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robininthelabyrinth · 4 years

Note

My third and final prompt I promise: Wen Zhuliu. WEN ZHULIU. What if instead of being Wen Chao's babysitter/bodyguard he was a different young master's? Picturing him heaving a long suffering sigh at Huisang or Zixuan's antics is hilarious to me. I just want to see all the different interactions with the Core Melting Hand!

I apologize in advance for writing a fic that technically fulfils your prompt but also is...not quite about what you asked for

That Bitter Draught (ao3)

It wasn’t that Su She was entirely unaware of what he was like.

He was a man almost entirely consumed by bitterness and envy, his eyes so firmly fixed on what his neighbors had that he couldn’t appreciate the blessings in his own life. He was selfish and ungrateful, and hated the ones he admired the most, hated all of the ones who were better off than him, even the ones who pretended to be fair and equitable about it.

Especially those.

He’d been born to an ordinary family, not cultivators at all – a feeder family doing agriculture for the sake of the great Lan sect, who never much thought nor cared about where their vegetables came from. He waded knee-deep through the muck and the mire for the first six years of his life before some passing Lan cultivator had discovered he had a bit of potential, and next thing he knew his parents had handed him off to be someone’s servant, taking him away from everyone he’d ever known – from his parents and his animals and his siblings and his brother – and he was supposed to be grateful for it.

There wasn’t anything wrong with being a servant, Su She supposed. It was a livelihood like anyone else’s, and maybe he wouldn’t be so bitter about it if he’d stayed that way, the way he was supposed to, as a servant with just enough skill at cultivating to not disturb the tranquil and thoughtful atmosphere of the Cloud Recesses as he rushed around doing all the things that were necessary.

(The Cloud Recesses – so pretty and clean and pure, except there was muck here, too, and no amount of pretending by the sect disciples that their shit didn’t stink the way everyone else’s did would change that.)

Maybe Su She would have been fine with being a servant, though he suspected he wouldn’t – in the darkness of the middle of the night he sometimes thought that his ability to be content had been taken away when he had, that the black gaping hole in his heart that had once held his family would always be a yawning pit that always wanted more than he had, forever incapable of getting the one thing that would fill it up again – but he didn’t stay that way.

No, see, Su She was good at cultivating. He was really good - not quite a genius, but his hard work paid off and he got better and better at what he was doing even though they barely gave him any time to do it in.

After all, someone had to make sure that everything was ready for the sect disciples when they woke up at the start of the mao hour, and that meant he had to be hard at work by yin, and of course the fact that they went to sleep at the end of the xu hour only meant that his work stretched well into hai, but despite all the disadvantages they loaded him down with he cultivated like a madman at every free hour, squeezing it in between work and even more degrading work. He got better and better and better, and eventually, finally, someone noticed him again.

This time they made him a disciple.

They expected him to be grateful for that, too. As if he hadn’t bought the chance with his own sweat and tears and blood, and all to be one of the blessed ones, one of the lucky ones, one of the ones who could – if they were meritorious enough – get a pass to leave the sect to go where they liked.

(Moling was too far to reach by foot, not even for the New Year, and he didn’t make enough money to buy a horse. But once he had a sword, gifted to him from the sect, once he could fly – once he was old enough – once he was trusted enough –)

Being a disciple meant that he woke up at mao hour and went to sleep at xu, that his chamber-pot disappeared in the morning as if by magic, that his food was brought to his table instead of being stuffed into his mouth in the crowded staff room right off the kitchen in the brief reprieves he had between duties…all things he had to adjust to, things that were strange and felt almost unnatural.

Now that he was a disciple, he had all the same rights as all the others, the ones who had been born to it instead of raised up from a lower level for it.

It was supposed to mean that they were all equal, all Lan disciples the same, except that all the arrogant young masters looked down their noses at the former servant who’d stepped above his station. They ridiculed him for it: for being ambitious, for being envious, for thinking too highly of himself, for not knowing the things they’d had a chance to learn and he hadn’t, for smelling like the shit no matter how clean he kept his clothing or how much he washed.

Equal – hah!

The worst, though…the worst was the Twin Jades.

Lan Xichen was powerful, yet kind and generous to the point of selflessness, a proper gentleman; Lan Wangji, equally gifted, always did the right thing, no matter the circumstances, his expression solemn and serious, his reputation famous for his righteousness.

Su She hated them. He wanted to be them, wanted to be Lan Wangji so bad it made his blood boil, but he also hated them – hated him.

The Twin Jades. They didn’t deserve to be called that, not with the three year age difference between them and at least four points of difference on their face, if you were looking; not when Su She’s brother had been born so soon before him that he’d been born clutching his ankle as they left the womb together. Not when the only difference, the only difference, between them was that fucking Lan cultivator’s comment that he only had enough room in his cart to take one of them with him.

A servant, even with cultivation potential, was worth less than a bag of bok choy meant to serve as a side dish on a trueborn Lan disciple’s plate, and so his brother was stuck in the muck back at home while Su She fought his way through the muck that was the Lan sect’s glorious principles and discipline.

He didn’t even know for sure if his brother was still alive.

Oh, Su She had the sect’s permission to write them letters, but what would it help? No one in his village could read, he certainly hadn’t been able to before he’d been forcefully taught so that Lan sect elders could pass him notes instead of condescending enough to speak to him, and the cost of paying a scholar to read it to them would be a waste of the money he faithfully sent them out of his wages every month.

So yes, Su She was bitter. Su She hated. Su She envied, and envied Lan Wangji most of all. After all, he was handsome, but not as handsome; he was talented, but not as talented; he was smart, but not as smart; he was powerful, but not as powerful; he was a twin, but no one cared about him and his brother the way they cared about Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen – Lan Wangji, who got to have his older brother with him any time he liked, but spent the entire time standing there stone-faced and driving him away.

And, of course, Lan Wangji also had – him.

Yu Zhuliu was the sort of guest disciple that was really a servant and not a proper Lan disciple, although his cultivation was high enough to rank alongside some of the shining stars of the Lan sect – even more so than most, given his cultivation of the unique ability that had made him renowned throughout the cultivation world as the Core Melting Hand. It was only that he had been too old, at the time the Lan sect had rescued him from some misfortune that Su She had never heard specified, to learn their ways properly, and for some reason the elders resisted allowing him into the sect properly.

Perhaps it was because he was what was termed an ‘inconvenient child’ of Meishan Yu, the bastard child of a daughter of the clan; a liability that could neither be killed nor kept.

Perhaps it was because his ability was truly too terrifying, attacking as it did the golden core that all cultivators strove so hard and so long to form.

Or perhaps it was simply that he made a very convenient servant.

Yu Zhuliu was, to put a point on it, Lan Wangji’s servant, acting as both bodyguard and attendant.

He was a deputy to help Lan Wangji with whatever he needed, big or small. The Lan sect prided itself on discipline and humility, but only to a certain extent – only to the extent it looked good or was pure – and of course they were desperate to keep their precious young jade safe from the growing predations of Qishan Wen; it was not so strange that they assigned him a bodyguard, and of course if he was already doing that he might as well do the rest.

After all, who could expect a proper young gentleman to care for himself?

Su She hadn’t taken much notice of Yu Zhuliu at first, other than a brief stabbing feeling of pity when he heard of the man’s circumstances. But then one day he’d noticed him rolling his eyes as Lan Wangji stiffly recited the rules in advance of yet another punishment he was inflicting over something minor – no one loved the rules as much as Lan Wangji did. There was a reason nobody talked to him, perfect disciple that he was, and of course unlike the lowly Su She who, despite himself, longed for the company and recognition of his peers, Lan Wangji rose above it all, was above it all. And while no one could claim that his distribution of punishments wasn’t as fair and equitable as might be asked, it was evident to Su She that he only did it that way because it was the subject of yet another rule.

But no one ever seem to notice or care, no one ever thought it as stupid as Su She did, right up until that moment when he’d seen Yu Zhuliu making a long-suffering face like that where Lan Wangji couldn’t see, and Su She couldn’t help but smile a little, heart suddenly warm with a feeling of fellowship.

Yu Zhuliu had seen him smiling, caught his eyes, and rolled his eyes again, this time more pointedly – a gesture aimed just at him, a shared joke – and that was it; Su She was lost.

Su She was in Lan Wangji’s age group, even if they weren’t close (no one was close to Lan Wangji), so it wasn’t hard to find time to go over and talk to Yu Zhuliu.

The conversations were mostly one-sided to start with, which Su She had expected. Yu Zhuliu was a reserved man, and of course there was always that master-servant divide lying between them like a gulf. Still, Su She had been a servant once, which Yu Zhuliu knew – everyone knew – and in time Su She got him to ease up a little, talk back, commiserate.

Su She told him about his family, the little he remembered of them after all these years; in return, Yu Zhuliu unbent enough to tell him a little about his own background: the mother that hated him as the living sign of her disgrace, the constant accusations that he didn’t deserve to bear the Yu surname.

“Have you ever considered changing it?” Su She asked, helping him fold Lan Wangji’s laundry. It wasn’t something he’d ever have permitted himself to do under other circumstances, knowing how important it was to distance himself from all things relating to servants, but he was willing to make some compromises if it meant getting to spend a little more time with Yu Zhuliu. “Obviously if you want to keep it, it’s yours; they can’t deprive you of your birthright like that. But it doesn’t seem like you particularly want it.”

Yu Zhuliu was quiet for a long moment. “Once,” he said, his eyes distant. “I considered it once, before I joined the Lan sect. I wasn’t yet sure who had been the one to – well. Suffice it to say that I was seriously considering an offer I had received to join a different sect, and they offered to allow me to adopt the main clan’s surname as my own if I performed well.”

Su She shuddered in automatic revulsion at the thought.

Yu Zhuliu saw it, of course, and chuckled. “It would have been a great honor,” he reminded him. “Especially for someone like me – to be able to shed my old name would have been enough, but to replace it with a name that was even more powerful..?”

“Gratifying,” Su She agreed, a little begrudgingly. The idea of giving away his identity like that, giving in to the arrogant young masters’ lies that they were better than him just because they had a fancier surname, revolted him, but he could, he supposed, see a little of the spiteful appeal of it. “Like – stamping on their faces with it, showing them what they’ve lost.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you take that offer, then?” They both knew the Lan sect would never in a million years extend a similar offer, even though there were plenty of branch families surnamed Lan and another one more or less wouldn’t much matter. It wasn’t proper, though, and no one cared more about propriety than the Lan sect. “With the clan surname, they would have had to make you a proper disciple.”

Su She would never agree to such an offer himself. He might want, in the darkest parts of his heart, to be Lan Wangjii, to be something better than he was, might occasionally daydream of what his life might have been life if they’d been born swapped in place, but he didn’t – he wouldn’t sell his surname for it.

(He wouldn’t sell his brother for it, even if all he had of his brother was a surname and some swiftly fading memories.)

But Yu Zhuliu hated his surname and all it represented. He wasn’t like Su She, always thinking of the past and the might-have-beens and growing fat on all his resentment and grievances; if Yu Zhuliu could shed his skin like a cicada, emerge somewhere else a brand-new person, he would do it in a heartbeat.

“It was the Lan sect that saved me,” he said simply. “And so I owed it to them to come here, no matter what the Wen sect offered me.”

The Wen sect. Wow. That was sure some offer to turn down; they commanded the loyalty of over a third of the smaller sects, maybe even close to half, and Yu Zhuliu could have gotten their surname.

Of course, the Wen sect offered that out much more readily than other sects did, but still.

On the other hand, if Yu Zhuliu had accepted, if he’d become Wen Zhuliu, then Su She would never have had the chance to meet him, or would have only met him under bad circumstances.

Maybe he wouldn’t have liked Wen Zhuliu that much at all.

“Your loyalty is admirable,” he finally said, after wracking his brain for something appropriately neutral to say.

That got him another chuckle. “Did you know that lies make you look like you’ve tasted something sour?”

“I,” Su She said with dignity, “am a great liar. You just haven’t noticed it yet.”

Yu Zhuliu was silent for a moment, maybe reviewing things he knew about Su She. “I suppose you probably are,” he said thoughtfully. “Which means it’s the Lan sect that you don’t like.”

Su She shrugged. “I don’t think I’d like any sect,” he confessed, even though he knew he shouldn’t.

Yu Zhuliu’s overwhelming trait was his loyalty, after all – he’d sell Su She out in a heartbeat if he thought the Lan sect deemed it necessary. Su She was mostly just counting on being so pointless and insignificant that Yu Zhuliu wouldn’t think it was worth telling anyone about him.

It probably wasn’t, either. Why would the Lan sect care about someone like Su She one way or another? He wasn’t anything to them, not really; even as a disciple, his only purpose was to act as an adornment, to bring honor and glory that would reflect upwards onto the great clan surnamed Lan.

“Why?” Yu Zhuliu asked. He sounded honestly curious – honestly interested, interested in Su She for something other than being an extra body in a formation or another cannon fodder to throw to the dogs when a night-hunt went badly.

Su She wanted to tell him everything.

But Yu Zhuliu was loyal, always loyal, and Su She may not be as smart as Lan Wangji but he wasn’t stupid.

“They’re all the same in the end, full of arrogant young masters,” he said breezily. “I mean, did you see the group of disasters at Teacher Lan’s lectures?”

Perhaps that was a harsh assessment, but he’d humiliated himself in front of them all on that night-hunt that went wrong against the Waterborne Abyss, with his still-shaky control over his sword, trying as always to live up to Lan Wangji’s example the way they kept always telling him he should and then being looked down upon as an idiot for even trying – why would he do something so stupid obviously he can never match Lan Wangji always aiming above his station and thinks too highly of himself still a servant after all obviously he’ll never be good enough – and the mere thought of them tasted like bile and hatred in his mouth.

“The head disciple from the Jiang sect seemed fairly smart,” Yu Zhuliu said, and Su She scoffed.

“He’s very smart, very smart indeed,” he said scathingly. “So smart that he’s forgotten who he is and where he came from. Eventually someone’s going to remember that he’s a servant’s son, not a proper young master at all, and he’ll pay for it in blood and tears – if he’s lucky.”

“Do you think so?”

“The Jiang heir has an inferiority complex as deep as the ocean –” Su She knew what one looked like; after all, he saw one every day in the mirror. “– and eventually the time will come when he has to be sect leader in his father’s place. On that day, all those pretty words about how wonderful Wei Wuxian is, how smart, how talented, what a credit to his sect, they’ll all fall onto Jiang Wanyin’s ears like a lash on his back. And when the time comes that he has to sacrifice something, well, we’ll see how much being smart helps Wei Wuxian then.”

“An interesting perspective,” Yu Zhuliu remarked.

“An accurate one,” Su She retorted. “He was raised as a proper young master, not a servant, and so he won’t even know to see the danger when it comes. None of them would.”

“No, I suppose not. It’s always the things you don’t know you don’t know that can harm you the most.” Yu Zhuliu straightened up – the laundry was done; they’d finished it ages ago. “We will have to continue this discussion another time, Su-gongzi –”

“Su She, please. Su Minshan, if you must.”

“Su Minshan, then. I look forward to speaking with you again.”

When Yu Zhuliu let, Su She hugged himself in glee, allowing himself a moment of triumph at a successful conversation with the person he liked, then went to wash himself clean again. He wasn’t dirty, and it was the middle of the day, but he wanted to make sure no one could smell the bleaching herbs they put in the laundry on him. He didn’t want to risk any more mockery, and anyway, it had gotten to be a habit.

As he went to the baths, he saw Lan Wangji standing on a nearby pathway, looking up at the sky as if deep in thought. He must be on his rounds again, even though it wasn’t his day for it, or even the right time; he’d taken to haunting the routine work of it as if it were the only thing keeping him grounded.

Whatever. It wasn’t Su She’s business.

Except maybe it was, because Lan Wangji kept – looking at him, over the next few days. Which was weird, because Lan Wangji never looked at anybody, his nose firmly stuck up in the sky where mortals dared not tread, and it was starting to make Su She nervous.

Surely Lan Wangji couldn’t tell – about him. He’d never been able to before, why would he start now?

And yet…what if he could?

What if Lan Wangji had figured him out? Figured out Su She’s rebellious heart, how he wasn’t grateful at all not matter nice a face he put on, how he hated the stupid Lan sect rules and the stupid Lan sect disciples and the stupid Lan sect arrogance, how he secretly schemed to learn everything he could and transcribe everything he couldn’t memorize so that he could take it back home to Moling one day and show his brother everything he’d learned, how he despised them all for their arrogance –

“Will you be attending the archery competition?” Lan Wangji asked stiffly. He did everything stiffy, like he was actually a statute carved out of jade and only just pretending to be human. “At the Nightless City?”

“Naturally,” Su She said, not bothering to look up from the verses he was copying. Not the most polite, not as kiss-ass as he ought to be when faced with the glory that was the second jade of the Lan sect, but he’d found that as long as he kept his tone as formal and humble as possible, he could get away with a little. “It may be nothing like yours, Lan-er-gongzi, but I do have some skill at it, you know.”

Not that most people thought so. They would be travelling to Qishan in three groups, for easier and more secure travel – one for the adults, one led by the Twin Jades to represent the shining hope of their sect, and the last of everyone else making up the numbers. He was in the last group, of course, even though his talent for musical cultivation was one of the strongest in the junior generation and his swordplay good enough to only lose to Lan Wangji three times out of every five – better results than a good half of the group of well-born Lan clansman being sent out as the representatives of their sect.

Was he bitter about it? Yes.

Lan Wangji hesitated for a long moment, and even shifted from one leg to the other – a sign of nervousness in most people, maybe. In Lan Wangji? Who even knew.

After a while, he said, “My group has an extra place,” sounding almost like it was an offer, and the entire thing was so bizarre that Su She immediately became suspicious.

“What do you want?” he asked.

Lan Wangji blinked at him.

“He who is unaccountably solicitous is hiding bad intentions, Lan-er-gongzi,” Su She clarified, glaring up at him and unable to keep his mouth from twisting as though he’d bitten something sour. He knew he often looked like that, and it made the female cultivators downrate his handsomeness, but he’d been the subject of too many jokes to stop himself from being so bitterly defensive. “You don’t know me, you don’t like me, and you don’t go out of your way to offer a better place to anyone, even if there’s no official rule against it. So what is it you want?”

Lan Wangji shook his head.

“If you don’t want anything, why offer?” Su She sneered. It would be just like Lan Wangji to have decided to recognize a promising disciple that deserve a chance to shine – he was perfect like that, after all, always thinking of others, always a true gentleman. Well, Su She had endured a lifetime of being seen as promising by gentlemen, being recognized as a talent without once being thought of as a person, having to humiliate himself in front of them like a dancing monkey and worst of all of having to be grateful to them for allowing him to do it, and he was sick and tired of swallowing down that bitter draught.

He didn’t need the better spot, not this time – he would be going one way or the other – and he wasn’t willing to give Lan Wangji of all people the satisfaction of doing him a favor he didn’t even want.

Lan Wangji shifted from one side to the other again, waiting a long time before he spoke again. Maybe it was nervousness.

“Yu Zhuliu is in my party,” he finally said.

At first Su She didn’t understand the point Lan Wangji was making, terse and oblique as the other man habitually was, and then he understood it far too well.

He saw red.

“What business is that of yours?” he shouted, dropping his brush and jumping to his feet, forgetting all of his good intentions to try to keep his head down and his tone at least plausibly polite. “So what if I spend some time with him when he’s free? Not every waking hour of his is yours!”

Lan Wangji’s eyes darted from side to side. “No,” he said. “I didn’t mean –”

“You didn’t mean what?!”

“You like him.” A meaningful pause. “Very much.”

“Yes, I do,” Su She said, his cheeks flushed red. “So what? So I cut my sleeve sometimes, big deal. It’s not against any of your stupid rules – every attempt to introduce such a restriction formally has been rejected, I checked. This isn’t something you can punish me for!”

He could, of course. No one would question Lan Wangji issuing yet another punishment – he could say it was due to Su She’s noise, no shouting in the Cloud Recesses – and of course not every type of punishment was the sort that got meted out in the Punishment Hall. There were other types, more insidious – isolation, ostracization, missing out on opportunities for advancement, resources…even merely sentencing him to write lines could be used to deny him his coveted spot at the Nightless City.

Lan Wangji wouldn’t do that, though.

Somehow that just made Su She angrier. Who told Lan Wangji to be so fucking perfect?

“You can add it to your list of achievements,” he adds bitterly. “Everyone knows you’re better than me - better at manners, better at cultivation, better at everything, and now better in this way, too, because I’m a cutsleeve and you’re not –”

Lan Wangji flinched.

Su She’s jaw dropped in shock. “You are?”

Lan Wangji’s features weren’t exactly easy to ready for anyone except Lan Xichen, but at the moment it was plain enough that even Su She could figure out that he was miserable.

“For who?!” A terrible thought slipped into his mind. “It had better not be Yu Zhuliu!”

“No!” Lan Wangji said hastily. “No – no. Not at all.”

“Good,” Su She said fiercely. “Because he’s mine. Or, well, not mine, we haven’t agreed on anything, I haven’t even said anything, but I’m trying and – well, it doesn’t matter. You know what I mean.”

He wasn’t actually sure Lan Wangji did. He wasn’t sure he knew what he meant.

But Lan Wangji nodded, as if his confused rambling had been as clear as a Lan sect rule.

“I thought you might like to spend more time with him,” he said, and – oh. His offer. The Nightless City.

“…I would,” Su She said begrudgingly. “Thanks.”

For Yu Zhuliu, he’d even put up Lan Wangji’s charity.

“Who is it for you, anyway?” he asked, unable to resist and wanting to take advantage of this strange intimacy, this momentary breach of etiquette undoubtedly never to be repeated, but Lan Wangji shook his head, refusing to share. “Fine. Have it your way.”

It wasn’t that he cared, anyway.

Not about Lan Wangji’s mysterious lover, and not about Lan Wangji himself – this wasn’t a charming little flaw that made the whole seem more relatable, wasn’t something that generated fellow feeling, the way Yu Zhuliu’s gentle mockery had. So what if both of them were secretly cutsleeves in a sect that most assuredly did not approve of such things? That didn’t mean anything. It didn’t give them anything in common. They still weren’t the same, not at all, not with Lan Wangji was nobly bearing the burden of it while Su She had given in to temptation almost at once…

No, this was just more of the same.

More of Lan Wangji being, despite all of Su She’s efforts to the contrary, Su She’s idol, his ideal. The person who he hated most because he envied him the most, the person who made him hate himself as being nothing but the lesser copy, the person he despised for making him sometimes feel as if maybe Lan Wangji’s better birth really did entitle him to be better.

So no. He didn’t care.

(It wasn’t that Lan Wangji had seen him, recognized him as something the same. As a person, worthy of recognition, even if not of respect. It wasn’t.)

Maybe he cared a little bit.

He must have cared, or else he would have just run away when the Wen sect descended on the Lan sect with flame and sword instead of being a stupid idiot and going to look for him.

(He told himself it was because Yu Zhuliu would undoubtedly be wherever Lan Wangji was, and it was a pretty decent lie, except that he went to the Library Pavilion and Yu Zhuliu wasn’t there. So he told himself that Yu Zhuliu would have wanted him to protect Lan Wangji, and that lie worked better.)

Of course, once he got there, the stupid noble gentlemanly fucker wouldn’t even listen to him and run.

“Aren’t you supposed to be the important one?” Su She bellowed. This was clearly not the time for manners, and anyway Lan Wangji had already seen beneath his mask once; another time wouldn’t hurt. “Yu Zhuliu’s out there fighting to keep you alive and you’re wasting all his efforts, you’re just standing here, waiting for them to come get you –”

“It is necessary,” Lan Wangji said, solemn as ever. “Someone must keep their attention here, instead of following my brother.”

“Oh fuck you,” Su She said, and took out his sword. Lan Wangji just had to play the fucking brother card, didn’t he?

Yu Zhuliu would want me to do this, he told himself as he tried to fight. He was pretty decent, but he was just a disciple, not a soldier, and as a Lan sect disciple he’d never killed anything before. After a while, he ended up shouting for Lan Wangji to throw him his guqin – the one Su She favored was rented from the sect, lacking as he did the money to purchase her in full, and so he didn’t have it with him – and he attacked with that instead for a while, being better at music than he was at the sword.

The lash of his music was less powerful than Lan Wangji’s single-note waves of power, but Su She was also sneakier about it, and a few unexpected distractions during a battle were much more helpful to Lan Wangji’s defense than any amount of getting himself killed waving a sword around would have.

In the end, unsurprisingly, they were defeated. Su She ended up surrendering in fairly dramatic manner, knowing that the Wen sect might preserve Lan Wangji’s life as a useful hostage but that they couldn’t give a damn about his own and, as always, humiliation was the path to survival; he bet Lan Wangji was already judging him for it, for his weakness, for how pathetic he was when he was sniveling at Wen Xu’s feet as they beat him black and blue to make a point to Lan Wangji, but he didn’t care because he bowed his head and lived while the disciple next to him that didn’t died.

Lan Wangji didn’t bow his head either, but they just broke his leg before throwing them both in a carriage headed to the Nightless City.

The worst of it was, he didn’t even have Yu Zhuliu around to comfort him.

