#neat bang but everywhere else is a mess
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Wherever you go, I won't be far to follow
Parings: Creepy!Vox x GN!reader
Summary: Vox is obsessed with you and he uses his VoxTek to stalk you
Word count: 1437
Warnings: Obsessive behaviour, one mention of Vox getting a hard-on, Vox being delusional, jealousy, k*lling, Vox jerking off
A/N: First time writing for Vox!! I got this idea from some amazing person on discord:’) I immediately went insane w the idea and had to write it up
“I can’t get them out of my HEAD!” He yells angrily, banging his fists on the table.
Valentino and Velvet have noticed his behaviour towards you and tried to talk sense into him.
“They’re nothing special, Vox! Just another sinner. Get over them.”
“You tell us to not ruin our reputation but look at you. You’re a mess.”
“Maybe just.. go talk to them? Instead of being a fucking creep.”
Vox doesn’t listen. He wants to know what you’re doing 24/7 and who you’re doing it with. He has cameras set up everywhere. In your room, bathroom, hotel (as you’re currently living at the hazbin hotel), the street lights. Absolutely everywhere. He doesn’t want to meet you just yet, not until he learns everything about you so he can charm you off your feet.
You don’t even know him. You’ve heard of him through hell, yes. But you’ve never actually seen him face to face. Alastor has told you all that he isn’t anything to worry about, in which you believe him. Apparently he owns all the electronics in hell or something like that? You’ve seen posters of him and you think it’s kinda neat how he has a full on tv head as a face. But other than that, you never gave much thought to him.
———————————————————————
Today was just another day. You woke up, took a shower, went downstairs to have breakfast, and hung out at the hotel. Nothing of which you thought anything of, it’s just a normal boring day.
But Vox on the other hand thought differently. He thought everything you did was the most exciting, interesting thing ever.
“Oh! Fuck fuck fuck, they’re waking up.” He says, getting closer to one of the MANY tv screens he has in this room.
He looks at you in awe, touching the tv screen gently.
“So fucking cute when they’re waking up. Look at them, my god.” He whispers.
He watches you as you get out of bed, yawning. Watches you get undressed, and into the shower.
“Such a perfect body. I’d treat you so right. Better than anyone else could.” He says as he watches you wash yourself. He feels himself get a hard-on, but ignores it. He needs to have all his attention on you.
Watching you shower, learning your routine and what product you use, he stores all the information in one of his computer folders.
After you get out, he watches you choose what clothing to wear.
“Aww, that’s my favourite top on you.” He says in awe.
Then, you go downstairs to eat and hangout with your fellow hotel members.
Vox knows all your favourite foods and least favourite foods, to when you come over to live with him one day. He wants everything to be perfect. You wouldn’t have to lift a finger.
“You’re gonna haaavee..” He starts while you’re picking out what to eat.
“Fruit with cereal!” He shouts just as you pick it up.
“HAHA! Fucking knew it.” He says.
After you eat, he watches you interact with people.
He hates it. Hates when you talk to other people. What if they get too close to you? What if you like them more than him? So many thoughts cross his mind.
“Oh don’t you dare talk to-“ He starts while you’re walking up to Alastor.
You start talking to Alastor about something and Vox’s eye twitches.
He remains keeping his cool, but inside he wants to march over there and take you away. But he can’t do that, can he? That would be a horrible first impression! Even though he’s sure you’d fall for him in no time, he can’t risk it.
Right now, you’re sitting on a chair, scrolling through your phone.
Of course, Vox has hacked your phone too. He has another tv in which he can see exactly what you see.
He’s intently watching you play Angry Birds, when an ad comes up. Not just any ad, but a VoxTek ad.
You’re intrigued because this is the “Vox” you’ve heard of. You click it and Vox almost falls over.
“OH MY GOD. YOU-“ He scrambles to get as close as possible to the screen.
You start scrolling through the VoxTek website. It seems pretty cool, honestly. There’s a lot of “Trust us.” quotes, which you find kinda suspicious. But nonetheless, you’ve been wanting a new laptop since yours broke a while back. Why not give it a go?
You find a good priced laptop that actually seems like it’ll work really well, so you decided to buy it online.
Vox’s eyes widen.
“YOU- I-“ He stares in shock. You bought something from HIS website. You KNOW about him, it’s confirmed now.
He has the great idea to hand-deliver you the laptop. That’s a great first impression isn’t it?
He jumps up and goes to put on his best outfit. Making sure he looks 11/10. He cleans his screen, puts a mint in his mouth, and walks to the room where they keep all their product, finding the one you ordered.
He looks to his right, seeing the one you ordered, but then he looks down and sees one that’s 10x the money you paid for that one, and it’s their BEST laptop. It has so many features that he knows you’ll use. It’s their most high end product. He’s gotta give you that one instead. You deserve it.
He picks it up and puts it into a box, sealing it and putting a nice red bow on it. He kisses it and walks out.
“Vox? Where are you going? You’re looking quite fancy.” Valentino stops him as he’s about to walk out of the building.
“Oh nowhere!” Vox answers as he walks out. He doesn’t want Val to give him a hard time about this.
Val looks in question, but just walks off.
As Vox is walking to the hotel, he’s rehearsing his lines.
“Ah! Y/n. Hello there, I’m here to give you your laptop.” He mumbles. “No that sounds so fucking.. Hi, Y/n! Here’s your laptop.”
He mumbles a bunch of fraises when finally, he arrives on the doorstep.
He adjusts his bow tie and takes a deep breathe, knocking on the door.
You perk up at a knock on the door, you’re the only one at the hotel right now, other than Niffty. You go to answer it, wondering who it’ll be.
As you open the door, Vox’s heart stops.
It’s.. Vox? That tv guy! That’s weird, you literally just ordered a laptop from his site about 20 minutes ago.
He’s staring at you, mouth open.
“Uh.. hello?” You say with a questionable tone.
“Oh! Oh, shit. Hi! I’m here to hand deliver you that laptop you ordered.” He chuckles. “Well, actuallyyy, I got you a better one.” He whispers that last part.
You’re very confused. Do they hand deliver every laptop that someone buys?
“Oh um.. thank you! Thanks a lot.” You say, reaching out to take the box.
“Oh of course!” He says with a smile, handing it over to you.
“Do you like the bow? I picked it out just for you, Y/n.” He says.
You feel a weird sensation in your stomach when he says your name. How’d he..? I guess you have to put your name in the website when you order it. So that’s probably how he knows your name!
“Oh yeah! It’s.. a great bow.” You chuckle awkwardly.
You stand their in silence as he’s looking at you, seemingly so to be admiring you.
He realizes this is probably weird for you and takes a step back.
“Well! Haha. It was nice to meet you.” He says with a smile, sticking out his hand for you to shake.
Adjusting the box to hold it with one hand, you take your other one and shake his hand. As you do, you feel an electric shock.
“S-sorry about that.” He says, pulling his hand away.
“Oh it’s alright, don’t worry!” You answer, finding it kinda interesting.
Vox’s internal monologue is screaming. He just TOUCHED your hand. He’s never washing this hand. Ever.
He doesn’t want to leave but he knows he overstayed his welcome. It doesn’t matter though, he will see you again soon. There will be more meetings, more and more and more until you beg to see him.
“Cya, Y/n!” He waves at you, walking away with a satisfied smile.
“Bye!” You say, walking inside.
He goes home and jerks off to the hand you touched, moaning your name and cumming all over himself.
He’s got it bad for you.
#:vox#my works#hazbin hotel#vox#vox x reader#hazbin hotel vox#vox hazbin#vox hazbin hotel#vox habin hotel x reader#hazbin hotel x reader#vox x you#vox imagine#vox smut#dark!vox#vox hazbin x reader#vox x reader hazbin hotel
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Velvette Slang Masterlist: for the fandom
A gift from a humble Brit to anyone (not from the UK) wanting to write Velv convincingly ~
Hello you wayward sinner!
Are you looking to write Velvette into a fan fiction, comic, roleplay or something else? Would you like to make her sound legit but you have no idea about British (or indeed, South London) slang? FEAR NOT! I, Bapple, am here to hold your hand and guide you through the wonderful world of British slang so you can have fun making Velv sound legit. Let's proceed!
Not all of this will be limited to the UK, of course, and it's not an exhaustive list of ALL British slang either - it's just the kind of things Velv WOULD say as someone from South London.
Insults
For men: bastard, prick, wanker, knob, dickhead, wankstain, bellend, git, tosser, sod, cock, pillock, numpty, codger (means old man)
For women: bint, bitch, slag, wench, slut, tart, trollop, scrub
For anyone: arsehole, arse, twat, sket, muppet, minger (means ugly), bugger, gobshite, cretin
The absolute worst thing you can call someone else is cunt - this is very strong and isn't used in casual conversation, unless you are in VERY informal company, in which case it's thrown around like it's nothing at all. (Come here you cheeky cunt - playful)
Terms of Endearment
Babes, hun, luv, darlin', sweetheart, mate, sweetie, mucker, pal, blud, fam, dear, dearie, honey
Eg: "Alright babes? How's it going darlin?'"
British people often use insults affectionately, too, especially with close friends as a way to tease / banter. (You silly sod, you useless prick, you cheeky git, you daft muppet, etc)
Slang Words
Drunk: trollied, smashed, pissed, wasted, legless, hammered, sloshed, battered, bladdered, merry, shitfaced, arseholed, plastered, lashed
Good: banging, well good, mint, the dogs bollocks, ace, blinding, cracking, brill, fab, neat, beast, fresh, hench, jokes (that's jokes innit), lush, peng (good looking), sick, wicked, peak, wavy
Bad: grim, naff, shite, shit, crap, tat (useless old tat), minging, rank, dry, nasty, humming (means gross)
Pleased: chuffed, buzzing, tickled pink, sorted (I'm sorted mate)
Annoyed: gutted, miffed, pissed off, fucked off, fuming, raging, ticked off, well annoyed, bovvered (used more sarcastically eg: I aint bovvered), vexed
Curses
Bollocks, fucking hell, bloody hell, bugger, piss off, any of the insults used above
Other random words
Bare = a lot of (eg bare money)
Chirpsing, grafting = flirting
Garms = clothes
Lips = kiss (are you tryna lips me?)
Peng ting = good looking person / high quality thing
Standard = of course, yeah no duh (Yeah that's standard mate.)
Tight = cheapskate (Don't be so bloody tight!)
Yard = your house (Come over to my yard)
Banter = conversation that's funny, casual, playful (S'just banter innit)
Convo, chinwag, chat = conversation
Defo = short for definite (Oh he's defo up to something)
Other random phrases
Are you taking the mick? = are you mocking me?
Stop faffing around = be serious and stop messing about
That's mad = wow, I can't believe what you just said or that's amazing
Allow it = just leave it, it's no big deal (Whatever mate, allow it)
Other helpful pointers
When British people (who talk like Velv) swear angrily we do so many times in a whole sentence and add a lot of qualifiers, eg:
"Fuck off you fucking prick, you absolute fucking useless arsehole!"
"Don't piss me off babes or I'll fucking end your shitty little life!"
Making a crude observation about something nearly always a curse in-front of it, eg:
"That's fucking rank."
"It was fucking buzzing mate!"
The Magical Use of Innit:
Innit is a wonderful word that can be used everywhere, especially for someone from South London. It basically means "isn't it?" but it has MANY uses. It can be used to mean an agreement, like "I know right?"
"That was well good innit"
"He's a right twat" - response: "INNIT!"
"It's fuckin grim in here" - "Innit mate"
Adding "well" to words
That was well good - that was well bad - that was well grim
(You get the idea)
That's about it for now!
If I think of anything else I will edit this masterlist and if anyone has any questions please feel free to pop them in my inbox. Happy writing!
#velvette#hazbin hotel velvette#the vees#hazbin#hazbin hotel#tips for writers#tips for fanfiction#hazbin roleplay#hazbin velvette#fanfiction guides#writing guides#hazbin guide#bapple chats#bapple guides#masterlist#velvette masterlist#velvette x reader
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[blurb] — member: jisung, word count: 1216, genre: fluff, flower shop-ish, warnings: none, tags: @fluffyskzclub
note: this is the draft of a fic I had planned to write long ago, I just don’t have the energy to pursue it at the moment
[12:08 pm]: “How do you feel about flowers?” Jisung asked out of the blue, catching you completely off guard for a moment.
The two of you were hanging out together, sitting around the den of your little apartment house you had the time being. The boy has impulsively decided to visit you when you weren’t prepared for any guests, only having his jacket, phone, and about ten dollars for a family sized pizza.
You couldn’t simply turn him away since he came all this way and he lived on the opposite side of the city so you had let him inside anyways.
“Flowers?” You repeated, taking a moment to think about how you would respond. You had your feet kicked up on the couch arm, sitting snugly in between the crevice of the couch and it’s pillows. “Well… I guess I feel fine about them? I don’t have much of a opinion on them since—“
“—You have allergies,” Jisung finished off, taking note of your unfortunate sufferings. “That’s right, you have a really bad pollen allergy, I totally forgot.”
“How did you forget about that?” You question him, narrowing your eyes suspiciously at the boy who sat on the floor with his phone in hand. “That’s… kind of a big problem in my life? You did know I was stuck at home for the entirety of the spring season because my allergies flared up really bad right? Or did you not notice I wasn’t at any of the gatherings?”
“Of course I noticed!” Jisung complained, a pout evident on his lips that you would even doubt his memory of your several month long absence. “It’s just that… Changbin. He got a new job, right? And that’s good for him and all but the job he got accepted into is a very… odd choice.”
Without another word the boy turned on his side and shoved his bright, white phone screen in your face. You squinted as soon as the light hit your eyes, scowling at the boy for blinding you without warning. Though you took his phone in your hands anyways and lowered the brightness to curiously look at what had been presented to you.
It was his messages in a group chat with his large and eccentric group of friends. They seemed to be talking about something, congratulating the previously mentioned boy on his employment and teasing him about coming to bother him while he was working. You scrolled up a little farther in group chat, ignoring the spamming of texts your chubby cheeked friend that sat below you had sent to find that a picture had been sent a little earlier in the chat. A picture of Changbin at his new job.
More specifically, it was of the boy and his coworker posing behind the counter with bright and excited smiles on their faces. You don’t think you’ve seen Changbin smile that widely before, a sense of childish excitement there in his eyes that’s rare to catch from him these days. 
His coworker seemed to be the exact opposite of him though, his blonde hair bright like the light from the sun and the freckles that stretched across his cheeks like stars. He seemed kind, so that wasn’t worrying you all that much. But the background of the picture did catch you off guard.
“Flowers?” You spoke out loud, though the comment was meant for yourself. Behind the two boys was a wall of flowers, all separated by their types and their colors in neat little stacks.
It was a beautiful background for sure, the rainbow-like aesthetic matching the tone of the picture almost perfectly, but it didn’t make sense. As quickly as you noticed the flowers in the background, you noticed them everywhere else in the picture.
The flower crown in his coworkers hair, the flower petal peering into the camera and blurring the picture slightly, the flowers that were being held in the apron that Changbin wore around his frame, even his coworker had on a golden ring with a flower imprinted on it.
They were quite literally everywhere and your skin shuttered at the thought of even approaching him. “He’s a florist?” You ask Jisung, handing his phone back to him as your body squirmed at the thought of all the pollen he was surrounded by. You could just feel your nose began to clog up and leave you begging for hair and your eyes becoming an itchy, watery mess within seconds of being around them.
“That’s how I reacted!” Jisung exclaimed, gladly taking his phone away from you as he jumped up onto his feet. “I mean, not to judge his choice in jobs or whatever, but a florist? That’s so… out of place for him? Honestly I could expect him to become anything else that’s not a florist.”
“Maybe he just had some random epiphany,” You suggested, sitting up from your place on the couch. “Maybe he needed a moment to wind down and relax, a place to think with an open mind and open heart. A change of scenery, really, and working in a flower shop was the way to go.”
Jisung turned to face you as his expression twisted into one of annoyance. “This is Changbin we’re talking about, not Bang Chan. You’ve got the wrong Chan [y/n].”
“How your faith in his competence is so low.” You muttered to yourself before shaking your head and addressing him again. “Anyways why do you have a problem with this in the first place? He’s got a job now so he won’t be leeching off of you or anyone else for money.”
“I don’t know I just,” Jisung admitted, falling into the cushions of the couch with a huff. “It just seems so… out of place? I was going to go up to the flower shop tomorrow and ask him in person because I know if I call him he’ll hang up and if I try and meet up with him on his accord I’ll avoid me so I’m just gonna show up and demand for answers.”
“Do you even know when his break is?” You questioned your friend with a smug grin. When Jisung didn’t answer you simply pat him on the back as a wish of good luck before stretching up and off the couch. “Well, good luck with that then! I know it’s not my problem and it's none of my business to go snooping around in other people’s business so have fun Jisung.”
“Actually,” the boy trailed off, playing with his hands as he looked up at you with pleading eyes. “I was kinda… hoping that you’d go with me?”
“Absolutely not!” You immediately deny, goosebumps crawling down your spine once more. “Are you insane, Jisung? Are you trying to get me killed? Don’t forget you’ve forgotten about my extreme pollen allergy already, it’s even like two minutes!”
“Oh come on, [y/n]!” Jisung begged, “it’ll only be for like five to ten minutes and then we’ll be out of the shop before you know it. You can even stand and wait outside the door if you want! But if you come with me, Changbin will think I’m just coming to congratulate him on his employment and not pester him for answers to my extremely specific questions.”
#stayhavennet#skzwritersclub#kpop imagines#kpop au#kpop scenarios#kpop#stray kids#kpop fluff#kpop blurbs#jisung x reader#skz jisung#stray kids jisung#jisung imagines#han jisung#han jisung x reader#stray kids han#jisung fluff
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Cross My Heart - CH.01
Pairing: Bodyguard!Dean x Reader; Chuck Shurley x Reader
Summary: After opening up a letter, the life as she knows it, changes forever. Her husband hires Dean Winchester to protect her but is Dean really who he said he was? And is her husband really worried about her safety?
Warnings: Abusive behavior towards a spouse, angst.
WC: 2913
SERIES MASTERLIST
It’s like any other day in her boring life, really.
Chuck, her husband, has already left to do whatever he’s doing. She doubts that it’s work but what does she know, really.
She was still sleeping when he left. He’s mostly up before the break of dawn, something with time zones and new deals. But she guesses it’s also because he doesn’t really want to see her and he’d rather go out early to avoid the awkward mornings together.
Y/N gets out of bed and hops into the shower. Afterwards, she dresses to impress, because that’s what people expect of her. They expect of her to always look presentable and the paparazzi are everywhere.
She walks along the landing, her heels clicking on the marble flooring as she descends the stairs.
While she passes the living room, she sees a stack of mail on the sideboard by the door. Chuck must have taken in the mail and put it there before he left. She stops to look through the stack. There’s the usual letters, bills and mortgages they need to pay, which is not really her concern since Chuck takes care of their finances.
She used to do it, though. But about three years back, Chuck told her that she shouldn’t hurt her pretty head by worrying about bills and he took over. He was adamant about it and there’s nothing she could have said to make him change his mind. Not that she hasn’t tried. She graduated summa cum laude from Stanford and now she’s just a really bored housewife.
Chuck didn’t even finish College. Dropped out and worked his way up at a record label, and when he had had enough, he split from them and opened his own, not without taking all the talents with him which ended up in a big lawsuit and he had to settle the huge bill.
Y/N met Chuck in College, they kept contact after he dropped out and after her graduation, they got married in Vegas. Not really a thing fairy tales are made of, she knows. Chuck was great at first and let her be part of his imperium. That was until he thought that his wife shouldn’t be working so hard. She basically got degraded from being a strong woman who still had her future ahead of her, to becoming someone's arm candy. Became something he can parade around.
Their relationship changed after maybe the first two years. She’s been with him for so long, she can’t even remember when it all really started. His record label took off, everybody was talking about Apocalypse Records, he was praised, had so many articles in magazines about how he’s a self-made millionaire. Little do they know that she was the one who emptied her trust fund in order to support him at the beginning of his career.
Y/N’s still skimming through their mail until an envelope catches her attention. There’s her name scribbled on it, no address, no stamps. She weighs the envelope with her hand, feels something hard and heavy, heavier than sheets of paper at least. She hooks the nail of her pinky finger into the latch and opens it, the content flutters to the ground.
Pictures, she realizes, and then she squats and picks them up. Her heart stops.
They are all pictures of her. A picture of her while she’s out shopping, a picture while she’s having lunch on her own. Pictures of her sleeping in her bed in her own home.
Oh my god.
Her hand’s are shaking as she reads the letter.
MRS. SHURLEY,
THE SAME LETTER WITH THE SAME CONTENT HAS BEEN SENT TO YOUR HUSBANDS OFFICE AS WELL.
WHAT DO WE WANT YOU MAY ASK?
THE ANSWER IS: WE WANT YOU.
PS. IT’S NOT REALLY OUR MODUS OPERANDI TO INFORM OUR VICTIMS BEFOREHAND BUT WE LIKE TO PLAY WITH YOU, SO.
PPS. HAVE A GOOD DAY.
Y/N feels nauseous but she manages to pull herself together enough to grab her keys by the door and walks out to get into her car.
On her way over to Chuck’s company, she tries to call him but it goes right into his voicemail.
She arrives and nods at the security guy before taking the elevator up to the top floor. Chuck’s secretary stops her as soon as Y/N steps out, but she wouldn’t let herself be stopped so she walked right into see something she probably shouldn’t.
Chuck’s bend over his desk, his face buried in the cunt of his assistant.
She slams the door close loudly, for the fucking dramatic effect, which makes Chuck jump and he looks at her, startled, the juice of his assistant still drips down his chin. The assistant screams and scrambles from the table, covers herself up with both her hands.
“Oh, I’m sorry, am I being too loud?” Y/N says, storms in and slams the letter onto Chuck’s desk. It’s soaked in the assistant's wetness. Katy, Kathy, Karen? She can’t remember.
“What the fuck!” Chuck shouts out.
“Karen? Is it?” She turns to his assistant.
“No, it’s Kacy.”
“Awe silly me,” Y/N grins, “I knew it was something with a K .”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Chuck growls and something with a K is getting dressed.
“Read it.” Y/N just says, ignoring the assistant. She wonders if something with a K knows that she’s not the only one. Y/N for her part stopped having sex with Chuck already three years after their marriage, when she found out that he’s been fucking all the other whores he meets. They’ve mostly been ignoring each other since, but they have to keep up the facade, mainly because Chuck can’t afford to lose out on divorcing her.
Something with a K slips out of the door and Chuck sits down on his desk, the swelling in his pants disappeared. Not that there was much to see in the first place.
“Is this a fucking prank? Why do they want me?” She asks Chuck and he’s still frowning while reading it.
“I don’t know? Maybe they want to kidnap you? Get money from me?”
She laughs. Loud and sharp.
“If they are watching me, they’d know that you don’t fucking care about me!”
“That’s not true, Y/N.”
“Oh, please! When was the last time you were here for my birthday? When was the last time we shared a meal together and I’m not talking about the outings we have to boost your fucking company!”
“I might not love you anymore but I still do care about you.” Chuck says, his voice is calm and she wonders if it’s sincere. She can never read him. Well, at least he’s being honest when he says that he doesn’t love her anymore, she has to give him that. Strangely, it doesn’t hurt as much as she thought it would.
“Go wait in the record studio. You’re safe there. I’ll get my team together, see what we can do. Does the police know?”
“I haven’t contacted them.”
“I’ll do it. Go.”
*
She’s pushing around some buttons as she sits in the chair in the record studio, waiting for Chuck to come get her. Maybe she shouldn’t play with them because Chuck will probably get mad when all the buttons are at the wrong places.
Y/N smirks at the thought that Chuck would be pissed, and begins to start pushing at more buttons and messing the whole studio up. For fucking good measure.
Time passes and she looks at her watch. She’s been in here for almost two hours already. Lunch time came and passed. Maybe Chuck forgot about her? She wouldn’t put it past him.
The door opens with a bang and she has to laugh. Chuck’s always so fucking dramatic. He walks in and closes the door behind him while she gets up from her chair.
“Okay, the police came and confiscated the letter and pictures. They did really send another copy to my office.”
“Crap. Do I need to talk to them?”
“Not yet,” Chuck sighs, “Here’s how it goes. I hired a bodyguard for you, he’ll protect you.”
“This is ridiculous!” Her lips twitch at the anger she feels, “I don’t need a bodyguard! Like really Chuck, who’s going to come after me? This is a joke. I don’t get it, I mean I know that you are struggling at the moment with signing on new talents and keeping old ones, so I doubt that someone can really dig for gold right now!”
She proceeds to walk away and out of here, but Chuck pulls her back by her arm, slams her against the wall and claws his hands around her throat. “If you tell anyone that I’m in a financial crisis, I swear!”
Y/N opens her mouth to protest but angry Chuck is not her favorite Chuck so all she can push past her lips is, “Okay,”
Chuck rarely gets physical with her, so it’s a complete surprise and she’s shocked at the pain he inflicts her.
“Good. Let’s play nice, shall we?” Chuck whispers into her ear and then he lets go of her.
Her hands immediately fly to her throat, and she has to cough.
Chuck waits for her to regain her composure before he opens the door again to call someone in, “Mr. Winchester?”
“Yes, sir.” He hears a voice but doesn’t recognize it. She’s never heard it before but she likes how deep and low it is. Feels that the two words alone soothes her aching soul.
Chucks walks back further into the room, and someone else is joining them too. She almost gasps out loud when she sees Mr. Winchester. He’s tall and broad, wears a black suit. He has a light scruff, the tie is neat and sits right at the center, and when he smiles and nods at her, she can see the crinkles around his eyes. His face is sprayed with little freckles. Mr. Winchester’s eyes are green.
“Honey, this is Mr. Winchester. He’s an ex-marine and he’s your bodyguard.”
Mr. Winchester’s green eyes stay on her before his gaze travels to her throat. He frowns then but he doesn’t say anything.
“Chuck, I don’t need a bodyguard,” She tries to reason with her husband.
“For fuck’s sake, Y/N. We’ve been through this. You will do what I say and you’ll let Mr. Winchester do his job.”
She sighs and rolls her eyes at Chuck before she purses her lips into a thin line, “Fine!”
*
“You okay, Mrs. Shurley?” Mr. Winchester asks her when she settles next to him. Apparently, she’s not even allowed to drive her own car anymore, “Did he hurt you?”
So, he did notice it.
She shakes her head, “It’s okay, don’t worry about it.”
Mr. Winchester frowns, the crease between his eyebrows deepens but he doesn’t press any further, just sends her a courtesy nod.
There’s silence between them and Mr. Winchester starts the engine to which she then asks him if he could take her to the next coffee shop.
He answers short, “Sure.”
And with that, Mr. Winchester drives off.
She watches him while he drives, tries to be subtle about it.
“What’s your name?” After a while she asks him bluntly, and she doesn’t know if he’s even allowed to tell her but the silence in the car is killing her.
“Dean.”
“Dean? Can I call you Dean?”
He chuckles, “Of course, Mrs. Shurley.”
His answers are short, quick. He doesn’t look at her once.
“You can call me Y/N.”
Dean doesn’t answer.
She offered to buy Dean a coffee and something to eat too but he said that he wasn’t hungry or thirsty, so she took her coffee to go. It’s best if they get it over with, she thinks. He can drop her off and go about his day. And she can go into sulking. Maybe she’ll call her friend, Meg, and tell her the newest episode of dickhead Chuck.
