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danniburgh · 3 years

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Boca del Diablo (Javier Peña x f!reader)

Pairing: Javier Peña x f!reader

Summary: I was wrong but I was doing it right; and we would steal each other’s grief, we were thin but we were thick as thieves; you gotta hold me down, ‘cause I might slip away, slip into the past.

Word count: +5.7k

Warnings: ANGST, you guys this is AWFULLY SAD, so, beware. mentions of alcohol and drinking.

A/N: oh god, okay; this is technically a ficsong, based and inspired by Mouth of the Devil by Mother Mother. also, the first time i heard that song i knew it was SO made for Javier Peña, i couldn’t just not write something based on it... I JUST COULDNT. im not sorry. also also i wanna thank my forbidden kitties @ezrasbirdie and @starlightmornings for proofreading and telling me it makes sense, love you so much guys. Jesus Christ Superstar i really should stop hurting javi huh.

Masterlist // Read on ao3 // ko-fi

comments and reblogs are eternally appreciated 💓

gif: @javierpcna

The first thing Javier did when he arrived to Laredo was tour his house around; he walked around the living room, looking at all the pictures his dad had hung onto the walks, he took his time to admire all the faces and the expressions and the situations; he took the time to reminisce about moments of his life he hadn’t given himself the time before to reminisce. He walked the narrow hallways of the house he grew up in.

It was like meeting the house again, even if after leaving he had visited, even if he knew exactly what was in what corner, even if he still remembered that stash of cigarettes he had hidden under a wooden panel in the floor when he was seventeen; he was familiarizing himself again with it; like the prodigal son coming back to a place he had forgotten because he need to forget it.

He discovered that day, after not living in that place for over thirteen years, that it was timeless.

It was as if the house itself was a spot in time that hadn’t moved; as if the place it was built on was rooted down so far into the ground that not even distance or time changed it.

The second thing Javier did when he arrived to Laredo was sleep.

He told Chucho he wouldn’t eat the dinner he had made and that he preferred to eat it for lunch the next day and just shut himself into his old room and slept for twelve hours.

When Javier woke up, he didn’t feel rested, but his mind had stopped reeling from all those excruciatingly exhaustive thoughts he had been carrying with him since he packed up the close to ten years he spent in Colombia into three suitcases and spent three hours inside a plane and two hours driving down from the airport.

In the twelve hours he slept, he didn’t dream at all, and for he was grateful to be so tired that his brain just had shut down for half a day; he didn’t need the constant reminders of what his life decisions had turned into. He didn’t need to dream about the pain he saw, tamed, and caused.

Javier didn’t want to go out of the house at all; because he knew there would be people that asked him about his doings like he was some kind of hero; they would ask him details about the things he did in what they called South America, details he wasn’t ready to even remember, as he wasn’t even ready to correct them; that it wasn’t South America, that it was just Colombia. As if he didn’t want to ruin their perceptions of him; when in reality he didn’t even want to be perceived.

The first time Javier went out of the house he drove to a convenience store that was there since before he was born; another proof that everything in that town he so wanted to get out of and leave behind him as a kid was timeless and immovable.

That time he forgo the cigarettes, as he was decided to try to quit smoking once again; and as he was walking out of the store with a plastic bag full of crap he shouldn’t eat and stuff he didn’t really need, across the street he saw you.

Javier just stood there, like a newly put statue, he watched you hop into a truck he was sure wasn’t yours or your dad’s and as the truck drove away with you in your pretty short sundress inside, he knew, once again, that he was completely and utterly screwed.

He had frozen in place because in that time, in the two minutes it took you to leave, the only thing that invaded his mind was what he did to you.

The second time Javier went out of the house, he had decided to visit some of his old friends that still lived in Laredo; the ones that, unlike him, had stayed there for reasons he, at the short age of twenty, didn’t really understand, but years later, at what he considered the middle of his life, comprehended at last.

None of them asked about Colombia; and, while he was grateful, he was sure it was because one of them told the others not to.

It was as if the subject of him working there had become a taboo; something that they spoke about and debated amongst themselves when he wasn’t there, and he preferred it that way.

Javier was enjoying the time he spent remembering stuff that hadn’t gotten people killed; he liked the feeling of nostalgia that sharing old stories and old experiences with friends made him heel; until someone mentioned you.

He learned then that what had gone down between you and him had also become a taboo; something only his and your generations and the parents of your mutual friends knew about but never said a thing, something that, as in most small towns happened, was a topic that someone brought up when they saw you walk by, or Lorraine, or his dad.

He had even escaped being the prompter of his own fall out being discussed by people on the narrow streets of downtown Laredo.

Javier also learned then that you were a month away from getting married.

The first emotion Javier felt when he heard the words “she's getting married on the fifteenth” was rage; not at you or at your husband to be, but at himself. Because he knew that if he had played his cards right, he would be the one you were sharing your life with.

The second emotion Javier felt was a profound, almost abysmal regret. Because if he had stayed put for thirty-six months he would've been the one you would’ve married. Because if he had stopped his unhealthy, obsessive desire to leave everything he knew and looked at you with all the love he felt for you, he wouldn’t have done what he did. But it was way too late to realize it.

The third emotion Javier felt was sadness. Because even when he had made sense of what he did and convinced himself he was doing the right thing, even when he was doing it wrong, the outcome had been the opposite of what he wanted.

He ruined his life trying to get a better one.

Javier had one too many beers that night and excused himself from the reunion; as he drove away he pulled over because there was an overwhelming question dragging itself from his brain to his chest and settled there like a rusty nail perforating his skin: when was the last time he had thought about you?

There was a difference that he noticed there; as he sat inside his truck in the middle of the country road with the crickets replying to the others and a few car noises at the distance; one thing was wondering about what was of you, asking himself in the little idle times he had in his job if you were doing fine, if you were mad at him, if you were happy, and another, polarizing, totally opposite thing was thinking about you and the years you spent together.

He avoided it.

Thinking about you consoling him with your body when words weren't enough, you understanding him to the deep ends of his persona, you, knowing him exactly as he was, as young as he was, complete as he wasn’t. You meeting him in vulnerability, in nudity, in cynicism, even meeting him in drinking and getting drunk with him every other weekend just to laugh about nothing and fuck like bunnies.

You and the perfect aura and the immaculate energy you exude at all times and that when he was inside you, he felt you share with him.

He avoided it because he knew that he didn’t deserve to get any of it back; but Jesus how much he wanted it.

So Javier decided, inside his semi-alcoholized head, that he had to do what he didn’t do when he had the chance.

He turned the truck back on and gave an U turn that he knew would get him fined if someone had seen him and drove back to where he came from.

He drove by muscle memory. Even after sixteen years he still knew the way and could drive with his eyes closed if he felt brave enough.

But he wasn’t feeling brave or encouraged or self assured; everything he was feeling as he drove was a heavy, disorienting need to fix what he broke.

Or try to.

He got into the driveway and started honking like a crazy man inside the afternoon traffic of the city; someone had to come out at some point.

And you did.

Javier couldn’t identify the emotions he felt when he saw you opening the door of your house or what he felt when he noticed your expression as you recognized the truck and him inside it. He couldn’t name the exact feeling of his chest tugging when you stood there, on your porch, dead on your feet, a hand covering your mouth when he got out of the truck.

He saw you see him; your face paled as he walked up to you, your eyes widened open, he felt like an apparition and guessed he was; nothing but an unwanted sight of a past he was sure you wanted to forget.

He noticed the simple and complex emotions your eyes poured out as he tried to say hi to you with a hand wave.

And even then, half drunk, standing on your porch after who knows how many years, he knew it was something that was supposed to happen.

“What… what are you doing here?” was the first question you asked him, Javier didn’t even have a response to it.

“If I say the truth you wouldn’t want to listen to me.” he said. He saw you shaking your head slightly and looked at you with clinical eyes.

It was as if the time hadn’t passed through you; you were still as beautiful as he remembered you. As terrifyingly gorgeous as the first time he saw you when he crashed your nineteenth party with his friends from college; as inexplicably stunning as a twenty-two year old guy could make sense of.

“What do you want?” was the second question you asked him, and Javier wanted so many things he didn’t know which one to say first.

He looked at you with that expression you had on your face the first and the last time you said goodbye to each other.

“Can we talk?” he replied, you looked at him and bit your lower lip and Javier had to close his eyes because he wanted to do that himself.

“Sure.” you muttered, Javier nodded a few times as he opened his eyes and you had crossed your arms tight on your chest.

“Can we go somewhere else?” he asked, shoving his hands inside the pockets of his jeans.

You stood quiet again as he guessed you were pondering your reply, and he felt like he was asking you to go out with him two weeks after your birthday party.

“Where?” was the third question you asked him “I’m kinda busy.”

“Just for a drive, please.” Javier heard himself begging, but didn’t really care for it.

“I–I don’t th–”

“Please,” he cut you off, “I just… fuck, I just need to talk to you.” he sighed out.

Javier couldn’t stand the look you were giving him, he couldn’t bear the feeling that your eyes on him were giving him because he had a specific memory of you looking at him with a shine in your eyes he didn’t see anymore as you stood in front of him and he was hating it.

“Okay,” you murmured, “let me go get my bag.”

He nodded, and you turned around and walked back inside. You didn’t close the front door and from where he was standing, he could see some parts of the house and some chat inside he couldn’t make out.

He wasn’t half drunk anymore; the weight of the emotions he was feeling were enough to sober him up. But he knew, as he stood there waiting for you, with the most pressing feeling he had felt in decades, hitching his breath and cutting his flow of air, that it was most probably that he wouldn’t get what he wanted. And that was scraping at the well-manicured mask he had built for himself.

You walked out of the house with your bag hanging from your shoulder and gave him a brief glance as you walked to his truck. He let out a heavy sigh and jogged a bit to catch up.

Javier didn’t know where he was driving to. He just didn’t think you would say yes, so he didn’t bother to think of a place to take you; he knew you’d appreciate going somewhere without many people. As you were less than a month away from your wedding and Laredo was a place where if the wrong person saw you walking around with your ex, bad shit could happen.

The truck’s engine roaring was the only thing that made any noise. You were sitting on the opposite side of the seat, all but glued to the window, avoiding to look at him; he understood it; he didn’t even know why you had said yes in the first time.

Javier was still thinking of a place to stop the truck, and as you stirred on the seat, he saw a familiar deviation with an old, tattered, fainted wooden sign on the edge pointing to the right that read Boca del Diablo, leading to a narrow dirt path surrounded by semi-overgrown wild plants.

He turned there and saw you stiffen on your side of the seat out of the corner of his eyes; he wanted to ask you if you remembered the place but instead you glared at him.

“What are we doing here, Javier?” you asked. He wouldn’t admit even to himself that he felt his stomach turn around itself when he heard his name being pronounced by you.

“You remember this place?” he asked anyway as he drove to where the dirt path became a wide opening that led to the edge of a cliff.

“What is it to remember?” you muttered in response, Javier pulled over and turned to you.

“Well, this was our place.” he shrugged slightly and turned off the ignition.

“No, this wasn’t our place,” you murmured, looking back at him, “it was a place where every single couple in Laredo came to make out.”

Javier huffed and nodded a couple of times, he noticed the way you were looking at him and, even in the darkness of the open country and the inside of the truck, he could see the way your brow was furrowing slightly, he wished to know what you were thinking.

“We made it ours.” he whispered back.

“Javier,” you sighed out, he knew you were getting exasperated “fucking in the back of your truck hardly was making a place ours.”

Your words made something inside him sting. He wondered if his actions had made you shift the meaning of your memories; he wouldn’t find it hard to believe.

“Why are you here?” you asked him, Javier was looking for your eyes but he found them outside, on the walnut tree you and him used as shade when you came there before the sunset.

“It made sense,” he replied. You scoffed and turned to face him, Javier saw your eyes water in front of him and took a deep breath “I didn’t know where else to go.”

“Right.” Javier saw you take a deep breath and swallow your tears. He wanted to hug you but instead gripped the steering wheel with a hand.

“You’re getting married.” he said, not as a question, but matter-of-factly.

“Yeah.”

“Can I ask why?” you bit your lip with a smirk on your face and Javier felt his chest compress.

“You really wanna know?” your voice was low and soft but it weighed on him like an anvil. He nodded. “I finally found someone brave enough to stay.” you replied with a shrug.

“I stayed.” Javier let out before he could stop himself and you glared at him with a frown.

He closed his eyes and rubbed his lids with the heel of his hand; he knew he was bad with the kind of conversations he wanted to have with you, and he knew you knew as well. But he still wanted to ask you so many things he didn’t even know he was curious about.

He knew exactly the moment he had fucked his and your lives, but he hadn’t stayed to look at the aftermath.

“You stayed,” you retorted “but you didn’t wait.”

“I know.”

“Why?” you asked him, now chasing for his eyes, Javier shook his head a couple of times and you shifted on the seat so you could face him with your body as well “why you didn’t wait?” you asked in a whisper.

“I don’t know.” he replied in a low voice and frowned when your reaction was to laugh.

As you looked around the truck’s cabin with that cynic smile of yours adorning your face, Javier saw a single tear rolling through your cheek that you didn’t bother to wipe off.

“You don’t know?” you let out a sob that sounded like a laugh, “you don't know why you threw away seven years of our lives?” he shook his head, and you opened your mouth in feigned amusement “seven years, Javier, unbelievable.”

“I tried to figure it out but I just couldn’t,” he murmured at you when you threw your head back and sniffed “it made sense at the time.”

“That’s bullshit.” you shrugged.

“It is.”

“I…” Javier started, he tried to find the correct words to phrase what he wanted to say “I know that what I did wasn’t good or an–”

“Wasn’t good?” you cut him off “that’s not really how I would phrase it, Javier.”

“I know, I’m trying, okay?”

“It doesn’t look like it,” you whispered again and rolled your eyes at the tears Javier could see flooding your eyes “you didn’t wait for me, you didn’t even try!”

“I did! I swear I did, but I wa–”

“Everyone knew us, Javier,” you cut him off again and he sighed “everybody in town thought that we would be that couple that stayed together forever,” you snarled as two thick tears made their way from your eyes to your cheeks and he had to refrain himself from leaning and brush them off “I thought that too.”

“Please,” he sighed. You shook your head slowly.

“And now, after what? twenty years? you com–”

“Sixteen.” he interrupted.

“What?”

“After sixteen years, it’s been sixteen years.” he muttered.

“Right, sixteen,” you huffed again and licked your lips. Javier remembered that little gesture as a sign of nervousness when you were barely an adult, “after all that time, you come back to break into my life,” you raised your hands in question, Javier chewed the inside of his cheek “for what? why?”

“Today Matt told me you were getting married,” he said, you rolled your eyes at him and Javier shifted slightly closer to you on the seat “I just knew I needed to see you first,” he saw you see through him and he felt once again like an apparition “I just realized I never stopped thinking about you.”

“Stop it,” you raised a finger to him, Javier stiffened up “don’t do that,” you shook your head at him “because when you should’ve thought about me, and about us, you didn’t,” Javier nodded his chin a few times “you don’t get to do that to me,” you sniffed and he closed his eyes when your voice started shaking “not after everything, not after you promised me you’d wait and then finding someone else.”

“I didn’t find her,” Javier opened his eyes as he said it, you rolled your eyes at him again, “I wasn’t even looking for someone else.”

“You’re lying,” you shook your head again, Javier mirrored the action, “don’t lie to me, that’s the only thing I’m asking, don’t lie.”

“You know I don’t like lying, I’m not.” he whispered, you let out a sob.

“Then what the fuck happened? huh?” you shifted closer “I asked for one thing, I asked you to wait, you knew I left town to do what I wanted, what happened that made you run to Lorraine?”

Javier moved closer to you and threw every sense of courtesy and respect out of the window; he grabbed you by the shoulders and pressed you against him. You didn’t try to fight him and he took it as a good sign, but you didn’t hug him back.

Your head rested on his collarbone and he could smell the softness of your shampoo, and wondered in the back of your head if you used the same strawberry conditioner he liked so much.

“Y’know,” you said, shifting your head so you could breathe “Lorraine and I talked when I came back,” Javier hummed in surprise but felt his body shiver at the thought of you and Lorraine sharing the only thing you two had in common with each other; him, “we tried to make sense of what happened but never actually could… what happened?”

“I wish I knew.” he whispered against your hair and felt you shiver, you buried your face in his chest.

“It’s not fair that you don’t know,” you muttered out, your voice being muffled by his shirt and his skin and him and he gripped you tighter “it’s not fair because I’ve been asking myself that question all this time.”

“I tried to make sense out of it,” he broke the brief silence that formed around you, his words like a knife that was sharp enough to mull but not cut, “I thought I was doing the right thing, even if I was doing it wrong.”

You separated from him suddenly and he immediately missed the warmth of your body on him; it was as if he had never stopped holding you.