“I ordered him to go with my brother,” Lan Wangji said in belated explanation. “To protect him.”

“You could have said,” Su She said, curled up in the corner of the carriage and feeling sick to his stomach. He should have just run away. He could be in Moling right now if he’d just run away, and who would have known? Of course, then he would have to have left behind all the things he’d prepared, and Yu Zhuliu, too… “Maybe I’d rather have been on that team. Why’d he run, anyway? I bet he had a great reason.”

“He took the key books of our sect –”

Su She rolled his eyes. Of course there was a good nice selfless noble reason for Lan Xichen having fled, leaving his younger brother behind as a sacrifice to cover his tracks – proper young masters never did anything without one of those. It was like they thought that admitting that they were afraid for their lives would be worse than actually dying.

“He took what he could,” Lan Wangji said, his eyes cast down. He wasn’t really talking to Su She. “But so much was still lost.”

Su She thought about all the copies of the books he’d been making, all the knowledge he’d been slowly siphoning away over the course of years, and how they were hidden far away from the main buildings of the Lan sect. He’d probably have more than they did, when this was all said and done, assuming he survived. Wouldn’t that just drive them all up the wall? All those stiff smug elders who thought they were better than him would have to come and beg him to give them the books –

Lan Wangji would, too. Those books were probably his only friends, just as they were Su She’s.

“…maybe not all lost,” he said begrudgingly, and curled up tighter, cursing himself as an idiot.

He might be feeling all warm and fuzzy towards Lan Wangji over something as stupid as a single moment of shared misery, but just because he had feelings about it didn’t mean Lan Wangji did. More than likely, when it came down to it, Lan Wangji would put aside all his noble manners and sell Su She out in a heartbeat, and probably not even count it as a betrayal. After all, in the end, Su She was still just a servant that had temporarily made good, still just cannon fodder, meant to be used and sacrificed for the sake of his better-born master.

At least Lan Wangji had probably given up on expecting him to be grateful about it, given the despicable personality he’d already seen Su She display.

It irritated him how much that mattered.

“There’s always copies, after all,” he added. “And before you say anything, I know it’s not the same as having the original, but it’s worth something, isn’t it?”

He was worth something, even if he was only Lan Wangji’s copy.

“That’s true,” Lan Wangji said. He was quiet for a long while after that, long enough that Su She started seriously considering going to sleep because unconsciousness was preferable to worrying about what was going to happen to them once they got to the Nightless City, and then he said, “You are unhappy.”

Su She turned to goggle at him. “Of course I’m unhappy! The Cloud Recesses was lit on fire, we’re prisoners, we’re probably going to die painfully –”

“Not now. Before.” A pause. “With the sect.”

Su She shut his mouth and glared suspiciously.

“I won’t say anything,” Lan Wangji promised. “I only want to know.”

Su She shook his head stubbornly. “You won’t understand,” he said, a little helplessly, when Lan Wangji continued to look at him, wanting an explanation. “It’s not – something you would understand. You’ve always had everything, all your life.”

Lan Wangji frowned a little, clearly thinking it over, clearly taking it seriously, and for a moment there Su She kind of hated Yu Zhuliu for making him actually like Lan Wangji a little bit. “Not – everything,” he finally said. “My family…”

He trailed off, probably thinking about where they were now. A father locked away in seclusion was different from one on the verge of death; a missing brother, an injured uncle…

Su She huffed and turned his head away, refusing to feel sympathetic. “At least you had them,” he said bitterly. “I haven’t seen my family since they sold me to your sect, and at this point I’m too scared to go visit them.”

“…the Lan sect does not keep slaves.”

“No, of course not,” Su She said. “You just offer people more money than they’ve ever seen in their lives if they’ll hand over their six-year-old son to be properly trained as a servant, because it’s better to get them while they’re young – teach them to be quiet and inobtrusive and grateful for how much better it is to spend their life cleaning up the shit that sticks to your boots. And the worst part is, you are grateful for it, no matter how bad it is, no matter how much you miss your home or your family or your brother, because the buyer could have picked him instead of you and then you’d be the one stuck on some farm somewhere doing nothing with your life, just waiting to see if he’ll come back one day.”

The difference with Su She was that he’d figured out pretty quick that going back wasn’t enough.

When he’d realized how important it was to cultivate a golden core at a young age, he’d saved up every bit of money he could on top of what he sent his family every month, volunteered for every job that paid and even bit his tongue and took out extravagant loans from the sect that he would be paying off for years to come, and he’d hired a rogue cultivator to go teach his brother the basics of cultivation.

He hoped that was enough to make up for all the years he’d been gone, even though he doubted it; he wouldn’t think it was enough, himself, and surely his brother was like him. He was still too young to go outside the sect by himself – he would have to apply for a token, and agree to take someone with him, and he didn’t want to take anyone with him except maybe Yu Zhuliu, who wasn’t an option.

He didn’t want anyone to know if his return home went as badly as he feared it would. If his brother turned out to be as bitter as he was, and turned that bitterness against him –

“You have a brother?” Lan Wangji asked, because of course he’d noticed the important part.

“A twin,” Su She whispered, and turned his face away.

They did not speak again until the Nightless City, and even then it was limited to necessary things, neither of them wanting to risk the fury of their Wen sect guards. After a while, it was announced that the Wen sect would be holding a camp for all young masters, meant to indoctrinate them into righteous conduct, and that they would be attending whether they wanted to or not. They had probably assumed that Su She was well-born because of the fine clothing and fancy hairpiece he wore, and never knew that they were loaned to him by a sect that liked to surround itself with pretty things even if it had to pay for the clothing itself, and Su She had never been happier to be counted among his supposed peers.

Still, when the indoctrination camp began, and Wen Chao – accompanied by three bodyguards at all times, because he was even more of an arrogant snot than even Su She had previously imagined an arrogant young master could be – began lording it over them all, Su She drifted over to Lan Wangji’s side again.

Mostly because no one else would, other than maybe that troublemaker from Yunmeng, Wei Wuxian.

“I know some curses,” he told Lan Wangji, pretending to be casual about it as if he hadn’t accused Lan Wangji’s sect of various awful things. “Really nasty ones. Want me to try one on Wen Chao? I can be subtle.”

“He’d figure out it was you when he checked us all for the inevitable backlash marks,” Wei Wuxian put in. “Then he’d just kill you to get rid of it. Stupid idea.”

“Depends on how quick-acting the curse was,” Su She said peevishly. He hadn’t even been talking to Wei Wuxian, and he hadn’t forgotten who it was that had charged in like a hero from a play to rescue him when he’d overreached himself fighting the Waterborne Abyss even if he doubted Wei Wuxian remembered him in return. “Also, why are you even here? Shouldn’t you be off somewhere drawing fire onto the Jiang sect?”

“What? No,” Wei Wuxian said. “I’m not –”

“I mean, I certainly can’t think of any other reasons for your actions, Wei-gongzi,” Su She said, his voice set at its most simpering. It wasn’t like there were any Lan sect elders here to punish him for being disrespectful, after all, and he figured that helping defend the Library Pavilion with Lan Wangji probably earned him a little space to be himself for once. “Aggravating Wen-gonzi, making light of everything, galivanting around flirting with girls – one might almost feel as if you’re on vacation. Surely your Jiang sect will not have to pay for any of that, politically speaking; it’s not as if the Wen sect thinks of them as one of their greatest rivals and is looking for any chance to cut them down…but no, surely it’s my misunderstanding. I’m sure Wei-gongzi has a thoughtful plan, being such a good servant to his sect.”

Wei Wuxian frowned at him. “But that’s not what I’m doing,” he said, but his voice came out a little weaker this time. “That’s not it at all, I was just…hm. Hey, Jiang Cheng! Jiang Cheng, I have a question for you…”

Su She watched him leave with satisfaction, then turned back to Lan Wangji, who was looking at him again.

“Why do you dislike him?” he asked before Su She could change the subject.

“I don’t dislike him,” Su She said. “I envy him, sometimes. The rest of the time, I pity him.”

“You think Jiang Wanyin will cast him aside, one day,” Lan Wangji said, and Su She thought back to that conversation he’d had with Yu Zhuliu. Lan Wangji had clearly heard more of it than he’d let on.

“Well, yes,” he conceded, because he did. He’d seen how close they were, which was only going to make it worse for them both when it inevitably happened.

“Would you tell me why? In your own words?”

Su She frowned at Lan Wangji, who raised his hands as if in surrender. “Please.”

Well, if he was going to ask nicely…

Su She decided to pretend that he was talking to Yu Zhuliu.

“Fine. You want my opinion? Whoever raised Wei Wuxian ruined him,” he said bluntly. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but he doesn’t act like a servant – he doesn’t even act like a second son. He acts like a master. He acts like he’s the next heir to the Jiang sect, not Jiang Wanyin; you’ve seen how he’s always bossing him around and refusing to listen to him even when he tells him to behave.”

“He’s his shixiong,” Lan Wangji objected, but mildly.

“For now. Do you really think Wei Wuxian’s going to suddenly learn how to be obedient the second Jiang Wanyin gets instated as sect leader? Or do you think he’ll continue to run rampant, doing just as he likes the way he always has, with Jiang Wanyin bending to his every whim the way he always has? What do you think the cultivation world will think of that?”

Lan Wangji was frowning deeper now, thoughtful.

“The cultivation world isn’t kind to servants who forget their place. If he keeps acting the way he has been, the time will come when he does something so outrages that Jiang Wanyin will have no choice but to throw him away,” Su She concluded. “A servant’s son, however precious, is nothing when weighed against the duty owed to the sect inherited by your ancestors. I mean, even your brother put that first and foremost, and he’s your blood.”

“…I agreed with Brother’s decision.”

“Sure. But did he ask you first?”

Lan Wangji remained quiet.

“If it makes you feel better, there’s always a chance that it won’t become an issue,” Su She continued, mostly to avoid having to listen to Lan Wangji’s injured sort of silence. “Maybe they’ll luck out and instead something will happen to remind Wei Wuxian that he’s a servant and that his job is to throw himself into the abyss to save Jiang Wanyin, probably without even getting thanked for it.”

Lan Wangji looked at him sidelong. After a long few moments of contemplation – Su She really couldn’t stand the way Lan Wangji looked at him, as if he was trying to figure out an interesting puzzle, but he also couldn’t get enough of it, it was horrible – he said, “It will not be that way, with Yu Zhuliu.”

Caught, Su She glared at him.

“How would you solve it?” Lan Wangji asked.

“What?”

“You were a servant, once,” Lan Wangji pointed out. “You are no Yu Zhuliu, no Wei Wuxian, to sacrifice yourself for the Lan sect, and it pains you to pretend to humble yourself before us. What is your solution? You are too clever not to have one.”

Su She wrapped his arms around himself, wishing he didn’t enjoy being called clever as much as he did. It didn’t sound condescending when Lan Wangji said it, the way it did when the Lan sect’s teachers did – like praising a well-performing pet that they’d raised themselves, patting themselves on the back for doing such a good job in training him. He sounded almost as if he resented Su She for being smart enough to see the messy contradiction that was Wei Wuxian’s life, and for being the only person he could ask to shed some light on the subject.

Su She didn’t mind resentment, not even aimed at him. On the contrary, it made it feel real.

Why wouldn’t Lan Wangji resent having to respect someone like him?

“I’m leaving, eventually,” he confessed. “I’m going to start my own sect, or try, anyway, if I can get the money for it from somewhere. Back at home in Moling. Maybe, if I’m very lucky, I’ll be able to convince Yu Zhuliu to come with me, notwithstanding the stupid debt of loyalty he feels he owes your sect.”

Lan Wangji looked contemplative again, surprised but not displeased, as if Su She had suggested something he’d never even considered possible. “What cultivation style will you use?”

“Yours, of course,” Su She said, rolling his eyes at him. “What am I supposed to do, come up with a new one of my own? In what free time, exactly?”

“People will say you’re copying the Lan sect.”

“People have said I’m a copy all my life,” Su She pointed out. “Let the cultivation world sneer and the Lan sect break its rule against gossiping to look down their noses at me – I’ll still be sitting by myself as a sect leader in my own right while they’re just disciples. I’ll make my own rules, admit anyone into the sect that I want, and that’ll be worth all of their disdain.”

He hoped it would be, anyway. He suspected he’d end up being bitter about it, but then again he was always bitter, and anyway, what could he do about it?

If life had taught him one thing, it was that there was no way to make people stop talking, stop mocking, because no matter if he took three baths a day and scrubbed until the blood ran red he would still underneath it all be a servant, a farmer’s son. But he was more than that, he knew he was more than that, and the only alternative – to stay in the Lan sect as a second-class barely-better-than-a-servant for the rest of his life – just wasn’t tolerable.

He’d do what he could and figure out the rest when he came to it.

“You think Wei Wuxian will do the same?”

“Probably?” Su She said and shrugged. “I mean, he has the reputation for being an unorthodox genius, so maybe he’ll come up with his own cultivation style to go with it – you can do things like that when you’re rich and have the time – but as for whether he will form a new sect…how would I know? Maybe he’ll go be a rogue cultivator instead, the way his father did when he got tired of being stuck in the Jiang sect’s shadow. Depends on how many people go with him.”

Lan Wangji hummed thoughtfully. “A rogue cultivator has only to concern himself with his own wellbeing,” he said slowly, as if feeling something out. “A sect – with others.”

“I mean, you could try to take a family around as a rogue cultivator, but I think Wei Wuxian is a walking illustration of why you don’t do that.”

A small flinch. Why were all these well-born sons of the nobility so delicate? It was only loss.

“But you are certain he will go.”

“Well, yes. Either he figures out that he needs to shut up and listen to someone else for once or he leaves, and I don’t think he knows how to listen.” Su She shrugged again. “Why do you care, anyway? He’s Jiang sect. It’s not any of our business.”

Lan Wangji was silent, but somehow it came across as a meaningful silence. An almost pointed silence.

An embarrassed silence.

“…him, really?” Su She said, twisting around to gawk a little at where Wei Wuxian was having a furious whispered conversation with Jiang Cheng that involved a lot of gestures and even more suspicious looks from the nearby Wen sect guards. “I mean, sure, he’s attractive, no one’s going to deny that – he’s not rated fourth for nothing – but…really? Him? He’s not exactly the quiet-and-thoughtful Lan sect type I thought you’d go for, you know?”

Lan Wangji, with all the great grace and dignity and pomp of a proper young master of high birth and proper breeding, buried his face into his hands.

Su She covered his mouth with his sleeve to keep from laughing at him. It wasn’t exactly nice to laugh at someone who was clearly all too aware of their evidently terrible taste in men.

From the way Lan Wangji glared through his fingers, he wasn’t doing a very good job of muffling his snickers.

It was a good laugh, which was nice because it was the last thing Su She had to laugh about for long while.

The “indoctrination camp” was frankly awful. It wasn’t that he thought being forced to do servant’s work like tilling fields or doing laundry was the worst thing in the world (although he did resent that they didn’t bother paying them for it), and memorizing useless maxims was more or less what the Lan sect excelled at the most, but the constant air of vicious supervision, the threat of punishment, of having the swords they had all worked so hard to obtain taken away from them…

And that was all before they were forced to act as bait in Wen Chao’s night hunt.

“I’m serious,” Su She muttered to Lan Wangji. “I know so many good curses.”

Lan Wangji condescended to elbow him in the side to get him to shut up.

“I miss Yu Zhuliu,” Su She complained instead. “He’s much better company than you are.”

“No one is better company than Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian piped up. He was hanging out by them – not quite with them, but nearby – again.

“I thought the Core-Melting Hand was terrifying,” Jiang Cheng opined. He was following Wei Wuxian, as always, and sticking as close as his shadow, as if he was afraid of losing him. Maybe he was. “All silent and stoic and looming.”

“He doesn’t loom. He’s just tall.”

“All tall people loom. Look at Chifeng-zun, he looms even when he’s sitting down.”

Chifeng-zun, who was the leader of the Nie sect, was, in fact, unreasonably tall and, yes, loomed quite a bit.

“Well, Yu Zhuliu doesn’t,” Sue She said. And then, because he didn’t actually like either of the Jiang sect’s young masters no matter what Lan Wangji might think of them, he added, “Not that you of all people have the place to say anything, Jiang-gongzi. Family shame should not be spread in public.”

He thought that would make an impact, remind them of their manners, but instead all three of them – Wei Wuxian, Jiang Cheng, and even Lan Wangji – looked at him in confusion.

“What?” he said, staring at them back. “I know Jiang-gongzi’s maternal family is Meishan Yu…isn’t it?”

“It is,” Wei Wuxian said, sounding baffled. “But what does…wait. Yu Zhuliu – his Yu is Meishan Yu?”

“Yes?” Su She said, looking between them. Yu Zhuliu had said it was no secret, but the junior generation was treating this as if the information had hit them like a sudden landslide: Jiang Cheng had gone white, Wei Wuxian’s jaw was hanging open, and even Lan Wangji’s eyes were as wide and round as the moon. “You didn’t know?”

“I assumed it was another Yu,” Jiang Cheng croaked.

“Meishan Yu probably doesn’t want to admit that one of their own went to work as a servant for another sect after they kicked him out,” Su She concluded. It seemed relatively reasonable to him, but somehow that made all of them look even more upset. “What’s the matter?”

They all just shook their heads and made their way away, looking stunned to a man, and Su She was left to roll his eyes and wonder what in the world made young masters act like that. Something in the water, maybe?

He would curse himself later for making the joke, because there was something in the water of the cave they went to, and that something was, apparently, a corrupted Xuanwu.

(Lan Wangji was still glaring at him for trying to pull the girl out when Wen Chao’s whore demanded it, but it wasn’t his life on the line if the Wen sect went through with their threat to start slaughtering disciples left and right if they couldn’t get to her. Anyway, it wasn’t like he wouldn’t be able to cut her in a way that let out a bit of blood but left her the mobility she might need to escape – she was a cultivator, too! What did it matter that she was a woman?)

Wei Wuxian was holding the Xuanwu’s attention with a fire talisman, and Jiang Cheng was leading the disciples to the pool with the water, which Lan Wangji had identified as containing an exit…as usual, all the young masters were showing their stuff. In a burst of resentful fury, the sort he hadn’t had in weeks, Su She leaned down and grabbed a bow and some arrows. If he shot the Xuanwu’s eye, he might be able to –

A hand fell on his shoulder, and Su She turned to look.

Lan Wangji shook his head. He didn’t seem angry about the girl anymore.

“Keep them,” he said, nodding at the arrows. “There will be Wen sect soldiers waiting for us outside.”

“You don’t think I can make the shot,” Su She accused, feeling obscurely betrayed. “You scored so high in the archery competition – I bet you think you could do better, is that it? You want –”

“If you miss, you may anger it further,” Lan Wangji said. “And I have promised Yu Zhuliu that I would see you safe.”

Su She’s anger was extinguished as quickly as a candle blowing out. “You – did? He asked about me?”

“Before he left with my brother.”

“You should’ve said something,” Su She grumbled, but he let himself be lured into allowing Lan Wangji to use him as a crutch as they waded into the water. At the last moment, Wei Wuxian threw the fire talisman into the air and ran after them, causing the Xuanwu to go crazy and chase, and then there was a bit of frantic swimming – it felt more like drowning, even with Wei Wuxian leading the way for them both – before they got to the other side.

“I’m going to be sick,” Su She groaned, spitting up water, and then he still had to sit up and shoot an arrow back at one of the Wen sect guards that, as Lan Wangji had predicted, were out there.

Of course, a few seconds later the Xuanwu came bursting out of the side of cave, so they all had a whole different set of problems to deal with.

At least the Wen sect mostly ran away.

(Not all of them. A few of them stuck around to shoot some arrows at them – every bad thing Su She had ever thought about any young master, he thought twice for the Wen sect.)

“Next time we deal with this inside the cave,” Su She shouted, running for cover. He was able to get the arrow into the Xuanwu’s eye the way he had planned to in the cave when he finally had a little time to stand and aim – admittedly, he might’ve missed in the cave, he never shot half as well when he was angry – and in the end Lan Wangji shouted something about Chord Assassination and Wei Wuxian had a brilliant-stupid idea about using it like a spider web to make a net and Jiang Cheng swam like a fish to lure it through the right spot and all together with a bunch of the others they ended up chopping the Xuawnu’s head off.

Well, chopping was the wrong word. More like a shichen or more or wretched sawing using Chord Assassination as a garotte, relying mostly on Lan Wangji’s arm strength – Su She and the few other Lan disciples that knew the trick were holding the strings down with burning bleeding fingers, an essential part of the process but ultimately only a prop to help Lan Wangji do what he needed – and by the time it was done their robes were more red and crusted brown than white no matter how many bleaching herbs and special arrays had been used.

“All right, the threat is gone,” Su She said, feeling bitter again as he scanned the treeline. He didn’t even know what the bitterness was about this time. “Can we go already?”

“You can come to Yunmeng,” Jiang Cheng said. “It’s closest.”

No one disagreed.

More or less the second after they arrived, just as soon as they’d had baths and a change of clothing, Lan Wangji wanted to go back to the Cloud Recesses or to travel around looking for Lan Xichen. He looked strange in borrowed Yunmeng purple, even if they’d politely given him the lightest and bluest shade they had – really it was at best a pale lavender at best – but that sure didn’t seem to bother Wei Wuxian from the way he kept gawking at Lan Wangji when he thought Lan Wangji wasn’t looking.

“If you don’t trust your brother, trust Yu Zhuliu,” Su She told Lan Wangji irritably after yet another request that was swiftly denied. He’d made a half-hearted effort to remember his manners after the stress of the moment had passed, but Lan Wangji seemed unhappy any time he did so now he was back at being a bit more of his awful actual self. Of course, Lan Wangji liked Wei Wuxian so maybe he just had a kink for rude people? “Do you really think he’d take him anywhere you could find him?”

“Then I should be at the Cloud Recesses,” Lan Wangji said firmly. “To help rebuild –”

“To help make them a target again, you mean?” Su She said scathingly. “Did you forget, somehow, that you’re still a valuable hostage? That they’ll be expecting you to go back? Or is it just that all that nobility is starting to make your brain rot, you stupid fucker?”

Lan Wangji glared at him, tight-lipped, and stalked away, which meant that Su She’s point had probably been taken and they could have at least a little rest before having to start running again.

Before the war started. War, which terrorized the common people…

He needed to go to Moling to check on his family. Even if his brother rejected him, as he feared, he had to go – better rejected than bereaved, surely..?

Consumed with dark thoughts, Su She didn’t notice that he wasn’t alone until he walked straight into Wei Wuxian’s chest.

(Why were they all so tall?)

Wei Wuxian was glaring at him. “Listen,” he said, sounding angry. “Listen, whatever your name is, you can’t talk to Lan Zhan like that –”

Su She punched him in the face.

Wei Wuxian stared up at him in shock from where he’d fallen on his ass on the ground, but Su She didn’t care; he turned on his heel and stormed off, his face hot with rage and shame and bitterness.

“On second thought, we can leave right now,” he spat at a shocked-looking Lan Wangji. “I’m not staying here one more fucking second.”

Whatever your name is.

Like they hadn’t just gone through life and death together, hadn’t fought side by side, like he hadn’t risked his life on Wei Wuxian’s stupid plan, none of that mattered; he wasn’t important enough for Wei Wuxian to remember his name. People like him really were nothing but side characters to people like Wei Wuxian, weren’t they? Their lives, their hopes, their dreams, their bitterness – all irrelevant. An aside at best, mere marginalia, a splash of color to liven up the background.

Su She would bet money that Wei Wuxian knew the names of all the rich young masters that had attended classes with them, whether he liked them or he didn’t. He even knew the name of that little Wen clan member that he’d so bravely stood up for during the archery competition. But not Su She’s name, no, even though he’d been so graciously suffering all of the stupid back-and-forth pining Wei Wuxian had been doing with Lan Wangji, even though he’d let himself foolishly believe that because he and Lan Wangji had something in common that they might be something like friends or at least companions, that he might be treated as an equal –

No, these stupid rich young masters were all the same. He’d been right the first time.

Actually, now that he thought about it, why was he even here? Did he really think Lan Wangji would take his side over Wei Wuxian, who wasn’t only his peer in every sense of the word but also his beloved?

What a waste of time.

Su She left again. He wasn’t stupid enough to try to walk away just as he was, no matter how furious; how far would he get with no money, no food, and even his sword back in Wen custody? Instead he made his way down to the kitchens to ask for travel rations that could last for a while, and planned to visit the armory to borrow a sword after that. He’d need to pack lightly, but comprehensively: who knew how far the Wen sect’s influence spread? He might not be able to risk going into the cities and towns on the way to get supplies, not even wearing borrowed Yunmeng robes – even if he hid the incredibly obvious white forehead ribbon with a hat, he still walked like someone from the Lan sect, something he’d only really noticed once he was surrounded by people who slouched and bent and took large ground-eating steps instead of the sedate pace that he couldn’t quite break the habit of using.

“Su She,” Lan Wangji said from the door to the room they’d been given. Su She didn’t look at him or stop stuffing the travel rations and the spare robes he’d obtained into a qiangkun pouch.

