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downthe-f4ndom-rabbith0le · 5 months

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As Brave As You Are (Newt x Reader) - A Maze Runner Story

As Brave As You Are (Newt x Reader) Reader Insert: she/her pronouns Word Count: 12,051 Warnings: death, bloody wounds, fighting, mental and physical torture, guns, suicidal thoughts and actions Spoilers: no spoilers because the books and films came out ages ago

After helping Newt recover from his ankle injury, Y/N and Newt formed an unbreakable bond that always had them looking out for each other. When they escaped the Maze, then navigated the Scorch, they always had each other’s back. It isn’t until Y/N is captured alongside Minho by WCKD and Newt contracts the Flare that he realises how he truly feels about Y/N.

Problem is, will he rescue her in time to tell her?

Note: I'm back in my dystopian future era thanks to the new Hunger Games film so of course I had to write for my original YA crush. This piece is based on the movie series mainly. Don't get mad at me, I love the books more, but I can appreciate the storylines that came out of the path they took with the films. And if there is one thing the TMR fandom can agree on, it is that the film cast was the best cast ever for the series. So enjoy - not sorry that it's horrendously long, Newt deserves it xx

‘Medjack! Medjack, now!’

Y/N recognised it was Minho was calling for help. Clint and Jeff ran out of the med hut to see what all the commotion was. It wasn’t long before they were hurrying back inside, carrying Newt of all people between them, Minho and Alby in tow.

‘Clear the table,’ Clint ordered, and Y/N quickly followed through, practically throwing off containers, bowls and medical instruments to get Newt on there as quick as possible. Once Newt was up, Y/N finally noticed the unnatural twist in his ankle and it almost sent Frypan’s sloppy sweet potato soup right back up.

She was still pretty new to her job as a Medjack, being the greenie and all. She was the only girl in the Glade of the current twelve residents, so she was intimidated at first as to what role she could play in the place. Medjack seemed the most suitable, and she seemed to have a knack for it, having stitched up some eyebrows and cleaned up knee scrapes with ease and precision.

But even though she’d seen blood, dealt with displaced bones and joints, she still got queasy doing her job. It didn’t help that Newt was hissing through clenched teeth from the intense pain, an occasional sob passing through.

‘What happened?’ Y/N asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Minho said. ‘We split up for only five minutes. I thought we could cover more ground that way. And we’ve run that part of the Maze like a hundred times already. I thought we’d be fine…’

Clint held Newt down as Jeff and Y/N took a look at Newt’s ankle. Jeff only pressed gently with his fingers around the bone, but Newt’s responding howls confirmed the severity of the injury.

‘The bone is completely shattered,’ Jeff said grimly. ‘We’re going to need to reset his foot first though. Y/N?’

‘On it.’ She rushed to a shelf that held bandages, then to a cupboard with flat boards about shin length. She grabbed two of those before heading back to the table.

‘You’re going to have to hold him down,’ Y/N directed at Alby and Minho, gesturing to follow Clint’s efforts. Then she turned to Newt, whose face was slicked with tears and sweat as he continued to writhe in pain. ‘Newt. Newt, can you open your eyes for me? I need you to focus on me.’

To his credit, Newt opened his eyes and he didn’t look away from her.

‘Good. Good, Newt,’ she said. ‘Now, we have to realign your foot. It’s going to hurt a lot. We’ll go on three, okay?’

In the short time Y/N had known Newt – which arguably was no time at all, as he ran every day and she was in the Medjack hut all day. They didn’t interact unless he or another runner got hurt, or at dinner if only to say hello. Even so, she had come to know he liked it plain and straight, no bullshit. So, despite his pain, he took two deep, calming breaths and gave her a nod to say he was ready for what they had to do.

Y/N nodded back, then looked to the others, who had their hands braced on all Newt’s limbs. ‘Ready?’ she asked, to which they nodded in reply. Y/N gently held Newt’s ankle, eliciting a quiet whimper from the boy. ‘Okay, on three. One, two…’ She cut herself off as she slammed her hands either side the ankle bone, causing a loud cracking sound as the ankle snapped back into place.

Newt’s wail of pain must’ve been heard from across the whole Glade it was so loud. He writhed and pulled to sit up, but the boys held him down as Y/N and Jeff bandaged the two splints either side of Newt’s ankle. Jeff then dabbed a small dose of chloroform in a cloth and pressed it to Newt’s nose. Soon enough, the boy was unconscious, finally pain-free.

‘You guys go have dinner,’ Y/N said to Clint and Jeff a little while later as they were cleaning up the hut. Alby and Minho had left soon after Newt fell asleep, but it was almost dinner time now. ‘I’ll stay with Newt tonight.’

‘You sure?’ Clint asked. ‘We can do shifts if you’d prefer.’

Y/N shook her head. ‘I insist. You guys rest up. I can do this. Consider this my final test to becoming a fully-fledged Medjack.’

Jeff chuckled. ‘You have much more to learn, Greenie, but suit yourself.’

‘We’ll bring you back some food, Y/N,’ Clint said as he and Jeff left the hut, leaving Y/N to idly clean up.

Newt woke up from a dull throbbing in his ankle, which turned into a harsh pain, causing him to sit up in alarm.

‘Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay,’ a voice gently said as equally gentle hands pushed him back down.

‘My ankle,’ he said, voice hoarse and dry. ‘It hurts…’

The face of the voice finally came into view: it was the Greenie. Y/N offered him a small smile as he finally recognised her. In one hand, she held a needle with clear serum. Her other she offered to his leg. ‘May I? It’ll help, I promise.’

He hesitated for a moment, but the intense pain in his ankle broke his composure as he eagerly nodded. The painkiller worked immediately, and Newt sighed with relief as the throbbing eased significantly.

’There,’ Y/N said, wiping the needle. ’That should help for a bit. Sadly, we don’t have much left for me to give you more than once a day, but I’m hoping you won’t need it beyond the end of the month.’

Confusion clouded Newt’s mind as he tried to process her words. ‘What… What happened?’ But he answered his own question as images of the Maze flashed through his mind, and he remembered it all. How he bid farewell to Minho. How he climbed as high as he could along the Maze walls. How easy it was to let go.

Then the pain fully encompassed him, and then it was just a blur. How Minho found him. How Clint and Jeff laid him on the table he realised he was still on. How angry and embarrassed he felt having his friends see him broken and miserable.

Newt managed to pull himself into a sitting position, propping a pillow behind him to cushion the hut wall. ‘How bad is it?’ he asked glumly, eyes unable to lift from his injury.

He couldn’t be bothered with pleasantries. He was too tired, and, frankly, saw no point in keeping up appearances anymore.

To her credit, Y/N seemed to pick up on his mood, saying, ‘It will heal to a point you’ll be able to walk again. But it won’t ever heal properly.’

‘You mean I’ll have a limp?’

‘Potentially.’

’So I can’t be a Runner anymore?’ Y/N didn’t reply, finally drawing Newt’s attention away from the source of his pain and to her.

Newt had only interacted with Y/N on a few occasions. Mainly at mealtimes or the odd occasion he passed her by on the way back from a run, only talking as much as greeting and farewelling one another. As the only girl so far, of course he found her intriguing, but he never had time nor a reason to get to know her.

And while he’d come to think of her as the quiet and gentle Medjack in comparison to Clint and Jeff, he didn’t see an ounce of pity on her face as she looked at him. Only quiet contemplation, as if there could be any other answer but no to his question.

‘I guess that’s up to you and Alby,’ she finally said. ‘I mean, I know what I should say is no. I’m sure Clint and Jeff will say no. But it’ll more so come down to if you want to go back in or not.’ Her eyes flickered to his ankle, sadness glazing her eyes briefly before returning to him. ‘But I think I can take a guess as to what your answer will be.’

Newt’s gut twisted with guilt and shame that she’d figured it out, and his face flushed with embarrassment and anger. ‘So, you going to tell everyone?’ he asked, words thick with hopelessness. ‘I mean, that’s your job, right? Diagnose me, then tell Alby, then the whole glade how pathetic I am?’

Y/N shook her head. ‘I think you give me too much credit. I’m not an actual doctor, you know,’ she said, coming to stand beside him. She inspected his ankle for a moment, then turned her gaze to him, and it shocked him to see such intensity in her eyes. It was as if suddenly he was the most interesting person in the world.

‘I can say it was a running accident,’ she finally concluded. ‘You can tell your truth when you’re ready. It’s not my place to take away hope when the others are so full of it right now. That includes me.’

He stared, stunned, as she packed up the last of her things by a spare medical cot at the other end of the hut. It wasn’t until she let out a loud yawn that Newt noticed it was dark outside. The silence of the Glade told him everyone else had gone to bed so it was late. Or early, he couldn’t really tell.

Y/N fluffed a sad excuse of a pillow and put it on the cot. ‘Now that I know you’re alive, are you going to be okay if I get a few minutes shut eye? I can stay up if you’d like.’

Now that the initial shock and embarrassment of the day’s events had subsided, Newt realised how exhausted he was still. ‘No, that’s okay,’ he said. ‘I think I should rest a bit more anyway.’

Y/N nodded and swung her legs up to lie down fully. Newt went to slide himself and his pillow back down to do the same when Y/N spoke again.

‘And Newt?’ she said, her voice soft and almost hesitant.

‘Yeah?’ he called back.

She was silent for so long Newt thought she’d gone to sleep. But then she spoke. ‘For the record, I don’t think you’re pathetic. For wanting it all to end, that is. I actually think what you did was really brave. You might be scared and maybe out of hope, but at least you did something about it. The rest of us can only hope to be as brave as you.’

Newt’s breath caught in his chest as it swelled with a mix of emotions. Brave? What he did was the act of a coward. Tears streamed silently down his face, both from a deep shame, but also a warmth he hadn’t felt in a long time.

The rest of us can only hope to be as brave as you…

Newt had lost all hope after a year of searching for a way out and finding nothing. But she didn’t know that, and neither will the next Greenie, or the Greenie after that. Even some of the boys already in the Glade didn’t know that. That’s why they waited every day for the runners – for him – to come back with news, with a shred of hope that they’d get out of there soon.

Newt twisted himself so he could see Y/N, who was rolled away from him, her body rising and falling with the rhythm of sleep. Even if he thought it would all be hopeless in the end, some truly believed they would get out of here.

And maybe that was something worth fighting for.

Two years on and Newt and Y/N had managed to forge something akin to a friendship.

Y/N had kept her word and said Newt had had a running accident, and he’d agreed with her for the sake of his worried friends. Y/N had also been right about his ankle; it healed to point where he could walk and do a decent jog with a limp. But he would never run again.

He was transferred to work as a Track-Hoe in the gardens with Zart. But it wasn’t all bad. As more boys arrived – never any girls much to their confusion – Newt developed a knack for leading others, for diffusing hard situations, and for wrangling the boys into line. Because of that, he was promoted to Alby’s second-in-command, which gave him more meaningful work to do than just the gardens – stuff that might actually get him and the other Gladers out of the bloody Maze.

It also meant he had more time to talk to Y/N. He would make sure to drop by once a day (and not just at mealtimes) to check in on her. For a time, he convinced himself he did that because it was his job as second-in-command to keep up group morale, and he would visit everyone in the Glade. Eventually, however, he realised it was because he genuinely enjoyed her company.

Since that night, Y/N had come out of her shell more. Still a little shy and apprehensive at times, but she would openly joke and play along with the boys’ antics. She was more confident in her work as a Medjack too, not afraid to boss Clint and Jeff around if she needed something from them.

Newt’s visits became longer, as they talked about any and all things. Aside from Alby and Minho, Newt considered Y/N one of his closest friends. And she must’ve felt the same – or at least in a similar fashion – as she entertained his thoughts about life beyond the Maze, and the rants he would go on thanks to whichever stupid shank put the fertiliser in the wrong place.

It was a friendship built on mutual respect and genuine care for one another, something that helped Newt convince Y/N to come with him and the others when they finally decided to leave the Maze. But he couldn’t help but feel a deep dread and guilt as he waited behind Thomas, knowing that Grievers were right around the corner.

While the others caught up, Newt turned to Y/N – who’d been helping him through the Maze with his limp – and offered her a spare spear he’d been carrying.

Her eyes widened at his offering. ‘I can’t take that. I can’t fight.’

‘Well, you can’t just go in there without something to protect yourself,’ he said, this time forcibly handing the spear over. Y/N clutched the spear awkwardly, and Newt saw the uncertainty in her eyes, in her trembling hands.

Newt felt bad for making her hold such a violent weapon. All her hands had ever done were help people, save them at times. Now he was asking her to kill. It was for the greater good they both knew, but to kill, nonetheless.

Newt placed a comforting hand on her shoulder and locked eyes with her. ‘Hey,’ he said softly, ‘you stay with me the whole time, do you understand? I promise you won’t have to use that unless absolute necessary.’

Y/N bit her lip to stop it trembling too, but she nodded, steeling herself in preparation for the fight ahead. Newt reciprocated the action and gave her shoulder a final squeeze before turning to face Thomas as he explained the plan.

They fought the Grievers, taking down a few while some of them took down Gladers. The Gladers were backed against the door that Teresa and Chuck were trying to open with a code. Minho shouted numbers at them as he, Newt, and the others fended off one last Griever.

Before he could finish, Minho was caught by a Griever, and Clint ran out to save him. But the Griever’s tail caught him, sending him over the edge of the walkway they fought on with one flick.

‘Clint!’

Before Newt could stop her, Y/N rushed out from behind him, spear drawn back and flying at the Griever in seconds. Not being a fighter to begin with, let alone a good one, the spear bounced off its metal leg without much effect. It did, however, alert the Griever to her presence, turning all its attention to her. Minho leapt to his feet, finally free, and ran back to the group. ‘Y/N!’ he cried as he ran. ‘Run!’

Y/N seemed to finally realise her situation, looking up at the Griever frozen with fear. The horrible creature raised its claw to end her, but Newt moved faster.

He ran as fast as he could, limp be damned, past Y/N and threw his spear at the Griever’s head. It landed true, puncturing one of the creature’s bulbous eyes, drawing a painful screech from it. Newt didn’t wait to see what it would do next, as he grabbed one of Y/N’s arms and Minho grabbed the other and ran back to the group, practically throwing her behind the front line and against the door.

Teresa finally got the door open and the Gladers tumbled in, Thomas throwing one last spear down the Griever’s throat as the doors closed.

Lights flickered on to show they were in some empty room with a door on the wall behind them leading to a corridor.

Thomas looked at the group, taking heavy breaths. ‘Everyone okay?’

‘What’s left of us, that is,’ Winston said, his tone sad and regretful.

As Newt eyed the group, he noted how many they’d lost, how little their group seemed all of a sudden.

Minho stepped ahead with Thomas, pointing towards the door. ‘Well? It’s not going to open itself.’

As Minho and Thomas led the group to the exit, Newt turned to Y/N, whose eyes had a distant look glazed over them. ‘What were you thinking?’ he asked, bringing her attention to him. ‘I told you to stay behind me. You could’ve been killed.’

‘I-I know. I’m sorry,’ she stuttered out, tears teetering in her E/C eyes. ‘I just… Clint… It all happened so fast, and I was just kind of moving before I knew what I was doing.’ She looked down at her hands then, and Newt noticed a slight tremble to them. ‘I thought I could help, but I was too slow. And I put you guys in danger too. I’m just… I’m sorry.’

Newt’s guilt came back full force then. He placed a gentle hand over her trembling one, grasping her fingers to stop their shaking. When she looked up at him confused, he just said, ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pressured you into thinking you had to fight. You won’t ever hold a weapon like that again. I promise.’

Y/N opened her mouth to object no doubt, but Newt cut her off. ‘But you have to promise me something back. Promise me that you’ll let us protect you. You can help by keeping us alive, just like you always have. But you’ve got to listen to me, you got it?’

He used his authoritative voice this time, and it seemed to work as Y/N calmed down, her unshed tears now gone.

‘Okay,’ she said, quiet but strong. ‘I promise.’

Newt nodded. ‘Good that.’ He turned to see the others leaving through the door then turned back to Y/N. ’Do you think we’d be lucky enough not to face anything else beyond those doors.’

‘I think we should consider ourselves lucky for getting this far.’ To her credit, Y/N managed a small smile as she looked up at him. ‘But why should our luck run out now?’

There it was again; the glimmer of hope Newt had felt from her since the night he injured his ankle. Newt couldn’t deny that they’d made it this far – by design or by luck, they’d made it.

And who was he to deny that things might be on the look up for them now?

Together, Y/N and Newt followed the rest of the Gladers to meet their makers.

‘I never thought I’d say this… but I miss the Glade.’

The group around the fire grew silent at the implication Frypan’s words had, the memories they conjured up. Y/N couldn’t help but agree as she looked into the dark sky above her, peaking from behind the crumbling pillars they took refuge under.

The sky was always so clear back in the Glade, she recalled silently. But, just like their current situation, the sky was now obscured.

The people who rescued them from the Maze were actually WCKD – the people who’d put them in the Maze in the first place. The past twelve hours had seen herself, Newt, Thomas, Minho, Frypan, Winston, and a boy named Aris find Teresa, break out of the facility, and enter the deadly Scorch. In their search for supplies, they’d been attacked by crazed, infected people, driving the group to hide where they were.

The Maze was dangerous, but it was familiar and the only home Y/N recalled ever having. Out in the Scorch, safety wasn’t guaranteed.

She looked to Winston, who laid back, his shirt pulled up to expose the bloody bandage she’d wrapped his torso in. Y/N tried not to think about the infected scratch marks underneath, and more specifically what gave them to him. The Grievers were one thing, but the things that attacked them? They used to be people.

Not wanting to sit in her thoughts anymore, Y/N stood up, brushed off her pants, and grabbed knife from their pile of weapons they’d found in the abandoned mall. ‘I’ll take first watch.’

She didn’t wait to hear if anyone objected, already walking around the stone that covered them so she was on top. To her relief, the others let her go without argument, putting out the fire and quickly settling down to sleep.

After half an hour, Y/N decided to get up and patrol around the area, knife tightly gripped in her hand and her footsteps quiet despite the sand.

There was so much of it, the sand. The lady in white – Doctor Ava Paige – had said in her video that the whole world was just desert now. The thought made Y/N yearn for the Glade even more. For the grass, and the woods, and the bonfires they used to have, and the games they played. The boys – Clint, Jeff, Alby, Gally, Chuck.

Y/N wasn’t a hateful person, but she clutched the knife tighter at the thought of all the loss they’d all suffered at the hands of WCKD.

It’s why she didn’t hesitate to follow Newt when he’d found her in her room – for some reason, she hadn’t been allowed to stay with the other girls from the other mazes just yet. It’s why they were now braving the Scorch searching for people that Thomas didn’t know even existed. They wanted a better life out from under WCKD’s thumb.

The crunch of sand had her whirling around, awkwardly poising the knife as if to attack, but she relaxed at the familiar person standing there.

Newt raised his hands in mock surrender. ‘Whoa there,’ he said, the quirk of a smile on his lips telling her he was just joking. ‘You could do some real damage if you’re not careful.’

Y/N blew out in relief, the knife dropping to her side again. ‘Thanks, but we both know that’s not the case, Newt.’

Newt shoved his hands in his jacket pocket, shrugging his shoulders as he did. ‘I don’t know, I’ve seen you with a scalpel. Absolutely terrifyingly precise with that thing.’

Y/N chuckled softly, appreciative of the distraction. But her smile dropped as she looked out into the dark cityscape. The moon hid behind clouds so Y/N couldn’t make out anything. ‘Is it pathetic that I’m scared to see what the world has become?’ she asked, not daring to raise her voice above a soft mumble.

Newt stepped up beside her, his body radiating the last remnants of heat from the fire and it warmed her slightly. ’Someone once told me that I was brave for facing my fear,’ he said after some quiet contemplation.

Y/N looked up at him confused, but he looked down at her with a knowing, smug smile. Much to her chagrin, she couldn’t help but chuckle and shake her head at him. ‘I don’t recall saying that specifically. But if that’s how you saw it, who am I to tell you that wasn’t what I meant?’

Newt hummed in agreement looking back out at the dark expanse, contemplation scrunching his brows together. ‘I’ll be honest with you, I’m scared too.’

That surprised Y/N. Newt, second-in-command, casual, leader Newt was scared? ‘You are?’

Newt nodded. ‘I’m scared that we’ve made a mistake. That Thomas is wrong and there aren’t any mountain people.’ He turned back to Y/N, the most serious she’d ever seen him. ‘I’m scared we’re going to lose more of us, and then what was our escape for? But… it’s not my place to take away hope when the others are so full of it. Including myself.’ Finally, Newt’s smile returned, and it warmed that cold pit of despair Y/N had been falling into ever since they left the WCKD facility. ‘Or, at least, I think that’s what someone very wise once told me.’

Y/N stared at him, awestruck. Hopeful. Newt was hopeful again. And she didn’t want to read into it, but she thought the knowing smile he was giving her told her that she had something to do with it. The thought alone strengthened her resolve, and she looked down at the knife in her hands, less afraid of it all of a sudden.

Y/N held it out to Newt. ’Teach me.’

He raised an eyebrow in a silent question. ‘What?’

’Teach me. How to fight,’ Y/N explained, eyes unwavering from his.

