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hearteyes-for-killmonger · 3 years

Text

This is gonna be a flashback chapter. How our babies met because I remember a few people had forgotten. Had to have one of these eventually, right?

Part 21: Introduction

Should I download Tinder?

Glee plays from the firestick, the scene where they're all walking and singing How Will I Know.

I should.

Laying cozied into the couch in a faded t'shirt with the tiniest pink shorts, your head rests on the butt cushion and your feet dangle over the arm as you hold your phone up in the air over your face.

"How will I know?.. How will I knoow..," you mumble along with the crew. You've heard the Glee version of this Whitney classic at least 8 times.

No, but what if I do and someone recognizes me? Someone I work with? What if my family is on Tinder? I'd die.

You put the phone down on your belly and pick up your apple juice from the coffee table, doing a sit up to sip.

Mm. You wipe your mouth nearly spilling. But if they're on there too then they shouldn't comment on what I'm doing, right? We'd ignore each other's presence and continue like ships passing in the night. So technically I should be able to download this app with no blowback.

Picking the phone up, you hit download and open the app. It immediately asks for your information and won't let you skip. Not even your location. You fall back down to your back raising the phone up again.

But what if someone's a serial killer?Would they look for me? No, that won't happen and I could tell if they were psychotic..

Tapping the download button, you go through the steps to set up an account including giving them access to your location and posting a headshot from a selfie. Scrolling through your gallery for more decent pics to post, you decide one's enough and upload a full body photo so that whoever meets you will know who they're meeting, no surprises.

Inputting your information, you decide to write into your blurb that you're looking for some awesome friends, specifically a movie buddy. In reality, the activity doesn't matter you just crave human attention and closeness. Any decent, polite, nice, smart, funny, left wing, hopefully attractive, young, black human.. possibly male.. will do. Not that you're picky. In the meantime, you swipe right on everyone black nearby, men and women. Somebody's gotta respond. Someone sane who wants to meet. Shockingly there are a lot of pretty people. Unfortunately the app only gives you one super like.. a blue star which you decide to save.

Giddily you head over to your match tab and see four matches. Drew P seems nice. Ashley J looks stylish. G Papa looks like he lives in a Freaknik video. Pussy Hunter is just nasty. Your nose twitches as you shamefully start conversations with all four. When neither responds right away you return to swiping and a notification says you've been super liked, but you can't access who super liked without paying money. You're not doing that so you just go back to the bios and swipe right until you get a reply.

Wyd, Pussy Hunter writes.

Bored, watching movies. You?

You gotta fat ass

Um. Thanks?

Netflix and chill?🙈

Netflix and Netflix. We can talk and hang out..

So no chill

No sex, but we can hang out and do something else

After 5 minutes, you realize he's not going to write you back. You start to swipe again on pictures, left for the whites and weirdos. Right for the black people.

Your finger hovers in the air as you gasp lightly at the thirst trap provided by a man self-identified as Erik. It deserves another sip of apple juice. You gulp it down from your cup. "Jesus.." You can't even see his face, because it's all BODY, but you can tell by the picture exactly what he's on Tinder for. Same m.o. as Pussy Hunter.

Erik S, 28

Fucc around and find out

Good Lord.. those shorts are yet holding on, you stare as if they'll slip down further by you willing them to. You swipe right. Your eyes widen as the app alerts you with a blue star meaning... He super liked your profile.

"NO," you gasp wide eyed at the phone ready to chuck it at the wall. Switching to the messages, there's a new one.. from him.. and you know what it's about. "I need some tea."

---

Erik lazed around his house bumping Schoolboy Q, clad in a white terry cloth bathrobe with a short glass of iced Ciroc and Lemonade in his hand. Dancing, he exfoliated his face with his spin brush, trimmed his mustache and beard, shaped himself up, and moisturized his locs and facial hair. The lil lip scrub he'd gotten as a gift from Cierra, he'd initially fought her on because it smelled like peaches but he liked how soft it made his lips. They even tasted good. He licked his lips for the umpteenth time tasting sugar. They tasted like Cierra.

Speaking of sugar, he looked at his phone wondering why his hoes ain't called. Then again, they could've. He wasn't near the phone all day. Checking the iPhone on the charging dock he saw that he had a missed call.. from Cierra.

Checking the time she called, he figured that was back when he was cleaning his guns and checking the parts. He'd already cleaned and sharpened his knives. He'd checked his security cameras. He felt good. Having no major responsibility and no place to be.

Outside of the missed call he had three new nudes and a video sitting in his messages to watch and record himself masturbating to. He was looking forward to doing that especially since Rell hadn't called with no bullshit local cases. Erik had stated he ain't want no hits near his temporary home.. for a year, he wanted peace. One damn year. But here he was still racking basic skills for pennies. "Chump change is still change," Rell's voice played in his ear. "You don't wanna get rusty. Gotta keep your skills sharp."

Erik had done his share of moving around, racking up international kills and earning the nickname Killmonger. But for a little while, he wanted to settle down in one concealed location where no one knew where he lived, who the fuck he was, or where he was coming or going. He wanted the illusion of peace and normality for a year at least. As much money as he had, he figured he could afford to stay in one place for that long if he was careful.

Only two people knew where he lived and that was Rell and Swift. They knew not to come over. Not even the previous owners of the house knew he was there.. because he'd made them an anonymous offer, killed them and moved in a few days after they'd sold it to him for cash. Needless to say he took all that money back.

He dialed Cierra, roaming to his bedroom to collapse over the bed as the phone rung. "Sup Ci?"

"Master," she whimpered, the desperation in her voice telling him she needed release. She'd been working too long through the past week and needed Master to come take control for a few hours. He could picture her on her knees, already in puppy space. She knew exactly how he liked her to wait for him.

"Yes, Ci. You need me to come for a scene?"

"Rrrrr," she growled. "Arf arf!"

"My bad. Lil Bitch."

"I gotta go to Target and see my sister," but come through later. I don't care how late just call up."

"Your sister? The one you met on Facebook?"

"Yeah, her! She live like an hour away. I'm a link with her and put her on Tinder! Get her a man to pop that back out," she giggles.

"You know I don't mind a two for one," Erik teased knowing she wouldn't go for it. He liked to mess with her anyway.

"Not with my damn sister, I'm not that nasty. A white girl can have it,"

"Damn crush my dream."

"Anyway!"

"Aight, I'm a let you go." Hanging up, he sat up and went to his closet pulling a colorful glass bong he'd gotten from a nigga he once knew in the military. Bruce Everett, white boy. Cool nigga... Too bad he shot hisself with his own gun. Sighing, Erik shook his head and went to the bathroom to fill it with water and headed back to pull his chrome grinder from his drawer along with a screen, hempwick, and a nug of Dr. Greenthumb's Emdog OG, grinding it down to pack the bowl making it fluff up.

"Perfect," he whispered lighting the bong with the hempwick. He lit the edges of the weed going around in a circle for an even and smooth burn as he stood taking a good long hit. "Shit," he exhaled releasing the smoke. I love bongs.

He looked and the bowl was empty as he'd expected. One hit's all you need when you do it right.

"Tinder...," he played in his mind. He already had a fetlife which was how he'd found his subs. Tinder was something different though. He was curious.

Downloading the app on the phone used almost solely for contact with subs, he went through the process of setting up an account, hesitating to put his info. It was general enough and the shit that was too specific, he could just lie. Still, he wouldn't upload his face.

So all I gotta do is swipe and see everyone in the area, he mused looking at all the faces.

"No.. No.. Nope.. Facially challenged.. The fuck is that?.. Hell nah.. Yes.. Yes.. She cute.. Hell nah.. Yes... No..," he paused looking a little closer at the screen. "Hello... Damn."

Out of curiosity he clicked on the profile. "That ass tho!"

He smirked hitting his super like.

"Shid... You can get the blue like.. Whatever the fuck that mean.." He stared at the picture. She had a juicy looking aro with thick black curls, brown skin, bright almond eyes, and enough ass to feed the needy for months. "Shit, if I was on a deserted island with coconuts and that ass.. that's enough meat for a damn.. shidd.." He chuckled. "Fuck is a super like? I super like yo ass meat..," he chuckled again falling back on his bed. "It mean I'm a break yo shit in thirds and fuck the pieces," he coughed, over his own bullshit.

---

Jumping up, you speedwalk into your kitchen and quickly heat some water in a pot, pulling a red mug and a bag of chamomile and a bag of lemon balm to mix with sugar. Combining it all, you take a sip and stand there staring at the wall before taking it with you back to the couch. "Okay," you sigh picking up the phone to open the Tinder message thread.

Cum talk to me, he says. You stare at the words. Wow, this is so cringy you don't know how to respond. You sit the phone back down taking another sip. You think about ignoring him, but you keep touching the phone, coming back to the message and staring.

Hey, you finally type hesitating at the simplicity before sending.

How are you tonight ? Why you up ?

Bored, lonely, contemplating my existence over Glee and wondering why my high school years were never that damn musical. You sip your tea.

Having a tv party with just lil ol' me. Why are you up?

The fuck kinda life you living. You need me to cum spice shit up for you? 👀

You think you that spicy? 👀

You wanna taste me and see?

Jeez. You flip back to the faceless picture of his body. Lord have mercy.

Don't play with a real one I'll show the fuck up real shit, he writes.

Internally you're screaming. He really thinks you're about to have sex with him. "I can't, oh my god," you sigh bouncing your knee. You hesitate before responding.

You can come, but bring food.

Hell yeah. Then you can be dessert. 😈

What? You turn the screen off and grab your head, your elbows on your knees.

What am I doing. Y/N what are you doing.

No sex nigga, you type before taking it back and staring at the screen perplexed. If you say that, he won't message you back.. If you don't say it, he'll be expecting to get some! You still want him to come through though even if he leaves because you're bored. You just want a little company for a little bit.

Maybe you should get a cat..

Your leg shakes unsure of how to respond and you take another sip of the hot tea mix feeling anything but calm.

Without further delay you just drop your address and hope for the best, wondering if you just signed off on your own murder. Maybe I should've told him to meet me somewhere else in the daytime.

Washing your apple juice cup, you put it away and then throw on some black leggings and rainbow fuzzy socks not wanting to open the door in pink bootyshorts adding onto the wrong message you'd already sent him. You also put a kitchen knife under the sofa cushion for easy access just in case.

40 minutes. You like wings?

Parmesan

🤢 Love yourself, sis. I'm getting a mix.

Oh I see you Mr. Petty Labelle, you smile getting a taste of his personality.

Yep. Finna get some of Ms. Petty's pie

Uh uh, you smirk.

We nuh ave dat

That right? Guess I'll see for myself when I pull up 👅

He's a whole fool. You set the phone down smiling at the tv. Meanwhile you watch another episode.. actually watching it this time.

Knock knock, he messages and you see it having kept the thread up just in case he had an issue. Jumping up, you snatch your phone and take a deep breath to steady your nerves. This is the first time you've ever done something like this and you hope it doesn't go badly.

Who's there, you jest messaging back right before you unlock your multiple locks and crack the door. Peeping out, you shut the door automatically throwing your body against it, holding your breath. He's huge! You didn't even look up, you just saw all that muscle like Kangaroo Jack. And why was he all up on the door?!

"Word? You must not want these wings then," he says through the door. You hear plastic rattling dramatically. "That's aight I don't mind eating em by myself."

You crack the door again, peeping out. You hadn't even seen the plastic bag hanging from his hand, you'd shut him out so fast. You reach out to grab it and he pulls it back.

"Aht! This how you treat guests? Door in the face? Snatching bags?" Your eyes roam from his hard chest to the broadness of his shoulder, resting on the sleeve of his charcoal grey Chicago Bulls shirt. Those biceps.

"Look at you undressing me in your mind already. Go ahead, you can touch me," he adds holding his arm forward as if reading your mind. He talks a lot.

You snatch the bag and put it behind your back a bit, opening the door. Then you look up and your kitty jumps. It's the devil himself. You try to control your surprise but between his sharp narrow chestnut eyes that smirk down, his sculpted nose, and his full pouting lips, you don't know if you want to kiss him, bite him, or climb him. You wanna do all three and more right in the hall.. up against the wall. His hair too, it's a mess of semi-thick locks that point everywhere like Coolio. It's his everything really..

"Y/N.."

Omg. It sounds so good coming from him. This isn't fair.

"Aye..," he waves.

"Hm," you sigh staring at his face.

"You gone let me in?"

"Huh? Oh." You step back quickly and scan him from head to toe as he steps across the threshold. Bulls shirt, black track pants, black sneakers. His shoes are ugly though, the back heel juts out too far. Balenciaga is written in white. Oh.

You look up and see he's looking you up and down too. Oop. Leading the way you take him to the living room and he settles on the couch, his develish eyes on yours. His knees spread wide as he leans back, hips forward.

Silently screaming, you look away and sit the plastic food bag on the table.

You can feel him staring. The air is full of raunchy expectation and you can't say you blame him. You practically encouraged it on the phone.

"You want something to drink," you smile in friendly attempt, risking a glance and it's just as you thought.

"You know exactly what I want."

"To DRINK," you exphasize, ignoring the thump of your heart in your nana as his eyes roll over your hips.

"Mmm... You got Henny?"

"I have apple juice, tea, water.."

"Ciroc?"

Your face screws, Didnt I just-- "I don't drink.."

"Ever?"

You shake your head.

"Damn, Apple Juice."

Taking your sweet time to pour his juice and refill your tea, you re-enter the living room as the Glee cast kicks off another song that he mutes.

"Here ya go."

You give him his cup and feel the chill in your spine as his fingertips brush yours. Unmuting the tv, you sit on the opposite side of the couch, legs crossed, tense and unsure of what to say to him now that he's there.

"You look uncomfortable."

"Me? I'm fine. I was just marathoning Glee before you came," you say handing him the remote, "I've already seen it though."

He hands the remote back. "You seen Menace II Society?"

"I've heard the title!"

"Well pull it up, let's watch it."

Thank God. That's something easy. You fumble through buttons and he starts opening the food as you set up the movie.

---

"Ooh Laurenz Tate he so fine," she smiled sitting up as the movie started. She would be into his ass. Erik rolled his eyes. Wait for it.

"I hate when they do that," she mumbled in response to the Asian woman following them around the store.

"Yeah," he agreed with swig of the juice looking from the tv to her face, watching her reaction. Wait for it.

"Why don't you give my homeboy his change," O-Dog says before walking to the door. "I feel sorry for your mother," the store owner snubs.

Bitch, don't talk about my mama. That part always pissed Erik off.

"What you say about my mama? You feel sorry for who?!" O-Dog shouts. "I don't want any trouble, just get out," the shopowner shouts, backtracking like the bitch nigga he is.

Fuck that, shoot his bitchass, Erik barked in his head. POP. POP POP. POP. POP. There you go! He shot the wife too, meanwhile, the princess jumped in her seat, absorbed in the felony she just observed on screen. Double-homicide.

"He shouldn't have shot them.. Bruh, now the cops gone be looking for him and his friend wasn't even in it but now he's an accomplice."

"You telling me you wouldn't have shot a nigga talkin shit on your mama?" Erik leaned into her space, curious, but she ain't seem to notice.

"No, 'cause they're rude, ugly, and racist but still. You can't kill without consequences."

Erik steeled. She wasn't wrong.

"I'd have shot his ass too," he admitted watching her. She didn't seem to agree. "Should've kept his mouth off his family."

"You close to your family," she asked suddenly.

"Yeah," he lied knowing his people were dead. "...You mind if I get more juice," he pointed to his cup and she took it refilling it.

Fifteen minutes into the movie, she noticed her wing choice wasn't in the selection and Erik kept a poker face having wondered when she'd realize. He'd already started on the barbecue.

"Where's my parmesan," she frowned looking in the boxes.

"They ain't have it," he lied. "Ran out."

"You're such a liar. Now what am I gonna eat," she pouted to his humor.

"Eat the carribean jerk," he nudged the box to her. She eyed it and he felt like a wolf trapping a rabbit, the wings being the bait.

"I ask you for one thing."

"Yeah and? I wasn't finna buy that shit," he chuckled grabbing a jerk wing and biting it, closing his eyes and humming as he chewed to entice her. When he peeked, she was watching his mouth out the corner of her eye as he licked spicy sauce off his thumb. Sliding down in the cushion, she crossed her arms and raised a knee with her fuzzy foot on the couch. Such a damn brat. Ol' hungry ass.

He started to flex the length of his tongue since she was looking but decided against it. He couldn't be too aggressive or she'd spook and he wouldn't get no ass. Why he cared, he couldn't put a finger on other than the fact that she'd become a challenge. This girl would not let him anywhere near her. She was very shy considering she was down for a one night stand. I'm getting the draws, he promised himself right then. How? He just had to make her come to him.

Her nose wrinkled as she picked up a jerk wing, rotating it.

"Girl eat the wing, this ain't rocket science," he fussed watching her bite it.

"It's better than parmesan?" Lie, he dared watching her closely.

She took another bite.. then she attacked the wing and when she licked her fingers, he looked away grabbing another wing and swig of his juice.

"OKAY. SHUT UP." She grabbed another wing chewing through it as he coughed in his elbow hiding his laugh.

"I didn't say anything," he croaked shrugging her off.

"But you smiling and I can hear you thinking."

He couldn't hide the fat grin plastered on his face though he'd tried by looking away. "How you hear me thinking," he squinted watching her collect bones.

"Because I do, you're loud," she stressed.

"How I'm l-"

"SHH!! I'm tryna hear," she whispered. He shook his head watching the corner of her mouth lift and they watched the movie in silence until she reached for another wing and all the jerk were gone. He pushed her another box.

"You all the way over there. Come sit next to me."

"I'm not that far."

"You are. I promise I won't bite you.."

Her eyes rolled.

"Not unless you into that shit," he added patting the cushion beside him. She lifted, barely moving. "You scared?"

"What you mean?" She looked nervous all of a sudden looking anxiously in his eyes. This was gonna be a tough wall to break.

He patted the cushion again, waiting, and she finally moved in closer filling the empty seat beside him. He determined right then not to touch her but to get as close as possible maintaining proximity to get her used to his presence. Draping an arm over the couch behind her, he observed silently as she sat tense for the the next five minutes before relaxing. He had his work cutout.

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#original #erik killmonger #killmonger #erik stevens #erik killmonger fanfiction #erik stevens au #black panther killmonger #black panther fanfiction #house rules

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soyeahitsmiddleearth · 3 years

Text

Dimension Jumping Pt. 5

Comforting a grieving hobbit and time get everyone ready to go out!

Via the genius idea from katzrfsoa / Kat88

There's been mention of the reader not wanting to take the groups out, for fear of the public's reaction... so what about a cosplay convention? it would give the Reader the perfect excuse to allow them out, and they would wear their original clothes

----

This morning has been uneventful for the most part.

Breakfast passed by without issue and now everyone is off doing their own things.

You looked outside and took a peek in the guest room, but you still can't find him.

Sam, Merry, and Pippin are playing a board game you showed them; Legolas is doing his meditation sleep thing; Boromir and Aragorn are discussing something; and Gimli is stacking bread on Legolas' leg to see how long it takes until he notices.

Frodo, however, is missing at the moment.

Right as you were considering telling the others of his disappearance, however, you heard some shuffling from your hall closet.

You open the door carefully and take peer inside, not wanting to startle the small hobbit, and at first you don't see him.

There's more shuffling and you hear a quiet sniff, followed by soft sobs, and you then realize he's hiding behind the shelf.

The door makes a soft clicking sound when you close it, and right away the quiet cries cease. You didn't want to alert him with the door, you wanted to do it yourself, but it's too late now, so you just go with it.

"Frodo?" You call in a gentle voice, staying by the door incase he wants you to go.

"Y-Yes?' He calls back, not moving from his spot.

His voice is thick with emotion, and the sadness in his tone makes your heart ache painfully. And when you walk closer and see him huddled up behind the shelf, your heart breaks a little for him.

He hastily rids his cheeks of any evidence of his sorrows, though the puffiness around his eyes and constant sniffles don't much help his cause, and looks at you with a false smile.

"Frodo, why are you crying?" You ask with furrowed eyebrows, kneeling down in front of him so you may look at him at eye level (mostly).

"It's nothing." He tells you quickly, looking away from your compassionate face with the same sad frown on his lips.

When you don't move to get up or leave, his gaze slides back over to you and he realizes that you're not going to leave unless he straight up tells you to go away. This makes him sigh, but truthfully, he doesn't want you to go away. Not really. For having company in a time of sorrow always mends suffering.

"I... did not have a proper time to mourn Gandalf. I've been so caught up in the oddity that is this place that I almost forgot my sorrows altogether, but then this morning is all... came rushing back." He explains with a surprisingly even voice.

While he speaks you cross your legs and listen along intently, your hands folded neatly in your lap. When he finishes, you reach forward and place your hand atop his with a gentle touch, "I didn't know him, but I can tell he was very dear to you. Honestly, I can't offer much advice, but I can tell you that keeping it all bottled up inside is not a good idea."

He looks at you with that sad face when you speak, and it prompts you to continue, "Also, I know everyone else can be pretty overwhelming or they just don't understand, and I want you to know that I'm always here to listen if you're feeling down, okay?"

Your words draw a small smile from the grieving hobbit and it elicits a similar grin from you.

"Thank you, Y/N. I... actually do feel a little better."

"I'm glad."

---

After your discussion with Frodo you rejoin everyone back out in the main room and let him recollect himself, going right onto your laptop to get some work done.

You're idly scrolling through a scholarly article you need to research when you see it.

An advertisement for some sort of comic book, cosplay, convention... thing in the area (no wonder you've been seeing so many oddly dressed people recently).

At first you almost scroll past it, but then you get hit with the brick of knowledge and a lightbulb goes off in your head.

"Yes!" You scream, successfully scaring everyone in the room and Penny who is sitting with you for once. "Ohh, my god. This is freaking perfect!" You exclaim, clicking on the link to get some more information.

Your eyes practically soak up everything on the information page, and, once you've skimmed through all of it, you look up with a bright smile on your face.

Literally all of them are looking at you like you've grown two heads, but you only clap your hands together a few times. "Guys, I just had a huge brain moment!"

The joke goes over their heads as per usual, but you don't let that deter you.

"Huge brain moment?" Pippin asks in confusion, looking at his cousin like he thinks he heard it wrong or something.

"Yes! I've figured out a way to take everyone out!"

That certainly gets their attention.

"You have?" Sam asks exuberantly, dropping his game piece so he can turn towards you and pay perfect attention.

"I have, yes," you start, continuing once you're 100% sure they're all paying attention, "So here's the thing, I knew that I could take out you tall boi's without issue besides having to find a hat for Legolas here, and I could explain that Gimli here has dwarfism," you pause at that and realize it may be offensive to him, but you continue once more, "but I also knew that there's no way I can explain away the hobbits, and then I found this gem."

You turn the computer so it faces all of them, but they only look more confused.

"There's a convention thing in town for the next week, and it's the perfect opportunity for me to bring everyone out! We just have to dress up the hobbits a bit and pretend that they're children."

At your explanation you receive multiple pleased smiles, and it serves to make you feel even better about your idea. "And you can all wear your normal clothes, too. And if someone asks who you are... I'll figure out a game or something you guys can use as an alias."

"Are you sure that will work?" Aragorn asks with furrowed eyebrows, sitting up from his spot in your arm chair.

"Um, like, maybe 98%." You confirm with a shrug, "It's better than 88% though."

He doesn't seem like he disagrees with you, so you look back at your laptop again and start to look for ideas to make them more believable as humans.

---

3 hours of research later, and you've successfully compiled a completely fool proof plan to smuggle this merry band of bizarre boys out of your house.

