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totallyexhausted · 9 months

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Random Sick Hirano (with his parents) Notes for my FF for Back-up

Just small notes on one of the ff’s in case my computer deletes the files again (so I have like a triple backup)...

(Just random-ass notes for right now to have a back-up back-up for myself) - feel free to comment or motivate me lol jk brb crying....

Title:

Sick/ dinner, bath, arguing, AE, mom, dad/ eating, sick, day off, calls Kagi… Dad EMT, mother stay at home.

Flashback, fight, feelings

Everything alright here, Kagiura?

Pft. This your boyfriend?

What? No, he’s-

It doesn’t matter who I am. Kagi? You good?

Y-yes. It’s fine, right, Tashaki?

He punches Kagi, Hirano tackles him.

FH:

Sore muscles?

Shit, how was he supposed to go back to normal after that?

6a.m.

The phone rang several times before the younger boy picked up, and Hirano smiled as his voice filled his ear, thick from sleep, still fighting to stay awake.

“I’m not sure if you remember but its Saturday, and we’re on break, which means I don’t have practice…”

“Well, I want to make sure you aren’t forgetting the routine. Have to keep you on your toes, after all.”

The lines quiet for a few minutes, and Hirano wonders if Kagiura fell back asleep. He’s about to say something when rustling fills the other end of the line, and the younger boy whispers, “Hirano… what’s wrong? Your voice… are you not feeling well?”

He sounds more awake now.

Hirano winces as Kagiura’s words meet his ears. Of course the younger boy knew him well enough to know when something was off. He hadn’t known there was something wrong with his voice but given he hadn’t talked much over the past few days, he’d imagined it sounded rough, hoarse, weak.

“No, I’m fine,” Hirano says, “Sorry, I was sick, but I’m better.”

There’s a quiet pause again.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I mean, I’ve been sick since… Wednesday? My parents took me to A&E the other night. But I’m better now. I feel better now. I promise.”

Hirano isn’t exactly sure why he promised… it just felt right. Kaguira sighs, “You were at A&E? Why didn’t you tell me you were sick? You should have- I would’ve- well, I don’t know what I would have done, but it would have been something! You’re supposed to tell me when you’re sick, Hirano!”

“You’re really dense sometimes.”

“Well, you’re an idiot sometimes, so…”

“Great. The blockhead and the idiot.”

Hirano laughed, “Yeah, has a nice ring to it.”

Part of him feels guilty. He’d be giving the younger the same lecture if it was the other way around.

“I’ll probably fall asleep.”

“That’s okay. Could we… just talk until then?”

“Yeah, I’d like that.” Hirano can hear the smile in Kagiura’s voice.

Blunt.

“Is that why you didn’t tell us you didn’t feel well, son?”

“We spend so little time together now…”

“We’d rather know you’re okay and healthy than fret over some cancelled plans… idiot.”

Hirano glances up, a small smirk crossing his face as his father’s eyes meet his, the playful smirk setting on old features.

“I’ve been told I’m dense sometimes.”

“Well, that’s an understatement. Whoever said that must know you pretty well, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess… he does.”

His father’s quiet for a few minutes, “You’re lucky to have him, then… so don’t mess it up, Taiga.”

If he was being honest, he felt okay on the train; but the day progressed he just started feeling worse… He blamed Kagiura. He’d taken a stupid sip from his water bottle when the younger had offered. A day later, the stupid kid had gotten the stomach flu and basically spent the day in the bathroom trying to isolate himself from Hirano until the older dragged him out, demanding he sleep on a bed versus the floor… they’d gotten into an argument which ended with Hirano getting puked on and Kagi breaking down. But Kagi was always getting sick, so Hirano hadn’t really thought too much about it. Besides he always felt like shit after exams or was getting sick after them, too much stress and pressure, eating away at an exhausted mind…

Her fingers running through Hirano’s blonde locks, brushing his bangs away from his blue eyes before tucking a few strands behind his ear. Truthfully, she hated the blonde hair and the earrings, but neither her nor her husband were going to stand in the way of Hirano expressing himself. Especially since he’d had such a hard time fitting in in middle school. It was heartbreaking to know he wasn’t the same kid they’d raised. He wasn’t open with others the way he used to be. Middle school hadn’t been kind to him… hadn’t been kind to a sweet boy. Because of that, Hirano learned to lock himself away, learned to keep his feelings inside, his thoughts, himself… until he broke, until he yelled or screamed or cried or fought… until he couldn’t hold it in any longer.

“These are new,” his mother said gently, ghosting her finger over the blue earrings. A gift from Kagi.

“He sounds sweet.”

“He’s getting too old for you to carry.” His father just grunted in response.

“Are you sure you feel okay, sweetheart?”

“Hm. Yeah, sorry… just tired,”

“Taiga.”

There’s firm hand pressed against his forehead, and Hirano feels the chopsticks fall from his fingers as his hand slips…

Whatever happened next was a giant blur. Nauseating and hot..

“You need to take the meds, son.” It’s not a suggestion. It’s an order. A command.

“Sorry, sweetheart, I’ll give you more water in a few minutes. We just really need you to keep this down.” There’s a tone of desperation in her voice that Hirano doesn’t like…

Bits of conversation flying around him that meant nothing to him.

“If his temperature doesn’t start to drop in an hour, we’ll need to take him to the hospital.”

“I know… hopefully he can keep these meds down. I mean, it’s been over 12 hours, what else could his stomach have left to purge?”

“You should get some rest. I’ll take his temperature in 30 minutes and let you know if it’s moved. Besides if he gets sick again or if we need to take him to the hospital, I can carry his weight. Kid’s not as tall as me yet.”

Fevered delirium he thinks of Kagiura.

“Where did you go?”

“Go? I haven’t gone anywhere, sweetheart, I’m right here,”

“No. I mean, you said, since we’ve been back.”

“Oh,” his mother laughed softly, and Hirano closed his eyes briefly. He’d forgotten how much he’d missed her laugh…

“You don’t remember?”

Cool fingers run through his hair, pushing blonde bangs away from his face before caressing his cheek, a thumb running along his cheekbone gently, and Hirano groans softly before opening his eyes.

“Sorry, honey, I needed to wake you so you could take some more meds,”

Door creaks open, a hand pressed against the side of his neck, then his cheek--- Hirano instinctively reaches his hand out, grasping a wrist before opening his eyes. Kagi?

“Sorry, son. I didn’t mean to wake you. I just came to check on you- you’ve been asleep for over 10 hours now.”

“How about we get some food in you? Then maybe a nice shower so you can wash everything away? You can finish off the remaining meds, then go back to sleep. Sound okay?”

Hirano knew it wasn’t a command. He could refuse if he wanted, and his father wouldn’t argue with him, he wouldn’t chastise him, he wouldn’t push him… but walking, stretching his legs after laying around for so long sounded nice…

Hirano felt his face blush. His parents were always like this. They weren’t overbearing or suffocating… just kind and gentle and nice. They were always open with him, trusting him, not afraid to show their emotions or wear their heart on their sleeve… but they were a little older than most parents, and more passionate. They weren’t afraid to express themselves, express their emotions, something Hirano had tried and got bullied for in middle school.

He hadn’t found a balance and because of it was the constant target of fights and taunts in grade school. He remembers crying, yelling, screaming at his parents while they just sat there, letting him lash out, letting him take his anger out on them because it was their fault he was a pushover… at least that’s what he thought. What he told them. It was their fault he was getting bullied… they weren’t mad. Not then.

Eventually, Hirano learned to hide himself through a tough exterior. People tended to stay away from you if you looked like trouble… and the fact that he’d been in more fights than anyone in his class helped. He didn’t like fighting, and he’d tried to avoid it, but he learned to stand his ground, he learned how to take a punch… and how to give one.

By the time he reached high school, everything became easier. He’d dyed his hair, got piercings, managed to perfect a cold-hearted stare, and deflect a conversation, or at the very least, shut down a conversation he didn’t want to have. Middle school had taken him, a sweet boy who wore his heart on his sleeve and tormented him until he crafted a suit of armor others refused to mess with. He learned to close himself off; opening up to only those he trusted… but that circle was small. Really damn small.

It wasn’t like Hirano could do no wrong in their eyes because God knows he’d fucked up more than he could count. Most of the time he was lectured; they talked about his actions, what he could have done differently, what he did and why he did it, and why he was being punished, then he’d accept his fate. But despite all the times he’d been grounded, or the time last year when he’d been brought home by the police for doing something stupid with Sasaki, Hirano had only been yelled at twice in his short existence. Once by his mother, the other, his father… both for fighting.

Even when his father went through a depressive episode, Hirano tried returning the favor. He’d sit with him, sometimes talking, sometimes in quiet, his legs sprawled out in front of him as he leaned his back against the wooden headboard or sitting on the floor next to the couch, listening to the sound of his father breathing. He knew there wasn’t much he could do; that he could fix… when his father was having a low period… but he wanted him to know that if he needed Hirano, he was there. That although he might have felt alone, he wasn’t… or at the very least, he didn’t have to go through this alone.

He’d become aware at a young age that his father dealt with depression. He was quieter sometimes, reserved, distant; his mother wasn’t. She was loud and brash, and she loved hugs… She’d explained to Hirano when he was 6 that sometimes, “Papa was just sad and there wasn’t much they could do to cheer him up.”

It wasn’t until he reached middle school that Hirano understood what that sadness was. How it affected you. How it hurt you. He’d started sitting with his father just so he wasn’t alone. Most of the time, Hirano felt completely useless, and he fucking hated that. He hated feeling useless. Watching someone he cared about sick or hurt, and not being able to help…

“You’re alright, son. It’s okay. Just get it up… your mother and I- we’ll clean you up. Don’t worry. You’re alright, son.”

“I felt better.”

“You might have felt better,” his father chuckles softly, his grip still firm against Hirano’s shoulder, “Hell, you might feel better… but you’re still sick, son. Your body is still recovering. You haven’t eaten in a while, so your stomach isn’t used to the food…”

“I don’t want to,” Hirano shudders, swallowing again as he lurches, “I- I can keep- it down.”

Hand on stomach.

“Next time, we’ll try something different than rice porridge, okay?”

“Here, sweetheart, I made ginger tea. It’ll help settle your stomach.”

Hirano was mad at him and that was okay...

#hirano to kagiura #hirano and kagiura #sick hirano #his parents #hirano taiga #kagiura akira

4 notes · View notes

passerine-writes · 4 months

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Silent Sparks - Volt 73

Warnings: Filler chapter for between episodes! Violence, Tsukare plus baby, i'm not a medical professional, emotions :( Word count: 3698

Notes: Italics - Tsukare signing Bold italics - Family member/friend signing 'Italics with apostrophes' - Thoughts

Masterlist

Volt 72 | Volt 74

Another week had passed, classes dragging out day by day only soothed by Denki and I spending time together when we got the chance to. Between school work, training and our work studies, it definitely cut out time that we could spend together without prying eyes.

However, Kirishima, Amajiki and I were back in Kansai with Fatgum patrolling again. The sun had just set twenty minutes ago when chaos broke out. A pregnant woman was robbed and held hostage with a knife until she gave up her valuables. The thief took off running as soon as he saw us, the man having a chameleon type quirk that helped him blend in with his surroundings. In his escape, he knocked over the pregnant woman.

"You three go after him, I'll stay with her!" The three hesitantly agreed and I quickly slid beside the woman, a pool of water now sitting around her. "Hey, it'll be okay, EMT's are on their way. Okay?" She nodded through gritted teeth. "It look like your water broke, can we sit you up?" She hissed through the pain and let me help her. "What's your name?"

"Reina." She said, not giving me her last name. I took a deep breath and offered her my hand, the woman taking it instantly and squeezing it.

"Okay Reina. It looks like your baby is coming today. Why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself?" I asked calmly, hoping to ease her nerves.

"I uh, I'm twenty four, this is my second kid. The dad isn't in the picture anymore." She groaned in pain.

'Four minutes apart.'

"He flaked, total loser, don't know why I ever went for him. He uh, he ditched me when I tested positive. I wanted to be surprised with the gender so I don't know if I'm having a boy or a girl. Uh, shit, my moms been a major help. My dad is out of the picture too and I hate that the pattern is repeating." I nodded and looked around the alleyway, hoping to get her to a cleaner place.

"Hey Reina, what do you say we move you yeah? Somewhere a bit cleaner? I don't think you should have your baby here." She nodded and insisted on walking, so I helped her to her feet and to the nearest store. The worker looked at us concerned as soon as we walked in. "She's in active labor and we needed somewhere cleaner, can we use your store please?"

"Yes of course! What can I do to help?" The younger lady, probably around eighteen, asked quickly, pulling her hair back into a ponytail.

"I need towels, as many as you can grab." She nodded and rushed to the back and came rushing back out with a pile of them. "Lay a few on the floor for her to sit on." Once done, I quickly helped Reina to the ground. "Thank you. EMT's are on the way, please wait outside and call them in here as soon as you see them." She ran outside and left the door cracked in case something happened. "You're doing great, Reina. Keep talking." She hissed in pain, teeth ground tightly together.

"Uh, I really like sunflowers. They're probably my favorite, yellow is the theme for the nursery. Shit, I wish I had an epidural."

'Three minutes apart.'

"The baby isn't even due yet, I'm only seven and a half months." I tried to keep my reaction hidden, that out her at about thirty two weeks.

"They're here!" The girl came back in, two EMT's following her and rushing beside us.

"You're a newbie, give us on update on our patient." The man said.

"This is Reina, she's twenty four and thirty two weeks along. Second kid, contractions are about three minutes apart. A guy knocked her to the ground and her water broke, my guess is from the stress and fall making it an early labor. Brought her in here cause before we were in an alley." The man looked at me in shock as he got his equipment ready, his partner doing the same.

"Alright Reina, looks like we're delivering your baby today. I'm gonna take your pants off and set up a towel for privacy." The girl EMT said, snapping her gloves on. "Sweetheart, draw the blinds and lock the door, nobody needs to be watching her. Sonus, you are going to be her support through this, sit behind her and hold her hands." I nodded and followed her instructions, sitting behind her and letting her death grip my hands. I closed my eyes tight as her pants came off, allowing everyone to get situated before opening them again. "You're in luck, Reina. I've delivered plenty of babies. Used to work in the labor and maternity ward before I switched to an EMT." I felt Reina calm down a bit hearing this.

"That's good to know."

"Yep and we are just in time because you are crowning. Minus where we are, I think this will be a perfect birth." I took a deep breath and tried to prepare myself. "Okay, on the count of three I need you to give me a big push, okay? One, two, three, push!" Reina gripped my hands tight and I made sure to tell her reassuring words. Her screaming filled the air around us.

"You're doing great Reina, the hardest part is almost over. You got this." I told her, trying to help by rubbing my thumbs on the backs of her hands. She cried and let her head fall back on my shoulder.

"I need another big push, Reina." The EMT said, the pain ensuing again for her. "Almost there, one more big push!" My hands felt ready to break from the force she used but I kept it together for her sake. She was already going through enough, I didn't need to add to her plate. "It's a girl." Reina let a heavy breath out of her body but there was no crying. The baby was quickly handed to the man and I felt my stomach twist in knots.

"My baby, is she okay?" Reina asked weakly with heavy breaths.

"She'll be just alright, Reina. We need to get you both to the hospital." She nodded and was placed on a gurney.

"She's coming with me, right?" She asked in a panic.

"Your baby has to go in a separate ambulance. We need to treat her for something and make sure she's in perfect health."

"No, no I want her with me. I want my baby." I stepped over and held her hand again.

"Reina, your baby needs special attention for something. If you both are in there, they won't have much room to focus on both of you like you need. I'll stay with your baby and make sure she makes it back to you, I promise." She bit back tears but nodded and walked over to the man.

"Rookie mistake, never make promises you can't keep." I glared at the man.

"I get it but what else do you want me to tell a panicking mother who doesn't have the father to her child? Tell me what's going on."

"The baby's a premie. Decreased oxygen, heart rate, blood pressure." He started carrying the baby out of the building and I followed, watching him set her down on the stretcher behind his ambulance. He cursed under his breath and an idea hit me.

"Unzip me." He looked at me like I was crazy, but the wires and oxygen mask on the infants face gave me a crazy idea. "Just do it!" He finally did and I slid off the upper half of my costume and went to grab the baby.

"The hell do you think you're doing?"

"Saving her life. Everything else is failing so at least let me try." He sighed but let me through. I gently scooped up the baby and cradled her to my chest, watching her monitor slowly start rising in all of her stats. "Thought you had a sound quirk, kid. Not a healing quirk."

"Kangaroo hold, it's still a medical mystery, but I have a heart problem with a high heart rate, I run warmer than a heater while it's night time in the middle of September and I have good blood pressure. The hold is most effective with skin on skin contact. And if it didn't work, she deserved to be properly held at least once in her life so she knew she wasn't alone." He stared for a moment in shock.

"You may have just saved this baby. Get in and sit down, you don't get car sick, do you?" I shook my head and got in the back of the ambulance, still holding her. As soon as the doors shut, we were speeding through the streets of Kansai to the nearest hospital. In three minutes, we stopped and he opened the door, we rushed in through the emergency doors and to a group of doctors who stared in disbelief.

"The kangaroo hold." A doctor muttered in disbelief. "What are we looking at?"

"Thirty two week female premie, had bad everything when she was born. I got her in the kangaroo hold when just about everything else failed." The doctor nodded and still stood in place.

"Sorry, we don't get a lot of cases where people think of that. Let alone a kid. We need to get her to the NICU. Follow us." I nodded, someone else coming over to grab her monitor. "Before we go in, you need a mask on." I gave a small okay and let someone put the surgical mask on my face. "I want to see what happens when we take her to her incubator bed." I let him take her off of me and we watched as her levels started slowly dropping again. I opened my arms and gently took her back. "I'm going to be frank, I don't know what to say."

"I can stay here for a while, I got time. I just have to call my boss and my parents, can you grab my phone? It's in the phone sized pocket on my belt." He looked at me confused but grabbed it for me.

"As a medical professional, I have to ask. Are you safe at home?" I let out a soft breath with my frustration.

"Yep, both of my parents are pro's, I was a foster kid." He hummed in understanding and offered me a chair, I got comfortable and the doctor switched out the towel for a pink blanket, the baby also now wearing a diaper.

"I'll give you some privacy to make your phone calls. A nurse will be in soon to check on her." I nodded and called Fatgum first.

"Kid! Where'd you go?" He answered on the first ring.

"I had to help deliver a baby, save said baby and now I'm at the hospital with said baby." He paused for a moment, clearly at a loss for words.

"I'll be there in an hour. Hold tight." I gave a calm agreement and called Dad next.

"Are you okay?" I smiled sadly, knowing I worried him.

"I'm okay. I'm at the hospital and it's not for me. I'm holding a baby. I'll explain more when I get out of here." He sighed and I could feel the tension leave his body.

"Okay. I saw you on the news, I'm glad to know you're safe."

"I'm safe, Dad."

"I love you."

"I love you too." I said in return, the phone call ending soon after.

"Sonus?" A random voice asked, so quiet I almost couldn't hear them. I looked up and saw a newer looking nurse standing there meekly.

"Hi, nice to meet you."

"This is amazing, you've become really popular lately." I softly chuckled at that as she got closer. "I'm just here to check on our newest patient." I nodded and let her take her notes. "You're doing an amazing thing. Coming to a hospital with a baby, for someone you never met until now."

"I'd do it all over again if I had to." She smiled softly, pleased to hear that.

"I'm waiting to get clearance from the babies mother about using my quirk to help." I looked at her curiously. "My quirk is healing palms. I can help with someones health through my hands. I just need patient consent before doing so unless it's an emergency."

"That's a really useful quirk." She blushed slightly and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

"Thank you. It's the main reason I chose this field."

"It's a perfect fit." Her eyes darted around for a moment before she looked at the ground. "You can say or ask whatever. You won't hurt my feelings." She looked at me with wide eyes from my bluntness.

"I saw the news cover and you're so young, but you've already been through a lot. If you'd like, I can heal some of your scars." I tugged my lip between my teeth and thought about it for a moment.

"I think I'm alright. You should save your energy for emergencies and the people who need it." She looked at me in confusion.

"Most people would jump at that opportunity." She said gently.

"Believe me, I want to. I'm self conscious about them and I probably will be for quite a while. But I'm not going to take someone's help that could go to someone in need for a cosmetic fix up." I said calmly, not wanting to disturb the peacefulness of the room.