Concern flashed across Newt’s face for a brief moment. ‘Y/N, I told you, you don’t have to fight if you don’t want to.’

‘If there is one thing I’ve come to know about WCKD is that it doesn’t actually matter what I want anymore. What any of us want,’ Y/N said, feeling the most certain she’s felt in a long time. ‘The one thing we have on WCKD is that we are defiant. We escaped, and are taking away the one thing they want most of all: a chance to find a cure. So, if we’re going to have any hopes of making it to the mountains alive, I’m going to have to know how to fight. So please – teach me.’

Newt contemplated her for a moment, and Y/N just prayed he wouldn’t say no. Or even worse, laugh. Instead of doing either, he took the knife from Y/N’s hand, his fingers brushing across her palm as he did.

‘All right,’ he said, moving his feet apart to get into a fighting stance. ‘First of all, you’ve got to have a wide-ish stance, and stay light on your toes so you can control when you back away from your opponent.’

He demonstrated the movement by quickly shuffling away, always keeping his feet a certain distance apart and the knife gripped tight by his hip. ‘…and when you go into attack.’ He moved so fast Y/N didn’t see his footwork, her eyes locked on his as they bored into hers, knife poised at her neck as if he’d strike.

He stepped away and gave her the knife back. ‘You think you can do that?’

Y/N nodded and took the knife, and for the next hour Newt taught Y/N basic blocks and manoeuvres that he’d picked up from Thomas and Minho and just from basic instinct. Just like she’d been with her Medjack skills, Y/N was a quick study, performing move after move when Newt asked her to.

She impressed herself. For a natural pacifist, she wielded the knife quite fluently.

They decided to finish the session on a quick sparring match. Newt took a swipe at Y/N, and she stepped back just like Newt had taught her. She then rushed in for an attack, to which Newt threw up his own knife in time to block. Y/N anticipated the pushback and twisted out of Newt’s way as he stumbled slightly forward. While he was disorientated, Y/N gripped his wrist that controlled his knife and pointed her own into his back.

‘Looks like I win,’ she said, breathless but proud.

Y/N didn’t like the carefree scoff he gave her, followed by, ‘Are you sure?’

She doubted herself for a moment, loosening her grip enough for him to twist out of her reach, knock her knife away and bend to sweep her legs out from underneath her. Y/N landed hard, groaning at the pain in her butt as Newt looked down at her and laughed.

‘I’m glad you find my pain amusing, Newt,’ she grumbled, rubbing her sore behind.

Newt laughed for a moment longer then calmed down. But his radiant smile remained on his face, brightening the darkness surrounding them. ‘I’m sorry, love,’ he said between remaining chuckles. To his credit, he held out his hand in an offer to help her up. ’But the surprise on your face was priceless.’

Y/N contemplated his hand for a moment, whether she should just push it away or take it. Instead, an idea came to mind, and she gripped his hand tightly then pulled him to the ground with her. He landed on his stomach beside her, getting a face full of sand.

Y/N let out a loud laugh before quickly covering her mouth to stifle the relentless laughter that wished to burst from her.

Newt spat and coughed out sand as he made to sit up. ‘Well,’ he started, spitting out more sand as he looked up at Y/N, ‘I should’ve seen that coming.’

That just made Y/N laugh even harder, using now both hands to quieten the giggles. Goodness, when was the last time she’d laughed this freely? When was the last time she’d felt such joy? After everything they’d been through, Y/N was worried she’d forgotten what was like to laugh.

When she’d calmed down, she looked down to see Newt propped up on his arms looking up at her with an odd expression on his face. Like he was in awe, maybe. Whatever it was, it made Y/N acknowledge how handsome Newt had become. His baby features had faded since she’d first met him, being replaced by a lean figure and a toned jawline from working in the gardens every day for two years. And with his big brown eyes, tousled blond hair and funny accent, Y/N wondered how he had changed so much without her realising it. How she hadn’t realised he’d grown up.

The intensity with which he looked at her brought a heated blush to her face, and so she turned away into the cool night breeze, willing the blush to cool down. Newt shuffled to sit up next to her. They didn’t speak for a minute, until Newt suddenly stood up.

‘Well, um,’ he started, and for the first time since Y/N had known him, he sounded uncertain about what to say. ‘I better let you continue with your shift. At least you know how to defend yourself now.’

Y/N hastily stood up as well, making sure there was at least a step between them. ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Thank you for that. I’ll be sure to practice.’

‘Good that.’

They looked at each other for a moment, and even though Newt said he was leaving, he made no move to leave. Maybe he doesn’t want to, she thought, and the mere possibility of that being true warmed her heart.

But he took a step away, gave her a shy smile and a small wave farewell. ‘Goodnight, Y/N.’

‘Goodnight Newt,’ she said, those two words hanging in the air long after he’d left.

As she finally woke Frypan up for his shift, she clung to the knife and went through all the manoeuvres Newt had taught her until she fell asleep.

Newt was unable to sleep until Y/N woke Frypan up to take the next watch shift, and laid down to sleep herself. Newt opened his eyes to see Y/N laying across the pit they’d dug out for the fire. She faced him on her side, and Newt noticed with curiosity that she held the knife she’d practiced with close to her chest. Her chest rose and fell rhythmically, and paired with her heavy breathing, Newt figured she was completely asleep.

An odd sensation fluttered in his chest and stomach as Newt considered Y/N’s sleeping face. It was the same feeling that had fizzled in his chest when he’d looked up at her as she laughed. He couldn’t remember the last time any of them had laughed as freely as she had.

And he couldn’t help but admire how beautiful she looked doing so – hiding her bright smile behind trembling hands, eyes narrowed but sparkling with joy.

All because of him.

He rolled onto his back then, not wanting to give the thought anymore weight. There’s no point getting your hopes up, he reminded himself. But like a moth drawn to flame, Newt couldn’t help but tilt his head to gaze upon her peacefully sleeping. An ache carved itself deep in his heart. How had he not realised her growing up, changing? Being the only girl for a long time, of course he and the others found her pretty. But now that he looked at her – really looked at her, and wasn’t concerned with his life for just a split second – he realised just how beautiful she was.

It was in her features, but also in her determination to be better for the group. It both hurt and impressed him when she asked for his help. He promised her she would never have to fight again, but things have changed drastically since the Maze.

It was in her ability to still find the joy in things, to still be able to laugh despite their situation.

It was how she believed in Thomas, in Aris, in the mountain people, even if she was scared.

‘The rest of us can only wish to be as brave as you,’ he whispered into the night, a silent promise that he’d tell her that sometime.

And with the fluttering in his chest finally easing into a calm warmth, he finally fell asleep.

Everything exploded with chaos as Y/N, Newt, Thomas, and Minho navigated their way through the Right Arm camp as guns fired and explosions went off.

Teresa had betrayed them. Y/N couldn’t believe it when it was revealed in front of everyone, and she still couldn’t believe it as Minho pushed her head down, sheltering her from another explosion. Teresa truly believed WCKD could find a cure, but still at the expanse of Y/N and her friends’ pain. And just when Thomas was going to blow them all sky high, Jorge and Brenda had come in like a saving grace, and that’s when all hell broke loose.

‘This way!’ Thomas yelled over the din, beckoning them behind a weapons container.

However, Minho stopped suddenly and picked up a launcher. Keep going!’ Minho called over his shoulder as he shot at WCKD soldiers around him. ‘I’m right behind you!’

Thomas and Newt reached the container, but Y/N stopped and turned at the sound of a painful cry. ‘Minho!’ she cried as her friend fell, his body convulsing from a launcher shot.

‘Y/N, no!’ Newt called after her, but she was already running back to Minho, grabbing at his jacket to drag him to safety.

But Y/N was not strong like the boys, and certainly not strong enough to move Minho in any hurry. She looked up just in time to see a launcher fire at her, then her body felt like it was on fire.

She was sure she was screaming, but she couldn’t hear anything as the electricity struck every nerve with a vicious bite. After what felt like an eternity of pain, she was granted a moment of peace as her vision went white, then in a flash was swamped by darkness.

Newt’s heart stopped when he saw Y/N shot. She convulsed as Minho had, then collapsed beside their friend unconscious. The second Y/N hit the ground, Newt found his voice again, feelings of anger and desperation clawing their way through every vein in him.

‘Y/N, no!’ His cry came out broken as he made to run to her, but a strong hand gripped the back of his jacket and pulled him back.

‘No, boys,’ Vince shouted over the din, holding both Newt and Thomas back.

‘Let me go!’ Newt protested, struggling against Vince, eyes darting between him and Y/N. ‘I need to help her! Y/N!’

But WCKD soldiers were already picking up Y/N and Minho’s unconscious bodies, dragging their feet through the red dirt and into a berg.

‘I’m sorry, son,’ Vince said, and Newt thought he sounded genuine. But that didn’t stop icy terror gripping tight on his heart as the doors began to close on Y/N, Minho, and other immunes from the Right Arm.

Thomas called for Minho, and Newt called for Y/N, but neither could do anything to help their friends as they were flown away. Back in WCKD’s clutches once again.

When the sun rose, the remaining survivors came out of hiding and began scrounging up supplies. They were moving on, Vince claiming there was nothing they could do but keep going with who and what they had left.

Newt couldn’t accept that, and neither could Thomas apparently, as he claimed he was going after Minho, Y/N and the others. Without hesitation or any further explanation, Newt was the first to sign up and join him.

And so, they went on a quest to rescuing Minho, Y/N, and as many immunes as possible. The train hijack was a huge success with immune numbers, but no Minho and no Y/N. Even so, Newt refused to accept that he’d never see either of them again. Even when they almost got killed by cranks. Even when he, Thomas, Brenda, Frypan, and Jorge were almost blown up by turret guns.

Even when he found out he was infected with the Flare.

He could feel it, his mind slowly slipping away as the Flare ate away at his sanity. He was usually level-headed and rational – it’s part of the reason he became second-in-command in the first place. Guilt and shame ate away at him as he sat on the rooftop of their hideout in the outskirts of the Last City, explaining to Thomas why he just bit his head off about being in love with Teresa.

Not that I’m one to talk, he thought as he rolled down as his sleeve, silence wrapping around him and Thomas comfortably. Newt could feel Thomas didn’t know what to say, and Newt didn’t like long silences so he broke it.

‘The crazy thing, though is…’ Newt started, a soft but sad scoff escaping him, ‘I’m not scared of dying. I used to be, back in the Maze. Because it felt like my friends were dying for no reason, without purpose. But…’ Newt looked over his shoulder, past Thomas, and to the peaking spires of the Last City. To where Y/N was being held somewhere.

‘I have something to die for now,’ Newt said, eyes never wavering from the spires.

Thomas came to sit beside Newt, a sad realisation drawing his brows and lips down. ‘You’re not just talking about Minho, are you?’ he asked.

It was how gentle and matter-of-fact Thomas spoke that had Newt’s chest tightening with fear and an immense pressure he’d been scared, until now, to acknowledge. His throat threatened to close on him as he spoke, rendering his words tight and uncontrolled. ‘I failed to protect her, Tommy,’ he managed to get out. ‘I promised I’d always protect her, and I didn’t.’

It surprised Newt how simultaneously hard and easy it was to speak about his feelings, and now that he had started, the words just flowed.

’She’s just always been there, so I never saw it coming,’ Newt continued, a melancholic smile adorning his lips as he recalls the day he met you, how you helped him with his ankle. How, since then, you’ve always been by his side, growing with him, changing with him, supporting him and everyone else around you.

’Saw what?’ Thomas asked.

‘I never saw that I could have a future after the Maze, after all of this,’ Newt explained. ‘That I would want a future… with Y/N.’ And with that, his tears finally spilled over, the pressure in his chest bursting into sobs that wracked his whole body. Newt was vaguely aware that Thomas was now holding him, and so he wrapped his arms tight around his friend, around his brother.

‘I love her, Tommy,’ Newt whispered over Thomas’ shoulder, his words obscured somewhat by his tears and holding back sobs. ‘And I’m scared I’ll never be able to tell her before I go.’

‘Hey,’ Thomas said, pushing Newt to arm’s length. He kept one hand on Newt’s shoulder and used his other to grip Newt’s neck, forcing their eyes to lock. ‘We’re going to find her – and Minho, and the other immunes. We’re going to get you that serum that helps with the Flare – as much of it as possible – and you’re going to tell her. You’re not dying. No one is dying. You hear me?’

No one could replace Alby, but the way Thomas was taking control of the situation reminded Newt of his old friend. How kind yet stern he could be. How hopeful yet pragmatic he was. It was something familiar that Newt was thankful for. He quickly calmed down, wiped away his tears and nodded at Thomas.

‘Good that,’ Thomas said, a small proud smile gracing his lips at his use of Newt’s common phrase.

Newt couldn’t help a chuckle as well. ‘Good that, indeed,’ he agreed, and followed Thomas back inside the hideout to finalise their plan to get into the WCKD facility.

…and you’re going to tell her. You’re not dying.

There was a nagging voice in the back of Newt’s head that was telling him not to believe Thomas. That Newt was going to die, or worse, turn into a crank and hurt his loved ones. That voice had followed him from the Maze, to the Scorch, and now the Last City. It was the voice that had driven him over the edge of the Maze walls all those years ago. But not anymore.

Newt had to keep hope, just as Y/N had taught him. He just had to be brave.

Y/N sat in the corner of her white-walled cell, hugging her knees to her chest as she rested her head on top. She’d sat there for hours, perhaps days. Y/N lost track of time after her first month in WCKD’s facility.

There were no windows, and the lights never dimmed. She pressed her eyes into her knees in the hopes of downing out the incessant white light. Her eyes ached with sleep deprivation, but she refused to sleep. The nightmares were much worse to deal with, and they always came whenever she closed her eyes.

Images of her friends dying in the Maze and the Scorch, of Grievers chasing her, of her friends turning into cranks and attacking her. Images fed to her by WCKD.

She knew they weren’t real, but she could never wake herself up in time to escape them. So, she stayed awake, knowing that she’ll have no choice but to face her nightmares when the doctors and scientists come to test on her again.

Y/N shivered at the thought of seeing another needle, of seeing her blood drained from her while WCKD turned her mind against her. When will it be enough? She might’ve lost track of time, but Y/N knew she’d been in the facility for a while now. If they hadn’t found anything by now, something told Y/N that nothing she gave would ever be enough. That included her life.

She knew Thomas and Newt would be dumb enough to come after her and Minho – that’s just the kind of people they were. Her heart ached at the thought that their efforts would be in vain.

Y/N hadn’t seen Minho since they arrived, having been separated from each other and the other immunes. Something about how they were the most promising subjects, she overheard from a scientist one time. Y/N didn’t know if Minho was alive, and if he was, what condition he was in.

But Minho was strong, the strongest of all the Gladers in Y/N’s opinion. If he was being tortured like her, he would be able to hold on. Y/N highly doubted she would last much longer.

The rest of us can only hope to be as brave as you…

Y/N wasn’t sure if Newt knew she was actually awake that first night in the Scorch, but she’d heard him, his words so soft she thought she’d dreamt it at first. But it had been real; Newt thought she was brave.

She was too dehydrated to produce tears, but an ugly sob desperately tried to escape her aching chest. She bit her lips instead, hard enough to draw a little blood, and the sob died out, leaving her body quiet except for her mind.

I’m sorry Newt, but I am not brave.

Even so, Y/N refused to crumble to WCKD anymore. They’d taken everything from her. Her life, her memories, her loved ones, her friends. Even her hope – something she so naively believed no one could take from her. They would not take her dignity.

She raised her head at the sound of her cell door unlocking, blinking a few times as bright light flooded her vision once more. Two WCKD soldiers and two scientists stood by the door, and Y/N spied a gurney just behind them.

One of the scientists – young male, maybe in his early twenties – stepped forward. ‘Time for more testing, Y/N,’ he said in a cold tone. But he had the sense to look sympathetic as his eyes roamed over Y/N as she stood up, showing how pale her S/C skin had become, how dark the circles beneath her eyes were, how the cargo pants and grey t-shirt hung off her in areas where she used to fill.

Y/N knew it was useless, but still she ran for the door, pushing past the scientists with ease despite her weakened state. However, she hit the soldiers like a brick wall, unable to fight against them as they restrained her arms and pressed her against the wall. The male scientist recovered quickly and injected her with a serum that made her drowsy enough that she wasn’t in control of her body. She was conscious as the soldiers strapped her to the gurney and the four of them wheeled her down corridor after corridor, and all she could do was watch fluorescent lights pass her by as she stared at the ceiling.

Soon enough, she was in a familiar room: the test lab.

‘It hasn’t been that long since we last tested her,’ the other scientist – a female, about the same age as her co-worker – said, her words laced with worry. ‘We put her under again, we risk losing her for good this time.’

‘I didn’t make the call,’ the male said as he continued to set up equipment around Y/N. ‘When Janson says he wants a cure, I don’t question him. Do you?’

The female didn’t answer, switching her focus to helping her co-worker. Y/N could slowly feel the serum wearing off – it was obviously only a light dose, the scientists knowing they’d put her under when they began testing.

But just as they unstrapped her to move her to the nightmare simulator, the room shook, sending Y/N rolling to the ground as glass and steel broke around her.

Sounds were muffled briefly and her vision blurred in and out of focus. She couldn’t hear what exactly the soldiers were shouting, but she saw them run out of the room alongside other soldiers. That just left her and the scientists.

Y/N flexed her fingers, the serum completely wearing off. Before she could stand though, two hands roughly grabbed her arms and hauled her to her feet. ‘Come on, Y/N,’ the male scientist said, pushing her towards the machine. ‘Just one more trip under…’

Fear electrified Y/N’s every nerve. No, not again. With a desperate cry, she shoved the male into the utensils table, sending him and the tools scattering across the ground. Before he could get up, Y/N straddled his upper body and slammed his arms into the ground.

‘Get off me!’ he yelled, struggling violently beneath Y/N. He managed to twist them both around until she was the one pinned to the ground. Y/N struggled but to no avail. She was significantly weaker than she was when she was first captured and he knew that.

‘You little brat,’ he spat in her face. ‘Ungrateful, selfish immunes. Your duty is to save us all! You–’

He was cut off when he suddenly went slack, falling unconscious on top of Y/N. She scrambled out from underneath him, then looked up from the floor to find the female scientist with a syringe in her hand. She looked between her unconscious co-worker then Y/N, a scared and disbelieving expression morphing her delicate features.

‘Go,’ the scientist finally said, her voice shaky, but the resolve in her eyes told Y/N that she wouldn’t chase after her. The room – no, the whole building – shook again, and when Y/N looked out the window, she realised why.

The city outside was on fire. Buildings crumbled, and Y/n could hear the screams and cries of civilians through the broken windows. The scientist wouldn’t chase her because there was no point.

This was the end.

‘Go!’ The scientist insisted, and Y/N didn’t think twice. She picked herself up, ignoring the cuts and scraps of glass it caused her, and ran out of the room.

She ran into the corridor, ignoring the cries of soldiers and other scientists who recognised her as a subject. She didn’t know where she was going, but this was the most freedom she’d had in forever.

Then a thought came to her – Minho. She had to find him, he surely had to be alive. She would run through every floor if she had to to find him. So she ran, looking into every test lab, every storage closest, every break room on the floor.

‘Minho!’ she cried, uncaring at this point if someone heard her. She just wanted to find him. She didn’t want to die without a familiar face with her. ‘Minho, where are you?’

She rounded a corner, right into the chest of a WCKD soldier. He was caught by surprise, giving Y/N an opportunity to slam him into the wall. It was like her fear was giving her a boost of strength, as she kneed him in the groin, sending him to the ground. He dropped the pistol he was holding, and she quickly picked it up and smacked the butt over the back of his head. He fell to the floor in one last scuffle and laid unmoving as Y/N sucked in deep breaths.

‘Y/N?’

She whirled around at the familiar call of her name, only to find three other people had entered the corridor. Thomas, Minho, and Newt. Her eyes scanned over them all, heart aching with an intense relief it threatened to crush her chest. ‘Guys?’ Her voice was hoarse with disuse and exhaustion. She was surprised she even had a voice after all her screaming.

Newt stepped forward, a relieved smile gracing his lips. ‘Yeah, love,’ he said, sounding on the verge of tears. ‘It’s us.’

Y/N’s first instinct was to run into his arms, the only place she’d felt since leaving the Maze. But she took a closer look at him. He was paler than when she last saw him, almost sickly with how dark the circles under his eyes were. Crank.

She pointed the pistol at her friends, causing them to raise their hands in shock. ‘Whoa, Y/N, it’s us!’ Thomas exclaimed.

‘No,’ she said, her voice cracking ever so slightly. ‘How do I know I’m not in that simulator again? How do I know this isn’t just another test, another trial?’

‘What are you talking about, Y/N?’ Newt asked, worry crinkling his brow.

’She doesn’t trust her mind,’ Minho said, as if in explanation. ‘Boy, they really did a number on her…’

‘Shut up!’ Y/N unlocked the safety and pointed the gun at Minho. ‘You’re just trying to trick me. Make me think everything is all right. But it’s just a lie. You’re not here. You’re not here…’

Newt stepped into the firing line. ‘We are here, love. I promise, we’re really here.’

‘Newt…’ Thomas warned, but Newt remained, eyes locked on Y/N’s.

