Greek maze that no telepath could find their way through if they ever caught her at a distance.
But the best protection she had was her anonymity. Her association with her teammates was their most highly guarded secret. So it wasn’t the why so much as the how.
How did Villain find her? How did he even know she existed?
Of course, no one was interested in answering her questions.
The man sitting across the table from her gave her a bemused half smile when she demanded this information. It gave him a boyish, non-threatening air despite the dark tinted sunglasses he wore.
“I’m afraid you have things rather backwards,” he said, voice soft and pleasant. Like they were on a coffee date. “I’m the one who gets the answers and you are the one who gets the questions.”
“You’re not getting shit from me,” she spat.
Her hands wiggled against the bonds tying her to the chair. The zip ties cut into her skin, tight enough that she worried about her circulation. If the man noticed her testing them out, he did not reveal it. Instead that half smile grew slowly into a smirk.
“I’m sure you believe that. You seem to have a very strong will. But willpower doesn’t really matter when I’m involved.”
He took his glasses off, folded them with care, and placed them with care inside his coat pocket. Brown eyes, sweet and warm like hot chocolate, looked back at her. He leaned forward, hands clasped before him, and focused those eyes on her.
“You will answer every question I ask, truthfully, with every relevant detail you can think of.”
His voice was low and soothing, with an easy confidence of someone used to getting their way. It gave her great pleasure to respond to him, leaning forward as much as her bonds would allow.
“You will go to hell,” she murmured, matching his tone, “and on the way there you can kiss my ass.”
The man tilted his head, eyebrows raised. Did he really think she was going to give him everything, just like that?
“Tell me your name,” he commanded in that same soft tone.
“Go fuck yourself.”
Surprise spread across his face. “Do you really feel no compulsion to do as I say?”
“Did you really think it would be that easy?” she retorted.
He just stared at her, eyes wide in delightful curiosity.
“Fascinating,” he murmured, pulling his glasses back out of his coat pocket. “Well, I suppose you and I are at an impasse. I could advise you give me your answers willingly, rather than face torture. But I assume you would not take that advice.”
“Your assumption would be correct.”
“A shame. You have such spirit. It’s a pity they will break it.”
Fear curled in her gut but she refused to let it show. “We’ll see about that.”
He slipped his glasses back on, hiding those sweet brown eyes. “When you feel like death would be a mercy, please remember that I tried to give you a choice.”
That line haunted her as she experienced the worst days of her life. No food, no water, no rest. Endless pain. Even as she burrowed herself further and further into her own mind, the pain followed her through every passage of the maze. She intentionally twisted herself down paths with dead ends, paths that recurved on themselves, keeping herself away from the information they wanted so badly.
If she could just hold out long enough, her team would rescue her.
She just had to last. Just a little bit longer.
The next time she found herself strapped to the chair in front of the table, the zip ties were the only thing holding her up, slippery from the blood. The light from the lamp felt like a laser in her eyes. A different man sat across the table from her, his features hazy from her blurred vision. The man was older, that much she could tell, and dressed in a sharp black suit.
Villain. She’d seen his face in so many files, in so much research for her team on him. She would know him in her sleep.
“You are remarkably stubborn,” he said, crossing his legs. “I see why they entrusted their secrets to you. A shame I didn’t find you first. That kind of loyalty is hard to find and even harder to buy.”
She had no quip for him, no scathing remarks. All her focus went to not puking.
“I am not going to waste any more of my resources trying to break you. That may sound like good news at first, but it simply means you are now completely valueless to me. That’s a very dangerous position to be in. Normally I would kill you and dispose of every trace of your existence, but my top scientist has asked me to spare you.”
He stood up, brushing imaginary dirt from his suit coat. “Again, that may sound like good news, but you will wish that I had killed you before long, that much I can assure you.”
Before she could make sense of this development, something sharp pricked the side of her neck and then she knew nothing at all.
Life passed in hazy flashes. She was in a bed. She heard birds and felt sunlight. She saw the man in the sunglasses. It was impossible to tell what was a dream and what was real. When she finally fully woke up, the world appeared in stages.
First the beeping. Then the cozy heaviness of a blanket. A small pain in her hand when she jostled it. When her eyes flittered open, she saw walls of deep green and cream, an IV drip that ran to the back of her left hand, a row of succulents on the window sill. A desk and a man sitting at it, scribbling in a notebook. A familiar, bespectacled man.
“Where am I?” she asked.
Or tried to ask. All that game out of her dry, dusty throat was a croak.
The man’s scribbling stopped abruptly and he looked over his shoulder.
“Are you finally awake?” he asked, standing up.
Another groan filtered from her cracked lips. He walked over to a side table that held a pitcher of water and poured her a glass, dropping in a plastic straw. His fingers pressed something on the side of the bed and the front half lifted slowly up until she was sitting.
“Drink slowly,” he said.
He held the glass to her lips and she sipped the water through the straw. It took everything in her not to chug it, not to rip it out of his grasp and drown in it when he pulled it away and set the glass on the table.
“Where am I?” she asked again, voice hoarse.
“Ah, here we go again thinking you can ask the questions,” he said with that crooked smile.
She glared at him, which only made his smile grow wider.
“I think though, this time I will be more generous with my answers. You are in my personal facilities. This is the medical recovery room. There is also my lab, my rooms, a kitchen. Everything we need, in short, for a long stay.”
Nausea roiled in her stomach, and she wasn’t sure if it came from the medicine he put her on or the implication of his words.
“Are you . . .the scientist?” she whispered.
It hurt to talk.
“I am a scientist, certainly.”
Another glare. Another smile.
“Why?”
Why was she here? Why did he want her? Why wasn’t she dead? All words that caught in her throat.
“Why am I a scientist? That story dates to my childhood, and I doubt you have much interest in that. Let’s say that I have a fascination with the rules of the world and how you can manipulate them.”
This man was impossible. If she had any strength left, she would have strangled him with the cord of her IV drip.
The steady beep of her heart rate monitor spiked with her anger. He glanced over at it with mild surprise.
“Don’t you feel at least a little hypocritical,” he asked, “expecting the truth from me when you refuse to give it yourself?”
Hypocritical? Hypocritical?
“Are you serious right now?” she hissed.
“As a heart attack. Like the one you might give yourself if you don’t keep your anger in check,” he added. “Take deep, slow breaths. Your body is still fragile. We wouldn’t want to undo all the progress of your recovery, would we?”
She took deep slow breaths, hating him the entire time, if only to keep him from knowing how much he got under her skin. He watched with little nods of approval.
“That’s it. Good. Now that you’re awake, I will take some of your vitals and check your bandages.”
Bandages? She resisted the sudden, panic laced urge to rip the blanket off and check her over her body. What injuries she sustained, he would reveal soon enough.
She held herself very still while he listened to her chest with a stethoscope. She realized then someone, most likely him, had dressed her in a medical gown and done away with the tattered remnants of her pajamas. He took her blood pressure, pinched the skin of her forearm for dehydration, took her temperature, before sliding the covers back and revealing bandages on her thighs, her knees, wrapped around her feet.
“Cuts and burns,” he explained at her morbidly curious expression.
“I don’t feel them,” she said in surprise.
“You have very good drugs in that IV drip.”
He treated her injuries with an antibiotic salve, spreading it oh so gently with gloved fingers. Then he returned the blankets over her lap and tugged up her medical gown. She tried to fight it, fingers gripping the hem as tight as she could manage, but he easily overpowered her.
“Relax, this is nothing inappropriate. You have bruised ribs.”
He checked her with the cold methodical touch of a professional before gently tugging her dress back down.
“You’re healing very well,” he said proudly. As if she had anything to do with it. “I expect partial recovery within two weeks and a full recovery within the month.”
He straightened up and slid his stethoscope off. “You should get more rest. Sleep is the most crucial component of healing.”
Her hand snaked out and grabbed a fistful of his shirt. Her grip may have been weak and pathetic, but she held on with all her strength regardless. The man considered her, his expression impressible to tell with his sunglasses on.
“Why?” she rasps throat aching. “Tell me why . . .please.”
It cost her to beg like that. And maybe he sensed that, because he bent down again and brushed an errant curl back from her face.
“Villain may consider you a lost cause, but I do not give up so easily. You are a fascinating little puzzle box and I am dying to create the tools that will break you open.”
He chucked her under the chin, and made his way out.
#hero x villain#villain x civilian#mad scientist x civilian#my writing#not a prompt#writeblr#a lost cause#enemies to lovers#whump
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“The Mission”
A short story about love, time travel, healing, spaceplanes, and making the world a better place, even when no one will ever know.
---
After the TAG forces shot me out of my cockpit in low orbit, I floated there for about six hours. Something – probably debris from my fighter – had hit me in the back, hard, and I couldn’t feel anything below my waist. My suit’s maneuvering jets let me correct the initial nauseating spin I was thrown into, but they didn’t have sufficient thrust to get me out of my unstable, highly eccentric orbit.
My suit told me I had about eight or nine trips around Titan before my periapsis wobbled low enough into the atmosphere that drag would bring me down below escape velocity. At that point, gravity would catch up with me, I would fall, and I would crash into the surface and die. The suit had an emergency beacon, but no built-in communications beyond that. I was alone in the silent dark.
I sped around the moon at a little less than ten thousand kilometers per hour. The view of Saturn, for the parts of the orbit where it wasn’t eclipsed by Titan, was gorgeous. That was a small comfort, as my brain endlessly analyzed the ways I could go. A bit of debris from the battle could kill me outright at these speeds, or it could puncture the suit on a glancing hit and it would be a toss-up whether I would die of suffocation or extreme cold. My oxygen meter also claimed I had about three hours of air left, which meant I would probably be unconscious or dead by the time I actually hit the ground. And, of course, there was the matter of my probably-broken spine. I suspected I was bleeding internally from that.
Later, when I woke up in a hospital bed on the Agamemnon, they told me that the TAG brass had transmitted a formal surrender eighty-seven seconds after my fighter had exploded. I was officially the last casualty of the Earth-Titan war.
They fitted me with prosthetics so I could still walk, but as the physical therapist with the cute dimples explained to me, there was some kind of incompatibility with my chromosomal something-or-other that meant I couldn’t use them at a hundred percent, which meant I didn’t qualify for combat. My spine, which had indeed been broken, was too damaged to repair with conventional methods. That left experimental regenerative genetic surgery, which was more expensive than the navy was willing to shell out for.
So, at thirty-one, after thirteen years in the navy, I got out with an honorable discharge, a pension that was decent enough but far from what it would take to fix my spine, a chromium heart for my injury, and enough PTSD to fuck me over for the rest of my life.
---
“I don’t care about my legs,” I said to Kate, the first time we ever met. We picked a bar about halfway between us for our first meeting. She had a gin gimlet with cucumber simple syrup. I had an old fashioned. “They get me from point A to point B just fine. I just miss flying.”
“Were you good at it?” she asked, blue eyes very wide.
“I certainly thought so. But then some TAG dipshit blew me out of my fighter above Titan and ended my career, so maybe I was less good than I thought.”
“You can’t fly for one of the intrasolar shipping companies?” she asked. “Or transport?”
I gave her a patient smile. “Do you know what a pilot actually does aboard one of those big fusion torchships?”
“No, actually.”
“They point the nose where the destination is going to be, fire the engine for half the trip, then flip the ship around and fire the engine for the other half. There’s nothing to that. I miss flying.”
She nodded sympathetically. “I understand.” I could tell she didn’t, not really, but that she wanted to.
I moved in with her a few months later. Part of me wondered if it was a good idea, moving so fast, but I was two years from Titan and still waking up screaming in the middle of the night, convinced I was back in my suit, in the dark above the moon. The greater part of me, the selfish part, was happy that someone was there to touch me, to talk to me, to root me back in myself and pull me back to earth from up there in the black.
In that sense, Kate could have been anyone. I never thought of her as replaceable, but there was always a vague sense of guilt, of knowing that I was definitely getting more from the relationship than she was. I voiced this to her once, and she told me I was being silly, and that she loved me, and that was all she needed.
So when she first approached me with her idea for the Mission, I like to think it was that part of me, the part that wanted to be more for her, that moved me to say yes to what was honestly an idiotic idea. Not the part that missed flying. Just selfless altruism and desire to help the woman I loved.
I like to think that a lot.
---
We cracked time travel about a decade after I was born. Much to our collective disappointment as a species, it was not the fun kind of time travel that lets you go back in time and kill Hitler.
Kate, as she told me once we were living together, was part of a DOD think tank tasked with finding some kind of use for the technology. After a lot of experimentation, they came up with what Kate called the Four Rules.
1. It’s time travel, not space travel. If you want to meet Julius Caesar, you had best make sure you’re in Europe when you travel back.
2. It only works by going back. There is no forward travel because the future hasn’t happened yet. The only exception is returning to your point of origin.
3. If you actually do meet Julius Caesar, it’s because your meeting him will not change history in any measurable way. If you try to go back in time to change something significant, it simply doesn’t work. The little box makes the noise, it uses up a lot of energy, and then nothing happens.
4. The corollary rule to number three, then, is that when you travel back in time, whatever you do end up doing has already happened.
I asked Kate what this meant about determinism versus free will, and she primly replied that she was a theoretical physicist, not a philosopher. The DOD was not known for employing philosophers and paying them the kind of money they were paying her.
---
The Mission’s personnel consisted of four people. Myself, the heroic pilot. Kate, the brains behind the time travel stuff and the one who came up with the Mission to begin with. Leon, the aerospace engineer slash DOD contractor. And Ash, the director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. We would go over to Ash’s place, have dinner, and conspire.
Over one such dinner – mac and cheese with broccoli, I remember it vividly for no adequate reason – we discussed the logistical difficulties involved.
“We can’t use anything from the last century,” Leon was saying around a mouthful of mac. “All the guidance systems on those ships are keyed into the orbital satellite network. There’s nothing like that at the target time. We need a craft that can achieve orbit, rendezvous, and de-orbit in a single stage, without remote guidance.”
I nodded. “That means we need a spaceplane. Not just a fighter, but an actual spaceplane.”
Ash chewed over the problem as well as their food. “There might be an SR-75 in decent enough shape we could appropriate from the displays at the museum. The hardest part will be bribing the transport operators to take it to home base instead of, you know, a navy cache where highly dangerous military surplus equipment is supposed to go.”
I raised an eyebrow at them. “That’s going to be the hardest part? What about getting the parts to get it into decent working condition, or the fuel?”
Leon waved a hand dismissively. “Do you know how many spare parts I have lying around at work? How many millions of tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen are stored in poorly-guarded places that I have access to?”
“No. I’m guessing the answer to both is ‘more than the general public would be comfortable knowing about.’”
“Exactly.”
I looked at Kate. “Is the magic box going to be able to send a whole spaceplane back, kitty?”
She wrinkled her nose at me for using her pet name in front of our friends, but let it go for the moment. “The magic box can send anything back given enough juice.”
“Okay, but is the shitty little battery at home base going to be able to give it enough?”
“Probably. If we strip everything nonessential out of the spaceplane, get the mass down as much as possible. I need to know the exact mass of the plane, plus us, when it’s ready for travel.” Kate shrugged. “If it won’t be enough, we can always add to our list of capital offenses and steal a torchship, then use its fusion reactor for the power.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. “Last resort.”
---
“I don’t really understand why we’re doing this,” I told her one night, in the silence following her helping me out of another flashback.
