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insomniac-dot-ink · 3 years

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Something is Coming

“Yes, ma’am,” a reserved voice said from the kitchen. “Thanks for picking up. We were looking for a dark sky site.”

Harmon hovered behind the couch in the living room like a visitor who didn’t know where the bathroom was and was too polite to ask. Cubby was in the other room with the landline held up to his ear. They were one of the last family’s on the whole entire block that still had a landline.

All the curtains were drawn but Harmon itched all over with a phantom burn. She wished she could break open the nearest window and feel the cool breeze across her skin. She didn’t want to see the street lights though.

“Harmon!” Cubby called and she snapped to attention. “She says the nearest one is over in Nevada. It’s called The Great Basin. You got that?”

“Uh huh!”

Harmon turned to pick up a yellowed Atlas from their parents attic. It smelled like mold and there were soft creases all across the oceans and land masses where it had been folded and faded away. She ran her fingers down one of these creases like she was feeling velvet before scanning the rest of the map.

“Found it!” Her voice was hoarse. She kept her finger on the Great Basin so she wouldn’t lose it-- like it might escape her if she let go. “It’s nowhere near Los Vegas.” Los Vegas was the only thing she knew about Nevada.

“How’s that help?” Cubby snapped at her before he said something else into the phone.

Harmon rolled her eyes. “Where we gonna stop for stuff then?” He ignored her. She was about to repeat her question when a soft rap came from the front door.

Harmon’s eyebrows shot up and she turned toward the sound. Two soft knocks came at the front door again and she thought of calling for her brother again.

Neither of them had bothered to lock the door with everything going on. It wasn’t that kind disaster. Harmon’s pulsed spiked with fear when the doorknob rattled and pushed forward. “Hey!” She made her voice big and fierce. “We got a baseball bat in here and I kn--” She stopped when a pair of big brown eyes looked back at her. Harmon exhaled. “Whatcha’ doing here?” She asked the neighbor girl with relief.

Marnie had to be only seven or eight and carried herself with a bird-like delicacy. She was never as loud as any of the other neighbors, but Harmon made of note of her. She was right next door after all and she always saw her scrawling with chalk on her driveway or watching ant hills out back with a type of reverence.

She stared at Harmon with the intensity of bugs right before they hit the windshield wiper. She was wearing an overly large hoodie with a hole in the sleeve where she had pushed her thumb through. Her jeans were ratty too and Harmon didn’t have the heart to ask if her mama knew how to dress or not. Her face was empty of everything but a small controlled frown and her grip on the doorknob was tight.

Marnie stood dully in the entranceway like a question. Harmon just gestured for her, “Come on now.”

The little girl exhaled through her nose before hurrying over.

Cubby came back into the room and glanced at the neighbor girl like he was less than pleased. He was a tall young man with limbs that were too long for him and floppy orange hair that fell into his eyes. He was supposed to get braces that year, but she supposed that didn’t matter anymore.

He put his hands on his hips and arched an eyebrow at her. “You pack?”

Harmon took Marnie’s hand and it was dry and firm in her own. “Course.” She nodded at her brother “She need to pack?” He thumbed at Marnie since their mama taught them some manners at the end of all things.

Marnie shook her head resolutely. Cubby looked at the ceiling like he was expecting it to open up and reveal something to him. He closed his eyes again. “The rest ain’t coming. Let’s go.”

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The road was straight as a horse's snout and the rumble of the truck made its way all the way up Cubby’s forearm to his elbows. His fingers were tight around the steering wheel: ten and one, just like his daddy taught him.

Harmon was sitting perfectly upright in the bucket seat and staring straight ahead at the nighttime back road. The other little girl-- Marnie, was huddled in the corner and attached to the door like cling wrap. She wasn’t sleeping despite the hour and her little chin was perched on the door in a way that must rattle her teeth.

Cubby glanced out the window. “There goes part of ORion's belt.” He announced to no one. There was a hole right in the middle of the constellation now, silent as you please.

“Guess he’ll have nothing to hold his pants up with now.” Harmon said in her usual monotone. Cubby thought she got it from their mama always telling her to ‘use her indoor voice,’ and now she had nothing but a flat table-top voice that you could place things on.

“Which one do you think will be next?” Harmon asked without much to it. “I dunno.” Cubby sighed. He didn’t know that many constellations to begin with, but they always had names and faces and a familiar feel to them. You’d be surprised what things you consider as “friends” until they were missing. “The dog one? His owner ain’t got no pants now anyway.” Harmon snorted. “Harry would follow you anywhere buck-naked or not.”

Cubby gave a chuckle and tried not to think about his own dog. “Maybe that’s why Sirius’ll be next . . .” He said in a reserved tone. “He’s following ‘em.”

Harmon didn’t say anything after that. She was staring at her lap.

It had started with the Seven Sisters. They were told not to panic since they said they are some of the oldest stars in the night sky and things like that happened. Sometimes things were just washed off the chalkboard and you couldn’t stop. They couldn’t stop nothing it felt like.

A small whimper came from the other side of the car. Cubby glanced over just in time to see a house approaching in the distance. It was a boxy kind of farmhouse built for being in the middle of nowhere. Cubby frowned.

Every single light in the house was on and all the curtains were open to reveal the honey-yellow light spilling out. He considered turning around then like it was a lighthouse telling boats to avoid the cliffs.

But it could be as bad as any other place. He heard New York City was lit up like a fireworks display. Maybe the rest of the country worse. Lights on. More houses as quiet as the grave. He paused as a cat looked back at them from the very top of the roof. It’s yellow eyes were reflected in his headlights and it seemed to be curled up there like a coiled snake. Marnie whined again and reached for the door handle.

They pulled over.

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Marnie wasn’t so sure how long they drove for. It could have been hours. It could have been days. She had been set loose much earlier-- like a kite with it’s string cut. Everything about her had been bundled up and packed away once she checked all the rooms in her house at least three times. Once she called her parents names over and over again and they hadn’t come.

A cat was in her lap and had been for awhile now. They all thought it might be a feral barn cat that would bolt the second they approached. However, maybe even cats knew what was happening. It was coaxed down and followed them into the car as docile as a lamb. Marnie had buried her hands it’s soft fur the second they began to drive again. It had closed it’s eyes and flicked it’s tail.

She named it Boots. Marnie seemed to sleep after that in an impossible kind of way since she thought she’d never sleep again. She woke again and everything was still gloom and empty road.

The car stopped with a burbling halt after they passed a large wooden sign. Her two neighbors-- both older kids, Harmon was at least a little closer to her age and Cubby a lot older, commented on finding “The Basin.”

The trees were tall and thin here with a stillness that gave her stomach cramps. It was damp with night by the time they stopped and they knew that it was time to get out. The cat hopped off her lap first to probably go do it’s business.

Harmon helped Marnie jump down and gravel crunched under her boots as she hit the ground. They went to the front of the truck and Harmon helped her clamber up the side of the car so they could all sit on the hood. Cubby was already tilting his chin up and staring up unblinkingly.

At least there were no buildings here. At least there were no more lights on in any houses. She closed her eyes at the memory of every lightbulb bursting to life in her own home as she hurried out the front door. She still didn’t understand how they hadn’t got her.

Marnie copied Cubby’s position and tilted her chin up. Harmon climbed up last and positioned herself in between the two of them as if they were arranging themselves by age. She took Marnie’s hand and then maybe her brother’s as well.

“There goes Cassiopeia.” Cubby murmured and Marnie blinked as a star right above their heads was abruptly smothered. A flame dipped in ink and disappeared as if it had never been there at all.

“Do you think,” Harmon seemed to struggle to form the words, “they’re being eaten?” Something was raw and young about the way she said it.

“Nah.” Cubby responded. “Can’t be. Nothing can eat up everything at once. It’s too big a universe.” Harmon nodded creakily. “Then what?” “Maybe they’re just tired.” He sounded tired himself. “It was just time.” Marnie shook her head and remembered the way everything lit up. Cities first. Then headlights in vacant cars, flashlights, rotting supermarkets, homes, and parking lots.

Marnie folded her legs up into herself. Boots the cat came back and jumped elegantly on the hood like it knew where it belonged, like even now it didn’t want to be alone despite everything. Another star blinked out. Marnie squeezed Harmon’s hand and unfolded her legs so Boots could curl up there.

“Maybe,” Marnie said the first words she had in days. “They’re sleeping so they can burn brighter again later.”

“Yeah, kid.” Cubby said and it was raw and young as well. “Maybe they’re just sleeping.” They watched as things disappeared around them and emptied out of light and substance. Marnie made sure to memorize the faces of the two older kids next to her. She made sure to take in the slope of their noses and hunch of their backs so when she woke up again after all this-- when they all blinked back to life, they would be with her there too.

So whatever came next would have them in it.

#flash fiction #absurdism #flash fic #writing #magical realism #apocalypse #found family #cosmic horror

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ace-in-a-shopping-cart · 3 years

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Stolen Moments (Love Letters)

Word Count: 5,848 CW: Mentions of violence, cursing, hospital

Gavin opened his messages, desperate to hear some news from Nines. Instead of getting a message from Nines telling him he was fine and ready to return home, he got an automated message from the repair hospital telling him he needed to pick up his personal effects, more information in an email to follow. Gavin switched over to his email and found a large file.

He sat down at his terminal, ignoring that it was his work device and he was on the clock, and opened it to find over two hundred messages from Nines, all addressed to himself. The email itself said that Nines, as his professional partner, was mostly his responsibility and property and that Gavin was responsible for his bills and the choice to repair or replace him. He needed to come to the hospital by end of day and make the decision.

Gavin scoffed. “I guess some things still haven’t changed no matter how progressive people pretend to be.”

He reread the last line until it set in that Nines’ life was in his hands. He jolted out of his chair, the seat rolling back until it hit the side of someone else’s desk, and rushed to Fowler’s office. He threw the door open, not caring that the captain was in the middle of a meeting.

Gavin didn’t bother with preamble, getting straight to his point. “Sir, I need the day off.”

Fowler sighed, moving things around on his terminal for a bit. “You’ve got days off saved up. Go ahead.”

Gavin thanked him, rushing out the door and to the repair hospital. He just about crashed through the doors and made a beeline for the receptionist. “I’m looking for an RK900 unit who goes by the name ‘Nines’. What room is he in?”

She looked up at him, expression bored. “Serial number?”

Gavin frustratedly gave it, having memorized it long ago, and waited impatiently to be told where he was. When told, Gavin didn’t bother thanking the receptionist before he was off to see Nines. It was agonizing having to wait for the elevator, even worse having to stand in it as it went up, his fingers tapping on his leg the entire ride. His eyes scanned the room numbers, getting frantic with the thought of not getting to him in time. When he found the room he’d been told was Nines’, he went directly inside.

Nines was alone in the room. He was lying on a white bed, his chassis exposed from his toes to his neck. His head and neck were the only things that still had his skin on it, looking for all the world as if he were peacefully sleeping despite the LED that kept a steady yellow light. Gavin sighed in relief at him being there, despite the numerous injuries he still sported, and pulled a chair over to sit next to him. He held his hand and grabbed his tablet from his bag.

“Alright, tin can. What’d you send me?” He opened the large folder, looking at the abundance of files that were inside it. Turning his head to Nines, he joked, “Any idea where to start?” Sadly, Nines stayed as silent and still as before, not a word to be spoken.

Gavin kissed the back of his hand, running his thumb over a crack in the plating. He turned his attention back to the tablet and scrolled down through the file names. Each one had a series of numbers as a name, something Gavin quickly figured out was a date. Scrolling through them, they were in chronological order. He only found it fitting to open the first one and go from there, wondering what they could be.

Detective,

The other day, we were talking on a stake out. I mentioned there being more to admire about you than to detest and have just now realized the error of not continuing that thought. I admire your work ethic, the way you have a single-minded drive to complete the case assigned to us. I appreciate how gentle you are with victims and those you like. You may not notice it but care is in every word you speak and every action you make for those you genuinely consider to be loved ones and the few victims we’ve spoken to. I’ve noticed your actions softening toward me, even as your words stay as harsh as they’ve ever been. I might be wrong, but it seems you’ve come to care for me yet wish to continue our ribbing as something more friendly. If this is your way of extending an olive branch, I am more than willing to accept it and will continue to banter with you.

Gavin smiled as he looked back at Nines. “Thank you so much for understanding me, you barely held together stack of rust and bolts.”

A voice laughed but it wasn’t Nines’. Instead, Gavin’s attention was drawn to the doorway where someone in a white lab coat, a small pin on the lapel reading ‘they/them’, stood. “I see you arrived.”

Gavin stood, laying the tablet on the bed but not letting go of Nines’ hand. “Who do I have to tell that this man is a person who deserves every right to live and fight as anyone else?”

They laughed again, coming inside the room to lean against a wall. “That would be me. I’m Ash Windlock, head of Simon Repair Hospital. I apologize if the message made it seem more urgent than it truly is.”

Gavin clenched his jaw, having to force himself to take even breaths. “What’s Nines’ condition?”

“I’m not going to lie. He’s in some pretty bad shape. We can only repair the body, not the coding and neural pathways he developed by being deviant. Right now, our best team is gathering to do a surgery, as repairs have taken to being called, as soon as we can. I’ll update you when that happens.”

Gavin’s hand held Nines’ just a bit tighter. “How well do you expect that to go? What do you mean, you can’t repair his code?”

“The surgery is expected to be a full success. When an android becomes deviant, their code changes in ways the programmers weren’t equipped to handle. It would take too long for them to learn the new coding that is specific to every android just to be able to repair them without fear of damaging the new coding and, thus, the deviant. Even if that were possible, RK900s are extremely rare in this part of the world, not many having been found and awoken. So, it’d take even longer to figure out his specific neural paths. That’s time we don’t have. So, while we can do everything in our power to repair his chassis and wiring, we can’t do anything about his mind palace unless he does something about it himself. He went into low power mode when he was damaged and we don’t know if he’ll come out of it after the surgery.”

Gavin nodded, struggling to process the amount of information that was just pushed onto him. “Okay, yeah, I’ll sign whatever permission waver you need me to when it comes to the surgery as I’m closest to next of kin while Connor is out of town. Just, charge the bill to the DPD, he’s under their employ.” Connor should be back by that afternoon but they didn’t need to know that.

They nodded. “I’ll be back in a moment with the paperwork for next of kin.”

Gavin sat back down, fidgeting with Nines’ fingers as he usually did when nervous. “While we wait,” he spoke to Nines, hoping it was like a coma where he could still hear him, “how about I look at another one of your files?”

This one was a video, a few days after the writing. It didn’t seem like much, just a video of Gavin flipping through some files while he worked. There were captions on it, little things being picked out. Gavin's bouncing leg, how his dominant hand was tapping a tablet pen against his fingertips and knuckles, the half full cup of coffee that Gavin had sitting on his desk, the mess of a desk that he knew like the back of his hand. Other things were noticed too, the way Gavin’s brow was furrowed as he concentrated, the clump of hair that’d fallen over his forehead, his nose wrinkling, the slight redness on his fingers from the repeated tapping of the pen, even the creases of his jacket were picked out as important. The video couldn’t have been more than two minutes of Gavin working but it said a lot about what Nines thought about him at that time.

Gavin looked back up at Nines, lying so still on the bed he would have looked dead to anyone else. “Did you really have a crush on me back then, toaster?” His voice was light and teasing. He wanted Nines to be awake, to tell him to stop with the android jokes, to tell him Gavin had been crushing long since Nines had, to tell him all sorts of things.

A video. Gavin walked down the stairs, Nines staring up at him. Suddenly the scene paused and became monochromatic, as a white outline of Gavin reached the bottom of the stairs, a grey outline of Nines leaned forward to kiss his cheek. The outlines reversed until the white outline matched with Gavin again and the scene unfroze, the world filling with color. Gavin passed Nines and the android turned to follow.

Another one, edited to follow that. Gavin sat at his desk. The world paused and faded again as a grey outline of Nines approached with a coffee cup, kissing the top of Gavin’s head and placing the cup on the desk before leaning into him and running his fingers through his hair. The images reversed and instead Nines simply handed him the cup, Gavin giving a brief, “Thanks.”

Three more scenes similar to those followed in sequence, where the grey outline tried to interact in a romantic way with the white outline before Nines inevitably didn’t act on those thoughts.

Gavin sat and stared at Nines, his grip on Nines hand tightening just the slightest bit. “You should have told me sooner, dumbass.” His voice was soft, softer than he ever spoke to anyone besides Nines.

Windlock came back in with a tablet that Gavin had to fill out. Other repairs Nines had previously had, if he knew who did those, if he knew who originally built him, signing a bunch of things that came with medical power of attorney. When he handed the tablet back, he was told they’d operate in a half hour.

Another video. This one was different, footage of a garden. Gravel crunched under footsteps and animals were heard but not seen, water. Nines stopped by a pond and glanced down, brushing a stray strand of hair back into place. His shirt had a simpler collar than normal and was a lighter shade of black. He leaned back, continuing on the path. Images of Gavin appeared along it, some sitting on benches doing random actions, others walking beside Nines for short periods of time. One of them came up to Nines and started talking about the case at the time, Nines participating in the conversation.

Gavin looked from the tablet to stare at Nines. “Were you dreaming about me?” His voice was quiet, bewildered yet flattered.

The next ten files were similar things, Nines’ dreams about Gavin and videos of Gavin doing mundane tasks that wouldn’t be considered special in any way. At least, none that Gavin could tell. As far as he was concerned, the videos of himself that had been overanalyzed were sweet but he didn’t understand why Nines kept them.

Soon enough, a group of people came in and took Nines away to the operating room. Gavin was allowed to stay in the hospital room but was warned the operation would last several hours. He reluctantly put down the files Nines had addressed to him, files he was quickly realizing were simply labeled with his name and may have been misinterpreted as for him when they were just about him, and pulled out a book instead. He tried to lose himself in a plot line but was too anxious to do so.

Calling Tina got him nowhere, her phone off while she was on patrol. He’d taken the day off to be with Nines so wasn’t technically allowed to work on case files. Besides, nothing felt the same without Nines being there to help him. So, he reluctantly pulled up the files again and selected the next one, a video. There seemed to be a lot of those.

Gavin smiled as Nines approached, coming to stand next to him on his balcony. They were quiet for a moment, both looking out at the city. Nines looked at Gavin, his sensors again cataloguing small things about his appearance. “I need to tell you something.”

Gavin looked at him, eyes trusting. “Shoot.”

Nines’ eyes shut briefly before he looked at Gavin again. “I’ve developed feelings for you.”

Gavin blinked, his posture changing from relaxed to attentive. “Okay, that’s something.” He took a deep breath, letting it out with a laugh. “I guess it’s ironic, you telling me that just as I realize something about myself.”

Nines head tilted to the side. “What would that be, Detective?”

“I’ve, somehow, also developed feelings for you.” He shook his head. “I dunno how I’ve done it, but I’ve come to really care for you.”

Nines took a step forward, towards Gavin. “What does this mean for us?”

Gavin shrugged, looking up at him. “What do you want it to mean?”

Nines leaned down. “I would enthusiastically pursue a romantic relationship with you if you say you would like that.”

Gavin smiled, leaning up to kiss his cheek before heading inside. “I wouldn’t say no,” was tossed over his shoulder.

In the top right corner of the screen, Gavin’s name came up highlighted in blue. Under it, highlighted in white, the word ‘companion’ changed to ‘lover’. Nines followed Gavin inside.

Gavin didn’t realize he was crying until a tear dripped onto the screen and he frantically pulled his sleeve over his hand to wipe it away. “Damn android,” he muttered, not truly angry with him.

They were slow dancing. Gavin’s head rested on Nines’ shoulder, one hand placed on his other shoulder while Nines had a hand on his waist, their other hands clasped together. A small pop up in the corner of the video identified the song as Can’t Help Falling in Love by Elvis. They were turning in a slow circle as the notes played. It was a peaceful moment until Princess walked into the room, screaming for food, and the charm was broken with laughter. Nines pulled Gavin into a kiss briefly before Gavin went to feed the cat.

Gavin took a deep breath. He remembered that night, remembered the hard day before it and the cuddles on the couch afterwards. He’d never been able to remember what song they’d been dancing to, it blurring into just another generic love song at the time. He wondered if they’d ever get the opportunity to dance to it again.

Gavin,

Every day, my soul rejoices in being able to see you, to wake up to you being there with me. I want it all. I want the quiet domesticity that comes with waking near you, that comes with you making breakfast while I feed Princess. I love being able to get ready for work with you, even if that means we end up discussing the cases in the shower and while you shave. I love being able to work with you, to have you as both my work and personal partner. I enjoy getting you coffee as you look over the case files, to make sure the desk is still in the organized chaos you left it in, your files and trinkets spilling over onto my pristine desk. I probably enjoy that more than most would think I do. However, I love watching you from afar as I wait for the coffee, watching the way you sit and interact with your environment, how you hold yourself while you read.

There’s a hidden beauty in the way people do things when they don’t think others are watching, the little mannerisms they pick up that are just for themselves and are all their own. I’m so glad you’ve let me into your life enough to feel comfortable showing me those and I hope that I never betray that trust.

I love being able to drive home with you, to relax after a long day and curl up with you. I relish the fact that you will fall asleep in my arms, that you trust me enough to keep you safe while you’re unaware of the world around you. I love being able to have you fall asleep on the couch and trust me to carry you to the bed, the ability to fall asleep beside you.

Gavin, darling, I don’t know what I’d do without you in my life. You’ve been a driving force for me, a guiding light. Whether you realize it or not, you’ve influenced so many of my choices. Thank you, dear, for helping me find life in deviancy, for helping me find love in turmoil.

Gavin wiped a tear from his eye, vision turning blurry. Nines didn’t usually use pet names for him, sticking to ‘Gavin’ and ‘Detective’ to the point that the latter felt like an endearment. It felt nice to see the endearments from him. He really hoped Nines would pull through and be okay. He couldn’t imagine living life without him at this point, he relied on him so much. He shifted in his seat, trying to get a bit more comfortable, before clicking on the next file.

A video. This was a memory that Gavin could fill in the smaller details for.

Nines was on his back on the couch. Gavin was laying on top of him, arms curled around Nines’ sides. His head rested on Nines chest, their legs entangled, while Nines’ hands carded through Gavin’s hair and over his back. They were watching an old rerun of some cop show that not even Nines bothered remembering. Nines’ shifted, kissing the top of Gavin’s head. He hummed, holding a constant note for longer than a human could.

Gavin looked up at him, chin resting on Nines’ chest. “Why do you do that?”

“Do what? Kiss you?” He chuckled. “Because I like to.”

Gavin smiled but pressed his hand to Nines’ side. “No. The humming thing. It sounds like a cross between a cat purring and the whirring of a fan. Are you okay?”

Nines nodded, smiling. “It’s kind of like a cat’s purr too in that I only do it when I’m content and safe. It’s also a way of doing a self-diagnostic of my systems as it tests both vocal modulator and fans.”

Gavin leaned forward to peck Nines on the lips before laying his head back on his chest.

Gavin sniffled, wiping a tear from his cheek. He hoped to get the opportunity to lay with him like that again soon. He believed Nines was going to pull through this, that he was going to get through the surgery fine and that he was going to come back to him. He had to.

“Detective.”

That sounded so much like Nines that his name was halfway out of Gavin’s mouth before he realized it was Connor, not Nines, that was standing in the hallway with his hands behind his back. “Oh. It’s just you. What do you want?” His voice was flat, none of his usual bite left.

Connor smiled, taking a step into the room, closing the door behind him. “Officer Chen overheard some of your conversation with Fowler and logged into your computer to gather information. She sent that information to me and I just now arrived to do anything with it. Scans indicate that you haven’t eaten in the past twelve hours. I suggest we deal with that first. What do you wanna eat?” His LED swirled yellow as he probably pulled up a list of nearby restaurants.

Gavin sighed, feeling the exhaustion of the day kick in. “At this point, you can pick. Give me whatever you think is best. Just! No fish, and no zucchini.”

Connor tilted his head. “That’s not in any medical files you have available. Am I correct in assuming that’s personal preference?”

Gavin nodded. “Can’t stand the texture of either of ‘em.” As he fully tuned into the real world, he pulled his shoulders back and grimaced at the sounds of all the machines and the buzzing of the lights.

“Okay, there’s a Chinese restaurant nearby that has some meals that look good. What do you want from there?”

“Uhh, sweet and sour chicken with noodles.”

Connor nodded. “I’ll go get that for you. In the meantime, how is my brother?”

Gavin filled him in on the details before Connor went to grab the take out for him. While he waited for his food, he opened the next file, another letter. This one was small, as if it were hastily written. From the date and what Gavin remembered, it was from a time where they’d been covering a case with a lot of violence and they’d been split. The letter reflected Nines’ frazzled emotions during that time as it wished Gavin good health and it was a small goodbye if Nines didn’t make it. Gavin was glad he had.

Another round of videos detailing Gavin doing mundane things followed the letter, many of the scenes now domestic as well as professional.

Connor came back and put the bag near Gavin. “Did you need me to stay? Tina only told me to check on you, not stay with you. If you want me to go, I will.”

Gavin thought about it. A year ago, he would have snapped for Connor to leave instantly, not seeing him as anything but a machine with nothing to offer. Now, he knew Connor was alive and actually trying to reach out. Gavin let a reluctant smile drag a corner of his mouth up. “You can stay, if you want. I’m not sure if you’ve got the time for it but you’re more than welcome.”

Connor smiled, gracefully sinking to sit on the floor. “I cleared my schedule to be at your disposal.”

Gavin groaned, letting his head roll back. “Am I that bad?”

Connor shrugged. “Hank was taking the rest of the day off already so it’s only natural for me to as well. Besides, Nines is kind of like my little brother. I want to be here.”

Gavin took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes before Gavin picked up the tablet again and looked at the next file.

Gavin,

Happy first anniversary. I don’t know if you expected us to last this long but I’m grateful we have. I’m grateful for every second I get to spend with you. I don’t know where I would be right now if I hadn’t met you, if we hadn’t been partnered. I’m so glad I have you as both the best detective partner I could ask for and a most amazing lover. It warms my soul every time you forget I’m not human, especially when it’s tacked on to an android joke. Those instances make me know you care so deeply for me and love every part of me.

You taught me to take life slowly, to savor what I have. That sentiment has been applied to every part of my life. I savor stakeouts, holding you in my arms, feeding Princess, even doing paperwork and being on the hunt. They are all good to me simply because they are part of my life and because you are there.