“Help me understand this,” you murmured, “I left town to do something you knew I wanted to do for so long,” you recounted in a low, deep voice, Javier nodded, “I left with the promise that you would wait here, that it was my turn of doing something I wanted and that you would be here waiting for me, it was only three years, you told me you’d wait,” he nodded his head again, trying to shove away the need of breaking down as you did “but as soon as I crossed the state line you ran to Lorraine,” you said, Javier opened his mouth but you raised your hand to him before he could pronounce a word; he hated that your version was like that, he hated it, “you started dating her saying nothing to me, and I had to find out, because my dad saw you kissing her inside this same truck,” Javier saw you close your eyes in pain as another pair of charged tears fell from them “and he called me to tell me to never come back, and you’re telling me it was the right thing?” you shook your head and Javier felt his throat close at the sight of your face quirked in pain from an old wound he just reopened “what was I to you tha–”

“Everything,” he cut you off, you sighed “you were everything to me,” he cleared his throat and begged his brain for some reason and sense so he could explain to you and give you what he thought you needed to know “and you didn’t deserve me making you responsible for my own well being.”

He saw you frown as you wiped away the tears you had shed.

“That doesn’t make sense, Javier.”

“Think about it, miel,” he tried to explain, barely noticing he had slipped the old nickname he had given you when the first time he kissed you and whispered that your lips were as sweet as honey, he brushed it off and looked at you and your unsure eyes and your bouncy leg and he was regretting everything he had done in his life up to that point until he saw you tilt your head, asking him silently to continue “we were young and stupid and we were both vulnerable,” he reminisced and you nodded ever so slightly “when we met we had lost a lot and I instantly became dependent on you and you know it,” you nodded again, another tear rolling out, he raised his hand and brushed it off, his hand stayed on your cheek, cupping your face, “the only reason I was living and breathing for was you and I knew you didn’t deserve to be the reason I was alive,” he leaned closer “you didn’t deserve to be anything else than my girlfriend.”

You let out a soft sob and looked at him with dovey, dampened eyes, his own were watering as well.

“I’ve always regretted the way I dealt with things, and I’ve always wondered what would be of us if I talked to you instead.” he whispered and then you leaned to rest your head on his shoulder, wrapping your arms around his middle.

Javier almost cradled you. He wrapped his arms around you too as you tried to drown your sobs and he felt the cold sting of a tear making its way out of his eye.

“You ran away.” you whispered, he nodded.

“I did,” he agreed and barely heard you asking why “everything fell on me out of the blue,” he shrugged with you still resting on his shoulder and his hand started gently rubbing your back “Lorraine almost forced me to propose, your dad was so mad at me he stopped doing business with my dad,” he explained, you hummed in affirmation “so my dad was mad at me too,” he scoffed, “and I couldn’t face you,” he whispered, gripping you tighter to him “I knew that you would throw everything on my face and I wouldn’t recover from that, so I just left everything behind.”

“What a fucking coward.” you whispered, Javier huffed a soft laugh.

“Yeah.” he blinked a few times. You sighed and Javier felt the warm breath that came out of your mouth clashing with his skin, making him think about all the times he had you between his arms inside that same truck in different circumstances. He yearned for those times to come back, he wished for a second chance he knew he wouldn’t get as soon as you pronounced:

“I’m supposed to be making the seating chart.”

Javier’s breath hitched when he heard it, and he scoffed at himself because in the back of his mind, deep inside himself, he held a glimpse of hope that maybe if you talked to each other, things would change. But it was a childish thought and of course… You weren’t ruining your own life again.

“You’re still getting married?” he asked.

Javier felt you undo the grip you had around him and you pushed yourself away from him.

“Don’t do this.” you shook your head. Javier saw you shift further away from him; you opened the door and jumped out of the truck and into the empty space that was the viewpoint of Boca del Diablo, he did the same; opened the door and got out of the truck to the cold air of the night and jogged around the truck to stand next to you as you threw your head back and looked at the dark, star-filled sky.

His logical side was screaming at him to stop, he knew he wasn’t being fair to you; he knew perfectly that you wouldn’t say yes; but he wanted to try so hard, he wanted to do whatever it was in his power to have you again.

He saw you there, standing in the middle of a darkish, barely moonlight illuminated, dry dirt viewpoint at the edge of a cliff he had taken you so many times when you were together, and all the feelings he had made sure to shove and hide deep inside himself came bubbling up. He never stopped loving you, and he had lost you once already, he didn’t want to lose you again even if he didn’t have you anymore.

“Miel,” he started next to you, he heard you let out a soft no “miel, is he good to you?” he asked.

You turned to see him and Javier saw the confusion in your face, he stepped closer and reached for your hand.

“As good as he can be.” you whispered in reply.

“What if…” he gripped your hand, you shook your head slowly “what if I told yo–”

“No.” you said before he could finish, Javier tugged you closer to him.

“Come with me.” he let out, softly, almost imperceptible even to his own ear.

“No.” you whined out after a sob.

“Please.” he heard himself beg again.

“Don’t, Javier please don’t do this.” you cried out again. He looked at you, the moonlight making your eyes shine with all the previously shed and yet to slide out tears.

“Miel,” he said, it was like his own judgement was blinded by the feelings he had been neglecting to process over the last sixteen years of his life; he knew he was talking but he wasn’t thinking about his own words, “I promise there was neve–”

“Javier, don’t.” you whispered, thick tears rolling out of your eyes that he brushed with his free hand.

“There was never anyone that could love me like you did…” he let out, you shook your head and he cupped your face.

“Stop it.” your voice was so thin he could barely hear it.

“...and I tried, miel, god knows I tried to find someone like you…” you opened your eyes to him and looked at him deeply.

“Please, stop.” you whispered again.

“...I was with so many women…” he whispered and leaned into you, you sighed and Javier could feel the warmth of your breath against his mouth “...so many of them and I couldn’t feel anything…” he felt another tear escaping from his eye and you reached to him, you didn’t brush it but your touch made his skin burn “...not one of them made me feel what you did, miel…” he pressed his forehead against yours “not a single one.”

“Why are you telling me this?” you whispered out, Javier tried to calm his racing heart as he fought himself from kissing you.

“Because no one was enough, miel, no one was you.” his voice was soft and he sighed slightly, you closed your eyes as a sob died inside your chest. Javier brushed his thumb on the skin of your cheek and you, out of the sudden, closed the distance with him.

Javier hummed in surprise but his lips acted by themselves. You tasted the same as the first and last time he had kissed you; sweet as honey.

You ate his lips gently, still whimpering and still crying, you brushed your tongue with this lower lip and he opened his mouth to let you in; he was willing to give you everything you wanted. He wanted to give you everything you asked for.

With the same sharpness you started the kiss you finished it.

Javier wanted to chase your mouth and keep kissing you until his lips went numb but you stepped back from him and shook your head as you licked your lower lip; he sighed once again with the wet flesh of his lip still tingling.

“You know that I can’t, right?” you asked, holding back his hand, he stood there, watching you look at him, “you know I won't risk my entire life just because the man I’ve been loving for twenty years came back, right?”

Javier dropped his gaze to the door and attempted to say that he knew; that he understood, that he wished you to be happy and that he only wanted to try because he loved you. He wanted to say that he was happy to know you still loved him after all those years and that he knew you had the right to decide what to do with your life. But he could only nod.

“I grew out of my pain, Javi,” you whispered, gripping his hand, he lifted his head to look at you, you were giving him a smile he thought he would never see again; small, soft, yours, “it doesn't hurt me anymore; you did what you did for yourself and I understood,” he nodded again, “now I’m doing what i need to do for myself.”

“Does he make you happy?” he asked in a mumble, you scoffed at him.

“Mostly.” you replied, Javier tugged you against him again and held you inside his arms.

“Good.” he whispered, burying his head inside the crook of your neck, he felt your hands roaming gently up and down his back and he wished you could touch him like that for the rest of his life.

“I’m gonna get married, Javier,” you said, he shook his head, “yeah, and I’m gonna move to San Antonio, too.”

“No.” he let out, his voice small, he felt you shake.

“Yes,” you sniffed, he held you tighter “and I’m gonna try to be happy,” you said before a sob came out of you, Javier felt your heartbeat against his nose and wished to feel it for the rest of his life, “even when I know I’m gonna forever feel sad that you’re not the one I wake up next to every morning.” you whispered.

“We can still do that.” he mumbled against your skin, he felt you shaking your head and he held you closer to him.

“I’m not gonna do that to him,” you replied, Javier sighed “because I love him too, he doesn’t deserve that.”

Javier lifted himself from where he was hidden in your body and looked at you; he slid his hands from your waist to your arms and your face and cupped it with both hands.

“What about you and me?” he let out; he heard himself and hated how broken his voice was. He felt the way your breath hitched as he finished asking and he saw you close your eyes.

“We don’t deserve each other anymore, Javi.”

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capricioussun · 2 years

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🌟 Capricious Suns’s Declassified AU+ Survival Guide 🌟

My AUs

Vesselfell - A Papyrus-centric Underfell AU revolving around the curious case of W.D. Gaster’s most successful experiment - The Vessel. Papyrus becomes a vessel for a doorway into the void, which gradually begins causing problems for not just their timeline, but the multiverse as a whole.

There are currently three primary iterations of the main story; Canon, The Good Ending, and The Variable.

Heartfell - A lovecore inspired Underfell AU where the world may not be as lovely as it seems. Exploring many facets of love and it’s perception and how sometimes what we believe is love is actually just trauma.

Orangefell - A semi-skeleton brothers-centric Underfell AU that revolves around how different things may be if the brothers had taken a different path.

Invertedfell - An Underfell AU where the characters personalities (and primary color schemes) are inverted. This is not a swapped AU as the changes are personal to each individual character.

Neonfell - An Underfell AU with slight cyberpunk stylings. After the fallen human and Alphys mysteriously disappear before the human had completed their journey to King Asgore, the underground falls into a state of chaos, eventually breaking apart into two sides - the loyalists and the rebellion. Will they ever learn the truth? Will they ever be free? Or will they drive themselves to extinction before they get the chance?

Demonfell - An Underfell AU where the monsters are all different types of demons. There isn’t much of a plot so much as a world to explore with honestly, I just liked the concept and ran with it, though I may develop a more solid story one day…

Glitchedswap - An Underswap AU that takes place in a “glitched game”. The monsters are mostly unknowingly permanently trapped Underground, and try to make the best of their abysmal circumstances.

Sweetswap - An Underswap AU similar to Heartfell in that it’s aesthetics are shifted, only to more cute, soft, and sweet stylings (cutecore, if you will), while exploring the many pros and cons of a sometimes perhaps too optimistic outlook on life.

Psychictale(fell?) - A Psychonauts inspired AU where Frisk must help the monsters address their inner demons to reach the truth of not just the underground, but the very monsters themselves.

Undersell - Underfell, but with a comedic twist. The underground is a grungy city type place, and everyone’s got an angle. It’s up to Frisk and Flowey to guide them back to a better way of life. (generally more lighthearted in tone)

AUs I have my own interpretation of

Swapfell (Metal) • Fellswap (Glass) • Swapfell (Red) • Mafiafell • Mafiaswap • Horrorfell • Horrorswap • Lovefell (previously Lustfell ) • MafiaLoveFell (previously MafiaLustFell)

AUs I need to work more on

Mafiatale • Horrortale • Outertale • Outerfell • Outerswap

Stories and Ideas

Glasses - Papyrus needs glasses. It really shouldn’t be this complicated.

7S - A monster and a human with good intentions form a plan that leads them on an unexpectedly difficult journey in an attempt to save monsterkind before losing themselves (and each other).

Tales of Divergence - A choose your own adventure type story about a collision within the multiverse that brings four neighboring timelines…together?

My Mother’s Eyes - An Underfell story about a strange accident that leads to Toriel raising Papyrus in the Ruins for most of his life.

Everything Stays - When a malfunction happens at the labs, Sans disappears without a trace. Alphys has to take the news to his family, only to find all that’s left is his kid brother. She doesn’t have much of a choice but to look after this increasingly strange child herself, with the eventual help of Undyne. They become quite the odd little family…but Papyrus never gives up hope of seeing his brother again. He knows it’s just a matter of time…

Asymmetrical - Accidents happen. But how could Gaster have anticipated this..?

A possible “full” Psychonauts Undertale crossover where Raz wakes up in a very very strange place with little memory of how he got there… (may attempt a comic of it some day)

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craftypeaceturtle · 2 years

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Grandpa

Summary: The day was going fine. Actually rather perfect. But, of course, that meant it was obviously going to go wrong. One off handed nickname later and Miles Edgeworth is now on a mission.

Note: Hello! I’m back to posting my writing! This was a really random idea that came to me for no particular reason. No shipping or relationship.

Miles Edgeworth thrived best in environments like this. When every minute of the day was busy with tasks and there was enough pressure to keep him focused but not enough to make him rush. There was a precise and delicate balance between the perfect day for ultimate productivity and spending the day breaking down trying to keep everything afloat. That precipice before disaster was the sweet spot.

But, again, that meant it only took one little thing to completely ruin his day.

“Prosecutor Debeste? Were you the last one with the MG-3 case file?” He poked his head around the door after knocking. Sebastian had yet to pass the bar all over again, but it was useful to have him help and play assistance to people here. To actually build up the skills necessary and he did have an excellent habit of pointing out things that no one else looked twice at. He startled at the question and glanced around his cluttered desk before muttering an ‘ah’ to himself.

“Oh, Grandpa was wanting to look at it himself, so I gave it to him yesterday. I doubt he would’ve finished with it already so it might be at his office still,” he answered with a smile.

As if it was the most natural thing in the world. Even Klavier, who he was assisting with that day, didn’t even look up. Edgeworth felt that careful balance come rocketing down. That sinking feeling of knowing this problem was going to cause an impressive headache. But he wasn’t one to leave a problem to just sit there.

“Grandpa?”

“Yeah. Grandpa?” Sebastian looked at him like he was an idiot. Edgeworth raised a brow as the silence continued. “Oh!” Sebastian cried out as it finally registered.

“Just who is ‘grandpa’?” Edgeworth stalked into the room fully, crossing his arms. He had to stand strong.

“Uhhh…” Sebastian nervously chuckled as he looked out the window. He wasn’t Kay, Edgeworth thought, he wouldn’t try to run.

“I think… Ja, I think I’m needed elsewhere,” Klavier stood as he pointed out the door. Edgeworth carefully didn’t react. “Ja, ja, ja…” He then fled. Leaving the stand-off between him and Sebastian.

Sebastian clearly thought his best option was to stay silent. A good strategy really considering how much the boy rambled when nervous. The fool! Little did he know just how much he revealed with the tiny part he did say.

With his reaction, he clearly revealed that he had been calling whoever ‘grandpa’ was for a while.

Grandpa was someone who visited yesterday.

Grandpa was someone in law if he had a case file (though that was pretty obvious).

Sebastian wouldn’t give a familial nickname unless the person meant a lot to him. Makes sense with how abysmal his perception of family was.

But then, on the other hand, Sebastian was one to mess up on nicknames a lot. He couldn’t begin to count all the times that he had accidentally called Judge Courtney a mother based nickname. Or himself with a fatherly nickname. He was one to easily mix up his words without much meaning.

He was currently standing there blushing madly and not making eye contact. He was embarrassed so he did believe in this nickname this time.

And this all didn’t even account for the fact that Klavier, the man who loved poking fun at everyone and anyone, didn’t react to the name.

All this creating an incredibly interesting mystery.

“Who are you referring to as ‘grandpa’?”

“S-sorry Mr Edgeworth! It was just an honest mistake! It was nothing. Don’t worry about it!” He stumbled as he started bending his baton.

“Such a mistake that Klavier wouldn’t point out?” He shook his head as he tsk’ed. An easy move.

“W-well you see… Oh hi Kay!” Sebastian practically yelled out. He turned and was met with Kay clearly nosing around and peering through the ajar door.

“Good morning you two!” She cheerfully saluted. “What’s Sebastian done now?”

“Me?! I’ve done nothing!”

Edgeworth let their bickering fade into the background. A single thought occurred to him and he felt a burst of emotion starting in his stomach.

“Kay.” He effectively cut through their bickering like a hot knife through butter. “Would you happen to know who Sebastian would refer to as ‘grandpa’?”

Her face dropped. She very unsubtly glared angrily at him before nervously grinning. “I wouldn’t know, sir!”

He glanced between them. Was it truly worth it to pester them when really there was only one culprit?

There would only be one match and he would absolutely be the sort of person to try and ruin his colleague’s professionalism. And also he was wasting time he couldn’t afford to if he wanted to drag his day back into the perfect balance.

“Nevermind. Perhaps you two should return to whatever work you were doing at this time. I think I have already pieced together who this… ‘grandpa’ is.”

Both nervously gulped but allowed him to dramatically turn out of the room and storm away.

Thankfully, ‘grandpa’s’ office wasn’t that far away. Only a brief five-minute walk. Ironically, the twelve flights of stairs were the longest part of the journey. He walked past Klavier but he gave the happiest grin possible at that. Now that seemed a bit more in character.

It was a perfectly cloudy day. Absolutely ideal for not having the sun get in his eyes or distracted by the sound of rain. This day would have been perfect but now he was running around the place. All for a stupid file that he just wanted to double check. All for one file for one stupid detail! But he wasn’t going to be the sort to overlook this. Yet now he was wrapped up in nonsense. A special sort of nonsense that only Kay and Sebastian could ever achieve. If only they weren’t so much of a delight to the office, then he would’ve shut this down immediately.

