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chezzywezzy · 2 years

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Yandere Pennywise (2/2)

Word count ; 3.6k

‘ROBERT ‘BOB’ GRAY, FORMER VICTIM AND CURRENT ASSAILANT, BURNS LOCAL SCHOOLHOUSE DOWN’

‘Mid-afternoon, many students were inside the classroom learning. Robert ‘Bob’ Gray, a man who was once pitied for losing everything in a fire, was found setting the entire school ground ablaze. It is hypothesized that he first poured gasoline around the outside before setting it on fire, successfully trapping all the children inside to burn.

‘Families are outraged, but it seemed that he trapped himself inside, as well. Some of the corpses were found with other wounds aside from burning. Some were stabbed and slaughtered by hand. His body wasn’t found, but with the entire building turned to ashes, officials are skeptical that he escaped and it assumed that he intended to commit suicide…’

I blinked. Something was so very eery about the article. My eyes flitted up to the photo itself. It showed but a pile of ash and degraded stone where a schoolhouse once towered. The woodlands surrounding it were untouched and the photo seemed to be taken in the middle of the day.

And that’s when I noticed it. Standing amongst the pile, frozen in time, was that damned clown. I gulped, wanting nothing more than to shove the paper in because I finally had some insight to it all. However, I was seemingly entranced, leaning closer to the photo.

The clown tilted its head and waved.

I blinked, thinking of it to be nothing. But even when my eyes opened once more, it was still waving. A shriek of fear escaped as I pushed it back into the folder. I was panting profusely from the sight and put it away. Or, planned to, but was cut short.

I heard the familiar grunts and giggles I turned, and in the dim lighting, I saw an entire line of my former classmates emerge from behind one of the shelves.They were just as distraught and disgusting as usual. I didn’t have a gun on me, so all I knew to do was grasp the keys tightly, painfully, and dash past them.

I panted as I tried to shove past the various archives. I felt terrible as I knocked over several of the boxes, but they got in the path of the makeshift zombies. I was truly about to pass out from fear. I didn’t even bother flicking off the light, racing up the stairs.

I threw the door open. I slammed against the silent library wall. I was panicked, and it was clear as Beverly emerged from one of the shelves, clearly bewildered. She gasped in concern, noticing my disheveled appearance. I slammed the door behind me and pressed my back to it.

“What happened? Are you alright?”

I shook my head. I was about to blabber about the evil clown and the walking dead, but I caught myself. Instead, I stuttered,” Spiders. There are really, really big spiders down there.”

She froze in place clearly not expecting me to have reacted so strongly to the small critters. And I wouldn’t have. But what I saw down there was far more frightening that giant spiders. It was my past, being controlled by some evil clown.

“Only spiders?”

“Yep. Thanks for the help, Bev.”

I shoved the key into her chest. He caught it, although was still clearly shocked. I began speed-walking away, not giving the woman the chance to reprimand or question me further. I needed sustenance, sleep, and general mental recovery.