"That's very noble of you." I hummed at her commented as I rubbed the babies back. "You seem like a natural with kids."

"I've been told that before, but I just see it as being patient and kind with them. Until they can talk, they can only communicate through sound. If you're gentle and kind, it seems to be a bit easier." She looked at me fondly and I glanced at her, my face turning concerned when her eyes watered with tears.

"Sorry, you just remind me a lot of my brother. He uh, he passed in my second year of nursing school. You have a kind heart like him and his way with words. Sorry, you don't need to hear my problems." She murmured and wiped a stray tear.

"Don't apologize. It's hard, losing someone close to you. I'd be a wreck if I lost my brother. He's my best friend." She let out a sad laugh.

"He was my partner in crime." I softly nodded my head and listened to her talk about her loved one until she felt a little better. "I'm sorry for that, I'm supposed to be professional right now."

"You're only human, you're allowed to have emotions." She gave me a soft smile, thanked me an excused herself. To pass the time, I checked my phone.

Tsukababes Pokémon

From Scraggy: Did you guys see the news?

From Scraggy: Tsuka and Kiri had a segment on there

From Rayquaza: Yeah!! It's so cool!!

From Pikachu: I love being able to see my man in action

From Espeon: Gross.

From Espeon: I feel like somethings missing.

From Venomoth: TSUKABABES WAS HOLDING A BABY

From Venomoth: OH MY GOSH

From Venomoth: AND HE SAVED A GIRL

From Venomoth: AND KIRI CAUGHT THE GUY

From Espeon: There it is.

From Pikachu: I don't know how happy Onryo's going to be about it guys

From Espeon: My thoughts exactly.

From Rayquaza: Yeah... Especially with the shot they got

From Venomoth: Oh yeah

From Scraggy: I don't think this is going to go well

From Pikachu: He looked amazing, but I don't know if he'll see it that way :(

From Whismur: I didn't even know the news reporters got anything

From Whismur: What'd they catch?

From Espeon: I think you should see for yourself when you get back here.

From Whismur: Hitoshi? What was it?

From Pikachu: I think it's best if you see it here, baby

From Whismur: Okay, but now this is really worrying me

From Scraggy: It's not something you'll be really happy about, so it might be best if you see it here

From Venomoth: I think we should tell him so he's prepared

From Whismur: Is it my scars?

From Pikachu: Yeah, a few people got videos and they ended up in the news

I took a deep breath and locked my phone, waiting anxiously for Fatgum to arrive. I saw Kirishima wave through the window first before the tall man walked in.

"You look comfortable."

"Everything from my lower back down is asleep." I mumbled.

"Care to fill me in?"

"The lady attacked was seven and a half months pregnant, between the stress and the fall, she went into labor early. Her contractions started four minutes apart, not enough time for her to get to the hospital so I brought her to one of the shops and helped her deliver when the EMT's got there. I stayed with the baby to make sure everyone was okay because the guy was starting to panic and stress. I remembered learning about the kangaroo hold and it worked. I told them I can hold her since our shift was almost over and they don't have a lot of free hands right now." He nodded and gave me a smile.

"You did good kid. We gotta go over not leaving the scene immediately but you did good." He looked back to the door and the nurse from earlier came in.

"I just got permission from her mom to use my quirk, so I can take this bundle of joy from you now." I nodded and passed off the sleeping baby.

The nurses hands glowed a warm yellow and I watched as her levels stayed where they should be.

"How's she doing?" I asked gently, finally standing up and stretching my legs, as well as having Fat re-zip my suit.

"She's doing great. Reina asked to see you before you leave." I nodded and went to her room, Fatgum, Kirishima and Amajiki in tow. I gently knocked and waited for someone with me to give me the okay I wouldn't hear.

"Sonus. Thank you." She said as soon as I walked in.

"No need to thank me, Reina. You did great today. How're you feeling?"

"I'm sore, but that's expected. I wanted to thank you before you left, I heard you saved my babies life." I gave her a warm smile and sat in the chair next to her.

"I want to be a hero so I can help people, I'm glad I can do that." She smiled gently and grabbed my hand.

"Thank you for helping me and holding my hand, I didn't know I needed it until then."

"You're welcome. I hate to cut this short, but I have to go back to the agency now. You take care of yourself, your kids need you." She sniffled and nodded, the four of us soon leaving.

"You're a natural with people, kid. Not a lot are." Fatgum told me sincerely.

"Thanks, I try to do my best when I'm around people."

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

Kiri and I walked back into the dorms sluggishly, Denki immediately giving me a hug again. I wrapped my arms around him and buried my face in his shoulder.

"How bad was the segment?" I asked weakly, my gut feeling telling me it was horrible.

"It's not bad, you looked great." I raised an eyebrow sarcastically and followed him to the TV.

"Welcome back from the break and we have more news, yet again, on Sonus. A young hero in training who keeps managing to impress us over and over. Tonight at around eight p.m. the young hero was in Kansai with Fatgum, Suneater and his classmate, Red Riot, when an attempted robbery broke out, here is some footage that a bystander caught." I watched as the camera cut and started again in a portrait frame on Reina just as she was shoved to the ground. "A local was assaulted by a man and the four were quick to run after the person in question. Sonus however stayed behind with her. And less than an hour later, he was seen coming out of a small shop on the street with a paramedic who was holding a baby." The camera switched to different videos of me cradling the newborn while the newscaster kept talking. "Sonus picked up the newborn child in what's known as the 'kangaroo hold' and went with the baby to the hospital, in doing so, he had the upper half of his costume undone but plenty of people are wondering, what happened to this young man? Is abuse why he wants to help people? Is he safe?" She continued as a video played where all of my scars were on display. "Furthermore, it's not just Sonus who seems to be making a young debut but his classmate, Red Riot, who stopped a violent criminal last week, helped taking down the assaulter with Suneater after chasing him down. The duo of young heroes seem to already be making a large impact on society." I looked away from the television, tears already brimming in my eyes.

"Onryo, it's okay." I shook my head at Denki's words of comfort and buried my face in my hands. He moved in front of me and slowly moved my hands, his golden eyes darting back and forth between my hazel ones.

"Everyone knows." I whispered, my stomach churning wildly in my abdomen.

"It'll be okay. Plenty of heroes have scars." I sighed and nodded, just wanting it to be over but my inner turmoil was still running rampant. "It'll be okay." I leaned forward and pulled him into a hug

He simply held me and waited for me to feel slightly more stable and in that moment, it was all I needed.

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stardustbarbarians · 2 years

Text

Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines

A Samuel Kiszka/Daniel Wagner fic

Summary: Sam always thought he'd see Danny one more time.

Tags: Angst, nothing but pure uncut angst, major character death like right off the bat, I cannot stress how much angst is in this fic, no happy ending, this is a masochist's wet dream

Trigger Warnings: death, dealing with grief, emotional meltdowns, a lot of crying

A/N: I know this is not anything that I've been promising to publish, but I'm going through the emotional ringer right now and this was my coping mechanism. Also I can only write so much fluff before I want to write angst again, so I channeled it here instead of in that fluffy Jake fic I'm working on. I highly recommend you listen to Fire and Rain by James Taylor either before or while you're reading this. Just another warning, major character death right out of the gate.

Words: 4.1 k

+++

“Drummers do tend to get all the babes.”

“Not really, no. They die first.”

Sunday.

Bloody fucking Sunday.

That was the day it happened, the day that Sam’s life changed on a dime. He would never forget the look on the representative’s face when she broke the news to him that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong. Her name was Daysha Williams and she worked for Tennessee Flight Training.

Sam had been there when it happened, sitting in the ambulance on the way to the hospital as the EMTs worked their absolute hardest to keep him alive long enough to reach the hospital.

It wasn’t enough.

The sound of the heart monitor flat-lining and ribs cracking were the soundtrack to Sam’s nightmares. The visual of the medics desperately attempting to restart his heart by performing chest compressions forever glued to the back of his eyelids.

It was on a Sunday that Daniel Wagner died.

Sam was sitting mere feet away as his best friend and the love of his life succumbed to his injuries. Daniel died right before his eyes.

It wasn’t real to him at first. There was no way that the medics were actually performing CPR as a last ditch effort to restart his boyfriend’s heart. Just like there was no way that it didn’t miraculously work like in the movies. Or how defibrillation also failed to get Daniel’s heart beating.

“Son, I’m so sorry,” one of the medics croaked to Sam, an older man in his late forties.

He didn’t respond. He didn’t know how. His mind was too busy blanking out on him as a trauma response. He wasn’t sure when he arrived at the hospital, but the next thing he knew the medics were wheeling Daniel’s body into the back entrance and the driver was explaining to him that Sam should notify his loved ones. She also told him that the nearest funeral home was going to be contacted to collect Daniel’s body.

Sam didn’t remember calling Josh, but suddenly he was being driven back to his house by his older brother, telling Jake to meet them there over the phone.

“Will you tell us what happened now, Sammy?” Jake asked gently, noting that his little brother was in a state of shock.

“Daniel’s dead.”

It rang out like a gunshot; startling and traumatic. The gasps the twins sounded at the news were about as loud as a gunshot in Sam’s ears.

“How?”

Sam explained that the plane Daniel was learning to fly had crashed but that he didn’t know why. He regurgitated the facts the EMTs gave him of his boyfriend’s injuries: a broken leg, punctured lung from a broken rib, and hemorrhaging of the brain from a fractured skull. They claimed it was amazing he was able to last as long as he had, despite dying in the ambulance.

Josh was the first one to cry, his hand clamped to his mouth as tears cascaded from his eyes. Jake began pacing, creating a rut along the length of the living room as he also had his fist pressed against his lips.

Sam just remained in his spot on the couch, watching numbly as his older brothers fell apart at the seams.

Jake was the one to suggest that Sam be the one to tell the parents.

“It will be better coming from you,” he claimed, his hand on Sam’s shoulder as he held Sam’s phone in front of him. Jake’s eyes were red and watery when Sam looked into them. The youngest agreed without protest.

He called Mrs. Wagner first, knowing that Daniel would always tell her about everything before anyone else knew. The scream she let out was horrible, making the ear he held the phone up to ring. Sam tried his best to answer her questions and comfort her, but it was really hard to do when all he felt was numb. Mr. Wagner thanked him for telling them after taking the phone and offered Sam his condolences with a shaky voice.

Telling Josie wasn’t any better. She kept asking if Sam was ok. How was he meant to respond to that? The love of his life was just snatched right out from under him within the blink of an eye.

Josh had already called their mother and father, making it one less thing for Sam to deal with. Their mom said that she would deal with the funeral home about transporting Daniel's body to Michigan as it was something she’d had experience in.

The twins stayed with Sam at his house until they had to be at the airport, packing his suitcase for him and making sure he ate and showered and slept.

They were both walking on eggshells around Sam the entire time, something that would’ve annoyed him if he were able to feel anything. It would later come to him that they were worried he might’ve had a mental breakdown over flying, the very thing that killed his lover.

It wasn’t until he was back in his childhood home washing the dishes that the reality of his situation hit him.

He tried handing off his plate to Daniel for him to dry, his usual job while doing the dishes. Sam looked over expecting to see his boyfriend standing next to him with a dish towel in his hands and his curly raven hair up in a bun, but he wasn’t there. In fact, he’d never be there ever again.

Sam hadn’t realized the plate slipped from his grasp and shattered onto the floor until he heard his father rush into the kitchen and ask what happened. Sam could barely tell it was his father as all he saw was a blur of colors similar to that of a watercolor painting.

“He’s dead,” Sam whispered, barely audible over the rush of the running tap behind him.

Immediately, his dad’s face shifted to a look of deep sympathy. He reached around his youngest and turned off the tap before pulling him into a hug. Sam collapsed into the paternal embrace, folding his neck so his forehead rested on his dad’s shoulder. He was barely aware that he was gripping his father’s shirt so hard that it was in fear of tearing.

It was strange experiencing such intense pain and suffering after days of feeling like the embodiment of radio static. Like a switch was flipped, Sam suddenly felt as though he was drowning in his turmoil. It was awful. He was being dragged beneath the current of his arduous loss in a never ending maelstrom of grief.

All he felt was the absence. The only thing his mind could process was the gaping void Daniel’s death created. So much of Sam’s life was interwoven with the presence of his boyfriend that it was nearly impossible to differentiate the two types of stitches. Now, however, it was easy to tell them apart because there was nothing left but a shredded and frayed cloth because Daniel was ripped away from him.

His throat hurt, closing up on itself as he wept. His eyes hurt from the salty tears stinging them. His heart caused him pain with each arduous beat. His head hurt from the overwhelming and earth shattering realization that had just struck him.

All of him was in pain, down to the last neuron firing inside his mind.

“I know, Sammy, I know,” Mr. Kiszka muttered into his son’s ear, his hand stroking Sam’s long hair.

Sam shook his head against his father’s words. “Mom’s still alive.”

It didn’t get any better as the days went by. Each one brought forth more plans for the funeral which Sam could barely stomach, but he couldn’t let the Wagner’s handle that burden all by themselves.

The nights were worse. They were lonely, cold. Sam never realized how much he took Daniel’s body heat for granted until he was huddled up under the covers, shivering despite his sweatpants and hoodie.

Nights were where he finally allowed himself to grieve properly, to just open the floodgates and sob silently until the rays of dawn peaked up over the horizon. Sleep eluded him often. Or maybe he was trying to avoid it. Either way, most nights would result in him screaming Daniel’s name until one of his family members would rouse him from his nightmare.

Josh eventually ended up just sleeping on the floor of Sam’s room every night, somehow feeling like it was his responsibility. Probably something to do with being the oldest, or whatever.

It was Ronnie that contacted Tennessee Flight Training, but it was his whole family that sat around the dining room table with a laptop placed in the exact center facing the only empty chair. Immediately Sam’s guard was up; this wasn’t normal.

“Sammy, please sit down,” his mother ordered, clutching her husband’s hand at the sight of their youngest.

Apprehensively, he did as he was told. Who knew that despite having a career where hundreds of thousands of eyes watching his every move was an integral part, having just eight sets of them trained onto him would be the most unsettling thing he could ever experience.

Ronnie cleared her throat before talking. It didn’t keep the small quiver out of her voice. “When I got the news about Danny, I contacted Tennessee Flight Training.”

Sam stayed silent as he watched his older sister unlock the laptop that he identified as her own. It opened to reveal an email with an audio file attached to it.

“Ronnie, what is that?” Why did he even bother to ask? He already knew the answer. Maybe he just didn’t want to be right.

“It took them a while to get back to me, but they gave me a copy of the cockpit recording from Danny’s flight,” she informed him, unable to look her little brother in the eyes.

“You don’t have to listen to it, but we figured you should be here with us when we do it,” Jake quickly offered, touching Sam’s shoulder lightly like he was afraid he would shatter.

Listen to Daniel’s final words. Could he do it? There was a huge part of him that longed to hear Daniel’s voice once more, to have his ears filled with his soft and lovely tone. But Sam didn’t know if he could handle listening to his lover panic as the plane went down, unable to be there to help and comfort him.

“Play it,” Sam finally ordered, his tone flat and devoid of emotion. Ronnie did as she was told.

The second that Daniel’s voice drifted out from the speakers Sam tensed up. The first minute of the recording was just a bunch of piloting jargon, Daniel and the veteran pilot - whose name was George Luckett and also didn’t survive - going through a checklist of tasks to get the plane up and running.

Are you sure he’ll be able to see the banner from the ground?

Sam’s attention was instantly snagged by Daniel’s question.

As long as Sam is looking at us when we fly over.

The youngest’s heart was racing.

God, I hope that he says yes.

A chuckle that Sam figured was from George Luckett came out of the speakers.

If he loves you as much as I know you love him, there’s no doubt he will. You’ve got nothing to worry about, kid.

That’s when an awful crunching sound filled Sam’s ears.

George, what’s going on?

His heart contracted painfully at the fear in Daniel’s voice. Sam clamped his eyes shut as they began to water.

He knew what was coming next.

Shit, I think a goose flew into the propeller.

The recording was filled with the sound of frantic shuffling briefly before Mr. Luckett radioed Air Traffic Control about their issue. Sam could taste blood as he bit down on his lip at the sound of his late lover’s panicked breathing.

I don’t see a safe landing point, we ain’t coming out of this one unscathed. Louisa, if you listen to this, I love you so much. Danny, say something while you can.

There was a brief pause as if Daniel was deciding what to say.

Samuel, I’m so thankful for every moment that I’ve been able to share with you. You’ll never be able to fully understand, but I lo-

Never before had static made Sam want to throw up. He was right, he couldn’t handle hearing his boyfriend sounding so terrified.

The ringing in his ears drowned out the sound of his family crying around him, but he was able to see the tears staining all of their cheeks. Besides Sam, Josh and Mrs. Wagner were the ones crying the hardest.

To his left, the youngest heard Jake clear his throat to gain his attention. It wasn’t until that moment that Sam noticed the white knuckle grip he had on his older brother’s hand, but that wasn’t what he was trying to point out. In his other hand was a scratched up dark wooden box.

“This was with Danny’s personal belongings that the funeral home gave back to us,” Jake shakily explained, his hand shaking as he set it onto the table.

His entire body throbbed with each thrum of Sam’s heart. Dear god he hoped he was wrong again.

Sam cursed his intuition as he opened up the box to reveal a shining gold ring nestled into black velvet. Was it possible for an inanimate object to steal all of the air out of his lungs by simply looking at it? It must be, or else Sam didn’t know how to explain why he was choking.

The humidity didn’t help his feelings of suffocation, the air of his backyard feeling more like a damp cloth pressed against his airways. He rubbed his fingers against his neck in a convoluted attempt to try to get oxygen into his lungs, his nails leaving red trails against his pale skin. The thousands of stars dotting the twilight above him blurred together as painfully hot tears brimmed his eyes. The grass beneath his knees was wet from the thunderstorm that had just passed.

Feeling the weight of every negative emotion he was experiencing overwhelmed him. Sam clenched his teeth together as he continuously failed at trying to stop his sobbing. It was far from voluntary, in fact he didn’t even realize he was actively wailing until it echoed off the trees back at him. It was the most heartbreaking and devastating noise he’d ever heard.

Somehow, Josh was kneeling in front of him, hands on both of Sam’s shoulders. He was shaking his little brother in an attempt to snap him out of his hysteria, but it wasn’t working.

“Sam!” Josh screamed, using those pipes that got the band so much notoriety to try and get through to his brother. He had both of his hands on the sides of Sam’s face, forcing Sam to look at him. That finally seemed to snap him out of it.

“He was proposing,” Sam choked out, his breathing still not normal.

A tear slipped out from Josh’s eye. “Yeah, he was.”

“Daniel died trying to propose to me,” Sam repeated, sensing himself beginning to spiral again but unable to do anything to stop that momentum.

It was Josh who stopped that spiral.

“It was my idea,” he admitted with a cracking voice. It was clear he was trying his absolute hardest to not just full on sob, but there were leaks in his resolve.

“What?”

“He asked me and Jake for proposal ideas and I was the one to suggest that he use his new flying skills that he was so proud of to ask you to marry him.” Josh was rushing his words, making it hard for Sam’s brain to process everything that was being said to him.

He just looked at his older brother. He took in the way that he was barely holding it together, the way he seemed to beg Sam for something.

“It’s my fault, Sammy. It’s my fault he’s dead.”

He understood, now. That’s why Josh was taking on the brunt of looking after him. Guilt.

“Josh, no-”

“Samuel, you and I both know that no matter what you say I’m still gonna blame myself,” Josh argued just above a whisper. He hadn’t stopped crying.

The youngest stayed silent. How was he meant to respond to that?

“If I hadn’t suggested he go flying, Daniel would-” Josh was hysterical. His shoulders were shaking violently but no sound was coming out.

Sam was so stunned. Josh was always producing sound. He was always humming or talking, singing along to a song only he could hear. It wasn’t right. Too many things had changed because of Daniel’s death.

A new set of tears were falling down Sam’s cheeks. It was so painful to see the person he looked up to his entire life just fall apart like that in front of him. Josh might’ve been small in stature, but his personality more than made up for that. To see him be small both in posture and spirit just solidified to Sam that nothing would ever be the same ever again.