“If you’re coming here to scold me about hitting Wei-gongzi, spare me,” Su She said stiffly. “We’re not in the Cloud Recesses; you don’t have any role over discipline here –”

“The silencing spell would have been more effective.”

Su She blinked, surprised by the apparent non-sequitur, and turned to look at him. “What?”

“To silence him,” Lan Wangji clarified, meaning Wei Wuxian.

As if that was the problem with what Su She had done.

“Yeah,” Jiang Cheng piped up – Su She hadn’t seen him standing by Lan Wangji’s side. “Hitting doesn’t work, he just pops right back up again. Please ignore him in the future; he’s an idiot.”

Well, Su She couldn’t disagree with that.

“You have a guest,” Jiang Cheng added. He looked almost – nervous? “Could – would you introduce us? Properly, this time.”

Su She couldn’t think of anyone he knew that Lan Wangji didn’t also know. Why would they ask him? The only person –

He stiffened abruptly, hope welling in his stomach. “Yu Zhuliu? He’s here?”

“Brother sent him to check on me,” Lan Wangji said. “And to tell me to stay where I am. You were right.”

It was – immensely gratifying to hear that.

“He and Mother are having tea,” Jiang Cheng added, looking impressed. “She insisted. It’s so weird.”

Yu Zhuliu looked the same as he always did, when Su She finally got to see him: tall and broad-shouldered, steady as a mountain, untroubled by wind or rain. There were a few points of similarity between his face and Madame Yu’s, if you looked for them, and he seemed pleased by her surprisingly gracious reception – when they spoke about it later, it turned out that he greatly admired her, the famous (or infamous) Violet Spider who had made a name for herself as a fierce warrior and top-grade cultivator, and who had never looked down at him for his birth when they’d both been younger.

Wei Wuxian didn’t apologize at any point, though he also didn’t call Su She out as the cause for his black eye. Instead, he opted to act as though their earlier confrontation had never happened, bounding into the room Su She shared with Lan Wangji – no one else rose at the same hour they did – and insisting on taking them around to see the sights of the Lotus Pier, to spend a day on a boat, another picking lotus seeds, and yet another shooting down kites.

Su She refused to go shoot down kites, not wanting to risk humiliation at something he was actually pretty decent at by competing at archery against Wei Wuxian, Jiang Cheng, and Lan Wangji, and spent the day with Yu Zhuliu instead.

“I missed you,” he blurted out instead of saying something reasonable. “I mean – not that I wanted you to be there and suffering, it was pretty awful, and who knows what the Wen sect might have tried to get you to do, it’s just – you know – ”

Yu Zhuliu was a reserved man who did not speak much. He put his hand on Su She’s and said only, “I know.”

Su She swallowed, and stared down at the hand that rested on him. It was a good hand, to his mind: broad in the palm, with short fingers that were the exact opposite of the long graceful ones favored by the Lan sect, but it did its vicious work well enough that the whole cultivation world knew about it – the whole cultivation world feared it.

Su She had never once worried about it. That probably made him a fool.

“Yu Zhuliu,” he said, very cautiously, even though he knew he shouldn’t speak; it was him being a fool again, except only this time he was a fool a hundred times over. “I know – I know that the Lan sect is very important to you. They rescued you at a bad moment in your life, and you owe them your loyalty; I understand that. But…do you think...maybe – one day in the future…”

Yu Zhuliu was looking at him steadily. He didn’t pull back his hand.

Su She gathered up his courage. “I’m going to go home to Moling, someday. Maybe even someday soon. And when I do, I’m not – I’m not going to go back to the Lan sect afterwards. I’m going to start my own sect, if I can manage it. When I do, would you – consider coming with me?”

He waited for Yu Zhuliu’s response with bated breath.

Yu Zhuliu looked serious and thoughtful, and he opened his mouth to respond –

There was a giant clatter from outside their door. “Wen sect!” someone shouted. “They’re here!”

Su She and Yu Zhuliu looked at each other, alarmed, and rushed out.

Unfortunately, that just meant they got a front row seat to the travesty that happened next.

Su She felt sick to his stomach: he’d predicted long ago that Wei Wuxian would one day rediscover that the Jiang sect saw him as only a servant, as something that could be sacrificed for the good of the sect, but each sizzle and snap of Zidian on Wei Wuxian’s back made him feel worse and worse. Su She’d been beaten plenty of times before, even whipped on occasion, but then again he’d never really taken the Lan sect to heart as his family – it wasn’t Wei Wuxian’s fault that he’d been so badly raised, tricked into thinking that they loved him like one of their own, into acting like a proud and arrogant young master who had a family that would hold up the world for him no matter what he did.

“She’s pulling the blows,” Yu Zhuliu murmured in his ear, too low for anyone else to hear, and that helped, a little. But not that much, since it was clear that Jiang Cheng, horrified, couldn’t tell, when it wasn’t clear if Wei Wuxian could, and then in the end it turned out to be all for nothing because Wang Lingjiao still demanded his hand.

Worse: he wasn’t sure if it was that, or the casual mention of a supervisory office, that was the step too far for Madame Yu.

Su She did not especially appreciate Madame Yu’s comments about Wang Lingjiao’s status as a servant, unsurprising and almost expected though they might be – although in a moment of horror-stricken hysteria he noticed that her words made Wei Wuxian, Jiang Cheng, and Lan Wangji simultaneously flinch and glance over at him in concern, apparently all to a one forgetting the circumstances they were all in out of fear of his sharp tongue – but seeing her beat up the disgusting Wang Lingjiao was oddly gratifying.

Right up until the Wen sect guards she had brought with her started attacking from the inside, while from outside the sound of bombardment began – Wen sect’s armies had been lying in wait.

“Kill them!” Wang Lingjiao screeched the second she was free to do so, lunging forward with claws extended at Madame Yu’s face. “Kill them all –”

She never got that far.

Yu Zhuliu’s palm caught her dead in the belly, the force of it throwing her backwards into the arms of one of her guards, who quickly scurried away with her.

“A waste,” Madame Yu said, straightening her clothing. “Of your abilities, primarily. Did she even have enough of a golden core to justify melting?”

Yu Zhuliu didn’t bother responding, drawing his sword, and the next thing Su She knew they were all being given swords from dead Wen sect guards and heading out into the battlefield.

“Oh, I really hate this,” Su She said, looking down at the one he was given. As a Wen sect blade, it wouldn’t have any pity on him, and he didn’t think he was good enough to avoid getting skewered the first second he got angry and stopped paying attention to all of his weak spots. “Doesn’t anyone have a spare guqin I can use instead? I know some really good attack songs.”

“I think I have one in my room, actually,” Wei Wuxian said, and led him away from the others, limping only a little. Madame Yu really must have been pulling her strikes – not that Su She hadn’t believe Yu Zhuliu, of course, but still.

“You play?” Su She asked as they hurried through the hallways. “I thought you used a dizi.”

“I – considered picking it up. Briefly.”

“Just kiss him already,” Su She advised, deciding to try to be nice for once. “It’ll be faster, and your reception will be warm.”

“Kiss…who?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of genius?” Su She growled, and took the never-used guqin. It had been impossible to use anything more than the most straightforward sound attacks when they’d been fighting at the Cloud Recesses, given how many Lan sect disciples and even servants cultivated with music, but here at the Jiang sect where just about everyone was a swordsman first, musician later, and only Lan Wangji to compete with, Su She had a bit more freedom to go find a nice safe spot near the walls to play.

He wasn’t a guqin player on Lan Wangji’s standard – it still burned to admit it even if he maybe didn’t hate him as much as he used to – but he’d spent an awful lot of time in the library looking for things he could use when he was building his own sect and, well, he’d always liked the weird stuff.

“Wait, are you playing ‘Banish Evil’?” Jiang Cheng asked at one point, hopping over a wall to get near enough to ask.

“What? No. Are you deaf? They barely sound alike,” Su She said. “Now get out of range already before it you’re affected.”

Not long after, the effect started to show, with Wen sect cultivators falling left and right out of the sky above his head once their qi started locking up in response to his music.

Had he looked up a method to lock someone’s qi through music just because it reminded him of Yu Zhuliu? No, but it sure did help motivate him in learning the abstruse and needlessly complicated finger-work for something that, yes, okay, maybe sounded a little bit like ‘Banish Evil’, but not enough for people not to immediately call him out on what would otherwise sound like an incredibly bad rendition of that song.

“Once formed, your sect will be immensely unpopular,” Lan Wangji informed him as he flew by on his sword, his own musical cultivation acting as a shield to allow him to fight unaffected by Su She’s music.

Su She grinned down at the guqin and thought to himself that he’d be keeping this one. They could consider it payment for having made him have to put up with Wei Wuxian.

At some point in the battle, Sect Leader Jiang returned and ended up fighting back to back with his wife, which – once the battle was over – turned into a shouting match.

Yu Zhuliu, when he arrived, took one look and his eyebrows went up. “Perhaps we should assist with clean-up on the pier,” he said, delicately enough that Su She immediately figured out what he was implying.

“Yeah,” he said, covering up his smirk with his sleeve. “Let’s go quickly.”

“Don’t you two worry about our feelings getting hurt by it,” Wei Wuxian said, sounding amused, as Jiang Cheng nodded along. “We’re more than used to them fighting.”

“Is that what you call it in the Jiang sect?” Su She sniggered, unable to resist, and both of them paled.

“How would you even know about that?” Jiang Cheng eventually recovered enough to volley back. “Being from the Lan sect and all – I’m amazed it isn’t against one of your rules.”

“Su She is starting his own sect,” Lan Wangji, appearing from who-knows-where, interjected. “With fewer rules.”

“Wait, really?” Jiang Cheng asked, looking – he looked impressed, actually. “A sect of your own? That’s amazing!”

Su She flushed, his face hot and red at once. No one had ever said anything positive about his idea before. “Not anytime soon,” he demurred. “I mean, even a small cultivation sect has to have money enough to buy a house – pay for swords, musical instruments, things like that – and I’m broke.”

“Oh, money,” Wei Wuxian said, in a tone of someone who’d never had to do without, and Su She was already starting to secretly plan his murder – yes, he was aware that Wei Wuxian had reputedly spent some time on the streets as an orphaned child and no, he did not care – when he added, carelessly, “You helped save our home, the least we can do is give you something to help start yours.”

Su She stopped dead. “Are you serious?”

“Certainly,” Jiang Cheng said, and fuck, they were being serious. That was the Jiang sect heir saying he would give him money, not a servant, someone whose words could plausibly be held to be binding on the rest of his sect. “Do you have a plan for what cultivation style you’ll teach new disciples?”

“Uh,” Su She said. His mind was blank. “I was just planning on using the Lan sect techniques.”

Wei Wuxian looped an arm over his shoulder. “With some innovations, thought, right? That qi-locking music was pretty nice, and I’ve never seen it used before.”

Su She puffed up a little. It was pretty nice, good of Wei Wuxian to recognize that – and he hadn’t even seen the teleportation talisman Su She had been painstakingly teaching himself how to use!

“Nor I,” Lan Wangji said, and looked pointedly at Su She. “I suspect it comes from the forbidden section of our library.”

“No, it isn’t,” Su She said immediately, holding up his hands. He knew what the punishment was for going in there without permission. “Not the forbidden, but the forgotten – I was one of the people assigned to sort through old inheritances. Books from abroad, obscure books no one ever bothered categorizing, that sort of thing. The big jumble in the basement of the secondary library…you know, the fire hazard. The one that blew up in the Wen sect’s faces when they tried to light it.”

“You remember enough of them to make it work?” Jiang Cheng asked, now looking even more impressed.

“Well, no,” Su She admitted. “But I made copies of everything that looked interesting and hid them in an abandoned root cellar halfway down the road to Caiyi Town, so they should still be intact.”

Lan Wangji lit up, which for him was a slight bit of color to his cheeks, a slight arch to his eyebrows, a faint curve to his eyes – in other words, he was positively glowing. “Would you permit copies to be made of your copies? We would gladly pay for the privilege.”

“And if you put that together with our money, and you should definitely have enough to fund a sect,” Wei Wuxian said enthusiastically. “And we can come visit!”

“Sooner rather than later, actually,” Jiang Cheng said, rubbing the back of his head. “Before the yelling started, Mother and Father agreed that we younger generation should lie low somewhere for a few weeks somewhere obscure to avoid any immediate reprisals from the Wen sect – and once they’ve lost the trail, we go out to recruit new sects to join the war.”

“That would be in line with what Brother requested that I do,” Lan Wangji observed, voice carefully neutral as always. “I would not object to spending some time in Moling, courting a newly formed sect.”

Su She didn’t know what to say, his mouth moving open and closed. It was almost everything he’d ever wanted, and he only need to reach out and grasp it – his own sect, his brother, the respect of the arrogant young masters…

Nothing could be better.

A hand fell on his shoulder, the warmth of it lighting him up inside.

“Our sect would be happy to host you,” Yu Zhuliu said.

Su She was wrong.

Now

it was perfect.

#mdzs #su she #wen zhuliu #lan wangji #wei wuxian #jiang cheng #my fic #my fics #VERY LONG #rainbowrites

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f0xfordcomma · 3 years

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Hello!! Happy FFWF!! Is there anything in particular that you find hard to write? Are there any WIPs that you've just absolutely given up on cause you think it'll go nowhere?? (would you share a bit of it? :D)

Croisty! Happy ffw tuesday (which tbh is earlier than I thought I'd be able to do these, so be proud of me lol)

I wish I had more to go off of in my writing portfolio to answer this question, but I think the thing I have the hardest time writing/ have avoided writing in my wips is just unfettered angst or like horror/ violence. Like character death? Gore? Fight scenes? (ooooh baby I SUCK at fight scenes) all of /that/ is just not really my forte as a writer. Don't get me wrong, I am not opposed to hurting my characters, but hurt/comfort is more where its at for me. You've read my stuff, so you know how emotionally driven a lot of my writing is. I think I would have a hard time writing more graphic/ heartbreaking/ violent *stuff* in my style. Idk, it would probably be a good thing for me to practice.... but.... I don't wanna (hands on hips) sooooo I'm not planning to really do anything quite like that anytime soon.

As far as abandoned wips go, I've got plentyyyy (or just verrrrrrry dusty wips that are not quite abandoned but are sitting very patiently on the shelf waiting for me to have the time to get back to them) Violent/ angsty/ deathy/ fighty abandoned wips though? Not so much.

But for you, mon petit croissant, have a bit of a miraculous ladybug reveal fic that I wrote one night after having a little ~ouid~ and convincing my husband to put on a sheet face mask with me that I now have no intention of finishing (oops, rip me).

okaaaaayyy so this is actually pretty dang long lol but I'm going to share the whole thing with you because I just re-read it for the first time in months and its pretty funny ~if you ask me~ so anyway... under the cut <3

NIGHT OFF

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t a totally crazy idea to take a night off.

Besides, Shadowmoth’s akumatizations had slowed down considerably in the past few months, and he rarely ever sent out two akumas in one day. The battle that she and Chat had fought that morning was brutal, but they’d come out victorious against HoneyBadger. Still, the fight had left her exhausted and wound up. Shadowmoth was planning something, she was sure of it. She just couldn’t, for the life of her, figure out what it was.

Ladybug was stressed.

Add to that, the fact that end-of-term exams were starting up next week and she’d not had nearly enough time during dead week to actually cram. Something about black butterflies and cranky kwamis and a cheeky cat (who, in recent weeks, had been considerably less cheeky.) Not to mention, she had been receiving an awful lot of memes, seemingly without preamble, from Paris’ favorite male model. Nino thought it was hilarious. Alya thought it was suspicious. Marinette thought it was confusing.

Marinette was stressed.

All of it was stressful.

Alya knew when her best friend was stressed. She could usually gauge the amount of Marinette’s exasperation by the frequency with which her bangs went flying from her face, propelled by a huff and a heavy sigh. Right now, Marinette’s bangs were a mess.

“Okay, girl. You need a night off.”

“What? No, I’m fine! Really! Plus, I can’t really afford to take a night off right now, Alya… I don’t know what Shadowmoth ha—”

“Yeah, no. I’m stopping you right there. For the next twenty-four hours, this space is a Ladybug-talk free zone,” she gestured vaguely around her bedroom, which was scattered with printouts and pictures that Marinette had brought over to work on nailing down Hawkmoth’s possible location using Alya’s beloved akuma-map. “I know, I know. It pains me more than it pains you, truly. But I’m doing this for you. Tonight: you, me, drinks, distractions. You are taking a night off.”

“But Alya! What if—”

“Hush, you know that’s incredibly unlikely. And, in the event of this IF you are so set on, you know that cat boy and I will have your back. Even drunk ladybugs can purify akumas when they have the clawed crusaders on their side.”

“I can’t believe you gave in to his silly nickname.”

“It is a badass nickname and you are just jealous that we bonded.”

“I’m not jealous. I��m annoyed.”

“Mhmm… keep telling yourself that, girl. Now, back to the matter at hand: what kind of drunk do you want to get tonight? Classy or trashy? I still have that peach stuff from last month, but if we are thinking classy I might need to call in the reserves to get us some decent wine.”

“You won’t need to call in anybody, Al, because I am definitely not getting drunk tonight.”

“Night off, Marinette. Drunkenness is a prerequisite.”

“Can’t we just watch movies or something? I really don’t know if that’s too good of an idea…”

“Girl, we watch movies every night. This is a night off. Don’t think I don’t see you stressing all throughout movie night every week, anyway. You need to take your mind off Ladybug,” she gestured at the mess that had consumed her bedroom. “And get your mind back on Marinette. Superhero or no, you’re still a teenage girl who is supposed to be enjoying the last few months of college.”

Marinette pouted.

“Stop pouting. You know you deserve to have normal girl fun.”

“But Alya I—”

“No buts.” An unnervingly devious look crossed Alya’s face. “Unless it is your butt in that pair of skinny jeans that you and I both know you-know-who loves. Boys will be here in twenty. Get to it, girl.”

Marinette just gaped at her. She didn’t even notice that Alya had grabbed her phone, but alas, there was the tell-tale ping.

Alya Cesaire → Akuma class OGs chat

Alya: anyone down for a little last minute get together—my door is open and my bar is stocked

Nino: HELL YEAH babe!

NL: got a new mix i’ve been meaning to show you… so entertainments on me fam!

Alix: This thing got an itinerary or just drunkenness for drunkenness sake?

Alya: the latter, natch.

Alix: Sick! Count me in.

Kim: same!

Rose: Do you need us to bring anything?

Alya: anything you feel like sharing

Alya: otherwise, just yourselves!

Alya: Agreste~you better bring us some of that expensive shit that i know your pops keeps somewhere in that castle of yours

Alya: no fancy wine, no admittance

Alya: the rest of you peasants just bring wtvr

Adrien: uhhhhhhhhhh

Adrien: ALYA

Adrien: dang it! You know I feel obligated to steal wine from my dad’s cellar now

Adrien: do you know how scary my dad is!!!??

Nino: DUDEEEE

Nino: DO IT you wont!

Adrien: shuddup Nino

Marinette: Adrien you totally don’t have to! Alya is just being **extra** Alya today

Alya: i plan a night off for this girl

Alya: and this is the thanks i get??????

Alya: can ya’ll believe this?

Alya: ridiculous

Zoe: UTTERLY RIDICULOUS

Adrien: utterly ridic

Adrien: dangit

Zoe: lol first! sorry adrien

Marinette: ugh ty I guess Als xxxxx

Alya: awe she DOES care, youre welcome babe!

Alya: so sunshine… about that wine?

Adrien: yeah yeah yeah

Adrien: use my people pleasing against me why dontcha

Alya: gladly <3

“Alya, stop bullying Adrien.”

“No way, girl. Giving that boy a task is the only way to ensure he shows up. Speaking of which… butt, jeans, go, now!”

The doorbell rang. Nino had perfected the quickest route to Alya’s house from every part of Paris years ago. Yes, he was whipped; and yes, he was proud of it.

“ALYA! I have to clean all of this up and I have to go home to get those jeans that you’re so dead set on and…”

“No you don’t. Kaalki?”

“Right here, Ms. Rouge.”

“YOU USED VOYAGE TO BRING ME JEANS?”

“No way girl! Don’t be silly. Kaalki and Roaar just volunteered to be my errand kwamis.”

“You guys do realize that I am the guardian, right?”

“Of course, that’s why we worked so hard to get everything that you need for tonight.”

“I—you… wait is this my good bra? How did you—”

“Us kwamis pay attention, Marinette.” Tikki cuddled up to her cheek.

“Et tu, Tikki?”

The ladybug kwami just giggled and made her way to the pile of papers scattered across Alya’s bed, starting to organize them back into neat stacks.

“Night. Off.” Alya punctuated each word with a shove and a smack on the bum, directing Marinette toward the bathroom and shutting her in to get ready while she got the door for Nino.

#foxford just casually drops an entire dang chapter of a fic for your ffwf enjoyment #oops #miraculous ladybug #foxford writes #ml #ml season four #aged up adrienette #ffwf #ffwtuesday #thanks for asking!!#<3 #foxford answers #thatcroissantgurl #a moment of silence for my wip graveyard #cw: mentions of drunkenness #(they are old enough in france okay)

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sennextheassasinkingoflight · 3 years

Text

"I'll Always Stay"

Witcher fic. Pre slash Geraskier fic. Rated T and up for minor swearing, blood and gore.

Cross posted on AO3

Geralt and Jaskier get into a fight. Geralt gets injured. Jaskier takes care of him. (Fae Jaskier.)

(Still figuring out read more links on mobile. Help!)

It wasn't as though he had never seen Geralt injured; or that he had never stitched torn and bloodied flesh back together, while the witcher sat brooding beside him; or like he hadn't learned all the witchers potions, how to make them, what they do, how and when they should be administered. But this. This was different.

Geralt was unconscious on the ground beside him. He was without armor, and based on the the amount of blood covering pale skin he wasn't sure that he'd even been wearing it when he was attacked. He'd had it when he'd stormed out of camp with a growled,

"Fuck off."

The witcher had not gone on a hunt. No, that would have been good. Would have settled Jaskiers heart, if only a little. No, instead he had stalked off into the moonless night because they were fighting and he was done with Jaskier and the conversation. When he hadn't returned by midnight Jaskiers unease grew, blossoming dread in his chest and reaching out with tendrils, spreading to Roach and filling the clearing of their campsite. Setting his jaw and recognizing he was being reckless and quiet foolhardy he started into the darkness. Concern squeezed at his heart and weighed like lead in his chest. The darkness was consuming.

He was blind in the darkness and it was by sheer luck alone that he found the witcher at all. Or so, he would say. Now he wishes he was closer to camp and that he had brought more than a single vile of Swallow. He glances around the blackened clearing and though his eyes had adjusted a little he can't see anything now. He's far to close to continue using his magic. Blindly he gropes for one of Geralts swords, anything, fear prickling his skin, raising the hair on his neck and arms. If Geralt had been rendered unconscious and bloody than it would be in Jaskiers best sense to run back to camp and stay there.

With one of the witchers too heavy sword, slick with blood in his hands, he knelt over his friend and listened for too slow breathes, feeling for a too slow pulse. Watching the barely there rise and fall of a bruised and bloodied chest. When he found it he foracably swallowed back his panic, thrusting it from his mind. With shaking hands Jaskier lifted a white clad head into his lap, hair more pink than white. Finally he pulled the vial of Swallow from his pocket and slowly tipped it into an unresponsive mouth. He brushed his fingers down Geralts throat, coaxing it into contracting and swallowing the potion. It was a slow process.

A few moments later, Jaskier huffs out a small sigh of relief. Geralt is breathing easier, if only just. There is no way to get the witcher back to camp and it's too dark to see the full extent of injuries, or find his other sword, and let's not forget the creature that was lurking somewhere in the shadows. Without thinking about it he let his magic sleep out around him. That would keep whatever it was away. He swallowed, it was a calculated risk. And perhaps Geralt would be to out of it to notice it in the morning.

He'd spent so long with humans he'd nearly forgot he had it. Still he dare not use it on Geralt unless there was no other option. That the witcher would notice immediately. So instead he whispers, "I'm sorry."

Sorry he can't use his very nature to save his friends life. Maybe one day. Sorry for the things he had said. Sorry that Geralt had been injured. Sorry for everything he'd done that annoyed, hurt, or angered the witcher.

While he waited for the sun to rise, he ran delicate musicians fingers through coarse, sticky hair. Guilt resting around him like a cloak. As the grey light of dawn rose he felt like an idiot forgetting he could have used his magic to take stock of Geralts injuries at the least, he'd already let it lay lazily around the forest floor. Panic had made him fuzzy. Though that too would have been a very calculated risk. If Geralt found out. Well…. Jaskier quiet liked his life as it was.

The wounds were healing, slowly. Witchers mutations and potion at work. But it wasn't fast enough, congealed red blood oozed from the wounds, even now. hours later. Jaskiers fears to think what would have been if he had waited for the light to go looking. Slowly as not to strain or startle the still unconscious witcher he extricated himself. He hated what he was about to do but it was necessary. He moved quickly, quicker than this form should have moved. He returned to and broke camp quickly and Roach followed him with a soft neigh.