What you've decided is that you'll put some makeup over Legolas' pointy ears to make them look more fake since the concept of elves is not lost in this world. Boromir and Aragorn can go as themselves, and you'll put some makeup on the hobbits much like you will Legolas (they'll be children elves since there are no hobbits in your world) and tell everyone who asks how they look so good that you're a professional makeup artist.

Gimli, fortunately for you, was the easiest to come up with something for next to the other two humans of this group. You can just tell people he has dwarfism and that's why he chose to go as a dwarf character.

Everything is in order except for what you're going to do, though you suppose you should match their theme and be some sort of renaissance, maiden, lady, thing. You'll figure it out, though you do need to make sure it's convincing like theirs.

You decided to, instead of putting it off, go ahead and start working on finding a costume to match theirs.

A couple of searches later and you come across a really pretty dress that looks to fit their style, and when you show it to them they give you the thumbs up, so you order it with express shipping so it should arrive tomorrow.

It's a lovely flowy medieval dress *just look up flowy medieval dress and go to images, there are some good examples there*, and you feel excited just looking at it. Of course, there's no guarantee that it'll be the best quality, but it's got great reviews and you certainly paid a hefty sum for it.

After that's done with you head to your bathroom to see what makeup you've got, and you find that you don't really have any theatrical/special effects makeup. You're going to need skin colored wax makeup, powders, and contour stuff.

You're no makeup artist, obviously, but luckily for you, your goal is to make them look less realistic, so it should be easy enough.

It's surprisingly easy to figure out what you need to make them as convincing as possible, and pretty soon you've got a nice little list going on that outlines each thing you need.

Since you don't want to delay anymore, you head out of your bathroom and grab your bag while putting on your shoes, "Legolas, I'm leaving now if you wanna come with." You suggest since he stated his desire to join you in the one of the last chapters (:o).

When you call his name he looks over at you quickly, smiling a bit at your offer, "Yes, but you said I need a hat."

"Oh yeah! I have one, just gimme a sec." You tell him, walking over to a drawer.

When you open said drawer, you find a grey beanie with ease and toss it over to him, "Here ya go. Make sure it covers your ears... and uh, tuck your hair up into it too if you don't mind."

He does as you say with ease and, surprisingly, he looks just as good with shorter hair as he does longer hair.

It sticks kinda awkwardly at first, so you waltz on over and gesture for him to crouch down so you don't have to reach up.

Once again he does as you request and leans down so you may fix it.

You adjust it a bit to make sure it won't fall first, and then you smooth it back a bit so it'll also look stylish. And once you're done you take a step back and smile at him brightly.

"All done! Let's go!"

---

He seemed rather fascinated in the way your car works first and foremost, but once you got him to look out his window instead of watching you, his excitement quickly turned into awe.

When you both get to the ULTA store he follows you without hesitation and asks some hushed questions about things he sees, like the light up signs, other passing cars, stoplights, and some other things.

You, of course, answer each question happily and lead him inside, holding the door open for him while he enters and looks around the brightly lit up makeup store.

Right away you head towards the general direction of the nose and scar wax (it's multi purpose, don't judge me), forgetting to make sure that Legolas follows you.

When it does occur to you, however, that the blond elf didn't come after you, you panic.

You turn in a circle and only stop when you see him standing with some ladies who practically have hearts in their eyes.

Unconsciously you breathe a sigh of relief and head over with the wax in your little basket, immediately reaching up to wrap your arm around his, "I got the first thing on my list, come on."

The girls stop their giggles and flirting as soon as you show up and look genuinely surprised.

You give them a smile and nod in acknowledgement, not wanting to make them feel bad over something so silly before turning with your arm still around his own and walking him over to look at some contour stuff and other things.

They make some snide comments when you turn your back about you being a 'clingy girlfriend' and 'not pretty enough to be with a model like that', but you only ignore it and relish in the fact that you didn't make them feel bad over something as silly as a cute guy in a makeup store.

"Why are those women talking about you like that?" He asks in a whisper, leaning down so only you will hear his question.

You look up at him with a bit or surprise since you didn't expect him to pick up on that, before you smile, "They're attracted to you, and they think that I was being selfish with taking you away from their advances."

"Selfish? Advances?" He looks confused, but you only smile and turn back to the display case.

"Don't worry your pretty little head over it, Leggy my boy."

"Leggy?" He asks slowly, looking at you in confusion.

"Leggy." You confirm with a nod with a distracted hum.

It isn't much later that you have everything you need, and so you go to the checkout and buy everything.

"Going to the convention?" The girl at the counter asks with a smile.

You smile back and nod your head, glancing up at Legolas before looking back at her, "That obvious?"

"No of course not, just the items in your basket always fly off the shelves around convention time." She replies with a giggle, ringing up all your items.

"Well, that's fair." You muse, putting your card into the reader to pay for it.

Once everything is in order she hands you your receipt and adds, "Maybe I'll see you there."

"Maybe!" You chirp back happily, liking the nice conversation going on here.

"You and your boyfriend have a good day now!"

You elect to ignore that.

---

On the way home you pretend to not notice the black car following yours and make small talk with the elf, answering some more of his questions and speaking idly on different things.

"There are so many odd, interesting things here..." He comments after a while, glancing out the back window. "Are you aware that, that car has been following us for the past 10 minutes?"

You nod and hum as an answer, "Mmhm, it's just Brian. He's probably trying to figure out who you are."

The blond knits his eyebrows together and glances back to look at the car again, "Should I do something about it?"

"The only thing you can do is ignore it. He went from lowercase 's' stalker to uppercase 's' since you guys arrived, and it'll only get worse if you intervene." You mumble, trying not to look in the rearview mirror at him. "It's fine."

"You don't seem to think it's fine." He challenges in the same even tone, turning in his seat towards you.

Instead of answering his question you look at him while you stop at a light and grumble, "I told you to put your seatbelt on."

"It's uncomfortable."

"I don't care."

"I will be fine."

"Not if we get into a crash, you won't."

The two of you stare each other down before he slowly reaches up and buckles his belt, never breaking eye-contact.

"Good boy." You coo in a way-too sweet voice.

"Anyways, I know we said as much before, but you needn't worry about that man while we're here." He continues despite your obvious subject change.

"I know." Your reply is softer and less defensive this time, for you really do appreciate it, "Thank you."

He looks surprised at your sudden gratitude, and his expression shows as much "For what?"

"For being you. For looking out for me. All of you."

This time he smiles and says no more.

---

When you both get back to your house you immediately put everything in your bathroom and get onto your laptop to view some techniques on theatrical and movie makeup, Pippin and Merry on either side of you while they view through the pictures and videos with you.

"That one looks interesting." Merry pipes up suddenly, pointing at a person to wolf makeup transformation.

"Yep, and way past anything I can do."

This pattern of going through pictures and viewing clips goes on for a little while until they two hobbits depart to have lunch, meanwhile you continue on so that tomorrow will be a success.

You're both excited and nervous at the same time, wanting to see how it'll all turn out but also dreading it incase something goes wrong.

You know the most important thing is to have a positive mindset about it, but it's kinda hard sometimes during your more anxious moments.

Also, there's the issue of Brian possibly following all of you...

Nah, that'll be a problem to think on for tomorrow.

"What time will we leave tomorrow?" Aragorn asks from his usual spot on the rocking chair, Penny still nestled in his lap as per usual.

"Around the morning. I bought the tickets already so we won't have to stand in line for too long... Hopefully."

"Thank you for working so hard so that we may see more of your world." He comments suddenly, stroking his hand down her fluffy back.

You tilt your head to the side and smile a bit, "You don't have to thank me."

"No, I do. You have seen to our every need and we no doubt pose to be a huge burden. Thank you, really."

His words make you flush slightly, and you look away shyly.

You've grown to care about all of them, so of course you would do anything to keep them comfortable at this point. More than anything you're just glad they see how much you're trying to make things easy on them. It feels nice being recognized for your efforts.

Plus, the added protection from Brian is pretty sweet.

"Anything for you guys."

#the fellowship x reader #the fellowship of the ring #the fellowship of the ring x reader #frodo baggins #pippin took #boromir #lotr gimli #legolas greenleaf #samwise gamgee #merry brandybuck #aragorn #lord of the rings fanfiction #dimension jumping pt. 5 #dimension jumping pt. 2 #frodo x reader

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travellvogue · 4 years

Text

Honeymoon Coast- Anyone You Like

it’s a long one, and one of my faves. i hope you love it (wordcount: 4.1k)

He’s trying his best not to stare, the dress you had on complimenting your skin tone so well. Body glowing under the rays of the sun, his own little ray of sunshine sat right next to him. The delicate pattern of his thumb brushing strokes back and forth over your hand painted a perfect picture of tranquility.

“Y’know, the view over there is better” you whisper gently with a side smile, nodding towards the staggered chocolate box buildings, painted in an array of blush pinks, dusty yellows and cotton creams. The rolling waves a vibrant blue against the calmness of the sand.

“No it’s not” he answers so effortlessly, a flirtatious wink making you giggle and blush under his compliment. “My views much better” he hums, twisting his fork around a clump of spaghetti, scooping it into his mouth, tongue wiggling around to beckon the stray piece that flops out of his mouth.

Two glasses of white wine twinkle under the sunlight, tracing your finger round the rim of the glass over and over again, picking at the olives in your salad, regretting eating all the mozzarella balls already. Knowing you should have gone for the pizza, but your breakfast of croissants and fresh fruit filled you up this morning. Smiling at the recent memory, how you laid in bed, tangled under the crisp white sheets, his naked body next to yours feeding you strawberries and chunks of melon, giggling when he leaned forward to kitten lick the fruit juices off your chin that had dropped down from your mouth.

It was the perfect start to your honeymoon. He’d remembered how you told him you’d love to get married in Italy and travel around after your wedding day. So he made it happen. First stop was Positano, where the two of you sat right now. A quaint little café tucked away in the peaks of the hillsides, a lemon tree hanging over your heads shading you from the afternoon sun. The calming noise of the waves rippling into shore partnered with the locals deep in conversation. Fresh plates of pasta and pizza filling the air with the most gorgeous aroma. The strings of a guitar being strung somewhere in the far distance playing a relaxing tune.

Yet, all you could focus on was him, how his hair was supporting natural highlights from the sun's rays, the tip of his nose slightly sunburn despite you packing factor fifty on his face every morning, “stops you getting wrinkles” you’d tell him every time he complained about the stickiness. He’s dressed in loose navy swim shorts, the toggles hanging unevenly, a thin white shirt thrown over his sun kissed torso, the top four buttons undone so you can admire his muscular chest, dark rimmed Ray-Ban glasses pushed onto his hair, droplets of salt water staining the lenses.

“What time is the boat ride?” you ask gently, leaning over the small circular table, stabbing your fork into his bowl of pasta, helping yourself to a mouthful as he giggles, well aware that the salad just wasn’t cutting it for you. He’d planned a boat ride for the two of you today, something you’d both desperately been looking forward to since you arrived in this perfect location. Wanting to sail around and explore the surrounding beauty.

“Two o’clock I believe madam” he answers playfully, tapping the screen of his phone to check the time. Quarter to twelve, plenty of time to head down to the dock. With a few more mouthfuls of food the two of you were stuffed. Laid back on the wooden chairs comparing your food babies. Laughing when the waiter comes over and gives you an odd glance.

“No don’t pay baby, my treat” you insist, grabbing at his hand before he puts his card on the table, unable to hide your smile when you feel the cold metal of his wedding ring against your palm. It was yet to sink in that you officially shared the same surname as him, for years he’d introduced you to people as ‘the missus or ‘my girlfriend’, now you held the title of his wife loud and proud.

The wedding had been very small, only fifty guests. An abundance of florals, pampas grass and bubbling champagne, and as the sun went down you fell asleep to the sound of waves greeting the Italian sand.

As you snap out of your daydream he’s already paying for lunch, giggling when you give him a harsh stare, unable to stay mad at that dimpled smile for long. He takes your hand and leads you out of the cafe, waving goodbye with a joyful ‘grazie’ to the staff. The warm air hits you instantly, a muggy breeze fluttering the bottom of your dress. Now away from the breeze of the sea front the temperature had seemed to pick up, his hand growing clammy in yours. Arms swinging back and forth in unison as you carefully walk down the steep roads towards the peninsular, the uneven cobbled roads under your sandals let you feel every rock and grain of transported sand from the nearby beach.

“I know we’ve just eaten but…” he holds his hand up to point at the shop you’re approaching. A quiet bakery hidden between a grand hotel and a small beach shop selling the usual ‘tourist tat’ as he likes to call it. The smell of warm freshly-baked bread billowing from its grand wooden doors, painted neatly with golden details. Newly bloomed bougainvillea flowers creating an arch over the entrance.

“How can I say no to that?” you smile. Squeezing his hand once, twice, three times. Your sandals slap against the tiled floor of the bakery, overwhelmed with the amount of choice, smiling widely when you’re greeted with a friendly “Ciao!”. The two of you opting for a baguette and a loaf of ciabatta. He stands behind you, arms wrapped around your body, pressing a kiss to your cheek whilst you wait for them to package it up in crinkly brown paper bags. And once again he uses his rusty Italian skills to bid them farewell. Reaching for your hand instinctively and squeezing it gently, unable to wipe the smile off his face. He’d never felt happiness like this- of course on your wedding day his happiness was unmatchable- but the sense of complete contentment and tranquility was so overwhelming.

***

“Where are you taking me?” you giggle, holding his hand tightly as he leads you along a rickety old boat dock, the wood swaying slightly with each gentle wave that washed into shore. “Was this your plan all along?” you laugh, “To marry me and then drown me in the sea” he chuckles and shakes his head at your ludicrous imagination.

“You gotta stop watching all those murder mystery youtubers babe” a blush appears on your cheeks at his words, remembering how you made him watch endless videos with you on the plane journey out here, secretly you knew he was enjoying himself, the way he gripped your leg as he told you a theory he had about where one of the missing people might be. “We’re here baby” the snap back into reality couldn’t be more perfect, almost feeling like you were dreaming as he holds an arm out to beckon to the large yacht docked up in front of the both of you. The sea twinkling around it and the staff giving you a welcoming wave, offering you a hand to help you onto deck.

“Are you serious?” you breath, walking onto the ship. When he mentioned a boat ride this morning you didn’t realise he meant a million pound yacht, something for someone in your position to just drool over as you pointed them out whilst your feet stayed firmly on the sand of the beach. But now your feet touched the decking, every step becoming completely overwhelming, not only was there two floors to this boat, there were several seating areas, your very own private chef, and a hot tub at the very front, giving you the perfect views of the bobbing ocean. “My love, this is insane! I thought you meant like… a little dingy” you giggle, pinching your fingers together to explain how small you thought the boat would be. All he can do is smile and shake his head. Something he’d always loved about you was the way you always stayed so grounded, cherishing every penny of your own and of his, never wanting any gifts or treats- despite him buying you quite a few over the years- you were happy with a chinese takeaway and a movie night, never expecting anything from him other then love and honesty, money would, and could, never buy your emotions. So a yacht, this was certainly something you’d never dreamed off.

“You deserve this, my wife” he whispers gently, coming up behind you as you look out to the sea, the cool breeze blowing a strand of your hair against his jawline, gently leaning back against him, feeling his arms wrap tightly around you. The way he referred to you as his wife still hadn’t sunk in yet, the butterflies still coming to life every time he used your new title. “Plus…” his voice drops to a whisper, leaning in closer so his lips brush against your ear, “you’ve always wanted to have sex on a boat” despite not seeing his face you can picture his smug smirk, of course there was a deeper reasoning to such an extravagant choice of boat. You shake your head playfully and push against him, probably not the best choice of action because he can’t help but let out a little groan at the feeling of your ass brushing against his crotch.

He manages to control himself for the majority of the boat road, smiling proudly as he watches you take pictures of the beautiful settings you sail past. Your beauty still shocked him, even after years together and a big diamond ring on your finger, watching your hair blow in the salty air, sun kissed skin and lips painted with your strawberry lip balm- that quite frankly he can’t stop himself from wanting to taste- he finds that he’s falling in love with you even more in that moment. He’d never realised home could be a person until you held him in your arms.

“We should come here every year” you whisper gently, cuddled up on the sofa-like sunbeds at the top of the boat, the air slightly cooler now the sun was setting, half empty plates of fruit and nibbled at bread resting beside you, the sea still holding the same glimmer and shine it had this morning, reflecting the orange and pink hues off the waves. You’d thrown one of his shirts over your bikini, the thin white material rustling in the breeze, tickling at your bare skin, your hair fluttering into his face every so often, wafting the familiar smell of your apple scented shampoo into his nostrils.

He only hums in response, leaning in to take the chunk of pineapple you were offering him into his mouth, too caught up in absorbing the beauty in front of him, with both the view of you and the never ending waves it was an overwhelming sense of content and happiness. “You don't want to?” you ask gently, not convinced by his response. A frown and a quick shake of the head convinces you a bit more.

“Of course I do” he whispers, lips pressed to your temple. “But I also wanna make love to you all over the world” he smirks, watching you playfully roll your eyes and desperately try to hide your giddy smile.

His fingers trace the side of your jaw, angling your head so he’s got perfect access to your lips, the moon seeming to match the mood of the moment, the sky becoming a thick pink, waves gently crashing against the boat, rocking your bodies unwilling against the sun beds. “Why don’t we start now?” you almost whimper against his lips, trying not to sound like a desperate beg but it was hard when all you’d been thinking about since stepping foot on the boat was the thought of him fucking you to the view of the rolling waves.

“Hmm right here?” he smirks, “I knew you were naughty but to have me fuck you whilst anyone could see… my wife’s a little minx huh?” he teases, brushing his hand down the side of your body, already getting to work with pushing off the oversized shirt you had on, the material falling off one shoulder, exposing your bare skin for his lips to attack.

“Everyone’s below deck” you whimper, aware that he wouldn’t care either way, there was no way he wasn’t going to make love to you on a private yacht to the view of the Amalfi Coast- no one could pass up that opportunity. “Plus… you’re little friend seems to like the idea” your thigh pushes against the growing bulge of his shorts. Your giggle splinters off into a moan as he bucks against you, continuing to suck and nip at the skin of your neck. The wet patch in your bikini bottoms continues to grow, pawing at him desperately for something more.

“Open up” he taps two fingers at your lips, doing as you’re told you part your swollen lips to welcome him, he watches your hooded lustful eyes whilst you suck on his digits, tongue skillfully twisting and licking. His other hand cupping firmly at the mound of your ass, helping you rub yourself against his thigh, slowly moving towards the front of your body. “Take ‘em off” he instructs, pushing at the material of your bikini bottoms.

“So demanding” you tease, humming around his fingers, a trail of spit connecting your lips to them as he pulls away, watching intently as you shuffle out of your bikini, pussy growing sensitive at the exposure to the cool air. Of course he wastes no time pushing his fingers against your entrance, skillfully tracing both digits along your folds, gathering your arousal at the tips. “Baby please” you whine, not wanting to be teased today, not when someone could walk up to the top deck and interrupt the moment. You cling on to him tighter, feeling his fingers push into you, slow and steady, your tight wet walls snug around him. You seem to clench around him in time with the waves rocking against the boat, the cool breeze helping control your body temperature, not wanting to leave sweat marks along the sun beds to give away what the two of you are up to.

“Wetter than the ocean” he teases, scissoring his fingers inside of you, your arousal dripping against him, curling his digits upwards to brush against the spot inside you that has you squirming against him. He rests his forehead against yours, noting how your body heat radiates onto his skin, your cheeks flushed, steady whimpers falling from your lips. “Moan for me baby, let the whole of Italy know who’s making you feel good”.

An orgasm was quickly approaching you, a pinch-me moment overtaking your body as you look out to the shore line, sandy beach only entertaining the last few remaining people of the night, the orange glow of lights gleaming through the windows of the chocolate box houses, praying none of them are owners of binoculars or take a keen interest in boats- because they’d certainly get an eyeful if they wanted to examine the one you were currently laid on (or getting laid on to be more accurate.)

“Cum on my hand” his words seem to resonate with you, your body obeying to his instructions. Legs becoming jelly-like as the knot bursts in your stomach. And the moan that was trapped in your throat pings into the air of the night, loud enough to make the staff downstairs freeze and listen out for a call, wondering if you were calling them for extra champaign. All you needed right now was right in front of you, poking you in the thigh. Whimpering at the empty feeling when he pulls his fingers out of you, clenching around the vacancy.

The wind picks up a little, brushing through your hair and rocking the boat to the right. Both of you bracing for the captain to rush to the top deck, blowing your cover. Giggling a little when the boat straightens out and the rocking stops. “Fucking cockblock” he groans, making you laugh, tucking your head into his neck. Your blushed cheeks would certainly blow your cover. “Gotta be quick” he whispers, “Wanna fuck on the Mediterranean sea”. The ocean seems to talk back to him, a large splash and spraying droplets of water falling against your calves.

He leans forward to catch your lips in a messy, clumsy kiss. Pushing himself out of his swim shorts, cock slapping against his toned torso, freckled tanned skin pressed against yours, your fingers drawing little hearts against his back, the outlines seeming to freeze when the tip of his hard cock brushes against your entrance, easily slicked with your arousal that stills lingers from your previous orgasm. His body hovers over yours, slightly leaning to the side to both keep his balance and to try and make it less obvious that he’s making love to you on top of a boat. Your hand wraps around his length, guiding him in the right position as if he hasn’t done it thousands of times before, but he can’t complain at the sight, something so beautiful yet filthy about your wedding ring sparkling in the light as you pump your hand up and down his cock. “That ring looks great whilst you wank me off” he moans, smirking when you let out a shocked gasp at his vulgar words.

He can’t quite believe his luck when he sinks into you, in that moment he thanks god, his lucky stars, and everything in between. His beautiful wife, the love of his life, moaning his name in the middle of the Mediterranean sea. A dream brought to life. “God you feel good... every- fuck- everytime” he praises the feel of your tight walls wrapped around him, warm and wet, just like how they always are for him. No time is wasted, his hips moving in a perfect rhythm, you’re quite impressed that he can keep himself balanced with the boat swaying in unison with the waves. His cock was enough to make you a moaning mess, reminding yourself you can’t be too loud due to the company downstairs. Instead sinking your teeth into his shoulder to try and silence yourself.

Pain is always something that turned him on, having a kink for anything involving spanking, choking, and hair pulling. So it’s no surprise when he throws his head back in ecstasy at the feel of your teeth grazing his skin, certain he’ll have a mark in the morning to remember the moment. It’s like you’ve read his mind, fingers pushing through his hair and grabbing a fistful, tugging at the roots with each thrust. With the pent up feeling of you wrapped around him as well as the added nipping and tugging he could nearly cum right there and then. But he’s learnt over the years of being together how to control himself, wanting to elongate sex with you, rinsing every second of being inside you.

“Cum for me again baby, give me another one” he encourages, watching you feebly mutter something inaudible, pleasure messing with your words, sweat growing on your collar bone, rising up the skin of your neck and painting your cheeks a darker red. The rapid clenching of your pussy tells him you’re approaching your second high, thighs slick with arousal, painting his skin damp with each thrust. “You’re boobs look great” he says under his breath, hearing you let out a little giggle and whisper “so romantic”, quick to change that when his mouth trails down to your right boob, leaving a wet trail of kisses to your breasts, nipping one of your nipples between his teeth and grazing it gently. Against your boobs you hear him whisper; “you’re close, I can feel it baby, c’mon” with three harsh thrusts, shaking your body with each one.

And just like that, with a loud whine and a cry you’re giving in to his words, pussy convulsing around his length, squeezing him towards his own high. His hand clamps over your mouth before you can scream his name for the whole of Positano to know, surely by now the captain and the staff must have an inkling about what you’re up to, they’d seen the eyes you were giving each other all day. The little slaps to your ass from him as you prepared to dive into the emerald sea, or how you sat on his lap whilst he fed you watermelon, his tongue licking playfully at your chin to capture the juices.