He rubbed his eyes tiredly as he stalked through the street and into a very familiar office. There was no way it wasn’t him.

“Good morning Mister Edgeworth! He shouldn’t be in any prior engagements, so you’ll be free to head straight up. Would you like me to page him?” The receptionist chirped.

“Morning, Joanne. No, I am only here to ask a quick question and collect a file.” He headed straight for the stairs and started the mildly humiliating slight jog up the stairs. At least his office was much much smaller than the Prosecutor’s office. It was slightly bigger than Wright & Co. considering it had more than one floor and two employees but it was still small for an office. He heard some cheery hellos as he speed-walked by, carefully keeping his gaze fixed on the office at the very end of the corridor. Now standing outside his office, ignited the feeling in his chest.

Okay, he could admit that his colleagues weren’t the most professional but they all excelled in their fields and knew when to keep their eccentricities to themselves. But he must’ve truly got under their skin if Sebastian was that caught off guard and it had been so casual. This all probably stemmed from this stupid idea that Sebastian, and probably Kay, were his kids. They are adults now. It was completely patronising to enforce them a familial nickname that paints them as unprofessional. He brushed a hand through his hair. He could already see the argument incoming.

He didn’t know Sebastian and Kay’s backstories like he did. While they came across as confident and capable young adults, they were in a very vulnerable position. The last thing they need is another adult making decisions for them. The emotion’s flames exploded higher. Especially now he was going to have to send them mixed signals now! He had to put an end to this before they got hurt even more but obviously this alone was going to hurt the pair.

He stormed up to his office and threw the door open without knocking. Serves him right. Not that he was coming looking for an argument! But also, he would win this argument flawlessly.

“Gregory, what makes you think it’s at all acceptable to get my employees to refer to you as grandpa!” He thrust his finger at him.

Gregory Edgeworth finished sipping his tea with a wide-eyed expression. “Ah. That was still hot. Uh, what?”

He shut the door behind him, shutting away any eavesdroppers (not that that would stop Uncle Ray). “Don’t play dumb, dad! Why are my employees calling you grandpa! They’re not my children and this sort of nickname is beyond unprofessional!”

His dad’s eyes finally went wide with realisation. He sat back on his creaky old leather chair before letting a determined calm expression overtake him. Oh for god’s sake! Great, another disagreement that turned into an entire mock trial. This sort of tactic should’ve stopped being used when he was a 18 years old. “Just who has been calling me this nickname?”

He crossed his arms. “Who do you think?”

“Well, I wasn’t there for the incident so how could I know,” Gregory smiled as looked on cluelessly.

“It was Sebastian,” He answered.

“Ah, of course it was him. Bless the poor boy.”

“Ha!” He thrust his finger at him again. “So you, albeit indirectly, acknowledge that there is not only more than one person who has been using this nickname but also that they have been using this nickname for a significant time now.”

“Okay, yeah. I guess I do acknowledge all of those things. But, can you then guess who else would be involved. You cannot make half-baked accusations.” Gregory just folded his arms. He felt a bead of sweat against the back of his neck. He swore under his breath.

“It’s Kay, right?”

“And what makes you think it’s sweet innocent Kay?” He replied just as emotionless. Edgeworth was almost too taken aback to answer. Just who on earth would describe Kay as innocent!

“Because…” The words felt forbidden. Like the first time you swear casually around your parents. That instinct of bad, forbidden, no, how dare. That shame crawling over you. He immediately knew what his dad would say in response and it would be the question to win this debate. But what other response was there. “Because people often see them as my children. Making you the grandpa figure to this hypothetical family.”

“Why do people think you’re a family?”

Well, there it was. Any time that was brought up bluntly, he played ignorant. Why what a ridiculous statement. But he wasn’t blind. No one else had stayed up all night after Kay had knocked herself unconscious, waiting for the doctors to allow visitors. As much as he tried to convince himself that he would do what he did for them for anyone else, he knew that he wouldn’t be wasting hours searching after learning difficulties for anyone else. He would ask them to do it themselves and that it’s not his role as boss. Yet for Sebastian, he was booking appointments and showing him websites to encourage him to seriously consider it. No one else in the office even knew he had a dog, let alone had pictures of when they all fell asleep cuddling Pess. Yet his phone’s home screen was of a Sebastian who’s lap was filled with a very big dog and a Kay draped over him like some blanket. Sebastian’s was also the same photo. Kay’s was of Pess laying on her back with a silly excited expression.

There were no other of his colleagues that would even come close to what he had with Sebastian and Kay. It wasn’t like he viewed them as his equal, work friends either. He felt this urge to protect over them. Every tiny question they asked, or little display of trust, made his chest glow warm.

“Because I act like I’m their father. A behaviour that I’m aware of and that I should’ve stopped awhile ago. It cannot be beneficial for them considering their backgrounds.”

“What, no! Miles!” His father leapt out of his chair. “That’s not the right conclusion.”

“What other conclusion would be appropriate!”

“The only other one!” Gregory huffed an exhausted laugh. “You’re only thinking from your point of view.”

“They are very vulnerable people with complex pasts. I am taking their perspectives into mind.” He now crossed his arms and tapped his arm. If his father was going to be ridiculous then he’d better let him do the explaining.

“Take last Christmas then! I invited them over…”

“Merry Christmas Kay. Merry Christmas Sebastian!” Gregory cheered loudly as he answered the door to them.

“We made pigs in blankets!” Kay jumped up as she posed the tin foiled plate above her, much to Sebastian’s heart attack.

“Ah, thank you. You didn’t have to,” He smiled as he ushered them in. It wasn’t snowing but it was icy and the air felt biting just standing by the open door. Once Kay dropped the plate down, she found herself quickly wrapped up in his hug. “I’m glad you could both make it. I know this hasn’t been an easy year so let’s send this one off!”

It was a little quiet moment between the three of them. Miles had just looked from the kitchen doorway with an exasperated head shake.

“Or that time Sebastian wasn’t sure if he wanted to visit Blaise…”

“I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I just… Such a mess. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry,” Sebastian tried to gulp as the sobs kept coming. “I should just go…”

“Don’t say that Seb. I’ve still got a spare room from when Miles was around your age. Sleep here tonight. It won’t be any trouble. Plus… hard nights like these feel so much worse alone.” Gregory smiled sadly as he dumped another handful of marshmallows in his hot chocolate. Miles wasn’t a very affectionate kid but even then, a very rare hug was the best way to cheer him up. It was his first time he met someone who despised any sort of touch when he got upset.

Miles had phoned him earlier saying that Sebastian was having a bit of a moment and that a comfort night was needed. “Are you sure, father? I dropped him round, I don’t mind then taking him home with me.”

“That’s nonsense, Miles. He’s already here and I’ve already got my heart set on using him as an excuse to make pancakes for breakfast,” He chuckled to lighten the mood. Miles smiled in thanks. Gregory’s own chest warmed at the thought that if Miles ever felt lost, he still turned to his dear old dad. But as he looked down, he smiled at the thought that maybe Sebastian could view him that same way too.

“There’s been so many countless times that they’ve come to me too or I’ve helped them. Even if you want to argue that you’re not a father figure to them, I think it’s my choice whether they view me as a family figure. And vice versa. I see them as grandkids.”

“You could’ve just said if you wanted grandchildren,” Miles replied bitterly, not meaning a single word.

Gregory laughed. “That wasn’t what I meant. I didn’t want grandkids. If they were there, then that would be nice but I’m not about to force to you adopt or anything. But you showed me these two young adults who were really struggling. You showed me them as you needed advice on how to best help them. Of course, I want to help them. I want to spoil them. I want them to know they can come to me with anything and I’ll do my best. If that isn’t grandkids, then what is?”

Miles bit harshly on his lip. “But I don’t think I’m ready for that sort of title. Maybe they’re also not ready!”

He felt his dad’s hands clasp his shoulders gently but firmly. “Then we should’ve talked about it.”

“B-but…” Miles looked around bewildered. “I can’t be a fath… a father like figure. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“What they need is exactly what you’ve been doing so far.” Gregory looked to the side before chuckling. “The best parenting advice ever: once your kids become teens or even adults, they’re starting to look out for themselves. If you do something wrong or start getting too much, or even not enough, then they’re strong enough to realise and speak up. Ha, trust me from your rebellious teen days. You’ll get a mouthful if you do too much. It’s all about trust. Trust them to know what they need.”

“So, what do I do if they fight back?”

Gregory tried hard to hold back his laughter. “Well exactly what I did! You came bursting into my room angry that your colleagues were calling me a name. You came in and gave me a mouthful. So I calmed things down, figured out the problem, then we talked about it. Changes or actions then follow after that.”

Miles scoffed.

Gregory sighed. “Listen. I know family is hard, especially with some much hurtful history there.” He winced but he knew this would be a great example. But this could either go brilliantly or Miles storms out that second and doesn’t speak to him for the week.

“Take DL-6, for example.”

Miles flinched but he did stay put.

“I know it doesn’t exactly fit but it’s the only example I have. When I was shot, it was so difficult to be a parent. All of a sudden, I could barely lift my arm up to scratch an itch. Then you obviously… really struggled with that too.”

“Hah,” Miles mocked, his voice cold and harsh. “I could barely function with the nightmares and flashbacks.”

“I didn’t feel like a parent. I felt like I had all my own stuff to deal with that meant I couldn’t be a dad. Then, by the time I even slightly healed physically, you were still hurting with all your stuff. You had learnt to shut me out and had latched on to other people. You used to cry whenever Ray went to the toilet in fear he’d get shot if you weren’t watching him at every second.”

Miles remained totally silent. Really, Raymond was an absolute blessing through that whole time. Just barely no longer a boy himself, yet he acted a carer for him and a dad for Miles.

“Point is!” Gregory clapped his hands, trying to snap himself out before he fell too into the past, “I know that being a parent to troubled kids is hard. Especially if you’re going through your own thing. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible or unethical. If Sebastian is latching on to us to deal with his stuff with Blaise, then speaking for myself, I feel capable enough to be there for him. If he’s having a bad night, then I know I can help him. Him latching on isn’t a bad or scary thing. It can feel bad or scary considering how serious his issues are. But that doesn’t mean it is. You don’t have to take on all of his issues. As you said, he’s an adult. But you can be able to look at a small problem and think, I know how to help him with that.”

“Well, I don’t feel capable enough for any of their problems.” Miles was looking away from him.

“Then that’s fine. I do, so I quite like the silly nickname to show that off. Speaking as your father, I do think you are capable, I just think you’re doubting yourself. You’ve been an excellent anchor for Seb and Kay to look up to. But as a friend, then I’ll trust your judgement.”

The silence in the office now felt awkward. Miles knew he had to say something but the words were gone. There were none left in him. He briefly noticed that he had the starts of a tension headache. He wanted to be someone for them to look up to. For all his employees. It was just that he saw… a bit more of himself in Kay and Sebastian. But was that enough to call him a dad. It didn’t feel like enough. He didn’t feel enough.

Looking up at his father finally, he nodded at him. Gregory held his arms out and Miles allowed himself to be quickly pulled in. One slight squeeze before they both let go. He turned to leave; way too embarrassed to say much more of the situation. But as he opened the door, he turned around.

“They may call you grandpa but only in non-professional settings. Th-they cannot call me father. Maybe… Not yet.”

“I kinda figured you’d be more of a ‘papa’ man, myself,” Gregory softly joked and Miles made sure not to react as he nodded farewell.

Maybe the problem was more he wasn’t considering the right familial nickname?

#ace attorney #miles edgworth #kay faraday #sebastian debeste #fanfic #My writing #gregory edgeworth #ace attorney investigations 2

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kimetsunoyaibawritings · 3 years

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Introspection

[AO3 Version] | [Original Request]

Rating: General

Summary: When a rainstorm threatens Tanjiro's travels through the countryside, he takes refuge in the home of a kind stranger. During his stay, he discovers that not only is his host of half-demon blood, but their mother had also been a member of the Demon Slayer Corps.

Tanjiro is nothing if not curious, and learns more about the multifaceted world of demonkind, hopefully growing ever closer to undoing the curse upon his sister.

Tanjiro could tell that something was off. From the moment that the man had entered into his physical perception he knew that something wasn't quite right. The man -- you -- weren't entirely human. Neither were you entirely demon, but he couldn't get much detail behind the simple fact of otherness that permeated the air around you with every shift of your body.

It wasn't a bad smell either. In fact, when you bowed in greeting, he found the gesture scented with honesty and friendliness instead of hidden malice or insincerity. He bowed in turn, and the two of you exchanged names. It didn't take long before you took note of his weapon, and much less after that to realize that the wooden case hefted against his back held something far less trivial than one would have assumed. Not something, but someone.

His nose was sharp -- for a human, at least. Yours was just as honed, though the ability came from your mixed blood than from a rare natural gift. It took but one breath with a defined focus to realize the young man you'd met was hardly a normal person.

Demon Slayer.

The words held some semblance of meaning. Nothing with coherent form; they were words passed down to you from your parents, spoken with such fearful vitriol that you had to wonder what kinds of people became such Slayers of Demons. Surely they would be bloodthirsty, heartless souls that would so willingly strike down such simple people without due thought or consideration to what their sins truly were -- assuming that existence itself wasn't a sin for a demon.

But as Tanjiro stood before your eyes, you had to reconsider the image that had built up behind the words. He did not look bloodthirsty. He didn't even seem aggressive. But he still carried the nichirin blade that you'd been warned of, and you had to wonder how many demons had been killed at the mercy of its sharpened edge.

So you, a half-demon standing before one so named a demon slayer, do the careful thing:

You invite Tanjiro to stay with you for the night.

Truthfully, Tanjiro isn’t in a position to reject the offer. he’d been traveling for several days through the rolling landscape between the mountains, and he could smell a thunderstorm coming in. For all that he couldn’t understand you or your strange scent, Tanjiro really had no reason not to trust in his kindness.

The house you called your own is humble, too far from the nearest village for anyone to randomly stumble upon you without incredible forewarning. Tanjiro is actually quite the rarity, one that you find some manner of joy in meeting — the last person you’d met was half as kind and barely a fraction as patient.

“Are you a demon slayer?” you find yourself asking barely a moment after the two of you have stepped into the narrow threshold of the front doorway. Beyond is a home consisting of a few rooms at most, minimally furnished but meticulously cared for.

Tanjiro barely has the chance to set his gear down, but he flashes an earnest smile in your direction.

“I am,” he says. There’s pride in his tone. “Though I’m a little surprised. Not a lot of people recognize us that quickly, unless…”

“No. I don’t have any connection,” you quickly dash his assumption aside. “But I recognize the uniform and weapon you’re carrying. Nichirin blade, correct?”

Tanjiro blinks, but the look of warmth never quite fades from his face even as he nods to affirm your suspicion. It sates your surface curiosity, but it doesn’t offer any sort of clue as to what is in the box he’d carried upon his back. For a moment you wonder if it would be rude to inquire about it, but shrug the notion off quickly when you remember how strange the box smells. Not weapons, not rations, but something softer.

“What’s in that box of yours?”

Tanjiro’s entire frame stiffens. In barely a breath’s worth of time, his demeanor tightens up and leaves the young man looking tense and unsure. With one hand gently laying upon the wooden surface of his cargo, he says, “Something… very important to me,” he then reaches his other hand up, fingers splayed open and shaking as if to ward off concern. “-but I promise it’s nothing dangerous.”

You can smell a soft trace of anxiety around him. While the unexpected reaction incites a spark of curiosity within your chest, it’s not without a resounding sense of restraint and mannered respect for Tanjiro’s privacy. If he doesn’t wish to share the nature of it’s contents with you — someone who is little more than a stranger to him, admittedly — then he is under no such obligation. Still, you purse your lips for a moment in disappointment before lightly gesturing for him to step further into the house with you.

“I’d been cooking food when you arrived,” you say gently. “Clean yourself up and I’ll serve us both something hot to eat.”

It doesn’t take very long before the two of you are sitting together, sipping at the brothy soup that had been bubbling away for the entirety of the earlier afternoon. Though the majority of the meal is somewhat silent, Tanjiro’s eyes move about the room, taking in every detail that raises above the floor and out from the walls. It doesn’t take a genius to realize how well he fits into the ideal of a Demon Slayer — Tanjiro is perceptive and foolhardy with at least some basic talent for the blade on his hip.

Beyond that, however, you’re not quite sure what is to be expected of him as a slayer. He’s very kind and respectful… but those are hardly the traits you’ve come to associate with the title. Everything about the young man demands curiosity, so much that you don’t realize how his gaze has settled onto one particular spot on the wall behind you. By the time you remember what is hanging openly, Tanjiro’s lips are already forming a question -

“Whose sword is that on your wall?”

You don’t even turn your eyes around to look at it. The object has taken a defined place within your memories — you can’t forget the shape of the blade, the texture of the hilt, or the soft smile of it’s previous owner even if you genuinely wanted to purge them from your thoughts.