I don’t know what life would be like without you. I’m so used to you being with me every step of the way.

Gavin looked up as footsteps approached the room, hoping it was Windlock with news on Nines. The feet passed the room, the person casting a shadow across the frosted glass of the door, and kept on their way.

A video. Nines was sitting on the couch, reading, when Gavin’s voice called from the bedroom. Nines’ HUD measured the level of distress in his voice as high and he went to investigate.

Gavin had torn the bedroom apart, a pile of things on the bed. Nines scanned him, noting the disheveled appearance and lack of caffeine along with his elevated stress signals. “What’s wrong, Gavin?”

Gavin turned to him, tears in his eyes. “I can’t find something I need and today’s been bad enough.”

Nines nodded. Gavin’s unmedicated ADHD could be a lot to deal with after a long day. He stepped forward, pulling Gavin into a hug, his hands rubbing soothing circles along his back. “What do you need me to do?”

Gavin sighed, melting into the contact and stability that came with the hug. “Could you scan the room for my tablet pen?”

“Of course.” Nines moved his head and time froze, going down to grey and white. He located the pen easily enough, it’s black shape standing out starkly. He chuckled and released Gavin to pick it up. “It was right beside your tumbler.”

Gavin took it, wiping the tears from his cheeks. “Sorry for making such a fuss over something so small.”

Nines reached out, his hand cradling Gavin’s cheek and thumbing at his tears. “Nothing is too big nor too small for me to help you. I understand your stress and I know the way you get. I’m perfectly content to help you find something right in front of your nose.” To punctuate the statement, he leaned forward to kiss Gavin’s scar.

Gavin wiped a tear from his eye. “Come back to me soon, tin can.”

Connor looked at him. “Did you say something, Detective?”

Gavin shook his head. “No, nothing.”

The door opened and Windlock came in. “Detective Reed, the surgery is complete.”

Gavin sat forward in his chair, resisting the urge to pace. “How did it go? Is he online yet?”

They shook their head. “Unfortunately, his neural network is still non-functioning. However, the surgery was a success. His chassis is intact and functioning again, every bicomponent in its place. His skin isn’t on as he’s not online to do that. Would you like to see him?”

Gavin stood, gathering his things. “Yes, please.”

Connor stood and approached Windlock. “Is there anything more you can tell us about his status? Have you at least figured out why he isn’t online yet?”

They shrugged. “I’m as in the dark as you are, RK800. Any insight you can spare would be helpful.”

“Okay, I’m ready.” Gavin slung his bag over his shoulder. “Lead us to him, please.”

Nines was almost the same way as how he’d left Gavin three hours ago. His skin was retracted below the neck, letting the white plating show, and he was lying so peacefully that for a moment Gavin almost thought he was just sleeping. Gavin walked over to the chair closest to the bed and sat down hard, leaning forward to take Nines’ hand. “I’m here, toaster. I’m right here.”

Connor placed a hand on his shoulder and Gavin was distantly aware of him asking for Windlock to leave them be. Gavin’s entire focus was on Nines even as he knew there were only a few more files in the folder to get through.

He held onto Nines’ hand with one of his own, letting his partner know that he was there and wasn’t going anywhere, and pulled the tablet from the bag by his feet.

The next file was a series of pictures. It seemed Nines was sentimental in that regard. All the way from first meeting up until just a night ago, they were pictures of Gavin doing various things. It started as just Gavin doing work at his desk, moving to crime scenes and the break room. Photos of him doing mundane tasks and midchase. The time stamps moved past their getting together and the pictures became more domestic. Gavin waking in Nines’ arms, sleeping on the couch, Princess coming home for the first time. He’d documented her entire growth process from stray kitten to spoiled adult.

Gavin smiled at Nines. “You really do have a soft spot for that cat, don’t you? Maybe it’s about time we get her a playmate.”

“I’ll leave you two be for a moment. I need to speak with someone.” Connor slipped out of the room.

Gavin opened the next file, shifting to sit beside Nines on the bed now that Connor was gone.

A video. Gavin was cooking breakfast as Nines fed Princess, their usual routine. Nines came up beside Gavin, kissing him on the cheek. “How’s the bacon coming along?”

“Pretty much done.”

“Good.” Nines turned the burner off and took the spatula from Gavin’s hand. Somewhere, music started to play and Gavin chuckled as Nines pulled him into a dance. It was sweet and short before Gavin was released to finish making his breakfast.

Gavin smiled, recognizing that morning from only a few days before the incident. He gripped Nines hand just a bit tighter as he clicked on the last file.

The last video. Nines was standing on a roof. Gavin was down on the ground, watching out for their suspect. “Hello down there.” He muttered to himself, not loud enough to carry.

He stepped away from the edge, pacing the length of the roof. “Is it weird to think that I’m bored? I’m an android with the internet at my fingertips, I should be able to wait for a few minutes.” He sighed. “I guess that’s the trouble with living and working so closely to you, time is meaningless and a minute is too long for you.” He chuckled. “You’re so used to moving so fast that slowing down is a difficult task for you. That’s okay, though. I like it that way.”

The door to the roof burst open and Nines sprang into action, launching himself into a fight with their suspect. They grappled for a moment, both trying to pin the other and get a better grip. In the end, Nines backed them toward the edge.

“I now know,” he was still muttering. “No matter how much time has passed, no matter how much time will pass, you truly are the love of my life. This is why . . . I’m doing this.” He took a final step backward, diving off the roof and taking their suspect with him.

Gavin sat in shock as the video ended, almost waiting for it to finish or replay or do anything but leave him there with that information and the knowledge of why Nines had been damaged almost to the point of no repair.

He looked to Nines, laying so still on the bed. “Why? Why’d you feel the need to do that?!” He released Nines’ hand to stand. “There could have been some other way! You could have called me! You could have used lethal methods!” He hit Nines’ chest with a fist too weak to do any damage to a human. “You don’t need to sacrifice your-damn-self just because you feel like it!” He knew he was shouting but he didn’t care.

A hand touched his arm and Gavin jolted to look at Nines. His eyes were open and his hand was hovering in the air. “I knew you would catch me.” His voice was weak and full of static but Gavin was so happy to hear him he cried, tears spilling down his cheeks.

Laying down, Gavin threw his arms around Nines. They lay there for what felt like an eternity and an instant, simply holding each other and comforting themselves that the other was alive and safe. Nines ran a hand up Gavin’s back, cupped the back of his neck, then began to softly card through his hair. His free arm curled around Gavin and pulled him close, holding him and feeling him and making sure he was real. Gavin pulled one arm down, curling it by his side and grounding himself by grabbing a fistful of the bedsheets, and let the other rest over Nines’ torso and had the hand sit on the white chassis of Nines’ shoulder.

“Did you look through the folder?” Nines’ voice broke the silence, not filled with as much static as before.

Gavin nodded, turning his head to look at the tablet resting innocently on a nearby table. “I watched, read, and looked at every single file in that folder while wondering if it would ever be added to again.”

Nines pressed a kiss to his neck. “I’m sorry, Gavin. I should have warned you or tried a different path.”

Gavin shrugged and turned back to rest his head on Nines’ shoulder. “I’m just glad you’re safe.” He paused for a moment. “The engineers said they could repair your body but your mind was too damaged for them to do anything with.”

Nines’ head rested against Gavin’s, his hand never slowing in Gavin’s hair. “I know. I heard bits and pieces of it, especially toward the end of the surgery and just now in the room. While they were spending all that time fixing my chassis and biocomponents, I was working on my coding.”

Gavin laughed, his jubilance at Nines being okay bubbling up. “An AI that fixes its own code, would you fucking look at that!”

Nines chuckled. “The irony isn’t lost on me, Detective. However, it’s simply the world we are living in where an android is capable of modifying their own code. Still, it was hard and taxing work to rebuild my own functions line by line. I shall be back to myself in no time at all, I assure you.”

A knock at the door caused them to abandon their conversation. Gavin turned onto his back to better see who came in before calling for them to enter. Connor stuck his head in, eyes lighting up at the sight of Nines. “You’re awake! I’ll go get Windlock, you two stay put!” He shut the door and left them with the sound of his fading footsteps.

Nines let his head fall back against Gavin’s and his hand hold Gavin’s, interlacing their fingers. “Who did he go get?”

Gavin did his best to explain as he sat up, cradling Nines against him. Connor came back with Windlock, who gave Nines a clean bill of health and said he was free to be discharged. Gavin ran home and got him some clothes as Connor dealt with the paperwork.

That night, Nines recorded another instance of Gavin falling asleep and marveled at just how lucky he was.

I don’t currently have a taglist for DBH but you can check out my masterlist before sending an ask to be added!

#gavin reed #adhd!gavin #rk900 nines #reed900 #dbh connor #jeffrey fowler #tina chen #hank anderson #(tina and hank are only mentioned)#mentions of violence #fluff #angst #fluff and angst #established relationship #tw hospital #ace writes

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samsflannel · 3 years

Text

So I ran a poll on my twitter asking this: If the car crash at the end of season 1 never happened, and John never died, would he have killed Sam in season 4 once he started drinking demon blood? And the answer that won: Yes.

So, I decided to write a ficlet about it. Read under the cut.

You can also read on Ao3.

AU: John lives to see Sam drink demon blood and go “darkside.”

“This is what I warned you about, kid.” The gun in John’s shaking hands is cocked. Fully loaded. Safety off. Pointed at-

The plastic gas station bag Dean was holding drops onto the floor past the threshold of the cabin door, and one of the water bottles rolls under the worn, wood table.

“What the fuck,” he says. Not a question. Sam’s asleep. Dead asleep on top of the sheets, book open across his chest and one of his stupid health nut breakfast bars unwrapped next to his hand. “What are you doing. Where have you been?” he whispers, hand itching for his gun.

“I told you, Dean,” John says, serious as all hell, gritting his teeth, sweat dripping down his temple. “You knew, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Dean insists, but it shivers down his spine, makes his arms go cold. Sam stirs in his sleep and Dean’s feet ache toward the open door. “Let’s just go outside for a minute, talk about it before Sammy wakes up and sees that piece pointed at him.”

John takes a minute, his shoulders dropping, a sigh pushed out of his chest, but he lowers the gun and clicks the safety on, stuffs it in the back of his pants. Jerks his head toward the door, c’mon, then.

Christo, Dean whispers when he closes the door behind them- but John doesn’t react.

“Dad, what the hell,” he shouts once they make their way around to the side of the cabin, leaves crunching under their boots. “Where the hell have you been for the last year? I’ve been looking, asking other hunters- how the fuck did you even find us out here?”

“One question at a time.” he presses the bridge of his nose between his fingers, breathing hard.

“I’ll ask as many questions as I want,” Dean pushes, stepping forward, anger blooming up in his belly suddenly. “You show up out of nowhere when we haven’t seen you in over a year and you’re pointing a gun at my brother.”

John looks up at him. The circles under his eyes are dark and heavy- he looks different. “Your brother isn’t your brother, Dean. Not anymore.” He licks his lips, lowers his voice. “I heard things from other hunters. Disgusting things, evil things. And I thought- no.” He shakes his head, toes the dirt. “It can’t be. So I tracked you two down. Watched him. And I saw-”

He looks like he’s going to vomit, nostrils flaring, closing his eyes. “I saw what Sam did to that demon. Sucked it dry. I saw the blood on his face, Dean, he looked-” he pauses. Breathes and makes eye contact. “He’s not human anymore.”

“You’re wrong.” Dean shocks himself with how desperate his voice sounds. His hands tingle, his palms start to sweat- “I mean, you saw wrong. Sam would never-”

“Bullshit.” John cuts him off loud, and some visceral part of Dean flinches. “Don’t lie to me, Dean. You know. And I know that you know, so let’s skip that.”

Dean stills. Looks back and forth between his father’s eyes, pleading. But not denying. And then- hurt, face hardening. “So that’s why you came here? To waste your own son? And in his sleep, too, you don’t even have the sack to-”

“First of all, you don’t talk to me that way, I am your father.” He says it matter-of-fact, like it’s enough of an explanation. John gets in his space, toe-to-toe, middle finger pointed at his chest. “Get your head on straight. I told you two years ago what would happen if you didn’t control the situation and here we are with Sam chugging demon blood like it’s water.”

“I was dead.” Dean looks him right in the eyes, leaned up on his feet, eyes wide. “Not sure if you remember, but I was in hell. For months. And you let Sam walk. Knowing how broken he was, knowing he would have done anything-”

“You never should have made that deal, Dean. It was stupid and reckless and suicidal. But you made that choice. And Sam made his.”

Dean sits back on his heels, mouth tight. Shaking his head. “What was I supposed to do.” He searches John’s face. “Let Sam rot? You don’t understand. You don’t even know how much I couldn’t do that.”

John nods, solemn. “I get that, son. I do. But it would’ve been a helluva lot better than what I’m gonna have to do now.”

Flames lick Dean’s insides, his shoulders squaring up again. “You’re not gonna do shit. Look, dad, I’ve seen it too. I know it’s bad, but Sam, he-” he searches for the right words, but comes up blank. Huffs. “We’re gonna fix it. He’s gonna be okay.”

“It’s gone too far already,” John insists, almost shouting. “Sam’s gone. That kid you know, he’s so far off the reservation he’s hit the dead end, and there ain’t no turnarounds. You get that, right?”

“No, I actually don’t,” Dean spits, scrubbing his face, then slapping his hands down on his pockets. Shrugs. “He’s still Sam.”

John stops, then. Shakes his head a little, smiling, looks at his feet. “God,” he says. “Yeah.”

Dean furrows his eyebrows. “What?”

John shakes his head again. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to pull the trigger. You two-” he stops himself, like he doesn’t want to finish the sentence. He meets Dean’s eyes again. “Just let me handle this, kid. It’s not gonna be any easier for me, but we can’t let him hurt anyone.”

“Dad, why do you think we came all the way out to this bumfuck nowhere cabin?” Dean spreads his arms out. “There’s no one here for Sam to hurt. No blood for him to drink, no demons, no nothing.”

John pulls his gun from his pants. “You know, I heard other things from those hunters. Things about you and your brother that I don’t-” gun at his hip, he bites at his mouth, looks at the ground.

Dean swallows hard. Blood rushing all through his chest, climbing up his throat under his skin. “That’s not-”

“Don’t,” John says, final. “Just. Just don’t. I can’t.”

They both take an awkward pause. The knife in Dean’s jeans is burning a hole in his back pocket.

He nods his head toward John’s hip. “Put the gun away, dad. You’re not going to kill Sam, alright? We’ll figure this out.”

“I’ve got it figured out already. Stay out here, you don’t have to watch it happen. We’ll give him a hunter’s funeral-”

Dean brings his foot up and kicks the glock out of John’s hand, flicks his knife open. Jams it right up against John’s throat.

He takes a shaky breath. “I can’t let you do that,” he says, almost a whisper. He presses the blade flat, not trying to cut him- not yet. “Walk away.”

John’s face remains stone-serious, cold as hell. “I’m not gonna hurt you, son. You’re not the one who needs to be stopped.” He glances down at Dean’s arm, held steady at his neck. “So you go ahead and do what you need to do, but just know that you’re making the wrong choice letting evil run free.”

“Not everything is as black and white as you want it to be.” Dean swallows again, heart somewhere down in his belly. “Maybe- you know, maybe I used to think like that too. Good or bad. That black, dividing line between us and them.”

“This is as clear-cut as they come, Dean-”

“You’re wrong.” Tears creep up in Dean’s eyes, his nose burning, and he blinks them back, tries to fucking focus. “Sam is-” he tries to think of the right words. He’s never been good with words, with expression. That was always Sam’s wheelhouse.

He settles on: “Sam isn’t evil.” He focuses on the blade, not able to look John in the face for some reason. “The thing inside of him is evil. But he’s kind and smart and a helluva lot stronger than you or me. But I guess you never wanted to see that.”

John sighs. Doesn’t respond. Fear is catching in Dean’s throat, strumming across his spine.

“Is there any chance I can talk you out of this?” Dean’s lip quivers, tears stinging his eyes again.

John gives him a look that’s almost sympathetic. Then- understanding. Or acceptance. Dean’s not sure.

He tilts his head back a little. “I’m afraid not, kid.” He says it quietly. Soft. “I’m sorry.”

Dean nods. “Then I’m sorry, too.”

The blade cuts clean, sharp, but John still gurgles on his own blood, hitting his knees hard, leaves crunching under him- and the blood, God, there’s so much, spitting from his throat in rivers, and Dean steps back so it won’t splatter.

Fuck, Dean thinks. Fuck. John stops struggling, twitching after what feels like an hour but is really only seconds. And Dean falls to his knees, too, pukes right there in the grass, hands burning with how hard he grips the ground.

He sits there for a while. It’s so quiet. The air tastes like copper. The sun begins to set, heavy and warm over the forest around him.

And then he pushes himself up. Drags John by the boots as far as his legs will carry him- tomorrow, he’ll get a shovel. Do right by his old man.

Sam’s still asleep when he comes back in, turned over on his side with the book thrown across the floor. Dean toes his shoes off, lets his jacket hit the wood floor.

He tucks himself up behind Sam, nose pressed into his back, takes a huge breath. Tries to get his hands to quit shaking.

“Dean?” Sam tilts his head back a little, stretching his legs out. “You alright?” He slurs. “Didja go to the store?”

Dean nods, eyes wide open. He pulls away from Sam, then- lays on his back so Sam won’t think something’s up. “Yeah, Sammy, I did. Got that Campbell’s soup you like.”

“Nice,” Sam says, yawns. Dean’s chest feels like there’s a gaping hole, unfurling at the edges. “Sorry for falling asleep. You want me to go get some firewood for the-”

“No,” Dean says, a little too fast. Sam turns over, eyebrow raised. “I mean, uh- no. It’s fine. I’ll take care of it.” He smiles at him, the way he does when he’s about to say some stupid shit. “You need to catch up on your rest, princess, don’t let me stop you-”

Sam tries to whack him with his pillow, but Dean catches it before he can. “Dick,” Sam says.

Later, when Dean gets up to grab wood for the firepit so they can cook dinner, Sam says: “Hey.” He’s watching The Goonies on the shitty, box TV they managed to get working.

“Is for horses,” Dean retorts, easy, distracted with his boot laces.

Sam does that bitchy little sigh he does when he’s annoyed or trying to say something. “Seriously. Dean, I-”

Dean looks over at him.

“Thank you. For everything. That you do for me, I mean. For us.”

Dean raises his eyebrows. “Don’t get too mushy about it.”

When he gets outside, he walks faster and faster until he’s running, cold air biting the tips of his ears until he falls at the foot of the forest and heaves, nothing left to lose from his stomach.

#enjoy!! this took me about a day so please reblog if you like it!#supernatural #samdean #john winchester #spn au #spn ficlet #wincest #wincest ficlet

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yeojaa · 4 years

Text

ANGELS & AIRWAVES (w. jjk)

He's never met you but you know how he sounds when he wakes up from a nap and his greatest fears. You know the way he sings after a shower and that he could be mistaken for a dying seal when he's laughing too hard. The best part? You don't judge him for any of it - including the fact he's a filthy Widow main. He might just love you.

alt summary. Jeon Jungkook has a big fat crush on a girl he's never met.

pairing. jeon jungkook

genre + rating. fluffy crack. general, for now.

warning / tags. long-distance relationship, crushes, canon compliant (ish), eventual happy ending, gaming, gamer!jungkook, strangers to lovers, friends to lovers, overwatch. tags are hard. :(

reading. n/a. a three part one-shot.

word count. ~2750

part ii.

JUNGKOOK’S ROOM Sunday, 15 March, 2020. 2:01 AM.

He falls for you in between the tireless teasing, the laughter that sinks into his ears and replays like a highlight reel. It happens when he leasts expects it, when he's got his face pressed into the velvet of Yeontan's fur and you're cooing over voice chat, whispering sweet nothings to the manic panic pup. It comes in the moments he's not expecting it to, when he's frustrated and unbearable and you're as sunny as always, spilling yellow paint across the doors he tries to keep shut.

Bit by bit, day by day, he finds himself thinking of you more.

First, it's wondering what you're doing while he's half-asleep and on his way to the studio. Do you look as tired as you sound? What colour is your hair and how does it stick up when you've just rolled out of bed? When you yawn, do you stretch like a cat? He thinks you do, if the sounds you make are any indication.

Then it's asking himself whether you might like the same things he does, from horror movies to carnival rides. Would you hold his hand as you made the drop, stomachs leaping into your throats? Would you scream? Would it sound anything like that terrified pterodactyl noise you make when you're spawn camped by a Roadhog? He doesn't consider the fact that he doesn't even know if you're in the same city and you'll likely never meet - bound to the servers of Overwatch only.

He thinks about all the things he'd like to do with you. Video game nights filled with butter-tipped fingers and spilled popcorn. Walks with your family dog - Natto - you'd told him about, all fluffy white fur and dark teddy bear eyes. Sunrises on the rooftop of his building, because you had the worst insomnia he'd ever seen and what better way to spend your endless waking hours than with him.

Jeon Jungkook knows he'll probably never get any of these things, but he lets himself daydream anyway.

Like now, for instance, as the two of you sit in another queue at 2 AM. You just woke up and you've got that tell-tale rattle in your lungs, words sluggish and lacking any real intent. He imagines you look the way you sound - tired and a little out of it, with barely opened eyes and sleep-loosened limbs.

"How'd you sleep?" He asks softly, crossing his legs beneath him and raising his arms high above his head in the same instance. The bones of his body realign, ridges of his spine clicking into place when he knots his fingers together and pulls taut.

"You know - the usual," you muse, apathetic. It's always the same.

He doesn't question it any further. He had once or twice, when you'd first started talking and he'd noticed the way you were always up at inhuman times. One grumbling response had told him enough - your schedule was what it was and no amount of remedying could fix it.

There's a beat of silence before he hears rustling and then the loud, inescapable sound of an electric toothbrush. You don't bother to mute your microphone, not that he minds. He simply sits quietly, scrolling through his phone as you go about your "morning" routine.

"How was your day?" You're settled back at your computer, he thinks. The acoustics sound far less like that of a bathroom.

"I had the day off, actually." He'd used it to edit some footage and record a cover. He hasn't posted it to Twitter yet - there were certain times he was supposed to, to maximize visibility - but he's excited for when he does. It's a song that's been stuck in his head for weeks, all thanks to you.

"Woah - you didn't work today?" There's genuine surprise in your question, rounded syllables that pop off your tongue in an explosion of shock.

“Right?” He laughs a little, short and sweet.

Despite his carefully crafted facade, there were certain plot points that just stuck, intrinsically weaved into his day-to-day whether he liked it or not.

His jam packed schedule, for instance.

To you, it’s the result of stretching himself too thin between teaching at his friend’s dance studio (where he also apparently moonlights as a personal trainer) and working as a videographer for his media-involved friends. Not that you know any of them. No, no. All the work he does is for the little guys - none of those big companies like BigHit or JYP. Jungkook’s just your average Joe behind the camera.

“What did you do all day then?” You’re still in awe, little flecks of wonder threaded throughout like glittering gold yarn.

“Hung out. Did some editing. I’m kind of behind.” That was an understatement. He’s working on footage from six months ago, trying to get it out before they head on tour and he won’t have the kind of time he has now.

“Probably spending too much time gaming.”

“Yeah, probably.” Not that he minds, or that he’d change it. He savours the time you spend together, even if it has kind of messed up his sleep schedule.

“Sorry not sorry,” you quip, seemingly reading his mind.

“You should be,” he retorts with laughter that builds in his stomach and echoes out of his chest. “I don’t think I’ve had a good night's sleep in weeks.”

If you hadn’t had this conversation a handful of times before, he thinks you might be offended. Instead, he can practically hear you roll your eyes - imagines your optic nerve nearly severs with the intensity of it - and grins.

“Don’t kid yourself - you know I’m the best thing about your nights!”

You’re not wrong. “You’ve been lied to.”

“I’m suing!”

“I’ll have my lawyer contact your lawyer.”

“Wait, what?”

The two of you have done what you always do - talked yourself into a tizzy that has you both laughing, sound crackling across the airwaves. It’s nonsensical and silly but it feels good. Your bond shines with it, glitters prettily between you.

Thank god for Overwatch.

You return the conversation to a semblance of normalcy first. “Did you listen to that song I sent?”

“Yeah.” The briefest pause. “It was terrible. Hated it.”

“Oh, shut up!”

“I’m kidding. It was really good.” Jungkook doesn’t tell you that he’s had it on repeat for the past few days, saved to the private playlist that’s filled with the rest of your song recommendations.

“I know!” You’re preening as if he’d just complimented you, clearly pleased by the praise. He supposes it’s a pretty good endorsement regardless.

“Got any more for me?”

“I should just make you a playlist.”

He ignores the way his heart skips a very real beat, mimics the erratic rhythm of his fingers on his keyboard. Because he’d absolutely love that.

“You should.”

“Really?” You sound uncertain but maybe - just maybe - a little hopeful. He might also just be imagining things, as he so often does with you.

“Yeah. Why not?” It comes nonchalantly despite the rushing in his ears, the wave that threatens to drown him. He can feel emotion in his chest - winged and distracting. A kaleidoscope of butterflies fluttering away.

You’re quiet for another second. It feels like an eon. “Okay, yeah. I’ll start one and we can just add to it together.”

BIG HIT ENTERTAINMENT’S GYM Thursday, 26 March, 2020. 6:30 PM.

“You sound like a meathead,” you say, off-hand and disinterested.

He loathes the grunt that squeaks past his teeth as he gently returns the dumbbells to the floor. Cue a generous chug of water and a near death experience when the liquid goes down the wrong pipe.

Loud coughing crackles through his airpods before he’s addressing you. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re grunting like a caveman.”

If your first comment hadn’t offended him, this one does. Jungkook scoffs, tonguing the interior of his cheek as his brow furrows. Weights are returned to his hands, rotated above each shoulder as he resumes another set of presses.

“Do you even workout anything other than your fingers?” He’s making a conscious effort not to make a sound, breath exhaled sharply through his nose. It’s harder than he cares to admit but he’s also not about to give you an excuse to tease him further. You already had way too much material.

“Don’t shame me!” You really don’t sound that indignant.

“So, I’m right? You’re a big couch potato who’s just jealous of my hot body?”