Y/N couldn’t look away from Newt. He sounded so genuine, so much more real than previous simulations. But WCKD couldn’t be trusted, and they were wearing soldier uniforms…

Her hands shook but her voice was strong. ‘Prove it,’ she said. ’Tell me something only the real Newt would know.’

Newt swallowed thickly. ‘Okay, um… You cut yourself when you tried out being a Slicer and had to have Clint and Jeff fix you up. That’s when you thought being a Medjack would be a good idea.’

‘WCKD was watching us the whole time. They would’ve seen that,’ she countered, using both hands to grip the gun.

‘Okay, okay,’ Newt said, looking away a moment to think of something else. When he finally looked back at her, he was calm once more, eyes genuine and sincere. ‘How about how I jumped off the walls of the Maze in an attempt to kill myself?’

The world around the four of them seemed to freeze, as if the world wasn’t collapsing outside. To Y/N’s knowledge, Newt had never told anyone the truth of what happened that day. It was the shocked and tragic expressions on both Minho and Thomas’ faces respectively that had Y/N loosening her grip on the gun slightly.

Newt took a small step closer, eyes never straying from her. ‘I had lost all hope of getting out of that bloody maze. So I did the one thing I could do to control the situation. But I failed.’ He stepped closer again. ‘I was embarrassed, ashamed. I was just a coward. But you healed me and told me something I will never forget. I have held onto it like a lifeline through the Maze, through the Scorch, and all the time I was looking for you.’

He took one final step towards her, unfazed at how the gun pressed hard against his chest. Now that he was so close, Y/N saw just how sick he was. He looked like the early stage victims of the Flare they’d seen in the decrepit city they’d lost Brenda and Thomas in temporarily. And while Y/N refused to believe Newt – her beloved, sweet Newt – was infected, his eyes were the same as always. Open, honest, and truthful.

‘The rest of us can only hope to be as brave as you.’

It wasn’t the fact that he knew the exact words – again, WCKD had cameras everywhere in that Maze, they would’ve heard it. It was instead the emotion tied to the words. She felt them, felt the lifeline they’d created for him in his darkest moment. He wasn’t lying, and that meant he was real.

Finally, she allowed the sob to break free as she dropped the gun and threw her arms around Newt’s neck. He breathed out in relief, bringing her closer to his chest, face pressed into her H/C hair.

‘It’s really you,’ she whimpered, grasping tighter to the person she’s always been able to rely on. The person who has always protected her and brought out the best in her. Her closest friend, her safety net, her home.

‘It is, love,’ he said into her hair, breathing her in deeply. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you before.’

‘It’s okay,’ she said, pulling away to look up at him then to the other two. ‘I can’t believe you came after us.’

‘I know right,’ Minho said, punching Thomas’ arm lightly. ‘Dumb shanks.’

‘You can berate us later,’ Thomas said, rubbing his arm. ‘Right now, we’ve got to get out of here before Lawrence brings down the whole city.’

Y/N went to ask what he meant but gripped onto Newt instead as the building shook again.

‘Come on, let’s go,’ Newt said, grabbing Y/N’s hand with one hand, and holding a launcher in the other. Together, the four of them ran to escape WCKD once and for all.

‘Brenda!’

Y/N didn’t care about the rain of bullets and walls of fire around her as she ran for the berg. After hearing Teresa’s broadcast, she needed to get the cure back to Newt fast. Leaving him was one of the hardest things she has had to do. He wasn’t in great condition, but Thomas insisted that he’d take care of Newt. But the medicine Thomas had given Brenda all those months ago didn’t just buy her time, it had cured her completely. It could do the same for Newt.

If she could make it in time.

‘Brenda!’ Y/N cried as she spotted her friend. ‘The cure! I need the cure!’

Brenda understood, immediately retrieving one of the extra capsules Mary had made from Thomas’ blood before WCKD raided the camp. ‘Here,’ she said, passing over the injector.

‘Thanks!’ Y/N said, already sprinting back into the war zone before anyone could stop her.

She could feel it, the exhaustion, the strain she was putting her body under. Underfed and under trained, she was struggling. But she refused to stop. Newt had come all this way to find her, risked his life to get her out of WCKD’s clutches when he could’ve been administered the temporary cure and been safe on the berg already. No, Y/N refused to let him die without trying.

Minho, Brenda, Frypan, and Gally – Y/N was still shocked about that revelation, but that was for another time to discuss - followed around her, covering her with guns and other weapons as they ran through the war zone.

After an eternity of running, the group rounded a corner to find a sight that made Y/N feel like she was back in the nightmare simulator. Newt was leaning over Thomas with a knife aimed at his chest.

‘Newt, no!’ Y/N cried, running towards the two boys without thought.

Newt faced her at the call of his name, and she froze as she saw his black eyes. Dark veins branched over his skin and black blood dribbled from his chin. He was a full-blown crank now.

He raced at her, snarling as he swung the knife at her throat. She ducked just in time and rolled away as he slammed the knife down where her neck was. She quickly jumped to her feet, and despite her fatigue, muscle memory took over her legs, then her hands. That first night in the Scorch came to mind, how her and Newt sparred. The injector was her knife, and Newt her proper opponent.

‘Newt, it’s me,’ she said, slipping into her Medjack demeanour – calm and steady. ‘It’s Y/N. Please, snap out of it for a moment so I can help you.’

She thought he would run at her again, but his brows crinkled with concern and he looked at the knife in his shaky hands. He looked back at her, and the voice he spoke with broke her heart. It was a mixture of his sweet accent and a gargled croak where blood clogged his throat.

‘Y/N…’ he started. ‘Run away… Before… Before I kill you.’

The scene reminded her of the time he came in with his injured ankle. How desperate he was to fade into nothing because he was scared and ashamed of what he’d done. But just like then, she refused to be scared of him.

Y/N shook her head. ‘I’m not leaving you, Newt,’ she said. ‘None of us will.’

Newt seemed to realise there were more people than just her and Thomas, turning around to see the others. The sight of them seemed to distress him, though, as he snarled angrily and charged at her. She shuffled back as he swung at her again and again, but as she stepped back again, she tripped on something. She fell onto her back, knocking the air out of her lungs. Before she could gather herself up, Newt was on her, straddling her similar to how he had Thomas pinned before. Newt raised the knife to bring down on her but was tackled by Thomas.

They rolled for a little, then scrambled to their feet as they fought once more. This was Y/N’s only chance. She pushed herself up and ran for the boys, injector at the ready. Newt was bringing the knife forward in a wide arc that would gut Thomas when Y/N threw herself in between them, slamming the injector into Newt’s arm.

Right as his drove the knife into her stomach.

‘Y/N!’

She wasn’t sure who called her name, because all she could focus on was Newt as some of the blackness in his eyes cleared and she saw some of his gorgeous brown eyes. She also felt her body finally giving up. As if it knew that this was the end. After all the torture and pain, she had stayed alive so long for one reason. To save Newt – the boy who had been there from the start. So much so she hadn’t realised until he wasn’t there how much he meant to her. How he’d wormed his way into her heart and consumed it without her even knowing.

She gripped his hand that held the knife in her stomach, unfurled his fingers from the handle, and brought them to her chest where her heart was slowly slowing down. Her weak legs gave out, and she brought Newt down to his knees with her. She could’ve been imagining things, but she swore she saw recognition in his half-black eyes which made her smile as tears finally fell from her eyes.

‘It’s okay, Newt,’ she whispered. ‘It’s okay because… I love you.’

Her vision blurred and she finally let go of Newt as the both of them collapsed to the ground. Her breaths were short and sharp as the pain made itself known. A rush of feet thumped around her, and she had the slightest awareness that someone was moving her, but she didn’t care. She was finally at peace as darkness, at last, consumed her.

Y/N woke to the sound of waves rolling over on sand. The first thing she saw was grey canvas, then rolled her head around to see she was lying on a cot in a small tent with tables and medical supplies similar to how her Medjack hut looked. But she wasn’t alone.

‘Oh my God.’ Brenda’s face came into focus as the girl crouched by Y/N’s cot, disbelief and relief morphing her gentle features. ‘You’re awake! You’re finally awake!’

‘Ow,’ Y/N clasped at her head at the sudden loudness. ‘Could you lower your voice please?’

‘Yes, right, sorry,’ Brenda said, but her lips split in a bright smile as she helped Y/N sit up. ‘I’m just so happy you’re okay.’

‘What happened?’ Y/N asked, all she remembered was being stabbed then falling unconscious. She pulled up her fresh linen shirt to see her wound bandaged. ‘I thought I was done for.’

‘So did all of us,’ Brenda admitted, her tone sombre as she pulled up a seat beside the cot. ‘We got you to the berg as quickly as possible and Vince got you stable, but you just weren’t waking up. It’s been a week.’

‘A week?’ Y/N made to get up but sat back down as her wound pulled in an unpleasant way.

‘Whoa, where do you think you’re going?’ Brenda asked stabilising Y/N back in her bed. ‘You’ve just come out of a coma induced by physical and mental torture. Not to mention you were stabbed.’

‘I’m fine. Trust me, I’m trained… somewhat,’ Y/N said, this time able to swing her legs over the side of her cot. Brenda didn’t try and stop her, but she did have to help Y/N when she stood. ‘Now, where is Newt?’ Brenda didn’t answer right away, and tears threatened to pool in Y/N’s eyes at what her silence could mean. ‘Brenda… Is he… Is he alive?’

Brenda, again, didn’t answer, and her face didn’t give anything away either. Instead, she just held back the flap of the tent and motioned for Y/N to exit. Y/N took cautious steps forward as she followed Brenda into a completely new place that had her staring in awe.

It was a bustling camp where sleeping quarters and other spaces were mapped out by canvas strung up on carved wood pillars and posts. Y/N spied a kitchen area where she swore she heard Frypan laughing with some others.

There was a gathering area where a giant stone stood in front of the seats. There were names carved into it, like what they used to do in the Glade. Y/N tried to make out if a certain blonde’s name was on it. She caught familiar names like Alby and Chuck, Clint and Jeff.

‘Y/N?’

She swung around to find Brenda smiling as she was joined by Thomas, Minho, and Jorge. The three of them ran at her, arms wide open to capture her in a hug.

‘You crazy shank, Minho said, laughter on his lips. ‘Look who finally decided to join the living again.’

‘And here I thought I was the lazy slinthead for sleeping for so long,’ Thomas said jokingly, pulling Y/N in for another hug. ’I’m so relieved.’

‘Welcome back, hermana,’ Jorge said, a warm smile gracing his lips as he gave her a comforting pat on the shoulder.

‘Good to be back,’ Y/N replied, smiling at the three males. ‘What happened after I thought I’d died?’

Thomas went to reply, but Minho cut in. ‘We’ll explain later. Right now, I think you should go say hi to someone else.’

Confused, Y/N followed Minho’s gaze to Brenda, who stood atop a hill and was staring over the other side of it. Y/N quickly reached Brenda’s position and followed her gaze to a large garden that people were working on. But her breath caught at the sight of a familiar blond at the edge of the gardens talking and pointing in all directions to people.

‘Hey, Newt!’ Brenda called out, causing the blond to turn around and look up. At first, he saw Brenda, but his gaze soon fell on Y/N and his whole face changed into disbelief.

With the other gardeners forgotten, he started climbing up the hill, and Y/N couldn’t wait another moment so she started walking down the hill.

They met in the middle, with Y/N standing at Newt’s height on the uphill. Neither said anything to begin with, both in disbelief and awe at who stood in front of them. Y/N looked over Newt, noting he still looked pale and somewhat sickly. But the dark veins were gone, as was the black blood and his black eyes. And the sun shone so brightly that his hair looked golden. It was as if he was never infected to begin with.

With a shaky hand, she reached out to rest her hand over his beating heart. ‘You’re alive,’ she whispered, too scared to voice it too loudly in case this was also another nightmare.

But he proved her doubts wrong as he rested his own hand on top of hers. ‘I am,’ he said, and the usual warmth of his voice truly convinced her he was real.

His face pinched suddenly with concern and guilt. ‘I’m so sorry, Y/N,’ he said, his hand tightening slightly over hers. ‘I hurt you. I almost…’

‘It’s okay,’ she interrupted, using her free hand to cradle is cheek and keep his eyes on her. ‘You didn’t. I am here, too. Looks like we both saved each other.’

To her relief Newt smiled. It was a genuine, happy smile, something she hadn’t seen on him in a long time. He nuzzled into her hand briefly, before bringing it down with his free hand so he held her hands between them.

‘Before I passed out,’ he started, ‘I remember you saying something.’

‘Oh.’ A blush heated upon her cheeks, but she refused to look away from him. ‘Right. I did say something.’

She was trying to play it cool, but as soon as his deep brown eyes fixed on her, she knew he could see right through her. But he didn’t smile smugly, he didn’t tease. He actually looked scared as his jaw clenched, fighting to find the next words to speak.

‘You said you love me,’ he finally said, words tight but hopeful. ‘Is that true?’

Y/N’s mouth dried up suddenly, constricted by all the things she wished to say but couldn’t say all at once. It’s not like she was scared, she just never thought she would live long enough to have a future, let alone one with love. One with Newt.

But she had – she had survived WCKD’s cruelty, she had survived the terrors of the old world, she had survived when so many of her friends hadn’t. And it was her duty to live her gift of a life to the fullest.

‘Yes,’ she finally said, and it was like breathing in fresh air after being underground for so long. ‘I love you, Newt. I don’t know when or how it happened, but I do. I love you.’

There was a second of hesitation, but then Newt broke out into a wide smile, and Y/N swore she saw tears brim in his eyes. He suddenly reached one hand up to cradle her neck as he pulled Y/N in for a sweet kiss that simultaneously knocked the air out of her and breathed new life into her. He held her neck and hip, and she pressed her hands against his chest, satisfied to feel his heart thundering beneath her hands. The heart that almost never beat again, the heart that had saved her over and over again.

The kiss was short but was no less breath-taking, and when they pulled apart neither could stop the smiles on their faces.

‘I love you, too,’ Newt said. ‘If that wasn’t already obvious.’

Y/N threw her head back in a hearty laugh. She slung her arms around Newt’s neck, a cheeky grin dancing across her lips. ‘I’m not so sure. Maybe we could try that again to make sure?’

‘Cheeky bugger,’ he murmured as he pressed his lips to hers again. Y/N sighed into the kiss, grasping the baby hairs at the base of his head.

They pulled apart at the sound of their friends whooping and clapping atop the hill. Y/N felt her face erupt with embarrassed heat, to which Newt laughed as she ducked her head into his chest.

‘All right, come on lovebirds!’ Minho called out. ‘Dinner’s almost ready.’

As they walked down out of sight, Y/N went to follow but was stopped by a loose grip on her wrist.

‘What is it?’ she asked as she turned back to Newt.

‘I just…’ Newt turned to the gardens below, then to the water, then to the sunset that bathed the whole camp in beautiful hues of orange, pink and purple. When he finally turned back to Y/N, she thought he couldn’t look any more handsome with that pure sunshine smile and sparkle in his eyes. ‘Thanks.’

‘For what?’ she asked.

‘For teaching me how to be brave,’ he answered.

Y/N gave his hand a squeeze. ‘You were always brave, Newt,’ she said. ‘It’s how I learned how to be brave in the first place.’

Newt squeezed her hand in return, then they walked hand in hand back up the hill and down to dinner to where their friend awaited them.

Where the lives they never imagined they’d get a chance to live awaited them.

#maze runner newt x reader #newt x reader #tmr newt x reader #maze runner imagines #maze runner x reader #the maze runner #minho #tmr frypan #tmr thomas #tmr minho #tmr newt #tmr gally #tmr brenda #tmr jorge #the death cure #the scorch trials #romance #angst #friends to lovers

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sp0o0kylights · 22 days

Text

Eddie was all about desecrating corpses.

Particularly, the huge ones--and nothing was larger than the burnt out husk of Starcourt.

Yellow caution tape, muddied and ripped from its time in the weather still decorated parts of the doors.

The place used to be crawling with security, but that had eased off now, the job returning to a local outfit rather than the smooth and swift guards who previously haunted the joint in pairs.

It was easy as two days spent camped out in his van, watching the main entrance and a few side doors. In no time at all, Eddie had schedules memorized, points of entry selected and even three possible escape routes should things get dicey.

He didn't expect them to.

Not when he’d already rolled his checks and came up with a number that, were this an actual D&D game, would make him a happy man.

It was always a point of contention between him and his Pa. This perception. The natural ability he had that good ‘ol dad just didn’t seem to possess.

The one that made him patient long enough to get a feel for a gig.

To know instinctively how hard a job might be, and how to go about doing it safely.

(Eddie personally doesn't believe much of it is talent. Thinks it is in fact, forcibly learned, due to the nature of his upbringing.

Grandma and Grandpa Munson, bless their dead, departed souls, had at least given something of a shit. Tried to keep family things family and work things work, even when said work was illegal as it gets.

They understood things like appearance and public reputation.

How that kept the pigs off your back and food on your table.)

His Pa had never cared for any of that.

Eddie didn’t grow up with family meals, or even food in the house let alone on the table. He grew up watchful, forced to learn or take a hit meant for an adult in the process. To weigh the risks against the benefits, and how to charm the pants off an unsuspecting target while doing so.

It was how he’d escaped his own prison sentence when his Pa finally got eyes too big for his abilities.

Eddi had gotten lucky in that situation.

Or rather--he’d gotten Wayne.

Wayne, who gave up his own room, his own bed, for his nephew. Had bought him his sweetheart on his sixteenth birthday and a van on his eighteenth. Both things were used, and a little battered around the edges, and Eddie had almost thrown up the day he accidentally found out Wayne had used his life savings for the damn car, but they were above and beyond anything he had any right too.

Eddie would be damned without him.

But he knows his uncle needs help.

Can't pay for himself and Eddie. Never really could, and so has been giving his nephew literally everything he has in an effort to make up for it until Eddie could help pay his way.

Not that a singular soul would trust a teenage Munson with such a precious thing as a part time job, and so Eddie had turned to the familiar.

The mall fire, and the resulting flood of federal agents had really put a damper on his income the past few months. Drugs were risky, and getting riskier with them sniffing about, and things were getting tight again in a way they hadn’t in a long, long time.

(All it had taken was finding the hidden stack of bills.

Big ol’ words stamped in red topped every one. Bold letters screaming ‘Overdue’ and ‘Payment Missed’ and ‘Late Fees.’

One single letter had panicked Eddie more than any other, the one that clearly said Wayne had been talking to the payday loan place down the street, and he’d be damned if his shortcomings made his Uncle willingly walk into a debt pit so few climbed out of.)

Growing up like he had, Eddie was trusted in certain circles. Had access to places many didn't as his sole inheritance, because he was known.

Someone who didn't rat, who could be trusted with given tasks. Who kept to the criminal code, and was good about not backstabbing you if caught.

He’d hit up a few old connections, dropped some hints. Put out “feelers” as one might say.

Got a nibble and soon enough, Eddie was back in business, getting called up and offered a few small tasks for decent dough.

Sometimes it was fetching information.

Sometimes it was ferrying an item.

Today, it was a retrieval.

There was something someone wanted in the ruins of Starcourt--and they were offering an insane amount of money to get it.

The plans hadn't made sense, not at first. The instructions Eddie had been given sounded outlandish, if not outright total bunk.

Like the existence of a multi level basement under Starcourt? How the hell had no one caught that being built?

Or that the security systems down there could possibly still be turned on? After four months?

Who was even paying for it?

Eddie had heard stupider things though, and the pay for this little jaunt was good. Too good to pass up.

"They want a local in case something happens and the rescue squad comes running in. That way, it's just a little trespassing fun. The town deviant getting his kicks in the big scary mall, and not what they think it is." His connection had told him, meeting with Eddie in a Mcdonalds the town over.

The place had a play palace, big enough to host a number of screaming rugrats. It made for a great cover as they pretended to be just two men in overalls, getting burgers on their lunch.

Not a soul could hear a sound over the kids screaming, and if a blueprint sat between them then, well, if it looks like a maintenance worker, and it talks like a maintenance worker…

People never did look twice.

"And what else exactly would they think this is?" Eddie asked, munching on the food he got for free as part of even entertaining the offer.

"A retrieval, Double D."

Eddie hated that nickname.

"Some rich kid bit it in the fire, and his parents are paying out top dollar to get a few of his things, seein’ as the feds wouldn’t let anybody back in after they condemned the place." The guy, whose name was Mickey said.

He idly traced a finger along the lines of the blueprint, the path he was wanting Eddie to take.

(The path Eddie would later ignore, on grounds that it was going to get him caught.)

“Specifically a signet ring and car keys.”

“Car keys?” Eddie had asked, mostly in a bid for more information. Mickey was the kind of guy you could breadcrumb into giving more information than he intended to, if one played their cards right.

And Eddie was a damn good poker player.

“Yup. Goes to a BMW--which they want you to drive to a safe place. Parents think he lost it somewhere around,” Mickey’s finger stopped, before tapping the blueprint twice. “Here.”

Something had niggled in the back of Eddie’s head. The first whispers of recognition, of a fact that he knew something about this--something he couldn’t yet recall.

He wasn’t stupid enough to ignore it.

“Who's the kid?” He’d asked.

Mostly because he was curious, partially because it was a way to ease in the real questions he wanted to ask.