A sigh escapes your lips after a few moments. “It belonged to my mother,” you explain after a moment. When Tanjiro’s rust-colored eyes light up, you decide to answer the question just behind his lips. “And yes, it’s what you think it is. She was a demon slayer herself.”

“Oh,” the syllable falls with a sense of understanding of was rather than is. A misjudged understanding, given the ambiguity of your answer, but a respectful one nonetheless. “I’m sorry.”

A moment passes.

“And… your father?” Tanjiro asks.

The speed at which you shake your head is almost comical. No. No. The visual image is a joke in itself, and Tanjiro doesn’t even realize why his question is so humorous to you.

“My father was not the kind of person for that line of work.” a gentle chuckle does manage to escape the poised line of your lips. “…I doubt he’d be able to wield a blade like that in the first place.”

It feels as if the conversation is going to continue out from there, a gentle rolling of waves upon the edge of a beach after the brief storm of near-realization to what was hiding just beneath the surface of half-dodged answers. But it doesn’t manage to get farther than another breath before a noise sharply echoes out from the wooden box set out near the doorway and shocks both of you into a gazing silence.

“Tanjiro,” your tone is careful and your eyes hone in on the item. Caution prickles in your fingertips and against your tongue as claws and fangs slowly emerge from behind a carefully-kept glamor. “what is in that-”

“What are your thoughts on demons?”

You blink, turning to face the man again with a look that does not hide an ounce of your confusion. It takes a few moments for some of the dots to connect to one another. The reason for him asking your opinion is hanging right above your head, a heavy reminder to half of your heritage — but it doesn’t quite match all of the points of confusion all but emanating from Tanjiro and the strange box he carried with him.

Still, his question deserves an answer. And even as your eyes settle carefully on the square shape across the room, you offer one.

“Asking my thoughts on demons is no different than asking my thoughts on humans,” you say, words careful and tone oddly tight. “Some are good, some are bad, and none-” a sharp breath passes over your lips. “-none are perfect.”

Tanjiro’s eyes linger on you for a long while, longer than what feels comfortable for the silence between you. For a few moments you wonder if his question was a test and your answer had failed it abysmally, but it didn’t change your feelings on the matter in the slightest. Nothing ever will.

Another sharp noise echoes from the direction of the box. Your eyes begin to dart towards it, but the motion of Tanjiro’s body commands your attention towards him instead, he as if ready at any moment to launch himself towards the box, but his eyes meeting yours openly and earnestly.

“So you’re saying you think some demons can be good, right?”

You watch him, but sense no malice in the young man’s gaze.

“Of course.”

Relief seems to flood across his expression. When another, more rhythmic sound comes from the box, he doesn’t so much jump towards it as he does shuffle to his feet and step across the room. Before he’s able to reach it, however, the door suddenly opens to reveal a shape of pink fabric spilling out from within. You blink and watch as the fabric moves, and ever so quickly does your mind realize that there is a person within it, wearing the kimono that reminds you of cherry blossoms in springtime.

By the time Tanjiro is at the side of the wooden box and holding out an outstretched hand, you’ve come to realize that it’s been a young girl inside of it the entire time.

A demon. The scent doesn’t escape your nose for a moment, though it lacks the underlying sharpness of iron you’d come to expect from others of her kind and yours alike.

And Tanjiro regards her with tolerance, nay, respect. It seems to take the young woman a few moments to orientate herself to her surroundings, but he smiles at her with all the same gentleness.

“It’s okay, Nezuko,” Tanjiro says brightly, pulling the woman onto her feet. “This is a safe place.”

Despite all the words that press up behind your tongue, you can’t help but stare at the young duo. Tanjiro smiles and gestures towards the young woman beside him, Nezuko.

“This is my… younger sister,” he says at last. The air settles around the room in a nonverbal confirmation of information that doesn’t take more than a heartbeat to confirm, but it leaves you equally confused and curious all the same.

“Tanjiro,” you murmur, words finally picking up a semblance of strength. “This may be a stupid question, but are you aware that your sister is currently a demon?”

Though it’s not clear what would have been more surprising of an answer, Tanjiro’s honest nod does seem to do plenty to throw you for a loop. A demon slayer traveling around with a demon at his side? The notion vexes you completely, even if the demon in question is a member of his familiy. Unless…

“Was she born a demon?”

Tanjiro and Nezuko both look at you, the former with a more defined look of confusion across his face.

“Born…?” he asks. “As in turned? Turned into a demon?”

“Ah,” you suddenly feel a bit silly and more than a little embarrassed as his confusion seems to be genuine. “I think I misunderstood a few things. I’ve got my answer in any case but, no, I did actually mean born as in physically birthed.”

While Nezuko loses interest in the conversation and begins to roam about the room, her brother slowly settles back onto his spot across from you — albeit shooting a glance to his young sister every once in a while which is admittedly endearing. The two of them seem barely old enough to be out on their own, and you’re not sure if the demon slayers even have a minimum age requirement to begin with as long as someone can hold a weapon and defend another.

“How could someone give birth to a demon?” Tanjiro finally asks. “I thought they were only created by… uh.” he pauses for a few moments, waiting as if to catch something in your eyes. Recognition perhaps? “…A man named Muzan Kibutsugi.”

He’s not bothering to conceal his befuddled expression as, behind his eyes, you can see the threads of thought and logic try desperately to put an answer together from the bits of information he already knows about demon-kind.

“Most are,” your words taste bittersweet on the tongue. “But not all of them. Some demons can create other demons if they’re strong enough.”

Tanjiro nods as the faces of both Lady Tamayo and Yushiro appear in his mind’s eye. Though she had been a demon created by Muzan, he recalled that Yushiro was created by her hand in the continuing search for a cure to turn someone human once more. It had been the only instance where he’d come across a demon not created by the demon king himself, but it’s a clear enough example that Tanjiro doesn’t need to stretch his mind very far to understand your words.

Seeing this recognition, your hand raises to gesture up towards your chest, fingertips barely skimming across the wash-worn fabric of your kimono.

“You asked before about some demons being ‘good’.”

Tanjiro nods. Even Nezuko has moved her attention towards you, though she stands solemnly in one of the darker corners of the room as her eyes glow like shimmering sakura blossoms.

Considering the nature of whom was sitting in front of you — the organization for which Tanjiro allied himself with — there was a part of you that wished to simply lie between your teeth and wait out the night until it would be socially acceptable to all but kick the young warrior out of your home. That part had good reasons to be cautious and fearful, but another part of you found something hopeful behind the young man’s eyes. You aren’t naïve enough to call it ‘trust’, but the emotion is certainly within the same pond.

“My father was a good man,” your hand lingers, stilled against your chest and all but faintly feeling the thrum of your own heartbeat. “An odd man, but a good one. Tended to the fields, took care of my mother when she fell ill, even managed to make friends with some folks of the local village. He respected everyone around him.”

Even as he remains politely silent, something starts to click in Tanjiro’s eyes, even before you finish the point of your words.

“…my father was also a demon created by Kibutsugi.”

Tanjiro blinks with wide surprise and shock stilling the words that otherwise press against the back of his lips. While there had been a growing hunch forming somewhere within his thoughts, he can’t help the suddenness of the question needed to confirm them when he finally can speak again.

“Does that mean that you are-”

“Half-demon, yes.”

"How does that even...happen...?"

You chuckle, "I'd imagine how most people go about having babies."

Tanjiro's cheeks turn a dark red, and he quickly drops that particular line of questions.

You try to offer the young man a comforting smile, but he continues to stare in a summation of awe and disbelief. He’d never even thought that a demon and human could have a child together. For the longest time since learning of their existence, Tanjiro simply thought that demons couldn’t have children at all — like an extension of the curse befallen upon them, leaving them wanting for human flesh and blood, feral and wild and-

It is then that Tanjiro’s thoughts click into place once more. No. He’s not without multiple examples to the contrary, strengthened each and every day by the knowledge that his own sister is of the same creation as many of the demons so easily vilified and hated. But, even then, it doesn’t change the fact that Nezuko is a rarity — her lack of bloodshed is, as far as he’d learned, a genuine oddity among other demons.

“… Have you killed anyone?” he finally asks. His eyes glance towards the floor, looking almost ashamed in having to speak the words.

You shake your head. The question is hardly a surprise — you actually would have been more caught off-guard if that hadn’t been the first thought on his mind. But oddly enough, the question is something of a comfort. It allows to you answer it honestly.

“I haven’t hurt or killed anyone before — since part of my blood itself is human, my diet is relatively lackluster.” with a sweep of your hand, you gesture out to the empty bowls in front of the two of you. “I can be out beneath the sun, but my skin is somewhat sensitive to it; just a short while in direct sunlight can leave me with a terrible burn.”

Tanjiro nods. He brings up a hand to his chin for a moment to ponder over the details and new information as what appears to be every thread of his thoughts devote to try and weave it all together with what he already knew. One detail into another, filling up the ever-growing sense of curiosity that he had for demons and those around them. If nothing else, it proved that there were still things that not even the Demon Slayer corps understood properly — or, if they did, they certainly didn’t admit to them. The Hashira’s response to Nezuko solidified that well enough.

After a few moments, Tanjiro’s attention flicks back up to your face.

“Your… mother was a demon slayer, right?”

You nod politely, though it doesn’t take more than a quick glance back up to the nichirin blade hanging above both of your heads on the wall behind you to be reminded of the fact.

Tanjiro’s gaze tilts ever so slightly with his head to one side. “How did your mother and father meet?”

You shrug. “I never learned much of the details, though I do know that he was at one time a demon she was sent out to kill.”

Tanjiro chuckles after a few moments.

“I think I can guess what came after that,” he says. “So was your father… around much after you were born?”

“Of course!” your expression all but beams at the gentle memories. “Just because he was a demon doesn’t mean by default he was a bad or neglectful father. Though I suppose he so often seemed sickly to others; not able to go outside during the day, having to hide himself when there was company… I admit there is a lot about my father I still don’t know.”

For but a flicker of a moment, you are absolutely certain that there is a sadness within Tanjiro’s eyes. A mutual bitterness, empathetic beyond words. But the look is gone ever so quick, so much that if your perception was but a moment slower it would have been missed entirely.

But what remains is yet a soft expression.

“Thank you,” he finally says. “I am trying to learn as much as I can about demons right now.”

“I assume as much, being a demon slayer.”

“No, no it’s-” the young man looks suddenly flushed. “I promise I’m-… I’m not going to tell anyone about you. I just, think that… there’s a lot that I don’t understand. But I would like to. You see, my sister and I-”

And so, Tanjiro tells you the story of how he and his sister began traveling together — the murder of his family, his sister being turned into a demon, his promise to himself and those he lost that he would try to right all of the wrongs that had been done to them. He explains how he joined the demon slayers, how he had met other demons who had been kind to him in much the same way that you had been. Though the names Tamayo and Yushiro held no recognition, they did bring a sense of warmth to your chest in the confirmation that being a demon didn’t truly mean one had to give up their sense of humanity and kindness.

One topic moved onto another as the night continued on and the rainstorms moved in. Through the soft pitter-patter of water against the roof, you did your best to answer as many of Tanjiro’s questions as you could despite the fact that your knowledge of Muzan went no farther than simply hearing it once or twice and having a basic understanding of his role in the origin of demons themselves. There is also something admittedly humorous in watching Tanjiro’s expression when your glamor falls just a little, revealing sharp claws at the tip of each finger and fangs barely hidden behind the press of your lips.

“Neither my father nor I had any semblance of combat ability, but they’re useful for hunting.” a moment passes. “Animals, I mean. Me and mother still had to eat something.”

Perhaps it’s the reminder of your mother, and her lack of presence in the house with you, that finally encourages the question forth, “How long have your parents been…?”

“Dead?” you don’t fear the sound of the word or the notion behind it. “It will be twenty years this coming spring.”

“Twenty years?” Tanjiro gawks. “H-how old are you then?”

“I was born in 1857, so…” you do the math in your head, giving Tanjiro several moments to try and come to terms with the fact that you barely look older than your mid twenties at most. “This year I will be fifty-five!”

Your bright, sharp grin is in hilarious contrast with the shock all but painted across the young man’s face. After giving him a breath to take in the information, you point out, “I am half-demon. Time doesn’t mean as much to my health as it does a normal demon.”

“I… see,” Tanjiro’s eyes return to normal, but there’s no hiding his lingering awe. “So will just a nichirin blade… kill you?”

You have to laugh at just how shy the question is for the severity of the words. “Trying to plan my demise already, demon slayer?”

Though Tanjiro immediately begins to shake his hand and try to babble out an apology and explanation alike, you aren’t cruel enough to let it linger for more than a moment before explaining, “A normal blade could behead me and I would die. I could drown in a lake or perish from a high enough fall. In all things but old age, I’m still very mortal, Tanjiro — for better or worse. I can’t speak for any other half-demon you may come across, but I know that much.”

A moment of silence passes between you. Tanjiro thankfully doesn’t ask about your parents or their passing. In fact, he seems rather satisfied by the amount of information he’s gotten already, so much that his mind constantly looks as if it’s rolling about within his skull, putting together a puzzle with far too many pieces missing for most people to even bother in the first place.

The rain continues to fall. It’s a gentle white noise, ceaseless, and punctured only by the dull rolling sounds of thunder as it moves across the edges of your perception. It doesn’t take long for you to realize the time either, knowing even without looking out the door or window that the moon is high into the night sky and that, furthermore, it was not hospitable of you to keep your guest from getting a good night’s rest.

“If you have no more questions, I think it would be a good idea to get some sleep.”

There were more questions — there is always more questions — but Tanjiro can’t ignore the fact that it’s late and, yes, he would need to be moving along to his next destination early in the morning. It doesn't’ take long to ready a place for him to sleep, and less so for Nezuko who seems content to simply be near her older brother. Though she doesn’t speak a single word to you, the look in her eyes seems soft and curious, perhaps even grateful.

It’s understandable why Tanjiro has such a moderate view of demons despite being among the Demon Slayer Corps himself.

That fact in itself is something of a comfort as much as it is a curiosity, one that lingers with you even when you see the young man off the next morning, so early that the sun has barely crested above the hills and mountains on the horizon.

And Tanjiro, as he leaves, finds himself renewed with energy and questions alike. Every time he thinks he has a strong grasp on the world around him, something new emerges that throws it further into perspective in an ever-growing map of knowledge. Though the edges continue to get blurrier, there’s something nice in familiarizing himself in it. To Tanjiro, it brings him further hope for the future of not only himself, but for the Demon Slayer Corps and the greater world around them.

Maybe, he hopes, he’ll run into you again one day.

And maybe then he’ll be able to introduce his sister to you as a human — or perhaps the world will have grown in such a way that, like the union of your parents and the makeup of your own blood, it won’t even matter in the first place.

#kny #kimetsu no yaiba #demon slayer #fic #male!reader #sfw #sfw fic #writing #sfw writing #gen fic #gen writing #no ship writing #no ship fic #readerinsert #readershot #tanjiro #tanjiro kamado #request fill

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stronghours · 3 years

Text

SUNSHINE IN THE SKY REPRISE

And it came to pass, a few weeks after she and Jules made a bad decision on his thrifted futon, that they met again during 4th of July merrymaking.

Lux toddled in grey lake water among Ava, Claire, and Archie (Celeste down and out with summer flu). Lux couldn’t swim, a fact disclosed in private to Ava, which Ava hadn’t kept to herself, and the group formed a stooped, anxious ring around her doggy-paddling. She was forced, among the smell of hot dogs in the safe green grass hundreds of yards beyond and the ominous cloud cover above, to make sure only her ass whomped her protectors’ knees when the waves tried to boil her body up and away. She’d made a mistake, and her only wardrobe protection beyond her suit itself and her spandex underthing was a hastily added solid color sarong, which while dry didn’t match, and while wet, just looked lousy and modest. But she couldn’t be parted with it and had made up a past bout of minor skin cancer, a pin-mole insidiously located on her protected inner thigh, the paranoia of which haunted her still. Even Ava dropped her chin for the C-word.

Now she suggested Lux float on her back and allow her perception of the water to form fingers in the magic slot located on her lower back, and soon she’d be floating like crazy among the wacky kids and her hot workmates and her boss and all their invisible pubes. A wave slapped dirty fingers up Lux’s nose.

“It’s kind of like learning a language,” Archie contributed. “Got to learn it when you’re young. Looks like your parents fucking doomed you.”

“My pap pap slam-dunked me in our above-ground when I was five,” said Claire, who floated tummy-down in frog position by exerting no effort Lux could observe. “I bobbed right back up, but like, what if I hadn’t?”

Lux, six feet tall, decided to use it to her advantage and planted her knees in the sandbar. She could just about do it and keep her eyes and forehead in periscope position.

“Reuben and I are thinking of installing an above-ground,” said Ava, and seeing Lux shrink, rose to her feet and splashed water across her dewy collarbone. Lux pushed every single one of them out of her mind and stared between the chops out into the open sea to make-believe Michigan somewhere on the other side. A rhythmic slap approached from the left and the white bow of a lifeguard’s canoe sailed past their collected heads.