She shifted a little in bed so she could look me in the eye. “You said you were on board.”
“I am. I’d do anything you asked, kitty, you know that. And obviously I’m excited to get to fly again. But nothing we’re going to do is actually going to matter. That’s one of the four rules, right?”
With a little shrug, she began running her fingers through my hair, which I’d stopped bothering to keep short after I was discharged years ago. It was pretty long by now. “It’ll matter to us, won’t it? And to her?”
“I mean, sure, but the risk-reward ratio is way off. You and Leon and Ash could all lose your jobs, we could get prosecuted by the Justice Department –”
“Vee, why did you sign up to be a pilot?”
I stopped. “I mean, I always wanted to fly.”
“Yes, but what was the reason you put on your application? And the reason you told me on our first date when we were still trying to look really good and put together for one another?”
That took me back, and I snorted gently. “To make the world a better place.”
“Exactly. Does there have to be a minimum threshold of goodness increase in order for an altruistic act to be worthwhile?”
I weighed that particular bit of moral utilitarianism in my mind before I committed to an answer. “No.”
“So, that’s why we’re doing this. To make the world a better place, even by the tiniest, slimmest margin.”
I gently snaked a hand out from under the comforter to lightly boop her on the nose. “And the real reason, since we’re not on our first date and this isn’t an application you’re filling out?”
She stuck her tongue out at me. “I know how much you want to fly again. And I want to see my magic box used for something other than letting rich assholes reenact Bradbury’s ‘A Sound of Thunder’ without any of the nuance or lessons learned.”
“Dinosaur leather shoes is not the outcome you probably had in mind,” I agreed. The time-travel hunting industry generated billions for the government every year now.
We fell asleep that night, and the next morning, we took a magtrain to Vegas, and from there we went to home base.
---
Home base was an abandoned aircraft hangar in the middle of the Nevada desert. Leon had said something about centuries-old top-secret aircraft testing, when we first conceived of the Mission, and lo and behold, there was a facility with room for a spaceplane. We spent far too much money on the highest-capacity quantum battery civilians could buy, hooked it into the Vegas grid, and watched it take eight weeks to charge.
It had also cost far too much money to bribe the transport operators to bring the SR-75 here, but the deed was done and they hadn’t sold us out so far. They probably assumed we were aviation junkies. What domestic terrorists would bother stealing a hundred-year-old spaceplane when there were far cheaper and more effective ways to kill people, these days?
Kate, Leon, Ash, and I sat at a small table in a corner of the hangar, drinking coffee and going over the ascent profile. Ash’s part was done, having delivered the goods, but they wanted to be here for everything, and I certainly respected that. The spaceplane took up the majority of the hangar space, a sleek black dagger with barely a suggestion of wings to either side. The underside was dominated by a pair of huge jet intakes, and the rear of the plane sported three engine nozzles, the center much larger than either of the ones flanking it. A gracefully curved tail fin slightly forward of the engines completed the vessel’s profile.
“The plane looks like it’s in good condition,” Leon was saying. “I’ve sourced the fuels we need. The main problem is going to be the timing, not the equipment.”
“How so?” Kate asked.
I spoke up. “The SR-75 should theoretically be able to hit escape velocity just on the air-breathing engine mode, but the target has an extremely elliptical orbit, and we’re launching much closer to the equator, so we’ll have to adjust our inclination, too. That means either a lot of burns with the rocket fuel mode once we’re in vacuum, or a very steep climb to orbit. That pronounced an angle of attack might affect the engines’ ability to get enough air to achieve escape velocity.”
Kate blinked. “Still not seeing how that affects the timing.”
I pulled out my personal comm, laid it on the table, and put it in draw mode, so I could trace pictures on its screen with the tip of my finger. I drew a little ball, the Earth, and traced a messy, elliptical orbit around it. I indicated the very top of the orbit, where the line peaked like a mountain summit. “We have about a thirty-minute window to achieve rendezvous with the target. We need to rendezvous at or near its apoapsis, here, where its orbital speed is lowest and matching relative velocity will be easiest.”
I loved Kate, but it was endlessly amusing to me how she could understand quantum and temporal physics and articulate mathematical concepts I could never grasp in a million years, yet still not understand basic orbital mechanics. She gave me a blank look, then just said, “And that’s hard?”
“Yes. It is very hard, kitty. We are trying to hit a target the size of, roughly, a bullet train car, except the target is going twenty-eight thousand kilometers per hour. We need to come alongside it, match velocity with it, perform our docking maneuver, and then decouple. And the parameters of the Mission mean that there is exactly one half-hour window we can do this in if we’re going to avoid violating rule three.”
“I think the best solution is going to be adding some external rocket fuel tanks,” Leon said. “Not much, since we have to think about flight performance and transit mass for the magic box, but even a few hundred extra meters per second of delta-vee might make the difference in your ability to match orbits with the target.”
“Agreed. Just make sure the Goddamn things aren’t going to come loose at Mach fuck-you.”
Leon grinned at me. “I love your optimism, Vee.”
---
Unlike with most modern fighters, and indeed with even-older jet aircraft, the SR-75 did not have a fully enclosed cockpit. The pilot sat in a big swiveling chair in front of the instrument panel, and the main cabin of the craft was accessible from there. It was a spaceplane, and therefore supposed to be able to perform orbital docking maneuvers exactly like the one we were about to attempt, which necessitated the crew being able to actually get up and access the docking port without going fully extravehicular.
Kate sat behind me in a second chair that Leon bolted in there for her. She had the magic box in her lap, hooked up by a pair of very fat and long yellow wires to the bulk of the quantum battery, which squatted heavily just slightly off-center in the SR-75’s main cabin. (“Gotta keep that center of mass where it’s supposed to be,” Leon had said.) She was doing something with the box’s controls, squinting at the small readout which displayed some kind of complicated waveform.
“I’ll initiate the breach when we get to fifteen thousand meters,” she told me. “It wouldn’t do for anyone to actually see us at the target time, because then it just wouldn’t work, but I would rather not get shot down by our modern-day autonomous airspace defenses.”
“Sounds good,” I told her. “Hey. Kate.”
“Yes, Vee?”
I craned my neck around as best I could while strapped into the pilot’s seat. “I love you, kitty.”
Her cheeks darkened a little and she smiled. “I love you too.”
I keyed in the ignition sequence and the SR-75 roared to life. Leon and Ash, both standing a safe distance away outside the hangar so their eardrums didn’t rupture, started waving and giving us thumbs-ups. I gave them a thumbs-up in return, projecting more confidence than I actually felt, and brought the throttle up just a little.
The spaceplane practically leapt out of the hangar. Ruggedized, smart landing gear wheels hit the Nevada desert ground like it was perfectly maintained asphalt. Within twenty seconds I pulled back on the yoke and the SR-75 was in the air, starting a steep climb. I opened the throttle up the entire way and was slammed into my seat with the gee-force.
“JESUS CHRIST WE ARE GOING TO FUCKING DIE!” Kate screamed.
I glanced over my shoulder at her. “You okay, kitty?”
She was clutching at her chest, magic box forgotten, and for a long, terrible moment I thought she was having some kind of heart attack. But then she nodded, looking pasty. “I just got taken by surprise,” she shouted over the roar of the engines. “Sorry!”
“Okay!” I returned my attention to the instrument panel. We were already moving at a good clip, and the altimeter was increasing fast enough that even the digital display was having trouble keeping up. For a long, pure moment, I just relaxed into my seat, hands on the yoke, feeling the currents of air spiraling around the ship. Now, more than ever before my prosthetics, it felt like an extension of myself. I was flying again.
“We’re at fifteen thousand meters!” I told her.
Kate pressed a button on the magic box. Everything blurred like someone just messed with the focus on a camera, except the camera was my brain. When it re-focused, we were still in the plane, climbing toward space at an impressive clip, but all of the global positioning systems were dead. There were no satellites to receive data from, not in this era. However, we had accounted for this; the SR-75 had its own onboard suite of computers dedicated specifically to calculating orbital information.
It was at this point that things began to go wrong. I felt a sharp tug on the yoke. Swearing to myself, I corrected, keeping the plane on course, and keyed a status readout. The SR-75’s onboard systems insisted that nothing was wrong, but that the plane was experiencing significant and unexpected drag.
It hit me. “Fuck me!” I snarled. “Leon’s fucking external fuel tanks! I told him they needed to be secure!”
“What’s going on?” Kate asked.
“One of the external fuel tanks Leon spit-soldered onto this Goddamn thing has come loose, and the drag is killing our velocity,” I told her. “I need to get it off of us, now.”
My gaze was fixed on my instruments, so I couldn’t see the horror in her big blue eyes, but I could hear it loud and clear in her voice. “How?”
“Shearing force. Hold on, this is going to fucking suck.”
I stomped down on one of the SR-75’s rudder pedals with my right foot, the motion almost as smooth as it used to be even with the prosthetic, and spun the plane in a sharp, hard three-hundred-sixty-degree roll. I nearly blacked out, and I know Kate did for a few seconds, since she didn’t go through flight training. But there was a sudden, violent wrenching feeling that went through the yoke into my arms, and afterward the drag was gone.
“Did it work?” Kate asked blearily.
“Yup. And apparently an external fuel canister from several hundred years in the future crashing in the Nevada desert doesn’t fuck up the timeline, since we’re here at all.”
“Are we still going to be able to make it?”
I eyeballed the delta-vee readouts on the navigation display. The lost fuel tank didn’t exactly have a ton in it, and of course, the reduced mass of the ship now that it was gone meant the net loss was slightly ameliorated. But even so, the situation was grim.
“Well, yes and no,” I told her.
“That is never the answer anybody wants to hear, Vee.”
“I should, should, still be able to match velocity with the target and achieve rendezvous. But our margins are basically nil now. If I don’t do this perfectly, we’re going to miss completely.”
I felt her reach out and place a hand on my shoulder, give it a squeeze. “You can do this, Vee. I know you can.”
“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” I told her, and was surprised to hear that it didn’t come out sarcastic.
The ascent became a delicate balance. I was trying to hit escape velocity while still using the air-breathing mode of the engines, which was incredibly efficient compared to the rocket fuel. But as I got higher, the engines needed to work harder to ram enough air in to function, which meant my thrust decreased. Without the global positioning system to feed me flight info, I needed to do it all by feel and eyeballing the orbital information given to me by the onboard computers.
I trimmed a couple degrees off my angle of attack, trying to find the sweet spot between still gaining altitude and not starving the engines of air in the increasingly-barren stratosphere. The SR-75 shuddered, engines straining, and began to threaten me with a stall. I swept my gaze across my instruments. “Fuck,” I muttered, and switched the engines to rocket mode.
Instantly, we were slammed back into our seats again as our thrust suddenly increased dramatically. I glanced at our projected apoapsis, counted to three, then shut the engines down.
In the sudden silence in the absence of the engines’ roar, Kate asked, “Did we do it?”
“Yes and no.”
“Goddammit, Vee!”
I looked over my shoulder at her and gave her my most reassuring grin. “Sorry, couldn’t help it. The drag from the fuel tank breaking loose meant that we lost velocity, which meant we took longer to get to the speed we were needing, and the spin I had to put the plane through shifted our course a little bit. Our inclination is about five degrees off of where it should be.”
“Okay. What does all that mean?”
“We are going as fast as we need to be, but we’re not in the place we need to be going that fast. I’m going to need to do correction burns at certain points in our ascent. We can still make our rendezvous, but we won’t have the fuel to do a proper deceleration burn. I’m going to have to perform emergency aerobraking.”
“In English, Vee!”
“On our way back down I am going to use the atmosphere to slow us down the old-fashioned way.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Is this plane designed for that?”
“Probably.” I shrugged. “Assuming we don’t burn up, I’ll be able to switch the engines back to air-breathing at a certain altitude and land without the need for lithobraking.”
I could see her trace the Latin roots of litho and arrive at the gallows-humor definition of the word. She went even paler than before. “Certainly hope so.”
I let my grin fade as we continued to coast on our momentum, rising inexorably up through the mesosphere into the thermosphere, our speed gradually slowing as we crested toward the very top of our parabolic arc. At key points, I reoriented the SR-75’s nose, now using chemical thrusters to maneuver the craft in the absence of air for the control surfaces to manipulate, and fired the engines in rocket mode, tweaking our orbital inclination until it matched that of the target.
The computers suggested to me, at that point, that we would be able to achieve equal relative velocity, and it would leave us with enough delta-vee to then de-orbit ourselves. We would not be stuck in orbit forever until we died. I blinked hard, banishing the memory of Titan as it suddenly threatened to overwhelm me, and repeated the affirmations Kate taught me. I am not there anymore. I am here, now. I am safe.
Safe was, of course, a relative term in the vacuum of space, going tens of thousands of kilometers per hour. But Kate took my hand from behind and gave it a squeeze, and I was good again.
“We’re going to do a long burn once we’re within ten kilometers,” I told Kate. “That’ll bring our relative velocity to zero. From there we just point our nose at the target, fire the engines for half a second, get as close as we can until we’re either about to hit or miss, fire them again to bring ourselves back to zero relative velocity, and then we do that over and over until we’re close enough to dock.”
“I don’t need to know all the mechanics,” Kate replied, and I could see she was fighting to keep her teeth from chattering. The environmental controls were working just fine, so it was fear she was dealing with, not cold. “I just trust you, Vee. Make it happen.”
I suited action to words. It took ten long, arduous minutes, and by the end of it we were very short on time to actually execute the retrieval, but I successfully brought the SR-75’s docking port, which sat on the dorsal surface of the spaceplane, in contact with the target’s own.
Not that they were remotely designed to be compatible, being hundreds of years apart in origin, but fortunately the SR-75 had the advantage of smart materials incorporated into its construction. Its port sealed itself tight around the target’s, flashing a green light and hissing open to reveal the shiny metal surface of the target.
Kate was already out of her seat, plasma torch in hand, and the acrid smell of it hit my nostrils as she ignited it and started cutting through the ancient hull like butter. It was joined less than a minute later by new smells: faint traces of iodine and ethanol, urine, feces, and a wet, animal musk.
And, of course, I heard barking.
“Got her!” Kate called to me. “She’s in pretty rough shape, but she’s alive!”
“Strap back in, and get her secured too,” I told her. “We’ve passed apoapsis and I need to fire the engines right now for the Oberth effect or we’re going to be stuck in orbit forever.”
I keyed in the command for the docking port to close on our end and release. The leftover atmosphere inside the target puffed out of it in sudden decompression, pushing our two crafts apart, but not hard enough to seriously perturb either of our orbits. That was the engines’ job, and I brought them to life as soon as we were clear.
They sputtered out as they burned the last of the rocket fuel. I looked at our orbital readout. “Ah, shit,” I muttered. “This is going to be a bumpy ride.”
---
We all but rammed into the atmosphere with the entire length of the plane. The yoke bucked in my hand and the instrumentation suggested to me that I was a fucking moron that had doomed us all, but with polite numbers instead of those exact words. I kept an iron grip on the yoke, worked the rudders with both my leaden feet to keep us perpendicular to our approach vector so we would generate more drag and thus lose more speed, and prayed to every God I could think of. Behind me, Kate’s teeth were audibly chattering, but she managed to avoid screaming again, and the dog was remarkably quiet.