Now you’re incredulous. It’s one of his favourite sounds because it comes draped in laughter, dancing around his head in the form of cartoon hearts.

“Did you just say ‘hot body’, Jay?”

“Maybe I did. What of it?” He sniffs - he’s picked it up from you over the months - and your amusement doubles, giggles crashing into each other in their haste.

“You are so, so weird.” There’s a tenderness in your voice that he’d like to live in. It wraps him up like a hug, tugging at his feeble little heartstrings.

“Weird and hot.”

“You can’t just say that!”

“Why not?” If anything, you’re the one person he can say it to. With you, it’s the funniest joke he’s ever made. It’s playful and silly, with no rhyme or reason. He doesn’t have to worry about it being misconstrued or held against him.

“You just can’t! Only other people can say it.” You sigh dramatically, from your chest. “Do I have to teach you everything?”

“Everything but being healthy, probably.”

“Har har har.”

He can tell by how the words roll off your tongue, muffled and lacking clarity, that you’re eating. He wonders if you’ve made pancakes - you’d been complaining about craving them just two days ago. There are no tell-tale crunching or slurping, so he knows it isn’t your usual double whammy combo of ramyeon and Choco Boys.

“I’ll have you know I used to run.” Something about the way you say it makes him believe you, even though he wants to mock you a little more.

“In gym class doesn’t count.”

“I used to run with Natto, you ass!” Okay - so that actually sounded legitimate.

“Why don’t you still then?”

“There was an incident once.” You’re sipping on something - likely coffee with oat milk and two pumps of hazelnut syrup. It doesn’t matter that it’s dinner time and most people would be winding down for the evening. “Because of my insomnia, I’d run at odd hours. One day, some weirdo stopped me while I was running along the river. He didn’t hurt me or anything—” A part of him thinks you’re downplaying it but he says nothing, only waiting for you to continue. “—but he followed me home. I made the mistake of telling my parents and they freaked out so…”

“So no more running by yourself.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“I’d run with you.” It doesn’t mean much, but it’s the thought that counts.

“Thanks, Jay.”

Not for the first time, he wishes he could hear his name - his real name. Just once.

“JUNGKOOOOOOOOOOK.” It eats up every ounce of space of the gym, filling the room with the resounding boom of it. How it manages to be so loud, he’s not sure. He wishes it weren’t. There’s no way you haven’t heard it.

Especially not when it comes again, deafening even to his occupied ears.

“JUNGKOOOOK-AH!” Namjoon now, right as the double doors fly open.

Jimin’s barreling toward the alarmed maknae as he shouts. “WE’RE DOING A VLIVE!”

Jungkook feels like his insides are melting - his internal temperature spiking with embarrassment and worry and something that chants oh no! over and over in his head. The tops of his ears are burning, as is the column of his throat. A quick glance in the mirror confirms his suspicion that he is, indeed, bright tomato red.

“Jay?” You repeat once, twice, when he doesn’t immediately answer. “Everything okay?”

He moves with a speed he doesn’t expect, weights unceremoniously dropped on either side of him before he’s tearing his AirPods out. “I’ve got to go. Sorry!”

He doesn’t end the Discord call a moment too soon, Jimin upon him in the next instant. The smaller dancer is draping himself across Jungkook’s shoulders, the widest shit-eating grin on his pretty face.

“Want to join us for a VLive?”

“No. I’m busy.”

“Busy with your girlfriend?” Jimin’s wiggling his eyebrows suggestively. He only stops when Jungkook shifts aggressively, tearing himself out from underneath the other.

“Not my girlfriend!”

“But you wish she was!”

He can’t deny that, so he doesn’t bother, instead seizing his discarded weights with an embarrassed scowl permanently etched into the planes of his face. He’s reracking them - because god, he’s not an animal - when he notices Jimin making his departure, that teasing smile replaced with something soft and edging on concern.

“What’re you going to do when we’re on tour?”

Jungkook blanches then. You’d become such an undeniable part of his everyday life that he hadn’t even considered what it’d mean when he was busier than now, unable to spend late nights gaming with you.

But Jimn’s already gone, leaving him and his thoughts alone.

JUNGKOOK’S ROOM Friday, 27 March, 2020. 12:05 AM.

It’s close to midnight by the team he logs on. Realistically, he should go to sleep. He’s clean and worn out and his bed is calling to him like a siren at sea. But you’re sitting alone in the channel, streaming Overwatch for no one to see, and he can’t just leave it at that.

He needs to say goodnight, like he always does.

“Coming for my title as Headshot God?” The quip’s off his tongue before you have a chance to acknowledge him, your laughter the first thing he hears once he’s connected.

“I’ve been waiting in this queue for seven minutes. Seven!”

It’s really not that bad. The rare times you’d both queue for DPS were nearly double that.

“Patience is key,” he teases, slumping into his chair as he watches you click through your Hero Gallery. You’re cruising seemingly aimlessly, roving through the different skins for your mains (Mercy, Ana, Genji, Ashe). The silence between you is comfortable, interspersed only by the occasional munching he can only assume comes from the carrots you seem to inhale.

For all the junk you ate, you were somehow also weirdly into vegetables.

“Patience sucks,” you retort, matter-of-fact.

“You know what else sucks?”

It’s a rhetorical question and he knows you know, but because you’re you, you start listing things off just to get under his skin. “Spiders? Undercooked samgyupsal? Not having coffee? Your jokes?”

If he weren’t laughing so hard, he might’ve given you shit for making fun of his comedic genius. He really doesn’t understand how you think he’s the unfunny one when all you do is crack puns.

“I was actually going to say me,” he finally manages in between those high pitched cackles of his.

“Wait, why?” You’re used to him having witty comebacks.

Edge of enamel worries his bottom lip and Jungkook can taste cherry Chapstick and what would be bashfulness, if it had a flavour. “For earlier.”

You scoff, your own tinkling laughter tearing him out from inside his own head.

“It’s okay, goofball.”

He appreciates how laidback you are, never holding anything against him. Not even when he hangs up on you or accidentally spams you with memes when you’re trying (and failing) to sleep. “No. I’m sorry.” He says it earnestly, with all the meaning he can muster.

MATCH FOUND flickers across his and your screen and you’re loading into hero selection. He knows you’ll be too distracted once the game starts, so he’s grateful when you laugh again, sweet as summer.

“Nothing to be sorry about. Just tell me everything’s okay and we’re even.”

Inhale, exhale. Try not to tell her you have the biggest, stupidest crush on her, he tells himself.

“Everything’s okay.” And he means it when he says it, though they aren’t the words he wishes he could say.

“Good.”

You’ve chosen Genji, He smiles to himself when you join voice chat and the rest follow, greetings filtering in from your team members.

“Good luck.” You don’t need it. He still likes to say it.

“You have an early day tomorrow, right?” Leave it to you to remember his schedule even when he doesn’t.

“Yeah, pretty early.”

“Then go to bed! I’ll still be awake when you’re up.”

He lingers on that fact - holds it tightly in his hands so it can’t slip away. You’d be there in the morning, just like you always were. Knowing that stirs those same butterflies in his chest, words stolen by the overzealous beating of their wings.

You read his silence like they’re your own thoughts, “I’m always here for you, Jay.”

“Goodnight.”

"Sleep sweet."

notes. this chapter is set four-ish months following the first, in case that’s not clear. :)

tag list. @teawithbucky

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starkerforlife6969 · 4 years

Text

Starker - Angel Fire

Tony is an Angel-Hunter, and Peter is...

Peter Parker is beautiful.

Then again, all angels are. Tony’s been following him for a couple of days now, his latest mark. He’s seventeen years old, one of the youngest Tony’s ever encountered, but really, that just makes him easier to kill.

Not that there’s anyone around to teach him how to fight anyway. His mother is human, and Tony’s a good guy, so he’ll make sure she’s not home when he kills Peter. She’ll mourn, of course, which is a shame, because she isn’t his real mother. His real mother’s an angel- hopefully killed already- and now Peter’s here, pretending to be her child. Pretending he can feel real, genuine human emotions. Pretending like he doesn’t feed off the souls of others.

Tony feels for her.

So, he waits and watches and follows.

Peter doesn’t have many friends which doesn’t surprise him. Angels are horribly standoffish beings.

What does surprise him is that even as he follows Peter in every shadow, he never sees the boy feed.

Well, he is a young angel. He doesn’t need as much as the older ones.

Tony wonders how many humans this one has killed.

The perfect opportunity presents itself on a Saturday morning. The mother’s out of town, and Tony sneaks into the apartment by quietly busting the lock, his gun in his pocket, as the sun begins to peak over the horizon outside.

It’s nearly seven am.

The apartment is still and warm when he enters, and he closes the door behind him silently. It’s painfully normal looking. Throw pillows on the couch, homework on the kitchen counter, left overs in the fridge. They’re struggling for money, that much he knows. At least the mother will only be feeding one after he’s done.

Right on cue, he hears Peter start to stir, so he presses himself behind the sagging armchair and the curtains, and watches.

Goddamn, he’s seen a lot of beautiful angels. But Peter Parker takes the cake. He watches as the boy ambles into the kitchen, rubbing one eye with his dainty fist. His skin is smooth and flawless, like a pearl, and his eyes are the warmest brown with flecks of honeyed gold. He’s wearing these skimpy little silk shorts; white with little painted dandelions, showing off those long legs and shapely thighs, and a flimsy button up sleep shirt that exposes the lovely sharp collar bones he has.

Goddamn. Such a shame.

The boy potters around the kitchen, eyes still half-closed, yawning every so often, and his thick, hickory locks tumble into his eyes, and Tony levels his gun, and takes a deep breath.

It’s second nature now, to see the lavender glow that shines around angels. It’s like a fuzzy aura that hovers just over their skin, he sees it without trying. But the halo? That takes effort. A lot of mental strain.

He draws on it now. He’ll need to see the halo. It’s the only way to kill an angel. A bullet will shatter it, and they’ll drop-

When he opens his eyes, he nearly drops his gun.

There’s no halo.

Above those brown curls, is nothing. Just air. Almost like a…

He steadies himself, and tries again. His head starts to ache with the strain, but still nothing.

He can feel his fingers trembling. What the hell? How is this- how is this possible-

And then, he gapes, as he watches Peter dig his hands into a box of Lucky Charms and inhale them noisily. He crunches happily, letting out little moans of contentment and…

He’s eating. He’s eating- human food- with no one around to prove anything to- just for- just for-

For one, absurd moment, he wonders if he got it wrong. Maybe he’s been tailing the wrong person, but-

no. He can still see, clear as day, the lavender light that glows over Peter’s skin. The sheer beauty of him, the elegant slope of his neck, the long flutter of his eyelashes- unnaturally stunning.

What is he?

There’s a clatter, as cereal spills all over the floor, and Tony looks up to see honey-gold eyes staring at him.

Oh shit.

Peter screams, immediately bolting for the door, and Tony strides over, and grabs his arms.

“Please!” Peter cries, yanking ineffectually, tears blossoming like crystals, “please, please! I don’t- I don’t have anything, oh god-“

If Angels can’t feel, how is- how is Peter crying? How is he shaking like a leaf with fear so tangible Tony is crushed with guilt?

But the lavender light- this boy is-

“Please,” Peter sobs, pulling harder, “please, I won’t tell anyone, I won’t, I swear-“

Tony can’t think. He doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t-

He twirls the boy in his grip, and Peter startles, and Tony gets him in a sleeper hold.

Peter struggles, and then slumps.

Tony can’t breathe. He draws in deep, worried breaths. What the fuck. What the fuck is happening?

No halo, there’s no- there’s no halo- he eats, he cries-

The dawn makes everything looks clean. The air is fresher, and birds are tweeting as they start to wake. The city is almost silent; the calm before the storm; the cacophony of car horns and exhaust pipes yet to come.

Tony carries Peter to his car without any problems at all.

Apart from when he gets there.

The front seat? The back seat? The boot?

He’s not sure. The Jeep is pretty high off the ground, and the back lights are doubly secured- no chance the kid could kick them out.

But- if he’s not an angel, and Tony’s vision is just a little wrong, he doesn’t really want to put the kid in the trunk.

Jesus, he tries not to feel the skin under his fingertips. Peter’s soft thighs are over one hand, his shoulders in the other as he carries him bridal style, and the slip of a thing is so light, so silky.

In the end, he picks up front.

He buckles the kid into the front seat and then zip ties his hands under the dash, before getting in. Peter’s limp body slumps against the window, and it looks like he’s dozing.

He’s a gorgeous sleeper. His lashes cast shadows against his sharp cheekbones as the sun moves farther up the sky, and his chest rises and falls languidly, like a princess in a story.

Tony peels off into the road and curses himself as he does so. The mother will be back in two days- but she’ll know something’s off before then. When Peter doesn’t answer her calls. She’ll go to the police- there’ll be posters- missing persons.

This is sloppy. Tony doesn’t like sloppy. But he doesn’t know what to do.

He could report to his boss. It’s a long drive up to Canada, but he could make it, he thinks. Hopefully. If the boy’s story doesn’t go national.

His fingers are deathly tight around the steering wheel, and he tries to get ahold of himself. Glancing to the right, Peter’s breathing gently, and the sound soothes him, as dangerous as that is.

The lavender light still glows beautifully from his skin.

Fuck. Tony exhales slowly, trying to get himself under control. Canada it is.

***

The kid wakes up a few hours before Connecticut.

He makes a soft noise, before he seems to remember everything, and he jerks desperately- letting out a whimper when the zip ties cut into his delicate wrists, and he spins to face Tony- eyes huge and petrified.

“Oh my god,” he whispers, yanking frantically, “please- oh god please-“

“Settle down, kid.” He warns, even as his stomach ties itself in knots. He better not be abducting a fucking innocent child. “I’m not gonna hurt you.” Yet, he thinks uncomfortably. If the boy is an angel. But how would they even kill one without a halo?

“Why? Please,” he begs, “we don’t- we don’t have any money, please, my mom- she’ll-“ his breath becomes fast and shallow, “she’ll freak out, Sir- please-“

He’s tossing and turning in the passenger seat now, his wrists already marked red with how he’s trying to free himself, his gaze wild and manic like a trapped animal, as he watches the motorway whirl past. “Calm down,” Tony tries, keeping his voice low, “kid, calm down- stop- jeez, just stop wriggling!”

Peter screams, ear-piercingly loud, and Tony nearly swerves the car into oncoming traffic.

“Shut the fuck up!” He snarls, and is immediately rewarded by silence.

He doesn’t look over for a while, heart pounding. Sweat is budding at his temples.

But when he does look, his heart breaks.

Peter’s got his knees drawn up to his chest, and his cheeks are red with tears- eyes glistening, and he’s muffling his sobs into his arms.

It cuts Tony up. “Kid, please,” he says, more softly, reaching out- only for Peter to flinch away in fear. He’s shaking so bad Tony thinks he might burst.

Okay. This isn’t going to work.

He pulls over the next chance he gets, and parks the car.

Peter doesn’t move. He’s still crying.

Tony rubs his face with his hands, feeling sick. The kid can’t be an angel. The fear and sadness is so strong as it rolls off him in waves Tony feels suffocated by it. He wants to let the kid go. Just drop him off here. But the lavender still hovers over his skin.

“Peter, listen.” He begins, but the boy only makes another choked off sob.

“You know my name.” He weeps, and Tony groans-

“Kid, kid, look at me. Seriously. I’m not gonna hurt you.”

“You were pointing a gun at me,” Peter wails, cringing into the window. Tony swears he can almost hear the frantic jack-rabbiting of the boy’s heart.

“You’re not human, Peter.” Maybe the truth will do it.

Peter squirms. “You’re crazy,” he whispers, looking like Tony’s a delusional kidnapper, gaze swinging to the window, desperately searching for help.

It’s not an unfair assumption. “Peter, I know you have no reason to believe me, but I’m an Angel-Hunter, okay? I kill angels. I was sent to kill you, but, you don’t have a halo.”

Peter looks at him for a long moment, before he hollers for help again and tugs at the dash so hard that the plastic creaks warningly. “Help! Help, please, somebody!”

Tony pinches the bridge of his nose. Thank god for his soundproof car. “Believe me or not, this is what’s gonna happen: I’m driving us to Quebec, that’s where my boss is. She’ll tell me whether or not you’re human, and if you are, you can go home, if you aren’t…” he shrugs, “I’m going to have to kill you.” How they’ll do that if the boy doesn’t have a halo, he still doesn’t know.

Peter seems to pause at that. He stops shaking so much. He looks at Tony tentatively. “If your boss says I’m human- you’ll let me go?”

“Probably reimburse you for your trouble,” Tony promises. “She’s very good like that.”

“Okay,” Peter whispers, nodding, even as his cheeks glisten with tears. “Okay, so-so- we just need to go there, and then you’ll- you’ll let me go?”

“If you’re human.”

Peter nibbles on his plush bottom lip, before he seems to sag into the seat. “Okay,” he whispers hoarsely, “let’s go to Quebec, then.”

Not that he has any say in the matter, but Tony doesn’t point that out. He doesn’t want the kid freaking out again. He just nods, and starts driving.

Silence, as it turns out, is not Peter’s strong point.

The kid’s a babbler. Asks a ton of questions. If Tony were a real kidnapper, he’s not sure he’d have bothered keeping the boy this long. As it is, he answers tersely, and then flips the radio on as an excuse not to answer anymore.

Of course, it doesn’t deter the boy.

“So, how long have you been angel hunting?” Peter asks over the thrum of a pop song.

Tony shrugs noncommittally. “Born into it. My dad was.”

“And-and what do angels do that’s so bad? Aren’t they meant to be, like- good?”

He snorts. Common misconception. “Not these ones. They look like people. But more beautiful. They feed on human souls. Drain the life out of someone and kill them. The death looks natural. It makes them hard to track.”

“Feed on human souls?” Peter repeats; horrified. “Oh. We didn’t learn that in Religious Studies.”

Tony almost cracks a smile. Damn, the kid’s a little cute. “There’s a lot you don’t learn at school, kid.”

“But- if they look just like humans, how do you catch one?”

“You have to train. Every human has the ability to see auras, but they have to harness it.”

“Auras?”

“A light that hovers over people. Humans have white, Angels have purple.”

Peter pauses. “You think I have purple?”

“I’ve been doing this for over twenty years, Peter. You do have purple.”

Peter looks down at his arms, and squints a little, before sighing. “Wouldn’t I know? If I was an Angel, I mean? I don’t kill people.”

“I know.” Tony frowns, “therein lies the problem.” Peter eats food.

On cue, the boy’s stomach rumbles.

His huge eyes look at Tony hopefully, before they quickly dart away. But it’s been a bit of a morning, and he hasn’t eaten bar a handful of Lucky Charms, and Tony has technically kidnapped him, so he follows the route to the nearest drive-thru.

Peter’s relaxed now, thankfully. Doesn’t seem so frightened. Seems desperately hopeful. He’s the optimistic sort, then. Awfully trusting, too. Naive. Innocent. It’s troubling.

“What do you want, kid?” he asks, as he pulls-up.

Peter vibrates with excitement. “A chicken wrap? If they- um have it?”

Tony rolls his eyes, and turns into the microphone- just before he does, he gives Peter a look. “You’re smarter than to cause a scene, right, Pete?”

Peter nods, pressing his lips together. He looks as if the thought hadn’t even crossed his mind.

Tony doesn’t want to, but he can’t risk it.

He takes his gun out, and sets it on his thigh. Peter’s eyes go wide, but he nods his understanding.

Tony turns to the microphone. “I’ll have three chicken wraps, a cheese burger, a black coffee and…” he turns to look at Peter, sizing the boy up. He’s sweet. “and a double chocolate milkshake.”

Peter smiles so beautifully that Tony feels a small lurch of arousal.

The thought is horrific. Not only is the kid seventeen, but he may not even be human. Tony shudders, and carefully doesn’t look at the boy as he rounds the corner, and gets to the window. The spotty teenager who hands over their food barely looks up, which Tony is grateful for. He doesn’t need anyone remembering they saw Peter.

He only has a day or so before he’ll have to get Peter to duck when they drive through busy areas.

He hands over the wraps and the milkshake, one hand on the wheel, before he takes a bite of his own meal.

Peter’s making contended little sounds beside him, opening the wrap carefully, making sure none of the foil falls on the floor, and biting.

His moan is pornographic, and Tony feels himself grow warm, and starts ahead resolutely.

The kid devours two of his wraps, and leaves the third one, before starting on his milkshake. Which Tony now realises is a mistake. Even in his peripheral, he can see the way the kid’s lips purse around the straw, the hollow of his cheeks as he sucks- fuck.

More significant than his arousal, though, is the fact that Peter can get nourishment from food.

If Peter is an Angel, he’s an Angel who doesn’t kill humans. And if that’s the case- then- would he have to be killed at all? Even if he was-

There’s some shuffling beside him, and he turns to see Peter attempting in vain to get comfortable on the seat. The boy notices he’s watching, and then blushes. He’s got freckles dappled all over his nose. It’s irritatingly endearing. “Could you um, maybe, just tie my hands together? Not to, the car- I mean?”

Peter’s wrists are very sore. Tony doesn’t like the sight of them. He wants to help the kid out, but…he shakes his head. “Sorry, Pete. We’re not there yet.”

The boy nods, and then shuffles some more, trying to find a position that’s comfy.

Tony falls into the lull of driving. He keeps thinking. If the boy doesn’t kill, then he’s not a threat. And if he’s not a threat, Tony could just…let him go. But it’s not up to him. He needs to see Peggy. She’ll know what to do. He just…he rather hopes that killing the boy isn’t the way she’ll handle it, but again, not up to him.

Maybe he should stop thinking of him as a boy. Because of the lavender light but- innocent until proven guilty, he supposes.

When he looks over, Peter’s got his cheek smooshed into the dash, curls spilling out over the plastic, hunched over, and fast asleep.

Tony smiles before he can catch himself. It can’t be comfortable, like that, but the kid’s clearly exhausted. Coming down from an adrenaline rush and some warm food will do that to you. Tony turns on the heater, and leans back into his seat, and tries not to think too hard at all.

***

It’s a reflex as they drive through towns, to keep his eyes peeled for any spark of purple.

There are a lot of Angels still around, but Tony doesn’t see any. Probably for the best, really. He doesn’t want to kill one in front of Peter.

He doesn’t know why.

He just passes trees and people until he gets past the border.

Then the people disappear, and sunlit woodlands spread out all around them.

When Tony pulls over, Peter stirs.

He blinks to awareness slowly, smacking his lips together and blinking hard.

His eyes seem to glow like liquid gold in the light.

“Bathroom break,” Tony says, by way of wake up call, and Peter lets out a sleepy little muffle, before sitting up.

Tony’s fingers brush against Peter’s wrists as he slices through the zip tie. He can feel Peter’s pulse; slow and lazy with sleep, and he wants to press his lips to it.

It’s so fucking dangerous. He’s walking a thin line-

“Are we in Canada?” Peter asks in surprise, as he looks out the window. His voice is still syrupy with sleep.

“We crossed the border about an hour ago.” Tony confirms. “My gun’s in my pocket, kid, I’m gonna open the doors, we’re gonna do our business, and you’re gonna stay in my line of sight.”

Peter nods, squirming like he already has to go, and Tony bites back his smile and unlocks the door.

Peter jumps out, flitting around the car to Tony’s side and hurrying towards the privacy of the trees.

Tony has no such qualms about privacy. This stretch of forest road is deserted. The sun is hot on the back of his neck, but there’s a nice breeze that sends the branches and the flowers dancing.

When Peter finishes, he heads back over to Tony obediently, before his eyes go huge and stare at something in the road like he can’t look away.

Tony turns and rakes his eyes over the environment. The blades of grass sway, the branches creak with old age; craning up to the sun, but nothing else moves.

And when he turns back to Peter-

the boy is gone.

Alright, Tony is almost impressed.

It was a sloppy technique, but the kid got the job done. It’s Tony’s fault really, he’s not on high alert. He should be. This case is more important than the others.

So, he makes his way through the forest. He’s slow and methodical. He’s quiet and he listens. Peter, no doubt, will be running as fast as he can. The kid’s smart. Acting docile so Tony will let his guard down, and what’s more infuriating is that that such a junior technique was effective.

He won’t be so lenient with the boy after this. It’s straight in the trunk. No more drive-thrus. No more nice guy-

He comes to a halt suddenly, when he breaks into a clearing.

A gap in the canopy, where sunlight is streaming down onto a meadow of grass- and there, sure enough, is Peter.

He’s on his knees, feet folded neatly underneath him, his profile as beautiful as the statue of a cherub, and he’s before the hulking great mass of a grizzly bear.

Tony thinks his heart does a horrible sort of jerk. He stares, uncomprehendingly for a long moment at the scene. The bear- huge and immense- and Peter- tiny and defenceless-

It’s the final thought that kicks him into gear, reaching for his gun when-

“I was calling for you,” Peter murmurs, and Tony creeps forward, gun in his hand, before he sees that the bear is holding it’s gigantic paw in Peter’s lap, and that Peter is pulling thorns from it. It’s horrifying. It’s beautiful. It’s something from a children’s story book. “But I realised I didn’t know your name.”

“It’s Tony,” Tony manages; wrecked.

Peter’s pulling thorns out of the paw of a fucking wild grizzly bear.

The bear looks at Tony, with horrifying black eyes, and Tony levels his gun.

Peter shakes his head without a word. “Put it away. It wouldn’t even leave a dent.”

Tony wavers. The kid’s probably right. A bullet against that. Fucking goliath. Have bears always been so big? But where’s the sudden wisdom come from? Where’s the kid who inhaled a milkshake-

“Couldn’t you hear it calling?” Peter asks.

Tony just stares at him. The sun throws its rays against him, and there’s a halo of sunlight around Peter’s curls.

He looks like an Angel. A real one, not a monster.

“No,” Tony whispers hoarsely, as the bear lets out a guttural moan, pulling his paw away as Peter wipes his hands. “I didn’t hear anything.”

The bear leans down and rubs its nose against Peter’s head, before turning away with its massive weight, and disappearing into the forest.

Peter’s still glowing lavender.

“Oh.” Peter frowns, turning to look at Tony with his big gold eyes. “I could hear him. That’s why I came, I didn’t…” he trails off, looking unsure. “You didn’t hear him?”

“No.” The woods had been silent.