Back home, she thought that Dean would leave her be but no, he gets out of the car and is right behind her when she unlocks the front door.
“Don’t you have anywhere you should be? Maybe another bodyguard job?” She asks him curiously.
Dean shrugs, “You’re my only priority.”
Wow, it has been too long since she’s someone’s priority. And she doesn’t know what it is but it makes her blush and her heart thumbs ridiculously fast in her chest.
Just when she opens the door to step in, she lets out a yell.
Dean immediately draws his gun, grips her by the arm and pulls her back, acting like a human shield for her. “What?” He hisses while he tilts his head back to ask.
She, on the other hand, freezes when she sees Dean’s gun, “You have a gun?”
He looks at her with one raised eyebrow, “How else should I be able to protect you, Mrs. Shurley. Now tell me, what is it?”
“Look for yourself,” She whispers.
She peeks from behind him, sees the overturned furniture in her home, sees the feathers laying around which spilled out from the pillows, sees that the walls and whole floor have been drenched in some kind of red paint that looks awfully like blood. Maybe it is blood because there’s this metallic smell in the air.
Oh my god . If it’s really blood, who's blood is it?
“Fuck,” Dean mutters under his breath and she guesses that he too, didn’t think when he took over the job, that it’ll be this intense.
“Where’s your room?” Dean asks, as they step inside. Their shoes are sticky with blood and they have to be careful not to slip and fall.
“Upstairs.”
“Okay, follow me.” Dean stretches out a hand for her to take and she places her small ones in his.
Dean’s hand is big.
Together they go up the stairs and to her surprise, her bedroom still looks the same as when she left it. They just made a mess out of the first floor. She thinks it’s shady as fuck and she guesses that Dean feels the same.
He checks the perimeter and calls the police when he comes back empty handed while she still tries to get the sticky thing off her shoes.
It isn’t long before some crime scene investigators arrive to take pictures of her house. They also taped everything and honestly, it scares her. She’s terrified that someone was able to come in and make a mess in her own house.
Unfortunately, it is also not long before the tabloids got wind about it, and began to show up one by one.
After a while, Dean and her had been informed that the blood is indeed real. But it’s animal blood and not human, so at least there’s that. She shudders when she thinks about it.
Who in the fucking right mind would play such a sick prank?
She and Dean are sitting on the stairs as they watch the police work on the first floor. Dean’s on the phone with Chuck for an awfully long time, and when she gets up to go to her bedroom, Dean follows her absentmindedly. That dude sticks to her like glue. She can’t even be alone in her damn house.
“Yes, sir.” Dean says into the phone and then he hands his phone to her, “Your husband.”
“Chuck,” Her voice is all shades of annoyed. Maybe not particularly because of Chuck. More because her life has become a fucking mess.
“Yeah, pack your things, you’re going away for a while.”
“What?” Y/N nearly screams into the phone.
“Our home is obviously not safe and I doubt that any other buildings in the city are safe right now. If it’s not the kidnapper or killer, it’s the tabloids.”
She sighs, feels helpless. This is not how she thought her life would become. “Where do I go?”
“Mr. Winchester will take you to a safe house.”
She eyes Dean when Chucks talks and Dean just stares at her. His gaze is intense, and there’s something in his eyes too. Worry, probably, she doesn’t know because he’s so hard to read.
“I’m safe in my own house.” She replies, knows herself that it’s totally a stupid thing to say.
“Are you?” Chuck has an amused tone in his voice. She wonders how much he really cares.
She sighs, “For how long?”
“For as long as it takes for the police to catch those bastards.” Chuck’s voice changes and he sounds as annoyed as her. He was always a good actor, she has to give him that.
“Fine.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
She hangs up without saying goodbye and hands the phone back to Dean. He pockets it back and then he stands up a little straighter. “Y/N, please pack light, we don’t have much space on the motorcycle. I’ll be back here in an hour. Be ready by then.”
There’s something fluttering in her stomach when she hears him say her name. It sounds good out of his mouth and she can’t suppress the smile.
“I thought you were not to let me out of your sight?” She’s merely teasing him.
“I need to go pack for myself either,” Dean explains and ignores her smile, “A policeman will stand guard until I’m back.”
“Okay,”
With a courtesy nod, Dean leaves.
CH.02
#cross my heart#dean winchester#dean winchester x reader#bodyguard!dean#dean winchester fic#dean winchester fan fic#dean winchester fan fiction#nathalie writes
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Delicate-- Jason Todd.
author’s note: this is definelty not my best work, but this has been sitting on my docs for a while and I can’t make it any better. Sooooo, here is a song fic with yours truly jason.
masterlist
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The dive bar on the east side of Gotham was his most favorite place. It was perfect. Crowded, but not too much so he could still go unnoticed by most. Cheap, but not too cheap, that way he knew the drinks were legal and not contraband. Clean, but not too clean to give off an air of pretentiousness that most bars on the central part of the city gave him.
Jason would go there all the time. Before patrols, so he could listen to the shady crowd that attended the bar and pick up some clues on some shady activities he could destroy. Those were the days he sat on the back, and carefully observed the movements that adorned the bar on those late afternoons. Those were the days he did not drink.
After patrols, he would sit at the bar, most of the times only without his helmet and armor. He would order scotch, neat, no ice, and would quietly drink as he observed the bartender. The bar was always mostly empty by the time he got there, so she was always tidying it up the place, cleaning cups and tables, washing the floor. She looked like she didn’t mind him being there, and Jason thought it to be the truth. She looked like she didn’t belong at a dive bar at the ends of Gotham city, at the prime of her life, cleaning messes that drunk thugs left behind. But, alas, she was, and Jason wanted to know why.
He slammed his glass on the counter. She flinched behind him, dropping the mop she was holding. They were the only people in the bar.
“Can I help you?” she asked politely. She had seen a lot inside her bar, and she concluded that politeness was always the best course of action. It would never make you target. She directed herself towards the other side of Jason. She grabbed the bottle of scotch he enjoyed—he had been there so many times, it was natural to pick on his habits. She poured him another glass and stared at him.
“Why do you work here?” he mustered up the courage to say. He had been wondering about it for a while, but he never had actually said something to her, too afraid to get attached.
“Excuse me?” she said as she put aside the bottle of scotch. His favorite bottle.
“You look like someone who shouldn’t be working at a… place like this,” he motioned to the bar around him.
“Are you implying that I’m weak?” she narrowed her eyes at him, looking over her shoulder.
“No, I’m saying that you look like someone who should have gone out of Crime Alley,” he took a sip of his drink.
She chuckled and turned to him. She picked up a rag and poured a bit of vodka on it and started to clean the counter. “This is my parents bar, I’m helping them keep the lights on,” she explained.
He picked up his wallet and put the money on the counter. “That’s very noble of you,” Jason said. He got up and started to walk to the door, careful not to dirty up the floor she had just cleaned.
She eyes the money. He had left considerably more than he should have. “Wait, you paid more than you should.”
He rested his hand on the doorknob and for the first time that night, he looked into her eyes. “Keep it,” he smiled.
She smiled back at him. “Thank you,” she said. He smiled in return and left.
#
#
“Don’t you think it’s weird?”
“What?”
“The pettiness of life,” she said, cleaning the cup Jason had just emptied. “It is so fickle, isn’t it? You try and try but, in the end, you don’t have control over it. You are forever in the hands of fate”
Jason felt her words hit close to his heart, so much that he wondered if she could read minds. He soon discarded this idea, it was possible, but highly unlikely. “Yeah, weird,” he said awkwardly.
His eyes wandered off to the rest of the bar as the last costumer of the day approached her to pay his due. All the booths had emptied out, as the night turned into day slowly, Jason being the last one out. His eyes landed on the old jukebox on the far corner of the bar. He had noticed it was there but never truly saw it until that moment. It shone on the dark, like a beacon asking for him to come near. He got up from his seat, walking slowly towards the juke box.
She took notice of his actions, as she closed the door and all of its locks. She smiled; the jukebox had that effect sometimes. She rested the keys on top of the counter of the bar and walked towards the stunned Jason—even though later he would deny wholeheartedly he was not stunned, nor perplexed.
“My Father used to play me these songs all the time when I was a little kid,” she said leaning against the jukebox. “But there was one that was my absolute favorite,” she put on a quarter and pressed a few buttons, “I used to play it on repeat. I know that if my Father hears it, he will break this jukebox just out of spite,” she chuckled. The song started to play, and she closed her eyes and started to hum.
Jason smiled. “Would you like to dance?” he said, making her open her eyes in surprise.
“Now?”
“Yes, now,” he caught her hand in his and guided her to the melody of the song.
She smiled coyly, trying to hide it. Jason felt a bubble of satisfaction and happiness burst inside of him. If only his younger self could see him now, he would have received a huge kick in the shin for being so soft and silly around a girl. To hell with his younger self, he died for a reason.
They swayed to the harmony of the soft song. Jason couldn’t contain the dumb smile he had on his face; this woman was special, and he knew all too well. She took a deep breath and rested her head on Jason’s chest, sending flutters all over his body. “I may not know a lot about you, but I trust you Jason,” she said softly.
“I—thank you,” he whispered.
“And when you’re ready to tell me all about you, I’ll be here,” she completed, fluttering her eyes close.
“It’s…delicate,” he explained himself.
“It’s okay,” she looked up at him. She reached for his cheek and planted a sweet kiss on it. She released herself from his embrace as the song came to a close. “I need to close the bar. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said with a bright smile on her face.
#
#
He needed somewhere to crash. Somewhere close. He felt the hurt of his wounds increase, as his uniform grew wetter with his blood. His eyesight was getting blurrier, and he probably shouldn’t be driving his bike.
Text, he should send a text to let her know. Yes, stop the bike and send the text. He looked over his shoulder, no one was actively following him. He needed to stop and send her a text. He stopped. ‘Meet me in the back’. Now, drive. Only a few more blocks.
#
#
Her phone lighted up next to the cash register. She stopped cleaning the last of the glasses. She had just closed the bar.
‘Meet me in the back’, it read. Her bones chilled. Unknown number. She put her phone on her back pocket and grabbed the baseball bat she kept under the bar just in case. She quietly made her way towards the back door, while three hastily and hesitant knocks echoed through the pantry.
Criminals wouldn’t sound hesitant while knocking the door, would they? No, they would bang the door until it fell off. But that was Gotham, she couldn’t let her guard down. She kept the bat firm in her hand while she opened the door with the other.
Jason was struggling to keep himself straight before her, his face fighting to not cringe in pain. He looked up at her, and she immediately dropped the bat and ushered him inside, not mentioning that he was wearing a red bat symbol on his chest and that she had never seen his eyes in that shade of blue before.
“What happened?” she asked, worried.
“I might have been slightly stabbed,” he said, trying to mask his pain. “This might not be the first time this has happened either.”
“Okay,” she said while frantically looking for her first aid kit. He laid on the floor, and she prayed she had scrubbed it enough to not give him an infection. “Please hang on,” she pleaded.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, suppressing every ounce of him that made him want to grunt in pain.
She had found the first aid kit. Now onto the vodka. And a needle. She kept a needle somewhere. She left the pantry and quickly came back with a bottle of pure vodka and a needle in her other hand.
“What are you going to do with that vodka?” Jason said already knowing the answer.
She opened the lid and poured it on the needle. She then proceeded to rip of Jason’s armor. As soon as the cut was revealed, she poured the drink onto it. Jason Screamed in pain. “YOU COULD HAVE WARNED” he said in pain.
She took a swig at the bottle, drinking a considerable part of the drink. “If I did you would have tensed and prevented me from doing.”
She closed the bottle and opened the first aid kit. Was there a thread in there she could use to close his wound? She should have put it there. She took out bags of gauze and cotton to find the closed package of surgical thread she had once bought in case she hurt herself. Hospitals were a luxury to her, and she couldn’t afford that. Thank God she never needed it. Now, she was sewing closed her… It was too delicate to say what Jason was to her. But he couldn’t get out of her head. In her dreams, when she closed her eyes, he was everywhere.
She looped the thread into the needle and started to sew. “I’m sorry you’re in pain, but I promise to make it quick. I took a course once of first aid and I was the best student in it.”
“Are you serious?”
“About the course? Yes,” she deliberately chose not to say that she almost dropped out of the course because she was constantly fainting. He wouldn’t trust her to do this, and she was well into the sewing and she hadn’t felt lightheaded once. It must have been the adrenaline. Or the large amount of vodka she had just ingested.
“I’m sorry about this,” Jason said. “I couldn’t go anywhere else,” he hid the fact that he could go to somewhere else, only he didn’t want to hear an earful of Bruce Wayne’s trademarked bullshit, so he chose to go to her bar.
“It’s okay, Jason, really. But you do have some explaining to do, I’m afraid.”
He looked at his injury and saw that she was almost finished closing it shut. “I know,” he whispered.
“Because, I—” she took a deep breath. “I can’t get you out of my head, Jason. You are everywhere, and I can’t help but wonder if you…” she gulped before continuing, “if you ever dream of me the way I dream of you.”
He looked stunned at her. “There. Finished,” she covered the injury with some gauze and medical tape and closed her first aid kit. She quickly glanced over Jason, “I know that it’s delicate, but I hope that it’s cool that I said all of that,” with that she left the small pantry.
He had to pull himself together. This was it, wasn’t it? He had done it. HE had gotten attached. And maybe it didn’t feel so bad after all. Jason had this imagery in his head that the moment he had created a bond with her, the world would end in flames and crowbars all over again. It definitely didn’t end in flames or crowbars, but maybe it did end in stab wounds and intense pain caused by vodka in his open flesh.
He sat up straight. Breathe in. Out now. He owed her more than half-assed ‘I know’s and the possibility of a heart attack in the middle of the night because of enigmatic texts.
#
#
“Before you say anything back,” Jason leaned at the frame of the open pantry door, his right hand over the recently shut wound. “you need to know that maybe this ain’t for the best.”
She breathed, almost in mockery. “What?”
“My reputation’s never been worse, so you can’t like me for any fantasy you have created in your head,” he said. Jason walked to her, and grabbed her hands, his still a bit tainted in red. His hands were calloused, but it was perfect. “You must like me for me.”
Her breath caught in her throat. She couldn’t utter a word, so she just nodded.
“We can’t make any promises, baby,” his hands found her cheek and she had never felt a softer touch, “but you can make me a drink. And I’ll tell you everything.”
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final note: here is a link to my jason playlist. enjoy.
#jason todd fanfiction#Jason Todd#jason todd x reader#jason tood headcanon#jason todd x y/n#red hood#red hood x reader#red hood x oc#red hood x y/n#song fic#to support my headcanon that jay is a taytay fan#i'm linking my playlist so you can listen in its entire grandure#my masterlist
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Chapter Two - Hermione Granger
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When Camille was a little girl, her mother and father used to tell her the tale of Lily Potter; the woman who saved her son with love, the same son who defeated the Dark Lord and survived the killing curse. Camille never realised that Harry Potter was the same age as her, nor did she realise how young he was when he defeated the Dark Lord. So as she sat opposite him, she gained an insane amount of respect for him.
"I thought Fred and George were just joking around but, god you're him?" Ron spoke, his eyes wide in anticipation as he leant forward at the same time as Camille slammed her book shut and got up, squashing next to the two boys; much to the embarrassment of Ron who was heavily blushing once again.
"Have you got the, um, you know?" He pointed to Harry's forehead.
Harry nodded and pulled his bangs back to show the lightning scar that sat right in the middle of his forehead.
"Is that where the Dark Lord, you know?" Camile uttered out quietly, not wanting to offend the boy in anyway but curious, as any person would be, as to how he survived the ultimate curse.
"Yes," Harry replied, "But I don't remember it very much. Some green light but nothing else."
"Wow," said Ron. He sat and stared at harry for a few minutes than snapped his head back to the window, realising what he was doing.
"So you two must know loads about magic already." Harry spoke, looking at Camille, who hadn't really spoken to much.
"Oh yes," Camille spoke, her hands falling into her lap to fiddle with her cardigan ends, she hated small talk. "In France I was lucky to be tutored by the headmistress of my older sister's school, Beauxbaton's. My mother insisted I wasn't behind with my education, so she had me start reading and learning a year early." She explained, both boys leaning forward, her French accent making it impossible not to listen.
"Though I heard you had to live with muggles, how was it?" She spoke, instantly regretting her question when a look of despair flashed across the boy's face before he covered it with a mask of tranquillity. "Yeah that must have been terrible. My mums got a second cousin who's an accountant, but we never talk about him." Ron began, Camille suspected that the Weasley's were one of the Sacred Twenty Eight, the twenty eight pure-blooded wizarding families, unfortunately the Delacour's were not a part of that twenty eight due to her grandmother being veela and her grandfather being a pureblood therefore leading to her mother being a half blood, breaking the Sacred Twenty Eight rules.
"Muggles are horrible -well, not all of them. My aunt and uncle and cousin are, though. Wish I'd had three wizard brothers or a wizard sister."
"Witch sister actually Harry, if you're gonna be a wizard you have to get the pronouns right."
"Five, actually" said Ron. For some reason, he was looking gloomy, but Camille supposed so would she if she had five versions of Fleur, one was quite enough. "I'm the sixth in our family to go to Hogwarts. You could say I've got a lot to live up to. Bill and Charlie have already left -- Bill was head boy and Charlie was captain of Quidditch. Now Percy's a prefect. Fred and George mess around a lot, but they still get really good mark's and everyone thinks they're really funny. Everyone expects me to do as well as the others, but if I do, it's no big deal, because they did it first. You never get anything new, either, with five brothers. I've got Bill's old robes, Charlie's old wand, and Percy's old rat."
He gently took the rat that had previously been asleep off of his lap to display to the group. "His name's Scabbers and he's useless, he hardly ever wakes up. Percy got an owl from my dad for being made a prefect, but they couldn't aff - I mean, I got stupid old Scabbers instead." Ron's ears went pink. He seemed to think he'd said too much, because he went back to staring out of the window.
Harry began to speak about his experience with muggles, how he had hand me down everything, and how he lived in a cupboard under the stairs, and how his aunt and uncle practically treated him like slave, or rather a house elf, Camille thought. Ron seemed to cheer up at the news that he wasn't the only unfortunate one in the carriage, and when both boys looked at Camille, as it were her turn to share the pity party, she froze. Despite having the perfect life to others, she had suffered from anxiety since she was a child due to an event that she wasn't quite ready to share just yet.
"My parents have always favoured my older sister over me, and it hurts you know. It's always about her, and her feelings, and how she succeeds, and sometimes I feel like I shouldn't be here you know? Like if my parents don't truly love me than who will. I mean they do all these things for me so they look good and fair enough but sometimes I wish they treated me like Fleur, and not some random that lives with them. Even when Fleur's boyfriend rap-" She cut herself off, her eyes beginning to water as she remembered how her parents had treated her after that. Her sister was just a loving as always, but naïve to the hardships that some faced, as she had never faced them herself.
Looking up at the two she felt a hand on her knee, Harry's hand to be specific.
"You don't have to carry on, it's okay." He spoke, Ron nodding in agreement, trying to find something to distract the poor girl.
"Hey look! We're out of London!" The redheaded boy pointed out the window as the trio smiled at the endless evergreen that surrounded them. They were finally on their way to Hogwarts.
Timed past quickly, and at half past twelve a faint knock was heard on the door of the compartment, waking Camille suddenly from her sleep, the book that had been rested on her face banging loudly as it fell to the floor, Camille bending down to pick it up awkwardly.
A smiling elderly woman poked her head around the sliding door gently, Harry and Ron already starting to thorough through their pockets for change. Camille assumed this was the trolley lady.
"Anything off the trolley, dears?"
Ron made the decision to stay sat down and pulled out a bag of sandwiches that Mrs Weasley had obviously made, the French girl melting inside at the sweetness of his mother. He stared at the girl strangely, as if he expected her to get up like Harry.
"I left my money in the trunk," she shrugged, before going back to her book. She didn't need to eat anyway, as her mother had told her countless times.
Hearing a gasp from Ron, she lifted her head to see Harry return, arms filled with everything you could think off; chocolate frogs, every flavoured beans, blowing gum, pumpkin pasties (Camille's personal favourite) and cauldron cakes. He had basically bought out the whole trolley, making Ron's sandwiches look inferior compared to his full course meal or rather dessert.
"Bloody hell Harry. Hungry, are you?" Camille spoke, but was silent soon after as her stomach chose the wrong to rumble loudly, most likely the result of skipping breakfast and lunch.
"Bloody hell Camille. Hungry, are you?" Harry spoke mockingly, after taking a huge bite of his pasty and causing crumbs to spray everywhere.
"Harry!" Camille scolded, whipping her napkin out of her pocket to wipe off the crumps that had landed in her lap. "You never talk with your mouthful, it's vulgar!" She muttered to herself, Harry and Ron began to laugh at her antics as she furiously wiped her dress down, and threw the napkin onto the seat beside her, stomach rumbling once again.
"Camille?"
"Yes." The girl said frustratingly, blowing a stray hair that had fallen on to her forehead away, looking at the boy who lived in annoyance. She despised bad etiquette. "Would you like a pastry, in return for forgiveness for my devastatingly terrible manners in front of a lovely lady like you?" An annoying tone of confidence dripped from his words as Harry held out his hand, in it a pumpkin pastry.
"Well," Camille spoke slowly, hand reaching over to Harry's, "They are my favourite."
"You too, Ron. I'm not just gonna leave you with a beef sandwich." The boy who lived spoke, pushing a pasty over to the ginger boy. It was nice feeling, Camille thought as the three sat there munching their way through the endless pile of sweets, Mrs Weasley's homemade sandwiches far forgotten.
The countryside now flying past the window was becoming wilder. The neat fields had gone. Now there were woods, twisting rivers, and dark green hills. Excitement built in Camille, making her rather giddy as she thought of their arrival at Hogwarts.
There was a knock on the door of their compartment and a round-faced boy with shaking hand entered. He looked tearful, and Camille felt the need to give him a hug.
"Sorry," he said, "but have you seen a toad at all?"
When they shook their heads, he wailed, surprisingly loud considering they were on a train full of people, "I've lost him! He keeps getting away from me!"
"Well I'm sure he'll come back soon," spoke Camille in a matter of fact way, "We're on a train it's not like he can get far!"
"Yes, I suppose he will." The boy spoke miserably, before leaving their cabin in a hushed manner, heading straight to the opposite compartment, asking them the exact same question he had asked them.
"Don't know why he's so bothered," said Ron, patting the rat on his lap aggressively. "If I'd brought a toad, I'd lose it as quick as I could. Mind you, I brought useless old Scabbers, so I can't really talk."
"He might have died and you wouldn't know the difference," said Ron in disgust. "I tried to turn him yellow yesterday to make him more interesting, but the spell didn't work. I'll show you, look..." He rummaged around in his trunk and pulled out a very battered-looking wand. It was chipped in places and something white was glinting at the end.
"Unicorn hair's nearly poking out. Anyway."
He had just raised his wand when the compartment door slid open again. The toad less boy had returned, but this time he had a girl with him. She was already wearing her new Hogwarts robes, her puffy brown hair and front crooked teeth noticeable. But Camille thought that she was quite pretty.
"Has anyone seen a toad? Neville's lost one," she said. Ah, thought Camille, so Neville's his name.
"We already told him we haven't seen it but we'll let him know if we do." Camille spoke softly, pitying the poor boy, Neville, she corrected herself, who still had tears pouring down his cheeks.
The girl however seemed distracted at the sight of a wand, a smile appearing on her face as she began to step further into the compartment, sitting herself down next to Camille. "Are you doing magic? Show us then." Ron seemed taken aback at forwardness of the brunette girl, who had made herself comfortable nest to Camille, even going as far to rest gently on her shoulder; Camille had found her new best friend.
"Uh-ok?" He cleared his throat. "Sunshine, daisies, butter mellow, Turn this stupid, fat rat yellow."
Nothing happened, and Camille just had to let out a tiny giggle, not noticing the looks she gained from Harry and the girl beside her.
"Are you sure that's a real spell?" said the girl. "Well, it's not very good, is it? I've tried a few simple spells just for practice and it's all worked for me. Nobody in my family's magic at all, it was ever such a surprise when I got my letter, but I was ever so pleased, of course, I mean, it's the very best school of witchcraft there is, I've heard - I've learned all our course books by heart, of course, I just hope it will be enough - I'm Hermione Granger, by the way, who are you." She spoke extremely fast, Camille having issues simply catching her name.
Hermione. Camille thought. That's pretty.
"Oh, w-well thank you I guess." Camille was just about as red as Ron's hair. She hadn't meant to say that out loud.
"Um you're welcome. I'm Camille." She locked eyes with the bushy haired girl, immediately looking away when she saw Hermione was as red as she was.
"I'm Ron Weasley," Ron muttered, his mouth once again stuffed with food.
"Harry Potter," said Harry.
"Are you really?" said Hermione. "I know all about you, of course - I got a few extra books. for background reading, and you're in Modern Magical History and The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts and Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century."
"Am I?" said Harry, feeling dazed.
"Goodness, didn't you know, I'd have found out everything I could if it was me," said Hermione. "Do either of you know what house you'll be in? I've been asking around, and I hope I'm in Gryffindor, it sounds by far the best; I hear Dumbledore himself was in it, but I suppose Ravenclaw wouldn't be too bad. Anyway, we'd better go and look for Neville's toad. You three had better change, you know, I expect we'll be there soon."
#harry potter#harry potter x reader#hermione granger#hermione granger x reader#hogwarts#hermione#harry#veela#fleur delacour#fluff
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If the place ain’t clean, there ain’t no Dean
What do I do to keep myself bus during quarantine?? Write fanfiction apparently! So here you go, a nice, fresh supernatural destiel ficlet for you. And it kinda relates to everything happening in the world rn (you’ll see why) but don’t fret, I didn’t write it to make a statement. I just really enjoy neat freak Dean, and there isn’t enough out there about him, so naturally that means it’s up to me to write it, right? Right?? But seriously though, even Dean says to wash your damn hands. If you won’t do it for me, or yourself, or anyone else, at least do it for him!
Ao3 link here
“If the place ain’t clean, there ain’t no Dean” | Not Rated | 2,309 word count
In which Dean is a neat freak and totally in denial about it, but Sam and his hot roommate know the truth.
Or where Dean cleans Sam’s dorm while he’s away, and it’s totally worth it in the end.
Dean took one step into his brother’s dorm, and immediately regret every conscience decision to so. He hadn’t even been in there for more than a second, before his instincts kicked in, every part of his brain telling him to plot his escape and flee.
“Jesus Christ, Sammy!” He exclaimed, absolutely appalled.
Dean took another glance around, and grimaced, his large Sasquatch of a brother running out from the bathroom in a frenzy.
“What is it Dean? Everything alright?” He had to suppress a snort at his baby brother’s concerned expression, despite the answer being no, things were very not alright.
“What the hell is this Sam? Are you trying to make me die of a heart attack?”
Sam raised a brow, “You mean my room Dean? And you know can’t die of a heart attack at your age.”
“Hey, you don’t know that for sure,” Dean said, wagging a finger in his direction, “and this ain’t a room, Sammy, it’s a friggin pigsty. Have I taught you nothing?”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Seriously, Dean, it’s not that big of a deal. It’s not even that bad.”
“Not that-Sam! Are you friggin blind?” Dean shook his head in disbelief, eyeing the clothes and shoes strewn everywhere, the leftover pizza boxes on the coffee table, and the dirty dishes piled into the sink to the kitchenette all with a high level of disgust.