Immediately.

~~~

“You don’t look like you’ve been sleeping well, honey.”

No shit, dad. I was either going insane or this town was haunted by some revenge-bound clown ghost. Either possibility had driven me to nightmares last night. All I could see were glowing red eyes in a dark cave. And I knew that the beast had to have some sort of headquarters where I could kill it.

How I could kill it was the only remaining question.

The first thing that came to mind was shotguns and fire. If fire killed the monster once, it would sure as hell do it again, right?

So, after making another pitstop at the gun store, I got gasoline and a lighter, and many, many bottles. The cash register recognized me and was clearly questioning what the hell I needed it all for, but I played it off. That everything was for general recreational use.

So, I was driving around the town. I knew that, whatever that house meant, it had to be where the root of the problem started. And I was led to believe that the house that burned down was just it. I was driving down a backwoods road, and it opened up to a hidden countryside. The pale yellow grass covered both sides of the road. There was a distant forest, but it was a nice field in the meantime.

There wasn’t a house in the area, it seemed, so I sped up ever so slightly. I kept my eyes trained on the road ahead, but one glance to the side made me recognize the semi-rebuilt and abandoned house from the fire so very long ago. I gasped quietly.

Just as I turned my attention back to the road, I recognized the clown. He was standing in the center of the road, waving eagerly. A scream escaped, and as badly as I wanted to have mown down the asshole, I swerved the steering wheel out of habit.

My scream echoed in the tiny car as I crashed through the weak white picket fence. My foot was slamming onto the breaks desperately and my life flashed in front of my eyes. But then, all at once, it came to a screeching halt as I slammed right into a small, yet firm tree.

Sparks flew from the engine. I panted profusely, my grip on the steering wheel tight and deadly. Some of my items had rolled off the seat beside me. They clanked against the gasoline canister. I was still preparing myself, stunned and frozen in place.

Suddenly, a knock came from the passenger window. I turned, gasping as I saw the clown there, crouching down. It was so human-like. Its movements, when its head wasn’t rolling away from the body, was so normal. If I didn’t know better and if he had disguised himself any better, I would’ve thought it was just some guy.

But it wasn’t. It was a murderous clown that was holding my dear brother captive.

I grit my teeth and grabbed my stuff. I moved quickly, undoing my seatbelt. My gaze didn’t leave the clown and I reached for the door. I swung it open and ducked my body out of the crushed vehicle. However, as I peered over the car the clown had seemingly disappeared.

Shivers rolled down my spine. I turned, marching right up the steps. The building had seemingly been remade but was abandoned regardless. The right of the building was rather tilted and the wood was rotted and broken. The windows were shattered and covered in newspapers.

I peered over my shoulder one last time. My heart thudded erratically in my chest. I was ready, and as I saw the clown standing in the road, still waving and grinning. I knew Robert ‘Bob’ Gray was, too, or whatever remnants remained from the possessed demon clown.

The front door opened with ease. I bit my lip and went inside. I scanned the area. To my left was a burnt crisp of a living room, and to my right was a fairly average extension of that plus a kitchen. I didn’t dare look out the window to see if the clown was still there; I knew he wouldn’t be.

And clearly, as I looked over the area, the devil spawn’s house wasn’t downstairs.

I began walking up some steps. I gulped as they creaked loudly beneath my weight. Some of the steps were broken and cracked in half. The house was eerily silent for something that was supposed to be possessed. And one supposed that the clown was trying to prevent me from reaching its secret hideaway.

But it wanted me to find him. That much was clear.

He wanted to see me try and kill him.

And kill him I would.

I made it to the top. I noticed many closed doors, but there was one in front of me cracked open ever so slightly. With the tip of my flame thrower, I pushed it open. The shotgun was strapped over my back and the rope tied around my shoulders. The first aid kit was tied to a belt loop, tapping against my upper thigh with each step I took.

Inside the room were many, many things. But, most noticeable, was a well. I furrowed my brows and checked the room for any signs of enemies to fight, but it was still empty. And yet, as I inched forward, the door slammed behind me.

I stood in front of the well. I wanted to back down. But I was fucked if I did and so was my dear brother, Mike. This was for him. And clearly, this clown had a knack for fighting kids. Not a grown-ass adult. That gave me the upper hand in this situation.

I crouched down and began lowering the rope. I couldn’t see into the darkness below, but I trusted that there was something. After that, I attached it to the side. I tested the rope, hoping it was sturdy enough to hold my weight plus a large gun plus a flame thrower plus other miscellaneous objects.

It seemed to hold.

And so, I took the next step to the terrifying adventure. I lowered my body into the well. The rope swung and it was hard to climb down, so very tempted to just slide all the way. And yet, the adrenaline gave me strength. One step at a time, I lowered myself.

I was completely submerged in darkness, except for the entrance to the well above me. It grew distant, but from the bottom, I heard dripping water. It echoed loudly. It sounded like some sort of cavern.

And then, suddenly, my body tensed. From above, I heard howling, high-pitched laughter. I tilted my head up as the rope started tilting. A scream seized in my throat in horror as I realized the clown was above, and in his claws fingers, he held the rope. He was grinning, taunting me.

“Fuck you!” I shouted angrily.

“Wrong answer, pal.”

With his other finger, he sliced the rope. The scream finally escaped as my body tumbled into the darkness. The rope had been cut, yet I gripped it so tightly in hopes it would magically reconnect. It didn’t, but not even a few seconds later, my body collided with the ground.

My head had hit a spiky rock. My vision spun and I saw stars. My body was contorted strangely and everything ached. My fingers itched to be ready to kill a bitch, but I had to recuperate. As I grew conscious again, I realized I was in a cave. It was dimly lit by oddly modern and romantic candles with a scent of lavender, stuck into the wall.

As I sat up, I realized the only path to go was straight. The terrain was rocky and there was a thin layer of water, shimmering menacingly. I pushed myself to my feet, panting slightly. I began walking, although I had a prominent limp.

It took a solid ten minutes - or, it felt like it, at least - before I ended up anywhere. The path began to widen and the light became more natural. As I stepped out into an open room, horror dawned on me. There was a large, tall entrance, and at the top of the ‘ceiling’, there was another well. Hanging from balloons, in the middle of the room, were dozens of children. Each of them were sad and unmoving, their corpses swinging to even the slightest breeze.

A scream echoed from my lips. I took in every detail. Some weren’t wearing the most modern of clothing, while others could’ve been swiped off the street just yesterday. My eyes searched desperately for my brother, Mike, but my attention flitted elsewhere.

Lining the opposite cave walls were various newspapers, photos, and journals. I made my way over, flame thrower poised and prepared. I gulped at the intensity of the tiny room, even though it was currently deserted. With squinted eyes, I took in the details of the articles.

One I recognized instantly. I was taken aback by how preserved it was. The same exact article, with the wife’s face scratched out, was preserved. A thumb tack hung it up, but because of the sheer hoard of documents, I had to pluck it free.

It was the same article. But, as I scanned it further, the woman, Y/n Gray, looked exactly like me. A slightly older version, probably around the age of twenty-five like Robert Gray, though. I let it float to the ground as horror dawned on me. Photo after photo was on the wall, and most uncanny of all, they all looked like me.

As I scooted down to find one that clearly wasn’t, I realized. I recognized several college photos of me, somehow plucked from frames at home. I tugged the free in terror before crumpling them in my fists angrily. I continued to do that, because whatever this freak clown was on, he mistook whatever preexisting lover he had for me.

And, because of that, Mike was paying the price.

“Now that’s not very nice.”

I swerved, automatically pulling the trigger. However, the voice echoed, and as the smoke cleared, there was no sign of the horrible demon. It was so silent, in fact, that I heard birds chirping from overhead.

I gulped. My eyes continued to scan the floating children for my brother, but I couldn’t. That had hope flourish within me that Mike was somehow alive. And that idea was reinforced further when I heard a struggling cough from a dark corner.

I froze in place. Crawling from an unknown area was my brother. He was coxed in blood and dirt and looked so very hungry. He was weak. He’d been trapped far too long. He reached a hand out toward me as he stumbled, and my heart melted.

“Y/n, help me!”

I surveyed the room. It was so suspicious. The little boy was trotting eagerly toward me, arms outstretched. My eyes scanned the floating children, searching for any blotches of bright orange that could be him. My heart thudded anxiously in my chest.

I couldn’t find Mike. But I also sure as hell didn’t trust the tiny child a few feet away from me. I gulped, tears threatening to spill. And then, I pressed the ignition, pointing the flamethrower at the kid.

For a moment, regret washed over me as the boy lit up into flames. He flailed and screamed at the top of his lungs, but remained in the spot he was. I took a few steps back, tears sliding down my cheeks. I fucked up. I fucked up. I fucked up —

And suddenly, the scream became something angrier. Far more high-pitched. Although the skin was flaky and ashen, it all started to morph and reform, the fire extinguishing. From the ashes, that damned clown… no. I realized it was still that horrible monster.

And yet, it was taking the form of something far more human. The same man from the photographs. Robert ‘Bob’ Gray.

He looked pissed, though. As he completely formed, I went to get him ablaze once more. And yet, the flame thrower was null and empty. After one final spurt of fire, it died down. And, as the demon watched this, he grinned. Widely, and then even wider. His fists unclenched and one hand raised toward me.

An amused grin stretched onto the monster’s face. He took a step closer. I took one back. He took another step closer. And I, another one back.

I shrieked out of frustration. All at once, the truth of the situation hit me like a freight train. Mike was dead. This demon tricked me. And now, I was dead, too.

I pulled the strap over my shoulder. I threw the flame thrower right at him, but he stood strong. It fell to his feet, and he let out an amused, bellowing laugh. Far deeper in tone than it had ever been before. And then, stepping over the machinery, he kept backing me up toward the corner.

I lifted the shotgun. I was hyper-focused, doing everything I needed to in a millisecond. And the moment everything was set, I shot.

The man only stumbled back somewhat. But the bullet was absorbed nonetheless. The grin continued to wide, unnaturally so. I shot again, but the gun yielded no results. I was fucked. It was impossible to kill.

After one final step, I felt the cave wall behind me. I pressed myself against it, fingers digging into the dirt. As a last resort, I burst into tears on the spot. The demon’s smile stretched and circled the entirety of his face. And then, it all caved in. He was right in front of me, tearing the gun from my grip in one fell swoop.

Underneath the facade was teeth. So many teeth. There were rows upon rows, like a shark about to devour its prey. A roar escaped, causing the entire cavern to shake and tremble. I shrunk my body as much as humanly possible. I was utterly frightened to the core, and tilted my head away.

I wasn’t sure how long I was exposed to the teeth. I squeezed my eyes shut, expecting to be eaten then and there. I wasn’t dumb. I realized the implications the minute I walked in here. The clown ate the children, and I was surely next. I was going to die because I stupidly thought I had an ounce of strength within me —

Everything fell silent. But I didn’t trust it. For a while, I stay there, frozen. And then, I felt it. A soft, human hand gliding across my skin and cupping my cheek. I dared to open one eye. It was Robert ‘Bob’ Gray, in the flesh, and any anger had seemingly dissolved into what I could only describe as a lovesick madness.

I squeaked fearfully. “Please. Y - you don’t have to do this! I don’t know what you want from me, b - but I’m not who you’re looking for!”

A smile twitched and tugged at the manic demon’s lips. He tilted his head ever so slightly. There was almost a fond look in his eyes. “Oh, but I do. And you are.”

He tilted my head. His thumb drifted underneath my eye, swiping away the onslaught of tears. I bit my lip, not daring to move. His yellow-slitted eyes were unnatural. A stark reminder of the horrifying clown it tended to take its appearance as.

“Returned to me at last…” he hummed fondly. “Just as it should be.”

“I’m not her. It’s all coincidence!”

“You sure seem like her to me.”

Silence fell between us. His eyes scanned every inch of me, as though he were doing a double-take. I gulped, waiting for anything. I’d rather die than be a captive and starve to death in a cave. This was never supposed to happen. How had things gone so terribly wrong?

“Your fear amuses me. You don’t remember. But you will.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. It was so odd to have such a demonic creature kiss my forehead so gently. It was positive I was its old lover, even though all we shared was the same appearance. Everything was wrong, so very wrong.

“Now… you’ll float too, my love.”

#yandere #x reader #x y/n #self insert #yandere x reader #yandere slashers #it chapter two #yandere it #it stephen king #it x reader #it 2017 #yandere pennywise #pennywise #pennywise the dancing clown #pennywise x reader #it movie #stephen kings it #it 1990

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im-totally-not-an-alien-2 · 2 years

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Halloween prompts no. 10

The demons instructions had been clear. Infiltrate the house the new Lazarus pit had taken over and report back. They were six highly trained assasins. This should have been easy.

The city of "Amity Park" had randomly appeared in the woodlands of Illinois with no warning or reason. All the buildings were in ruin and looked like no one had lived there for years, yet no vegetation had reclaimed them. The house the pit was in was the most eerie thing however. A thick glowing ooze seeped from the darkened windows, metal supports jutted up from the top of the building from where they had supported something massive once upon a time. He was embarrassed to admit he just now realized that the entire city was completely silent. Even the animals that should be out this time of night were no where to be found. Odd.

The Lazarus House- as he'd taken to calling it- opened its front door as they approached. The long unnerving squeal from the henges truly set the horror movie tone. It felt like something inside was mocking them. Daring them to come inside. Entering they found the living room to be a completely ordinary, save for the fact that all the decor and electronics were decades out of date and the glowing green ooze was all over everything casting a dim grow on the entire space. There seemed to be writing on the walls made in the slime, but they had no idea what it meant. Thankfully their goggles were capable of both video and audio recording as well as establishing a live feed from which the Demons Head was no doubt currently watching.

They came across a door with glow in the dark star stickers and space shuttles on it, but the door wouldn't budge. Even using explosives on it didn't seem to phase it at all. They came across another door with the name Jasmine spelt across it and this door opened easily enough inside was a very feminine room loaded with pinks and lace save for the window which was just as blacked and ooze filled as the others and filled with a heavy sadness. The saw a laptop and made a note to retrieve it on thier way out.

It didn't take long after that for things to start going to crap. First, one of his team had mysteriously disappeared. Then one of the doors slammed shut immediately after one of them entered and he knew that the screams that followed would haunt him for the rest of his life. Things continued this way with thier team being picked off one by one until he was the only one left.

He sprinted down the stairs after his attempts at breaking one of the windows proved futile and would up in the basement, which turned out to be the location of the pit. The vibes this room gave off were comforting on the surface, but had an undercurrent of apprehension. Like someone was holding thier breath and waiting for something to happen. This place seemed to be a lab of some sort with metal walls, scientific equipment strewn about and a machine in the far wall making large gaping hole that sparked with electricity every so often. His focus snapped back to the pit once he realized there was something moving in it. His other assasins? No. It was a single figure and far too small.

A white haired child floated to the surface of the pit, glowing just as brightly as the waters themselves and his eyes were filled with that God awful green. Instead of enraged he seemed distracted, dazed-as if half caught in a dream. "No, you're not the one." He said blankly, no emotion evident in his voice.

And then everything was black.

Ras Al Ghul stared at the screen, contemplating. A child living in a Lazarus pit? How would that effect the body? Was this child perhaps created by the Lazarus pit? Was that why he could seemingly control it?

---

Red Robin looked at the house warily, then back at Jason who was refusing the leave the vehicle they have in. Jason had tried to stop him from leaving it as well but that didn't work out very well for him.

He swears the house welcomed him in. Every door his came across was shut tight and wouldn't budge no matter what he did. The only exceptions were the door to the pink room where he found and retrieved a laptop and the door that lead to the basement were the Pit was most likely to be. Finally resolving to go down there he stood on the stairs as the door slammed shut behind him.

Taking a steadying breath he walked down to investigate the obvious lab, starting with the large hole in the wall. He was careful not to go inside it and get shocked by the electricity sparking in it. He stuck a USB stick into one of the nearby machines and began downloading whatever information was on them when he hard something behind him.

Spinning around he saw nothing. Wandering over to the pit he reached down to collect a sample when a white gloved hand grabbed his wrist from the waters. A figure slowly emerged with white hair and familiar glowing green eyes, "Its you. You're the one from my visions."

Tim only had time to hold his breath as he was dragged under. The...pit creature held his wrists as his legs fused together and formed a tail that was then used to wrap around his own legs, keeping his pinned at the bottom of the pit. During his thrashing he looked over and saw another boy that looked exactly like the one that was drowning him but the outfit and hair was the opposite of the original. It was by staring into the black haired teens glassy blue eyes did he realize what he was looking at.

A corpse.

He was going to die. This guy was going to kill him. It was only after the panic left him along with his breath that the infamous calmness that came with drowning seeped in and he heard what the being had been saying to him, I'm so sorry. I never wanted this. At least I can teach you how to use your powers

Powers?

Yes, so many powers! Flight, intagibility, plasma blasts, telekinesis-

Red Robin wanted to listen more even if to only gain a better grasp on this things abilities but he was fading fast. He was dying.

Soon

Tim didn't know what that meant since he was very clearly dying and just before everything went black he felt a kiss be placed on his forehead.

Thank you

The next think he knew he was waking up to the worst pain he had ever felt in his life. He was being electrocuted. No, he wasn't being killed again he was being resuscitated. He gasped as he sat up hurriedly only to realize he was still in the pit. Oddly enough all the pit water was gone and he and that guys corpse were laying on the dry ground inside of it.

A pained groan from the teenager next to him made him switch gears. He was alive? The boy immediately apologized to him after he came to, but wouldn't say anything other than that he was sorry. He grabbed Tim's wrist and flew them out of the pit. It was then that he noticed all the goo was gone but he didn't have time to question it as the other teenager flew them up and through the ceiling and out the front door. They stood there for a moment, silent while Tim watched the other boy shiver. Probably in shock, he thought. This must have been traumatic for the guy, heck it was for him.

It was then that Jason charged at them, not ran, charged and punched the other guy in the face, "What did you do to him?!"

"I'm sorry!" The other guy cried from his place on the ground.

Red Hood aimed his gun, "What did you do?!"

Tim reached out intending to stop Hood from shooting someone when he noticed his gloves were white instead of black. His heart dropped when he looked down at himself. All his colors were changed. The blacks had become whites, his reds had become a pastel yellow. It reminded him too much of the being from the pit. "What?"

The teen appearently did something Hood didn't like and a shot was fired into his shoulder. The guy cried out before giving one last apology before telling them, "I'm sorry. I was fading. I needed the creation of another to heal myself." He then vanished, leaving Red Robin and Red Hood alone in front of a brick building that was slowly starting to crumble before thier eyes.

No, not just the building. All of them. The whole city was crumbling around them and they needed to get out. Now.

They raced out of there with Red Hood cursing the entire way. RR pouted about needing a charger to start up the laptop seing as it was the only thing they got out of that crapshow of a mission. Hopefully the USB wasn't destroyed and he could access it later though it outside connection he used as a failsafe. He needed to know what was happening, not only with that kid but now himself.

#fanfiction prompts #prompts #danny phantom #dp x dc #danny fenton #tim drake #red robin #jason todd #red hood #drowning #tw: drowning #tw: guns #tw: gun violence #dead dove do not eat #im very serious #ras al ghul #league of assassins

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avaritia-apotheosis · 3 years

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A Kinder World

Going Angst Week 2021 | Day 2 - Obsession/Instinct

Ft. Danny Alone AU, semi-graphic depictions of violence, implied character death

It's 12:37 AM and I wrote this in like 45 minutes so its probably really incoherent and did not go as planned, but I tried

[AO3] [Day One]

In a kinder world, Danny Fenton goes into the portal alone, but when he stumbles out its into the arms of his two best friends. In this reality, they are his anchors to humanity, his sense in a world of madness. They keep his secrets locked close to their hearts. Keep his six, his three, his nine; ride or die even when its at the end of an agent’s gun or at the mercies of an eldritch abomination.

In a kinder world, Danny Phantom banters with his ghostly enemies, throwing quips and witty puns as often as they do actual punches.

In a kinder world, Danny Fenton grows into his powers and becomes something greater than a strange teen with eccentric parents. He is the bridge between the living and the dead. A symbol of hope for the powerless, the defenseless. Humanity’s defender and the Ghost Zone’s greatest champion.

In a kinder world, Danny’s obsession develops into something noble.

In a kinder world, Danny knows that ghosts aren’t the personification of evil.

This is not that world.

Because in this world, Danny goes down into his parents’ basement alone, and when he stumbles out of the swirling gates to hell, it’s with convulsions racking through his entire body and a ringing in his ears that won’t go away. It’s the synapsis of his mind rapid firing but coming up with nothing. It’s his heart stopping and starting and stopping again. His lungs refusing to fill with lungs and oh god oh god oh god what’s happening?

In this world, his first encounter with a ghost is brutal. He faces off this beast with too many eyes and too many limbs, teeth sharp and dripping green. And Danny is alone. Alone and terrified out of his mind because in this world, his parents never build the Fenton thermos. That would be too kind, and this world is anything but.

He leaves that fight with knuckles dripping ectoplasmic scum, his nose broken and a chunk of his shoulder missing. He smashes that ghost’s core with his heel, empty lungs heaving air it doesn’t need and eyes dilated into pinpricks.

His parents get a lot of things about ectobiology wrong. This part, they get right: destroy the core, destroy the ghost.

The ghosts keep coming. And coming and coming and coming and coming and—

Tucker and Sam are wondering why he keeps ditching them. They rarely see each other anymore. Is something wrong at home?

The ghosts keep coming. That first fight sets the precedent. Danny ends his fights with a core disintegrating in his fist, green flesh slowly knitting itself back together as he watches his enemies destabilize before his eyes.

His parents are oblivious to a lot of things but this, they take notice. Jazz will not stop poking and prodding, picking his mind with her sharp intuition and soft hands and softer words. Is something wrong at school?

The ghosts keep coming. Danny comes home past curfew with bruised knuckles and broken bones on the mend. No one remembers what he looks like without shadows beneath his eyes.

His grades slip. An A- to a B to a D to a bright red F. Late slips and endless detentions. At one point, a suspension. The school counselor takes him aside to ask what’s wrong. What can they do to help? Your grades are slipping, your records abysmal, think about your future Danny—

Danny tears down the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling, the eerie green haunting his dreams. He rips the NASA posters off his wall and stores all hsi model rockets in the dark corners of his closet. He’s reached for the moon, but it’s hopeless now. Not even the stars can catch him, he’s too far down.

The ghosts keep coming.

His parents say that ghosts are evil, and in this world Danny’s inclined to agree. If it wasn’t for ghosts, then he wouldn’t have to fight. If it wasn’t for ghosts, his grades wouldn’t be slipping. If it wasn’t for ghosts, he could go to school and hang out with Tucker and Sam and laugh about stupid things and argue over food. If it wasn’t for ghosts, his parents wouldn’t be grounding him for breaking curfew so much and Jazz could finally stop nagging him.

If it wasn’t for ghosts, his parents would have never built that portal.

If it wasn’t for ghosts, Danny would have never died.

In a kinder world, Danny’s obsession with heroism was born out of his desire to protect the ones he cares about. In this not-so-kind world, Danny’s obsession is nothing so noble. He wants to stop all the ghosts from coming through; making sure they never get another chance to come back is simply the most effective way.

Ghosts are stubborn creatures that refuse to be reasoned with. Danny isn’t the best with words, but he’s very persuasive when he wants to be.

Ghosts still come but there’s a little less every time.

Soon, the daily ghost fights turn into twice a week.

Once a week.

Thrice a month.

Once a month.

…

Danny turns on the sink in his bathroom. The water is clear and loud, almost enough to drown out the ringing in his ears. Green goop slides from his fingers and swirls down the drain.

There are no more ghosts in Amity.

Danny should be happy. He should be jumping for joy and thanking whatever higher power there is in the universe that this war is over and he can go back to being regular old Danny Fenton.

He should be happy.

The thrumming beneath his skin refuses to stop. Every shadow sends his hackles rising. His fingers twitch—

His heart hammers inside his chest. Says to him fight-fight-ghost-battle-where-stop-them-evil-fight-molecule-by-molecule.

Danny needs to get rid of the ghosts.

There are no ghosts in Amity Park.

Lie-lie-lie-lie

He looks up and catches it. A wily little ghost that’s escaped his notice up till now. It’s thin and lanky with eyes like glow-in-the-dark stars and hands dripping green.

Hello

There is one last ghost in Amity Park.

Danny needs to get rid of the ghosts.

#going angst week 2021 #dp fic #danny phantom #clockwork #ghost hunger #my writing.txt

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soliloquiums · 3 years

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You find him under a bench in Berlin, more skeleton than man. It is 1955. It is winter. It is the post war era. Behind every dingy, squalid corridor you're bound to find a hundred of them, the left over almost-corpses that god just wasn't kind enough to kill. Haunted by a memory of a Germany that just doesn't exist anymore with charcoal padded under their eyes, limbs trebling from one two many needles. You're sure that if you pulled that ratty, dark blue coat sleeve you'd find his similarly pockmarked with cowardice. Still, something draws you in closer, a shiver, something about him seems heavier, denser, like his very body extends with gravity. A planetary mass. His neck snaps up in a lightening motion and he smiles, his mouth a crooked line that resembled a mountain you swear you've seen in the horizon, somewhere in the east. Beggars aren't allowed to be this beautiful. You shudder. And you take him home.

To your surprise, his skin is deceptively smooth. Like untouched snow after a blizzard- and you search him thoroughly, almost desperately, during your intimate moments, for some sort of mark, some sort of human imperfection. He allows you, absently, as if he’s been through this before, and strokes your hair as his mind wanders into places you know you will never reach. But that comes after, first, you seat him on the rim of your bathtub. He is listless, almost bored, as you wipe the river of blood off his shoulder. There’s no entrance wound, exit wound, no highway crossing where it could come from and after 20 minutes of frantic scrubbing, his hand grips yours. “It’s not mine,” he tells you gently, with that same crocked smile, eyes a circle of glowing blue like the hottest kind of fire, and you pretend not to notice as a very, very fresh red droplet runs down your porcelain bathtub and streaks red onto the tile. There’s not enough of him and there’s too much. After a week, his presence on the couch, skeleton hands gripping a book or remote seems commonplace. His place at your dinner table, the second pair of shoes thrown carelessly next to your orderly ones. The permanent, watery brown stain on your granite countertop where he'd spilled tea and that neither of you bothered to clean up. He is an indelible and yet insignificant mark. Most days, it's nice, quaint, the gentle buzz from the television every time you come back home, his coarse laugh punctuating a mediocre sitcom joke, the way he threatens bodily violence on inanimate objects for refusing to bend to his will. Other times, he is something just north of uncanny valley. He is wearing human skin. Sometimes, at night, he doesn't seem to be breathing and every few weeks, for a second at a time, you'd swear his eyes flashed a macabre red. Two months in and he still doesn’t have his own clothes. Doesn’t have his own closet. You offer to take him shopping, to empty out another shelf but he only shakes his head gently, pityingly, “I don’t own things.” You’re not sure if he’s crazy or if he’s one of those communist philosophy types. You’re not sure if you’d care if he was. You press your lips together. Don’t say anything about how his old clothes seemed to have vanished from the laundry altogether. Three months in and you don’t know his last name. You ask once, casually, assuming that a man abandoned to the snow wouldn’t care much for family anyways. (You can relate, your strict, catholic mother and even stricter pastor father are tucked far away somewhere in a mountain village in Saarland. Out of sight and out of mind.) But he says nothing, or smiles in that whimsically gentle way of his, or stares blankly as if he isn’t sure what a last name is. Sometimes he carefully grasps your hands and kisses you as a distraction and in those moments you’re sure you could live without knowing. Sometimes, you see his gaze catch on the window and you know he is somewhere else. Doesn’t feel like he was ever here in the first place, a ghost boy that floats around your apartment and gives you frigid smiles in place of actual conversation. Once, he lays awake in bed with you and asks if you will remember him on your deathbed with an earnest that makes you want to climb out of bed and vomit. His eyes flash blood and pin you to the bed. Yes, you say, without really understanding why, yes even when you are gone I will remember you always even in the smallest things even when there is nothing more to remember. His eyes go back to blue and you drift off into dreams about an achingly vast field with no horizon and crooked mountains shaped like a smile All at once you are disastrously, cripplingly in love. Falling from a cliff. You try every method in the book to ground him. You bring him flowers in the middle of winter, you buy him books, watches, a cell phone, wine, chocolates, a car. You clean up your act, work out, pen him love letters in the candle light when you think he’s sleeping, insist on cooking the food you think he likes. You drive her to parks. A cottage by the sea, take him to every pretty place in Germany that might even slightly interest him. Cologne, Dresden, Munich, Heidelberg, Watzmann, Brocken. You He dismissed every material gift with an apologetic shake of the head, almost disappointed you don’t understand. His fingers wrap around your wrist and you can feel the cold from his skin drip into yours as he pulls you close, whispering gently, a reminder, “I do not own things.” And I cannot be owned, without saying. The places, however, slaps him out of despondency. He puts a hand to an oak tree in a park in Heidelberg and tells you, absently, his voice drenched in memories, “Someone I loved is buried here.” He sees things you do not. He stares at abandoned buildings with a remorse and vindication you do not understand. There is a tragedy under the bridges, in every lake, that he seems intimate with. In cologne, he strikes a match and lights up a car at 9:43 pm. The pretentious, red thing goes up in smoke a carcass of metal and charred leather seats. He is seething with rage and you don’t touch him because you know he’d burn you if you did but you watch. In rapture and fear. He seems to consider doing the same to the house, but doesn’t. It feels empty, the motion, like the brace before firing a gun. Except there’s no bullets. You watch as the dancing flames reflect on his face, still perfect as soot begins to gather like dark butterflies. “Why?” You ask, sacrilegiously. Breaking the silence of that distinctly consecrated night. Even the stars seem to be holding their breath. “Personal despair could never be desperate enough," he tells you, watching as the smoke gathered and swirled off into the open night sky. A translation of pain, “When tragedy happens, it needs to pass down the line, like a disease. There is an innate sin in the blood of some people.” Like most things, this escapes your comprehension entirely, and all you can focus on, even when the police sirens start blaring, is how beautifully the red reflects off his irises. He gives you a wayward grin. Like he’s done this before- and he has, you know he had- as he grasps your hand with a grip that for once feels real and solid as he darts the other way, dragging you along behind him in this mad dash. He laughs, the sound beautiful and loud and perfect, like church bells or sermon. Something holy, pure. You’re just sane enough to stop your ethereal, cackling lover from veering into oncoming traffic. He looks at you were a eerie intensity that makes you stammer an apology, an apology that he quickly cuts off as he pushes you against exposed brick and crushes his lips to yours. Your tongue flooding with the taste of him, a musky wilderness. There’s a sigh, somewhere, and even though you’ve had sex this feels like the most heart trending thing you’ve ever done in your life. You tremble. Your arms slip around his waist, pulling him closer, as if forevermore. As if drinking god. It’s enough to make you forget that it’s the 50s and that you’re both boys and that if any police officer caught the way his fingers were tenderly, tenderly brushing against your cheek, both of you would be carted off to jail for a decade but you don't care, really you don't, for the first time you feel as if you know him. Gilbert. Your Gilbert. - When the story ends, you're on the floor and the coolness of his skin seems to finally have crawled inside you, making a home amongst your other fragile, human organs. He stands above you with his red eyes, disappointed but not surprised. He mumbled something about this before, in the beginning, about what it would be like once you knew, what the pain would feel like. A sigh from him and you know without looking that all the stars outside the glass have blinked out, that every single other person in the apartment besides you and Him have gone still, paused or maybe dead. Maybe it was the whole street, the country, a few million bodies and still, how can it said to have mattered? "Ignorance isn't safety," He quietly tells your quaking form, in some something that could've been kindness, "Tell me, how many poor weeds have you stepped on, unthinkingly, in your lifetime?" The clock doesn't tick but you can feel the universe moving, entropy. You can feel the vastness of it, remember those dreams with out any horizons in sight and the knowledge weighs down on you like a million bowling balls. "You promised to remember me," He reminds you, his voice still quiet but brimming with an emotion that hasn't quiet come to a boil, "We had more than this." All of Germany shifts slightly, as if moving in its sleep, and the stars blink back, your breath releases. "If I've hurt you," he begins, but shakes his head, stumbling over words that he knows you won't ever really understand, won't forgive him if he lets you know. Resignation, tinged: resentment, "You'll go on living just fine." You look up at him once, I love you, your look says, but he does not look back. The door closes. There are no footsteps down the hall.

#aph #prussia #x reader #hws prussia #prussia x reader #mine #hetalia #long post #mlm #male!reader #50s #internalised homophobia #exestential crisis #??? idk bro #i wrote this at 4 am dont @ me

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timextoxhajima · 4 years

Audio

Playlist Feels: SHORT SERIES PART 2

PART 1

Member: stripper juyeon

Genre: angst, drama

“i know it hurts to smile but you try to.”

the end.

it was almost traumatising -- no -- it was traumatising.

to see juyeon listen to your command.

the last time you will see him was the view of his back, a single, lone tear dribbling down his left cheek as he looks back.

almost like he was looking back at your past with him.

like he was bidding you a painful goodbye.

now, five years into the future, his eyes were different.

maybe it was the makeup, or the hair, or the clothes.

but this is not the juyeon you recognised. this is not the man you met in the library. almost ten years ago.

he is stone cold, he is a professional at this job, even if it was a raunchy, controversial one. he is hardened concrete and he is a piece of stone that medusa looked at and turned to rock.

he is a dead flower that you failed to care for.

you’ve tried convincing yourself that it wasn’t your fault. that juyeon had, in fact, been a terrible boyfriend.

who leaves their girlfriend hanging on edge for days and then gets himself involved with another girl?

then again, your mistake on its own was one to be reckoned with.

despite the reputation of the club you were sitting in, juyeon doesn’t take off a single piece of clothing.

the skin of his neck and chest and occasionally, the skin on his arm when the shimmering outer layer falls over his shoulder, is pale under the spotlight. pale like it belongs on a corpse, and it takes you awhile to decide who felt more dead given the circumstances.

you wonder if he’s seen you, or recognised you or even let you have some kind of effect on you.

watching him dance wasn’t terribly new, but you’ve never seen him perform something of a similar genre or dancing technique ever.

the material of his leather pants was wrapped so tightly and snug around his thighs, your eyes find trouble peeling themselves away from his legs. the whites of the shimmer on his clothes do no good from preventing your attention to gloss over his collarbones and his adams’ apple.

your throat runs dry with anxiety when his dark orbs finally look up and they pierce through yours for a solid second.

the eye contact sends violent shivers down your spine and throughout your body, not realising that your ears were naturally cancelling out the music because all you could pay attention to was that juyeon was having more of an effect on you that you’d like to admit.

it was terribly arduous a task to ignore the bitter taste of displeasure on your tongue when you notice the way your friends were looking at juyeon.

he is no longer yours, and he is just doing his job. it is none of your business how people look at him.

but confusion overwhelms you like a spell being cast over your head, the witch condemning your demon back to hell and into the realm of truth which you’ve kept away in a coffin for so long.

“you lie but i don’t let it define you.”

he is looking at you like he knows your secrets. the sharp edges of his eyes feel like knives against your neck and his hair makes him look like he has demon’s horns growing out of his head.

the red and black lighting makes you feel like you were truly in hell, and a strangling ache begins to crush your lungs.

juyeon is dancing with every strand of emotion he has in his blood, and you feel it more than you know your friends were feeling it.

he is moving with the music with the ripping of his heart he remembers when he saw you with sangyeon.

he is reaching up into the air with the vulnerability he presented to you when he cried.

he is walking away with the reluctance you remember seeing printed all over his back when he leaves your dorm room.

your deep breath was shaky, at a complete loss of stability when you find yourself nearly choking up. your friends burst out into cat calls, standing up and applauding the performance.

they scream something at you, probably encouraging you to stand up and clap too or something, but you don’t register it. not when he’s disappeared into the dark without even taking one last bow.

barely twenty minutes later, you were sat in a private room with a classy-looking karaoke set-up, and your friends were already on their third song, screaming the lyrics of The Weeknd and Post Malone like they were tone-deaf.

it distracts you every now and then, but the version of juyeon that’s strutting around in the building has buried itself in some burrow between the muscles of your brain.

your friends down way too much beer for this amount of screaming, so they end up ditching you for the bathroom after they scold you for being such a spoil-sport.

they are almost tripping over one another on the way out, leaving you inside the private room with your phone, a disco-ball and some tracks playing in the background.

you hope looking through the documents you’ve got saved on your phone for work will pry your mind away from where you were, and it was working until the door clicks open again.

the brightness of your screen makes it difficult to identify the face that walks in, but it’s not too perplexing to recognise the height, the build, and the fact that he was alone.

medusa freezes you when his face comes under the light, and he pulls the blinds over the window on the door.

“your friends paid me to do this, so just let me do my job.”

his voice reminds of you of something similar to a siren. sirens who sing and seduce shipmen to lure them into shipwreck.

when were the gender roles reversed?

just the way he looks at you in the dim lighting was enough to make your skin crawl.

your phone remains lit up, in dire need of providing you a brighter source of illumination besides the television that was flashing on the wall of the room.

reluctance was dripping off the edges of his clothes as he walks towards you, his costume unchanged and his makeup and hair looking like they were just reprinted onto his head altogether.

his eyes glowed an eerie darkness in the lack of light, his fingers coming around your phone and gently pulling it away from you, locking it in the process as he places it on the table behind him.

had you not known this man, this might’ve been sexually appealing. but it was because it was juyeon, he knew all the right buttons to push.

he knew where to gently brush his hand across your neck and cheek and he knew how much pressure to press into your skin to make goosebumps erupt all over your skin.

but now, he is running his hand up your arms like feathers, fingers gently brushing against the hairs on your arms with his neck right over your head, in a bid to make his provocative dance more exciting.

the scent washing off him slaps you back to when you hugged him for the first time, and it makes you realise he hasn’t changed his cologne since.

the nauseating memory becomes a terrible reason for you to abruptly shove juyeon off you, and you back off to the other end of the sofa while he looks at you, surprised but not entirely amused.

“i highly doubt you’re allowed to touch customers. female customers...”

he runs an exasperated hand through his hair, looking away with such disdain, you wouldn’t have missed it even though you were in a dark room (which you were).

“it is part of my job, y/n. as long as i don’t touch any intimate parts or if the customer sounds out about being uncomfortable and i stop, i’m all good.”

it is a freeze frame again, the only things moving in the room were the circles of light reflected off the discoball in the room.

“in any way,” he rubs his jawline with his thumb. “i was paid to spend thirty minutes with you, and i’m not allowed to compromise it after i receive payment.”

the air was filled with a horrid mixture of beer and cologne, his cologne, and you reprimand yourself for not being able to block him out.

your sins have come back to haunt you, and it doesn’t seem like it was going to go away that easily.

“i’ll make sure nothing happens to your pay,” your legs come off the sofa and meet the floor, trying your best to maintain your composure while you reach for the cup of beer. “just don’t... don’t touch me.”

the television warrants your attention while you try your best to ignore him awkwardly standing at the edge of the C-shaped sofa lining the curved wall of the room.

the uncomfortable atmosphere was making the beer churn in your gut like it was a washing machine.

juyeon sits down by the edge of the sofa, a safe distance from you as he takes a can and cracks it open without asking.

“what are you doing here, juyeon?”

the question comes out sounding like a command instead of a query, a frown forging itself on your forehead without looking at him.

neither does he look at you while he gulps down easily half the can of beer, and he sucks his lips between his teeth before placing it down on the table.

“part-time job.”

“does your day job not pay enough?”

“my day job doesn’t let me do what i like to do.”

you smirk to yourself, picking up your cup of beer and finishing what was left in it.

“so you went to a dance academy for four years and graduated from it... only to not do something related?”

you watch as he turns to glare at you from the corner of your eye.

“fun.”

it feels like the witch living in the back of your skull was dribbling curses all over your tongue, making you say things you know you shouldn’t say, making you feel things you know he had every right to feel as well.

rage. jealousy. hurt.

“i’m sorry, did i happen to miss something important here?”

“did you?”

he looks away, an exasperated smile of disbelief printed on his lips. his arm reaches out and rests on top of the backrest of the sofa, his thumb fiddling with the metal rings he had on his fingers.

fingers that were once interlocked with yours; fingers that once caressed your cheeks and your eyes.

“i can’t believe five years didn’t do much to your maturity.”

“maturity?” his words leave paper cuts on your skin. “you really want to talk about maturity?”

“oh, sure. definitely better than running off and sleeping with a club alumni, right?”

your body feels like a puppet being controlled by the resident witch in your head and she pulls you to your feet, your blood already beginning to boil like poison and potions in a large, black pot over a fire.

juyeon is still sitting down, one leg crossed over the other as he looks at you. under the shitty lighting, you could see that he was hurt. he was in pain, from the sole reason that you were standing in front of him.

your deep breath was shaky, and your eyes flutter shut for a second in attempt to calm your nerves. your clenched fists were by your thighs, and the music in the private room was starting to wash out with everything that’s going on in your head.

juyeon was arguably the only person you’ve ever loved who wasn’t related to you by blood, so remembering how you ended things with him was one too torturous a deal to forget.

“was he good in bed?”

it takes you awhile to process juyeon’s question, but it only pushes all the wrong buttons all over again.

“leave him out of this, sangyeon has nothing to do with it--”

“how does he have ‘nothing to do with it’ if he was the one who shoved his dick into my girlfriend--”

“your girlfriend? you disappeared off the face of earth for god knows how long--”

“i was busy and caught up with work--”

“and it leaves ‘your girlfriend’ no time but you had time to go out with someone else--”

“she was my project partner--”

“what project? a performance project? bet you had fun laughing the night away in the studio with her--”

“and i bet you had fun letting someone fuck your brains out when i wasn’t around to do it--”

“so you do know you weren’t around to do anything?”

juyeon turns away at your last blow, and you realise tears were collecting in the corners of your eyes.

the roles really have reversed.

back then, he was the one who cried first because he caught you with another man. now, you’re the one breaking because you were feeling the hurt in the relationship before he did. his reaction just drowned your pain out back then.

“where the hell were you when i needed you?”

silence.

“we had a deal that you’d be there for me if i needed you, and even then i tried my best not to rely on you completely because i knew how much you wanted to get into that academy.”

no response.

“i thought i was being unreasonable for wanting you to be around. but at some point of time, it really did feel like we weren’t together anymore. it felt like we had a break up and i didn’t know about it.”

the tears roll down your cheeks despite your efforts to keep them in your tear glands. the back of your hand meets your skin on your face and the wetness cools your eyes in the air-conditioned room.

“i blame myself for sleeping with sangyeon but it doesn’t feel like you’re blaming yourself for forgetting about me.”

you reverse in your steps to grab your purse, walking the other way round the table so you didn’t need to pass him on the way out.

your heart was relentless in pushing out all your grief in the form of tears, and you push past your friends when they meet you in the hallway.

they are shocked and surprised, probably worried that the stripper they hired was being inappropriate, but the security footage of the room would clear juyeon’s name anyway.

by the time you were home, you are exhausted. it feels like your soul had been sucked out and shoved back into your body with a complete absence of mercy.

it feels like your bones had been pried and yanked out from under your muscles and nerves, tendons and flesh being ripped and snapped with splatters of blood flying everywhere.

the witch has cursed you into some agonising dimension of pain and torture where you could see your own blood on the walls, where you’ve been picked apart like a lego artwork and then haphazardly put together again.

all because of juyeon.

it is ironic, to realise and to be fully aware that you are only feeling this magnitude of anguish because you still loved him.

five years spent trying to let those feelings for him wear away, by convincing yourself that he was a shitty boyfriend for forgetting about you and then be angry when he realises you’ve replaced him.

you can’t deny it was your fault for sleeping with sangyeon, but had he shown a little more care and concern without frolicking about outside with another girl, you would’ve been more secure. you wouldn’t have opened your heart out to sangyeon, who was kind and caring and gentle.

so what if sangyeon was good in bed?

so what if juyeon might be better?

he’ll never be able to provide you the same amount of safety and warmth sangyeon did, and he had proven it himself.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

to be continued

#juyeon #lee juyeon #the boyz #the boyz juyeon #juyeon angst #juyeon fanfic #juyeon smut #the boyz fanfic #i am in pain

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nightshift-cup-of-coffin · 3 years

Text

Damn Kids (How Dexter became Two-digits)

The building glowed as if alive, even in its empty state, even in the dead of night. Elbow deep in an empty octopus tank Dexter admired the beauty as noises from various tanks and exhibits played tricks on his ears. Though he knew it mostly imagination; the sounds of the day were still playing off all the glass and concrete, spiraling down the hallways, throughout the closed aquarium like a haunted wind.

The laughter came as a small roll. Dexter picked his head up briefly from the tank and looked around. Shaking his head, chuckling softly to himself. The eeriness that creeps through the world in the dead of night still produced goosebumps years after his first shift.

Footsteps rattled the metal walk above the Shark tank. Dexter peeked his head around the corner, the bucket of tuna in his hand splashing about. The sharks stirred only slightly at the sound following it for food.

It wasn't realistic for security to miss a child while closing up. He had been through the whole facility at least twice; it was unlikely the kid had hid so long. Dexter again shook his head causing stars to enter his eyes. ‘The noises are nothing more than my imagination, late nights do this, I know this. I just need to focus.’ He told himself.

Dexter was shucking clams for the walrus when a chill ran down his spin. An uncontrollable shiver rattled his shoulders, his hand slipped nearly costing him skin. Lucky enough after the last cut he had learned to wear protective gloves. Turning on his heel, clams in hand, the freezer door stood open. Not a thing in sight but the billowing fog from the industrial freezer rolling out in clouds covering the floor. ‘I simply didn’t shut it. Get it together man!’ Dexter let out a sigh as he scolded himself.

Dexter took a step forward. Pattering of wet galoshes crossed the distance between him and the freezer, splashing sounds echoed through the kitchen. Dexter paused, 'he may have glasses, but fog or no, no fucking way did he miss someone two feet in front of him'. He took deep breaths of sharp air.

Reaching his hand out, he listened, breath catching.

In response a loud clatter came from inside the freezer. A cooler of lettuce fell loose, heads rolled to the tips of his shoes.

Dexter shaking picked them up, jamming them back in the cooler and onto the shelf.

The hinges of the freezer door let out a squeak as it slowly began to close. He made a bolt for it, shoulder connecting. For a short moment there was resistance, it released and the freezer door slammed against the wall under the force of his shove.

It had been enough for him, even as a figment, it was only 4:30, another 3 hours left in his shift. He returned to the control room, grabbing another cup of coffee, set to wait out the rest of his shift. How absolutely ridiculous he felt, he has been on night shift since he was able to work, and in the aquarium for a year. His third cup would calm his nerves. He sat looking at the security screens as he flipped through TikTok.

Footsteps erupted behind him carrying down the hallway. Dexter bolted from his chair. Nothing was there, the motion sensor lights didn't even activate.

Like a light breeze came a soft whisper in his ear "Boo!"

Jumping and nearly collapsing all the same Dexter's heart pained out blood.

2 hours and 46 minutes left.

He thought about the most open and bright place he could camp out. Above the deep ocean tanks overhead lights illuminated the catwalk, one could see the entire event area. He closed the door and flicked on the lights. Footsteps ran outside in the hallway, he ignored them releasing his breath as they passed. Dexter sat with his feet dangling over the edge of the catwalk. Paper clownfish swaying alongside his canvas sneakers. Time passed, all was quiet. Dexter turned on his music, set on riding out the rest of his shift sitting in this spot.

"Tag! You're it!" a chorus of voices yelled as Dexter fell from the catwalk.

His feet met the floor only a few feet away. A tug brought pain. Something slick, sticky wrapped itself around Dexter’s forearm still held in the air. Red dots began to fall painting the clownfish.

Dexter had had his fingers laced in the grated floor of the catwalk. Dexter gave his fingers a light tug, pain spread. Dexter clenched his lids tightly before looking up. His fingers, purple and swollen were only stuck as they doubled in size.

A parade of laughter, shouting, clattering and running feet raced above him. The invisible band in their play had toppled shelves and crates. Giggling followed as the boxes, buckets and tools showered the catwalk. Dexter gave his arm a vigorous tug as a black box fell.

Dexter’s face paled past its usual pigment, his lunch and bitter coffee threatened his throat. He pulled down his hand now easily free from the grate and its contents. Three fingers swollen bloody and purple throbbed back at him. Two nearly gone in their shredded pile atop his palm.

He held his breath for a moment, the world around him became a blur. His fingers wrapped in his tie, the blood stopped as the throb became worse.

That old song on the radio that he can never remember the name of played loudly. It had something to do with a wedding or maybe a witch. He had heard it just yesterday. Flowers bloomed as he walked through the streets he used to scrape his knees on. The same concrete felt almost like jelly as he walked. He scoffed at the tip of his shoe catching on a bit of grass. Ice cream, when it's too hot, a boy and his friends need ice cream. Snow began to fall.

“Hello? What’s your Emergency sir?”

The pain brought tears to his eyes, the air punctuated by the familiar musk and coffee smell.

His locker, cold against his forehead, eighth grade valentine's day.

Dexter slumped into the chair, his eyes flashed open as he give his information to the operator. The ambulance showed up about an hour before his manager.

For the remainder of his two weeks; each shift ‘Sorry’ was written in spilled sugar when Dexter came back for his third cup.

Damn Kids

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faulty-writes · 4 years

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Okay, feel free to queue this for the time being, but I gotta send this in before my dumb-dumb brain forgets about it! A soulmate AU scenario: pro-hero Mirio moves in a house that's supposed to be haunted and finally meets his soulmate! The ghost. (she has a physical form btw). But she doesn't care if she is his soulmate, she wants him OUT. She throws things, torments Tamaki when he's over, and tries t keep Mirio awake at night. She died a year ago bc of villains and tells Mirio he's 'too late'.

[ I thought of Ghost Princess from Adventure Time when I first read this. Anyone else love Adventure Time? Definitely one of my favorite cartoons of all time. ]

Ever since graduating from U.A. Mirio had made quite the name for himself and he hoped he was making Sir Nighteye proud. Of course, he had taken the man’s words to heart. That he’d be the greatest hero there ever was and he wouldn’t let those expectations down! Of course, he did have the option of taking over Sir Nighteye’s Agency. However, he just didn’t have the heart. Instead, he had floated the idea of opening a new Agency to his friends Tamaki Amajiki and Nejire Hado. Though Nejire seemed on board, downright excited for a chance at owning an Agency with her friends.

Tamaki took a little more convincing, though Mirio understood why. Tamaki was close with Fat Gum and Kirishima in the current Agency he worked at. But eventually, everyone had to move on, right? Of course, he had given Tamaki some time to think it over. But in his head, he continued to picture The Big Three Agency. Though the three of them had only been Pro Heroes for about a year before pulling their money together and buying a building that was outside of Tokyo.

Of course, Mirio was already high in the ranks so he had a little more money to spare. He wanted to be close to his newly under maintenance Agency and decided to buy a house near the location. Given, the realtor seemed intent on trying to convince him to buy something else. He brushed it off, “Aw, come on! It could use some work sure! But that’ll just give me something to do on my off time!” he insisted, the house was rather big. Not so much a mansion, but a fairly decent size for Mirio’s taste.

Given it had cobwebs, some broken boards and the rooms could use some serious work. He looked at it as a friendly challenge, of course, there was one thing that he didn’t count on. His newly bought house was haunted or so the rumor went, Mirio wasn’t entirely sure if he believed in such things. Then again, in a world full of quirks and plenty more mysteries to be had. Maybe he shouldn’t push down the idea so quickly. Still, the first few nights during his stay at his new home were a little eerie.

He heard the house give a few creaks almost as if it were settling, sometime in the middle of the night he swore he heard whispers and doors opening. At first, he thought it was nothing more than his imagination. Until one day he had gotten up in the night to use the bathroom and saw a white glowing figure, he gasped and quickly rubbed his eyes. However, when he looked again the figure was gone. “Hm, that’s kind of weird. Guess I’m sleeper than I thought!” he said, though over the course of a month. He continued to see the figure and the noises he heard seemed to grow louder with each passing night.

The truth was, these occurrences were because of you and the fact was, you didn’t like that Mirio had budded into your territory. This was your home, this was your resting place and you’d be damned if you’d let someone else take that away from you. So, one day you had decided you had enough and when Mirio was sleeping. You began to administer your haunting. It was so easy, he was practically a sitting duck. Though you thought he looked almost peaceful as he laid there. But that wouldn’t stop you.

You began to rattle the furniture around him, the lamp, bed, and closet shook simultaneously. Making Mirio’s sleeping figure stir, you growled. This wasn’t enough, so you increased your power. The closet door slammed shut and Mirio jolted up, “Huh!? What’s going on?” you hadn’t decided to appear in front of him yet. But you did raise your hand, making his blanket fly across the room. His bed continued to violently shake as though there was an earthquake and Mirio stumbled to try and get up, but he ended up falling to the floor with a loud crash.

“Ah!” he cried out, groaning as he pushed himself onto his knees. He looked around, his eyes wide and fearful as he saw the various items shaking and dancing towards him. You loved the sense of fear that dripped off of him and slowly appeared before him. Your feet floating above the floor and your hair flowing behind you, there was a white glow to you though Mirio would be able to see straight through your transparent body. “Get out.” you hissed and Mirio’s head immediately turned to face you, his jaw-dropping further as he settled his eyes on you.

Yet, his trembling came to a stop. You could see your own reflection in his blue eyes which seemed to sparkle with something. “Wow…” Mirio whispered before slowly standing on his feet, he took a step toward you. “A-Am I dreaming?” he questioned and you raised your eyebrow, “GET OUT.” you repeated, your eerie voice echoing through the room. Mirio however, seemed unphased. His eyes never leaving you, what was he so fascinated with!? A smile was across his face and his hand reached out, almost as if he wanted to touch you.

“Y-You’re so beautiful,” he said and for a moment, you felt some form of warmth wash over your otherwise cold atmosphere. But it was cut short when your eyes turned red and you sent the lamp flying towards the blond. However, the last thing you expected was for the lamp to pass right through him. Your eyes went wide and you floated back. “What is this!?” the demand came out as a hiss and for a moment, you wondered if he was a ghost as well. But that was impossible, you had seen him with the realtor. You had seen the news stories about him whenever he watched television.

He was some sort of hero, you knew that and such a thing only further angered you. “Hm?” Mirio blinked and soon a chuckle left his lips, “How dare you mock me!” you screamed, your ghostly form morphing into something hideous. Your eyes remained red and your fingers grew into almost jagged claws. The whole room shook as you focused all your energy. Mirio frowned and you partly wondered if he had realized how badly he fucked up. But it was a little too late and you watched in satisfaction as the force of your power knocked him off his feet.

You watched him fly across the room, straight through a wall that he had worked ever so hard to repair. But you felt nothing, he deserved it. With that, you disappeared once more. However, unknown to you. Mirio had felt something when he set his eyes on you and though it didn’t make sense, he immediately knew. He had heard stories, each person in this world destined for a soulmate and some were lucky to find their other half. He never thought it would happen to him, much less in this way.

He had gotten injured when you threw him through the wall and for a short moment, Mirio was struggling with his own beliefs. Did what occur truly happen or was it simply a bad nightmare? Were you a villain? Were you a ghost or you were simply using a quirk? He wasn’t sure, but when he told Nejire and Tamaki. They seemed to go white in the face. “T-That doesn’t s-sound g-good, M-Mirio.” Tamaki said and Nejire nodded, bringing her hands up. “Yeah! Didn’t you hear those nasty rumors regarding that house? Why the heck did you think buying it was a good idea!?” she exclaimed and Mirio only shrugged.

“I mean, it was close to the Agency,” he explained, and both his friend's sigh. “A-Are you h-hurt?” Tamaki questioned and Mirio shrugged. “Not really, I didn’t expect them to have such power. But if you saw how beautiful they were! You’d probably be just as memorized.” he said and Nejire immediately began waving her arms. “Oh no, I am not going to a haunted house! Too scary!” she declared as she crossed her arms and then Mirio turned to Tamaki who felt his stomach drop. “W-What-” before Tamaki could even speak, Mirio had grabbed his hands.

“Come on, Tamaki! You gotta help me! Stay the night or come over one day! Maybe they’ll appear before you too! I kind of want to know if it’s just me or if I’m crazy. Please!?” he begged and Tamaki groaned, of course, he’d do anything for his friend. But this was a little extreme, he didn’t like the idea of going to a haunted house. Much less see this thing that happened to attack Mirio and throw him through a wall. But, like many other times in his life. He felt as though he had no choice and that he didn’t have the courage to say no.

So with a deep sigh, he hung his head low. “Fine,” he said and gasped when Mirio pulled him into a hug. “Thank you so much Tamaki!” he exclaimed before pulling away, his hands on the shy boy’s shoulders. “Don’t worry! I’m sure it won’t be that bad,” he promised, though somehow Tamaki knew better than to believe in Mirio’s words. Sure he looked up to him and he still believed the man shined brighter than the sun. But ever since they were children, the things Mirio dragged him into caused some rather bad results.

Still, at the end of the workday. Tamaki left with Mirio and nearly fainted when he stepped through the doors of Mirio’s house. He had an eerie feeling and his stomach twisted into knots, “Come on! I’ll make us some food!” Mirio insisted and though Tamaki was hesitant, he agreed. Though he couldn’t help shake the feeling that someone was watching him. The evening was peaceful, but when the sun began to set. Tamaki began to experience odd phenomenons. It was small, like how his coffee cup had moved from the position on the table he had originally placed it.

How his jacket was suddenly thrown across the room, he was a shaking mess by the time he felt someone’s fingers brush across his body. But the final straw was when something flew across the room at him, shattering against his body. “M-Mirio! I c-can’t!” there were tears in his eyes and it was clear he was close to having a panic attack. Mirio frowned and tried to pull his friend into a hug, but Tamaki pushed him away. “I d-don’t know what g-going on, b-but maybe you s-should listen to t-this...g-ghost, t-this demon! W-Whatever it is and l-leave! I-It’s clearly n-not nice!” he failed to notice that during his panicked rambling your figure had appeared behind him.

You were floating in midair as always. Mirio’s worried expression faded when he saw you, once more that sparkle appeared in his eyes and a smile came across his face. Though you were wearing an annoyed expression, it was bad enough having Mirio invade your peace. But now he had a friend? Tamaki as you came to understand his name was. That wouldn’t do. “W-What are you looking a-at?!” the dark-haired boy demanded before turning around.

You grinned and shifted into your more menacing form, watching as all the color drained from Tamaki’s face before you let out a threatening growl that sounded like it was from the depths of hell itself. The satisfying sound of his scream was like music to your ears and despite Mirio’s best efforts to try and stop Tamaki, the utterly anxiety-ridden boy from running out the door. He didn’t care about leaving Mirio behind, in fact, the only thing he seemed to care about at that moment was running as far away from the dangerous situation as possible.

Mirio frowned and turned back to you, “That wasn’t very nice.” he replied, though he was normally happy and bubbly. He was also a hero and he didn’t hesitate to put people in their place when he needed to. You merely laughed at his words, returning to your normal state. “You’re next.” you threatened and while Mirio was still mad at your antics from earlier. Your efforts to scare him off during the middle of the night seemed all in vain.

In fact, it seemed that Mirio was more or less used to your hauntings now. Which in a way annoyed you, but not as much as the fact that he tried to strike up a conversation with you. “Sunshine, I know you’re not going to believe this. But I feel something between us, it’s kind of weird. But well,” he paused and rubbed the back of his head, sitting up in his bed. You were floating in front of him and clearly, you weren’t happy. The light that you produced illuminated the otherwise dark surroundings, “Can I ask how you died? How long have you been...here?” he questioned and you growled, once more your eyes turning red. “NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS HERO!” you snapped before disappearing, leaving Mirio dumbfounded.

It was no surprise that you didn’t want to share the facts behind your death with anyone, but somehow or another. You had grown so used to Mirio’s presence the hatred you once felt seemed to melt. Which you found strange, but instead of haunting him at night. You would watch him sleep and you began to get eager when he left, just waiting for him to return to you once more. Mirio seemed happy by your reaction, but somehow he just knew you’d get along with him. However, you still kept your guard up and found yourself being a little envious of the stories Mirio began to share with you. But what bothered you the most is the day Mirio came home, excited beyond anything.

Apparently, he had moved up on the hero board, taking the number two spot and for the following weeks, it's all he seemed to talk about. You had quickly gotten sick of hearing it, yes being a hero was wonderful. But hearing him talk about his accomplishments made you angry. You too had done some great things when you were alive, in fact, you loved being a hero. Yet, the world cursed you with death and you had to watch as others accomplished the dream you wanted. "I still can't believe it! I mean, someone like me the number two hero in the world! It's just incredible-" you growled and snapped your head in his direction.

Your hair whipping around like fire and your eyes burned with anger. "WILL YOU SHUT UP?!?" you finally snapped, objects that were once peacefully resting on the tables and shelves now shot across the room. Pieces of glass scattered on the floor and Mirio’s eyes widened, you didn’t care if you had surprised or shocked him. It was a miracle that he had finally stopped talking. “I am sick,” you began with a hiss, “of hearing you and your hero stories! Do you think I enjoy hearing about your success when I cannot leave this property!?” you snapped. You could swear you heard Mirio swallow, was he nervous?

Your shoulders dropped and a sigh left your lips. Mirio still looked shocked and there was a hurt expression on his face. Somehow, you hated seeing that. “Sorry,” you muttered before floating to his side, giving the illusion that you were sitting next to him on the couch. “No…” Mirio said, his voice soft. “I should be sorry, sunshine. I didn’t mean to make you angry,” he said, hanging his head low. You heard a sniff come from the man and watched him wipe his nose. Damn, did you make him that upset? You wanted to reach out and touch him if only your hand didn’t phase through him.

“Look...you...um,” you struggled to find the words and rubbed the back of your head. “I guess I just got...angry because...because hearing all your success stories just makes me think back to when I was a hero and I...loved it.” you began and watched as his head turned to face you. “Y-You did?” he questioned, yet again reaching up to wipe his nose and you nodded. “Yes...but I met my untimely death at the hands of a villain. It was during an important mission, we were scouting out the whereabouts of an underground lab where they were doing involuntary experiments on quirk users.” the memory flashed clear as day before your eyes. “I made the mistake of letting my guard down and…” you took a staggered breath and squeezed your eyes shut.

“You don’t have to say it,” Mirio whispered, reaching his hand out only for it to phase through you which made him frown. “Even if you are...just in another form of life, you are still my soulmate and...I still want to be with you and have your heart,” he said and your eyes snapped open. “What…” you hissed, anger filling you once more and Mirio looked confused. “Did I say something wrong?” he questioned and you growled before the room grew cold. “You dare mock me with such words?!” before Mirio had the chance to speak again, his body flew back. Hitting the opposite wall and objects began to swirl around him.

“S-Sunshine, what are you doing!?” you didn’t answer him and over the course of the next few days, you tormented the man. Broke almost every possession he had, kept him up with terrifying noises at night, and smiled in satisfaction when you saw how physically drained he was. Maybe now he’d give up. But once more you were proven wrong when he came home from work one day and you resumed your torment routine, but this time when the objects came flying at him. They phased right through him and you growled, damn him and his quirk. “Listen, I’ve been thinking,” he began, “maybe I said the wrong thing. But I don’t regret it and like it or not. You are my soulmate, I know you are. I feel it in here.” he placed his hand to his heart.

“Huh?” you paused, “It doesn’t matter what you do to me because I love you.” your eyes widened, what!? How could he still feel that way after everything you had done to him?! Done to his friend!? This was...bullshit in its purest form. “You are a liar! You cannot love what is not there! I do not exist in this world! People do not believe in ghosts and I will never love you.” once more you watched that hurt expression come across his face but you ignored it as you disappeared into thin air. You didn’t reappear, deciding it was best to enjoy some solitude. You could hear the pipes rattle when Mirio got up to take his shower and the sound of doors opening and closing. You hadn’t realized just how quiet it was without him.

A few days later, Mirio had left as usual and hours later, you waited for the sound of the front door to come when he returned. However, the house remained silent. You tried to shrug it off at first, much like you had done before when you realized you actually enjoyed his presence. But as the hours continued to go by, somehow you knew something was wrong. You phased through the floors to look for him, but he wasn’t in the kitchen, nor the living room or in any of the other rooms. Where the hell was he? Was he hanging out with his friends or something? You tried to ignore the jealous feeling that came over you. Perhaps it was because you were dead, but whenever Mirio was around you felt a certain sense of warmth. It almost made you feel alive but you didn’t want to fully believe it, you didn’t want to believe Mirio was your soulmate.

You growled, curling your hands into fists and released your energy, much like always. Objects flew around you, which included the remote. You hadn’t expected it to collide with the television and ironically enough it turned on, “Oh, what the hell!?” you exclaimed, irritated as the rather boring chatter of the news echoed in the empty house. You let out a sigh and pressed two fingers to your temple, shaking your head. “Where is he…” you muttered to yourself and as if the television had actually heard you, the name ‘Lemillion’ was mentioned and you immediately turned your head.

Watching the news banner flash before the screen. You quickly scanned it before focusing on the news anchor. ‘That’s right folks! Just recently promoted, Lemillion the number two hero in the world has done it yet again. Stopping not only one, but two villainous gangs from performing an illegal drug shipment. Though our favorite hero was injured during this mission, we’re told he’s in stable condition. Later details when they come’ your jaw hung open and though you hadn’t realized it, your hands were clenched to your chest.

He was in the hospital? “Dammit!” you snapped, the room slowly icing over as your negative emotions made the temperature drop. Now more than ever you wished you hadn’t gotten killed, you wished those villains hadn’t ended your life, you wished you had never taken on that stupid mission. Is a hero truly supposed to sacrifice themselves like this? You were a great hero and yet even after your death, you were quickly forgotten.

Tossed alongside as new heroes rose through the ranks, just a forgotten relic that even the history books wouldn’t document. You hunched over, your body trembling before you let out a shriek. The sound of glass shattering filled the house, but you didn’t care. This...this wasn’t fair! The world hadn’t changed at all and Mirio...as kind and sweet as he was couldn’t see that and it might just mean his death.

The house was in ruins by the time Mirio returned, “Sunshine, I’m home-” his expression dropped as he saw the damage you had done. Tables overturned, furniture ripped to shreds, pieces of glass everywhere, even the walls had deep scratches on them. “Y/n!?” he called as he stepped inside, trying his best to avoid the glass. “Y/n!? Where are you? What happened!?” he demanded as a frown spread across his lips, why did you do this? Was it because he was gone too long? He felt a sense of guilt fill him before he heard a sigh coming from behind him. Immediately he whipped around to see you floating there, your head hanging low and your eyes avoiding him.

“Y/n! What happened?” he asked once more, trying to keep calm. It would take him weeks to clean this up and possibly get new furniture. “You were gone for too long,” you replied, your voice soft and an almost childish tone accompanied it. Mirio stepped closer to you, his arms spread out. “So you did do this, all of this?” he said as he used his arms to signify the mess around him. You kept quiet for a moment before slowly raising your head to look at him, “You shouldn’t sacrifice yourself like that.” you commented and Mirio grew confused. “Huh?” he replied and you growled in frustration, your body moving on its own as you tried to push against his chest. But, of course, your arms went right through him.

He raised his eyebrow, “W-Were you trying to push me?” he questioned and you wanted to let out a scream, but instead, you snapped. “Why did you do that!? Sacrifice yourself for people that don’t care!?” your voice echoed through the room and Mirio took a step back, his eyes wide. “What’s going to happen if you die!? Hm? You think dying is fun!? You think any hero who loves what they do and risks so much is actually going to be remembered in the end!?” you continued, jabbing your finger in his direction. “Well, they aren’t! I was a great hero too! One of the best in my class and yet...yet when I died no one remembered me! I was buried along with every other wannabe hero in existence! Forgotten!” you exclaimed, if you were alive surely there would be tears streaming down your face but ghosts didn’t have that ability. Perhaps it was the curse of being dead, you could feel emotions yes but physical aspects like crying were impossible. But you felt a deep sadness nonetheless.

Mirio blinked, “I-Is that what you really think?” he questioned, his shoulders dropping. Well, no wonder you were so sad, someone needed to tell you that you mattered! So instead, he tried to smile. “That’s not true! Maybe certain people will forget you. But a great hero always lives on! No matter what you believe, someone out there. Heck, I’m sure lots of people still remember you! I bet they miss you every single day and I also bet you even inspired some of them that wanted to be heroes. So, they’ll follow in your footsteps as a dedication to you.” he said and you swore you felt a thump in your chest, “No one is ever truly forgotten and though it’s only been months since we met. I know I’ll never forget you.” he concluded as he approached you.

Your face was twisted, it almost looked like you were in pain. How could he say such things?! Your hand twisted in your shirt, that same warmth you felt near Mirio seemed to be spread through your body and that thumping continued. You hated it, whatever it was. You were dead, this couldn’t possibly be a heartbeat? You choked down a sob as Mirio’s hand reached out to you. “What are you-” he interrupted you, “Just try to take my hand, sunshine,” he replied and you frowned, how were you supposed to do that? You looked at that hand before shifting your focus to Mirio once more and hesitantly reached out.

Your hand hovered in his, giving the illusion he wanted. That you were holding hands, “Wow.” he said, almost acting as if something was new or wrong. You raised your eyebrow, “Uh w-what?” you questioned and grew puzzled when you watched a blush come across his face. “You’re so warm, unlike before.” your eyes widened, what? How could that be? You couldn’t be warm unless you somehow found a source of happiness. “It’s so nice.” he said as he stepped closer to you, “I also hear something,” he noted before closing his eyes, just listening for a moment. “Uh…” you trailed off and floated back some, though your hand was technically still in his. “It sounds like a heartbeat,” he concluded and you grew panicked. Mirio must have sensed this, “Please don’t run away. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, in fact, I think...I think it’s a sign.” you looked at him confused.

“What?” you replied, tilting your head to the side and he chuckled in response, the noise only causing your heartbeat to accelerate. “Well, what would you say if I was bold enough to assume that you have feelings for me too.” he began as he stepped even closer, invading your personal space. “Uh…” your eyes widened as it almost seemed like he was trying to corner you. His hand even came up, attempting to caress your cheek. “I want to try something, is that okay?” he questioned and through you were a little antsy as to what he wanted to do. You nonetheless, found yourself nodding. He smiled gently at you, “Good.” he said with a smirk before leaning forward.

Your breath hitched when you realized what he was trying to do, it was silly. Stupid actually, but somehow it made you smile as his lips phased through yours. It was still a nice feeling and you swore you could actually feel it. You closed your eyes, phasing your arms through him to try and hover your hands on his shoulders. It was a strange moment, to say the least, but it made you smile all the same as he pulled away. “You do realize that wasn’t technically a kiss. More like pressing your lips against the air.” Mirio chuckled, “Well...I think it’s the best I can do for now.” he said, rubbing the back of his head with a flushed face.

“You’re in love with a ghost,” you replied, finding yourself laughing. “Hey now…” Mirio pouted, “Don’t make fun of me too much! You’re the one that didn’t feel the same at first!” he pointed out and your laughing came to a screeching halt. You growled, “That’s because you kept insisting that-” he held his hand up, “Yeah, I know. Maybe I was too pushy with my feelings, but regardless. I do love you and you love me back, hopefully?” he said and almost reminded you of Tamaki with the way he began to play with his fingers. You let out a sigh, floating past him. “I guess that’s something you’ll find out when your time comes,” you replied before disappearing through the ceiling. Mirio stood there, dumbfounded for a moment before calling your name and trying to chase after you. This was certainly some kind of love story.

#bnha requests #mirio x reader #togata x reader #Anonymous

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sunflower-swan · 4 years

Text

Wolfstar Chapter 14

A/N: Here’s what you need to know: I created this story for Writer’s Month 2020. Every day is a new prompt, and therefore a new chapter. This is an AU Wolfstar where Remus is a tattoo artist next door to Sirius who manages a flower shop. James and Lily are alive in this universe and own a coffee shop across the street. And to make parts of the story work with the prompts, Remus is about 10 years older than Sirius. It also takes place more or less in present time, minus Covid-19.

This is chapter 14 of a multi-chapter work. If you’d like to start from the beginning, here is chapter 1.

Disclaimer: I don’t own these characters. I just like to play with them.

Day 14 Prompt: Metamorphosis

Rating: Teen and Up

Word Count: 1240

Tags: angst, confessions, language

Chapter 14

Sirius

Warren Zevon, “Werewolves of London”

Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen

Doing the Werewolves of London

I saw Lon Chaney, Jr. walking with the Queen

Doing the Werewolves of London

Remus and Sirius thanked James and Lily for a wonderful evening, and stepped out of the Cafe into the warm, late spring night. They wandered down the sidewalk, heading in the general direction of the alley apparition point.

Sirius stuffed the hand not carrying his guitar into his jeans pocket. “So…” He looked up at the inky sky to avoid looking at Remus.

“So…” Remus replied.

He had basically just poured his heart out through song, and ‘so’ was all either of them could say. Either Remus feels as uncertain as I do, or he doesn’t feel anything at all. It’s time to find out.

“What did you think of my song?” Sirius asked.

Remus breath hitched, and the sudden anxious tension was palpable in the air around them. “It was more pleasant on the ears than the last time I heard you play.”

Sirius stopped walking. Remus walked a couple strides before he noticed Sirius was no longer next to him, and turned.

“Seriously? That’s all? It was better listening than when I was circling the pit of Hell?” He quivered with indignation.

Remus looked down. He placed one hand on his hip, and the other rubbed his forehead. When he finally looked at Sirius, his eyes had a haunted look. He lowered his arm to his side and said, “What do you want me to say, Sirius?”

“I don’t know, Remus. But I poured my feelings out to you through a song about thirty minutes ago. I thought you might have some thoughts on the subject.” Embarrassment stirred within him. Guess it was just me then…

Before the tears that were threatening could come to the surface, he tore across the street. Sirius was a few paces from the apparition point when Remus caught up to him.

He placed a gentle hand on Sirius's upper arm. “Sirius.” His voice was gravely. “Please, wait.”

Sirius' skin sizzled in the most delightful way under Remus’ palm. He took a deep breath before turning and Remus' scent washed over him. Old books and chocolate. A streetlight backlit Remus, so all Sirius could see was his dark outline.

“You’re right,” Remus said. “I do have thoughts on the subject of...you.” He moved his hand down Sirius’ arm, ending with brushing his fingertips along the backside of Sirius’ hand, before pulling it back to himself.

Long after Remus’ hand was gone, Sirius’ entire arm tingled from the gentle touch. Breathless, he said, “Ok…”

“There’s...something you need to know first.” His tone had taken on a slight bitter lilt.

“What’s that?”

“Come over to my flat tomorrow night. Nine o’clock. I’ll tell you then,” Remus said. “Good night, Sirius.”

Sirius watched the retreating figure of Remus until it turned the corner in the direction of their shops, and Remus’ flat. He wondered what it was that Remus couldn’t tell him right now. Why did it have to wait until tomorrow night? With those thoughts floating around in his brain, he turned and apparated back to his flat.