The funeral was the hardest thing Sam ever had to do. So many people had come up to him and asked how he was doing. They say the average person lies about once or twice a day. Sam surpassed that by at least a thousand that day.

Mr. Wagner asked him if he would make a speech days before the service. Like he could’ve said no to that.

Getting up in front of a crowd of people to perform a task was something Sam was extremely intimate with. This was the first time that Daniel wasn’t there to offer his love and comfort to Sam to try and ease his anxieties.

“As many of you here know, Daniel and I had been dating since sophomore year of high school. About half of everyone here knows that he was constantly making music; drumming his fingers on every available surface, strumming a guitar when he was struck with the inspiration for a new song, singing out lyrics when he thought no one was listening. Even less of you will truly experience what the absence of that constant music feels like.”

Sam pursed his lips and shut his eyes against the tears that were threatening to leap from his eyes.

“Only a handful of us here know that when he died, he was trying to propose,” he choked out into the mic. He didn’t see their faces, but the various gasps of shock and coos of sympathy tipped Sam off to the audience’s reactions.

Sam found the strength to continue by twisting the engagement ring he had on his finger. It was a perfect fit.

“Daniel was more than just a bandmate or a best friend, but the love of my life. Despite not being able to spend the rest of my life with him, it was an immense privilege to be able to have the time I did with him. Every second I was with him, I was counting my blessings. I was hardly worthy enough to have even a moment of his time, but thank god he didn’t seem to see it that way,” the youngest continued, ignoring the tears that were quietly falling down his face.

“Years ago, before our first album was even released, Daniel admitted in an interview that he always believed I would be the reason he was going to hell.”

Leaning over the side of the podium, Sam faced towards the ground, some of his hair slipping out of his bun.

“So Daniel, if you can hear me all the way down there-”

The audience broke out in laughter. Sam smiled, it’s what Daniel would want at his funeral.

He waited for it to die down before he continued.

“-of course I would marry you.” His tone and smile were watery, but he didn’t care.

The reception was less difficult. Less people checked in on him. Mostly, Sam just stuck with his older brothers as they all exchanged stories about their late best friend.

“That was his proposal speech,” Jake confided after touching on the subject of Daniel’s interest in flying.

“What are you talking about?”

“Danny’s last words… they were the beginning of his proposal speech.”

It was as if all of the sudden, Sam’s lungs lost all ability to function.

“He practiced it in front of us to ask our opinions on it,” Josh added, his fingers nervously tapping on his drinking glass.

It suddenly felt like he was submerged into a body of water. His hearing was muffled. His vision blurred. Breathing seemed to be a fatal error to make.

He needed to escape, to get away. He didn’t feel them, but he saw the world go by as his legs took him away from his brothers. Where was he going? Did he care? Should he care?

The familiar feeling of piano keys beneath his fingers brought him back to the present. This was the first time he sat behind the instrument since Daniel’s death.

Pulling from the depths of his sorrow and longing, Sam began playing. He completely turned off his thoughts and only focused on putting his emotions into sound. He knew words couldn’t describe the insurmountable sense of loss he was feeling, so he explained it in the way he knew how.

Sam failed to notice the way he captured everyone’s attention in the room. He even managed to bring a few people to tears, but Sam didn’t see. He was too focused on transcribing just how much he loved Daniel Wagner into song.

He felt lighter when he finished, the burden of repressed emotions lifted. The applause he received was a shock to him; he didn’t expect anyone to pay attention. He didn’t realize that it would be impossible to miss someone pouring their heart out into their art.

“How long have you been working on that?” Jake asked from his spot leaning against the piano.

“I wrote it just now,” Sam admitted.

“It was absolutely beautiful,” Jake complimented, his eyes watery and red.

Sam thanked his older brother, wishing there weren’t so many people around so he could talk to him and Josh.

He didn’t get the chance to until they all returned home.

“I want to release that song I wrote earlier,” the youngest pitched.

“We can do that,” Josh agreed, his tone distracted as he seemed to be far away in his mind.

The silence was deafening. There was an unspoken question hanging heavily above them all.

“I don’t want there to be any drums for this song.”

It seemed that Sam’s declaration was a confusing one, judging off the twins’ reaction.

“This song is all about how Daniel’s death left a gaping hole in my life, and I want the listener to also feel that absence from the song,” he explained.

Jake and Josh both nodded, their brows knit. Sam knew they were talking to one another non-verbally in that way they always could, but about what he couldn’t guess.

“If we do this, it should be the last song Greta Van Fleet ever releases.” Jake was looking at the ground as he spoke.

It seemed they were finally addressing the question that everyone had on their mind since Daniel’s death, but never spoke. They didn’t have to.

“Jake, are you sure?” Sam questioned, his hand placed on his older brother’s shoulder.

“You of all people should understand that we can’t just find a replacement for Danny.”

Sam knew that better than anyone. Even though Jake said it in the softest and least argumentative tone, the words hurt just as much as if Jake spat them at him. It wasn’t his intention by any means and Sam understood that.

“Daniel Wagner was one of a kind,” Josh added, a sad smile on his lips.

“There’s no doubt about that, but Jake, this is your dream. Are you sure you want to give this up?” Sam asked.

The guitar player let out a single huff of laughter. There was no humor in it. Finally, he looked his little brother in the eyes. He wore a rueful smile that matched his tear stained cheeks.

“There is no Greta Van Fleet without Danny, we’d be delusional to think otherwise. Despite what twitter says, we can’t do this without him,” Jake explained shakily. His smile was weak, but it was there in an attempt to convey to Sam that he didn’t blame Daniel for any of this.

Sam could empathize with Jake. All his dreams shattered alongside the airplane pieces that littered the ground on that fateful Sunday afternoon.

“Alright, then. One last ride,” Sam relented. The irony of the brothers discussing the ending of their band in the very same garage it was created in wasn’t lost on Sam.

It was on a Sunday that Greta Van Fleet released their last song before disbanding. Just as planned, there were no drums supporting the track.

Absence would come to be known as their best song ever recorded.

+++

If it makes you feel better, I made myself cry while writing this.

Samuel: @doodle417 @sammykiszkasunusedshoes @jmks-housewife @ageoferin @alwayssotiredbutneverofyou @etoilesnoor @ascendingtostardust @godlygreta @turtleskane @s0livagant

Daniel: @doodle417 @sammykiszkasunusedshoes @jmks-housewife @alwayssotiredbutneverofyou @ageoferin @etoilesnoor @ascendingtostardust @godlygreta @s0livagant

Link to the taglist form

#greta van fleet #greta van fic #samuel kiszka x daniel wagner #sam kiszka #samuel kiszka #sammy gvf #sammy kiszka #samuel francis kiszka #danny wagner #daniel wagner #daniel robert wagner #danny gvf #jake kiszka #josh kiszka #angst #major character death #sam x daniel

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unbridgeabledistances · 3 years

Text

hi 💜💜 i got a prompt about ian x body image a while ago (my inbox is a hot mess and i may have deleted the prompt lol, but i did paste it into my phone notes)- and i was feeling some feelings today & had some spare time amidst my travels & ended up writing this!!

prompt: can you write about ian and his relationship with his body image, esp post-canon when they move to the westside

(tw for body image/eating disorder/food mentions)

He didn’t really even think about it the first times that he did it— skipping a few meals that went unnoticed in the morning clamor of the Gallagher kitchen. He noticed his skin growing tauter and tighter around his abdomen with every passing day, a hollow absence sitting like a rock in the pit of his stomach.

He did it for a reason—he’d been getting more lingering looks under the flashing lights at the club, more unwelcome fingers pressed against the now-present ridges on his stomach, tracing his toned upper arms. The less there was of him, the more they wanted him.

The thing about Ian is that he was always disciplined; the middle child, the one who was overlooked and ignored and blended in until he decided that he had to make a name for himself. He and Lip and gotten into hair-tugging, jaw-smashing fights about this very reality; Ian was completely, totally, absolutely ordinary. Until he made himself extraordinary—until he burst through the storefront labeled “ARMY” at a strip mall with smudged windows and said with a tall chest: I want to enlist.

Everything had led up to this— every push-up on the creaking slanted floor of their childhood bedroom, every jog at the crack of dawn. He was going to make something of himself, he was going to be a hero.

He was going to get the fuck away from Mickey, and his wife, and whatever else kept pushing him down and holding him back.

When Ian came back from the army, when he was sleeping on exposed floorboards and working at the club all night—that was when it all actually started. When he decided that less of him meant more—when he decided that he should give people the best show he could, because everything else was fucked up anyways. This was all he was good for.

But then Mickey came through the door, pale skin flashing in the strobe lights, wearing that fucking dark button-up with sleeves folded to his forearms and smelling like nice cologne that he’d almost definitely stolen from one of his brothers’ bathroom shelves; and for a brief moment after the initial shock set in, Ian was proud— proud of how much negative space surrounded him, proud of how he could press his thighs into stretched golden spandex better than any of the other men thrumming to the beat beside him on the podium. Proud of how much other people wanted him, when Mickey didn't.

It was only later, after Mickey carried him home (easily, too easily) after he’d passed out in a snowbank, and Ian had woken and waited for Mickey to burst into his bedroom door at the Gallagher house while he leaned against the wall and scribbled on a notepad— later, when Mickey was about to curl on the floor and sleep using one of Liam’s balled-up t-shirts as a pillow— that Ian noticed Mickey’s eyes lingering on his uncovered torso, a second longer than the quick glances of admiration from the well-dressed men with greased-back hair and grubby fingers at the club. It hit Ian, then, when he saw Mickey’s gaze that was soft around the edges, the same fuzziness and confusion of Fiona’s stares when he would chatter on for too long in the mornings:

He’s worried about me.

But Mickey played along— Ian was back, and Mickey stayed beside him this time, and chuckled when he walked down the stairs to the sight of Ian cutting off the bottom half of his old ROTC pants, now multiple sizes too big and hanging baggy even at the hips. Mickey curled beside him on the twin bed, silently stroking hair back from his forehead and cradling his cheeks with a feather-light touch as Lip and Liam’s even, sleeping breaths swirled around them. And Ian kept doing pull-ups, and told Carl that he liked the way that Mickey smelled. Mickey came out for him. And for a while things were really, really fucking good, and Ian didn’t even think about the gnawing hollow feeling in his stomach at all any more.

Until a grey morning came, quick and silent, and kept him frozen under the sheets for days.

In the months afterwards, Ian trained harder, faster—he met up with Fiona as she pushed Liam in the stroller and jogged beside them, ran before and after shifts at the club, did push-ups on Mickey’s grimy floor while he was out handling Rub N’ Tug shit.

I’m not Monica. This wasn’t going to happen again. His body could do this. His body could fix his brain.

It couldn’t.

Most of what happened on the “road trip” with Yevgeny (that was the only phrasing that Ian could really mentally use to name the incident, the only semiotic filler for “kidnapping” that didn’t want to make him burrow even deeper under his tattered blankets) was a blur—Mickey feeding him fistfuls of pills and room-temperature Gatorade, luring Mickey to the dugouts where he tried to do a pull-up and felt a quivering in his limbs, a weakness rather than a familiar and fulfilling burn. Slamming Mickey in the face with a fist that was too flimsy, too weak—a fist that still left the blooming of a bruise on Mickey’s jawline, a splatter of blood caking into his eyebrow. But still weak, still not enough. Definitely not strong enough to fight off two MPs with loaded guns, tangling his hands behind his back and forcing him into the backseat of a car.

More blurry days— on the road with Monica. Breaking up with Mickey. Getting a job at Patsy’s. Withering away, purple bags sagging under his eyes. Becoming less, always less.

Then, a glimmer of light— he met Caleb. He studied to be an EMT. He got a call from Mandy, got to wrap her in his arms in less-than-ideal circumstances.

“I got tired of starving myself to fit in that golden thong.”

It was the first time he’d said it out loud.

He started to run again—and he started to not miss it, the hollow feeling gnawing at his insides, the twisting lack. He met Trevor, he went to brunches, he ordered mimosas and muffins and kept himself in shape, but didn’t push himself too far.

So it surprised him, really, when once again his body and mind weren’t in sync.

That was the biggest thing he’d think about, in the idle hours of he and Mickey’s prison cell, months later—that for once in his life, years after the nights at the club or the hazy early mornings at Patsy’s or in a baggy janitor uniform, he was actually doing really, really fucking good. He had a following. He was strong. Or at least he thought he was.

But something about being near Mickey pulled him out of his head and into his body, centered him— it always did. Mickey had always liked his body; Ian remembered how Mickey’s eyed at lingered that night at the dugouts, when they were two kids doing pull-ups and Mickey watched his muscles clench in the moonlight, two sets of shining eyes and bodies warm with beer leaning closer to each other in the muggy air. But Ian never felt a need to flaunt his body, or change his body, for Mickey— and in so many ways, those first days in prison were like his body was coming home. Sometimes it was hard, and fast, and filthy words whispered into each other’s skin—and sometimes it left them grasping for breath in an entirely different way, in fingertips lazily skimming over collarbones and fisted into roots of hair, of breathed “Fuck, you’re so fucking beautiful”s escaping Mickey’s parted mouth that Ian mentally stored but never brought up again, because he knew in the best case scenario Mickey would just roll his eyes and call him a “soft bitch,” and in the worst he would just flat-out deny it. But Ian felt balanced in a way he hadn't in months, with all the "Gay Jesus" bullshit pressing in. He took his meds, he did his nightly sit-ups, he counted down the days—until the hourglass was slipped out from under his fingertips and he was teleported back to the Gallagher house, back to the place where so much of this began and so much was about to end.

The hollowness, the hunger, didn’t really need to be there anymore once he was out— it was only a dull murmur. A ghost, a memory trapped in dreams of strobe lights and prying hands.

Mickey got out, and they got married—and in the moments before Ian called Mickey an “ugly motherfucker” as he let a smile crack onto his face—and he knew Mickey felt it, knew Mickey heard: I have never known anyone as beautiful as you.

And Ian’s fullness just kept blooming and compounding and radiating after the wedding; they fought, and then they didn’t, and it didn’t matter anyways because they were fucking married. Ian kept doing sit-ups before they went to bed, even though he felt like he didn’t really have to anymore. Something big had shifted; something had settled and given way, had filled in all the cracks.

So he’s surprised, when they move to the West Side, and that feeling starts to stir again; faint, fuzzy, like some sort of invasive and shapeless amoeba in the dark corners of his brain, whispering and hissing that there should be less of him. On their first morning in the new place he heads to the gym, wearing a camo t-shit that covered his torso and shoulders—and of course he ends up making a fool of himself next to some guy, some guy that he could have been, with sweaty toned abs and bronzed skin and rippling muscles. He doesn’t know why it gets to him, that small interaction—he’s so much happier now, so fucking happy he’s buzzing with it, but there’s also something churning in the faultlines of transition; that aching for hollow absence and stretched skin and interested eyes, that feeling that made him woozy and lightheaded as a kid but also sickeningly proud, like every moment of standing tall, of dancing, of staying alive was a statement, a challenge, a test of how much he could push his ability to be desired.

He immediately pushes the thought down. He doesn’t fucking need that anymore to keep his head above water; he’s stable, he’s loved, he’s fed. He’s growing organic tomatoes, and definitely developing a farmer’s tan from his days hunched over their way-too-tiny community garden plot tenderly watering and pruning the vines and brambles. He is desired. So it doesn’t make fucking sense that the hunger, the clawing in his stomach for the absence, doesn’t really stop.

“Okay Gallagher, spill.”

Ian felt his eyebrow raise instinctively at Mickey’s tone. “Huh?”

“You’ve been staring at this fancy fucking chicken thing you made for, like, twenty minutes. Stop staring at it and eat your goddamn dinner.”

He felt a twist in his gut. I don’t want to.

“M’actually not really that hungry.”

Mickey’s eyes narrowed. “The fuck’s up? You stressed about work shit?”

Ian huffed out a breath of relief. “Nah. It’s not that.” He fiddled with his fork on the plate, drawing lines into the sauce pooled under the tomato-basil chicken he’d made. It was healthy, it was good, he’d worked out today; he could stomach a couple bites of dinner if he fucking had to. He just had to work up to it. Even the smell was making his stomach twist— it had smelled good while he was cooking it, placing fresh-scented basil leaves into the simmering sauce, but now it just was too much.

Mickey’s boot nudged against his calf from under the kitchen island. “Ey. Is it a tired thing? Or a… sick thing?” His eyes darted to their kitchen cupboard, where Ian kept his meds on the bottom shelf by the water glasses. “Or, like, a food thing?”

Ian felt his fingers go slack around his fork. “A food thing?”

“Yeah, man, y’know. When you get all weird about food.”

A tightness in his chest. “What the fuck? I don’t get weird about food.”

Mickey’s eyes flickered to meet his—and Ian would have gotten more pissed off if he didn’t see the soft concern bleeding into Mickey’s gaze, how cautiously Mickey was trying to broach the topic. Ian blew out a breath. Of fucking course Mickey noticed this shit— he always did.

“Weird how?”

“I don’t know, man. You’re usually good, especially compared to when you were fucking starving yourself when we were kids. But, uh… I don’t know.” Now it was Mickey’s turn to play with his food, scraping his fork along the remnants of sauce on his plate that was nearly clean. “You got kind of weird about working out and shit in prison. And then at the house, with all the quarantine bullshit the first few weeks. Eating fuckin’ cereal all the time, then not eating at all. You’ve been normal since then, or whatever. Lookin’ healthy.” Ian felt Mickey’s gaze drag over him. “Just don’t want you getting stressed out and not eating again or whatever.”

Ian felt a muted warmth blooming in the hollow of his stomach, filling in the cracks of where the jagged feeling continued to claw. If it was anyone else laying out this fucking analysis of his habits Ian would’ve gotten defensive—or at the very least annoyed, that someone was pinning down yet another one of his behaviors, putting them under a fucking clinical microscope.

But of course, this was Mickey— and the difference with Mickey was that he cared, he cared so much that it made Ian’s body ache every time he realized it. Those words wouldn’t have come tumbling out of Mickey’s mouth if they hadn’t been building for a while, hadn’t been gnawing away at some corner of his mind over time.

Ian raised a hand over the table to clasp into Mickey’s warm palm—reaching over the empty plate, the plate of uneaten food.

“It’s, uh. A food thing.”

Mickey’s eyes met his—open, listening.

“You’re right about all the starving myself shit from forever ago. And the not eating. And the… quarantine stuff. I guess I just thought that now that things were good, it’d go away? And I feel so fucking good right now. But sometimes I just have weird days.”

Mickey huffed out a breath. “I fucking know you do, dumbass. M’just saying that I notice that shit. And we can figure it out.”

Ian felt the corner of his mouth tick upwards. “I really thought it was gonna go away. I’m a fucking adult.”

Mickey shrugged. “Sometimes shit doesn’t work like that, Gallagher.” He chugged a sip of water from his glass, apparently glad that this heavier part of the conversation was over now that he knew what was up. “It’s like what you tell me about my shit with Terry. Trauma doesn’t just magically fucking disappear.”

Trauma. He’d never really thought about it like that before—he had plenty of childhood shit to work through, between abandonment and raging mental illness; and he’d never really thought that his body image issues made the list.

But maybe they did— maybe this was another wound, one that he could learn to heal.

Mickey kicked his shin under the table. “There’s cereal and stuff in the cabinet, I got the Fruit Loops shit you like. Want me to wrap up the chicken and shove it in the fridge?”

All he could do was nod— and once again feel that warmth on his insides that Mickey was this good, that he knew how to make shit like this easier.

And he snuggled into the couch beside his husband, a bowl of soggy cereal in his hands.

#idrk what this is but i wrote it at LIGHTNING speed #can u tell that i reached the destination of my childhood home & am having lots of thoughts and feelings about body image LOL #i was like !!! i have a prompt about this #love u all xoxo #gallavich #shameless #shameless fic #gallavich fic #gallavich fanfiction #ian gallagher #mickey milkovich #ian x mickey #ixm #tw eating disorder #tw food mention #tw ed #tw body image

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lsvdw-blog · 3 years

Text

Not a Minute More: Part 5

Pairing: Ethan Ramsey x f!MC

Word Count: 2.2k

Warnings; Rating: Severe bodily injury, Mentions of blood, Angst; Mature, 18+

Premise: Everyone is in the fight to save lives and they finally find out what happened to Serena.