Peter looks very troubled, and he doesn’t resist when Tony comes over and offers his arm. Peter gets up, grass stains on his knees. He’s still in his pyjamas- all floral and soft. He looks like a flower child. Like he grew here, in the forest, surrounded by nature.

“A bird fell in the playground in middle school.” Peter says, and he sounds far away, as Tony guides him back through the forest. “I heard it in class and no one- no one else did.”

“Peter.” Tony says, because it’s all he can say.

“Is that what-“ his voice drops into a whisper, “am I an..?”

“I don’t know.” Tony confesses, “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of an Angel being able to hear animals.” But then- he doesn’t know much about them. Other than that they glow, that they feed off humans, and that they can’t feel. “I don’t think they do, though.”

“What am I?” Peter asks helplessly, and Tony’s touch is more protective than it should be.

“I don’t know, sweetheart, but we’ll- figure it out.”

The incident sets Tony on edge.

Instead of driving right to Quebec he pulls over at a nice looking hotel. It’s expensive, but he has the money, and the receptionist’s smile turns much warmer when he slides over his card.

But he has eyes for no one but Peter. The boy’s staring at his hand. Squinting hard. He looks utterly dazed.

Tony supposes wondering whether or not you’re human will do that to you.

It doesn’t mean he should want to reach out and comfort.

Tony’s leather jacket is hanging over Peter’s shoulders, draped there, but the bare feet and grassy legs have drawn a little bit of attention.

Not too much attention, but even a little can be dangerous.

Tony gets them up to their room as fast as possible.

Peter still looks dazed. He doesn’t take in much of their room even though Tony’s sprung for an enormous, gorgeous, airy suite, he just sits on the edge of the bed where Tony settles him, and looks down at his lap.

Tony checks all the windows and shuts the curtains, and locks the door, before turning to look at the boy. Peter peaks up at him through his curls. “I’m scared,” he confesses.

Tony’s heart. He pads over, and lays his hand awkwardly on the kid’s shoulder. The boy’s so small. “I know. We’ll figure it out.” We?

“I can see…or maybe I’m imagining it.” Peter lifts up his hand and squints, “It’s purple. My head hurts.”

It’s a relief, that the kid can see it too. Tony nods, before flipping off the lights. “Get some rest, Pete.”

Peter flops down onto the bed, and wriggles under the blanket with the sort of fatigue Tony’s seen on men back from war. “I don’t have any friends.” He whispers, “I feel alone.”

“You’re not alone,” Tony says fiercely, automatically, coming over to sit on the edge of the bed. “You’ve got me.”

#starker #peter x tony #au #half angel peter #angel hunter tony #angel fire inspired #protective tony #kidnapping #precious peter parker #tony stark has a heart

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lepus-arcticus · 3 years

Text

48.

Billy Miles has a voice like an echo, or an epilogue.

Mulder remembers a whole generation stolen into the sky, a rain-beaten cemetery, the spice of pine needles crunching underfoot. He senses the parabola of their small, searching lives, the clumsy tautology of their strange and lovesick saga. He recalls the first time he touched her, the giddy exhilaration he felt as he first beheld the white slope of her bare shoulder.

Fate or choice, it hardly matters. There was never a time before her. There is all the time in the world ahead.

One last look into the blaze outside, before they let the blackout curtains fall.

That frightened, bleeding girl from the diner, her fat-cheeked baby on Scully’s knee.

Mulder contemplates the implications—he can’t help but see the child as somehow saturated with starlight, knit through with filaments of the otherworld. An inherited radiance, trauma in the blood, the unsteady aura of the reluctant traveller.

He can’t help but wonder—

The baby sucks noisily on Scully’s knuckle. Her hand is doused in drool. He remembers how she was with Emily; immediately devoted, intensely tender, making a mother of herself without a moment’s hesitation. That secret part of her, unfurling like a corpse flower in its seventh hothouse year.

For too brief a time, Emily knew what he knows: she is the safest place, the truest north, the candle in the window on a moonless night.

She is pale and cold at his motel door.

His spread of old photographs and case notes slips to the carpet and scatters as he pulls back the comforter. He pries off her shoes and briefly squeezes her small, chilly feet between his palms.

She thanks him sheepishly as he tucks her in and folds himself around her. He’s touched that she would even come to him; his proud little stoic, ever loathsome of needing anything or anyone. It is a rare treat to comfort her, and he basks in it, breathing in the clean scent of her hair, holding her close.

Sometimes, when he thinks about it, he really can’t believe his dumb luck. He remembers the unexpected delight of sifting through her senior thesis: it had been snotty and cocksure, playful, audacious, the most intellectually and creatively stimulating thing he’d read in years. Her first handshake was firm, her first kiss soft and hungry. He’d fallen for her all at once, and then again, very slowly, over years and years.

It’s time, he thinks, burying his nose into her shoulder. It’s time.

“It’s not worth it, Scully,” he murmurs.

“What?”

“I want you to go home.”

“Oh, Mulder, I’m going to be fine,” she sniffles, but he senses that she’s only saying it out of habit, only trying to cover for the grievous crime of borrowing a bit of warmth, of craving a bit of comfort.

“No, no, I’ve been thinking about it,” he continues, hurting for her. “Looking at you tonight, holding that baby… knowing everything that’s been taken away from you. A chance for motherhood, and your health—and that baby…,” he swallows back a fresh swell of emotion. “I think that… I dunno, maybe they’re right.”

“Who’s right?”

“The FBI. Maybe what they say is true, though for all the wrong reasons. It’s the personal costs that are too high.”

She should be restoring health and life with her skilled hands and beautiful mind, receiving tearful declarations of gratitude in hospital waiting rooms, write-ups in medical magazines, plaques at conferences.

“There’s so much more you need to do with your life,” he whispers. “There’s so much more than this. There has to be an end, Scully.”

He presses his lips to her cheek. Her hand frets within his. A warm tear slips over one of his knuckles, becoming cold as it travels over his skin. She snuggles closer into him, and he can’t hold himself off any longer—he allows himself that forbidden image, the one he hasn’t indulged since the IVF failed, the one where she’s heavy with his child, well-fed in a way she hasn’t been since her cancer, glowing with the radiant happiness of miracles.

Scully is out sick.

Her dizzy spells are getting worse. He’s been finding her slumped in corridor chairs with her head in her hands, leaning drunkenly on walls, and, to his violent concern, flat on her back on the forest floor. His covert bursts of research assure him that this is normal for some women, but still, he banishes her to bed, moves the TV to her dresser, leaves her with a kiss and a triple latte in decaf incognito.

There is no work, and there’s a chance that there won’t be, not ever again. In the office, he slings his feet up onto the desk and spins a basketball, lazily inspecting the homey disorder of their office: their omnium gatherum of weird tchotchkes and bibelots, outdated med school textbooks, a chunk of raw jade, the rolled maps in their wire basket, his intramural track and field trophies besides her marksmanship commendations. The room is their story, written in airport gift-shop magnets and grisly polaroids, redacted reports, the walls fire-scarred, the green chair stained with semen. He’ll have to set up a home office, he thinks, unwilling to imagine a world without their lovingly-curated clutter.

He’s pulled out of his preoccupation by a knock on the doorframe. Skinner wanders in, and Mulder feels a smack of affection for the old guy—hell, at this point, he’s almost a friend.

There is no forthcoming letter of termination or notice of reassignment, not even a signature AD verbal ass-whooping.

There is, however, a twist.

Krycek, that one-armed bastard, all comely, belligerent grit; behind him, an undead Marita Covarrubias, retaining all of her glacial film noir self-possession. Their intrusion feels like an astonishing violation of his endangered sacred space.

A flame of rage licks him deep, but it quickly withers to embers. Once the fight goes out of him, he feels like he’s thumbing through a yearbook, or a smudged, yellowed newspaper. They are extraneous threads, those two, fraying brails; Jacks in a card game long discarded in favour of the warmth of the hearthfire across the parlour.

So this is the swan song, he tells himself—the final pursuit, the terminating inquiry. The price of admission to the great awaiting Eden. Beyond, there is a land of sleepy Vineyard summers, of deck stain and manuscripts, scrubs in the washing machine, sourdough starter thriving in a repurposed jam jar in the fridge. Beyond, there is a new life of making and growing, their wartime days all laid to an uneasy rest in the vegetable garden out back.

He will pay this last toll. He owes this much to Scully, cancer-scarred and sisterless. He owes it to the brief memory of Emily, their first ill-starred child. To those two unlucky zygotes, and all the foolish and extravagant dreams he harboured for them.

This time, perhaps he can earn a different fate.

Dawn begins to lift the unquiet night. His travel bag is at the door, his hair is still damp from the shower. He sits down on the bed, traces the crook of her elbow, reaches out to move a stray wisp of hair from her face. She awakens softly into his palm, as if from an enchanted slumber.

“Hey,” he says softly. “My flight’s in an hour. Skinner’s outside.”

She gazes up at him from the shadows, her eyes shining with a love so plain that it knocks the breath right out of him. Through an ache of adoration, he bends to kiss her, and she receives him with desperation, latching onto him and making sweet sounds of protest when he reluctantly pulls away.

“Don’t go,” she pleads, sitting up. She is Venus in lavender satin, Onuava, a nymph arisen from the lake. She has pillow marks on her cheek. Sometimes, she looks like she does not belong to this world, but has slipped through from the transient dimensions beyond.

He finds her hand and brings it to his lips. “I won’t be long. And when I’m back...”

A moment passes. “When you’re back,” she says. “Will you marry me?”

The fae queen offers him a cup. He knows he will drink, and that he will gladly remain hidden in her realm forevermore.

“Ah, Scully,” he says. “Thought you’d never ask.”

#incrementum #txf fic

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contemplativepancakes · 4 years

Text

where to, cas?

Castiel hears Dean talking, sees his mouth moving, knows he should reply, but all he can do is stare at Dean blankly. The words rattle around in his brain, too empty now that it’s devoid of all the voices of his brothers and sisters.

Where to? It’s a reasonable question, a good one, but one Castiel has no answer for. Nora had just found his things at the Gas n’ Sip earlier that day, so he doesn’t want to try and press his luck there, but he has nowhere else. A shelter, maybe? He had stayed in a few while he was making his way to the bunker, and while they’d be okay for a couple nights, maybe, if they have room, it’s not a long term solution.

“Cas?” Dean prods, shaking Castiel out of his thoughts.

Castiel bites his lip. “I’ll…I’ll just tag along with you, if that’s all right.”

Dean’s not making eye contact, so he takes the chance to give Dean a doleful stare, admiring his profile and the way his stubble turns a reddish blond in the glow of the streetlights. “I’ve missed you,” Castiel admits softly.

Dean finally turns his head to look, really look, at Castiel. “I’ve missed you, too.”

Dean lets out a deep sigh, then. “Look, Cas, I—”

Castiel cuts him off. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me. I’m not an angel anymore. What use am I?”

A look Castiel can’t quite identify crosses Dean’s face. Even after several years, Castiel still isn’t the most versed in identifying human emotions. “What? It’s not about that. You don’t have to be useful to be worth something to me, man.” Dean huffs and runs a hand through his short hair. “And of course it’s fine that you stay with me for the night, but how about you show me your place, huh? It’ll help me sleep better if I know you’re doing okay.”

“Well, I don’t exactly have… a place.” Now Castiel is the one avoiding eye contact.

“What do you mean? Where have you been staying?”

“At the store,” he answers, glancing over at Dean as shame washes over him in a bright blaze.

“Oh, Cas,” Dean murmurs, before clapping one of his hands against the Impala’s dash. “Well, we ought to get you some better digs, then, right?”

Castiel coughs awkwardly, not wanting to upset the delicate balance of Dean’s now-forced good mood. He looks out the window and leans his head against the cool glass, closing his eyes and trying to pretend he has his wings again, but it’s a poor substitute. His wings never rumbled, or hit potholes, or expelled fumes. Castiel’s nose wrinkles in distaste when Dean cracks his window.

Eventually, after an amount of time Castiel has completely lost track of, the Impala rumbles to a stop and Dean reaches over to shake his shoulder. “Wake up, sleepyhead. We’re here.”

Castiel doesn’t bother to waste his breath protesting he wasn’t asleep. He’s not an angel anymore, so it was a reasonable assumption for Dean to make, he supposes. He squints out at the bright lights proclaiming vacancy refracting through the window. The driver’s door slams shut, followed shortly by the trunk squeaking open, and Dean presumably retrieving his duffle bag. Castiel opens his door and slowly gets out, feeling the crunch of gravel beneath his thin soled shoes.

Castiel trails Dean into the lobby, trying not to look out of place as Dean talks to the clerk. “One king,” he says gruffly, and Castiel’s head whips up in surprise.

keep reading or read on AO3 here!

“I’m paying for the month.” Castiel’s head drops just as quickly.

Dean’s just going to dump him here and move on, since Castiel is obviously no longer a worthy investment of Dean’s time now that he has nothing left to offer. To Castiel’s surprise, Dean doesn’t just press the key into Castiel’s hand, but brushes past Castiel and out the door, ignoring the questioning look the desk clerk sends the two of them.

Castiel stumbles out after him, the cool night air biting his skin. Dean looks down at the number on the key and mutters to himself, looking around before he spots the door and walks up to it. Dean pounds a hand against the door, as if testing its sturdiness, and he must be satisfied because he unlocks it and gestures for Castiel to go in.

Dean follows and closes the door behind him, tossing his duffel on the bed before pointedly moving it to one side. “I—I figured we could share for the night. That way you’d have more space to stretch out the rest of the time, when I’m not here.”

Castiel may not have angelic hearing anymore, but he can still hear Dean’s hard swallow. “Sure,” Castiel says awkwardly, turning away from Dean and unbuttoning his shirt. He drops his slacks as well before he climbs into the bed, using the covers as a shield for the uncomfortable emotions swirling around in his gut.

Everything is so much more intense now that Castiel is a human, but at the same time, it’s not. His emotions overwhelm him more than they ever did when he was an angel, but his head feels empty without the voices of his brothers and sisters constantly swirling around and the world seems dull and flat now that he can’t perceive souls. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to see a sight as beautiful as Dean’s soul again, and the thought is more than a little depressing.

While Castiel's thoughts have been occupied, Dean has slipped into the bathroom, and Castiel can hear the shower running. An urge possesses Castiel to open the door, pull back the shower curtain, and join Dean, like he’s observed many humans do in the years since they’ve invented indoor plumbing, but he stomps down on it.

Castiel lays there staring at the ceiling for what seems like hours, but is probably a few minutes. His patience is just one more thing that evaporated into thin air when he fell. Finally, the bathroom door opens, and Castiel wilts back from the cool air. He was expecting steamy warmness, but he’s left shivering.

Castiel tries to keep his eyes on the ceiling, tracing the cracks and water stains, but his eyes keep shifting towards Dean, tracing drops of water as they run down his back, highlighting the muscles. Castiel swallows hard. He’s lost count of how many times he’s cursed being human in the past day alone.

Castiel snaps his eyes back to the ceiling, turning over for good measure when Dean drops the towel, but not before he gets a good look at Dean’s ass. Castiel remembers shaping the curve of it, placing every freckle with care after he raised Dean from Hell. It’s different, though, now.

Everything is different, and Castiel hates it.

His throat is scratchy. Castiel considers getting up to get a drink from the sink, but then he would have to walk past Dean, and there’s a rapidly developing situation under the sheets that would make that mortifying. Castiel’s newly human body hasn’t seemed to have received the memo that Castiel is not a teenage boy. Castiel holds his breath as Dean lifts the sheets and slides in next to him. There’s a rush of cold air, and Dean shifts as he settles in the bed. “Is this okay?” Dean whispers.

Dean’s presence draws Castiel towards him; it always has, and now Dean expects Castiel to resist his pull when he’s less than six inches away from him. No, it’s not okay.

“It’s fine,” Castiel grunts.

“Just don’t stick your cold feet on me in the middle of the night, okay?”

Castiel always runs cold now that he’s human, and he can feel Dean’s heat radiating even from his spot on the mattress. “Of course, Dean.”

Castiel stays resolutely still, not wanting to bother Dean with his fidgeting. He can’t seem to fall asleep without tossing and turning, and it’s so pathetically human that Castiel hates himself for it. For not being able to fall asleep, and needing to sleep at all in the first place. It’s not until Dean’s breathing evens out that Castiel allows his body to relax. His back and jaw ache from holding himself so stiffly. His wrist throbs from where Ephraim had brutally twisted it. He thinks it has a slight fracture, and he knows he should do something for it, to make sure it doesn’t get worse, but he can’t seem to summon the motivation. He cradles it against his chest and stares at the wall.

The passage of time is marked by the headlights of cars sliding across the walls as they drive by and the slow turn of the flip number alarm clock. His heart pounds in his ears, but he can’t hear Dean’s, which is an uncomfortable change. He turns so he can see the rise and fall of Dean’s chest. Castiel lets the sight soothe him to sleep.

Castiel wakes to a pleasant friction. His hips are slowly rolling into the mattress, and his eyes flutter back shut. Since becoming human, he has discovered the peculiar phenomenon of morning erections, and although they can sometimes be an inconvenience when he’s running late for work, they’re largely enjoyable. He moans a little as he lets the sensation wash over him.

A choked sound comes from next to him, and Castiel freezes, stilling the movement of his hips. The last night comes rushing back to him, and he realizes he’s not as alone as he thought he was. Blood rushes to his face, making it uncomfortably warm. He cracks his eyes open and is relieved to find he’s facing away from Dean. Maybe he can pretend he’s still sleeping.

“Cas?” Dean whispers.

Damn it.

“Good morning, Dean,” he grates out, his voice sleep-hoarse.

The mattress shifts as Dean moves, and Castiel expects the dip of Dean’s weight to disappear, for him to go to the bathroom, or even more likely, say goodbye and take his leave, vanishing from Castiel’s life forever, but all of a sudden, there’s heat pressing against his back instead. Dean reaches over, and his fingers trace a path down Castiel’s chest, ghosting over his hip bones, down to his groin. Castiel stiffens, unsure of if he’s still sleeping or not. This doesn’t happen to him when he’s awake.

Maybe he got thrown against the wall harder than he thought.

“What are you doing?”

Dean’s hand stills. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Why, then?” Castiel is puzzled as to why Dean hasn’t left. He had had no qualms telling Castiel he couldn’t stay in the bunker, so he’s not sure why Dean wants to spend extra time with him now, and he has absolutely no idea why Dean would be trying to initiate this with him. Castiel is still new to feeling emotions in their most potent form, but he doesn’t know which cocktail of them could lead this.

Dean swallows hard, and his hand retreats. “I—I just thought—”

Castiel turns over to face Dean, to look at the microexpressions that flit across his face. Now that he can’t see Dean’s soul, this is all he has to rely on when it comes to gauging Dean’s mood. Dean’s eyes catch on Castiel’s for a second, before he looks away, staring at the curtain instead. He licks his lips nervously. “I thought you looked like you could use a hand. And, you know, you look sad. Sex always makes me feel better.”

Castiel raises his eyebrows. “Does it?”

Dean huffs. “Most of the time. Well, I just thought I’d help you out, but you obviously don’t want that, so that’s fine. That’s cool.”

Dean stumbles out of the bed, accidentally dragging the covers with him, and Castiel winces at the blast of cold air.

“I’m, uh, I’ll go, then. You probably have to be at work, anyway.”

Castiel looks over at the alarm clock. “I have until ten.”

Dean follows his gaze. It’s six. “I suppose you need a ride?” he sighs, tugging a hand through his hair.

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

“Of course not, just— Fuck, Cas. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

Castiel looks on in alarm as Dean takes a heavy seat back on the edge of the bed, bringing his hands up to his head and burying his face. Castiel can barely handle his own feelings, much less someone’s else.

Nevertheless, he sits up and puts a hand on Dean’s back. “Are you okay?”

Dean laughs ruefully. “I’m pretty far from okay. I miss you, man, and Sam’s up my ass all the time, and—”

“And what?”

“Nothing, it’s not important. I’m just… stressed, I guess.”

“Ah. So you wanted a relaxation?” Castiel asks. He’s heard of humans using intercourse for anxiety management.

“What? No. Just forget it.”

“Forget it,” Castiel echoes. “Right.”

He turns away from Dean, swinging his legs off the bed and letting his toes wiggle into the scratchy carpet. He wrinkles his nose as the smell of cigarette smoke wafts up.

“Wait, Cas,” Dean says, and Castiel can’t help the way his mind jumps back to last night, when Dean had said the same thing. Castiel had thought Dean was going to tell him to stop, to not go to Nora, to quit his job, to come back home, but there was no such luck last night, and Castiel doesn’t allow himself to get his hopes up now.

He turns to look at Dean, and Dean wilts. “Nevermind.”

Castiel huffs and darts his gaze away, standing up and retrieving his clothes from where they’re a puddle on the ground. He pulls them on, and Dean clears his throat behind him. “Looking a little wrinkly there, buddy.”

Castiel shrugs. “This is all I have.”

“Well, here.” Dean reaches into his army green duffel bag and unfurls an impressively unwrinkled pair of jeans and a shirt. “This ain’t amateur hour, dude,” Dean says, responding to the questioning raise of Castiel’s eyebrows.

Castiel watches intently as Dean folds his clothes from the day before into his duffel, trying to learn the technique. He needs to be able to keep his clothes looking presentable. Dean finishes his folding and looks up to see Castiel’s eyes fixed on him. He grunts. “You ready to go?”

Castiel looks back at the clock, ready to protest and fight for more time with Dean, but he jostles his arm and hisses. Dean is on him in a second, his hands warm and gentle on Castiel’s arm.

“Did this happen last night? Why didn’t you say anything?”

Castiel shrugs.

Dean pokes at it with two fingers. Castiel flinches away.

“All right, all right. Let me wrap this up, okay? A splint probably wouldn’t hurt either,” Dean muses.

Dean pulls out his alarmingly large first aid kit and sifts through it until he finds what he’s looking for. He holds Castiel’s hand like he’s afraid he’s going to break it, and something shifts in Castiel’s chest.

Castiel crushes it deliberately, and as he waves at Dean from just outside the Gas n’ Sip after Dean drops him off, he knows he made the right choice. There’s no ember to be stoked from their ashes.

He wonders if he’s just seen Dean for the last time. He restocks the dairy case, and tries not to think.

“Boyfriend?” Nora asks, making Castiel jump as she appears behind his shoulder as he refills the nacho cheese dispenser.

“What?”

“That guy you left with yesterday. Is he your boyfriend?”

Castiel swallows hard. “No.”

“Oh,” Nora says knowingly. “Your ex.”

“Dean and I have never been together,” Castiel protests, his voice a little more high pitched than normal.

“Oh,” Nora says again. “Hmm. You know, I don’t know much about your past, Steve. I’m here if you want someone to listen.”

Castiel’s throat is dry. “Thank you.”

Later, he stands in the doorway of Nora’s office where she’s hunched over her desk doing payroll. “We were… in the military together.”

Nora looks up, and Castiel sees confusion cross her face, swiftly replaced by understanding. “You must have been through some real shit together, then.”

“You could say that,” Castiel hedges.

“You don’t have to hide from me, Steve. I saw the way you looked at him.” Nora squints at him.

“We’ve saved each other's lives.”

Nora doesn’t respond, just looks at him steadily with a knowing smile, and Castiel retreats back to the register.

He pastes on a smile as he serves the next customer.

That night, he goes back to the motel where Dean had paid for him, and he’s disappointed to find that Dean’s scent is already gone, replaced by the smoke that seems to permeate the whole motel. Castiel figures it’s fitting, at the very least.

He stares at the ceiling and wonders what life has left to offer him.

Nora catches on to his mood the next day. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

Castiel sighs and drums his fingers against the countertop before giving her a wry smile. “Boy problems.”

Nora doesn’t react, and Castiel doesn’t know how to feel about that. “Want to talk about it?”

“Maybe.”

She hums. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be here when you’re ready.”

After a millennia of impermanence, of empires rising and falling and everyone Castiel cares about leaving him or pushing him away, Castiel knows Nora can’t promise that, but he appreciates the sentiment.

Castiel’s days fall into a pattern. He scrounges up enough money to keep living out of his motel room and afford some canned fruits and vegetables to supplement his diet that largely consists of peanut butter and jelly and what Nora shoves on him from the Gas n’ Sip. She squints at him and says he looks like he’s getting skinnier, and that’s not going to happen on her watch.

Castiel can’t say he’s too surprised when the pattern breaks. He’s coming from a long day of work, and the door to his motel room swings right open. Castiel freezes. He knows he left it locked. He fumbles in his bag for his angel blade, his one last reminder of his old life. He has a feeling whatever is inside is going to want to compete for that title.

Castiel wonders if it’s too grim to speculate if this will be the thing that finally puts him out of his misery. Although, he supposes it’s not fair to say he’s living in misery. The amount of time he spends staring at the atrociously papered motel room wall might say differently, but Castiel prefers to think of it as monotonous rather than any of those other descriptors.

Angel blade in hand, he walks through the door, scanning for any disturbances. He’s never been more surprised to see Dean. Dean’s propped against the pillows, his legs crossed at the ankles. His flannel is draped over the back of the desk chair, leaving him in just a threadbare t-shirt.

“Hey, Cas.”

Castiel lowers the angel blade with shaking hands. “Dean. What are you doing here?”

Dean shrugs, and Castiel notices just how beat down he looks. Dean has always seemed to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders, but it finally appears to be taking its toll. He’s paler than Castiel remembers, more drawn, and even more worried looking, if that’s possible.

Castiel sets his bag down on the ground. “Do you need something?” Castiel asks, even though he doesn’t know what he has to offer now.

“Is it a crime to want to see you?”

Castiel lifts his chin. “I was under the impression you didn’t want anything to do with me anymore.”

Dean looks at him in surprise. “What makes you think that?”

“You kicked me out. You told me I couldn’t stay! All I wanted to do was stay,” Castiel says, his voice cracking on the last sentence.

Dean uncrosses his legs and stands up, moves into Castiel’s space. He puts a hand on Castiel’s shoulder, and Castiel realizes just how much he’s yearned for touch since leaving Dean last. The most he’s gotten is a brush of fingers as he hands someone their change, and his human body craves more than that.

Nevertheless, he jerks away from Dean. This way, it’ll sting less when Castiel is inevitably dropped from Dean’s life again.

Dean steps back, hurt flashing across his face. Castiel doesn’t let himself feel bad. He’s not the one who should be apologizing. “I missed you,” Dean says weakly.