The interior of the SR-75 got incredibly hot, naturally. The instrument panel helpfully informed me that it was almost fifty-five degrees Celsius inside, and that was with the life-support system working as hard as it possibly could to cool it. The one saving grace we had was that the spaceplane’s designers had anticipated the need for this kind of extreme aerobraking, and the skin of the craft was designed to tolerate it – in theory. I sweated, and I panted, and I watched our velocity slowly decrease until we were no longer going to boomerang back up out of the atmosphere.
Then I pointed the plane’s nose down, let gravity take over, and switched the engines back into air-breathing mode.
They decided they did not want to start.
“Well, we’re fucked,” I laughed.
“This is a plane, right?” Kate asked through clenched teeth. “Aerodynamic? You can fly it without the engines, right?”
“Well, glide, yes. Fall slowly, yes. Land… maybe.”
I let us half-glide, half-fall until we were back in the troposphere. “Magic box time,” I told Kate.
Everything unfocused again, and when I was able to see once more, my global positioning displays were back online. They told me that, if I did nothing, we were going to crash into the ocean just off the coast of Hokkaido.
I tried the engines again. Still nothing. The reentry had fried them, as far as I could tell.
I started the plane’s nose trending up again, trying to bring us out of the dive and into a climb. The control surfaces bucked and the plane fought me.
“I’m sorry, Vee,” Kate said.
“Don’t start,” I told her. “We’re not dead yet.”
“I couldn’t go back and save you from what happened at Titan. I thought, if I could save Laika, maybe –”
“I know exactly what you were thinking, kitty.” I looked back at her, and the scared-looking mutt buckled into her lap. “It’s okay.”
“I just – when I read about how she died, all alone, in that terrible little capsule –”
“I said don’t start, Kate. I said it’s okay and I meant it.”
She kept going like she hadn’t heard me. “She was supposed to have enough food and oxygen for a week. But the satellite was rushed, and the temperature control system failed. So when she was –”
“FUCK me!” I shouted.
That finally got through to her. “What?!”
“Temperature control.” I quickly hit a series of switches. “The jet intakes were superheated by our reentry. When you switch the engines to rocket fuel mode, they have shutters at the front that close so you don’t get trace amounts of gaseous oxygen mixing with the liquid fuel. Those shutters are probably half-melted shut.”
“And?”
“There’s an emergency release that just drops them completely.” I pressed the button, felt the SR-75 shudder as explosive bolts fired and it shed hundreds of pounds of metal. “Okay. Now –”
I was cut off as the sudden force of the engines firing slammed me hard into my seat. The plane began to corkscrew wildly as the engines put out differing amounts of thrust for the first few moments until the oxygen feeds equalized. Clearly one of the intakes had had less of its shutters blown off than the other, and the plane had needed some time to adjust.
Kate coughed. “The engines? They’re working? We’re not going to die?”
“Oh, we’re still going to die,” I told her. “Eventually, of old age. But probably not today.”
She smacked the back of my head. “Jackass.”
---
The vet gave us a very suspicious stare as we paid our bill and accepted Laika’s carrier back from his nurse. “I have never seen an animal in that kind of shape before,” he said. “Malnourished, half-dead from heat exhaustion, matted shit in her fur, and primitive bio-monitoring equipment surgically grafted into parts of her. I assume you didn’t do this, since it would be colossally stupid to come into my office and ask me to fix her up if you did.”
Kate shakes her head. “No, it wasn’t us. She’s a stray. Found her while we were out on a trip. We felt so bad for the poor thing that we brought her back with us.”
Somewhat mollified, the vet nodded. “Well, make sure to give her the antibiotics for the rest of the week, and call me if there’s anything else she needs.”
We stepped outside, and I opened the carrier to let Laika out. She staggered out, still a little loopy from the anesthesia, and I got her leash onto her without too much trouble.
“You know,” I said to Kate, “when we first shacked up, I said I didn’t want any pets.”
She grinned at me. “For someone who was so against the idea, you went very far out of your way to get me one anyway.”
---
About six months after we brought Laika home, a very humorless man in a snazzy uniform, accompanied by many more humorless men in uniform with large guns, came and visited our house. The humorless man in charge sat and chatted with us for a while, and Laika sat in his lap and let him give her pets.
Nothing else ever came of the visit.
There is no neat bow to tie on this story, unfortunately. I still wake up screaming in the middle of the night, though not quite as often. That probably has more to do with the passage of time and a lot of therapy than pulling a time-travel dog rescue, though. The only point to any of it is that we spent a lot of taxpayer money (since Kate, Leon, and Ash are all paid by the government) and risked our lives to make the world a better place, even by the tiniest, slimmest possible margin.
And perhaps having read about it will have made your world a little better too.
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💼Larry NSFW HCs🏢
cw: 18+ content, AFAB reader,
Minors DNI
🍙 He's a guy who skews not too horny in general. He's busy so much that when he finally gets home, he's out cold in bed within the hour. With you, however, he does know you have needs, and he does, too. Larry admits he is fine with whatever appeases you. There aren't a lot of ways for him to get off easily, so letting you have a bit more reign than him helps him relax.
🍙 Larry prefers to bottom most of the time. He just isn't used to being someone in control, and he likes answering orders. You can tell him to do just about anything, and he'll do it in his own Larry sort of way. He's slowly eating you out or lazily fucking into you at your request. Each noise that comes from you rings in his ears pleasantly. It's a change from his busy schedule that he deeply enjoys.
🍙 Sometimes, though, all the stress and lack of time to himself gets to him. Larry is never truly aggressive, but you can tell when he needs to be somewhat in charge while fucking. Larry would grasp at your hips tightly while rutting into you with a rare vigour. In those moments, you could see a certain passion from him that was almost entirely missable. You eagerly gave him control, entranced by the pleasure he brought and this new side to him. The older man took everything you willingly gave him in those sessions.
🍙 Not too much on the kinky side, honestly. He's never been one for going too experimental, obviously, so if you have any, you'll have to introduce them to him. Larry admittedly doesn't act overly interested in them, but he's down to try anything you ask him to, with certain exceptions. You want to tie him up? Sure, why not. Just untie him when he asks. You want him to tie you up? His knot may not be the best, but he'll try. He'll meet you halfway.
🍙 On the topic of eating, his favourite thing to do is eat you out. Larry's tongue really shows its talents when he's able to sit between your legs and go to town. Soft groans come from the man's throat and send shivers down your spine. The look of his face covered in your juices as he licks his lips is something framed in your head (even if he still looked utterly exhausted). It kills you every time he pulls away after you cum and thanks you for the meal. He enjoys head, too, naturally. Larry is never one to turn down a blow job unless he doesn't have the in his schedule. You have definitely been hid under his desk while his poker face is worked to its extreme.
🍙 His own personal kinks probably involve food, honestly. Having lazy sex after a good meal sounds heavenly to him. Letting him eat off of you? He enjoys it deeply and shows a bit of shocking technique with his tongue. There is a certain pleasure found in light bites that both of you enjoy heavily. Office sex isn't something he minds, but he isn't a fan of the risk. If you can manage it, having him fuck you against his desk is worth it for the way he truly works out his pent-up emotions.
🍙 His dirty talk is lacking. He tries his best, but his manner of speaking is just that of a business email or oddly awkward with a sense of bluntness and that fails to spring any kind of horny out. Riding him in a hot moment on the couch and having him say to you, “You're good – Good in a sexual way, I mean,” is a bit of a slap in the face. You can tell he's trying his best, and it's not entirely a mood killer. Just going a bit more roughly to stutter his ability to talk was always an option, too.
🍙 Turning him on is either something accidentally done or near impossible. Something that will never leave your mind is when you ate a popsicle in front of him and the way his poker face broke as he averted his eyes and his blushed a slight pink. There was a noticeable shifting in his manner of sitting as he checked his watch. Then, there are times where you wait up for him in lingerie and have him take a look at you, nod, and then proceed to eat his leftovers before heading to bed. At least the popsicle situation led to him fucking you as soon as you were in the door.
🍙 Larry enjoys sex for what it is. It brings pleasure and helps bonding with your partner. That's why he always tries to find time for it. The feeling of you either on top or underneath him is something that he comes to miss in his long days at work. He may even dare visit you on his lunch break for a quickie to relieve some stress and feel close to another. There's something wonderful in the way his stuff expression shifts in those moments. His brows furrowed together while his eyes squeeze shut. His facade is utterly shattered as he loses himself in you. Larry feels oddly thankful for you reminded him of this part of himself.
🍙 As for aftercare, he probably asks if you enjoyed yourself, offers to run a bath, and then passes out. Cuddling isn't his strength, so it needs to be requested for him to actually do it. Larry does like the affection, but it simply slips his mind in favour of getting some much-needed sleep. In those moments as you lay beside each other wherever you are, he'll peck a quick kiss to your cheek, and thank you for sticking with him. He's aware he's not the easiest to get along with but your understanding means more to him than he cares to say. Larry's snores as he sleeps next you are a sign of how strong his trust is.
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Abstract: 15 Oct. Suptober
deancas post-s12 au + real baby Jack
Jack was halfway through his fourth masterpiece when Cas shuffled into the kitchen, half awake after a short nap on the couch.
Dean smiled at him from their spot on the floor. "If you wanted, you could go on to bed."
Cas slowly sat down beside them and leaned back against the cabinets. He studied the painting taped to the floor. "Is this a pumpkin patch or a more experimental subject?"
Dean plopped Jack onto Cas's lap. Jack gave a funny little snort and dripped a blob of drool onto Cas's sweater. Dean was 99% certain there was an incisor vying to make an appearance soon. The drool situation was becoming severe.
"Oh, thank you," Cas said to Jack anyway, managing to sound like he meant it.
Dean turned his head to view the painting from a different angle. "I think he's really captured something autumnal in this abstraction."
"Hmm." Cas bounced Jack, who made one of his patented Lecherous Old Man Giggle noises. "How did he manage to combine the red and yellow together into so many shades of orange?"
"Well, we started with orange, yellow, white, and black." Dean smoothed down a wayward curl behind Cas's ear. "I don't know what happened to the red paint."
"It might be in the tox box," Cas said.
They'd found the old trunk in the basement in August, hauled it out into daylight, scoured it with dish soap and hot water, and once it was dry filled it with teethers, binkies and board books, a rattle shaped like an owl, miniscule socks, craft supplies, and a squishy anthropomorphic candy corn. Tummy time, of late, had been transformed by the suggestion Dean had read about on a mommy-blog he otherwise loved to hate. Finger paint squeezed onto white paper put into a ziploc bag taped to the floor became a canvas for Jack to smear his artistic ambitions onto, in between learning to hold up his own head and participating in conversations with a series of babbles, squeaks, Ah-ah-ah's, and, once, a fart so loud he started crying.
The baby cuddled against Cas's chest. Cas rubbed his back and started humming a slow, silly, rumbling version of The Addams Family. Too in love to hum along too, Dean threaded his arm behind Cas and rested his hand on Cas's waist. Jack patted at Dean's knee softly, as if to complete the circuit.
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Underwear Thief
Trace x Gender Neutral Reader
1.8k Words
Explicit smut!! If anybody under the age of 18 interacts with this, I will block them.
Warnings: yandere content, stalking, object marking, stealing underwear, breaking and entering, heavy delusions
Content: trans male character, scent and sweat kinks, masturbation, indirect kisses, general Trace delusions because he just loves you so much~
Summary: Trace decides to pluck up the courage to visit your apartment whilst you're not home, but ends up getting a lot more flustered than he thought he would...
He knew it was wrong.
Trace knew that it was wrong, so so wrong as he stood there grasping your spare stolen apartment key as he shakily unlocked the door, his head jerking and swivelling around every time he heard noises coming from your neighbours across the hall. You were so annoyed when you had found out that you’d lost your spare key, and he hoped that you’d find it in your heart to forgive him for it one day.
He knew it was wrong that he knew your daily schedule, that you’d be out doing your grocery shopping for the week today at your usual shop of choice halfway across the town for a few hours, leaving him plenty of time for him to summon the courage to enter your welcoming abode whilst you were away.
Yet he still pressed forward, taking short, shaky steps forward like that of a newborn deer as he entered your small apartment, stifling a groan as the smell of you was immediately caught by his keen nostrils. Before he got too overwhelmed, he locked the door behind him and let out a shaky breath, running both hands against his flushed sweaty face and through his fluffy ginger hair.
He felt like he was in heaven.
He was well and truly surrounded by you; all the little quirks that made you…well, you, were laid before him just for his eyes only, and he swore to himself that he would commit this sight to his memory. The way you organised your furniture, the pictures and little knick-knacks here and there, the homeliness of it all…he’d just need to visit a little more often, just to make sure that his memory of your save haven was correct in his mind.
He walked over to the little makeshift kitchen area you had- dishes were piled in the sink ready to be cleaned and your drinks glasses were on the side of the sink waiting to be cleansed after the plates. He sighed to himself, picking up one of the glasses, looking at it experimentally.
Then, his eyes homed in on the delicious sight of your lip reside at the rim of the glass, painting the otherwise dull glass with your mark. He swallowed thickly, bringing the glass closer to his own face. The glass fogged with each depraved breath he took, but the shape of your lips remained on the glass like the shape of your entire being remained within the inside of his head. Licking his lips, he brought the cup up to his mouth and kissed around the mark your gorgeous lips left for him, before licking around it and groaning.
An indirect kiss.
The best he was going to get for a while as he figured out how to win your heart.
He leant against the counter panting madly as he felt himself grow wetter with each kiss and lick that he gave the glass desperately wishing that the fragile and hard coolness of the glass would one day be replaced by your soft and sweet trembling lips against his own hungry ones.
After removing your essence from the glass, he quickly ran it under your tap and dried it on a piece of nearby cloth to remove his marks from it, and with a barely supressed shudder he thought of you drinking from that very glass, completely unaware that his lips and spit had claimed it for another indirect kiss…
His eyes began to roam around your domain yet again, however, still eager to take in any and all of your essence that he could, and his eyes settled on your messy nest of a bed. His lips quirked up into a small smile, gazing at the adorable little mess that you’d left your bed in; a bundle of blankets and a quilt were screwed together from where you’d thrown them off that morning, alongside several soft plush toys that sat by your pillows. It looked incredibly comfortable, and Trace wished he could be snuggled up in this little bed with you pressed up against his large, muscular frame.
Trace knelt by the bedframe, slowly reaching out for the crumpled pillow that had an indent from where you had slept soundly against it. He dragged his large fingers down the soft fabric, and unable to hold himself back any longer, he thrust his head in the indent to inhale your sweet scent.
Heat shot straight between his legs and right into his core- your pillow smelt divine. He recognised the scent of your favourite shampoo as he thrust his nose against the plushness, desperately trying to take in your scents, and the more he inhaled deeply, the more he could smell the faint smell of sweat, your sweat, your beautiful scent that he wished he could breathe in whenever he wanted, your sweat that he wished he could lap up from your gorgeous skin…and alongside that, he could smell the faint traces of the lavender washing detergent that he had used from when he had washed your clothes and bedlinen for you a few weeks back.
He pulled away, panting heavily as he nuzzled his bearded chin against the pillow. He laid one single kiss in the little indent, then tried his best to reposition the pillow back to where it was so that you’d be none the wiser.