He turns to her and whispers softly.

"Don't tell him please." He holds eye contact with her until she snorts into his shoulder. This really shouldn't be a concern right now. But it is.

When he returned to Geralts side he collected his silver sword, gingerly, and placed it with the steel. He gathered up shredded armor, and for all his vast knowledge of magical creatures, more than he let's on, he has no idea what did this. He swallowed harshly. This was not good.

He built a fire and set water to boil. Doing things the mortal way was not his favorite thing. He notes absently that their supplies are running low. He gathers another bottle of Swallow and again coaxes it down Geralts throat. Finished he set about creating a salve or potion. Anything that would help his friend. With the water ready he set about washing away the blood and dirt from the front of Geralts torso. He couldn't reach his back and hoped it wasn't as bad. Although the fact that the injuries were this severe on his stomach was disheartening and highly concerning.

Really he hadn't meant to make him angry. But he had been cold, wet, hungry and they had been traveling for 3 days straight stopping only for a few hours of sleep. Not a problem if he wasn't hiding what he is from the witcher, remarkably well at that. And Geralt hadn't told him anything. Hadn't said where the were going, what they were doing. And he'd known the moment the words left his mouth, he'd known he had completely and irrevocably fucked up. So he'd spent the next five hours apologizing profusely for his mistake. Saying that he hadn't meant it he'd only been angry. It wasn't true. It was never true. The witcher had decided to set camp and then stormed off into the dark effectively ending the conversation. Uncertain what to do he had tended Roach and the fire. He hadn't even attempted to compose. Then he'd just listened in silence and darkness for Geralt to return thinking about how to make it right.

Now he was sitting on his knees in the dirt beside his wounded friend who could very well die. He told himself to stop thinking like that.he'd give himself away before he actually let Geralt die.

He continued peeling back torn remnants of clothing, soaking bits that were stubbornly stuck and then removing them completely. He washed as he went removing dirt and congealed blood with water then antiseptic. He knows it has to sting a ridiculous amount and is grateful the witcher is still unconscious.

The cuts are deep. The flesh is torn and ragged like it had been ripped from bone; the cuts were not clean and sliced. They are deep and he pulls back flesh to make sure its clean. Infection has likely already begun to set in. Once he's satisfied that the wounds are as clean as they can be he sets to work stitching the flesh.

It isn't pretty work. And his stitches, though practiced, are not beautiful against ashen skin. They're uneven and some are a little tight others a little loose. But he's a bard. He is not a surgeon or a seamster. Still it's work that needs to be done so he bites his lip and let's hands accustomed to playing strings guide one through muscle and skin.

He swallows down bile. Guilt returning as the stitched wounds continue to ooze blood. If only he hadn't riled him up, hadn't let him stalk off into the darkness of night, angry and alone.

He continues to work with nimble fingers on the skin he can see. At some point he lost track of how many stitches he had run. Finished with the visible portion of Geralts torso he smears a thick salve across it. He can't bandage it now. He has to wait for the witcher to sit up. And he prays to every deity he can think of that he isn't badly injured on his back. He clenches his teeth, bounces his leg, and let his eyes roam over Geralts prone form. "Wake up" he thinks desperate with nervousness. Tears work their way towards his eyes, his throat constricting painfully.

"Geralt please. I know. I was unkind. I didn't mean it. Truly. I swear it just slipped out. It was a low blow and I knew it would get a reaction. But I didn't mean it. I swear. I am so sorry. Please. Please don't die here Geralt. Don't die. Not yet. Not like this." He whispers leaning back against the tree head titled back silent tears streaking his face. He closes his eyes. He tells himself if there's no improvement by that night, he'll use his magic and hope against all odds the witcher doesn't send him away.

Until Geralt woke up there was nothing more he could do. He keeps his eyes closed but doesn't sleep. Ears turned to the sound of breathing beside him. Time passes and the sun rises high overhead. A low groan pulls him from his heartache.

"Geralt?" He pitches forward from the tree and scrambles to push the witcher back down.

" Geralt! Stop. Dont sit up your injured. Badly." He frowns. The witcher lays back obediantly. Tired eyes scanning his surroundings. He nods and seems to relax. And the dread in the pit of Jaskiers stomach dissipates.

" I tended the injuries I could find." He starts quiet, just barely a whisper and then more confidently. " I'm sorry Geralt. Really. I- I am so sorry." He gets a grunt and the two stare at each other for a while. Geralts features hard, but he must see something in Jaskier that tells him undoubtedly that these words are true, because his brow unpinches and his jaw relaxes. The witcher let's out a long sigh. Then pushes himself up into a sitting position. and Jaskier goes from concerned his friend won't forgive him to concerned his friend is going to run off and never come back and die alone in the woods to hes not moving but now I can see his back, oh God I can see his bakc in the span of a single breath.

"Your wounds are serious! Geralt you really shouldn't --"

" Stop, Jaskier. There's a--"

"Oh yes indeed. Stay put. I'll just grab the supplies." So he gathers up a fresh rag and the water he's kept warm and the salve and bandages. The needle and threading. Finally he settles himself behind Geralt and neither speaks. He hears the witcher inhale against the sting of the antiseptic.

"Two vials of Swallow. One when I found you. One 6 hours later, when I could see to get back to camp." He says dutifully, never looking away from his work. These arn't nearly as bad as the others. He works quickly so he can properly bandage the mess.

"Hand me the bandages." He says pulling the last stitch tight. And Geralt let's out a pained grunt as he reaches for them. Jaskier doesn't hesitate to begin winding them around the witchers torso. Arms bracketing the larger man far to intimately in the process. He pulls them just tightly enough, with well and overly practiced ease. He hesitates, then he moves back to Geralts side.

He doesn't speak, just breathes. He's said his peace. He doesn't flinch under Geralts scrutiny as the man continues to look at him.

"Your eyes seem bluer."

"Crying." He says after a moment of silent panic.

"Hmm…. I'm sorry too."

And he actually chokes on his own spit. What? He looks at Geralt and stretches a hand out to touch his forehead but the witcher holds eye contact.

"Well then. I guess were squared away now?"

A nod. "I'm tired Jaskier." The witcher says eyes soft and unfocused as he reaches out a hand to brush fingers against the bards flushed cheek.

"Then sleep, Geralt. I'll stay."

"I'll always stay."

#the witcherr #Geraskier #hurt comfort #mostly hurt #fae jaskier #major character injury #everyone lives

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more-stuff-of-pi · 4 years

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The Shape of Love and Water

a/n: I had a really hard time choosing which HQ boy would do this (top choices: Makki, Suga, Kuroo, Terushima, Atsumu). but also the scary thing about writing fanfiction is that you’re writing ooc. also also, this is heavily based on a mini fic I wrote years ago for a different fandom hehe. remember kids: reduce, reuse, recycle!

notes: Y/s/n = your surname. mattsun’s a bad boy and does not give a single fuck. I mean, look at his face. that’s the face of a bad boy, yessir! find my masterlist here

pairing: matsukawa issei x fem!reader | genre: fluff | warnings: trespassing, swearing, it gets the tiniest bit spicy | word count: 2,031

“I still cannot believe that we’re doing this,” you whisper harshly, ducking behind your boyfriend as if to hide from your impending adventure. “How’d you even get those keys, anyways?”

Issei chuckles, jiggling the keys in the lock before him. The sound of the other keys on the chain jingling together only served to add to your anxiety. Sure, you liked adventure, but you also liked not getting in massive amounts of trouble. Issei, on the other hand, could care less. “Captain of the swimming team owed me a favor,” he says with a sly grin.

You huff. “What even is your plan if we get caught?”

Issei glances over his shoulder to give you an unimpressed look. “We’re not going to get caught, Y/n, relax,” he says, clear to you that this asshat indeed had no plan. As he turns back to struggle with the keys, a small part of you hopes that it won’t work, that Issei will somehow have the wrong keys and you both can laugh at what could have been and turn around and call it a night. But, regrettably, there is a larger, louder part of you whose heart swells with an invigorating thrill rather than anxiety when you both hear the satisfying click of the lock echo off the concrete.

Issei pushes the door open, turning to walk backwards, holding his arms out in the air, a lazy grin spreading like paint in water across his face. “Not bad, eh, princess?”

Despite yourself, your lips stretch into a tight-lipped smile, not wanting to admit your excitement. “I still think this is a bad idea,” you chide even as you go to slip your hand into his. The two of you navigate the dark hallway by the light of a flashlight Issei had the foresight to bring, the false yellow beam mixing with the soft white moonlight. It’s odd hearing your footsteps echo off the walls, the hallways normally full of the bustling of Seijoh students, not the quiet shuffling of trespassers. You two don’t dare speak, believing that somehow your voices would disturb the sleeping building.

You come to a door and Issei squeezes your hand before dropping it to work on the second lock. It turns much more smoothly and Issei shoulders the door open, dramatically sweeping his arms and bowing his head. “After you, m’lady.”

Swatting Issei as you pass him, you take in the sights and sounds of the pool before you, the water gently lapping at the bordering tiles despite the lack of recent use. From the high windows, brilliant moonlight filters in past the trees, reflecting beautifully off of the delicate ripples of the water. You hear Issei pass behind you, you assume in search of a light source other than the flashlight he carries. You close your eyes and let the lulling sounds of water and doors opening and closing surround you, enjoying the peace that they create. When you open your eyes again, you assume Issei was successful in his endeavors as the underwater lights have been turned on. The soft glow of the rounded lights combined with the moonlight come together to show off the glisten of the water that was almost… magical. Ethereal, even.

In the softly filled silence, you felt indestructible here, lost in your own world. It might have been due to the fact that it was midnight and most of Miyagi was asleep, but it truly seemed as if the world just stopped and let you and Issei exist in this moment. And there was something so exciting about just being here, together. And also the fact that it was the school’s pool and it was a Saturday night; it electrified the air with an intoxicating exhilaration.

Issei, in your distraction of the wonder all around you, has reappeared, sliding his arms around your waist. He presses a kiss to the top of your head before going to stand at the pool’s edge, his hands dragging off of the small of your back. Having already abandoned the rest of his clothing with the exception of his boxer briefs, Issei pulls at his shirt and tosses it off in some unseen corner. He stretches an arm across his body, the muscles flexing powerfully in his back under smooth skin. He switches arms and again you can’t help but drink in the view like a dying woman of strong muscles moving beautifully. You swear you could watch Issei stretch for the rest of eternity and never tire of the sight, the quiet display of immense power held in one body never ceasing to excite and amaze you. And suddenly you’re remembering the not-so-quiet displays of power, how that skin, that back, those moving muscles feel under your own fingers while you’re desperately clutching to Issei for support. You remember how bittersweet it is to mar that perfect skin with angry red lines of pleasure drawn out from your own nails--

The memories send tingling warmth throughout your body, a flush no doubt heating your face as you hurriedly remove your shoes, silently reprimanding yourself for being distracted by your boyfriend -- which, though you’d never tell him, happens constantly, certainly more than you’d care to admit -- and his stupid perfect awful back, of all things. You genuinely never thought you had a thing for backs -- honestly, you never thought you had a thing for a variety of different things -- and then you met Issei and that all went to shit.

The sound of Issei diving into the water brings you back to the moment and out of your own mind consumed with less than wholesome thoughts. Issei’s head surfaces, messy black hair now plastered to his forehead. He turns around and flashes you one of his heart-melting lazy grins. You shake your head, laughing, still amazed that you two are actually here in the first place.

“You, Matsukawa Issei, are ridiculous.”

Issei’s eyebrow quirks up, his grin shifting into a wicked smirk. “I am, huh?”

“Undeniably,” you tease, taking off your shorts and taking the time in folding them, mostly so you won’t have to look at Issei with your cheeks still flaming hot. Issei’s smirk morphs into a rare simple smile, a loving warmth reflected in his eyes as he just looks at you. You laugh nervously when you catch his eyes, “What now? Are you going to tease me for not wanting to get in trouble like a normal person? Not everyone is a bad boy, y’know,” you giggle.

Issei just keeps looking at you, that same soft smile that makes your heart beat a million times faster still settled on his lips, wading over to the edge of the pool. Uncharacteristically, Issei just keeps on looking at you, causing your cheeks to grow hot again. You’re down to just your shirt and underwear and you laugh again, nervously, self-consciously, this time at Issei’s silence. “What?”

His smile grows into his more familiar smirk. “Nothing,” he charms as his eyes rake up and down your body, “just admiring the view.” You roll your eyes and dip your toes in the pool to fling water at your stupidly handsome boyfriend.

“You think you are just so smooth, don’t you,” you poke your tongue out, hands on your hips.

“No,” he smirks, “I know I am.”

You scoff at him. “Oh, shut up.”

“C’mon,” he gestures sweepingly, “you have to admit, this is pretty romantic, yeah?”

At Issei’s dopey grin, you close your eyes and laugh lightly, happily. When you do open your eyes, your gaze is met with Issei’s open loving one and immediately you are drawn into it and you almost don’t realize that you’re standing on the edge of the pool, for once looking down into your boyfriend’s face. His smile is as lazy as ever but his eyes hold so much love that you almost can’t believe it. You wouldn’t believe it if Issei had not shown you time and time again that he loves you. He loves you in every smile, every teasing glance, every late night phone call, every wiggle of his brows, every less-than-flattering snort of laughter, every tear, every win, every loss, every breath -- Matsukawa Issei loves you in everything that he does. He’s so helplessly in love with you that he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Sometimes, despite his easy-going manner, he worries that he doesn’t show you enough, doesn’t tell you enough, just how much he loves you. But when your lips spread with a blindingly beautiful smile, he knows that you can feel his love and he can’t help but love you even more.

Issei reaches out a hand that you instinctively take into your own… and immediately regret being so hopelessly in love with this idiot that you would blindly do whatever he asks. The next thing you know, your body is mercilessly yanked into the pool with a splash, your shirt clinging to your skin as you break the surface. You come up and immediately whirl on Issei, shriek-laughing. “Matsukawa Issei! I liked this shirt, you jerk!”

Issei is laughing with you as you playfully beat at his chest. He catches your wrists and pulls you close to him as he turns your hand and kisses your palm. You feel your heart skip a beat as Issei’s features soften unbelievably as he gazes down at you, both of your laughter dissolving into quiet smiles.

“I can’t believe I fell for that,” you murmur softly, a smile dancing on your lips.

“I can’t believe you fell for me,” Issei whispers back with a cheesy grin. In that moment as in every moment, he is beautiful. He is beautiful and he’s looking at you with all of the love in the world. It heats your cheeks, warms you from the core spreading throughout your body like a tender embrace.

“That’s kinda romantic,” you admit.

Issei laughs freely as he wraps an arm around you, a hand coming up to push his hair out of his face. “Way to ruin the moment.”

“You’re the one who yanked me into the water like a big old brute!”

“Careful, princess, you’re starting to sound like Oikawa.”

You cringe. “Oh, goodness, please no.” Issei cackles, coming to rest his forehead against yours as he winds down, his hand settling on your hip

The water gently slaps against your back as Issei pulls you impossibly closer. “You know I love you, right?” You inhale sharply as he searches your eyes. “I know I tease you all the time and I probably don’t say it enough, but I love you. Probably more than what’s considered healthy, honestly. God knows Makki rags on me all the fucking time for it.” You grin. “But I love you. A lot.”

“Well, I have good news for you Matsukawa Issei.”

He grins at you. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I, Y/s/n Y/n, am hopelessly in love with you. Like, a lot.” Issei squeezes your hip, chuckling at your teasing.

“God, I’m so in love with you. I love your nose,” Issei kisses there, “your jaw,” more kisses, “your neck,” you gasp as he nibbles a sensitive spot, “your lips,” he says, rubbing his thumb over them.

“You do?” you breathe out, hands coming to rest on Issei’s chest.

“Let me remind you how much,” he whispers against your lips before tightening his hold around you, closing his eyes and kissing your breath away. Your eyes close, revelling in the sensation. Issei walks you both back, hand out so he won’t crush you against the wall. His hands slide from your waist and your hips to your thighs, leaving trails of fire in their wake. He pulls up and you leap, locking your legs around him and crossing your ankle at the small of his back as you slide your hands around his neck. You moan softly into the kiss as Issei presses against you, greedily swallowing the noises you make.

And, as Issei pulls away for a gasping breath only to dive right back in, you decide, have always known, that your greatest happiness comes from existing in these moments. Together.

taglist: @samwrights :’)

#matsukawa issei x reader #matsukawa issei #haikyuu x reader #haikyuu imagines #matsukawa issei x you #I feel like mattsun is so ooc i am so sorry aaaggghhhh #also i do not know how to write anything remotely spicy so i am also sorry for that #lord knows this fic is full of writer's anxiety lmao #the shape of love and water

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master-sass-blast · 4 years

Text

Release.

Hmmmmm... this thing is solid projection. Whoops.

Summary: You're exhausted. No matter what you do, you can't get enough rest to save your soul. You try to keep up with everything, try to not let the fatigue hinder you

--And then it all comes crashing down.

Pairing(s): Piotr Rasputin x Reader.

Rating: T for depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue, and general angst-hurt/comfort vibes.

Set after “It’s Truly Magical,” but this one is special in that it doesn't directly impact the canon. It's sort of a special one-off.

Author’s Note: So, as some of you may have gathered from the tags and preamble, this fic is basically me venting my own frustration.

I've been dealing with some pretty wicked chronic fatigue for the better part of... coming up on a year now, actually. Wow. I didn't realize it'd been that long.

It's made life really hard for me, from everything to eating to doing chores to hanging out with friends to writing. We don't know what's causing it, and we're trying to take care of it through lifestyle changes and making sure I don't exert myself too much (we meaning me, my family, my fiance, and my doctor). There's been a few things that have helped, but by in large it's still been kicking my ass.

I know I was gone for a long time. Part of that was the fatigue making it impossible to write or post. To those of you who are still around, thank you -and I'm sorry. I'm trying my best, I promise.

If you're dealing with chronic fatigue or think you're dealing with chronic fatigue, just know that it's okay that you're tired. You're not lazy. You're not a failure. You're not going crazy. You're not a burden. Your body needs rest, you need rest, and you *deserve* to rest.

Here's a resource on chronic fatigue syndrome and what it looks like.

I hope you're all doing well. Stay safe and wear your mask.

Taglist: @marvel-is-perfection, @chromecutie, @girl-obsessed-with-things, @super-darkcloudstudent, @dandyqueen, @leo-writer

It creeps over you. It starts as a wispy, soft cloud, hanging over the horizon of your existence.

And then it grows. Larger, more oppressive. Until you’re fully immersed in it, with no sense of direction or how to get out.

***

You’re not really sure you remember when it started. You’ve always been tired to some extent –anxiety, nightmares, and running on the X-Men schedule will do that to a person.

Exhaustion hits like a brick one day after training. You slump against the tiled wall in one of the shower stalls in the locker room. Water streams down your sweaty face and body while you struggle to make your eyes focused. Shit. I must have pushed too hard.

You manage to get yourself cleaned up and trudge back to yours and Piotr’s home at the back of Xavier’s property. You collapse onto the couch in the living room. Your limbs are stone, too heavy to drag another step. Your body throbs in time with your heartbeat. I need a nap. Just for a couple hours.

You only want to sleep for a couple hours.

You only mean to sleep for a couple hours.

You wake up at nine in the evening, to Piotr gently nudging you.

He tuts, fussing over you like a worried mother hen. “Are you feeling well, myshka?” He presses the back of his hand against your forehead. “You have slept for long time.”

“I’m fine,” you mumble, mind still cloudy with exhaustion. You force yourself to sit up. You jaw cracks when you yawn. “Just overdid it in training today.”

Your husband gently chides you, ushering you into the kitchen so you can eat. “It is important to replenish energy.”

You go straight to bed after eating and sleep for another ten hours.

***

Part of you wonders ‘how did I let this happen? How did I let it get this bad?’

The other part of you wonders if you had any say in it at all.

***

The fatigue starts seeping into other areas of your life as well. Training, grading, hanging out with friends, eating…

You’re so tired. You chalk it up to mission stress, to going too hard during training, to running on weird hours all the time.

You start sleeping through the day to cope. No matter how well you sleep at night or how much sleep you get, you’re always so fucking tired.

Piotr notices the change in your sleeping habits. Because of course he does. It’s ingrained into his very DNA to be an observant, loving nurturer.

He brings it up during dinner one night. “Are you doing alright, myshka?”

“What? Yeah. Of course.” You’d woken up from a nap a couple hours before, and you feel good for once. (You’ll crash a couple hours later.) “Why? What’s wrong?”

“You have been sleeping at odd hours,” Piotr says, stirring his soup with his spoon. “I just want to make sure you are not having mental troubles.”

“I’m fine, baby.” And, on that front, you are. You’ve got your meds, your support system, a home, creative outlets, and a fulfilling –if occasionally dangerous—job. “I’ve just been tired lately, is all. I think it’s the weird mission hours just putting my body clock out of whack.”

“You should try to stay on normal schedule, then,” Piotr points out. He frowns, concerned. “Is not good for mental health to keep odd hours.”

You bristle. You are trying, dammit. You push through training and grading and your obligations every single damn day, even if all you can do is collapse in bed afterwards. Who the hell is he to say that you’re not trying?! “I am, Piotr. You don’t have to micromanage me. I’m not one of your teens.”

Piotr recoils, blue eyes widening. He holds up his hands. “Easy, dorogoy. I am not trying to micromanage. I just want you to be healthy.”

You drop your gaze down to your bowl of soup. Your heart races in your throat. “Sorry.”

***

It’s like being one of those houses infested with termites. You’re being consumed from the inside out. On the outside, you look fine. On the inside, you’re crumbling away like a sad, dry cookie left in the bottom of the cookie jar for five long, lonely months.

You’ve always been weird. You oscillate between outgoing and reclusive like nobody’s business. You’re a lot like Wade –somewhere between amusing and a nuisance to most of the adults, though most of the teens and kids like you.

(Piotr insists that it’s not true, that everyone likes you well enough, but you’ve never quite had the full faith to believe him.)

No one notices that you’re hurting. No one notices that something’s wrong. No one notices, no one notices, no one fucking notices—

But, to be fair, you hardly notice it yourself.

***

You kind of start to lose your mind, if you’re being honest.

It’s hard enough to keep up with your workload with the mission scheduling –but being tired all the time slams the nail in the coffin. You manage to drag yourself to training on time because it’s mandatory, because it’s important, because it’s for the good of your team, and—

And everything else falls apart.

You spend countless late night hours on the couch cramming through your grading, because you needed to sleep earlier, and the deadline’s only looming closer, and you have to be productive, dammit—

More than once, you drag yourself up to bed when Piotr’s just getting up for the day.

He frowns, forehead creasing. “Myshka—”

“I had grading to do,” you mutter as you crawl back into bed.

He finishes buttoning up his shirt, then sits down next to you. The bedframe groans under his bulk. “This is not healthy, moya lyubov’.”

“I’m fucking working on it, Piotr!” you snap, glaring at your husband. “Just –leave me alone!”

He swallows hard, blue eyes shining with hurt. He looks like a kicked puppy.

You huff and slam your face into your pillow, mostly to hide the fact that you’re crying.

Piotr smooths your hair down, then kisses the back of your head. “Ya tebya lyublyu, myshka.”

You bite down on your pillow and cry harder.

***

It’s more than just being tired.

It’s guilt. It’s enough guilt to fill an ocean. No amount of effort you make is good enough; no matter how hard you try you wind up failing. Or snapping at someone you love. Or being unable to do even the simplest shit.

There’s so much anger, too. At the world, at anyone who points out that you’re not doing well, at yourself. There’s a scream constantly behind your lips, trying to crack its way out of your chest.

You’re failing. You’re trying to scoop up handfuls of sand to keep an entire dune from consuming you, and the grains keep running through your fingers; it practically looks like you haven’t done anything at all, and you’re so fucking tired…

***

The ‘house’ collapses over a load of dishes.

One load of fucking dishes.

It’s ridiculous.

You manage to drag yourself out of bed one morning, trying to get the haze that seems to be a permanent fixture in your mind to clear. You trudge downstairs, energy sapping out of you with every step you take.

You see last night’s dishes in the sink, waiting to be rinsed and loaded into the dishwasher.

It’s an easy task. The dishes aren’t all that dirty, and there aren’t that many of them.

And you can’t do it. You don’t have the energy. You’re just too fucking tired.

You failed.

You crumple to the floor, weeping against the wooden floorboards as the dam you’d been trying so hard to keep stable gives way. You scream, anger and guilt and frustration and self-loathing washing over you, crushing you beneath their weight. You clutch at your hair, seething as the past few months finally come to a head—

And then Piotr’s arms are around you. (Later, you’ll learn that he stopped back at the house to pick up a gradebook, which is why he was even around during the day in the first place.) He scoops you up, cradling you against his chest. “Myshka, what’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

You sob into his shirt, beyond words.

“Okay, okay.” He checks you over to make sure you’re not visibly injured, then carries you upstairs to bed.

You whimper when he tries to tuck you in. “No –I’ve got stuff to do—”

“It can wait,” he says, loving but firm. He gently tugs the comforter over you, then toes his shoes off before laying down next to you.