Now his favourite juices soaked his cock, his baby scratching lines into his back- far less innocent than the hearts that were drawn on his skin earlier. Your bikini bottoms on the floor and your bikini top flooded by your boobs and they hang over the edge of the material. In that moment you’re both so free, nature housing such pleasure.

He’s not far behind you, he couldn’t possibly be when your pussy grips at him with such force, dirty words encouraging him to coat your walls with his seed. “Cum for me hubby” it’s more the new title that does it for him. This was his life, married to a filthy little goddess, making love to you where anyone could see, yet in this moment it was only you and him- just like it’ll be for the rest of your lives.

He frantically slaps his hips against yours, the overwhelming sensation to cum washes over him quickly, feeling the fire in this pit of his tummy grow bigger then it ever had before. “I’m gonna cum baby” he chokes out, the grip on yur hips becoming tighter, thrusting into you as he rapidly chases his high, “it’s gonna be so much, it’s- fuck- oh god” you can’t seem to string a sentence together, stuttering and shaking with each word.

“Fill me up baby” you whisper, scratching at the back of his neck, “Drown me” you can’t help but let out a little giggle, “pardon the pun” he scoffs at your attempt of linking being on the sea with your pussy ‘drowning’ in his cum. Trying to hide his smirk, tongue licking his top teeth as he shakes his head.

“Still making stupid puns whilst I’m balls deep inside ya… I married an idiot” he laughs, pulling you even closer to him, soon to choke on his own moans, hitting his high and spilling his seed sloppily inside of you, the sensation making your walls clench, draining him of every last drop of cum he can give you. Riding out his high with a few more lazy thrusts, pushing his cum deep into you, his rhythm faltered by the rocking boat, nearly losing balance when his wobbly legs push himself off of you.

Now you’re a sight to behold, breathless, glowing with that freshly fucked look. Eyes watching him intently as he pushes himself into his shorts and lazily looks for your bottoms, knowing if his cum dripped out of you there would be a hefty fee for leaving ‘bodily fluids’ on the sun lounger.

***

The stars start to poke through the dark sky, sailing back to shore in a comfortable silence, chests still rising and falling in a quicker manner then usual, regaining the normality of not being caught up in each other's bodies. His finger plays with your ring, yours plays with his. How a simple gold band could look so flawless on his hand.

As the waves say one last goodbye, now twinkling under the light of the moon, the boat moors into the dock. Hand in hand walking back to land, still feel the rocking sensation as you get used to the solid floor beneath your feet.

“So…” he whispers, aware it’s late at night, a buzz of nightlife coming from the restaurant nearby, your arms swinging in unison. “This time again next year?” he smirks, this certainly couldn’t be a one time thing.

“See you then” you wink playfully, voice laced with sleep, ready to head back to the villa and be held in his arms for the rest of the night.

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haircoveredwriter · 3 years

Text

Okay before anyone asks, yes I've seen the summaries of the 6 extra eps. Yes I'm excited about them, and hell yes I'm still zen and think Caryl is coming.

Let me regail you with an unsolicited word vomit about how I see things panning out. Feel free to scroll past this now if you don't wanna know or don't care. No hard feelings.

(Putting it underneath a break since it got longer than I meant it to be. And I can't figure it out of the app so here's my makeshift one)

--------------------------------------------------

We good? Good.

So Kang really has put together the same formula we've been getting with Caryl for God know how long, except this time it looks like they are actually gonna hash some of their shit out. No more dancing around it or doing the Gimps special of just forget about it and it'll blow over with sunshine and rainbows. Actual talking. (Let's pick our jaws off the floor and continue.)

'Home Sweet Home' has them in their usual awkward place of not being able to deal with anything because they're dealing with Neg@n/M@ggie/Elijah (magic ninja)/the kids/did we just fucking destroy the whisperers??/does anyone have any snacks stuff??...the usual and instead of letting them heal they have become the group's caretakers. It's just a bunch of whoopie 😶 although we've seen clips where Daryl is already up to defend Carol's choices regardless of how mentally and physically exhausted he is. True love at its finest. Plus we know they talk a bit on some level and it leads us to them going off together in 'Find Me'.

Caryl. Alone. In a tiny cabin. Daryl opening up and talking about his past. Yes please. (I'll give y'all a min to laugh at Caryl having a cabin episode 😏😏)

Now the way it's worded sounds to me like Daryl has callbacks/flashbacks to a variety of things; 1- his childhood and dick bag daddy 2- his time locked in the cell at The Sanctuary which plays into Neg@n and can also link to things from the first one, and 3- how he had to just get away after R!ck "died" and Carol was in Kingdom land since it was too painful to be home. The last one I see him relating feelings more towards Carol, fearing she's gonna run since it's all over, deciding to open up about his other stuff in hopes he can delay what he sees as inevitably heart wrenching and soul destroying. Why is this important besides making him have sad puppy eyes? Because Carol learns some truths she didn't before (mostly about the whole Neg@n situation) and in true broken ZA queen style we've come to expect, she puts this issue and the self imposed guilt on her shoulders to fix they into way she thinks she can, what Daryl deserves to be distant from her and Carol is the one who decides in 'Diverged' that it's a super cool, fun idea they go different ways for reasons I can't pinpoint yet. She wants to go het something before going home....he should make sure everyone is okay while she looks for berries...she's gonna go find throw a couple rocks at the collapsed cave since she can't pour one out for Con©on...take your pick.

Any way you slice it, it leads to Caryl trying to function separately and failing like a couple of fleshing birds flipping out of the nest to waddle across the grounds, landing face first every 3 steps. Tptb ain't even trying anymore with that 'will this break Caryl forever and they'll despise the other for eternity?" Yeah, cus we all go on potentially one way road trips with a person we can't stand to be around. Come on guys. Put SOME kind of effort in.

Yes there is gonna be angst but I see it resolved by the end of the ep and Caryl fixing whatever never there crack the writer's pretended was there.

By 'Here's Negan' we have Carol "taking Neg@n on a journey to diffuse issues at home". I don't for a second see this as her leaving with him, her choosing to spend time with him, or them bonding over anything except for Carol laying down the law of how things are gonna be going forward if he gets to sticky around. If not then he has the choice to hit the road make his own way again. I hope she brings up some kind of hint as to how pissed she is about what she learned from Daryl and he's lucky she didn't know about it beforehand or he'd be walked bait by now. Give me some take no shit Carol all day y'all but Neh@n is gonna have his use in reliving his past life (Lucille) and give Carol a pep talk on not letting great things right in front her nose slip through her fingers before it's too late. He's gonna push her the same.way he made the girlfriend comments to Daryl until the light bulb goes off and her penny drops in the bucket, making her see what IDIOTS she and Daryl are being.

Basically, the ship is still sailing. Kang is aimed straight at canon Caryl and she's never waivered in her destination so we good fam. Settle in for the angsty goodness because it's gonna lead to the biggest release we've been waiting 10 damn years for. Get your popcorn and tea ready.

Caryl on.

#caryl #caryl positivity #twd spoilers #my 2 cents #carol peletier #daryl dixon #we're good fam #im really excited to see it happen #can we also get a shout out for great ep titles again?#thank fuck we're back to s2 style titles

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pricklerick · 3 years

Text

Thanksgiving used to be Summer’s favorite holiday.

It meant spending two whole nights with Jerry’s parents and waking up early and going for a long walk in the snow, then peeling off wet clothes just in time to watch the dog show on TV while grandma baked pumpkin pie.

Things are different now, with Grandpa Rick and Morty gone. Dad, of course, had instantly accused Grandpa Rick of kidnapping Morty. Mom had screamed that her father would never do something like that to his family, to her (even know Summer knows that deep down, her mother was very afraid that Grandpa Rick had done exactly that).

The divorce was so ugly that Summer transferred to a school in Texas, losing a bunch of her class credits just to get away from them.

Texas is good. Well, it’s hot, and Summer’s skin hates that, but the people are nice and her classes are easy, and if she stays within a certain neighborhood, she can find whatever she wants without having to edge over to the east side of town.

She even has a finance. David plays football and his parents own a ranch in the Texas hill country. They have a little money and they like to flaunt it.

Years ago, before Grandpa Rick burst into Summer’s life and started taking her little brother on adventures, before portal guns and real guns and near death experiences became Summer’s adrenaline fix, she would have been thrilled to nail down a guy like David. David is kind, and sweet, and very attractive. He’s got a good future and he’s looking at being scouted as quarterback next year.

Summer’s ring is a gaudy thing, at least two carats, and it sits heavy on her finger. She only wears it when she knows she’ll be with David or the in-laws. It’s an heirloom ring, passed down through generations, and Summer hates it. She’s forever fiddling with it, or pulling her sleeve down to cover it, or hiding it in her back pocket when she’s out with girl friends.

She doesn’t go out as often anymore - they’re seniors now, and Summer has been told that the partying needs to slow down now that David’s future is getting serious. Summer is fine with this. There’s nothing on this earth that matches a party in space, anyway.

Sometimes, Summer looks up at the night sky and wonders how she could get her hands on some of Grandpa Rick’s K-Lax. That was good stuff.

It’s easy to justify spending Thanksgiving away from home because of travel expenses and final exams. Summer’s done it three years in a row now. She doesn't often think of Beth, or of Jerry, either. She’s deeply entrenched in a new family now, invested in a future mother-in -law who insists on being called “Mama June” or even just “Mama,” and an emotionally detached father-in-law who feels that talking to a woman who is not his wife is beneath him.

Summer is spending more and more time outside, looking at the stars, wishing, remembering.

But this week, the week before break, at 2:43 am, Summer’s phone screen lights up with a call from “Beth Smith.” And when Summer, groggy and maybe already a little hungover, answers with a hoarse, “Hello?” Beth is slobbering drunk.

“Honey, please,” Beth cries, slurring her words and hitching her breaths. “I need to see my baby, Summer. It’s Thanksgiving, next week. Summer, remember? Remember Thanksgiving? You... You’re all I have left.”

Yeesh.

Summer does not want to spend her break dealing with Beth and all of her sloppy-alcoholic coping mechanisms.That’s why she’d run away to Texas to begin with.

Summer hasn’t been home since the night they lost Morty.

She doesn’t want to go back. So she shushes Beth over the phone, lets her cry it out and then they start it all again, the crying and the shushing, over and over until Beth is nearly asleep, slurring half-formed words into her pillow.

Summer disconnects the call and drops her face into her hands. “Fuck.”

“What, babe?”

Ugh, she’d forgotten that David had stayed over.

David wraps his greedy arms around Summer’s waist and pulls her in, his naked boner brushing hot against her thigh. It makes her sick. She pulls away from him, leaning against the headboard and fumbling for the lamp. Beside her, David blinks owlishly in the light.

“I’m going home for Thanksgiving,” she tells him. No sense dragging it out.

“Oh,” says David, reaching up to stroke Summer’s cheeks and twine his fingers in her hair. Summer tenses at this, but David is oblivious, still carding his big stupid paws though Summer’s shower-damp braids and looking at her with an intensity that is frankly... terrifying. “What about coming back to Pilot Point, babe?,” he reminds her and he leans forward in an effort to pepper Summer’s face with kisses. Summer dodges them, making a show of reaching for her phone, so David grabs her hand instead. “Remember talking about seeing my folks?”

Summer is suddenly disgusted with herself. She ran away from home straight into the arms of this Mama’s boy who can hardly keep it up for the four and a half minutes it takes him to blow his load in missionary position.

Summer is a Sanchez.

She’s wondered for a while, especially after that stunt Dad pulled during the divorce, if she should have her name legally changed. She shares a quarter of Grandpa Rick’s genes, and by her rights as a Sanchez, the universe owes her good sex.

At least.

“Sorry, David,” she says and she deftly rolls away from him to stand at the edge of their shared bed. “Plans have changed. Mom needs me.”

Now David is sitting up, looking for all the world like a kicked puppy, but there’s a hardness in his eyes that Summer doesn’t like. Oh well. In for a penny, she guesses.

“Listen, dude, this isn’t working anyway. I’m not the hot little wifey on your arm that your parents are hoping you’ll find here.” She snorts, pacing around the bedroom, ticking off points on her fingers. “I don’t even want kids. I’m Summer Sanchez. I’ve been to space. I’ve seen the stars and constellations and comets and asteroids. I’ve met people you wouldn’t believe. I’ve met planets you wouldn’t believe - sentient planets, David! I’ve hit alien drugs that would blow your tiny mind.” She’s trembling now, all keyed up, but it feels good. There’s something cathartic about acknowledging the truth after so long.

She decides that Summer Sanchez has a nice ring to it.

She lifts her hands and twirls, landing in a heap at the foot of the bed. “The best sex I ever had was with a flying lamb on Oourivian Prime, for Chrissakes.” Summer turns, flushed and grinning, and pokes David in the chest. “You better believe I’m not settling down on a silly horse farm in Pilot Point!”

David is looking at her wide-eyed and slack-jawed, like he’s seeing her for the first time. The thought makes Summer smile a real smile. In a fit of giddiness, she pecks him playfully on the lips, sliding his ridiculous ring from her finger and curling it into his palm. “Good luck with that, babe!”

Feeling freer than she has in years, she flutters around the room, grabbing a few outfits that she likes and stuffing them haphazardly into an old gym bag. The whole thing takes less than a minute.

“Oh, and don’t take it too hard,” she calls over her shoulder, “I don’t think we’re really all that sexually compatible, anyway.” She waves a hand toward the flagging erection that is peaking from David’s boxers. “I’m more of a tentacle kind of girl, if you know what I mean.”

And so, during the fall semester of her senior year, Summer Sanchez dropped out of Texas A&M’s pre-law program and flew home to see her mother for the first time in three years.

xxx

Morty enters through the front door because he’s not a stranger. He’s not exactly sure how long it’s been on Earth - time moves differently on Morty’s waste planet - but somehow, he hadn’t expected it to be night. It makes him feel like a burglar, walking up the concrete steps to the front door with his big black cowl pulled low over his face, a deeply ingrained habit.

“You’ve only got one face, Mo-AAAUURRGG-rty. Don’t get caught with it.”

The key code to unlock the door is the same. Morty sighs, surprised at the stress that leaves his body with this revelation. He hadn’t wanted to break into his parents’ home. Now, he doesn’t have to.

He whirls around, taking one last look at the ship he’d parked on the garage pad. He’d avoided the streetlamps best he could, managed to land very quietly (thanks for that rad auto-landing feature, Rick)partially concealed behind some overgrown azaleas.

Morty sighs, tense again. Modifications aside, that is obviously Rick’s ship to anybody who knows it. Morty hopes he can get what he needs and get out. It would be wrong to disturb whatever peace his family had managed to regain in the years he’s been gone.

The front door is squeakier than Morty remembers. He slips into the kitchen as quickly, quiet as a ghost, and pulls the door slowly to behind him.

His first thought is that he’d forgotten that home has a smell. Carpet and lemon pledge and laundry detergent, and the lingering scent of last night’s dinner all converge on his senses like a physical blow to the gut.

How could Morty have forgotten that smell?

He glances around, eyes adjusting to the dim light of the street lamps. A few scattered dishes lie in the sink, an empty wine bottle sits abandoned on the counter. He’s standing on the same ugly linoleum floor with its worn green leaf patten, so subtle you’d miss it if you didn’t know where to look.

Time hasn’t touched the kitchen.

Morty stands in his childhood home and takes three deep breaths. He thought he’d been prepared for anything and everything - all the changes. He’d been ready.

But the house is exactly the same.

It’s Morty who has changed.

Morty’s breathing speeds, and he shakes off the shudder that tempts to run down his spine. If the kitchen affected him this deeply…. He swings his gaze to the garage door that beckons ominously to his left.

Don’t think about it, he reminds himself sharply. The plan is simple - break into the garage, grab the stuff, and get out. There will be time for memories later.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about… him.

Morty shakes himself, setting his shoulders and pulling the heavy door handle toward him as he turns it to minimize noise. Unlike the kitchen, the swing of the garage door is silent.

The darkness deepens as Morty steps down the single step - there are no windows to let in the glow of the street lights here. The air is hotter and heavy, almost stale, and as Morty turns his back to the room to slowly pull the door to, he gets the strangest feeling. It’s almost the uneasiness he feels when he walks to the grave of the other Morty who is buried in the backyard. It raises the hairs on his neck, and Morty wonders if anybody in the family have used this garage since...

Don’t think about it.

Door secured and locked, Morty lets his fingers drift along the walls, his opposite hand outstretched in search of obstacles. But it seems that the garage is exactly as Morty remembers, and he navigates the dark with increasing confidence. He snags the dangling string - right where it should be - and tugs. The bare bulb that hangs over Rick’s work table pops and hums as it slowly blinks on, and Morty bites back a smile at the irony of the inter-galactic space genius Rick Sanchez discovering his greatest scientific breakthroughs beneath this dirty fluorescent bulb.

A thousand memories assault him at once.

“A hair, Morty, I need one of your hairs!”

“Bring me the thing. The thing. The thing. The -- the -- it's got, like, buttons on it and lights on it. It -- it -- it beeps.”

“You little son of a bitch! Y-y- are you a simulation?! Huh?! Are you a simulation??”

“I’m the Rickest Rick there is. And you know, it would - UUUURRGGHH- go without saying that the Rickest Rick… would have the Mortyest Morty.”

“Be better than I am.”

“Don’t… Don’t think about it.”

Morty sucks in a deep breath and grits his teeth hard. Time to get busy.

xxx

Three hours later, and Morty is almost done with the garage.

He glances at the digital clock that reads 3:33. By the time he gets this stuff loaded, it’ll be nearly daylight.

Damn, he’d really hoped to get everything in one trip. Fuel for a trip to Earth from his encampment is not cheap, and this was a long trip.

He picks up the first item, a strangely lightweight box labeled “Time Travel Stuff” and heads toward the kitchen. He dares not raise the garage door - that would make too much noise.

He opens the door and comes nose to nose with Summer.

“What. The fuck. Are you doing in my grandpa’s garage?” she says slowly, advancing on him with each word.

Morty’s first thought as he stumbles backward is, “Where did my sister get a pistol?”

He trips over the step in an effort to give her some space, sending the box flying. He finds himself sprawled on the floor, space bits everywhere, and his ass is killing him. “Ah, geez,” he breathes, repositioning slowly to take the pressure off of his coccyx. It’s probably broken.

Summer’s hands are trembling, and she lowers the gun. “Morty?”

Oh. His hood had fallen when he did. Morty looks up at her, a little sheepishly, suddenly very aware of the beard he’d decided to grow a while back. “Umm, yeah,” he says lamely, still wincing at the pain. “Hi!”

There’s a funny expression on Summer’s face, like she’s thinking a billion things at once, and her eyes are wider than Morty’s ever seen them. But then her gaze hardens. “And which one are you?” she demands, looking as if she’d like to bring the gun back to his head.

Morty raises his eyebrows. He wouldn’t have expected Summer to immediately question his dimension. Clever of her. He quirks a little smile. “C-137,” he answers her, trying and mostly failing to get back on his feet. “I’m your Morty. Well, your second Morty.”

Quick as a blink, Summer slings the gun away. It lands with a clatter and she launches herself at Morty, wrapping him in a rib-creaking hug. Morty’s body tenses - hugs are definitely not his typical physical interaction. But Summer is burying her face into the crook of his neck, and Morty is surprised to find how easily it fits there. When he’d left, they’d barely stood eye to eye.

Morty is stunned. Summer has never hugged him like this. Feebly, he reaches up and lays his hand across her back. She’s shuddering. So Morty pulls her closer, shifting his weight so that his knees are beneath him, and gathers her in. She allows this, never looking up at him, and slowly, Morty relaxes into it.

“Summer?” he asks softly after what feels like a long time. He’s never been good with his sister’s emotions.

Summer cranes her neck sideways to look at him, and she’s a mess of mascara and tears, red-faced and absolutely shaking with laughter. Morty huffs with her, still utterly bewildered by girls. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing’s funny, Morty,” she tells him, but she’s still laughing, so Morty laughs with her. “You’ve been gone for three years. You’ve been legally declared dead, you asshole!” She swats him on the shoulder, but he manages to doge the blow, which only makes her face fall. She comes closer, looking more tearful now than before, and settles beside him. “We had a fucking funeral for you, you complete sack of dicks!”

Morty doesn’t know what to say, so he grabs Summer’s hand and squeezes. “Sorry.”

And he is.

Summer rolls her eyes and snorts, but there’s something softer at the edge of her lips, and she lays her head on Morty’s shoulder and sighs. Morty assumes means he’s forgiven, at least on some level.

They only sit like that for a minute or so before Morty starts to fidget. His ass is absolutely killing him, and time’s a-ticking. He needs to get out of here soon. Summer seems to read the tension in his body, because she stands abruptly and offers her hand, pulling him to his feet with an exaggerated groan.

“Thanks,” he quirks her a little half-smile, the only thing he has to offer her.

But Summer isn’t looking at him. Her eyes are tracking around the garage, noting the boxes that have been drug out and packed up. Something tightens in her face, and when she speaks, it’s in that no-nonsense tone that always drove him up the wall when they were kids.

“What happened, Morty?” Summer finishes her sweep of the garage and pins her gaze on him.

Morty nearly stumbles back at the intensity of it.

“What happened to you? Where is Grandpa Rick?”

Authors Notes:

Based on Vapor Morty, who was originally developed in this hot mess of a text post. Rick’s been kidnapped and Morty has been scouring the universe trying to find him and doing a lot of learning and growing along the way.

Kidnapped Rick saw Morty “die” just before he was kidnapped and went crazy over it. Morty obviously wasn’t dead, was trying to get to Rick to say hey, I’m all good and these guys are after you so let’s get out of here.

Morty literally lives in an intergalactic dumpster and makes a living renovating and selling weapons and machinery. He found his way home to earth because he wants to find any of Rick’s stuff that he could possibly use to track him down, or maybe even build his own portal gun.

Basically, Morty is a little badass now.

I might write more of these little drabbles if people are interested in them. Also, just really hoping I got Summer’s voice right here. Feedback is always, always appreciated, friends! My messages and ask box are open!

#pricklerick original #rick and morty #vapor morty #rick sanchez #morty smith #rickorty #summer smith #i could pretty easily be convinced to dabble deeper into this au #so many vapor morty feelings #summer is my precious sunshine child

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prince-toffee · 3 years

Text

Villains

Part Three

The freezing air burned as it collided with Catra’s furry face. She shivered in her blue blanket and her thick fur coat, she turned away, angled herself so that the snowflake peppered wind hit her flipped up hood. Her face was spared. The transporter flew so quickly Catra could barely see the condensation from her mouth as it was constantly pushed off backward. It was obvious Catra wasn’t in a good mood, that much was obvious by her grumpy face and crossed arms. In fact she was writhing with rage, which kept her warm enough in the cold climate. But that, was kind of the reason she went out onto the deck of the ship - to cool off. And partially to get some time alone away from her annoying teammates. The transporter was an upgraded model of the regular skiffs, but it wasn’t that much larger, roughly around the size of a yacht, maybe two. So there wasn’t much room inside under the deck, not much space to hide from the personal-space-invading Scorpia and her lung crushing hugs, or the overly talkative Entrapta. Even though the Drylian Princess was being uncharacteristically quiet and stationary during the trip. Just giggling and chuckling to herself as she read something on her data-pad.

She was furious, not only was she sent on this dumb, cold, mission, that wasn’t the worst part. Being away from The Fright Zone meant she was away from Shadow Weaver and that was always a positive. But everything changed, everything was different, Shadow Weaver was now the ruler of the Horde, she controlled everything now! She was even more insufferable. Because now she had to even look at posters in hallways of her ugly mug. She was everywhere. For Catra it was like living in a nightmare. When she was given the rank of Force-Captain by Lord Hordak months ago, she thought that things might’ve started to be looking up. But everything fell apart the day their trio tried to enact her plan. Well, Catra claimed to Hordak that manipulating the Black Garnet was her idea, and took the credit for it, when really it was Entrapta who stated she could do so and the only one who knew how to pull it off. But Entrapta didn’t seem to mind. No matter how hard she tried, no matter how high she climbed in the ranks, it seemed like she was always going to be under her, always number two.