He shuffled around on the floor, moving his hands onto the little carpet before your bed to keep himself steady, only to find himself freezing as he felt something with a much different texture to the carpet. He covered his mouth as he let out a whine, his eyes widening like saucers from behind his rapidly fogging up glasses as he stared at what was underneath his large hand- a pair of your underwear. Right there. Below his hand. Touching his skin. His. Skin.
He knew it was wrong but didn’t care as he hastily stuffed the cute little shorts into the pocket of his jeans, staggering up as he struggled to find and hold your stolen key between his fingers. Just as quickly as he entered, he left, making sure to lock up behind him so that your wonderful little world would be accessible to nobody else but you and him.
He practically sprinted back to his apartment building, desperate to get back home to he could alleviate the painful throbbing from between his legs that sent pulses to every nerve in his body. People stared at him as he raced down the busy streets, but he didn’t care- he was a man on a mission, and he needed to get home as fast as he could.
Finally, he entered his block of flats, and took the elevator up to his floor; usually he’d walk up the fight of stairs, using it as a nice pre-workout, but right now he couldn’t care, he needed to be home and in bed as soon as possible. Speedwalking across to his door he quickly unlocked and locked the door and raced off to his bedroom.
The familiar sight of his four-poster bed filled him with relief as he took off his shirt, crawling onto the incredibly soft mattress. He let himself sink into it, pulling out your underwear from his trouser pocket before discarding of the jeans too.
With one hand Trace immediately put the underwear against his face, groaning as he found his other hand slipping its way under the elastic band of his boxers, travelling and grazing against his thick pubes as his hand found its way to his erect clit. He moaned unashamedly, setting a fast pace as his large digit circled his clit. He wished that you could be sitting on his face right now, using him for your own pleasure, rubbing yourself against his sharp angled face and his delicious feeling facial hair…
He poked his tongue out, lapping at your essence that you’d left in your underwear; you tasted so sweet against his ravenous tongue, and he swore to himself that he would taste and sample your forever if he ever got permission from you. He stopped circling his throbbing nub to peel away his underwear from his now sweaty clammy skin, and his hand resumed the fast rapid circling it had been doing before.
He moved his other hand towards his dripping cunt, swiping up a copious amount of his slick with his forefinger and his middle finger in order to lube them up, and his fingers glided deep within his pussy with barely any resistance. He groaned deeply, the sound reverberating within his large chest and began sucking at the now soiled and spit-soaked underwear and he pistoned his fingers in and out of his hole, the stimulation from his clit making his pussy clench and twitch around his fingers.
God he wished that your fingers were in him instead, he wished that you could just nestle in between his thighs and just use him for your pleasure, he wished he had you, he wished that you wanted him…but that would come soon, he knew it, he would break down your walls one way or another and would make you fall for him, make you come undone for him. He would have you, own your heart, and you would own his.
You would both become one.
The rapid thoughts and the repeated rambling of your name tumbling from his lips began to make a coil within his core tighten, and his fingers began to pick up speed. He didn’t care about the noise, about the frankly whorish way he was moaning for you and the slick squelches that his cunt was producing, he wanted the world to know how much he loved you.
And with that, the coil snapped.
White hot pleasure rippled through him as he felt his walls grip and spasm against his thick fingers, and he curled them up against the deepest part of him whilst he bucked against his hand. He removed his hand from his clit, overstimulated now, and instead just pressed it against the underwear that covered most of his face. All he could feel right now was the beautiful scent and taste of you and your musk that danced around his hungry maw and nose, and the maddening ripples of pleasure that coursed through his body as his cunt pathetically clenched and twitched around his fingers.
He slowly withdrew his fingers from his dripping wet hole and moved the underwear next to him so that he could lick them clean of his slick. The thought of you shyly licking the slick off his fingers made him flush, but he was knocked down by the sudden pleasant wave of tiredness that washed over him.
He curled up on the covers, panting as he stared at the soaked underwear before him, this beautiful little holder of you and your essences all for him and him alone…he closed his eyes, basking in the warmth of the afterglow, wrapping his arms around a pillow and squeezing it tightly.
He’d have to give the underwear back to you the next time you asked him to wash your laundry, but for now…he was going to make as much use of it as he could before your gorgeous scent ended up escaping from the fabric for good.
#forrest's fiction#the hunt for love#thfl#trace thfl#yandere#male yandere#yandere boy#yandere x reader#male yandere x reader#male yandere x you#yandere writing#yandere drabble#yandere x you
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When He’s “Respectful” During Sex
Warnings: smut (including cussing, cunnilingus, fingering, vaginal penetration, missionary sex, nipple play, doggy style, riding, blowjob, etc.)
This man, as genuinely kind and respectful as he is, uses politeness to cover up just how badly he wants to dismantle you and break that pussy down. He forces your submission only with your permission. You’re his baby, it’s not an option!
Will not touch you until you ask
“Can I take your panties off?” When you allow him he tucks them in his back pocket when you stare up at the ceiling.
“There’s lube on my night stand if you feel like you need any.”
Stares at your face for any signs of pain while he tenderly sucks on your swollen bud, but his intense gaze makes you look away in shyness.
He circles your hole with his index finger, before steadily intruding your doughy walls. Your face scrunches up at the way he strokes that squishy bundle of nerves.
“Does that feel good, angel?”
Firmly but gently presses his forearms on your lower belly with an innocent smirk, to restrain your spasming when you cream all that you’re worth in his mouth.
“What position do you want to be fucked in?”
His voice is almost monotonous but lilted with eagerness as he watches your limp figure breathing heavily after that nut he just gave you. Pausing in thought, your eyes light up like a lightbulb.
“Ooh! Why not missionary?” You chirp.
You’re spread out on your back as your man sits on his haunches, lining his thick dick along your entrance. You wiggle your hips in impatience.
“Please stay still, honey. Don’t wanna hurt you.”
The serious concern in his baritone voice leaves you motionless as a statue (and soaking wet).
The burning stretch you feel when he pushes in grows exponentially, but he’s extra slow and attentive just for you <3. You hold onto his elbows as his strong hands clutch your soft waist. He stops halfway when you whine and sees your knee jutting up and down.
“Are you okay? Does it hurt too much?”
“Uhn-uhn,” you strain, but you show you’re actually alright when he feels your hold relax a bit.
His firm ass clenches a bit to create more space between his knees, lowering his body.
This allows him to position his hips in an experimental angle that nudges his tip right against your deepest cum spot, pulling back and slowly thrusting again just to see you grab your tits and cry out pathetically.
His eyebrows crinkle adorably in concentration as he massages your clit while grinding into your soaking cunt. You hit your head on your pillow to cope with the melting hot pleasure that fills you up, running your hands up his hard abs.
“Holy fucking shit!” you gurgle, eyes stinging as he twists your hard brown nipples with the rough pads of his fingers.
“How we feeling babycakes? :D” the loud squelching answers his question.
Makes a mental note that you like your nips played with.
“Ohhhhhh fuckkkkkk wait a second!” You yell desperately.
your boyfriend doesn’t wait, eyes fixating on how the sheen of sweat coating your deep complexion makes you even more radiant as your curves jiggle briefly with his lethargic thrusts. He was in no hurry to ruin you, rolling your nipples between his fingertips
You wail as your legs shake uncontrollably, the hot friction in your lower belly spills, feeling too heavy to sustain. your second orgasm makes your jaw slack open and your tummy constrict. That dick got you tired already :(
His balls tighten at the mess you’re making, steadily fucking you through your high before sliding his dick out of you.
“May we try doggy?” He murmurs. You take a deep breath.
“Yeah sure,” you slur blissfully. His manners make you throb helplessly. He flips you on your knees without a second thought.
“Can you arch your back for me? Thank you, baby.” He purrs.
Will not be rough until you ask. If you beg for it, he will palm your head in your pillow and muffle your screams as he quickly humps his fat heavy cock into your weeping pussy.
Is so so super duper sweet. Will always check on you and talk you through your sexy time together. Very tactical when he fucks on you, but still relies on your physical reactions, communication and his instincts. He tends to overthink in self-doubt tho, and inadvertently ignores the needy sounds you make when his balls repeatedly slap your clit while fucking you from behind.
“YesyesyesyesYESYESYES-“
“Yes what, pretty?”
The way he rotates his thrusts while you ride him is so nasty, his pelvis swipes your aching clit with every swiveling buck of his hips. Tries to abstain from moaning but as soon as your cunt grips him with no intention of letting go while you whimper right into his ear, a devastating groan rips from his throat.
Wipes your tear-stained cheeks while you recover from your sixth orgasm :p
“Can you suck the tip a little harder? Just like that, love.”
he bites his lip to avoid fucking your pretty face wide open. Precum leaks down your throat as your drawn out moan reverberates through his girth.
“I’mm g-getting close, sweetheart. where do ya want me to cum? Inside?”
Leaning your head back and releasing his tip with a loud ‘pop’, you suck his ballsack next; letting the tender flesh sink between your pillowy lips as your hand strokes his pretty dick. You felt like sin, making his chest cave in.
“Th-that feels really good, can you go a little fas-oh fuck!”
Ya man spurts milky white cum, fat dribbles of the pearlescent liquid running down your fingers. You return the same obsessive stare he gave you earlier while licking your hand clean.
Yeahhhh you’ll be the death of him😌
Armin, Connie, Izuku, Kirishima, Kento, Yuuta, Yuji, Megumi, Miguel O’Hara, Choso, Rock Lee, Sanji, Aran Ojiro, Tooru Oikawa, Baki Hanma, Nishinoya, Tendou, Atsumu, Saitama, and any other of your faves!
Thank you for reading! Comments and reblogs are appreciated!
Copyright ©️ blimbosworlddd. Do not copy, plagiarize or repost.
#fanfic#fanfiction#drabble#jujutsu kaisen x black reader#black reader#jujutsu kaisen#naruto#one punch man#one piece#my hero academia#haikyuu
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TwiFicmas23 Day 7: Hybrid Jasper
Good evening! Tonight, we have something experimental. I was trying to put together a one-shot that focused on Jasper as a hybrid because I'm equal-opportunity with my nonsense.
It's still in parts, and I'm not sure that I've captured the vibes that I'm aiming for, but we persevere. I kind of love the idea of Jasper being the vulnerable one and Alice being the protective one and wanted to riff on that concept. Some of the 'rules' and world-building are a little iffy at the moment, but first drafts always need a little work.
Thank you to everyone who has read, liked, tagged, and messaged me. Those tags and messages absolutely make my day and I love every single one of them.
I'm off to sleep off this cold, in the hopes that I can recover fast enough to finish off a couple of planned entires <3
on the edge of dawn.
His past is knotted up in secrets and lies.
And blood, he can’t forget that.
(It starts and ends in rivers of blood, in so many lives worth of blood, that it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge it.)
When he meets the eyes of the recruitment officer and tells him that he’s of-age, he’s not lying. He’s been a grown-ass man for a decade now; just because he’s sixteen in human terms is meaningless. He is more than capable of fighting a war.
(He fights to protect the people that raised him, the cousins who were really his little sisters. He goes to war to make sure that he can send money home, enough to keep them fed and warm and safe. He doesn’t need much, and it’s nothing compared to what they gave him.)
When he runs afoul of Maria, he expects it to be his death. One that is surprisingly appropriate considering his own origins. Instead, it is a fever that cooks him from the inside out, one that he stays lucid throughout, begging for answers, to explain what is happening for water, to know what has become of his poor horse. He sees a lot of people, strange people, that feel like they are all wrong but he doesn’t know why.
He thinks of his little sisters, and hopes that they’ll be okay. He saved a lot of his pay, sent it home, so maybe they will. Maybe they won’t go hungry or get sick.
Maria is exceptionally intrigued by him. This man who doesn’t die, who rambles at her, begs her. And even when the fever ebbs, his eyes are still a piercing hazel. He still bleeds and sleeps and breathes. But he feeds on blood, he can move at least as fast as the slowest newborn, and has a gift that he almost effortlessly weaponising.
He is a marvel, a miracle, a prize.
So she keeps him, and Jasper is mostly reminded of stories about hell from the Bible.
(He can never go home again.)
—
Her visions have shown him since she awoke, but he’s always been very strange in them - like he’s made of smoke and memory, faded and halfway gone. She doesn’t understand it, and it scares her - that very first vision, where he tucks a flower behind her ear and says her name - is her north star, and her touchstone. She doesn’t know who she is without him, and the idea that he could disappear terrifies her to the bone. No one else does that in her visions, and she can’t work it out.
Then she realises his eyes are hazel. Somehow she missed that little detail as she watched him fight and feed and rule Mexico in Maria’s name. They are such a beautiful shade, impossible for a vampire.
And then she sees him sleeping, and it terrifies her that he is so vulnerable and unguarded in such a terrible place. She feels sick at it.
He’s still an enigma, she still has questions, but it’s a clue. It’s something. It helps her shape and frame their future in her mind, knowing that he is not entirely the same as her.
It makes her feel useful, and that’s a nice feeling.
—
He remembers his mother a little too well. She had sharp hazel eyes and hair so light it was almost white. She’s already dead by then, washed out and still, and it’s a single frame in his memory. Something he should never be able to remember. But he does.
(Jasper remembers her best when faced with the bodies. The ones who were taken as a meal, and the ones that don’t survive the change. Bloodless and broken in every way that counts. Her face is always clearest in his mind as he gathers up those dead people, and maybe he remembers his upbringing and says a quick prayer for them. But it doesn’t take long for those prayers to be meaningless mutterings under his breath, part of the routine without any of the meaning.)
Sometimes he wonders what would have become of him in another life, with his mother perfectly dead. His grandmother had no love for him, not in those earliest days; a pious woman, she would have cast him out young if it hadn’t been for his mother’s brother.
For a long time, he’s raised by his Uncle Jed. Jed looks at him and seems to see past all the things that shouldn’t be and the things that make him strange, right down to the lost boy he is.
Jed gives him the family name - Whitlock - and puts him to work on the ranch. It’s a good life, and he likes working with animals, likes that the things that make him different make him useful on the ranch. He likes that he never has to see the old bitch of a grandmother that never let Jasper forget that he was the reason his momma was dead.
(His momma named him. She picked the name out herself and started embroidering it on a blanket because she became too ill. That’s something he tucks in the back of his mind, that possibility that maybe she didn’t hate him, maybe she even loved him.)
Then Jed meets Gracie Wainwright and Jasper is terrified that he’ll have to leave; that being reclusive and unseen is the only way he can stay there, outside San Antonio. Jed doesn’t even let him go to church except at Christmas; for Jasper to grown up, he must be invisible and it’s the one family law they all obey.
Except… Aunt Grace is his greatest champion, the mother he never had before. She is quick to teach him, bringing him books and teaching him his sums, how to sew on a button and darn a sock, and cook a hot meal - “Everyone needs to know these things Jasper, no matter where you go in life.”
And then there are the girls, he beloved cousin-sisters who climb over him and cling to him and are nothing but laughter and soft, kind things. Jed and Grace produce five of them, one after the other, all golden-eyed and blue-eyed and his favourite people in the world. Girls he would die for.
So he does. He goes and signs up for the army because he’s been grown for years, because he’s faster and stronger and doesn’t need food or water. Disease never seems to touch him, and there’s little-to-no chance that they won’t have to leave the ranch. They’ll need to eat and travel, and his stipend will help with that. It’s the least he can do.