Author’s Note: This is very heavy - I apologize in advance 😭 Thank you to my girl @choiceskatie for pre-reading 😘 I hope you enjoy and thank you for reading 💖

~ Monday, 3:00pm ~

The explosion at Harvard labs reverberated throughout the campus and the surrounding suburb. The ER is swamped, an all hands on deck situation. Ambulance after ambulance arrives, wheeling in more patients before departing. Doctors and nurses are being pulled every which way, trying to help as many patients as promptly as possible. But they’re quickly becoming overwhelmed. Empty boxes of sterile gloves line the walls, medical equipment wrappers scatter the floor. They can barely hear each others’ shouts over the cries and less severe injuries are left unattended as the dire patients are intubated, defibrillated, or ushered off to an OR.

Ethan, Naveen, and Serena’s friends are on the ER floor, moving as quickly as they can, doing as much as they can, hoping their training and expertise is enough. But every time someone enters the hospital, they can’t help but pause for a beat and stare, hoping it’s her.

~ 4:00pm ~

Patients are referred to by their room number, blurring together. Everyone is exhausted, limbs heavy, grabbing yet another cup of coffee to keep going.

“Incoming!” A handful of nurses and doctors leave their stable patients and rush to the entrance, receiving the new bout of admittees.

“What’ve we got?”

“Two individuals, one male, one female, recovered just outside one of the classified Harvard labs. They’re unconscious, but stable. We didn’t see any obvious injuries, but that doesn’t rule out anything internal. The site of the explosion just cleared enough for us to work our way there,” one of the EMTs respond.

Ethan’s ears perk up at this new piece of information, but before he can corner the EMT, there’s another shout.

“We need an OR room stat!!!” Everyone turns towards the automatic doors at the familiar voice.

Rapidly pushing the side of a stretcher, is Rafael, his face ashen.*

Reclined on the stretcher, is Serena.

Ethan feels his world stop, the noise and hurried movements of the ER fading to black as his eyes trail over her. She’s covered in blood, drifting in and out of consciousness, and breathing through an oxygen mask. There’s several visible gashes on her head and body, but the most alarming thing is the large piece of metal protruding from the side of her abdomen.

She slowly turns her head towards him, as if she can sense his presence nearby.

As they lock eyes, he regains his senses, and rushes to her side.

While the paramedics continue to push the stretcher, he reaches for her hand and clutches it over his heart. "Baby, can you hear me?!"

She blinks groggily at him, acknowledging his words.

"H—," she swallows. "...Hurts," she manages to squeak out.

He nods continuously, his other hand reaching up to brush her blood-matted hair away from her face. "I know, baby, I know. Help is on the way. Until then, I need you to stay awake, okay?" He lifts her hand and kisses it. "Look at me, focus on me, and stay here with me," he urges. He relaxes a fraction of an inch when he feels her lightly squeeze his hand.

"Dr. Ramsey, I need you to step back!"

He shakes his head furiously. "I'm scrubbing in."

"The hell you are! We both know you can't be in there." Harper watches him closely. He's hunched over the stretcher, keeping pace, knuckles white from gripping Serena’s hand, eyes never leaving her face.

Harper sighs and her voice softens just a touch. "Let me do my job."**

He knows Harper is right, but Serena’s eyes are searching his and the thought of leaving her side makes him sick.

"E…"

"I'm here, I'm right here," he responds, tapping their entwined hands over his heart, hoping she can feel the heart that beats for her.

"I lo—," she lets out a breath and her eyes close.

"Rookie?" Her head lolls to the side.

"SERENA!!" He squeezes her hand multiple times, but her hand remains limp in his grasp.

As they push through the doors to the OR, her hand is ripped away from his. He reaches for her, but is stopped by Naveen and a few security guards he called for backup.

"LET ME THROUGH!! SERENA!!!" His voice cracks over her name. He continues to fight, leaving the security guards no choice but to drag him back towards the ER entrance.

Naveen stands in front of him. "ETHAN! You're not in the right state to be in the OR! Serena needs you to trust in Harper and her team. She needs you to be here when she wakes up! And you can't do that if I have to lock you down!"

Naveen takes in the man before him. Ethan's normally perfectly coiffed hair is in disarray, strands falling in his eyes. Cheeks flushed from the effort of screaming and battling the guards' hold. Hands and clothes covered in blood. Serena’s blood.

Naveen's heart plummets at the realization and it aches for the man he's come to consider a son.

Ethan stares down Naveen, chest heaving. After a few seconds, he gives a curt nod. Naveen waves his hand and the guards let go.

As soon as Ethan has range of motion, he walks to the nearest wall, and punches it. He walks away in a huff, leaving a room full of stunned individuals, and a gaping hole in the wall.

~ 8:45pm ~

Ethan sits with his head hung low in the waiting room, elbows resting on his bouncing knees, hands clenched together. Different people have come through, taking turns checking on him. He only mumbles or moves his head in response. The assortment of food and drinks brought to him remain untouched. He refuses to go home, sleep, or even change out of his bloodied clothes. Each time there's slight movement in the direction of the OR entry, he immediately turns towards it, only to be disappointed.

Naveen has been watching from afar, waiting to take his turn. He meanders over, silently taking a seat next to Ethan. He leans back in his chair, lacing his fingers over his stomach. He sits calmly, patiently.

After ten minutes, Ethan lets out a shaky breath.

"She needed me," he whispers, barely loud enough to be heard.

Naveen remains quiet, waiting for Ethan to continue.

“She left me a voicemail… said she was scared, that she wanted to hear my voice. I’m supposed to be her protector, but I didn't even pick up the phone.” He buries his head in his hands.

Naveen leans forward, gently placing a hand on Ethan's shoulder.

"My boy. You couldn't possibly have known what was going to transpire today. You can't hold yourself responsible. Don't think I haven't seen the way you look at her, treat her. How you're always standing slightly behind her, a pillar of support during patient interactions, ready to step in if need be. How you consistently have a gentle hand on her, guiding her through the busy corridors. How you wait to leave together so she doesn't have to take the T,*** despite the fact that your shift ended hours earlier. You do protect her, every single day."

"But when she needed me most!” He shakes his head. “I wasn't there. I failed her. Miserably.” He runs his hands through his hair.

"She is everything to me, Naveen, everything. She's shown me what it means to be loved unconditionally, that vulnerability isn't a weakness. I no longer see the world in strictly black and white, or even in shades of grey. I see hues of red, purple, green, the whole damn rainbow, all because of her. She's made me a better mentor and doctor, a better son, a better man. I can’t even imagine where, or who, I’d be now without her. I wasted so much time running from my feelings, when committing to her has been the best decision I've ever made.”

He takes a steadying breath.

"She's the love of my life and now… not only may I never get the chance to tell her, but I also may never get to see our future together," his voice cracks and tears stream down his face.

He swivels his head slowly to face Naveen. "I can't lose her. I just can't."

Naveen nods solemnly. "I’m worried too; I don’t want to lose her either. One of the best surgeons in the country is leading her case. You know Harper and her team will do everything they can and we know Serena is one hell of a fighter. She has to be, to have gotten past your walls and to deal with you on a daily basis,” he teases.

It does the trick, as Ethan chuckles through his tears, nodding in agreement.

“She really is something, isn’t she?”

“She really is,” Naveen responds with a twinkle in his eyes. “And that’s another reason why I have faith. She's a warrior, having fought so long for you, for your relationship, and she knows you’re out here, waiting for her, waiting to be reunited and happy together. She wouldn’t give up now.”

Naveen locks eyes with his protégé.

“The two of you? The story is far from over. I know that in my soul.”

Ethan holds Naveen’s determined gaze, drawing strength from it, and sits up a little straighter.

“Thank you, Naveen. It means more than you know. And… I’ll take care of the hole in the wall,” Ethan grimaces.

“Don’t worry about it, my boy. I’m just relieved you didn’t do more damage,” he laughs. “And if we’re being completely honest, I’d be more shocked if you hadn’t punched a wall.”

Naveen gives Ethan a wink before he stands and walks back towards his office, leaving Ethan shaking his head in amusement, feeling a bit lighter and more hopeful.

~ Tuesday, 1:30am; 1 Day Since Attack ~

Ethan had finally dozed off, albeit uncomfortably, in a waiting room chair, when he felt a petite hand gently shaking him awake. He lifted his head and opened his eyes, coming face-to-face with Harper. He bolts up.

“Where is she? How is she?” Ethan’s eyes are frantic, searching Harper’s face for any sign of information.

She remains silent for a few beats.

“She’s currently being moved to the ICU.”

“She’s alive?”

Harper nods. “She’s alive.”

Before Ethan can breathe a sigh of relief, Harper continues.

“But Ethan… it was really bad. The piece of metal in her body was larger than we thought. It spanned from her kidney to her lungs. It was only two centimeters away from puncturing her heart. Additionally, it was so embedded within her body that every time she took a breath, it dug itself deeper. This isn’t even mentioning the bits of shrapnel she had in other places.”

She squares her shoulders, bracing herself for what she’s about to tell her friend.

“At one point during the surgery, she flatlined.”

Ethan gasps and his eyes widen.

“For a very short, and scary, moment, she was gone.”

Harper’s words hit Ethan like a semi-truck and he has to sit back down to try and calm his thundering heartbeat. Harper crouches down in front of him, eyes softening.

“But we were able to bring her back and I strongly believe that the brief lack of oxygen will not have any lasting effects.”

“However, she has been through a lot in the past twelve hours,” she gently places her hand on his shoulder. “She’s still in a coma and we cannot say for certain if she’ll wake back up.”

Ethan tightly shuts his eyes and balls his hands into fists.

“I assure you, Ethan, that we did everything we could. But now, it’s up to her, and her body, to decide if she wants to rejoin us.”

A tear slips down Ethan’s face.

“Can I see her?” His words come out soft, broken.

“No visitors until she makes it through the night. But, you can see her through the window.”

Ethan is unmoving, trying to swallow the lump in his throat.

Harper stands. “Come on,” she tilts her head slightly. “Let’s take a walk.”

Ethan follows suit and they make their way through the waiting room, side by side.

~ 2:00 am ~

Before Ethan knows it, they’re in the ICU, Harper having coyly led him in that direction. She comes to a stop in front of a room.

“This is her. If you need anything at all, you know where to find me.”

Ethan stops her as she begins to turn away, looking at her earnestly.

“Thank you for saving her, Harper. It means…,” he sighs. “Everything.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” she responds, eyes fixed on Serena through the window.

Ethan gives a weak nod.

“She’s a stubborn one. I have a feeling she isn’t done with us yet.”