~~~~~

The following night, at ten minutes till nine, Sirius apparated to the alley behind the shops. He’d spent most of the day wondering what in the world Remus needed to tell him tonight. Why couldn’t he just say last night?

Sirius walked through the sun’s last rays of the day. The refracted light cast the world in a hazy red-orange color that reflected in the shop windows he passed. It was rather beautiful in a surreal and eerie way.

He came to the side door of the Lounge that led to Remus flat and rang the buzzer. Remus appeared at the door and opened it, then stepped aside to allow Sirius to enter.

Sirius looked Remus over. He looked...a bit of a mess actually. Instead of his usual trim and well-fitted clothes, he was wearing baggy sweatpants, and a threadbare shirt. It appeared he hadn’t bothered to shave today, and under the scruff his mouth formed a ridged line.

“Erm...Remus? Are you ok?”

Remus offered him a blank, expressionless stare. “Mostly,” he said. Then he turned and started walking down to the basement.

Sirius had never been to the basement of the building before. The door was always shut with a padlock. He assumed Remus meant for him to follow, so he did.

Apart from the musty mildew smell that haunted most old basements, there was also a distinct trace of iron...blood? What the fuck?

At the bottom of the stairs was a small concrete room with one small window on the west wall in front of him. An iron cage, similar to an old-fashioned jail cell, stood on the north wall to his right. A small spindly table sat under the window. What...the fuck?

Remus had one hand wrapped around a bar of the cage. His other hand rested on his hip, and his head was hung so that his chin was on his chest. The color had drained from his face.

Sirius had not moved from the foot of the stairs. “Remus. What is going on?” he asked nervously.

“The, um…” Remus squinted his eyes shut. “The Wolfsbane potion helps me keep my mind. And,” he took a deep breath, “the Calming Draught makes me sleepy. You won’t be in any danger.”

“Wolf...Wolfsbane?” His voice came out as a squeak. What. The. Fuck?

He watched his friend fling his wand on the table, and step into the cage. Remus swung the door closed with a loud CLANG, and then latched a heavy lock across it. With a heavy sigh, he grasped a bar in each hand, and settled his forehead in between the bars. His eyes were closed.

Unable to control his movements, Sirius stepped forward until he was in front of Remus. He lifted his hands until they wrapped around Remus’ hands.

Slowly Remus lifted his face. It was still pale. The corners of his mouth and eyes were downturned in the most somber expression Sirius had ever seen.

“You’ve always wanted to know the reason I don’t date. This...is part of the reason.” Remus lifted his head and looked out the small window.

Following his gaze, Sirius noticed the sun had fully set, and the moon was out. The full moon. He looked back at Remus and gasped at the golden glow in his normally soft amber eyes. Sirius took a step back. No!