Before she could’ve punched something her thought process was put on hold as the sound of the deck doors sliding open and a pair of heavy footsteps moving towards her. Then a new irritation gripped her, before she even turned around she knew who followed her outside. As she turned, her guess was proven right as towering over was Scorpia. The tall and broad scorpion wore a similar fur coat to protect against the cold, only several sizes bigger. Precariously pinned between her two huge pincers was a steaming mug of hot chocolate. The way the transport was heading and the direction the wind was blowing, the steam flew right back into the Princess’ face.

“Woaw, woohoo, man it’s freezing out here. I, uh, I know you like to be on your own, brooding. But uh, I got kinda worried, you out here, cold, and you could get a... well a cold. So to warm you up a little I brought you some hot choco!” She looked around for her right to her left and noticed nothing but a landscape of white, she could barely depict icy blue mountains on the horizon. But not much else. “Maybe next time they should send us out on a mission somewhere warm, huh?” Hehe... heh...” She looked at Catra hopeing to see something resembling a smile, no such luck. Catra agreed with the statement, she way better preferred a warm location, but at least she was away from Shadow Weaver.

Catra wanted to stay cool, stay broody, wanted to show no weakness. But also at the same time it was freezing, and the magicat really could’ve used that coco, and she didn’t want to admit it, but it was Scorpia’s begging puppy eyes that totally convinced her. The cat huffed and rolled her heterochromatic eyes to maintain her ‘bad girl’ reputation. But ultimately took the mug, against her instinct and better judgement she mustered out a “Thanks.”

Scorpia’s eyes lit up and smiled ear to ear, “Y- You’re welcome!” Catra turned her face away from Scorpia as she felt a slight blush rise on her cheeks and across her nose, and she would’ve rather face the harsh stinging snow and wind than show the slight hint, tint of red, to Scorpia. She would’ve never let her live it down. The scorpion-Princess cleared her throat, “Sooo... You wanna talk about it? The Shadow Weaver thing, I mean. I know you probably don’t! But! I- I’m here for you! Even if you just need to vent or rant or whatever.”

Catra took a sip, it was pretty good, and the warmth was a welcome intrusion. “No. No, I don’t.” Months ago everything was looking up, how did it all fall apart so quickly. And now she was back at the bottom of the food chain, miserable and angry. “But thanks for the offer... How long until we get there?”

“Two hours. Hour and a half, if we’re lucky and the weather clears up. We should make it before nightfall, that’s when the temperatures really drop. At least that’s what Entrapta estimates.”

“How is our Princess anyway? Quieter than usual.”

“Oh she’s looking through some of Hordak’s data from his Sanctum. She seems... captivated... Shame what happened with Lord Hordak.”

“Mmmhmm.”

“You know Shadow Weaver says he’s dead, and I mean we did see her kill him, but you know the weird thing about that? No one can find a body.”

“Huh, weird.” Catra took another sip from the mug, a long one this time, as she looked on. She might’ve known something about that.

---

Glimmer groaned, she was so freaking tired, she leaned against the chair, practically draped over it, looking like she melted down over it. Well, it wasn’t really a chair, it was three box crates positioned in a way to imitate a chair. It wasn’t comfortable, but the alternative was standing, of which she was tired, or laying down in a sleeping bag, but she wasn’t ready for that kind of embarrassment. She folded her arms and grunted to herself. Nobody heard it, and no attention was paid to her. She took another look around the Dragon’s Daughter III, or was it IV, maybe II. Didn’t really matter. She must’ve surveyed the deck about a hundred times by then, and the scene hadn’t changed much. Bow was watching and listening to the flamboyant SeaHawk, one boot above the other on a crate, his pointing finger was pointing to the sky at nothing really. And on the other side at the front of the boat stood a golden and white giant, flowing blonde hair, bellowing skirt, knee high boots, and short pants. All accompanied with beautiful ornate designs in the gold. Glimmer couldn’t see from where she sat, but her chest armour sported a golden design, something a cross between a flower and a star, with an ocean blue stone at its centre.

In her hand gripped was a broad sword with golden ornate detail extending from the hilt forming a beautiful cross guard. Another sapphire stone at its centre. That wasn’t just any sword, it was The Sword of Protection. And that wasn’t just any ordinary warrior, she was the mythic and legendary She-Ra, The Princess of Power. Her friend.

But Glimmer noticed there was something off about her friend today, she might’ve been the indestructible She-Ra, but underneath that extra magical layer of skin was Adora, just Adora. A girl that wasn’t indestructible. She was the hero of Etheria, its so called ‘saviour’. Adora didn’t like to be called that, it made the life she lived sound official. The fate of the entire world rested on her shoulders. Saying she was stressed or anxious was an understatement. Glimmer was contemplating walking up to her and asking her what’s wrong for about half an hour now. But she had no idea what to say, what Adora needed to hear. But hey, friendship was about trying.

Before the boredom could claim her she stood up and marched over to the golden giant woman. “Hey Adodo~. You good babe?” The small pink cotton-candy Princess gave a little nervous chuckle.

She turned around to face her small friend, and on her face as always was a bright warm smile. “Hey, Glim.” It was subtle, but it was there, in her eyes, there was a hint of tiredness, it looked like she was deep in thought and Glimmer brought her out of it.

And to be honest Glimmer herself had a lot to think about. Glim felt like the Alliance was just reacting to the Horde’s attacks, they were too much on the defence and not enough on the offense. She approached her mother about that query, Glimmer proposed that the Princess Alliance should start going more on the attack, hit some key Horde outposts - Troop barracks, resource transports, and silos containing food, drink and medicine supplies. Cripple the Horde. But her majesty Queen Angella overruled the idea and stated they should priorities defending their own and their allies. And denied Glimmer’s request for more soldiers under her commanding. She was a Commander but sometime it felt more like a ‘well done sticker’ or a ‘second place ribbon’, than an actual rank. Angella said she ‘didn’t want to risk losing lives when it can be avoided’.

Coward.

That’s what Glimmer thought, but never had the bravery to actually say it to her face. But she had a feeling that the day would come when she’d oppose her mother, and insult her. And she knew the day was coming soon.

“Ah,” Adora waved her hand dismissively, “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Penny for your thoughts?”

Adora looked like she was thinking about something and whether to say it, “I- It’s just the whole Shadow Weaver thing, ya know? The person who raised me now leads the Horde and I bet the Horde’s new priorities will be to bring me back in like before. I feel like I’m painting a huge target on anyone around me.”

“Adora, come on, don’t say that. We’re always under a huge target. We’re the Rebellion! Anybody who opposes the Horde is in danger. You make us stronger than ever.” She winked and gave her friend a little playful nudge.

“Heh, thanks Glimmer. I- I know that, but I can’t help but self-pity... mind me asking?”

“Shoot ahead.”

“Does Hordak seem off to you?”

“I mean yeah, but elaborate.”

“It’s just, I don’t know, he doesn’t seem like... Hordak.”

“Yeah, he’s way skinnier than I expected, like a skeleton.”

“It’s not even that. It’s... I don’t know, he’s not scary! He’s uncomfortable, he feels small, he’s sick... he’s just... some guy, just a person. After all my life seeing Hordak as this myth, this folktale, it’s hard to accept him as a person.”

“You think he’s a double, some trick by the actual Hordak? Maybe he knows the Shadow Weaver news will mess with you. There’s a lot of shape-shifters out there.”

“You know, a part of me wanted to believe that, but that part of me I left in the Fright Zone. I think that really is Hordak, I can’t know for sure, but I have a feeling... like a memory.” That last part of the sentence she whispered to herself, didn’t want to trouble Glimmer with things she herself wasn’t sure were real. She didn’t know what she saw, she could hardly make sense of the scene. She didn’t know if it was fake, a dream, her mind playing tricks on her. But there he was, his face, surprise and confusion written across it, big pointy ears, and big red eyes. She was looking up at him. It couldn’t have been a memory, could it? Adora often recalled her earliest memory being that of Catra arriving at the Fright Zone, in that applesauce cardboard box. The image she so struggled to perceive didn’t have Catra in it so it had to have happened before meeting her since the two were inseparable all their lives. That would’ve lined up with Hordak’s story of finding her as a baby and bringing her in. Adora didn’t mention any of that to Glimmer or anyone else. She changed the subject, “But anyway, how about you? How’s the long journey treating you? Enjoying the weather?”

Glimmer couldn’t help but chuckle, “So infinitely jealous of that impenetrable magical skin that resists temperature change, this cold is unbearable. And past the boredom and the shanties the trip is only horrible. Hehe. I’m actually glad my mum allowed us to deploy so far away.”

“How do you mean?”

Glimmer sighed, managing to sound disappointed and infuriated, “I love my mum, and I get her, but I really think she’s not in the right here. She’s not the right kind of leader for our war. She’s too scared. She just sits there in the castle alone doing nothing, being useless. And the Horde is rolling over us! She’s making me feel useless.”

“Glim-”

“I said that I get her, and I do! But I disagree. Plus, I feel like she sent us off on this excursion just to get us out of the way. Remember before we left she said something about wanting to talk to Hordak on her own. I still feel like she’s treating us like kids, sending us away when she has adult business to take care of, she doesn’t trust us with things!”

She-Ra shrugged, “She’s the Queen, of course she wants to personally talk to the ‘Hordak’. As for the Horde winning the tug of war for Etheria, it’s always hard to say, but we’re doing well, Glim! Last time I checked the Horde didn’t have any elemental meta-etherians. We’re in a good position.”

“...When I got captured by Catra, she was going to give herself up! Like a coward! It was you and the rest of the team that came for me! Broke into The Fright Zone for me! And she didn’t even go with you! She just sat there in that stupid castle and. Did. Nothing!...” That drew the attention of both Bow and SeaHawk, they all looked at her, worried. Adora wanted to place a hand on her shoulder, but Glimmer turned around and returned to the inside of the yacht, they didn’t talk for the next two hours.

---

Entrapta scratched Imp’s chin as he tried to fall asleep wearing a small custom fur coat, he lay there next to her keyboard. Entrapta had her feet kicked up on the desk as she looked through slides and pages of data. It was safe to say she was captivated, the screens displayed the contents from Hordak’s Sanctum, she didn’t understand everything she saw which was why she was fascinating. So much to learn, theorise about, in one place. Most things she understood, up coming upgrades to stun-weaponry, updates to troop schedules and routines, new concepts for the Horde tanks and skiffs. Once she got past all that basic stuff that’s when things got interesting.

Some sort of schematics for what Entrapta would call an exo-skeleton armour, she immediately spotted several aspects where she could’ve improved it. Then there were files under even heavier encryption, no major obstacle for Entrapta of course. She recognised the terminology and the diagrams, it talked about cell division, mitosis, and depictions of chromosomes being ‘tampered with’. It looked like he was playing with them, putting them in different sequences, altering them, seemingly creating new chromosomes. It was quite amazing, really. Cloning. Next there was the real enigma, a strange power generator, the question she had was what needed that amount of power? The armour would overheat, and that amount unnecessary for the cloning process. It must’ve been for a different project, one not listed in the files. He must’ve been very paranoid. The only thing she managed to find on this mysterious project was some set of random co-ordinates... It couldn’t be, could it?

Just then a beep went off from a panel on her right, startling Imp. The nap was ruined. She tried to pat him and calm him down, but it was too late, the little batling had taken flight. The noise signalled that the lasers and drills had finished excavating. The First Ones tech piece was quite large, largest piece she’d ever seen. It resembled an enlarged coin with their ancient alien writing on it in neon purple. Great colour, Entrapta noted. As if on cue Scorpia entered the room. With her she brought a huge rug which she easily carried under arm as she whistled to herself, while avoiding eye contact. Entrapta didn’t know what was rolled up in the rug, probably a person, judging by the rug’s length. It didn’t matter. Entrapta had more important things to take care of. She moved out to check on the FOs tech without saying anything.

Scorpia rushed into the supply closet, closed the door behind her, and placed her back against the door, double checked if anyone was watching through the slit in the door. And she unrolled the rug, throwing Adora out on the cold floor. The Adora in front of Scorpia wasn’t the same Adora she saw on the battlefield, a determined, powerful warrior. No, this one acted like a drunk. It was because of the effect of the corrupting agent, but still. She sighed, “What am I going to do with you? You keep making everything worse! Catra was already in a bad mood because of all that Shadow Weaver taking over stuff, and now you show up!”

“So all that stuff with mama Weaver is true? No way! Hordak was telling the truth.”

“Hey, hey, woaw, woaw, Hordak’s alive!?”

“Yeah, we got that skinny son of a bat in a prison cell in BrightMoon, well it’s not really a prison it’s a spare room for guests, hehe, but shhhh don’t tell Glimmer’s hot mum I said that.... Who are you?”

“Oh no, this isn’t good. Shadow Weaver will freak! Me and Catra are gonna get in so much trouble... unless... she never finds out.” Scorpia looked above to see a snoozing Imp attempting to hang upside down, unfortunately for the boy Scorpia grabbed him with haste. “Hey baby satan bat! Tell Adora’s friends she’s in here. They can get in through a back door. Get them out of here! And I promise all my granola ration bars are yours.” With a smirk he flew off.

#entrapta #catra #scorpia #adora #glimmer #shadow weaver #hordak #queen angella

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peakyblinderswhore · 4 years

Text

req: where a girl runs away from ireland, pregnant and scared and rents a cottage in small heath before accidentally becoming good friends with ada. one day they go to john’s estate and find it in chaos, you go to save michael as he’s still breathing. later on, polly wants to meet me and thank me for everything and this is where they find out about me being pregnant and alone.

a/n: this was initially supposed to be a wattpad exclusive since i was asked on wattpad for this but man, i wrote so much that i think it deserves to be seen on here too. anyway, i hope you enjoy! ps: between me and you, i flaked our at the end and went cliché as per my usual writing.

w/c: 2.8k

warnings: mild abuse (skip past the “keep reading” line and you won’t have to read it)

Somehow, I had managed to catch a boat from Dublin to England. I wasn’t entirely sure where it was headed specifically, I had been much more worried about getting out of here. I’d seen a woman Tuesday evening, she had confirmed my suspicions — I was pregnant.

I carried life and I was overjoyed, until I went home to my husband, bouncing on my toes, waiting to tell him the good news. Initially, I had been ecstatic; that was my first mistake. The second had been talking and the third was for being a whore.

In those moments, my heart shattered. He went out drinking and told me to be gone before he came home. I’m sure he just meant out of the house, to sleep at a friends house for a small amount of time, or something along those lines, but we’d been down this road before. The last time, he had beaten the child out of me. He didn’t know it and it broke my heart even just thinking about the potential it could’ve had.

Of course, I chose the only thing that could guarantee a good life for my child, I fled. First I pulled the house apart looking for every penny in every corner and crevice of the house, then I packed my bag and walked in the shadows to the docks. It was daylight and I hadn’t wanted anyone to see me this way. Upon reaching the boat, it took me all of my grovelling to make it onto the ship. I don’t know if they felt guilty or just wanted me to shut up but they let me on the boat under the promise that I would get off wherever they docked next.

When we docked, I kept my promise, glad to be away from what I called my husband.

“Where are we, please?” I asked a younger sailor.

“Birmingham, Ma’am. Small Heath, specifically, I believe.”

Nodding at him in thanks, I made my way off, following the small crowd that had emerged from within the ship with me. I had almost no idea where I needed to go. Of course, I had to figure out where I was going to sleep.

Once a week or so had passed, I had found a place to rent with the money I had fled with. I think I must’ve drawn some attention as a woman called Ada took a very quick liking to me. She was present, wherever I went and I was worried at first, possibly paranoid that my husband had sent someone to fetch me or do something about me, but I quickly found out that she had absolutely no idea where I’d washed up from.

She was one of the few things that kept me sane over the coming days. My life was a small mess but she helped me set everything in order again.

“Why?” I muttered to her one day, fed up with everything that I was dealing with that day.

“Because once, I was like you. Pregnant and alone; trust me, it’s not fun nor is it good for the baby, whether it’s been born yet or not,” she diligently replied, walking past me into the cottage I was renting.

For a second, I blubbed like a fish, wondering how she had guessed my pregnancy without me giving her any clues.

She must’ve sensed my confused face staring into her back as she set down some food she had brought over from the market because she carried on, “I know because I’ve been there. It’s the small things that give it away the most because you don’t try to hide them as much — you simply think others won’t notice if you pretend that you don’t either.”

She’d managed to hit the nail on the head, shocking me mostly but also making me think about some of my choices, my presumptions about her and what her family was like or what they thought of her.

“Karl and I,” she began, “well, Tommy wasn’t Karl’s Dad’s biggest fan. I was pregnant before we got married and then when we were married, it didn’t last for long. Freddie… he died. Pestilence got him in the end. All of that fighting for a disease to end it.”

I didn’t quite get what she was talking about for the most part, I’d known her long enough to have met Karl but apart from that I was clueless.

“Ada —”

“Don’t pity me, it was a long time ago.”

I clasped my lips together and abruptly nodded my head as I changed the direction of the conversation, “Shall we go out today?”

“Actually,” Ada said as she stepped away from putting the food away, “I was going to take Karl to visit my brother and his kids. Wouldn’t be bad for the boy to get some fresh air and to see his cousins. I’m sure they’ve been driving John doo-wally.”

Giggling, I say, “Doo-wally?”

Ada rolls her eyes, “Get ready, we’ll be off soon.”

Within the hour, you had set off in a car that Ada borrowed from one of her brothers and I had arrived at John’s estate. Karl had gotten out of the vehicle, eager to be greeted by his cousin's big smiles and playing around with them.

“He seems excited, how long has it been since you last visited?”

“Oh gosh, I don’t think I’ve been since they first…”

Ada’s voice trailed away as we turned a corner, revealing the pools of blood covering the expanse of the patio. Who I assumed to be John’s wife was screaming and crying, barey taking a moment to breathe as tears streamed down her face and blood seeped into her dress, staining it dark.

“Oh fuck,” Ada muttered, still in shock before commanding her body to move towards John, “Esme. Esme, is he alive?”

Ada turns to face me as Esme ignores Ada to continue weeping, “Go to Michael, his chest is still moving!”

I fell to the ground once you reached Michael. Without acknowledging the blood that was dying my skirts and now smudged all over my hands, up to my elbows.

I held his head, “Where? Where does it hurt? There’s blood everywhere; I can’t see where you were shot.”

He weakly pats his abdomen, to which I quickly rip open his suit, popping a few buttons from his shirt when I managed to pull it apart and apply pressure to where it became evident of the hole in his skin. Wincing, he groans and I hurriedly say, “I know, love, this is gonna hurt so much, but I have to stop it from bleeding.”

“I’m calling an ambulance!”

I nod, not even turning my head to watch Ada, “Karl go inside,” Michael muttered.

I lift my head, having not noticed the boy standing, lifelessly as he watched me and his mother frantically try to fix things.

“Karl, honey,” I whispered, “follow your Mum. Go inside; don’t come back out until after we come and get you together,” he nodded his head silently and walked inside, as if he had been sleep-deprived and stumbled up the steps.

Michael’s head was lolling about, barely conscious at this point. Focusing my attention back on him, I noticed his eyes rolling into the back of his head, “Hey,” I grab his head, pulling it to face me, his eyes were still rolling so I shook his shoulder a little, “don’t go anywhere. They’re so close to being here, don’t make their journey not worth it.”

He manages to avert his attention and put all of his might into focusing on me, “Wow,” he hastily breathes out, “I made it to Heaven, who would’ve thought? Ha, fucking Tommy, eh...”

“Nu-uh,” I slapped his face before forcing him to look at you and sternly said, “Don’t go anywhere.”

He seems rather amused and continues his rambling, “That felt pretty real to me, you Irish angel.”

Stopping for a moment, I was connecting the dots between what he said earlier and what he was muttering now. My face flushed and he whispered, “Wow, all the way to your ears? That’s adorable.”

Suddenly, I was acutely aware of my hands and how bloodied they were, drawing my attention away from his lazy grin. Deciding in my head quickly, I tore off a strip of my skirts to help prevent any more blood loss from his bullet wound when I applied pressure. I wrapped it around my hand twice and let the rest bundle on top of his wound before pressing down to the point where he winced.

“Sorry,” I murmured, “I can’t have it leaking before they get here.”

At that moment, Ada rushes out of the double french doors, “They’re almost here, I’ve been consoling the kids, as Esme gathers herself.”

Slowly I lift my head to see a quivering Esme, looking longingly at John’s body. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what must be going through her head.

“I’ve got Michael for the moment, not much more blood loss and he’s holding up a conversation for the moment,” I glanced over to a scared Karl behind Ada, clutching onto her skirts, “go back inside with the kids; get Esme cleaned up.”

Ada simply nods, suddenly needing someone else to give the orders, she was in shock from the scene we had stumbled upon this afternoon. It would be hard on anyone but it’s more shattering when it’s your brother. Her hair bounces a little, the only movement that suggests she was still breathing, even if she was shaking — scared hadn’t been a look I’d seen on Ada before and you weren’t sure if I ever wanted to see it again.

Until the ambulance arrived, I had continued talking to Michael, keeping him there and making sure he didn’t lose consciousness at any point.

Eventually, they came and took Michael, keeping him alive better than what I could, I hoped. It had taken every last bit of my energy to drag Ada away once Tommy had arrived to sort the rest out. It had felt like he’d surely taken his sweet time turning up; I had no idea who was more distraught, Esme or Ada; it definitely wasn’t Tommy.

I managed to pull Ada and Karl into the car they had borrowed and drove them back to the outskirts of Small Heath, stopping right outside my small cottage, where the fields met the streets. Neither had argued when I woke them up, their tear stained cheeks and bloody clothes sticking to the seats. Despite Ada’s wishes, I pushed them into my bed and took the sofa for the night, acknowledging the fact that they probably needed a better night’s sleep than I did tonight, after everything that had happened.

. . .

Weeks later, everyone had been to John’s burial. It was strange, Ada had insisted that I was to be there as she didn’t want to go alone but I said otherwise.

“It’ll be harder for you if I’m there. I was there that day too, you don’t need another face to remind you of what happened; neither does Esme, the woman has already been through far to much for me to even get into right now,”

Ada’s face had gotten swollen over the days, mostly from crying over and over again, never getting the chance to get it all out before Karl interrupted. I had often tried to distract the boy but on days when I went out to the market to buy food it was hard to control what he did. He didn’t want to go out, sometimes I had successfully managed to drag him away but I couldn’t blame him for wanting to be with his mother so much.

“Karl, is she home?” Ada called, one morning after I’d been out and bought some flowers to liven up the atmosphere a little.

“Yes, she’s home. She’s got pink flowers too.”

Surprised at Ada’s voice, I walk through, “Awake, love? I got some freesias to lighten the room a little.”

Ada smiled, “Polly wants to meet you. And Michael, properly. They want to thank you for that day, for saving Michael… and for trying to save John,” she sniffed, forcing her smile to stay on her face, “Pol’s invited us to afternoon tea today. I was just trying to convince Karl to go with you to the market to buy something nicer to wear.”

“I might have something that I can adjust for him.”

“So you’ll come,” she says, turning her head away from the newspaper that she was reading, “to Polly’s this afternoon?”

Wincing, I reply, “I suppose so. I think it might be good if I got to see Michael the way he is conscious.”

After fussing about for a few hours over sorting something for Karl to wear and making sure you wore something that was fresh, yourself, you had made it to Polly’s townhouse. It was grand, especially compared to the cottage you were renting out. The front garden was neat and had colour coordinated flower beds and a neatly trimmed border that accentuated the pathway that led to the wooden front door.