Like what a rich kid was doing four levels down in Starcourt the night of the fire.

“Does it matter?” Mickey said, but dug into his pockets anyway. Retrieved a little 2 by 3 wallet photo, done in the traditional High School Picture Day style.

He’d tossed it on the table, and Eddie didn’t react.

Kept his face perfectly blank, even as his stomach contracted and his breath caught in his chest.

Carefully pulled the picture to him, to make a show of examining it.

“Don’t know him.” He lied after a moment, fighting to get his breathing back under control before Mickey figured out what was up.

“Told you it didn’t matter. What matters is that you get the shit. And hey, while you’re down there…”

Mickey talked a bit more, and idly, Eddie listened. He knew this little B&E was going to have more components than just retrieving a few things. Had long figured out that this entire front of retrieving “some rich kids keys” was just that--a front.

Word on the street was that Starcourt was hiding something--something a lot of very powerful people were getting increasingly interested in. He’d rolled his eyes when he caught wind of the first little rumblings, the rumors and whispers that the thing was shrouded in Government secrets and conspiracies, but hadn’t been able to ignore the shit that had come after.

Likely, the people who had hired him and Mickey understood they had to act now, before someone else did, to see if anything worthwhile was actually down there.

The real question is why the hell they were using Steve Harrington’s death to do it--when Eddie knew for a fact that Steve Harrington was alive.

Or alive as anyone could be, at two am at a Shell gas station.

“Alright.” Eddie said finally, pulling the blueprint towards himself before rolling it up, making sure to casually roll up Harrington’s picture with it. “You got me interested. Half up front and I’m in.”

Mickey grinned at him. “Knew you would be, kid.”

One hand shake and a hefty envelope later, and Eddie found himself on the way to Starcourt on his very first stakeout.

It was that first initial look that confirmed it--Harrington’s prized BMW was in fact, still sitting in the parking lot.

Abandoned by rich assholes who absolutely could have paid to have it towed.

Which led to a domino effect of stakeouts, late nights and confrontations, up to and including his present position, counting down the minutes before he could break into Starcourt.

“Ready?” He murmured, and one could be forgiven for thinking he was talking to himself given how quietly he said it.

They would be wrong.

“Yeah.” The not-so-dead rich kid drawled from the passenger seat.

Eddie tossed a grin at Harrington, who rolled his eyes and ran a hand through his hair.

“Come on, Stevie.” He purred. “Let’s go find out who impersonated your parents, and why they want that ring you supposedly own so badly.”

“Honestly dude I just want my car back.”

“That too.”

#this is a two parter #the second part has the steddie lol #steddie #eddie munson #steve harrington #season 3 AU #sorta #0o0 fanfics #stranger things #I mean really how did he get his keys back #breaking and entering #you cannot tell me eddie wasn't drawn to starcourts remains like a moth to a flame

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moonstruckme · 3 months

Note

Hey I don’t know if you’re taking requests but if not just ignore this :) but if so could you write a poly!emt marauders fic where readers sick or something’s wrong but she doesn’t tell them or anyone until she gets semi seriously hurt

FYI your fics are literally my favorites they are so good I’ve been binging all your marauders fics <33

Thank you gorgeous!

cw: fainting, nausea, mention of skipping a meal

(also note: I used celsius because they’re british, but for my american homies 39.5 is just over 103 degrees fahrenheit)

emt!marauders x fem!reader ♡ 1.5k words

Your day has been hazy. You knew you were off before you even left the house, the lazy sluggishness of sleep not wearing off the way it normally does, but you couldn’t afford to pay it any mind. Your work had gotten done slower than usual, frustrating for all the effort you put into it. The thought of lunch made your stomach churn, so you had mint tea during your break instead. The joints in your fingers ached from typing. Even now, sitting on the barstool at your kitchen counter while you try and finish up an assignment that really should have been done hours ago, your back seems stiffer than usual. Your bones hurt.

“That’s far too much onion,” Sirius comments from the stool beside you, leaning across the counter to scrutinize James and Remus’ work in the kitchen.

Remus pauses in dumping a cutting board full of chopped onion into the pan on the stove. You see him look at James in your periphery, and even without paying proper attention you know something passes between them. James takes the cutting board from Remus, scraping the remainder of the onion in with a knife.

“Overruled,” he decrees.

Sirius scoffs, leaning back and crossing his arms. “Have fun kissing me tonight.”

“I’d think if we’re all eating it, we’ll be on fairly equal footing in that regard,” Remus points out.

“Yes, equally foul-smelling. So romantic.”

“Angel,” James says as he starts slicing up bell peppers, “do you plan on working on that all night?”

“Almost done,” you murmur, trying to ignore how nauseous the smell of all the food makes you. You squint into the brightness of your laptop, typing as quick as you can think. Which is to say, not impressively fast.

It’s your boyfriends’ day off, and they’ve decided to celebrate the rare occurrence of none of them being scheduled to work by going to the cinema. James and Remus are making dinner first, but the film’s in just under two hours. You know you’re sacrificing some time with them now, but it’s only so you can enjoy the main event later. Plus, if you stop working, you’re not sure you’ll be able to pick up the momentum to start again. You have a creeping sense that at the first opportunity for rest, you’ll lie down and never get up.

James says something encouraging, and then the conversation goes on without you. You lock into your laptop screen, fingers pressing down upon the keyboard like an extension of your brain, and gradually the sensation of being outside of yourself, your body moving on autopilot while your mind simply fuzzes over, envelops you. Slowly, the world just…slips.

An odd sound leaves Sirius as he lunges for you, like an alarm that went off without him telling it to. He catches you but not quite, one hand wrapping around your arm and the other fisting in the material of your shirt, stopping you from tipping over only temporarily. James runs from behind the counter to help. Accompanied by a steady stream of curses from both of his boyfriends, he eases you out of your stool and onto the floor. You’re already coming to.

“Is she okay?” Remus asks from the kitchen, and Sirius hears the sound of the stove flicking off.

“She’s hot,” James says, one hand cushioning your head from the floor while the other feels about your face and neck.

The quip comes to Sirius naturally—as usual—but he’s in no mood to deliver it. Though he trusts James’ assessment, he touches the backs of his fingers to your forehead anyway, hissing at the heat that meets them. It’s a wonder he didn’t feel it emanating from you in the barstool next to him.

“Angel,” James’ voice is a coo, gentleness coming naturally to him whereas Sirius’ panic feels hot and dangerous beneath his skin, “do you feel alright?”

You hum, though it sounds more like a grunt. “Mhm.”

Sirius almost laughs. “Come on,” he says, “be straight with us.” He works two fingers into your wrist to get your pulse, rubbing his free hand up your arm cajolingly. “You did just pass out, so we know you’re not fine.”

Remus sets a hand on Sirius’ back as he lowers himself to the ground by your legs. A support for them both.

“I…” You blink for a couple of seconds, and they wait, knowing you’re probably still out of it. “I guess I feel a little sick.”

James cracks a smile, though it’s tinged with worry. “A little?” he asks, smoothing down the baby hairs at your temple. “You’ve got a horrid fever.”

You sigh. “I figured.”

“You figured?” Sirius is aghast. He suddenly has a very clear picture of how your day has gone, and it unnerves him. “How long have you been feeling like this?”

You look wary, and Remus’ hand runs the length of Sirius’ back quickly as he stands. “Alright, let’s move you somewhere more comfortable, yeah dovey?”

You relax a bit at the affection in his tone, and Sirius feels bad about ever making you miss it. This is something he’s never been able to quell about himself. His love almost always manifests roughly. For the most part, you all know how to interpret it, but when you’re vulnerable like this and he can feel you feeling the gnashing teeth of his worry, Sirius wishes he were gentler.

James won’t let you walk yourself the short distance to the couch, lifting you in a bridal carry and setting you down with such carefulness it makes Sirius’ chest ache. Remus goes to get the thermometer. Sirius steals the spot beside your head selfishly. Thankfully, there’s no lingering timidity in your gaze as he combs his fingers through your hair, pushing it away from your ear and trailing his touch down your neck.

“You’ve been feeling unwell for a while,” he says, softer this time, “haven’t you.”

You look more guilty than anything, eyes going big and doe-like. “Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you say?” James asks, lifting your legs so he can scooch underneath. He rubs the skin above your knees fondly, a small furrow between his brows.

“I just,” you sigh as though disappointed, “wasn’t ready.”

“Wasn’t ready for what?”

“To be sick.”

The scratchy, delightful sound of Remus’ laugh comes into the room with him. “Well that’s silly,” he says, reaching over Sirius to settle the thermometer in your ear. “It doesn’t seem to be waiting on you, does it?”

“Guess not,” you mutter. Sirius strokes your jaw with his thumb.

When the thermometer goes off, both he and James lean in to see, but Remus forsakes them, bringing it up near his face where he can read it. He hums.

“What is it?” James asks.

“Thirty nine point five.”

They all frown. Sirius touches your forehead again, just to be sure. Unfortunately, it seems accurate.

“What are your symptoms, sweetheart?” Remus asks you, settling on the floor beside Sirius with his knees bent in front of him. “Does anything hurt?”

“I feel sick—like nauseous, and sort of achey.” A little notch appears between your brows, and Sirius had the impression that you’re finally letting yourself acknowledge your own misery. His gut twists with sympathy. “My stomach is starting to hurt, but I’m not sure if that’s just because I skipped lunch.”

None of your boyfriends even have to say anything. You look abashed enough by their expressions.

“I wasn’t feeling well,” you say in a small voice.

James breaks easily, taking your hand and bringing it to his mouth for a firm kiss. “Can’t believe you went all day feeling this poorly and didn’t say anything,” he chides lovingly. “What did you think was going to happen, hm?”

“I know, I’m sorry.” Your gaze flitters about the room, landing on Sirius’ eyes for a fraction of a second before it’s dropping shyly to the couch cushion. “It was dumb.”

“So long as you know,” Remus agrees with a brief eye-roll. “It sounds like the stomach flu, so at least it should be better in a couple of days, but there’s not much to do other than rest.”

Your face pinches unhappily. “I’m sorry for messing up your big night too,” you say, and you look like you’d curl up in misery if James weren’t currently using your legs as a blanket. Sirius’ heart gives a little throb.

“Don’t be,” James says. “We’re still with you, aren’t we? And if we get sick, too, that’s just more days off!”

It’s clearly a joke, but you look extra guilty anyways. Your features tighten in a slight wince. Sirius works a hand between your face and the couch cushion, leaning forward to kiss the space between your brows.

“Don’t worry about it, darling,” he says. “Better when we can be with you than when we’re busy helping some other poor sap, yeah?”

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leighsartworks216 · 8 months

Text

You Hate Me

Astarion x gn!Tav/Reader

Sooooo I wrote this one morning when even just laying down had my knees hurting and I was like,, well what if Tav had that too? Also inspired by the fact I get to campus an hour early and still try to rush to the (empty) classroom instead of, ya know, taking advantage of the huge time buffer I give myself

Warnings: swearing, descriptions of joint pain, insecurity, crying, possibly OOC, clown mention

Word Count: 1,545

Masterlist

AO3

Just a bit further. A little further and then you could rest. If you make it to that tree - make it to that tree and you can sit down. Just a bit left to go.

It started almost a week ago. Unable to cope with all the traveling, your right knee started bothering you. With every step you could feel your kneecap shifting back and forth with a dull click. Then, it started to hurt. Nothing serious. If you walked slow enough, you could avoid it. But now every step sent shocks of pain up your entire leg. Your left knee joined the party this morning, removing any sense of relief you had while walking. Even sitting down didn't remove the pain, but you couldn't afford a day off.

Your companions noticed the changes, despite your best effort not to show any outward discomfort. You moved slower, the occasional grimace slipped through, they weren't traveling quite as far. You consider asking Shadowheart for anything that could ease the pain, but you already knew there was little she could do to help. So you grit your teeth and kept going.

Your foot stepped on uneven ground and you nearly dropped from the agony that shot through your whole body. Karlach worried you might actually just collapse. But you kept going.

Astarion couldn't bear it. None of them could - they hated seeing their intrepid leader fight their own body just to go a few more feet - but your struggle settled like a boulder in his stomach. Every time your face scrunched up, every hiss of your sharp inhales, felt like someone had stabbed a knife in his chest and was twisting it ever deeper. He hated the feeling.

With only a few long strides, he slipped from the back of the group to the front, walking alongside you. He had to change his normal gait just so he didn't surpass you. "Darling," he hummed quietly, just loud enough to keep the conversation between you two, "you should rest."

You shook your head. You didn't even spare him a glance. Your eyes didn't shift from the tree. "We're almost there," you dismiss. It's slightly breathless. Despite needing to walk slow to avoid the pain, you were pushing to go faster.

He tsked. "And how far do we still have left to go?" He tilted his head as he looked at you, already knowing whatever distance you said would be too far.

You nodded to a tree dead ahead. "Once we reach that birch, we can rest."

"That birch?" He pointed. "The birch tree that's nearly half a mile away?"

He could feel you bristle with his incredulous tone, but you didn't say anything.

He scoffed. "My dear, I can be stubborn at the best of times, but this is ridiculous! You're barely staying upright as it is."

"I'm fine-"

"No, you're not," he sharply cuts you off. He grabs your arm and pulls you to a stop, holding you there with enough force that you wouldn't slip out and keep going. You refuse to look at him even now. "You're wincing, your hands have been clenched for the last mile, and you keep stumbling. The tree will still be there if you just sit down for a minute."

The rest of the party watches from a distance. Far enough away they can just make out what Astarion's saying, especially as his voice rises in pitch the more frustrated he gets.

Standing still hurts. It's hard to say if it hurts more or less than walking; it just hurts. Your face is pinched as sharp jolts run up through your joints, like someone is poking you with a sewing needle. Walking, you decide, must be better than this.

"It's not that far," you insist, voice low. "And when we get there, we can-"

"Gods above, you're impossible! Fine. Fine! You want to get to that tree, fine." He lets go of your arm.

Before you can even take a step, he's sweeping you into his arms, supporting you with one arm under your back and the other hooked under your knees. The pressure hurts for a moment, but it quickly fades away. The lingering aches are from pushing yourself too hard. He begins marching once more toward your end goal.

You want to shout, to demand he put you down. But when you look up at his face, his eyes are sharper than usual, lips pulled into a tight frown and crease forming between his eyebrows. He's angry.

He's angry with you.

The words die in your throat. You hate being so dependent. You were the leader - you needed to be strong and fearless and without weakness. To receive help feels like someone plunging their hand between your ribs and stealing away a chunk of your worth. But seeing Astarion upset, upset with you, that stings far worse.

You avoid looking over his shoulder. You could just imagine their faces. How Lae'zel would scowl at you for being weak. How Gale's face would turn somber when he realizes you're not as capable as he thought. You couldn't bear it. So you press your forehead to Astarion's neck and stare at your lap.

There's an unwelcome burn at the back of your eyes. Shame floods your chest and crawls up your throat until it chokes you. Water pools along your lower lids and blurs your vision. You can't walk and now you're going to cry. Just how fucking pathetic can you be?

Astarion's head shifts and you can tell he's trying to look down at you. He's trying to see your face. Because he can feel you shaking in his arms. He can hear your lungs quivering as your breaths become uneven and choppy. You press your closed eyes against his throat and he can feel the hot tears against his skin.

His frown softens, though you can't see it. He slows down to a stop and tells the others to go on ahead, to the birch tree just there, and start working on setting up camp, but all you can hear is your heart pounding in your ears. Their faces become fraught with worry; Karlach is the last to go. She still looks back once or twice. Astarion finds a suitable rock and he sits.

"Shh, sweet thing," he cooes, voice no louder than a whisper. His arm around your back pulls you into his shoulder, hand tangling in your hair as he cradles you. His other hand rubs soothing circles along your thigh. You gasp around a sob, body curling further into itself, into him, as you release your emotions. "It's alright."

You strangle out an apology. It's wet and croaky and painful.

"Whatever for?" he asks.

"You're mad at me," you whimper.

He huffs. The frustration from before rises in him again just thinking about it. "Yes, I am."

He feels your breath catch in your throat, and the heaving breath you take after. "You hate me."

Astarion laughs, short and sharp. "Why would I hate you, dear? Because you're too stubborn for your own good?" You don't have a response for him. He kisses your head, wherever he can reach. "I'm mad because you put yourself out trying to solve all of our issues, but the moment you have one of your own, you refuse any help. You're going to tear yourself apart."

He sighs and rests his cheek atop your head. His fingers rub the nape of your neck, gently tugging at the hair there. You carry so much tension, it's a wonder your muscles haven't locked up from the stress.

Time passes slowly in his arms. It seems to take forever before you start to calm down, and even longer before your eyes have dried. He does nothing to speed the process aside from gently hush you when you try to choke out apologies.

You sniffle quietly. Your eyes are raw, and you're all too aware of the stain of water you've left on the vampire's neck. When you speak, it's a painful creak in your vocal chords. "You don't hate me?"

He presses another kiss to your head. "No, love, I don't hate you. Not unless you've done something truly horrific, like invite a clown to show up at camp in the middle of the night." You chuckle weakly. It's such sweet music. "Gods forbid you start donating to charity." You laugh this time, and Astarion's chuckle vibrates against your ear.

His fingers detangle themselves from your hair with one last gentle tug, and his arm wraps around your back once more. As though you weigh no more than one of his pillows, he stands once more with you in his safe grasp, and begins heading for camp. He can see Karlach up ahead light up when she sees you're finally on your way.

"I'm sorry," you whisper. "I just feel so... useless, like this."

"Please, stop apologizing," he begs, dramatically. "Just say 'thank you' and we can move on."

You peel your face from his skin, dried tears sticking you together. You wince at how disgusting this must be for him. You lean up and kiss his cheek. He smiles at the affection. "Thank you."

Softer, he says, "Of course, my love."

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gildedkrone · 9 months

Note

Could you maybe write a Jealous!GhostxMaleReader...maybe Ghost gets jealous of Reader and Graves?? Dunno just want to see a jealous Ghost....I like how you write Ghost...it doesn't have to be Graves, it could be a member of Shadow Conpany...

- ☁️

Don't listen, I'm near 🔞

My first request, so I thought I would put a bit more effort into this fic than usual. It ended being written from Graves' POV? So I'm not sure if it's exactly what you wanted but I hope this is somewhere along the lines of the request :3

Relationships: Ghost x bottom!Male Reader Synopsis: A jealous Ghost fucks you into oblivion and Graves hears every single bit of it. Contains gratituous smut. A/N: NA Master List

“Hey there, sweetheart, need a hand?”

Phillip Graves, that was his name, right? Commander of the Shadow soldiers currently milling about the base as part of a joint operation between the 141 and Shadow Company. You follow his eyes to the crates of beer in the storeroom.

“Oh, Graves, right? Yea sure!” You heave two crates of beer off the floor and Graves trails his eyes over your way your shirt exposes your chest and abdomen with each exertion of your body.

He is not salivating. He is just admiring another soldier preparing a feast as part of the collaboration, a dinner and night of celebrations. Nothing untoward and nothing scandalous. Your request for him to grab the drinks jolts him out of his naughty daydream and he nods with as much grace the Shadow is known for. That is, not much.

The men are gathered in the rec room when both you and Graves return with alcohol. Soap and Gaz help themselves to a bottle each before you can put the crates down. Graves imitates your actions and places his crates down.

Ghost is sitting in an armchair all by himself, while Grave’s soldiers are fanned out around the room. Some eating, some drinking, mostly engaged in conversation or tabletop games. You crack open a bottle and he has to resist grabbing choking that sinuous neck and the bobbing of your throat. Ghost is nowhere at his chair and once he reestablishes visual contact, Ghost is standing by your side.

“You want a bottle, Ghost?”

The masked freak shakes his head and the smile on your face makes him green with jealousy. He wishes it was him on the other side of the smile.

“Of course, the LT himself doesn’t drink beer.” You dug around your pockets and reveal a metal flask. “Bourbon, straight from Kentucky.”

Ghost rumbles something affectionate and takes the flask. The mask is raised up to his nose bridge and Graves catches a sight of the pink lips and perfect teeth.

“Thanks, corporal. Appreciate your efforts.”

“Anytime, LT. Anything for you.” The skeleton hand on your shoulder lingers for too long for Graves’ liking.

The man looks up from you to meet Grave’s gaze. Inside, he spots something feral and territorial curling in the lieutenant’s eyes.

Stay. Away.

---

The rest of the night goes smoothly. Graves gets to spend time with you on the dance floor and his hand even wrapped around your waist at one point. You don’t seem to be too phased by the close proximity to him and he flashes a grin, all teeth and vibes.

He catches the boring gaze of Ghost, intensifying each time he went anywhere near you. Fuck him, he doesn’t own you and Graves is free to flirt with whoever he wants. The skull man is free to kick rocks if he doesn’t like it. Eventually, you are too tired to continue partying and excuse yourself from the dance floor. Graves watches as you say something to the lieutenant and his eyes are overcame by something fond and soft before a pat by a skeleton hand sends you leaving the room.

It's boring without you on the dance floor and Graves leaves his men in favour of turning in for the night. The base is huge and Graves stumbles around, trying to find his room and it is just bad luck Ghost is who he sees first.

“Ah, lieutenant, mind showing me the way to my room?”