“Hey now,” scolded the familiar voice behind the sunglasses, “only three hot bitches are allowed in the water at a time. Think of the community.”

Ava sloshed around at the familiarity, but everybody else had already noticed it was, absurdly, Jules, and sent up a bunch of soggy greetings, all except Lux who rose into a semi-crouch in the drifting seabed out of surprise, and Ava, who let them all perform verbal recognition on her behalf and only spared a nod.

Jules looked very high school, very lanky on the bobbing bench, with the oars braced under his tanned arms and his cute red tank top cinched under his fanny pack. He rode the up-down of the surf the same way he did most things, with enough bored grace to suggest he’d learned quite enough and had more interesting things to do. Lux had recently learned this conceit of his could be bypassed, and she was glad he kept the sunglasses on when he looked her over.

“What’s up Cathy,” he said, with the same Sophomore carelessness, and she plunged her head under an oncoming wave, the pressure preferable to the dawning knowledge that now, he had information he could disclose, and he’d had it for weeks.

She rose again, squinting. She couldn’t tell if he had caught on.

“What?” he asked. “What did I do?”

“You got another job, Jules?” Ava surged forward, displaced Lux. “Roscoe doesn’t give you enough to do, on top of commissions?”

“Give me another commission and you’ll find out.” He drew the left oar’s pole hard under his titty to keep the nose of the canoe from slicing into their crescent. The mechanism bucked like a horse and the wind snatched the ugly white hat off his head and toward an oblivion of preteens due north. Claire yelped and threw herself into the water, rippled away to go fetch it. “You ever been in the cellar underneath Rawhide, Ava? That’s like, thrice-darkness. I was gonna kill myself.”

“I’ve never been in a situation that required me to be in the cellar underneath Rawhide.” Prim Ava glanced pityingly at Lux, who allowed wave after wave to pummel her head in her effort to stay low. “Poor baby. She can’t swim.”

“Throw her off the pier,” Jules suggested.

“It worked for Claire’s pap pap,” Archie said, and braced an annoying hand on the back of Lux’s neck. “Sorry babe, looks like you’re going down.”

Lux threw herself underwater before Archie could push her into the drink. Beneath the top swell she had enough time to touch her palms to the sand and try to dig her hands where she’d braced her knees, but she was blind, and the divots were washed away and the grains were swept off and replaced swept off and replaced, and she panicked when the water tugged the sarong’s knot. She resurfaced from the green and grey, coughing and yanking the weedy fabric around her legs. Ava, shining and petite against the sky, so securely tucked to smoothness, had finished with Jules herself and was high stepping back to shore.

“…I’m just saying, you should definitely try it out –” Archie had spoken in the interim. Jules was nodding. He’d shoved the sunglasses up and over his curly head and while his gaze was trained forward to take in the gamboling bathers, Lux could feel him keeping her in the corner of his eye.

She remembered being in good if overenergetic spirits. She recalled a hot yellow sun. She wore her lavender halter with the powder-blue culottes, her hair freshly hennaed from the night before and trustily bunned. She traveled from a three-hour duo with Ava regarding some mind-numbing bouts of predicament ropework that left her guiltily bored of the client and his ballerina snobbishness, but pleased with her improving knots, and with the fact she could at least trick Ava into thinking she was a viable rope top. She’d exited the bus prematurely and entered the sidewalk throng to burn through her constipated spirits, past a raucous patio partition of a dippy sport’s bar and collided with Jules himself, exiting.

It was like striking a human-size grasshopper. He recoiled, elbows up, and almost upset a busboy’s tray. She reared at his excess, ready to dive into the full indulgence of her insult. In the past year after the Annelise Petro incident she’d only seen him at a distance. Their last words, exchanged in close quarters within Jules’s car more than twelve months ago, had not been civil. He was much tanner than she remembered of him in previous summers. He’d filled out in the chest and shoulders. For a second, she could glimpse he’d gained some weird physical vitality – but as she observed, the color drained from his face. His shoulders slumped. He looked sick as a dog. She’d thought he was drunk.

She grabbed him by the shoulders and steered his head away from her. “Do not,” she ordered, “Do not fucking puke on me.”

He pulled himself straight but didn’t dislodge from her grip. “Don’t say anything,” he hissed, dirt-sober, and before she could make him clarify, a middle-aged couple loomed over his shoulders. The woman, a full six inches shorter than both Lux and Jules (it was just then Lux realized she and Jules were precisely the same height) sparkled nervously, trussed in Cubs blues.

“Oh Jules,” she said, “Who’s this?”

She was blond and ferrety, but in the man, Lux could see a sour and fleshy shadow of Jules’s own face and bearing. He looked at her with the same stern contemplation Jules had leveled on her in the past, and Jules presently, dead in the eyes, curled in on himself like a shrimp.

She’d inexplicably exited her rancorous ditch and stumbled over Jules in the no-man’s land of Blood Relatives. She wanted to, against all rational thought, shove him behind her back and put her arms out.

Instead, she reached a hand to the man (dad? Oh boy, what fun) and chirped, “Hi, I’m Catherine!”

And to the woman (mother? God in heaven), “don’t we just all love Jules!”

The woman shriveled with feeling that hardly looked like relief. The man gravely shook Lux’s hand, and she was pleased with his grip’s condescending pressure. Her body moved far ahead of her brain. She could see herself at distance, popping one toe behind her planted heel, one hip cocked, tits pushed out, but no further than her glowing smile. “And how do you two know each other,” the man said, said, explicitly did not ask. Neither man nor woman introduced themselves.

Jules, white-lipped, opened his mouth but Lux flowed over him. “2007,” she answered, “Leidermeister Playhouse, down in, uh, are you from around here? No? Well, Tinley-ish. Way down there. Spring musical. I was on playbill. And Jules was doing costumes for Pippin.”

For the first time, Jules treated her to the sweet sight of his smug, sick face struck totally dumb.

“Theater!” The woman bubbled. She put her hand on her companion’s meaty forearm, placating.

But the man was not letting her go without a fight. “Theater,” he said. “And what part did you play.”

She treated him to her glowing smile first (cracking, a little). If Jules had learned his own abysmal manners from these creeps, then he’d somehow made improvements on his own time.

“The Mother,” she improvised. “Of course.”

“Stepmother,” Jules piped up, at last.

It was all yadda-yadda to Lux, but the man finally checked the neon dial of his watch, gripped the woman by the elbow, said they would have to start taking pains for a cab if they wanted to catch the game in time. “Sure,” Jules said, though his permission hadn’t been asked, his advice unsought. “You’re not far away.”

“You call her and say you saw us, sir,” the man said. “She’ll expect it.”

Jules was too busy accepting limp patty-pats from the woman, who shot Lux a tragic grin before she scampered up the sidewalk, followed by the broad back of her presumed husband. No proper hug, no I-Love-You, no masculine head smacks or back whacks or take-care-of-yourself-you-hear pronouncements. They just walked away. Her own parents would be appalled.

The life was coming back to Jules’s face, but he was still doubled over, as if from a cramp. “Jiminy Christmas,” he uttered, and she wanted, in a surge, nothing more than to pinch his cheeks and trap his head in her armpit and noogie him to death and bust his fluff. Instead, she assisted him away from the crowd, and before long they strolled down a quiet residential street, arm in arm. She decided to give him five whole minutes to recover from the encounter, but he did it in two.

“Ledermeister,” he said to her, appalled.

“Leider,” she corrected.

“You nutty bitch,” he dared, but there was no gas behind it.

“It’s like you think I’m some kind of pervert or something,” she said, and before she could help it, she started to nag. “What did you think I was going to say? Jules makes rubber sex suits with built-in condoms? I saw him in street clothes in a high-etiquette dungeon fingering my boss’s twenty-one-year-old latex bottom?” She felt him up a little in her haste, accidentally, and he squeaked. “Who actually has something to lose here?” She asked. “Who’s the fucking dominatrix here?”

“You don’t like me,” Jules said, coolly. “I had no idea what you would say.”

He sounded terribly calm. The sidewalk was dappled in shadows of maple leaves and, boxed in by reasonable townhouses on both sides, she was inclined to stay calm as well, and in her calm, she found a strange truth.

“I like you just fine,” she said.

“Oh.”

She liked him just fine. She liked him more than she liked Ava.

They walked.

“God, it’s fucking hot,” she said. It would be more comfortable not to have their arms around the other, but she didn’t unlatch.

“I moved to this neighborhood a couple weeks ago,” he said. “We’re not too far. I’ve got a window unit.”

A window unit meant he’d accumulated an actual window; a net gain from what she remembered of the dismal basement unit she’d ducked inside three times over their three year acquaintance, along with a damp cement strip notating the kitchen and two hoary pipes jutting six inches from the ceiling where tawny water dripped into provided buckets and Jules himself, barefoot, crisscross applesauce on a carpet square stringing the hundredth of ten-thousand waiting bugle beads with one or two local drag queens, staring open mouthed at a small, shit television propped up on a pile of clean laundry encased in a garbage bag, and onscreen a shoulder-padded daytime soap actress made lines like “there’s nothing to worry about Blake – do you really think I’d expose the Nazi treasure to outsiders?”

“Yeah, let’s,” she said.

He’d found a squat, orangey building with collapsed flower beds out front and only the faintest smell of weed in the halls. She noted, vain, that he opened the doors for her and motioned her up the stairs first and it wasn’t until she’d reached the top landing of the third floor, and he was sorting out keys that she felt the pluck of that old sexy situation, which was Going Inside a Boy’s Apartment, something she hadn’t done since college, and even at that time, something that usually happened under the close watch of protective friends. She couldn’t eye him either, to see which way his intentions were shifting – he was already eying her – but then he let her inside and the feeling was wiped out by absurd, maternal relief.

“Oh, thank God,” she blurted out. “This is so much better.”

The place still smelled like paint and floor wax, and she walked about at her leisure, touching the walls, and flapping her arms, knowing she wasn’t going to crash into a spiderweb or trod on mummified centipedes. The only furniture yet was a pulled-out futon (he was a bedmaker, who knew) and the walls had been built out to delineate a kitchen. She lifted the back of her shirt to the air conditioner.

“I thought you were an idiot for accepting that place, before,” she told him, regarding the old basement. “Or you’d picked it to antagonize people on purpose.”

“Give me a break! I was broke. I was nineteen.”

He shed one flip-flop on his way to the kitchen. She watched it prone on the floor while she calculated.

“No, no,” she reminded him. “When we first met, Ava said you were twenty. We were in a bar. She made you duck under the table when the bouncer made rounds. You were illegal.”

“Nuh-uh,” he said, unevenly thwap-thwapping back to her. He handed her a beer. “I was here a whole year before you showed up. I came before you.”

He sat on the edge of the futon, and she considered that perspective as he scratched the back of his shin with his bare foot. He had long, narrow feet, and when he was looking at things that weren’t people looking back at him, his eyes tended to glaze over. He was looking at the blank wall.

“Hold up,” she said. “How old are you now?”

“Old enough for you to sit next to me,” he replied.

It didn’t mean anything, coming from him. She left her beer on the windowsill and sat next to him. He’d have to get a nicer bed at some point, she thought, bouncing up and down a little, and wondered if, all along, his manners and his living situation pissed her off so much not because, as she initially believed, they were representations of his obnoxious personality, but because she had been frightened that he was going to get hurt and clearly no one else around was going to warn him otherwise.

“You must have left your parents pretty quick,” she said.

“That was my aunt and uncle, just now.”

“Were they more fun when you were growing up?”

“My grandma raised me,” he said. “For eight years. Then we swapped.”

She unfastened her sandal straps and tried to dream up a guess about him that could possibly be correct, but she had the feeling if she said raised in a house? He’d go no, in Mr. Toad’s canary-colored caravan, and the woodland squirrels taught me how to sew, and I lost my virginity to Morlocks. She wondered if she was the first girl he’d ever brought up here. She wondered if his aunt and uncle already knew he was gay. She wondered if he was gay. And in her wonderings, she missed, at first, his growing impatience beside her. He touched her hand; she accidentally flipped her right sandal underneath the futon.

“Crap,” she said.

He rolled his eyes and slid to the floor, slipped between her legs, and with one cheek pressed to her thigh he rooted one armed underneath the springs and came out with the sandal, which he deliberately tossed several feet away. He came up on his knees, face lifted to hers, and she had to spread her own knees to accommodate him. His stern little expression was very cute, and she was warm with pleasant condescension, something sorely missing from her and Ava’s ropework that afternoon. She was tired of art, she decided, ignoring Jules’ cold hands creeping up the back her shirt, and she was tired of fantasy and she was sick of endurance feats physical and mental, and she was tired of her own cowardly communication, so much so the tiny bubble of unearned pride she felt for Jules’s ability to maneuver himself into the positions he required ballooned, out of control, into an old familiar cocoon where she couldn’t hurt him and he couldn’t hurt her.

“Nobody knows,” he told her, perhaps feeling it too. “But I can be a good boy.”

Jiminy Christmas, indeed. But he couldn’t have her for cheap, and he clawed her spine too confidently. She put her palm to his left cheek, let her thumbnail scrape over a pale divot where it looked like the nap of a paint scraper had teased out a pill of his flesh, years ago.

“Listen,” she asked, and squeezed his ribs with her knees. “If you had met me while I was with relatives, and I looked scared about it, what would you have done?”

His fixed gaze skittered to the side, over the wall, across the floor, and while he didn’t retreat, he only spoke up when his face reached a zenith of clumsy guilt. “I would have fucked around with you first,” he admitted. “Only a little.”

“I thought so,” she said, and smacked him a nasty one across the face.

With no furniture around, the crack resonated. Jules took it open-eyed. He didn’t whine or argue and only clenched his jaw a couple seconds after, when the real pain hit. He faced her again, glowing and pink, his left eye watering. She couldn’t help it. She grabbed his head and squeezed and clawed and palpated, yanked his lamby hair, perfect for yanking, and beat his butt with her heels. His head thrashed and his hands flapped around behind her back. She seized one and forced it down on the blanket and let the other undo her halter knot while she bridled him with her free thumb. His back molars rose on the edges in sharp ridges, and she whirled her wrist under his chin until she could see him swallow from the inside. The whites of his eyes showed.

“Good boy my ass,” she said, to herself, but he heard and appeared wounded. “Okay, okay,” she conceded. She wiped her thumb on his face, forgave him silently, and even her playful meanness disintegrated. He crawled over her lap and rubbed his red-hot face in her shoulder, gnawed painlessly on her clavicle. His shorts stuck out in front.

She knew a hundred ways of positioning and a hundred more roleplay scenarios he’d probably accept without suspecting she used them not to her pleasure, but to protect her modesty. She was sick of it all, hadn’t fucked or been fucked properly since she’d been his age, and was horny enough to maim. She took him again by the shorthairs along the nape of his toasted neck, and when he sighed down her back, she pressed his hand to her groin.

“Feel,” she ordered.

He felt dopily, paused, and resumed. Squeezed. Offered no comment.

“Tell me what that is,” she said.

He had delicate ways when he had enough patience to reveal them. Without asking permission he slipped a hand down her waistband, far between her legs, far too quickly for her to chase him off, and by the time she felt him properly, he held her so the head nestled in the heel of his hand, wedged against the meat of his thumb. He felt her up against the underside vein of his silky wrist.

“That’s the cock that’s gonna fuck me,” he answered, correctly.

She had condoms in her purse. He had Vaseline in a bric-a-brac moving tub besides the futon. He rolled onto his narrow tummy, and she flipped him onto his back again so fast he nearly rolled off the mattress. She wished, as she watched him raise a knee and finger himself, that she’d brought her toolkit with her from the club where she kept her nitrile gloves and her fancy salves and her more mobile toys. Jules laid himself out on the futon like somebody else would on a beach, languid and comfortable and she pressed one of his nipples with impatience. She suspected he’d be chatty, but he didn’t speak at all during the preliminaries. He had more body hair than she would have expected, but not enough to grab, and a severe bathing suit tan line that reminded her of Ava’s jabs about the minor gossip between him and Roscoe. She wondered if some queen paid him to lay out on a patio somewhere, if that kind of arrangement still happened, and she wondered if he could let go of the sniping and the attitude long enough to show that hypothetical crowd what he was showing her now – that he was, actually, a very good boy.

When he was ready for her, the very good boy reached out with his arms (and made gimme-gimme clutches with his hands). She obligingly sank on top of him, then, quicker than she intended, into him, guided by his hooked shin and a decisive hand on her ass. She clawed his scalp and arched, involuntarily driving herself forward. A telltale sensation like he’d dumped a bucket of his own blood over her head soaked her from head to toe, and for a hot second she thought it was too late – then he jerked one her nipples until she shrieked and came back to him, stunned.

You’ve got more than that in you, she heard him say, through the haze in her brain, and in between two blinks he swapped out the sadist faunlet for, once again, being her very good boy, and he undid her bun with one hand and guided her head so he could kiss her mouth and calm her down. She saw from above his legs lock around the small of her back. She was shocked she could get hard enough to effectively penetrate, a shock that blissfully vaporized as she rocked inside him.