“I’m gonna need to bathe in freaking hand sanitizer afterwards.”
“You’re being dramatic.”
“Hey, you shut your face. I’m not dramatic, Sam. This is friggin serious. I mean, you wouldn’t take a girl home to this would you?” He took a reluctant step toward his baby brother, and tripped over something he didn’t even want to identify.
“Oh c’mon! This place is freaking disgusting man. Shit everywhere on the floor, left over food. Not to mention, it smells like a friggin boy’s locker room. Tell it to me straight, Sammy. Would you bring a girlfriend back here? Cuz I sure as hell, ain’t.”
“I honestly think girls are the least of my worries, Dean.” His older brother snorted, muttering something close to, I agree, before he grimaced again.
Sam rolled his eyes, and glared at Dean, “Seriously, studying for school and going to classes is more important than sleeping around...like some people.”
Dean glared back at Sam, and motioned around the room. “I get that Sammy, but freaking proper hygiene is important too.”
“Well, Castiel doesn’t seem to mind it.” Sam said, matter of factly, bringing Dean up short.
“Cas-Casteel-what? Who the hell is that, and why should I care?”
Sam sighed, “My roommate, Dean.”
Dean’s eyes widened. “You’ve got a friggin roommate, and he’s okay with it? Oh god.”
“Again you’re being dramatic.”
“There’s two of ‘em.”
“Dean...” Sam said, exasperated, and sporting one of his famous bitch faces.
“Alright, alright. But mark my words, Sammy, one day you’ll be in classes, and I’m gonna come in here and clean this entire room. It’ll be spotless. You won’t know what hit you.”
“Whatever.”
“Now finish getting ready so we can go out for lunch. I don’t want to be in here any longer than I have to be, bitch.” Dean shooed him off, taking one final look around the room, and suppressed the oncoming shudder.
“Yeah, sure. Jerk.” Sam went back in the bathroom while Dean secretly planned his operation: Clean the Moose Den.
Dean slowly opened the door to door to his brother’s dorm, and checked to see if the coast was clear. If he was correct in his assumption, and he very rarely was ever wrong, he should have timed his arrival perfectly to when Sam would be in class.
The dorm was quiet, and definitely still an awful mess. This time Dean didn’t hold back the shiver that went down his spine, already feeling the germs crawling all over him.
“Alright, Sammy. This’ll each you not to be so disgusting next time.” He muttered to himself, walking into his brother’s bedroom to retrieve his hamper.
“What’s the point of having this if you aren’t going to use this, man?”
Dean started with picking up the clothes, making sure they were his brother’s before stuffing them into the hamper. He hung Sam’s overly sized jackets back in his closet, and put his shoes on the mat by the door.
“Seriously, you’d think he was raised in a freaking barn.” He shook his head, and grabbed a garbage bag.
“You need a mask and friggin gloves to even make your way around.” Dean threw away all the left over food, including the pizza boxes and take out containers.
It was dirty work, that just had to be done. And if no one else was going to do it, Dean was the obvious choice.
He started in the kitchenette next, doing the dishes and wiping down every counter space. When that was done, he, albeit reluctantly, got down on his hand and knees, and scrubbed the floors.
“Hello.”
“Jesus Christ-“ Dean jumped, banging his head on the underside of the counter.
“Son of bitch!” He cursed, and rubbed the back of his head as he stood. “What the hell man?!”
Dean turned around, to tell off the guy who scared the shit out of him, who was almost the cause of what would’ve been his second heart attack that week, but stopped dead in his tracks, any response dying on his tongue.
“My apologies. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Uh...” Holy shit. Sam didn’t say anything about his roommate being hot. And damn, that voice. Now here Dean was, eloquent as ever, acting like a complete idiot.
“I wasn’t aware Sam hired a maid.” Wait what?
Dean furrowed his brows, “I’m not a freaking maid! Do I look like a maid to you, dude?”
“I only assumed, because you are here cleaning.”
“Yeah well I’m not. I’m Sam’s older, and much more attractive, brother.”
“Oh yes, Dean. Sam informed me that you were a neat freak.”
“I’m not a...” Dean dragged a hand down his face, “look, I’m sorry man, but your place was disgusting. So really, I’m doing you a favor.”
Castiel just smiled, which unnerved Dean for some odd reason. What was this guy’s deal?
“It’s okay to be germaphobe Dean. There’s nothing wrong with having certain phobias.”
“Yeah, I know there’s no problem with it. Just like I’ve got no problem.”
“Sam also said you’d be in denial.” What the hell? Was this dude for real?
“Listen here, Castiel, you can tell my baby brother to friggin shove it. And for the record, I ain’t in denial. Nothing wrong with wanting a clean space.”
“But this isn’t your place Dean. There’s no need to clean it.”
“Well, if the place ain’t clean, it ain’t got Dean. And that’s a tragedy, Cas, because I’m a joy to be around.” Castiel laughed, and gave Dean a gummy smile, one that had Dean smiling back.
“Hey guys.” Sam chirped from the doorway, before taking a look around the room. He made a face, and joined them in the kitchen.
“Really, Dean?”
“I don’t know why you’re surprised. I told you I was going to do it when you were in class. Of course I didn’t account for your roommate being here.”
“And for that I need to apologize.” Sam said, wearing one of those faces that made him look constipated.
“Damn straight.”
“Not to you, to Cas. For having to deal with you.” Dean glared at the moose that was brother.
“Hey!”
“It’s fine Sam. I was enjoying his company actually. And you’ve got to admit, the place looks good.” Cas smiled at Dean, and again, the man found himself returning the gesture.
“See Sam? At least someone appreciates my efforts.”
“Whatever.” Dean chuckled, and Sam made a bitch face, before muttering something about going to his room to study.
“Don’t you go messing it all again, you hear me Sammy?”
“Whatever, Dean. Even if I do, I know you’ll just come in and clean it again. Since it seems to give you some kind of pleasure.”
“Bitch!”
“Jerk.” Dean chuckled as Sam shut his bedroom door, leaving him and Cas alone in the kitchen.
“Well, I suppose you probably don’t want me to stay, so I’ll uh, just get out of your hair.”
“I can help you, Dean. Finish cleaning, that is. I’d hate to see a man with your condition leave the job unfinished.”
“Sure if that’s what you want, Cas.”
Castiel nodded. “I’d like it very much.”
“Right, well, first things first. It’s not a freaking condition alright? It’s just a high intolerance for things that aren’t clean.”
“Of course, Dean.”
Dean pointed at Cas with a rag. “Don’t think I can’t sense you judging me, Cas. If you’re gonna help, you’re gonna have to knock it off with all that phobia bull crap, got it?”
Cas smirked. “Of course Dean.”
“Good. Now get to work.”
Sam didn’t emerge from his room until several hours later, on the hunt for some food and deciding that he’d watch some television on the way back. He was slightly confused that there were still clothes on the floor, assuming that Dean had been very thorough in his cleaning, but shrugged it off because he didn’t actually mind it. He wasn’t a beat freak like his older brother was, no matter how adamantly he denied it.
Sam shoveled the leftovers he got from the fridge into his mouth, a little smug that said brother wasn’t here to complain about his more than questionable eating habits as well. It wasn’t until Cas came out of his room a bit later, that he turned his attention away from the tv.
“Oh hey Cas.” Sam’s brows furrowed when he seemed to startle Cas, who was attempting to sneak out of his room.
“Hello...Sam.” Castiel cleared his throat, clearly caught off guard, and looking like he just got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
“Is everything alright?”
“Yes, everything is perfectly fine. No need to worry Sam. I was just, uh, heading to the bathroom.”
“Um, okay. Did Dean get back safely then?”
“Huh?” Cas was acting startled again, and out of it, making Sam even more confused at what was going on with his roommate.
“Dean. You know, my bother?”
“Of course...”
“Are you sure you’re okay, man? You seem jittery.” Sam asked, concerned about his friend’s wellbeing.
“Yes, I assure you, Sam, there is no need to worry.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.” The two eyed each other curiously for a moment, before Sam relented, unable to find anything of import, and nodded as he turned back to the television screen.
Cas let out a breath of relief, to which Sam chalked it up to being relieved he made it past his scrutiny. His roommate was always a weird guy, so he didn’t really think much else of it.
So Castiel went to the bathroom, only to be stopped by Sam again on the way back to his room.
“You can join me if you want.”
“Thank you Sam, I appreciate that, but I think I should really get back-“
“Jesus, Cas, did you get lost on the way to the toilet or something?”
Sam’s eyes went wide, and he looked over at his brother, who was standing in the doorway to Castiel’s room. “Dean?”
“Shit,” Dean’s eyes went wide in return, “uh, heya Sammy, how’s it going? Nice seeing you here.”
“Dean, I live here. You however, do not.”
“I did tell him that earlier today.” Castiel added.
“Yeah about that...” Sam put a hand up, silencing his older brother.
“Nope. I do not want to hear it. Just please...keep it to yourself.”
Dean chuckled. “Whatever you say Sammy.”
“I’m gonna go back to my room, I think. I’ll see you guys later.” Sam went to get up, looking for the quickest way out, before his brother intercepted him.
“Not so fast, Sam. Put the freaking dirty container in the sink so it can be washed.”
“Sure, mom.” He did as he was told however, making a big show of it for Dean.
Cas was still standing there awkwardly, looking even more constipated and seriously deep in thought than Sam usually does when he makes those faces.
“Happy?”
“Very.”
“Good,” Sam snorted, “and goodnight. I still can’t believe you not only broke into my dorm so you could freaking clean the place, but also slept with my roommate.” He shook his head, before locking himself up in his room.
“He‘ll get over it.”
“I’m sure he will.” Castiel hummed, joining back into the conversation.
“In the meantime, do you think there’s anything left in your room to clean?”
“I’m sure we can find something. Besides, even if we can’t, I’m sure we can dirty something enough for us to clean afterwards.” Dean drew the other man close, and kissed his lips, pulling away with a grin.
“I like the way you think.”
Castiel grinned back. “Wasn’t it you who said if the place wasn’t clean, there couldn’t be a Dean? And I’d very much like a Dean, so...”
“That I did,” Dean chuckled, kissing Cas again.
“And so you shall receive. Plus you were an awesome helper this afternoon.”
They both head back into Cas’ room, and shut the door behind them—more so for Sammy’s sake than theirs of course.
“I had an exceptional teacher.”
“Eh I do what I can.” Castiel leaned in for another kiss, before Dean stopped them.
“Wait, we should probably pick up our clothes outside on the floor first. It’s gonna bother me if it isn’t taken care of. And you wouldn’t want to trip, right? You could forget later that they’re even there...and it’s only logical.”
Cas smirked. “Of course, Dean.”
#my work#my own work#supernatural#supernatural fic#supernatural fandom#supernatural one shot#Destiel#cas x dean#dean x castiel#DEANCAS#CasDean#castiel#Sam Winchester#dean winchester#non-hunter winchesters#alternate universe#collegeau#sam and cas are roommates#oh my god they’re roommates#neat freak dean#dean is a germaphobe#dean is also in denial
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Hey Dollface
Summary: The best surprise after a really long, hard day at work.
Warnings: Swearing
Word Count: 3086
Notes: For @bucky-smiles since they’ve had some hard times lately! It’s me, your Bucky anon haha. I just wanted to be really soft and writing Bucky for you really inspired me! I hope you like it :)
Tagging: @holy-captain
It’s a shit day. It’s a really, really shit day.
It all started with a burnt pancake, on Monday of all days. Pancakes are a Monday tradition you picked up from your mom, who always made them sprinkled with different fruits to give you a pick-me-up (because Mondays you know?). And you had never burned a pancake, not even the one you made alone at the tender age of seven.
You’re not the superstitious type, not really, but a burnt pancake spelled out trouble and you knew it. You were quick to toss the thing but not quick enough for the smoke detector. Its shrill shriek pierced the morning calm and you heard a clattering through the thin walls of your (mediocre on a good day) apartment. And you had winced when someone banged on your door, asking if you were okay. Of course, you had to answer them, meekly peeking from behind the door. Although they had taken it gracefully, it had already put a damper on your day, which really only got worse from there.
Cleaning the pancake and clearing the smoke detector debacle took up your morning, which meant you didn’t have breakfast. At all. Not even a grab and go banana. Instead, you went sprinting down and out, nearly running over your two floors down neighbor’s dog and getting a shouted earful about that. And of course it was drizzling, enough that an umbrella wasn’t going to keep you from getting uncomfortably damp. Your sneakers squish as you walk in the building, your co-workers wincing when they see you. Your best friend Wanda fusses over you for just a moment, trying to pat moisture out of your shirt.
“Really (Name), you’re such a mess today. I mean more than usual. Did someone get some,” She glances in both directions and whispers in your ear, “Action last night?”
You sputter, pushing her away gently. “Why would you think that?!” He’s not even home right now so it’s not like you could anyways.
She just giggles. “I’m kidding, kidding! Here.” You take the towel and try to dry your hair. You hate this because now you’re going to look like a puffball. “I made some of my famous soup today! For you and me and Natasha, so you’ll be warmed up before you know it.”
You heave a great sigh and drape yourself over her lap. “Oh Wanda, my love, what would I do without you?”
“Starve? Maybe suffer a soupless life?” You gasp, flinging your arm over your eyes. She just laughs again and pats you on the head before she sneaks back to her desk. You’re grateful she’s willing to suffer the wrath of the boss, who pushes productivity to the max.
You take a pause to check your phone before you move and light up when you see (1) message from Bucky.
BUCKY: Good morning beautiful
BUCKY: Just wanted to remind you that you are the bestest, most awesome person in the world and you’re gonna rock your day!
You work a classic office job, the kind in weird half cubicles where the walls are too short to hide anything from anyone. Before you even start working you have to clear away all the sticky notes and remnants from last Friday when you had dragged yourself home after some overtime. When your workspace is adequately cleaned (or at least cleaned enough you aren’t knocking over things when you shift), you get to answering your emails.
Which of course, leads to another bad thing. The client was infuriated with the current status of the project. In his eyes, it should have been done a week and a half ago, when you know full well that this project isn’t going to be done for another week if not two. It’s an intense request that just takes time and you’re already doing your best, putting in the overtime to try and reach his ridiculous goals. Heinrich Zemo really needs someone to knock him down a peg and you might just be the person to do it if you ever meet him in person.
So begins the back and forth emailing between you two, filled to the brim with polite fuck you’s. And since he seems to zing back mail at the speed of light, you can’t even work on anything else you’re supposed to, like the design blueprints for Natasha or the business plan outline for Sam. And they’re shooting you little looks because they kind of need that stuff for the next steps of their own projects. Sympathetic looks but looks just the same. And it makes you burn with frustration because you want to get it done, you want to be productive but you just. Can’t.
In between your phone keeps pinging with messages from Bucky, which is the only reason why you survive this entire frustrating situation.
BUCKY: i love your fashion sense. It’s so chic and sleek and ugh, so perfect for you
BUCKY: can’t wait to dance with you again darling! Hope you’re ready to try some tango this time ;)
BUCKY: do you want s’mores pie or banana cream? i’m thinking s’mores because y’know, chocolate. marshmallows. what’s not to love?
BUCKY: next date at the flower garden? we can have a picnic!
BUCKY: holy shit I am so ready for blueberry season again. I know it’s a while away but ugh, I really want some right now :(
BUCKY: you got this babe! I believe in you!
BUCKY: do you want to get Chinese or Italian when I see you again? I’m feeling a strong Chinese vibe.
YOU: Chinese
BUCKY: that’s my girl
The morning is a blur of pent up anger that ends with you squishing the ever loving shit out of a pumpkin plush, a desk leftover from Halloween. You’re half surprised the thing doesn’t pop under the pressure but you feel bad, placing it back down and patting it. Finally Zemo shuts up and you’re left with fifteen minutes before lunch, which really isn’t time to start anything for work. Instead, you bring out your white bound planner, a bullet journal you’ve been steadily working on, and start to build the next month. End of the month means needing to prep all the pages for February, and you sigh as you stare lovingly at your collection of pens just for this. They’re all absolutely lovely, shades that you adore and a quality that can’t be beat. You mill briefly, deciding between a pastel and a hard pink. The pastel wins out of course and you smooth out the page, already covered in neat pen lines from last night. You begin to fill in banners and hearts and…
Just your goddamn luck your pen starts to fizzle out. Which really sucks because these puppies are not cheap in the slightest. You growl and thunk your head on the desk, making Sam snicker.
“Not your day?”
“Not now Wilson.”
“Aw, c’mon. I’m pretty sure there’s something good in your horoscope for today.” He’s teasing you now for sure. He’s not even into horoscopes, not even as a joke. You turn your head enough to give him your darkest stink eye, which just makes him grin wider. He pats your shoulder and slides over some chocolates, dark like you like it. You huff and your hands come up to open the blue foil, fumbling a bit before popping it in your mouth.
Your phone pings and you glance at it with dull eyes. Sam can visibly see them getting their spark back though and he can guess who’s messaged.
(1) message from Bucky
BUCKY: hey sweetheart, just wanted to tell you that you’re my favorite girl and it’s lunch time! I made myself a sandwich today, look!
BUCKY: (1 photo attached)
YOU: why’s it so full? it’s practically bursting!
YOU: if you take a bite you’re gonna spill everything out of the bread
BUCKY: hey! rude! >:(
BUCKY: I’ll have you know I am a sandwich expert and it will not spill everywhere
YOU: sure it won’t babe ;)
BUCKY: >:T
“(Name)!!” Wanda comes bursting back in, holding up a thermos for you to see. It does brighten up your day, especially when Natasha pops up right after with a box of sandwiches from the best deli on the block. She even got you extra fries. God your friends are so good.
At least lunch passes without any scruples. You don’t spill any of Wanda’s spicy and absolutely delicious soup and you don’t drip any mayo on your blouse from the sandwich. There’s a close call with some ketchup for the fries but it lands next to your leg instead of on it.
“Absolutely not. How dare you even assume Eliza has a chance?” Natasha jabs a fry in your direction.
“Well it’s better than Martha! Did you see her bedroom eyes at him? And he just straight up ignored her!” Wanda throws her hands up in frustration. “Honestly, does this guy even like any of the contestants? It’s like he has the stiffest face in the world.”
You shrug, thoughtfully munching for a moment. “I just think Eliza’s nice y’know? She’s sweet and she’s not pushy, which I mean. It’s probably not great for ratings but Nick hasn’t eliminated her yet so that has to count for something right?”
“Nuh-uh! Angelica’s a favorite here. Did you see how he was laughing on their fake date? I can tell flirting when I see it. And she’s a real firecracker type, which means she’s definitely there to spice up his life if you know what I mean~” Natasha wiggles her eyebrows and you snort, nearly choking on your ice tea.
“Y’all are crazy! It’s definitely gotta be Delanie! Cute, small, hips fit real well.” Sam runs his hands in the same, also wiggling his eyebrows. “And did you see how he was watching her when she was talking about her family? How she wanted a cute little wedding like her parents? That’s a catch.”
You sigh and put your head in your hands. “It’s so artificial though. Like I know all this is scripted and framed and stuff so like, what does it matter? I’d want something real.”
“You sound really dreamy there (name). Got some embarrassing sappy things you want to say to us?” Wanda has her face pressed up to yours and you blush, pushing her away again. Wanda’s really dangerous like that, able to sniff out feelings and stories just like that.
“No! Shut your smug little faces.” All three have taken on that look that you know oh so well. You shovel another few fries in your face and then shut the empty container. Around a mouthful of the dry potatoes, you mumble, “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some outlines and blueprints to work on.”
How is this day not already over? Honestly it feels like it’s been an eternity.
Your phone pings with a message. Steve, inviting you to a Monday movie night. Since movies are cheap as hell, Steve likes to visit the theaters often and see what the new thing is. Not surprising given his theatrical/acting/film study obsession.
STEVE: Movie night?
YOU: what movie?
STEVE: Cats (2019)
STEVE: I know, I know I just really want to see it. It’s so interesting, the CGI work!
YOU: i dont really want to pay money to see that though
YOU: like its
YOU: so weird
YOU: and like not
YOU: i dunno i just don’t really want to see it
STEVE: :(
STEVE: C’mon, it’ll be fun! We’ll get caramel corn.
YOU: ooooh tempting me
YOU: but no i think imma go home and like wine night it
YOU: its been a long day :/
STEVE: Ouch. Well it’s the same place as usual, 6 PM if you wanna come.
YOU: probs not but thanks anyways
STEVE: :)
You plug in your headphones and scroll through your music, settling for some chilled out tunes to slowly progress through the dense documents you have to read before you can properly plan out Sam’s thing. It sucks because you can already feel a headache starting to bud and you have to stop periodically to press on your eyes. You also frequently get up to get water, which means you’re also going to the bathroom a lot and today’s productivity has just slam dunked down the drain. To compensate for not doing literally any work in the morning (gee, thanks Zemo), you put in some overtime hours, which means you’re definitely movie night. You don’t even leave the office until your eyes are burning with the strain of staring at a screen for seven or so hours. You stumble out and rub your eyes, yawning and stretching, trying to get some of the tension out of your shoulders.
(1) message from Bucky
BUCKY: have you been at work this whole time? Damn girl
BUCKY: the grind never stops💪
YOU: i wish it did
YOU: ugh i’m so tired :(
BUCKY: well you’re almost home right?
BUCKY: im sure there’s something good waiting for you at home
BUCKY: like dinner! what are you thinking today?
You don’t even know what you’re going to do for dinner, but you’ll deal with that when you get home. At worst you have some cheap instant noodle thing that you can spice up with some eggs. It’s still dreary out and it feels like rain in your skin so you almost sprint home, sticking to the well-lit areas because you are not in the mood to punch a mugger in the nose.
You stop by the corner store though and buy yourself two bottles of wine. You buy something that’s nice, indulging a little. Or you try to anyways, when you discover you left your ID at home. You groan in frustration and instead grab some peach-mango juice and a bag of BBQ chips, hovering momentarily over the big blocks of cheese. You really could just use one to bite into, but you refrain, knowing you have shredded cheese at home, and you can just eat that with a spoon.
Trudging up the stairs, you nearly kick the dog again because it comes shooting around the corner of the stairs. As it is, you end up swerving and kicking the wall which makes you drop your grocery goods and you just.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
You gather the groceries in your arms again and make it finally to your apartment, nearly staggering into the door. You fumble with the keys, missing the lock a few times before jamming it in and twisting. You’re ready to collapse on the couch and chug your juice straight from the gallon container but you don’t because when you lift your eyes up from the ground, you’re met with the bestest, sweetest, slightly crooked smile in the world.
“Bucky!” You drop everything and full body launch yourself at him, nearly tipping him over. Whatever he says about being strong and sturdy, you’re a force to be reckoned with and you snuggle your face up against his neck, breathing in the pine needle and wood smoke scent he has. “I thought you weren’t going to be back for another week!”
“Decided to surprise you doll face.” He peppers your cheeks with kisses, and you can’t help the giggle that bubbles out of you. His lips are so warm against your chilled skin and you try your best to catch them against yours.
He hefts you up a bit so you’re almost sitting on his hip. He bends down to get the fallen chips and you squeal, tightening your hold on his neck. He fakes a choking sound and you loosen a little, feeling him smile against your cheeks.
“You’re so prickly.” Your fingers run along his jawline that’s covered in stubble.
You can feel his laugh, from his chest where you’re pressed. “Sorry pumpkin, I didn’t have a lot of time between there and here.” He stands back up again and you shriek again, burying your face at the sudden moment. “Sounds like you’re still full of energy though.”
“Noooo. I’m really tired Bucky, I had a hard day at work. I’ve had a hard day all dayyyyy.” You turn with a pout, which makes him kiss your puffed cheeks. His eyes sparkle with mirth and you feel like the entire day has completely melted away.
He carries you to the couch, depositing you in front of some of your favorite Chinese take-out. The smell alone makes you wanna drool and you lean forward to take a big, deep breath. “You are a god send.” He waives it out with another full belly laugh, handing you a pair of chopsticks. He got your favorite dumplings and sour-spicy soup and of course, shrimp lo mien. You practically inhale the food. “It’s so good babe, oh my god. I have been revived from the dead.” He flicks on the TV, finding some movie marathon. It sounds like Harry Potter but you’re way to invested in the food in front of you.
It makes you feel so overwhelmingly warm to have him home again after being away for so long. Soon enough, the empty cartons are abandoned on the table and you’re curled up against his side, exhaustion seeping into your warm, full body. Bucky’s got his arm around you, gently playing with the hair that curls by your neck. He’s telling a story, something about how he had found an adorable kitten at work who had clung to his shoulder all day. His voice runs over you like honey tea, so warm and comforting. You have his other hand in your own hands, tracing the scars that lace over his knuckles and across his palm. Everyone your fingers cover, you follow with kisses.
“I love you.” You yawn in the middle, but he just leans over to kiss your forehead, simultaneously pulling over the blanket from the edge of the couch towards you. It’s your favorite blanket, and it definitely wasn’t on the couch this morning. God he’s so sweet.
“I love you too (name).” He gives you another forehead kiss and begins to play with your hair, which you almost purr at. This is it, this is peak comfort. You grip his shirt tightly, slightly worried this is just some fever dream you’re having at being so tired. “Tell me about your day. Don’t leave out a single detail!”
“Mm, well it started with a burnt pancake…”
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foul mouth | kth ceo au
∷ Cursing out and not recognizing your boss earned you his constant (and annoying) attention alongside a new nickname.
Taehyung x Reader
Words: 4,689
∵ fluff
∵ ceo au ,,, e2l au
“Um… you,” a hand was pointed towards your face, “photocopy 2 of everything then man the desk,” now a tonne of papers was slammed in front of you, sending a gust of wind backwards and shocking you from the force they were dropped at.
Getting bossed around was something you had to get used to being a junior secretary at a huge up and coming company- a new junior secretary who also only started three days ago.
There were also nicknames; they were rather degrading as most people never bothered to learn your name until they decided you could last at least four months here. Nothing too special; most people opted for: ’hey you!’ or ’thingy’ and the most welcoming- ’newbie’.
You had to take it on the chin, this was your job -a well paying one- that you weren’t planning on losing any time soon. So the workload and rude coworkers are something you’ll have to get used to, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t annoying as shit.
”It’s Y/N,” managing to wrap your tiny hands around the blocks of paper, you lifted up the weight, ”you should know; you’re the one who hired me Amanda,” your boss or head secretary, Amanda, didn’t have time for ’casual’ conversation (somehow, knowing your name was casual) and anytime anyone brought up anything other than work she shut it down. So making friends was out the window.
”Alright then Adrian,” not even close, “can you stop messing around and photocopy these for me quickly. I want to go to lunch,” you did admire her however; the way she managed to talk with you, the person on the phone, the person in front of her, all while clicking the mouse to add another tab onto the already filled screen on her computer was multitasking skills beyond even your own mother. And the fact that she still managed it with impeccable slicked back hair, untouched skin and a perfect pantsuit combo was some sort of sorcery.
”Chop chop,” Amanda waved her hand in your general direction and went back to her multiple conversations.
The sigh that fell from your mouth was heavy enough to even worry the man standing behind the desk, but nonetheless, work was work and you were willing to commit until this job inevitably kills you.
The walk to the photocopy room wasn’t that far, so you didn’t bother thinking about the fact the trip back you were carrying double the weight until you were there, smacking your head against the photocopier for your sheer stupidity of not doing this in two trips.