“It can’t,” you cry, even as he tugs you into his arms and tucks you against his chest. “It’s already waited for so long.”

“And it can wait longer.” He kisses your forehead. “It is okay, myshka. Rest.”

You snuffle and sob and gasp—

And, eventually, you fall asleep.

***

You wake up to Piotr stroking your hair. You inhale sharply, blinking to cast the bleariness out of your vision. “What time is it?”

“About noon,” he says.

Your heart sinks. “Shit. I’ve got grading—”

He places his arm over your waist, holding you in place. “It can wait.”

“But—”

“You had breakdown this morning, myshka. Health comes first.” He gazes into your eyes, brow furrowing. “Talk to me, moya lyubov. Please. What is wrong?”

Your heart rips into infinitesimal pieces at seeing him so worried –and then you start crying again. “I can’t…” You squeeze your eyes shut and buy your face against his chest. “I can’t. I can’t do it. No matter how much sleep I get, or I don’t get, or how much I exercise or don’t exercise, or what I eat or –any of it. I’m so tired, Piotr.” You let out a choked sob. “I’m just so tired, and I keep failing—”

Piotr rubs your back and kisses the top of your head. “It’s okay, myshka. It’s okay.”

***

Eventually, you settle again. You’re snuggled against Piotr’s chest, sniffling and sighing while he strokes your hair.

It’s not a bad place to bed.

“How long?” he asks, voice quiet and gentle. “How long have you felt tired?”

“I don’t know,” you mutter, lulled to a state of near drowsiness by his ministrations. “A few months? Maybe a little longer? I’ve always been kind of tired, what with anxiety and nightmares and all that shit.”

He ‘hmms,’ kissing the top of your head. “Have you eaten yet?”

“…does leftover pizza at three in the morning count?”

He sighs, exasperated and amused. “Okay, time for food.”

“I can’t,” you whimper, tears coming back as frustration swells in your chest. “I’m too tired to eat.”

Piotr shushes you, gently drying your cheeks with a tissue. “What if I bring you something?”

You stomach churns with guilt and self-loathing. “I’m not a baby. I don’t… I shouldn’t need people to make food for me.”

“No, not baby,” Piotr agrees, kissing your cheek. “But you are unwell.”

“I’m not sick!”

“Unwell is unwell,” Piotr states, voice brokering no room for debate (though it never loses that gentle intonation of his). “If I bring you food, will you eat?”

You hesitate, then manage a small nod. “Something small, please. I don’t want, like, a whole meal.”

Piotr nods. He heads downstairs, then returns a few minutes later with some toast, fruit, a glass of milk –and some Cheetos.

You giggle when you see the fluorescent orange cheese-snacks on your plate. “You do love me.”

“Navsegda.” He hands the plate to you, sets the glass on your nightstand, then waits for you to start in on your toast before speaking again. “I think you should see Dr. Mccoy about fatigue.”

“But I’m not sick,” you argue after swallowing a bite of toast.

“That you know of,” he corrects. “Lots of things can cause fatigue. Is best to check, to make sure more serious problem is not happening.”

“But…” A lump rises in your throat. “What if this is just me now? What if… what if I’m just broken?”

Piotr takes your hand in his. He presses his lips against your knuckles. “Then we know, and we make life suited to your brokenness.”

“I can’t slow everyone down, Piotr,” you insist. Your eyes burn with unshed tears. “I can’t –I can’t be a burden. It’s not fair to everyone else if I’m getting some sort of special treatment because I’m tired.”

“You are not burden,” Piotr declares, gaze boring into yours. “You are never burden. Understand?”

“Piotr—”

“Things happen, myshka. Sometimes, our bodies just… do not work right anymore. You still deserve comfortable, happy life. Nothing is unfair about that. Nothing.” He kisses the back of your hand again when you sigh, then pats your leg. “Finish eating. We go to doctor afterwards.”

***

The only way out is through.

Who would’ve guessed.

***

Dr. McCoy runs a series of comprehensive tests. Thyroid, allergy, iron deficiencies, vitamin deficiencies, glucose levels—

It comes back negative. All of it.

On one hand, it’s a good thing, given that you don’t have some sort of life-threatening condition that needs treating.

On the other hand, you just feel worse. It’s like proof that you have no excuse, that you’re tired for no reason, and that you just need to try harder.

“You are trying,” Piotr says when you admit as much. He draws you into a hug and kisses the top of your head. “We just need to find tools so that trying isn’t so hard.”

“What if there’s nothing?” you ask in a horrified whisper. “What if we try everything and nothing works?”

He kisses the top of your head again. “Then that is okay, too. However you are is okay, myshka.”

***

“How’s the tai chi going?”

You shrug. “It’s fine.” Nathan had switched you over to low impact exercise the second he got wind of your fatigue issues. “Wade likes to do it with me; we like to try and incorporate lame dance moves into our sets to see if Nathan’ll catch us doing it.”

Alyssa chuckles and shakes her head. “And does he?”

“He definitely did when Wade started doing the worm.”

The two of you laugh together.

“And how’s your task setting going?” Alyssa asks when you both settle back down. She grins when you scowl. “Ooh, I knew that’d be your reaction. I knew you were not going to like it one bit. You keep trying to eat the whole whale, sweetheart. You’re gonna choke!”

“I know, I know.” You sigh, frustrated and dejected in equal measure. “It’s just… hard. I used to be able to do so much more. And now –it’s like my body was stolen away from me.”

“I know, sweetheart. And I’m so sorry. But it’s important that you learn to readjust your scope for what’s reasonable and what’s not. Otherwise, you’re gonna keep spinning yourself in anxious circles –and you’re gonna keep making the fatigue worse by overworking yourself.”

You groan and rub at your face with your hands. “It just… it feels wrong! Like I’m being lazy! I don’t have a reason to be so tired.”

“Sure you do,” Alyssa says, as if it’s that simple. “Your body is healing. You spent a lifetime being traumatized and abused. Your body put itself on hold to help keep you alive. You’ve dealt with your anxiety, depression, and trauma to the point where you’re stable, so now all those years of stress and pain are finally catching up. This is your body’s way of saying ‘hey, it’s my turn!’ So, now you need to listen to it.”

“But what if I don’t get better?” you ask, voice fraying. “What if I’m like this forever?”

She shrugs, tucking her braids over her shoulder. “That could happen; the amount of trauma you went through would be more than enough to result in a permanent presentation of chronic fatigue syndrome. But it could also get better, too. There’s no point in trying to predict the outcome.”

“But if I don’t get better, I’ll have to step down from being an X-Man.”

“There is more to this life than being an X-Man, honey,” Alyssa says, smiling warmly at you. “You have an entire world to discover. You just might have to do it at a different pace than everyone else. Your goal isn’t to get back to being an X-Man. Your goal is to take care of yourself.”

You tuck your knees under your chin and wrap your arms around your legs. “That doesn’t feel like enough.”

“How come?”

“Because it’s me. I have to do more to make up for the fact that it’s me.”

Alyssa points her pen at you. “That’s the anxiety and depression talking. You are more than enough, just as you are. Your worth is not based on your productivity or what you can offer to society. It’s based on your existence as a human being, that’s all.”

You drop her gaze, opting to look down at the ornate, ocean blue rug she keeps in her office instead.

“I want you to keep working on adjusting your goal setting,” Alyssa says as she jots down a few notes in your file. “Three things a day, whether it’s chore, work, or self-care related. Nothing else goes on that list unless you need to remember to do it, like taking your meds. Okay?”

You mutter your assent.

“Attagirl. I also want you to do your positive affirmations. Three times a day, plus whenever you get caught in negative thought patterns.”

You groan and slump down on the couch. “No! Positive affirmations suck!”

“They’re wonderful,” Alyssa fires back, chuckling. “They’re so good for you, so good for your brain…” She laughs when you retch, then closes your file and stands. “Alright, sweetheart. Keep at it. I’ll see you next week.”

Piotr looks up when you walk out of Alyssa’s office. “All done?”

“She’s making me do more positive affirmations,” you grumble (you can hear Alyssa laugh at your admission).

“Ah, is good for you,” Piotr says as he ushers you down the hall. “Good to say truth out loud.”

You retch again. “Not you, too. I need to go find Wade. He’ll understand.”

Your husband chuckles and shakes his head. “Come on, myshka. Back home with you.”

“Why does it have to be so far?” you groan. “It’s so much walking.”

“Are you feeling tired?”

You sigh. “Honestly, yeah. I’m really wiped out.”

Piotr puts an arm around your shoulder in a one-armed hug. “I am sorry, moya lyubov’. Would you like me to carry you?”

“I shouldn’t need carrying.”

Piotr stops. He cups your face in his massive hands, making you look up at him. “Is not about ‘should’ or ‘should not.’ If your body needs help, then you need help.”

You hesitate, but ultimately nod. “Yeah. I’d be nice if you carried me.”

He nods. He waits until you two are outside, then kneels so you can clamber on his back. “Hop on, myshka.”

You loop your arms around his neck. You wait until he has his arms looped around your legs, then point in the direction of your house. “Home, Jeeves.”

Piotr chuckles. “I am transport service, now?”

“Damn right.” You gently slap his burly chest. “Mush. I want Poptarts.”

Piotr laughs again, then sets off across the lawn.

***

You’re not alright. Not technically. Alyssa’s right that you’ve been hurt. Healing takes time, and you’re just beginning your journey.

But you’ve got Piotr. Your family. Your friends. You’ve got Dr. McCoy and Alyssa as professional support. You have a home to rest in when you’re weary.

You’re okay –and on the days that you’re not, you will be.

And that’s more than enough.

#sass writes #piotr rasputin x reader #colossus x reader #*sighs*#well this happened #tw: anxiety #tw: depression #tw: chronic fatigue #not technically canon to the series #the author needed some catharsis #angst #hurt comfort #deadpool fanfiction #x men fanfiction

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grandcollections · 4 years

Link

by @bonearenaofmyskull

Summary:

While isolated from the rest of humanity as they escape the United States on their own sailing vessel, Will grapples with what he wants out of his renewed relationship with Hannibal.

Comments:

God, what a lovely, perfectly measured, somber post-fall fic. This is one out of maybe three perfectly executed post-fall fics that are my personal canon. This one... oh, THIS one!!!.... A somber sailboat fic composed of quiet moments and introspection, surprisingly short considering the amount of emotion and resolution it packs in its small real estate, it's the perfect fic to read the very night after you finish the last episode of Hannibal for a good, cleansing cry and a full heart before you go to bed.

Will had been afraid those few weightless moments: afraid and at peace, warmed by Hannibal’s body in his arms, and it had been so right. Right that they should die there together, right that they had killed together, right that Hannibal had known what was coming and still given himself over to Will as they stood on the eroding edge together. It was right when Hannibal’s arms tightened— desperately, compulsively— around Will. In those moments, Will had loved him more than he could reckon.

But here was Will, only a few feet away from him, his fingers thoughtlessly caressing the silver circle of wheel with just the pads, gripping, releasing. There he was, the toes on one foot curling and pressing into Cetus’s decking, his bare feet peeking out from new linen pants, slightly too long without shoes on. There—impossibly there, undeniably there, inconceivably there. Close enough to touch, if Hannibal reached for him. Hannibal stored him up in his mind, in a room encompassing all the oceans of the world.

“You are so consistently insistent," Will said. Hannibal smiled. "And you so persistently resistant."

TLDR: The writing is exquisite— the tone belongs to the show, pairs perfectly with it. It’s full of restrained sensuality, has an amazing grasp on nautical terminology, a mastery of setting the scene in the loveliest way possible, and a real grasp on Hannibal-esque dialogue that was so, so satisfying. It treats both Hannibal and Will individually with such respect; Hannibal’s yearning and penchant for manipulation and his constant pushing, Will’s reservations and melancholy and frustration. Both of their fears and their pain. Hannibal is allowed to be vulnerable and afraid (while giving us heaps of pining and possessive Hannibal) and Will is allowed to be strong in a way that rings true to both their characters. It highlights the bitterly circular nature of their relationship, the way pain and tenderness seem to always be intertwined. The fic has so much angst and little resolution (just how I like it— a bitch likes blue balls). What’s unique about this fic is how it refuses to shy away from any facet of the twisted, tremulous place Hannibal and Will would be post-fall — the immense confusion, the yearning and learning and re-learning, the sea of blood and betrayal between them. This fic is not an ending; it’s a beginning, and that’s its true strength.

(much) more detailed review below the cut!

I'll talk about the writing first! (I'm being shockingly coherent here considering how much I incoherently screamed while reading/ in the fic comments). The TONE! is literal perfection. IMMACULATE. Only a few paragraphs in and I felt like I was watching the show, I FELT the bond between the show and the fic. The aesthetics matched — a feat, as the author manages to do that with such tight, contained writing while the aesthetic of the show is outrageously, extraneously beautiful. At no point does this author resort to flowery writing or extraneous detail— every word is measured, purposeful, bare, yet bursting with feeling.

This translates to one of my favorite aspects of the writing: its restrained sensuality. I say “sensuality” instead of “sexuality” because that’s what it is— gentle, but roiling eroticism, barely communicated in the slightest of details:

He became slowly conscious of Hannibal’s steady gaze on him as he moved. He halted as he came to his door, hand on the latch. Somewhere in the back of his mind those words echoed again—Is Hannibal in love with me?—and Bedelia’s measured tones as she answered... Will turned his head but did not quite look at him. Hannibal’s attention remained steady, intent, curious. “Will?” he asked. Will went inside. Thereafter the association had him and would not let him go. He became aware of Hannibal’s attention in a manner he had never thought about much before.

... but instead he stayed with Hannibal, watching Hannibal’s face just inches from his own. Hannibal licked his lips and continued to apply pressure, watching Will watch him. They remained in this tableau, waiting for deliverance.

Hannibal peeled the shrimp and removed the veins with deft turns of his wrists, his sleeves rolled up halfway to his elbows. “I can help with that,” Will said.

Will could not resist testing his hand’s movement and felt it brush against the seam on the inside of Hannibal’s thigh. “Try to be still,” Hannibal murmured. He ran his warm palm over the muscles of Will’s shoulder again, much the same as he had smoothed the blanket fifteen minutes before, and as he had once drawn a blanket over Will’s chilled form and caressed him, Will thought idly, mere hours after shoving Abigail’s ear down his throat.

Hannibal’s lips were parted, and Will could feel his warm breath. He knew the look without needing to see it clearly: admiration and ache warring equally over his chiseled features. Consuming, as always. Drinking him in. Taking. He wondered what Hannibal saw in his own face.

What’s glorious about this style of muted sensuality is that the power is all left to the implications — which are infinitely more than a scene in which a finite ~thing~ happens— to what’s unsaid, not done (but yearned for). Yearning (oh, there is so much yearning) takes a front seat. As a huge fan of Hemingway’s iceberg theory and contained writing in general, I loved this style.

The physical descriptions of the boat and the beauty of the sea were always lovely and anchoring. This author has a ridiculous command of the nautical world, and even if I didn’t understand all of it I deeply appreciated the attention to detail —

Hannibal had been a long time indoors and not a molecule of this natural beauty was lost on him. But mostly he watched Will. Will did not see this world of ultraviolet glare and sunblind desaturation as Hannibal did, but rather with the eye of a mariner and a fisherman. In the previous week, Hannibal had coaxed him into voicing some of his observations, and seeing life through Will's eyes had been in its way as fascinating as viewing death. A loon's laughing cry rose and passed on more than one occasion, and Will commented that it was a good sign for the fishery, that there must be a good number of menhaden, a baitfish, in the Bay that year...

A diffuse glow of sunlight illuminated his face from below, as the sun peeked through the skylights and lit up the woodwork and white upholstery in the saloon. It warmed the recesses of Hannibal’s sculpted face and made his eyes glow, more amber than brown.

There was no word on the weather, of the hot and unnatural stillness that held Hannibal and himself in its unrelenting grip.

The quotes at the beginnings of the chapters were also a really nice touch!

Hannibal's voice, his elite brand of dialogue— cyclical, cutting, seemingly random but never actually so— is captured perfectly; a difficult feat. It was so satisfying to read:

“Moments are all that we need, Will. Enough moments, strung together, make eternity.”

"To feel intensely is not a symptom of weakness, Will. It's the mark of the truly alive."

This makes the hannigram conversations feel so authentic, so classically them, with Hannibal's philosophical overtures, the religious imagery, the refusing to shy away from previous interactions/conflict between them, and prodding and digging into Will as he loves to do, as he can't resist doing. Combined with Will’s insolence and the way he can surprise Hannibal, can (briefly) render hims speechless, the conversations could be scenes pulled from the show.

I deeply loved and appreciated the instances of Hannibal pushing, of refusing to let things go (more on that later), of behaving instinctually (especially when Will pulls strong emotion from him). It rings so true to the character— Hannibal’s worst vice (with Will at least) is his inability to control his black impulses when he's overcome with feeling when it comes to Will, especially if it's negative, burning emotion like betrayal, jealousy, or hurt. (See: Mizumono, Dolce). Then Hannibal becomes a viper, lunging and striking without thinking, poisoning the space between them.

Hannibal’s continuous pushing was a product of the author refusing to ignore the latent issues that would lie between our favorite murder husbands post-fall. A lot of fics jump straight into murder-husbands epilogue or Will-is-immediately-as-bloodthirsty-and-happily-cannibalistic-as-Hannibal (and I'm not gonna lie there's a couple of those that are favorites, writing makes all the difference for me) but this fic doesn't do that. I’ll admit that it’s very much not a focus of the fic, there is absolutely no exploration of how Will feels about killing or cannibalism, if he felt powerful, if he wants to chase that feeling, no exploration of “it’s beautiful”. It’s not a weakness of the fic, just very glaringly not a part of it. This fic is severely focused on Hannigram’s complicated feelings about each other, in a dreamlike isolated place. The fic doesn’t bother itself with morality, doesn’t place judgement, positive or negative, on any of those acts. It also doesn’t dismiss them from the future, and any realistic future would involve such acts. As I said before, this fic is a beginning.

But, yes, back to my point! The fic touches on issues such as Abigail, Molly and Walter, and even the fall off the cliff by having Hannibal push Will again and again (even literally). I’m hesitant to say “explores” rather than “touches on” because it doesn’t do that, doesn’t provide a full resolution— it acknowledges these issues, establishes that they would be part of a continued conversation, and moves on. (Like I said; a beginning).

Although Will rarely (or may actually never) bring up any of his own issues— he only engages when forced to by Hannibal— he does display strength in typical Will ways, through resistance and insolence.

What Hannibal wanted was what Will had shared with Molly and Walter... He did not want to give these things to Hannibal.

A lot of fics will have Will either shy away from any discussion of Molly and Walter, because they’re ugly and difficult to execute well, and so they are erased as if they never existed— or they will simply have Will completely demote and reject Molly and Walter and the life he lived in Maine. But in this fic, Will is still protective of them, even as a memory, even as something that exists completely in the past, even as he moves forward with Hannibal. It’s a display of strength, of non-compliance, that I love.

Will shows strength in other ways, too. While he doesn’t start many of the difficult conversations as Hannibal does (as only insightful Hannibal can do), once engaged he’s present and sharp, sometimes unyielding and even hurtful. Will doesn’t shy away from the bitterness of the walls placed between them, walls that aren’t made of matter but of space— space Will placed between them, space Hannibal took (and continues to try to take) from him.

The result are many (beautiful) references to their past, to the rivers of blood between them:

The grief of their years apart flooded after, with the weight of what they had done to each other and what they had suffered at each other’s hands. The shadows of pain and stains of blood surrounded them, filling the boat, threatening to sink it and carry them both to the bottom of the sea.

He had been sure, and he was still sure- they had to deal with each other, to grope their way through their shared maze of long-stored griefs and the dead ends of failed trust.

Hannibal had awoken, and Will’s peace fled.

This last gutting quote takes me to another hallmark of this fic for me— a truly beautiful and mature display of their mutual unhappiness, a living example of “be careful what you wish for”. Both men have wished for this (for different lengths of time and in different degrees, yes, but they wished for it)— to be alone together, which is to not be alone, finally (“we are both alone without each other”). But now that they have it, they learn that they have to actually be together, and that perhaps they don’t know to do that, or at least how best to do that. They learn that there’s so much pain and unresolved emotion to contend with, when faced with the nothing but the other and time.

And so, after the story ends, they don’t leap into happily-ever-after. Instead, they leap into explorations of their unresolved feelings and their own failings. There’s such a deep understanding of both men’s failings, the unique ways in which their hearts are broken — there’s even a beautiful mirror where both men (separately) reflect on the ways in which they’re not enough for the other.

As then, Hannibal knew he had little with which to fight this enemy. He had no secrets left to reveal, no curiosity to exploit, no monsters to fight, no daughter to share, no one left to save but Will himself. He had only Hannibal Lecter, and that had never been enough.

Will wondered what equally tender and ravenous urge had brought Hannibal forward to watch over him while he slept... He tried to imagine if there might ever be any way he could give Hannibal enough to sate him. Maybe there was, if Hannibal had succeeded in sawing his way into Will’s head and eaten his brain after all. Will could not see it otherwise. The whole of Will’s entire life and being was not enough. It had never been enough.

This whole thing is both gorgeous and tragic, both of them harboring imagined shortcomings and impossible desires. Will wonders if literal consumption, to be eaten or allowing himself to be possessed in every other way, is the only thing that will sate Hannibal. And this Will is, very definitively, not willing to do that. (I’m not averse to fics where Will is— when done well, it’s supremely good). And Hannibal has always used Something Else to hook Will, to keep Will, and so the tragedy is in the hypothetical— what could have happened had he resisted some of his own worst impulses? Did Hannibal behave this way because of Will’s resistance, or would Will not have resisted him, rejected him, had he not been so manipulative, coercive, demanding, taking? *Sigh.* I also love that Hannibal is allowed to acknowledge his own failings and betrayals in this fic; it doesn’t always exists in post-fall fics (again, it's usually Will apologizing for his false life with Molly, etc). It makes for some delicious angst.

And my god, is the angst good! Striking, painful, gutting, love that for meee!!!! (I genuinely do!)

Will did not speak, not even to thank Hannibal. It stung.

BABEYYYY NOOOO why do the SIMPLEST sentences fucking destROYYYY me?!!

Does that make you feel better?” Will asked in a low voice. “It’s not enough that you take everything else—you have to take even the symbols of anything I had that wasn’t about you?”

Reaching out, he gripped the fabric of Hannibal’s shirt in his hand, closing his fist around it slowly. “Maybe that should tell you something.” Hannibal twitched slightly—Will had caught some of his chest hair—but he remained passive. It was Will’s weak arm, his right, and so the gesture was just that: a gesture, made for no better reason than emphasis. But it felt good to have Hannibal under him, looking surprised.... “What should it tell me, Will?” “Some things”—Will breathed deeply through his nose, trying to steady himself—“do not belong to you.” His voice came low and quiet. Hannibal’s hand came up and touched his arm, moving up to the recently injured shoulder, running his palm over Will’s shirt, passing his fingers over the roughness of scars beneath. “I only wish to know you.”

literally SCREAMING INCOHERENTLY!!! I haven’t even used the worst (best) angsty bits — gotta save something for the actual fic! so go go go!!!

This deep understanding of both Will and Hannibal as separate individuals shines throughout the fic, but I’d like to showcase some really strong character lines. On Hannibal:

Hannibal was pleased with his age and the experiences that fueled it: every moment he lived he had snatched from God’s own sticky fingers.

He knew that Hannibal could and did partition his mind against such associations, that his affection was every bit as real as his violence... He could only find and explore this newly tender and painful place within him, like a man who cannot keep from tonguing an aching tooth.

... the mercurial author of both his pain and his relief.

He had probably investigated all of Will's belongings at some point.

Hannibal could believe, but he could never know.

(^ one of my favorite parts of the fic; the recurring explanation of Hannibal’s desire to possess Will is a product of his fear of not knowing him. This line is so simple and well done, yet full of anguish.)

Will had seen Hannibal’s heart break enough times to recognize it in his stillness, in the slight thrust of his jaw beneath closed lips, in the shifts between denial and acceptance in his brown eyes, which could find no safe place to rest in the landscape of Will’s face.

(i’m EMO.) Okayokay, Will’s character lines are just as fantastic:

He would be unable to tend his right arm well with his left hand, and Hannibal would insist, and he would be forced to give in. Will wished it did not matter.

(THIS. LINE. So much communicated about Will's mingled frustration and acceptance, about the power imbalance in this relationship, in just six words.?

He was so tired of it-tired of the vulnerability, of dependency, tired of the torture of needing comfort, of wanting comfort from his tormentor.

Will had adopted his trademark flat affect by the second of these sessions. He would stare ahead, at the pulse at the base of Hannibal’s throat, following Hannibal’s instructions to the letter, but he might as well have been the walking dead for all the emotion he expressed. He spoke when spoken to and offered nothing. (my chest hurts, oh will)

Will was a dark presence near him, slim and sharp as a cutlass.

And then he smiled, gray eyes lifting to Hannibal’s, bringing Hannibal’s heart into his throat. He smiled that sad smile of his, the smile that could contain oceans of sweetness and bitterness all at once.