His own cock, which they mutually ignored, was restrained by her soft stomach. Her breasts ached, pressed against his chest, and she had to break free from his clasp to prop herself on her forearms. He followed her, licked her lips until she gave up and sank back down. The tip of his nose was cold against her cheek. She could feel his lashes and the curve of his eyeball roam around in the socket. He was a ferocious and intent kisser, not nearly so languid now, and every goosebump outside his skin and strand of muscle beneath rose to her, encased her in his prickles. His focus made her quite aware of a separation between her hips (melted, as far as she was concerned) and her brain, electric-bright now, entertaining Jules by turns as a barbed, poisonous plant, as a nuzzling, brainless creature, as a mean bottom slut who clawed her bottom and held her hair in a knot in his fist, who maybe needed to be exercised as a handler would a spirited pony, in order to nurture his kindness, improve his manners, and keep his juices fresh – and she giggled involuntarily, a tight muscle in her back relaxed, and she came inside a boy for the first time.

She either made an unacceptable noise, or a had been making noises all along. A downstairs neighbor ratta-tat-tatted their ceiling, Jules’s floor. Practical as a fillet knife, Jules pushed her out of his ass, swung one leg wide, slammed his heel rudely against the floorboards, uttered “fuck off, asshole” then rolled back to her again and rubbed his face between her breasts. She cuddled him a couple tender seconds, which he tolerated, before scuttling backward and regarding her from a lucid distance as she disposed the condom.

“Come back here, she said. He looked like a praying mantis.

First, he stuck his legs off the thin mattress and with one judicious sweep of his torso, seemed to crack every bone in his body. Then he crawled over and allowed himself to be held.

“Oh,” she noticed. “You didn’t come.” His dick was still hard, and when he laid his back flat against her hip, it bobbed due west of his belly button.

“Relax, it doesn’t always happen for me.”

She ignored him and let her ego propel her forward. He reclined on her like she was a chaise and breathed through his nose.

“You know what Ava calls you?” She asked, jerking him onward and upward, hopefully.

“I’m a community opportunist,” he answered smugly. “Plus, Roscoe’s houseboy.”

Two out of two, verbatim. She drew her nails up and down his stomach and he twitched, fought against curling up. “Houseboy,” he repeated, hissed. “The last houseboy passed away in the fucking nineties. They peeled him down with the wallpaper.” She felt, through his spine, how he tried and failed to work up a temper. “Then they tatted his chalk outline above some burlesque artist’s John Willie tramp stamp. Mistress Avalon sure is concerned with faggot business.”

“Your boys don’t make you come?” She asked, a hill over him now, and above arguing. He sparred solely with himself.

“What boys? These guys – big guys –”

She went back for more Vaseline, not great for this kind of thing, but she was getting the idea Jules had a sensible nursery spirit and rarely abused himself. He didn’t appear to know much about his body and froze like a striker frame when she rolled the tip of him in her palm for more than fifteen seconds.

“– They think your asshole is your only sex organ,” he continued. “They hate themselves for loving twinks. And then they give you the reach around and if you aren’t wet like pussy then oh-h-h-h my god, it’s like the fucking sky is falling –”

She sat up, and his feet paddled the blanket to stay in contact. He reached behind her and grabbed her hair again but didn’t pull. He turned his face into her neck, and he shook all over.

“Being a slut is really hard,” he said, woefully, failing to hide, for a millisecond, the ghost of what might have been a sweet kid. Or it was her imagination. Either way, she made him come all over himself. It didn’t seem to register to him until the drops hit his chest. He looked down at his sad, wet dick and then back up at her, so testily she laughed in his face. He was smudged pink all over from her lipstick, and she pinched his springy cheeks.

“I’m a cradle-robber,” she declared.

“Okay, Methuselah,” he said, unimpressed, and darted away into the dirty ivory bathroom before she could slap his ass.

He recovered rapidly. In the sunny room things took a slumber party turn. He fetched her abandoned beer, dug out makeup wipes he inexplicably possessed, and repaired the damage to her makeup. He berated her when she couldn’t stop giggling.

“I was kind of wondering…” he began.

He paused. Sex had made him tactful.

“Go on,” she allowed.

“I was wondering if I’d ever figure out why you bothered being a dominatrix.” He used the point of his little finger to clear wet black scuzz from the corner of her eye. She hardly felt it. “Ava’s got her thing about being top dog. Claire’s a sadist. And somebody needs to get around to neutering Archie before he starts spraying the furniture. You, a mystery.”

“You think about me!” She preened and wiggled.

“You go on.”

“I like,” she confided, “to strap muscle hunks to the pommel horse and tickle them until they scream.”

“Gee whiz.”

“I like straitjackets, but I don’t like rope,” she continued. “And I like floggers, but not single-tail whips. And I like human furniture, but not human ashtrays.”

“The Marquis de Lux over here.”

He’d reached around and started French-braiding her hair. She put her ear to his chest and found his mousey heart.

“My mom and dad were angels,” she continued. “And my sisters were angels and my aunts and uncles and my grandparents. They were angels from the start. So was I. I liked it. Doctors like it too. When a kid is angelic, and very, very, very, very good, and says the right things, and rolls over. They give you what you need.” She thought that over. “They decide to give you what you need,” she clarified. “I was rolling over constantly. I didn’t know how to stop. It freaked me out.”

Jules’s heart answered wug-wug-wug. He sat in her lap and tried to get her braid to stay fixed in a twist. “See, I’m the opposite,” he said. “I’m a huge cunt, but I’m always looking for an excuse to be nice.”

Her hair unwound down her back. He clamped her bobby pins between his teeth, to deliberately make the job harder, then, looking down in their laps, spit them on the floor. And as quickly as she decided she needed to find her clothes and depart, having revealed too much, she stayed the entire night.

On the lifeguard pavilions, the green flags were lowered, and yellow flags were handed up.

“Archie,” said Jules, from the safety of the canoe, “Head on back to dry land. No! no,” he called when Archie took Lux’s elbow. “Cathy and I need to talk really quick.”

“It’s not safe,” Archie said.

“I’m Red Cross certified,” Jules said, arms outspread up the oars as far as they could go. “I’m a beautiful heroine, waiting to happen. Also, I’m in fucking charge.”

“Go away, Archie,” Lux agreed, and Archie slopped to the shore, his broad back damp red in the sun’s undergrowth. Dark clouds approached from the west.

“Actually, that’s my boss.” Jules pointed to the sand straight ahead, where a bronzed ingenue, her thigh muscles sticking out like bread loaves, appeared to be watching the duo intently.

“You’ll get in trouble,” Lux cautioned.

“She wants to ride me hard and put me away wet, I think I can get away with it. I feel like you must have,” he added, pointedly. “She’s nineteen.”

It was hard to glare when wet, and it was hard to talk with Jules high and dry. Lux was clammy and clingy, and she couldn’t understand why he sniped at her. Then he crouched down, chest to knees, under pretext of scraping the oars straight down his gunwales and snapped, with pure, guileless annoyance: “Why are you pissed off? I’m the one who should be mad.”

That was too much to bear. “Jules –”

“I showed you my hole and said call me.” He straightened, the little snot, sincerity evaporated. “And you didn’t call me. Now I feel cheap.”

“Jules,” she said, sticking to her own path. “They don’t know.”

“Of course, they don’t know!” He said, clueless, if technically correct. “I didn’t think you’d spread it around to that crowd.”

“Shut up, Jules,” she tried again, and when his mouth opened automatically, she really blew. “Shut the fuck up!”

He shut the fuck up.

“They don’t know. They don’t know.”

She refused to say anymore. She wasn’t in the mood to roll over. Funny, how fucking a guy in the ass could spackle over a few of the gaping holes in her dignity. Patiently, she watched Jules rock to-and-fro, his face oscillating between his premature certainty and the vanishing tail of what she was trying to explain. Then he exclaimed, “huh!” and raised his face to the heavens.

Whistles sounded north and south, and one of his canoe companions raced twenty yards past, churning the creaming waves to reach the point to disembark. Jules ignored it all.

“Oh.” He started, blank-faced. “There’s bossola.”

He waved to the girl on the beach, who was really putting her back into her whistle. “Jesus, baby,” he said just as abruptly to Lux, who had been forced to retreat a few feet to find higher ground. “Now I’m really starting to worry.”

It was either of their guesses, as to what situation he was talking about. Lux wasn’t sure herself, and doubted he knew. His confusion reminded her less of him now, more of him the morning after, when she’d woken up, found him sitting bolt upright, staring at the walls of his clean, sunny studio. He’d turned to her bleary face, and with no confidence whatsoever, asked, Is it really so much better?

“You want to climb up?” He asked now. “I’ll tell boss you have a cramp.”

“No, I can make it by myself.” She strolled backwards, ass out of the water, and twisted the sarong in front.

“I told Roscoe I fucked a girl for the first time,” he called to her, his eyes cast demurely downward. “You should have seen the sweat roll down his back.”

“I’ll call you,” she promised.

“Yeah, you better,” he advised, and shielded his face against the bursting spray. “Before someone else does. Ladies love the canoe.”

One perky heave-ho, and he displaced bow and stern, fixed his little craft perpendicular to the beach, and cast off toward the pier.

On the beach, Archie and Claire scuttled in the sand, packing their bags, and shaking out their towels. Claire held Jules’s rogue, soaked hat. “I was going to swim back over, but she yanked me out,” she explained, and pointed out Jules’s bossola, who had, watching Lux emerge from the dirty waters, eyed her face, eyed her cleavage, and continued stalking down the shore. She had an ass that needed to be seen to be believed. Lux hoped Jules wouldn’t tease her too much. She might call him sooner, to demand that exclusively. Possibilities, vistas, scenarios, she thought of all these and wrapped her towel around her waist, and she faced the dreary city skyline and she dreamed, and the full force of her imagination asserted itself.

“I’ll give it to him when I see him next.”

Domme Lux took property of the hat.

Ava, ever watchful, caressed their folded umbrella. “I thought you and Jules didn’t get along,” she said. Deliberately did not ask. Lux, in that moment, didn’t care. It wasn’t her job to teach Ava manners.

“I like him just fine,” she said.

#SAFEWORLD #intimacies; ambiguities; a twunk in a boat #beautiful friendships have been sprung for less #isn't particularly relevant but this takes place in 2009

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tactyl-ymon · 3 years

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DnD session recap - Acceptance and Agony

So we left off after a very emotional moment between Sutha and Eridol where she realised he couldn't be what she needed at the moment and then Veiraen hugged Eridol and Eridol hugged him back for the first time since they’ve known each other

After some light preparations, the group sets off with Eridol's cleric mentor Bradul and they're still very busted carriage towards the holy city of Varildesh, with the carriage all busted it'll take about 4-5 days travel with a quick stop over in a nearby town

The first few hours go smoothly despite everyone being on guard the whole time and them all slam dunking Eridol into the cushions in the back because tiny baby man's been through a lot and he needs a nap. After sunset, he's joined in the back by Septima, Donnatello our new barbarian and Whisky

Not wanting to be rude, Eridol starts a conversation with Whisky in gnomish because he knows she speaks it, he tiredly asks what actually happened with Sutha and after several half truths and abysmal deception checks he realises Donnatello also speaks gnomish and Septima cast comprehend languages so now everyone can hear what's going on. someone just says "Well why don't you just message Sutha if you trust her so much"

And he does.

“Sutha, you said you nearly killed my ... companions, I need to know what happened. They're being obtuse.” And after several tense minutes, the magic flares to life and in him mind he hears “They questioned whether or not I would want you to come back for me. They refused to leave me be after 2 warnings. I'm sorry”

so Eridol rightfully furious that they'd say that but also understanding that he was still technically in the wrong for leaving decides to drop the subject. Septima had goodish intentions despite his complete lack of social awareness and Whisky straight up thought she was asking a friendly question because she believes that everyone wants to be her friend all the time

So he moves on and asks whisky about how he noticed she seemed a bit distracted during their last fight with the hydras and she didn't seem to want to go near the water, she mentions a very bad history with water and asks if Eridol remembers the last time they were in the water and because he was very drunk and just got a lifetime of trauma back absolutely doesn't remember

She mentions being on the beach after the dragon fight and having to swim back and her nearly drowning and Eridol saving her. Eridol feels very bad about nearly letting her drown and begins rummaging through his bag for some potions of waterbreathing he's got and gives them to her. All in all a very nice moment between them

It's just then that everyone can begin this very faint buzz in the air, slowly getting closer and closer along with the sound of old rusted carriage wheels, the buzzing whine getting louder and louder every second until it's deafening and not wanting to get caught in whatever this is unaware, Eridol orders everyone out of the cart as a precaution. In their haste, everyone fails dex checks and tumbles into SWARMS OF BEES

like tens of thousands of bees

we see a small procession of carts coming our way, each with several old timey bee keepers and many a swarm

Eridol having a general dislike of bees and knowing that he just got stung a good 70 times in an instant decides thats enough of that and moves off to the side of the road and casts spirit guardians so it'll encompase our cart and horses and still leave enough room for the carts to get by

Weirdly the beekeepers are not exactly happy about Eridol killing thousands upon thousands of bees and begin shouting at him to turn whatever this is off, he refuses because one round in that took of a third of his health and he has people to protect. It's on the third cart that one of them pipes up and politely asks if he can remove the spell, he politely declines because his people are a priority for him and he does apologise. Suddenly the beekeeper casts a spell and everyone gets encompassed in a tight dome of earth and rock.

Eridol drops the spell because hey safety is safety and he isn't cruel

A good 10 minutes later the spell drops and everyone gets back on their way, slightly swollen and pincushiony. a few hours later they see slight firelight up ahead and what sounds like muffled discussions, with Septima's god like perception he can see it's 4 eladrin ladies discussion things and the group all being tired and weary decide to try and see if they could pursuade the eladrin to let them stay at their camp for the night and wanting to make a good first impression decide someone should go talk to them first. But who would be the most innocent and unassuming of them all I wonder?

Eridol gets yeeted out of the cart with veiraen being shadow backup in the woods in case anything happens and Eridol begins walking slowly and unarmedly up the road towards them. Casting light on himself so they can definitely see him coming. After a ... rocky introduction where one of them got spooked and accidentally shot their crossbow at the tiny man. Septima and Whisky do a septima and whisky and begin yelling innapropriate questions from the darkness, with Whisky asking what booze they have and Septima just answering their questions because the man has observant and is a terrible person

Then after confirming that we mean them no harm and could help with securing the camp because of our numbers We get given the ok to come forward and Veiraen just skulks out of the bush behind them which gets Eridol nearly shot again

The eladrin introduce themselves as Summer, Spring, WInter and Fall and say they often travel to the material plane to discuss which season is best and ask the group their opinions. Septima says spring because nature boy go woo, Whisky says winter because she loves just stretching out in front of a cozy fire on cold nights, Eridol says summer because Falthresh being entirely a western hemisphere country tends to have wonderful sunsets and Veiraen was too busy looking for trinkets to answer

Most of the group goes off with the eladrin to drink and swap stories and be merry with Eridol and Septima taking watches in the camp itself and the surrounding forest.

After Eridols shift, nobody really comes to relieve him and he basically just nods off from exhaustion and then the dream happens

Eridol finds himself alone in a grey foggy void, the faint whislte of wind the only thing outside of his breathing and the blood thrumming in his ears. Armor and weapons as new as the day he got them and he begins to feel a burning on his right side, as blindingly painful as when the brand was first applied and tar like ooze begins cascading out of his side. Every beat of his heart causing more and more to flow out into the void

As Eridol is left close to vomiting and doubled over the goo begins to take form and Eridol begins to fear the worst that this is Bane himself and Eridol will never see his friends again

The goo crawls up itself into an imperfect mirror of the gnome, with crazed anger filled eyes and clawed hands balled into fists but otherwise it mirrored every twitch and heave of breath and I have to roll initiative to fight myself

Eridol's first thought is of course violence and both Eridol and Miradol cast spirit guardians at the same time as they rush into melee, each taking blow after shattering blow and Eridol coming out slightly worse each time.

Then he tries to get rid of it, both casting Banishment on their worse half. Then he tries to cast silence on it, his mirror self doing the same and in the silence they each drop their hammers and continue trading blows, Eridol swaying and practically dead on his feet as the pantomime boxers become more and more exhausted.

Eridol stops and breathes. dropping silence and trying to open up his connection to tyr, casting channel divinity, not to fight, not to win, but just to forgive, to understand and to find balance and Tyr responds, not a booming voice or a solitary judgmental eye but a feeling like a calming whisper and Eridol looks at his counterpart, nearly as dead as he is, but still standing defiantly almost goading him into another attack

Eridol breathes and casts healing word on his other self and begins apologising to the embodiment of all his negative emotions. “I have hurt so many people trying to deny what you represent, I let this fester and rot and I can’t let that happen anymore. I have so much to rightly be angry over, but anger alone isn’t what needs to happen anymore. So, together then, hopefully in balance, to serve Tyr and protect those who need it" and it fades away. Eridol is left in the empty expanse. A single blue light flickering in the distance like the first rays of dawn as it grows warmer and brighter until it is almost blinding and Eridol accepts it

He wakes up before dawn, to a very worried Veiraen holding a damp cloth to his forehead, pain everywhere and a small lightness in his chest that wasn't there previously. Like it's almost slightly easier to breathe all of a sudden. He asks Veiraen if he can help him get out of his armor and he checks the brand on his side, still there as it always was unfortunately.