Upon knocking, Ada had pushed me in front of her so that when the door opened a beautiful, classical lady answered. Instantly her face lit up, she held out her arms, “You, my darling, must be the one who saved my boy’s life,” she pulled me into a hug and engulfed me into her embrace, tightening her grip so as to not let go and whispered, “thank you so much. I only wish we could’ve helped John.”

Carefully, I wrapped my arms around her, and breathed in her homely scent, “Of course, Polly. My deepest regards, I wish I could’ve done more too.”

She pats my back twice and pulls away, holding me at an arm's length, “Pregnant, pretty and a lifesaver. I’m not sure what else we could’ve asked for. Come in, I have some tea ready,” she beckoned us in, stepping aside to allow us to walk into her home.”

She led us through to the sitting room, offered me a seat next to Michael and walked off to fetch a teapot and some cups and saucers for us all.

“Wow, this is she?”

I turn to face him, blushing profusely, “It is she. How are you Michael?”

“Much better thanks to you. Mum says she doesn’t think I would’ve made it without you.”

“I’m sure you would’ve…”

Ada pipes up, “Michael was in a pretty bad state. Polly spoke to the doctors and they said he’d been stabilised at the scene; that was you, love.”

I sat, bewildered by the thought that I had literally stopped someone from dying. Before, it had only been talk and I had let them while they were mourning but now — it was real.

We sat in silence for a moment as Polly walked back in, now carrying a tray full of tea for us all.

“You know,” Michael began, “you’re beautiful. Your baby is going to be so well-looked after and is going to be just as smart and beautiful as you are… I bet your husband is thrilled to have someone like you.”

I let my head fall slightly and ignore as Polly hums in agreeance with her son and I stare at my hands as I fiddle with the sleeve of my dress.

Ada notices the tension I was radiating and quietly states, “She ran away from home because her husband doesn’t want anything to do with her and her to-be baby.”

Polly halts in her position, currently pouring tea into a cup and turns to face us properly, “Excuse me?”

Michael stands from his seat, “What? What kind of idiot doesn’t want something to do with their wife and kid?”

His face slowly distorts and his cheeks redden as the anger boils inside of him, “You saved my life and fucking goddamnit if I let you and your child grow up without a father figure. You saved mine and I want the chance to repay you.”

“Michael —”

“No, love, he’s right. You’re so strong and you’ve made it this far, but we want to help. Nothing will ever repay the fact that you saved Michael’s life but let us try,” Polly says, resting a hand on my shoulder affectionately, her voice running through the room like silk as she softens.

“That’s right. Marry me.”

My eyes widen, “Ah, Michael, I’m not sure that’s necessary.”

“You’ll be shamed if your baby doesn’t have a father,” Polly soothes, “It’s different if you’re a widow but if word gets out, we can’t fight every single fucker who natters on about your personal life.”

“Marry me; I’ll be the father figure for your baby. It’s the least I can do.”

tags: @saintd0lce lmk if you want to be tagged! :)

#peaky #littlemissshelby #littlemissshelbyreplies #John Shelby #Esme Shelby #michael gray #Michael Shelby #aunt polly #polly gray #polly shelby #Ada Shelby #ada thorne #Peaky Blinders #peaky blinders season 4 #birmingham #1920s #luca changretta #shelby

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ajokeformur-ray · 3 years

Text

I watched Joker tonight and typed out my thoughts as they occurred to me. Unedited; typos are guaranteed. I did this a few months ago and really enjoyed looking back at my thought process and I wanted to do it again so that I can look back and know that what I feel is real and true in my darkest times.

You're welcome to skip this; it's under a cut for ease of doing so. Warnings for occasional sexual comment lmao. There’s no self shipping in this, I don’t think.

word count: 2, 575.

I’M SOBBING and I’ve only just pressed play.

Heart squeeze Chest much ow

THERE HE IS

✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

Nooooo baby omg don’t pretend - let yourself hurt if it hurts. Don’t pretend.

Carnival Carnival Carnivalllllllll 😍😍😍😍😍

I am a Simp for one clown and his name is Carnival

Someone help him, I????

That sign hit Arthur as hard as my love for him did ksksksk

MY EYES BE LEAKIN💔💔💔💔💔

bb nooooo

Oh honey let me kiss those bruises and replace the marks of violence with love, hm? You’re safe with me.

Breathe, my love. Don’t fight the laughter. Let it out, let yourself go.

Screams into a pillow because????? much sad must kiss

“have you been keeping up with your journal?” LIKE HE HAS TIME

oHHHHH boi’s close to losing his shit

Do it, Artie. Give ‘em hell.

“I think I did” YOU TELL HER!!💖💖💖

I want to be his cigarette. Where’s Satan??? I got a new deal for my blackened soul which he took at half price😂😂😂😂

I’d have my hand between the door and his head so fuckin fast I swear

“I just don’t wanna feel so bad anymore” yep SAME

ohhhh peekaboo🥺🥺🥺

this makes me giggle ksksksk i watch this scene when i feel sad bc it always makes me happy for the time it’s on

he’s so good with kids; he doesn’t have to try and think about what’s funny, he just does it, he’s himself and it works

FUCK OFF LADY CAN’T YOU SEE HE’S STRUGGLING????

give

him

back

his

card

casually wrinkling my nose against tears lmao

ohhh the way he looks up at those stairs from the bottom

i can feel his exhaustion

me too, my love

step step step step

god i wanna get him the fuck outta gotham

and into my arms and a soft, warm blanket

“eat. you need to eat” LITERALLY WHAT I TELL MYSELF EVERY DAY IN HIS VOICE BC OTHERWISE I JUST WOULDNT EAT???? I’m losing so much weight asdfghjk its not enough tho

SUPAH RATS

Did Arthur come up w that joke or was it actually a Murray joke????

HIS VOICE IS SO SOFT IM CRY??🥺🥺🥺🥺

“I WAS PUT HERE TO SPREAD JOY AND LAUGHTER”

YOU DO BABY, YOU DO!!!! EVERY FUCKING DAY!!!!

go deepthroat a cactus randall - youre already a bit of a prick so🙃🙃🙃

“THE GUYS THINNK YOU’RE A FREAK BUT I LIKE YOU”

HOYT. YOU CAN GO SIT ON A CACTUS TOO

FUCK OFF

😡😡😡😡

“WHY WOULD ANYONE STEAL A SIGN”//”WHY DOES ANYONE DO ANYTIHNG?” HOYT YOU’RE SO FUCKING ILLOGICAL HERE IM????? ERIKA DOES NOT (ALSO WILL NOT LMAO IM A STUBBORN BIITCH) COMPUTE

Can arthur fuck me like he pounds the trash/????🥵🥵👀

those dark curls.... that crooked tooth... must kiss.🥺🥺🥺

pennys casual cruelty makes me so fucking angry

foreshadowingggggg ~ *JAZZ HANDS*

ugh the way he dances with that gun im👀🥵🥵🥵

he enjoys the power of it and his breathing gets deeper asdfghjk

clumsy baby omggggg i just COOED 🥺🥺🥺🥺

okay maybe im stupid but i genuinely dont understand this “senior who needs to graduate” skit i’m??? how is being an intro to western civ student funny im???? someone explain???

but also dont bc fuck that guy lmao arthur’s hilarious

true millenial humour (and brit humour lmao we’re dark asf)

THE WAY ARTIE TWIRLS HIS FINGERS AROUND HIS HAIR AND DANCES IN HIS SEAT IM???🥺🥺🥺

wanna curl up on his lap at night when hes writing and go to sleep with a

blanket around our bodies🥺🥺🥺🥺

when arthur wears a shirt at home you KNOW it’s a daydream

THAT CROOKED TOOTH IM WANT KISS.

WAIT IS IT CALLED STAND UP COMEDY BC YOU STAND UP... AND ITS COMEDY???

23 FUCKING YEARS, PEOPLE... TO REALISE THAT🙄

WHEN CARNIVAL CAME ON SCREEN I NTHE HOSPITAL I MADE A PORNOGRAPHIC NOISE LMAO I LOVE HIM SO MUCH

IF YOURE HAPPY AND YOU KNOW IT, SHOOT MURRAY

WOOPS WRONG LYRICS

😂

“doctor of laughter”🥺🥺🥺🥺

doctor i have a case of the Big Sad can you... do an exam? 😉😏

NO BB DONT BEAT YOUR HEAD UP THERES PRECIOUS CARGO IN THERE

in what world does chucking cold greasy chips in a girls hair being “nice”???

lmao fuck these guys

ohhh honey breathe. dont fight it, my love, just breathe.

my heart’s breaking for you, you sweet thing🥺🥺🥺

i love you so so so so so so so much ugh you’re an actual fucking angel

just breathe darling

i need to get you a cup of tea with honey in it, your throat must be so sore

ohhhh baby im so sorry

i’d take every single punch if i could

i’d die for you

i wish i could protect you

i wish i could look after you

and take all those hits

and kill those guys for you

im so sorry

sobbingggg

YES GOOD MAN THANK YOUUU

KILL THOSE ASSHOLES LMAO DESERVED IT

yeah i have a grey morality... im similar to deadpool in that way tbh

carnival comin’ to kill your insecurities

8 bullets in a 6 chamber???? mm-hm

DONT FORGET YOUR BAG THATS EVIDENCE

AND THE WIG

RUN BABY RUNNNNNNN

GO GO GO GOOOOOOOOOOOO

RUN LIKE THE WIND BULLSEYE

THE SOUND OF HIS FEET SLAPPING THE PAVEMENT IM👀

OOOOOH JOKER’S WAKIN’ UUUUUUP

fuck he’s so hypnotic

the way he runs his hand down his lower stomach asdfghj🥵

must kiss the inner tendons on his wrists and lick the blood off his face

must kiss

he moves like water

fuck hes so fluid

bathroom scene = the scene in which my heart and vagina clench at the same time

im WANT

T POSEEEEEEEE

“i still owe you for that, dont i?”

PUNCH OUT IS MY FAVOURITE THING E V E R

D O N T S M I LE

UGH I FUCKING HATE being told to smile if i don’t fucking want to so BIG mood

PLEASE SHUSH ME THE WAY YOU JUST SHUSHED PENNY IM???

but also dont lmao bc i’ll think you’re mad at me and i’ll hide in the bedroom for the rest of the day lmao i’m sensitive✨✨✨

i wanna sit on his lap and still his bouncing knees

“thats not funny”

fuck off penny yes it is

I JUST CHOKED ON MY COFFEE IM???

“but i do” god the P O W E R

ugh that fucking sexist piece of shit comedian can choke “women look at sex like buying a car” 🤢🤮🤢🤢🤮

chauvinistic pigs can die thanks

his lil trip upstage im cry🥺🥺🥺

ohhh baby. just breathe, darling. it’s okay to be scared. dont fight it. just breathe.

he and i both cover our mouths when we laugh/smile in the exact same way and it makes me feel closer to him

how can they think hes laughing at himself when hes literally gagging????

people only see what they wanna

the Penny imitation is👌👌👌

s m i l e

i remember when i came home from seeing this for the first time, i got home and dropped to my knees to cry in the bathroom. it was such an emotional release and so much love and i played smile to try to make myself smile but i only made myself cry harder lmaooooo ~

smile and thats life are my go-to songs if i gotta cheer tf up

danger sign = neither works

he looks so soft after his “date”🥺🥺🥺

“thats life” yeah but murray you dont even leave the studio so how do you know????

ngl arthur’s anger scares me.

anyone so much as raise their voice at me and i’ll cry really bad and i will shut myself away for the rest of the day and quiet anger terrifies me so his banging abt in the kitchen would freak me tf out😲

angry bb😭

he controls his anger so fast though omgggg ~

that soft please sends me

idk where it sends me lmao

down below probably

BARE FACED CARNIVAL OMG THIS SCENE IS SO CUTE

I LOVE THE MATCHING COLOURS ON ARTHUR AND BRUCE TOO ???

okay but the implication that arthur always carries a clown nose on him is🥺🥺🥺

hes such a good clown im?????

lmao im enjoying the show more than bruce is skskskk

arthur’s lil chuckle makes me🥺

his HUMMING im??? soft?????

his brows are so strong and dark omggg ~ he’s so beautiful

OKAY i’ll be honest i’ve seen this alfred/bruce scene and the thomas bathroom scene later on and the penny flashback scene a 100 times and i still dont fucking understand what did or didnt happen regarding arthur’s parentage im????

ive seen interpretations to say he is thomas’ son and some to say he isnt and i still cant decide so? im stupid i guess 🙃

“a clown thing?” the s a s s

“it’s exit only” yeah so’s my ass🙃

if i was there in the hospital room i woulda turned that tv off as soon as i realised what clip was gonna play

murray’s cruelty is d i s g u s t i n g

lmao hes an asshole

arthurs lil clap from joyyyyy ~ 🥺🥺🥺

did i say murray???

i meant m u r r a t

🙃🙃🙃

sneaky baby

wayne hall either has super bad security or arthurs v quick on his feet

🤔🤔🤔🤔

he looks so good in red omggg ~

f o r e s h a d o w i n g

arthurs smile when hes watching chaplin is how he smiles when we all gush to each other abt him and ourselves!!!

hes so cuuuuuute🥺🥺🥺🥺😭😭😍😍😍🥰🥰🥰

“told me what”

ohhhh honey🥺🥺 im so sorry. “crazy” is a trigger word for arthur; it made him start laughing in the bathroom with thomas

“touch my son again ill fucking kill you” yeah?? touch my arthur again and i’ll fucking kill you🙃🙃🙃🙃

^^^ that ones a joke do not come at me

the clerk in arkham was nice to arthur - he, gary and sophie are the good gothamites.

none of it was enough to stop his descent into joker, though, and i’d even say it was too late right at the beginning of the film, too...

his sock puppet thingy “they cut all those” is such a Joker thing to doooo ~

the way arthur’s laughing in the hall at arkham turns into sobbing is gut-wrenching omg the poor thing😭

i wanna hug him and protect him and help him to process this in a healthy way

sweetheart, if i could take all of your pain and put it onto me... i so would. i’d do it in a heartbeat.

i wanna get you into a hot shower, make you some food and sit and listen to you. we can either sit in silence or you can talk to me, my love, and you will be heard and understood and loved.

“i had a bad day”

IT’S OKAY I DIDNT NEED MY HEART ANYWAY OMG YOU POOR SWEET INNOCENT THING IM LOVE YOU🥺💔

THAT ENTIRE LATE NIGHT SCENE LAUGH/SOBBING GOT ME -

💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔

i just wanna hold you and protect you and help you and love you

I’m so fucking sorry, darling. i wish i could take it all away from you

“i havent been happy one minute of my entire fucking life”

NO ONE SHOULD LOOK THAT ANGELIC AFTER COMMITING MATRICIDE IM????

get

that

fucking

gun

away

from

your

face

boi dont test me ill fucking go feral or - no, tell you what, i’ll point the gun at me and see how you like it

im looking respectfully at the green speckled undies scene....👀👀👀

“coming” 😏😏😏

“my mum died im celebrating” and “i stopped taking my medication” and you STILL stayed in the apartment with Arthur????? dudes those are 🚨🚨🚨 signs

woe betide anyone who underestimates arthur fleck lmaoooo

randalls death scene makes me laugh every time omg i feel so vindictive

get WRECKED

i wanna lick the blood off his face. i really want to

ngl i think i have a blood kink...

“dont look just go” ME WITH MY ACNE WHEN I SEE IT IN THE MIRROR 😂😂😂😂

JOKERJOKERJOKERJOKER

ASDFGHJKL

ERIKA.EXE HAS STOPPED WORKING

JOKERJOKERJOKERJOKERJOKERJOKERJOKERJOKERRRRRR

😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍 MY BABY MY MAN OMG THERE HE IS IM CRY???????😭🥺😭🥺😭🥺

my mind is literally blank rn im just staring and crying and smiling so hard my face hurts????? im love him so so so so much

sweet thing’s so used to pain he gets HIT BY A CAR AND KEEPS GOING????

I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU

hghhhhhhhhhhhhhh

euirrrrrrgkjbgkfbirsghigrbugr

*incoherent keyboardsmash to portray utter love*

ohhh baby no dont cry. oh honey😭 i wanna sit on your lap and kiss your tears away

“i love dr sally”

you have a WIFE at home

“DO YOU REMEMBER?” THAT WAS YOUR CUE TO APOLOGISE LMAO GET FUCKED MURRAT

he’s so CUTE

omgggg ~

my hearts gonna give out its SQUEEZING SO HARD IT HURTS

YOU MOCK THEM, BABY!!! THEY GOT IT COMING

“i wanna get it right” hes so passionate

my comments have deceased in number bc im just too starstruck and in love to even think clearly lmao

jokers all i know rn and this is the most peaceful ive felt in WEEKS

im sobbing

ugh fuck this hurts so BAD

youre speaking the truth, darling. im so so proud of you and i love you so much

“THEY COULDNT CARRY A TUNE TO SAVE THEIR LIVES” LMAO INSIDE JOKESSS

literally sobbing right now ugh what the fuck youre in so much pain and in the middle of a breakdown and no one saw you

ugh baby im so sorry, you deserve so much better

you tried so hard and you were gonna fall no matter what

IN THE WHITE ROOM

“hi” baby they cant hear you but im COOING 🥺🥺🥺🥺

you’re so fucking cute

say the word and ill burn gotham to the fucking ground for you

i wanna sit atop that car and cradle your head in my lap and wipe the blood off your face and help you stand up and be there for you and and and😭😭😭😭😭😭 i love you so so so much.

i’d be so much worse off without you in my life. you brought a splash of colour which has never dimmed or faded. it never will.

b l o o d s m i l e

im wearing my inside on the outside now and it still hurts

angel💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔

i see you and your pain. i love you.

i see you, angel.

his genuine laughter is🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

that cute lil “ksksks” he does im🥺🥺🥺

i always laugh with him omg the two of us are laughing together ugh its the closest i will ever get to sharing in his joy

t h a t ‘s l i f e

i love the hallway daaaaaaaaaaaaaance ~

them hips dont lie😉😉😉

i love you i love you i love you i love you omg the sun’s like a halo ugh i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you im singing along to thats life while i type out how much i love you at 220am lmaooooo ~

i l o v e y o u

#erileck #<- ref tag #arthur fleck #joker 2019 #erika talks

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hikaridemina · 3 years

Text

SO, I uh, wrote some stuff. Going with the whole Asmodeus’ daughter thing for my bat OC (until something happens in the show to rip my fancanon a new butthole but hey)

Really though I can just call this an AU where Asmodeus is one of the nicer rulers of hell and is trying his best to be a single dad.

I don’t write things often and I am so sorry in advance for how bad it is.

Warning, cringy fan-character bullshit.

-----------------------------------------------

"Hmm, let's see here..."

The bat demon flicked a strand of hair out of her face as she sat on the edge of her bed, shuffling through a few pamphlets she held in her hands. She pulled one paper out to take a better look at it. It had a picture of a circus tent printed on it along with obnoxiously huge text.

LOO LOO LAND GRAND RE-OPENING! JOB OFFERINGS AVAILABLE! APPLY NOW! ONLY IN THE GREED RING! (not associated with any coincidentally similarly named theme parks)

"Didn't this place just burn down a while ago? Man, they sure work fast when there's lost money involved."

She sighed and set the paper beside her on the bed, into the 'maybe' pile of job postings she had been looking through. The next paper she pulled out was printed with a bright red sky, however she only needed to read the headline to know which pile to sort it into.

- PRIDE RING seeking workers after another yearly extermination -

"Yeah no, I'd rather not have a holy spear shoved up my ass."

And so into the 'nope' pile it went, which was sadly about three times taller than the 'maybe' pile. One last paper remained for her to look at with crippling disappointment before she would just curl up in bed and go to sleep like every job hunting night.

"Oh for fuck's sake," she muttered as she immediately recognized the fancy writing and neon pink coloring, not to mention the array of hearts dotting the edges of the page.

♥Stop by the LUST RING now for the XXX-citement of a lifetime!♥ ♥Always hiring! Hourly pay available for those with advanced skills!♥ ♥Apply at Ozzie's today!♥

She let out a frustrated groan before crumpling the paper and tossing it to the floor. Almost as if that was some sort of trigger, her smartphone began ringing on the nightstand. She picked it up and read the caller ID, letting out another groan as she reluctantly pressed the answer button on the screen.

"Hey dad," she said flatly while still holding the phone in her hands, having set it to speaker.

"Demina! Sweetie! How goes the job hunting?" The voice was quite deep, despite sounding excited.

"Terrible."

"Oh, well, I might have some good news for you!"

"Dad, we've been over this. You know I'm not comfortable working... those kinds of jobs."

"Nonono! You see, I need an extra pair of hands to manage the books at the club. Guest lists, timetables, that sort of thing."

"So, how many drunk bastards am I going to have drooling at me?"

"... Sweetie, you know if things get out of hand, my bouncers are more than willing to-"

"Sorry dad, but I'm gonna pass."

There was a bit of an awkward silence as neither demon said anything over the phone. Finally the voice on the other end spoke up.

"Has... there been anything at all that's caught your interest?"

"Well," she picked up the first pamphlet and looked it over again. "Loo Loo Land is hiring. Says they need maintenance crew and people for general cleanup. That can't be too hard, right?"

"Hrmph, that's in the Greed ring. You'll be lucky if you ever see a penny from that cheapass Mammon."

"Aren't you two kinda friends, though?"

"Friends would be stretching it, but yes, we do make business deals once in a while."

"Mmhm," she continued to rummage through the stack of papers to her side on the bed. Her eyes went wide as she remembered an older paper at the bottom of the stack, pulling it out and causing all the other papers to scatter on the floor.

"Oh yeah, some rando gave me this flyer a few days ago. It's in the Pride ring but, holy shit the money they're offering is insane!"

"What is it?"

"Er, I'm not entirely sure to be honest... it just has a big fancy V on the front and an address. Says you need to inquire in person and they'll give you a list of jobs they currently have available. But it's like 100 bucks an hour!"

"Do not go anywhere near there!" her father's voice rang out from the phone like a guttural roar.

She held her phone out as far as her arm could go, taken aback by the sudden outburst.

"Whoa, what the hell was that?! What's so bad about it? Well aside from the whole ring being nuked every year..."

"Just please, please trust me," he almost sounded like he was... begging?

Another awkward silence, lovely. After a while her father was the first to speak yet again.

"If you're set on working in that theme park, I can help you find a place to live in the Greed ring, no trouble at all."

She stared blankly at the phone for a good moment.

"Re... really? Dad, you don't have to-"

"I insist. I'll start looking first thing tomorrow. Meanwhile, you should really get some sleep, don't let your old man keep you any longer."

Her bat ears drooped down as a twinge of guilt hit her. Suddenly she felt bad for the way she turned down her father's help earlier. "Thanks dad. I'll call you tomorrow, I promise. Love ya."

"I love you too, sweetie."

Click. The call hung up. On the other side, her father scrolled through his own phone, searching for something. He found a specific phone number and immediately dialed it, his eyes glowing in the darkness with a stern look as he brought the phone to his ear. It rang for a decent while until someone finally answered the other end.

"Ah, Asmodeus! To what do I owe a call from the great prince of Lust himself?"

"Shut it, you motherfucker. You think you're so clever but I know what you've been doing."

"Oooh, really now? Tell me, what have I been doing, hm?”

"Listen you four-armed freak, keep your goons out of my ring or else I'll be shipping them back to you in garbage bags."

"Hmph, wow, such a threat. So, how is the little not-princess doing? Still trying to make it on her own? I'd be more than happy to give her a job or two. ♫"

Asmodeus let out a growl as he clenched his fist on the desk. "Stay the fuck away from her or so help me I will-"

"You'll what? The king wouldn't be very amused if one of the princes of hell decided to start a war out of nowhere."