She turns and walks down the hall a ways, before glancing back. Ethan has one hand on the glass, watching Serena wistfully. She hopes that doing everything she could was enough.

~~~~~~

Disclaimers:

*I kept Rafael as an EMT because I wanted to include as much of the crew as possible and having a friend wheel Serena in adds to the angst deliciousness.

**I know Harper is a neurosurgeon, but I wanted to include her badass self and a bit of her platonic friendship with Ethan. So slight Harper AU!

***The “T” is what the locals in Boston call the subway.

#ethan ramsey × mc #dr. ethan ramsey #ethan ramsey fanfiction #ethan ramsey fic #ethan ramsey open heart #ethan ramsey #ethan x mc #open heart fic #open heart ethan #open heart fanfiction #choices open heart #open heart choices

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roundtableknight · 3 years

Text

Suptober Prompt 8: Leather & Lace

Hope you all enjoy my *checks time* five minute late fic for today, but I still got it done! This one is more for a mature audience but nothing graphic (sorry...or not sorry depending on your enjoyment of that kind of stuff). Anyway I hope you all enjoy 1.5k of football player!Dean and EMT!Cas, both college students.

Dean was fucked. Or, more aptly, he wasn’t going to be fucked. Metaphorically and physically different and all that yada yada.

The point was that Dean Winchester, star quarterback for his college’s football team, had a concussion now and wasn’t going to get fucked by his roommate/best friend/friends with benefits.

‘Fuckin’ hell’ Dean thought, trying to sit up from the bench situated behind his teammates, ‘Could that dick Roman hit any harder.’ He snorted at his joke, disgusted by his mind and pleased to see it was in working condition after the hit he took half an hour ago. The EMT on scene had checked for any signs of internal bleeding but signed him off fresh as a daisy with the note not to do anything strenuous for the next week or so. Dean wouldn’t have been so worried about his boyfriend sliding past that note from the medic if it wasn’t for the fact that Cas was a trained EMT as well and knew the precautions, and treated Dean like a boyfriend should: attentive, caring, and everything Dean didn’t deserve.

Okay, Dean may have some underlying trauma to parse out, but he was getting there. Hey, just last month he had finally confessed to himself and Cas that he had been in love with him since their freshman year when they had met; Cas having a studious air to him but blushing way too easily for Dean’s own good (though that blush turned out to be decidedly not innocent in the bedroom), and Dean acting like a full blown jock, hiding his love of fixing cars and other mechanical items.

Cas had been pissed when he found out that Dean had been hiding that from him for the better part of two years, and then had proceeded to say that he wanted to fuck Dean in his 1967 Chevy Impala while he completely and utterly caused Dean’s brain to fucking elevate beyond this dimension into the ether or some shit by giving him a blow job.

So yes, Dean had needs to attend to and a law-abiding fucking boyfriend who needed to get off his high horse and realize that Dean had put way too much effort into this Homecoming game for Cas not to ravish him.

He shifted on the bench, his jersey scrunching up behind his head acting as a pillow, so his lace underwear wouldn’t twist into an uncomfortable position; he had ordered them two weeks ago after he had first seen a pair on sale at Target and bought them, clearly seeming like a misogynistic asshole of a boyfriend for buying his supposed girlfriend a pair of underwear to wear in his liking, when in reality they were for his eyes only. Well, until Cas had seen him. After that he needed another pair since the first could barely make it through the wash until they needed to be washed again.

Moral of the story: he was wearing lace underwear because they felt nice and because Cas seemed to really enjoy them (a lot), but it wouldn’t happen anytime soon ‘because of this fucking concussion.’

Dean groaned, moving his head to the side. He heard footsteps approaching and smiled: “If you're going for payback against Dick, I suggest outside the locker room, I saw him doing some shady dealing with someone or the other, possibly with sugar. I don’t know what the fuck that guy is doing but he sure as hell ain’t worrying about me.”

“I’ll definitely look into it,” a voice replied, smooth and low, causing shivers to cascade up Dean’s spine. He opened his eyes to see his lover dressed in a leather jacket and skinny jeans; glasses were perched on his nose and he had a look between concern for Dean and annoyance that he just had to get in a tumble with Dick.

“Hey, it’s not my fault, babe. You should see the other guy.” Dean reached his hand out, realizing sometime between his internal monologues and past memories his teammates had moved him into a smaller area, complete with actual walls for privacy and quiet.

Cas quirked his lips. “I think I’ll pass for now. I have something more pressing at hand.” He bent down and gave Dean a kiss on his forehead, letting his lips linger and make sure that Dean wasn’t burning up on his forehead or anything (and, Dean found out not that long ago, to ground himself as Cas was an anxious and worrying person sometimes most of the time).

“So doc,” Dean started, leaning into the feel of Cas’ lips on his forehead, “what’s the diagnosis?”

“Hmm, well, considering it’s a concussion, you have to leave off the more strenuous activities on your body and mind.” Cas took back his lips from Dean’s forehead, and Dean whined at the loss of contact. Cas’ mouth softened and he gave Dean a small but brilliant smile. “It will be okay, Dean. I’m right here and I’m not leaving you for the rest of the game.”

Dean routinely questioned how he got so lucky with snatching Cas up before literally anyone with two competent eyes could see how good he was, both inside and out. Hell, the man took training for becoming an EMT just because he knew Dean was in football and wanted to be prepared if anything happened.

That didn’t mean he couldn’t help but drive Cas a little wild.

“But it’s all going to go to waste now,” Dean said with a sigh, both faking it and finding out his statement was true.

“What will?” Cas sat on the edge of Dean’s makeshift bed he was laying on now, his fingers intertwined with Deans.

“The lace panties I put on for later.” Dean could feel the moment Cas stopped breathing; his thumb, which had been rubbing the top of Dean’s hand in circles, had stopped its movement.

“What?” Cas swallowed, Dean could hear that much, and shifted how he was sitting. Dean smiled a knowing little secret on his lips and could almost hear the cogs of Cas’ inner morales stutter to a stop with what he knew Dean wanted and would continue to hark on him about as long as this concussion continued.

“And beyond that,” Dean continued, skipping past Cas’ question, “how will I occupy myself since I have no football practice now?” He laid his thumb on Cas’ pulse point on his wrist and felt his heartbeat, a fast-paced rhythm courtesy of one Dean Winchester.

“Dean,” Cas said, knowingly and darkly. He narrowed his eyes at Dean and his tactics, to which Dean smiled his charming little innocent smile and started to move his thumb back and forth across Cas’ pulse point.

“What?” Dean repeated Cas’ question from earlier, not knowing what exactly was going to happen but couldn’t help the excitement thrumming through him. Dean wasn’t exactly expecting Cas to ravish him right them and there, they were still near the football field of course, but maybe a talk that left Dean worse for wear or Cas doing his own, ahem, check on Dean, even if he star—

Instead Cas slipped his hand free from Dean’s own and walked out the door, leaving Dean high and dry.

That bastard.

Dean couldn’t believe Cas would just leave him, but then again he didn’t exactly give Cas any other option (well, except all the excellent ones he had just been thinking about) besides that. He huffed, vowing to make Cas’ next few weeks a living hell, when he reappeared in the doorway.

“Couldn’t stay away could you, babe?” Dean said, wanting to rile Cas up, but he stayed unaffected by Dean this time, instead going around to pick up Dean’s various clothes thrown about.

“You’re lucky you’re a mechanic and I don’t just walk out the door again for that remark,” Cas replied, and Dean gave a burst of laughter. Cas helped him upright from the bed. “Come on, we are leaving.”

“What? Where are we going?” Dean questioned, “Coach said I have to stay after to have a quick follow-up.”

“Well,” Cas said, putting on Dean’s socks for him one at a time, “I just talked to your lovely coach and he approved of me taking you back to my place for proper evaluation.”

“A proper—you sly dog!” Dean exclaimed, causing Cas to give him a pointed stare. “Have I told you how much I adore you? ‘And love you’” Dean thought the last part. Cas just shook his head.

“Come on, lumberjack, before I leave you here.”

Dean was about to make another remark on that (he wore an acceptable amount of flannel, thank you very much) but shut up for his own good.

His teammates were just making their way toward him when Cas helped him out of the small area he was in, wishing him good luck with his concussion. They didn’t need to worry though, Dean got a thorough examination back at Cas’ place, and another load of laundry to add to his to-do list.

Fic

#suptober21 #Prompt 8 leather & lace #destiel #fic #college students #mature #knights tales

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soranihimawari · 2 years

Text

Today, I thought about how Sawamura Daichi has to take first responders classes in his second year at the police academy solely based on this tik-tok.

Ready for a short drabble? Here we go!

Update: ‘kanaa’-san was just an alias assigned to the victim card for yn-chan.

++__++__++__++__++

Daichi’s classmates at the academy were passing out fliers at the local street market when you happen to pass by. It’s been a couple weeks since you’ve seen him at the grocery store. He was on the phone with his siblings asking what else was missing for the hotpot he promised to make. You thought he was cute when you suddenly turn to study the selection of coffee creamer (and the hazelnut one was a seasonal flavor, honestly becoming the most interesting thing in the dairy aisle at that point). Although the handsome stranger wore a a neighborhood police academy sweats and white undershirt, you couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to ride his thighs and on a whim, your thoughts entered unholy territory for a second.

Thanks to a few more random coincidences, like going for your evening run at the same park he uses for his conditioning workouts, he smiles and waves at you when you pass by. Surely this becomes a weekly routine together and soon enough you have a good looking friend who invites you out to dinner on a cloudy afternoon. You agree after you pretend to make an excuse about work kicking your ass at the law office uptown, but when he’s about to say “another time then,” you amend your statement that you can forgo drawing up last minute notes for your boss for a couple of hours.

So now why is his classmates, along with him, asking for volunteers from the public? Your heels clack against the concrete as you make your way toward your dinner date. Your hair must have caught the sunlight in such a way that when you called out his name, Daichi suddenly takes a double-take, oak eyes wander over your business attire: button up satin top where the buttons sort of struggle to hide your bust, the high waisted business slacks give away more of your silhouette than you think. He knows you see him check you out until one of his classmates hands you a flier.

“We’re looking for volunteers later miss,” he says, giving daichi a silent order of “get yourself together man, I know she’s hot as fuck.”

“Is that so?” You take the flier in your hands, a sly grin on your strawberry pink lips.

The first responders in this district was looking for civilian volunteers and those civilians were going to be compensated for missing work as they would be given victim cards out on the training field. The latter half you didn’t find out until you called your boss five minutes later that you weren’t feeling too well after lunch was picked up by an intern. It was an open and close yet believable lie, and suddenly your afternoon opens up.

“Well then,” you turn your attention back over to a tongue-tied Daichi. “I’ll look forward to being rescued by you.”

Waving over your shoulder, you set an alarm for half an hour before the appointed time on the flier.

\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//

As far as first dates go, being rescued by your date for a training exercise made more than one set of butterflies flutter their wings. You were told by the instructor along with the other volunteers who received their victim cards to lay where they were standing in the center of a trailer-esc soundstage. You glanced down at the card handed to you and you were supposedly one of the worse laid victim: age, 24 years old, female; gunshot wound to the shoulder; you fill out your height and weight with a pencil the instructor provided. Your fellow volunteers introduce themselves (at least the ones closest to you) and you take your place, slumped over. The door is opened then closed and you can hear the instructor and their assistant talking to the EMTs and Police Academy recruits explaining the rules of the exercise. The assailant is long since gone and apprehended, but the main priority is to rescue the volunteers.

“On my mark,” you close your eyes and count down mentally. “Three… two… one! GO GO GO!”

BAM! The doors swing wide open and you hear the familiar voice of Daichi’s classmate telling the other recruits to head up to the west side of the building to start picking up the other victims.

“Miss?” Daichi’s voice reaches your ears a minute later after the B-team scurried off to the next room. His friend notices the second body a few feet away from yours and he picks up the victim card and goes through his spiel to calm down the man. Daichi on the other hand, notices your shoes from earlier to his right. He jogs toward you and is currently kneeling down, reading the victim card.

“Don’t worry, I’m going to get you out of here,” he said. “Can you stand?”

You nod weakly. Apparently your victim card also reads severe blood loss, so when you are helped to your feet, Daichi, being the strong man he is, just hoists you up in his arms like you weigh no less than a paper bag and rushes you out of the building. He does this a couple more times before he confirms with his friend from earlier that the first room was cleared before retreating back to make sure the b-team didn’t leave anyone else behind. A total of twenty-seven minutes goes by and the EMT counterpart who was taking your ‘vitals’ after reading your card makes a comment about how you and the police man looked really close. You deflect by saying you shop in the same neighborhood grocery market when you’re on the way home typically for the weekend and it’s just random happenstance you saw him earlier with the papers for today’s exercise.

“Well then,” the EMT student says after signing off your faux paperwork. “I guess you get to live Kanaa-san.”

You notice their precise handwriting summarizing your post-rescue chart with how many stitches were needed to bandage your wound after removal of the bullet in the emergency room took a little over two hours because the surgeon needed to extract all pieces of the fragments before declaring you stable. You also needed a blood transfusion, so you were due back for that in two days time. You laughed at the green circle stamp for saying that you, unnamed female 114, with the gunshot wound to the shoulder, lived to tell another tale.

Once the recruits were dismissed from their training exercise, you notice the same pair of friends from earlier walk toward you before parting ways. The one who handed you a flier punches his friend on the arm laughing about buying him a beer when they reach their goals of either becoming a beat cop or a detective.

“What was that about?” You ask, a small smile curves your lips upward.

“Don’t worry about it,” he replies, a boyish grin matches your own. “Want to get out of here? I know this late night burger place and my date just got cleared to go home after getting shot in the shoulder…”

You shake your head muttering an short, “unbelievable,” loud enough for him to hear before saying that you’d love to. He extends his arm for you to take and with the flashing blue lights to your back, both of you begin laying the foundation for a beautiful relationship.

#🌻— flying around collecting pollen—queue #haikyuu x reader #sawamura daichi x reader

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rachaelswrites · 3 years

Text

The Unsub

Spencer Reid x daughter!reader

You help the team with an unsub that’s connected to you.

Word Count: 3,498

A/n: I got a little carried away with this

Warnings: Violence, kidnapping, guns, blood

“Y/n I promise you’ll be fine. I’m not coming to get you,” your dad said over the phone. He had been arguing with you the whole way to the BAU.

“But dad please? I can retake it. I’ll get a better score if I do,” you pleaded.

“Honey I said no. I’m at work now. What ever score you get I’ll be proud of you,”

“You’re only saying that to make me feel better,” you said.

“No I’m not. I mean it. I know you work hard,”

“I wish I had your memory. Could you just give me a piece of your brain please?”

“Goodbye Y/n. I’ll see you after school,”

“Bye dad,” you hung up the phone and Spencer was running late so he hurried to where the rest of the team was.

“There you are kid. You’re never late,” Morgan teased.

“Sorry something came up with Y/n,” Spencer responded.

“Is she ok?” Hotch asked.

“Oh yeah she’s fine. She just had a test she didn’t study for and wanted me to get her so she didn’t have to take it,”

Everyone nodded and looked to Garcia to present the case. “We have an interesting case. It’s local so we don’t have to travel. Three teenage girls have been taken from the local high school,” Garcia said, “so far, they haven't been able to make a connection yet. All the girls so far have brown hair and brown eyes so we could narrow down our search for potential victims,”

“Do we have contact with anyone who knows the girls and the families?” JJ asked.

“Yes. The families will be by later and we need to get someone at the school,”

Spencer was looking at the board, looking at all the girls. You were the same age and went to the same school as them. You could have easily been taken instead.

Hotch noticed Reid deep in thought and spoke up, “Reid why don’t you go to the school and see if they can give us information on the girls,”

Reid nodded and stood up and went to leave, but Hotch grabbed his sleeve and whispered in his ear “I know you’re worried about Y/n. Feel free to bring her back here so you can keep an eye on her,”

“Thank you Hotch,” Spencer responded. He grabbed his bag from his desk and left for the school.

You had just finished lunch and your friends were walking around the school talking. One of your friends stopped you mid sentence. “Isn’t that your dad Y/n?” She pointed towards the main entrance. Your dad was in fact standing outside the office, talking to one of the office workers.

“Yeah. I don’t know why he’s here,” you said, “I’ll see you guys later,” you walked down the hallway towards your dad.

“I just need to see if I can get the files from the students who went missing. Maybe to try and find a connection,” you heard your dad say.

“Sure I'll go get them,” the lady said. She disappeared into the office and he started to look at the posters littering the wall.

“Dad? What are you doing here?”

Spencer turned “I’m just here for some work stuff. I didn’t mean to interrupt your day,”

“It’s fine. It’s lunch right now I’m not missing anything,” you said. You so badly wanted more info on the case he was working on. You knew about the disappearances but didn’t think your dad would be out in the field, “what kind of work stuff?”

“Uhh. I can’t really tell you right now,” He tried to figure out a way to explain everything without scaring you, “do you want to come back to the BAU with me? You might be able to help us a bit,”

“Sure,”

The office lady returned with a stack of files, “here’s what we have on file. Anything from discipline records to attendance,”

“Thank you. I’m also going to be taking Y/n with me, is that alright?”

“Yes just sign her out at the desk,” the lady returned back to her own office and Spencer signed you out.

You took the train back to the BAU and nearly skipped into the room where the team was, “hi guys” you said cheerily waving to them.

“Well. If it isn’t my favorite Reid. How are you doing Little Reid?” Morgan asked, ruffling your hair.

“I’m good. What case are you working on?”

Morgan looked at Reid, “you haven’t told her?”

“Not yet. I was just about to,” Reid said.

“Tell me what?” You butted in.

“We think the unsub might be someone at the school. Either a student or faculty member. We’re hoping you could help us narrow it down,” Rossi explained.

“Yeah sure. Do you guys have a profile yet?”

“Not yet. We need your help with that Y/n,” Hotch said.

You nodded and he led you into the conference room. You sat down and watched as JJ laid out pictures of all the missing girls in front of you.

“Did you know any of these girls? Were you friends with them?” She asked.��

You took your time and looked over the pictures. You knew of them. Your school was a private school and the class sizes were small. Everyone knew something about everyone, but people still kept things in their own circles. “Not really. The school is small but people are private. Kids like to stay in their own group pretty much,”

“Was there a bullying issue at the school? Maybe these girls picked on the same kid,” Morgan suggested.

“Mmm. I don’t think so. Everyone got along well. Just people like to stick with what they know I guess,”

“What about teachers? Anyone who was maybe too friendly or really interested in student lives?” Hotch asked.

“Not that I can think of,” you said.

“There’s too many classes that overlap with each other so I don’t think it’s a teacher. There’s also no correlation in extracurricular activities. It would have to be a student,” your dad said. The whole time, he was flipping through the files, “Y/n is there anyone you can think of that had contact with all of them?”

“I can’t think of any. Sorry,” your knee was bouncing up and down. You didn’t feel like you were helping much.

“They are teenage girls though. Maybe they hid stuff,” Prentiss suggested.

“We had all their things checked. The unsub took the backpacks so all we could get were lockers and the houses,” Rossi said.

“Oh! There is something I remember,” you exclaimed.

“What is it?” Hotch questioned.

“A few days ago at lunch, this group of girls were talking. I think they were friends with one of the missing girls. They talked about a note she received the day she went missing,”

“We talked to friends. They didn’t know anything,” JJ said.

“Kids lie. Especially teenage girls when they do something they’re not supposed to,” Morgan said.

“Do you remember what the note said Y/n? Reid asked.

“No. They didn’t actually say what the note said. They had a picture of it on a phone. I didn’t exactly inherit your eidetic memory,” you teased at your dad.

“Just say what you remember,” he responded.

“It was something about meeting someone else. I think there was a time listed. They signed it too I think,”

Everyone looked at each other around the room, “what did it say?” Rossi said.

“I think it was signed ‘D.J’. But that could be so many people,”

“It could be initials or a nickname or pseudonym,” your dad said, “but that does narrow down the list,”

All of a sudden, Garcia came into the room, “I was able to find a connection between the victims. They all had parents in either government jobs or in first response,”

“That narrows it down even more,” Morgan stated.

“Most likely our unsub has a tie to either government or first response. He most likely had a vendetta for some reason,” Hotch said.

Spencer noticed your leg was bouncing quicker now. He moved from across the room and sat in the chair next to you. He grabbed one of your hands in his, “take your time sweetheart. You’re ok,” he whispered.

You sat and thought for a moment, “there is one boy. His name is Dylan. His mom died about a year ago. It was a car accident. His dad was an EMT. He was the first one on the scene. They didn’t know it was her though. I think he saw her die. Over the summer, Dylan’s dad killed himself. I think Dylan said the note he left said something about not being able to watch people die anymore,”

“Definitely sounds like our guy,” Morgan said.

“Why would these girls go off not knowing who is writing them those notes though?” JJ asked.

“I think they just assumed it was him. He’s the only one with enough guts to do that,” you explained, “and he’s the best looking,” you mumbled.

“What was that?” Reid asked, clearly hearing what you said.

“All I mean is that guys who look like Dylan could get any girl he wanted. Everyone has a crush one him,”

“Everyone?” Prentice wiggled her eyebrows at you.

“Everyone does,” you repeated.

Spencer decided to save this conversation for a different time.

“JJ, get a list of potential victims and put a security detail on them. Garcia let’s try and get an address on Dylan,”

The team started to leave the room, “Dad can I go home now?” You asked.

“Really? You’re a potential target for a serial kidnapper and you want to leave a government protected building? Absolutely not. You’re staying here for the rest of the day,” Spencer said standing up.

“But you have his name and you’re finding his address. I’ll be fine,” you complained.

“Y/n I’m serious. I said no. I don’t want you leaving this building without me. I’m trying to keep you safe,”

“Fine,” you pushed past him and stormed out of the room. Spencer sat down at his desk. He started working on something to blow off some steam.

You managed to keep yourself occupied for a few hours by talking with the team and doing school work. You were sitting in JJ’s office, working on an essay. You were growing restless and wanted to go home. You quickly pulled out some math work, pretending to look it over. “Hey JJ I’m going to go see if my dad can help me with some math. I’ll be back soon,” you packed your things and headed towards your dad’s desk.

Once you were out of her eyesight, you diverted your path towards the exit and headed home.

Back at the BAU a few hours past and your dad hadn’t seen or heard from you. Reid walked around, looking for you. He bumped into JJ, “Hey JJ have you seen Y/n?”

“Very funny Spence. I know she’s with you,” she replied.

“What do you mean? I haven’t seen her in awhile,” Spencer was now worrying. What if the unsub found you here?

“She told me she was going to find you. She needed help with homework,”

It all clicked for Spencer. He knew where you went. He just hoped neither did the unsub. “We have to go. Get the team,” he grabbed his bag and ran out the door, heading towards the apartment with the team behind him.