Ghost doesn’t seem to be too pleased to see him, judging by the arms crossed but mainly, the eyes give away his ire and displeasure at seeing the other man.

“Down the hallway. Room 103.”

Graves thanks the man not before he is slipped a radio.

“You left this at the party.”

Wait, what? The last time he checked, the radio was still affixed to the holster on his arm. Before he can object, Ghost is gone.

---

“Ah, faster! Michaelo!”

The room is dim and the man lying on the bed touches himself gently to the sounds of porn on his phone. Fuck, Graves swore when the woman in the video takes the monster dick fully. His dick is semi hard and his hand gently strokes the organ to nurse it to full hardness.

“Shit!” Graves takes off his headphones. That isn’t—

“Ngh! Fuck, it’s not—” His phone clatters onto the floor as he jumps off the bed in search for the source of the sound. Sounds of a man being pleasured are definitely not from the video he is watching. His search stops at the radio Ghost passed him earlier. The green light flashes periodically, a sign the radio is receiving a signal.

A moan.

Not just any, but yours. He rushes to the table and grabs the radio. Raspy moans of desire. There is no mistaking it, that is you on the other side of the radio. Who the fuck is doing this!

“Ah, ah! Fuck, slow down!”

If he closes his eyes, his mind fantasizes the scene. You are all drunk on pleasure, mouth open as a thin trail of drool slicks down your cheek. Someone, a mystery person, bringing you waves of pleasure. Their hands? Or their mouth?

It should be him. It’s all so wrong. He should be turning off the radio and reporting whoever was doing this. But his mind taunts him with finding out just who you were with.

Graves retreats to the bed and lies down. His hand creeps ever closer to his dick and your moans are there again. The radio is jammed against his ear and his dick jumps at the breathy and sinuous moan. It tortures his soul to hear it and not be the one eliciting it.

His hand is no longer under his control and starts stroking.

“Fuck! Shit, what has gotten into you!” Sounds of wet slapping noises punctuate your groans into pauses. The other person doesn’t say anything and Graves is so fucking turned on, it hurts. Pre is all over his hands and the sound of his hands are filthy, but not as much as those in the radio.

Then, he hears it. A whimper, all soft and delectable. His hand grips the base of his dick and arrests his building climax. Shit! His favourite porn didn’t come anywhere close to the performance you are putting on in a room somewhere.

He wants to cum just as you do with your mysterious partner.

“If you—ah!—keep doing this, I won’t LAST ah!” The duvet is in between his teeth as his hands are moving at a feverous pace against his morals.

“Have you learnt your lesson, yet?” Graves stills his hand. Mr mystery is speaking.

“Yes! Please, I will be your good boy! I—ngh—will stay away from him!”

“That’s a good boy. Taking me so perfectly; I can feel you spasming like a cheap whore. Are you close, pet?”

His traitorous mind paints a picture of another man railing you hard and fast, bitching you in the process into a mindless whore who lived for cock and cum. Who, dares, to claim you?

“Yes, I’m—so—fucking close! P-please!” He grunts at the desperation in your voice to climax.

His finger scrambles to turn the knob on the radio to max volume and then, he can hear so much more. The faint creaking of the bed under the powerful thrusts of your partner, the whines and whimpers escaping your mouth driving him crazy and the reserved grunts of the man. Wet sounds of slapping and something obscene fills the room and Graves thumbs his dick roughly. The burn is something real and he desperately wants to know just who it was.

Who was bringing you so much pleasure, dear cock addled slut?

“Say it. Say that you want to cum.”

“Mmmh! Please, let me cum! I want to cum!”

“Say that you are my little cum addict.”

“I’m—” A sharp thrust breaks your speech and you groan. “Y-your cum addict!”

“Good boy. This is what you wanted, right? Flirting with that poor excuse of a man to rile me up. Well, this is your reward, love.” And a sharp squeal at what Graves imagines to be a bite on the neck.

Flirting with him? Who can it be, to be upset at Graves?

“Yes! Yes, I-I am all yours! Yours to use, sir!”

Sir? His hands pause and grip his prick loosely. Was it a nickname, or something more?

“That’s what I like to hear. You need to be bitched more often, love.”

“Yes! Yes, I want to be bitched! Fuck, please, ah!”

The knot in his abdomen is tight and squirming as Graves lets himself imagine the mystery man to be him. Your tight ass squeezing him hungrily like a sleeve thirsting for cum and all he has to give. The pillow fluffs at the commander’s head falling back into it.

“So beautiful and all for me. Do it, cum for me, sweetheart.”

That’s the cue and Graves’ eyes are closed in a grimace as he times his finish with yours.

“Ah, yes sir! Thank you! I—fuck!—” And the noisy squeal and cries of a man drowning in orgasmic bliss spearheaded by his lover’s dick. Graves chokes a cry as he came with a shout and a spray of cum over his heaving chest.

The orgasm leaves him boneless and he struggles to collect his thoughts. The radio flops onto the bed as a sweaty arm rests on an equally sweated chest. The radio is silent and the light is extinguished; no more transmission by whoever is doing this. He won’t admit it, but this ranks high on his naughty escapades.

Fuck, he really shouldn’t have done this. The mess on his cooling chest is hardening into sludge and he swipes a finger through it. Grabbing a bathrobe, a shower is in order to get rid of the stains of his scandalous voyeurism.

---

He steps out of the room into an empty corridor and heads for the communal toilets. Pass room 120 and the door to the room opens without warning. Graves slows and Ghost steps out from the room still dressed in his combat fatigues. His gloves, however, are gone and Graves sneaks a look at the exposed hand. Black nails? Maybe the man truly was a freak. He looks closer and there’s something dripping? A viscous cloudy liquid coating the thick fingers and Graves can’t stop his mouth from running itself.

“Howdy, you’ve got something on your hand, lieutenant.”

Ghost’s eyes remain impassive and he raises his hands to look at them and back at Graves. A glint in his eyes is all the warning he gets and Ghost is breaking eye contact. Then, those hands are wiping against the dark fabric of his tactical jacket and—

White and milky liquid separate into strings upon contact as they stain the pristine clothing.

That is—

“You look shocked, commander Graves. Do you need a medic?”

“Is that … cum?”

Soap’s hearty greeting stumps Graves as the sergeant rounds the corner and he makes a face at the sight of the Shadow commander. Sidling up mischievously to the American, he lobs an arm around Graves and pulls him close under a gaze Graves would describe as victorious belonging to the masked man.

Like a roman victor on a pedestal while luxuriating in his opponent’s defeat.

Soap chuckles. “This is why we don’t mess with the LT’s property, Graves. Did you truly think the corporal would be interested in you?”

“In someone who can’t even use his dick right while LT can do it all with just his arm?”

Mortification and humiliation burns and scorches his face.

---

Ghost wasn’t truly worried when he saw Graves flirting with you all night. You smiled and assured him you could handle the grabby Shadow commander and your lover nods, trusting your judgement but still hanging around to intervene if the bastard tried anything. Your cheery disposition and innocence was a fire drawing in the moths of military men and Ghost stayed to keep an eye on the man.

---

Graves swallows and the taste in his mouth all night—he knows what it is now. Ghost pulls up his mask to lick a line across his still dirty fingers.

His mind conjures an image of you, a man in the throes of desire and thoroughly debauched by the fist in your ass and your dick, angry and leaking in protest. Why would a man be lost in the height of rapture ever be interested in him?

Those lips mouth something. Sweet.

Total defeat.

#fanfic #cod mw2 #male reader #x male reader #x reader #simon ghost riley #ghost x reader #simon riley x reader #simon riley x you #simon riley x male reader #ghost x male reader #reader had a wee #phillip graves #doesn't have a good time #jealous ghost #simon ghost riley is jealous #ghost fanfiction #call of duty

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halfrican-heat · 8 months

Text

ALL MINE (Ony)

"You come here, I'll knock your pussy out the damn frame. Remember the last time I made you miss your damn plane? Remember the last time I wet you down with champagne?"

A/N: Hey! I'm down bad for this man rn, lol. I've got lots of ideas for him though, so yay! Happy reading :) Inspired by @lingeriae and this post! Requests are open, too! Get at your girl.

Warning(s): Explicit Sexual Content; Penetrative Sex (p in v), Oral Sex (F receiving), Cursing, Public Sex (Outdoors), Cervix kissing, Wedding details, N Word Used, Black reader in mind, AAVE/Dialogue with Dialect, Dominant!Ony (when tf is he not in my mind), Depiction of marijuana usage, Depictions of alcohol consumption, Mild Dubious Consent; Beta'd by my besties <3

Pairing: Ony x Wedding Planner!Reader

Song Inspo: All Mine - Brent Faiyaz

His eyes drilled into the side of your head, trailing the curves of your body.

As maid of honor, your dress was a little different from the other bridesmaids. Make no mistake, your girls looked good with a t on the end. You made sure of that, but you all agreed upon something more…tailored for the lady making the most moves. So, your dress was designed to your tastes and fit you like a glove. It accentuated all your assets and Onyankopon was taking stock.

The two of you had only fucked once but there was this heightened tension ever since.

During the entire wedding process, Ony had been a pain in your ass. Because he was the best man, the two of you had to collaborate on many of the joint events-- like the Engagement Party and Bridal Party mixers. He was a terrible flirt and spent most of his time trying to get in your pants. Then, if it wasn’t you, he was flirting with any lady he could. And they would swoon just as soon as Ony flashed that handsome, megawatt smile of his.

But for some reason, Ony liked the challenge you posed. The way you were resistant to his charms. Unfortunately for you, Ony was interested in you. He liked you.

You dealt with his bullshit for a good while, putting in a valiant effort because you were doing your best friend and fellow soror, Kendra, a favor. Y’all went back to diapers and stuck together through everything. You were a celebrity event coordinator, specializing in weddings, so you were doing double duty by being her maid of honor and planning the entire wedding. But shit hit the fan between you and Ony the night of the final Bridal Party mixer. The two of you got into a huge blowout fight that ended with your cute little cocktail dress torn and strewn about the floor of Ony’s hotel room, his tongue licking champagne from places it shouldn’t have been.

“You doing so good, ma.” He had whispered, fucking you into his sheets.

You ended up missing your damn plane the next morning. Needless to say, he moved up on your list of people you wouldn’t mind spending time with. But he quickly moved back down the list after he ghosted you the next day. During the rehearsal dinner, you found him talking up some girl in the hotel lounge. He made eye contact with you as he flirted with her, looking away to give her his full attention.

So, you kept it cordial and cute after that. You acted like it didn’t bother you. Did he have amazing, life-changing dick that made you want to murder him and the bitch from the hotel lounge? Yes, yes he did. But were you a classy, sophisticated bitch who successfully planned a destination wedding while being the maid of honor and dealing with Ony’s shiesty ass? Yes, yes the fuck you were.

And no nigga was gonna make you second guess that shit.

The “Lounge Incident”, as your friends lovingly dubbed it, had happened a week ago. Fast forward to the present and there you were, watching your best friend dance and act a fool with the love of her life. You were happy for her, of course, but it did make you feel a little wistful.

The wedding ceremony wrapped up two hours prior and you found yourself nursing a glass of champagne at the reception. You were pretending to be unfazed by the looks Ony was sending you from across the room. You stole a glance at him when you felt like he wasn’t watching you and…dear Lord.

His white dress shirt was tucked into his green slacks, suit jacket long forgotten, with a few of the top buttons opened. His gold chain shined at you, almost winking, as it matched the gold Rollie on his wrist. He flashed a smile to one of his homeboys and you felt your knees wobble a little. You looked away quickly and crossed the room to find your girls. They were standing around one of the reception tables talking.

“Aht, don’t bring that energy over here, ma’am!” Your friend, Chelsea, said. “That man look like he ‘bout to jump your ass.”

“Please tell me y’all not about to fuck at this wedding,” Liyah groaned.

Your girls laughed loudly and you hid a smile behind your champagne glass as you took a sip. You risked a glance back at Ony, finding his gaze already on you. He didn’t care to hide the fact he was staring at you, not even giving the young lady in front of him a glance as she spoke to him. You whipped around, clearing your throat.

“Bye, girl. It ain’t even like that.”

The table went quiet, all the girls looking over your shoulder. A shit-eating grin spread across Chelsea’s face as she raised her hand, waving playfully.

“Hey, Ony.”

Your eyes widened as his chest pressed against your back, his warmth surrounding you. You tried to pretend to be unbothered as your friends gawked with wide eyes and smirks.

“Hey, ladies.”

The smile was evident in his voice, sending chills down your spine. But you took a sip of your champagne with a neutral face, not acknowledging him. In truth, you didn’t need to. He leaned down so that his mouth was close to your ear, hands braced on the table as he trapped you against his chest. His chain brushed your neck, not helping the goosebumps erupting all over your skin. His words, low so only you could hear them, didn’t help either.

“Say bye to your lil friends so I can eat your pussy.”

He paused as you turned your head slightly, your faces close to touching.

“And stop playing with me.”

His eyebrow arched at you as he pulled back, taking a sip from his whiskey glass. He addressed your friends again, setting the glass down.

“Ladies,” He said with a charming smile.

With that, he left you standing there as you slowly looked back to your friends who gaped back at you.

“Bye.” You said finally, scurrying from the reception hall as fast as your legs would carry you.

You found Ony outside the building, perched against the wall. A blunt hung from his lips as he gazed at you sidelong. You approached slowly, hips swaying with each step. His eyes never left yours as he sparked up and inhaled, exhaling the smoke slowly. You felt dizzy with need but you weren’t down that bad. Not yet.

You took the blunt as he passed it to you. You let the smoke soothe you before you exhaled. You took a few more pulls before passing it back to him.

“Take your panties off,” He said finally, after a long draw.

You tutted, crossing your arms.

“You just gon’ act like you ain’t ghost me, Ony?”

“I was wrong for that. But I'm here now, ain't it?” He said casually.

You rolled your eyes, turning to go back inside. He grabbed your arm and pulled you back to him, his lips pressing firmly against yours. His mouth teased yours, opening it as smoke billowed between the two of you. His arm slid down to your waist as you exhaled the smoke he gave you.

He took another pull, exhaling, before he looked back down at you.

“I told you stop playing with me.”

“Maybe I'm done with you," You bluffed. "Maybe I got me another nigga to fuck on now.”

Ony scoffed, tucking the rest of his blunt away for later.

“Aight, that’s enough of that shit,” He mumbled, grabbing your hand as he pulled you to the side of the building.

It was a more hidden spot, behind large bushes that wrapped around the front of the building and off to the side. From there, you could see guests entering and exiting but they couldn’t see you unless they were looking hard enough. Your eyes widened as he kneeled in front of you and shoved your dress up your legs. You swatted at his hands, panicking as your eyes darted around. Ony stilled, his gaze hard as he grabbed your hands and looked up at you.

“Don’t piss me off.”

Now, you were down bad.

You took a shaky breath as he released your hands, going back to bunching up your dress.

“Hold that,” He said, tossing your leg over his shoulder.

You did as he asked, taking the garment in your hands. Your body flushed with heat as he shamelessly nuzzled his nose against your soaked core, smelling your needy scent. He kissed your clothed core and pushed your panties aside, holding them in one hand as he slipped a finger into your dripping cunt. He moved the digit in and out, brushing against that soft spot inside you.

“Oh, fuck,” You whined, your head falling against the wall.

“Yeah, say that shit you was sayin’ now,” Ony taunted, sliding another digit inside. “This pussy all mine.”

You panted, bracing yourself with a hand on his shoulder, as you forced out your next question.

“What about that bitch from the lounge, Ony?”

“I was gonna try what she was offering, but she wasn’t you,” He said easily, his eyes glued to his fingers moving in and out of you. “Damn, ma. You sucking that shit in.”

“Ony,” You whimpered. “I don’t want to play no games with you--”

“I’m not. That shit not an offer to me when you’re around,” He said firmly. “Now, you gon’ keep complainin’ or you gonna let daddy eat his pussy?”

“Ony--”

Any rebuttal you had became a wanton moan as he didn’t wait for a response, his mouth descending on your clit as his fingers continued to move inside you. You covered your mouth with your hand, trying in vain to stifle the sounds of pleasure he was snatching from you. He pulled his fingers from you gently, spreading your sopping pussy wider as he fucked his tongue in and out of you.

He ate you out messily, drinking up your juices like sweet nectar. The slurping noises were lewd as he sucked on your clit, teasing it with his tongue before dipping it back into your weeping hole. His performance was drawing pathetic whines from your throat as you tried to keep the two of you from getting caught. Heat pooled in your belly as his mouth on your core drove you toward a heated finish.

Then, he stopped completely. You let out a confused moan as the pleasure waned, your orgasm evading you. The confusion didn’t last long, however, as you heard his belt coming undone. He pulled himself from his pants as he tore your panties. He hiked your leg around his waist and slid home without warning.

“Hold on to me,” He grunted, his other hand supporting your back.

You wrapped your arms around him, your head resting on his shoulder as he thrust into you. His pace was rough and deep, fucking you like he owned you. Maybe he did. Maybe you wanted him to. You muffled a scream into his shoulder as his length kissed your cervix, unrelenting as the drag of his cock against your tight walls sent you into oblivion.

“Fuck, baby,” He groaned. “You so tight f’me. Takin’ me so good.”

You choked back a sob as his tip brushed that soft spongy spot, bringing back the pool of pleasure from before. Ony noticed your reaction, angling his hips to hit it over and over again. Your whimpers and moans were his own private mixtape as you keened and cried in his ear. He stretched you so good, the feeling of being this full something new and foreign to you. Ony was a bad habit, and he was making sure you wouldn’t be able to kick him any time soon.

That pool of pleasure warmed further with each snap of his hips into yours. Your quiet, open-mouthed cries built in intensity as the temperature inside you began to rise, swirling like a tsunami. You felt yourself teetering on that delicate edge and so could Ony. He picked up the pace.

“You gonna cum on your dick?” He taunted, egging you on. “You gon’ show me who this dick belong to?”

Your climax crashed over you as you slapped a hand to your mouth, muffling the sob that broke free. He fucked you through your orgasm, prolonging it as your body seized around him. He could barely pull out, opting for shallow thrusts as you came down from your high.

You sagged against the wall, trying to catch your breath as Ony pulled out. He fixed your dress and smoothed it down around the hips. He tucked himself back into his pants and dug his wallet from his pocket, fishing out his room key.

He flashed it in front of your dazed face before placing it in your hand. He pulled you off the wall, making sure you looked good before nudging you in the direction of the front doors.

“Go to my room. Third floor, 303. I’ll be there in a minute.”

You looked down at the key card in your hand then back to him. He sparked up his blunt again, blowing out smoke as he smacked your ass.

“Go ‘head, ma. I’m coming.”

You jumped slightly from the impact and found your feet moving you out of the bushes. You stumbled back into the hotel lobby, walking on wobbly legs to the elevators with his room key clutched in your hand. Your girl, Chelsea, was coming from the restrooms as the two of you made eye-contact. She smirked, her eyes trailing over you. She subtly adjusted the top of her dress, nodding at you.

You took the hint, fixing yours.

She went back into the reception hall without a word as you fumbled to press the elevator button.

Your night was not over yet.

#onyankopon x reader #onyankopon x black y/n #ony x reader #onyankopon smut #onyankopon x black reader #onyankopon #aot onyankopon #black writer #black reader #my writing #Lyv's Library #Ony's Observatory #Fanfiction for black women #Black women #smut #Onyankopon x black!reader #Potential Series ;)#Wedding Planner!Reader

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random-stardew-panda · 2 months

Text

||•~The Worst Thing~•||

Harvey (SDV) x reader(female)

Warnings: Language, Violence, Death, Nightmares

Word count: 2.6k

Helloooo everyone! New blog dedicated to my rekindled Stardew Valley obsession. First fic obviously must go to my beloved doctor, you will be seeing him here a lot. I hope you enjoy and hope you don't hold my terrible grammar and probably terrible spelling against me 😅 I have no excuse. English is all I speak and I do it terribly.

====================================

You’ve had an exhausting day, it was the end of the season and you had been fishing all day for the last fish you needed for the community centre and the ones you needed just were not biting.

“Finally!!” You squealed as you reeled up the last fish you needed, sighing loudly you stretched your limbs and groaned as your joints crack softly. It was so much later than you realised, it was already dark out.

You wandered through the town square, eyelids drooping, trying to stay awake when you passed the calendar and help wanted board and your eyes shot open as you rushed over and let your finger scroll over the date and you curse yourself. You had accepted a quest from Clint a week ago to kill 50 Slimes you hadn’t gotten around to finishing it, too busy trying to finish these fishing bundles, today was the last day left! You let your forehead fall against the wall as you look down at your watch, 7pm, you could finish and get home in time surely? You only had 7 left to kill, easy work.

“Harvey is always upset when I get home late…oh but I promised Clint. Uhg…one more late night won’t kill him, I’ll just give him some extra kisses. He can’t stay mad at me.” You giggled and slowly pushed yourself off of the wall and started making your way to the mountains and down into the caves. The trail to the caves felt extra long tonight, you splashed your face in the lake trying to wake yourself up a bit before you entered the caves.