Another growl, deeper than the last, was met with a maniacal chuckle.

"Listen, Ozzie, you're a nice guy so I'll give you some advice. If I were you, I'd keep an eye on that pretty little daughter of yours."

BAM. Asmodeus slammed the phone onto the desk, shattering it into dozens of tiny pieces.

At the very least, he couldn't hear the diabolical laughter coming from the other side of hell.

#helluva boss oc #oc x canon #helluva boss #my writing

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starrysupercell · 3 years

Text

A quick one shot I whipped up over the course of yesterday evening to now. Give it up for our holiday-loving Pirate girl!

~💰~Penny For Your Pranks ~🃏~

It was very early in the morning, or super late at night, depending on how you want to describe it. The sun was nowhere near to coming out yet, and everyone was soundly sleeping.

For one girl, it was the perfect time to get up- for her plan that is. What plan was that, you ask? Well, it was the funniest day of the year, April Fools', and it would be such a waste to let it pass without topping last year!

No section would be left untouched by Penny today! She had targets everywhere.

To get started, she had to get from her room to the deck first. That meant sneaking past Darryl's room, then dropping down to the small rowboat attached before he noticed. Then, if things went well, she'd be out of reach thanks to her top secret plotted out map.

Penny opened the door slowly, carefully. She peered out and looked down the dark looming hallway. First right, then left.

She stepped out, opening the door further to take her brown bag stuffed full of tricks and tools she needed. Her trusty cannon was strapped to her back. For now, she also held her boots at hand to minimize any noises she made for the trek.

Penny tiptoed down the hall, stepping on the wooden boards that creaked the least. It took several long minutes, but it was well worth it when she made it to the surface without a problem.

The girl walked to the side of the ship. It was chilly, but nothing she wasn't used to. She placed the bag on the small boat one end, and began to climb over the side of the ship. She stood on it now with a triumphant grin and began to shift the ropes necessary to bring it down.

Penny looked forward and froze.

There, at the center of the deck stood a bot. Not the one she was on the lookout for, but one who could still make it or break her scheme. He bounced in place idly, a grin on his face. "Klafshgijnknalu?" Tick asked.

Penny held a finger to her lips and whispered. "Shhh...! Tick- Look. It's April Fools'! You can't expect me to hold still today."

"Spiwygdt? Ydeimwiwhbpa. Lwbikdya!" Tick frowned.

"I had to keep this under wraps, buddy!" Penny told him. "I would have told you, but this a big top secret project, I promise! Next time, I'll bring you along, but I need you to just keep it on the downlow, can you do that for me?" She reasoned with him.

"...Skjshfkulinbanieu," Tick said. "Lempikenlochopak."

"A month?" Penny rolled her eyes. "Fine! But I'm not gonna cover your tab anytime soon pal!" She stuck her tongue out.

"Sjsjkfjkti." Tick grinned and hopped away.

Even with the drawback of extra chores for a month (overpriced favor!), Penny smiled again. She looked out the water. That little exchange may have set her back some minutes, but she could still make due time. She lowered the boat carefully into the water. The rope went up, and she floated atop the water.

She shoved her boots on. She took off her beanie. The finishing touch to her ensemble was a Jester's Hat. Just for the occasion.

Penny began to row to the mainland of the Park.

°•○●○•°•○●○•°•○●○•°•○●○•°

The first place hit was the Junkyard. When they opened that day, everything seemed okay.

Pam had left some projects on the worktable the night before, so after breakfast she opened her toolbox and grabbed a hammer. Wait. It felt... light. She was strong for sure, but hammers usually had some weight to it.

With a strange look and unadulterated confusion, Pam hit the tool against the table. Squeak! "What in the..?"

Pam looked at her box, her tools. She grabbed and lifted it. Light as a feather. She turned the box upside down to dump out the contents of fake tools, but dozens of nuts and bolts fell out as well with a loud clatter. "Ugh!" Pam exclaimed.

Wait another pickin' minute. Today was a certain day, wasn't it? That day.

Jessie poked her head in through the door. "Are you okay, Mom?"

"It wasn't you who did this, was it Jessie?" Pam asked. For her sake, it better not have been.

"Um, no?" She said, walking in. She poked at one of the tools with her foot and giggled at its squeak. She stopped when she realized her mom was only frowning.

Pam believed her. She raised her so Jessie would know better than to lie. "Nani!" She called, annoyed as she kicked at the inflatable tools. "Come here!"

The robot entered with a smile. "Yes? What is it?" She asked.

"Go through Peep's archives. See if he filmed the troublemaker responsible for this prank."

"Okay." She responded dearly, sending a signal to her analog. The hovering bot zipped in, circling the room once before landing in Nani's hands.

Near instantly, fast moving scenes of the night before began flashing on Nani's screen. Dinnertime, preparing for bed, scouting the halls.

At one point, there seemed to be a flash of a silhouette with dark shades of purple and green present, but Peep's screen was suddenly shot with something that obscured his vision. He started the self cleaning process, but by the time it was done and he was ready to record again, whoever it was vanished. Everything seemed unchanged, so Peep went on his way.

"Crafty little.. bugger." Pam said, minding her language in front of her daughter. She sighed.

"Sorry," Nani said, her eye returning onscreen.

"Ehh, it ain't your fault. I'm more ticked at whoever's done this." Pam assured her. "I guess I'll continue later- well I'm expecting whoever it was to return or something. I'll raise hell if I don't get my tools back."

Jessie stayed quiet, the scene made her vaguely recall something that morning...

The more she thought about it, the more she could swear she recalled being woken up briefly by a bit of clattering outside. She sat up sleepily and looked out her window, where she saw a figure stumbled over a pile of junk outside.

She looked around and hastily ducked out of sight somewhere out of view, not noticing Jessie at all, it seemed.

Whoever it was, had short pink hair.

After that single observation, Jessie fell back tiredly and slept soundly once more.

'Penny?' Jessie wondered now. 'It makes sense too.. she loves every holiday.' The young redhead smiled to herself, a plan of her own beginning to form.

°•○●○•°•○●○•°•○●○•°•○●○•°

Tara meditated, facing the sun and feeling the warm glow graze her face. This was how she greeted every day. Reflection was essential. Taking time to be at peace with one's self, and the world around them was a daily task for her.

She inhaled, and kept her breath.

Somewhere inside, Sandy was drowsily walking along. He mumbled sleepily at Gene's garbled good morning.... and stepped on the rug placed in the living room. As soon as he placed weight on his foot, the bubble wrap underneath popped and he jolted, startled.

Sandy hopped forward to escape the noise, but only managed to set off more of the wrap. This went on for another couple of dance-like steps before an eye slipped open and he looked down at the carpet. "..."

He sidestepped and continued on his way to the bathroom, pretending nothing happened even as Gene laughed. He was fully awake now (as awake as Sandy could be that is.)

Tara exhaled evenly, but her eye was closed in a smile.

Yes, she did know. Nothing could escape her- not even a mischievous little jester... but that didn't mean she was obligated to warn everyone else here.

She laughed quietly in her mystic chorus of voices as she thought about the other little noisy traps set throughout the house.

'Like those cheap party poppers attatched to nearly every door,' Tara mused, hearing the tell-tale sound of the first one going off.

°•○●○•°•○●○•°•○●○•°•○●○•°

It was always a dilemma, practically ritual by now.

He took off the hat, and considered how he looked. He put it on, striking a different pose in front of the mirror. Then off again, and he worked on his hair with a hum.

Chittering from his Bats right outside his door made Mortis glance over. "What is it, my pretties?" He called, then mumbled absent mindedly as he continued to preen. "I'm trying to look pretty."

They started to scratch at the door. Mortis sighed, placed the top hat on his head, gave a "hmm," and tossed it to his bed to go and open the door.

His cloud of Bats flew in overhead, and Mortis ducked partway. "What? What is-?" He looked up at them, and his mouth opened slightly in a shocked, confused expression.

"Why are you all... festive?!" Tiny, colorful party hats and bow ties adorned a good number of the colony- Who... and how...when...?

He made it out of his room and darted to the dining room but Frank and Emz weren't there. He looked out the window, and was even more distressed.

The outside looked like....!

Mortis ran outside, his cape trailing behind him. He kicked the front door open, where there they were- His niece and Frank.

The scenery was bright and colorful- looking like someone's birthday party. Balloons littered the place, and there were streamers all along the house.

Frank was looking around, scratching his head.

Emz was flashing pictures. "You know, I'd thought this place needed a splash of color. And look at that, I was right!"

"This is a graveyard!" Mortis exclaimed. "It's supposed to be dreary!"

"Yea, I guess." Emz rolled her eyes. "I'm just saying, geez." She fixed her hair, and turned so the balloons would show up in her background.

Frank had walked to the side upon noticing a shining sheen of paint high above on the house. He grunted at the two to call them over.

It was a sparkly portrait of a unicorn gracefully mid-run. Pastel spray paint which likely had glitter in the mix. (It was washable, but the Spooky Triad didn't know this yet.)

"Who even had the time for all of this??" Mortis asked, hands in his hair and truly bewildered. "My Bats, the balloons, THIS!"

"Do your Bats look this cute too?" Emz asked, taking a whole new photoshoot with this backdrop too.

"Yes, the most precious things you'll see in your life, ever! But that's not the point here!" Mortis said in distress.

Frank laughed. He knew one thing. He wasn't going to help clean this up.

°•○●○•°•○●○•°•○●○•°•○●○•°

A tropical setting at the Snowtel, complete with coconut halves instead of paper snowcones for Lou.

'Please Use Other Door' signs were posted on every door in the Gift Shop... inside and out.

Sticky notes scrawled with 'out of order' was on everything in Bea and Rosa's Lab. Yes, everything. The computer, plants, Sprout, the desk, every single pen and pencil...

Bull's Diner... was now Bull-erina's. Instead of the cool and retro vibe the Gang was proud of, you guessed it. It was now a ballet dance studio-themed diner.

And so on and so forth with pranks along these veins at each of the sections. It was mayhem in Starr Park. The wild lass actually did it.

°•○●○•°•○●○•°•○●○•°•○●○•°

Penny yawned as she rowed back to Darryl's ship. Her bag was empty. Everyone would be discussing this until next April. And nobody caught her! All in a night's/morning's work.

The prankster climbed over the railing of the ship. She felt great.

One thing left, she tilted her near empty bag and scattered countless marbles on the floor.

And then, she headed back to her room to snooze for as long as possible.

It was a long night, so took her hat off, changed into some comfy PJs, and threw herself back onto her bed. She closed her eyes with a smile before hearing a faint beeping.

Penny opened her eyes in time to see a hatch on her ceiling open and a pie fall out.

The attack was direct on its target. Her face. Cherry Bomb...

The girl sat up, wiping off the fruits and crust as best she could to at least be able to see. Ugh..! Was this Tick? That little rat! She trusted him!

Penny stood and headed to her bathroom. She may as well take a shower. She's been up all night and then this. Afterward, she could sleep.

As she showered, the cherry smell never went away. She'll just deal with it later, she supposed. However, as she was drying off, she finally realized it. Her skin wasn't clean- she was sticky.

°•○●○•°•○●○•°•○●○•°•○●○•°

"...And as I was walking here, I saw a whole bunch of other places she hit already. So you'll be hearing from them if anyone pinpoints the pranks to her like I did." Jessie explained, popping a cherry Jolly Rancher in her mouth as she talked to Darryl at their table. "Thanks again for letting me put that motion sensor above her bed."

The Captain nodded. "If she dishes out pranks, she should expect them too."

They then began to chat about other things, how work was, the weather, and more.

Tick listened in and snickered at the turnout for the day. He went to the deck and slipped on some marbles. "Ogjwbrqltbbsheka!" He cried out.

#Penny #Brawl Stars #Writings #Pirate Trio #Jessie #Oneshot #Others #slight Jessie/Penny if you squint #I can go either way on them tbh #April Fools'#Holiday

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yeats-infection · 4 years

Note

hard agree with ur roommate on that WIP, that snippet was sooo good oml

by popular demand, here’s what i have so far of the possibly never-to-be-finished or maybe eventually-to-be-finished band of brothers weed farm AU, tentatively titled PURPLE HAZE, below the cut:

Dick was no hippie. He was also no fool. “We’ve got to hide it from the air,” he said thoughtfully.

“The real pros plant it between rows of corn,” Nix told him.

All in all this was going better so far than he had thought it would.

“What do we do with all the damned corn?”

“Why, moonshine, of course.”

“That’s pushing your luck,” Dick said. He was a real pragmatist. “How do you know all this?”

Nix scratched his head. He knew it was his poker tic, and he knew that Dick would know that too. “Family connections,” he said.

“I thought your family connections were in the fertilizer business,” said Dick, who knew this well, in fact, having worked for said company, for a brief time after the war, during the period when they had all independently decided they were going to try to hack it in the Real World.

“Well, what do you think they started off fertilizing?”

Dick hesitated. “I just don’t know why you never told me any of this before,” he said. “You haven’t made a habit of lying to me.”

“This was just omission.” Nix shrugged. “You’re a straight laced kind of man.”

“That I never wanted to drop acid with you when we were over there doesn’t mean I’m… entirely opposed to mind-altering substances.”

Nix had sure as hell fielded a lot of dirty looks, and, worse, concerned looks, in the CP over in Vietnam, when he closed the tent flaps behind himself and Dick after some particularly rough patrol or briefing and sparked a joint. Dick had always put a thoughtful hand up to go with the dirty or concerned looks, because Nix had always offered the joint to him, even knowing he wouldn’t take it. Especially knowing he wouldn’t take it.

“Well,” Nix said, “before I brought this proposal to you I wanted to make sure I had retained anything at all from my degree in horticulture.”

He took the film canister out from his pocket and put it between them on the kitchen table. For a moment Dick studied him, and then he grabbed the canister and opened it and poured the contents out onto one of the nice floral cotton placemats that had been made for him by his sister.

“I’m calling it Easy Diesel,” said Nix.

“You’ve got to be god damn kidding me,” said Dick, but he picked up one of the larger of the buds and carefully started pulling it apart. They had come out nice, if Nix did say so himself. They were big and sticky and a psychedelic iridescent purple-green.

“It’s my own breed,” Nix went on, wondering if he sounded desperate. He sure as hell felt desperate, not least for a god damn toke. “Good for sleeping.”

Dick cocked a pale eyebrow in his direction. “It helps you sleep?”

“Sure, this strain does, but I can breed different strains that’ll make you feel different things…”

“Nix, you grew this?”

He turned the bud in the light through the kitchen window, curiously, like a jewel.

“Well, I grew its grandparents from seeds, and then I crossed them, and this is the cross, second generation, grown from a cutting.”

“How many of these have you got?”

“Four in my bathtub in Jersey,” Nix said. “I’ve been showering at my sister’s. Couple more in the basement too, under a light.”

“And where do you get the seed?”

He’d hoped not to have to involve Dick in this part of it. “I have a contact,” he said.

“Nix, if I’m going to go in on this with you, I need to be an equal partner.”

“Fine. It’s Spiers.” As it had been over there. “You know he lives in Texas now, and he can get seed from Mexico. But I don’t need him anymore unless we want to grow another strain.”

“We might want to keep that in mind,” said Dick.

“Alright. I’ll write to him.” He indicated the bud in Dick’s hand. “We might want to try that before you sign on the dotted line.”

Dick passed the bud back across the table to Nix who set about expertly shredding it into flakes. “I don’t have any papers,” Dick said, watching him.

Nix cocked an eyebrow. “You used to smoke rollies exclusively!”

“Been trying to quit cigarettes. You just can’t keep anything in the house.” At Nix’s upward glance he said, “This is fine, though. As long as you have a way to smoke it.”

“You think I’d come all this way and level you with this without a way to smoke it?”

Nix had a little pipe in his overnight bag. He packed it and they lit up. The rest was history.

Nix had enlisted right after college. He didn’t want to go through the whole song and dance of avoiding the draft, and his father was breathing down his neck, having gotten a Purple Heart at Monte Casino in the Second World War. Dick had signed up straight out of high school, having believed out of his damnable earnestness that it was the right thing to do. Dick was like the “some folks are born, made to wave the flag” line from the beginning of “Fortunate Son,” but none of the bad stuff after. That was just the way he was. He had been at boot camp then in school learning to be an officer. They saw each other summers and went to the drive in movie theater and talked about the news from the Soviet bloc, and about spies and space and music. Sometimes Dick had Things to Say about the stuff Nix was learning about at Yale, like colonialism and hegemony, but they argued about it good naturedly and then they moved on to arguing about music. Dick liked those Greenwich Village folkies and he was legitimately let down when Dylan went electric. Nix had Are You Experienced on repeat. There were other things they didn’t talk about at all, like that Nix had read Alfred Kinsey’s reports in class and thought of himself first as a one, then as a two, then a three, and now intermittently as a four, sometimes even a five. The truth was he only incidentally thought of any people who weren't Dick. He couldn’t even regret being doomed to such a sorry condition, because being around Dick was such a joy. It was a joy, in its brutal way, even when they were over there. It was a joy when he had forgotten he could feel joy.

Now, after everything, Dick had all this land, off Route 6 not far from the New York border, on which the trees moved quietly, and the hills were low and green. He had all that land, and just about nothing else, because he had spent just about every penny of his salary from Nixon Nitration and his war pension and his inheritance from his parents' deaths buying that plot to get himself away from the world. In New Jersey, working for his father as little more than a body in a suit, Nix had just about everything he wanted, except his own soul. That was somewhere yet to be seen. In Vietnam, he must have put it down somewhere, like his helmet or his canteen or something, except that he had forgotten to pick it up. This had happened to most of them, except for Dick, who had doggedly held onto his somehow as he had also held onto his life, his relative sanity, his damnable good looks, and his even more damnable good humor.

The big idea was a relatively obvious one to Nix, who had had his first toke in San Francisco just before shipping out, and who drove out to Dick’s farm twice a month or so to shoot the shit at the kitchen table and lie sleepless in the twin bed in the guest room listening to the woods and the snoring from the next room over and debating numerous impossibilities until dawn, when he would get up and go down to the fallow fields and make estimates as to the soil quality. Then he would make coffee and biscuits. “Well damn, Nix, you didn’t have to do that,” said Dick, coming down around seven, chuffed and bedheaded, which was exactly why Nix had to do it.

He understood he had ulterior motives. But he could make an entire list of reasons why this wasn’t the worst idea he’d ever had that weren’t those ulterior motives.

Finally Dick said something like, “I don’t know how I’m going to do this anymore.” They were sitting at the kitchen table in the sunset. He offered Nix a weak smile that might be described as heartbreaking. “Might be scrounging for a job around Nixon Nitration.”

Nix couldn’t help himself, though it did feel like the first second when you had to stand up and start running across an open clearing under enemy fire, before the adrenaline kicked in and everything cleared. He had been waiting for the right moment for what felt like his entire life. “You wanna know what I think?”

Dick’s brow tightened. “I always wanna know what you think.”

“But do you really wanna know what I think.”

It was expensive to get a grow operation going. Nix had some money, but he’d long since drunk most of his nest egg, so it was barely enough to get seed and nitrogen and decent irrigation. They woke up with the sun and worked the field until it went down, and some nights they came stumbling in at dusk, sunburned, parched, and there was hardly any food to put on the table. It wasn’t much worse than it had been at war — rice, stale bread, cans of beans or tuna fish, hot water with lemon. Ears of steamed or grilled corn, eventually, when the crop got kicking. By night Nix hunched over the grow light in the living room and tended to the hatchlings. “Never seen you act so gentle,” Dick said, putting the radio on, settling onto the couch with the paper, dirt under his fingernails.

“Yeah, well.” His face was hot, not just because of the proximity to the light. “They’re notoriously fragile.”

They shared a joint, went separate ways to bed. Most nights Nix passed out before his head hit the pillow. This was a marked improvement from what things had been like back in Jersey. Who knew the secret all along had been back-breaking agricultural labor? He thought about writing a letter to the Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs or whoever was supposed to be handling the burgeoning public health crisis that was an entire generation's rampant PTSD.

They were accustomed to working hard together. Dick had never been the kind of officer who had gotten off on asking the underlings to do all the shit-shoveling, and Nix had followed suit, only wanting to be an officer half as good as Dick. He remembered participating in a kind of bucket relay, tossing sandbags off a truck toward the CP on one of the many, many nights it flooded. In the highest heat of the day he sat in the cool grass in the shade, drinking too-tart lemonade and puncturing a hose just-so with a knife to lay some makeshift irrigation. Dick came out after a few minutes with what passed for sandwiches. His sunburnt nose was peeling, even though he sometimes put zinc oxide on it like a lifeguard in a soap opera. “Remember when you got hit in the head?”

It was a ricochet that glanced off his helmet — the closest he had come over there to turning in his dance card forever. He had a headache for a few days after, and the doc had moved a flashlight between his eyes with an air of concern. Dick had been quite alarmed. He hovered for a while like some kind of fairy godparent. It was kind of embarrassing, but Nix didn't say anything about it.

“Of course I do.”

“Well,

Nix went to town to buy nitrogen at the Agway. On the way back he stopped for cigarettes at the general store. Scanning the magazine rack whilst the shopgirl fished out his Marlboro Reds he nearly had a massive coronary. There was a picture from Vietnam on the cover of Esquire Magazine with the following caption:

HEART OF DARKNESS: D.K. WEBSTER REVISITS VIETNAM

He picked it up. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“What’s that?” The shopgirl was a pregnant woman in overalls and a man’s ribbed tank top. She tossed the cigs Nix’s way.

“Nothing.” He showed her the magazine, wishing he had the sleight of hand to just shove it up his shirtsleeve. “I’ll take this too.”

In the parking lot, he checked that the bags of nitrogen were secure in the bed of Dick’s pickup, and then he sat on the back bumper in the profound sun and opened to the table of contents, then, skipping cologne ads and spreads of beautiful women in states of undress, opened to the introductory page preceding Webster’s article. According to the byline, the pictures had been taken by a photographer who had been with their company for a little while, had been all over the country and had disappeared in the Spring of 1970 somewhere on Cambodia’s Highway 1. The article was preceded by a two-page spread of one such photograph of Easy Company on Hill 926 toward Christmas ’69. He looked over the faces of all the boys, naming them, the dead ones and the alive ones and the should have been dead ones and the should have been alive ones, inside his mind, until he came upon the pixelated black mar of his own eyes. Then he folded up the magazine and put it in his back pocket and drove back up to Dick’s farm in something of a fugue state. Over there, on the rare occasions upon which they had access to a Jeep, Dick usually drove it, because Nix was usually under the influence of something or other. Dick could not be gotten under the influence of anything besides grief, or anger, a few times that he let Nix see, and these did not seem to cloud his judgement overmuch. It had been something to see Vietnam that way — like a tourist, watching the forest from the windows, the beach and the water, the blood in the water, the great napalm swaths like deep burned scars. He had thought at first that Dick thought he was stoned and useless, but now he wasn't so sure, and anyway it had felt like a strange gift, like new eyes…

Back at the farm, he practically threw himself down in the better chair pulled up to the kitchen table. He rolled a joint and sparked the end of it. Thus prepared, he took the magazine out of his pocket and began to read:

In March 1969, D.K. Webster appeared before the editor of this magazine and just about prostrated himself before the news desk to ask if he might be permitted to cover the conflict in Vietnam. He flew to Saigon that June and embedded himself with E Company of the elite 101st Airborne, where he remained until February of the following year. Shortly after returning stateside he checked himself into an inpatient mental health facility. Now, three years later, he has at last filed his first story for this magazine. — Ed.