“I’m sorry,” Remus said. Then a tortured cry rent the air as his body contorted and transformed.

Where a moment before Remus had stood, now a werewolf sat. It tilted it’s head to the side, and looked at Sirius and whined.

Sirius sank to his knees and peered through the bars. “Remus?”

The wolf sniffed and pawed the bars. A sad whimper left it’s throat.

“Remus? Can you hear me?”

It tilted it’s head back and let out a long sad cry. Then it circled a couple times and lay down next to the bars as near to Sirius as it could get.

Sirius edged closer to the cage. The wolf picked up it’s head and gave another whimper and pawed toward Sirius.

“I don’t care that you’re a werewolf, Remus. No one is perfect,” Sirius told him. He conjured a pillow and blanket for himself, and lay down outside the cage where Remus was laying on the inside. “I love you, you furry idiot,” Sirius muttered as he fell asleep.

Next Chapter: Chapter 15

#writersmonth2020 #wolfstar #remus lupin #sirius black #remus x sirius #sirius x remus #mauraders #slow burn #alternate universe #harry potter #fanfiction #fanfic

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livayl · 4 years

Text

The warmth of comfort that kindled a desire (Par 1)

I actually needed two weeks of building courage to post this because part 2 did slip into the 18+ category. But in this part you´ll only have Marya and Amaziah both exhausted and coming down ill, comforting each other. At least as far as that goes with those two. ;) A little warning for a general description of war in the first paragraph, just skip that one if you want to. And don´t worry, the story is not violent or sad.

And as always, please only re-blog it to other kink blogs, thank you. :)

The silence was one often heard after a long fought battle. Once the seemingly eternal clash of weapons, the song of blood and steel, had ended. When no more magic split the atmosphere with thunderous lightning bolts and all consuming flames. As soon as the last gigantic foe fell, the earth trembling one last time in fear as the ground is crushed by it´s dead weight. Once all crying had stilled, the last breath was choked and even the bravest heartbeat deceased, this was when the silence became more deafening than the loudest roar.

And so their army marched, shrouded in screaming stillness. Ice cracked sharply underneath heavy set steps. A victorious return that still seemed to be too much of a loss.

Dawning had tinted the snow deep lilac and painted the horizon a blazing orange-red. A fiercely smoldering sun rose from its slumber to awaken the coming day still wrapped in haze. The few trees and abandoned houses they passed where still no more than black silhouettes in front of the glowing skyline that shadowed their surroundings with twisted black shades. It was an eery yet appealing atmosphere that Amaziah would have enjoyed if not for the pungent stench of war and ashes that lingered even after leaving the battlefield long behind. Hugging her whole body tightly like an old lover resistant to be left unattended. Her magic; as destructive as it was: The only love she once thought of being exhilarating in all its clashing emotions had now turned to drain her deeply. Carving a big hollow space where it once could almost be described as all pervading. The turns her mind took made her snort derisively and silently chide herself. She really must be tired to indulge in such foggy nonsense instead of keeping watch properly.

"Are you unwell?" A whispered voice asked as a small, gloved hand gently came to rest on her armor clad lower arm. Amaziah swore that she could feel good intentions melting into her like a pleasant warmth radiating through the icy metal trapping her skin. May it be the moments own kind of magic or her wishful imagination.

"Forgive me, just lost in thought. But you seem cold and exhausted, Love." She answered upon looking down, gently tightening the grip around the small figure seated in front of her. Maryas head titled back just enough to shift her hood and release a curled, lustrous mass of hair into the open. The ever present wind entangled those silky wisps even more, making them dance and waft around a shockingly haggard looking face. The still dim light made it hard to tell but Maryas usually bright blue eyes seemed veiled and unfocused with eyelids at half-mast and lashes breathed on by frost. They also were unusual shiny, almost feverish and deeply embedded into the lilac shadows surrounding them. Her face appeared to have lost its color completely, hovering in between flowy coppery waves like a pallid ghost dappled in freckles. Full, paled lips slightly parted under a rosy-tinted, very sniffly nose. Her body slightly swayed, if to balance out the wyverns fast pace or out of exhaustion was hard to tell.

"I do? You should look into a mirror yourself more often." Marya said, her normal melodious speech all rough around the edges. Her body unconsciously pressed closer to the Archmages front, longing for comfort. "Oh I would for sure but there is always this angry, terrifying face that keeps staring back. It is haunting me." That made Marya laugh despite the circumstances which rapidly turned into a rattling coughing fit. "Ugh. Now that was scary too..." She breathed, still panting, and shivery huddled deeper into her coat. "Here, let me try something..." Amaziahs strong yet delicate, already bare fingers gently plucked the fingertips of Maryas fine leather gloves to slowly undress her trembling hands. She could not help but to shudder a little more as her once sun kissed skin was exposed to a sharp frostbite inch by inch. Compared to the exquisitely soft, always warm dragonskin Amaziahs own seemed rough and cold when she entwined their hands with each other. Yet, how cold could a woman be that had defied the searing blaze of a dragon just to defend others. And to give out wonderfully warm clothes, too apparently.

Marya startled a little as a prickling sensation started to spread from her hands up to her arms. It was not unpleasant and seemed vaguely familiar. She concentrated hard enough to recognize her veins resonating with the well known, almost erratic, seething pulse which infused the battle mages body. One that could be as feeble as a freshly ignited candles flame dancing in a breeze, only to grow to a burning, all consuming blaze within a heartbeat should the winds turn. For a second it felt like an overwhelming wave erupting through a bursting volcanoes crater. It flooded her with almost unbearable heat that took her breath away only to lessen to a slowly flowing stream of constant warmth not unlike magma- albeit less deadly. The Archmage; a hardly controlled force of nature. Not that this was something unusual.

"Forgive me, that did not go entirely as planned." "Oh so you did not want to ignite me?" "Mhmm not today at least, no. Does it feel fine now?" Maryas focus went inward once again. The steady flow of magic had now unfurled throughout her whole body. It felt like floating in silky hot healing water with one of those bubbling bath soaps. Of course no one ever would add one of those to a healing basin. Though it should have been something worth consideration. They were perfumed nicely and felt so fizzy and- really really tingly? Tickling her almost too much to enjoy- "apTSCHIh!-ISSCHuh!- hah-ITSCHiiuh! Ihhh-s it supposed to tickle my nnnh-nose?" The sensation had peaked too fast for her to unwind her hands from Amaziahs grip and had left her no choice but to sneeze openly down her lap. "That tickle seemed to be rooted somewhere else." Amaziah replied, still reluctant to loosen her grip despite Maryas increasingly desperate efforts to squirm out of it. "Whah-hah-TSCHih!- hdt~TSCHIU! -apTSCHIEW! What a shame. I thought- hii-IIISCHHiuuh! you found a new battle strategy. SNNFFFff please let go of my hands." "But then you´ll be cold again." "Spitting all over the place is not much better!" Amaziah unwillingly agreed to free one, but not without a ridiculed glance down her still blood stained armor. She wrinkled her brow at that thickly clotted mass of charcoal frost-giant-leftover still coating her whole right side. "I've been splattered with worse today." She paused while Marya cleaned her nose with a gurgling blow that ended with a pair of raspy coughs. "You could try to sleep a little. We will reach the outpost before mid morning and as much as I already despise it, I´m sure there will be plenty more in need of your services."

There had been more indeed. Not enough to be numbered as plenty but a sufficient amount to reduce her still battle deprived mental and physical resources to a shaking, almost nonexistent core. Marya could almost feel Amaziahs worried gaze burning through her back as she had finally been dismissed to retreat to their shared tent. Her mind was drifting in and out of a fevery blur, only vaguely aware of the outstretched arm behind her. She was carried on heavy legs that felt numb with exhaustion, one wavering step after the other. Suddenly, her complete range of vision seemed to loose fight against an ever present, approaching darkness that had patiently lurked in the corners. Focus blackening and eyelids barely lifting anymore, everything so heavy as if smeared with glue, she realized: I´m about to pass out.

When she regained consciousness it was mainly through the slightly irregular rise and fall of her pillow. But pillows did not move or breath. Right? Nor should they feel that solid. She blearily rubbed her face deeper into the thing she recognized as a shoulder connected to a small yet soft curve she knew all to well. Her hand was placed above a slightly hollow, firm belly that contorted in rhythm of every hitch. And there, under a mutually used cozy blanket, was that protective grip on the small of her back she had come to appreciate.

Marya also realized that faint, but oh so familiar smell of bergamot paired with a deep underlining of sandalwood that finally teased her out of that fuzzy warm place her mind must have hidden in. That she was able to discern it also confirmed that she felt much better. Less the stuffy, achy and overall exhausted mess she had been just a blink of an eye ago. Eyes still closed she was still wondering how she had managed to retreat to their shared bed when the former light, yet recurring hitch suddenly accumulated to an urgent gasp. Which then accumulated in a single, violent and full-bodied attempt to stifle what hardly could be contained. The action, while relatively quiet, shook her as well and made her rip open her eyes as she needed to steady herself.

"Woah. Gesundheit!" She exclaimed as the surprise had chased away any afterthought of drifting back to sleep again. Amaziah, who obviously still struggled to compose herself, just looked at her. All teary eyed, disheveled and maybe more than a bit embarrassed. "Apologies." "No worries." Marya giggled as she draped first herself and then the blanket back over the Archmages body. "How do you feel? Did the potion work?" Amaziah asked. "Much better actually. Was I unconscious for long?" "No, a minute or two at best. But you've slept for a few hours, which I am really glad for." "Were you able to sleep, too?" Marya then asked, growing increasingly worried at the heat radiating off the Archmages usually cool body. Now, upon close inspection, there were also lots of tiny, gleaming beads of sweat glistening on her feverishly hued skin. "Mhmm... I did not feel tired." Amaziah replied elusively. "Also, I had to resume my likewise infinite war with the oh so dreaded paperwork" She added, chin nodding to her side where different scrolls and books littered the otherwise unoccupied half of the bed. "Did you at least have a potion? I could brew you one." Marya offered. She was readying herself to get up again but was swiftly and very decisively hindered with a smooth pull and an even softer kiss. "No. Potions are for those who are in need of them. And you still have to rest." "But you are ill, too!" "Hardly." "Of course. As much as I enjoy cuddling with you, your clothes are about to be drenched in sweat. And you almost threw me out of the bed with that sneeze a minute ago!" "I did not sneeze." "Oh? Then that suppressed monstrosity was a seizure. Which is even more worrying. And- ooh look, it is about to happen again!" To that the Archmage almost frantically shook her head, whether in denial or to ward of the inevitable did not seem too clear. Her flaring nostrils, increasingly deepening inhales and knitted browline did speak a much more obvious language though. As did the suddenly handkerchief-clad hands that flew up to cover a harsh sounding: "Huh-EESCCCH-AH..." quickly followed by a rushed, hastily muffled and messy "HEHIIZSSSCH-ue!" that rattled both of them. Amaziah could not help but to cough and blow productively in the aftermath. When she was finished the effort left her nose red rimmed and still vaguely shiny with fluid. "Ugh- I am disgusting, forgive me." The Archmage mumbled, nose already crinkled and twitchy with a newly rising discomfort that made her sit up and turn away. "No, you are ill." Marya soothed and hugged her Love from behind. "With me that-..." Amaziah stopped and raised a vaguely trembling hand towards her lower facial regions. There it came to rest securely caged around her mouth with a thumb and forefinger already hovering around each widened nostril. She felt each slight expansion tremble against her fingertips as the next inhale reached a sudden crescendo. Her grip tightened in a fruitless attempt to squelch her stubborn nose into submission that ended with a painfully held back, entirely unsatisfying release. Quickly followed by an almost agonized groan. "Excuse me...With me that amounts to the same thing, I´m afraid."

#my fic #my oc #elves #Marya #Amaziah #snzfic #sneeze #cold #female

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wizardwisenmore · 5 years

Text

Starjack Week Day 1 Favorite AU

Day 1 - Favorite AU = Soulmate AU

A bit late for the first day but here’s my own contribution:

His lines burned and his frame ached as he tumbled out of the pod, his mind cloudy and heavy from forced stasis as he looks around aimlessly, trying to regain his bearings. Figures crowded around him as he straightened up to find red optics searing into him from a new frame, a new place but with the same voice. Everything about Starscream had been red, almost glowing as his optics focused in on him and a throwaway remark on his new frame was given before he snapped back to reality to fully comprehend what Starscream had said. Ruler of Cybertron. That was new and terrifying and Wheeljack didn’t want himself to think it, to feel it, but that almost seemed right, like he’d filled the space he’d always meant to be in. Gorgeous and red and powerful, and right there so he’s close enough to reach out and touch, to feel and tear away what little distortion of reality there was left dissipates and everything becomes sharp almost too suddenly. Starscream is right there, sinister and more powerful than he has ever been. So close…

Wheeljack jolts up to the blare of an alarm, gasping into the cool morning, sucking in the chilly air into his vents to cool his heated and stressed frame. That dream that was more a memory haunts him from the back of his mind, a lingering thought with the images already beginning to fuzz and blur into each other, their clarity now long gone. The feeling of it all still flutters over his frame in a faint charge and he still can’t decipher what it all means. He couldn’t stop it and didn’t know who to talk to about how the same dream came to him night after night but escaping him so easily all without ever giving him any hint or sign why that memory was so profound, why that was the one his subconscious wanted him to remember. He groans as he rolls off his berth to greet the day, bitter and exhausted even though hi chronometer informs him he got a full recharge which is unusual for him even with the newly garnered peace. It’s been decades now since he was reawakened and Cybertron has been under the imperious but surprisingly just rule of Starscream. He likes to think he had some part of that even if he’s just an engineer, a scientist but he gave Starscream council whenever he asked and was there some late nights to help with paperwork. Those late nights almost always turned into long discussions of right and wrong and of what the future held. The later it got and the more engex that was added to these conversations, the freer they became with Starscream making confessions to him he doesn’t think he’s ever made to anyone else. He’s a lier but not Wheeljack. That’s what he had said and Wheeljack believes him especially after everything, after what they’ve seen. Wheeljack doesn’t like how closely he hoards that piece of Starscream, knowing that he’s the one who’s never been lied to, who’s never been tricked.

Maybe that was it. The strange pride he felt from this connection he has with Starscream that makes him feel… Powerful? Elated? Special? He doesn’t know and he doesn’t want to look too closely at that because feelings like that are dangerous or, at worst, fatal. He shakes his head to clear his mind and sets about getting ready for the day, taking a quick rinse and then gathering his datapads, he’s out the door and rushing for the lab.

It’s a busy day but a quiet one which is normal. It’s all normal. It’s all too normal and quiet and he’s actually bored with his latest project which hasn’t happened in thousands of years. He puts his head on the table in front of him, unmoving for a few good minutes trying to get himself to just get back to work already and escape whatever this funk he was in to go away. Then a harsh beep startles him up to his feet and when he calms down he sees it’s a message from Starscream that just has an address which of course meant he wanted to meet Wheeljack now. While he would normally scold Starscream for calling him on such short notice but right now he didn’t care and was already rushing to the door before he had even started typing out his return message confirming he’d be there in just a few minutes. He rushes down the hall then transforms as soon as he’s out the door, startling the nearby pedestrians as he zooms off down the road, navigating to the address that’s pulled up on his internal map. Once he’s at his destination, he doesn’t even stop to transform back into his root mode, instead landing on his feet from a flying leap in front of the grand building Starscream had called him to.

It turns out to be some kind of temple, to what he’s not sure but it seems to have been newly restored with some evident construction still going on at the far side. So it was old then, old and important. Something uneasy settles in his tanks and he takes to the doors, opening them with relative ease and quietly makes his way into the central chamber with ceilings that loom well above him. Tall, stained-glass windows set into the walls glow almost lazily in the morning sun all depicting different scenes of old stories of the past. He could spot a few of the Primes that he has long forgotten the names of but never forgot their faces and of other grand events like Primus bringing about the first Cybertronians. He looks on them in awe as he silently walks through the pillars that line the walkway that leads to the back where a shrine of crystal and glass sits depicting the light of Primus and forges of Solus. A shiver runs through him, the eerie quiet of the place sinking into his plating, the thick walls having blocked off the ambient noise of the bustling city the entire place stands in a devoted hush.

Double doors open to his left, their creaking hinges startle him and he turns to find Starscream who gestures for him to enter. He moves quickly from the shrine and into the antechamber of the temple to find Windblade as well as The Mistress of Flame waiting there with something large and bulky hidden under a cloth. Wheeljack nods to both The Mistress and Windblade before turning back to Starscream, feeling their optics burn into him expectantly as he silently asks what in the pits Starscream called him here for. Seeming to understand Wheeljack’s distraught look, Starscream simply waves him off with a smirk and approaches the cloaked object. Ever one for the flare of the dramatic, Starscream unveils the object with a flourish and the grace Wheeljack has come to associate with him. What Wheeljack sees makes him pause and tense his brow in confusion and he takes a step closer to get a better look at what appears to be yet another window with another scene elegantly embossed in glass albeit tarnished from time and lack of tending. The scene is of two transformers, plain and obscure in terms of form and mode with their chestplates open to reveal their sparks to one another. At that moment, the realization of what the picture is about hits him and he stands back up, straightening out his form and turns once again to Starscream.

“This is a mark revealing ceremony,” Wheeljack says, hands clenching at his sides and optics flickering every so often to the window. He’s familiar with the soul marks that illuminate from an individual’s spark that is meant to denote another’s destined bonded and because the mark is centered on the spark, even cold constructed broadcast them. Another argument why they deserved equal rights within Cybertronian society. During his early centuries, Wheeljack would sometimes open up when he was by himself to trace the delicate pattern formed by the light of his spark, thinking of the mech out there somewhere destined for just him and he for them whenever he was struck with a wave of loneliness. After he matured some and the less than hopeful statistics of finding your soulmate dropped even further when the war struck he had stopped such a habit.

The Mistress of Flame saunters up next to him, appraising him, “At least he knows what it is and so I hope he understands its significance and importance both culturally and spiritually.”

“Yes,” Windblade hurries up beside her, “I’m sure he does. As I am just as confident as Starscream in his ability to restore it.”

“Quite,” Starscream says with a click of his glossa as he sidles up to Wheeljack, placing a hand on his shoulder, “What do you say, Jackie? Up for the challenge?”

“Star, I’m an engineer…” Wheeljack softly hints and The Mistress of Flame scoffs.

“And an accomplished chemist if I recall,” Starscream quirks a brow at him, that sly smirk still on his lips, “That’s why you’re perfect. The window has been laid victim to the elements including acid rain and is carefully held in a frame that relies more on pressure than anything else. The piece needs to be taken apart and put back together with an expert hand or it will simply remain in pieces. I’m sure that you can do it. That’s why I recommended you for the job.”

“Isn’t that a little…” Wheeljack’s optics flick to the other mechs in the room before settling on Starscream again, “out of my department?”

“Well,” Starscream pouts and tilts his head, “What are you working on right now? Would it be too much to fit it in?”

Wheeljack thinks back to the project still laid out over his station at the lab and sighs, shaking his head.

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Wheeljack looks back at the window, “Who knows? Might be fun.”

Windblade smiles at that and gives him a little nod of thanks before walking away to call in mechs to load up the window for transport back to his lab. Starscream tries to catch him in another conversation only for The Mistress of Flame to make her presence known rather haughtily, stepping right in front of Wheeljack with an accusatory finger jabbing his chest right above his spark.

“This isn’t just some pet project,” she hisses, “This is a very important piece of our history, our faith. I am entrusting it to you upon the grounds of the words of others I trust to some extent and simply because no other satisfies my standards for such a delicate process. Know that if there is so much as a chip in the glass I will have retribution.”

With that, she flicks her cape out behind her and strides out of the room at a fast pace. Wheeljack watches her go then shares a look with Starscream who gestures to her implying that is simply how she is making him sigh as his shoulders sag.

Later in the lab, Wheeljack has the window carefully dismantled in front of him which took all of five hours to do just to make sure he didn’t torque the beams holding the glass in place. Then had come carefully melting away the old soldering that he is now only a quarter of the way done. He has to take breaks to let the glass cool down from the heat so it doesn’t fracture from the rapid change in temperature which simply slows down the process even more. During yet another break, he rests his hands against the station and shakes out the aching cables in his shoulders. Lolling his head to the side, he watches Starscream scan the script on the datapad he’s holding, the same he’d been reading this entire time as Wheeljack worked. While either ignoring or simply not noticing Wheeljack’s hard gaze, Starscream makes a few notes on it with a stylus before continuing to read. Wheeljack huffs and straightens back up, stretching the cables and readjusting the suspension in his back before walking over to Starscream who’s perched on a tall chair. He leans against the wall next to Starscream so he can look over his arm to see whatever it is he’s reading and is surprised to find it to be an old text presumably about the very window he’s working on.

“What’s so important about this window that it’s got the Emperor of Cybertron of all people researching it?” Wheeljack murmurs as he continues reading.

Starscream folds his arms to hide the datapad against his chest as he smirks over at Wheeljack, “It is a delicate political matter. It’s important to The Mistress of Flame which means it’s important to Caminus which means it’s important to me.”

“Doesn’t mean you have to research all the ins and outs of it,” Wheeljack pushes off the wall in favor of putting his hands on his hips.

Starscream shakes his head and gets up to push past Wheeljack towards the window.

“The Mistress of Flame knows her lore and scripture like the back of her hand,” Starscream explains with a flare of his hand, “I have to read it forward and backward just to keep up with her and understand what it is she’s even saying.”

“And? What do you make of it so far?” Wheeljack asks as he watches Starscream look over his work.

“A bunch of terribly melodramatic drivel that wants the reader to believe that so long as they have enough faith in Primus he will guide them to their destined,” Starscream rolls his optics at his words and scoffs, “As if.”

“What?” Wheeljack laughs, “You don’t buy into all the stories about chance meetings and miraculous moments of revelation?”

Starscream rolls his optics again and gestates wildly as he goes on a rant, “You mean all those sermons and pronouncements declaring how that Primus chose the perfect mech for even the lowliest cold construct? Please… If the war proved anything it proved that we are all sooner to hate each other than love each other.”

“That’s a rather bitter outlook even for you,” Wheeljack crosses his arms, giving Starscream a look, “Not worried that Primus might try to prove you wrong just to spite you?”

Starscream vents a harsh, sharp laugh, “At least that sounds more like the Primus I know. I know I can’t deny the existence of the marks or that those who share the same ones do wind up being happy but I can’t accept that we’re all walking on this path-”

Starscream’s words cut off into a yelp as he slips on some of the melted flux from the solder that had dripped to the floor. As he flails, trying to get a grip on something to keep himself stable, he accidentally knocks over canisters of oil for other machines and manages to spill some on himself. Wheeljack rushes forward and manages to catch Starscream before he hits the floor, gripping him under his arms as the datapad clattes to the floor. They stall like that, tense from the sudden break in the calm then their optics meet and Starscream’s face tenses.

“Not. One. Word,” Starscreams hisses under his breath.

Wheeljack just blinks down owlishly down at him then breaks out into a deep laugh that shakes his whole chassis, his arms still tightly holding Starscream. Starscream tenses and quickly tries to scramble out of Wheeljack’s hold only to slide more on the flux making Wheeljack have to tighten his grip further to keep him from falling.

“Star, wait, wait,” Wheeljack gasps between vents, calming down his laughter to help right the flier.

Once fully righted, Starscream makes a show of brushing off his thighs and turns pointedly away to delicately step from the work station and back to his chair to sit and rest his chin in his hand rather moodily. Wheeljack continues to laugh softly under his breath as he watches him go then cleans up the bit of mess. It doesn’t take too long to clean up with just a few cans spilled and the flux on the floor. Wheeljack has plenty of rags and solvent on hand to clean it all up, he’s just glad none of the pieces of the window were damaged. After he’s done, he looks back over at Starscream who’s still brooding and still covered in splotches of oil making Wheeljack shake his head. He picks up another rag and drenches it in some solvent before approaching Starscream.

Hearing him approach, Starscream says, “It’s all ridiculous.”

“Hey, come on, everyone slips once in a while,” Wheeljack pats his shoulder.

Starscream straightens up to face him, “Not that. Those stories about how it’s supposed to feel when you meet your soulmate.”

“Uhuh,” Wheeljack sounds, carefully bringing the rag to Starscream’s chest to clean away the oil there and when he makes no move to push Wheeljack away, he continues cleaning Starscream in earnest.

“I’m serious,” Starscream insists, “All that nonsense about knowing just from your optics meeting or from a single touch.”

“Maybe we’re just bitter, old veterans,” Wheeljack shrugs, “Nothing seems enchanting to us anymore.”

“You can’t tell me you actually believe in all of it,” Starscream eyes him as he continues with his work, “How you’re supposed to feel this… spark…”

Starscream trails off and Wheeljack pays no mind to it at first, now cupping Starscream’s face with the rag in his other hand as he dutifully cleans the oil from Starscream’s helm. Once the oil has been all wiped away, however, he returns his attention to Starscream’s optics and is struck still, his hand freezing where it is on Starscream’s face, cupping his cheek. Starscream is looking up at him with an unusual expression and Wheeljack can’t help but return to his dream. Red. Glowing, beautiful, and searing him to his core. He pulls from Starscream slowly and walks away back to the table to set down the rag. Wheeljack tries to steady himself but the same thought swarms his mind: it’s the same.

“So, you’ve never bothered to look at your mark then?” Wheeljack asks, keeping his back to Starscream.

Another scoff breaks the air behind him if somehow subdued, “No amount of skepticism could have quelled that bit of curiosity… I’ve looked at my mark. I don’t know what to make of it.”

“Three diamonds, all interconnected at the shallow points with the middle one higher than the other two and an elongated triangle hanging from the bottom point of it,” Wheeljack says, trying to keep his voice casual only to whip around as something crashes from behind him.

The chair Starscream was sitting on has been knocked to the floor with Starscream standing defensively in front of it with a look of mixed horror and rage stricken on his face. Wheeljack tenses, not ready to know what this means, not ready to understand what he’s feeling. Starscream doesn’t know and marches right up to Wheeljack and grips his arm tightly, the other stretched out ready to attack. Wheeljack doesn’t resist the grip, feeling too off-balance to manage anything else than simply watching Starscream, his little expressions, the way his optics flicker, how his wings twitch in irritation.

“When did you look at it?” Starscream growls out, dangerous and low.

Wheeljack’s optics tilt down as he whispers, “Never. I was describing mine.”

Starscream’s grasp falters as his expression softens to that of shock, his free hand coming up to brush over his own chest where his spark resides.

“You’re lying… Don’t lie to me, Wheeljack. I don’t lie to-” Starscream cuts himself with a harsh vent.

“I know,” Wheeljack says softly, letting his chestplates fold away to reveal his spark, making Starscream step back.