Castiel desperately returns the sentiment, but he doesn’t voice the thought.

At Castiel’s stony silence, Dean points to the windowsill. “I brought you a housewarming gift. Well, motel warming.”

Castiel follows his finger to where a tiny cactus sits, soaking in the feeble rays of evening sunlight. “I can barely take care of myself,” he jokes, but it lands flat.

“Don’t worry. Sam says they’re impossible to kill.”

“How is Sam?” Castiel asks, seizing on the new topic.

Interestingly, Dean clams up. He’s never not wanted to talk about Sam before. “He’s fine. We’re fine.”

Castiel hums. “That’s why you showed up here, right?”

Dean’s glance flits away before it comes back, making eye contact with a vengeance. Dean’s always been a skilled liar, so Castiel doesn’t give it much weight.

“Can I stay?” Dean asks. “For the night?”

Castiel agrees, and tries not to think of the irony.

When he wakes up in the morning, Dean is gone, and only the lingering scent of his cologne betrays the fact that he was there at all.

Nora notices. “You seem… more melancholy than usual today,” she says carefully, and Castiel tries not to snort.

“Melancholy? Really?”

Nora waves a hand. “You know what I mean.”

Castiel bites his lip. “I saw Dean yesterday.”

“Oh?” Nora asks, keeping her voice carefully neutral.

“He just showed up. And now he’s gone again.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much. He seemed stressed.” Castiel shakes his head. “He brought me a cactus.”

Nora looks puzzled by that, and frankly, Castiel is, too, so he lets Nora redirect the conversation, giving him all the latest news about her daughter.

Back at the motel, he runs his fingers over the tiny spines of the cactus, and wonders.

Nora helps him get a bank account, and Castiel watches the numbers slowly add up. Dean drops by periodically, always topping off Castiel’s motel credit. Until, one day, it runs out, and Castiel begins to worry. He and Dean don’t text; Castiel doesn’t even have a phone. Castiel pays for the next week at the motel and frets through his day at work. Nora has the day off, so Castiel has no one to confide in.

He’s never been so relieved to see his motel room broken into, but his relief is quickly shattered when he sees the blood seeping onto his bed spread.

Dean is pouring whiskey on to a wound on his side, and Castiel feels affronted for a second at the disregard Dean has for his sheets, but he rushes forward to take the bottle from Dean. “What happened?” he demands.

“Werewolf got the jump on me,” Dean says weakly. “You got any floss around here? Preferably not mint? That shit stings like a bitch.”

Cas just stares at him.

“Well, you gonna stitch me up, or are you going to let me bleed out?”

By this point, Cas knows better than to ask where Sam is, so he lets his feet carry him to the bathroom where he finds a sewing needle and the requested floss. Unflavored, thankfully for Dean. He digs through Dean’s jacket pocket where he knows he keeps his lighter, ignoring Dean’s comment about buying him dinner first.

Castiel sterilizes the needle and soaks a washcloth in whiskey before wiping at Dean’s wound. Dean hisses. “Don’t be a baby,” Castiel says, and Dean’s mouth flaps up and down, but he doesn’t come up with a response because by then Castiel has the needle threaded and pokes it through Dean’s skin.

Castiel makes neat stitches under Dean’s close supervision. The only time it wanders is when he takes another swig of whiskey.

By the time Castiel has finished and takes the bottle back from Dean to douse the whole thing, Dean is nearly asleep. Castiel puts a bandage on the wound, taken from Dean’s painfully familiar first aid kit. Dean watches Castiel clean up with hooded eyes, and when Castiel curls up beside him, he pets his hand through Castiel’s hair. Dean mumbles something, but he slurs it so much that Castiel can’t understand what it was. He falls asleep with a hand fisted in the sheets.

For once, when Castiel wakes up, Dean is still there. He prods at Dean’s bandage-covered wound, and Dean slaps his hand away and rolls onto his stomach. Castiel gets up to start getting ready for work. When he leaves, he tries to memorize the shape of Dean’s sleeping form. Castiel doesn’t allow himself to hope that that will be the case when he returns.

To Castiel’s shock, there is still a Dean-sized lump in his bed when he finishes his shift. Dean notes his gobsmacked look and rolls his eyes. “Baby’s not exactly the smoothest ride. Did you want me to get all jostled around and open up my stitches?”

“Um. No?”

“That’s what I thought. Now what do you have to eat around here?”

Dean stays the night, and the night after that. Castiel can’t believe his luck, but he doesn’t want to let himself get too used to this, either.

Surprisingly, it’s not Dean that shatters Castiel’s idyll, but Castiel himself. Castiel jerks awake, panting, and Dean is right there with his hands all over Castiel, asking if he’s okay. Castiel flinches back, still seeing the Deans from his dream with their unseeing eyes. He hasn’t told Dean about how Naomi made him kill all those versions of him, and he doesn’t intend to now.

Dean runs a soothing hand down his back, and Castiel melts into the touch, deliberately slowing his breathing. “You good?” Dean asks softly.

“I am now.”

When Dean finally leaves, he presses a worn paperback into Castiel’s hands that he says he picked up at a second hand store. Castiel squints at the cover curiously. Stranger in a Strange Land, it proclaims. “Thought you might be able to relate,” Dean says, shrugging.

“Thank you.” Castiel sits it next to his cactus, and he almost misses the way Dean swells in pride.

Castiel buys a car, Nora by his side and glaring at the salesman until he lowers the price. Castiel smiles at her gratefully. He pats the hood as the salesman walks away to get the paperwork. “What do you think?”

Nora looks over the golden Continental. “It’s, uh, it’s nice.”

Castiel beams.

Castiel knows how Dean takes care of the Impala, so he tries to do the same to his new car. He buys a phone so he can learn how to change the oil on youtube. He carefully plugs in Dean’s number from memory and texts him, letting him know Castiel’s new number. He doesn’t get a response, and Castiel tries not to let it bother him.

His car never seems to become imbued with the same sense of home that Baby has, but he likes it regardless. It’s something that’s solely his, with no influence of his siblings or Dean carved all over it. Nora makes fun of him for it, but he doesn’t mind.

Eventually, Castiel gets a phone call that some part of him knew was inevitable. No one ever really gets out, that’s what Dean has always said.

“Cas, it’s bad. It’s Sam. Just… I need you.”

“Okay. It’s going to be okay, Dean.”

“I know,” Dean says, and Castiel graciously doesn’t call him out on the falsehood.

“You know I love you, right?” Dean asks, rushed and all of a sudden, like it’s something he’s been working towards for a while.

“I know,” Castiel lies.

Whatever happens next, he’s excited at the prospect of being able to learn that for himself.

tags (let me know if you’d like to be added or removed!): @urbankat82 @that-one-fandom-chick @youcancallmeanet @nineteensevetyfour @1stborneve @good-things-do-happen-dean @no-frigging-idea

#supernatural #destiel #ficlet #castiel #dean winchester #heaven can't wait #spn 9x06 #contemplative writing

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daringyounggrayson · 4 years

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Summary: Dick and Bruce have been on shaky terms for a while, but they realize that none of that matters when they're both captured on an impromptu team-up. To make matters worse, one of their captors has a grudge against Dick, who already isn't at the top of his game due to injuries. Separated, Bruce can only watch and hope that someone finds them before it's too late.

Content Warning: gunshot wounds, blood, discussion of injuries, vomiting, and feeding tubes.

oOo

“Nightwing?”

He’s on the ground, gravel pressing into his back. The smell of rain mixes with the distinct smell of blood. He can hear the rain pounding against something—an umbrella, or maybe a tarp—but it doesn’t touch him. He’s wet, though, and he can feel blood running down his face.

“Nightwing?” the voice is louder now, more urgent.

“Quiet!” someone hisses, followed by the sound of a blunt object coming into contact with flesh.

Dick opens his eyes only for them to immediately close again. He uses all of his energy to blink them open and refuse the tempting offer to keep them closed. He looks like he’s in a scrapyard, and Batman is being restrained by two men, both armed. Not good.

He tries to push himself up, to get a better look at their captors, or to at least adjust himself so into a less painful position, one that makes it a little easier to breathe. He hears the gravel crunching before he’s even gotten an arm under himself.

“Don’t touch him,” Bruce warns, followed by a grunt when the butt of a gun collides with him again.

Dick is still trying to push himself up when a foot collides with his chest. It sends him back down gasping, but more kicks keep coming. He’s coughing and curled up on his side by the time they stop. There’s something metallic in his mouth, but he can’t work up the strength to spit it out. A hand grips his hair and yanks his head up. He snaps his eyes for a moment, and one of the strangers shakes him a little, hissing, “Stay down.”

His head slams against the ground again and Dick does his best not to move. Not so much because of the warning; it just really hurts.

“Nightwing, are you alright?” Bruce asks, taking another hit before he’s even finished his question.

“Talk to him again, and we’ll shoot him.”

He hears a car roll up over the sound of his ragged breathing.

“What the hell took you so long?” Someone calls out when a car opens.

There’s a laugh. “I don’t think you have a right to complain here, seeing as you’re the one who—”

“We don’t have time for this,” another guy says. “Did you get the stuff?”

“Right here.” Something rustles, maybe a bag. Dick is too busy breathing to open his eyes and look. “There are a few doses in there, wasn’t sure how much we’d need.”

The bag rustles some more. “We’ll start with one and see how it goes. You get the Bat, I’ll take that one.”

“I hate needles,” someone else mumbles. “And does he really need it? Look at him.”

“We’re not taking chances. Suck it up.”

More gravel crunching, and then Dick can hear Bruce struggling against his captors. Dick can’t bring himself to move, but he does open his eyes. A guy is coming toward him with a needle.

Dick watches as he kneels on the ground and sets the needle on the ground. He pulls a penlight out of his pocket and turns it on, holding it in his teeth. The brightness makes Dick close his eyes again.

“Don’t think it will go through the suit. Neck okay?” he calls.

“Just get it in him!”

The man pulls Dick’s hair back and holds his head down, then Dick hears the clatter of the syringe.

Bruce is struggling again, and Dick wonders if he’s already been given his injection. “Don’t touch him!”

There’s the smack of a gun against Bruce again. “What the fuck did I tell you?”

Dick hisses as the needle is shoved into his neck and the liquid is forced into his veins. It burns and Dick wonders what hell it will do to him.

“Mel, you finished?”

“One second,” the guy—Mel, apparently—says. “Yup, all good.” The needle slides out of Dick’s skin and he digs his fingers into the gravel.

“Move,” the other guy says, and the gravel crunches quickly as he gets closer. He looks up to see Mel shoved to the side as a gun is aimed at Dick. “Maybe this will help you learn that your actions have consequences.”

The gun goes off and Dick feels a sharp, burning spread across his lower leg. He tries to move, to grasp his leg, stem the bleeding, but he takes a kick to the stomach for his efforts that leaves his coughing and choking.

“Stop!” Bruce shouts, has been shouting, but it sounds slurred. “Get away from him!”

The man tisks. “Now look what you’re making me do.”

The gun goes off again, this time hitting his stomach. Dick gasps, hands going to cover his stomach.

Bruce doesn’t say anything this time.

“Good. See? Keep that up and you two will be just dandy.”

“My car won’t,” one of the guys whines. “Blood is such a pain to get out.”

“We’ll bandage him and put him on a tarp, chill out.”

Dick feels dizzy and his ears are ringing. It’s getting hard to stay awake, and he feels a little numb.

Someone’s pressing against his head, his stomach, his leg. Then he feels himself being lifted to the air and set down on a hard, crinkly surface. A door slams shut and Dick has no idea how much time has passed when he feels himself lurch forward.

“Nightwing?” Bruce whispers next to him. “You’re going to be alright, chum. They gave us sedatives.” Bruce must be restrained because he doesn’t touch him. “Fight it.”

Dick can’t answer him; he’s already lost to the world.

oOo

Dick wakes up on a padded surface. The surface isn’t especially soft; his best guess is a gurney. There’s the familiar sound of medical monitors beeping, and there’s a nasal cannula feeding him oxygen. He feels nauseous and everything hurts, which someone should do something about, because by every indication, he’s somewhere where someone could do something about it.

But something’s off, too. Because there’s something tight pulled across his chest and thighs, and something is digging into his wrists and ankles. When he forces his eyes open, he finds that he’s in a poorly lit room that he doesn’t recognize. It looks like a basement or a storage unit.

He turns his head—damn, his neck is sore—and finds what looks like a chain-link fence that goes all the way up to the ceiling.

“What?” he can’t help but whisper. His throat hurts too, in a family way like he’s just gotten out of surgery, and that much would explain the rest of what he’s feeling. But if that’s the case, why is he here? Why isn’t he home, or at least someplace that looks like it’s been cleaned in the last month?

“Nightwing?” that’s Bruce. He’ll explain everything.

Dick turns his head to the other side, now taking in the IV pole beside him. He sees Bruce—still in his Batsuit, but stripped of his belt—restrained and kept in his own chain-link cage. “What . . . what happened?”

Bruce’s face falters. “I couldn’t get us out of the restraints. The sedatives they used where strong, and they gave me a second dose before we were put in the van. I couldn’t stay awake.”

The van triggers Dick’s memory, and he remembers the scrapyard, and the men, and the gunshots.

“I woke up when we got here, but we were getting out of a different van than the one we got into and the guards were different. Several people joined us and took you away. They brought me here and they wheeled you in on a gurney about an hour ago,” Bruce explains. “Do you know where they took you?”

Dick shakes his head, trying to think. He remembers bright lights and people wearing scrubs. Someone had asked him questions and he’d tried to answer them but his thoughts wouldn’t cooperate. The scrub-wearing people—doctors, he supposes—hadn’t been happy about that. He thinks he threw up, something else they hadn’t been happy about. They sent someone to get a new gown because Dick hadn’t been able to roll over in time—or move at all, for that matter. He’d passed out again before they’d come back, but he didn’t feel vomit on himself, so he guesses they’d succeeded in finding a new gown—wait! He’s wearing different clothes and his mask is gone.

He flails on the gurney in panic, trying and failing to get up, get out. The gurney rattles but it doesn’t tip over.

“Nightwing, deep breaths. You’re alright,” Bruce tries to tell him.

“Do they know? My suit—my mask—they took it,” Dick tries to explain.

“I know,” Bruce says. “I know. And we’ll deal with it. But I’m not concerned about that right now.”

“Do they know?” Dick repeats, noticing how the beeping his picked up.

“They haven’t given any indication that they know or care about our identities,” Bruce says. “Take a breath, chum. You need to breathe.”

Bruce hasn’t called him that in a while; something about the nickname calms Dick, letting him relax enough to take a breath. A door opens and someone in scrubs comes running in. “I told you we should have kept him in medical,” the one is grumbling.

“And I agreed with you,” her partner grumbles back. Bruce has gone quiet again, and Dick listens as keys clatter and unlock the cage door. It swings open with a rusty squeak.

“How are you feeling, hon?” the woman says. Her hair is pulled into a bun and she has a medical mask over her mouth and nose. She’s pulling on gloves.

The man already has his gloves on and is fiddling with the monitors. “His oxygen is dropping again.”

She glances over at the monitor. “Raise it by ten percent and see how he does.” She steps forward toward Dick, pulling down his blanket and unbuttoning the top of his gown before pulling that down to. It’s then that Dick notices the chest tube, explaining the tugging feeling. She unwraps the stethoscope from around her neck and presses it against his chest, making him shiver. “Deep breath, Nightwing,” she tells him.

He doesn’t change his breathing at all, just stares at her.

She looks down at him, frowning. “Can you understand me?”

Dick doesn’t answer. He moves his gaze to look at what the man is doing. He’s by the end of his gurney, looking at some bags, one of which has blood in it.

“Nightwing,” the woman grabs his chin, pulling his eyes to her. “This is important. Can you follow my finger with just your eyes?”

She moves her finger and Dick, begrudgingly, follows it, unsure of what would happen to him if he didn’t.

“Good,” she praises, a little relieved. “I’m going to flash a light in your eyes now, just look at my nose.”

He does as he’s told, bracing himself for the painful light. She pulls his eyelids up one at a time. “Hmm.”

“What?” the other doctor asks.

“Can you pass me his chart?”

“Here.”

She flips through it, adding a few notes. “I think we’re okay for now, but we should probably schedule another CT later today.”

The man scoffs. “Like they’ll approve that.”

She shrugs. “We can still ask.”

The man lifts the bottom half of Dick’s blanket off, pressing against his feet. His toes curl, and the man asks, “Can you feel that?” Dick nods, and the man lets go of his feet and moves to check the catheters.

“Nightwing,” the woman catches his attention again. “Can you speak?”

“Yes,” he says slowly.

She smiles. “Perfect. Are you in any pain? Still feeling nauseous?”

Dick nods, not feeling speech is worth the throat pain, especially for these two.

“I’ll see what we can do for that. Does taking deep breaths make it worse?”

He nods again, and she nods back sympathetically.

“I thought so, but I need to check your breathing, okay? You were in pretty bad shape when they dropped you off, and with your oxygen dropping like that, we need to make sure things aren’t getting worse.”

He doesn’t like being talked to like this, but he nods.

“Alright, then, let’s give this another try.” She places the stethoscope on his chest, saying, “Deep breath.”

He does as he’s told, taking a deep breath each time he’s asked. Eventually, she’s satisfied and puts the stethoscope back around her neck. “No change,” she announces. She turns to her partner. “Finished?”

“Yeah,” he’s frowning. “No change.”

They pack up their stuff, but Dick realizes he’s now wearing a blood pressure cuff, which they leave on. They button up Dick’s gown again and tuck him back up in the blanket.

“What’s going on?” he finally brings himself to ask.

“Classified,” they say in unison.

The guy gets his attention. “See this?” he points to a button attached to the gurney. “If something feels wrong, press it and we’ll get an alert.”

“Who’s keeping me here?” Dick asks.

“Classified,” they say again.

“We don’t even know this stuff,” the woman tells him. “But some advice: don’t ask questions. They’re not going to kill you, so just don’t cause any problems and you’ll be okay.”

“How long do you plan to keep me here?” Dick tries.

“They’ll probably move you soon, but they never give us a date,” she says. “I doubt they’d do anything with you so soon after surgery, though. There’s nothing you need to worry about right now.”

“And the surgery was for?” Dick asks, already knowing they’re not going to tell him if he still owns all of his organs.

“We told you: you weren’t in good shape when they dropped you off. Worst guy we’ve seen in a while. Pissed off the wrong people, huh?” the man asks.

“We need to get going,” the woman tells him, already at the door. “Oh, and no more trying to move around, yeah? You’ll just hurt yourself. Besides, everything is being video-taped, and if you manage to get off the gurney, we’ll see it and have to activate the electric fence and sedate you—it will be a whole thing.”

“Set your recovery back too, no doubt,” the man adds. “And it will probably make them mad, so fewer painkillers for you.”

Dick blinks at them as they leave without another word. He watches as they say something to Bruce, but Dick can’t make it out. Then they’re gone, out of sight.

“Where the hell are we?” Dick asks Bruce. “Who are these people?”

“I don’t know. I suspect that they’re going to try to auction us off,” Bruce says.

“Great.” Dick rolls his head back to stare at the ceiling. His head is pounding, and after a moment, he closes his eyes.

“How are you feeling?” Bruce asks. “They wouldn’t tell me anything.”

“Honestly? Not great.” And that’s the understatement of the year. Maybe if he could just move, or sit up. “Is someone coming for us?”

“We’ve been missing for at least twelve hours,” Bruce says. “I’m sure someone is looking.”

Dick can feel himself starting to drift off, so he opens his eyes and turns his head to look at Bruce. The lighting isn’t great, and Bruce isn’t exactly close, but from what Dick can see, he looks alright. “Are you okay? They didn’t shoot you too, did they?”

Bruce shakes his head. “I’m fine. A few cuts and bruises. They stitched something when I got here, but they never took me to a medical unit.”

Dick thinks about how Bruce must have felt, sitting here alone and not knowing what they did with Dick or if he’d come back. Dick can only imagine the relief Bruce felt when they wheeled Dick in, and then how quickly it must have been replaced by panic when Dick lied a few yards away, unresponsive for an hour.

Dick swallows. “I’m okay,” he says, but his voice shakes.

“Oh, sweetheart.” Bruce sounds helpless, and it’s just making Dick feel worse.

“I’m okay,” he tries again, but his voice sounds worse than the first time.

“You look tired, chum.”

“Yeah.” It’s weird, Bruce being so close and so far away from him.

“Get some sleep. I’ll take care of everything else.”

“Okay.” Dick exhales slowly. “Okay.”

oOo

Pressure against the bottom of his eyebrows jolts him awake, and he hears the clacking of his restraints against the gurney as he reflexively tries to bring them to his face to smack whatever is causing the pain to go away. The pressure disappears and Dick looks around the room to see three people in the cage with him. The two people in scrubs are the doctors who visited him earlier, and after he woke up from surgery the first time, but the third person is someone new, a little older, and wearing what Dick guesses is a guard uniform. Dick feels a new wave of nausea when he sees he’s holding a tray of food.

“Nightwing?” the one doctor asks. He groans when he sees the penlight she’s holding. “I wasn’t able to get you anything more for the pain or nausea, but we’re working on it. I’m going to do another exam now, and then I’m going to need you to eat something, okay?”

“I’m not hungry,” Dick grumbles. He’d wanted to sit up so badly earlier, but now he just wants to lie down. He turns his head to find Bruce. There are two guards in his cell, watching him eat with one hand still attached to the cage wall. But he’s eating, and Dick wonders what they said to get him to eat. They haven’t been here that long, after all; no way Bruce would crack so easily.

“That’s not up to you,” the guard snarls at him.

“Right,” the woman sighs. “Exam, then?”

She runs through the same exam as earlier while the male doctor changes out his IV bags and jots down vitals. This time, however, they also check his wounds and change some of the bandages.

“Everything is still stable,” the doctor announces, pulling Dick’s gown down again and the blanket back up. “I still want another CT, though.”

“You just said he’s fine,” the guard snaps.

She puts her hands in the air. “Just giving my medical opinion.”

The guard mutters something under his breath that makes her roll her eyes. “Can this one feed himself?”

“He hasn’t eaten anything yet,” she supplies as an answer. “So, we’ll find that out together.”

Without warning, they raise Dick’s gurney, and he’s left reeling in dizziness and nausea, but because of the restraints, he can’t curl forward to provide any relief. The guard grabs his hand a little tighter than necessary as he lengthens the restraint.

“Try to touch any of us or any of the medical supplies, and you’ll regret it, understand?” the guard asks, and Dick nods. The man grunts and shoves a spoon at Dick, then drops the tray in his lap. “Eat.”

Dick scoops up a bite of food and brings it to his mouth with a shaky hand. He swallows and takes a deep breath, trying to keep it down.

“You’re not finished,” the guard presses.

“Trying not to puke,” Dick grits out.

“Enough of the backtalk,” the guard shouts at him.

Dick doesn’t even look at him, just tries to take another bite. He drops the spoon when he feels the mush he swallowed rise in the back of his throat. He claps a hand over his mouth, trying to swallow it back down, and in his haste, he brushes against the nasal cannula.

“What did I tell you about touching the medical equipment?” the guard growls, grabbing Dick’s hand and slamming it back down against the gurney. He watches as the guard shortens the length of the restraint to even shorter than before, and he does the same on the other side, taking the opportunity to tighten them both around his wrists while he’s at it. He’d thought they were tight before, but now he thinks they’re going to risk cutting off his circulation.

He looks over at the doctors, who are standing in the opposite corner looking bored. He looks over at Bruce, who’s watching him with hidden panic as he keeps eating.

His guard has picked up the spoon and shoves it at Dick’s face with such force that it hit his teeth and he gags on it. He turns his head on reflex, spitting out the bits of food that managed to get in.

“Wrong move,” the guard snarls. He takes the tray and moves away from the gurney. He finds a lever and Dick is suddenly horizontal again. “He’s no cooperating.”

“And what do you want us to do about it?” the doctor asks, glancing at her nails.

“Tube him. The boss won’t be happy if he starves to death, and I’m not dealing with any sort of hunger strike from the prisoners.”

“As always, we thank you for your astute observations and predictive abilities. You truly are keeping us all safe,” she drawls.

“Shut it and just get the job done.” The guard is clenching his fist, but she doesn’t seem the least bit concerned.

“Sure thing,” she says. She looks at her partner. “You put the kit on the cart, right?”

“Right here,” he says, holding it up.

Dick furrows his eyebrows—how did they know they’d need it?

The guard leans over him. “You’re here for a minimum of two weeks, and after what you did to my brother Tommy, I’m going to make it as hellish as possible.”

Dick is about to ask who exactly Tommy is, but he’s sure whatever happened was justified. After all, Nightwing does sort of have a thing for dealing with criminals and protecting innocents.

“If you could step away from my patient, I’d love to get started,” the doctor interrupts.

“All yours,” the guard says taking a step back.

Dick glances at Bruce. He’s finished his meal and is back in his regular restraint position, watching Dick like a hawk. Bruce’s guards are outside the cells and watching Dick.

“Pass me the Xylocaine,” the doctor says as she slowly raises Dick’s gurney upright again.

He’s had NG tubes placed before—not exactly something he wants to have happen again, especially for no reason whatsoever. If the guard wasn’t standing there, maybe Dick would have tried to talk the doctors out of it, but it’s too dangerous. For himself, sure, but also for Bruce. They had no problem using him against Bruce earlier, so he doesn’t see why the reverse wouldn’t also be true.

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” the guard says.

The doctor closes her eyes and takes a breath, then turns to the guard. “I know you have fun with this sort of thing.” He grins, malicious. “But I promise, this will be uncomfortable enough with the Xylocaine.”

“But it’s not necessary, is it?” the guard asks.

“No,” both doctors reply begrudgingly.

“So why pump more drugs into the kid? You’ll ruin his worth like that. Nobody wants a junky,” the guard reasons.

The doctor closes her eyes and takes another breath, no doubt holding her tongue with all of her willpower. “Fine. Since I guess you call the medical shots around here now.”

“Sure as hell I do.”

“Nightwing, you’re going to need to work with me on this or you could hurt yourself, okay?” her eyes are a little pleading, and Dick wonders what will happen to her if something goes wrong. He nods and she looks a little relieved. “I’m going to measure out the tubing and then thread it down. You’ll need to swallow some water when I ask you to, and you’ll need to tell me if it hurts too much, understand?”