(In her letters, Aunt Grace worries about him incessantly, tells him that Little Emma wanders around calling for him, not understanding that he’s not coming home any time soon; that his stipend has been useful in keeping them fed and well. Jed writes him and scolds him for running off and for sending them his money, but always ends his letters speaking of his pride in Jasper, and wishes to come home safely. Jasper’s always felt guilty he never made it back.)
Maria is oddly fascinated by the concept of his family, by how dearly he holds them, and how he still remembers them, still adores them. Vampire memories are supposed to decay; it’s considered a rebirth for a reason. He doesn’t know why his memories stay so vivid, but he treasures them. In the end, it’s easier and safer to stop mentioning them, to pretend the memories are starting to decay, so that Maria stops interrogating him, so that she thinks he’s finally behaving how he should.
//
The first time Alice sees Jasper bleed, she nearly screams. It trickles into his eyes and he swears, and she’s frozen in a vision that she cannot escape from. He swipes it off his forehead and sucks on his fingers a moment to swipe over the shallow wound.
And it’s sealed. Does he have a healing gift?
She doesn’t know.
But the visions start showing her the things that are to come. The Cullens are still a possibility, but Jasper will be more skittish about joining them, about letting others know about what he is. About having to live with more vampires after South. He’s terrified of Carlisle on so many levels, and the idea of school goes against everything his uncle taught him.
But she’s gratified that he seems happy when they’re together. That he sees something in her, the lost girl, that maybe he recognises.
I love you Jasper, and I know that we’re going to be so happy together.
And she does. She loves that he can walk in the sunlight without notice, but he still hates doing it. She loves that he has no special talent for languages, but has still managed to learn Spanish and French fluently. That he’s never learnt to dance, but he’ll dance with her. That at some point she’s going to try to cook for him, and it’ll be a messy disaster and he’ll just laugh until there are tears in his eyes and tell her that he loves her for trying.
Sometimes she wishes that she could share visions, pass them from her head to another’s because she wants to be able to save all of this for him, to show him that everything is going to be okay. Better than okay; perfect.
//
Peter is a blessing in disguise. At first, he’s only there to make trouble, only there to test the boundaries and question authority. He hears Jasper’s sluggish heart, sees the way Maria watches over him, and decides that Jasper is the weak link, and he just needs to exert the right amount of pressure to break him.
It goes about as well as expected, and something about the fact that Jasper is the one that returns Peter’s arm instead of throwing it on the pyre cements something between them. Loyalty, understanding, and a sense of fairness.
Friendship and brotherhood comes in time. But that evening, as Jasper realigns the joint and explains to Peter that Maria has tried to rip off Jasper’s arm before but the joints are weird because he was already venomous before being bitten, that it didn’t work. Did fuck up his shoulder for a while though.
Peter is fascinated. That he can be cut and bruised and broken, but they can’t do something as simple as tear him into pieces. That Jasper takes days to heal, and on the long sunny days they stay inside for, Jasper sleeps.
//
She finds him in Philadelphia and, oh, her heart breaks. In her well-loved dress and too-big shoes with the creases deep across the toes, she looks like a real lady compared to him.
He’s outside in the alley, trying to convince himself to go inside. She’s seen it happen both ways, and that’s why she was late. To make sure that either way, he’s going to find her. She refuses to risk it any other way.
In the flesh, he’s a lot further gone than she expected. Enough that she discards her coat and her shoes as she enters the alley, moving quietly towards him. He’s so thin, and his hair is a tangled mess around his face, and he bares more than one bruise. His clothes are woeful, filthy and too thin for the cool weather. He’s not going to survive another winter like this.
“Hello,” she says, and when he looks at her, his eyes almost pass as hazel, with the ring of fading red around the pupil. But he also looks hunted and haunted, like an animal backed into a corner. “I’ve been looking for you.”
She smiles at him, and he stares back for a moment before he relaxes a little. “I didn’t realise I had an appointment,” he manages, his voice cracking with disuse. He lets her get a little closer, looking at her bare feet, her green dress that has seen better days, the less-than-clean gloves, and the ribbon in her hair. Oh, and her purse.
“That’s okay, because I’m here now,” she decides to brazen it out, and goes closer to sit beside him except he stops her.
“You’ll spoil your clothing,” he says, getting to his feet and he’s so very tall. He has to look down at her, and she feels very delicate and precious as he does so.
“I have a lot of clothing to spoil,” she says honestly, and he still looks uncomfortable. “I’m Alice.”
“Hello Miss Alice.” He sounds uncertain but for her, it’s the most beautiful sound because it’s the very first time that she’s ever heard him speak her name out loud.
—
#jasper hale#alice cullen#jalice#my fic: hybrid jasper#ficmas#ficmas23#twificmas23#jasper being 'special' would make maria even more posessive#and peter more protective#and alice going 'oh no i have to look after both of us' when jasper picks a fight and ends up with a bloody nose#poor alice trying to make pancakes and it going so so wrong#alice and jasper trying to work out how to conceal his condition so the cullens don't find out#i will have so uch fun finishing this
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The world that harmed us
If you’d told him two weeks ago that he would be seriously discussing leaving the dimension with four used-to-be-strangers in a Kings Dominion he would have slowly backed up and thought you a drug addict.
But here he was, sitting at a picnic table in the shade away from the hustle and bustle of the amusement park, staring at the poke ball on the table as if it could change his life.
For years he tried to gain his father’s approval, to earn a place in his heart. And for years he failed, always compared to his siblings. Never the first like Dick, never the most loved like Jason, never the smartest like Tim, never never never.
He can’t remember when he gave up. Maybe it was after his birthday was forgotten the fifth time. Maybe when he was ignored for days at a time. Or maybe it was the first, and last, time Bruce told him he hated him.
Regardless of when, it didn’t take much for him to pack a bag and leave. It was hilariously easy, actually. You’d think someone would have noticed, but that just showed how little he meant to them. And a part of him was grateful.
In two days time he was out of New Jersey and halfway through Michigan. It was there that he met a rag tag group of metas his age also trying to leave the country.
Danny Fenton, Dove Elopeman, Noel Lok and Lydia Lippet had each been traveling–running away–alone before stumbling into each other and deciding to stick together. The four hoped Canada would be kinder to them as Dove was from Italy, Lydia Ireland, Noel California and Danny Illinois. Damian was then told of their “tragic backstory’s” as Lydia called it, and then had to share his own.
Dove was an orphan street rat who discovered she could control peoples minds after accidentally taking control of a soup kitchen. A few restaurants and a Kardashian later she was blacklisted by the Justice League who thought she was an up-and-coming supervillain and she’s been on the run ever since. Damian could tell she was hiding something, but it wasn’t his business so he said nothing.
Lydia was born with a very odd power—aspects of her life could be controlled like a game of DnD, all that was needed was a twenty-sided dice. If she rolled a twenty on intelligence, she would suddenly know enough about quantum physics to teach a college lecture. If she rolled a one she would forgot what colors were what. She also had a character sheet which affected rolls, and classed herself as a Bard.
She called the reason she ran away “The Crush™ Grape Soda Incident” and no one wanted to know what that meant.
Noel, also an orphan, used to be Californias weightlifting state champion before she was given an experimental steroid by her coach without her knowing. She didn’t realize she was a meta until she lifted her coaches beach house on, what was at the time, a funny joke. Her coach was arrested and the Justice League wanted to recruit her. Noel told them no, and when they kept trying she packed what she had and ran.
Danny’s parents were scientists who were desperate to prove ghosts were real. When their portal into the ‘Ghost Zone’ kept failing, they came to believe that the problem was they didn’t have a strong enough tie to this world to keep the portal open and stable. They decided to use Danny as that tie. This led to them turning on the portal with Danny inside, which led to Danny becoming ‘half’ ghost. When his parents tried to capture and experiment on him, he used his new ability’s and ran away.
All of that led to them putting their various abilities and life skills together to cross the Canadian border, meeting Damian a few days before they reached the border. After telling their stories and hearing his–and a high-speed boat-chase across Lake Michigan with the local police that he knows they’ll never let him live down–they continue their journey with odd but little interruptions.
When they finally crossed into Ontario it was close to three in the morning. They were all tense, each of them expecting someone they knew to jump out and drag them back. But no one did. And when they finally, finally, drove all they way through, they stopped in a forest and sat there in silence.
It was Noel who started laughing first. Him and Dove shared glances and wondered if she was ok mentally when Danny started laughing too. Then Lydia, Dove and he joined in. There was something freeing, something joyous in the air. They were out. They made it.
They fell asleep in a pile, and when they woke up they started driving again. (Lydia kept fighting him for ‘her turn’ to drive even though she admitted she didn’t know how to, as if Danny’s driving wasn’t bad enough)
They all agreed Ontario probably wasn’t safe enough so they kept going until they reached Nunavut. And then they celebrated their newfound freedom with a trip to an amusement park, a place neither of them have been before.
Damian won seven toss games and twelve stuffed animals bigger than him, Noel broke four test your strength games and won about ten thousand tickets, they used said tickets to but about fifty small toys and trinkets, Danny dragged all of them to every roller coaster and ride there was, Dove and Lydia got into a dance battle on a DDR that resulted in an all-out musical war(Lydia won) and they finished their day by buying half the candy store.
They’re food and prizes sat in the middle of the table for them to share as they giggled and joked in ways only sugar-high teens could. Danny and Lydia were in a thumb-war while Noel was messing with a puzzle. Dove was teaching him the pocky game and doing a really bad job at explaining, which was making him incredibly flustered.
However, in the middle of her explanation she fell silent. She looked at him as if she were seeing his soul, and then turned and looked at the others. Lydia cheered as she won and began tickling Danny, but shrieked as Noel began tickling her from behind. She watched before smiling and pulling something out of her bag and setting it in the middle of the pile.
It was…. a Poké ball?
It didn’t look like the other real-life poke balls he’d seen though. While those were bright plastic and bigger that his hand this one was metal and shiny, and was about the size of a tennis ball. The middle button also seemed to be slightly glowing.
“This is a portal to another dimension where Pokémon are real.” Dove said quickly, and everyone went quiet. “I know I sound insane, and I know you probably don’t believe me, but I know for a fact because I’ve been. I’ve seen it. In the world this takes you to Pokémon are real. And I think I know a way for the Justice League, the police, are parents too never find us again.”
They all stared at her for a minute, absorbing what she said. “Are you shitting us?” Lydia asked first, “Are you absolutely, one-hundred percent serious?” Dove nodded softly, biting her lip.
Damian surprised himself with his words. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s get out of here.” Dove stared at him wide-eyed before Noel nodded. “Yeah, it’s not like I’ve got anything left here. Anyone got a reason they want to stay in boring-land and not become Pokémon trainers?”
Danny and Dove thought for a second while Lydia began listing all the Pokémon she wanted. They came up empty, and Dove began laughing. Damian asked if she was ok and she smiled at him. “I just thought you guys wouldn’t want to leave. I’ve been thinking about it the moment I found it.”
They discussed it a little more–names, Pokémon, money–before packing all their stuff and getting ready to leave the dimension.
“Hey, do you guys wanna be cheesy?” Danny asked, and put his hand on the poke ball. Noel snorted and put her hand over his. Lydia gasped and said “We could be even CHEESIER!” and put a peace sign over their hands.
He didn’t get it, but the others did. Danny and Noel made peace signs next to hers and he groaned. He got it, and Dove did too, giggling and putting her peace sign. Damian looked at their grinning faces, thought of his father—if he was missing him, if he regretted not loving him, if he even noticed that he was gone.
Fuck him, he thought, and finished the star. His friends cheered, Dove used her thumb to click the button—
and the poke ball opened, and they were sucked in.
When he came too he saw they were still making a star, but they were standing in a clearing a little ways away from a forest. They began looking around, and were dazzled by their surroundings.
Small little fairy’s with flowers–“Floettes!” Lydia cried–were everywhere, some were bigger with bigger flowers and in the distance there were about three giant ones that looked to have flowers for their heads. Small little orange hexagon-shaped bees buzzed around, and giant butterflies with big, magenta eyes flew about above them.
This, he thought, this is far better than being Robin. And as he ran with his new friends through the clearing, heading towards the city about the tree line, he knew he would never think about Gotham ever again.
~~~~~
this is just something I’ve had rolling around in my head on tumble dry for the past few days, and it’s not as useless as I thought it would be! It actually helped me flesh out backstory’s for the three original girls here. Descriptions under! Thanks for reading, and tell me what you think! And if–on the very unlikely chance–anyone who writes wants to write a story like this, please be my guest! Take it! You can do it, I believe in you!
Dove—Italian with honey skin and black curly hair that reaches below her shoulders. Her eyes are purple and glow a little when using her powers. A pastel goth, usually wearing skirts and knee high socks and heels-usually always thrifted or handmade
Lydia—African American with an Irish accent. Golden eyes and bright blue hair styled in a side-parted curly bob. Tomboyish with ripped jeans and a jean jacket, worn boots and shirt with memes on it
Noel—Native American with long and wild bright pink hair. Bright blue eyes and MEGA muscles. Usually wears dark jeans and her weightlifting varsity jacket-white sleeves, purple body, and teal accents on the cuffs and bottom and running shoes
#Dc x Pokémon#pokémon au#damian wayne#damian al ghul#danny phantom#danny fenton#original character#original story#superpowers#dimension travel#five teens#Leaving their home dimension#Starting a poly relationship#Cuz their all gay#Started as angst ended as serious crack#Sort of an au for a fic I’m writing#Why am I writing this instead of the fic you ask?#I don’t know#@inkher0 forgive me#I don’t know how to manage my executive dysfunction
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Surviving Sokovia - Chapter Twelve
Pairing: Pietro Maximoff x Reader
Work Summary:
You were a Sokovian orphan living on the streets of Novi Grad, until Strucker offered you a choice.
Now you are a part of his human experimentation programme, trying to survive an entirely different world of horrors. The kind boy with the beautiful eyes is the only thing that keeps you going.
This story contains dark themes. Please read the notes on chapter one for more details. Dialogue in {these brackets} is in Sokovian.
Chapter Summary: Ultron's plans have been revealed, and the three of you need to get away. You run into a friend.
Series Masterlist
Word Count: 1803
Read on AO3.
Masterlists.
Taglist: @mcximffs @noz4a2 @xlucyintheskywithdiamondsx @lanemarvels @marrigold-2002 @kathrinchek @ifilwtmfc @officiallykuute @mrs-kai-anderson @ang3l1te @missryerye
Taglist info.
Previous Chapter
Notes:
This timeline mostly follows the AoU canon with some slight differences. I'm mostly going to be skimming over the AoU stuff because it's not hugely relevant, but the key plot points to be aware of are: Ultron recruits the twins, the twins help him get the vibranium from Klaue, Ultron goes with the twins to Seoul to create a new body for himself, Wanda reads his mind during the process of transferring his consciousness to the new body and realises that he plans to destroy the world. In this version, the reader is with the twins, also helping Ultron. All of this happens between the previous chapter and this one.
Warnings for pregnancy, vomiting, stray dog
---
You would be the first to admit that you’d never trusted Ultron, but he had made some promises that were hard to turn down. For one, there was Tony Stark. Ultron hated his creator just as much as Wanda and Pietro did, and had the power to bring him down once and for all. For another, he had access to resources. He had given you food, shelter, whatever you needed to survive.