Starscream takes in the sight of Wheeljack’s spark almost hungrily, tracing the mark with his optics, his hand lifting slightly almost as if to touch it. In a moment of spontaneity, Starscream does something Wheeljack would never expect of him and reveals his spark to him and, sure enough, there is a mark to mirror Wheeljack’s own hovering over Starscream’s spark. It’s almost too much and yet suddenly not enough. The desire to reach out, to hold, to touch floods Wheeljack but he doesn’t dare move, can’t find the will to do so, as he’s so paralyzed with fear. Starscream steps closer to him and that’s enough for him to break. Wheeljack closes the distance all at once, taking Starscream’s face in his hands as he all but rips away his mask and presses his lips to Starscreams who melts into him. It starts gentle and chaste then Starscream licks over his lips and he lets him in and in return delves in, tasting Starscream on his glossa, all steel, energon, and the faint taste of zinc he likes to add to his morning energon. It’s perfect. That’s all Wheeljack can think as he feels Starscream’s hands tighten behind his helm as he trails his own down Starscream’s frame to his hips before wrapping his arms around Starscream to pull him closer. As their chestplates meet, they gasp as a sudden sharp pleasure wracks between them, making them break the kiss.

They look down to the soft blue light between them find they had forgotten to conceal their sparks and they had met in the collision and their marks now glow brighter than ever. Wheeljack looks at Starscream sheepishly as he lets his plates close and Starscream does the same while trying to suppress a wonderfully sweet, soft smile. Wheeljack doesn’t resist the impulse to feel that smile on his lips and kisses him again, quickly and softly then presses his face to Starscream’s neck, holding him close. His soulmate.

“I suppose if that could have gone anyway, that was how it was going to go,” Starscream mutters, bemused.

Wheeljack comes back up and smiles at Starscream, “I should’ve known the moment I stepped out that tank. I certainly haven’t been able to stop dreaming about that moment.”

“You’ve been dreaming about me,” Starscream teases but there’s something much more vulnerable just beneath the surface.

“Every night,” Wheeljack confesses.

Starscream just looks at him in disbelief, “You really are oblivious.”

“In all fairness, I didn’t take much stock in the whole soulmate business either,” Wheeljack counters.

“Fair,” Starscream responds flatly before kissing him again and Wheeljack decided that he’d been very stupid indeed.

No more work got done that day.

#starjackweek #starjack #starscream #wheeljack

18 notes · View notes

strawberriestyles · 5 years

Text

Part 5: All Hallows’ Eve

(BANNER MADE BY MY TALENTED SWEETIE PIE @adashofniallandasprinkleoflunacy)

Harry X Reader (AU)

In which you’re persuaded to help a young witch named Harry.

Read previous parts here.

Word count: 4.9k+

Author’s note: There will be an epilogue!!! I hope y’all enjoy this. Pls let me know what you think. Don't forget to like and reblog, too. Xx

When you wake, it’s with a grogginess and confusion that leaves you unable to move for minutes that inch by. When you open your eyes there’s an ache in the back of your skull. It’s still dark, still night.

You can’t bite back the pained groan that surfaces as you try to sit up. Your limbs feel thick and heavy and all of your blood rushes to your head at the same time.

The first thing that comes to mind is the face of the stranger, still haunting the forefront of your memories. You peer around the room but find it empty. Your second thought is Harry. Tea. Drugged tea and muttered apologies.

The pentagram is gone, as are the items once scattered around its perimeter. You find that the candles around the room have been extinguished again. But it’s not pitch black. There’s a glow about the air—red and eerie. So strange that at first you think it’s just an after-effect of the tea, but it remains when your brain begins to clear. It’s the moon.

The house is quiet along with the dark. There’s no hint of Harry or even of Nicks. Your feet settle on the wooden floorboards, where the spilled tea and mug fragments have been cleaned up. It takes you a moment to stand and when you do it's dizzying.

You’re torn between anger and mere confusion. What is going on? Why would Harry drug you? What is his spell? And more immediately, where is he?

Your legs carry you with all the weight of anchors. You first reach the stairs to the second floor. The narrow stairwell is dark, holding even less light than the living room. There’s no noise. Harry wouldn’t be sleeping, you decide, and move on toward the hall which leads to the kitchen.

You stop, freeze against the wall as a heavy gust of wind beats against the side of the cottage. The frame of the building creaks and groans against the pressure. A fresh smattering of clouds follow the wind, shadowing the moon, and the reddish glow fades into darkness.

You have to steel yourself to keep moving. But when you reach the corner, in the mouth of the kitchen, you pause again. Across the table, past the doorway, in the short yard which meets the woods, Harry stands with his back toward you. There are candles—your candles—spaced out on the ground in front of him, burning with that steady Hellfire.

A breeze blows through again, ruffling Harry’s jacket. It spills through the open kitchen door and reaches your bare legs. You shiver. But the wind has also ruffled the pages of a book laid out on the table. The book.

Harry keeps his back to the house. You think that you can hear the distant sound of his voice, but you have no clue what he’s saying. Your heart pounding erratically, you inch into the kitchen, around the corner of the table. The you from just a few weeks ago would have escaped at her first chance. You’re too invested at this point. Even if Harry isn’t who he’s said he is. He hasn’t paid you and so the least you can do is fuck up his spell that’s important enough to drug you.

When you reach the book at the other end of the table there’s a moment of intense hesitation. “It’ll burn the eyes right outta your skull.” Harry’s words play through your sore head over and over again in his voice, like a little devil sitting on your shoulder. But there’s only so long that you can hold yourself back and eventually you take the risk, leaning forward over the table and lowering your eyes to the pages of the book.

It doesn’t take long for you to release your nerves. When your brain hasn’t turned to mush and your eyes haven’t begun to melt like ice cream on a summer day, you focus on the Latin scrawled across the pages. Thick pages. Leathery and dry. You shiver to think what they’re made of.

The top of the righthand page reads like a manual. And there’s that word. “Gaudens.” Orgasm.

You skim through this upper portion, frown deepening with every word as it vividly describes the setup for the pentagram where you and Harry had sex. But your eyes slow when you reach the next section. “Ritus.”

You’ve read a few lines before you pause. You flip backwards until you find the beginning of the spell. The title. “Et resurrectionis erimus.”

There’s a loud hiss and a blur of darkness. Your fingers sting as you reel backward, your skin torn open by Nicks’s claws. But your steps fall short when you back into something solid, soft.

“Weren’ s’posed to see that,” Harry mutters. Before you can take a step forward, his arms curl around your body. Your own arms are locked to your sides at the elbows.

“Let go of me!” you shout.

Your legs kick out and find the corner of the table. Nicks hisses again from where she’s perched atop the open book as she’s shaken. Harry’s arms only tighten around your body and you’re swept across the room, out into the hall. He pulls you into the living room, kicking and struggling the whole way. The two of you approach a wooden chair tucked into the corner. Characters are carved into its surface, along its entire length, foreign and certainly not Latin. In a final effort, you swing your head backward and feel your skull combine with Harry’s chin. He merely grunts.

Somehow, Harry finagles you into the chair and steps back. You lunge—or try to lunge. Your legs are set in place, stiff and frozen. Your hands are curled around the chair’s seat and you can spread your fingers over the wood, but can’t peel your palms away.

Harry rubs at his chin, sighs, and then rounds the chair. He yanks it across the floor by its back, dragging you through the house until you’re out in the autumn air.

There aren’t just candles spaced out over the fallen leaves, you realize, as Harry tilts your chair forward onto all four legs with a force that rattles your very bones. It’s a pentagram. At a much larger scale than the one you laid on not too long ago. The leaves are cleared away from the circle and the lines of the star, revealing brittle, dead grass. Overtop of this grass lays lines of something white, like salt, but the breeze does nothing to stir either these granules or the leaves within the pentagram’s circle.

“Harry, what is this?” you hiss, surveying the points of the star and the objects placed there. In the corner closest to you there’s something disturbingly grotesque. It’s red and bloody, bright color spilling into the salt. But you can’t discern what it is, and you’re not sure you even want to.

“’S the spell,” Harry answers softly. He steps around the chair to face you and a hand reaches out to brush hair from your face. You whip your head out of range, but he only steps forward, tucking strands behind your ear.

“Don’t touch me."

He sighs, stepping back up to the outside of the pentagram. You try once more in vain to free yourself from your seat.

“I thought you were supposed to do this on Halloween.”

“It is Halloween,” Harry says. “You were supposed to sleep for two days, not one. I should’ve taken yeh home.”

“Yeah, well maybe you should take me home now.”

Harry shakes his head. “Despite what yeh’re prob’ly thinkin’ right now,” he says, twisting to look at you over his shoulder, "I really do like yeh, and I’d rather yeh not die. So, ’m gonna ask yeh to sit calmly in that chair an' try not to draw any attention to yourself. D’yeh think yeh can do that?”

“I’m not promising you shit.”

“Wonderful.”

Your muscles strain against the magic gluing you in place. There is no give. You turn your head to look around you for anything that might help. Nicks is sitting in the open kitchen doorway, her tail flicking back and forth as per usual. But nothing in your immediate vicinity that can help you get free.

Harry stands silently, staring at his spellwork. With the gathered clouds overhead, you can barely see his face. There is no light. And then the gray parts, that strange red glow filtering down through the treetops, paint dripping, oozing over both Harry and the pentagram.

“What is that?” you whisper.

“’S the blood moon,” Harry says, shooting you a quick look. “Don’ yeh pay attention to anythin’?”

You don’t have time to reply before he begins chanting, just like in the movies you’ve seen. Thick, flowing Latin falls from his lips like the juices of a fruit. The bloody moonlight grows darker, richer. The breeze picks up. Dried leave are lifted from the ground, swirling through the air, whipping across your cheeks and tangling up in the loose strands of your hair. And yet everything within the pentagram’s outer circle sits still as stagnant water.

You try to pick out Harry’s speech but the wind carries it away from you. You can only make out odd words that give no context. “Pax," "vita,” “resurgemus.” But you read the title of the spell: "Et resurrectionis erimus.” Resurrection.

“Harry, stop,” you gasp out. The very air around you has begun to chill. In the center of the pentagram, a figure has begun to form. From the first glance, you notice the familiarity. The piercing eyes, the white hair, the hard, pursed mouth. “Stop, stop!”

Harry ignores you, continuing his uninterrupted chant until the man who spooked you last night begins to solidify, sharpening at the edges. And then his spell is complete.

You struggle to inhale as you watch Harry and the ghostly man stare at each other from either side of the pentagram’s perimeter. And then the apparition speaks.

“Hello, son.”

“Son?” you hiss. Nicks hisses as well, spinning to dart back into the cottage.

“He’s not my father, Y/N, shut up,” Harry implores you without so much as a glance. He tips his head in the man’s direction. “I’ve raised yeh to complete your work.”

“Well done, boy.” The stranger smiles, and there’s something so uncomfortably jarring about it that you find yourself wincing. His voice is accented, but clear. A sharp contrast to Harry’s muddy English. He lifts a hand. “Let me reward you.”

“Harry, don’t!” you shout, even as he steps over the salt line of the circle. The old man’s eyes flicker to you. His lips quirk. Then he seems to completely disintegrate, just fall apart, piece by piece, dissolving as he touches the leaves at his feet. You and Harry both freeze, but it’s only a moment before he drops to the ground and begins writhing like a trapped snake. He grunts, spasms, and your fingertips curl painfully into the wooden seat of your chair. And then he stills.

You wait for a few seconds, your lungs heavy as your breath comes in pants, your facial muscles trembling beneath the thin layers of your skin. The breeze has died down and the moon has dulled with spotty cloud cover. You blink furtively at Harry’s curved back.

“Harry,” you whisper when you can no longer stand the silence and the suspense. “Are you okay?”

The quiet endures. And finally, when you think you might start screaming, he sits up. A heavy cough comes from the back of his throat. You can’t see his face, only the hunch of his shoulders.

“Harry?” you whisper again. The clouds join over the moon like curtains after the first act, and you dip back into obscure darkness. Your breathing picks up.

A minute passes with your vision blinded. Leaves are stirred up again and you flinch at the proximity as they sift together and apart. Harry’s silence, though, is the most unnerving part of it all.

You can do nothing but wait, pulse hammering. The cool air coaxes up goosebumps across your skin, over your bare thighs. You feel the moments tick by until the moon peeks out, just barely, for a blink of time, but what you see makes your muscles tighten even further before the clouds suck up the light. Harry is standing just feet in front of you, eyes level on your face, his mouth tight and his face expressionless. The darkness seems more whole then, with that picture painted vividly in your mind, and when the light returns and he’s closed the distance between you two, your only form of defense is to squeeze your eyes closed and pretend he’s not there.

“Lovely girl,” he says, and it’s not Harry’s voice. It’s the cold, articulate voice of the resurrected man, but it comes from Harry’s mouth. This much you can tell by the scent of his hot breath as it folds around you. “And what do I call you?”

Harry’s nose brushes the edge of your jaw and it sends shuddering chills down your spine. You rip your face away from his touch, lifting it toward the sky, your eyes still plastered shut.

“Well, you can call me Henry.”

“Go to Hell, Henry,” you spit between clenched teeth.

“Those are not the words of a lady.”

Your breath dies in your throat as his lips find the dip of your neck. You can feel his tongue flick out, trail a stripe across your skin.

“You taste like magic,” Henry mutters. His fingers—Harry’s fingers—curl around your chin, anchoring you in place even as you jerk against his hold. Your nostrils flare with your heavy exhales.

His mouth presses to your exposed neck once again, over your pulse. He hums against your skin. Then his teeth scrape, and finally, puncture.

You gasp, shocked, and then your struggle escalates. You maneuver your head as much as you can, twist against his fingers, but they only bite into your chin as he bites into your throat.

“Get the fuck off of me!” you scream.

And he does, a few moments later. He peels his mouth away from you. He takes a step back and when you finally open your eyes, you wish you hadn’t. Harry is standing there, hollow grin on his face, dark blood gripping down his chin. It looks even more red in the moonlight.

“That chair is wonderfully made,” Henry says, wiping casually at the skin around his mouth. “You will just stay here, then, while I do my work.” And with that, he strolls into the house. Even his gate is different than Harry’s.

“No, I will not,” you mutter beneath your breath as clouds join once again overhead. You strain against the chair’s runes, your bones aching with the effort. But even still there is no give, not even an inkling of freedom. When you finally relax, you grit your teeth against the pain in your muscles. That approach won’t work.

From inside the cottage, you hear a sharp crash and the urgency of an animal racing across wooden floors. Nicks springs through the kitchen door and into the leaves, darting into the woods. Your heartbeat, against all odds, has somehow sped up even further. You try to ground yourself in your current dilemma before thinking about what will come after. First, you need to get out of this chair.

You try to tune into the magic engraved into its legs and seat, the same way that you think Harry’s probably been able to feel your presence, the same way that you can feel a sort of draw to him. You relax, closing your eyes again. There’s a vibration that runs through your loosened muscles, hums in the depths of your bones, in their marrow. It’s uncomfortable at first. It feels like the reverberations after hitting something with a metal bat. And then suddenly it doesn’t. It begins to feel almost pleasant, like the quick buzz after a cup of coffee. And then it feels as though it meets something in your chest that stops its flow. Your own power, a will of sorts.

You try to focus on this point in your chest and push back against the buzz of magic beneath your skin. Calmly, thoughtfully. And your fingers loosen. That’s all you can muster, even with all of your focus, is to unstick your fingers from the wood, but it will have to be enough. You will make do.

Your fingers, splayed as they’ve been, are able to stretch there range of movement. You can feel symbols carved into the underside of the chair’s seat, deep grooves that your fingernails catch in. That your fingernails catch in.

You’re not sure if it will work. You’re not quite sure of anything magic-related, really. Harry decided to save your lessons until his spell was complete. Convenient for him. Now you’re not sure whether he ever meant to give you lessons, or whether everything that you’re learned up until this point is true, or if he’s just been feeding you easy answers. But you will try anyway.

With another deep breath and a grounding focus, you turn one of your fingers until your nail is perpendicular to a groove, pressing into the wood with as much pressure as you can muster. You scratch back and forth. It’s slow going. There are minutes before you can feel anything forming from your efforts, but then a groove begins to deepen counter to the rune you’ve chosen. Your nail and the skin around it grows sore and raw. You take breaks between bursts of scratching.

And then your muscles all loosen at the same time. You slump forward, lifting first one hand and then the other from the seat of the chair. In the red moonlight, you can see blood pooling at the tip of your finger, the jagged edge of your nail. But you only take a moment to recover before standing on weary legs.

While you were preoccupied you didn’t notice the dropping temperature. But now, barefoot and half naked, the chill is brutal. It rips right through your skin on the breeze. When you look up, for the first time you catch a glimpse of the entire moon, full and colorful and eerie. It seems a warning, one that's come too late. You press your fingers to your neck, where blood is still trickling slowly from your puncture wounds.

Your mind races for a short moment. This is an opportunity. You can leave. You can escape. If you left now, you could find your way back home in the dark and the cold. But somehow you know, even as you’re thinking it, that you can’t leave. Your conscience won’t allow it, not without knowing what’s going on and if you can stop it. And you’re turning on your heel before you’ve made a conscious decision.

The shelter of Harry’s cottage offers no reprieve from the chill of outside. In fact, it almost feels colder. And it’s silent. So heart-tickingly silent. You move on your toes.

The darkness feels imposing, everything unfamiliar without the usual candlelight. You work your way through the kitchen and into the hall, using the walls as your guides. The living room is empty. And then you hear a creak from above you.

You’re hesitant, of course. You don’t know this Henry. You’re not sure who he is, where he’s from, or when for that matter. But even after what he’s done, you’d like to think that you have some sort of grasp of his character. He doesn’t seem like a bad person. Maybe that’s just your optimistic side. Henry, on the other hand...

“Harry?” you whisper. The floorboards creak beneath each of your steps, as you creep up the stairs and you think maybe it’s just to taunt you. Your heart pounds against the cage of your ribs.

You stop at the third step from the top, swallow down your fear. “Harry?” you whisper again.

There’s a rustle, a strange pressure in your chest, and suddenly you’re tumbling backwards down the stair you’ve just ascended. Your head knocks against hard wood, your arm bangs against the side of the stairwell. You sprawl over the floor at the bottom, chest heaving against the pain of your fall, desperate for air. You’re dizzy and breathless.

Harry appears above you, haloed in red like some angel of death. Like a symbol of the apocalypse, from Revelations. You know what he would say if you brought it up. Some speech about how Christianity isn’t a part of witchcraft. Magic is a sort of religion all on its own.

He descends the steps leisurely and by the time he reaches you your lungs have found some oxygen. He’s shed his jacket and he’s holding the book, you see through the blur of your vision. He peeks over its pages at you.

“You are clever, aren’t you? Found your way out of a chair I made myself.”

You feel too achy to reply. Harry steps over you and into the living room, lighting a couple of candles with a passive wave of his hand. Your muscles strain to lift you into a sitting position.

“Now, don’t get up.”

You ignore him, clinging to the sofa to pull yourself to your feet. Harry—you really don’t know what to call him—is leaned up in the opening to the hallway, his fingers skimming the thick pages of the book as he flips through it. Shadows fall over his face from the lit candles.

“What are you doing with the book?” you ask through the splitting pain that’s found your head. “Gonna take over the world or something? Like in all the movies?”

“Movies? What are those?” Not-Harry raises an eyebrow at you and then watches your feet as you step toward him. “Some new type of spell?”

“Something like that, I suppose.” Who is Henry? you find yourself asking again.

“You don’t really want to know what my plans are, do you? Where is the mystery in knowing everything?”

“Sounds almost exactly like what Harry told me,” you mutter, “before he conjured you up.”

“A wise boy, this Harry. I would stop where you are.” He nods toward your legs as you continue to creep forward. “Wouldn’t like another tumble, would we?”

“I’ll stop as soon as you tell me that whatever you’re trying to do isn’t some evil plot. That you aren’t going to hurt people.”

“Well, now, that’s all rather subjective, don’t you think?”

“No,” you snap. “I think it’s quite clear cut.”

“Good, evil. Hurting, helping. People. What makes a person, anyway? All of these mortals, magic weeded out of their lineage, bled from them like drained game? It’s like they’ve devolved.”

“So, what, you’re gonna get rid of them?”

“I told you”—Harry’s hand flicks gently at the air and from where you stand, only feet from him, you sail through the air, crumpling to the floor in the center of a pile of broken glass—“to stop moving.”

You hiss, lifting your hand to examine your palm, where a shard has embedded itself into your skin. Blood begins to seep from the edges of the wound as you pull the glass out. You can feel similar stinging in your calves and in the sole of your opposite foot. The aching of your body intensifies.

“A genocidal witch,” you manage to huff out with a dry laugh. “Very original, Voldemort.”

“You really must stop making modern references,” Henry mutters.

“You gonna kill me, too?” you ask, struggling once again to your feet. You don’t know how much more of this beating you can take. “Oh, no.” Harry’s head shakes and he smiles as he finds a specific page of the book in his hands. “No, you do have magic in your blood, even if it is very little. It would be a pity to waste that. It has become so progressively rare in this dying world.”

You wince, reaching down to remove the glass from your foot, but even as you watch, it slides out of your skin all on its own.

“Blood is the most powerful element, you know,” Henry says. You look up to find him watching the glass fall from your skin. “Not water, not fire. Blood can drive people mad and nourish the earth, start wars and win them.”

You peel another shard of glass from the back of your thigh and let it rest in your already bleeding palm. “Good to know.” You whip the jagged glass across the room, grunting at the way the throw makes your tendons scream. It catches Harry in the crook of his elbow, slicing through a thin layer of flesh before crashing to the floor and shattering into smaller fragments.

Harry drops the book in his hand. He stares down at the shallow cut, where blood should be welling up, but only thin gray smoke wafts into the air. He claps his opposite hand over it and lifts his head to glare menacingly at you.

“Maybe I should kill you. How does that sound?”

“Sounds like your plans aren’t working out exactly right.”

Despite your quick mouth, you take a step back as he moves forward. Your shoulders tense and even this hurts your already sore muscles.

“I’ll wring your pretty little neck, girl. Save all that precious blood for myself.”

Your eyes flick across the room as he nears you, and then you whisper, “Catch me if you can.” With a spurt of adrenaline, you throw yourself to the side, jumping onto the couch cushion, onto its back, and landing in the floor in front of the stairwell. You scurry for the hallway, your head pounding and your cuts stinging, leaving a trail of fallen blood behind you.

You make it to the kitchen and grab the doorway to swing yourself around the table before you feel a foot hook your ankle. You trip forward, your chin smacking into the wooden floorboards before you can catch yourself. Your teeth knock together, your head rattling. And Harry’s cold hands close around your thigh, pulling you across threshold of the kitchen as they travel up your leg.

“Fuck off, Henry,” you murmur. You twist your head and find him grappling with your knee. Smoke rises in tendrils from his arm. And you bend your free leg, kicking backward to connect your heel with his cheek.

His fingers loosen just enough for you to pull yourself free. You scramble up to your feet, throbbing all over, your vision blurred, your movements clumsy, and all but drag yourself across the room, out into the lawn. You don’t take any time to assess the weather, the temperature, the color of the moonlight, before you’re sprawling across the leaves. The pain is too much. It’s humming through every inch of you.

The ground dips beneath you as you’re pulled back to your feet by the shirt you’re wearing. You gasp when you’re whipped around. Harry’s face is a mere inch from yours, his teeth bared, a red splotch spreading across his cheek from where you kicked him. The vision swims before you.

“You,” he hisses out, “are a pain.” His hand wraps around your throat, and without any pressure behind his touch, you can feel your windpipe closing. You try to gasp, wrap your fingers around his wrists, feel your feet slide uselessly over the ground beneath you. Your blurred sight grows foggy.

There’s a familiar snarl, a whirl of darkness, and then the hand falls from your throat and you’re coughing into the night. You drop to your knees, even weaker than you were. Harry has stepped back. Nicks hangs from his forearm teeth and claws sunk deep into the skin. More smoke rises as he flings her away.

You take the momentary distraction to skitter backward until your fingers find something grainy. You look down. Salt.

You've reached the circle of the pentagram. When you spin to look to your other side, you see the ugly organ that you noticed earlier. The blood that has spilled from it seeped through the salt granules, staining them a deep pink. Nothing spills past the lines of the pentagram, you notice. Not blood, not air, not leaves. The areas between the salt lines remain undisturbed.

Harry stalks toward you. One of his arms is crimped to staunch the flow of smoke from his elbow, his hand clamped over the opposite forearm. You watch him come for you, watch his eyes glow, not with the blue that you’ve grown accustomed to, but one that’s paler, icier. You take a chance.

Your sliced hand lifts and lands on the inside of the pentagram, in the wedge between the organ and something thin and lumpy that you can’t make out. Harry gasps. His glowing eyes roll back, his arms fall limp, and he crumples to the ground, hair spilling over his forehead. Smoke pours from his wounds with a loud hiss. More smoke lifts from the candles around the pentagram, their Hellfire extinguished.

You swallow around the dry sting in your throat. Your elbow buckles beneath you. You dip back over the pentagram’s circles, head in the leaves that have begun to stir up with the chill breeze. You watch the moon grow fainter, dull, and then disappear behind a wall of clouds. Your tired eyes and aching body are only weakened by the cold that bites at you. You blink against the night sky as a patch of clouds separates to reveal a spotted stars. And then you relax into sleep.

Epilogue: Sunrise

#harry styles #harry styles writing #harry styles angst #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles fan fiction #harry styles fanfic #harry styles fan fic #harry styles fic #blood moon

94 notes · View notes

khrsecretvalentine · 5 years

Text

KHR Summer Exchange 2019 for @khrkin

Notes: KHR Secret Summer Holidays 2019! For Fran (@khrkin), who asked for terrible comedy and found-family (and 1827, which I unfortunately didn’t manage, sorry ;o;).

From @kyogre-blue to @khrkin

~.~.~

The Special Investigation, Containment, and Discipline Committee, Namimori branch, was supposed to investigate, contain and punish supernatural crimes — hauntings, possessions, curses, use of magic in illegal affairs, as well as monster attacks. Ghostbusters, pseudo government version, basically. Sawada Tsunayoshi, terrified out of his mind, had received a full course of training on all those things during new hire orientation… the “orientation” that was just a shaky home-made video and a powerpoint slide with clipart zooming onto the screen.

Anyway, apparently all those scary things did exist.

However, dealing with them… was not what they actually did, day to day. In his three months at the Committee, Tsuna hadn’t seen a single supernatural thing outside of his coworkers.

He had seen a distressingly high number of stalkers, serial killers and scammers though.

“Don’t worry, Tsuna-kun!” Sasagawa Kyoko, the secretary, receptionist and nanny of the team, comforted him when he tried to bring up the subject. “It’s summer now, and we’ll have more real work. Summer is the season for seances and ghost stories, after all. That’ll stir up the spirits. Lots of people going exploring too, in all kinds of places, waking up all kinds of things… I’m sure it’ll pick up soon!”

That wasn’t comforting.

…Let’s start at the beginning.

Sawada Tsunayoshi, also known as Dame Tsuna, age 18, had completely bombed every university entrance exam he’d taken — as expected. His middle school crush Kyoko found him crying behind the school building on graduation day, completely without future prospects. With the kindness that had made him fall for her in the first place, she gave him her handkerchief and listened to his sobbed complaints.