He nods again and tries to stay still as she places the tubing at the tip of his nose and pulls it back across his cheek, measuring it out. This isn’t going to be fun for anyone—well, anyone other than that fucked up guard.

oOo

Dick thinks he’s dying. He’s lying on his back, desperate to be able to do so much as roll on his side. The tube is making his throat hurt more and his nose burns. His cheek is itchy where the tube is taped in place and he can’t adjust it at all. He’s nauseous and his stomach has been cramping since the feed started. The male doctor had turned it off early when Dick almost puked because they were afraid the tube would come up. Again.

Because of Dick’s gagging, it took three tries to get the tube in in the first place. There’s no doubt in his mind that it would have been easier with some Xylocaine, but he hadn’t been allowed that, and now they’ve stopped his regular painkillers too. He isn’t even 48-hours out of surgery and he has nothing to help with the broken ribs, punctured lung, head wound, and two bullet wounds. And that’s just what Dick knows; there could be other internal injuries they repaired that he’s not even aware of. Maybe there’s something wrong with his stomach and that’s why the nausea has been so bad. No one’s telling him anything and he just wants to go home.

“Nightwing?” Bruce calls.

“I don’t feel good, B.”

“I know,” Bruce says. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

There’s a pause that says Bruce thinks this is his fault, but Dick can’t give a reassuring talk right now. Talking hurts too much.

“What did the guard say to you?” Bruce asks. “Before, when you were eating.”

Dick squeezes his eyes shut as a wave of pain courses through him. “Uh, he wants revenge. I put Tommy—his brother—away or something,” Dick says, trying to press his temple into the pillow as best he can. His head and neck are killing him. He wishes they would turn the lights off.

“Hnn. Did he sound or look family?” Bruce asks.

Dick shakes his head, and a moan leaks out.

“What’s wrong?” Bruce asks, like he can do something.

“Just hurts,” Dick explains with a croak. “No painkillers.”

“Those bastards,” Bruce growls.

“Said.” Dick swallows around the tube. “Said I’d be here for at least two weeks.”

“Hnn. That’s interesting,” Bruce says. “That must be when the auction is.”

“Confirmation?” Dick asks, trying to speak as little as possible.

“I overheard the guards talking. They said enough to imply,” Bruce says.

“Got a plan?” Dick asks, because Bruce always has a plan. Dick is supposed to always have a plan, and usually, he does, but the best plan he has right now is to let someone else get him out of this mess.

“Working on it,” Bruce says, which is the exact opposite of reassuring. “For now, we need to be patient.”

“Easy for you to say,” Dick mumbles. Bruce still hears him though; his flinch is enough to tell Dick that much. Dick rolls his head to stare at the ceiling.

“Is there anything I can do?” Bruce asks after a while.

Dick figures he’s offering to talk to him, and maybe Dick would take him up on it, but his head hurts too much. “I’m tired.”

“Sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

The last thing Dick thinks before slipping back into the blessing that is unconsciousness is how hollow Bruce’s words are, how the man has no say in where he will be when Dick wakes up.

oOo

The sleep doesn’t last, but the nausea has finally let up. The pain gets worse, though, and it pulls him from his slumber. Dick just wants to be able to curl up, but he can’t. He’ll just have to deal and try to tap into some of his pain management strategies.

(The problem is, Dick can’t think like this. He’s tired and in pain and can’t focus long enough to have anything work. He needs help.)

Bruce dozed off at some point, but he wakes up when Dick calls him.

“What is it, chum?” Bruce asks, urgent and attentive.

“Can you,” Dick starts, pausing to swallow and lick his lips. His voice must be barely audible at this point, just a croak. “Can’t think. Guided imagery?”

“Of course,” Bruce says, sitting up a little straighter. “How bad is the pain?”

Dick just nods.

“Oh sweetheart,” Bruce says, and Dick thinks Bruce is going for a record, calling him that so often since being captured. He wonders why Bruce isn’t concerned about keeping up the tough Batman front; maybe Dick really looks that bad.

“Please?”

“Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths.” Dick does as he’s told, listening as Bruce takes a deep breath with him. “Imagine you’re walking through the woods . . .”

oOo

Bruce is still talking to Dick in a calm voice—telling him to hear the crunch of a branch under his foot, feel the wind running through his hair—when the guards come in with the two doctors. Bruce stops speaking and Dick takes a deep breath. The guided imagery had been helping a little, and with Bruce’s voice grounding him, he’d been able to follow along for most of it. He thought he was about to fall asleep, but now the woods are gone and who knows what tortures await him now.

The guards hand Bruce a tray of food, and he starts eating without protest.

“How are you feeling this morning, Nightwing?” the doctor asks, pulling on her mask and gloves.

Dick doesn’t answer, just focuses on Bruce.

“Alrighty then, no pleasantries today I see,” she says. “We’re going to do a quick exam, and if you’re a good boy, we’ll give you a sedative and take you on a little trip, sound like a plan?”

Dick furrows his eyebrows and frowns—what?

“Relax. I can’t tell you what’s happening until we’re done—company policy—but trust me, this is a good thing. Plus, a sedative will do you some good,” she says. “I’m guessing you didn’t get much sleep last night? What with the painkiller ban and all.”

He blinks at her, still not wanting to talk.

She shrugs and starts checking Dick’s wounds. The male doctor is there too, yawning behind his mask as he changes out the bags hanging off the gurney—all of which have varying amounts of red in them, something that makes Dick’s eyes go wide. No one comments on it when he points it out, just shrugs. Great.

The doctor finishes changing his bandages and gauze, cleaning some of the wounds as she goes. The male doctor jots down his vitals and checks out his various tubes. It’s still uncomfortable, but knowing that the doctors aren’t going to hurt him offers him some reassurance.

The male doctor checks Dick’s feeding tube, grimacing with his eyes at the sight of Dick’s throat. “I suppose we should be grateful he let us use the lubricant.”

“Don’t say that,” the doctor hisses.

“What? He’s not even here,” he says, taking the penlight away from Dick’s mouth. Dick glances over at the guards, but it does no good; he can’t tell them apart.

The doctor must finish, because Dick’s gown and blanket are fixed and his gurney is being raised.

The doctor runs him through a quick neuro exam and she seems satisfied. She goes back to her tray and fills a syringe, no doubt with the promised sedative. She walks back to him and injects the liquid through his IV. It’s cold, and it makes him feel tingly within seconds.

“How’s the swelling on his neck?” the doctor asks as Dick feels himself fading.

Dick blinks, looking at the male doctor to try to figure out what’s wrong with his neck. “A little worse than yesterday.”

“What was his temperature?” the doctor asks.

Dick blinks hard, trying to stay awake, to get the information that’s rightfully his, but he can’t. He sleeps.

oOo

Dick wakes up still in his cage, which doesn’t make sense. He looks around, but it’s the same room, and Bruce is still in the cell next to him. His nausea is back too—god he hates sedatives.

“What happened?” Dick asks, and Bruce snaps his head to look over at him.

“You’re awake,” Bruce says, a little sad. Dick’s a little sad about it too, to be honest; recovering from surgery without any painkillers and unable to move isn’t exactly fun. “I don’t know where they took you, but I think it was for another CT scan.”

“Why’d they sedate me?” Dick asks. It still hurts to talk, but it’s getting better. A little.

“They probably didn’t want you to be able to figure out where they were going,” Bruce explains, and Dick hums in agreement.

“My head okay?” Dick asks.

“They wouldn’t talk to me, but they brought you back without any new bandages,” Bruce tells him, and Dick hums again. “Still tired?” Bruce asks.

Dick nods a little, breathing deeply from another wave of nausea. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Bruce grunts. “Worried about you. They said you have a fever.”

That might explain part of why he’s feeling so shitty, and fuzzy. “Yeah?”

“They were worried about your neck.”

That night in the rain—the man injected him with the needle after he placed it on the ground, in the gravel. “One of the goons that grabbed us doesn’t know anything about keeping needles clean.” He wonders, idly, if the needle had been used.

Bruce growls, literally growls. Dick almost laughs, but the tube shoved down his nose keeps him from it.

“There was a lot of blood in those bags,” Dick muses, thinking back to this morning. He wonders how long he’s been out, he wonders if Bruce kept track.

“I know, sweetheart,” Bruce tells him gently; Dick adds another “sweetheart” to his count. “From what I can see, there’s less now. You’re not getting worse.”

“Except for the fever,” Dick says.

“Except for the fever.”

oOo

Somehow, Dick is able to fall asleep again. He wakes to the sounds of people murmuring around him, something that never fails to spark panic in his chest. He’s shivering, he notices; someone’s taken his blanket, but his gown is still in the right place.

He opens his eyes to find the two doctors and several guards.

“He needs medicine,” the doctor is instating. “He could die.”

“It’s a fever,” the guard says. He meets Dick’s eyes, “Look, he’s even awake. He’s fine.”

Dick doesn’t think that’s true; he’s feeling worse than he did last time. He rolls his head to look at Bruce, he looks back at him and mouths something Dick can’t make out. He wonders if he should add another “sweetheart” to his count, just to be safe. What was his count again? How long have they been here, and where is here?

“Where?” Dick croaks, and his throat hurts and his voice doesn’t sound like his. He coughs, trying to clear it, but that makes his throat worse and sends pain crashing through his ribs, tugging at his side. He tries to move his hands, to hold his chest together, but he can’t move them. He can’t move! “B?”

“You’re alright, Nightwing. Focus.” Bruce is always telling him to focus, but focus on what?

“Don’t talk to him,” the guard spits.

“Will you let me run a blood test?” the doctor asks. “Then when those come back with infection written in bold, we can give him antibiotics. No painkillers, just antibiotics and an ice pack for the fever, cross my heart.”

“It’s probably just a cold, he doesn’t need medicine,” the guard insists. “And if it’s not a cold, whoever buys him can decide what to do with him and his medical care.”

“No one will want him like this,” she presses. “And last I checked, you were supposed to get approval for what I asked for, not take those decisions into your hands and—”

There’s a hand around her throat, and Dick tries to leap up to help, but he’s stuck—he’s stuck, he’s stuck, he’s stuck!

There’s beeping, and someone is telling him to take a breath, and someone is telling them to shut up and it’s too much and Dick can’t think, he can’t—

Dick’s finger twitches, brushing across a button. He remembers someone telling him to press it, and that someone would come. He presses it once, twice, three times. A louder beeping goes off, a different octave. It’s an alarm.

The woman reappears, the alarm stops, the monitors keep going. “What is it? What happened?”

“Need help,” Dick grits out, and that’s the last thing he remembers.

oOo

“Check on Nightwing first.”

Dick pulls his eyes open at the sound of his name, and when he looks toward the doorway, he sees not the doctors he’s half-expecting, but Robin and Spoiler—the rescue team has finally arrived.

With a click, Tim cuts off the lock and the two of them run to his side.

“Are you alright?” Tim asks him as he and Stephanie work on getting off his restraints. Bruce is cutting his own restraints with a weapon someone must have given him.

“Fantastic now that you guys are here. Get this stuff off me, yeah?” Dick asks, sitting up as soon as the restraints are gone.

“I don’t . . .” Tim trails off, looking up at Batman when he joins them.

“Spoiler, turn off the monitors,” Batman commands, receiving a dutiful nod. She’s oddly quiet and her movements are stiff, Dick notes.

Dick moves to pull the IV out of his hand, but Bruce stops him.

“Let me. Lie down and relax.”

“I’m fine,” Dick protests, but he knows he’s not; sitting up is sending a shooting pain to his chest and stomach, but he’s too stubborn to listen to them.

Bruce ignores him but takes out the IV, then lets Dick take off the blood pressure cuff and sticky pads for the heart monitor. Steph and Tim watch as Bruce and Dick remove most of the medical equipment, leaving in the tubes and catheters in until they can get the proper supplies.

“Lie down,” Bruce tells him, again.

“I can walk,” Dick says.

Bruce gives him a hard stare, forcing Dick back down by sheer will.

“Oracle?” Bruce asks, pressing the new comm Tim must have given him. Bruce nods in a way that tells Dick that Babs gave him good news. “Let’s move.”

Dick drapes an arm over his eyes and takes a deep breath as he’s rolled out of the room at what he’s sure is a sprint. Tim grabs his hand, squeezing it once to reassure him before letting go again. The past few days have been a nightmare, but it’s almost over; he’s going home.

oOo

Alfred freaked out as much as he’s capable of when he first saw Dick, all wide eyes and sharp inhales followed by frowns and tisking. Dick’s chest had a looked particularly bad, covered in bruises from where he’d been kicked repeatedly and with enough force to do more than bruise. The doctors, though, had done a good job. After countless scans, Alfred confirmed that they’d managed to repair one of his kidneys, which was likely damaged by one of the bullets, and a punctured lung. All of his organs were still in place and Alfred didn’t have to perform any additional surgery.

He did, however, remove the chest tube, feeding tube, and catheters.

Alfred wanted to keep him on an IV for painkillers, fluids, and antibiotics. The antibiotics, weren’t for the injection site, to Dick’s surprise. While it had been red and swollen, it wasn’t that bad by the time he’d arrived at the cave; their bigger problem was the fact that Dick had developed pneumonia, probably because he’d been immobilized, kept in poor conditions, and had broken ribs paired with a punctured lung. Despite his condition, Dick had convinced Alfred not to put him on an IV, citing that he’d had too many wires and tubes for his taste. They both had a sense that Dick would be fighting IVs for quite a while.

Dick mostly stayed in his bed for the first few days, too knocked out by drugs and fever to do much of anything else. By the fourth day, he was up and shuffling around the manor, gearing up to convince Alfred to let him go home and recover there. It was weird, being in the manor. It gave him a hard to describe feeling, one that made him almost itchy.

He figured, though, that his argument wouldn’t be very effective if Dick looked as tired as he felt. He’d had a hard time sleeping last night and one glance in the mirror told him it showed; taking a quick power nap on the couch while he waited to run into Alfred would be for the best.

Bruce, however, felt that it was up to him to sabotage Dick’s perfectly good plan by waking him up.

“Sorry, I didn’t realize you were asleep,” Bruce says when Dick sits up on the couch with a yawn. He’s wearing a suit; Bruce must just be getting home from work, then, meaning Dick slept longer than he’d intended to.

“It’s fine,” Dick mumbles, stifling another yawn. “Did you need something?”

Bruce shakes his head. “You weren’t in your room. I wanted to make sure you were alright.”

“Oh. I’m feeling a little better and just wanted a change of scenery,” Dick explains. “I actually think I’m healed enough to get out of your hair, so.” Dick ends with a shrug.

“And you think that’s a good idea.”

“Yeah, why wouldn’t it be? I feel fine,” Dick says.

“You have pneumonia and are recovering from two GSWs.”

Dick scoffs, rolls his eyes. “I’ve dealt with worse on my own.”

“Hnn.” Bruce tightens his stare, but it’s not angry. Concerned, maybe. Worried. “I’m sure Alfred agrees that you should stay here until you’re fully healed.”

Dick blinks at him, wondering where this is coming from. Dick had kind of gotten the sense that, if anything, Bruce had been avoiding him. But now, it almost sounds like Bruce wants him around. Bruce had obviously and understandably been worried when Dick was first hurt, but he’s in the clear now; Bruce should be back to normal.

“This is the first time we’ve really seen each other in a month,” Dick muses, unable to think of another time they had been around each other more for than an hour outside of masks.

A beat passes, a pause that lasts a moment too long. “Yes. What’s your point?”

Dick sighs, pushes his hair back. “We weren’t even planning on seeing each other last week, it was just by chance.”

Bruce nods.

“So, if you had no problem avoiding me for a month—a whole month, Bruce—why do you care now?” Dick asks, and he really hopes there’s an answer out there. “I’ve been sick and injured on my own before. There were plenty of times when you knew I was sick or injured, and Alfred called, but you didn’t.”

“I thought you wanted space,” Bruce supplies.

“Bullshit,” Dick snaps. “What kid doesn’t want their”—Dick cuts himself off, not knowing what he’s going to say, not wanting to say it. “When have I not wanted you around when I’ve been hurt?”

“You have asked me to leave on several occasions,” Bruce says.

Dick presses his palms into his eyes. “Why are you so difficult?”

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Bruce says. “It seems like you’re angry with me no matter what I do. If you ask me to go, you’re mad that I didn’t stay, but now I’m asking you to stay, and you’re arguing with me. What do you want?”

“I don’t know,” Dick whines. He wants Bruce around, but sometimes it feels like the Bruce he wants isn’t around anymore, or maybe never was. It’s hard, looking at a parental figure without the rose-tinted glasses childhood hides them behind. Now he looks at Bruce and he’s reminded of all the hurt and shortcomings that came with his upbringing; he looks at Bruce and he’s angry for everything that wasn’t and isn’t.

“Neither do I,” Bruce tells him. “Sometimes it feels like you want nothing to do with me.”

Dick wants to scream, tell Bruce that there’s a fucking reason why Dick doesn’t want anything to do with him, with certain sides of him. He wants to tell him that, yeah, maybe both of them are at fault for the way things are between them, but he was the child—just a dumb, angry teenager—and it shouldn’t be his job to make things right and ignore all the things Bruce has done to him, or hasn’t done. He wants to take the venom on his tongue and tell Bruce all the ways he fucked up and demand apology after apology and make Bruce feel like shit.

(In this moment, all of that feels like an absolute truth, a certainty. But given time, it will falter; Bruce’s flaws won’t seem so extreme and the hurt Dick feels won’t run as deep.)

Instead, he says, “That’s not true.” This is another truth—albeit one that doesn’t always feel absolute and constant, but a truth nonetheless.

“Then why did you stop coming to the manor?” Bruce asks.

It’s a fair question with a complicated answer that Dick doesn’t think he has. It’s more complicated than saying “you replaced me with another kid” because that isn’t where it started, and deep-down Dick knows that isn’t completely true. It’s more complicated than saying “you never ask me to come home” because Bruce might be asking, probably has been, but Bruce doesn’t use words for those kinds of requests and Dick is too tired, too done, to translate Bruce-speak. It’s more complicated than saying “I don’t know what I’m doing and I can’t be around people who know that I don’t know what I’m doing” because then it wouldn’t just be Bruce he’s avoiding.

He finds himself voicing a watered-down version of the truth: “It doesn’t feel like home anymore.”

“Hnn.” Bruce takes a seat on the couch, and Dick moves his feet to accommodate him. After a moment of silent debate, Dick leans his head against Bruce’s should, and Bruce tucks him underneath his chin, just like he used to do when Dick still lived here. “Things have changed,” Bruce says simply.

“Yeah.” And Dick can’t pinpoint where exactly the change started, where the tipping point was, and what role Dick played in tipping it.

“I’ve missed you.”

For a second, Dick is wearing the rose-tinted glasses again, but only for that second. “I’ll stay,” Dick agrees.

Bruce presses a kiss into his hairline, and Dick feels at home, if only for a second.

“I don’t want to go another month without seeing you,” Dick continues. “We need to start making an effort.” That’s what it means to be an adult, right?

Bruce nods, humming in agreement. “I’m sorry I stopped, that I . . . pushed you away.”

Dick sighs, not feeling up to the conversation boiling in that sentence. He presses himself into Bruce a little harder despite his aching ribs. Bruce runs his fingers through Dick’s hair, and Dick closes his eyes, breathing slowing.

In that moment, Dick feels like everything will be alright. He knows that the rose-tinted glasses will eventually fall away and shatter, but when they do, he hopes that things will still look brighter than they did before he put them on, even if he knows they won’t be as bright without them. He doesn’t need a childish fantasy of a perfect father figure, but he does need Bruce, and with a little effort, he hopes that it will be more than enough.

#dick grayson #bruce wayne #nightwing #batman #batfamily #batfam #this was just an excuse to write whump #elizabeth writes

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spacestationdaedalus · 3 years

Text

Happy late Christmas to @malevon!! I might not be able to throw you a party but at least I can give you a fic to read to celebrate the last day at your job. This is the longest single piece I’ve written in a long time and my first time writing injury/whump, so I hope it’s comprehensible, at least. It was SO much fun to write, thank you for the lovely prompt <3

ao3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28435182

...

She's coming apart, now.

I’m not scared of you.

Helen...was that...a lie?

Once he heard it, Saw it, Jon knew it was over. Her doors and hallways bend and creak under the weight of the Watcher’s gaze, and she herself is twisting. She’s always twisting of course, but this is different. It’s uniform, too comprehensible for the incarnation of lies and deceit. She’s screaming, crying out-

- it’s me, it’s Helen -

Channeling the power of the Eye comes a bit easier each time, which Jon registers in the back of his mind as vaguely concerning. The corridors are crumbling, colors blending into each other as Distortion and Spiral become indistinguishable. Jon staggers as the walls and floor shift, disorienting still even with the Eye staring down at them. It reaches out, then, a last-ditch effort to save itself. Stretching and warping with hands, sharp fingers that don’t belong to Helen or Michael or anyone with a name. Jon doesn’t stop talking.

He registers a pain, vague and far-off. Everything warps into red and a million colors all at once, and then he's nowhere.

Dry grass crunches under his feet, and icy wind cuts through him. He can’t actually hear it over the ringing in his ears, but he can definitely feel it, bracing and whipping the dark strands that had come free from their bun. There’s a ringing in his ears; it travels into his jaw, rattles his teeth. There's a coppery taste in his mouth and warmth trickling down his face. Another nosebleed. Great.

"Christ, Jon!"

Martin's voice comes from behind, and Jon sags with the relief of it.

"Oh, Martin! Good." Jon turns to greet him. His words sound strange to his own ears. Slippery and lopsided and wrong. The ringing in his ears is replaced with the dull roar of rushing blood. Accented by a rhythmic thud - his heartbeat, surely. Was it always so loud? He can feel it behind his eyes, and with every beat it hurts just a bit more.

"Wh-what happened? There was the hotel and then..." Martin's voice trails off, eyes widening.

Jon laughs, bringing a hand up to wipe his face. His fingers are cold. Which is strange because the rest of him is light and warm. He shivers. "Oh calm down Martin, it's just a nosebleed." He can taste the copper, still.

Martin rushes toward him. He's saying words that Jon desperately wants to hear, but he can't. Not over the roaring in his ears, or the blur of color and static. He can feel Martin's hands on his arms, his shoulders. Jon reaches up, tries to grasp one of his hands. Has his arm always been this heavy? He feels a pulling, sudden and deep - his abdomen. And it hurt.

He blinks. He's on the ground, half kneeling. Martin's arms are around him.

"-my god, what happened? Oh god Jon-"

His head is heavy, eyes tired. He looks down. And there's blood. His blood?

Oh.

He opens his mouth to tell Martin that it's alright, it's ok, it's not as bad as it looks. He makes a sound, he thinks. He hopes, desperately, that Martin understands.

A wave of dizziness overtakes him, followed closely by darkness.

Without himself to talk to, the dismal weather is a bit distracting.

Martin braces himself against the wind and the light pattering of rain. There’s hardly a way to tell if he’s walking in the right direction, or if there even is a right direction to begin with. He’d simply picked the way that felt right and began the trek, hoping he’d meet Jon along the way. Which isn’t an outstanding plan, sure, but Martin has a hunch that wherever the fog of the Lonely ends is where he’ll find Jon. Or, where Jon will find him - not that there’s much of a difference. Regardless, Martin hopes it’s sooner rather than later. His other self had slipped away into the fog long before, with all the fanfare of a breath dissipating into cold air. At the very least he’s walking with the wind instead of against it, though it doesn’t stop the minuscule droplets from painting his glasses. He’s already given up on cleaning them, resigning himself to the rivulets that form and drip down the smooth surface.

When the rain lets up and the fog clears just enough to catch a building crest over the horizon, the relief marginally outweighs the apprehension. The sight of something other than gray mist and dead grass is promising that he’s reaching the boundary of his domain.

Hidden horrors beyond comprehension aside, at least he can get a break from the damn wind.

It’s a hotel, Martin realizes, one of the old kinds you see in travel magazines and history shows. It’s weather-worn and outdated in a way that might have seemed charming at one point, but now practically oozes terror. The wind dies down as he approaches, for which Martin is grateful.

And in a matter of moments, it’s gone.

Although "matter of moments" might be pushing it. One second it was there, and then Martin blinked, and then it wasn’t.

And Jon is there.

"Christ, Jon!" Martin says, half startled-fear and half relief. The wind picks up again in the hotel’s absence, but it seems more tolerable, now.

"Oh, Martin! Good." Jon turns, a dazed look on his face to match his tone. There's a thin trail of blood dripping from his nose. Overusing his powers again, Martin realizes with a bolt of apprehension.

"Wh-what happened? There was the hotel and then..." Martin looks to the space the hotel once occupied, and back to Jon, who’s facing him now. His voice trails off as slow sinking horror creeps in its wake.

Jon's shirt is ripped open, tatters fluttering like wind chimes in the frigid breeze. Four gashes, deep and red, run diagonally across his torso, from mid-rib cage to just above the waist. Blood is coating his stomach, his clothes-

Oh, god

Jon's wiping the blood from his face and laughing - why is he laughing? - as Martin closes the gap, heart lodged and hammering in his throat. He grabs Jon with shaking hands, holding him, steadying him when he sways back. Martin’s vaguely aware that he’s speaking, words and half-formed questions rattled off rapid-fire.

What happened where were you when how oh god fuck fuck-

Jon's knees buckle. Martin brings him into his arms, supports his weight as he lowers them to the ground. Jon is dead weight at this point, head falling to rest on Martin's shoulder. He brings a shaking hand to Jon's hair, then his neck. He can feel his pulse against his palm, light and fast and as frantic as the beating of Martin's own heart.

He lays his down, gently, as gently as he can with how bad his hands are shaking. He rips the backpack open and grabs the first piece of cloth he sees. It's an old t-shirt, one of the few Martin brought with him from the safehouse. A faded band logo adorns the front. Jon had been pleasantly surprised to find Martin wearing it, since he was a fan of the same group. They’d laughed and sang their favorite songs together-

“I can’t believe I didn’t know you could sing!”

“I can’t really sing, Martin, it’s a functional skill more than anything-”

“Bullshit! You’re good! Like, actually good.”

“Is now a good time to mention I used to be in a band?”

“What?!”

Martin crumples the old shirt and presses it to Jon’s bleeding stomach.

That pulls a low moan from him, eyes closed and face screwed up against the pain.