✨ and this line, that encompasses both of them:

It still hurt, to be so vulnerable. It hurt that Hannibal had turned on him and could have drowned him or let him drown, yet again after so many times down this path. It hurt that Hannibal lived day to day and moment to moment, awaiting Will’s next betrayal.

and oh, oh this fic is rife with lovely hannigram passages:

Hannibal seemed to sense his weariness. “We’re always braver in the face of our own pain than in the face of the pain of those we love,” he said quietly. He turned his attention back to Will’s arm and let the conversation rest.

Is Hannibal in love with me? he had asked... Will had been enormously afraid of either answer. Hannibal continued to cut the bell pepper in to a twisting spiral of red, his face and body still, only his hands working. “I thought of you,” Will said finally. “Often.” Hannibal’s breath released in a slow sigh. Will watched the words fill him up, set him to rest, with no outward change in his demeanor. He wished it were always so easy. Or had it always been?

His movements were slow and deliberate, less like a doctor at work than a supplicant at prayer.

(^ okokok i'm NOT going feral i'm NOT! supplication/worship/devotee imagery in tender moments between lovers/from a hopeful lover to the object of his/her devotion is my WEAKNESS)

What would you give me?” Will asked finally. “What would you have of me?” “Would you give me”—Will articulated slowly, deliberately—“Bedelia du Maurier?” Hannibal felt a thrill of surprise in his chest. Will was steady, studying. Hannibal watched the gray-blue of his irises. His pupils were constricted in the harsh daylight. “Do you want her?” Hannibal asked curiously. “No.” “I would deny you nothing.”

But, there is resolution. (Some). There is peace to be found. It comes in the form of Will letting go of the desire to ever kill Hannibal:

... dim memory of the thrill he used to get while imagining killing Hannibal came and went, just a phantom—powerless, soon forgotten. There was something freeing in the knowledge that he could not kill Hannibal even if he tried.... Will held himself over Hannibal for several long seconds. He imagined hurting him, pressing a knee to his throat and crushing his voice box, silencing that voice forever. No thrill accompanied the thought now. No pain, either. Nothing. He would never do it, he knew; he had taken his opportunity at the top of the cliff, and it would never return.

and is completed when he lets go: All of it was lost to the sea.

There is such tangible relief in Will’s deciding to let go of any illusions of killing Hannibal, and in releasing his pain to the sea. (And remember, the entire premise of this fic is Will deciding what he wants from Hannibal in this new life they find themselves in... and he decides.) With it comes such hard won, painful freedom. I literally felt a surge of relief and a burden dropped; Will’s. He is freed from having to "seek justice" or do the right thing. It's over. He can just, BE (whatever that looks like).

ps: I haven’t quoted too much from the last two chapters, as that’s where the most “plot” happens and they’re phenomenal and I can’t just copy and paste the whole chapters here. Please, just go read it! And I will link my comments: chapter 13 | chapter 14

I just... can’t say enough good things about this fic, but I’ve thoughtfully laid out everything major. It’s tremendous, satisfying, lovely. Go give it a read.

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settle-down-frohike · 5 years

Note

fic trope mashup: 38, 56

Spoilers: Redux II

Rating: R for language

38. Grief Fic 56. Awful first meeting, fill in the blanks fic

Part 2 of this (sort of a fleshing out of this) Sorry this one took me so long!! Tagging @today-in-fic and @edierone

Two nurses and a very insistent Maggie help him from the floor, huddling and fussing over him appropriately, his ears vaguely registering Scully’s voice in the background insisting that he go down to the ER to get checked out. Christ, but it was good to hear her scolding. He wished he could faint every day of his life from now on if only to hear her bark, “Mulder!!” over and over again. Voice meant breath and breath meant she yet lived. She lived. She was going to live. Isn’t that what she had meant?

They finally all agreed on allowing him a cup of juice and a cookie to bring his blood sugar to an acceptable level, provided he stay put in a chair keeping his head between his legs, which suited him just fine being that he couldn’t bring himself to meet her eyes. He had no intention of making a sobbing spectacle of himself with Bill glowering in the corner like a petulant teenager.

What passed for a cookie was bland and dry but downed easily enough with the “juice” that tasted more like a melted popsicle than an actual orange. Slowly his racing heart began to recede to an acceptable rate and the sweat coating his body began to dry, leaving him sticky and chilled. Daring a glance up, he found Maggie at Scully’s bedside, kissing her daughter’s knuckles and thanking God, oblivious to Scully’s sobering definitions of what remission really meant, that the cancer was not gone in fact but dormant. The Devil would not be defeated, only smothered for the time being. According to their faith, Satan could only truly lose his hold on this world when a Savior had been born and sacrificed to one day resurrect from the dead, eventually claiming the victory in the Last and Holy war on evil. He knew of no such savior. Not yet, not in this story.

Time had been bought nonetheless, and as for Mulder, he could only thank whomever had been listening to his offer of sacrifice in the chapel. He would meet his end in exchange for this charity, of that he was sure. If it be tomorrow, he was ready. Samantha was alive, albeit a stranger to him, and Scully’s beautiful heart was still beating. He could be done with this life in a moment knowing those two things. Til death do we part…his left ring finger faintly tingled, sympathetic nervous system recalling Maggie’s thinly veiled hint at her understanding of the order of things.

He shook his head against maudlin thoughts, reaching desperately within himself to try and find a smile or at least a joke that Bill might find inappropriate given the circumstances. Finding none and feeling suddenly claustrophobic, he mumbled an excuse to use the men’s room, feeling rather than seeing Scully’s attempts to make eye contact. He felt her reaching for him, and he wasn’t yet strong enough to be any sort of tether, so he ran. Ever selfish, and wasn’t that just like him. Maggie was joyously sobbing on her phone to their priest it seemed, blubbering something about miracles and answered prayers. Bill continued to play the part of sullen watchdog, and though he would never admit it to the towering Irishman, Mulder was grateful. However misguided his actions, he loved his sister. And maybe he was right to protect her from this ominous, looming form dressed in a suit. This fallen angel who seemed to have ushered in a good portion of their family’s sufferings.

His legs still felt limp and toneless as he searched the hallway for any sign of a restroom, which mercifully ended up being just past the nurse’s station. Before he could truly embarrass himself once again he made it to the sink and began to splash generous amounts of icy tap over his cheeks and around his neck. His heart had begun to thud again suspiciously and he had hoped he could ward off another attack of the vapors. A look into the mirror revealed glassy eyes and ashen skin, and he chastised himself inwardly for his inability to pull it the fuck together. His heart continued to pick up its pace, and yet he could not physically draw in enough oxygen to pacify its need. A sudden painful, unrelenting tension in his chest began to build until he could only collapse back against the outside of a stall, desperately tearing at his collar and tie in search of freedom from a sense of helplessness and terror that had rapidly begun to consume him, making his vision swim and the floor seem to tilt on its axis.

A hand on his shoulder made him flail out reflexively, “DON’T TOUCH ME!!” he yelled at the beige blur hovering over him.

“Dude are you ok?” he could hear it say, barely able to make out shaggy brown hair and a stout form in what looked like a uniform.

“I’m fine…” he gasped, “I just can’t breathe. My chest—“

“I’m gonna get a nurse man hold on—“

“NO! No nurse…” Oh God he was dizzy. He was going to be sick. This oaf was probably going to have the calvary with a crash cart in here at any second and Scully had seen enough of his antics for one day. God please, just give her 24 hours of respite. He could die tomorrow he promised but give her today.

“My chest…I just need to breathe. I can’t….my chest hurts…I just need to breathe…” he pulled futilely on the reigns of his galloping, runaway pulse, unable to command the beast that continued to carry him to a sure and humiliating death.

“I can’t do this..I can’t do this…I can’t…’ the words tumbled from his mouth, unbidden. The grip on his shoulder tightened, and he swatted weakly at the offending gesture.

“Hey man I think it’s a panic attack. I get’m all the time. Listen to me you gotta breathe in your nose, dude. Breathe big. Big breaths. Focus on the floor, man. Look at the tiles. Focus on the still stuff.”

Infinitesimally, the grout, then the grid like pattern of the floor came into focus, as did the owner of the west coast valley-guy accent. A janitor. Name tag: Todd…Young. No… Not young… Thirties…Flunky..Another wave of nausea washed over him as he watched the other man rise and swing the door open, then closed.

“I put my sign on the door. Just take a minute man. It’s cool.”

As the room around him expanded and stilled, the hysteria began to abate. His throat began to close around a heavy lump and stung behind his jaw, his mouth watering. He clenched his teeth and refused to cry on the grimy floor of a public restroom in front of an equally grimy guy who just so happened to have missed his calling as a therapist. With some effort, he swallowed the tears down along with his insulting first impressions. Todd sat cross-legged next to him, and remained otherwise silent for a time, allowing Mulder to finally reach some form of stasis.

“You ok dude? Man I thought you were having a heart attack. Guess I made the right call, he chuckled soberly, “Shit. I’da lost my job. You aren’t gonna die on me anyway are you?”

Mulder chuffed, “Not today.” He’d managed finally not to gulp down air. Todd nodded and added distantly, “Cancer ward, man. It happens a lot here.”

Now Mulder was truly remorseful for his earlier aggression. This guy had probably seen a lot of grief in these halls. He wondered about this Good Samaritan. Probably tossed aside by most, and yet a blessing to the injured who happened along his path. Todd. He would not forget his name.

Feeling sufficiently contrite and knowing his extended absence from Scully’s room would not go unnoticed, he gathered himself from the floor and picked up his tie to tuck in his pocket. Whatever words of thanks he could have formed during another moment when his wits were about him, they weren’t forthcoming right now. Todd heaved himself up as well, and went to retrieve his cart. One job finished, another to start. Mulder understood the feeling. It never really does end. He strode slowly from the restroom, leaving Todd to his duties, and the festering source of his malaise bubbled up like a bratty child, refusing to be ignored.

Samantha. The feel of her snatching her hand from his had been akin to a slice to his palm. Quickly over and done, leaving a gaping wound destined to scar. He had failed and yet he hadn’t. She was returned to him and yet rejected their reunion. He had her back and yet had lost her all over again.

Scully. Alive and warm and…incomprehensibly lovely… and doctoring him from a hospital bed. He was so sure that call had meant the end. And yet they had been granted, by some deity or malevolent force, another chance. A life to live or to barter for some future price, he had still to know. Why can’t he smile? Why can’t he be happy? He’d gotten what he wanted, hadn’t he? The questions presented themselves in his mind in Scully’s voice, not tauntin exactly, but coaxing him into focus on the here and now, on the what is, and not what might be. And wouldn’t that be just like her…Is just like her…because… she’s okay. Today, right now. She’s okay and in the next room to his left. The idea seemed so ridiculously improbable at that moment that he began to giggle, manically at first, then fitfully, finally collapsing into full blown sobs on the bench just outside her door. Hands hiding his face, head between his knees, just as he’d been instructed. For a moment, he had release.

#myfic #prompts #asks #fic trope mashup #i dont know why but i pictured jack black as todd lol #maybe oneday i will finish this series #i think part 1 was like a year ago

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keelywolfe · 5 years

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FIC: Ankle Biter

Summary: It’s Red’s turn to be de-aged. Luckily, Edge knows someone who has experience with babies.

Tags: Pre-Spicyhoney, Pre-Relationship, De-Aged, Baby Bones, First Times

Notes: So, I have this weird not-really-a-series-but-it-is storyline of de-aged fics. This came to me last night at 3am, while I was well-dosed with cold medicine so do with that what you will.

The stories are, in order:

A Little Edgy | A Lot Edgier | Keeping Elastic | A Bit of a Stretch

And now this one:

Read ‘Ankle Biter’ on AO3

Read it here!

~~*~~

It was close to noon when the pounding on the front door woke Stretch. Much too early to be dragging ass out of bed but whoever was exercising their fist on their door wasn’t taking ‘not home’ for an answer.

Stretch shuffled down the stairs, bathrobe hanging open over his shorts and T-shirt. He scrubbed at his dry sockets with the back of his hand, grumbling out, “yeah, yeah, keep your hair on.”

As it turned out, the knocker didn’t have any hair to cling to. Edge stood on the porch in that stiff posture of his that made Stretch wonder if he shoved a broomstick through his pelvis every morning to make sure his spine was level.

He hadn’t seen Edge in a few weeks; some shit was going down in Underfell, or that was the Fell bros’ excuse for skipping out on movie night. To have him showing up on their porch in the middle of the damn day meant things, probably none of them good.

In his arms was a bundle, wrapped up in Edge’s prized scarf. Before Stretch could even put together a ‘what the fuck’, Edge twitched aside the corner of the scarf to reveal a sleeping baby bones, one with suspiciously familiar bone structure

Stretch sighed and held open the door. Looked like his penance for skipping out on sentry duty made deliveries.

“whatever the fuck our science types are working on, they can stop anytime now,” Stretch grumbled. His own turn in short pants was still a sore point between him and Blue, his bro being torn between outright asking what was up and pretending it never happened. Just as well, Stretch wanted to talk about it again right around as much as he wanted to loan out a femur to the Dogi.

At least now they had baby clothes laying around. Red hadn't been happy about being changed into the panda outfit and Stretch nearly lost a finger to those baby shark teeth. Little bastard was quick, even when he was fun-size.

Luckily, Blue had a few cinnamon bunnies in the kitchen. Stretch was currently tearing off pieces and handing them to Red, watching in morbid fascination as he stuffed them into his sharp-toothed maw. How Red and Edge hadn’t accidentally bitten their own hands off as kids was a mystery for the ages.

Edge was still standing stiffly next to him and Stretch wondered idly if he’d forgotten to take out the broomstick this morning. Maybe that was what made Edge sound so surly when he snapped out, “Watch your language!”

That made Stretch blink. He played back everything he’d said recently in his head and came across a possible stumbling block. Disbelief was dripping from his voice as Stretch asked, “did you just tell me to not swear in front of your brother?”

To Stretch’s delight, a flush of red tinted Edge’s cheekbones, “He’s a baby.”

“your brother?” Stretch asked gleefully, handing another piece of cinnamon bunny to the brother in question. Red crammed it into his mouth, the pastry decimated instantly into mushy crumbs between those teeth. “i learned curses that left permanent scars on my soul from your brother.”

That blush heightened and truly, the heavens smiled down upon Stretch on this day. Edge didn’t give in, though, snapping out, “Not when he’s like that!”

“okay, okay, i’ll keep the rating to pg.” With the last bite of the bunny messily consumed, Stretch wiped Red’s face clean, neatly avoiding his snapping teeth. “all right, you little piranha, down you go.”

He plunked Red on the floor and sat crosslegged across from him, taking a quick picture of his scowling face with his little panda ears bobbling. Fucking adorable, all there was to it. That frown turned to glee when Stretch covered his own face with his hands, quickly peeking out to earn a chorus of happy baby burbling. Oh, yeah, he was a regular comedian for the one and under crowd.

Having Edge agree was unexpected. “You’re good with him.”

Stretch gave peekaboo a time out to send Edge a sour look. “thanks. i did manage with blue.”

But to his surprise, Edge shook his head. “No, Blue and I managed with you. You’re actually very good at this.”

A compliment from the Edgelord? Seemed like it was his turn to blush. Stretch rubbed at the back of his skull uncomfortably, mumbling out, “um, thanks.”

A little avoidance seemed to be in order. Stretch scooped up the baby, flopping on his back and dangling Red above him. The baby squealed happily, hands and legs flailing. Had Red ever been so happy in his actual childhood? Stretch had no way of knowing, but he had his doubts. He didn’t remember his own baby days, either time, but since Blue looked like he was gonna burst into tears anytime it came up, Stretch was guessing he wasn’t a bundle of sunshine as a kid.

He swore he heard bones creaking as Edge slowly lowered himself to the floor to sit by them. That broomstick was getting a workout today, for sure.

“babies are easy,” Stretch said, singsong, as Red crowed his happiness, “they pretty much stay where you put em and if they cry, you toss some food their way. at least we don’t have to worry about diapers.”

“Thank you for that mental image.” Edge hesitantly reached out to touch and hastily pulled his hand back when Red growled and snapped his teeth.

“nah, don’t poke his face. like this.” Stretch lowered Red to sit on his chest. With an effort, Stretch lifted his head from the floor, crossing his eye lights and sticking out his tongue with a loud, “plllllb!”

Red laughed in delight, slapping his tiny hands on Stretch’s rib cage with enough force to make him wince. “see? easy!”

“I’m sure being a fool is very easy for you.”

That made Stretch sit up with a scowl, setting Red back on the floor on his little bottom. “look, you asked for my help.”

But Edge looked a little melancholy, something almost wistful on his face as he said, “I did. And I appreciate it.”

Okay, yeah, it might be hard for someone like Edge to unwedge his broomstick enough for a little baby silliness. “there’s no one here. make a face for the baby.”

That scowl was not what Stretch had in mind. “I refuse to behave like a ridiculous—“

“c’mon,” Stretch coaxed. He made another silly face of his own and Red laughed gleefully. “see? he loves it!” The visible waver in Edge’s expression made him add with impulsive sincerity. “i won’t tell and i won’t tease. try it.”

Reluctantly, Edge pursed his mouth, crimson tongue slowly poking out and Edge blowing a raspberry was a sight that would stay with Stretch until the end of time.

More importantly, Red gave up the equivalent of a baby cackle and Edge smiled reluctantly.

“see! you’ve got some idiot in…you…” Stretch blinked, trailing off. Edge had turned towards him at the same moment Stretch leaned in and it left their faces entirely too close. Unwillingly, Stretch remembered that time in Underfell, Edge’s unexpected gentleness in the face of Stretch’s near panic at the nebulous memory of his childhood. Another brief moment of being too close and the temptation he’d felt then struck again, hastily shoved back as he had last time; it was a terrible idea, foolish and impulsive and it could only bring trouble.

Only Edge didn’t seem to have gotten the warning memo from his instincts because he leaned in and pressed their mouths together. Softly, almost chaste, a tender brush and Stretch pulled away with a gasp.

Something unreadable was glittering in Edge’s eye lights, open and vulnerable in a way he hadn’t even been when he was temporarily a baby bones himself.

“oh,” Stretch said, blankly. His own thoughts were a turmoil, what the fuck, this was…they didn’t….

“I’m sorry,” Edge said abruptly. That vulnerability was fading and it made something lurch painfully in Stretch’s soul. Edge started to stand, drawing away. But he didn’t fight when Stretch caught hold of his scarf, sinking back down as he was pulled into another kiss.

The scream of Stretch’s instincts was muffled by his soft groan as he deepened the kiss. Edge’s mouth was sweetly pliant beneath his, teeth parting, and those sharp teeth were easier to navigate like this, with equal parts care and tongue. The tang of his magic was a heady spice, his lax tongue coming slowly alive against Stretch’s and he cupped Edge’s jaw in one hand, swallowing his sigh and this was…oh, this was…

“if you two are about done, can someone get me my fucking pants?”

They jerked apart, heads turning as one to see a full-sized version of Red scowling at them. The remains of the panda pajamas were draped haphazardly over his bare pelvis, which left a horrifying amount of scarred bone on display.

Stretch cleared his throat, “i didn’t teach him that word.”

“No, I’m sure he’s known the word fuck since birth.” Edge’s brusqueness made Stretch’s soul sink, fuck, he’d known this was a stupid idea, he’dknown it.

Glumly, Stretch scooted back to sit on the couch, eye lights discreetly averted as Edge drew a pair of shorts from his inventory and handed them to his brother. He didn’t watch as Red scrambled into them, muttering increasingly foul curses beneath his breath as he accepted shirt, shoes, and jacket as well.

Only when a pair of untied sneakers appeared in his line of vision did Stretch look up again.

Red lit a cigar, exhaling a foul cloud of smoke even as he smirked. “welp, thanks for looking after me, honey bun. if it ever happens again, don’t think babysittin’ requires that much inspecting my bro’s tonsils.”

Not much Stretch could say to that. From Red’s viciously sharp grin, he knew it; it wasn’t even worth pointing out that they didn’t have tonsils. Stretch managed a mute nod and Red wandered off in the direction of the door. He didn’t wait, heading out into the snow even as Edge hesitated by the sofa.

“Thank you for your help,” Edge said stiffly and Stretch almost choked on a bitter laugh. Broomstick firmly back in place, check, and now seemed like a great time to head over to Muffet’s, get an early start in honey-laced denial.

Only the gentle touch of fingertips against his cheekbone made him startle, involuntarily looking up.

Those crimson eye lights weren’t as open as they’d been only moments before, but it was a close thing. “I’ll see you at the next movie night?”

“um, yeah, sure,” Stretch said dumbly. Those fingertips lingered, the touch firming, holding him still as Edge seemed to come to a decision. He swooped down like a damn bat, making Stretch jerk, but the soft brush of Edge’s mouth against his own again stilled him. Too brief by far and he was gone just as quickly, following his brother out with a quiet click of a closing door.

Stretch exhaled slowly, touched his mouth with trembling fingertips. How was it, he wondered distantly, that all of them were somehow getting turned into baby bones for a day but the only mystery Stretch cared about came from a kiss?

Suddenly, he was a lot more interested in watching ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ this weekend than he’d been a few hours ago. Stretch got to his feet, gathering up the shredded panda jammies and dusting cinnamon bunny crumbs off the table to disappear into the carpet.

Time to get dressed and head out to the last half of sentry duty for a nap. And if Stretch’s thoughts wandered back occasionally to the memory of a kiss, well, hey, his bro could be proud, right?

At least he was trying to solve a puzzle.

-finis-

#spicyhoney #papcest #keelywolfe #underfell #underswap #underfell papyrus #underswap papyrus #underfell sans

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gffa · 5 years

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Name ten favourite characters from ten different things (books, tv, film, etc.) then tag ten people

Tagged by @thewillowbends. These lists are always hard, but that’s kind of the fun of them! And that’s why we cheat and sometimes have lots of ties because no you can’t make me choose. 1. Thor from Marvel’s Cinematic Universe - I am a sucker for a character who has their shit together but can still be human and face ridiculously traumatic experiences and come through them whole because they had a rock solid foundation to begin with. From being thrown out of Asgard, made mortal, and taking that chance to suck it up and make himself better that he did that himself to the loss of pretty much his entire family and most of his people and his sense of purpose, the thing I love about Thor is that he keeps getting back up. That kind of fortitude is even more appealing that the ridiculously hot lightning powers. 2. Tsukino Usagi from Sailor Moon - I always loved her in the ‘90s anime, but reading the manga skyrocketted her into this special untouchable place in my heart. The beginning of her journey is a girl who is so fragile that she would kill herself if she didn’t have the emotional support around her, who had to take step after step forward to find her inner strength, who wasn’t weak or terrible for her fragility, but instead her story was worth telling for it, that the point she started out as was just as valuable as the place she ended up, where she could be the one to stand up to save her friends and get them back herself, that journey was worth telling. I LOVE HER TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH. 3. Thranduil and Maedhros from Tolkien’s Legendarium - It was really hard to choose, because I love a lot of the characters (and I feel badly leaving Thingol and Maglor off the list and I will fight a bitch for Galadriel and Elrond and listen Glorfindel is pure joy and also the internet is too mean to Elwing and I kind of want alllll the Melkor and Manwe fic because sobs they’re brothers shut up you can’t make me not have feelings about that, but also trashbag Melkor/Sauron and--) but those are the two I usually wind up wanting to know their pov in a fic I’m reading or have them around when shit’s going down because I want to see what they’ll do or I just miss them the most when they’re not there. 4. Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars - If you asked me to pick between them, I don’t know that I could. Yeah, sure, I love Obi-Wan ridiculously, but if you give me five minutes, I’m pretty much always going to drift back to talking about Anakin and his issues instead. I’m not sure I can even boil them down into a nutshell about why I like them so much, they’re the kind of characters that I love so intensely and with such big, sweeping thoughts, that I’d have to write a whole essay. But my best attempt: Anakin’s being both dumbass and genius at the same time, being charming and magnetic while also being a bag of garbage at the same time, who had such good in him but was also an absolute monster, who I desperately want to be happy, but I also struggle to forgive him sometimes and that’s saying a lot for a fictional character, he’s brilliant enough to truly carry an entire Saga about him. And Obi-Wan is the bedrock of all goodness in that galaxy, he could be obnoxious at times and he didn’t always see Anakin clearly, but he always cared and he remained good and hopeful, he continued to serve the galaxy, no matter what it threw at him, and even forgave Anakin in the end, because he always rose above. That’s it, that’s my shit right there. 5. Inoue Orihime from Bleach - ORIHIME WAS MY GIRL FROM THE VERY BEGINNING, her unwavering kindness and care, her desire to be soft in a world (and, frankly, fandom) that wanted her to be hard and to fight everything, when she didn’t want to fight, she wanted to heal, she wanted to have fun and be weird, she wanted everyone to be happy, all of that made me love her. Her loopiness is an absolute delight, but what I loved so much about her is that Orihime had the powers/abilities to be quite possibly the most OG of the entire cast, she could reject reality itself, and she never once wanted to use it to beat anyone up or to destroy anything, she wanted to make friends with her fairies and she wanted to help people. That girl refused to let the world make her anything less than kind and caring and sweet. She was THE BEST. 6. Hara Akiha and Umeda Hokuto from Hanazakari no Kimitachi e/Hana-Kimi - Sometimes we all fall in love with those minor characters and they just fucking consume us. A lot of it came from that they were both hot, they were both hilarious, and so they were just really fun, but what really got me was that I genuinely loved everything Nakajo did with Umeda’s character. There weren’t a lot of gay characters in shoujo manga that weren’t complete comedic relief, where their sexuality was the joke. Yes, Umeda was often a humorous character (all of the cast was) but he firmly was completely uninterested in high school kids, he liked adult men, and his advice to Mizuki may have been crabby as hell, but it was genuine and good. His sexuality wasn’t the punchline of his character. Then there was Akiha, who was also comedic, but his bisexuality (another rare thing to find in manga!) had nothing to do with the humor of his character, all of it was in the way he chased after Umeda. He was a genuine suitor (and, reading the post-manga character interviews, apparently they got together, OMG MY HEART) and the kiss they shared was treated just as seriously as any straight kiss would have been. That meant a lot to me, even though I’d have loved the characters just because they were so interesting and Umeda’s struggle to get over the guy who never cared for him and to let himself be vulnerable with someone that he could actually care about, was so great. 7. Yuki Eiri from Gravitation - I can’t begrudge anyone for giving this show a lot of shit (and I definitely am going with anime!Yuki here, rather than manga!Yuki) or dismissing it as being god-awful, because it probably was pretty cringeworthy. But Yuki got under my skin because he was one of the first characters I resonated with where his depression was real and it was ugly. He could be cruel to people around him, he pushed them away, not just half-heartedly, but genuinely, and he couldn’t stand being vulnerable, because it touched on all the terrible places that had been damaged by what Kitazawa had done to him. And he couldn’t just be magically fixed by Tohma’s devotion or Shuuichi’s unwavering amounts of love poured into him. He couldn’t just be fixed with a hug or one good crying session. He was damaged and it was going to be a hell of a long hike back up to anything even a little bit normal. Especially back at that time, I felt like depression and trauma were never given any real weight, then along comes this ridiculous BL series that just refused to make Yuki anything less that genuinely damaged and it hit all these places in wee me that was struggling through my own depression that couldn’t just be cured with some hugs and people telling me they loved me.