It wasn’t enough. You had watched the dawning horror on Wanda’s face as she looked into his mind, and you knew it was all over. There had been no time to think. The next thing you knew, you were being deposited on a street corner by Pietro, who gave you a fleeting kiss on the forehead as he promised he’d be right back.
You collapsed onto your knees, throwing up into the road. Snow crunched under your bare hands. The world spun horrendously. You grabbed a handful of snow and pressed it to your face, relishing the coldness.
If you had been more aware of your surroundings, you might’ve heard the soft padding footsteps, but as it was, when something nudged you in the arm, you fell back in surprise, a scream halfway out of your mouth.
It was a dog. You blinked. Not a dog. The dog. The one that you’d fed a banana. You realised with a start that you were on the same corner Pietro had dropped you off at last time, thousands of miles from where you’d just been. No wonder you felt ill. The dog looked at you expectantly, its tongue lolling out of its mouth.
Feeling as though you might pass out if you tried to grow anything, you pulled your backpack off and rummaged around in it until you found a bread roll wrapped in a paper napkin. You unwrapped it and the dog barked happily, watching you like a hawk as you put the roll down on the ground next to you.
You didn’t watch it eat the bread. You settled back onto your butt and closed your eyes.
“Hey!” Your eyes snapped open at the sound of Pietro’s voice. “{Get away from her},” he snapped, and the dog grabbed the bread roll in its mouth and darted to your other side, hiding behind you.
“{It’s okay, Piet},” you said. “{She’s just hungry}.” You assumed the dog was a she. You didn’t know much about dogs but you saw no evidence of testicles.
“{My love, please be careful. She might be dangerous}.”
“{She’s not}.” Your voice was dreamlike. You felt far away from yourself. “{She’s a good girl}.”
Pietro’s arm came to wrap around your waist and he carefully pulled you to your feet. You leant against him, thankful for the support. Wanda was standing on his other side, still clearly reeling from what she saw in Ultron’s head.
“{Why did you bring us back to Novi Grad?}” you asked. It was a fair question. One moment you had been in Seoul, the next, you were back here.
“{I…}” He exchanged a look with Wanda. “{I didn’t know where else to go. I just wanted to get far away from him}.”
“{Well, I don’t know if I can go much further},” you said shakily. “{I don’t feel so good}.”
Wanda put one hand on your shoulder and the other on Pietro’s. “{We have to go back}.” Pietro opened his mouth to argue, but Wanda pushed on. “{Ultron is going to destroy the world and we helped him on his way. We have to do something}.”
“{Wanda, she can’t},” said Pietro. She gave him a meaningful look. He shook his head immediately, anger spreading across his features. “{No. No way. I’m not leaving her behind}.”
“{Of course not},” said Wanda, just as angry. “{But we need to track down the Avengers before it’s too late. We can’t keep her safe and make it to them on time}.”
You straightened up and wiped your mouth with the back of your hand. “{I’ll be fine. I know the streets of Novi Grad. I spent many years surviving here before I knew you, Piet}.”
An anguished look passed over his face. “{You are not staying on the streets. What if Ultron finds you? Or Hydra?}” An involuntary shiver ran down your spine.
“{We can find somewhere safe},” said Wanda gently. “{A hotel. A place you can hide out until we can come back for you}.” Pietro’s face was drawn, and he had a quiet, contemplative expression.
“{How will we pay for it?}” you asked.
“{Don’t worry about that},” he said. “{Just wait here. Both of you. I will find us a place}.” And with that, he was gone.
“{I’m so sorry we have to do this},” said Wanda. “{But the things I saw in Ultron’s head… We have to stop him and we can’t do that alone. It’s our fault he has the vibranium}.”
“{I know. It’s okay}.” Absentmindedly, your hand came up to pet the dog’s head. She leant into you.
A moment later, Pietro returned, looking slightly out of breath. “{I have the money. I’m going to find a hotel now}.” He was about to run off again but you grabbed his wrist.
“{Make sure it’s somewhere that allows pets},” you said, and he looked at you as though you’d grown a second head.
“{Pets?}” His eyebrows were drawn together in confusion. You gestured at the dog, and he grimaced. “{It’ll be much harder to-}”
“{Please, Piet}.” You looked up at him, your head tilted to one side in a way that you knew made it hard for him to say no to you. “{She’s hungry. She can keep me company while you’re off being a superhero}.”
Pietro sighed but nodded. “{I will be right back}.”
Wanda was looking at you with an amused half-smile. “{What?}” you asked, but she just shook her head. She took a step forward and scratched the dog between her ears.
“{If you’re going to be bringing her with you, she deserves a name, no?}”
You thought about it for a moment. The dog looked up at you with her big eyes. “{Her name is Odeta},” you decided.
“Odeta,” said Wanda, trying out the sound. “{I like it}.”
“{They don’t normally allow dogs},” said Pietro, appearing beside you suddenly. “{But I paid them enough money that they’ll make an exception. I stopped at the grocery store too. And the pet store. All of the stuff is already in the room. Come on}.” He wrapped an arm around you.
You closed your eyes as he sped off with you. You had very quickly come to realise that you hated speeding around with Piet. Maybe it would be different if you weren’t pregnant. Somehow you doubted that.
You found yourself very suddenly in a large hotel room. It was fully furnished with a double bed, wardrobe, and even a desk. There were a collection of plastic carrier bags on the bed. A cursory inspection revealed an ensuite with a bath, as well as a balcony. Pietro had really outdone himself.
A moment later, he appeared with Odeta in his arms. She was barking furiously, evidently terrified, as he set her down.
“{I’m sorry},” he said, trying to pet her head, but she shrank away from him. “{I’m sorry}.”
He disappeared again, and returned a moment later with Wanda. She seemed far less affected by his speed than you were, which gave you hope that it would be easier once the baby was born. Odeta lay down on the ground and pushed her face into the carpet.
“{Poor girl},” you said, reaching out to stroke her head. She relaxed under your touch.
“{I got treats},” said Pietro, lifting up one of the plastic bags. It was printed with the logo of a pet store. He pulled a packet of dog treats out of the bag and held it out to you.
“{You should give them to her. She already likes me}.”
Looking a little nervous, he opened the bag and pulled out one dog biscuit. “{Here, girl. I have a treat for you}.” She lifted her head and looked up at him. She looked just as frightened as he did.
You very gently nudged her with your foot. “{It’s okay, Odeta. It’s just Pietro. He won’t hurt you}.”
Cautiously, she got to her feet and ate the treat out of his hand. Emboldened, he offered her another, which she took greedily. He was reaching into the bag for a third when you put a hand on his arm.
“{Slow down there, cowboy},” you said. “{If she eats too much too quickly, she might puke}.”
He nodded, closing the bag. Odeta let out a little whine, but accepted her fate.
“{There’s a minibar},” said Pietro. “{And room service. Although I gave them so much money that they’ll probably bring you whatever you want}.”
“{Where did you get the money?}”
He paused for a second, surveying you. His expression was unreadable. “{I robbed a bank}.”
“{A bank?}” You knew that Pietro had been light-fingered even before he got his powers, but this seemed like a lot, even for him.
“{They didn’t see me coming}.” He gave you a lopsided grin that made your heart stutter. “{I got supplies, but if I’ve forgotten anything, you can call room service…}”
“{Thank you, Piet}.”
“{There’s one more thing}.” He handed you a cell phone. “{It’s not very sophisticated, but it can make calls. I’ve got one for each of us. I’ve already programmed in the numbers, but please memorise them, just in case}.”
He dropped a kiss on your forehead, but you caught the front of his shirt, pulling him in for a proper kiss. Beside you, Wanda turned her attention towards Odeta, embarrassed.
“{I love you},” you murmured.
“{I love you too}.” His voice was low as he spoke.
“{Come back to me}.”
“{We will},” Wanda assured you. She put her arms around you and hugged you tight.
“{Let me know when you’ve found the Avengers},” you said, holding up your phone.
“{I will},” said Pietro. And with that, they were gone, leaving you alone with Odeta.
Odeta stood up, confused as to where Wanda and Pietro had just gone. Maybe it was the pregnancy hormones. Maybe it was the fear of not knowing when the twins would be back. Maybe it was the fact that for the first time in a long time, you weren’t under anyone’s control. Either way, you burst into tears.
Odeta let out a distressed noise and rested her head on your lap. You stroked her fur gratefully. Seeing it up close like this, you saw for the first time how matted and dirty and tangled it was.
“{You’re filthy},” you half-hiccupped, half-laughed in between sobs. “{Let’s get you a bath, okay?}”
Next Chapter
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A Better Distraction : a Jesper Fahey x reader FF : Nine
After touching down in the palace grounds, you were led unwillingly into the throne room where your mother and father were waiting. Bethel and Caolán, queen and king, gazed down at you from their gold tipped thrones. Your mother looked more sympathetic than your father did, but that still wasn’t saying much.
“You have been gone far too long, daughter” Caolán thundered.
You looked around you at the guards, your cousin, and the priest, all waiting to see you shackled and taken away to be imprisoned and married off.
“Not long enough” you replied.
Your father’s eyes narrowed and your mother sighed heavily, hiding her face in her hands.
“You are to marry your cousin in one week” Caolán told you, glowering. “You are to remain a virgin princess until that day.”
You rolled your eyes, feeling a flash of stubborn pride.
“That ship has flown, your majesty.”
Your mother’s shoulders straightened and she stared at you, taken aback. Your father’s cheeks reddened so dark you thought he would burst.
“You have been gone fewer than three weeks!” he blustered. “How? Who?”
You shrugged, but Bryn stepped forward to speak.
“I believe I know who it was, your majesty” he said slickly.
You turned your head to glare at him, but he ignored you, smiling smugly.
“A Zemeni boy” he announced. “A sharpshooter. The princess was taken in by a gang in Ketterdam and soundly corrupted. She sang in the evenings wearing hardly a stitch, and slept nights in the boy’s bed.”
Your face flooded with hot colour as your gaze filled with loathing. You raised your hands and flame sizzled between them before lashing towards Bryn and lacing around his neck in a fiery rope. You felt your power rise and tugged at the rope, watching as his eyes widened with fear and pain and welts blazed across his skin.
And then something struck you on the back of the head and your hands faltered as your eyes rolled and you stumbled; someone behind you took the opportunity to secure your hands apart, a metal bar separating the cuffs. You glared through hazy eyes as you were led out of the room half guided, half pushed down the corridor in the direction of your old bedroom.
You were shoved inside it, over to the four poster bed, and then shackled to the nearest post. When the guard had left, you gave an experimental yank, but there was no give in the chain. You sighed and slumped onto the deep, soft mattress, shifting uncomfortably. You had grown accustomed to sleeping on a narrow, skinny one with Jesper wrapped around you, and it was much preferred now.
Jesper slipped inside the door to the Slat, out of breath and grinning in triumph, a sheen of sweat over his forehead. Kaz slammed his cane down onto the floor in annoyance, shaking his head.
“Jesper, if you burn down one more building, I swear to Ghezen I’ll -”
Jesper cut him off and sat down in a hurry, almost falling off the chair in his haste. He slapped a slightly singed sheaf of papers down onto the table and Kaz reached reluctantly for them, scanned them sheet by sheet. He glanced up at Jesper halfway through.
“This is a certificate of marriage, property transfer and confirmation of virginity” he said, darker eyed than usual.
Jesper nodded, waiting.
“And...?” he prompted.
“And a notice of the wedding being fast tracked to the end of the week. In the Wandering Isle.”
Kaz sighed, eyeing Jesper over the documents.
“You want us to travel there and break her out, don’t you?” he asked resignedly.
Jesper threw his hands up in the air.
“She’s a princess, not property!” he exclaimed, frustrated. “And besides all that, she’s hardly a virgin anymore; what do you think they’ll do to her when they find that out? Yes, I want to go there and break her out. And I’ll go by myself if you won’t help.”
He sat with his arms folded over his chest, his jaw set in a tight stubborn line. Inej shot Kaz a dangerous look and Nina stood up, Matthias following her with his eyes. Kaz dropped the papers on the table and stood up slowly, staring around the table at his Crows.
“We’ll need wedding invitations and really good costumes” he announced finally, and could almost feel Jesper’s sigh of relief. “We need to look like what we aren’t.”
An hour later, there was a forger getting to work on wedding invitations and Kaz had sent Nina to the same costumer who had provided your costumes for the evening shows.
“What is this all for?” the woman asked, puzzled, as she looked over Kaz’s list. “Are you all going to a wedding?”
Nina winced.
“Hope not. Or we’ll have a very angry, very heartbroken gambling sharpshooter on our hands.”
The woman glanced up at her again, eyebrows raised.
“Right. How soon do you need these by?”
Nina folded her hands in front of herself and smiled sweetly.
“Tomorrow morning” she answered. “It’s short notice and we have a long way to travel.”
The costumer rolled her eyes and started to shoo her out of the shop, muttering to herself about young upstarts and their demands. Nina practically skipped down the street. Something was being done and Kaz was planning; Jesper’s princess would be all right in the end.
The following morning, as soon as there was enough light in his room to see by, Jesper was up and pacing, thumbs stroking his revolvers over and over again. He didn’t stop until Nina knocked on his door and delivered him clothing suitable for a Zemeni diplomat, top hat and high collared coat included. He laid them out on the bed and cocked his head to one side, studying them. If he ever married you, he would not be wearing clothes like this. They were very fine, but too heavy, and too hard to get off again.
He prayed to whichever of Inej’s saints were listening that he would be on time and would not have to witness you marry another man.
Locked in your room in the palace, you could only sleep fitfully and with bad dreams plaguing what slumber you could scrounge. A particularly bad nightmare of Jesper on the end of Bryn’s sword sent you howling awake, tears and sweat pouring off you. Nobody came. Nobody cared. But you couldn’t get the image of Jesper, bloody and dying, out of your mind.
You prayed to whichever of Inej’s saints were listening that he wouldn’t be a hero and try to save you.
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The Boiling Point
Hawke and Varric have always been there through each other for thick and thin. Pity they're both also incredibly oblivious. Hawke and Varric dance around each other for years, but what happens when they finally figure themselves out? ~3500 words of friends to lovers, fluff and angst, and idiots in love. written for Hightown Funk 2022 for @veorlian. :)
-
“I didn’t realize it was possible for something to smell like that,” Marian Hawke hissed, using the tip of her staff to poke at a pile of sludge. Something twinkled in the muck, a faint gleam of gold. She forced herself to swallow her gorge. “But coin is coin, right? I don’t suppose Bartrand would object to another sovereign, even if it is a Darktown special.”
Varric raised an eyebrow. “Can’t you do a spell? Magic the stench off of it? My brother does love gold, but this might cross the line.”
“Really Varric, where do you come up with these ideas?” asked Merrill. “Hawke, I’m afraid you’re on your own for this.”
“Oh, yes, just a bit of a destenching spell, first magic I ever performed,” Marian snickered. She glanced at Carver, who gave her a warning look. “I suppose you’ve got a point. Growing up with siblings, it’s a good spell to keep in one’s back pocket.”
“As if you weren’t right there with me, getting dirty as anything,” said Carver. “Bethany might be the only one of us who’s ever known decorum.” He gazed skeptically down at the sludge. “Are you certain we can’t just find another job? Do we really have to scrounge about in the muck?”
Marian wavered. “I can’t bear to leave it, not when we’re so close to having enough for the expedition. Stench or no.” She reached for mana, experimentally trying something halfway between a force spell and fire magic --
Flaming shit exploded outward in all directions, spattering the passageway, the ground, and the entire party.