The boys were just about to go to the wire for the night when I got to the camp on Hill 926. The guns among them were varied and babied like children. Spit-shined barrels caught the last sun. The medic came over at the last with speed pills. There was no dinner. I was shaken up, literally, from the chopper, and also figuratively, being as I had been the only living cargo, unloaded en route to Saigon with corpses draped with their camouflage ponchos, ripped through with bulletholes and muddy with blood. I was pretty sure my brain had released the store of psychedelic chemicals you were supposed to get at the moment of death so it was just as well the medic didn’t offer any speed to me, that first night, though he would later.

The boys were my age. Some were younger than me. After some spiteful if hushed debate among themselves they gave me a helmet which had belonged to someone dead. There was blood splattered inside it and nothing to clean it out with. Still, I put it on. The bodies in the chopper had put the fear in me and there were not, absolutely were not, enough cigarettes. I waited for someone to offer me one, but nobody did. Instead the First Sergeant offered me a gun.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

Remembered belatedly you were supposed to call them sir. Some of the grunts snickered.

“Point it and shoot it,” said the First Sergeant.

I’d been in places where they wanted to put a show on for me and in other places where they herded me back onto the chopper as soon as they heard I was a reporter. I had also been in Saigon, where there was not much to do but lie in bed drunk and jerk off until raw. On Hill 926 I was another body with a beating heart. I took the gun and we went to the wire. There were more boys out there taping sixteen clips together so they’d go faster. They had gloves to move the big box guns by the hot barrels but the fabric was wet and rotting. Cassette player spinning Donovan. Somebody had VOODOO CHILD engraved into his helmet. At last somebody gave me a god damn cigarette. You would have needed something to look across what men like these in previous wars might have termed no man’s land. The napalm had turned the edge of the forest into a bridge between this world and Hades. The night fog was coming out of it. Between us and that was barbed wire stretched over blood-slaked mud, hung with charred corpses. Now I was glad there had been no dinner.

The speed was kicking in for just about everybody else. Because there was nothing to shoot at yet they took a keen interest in my well-being. “Keep your head down.” “Keep your mouth shut.” “Keep the belt flat.” “If you get hit, yell for the medic. Only if you get hit!” Finally, “For gods sake wait for one of us before you god damn start shooting.”

I asked them if they ever got friendly fire.

“Medic in 4th Company got killed that way.”

“Took out some of the Lurps in the 67th.”

You were always learning new words which were just ways of saying things that took less time.

“Long range recon patrollers,” explained one of the boys. The nameplate, as well as the sleeves, had come off his jacket, but everybody called him Babe, except for the medic, who called everybody by the surname, and Babe’s was Heffron. When he looked to the forest, he saw something I didn’t, because of his training, and because he had put greasepaint around his eyes, like an ancient Egyptian lady, against the infernal messaging of the high yellow moon. Ready to burst like a pincushion mushroom on the edge of the horizon. “Ours are coming,” he said.

“You see em?”

The call went down the line to hold fire. The movement in the fog and the skeletons of the trees — like actors on a stage, like apparitions, ghosts. There were two negotiating the brutal wasteland, delicately around the landmines. Someone put a flare up. There was a captain and a corporal, differentiable by the insignia upon their tattered uniforms. They wore greasepaint and carried rifles. The corporal had let his rest against his forearm and shoulder so that he could roll a cigarette from a pack of loose tobacco drawn from inside his destroyed fatigue jacket.

A line from Dylan surfaced in the civilian part of my mind: Maggie come fleet foot face full of black soot…

“How long have they been out there?”

“Since yesterday noon.”

The captain went toward the CP to speak to the major. The corporal came into our foxhole and sat up against the sandbags to light the cig he’d just rolled. His boots were so bad he might as well have been barefoot. His eyes were dark, helmet askew and dented. A startling quality of blood on his person not necessarily his own. “How many, Lieb,” said the gunner, Toye.

“Two companies coming down from the mountain camp. Who’s got pills?”

“Two companies?”

“That’s what I said, ain’t it?”

“Lieb, we’re just one company.”

The dark gaze found me. It was like looking back into the edge of the forest, the skeletons and fog, shadows, death lurking close at hand. “Who’s this then?”

Heffron cackled. “They gave us a correspondent.”

I made up my mind I had to talk to the LRRP that the boys called Lieb, because he scared the shit out of me.

The Lurps’ job was to go into the woods and try to figure out whereabouts the VC were moving, where they were encamped and the gear they had, their numbers, the locations of their traps and tunnels. The company at the camp on Hill 926 had two men who served this purpose, the captain, Spiers, and the corporal, Liebgott. Rumor was general in the camp about the quantity of VC these men had killed and the things they had seen and done. Between them they had done five tours before this one. Between them they were rumored to have survived a chopper crash, at least three VC ambushes, a court martial, a suicide attempt, a week without sleep, more than fifty parachute drops, booby traps galore, setting foot in the city of Hue, flushing out a collective six VC tunnels, and stepping on a no doubt exaggerated quantity of dud landmines. Spiers was unapproachably scary. He had allegedly executed prisoners on numerous occasions. In the heights of misery when not even the Dexedrine pills could bring you up out of the depths of the fear the men would joke about asking the captain to take them behind the CP and get it over with.

Liebgott, called Lieb, not seeming to understand what this word actually means in the German language, was also a stone killer by all accounts, thoroughly dead in the eyes, like looking at them you were surprised his lips weren’t blue, and they caught no reflection, but he spent all his time at camp, which was slim, listening to Da Capo and The Notorious Byrd Brothers (Do you think it’s really the truth that you see? I’ve got my doubts it’s happened to me) on cassette and chain smoking. This made him seem like someone I might have gotten to know if I had stayed in college, though I understood this was a fallacy. Anyway, by this point I was taking the uppers when the medic offered so I went over of an early morning when he was shaving his face.

He had Love on. “You know you have the same name as this band,” I said.

He was trying to figure out if I was serious. He had the razor poised right over his carotid artery. Under all the greasepaint he had good skin, thin beard, hollow cheeks. His hair was limp and filthy. In another life he might have been good looking. I sat down in the mud. That’s how bad I wanted to talk to him. I sat in the goddamn mud. The mud was made of blood and piss and worse around here. It didn’t even faze him, because he was sleeping in worse every night he was out there.

Tried another in: “You listen to Forever Changes?”

He set the razor gliding again over the bone of his jaw. “Had a tape,” he said. “It rotted.”

“Well, I’ll see if I can get you another one.”

He was trying to get the read on me. “What do you want.”

“Talk to you.”

“Not enough to get shot at out on the wire?”

“This is for Esquire,” I said. “It ain’t for Newsweek.”

He spat in the mud, but it came so perilously close to the toe of my left boot that it might’ve been intentional. “Can’t say I’d make a good centerfold,” he said. His face was twitching with the smile he was playing like he was too tough to put on it. “Even in lingerie.”

I liked him, though he made himself very difficult to like, and was out in the bush with Captain Spiers more nights than not; when you got him warmed up, he would talk about it, sometimes too much, sometimes things you didn’t really want to know. I went back to my bedroll and wrote them down and tried to put them out of my head. Six months later, I was at the tail end of a sleepless 36-hour benzo binge, and the wind was blowing wrong, out of the wrong mouth at the wrong end of the world, bringing rain and the smell of death and napalm and the latrines, on the suffocating humid night when Spiers half-carried him out of the woods —

Dick’s shadow loomed over Nix’s shoulder and distorted the light on the text. “This is mildly embarrassing,” he said.

Nix felt like someone had grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and yanked him out of a dead man’s float. “Hell,” he said, voice cracking, “for who?”

Dick shrugged. “Everybody involved.” He headed over to the stovetop percolator to spoon in fragrant coffee grounds. “David might've played it a little less fast and loose on the schoolboy crush front.”

“Schoolboy crush?”

Dick cocked an incredulous eyebrow. “Nix, your reading comprehension leaves something to be desired.”

“On — wait. On Liebgott!”

Dick turned back to the stove. “Maybe you need an eye test.”

Nix dropped the magazine on the table like it was radioactive. He supposed it might have been. His heart was acting up. What other kinds of things had Dick noticed? “My head was pretty damn far up my own ass.”

“I’d say so. Anyway, in my day we called that kind of prose florid.”

“In your day! Where the hell?”

“High school English.”

The knock at the door in the night was a sharp shock, bright as lightning, that sent them both back to Khe Sanh and before. Nix ducked. Dick went behind the doorframe. They kept low into the kitchen, where Nix took his old officer’s pistol out from where he kept it hidden behind the fridge. Then they went to the door, keeping to the edges of the hallways.

On the porch was Liebgott. He could have made his own way in likely right onto the couch without either of them noticing, so it was something that he had knocked on the goddamn door. It was particularly something given that none of the boys from Easy should have known about the grow operation, or even about Dick’s farm, being as Dick’s address on file at the V.A. was a post office box in town and Nix’s was still in Jersey. These considerations were nil to somebody who had spent the better part of five years in the bush of Vietnam. He took a last draw from his cigarette and put it out against the rubber sole of his boot, then he put the butt in his pocket. As far as Nix knew, he hadn’t said a word since January 1970.

“Joe,” said Dick diplomatically. He put his hand out and Liebgott took it. Then he took Nix’s. He had handsome dark eyes, but they were full of a wall. You could tell he saw you, but it was like nothing followed the necessary channels to the brain to spur emotional response. It had been like this even while he was still talking, and after a while you got used to it.

“You comin' in,” said Nix, knowing he probably would even if he wasn’t invited.

Inside, they all three sat at the kitchen table in silence nobody was about to break. Finally Dick got up and went to the drawer where they kept the rollies and their share of the product. He passed a sheaf of papers and a film canister full of bud to Liebgott across the table. Nix understood as well as Dick apparently did that there would be no getting anything over on this kid, who had eyes in the back and sides of his head. He’d probably had a nice tour of the property before coming inside. “You hungry, son,” Dick said.

Liebgott shook his head. He extracted one of the buds from the canister and inspected it. They did look mighty good if Nix said so himself. They looked artful in Liebgott’s hand. There were black scabs across his knuckles and a dark rime of filth under those fingernails which still existed. He seemed satisfied enough with what he saw to take a paper out of the sheaf and start shredding the flower into it.

“Captain Nixon calls it Easy Diesel,” said Dick, like he was trying to pretend it wasn’t the funniest thing in the world.

Liebgott looked up and a smile flashed across his face like the savage golden light of a flare falling over the far hills. His smile was sort of brutal, like the edge of a knife in a barfight, or like a seething animal. Luckily it went away as quickly as it had come. He rolled the joint with a quick grace and lit the business end with his old silver Zippo Nixon hadn’t seen since the war. There was a skull engraved on one side and on the other it read IF YOU ARE RECOVERING MY BODY, FUCK YOU.

“I don’t know how you found us, Joe,” Dick said thoughtfully. “You don’t have to… tell us. But we ain’t exactly keen to have just anybody here.” He paused and looked quickly to Nix, who tried to make it abundantly clear by means of eyebrows that he wasn’t sure they ought to go down this road, wherever it was leading. Dick ignored him. Liebgott was watching them, fully understanding their attempted clandestine exchange. “We ain’t exactly keen to have the DEA here,” Dick said at last.

The cherry at the end of the joint atomized with a crackling hiss. Liebgott looked between Dick and Nix with extreme seriousness sullied only by his exhaling a dignified white cloud out his nose. Then he nodded, once, curtly, demonstrating he understood his orders as they had been relayed.

Nix flashed Dick what he thought was a what have you done type look. But Dick looked totally unbothered. He should have gone into this business years ago for how violently unflappable he was. He said to Liebgott, “I’ll get some blankets and you can make up the couch.”

Liebgott shook his head to say no need. He got up, careful not to scrape the chair against the floor, shook each of their hands again, and in less than a minute’s time he was back out the door with nothing more than what he’d come in with except the joint.

Nix and Dick, on the porch, listening to the crickets, watched him disappear into the darkness.

“Are we hallucinating,” said Nix eventually.

“I sure as hell hope not,” Dick replied. “We’ve got to ship all that product or we’ll starve.”

In the morning Nix was in the field, inspecting the plants. Liebgott was standing there at his quarter for god knew how long before he cleared his throat and Nix jumped about six feet in the air. There was a smirk shifting across Liebgott’s face that he would have been better about hiding when Nix had been his commanding officer. He looked like he hadn't slept. Back over there he had looked like that a lot, but it had been different, because of all the uppers they were taking. He cocked his head back over toward the long driveway and then he was off across the dew-wet grass which had already soaked through the hems of his canvas pants and his destroyed shoes.

Nix followed, like a duckling behind a hen. Liebgott still walked as though there were eyes in all sides of his head quickly processing information as he moved. Nix doubted you ever lost that kind of skill, even if in the real world it made you look like a mental patient. He caught up so they could walk side by side through the dew-wet grass. “What did you think,” he asked Liebgott.

Liebgott passed Nix the universal sign of furrowed brow that meant please clarify.

Nix gestured with pinched fingers to his own mouth as though Liebgott were also deaf. “The grass.”

He shaped his hand into an a-ok sign.

“You get any sleep?”

He nodded an infinitesimal nod, like the answer was a secret just for Nix to know.

“Well if you think it could be better just tell me how.”

Nix had had a high school friend whose sister was deaf from scarlet fever and whom he had watched on occasion communicate with her by means of sign language. Early on, back over there, he had sent off to command for a book, but by the time it came he understood it wasn’t that Liebgott couldn’t speak, he just didn’t want to. It was something like how people’s hair supposedly turned white if they witnessed some evil thing, or how people became ascetics in the name of god. If you were really fucked up on drugs or fear or otherwise, or if the natural magical thinking from childhood hadn’t been fully beaten out of you, you might have seen it as the sacrifice he had given to the forest for letting him out without a scratch so many goddamn times. It had been a bit of a trial to explain this to Spiers, who was practical almost to a fault, sometimes.

Liebgott showed another a-ok sign. Then he did a thumbs up which Nix knew meant it was good.

All in all it was smart. If he was still talking, Nix might have asked him, what have you been up to? You been sleeping on the street? You been to the V.A.? What did they tell you? And the answer would’ve been nothing good. Instead they just walked in the cool grass together in the sunshine and the morning was beautiful, and the air was sweet. It was all lovely until Liebgott had to physically stop him, laughing, somehow silently but also hysterically, from stepping right onto the razor-thin tripwire stretched invisibly across the dark gravel.

In the kitchen, Dick was doing the numbers. He took his glasses off when Nix came in and put the coffee on. “He learned a thing or two from Charlie,” Nix said, leaning against the counters.

“Who, Joe?”

“Our driveway is thoroughly ratfucked.”

“Hmm,” said Dick. He put the glasses back on and turned back to the accounting book. He was going to do this whole thing as above board as was humanly possible. The vivid daylight came through the window and struck the lens of his unstylish Ray-Bans and threw a kind of prism of color upon the white paper and the chicken-scratch sums. Nix felt like maybe this was something you would paint if you had the necessary implements and artistic ability. “Maybe we should see if we can get any more help.”

He was mildly ashamed to say it, but the doc had always kind of creeped Nix out. He imagined a hypothetical conversation with Dick, who he knew loved the kid, almost like a son: Listen, don’t get me wrong, he’s a good kid, I owe him my life, yadda yadda. But either he’s dropped the brown acid one too many times or the voodoo exorcism went FUBAR.

The doc had arrived on the farm on the heels of Sunshine and Rainbows, aka Mr. Bright Eyed and Bushy Tailed, aka one Edward “Babe” Heffron. Nix had written Babe in South Philly, being as he was a connoisseur of bud and once upon a time had been famed among their company for smoking anything anyone put in his hand, often to his own detriment. The operation was getting big enough that Nix needed another pair of hands, other than Liebgott, of course, who was still fortifying the long driveway whilst giving away his cover by playing Led Zeppelin IV as loudly as was possible. It was a tough calculation, because Babe was a genius of pot, but he couldn’t keep a damn secret, and lo and behold he had dragged along with him a dark shadow in the human form of Eugene Roe. They came up the driveway in a big old Ford pickup that rattled its rust off in the potholes. Liebgott had dismantled the traps specially for their arrival when they had called from Williamsport to say they were an hour out.

“I figured we could use a medical professional to lend some credibility to the operation,” said Babe thoughtfully, sparking a joint on the porch over sweating jam jars of iced tea.

Roe snorted or something but it wasn’t really a normal person’s self-effacing laugh. Winters clapped his back. Nixon knew Roe had dropped out of medical school after two years but there was no need to say anything. Everyone knew that. Now he was working construction and Babe claimed to be working as a mechanic in a garage, but this seemed suspect given the state of the car they had driven up in.

“Well we sure as hell are glad you boys are here,” said Dick magnanimously.

Babe exhaled an opaque cloud that rivaled Nix’s own father’s ability with a stogie. “Can we see the bush?”

They went out all together to the field and ducked between the rows of corn. Babe knelt in the soil. It was damp with dew and quiet in here. It would have been almost like over there except it smelled good. “What’s the cross,” Babe said, inspecting the plants.

“It’s an indica blend…”

“Well, I can tell that,” he said.

“So you’re an expert on the plant now too?”

“I’ve just smoked an awful lot of joints in my life, Captain Nixon.”

Roe snorted again. When they all looked to him he said, “You said in the letter there was some kind of altruistic reason for all this.”

“It’s medicine, Gene,” Babe said gently, but also like they had had this conversation thirty thousand times. Nix filed away for later the intimation that Roe had read the letter he’d sent Babe at home in South Philadelphia.

“I guess you don’t remember the psychic break you had at the Do Lung Bridge.”

Babe waved this remark off, even though Nix remembered it too. It threw a chill down his back, like a water balloon had hit him at the base of his neck. “That was laced,” Babe said.

“With what!”

“I don’t know! Something bad!” Babe turned to Dick and Nix. “Gene’s teetotal,” he said, like this was a big old point of contention.

So that counted out the bad acid. Maybe he was just like this. Maybe he had had those big sad bug eyes as a child or an infant or a fetus in the womb. “Good on you, Doc,” Nix said.

“I ain’t trying it,” Roe said, folding his arms over his narrow chest, “no matter what it does.”

The doc was a tough cookie. Babe had claimed, over there, about as high as the Byrds song, that the doc came from a long line of the kind of folks described in Dr. John’s “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya” and that, as such, he could heal wounds with his mind. When it didn’t work, as on the night when Jackson died, or the night when Hoobler died, or in the forest when Muck and Penkala died, or the night when Liebgott stopped speaking, he went to sit for a while on the edge of camp until Dick went over and made him eat something. Nix watched them in a state of confused envy, and then he went to write the letters to the families, so that Dick wouldn’t have to.

At dusk, after they ate a light dinner of corn on the cob and rice and beans, he took the boys up into the hayloft with an armful of blankets. “Sorry this is the best we got,” he said. He had said that about a hundred god damn times since they got here.

Roe looked like he wanted to say, you’ve got to stop apologizing for everything. Instead he said, “Where does Lieb sleep.”

Babe perked up. “Joe’s here?”

“You didn’t see him in the driveway?”

Nix sighed. “He’s gonna want to know what he did wrong that you saw him,” he said.

“Does he still — ”

Nix shook his head. “Not a peep.”

In a couple days time, he couldn’t take it anymore, and he was hot and tired and stoned, up to his elbows in earth in the field, showing Babe how to replant the hatchlings he’d grown from seed. “You guys room together or what?”

“Me and Gene?” Babe’s eyes were red in the corners from smoking and from the sun. “What about you and Dick?”

Dick, who had the radio on inside turned up as loud as it would go, so that they would hear it in the field, playing Crosby Stills and Nash doing “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” “What about me and Dick?” said Nix.

Babe was a smart kid. He realized this was going nowhere. With muddy hands he popped one of the seedlings out of its little pot and cradled it into the ground. “Well, I think he thinks he’s looking after me, but in actuality, I am looking after him.”

---

i do hope to someday finish this. webster in this AU is based on michael herr and that whole section is my impression of dispatches. the band that lieb and webster start to bond over is arthur lee’s band love. lieb’s lighter is based on a real one i saw on here sometime. this whole conceit is inspired by steve earle’s “copperhead road.”

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korora12 · 5 years

Text

Ladybug Week Day 7 - Bookstore

Day 6 Day 8

Word count: 2201

Ghosts in the Closet and Other Scary Stories. Grimm Eclipse. The Lone Hatchling: A Qedem’s Story of Overcoming Hardship. Cyber-Ninja Vs. Zombie Cats. That one sounded silly, Ruby thought as she perused the book titles before her. She wondered if Blake would like it.

Ruby reached for the book, only to bump into someone else as she did. An apology had already slipped out of her mouth before she saw who she’d hit. It was a girl in a short, shoulderless dress and leggings, with red hair and long, donkey-like ears.

Ruby recognized her in an instant, even though she hadn’t seen the girl – no, woman – in years. “Penny? Is that you?”

The woman in question startled, then peered closely back. “Friend Ruby? How fortuitous and unlikely to see you here! You’ve gotten so much taller!” She spoke with the same enthusiastic and precise tone that she had when Ruby had first met her.

Ruby chuckled. “Yeah, humans tend to do that.” She found herself suddenly lifted in the air as strong arms wrapped her in an unbreakable grip.

“I haven’t seen you in years! How have you been?”

Ruby’s bones groaned in protest. “I missed you too Penny, but you’re crushing me. Please let go.” When her feet had returned to the ground, she took a moment to stretch out her aching rib cage. “I’ve been good. What are you doing out here? This system’s the last place I’d expect to run into you. Did you leave Atlas again?”

Penny shook her head, her hands still on Ruby shoulders. “No, I’m actually here for work. What about you, Friend Ruby? What brings you out this far?”

“Freelance work,” Ruby answered. “I finally got my own ship. Her name is Crescent Rose.”

“Oh,” Penny started to shake Ruby in excitement, “I’m so happy for you. That’s just what you always wanted!”

“Tha-a-anks Penny,” Ruby managed to get out before Penny stopped shaking her. “I actually came to this shop with my girlfriend. You should come meet her.”

“That sounds wonderful!” Penny said, even as Ruby was already dragging her along by her wrist.

x-x-x-x-x-x-x

It wasn’t a particularly large bookstore that they’d found themselves in. It was located in downtown Evernight, the capital of Eltanin and finest (read: only) city in ten parsecs. Squeezed in-between a local furniture shop and a Mistrali restaurant, Blake had found that, despite its abysmal organizational system, Tukson’s Book Trade was one of the best places to find rare and unusual books.

The store’s small size meant she would’ve needed to be completely ignoring her surroundings to not see her girlfriend heading straight towards her with an unfamiliar woman in hand.

No, wait, Blake recognized her. She looked like Penny, the synthetic she’d met in the other universe they’d traveled to. The two of them had spoken briefly, that Penny interested in an entire species of beings like her, but aside from both being amongst the only three people still sober after the queen’s reception party, they hadn’t had much in common.

“Blake!” Ruby shouted, a completely unnecessary act in such a quiet place. Fortunately, the owner seemed to be the only other person in the store. “I want you to meet someone.” Coming to a halt, Ruby gestured dramatically at her companion. “This is Penny. She’s, like, my oldest friend.”

Blake took a moment to look her over. She was a bit smaller than Ruby, with short hair wrapped up in a bow and small bag slung over her shoulder. Everything about her, save for her second set of ears and her giant smile, seemed small, giving her an overall appearance of youth. Of course, she was clearly a FAUNIS, so apparent age had nothing to do with actual age. By comparison, Ruby was no giant, and she occasionally gave off a false air of naïveté, but she never looked as childish as Penny did. Still, the two of them standing together, side-by-side and grinning like idiots, churned something in her stomach. They looked like peas in a pod, to borrow a Valean saying, like they belonged together. She fought the urge to look away.

“Pleasure to meet you,” Blake said. “Ruby never mentioned you.”

“What?” Ruby glanced back and forth between the two of them. “I must’ve mentioned her at some point.”

“Not that I remember,” Blake countered.