There was no sign of forced entry, but you were gone and there was blood on the carpet and things knocked to the floor. The team was looking around the apartment, hoping to find something that could lead to you. Spencer was sitting on the couch, trying to process what was happening. Morgan stopped what he was doing and sat next to him, “Reid we’re going to find her. Your girl is tough, she'll fight him,” he reassured.

“I know. I just feel like this is my fault. I forced her to stay with me to keep her safe, and now look. She’s been kidnapped!”

“This is not your fault. You were trying to protect your daughter and Y/n knew that. She’s just a stubborn kid who doesn’t like listening to her dad. That’s not on you,”

Before Spencer could respond Hotch got a call from Garcia, “Garcia you’re on speaker,”

“I checked school records and it turns out that the home Dylan shared with his family was sold a few months ago,”

“So where is he living now? Is there any family in the area?” Hotch asked.

“Uh it looks like the father owned a storage unit that has been accessed several times in the last few days,”

“When was the last time it was accessed?”

“Thirty minutes ago. I’m sending the address your way,”

You don’t remember much about how you got here. You were bound to a chair facing a garage door. Only a few hours ago you were walking home, just wanting to watch tv. You had unlocked the front door and set your things in your room. You went into the kitchen to grab a snack when you heard a key in the door. You assumed it was your dad. “Hey dad,” you said, turning towards the open door. You were not expecting the person in front of you, “Dylan what are you doing here?”

“What do you think?” he said, slamming the door shut, “I came here for you. Isn’t that what your dad warned you about. He works for the FBI right? He probably knew it was me,”

“Yeah he did,” you were trying to stall him. Your dad would get worried about you sooner or later, “The team figured it out pretty quickly. You didn’t do a very good job,”

“Well I got you. That’s all I need,” he took a step towards you. You looked around for something you could use to hurt him. Before you could reach for one of the books on the counter, he grabbed you. You tried to kick and punch your way out of his grip but he pulled a knife out of his pocket and stabbed you in the stomach. Only deep enough to make you bleed, not puncture an organ.

You stopped fighting and tried to apply pressure to the wound, “If you’re gonna kill me, at least tell me why,”

“Don’t you want to know how I got in?” he teased.

“I do but, the FBI agents will figure that out. I just want to know why you’d kill me,”

He pulled you up and pinned you hands behind your back, “Do you remember last year? We worked on a project together. Your dad wasn’t here. You said he was working. We had a nice long talk about how our dads and their jobs get in the way of raising their families,”

“I don’t remember that. Guess you didn’t make much of an impression,”

He grunted angrily and shoved you forward, making you fall. Your head hit the floor and you rolled over. You felt blood trickling down the side of your face. The fall most likely giving you a concussion. He pulled you up to your feet and pushed you out the door and down one of the back stairwells. He shoved you into the back seat of his car and tied a blindfold around your eyes.

The ride was short and he stopped abruptly. He grabbed your upper arm and walked you a few feet before stopping. You tried remembering things your dad told you to do if you were kidnapped. It felt cold so you were outside, maybe near water. You could smell metal and a musky odor. There’s a storage ward near the marina. That's where you probably are.

The sound of a door sliding open startled you. You were led into the unit and placed on a chair. You could hear the breathing of other people. Dylan took the blindfold off and you waited for your eyes to adjust to the light. Not that there was much. Dylan was already gone. You looked around and saw all the other girls who went missing.

A few minutes later, Dylan returned with another knife and now a gun, “I thought we were on the same page Y/n. Our dads missed our lives because of work. But I guess I was wrong. I realized shortly after our conversation I was wrong. You had a better life than me. You were happy. And I had to suffer by myself I had no one who understood me,”

“Dylan stop! This is stupid. Let them go. Hurt me not them. Your issue is with me,”

“My dad watched my mom die and then I had to watch my dad throw his life away,” he held the gun up, towards the other three victims, “Now you’re going to have to watch them die,”

“Dylan don’t do this!” but it was too late. He pulled the trigger and the three girls were dead. He now trained the gun on you.

“Now your dad will get to watch you die,”

The sound of three gunshots rang in the air. The team ran in the direction of the shots. They reached the storage unit that belonged to Dylan. “Spence stayed out here. We don’t know what we’ll find,” JJ said.

Morgan and Hotch opened the door, “Dylan Johnston, it’s the FBI,” Hotch yelled.

You couldn’t see anything. Your eyes were covered in the blindfold again. You looked up in the direction of Hotch’s voice.

“Put the gun down Dylan. Let the girl go,” That was Morgan. He was pleading with him. He saw you as his little sister, he cared about you. He couldn’t let you get hurt.

“I can't, I have to do this,” You felt Dylan move away from you. Then gunshots.

“Get an ambulance,” Morgan said, most likely to Hotch, “Y/n are you ok? Are you hurt?”

“M’fine. Just a little blood, and a headache. Morgan?”

“What?”

“Am I dead? I heard a gun. Did he shoot you too? Are we both dead,”

“Not on my watch Little Reid,”

Morgan walked towards you and lifted the blindfold off of your face. He sighed when he saw all the blood. He reached to move some hair out of your face but you pulled away, “I want my dad. Please get my dad!”

“JJ, get Reid in here,” he spoke in his ear-in, “Can I untie you?”

You nodded and he bent down in front of you, “Where’s my dad? I want him now,” you said again.

He pulled the ropes off your wrists and helped you stand up, “I know, he’s getting here,” he looked at the doorway, Spencer still wasn’t there, “Reid get in here!” he yelled. Morgan helped walk you towards the doorway.

Y/n!” Spencer exclaimed. He rushed over to you and grabbed you from Morgan. He hugged you tightly, loosening his grip when you winced, “are you ok? You’re hurt aren’t you?”

You nodded your head, “It’s bad Reid. She needs to go to the hospital,” Morgan whispered to him, “she can’t walk very well either,”

Reid looked at you. You were clinging to him, scared of losing him again. He carried you out of the unit, just in time for the ambulance to arrive. One of the paramedics opened the doors and brought out a stretcher. Reid carefully placed you on it, not letting go of your hand, “We have to go, she’s losing a lot of blood. She needs surgery,” the medic told your dad.

“Reid go with her. Morgan you too,” Hotch instructed. Both men climbed in the back of the ambulance next to you. Voices were fading in and out and you felt your eyelids getting heavy.

“Sweetheart, please keep your eyes open. Please, for me,” your dad begged.

“I can’t. M’tired,”

Spencer and the team were in the waiting room. Everyone was worried about you. Spencer couldn’t sit and was pacing back and forth while Garcia kept fidgeting with the hem of her skirt. “Dr. Reid?” a nurse came out, and he quickly walked over to her, “Your daughter is going to be fine. Her surgery went well,”

“Can we see her now?” Prentiss asked from her chair.

“She’s not awake yet. The anesthesia should wear off in a few hours. Only family can visit right now,”

“Ok,” Reid turned and faced the group, “I’ll see you guys tomorrow. Thank you for everything,”

“Of course Spence. If you need anything you can call,” JJ said, putting her hand on his shoulder.

Spencer shot her a smile and nodded. He followed the nurse to your room and sat in the chair next to your bed. He studied your face while you slept, You were relaxed and content, the opposite of just hours before. He held your hand in his until you woke up.

Taglist

@ssebstann @peachyprincessss @emmy-writes-sometimes @teenage-incompetence

#x daughter!reader #x teen!reader #spencer reid #criminal minds #bau #criminal minds fic #criminal minds fanfiction #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid fic

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tomtenadia · 3 years

Text

A Little Braver - Chapter 2

I think I will be brave as well and post chapter 2.

In the chapter when Rowan muses about his call sign he uses the term FNG - it literally mean Fucking new guy. In US military it describes a newcomer.

Enjoy the chapter!

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The next morning Rowan was on his way to the fire station. He had left the house a bit early to allow for traffic or getting lost. In the end he had arrived with ten minutes to spare. He parked the car along the road and walked to the main area in front of the station and stopped.

The tall training building was on fire and a few people were outside in front of it as if in waiting. He searched for the captain but she was not there. He wanted to go and ask to the team about her whereabouts but did not want to interrupt the training session. So he just decided to lean against a wall of the fire station, arms folded at his chest and just watch the drill.

He was curious about why they were not using the truck or water and wondered if they were following a specific exercise.

Being a fighter pilot was full of risks but by looking at the raging fire and thinking that there were people willingly putting themselves through that inferno made him shiver. He’d rather been strapped in a metal cage than in a house on fire.

All of a sudden a figure ran out of the building carrying what looked like a dummy and two more followed. He gasped when he recognised the captain. The dummy she was carrying on her shoulders must have weighed a ton and he was impressed. He followed her, dumping the dummy on the ground and joining the tall blonde man and pat him on the shoulder looking happy. His lips turned up in a hint of a smile.

Her eyes met his and she gave him a huge smile and Rowan straightened up and pulled away from the wall. She walked to him while unbuttoning her bulky fireproof jacket.

“Morning Captain,” she brushed her hair away from her face and Rowan’s heart started to race.

“Enjoyed the show?”

He cleared his voice while he tried to gain some sense again “That was fascinating.”

“Can you give me twenty minutes to have a very quick shower and get changed? You don’t want to be in a meeting with a stinky woman.”

Captain Whitethorn nodded “Take your time.”

“You can go and meet the guys. They are a friendly bunch.” She offered “just ignore the lewd jokes.”

“Thank you for the head’s up.”

Aelin ran away and he gathered some courage and walked to the team. He was not the best around people he did not know, but he wanted to play nice.

He took another step and the tall blond man noticed him and walked with purpose toward him and offered him his hand “Captain Whitethorn isn’t it?”

Rowan nodded.

“Aelin told us you were coming. I am Lieutenant Ashryver.”

Rowan nodded and studied the man in front of him and noticed that his posture and attitude screamed military. After he had spent all his adult life in the force he had gotten used to spot one of them. He had the same feeling at the base during the fire.

“Can I introduce you to our team?”

“Gladly.”

Aedion turned to the red-haired woman “Ladies first. This is Ansel. Never leave her and Aelin alone because then you are in trouble.”

“Hey, I’ll tell her you said that and she will put you on truck cleaning duties for a month.” Aedion ignored her and continued “then here we have Brullo, Nox, Ress, Ren and finally Luca.” He grabbed the young man’s shoulder “he is our probie. He finished the academy and he joined us a few months ago. For now he is coming to the less serious calls but we are planning on coddling him a bit less and make him see the real stuff as well.”

Then the man turned around, scanning the area in search for something or someone “we also have two EMTs, Elide and Lysandra but they must be around the station doing something. You will meet them anyway.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you all.”

“Everyone, clean up and don’t leave everything to Luca. All of you haul ass. Nox, Ren you are on equipment duty. Ansel, Ress you two are on uniform checks. Brullo, take Luca with you and go over him some truck procedures for before and after calls. Now away all of you.”

Rowan chuckled. The man was definitely ex military.

“Where did you serve?” He asked the man taking a chance.

“I was in the army. I was an artillery specialist. Once I retired Aelin called me saying her station was looking for recruits and I applied for the job. Guess my experience with explosives and such was a plus. Many years later I am still here and still loving it.” Then he studied the Captain “how did you guess?”

“Your posture. It’s the stick up your arse, as Captain Galathynius would say, that gets drilled into you from day one. The way you give order, again, very familiar.”

“Call her Aelin, Cap or Captain. She hates being called Captain Galathynius.”

Rowan raised a eyebrow with curiosity for that statement.

“I usually call her brat or menace.” Aedion chuckled “she is my cousin. I have known her since we were little. I have earned that privilege.”

Aedion started walking back into the station and Captain Whitethorn followed him.

“She has the bas habit of not filtering what she wants to say, can be brash and very vocal when she is mad at something or someone, but she loves her job and her team. She loves being a firefighter. She might be young be she is extremely capable. She is the first female captain. Absurd to think that before her it was just a boy’s club, eh?” The man joked, and lead him into a big spacious room with a lone table and chair and a kitchen at the bottom of it “If she keeps likes this I can see her climbing up the ladder pretty quickly, although I cannot imagine her in a desk job.”

Rowan knew very little about the woman but he had the same feeling.

“This is where we spend most of the time when we are on shift, all tasks are done and just wait for a call. We have books, video-games, tv… you name it. And like all families we fight for who controls the remote.”

Aelin joined them a moment later “Are you giving our Captain the tour?”

“Yes, just the cheap tour for now. You can give him the proper one later.” Aedion winked at her.

“I guess that after our meeting, the Captain will be more than happy to get rid of me.

“I gave you a tour of the base, I would love a tour of the station.”

Aelin’s mouth almost fell open in disbelief.

“If you are not fed up with me we can think about it.” And she turned around and walked away the same way he did the day before.

Aedion gestured with his head to follow her and Rowan ran after her.

“I am sorry for the delay. Once I got back to work yesterday I had an email saying that our annual performance review is due in three weeks. I did not have a way to contact you otherwise I would have pushed the meeting forward a bit.”

“It was actually interesting watching you guys train.” He followed her to her office and took the seat she offered “we have performance reviews as well. What do you guys have to do?”

Aelin was caught off guard by him being talkative all of a sudden “We get tested on our abilities. We usually go to the academy, are given a scenario and the whole team has to work as if that was a real call. We also get to perform some individual tasks and those are timed. It’s a very stressful period.”

“You can leave our project to me until you are done with your review. I am happy to give you an update and you can come once a week to check how things are progressing if you are too busy.”

“Are you trying to get rid of me, Captain?” She smiled at him, leaning back in her chair.

He shook his head and she noticed him finally relaxing and sitting more comfortably in his chair “we have those review as well and they are always stressful for the team and I am aware how much of my time, preparing drills takes me. I am offering you to concentrate on your mission ahead for now and then catch up in three weeks.”

Was he actually being nice to her?

“I will be fine captain, but thank you for the offer. I appreciate it.”

“If you change your mind, my offer will still be on the table.”

“So,” she said quite abruptly changing the subject. If he even thought she needed his help because she was a woman he was in for a tough ride.

Aelin grabbed a folder with her plan. She had spent the entire previous day working on it. “These are the copies for you.” And she passed him a pile of papers “they are the ideas and changes I would like to suggest. I believe that is the part you will have to discuss with your CO. the biggest and probably most time consuming change is the extra door. All the other suggestions are repairs and perhaps replacements of old parts. I would like to explain again that these changes are not up for discussion. They need to happen.”

Captain Whitethorn nodded “I have discussed the matter with my CO after our meeting and he understands that and agrees. He promised me that he will fight until the last ditch if they start blocking him with budget bullshit, his exact words.”

“Please tell Air Commodore Salvaterre that I appreciate his cooperation. It goes in the interest of every single person who works at the base. Him included.”

“This pile here is a draft of possible training sessions for both your squadron and the ground crew. I want basic fire prevention training, fire extinguisher training, reviews of fire drills. I would like to do some training, especially with the ground crew on fuels handling, fuel storing and clearing spillages. Your squadron will be welcome as well. I think it will benefit everyone.” She flipped through her notes “I would like to nominate a couple of people as Fire champions or any other name we can come up with. Their role would be to perform monthly deep inspections and weekly spot checks. The idea is that by doing this, you are always on the ball with any problems. Of course we will provide training on how to do all this.” She kept explaining and the man in front of her listened to her with great interest, never interrupting her.

“Needless to say that fire prevention is everyone’s job. See it, report it. And if you can, fix it.” She jotted down a few things “of course all of this depends on our rosters. I don’t know how it works for you guys but we work in shift patterns.”

“My squadron and I, we work Monday to Friday when we are ground-side. Ground staff such as engineers for example, they tend to follow shift patterns as well. I can talk to the supervisors for the mechanics and engineering team and see if I can get a roster from them. They are aware of the fact that extra training is on its way.”

“Please do. I have a feeling that will be the biggest job.”

“Do you have any questions for me so far?”

“Which venue will we use?”

Aelin tapped her pen on the table “I was thinking here if it’s okay with you. We have the equipment, also we don’t have maximum security checks.”

“Speaking of security…” he extracted something from his pocket “`I have your badge.”

Aelin took the badge he offered in surprise.

“I imagine we will be working together quite a lot and you will need to visit the base as well on a regular basis. You have now the badge with consultant clearance. It’s not a lot, but it will grant you access to all the are you will need. And no more forms to fill.”

“Thank you, captain,” she was speechless “Thank you for trusting me.”

She smiled fondly at him and Rowan realised he’d do literally anything to see that smile. It was intoxicating.

They worked for a few hours and Aelin realised it was not as bad as she had feared. The captain had been very keen to listen to her plans and making suggestions according to his knowledge of the base and his team. He had also looked a bit less uncomfortable and more willing to have a full conversation instead of monosyllables. At least it was progress and since it looked like they were going to work together for a while it was a good thing.

When her stomach grumbled loudly she coughed embarrassed to try and cover it but the very faint hint of a grin on the captain’s lips told her that he had head her.

“We can stop for lunch, captain.”

Aelin almost blushed “I guess so. I think I have a black hole forming in my stomach. Those drills always leave me famished.” She stood “there is a lovely diner very nearby. Can I interest you in lunch? It’s on me. But no shop talk.” She was ready for a refusal but the captain stood and nodded.

“I’d like lunch.”

When they left the office they met Elide and Lysandra carrying boxes full of supplies to stock the ambulance. As soon as Rowan noticed he jumped forward and offered to help Elide.

“Let me carry them. They are quite bulky.”

“Thank you,” said the woman flashing a smile to Aelin then showed the captain the direction to the ambulance.

“Where do I place it?” He asked once they were arrived. Elide opened the back door of the vehicle “just here. Lys and I will sort through everything. Thank for the help.”

Lysandra dropped all her stuff and turned to the two captains.

“These are Lysandra and Elide, they are our two resident EMTs.”

“Ladies, this is captain Whitethorn.”

Lysandra mouthed hot to Aelin and the woman rolled her eyes.

“The captain and I were going for lunch. Could you please tell Aedion to man the fort for me while I am away? I am just going to Emrys and I have a radio with me if anything happens.”

The woman nodded “I know the drill. Go, enjoy lunch.”

The two captains left “we are walking. The place is just down the road. We are all regulars there.”

Five minutes later they reached the small diner and Rowan thought the place looked cosy and felt like the good old fashioned family run restaurant.

“Emrys and his husband Malakai have been running this place since forever. It’s an institution in the neighbourhood.”

“Aelin, my girl.” A very smiling Emrys walked from behind the counter and went to hug the woman “Are you keeping well?”

“Of course.”

“Two today?” He asked looking at the Aelin’s companion.

“Yes please. Can we sit anywhere?”

“Go ahead.” He gestured pointing at the tables.

“Quiet today?”

“Not at all. You just missed the rush. Until twenty minutes ago we were full. Malkai is delivering an order to the police station.”

Aelin walked to the table near the window and invited Rowan to join her.

“Here’s the menu for your friend. Let me know when you are ready to order.”

Rowan took the menu, opened it and lowered his head to start reading it.

Aelin studied him for a moment while he was distracted. Stared at his hands and noticed the hint of a tattoo sneaking from underneath the uniform. Interesting, she would have never pinned the man as someone who would have a tattoo. A smile tugged at her lips. A part of her wanted quite badly to get to know him a bit more. “Your hair,” she asked “has it always been silver or it became like that with age?” Then she stopped embarrassed “I mean I am not saying that you look old. I just meant as if it got like that as you grew up.”

He lifted his head from the menu and his piercing green eyes settled on her “I was born like this. Apparently it runs in my family.”

“I am sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. I was just curious.”

He gave her a half a smile. It did not linger. It was quick and for a second she thought she had imagined it “I am used to it.” He tapped on the plastic menu “you haven’t decided yet?”

“Oh no, I don’t need a menu. I know it by heart and I know what I want.”

Emrys came back and both placed their orders and Aelin enjoyed the shocked expression on the captain.

“You can’t possibly eat all that stuff.”

“Watch me.”

The silence grew uncomfortable again. It looked as if he was chatty only when it came to work.

“Why did you join the airforce?”

For a moment he looked stunned at her question “I was eighteen and fresh out of high school. Happy I was done studying. My parents wanted me to go to uni, but the idea of spending four more years on books was not for me.” He explained and noticed she had he hands folded under her chin “One day I met Lorcan. We knew each other from before already, being both from Wendlyn and all. It was nice to see a friendly face in a new place. Anyway, he told me he had moved here to Terrasen with the TAF. He told me they were recruiting and I went to the base during an open day. The day after I had signed up and a month later I was starting pilot academy.”

“Where in Wendlyn?”

“Doranelle.”

“I was there once. On holiday with…” no, not time yet “with a friend. We loved it very much.”

He nodded “It’s a nice place, but I must admit that after so many years I feel like an adopted citizen of Terrasen. Orynth is quite a gorgeous place.”

Emrys came with their food and Rowan noticed how skilfully placed all the plates on the table. As if he was used to have all those orders from her.

“You can’t be serious and actually eat all this food.”

Aelin tackled her first plate “watch the pro at work, captain.” She gave him a smile and Rowan shook his head and tackled his food.

“Why firefighter?”

He noticed her still for a second and the happiness wash away from her face in an instant. Fuck. Wrong question already.

“I was eight.” She said playing with her food for a moment “I was out playing with some of my friends. I was on my way home when I saw two massive fire trucks in front of my house and my home on fire.” She placed the fork on the plate “I ran toward the house but this fireman stopped me. I was crying and calling for my parents. He hugged me, he told me they were working to try and save my parents. I remember trashing in his arms to get free but he held me tight.” She took a bit to keep herself busy while telling the story “he took me to the back of the engine and showed me some of the tools and explained to me how the engine worked. He distracted me while his colleagues worked to stop the fire and save my parents.” She finally met his gaze “it took them almost two hours to kill the fire. After that there was nothing left of the house and of my life. My parents had been found dead in the house. The gas boiler has suffered a fault and basically exploded. They stood no chance.”

“Aelin I am…” his hand moved slowly closer to hers and brushed it gently “I am so sorry.”

“When I grew up I decided I wanted to be like the firemen who attended my fire. I wanted to rush into a house on fire and try to save some person’s parents of spouse and help them avoid the loss I suffered. I wanted to be like the man who stood with me and distracted me.”

Her finger lifted a little and met his almost in acknowledgement “Aedion’s family took me in. As soon as I finished high school I was like you. I had no interest in uni. So I signed up for the fire academy.”

“Sorry for ruining lunch.”

She shook her head and flicked his finger playfully. That had been the first contact between them. He had always kept his distance and that little flicker of affection made he heart flutter. The man was a puzzle. He could go from stone cold bastard to this in a small amount of time.

Aelin finished her food and noticed the captain staring at her with curiosity.

“I cannot believe it.”

“Told you,” she smiled at him with a smug expression “and I am even going to get cake.”

“No you are not.”

In defiance she stood and went to the counter and ordered chocolate hazelnut cake from Emrys. She came back and sat down again and ate the whole slice.