Varric and Carver got the worst of it. Wrong place, wrong time. Merrill was slightly protected, standing a bit behind Carver as she had been: she had a split second to summon a touch of frost magic to neutralize the foul flames. Merrill shuddered at the fate she had nearly suffered, and turned her attention to de-flaming Carver. Frost magic settled over him. The set of his ice-studded eyebrows predicted imminent apoplexy.
Varric stood where he had been struck, unmoving. Tragically, he had transformed into a shit-covered impression of a dwarf. Marian felt a slight pang of regret. Only time would tell if he had really survived the blast, though she suspected by his thousand yard stare that the scars might be permanent.
Marian’s shock slowly retreated, replaced by awareness of the most astounding smell. She reached up a shaking hand, gingerly wiping hot filth off her forehead. She blinked. Then she bent down, picking up the now sparkling clean gold sovereign and tucking it carefully into her purse.
“Is this something you’re planning on trying out in the Deep Roads?” Varric managed, the last word ending in a choked gag. “If so, I request to be somewhere far, far away the next time you pull out that little number.”
“You’re the one who asked about destenching, Varric. This is at least your fault as much as it is mine,” Marian insisted, wiping off her front, which only seemed to smear things around more. She heaved a sigh of defeat. “Besides, we’re one sovereign closer, so I count this one as a win.”
“You’re something else, Hawke.” Varric shook his head, looking greenish under the splatter. But she could have sworn, despite the stink, that he still gave her a smile.
Or maybe it was a grimace. Considering he bent over and vomited about five seconds later, she wasn’t sure which.
-
“Varric,” Marian said carefully.
“Yeah?” he asked, his tone too light to be perfectly casual.
“We’re lost, aren’t we?”
“What makes you say that?” he said heartily, turning around in the junction of the crossroads to face her and the others. Three completely identical paths stretched beyond him. “This is absolutely where I meant to take us.”
“Up the ass end of the Deep Roads?” Carver asked.
“It’s all right to admit it, Varric. I hate these bloody roads too,” said Anders sympathetically. “Perhaps we can sort it out together. Anything to get out of here a bit faster.” He focused, looking down the identical halls. He turned to the north fork. “Come on, this one feels like it might be right. Or, well, at least it’s not got darkspawn down it, and that’s something. What have we got to lose?”
“You mean after everything went pear-shaped?” asked Carver. “Not much.” He followed Anders, and Varric and Marian brought up the rear.
Varric was quiet beside her, too quiet by far. She knew him rather well by now, as well as she knew Anders or Fenris or Merrill, and this wasn’t right. She pondered the evidence as they walked, the downcast gaze, the way he shuffled next to her, the hand worrying something in his pocket. His quill, maybe. Her gut nagged at her.
You ought to say something.
“This is Bartrand’s fault, you know. Not yours,” she said at last. “I mean, there’s plenty of times I’ve taken the fall for Carver, brothers being what they are, but you’ve got nothing to fret over here. Unless it’s the food, in which case, I agree, I’m getting rather tired of hardtack and nothing.”
He trudged along, his mouth twitching to one side as if he wanted to say something.
“Come on,” she wheedled. He was starting to worry her.
“It’s not --” Varric let out a long breath. “It’s complicated.”
“I know.”
“Bartrand’s always been an ass, but this is… this isn’t him, Hawke,” he muttered. “I don’t know what it is -- greed? Magic? I’m out of my depth here.”
“Funny thing to say, given we’re in the Deep Roads,” Marian cracked, but he didn’t smile. He seemed as if he hadn’t even heard her.
“I know I’m not the one who locked us down there, but I don’t know. Still feels like it’s on me, that’s all,” he said, his face drawn. He shrugged. “I talked you into coming down here. Not Bartrand. I’m sorry.”
Marian gave him a hard look. “Well, if that wasn’t Bartrand back there, this isn’t you here. Self-flagellation’s got its perks, but it’s an odd fit on you; doesn’t go with your outfit. And to think, normally you’re such a style maven.”
A faint smile finally flickered across his mouth, almost reaching his eyes. “Yeah? Huh. Maybe you’re right.”
“Ahh, there’s that Tethras optimism,” she said fondly. “Now then. Onward and hopefully upward, yes?”
He chuckled. “Yeah, that’s the idea.” They picked up the pace, Carver and Anders having pulled far ahead of them. “Thanks, Hawke.”
“No worries, Varric. After all, what are friends for?”
-
Varric didn’t say anything the first night Marian stayed over at the Hanged Man. She’d had a lot to drink, she was tired, it made sense for her to crash in his overstuffed, dwarf-sized armchair, even if she didn’t really fit and the arms dug into the small of her back.
He didn’t say anything the second night. The gangs had been roving around more than normal. He understood why she didn’t want to climb the long stairs back to Hightown, alone, this time of night. She tried the rug beside his bed and woke up in the morning complaining about the wooden floors.
He didn’t say anything the tenth night. She’d run out of excuses to invent. Eventually she drank to the bottom of her glass, and all she said was, “Mother wanted the manor so badly. It’s… it still isn’t home.”
Varric just smiled at her. He let her take the bed while he took the chair by the fire. And the next day he put in an order for a human-length settee, the plushest one the merchant had to offer.
-
He’d never seen her look like this before. When Carver fell ill in the Deep Roads was the closest. But this --
She looked more ghostly than Leandra.
It was the second day, the dust settling, the reality sinking in. Marian was a jumble of long limbs, curled in on herself in the seat by the hearth; Varric sat a few feet away. The great hound uneasily guarded her feet. The manor felt more vast than ever.
“She never really knew how to be a mum, I think,” Marian whispered across the empty room. “Sometimes I hated her for it.”
Varric blinked. “Some mothers just know what to do. Suited to it, I guess. Others…” He left out the part about his own mother, turning yellow in her own sick at the end.
“But she suffered,” Marian said, still in that same broken voice. “She never deserved -- that.”
“No,” Varric echoed. “No, she didn’t.”
The crackling fire swallowed his useless words.
-
“Well,” Marian said, her feet swinging over the edge of the great stone steps outside the Chantry.
Varric sat beside her, his legs swinging much further above the ground. “Well,” he agreed.
“That might have gone better.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Varric. “I think the Qunari got something out of it.”
“Viscount Dumar might have a few words to say about that. Mother Petrice’s corpse probably would as well.”
Varric mulled this over. “Fair enough.” His boots dangled idly, their swinging stilled. “It’s going to be a mess. Scratch that, it already is. The Viscount’s son…” He whistled, shaking his head.
“He hadn’t wanted any part of this. And she had him, and those Qunari, killed to make a bloody point.” She buried her face in her hands. “It’s all another mess that I’m somehow deep in the middle of. Maker’s balls. What was that madwoman playing at, Varric?”
“Whatever it was, I don’t think the Maker’s anything had much to do with it.” He shook his head. “She wanted a war with the Qunari. It’s not looking good.”
Marian rubbed at her eyes. “This is an absolute shit show. And it’s going to get far worse before it gets better. If it gets better.”
He reached out, patting her knee. The weight of his hand felt good, a fact she tucked away for another time. Hm.
“Hanged Man?”
She nodded fervently, lowering her hands and giving him a rueful grin. “Hanged Man.”
-
“You look like hell, Hawke.”
“I look better than the other guy,” she said stubbornly. Dark circles ringed her eyes, fading bruises still visible on her face and arms, and she was still in bed, but she’d managed to sit up, which was a definite improvement. A veritable explosion of pillows precariously supported her, keeping her upright.
“Hasn’t Anders been doing his glowy thing? Or am I gonna have to have a talk with him?”
“He has been,” Marian said. “We mages might be magical, but we’re not miracle workers. Just because we can bend the laws of nature doesn’t mean we can ignore them entirely.” She stuck out her tongue and blew a raspberry at him. “I’m healing as fast as I can, honest.”
Varric winced, dismayed. This was after a week of healing? From Anders, the guy with a spirit supercharge and more talent for healing than any mage he’d ever heard of?
Shit. Shit. This was too damn close.
“Don’t look so pained,” she said. “You’ll make me feel worse if you treat me like I almost died.”
“That ignores the fact that you did almost die,” he pointed out, perfectly reasonably.
“Arguing with the recovering patient. Charming of you,” she said, coughing with the effort, her face twisting in a pained wince.
“Hawke, it’s time you faced the truth. I’m always charming.”
“You having anything to do with the truth? Oh now that’s absolutely rich --” She started to laugh, but the laugh quickly transformed into another wracking cough, one that made her double over. “Maker,” she groaned, panting.
He was at her side before he realized he’d moved, laying a hand on her shoulder as she struggled to catch her breath. “Take it easy now. Didn’t mean for the charm offensive to take you out,” he said hastily.
“You’re a bastard, Varric,” she wheezed. She draped her arm over him, leaning hard into him, forcing herself to take slow, deep breaths. “I hope you know that.”
He braced himself so that she was more secure, slipping his arm around her waist and helping her stay upright. “Guilty as charged. But you didn’t hear it from me.”
-
Varric kicked the floor, dust billowing out in clouds beneath his boot. The ghosts of Bartrand’s manor had faded, but Varric was still pale, the set of his jaw hard and unfamiliar.
“Want to talk about it?” Marian asked, already knowing the answer.
“Are you crazy?” asked Varric.
“Suppose it depends who you ask, doesn’t it?”
Varric glanced at the pouch at her waist, where the red lyrium’s glow faintly emanated through the fabric. He sighed. “Thanks for taking that thing.”
She shrugged. It felt warm against her hip. “It gives me a terrible feeling,” she said in a low voice. “You know the feeling you get, right before walking into a trap? Where the hair on the back of your neck rises before you even know why? That’s how I feel, thinking of you keeping this thing. It’s caused an awful lot of trouble. More than the two of us combined, and that’s saying something.”
“Seems like trouble follows that stuff wherever it goes,” he said, tilting his head to regard a dusty portrait on the wall. She could just make out the faint outlines of dwarven faces, one of them seeming a little familiar, if very young.
“Is that you?”
Varric snorted, which turned into a loud, forceful sneeze. “If you squint. Definitely not one of the better portrait artists in Hightown. It wasn’t all her fault, though. As Bartrand told it I couldn’t sit still to save my life.”
She peered at the dusty portrait. A towheaded, round-faced little boy stared back at her, looking uncharacteristically solemn. He was right. It didn’t look much like him at all.
“I’ll take care of the red lyrium,” Marian said. “What will you do with everything else?”
He turned away from the painting, no trace of a smile on his face. “I’m doing it,” he said tiredly, and he walked away.
-
It’s coming to a boil.
The phrase repeated in her head, a warning knell beneath her jokes, her chatter, her rare quiet moments. Coming to a boil.
Kirkwall had been seething for years now, a tempest in the making. She could feel it in the hard glares of the templars, the furtive paranoia of the mages, the denials of the Chantry. Something was coming. Something big.
She did her very best to ignore it.
It wasn’t too difficult, at first. She could pretend that things were normal when she settled into a game of Wicked Grace with her friends, or got out of the city for a bit of fresh air with her Mabari, or put out little fires in Darktown or the alienage. Pretty standard stuff. She knew how to deal with that.
She didn’t know how to deal with people calling her Champion. Or tense, dangerous audiences with Elthina, Meredith, Orsino. Or rumblings about uprisings and rebellions, strident whispers from both the templars and the mages.
So she found herself at the Hanged Man for the fifth time in a week, sulkily staring down her third pint, waiting for the sun to set and her friends to join her so she wouldn’t need to be alone with her thoughts.
It’s coming to a boil.
“You look deep in thought, Champion.”
“It’s been known to happen, on occasion. And don’t call me Champion,” Marian said as Varric climbed onto the bench beside her, a pint in hand.
“Don’t worry, Hawke. All in jest.”
“Damn right,” she said, finishing her pint. She cast around for the barmaid and nodded when she caught her eye. “How’s tricks, Varric?”
“Same old, same old.”
He looked just as world-weary as she felt. “Liar.”
He chuckled. “Takes one to know one.”
“Obviously.” She tossed a silver to the barmaid in exchange for another ale, and took a long draught. “You ever have those days where you’re just counting down the hours, hoping that somehow, some way, tomorrow will be different?”
“Something on your mind, Hawke? Not that there’s anything wrong with introspection, of course,” he said, taking a drink of his own ale. “You’re worried. About Kirkwall, I take it.”
“Is it that obvious?” She let out a huff. “Something’s brewing, Varric, and I don’t like it.”
“Well, you’re gonna hurt Corff’s feelings with that. He’s been working on this new crappy lager for months now.” His mouth quirked in a grin, one that she didn’t return.
“You know what I mean. You feel it, too, don’t you?”
His smile faded, and he nodded. “Yeah, I do. Why do you think I came over here? Distracting you is a great way to distract myself. Funny how that works out.”
Marian sighed into her ale. “At least whatever existential dread there is lurking about feels a little less nasty when I’m with you. You’ve always helped. That’s got to be something, don’t you think?”
Varric’s face had gone ruddier than normal. “That’s me, worth my weight in gold.”
“Is that a blush, Master Tethras?” she asked, her voice rising just a little too high.
“It’s the ale,” he said defensively. “Something really has gone wrong with that lager.”
Marian considered. “I think you’re blushing. And I think it’s because I said I feel rather better when you’re around.” She nibbled thoughtfully on her lower lip, contemplating things. “It’s true, you know. Has been for ages.”
How long? How many hours had she put in at the Hanged Man, hoping to see him? How many nights had she stayed over when going back to a vast empty manor seemed too hard? How many times had just the sound of his laugh lifted her spirits?
“Oh, shit,” she said.
“Oh really?” Varric asked. “Come to realize how wrong you were? Most would say I’m more of an annoyance than a comfort.” His flush deepened, if anything, but he leaned closer, his arm brushing against hers. Her heart beat faster.
“Shit, shit, Varric. I’m an idiot.”
“Hey! That’s slander about my favorite misfit, and I won’t hear it,” said Varric. “But now why would you say something like that? You’re a lot of things, Hawke, but an idiot's not one.”
She groaned, rubbing a hand over her face. “No, no, I’ve been quite daft. Argh.”
“If you’re trying to paint me a picture, it’s clear as mud.”
“I think I’m in love with you,” she grumbled. “Happy now?”
He froze. He looked up at her with hazel eyes the size of sovereigns, his cheeks flaming. If she hadn’t been so mortified it would have been funny, seeing him finally at a loss for words.
“You, uh -- you what?” he finally forced out. “Now that’s one I’ve never heard before.”
“Ugh, you heard me. I can’t believe I’ve been so dim. Why do you think I’m always hanging about here? It’s not for the bloody ambiance, it’s for the company.” She hauled her arms up to the table, resting her head on them and burying her face so Varric couldn’t keep staring. “I’m an absolute fool, Tethras. I hope I haven’t put you off permanently. Still friends at least, yes?” she asked, voice muffled in her sleeves. Oh, if she hadn’t put her foot in it.
For a horribly long moment the only thing she heard was the background chatter of the other patrons in the pub. Then Varric’s laugh started up, a low, deep rumble leading up to rich, rough chuckles. “You’re really serious,” he managed, as his laughter trailed off.
“Of course! You don’t have to rub it in,” she muttered.
“It’s just -- hey, hey. Would you look at me, Hawke?”