"Sorry, sorry, I know," Martin placates, high and strung thin. Out of the grab-bag of work experiences Martin had gathered over the years, anything tangentially related to health care was nowhere to be found. Everything he knew came from corny 90’s job safety trainings and overly-dramatic television shows.

He wants desperately to check the wounds - how deep are they? Will Jon be able to heal them before he, he bleeds out or something?! - but his arms are locked at the elbows, fists clenched in the white fabric ever-so-slowly seeping with red. He fears that if he were to move even a millimeter, everything would slip between his fingers.

A touch, feather-light on his arm, feels like a shock. It’s Jon’s hand

"I-it's fine, it's ok-" Jon's voice is soft and ragged.

"It's-it’s really not, actually," Martin replies, and it might have come across as playful if it didn’t crack so deeply through the middle. He sacrifices a hand to grasp Jon's. It's ice cold and small and thin.

Martin uses his other hand to gingerly lift the shirt. The bleeding is slowing now - thank god - and Martin is sure the edges have closed ever so slightly. Not that he had gotten the best look before. He remembers how quickly Jon’s leg healed after Daisy-

It wasn’t a miracle though, his mind supplies.

He throws the bloody shirt aside and digs through the backpack once more, Gauze, some tape, a knife, a bottle of water. There’s only a half-roll of the gauze left, and it’ll have to be enough. With a jittering determination Martin uses the water to clean away some of the blood, cutting away the remains of Jon’s shirt as he goes. As the red washes away, the wounds don’t look quite as deep, quite as awful as they did before. He feels the smallest sliver of panic leave him and he draws in a deep breath to calm himself. Martin notices, really notices the wind for the first time in minutes - or hours, how long has it been? It burns the tips of his fingers numb, slicing through him like the knife in his hands. They don’t have anything in the realm of antiseptic, because of course they don’t, and Martin desperately hopes that Jon can heal himself before it becomes a problem. He gently wraps Jon’s middle with fumbling hands, placating as best he can when Jon winces against the movement.

They aren't in the Martin's domain anymore, technically. Just on the edge between Lonely and god-knows-what. But the open, gently rolling hills and vestiges of fog sends his spine tingling. Like a rabbit with no cover, and a hawk circling overhead. Not to mention the wind - now that Martin’s brought attention to it, he can’t stop shivering.

There’s a cobblestone wall, maybe twenty meters away. Left over from the perimeter of the hotel, if Martin had to guess. Wedging themselves into a corner to block out some of the wind is probably their best - only? - option.

Martin leans forward, brings his hands to cradle Jon's face. For as frozen as his fingers are he can still feel the chill against Jon’s skin, which isn’t the most comforting sign. He caresses his thumbs against Jon’s cheekbones in an attempt to coax the barest bit of attention out of him. Jon hums as he opens his eyes, slowly, foggy and unfocused. Whether it’s blood loss or pain or the after-effect of using his powers, Martin isn’t sure. Probably all three.

“There you are,” Martin whispers, and as small as it is he can’t hold back the relieved smile. He presses a soft kiss to Jon’s forehead. “We need to get out of the wind, love. I’m going to pick you up, alright?”

“I can walk.” Jon murmurs, almost lost in the air between them.

Idiot man .

“Not a chance.” Martin kisses his forehead once more, the comfort at the sound of Jon’s voice, ragged as it is, bringing tears to his eyes. He re-positions the backpack and slips his arms under shoulders and knees, rising to his feet with only a slight stagger. Jon cuts off a cry with his teeth, and Martin whispers apologies once more.

The stone wall on both sides makes more difference than Martin had dared to hope. He sets Jon down delicately on the grass, followed by the backpack with a bit less care. As he rummages through it once more - he’d packed that blanket, hadn’t he? - Jon shifts, raising himself on shaking arms.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Martin starts as Jon leans himself against the cobblestone, arm wrapped gently against the new bandages.

“It’s ok, I can manage it,” Jon replies in between deep breaths. He’s shaking, Martin can tell, pale and drawn. Martin grabs the blanket from the bottom of the pack at last, crawling to kneel next to Jon.

“Alright, alright, just stay there now, will you?” Martin chides as he leans against the stone, dragging the blanket over them. He was starting to think they’d never need it, but with the cold air still biting against them he was more than grateful they’d kept it around. “It’s not like we can give you, y’know, stitches or anything, so try not to move around so much while it’s healing.”

Jon leans his head - and most of his weight - against Martin’s shoulder with a hum, eyes sliding shut. They sit in a not-uncomfortable silence for a few moments. Martin takes a breath to ask-

“I killed Helen.” Jon speaks, soft and half-muffled by the sleeve of Martin’s jacket.

“...oh.” Martin says, quietly, because what else is there to say? Then, louder: “Wait, did- did she do this to you?!”

“Not her fault.” Jon takes a breath, slowly. Martin thinks he’s about to fall asleep. Or pass out, but he certainly hopes it’s the former. “It was self-defense.”

Oh.

Martin’s not exactly sure what to do with that, and by the time he figures it out he’s sure Jon won’t be conscious anymore. Jon’s breathing evens out into something resembling sleep - or rest, at least, since he can’t really sleep anymore - and Martin resigns himself to his thoughts and his still-slowing heartbeat. The feeling of Jon’s breaths against him are enough to dispel the last dregs of his panic, leaving exhaustion in its wake.

Jon couldn’t have been asleep, because he didn’t dream.

The sensation is similar though; the lost time, the panic, the awareness that comes back to him with all the subtlety of a freight train. The headache isn’t exactly new, but the deep ache that sinks its teeth into his bones is an interesting touch.

He’s against Martin, still - Martin it’s Martin he’s safe you’re both safe - who’s breathing is slow and deep. He’s not dreaming, though. The last dream he had, at the safehouse, was about his mother-

Jon sits up, sudden, fast. He didn’t know that. Not before. But now he Knows.

Knowledge; a familiarity, awareness, or understanding of something-

Stopstopstop

The knowing pushes against him, against the back of his eyes that throb in time to his heartbeat. It’s hard and fast and it hurts -

Fever causes and increase in heart rate, breathing rate, and blood circulation to the skin-

Temperature is considered elevated when it is higher than 38 degrees Celsius, or 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit-

(32°F − 32) × 5/9 = 0°C

He brings his hands up, foolish to think he can force the onslaught back with the heels of his palms against his eyes. His hands are frigid and damp against his face, or is it his face that’s burning against his hands? The movement of his arms tugs against his chest, his stomach, and folding in on himself only makes it hurt more but he can’t stop-

You think you could be saved without paying the price?

T̶h̵i̷s̴ ̵i̷s̷ ̷h̸e̶l̴p̵i̴n̸g̶ ̶y̸o̵u̴.̴

Ỳ̶̧̮͎͔̇̑o̷͚̖̬͈̙̽̅̆̕u̷̢̙͍͙̅̽̌̂́ ̸̯̈̓͠ͅs̵̙͇̗͠͝ȟ̸̩̝̗͚͓̈́͒̈͑o̸̢͉͎̯͒u̸̬̩̯͇̿̿̍͛͝l̶͇̗̮̦͒̾d̴̠̪̰͉̉̃̈́ ̵͍̙̺͖̮̒̊b̵̡̯͕͕̘̑e̶̫̹̒͊ ̴̬͑̓g̸̟̝̻͕̣͊͠ ̶̞̰̯͍̟͌̑̌ṛ̶͍̹̀ ̴̲̭̚͜ã̸͎̼̥̜̦͆͝ ̵̝̺̈̿t̴̢̛͗͝ ̶̺̝̂͛e̴̙͆̆̉̚ ̶̜̦̮͓̱̓̒f̶̢̗͓̥͗ ̷͓̾͜ụ̵̭͋͛ ̵̝̪̃̋͗͘l̶̨̥͈̼̝͂͘͝

He tastes copper again. Copper and static and paper and magnetic tape pooling on his tongue. He clenches his teeth against the need to vomit every bit and piece of knowledge and horror he’s ever known. The door in his mind is cracking now, buckling and splintering with the pressure and the weight of it all.

It was a small, unremarkable door, painted dark yellow, with a matte-black handle.

Something touches his shoulder and he would scream if he could open his mouth. The same something - hands hands two hands - touches his face, his hair-

And he had long, straw-coloured hair that fell onto his shoulders in loose ringlets-

“Jon,” someone says, and it’s Martin because of course it’s Martin. He’s kneeling in front of him, blessedly cold hands cradling his face. One hand brushes his hair back - had it come undone again? - resting against his forehead. It’s so soft and cool and comforting Jon can barely hold back the sob against his throat.

I felt the cold night air on my face and, and wet tarmac under my hands and knees.

“Good lord, you’re burning up!” He sounds frantic and Jon wants to comfort him, but he doesn’t know how. Martin starts on about medicine and things they don’t have and things that Jon knows, Knows can’t help him. He Knows it’ll pass and he Knows it won’t kill him, but in the moment that doesn’t feel like the mercy it should.

Jon shakes his head against Martin’s hands and tries, really tries to tell him it’s ok -

I decided to come to you and tell you my story.

“ I- ” The one syllable is jagged and dripping with compulsion and tellmeyourstory . Jon clamps down on it with a whine, shaking his head again. He brings a shaking hand to touch Martin’s on his cheek. He meets his eyes for the first time, wide and searching. Jon realizes he must look as wretched as he feels for Martin to have that look on his face.

I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry

“Oh, Jon.” Martin must understand, at least some of it, because his face softens. He pulls Jon to his chest - Jon would put his arms around him if they weren’t so heavy-

-held up my arm for a handshake, but he just looked at it, and laughed-

-but he settles for burying his face in the crook of Martin’s neck, eyes shut.

...felt like I couldn’t trust my eyes.

Her statement echoes in his ears and on his tongue. He remembers her face, her real face, before Helen twisted it into endless, sickening spirals. The bounce to her hair, the odd way she held her pen, the bags under her eyes that mirrored his own. He wasn’t mourning her. He certainly wasn’t morning Helen . She didn’t deserve that. He wasn’t mourning the woman he’d never known, a woman he probably wouldn’t have liked anyway , a woman that he let walk through that fucking door -

There has never been a door there, Archivist.

He doesn’t realize he’s crying until his next breath catches in the middle. It’s silent because he makes it silent, because the second he opens his mouth the words will come spilling out and they’ll never stop. So his shoulders shake and his chest heaves from the force of it, and it hurts . His tears drip down the collar of Martin’s shirt, and Martin - god Martin - has one hand on his back and another in his hair, making soft circles with the pads of his fingers. He’s talking to him, and Jon can’t hear the words over the static and statement pulsing through his eardrums. But the vibration of his voice is gentle, comforting, and it makes breathing just a bit easier. His face is hot and he shivers against the chill creeping up his frame, but Martin is here and warm and safe and Jon hopes that he never has to leave.

“Here,” Martin says - and Jon hears - after who knows how long, shifting slightly but never taking his arms away. He repositions himself, back against the wall, and lowers Jon by the shoulders until his head is pillowed on his lap. The motion hurts, Jon knows, but it’s muted and far away against the burning of his skin and how cold he is in spite of it.

Later they’ll talk, when he’s better, about Helen and friendship and other things. Jon will say I’m sorry for worrying you and Martin will say it’s ok and they’ll both say I love you . But for now, Jon drifts off to Martin’s hand resting on his head, his whispered reassurances reminding him that he’s safe.

“Rest, love.” Martin presses a kiss to his forehead and brings the blanket over him. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Jon can’t stop himself from Knowing that, not now, but he doesn’t need the Eye to know that it’s true.

#my writing #tma fics #jonmartin #i wrote a lot more than i expected to for this!! i really hope it like #makes sense hahaha #tma

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petra-deserved-better · 4 years

Note

Various canon fanfic of Petra and the squad alive particularly during the Uprising arc ( yes it’s my favorite ) by the way great work love you fanfics

Levi Squad Lived Uprising AU - Part One

Word count: 1752 words

——————————————————————————————————

“I’m sick of baby sitting these children!” Oruo cried, looking on in indignation as Eren and Jean squabbled about who had made the others bed.

“We aren’t supposed to be baby sitting them they’re on our squad now.” Gunther replied, but even as he spoke he could see Petra fussing over the two boys who had just been arguing and Eld helping a girl sneak an extra roll of bread. Gunther shook his head smiling. “You weren’t sick of it when they were all fawning over your kill count yesterday and asking for tips.”

“I can’t help it if I’m an inspiration.” Oruo said dismissively. But Gunther knew he had loved the attention and Petra had teased him about it later that evening.

A squabble had broken out among the new recruits and Petra had thrown herself into the fray smoothing the ruffled feathers and smiling at each of their new squad mates in turn.

“Pfft, what is it with her and these brats anyway. First Eren and now this lot, if she’d wanted to be a mother she should have stayed at home.” Oruo crosses his arms over his chest as he watched Petra and Eld expertly divide the chores between the newly pacified recruits.

Gunther raised an eyebrow at his friend. “Who was she supposed to have kids with you?” He teased.

The colour rose in Oruo’s cheeks. “Yeah she wishes. Come on let’s go help I don’t want to spend the rest of my afternoon doing press-ups because some snot nose brats couldn’t clean this cabin up properly.”

Laughing Gunther joined his squad mates, and together they had the place spotless by the time the Captain returned.

For the first few hours they had been at this hide out Gunther had really convinced himself that this latest mission was going to be a piece if cake. How hard could it be to protect these two kids when you were used to going outside the walls and fighting giant monsters. Truthfully, he had almost been looking at the next few weeks as the closest he would ever get to a proper holiday. Sure, he still needed to do patrols and clean and cook, but honestly he had felt a little bubble of joy well in his chest the way it used to when school closed for summer when he was a kid. When was the last time he’d been able to look so far in the future without seeing imminent danger.

He hadn’t really been listening whilst the boy Armin he been talking about his plans to retake wall Maria it all seemed like a dream to him. His attention had been brought back to the table when his Captain said Hange looked like she was holding in a shit. Gunther smirked, he’d always appreciated the Captains toilet humour more than others.

“Minister Nick was found dead this morning, in the Trost barracks.”

The bubble of joy burst, he wasn’t smirking anymore.

“I know he was murdered, they’d pulled off his fingernails.”

The Captains face was an unreadable mask, Gunther looked to Eld instead, he saw the way his eyebrows where drawn in and his fists were cleansed. He knew this wasn’t good.

“It’s my fault he died.” Hange continued in a downcast voice, the lack of all usual enthusiasm was unnerving. “I hid him in the Trost barracks to protect him from the church. I never thought that it would be the interior police that killed him, I was naïve.”

The room was silent, he looked from his squad to the new recruits. All the happy laughter and playful banter of the morning was gone, each wore looks of shock, disgust or fear as they digested what the squad leader had said.

The silence was interrupted by the sound of their Captain slurping his tea. Even in the midst of such a startling revelation it amused Gunther to see the way the new recruits jumped and looked disbelievingly at their captain. They had a lot to learn!

That evening he was on patrol with Eld, the night around them was cool and silent apart from the crunching of their boots as they made their way around the perimeter of their property, a precaution Captain Levi now felt was necessary.

“Do you really think we may have enemy’s in the interior police now?” Gunther asked in a low voice as they made their second sweep of the area. He felt reasonably confident there was no one around now but he wasn’t going to raise his voice unnecessarily after all that has been discussed today.

“If the Captain says you talk after one nail, then you talk after one nail. He knows more about it than the rest of us. Plus when you think about it, it just makes sense.” Eld shifted the rifle he held from one shoulder to another whilst he spoke.

Gunther felt reassured, he’d known Eld since they were in trainee corps and from the moment they’d meet he’d looked up to him, he couldn’t put his finger quite on what it was, he’d just always found him a reassuring presence, he’d been eternally grateful when they were put on the same squad.

“You think Hange’s idea will work, that we should go after our enemies as well as carry on our experiments with Eren?”

Eld scratched his chin and contemplated the question. “Seems the only sensible option to me.” He responded. “The interior police might not yet know that the Survey Corps has its eye on the Riess family but the fact that Historia is in our ranks might be enough reason to go after us, it makes sense to cover our backs.”

Gunther signed. “I thought we were in for an easy few weeks. Now I feel like there are enemies round every corner.”

Eld threw his arm round Gunther’s shoulders and laughed. “It could be worse?”

“Yeah how?”

“We could still be outside the wall fighting titans. Come on, what’s a few interior police to them. You’ll see will have this all sorted in no time.”

Gunther smiled. “Yeah, your right.”

“As always.” Eld grinned.

Gunther felt better. He always did after he spoke to Eld.

X~~~X

The wind blew tendrils of Petra’s hair about her face as she watched the emaciated form of Eren’s Titan below them ripping apart the the house he had built himself. Her chest felt hollow, not long ago she’d watch him follow Hange’s instruction and built the structure. She’d felt hope like she hadn’t dared to let herself feel before. That hope rushed out of her in a breath as Eren’s Titan fell forward and revealed most of Eren’s torso and legs hanging out of his nape.

“He’s not even ten meters this time and I can see his scrawny arse hanging out.” Levi remarked.

Petra let out a gasp of shocked laughter. Beside her Hange was yelling instructions at Eren screaming at him to move.

“I don’t think he’ll be moving again today.” Petra muttered under her breath.

Levi glanced in her direction and then nodded to Hange who began to make her way to cut Eren out of his Titan form, she was beaten to the task by Mikasa. There was a commotion below as they had some trouble getting Eren out of his Titan form.

“Do you think he’ll be ok?” Petra asked peering over the edge of the cliff.

“He’ll be fine.”

The Captain began arranging their retreat from the area. It was important to make it look like they had never been there. It wasn’t until they were on their way home that she was able to speak to him again.

They were riding their horses a little behind everyone else, they didn’t want to be obvious by riding a long in a large procession. Petra cherished little moments like these. It had been a long time since she’d realised she was in love with her Captain. She knew that nothing could ever happen between them but that didn’t stop her foolish heart from enjoying any little moment she could spend by his side. But things had been so busy over the last month such moments had been few and far between.

“What’s on your mind Ral?”

Petra had been so caught up in her thoughts she hadn’t noticed that the Captain had been watching her so closely. She felt the heat rising in her cheeks.

“Do you think we are safe here Sir, from the military police I mean.” It seemed like a safe enough topic, far safer than admitting she’d been thinking about how much she’d missed having tea with him in their old barracks.

“No.” The Captain was nothing but honest.

“Then shouldn’t we get Eren and Historia to somewhere safer?” She asked.

“For the time being, we need to assume no where is safe.”

Petra looked down, studying her hands as they held onto the reins of her horse. “Things were much simpler when the enemy only wanted to eat us.”

Captain Levi let out a huff of laughter and Petra felt her heart swell. She always felt proud of herself when she made him laugh, she knew not many people ever got to hear it.

“That’s true.”

They rode on in comfortable silence for such a length of time that when he spoke again it made her jump.

“Can I trust you with something I can’t tell the others yet.”

“Of corse.” Her answer was a knee jerk reaction. She spoke without thinking, he could trust her with anything. She knew she would never have his love but his trust was something she would always treasure.

“I think that we might be fighting humans soon.”

“Humans, really Captain?” Her voice came out in a panicked squeak.

“It’s just a hunch, but there’s something about this whole situation, that’s familiar. Like I’ve see it before.”

Petra felt bile rise in her throat and tried to swallow it down. She looked at her captain, he’s brows pulled down into a deep frown, she knew she’d follow this man to hell if she had to.

“Well, whatever happens Captain, I’m with you.”

He looked round at her, he’s grey eyes studied her own with a steely intensity that made heart squeeze in her chest.

“Thank you.” He said quietly.

They couldn’t talk anymore. They rounded the corner that revealed the cabin they were staying in. A familiar figure dismounting a horse took Petra by surprise.

“That’s strange, what’s Nifa doing here?”

———————

A/N - I hope this was ok and what you had in mind. I decided to break this up into a series as I couldn’t decide what parts of the uprising to do so mostly decided it would be fun to do most of it. Will be happy to continue if you’ve enjoyed it!

#rivetra #og levi squad #new levi squad #cannon au #everybody lives au #fanfiction #my writing #prompt #fic request

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zmediaoutlet · 4 years

Text

in support of Black Lives Matter, @petitgateau911 donated $25, and requested weecest first time. Thank you for donating!

to get your own personalized fic, please see this post. (no longer taking prompts)

They’re just outside Wheeling, and Dad’s been gone for twenty-four days, and it’s friggin’ cold outside but it’s going to be 1999 in an hour, and Sammy’s--

“Dude, are you drunk?” Dean says.

“No,” Sam says, with affronted dignity. He puts his beer down in the snow and stands on one leg, easy balance. “See. You’re drunk.”

“Sure thing, squirt,” Dean says, laughing, and Sam grins at him in a total unexpected bloom out of nowhere, and it warms his gut just as much as the bonfire’s doing. It’s not much of a New Year’s Eve, but he’s got himself with no broken bones, and he’s got Sammy smiling, and Dad’s in the wind but they’ve got a twelve-pack and bottle of five-buck champagne waiting and a fire, out back of the trailer, and things aren’t all right with the world but, shit, Dean’s known them of a hell of a lot more wrong, so. He lifts his beer in a little toast, to Sam’s balance and to the world in general, and kicks his boots out into the snow. “You let me know if we’re up too far past your bedtime.”

Sam sticks his tongue out, kinda proving Dean’s point, but hell. He’s cheerful, which can get in short supply most days. No school to miss, with everything closed for the winter break, and Dad’s top-secret-no-sons-allowed hunt’s been keeping the boat unrocked, since Dad pretty much just calls Dean every few days to check in as proof of life, and so it’s just been them, and the woods out here, and the trailer. No job in this town, but Dad left enough cash that they’re floated for a while, and Christmas was pretty lame but Dean made a mega-batch of brownies from a box mix that turned out pretty good and Sam nearly ate his weight in ‘em, and there was enough cash left in Dean’s budget to do New Year’s right. Sammy’s even unbent enough to have some drinks, which frankly Dean’s surprised didn’t take more wheedling, but Sam shrugged and said, “It’s traditional, right?” and Dean could’ve just hugged him, but he settled for a noogie instead.

Sam’s still insisting on his sobriety. Dean can’t stop laughing, from his tree-stump that’s serving as a seat. “Shut up, watch,” Sam says, and does the whole rigamarole of the DUI stop to prove it. Walks a straight line, and stands on one foot, and recites the alphabet backwards while touching his nose. “See?”

“Sammy, how the hell do you know all that stuff?” Dean says. “You drunk-driving when I’m not around?”

He keeps holding his balance, looking up at the dark sky with his finger still on his nose. “DARE class, when we were in New Mexico,” Sam says, and finally drops the stance, shrugging. “Figured it couldn’t hurt to be good at it, just in case.”

Just in case. Dean’s little brother, ladies and gents. “You’re such a freak,” Dean says, glad, and Sam rolls his eyes but stumps over through the snow in his too-big boots, shaking his empty can. “Oh, and now you want a refill?”

“How long until we can open the champagne?” Sam says, practical, and Dean checks his watch. 47 minutes. “So, beer,” Sam says, and Dean shrugs, and gives him one.

“All right, short stuff,” Dean says, getting to his feet. He really is getting kinda tipsy--five beers to Sam’s two, that’s maybe understandable. “One thing about being a Winchester--you gotta hold your liquor.” Sam snorts, which Dean ignores. “Second thing, though, is that no matter what, you gotta be able to handle yourself. No matter what.”

“You said no matter what twice,” Sam says, helpfully, and Dean tugs his hat down over his face.

“So,” Dean says, and hops inside for their pistols, and a box of rounds. When he comes back out into the cold Sam’s resettled his hat and his face is pink and his eyes bright, and Dean does hug him then, a one-armed sling around his neck that makes Sam squawk but drags him all warm and bony up into Dean’s side, and then Dean drags them to the other side of the bonfire, where the light starts to fade as the trees encroach on the yard. The fence is kinda falling apart, but it’s steady enough to hold their empties.

Dean sets it up while Sam’s making skeptical-face. “You’re making me do training now?” Sam says, and Dean jumps back over through the deeper snow, crunching into the holes he already made. “Dude, this is lame.”

“Dude, it’s gonna be great,” Dean says, “because check it out: every can you take out, you get to take a drink!”

Sam sighs, like he’s aggravated, but he’s just being fifteen, because he’s grinning right after. Dean stands a pace behind him while he loads, professional, checking his weapon right just like Dean taught him--and he lines up, skinny shoulders square, and sights along his strong arm just like he’s supposed to. Shot--whipcrack sound that ricochets through the clearing--and-- “Yes!” Dean says, punching Sam’s shoulder, and he grabs their beers and toasts Sam, clunking the cans together, and even Sam going wait, you don’t get to drink yet! doesn’t dim Dean’s cheer.

“Okay,” Dean says, waggling his eyebrows, “my turn,” and Sam squints at him thoughtfully and then stoops and flings at handful of snow at Dean just as he’s lining up to fire, and he sputters and the shot goes wild into a tree, and he yells “Dude!”, scraping snow off his face, but Sam’s dancing backwards, laughing, saying, “Hey, you never said that was against the rules!” and oh, it is on.

Snowball fights aren’t supposed to involve gunfire, Dean’s pretty sure, but sometimes the Winchesters play on different rules than other people. All bets are off after Dean dumps a handful of snow down Sammy’s jeans when he’s aiming for his next can, and Sam’s girly-ass scream could probably be heard down at city hall. Dean makes his next shot even with Sam jumping around behind him making crazy monkey noises, and he drains his beer that time, and watches Sammy do the same. There’s a brief stand-off when Dean’s got two snowballs packed and ready, tossing them back and forth between his gloved hands, and Sam keeps watching him instead of raising his pistol to fire--solved when Sam raises--Dean throws--Sam immediately ducks and rolls forward in the snow, and fires closer--and totally misses, but Dean’s so impressed at the shitty attempt at ninjahood that he says Sam earned a drink anyway, and before long they’re laying on the ground, laughing and breathless, the cans all shot and the beer mostly gone, things pretty much perfect.

“How long,” Sam says, and Dean checks his watch.

“Eight minutes,” he says. Sam hums, sits up. He’s still got on his hat, somehow, but his nose is bright pink with cold. “Damn, kiddo. You’re gonna turn into a popsicle.”