He gets his armor back on and a vaguely worried Whisky comes up and hugs Eridol and after a second, he shrugs and hugs her back. Whispering "Nobody will believe you if you tell them I did this"

Unfortunately, Septima sees all and Eridol forgot how quick whisky can be so she locked him in the hug, shouting to get everyones attention and not letting go until everybody mentions that yes they see Eridol hugging her back and we ended the session

#dnd #DnD Recap #Tactyl Ymon

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ecoamerica · 23 days

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swordsxandxshadows · 3 years

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The shapeshifter stands by the haunted pyromancer, as the tenebrous abysmal shadows reach for Scorpion's claim. But will Aku whisper sweetly once, just once, his real name? Because before he's lost to this complete darkness, Hanzo Hasashi would like to know the voice of a true lover's softness, in Harumi Hasashi's gentle passion and undeniably unbreakable devotion. Beneath the mask and the hood, his scorched clouded gaze remains scintillating like moon jewel, as his shackled soul will soon be bound with his amplified Arcana, to become unwind and defined by the shadows of nonexistent smoke, barely perceptible by anyone's naked eye. The dystopia of his mind will be mitigated, with all-consuming vengeance and rage, and soon, the world as he knew will be scorched to cinder and ash. "We romanticized dystopia so much; now we will live in it."

It was an odd new sensation for the wizard, never before had he imagined himself in such a situation or the feelings that would come with them. Having grown a fond attachment and affection for the pyromancer next to him. A foreign concept to him, in all his years of building up walls and barriers to protect himself from the misfortune that plagued him. Better to deny such compassions existed in his being, least they be ripped away like so many countless times.

He wanted to deny those when this man entered. Someone, who seemed to understand better than any the sorrow, the anger, the vengeance. A connection. Which only made the connection grow, much as he tried his best to resist that growth. Not wanting reality to destroy and rip something else away from him.

No. Not this time.

“Hanzo...”

A soft and gentle touch reaching out to caress the other’s features. Tone soft and almost inaudible, a tenderness he though he had lost long ago. A gentle look crossed his features, the tenderness speaking volumes the sorcerer felt for the other beside him.

“Whatever dystopia awaits us, Aku plans to stay by your side.”

No, he wasn’t going anywhere. No matter what happened, what awaited for Hanzo or himself, he was going to stick by the pyromancer. Stay with him, to whatever and however this end came. His pact with this man eternal and his affection even more.

#IC {Aku}#ask #answered #sasorikigai #Burning in the Eternal Darkness...{Verse}#ENJOY #I LOVED THIS SO MUCH #HNNNNGH #KILLS ME #I need to think of a ship name since seems this ship is going to happen now #Opps not sorry #Heehee #RP Menu {Threads}#Sweet Dystopia {RP}#Scorched Souls {Aku x Hanzo Hasashi/Scorpion | sasorikigai}#Fierce Inferno of Hellfire {Hanzo Hasashi/Scorpion | sasorikigai}

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believerindaydreams · 3 years

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Far Harbor edition of the Carla and Boone Show, natch. Spoiler times ahead.

...I feel like I've walked into a visual novel; there are an awful lot of people, they have a lot to say, and aside from the initial burst of excitement at the start, not very much action as of yet.

From Boone's POV, though, Far Harbor is the first place that really vibes with him. Sitting on the Mariner's wall to snipe Gulpers is precisely all he wants out of life, if he can get Daisy back. A town on the edge of hell where he doesn't need to like people very much is perfect.

Carla was gonna be all "oh no it isn't, let's go home to Goodneighbor" but then they had Old Longfellow guide them up the hill (he's okay, but four companions is overdoing it so he departed at Acadia. Nick is calling Boone a partner now, he's great.) She's delighted with the place. Would offer to make hats for all the refugees if it was possible...

well it would be actually, if she had access to settlement resources. Question for another day.

So Nick came in with them to meet DiMA and...wow that sure was. A conversation. I <3 this dry-voiced detective so much.

Carla asked him afterwards if he was okay. His response that they need to do more DETECTING was delightful.

And they all found the missing kid. She too wants to do some detecting. Cool cool.

It's also a big relief to our couple that it IS possible to fight the Institute. That was the kind of info they came north hoping to find, and they are very pleased.

Also Boone was quite insistent that he is very much not a Synth to DiMA. I'm not totally sure Carla would say the same. The fact that their memories are ten years out of date can be explained by a Tranquility Lane lounger, but it might also...be something else.

(I really need to get off my butt and finish posting the Capitol Wasteland part of their story on A03. I already posted the storyline about how they can't go home again, but...I never actually worked out the backstory for what they ARE doing for the decade between Fallout 3 and 4. It seems increasingly likely this gap stays a gap.)

On the more cheery side, Boone is finally up to his stats from NV, which means I can finally invest in Better Criticals. He should have had this ages ago but I wasn't planning on perks for basic settlement functionality...oh, well, next level. I do more hip-firing than I should, but it isn't like he has his Spotter perk in this game. Which I regret, because boy I sure could use it. Compass enemies always did seem a cheat, but so does my abysmal perception without it even though he's topping out Perception with the Bobble plus Four Eyes (I mean he has to wear glasses all the time anyway...).

(One of my reloads on the route from DC was just getting one shotted by an enemy sniper. It was obviously not an irony Boone could appreciate.)

He fucked up the chat with Brooks' runaway because Boone doesn't have grape mentats for anything but buying ammo and a pretty dress only gets you so far. Not only embarrassing but worrying when he went back to Chase- like he might not have if Nick hadn't been there. In a full suit of power armor. So her saying "actually, you know what, I did screw up that death is on me..."

Well. He gave the nice new Institute gun to Nick.

Then he actually went ahead and used the power armor to get the data drives, a decision I can really only justify in RP terms by blaming it on his illness. (Carla picked up wearing power armor from Veronica. )

Old Longfellow is a weirdo. Please stop asking if you're gonna guide our couple around the island, you aren't in the detectives club. I wouldn't have sent one unfortunate settler all that way if I understood that Longfellow can be a salvage beacon guy by himself. Either my settler goes back to the Commonwealth or I should send like several more that way.

#the carla and boone show #sole survivor #fallout 4

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chemicalmagecraft · 3 years

Text

Foresight is 20/20 Chapter 15

Usagi

"I'm tellin' ya, boss, it was some kinda monster," the now one-armed bandit explained to his leader as another bandit bandaged his bleeding stump. "It did... something to Koji, and he turned into some sorta zombie."

"And did either of those monsters rip off your arm?" the red-haired woman asked impassively. Ah yes, she would do nicely. Her body was compatible enough with my power that I wouldn't have to worry about replacing it for a while and she appeared to be an awful human being, so I wouldn't have any guilt from ending her life. Despite her looks she was probably not an Uzumaki, so I had no reason to worry about that, either. I was currently in the process of extending a light telepathic touch into all the minds present, sorting through their memories to find a way to possess her, as well as stealing what procedural memories of theirs that I found useful.

He shook his head, a fearful look in his eye. Perhaps I was a bit too harsh on him... "No, Koji bit me. I ran, and..." He shuddered. "My arm... it went numb, and the same weird markings that appeared where the... thing... touched Koji started to appear on my arm. I... I didn't risk it."

"Wise," the bandit leader said. He smiled weakly at her.

An then buried one of her knives in his gut. "Don't take any risks," she murmured into his ear as he breathed his last. That poor, sweet fool. Well, not sweet. If there was any word that could describe her less, I had yet to find it from my delving into her or her subordinates' minds. My point, though, is that a zombie is much harder to kill than a normal man. The red markings sprouted from his good arm, and with inhuman speed the freshly-made monster sank its new claws into the man who was bandaging it just moments ago. The woman snarled as the markings spread across both zombies. She managed to decapitate the original, but my second zombie evaded her blade and shambled toward another bandit, which it bit.

Long story short, I let a few of the bandits survive but my small-scale zombie apocalypse led to the deaths of most of the scofflaws.

The leader of what was now considerably fewer bandits slammed her fist on the wall in rage as she surveyed the corpses left behind. "Damn," she growled as they dissolved into red dust. "At least they won't be coming back..."

"You do care, boss!" one of the survivors cheered.

"I don't care one bit about you idiots and if I hadn't just lost most of my men I'd have killed you for that moronic comment," she said coldly. She meant it, too. "We need to recruit, and that means we need more money. Secure the base, we can't leave anyone on guard." If I had a mouth, I'd have smiled. I needed the practice, after all. Their hideout was an abandoned mine, secluded and buried in a mountain. Not to mention the gold stored within, even if I would want to give some back to the villages they were stealing from. And they were leaving it for me. How thoughtful.

kukukuku~

"Are you sure you want to do that?" Neji asked me.

I shrugged and licked my lips. "Not gonna get any better at fighting by going easy," I said.

"Yeah, but you pretty much need your powers to take me down if I activate Furnace." Neji's pseudo-jinchuriki power. We started calling it Furnace because with how unique it was it pretty much deserved a unique name. Technically, his red chakra reserves were abysmal. However, we found out that whenever he exerted himself he could activate it to essentially let himself generate more, though he'd only keep it for so long when not exerting himself.

End result, his power steadily grew the longer he fought. He also gained power each time he hit or was hit. It had a few limitations and placed strain on his body the more he used it, but as far as I knew he could theoretically fight a biju if he built up enough, maybe even Kaguya. That'd probably kill him at the moment, though. And from what it seemed, it was hard for him to use it for more than just brute force. Though that might just have been from how he could only keep it active for small intervals at a time before it started eating away at his health prevented him from training his control over it much...

"And how else am I supposed to change that?" I asked. I got into my stance. "Let's do this before I change my mind."

His eyes turned red, with a white slit pupil because of his Byakugan. "Your funeral..."

A few moments later...

"Owwwww," I groaned. "My... pride..."

"I didn't even get warmed up at all," Neji smugly remarked from where he was sitting on my spine, pinning me. I didn't ask him to get up because I was sucking off the last dregs of his red chakra. For whatever reason I couldn't assimilate Furnace, but I could still steal Neji's red chakra to heal myself and stuff.

"You okay, dude?" I asked.

"As I said, I barely got warmed up. My body is fine." After he activated Furnace for the first time, he'd ended up bedridden for an hour because of the strain it put on his body. When he started to test it, he pretended he was fine even though he kept using it past his limits. He ended up too sick to stand for weeks. It was actually around that time that he managed to figure out natural energy manipulation, probably because he was stuck in bed and bored out of his mind for so long. "I probably should let myself cool down for a bit, but I'm assuming you'll want to fight me without Furnace anyways."

I snorted. "Jerk. And here I was worried about you."

He got up. He had an amused smile. "Let's go another round, then."

kukukuku~

"I'm sore," I complained as we walked through the halls.

"You hit me a few times," Neji dismissed.

"You hit me more..."

"And whose fault was that?" I rolled my eyes and lightly punched him on the shoulder. He sage-flicked me. I was about to retort, but I felt a familiar signature when I opened up my senses, so...

"Is that Ino?" I asked, jerking my head in the direction of the compound's main entrance. I knew this was going to happen for a while. I'd been keeping tabs on her in a totally not creepy way because if it. I was also keeping tabs on Sakura, but that was more to see what the effects of that strange power were on her body. She accidentally ripped a door off its hinges more than once, which would've been pretty hilarious if it weren't for the angst it was giving her...

"That feels like her. I wonder why she's here." He used his Byakugan for a moment. I pulled out a compact mirror I'd made to be compatible with my scrying jutsu and looked at her as well. "Does she have a flower?" She was walking up to the door with a flower in her hand, yes.

I sighed. "I'm not good with flowers, but I'm pretty sure that's a forget-me-not. Pretty sure she's here for me, I'll go deal with her."

Neji insisted on hiding in the background while I greeted Ino, because she wasn't exactly subtle about her childish crush. I really hoped I wouldn't lose her as a friend, though... Just in case, I used my power to try to find the best path forward. I really hoped my life wouldn't become some sort of anti-dating simulator...

I opened the door. "Ino. Why are you here and holding a flower that symbolizes true love?" I'd learned some hanakotoba from her and some other sources, but to be honest I just knew it from looking ahead in the script.

She smiled and held it out to me. "I came to confess my true love to you, Kouki."

I took a deep breath, trying very, very hard not to sigh. "Ino, no offense, I love you like a friend, but we are both four years old and you have no idea what true love is."

That confused her. "But... you saved me?"

Why do romance stories have to be so romanticized?

Don't... don't answer that...

"I'm your friend. Of course I saved you. But I don't love you like that and you don't love me like that because as I just said, we're both children."

She lowered the flower. This was a little harsh, but she needed to hear it. "Oh. Yeah. I guess I look stupid to you now, huh?"

I shrugged. "To be fair, you have a level of wisdom appropriate to our age. It just so happens that being wise as a four-year-old is an outlier."

"What?"

I poked her in the forehead. "You're a kid. You're allowed to be stupid, as long as you're not being too big of a jerk."

She thought about that for a moment. "So... you're not mad at me or anything?"

"You're my friend. Of course not." I smiled. It probably wasn't the best smile, but at least Ino didn't run in terror... "Hey, if you want, I can show you a really cool jutsu."

She nodded. "Sure!" As I walked past, I gave Neji a smug grin when I saw his jaw on the floor. I'm sure he was expecting some kind of awkwardness.

To be fair, so was I.

kukukuku~

Chikage

Sarutobi Hiruzen sighed as he returned to his room after a long day of paperwork. Even with a shadow clone, it was just so slow. Seriously, I was so bored, and I was just watching over his shoulder! I can't even imagine having to do paperwork... He closed the door, locking it. "You're here, aren't you, Kouki?" Half right. Eh, I'll give it to him.

His shadow moved to be in front of him. "How perceptive of you," my voice seemed to come from the shadow. I couldn't exactly speak when my body was literally flat against the wall, but I could very much trick people's brains into thinking I could. My arm peeled off of the floor, keeping its pitch coloration. I raised my other arm, then used them to "pull" myself off of the floor, still in the form of a shadowy Hokage. I did a few stretches. "Man, staying in one shadow for hours kills my back, apparently. I don't even know how that works, considering the fact that I don't even have a form as a shadow..." I changed back to my humanoid form and licked my lips.

"I know that Kouki is responsible in some way, but what are you?" he asked me.

"Rude," I said, faux-offended. "You don't hear me asking you humans what you are. Though to be fair I already know."

He frowned. "You're like Kouki, but not quite. Who are you, then?"

"Did I really never tell you about me?" I paused and thought for a moment. "Or would it be better to ask if we never told you about me... I'm still not sure how pronouns work with our unique situation..."

"What, exactly, is the answer to my question?"

I shrugged. "I'm Kouki and Kouki is me. We're two halves of the same whole, at the moment."

"What are you..." He frowned and closed his eyes. "Red chakra?" he said when he opened them.

I nodded. "I've been purified of almost all of my humanity, the same as how Kouki's removed most of the red chakra from her- himself for the moment. He's weaker, I'm stronger, and because we're two separate entities we have independent thoughts and can be in two places at once, as you can tell. Sorta like a weird shadow clone, I guess. And we can recombine at any time." I sat down in midair. "Call me Chikage."

"I suppose that that makes sense... That sounds like a useful jutsu. Though why are you a girl?"

I examined my clawlike black nails. "Why not?"

"And I suppose that's also why you're wearing a frilly dress?"

"It's called gothic lolita, and the best thing about being made of chakra is the fact that I can more or less freely shapeshift. Now, sit down." I gestured behind him, where I'd pulled up a chair without him noticing. I also made an illusion that made both his chair and the air I was sitting on look like identical, ornate seats. "We have business to attend to."

"The Uchiha massacre, I assume?" I nodded. A table with a deck of fancy-looking cards "appeared" in between us. I really love genjutsu.

"In one year today Itachi will be forced to kill his entire clan, with the exception of his brother." I picked up the top card from the deck and flipped it over. The Tower. "And obviously we would prefer this not to happen." I reversed the position of the Tower. "But of course, there is a problem." I flipped over the next card, Judgement.

He sighed. It seemed he got my message. "The public is being turned turned against the Uchiha, which is in turn turning the Uchiha against the public. Until we stop that all we can do is delay the massacre..." I revealed the third card, The Devil, with Danzo as its subject. "Yes. Even though we haven't tipped our hands yet and he hopefully doesn't suspect us, Danzo is still fighting us."

"There are two paths that you can take to deal with him." I reversed the position of the Devil, causing the illustration's face to soften. "First, you could make him see the light, show him how much he's tearing the village apart to 'protect' it. Maybe you can do it because you used to be friends or something, but to be honest I doubt it, which leaves the second option." A black flame sparked from my finger, setting the Devil card ablaze. It disappeared without a trace. "Either way, he needs to be neutralized. I take it he's good at covering his tracks, considering the fact that he's made an attempt on your life without retaliation?"