You slash at the monsters in the cave, stumbling at the force behind your swing, you were panting and clinging to the wall of the cave. Maybe this wasn’t the best idea after all…You felt so, so tired…No. No! You only had one more left. You glance down at your watch, 12am…damn it really was getting late.

“One left. One more. I got this…I got this…” You mumble to yourself, repeating the sentiment that you could do this as you start climbing down the ladder, using the inside of your elbow, squeezing the ladder rungs between your forearm and bicep to help support your weary muscles as you climb down, shaking a little bit, two steps from the bottom you lose your footing and slip off the ladder.

“AH!” Your body hits the floor and your head bounces off the ground, you squeeze your eyes shut and lift a shaky hand to your bleeding head, the room feels like it was spinning. “Ow…” you lay there flat on your back on the ground for a moment staring up at the ceiling as a ringing filled your ears, it was at this point you hear the familiar squelching sound of slimes approaching.

With great effort and loud groans you push yourself up onto your hands and knees and are met with 5 slimes, using your sword to push yourself up to your feet you lunge at one of them slashing it in half, your vision is spinning and everything is blurry and out of focus you were cursing yourself, this had been a horrible idea. With every slash at the creatures you staggered trying to catch yourself, every hit from the monsters was causing worse aches in your muscles, cuts and bruises littered your body and you were getting to a point where you had embedded your sword into the ground using it to keep yourself upright leaning on it more than actually attacking the monsters, you desperately tried to kick the slimes away and with the hand that wasn’t white knuckling your sword you tried to swat away the insects cutting into your flesh with their sharp claws. The few slimes left leap up attacking you, smashing into your chest the sudden force knocks you back to the floor, you desperately try to reach out and grab your sword, your hand sliding down your sword slices your palm open as you topple over your head once again hitting the hard ground of the cave, you fall unconscious.

====================================

Linus had seen the farmer go into the mines hours ago but he hadn't seen her leave yet, the farmer always took the path past his tent through the back of the mountains to get back to the farm late at night. He was getting anxious it was almost 2am he had a terrible feeling something was wrong. Linus walked over to the adventures guild and started pounding on the door. After several moments the door was yanked open and a very disgruntled Marlon was standing infront of Linus.

“What?!” Marlon growls a deep frown set in his features.

“I think the Farmer is in trouble. She is still in the mines…”

Marlon groans and turns back into the guild, leaving the door open as he reaches over the counter and pulls his sword up into his arms. He walks out of the guild, pushing past Linus, slamming the door behind him.

“That kid is going to be the death of me…let's go then.” Marlon sheaths his sword and rubs his forehead.

The two men head into the mines, every level was littered with dead creatures and exposed ladders, the farmer had definitely been here. They made their way down more levels of the mines.

“Oh Yoba!!” Linus yells as they round a corner and are met with an unconscious farmer being smothered by creatures, cave insects, slimes, even a stray cave crab was slashing at their defenceless body.

“Well fuck.” Marlon unsheathed his sword and starts slicing at all the creatures making quick work of them. “Get the farmer!!” He yells at Linus as he brings his sword down piercings the crab.

Linus grabs the farmer under her arms and starts dragging her body towards the ladder leaving a trail of blood in the dirt. Marlon quickly grabs the farmers sword off the ground and rushes over to the ladder. Marlon grabs the farmers legs and they quickly climb up to a level with an elevator. As soon as Marlon saw the elevator he grabs the farmer off of Linus and starts carrying her by himself.

“Is she okay? She doesn't look like she is breathing!” Linus is fussing over the unconscious farmer the entire time they are in the elevator. A loud ding sounds and the doors open to the main level of the mines. Marlon sighs with relief.

“Linus. Go get Robin to call the farmhouse. Call Harvey. Get him to the clinic. Tell him Y/n needs him NOW!”

Linus rushes out of the mines sprinting towards Robins house. Marlon follows behind him carrying the limp unconscious body of the farmer in his arms. Marlon kept glancing down at the farmers face he was trying so desperately not to show how alarmed he was. Everyone else was going to freak out someone needed to be to be calm and reasonable but tears filled his eyes as he thought about how injured his dear friend was, was she going to make it…? He shook his head and kept heading out the mountains. No, he couldn’t think like that, he was going to get them to the clinic in time and Harvey was going to save her.

Marlon was rushing past Robins house, the door was wide open, he was the chaos inside, Linus and Robin were practically screaming into the phone as they saw Marlon and the injured farmer rush past the house down towards the town. Maru was pushing past everyone in the hallway, shoving them out of the way as she rushed out to catch up to Marlon.

====================================

*RINGGG RIIINGGG RINGG*

Harvey groaned and rolled over in bed to hold his wife and was suddenly aware of the absence of the second person in his bed he frowned and rubbed his eyes gently tapping around on the bed trying to find her.

*RINGGG RINGGG*

Harvey groans and flings his hand over to the nightstand and blindly feels around until the phone is in his hands.

“Hello?” His voice was gruff and tired.

“Harvey you need to get to the clinic now!!” He was met with Robins frantic voice and he sat up finally starting to wake up.

“Robin? Calm down tell me what is happening?”

“HARVEY NOW YOU NEED TO GO NOW. IT Y/N!” Robin sounded like she was about to burst into tears.

Harvey’s heart stopped, he looked up at the clock on the wall, 2am? She wasn’t home…? His mind was running through every single injury she had ever gotten. Every operation he has had to preform. Every single time he scolded her for staying out so late, for being so reckless. A horrible feeling of dread was starting to choke him.

“I’m leaving right now.” Harvey hung up the phone and flung the blankets of off him.

Harvey was practically flying out of the house, stumbling over his own feet as he grabbed a coat off the hanger and slid his shoes on without even tying the laces. He slammed the door behind him so hard it shook the wall slightly as he ran out of the farmhouse.

Harvey was sprinting towards the town square, towards his clinic, he was fumbling with the keys in his coat pocket. The cold night air was making his tears feel cold. By the time he reached the clinic he was out of breath and trying his hardest not to breakdown but his mind was racing with every horrible outcome. What kind of shape would she be in when she got here? He was pacing around the clinic preparing everything he thought he might need.

It took 10 minutes for Marlon to reach the clinic, Maru rushed in first and held the door open, the sound of the bell dinging caused Harvey to stop dead in his tracks and stare teary eyed at Maru, who looked equally distressed.

“H…Harvey…she isn’t breathing…” Maru has tears in her eyes.

Marlon entered the clinic holding the farmers limp body and he looked like he was about to start shaking and crying. Marlon places the farmer down on an examination table Harvey had already prepared. Harvey was looking wide eyed at Maru for a moment before he rushes over to the table and tries to take his wife’s pulse but he can’t find one, tears are streaming down his face as he stares at his wife, her bruised cut up body laying there in front of him. Maru was softly crying and Marlon was leaning in the corner of the room with an unreadable expression.

“No. No she isn’t…She can’t be.” Harvey climbs up on the table and starts doing CPR.

“Harvey.” Maru steps closer to him but he doesn’t stop, he leans down pressing his lips to his wife breathing air into her lungs.

“Wake up…wake up!” he is pushing down harder against her chest.

“Harvey.”

“NO! SHE IS OKAY. WAKE UP!” Tears are rolling off his cheeks as he keeps giving her chest compressions, leaning down trying desperately to force air into her lungs.

“HARVEY!” Maru yells at him with tears streaming down her face.

“NO SHE CAN’T BE. SHE…she can’t…” His compressions slow down.

“Harvey…” Maru puts a hand on his arm urging him to get down and he shoves her hand away.

He leans down collapsing onto his wife’s body and starts sobbing, he clings to her, wrapping his arms around her as tight as he can.

“Harvey…man you have to stop…” Marlon grabs Harvey’s shoulder and tries to pull him off.

“GET OFF OF ME!” Harvey sobs trying to shove Marlon away.

====================================

Harvey shoots straight up in bed he tried to scream it came out as a strangled wail his voice cracked, his eyes were filled with tears. He was gripping at his heaving chest, gasping desperately for breath. His eyes were darting around the room as he struggled to breathe.

“Harvey…?” You softly whisper as you sit up in bed and place a hand on his arm softly, looking up at him with sleepy eyes you find his hand covering his mouth as he sobs, wide eyed and straight ahead.

“Harvey?! Are you okay? Sweetheart what happened…what's wrong??” You sit up higher on the bed and place one hand on his chest and the other gently on his cheek rubbing your thumb softly over his face whipping away the tears that were streaming over his cheeks.

“H…Harvey..? What's wrong talk to me what happened..? Harvey darling…?” Your voice was shaking a little full of concern

He doesn't even speak as he jerks forward and wraps his arms around you pulling you tightly against his chest as he cries hard into your shoulder

“oh!…Harvey…” you wrap your arms around his head holding him against you, gently running your fingers through his hair softly scratching at his scalp “shhh….shh it's alright sweetheart…it's okay shhh I'm right here it's okay…” his grip on you tightened clinging to you like you were about to disappear, like his arms were the only thing holding you to the earth.

“You were gone…” his voice cracks as he whispers softly continuing to cry into the crook of your neck. “You were…gone and I couldn't save you. I couldn't…” he is gasping for air as he sobs

“hey...hey shhh breathe…breathe I'm right here. I'm right here okay? I'm not gone. I am right here, you have me in your arms, see?” You squeeze him a bit tighter before cupping both his cheeks and lifting his head in your hands so he can look into your eyes

“You were gone y/n…you were g…gone…” he is clinging to you tighter it was a bit uncomfortable but you didn't say anything “You were dea-” he gasps and more tears fill his eyes as he looks into your face “You were dead! You…you were dead in my arms and I couldn't do anything to save you. You were in the mines and I failed you and you were gone. You were gone and you weren't ever coming back.”

You are running your thumbs over his cheekbones as you lean forward and softly kiss him.

“Harvey. I am right here. You need to take a breath and calm down, you are getting yourself all worked up. I am right here. I am right here. Take a breath honey…” you press another more chaste kiss to his lips before pulling him back into a tight hug.

“You're safe..?” He whispers quietly.

“I'm safe.”

“…You aren't going to leave…?”

“Harvey sweetheart. I'm right here and I'm never leaving you okay? Never. I'm staying here with you forever.”

“…P…promise…?” He sniffles quietly as his tears slowly stop.

“Harvey look at me. Hey look at me. I promise you. I promise I am not leaving. I know I'm a little…uh…reckless in the mines sometimes and I'm so sorry I didn't know it was upsetting you this much. I'll be more careful. I promise. Come back to sleep…” you softly rub his chest “I promise I'll be here in the morning too.” You kiss his cheek as he pulls you down onto his chest, holding you tight against his body, he sighs deeply as you snuggle up with him.

“I love you so much My Love…you mean the world to me.” Harvey sighs quietly as he squeezes you tighter. You kiss his cheek a few times softly rubbing your nose against his jaw.

“I love you Harvey. Always.” You softly trace invisible patterns over his chest as he slowly drifts off to sleep, you stay up a while after he falls asleep making sure he sleeps soundly. His arm draps loosely over you even as he sleeps he wants to feel you close to him.

“Goodnight Harvey...” You kiss him one last time, smiling softly and put your head down on his chest letting yourself finally fall back asleep.

====================================

You can check out my other non stardew related stories at @random-writing-panda

#stardew valley #stardew harvey #harvey x farmer #harvey x reader #sdv farmer #sdv harvey #sdv headcanons #sdv #stardew valley harvey #stardew farmer #stardew #harvey sdv #Harvey stardew valley #sdv harvey x reader #sdv harvey x farmer #stardew valley fanfic #sdv fanfic #my husband from day 1 finally getting the love and attention he deserves

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thatsonemorbidcorvid · 4 months

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ON AN AUGUST night in 2003, a young woman who went by the name Paulina sank into the sofa of her modest, rented apartment, opened up her laptop, and began talking about sex with a man she’d recently met in a Yahoo chat group. His name was Stephen Bolen. His first communications had been terse, but he soon warmed to Paulina. It didn’t take long for both of them to begin to open up.

Paulina had told Bolen she lived in the Atlanta area, that she had a three-year-old daughter, that her daughter’s father was no longer in the picture. Soon, she was sharing more intimate details: what it was like growing up a skinny white girl in a rough neighborhood outside of D.C.; how her dad, a Marine, had died by suicide two weeks before she was born; how her mom had been emotionally and physically abusive, and had never really shown her love. How she’d had a sexual relationship with her stepfather.

Paulina would put her daughter to bed and then she and Bolen would chat throughout the night, over Yahoo and sometimes on the phone. The back-and-forth could feel like dating, but with an added element of danger and risk: Both Paulina and Bolen knew they were tiptoeing up to a line to see if they trusted each other enough to cross it. It could take a while to figure that out.

Eventually, Bolen asked Paulina to send pictures of her daughter, and she agreed to do so, though the ones she’d shared were chaste — the little girl clothed and her face turned away from the camera or obscured behind an untamable halo of blond curls. After seeing the pictures, Bolen asked to meet. While a lot of the men Paulina had encountered in chatrooms like “Sex With Younger” just wanted to trade images and videos of children, to expand their illicit collections, Bolen was a “traveler,” someone looking to act upon his obsessions.

On Sept. 17, just as they’d arranged, Paulina sat on a bench outside Perimeter Mall with a stroller parked in front of her, scanning the parking lot nervously. Part of her hoped Bolen wouldn’t show. When he did, she could see he was handsome, a preppy guy in a pink polo shirt and khakis. “Paulina?” he asked eagerly. She nodded. As he smiled and pulled back the blanket draped across the stroller, he found himself surrounded, handcuffs slipped around his wrists.

“Paulina” watched his face fall, his confusion giving way to distress as FBI agents took him into custody. It was her first undercover arrest. It would be the first of many.

[long read]

IF ONE WANTED to hide in plain sight, one could do no better than the tidy, suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of St. Louis, where FBI Special Agent Nikki Badolato now resides. The well-tended, two-story homes are so pleasantly indistinct that I could hardly tell you what hers looks like, even if it were safe for me to do so, which it is not. Suffice to say that Midwestern comfort and conformity unspool around every gently winding curve. Here Badolato has raised her two children, a daughter who is now in college and a son who is a junior at a local high school. When planning a neighborhood scavenger hunt or tending the community garden, Badolato does not often mention her many years as head of the Child Exploitation Task Force, a joint effort between the feds and local law enforcement that targets some of the country’s most heinous crimes. Open a cabinet in her kitchen, however, and a government-issued Glock 42 can be found stowed away between the vitamins and mixing bowls.

On a sunny morning this past October, Badolato sat at her dining room table, scrapbooks and albums spread out before her on the dark wood. There was the acceptance letter she’d received from the bureau the spring of her senior year of high school, after a representative had shown up to administer a test in the typewriting room. “I chose to wear a red dress and red heels,” she says of her first day as an FBI mail clerk, two weeks after her 18th birthday. “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I guess maybe I was trying to go in bold?” She pauses at a picture of herself on the gun range at Quantico almost 10 years later, her shoulders squared and her caramel hair pulled back into a ponytail as she fires off rounds. By then, she’d married a man she met just after high school, had a little girl, completed college at night, and been accepted into agent training in the heady days after 9/11. She’d seen her first dead body only a few weeks into the job, after the pursuit of a bank robber ended with a shootout in a Walmart. When Badolato got to the scene, the body was still warm, and the perp’s head was resting on a bag of cookies. “It was surreal,” she says. “How many times have you been in a Walmart and walked down Aisle 4, not really expecting there to be a dead person with his head lying on a bag of Chips Ahoy?”

Badolato wasn’t deterred. She felt like the bureau saved her, plucked her out of a shitty home life, and gave her prospects and purpose. As a new agent, she was intent on proving herself worthy. “My training agent told me, ‘You know, Nikki, it’s a marathon, not a sprint,’ ” she says. “I was like, ‘That’s ridiculous. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.’ ” She turned a few pages to show a picture of the 391 kilos of cocaine and 140 pounds of meth she’d recovered on a single raid during a stint with a cartel squad, then pointed out another in which she poses with a five-year-old child she’d rescued, the little girl’s hair cut short because the kidnapper had wanted her to look like a boy. But the keepsake she really wants to find is the card that Bolen’s wife had pressed into her hand at his sentencing, the one with the picture of their children — a blond girl of about three years and a tiny baby — and the words “These are the faces of the children you protect each day.” Bolen’s wife had been the only one she’d ever encountered who had lobbied for her husband to receive the maximum sentence. Some wives accused the FBI of planting evidence inside computers. Most seemed intent on clinging to their delusions. (Attempts to reach Bolen for comment were unsuccessful.)

“Right now some little girl is being dropped off in the parking lot of a motel. There are four girls holed up in a hotel next to a McDonald’s. It is happening all the time.”

Which, Badolato has come to understand, is the way it goes with child trafficking and sexual abuse. She had invited me into her home — had agreed to speak on the record about her decades-long career working undercover — because when it comes to the crimes she’s spent her career fighting, she has had enough of the delusions people are under. She’s had enough of the way movies like Sound of Freedom both glamorize and trivialize the work she and her colleagues do, enough of the idea that swashbuckling white men burst through doors and rescue trafficked children with a Bible in one hand and a firearm in the other, enough of conspiracy theories about Hollywood and Washington that detract from the real root causes of why children are trafficked and abused. “Human trafficking is not the movie Pretty Woman — the girl doesn’t get the guy — and it’s not the movie Taken, where people are kidnapped in a foreign country and sold on the black market, or shipped in a container across the world,” one of the detectives who worked on Badolato’s task force tells me. “I’m not saying that doesn’t ever happen, but it’s not what we’re seeing.”

What they are seeing is a lot more insidious and a lot more homegrown. A report released in 2018 by the State Department ranked the U.S. as one of the worst countries in the world for human trafficking. While the Department of Justice has estimated that between 14,500 and 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked into this country every year, this number pales in comparison to the number of American minors who are trafficked within it: A 2009 Department of Health and Human Services review of human trafficking into and within the United States found that roughly 199,000 American minors are sexually exploited each year, and that between 244,000 and 325,000 American youths are considered to be at risk of being trafficked specifically in the sex industry. Heartbreakingly, many of these children are victimized not by strangers who’ve abducted them from mall parking lots but rather by people they know and trust: Studies have found that as much as 44 percent of victims are trafficked by family members, most often parents (and not infrequently parents who were trafficked themselves). Between 2011 and 2020, there was an 84 percent increase in the number of people prosecuted for a federal human-trafficking offense. Of the defendants charged in 2020, 92 percent were male, 63 percent were white, 66 percent had no prior convictions, and 95 percent were U.S. citizens.

Badolato started her career as an FBI agent in some of the earliest days that children could be bought, sold, and traded online. As the internet-porn industry mushroomed, its most lucrative branch turned out to be that of child sexual-abuse materials (the term “child pornography” is no longer used by those in the field, as it implies consent). And as demand for these images increased, so did the abuse that led to their creation.

In 2003, just a few months after Badolato graduated from Quantico, a Crimes Against Children squad was formed in the Atlanta office where she’d been stationed. By then, the FBI was starting to get a handle on the extent of the problem — if not exactly what to do about it. At a weeklong training in Baltimore, Badolato was given a tour of the darkest underbelly of fetish chat groups and then instructed to figure out how to infiltrate. “Everyone was a little nervous,” she explains of the directive. “It was a process, a direction that was new.” Agents were told that they would need to come up with a “persona” and a “story,” and that they would likely have to provide images of children to “prove” they had a minor on offer. They were also told that they could use images of their own children, if they were comfortable doing so (the FBI no longer endorses this policy).

Badolato’s unit with a kidnapping victim after her recovery in 2011. A Health and Human Services review found that roughly 199,000 American minors are sexually exploited each year, and that as many as 325,000 American youths are considered to be at risk of being trafficked in the sex industry.

Badolato developed “Paulina” based on her understanding that any persona would need to share most of her own backstory and traits. “That’s the only way you can really do undercover work,” Badolato says. “People can tell the sincerity in what you’re saying, so there has to be a level of genuineness, but then you just add this criminal element to it.” Most of the things Badolato had told Bolen were true: where she was from, her family background, the monstrousness of her mother, a woman who she says would pass out cigarettes and beers to Badolato’s 13-year-old friends in a state of manic permissiveness one minute and fly into a violent rage about a piece of lint on the floor the next. (Badolato’s mother declined to comment for this article, but a childhood friend corroborated Badolato’s account.) It was true that growing up in an unstable home with a string of stepdads, she had never really felt loved, true that she had divorced her first husband, true that she was raising their three-year-old daughter on her own. The only thing that wasn’t true was her tale of being molested, her initiation into the “lifestyle” — to use the chatroom parlance — that Paulina said she now wanted for her daughter. As Badolato had familiarized herself with the language and behaviors of the chatrooms, she’d honed that added criminal element, imagining what psychological conditions might believably lead a parent to traffic their own child and how those conditions could be grafted onto her real life story. She already had a history of abuse; it was not hard to extrapolate to a fictional stepfather who had seemed to provide a gentle counterpoint, showing her love and making her feel special when no one else had, even if others couldn’t understand. From there, it was easy to convince the chatroom participants that she shared their belief — or justification — that most people had it all wrong and that “child love” was natural, and could even be beneficial for the child.