8. Hashiba Touma from Yoroiden Samurai Troopers - I’m not sure I could even say why this character got under my skin the way he did, other than that there was definitely a group of us who were SUPER into the show and it was fun to make a playground for ourselves, and Touma just really got to me. The brilliant character who didn’t always know how to relate to others, but who cared very deeply about them, who gravitated to those who were better at social interaction than he was, who were better able to connect to people than he was, that he found this group where he really belonged, that just really touched wee me’s heart. 9. Tendou Souji from Kamen Rider Kabuto - THIS OBNOXIOUS HOT MESS I LOVE HIM SO MUCH. It was hard not to put Kagami on the list as well, because so much of what I love about Tendou is illustrated through his relationship with Kagami (whom I also love on his own), but I think I keep coming back to that I love his issues the most. He’s the best at everything and so it puts distance between him and everyone else, all the more so because he’s so obnoxious about it and doesn’t slow down for anyone else to catch up, but the thing is that there’s a very caring heart underneath all that. He loves his sisters, he loves Kagami, he even kind of tolerates the rest of their weird gang, and trying to find that difficult line of his superiority over the others versus that he wants them to catch up to him in his own way, all while being the most condescending dick ever, is absolute joy. 10. Relena Darlian from Gundam Wing - I had a difficult path to liking Relena, because so much of fandom boiled her down to either being a creepy stalker who got in the way of Heero/Duo or they only ever wrote her in romantic pairing stuff with Heero, neither of which really encouraged me to like her. But, as time went on and I rewatched the series a couple of times, I realized there’s so much more to her. She’s a character who has to walk an impossible line between both of the legacies that weigh on her, the birth family that she never knew but maybe she could help bring peace to the world by taking up that name, by trying to bring back the Sanq Kingdom that promoted absolute pacifism and peace. Yet, ultimately, for all that her relationship with Zechs is really important and she was the heir to that kingdom, she chose to be Relena Darlian. She choose to try to bring peace to the world by standing up on her own as a politician, not a figurehead queen of the world. The struggle to figure that out, who she wants to be and how she wants to achieve it, to go from a sheltered young girl at the start of the series to someone who has seen how terrible war is, is far more interesting than either of those first options for me! And I’ll tag @forcearama (and if I couldn’t put Obi-Wan as all ten entries, neither can you!) @belldreams @subskywalker @cacchieressa @bpdanakins @glompcat @writegowrite @fireflyfish @evaceratops @amarielah and anyone else who wants to do it that I’m not sure I feel quite like I’m able to try peer pressuring you into it. ♥ I love seeing these from anyone who wants to do them, I’m just never sure if I’m allowed to go HEY YOU DO THIS THING. orz

#i should have a personal tag around here somewhere

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blackberreh-art · 5 years

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The Bird and the Wyrm - part 2

Because I posted this on twitter, y’all can get this as well huhuh. This will be done in the same kind of vein as the choose your own adventure fics I used to do, only this’ll just be added onto as I write without reader input for now.

This is a continuation of the XueXiao Beast AU drabble I wrote before!

Things had been good. No, better than good - great.

On the edges of that small city, it was just him and his Daozhang. And Little Blind. Hell, even that little shit of a fae girl was tolerable - fun to pester, fun to argue with, good enough to allow to stick around. Her backtalking was amusing, even if she tried to vie for the Daozhang’s attention and hardly allowed them any time to themselves.

But then he showed up. That damned Xiezhi. The one his Daozhang gave his sight for.

In a roundabout way, it was all Xue Yang’s fault. Maybe if he had shown some restraint, maybe -

But no. It had been for revenge. Revenge on both Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan. They had deserved it, for ruining everything -

It had ultimately allowed him a place by his Daozhang’s side. He Couldn’t complain. Shouldn’t.

But then he came, and he ruined everything, and the hatred Xue Yang felt was all consuming. His carefully crafted identity, the life he’d built, his plans of revenge - all gone out the window because of that high and mighty beast thought to step in and - and what, save Xiao Xingchen? Save him from what?

Phoenixes were immortal! If Xue Yang managed to kill him, then he’d easily just rise once more from his ashes! Even those eyes he had so valiantly sacrificed for Song Lan would be replaced, so it truly wasn’t a loss!

What Xue Yang had been trying to do was to - to earn the Daozhang’s trust. To make it so that he was so completely attached that the inevitable betrayal would utterly break him. And Xue Yang was close. So, so close. No matter how much he taunted and ridicule, the phoenix patted him on the head and gave him that pretty, gentle smile. No matter how much Xue Yang bit and tore at him, the phoenix cried out for more.

He laughed at Xue Yang’s jokes. He helped polish his scales and groom his hair. He returned Xue Yang’s biting kisses with gentle moans.

He gave him candy, without Xue Yang having to ask.

Song Lan showing up ruined everything.

He pressed his teeth to the bared column of Xiao Xingchen’s throat and revelled and the shudder he felt wrack the phoenix’s form. Xingchen’s wings were pinned against the wall, his legs having fallen open to allow Xue Yang to slot between them, and one slender, pale hand was wrapped tightly around one of Xue Yang’s horns - not pushing him away, but pulling him closer.

Glee churned Xue Yang’s insides. The fear he felt on his Daozhang was palpable, yet he wasn’t trying to escape, or even pull away - and what, exactly, did that mean?

Had Xiao Xingchen… missed him?

Or… was that just wishful thinking on Xue Yang’s part?

Well, regardless, right now he had the phoenix pinned against the wall, his flesh and blood ripe for the taking, and Xue Yang laughed. Laughed and pressed close, and Xingchen arched against him with a strangled noise, and Xue Yang couldn’t hold himself back any more. His teeth sank into that perfect pale flesh, the iron tang of blood filled his mouth, and he heard Xingchen’s lips part in a wet gasp, his body jerking in Xue Yang’s hold. It was undoubtedly pain that the phoenix was feeling - Xue Yang wasn’t gentle where he gripped his waist. His teeth sank in deep, as deep as they would go, would easily be able to tear out the mass of flesh in his mouth if he so tried, but the dragon didn’t want that - not exactly. It was pain Xingchen felt, but even still -

He arched closer, pulled Xue Yang to him by his horn, let out a whine that went straight down to Xue Yang’s groin, and fuck but he had missed this -

He wanted to take the phoenix right then and there. wanted to hold him against the wall and plunder that hot, fiery passage until he was screaming, and letting everyone in Koi Tower know that he was being taken so brutally, so thoroughly, so completely that it left no thought for anything -

Not their surroundings. Not their identities. Not their pasts.

And certainly not Song Lan!

“Xue Yang-” Xiao Xingchen panted, his usual musical voice hoarse - breathless. The hand on his horn tugged again, more insistently, but Xue Yang didn’t budge. He merely let out a purr and lapped up the blood from the marks his teeth had created before the red liquid could stain the phoenix’s white, white robes.

He’d missed this. Missed the taste. Missed the way those marks closed right back up, allowing Xue Yang to make them all over again. Missed this wonderful, beautiful creature that he could ruin over and over and over again and not completely, utterly destroy it-

(But he wanted to destroy it. More than anything. Of course he did! That was what the game was! He wanted to destroy Xiao Xingchen and ruin him and make him wish for a death that he could not come back from. Xue Yang wanted it. He wanted it, he did, he truly did-)

“Xue Yang!” The phoenix tried again, but Xue Yang only purred once more. Gentled his touches, softened his grip. He nuzzled that elegant, pale throat, trailed his lips all the way up to the phoenix’s rapidly racing pulse point, and gave it a soft kiss.

Xiao Xingchen shuddered.

As much as he would never admit it, the phoenix loved the way Xue Yang touched him. The way that sharp, all encompassing pain could easily turn to gentle, soothing pleasure was addicting to the phoenix in a way that left him incoherent. Many evenings in that coffin house, Xue Yang had enjoyed discovering that about him. Who would have thought the righteous, just Daozhang had such a filthy, depraved side to him?

The phoenix seemed to realise that calling the dragon wasn’t amounting to much, so instead he tried speaking - sounding very much addled, much to Xue Yang’s pride. “We - we shouldn’t, Xue Yang. Not - not here - anyone could-” Xue Yang let out a childish whine, trailing his mouth up to nip at that cutely feathered ear, delighting in the twitch it gave. “But Daozhang… haven’t you missed me? I’ve missed you so much…” To punctuate his point, he ground against the phoenix, his hardness easily distinguishable even through the thickness of their robes.

#XueXiao #mo dao zu shi #mdzs #Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation #xue yang #xiao xingchen #my writing #lemon

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kiribaku-some-cute-stuff · 6 years

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All tongue taped - Seroroki

So at first I thought this was going to be “the 5 times Sero tried to confess his feelings and the 1 time he did fic.” However, considering this is me, your resident edgelord I have something else in mind for the ending so it’s gonna be “The 5 times Seroroki tried to confess their feelings and the 1 time they did.”

The first time was Sero’s failed attempt at confessing. They were in their second year at UA, and he was so desperately nervous. He and Todoroki were talking across their balconies, it had become a tradition for them. Sero was about to say it but then Todoroki admitted he kinda sorta liked someone. So Sero bit his tongue and watched Todoroki from afar as Shouto was very happy and hopelessly in—well not love exactly, but he was deep in the feels for his s/o.

The second time it was Todoroki’s turn, he had truly cared for the person he was seeing at the time but something—something had never been quite right… Todoroki felt like he was trying very hard to make it work but that feeling was nonexistent with his current dating partner. Meanwhile… he never ever had lost chemistry with a certain boy who had been one room away from him for the last 3 years. So he had broken up with said person he’d been seeing and started working up the nerve to tell Sero. Tragically… unbeknownst to him, he had already missed his shot some time ago. He was across the lunchroom when he saw it. Sero was just laughing but then all of a sudden he saw a girl from class b peck Sero’s cheek and then his lips. Todoroki felt his stomach drop and he kept quiet.

The third time it was Sero’s turn again, after UA he had broken up with his girlfriend. She was moving all the way to Nagoya and they kinda fizzled out anyway. Sero was a little surprised when Todoroki offered to be his roommate in an apartment he knew he couldn’t afford on his own. They had just gotten home from a long shift. Sero sat on their couch and Todoroki offered him a beer, Sero took him up on that and Todoroki gave him one. They decided neither of them were cooking and ordered in instead. When Todoroki sat on the couch their legs touched and Sero went from being half asleep to wide awake. What the fuck? Hadn’t these feelings died in high school??? He could feel himself blushing and fuck it. Both of them were single, yeah they were roommates but they’d been friends a solid 7 years what was the worst thing that could happen? Todoroki saying that he only digs Sero as a friend. Sero was about to say it, to tell Todoroki everything but then their doorbell rang. The food. Sero lost his nerve as soon as Todoroki left the couch to get it.

The fourth time it was back on Todoroki. He had no idea how anyone convinced him into going to a Karaoke bar for his Birthday. But here he was everyone promised him he wouldn’t have to sing, and everyone kept their word. It was actually nice and pretty funny to see most of his friends crash and burn trying to sing. The only two who could sing were Jirou and Kirishima—well that wasn’t true. Sero could, but he never did, he was ridiculously shy about it, which might honestly a good thing right now. There was tension building up between them it wasn’t bad or anything. But it made Todoroki really nervous, he was worried blurting out his feelings every time Sero so much as looked at him. Todoroki had been too consumed by his own thoughts before he realized Sero actually gone up to sing. When he heard Sero’s voice and saw him smile… Todoroki decided that night he’d tell Sero for sure this time. He didn’t.

The fifth time was the worst time. They were just doing some ordinary shopping on their day off, trying for the life of them to get up the courage to hold the others’ hand. The both secretly thought there was something between the two of them, something warm and something that was hopefully mutual. Their pinky fingers almost touched when the earthquake hit Tokyo.

Even though they were in civilian garb they still did everything to get everyone out of the building before it collapsed. When the ground stopped shaking to went back in to do one last sweep of the place. As they turned to leave the entire ceiling caved in. Sero managed to get them to an area where they weren’t crushed to death but Todoroki broke his leg and Sero… Sero might have looked in better shape than Todoroki except for the piece of shattered glass Sero had protruding from his abdomen.

“Sh-shit… Todoroki… you ok?”

“yeah my leg’s broken but otherwise I think I’m ok, are you—S-sero.” Todoroki could barely breathe when he saw Sero. Todoroki suspected that it was like an iceberg, he could only see a part of it but the majority of the shard was probably embedded inside Sero.

“it’s ok… it’ll be ok. Remember help is coming and those people knew we’re in here. I just need to make sure not to move the glass. Man, being a hero sucks sometimes huh?” He tried to laugh but ended up mainly coughing.

It wasn’t long before they heard a voice—Uraraka’s telling them to hang on and that they were working on getting them out. Todoroki called out and gave her their medical status, he was surprised when she gasped—oh she hadn’t realized it was them who were stuck in there… her voice started to tremble but she held it together and pleaded with them to hold on.

After a while Sero started to shake a little he said he was just a little cold. That Todoroki was right he should have worn the extra layer after all. Todoroki felt like crying.

Instead Todoroki put his arm around Sero very very carefully and warmed him up with his left side. “Any better?”

“Much, th-thanks man.” Sero would try so hard to show that he was ok but he was in an excruciating amount of pain. If we’re being honest it was taking everything from both of them to not scream, cry or pass out, but even with all of this mess a single thought passed through their minds. ‘I need to tell him before I go.’

”Sero… H-Hanta we really might die here and there’s, there is something I have to tell you.”

“Don’t. At least not like this… I-I think I need to tell you something similar but not like this. If we, if we say it now then h-heh one of us will definitely die and what will have been the point then, right?”

Tears were streaming down Todoroki’s face so Sero gave him a weak smile, and that was all Todoroki needed to give Sero one back. “Can I kiss you then?”

“Yes.” Sero said giving Todoroki a small nod, “please.”

Todoroki leaned over to him, palming Sero’s cheek as he pressed his lips softly but also desperately against Sero’s. Sero moved just a bit as to not disturb the angry sharp intruder in his side. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go, it was supposed to be exciting not terrifying, it wasn’t fair. Sero parted his lips just a little and Todoroki wasted no time in deepening the kiss, because even though it was their first kiss… it very well could be their last.

The time they did.

They got out of the rubble.

Sero was rushed to surgery and Todoroki was examined very carefully to make sure nothing else was wrong when the doctors healed him. Sero has a longer recovery time, but once he was able he received a healing quirk that fixed him right up. Their agencies insisted that they get 6 weeks of paid medical leave. For half of that time… they don’t dare to mention the kiss, or what they had been wanting to tell each other since their UA days. They both thought they may have imagined it. That they were just delirious from the shock of it all…

Finally, they get around to talking about it. It’s a little painful for them at first and a little bit frightening because after this there was no way they could hide behind the illusion that it was just a hallucination or a dream, but slowly it becomes okay. They assure the other that no… it wasn’t just because they were scared, it was real. It was all real, and they say the words they had been so stupidly fearful of for all these years.

‘I love you, I have always loved you.’

#seroroki #todosero #todoroki shouto #sero hanta #bnha #zuko #sokka #protect mom friend sero from all harm #Anonymous #ask meme #alcohol ment #slight gore #almost character death #and they were roommates

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hannahindie · 7 years

Text

Maple Leaves and Flannel

Characters: Sam Winchester x Reader, Dean Winchester (mentioned) Word Count: 2,608 Warnings: Cutesy fluff and extreme descriptions of fall. (I don’t think that’s really a warning, but I’m a wordy girl so...maybe?) A/N: I wrote this for @impalaimagining’s Favorite Seasons Gif Challenge! Fall is my favorite time of year, so I was excited to get to write a fic that primarily focused on that.

Beta’d by my wonderful @trexrambling, because without her, a lot of my thoughts would be jumbled: “THIS. HANNAH, THIS!!!!!! YESSSSSSS I LOVE THIS LINE IT IS MY NEW FAVORITE LINE. Gaaaaaaaaaah this is wonderful.”

And my sweet @pinknerdpanda, who encourages me even when I hate nearly everything I wrote and feel like starting over: “ I love this whole sentence sooooo much!”

As usual, tags are at the bottom. Please let me know if you’d like to be added!!

Fall has always been my favorite time of year. Summer had its moments, but when the stifling heat finally started melting into cool breezes, when I could enjoy the sun’s warmth on my face without immediate fear of being burnt to a crisp, I was in my happy place. If anyone were to ask me why fall was my favorite, besides the cooler temperatures and the lack of sun poisoning, it would be hard to pinpoint an exact thing.

It could be the brilliant colors the leaves inevitably changed to, a magnificent splash of reds and oranges and yellows all mixing together to make it look like the landscape was on fire. The slow appearance of Halloween decorations that would go up bit by bit; a zombie here, purple and green lights there, fake spiderweb stretching across every available surface. The extraordinary amount of pumpkins that would just appear with no warning on porch steps, balanced precariously on hay bales that also would magically appear, a majority of which had simple faces that had been painstakingly carved into them by excited children who cared less about the carving and more about cleaning out the slimy guts inside.

So, had you asked me what my favorite thing about fall was, I would have told you it was too hard to choose and wandered off with my pumpkin spice latte to find some crunchy leaves to jump in.

Well, that’s what I would have said. But then I saw him.

Right in the middle of town is a large maple tree. Large is really an understatement. This maple tree is one of the oldest I’ve ever seen, and it’s huge. It’s right on the edge of the sidewalk, and the roots have pushed up the concrete slabs like they’re made out of foam. Every year, I expect one of the massive branches to break off and land on top of the old, Victorian-style house that sits empty next to it, but every year it proves me wrong. It also sits directly on the path I take from my apartment to the library, and every time I walk past, regardless of what I might be doing at the time, I glance up at the huge spanning limbs and falling leaves. Most days, there’s nothing remarkable about it. It’s beautiful, yes, and it’s one of my favorite things about my town...but generally speaking, it’s the same scene every single day.

Except one day when there was an addition to the normal scenery.

I had just crossed the street and was making my way down the sidewalk when I glanced up out of habit and stopped dead in my tracks. Standing just under the maple was a tall man, his head bent as he looked down at his phone. His shaggy, chestnut hair hung down and obscured most of his face, and I held my breath as I waited for him to look up. He was wearing a burnt orange coat and a lighter orange flannel; he was like the perfect autumn day in a ruggedly handsome, broad shouldered package. He must have realized someone was staring at him because he looked up and locked eyes with me, a small smile playing on his lips.

“Hi,” he said softly, his voice deep and smooth.

I finally released the breath I’d been holding, my eyes wide. “H-hello.”

He took a couple of steps towards me and pocketed his phone as he did, “Sorry to bother you, but do you live around here?” I nodded but remained quiet. “Do you know much about this house?”

“Oh, yea, it’s one of my favorite places in town. Are you...are you interested in buying it?”

He shoved his hands in his pockets and nodded, “Yea, actually. Me and my brother grew up in a house like this, and I just happened to be driving through when I saw it.”

“So do you live close by?” Surely I would have remembered seeing him around.

He shook his head, “No, I'm here on business. I've been kind of looking for a place to start over, and since I was already here, I thought I'd look around.” He held his hand out, “My name is Sam, by the way. Sam Winchester.” I took his hand, and I was unsurprised when his totally engulfed mine.

“Y/F/N Y/L/N. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Same.” He smiled again, and just as he opened his mouth to say something else, a muffled ring interrupted him. He quickly reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. After a quick glance, he looked at me apologetically, “I'm sorry, that's my brother. I gotta go meet him...family business stuff to work on. Maybe I'll see you around?”

I smiled at him, “Yea, that would be nice. See you later.”

He gave a small wave and started walking down the sidewalk in the opposite direction that I was going. Luckily, that wasn't the last time I saw Sam Winchester.

The second time I saw Sam Winchester I was at the library, coffee in hand as I flipped through pages upon pages of town history. I had just started at the local newspaper, and my first assignment was to put together a large series leading up to the town’s centennial celebration. Most people would have wondered what they had done to deserve such a fate, but I loved stuff like that. There was something about getting lost in old newspapers and books, scattered photographs that lay forgotten in people's attics, only remembered when you ask them if they have anything that would help you. I could sit all day at the library, curled up in one of the overstuffed chairs with a giant book. Most of my days consisted of that, actually.

I had been reading about The Great Flood of 1928 when I heard someone clear their throat. I looked up to see Sam looking at me, one corner of his mouth turned up in a smile. “Hey, Y/N.”

“Hi, Sam,” I said as I shifted into a more upright position. “How are you?”

He shrugged, “Pretty good. I think we’ll be here for a few more days.” He nodded towards my stack of books, “What are you researching?”

I glanced down at the book in my hand, “Currently, a catastrophic flood that destroyed most of the town in 1928. In general, just getting some information for a series I'm writing for the paper. The centennial is coming up. Although I have to say, there's less interesting and happy things than there are devastating natural disasters, murder, and general bad luck.” I closed my book and sat it on the table. “Why are you here?”

“Well, I needed to do some research of my own. The librarian told me you might have a book I need. It's actually a collection of property deeds and stuff.”

I raised an eyebrow, “That sounds…”

“Boring,” Sam laughed. “It is. Which is why I'm here and not my brother.” He sat the books he'd already claimed down, “Mind if I join you?”

I shook my head as I handed him the book he was looking for, “Not at all. I can't promise that I'll be exciting company, though,”

He laughed, “At least we can be boring together.”

And so we sat, the next three hours consumed with what was supposed to be serious research but had quickly turned into us laughing about some of the more ridiculous things that had happened in town.

Sam sat back with a laugh, and I couldn't help but stare at the deep dimples that formed when he allowed himself to truly smile. “Wow, it's been awhile since I laughed that much. That was nice.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and his smile quickly disappeared, “But it looks like it's time for me to head out.” He stood and shouldered his coat on, “Hopefully I'll get to see you before we leave.”

I smiled, “I would enjoy that. See you around.” Sam smiled and strode quickly out of the library. I looked down to find that he'd left the book he'd asked for open, and I pulled it around to look at the page he'd marked.

The deed was for the old abandoned house with the giant maple in the yard.

The last time I saw Sam Winchester is a little blurry. It's kind of a long story, and honestly I'm not even sure that I have all the details. I remember seeing the deed for the old house. Curiosity got the better of me and I did the one thing that I'm surprised I hadn't done before but realize now should never have; I googled the address of the Victorian house with the town’s oldest maple tree.

I vaguely recall reading what had to have been one of the more disturbing stories of our town that I had soundly decided not to include in our centennial write up. But even after I sat down to read something else, determined to not focus on the vicious quadruple murder/suicide that had occurred in the house, my mind kept returning to it.

Which had led me to my next question; why was Sam so interested in that house? And what family business was he doing that he needed the deed information? Nothing was adding up, and I was beginning to wonder what that handsome stranger was up to.

I remember leaving the library, bag in tow and determined to figure out what was going on. I had stopped at the end of the sidewalk before taking a big breath and striding up the cracked concrete like I owned the place.