“Remind me to apply for a mortgage if I ever take you out for dinner.” At those words Rowan froze. He did not mean to do say that. It was supposed to be a joke but he should have learned by now that he was bad at making jokes.

“I’ll keep that in mind, Iceman.”

His head shoot up and looked at her. She had used his callsign. Something that only his squadron members would ever use. They all had one. It was a tradition. But it also meant something. It was always the other pilots in the team who choose the callsign. Never the pilot himself. It was a rite of passage that welcome you in the squadron. In a family. He got his one because of his hair. Everyone thought it was because he was cool and calm under pressure but no. When he was still one of the FNG he went through his naming ceremony like all the others FNG and they had decided he was going to be iceman because with his hair he reminded them of a creature from the snowy glaciers of the Staghorn mountains, hence iceman. Hearing her calling him like that made his heart skip a beat.

“We don’t have call signs. We got nicknames but nothing official like you guys.” She polished the plate from the chocolate left from the cake “the guys usually call me Captain or Cap. Aedion is the worst. Because he is my cousin he takes the liberty to call me brat or menace. I should really write him up for insubordination.”

She tapped his hand “come on grampa, let’s get back to work.” And stood. Rowan had wanted to grab that hand and hold it for a moment. It felt as if a small shift had happened in their weird work relationship.

Aelin paid for the meal as promised and they walked back to the station “are you sure you will be able to concentrate with all that food in you?”

On the way back Aelin looked up at the sky and noticed a few flakes that had started to follow. “Looks like it’s going to snow.”

She turned her head and caught Rowan sniffing the air, the eyes closed and a relaxed expression. The hard lines of his face had disappeared and the faint smile on his lips changed him completely. Yes, the man was hot but there was more to it. The very rare times that his face softened his eyes lit up as well turning a deeper green and made him stunning. She had a feeling those moments were rare and was glad that she had caught at least a couple. Like right now, his body relaxed enjoying the first flakes of snow. That was a precious insight in the man at her side.

“You like winter?” She broke the magic.

His eyes snapped open and his face turned hard again as if he hated being caught enjoying something.

“I do.” He said softly “I love the snow and winters in Terrasen are incredible.

Aelin smiled. His scent. His scent reminded her of Terrasen. Pine and snow. She had smelled it the other day while she was inside his plane and he was quite close to her. He smelled like winter and realised for a second that the nickname Iceman was perfect as well for that reason and not just because he could be a cold hearted bastard. They got back to the station and she found it quiet apart from Brullo and Luca near the fire engine. Apparently the man was explaining the youngster some of the routine checks they performed. He was their resident engineer and mechanic so he was the best one for that type of training.

“Nice lunch, Cap? Did you eat all the food at Emrys?”

“The vegetables are still there. They are safe.” Aelin turned when noticed that the joke came from Rowan.

Brullo and Luca burst out laughing “oh he is good.” Added the older man.

“My eating habits are the joke of the station.”

“Cap, they are insane.” Added Luca.

Aelin turned to Rowan and he lifted and eyebrow as if to say I agree with them.

She turned again on her colleagues “one more joke from the two of you and I’ll have you scrub the station from top to bottom with a toothbrush.” Then she turned on her feet and walked away to her office.

Rowan tapped his hat in salute to the two men and followed her. He found her in the kitchen making coffee “Do you drink coffee?”

“I don’t think I could function without it.”

“Good. We basically drink it by the litre. It keeps you alive on a night shifts.”

She made some coffee and offered him a mug “milk, sugar?”

“Black, thank you.”

He watched her as she dropped two spoonfuls of sugar in it “All this sugar is not good for you.”

“Shhh you heathen.”

He rolled his eyes and took a sip of his coffee “Thank you for lunch by the way.”

“My treat, for working with me.” She apologised, while leaning against the counter and drinking her coffee.

“You are not as bad as I thought. I agree with Aedion, you are a brat and a menace but I can work with that.” Bad idea. Rowan noticed anger flash in her eyes.

“I am not having you calling me that.” She slammed the cup on the counter “you barely know me and I have been professional, sure if cracking a joke or two makes me a brat it’s your problem you need sense of humour. I have been busting my ass to fix the shit that went down in your station.” She took a step toward him and Rowan braced himself “I know how I run my station. I am aware of every single problem or fault that happens here. Your fucking hangar went down in a blaze of glory and you had no idea of the shitstorm about to happen.” She was now a few mere centimetres from his face and a foolish part of him wanted to push her against the counter and kiss her senseless. She was mad at him and all he thought was how her lips would feel. What was wrong with him?

“Don’t ever call me that again with that smug face of your because I have no problems removing that smirk with a punch.”

Rowan kept staring at her in silence, not risking saying a word while she was that mad at him. Damn the woman had fire in her. And it did not matter he was getting a well deserved lashing down from her, he could not stop thinking that she was beautiful. Not just physically, she was fierce, brave and passionate and he was irremediably drawn to her.

Which it was totally crazy since they had met the day before.

“Now get the fuck out of my station. We are done for today.” And she stepped back.

“Captain, I did not mean to offend you.”

“I said out.” She repeated through gritted teeth “I have your contact. I will let you know when I am in the mood to meet you again.” She grabbed her coffee and walked away from him.

Rowan stood still and stared at the spot where she had been. He ran a hand through his hair and cursed himself for his stupidity. They had finally set aside the bad start they had, and messed up everything again.

He picked up his cap on the counter and then realised he had left all the documents in her office. He was about to walk to her but then changed his mind bad idea. So he just left the station, got back to his car and drove back to the base.

Aelin was furious. Why did he have to go and ruin everything with his bloody mouth of his?

That beautiful mouth of his.

She paced the office for ten minutes then she left, went to changing room and changed into her training gear. Some exercise will do her good to clear her head.

Aedion found her twenty minutes later “here you are,” he shouted as she ran back and forth in the yard with a dummy on her shoulders.

“Aelin!” He shouted when she did not stop. When she ignored him again he went in front of her and stopped her “Aelin.”

“What?” She growled dropping the dummy on the ground with a loud thump. She was breathless.

“I thought you were with the captain.”

She ignored him and grabbed the dummy again but Aedion stopped her and grabbed her hand “did something happened?”

“Yes, he happened. He is an arsehole and I don’t know why I am bothering to help him.”

“Because it’s your job.”

“Well, he can go and ask west station for all I care.”

Aedion shook his head “they are in our territory.”

Aelin ran a hand through her hair.

“Did he do something to you? Because if he did I am very good at hand to hand combat. I’ll destroy his stiff arse.”

Aelin chuckled. Aedion had always been very protective with her.

“He called me a brat and a menace. He said that I am not as bad as he thought and that he agrees with you for my nicknames.”

Aedion laughed “that’s why you are mad at him? Ace, I love you but you can be both.”

She sat down on the dummy “I know. But if you say it it doesn’t bother me. We grew up together. You know me better than anyone. He instead…” she punched the dummy’s face “he had this smug face and he used this tone like a condescending prick.”

She groaned “you can be a brat and a menace but I can work with it,” she repeated in a mocking tone “I am the one doing him a favour to help him. Idiot.”

“You just want to find an excuse to hate him and push him away from you.” He sat down on the dummy beside her “Ace, could it be that you like him but you are still too scared to allow another man in your life?”

“No. I have known the guy for two days. And no, I do not like him.” She protested.

“Would it be that bad?”

Aelin stood and faced him “I am not interested in getting any closer to him than what works dictates. Lie. Lie. Lie. Lie.

“You are overreacting and you are behaving like a brat and proving him right.”

She pushed him off the dummy “you are on truck duty for the whole week.” Aelin grabbed the dummy and went back to her training.

Rowan finally made it back to the base and went straight to his office but Lorcan intercepted him.

“You are back early. I thought you were going to be at the station all afternoon.”

Rowan ignored his CO and plopped on his chair and closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“That bad, eh?” Joked Lorcan at the man’s reaction.

“I opened my damn mouth. That’s what I did.”

Lorcan sat on the chair on the opposite side of the desk “What did you do? I thought you were the guy who counted till ten before opening his mouth. That’s why I gave you this assignment. I need this to go smoothly and fix all the shit that the old CO messed up. If I wanted to piss off the TFD’s captain I would have sent Moonbeam.”

Rowan snorted “probably would have been better. Far more charming than this cranky old bastard.”

“I have seen the woman. Fenrys would end up fucking everything. Literally.”

Lorcan sat back relaxed “I am coming to the station tomorrow and I will talk to her and bring her back into our good books.”

“You?” Rowan scoffed “if there is someone who has a worse temper than me is you, Lorcan.”

“I’ll be my charming self.” The man joked.

“The gods save us all.” Rowan joked standing and pacing the office “trying to scare her will not work either.”

“I noticed that. I wish some of our men would have that level of balls. Quite amazing for a woman.” Rowan’s head snapped at his CO’s words.

“Don’t even dare say anything like that in her face or you are a dead man.”

He and Lorcan would go along on most of the days but on some concepts, Lorcan still followed the good old fashioned ideas that for example females were not suited for the military, a topic they had many fights on. Rowan had tried to open up the ranks to a few more females in the squadron but Lorcan had rejected the idea every single time.

“You know how I feel about those things.”

“Yes, our very progressive man. Equality and all.”

“You can be such an arsehole.” Rowan stopped at the window “even the Navy is accepting women. Their recruitment for female officers is up by 40%. We are still to celebrate when we will have our first female officer.”

Lorcan growled “well, then move to the Navy.” He stood annoyed “flying a jet is not like service on an aircraft carrier!”

Rowan turned furious “you are not seriously telling me that you don’t believe a woman could fly a jet.” He slammed his fist on the table “I have seen Aelin in action and during drills. I have seen her jump into a building on fire without any second thought to save one of our men. I have seen her drag a dummy twice her size off a burning building while wearing the fire suit and an oxygen tank on her shoulder. She could probably do a vertical, pull 9G and then get off the plane and have a dance in our face. She is definitely not the fragile thing you think she is just because she is a woman.”

“What is your point?”

“Stop being a misogynist prick.”

Rowan phone went off and Lorcan moved away “if you are coming tomorrow, you leave that attitude behind.” Lorcan left and Rowan took the call. Once he was done he sat back down on his chair and looked outside noticing the snow falling and a gentle smile tugged his lips at the memory of the moment they had shared at the restaurant. He had to apologise. And quickly.

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icasttourniquet · 3 years

Text

Common Misconceptions: Raising the Dead (CPR)

Let's start with the bad news: basically all the CPR you've seen in movies and TV shows is performed terribly.

Here's the good news: most CPR is performed on dead patients, which means even bad CPR is better than nothing.

What is CPR?

CPR stands for (googles hurriedly) Cardio-Pumonary Resuscitation. It has two parts: 1) chest compressions and 2) rescue breaths. Here's a video in case you're still confused, but most people have seen CPR performed a ton of times during the climaxes of medical shows. It comes right before either a) the nurse yells "Clear!" and the patient comes back to life or b) the EMT says "I'm not losing you" and injects the patient with adrenaline right to the heart, and then they come back to life.

Raising the Dead

CPR is generally performed on dead patients. That is, patients without a pulse. In the first responder business, the situation doesn't really get worse than dead, so it provides a unique opportunity for authors because you can't really get it wrong.

Here are some questions I've heard people ask while learning CPR:

Should I perform CPR on pulse-less patients who have chest wounds?

Can I continue performing CPR if I break a rib?

Should I perform CPR on pregnant people?

What if I can't give rescue breaths? Should I still give CPR?

My patient has a lot of broken limbs. Should I fix those before performing CPR?

My patient was electrocuted. Should I give CPR?

Here's the trick to answering all your CPR questions. Is my character dead (no pulse)? Does performing CPR put a) the first responder, b) another patient, or c) a bystander in danger?

If you can answer (yes) (no, no, no), congratulations! Your first responder can perform CPR, even really crappy CPR, even CPR that is ineffective, for as long as the plot requires (ModN's WFR instructor tells the story of a 6-hour CPR session on a dead patient during a journey to care that included a toboggan ride).

(NOTE: there's actually one solid contraindication: if the patient is severely hypothermic, their heart rate may be so slow and weak as to be undetectable. In this case (and pretty much only this case) chest compressions may actually do more harm than good. Other than that, obvious signs of death like decapitation or rigor mortis indicate you don't need to start resuscitation, but there are still plenty of compelling interpersonal reasons to do it – at that point you're doing CPR for the responder and survivors rather than the patient.)

Otherwise, your character should go for it!

The bad news about CPR

Time for the bad news (other than you having a dead character on your hands). In general,* CPR is not enough to bring someone back. Its role is to continue circulating oxygenated blood while you wait for a defibrillator like an AED to arrive. The AED or manual defibrillator is what actually convinces the heart to stop fluttering/beating erratically, and allows it to resume something like a normal rhythm. That means that in the wilderness, CPR is almost never going to work. That said, ModN's WFR instructors had a couple tales of AEDs falling from the sky (via helicopter, not under their own power), so it's worth trying regardless.

* The exception: lightning-struck patients can at times restart regular rhythms with just chest compressions. This leads to interesting triage considerations when dealing with the aftermath of lightning, but that's a subject for another post.

How to perform non-crappy CPR

There are a million videos on YouTube that can talk you through every sort of CPR. Keeping in mind, of course, that some CPR is better than nothing on a pulseless patient, here are some quick tips that could indicate your character has some training:

Your character distinguishes between adult and pediatric CPR. Because children don't tend to get heart attacks, pulse-less children almost always have a trauma or respiratory cause. This means responders give children more rescue breaths.

Your character keeps their elbows locked. Here's a playlist of some examples of bad CPR (and some are really quite bad). Actors generally can't lock their elbows because they'd risk injuring or even killing their scene partner (so, okay, fine, that's a decent excuse), but people with real training will know better.

They do not always give rescue breaths. Any CPR is better than no CPR. Rescue breaths can put the first responder at risk because they can involve lip-to-lip contact, assuming no PPE is available. I once had a paramedic say bluntly that he really only gives breaths to children—it's just not worth the risk to him for anyone else. If this sounds callous, remember, CPR is (almost) only performed on dead patients, and the number one priority in any disaster is yourself.

(ModN edit: in a professional setting your character will always have some sort of PPE for rescue breaths: a face shield at the minimum, or in the front country a full-blown bag valve mask (BVM) that allows them to use their hands to get air into the patient.)

Your character does a blood sweep before staring CPR in a trauma injury. You may have heard the rule no pulse = chest compressions immediately. This is almost always true, especially in the frontcountry, when most pulse-less patients you encounter will have had a heart attack. However, in the wilderness, we can run into a bad situation: chest compressions that pump all my patient's blood out the gushing wound in their side.

Maybe you're thinking, hey! I thought you said my character could always do CPR on a dead patient and they'd be fine! And yes, I did say that—thank you for listening. If your character performs CPR on a patient with no pulse and arterial wound, they have not killed their patient. This is because the patient was already dead. They have not "sped up" the bleeding out process because this patient has basically already bled out. So, I'm not blaming your character for anything.

That said, the pro-est of pros will do a blood sweep after finding no pulse and stuff/apply direct pressure/tourniquet as necessary. As an added note, your character with no pulse and the arterial bleed? Probably not going to survive.

This leads me to...

Writing more realistic necromancy

If your character's CPR is successful, your character has just raised the dead. Thinking about it this way can help you write more realistic resuscitation scenes. Here's the number one thing that will make all your CPR more realistic:

Your dead patient does not go from dead to walking and talking in a few seconds.

When the body has no pulse for a while, it gets unhappy. This is because all its internal organs are dying and also because it is dead. CPR replicates the pumping of a heart, but not particularly well. Most people whose organs are all dying don't get that shot of adrenaline to the heart (this is not part of any WFR or EMT protocol but whatever) and then go back to swashbuckling adventure after a quick sip of water.

In fact, in real life, checking the pulse of your patient is an important part of performing CPR because sometimes they come back to life and you don't notice.

So how might you accurately describe someone who's just come back from the dead via CPR (possibly plus defibrillation)? May I recommend some of the following words (no need to cite me—just plop 'em in your writing):

Unconscious

Unmoving

Pale

Clammy

Weak pulse

Non-responsive to pain

Not dead!!!

An added point: absolutely no one whose heart stopped is now "okay" because their heart restarted. They are "not dead" because their heart restarted. Admitedly, not dead is pretty good in the first response business, but they need to see a doctor. As soon as possible. This is because something caused the heart to stop and CPR did not treat that underlying cause. Many people who come back from the dead die again soon after, and could come back and die multiple times before picking a state more permanantly.

Wilderness-Specific CPR

In the wilderness, we have get one (1) special CPR-related ability and that is the ability to stop.

In the US, there's a thing called patient abandonment that can get folks in trouble. Basically, if you start treating a patient, you need to keep treating them until 1) they are dead, 2) they are conscious enough to refuse further treatment and do so, or 3) someone else with an equivalent or higher level of training is treating them (ModN: as a W-EMT this is tricky – it's hard to find people more qualified in the wilderness to hand a patient off to!).

Because WFRs and EMTs cannot declare patients dead, and a dead or unconscious patient cannot refuse treatment, that means you are treating them until someone else is treating them. (As a side note, my first first-aid instructor told the story of performing CPR for 30 minutes in an ambulance on a patient missing part of his brain [this is bad] because the police officer at the scene didn't want to declare him dead on the highway, which would mean shutting down the road for a few hours).

CPR is unique, however, because it's performed on dead patients. The law doesn't want a poor WFR to be stuck in an endless CPR loop because they can't abandon their patient, so in the wilderness only, your character can stop CPR:

After 30 minutes of sustained pulselessness.

If another patient needs more help.

If continuing is dangerous to self or others.

Otherwise, backcountry and frontcountry CPR are pretty similar.

Summary

CPR is generally performed on dead people.

It is difficult to get worse than dead.

Garbage CPR is better than no CPR.

Recovering from being dead takes time and always warrants more care.

WFRs have a superpower and it is called stopping CPR.

Good luck raising your characters from the dead!

#ict #wilderness medicine #cpr #writing advice #writing tips #raising the dead #cycs

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ledenews · 1 year

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Father's Quick Action Saves Daughter's Life

First Aid training can and will help you save the life of another. Thousands of people know this fact each year when they sign up for basic first aid or CPR training certification classes. Most taking these classes never imagine they’ll actually have to use them, let alone on a family member. Last weekend, Rabbi Joshua Lief got to experience that potential nightmare scenario. Fortunately for Lief, his previous training and life experiences prepared him for just such an occasion His daughter was drinking from a Dasani water bottle when she put the cap back on. As children are want to do, she was playing around and squeezed the bottle into her mouth, believing the cap was securely tight atop the bottle. It was not. Water wasn’t the only thing that shot back into her mouth, as the cap rocketed toward the back of her throat and became lodged tight. She wasn’t breathing. “My wife came running in, as they were about to leave to go shopping, and yellow that our daughter was choking,” Lief recalled. “I told her to call 911 and quickly did a finger sweep to see if I could clear her airway that way, but I didn’t succeed. “So I performed the Heimlich, she coughed a little but was still choking, so I did it a second time. It spewed out whatever she ate for lunch, but not the cap.” Lief’s daughter could now talk and, more importantly, breathe. But true, the cap had yet to be located. Might it have been lost in the shuffle? It was certainly small enough. Ironically, a design feature that seeks to lessen the environmental impact of the bottles made it easier for Lief’s daughter to choke upon the cap. Lief noted that the caps used to be 1-inch round in diameter, but because the caps are not one-quarter of an inch in depth, the cap could be swallowed and wedge itself in her esophagus. A Cap’s Whereabouts The question remainder, where was the cap? The family searched for it all around, on the floor, under furniture, but to no avail. What the family did find, however, is that the daughter still was suffering from unusual pains in her upper chest. The Lief family consulted with emergency medical technicians who already arrived on the scene. The general consensus? The cap was swallowed further and still in her body. “She was having sharp pains in her upper chest and we thought maybe the cap was stuck and the EMT folks that had came agreed,” Lief said. “So we went to the hospital and they did CT imaging and determined that it was stuck.” After a CT scan confirmed their worries, the Lief family went to WVU Children’s Hospital in Morgantown, where the piece of plastic was ultimately removed. Thankfully with that ordeal behind them all, Lief’s daughter is on the road to recovery. “Her throat is a little sore and they said it’d be like that for a couple of days,” Lief said. “The benefit for her is that she gets to eat ice cream, milkshakes, and slushies. “The folks are Children’s Hospital were wonderful. The team was excellent and all had incredible bedside manners. The folks at Wheeling and the EMTs were great as well. They did everything they could and, as soon as they realized it was still stuck, they knew we needed to go to a more specialized facility.” That’s Why We Train This was a potentially life-threatening situation that had a happy ending. Lief’s previous training, quick thinking, and calmness in a potentially panic-inducing situation were critical. In Lief’s younger days, both in the Boy Scouts and working as a lifeguard, he took multiple classes both in first aid and CPR, learning the Heimlich in the process. Rabbi Joshua Lief of Temple Shalom in Wheeling It wasn’t the first time necessity dictated he perform the Heimlich, nor a need for Lief to spring into action to help save another’s life. It’s that training and those experiences that allow the father of two to act on instinct when his wife pointed out the urgency of the situation with their daughter. “I took a significant amount of first aid training over the years, so I knew what to do and was able to quickly clear her airway,” Lief said. “Fire and EMTs came very quickly, but had I not cleared her airway, she likely would have passed out and it potentially have become a lot more serious. “I had not done it for a very long time, but on many occasions, I’d performed CPR and life-saving techniques in the past. Knowing some basic first aid and basic life-saving techniques is critical. “It’s like the AEDs at ball fields. You can save someone’s life with it, but if you don’t have the knowledge of how to use one, it’s just a useless piece of equipment.” Lief was a proponent of receiving first aid and associated training before the events of last weekend transpired. Safe to say he’s even more in that camp now. Had he not received previous training, he may have frozen, even for a second or two, when he first learned that his daughter was choking. In a potentially life-threatening situation, every second counts. “The classes I took showed me what to do and to follow through on the procedure,” Lief said. “Every situation is unique and you will never know the exact circumstances, but if you’ve been exposed and learned the training, then you will at least have the chance to deploy those. It’s worth getting yourself that knowledge.” Lief’s daughter most likely agrees with that statement. She’s standing here today in part because of it. Read the full article