”Finally,” Amanda got up from her chair, not to help, but to grab her purse, ”I’m going to get some food and I’ll be straight back as I still don’t trust you here alone. Put the papers on my side of the desk,” oh, that’s a nice feeling.
Being bashed and then ordered around again. You stood there, loads and loads of paper somehow balanced in your hands as you watched Amanda walk away, heels clicking against the tile floors with every self-entitled step.
You set down the papers with a slam next to her computer, the pens laid on her desk dispersed and you didn’t make an effort to pick them up. A favour for a favour.
Expecting a clear desk, you sat down in your chair with the annoyingly squeaky wheel and gasp at your computer screen. You stared at what was normally a flawless sheer black, clean screen that had transformed into a mood board for yellow and pink post-it notes, all similarly decorated with a neat ’A’ at the bottom of the task set on each one of them.
”Fuck sake!” You bang your head onto the keyboard; unintelligible combinations appearing onto your Microsoft Excel and stretching the collum as your profile stays firmly pressed against the board.
”I know the feeling, but maybe keep the language to yourself, you’re in a public space,” an unfamiliar voice ringed in your ears, the tone of was deep, but it was smoother than caramel; you could fall into it and listen to it all day… but once the words registered in your mind your head shot up, hair flying everywhere and out of your pathetically tied bun.
“There you go,” the man watched as you appeared from under the desk like a bunny coming out of a magicians top hat, “you need to let me in. I’ve lost my ID and can’t get through the turnstiles. You have to let me in, I would jump over, but I don’t want to rip this suit.”
Not only were you the secretary for this building and company, you also were the ’gatekeeper’- as you liked to call it. You and Amanda decide who goes in and who doesn’t; people who work here have an ID to get them past the turnstiles, and others, who have scheduled appointments, are given a temporary guest ID to let them in. This guy, however, has neither of those things and Amanda made it very clear: ’never let someone who doesn’t have an ID or appointment through. Or else’.
And as a new employee under her care, you didn’t want to embarrass you or her.
“I can’t do that sir. You don’t have an ID or an appointment so you can’t go through,” you say with a monotone voice a shuffle through papers to make yourself look busy.
The look he fires back to your remark is either completely disgust or shock, ”my face should be ID enough.”
Wow, what a cocky little shit. You scoff and smile, shocked by his attitude.
”Your face? Sorry, but as a person who works here, I’ve never seen you around,” you roll your eyes and turn away, sitting back down in your chair, ”you can’t go through.”
“You’re just a secretary, who have you seen around and what do you do anyway?” You could see the self-entitlement dripping off of him.
Your blood starts boiling and you slam your hands on the desk, rising slowly and building up and ready to burst like a volcano. At first, before you took this job, you would’ve thought the same thing, but finally having the experience of being a secretary and the workload, you were ready to punch this guy square in the face.
”Just a secretary? Sorry, sir,” you over pronounce the sir, ”but i’m not just the fucking secretary, I also manage the damn gates.”
”Revolutionary. You hold the company on your shoulders,” you didn’t much enjoy the sarcasm or smile that this man’s mouth is showing.
“Alright you fucking listen here mister,” you lean over the counter while pointing a finger, officially done with today and this random dude, “I work fucking hard, this job is hard as shit I hope you know that. Also, I’m not letting you in the bloody building, okay?”
The fact that he was still grinning was all the more frustrating; you wanted to slap it off his face.
”You have such a foul mouth,” he speaks softly, but with a teasing smile which aggravates you further.
”You have a foul personality. Don’t come over to me and demand stuff I can’t give you like a spoilt child,” you spit at him. Honestly, if he caught you at any other time, you wouldn’t be this fired up.
”Actually you can because I’m-”
”Mr Kim?”
Both you and the frustrating man turn to see Amanda, standing there, half-eaten sandwich in her left hand, ”are you here for your afternoon meeting?”
Confusion struck; Amanda knew him? Who’s mister Kim? What meeting?
Your confusion wasn’t exactly hidden; it was pretty obvious to Amanda what happened as she clicked her heels back around the desk to your side to look for the guest IDs, all while shouting/whispering in your ear, ”he’s the CEO of the company, Kim Taehyung. And you’ve made him late for a meeting”
The expression on your face was priceless; Taehyung had to let out a small snicker as your eyes slowly but surely widened and your back straightened up. Words were on the tip of your tongue but came out as stupid stutters instead of the calm and sweet, honey voice he had.
Amanda handed over the ID and shook her head, apologizing on your behalf, “sorry, they’re the newbie,” you could feel the cheeks redden and you hoped he wouldn’t point it out, but after talking to him for only 3 minutes, you felt like he’s a person who would.
“Alright foul mouth, think you can remember this face for next time,” the way you tried to hide the incredulous look on your face only made Taehyung smile wider.
Taehyung bid farewell to Amanda and walked over to the turnstiles, letting himself in and running to the elevators.
”Hey y/n,” Amanda nudged your arm; you were expecting a scolding for not knowing who the owner of the company was, but you got, “I think he likes you,” you see her smiling for the first time as she walks back to the seat.
You were left in a daze… he likes you? And Amanda knows your name? It got you blushing even more than usual… Taehyung did, not Amanda.
“What?” You blinked at her. Too many thoughts that ’what’ was the only word you could let out.
“Well, he fired the last secretary because they couldn’t remember his name… so I guess he likes you,” Amanda shrugged.
You visibly gulped. You were in for it. This guy was bad news. And he was your boos.
“Should I get my dog the banana costume or the Dorothy costume for Halloween?”
It had only been a month since you had started work here and Amanda had taken a complete 180. The two conversation topics you and Amanda fall back on when the awkward silence fills the desk is her dog, Grumples (which you didn’t mind, like, at all) and Taehyung, the CEO (which you did mind, making it Amanda’s favourite subject topic)
”Those Dorothy shoes look like they’re from build-a-bear,” you lean over and give your input as she shows you her phone.
Amanda nods in agreement and keeps scrolling, “banana it is,” she copies you and rests her feet on the desk next to yours.
Over the past month, yours and Amanda’s computers slowly got closer and closer together -as did your friendship- and now you were reading a magazine and resting your feet on the desk.
Old Amanda would’ve erupted if she saw the both of you. Maybe once Amanda found a conversation topic that was mildly amusing (Taehyung, unfortunately) she got attached to you.
At least she knew your name now.
“It’s September, why are you ordering now?” You questioned
“I don’t trust delivery services at all,” Amanda responded.
”I can pay for next day delivery for you,” the deep, honey voice had shocked you once again- at least Amanda was there to flinch too.
As Amanda keeps her cool and places a hand on her chest to calm down her heart, you, on the other hand, jump up in your chair with a, ”what the fuck!”
”Wow, foul mouth has foul feet too,” Taehyung poked your big toe on your foot, which is sprawled out the desk; you flinched away while yelping- his hands were incredibly cold.
There was no one in the lobby and your feet hurt from the heels, who really would blame you for taking them off and relaxing- letting them breathe perhaps.
”W-what are you doing down here? Get back to work!” you struggle to fumble off the chair and stand up, blubbering uncontrollably as you slip slightly while trying to maintain some composure.
”You’re the one who’s resting their dirty feet on the front desk foul mouth!” Taehyung retorted, causing a small gasp to fall past your lips in offence; the nickname and him calling your feet dirty somehow cut deeper coming from his lips.
Amanda, like always, sits at the side and watches you and Taehyung’s usual ’run-ins’ with an amused look on her face.
These ’run-ins’ have been occurring more than you would like them to. It seemed to start happening after you embarrassingly didn’t recognise him as the CEO of the company you work for (you have brushed up your knowledge on the company after that incident) and then cursed him out.
The ordinarily quiet lobby (apart from mornings and rush hour when everyone leaves) now always -what you thought- had a scampering child running around in it. Taehyung was constantly there, popping up unexpectedly to get a reaction out of you- specifically a reaction to get you cursing at him again just to tell you off.
Just when you thought you got rid of the insufferable nicknames, another one came out of nowhere. ’Foul mouth’. So what you had a slight potty mouth? It wasn’t a big deal. But when Taehyung pointed it out, it became some sort of horrible thing you should stop doing. Obviously, you didn’t.
Every time the name dropped from his lips it was always spoken as a hum; a horrible nickname sounded sweet with his voice; like he was singing a beautiful song every time he said it, and you hated it. You were sure he didn’t know your name as that’s all he ever called you.
He shouldn’t even be down here; he should be in his office, a hundred feet away from you.
”Mr Kim, leave before I fucking drop kick you,” you slammed your hand down on the stapler, connecting the two papers and showing hostility in your irises.
”I love it when you talk dirty to me baby,” Taehyung rested his elbow on the desk, cheek resting in his hand as he stared at you lovingly; the look in his eyes was bewildering, it looked so real, but you knew it was just some tease.
“Go upstairs,” you hiss as a warning.
“This is so cute,” Amanda chuckled and was practically eating popcorn as she watched you both. Witnessing you and Taehyung squabble was her new favourite pastime.
You knew because she told you.
Amanda chirping in was ignored and Taehyung continued the conversation, “if you actually read my schedule, you would know I’m going out to negotiate a business deal so-” Taehyung showed his mature side by flipping you off with both hands.
”Of course I read your schedule!” no, you didn’t. You read ’Mr Kim’s sc-’ and tossed it into the trash.
“I know you didn’t, but i’ll forgive you,” Taehyung flashes a bitter smile as you watch a sleek black car pull up in the street through the lobby windows. You didn’t want to guess how much it was, but it looked expensive. The tinted windows and paint job looked as if they cost more than your monthly rent.
Taehyung notices the car too and starts walking backwards slowly, keeping his eyes on you, “bye foul mouth,” a wink was directed at you, as was a shit-eating grin before Taehyung turned around and left the building, pulling a large coat on to cover his already large frame.
A wink. How cheesy.
”Did you see that? Mr Kim winked at you,” Amanda chirped in, poking your sides playfully.
”It was cringey.”
”Why are you blushing then?”
“Should I get my dog the elf costume or the reindeer costume for Christmas?”
“Those hoofs look deranged.”
”Elf it is.”
“It’s November, why are you ordering now?”
You and Amanda looked over at each other- you’ve had this conversation before.
Smiling at the infamous deja vu, you loosely chuck your wallet into the handbag that was definitely too big for the things you normally carry and grab your phone, ”do you want anything?”
”No, just be quick y/n,” Amanda’s workaholic side was evident in that sentence, wanting you back from your break as quickly as possible.
You nod and circle round the desk, quickening your pace as you don’t want to face Amanda’s wrath if you’re late.
”Wait! Y/n!” you whip your head around, expecting to be faced with Amanda’s face, but instead, a thick coat harshly smacked into your face and fell into your arms, ”you forgot your coat.”
Saluting to Amanda, you dash out of the door and give her another reason to scoff at you. You carelessly scramble to pull the coat on; the soft fabric touching your skin as you pulled your arm through the sleeve, tips of your fingers visible at the end.
The doors at the exit automatically opened once you were close enough and you swiftly stepped out, smiling to the bodyguards before doing so.
Cold air breathed into your skin once you stepped outside, hitting you like a truck; red cells rising to your cheeks to protect you from the harsh breeze. Your coat was already wrapped around you, adding another layer of protection as your flimsy dress and wool tights are useless against this weather.
It wasn’t unbearable, but you wanted to get out of the bitter weather and find something to warm up your hands; the nearest cafe to the building was a safe bet.
The place was small and quaint, so whenever someone walked in, the bell would ring and almost every face would turn to you, checking the arrival of the new person is acceptable enough to stay here.
That’s exactly what happened to you; not only did the warmth from the heaters hit your face, about 8 different eyes burned holes into you too- effectively heating you up more.
Looking down, you sauntered forward, avoiding the looks as you neared the counter. The man in front who had just finished his order turned around and- oh fuck.
“Mr Kim?”
The egregious smirk etched its way onto Taehyung’s face -insufferable and handsome as always- as he finished his order with, ”-oh, also a latte for foul mouth too,” he spins around, smile still present, ”you like lattes right?”
”I hate them,” you keep lying so he wouldn’t have the satisfaction of being right, ”and you’re not paying for my coffee- why are you even here?”
”It’s my day off. You really don’t read my schedule do you?” Taehyung looked slightly hurt, but the teasing kind that suggests he’s upset you aren’t obsessed with him. Like you’ll be obsessed with someone so full of himself to think like that.
”I did!” that was true. You eventually looked.
You tried resting on your tiptoes, looking past the tall man, but your view was blocked by his annoyingly becoming face, “and cancel the damn latte!” you shout to the barista, unable to get past the wall that is Mr Kim.
You let out a heavy sigh at him rotating his head around and gesturing at the poor barista to make it anyway.
Stumbling back, you finally got a good look of Taehyung in casual clothes. Well, casual enough for a businessman like Mr Kim. A striped, collared red shirt layered with a navy cardigan and a trench coat you really didn’t want to guess the price of.
Everything looked seamlessly exceptional on him, wearing it with so much confidence is what made him all the more attractive; any piece of clothing that was worn by him gained value by 100% just because it touched his skin. You shamelessly got too lost starting at him to notice the hand waving in front of your face.
”Foul mouth?” a look of genuine concern crossed his face, “stop spacing out.”
The nickname brought you back- does he even know your name?
”A cappuccino and latte to go?” the barista called from behind you, holding the plastic cups towards you.
There was no way you were letting Taehyung pay for you; your pride wouldn’t let you- even though it was just coffee.
You swatted his hand away that held a wad of money and dug into your oversized handbag to pull out your flimsy wallet. You handed the barista a 10 and refused the change.
“I was going to pay for that,” Taehyung held up his arms.
“Tough,” you grab onto both coffee cups, harsh pricks of warmth stabbing at your fingertips and tickling up your arm. To say it woke you up a little was an understatement.
Forcing the coffee into his open hand, Taehyung tried resisting, ”but-”
”Just because you’re ‘rich’,” you used air quotes with your free hand, ”doesn’t mean you have to pay for everything.”
Normally, Taehyung was not one to show when certain words affected him -being a businessman it could come in handy- but those small, simple words struck a chord within him. He never noticed; everyone always expected him to pay; everyone always waited until he reached for the bill first. It was refreshing to hear it.
Taehyung just froze up; a smile on his face and coffee in hand, the heat from the plastic cup is not the only thing sending tingles of amiability up his spine.
It took you a second to notice Mr Kim was staring at you. You couldn’t help but tease, waving a hand in front of his face and smiling at him, ”are you having an embolism?”
You had got him to laugh, which you were curiously happy about.
”No… thank you,” Taehyung looked down at the ground while holding up his cup, grinning just to glance back up at you with that boyish smile that would make any girls heart flutter. Including yours.
”No problem,” the air gets awkward so you step back and out of it, ”I should get back to work before Amanda kills me.”
”I could walk you b-”
”No! I’m fine!” you rush out the door; heart at a pace that wasn’t what anyone would call ’normal’ and cheeks completely burning. The cold breeze was barely doing justice in cooling you down.
”Guess what,” Amanda grins as she looks up at you as she sits on the other side of the desk.
”What?” it was like you knew what she would say, but you ask anyway because you had just arrived and slumped on the customer side of the desk.
”I cancelled the elf costume and went for the reindeer anyway.”
You roll your eyes at Amanda- of course she would.
Amanda greeting you by talking about her dog didn’t cheer you up like it normally would. This morning had been unbearable and it hasn’t even started properly. All it took was one thing -that one thing is waking up late- to screw up the rest of the day.
”We have Mr Kim’s new schedule for this week,” Amanda held out the piece of paper whilst typing on the computer, once again showing off her prodigious multitasking skills.
The paper flew out of her two fingers as you snatched it from her and speed-walked around the desk. Crashing down onto your leather seat you read through it with gleaming eyes that didn’t go unnoticed by your desk buddy.
Things between you and Mr Kim have been… friendly? What was once teasing and cursing back and forth turned into genuine conversations every time he came downstairs, (there was still a little teasing and cursing) becoming significantly uninteresting to Amanda, which was a plus for you- although he did still call you foul mouth, proving your suspicions that he didn’t know your name to be true.
Running your fingers over the ink on the page, you memorized as much as you could on first glance, however, it came to a halt once it landed over the end of today.
Monday 5:30 - Dinner date.
A date? The words tasted strange on your tongue and you haven’t even said it out loud yet. You didn’t even know he had time for dates, but you knew it didn’t sit well with you; a grip was on your stomach and the fact that you felt like that, felt wrong entirely. He was basically your boss.
Your upset face was obviously more noticeable than you first thought as it attracted the attention of Amanda, ”something wrong?” she notices the placement of your finger and smirks.
”Jealous?” she spoke in that annoying mocking voice again.
”No,” you slammed the paper onto your desk, becoming engrossed with your computer screen instead, ”why would I be jealous?”
”Because you secretly like your boss and he’s going out with someone who isn’t you,” she had pinned the tail onto the donkey. The donkey was you and the tail was the cold hard truth.
”Fuck off.”
”Stop sulking!”
You scoff at Amanda as you continue to indeed, pout.
You promised yourself you wouldn’t get that upset over it, it wasn’t a big deal at all; he could even have a girlfriend for all you know. What you were really pouting over was the fact that Taehyung had not come downstairs at all today. It has become a habit and you had got used to it, getting comfortable with his presence being there.
You let out one big, final sigh as you start packing up; you hurriedly shove everything into your handbag, mumbling curses to yourself when you accidentally dropped your phone to the floor.
Bending over while praying it didn’t smash, you retrieve your phone and stand back up straight to meet a face you say you’re comfortable with, but still get scared of every time it appears unexpectedly.
”Mr Kim!” you place a hand over your chest and try to calm down from another jumpscare, ”what are you doing down here?”
”You really don’t read my schedule, do you?” Taehyung studies your every movement as you walk around the desk, ”I have a date.”
You press a smile together and raise your eyebrows, ”have fun,” lowering your face, you start speed walking for the door.
As you listened to your heels click against the floor rapidly, another sound of steps close-by catches your attention. You stopped abruptly and whipped your head to the side to see Taehyung.
”Mr Kim what-”
”I prefer it if you would call me Taehyung.”
”But you’re my boss-” you tried speaking again, but inevitably got interrupted.
”And you’re my date y/n,” your heart sped up and somehow slowed down at the same time. He said your name and date in one sentence, ”so let’s go,” your hand was taken from you as Taehyung dragged you away; Amanda excitedly waving you out of the door.
”Mr- Kim, what’s going on?” Taehyung somehow managed to get you into his car before answering your constant questions.
You were both in the back seat and you could not be more confused. You were his date? He knew your actual name?
Taehyung slowly reached over you, grabbing the seatbelt and helping you strap in; the close proximity was deadly as you held in a breath. You could feel his breath tickling the peach fuzz on your cheeks, which were bright red by now.
”You’re my date,” you felt the seatbelt click in place, ”because I like you. You stand up for yourself, which is hot, and are more caring than you think… and I wanted to take you out.”
You were a stuttering mess, words failing to get out, but you managed a small, ”w-wh-well what if I-I don’t want to go out?”
By the smirk on Taehyung’s face, you could tell he was planning something, ”tough,” you watched his dilated pupils getting closer and closer to you; hands nervously sweating and gripping onto the seat once his lips collided with force onto yours.
You felt two hands softly hold your cheeks, easily covering each one with how huge his hands were.
Just like everything else, Taehyung effortlessly got whatever he wanted and you relaxed, kissing him back; fluttering your eyes shut, your hands fell on top of his, softly caressing them as your lips worked together as if that was their sole purpose.
Everything was still confusing for you, but this felt right. It felt comfortable.
Taehyung was the first to pull away, causing the tiniest whimper to fall from your lips once he did. Your foreheads gently lean against each other; his cheeky grin still visible as you gulped.
”You know… for such a foul mouth, I didn’t expect you to taste so sweet.”
Taehyung may have got a smack around the head for that, but, he still pulled you back and enjoyed the taste of your lips for the whole ride to the restaurant.
#foul mouth#taehyung#kim taehyung#bts#bts kim taehyung#bts taehyung#v#kim taehyung x reader#scenario#taehyung scenario
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The First Step
Word Count: 3320
Characters: Tim McGee, Tony DiNozzo, others mentioned
Summary: Sometimes we just need a friend to help us get back on our feet. Tony and McGee friendship fic.
A/N: This was the first ever NCIS fic I wrote. Originally posted on FF (which I’m slowly moving away from to AO3). Link to the AO3 story is posted below. As I post more NCIS stories, I will create a master list. Enjoy!
AO3
Timothy McGee could not believe he was about to do this, but he steeled himself and banged on his partner's door—loudly.
It had been four days since anyone had spoken to Tony DiNozzo. He was ignoring cell phone calls, landline calls and emails. Effectively the federal agent had shut himself up in his apartment and off from the world. Abby was in tears most of the time, Gibbs snarled at McGee at every opportunity he got. The poor green agent that had been assigned to the now empty desk had only lasted a day before she ran from the building in hysterics herself.
Everything had fallen apart four days ago. And he wasn't even embellishing like Tony. Ziva's abrupt departure had thrown them all into a topsy-turvy, spiral, where some of them were fairing better than others.
"Come on, DiNozzo, I know you're in there!" Tim hissed. "Abby traced your cell."
Slowly the door to the apartment opened and all fight left Tim as a hallow look peered back at him from heavy lidded hazel eyes. It appeared Tony had not shaved—or showered for the matter—in a week. An unkempt beard covered his face, his skin, which usually had a healthy tan to it, was a gray pallor, and his breath reeked of stale beer and whiskey. "Tony?" He gasped, pale green eyes widening. "What the hell?"
"Oh, nice to see you too, McGee" Tony snapped but there was no bite behind it.
Tim realized he was looking at a man that was defeated. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen Tony quite like this. Not even after the break-up with Jeanne had the man gone on what was most appropriately deemed a bender. Tony was warped into a man that Tim didn't even know anymore. "Listen, I'm sorry. That came out wrong. But your appearance…it's not what I'm used too and we've been worried about you since we got the news that Ziva was leaving. Ducky said you needed your space. But Abby wanted to storm the gates—this was the compromise."
Tony grunted a response and threw open the door, allowing Tim access to his domain. The usually neat and orderly apartment was in disarray. Dirty clothes were tossed everywhere, pizza boxes towered on the dining room table, and beer bottles accented as many empty surfaces as possible. Ironically the only thing that could be considered clean was the goldfish bowl. Kate the goldfish happily swam around her bowl, in pristine water, and Tim realized that there was a sliver of hope that deep down Tony was still Tony—he still cared about something.
For a moment Tim watched as Tony plopped back down onto his sofa, eyes focused on the screen on some movie that the younger man had no idea about. There was a bottle of Jack Daniels on the coffee table and he winced at the implications of that. His partner had moved on from beer to the heavy stuff. He supposed that all men had a breaking point—he just never believed Tony DiNozzo was amongst them. Abby had once said that he was a solid rock. It took a lot to chip him and everything just rolled off of him and he kept going.
But was that a fair description? Tony was, despite the juvenile nature, very complex.
"So, um, Abby and I were wondering if you'd meet us for drinks later," Tim ventured.
Tony reached for his bottle of whiskey and took a swig. "Got plenty of drinks here."
Tim winced. That had been a dumb question. It was obvious that Tony had been drinking since he'd come back from tracking down Ziva. He knew it was none of his business but he desperately wanted to know what she had said to Tony to shove him on this self-destructive path. "We can do pizza and a movie. Or Chinese. It's been awhile since we all hung out. And I think…I think we all need it."
His partner shrugged his shoulders. "Don't feel like hanging out, Probie. You and Abby go and have a great time though. Suppose she's upset."
"Well, yeah, I mean she had to deal with us all resigning and we're not exactly coming back whole, are we?"
"Nope. We're not."
"Listen, if you need to talk about it."
Tony glared at him and Tim backed down. There was a dangerous look in the senior field agent's eyes and Tim was not in the mood to explore it. After all, Abby had requested that he get Tony to come out of his apartment for a few hours, not make matters worse.
Tim looked around the room, listening to the old movie playing in the background. "We can go bowling. Sister Rosita and the nuns bowl tonight. They'd love to have us."
"Sorry, but no thanks. My back hurts."
"Come on, are you going to hole yourself up here for the rest of your life?" Tim sputtered. "It's not the first time changes to our team have been made. You once told me that you suffered through a rotation of agents and then as a two-man team with Gibbs before Kate joined. We'll get through this. It's not reason to drink. We survived Kate's death, we can survive this, Tony."
"This is different," Tony mumbled.
"Of course it's different. It's better, right? I mean, Ziva isn't dead. It's not like she can't come back and visit us."
"She won't."
He was a little tongued tied. "You psychic now?"
Tony shook his head, another swallow of whiskey. "Nope. She made it clear that she needed a clean break. If she comes back, it won't be any time soon. Tell Abby she can stop emailing and begging Ziva."
"How...never mind, it's not important that you knew this," Tim said, putting his hands up in surrender. "What's important is that we get you out of this apartment and...and functioning again."
"Saying I'm dysfunctional McGee?"
Tim's mouth hung open for a moment. "Well! Look at you!" he gestured to Tony's bum like appearance. He really didn't know what else to say. It was the last card he could possibly think to play at this point.
Tony quirked an eyebrow and swirled the amber liquid around in the Jack Daniels bottle. "Guess I have let myself go."
"You guess?"
"Alright I have. Just a little."
"Just a little?" Tim spat, the pitch of his voice raising. God, I need a mirror so he can see.
His partner didn't offer any counter argument to that and leaned back into the cushions, watching the movie on his plasma television screen. He was really starting to worry Tim. Had Tony been this messed up after Kate died? Tim couldn't recall but at the time he was still fairly new to NCIS and had easily accepted whatever Tony told him. He should have known that Tony did not cope with Kate's death by eating junk food. Tim rubbed his temple for a moment. "Come on, Tony. You need to get out. Hiding away here isn't doing you any good."
Tony threw his head back and took another long swig of the whiskey. Wiping his mouth clean of the alcohol with his sleeve, he narrowed his eyes at Tim. "I know what I need—to be left alone. I'm not going to bounce back like you or Abby or Jimmy. I'm not going to let this roll off my shoulder like Gibbs or Ducky. Because it's different this time. This isn't just a partner leaving. She meant more to me than a partner, than a friend. And forgive me, if I feel like drowning my sorrows in alcohol and old movies."
Suddenly the gravity of his words hit Tim full bore in the chest. He saw the pain, the betrayal and the longing in his partner's eyes. He'd been turning a blind eye now for years. Sure, he'd always known that Tony and Ziva's relationship was different, he just didn't think-or refused to believe-Tony had actually fallen in love with her. Lord does he have a way of falling in love with the wrong woman, Tim thought as he found the easy chair and sat down. "She was Mossad, Tony. You didn't actually think…it was every going to work out in the end, did you?"
"Not when she was officially with Mossad, no," Tony muttered, closing his eyes tightly, "but she left them, to join us because…foolishly I thought it was because she wanted to start anew."
"And you thought, someday, it would work."
"Yeah. Should have known it wasn't going to end any other way. Once Mossad, always Mossad, eh?" Tony spat, bitterly. Another swig of whiskey. "Just another notch on my stupid things I've done belt."
Tim shook his head. "It wasn't stupid, Tony. We can't always control who we fall in love with."
Tony peered at him, thoughtfully. "Look at you, McRomeo. I take it that fair Delilah is treating you well."
"Don't change the subject—this is about you," Tim admonished him. "And besides, you'll bounce back—you always do."