And that's when things get a little fuzzy. All I can really remember is that I saw something that shouldn't have been real. That moment of pause, the shock of seeing a man that was long dead standing directly in front of me, nearly cost me my life. What I do remember is Sam appearing out of nowhere, quickly followed by a shorter man with bright eyes that I guessed was his brother, and a loud shotgun blast.

Then I was outside, my back against the maple tree and a large, rough hand cradled against my face.

“Y/N...hey, are you alright?” Any other time, opening my eyes to that handsome face would have been welcome. As it was, I could barely remember where I was, much less who was in front of me.

“I...yea...I think so...what happened?”

Sam breathed a sigh of relief, “It’s a long story.”

I shifted my weight and groaned as my bruised ribs protested at the movement, “What exactly do you and your brother do, anyway?”

He chuckled, “That's also a long story.” He helped me stand up, and I grimaced again. “Are you sure you're okay?”

I nodded, “Aside from the fact that I just saw something impossible, and said impossible thing tried to kill me...I'm pretty sure I'm good. Ask me tomorrow.” He smiled sadly and my chest ached, “You won't be here, will you?”

He shook his head, “No, we uh...we have some other things to take care of.” I stared at him for a moment and tried to memorize the way his hair fell in his face, the little mole on his chin, how his eyes seemed to change color. There were too many details, and I knew it would be impossible to do him justice in my spotty memory. So instead, I put my arms around his waist and pressed my ear to his chest and listened to the strong, steady beat of his heart.

“It was nice to meet you, Sam Winchester.”

Sam didn't say anything, but he wrapped his arms around me and held me a little tighter.

It's been a year since I last saw Sam Winchester. A year since I saw him standing under that maple tree, its bright red and orange leaves falling around him as he looked at his phone, unaware of the dumbstruck girl staring at him.

It's been a year since I let curiosity win out over common sense and I discovered that there was far more to this world than I could have ever imagined, and that the gentle giant that I had laughed with over coffee was responsible for keeping it all in check.

Sam and Dean had driven me home and the ride there was mostly silent. Sam sat in the back with me, his long legs tucked in as well as he could, and I had curled tightly into his side. My ribs complained the entire ride, but I ignored them; I wasn't passing up what could be my last chance to be this close to Sam.

Sam walked me to my door and pulled me into one last hug, and it took everything I had not to beg him to at least stay the night. He'd started to walk away, but at the last minute, turned back and pulled me into him, his soft lips working against mine almost desperately before he pulled back, gave me a tight lipped smile, and walked to the car. The next morning I went to stick my hand in my jacket pocket and found a piece of a napkin containing small, cramped handwriting. There was a number, and under that a single word - 'Sam'.

We had texted quite a bit for awhile; what he and Dean were up to, plans to get coffee when they finally made it back into town to visit, the most recent book we'd read. I knew that with their lifestyle, it would probably be awhile before I got to see Sam again, but I held on to hope. Then, finally, the messages stopped.

I'd like to think that he's okay, that he's saving people from the monsters that linger in the shadows, but I often worry that something happened. I think I'd feel it, though. For that much good to leave the world, I'm sure my heart would know.

I've kept the same routine this whole year. I walk the same path, go to the same job, live in the same apartment. And every day, I walk past the old Victorian, the maple looming over it with its canopy of fiery leaves. I’d always looked towards the house, only now I do so in hopes that I'll see a man, dressed like fall, and smiling. When I don't see him there, I like to imagine that he's off saving the world with his brother, one monster at a time.

That is, until today.

Because today, I walked the same path down the same road, crossed at the same corner, and just like I did exactly one year ago, I looked up at the house and the maple. Under its falling leaves, standing just where he was the first time I saw him, was Sam. Only this time, he wasn't looking down at his phone; this time he was looking straight at me. He was a bit thinner than he was back then, and he'd cut his hair a little different, but the smile was the same. I stopped a few feet away, afraid that if I blinked he'd disappear.

“Sorry I'm late,” he said softly, “things got a little...crazy.”

I nodded, “Long story?”

Sam chuckled, “Yea, you could say that.”

I walked over and wrapped my arms around his waist, my ear to his chest, and sighed happily. I never realized how relieved I would feel to hear someone’s heartbeat. “You know what, I have all day.”

Like what you see? Would you like to read more? Check out my Master List here!

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#Taylor’s Favorite Seasons Gif Challenge #supernatural fanfiction #sam winchester #sam x reader #autumn #fall #fluff

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duhragonball · 7 years

Text

[FIC] Luffa: The Legendary Super Saiyan (66/?)

Disclaimer: This story features characters and concepts based on Dragon Ball, which is a trademark of Bird Studio/Shueisha and Toei Animation. This is an unauthorized work, and no profit is being made on this work by me. This story is copyright of me. Download if you like, but please don’t archive it without my permission. Don’t be shy.

Continuity Note: About 1000 years before the events of Dragon Ball Z.

Previous chapters conveniently available here.

[24 November 236 Before Age. Extraliga.]

The Shockmaster awoke from his meditative trance to find Luffa on top of him, grasping the sides of his helmet with her hands. She was furious. He didn't care.

"YOUR MISTAKE WAS IN SENDING YOUR ALLIES TO TAKE CONTROL OF THE RECOLLECTOR," he said. "WHEN THEY ACTIVATED IT, I WAS ABLE TO SENSE ITS PSIONIC SIGNAL. IT WAS A SIMPLE MATTER TO ENTER MY COMMANDS INTO THE DEVICE."

"I pulled you back to reality, didn't I?" Luffa shot back. "Your trance made you intangible, so I couldn't hurt you physically, but I could force your body to become solid again with my own mental powers."

"IT DOESN'T MATTER!" the Shockmaster bellowed. "THE RECOLLECTOR IS SET! SOON IT WILL BRING THE UR-EMBER FROM THE DISTANT PAST, BRINGING IT TO THIS WORLD! AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU OR ANYONE ELSE CAN DO TO STOP IT!"

"Fine!" Luffa shouted. "Let's say you're right. Nothing I do from here on out matters! The Ur-Ember is coming to Planet Extraliga, like it or not! Well, what happens when it gets here? What's the next part of your stupid plan?! The radiation from that thing will kill everyone on the planet!"

"NO, NOT EVERYONE!" the Shockmaster scoffed. "THE CHOSEN WILL SURVIVE THE UR-EMBER'S RADIATION! THEY ALONE WILL SURVIVE... AND MORE!"

"What are you babbling about?!" Luffa demanded. He savored the moment before he answered. Strong as she was, she had lost the initiative at the moment the Recollector was activated. Now she would try to play for time, goad him into revealing his plans, in the futile hope of finding some way to stop them.

"THE UR-EMBER IS A MYSTICAL POWER SOURCE UNLIKE ANY OTHER," he said. "LONG AGO, MY PEOPLE HARNESSED IT'S MAGICAL MIGHT TO BUILD A GREAT STAR EMPIRE, BUT BEFORE THAT, IT ORIGINATED HERE, ON EXTRALIGA! BACK THEN, THIS WORLD WAS UNINHABITED, AND SO A BAND OF WARLOCKS USED THIS PLACE TO UNLEASH THE UR-EMBER'S POWER, MAGNIFYING THEIR OWN MYSTIC POWER A HUNDREDFOLD! MOST OF THEM MOVED ON TO THE PLANET WIST, WHERE THEY FOUNDED THE SOCIETY I NOW SEEK TO RESTORE, BUT SOME REMAINED HERE, AND INTERMARRIED WITH THE ANCESTORS OF THIS PLANET'S POPULATION! AT LEAST SOME OF THEM STILL CARRY THE BLOOD OF THE ANCIENT WARLOCKS WITHIN THEM. DILUTE AS IT MAY BE, A SELECT FEW CAN SURVIVE THE UR-EMBER'S RADIATIONS, AND BE REBORN AS A NEW RACE OF MYSTICS!"

Luffa was dumbstruck. "Then what?" she asked. "You think any of those people are going to want to help you? After you destroy all their friends and families?!"

The Shockmaster crossed his arms over his massive chest and chuckled. "THEY WON'T BE ABLE TO CONTROL THEIR POWERS AT FIRST," he said. "THEY'LL NEED MY HELP TO SURVIVE, OR THEY'LL BE FORCED TO FEND FOR THEMSELVES ON AN EMPTY PLANET. THOSE WHO ACCEPT MY HELP WILL RETURN WITH ME TO PLANET WIST, WHERE THEY CAN LEARN THE WAYS OF THEIR ANCESTORS, AND CREATE A NEW MYSTIC COUNCIL, FUELED BY THE POWER OF THE UR-EMBER, AND THE WISDOM OF WIST'S CULTURE."

"I won't let you get away with this," Luffa said quietly. "I'll kill you."

"AND WHAT WILL THAT ACCOMPLISH?" the Shockmaster asked with a laugh. "YOU MIGHT BEAT ME, BUT YOU'LL STILL FAIL. ENDING MY LIFE WILL ONLY ENSURE THAT NO EXTRALIGANS WILL SURVIVE."

She screamed, and started punching his helmet. He didn't understand why she kept targeting the one part of his body that was armored, especially when she had already broken one of his ribs. Ignoring the pain, he released a burst of ki energy from his body, knocking her away long enough for him to get to his feet.

Almost as soon as he rose to a standing position, she was back on him again, her punches and kicks even more vicious than he had thought possible.

"I actually respected you once," she seethed. "I thought you were a worthy adversary, the kind I had dreamed of ever since I turned into this thing! But you're a coward! And a hypocrite! And a fool!"

He was defending himself with all his might, but for every fives strike he blocked, she landed a sixth. And the blows were getting heavier with each moment. He realized that this was it. She had been merely enjoying herself before, but now she was determined to destroy him. His only hope was to fight back, but every technique in his arsenal had failed to stop her. His strongest attacks had failed, and she kept getting stronger and stronger.

"All of this! You did all of this, for the sake of a dead country no one even remembers!" Luffa screamed. "If it was so damned wonderful, then why is it gone?!"

She kicked him in the chest and followed through with an energy blast to his torso. He managed to bring his hands up to block it, but the impact still took a toll.

"Everything you stand for is a relic! Or a lie! The people on this planet are real, dammit! They're alive, and you're trying to turn their planet into some sick... experiment?"

It was as though her anger was fueling her strength, or maybe it was the other way around. He refused to give up, and yet he could see the writing on the wall. He was losing! And what truly filled him with despair was that defeat no longer surprised him. How could any Saiyan be this powerful?

"Do you even care about the people who might survive whatever it is you're trying to do here?! Some of them could have children! And you'd kill their brats and turn them into what? Sorcerers? Gods? Monsters? You have no idea! How do you think they'd feel?! To see their whole! Life! Turn to! Ashes!"

She was back on his helmet again, raving like a lunatic as she rained blows down upon him. This time he could actually feel the impact of her knuckles against the silver metal.

"And all they'll have to show for it is a power they didn't earn! A power forced upon them by an enemy! And they'll have to rely on the charity of others to survive!"

As the ferocity of her attacks increased, she started to become sloppy. He managed to knock her back just long enough to get clear of her. He wanted to fight back, but he knew his best bet was to withdraw. Was she... crying?

"Not again! I won't let this happen to anyone else!" she shrieked as she bombarded him with ki blasts. He dodged most of them, but not all.

Suddenly, she was behind him, and she struck him in the small of his back. He dropped to his hands and knees, only to find that his knees couldn't support him.

"It ends here, Shockmaster!" she snarled. He could hear her charging her ki, and then he could feel an intense heat on the back of his neck, like she was pressing a white hot iron against his flesh. “Whatever happens with the Ur-Ember, whatever happens to the Extraligans, you won't be around to see it. I'll destroy this planet before I let you have your way with it. I'll destroy Wist too, if I have to.”

"N-NO..."

"I am going to tear that ridiculous helmet right off your shoulders!"

She started striking the back of his helmet, and he could feel the heat with each blow. Now that he could no longer defend himself, she was putting an enormous amount of ki into her strikes, all for the singular purpose of unmasking him. Perhaps she recognized the helmet as the source of his power. He had thought it to be indestructible, though his faith in that was beginning to waver.

But it was all he had left now. He couldn't move. He was lying face down in the dirt. She was relentless. She would keep targeting the helmet until it broke apart. His only hope was that it could resist the Saiyan until the Recollector's work was complete. There was no way to be sure, but it was possible that the Ur-Ember's mystic energies might kill Luffa just as easily as most of the other life forms on the planet.

And then he heard a crack.

Like thunder.

And the world around him went white...

*******

Luffa had been punching the Shockmaster's helmet for so long that she almost didn't notice the surface beginning to buckle under the constant impact of her fists. She was consumed with rage, but not so consumed that she couldn't take satisfaction in the moment.

She was afraid. She didn't know if Zatte could stop the Recollector, or what would really happen if the Ur-Ember was delivered to this planet. Zatte would probably be the first to die--

No. Luffa refused to entertain that train of thought. Zatte was a Dorlun, a survivor. If the Ur-Ember could be survived, then Zatte would find a way to stay alive. If not, then Zatte would die for what she believed in. It was unseemly to worry about one's own wife in the middle of a war. There was plenty of death to go around, after all.

Perhaps it would have been better for Luffa to focus on the Recollector instead of fighting the Shockmaster, especially now that he was no longer able to fight back. But he had tricked her once too often, and she knew that he had to die before she could turn her attention elsewhere. That was the whole point of including Zatte in her plan, so Luffa could defeat the Shockmaster without distraction.

She told herself this in an effort to focus her mind on the task at hand, but all she could think of was the horror that awaited the Extraligan population if she failed. It wasn't proper for a Saiyan to be so sentimental during a battle. All this useless fretting was supposed to be bad for one’s fighting style. She felt sick to her stomach, and yet the queasiness only seemed to make her stronger.

And then a crack formed in the Shockmaster's helmet, and a blinding light shone from the fissure. Reacting on instinct, Luffa leaped away from the sudden illumination, thinking it might be some sort of attack. Instead, the crack expanded, until at last the helmet split apart and crumbled into silver dust.

She raised her arms over her face to shield her eyes from the light, and watched as his entire body began to glow with the same intensity. To another observer, it might have seemed as if the Shockmaster was dying, but Luffa could still sense his enormous ki, and she could feel it increasing.

Dark clouds had been gathering in the sky since their battle began. Now rain began to fall, and lightning flashed, first from one cloud to another, and then down to the ground. The planet itself seemed to tremble as the light from the Shockmaster's body grew brighter. The raindrops sizzled as they fell upon him, producing a trail of steam.

Without warning, he floated up from the ground and his body tilted into an upright position. He was so bright now that Luffa could barely make out a distinct shape. A bolt of lightning struck him, producing an intense flash. Then at last the light faded, and his form became easier to see.

He had changed. His figure was basically the same: a mountain of a man with thick arms and a voluminous gut. But the trousers and sleeveless jacket were gone, replaced with a skintight unitard colored gold and blue. The silver helmet was gone, revealing the Shockmaster's head, though most of it was covered by a blue mask. Only his lower face was exposed, along with a tuft of dark, curly hair on the top of his scalp.

But the change in appearance was insignificant next to the dramatic increase in his power. Luffa had suspected that the Shockmaster still possessed immense reserves of ki, and she had wondered when he would put it to use. The time, it seemed, was now.

In spite of her anger and fear, she smiled in satisfaction.

"Behold, the Fifth Move of Doom," he announced. His voice was still low and rough, but much more natural than before. If nothing else, it finally sounded like it was coming from his mouth for a change.

"About time," Luffa replied. “I was wondering when you’d finally get around to that one.”

"Actually, you're the one who activated this form, Luffa," he explained. "The elders who gave me this power told me that the Fifth Move of Doom would come to me when the time was right. The helmet was the source of my power, but it was also a seal, restricting my access to this power."

"Until you ran into someone like me, someone strong enough to break the seal and release it,” Luffa said. “So you've pulled out all the stops, Should I be quaking in my boots now?"

"You're not impressed?" he asked. "You seemed disappointed with my power before."

"Don't get me wrong," Luffa said. She widened her stance and raised her arms to shoulder-level. "I'm glad you've got more power to throw at me, and maybe the transformation would have been scarier for someone else. But I transform all the time lately, so I guess it's become old news for me. Maybe I should start calling you the Super Shockmaster."

"You've defied my objective long enough, Luffa."

"Do something about it."

"You want a piece of me?"

"A piece?” Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, I want the whole thing, Shocky."

"Come after me! I'm ready!"

Luffa vanished, and reappeared in front of the Shockmaster, with a ball of energy already fully-formed in her hand. She tried to drive it into his chest, but he swatted her hand away, and sent the blob of light flying off into the distance. Luffa pressed on with a flurry of punches and kicks, but the Shockmaster managed to block every single one.

He struck back, narrowly missing her with a forearm strike. Then another, and another. Luffa was dodging them, but with less and less margin for error each time. At last, she had to block his strikes, and then he finally managed to land a blow, driving his fist into her nose.

She stumbled backward, her eyes shut tightly while she used her other senses to follow his movements. When he tried to follow up with an energy blast, she avoided it, but not the elbow strike between her shoulder blades.

Now it was her turn to lie face down on the ground. She could hear him laughing triumphantly, drinking in the satisfaction.

*******

He had won! The Mystics of Ancient Wist had done it! His faith had wavered slightly in the end, but the promise of the power they had given him had been fulfilled. Luffa was defeated, and the Ur-Ember would soon return to Extraliga. The only ones who could possibly stop him were the ones trying to sabotage the Recollector, but with Luffa out of the way, he could put a stop to them quite easily.

But he wouldn't risk leaving her without certain assurances. He knelt over her and put his hands around her neck. He had sworn never to take a life, and while he was bending that rule by condemning most of Extraliga's population to death, he still intended to honor his vow, at least as far as never killing by his own hand. In spite of Luffa's repeated interference, defiance, and disrespect, he would continue to spare her life.

So instead of killing her, he would simply paralyze her. A cervical fracture in just the right place would allow her to live, but keep her from coming back to interfere in his plans.

It disturbed him that it had come to this, but he reminded himself that it was for the greater good.

And then suddenly she had rolled onto her back, and was wrapping her left arm around the back of his head. Before he could make sense of what she was doing, she had seized his right arm into her left hand, then grabbed his right wrist wit her other hand after threading her arm around his own. With a flash of yellow light, she rolled him over, forcing him onto his back. He found himself looking up at her, his neck caught between his own immobilized right arm and her left.

She was covered in mud now, and while the rain was washing some of it away, the trickle of blood from her nose continued unabated. And her hair and eyes were as radiant as ever. As she leaned back to put pressure on the hold, there was a look of sublime cruelty on her face, as though she had been waiting for a moment like this.

The pressure on the sides of his head was immense, and he cried out in agony. The only flaw with her hold was that it left his right arm free to attack, while her own arms were committed, and her legs were out of position to defend herself. But when he punched at her head, she just snarled and applied greater pressure to the hold, smiling viciously all the while.

"Did you think you were ready?" she asked with a chuckle. "Ready for me? You have no idea what I am. But you're about to find out."

Her eyes suddenly went wide, as if she had surprised herself with what she was now doing. She yelled, and the golden aura around her body expanded in every direction.

******

In a cavern near on of Extraliga's oldest cities, there lay the Recollector, an ancient device that was now working to bring about the Shockmaster's ultimate victory.

Put simply, the Recollector had the ability to retrieve objects from the distant past and bring them into the present. Before it was abandoned countless centuries ago, it had been originally designed for archaeological research, and carefully programmed to prevent it from being misused. It could only be operated by Wistians who knew how to use it, and it had failsafes to foil any attempt to alter the course of history.

But the Shockmaster had no intention of altering the past. He had programmed the Recollector to retrieve an artifact that had once been on Planet Wist's moon. That moon was destroyed in a cataclysm, the Ur-Ember had been lost. If the Recollector retrieved it at the very moment of the moon's destruction, then there would be no change to the past.

And so, with the Shockmaster's program already running, there was nothing to stop the Recollector from completing its task. There was a queue of instructions which could be edited as it worked, but once a step was in process, it could not be cancelled or interrupted.

Standing in front of the Recollector, Zatte placed her hands on its surface and concentrated. The Recollector used a psychic interface, and as she thought about its function, it produced a holographic display that illustrated its status and available features.

She was the only one who could stop the thing now. The cavern was empty, save for the lamps she had set up earlier, and a carryall bag she had laid down a few yards away. The Extraligan military was aware of her mission, but they had kept it classified, to prevent the Shockmaster's forces from discovering the Recollector's location. There was little use in having anyone else accompany Zatte into the cavern. She had studied the technology and devised the means to access its programming. Either Zatte would disable the device, or not.

But she wasn't alone. On the other side of the galaxy, three allies had established a telepathic conference with her, to provide assistance in deciphering the Recollector's ancient runes. This four-person collective manifested itself as an imaginary roadhouse, where they sat at a table with the Recollector in the center.

"I've got it running a diagnostic now," Zatte informed them. "That won't slow it down for long, but it's just about the only step I can add to the queue that will take priority over the Shockmaster's instructions."

"Where's that leave us?" asked Scotch Woodcock. He raised the brim of his black hat and regarded the Recollector with his three eyes. It was his power that allowed them to communicate from one planet to another, but he had no practical experience with Wistian technology, so he could only look on helplessly and hope the others could offer more useful suggestions.

"We can't shut it off, and we can't cancel the command," M'ranga said grimly. She was a freedom fighter, accustomed to saying inspirational things in the face of dire situations, but she was realistic enough to admit they had reached a dead end. "Even if we could get the Recollector off this planet, we don't have enough time to get to a safe distance before the Ur-Ember arrives."

"How much time do we have left?" asked Tobiko. The exiled wizard was incredibly old, and yet the Recollector was a forgotten relic before even he was born. His magic had gotten them this far, but he had just about run out of tricks.

Zatte shook her head. "Thirty minutes. Maybe a little longer if the preparation phase needs more time. Dammit... there must be something we haven't tried yet. Anything."

She went over the systems menu one more time, while the others watched. When she finally looked up, her expression was one of resignation.

"Is it safe for you three to stay connected with me?" she asked.

"We're not even on Extraliga," M'ranga reminded her. "We're on Planet Wist right now."

Zatte looked at Woodcock. "Don’t get me wrong, I'm not giving up, but if we don't think of something in the next half hour, me and everyone on this planet will be exposed to lethal radiation. I'm no expert, but I don't think it's a good idea to be mindlinked to someone while they die."

He curled his lip, revealng more of the teeth that held a cigar in his mouth. "It ain't exactly safe," he admitted. "Doesn't mean I plan on leavin' ya."

"Woodcock, we have to be practical about this," Zatte protested. "You can't do any more good here--"

"Bollocks," he said. "Never said I was here to do 'good'. That's M'ranga's line. I only tagged along to cause a little trouble."

Zatte looked to Tobiko. "Make him see reason," she pleaded. "There's no point in risking your own lives like this."

"We still have some time left, do we not?" Tobiko replied.

"You said it yourself," M'ranga added. "You haven't given up yet. If you're so worried for our safety, let's focus on finding a solution."

Zatte muttered a curse in the Dorlun tongue, then ran her fingers through her hair. "All right. All right. What if I tried to disrupt its power?"

"You already tried to shut it off," M'ranga said.

"No, we tried telling this thing's computer to shut itself down," Zatte corrected. "I'm talking about restricting the flow of power directly. I have the ability to manipulate energy, you know."

"There are magical elements in the Recollector, Zatte," Tobiko warned. "Even your skills would be poorly suited to cope with it."

"I'll try to be careful," she said. "This thing has temperature and conductivity sensors that have to reach a certain threshold before it can execute a retrieval. So maybe if I can make it just a little too cold in there, or manipulate the electrical currents just a hair, I can fool it into waiting. Maybe even trick it into aborting the whole queue. At the very least, we can buy time until Luffa can help me haul this thing into space."

They all looked at each other for a few moments, but none of them had had anything to say. Finally, M'ranga nodded, and Zatte began her work.

"The problem," she said after a few minutes, "is that I have to stay in physical contact with this thing to make this work. Normally I can manipulate energy at a distance, but this is trickier."

"Never mind all that," Woodcock said. "Is it workin'?"

"I think so," Zatte said. "Yeah, the queue is paused while it waits to reach the required setpoints. This just might work after all... I--"

And then suddenly she cried out in pain. The other three rushed to her side, only to see her arch her back and clench her jaw, and then she fell backwards. M'ranga barely managed to catch her before Zatte hit the floor of the roadhouse.

"Something must have gone wrong! Zatte, can you hear me? What happened?"

Tobiko looked at the display on the Recollector and furrowed his brow. "I believe the queue has resumed," he said. "Perhaps we can try again, if Zatte is well enough to--"

The word "continue" died on his lips as he turned to find M'ranga holding no one at all. Zatte--or rather the image of Zatte in the psychic conference-- had vanished completely.

"I can't sense her," Woodcock said after taking a moment to concentrate. "Musta been some shock she got. Coulda knocked her out, or just stunned her. Soon as she comes 'round, I can try to bring her back to us."

"If she can come around," M'ranga said darkly. "For all we know, whatever that feedback was may have killed her!"

NEXT: Sudden Death

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