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uglymanchronicles · 3 years

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Ugly Man Chronicles Reignition Book 2 Chapter 2: My Breakfast With Evan

Just a couple dudes getting to know each other.

“If you must know,” Evan sighed, spearing a glistening sausage on the end of a flimsy plastic fork, “my jackass older sister thought it would be hilarious to give me a cupcake she'd baked with about a dozen powdered viagra for my fifteenth birthday. I wound up passing out eventually. Burst a lot of blood vessels. Damaged the erectile tissue beyond usefulness.”

Titus froze mid-coffee-sip. “Seriously? What a bitch!”

“Buddy, you don't know the half of it.”

“So... no signs of life down there?”

“Nothing for twelve years.”

“I think I would literally kill myself.”

“It's not so bad, I guess. At least I don't have to drain the blood out of it any more.”

“Eugh! Fuck! Did not need to hear that!”

“Well, maybe you shouldn't ask questions you don't want the answer to.”

“Do you get, like, blue balls all the time, then?”

“That's basically my ground state of being.”

Titus whistled flatly, avoiding looking Evan in the eye. He settled for staring at the table. There wasn't a lot of Evan's face that he felt comfortable looking at; every part seemed to at least be adjacent to some unpleasantry or another. About the only safe area was his right eye, which, as luck would have it, was directly opposite Titus's 'good' eye. Titus rallied and met Evan's gaze again. “Alright, your turn.”

They'd agreed on a sort of mutual interview process, taking turns asking questions to suss out what the other was capable or if he was worth having around. Evan took a bite out of the sausage and chewed thoughtfully for a moment.

“Who's Moreno?”

Titus hissed through his teeth. “A real piece of shit.”

“I'm going to need more than that.”

“I'm getting to it. He's basically, like... a freelance henchman? Like, sort of a mercenary criminal. Sells his services to the highest bidder.”

“And why's he matter?”

“That's another question.”

“No, it is not,” Evan said, quiet and serious. “Do not argue with me in bad faith, Titus. I have very little patience for it in the best of times.”

Titus regarded him for a long moment. The man across from him was wider than the table they sat at. His muscles were so pronounced in some points that Titus could tell when he was about to move by the way they bulged and contracted. Yet he gave the impression that he was constantly trying to pull himself inward, to make himself smaller. He spoke quietly and with a simple formality, but only hours before Titus had watched him single-handedly beat down some of the nastiest people he'd met in the past month.

Hmm.

“Fine. Moreno matters because I'm after the guy he's working for. You see, Moreno isn't just a normal scumbag. He works for people who need nasty things done. Not like regular nasty, either. How much do you actually know about magic?”

“I've got some... notes. So far I'm not able to find a lot of coherent rules. It mostly seems like it relies on things that nobody would normally do.”

Titus snapped his fingers and pointed at Evan. “Hit it right on the head. Rituals, reagents, that kind of thing... the reason—well, one of the reasons—magic doesn't just happen all the time by accident is that it's all weird little things. A lot of the more heavy magic relies on some pretty elaborate and obtuse shit to get it going.”

Evan momentarily thought back to the Book of Fate and his ritual in the woods. “So Moreno does these things for people?”

“Yeah. Thing is, though...” Titus stopped raising a forkful of eggs halfway to his mouth and set it down again, as if he'd momentarily lost his appetite. “The people who use his services generally practice some pretty vile magic. Real depraved shit. And to empower depraved magic, you need depraved rituals. Moreno is the guy you go to when...”

“I think I get it,” Evan interjected, since Titus seemed to be struggling with deciding whether to continue. “Your turn.”

Titus tapped his fingers on the table for a moment, then looked Evan in the eye. “How smart are you?”

The scars on Evan's face squirmed around as he actually smirked. “What kind of question is that?”

“Hey, we agreed no 'whys'.”

“Alright, alright. Well, there's really no objective metric for it, but... I have Master's degrees in computer science and theoretical physics, Bachelor's in those in addition to mathematics and electrical engineering, and associate's degrees and certificates in everything from EMT training to ballet. I should have my doctorate in physics, but...” he said, with a bitterness that Titus made a note of, then changed gears. “Oh, and I also speak Mandarin, Spanish, Japanese, French, and Arabic pretty fluently. I also know ASL. I can get by in German and Russian, too. I don't know if any of that is what you meant but--”

“Jesus, I get it,” Titus muttered, rubbing the side of his head. “How the fuck do you make money?”

“Software consulting, mostly. I specialize in security and processing efficiency. People pay me to break into their systems and then patch the holes, or to make their code run quicker or make their programs smaller. I've got a few patents I've licensed that bring in most of my income nowadays, though.”

“Anything I would have heard of?”

“If you've used a computer made in the last four years it probably has something I wrote integrated somewhere into it. I also helped develop a protein-sequencing program that helped develop a vaccine for this nasty SARS variant that broke out in China last year. They say if they hadn’t nipped it in the bud it could’ve spread worldwide and we’d be looking at millions of deaths by now.”

Titus scrunched up his face. “Oh yeah, just say that like it’s no big deal.”

“I’m just glad it turned out not to be one. What I'd really like to do is get my compression algorithm out there, but if I do that, somebody's going to try to hoard it all for themselves.”

“Are you talking to yourself or me?”

“Look, I... a few years ago I figured out a way to compress memory down by a exponential factor of six with zero loss. All it takes is a couple software plugins that don't take up much room themselves. Essentially, I could make a gigabyte fit in a kilobyte with very little trouble, now that the math's figured out.”

“Holy fuck, that's insane! Why haven't I heard anything about this?”

“Mainly because I don't tell people. If I put it up on the market, some ISP would buy it and bury it. If you make information smaller, you make it faster. Can you imagine what it'd do to internet access if dial-up and barebones cellular networks suddenly had the bandwidth of fiber optics? It would... maybe not revolutionize our society, but it would level a lot of playing fields. Bring a lot of underdeveloped areas of the world—hell, this country—up to modern levels with no extra cost. The telecomms would crash and burn so hard. But I don't have the means to get it out there without going through someone else. Yet,” Evan added. “So I basically work watered-down versions of the compressor into the software I make. Nothing that can be duplicated, and nowhere near its full potential, but enough to get me hailed as some kind of genius and pay the bills.”

“So why aren't you on your own private island or something somewhere instead of puttering around God's Ashtray in a shitty old Bug?”

“Hey, the Beetle is not shitty,” Evan said, defensively. “And I'm just waiting for the AC in my RV to get fixed or I'd be driving that.”

“Oh hot damn! Now that's the way to live!”

“Not the one I'd choose voluntarily, but it could be worse.”

“How come you're doing it, then?”

“I think it's my turn to ask,” Evan said, mildly.

“Fine,” Titus said grumpily, crossing his arms.

“How do you make money?”

“That's easy. I'm basically a freelance bailbondsman. I just roam around, drop my advertising around bars and courthouses.”

“You get many clients that way?” Evan asked, cocking his remaining eyebrow.

“Oh, you'd be amazed how desperate people can get,” Titus said, shrugging. “Of course, they're usually not the most responsible people, so when they bounce, I track 'em down myself, drag ‘em back to jail, get the money back. My eye usually makes it super easy. Sometimes they don't even see me before I get the cuffs on 'em.”

“Why did you feel the need to rob a bunch of drug dealers, then? The thrill of it?”

“I had a pressing need for a large amount of cash that my normal work doesn't bring in. That got me enough to hold it off for a while. My turn.”

Evan waved down a waitress for a refill of his coffee, trying not to take it personally when she gasped upon seeing his face. “Go ahead…”

“No, no, hang on.” Titus waved a hand dismissively. “I want to try something. Take your hair out of the ponytail.”

“What? Why?”

“Humor me.”

Evan groaned and reached back, removing his hair tie. After shaking his head, his hair fell over his face, obscuring everything but his nose and mouth. Titus pursed his lips and regarded him seriously for a moment.

“Can you see?”

“Yeah, I guess. Well enough to not walk into things, I think, and I could probably read if I had to.”

Titus snapped his fingers. “Good. Go with that from now on.”

“Why?”

“Because now you don’t look like God’s mistake. Now you look like a big, dumb-but-lovable goon. Like Jack Black would voice you in a cartoon.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“Do you like seeing people contemplating their own mortality and the general cruel absurdity of the tragic farce that is human existence when they get a glimpse of your face?”

Evan felt his cheeks burn and was actually grateful his hair was covering most of his face. “…not particularly, no.”

“Then there you go. You’re welcome. Okay, question time. Uh… how did you get your powers?”

“Which one?”

“Oh, now who’s arguing in bad faith? Fucking all of them, you thick-lipped gargoyle.”

Evan had the feeling he hit a sore spot. Titus's easy-going, jocular tone had bled away from him, leaving behind the hard-edged razor-blade of a man that had ambushed him the night before. He decided not to belabor the point.

“I don't know why I can rege—why I heal so quickly. No, I'm serious, as far as I know, it just started happening sometime in the past few months. I can't remember. Don't look at me like that, I'll get to that in a minute. When I was younger I recovered from a lot of injuries a lot quicker than the doctors thought I would, so maybe it's something I was born with and it just got stronger recently for some reason.”

Evan took a sip of coffee, mainly to buy a few seconds to think of how much to explain for the next part.

“The ability to shut off powers... that's part of, well, I guess you'd call it a magic ritual, because I don't know what else to call it. I found a weird old book that said it contained the key to making someone an instrument of universal justice, or something of the sort. Since then I can see... I guess they're souls? Maybe? I can sort of move mine and when I run it into someone else's it seems like I can shut off their powers. Or... take them entirely, if they're dying.”

“Horseshit!” Titus scoffed. “That's... that's like meta-magic. I don't even know if that's real.”

“No, seriously! I don't think it's just magic powers, I think it... 'normalizes' things.” He briefly recounted his encounter with the pain monster.

“Are you kidding me? That...” Titus took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair, exhaling slowly and loudly. “Look, I don't know much, but the fact that you even ran into something like that, let alone survived... those odds are astronomical. And you say you negated not just its powers, but its whole form?”

“Yeah. Once I... reached into it, like I did with you—oh don't make that face. Grow up—I kind of disrupted what made it... different, I guess? Like I cut it off from its special qualities. Like it was...”

“Disjuncted,” Titus cut in.

“Yeah, that's a good word for it. Like the old Mordenkainen spell?”

“Fucking nerd.”

“Eat my ass. Anyway, after I killed it, I was able to reach into its... soul? Animating force? Aura? I don't know what to call it. I was able to grab something and pull it out and it just got pulled into me.”

“Not aura.”

“What?”

“Aura's a different thing,” Titus said, dismissively. “So what did you get from doing that?”

“I.. I feel pain differently. I don't flinch or get adrenaline rushes from injuries that don't actually impede my ability to function. I think I have a better sense of what is actually dangerous to my body now. It still hurts, but I don't react to pain like people normally do. It's like...hmm.” Evan drummed his fingers on the table. “Do you know anything about video games? Fighting games, specifically?”

“I used to fuck around on an old Alpha 3rd Strike cabinet when I was a kid. Why?”

“Do you know what 'super armor' is?”

“Isn't that where a move can't get stopped by being hit when you're doing it?”

“Right. I'm kind of like that now. Pain doesn't interrupt me.”

“Fucking nerd.”

Evan's fist involuntarily clenched. “I'm trying to put this in terms you can understand, you stupid reprobate. My experience with your judgment thus far hasn't given me much faith in your intellect.”

Titus burst out laughing. “So he does know how to banter! I thought you might be one of those Rainman types.”

“Oh sure, call it 'banter' to try to excuse the fact that you've been insulting me for the past half hour. Do you say you're ‘just joking’ when people get mad at you for saying stupid shit, too?”

“C'mon, lighten up! We're partners now! Tell me more about this soul thing. I still think you're full of shit.”

Evan sighed through his nose, then held up his left hand, forming his fingers into a circle and peering through them.

“Yours is... a sort of cross between a sea green and an oil slick. The tendrils of it keep reaching out and snapping back, going all over the place. It seems to keep expanding and contracting. It's almost flickering, like... it's indecisive. Very chaotic. The tendrils that aren't snapping around seem to be kept pretty close to your body, wrapping around you like... I can't tell if it's protective or restrictive.”

Titus's expression slowly became serious. “What does that mean?”

“I don't know. I have a lot of theories, but nothing solid to go on. I'm not sure if it's allegorical or a literal representation of a person's... power, maybe? Yours definitely looks a lot different than most people's.”

“I don't believe this for a second. Let me see.”

“How would I do tha—hey!”

Titus grabbed Evan's wrist and held his hand up to his eye. “Ho-lee...”

He pulled back from Evan's hand, staring at him. Then he looked around the room, mouth slack as he took in the diner's other occupants.

“Huh. Did you know it keeps working until you blink?” He said after a moment, a faraway tone to his voice.

“I didn't even know other people could do it,” Evan said, awe in his voice. “Hey, wow, you're right!”

“Jesus, yours is, like, really blue. It looks like... a bunch of steel cables. It's weird, I felt like I both could and couldn't see the edges of it...”

“I can kind of move it, but I'm not sure if I can do anything with it beyond interfering with people's powers. It's like learning to use a muscle you didn't know you had.”

“Huh.” Titus was again silent for a long moment. “Your turn.”

“Can you do anything else supernatural? Besides your time-eye?”

“Don't call it that, it sounds stupid. And... sorta. I seem to have whatever innate talent you need to actually do magic, but it's not like it's easy to find instructions. Most of the people I know who can use it just dabble with half-broken magic items—wands, amulets, charms,” he pulled the silence charm out from under his coat and bounced it at the end of its chain. “I guess I'm sort of a dabbler. I know a few tricks, I can use a lot of magic tools, I can sense magic pretty well, I can dowse... Most of the time I really never have to use anything besides the eye, though.”

“Is the eye all-or-nothing?”

“Yeah. It's not nearly as useful as you'd think, but any edge is an edge.”

“When I turned off your power and it was coming back, though, you started speeding up—or, I guess, everything else was slowing down? You were moving faster, one way or the other. You were able to touch me, and those punches hurt.”

“Huh, yeah, you're right.”

“Do you think there's a way you could learn to only partially activate it?”

“That'd be great, wouldn't it? Thing is, just using it is a huge strain, and that time spend outside of time adds up. Going by normal calendar time I'm only 26.”

“Fuck, I'm 27!” Evan laughed.

“Yeah, well, I'd rather be prematurely gray than what you've got going on. My turn. Uh... huh, I can't really think of anything else. Uh... are you gay?”

“Are you fucking serious?”

“No, but the question still counts.”

“I'm bi,” Evan mumbled, crossing his arms across his prodigious chest. “Not that it matters. And before you ask, no, you are not my type. We're done talking about this.”

“Huh. You ever sucked--”

“We. Are. Done. Talking about this.”

“Fine, God. Go.”

Evan mentally circled back to an earlier question he felt hadn't been properly answered. “Why are you after Moreno?”

To Evan's surprise, Titus didn't hesitate. “I'm actually after his current boss. He's just the best lead I have to go on.” He took a deep breath, then started talking with a rushed, deadpan pace, as if he was eager to get the words out as quickly as possible so they wouldn't be in his mouth very long.

“Moreno is working for a guy only known as the Soultaker. He has an innate supernatural ability to pull a person's soul out of their body. When that happens, the person just... shuts down, usually. No motive force behind them. Eventually they just die of dehydration, usually. I've seen some people so set in routine that they keep going without a soul, but... it's not really life.

“It seems like the extraction process takes a while, so he can't just walk past you on the street and pickpocket your entire essence. So he needs people rounded up for him, held until he can do his nasty juju. So that's where a degenerate like Moreno comes in.

“So when he pulls out a soul, it, well, it looks like this.”

Titus pulled a battered, faded Crown Royale bag out of his jacket. It bulged strangely and made a quiet clacking when he set it on the table. He pulled out what looked like a large marble, or maybe a dull pearl, and handed it to Evan.

Evan brushed his hair out of his eyes and peered into the milky depths of the sphere. After a few moments of staring, the murky clouds inside the thing seemed to clear and a face floated to the surface. A black man, maybe in his late 40s, going thin on top. His eyes were closed and he appeared to be sleeping, but his expression had a look of discomfort to it, as if he was having a bad dream.

“Jesus Christ,” Evan whispered, “I've seen this guy... Martell Calloway? I saw some news article about how his family found him tied up in his apartment and completely comatose! But he didn't have any injuries beyond being a black eye... so he's dead?”

“Life support,” Titus said, taking Mr. Calloway's soul back from Evan's unresisting fingers, “technically, he's one of the lucky ones. They found his body before it wasted away to nothing, and I was able to intercept his soul before it got to a buyer.”

“Why would someone buy something like this? What use is it? Can you fix him?”

“A human soul is a damn near exhaustible arcane battery,” Titus said gravely. In the split second between sentences, Evan noticed something—after he'd put the bag back into his jacket, Titus surreptitiously touched a pocket on the other side of his jacket, as if he was making sure something was still there.

“If you know what you're doing, you can power a lot of magic using a soul. And you can reuse them as long as you don't overdo it. If you know what you're doing, you can wring all but the last drops of essence out of a soul and let it heal or recover or whatever, and it'll eventually be back to full strength. Very resilient things,” Titus continued. “I don't think they're conscious in there, but... anyway, it's supposed to be really hard to extract a soul. But this guy was born with or spontaneously developed or somehow figured out a shortcut to the whole process. So the market is getting flooded with torture-batteries and ECUs are getting flooded with vegetables. And families are winding up with loved ones who are as good as dead, without having any idea why this happened to them. Dozens of them have been taken off life support in the past few months. Half these souls have no body to return to. And no, I can't fix it. At least not yet,” he sighed again. “I was hoping once I found him, I could somehow get the secret out of him or force him to put them back, or... maybe I thought if I killed him it'd reverse the effect. He needs killing, either way.”

Titus's eye widened as a thought struck him and he looked Evan in the eye for the first time since he'd started the story. Evan realized what he was thinking and looked down at the tattoo on his left arm, flexing his fingers.

“If you can take people's powers after they die...”

“...then we can save these people.”

Titus put a hand over his mouth and for a moment Evan thought he saw his eye well up.

“I'm in,” Evan said, a sense of righteous purpose welling in his heart. “I don't really know what the universe wants, but I doubt... I know it's not this. We'll find him, we'll stop him, and we'll save as many of these people as we can.”

“...thanks,” Titus mumbled behind his hand. He swallowed hard, then seemed to come back to himself. “We're back to square one, though.”

“You said you could dowse? Like, for real?”

“Yes, for real. I can find things and people with the pendulum method. It's handy for tracking down bounties.”

“Why don't you dowse Moreno?”

“Why didn't I think of that?!” Titus said incredulously, smacking his forehead. “Because he's warded. He's not magic himself, but he's collected enough gear through his career that my normal methods don't work.”

Evan rubbed his chin. “What if we used an abnormal method?”

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

An hour later, they were in the RV. Titus was poring over the collection of Evan's notes and the strange papers he'd bought from Delmann's shop. Evan was very carefully slicing a strip of skin from his own ankle up all the way up his leg. The Guiding Light—the Finder's Follysat on the table between them, filled with fresh blood.

“Even if this works, he's going to know we're coming,” Titus muttered, engrossed in the pages. “Remember what I said?”

“That's why we're not going to look for him,” Evan said, adjusting his grip on the potato peeler. “I don't know how we'd even write his name. Can you read that, by the way?”

“Kind of. This is... most of this is written in, like, arcane pidgin. Who compiled these notes?”

“I did, I think.”

“You think?”

“Oh yeah, I forgot to clarify on that. Apparently a couple months ago, before the ritual, I drilled a hole in my own brain to erase some kind of very dangerous memory.”

“You what.”

“That's not a metaphor or anything. Really did it. I could show you the video.”

“I'll pass. So you don't remember where this came from?” Titus shook the Book of Fate at him.

“Nope.”

“Jesus shit, do you have any idea--”

“How reckless that was? Yeah, yeah, I'm still here and I'm the answer to your fuckin' prayers, aren't I?” Evan gave a whoop as the peeling skin reached his thigh. “Got it this time!” he said cheerfully, snipping the flesh-ribbon off with scissors.

“God, that's so fucking gross. Anyway, you haven't explained how we're going to use that thing to find Moreno.”

“We don't set it to look for him. We look for somewhere he's been. Maybe the last place he slept. Do you think you can describe him well enough in that language for it to work?”

Titus looked like he might actually be impressed, but he hid it well. “Yeah, probably.”

“Good. I've got a dictionary I've put together on that tablet next to you, but I'm not sure how accurate it is. Maybe it'll help?”

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

Two hours later, they had it.

Find where a man born between the 27th and 28th north parallels during a new moon under the sign of capricorn with black hair and green eyes who has killed at least 10 people slept in the past week.

They really had to squeeze the letters in, but when Evan put a flame to the wick, it sprung to life, wavered for a moment, and then pointed east. Both men cheered. Evan threw Titus the keys.

“Drive! Drive north until I tell you otherwise!”

While Titus started the engine, Evan spread a map of the United States on the table in front of the lamp, then produced a protractor and a notebook from a drawer. “Okay, you bastard... let's see where you've been hiding...”

It took three days—one spent driving north, one spent driving back to where they'd started, and one spent driving south. While Titus drove, Evan made meticulous notes of the flame's direction, marking angles on the map. Finally he threw the pencil down triumphantly.

“He's in Salt Lake City.”

“Well, that narrows it down a little, I guess. So what, do we just go there and hope this thing points us in the right direction?”

“Too slow,” Evan called, stepping back into what used to be his bedroom and sitting at his computer. “Now I work my magic.”

After parking, Titus walked back to look over Evan's shoulder. The half-dozen monitors on the wall were flickering between rapidly-changing pictures of faces and what appeared to be CCTV footage.

“What is this?”

“This,” Evan said with dramatic pride, “is Blaccat. Facial recognition algorithms that the CIA wishesit had. I actually started working on it years ago before I thought about the implications of it, but I shelved it. I figured since I may be needing to, uh...”

“Be Batman?”

“...yeah...that I should get back to work on it. Right now it's comparing faces to the description you gave me and cycling through every damn security camera in the city looking for it.”

“How illegal is this?”

“Soooooo illegal.”

“Oh, hey, can you get into police department records?”

“Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

“See if you can get into the Las Vegas mugshots from... February 2019. Run your face-recognition thingy there.”

“Alright.... and... is that our boy?”

A handsome Latino man in his early 30s with shoulder-length jet-black hair and piercing green eyes stared at them from over a booking clipboard.

“That's him,” Titus breathed.

“Perfect! Now I just have to feed that into... wow.” Evan made a gesture and a black and white video popped up on the biggest monitor. The man in the mugshot was walking along the street, flanked by a short stocky man in bandanna and a lanky man with the ugliest white-boy dreads Evan had ever seen.

“That's him! Where is that? When is that?”

Evan grinned up at Titus. “That's live. I can track him and put us at the nearest intersection.”

Titus smiled, eye overbright, and began breathing heavily through his nose. “We got him.”

Evan met his eye and nodded. “Let's get him.”

#my writing #urban fantasy #ugly man chronicles: reignition

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