He nodded solemnly. "Of course. And I take it he'd use it as evidence of my 'senility' if I attempted to pin him on it without enough evidence?"

"My eyes don't show it, meaning there's no possibility of us attempting it. Probably, though." I cocked my head. "If I were to, I don't know, figure out a way to take other objects with me when I shadow travel and use that to steal all kinds of incriminating evidence, would that work?"

He nodded. "That would work. I'll proceed assuming you don't, with how that was a hypothetical, though."

I sighed. "Yeah, that's about right. If we fail, though, I have one last idea." I revealed The Hanged Man, reversed, with Uchiha Shisui modeling for mister four-legs. "If we stop Danzo's attack on Shisui, then he can use Kotoamatsukami on the Uchiha. It's not ideal, but hopefully it'll work."

"Yes, that sounds good. Unless there's anything else, you may leave."

I faded into the shadows, taking my illusions with me.

kukukuku~

Usagi

"Alright everyone!" one of the bandits shouted, waving a weapon. "You know the drill by now, your money is ours! Give it up easily and we won't kill you!" The townspeople were afraid, but they'd clearly been through this before.

"Will you really?" I asked, walking into the village. "You may find some trouble with that."

"Who are you?" the leader asked me.

"You would already know," I said as I strolled across the road to her, "had you not murdered my puppet."

"Ah, so you're the monster he talked about." She sneered at me and drew her daggers. "You killed my men."

"I did nothing of the sort," I retaliated. "I mutated them, controlled them. You were the ones who killed them."

"All the same, you'll die."

"To be honest I am not entirely sure I can die." I slowly removed my gloves from my hands and placed them in the bag under my cloak.

"I'll test it for you, then."

"You may be able to destroy this body, but my essence has already soaked your hideout. I believe I should be able to resurrect myself there, as it were."

The woman smiled a sadistic smile. "I'm fine killing you over and over again until it sticks." She lunged at me, daggers flashing. I yanked back my sleeve and used my bare arm to block. I wasn't going to be needing my arm much longer, but I wanted to preserve the cloak. Her daggers sank into the stone of my arm, as I had made it softer. I wanted the knives as well. I capitalized on the bandit leader's momentary confusion to take off my mask and jam it onto her face. The last thing she saw before her life ended was a glowing red pearl on the backside of the mask.

I retrieved my new knives from my old arm, then took my cloak for my new body. Luckily, my new body wasn't too much larger than my old one, so the cloak still fit well enough. Along with the cloak, I'd palmed the other blood pearl (the extra-compressed pearl-shaped demon gems I was using for my Usagi persona) from my old body, causing it to crumble back into dirt within moments of me putting the cloak back on. I took my bag from the dirt and shook it off.

"Boss?" one of the bandits asked. "You okay?"

I slowly reached up to my mask and grasped the bottom. It cracked at the mouth such that the entire bottom was smoothly removed. I stored the bottom back in my bag, though, just in case I should come to need it. With my new mouth and the bottom of my nose uncovered, I took a deep breath, as if my first in a century. "No, I do not believe she is," I said. "For one, her mind and soul have been wiped from this body."

"What the hell even are you!?" one of the bandits asked.

"To be perfectly honest I'm not quite sure. I do know one thing, though." With an organic body, I no longer had problems with agility. And in particular, this new body was trained for rapid movement. As such, the two bandits nearest me were bisected in a flash with red-glowing knives, as if a hot knife through butter. Their bodies dissolved into the same red dust that the other bandits' corpses had. "You are dead. Now, are the rest of you willing to fight, or will you run in terror?" They ran in terror. Wise.

"Who are you?" a villager cautiously asked me a few minutes after I sheathed my knives. The villagers were understandably quite afraid of me.

"My name is Usagi." With the bandits gone, I'd switched to a small, personable smile. "If you wait, I should be able to bring you the money those bandits took from you."

The villager bowed to me. "Thank you so much."

#fanfiction #naruto fanfiction #naruto #Foresight is 20/20 #F20 CH15

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fasterthanmydemons · 4 years

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If Pietro was alive during CW, how would he react to Wanda's accident in Lagos? Would Wanda listen to him if he tried to comfort her, or would she feel too guilty to accept Pietro's words? Would Pietro even try to comfort her at all? He knows (both twins know) what it feels like to lose your loved ones, and all the people who worked there had family, friends... Wanda's reaction is pretty clear in the movie, she probably felt like a monster, even if it was an accident, but how would Pietro feel?

{out of breath} So... I thought this was such an interesting topic, I wrote a teeny little ficlet for it. If Pietro was alive during Civil War, here’s how things might have gone down. I hope you like it. It’s under the cut. =)

As soon as Wanda realized what she had done, she drew her hand over her mouth, her eyes welling up with tears. Not long after, Pietro came skidding to a halt near her, looking at her and then wide-eyed up at the destruction done to the building. For a moment, neither one of them had any words. This was bad, they knew. Really bad. And it couldn’t be undone. Concerned for his sister’s state of mind, Pietro went to Wanda and laid his hands on her shoulders.

“Take a deep breath, I’ll go to help,” he said. “It was an accident,” he reassured her.

Wanda only stared up at the smoking building, listening to all the screams.

“Stay right here, I will come back to you,” Pietro said.

“No,” Steve said nearby, causing Pietro to turn and look at him. “Let emergency rescue and medical handle this.” It was as much a suggestion as a slight warning. It was better that the twins stay out of this for now. “Stay with Wanda.” With that, Steve continued to direct aid over comms, sprinting around to see what the condition of the other side of the building looked like.

Pietro didn’t argue. He wanted to help, but he heard the warning in Steve’s tone and would much rather make sure his sister was alright right now. Turning back to her, Pietro took her into his arms, holding her protectively and securely. “It’s alright…” he whispered in their native Romani dialect.

“It’s not alright, Pietro!” Wanda protested back in their native tongue. “I killed people.”

“It was an honest accident. You didn’t meant to do it,” he insisted.

“They’re still dead…” she whimpered as she curled against him, hiding her face against his chest.

Pietro simply held her and rubbed her back, knowing there was little he could say that would console her just then. As he looked around, however, he noticed some people in the crowd beginning to stare at them with resentment, irritation, and even fear. “Come on,” he said, switching back to accented English. “We go back to the jet now.” Concerned for her safety should they continue to stay there, he scooped Wanda up into his arms and whisked her away to the quinjet.

- - - - - - - - - -

The aftermath of the incident was staggering. Many lives were lost, millions of dollars in damage was done, search and rescue was still underway days later, and the press from many nations was abysmally negative. Criticisms of the Avengers’ conduct – especially Wanda’s – were being openly discussed on just about every TV channel one switched to. Special report after breaking news after latest update blared on any channel that was turned on. Pietro frowned as he clicked the button on the remote, trying to find a station that didn’t put his sister down. He lay on his side on his bed, staring at the TV in frustration. Wanda sat nearby on her bed, their room being a shared one. It had been about a year since Ultron, and even now it was recommended that the twins share a room if it made them more emotionally comfortable to do so. It was simply not time yet to push them to be more independent of one another, and now with this added trauma for Wanda, no one was about to say otherwise.

“What kind of authority does an enhanced individual like Wanda Maximoff have to operate in Nigeria?” a commentator on one of the new shows asked.

“Bah,” Pietro said angrily, turning the TV off. “They don’t know you like I do,” he said in Romani.

“I don’t think they care, Pietro,” Wanda said flatly, her eyes falling and her tone giving away her disgust and disappointment at herself for what she had done.

“You made a mistake. It happens. You were trying to protect Steve,” Pietro said.

“None of that justifies killing innocent people,” Wanda said.

“You didn’t mean to do it!” he insisted.

“They’re still dead!” she insisted right back, just as she had done in the field.

Pietro sighed, wanting his sister to feel better but not knowing how to make that happen.

“They’re still dead…” she whispered again.

Hearing the slight and barely perceptible tremble in her voice, Pietro slipped off of his bed and hopped onto hers, pulling her close. She wrapped her arms around him and sniffled softly. “It was an honest mistake. Yes, people died. Yes, it’s terrible. But you did not mean to do it. We will find a way to atone for this. We will,” he said, hoping to reassure her.

“You don’t have to. Only I do,” Wanda said.

“Nope, we do everything together, so they get me too.” he said with a smile. “I’ll help you. I promise.”

“How’re you holding up?” a voice said, and both twins turned to see Steve standing in the doorway.

“It’s my fault. All of it,” Wanda said, switching back to English.

“Not just yours,” Steve said.

“Turn the TV back on. They’re being very specific,” Wanda said flatly. “I directed the bomb up towards the building. It’s on me.”

Steve sighed and went over to sit next to Wanda. Pietro sat on her other side, just listening for now, although he did rub her back with one hand. Constant contact when she was upset served to calm her and keep her grounded, he knew. “I should’ve clocked that bomb vest long before you had to deal with it. Rumlov said ‘Bucky,’ and all of a sudden I was a sixteen year-old kid again in Brooklyn. People died. That’s on me.”

“It’s on both of us,” Wanda admitted.

“But it was an accident. Nobody meant for that to happen,” Pietro said, hating to hear Wanda feel so terrible about herself.

“I know that. Everyone else here knows that. But that’s not how everyone else in the world is seeing it. They see… recklessness and lack of training,” Steve said.

“Wanda has had plenty of training,” Pietro said.

“She’s had some, but she lacks experience. You both do. That’s where I come in. And Nat, and the rest of us. We should have guided you better,” he said.

“Bullshit. You can’t predict everything,” Pietro said.

Wanda sighed heavily.

“No, we can’t. In this job… we try to save as many people as we can. Sometimes that doesn't mean everybody, but if we can’t find a way to live with that, next time… maybe nobody gets saved,” Steve said to Wanda.

“Exactly,” Pietro said.

Wanda swallowed hard. What they were saying made a lot of rational sense, but… emotionally, she couldn’t help but feel like something she never wanted to be… a monster. “Is this how Stark felt?” she said suddenly. “When his weapons would take innocent lives?”

“Oh, come on, Stark knew what he was doing,” Pietro said angrily. “Is not the same thing.”

“Actually… from what I know of it before he restructure his company… yeah. That’s exactly how Tony felt,” Steve said quite seriously.

Wanda’s eyes lost focus as she considered that for a moment.

Pietro shifted where he sat, not ready to let that sentiment stick. “You can’t compare Wanda to Stark! My sister is nothing like him!”

“Maybe not, but… there are certain situations you deal with sooner or later when you’re in this line of work. Unintended, accidental, and potentially avoidable collateral damage is one of them. You have to be able to overcome the guilt enough to keep going. To promise yourself that it won’t ever happen again and get back out there the next time. Because believe me, Wanda… we save more lives than we accidentally take, and if we stop trying to help because we’re afraid of making mistakes… well, then a lot more innocent people would die.”

Petro sighed. That was true. He thought for a second about how he would feel if he’d done what Wanda did. It was a seriously uncomfortable mental place to be in. He knew that he would never forgive himself, and it would be very difficult for him to move past it. But even worse than that for him was for it to happen to Wanda instead and have to watch her feel badly about herself. Pietro would always rather shoulder any burden himself rather than see his sister have to bear it. He had to make sure she was okay…

Just then, Vision phased through the wall. Wanda turned, startled, and Pietro zipped around between him and her, only to relax when he realized it was only the synthezoid. “Dude!” Pietro said, irritated. “What the hell?”

“Vis… we talked about this,” Wanda said.

“Yes, but the door was open, so I assume that…” Clearly it was still not okay to phase through the wall and into someone’s private living quarters whether the door was open or not. Confused and sorry, Vision dropped the subject entirely. “Captain Rogers wished to know when Mr. Stark was arriving.”

Steve nodded. “Thank you. I’ll be right down.”

“I’ll… use the door,” Vision said, pointing to it.

“Yeeeah,” Pietro said, sitting back down on the bed. He always felt uncomfortable around Vision.

“Oh, and apparently he’s brought a guest,” Vision added before leaving.

“You know who it is?” Steve asked.

“The Secretary of State,” Vision said with an ominous air.

Wanda drew in a slow, deep breath.

“Is okay. I won’t let anything happen to you,” Pietro said, rubbing her back again and leaving a kiss on her temple.

- - - - - - - - - -

Sokovia Accords? Is this some kind of sick joke? Pietro grabbed the thick document, proceeding to read it cover to cover. Everyone around the meeting table and Secretary Ross watched as his hands and the pages became blurs for several minutes. They chatted for a while with Wanda looking on and Vision absolutely amazed at how quickly Pietro could read. When Pietro heard the word Sokovia, he paused in his reading and looked up to see a video of their home… being destroyed. He swallowed hard and swore that some of his bullet wounds were starting to ache. When the video changed to Lagos, he saw Wanda bow her head.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Steve said.

Pietro… was less subtle. He grabbed the nearest coffee mug and hurled it at the screen, causing glass to shatter everywhere. “My sister knows what happened. Stop trying to traumatize her. We have enough trauma to last us a lifetime, thanks,” he said bitterly to the Secretary. Then he went back to reading.

“Kindof an expensive screen…” Tony mumbled in frustration.

“You’re mad about the coffee. Admit it,” said Natasha.

“I am. That was really good coffee,” he said.

When Pietro was done, having read the long legal document in its entirety, he sighed angrily and tossed the document onto the table before him with a loud and heavy slam.

“You did not just read that whole thing,” Ross said, chastising Pietro for playing around. “Get serious.”

“There are typos on pages 8 and 187, and the same sentence is repeated twice on page 252,” Pietro said flatly, crossing his arms. “Get an editor.”

Ross stared for a second as Natasha and Tony smirked. Even Steve had to fight not to smile. Wanda, on the other hand, did nothing to hide her proud smile, although it faded quickly with the heaviness of the topic at hand.

“There needs to be a forgiveness clause,” Pietro said. “Amnesty… for when we handle shit we aren’t told to and turns out… we really needed to. You don’t send us, you tell us it is against the law, we go anyway, we save your asses. What then? We go to jail for it? No. Forgiveness clause is necessary… to assess after the fact and decide that what we did was right. Sometimes… is no time for arguing. No time for decisions with governments all over the world. We just need to go. Now, if we go, and we aren’t allowed, and we screw up badly… okay, punish us. We did wrong. But denying us that spontaneity to go when shit hits the fan and sprays in all directions… that will kill more lives than it saves.”

“You sign it, as-is. It’s getting ratified tomorrow by the United Nations,” Ross insisted, not interested in negotiating.

“Nice try to threaten us with actions of many countries, but I don’t care how many rats you throw at it,” Pietro said, his tone deathly serious despite not understanding the word “ratified.” Tony facepalmed nearby. Pietro continued. “This was written without consulting my sister or anyone involved with latest incident or what happened in Sokovia. If you really cared about all that, you would have taken time to make something just and fair and all-inclusive instead of pushing this crap through at speeds faster than even I could flip you my finger. This…” He lightly patted his hand on the Accords. “…this is not diplomacy. This is fear and control. If I wanted that, I would have stayed in war-torn Sokovia. You are doing this because you want full control over us, our bodies, our freedom, our judgement. You don’t want chance of any bad press. And… you are scared of my sister and people like her with power you don’t understand. Is shitty reason for laws to be made. Do it right, or don’t do it at all.”

“Sign it, Maximoff. That’s your only option. That’s your path to proving to the United States government that you’re serious about becoming an Avenger and taking the unique abilities you have and public safety seriously,” Ross said firmly.

“No,” Pietro said defiantly, leaning back in his chair. “I won’t sign.”

“I… actually think he’s right. Some contingency clauses might be a good idea,” Natasha said. “It’s impossible for us to predict what the future might bring. There are going to be times when a decision can’t be made quickly enough for us, or when we have information from our perspective that you don’t when formulating your decisions. We need legal protection if we cleanly handle something you should have sent us to take care of but didn’t.”

“That just gives you the right to do whatever you want and then claim it was necessary! Come on!” Ross said condescendingly.

“So you would arrest us? Send us to prison? If we saved lives or eliminated a threat we didn’t have prior authorization to handle?” Steve asked.

“If you aren’t authorized, yes,” Ross said. “You don’t get to pick and choose when you follow laws, Captain.”

“Then I can’t sign it either,” Steve said, looking him in the eye.

“Then you retire,” Ross said threateningly.

“Let’s… takes some time and discuss it first,” Nat said prudently.

“You want to write this without us, then you sort it out without us. You don’t treat my sister like this,” Pietro said, getting up out of his chair and offering his hand to Wanda.

Wanda took her brother’s hand, needing to get away from everyone for a while and think things over in peace. She was finding it difficult to think clearly while being the center of attention.

Pietro led them back to their room, and once inside, he cupped Wanda’s face in his hands. “You know I love you, always. Yes? No matter what,” he said in Romani.

Wanda nodded, but her eyes welled up.

“Listen to me… If this doesn’t work out for us here, then we leave. Okay? That is always an option,” he reassured her.

“We’ll never have this opportunity again to help make the world a better place if we leave here. This is what we’ve wanted to do since we were ten…” Wanda said.

“And we still can. Here, elsewhere, whatever. We will help people. I promise,” Pietro vowed.

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