“That’s alright,” Penny said. “It was a long time ago, and we didn’t really know each other for all that long.”

“Mhmm,” Ruby hummed, settling her gaze on Blake. “I met her back on Patch, when I was a little girl. It was shortly after my mom died, and Penny was just the friend I needed to help me through everything.”

“Oh, you’re too kind,” Penny rejoined. “You helped me quite a bit too, you know. I’d only recently been freed from my previous duties, and found myself quite uncertain what to do next. I may well have remained floundering if not for your wise words.”

Freed? Was she referring to the FAUNIS liberation? That would make her older than Blake, though probably not by much, given her behavior.

“Oh stop,” Ruby said, blushing and wriggling in place. “I was, like, six. It couldn’t have been that wise.”

Blake put her arm around Ruby’s shoulder and pulled her in tight, ending her squirming.

“I’ve been living with Ruby for almost a year now,” Blake announced.

“Yes,” Penny said, “Ruby mentioned you two were dating. I’m thrilled to meet the woman who’s captured her heart.” She grabbed Blake’s free hand with both of hers and began vigorously shaking it up and down. “And another FAUNIS at that. It’s such a pleasure to meet you.”

Despite Blake’s metallic skeleton, it still felt like this woman was about to rip her arm off in her enthusiasm. When at last she stopped, Blake had to shake her hand to regain its feeling.

A staredown commenced, Blake’s stern silence versus Penny’s cheerful smile, until Ruby finally broke the tension.

“So, Penny, what brings you to Tukson’s?”

“I’m here to purchase a book,” she replied, removing just such an item from her bag. Enemy of Steel was the title, the first of a very popular series of crime novels. “It’s a gift for General Ironwood.”

“General?” Blake asked. “Are you in the military, then?”

“That’s correct. Junior Lieutenant Penny Polendina, Atlas 32nd Division, at your service.” She sketched a brief salute.

Atlas had a tendency to rely on military might to maintain control of its colonies and Eltanin, new, volatile, and politically complicated as it was, was of particular interest to every kingdom. It wasn’t too surprising to hear that Atlas forces were in the city, though the presence of a general was a bit unexpected. Even less expected was that Penny was a member of said military. The Atlas government had made heavy use of FAUNIS to bolster its armed forces back when they were considered property, but since their liberation, most FAUNIS had fled the military for a calmer, less deadly lifestyle. Very few had willingly returned to active service. Even less obtained a rank as high as Penny claimed to have.

“How long have you been serving?” Blake asked.

“All my life,” Penny answered. “Except for a few years after the Liberation, during which I met Ruby.”

Blake shook her head. She couldn’t imagine willingly returning to the people that had enslaved her. “Why would you go back?” she asked. “I’ve talked to other FAUNIS who were forced into Atlas’s military, and they all have horror stories about what they went through.”

Penny’s smile disappeared, leaving her looking serious for the first time since Blake had met her. “My decision to return was complicated and personal; it took years to make. But whatever you might have heard about Atlas military, there are good people there too, and they’re trying to do good work.” She waved her book around. “General Ironwood is a good man of fine character. He’s looked out and cared for me for most of my life and he’s earned my respect a thousand times over.”

“Okay!” Ruby declared, looking about ready to jump between the two. “We’re hitting on some pretty serious topics for a first meeting. Blake, have you found a book you like?”

Blake allowed the topic change, nodding and pulling a book she’d been eyeing off the shelf.

“Great! I’ve got what I want and Penny’s got what she wants. Let’s all go pay for our new books.”

Blake continued to hold on to Ruby’s shoulder, letting herself be dragged along by the smaller girl.

As their purchases were rung up by a very bemused-looking man who had probably heard every word they’d said, Ruby and Penny exchanged contact information, promising to catch up at a later date. The three left the shop together, at which point Penny went in one direction and Ruby and Blake another.

“Blake,” Ruby began, looking up at her from under Blake’s arm as they walked, “are you… jealous?”

Blake inhaled sharply. Is that what this was? The roiling in her stomach every time she thought of Penny being anywhere near Ruby, of the past the two had shared, was that jealousy? She’d never been jealous of someone before, always thought herself above that. She wasn’t sure what to do with it now that it had reared its head.

Amusement flickered across Ruby’s face. “You are, aren’t you?” Ruby laughed and Blake felt herself warm. Whether in anger, embarrassment, or shame she wasn’t sure, but she didn’t like this particular laugh.

Ruby must’ve noticed, because she quickly stopped. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I shouldn’t laugh at you. It’s just, you have nothing to be jealous of. I’ll admit I had a bit of a crush on her when I was little—” despite her attempts at reassurance, Ruby’s words were a lance through Blake’s core; she was finding that she very much detested the feeling of jealousy “—but she’s way too old for me to be serious about that now.”

That held up Blake’s thought process as she tried to line up the idea of the child-like woman she’d met with this new information. “How old are we talking?” she asked.

“I never asked exactly,” Ruby answered, “but she says she was one of the first FAUNIS ever made. So she’s at least 200.”

Blake froze in her tracks, turning her head back in a futile attempt to pick Penny out of the crowd of people on the street. She suddenly felt sick, and not because of jealousy this time. She’d just been incredibly rude to an elder. And not just any elder, but one of the oldest members of her species. After everything she’d survived, everything she must’ve gone through, now she had to put up with some upstart kid’s misplaced emotions. She was appalled; growing up, she would’ve been lucky to get away with a swat of the ears for such disrespect.

She finally let go of Ruby.

“I… really screwed up, didn’t I?” she said, more a statement than a question. “She was your friend, and I was so rude to her.”

“If it’s any consolation,” Ruby offered, “I’m not even sure she noticed. Her understanding of social nuance has never been great. Too much time spent around materia, I think.”

Blake shook her head. “That doesn’t make it okay. I need to apologize to her.”

“Well,” Ruby offered, “you can come with me when I meet up with her next. As long as you promise to play nice.”

Blake felt herself warm in well-deserved shame and bowed her head. “I’m sorry you had to put up with me like that.”

Ruby smiled, sidling up close and planting a kiss on her cheek. “You’re forgiven.” She bounced backwards, holding up the brown paper bag with her purchases inside. “Hey, I got you something.” She opened the bag and pulled out a book, holding it out for Blake to take. She’d been too busy glaring at Penny to notice what Ruby had gotten earlier, so she had no idea what to expect.

The cover had a cartoonish depiction of a woman dressed all in black in an alleyway, about to be attacked by a litter of decomposing streetcats. “Cyber-Ninja Vs. Zombie Cats? They had this there?” Blake was surprised to find herself tearing up a bit as she was hit by a burst of nostalgia. “This was one of the first books I ever read. I could probably quote it front-to-back I read it so many times.” She flipped through the pages, looking at the illustrations at the beginning of each chapter. She could vividly remember hiding under her covers in the dead of night, reading and rereading the book by the light of the moon.

“It’s a good book, then? I grabbed it on a whim, so I wasn’t sure.”

“Oh, it’s terrible,” Blake answered. “Incredibly cheesy and cliché, but in the best possible way.” She flipped the book closed and wrapped Ruby in a hug. “Thank you. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve you.”

Ruby returned the hug. “That’s easy. You were yourself, and that’s amazing enough to be worth everything.”

#rwby #ruby rose #blake belladonna #penny polendina #ladybug #ladybug rwby #ladybug (rwby)#ladybugweek #fanfiction #my writing #The Last Frontier #space au #Ladybugweek2K19

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justlostinautumn · 5 years

Text

Playing House 5

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Clint Barton x OC (Alexandra Knight)

Fury calls in help on a long hall mission that requires Clint to play house with someone he doesn’t know and has never met. Alexandra likes to work alone and isn’t one to play well with others. Nick and Alex have a past together and now Nick is asking his old friend to help out with the monitoring and infiltration of some HYDRA agents. But, not everything is as simple as it seems. Nick isn’t the only old friend Alex has on the team.

We get dressed I opted for a pair of black yoga leggings with a matching sports bra and a purple lumberjack shirt wrapped around my waist, deciding to wear a pair of black trainers. It would be nice to get some training in with Clint, to feel his hands on my body… no, to make sure he is ready for everything and anything. Clint opted for a pair of black jeans and grey fitted tee, I can’t help but stare and pout a little.

“I thought we agreed you’d be shirtless?” I smirk looking at him as his eyes scanning my body.

“Looks like you’re doing it for me. Plus, I don’t think Fury wants me to distract you.” Clint laughs.

“We’re training after Nick gives us a speech about being considerate for others and also mission updates.” I sigh, this was a speech I knew well, I most probably could say it word for word.

“Get that speech a lot?” Clint smirks trying not to laugh.

“Yes, every time I am around Maria… oh, he gave it to me when I first met Nat too!” I giggle.

“I can imagine both you and Nat gave him a run for his money.” Clint laughed as he watches me tie my laces.

“Oh we tried, but Nick is good with being patient with me. He’s one of few people who doesn’t get distracted easily by me... to be honest, he’s the only parent I have ever known.” I sigh looking at Clint who is smiling, “but if you tell him that, I will kill you!”

“Let’s go Trouble!” Clint shakes his head smiling at me, he knew the threat wasn’t real.

Walking back into the living room with cups of coffee we see them all whispering and we stand there waiting.

“Nicolas, do you really make them call you Fury?” I ask taking a sip from my coffee as they all try and figure out when we walked in.

“It’s respectful, I am their boss.” Nick looked at me sternly.

“Geez, you and that Dad look. Also, it’s kinda douche like.” I smirk at him.

“Talking about respect…” Nick started and I turned to Clint smirking.

“Told you the consideration of other’s speech is about to happen.” I snicker and Clint can’t stop the smile spreading across his face.

“Really Alexandra!” Nick warned me.

“I know the speech, there are other people here and I should take into consideration about my attire and not play my tricks on them. Blah. Blah. Blah.” I wave my hands dramatically and impersonate Nick. Nat and Maria don't stop themselves from laughing, while the others cover their giggles with coughs.

“Watch it, young lady.” Nick points at me. “Also you impersonation is getting good.”

“I know, I work on it while I work… and when I’m bored. It helps when I give myself little pep talks using your voice, reminding myself I can do anything.” I smile at him and he returns the smile.

“Mission update.” Fury started.

“I told you! The speech then update.” I pointed at Clint bouncing up at down laughing.

“You should know the routine by now, you do it every time.” Maria giggles.

“You guys will be leaving in a month,” Nick started ignoring our idle chitchat. “Before you go into suburbia there are a few jobs that need to be done… some are hits, some are extractions, but they are all very illegal. Stop smiling like that! This isn’t something you can do alone Ally-Cat they know you are a duo and they are showing interest in the both of you.”

My Black Butterfly phone alerted me someone was looking for me. I looked at it smirking and then it started to ring.

“Hello.” I purred, putting my phone on speaker.

“Nice to hear your voice again Black Butterfly.” A deep voice that caused Bucky to stiffen rang out.

“Miss me?” I smirk and Bucky looks at me confused.

“No, the last time I saw you, you left me with a horrible present and broke out my favourite asset who is now on the opposing team.” He growled.

“Well, money speaks pretty loud. Someone wanted your toy and was willing to pay a pretty penny, more than you would ever pay me.” I spoke coldly.

“Where are you Cat?” He growled.

“Can’t find me?” I laugh coldly and I see several of the team in front of me shiver.

“I want you and your rogue Avenger to do a job for me. I hear you’re planning to move to suburbia, I want you to have an easy transition and for you to prove your loyalty.” I could hear his smirk through the phone.

“Everything comes at a price you know that well,” I spoke calmly.

“Get me my file.” He said simply.

“That’s all you want.” I cackle.

“You have it! How you little bitch?” He growls.

“Ohhh, my husband doesn’t look to please at you calling me that. I’d be careful his temper is worse than mine. I’d hate for him to find out what you tried to do and do to me.” My voice was sweet, but the threat was there and I could hear him gulp through the phone. I could feel Clint’s stare on me, along with the rest of the team as if trying to figure out what it was.

“Fine. I need you to take someone out. He’s HYDRA, he worked closely with the asset and survived the downfall of SHIELD.” He was tensely waiting for my response, scared of what I might say.

“He’s one of your own. Why am I taking him?” I purred.

“He’s a liability and also seeking vengeance against Rogers, Wilson and Barnes. You know that’s not we want… well for now at least.” He laughed.

“The new assets first then the destruction of the Avengers. You forget I know you, Dimitri.” I laugh.

“I forget how good you are. I have missed you, Sweetie.” He laughs and I withhold a gag at the nickname he has for me. I see Bucky’s eyes widen hearing the name.

“Name Dimitri, I have things to do. A husband to cheer up.” I smirk at Clint as he stares at me.

“Brock Rumlow.” He states.

“Oh, I may have killed him already. I’ll ship you his body… in parts.” I smile.

“Who’s been using his phone?” He asks, “Tell me it’s you.”

“I don’t have it. You’ll have the body tonight and I will look into the phone thing and tell you what I find. He didn’t have it on him when I took him out.” I shrug, I was bored but also worried.

“Why did you kill him, Sweetie?” He asked, his tone serious.

“He was trying to get me to kill people he couldn’t afford to kill. Also, when I refused him, he sent someone after me and I dragged his little hitman to him and tortured him in front of Rumlow until he broke and told me it was his brother and then I killed his poor brother and then slowly killed him.” I smirk as I remember the day.

“You have both bodies?” He asked.

“What HYDRA want their property back or hoping you can track them with the little trackers I carved out of them and destroyed?” I laugh.

“Worth a try.” I can hear his smirk in his smug tone.

“You’ll have the bodies tonight and the information will be sent with them.” My tone is cold.

“Thank you, Sweetie, I know they’ll love you and your husband… Congratulations on the marriage. I have to admit I always thought it’d be you and the Soldier, but oh well.” He laughs.

“Goodbye, Dimitri,” I said before hanging up on him.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath and then pick up my phone and send a message to Marcus to let him know we needed Rumlow and his brother's body.

“Marcus?” Fury asks and I hum in acknowledgement.

I look at Nick raising an eyebrow asking where my bag is and he points to the table. I walk forward and take my laptop out and drop to the floor and start to tap away tracking Rumlow and his brother's phone along with Dimitri. It looks like Dimitri was in suburbia, I’m sure it’ll be short-lived. The pings come back and I pull out my holsters and weapons and place them on the table.

“Where’s the collar?” I look at Maria, there is no humour or fun in my eyes. This was the job.

Maria passed it to me and I looked at the pendant, Maria added the new toys on the table and I smiled at her. Putting the collar on I tap the crescent moon pendant that catches Bucky’s eyes and I smirk at him. I rip the Lumberjack shirt from my waist and drop it into the bag, tapping the pendant the suit covers my body. It’s black with hints of silver running through it, a mask covers my mouth and I pull on all my holsters checking my guns and my new toys. Slipping the bracelets on and flicking my wrists and watching the claws come out and I smirk, flicking them to retract them. I put the whip on my waist and looked around the room.

“What?” I raise an eyebrow.

“Where are you going?” Steve asked using his Captain voice.

“To work.” I shrug, closing my laptop and checking my phone.

“Kitten?” Clint looked worried.

“Husband,” I answer laughing pulling the mask off for now.

“I’m coming.” He states, I look at him and hold my hand out to Maria and she presses the leather bracelet into my hand and puts Clint weapons on the table.

I put it on his wrist and bring his other hand up to tap and activate the suit. His was black with gold and I smirk. I take his mask off for now and help him with his holster standing close and tugging roughly causing him to groan and for me to smirk.

“I say jump, you say?” I looked him dead in the eye.

“Yes, wife?” He laughs, I step back and my gaze hardens.

“I say jump, you say?” I turned to Nat and Bucky asking them.

“How high.” They gulp looking worried.

“This isn’t a game Clinton. When I tell you to do something it isn’t for fun or a joke it’s to ensure you survive this.” I look him in the eye and I could tell he could see my stress and worry because he pulled me close.

“We will be okay.” He murmurs and kisses my forehead lingering and I close my eyes and let out a sigh.

“Okay.” I pick up our masks and hand him his and I put on mine. I take his hand and look at Nick with a nod before I pull him to leave the room.

#playing house #avengers imagine #avengers x reader #the avengers #the avengers x reader #avengers #the avengers imagine #the avengers x oc #clint barton #clint barton imagine #clint barton x ofc #clint barton x reader #marvel imagine

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ravens-rambling · 5 years

Note

1. + Prinxiety for the Drabble prompts please?

A/N: Sorry this took a while Anon! Hope you like it!

WC: 1,503

ships: Romantic Prinxiety

warnings: Mentions of Anxiety, Mentions of low self-esteem, Selective mute Virge, uuuhh idk

Tag List: @punsterterry @stormcrawler75 @frostedlover @mycatshuman @mutechild @panicattheeverywhere15 @thewinterbookqueen @analogical-mess @saddestlittlebabe

“Ro, what are we doing here?”

“Well since I have a bit of time before work and you don’t have to go in until later I thought we would have a little coffee date!”

Virgil stared at Roman as he beamed and stepped his way towards the said coffee place. Then he heard a huff.

“First off, that's incredibly cheesy even for you.”

“Hey! Sometimes cheesy can be fun!”

“Second off, you know how I am with coffee.”

Okay, Roman winched at that. There was one time Roman gave him coffee and only one time. His thoughts drifted towards that day before they had started dating in fact, it had been a simple coffee that he got from Starbucks. Or at least for him, it was simple. It seemed that Virgil liked it so he gave him the rest and…

It took hours to calm him down. He was hyper beyond belief and jumping at everything that moved, even his own shadow, his anxiety increasing tenfold. He couldn’t stand still for the life of him even when the caffeine was starting to die off and he was about to crash.

It honestly broke his heart seeing his precious Verge like that.

“Yes… But I heard they have great Frappuccino's! And I know how much you love those!”

“Mhm… That's true…”

“Please, Vee? I’ve heard it’s a very pretty place even though it just opened. Perfect for dates, I’ve heard.”

“Hmm…. Fine,” He heard Virgil huff yet again as he stuffed his hands in his hoodie pockets.

Well, that’s as much of approval as he’s gonna get so with a little hop to his step he pushed open the door letting his emo step in before coming behind him.

He has to admit they did a great job with the interior. It was cozy that’s for sure, they even had bean bags in the corner along with large bookshelves littering the walls. It was dark in here but it helped play towards the cozy and warm vibe that it played off well.

And luckily there was no line, properly too late for the teens and that’s properly why there weren’t many people in here too. They instantly walked up towards the bar and as they waited for the barista he eyed Virgil grabbing for his wallet.

“Nah no need for that I’m paying.”

“Ro…”

“And you can’t say anything about it.”

“Why hello there, sweet cheeks.”

Roman looked up as he was greeted with a smile. His eyes met the baristas ones behind the sunglasses, why was he wearing sunglasses inside Roman had no idea. His hair was wavy and dyed a dark green color which helped his vibe quite a lot he must say. He wore on a leather jacket over his uniform on his said uniform there was a name tag which read ‘Remy, He/Him pronouns’… And giving him cutesy eyes.

“Hello there to yourself, action hero.”

Remy laughed, “That’s a good one, babes. You don’t know how many people think that. Though I like to go with it a bit.”

“Really? I feel that I get called jockey a lot. If I have a penny for all the times I’ve been called that I’ll be rich.”

“Mood, sweet thing.”

Roman was about to say something back when he felt a light pull on his jacket. Looking over he saw Virgil glaring daggers at him. Okay, he’s played too much into the others game... Whoops.

“I’ll take a Carmel latte with whipped cream.”

He glanced over again to read Virgil’s signs. He remembered when they first met, Roman had been offended that Virgil never spoke to him always signing but yet he would talk to Pat and Lo just fine. It had taken Pat to tell him that Virge is just anxious around new people and it’s hard for him to speak to them. So when he finally got Virge to realize that he’ll never make fun of him no matter what he says and the first time he spoke to him even if it was just a single word he just about started crying right then and there.

“He’ll take a vanilla Frappuccino.”

Remy smiled at them both and just as he was about to turn away winked at Roman, “Gotcha, hun.”

With that done they settled down at an empty seat somewhat close to the bar so they can hear their name being called though Roman noticed an unsettling feeling engulfed the pair. That's quite worrisome.

“Virge?”

What was even more worrisome was the fact that his emo was incredibly silent. Most of the time when they get away from new people he’ll start talking to him again. But this time he had his back turned away from him and was dead silent.

“My prince? What’s wrong?” He placed a hand on the other's shoulder which seemed to do it. His emo turned around to face him his face a mix between anger, embarrassment and hurt.

He takes that back, his heart broke again at the sight.

“What were you doing back there?”

“Back there…?”

“Ya know what I’m talking about, Roman, don’t play dumb.”

Romans' head tilted as nothing came to mind, he thought about it then something clicked, “Oh…You mean how Remy was flirting with me? You're jealous?

"No… Yes… I mean…” He looked away again now his face full of hurt and pain and bright red. Oh, he fucked up didn’t he? He knew way before even asking Virgil out how insecure he was, how he felt like he was worthless all the time, how he felt like he was a fuck up with every step he took.

He properly made him feel even worse by playing into Remys flirting games, didn’t he?

Roman swallowed thickly as his hand reached out and softly grabbed the others, “Virge. Virgil, can you look at me?”

Slowly, very slowly, his precious Prince turned his head towards him and Roman gulped thickly once again at the sight that greeted him. Yeah, he fucked up big time. Virgil’s entire body was tense and his shoulders were raised as if he was expecting a blow of some sorts. His eyes glittered with pain as he met Romans.

“My prince. My emo disaster. I will never give you up alright? I will never leave you for anybody. I know that’s what your thinking,” His words were only proven right as Virgil’s eyes shined even more, “You are my everything. I’m so sorry I made you uncomfortable. I promise I won’t do it again alright? I know I shouldn't be flirting with anybody I'm really sorry.”

There were a few moments of silence as those thoughts hit him. Just as his eyes softened and he opened his mouth to say something another voice cut him off.

“Roman Prince!”

And their drinks were ready. He glanced towards the bar than back at Virgil and smiled, “We will finish this convo. Hold a sec, my dark angel.”

Gently he let go of Virgil’s hand and stood up making his way back towards the bar. Remy was there smiling at him and his sunglasses were slightly down his nose so his eyes could meet his.

“Nice to see you again, sweetie. Here are your drinks.”

Roman took a breath as he grabbed for them, “Thank you. Though not so thank you for flirting with me in front of my boyfriend.”

At first, Remy didn’t seem to understand, his face full of confusion, that was until he looked at Virgil at his seat then back at the hard expression of Roman, then his eyes went wide. Instantly he raised up his hands, “Woah sorry, didn’t know he was your boyfriend. My mistake, hun. I’m really sorry. Here I’ll get you two a free drink on the house how does that sound?”

Roman was surprised by how quickly he reverted back. Huh… He was expecting this to go the complete opposite direction.

“No, no it’s fine. Your apology is enough don’t worry about it.”

“You sure? I really don’t mind it, sweetie.”

“I’m sure. Thank you though,” He kindly smiled back as he walked back towards his angel. Placing them down on the table and winking at his love, “He won’t be bothering me again. I just showed him who’s boss.”

Virgil’s eyes grew wide as he took his drink, “You did what, Roman?!” He sputtered out.

“I told him you're my boyfriend and that if he doesn’t stop I’ll hit him.”

“Jesus Ro! Your gonna get us kicked out now! What did he say?”

“He immediately back off! Must be these muscles that frightened him off.” He beamed as he showed off his arms, even under a shirt and jacket anybody could still clearly see his muscles underneath.

Which caused Virgil to groan but giggle slightly as he playfully pushed him, “Ew Ro stop it!”

“Stop what? You can’t tell these babies to stop!”

He laughed harder when he heard Virgil’s little giggle snort. Yep, he fixed it now.

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