Eyeroll, very obvious over Sam’s shoulder. “You’re the one who’s not wearing a hat,” he says, and Dean shrugs. Some things are just too dorky. When Sam’s a little older he’ll know it. “Anyway, whose fault is it that I’ve got snow in my boxers.”

“Um, yours,” Dean says, and Sam raises his eyebrows outraged and Dean says, “Hey, you started it, squirt,” and Sam says, “Only because you cheated first!” and Dean scoops a little clump of snow up and tosses it at Sam’s head, and Sam squawks and launched a full out tackle at Dean, and it’s on, yet again.

Sam’s wriggly and he’s got the bony elbows, but Dean still has five inches on him and the reach to match, and also he’s been fighting dirty way longer. He gets Sam pinned in pretty short order, an armbar over his chest and Dean grinning down into his face, and Sam puffs in irritation but then melts back into the ground--Sam’s special way of losing where somehow he tries to make it seem like it was always his idea, and he doesn’t care, anyway. “Uncle?” Dean says, and Sam says, “Whatever,” and Dean roll his eyes but sits up, straddling Sam just in case he tries anything else, and checks his watch again.

“Hey, one minute!” he says. “Got any resolutions planned?”

“Yeah,” Sam says, quiet. Different, to his usual moody Sam-ness, and Dean frowns, looks at him. His face is still all pink, nose and cheeks and what Dean can see of his ears where his hat’s not tugged down, and he doesn’t look--sad, or anything. Sam licks his lips, looks back at him like he wants to say something, but doesn’t know how to get it out.

“What?” Dean says, and Sam’s mouth twitches, and then he grabs Dean by the lapels of his leather jacket and pulls him down, and kisses him.

Dean catches himself with one hand in the snow to stop from toppling forward. He hovers there, shocked, and Sam--Sam holds on tight, presses their lips clumsily together. Like he has no idea what he’s doing, but he’s determined to do it anyway. “Sam,” Dean mumbles, brain still not quite together, and Sam huffs against his mouth and kisses him again, this weird smoochy noise that makes it really click in Dean’s head--Sam, kissing him. Sammy, kissing him. He blinks, pushes up, and Sam lets him go, back in the snow, face bright red and his mouth set like he knows he’s lost a bet but is determined not to care.

“Sammy,” Dean says. Everything’s static, two-am test pattern in his head.

Sam looks at him, then at the fire. “Midnight,” he says, and Dean glances at his watch to see that--yeah, jesus, it’s midnight, happy 1999, and Sammy fucking kissed him in the snow and that’s not--

“I just wanted to,” Sam says, quiet. Dean sits there, uncertain. “Just one thing, for me. Doesn’t have to be a big deal, Dean.”

“It doesn’t?” Dean says, and Sam gets redder somehow, his face all washed-out warm in the firelight, and Dean thinks--just one thing. For him. For all those days and days of curling up on the fold-out together and elbowing each other through Escape from LA and Sam falling asleep in the curve of Dean’s arm, that time, and Dean touching his cheek and thinking--wondering--

“Can we open the champagne?” Sam says, fake cheerful, pressing his hands down against the ground to squirm backwards, to get away, and Dean leans down and kisses him right--full contact, spreading himself over Sam’s body, a hand on Sam’s cheek and pressing Sam’s mouth open, wet touch of beery heat and Sam full-on gasps against Dean like a girl having her first time, and Dean pulls back for a second, turned upside down, inside out. Sam shudders, grabs at him, says his name.

“Sammy,” Dean says back, and then, weird and raw, “you never did this before?”

Sam stares at him, four inches away. Shakes his head, and the ends of his hair are wet with snow, clinging to his cheeks, and Dean licks his lips and tastes--beer--and tugs Sam up, and over, and when he sits down on the stump Sam collapses into his lap in total and ongoing surprise, like having started this he had absolutely no idea it could go further. “What?” he says, dumb, which is a nice change for once, for Dean to be the one who knows what’s going on, and Dean says, “Shut up, Sammy,” and tucks his hands on either side of Sam’s jaw and kisses him again, and again, soft and slow like he learned to do with the nervous chicks, and Sam just melts into his lap, grabbing at him awkward but eager. Wanting, and that’s just--Dean can’t think about that.

He gets an arm around Sam’s waist, keeps him close, and Sam squirms, his weight shifting in Dean’s lap. “Yeah?” Dean says, and his dick--jesus, his dick’s on board, has been, rocking a half-chub since Sam started wrestling with him but he’s been able to put that away--has always been able to put that away--only this time he doesn’t have to and it’s got his head spinning, his body moving on weird autopilot, since Sam wants it, Sam’s been wanting it. He grabs Sam’s ass and Sam jerks, gasping into his mouth, and Dean squeezes, instinct telling him that that’s a good thing, a good turned-on sound, and Sam shivers and his hips push back, and then cringe forward against Dean’s stomach, and then he jerks and says, “Oh,” soft, and Dean doesn’t get what that means until Sam’s hiding his face in Dean’s shoulder, shaking, and Dean realizes that Sam came in his pants, just from Dean touching him and having him in his lap, and his whole body feels like it about catches fire, right then.

Sam’s still quivering, though, and Dean’s not a dickhead. “Sammy,” he says, and tugs off a glove with his teeth to touch Sam’s bare skin--his neck, exposed to the cold, and the silky hair at the base of his skull.

“I didn’t--” Sam mumbles, clutching at Dean’s coat, and Dean doesn’t know what that means but he’s got a lot of experience reassuring his little brother, and even if this situation is--insane--world-ending maybe--well, he knows what to do here.

“Probably got jizz on my jeans, freak,” he says, super soft, and Sam pulls back and looks at him horrified, and then sees his expression and punches him in the shoulder, hard. “Ow,” Dean says, obligingly, and then touches Sam’s jaw, easy. “Hey. It’s cool.”

“Is it cool?” Sam says, echoing, and Dean bites the corner of his mouth, knowing he doesn’t really have an answer. Sam snorts, bitter. Dean doesn’t know if he was ever so bitter. “Yeah, see? I--I shouldn’t have--”

“Shut up, Sammy,” Dean says, again, and Sam looks at him, miserable. Dean shrugs. “New year. We still got that bottle of champagne. We could go inside. Whatever--whatever you want to do, man. Night’s still young.”

Sam stares at him. “Really?” he says, and Dean says, maybe more honest than he can ever remember being with anyone, “It’s all good with me,” because--it is. For once. Maybe for the first time in Dean’s whole life--everything is completely, totally, bizarrely, freakily--good. He blames it on the beer, and on how Sam starts, even if uncertainly, to smile.

#fffb #petitgateau911 #weecest #tw: tipsy decision making #my writing

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ma-lark-ey · 4 years

Text

((Remember that brief post I made on Lark(?) getting sick? Yeah here's a whole chapter. But this time its angsty))

CW; for sickness, mentions of vomit, dry-heaving, minor panic attack description, spoilers for Episode 39-40. Theres some Oakson if you squint, I dunno if that counts at a trigger,,, but yeah

Henry couldn't remember the last time Lark was the twin to get sick. He had such an impenetrable immune system he thought he was incapable of the thing. But here he was, fixing Lark a bowl of soup while he laid on the couch under a fuzzy blanket.

"Here, Birdie. Don't eat it too fast, alright?" He brushed Lark's bangs back and pressed a kiss to his forehead. Sure, his boy was nearly fifteen, but no child is too old for a sweet forehead kiss.

That usual fire Lark had boiling in him was dessimated by his case of some virus, and instead of his usual extravagant response to Henry, he just nodded.

"When's Ma gonna be home?" He asked, pushing himself to sit up enough to eat comfortably. His eyes looked like a raccoons, deep dark circles around them, sunk and dull. His skin was pale and lifeless. He could pass as a vampire. And that's his the boys went, either they were perfectly healthy, or they nose dove into being couch bound for a week.

"Somewhere around seven, she's bringing dinner. But, I may have to leave here soon. I have a meeting for something. You think you'll be alright by yourself for a little bit?" Henry hated the thought of leaving his boy when he was so vulnerable. Anything could happen in two hours. Especially with how quickly Lark's health could plummet. Last time one of them got sick, Sparrow was fine Friday morning and by Sunday evening they were taking him to urgent care because he had fluid in his lungs.

"I'll be fine, Dad." Lark set his half eaten bowl of soul on the coffee table, snuggling right back down into his blankets. "Hey, could you go get me the plush on my bed? The- the Pichu one."

"Of course, Lark. I'll be right back." Henry stood, making sure Lark was cozy in his blankets and went to grab the stuffed animal. It was rare the twins had toys un-destroyed as kids, but that Pokemon bear Nick had gotten Lark as a birthday gift when they were six? That thing always stayed perfectly in tact.

He picked the old, well-loved toy up off the bed. He could see the stitching on its ear where Sparrow had accidentally ripped it when they were seven. Lark cried for hours, wouldn't talk to Sparrow for thirty whole minutes over it.

The young granola-crunching dad trotted back downstairs. Lark was laying limp on the couch, breathing short and shallow. He looked horrid. Henry's going to have to cancel his meeting, he knows that. He's not leaving Lark alone when he looks this bad. Henry should recheck his temperature.

He set the Pichu down in the gap between Lark and the back of the couch, placing his palm on his forehead. God,,the kid felt like fire.

Lark gagged suddenly, throwing the blankets off himself and grabbing the pot he kept on the floor next to him. The soup he'd just eaten came right back up, he sat there, hunched over, crying and dryheaving for a good five minutes. Henry rubbed circles in his back and tried to soothe him. But, Lark couldn't even keep water down anymore. Henry knew he was dehydrated, and he didn't know what to do anymore.

Lark let out a sob, leaning into his dad. Henry held his boy against him, not daring to give a gentleman sway like he usually would.

"It hurts... Everything hurts..." He whimpered. He sounded so small, which wasn't a way Lark Oak-Garcia should sound.

"I know, baby. I know." Henry reached for thermometer he'd been keeping on the coffee table. He pulled it out of the protective case.

Lark looked at him, his eyes looked so tired. He opened his mouth and let Henry put the device under his tongue. It took a minute, but the thing beeled and Henry checked.

106.7. Oh hell no. Oh heeeell no.

"Get some shoes on, Lark, we're going to the emergency room." He said quickly, pushing himself to his feet and going to grab his keys, phone, wallet, and own shoes.

"Dad, I'm fine, I-"

"You're temperature is one hundred and SIX! That is not fine! Get some shoes!" Henry felt his hands started to shake. No, not now. He felt that familiar crushing feeling of his chest caring in on itself. Not now. Stupid panic attack disorder.

"Dad, really, itll go down in the hour I'm-"

"Lark Oliver Oak-Garcia, do not argue with me on this please, we are going to the emergency room and thats final. Now put on your shoes!" He knew he snapped, but he was freaking out. He didn't know anything about his stuff. In the Realms, when someone was this sick you'd cast a healing spell and bada-bing bada-boom, hes fine! But this isn't the realms, and there isn't magic! He pressed trembling fingers to his temples, trying to ease himself out of the coming panic attack before he really got consumed in the anxieties. He needed to be Dad right now, not Henry.

He looked around the room, listing off things he could touch or hear or see. Just like Mercedes had taught him.

Deep breath in.... Deep breath out. Its good. Lark's good. Focus on getting him to the doctor.

Henry snatched his keys and phone off the table, grabbing his wallet from the counter in passing and shuffling to get on his Birkenstocks.

Lark was shuffling awkwardly to the door, holding his Pichu plush. He looked nauseous just standing, but both Henry and Lark knew there was nothing left in his system to come back up.

Henry helped him into the passenger seat and buckled his seat belt, leaning it back so he wasnt sitting straight up and making himself light-headed. Then, he got himself in the drivers seat and pulled out of the driveway, handing his phone to Lark.

"Call your brother." He said sternly, eyes focused on the road as he moved to the urgent care clinical as fast as possible. Of course Lark listened, and Sparrow came through the Bluetooth of the car.

"Hey, Dad. What's up? How's Lark doing?"

"Hi, Sparrow. Letting you know, Lark's fever is almost 107, so we're going to the emergency room. Don't know when I'll be home, you can stay with one of the boys, or stay at home. I don't care. Mom's gonna be home around seven."

"Uh- oh! Okay. Um... Okay. Thats- okay, Dad. Is he okay? Just a high fever?" Of course Sparrow immediately sounding absolutely terrified.

"Don't panic,,Lark's good. He's just... He's low on fluids, his fevers high. I'll send you plenty of updates, promise. But, I gotta let you go cause we're here and I need to get him in. I love you so much, Sparrow."

"I... I love you too, Dad. And Lark. I- okay. I'll probably stay at Terry's."

"That's fine, call me when you get there, okay?"

"Okay... Bye."

"Bye, Sparrow.

------------

Henry paced the waiting room. Its not that they were doing anything major to Lark, just running some standard health checks and getting him settled in a room for the night. But, your pride and joy, your beautiful son whom you love more than life itself being in a hospital room without you? Terrifying. Fucking terrifying.

Darryl had arrived about five minutes ago, and was currently trying to get Henry to stand still.

"Darryl, Darryl, darling, you're wonderful but you really need to shut the fuck up. If I sit, I will stop the adrenalin rush and when I stop the adrenaline rush my thoughts start going-"

"Henry-"

"and that means my brain turns back on and when my brain turns back on, it means I'll probably have a panic attack and I really don't want to have one right now,"

"Henry!"

"at this moment, because for the love of god, Darryl, I need to know when my boy is okay and I can't know when my boy is okay if I have a panic attack because then I won't be able to-" Darryl grabbed hold of Henry's shoulders and stared him right in the eye.

"HENRY!" Thank god he finally got him to stop going down the rabbit hole, it took Henry long enough. He stared the other father in the eyes. His mind stopped for a moment. Just a moment. But it was a long enough moment.

Darryl knew the tears were coming before Henry ever showed signs of beginning to cry. He pulled him into a tight hug and just held him there, in strong arms.

"Its okay, Henry. He's fine. Just a high fever and some dehydration. He'll be fine." Darryl promised him.

------------

And, Darryl was right. Lark was fine. Henry freaked out over nothing. Late that night, Lark was discharged again. After his fever went back down and they gave him fluids.

It was now well past midnight, and Henry was exhausted. He got his just as tired son in bed, tucking him in and making sure the pichu was tucked in Lark's arms. He gave yet another forehead kiss, turning off the lamp.

"Goodnight, kiddo. Hope you feel better in the morning."

And, Henry dragged himself back to his bedroom, where Mercedes laid already asleep. He changed into a pair of pajama pants and crawled in next to her. Like her sixth sense, she rolled over to use Henry as some kind of large teddy bear like she did everything night. It was so nice. He took a long, deep, satisfying breath and settled into his pillows. His eyes became heavy, and he fell asleep faster than he had in years.

#dndads #dungeons and daddies #this was more slef-indulgence than anything #henry has panic attacks okay? no one can take this away from me.

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myherowritings · 5 years

Text

Kitty Kisses

Overview: Your boyfriend and your cat don’t get along. Bakugou keeps trying to come up with different ways to get your cat to finally warm up to him.

Word Count: 2,171

Pairing: Bakugou Katsuki x Reader

Author’s Note: I never knew that fact about cats! That’s so cute, omg! I’ve actually never been a cat person, but once I entered the BNHA fandom… It’s like I can’t escape them now. Those little furry tsunderes are growing on me. :P

“That thing hates me.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t hate you if you stopped calling him that thing.”

“Tch.”

Bakugou stared at the cat in front of him, eyes narrowing as it seemed to hiss at him when you weren’t looking. He didn’t know what you saw in that cat. It was rude and arrogant and walked around like it owned the place.

But when Katsuki saw you playing and interacting with it, rubbing its little cheeks and scratching its chin, he supposed it couldn’t be as bad as he thought.

There must be something about the cat he just couldn’t see.

He huffed. “I’m not going to be nice to your cat if it’s not nice to me.”

“Well, I’m sure Mr. Mochi would be nicer if you didn’t glare at him every time you saw him,” you said, sticking your tongue out as you petted the cat between its ears. “You brought this upon yourself, really.”

“The first time I saw Mr. Mochi, it attacked me before I even did anything!”

“To be fair, you do look a little intimidating at first,” you said defensively, holding the cat close to your chest. His eye twitched. “He was just trying to protect himself. Just give him time and he’ll realize you’re a big softie.”

“I’m not,” Bakugou snorted. But he let out a sigh when he saw your pleading look, muttering a string of curses under his breath. “But since you made it clear he’s not going anywhere anytime soon, I guess I’ll have to try.”

“See?” You grinned. “Softie.”

“Say that one more time and I’ll change my mind.”

With a small burst of laughter, you rested your head on his shoulder and gave him a chaste kiss on the jaw. “No. You won’t.”

Katsuki rolled his eyes, a begrudging smile on his face despite himself. “Hmph. Whatever.”

- - - - -

“Come here, cat. I have a treat for you.”

Bakugou carried with him a bag of goldfish-shaped salmon cracker treats. They were made of eggs, flour, and most importantly fish. He knew your cat loved all things tuna and salmon and he wasn’t above exploiting that weakness.

Holding a single treat between the pads of his fingers, Katsuki let out a sharp whistle as he tried to catch the attention of Mr. Mochi. When it paid him no attention, he grew impatient.

“Don’t you want the damn treat, you ingrate?” he growled.

Seeming to notice his frustration, the cat simply trotted even farther away from him and onto your lap on the opposite side of the living room.

“What the fu--?’’

“Nice, calming words,” you reminded, offering Mochi your hand which it licked with no qualms. Bakugou narrowed his eyes. “Mocchan will warm up to you sooner if he doesn’t see you as a threat.”

“If your cat thinks I’m a threat now, just wait until I get--!”

“Katsuki!”

He exhaled a heavy cloud of air to calm himself down, accidentally crushing the salmon cracker between his two fingers. Feeling relatively more level headed, he tried again.

“Mochi,” he called softly, his voice sounding gruff and uncomfortable even to himself. “I have something for you.”

You redirected your cat’s attention to him with a snap and the cat stared into his eyes, unblinking. Bakugou shivered. What the fuck did everyone see in these creatures who looked like they were glaring into the depths of your soul?

He took a handful of crackers out of the bag and laid them on the palm of his hand. “If you don’t try it, neko-chan, you’ll regret it.”

“Bakugou, saying threatening things in a quiet voice does not make it nice.”

“This is hopeless, then!” he cried.

“It is not!” you fired back, picking Mochi up and bringing the cat closer to him despite its mewls of protest. “Look, he would love to eat these treats. Wouldn’t you, Mr. Mochi?”

You walked over to him with the cat in your arms before sitting down on the couch by his side. The cat eyed the treats curiously but refused to move any closer.

As you examined the jar of treats, you pursed your lips thoughtfully.

“Katsuki-chan…” You studied the small fish-shaped crackers that looked too authentic to be store bought. “Did you make these yourself?”

His cheeks flamed as he shook his head, ready to deny it. “Are you kidding me? That-- That’s ridiculous!”

“Hmm.”

“I didn’t!”

You tilted your head to the side without saying a word.

He groaned. “Okay-- So what if I did?”

It wasn’t like they were much work anyway. Bakugou just combined three ingredients and threw them in an oven. It didn’t matter that it took him an hour to punch out all the dough into bite-sized fish crackers. Nor did it matter that his hands smelled like salmon for the remainder of the day.

Your face broke out into a grin.

“Stop staring at me like that, baka!”

You grinned wider. “I knew it.”

“Knew what!?”

“You do like Mr. Mochi!” you exclaimed, making your cat give you a feeble high five. You turned back to him with a satisfied look on your face. “And deep down, Mr. Mochi likes you, too.”

Bakugou snorted.

“Here, give me a treat. I’ll give him one first to ease him into it.”

Begrudgingly, Katsuki handed you a goldfish-shaped treat and watched as you fed it to your cat. Mochi sniffed it skeptically for a moment before softly gnawing at it from between your fingers. With a satisfied crunch, the cat finished the treat and blinked expectantly at you for more.

You gasped. “He likes it!”

Bakugou couldn’t help but puff his chest out at that. “Well, obviously. I made it.”

“Does this mean you’ll bake something for me next?”

“Do I have to bribe you if I want you to stay with me?”

“Maybe,” you said, giggling as he ruffled the top of your head. “Now, you try feeding him one!”

With a determined nod, he took a treat from the jar and held it out a safe distance from the cat’s nose. He made sure not to look Mochi in the eye as he offered the food to him slowly.

In a split section, Mochi tore the treat away from Bakugou’s hands and turned around before eating it, making sure to whack him in the face with his tail before running away.

He blinked, unsure of what just happened. “Was that a good thing?”

You scratched the side of your head with a sheepish grin. “Well, not exactly. But… I would say that’s progress!”

Katsuki narrowed his eyes as the cat stared at him challengingly.

“Progress, huh?” he muttered, crossing his arms over his chest. “Just you wait, Mr. Mochi.”

- - - - -

“Y/N, come here.”

You glanced at him questioningly, raising your eyebrows as you continued rubbing Mr. Mochi on the cheeks.

“I have an idea,” Bakugou said, giving the cat a sideways stare.

“Oh?”

“I read something online that said if a dog sees their owner showing someone trust and affection, they’ll be more likely to accept attention from the person.”

You blinked. “But Mochi’s a cat.”

“Well, there was no research about how to make a damn cat like you! The only advice they had was ‘don’t give up’ and other useless shit,” he scowled. “This is close enough.”

Laughing at his disgruntled expression, you walked over next to him, Mr. Mochi examining the scene from behind. “I guess it couldn’t hurt to try.”

Awkwardly clearing his throat, Bakugou extended his arm out as you drew nearer. When you were close enough, he hugged you firmly into his chest, gently stroking the length of your hair down to your back.

You stood there for a while, motionless except for the slow touches, as you tried to hold in your laughter.

“Do you think he learned to like me yet?” Bakugou asked in a loud whisper.

Standing on your tiptoes, you peered over Katsuki’s shoulder and looked around. With a confused blink, you glanced back at him.

“Um-- Kacchan?”

“Hmm?”

“Mochi isn’t even in the room anymore.”

He stiffened, swearing under his breath as he reluctantly let you go.

“Are you kidding me? The only time that cat decides to move its lazy ass from this room is when--” Exhaling through his teeth, Bakugou shut his eyes. “Never mind. It’s fine. This is fine.”

You patted his shoulder comfortingly, offering him a small smile. “Maybe if I’m petting Mocchan while you’re hugging me, this’ll work.”

Katsuki blinked. “Huh?”

You tilted your head. “Isn’t that what you were trying to do? Transfer some of your aura to me so he’d get used it it?”

“What the fuck?” Bakugou stared at you in mild concern. “I was trying to get him accustomed through observational learning, not by hoping the affection would transfer from your body to his!”

You mouth formed a small ‘o’. “Huh. That…makes more sense.”

With a defeated sigh, Katsuki patted the top of your head as you registered what he just said with a dazed look.

That was a failure, he thought. He would just have to try again tomorrow.

As you snuggled deeper into Bakugou’s arms, he spotted Mochi sauntering back into the living room with a lifted chin. The cat spotted his owner and peered curiously when you shut your eyes and rested your head on his chest.

“Now you decide to show up?” Katsuki said, shaking his head when he heard the sounds of little paw prints. “You really are something else, neko-chan.”

- - - - -

Today was the fifth consecutive day in a row Bakugou had been over at your house for over four hours. And of those four hours, he spent three of them trying to make progress with Mr. Mochi.

But as the time went by, Katsuki could feel his patience wearing thin.

“This is going nowhere!”

“What do you mean?” you asked with concern, glancing over at the two of them on the floor. “I thought you were making progress. He even ate a treat from your hand the other day.”

“I thought so, too,” he groaned, pressing his hand against his forehead. “But now all he’s doing is staring at me and blinking slowly!”

You dropped the slice of fruit you were eating, looking at him in shock. Slowly, a big smile spread across your face and Bakugou furrowed his brows in worry.

“Mocchan is blinking at you?” you repeated.

“Yes,” he said, a little uncomfortable. “And he’s doing it in a weird way, too.”

You hid your smile with the sleeve of your oversized jacket and he could’ve sworn he heard you squeal. “He’s giving you a kitty kiss!”

“He what?”

Katsuki tilted his head as he watched you blinked at him slowly, imitating Mr. Mochi. Your lips were flushed and parted ever so slightly, and your lashes cast a shadow on your cheekbones as you opened and closed your eyes at him.

Somehow, he found it cuter coming from you than from the cat.

“That’s a kitty kiss!” you chirped, a bright smile on your face and Bakugou found his cheeks warming up. “Cats convey a lot through their eyes. When he stares at you unblinking, he’s either threatened by you, or he’s most likely trying to intimidate you and show that he’s the superior animal--”

“Pfft. He wishes.”

You laughed before continuing your explanation. “If he’s blinking slowly with his muscles relaxed, he’s showing he trusts you enough to be vulnerable in front of you.”

Bakugou glanced back at Mochi and saw him gently trot around the floor, walking back to him and slowly shutting his eyes. Without second thought, Katsuki blinked back, hoping to return the kitty kiss quickly enough that you wouldn’t notice.

He was fairly certain you noticed, but you hid your reaction behind your sweater paws as to not embarrass him.

“So, he…trusts me?”

You nodded.

“Tch. Took him long enough,” Bakugou said dismissively, but deep down he felt something like happiness and satisfaction at the thought. And judging by the twinkle in your eye and the grin on your face, you knew he was more pleased about it than he let on as well.

You walked over to his spot on the floor and took a seat next to him, holding your hand out to attract Mochi’s attention. Mochi climbed into your lap with a soft purr, stretching his forelegs out so they were resting on Katsuki’s knee.

“Good,” you said, smiling at the sight as you placed your head on Bakugou’s shoulder. “Now my two favorite boys are finally getting along.”

With an amused huff, he brought his arm around your waist to pull you closer to him.

“Sure, but I’m the number one favorite, right?”

“Hmm,” you hummed thoughtfully, petting Mochi’s ears between your fingers. “It’s a close call, but yes-- You’ll always be my favorite.”

Katsuki patted the top of your head, mimicking you with a sideways grin. “And I suppose you’re my favorite, too.”

A/N: So cute, so soft, I’m crying. TT.TT I have no clue what my crackheadass was on when I wrote this, but it was very fun so I hope y’all liked it. :’)

On another note, cats are tsundere. Bakugou is tsundere. Bakugou is a cat. Thank you 9th grade geometry.

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