"No, I don't just bounce back. I'm not a rubber ball."
"I don't understand."
Slowly Tony let out a breath, and looked right at Tim. "After Wendy left, I didn't eat for weeks. Gibbs almost literally had to shove food down my throat, pick me up and dust me off," Tony mused. "It was years before I actually went on a date again. Just around the time we met you I think. Oh, don't look that surprised. You've known for a while now that most of the time the women are just apart of the act."
Tim had to admit there were times he was certain that Tony's stories of his dates and his little black book were just that—stories. But hearing first hand affirmation of that shocked him. "And after Jeanne?"
Tony shrugged. "Pretty much the same, except for Gibbs picking me up and dusting me off. I kept the pain private, made it look like that I really had been acting and that I never did love her. Truth was, I loved her—a lot. If we had met under different circumstances, say, where she knew the real me, I might have ended up making a life with her."
"EJ?"
"It hurt that she didn't trust me. Ran from me all the time. But I couldn't let people see how much it hurt. Have a reputation to maintain after all, McGee."
"Tony…why didn't you…God, we would have helped you."
Silence fell between them for a moment, before the SFA put the bottle of whiskey down and looked at his partner, sternly. "You already don't think very highly of me, McGee. I didn't want to give you anymore ammunition to use against me if you saw how weak I'd become."
Tim looked away, embarrassed. It was true. He wasn't always nice to Tony but somewhere throughout their eleven years of working together, the man's goofy charm had grown on him. It was true that at times Tony annoyed the hell out of him, but as of late, he was finding that he really missed the oddball joke or movie reference just to break the tension. "Yeah. Guess I owe you an apology."
Tony shook his head. "No. You don't. I didn't make it easy for you."
"I'll say," Tim mumbled. He heard Tony chuckle for the first time since arriving.
Again they fell into silence, the only sound in the apartment that of the old movie playing on the television, and then the clunk of the Jack Daniels bottle as it was set down onto the coffee table. Tim watched as Tony rubbed his hands over his scraggly face. "What am I doing, McGee?"
Tim cocked an eyebrow in curiosity. "You mean besides locking yourself away, drinking at all hours of the day and watching old Cary Grant movies?"
Tony smiled, sadly. "Impressive, McGee. Didn't know you were familiar with Cary Grant."
"Well, Ducky says you fancy you self the modern day Cary Grant with your dress," Tim replied with a slight shrug of his shoulders. "But back to the point, since your ADD has sent us off track again. What do you mean, what are you doing?"
"I'm sitting here wallowing over a woman that I was never in a relationship with."
"Come on. Not the first time a guy has wallowed over a woman that wasn't his."
Tony grunted, lowly. "Don't try to make me feel better, because this is how I end up—again and again. In the movies it's the pretty girl crying over the jock breaking her heart. My life—it's my heart that's been broken over and over. Wendy, Jeanne, EJ—Ziva—they all left me."
Tim absorbed that bit of information. "Come on, you must have ended a relationship before."
"I've ended a lot of one night stands and long weekends, relationships that really do not qualify as one."
"I could drop a horrible cliché here and say, everything happens for a reason."
Tony shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. "Horribly cliché. Not sure the reason why my heart being broken over and over again is. Guess I should just come to terms with the fact that I'm probably going to be alone the rest of my life. I'm married to the job."
Tim didn't know why but his partner's declaration of damning himself to solo life, stung. Tony didn't deserve all that had been thrown at him over the years and as he sat there with him, Tim was beginning to wonder why the mental breakdown had taken so long to grasp him. Of course, maybe it was always that the thought that someday Ziva would feel the same way about Tony and everything was going to work out that they would get their happy ending. Who knew that the womanizing, play boy, Anthony DiNozzo was really a hopeless romantic at heart? "You just haven't met the right girl yet."
"Ya think, Probie?"
"Listen. If it's going to happen maybe you shouldn't be looking for it."
"Wasn't looking for it when I fell for Ziva."
Tim rubbed his temple. They could easily go around in circles for hours. Tony was good at that. "You said Ziva was different. She was different because she was your partner for eight years. You survived all different kinds of hell with her. There's a small possibly that you love her but you're not in love with her."
Tony reached for the bottle of Jack and took a long sip. "You're not making any sense, ."
"Hear me out."
"Fine."
Tim took a deep breath. "If you were in love with her you would have stormed off that plane in Israel and told her. If you were in love with her you would have stopped her from going on that suicide mission to Somalia. If you were in love with her you wouldn't have waited for Gibbs silent signal to go after her when she stormed out of the cabin in May. If you were in love with her you never would have let the relationship with Ray get that close to marriage and that was only stopped because the guy killed someone."
Tony looked away, briefly. "You forget I went to Africa to avenge her death, I disregarded protocol to protect her when Rivkin was in town, and I spent all those hours trying to track down those damn opera tickets but had to settle for a recording. Does someone who isn't in love do that?"
"You did all those things because you care about her. You didn't want her to lose her job when Rivkin was compromising her, we both went to Somalia to avenge her death, and we both know how much honoring Tali means to her. You leave Nutter Butters on my desk all the time, bring me coffee late at night and Chinese food. Abby gets roses and cupcakes on her birthday, and whenever she's down, I can usually find her here, curled up on your sofa with you watching a movie—does that mean you're in love with us too?"
"Don't be ridiculous, Probie. I do that because I care about you guys."
Suddenly a look of understanding passed over Tony's face. Tim finally felt he'd broken through. God, Tony was stubborn, and Abby was right that he was a rock—but he was a rock wall that needed to be chipped away in order to get to him.
In that moment the senior field agent's shoulders eased and it was as if he finally came to accept that Ziva wasn't coming back, that he needed to move on with his life no matter how much it hurt. Tim wasn't stupid. He knew that Tony wasn't going to heal overnight, but at least he could go back to NCIS and report to Abby that he broken Tony out of his fog.
Maybe now he would come back into work. Vance was being awfully lenient with all of them, giving them some days to sort everything out before returning to work. Tim and Gibbs had not taken the days offered to them, but Tony had. It had surprised them both if they were honest.
"So. What are you going to tell Abby when you go back?"
"Oh, ah, that you just need some time…and space."
His lips pulled into a small grin. "Like Abby's going to listen to that. She'll be here tonight," Tony replied.
Tim winced. "Yeah. Probably. I'm really sorry, Tony."
"Don't be," Tony said, pulling himself from the sofa. "Gives me an excuse to finally clean the place up, maybe shave and take a shower."
"Maybe? You smell like you've been lost in the desert for weeks."
Tony lifted his tee shirt to his nose and sniffed. He made a vulgar face and agreed. "Yeah, maybe I'll shower first."
Tim felt some relief wash through him. "Want me to stay and help?" When Tony threw him a questionable look, he clarified, "I mean with the cleaning."
"Put the pizza boxes in the trash chute on your way out?"
"Sure."
Tony moved towards the bathroom but paused. Slowly he turned while Tim was gathering up the pizza boxes and bit down on his lower lip. "Probie."
Tim glanced up from his cleaning and looked at his partner expectantly.
"Thanks. For picking me up and dusting me off."
"No problem, Tony."
"You do realize that if you tell anyone about our little heart to heart here I will have Abby kill you without leaving forensic evidence?"
Tim couldn't help the goofy grin that plastered his face. It was great to have a semblance of the old Tony back. "Yeah. I know."
Tony grunted and disappeared into the bathroom. Tim gathered up the pizza boxes, left the apartment with the door slamming shut behind him and tossed the trash down the chute. On his way out of the building he shoved his hands into his pockets. He knew that Ziva leaving was going to linger with Tony for a long time but at least now he was moving beyond sitting on his sofa drinking the days away.
And that, he reasoned, was a the first step.
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Not Your (soul)Mate {4/?}
Killian Jones doesn’t like the idea of soulmates. He sees how happy his friends are with theirs, but he still doesn’t like the idea, not when he’s found love and lost it time and time again only to still not know his sign. He has no markings on his skin, no voices in his head, but then one day he meets Emma Swan and everything changes. Because, well, he may not have ink on his skin to tell him who to love, but the very first time that he hears Emma’s voice he knows that she’s the one for him. Then again, that could simply be his desire talking. After all, for every word she speaks, he becomes aroused.
It’s not the worst thing in the world to be incredibly attracted to a beautiful woman, but things aren’t that simple when she doesn’t have any interest in being his soulmate.
He’s screwed. And not in the good way.
Rating: Mature
A/N: As always, thank you to @captainsjedi for her art, her support, and her general kindness throughout all of the time that’s been spent working on this story! You’re the best 💛
Found on AO3: Beginning | Current
Tumblr: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Tag list: @scientificapricot @lifeinahole27 @captswanis4vr @a-faekindagirl @galaxyzxstark @emmas-storybook @searchingwardrobes @spartanguard @ultimiflos @jamif @idristardis @dreameronarooftop15 @nikkiemms @resident-of-storybrooke @tiganasummertree @wellhellotragic @bmbbcs4evr @onceuponaprincessworld @jennjenn615 @mayquita @captainsjedi @teamhook @kmomof4 @ekr032-blog-blog @superchocovian @ultraluckycatnd @artistic-writer @cs-forlife @andiirivera @qualitycoffeethings @jonirobinson64 @mariakov81 @xellewoods @thejollyroger-writer @cssns
-/-
“Fuck,” she mutters under her breath before pulling her finger to her lips, trying to sooth the paper cut. She’s literally broken her arm before. How does a paper cut hurt so much worse? That just doesn’t seem right or something. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“For someone who works in an office, you swear like a sailor.”
She holds the middle finger of her free hand up to David while her legs begin to tap underneath her desk to try to make her focus on something else other than this pain. What did she do? Slice her entire finger open on a document about Leroy being drunk and disorderly at the Rabbit Hole last night?
They’ve got to switch to digital files.
And Leroy has to stop getting drunk and then serenading the people who live in the apartment building across from the Rabbit Hole at two in the morning.
And they really have to get another bar in this town, especially with how many tourists that they get in the summer months. Granny’s doesn’t count. She goes there more than anyone else, especially when she meets up with Ariel on their lunch breaks, but it is not a bar atmosphere even if she sells alcohol, most of which is stronger than the stuff at the Rabbit Hole. Granny knows how to pack a punch. Then again, Ruby has to get it from someone.
“Fuck off, David,” she bites, pulling her finger out of her mouth and looking at the miniscule damage that’s been caused there. How in the world does that cause this much pain? It’s probably extra because Leroy haunts the paper or something. She may have lost her mind. “This hurts.”
“Wash it and put a band-aid over it,” he shrugs, looking up at her over her coffee mug. Sometimes she hates that ever since Graham quit (apparently it was too hard to look at her face after they broke up even if he was the one off living with his soulmate) it’s only she and David in this department. Storybrooke is too small a town to need a lot of detectives, and even though most of the time she spends her time doing the work of a patrol officer, at least she gets paid like a detective.
There are perks.
And she loves David, but sometimes it’s too much to spend all day with him.
Today is one of those days.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
“Not a Captain quite yet.”
She rolls her eyes at his cheeky smile at the same time that she rolls her chair back and across the room to the area where they keep their coffee machine and their first aid kit, oddly enough. She’s pretty sure they also keep extra ink in this cabinet as well, but David is always the one who changes out the printer stuff anyways. If their printer doesn’t work, she always heads downstairs and uses the one in the bullpen.
It’s really not because she’s lazy. The printer is evil. Pure evil.
“We have got to switch to a digital filing system,” she tells David as she unpeels the band-aid and wraps it around her finger. “I know we don’t have the money for it, but we should do a fundraiser or something. I’m sure Mary Margaret would love to put on a bake sale.”
“How much money can a bake sale make?”
She shrugs her shoulders and twists her chair around before propping her feet up on Graham’s old desk, her boots banging against the wood. “I don’t know, but my other option was making a calendar with all of the hot male cops in it. Like, sixty percent of Storybrooke would buy that.”
David scoffs and pulls his head back, his face practically in his neck while his brows furrow together, all of those little old man wrinkles coming into play. He’s such an older brother type. If she’d ever had any family, she imagines he would be the type of sibling she’d want. She loves Mary Margaret, but she’d kill her if she had to spend all of her time listening to that never-ending optimism about every little aspect of life.
“Why only the male cops?”
“Because the equality here sucks, and I don’t think Ashley and I can fill up an entire calendar. Plus, you know, women have been objectified for thousands of years. You guys can have a turn. Also, it’s illegal for me to show my nipples in any kind of publication that’s not HBO. You can show yours even though our nipples look the same.”
“You’ve compared my nipples to yours then?”
“Gross,” she moans, tilting her head back in a laugh so that her hair falls over the back of her chair. It’s kind of hot in here, June really living up to its reputation, so while she’s still very unfortunately thinking about the similarity in her nipples (she’s thought the word nipples far too many times in two minutes) to David’s, she pulls her hair up into a ponytail, fluffing it out in the rubber band so that it’s no longer on her neck. “Let’s not have that conversation again. Like, ever.”
“Agreed.”
After messing around for a little while longer, she rolls back to her desk and goes back to her paperwork. She’s behind after missing half of work yesterday to go to the dentist, so she’s still got quite the dent to make in her stack. This town should not have this much paperwork, and she swears half of this stuff should be filed at city hall anyways. One day this town is going to make sense. She loves it, really. It’s the first place that’s ever felt like home for her, but it’s all kinds of weird.
Just as she’s made her way through half of her paperwork, there’s a knock on their open door, and she turns to see Ashley holding a large basket.
“Hey, Ems. This basket was dropped off for you at the front desk.”
“Are you sure?”
Ashley holds up a white card, the word “Swan” written across it in neat, scrawling script. If this were any other town, she’d be convinced that someone was trying to poison her or something, but this really only seems like some kind of creepy gift.
Not a murderous one.
“Well okay then,” she mumbles to herself before getting out of her chair, her legs aching a bit from how she’s had them crossed, and walking to take the basket from Ashley. “Did you see who dropped this off?”
“Mr. French did. It’s from his bakery. I’d recognize those blueberry muffins anywhere. If you don’t eat them, I’d be happy to take them off of your hands.”
She laughs and looks down into the basket. It’s full of bread. Like, a hell of a lot of bread. It’s mostly rolls and baguettes, but she sees the muffins and a few cinnamon rolls in there that she would recognize everywhere. Living with Belle means they always have books, but her dad always sends them baked goods and flowers too. She’s never quite gotten the full story of how Mr. French came to own a flower shop and a bakery, but he’s pretty much got the Valentine’s Day market down.
Smart man. People lost their minds over Valentine’s Day.
“You can have the rolls, but these muffins are all mine. I’m not going to refuse free food.”
“Smart lady. I’ll see you guys later!”
“Bye, Ash,” she says as Ashley walks away and she turns back into the office, placing the food down on her desk and pointedly ignoring the smirk that David’s got painted on his lips right now. She is not acknowledging that, especially since she already knows what he’s going to say. “You want a muffin?” she asks instead, picking a chocolate chip one out and unpeeling the wrapper before popping a bite in her mouth. “They’re really good.”
“I didn’t know you were dating someone,” David teases, reaching over and grabbing a roll. “And that he is very into bread.”
“I’m not dating anyone,” she murmurs under her breath, not caring that her mouth is full. David knows not to tease her about her love life, and here he is doing just that while eating her food. Traitor.
She guesses she did offer it to him, but that’s beside the point.
“Really?” he hums, and before she can stop him, he reaches over and grabs the envelope that she hasn’t opened yet, snatching it away from her grasp as she gets up and tries to take it from him, practically tripping over a filing cabinet and nearly stubbing her toe into David’s desk while he holds the card in the air (sometimes she hates how much taller he is than her) and reads it aloud. “Swan, since you said we couldn’t steal the bread from Belle at dinner, I figured you’d like some delicacies that still stem from the French family.”
It takes her less than a second to realize who sent her the bread basket, and it takes her approximately two seconds to figure out how she’s going to strangle him with a baguette.
Killian Jones.
Killian freaking Jones.
That’s not his middle name, but she feels like it might as well be. Or maybe something a little more crass. What the hell is he doing sending her a bread basket? She gets it. She does. It’s a clever callback to their dinner last week. The dinner that was so clearly a set up from their friends.
It doesn’t matter how many times she asks them to stop interfering with her love life, they never do. And there they were trying to set her up on a date with the one person who she doesn’t want to go on a date with. There they were setting her up with a man she can’t even speak to without getting aroused. She’s had months to let that settle in, and it’s still the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard in her life.
She’s heard a lot of ridiculous things too.
But Killian was nice, if not a little inappropriate sometimes with some of his jokes. She gets that though. She’s not a prude. She’s got a sailor’s mouth and likes to talk about sex and make innuendos as much as the next girl (if that girl is a mix between Ruby and Mary Margaret), so she’s used to it. She finds it funny. She finds him funny if she’s honest with herself, but liking Killian is not something she ever really plans on doing even if he’s hypothetically her soulmate.
(It’s easier to say hypothetically instead of admitting it to herself every single time she thinks about it.)
A part of her is still convinced that something else is going on, but she can’t figure any other explanation out. She’s spent weeks, literal weeks, thinking about it while trying to go to bed at night and is left alone with her thoughts and with the sounds of Belle and Will in Belle’s bedroom. Eventually they have got to move in together because Emma’s not sure how long she can live sharing a wall if Will is going to stay over.
It’s always the quiet ones who make the most noise.
But she gets it. Soulmates aside, they’re still human beings. They didn’t instantly fall in love, and not everything is perfect. They have issues and fights, and honestly, the tiny part of her that has faith in this whole thing is only reassured by that. She doesn’t want perfect. She’s never wanted perfect. Really, she hates the whole concept of perfect.
“You’re perfect, Ems.”
She shakes that thought of Neal away and looks back to David who is still smirking, looking for all the world like the cat who ate the canary, and accepts the fact that even though Killian Jones is not the worst person in the world, that doesn’t mean she has to run and leap into his arms and let him sweep her away with his accent and charm and…bread. She can still go about her business like usual. They’re not friends, and they don’t have to be.
Their text conversation that one night aside.
“Who sent you this food?” David asks again, sitting down in his desk chair and tossing her the card. She lets it fall to the ground, landing just below her desk. “And don’t lie to me. I can apparently ask Belle or her dad.”
“It’s nothing.”
“You’re blushing.”
“I’m not blushing.”
“Look at the red on your cheeks! That’s blush!”
“It’s June. It’s called a sunburn.”
“Blush.”
“I hate you.”
He rips off another piece of bread and takes a bite. “You love me, but alright, I won’t ask who your mystery man is just yet. I know you’ll tell me when you’re ready.”
“That,” she chuckles, “is not ever happening.”
It takes until a little past six to get all of her paperwork finished, but she finally does, her hand only cramping the slightest bit. She’s serious about some kind of fundraiser for the department. She needs a computer system that’s better than the one they have now. And, yeah, maybe a bake sale won’t work, but that calendar will. Mary Margaret and Ruby alone will buy the place out.
(Mary Margaret because she’s supporting David; Ruby because she likes hot men.)
They’re most likely not doing a calendar, but she’ll come up with something. Maybe she can go to city hall and see if they can find a little room in the budget. She’s sure there has to be room somewhere. Hell, they haven’t been paying the extra detective’s salary since Graham left. It’s probably all sitting in a bank account somewhere.
Maybe they can get a better coffee machine while they’re at it.
She could go for some coffee right now as she walks past Granny’s on the way to her apartment, nodding her head at some of the families that pass by. It’s summer in Storybrooke, which means family after family is flooding into town to use their beach and stay at the few rental houses that line the dock area. It’s a nice place, she can admit that. It’s part of what drew her here from Boston in the first place. She needed out and away from a large city and wanted somewhere nice and quiet, at least for a little while.
She’s been here for seven years.
And maybe she doesn’t get out to the beach as often as she used to, but she’s usually always working. Plus, it’s crowded all summer long. She has to go early in the mornings to get any peace a quiet there, and mostly it’s too cold for that. This is Maine after all.
She’ll go running there in the morning, really work up a sweat before work, maybe even see the sunrise.
Who is she kidding? She’s not going to get up early enough to see the sunrise.
A little bit after, though.
Ten minutes later she gets to her apartment building, taking the stairs the three floors up with her basket of bread and walking inside to find Belle sitting on the couch drinking a glass of wine and watching an episode of the Bachelor. She has a lot of thoughts on that show, most of them probably pretty insulting, but if she’s drunk enough, she can find it entertaining enough.
Though, she’ll never understand why there’s a show on finding love when everyone already has that predestined partner.
Money. Publicity. Ratings. And the occasional time when someone very literally finds their soulmate on the show.
“Hey,” she tells Belle, dropping her keys onto their tray. There’s her chapstick too.
“Hi,” Belle greets her, twisting around before turning back to look at the television. “This guy just jumped over the fence on here, and they can’t find him.”
“How can they not find him? They live on a compound.”
(So maybe she knows more about the show than she’s willing to admit.)
(Maybe she can be a bit more into it than she’s willing to admit.)
(Maybe she watches with Belle because this is when they get to hang out and when Belle breaks out the good wine.)
“He jumped over the fence to get out of the compound because the girl he loves just broke up with him.”
“No,” she gasps, walking over to the couch and placing the basket on the table before plopping down on the couch and pulling Belle’s fuzzy white blanket over her legs. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do when Belle does finally move out because all of the nice stuff in the living room is hers. “Are you serious? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Yeah, apparently he was – ” Belle stops talking while she watches the host chase after the fence jumping guy (she can’t remember his name). “Why do you have a giant gift basket of food from my dad’s bakery?”
Well shit.
“Oh, um,” she mumbles, messing with the tips of her hair, “someone dropped it off for me at the station today.”
She’s very pointedly not looking at Belle who she knows is looking at her. This Bachelor rerun is very exciting. How could she possibly look away? She can’t. It’s against the rules.
“Who?”
“Um, I don’t know,” she sighs as she reaches forward to grab another muffin, stuffing it in her mouth. She really does have to go running in the morning if she’s going to eat all of this. “There was no name. It was an anonymous donor or something. Probably just someone wanting to thank me for helping the town.”
Her eyes cut over to Belle, and she sees her readjusting her seat, sitting up on her knees while a grin slowly starts to form on her face.
Shit.
She’s about to get interrogated.
“Let me call my dad and ask who ordered this. He can tell us that way we know.”
“No, no, no. Let’s not do that.”
“Too late. I’m calling him.”
“Belle.”
“I’m doing it.”
She watches Belle pick up her phone, already dialing her dad, and in a move that she’s not proud of, she practically jumps over to Belle, grabbing her phone out of her hand and snatching it away unlike how she wasn’t able to grab the note out of David’s hand.
“Ha,” she laughs, standing up on the couch and backing away with the phone, “now you can’t.”
“Did you get drunk at work or something?” Belle chuckles, falling back against the couch cushions. “I mean, you can’t keep my phone forever, and also, I can just walk to go see my dad. So I’m thinking you know who sent you the basket, and you should definitely tell me. I’m going to find out no matter what.”
“If I tell you,” she begins cautiously, slowly settling down on the couch and taking a deep breath, “you have to promise to listen to the explanation and not make a big deal out of it. because I promise that it’s not a big deal.”
“You’re blushing. It’s a big deal.”
She rolls her eyes, throwing Belle’s phone back at her. “I hate you.”
“You do not.” She feels like she’s had this exact conversation before. Talk about Deja vu. “Now tell me. No one came into the library today, and I have been starved for entertainment.”
“Have you ever considered reading a book?”
“Ha ha,” she deadpans, rolling her eyes and crossing her arms over her chest. “So funny. Now tell me who this is from before I walk to my dad’s.”
There’s suddenly a very interesting piece of lint on her blouse, and she focuses on picking at it while she mumbles, “Killian Jones sent it.”
“You want to say that again?”
She groans and throws her head back, clenching her teeth before looking at Belle. “Killian sent it to me.” Belle’s eyes light up, her lips parting to say something, and Emma holds up a finger before she can finish. “No, we are not dating, and no, we did not hit it off with each other the other night. While you and Will were arguing over your vacation, he made a joke about taking the bread and making a run for it. I told him we weren’t doing that, and for some reason he decided to spend far too much money sending me the largest basket of bread I’ve ever seen.”
“That is the cutest thing I’ve ever heard,” Belle practically squeals, jumping up and down a little on the couch. “Oh my gosh, I have to tell Mary Margaret.”
“I will rip the pages of a chapter out of one of your favorite books if you tell Mary Margaret.”
“Traitor.”
Yep. Definitely a sense of deja vu here.
“You’re the one who’s about to make a big deal out of nothing and who’s only going to make it worse by telling Marg.”
“It’s cute. Killian likes you. He’s obviously trying to impress you.”
“I don’t want to be impressed,” she huffs, scooting down further on the couch and toeing her shoes off before she takes another bite of her muffin, the crumbs falling on her shirt. “I want to go to work and do my job and then come home and watch the History Channel without anyone interrupting me. I don’t need a guy trying to make me smile with baked goods.”
“Oh, hon,” Belle sighs, reaching over and placing her hand over Emma’s, the compassion in her eyes so different than the glint of teasing that was just there, “it’s okay to flirt and have fun every now and then. Killian is a nice guy. He’s not trying to hurt you.”
“Just hurt my waistline.”
“Yeah, maybe that. Look, I can tell this is bothering you, and since I know you, I know it’s probably some deep seeded fear that no one but you knows about that’s going to make you drive yourself crazy. Don’t overthink the gift. That’s all that it is. And I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
“Thank you.”
She doesn’t say more because she doesn’t want to say more. Belle is right. This is about more than Killian being playful and teasing her. It’s about the fact that Neal did the same thing. So did Walsh. Graham did too, really, but she wouldn’t ever categorize him in the same douchebag category as Neal and Walsh. She probably wouldn’t categorize Walsh the same way that she does Neal, and he cheated on her. For months. And she didn’t even really care at the end of that even though she’ll never see the Fourth of July in the same way again. She was already checked out and resigned to herself never finding someone who she could trust.
And Neal…she doesn’t want to think about Neal. She can’t. It hurts too much.
That’s why Killian and his flirting and his bread basket terrify her. He can so easily charm her, is probably already on his way there, and if this whole magnetic thing between them really is their sign, that terrifies her all the more. Because what if he is her soulmate, and what if they still can’t make it work?
What if?
What if they’re the ones who can’t make it work?
But it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t know him, not really. She barely knows anything about him, and unless he keeps hounding her with random gifts that are going to make her go up a jean size, it’s not like she’s going to have to see him that much more.
So it’s all just fine.
When her alarm goes off the next morning, she almost turns it off and sleeps in, but something keeps her up and gets her going so that she’s lacing her sneakers and tugging on a sports bra and some leggings as she makes her way down to the beach, starting at the pier closest to her apartment and running until her legs burn and her chest aches while all of her other problems melt away. She runs and runs and runs until…
Well, until she sees Killian himself running toward her, his dark hair flopping up and down with his movements as his brother runs beside him, the two of them seemingly racing each other on the sand. She knows the moment he sees her because he falls behind Liam, his step faltering a bit before he speeds up again and moves toward her with this goofy grin on his face that almost makes her stop in her tracks, her feet sinking through all of the sand.
“Hey, Emma,” Liam yells to her, stopping his jog right in front of her. “I didn’t know you ran this early in the mornings. Elsa never mentioned that.”
“I usually don’t,” she gasps, reaching up to wipe the sweat from her brow and avoiding Killian’s gaze as a wave crashes behind her, sea mist reaching the skin on her ankles. Really, all that does is allow her to see the muscles on his stomach under his shirt, and she’s not sure how that helps. “I had a lot to eat yesterday and am trying not to be majorly bloated. Plus, I missed the beach.”