Badolato estimates that she has arrested more than a thousand people; not one of those arrests has failed to end in a conviction. She didn’t know until she was in the thick of it that most agents refuse this sort of work, that most can’t even pretend to forge a relationship with someone looking to victimize a child. But she could. “Paulina,” she points out, is not a name she chose at random; it’s similar to her own mother’s name. Badolato says she had grown up learning to compartmentalize for the sake of her own emotional survival. She’d perfected the art of engaging with someone whose actions she couldn’t stand. Doing this work had felt like a way of taking her trauma and putting it to good use, of leveraging her past as a safeguard against her daughter’s and other children’s futures.

Of course there were moments that were hard to take — when suspects mentioned which brands of lubrication were best or whether or not a parent might hold a child down. There were times when she knew that even talking about these things was a turn-on for these men, times when the conversations made her nauseous, times when she’d lie awake all night or play back a recording and think, “Holy shit, I listened to this? I said these words?” But she kept faith in the mission. She reminded herself that the pictures she sent of her daughter — the beautiful, little girl sleeping in the next room — did not represent a real child on offer. “I was thinking, ‘If I send this obscure picture of my daughter and he acts on it, then he’s never going to harm my daughter or anybody else’s,’ ” Badolato says now. “I was presenting a fake girl to save a real one.”

KYLE PARKS SEEMED to think he could get away with anything. He seemed to think, for instance, that he could get away with running a brothel, a 1-900 sex line, and a housecleaning company out of the same Columbus, Ohio, office park and under the same oxy-moronic name, XXXREC and Hygiene Services. He seemed to think he could invite one young woman and five teenagers (four of whom he had only just met) on a road trip to Florida, but instead deposit them in two rooms of a Red Roof Inn in St. Charles, Missouri. When they piled out of the minivan — high on the drugs he’d given them — saw snow falling and asked to be taken home, he thought he could make a little money off them first. All it took was a few ads in Backpage — the Craigslist of sex advertisements — and men began showing up.

Even after things started going south for him, Parks couldn’t fathom that he wouldn’t prevail. When someone alerted law enforcement as to what was going on, Parks (who, according to legal documents, had been out getting food when the police showed up) burst into the precinct the next morning looking to bail his “friend” out. When questioned about the 88 condoms found in the back of his van, he said they had been prescribed to him by a doctor. After being taken into custody, he protested that he was being set up. Most people would have cut their losses and pleaded guilty, but not Parks. He thought he could take his case to court and win.

And it wasn’t impossible to imagine that he might. Badolato knew that even the tightest cases could go sideways when put before 12 people who would inevitably enter the courtroom with a cinematic sense of what sex trafficking was supposed to be. In fact, it wasn’t just the jury that Badolato knew she would need to convince; it was also often the victims themselves, young people who had internalized the exact same misconceptions about trafficking that the jury had — along with any number of other judgments society had thrown their way — and who were loath to submit themselves to a courtroom full of more judgment.

Of all of Parks�� underage victims, the hardest to pin down had been a 17-year-old we’ll call Sierra. Once she returned to Columbus, Sierra seemed to basically disappear. Calls to her mother’s number went unanswered. When one of the other victims managed to track her down in December 2016, a month before the case was to go to trial, Sierra agreed to meet Badolato on a blighted Columbus block with a string of dilapidated homes, climbing into the bureau’s Chevy Malibu with matted hair, dirty clothes, and a wary expression.

By this time, Badolato had remarried, had a second child, relocated to St. Louis, and taken over as head of the Child Exploitation Joint Task Force, which had become one of the most productive FBI teams in the country in terms of arrests and convictions. Meanwhile, as the internet streamlined the process of buying or selling any good or service, trafficking had become one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises, estimated by the Department of Homeland Security to bring in $150 billion globally and considered by many criminals to be a superior business model: If caught, the sentences were often lighter than those for peddling drugs; and unlike crack or heroin, the same product could be “used” again and again and again.

Badolato taught her team of 20 how to do the online undercover work she’d trailblazed in Atlanta, tracking the movements of child-abuse material through the online underworld and then prosecuting those who distributed and produced it. Her new squad also initiated her in the type of undercover work it had been doing before her arrival: covert sting operations in which a detective would pose as a john, set up a “date,” and then meet said date in a hotel room fitted out with hidden recording devices while, in the next room over, a taskforce team listened in, waiting for the code word that would let them know that enough evidence had been gathered for them to swoop in and shut the op down. This had proved a very effective technique for getting convictions, but Badolato’s arrival coincided with both a growing sentiment that consensual sex work had been over-criminalized and an increasing awareness that what looked like consensual sex work might actually be trafficking, no matter what the “date” professed in that hotel room.

Badolato has a tendency to say aloud the things she notices — about you, about others, about situations — observations that are not at all unkind but are perceptive enough that most people would keep them to themselves. She points out when someone deflects, and she has a sharp eye for defense mechanisms. She once casually mentions my tendency to mirror other people’s vocal and speech patterns. She is not shy about bringing up the emotional and physical abuse she says she experienced as a child, and she is quick to comment when someone is making excuses for someone else’s behavior. It was soon clear to her colleagues that Badolato brought a trauma-informed mentality to the work, a tendency to look beyond what someone was doing and instead try to parse why they were doing it. And she was relentless: While some squads did one or two trafficking sting ops a year, her team was doing four or five a month. In addition to the hotel rooms reserved for the john and the team, they would have a social worker set up in a third room, ready to offer services to the victims. They would have lookouts stationed to see who might be dropping the date off. If that date was found to be underage, the case was automatically classified as trafficking. But even if they weren’t, Badolato’s team was primed to get to the bottom of what was going on, to figure out whether they were being manipulated or coerced, and by whom.

“If I could put my hands on a pimp, that’s what I wanted,” says Jeff Roediger, a St. Louis county detective who was the “john” for many of Badolato’s sting ops and who makes clear that the team was not interested in policing voluntary sex work. “When I had those types of cases, and I knew they were being sincere with me, I wouldn’t book them,” he says. “It was all about talking to the girls. It’s not like in the movies where they come running to you. You know, ‘Thanks, you rescued me!’ It’s not like that. A lot of them try to bullshit you at first — ‘That’s my boyfriend, blah blah blah’— but once I talked to them for a while, they would become more forthcoming.”

Badolato’s unit was one of the first in the country to take on this “progressive and proactive” approach, as she puts it. Soon, St. Louis looked like a sex-trafficking capital — not because it was actually trafficking more victims than other cities but because the task force was so aggressively pursuing those cases, and classifying them as what they were. “I mean, I was working in vice for years,” says Roediger. “Back in the day, it was always ‘prostitution,’ ‘prostitution,’ ‘prostitution’ — until we started to figure it out a little bit, until we started digging a little deeper.”

Once they did, the task force found that roughly a third of the sex-trafficking victims they recovered were under the age of 17 — and they began to see the reach of the problem. Kids were being trafficked out of every hotel in the area, from the seediest roach motel to the fanciest Ritz-Carlton. They were being trafficked every time of day and by every socioeconomic group (“Before you go do brain surgery, you got to bust a nut real quick,” one underage victim told Badolato of her high-end clientele). Some of the victims were girls. Some were boys. Some were LGBTQ kids who’d been kicked out of their homes. Some were straight cis kids from the suburbs. “I tell people that I could probably name two or three [kids] in the school district they live in that have been trafficked,” Roediger says. “And they just can’t comprehend it.”

“If I can be perfectly honest, I truly don’t believe that the FBI realizes what they put their agents through doing that kind of work.”

There were kids who were about to age out of foster care (a particularly at-risk group, according to those who work in the field), kids who’d run away, kids who were being sold to pay their family’s rent, or to buy their family member’s drugs. There were kids who’d sit in the hotel room, backpack at their feet, dutifully working on their math homework while agents and social workers tried to figure out what to do with them. Was their home life safe enough that they could be returned to it? Would a residential program take them? Of all the imperfect options, which would make them least likely to be trafficked again?

The one common denominator was this: They all had a vulnerability that could be preyed upon. They all lacked a safety net — societal, familial, emotional, or some combination thereof — that might have broken their fall. Mostly, their stories weren’t dramatic; they were typical American tales of neglect, of abuse doled out casually, of a steady stream of letdowns by people and institutions who should have propped them up. Badolato found that she had a knack for getting them to talk about this, for getting them to open up to her. She didn’t look like an FBI agent — at least not what they’d imagined. She spoke softly, but with authority and a slight vocal fry. And she thinks that, at some level, they could probably sense that she’d once been a vulnerable kid too, that with only a few slightly different twists of fate, she could have become a trafficking victim herself — and that she knew it. “My trauma looks different than theirs, but it’s trauma nonetheless,” she says.

“And I think victims can feel that.”

AS THE TASK force learned more about the psychology of victims, they also learned more about the ways in which their vulnerability was being manipulated, and how those ways were evolving. It was known in law-enforcement circles that once a skilled trafficker set his or her sights on a vulnerable young person, they could be groomed in a matter of days: one day for an introduction, a day or two to make the victim feel special and cared for, and then the day when a “friend” comes over and he needs to be “cared for” as well. Sometimes violence was involved at that point; sometimes drug use was involved throughout. But emotional manipulation was the key element, which is why it was so easy for grooming to move online, for groomers to take advantage of the false senses of connection fostered on social media.

Of the victims who are not being trafficked by family members, the majority are being groomed in this way. “I would say that probably 75 percent of the initial grooming is happening online now,” says Cindy Malott, the director of U.S. Safe Programs at Crisis Aid International. “Recruiters used to have to work really, really hard to get access to kids, but now they’re practically sitting in a child’s bedroom. And kids put everything out there — what’s going on in their life, who they’re angry about, parents are going through a divorce, their insecurities about their body, about themselves, what they do, how they spend their time — so it’s like a gift to these predators.”

The ways to manipulate are legion: Get a kid to send a compromising photo, and she’ll do almost anything to keep you from sending it out to all her Facebook friends; find out a gay kid is still closeted, and the threat of outing him gives you incredible power. And predators aren’t just on Instagram and Snapchat; they lurk in the chat functions of Roblox, Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto. “They’re everywhere,” says Malott. “People think, ‘Oh, I just got to keep my kids away from those porn sites, those horrible places.’ Well, no, predators are gonna go where the kids are.” And once there, they’re going to zero in on the kids who are most vulnerable.

That’s what got to Badolato. In her online undercover work, she’d plumbed the psychology of pedophiles, but now she wasn’t just dealing with suspects; she was spending time with victims and seeing the same vulnerabilities in them that the traffickers had seen: the instability or poverty, the addiction or mental health issues or abuse that had been normalized in their lives long before the traffickers entered them. Sometimes Badolato couldn’t help but feel that all the conspiracies and misconceptions weren’t just a distraction from the truth of trafficking but rather some sick attempt to let society off the hook for trying to solve the much more intractable problems at trafficking’s root.

“People would rather stick their head in the sand than address the real problem, because then you have to face and talk about the societal issues,” she says. “With a movie like Sound of Freedom, it’s like, ‘Oh, this is in a jungle in South America. This isn’t actually in [my neighborhood].’ You know? It’s easier for people to ignore the problem than deal with the issues on a societal level.”

BY THE TIME Badolato was sitting in that Chevy with Sierra, on that blighted Ohio block, she knew that the rate of revictimization for children who are trafficked was as high as 95 percent, according to FBI reports. She knew that 90 percent of sex-trafficking victims have a history of child sexual abuse, that more than 75 percent had lived in foster or adoptive care. She knew that she could arrest one perpetrator, and another would pop up in his place, that she could send one pimp to prison and the same victims would show up to stings some short time later, run by a different crew. She knew that testifying was a way for Sierra to psychologically push back against what had happened to her, and she was right: After the young woman took the stand on Jan. 10, 2017, Parks was found guilty and sentenced to 25 years; while testifying, Sierra had seemed to transform, to channel and embody a sort of empowerment. But Badolato also knew that once her testimony was over, Sierra would go back to that blighted block. She wondered how long that empowerment would last.

She also wondered about her own trajectory, her own ability to continue doing this work. The youngest trafficking victim she’d ever recovered from a sting op — an 11-year-old who’d been recruited through Facebook — had been returned to her family in a house that had no heat (Badolato had used an FBI slush fund to get it turned back on). One did not become immune to the human misery of such things. They compounded, became harder and harder to compartmentalize. “It’s just a combination of all of those years — and it’s all awful,” she says. “But there are particular moments that, for one reason or another, you can’t get out of your head. I just don’t think it’s in human nature to be exposed to that for so long and it not start changing who you are.”

One night, at a restaurant near where Badolato lives, I ask her whether she thinks children are being sex-trafficked right then, in that very moment, in just the mile or two radius around us. She’s quiet for a long time, her gaze fixed downward at her glass of wine. By the time she looks up, her whole body is trembling. “It’s happening right now,” she says quietly. “Right now some little girl is being dropped off in the parking lot of a motel. There are three or four girls holed up in a hotel next to a McDonald’s. It’s not only when we think about it. It is happening all the time. And if I’m just sitting here, present, having dinner, not thinking about it, that means I’m ignoring a problem that I know is real.” Tears stream down her face.

“Many images have never left my mind,” she says. “It’s really hard to have worked your entire life in law enforcement with a lot of child crime victims and be at the end of your career looking at the situation where you realize you can only do so much to make a difference.” Badolato wipes back the tears with the palm of her hand and shudders her head, as if she can shake the thoughts away. “Damn,” she says. “Fuck. I shouldn’t be the one crying. I’m not the victim of this.” The veteran agent steels herself and repeats, “I am not the victim.”

THE HOUSE WHERE Korina Ellison says she was first sex-trafficked no longer exists. It once stood on an unassuming lot in a residential suburb of Portland, Oregon, that stumbles down to the banks of the Willamette River. Now, Ellison can’t quite bring the house’s features to mind. She was so young back then, maybe four or five. There is so much she’s repressed, or only pieced together after the fact. As a child, she wouldn’t have known what she now believes to be true: that her grandmother scored her drugs by offering up her youngest daughter, Ellison’s mom. Or that, once her mom was hooked on the meth cooked by the man who’d lived in that house, she’d known just what to do to get more. But Ellison does remember being inside the house, unclothed. She does remember how the man would touch her.

Her life unspooled from there. Her father died of a heroin overdose when she was six. Her mom lost custody for good. She bounced around foster care, then various residential institutions, then whatever shelter she could find. In the story she tells of how she was sex-trafficked again in her teenage years, there’s no moment of drama, no kidnapping, no clear coercion. There was just a random, rainy afternoon when she had no place to go and was alone in the street and a car pulled up. The man inside took her home with him, fed her, introduced her to his girlfriend. They took her shopping. They let her stay. When men showed up at the home to have sex with the woman, Ellison was invited to watch, but she wasn’t expected to participate — not at first, anyway. According to a statement Ellison later made to law enforcement, she just “realized that people aren’t going to take care of [me] for free.” Soon, the woman was posting Ellison’s services on Backpage — $150 for half an hour, $200 for a full one — and the trio were traveling the Midwest. For a long time, it didn’t even occur to Ellison, then 16, to leave. “Where would I have gone?” she asks. “I’d been missing for over a year. Nobody was looking for me.” When the man told her to call him “Daddy,” she complied.

That was more than a decade ago, near the beginning of Badolato’s tenure as head of the Child Exploitation Task Force. But by 2021, leaving it had seemed a necessary form of self-preservation. One of her last cases had gone well legally: The perp, a retired police officer from California who had produced child sex-abuse materials of three sisters in Manila, had pleaded guilty to such charges when he learned that Badolato had brought the girls to the states to testify against him. But the experience had been emotionally devastating for Badolato, who had wanted the sisters, then 16, 13, and 11, to have memories of the U.S that consisted of more than reliving their trauma in a courtroom. She took them shopping and to the zoo, invited them to her home to have dinner with her own family, saw them slowly start to open up and laugh and behave like the children they were. Then she’d had to put them on a flight back to Manila, back to the aunt who had allowed the man to abuse them and who Badolato had been unable to extradite. Fortunately, she says, their estranged father ended up intervening and taking custody of the girls, but that feeling of futility in the fight lingered.

“I stayed for a little bit longer after that trial, but it really was when I should have been able to look myself in the mirror and say, ‘Nikki, you’re done,’ ” Badolato had told me in St. Louis. “It became clear that I had been doing it too long.” She’d spend the last couple of years working national security, a position without the immediacy of child-exploitation work, but also without the heartache. “If I can be perfectly honest, I truly don’t believe that the FBI realizes what they put their agents through doing that kind of work. I just don’t,” she says.

And yet, here Badolato was in Portland, leading Ellison, now 30, up to her hotel room, telling her about all the announcements she’d heard in the Atlanta airport instructing travelers to be on the lookout for sex trafficking. “It’s like white noise in the background,” she says as Ellison settles into the sofa. “It’s a false sense of doing something to help.”

“Here’s the thing: Nobody knows what to look for,” Ellison agrees.

“And what about the victims who are in that airport, who are walking around and listening?” Badolato asks.

“I wouldn’t have even heard that announcement,” Ellison replies. “Because I didn’t feel like a victim. It goes a lot, lot, lot deeper than anybody realizes.”

That’s what she and Badolato both understand. That’s why they started talking eight months ago. Of all the teenage victims Badolato’s task force recovered, Ellison is one of the few who she knows has permanently extricated herself from being prostituted, though it took years for her to get to that point, years for her to see that what happened to her was not her fault but rather a fault in the system, a fault in many systems over the course of generations. Neither she nor Badolato can fix that.

Yet they can’t help feeling like there’s something they can fix — or at least try to. Under the umbrella of an organization she’s founded called Innocent Warriors, Badolato created a program for schools, instructing educators on the signs that might indicate a student is being trafficked and teaching kids how to avoid getting groomed online, which, she believes, is not about stranger danger but rather an awareness of subtle manipulation. Ellison has been working with trafficked youth through nonprofits like Children of the Night, the residential program where Badolato’s team sent her when she was 17. Together, they’ve been talking about having Ellison help train undercovers who are learning to do trafficking sting ops. They’ve also discussed starting a mentorship program in which children who are still being sex-trafficked are paired with young adults like Ellison who once were, providing a way for victims to begin to envision a different future for themselves and a path toward it even while being prostituted. Such a program may be retroactive rather than proactive, but it would capitalize on Badolato’s and Ellison’s experience and expertise — and it could help in the healing of mentors and mentees alike.

Badolato had traveled to Portland for the two to talk face-to-face about how the program might work. “You have to understand how they’ve been traumatized because sometimes, to a child, relating doesn’t sound like you’re relating. It sounds like you’re pointing out all the bad things in them,” says Ellison from the driver’s seat of her Nissan Pathfinder as she drives Badolato around to show her certain landmarks of her past after she’d left Children of the Night: the bridge she’d slept under for over a year after a boyfriend had gotten her hooked on heroin, the blocks downtown where she’d bounced between a children’s shelter and the needle exchange. It had taken a prison sentence for her to finally break her addiction and commit to a different kind of life, though that evolution had had less to do with not having access to drugs than with seeing her own mother cycle in and out of the same facility — like looking into her own future and witnessing how bleak it would be. Maybe, she thought, she could provide the inverse of that for kids in Innocent Warriors. Maybe she could reverse engineer her own escape.

“I just want to make it very clear that if you were a victim, you are a victim, and just to not have any shame in that,” she tells Badolato as they drive through Portland’s misty streets.

“What I anticipate and hope is that then we get survivors that are like, ‘They get it,’ ” Badolato replies. “And that it opens up doors to help, for people to recognize that there are people who get what’s really going on.”

“It took a really long time for me,” Ellison says of coming to terms with her own victimhood.

“It’s like reworking your thought process about some of those things,” Badolato agrees. “And that’s hard, and it happens slowly over time, and it looks different for everybody.”

Ellison grips the wheel tightly. “The truth does matter. It does. The truth is the fucking truth. And it’s been empowering to be able to talk about it because that’s another way that I’ve realized, like, ‘Man, I was a victim,’ is re-going over all of this. Because when it happens so many times, you do blame yourself. It’s a lot easier to just continue to live in a lie than believe that you were lied to.”

Still, Ellison and Badolato agree that the impressionability that makes children vulnerable is also what makes them open to guidance and mentorship if a relationship of trust can be established. “What do you think a parent does? They groom you. I’d been waiting to be guided and groomed,” Ellison says.

It’s been instructive to see that potential from another perspective, as a mother doing the guiding. As the afternoon wears on, Ellison stops to pick up her then-15-month-old son, who was being watched by a social-worker friend. She buckles the little boy into his car seat, ruffles his hair, and passes him a bottle. He grins widely and begins removing his shoes and socks, throwing them gleefully onto the floor of the car and then kicking his tiny feet in time with the music as Ellison glances back at him and smiles. “Kids are so perfect,” she says.

The last stop of the day is the large plot of land where the drug dealer’s house once stood. Now, it’s been turned into a playground, with brightly-colored jungle gyms, a covered picnic area, and a large lawn, where a couple leisurely walks their dog. Ellison and Badolato climb down from the car and stand at the park’s edge, as Ellison’s son toddles around the grass, oblivious to what had transpired in that very spot. There is some form of poetic justice in the land being earmarked for children’s enjoyment, but neither woman voices it. Mostly, they’re quiet. Night is falling, the air growing cooler, and the gray sky fading into dusk.