“So you can laugh at my ridiculousness? Oh, I must be a glutton for punishment.” But she lifted her head from her arms, her hair falling into her eyes, her cheeks burning.
“No, no, it’s not that at all,” Varric protested. He laid a hand on her arm and took a deep, long breath. He swallowed, then said in a shaky voice, “It wasn’t love at first sight. That’s the crap I put in Swords and Shields; that doesn’t really happen. But… I’ve loved you for years, Marian. And that’s the honest truth.”
“Oh,” she croaked.
Oh.
“That’s, ah, very interesting, Varric.” Her hand wrestled awkwardly with Varric’s until their fingers interlaced. That felt pretty good. It felt right. “Maybe we should talk about this?”
A smile spread slowly across his face. He opened his mouth, his eyes bright; he always did love getting the last word. Before he could speak she bent down and kissed him, his stubble brushing against her cheeks.
And for a moment, they didn’t say anything at all.
---
(end)
(for @veorlian , whose prompts were right up my alley!)
Thank you very much in advance!! <3 Here are my prompts:
- I love slice of life mutual pining friends to lovers fluff where it's snippets of Hawke and Varric together going on missions and spinning lies and just generally being incredibly important to each other while fully ignoring how important they are to each other
- I really enjoy stories that fill in missing parts of the story, so I'd love to see the things that happen in between acts. For example, Hawke going to visit Varric at the Hanged Man because their manor is too big and doesn't feel like home; Varric and Hawke going on low-stakes adventures together, and so on. Really, whatever you think might fit in the several years we didn't get to see!
- Varric and Hawke get into a competition for who can tell the most elaborate lie and one of them messes up and accidentally confesses their feelings and/or one of them decides to use the opportunity of a lie to confess their feelings
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Do I wanna know? | chapter nine
summary: a plan is a plan but sometimes you need to slap someone.
warnings: blood, violence, torture, kidnapping... you get the gist.
listen to: arsonist lullabye - hozier x2 (playlist here)
word count: 1.3 k
series masterlist + read the next chapter early on my ko-fi!!!
“Are you sure you got this?” you asked him as you stared at the door of your cell.
It wasn’t like you didn’t believe the Winter Soldier could do what you’d planned but it had been days since you’d received food or water, and although he had a lot more of the superhero serum in his blood than you, you were still a bit afraid that he wasn’t going to make it.
You’d explained to him that they would crack your head open, at least, that’s how Petrovich had worded it. They wanted to place a new experimental chip in your brain and you would be cut open to see if they could replace it with the old one you had currently that was neutralized by Yelena.
“Can you trust me?” Bucky stated as he turned his gaze to you.
Bucky knew he should’ve been thinking about the plan, he knew he should’ve been recalling every one of your indications to get into the place halfway on your usual path to the room where they had you but as he gazed at you he could only smile as he saw you glaring at the door, he couldn’t help but find beautiful how prepared and determined you were.
You noticed his gaze burning you after a few seconds and you glanced at him. You never thought particularly that blue eyes could be warm, they were beautiful but not warm. And yet as James ‘Bucky’ Barnes gazed at you, you knew that he had the warmest, most beautiful, comforting eyes you’d ever had the honor of seeing.
You could feel your cheeks getting warmer but you looked away. “Can you focus?” you bite back, a challenging smirk appeared on his lips as he heard you, his eyes twinkling in mirth.
“I am,” Bucky pointed out.
You gave him an incredulous eyebrow raise, and Bucky’s cheeks flushed. You watched him in amusement, waiting to see what excuse he would come up with but he didn’t say anything, he simply stay there looking at you with that same smirk. A few days ago, you would’ve seriously said that you hated the Winter Soldier and that your ultimate goal was to kill him but something had clearly shifted in your relationship. You’d always felt so broken and lost since you’d woken up, you felt so dead inside and not even Yelena could’ve prepared you for the gaping hole in your chest when you’d snapped out from your murderous haze.
It was tearing you apart, you didn’t get why it didn’t bother Yelena so much and although she had clearly helped you through it and you felt so calm by her side, it wasn’t the same feeling as with Bucky. Maybe it was the fact that he had it way worse than you, that made you feel a bit better to see that he was able to change, that you could see that he was grieving but that he could still live and do good while recognizing what he’d done. You felt somehow close and comforted by him, especially the last few days.
Then you heard the boots in the eerily quiet atmosphere. Both of you quickly tensed up and look straight, gazes determined as you waited for them.
As in the days before this one, you were aware that you’d fight but not in the same way. And so, you were the one who launched to attack first. It was fairly easy to jump to the guys, you grabbed a guy by the neck jumping as best as you could, and quickly threw him against the floor before landing backward, your back touching the chest of the other guys that quickly grabbed your arms and you squirmed from them but you’d done the part of the deal, now it was Bucky’s turn.
He launched as soon as they got you and started to drag you outside of the cell. He quickly punched one guy on the shoulder and threw him to the other side of the room, breaking the wall, easily. He put extra effort on that one before he was punched in his ribs by two other guys, they went one after the other before Bucky managed to elbow stroke one to the back of the neck but after that, he was left at the mercy of other six men that were waiting for him with their tasers. It took only one taser for Bucky to fall to his knees, on purpose, and now the plan had begun.
You struggled a bit as they carried you to the room where the surgery was supposed to take place. You’d been slipping in and out of consciousness fairly often the last few days, so you hadn’t really done any detailed recon as they dragged you. At least not until today, when you’d finally seen a small door where people were delivering some packages, you glanced at it until one of the guys slapped you as soon as he caught your glance.
You smiled after it, your cheek tingling from the punch but with a bright and bloody smile, you looked back at him.
Bingo, you thought.
It didn’t take long for you to reach the room, Petrovich's eyes on you the second that they dragged and quickly strapped you on the exam table as you grunted. Petrovich was standing there, surrounded by other doctors, arms crossed and a treacherous smile on his lips while he walked towards you. Petrovich grabbed your jaw forcefully between his thumb and index finger, almost as if it was an instinct you growled as you tried to push away his claws.
“Let’s play nice today, kukolka,” he said playfully while his grip just grew stronger, to the point that it became painful. “It’s a great day, you’ll come back to me today,”
“I’ll never be yours again,” you spat at him, snapping one of the belts that were holding you.
For a second you forgot about the plan and your mind acted on your own. You swatted your arm at him and scratched one side of his face, immediately Petrovich cursed in Russian and howled in pain as he held his face, his eyes widened as he realized your newfound strength while other men tried to knock you out. One with a taser and another one held your arm down and strapped you again, you growled as they did it but you were still feeling weak by the last few days of torture.
“You are still strong, a strong will,” he chuckled as he glanced at you while you let out a ragged screamed and trashed about as you felt a needle on your neck. “Not for long though,”
He quickly slapped you, even harder as he hit directly your nose. You hissed in pain while you started to watch the blood trailing out and slipping down your mouth. Then you felt him, how he touched your body with a blade of a knife and you squirmed, tears leaked from your eyes as you felt the unmistakable nature of his touch on you.
Kukolka meant doll.
You tried to move and break the straps again but your body suddenly felt too weak. Petrovich chuckled psychotically as he saw how you reacted. In horror, you realized that they’d drugged you, enough for your limbs to stop working for a moment. Your breath caught in your throat as you realized that you recognized the dead, empty and dangerous look in his eyes. He wanted you gone for good and you’d made a mistake by acting out. Your breathing was shallow, mostly because if you took a full breath -or even half of a full breath- you felt as if the air on your body would leave you completely.
You could only hope that Bucky would arrive.
**
author's note: AGAIN had to cut this chapter short but then again, chapter ten's good !!!!! I hope that you like it. as always thanks for reading and lmk your thoughts!!!
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taglist: @capswife @nohuyck @fluffydangerr @queenofshinigamis @missgurlbaddie @flannellover67 @brownlee-22
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[collaboration with @the-angel-of-filth]
From somewhere in the eye of the shark storm, a bright, yellow light sparked to life. As its glow began to overtake the area, the raging winds froze. The thousands upon thousands of sharks with glowing green eyes that were plummeting down to Earth from nowhere were suspended in the air almost instantly. In seconds, all the sharks, both fallen onto the ground and still above, dematerialized into sparkling glints of light. The weather cleared, and all tangible evidence of the sharks vanished.
Amari sighed in relief as the curse dissipated.
Specs, too, sighed. He looked more than a little worse for wear. Two large, semicircular wounds lingered on his body--one around his left thigh, one at his shoulder. He’d managed to pry both sharks off before they’d actually taken the limb, but the teeth had sunk deep: blood ran down his side in a river, and as he cradled his shoulder the stinging pain made his breath shudder.
“Thanks, Amari,” he mumbled, dropping one arm down to the cartridges at his hips.
“Of course,” they said, brushing themself off as they turned to face him and his wounds. “Specs, do you need me to heal that for you? I don’t want to just leave you like this,”
He was a little groggy, having lost a lot of blood over the past hour or so, so it took him a minute to locate his cartridge of medical webbing. “This is a little on the grievous side, isn’t it,” he admitted. Wincing as he tried to use his bad arm, he swapped out one cartridge for another as he said, “Uhh, how much of this can you heal before you start fading? This doesn’t feel quite on the level of ‘flying geezer just fell from the sky,’ but I can’t imagine this’ll be an easy heal.”
“Specs, please don’t worry about me,” Amari said as they unsheathed their ritual knife, “You’re the one who almost lost his limbs to sharks. I’ll be fine,”
Specs couldn’t help but chuckle at that. Dear lord, he was getting woozy. “Fair enough,” he said, turning his hurt shoulder their way. “Go ham, I guess.”
Amari could tell that they didn’t have much time to waste. They got to work, quickly slashing the palm of their hand like they’ve done many times before. Muttering in a language that Specs couldn’t quite make out, the slashed palm began to glow as Amari gently placed it on his shoulder. In a few moments, the pain dissolved in the warm glow and his wounds began to quickly heal up. His breathing settled and slowed, and he gave the fingers of his arm an experimental wiggle as he felt the skin closing.
“Thanks again,” he said, rolling his shoulder. After giving his leg a little bounce to test it the same way, he said, “Before I forget. Is there any specific reason Odyssia decided to sic a shark storm on me today? Or was she just feeling frisky.”
Amari tensed a little at that as they tried to think of a reason why Odyssia would suddenly attack Specs out of nowhere. A part of them felt they were somewhat responsible; this was their Doctor Octopus’s doing, after all. They sighed as they shook their head.
“I’m.. I’m not sure. Unless she started working with your Ock, I don’t really understand why she went out of her way to target you with a curse across dimensions.. I know that she finds antagonizing you to be funny for some reason but,” they trailed off, a sense of shame washing over them, “…I’m sorry about her, Specs. I shouldn’t have let her get like this.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said instantly, and maybe a little more forcefully than he’d meant. Softening up, he turned to them and said, “You aren’t to blame for her choices. Pretending you are is gonna do nothing but hurt you.” He tried not to drown in his own hypocrisy here, instead adding, “She antagonizes me because I have the most dramatic reaction to her bullshit. That’s all it is. Though, that said, I’m gonna do my best to pretend that this never happened.” With a slight joking tone, he said, “She doesn’t need to know that she sent me screaming halfway across the city. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Amari nodded, trying to quietly shove the ever present guilt out of their mind.
Specs smiled under his mask and gave them a friendly (if rather awkward) pat on the shoulder. “C’mon. I owe you lunch. Sky’s the limit, up to--” he checked his costume’s pockets “--seven dollars…and eighty-four ce--”
He stopped, frozen in place almost like he’d been put on pause. The constant, unearthly tingling in the back of his skull had sharpened in tone. Slowly raising his head, he looked off the rooftop and over the street they stood above. Amari noted his sudden change of reaction and followed his gaze.
A shark had bodily smacked into the hologram projector on the neighboring building’s exterior, so the holographic Mega-Mart advertisement flickered erratically above the city street. He squinted through it, scanning the sky, glancing to the left and right, trying to pin down that sharp, fast-moving buzz.
“...Something’s coming.”
“… I think I feel it too,” Amari muttered, their third eye’s gaze scanning the surrounding area.
One step back, then two. Specs craned his neck to see around the corner of a building, following the tingle with his eyes. It shouldn’t have been this sharp so far away, this dramatic. Whatever it was, it must have scared something in his brain far more than threats usually did. Adjusting one arm’s web-shooter, he concentrated and listened hard…until, in sync with the movement of spider-sense, something cut through a hologram a few blocks away. Something that swerved between buildings, banking and turning with incredible precision. Something that, for a fraction of a second, the light caught and revealed to be a humanoid shape standing upright.
Specs’ breath caught in his throat. “Amari, run.”
Amari wasn’t about to argue. They knew who this had to be from his reaction alone. But they did hesitate for a brief moment. “What about you?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, not fully believing it. “My limbs are back into working order, and there’s no way he could’ve planned ahead for this. I’d know if he’d had any communication with Odyssia.” He shifted his footing, tensing his leading leg in preparation to pounce. “I’ll keep him from killing anyone until his stupid manpurse is empty and then I’ll slip away. The Cluster’ll get a text from me once I’m safe.”
They nodded in acknowledgment. As much as Amari didn’t want to leave Specs to fight all by himself, they did trust him to know how to deal with this. But, they would leave Specs with one last thing. Pressing their bloodied hand onto the mirror on their chest, they pulled forth a hand made of light from the reflection, a mirror double of themself forming.
“Alice,” Amari said almost immediately, “Keep Specs safe.”
With that, they fled, leaving Alice standing silently by his side, ready to assist.
Specs, for his part, took a second to stretch his newly-healed leg and arm. Cracking his knuckles, he listened for the ringing of spider-sense to reach a fever pitch, then broke into a sprint and launched himself off the roof. The Green Goblin banked hard around a building and very nearly came face-to-face with Spider-Man’s fist. It was only the supervillain’s own super reflexes that stopped the fight from ending before it even began.
As Norman reeled back and swerved on his glider, Specs caught himself with two weblines and wove a quick spiderweb spanning the space above the street. He bounced in place as it absorbed his momentum, turning around fast to keep the Goblin in his sight, and as the first pumpkin bomb was lodged his way the mirror double of Amari snagged it with glittering webs and threw it aside. It exploded, not quite harmlessly, but without drawing anyone’s blood.
“I KNOW WHAT YOU MUST BE THINKING, PETEY,” shrieked the Goblin, his voice distorted and made shrill by the modulator hidden in his prosthesis, “BUT I ASSURE YOU, I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR LITTLE SHARKSCAPADE.” He cackled at his own pun, and Specs’ skin crawled.
“No, I know,” Specs called back, scurrying to the top of his spiderweb and getting ready for another jump. “You’re not that creative, Norman.”
The Goblin ignored the insult. “OH, BUT I’M NOT ONE TO LOOK A GIFT HORSE IN THE MOUTH.” He drew another pumpkin bomb out of his satchel. “AS LONG AS YOU’RE SO TIRED, I FIGURED, WHY NOT COME AND KILL YOU NOW? I’M AN OPPORTUNIST, YOU KNOW.”
Specs sighed and glanced at Alice, deadpan. Alice didn’t seem to acknowledge him, only remaining focused on the task at hand as they stared at the Goblin. As Norman threw his next grenade, Spider-Man and the magic mirror each leaped off the web and got to work.
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