Killian coughs, and her eyes finally find his and notice the way his jaw is ticking. She almost forgot the effect she has on him, but she can tell that he’s squirming a bit, that he hasn’t spoken.
Why are the seagulls on this beach so damn loud?
“Don’t you just love the beach?” she continues, her lips pressing into a smile while she looks right at Killian. “It’s so beautiful, especially in the mornings before all of the crowds get here. I bet you guys spend a lot of time out on the water with your jobs.”
“Not as much as I’d like,” Liam admits, looking over to his brother. “Killian gets to a little more than me, though. He’s very hands on. Maybe one day we can take you out on one of our new boats that we’re test driving. I’m sure Elsa would love that.”
“I would love that too. We can make it a whole thing with some of our friends. Wouldn’t you love that, Killian?”
“Aye,” he grits, his fists clenching at his sides. “That’d be great.”
Her body tingles at his words, the beginnings of arousal pooling between her thighs, but as they continue to talk, she ignores it and makes sure that she gets more words in than him. It’s more fun than she thought it would be, and it only causes her a little pain. Maybe he doesn’t deserve her to torture him like this, but she did have to endure a lot of teasing from her friends yesterday like they’re all high schoolers. What’s fair is fair after all.
“Alright, lass,” Liam says a few minutes later, beginning to jog in place, “we best be going and let you finish your run.”
“Okay. I’ll text Elsa about that day out on the water, okay?”
“Sounds great.”
Liam begins to jog out of the way, and she thinks that Killian is going to join him, but instead he steps closer to her, his beard briefly scratching her ear as he leans in to whisper, his breath hot against her ear. “Two can play at this game, love.”
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The Fear of the Dragonwitch (Triplets Rolorem AU) Chapter 2!!!
Word Count: 2738
TW: Remus, vague mentions of deceit, swearing, arguing, anxiety, self deprecation, that’s it I think, lmk if I missed anything!!!
Notes: Ok so we have a second chapter!!! First chapter here! I have a whole plot line planned out for this fic y’all don’t understand. This chapter is just family dynamics, but next chapter should have more interaction with the other characters. Hopefully I get to a bit of Logan centric things soon but who knows, I certainly don’t! I hope you like it, I really do!
Pairings: Vivian x Mimi (OCxOC), pining demus possibly more in the future!
Summary: “wait you can sing?” roman was just trying to tell his family about this lifechanging event, and no one is taking his concerns seriously! though, maybe a bit of confidence and encouragement from the right people might sooth his anxieties enough for him to actually be excited instead of dreading what was going to happen tomorrow.
“wait you can sing?”
While it was an expected outcome, Roman was in fact rather upset at how quickly his brother had brushed off the important part of his confession. yes, in fact, he can sing but that’s not the point! The point was that he was now being thrown headfirst into a leading role in a musical in front of way more people than he was comfortable with and he was expected to sing and dance as well? While he was catastrophizing Logan pulled up to the curb, stopping to let them get in the car. Unfortunately, while Roman was ready to just drop it and move on, Remus had other plans. As they strapped into the car Remus kept running his mouth.
“seriously though, I've literally never heard you sing how can you be lead role worthy when you’ve never sung in your life? I mean like congrats I guess but like, I dunno if your teachers all that-”
“Remus if I had brought this up so you could tell me how unqualified and bad I was in general I would have asked this morning. I mentioned it because I'm terrified of doing any of this and I can’t let down my teacher. Yes, I can sing, I do it often you just never pay attention to anything in the world other than your stupid bubble. I should have known better than to talk to you about this, of course this is how you'd respond.”
“what's this about?”
Oh yeah, Logan was there too. Well he should probably know too-
“Roman randomly sung in his drama class and got chosen to play the leading role in the schools musical for this quarter.”
Well then. Guess he didn’t need to explain himself. He turned around in his seat, giving a look of ‘what the fuck???’ towards Remus before settling again, ready to be interrogated. However, Logan simply smiled.
“so, your friends absolutely hate you for singing huh?”
“no… shut up!!!”
“hey, congrats ro. You deserve it.”
“no??? no I don’t???? Logan you don’t understand I didn’t even audition!!! He just gave me the part!!! Like firstly that’s unfair to the rest of the kids who actually want parts, and secondly, I don’t want the part?????? This isn’t a ‘congrats!’ occasion!!! This is an ‘oh shit you just got roped into complete life ruining changes because you're an anxious mess who is too afraid to disappoint your teacher’!!!”
“one is easy, the auditions were last week. He already heard all the other options and decided you were the best. You should feel good about that Ro. Two, also simple. I know how much of your free time you spend wishing you could be the one on stage, I see you humming and swaying around the house restraining yourself, you want to do this, you're just scared.”
“…”
“third, change isn’t going to ruin your life. he's not changing your classes, he's not taking you off the tech crew, not much is actually changing. You're using your teacher as extra justification to do something you’ve been dreaming of. You’ve let your anxiety blind you from knowing what you really want. You can’t let it control every aspect of your life.”
“… stop being ‘wise beyond your years’ with me its uncalled for and I'm feeling attacked.”
“listen what do you want from me, I have the knowledge what else am I supposed to do with it at this point?”
“stupid jerk prodigy brother… you stole all the brains from us I can promise.”
“I was by far the smallest of us, I did not absorb your brains.”
“pics or it didn’t happen.”
“insufferable”
As soon as they were home things flipped on their head. Remus had a call and suddenly he was having a breakdown. He wouldn’t even tell anyone what had happened he was just pacing back and forth with wide eyes filled with tears. He was half delirious and Logan was trying and failing to reason with him.
Re, you're walking a hole in the floor you need to calm down. I know you're having an anxiety attack but-”
“IM NOT HAVING AN ANXIETY ATTACK!!!”
“Remus stop yelling-”
“NO, YOU SHUT UP!!! IM NOT ROMAN I DON’T HAVE ANXIETY IM NOT EVEN STRESSED SEE I AM FINE JUST LEAVE ME BE!!! YOU HAVE THE WRONG BROTHER”
Roman and Logan sat in stunned silence as Remus ran off to his room. Roman gave Logan a look and Logan straightened his back and shook his head trying to be composed, though his steadily shaking hands sold him out. He turned away from where Remus had previously been standing and looked back at Roman, moving his offending hands behind his back.
“well it seems like he refuses to be reasoned with. I suppose we have to wait for mother to get home to fix whatever is bothering him.”
“its not your fault lo.”
“… yes. I- of course I know that why would you think I thought otherwise. It was clearly whatever stressor acting on him and not my involvement. I know that. Of course. It’s the only logical conclusion.”
And almost right after their mom walked in the door. She held a large satchel thrown crossbody and her hair was slicked back held in place with a little hairspray and a bunch of bobby pins. It was styled in a neat bun with her bangs framing her face perfectly. She had small black glasses and little silver earrings and had a simple matte red lipstick perfectly in place. She was wearing a light blue button up shirt and a black blazer with matching dress pants and flats. She looked perfectly put together as she tossed off her shoes and threw her bag onto the couch. She smiled at her kids and finally let herself slouch and look a little more like the mess she felt like.
“hi kids, how was school today?”
Roman shot a look at Logan before answering.
“well, um there was a lot, and though I want to tell you, Remus had a meltdown and we need help to get him back. Logan tried but he wouldn’t listen.”
“oh, geez ok um, Lo could you please grab my computer from my car? I have to finish something up later, and Ro could you pop the clam chowder on the stove? It was gonna go with dinner, but I know how much Rem loves it. Besides there should be plenty of the French mac that Mimi makes to feed us tonight. I’ll go work things out with him.”
“hey kiddo? Can I come in?”
Vivian Royale had a knack for pulling her kids out of their heads enough to actually fix problems, but her son Remus was usually rather self sufficient in that regard, while Logan and Roman both had anxiety and Roman had the rest stacked on top, Remus was rather neurotypical and usually had less issues that required her intervention. That was, until high school hit. His mental health took a rapid hit as soon as he had started high school, and no one quite knew what happened. She knocked on his door, waiting for his answer before stepping in.
“hey bud. What's wrong? I heard you had a bit of an outburst. Can you tell me what happened?”
Remus sat on his bed, a green octopus comforter laid on the bed and his Cthulhu plushie was in his grip. He hid his face in the toy as he mumbled something into it.
“Hun I'm gonna need you to speak up ok? We can’t fix anything if I don’t know what's wrong.”
“it’s dumb.”
“obviously its not to you. If it was it wouldn’t have affected you enough to cause you to yell at your brothers.”
“… I just- it’s so dumb I don’t wanna say it!”
“you're safe here Rem.”
“my friend got asked out by this lame dude in our class. And- and I think I have a crush on him. My friend I mean! And- and I don’t know what I'm supposed to do, I can’t tell him, what if he hates me? I just. I don’t know how to feel I just know it sucks.”
Vivian set a gentle hand on her sons’ shoulder and gave him a soft smile. She took his hand and gave it a squeeze.
“I understand Rem. That’s sort of how it felt when I realized I liked Mimi. I've known Mimi since we were kids and it wasn’t until after me and your dad broke up that I realized that I loved her. We were in our twenties and I had three newborns and my best friend jumped headfirst into that without hesitation. Is he actually going on the date?”
“no. he's not his type, I guess. That’s what he said at least.”
“then ask him out! He's not interested in them, and he called you to tell you. You obviously matter to each other, even if he doesn’t like you back, I don’t think it would change anything. Just go for it, what's the worst that could happen?”
“…you're right. I-I guess I’ll talk to him later.”
“atta boy!!! Now come on, Roman has clam chowder on the burner and Mimi should be home soon!”
The four of them sat down at the dining table eating and Logan and Remus recounted their day to their mom, Roman staying quiet for the time being, only wanting to say his announcement once. It was 15 minutes before Mimi got home in her fancy outfit. Her red hair was everywhere, curled and messy and absolutely her. She wore a black dress that had a cat head shape on it, with a pink bow at her waist and where the cats head didn’t cover was a see-through mesh. She had a light pink tank top under it and had a pink and white jacket about 2 sizes too big for her on around her shoulders. Her shoes were shiny pink stilettos that made a pretty click clack noise as she walked. She held a pretty black purse and she had little unicorn earrings that looked adorable with her pink lipstick and black to pink cat eye. She set her bag down on the table next to the door and slipped out of her shoes neatly setting them next to the door before slipping over to the table where everyone was sitting. She ruffled Roman and Remus’ hair before giving a big smile to them all.
“how are my boys doin? I see Viv pulled out the chowder, I hope everything is good!”
“I'm really gay!”
“me too Hun, what's new?”
They all let out a fit of giggles. Mimi went to serve herself a bowl of soup and Logan and Remus repeated their day back to her. When they had finished and Roman still hadn’t spoken, she leaned on her arm with a gentle smile and encouraged him to speak. He nodded and cleared his throat.
“um… it was pretty average all around, but this morning Mr. Sanders heard me singing and um, well he uh,”
Logan gave his hand a small squeeze from under the table. He swallowed and finally finished.
“he cast me as the lead in our coming musical.”
Mimi and his mom stopped mid bite of soup, staring at him intently and he wanted to melt through the floor. They swallowed their mouthfuls and looked at each other before turning back to him with wide smiles. Suddenly Logan and Roman clasped their hands over their ears as the two started squealing at the top of their lungs, Mimi jumping out of her seat, jumping up and down. when they finally stopped screaming, Mimi was still bouncing and had Vivian’s hand in hers.
“oh my god Roman!!! Our baby boy oh I'm so so proud of you!!!!!”
“Roman sweetheart, that’s incredible!!! Wait, but weren’t auditions last week?”
“yeah, um, he just had me sing and dance again and he gave me the part.”
“Roman that’s incredible!!!!!!!!! Oh, I knew it!!! Didn’t I tell you Vivi? Didn’t I tell you that Ro was gonna be an incredible performer? I remember, I remember when I first saw him when he was an itty-bitty peanut that I told you he was gonna be a star in the showbiz!!! Oh, he's our little star oh I'm so proud!!!!!!”
“yes, babe I remember, calm down you are going to make him explode! Roman I really am so proud of you honey.”
“oh, oh oh!!! Roman you should sing for us!!! You always stop singing whenever either of us enter the room, I want to hear you sing!!! If you're ok of course, no pressure”
Roman’s face was the shade of an apple. His stepmom was always over the top with support, but this was more than he expected. He was about to nod when he heard Logan make a confused noise.
“am I really the only person who has heard him sing? He never stops singing its like his default mode! He's always making music whether through his fidgets or humming or singing, I don’t know how you guys have missed it!”
“I mean, I do my best to keep people from hearing me but you're sorta the exception. You're calm and you won’t like, smother me.”
“… well then. I also vote for a song.”
“hold on, lets get dinner ready first and then we can fully focus on him”
They had sat down with their plates and Roman was playing with his ring to keep him calm as 4 pairs of eyes stared at him waiting to hear him sing. Logan gave him a small smile and that was enough to help him start.
As the smile fell from your face, I fell with it Our faces blue There's a heart stain on the carpet I left it, I left it with you Yeah, the truth is that I'm sorry Though I told you not to worry I'm just some dumb kid Trying to kid myself That I got my shit together So go, get to runnin', won't you hurry? While it's light out, while it's early Before I start to miss any part of this And change my mind, whatever
Logan’s smile widened as he recognized the song. Remus mom and Mimi sat still, with looks of… awe? He was too nervous to analyze their expressions while he was singing. He continued on.
I say I wanna settle down Build your hopes up like a tower I'm giving you the run around I'm just a lost boy Not ready to be found Not ready to be found I'm just a lost boy Not ready to be found
He let his eyes close and his body sway to the song playing along in his head. He didn’t see the looks his moms gave each other, he didn’t see Remus shove Logan with a jealous look screaming that he was bitter he hadn’t heard him sooner. He was absorbed in the song.
I don't care much for locks on the window To keep me at bay I'll leave you one last kiss on your pillow Before I fly away Yeah we knew from the beginning That this wasn't never ending Shouldn't stay too long Cause we're both too young To give into forever
So what are you waiting for? Cause someone could love you more I'm just a lost boy, lost boy So what are you waiting for? Cause someone could love you more I'm just a lost boy, lost boy So what are you waiting for? Cause someone could love you more I'm just a lost boy, lost boy So what are you waiting for? Cause someone could love you more I'm just a lost boy, lost boy
Roman quickly finished the song and hesitantly opened his eyes. The amazed faces that they all had completely floored him. Mimi got out of her seat and surrounded him in a hug, which was objectively adorable due to her barely reaching his collarbone. Remus had an odd look on his face with a mixture of awe and curiosity. Mom sat with a wide grin on her face that matched Logan’s. He felt happy and at ease and calm. And he felt much better about his new part in the musical seeing his family filled with some interesting type of pride.
Taglist: @fivebyfive-finebyfive @tacohippy56900 @analogical-mess @crookedlyoptimisticdestiny @angels-and-dreams @fandomloverangel @demented-dukey @karmels-stuff @demented-dukey (sorry if you didn’t want to be tagged, you seemed interested in it)
Let me know if you want to be tagged in my writing!!!
Thank you for reading I will see you later ladies lords and nonbinary royalty!!!
#roman sanders#logan sanders#duke remus#remus sanders#2 original characters mentioned#rolorem triplets au#familial creativitwins#familial logince#familial lomus#ocxoc#tw swearing#tw cursing#tw anxiety#tw argument#tw self deprecation#my writing#my fanfiction#chapter 2
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Tritype made an interesting post about an au where Emmet and Rex share a body similar to good cop/bad cop what do you think about it? Any headcanons? PS love your blog :D
Haha, that’s okay! I’ve done that before multiple times!for anyone wondering, it’s this post here by @tritype
spoilers under the cut!
I really love this idea! Especially as, while being the same person, Emmet and Rex have hugely different personalities. Emmet is like an excited puppy, jumping from one thing to the next and always smiling so much it’s a wonder his jaw isn’t aching. Rex is more “Mister Cool Dude”; he’s much more confident and brave than Emmet is. It’s like seeing two sides of the same coin, the same way it is with GCBC
Headcanons are as follows:
- Emmet spends ages trying to fix his hair every time Rex messes it up. Emmet likes the clean, styled, neat and tidy look and Rex likes looking as though he’s just crawled out of bed. Rex likes the rugged, five-o-clock shadow, stubble thing going on and Emmet likes a clean, smooth face. Hence why he keeps washing off the facial hair (or shaving, if you’re taking this from a Human Legos perspective). It irritates Rex to no end as it takes forever to get that rugged tough-guy look back, but it’s not as though he can do all that much to stop Emmet doing it again as soon as he wakes up and takes over.
- They have different tastes in movies/TV shows. Rex loves fast-paced action shows and movies, while Emmet is a sucker for rom-coms and sappy love movies. Rex could be sat watching something like Fast and Furious or one of the Marvel movies and Emmet will take over, switch the channel and put on something different. They frequently argue over what to watch on TV and half the time they end up both missing whatever they wanted to watch. They never even bother going to the cinema as they know that whichever film they go and see, at least one of them will be unhappy about it. Rex gets a reprieve from Emmet’s “horrible taste in movies” whenever Emmet’s asleep, so he does occasionally get away with watching what he wants on TV. Emmet gets back at him and watches what he wants when Rex goes to sleep.
- Rex is a complete flirt, while Emmet couldn’t seduce a cactus if his life depended on it. How he ever ended up with Lucy, he’ll never know. (Hint: Rex helped). Rex is always coming out with these cheesy one-liners while Emmet’s go-to pick-up line is “Lovely weather today, huh?”. Lucy finds it adorable that Emmet can’t flirt for toffee.
- Along similar lines, Rex’s mind seems to be fuelled by testosterone. He makes lewd jokes far too often and really does make an effort to get funky. Emmet finds it horribly embarrassing and never knows what to do.
- They have different tastes in food, too. Rex likes all things spicy, whereas looking at a jalapeno pepper would be enough to set Emmet’s tongue on fire. Emmet often hates it when he wakes up and takes over, only to find Rex had eaten a whole deluxe spicy pizza himself and left Emmet to deal with the aftermath. Emmet’s cooking can be a bit bland for Rex’s tastes, but Emmet is a far better cook than Rex could ever hope to be. Hence why Rex defaults to ordering takeaways.
- Their music tastes are very different as well. Rex loves the heavy metal head-banging kind of stuff, while Emmet’s playlists consist pretty much entirely of ‘Everything Is Awesome’ remixes. He has a few other albums, mainly along the lines of Owl City, but not much else. Rex thinks it’s pretty childish, but Emmet stirs up a fuss every time Rex tries to delete his music choices from their phone.
- They argue over how to handle certain situations. Rex’s method of dealing with things usually consists of “argue and shot, and then fight” while Emmet tries the pacifist route of “why can’t we all just get along?”. Their different way of dealing with things leads to the pair of them arguing a lot, and those arguments often end up with Rex saying something he doesn’t mean and Emmet going silent for hours.
- Their house looks like two different houses fused. All over the place, it’s easy to notice the differences in tastes the pair have. Their bed is at least one solid colour (dark blue, something they could both agree on), but everywhere else is a mess. They have two completely different and distinct sets of clothes. Emmet’s are all bright colours and cheesy references to things, while Rex’s are far more rugged. Rex is a fan of plaid shirts (”They make me look like a lumberjack, and those guys are cool!”) while Emmet owns pretty much entirely t-shirts and big fluffy sweaters. Side note: Rex hates Emmet’s work uniform. It’s too colourful and makes him look like a colouring page that was completed by a five-year-old with the brightest crayons in the box. Emmet insists he has to wear it (”it’s safety orange!”) but Rex gets that damn thing off as soon as he gets home.
#the lego movie#the lego movie 2#tlm#tlm2#tlm 2#the lego movie 2: the second part#emmet brickowski#rex dangervest#delorean talks
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At the last it bites like a serpent
A writing collaboration by @thatshipcat and @awintersrose.
Direct sequel to A Deal with the Devil.
Summary: After a night of wild passion, Kakuzu and Orochimaru make a swift escape from the hotel before anyone charges them with the destruction of private property. Needless to say, they are permanently banned.
Warnings: Allusions to Sex, Mature Themes, Minor Character Death
The front desk is a picture of quiet as the young attendant takes her place and begins her day, with a smile and a cup of hot tea in hand. She hums to herself as she gathers paperwork and peruses the list of guests checking out of the hotel, just as out of nowhere, two men in dark cloaks arrive at the desk without making as much as a sound.
“Ah!” The attendant jumps in fright, squeaking as her tea splashes all over her blouse, and sheets of rice paper fly into the air around her.
“G-good morning sirs!”
The smaller, feminine man chuckles condescendingly at her greeting as he leans against the other, a fine piece of shredded fabric wrapped around his throat. Purpling and green bite marks dot his skin, each varying in brightness and intensity as they disappear under his coat. His hair is haphazardly brushed - neat, but with the sort of wavy texture that comes from sleeping on wet hair.
It looks as if he tangled with a wild animal, lost, then hastily threw on his clothes and pretended to be the victor. He is certainly cocky enough, as he grins at her like the cat that ate the canary.
The taller man stares at her, unimpressed. His hair is similarly mussed, carelessly stuffed behind a mask and forehead protector. He reaches into his sleeve, decorated with swirling red clouds, throws a room key onto the counter next to several tea-soaked documents.
"Room 810," he grunts. He turns on his heel and stalked towards the exit before she could say anything else.
Shaken and trying to clean up the mess, the attendant scrambles to catch the key, calling a hasty, “Have a nice day!” after the guests.
She nabs it, then grimaces as something that is decidedly not tea smears on her hand in a lurid shade of rusty red. She looks toward the door and the two men are gone, as if they had never been there.
Grabbing a tissue from her desk, she cleans up her hand and the key, then sets to finishing the checkout process. The paperwork lists nothing more than a single name, 'Donyoku', staying one night with a guest. The man paid cash upfront, as many of their guests do, but the attendant finds it curious that he did not even ask for his deposit to be returned. No one leaves money behind without good reason, so it can only mean one thing. A mess. She rings a bell for housekeeping to be alerted, then files the paperwork.
“Room 810,” she advises the maid, before leaving to start another pot of tea.
Ten minutes later, an elderly couple ambles up to her desk. This time she is not surprised but sets down her second cup of tea.
“Good morning!” she chirps. “I hope you enjoyed your stay. Will you be checking out this morning?”
The poor little granny gives her a weary smile, and nudges her husband with her elbow. He jerks awake, blinking wildly.
“Oh! Well we didn’t get much sleep, you see. There was a lot of noise next door,” the man says nervously, taking off his spectacles to wipe them with his sleeve.
“What room were you in?” the attendant asks, trying to remain calm, rifling through the pile of papers, and looking for their receipts.
“809.” he says, and her blood runs cold.
“What happened?”
“Some kinda fight, I tell you!”
“Oh, my stars! It honestly went on over and over, off and on throughout the night. Crashing and banging, and at one point it sounded like someone was getting murdered! I do hope they are alright, “ the wife sighs, shaking her head in disbelief.
The attendant gulps nervously. “I - I am so sorry for the inconvenience - ”
A bone-chilling screech rips across the courtyard, echoing through the stone building.
The two watch the panicked attendant rush off.
"Perhaps we should have called the police, Kentarou..." The wife says solemnly to her husband. He nods solemnly, chin dipping to his chest... and begins to sleep once more.
The door to the room has been flung open by the maid, who had apparently fainted in fright. The attendant gingerly steps over her, crunching broken glass into the carpet - and immediately gasps, one hand covering her mouth in shock.
A mess wouldn't even begin to describe room 810.
The queen sized beds have been pushed together, though the bed frames are shattered beyond repair. All of the bed linens are torn in countless places, like the cloth around the smaller man’s neck, stained with blood and other sticky substances best left to the imagination.
Glass crunches under her feet as she makes her way further into the wreckage. The lamp is in pieces on the floor, most of it anyway, the base dangling from the broken bedside table, sparks jumping from the outlet where it is still plugged in behind the bed. There are blood trails all over one of the walls, leading into the bathroom, where the scene becomes even more harrowing.
There are two hand-shaped craters gouged out of the countertop, and broken tiles are littered everywhere the attendant looks. The floor is covered in water and red-streaked towels, and the bench in the shower is cracked and collapsed down the middle.
The attendant stumbles out of the bathroom, light-headed.
“Cops,” she mutters to herself, heading past the splintered bed frames and toward the nightstand. “I need to call the cops.”
She is climbing over the crushed mattress towards the phone when something sharp nicks her foot.
A lump of nerves leaps to the back of her throat, constricting her airway so tightly that she is forced to swallow her dread head on. It slides down her esophagus, heavy like a boulder, and settles in her stomach as fear. Terror.
She makes herself look down.
There, stabbing through the wooden sole of her sandal is a senbon needle - sharp, deadly, and covered in a strange, iridescent color. There is a paperthin, near invisible scratch between the first toe and the second, where the skin is already starting to turn purple and black.
Deep down, she already knows it’s too late.
When the maid finally regains consciousness, she sees the attendant’s corpse. And screams.
Hours later and many miles away from a nondescript town containing a very unfortunate hotel, Orochimaru and Kakuzu stop to recalibrate and ready themselves for their next assignment. Simple bounty collecting it may be, but Orochimaru is insistent on being well prepared for all eventualities, and he knows his partner shares that sentiment. After all, one never knows what they might find when encountering other missing-nin; there may be manifold opportunities to sate his ceaseless curiosities.
Their belongings are intact, with exception of his haori and Kakuzu’s cowl, which went missing during the activities of the night before, and his weapons pouch is oddly light. After a moment perusing the contents, Orochimaru realizes what is missing.
“Kakuzu-san, I do believe my senbon were left behind,” he says mildly. “You would not have happened to have anything to do with that, would you?"
"You must have forgotten them." Kakuzu clicks open the metal lock on his briefcase. He recalls his hand on Orochimaru's ankle, the scent of musk and sex permeating throughout the room, and the muffled tinkle of the senbon needles as they dropped onto the carpet. The memories of their coupling flit through his mind, unbidden but impossible to forget.
First, on the bed with several sake-flavored kisses. Then again, Orochimaru’s legs knotted about his waist, panting low into Kakuzu’s ear, stamping a red imprint of his partner’s form over the walls.
Once more, in the bathroom, bending Orochimaru over the sink, Kakuzu’s hands braced against the counter, his nose buried into the back of the smaller man’s neck. Being stunned by the vision of Orochimaru in the mirror - pupils blown, cheeks stained crimson - as Kakuzu comes inside him. Pulling away from the other only to find pieces of the counter crumbling in his hands.
Again, unexpectedly, when they are trying to get clean. In one moment, watching Orochimaru bend down to get something, then in the next he is riding Kakuzu’s cock. Breaking the bench, moving outside the shower and fucking Orochimaru in a bed of towels. Leaving the tile cracked and the bathroom flooded.
At last, in the beds. Five times in total. Orochimaru glancing over a sliver of his pale shoulder - cold and gleaming like the crescent moon. Questioning Kakuzu’s promise to push the beds together. “Are you not the devil?”
He remembers, in vivid detail, shaking his partner awake; the slow, sleepy smile that had curled on Orochimaru’s lips - then his hidden outrage when Kakuzu shoved him into his cloak and rushed him out of the room, ignoring the metallic glints in the morning light in his haste to leave.