“You would never think a park could hide what it used to be,” Ellison says at last. And yet it did. Driving off with Badolato at her side and her son babbling happily in the back seat, Ellison glances in the rear-view mirror, but only for a moment. Badolato keeps her eyes fixed only on the road ahead.

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ddejavvu · 9 months

Note

MORE BEREAL WITH HOTCH OMG!!

but he takes one where he rails me from behind 🤭

part 1

this post is 18+, minors dni.

The consequences of your relationship with Hotch being outed are much less severe than you'd worried about. No one has snitched to Strauss, no one accuses you of sleeping with the boss for leverage in the government. But they do adopt a penchant for teasing you, and it grates on Aaron's nerves more than yours.

"Y/L/N, I didn't peg you as a grave robber," Derek grins, his pen caught between his teeth as he leans back in his chair, "Tell me, can the old man even get it up anymore?"

"That's enough." Hotch snaps, "You're working right now, Agent."

"I'm working, I'm working," Derek assures his boss, putting pen to paper but writing nothing, "Just making sure Y/N's not getting the short end of the stick in this little thing you've got going on."

"It's not short." You promise with a sly grin, and you see Aaron's jaw clench as he tries biting his tongue to keep from smirking. He's stirring his coffee on the counter of the kitchenette and Derek, properly cowed by your retaliation to his teasing, ducks his head and begins scribbling away with a grimace on his face.

You've developed a habit of meeting Aaron in his office for lunch, and today is no different. You take the brunt of your coworker's teasing jeers as you bounce happily up the stairs to Hotch's office, shutting the door on them before Emily can finish whatever jibe she's got locked and loaded.

"Hi," You greet, like you haven't seem him all day, like he wasn't expecting your presence, "You ready to eat?"

"I am," Aaron beams at you, shuffling paperwork out of the way to clear a space for your lunch bag, "Did you happen to grab any crackers from the pantry before we left?"

"I did," You brag, showcasing a full sleeve of them to pair with the dip you'd made, "We need more of them, though, this is the last portion."

"I'll add it to the grocery list," Aaron mumbles, digging in his pocket for his phone, and you feel something warm and soft in your chest at the domesticity of it all. Your grocery list, your joint grocery list with the man you love. Food bought together, with shared funds and shared smiles across the shopping cart as an unnecessary bag of cookies is added to the cart.

"JJ thinks you're nicer now that we're together," You muse, munching on a cracker with dip smeared over its surface, "She says you smile more."

"I do," Aaron's eyes scrunch slightly with the force of the expression in question, "I bet Morgan doesn't feel that way."

"He does that to himself," You scoff, reaching over the desk to squeeze Aaron's arm, "He loves you, Aaron, he just likes teasing you. That's his way of showing it."

"I know," He assures you, "I just wish he wouldn't do it in the office."

"I bet he wishes we wouldn't do it in the office," You gnaw at your lower lip, remembering Derek's scandalized grimace when he'd forgone a knock at Hotch's office door last week. It had been a kiss, barely more besides wandering hands, but since then he's doubled his efforts to tease you two.

"I locked the door this time." Aaron chuckles, but falls silent with the weight of his words, "That is- if you want this time to be like last time. Or we could just eat, or-"

"Shut up," Your finger flies to Aaron's mouth, his eyes crossing to follow it as you press it to his lips, "I want you."

His chest shakes with a hearty chuckle at your brazen words, but he's more than happy to scoot his chair back from his desk to give you space to sit over his thighs. Your kiss tastes like the dip you've both been sharing, but the messier it gets, the more you lick and drool into his mouth the less potent it is. It doesn't take you long to feel a needy ache in your core that Aaron's bulge would satisfy, so you reach down to palm him through his pants.

"Jesus-" He hisses, eyes fluttering open to blink dazedly at you, "You- do you want- here? Now?"

"Yes here and now!" You nod vigorously, his face held in your hands, "I need you, Aaron, please."

His hands fly to his belt buckle with no further hesitation. You're eager to help, palming his cock through his boxers until it's sufficiently hard and tugging eagerly at the elastic waistband to free it. It's a mouthwatering sight, but you don't have time for that now, all you can manage on your lunch break is a quickie.

With mental plans made to suck him dry as soon as you cross the threshold of your apartment, you lift your hips, relishing in the way that his fingers prod at your barely-slick entrance to coax more lubrication out of your cunt.

"Just go," You beg, "There's no time, I- I'm wet enough."

"Okay." He hums, kissing your mouth where you pant against his own, "You sure you're ready?"

"Mhm! Yeah, I'm ready." You nod, letting him line up his cock with your entrance, "Aaron, please- hnngh!"

You bury your face in his shoulder at the slight sting of his dick, the pain eased when he pushes all the way in and the slickness that's accumulated deep inside gets distributed around your cunt. It's smoother then, and he's able to get a steady rhythm going with both his hips and yours as you ride him. He thrusts as best as he can and you pick up the slack by bouncing your hips, until you're biting into the soft silk of his tie to muffle your moans.

Your phone chimes. It's BeReal.

You've had a little more freedom since outing your relationship, your photos now of you and Aaron together rather than the grass beneath your feet and a carefully taken selfie that doesn't include your brooding boss.

But it's Aaron this time that lunges for the cell, your weight supported when his arm wraps around your thighs, and your legs encircle his waist. It's a startling change of position, and you're worried about falling, but he's surprisingly strong.

"Aaron!" You gush, your back aching when it's pressed against the corner of his desk, "Ow, don't-!"

"Sorry," He pants, hands falling to your hips and hips jerking backwards. His cock is no longer buried in your cunt and you mourn it's loss, but he manhandles your waist to turn you around, and you fall forwards against his desk. You catch yourself on your palms against the smooth wood, yelping as he shows no hesitation in lining his hips up with your ass and plunging his cock back into your pussy. He's thrusting from behind now, one hand latched onto your phone as he clicks the notification.

Your face barely suffices to unlock the phone, your expression warped in pleasure as Aaron takes you from behind. But the phone unlocks after only a moment's struggle, and Aaron eagerly loads the front camera.

"No porn," You warn him, "I- I don't need Reid seeing my- tits!"

"I'm not showing anyone your tits," He grunts, aiming the camera at your face just as your brow scrunches, and your mouth falls into a rosy ring, "I'm showing them your face."

"Aaron-!" You mewl, hearing the shutter of the camera as he takes his own picture, the saliva-ridden bite you'd left on his tie. There's a ring of darker fabric where your drool had seeped into the silk, and he's proud to showcase it alongside your pleasure-ridden expression.

"There," He tosses the phone back on the desk, perhaps harder than he should. He's simply overwhelmed with passion, the need to prove himself worthy of you. Derek's nagging comments eat at his brain, 'the short end of the stick.'

It doesn't look like you're suffering. His chest surges with pride as he stares at the photo he'd snapped of you, face contorted and riddled with bliss.

'Short end of the stick', he sneers, digging the expression into your back and nipping at the skin of your neck, you're nothing short of mindblown.

#aaron hotchner x reader #aaron hotchner imagine #aaron hotchner scenario #aaron hotchner oneshot #aaron hotchner one-shot #aaron hotchner one shot #aaron hotchner headcanon #aaron hotchner headcanons #aaron hotchner hc #aaron hotchner hcs #aaron hotchner fanfiction #aaron hotchner fanfic #aaron hotchner fic #aaron hotchner blurb #aaron hotchner drabble #aaron hotchner dialogue #aaron hotchner fluff #aaron hotchner x reader fanfiction

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satoruhour · 9 months

Text

HE PLAYS BASS !

a/n: modern au bc i cant handle any angst rn. i ramble a lot in this to set the scene teehee. not beta read, gn btw / tagging @crysugu @slttygeto @getousex :3

wc: 3k ish

warnings: bass guitarist!geto, soft dom!geto, he is respectful of your boundaries, both geto and reader smoke weed, shotgun kiss, sexual acts under the influence, fingering, clit stimulation, implied second round, implied cunnilingus, dry humping, praise, n*sfw under the cut

bass guitarist!geto who has had an interest in music and its instruments since being a little boy, practically begging his parents to enrol him in some guitar classes. with fingers strumming the nylon strings alongside complicated chords on the frets felt so right that since then he and his guitar have been inseparable since.

bass guitarist!geto who gets to know the guitar so well that he masters guitar solo after guitar solo, playing songs by ear in his free time and thought lead guitar was all there was to music until the age of fifteen where he stumbles across a song with a bass line that sounded absolutely heavenly — through the 240p quality of the youtube video, he watched the bassist dish out the heavy beats, always in the background yet detrimental to making the band sound complete.

bass guitarist!geto who leaped at the opportunity to buy a bass guitar with whatever money he had to purchase a Squier bass — it was a little shitty in sound but it was cheap, something affordable for a middle schooler. suguru didn’t care. he perfected the use of his bass guitar, already having the basics down from playing guitar; his room is filled with posters, picks, pieces of displaced lyrics.

bass guitarist!geto only has the chance two years later to ask his new friends if they wanted to jam out together and down the line, if they wanted to form a band. it was a clueless band of boys (with shoko of course) in some room of gojo satoru’s luxury house where his parents don’t care to ask him to keep the noise down like suguru’s parents do.

bass guitarist!geto fights to get a spot to audition for one of tokyo’s biggest music festivals a few months later. if they won they would get more recognition, more support, even if they haven’t figured out the specifics of how to operate a band. with gojo as the singer, shoko on the lead and nanami on drums, they would find out what they had.

bass guitarist!geto who breaks that stereotype of the bassist being ignored throughout a performance. he thinks it could be because of his longer hair and his newly bought gauges, and he thought he didn’t look too shabby himself — although he isn’t surprised to see most of the girls fawn over gojo as he sang lyrics of an original song, courtesy of the joint effort between geto and shoko.

bass guitarist!geto who gives judges the finger after they said they couldn’t perform originals at an audition, blacklisting them for future performances — but gojo sees it as a win when he has a hoard of new fans waiting outside to get a photo with him with autographs that differed from each paper his pen made contact with. later, he bursts out laughing when gojo says he hadn’t even thought of a proper signature yet and just ‘did whatever on their paper’.

bass guitarist!geto whose band gained popularity fast because of everyone’s good looks, singing at that same place they auditioned at, but now with repertoire under their belt. it’s then that they’re already all in university, and yet everyone’s still incredibly passionate.

bass guitarist!geto who spots you in the crowd together with your friends, jamming out to their set, but while your friends’ eyes are locked on gojo who’s loving the attention, nanami who can’t give a shit and shoko who’s too focused on her solo, you manage to draw geto’s eyes to you. he spends the rest of the set locking eyes with you, amidst other things like sending you winks and licking his lips until you’re under his spell. all throughout he doesn’t lose the rhythm, but he does slip-up from time to time and there’s a panicked look that nanami sends to geto for messing up his rhythm.

bass guitarist!geto who sees you at his next show alone, smiling up at him right at the front row while he’s trying not to mess up after the last time. this time he has a chance to show you what he’s got in a bass solo, losing himself in the music until even you fades off and you’re truly seeing the bassist for who he is. he’s easing back into the main melody of the song but not before leaning over the speakers with a knee on the floor, hovering right over you before shoko takes over and he’s back to his heavy beats.

bass guitarist!geto who brushes off the teasing after the set ends, only to be bombarded with more of it when he sees you on campus — no way you’re in the same school as him, walking around with your cute outfits and laughing along to your friend’s joke with no care in the world.

bass guitarist!geto who doesn’t have much trouble charming you into hanging out with him, already recognising him from far away when he’s got his long flowy hair and gauges and tight black shirt and tall stature — you aren’t realising he’s asking you if it’ll be okay for you to head over to his dorm room. you’re getting pushed by your friends behind you to say yes with giggles and gossip, and of course you weren’t going to reject the hot guy you missed class and ditched friends for.

bass guitarist!geto who shows you his room and tells you to let him know if he’s made you uncomfortable in any way. in the background, there’s a faded, soft song that continues to play that really completes the dorm, immediately hitting it off until he starts to roll a joint a while later, offering it to you with a raise of his eyebrow.

“oh— n-no it’s fine, geto-san, i don’t really smoke…” you sheepishly turn down the weed, settling instead to watch him and his beautiful side profile, letting him explain to you about bands and guitar and chords.

“thank you for having me, geto-san,” bowing, you’re nothing like the person in the bar that day, geto thinks it’s the lack of alcohol but he doesn’t mind, simply leaning on the doorframe as he nods down at you. his smile is intoxicating and so goddamn attractive you would’ve buckled to your knees if not for the deep breaths you were taking.

“next time, pretty?” geto smiles, a little high from smoking. his eyes are lidded (they usually are anyway) and smile lopsided. his hair’s almost out of the bun.

“yeah, next time,” it sounded so breathy, you bit your lip. “i guess you’d have to find me on campus, though.”

bass guitarist!geto who mutters how you’re a little tease to himself later when he closes the door. he swears to himself he’d get your number next time, but it’s not difficult to find you the next time, hanging around the same place at the same time. it’s like you wanted him to find you — he’s not opposed to it. it’s a few weeks down the road now, and the second time is watching him curiously as he smokes, too. you take a hit and embarrass yourself completely in front of him though, and while you’re fighting for your life, you’re not opposed to the buzz it gives you.

bass guitarist!geto who’s opening the door to you the next time, surprised to see your dishevelled state and a pillow between your arms, walking almost a block like this to the next building where his dorm was. he offers to make you some tea and you shake your head, feeling a pounding headache already coming on just from explaining that your roommate was an asshole.

“you can sleep here if you want to, okay?” you sigh, thanking him immensely because even after knowing him for such a short period of time, you’re comforted by his presence.

“at least satoru’s not here,” you laugh at that, nodding tiredly before you’re settling on gojo’s bed after insistence from the other. he wouldn’t care, he’s always going back home anyway, don’t know why he wanted to share a room with me. but before you can get settled in, you hear the familiar crinkling of the paper and the click of the lighter and the smell of weed fills the room again.

again, his hand is outstretched, holding an ashtray below him as the tip of joint glows a red, calling out to you yet reminding you of the way you coughed the other night.

you crawl off his roommate’s bed, snatching the cig out of his hand in a way to prove something to yourself before taking a big puff. this time you’re better, letting the drug flow through your system, but tolerance is another thing, because it only takes another hit for you to be smiling drowsily at the other while geto is a little high, too, eyes rolling to the back of his head when your hand traces over his arms and you giggle.

“you w’nna kiss?” geto asks quietly, a little soberly, having talked late into the night while you hang off his arm and slur your words. but now you know you’re feeling a little more sensible when you can feel your heart pound and your eyes widen despite their need to close.

“i meant it, doll. you’re fuckin’ stunning,” suguru mumbles, the coldness of his rings sending a chill down your body, but also a spark to your core, “you look exactly like the day i discovered bass.” and it’s like cupid fully shoots his arrow through your heart — because have you heard the man play? you’re speechless at his point, only mustering a nod before you’re leaning in.

he hums drunkenly as a way to ask you to wait a min, manoeuvring you onto his lap before he’s taking the almost vanishing joint into his hands. two more puffs are perfect for the cigarette to be discarded and so with a gentle hand, he holds onto your nape while he tries not to get hard from having you on his lap. slowly, your lips wrap around the other end of the joint, taking in another influx of the drug before he does too.

bass guitarist!geto who pulls you towards his lips a little roughly but he doesn’t give you what you want (what he has in mind is much, much better), rather leaving his lips ajar as he exhales the smoke from his mouth into yours, your own smoke already dissipating. weirdly, this burn is more prominent, probably because all you can focus on are suguru’s dazed eyes and the way they burn through your skull. you inhale the smoke before you feel his soft lips on yours.

geto hums into your lips, coming off of them periodically to allow the smoke to disperse, but the moment is so intimate and hot that you blow away the smoke and lunge forward to wrap your arms around his neck.

“no more pullin’ away, geto-san…” you’re trailing off, words messily whispered against his lips and you burn at the chuckle he sounds out, muttering back a question of consent. you’re nodding, reeling at the speed at which he places his hands on your thighs, dragging you further up his front until you rested on his pelvis.

“kissing me like you can’t breathe and you’re still calling me by my last name? i’m wounded.” geto pulls away and defies your rule — you think he’s the only one who can do that. pouting, suguru pushes away the hair enclosing your face. “c’mon, drink, sober up a little.”

“...i like it like this,” you murmur, ashamed as to how readily you leaned into his touch. his stare is piercing though, not budging until you’re gulping down half the cup.

“throats turn dry when we smoke, princess. we can do it more when you’re more used to it, alright?” geto explains, patting your thigh and ignoring the tensing of them around his own. he’s trying so hard to act nonchalant, but he can’t get the image of you parting your lips for the smoke out of his head. the way your eyes flutter close, how you wanted more of him.

“alright… suguru,” you sigh out the name and geto wishes he could hear it somewhere else, “but can we—” the high is getting to you, making your hormones go into a frenzy and you’re grinding on his lap. geto hisses at the feeling, of your cunt brushing against his bulge. your hips are inexperienced, but you’re going by feel, drawing little circles and moving back and forth; whatever that brings you pleasure.

“baby— f-fuck…” geto swears when you pair it with the lips tha kiss down his cheek and jaw and neck, hands on your hips guiding you as you try to chase your high. but a whine from you draws geto out of his daze and he almost cums hearing your needy voice, begging him for something, anything.

“’m tired, suguru,”

he knows, grinding is a tiring thing, so rather he opts for you to lie on him with your back to his chest. by now, the room’s filled with the smell of weed and arousal, asking once again if he could take off your pyjama shorts. geto smiles at the lack of underwear but he says nothing, eyes latched onto the strings of juices that connect your pussy to the shorts.

“my baby ready to be touched?” he feels you nod, loving the way your stomach contracts and expands at the hand that travels over your clothed tits. there, he squeezes them, rubbing fingers over the hardened nub but soon creeps towards your centre. his hand and fingers are so much larger than yours, covering your whole core easily when he cups it and the contact is enough to make you mewl.

“hurry,” your hips hump the air.

“patience, darling,” geto’s gravelly voice cuts through to your ear before he finally draws languid circles upon your clit, rubbing and pressing on your bundle of nerves. his whole body burns from seeing you react so cutely, all cause your eyes couldn’t leave his on that stage. now your eyes were rolling up and over, little moans leaving your lips just from his hands.

bass guitarist!geto who seems to know all your pleasure points in one night, kissing the spot under your ear, to talking you through your orgasm. you were enamoured by the guitarist that you’d let him do anything to you, obsessed with the way he never missed questions of “is this okay?” and “tell me to stop”. geto is just as besotted by you, the arch of your back, the call of his name. god, he was going to write so many songs about you.

“think you can handle a finger, baby?” suguru whispers, caressing your twitching thighs from your first orgasm. with a shaky “yes”, geto plays with your hole, smearing your juices around your sex and getting it all on your thighs. the bashful suguruuu! has him laughing, taking your lips into another kiss as an apology.

“sorry, sweetheart. love teasin’ ya,” muffled words are said, “goin’ in.”

your jaw drops even more when geto first inserts a finger, so much wider and longer that a long moan escapes you. the stretch is so good, everything you’ve ever imagined after watching his fingers travel over the bass strings, and you’re already asking for a second finger. when he does oblige, your hands fly to grab at his wrist.

“feel good?” he chuckles at your lack of an answer, rather responding by clenching around his fingers and leaning back more into his hold. geto sets a pace, thrusting his fingers in and out of you. he thinks it’s enough of staring at you and almost gets whiplash when his head turns to his hand — from the way he disappears into your dripping cunt, he thinks he’ll cum untouched, although your desperate hips also would play a part.

“feel s’good, suguru— shit…” geto groans lowly into your ear when he feels your hand replicating the circles he’s made on your clit, juices starting to collect in his palm from how wet you were.

“you keep clenchin’ around me, baby, you w’nna cum?”

your body is more vocal than your voice, twisting and thrashing from how his fingers already feel so good. the haze and the smell of geto suguru and the weed in your system is all overloading on you at the moment, but in between you’re able to nod, fingers rubbing at your clit while geto’s speed picks up a little.

your legs naturally spread, each slap of his palm against your pussy paired with the lewd noises only making the whole thing better. it’s not long before you feel that familiar feeling, using your right hand to direct him to you once more and it’s here you see the man you saw on stage before: focused, flushed, small smirk on his face. “gonna cum.”

“yeah? are you?” geto asks against your lips, still tasting the faint aroma of the joint. your eyes are so heavy and your limbs feel like lead; it’s a wonder how both your hands are moving on your soaking wet pussy.

“yeah, sugu, s’sensitive—!” geto coos softly at your whimpers before capturing your lips, swiping his tongue over your bottom lip and your orgasm comes crashing down on you. suguru effectively swallows your moans, groaning on his own end when he can feel your cum running down his hand. slowly, he lets you ride through your orgasm, pressing pecks on your skin and shoulders.

“attagirl. so much cum, hm?” your chest is heaving, whining when he removes his fingers and there’s a cute little squelch from the juices, gasping softly as geto separates his fingers and there’s strings connecting his middle to ring finger. “dirty girl.”

you scoff softly with a smile, eyes following how his fingers make his way into his mouth. the other only hums before carrying you bridal style to the shower with a sweet smile on his face. geto suguru was certain he’d worship you.

“gotta taste that cute little pussy next time.”

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