“It’s okay, Tsuna-kun,” she said, after he calmed down. “I know a place that’s always looking for people!”

That place was the Special Investigation, Containment, and Discipline Committee, Namimori branch.

Kyoko and her brother Ryohei had been recruited after they ended up involved in a supernatural incident. It wasn’t a kind of “you know about us, so now you must join” thing. They could have forgotten all about it and gone home to their normal lives. Although the Committee did not have anything as nice as actual memory alteration, they did have a substance that could blur recent memories, which was given to most witnesses.

Ryohei refused. Punching ghosts or whatever was apparently too exciting. And Kyoko followed his lead.

Frankly speaking, Tsuna hadn’t really believed in this stuff. He figured that this was the designated ‘loser’ group that was changed with wild goose chases and hoaxes — someone had to deal with the citizens calling in hauntings and such, after all, even if it all turned out to be squeaky windows and leaking pipes in the end.

Most importantly, it was a job that didn’t care about his qualifications and didn’t require any competence test. As long as he could escape being an unemployed waste upon society, Tsuna would take anything.

He… did not expect his boss to beat him up on the first day, or one of his coworkers to have a shape-shifting bamboo sword that could cut through sheets of solid steel. Or the weird foreign kid, who might have been a coworker but Tsuna wasn’t sure, to be able to generate lightning out of nowhere. Or his other, other coworker who may or may not have been possessed.

But it was still a job. Tsuna would take anything, including all that.

The current job market was scarier than any ghost.

…Probably. Final judgement pending actually seeing a ghost.

~.~.~

Just as Kyoko said, summer was the season of ghost stories and seances. What this meant was that the police, the fire department and sometimes even government agencies that didn’t like naming themselves would transfer over cases from concerned citizens who were absolutely sure they were being haunted by the spirit of their great-grandfather, a jilted office lady who hung herself at the abandoned building a block over, or a famous serial killer. (Why did people like trying to call up the ghost of Jack the Ripper so much anyway?)

Kyoko and Yamamoto, the only two employees with basic social skills, were on the phone without rest, using their friendliest, most soothing voices. Meanwhile, Tsuna and Ryohei were given links to videos of exorcism ceremonies and some very realistic looking Shinto priest robes, sewn up by their intern Haru. Thus equipped, they became… con artists on a government salary.

Gokudera had also been offered a costume, but he insisted on trying to prove the concerned citizens’ worries unfounded through the power of science — even if Gokudera’s idea of science included “energy fields” that could not be detected by modern instruments, which left “imprints” that carried an “echo of the deceased’s biopatterns” blah blah, and other things that sounded no less creepy than just calling it a haunting.

Gokudera’s success rate dropped to an all new low, along with his salary.

It was the usual combination of dumb job and crazy coworkers, just in sweltering heat.

And then, Tsuna tried to perform an… exorcism (scam) at the new Nonohana Building downtown.

The building had been suffering from a number of creepy rumors, which came to a head when several bored employees had a few too many drinks after working overtime, did a seance (of course), and then ended up in the hospital one by one after mysterious accidents (of course).

“Na-mo-ta-mo-ra-su-ro…” Tsuna chanted pure nonsense while walking through the motions roughly approximating an exorcism. The paper ropes at the end of his stick rustled as he swung it back and forth. Nearby, the building owner and several other figures in business suits watched with expressions ranging from worry to desperate hope to outright boredom. One of them was filming with her cellphone. Tsuna sweated a little more than usual, under the heavy priest robes.

Thankfully, he didn’t trip this time — that was always hard to explain away.

The air felt a little strange, as Tsuna knelt and completed the fake exorcism. And his stick — currently serving as a scam prop with paper ropes tied onto it, but in actuality a collapsible nightstick he had been given as self-defense weapon — was almost uncomfortably hot in his hand. It made him hesitate and get up only slowly.

Before he could lift his head, the nearby peanut gallery gasped collectively. When Tsuna looked at them, they were all staring at something on the high wall of the lobby, behind the reception desk.

Tsuna turned.

“Hiiiiieeee—!”

There was dark red, blood-like substance flowing down the smooth surface of the wall. There was no indication where the hopefully-not-blood came from, as it seemingly appeared out of nowhere several dozen feet up. It didn’t flow straight down like a proper rust stain either. The red smears thickened and thinned, and curved — into what looked entirely too much like writing.

PAY

—It said.

“M-Mr. Sawada!” the building owner whimpered. “Wh-what…”

Tsuna also did not know what. With trembling hands, he fumbled through his robes and pulled out his cellphone, hitting the speed-dial for the office.

The call did not go through. What came from the speaker was instead an almost cliche horror movie mix of sounds — a screech, static, and a long moan-like clicking. The screen flickered and showed Tsuna’s wallpaper, only to glitch and twist until there was something like the shadow of a screaming face among the pixels.

Tsuna wanted to pass out. He really, really wanted to pass out.

His terrified shrieking — as well as that of the gathered businessmen — was drowned out by the clatter of the storm shutters descending across all the lobby windows. The suited clients, er, concerned citizens scattered, running in several directions in a futile bid to find some way out of the lobby that was suddenly in lockdown. Tsuna’s legs trembled too much to follow them.

It was suddenly the real deal?! Unfair! Illegal!!

…Hauntings were, in fact, illegal. They had rules about them. Tsuna couldn’t remember them now, but they were definitely in the rulebook. (He had thought it was kind of funny at the time, but he definitely couldn’t laugh about it anymore.)

“Mr. Sawada! Mr. Sawada, do something!” one of the suits wailed, suddenly grabbing onto him.

Do something? Like what?!

The lights flickered disconcertingly, taking on a red glow. There was the sound of static and an air raid siren echoing across the lobby, almost loud enough to drown out the sobbing and the screaming.

Between the half-light, darkness, and eerie red backlight, a figure appeared near the blocked off doors. Shapeless under a swathing cloak, it turned slowly toward those that had been pawing hopelessly at the shutters, prompting a new round of screaming.

Now, there was even a… ghost? Grim reaper?

Tsuna was so terrified that he mostly just felt numb.

Some of the other businessmen had been frantically pounding the elevator button up, and their prayers were unexpectedly answered. With a quiet ding that was almost drowned out by the chaos — why were there sounds of thunder?! — the thick doors slid open, and blessed, pale light flooded out of the elevator cabin.

Everyone who hadn’t been standing by the elevator rushed toward it. Those that had been already there tumbled inside like knocked over bowling pins. The suit who had been clinging to Tsuna followed suit, dropping him like last season’s designer boots and sprinting toward the salvation elevator with a speed that belied his impressive salaryman drinking belly.

Naturally, Tsuna very much wanted to follow. But when he tried to do so, still staring fixedly at the cloaked apparition slowly approaching, the hem of Haru’s carefully sewn robes tangled his legs.

With a yelp, he splattered across the polished floor. His attempts to either scramble to his feet or just scramble away on all fours were impeded by those same robes, leaving Tsuna faceplanting a few more times. The cloaked figure approached slowly but unrelentingly.

“Hiiiieee—! S-s-stay away!” Tsuna squealed.

In pure, mind-numbing panic, he threw his baton at it.

What happened next could only be considered an act of providence, proof of the divine — or that the universe had a terrible sense of humor. Tsuna’s aim was and had always been atrocious. He really couldn’t even hit the broad side of a gym.

And yet, with a dull thud, the nightstick planted solidly into the center of the ominous figure’s hooded… head? It bounced off and clattered away somewhere in the shadows, but Tsuna had no mind to care about that.

Along with the ability to aim, he also lacked any sort of arm strength, so logically, getting hit by something he threw should have not been worth noting. But the cloaked figure swayed and, unbelievably, toppled over into a heap of fabric and… limbs?

Legs in jeans and sneakers, completely normal-looking arms… With the cloak bunched up carelessly, the true nature of the ‘menacing figure’ was revealed.

The lights were still flickering, there was still a horror movie soundtrack of noises echoing through the lobby, and the exits were still all blocked. But Tsuna didn’t have the mood to ‘appreciate’ that any longer. Slowly and carefully crawling over, he used two fingers to pull back the hood of the cloak. Beneath was… the face of a completely ordinary young man, maybe a couple years older than Tsuna.

“Oh, Madam President, isn’t that your youngest?” the suit, who had clung to Tsuna and then heartlessly abandoned him, had come back and peered over his shoulder with interest.

Tsuna had a truly annoying premonition.

In a while, they would indeed confirm that this young man was the building owner’s youngest son, skilled with computers and going through a rebellious phase. Since this building was quite modern, everything was controlled through electronic systems. Painting something invisible on the wall to leave an outline for the rust-colored liquid to fill was also simple, if you were creative. He had apparently planned to lock all the executives, their assistants and Tsuna in the elevators for a while to give them a good scare, then let them out without too much harm.

So basically, a horror-themed family dispute, the kind of thing no one even wanted the cops to be involved in, much less some dubious government committee.

…There were actual hauntings, zombie outbreaks, and monster attacks out there. Tsuna had been assured of this point.

However, this was not one of them.

~.~.~

It was late night, and the Committee office had been slowly emptying. Even Kyoko was already packing up. Before heading out, she stopped by Tsuna’s desk, where he was mournfully pecking away at a report regarding the latest joke of an incident.

He was mourning his overworked brain, his lost youth and innocent dreams, and also his sore eyes from staring at the computer screen for so long. At least this incident had been minor enough that only Deputy Chief Kusakabe would be checking his report, not the actual Chief. Reports to the Chief had to be written with a brush.

“Don’t stay too late, Tsuna-kun,” Kyoko said, patting his shoulder kindly. “You can finish in the morning.”

“Deputy Chief said it has to be in his inbox first thing tomorrow,” Tsuna said gloomily.

Kyoko’s lips pursed disapprovingly. “For such a minor incident? He’s just giving you a hard time because you’re new,” she said, huffing. “We should make a complaint!”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Tsuna assured her quickly. “It’s just so that I learn the ropes!” He appreciated Kyoko’s willingness to stand up for him — truly worthy of his first crush — but this level of… what couldn’t even be called hazing wasn’t even worth mentioning, for someone who had been thoroughly bullied all through his school years. This was just actually doing his work, not having his shoes hidden or his books torn up or anything like that.

“…Well, okay,” Kyoko conceded after a moment. “But tell me if it gets too much, okay? I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“See you tomorrow!”

Once she had stepped into the elevator, drops sliding shut behind her, Tsuna let his waving hand drop and slumped in his not very comfortable office chair with a groan.

He had always received abysmal scores in composition, but this was far from Tsuna’s first time writing a mission report, so it wasn’t like he didn’t know what to do. Even if there remained a 50-50 chance that Deputy Chief Kusakabe would send it back to him for corrections, that was still an improvement over his previous 4 out of 5 returned as unacceptable.

Tsuna was really just dragging his feet and procrastinating too much, partly out of embarrassment. He had actually gotten caught up in that prank and believed it. None of the others would have fallen for it, he bet. But mostly, it was taking so long out of boredom. Writing reports… was really boring.

Sighing, he sat up and went back to typing.

Half of the lights in the office had automatically turned off once the motion sensors no longer picked up anyone around. With almost all staff done for the day, the only sounds were the clicking of keys from Tsuna’s desk — and muffled cursing from Gokudera’s, where he was supposed to be working on his own report, along with a formal apology to the owner of the construction site he’d blow up instead of ‘exorcising’.

Tsuna had already been almost done anyway, and once the main recounting of events was done, the more formulaic closing sections came to him with the ease of practice.

His head snapped up in surprise at the sound of an office chair skittering back. Not his chair — Gokudera’s.

His coworker stalked around the row of desks with a scowl and a slouch that any delinquent would have been proud of. With the Chief absent, Gokudera had even dared to wear his regulation black suit unbuttoned, with his tie pulled loose. Frankly speaking, he terrified Tsuna only slightly less than Chief Hibari and Chrome in one of her kufufu moods, so Tsuna made every effort to remain very still, in hopes of being overlooked.

No such luck. It was precisely his desk that Gokudera shambled his way over to, and when Tsuna failed to look at him in a timely manner, he kicked snappishly at the legs of his chair.

“Hey, new kid!” Gokudera barked.

“Y-yes!” Tsuna spun around, spine ramrod straight and his gaze somewhere to the left of Gokudera’s head.

Unexpectedly, a phone was thrust at him, making Tsuna fumble as he tried to take it, missed, and finally clutched it in his sweaty paws. “This is… my phone?” he realized. How did Gokudera manage to get it? Tsuna thought he might have left it on his desk, or maybe in his bag, or… Well, he wasn’t sure where he’d left it, but he hadn’t handed it over.

“Getting hacked by some amateur, that’s just embarrassing,” Gokudera grumbled. Sticking out his lower lip in a way that was probably meant to be intimidating but would be more sullen to anyone except Tsuna, he looked off somewhere to the side and rubbed the back of his neck. “I put in some actual security for yah. And a couple sensors for fluctuations in od, in case you finally manage to run into some actual deviations in ambient true energy.”

“Like a ghost sensor?” Tsuna guessed, mostly because he wasn’t sure what else Gokudera could be talking about.

“Don’t call it something so unscientific!”

“Hiieee! Yes! Yes!” Tsuna squeaked, ducking his head and trying to hide behind his newly modified phone as Gokudera snapped at him.

Clicking his tongue irritably, Gokudera turned and shambled away, perhaps back to his own report and apology letter that were still waiting for him. He was exceptionally brilliant, Tsuna was aware, so a few updates to a phone wouldn’t take him long, but the fact that he had taken the time to do it…

Tsuna smiled down into his lap, fiddling with the device.

“Th… thank you, Gokudera-kun,” he mumbled.

His didn’t have the guts to raise his voice, but in the quiet, empty office, there was no doubt Gokudera heard him.

~.~.~

Sasagawa Ryohei and Yamamoto Takeshi returned the next day, making the office much livelier. Ryohei had been on helping look into recurring disappearances of hikers on the ominously named Death Mountain, while Yamamoto had been sent to the beach regarding a supposed sea monster attack.

Both of those definitely sounded like better assignments, so it was no wonder the more senior agents snatched them up. …That being said, Tsuna was aware that his pathetic stamina and physical capabilities wouldn’t have been up to running around in the mountains, or even out in full sun on the beach. Ryohei and Yamamoto, being sports club types, were far more suited to those kinds of missions.

“So was it a real one this time?” Kyoko asked when she stopped by her brother’s desk that morning. Since it wasn’t a private sort of conversation, naturally everyone listened in.

“Nah,” Ryohei waved one hand wrapped up in bandages like always. “They all just kept getting lost to the extreme. Only thing out there was piles of beer bottles. I made a few groups help cleanup, and since they all made it back, everyone calmed down about the place.”

Kyoko laughed, bright and cheerful. Tsuna, two desks away, sighed. Typical for their office, really.

Pushing off from his desk, Yamamoto rolled over in his chair. He spun around to face them smoothly and said with a grin, “Mine was real.”

“Oh!” Kyoko gasped excitedly, and even Gokudera, who detested Yamamoto fiercely, leaned closer to listen in.

Yamamoto’s smile widened as he began to narrate. “There really was a sea monster, tentacles and everything. It was a kind of mutant octonus thing, but also with lobster pincers. It swallowed a bunch of people and a few boats, and when it spit them out, they were covered with goo… very gross.”

“Mutation? From pollution? Radiation?” Gokudera muttered to himself.

“It’s good that it spit them out,” Kyoko said. “Were they okay?”

“Oh yeah, they were fine,” Yamamoto said. “I mean, grossed out, but fine. It turns out… somebody dropped an ice cream cone into the water, and it really liked the taste, so it was looking for more. Once it figured out where to look, it mostly just kept eating ice cream trucks…”

Kyoko laughed again, but Tsuna could only groan internally and palm his face.

Really? A real life monster, and it just… wanted ice cream? Why was his job like this? Why was the world like this? Ice cream?! What about the hunger for human flesh! What about revenge against mankind! What about invasion of the sea dwellers! Manga had lied to him!!

Even when the monsters were real, the cases were still ridiculous.

…Well, at least he was getting paid. The benefits were also good.

Their gossip time came to an abrupt end as Yamamoto spotted something behind them and quickly sat up straight, his expression serious and professional. A quick glance confirmed — it was Deputy Chief Kusakabe, coming over from Chrome’s… office, or maybe cell, Tsuna wasn’t clear. In the presence of an authority figure, everyone quickly turned to their desks and computers, trying to project an image of productivity and focus.

Their attempts weren’t very good, but Kusakabe didn’t seem to notice. He wasn’t like the Chief anyway. Although he was certainly stern, he had always been patient with Tsuna’s many, many, many screw ups.

Trailing behind him was Chrome. Tsuna blinked in surprise — it was rare for her to leave her area.

“Sasagawa,” the Deputy Chief called out. “Your status?”

“Yes! I’m extremely good!” Ryohei sounded off without hesitation. “Ready to go any time!”

Kusakabe nodded. “Good, then come along,” he said. “The rest of you, don’t take any cases today. Stay at the office and hold down the fort. I will contact you if the situation changes.”

He didn’t explain what that meant, walking off quickly with Chrome and Ryohei in tow. When the Deputy Chief’s figure vanished into the elevator, Tsuna glanced at the others. “W… what situation?” he wondered. “What was that all about?”

“Are you dumb? There must be something big going down, if the Deputy’s taking Dokuro out,” Gokudera said snappishly.

“Sounds like it,” Yamamoto agreed, somewhat pensively. Agreeing with Gokudera earned him a sharp glare. “And we’re on standby, so I guess we should be ready to help, if it comes to that.”

The earlier cheerful gossip mood had all but dissipated, and everyone began to turn back to their tasks with a lingering sense of tension, even as Kyoko quietly wondered whether to let Lambo know. Tsuna cursed internally. With the current state of things, Deputy Chief Kusakabe had almost certainly had no time to read his report. If he’d know it would be like this, he wouldn’t have bothered staying late yesterday to finish it!

~.~.~

The weather recently had been sunny and very suitable for summer, but by afternoon, thick gray clouds had overtaken the sky and wind battered in strong gusts against the windows. Although it was still early, typhoon season had begun.

After lunch, Kyoko read out the weather forecast. “Meteorologists were taken off guard by the sudden appearance of the storm front rolling onto the Kanto coast…” she said distractedly, her eyes skimming the text on her screen. “Expected to make landfall around sunset… Category is not yet determined… I’d say we should head home a little early to make sure we’re not caught out in the storm, but with the way things are… what should we do?”

The Special Investigation, Containment, and Discipline Committee, Namimori branch, wasn’t a large group to begin with. With the Chief, the Deputy Chief and even Ryohei out, everyone left was about the same age and with little difference in seniority. When it came to making a decision, they could only exchange uncertain looks, no one willing to take on the responsibility.

After about a minute of silence, Kyoko accepted that there would be no answer. “Okay,” she said. “Deputy Chief didn’t say we needed to stay late, and we don’t have a night shift to begin with, so let’s have one person stay until closing, and everyone else can head home early. Who lives closest?”

Ah, Kyoko-chan really was amazing, Tsuna thought.

“Probably me,” he volunteered. “I can stay.”

It was summer, so it wasn’t like sunset was at all close to the normal end of business. It would be windy, but he’d make it home fine.

…Or so Tsuna told himself while foolishly smiling at Kyoko. Things like logic and actual thinking were not involved.

Since meteorologists had completely failed to predict this storm coming in at all, why did he think they’d be able to predict when it would arrive? By five PM, it was so dark out that the few passing cars needed headlights, even hours away from sunset. The sky was a roiling gunmetal gray. When Tsuna stepped outside, he was nearly blown off his feet by a gust of wind, and his backpack was shoved up so hard that it hit the back of his head.

Stumbling along with a series of yelps lost on the wind, he managed to grab hold of a lamp post and clung for dear life.

There was no one else out on the streets, because every other person in Namimori had more sense than Tsuna. Aaah, why did Kyoko-chan’s smile have to be so cute and wonderful? Why did he have to go and try to act all reliable? Bemoaning his own foolishness, Tsuna squinted against the wind and tried to get his bearings. There was nothing to do but hug the buildings and stagger off in the direction of the train station.

However, Tsuna only made it a block over before a hand clamped onto his shoulder and he was suddenly dragged into a narrow alley between buildings.

“Hiiiiee! Take my wallet! Take my bag! Take anything, just don’t kill me!” he started begging immediately, throwing his arms over his head and cringing away.

But the presumed mugger, or maybe human trafficker, or maybe serial killer made no demands and didn’t hit him. After several long moments of silence, Tsuna dared to peek out, trembling.

What greeted him was infinitely more terrifying than a petty crook. Or a human trafficker. Or a serial killer.

It was his boss.

“Ch-Ch-Chief!” Tsuna stuttered helplessly.

Hibari Kyoya stared at him with the same blank coffin face as always, somehow still faintly exuding an aura of violence and murder. Unlike usual, his suit jacket was missing, and his tie was askew. He was also soaked, even though it hadn’t started raining yet.

“Phone,” Hibari ordered sharply. As Tsuna scrambled to obey, he added, “Call Kusakabe.”

“Y-yes! Right away, sir!” Tsuna blurted out, fumbling as he went through his pockets. Where had he put it? Oh, he better not have lost it. He’d be losing his life next…

Fortunately, his work phone turned up before Chief Hibari could lose his temper and give him another beating that was precisely short of putting him in the hospital. This was, Tsuna felt distantly aware, completely illegal and abuse of an innocent subordinate. But even Deputy Chief Kusakabe had just said it was “training,” and since Tsuna only saw the Chief once a month at most, it was still preferable to… shudder, returning to the job market.

It was only with his phone in hand that Tsuna realized it was continually beeping and vibrating as some kind of alarm went off. Given the juvenile punk font of the notification on his screen, Tsuna could guess this was Gokudera’s ghost sensing app.

He couldn’t tell how its metrics are supposed to work, but the weird typeset certainly looked threatening. It was also annoyingly hard to dismiss.

“J-just a moment, sir!” Tsuna squeaked, darting a nervous glance at Hibari.

The Chief was no longer paying him any mind. Hibari’s attention was on the main street outside their little back alley, and his expression was subtly furrowed. “Hurry up,” he ordered shortly, lifting up one of his tonfas. The other was notably absent, along with his belt and one of his cufflinks. “It’s here.”

…What was?

Down the street, a manhole cover was suddenly thrown into the air as a geyser of water burst up from underground. Then another, and another, and another, geysers burst up one after another, moving down the street — toward them.

“W-what the…” Tsuna muttered, staring in shock. The phone in his hand blared an alarm, louder and louder.

Water was flooding down the street, crashing against the buildings and sweeping away anything that had been left outside. But as the wave rushed past their alley, Chief Hibari inexplicably… lifted his tonfa and struck out at it.

The force of his blow parted the water halfway across the street, revealing the asphalt and the painted lanes — and making Tsuna’s eyebrows climb in shock and some horror. He’d known their Chief was strong, but this was just shounen anime levels of ridiculous. Thank goodness he’d apparently held back when beating up Tsuna. Thank you, Chief, you’re so merciful!

Something moaned unhappily, and waves twisted around to bear down on Hibari.

Great. So it was a water monster.

Hahaha… ha…

Frantically, Tsuna pounded on his phone screen. He could barely tear his eyes away from the spectacle of his boss fighting a wall of water that continually reformed under his devastating attacks, but somehow he finally managed to hit the contacts and the Deputy Chief’s entry.

“This is Kusa—”

“Sir! Sir! Sir! Chief is here! And fighting! And water!” Tsuna wailed without waiting for Kusakabe to greet him.

“We’ll be right there,” Kusakabe said with an unnatural degree of calm. Presumably, they could track his phone’s GPS to fight out where ‘here’ was.

Tsuna did not pay this or the end of the call any mind. Screeching, he threw himself aside just in time to avoid a lashing water tentacle that struck down the alley. The heavy industrial dumpster which took the hit in his stead was dented into a rough V and was thrown free of where it had been chained down.

This was it, the real deal. A real monster or supernatural phenomenon or ghost or whatever. Tsuna’s internal whining about his boring con artist job had finally been answered.

And now he was going to die for it.

But before the next water whip could turn Tsuna into another rough V shape, Hibari forcefully punted him aside. …Well, no. Despite the pain, all his organs were still intact, so it wasn’t that forceful, really. Ah, Chief, so merciful…

“Useless!” Hibari barked, but he didn’t have the attention to spare for the glaring that usually accompanied such a pronouncement. Although he was still fighting with relentless intensity, even a useless wimp like Tsuna could see that he was being forced back step by step.

Distantly, he considered drawing his own weapon, but really, what good would it do?

And in the middle of the chaos, it began to rain.

It came down suddenly and heavily, almost blinding Tsuna. And even though the volume of water added shouldn’t have made any difference yet, the wave blocking the alleyway and advancing on Hibari swelled and reared up.

‘Oh no,’ Tsuna thought, just before it crashed down over both of them, completely disregarding Hibari’s last attack.

Blub, blub, blub — a few bubbles sprang free before Tsuna managed to clamp his mouth shut. The underwater currents sent him spinning head over heels, and he was vaguely surprised that he hadn’t been thrown into any of the buildings. The alley had been narrow, after all, and despite having lost his bearings, he thought that he had already floated quite a ways. When he tried to pry his eyes open, he couldn’t see anything at all.

A pale hand shot out of the dark water and grabbed hold of his jacket collar.

It was Hibari. He glared at Tsuna, then twisted — and somehow, in defiance of all laws of physics, hurled him away. Before Tsuna knew what was happening, he shot out from beneath the surface and crashed onto a ledge a couple stories up. Rain was pelting down in full now, driven by gusting winds. Rolling onto his hands and knees, Tsuna scrambled up to the edge and looked down at the flood water that ran along the streets.

“Ch… Chief!” he called out. “Chief!!”

He needed to do something! But he couldn’t do anything! Tsuna wailed helplessly.

With an ear-splitting screech, a car skidded around the corner down the street. It sent sheets of water flying, making Tsuna realize with some surprise that the flooding was not nearly as high as he had expected. It was only just above a person’s knees. Even accounting for a strong current, how in the world could Hibari have been swept away…?

Right. Supernatural monster thing.

Even before the large black car had jerked to a stop, the rear door was flung open and Chrome, looking tiny and delicate as always, jumped out onto the rainy street. A long trident appeared in her hand — Tsuna felt sure she hadn’t been carrying it inside the car, since how could she have moved so smoothly with it? And then, just as she landed on the wet asphalt, Chrome… turned into a man.

Okay.

Twirling the trident over his head, guy-Chrome (??) slammed its tail into the pavement, and a shockwave rippled out all the way down the street.

The rain was sent flying. The water was sent flying. Tsuna was sent flying, barely managing to stay on his ledge — the fall was the kind that killed normal people.

There was a long silence as even the storm was momentarily halted.

Then, something landed on top of Tsuna’s head with a wet plunk and bounced off. It wasn’t rain. Left wiggling helplessly on the ledge was a single ordinary goldfish.