Orochimaru hums thoughtfully, breaking Kakuzu from his thoughts, and meeting his eyes. He can sense the heat rising on his partner’s face, smell the faint traces of lust radiating in the air between them. Kakuzu may hide his expressions behind a mask, but it is clear to Orochimaru what he might be thinking about.
"Those senbon were dipped in an extract of aconite... I suppose they will just have to be replaced."
“Then replace them.”
"That poison is rather expensive."
"If they are so expensive, then you should take better care of your things."
Orochimaru brushes a hand through his hair, a breeze fanning through the dark locks. "Hard to take care of things when someone else is in control of them."
Kakuzu glances at the ragged cloth tied around Orochimaru’s neck, the teeth-shaped indentations on his pale chest, and the shadows underneath his eyes. Satisfaction blooms in his own chest, but with it comes a tinge of near-guilt. Hardly much at all, but enough to make him pause.
Kakuzu lets out a long, exasperated sigh and begins picking through the briefcase, counting the notes again and again. They are short, painfully so. Once Pein took the Akatsuki's cut, they would certainly be in the red.
Standing up, Kakuzu snaps the briefcase shut and throws it behind his shoulder. "In two days, we are returning to the Hot Water base to obtain funds and supplies. We will borrow some poisons from some of Akasuna's stores then."
"Now, now, it's not worth risking both our lives over. Sasori-san is...temperamental about his poisons. I'll improvise."
Kakuzu snorts. “Akasuna is always ‘temperamental’. To say the least.”
“I’m only interested in getting caught in strings of my own choosing.” Orochimaru passes in front of Kakuzu with a slight flourish, golden eyes darting back to peer at his partner. “I can make more when we pass through Rice Paddy country.”
Pebbles and dirt crunch under Orochimaru’s feet, cloak floating elegantly behind him as he sways down the path. Kakuzu allows himself a second to admire the view before catching up to the snake.
“Fine.” The edges of their sleeves brush as Kakuzu takes the lead, calling out behind him, “Rice Paddy, it is.”
“You’re the boss, Kakuzu-san.”
Orochimaru allows the hint of a smirk to grace his features, eyeing the set of his partner's broad shoulders, the line of his spine, and the places where he knows four mysterious masks are embedded in Kakuzu's flesh. They still have not had their talk, and if Kakuzu wants to dissemble, Orochimaru knows just how to handle it.
Rice Paddy Country is home, after all.
#KakuOro#OroKaku#Kakuzu#Orochimaru#awintercat#Please see the warning tags before reading#If I cannot serve in heaven#our fic
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An Interview with Gaylord Herron
INTERVIEW ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ROMAN CANDLE ISSUE 1 - AVAILABLE HERE AND HERE.
No one ever admits it, but a lot of ‘photobooks’ are pretty dull. £40 for page-after-page of po-faced portraits? What a swizz. And how about those supposedly intellectual photos which just show the corner of a hedge or something... school textbooks were more fun.
One photobook which most certainly IS NOT DULL is a seldom-spoken-of gem called Vagabond by a chap from Tulsa named Gaylord Herron. Released back in 1975, this is a bizarre ride way beyond the far side, showing such amazing sights as a pair of overweight wrestlers, a proud man’s hat collection and a teacher sat by the roadside scoffing a slice of cake.
There’s paintings too. And words about Cain and Abel and Tulsa and trips to Japan and countless other things. The whole thing is a thick and hearty soup worthy of wading through, and repeat servings are advised.
Gaylord, or G.Oscar, as he’s sometimes known, now runs a bike shop which sells affordable vintage bikes. I called up the shop phone one morning to pester him about Vagabond and anything else I could think of...
I can’t say I know too much about your home city of Tulsa. What’s it like there?
Tulsa is kind of becoming more of a cosmopolitan city than before. There’s a family foundation called Kaiser, which covers the whole country, and they built a park here, which is the most incredible thing in the world. It’s a huge, huge park, which has won the award for the most outstanding park, worldwide. He hired people from Holland to design a lot of it.
Sounds nice. How big is Tulsa? What’s the population?
With the surrounding towns around it, it’d be a million I guess. It’s not that big.
What was it like growing up there? Was it the typical America you’d imagine from films and books in the 50s?
Well, it was more of that rural kind of feel. It was an oil town—it grew out of oil. I think it became an incorporated city in 1907, so it’s only just over a hundred years old. It was built on the curve of the Arkansas River at a place where Washington Irvine and those guys used to hang out. It’s a really historic area.
So that’s kind of the hook—the river—which has been developed and exploited in all kinds of ways over the years. But now it’s kind of taking on the feel of a larger city.
When I was a kid, we grew up near downtown, and we’d ride the bus into town, because we just didn’t have the money for all kinds of things that other people had. And I remember seeing the skyline in the distance on the bus, and thinking how neatly it was done—it was good math—perfect. Of course, that skyline has been decimated since then, it doesn’t have the architectural look or the charm that it once had.
But at the same time, there’s an area in midtown that’s about nine square miles of old growth trees that are there because of the watershed coming down from that curve in the river and making it very, very fertile. You British would call it a wood.
Yeah, or maybe a ‘copse’, although not many people use that word.
There’s a lot of European paintings of that kind of thing. They haven’t decimated it with pharmacies and parking lots, although I’m sure they’d love to. I’m taking photographs of the trees to call attention to it—I wanted to make people aware of what they have in Tulsa.
Do you think people take that kind of thing for granted a bit?
Yeah, they do. There’s this dappled light at the base of these trees, which filters down through the canopy and splashes across the ground, and that has a psychological draw for people. They get into that dappled light, and they don’t really realise it’s doing something to them, making them relaxed, making them feel protected—it’s neat. But when I first started taking pictures, I used to avoid dappled light. I didn’t want it, it was too chaotic and confusing. I liked solid blocks and shapes that were well defined. But at my age now, I love that dappled light—I look for it.
From what I gather, you started taking photos when you joined the army and went to Korea, but had you any interest in it at all before then?
Not a bit—I really hadn’t. I mean my sister and I would do goofy shots out in the front with a Hawkeye camera when I was a kid, but I didn’t do anything until I got to Korea.
You see what happens is you go in there and they say, “Let’s go to the village.” And they’ve all got cameras around their necks. So by about the third or fourth trip, I went and bought a camera. I remember it was a Petri, and then after that I got a Honeywell Pentax PX.
So I’d go out, and shoot these slides—but then one day I decided to try black and white—and one of the better pictures I’ve done was on that roll, at the very beginning. It was shot out of the bus window, going down the street. I shot these guys who were out on the street, these old timers who had been in the war and were reminiscing. It was just a neat shot.
And at some point someone said, “You know you can make a print off that?” So I went into the darkroom, and I get this picture. It’s a guy on a cart eating an apple. He’s a human truck, waiting for his next job. So I print this picture of him, and it was still wet, but I ran down to the club where my buddies were all drinking, and threw this print down on the table. And they went, “Ooh, look at that! That’s great!” They were all over it, and that was all needed. So I ran back to the darkroom and I was there ever since.
You just thought, ‘right—this is what I want to do’?
Yeah. Then I started messing around with cropping and all those other elements of art. I started really examining everything, until I got to the point where I was just excessive.
What sorts of things were you looking for back then? What were you trying to show?
Chronologically, it starts with me taking pictures of people farming along the Han River. Those kinds of things that were related to a kind of rural mind-set. But then I just expanded into all other kinds of things. What I realised then is that with a twist of this, or a twist of that, you could make a whole new world out of these images. I saw the potential for all the kinds of things you could do to change the feel of a print.
And now, later on, I’ve came to the conclusion that what I was looking for was perfect math. Everything is math—the frequencies in colour, lengths and distances, ratio and proportion—and if you frame it, and put it in a rectangle, then you’ve got the potential for perfect math. Or maybe something that’s perfect on one side, but not the other side. And all those kinds of unknowns.
The eye picks it up, sees it, then the mind says, “What’ve we got here, let’s put a rectangle on it—it’s perfect.” And then you shoot! Bang! Hit the shutter! And that’s what it is, isn’t it?
Your photographs aren’t maybe what I’d think of as being ‘mathematical’— they’re not straight, stiff architectural shots—they’re loose, and some parts are blurred, but I suppose maybe they’re mathematical in the real sense… rather than someone just lining their camera up 90 degrees to a subject.
Yeah, and I’m dealing with this now in another sense. My wife died about five or six months ago, and I’m still in that in-between land. We were married 50 years, and she was part of this bike shop with me for 22 years. And when she left, I started doing something really odd. I had some craft paper on a roll, and I brought it over to my bar. I taped it down, and I started darkening these frames which I wanted to put around these old sepia tone prints.
I wanted it to be this really, dark, dark brown. Almost black—but if you look at it next to a colour it’ll pick it up and amplify it—it really incentivises the silver to pop out at you. And it’s working a charm by the way.
So I’m doing this, and I splash some ink—well actually, it’s more of a stain like what you use on furniture. And on this craft paper I’m doing this very physical, violent Jackson Pollock kind of thing, and all of a sudden, these faces are coming up out of this paper. And I’m getting pictures of my wife, pictures of my kids and pictures of people I know, coming up out of this craft paper. And you talk about loose, this is as loose as I’ve ever been.
It’s that thing of the mind joining up the gaps?
You’re looking for math, your brain is looking at what you eyes are sending in, and it says, “Wait a minute, I recognise this.” But you didn’t do it on purpose.
And another thing when you talk about mathematics… I shoot a lot of photographs at a 15th of a second—even in the bible it says that’s the twinkling of an eye. So I shoot these drive-by photographs at 40 miles and hour and I realised in looking in these pictures that a lot of stuff comes and goes in that 15th of a second that we won’t see with our eyes. It real mysterious. It’s like a no man’s land of time— a warp of time.
I suppose if the eye processes 25 frames a second or whatever it is, what’s going on in the in-between time? There’s could be all sorts of stuff.
Yeah, that’s the point… there’s stuff in there. And I’m getting to the point now where I’m seeing faces everywhere, in all kind of objects. And I’m loving it. I’ll say that if you want to get over loss, and get through the pain, use art to do it. Make that your vehicle—and use your hands!
Art is a thing that is so hard to define, but I’m starting to think that it’s picking up impulses from the past, and fitting them into your current situation. And that’s why art doesn’t have to be anything in particular, there just has to be a connection. That’s what it has to be.
When you were in Korea in the early 60s, were you thinking of making art?
No, I can remember after a couple of weeks of doing those prints, I had a photo of some laundry hanging on some clothes-lines in a house in Seoul in the snow, and I made a print of this, and I turned it on its side 90 degrees, and all of a sudden it’s like an exotic seascape. It was all being done with this white linen laundry. And I thought this was unbelievable. You could twist it, turn it, dodge it, burn it, and you could make a whole different world.
And that began to fascinate me, that you had the control there. So I would crop and crop and crop until the math was perfect. And I trained myself to look for all the elements of math. And now, at my age, I’ve realised that that’s the name of the game—recognising and making available perfect math. And you can either see it, or you don’t. It’s a weird thing… I guess it’s a gift.
The subject or the narration takes a back seat—you’re showing the math that’s going to appeal to the eye or the brain of the person looking, and then they’ll investigate further. It’s the hook that gets people to look.
So you weren’t bothered about the subject?
That’s where it started—but looking back over my old prints, I’ve realised that everything I shot early on, I continued to investigate. I love architecture, I love portraits of people, and I love those Cartier-Bresson photos… the non-events… those photos where everyone is doing something, but they’re not related. I loved those. I was always real bold about putting the camera in people’s faces. I did a whole bunch of that. I didn’t ask, and I made a lot of people mad.
Did you get much grief for doing that that?
I didn’t have to fight them off, but I’d have to push them away.
What’s your argument against people being mad about that? Surely the photo was more to appreciate the person rather than condescend.
Right, exactly. Or actually, it wasn’t so much to appreciate… I took a lot of pictures that kind of exposed people and showed some of their idiosyncrasies. I liked to do that. I was always bold like that, especially when I was doing a story for the newspaper.
I did television news too. I would always have a microphone in your face… and I had a Nikon around my neck the whole time. I was banging shots and doing interviews. And some of my best work was taken during those investigations for television. I was banging shots whilst I was doing the work—unconsciously. If I saw something and it looked right… BOOM. As simple as that.
Sometimes I think you get an inkling or a hint of what is about to happen. I think that’s what Bresson and those guys did. They were always on the shutter, just before the moment. You had to be ready before the decisive moment. I used to kiss the back of the camera when I’d hold it up to my eye. And then I’d wait and I’d wait and then at some point I’d hit the shutter.
How did you get involved with the news stuff? Did you get into that straight after you got back from Korea?
As a matter of fact I did. The first job I had coming back, I worked as the night-wire editor of an evening paper in Tulsa. I would pull the copy from the AP wire and the UPI wire and Reuters and all that stuff, and put it on the desk of the guys coming in to write about that stuff in the morning. It was an evening paper, but I worked all night long. I had the whole newsroom to myself.
And then after that, I was cleaning swimming pools, and then let’s see… what else did I do? Around that time I built a dark-room at home and I printed a lot of the stuff I’d done in Korea, and put it all together when my father died. That was in ’64. I hadn’t been home very long, so I just packed it all into my ’57 Desoto with push-button controls, and drove 90 mph to New York with all my stuff.
There I worked for a photographer called Vincent Lisanti, he had gone to Brooks, which is a school in California where people go to learn how to use view cameras and super commercial photography. When I got back to Tulsa, I moved into this apartment, and next door was a photographer called Bob Hawks, he’s turns wooden bowls now—they’ve even got a bowl of his in the White House—that’s how good he is, but he’s one eye a photographer, and one eye a bowl carver.
I said, “I’ve just come back from New York and I wanted to see if you needed some help. I worked for Vincent Lisanti.” He said, “Vincent Lisanti? I know him. I went to Brooks with him.” So he gets on the phone to Lisanti and he said, “Oh, he’s great, give him a job,” so he did, and I started travelling around shooting the Sweet Adelines.
How long were you doing that for?
That was about a year, going all over the country. It was great. I’d do the quartet portraits and all that stuff, and then I’d go out and shoot my own pictures. I was just obsessed with shooting.
And then I got a scholarship to go to Tulsa University and photograph their year-book, so I did that—shooting the yearbook in exchange for tuition. And then I just quit and joined the newspaper again, and did television news.
And whilst you were doing this news stuff, you were taking your own photos?
Yeah, but eventually I stopped doing everything and anything apart from taking pictures. But it’s expensive, and where’s it going to go? You get these pictures, but what are you going to do with them? No-one is going to hang them on their wall. It’s not the kind of thing that people use to decorate.
So that’s when Vagabond came along, in 1975. I quit my job to do Vagabond, I went to New York and stayed in the Chelsea Hotel. I think we were in Eugene O’Neill’s old room. Dan Mayo and myself spent a year doing that book.
How was New York back then?
Oh, it was great. I’ll tell you when it was better though… when I went in the mid-60s. The skies were cobalt blue and there was beautiful weather, but then all of a sudden it became smog-ridden.
What was the process for making the book? There’s a lot going on in there.
Yeah, I was using the Cain and Abel story to depict an outcome that was predicted. I was using myself, and my friend Bill Rabon, as examples of the vagabond. And that became a way for me to talk about the dilemma we’re all in right now as modern humanoids.
What do you mean by that?
I think it’s one DNA versus another DNA. There’s maybe 12 DNAs on this planet, and they’re always at loggerheads with each other—that’s my idea anyway. And those DNAs go 6,000 years back to the Garden of Eden… or maybe they go back 60,000 years? They’re all over the lot.
I’d decided that my father had died sooner than he should of, because I had a talk with him a couple of weeks after I got back from Korea, and I started to point out some of his deficiencies—I chewed him out. And two days later, he died. And I always carried that with me, and I’m still carrying that with me. So I did this book for him. He was a vagabond, and I was a vagabond.
When you talk about the dilemma we’re in, what do you mean?
It’s politics, it’s art, it’s war. It’s the dilemma, the debacle. The best example is the chimp—the young males beat each other to death, but they’re almost exactly the same, when it comes down to DNA or whatever, as the bonobo, and they just kiss all day. That’s all they do, there’s no war, they just love all day long. It’s two different wings of the same animal. And that’s kind of what we are. We don’t have enough bonobo, we’ve got too much chimp. And chimps will tear your face off.
Do you think that’s changed at all, since the 70s when your book came out? Will it always be like this?
I don’t know about that. I don’t know about where you are, but around about ten years ago I started having a feeling that we were starting to become dull normals—we were being ‘dull normalised’. You could tell in the advertising and the culture and the thoughts and the way people entertained themselves that they were getting much more like dull norms—like children, just wanting to be occupied and entertained all the time.
Nobody wants to think of better ways to organise our various cultures around the world, and help people out. I think we were much more egalitarian back then. We’re really selfish and childlike now.
AT THIS POINT WE GO OFF ON A TANGENT ABOUT DNA AND ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS. THINGS ARE EVENTUALLY BROUGHT BACK AROUND WHEN GAYLORD SAYS…
…at the same-time, I think the photographers that are serious about photography are called to do that.
Your book wasn’t just photos, it had paintings and writing in there too—a definite departure from the ‘Aperture Monograph’ style of book. How did people react to it?
That book was really well reviewed. I even got a shout-out from Robert Frank.
Did you ever meet him?
Oh no, but I’d have loved to. He was an outstanding photographer. When I first saw The Americans, I loved it. He was going around, shooting in motel rooms, on highways and all kind of things. He was trying to get the atmosphere that goes with it… the dance that goes with it. Sometimes it’s dancing inside and you’ve got to grab it… you’re obligated to grab it.
Where did all that extra stuff in Vagabond come from? How did you go about laying it all out?
Do you know who was going to do it at first? The guy who did that book Somnambulist… who was that?
Ralph Gibson?
Yeah, Ralph Gibson was going to do the book—that was who Dan Mayo was negotiating with, but then finally I said, “Do you know what? I would love to do this myself.” And so I went with it, just starting to wait for ideas… and they came. It was about that simple. It took a year to do it.
And that was the same thing as the photographs… mathematics. When it feels right, the lines are right, the ratios are right, the distances are right, and then there’s texture and colour… when all of that seems to be in balance, like a Calder sculpture, then you nail it, and you get the page.
How did people lay out books back then?
I made a dummy of the pictures and the copy and everything, and then I took it to this guy Sidney Rappaport in New York, the guy who did all the Edward Weston and Ansel Adams books. He was a great printer. He used this triple-tone, it was a lithograph kind of a thing. It was beautiful.
How many did you get printed?
I think there was 10,000. I’ve got about 300 left. People reviewed it very well, which I loved, but it was such a small niche. I tried to promote it as much as I could, but I did a horrible job. I can sell bicycles and I can talk to people until they buy a bicycle, but I can’t sell photographs.
Was there ever plans to do another book? You carried on taking pictures, but as far as I know, Vagabond was your only book.
I’m at the point now where I’d like to relocate the negatives into a collection… a museum or a school or something so they could use it for education. But I haven’t done that yet, so I may at some point try to do a couple of books.
I’ve got thousands and thousands of images, and I’ve scanned in my prints, but until I know what I’m going to do with my negatives, I don’t know whether I’m going to need to print anything else or not. I need someone to sponsor me… it’s not easy.
If you’ve only scanned in your prints, I imagine you must have countless negatives you’ve never seen before. How many photos off a roll of film would you print?
Back in 69 to 71 when I was working at the newspaper I was banging so many shots on a roll that I’d want to print half the roll. It was one after another. I made them on an Ektamatic Processor, which is an interesting aside.
Kodak made this A/B solution roller, feeder and printer. You put your Ektamatic paper in, it goes through an activator, it goes through a stabiliser, and then it comes out, you squeegee it off and set it down and it air dries.
And I made gazillions of prints, just sitting on a stool with that roller printer, and now I’m looking at them, and they’re better now than ever. They were never fixed! Somehow Kodak figured out how to make the chemicals co-exist forever… or something. And these are 50/60 year old prints. They self tone down to sepia over time, as random sulphite molecules attach to them, but the silver is still pristine.
A lot of older photographer has a mystery to it. There’s maybe not as much information in the image, so your mind has to fill it in. Do you think that mystery has been lost a little bit nowadays?
It could be, and it could be that selfies have become ubiquitous and no one thinks about any other form of visual representation. People aren’t doing much because they’re always looking at their iPhone. They’re not getting anything done. It’s seems like as a culture, we’ve made preparation for an accomplishment into the goal. “I’ve got to get all this stuff together, get my money, get all the stuff I need, and then I’ll accomplish this goal.” All the time we’re preparing for everything, we never actually do anything… we’re just preparing.
I think people don’t investigate as much. In an old article, I said that taking a photo was like a stream of water running down a bubbling brook—you reach in and pull out a few drops that you can examine. That’s what a photograph does. It pulls a drop out of the stream so that you can examine it, or identify with it, or learn from it, or even be inspired by it. Or are made comfortable by it. And that’s the beauty of it.
Whose photographs did that for you?
I liked those guys who did the ‘decisive moment’ thing, where you capture it just right. You’d have to be on top of the shutter to get that—you’ve got to be ahead of it. If not, you don’t have it—you’ve just got another dull rectangle. But that’s okay, I think those are important too by the way… they’re just dull.
But I think that permeated my thinking all along. What I was going to say before is that when you shoot that roll of film you were talking about, well, you might have six images on there that you know are good, but then there might be one down at the end of the roll… and you’ll say, “This is it! That’s the shot!” It wasn’t those six—it was that one vagabond image that you saw. You print that puppy and you love it. That’s the one that stands out. You’re talking about various levels and grades of attraction, and math.
And then there’s content. I’ve always been mindful of content. That picture of that woman holding that girl on that street corner… her face and her body attitude… it makes me cry, every time I look at it, and I don’t know why. There’s just something about the arrangement that touches my soul.
Is that because it’s figurative? There’s always going to be more of an emotion connection to a photo of a person.
Yeah, but those trees… I’m having an emotional affair with the trees right now… but yeah, people come first.
Maybe going off on a tangent here, but I’ve noticed every time you’re mentioned, it’s often in the same sentence as Larry Clark. Is that a bit annoying?
Yeah, there was a review that a woman wrote which compared the two views of Tulsa, Clark and me, and she came out eventually to say that mine was positive, and his was negative.
I suppose his wasn’t really about Tulsa, even thought that’s what it was called.
Yeah, it was about that subculture, the methamphetamine. Whereas I wanted to be as universal as possible. When I was a kid, I’d think, “Wouldn’t it be neat if you could see everything in the world?” And maybe that’s what I’m trying to do—to photograph everything and see everything? But that’s the definition of omnipresent or something, and you can’t have that. But yeah, I thought that’d be neat.
I would just like to see everything, I don’t know why. I do know that it’s a visual thing. I think there’s a speed to your vision. Sometime you can look and get an immediate read from your brain. A lot of times your brain looks at it and says, “What the fuck is this? What are you doing?” But you get this fast, fast read, visually.
I suppose your book is a good example of that mix… of seeing everything. There’s all sorts in there.
It’s a cultural dragnet, over the whole thing. The overarching drag-net.
What do you think about photography now? Do you look at much contemporary stuff?
I wonder about the people who photograph now. They’ve got their iPhones, and they’ve also got their Nikons, and they’re banging shots… but I’m not seeing anything. It might be that they don’t know how to read the culture, or maybe they’re not interested in the things that I’m interested in, but there’s a lot of flamboyance now in art.
I don’t know how to explain it, but I always wanted to reduce it to the basic elements. But now there are all these different things to make it brighter, or make it shiny… we all like shiny things. But right now I’m drawing on this brown craft paper… and that’s what they wrap fish in!
What do you think has kept you going with photography and art and everything? A lot of people eventually slow down or stop, but you’re still at it.
One of the reviewers who wrote about Vagabond said, “I don’t think Herron’s going to write another book.” And he put that thought in my head… but I’m going to do another book—I’m not going to quit just because he said I would. But it was almost like that was my message and that was all I needed to do, and that was pretty much right.
But then I discovered something when Judy died, after that I didn’t go down and print old stuff, and I haven’t been taking pictures the way I normally do—I substituted it for drawing. But I can’t do that forever, so I guess from now on what I’ll do is collate what I’ve done, and try and make it accessible as a teaching tool. But I’m not having much luck with that. That’s why I’m selling bikes.
How did you get involved with that?
It was my son. He had a job in a bike shop, and he wanted to go skiing, so his boss said I could run his bike shop whilst he was skiing. And I just fell in love with it. And we’ve had this place for 22 years now. I grew up helping my father with his business, so I knew about mechanics early on. I made my own everything—whatever I needed, I built it. So this is a hangover from that. And I love the people who come in the bike shop. This is how I maintain my contact with people. But I’m not maintaining my art, and I think it’s because I was doing it for Judy. I couldn’t wait to show her a print. I was trying to impress her, and all along, through all those decades, she supported me—she kept me going. I’d print endlessly, with sepia tone, stinking up the kitchen… and I did it for her.
But now I’m re-organising, and rethinking all of it. And right now, I’m loving the idea of drawing on craft paper. And at the same time, I’m putting a little gallery upstage, showing some prints upstairs.
I might be wrong, but you seem like a fairly deep thinker; what do you think life is all about?
I think we’re here to reproduce, and to help what we produce. We’re here to survive and to thrive. I think we get tweaked up and down from time to time as well. I think it’s pretty simple really.
We’ve got so much energy flying around the planet at all times. There are all kinds of frequencies and wavelengths, and all kinds of lanes, and some people can pick up on a lane, and some people can’t. I keep thinking of Einstein, he’s drawing on a blackboard and doing all these calculations, and he’s in a lane that nobody knows about. But that stuff, the math, is there all the time, you just have to know how to grab it. And I guess taking pictures is maybe a practice of grabbing it. You’re grabbing the math and your brain is interpreting the math.
Were there photos you wished you grabbed? Some that got away?
Oh yeah, there are a bunch of those. But like I say, there’s always that one down the end of the roll that makes up for all the bad shots—all those dull rectangles. I love to look at it when it’s on those proof sheets, I can see the math real easily when it’s reduced down like that. In fact, it becomes bolder in terms of the contrast and the shape. When you’ve got one, you’ll see it, and it’s always that sleeper that you didn’t think of.
I don’t make wet-prints anymore, I do ink-jets. I really don’t like it, but I do it anyway. There’s something about looking into that silver. Silver is eternal, and it’s going to go thousands and thousands of years on that paper. It doesn’t diminish or dissolve or anything, it’s solid, and it stays solid. It’s a very mysterious thing, it’s hard to describe, there’s a luminance that reflects back to you.
Has the computer screen ruined that?
What did Marshall McLuhan say? “The medium is the message.” That’s what I think about all those pixels running around. It just looks like faux… faux life, faux everything. But when you look at silver, you’re looking at a solid piece of material that’s been around for hundreds of years. It’s completely different.
Yeah definitely. I think I’ve got to go fairly soon so I’ll try and wrap this up a bit. What have you got on this afternoon?
I’m actually going to go upstairs and work with photographs, and then do a little work for the bicycle shop. I’m G. Oscar Bicycles in the bike world, and then I’m Gaylord Oscar Herron in the art world. I can maintain both of them though… I can chew gum and walk at the same time.
Do you think it works well together?
Oh yeah, there isn’t anything that I don’t do anymore. I keep them all separate, but it’s all one flow. The whole thing is math.
It all comes back to maths doesn’t it?