It wasn’t single for long. A veritable torrent of goldfish soon followed it down, covering the entire street in piles of flopping little bodies. The largest pile stirred, and Hibari rose up out of it, looking particularly murderous and also entirely too threatening for someone with fish in his hair.

“Kufufufu,” guy-Chrome laughed mockingly. “No need to thank me, ‘Chief’. How could I possibly leave you to struggle on your own with just your meager power? Kufufu…”

Tsuna’s first thought that guy-Chrome clearly wanted to die very much, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Without giving Hibari a chance to brutally murder him, guy-Chrome swiftly turned back into normal Chrome, his creepy laughter still echoing in the air. Chrome looked at the Chief wide-eyed, clutching the trident’s shaft to her chest.

Hibari, waist-deep in goldfish and under the pleading stare of a cute girl, gritted his teeth and, kicking his way free, stalked toward Kusakabe, who had emerged from the large black car’s driver’s seat.

“Deal with this,” he ordered Kusakabe, passing by Chrome without a look at her and stepping into the still open rear door of the car. The car door slammed shut behind him.

Then, it opened again, and Ryohei was unceremoniously flug out, followed by another slam.

Wordlessly, Kusakabe pulled out his cellphone and began to make arrangements.

Clearing his throat, Tsuna called out, “Um… Excuse me? Could someone… help me get down?”

~.~.~

The next day, the Chief did not come in and the Deputy Chief was away as well, probably handling some kind of cleanup and explanations to their superiors. Regardless, the office gossip circle reconvened with impunity.

“It’s so sad,” Kyoko sighed. “Those poor fish… I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to look at those festival stalls the same way again.”

It turned out that the water monster, which drew in a storm and flooded several locations across Namimori, had been created out of the accumulated resentment of all the goldfish that had been flushed down toilets over the years. Many of them had come from the summer festivals and the traditional dish scooping booths. Kids and couples and who knows who else would win themselves a goldfish in a bag, only to realize they didn’t actually want one after they got home.

So down the toilet the fish would go, and its little resentful goldfish spirit would haunt the sewers, schooling together with its countless wronged brethren. Until they had enough to make an entire monster.

Tsuna didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“Hahaha… yeah, same,” Yamamoto agreed. “I’m just sad I missed it. But hey, good on Sawada for having his first real encounter, huh? So how was it? Exciting?”

“Uh… I wouldn’t really call it that,” Tsuna said. “Did you think it was exciting, when you had your first, uh, encounter?”

“Yeah! It was great!” Yamamoto said, laughing.

Uncharitably, Tsuna enforced the ‘crazy adrenaline junky’ label in his mind. He’d suspected as much. After all, Yamamoto was good looking, popular, and talented. Why else would he stay at this kind of job?

“Did you even do anything?” Gokudera asked dubiously.

“I… called Deputy Chief Kusakabe?” Tsuna said, thinking for a moment. “I think Chief lost his own phone, so we had to use mine.”

“That’s good!” Kyoko encouraged. “The first I went out on a case I just got kidnapped…” She laughed self-deprecatingly.

Feeling daring after facing death by monster the day before, Tsuna patted her on the shoulder and offered her a smile in return. “Let’s work hard,” he suggested.

“Yeah!” Kyoko agreed brightly.

The warm glowey feeling of camaraderie sustained Tsuna through the day and writing this time’s incident report, which was more nerve-wracking than usual, given the need to avoid putting anything that might make the Chief look not absolutely terrifying and invincible. Tsuna felt he did pretty good at that, so it was utterly unfair that the Chief appeared anyway, as if summoned by the mere thought of him.

Instead of striding straight from the elevator to his office like usual, looking neither left nor right as if his minions, er, employees didn’t even exist — which was how both sides preferred it — Hibari paused mid-step and took a sharp turn, heading for Tsuna’s desk.

Tsuna watched him approach in mute shock. So did everyone else. It was only when Hibari came to a stop slightly further than necessary from him that Kyoko, Yamamoto, Gokudera and Ryohei remembered to snap their heads away and furiously pretend to be busy and not eavesdropping with their ears pricked.

Naturally, Tsuna wanted to turn away too, but he didn’t dare. Jumping to his feet, back ramrod straight, he saluted instead. “Ch-Chief!"

He also didn’t dare to ask what Hibari wanted.

The silence stretched on.

”…You,“ Hibari said finally.

"Yes!” Tsuna sweated intensely.

“Are you quitting?"

The question was blunt and simple, but also so unexpected that Tsuna only stared at his boss in confusing. "Am I being fired…?” he wondered.

“No,” Hibari said.

“Um,” Tsuna said. “Then… also no…?”

The Chief pinned him with an unreadable (terrifying) look for far too long, before finally nodding sharply. “Good,” he allowed. It was glowing praise for Hibari, and Tsuna had no idea what to do with it. Turning on his heel, his boss strode away just as abruptly as he had come, leaving Tsuna feeling like he’d managed to escape death — as usual.

“Great job, Tsuna-kun!” Kyoko said, giving him a thumbs up. He returned it numbly.

“Yeah, great job! You didn’t ditch like the last three new guys!” Yamamoto said. Rolling over, he threw an arm over Tsuna’s shoulders. “Now you’re one of us for real!”

…Oh! Was that what it had been about?

Well, it was true that a normal person would have probably run away screaming after their first encounter with a real supernatural being. Probably, the Committee had lost many recruits that way. Tsuna also… somewhat wanted to run away.

But the hazard pay was very high.

And, frankly, the monster was still better than a job interview. At least it didn’t stare into his soul and demand, in various ways without pause, that he justify his place in society and his right to exist.

Even though it was equal parts ridiculous and terrifying… he thought he just might like this job.

~.~.~

#kyogre-blue #khr #khr!#katekyo hitman reborn!#hitman reborn #Katekyoshi Hitman Reborn #gift #exchange #summer #holidays #story #fanart #fanfiction #drabble #vongola #submission

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spookyspaghettisundae · 5 years

Text

Murder of the Crows

Thick branches snapped like twigs under the weight of heavy boots and metal greaves. The knight’s heavy breathing clouded his own perception, filling both his black horned helmet and his very mind with a thick fog. He stumbled forward, catching himself against the massive trunk of an ancient tree, preventing himself from falling. His pauldron-clad shoulders heaved as he struggled to recoup his breath.

A scream pierced the sky and a murder of crows flocked away, cawing in terror as they fled from the forlorn forest’s oppressive canopy.

More screams followed, and in spite of them, a mad bellow escaped the knight’s mouth, muffled by the helmet. It was a laughter born of desperation and welling fury. A knight of the Order of Crows seeing actual crows fleeing overhead spawned both emotions. He needed not see how the ferocious beast was sinking its blade-like claws and fangs into his dying companion and compatriot.

His fellow knight’s screams came to an abrupt stop. He could only imagine how the monster had clamped its maw down around the man’s head and bitten it off.

Tormented by the unbearable heat building up within his armor, this knight—Shaon of the Devonbarrows—ripped his helmet from his shoulders and tossed it aside. His locks of raven-black hair clung to his forehead in a sheen of sweat. His eyes darted back and forth, his head stayed on a constant swivel to see if the beast now closed in on him.

The last of his order. All others had perished. Beladr was the last to go, his best friend’s screams still echoed in his mind or in between the ancient trees—which it truly was, Shaon could not tell. Perhaps both.

The leaves began to rustle violently, the branches groaned as they bent under the strength of the monster. Gooseflesh spread across Shaon’s skin. The back of his head throbbed. He sensed the creature’s approach.

In spite of all the exhaustion, despite the burden he shouldered, he felt the earth tremor beneath his feet as the devious Tatzylwyrm neared. Its humongous body slithered through the woods, its gigantic claws dug into the soil and sliced through durable roots as it propelled itself forward, closer and closer.

The knight spun around, his shield emblazoned with the Crow raised in front of him, and his lance at the ready, gripped tightly in his other gauntlet.

He stared at the grinning, sneering maw of the serpentine monstrosity. The horrible creature neared with a speed that defied its sheer size. Its claws opened and closed repeatedly, prepared to rip the man apart. Its eyes stared back at him with cunning and a sadistic, murderous glee—and a hint of fear.

The knight stifled a gasp as he recognized this and took in the beast’s appearance. The Tatzywyrm was covered in cuts and wounds, riddled with broken arrows and lances sticking out of wounds across its entire body, even more clearly on display as it neared dangerously close and rose to greater and ever greater height, looming over him like a mighty tower. It was closer to death than he had anticipated. The whole order of knights had grievously wounded it already.

The monster was afraid, but in its cunning, it hoped to hide its fear of dying from the single surviving knight-hunter. Its hesitation to strike spoke volumes, underlining this notion. It needed an opening to strike decisively, for it fought for its life. For survival, not for sport.

Shaon of the Devonbarrows gritted his teeth and took a step backwards, baiting the creature to attack, pretending to be ready to turn and run.

Pine needles and rocks and twigs crunched underfoot as he twisted around, and the Tatzylwyrm took his bait. No roar, just a blood-curdling slithering sound heralded its forward glide, the only audible indication of it lunging at him. A hiss erupted from the beast.

A claw dug into the shield, razors cutting through steel and hardwood like a hot knife through butter. The lance shot forward, remaining in the iron grip of the knight’s hand, driving its way through the inside of the beast’s mouth—and ending in a lance tip that emerged from the upper side of the draconoid’s skull with a sickening crunching sound.

Shaon shouted in agony as the other claw slashed through his breastplate and flung him away, leaving gaping wounds to scar his chest once they would heal. He landed on the forest grounds and the force of the fall knocked all the wind out of his lungs. The knight wheezed and scrambled away from the monster, struggling to get back up on his feet.

The Tatzylwyrm lunged forward again but collapsed in front of the armored warrior, with the weight of ten horses crashing down and causing the grounds to quake. The fall drove the lance even deeper through the creature’s head, ensuring the destruction of its brain, accompanied by squelching noises and viscuous dark red matter climbing up with the shaft of the lance as it emerged farther and farther outside the wyrm’s skull.

The knight’s pause ended the moment he felt certainty over the monster’s demise. He scrambled yet farther away from the creature, and braced himself against the stump of a tree broken by stormy weather decades ago. Using the stump to get back up on his feet, he stood and took more heavy breaths. In a blaze of unyielding fury, he drew the sword from its sheath by his side. The blade reflected the sun’s rays for a brief moment, sending a flash of light throughout the labyrinth of trees of this ancient, accursed forest.

The battle had only just begun.

He looked around for his true enemy, the Black Witch who had controlled the Tatzylwyrm. For the Order of the Crows had arrived here to reclaim the forests for the people, to take the woods back from the horned beast-men and fair folk and sinister witches that haunted it and slaughtered innocent people who strayed too close to the unhallowed groves.

The Black Witch had to be close. She had to be watching. Even should this not be the truth, Shaon willed it to be. He needed it to be true, so that his quest had not been in vain. He needed to believe that all the deaths of all his fellow men had mattered.

And he was right.

Like wind chimes, the lanterns in her hands rung. The ringing sung out to him like a siren’s song, somehow soothing and enticing—but at the same time, chilling him down to the bone.

The shadows between the trees grew longer, crawling outwards like tendrils or tentacles, writhing and slithering like a tangle of pitch-black snakes. The shadows flowed from the pale white legs of the witch, dripping off of them as tar would, but melting into each other like ethereal nothingness given shape. Her raiment of black feathers and vermin skulls rustled and clattered as she moved towards him.

Approaching from behind him.

Shaon saw this—saw her—before he had even turned around. Time flowed together. The future and past clashed, and he knew her black magic was at work here. The deaths of his comrades haunted his mind’s eye, reminding him of all he had sacrificed to reach this very moment, and he felt the tender touch of her slender fingers curling around his cheek, caressing him and cursing him and destroying everything he once was, kneeling before her, powerless before this witch and an arcane might honed over the thousands of years she had ruled over this forest.

He spat and spun around, steeling himself to render that vision into only one of many possible futures—ones of his defeat and ones that he would prevent—and trying to push the horrifying memories into the recesses of his mind. But he failed.

In her hands, she carried a lantern each. Both glowed with unreal blue light, barely brighter than a candle and constant, unlike what any natural flame could shed. The lanterns rung again like bells. Her blackened fingers, gingerly holding the lanterns by rings at their tops, appeared more like claws, with shadow itself dripping from them like honey.

That was what he smelled. Something sweet, like honey, or rotten fruit. It clouded his thoughts again, and the memories returned, as did the future that he dreaded.

He raised the sword, prepared to advance and cut her down. Alarain, the Black Witch, the goal of his quest, came to a halt mere steps away from himself. The knight’s eye twitched and his mouth stood agape.

He hesitated. Underneath her strange appearance, with her pitch-black, featureless eyes staring right through him, and her alien visage exuding an eerie calm of resolve—he sensed a resolve that dwarfed his own. An imperious presence that made him feel small and insignificant. He stood a whole head taller than her, and her lithe, frail-looking figure looked like little more than another twig for him to snap underfoot.

What would he even need the blade for?

She asked, as if reading his mind, “What do you need the sword for?”

The battle had already begun. And Shaon had already lost.

“To slay you,” he said under his breath, struggling to let his convictions fill those words with the fires of his faith.

“Hellknight,” she whispered. The way her lips and tongue moved enticed the knight, reminding him of the sensation of silk gliding across his bare skin. “How much have you sacrificed? What have you destroyed on your path before arriving before me?”

“T-there was no saving them,” he stammered out, his chin quivering with the dread of realization. “And the denizens of these forests are abominations, one more awful than the other. You fair folk and demons and witches have no place—you do not belong in this world.”

“You killed them all without hesitation, without remorse,” she whispered. Her brow furrowed with confusion and sadness. Shaon could not tell which, and suspected it to be both.

He just needed to lunge forward and cut her down. His steel would chop through her as if it were nothing. That frail body could not withstand a blow from his strong arm. He had slaughtered opponents far mightier than her.

Doubt stopped him dead in his tracks.

“You doubt your own cause. You doubt your own justice, Hellknight.”

Shaon inhaled loudly and sharply. “And you have spoken enough. Prepare to die,” he said.

Yet he continued to hesitate. In his heart, he knew this was no spell.

She said nothing.

The anger returned and he gritted his teeth as he spoke with contempt, asking, “Have you cursed me?”

She shook her head and the bell-like sounds rung from her lanterns yet again. The tendrils of darkness encircled him, reaching out from the shadows pooling around her feet, creeping out towards him but always shying away, mere inches short of reaching the soil he stood upon.

“Not yet, knight,” she whispered. “But I will.”

He eyed the darkness all around him, closing in on him and only now realized how close she was. So close that he could feel the warmth of her breath upon his face. Close enough to kiss.

“I curse you to have a heart,” she said. The words came out as a whisper, echoed in his mind with the volume of a royal command, and shook the skies like thunder.

Her slender fingers, blackened and claw-like, curled around his cheek, caressing him with a gentleness that sent shivers down his spine. The lanterns were gone. Her lips neared his, but not close enough to lock each other in a kiss. He wanted it more than anything now, but it would not happen. Not now.

The sword in his hand had long fallen, its tip and inches of its blade buried in the ground by his side. Between them no shield, only her other claws scraping down the length of his breastplate with a tenderness that made him weak, leaving scratch marks on the steel surface.

Her curse took hold. Tears rolled down his cheeks, as he remembered everybody clearly. All the people they had executed as heretics in that town. He had stood by, reading from the scrolls their accusations—every time. The Order of Crows dragged those who consorted with the fair folk, peddling potions made with fey magicks, kicking and screaming, to burn them at the stake.

And he remembered all the men he had lost. The people he had trampled underfoot on his way to becoming commander back in his homeland, victims of his ambition. The ones that had perished in battles born of his arrogance. The ones who had fallen along the way to finding this damned witch. Even his trusty steed, slain by the Tatzylwyrm mere moments ago.

The heart she had cursed him with filled the empty spot in his chest. It fluttered with a strange new life, like a cluster of butterflies. It cursed him with guilt.

Shaon fell to his knees, weighed down by the crashing waves of this crushing guilt.

“Why? Why would you do this? Why not destroy me? You—you monster.”

He stared at the ground, the shadows beneath her. The darkness roiled like waves on a stormy sea. He glimpsed inside them the memories that plagued him, and saw into the future, witnessing centuries of servitude before him. He saw his sword in his hands, bathed in a magicked black light, cutting through man and beast alike.

“Because I have use of you, Hellknight. You may serve a greater purpose, yet. A lesson to others, a sword in the night to combat a deeper darkness,” she said.

Her hand gently rested on his head, claws curling through his hair in a way that only a lover would.

Crows flocked to the trees around them, cawing and flapping their wings as they landed and congregated in the canopy above. One landed on her shoulder, turning silent as its head cocked around and it stared at the Crow Knight.

“You may pay for your sins by serving me. I curse you to live immortal, put to rest only by fire and steel, and never perish of old age nor sickness.”

A claw twisted and curled up tightly underneath his chin. She softly lifted his face so their gazes could meet. A void in the center of the darkness that made up her eyes stared into his own pupils.

Shreds of his future bled through and caused him to tremble with anticipation.

He wanted nothing more than to kiss her, but dreaded the consequences. And he knew he would see enough moons to fill two centuries before his service would end. But before he knew it, he stood and they embraced.

They kissed.

—Submitted by Wratts

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call-me-mister-midnight · 5 years

Text

Aiden’s Highway to Hell: Watch Dogs/Hazbin Hotel Crossover

Hey everyone, I’ve started writing my first ever fanfiction and I’ve gotten great reviews over at AO3, so I figured I’d share it with all of you, as well! Not sure if I should post the whole story over time or not, but for now, I’ll leave you the first chapter and link you to the full story on AO3. Be sure to like and review! I’m also open to suggestions if you have any.

Summary: After the events of the first Watch Dogs, Aiden Pearce finds himself on the wrong end of a rescue gone wrong and ends up in Hell. His only ticket out? Through the Happy Hotel, where he must repent for his crimes and give up his vigilante ways for good. Only true remorse and a change of heart will be his saving grace. Sounds simple enough, but when he finds an old enemy and some not so friendly demons along the way, Aiden will learn that the road to redemption is long and difficult. Will Aiden be able to turn himself around and live an honest life? Will he be able to escape hell? Or will he be exterminated? What else is in store for The Fox? Tune in and find out!

Chapter 1: Hellbound

It was a cold February morning in the city of St. Louis; a perfect day to start cleaning up the streets and getting back into the swing of things.

At least, that’s what Aiden thought as he got in his car and began to head towards Indigo Drive, where his Profiler was informing him of a crime in progress.

‘Another day, another assault…’, thought Aiden as he floored the gas, tearing down the highway. ‘I’ll get this over with and then try out that new diner. Nothing beats a good omelet.’ As he got closer and closer to his destination, a sense of uneasiness began to creep up on the battle-hardened vigilante. Why did he suddenly feel this way? He took down many an armored soldier before this with relative ease. This was going to be no different.

3 miles to the crime scene.

The unsettling feeling only grew worse. Shaking his head in disbelief, Aiden did his best to ignore the fear. Fear is what gets people killed in this line of work. Although he realized the importance of trusting his gut, Aiden knew damn well that he was merely overreacting. Perhaps he could use a vacation, he had endured quite a bit over the past few months. That’s it, the work was just getting to his head. Nothing to be worried about.

1 mile to the crime scene.

Aiden started to have second thoughts about interfering with this one. He couldn’t put a finger on it, but something felt seriously off. ‘No, I must. I can’t stop now, not after everything I’ve sacrificed’ he almost pleaded to himself. ‘I’ll do it, even if it kills me’. The anxiety was starting to peak at this moment; Aiden could swear his hands were starting to sweat. Embarrassing. How could someone who was so used to dropping the hammer on every person who came in between him and his niece’s killers suddenly be so timid? He NEVER had second thoughts before in his entire life. He couldn’t imagine what Jordi would ever say to him if he could read his mind. Thankfully, he never had to find out. All he needed to worry about was incapacitating his target and getting the hell outta Dodge.

“You have arrived.”

The robotic sound of his GPS snapped him out of his thoughts, prompting him to hit the brakes in order to study his surroundings. Under the bridge, perfect. His target wouldn’t even see him coming. As Aiden exited the car and screwed the silencer onto his pistol, he felt a cold chill blow over him. Gotta love that brisk St. Louis weather.

He powered up his Profiler and started searching the docks where the giant blue circle he had come to know and (not) love glowed back at him on the screen. After around 5 minutes of searching, he finally found his target: a tall, slender man in a black hoodie with the hood raised. It didn’t get any easier than this. Aiden hid behind a bridge support, keeping a close but safe distance between him and his potential prey. The man was clearly not in a hurry; he had no idea what was waiting for him just 10 feet away. As Aiden continued to tail the man, he saw it: a woman and child were tied up and were squirming around on the deck of a red and white boat that was sloppily docked about 25 yards away by Aiden’s prediction.

Easy pickings.

Aiden holstered his pistol and prepped his baton. He was gonna make this one hurt. He pulled his mask up and quickly approached the man. With a few well-placed swings and a liver shot for the cherry on top, the man went down onto the muddy grass with a satisfying thud.

‘See? Not even remotely a problem.’, thought Aiden as he ran over to the boat to free the hostages. He couldn’t help but feel proud of himself; not only did he get to save a couple of lives, he also didn’t have to break his back to get the few joys of being The Fox. That was all fine and dandy, up until the part where Aiden realized he made a gigantic tactical error.

“See you in HELL, scumbag!” came the sharp, high pitched voice of a second person that Aiden didn’t even account for. Before he could even turn around to confront the ambusher, it was too late. There was a bang, a flash of blinding white light, so bright that even the blind would have to shield their eyes from it. It was strangely beautiful, not even the slightest bit annoying. No pain, no blood… nothing. After what seemed like hours of this, he could hear the faint sounds of sirens and yelling, before suddenly feeling like he was falling. Not just falling, but freefalling. As in, going down a rollercoaster with nothing but your own body, hurtling towards a seemingly endless void. His speed and velocity only seemed to be increasing. Holy shit, this was REALLY fast. How was he not on fire from this much speed?

Aiden, too terrified to scream or flail, simply closed his eyes and braced himself for what was inevitably coming. This was the end, he knew it. He should’ve trusted his gut and just went to that stupid diner. For a brief moment, he regretted everything he ever did. The Fixer contracts he carried out, the convoys he destroyed, the cars he had stolen, but most of all, the people he put in danger… Nicky, Jacks… no, don’t think about her again…. dammit… even Lena. For the first time in what felt like forever, The Fox felt tears coming on. The intense speed at which he was falling didn’t even bother him anymore. The regret was heavy, burdensome. All of his past sins came to haunt him one last time before he met his fate. He supposed he deserved it. What a bitter pill regret is.

WHAM!

Aiden felt an impact so hard, he thought all of his body parts disconnected at once. All of the wind was instantly knocked out of him, the beautiful white light now gone. He was dead. But wait… he could still feel his arms and legs. He could still feel pain. So much pain…

All of the energy once within his shaken bones instantly disappeared. He felt like he could sleep forever. Isn’t that what he was doing? He honestly didn’t know anymore. All he knew was, he was splayed all across some hard surface… asphalt? It felt rocky, like asphalt. He tried moving his left arm slightly. It hurt a bit, but he managed to get the appendage out from under his body.

So far, so good.

He tried moving his right leg and was greeted by a tremendous amount of pain that rippled throughout his entire body.

Not good. Horrible idea.

Clearly, he wasn’t dead. At least, he didn’t think so. Also, what a nice warm atmosphere he was feeling. Wait… atmosphere? He was dead! He started hearing other ambiance sounds. Cars passing by, the distant chatter of human sounding voices… what the hell was going on? Only one way to find out. He tried to pick his head up to moderate success, managing to catch a glimpse of a very dark sky and what seemed like a wall of neon before letting his head smack against the pavement-like surface again.

‘Ow.’

It was bad enough he got shot in the damn head, now he had to be reckless and let his skull drop like that. He lifted his head again, this time getting a clear view of what was right in front of him. Aiden couldn’t believe it: he somehow ended up in a city! But not just any city; it was a city bathed in an eerie red fog, with a brightly lit sign around every corner. The buildings were tall and strangely shaped, some tipping to the side, others having jagged edges that jutted out at very peculiar angles.

‘Where the fuck am I?’, thought Aiden as he very slowly managed to get to a sitting up position, every muscle he moved screaming out in pain. After a couple minutes of scanning his surroundings in more detail, Aiden noticed something else: nobody else looked human. Well, they did, but they somewhat resembled some kind of animal or something. He quickly looked at his own hands, his eyes trailing down his chest and eventually stopping at his legs and feet. Somehow, Aiden looked completely unchanged. Everything about him was completely normal from before.

Breathing a sigh of relief, he started to try and get to a standing position. This time around, he managed to get it right the first time. He felt some cracking here and there, which, compared to the previous attempt at moving, was a welcome sensation. Anything was better than pain at this point. Spotting a vending machine nearby, Aiden decided, against his better judgment, to throw himself towards it to at least have something to hold on to.

That didn’t happen at all.

Aiden ended up almost rag dolling right past the machine as he awkwardly plummeted to another painful and embarrassing defeat.

“Well… that went well”, scoffed the vigilante bitterly. After spending another seemingly long time to get back on his feet, it finally hit him: this was no ordinary vending machine. “Heroin… acid… cocaine… molly… what the hell?”

He was beyond confused at this point. A vending machine that dispensed drugs?

Before he could ponder the situation any further, Aiden’s thought process was interrupted by a long scream followed by a what sounded like a laser blast. Adrenaline now kicking in, Aiden headed towards the general direction of the noise. It didn’t take him very long to pinpoint the source: a pair of creatures, jet black in color with icy halos over their head, open firing on some person vaguely resembling a frog. Their laughter was very chilling, half robotic and half distorted with a moderate amount of static. The sound cut through the air like a hot knife through butter.

Suddenly feeling mortal again and terrified beyond rational thought for the first time in his life, Aiden bolted for the closest street as one of the creatures turned to face him with a menacing smile. Heart pounding, Aiden managed to quickly limp a couple blocks before the adrenaline left his body, forcing him to come to a screeching halt under a small overhanging roof, slumping against the wall to catch his breath.

Aiden quickly scanned the building. “Looks like a hotel. Perfect.”

Without further delay, he opened the door, which was strangely unlocked, and quickly hid inside and slammed the door shut. Finally feeling safe, he let all of his weight rest against the hefty metal frame. The air was very still. The seconds seemed like hours as Aiden tried his best to keep his breath under control. He thanked his lucky stars that the place was abandoned. At least, until he suddenly felt something extremely sharp and extremely metal stick him right above his spine, followed by an intense and hostile female voice coming from behind him.

“Don’t move a muscle, asshole, or I’ll end you.”

Like this story? Get up to date with the full story at:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/18106346

#fanfiction #hazbin hotel #watch dogs #aiden pearce #crossover #vivziepop #hazbin charlie #hazbin vaggie #hazbin baxter #hazbin angel dust #hazbin husk #hazbin alastor #fourth wall breaks #easter eggs #much more coming soon

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escapingreality1992 · 5 years

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Fighting Haunts

Captain Marvel x OC

Carol Danvers and Cecilia go to fight a spirit in a mansion who murdered innocents who also reside there. The malevolent one tries to drown Cecilia but Carol saves her, confessing her love.

Standing in front of a massive mansion, I looked up into the middle window; three translucent figures were on the third story, standing there peering down at me. Children, they were; the ages not ranging past 13.

“See anything?” a female voice asked, breaking the silence for the first time this night. I glanced over to my left at my companion for this mission, Carol Danvers, or as she was otherwise known, Captain Marvel. Her long, blonde hair blew in the wind, the chocolate brown of her eyes set with determination and – dare I say it – a hint of fear.

I turned my head back to the windows, almost screaming at the sight of the other one, the malevolent figure with glowing purple eyes and a deep frown etched on his lips standing in the far-right window on the same level. All the figures wore old-fashioned attire – I’d take a guess and say the clothing resembled pieces from the 1700s; petticoats and lavish dresses on the children, a nice tailored suit with coat tails flowing to the back of his knees. Three of these figures I had previously seen were innocents, caught up in a brutal murder by the man with the glowing eyes.

I sensed nothing but evil pouring out from him and had a feeling we were going to have a long night ahead of us.

“Cecilia? Did you hear what I said?” Carol asked.

“Yes. Yeah, there are four spirits in the mansion. At least, I hope so,” I answered, hugging my body against the chills sliding down my spine. How the hell did I get brought into this mess? I’ve only just recovered from the last outing with spirits, I thought to myself. Wincing as my hand brushed over the large cut I received while fighting off a force strong enough to inflict harm.

“Alright ghost girl. Let’s go get this done,” Carol ordered, marching up the marble porch steps to enter the mansion. Oh right. That’s how, I thought as my nickname passed her lips.

Three Days Earlier

“Explain to me why you brought him along?” I snapped at Stephen Strange, my master, as we entered an abandoned hospital. The “him” I referred to happened to be no other than Tony Stark and he started to become a pain to deal with on this mission. Not only did he panic every time something happened – paranormal or not – but he’d make stupid comments every now and then about the building or the supernatural in general.

“I thought he could be useful,” Stephen answered me, magic shields up in case of an unexpected assault.

“At least Rogers here isn’t afraid though I’m almost positive we could’ve handled this on our own,” I remarked, gesturing to the man on my right. Both men offered to help out with this insane mission; spirits still hadn’t moved on in the hospital and it was our job to banish them from the premises.

“I am not afraid. I still don’t understand how you three don’t find this place eerie though,” Tony commented, folding his arms over his chest in a defensive, yet protective position.

“Nature is taking over the building. It’s what happens when you…Strange, move!” I explained, before shoving Stephen out of the way of knife-wielding, corporeal spirit. I took the blow to my upper arm, wincing at the sharp pain. The spirit, a woman, screamed and turned back toward us, slamming my body against the concrete wall, more pain shooting through me. She tossed me to the floor like a rag doll and I slid a few paces, dirt and rocks embedding into my skin; I groaned as my head hit a medium-sized rock.

“She’s too…strong. Be careful,” I wheezed, slowly sitting up. I touched the back of my head, my fingers coming away red with blood. If that wasn’t bad enough, my vision swam as I tried to make out the battle going on in front of me.

“Tony, watch the knife,” Steve stated, dodging a slash at his stomach.

“Try blasting it away. Cecilia, is there something you can do?” Stephen asked, trying and failing to produce a binding spell. He dodged her slashing movements and conjured a sword to fight her off.

“Your apprentice got slammed down pretty hard. I’m not sure she can help us at all. Try one of your fancy spells. Get rid of it,” Tony commented, flying into the air to avoid the spirit woman. Closing my eyes, I concentrated on building the custom spell I often used to send spirits to where they belonged. My hands flexed and moved in various patterns to bring the spell forth, power coursing through me.

My eyes flew open as I sent it out towards our assailant, a bright, golden light flooding the room as she dissipated into nothing but space. It must have released into the entire hospital because the thick air hanging in the air when we first arrived became light and easier to breath, the temperature cool all around us.

“Excellent work Cecilia. We need to get you back to the Sanctum to take care of your injuries,” Stephen said, releasing his spell for the sword, everyone breathing hard after fighting the spirit woman.

“Actually, it’d be best if we go to the compound. There are better ways to treat them at my lab,” Tony stated. Steve and Tony helped me to my feet as Strange formed a portal to the compound; they brought me straight to the lab and helped me sit on a medical bed. I pulled down the top half of my spandex suit, my sports bra revealed, so Tony could get to the wound on my arm. I winced as stitches were sewn through my skin with help from one of his fancy technological machines.

As Steve cleaned up my head wound, a woman walked into the lab with a serious look on her face. I recognized her as Carol Danvers, but I never really had the chance to talk to her outside of missions and parties; even then I had a difficult time because she always seemed nervous around me. No surprise there, since I could see ghost and other entities. She was nice to look at though; blond hair falling to just past her shoulders, dark brown eyes, which were warm and inviting if you got the chance to glance into them.

Her body, lean and muscular, made heat flow through every inch of me and I’d find my gaze traveling to her ass when she’d walk away from conversations. I could imagine her in my bed, hair fanned across the pillow, naked with my body on top of hers…

“Damn. Look at those bruises. It must have been some fight,” She greeted me, breaking me away from my fantasies.

“Yeah, the spirit happened to be a bit too strong. I guess she had been there a while to build up enough strength to cause harm,” I commented.

“A spirit did that? Is it why you’re always covered in bruises every time I see you? Because of spirits?” she remarked, gesturing to the cut and the wound on my head.

“Most of the time. Sometimes it’s because Stephen whoops my ass during training. I’m not complaining though. He’s an excellent teacher,” I answered, giving Strange a wink, which made him smile.

“Did you need something Danvers or did you come here to strictly talk to Cecilia?” Steve interrupted our conversation, eyebrows raised uncertain to her sudden visit.

“Sorry, yeah. I have a call to check out a mansion that’s supposedly infested with ghosts. They’ve been causing a problem in the neighborhood. I wanted to see if I could borrow the sorcerer in a few days to find out what’s been going on?”

“Unfortunately, I can’t help you. I’ve got something to take of myself. It’s out of state…well more like out of this universe,” Strange told her.

“Damn, guess I’ll have to go it alone then,”

“Hang on. You could take ghost girl with you. I’m sure she’ll be okay within a day or two. She should be able to tell you if it’s ghosts or something else entirely,” Tony offered, waving his hands around me. I rolled my eyes at the nickname, something everyone started to call me when they discovered my ability.

“I don’t know. She looks really banged up. I wouldn’t want her to get hurt. Strange might kill me if I got her injured or even killed,” Carol commented.

“She’s right here. I’ll be fine. When’s the mission?” I stated, annoyed at them talking about as if I was invisible.

“Three days from now. I’ll pick you up at 6 on Friday okay?” Carol informed me, placing a hand on her hip, leaning to the side so it jutted out. I tried not to stare, instead dropping my eyes to the floor, preparing myself mentally for the task at hand.

“All right. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to change and grab something to eat,” I slid off the bed and pulled the top half of my suit back on, exiting the room. Nothing would prepare me for the danger coming my way.

Present Day

At Carol’s command, we entered the mansion, defenses up in case something attacked us. You can tell if a place is haunted based on the air and the heat surrounding you. The air has a thickness to it and sometimes the heat can be unbearable, and this place had equal amounts of both. Inside the mansion, the air had become almost suffocating, the sweltering heat already making me sweat, little beads forming on both my forehead and my back.

I suspected Carol started to sweat as well, getting confirmation when I glanced her way, sweat rolling off her forehead and dripping onto her suit. We cautiously walked through the living room in front of us to the stairs, ascending them to the third floor where I had seen the spirits.

“Listen, Carol, It’s much too humid in here for only four spirits. I think we’re dealing with something much worse than I previously thought,”

“We’ll need to be extra cautious then. I…” She yelped when a group of ghosts materialized around her, pushing her back into a corner. She fell to her ass, thrashing about, not hitting anything as these weren’t corporeal. I tuned into my senses and looked at them fully using my ability, noting their innocence. If anything, they were only here to warn us about something, unable to use their voices to do so.

“Don’t hurt me! Get away!” she continued to yell until I pushed through the group, taking her hands in mine, stopping her thrashing.

“Carol, it’s Cecilia. Stop screaming. You’re okay. Carol, they’re harmless. Relax,” Her actions ceased, those brown eyes filled with fear softened when she caught my gaze. Her chest still heaved, out of breath from screaming and yelling.

“Harmless?” I nodded, helping her to stand up and brush off the dirt from her ass.

“What makes you so certain? They could be fooling us,”

“Their eyes don’t glow like malevolent ones do. Though, I haven’t seen eyes glow as bright as the one in this mansion. But, look at the spirits surrounding us. Their eyes are colorless, white because they’re deceased. They won’t harm you. I think they might be trying to warn us or stop us from going any further,” I explained, making her glance at the group of children surrounding us.

“Oh. Well okay then. We still need to investigate. Cecilia? Cee? Hey, ghost girl, what are you looking at?” My focus removed itself from her, shimmering water catching my eye from one of the windows. I moved closer to see what was out there; a pool, which should have been filled with dirty, greenish water, except it wasn’t. Instead it had clear, blue, shimmering water inviting any passerby to jump in.

“I’ll be right back. The water…it’s calling me,” I mentioned, walking back down the stairs and to the back door in the kitchen leading me to the magnificent pool. I vaguely heard Carol’s voice shouting at me to come back, but I ignored it desiring to get a better look at the pool and why it had clean water in it, despite no one residing in the mansion.

“That’s it my dear. Come to the water. Don’t you want to get in? It’s so warm, so gorgeous. Take off your clothes, dive in,” a male voice – the male spirit – coaxed from behind me. I shivered, the touch of his skin against mine like ice as he placed his hands on my shoulders. The sound of his voice had a spell over me, and I found myself stripping out of the spandex suit I wore on missions, my underwear and sports bra on view for the world. I walked closer to the entrance of the pool, dipping one foot in to test the temperature of it, warmth spreading over it.

I stepped in further, immersing my whole body in the pool, swimming around unaware of what the malevolent spirit really wanted; my death. I closed my eyes and floated, my worries melting away, until icy hands forced me under. My eyes popped open, trying to fight against the evil spirit; his grip too strong as he plunged my body under again and again, oxygen escaping my lungs each time. My vision blurred as I struggled to get air, unable to break away from his wrath and his strength. My world went black, the last thing I saw being the entity’s true face.

Carol’s POV

I watched helplessly as Cecilia walked down the steps to head towards the pool, unable to get her to come back to me. Thinking she’d be okay, I continued my ascent up to the third floor, looking around for any clue as to why these spirits would still be hear causing trouble. Multiple rooms greeted me, and I explored each one, finding a study with newspapers strewn about the floor and the desk earning my curiosity. The first one I picked up showed a picture of a family – a man and his wife, three children, a boy and two girls – with neutral expressions on their face, the headline reading ‘Drake family buys house in 1701’. The children looked familiar, bringing my memory back to the ones who appeared on the steps before Cecilia and me.

The next one I chose to pick up had a big headline on it reading ‘Chester Drake kills entire family. Drake seems to have disappeared from the area to avoid justice’. More headlines with missing children and missing people printed on each newspaper I read, realization at who haunted this mansion setting in. As I continued reading, the last headline read ‘Drake commits suicide in mansion bought with family. Trial was meant to start next day. No justice served to any family who wanted to see him hanged’, cold air brushed my face causing me to turn around abruptly.

What I saw behind me gave me a new fear as the children before me resembled the ones from the first headline.

“He murdered you. All of you. Justice needed to be served and he never got it. I’m sorry,” I stated. They tilted their heads, pointing to the windows as if to show me something.

“What are you pointing at? Can you speak?” I asked, brows furrowing in confusion.

“Your…friend. He’s…killing…her. He lures…people to the pool. Drowns…them. Almost…like a spell…is put on them. You…need to…save her,” one of the children, the boy told me. My heart almost stopped beating as I flew to the window to look out of it, Cecilia’s body being plunged under the water multiple times until it went still, the spirit grinning as his goal to kill her came to pass. Well almost. I blasted through the glass pane and flew down to him, firing off another photon blast, hitting him square in the head; he got flung into the wooden fence, immobile for the moment.

“Cecilia!” I shouted, jumping in the disgusting, murky water to pull her out. I suspected he had put an illusion on the water to draw her in, the illusion fading once I cast him away from the pool. I laid her out on the concrete, pushing her wet hair from her face to get access to her mouth.

“No, no, no. Wake up Cecilia. You can’t be dead. Come on, wake up!” I said, shaking her to try and rouse her. She was too still, and I started to panic. I couldn’t lose her. Not her; she became important to me, the crush I had on her growing stronger each time I saw her pretty face. Sure, I got nervous most days and could barely hold a conversation with her, afraid I wasn’t intelligent enough for her, especially since she worked with the Sorcerer Supreme, but I still liked her.

Coming to the realization she wasn’t going to wake on her own, I began to perform CPR on her hoping she’d come back and take care of the evil spirit.

“Come on, Cee. Come back to me. I need you. I like you. Please come back. Please,” I stated, placing my head against her chest when she still didn’t come around. Tears pricked my eyes, rolling down my cheeks, sobs coming out of me when I thought I’d failed at saving her.

“Cecilia…come back. You can’t be dead. If you’re dead, I won’t be able to ask you out. I’m falling in love with you. Come…back,” I cried, succumbing to my feelings about her. Abruptly, she sat up, shocking me as I scrambled off her to give her room to cough up water from her lungs. She turned to face the spirit, whom had gotten up and made his way over to us, a grin spreading over her lips. She raised one hand, brilliant golden light flashing and surrounding him. The most awful scream erupted from his mouth; I had to cover my ears to block it out until it ceased from existence.

“Carol. It’s over. He’s gone and he won’t be coming back,” Cecilia said, crawling over to me. She collapsed into my arms, her hands flat on the grounds and she released more light illuminating the entire mansion. I glanced up and saw all the spirits that resided there, vanishing one by one, smiles on their faces as they found the peace they deserved.

“You love me?” Cecilia asked, my eyeline descending to meet hers.

“No. Yes. I think so. Would you want to go on a date with me?” I asked, heat spreading on my face despite the cold water soaking my skin.

“I’d love to,” She answered. I leaned down and kissed her lips and helped her up to return to the Sanctum. We explained what happened to Strange – he was furious at her almost dying, but grateful I saved her – and set our date within the next week, beginning a wonderful life together, something which would last an eternity.

#Avengers #Carol Danvers #carol danvers x oc #marvel #Stephen Strange #doctor strange #Doctor Stephen Strange #Iron Man #tony stark #steve rogers #captain america

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mininky · 6 years

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Heavy Lies the Crown-1

Summary: (Y/N) has the fate of her people on her shoulders and according to a seer, the only way to save her kingdom from the bloodthirsty wolves is by giving herself to the god of the hunt.

Pairing: Namjoon x reader

Warnings: discussions of human sacrifice

word count: 3K

I highly recommend reading the prologue first

Chapters one two three

You had spent the day being bathed, groomed, plucked, moisturized, and dressed by your chambermaids. None of you spoke through this whole process other than quiet words of reassurance. Your sisters had come to you at one point as you were being bathed in rose and honey tonic, but they had fled quickly after choked goodbyes. Today was the day that you would finally meet your fate, and today the entire kingdom was celebrating your demise. The few in the kingdom that had spoken to you in the last of these days either apologized over and over or would tell you to have no fear, that you would soon become the bride of a god. While you didn't believe that you would actually become the bride of any god as you doubted their existence you certainly were looking fit for it by now. Unlike every princess before you in your kingdom, you had spent most of your time among warriors. Your body was lean from years of training with light scars scattered about, your hair was usually tied up and certainly not usually as radiant and shining as the lavender and olive oil tonic used today had made it. While you had occasionally been forced to be made up for a few different grand balls and other royal gatherings you looked completely different today. Your face was powdered, your lips looked like a bitten berry and your eyes were lined with a more elegant charcoal than what you usually slapped on to protect yourself from the sun. Now you stood alone after being dressed, the only company was your slow-moving thoughts. You had chosen this path, and you weren't hesitating to go into it. You knew that you had to be the one, although for different reasons than others might think. You couldn't allow girl after girl to be flung to her death in the forest. You didn't believe that there was an angry god, but you did firmly believe that there was a beast that needed to be satiated in the forest that was driving the wolves closer and closer to the forest edge. While being forced to go into the forest without weapons, weighed down in gold, wearing a dress, and reeking of incense and flowers wasn't exactly fit for a hunt you still knew that you had to find this beast and kill it. You also knew that even if you were to die you wouldn't have much of a life to live in the palace what with your father already speaking about you being of age to be married off to some other castle where you would no doubt be forced to dwell within the walls and only dream of the days that you fought and hunted amongst others. The sounds of the drums beginning to beat outside alerted you that it was time. Tearing your sight away from the reflection of a woman you couldn't even process as yourself you held your head high and began to walk out of your room. Everyone had already left to join the procession, there would be no last-minute goodbyes, no loving hugs. The people would be furious if there were, after all, to be sacrificed to the gods was to become one yourself and it is an honor, not a goodbye. The wretched sobs of your youngest sister could be heard over the sounds of the near deafening drums and songs of praise from almost everyone around you. Your heart ached to assure your sister that everything would be okay, but you knew that you had to keep walking. The lit lanterns cast an eerie incandescent glow that distorted everything into shades of violent reds and oranges. With each step, you could feel the ornate golden headdress dig deeper into your scalp. While it couldn't be heard over the sounds of the procession you knew that once you were in the forest the jewelry covering your body would alert the forest of your entry, surrounding prey and predators would certainly notice the heavy jangle of your steps. You took long, steady, deep breaths as you finally made it towards the towns gates. It would only be a few more feet, and then you would meet your fate, whether it would be a god, survival, or death. Your bets, however, was that there was something sinister lurking in the forest that needed to be killed. You had never been one for believing in gods, but you did believe in your own skills and you knew that whatever it was that was chasing the wolves further to the outskirts of the forest needed to be stopped. You would survive, you would get through this. The procession was coming to a halt, you were now out of the gates. The songs were becoming lost to the noise of your pulse rushing through your ears, the echo of your little sister sobbing forcing you to close your eyes. With a deep breath, you sang out to those near enough still to hear, "While you live, shine

have no grief at all

life exists only for a short while

and time demands its toll." Opening your eyes back up you gazed upon the forest. The first trees were dimly lit by a few of the lanterns. In the still of the night, it almost appeared to gaze back at you. You could feel something stirring, you knew something laid deep in the thick of the trees. Dark gnarled branches swayed gently in the breeze was a haunting dance of death that surely had awaited those that would try to step forth unprotected in the middle of the night. With your head held high, you didn't even look back as you made your way inside. You never were good at goodbyes, and you had already had weeks to say the last of your words to your loved ones. Now it was time to see if the god of the hunt would be appeased by you. Your pulse was quickly elevating as you tried to adjust to the heavy darkness. You had already made a plan weeks ago that after enough time you would disrobe of your heavy jewelry once far enough in. If done too quickly it would easily be found by one of the few hunting parties that still gathered. You would have to move cautiously until then, but once at a safe place, you would discard the headdress, necklace, anklet, and bracelets. There was no time to build a shelter, the best that you would be able to do is to get off the ground by finding a tree that would be wide enough to accommodate. Gingerly you made your way around before finding yourself in a clearing. The good part about a clearing is that it's easy to see any predators that might be there. The worst part about now being in a clearing in the dark is that predators can also easily see you and you won't be able to see them with your poor vision until it's far too late. You tried to quicken your pace, no longer taking quiet steps you ran as quickly as you could across the clearing, stripping yourself from the headdress along the way. The lack of weight was certainly helping, but before you could break across back into the safety of cover the silence of the forest was broken by the sound of howls. You could hear at least two to the left, three to the right, there were more in front and even from behind. The wolves had you in their line of sight, you had no doubt of that now. Heart racing, adrenaline surging you continued your journey, your eyes focused on the tree about a dozen yards away from you. If you could climb it fast enough you would be safe for now, but with no weapons and being completely outnumbered in the dead of the night fighting was no option. As your lungs greedily gulped in air and began to burn you heard the sounds of a growl only a yard to your right. Quickly you jumped to the side and got into a defensive stance. You had no chance, you had been able to make out at least seven howls, but you wouldn't go down without trying. With your arms up you tried to push back at the weight of the large gray wolf jumping on top of you. Your hands were quickly struggling as they pulled the wolf off of you before he was back again, his dank breath directly over yours as he bared his teeth. Just as you tried to roll yourself out from under him he was distracted by a howl, his whole demeanor changing as he looked down at you before backing slowly away with his head down. Breathing slowly you tried to think of a plan, a way out of the certain death that awaited you. You weren't sure what changed his behavior, but you also assumed that it wouldn't last long. The sounds of movement towards you almost made you stir, but you refused to move and call attention to yourself. Straining your ears you swore you could hear someone breathing, it sounded like a person, not like an animal panting. Confusion washed over you but you remained laying there until you heard a voice speak out, "I said do not touch her. She is my mate." At the sound of the voice, you couldn't help but move. Quickly rolling into a crouched position you stared straight into the eyes of the man before you before looking around. Surely you must be losing your mind, the stress of everything must have taken its toll. All around you the wolves shifted into human forms. You had heard stories before, you knew that the people claimed that they were the spirits of the forest. Perhaps you were wrong, perhaps there was a god of the hunt after all. Slowly you looked once again at the first man. His eyes shone as a molten glint in the night and the moon illuminated his golden features. While just a few minutes ago you would have silently scoffed at the idea of a god you couldn't help but believe in their existence as you took him in. He was perhaps the most handsome creature you'd ever seen, and the energy around him had a primal power, unlike anything you'd ever felt. It was as if his presence was both comforting and terrifying at the sheer overwhelming strength in his eyes, his gaze causing an electrical current to zip through your veins. You weren't sure what to do. If this was the god that you were to be sacrificed to were you supposed to bow? Were you supposed to pray? They had never told you what you actually do when you come face to face with a god, it seems like that had been missed in your lessons of how to be sacrificed to a god. Your own thoughts were broken by one of the other wolfmen speaking. "That's not possible. She's clearly human." "I think she's broken, she's not speaking." "She's really pretty. Hey, doesn't she look like a princess in one of Jimin's books?" "She does! Maybe she is!" "That's not the point, the point is that she's clearly human. She couldn't possibly be his mate. She's just a dirty, weak human." "I am not weak. I might be human, and I might be a woman, but I will not allow you to call me weak." The moment the words bubbled out of your mouth you almost wanted to take them back, almost, but if you were going to die at their hands you wouldn't go down without standing for yourself. Even if it was just a pathetically foolish verbal spar. "You are a human, of course, you're weak." You looked at the one scoffing at you, your eyes defiantly glaring back at him. "Yoongi, she is my mate. I can tell. I can feel it." You broke your eye contact to gaze back at the one in the center. Twice now he had called you that, his mate. What did this mean? "Are you the god of the hunt? I was sent here to be sacrificed to you to appease our people. They expect you to marry me. I don't care if you would rather kill me, just hear out my pleas to save my people. If they can't hunt they can't eat and they will starve to death. If you don't stop the bloodshed against my people they will also continue sending young girls to you that have done nothing wrong to warrant their deaths. Take me if you must, but I am asking of you to allow my blood if need be to appease your bloodthirst and calm the forest. Whatever it is you need, I will give you." You looked directly into his eyes as you spoke, your tone low but unwavering. "God of the hunt?" A younger one was speaking out from the back to you. "We're werewolves human and we-" "That's enough Jungkook. No, I am not a god, however, your people might have mistaken me for one. I am the leader of my pack, and that makes me ruler of this forest as this is our territory. As for your peoples' bloodshed, I assume that you're talking about the people who have been murdering mine just for our fur? I can't promise you anything, however, I will speak to my people and I will let them hear what you have to say and in turn, you can hear what they have to say. I'm a fair ruler, I understand that my decisions impact their lives and I need them to agree before I make changes. If you can persuade them, I will agree. If you cannot, then I cannot." While you wanted to be infuriated at his lack of commitment, about the fact that your sole mission was now hanging on the whims of people you didn't know you couldn't help but feel yourself growing calmer the more he spoke. His deep voice felt like it was scorching your skin, the electrical current from his gaze was at war with this bizarre feeling of familiarity you had when looking at him. "Namjoon," One of the others with dark hair and perhaps the broadest shoulders you'd ever seen called out to the leader. Namjoon, his name was beautiful. "We need to take her to the elder. I know you say she's your mate, but Yoongi's right about the fact that she's a human. The elder though...he might know if this has happened before. I'm not saying she's not, but he'll be able to help the two of you figure this out." Hearing his words you started to think of everything. You weren't sure what a mate was, you only understood that a werewolf was a wolf-man and that they have packs just as wolves did. Really you should be more concerned about all of this news, in fact, you should be concerned if you haven't already died and this is just all a place your brain has taken to but somehow you trusted that Namjoon wasn't a man who would hurt you. Where they lived and how their people lived was something you were obviously about to find out, but you were still unsure why he kept calling you his mate. Namjoon looked back over to you, his body now towering over you. "Our homes are too far for you to travel on foot, especially at night. When I transform, get on my back. I will take you to our home, and there I will answer any questions you have." Nodding you got out of your crouched position and dusted yourself off. One of the younger, smaller men came to your side and silently handed you the headdress that you had thrown off what felt like years ago. You had never cared for royal ornaments, but considering that this was supposed to be a gift to their people you figured you would take it back and give it to them. Smiling, you gently took the headdress back with a quiet thank you before turning back to Namjoon. "You are very calm, especially for a human. I'm sorry for not asking you earlier, what is your name little one?" Namjoon's voice was a husky whisper among the rustling of the leaves and sounds of the night. Normally a man calling you little one would have angered you, but somehow, coming from him you found yourself almost feeling girlish at the nickname. What exactly was this man doing to you? "(Y/N), my name is (Y/N)." "(Y/N)...that's a beautiful name." His smile was gentle, deep dimples shining under the stars before he turned around and magically transformed. His wolf form was almost as breathtaking as his human form. He was the largest of the wolf-men in this form as well, a long thick body with a gleaming black coat he was less beast and more magical up close. He turned his head back to you and motioned towards the north. Taking that as your cue you gently sat down on him and reached around his throat. While nothing at all went as you had anticipated tonight and you had countless questions, you couldn't help but feel excited anticipation at this new land. Perhaps the seer wasn't wrong at all, you were the one that was fated to go into the forest. Things so far had gone better than you could have imagined. You were at least alive and you had the ability to save your people still. That was all that mattered, burning questions could wait for another time.

#namjoon angst #namjoon smut #rm smut #rm angst #namjoon fic #namjoon fanfic #namjoon reader #namjoon reader insert #bts fic #bts angst #bts smut #bts werewolf au #bts royal au

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