The best example of math is this; you’ve got the guy playing baseball, he’s out in the left field, and he hears the ball hit the bat and his mind records the sound. And then he sees the ball leave the bat and coming up to his right, so immediately the eye sends that into the brain and the brain looks at it and says, “Okay, start this leg and this arm and move as fast as you can into the direction that the ball is going to go to, so that you can catch it”. Think about how many calculations that is. It’s all mathematics, it really is. And then he can catch the ball with his glove. And that’s the best example of how math determines everything we do. It’s all mathematics.
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To Every Thing a Season (15/16)
Summary: After witnessing the tragic murder of his brother Liam, Killian Jones is more determined than ever to discover the secrets of time travel. Fast-tracking his education at Storybrooke University, Killian is assigned a lab assistant, one Emma Swan. Together, they find a way to break through the veil of time so Killian can set things right. But what will be the price for changing the past, and is it one they’re willing to pay?
Rated: T, for violence, some dark themes, angst, and whump
Art credit/link: The totally awesome @optomisticgirl made imagesets for all the chapters and @ab-normality made a video and a gifset for this fic. You can find the imageset for this chapter above and here on @optomisticgirl‘s blog. The video is linked here and on @ab-normality‘s blog here and the gifset is posted here!
Beta readers: The as-always wonderful @nothingimpossibleonlyimprobable, thanks so much for all of your help and cajoling and reassuring! And a huge thank you to the spectacular @spartanguard who stepped in to help beta read as well!
A/N: Written as part of the 2017 Captain Swan Big Bang Challenge. You can catch up with all the other fics that are complete by following @captainswanbigbang and/or subscribing to the Group Collection on AO3 and/or the C2 on FFN.
This is complete in 16 parts and will be posted every Thursday from now until its completion.
And yes, there is a happy ending after all this… just so you know.
Word count: ~ 5,600 (80K+ Total in 16 chapters)
From the beginning: ao3 | ffn
Current Chapter: AO3 | FFN
Chapter 15: And a Time to Every Purpose
Killian wasn’t sure how long he sat at the controls, staring brokenly at the coordinates flashing on the screen. He hurt all over from the journey, but didn’t seem to be missing any important bits, so he supposed Emma had been right about that, after all. The harness dug into his chest painfully, highlighting the ache he felt at Emma’s betrayal. He was sorely tempted to find where she’d stashed the second key, input the coordinates for home, and never look back.
But the key fell out of its slot and a note fluttered down to his lap after it.
Believe in yourself, Killian, and in us. I do.
Love, Emma
He shut his eyes tightly. It was morning in Ireland, just hours before his brother would be shot down in the street and Killian’s life would be irreparably changed. He could fix it. He could save Liam. And then he’d spend the rest of his life trying to find Emma again. He tucked the note in his pocket as a reminder of what he was working to save.
Killian finally unbuckled himself, struggling with the clasp at his chest, and unsealed the hatch. Bright sunlight assaulted his eyes, making him blink rapidly in the early morning light. He’d just left a stormy evening in Maine, so it was a bit of a shock to his system.
It was cold. He’d forgotten how cold it was that morning - he’d spent half the day huddled in Liam’s jacket as they’d wandered around the city. It was only when they’d gone back to the dingy motel room to change for the lecture that he’d given it back.
And now it was on his shoulders again, worn with age and no longer smelling like his brother, but a comfort all the same.
He locked the machine and threw a camouflage net over it as best he could. With a determined set to his shoulders, Killian stalked towards the city. He’d only taken a few steps when everything hit him suddenly - he had no idea how to keep his stubborn as Hell older brother from walking down that street and getting himself killed.
The trek into civilization tested Killian’s patience as he argued with himself over what he was going to do and how loudly he was going to yell at Swan when he found her again. Granted, that version of his Emma would no longer exist and the version he would find didn’t deserve his anger, but that didn’t seem to matter at the moment. He was angry and he was chagrined and he wasn’t going to just let that lie.
Right after he kissed the daylights out of her…
And likely got smacked for his troubles if she had no idea who he was.
Despite his current mood, Killian found himself smirking at his future self’s pain. His Emma was a spitfire and she’d make him pay for it.
Killian's hands fell naturally to his pockets as he trudged away from the machine. His fingers closed protectively around the catalyst key, clutching his only lifeline back to the present - he refused to even think the phrase "Back to the Future" - as he walked. He didn't really pay attention, at first, to what else cluttered his pocket. Emma was constantly complaining that for how neat he was everywhere else, his pockets were always a mess of detritus when it came time for laundry day.
And then the crinkle of paper caught his attention. He fished around for a moment, not remembering stashing any of his class notes in his pocket, and pulled out a crumpled mess of printer paper. Smoothing it out against his leg, Killian saw that it was a black and white photo of a young man - perhaps a few years younger than he and Emma - and a name scrawled in Emma's familiar penmanship.
Malcolm Pan.
And a note underneath the name in someone else's writing.
Best guess, initiation ??gang or IRA?? payment of Jones' debt.
At least now he knew who he was looking for.
And then he hit the city limits.
The sights, the sounds, the smells, they all bowled over him and sent him stumbling to the nearest wall for support. He’d left Ireland behind the day Liam had been killed and he’d never been back. Until today.
Which, he supposed, meant that he still hadn’t been back to Ireland since Liam’s death. Time travel made his brain hurt sometimes.
Killian stalked through the streets of the city, glaring at everyone he passed and retracing his steps until he knew the path from the motel to where Liam had taken his last breaths in Killian’s arms by heart. Every rock, every piece of trash, even the crack in the sidewalk he’d tripped over that day.
He knew every inch of where they would walk on the path towards Liam’s death, not knowing it was their last minutes together.
But it wouldn’t be. Not if he could help it.
He had a face, a name, a target to hunt. Part of Killian wished that he hadn’t spent so much time in his room and then in a lab as he’d grown. That he knew people well enough to understand where and why this Malcolm Pan would be coming after his brother.
He didn’t, and what he did know would have to be enough - what Emma had found for him would have to be enough.
Killian stalked the street again, his eyes peeled for the boy, his brother, or himself. He had no idea what to do when he found any of them, but he would cross that bridge when he came to it.
There.
The boy, Malcolm, came around the corner looking around shiftily as he fiddled with the hem of his jumper. Killian would bet his key to the machine that there was a gun tucked into the boy’s waistband.
What the hell was he going to do? Walk up to the boy dead out and ask him nicely to please not shoot his brother? Not only would the boy still kill Liam, Killian would likely end up with a bullet of his own for the trouble.
Should he rush Malcolm and hope that the sight of someone charging him would scare him off? No, that wouldn’t end any better.
Call the police? They likely wouldn’t get there in time. And what would he even tell them? The boy hadn’t done anything yet.
Try to find Liam and stop him? Killian laughed out loud. Liam was far more stubborn than Killian and Emma combined - especially when it came to his little brother. No, trying to talk Liam out of bringing the younger version of himself to the lecture wouldn’t accomplish anything.
So what could he do?
Maybe if Emma were here, she would know how to…
No! he chastised himself. If there was one thing Killian knew for certain, it was that he absolutely didn’t want Emma anywhere near the gun-toting maniac across the street from him. If she were to get hurt… Killian couldn’t even imagine it, his heart already clutching in terror at the thought. He looked wildly around, as if thinking about it would make her magically appear.
She didn’t.
But Liam did.
Killian was out of time.
Instinct drove Killian towards the familiar mop of curly brown hair, his brother looking startlingly young now that Killian was older than Liam. He gave a moment’s glance back towards Malcolm, the glint of metal shining in the sun tearing the first shout from Killian’s throat.
“Look out!” he screamed, his voice shrill as it echoed down the street.
Liam looked up - alarm crossing his features - but he didn’t run, only glanced back over his shoulder and froze.
Killian knew exactly who Liam was looking for. But trying to protect the younger Killian wasn’t going to keep Liam from getting killed - noble though the sacrifice may be.
“Liam! Run!” he tried again.
Liam turned slowly to face him, shock written plainly across his features.
But he didn’t run.
“Gun!” Killian shouted, pointing across the street to where an equally shocked Pan was aiming at Liam.
“Malcolm Pan!” Killian screamed, abandoning the thought of getting Liam to safety and directing his murderer’s attention to himself, Killian took off sprinting across the street.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
He heard the loud retort of the weapon, spinning mid-stride to see if Malcolm had hit Liam or if the idiot had finally realized that Killian was trying to save his bloody life.
The idiot in question was running towards Killian and Malcolm.
“What the bloody hell are you…” Killian trailed off as he stumbled. Liam was shouting something, but the buzzing in Killian’s ears drowned it out. When did it get so cold? he wondered, a moment before the hollow thunk of his knees hitting the pavement reverberated through him.
Liam caught him as he fell, the warmth of his brother’s embrace such a foreign comfort after all these years that it shocked Killian out of his daze. He automatically tried to curl into his brother - Liam was here, everything would be all right now.
Only it wouldn’t be all right. Because Liam was still in danger.
“Get your bloody arse out of… argh!” Killian’s tirade dissolved into an agonized howl as Liam pushed down on his stomach - hard.
Fire. Burning pain worse than when the machine had taken his hand erupted from his abdomen and raced outwards until it consumed him. His body started to shiver uncontrollably and a tiny whimper pushed past his lips.
He’d been shot.
Killian didn’t know why that hadn’t registered before, but it didn’t matter at the moment.
Liam did.
“You have to get out of here,” Killian managed. “He’s after you.”
Liam looked down at him, dumbstruck.
“Killi-” Liam cut himself off, shaking his head violently. “Never mind, it can’t-”
But Killian was already nodding, caught up in the thought that he didn’t want to die a stranger in the wrong time with his big brother right there. “You have to get out of here, brother,” he mumbled around the blood bubbling up his throat.
“You did it,” Liam whispered reverently instead of running. “You figured out how to travel time. Oh, Killian…”
It was the awe and the pride that broke Killian’s defenses. Tears coursed down his cheeks as Liam hugged him more tightly, pressing down harder on the gunshot wounds and eliciting a strangled cry from Killian.
“I did it to save you. Please, Liam, I don’t want to grow up without you,” he begged. “Go. Please!”
Liam looked pale, his gaze automatically searching out the corner where the younger Killian still hadn’t appeared from.
“I don’t want to leave you,” he whispered.
“And you won’t,” Killian assured him. “Not if you leave now, before Malcolm tries again.”
They both looked up to see the boy across the street standing stock still, his line of sight partially blocked by the throng of people running past in a panic.
Liam still hesitated. “But you shouldn’t have to die alone, little brother.”
“I think you mean younger brother.”
Liam scoffed out a laugh. “Looks like you’re always going to be the little brother, Killian. You’re pretty scrawny.”
Killian shook his head ruefully. A bolt of pain shot through him and the world started to fade away. Emma, he thought of her for the first time. “Promise me something, Liam,” he pleaded.
“Anything,” Liam avowed. “Anything, Killian. You know that.”
Killian nodded his head. He did know that. “Not Oxford.”
“What?” Liam sounded scandalized.
“Not Oxford,” he repeated, Emma’s face dancing through his thoughts and making him smile softly. “If this is going to work, you need to take me to Maine. There’s a little Universi-”
“Storybrooke?” Liam questioned, and explained further at Killian’s confused glance. “There’s a Dr. Hopper there who has been asking after you. Is that where you mean?”
Killian nodded, the edges of his vision starting to go fuzzy. “There’s a… a girl,” he mumbled, his eyes beginning to close.
“You mean to tell me that after all these years, my little brother has finally learned about girls?”
Killian’s face lit up as he imagined Emma smiling gently down at him. His eyes began to close, everything fading away and leaving him floating.
“Only if you go, Liam. You’ve got to get out of here,” he managed.
“I love you, little brother,” Killian heard Liam whisper before he felt himself being lowered to the ground. “I promise, I’ll help you fix this.”
It was cold outside his brother’s embrace, but the quick footsteps hurrying away from him let Killian finally relax, his mission finally accomplished.
I’m sorry, Emma, he thought sadly. I didn’t mean to leave you behind like everyone else.
A cold burst of air made him shudder, his breath hitching in his chest. I will find you again, luv. We’ll get a second chance, I know it.
Everything seemed to drop away as his heart rate slowed and the air in his lungs seemed to liquify. He was dying and there was nothing he could do about it. It wouldn’t matter now, though, not now that Liam was safe. The timeline would change and he would never again have to come back to this accursed place. Never again would he have to remember the way Liam had died - just like this, drowning in his own blood.
Because Liam was safe now. Killian had succeeded. Liam was-
BANG! BANG! BANG!
No!
One last burst of adrenaline allowed Killian to open his eyes. He found Liam’s shocked gaze, saw the blood as it began to stain his shirt, his pants, the leather jacket that was - against all laws of physics - in two places at one time. One last burst of adrenaline that allowed him to watch Liam fall to his knees and then his back, blood pooling on the ground beneath him.
Killian watched in horror as the younger version of himself finally came barreling around the corner, pushing through the crowd of panicked city dwellers.
He’d failed.
Hot tears of shame and grief streamed down his face, matching the panicked ones that coursed down the cheeks of the teenager that knelt at Liam’s side. Killian could hear himself pleading with his older brother, begging him to stay, not to leave him behind. He heard Liam’s attempts to be strong for the younger Killian, heard the dumb jokes about Sherlock Ohms and then the sounds of sirens that were too late to save either of them.
“Think like a proton, right?”
How was he supposed to save his brother now, if Liam were to die here, alone, on this filthy street?
And how would he ever find Emma?
Killian watched, detached, as the paramedics loaded Liam into the back of the ambulance, ignored the men at his side, trying to save his life. Killian wanted to rail at them for wasting their time when it was Liam who needed to be saved. He couldn’t muster the energy around the pervasive cold and the utter failure that stole the last of his life from him.
The world faded to black as Killian’s breaths petered out, his heart stuttering to a stop as the image of a textbook - battered and all covered in his big brother’s blood - was the last thing he saw.
Pain.
Burning.
Numbness.
Cold.
Had he just died?
Killian’s eyes opened as he gasped in air. His hand clutched at his stomach and he expected to feel the warm stickiness of his blood flowing steadily out of him.
His shirt was pristine.
Hadn’t he just been bleeding? Liam’s voice, sad and resigned as he promised to fix this, echoed in his ears. “I love you, little brother,” filling him with a sense of dread. What was wrong with him? What was going on? As he tried to remember, pain and chilling terror forced him to forget. The chill that permeated his entire body still made him shiver.
He’d died trying to save Liam.
And Liam had still been gunned down in the street. Killian hadn’t fixed anything.
But Killian had died.
Hadn’t he?
No. Of course not. That was…
Hadn’t he?
How many times had he died and reset the timeline? How many times had he - or rather a version of him since he clearly could only die once - failed?
No, he hadn’t died, that was absurd. He had just been arguing with Emma.
Hadn’t he?
Killian stared at the computer in front of him, the time coordinates flashing on the screen proving to him that he was sitting in the machine just hours before Liam’s death. The memory… dream?... of him dying began to fade.
But watching Liam collapse in the street and seeing the younger version of himself sprinting around the corner stayed firmly in his mind.
He had to save Liam.
Killian reached for the small compartment, looking for the key that would return him to Emma after he completed his goal. A note fluttered out.
Believe in yourself, Killian, and in us. I do.
Love, Emma
Killian unbuckled himself, struggling with the clasp at his chest, and unsealed the hatch. He stepped out in the morning light, surprised when it didn’t take long to adjust. He thought he’d just left a stormy evening in Maine, so it should have been a shock to his system.
It wasn’t.
The crinkle of paper in his pocket caught his attention and he pulled it out. There was a name scrawled in Emma's familiar penmanship.
Malcolm Pan.
At least now he knew who he was looking for.
And then he hit the city limits.
The sights, the sounds, the smells, they all bowled over him and sent him stumbling to the nearest wall for support. He’d left Ireland behind the day Liam had been killed and he’d never been back. Until today.
But hadn’t he just been… no, that was stupid. He hadn’t been here since Liam had been killed. Which, he supposed, meant that he still hadn’t been back to Ireland since Liam’s death. Time travel made his brain hurt sometimes.
Killian wandered the streets for a while, reacquainting himself with the layout and trying to ignore the grumbling need for dinner in his stomach in spite of the smells of breakfast wafting out of the restaurants he'd passed. He was too antsy to sit down and eat, but he couldn't concentrate on anything until he did. He finally stopped in a little family-run cafe and sat down with a good cup of tea and a breakfast sandwich, contemplating his next move. It had been almost seven years since he'd been here, he couldn't remember exactly where Liam had taken him around the city before they'd headed towards the lec-
Liam walked in the front door, the younger version of Killian, himself, trailing along behind.
The leather jacket was falling off his shoulders, the sleeves clenched in his hands. But it was him. And bloody hell, had he really been that small?
Killian watched with sad nostalgia as Liam placed their order and shepherded the younger him to a table. His nose was already buried in a book. The teenage version of himself had idolized his older brother - still did, if he were being truthful with himself - and had taken for granted that Liam would always be there for him. Killian just wanted to march over to the table and shake himself, beg him to stop reading and just revel in the fact that his older brother was right there.
But he didn't want to terrify himself, or worse - have Liam panic and run off before Killian could figure out how to save him.
So he sat, sipping his tea and watching the two of them interact.
"-your breakfast, little brother?"
"Younger brother, Liam," he mumbled under his breath, parroting his younger self as he whined.
He watched Liam shake his head jovially, smacking his younger brother on the back and laughing at the way the boy glared over the rims of his glasses. "Maybe someday, Killian, but not yet."
Killian looked down at his own slight frame and grimaced. Liam would never let him live down that he'd never grown out of 'little brother' size.
He grinned like an idiot, thinking of how often Liam would take the mickey out of him for still being littler than him.
But first, he had to save the idiot. Killian finished up his own breakfast, watching them carefully over the rim of his mug lest he lose them in the shuffle of the crowd. For such an out of the way cafe, it was surprisingly popular, but his brother's curly hair stood out amidst the throng of people bustling about. He waited until Liam had guided his younger self from the restaurant, stalking them around a corner and down the road.
In retrospect, he should have remembered the long moments after breakfast that morning when Liam had seemingly disappeared without a word, coming back angry and overprotective.
As it was, he didn't remember until Liam had him shoved up against an alley wall, his forearm choking off Killian's air supply.
It hit him all at once: his brother was standing right there. Killian could reach out and touch him, wanted to wrap his arms around the solid, flesh and blood, man he hadn’t seen outside of his nightmares in seven years. Even with Liam looking at him like a dangerous stranger, even with his older brother choking the life out of him, even with the looming deadline just hours away, Killian wanted to take a moment for himself just to relish in the fact that his brother was right there.
But they didn’t have time for that. There was a deadline to this visit, a timeline to alter, and his brother to save.
"Who the bloody hell are you and why are you following us?” Liam asked through clenched teeth. “Did Midas send you?"
Who?
Killian shook his head frantically, scrabbling to get a hold on Liam's arm. His brother was strong - well-built and muscular. He’d forgotten that as well. More importantly, however, he had no idea what Liam was talking about. Who was Midas and was he related to this Malcolm Pan who had supposedly murdered… would murder Liam?
Did Liam know all along that there was a threat? Was this more than just a random shooting?
What had Emma found that she thought he wasn’t going to like?
"I'm..." he gasped, pushing those questions aside for later, "trying to protect... you and your... brother."
If he knew one thing, he knew that Liam would take him seriously if he mentioned the younger Killian.
Liam's arm dropped away from his throat abruptly, leaving Killian floundering for support as his diaphragm spasmed and then finally allowed him a stuttered breath.
"From who?" Liam asked suspiciously, looking over his shoulder - for him, Killian realized.
Killian shook his head. "You're in dan-"
"Who are you?" Liam cut Killian off, turning back to him and looking at him curiously.
Killian blanched. "N-no one. Nobody important. Just, you need to be careful today. Keep your brother and yourself out of sight."
As he expected, Liam shook his head vigorously. "I can't. My little brother needs-"
"Needs you!" Killian couldn't help interrupting loudly, cringing when his brother started looking more defensive. This was not how he wanted this to go.
Liam was backing away, still staring at him as if he couldn't quite place him. Killian knew the feeling. He'd seen an older version of himself months ago in the corridor, and he had felt the vague sense of familiarity while being utterly lost as to how he knew the man. He imagined Liam felt similar now.
"Your little brother needs you," he tried to explain again. "I can't explain how I know, but I know that if you take him to his lecture today, you're going to be... he's going to lose you. Can't yo-"
He was cut off again, this time by Liam's fist plowing into the side of his face. Killian hit the ground hard, hand automatically coming up to cradle his cheek. The skin was already warm to the touch and starting to feel tight with inflammation.
"If you ever come near me or my brother again, I'll end you," Liam seethed, standing over him and practically radiating danger. It was a side of Liam he had never seen before and never wanted to see again.
"You don't understand," he pleaded, trying to rise to his feet by aborting the movement swiftly when Liam's fists clenched again. "I'm trying to save your life!"
Liam growled, taking a step closer and speaking in a whisper that was no less terrifying than the unbridled anger he'd just spoken with. "You can tell Midas that despite my father's debts and his faults, his sons aren't on the table and never were. He has a problem with Brennan, he can take it up with him."
Before Killian could get a word around the shock that paralyzed him, Liam stalked out of the alley, leaving Killian feeling bereft.
And reeling.
Liam had known so much more than he had ever let on to Killian. Killian could read between the lines, and when he got back to his timeline, he was going to eviscerate the man who had sired him. Brennan was the reason Liam was dead, was the reason that Killian's life had been so effortlessly shattered. And he had the nerve to go and name his do-over son after the one whose death had been on his hands.
Killian wanted Emma. More than anything right now, he wanted her solid and steadying presence. But he didn't have time for wants and wishes. He had to get back on track and follow Liam - save the idiot's life for him, if he wouldn't do it himself.
Killian picked himself up off the ground, dusted himself off, and gingerly fingered his cheek. There would definitely be a bruise there, the swelling already beginning to impede his vision. Liam had just barely managed to miss his glasses, although they were askew on his nose. Regardless, he needed to get off the street and regroup, figure out the best vantage point on the street Liam had died on to get the jump on Pan. He needed to have a better plan than jump in the bastard's line of sight and hope for the best.
Killian had no idea what to do and no time to plan for contingencies and backups.
He was the only one around who could save Liam, and damn if he wouldn't succeed or die trying.
Bound and determined to figure it out as he went, Killian walked the familiar streets and tried not to let the memories overwhelm him. The smell of Liam's blood, the feel of his skin cooling and his grip slackening, the sight of Liam's eyes closing forever. They were all in the back of his mind as he walked, and he didn't realize he was standing on the exact spot Liam had fallen... would fall… wouldn’t fall until he tripped over a catch in the sidewalk that he remembered from that day. Though the concrete was fairly clean, all Killian could see was a pool of blood, his textbook covered in it and abandoned. He didn't have much time before Liam would be there, he still needed to figure out where the shots would come from, find Pan, and stop him.
Liam had fallen that way, he decided a moment later, meaning the shooter was likely hiding behind the mailbox and tree over there.
Killian took off running, wanting to get there before...
Malcolm Pan turned the corner and aborted Killian's movements before he could get there. He'd have to figure out something else.
Killian ducked down an alley, looking at his watch and trying to figure out how much time he had left. Liam would be coming around the corner in just a few minutes, not long enough to do anything other than charge Pan and hope he could distract him long enough for his brother to get out of the line of fire. He crossed the street at a run, straight at the younger man who was already sighting down his weapon.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
He heard the first set of shots, his heart in his throat. He remembered trying to rationalize those shots as a boy, but knew if he didn’t make it to Pan before the second set...
"Hey!" he screamed, desperate now for anything that would stop the inevitable.
To his surprise - and utter relief - Pan looked at him, startled, and dropped his weapon. He looked as if he'd seen a ghost.
"Wha... who are you?" It was the second time he'd been asked that today.
Killian glared, putting himself firmly in front of the boy, trying his best to look intimidating. "You're not going to do this," he threatened.
"I have to,” Pan said, and Killian could hear the fear.
He stepped in front of the boy again when Pan tried to weasel his way around him, warring with himself about what to do. “What do you have to do?”
“I… the little one. I’m supposed to take the little one as payment. He was the collateral his father put up as payment. And Midas always collects on his debts.” Pan wouldn’t meet his eyes, toeing the gun at their feet, but his words sent Killian reeling.
The little one? Him?
Killian didn’t have time to process that before the boy was scrambling for the gun.
“Where is he?” Pan hissed, shoving at Killian to get the weapon he was standing on. “The little one is supposed to be with him!”
Killian gulped. He knew exactly where the little one was - around the corner, sitting on a step, engrossed in his book.
Pan finally shoved him away from the gun, reaching for it and muttering, “Midas will take the older one. He won’t be happy, but he’ll take it.”
He aimed the weapon again, and Killian barely had time to grab the barrel and redirect it before one, two, three shots rang out. His hand burned, but he didn’t let go. Screams and pounding feet echoed down the street, but Killian ignored it all.
He looked around wildly, making sure that the bullets hadn’t found their mark. Liam’s terrified gaze locked on his from across the street, and his older brother’s jaw dropped.
Thank you, Liam said tearfully, though Killian couldn’t hear the words.
Go, he mouthed urgently, and Liam didn’t hesitate, melting back into the crowd.
He was just about to turn back to the problem at hand, scrambling to find away to protect Liam permanently, when he saw Liam again - knelt down next to the first man Pan had shot - the one who looked terrifyingly like himself.
Had he…? Was that him lying there?
He had to think of something, some way to - “What if I can give you Brennan instead?” - Killian wasn’t sure who was more startled, Malcolm or himself.
“What?”
“I know where Jones is hiding, I know exactly what tavern he’ll be in tonight. All you have to do is leave his sons alone.” He felt sick, but he’d always known there was a little bit of darkness in him.
Pan nodded reluctantly, lowering the gun until Killian let go and stuffing it into the waistband of his jeans. A few minutes later and it was all over. He watched as Liam sprinted around the corner back to where the younger version of him would be waiting. All Killian had to do now was go home to find Emma.
He only hoped he’d be able to find her when he got there.
Killian felt light as he raced back to the woods where he’d left the machine. Liam was alive. Liam was alive and he hadn’t died and whatever else had happened in the moments before Liam didn’t die didn’t matter any more. Because his brother was alive and would be at his side once he got back and would help him find Emma.
The feeling that wrapped him in a warm blanket lasted right up until he had buckled himself into the machine. All of a sudden, it was as if someone had dumped a bucket of ice cold water over his head. His entire left arm erupted in agony, the only thing keeping him in his seat was the harness over his shoulders as he tried to curl in on himself. The catalyst key clattered to the floor, forgotten in the haze of pain that shrouded him.
He was terrified to go back.
Terrified of what else it would cost him if Emma had been wrong - if time travel exacted a sacrifice from its manipulator. He’d already lost a hand in his pursuit to save Liam, what else could he stand to lose and still face Emma, pretending to be a whole man.
Believe in yourself, Killian, and in us. I do.
Love, Emma
He laughed at himself, the absurdity of his thoughts breaking through the fog and sending the phantom pains scurrying to the back of his mind once more. Emma loved him; he loved Emma. That was all there was to it.
Killian picked up the key and inserted it in the lock.
Tagging: @gusenitsaa, @katie-dub, @kiwistreetswan, @lenfazreads, @xhookswenchx, @killian-whump, @eala-captian, @kmomof4, @onceuponaprincessworld, @couldnthandleit
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